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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Times are dark now, but I'm actually excited about what kind of education system we'll produce when we finally tear down the 19th century one we have now and build a 21st century one. Can you imagine what kind of 20-year-olds would come out of a system that successfully produced deliberative practice across a wide variety of disciplines by harnessing the power of computers melded with the strengths of human instruction to build custom curricula for everybody?

The country that cracks this and builds this system instead of incrementally tweaking our 19th century system will own the rest of this century and most of the next.

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It won't be a country; it will be a large network of individuals.

I can't help but think that the future of education looks like the current home schooling community. The results with my own children are remarkable.

The resources available now online are vastly better than anything I had when I was in school, and far cheaper. At Khan Academy one excellent teacher can teach the world. That's a science-fiction level of awesome.

And you can tailor the education to the strengths and weaknesses of the child. I don't think a large organization could ever replicate this process or get these results. It's too difficult and expensive to do on a large scale.

While I agree that central management will never be able to effectively create this itself on a large scale, there are things that the government will have to do to get us to where we need to be... not least of which is to let up on the centralized control. This building of a new system can't be in more than fits and starts with limited benefits to the society it is embedded in if the primary government still mandates (or nearly so) the use of the old system on a grand scale. There will be some set of jurisdictions that do, and some that don't.

> there are things that the government will have to do to get us to where we need to be...

Namely: recognize that, in imposing a double cost on anyone seeking private education, it is stifling entrepreneurship in education (where it is sorely needed) and step out of the game entirely.

We are already working on that in the education community - project based learning. It has its detractors but the fundamental tenets are: 1) learning is the product of the work of learners, 2) students learn by doing. Science classrooms taught this way typically produce students who go on to be very successful academically and professionally in the maths and sciences. The secret? Integrate multiple disciplines, let students explore facets of the subject which appeal to them, and have them work on something - with each other (!!) - which has a tangible result or artifact. We have cracked it, and we have peer-reviewed papers to prove it. Now we just have to get the troglodytes in charge of public education to adopt it.

[Edit]

Some citations:

Rivet, Krajcik:"Achieving Standards in Urban Systemic Reform: An Example of a Sixth Grade Project-Based Science Curriculum"

Hmelo-Silver et al. " Scaffolding and Achievement in Problem-Based and Inquiry Learning: A Response to Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006)"

We have cracked it, and we have peer-reviewed papers to prove it.

Citations, please? (An edit to your original post rather than a new reply would be fine.)

Science classrooms taught this way typically produce students who go on to be very successful academically and professionally in the maths and sciences.

Where are some of the schools that operate this way now?

I will find citations and put them in my original post. As for schools which operate this way now, the New Tech Network (http://www.newtechnetwork.org/) of schools operate this way. I can speak most specifically for Manor New Tech HS in Manor, Texas, as it is the most accessible to me.

I also know that LASA in Austin ISD has a number of classes taught this way though they do not have any sort of project-based "ideology" that they follow across the board like New Tech schools.

you should put contact info in your HN profile page! I would love to follow up with you privately on this.

Paul, could you explain here or through a private e-mail what your company Matygo is doing and how it is a catalyst? The tagline on the blog is a tease :).

I rewrote the tagline earlier today, I'll take that as positive feedback. :)

A catalyst speeds up a reaction, sometimes essentially so. The coming education revolution is going to be much larger than any single organization but we think we can help bring it about a little bit quicker. Sal Khan is definitely a catalyst in this respect.

We do this through two complimentary features sets:

1) Learning about learning. These are tools to track student progress, judge the effectiveness of different techniques, etc... Think an education effectiveness dashboard. By providing high-quality information we can shorten and improve the feedback loop by better understanding what works and what doesn't.

2) Online learning delivery. As a starting point, think an LMS like Instructure/Moodle/Blackboard, etc... but designed to work with the previous point - try new things and measure. The key here is enabling teacher creativity. It's all well and fine for us to implement and measure new tools in house but that's not fast enough (and gives us no particular advantage). The Instructors on our system need to be able to easily implement their own thoughts on how to improve teaching (and then see the results). They are much smarter than we will ever be about this. We need our instructors to see this 'LMS' as their playground for teaching experimentation. And, of course, when one of them makes a breakthrough they will share it and everyone will be better off.

Innovation is experimentation that results in an improvement. We help teachers experiment and judge the success of their experiments, shortening the feedback loop and increasing the rate of innovation. This is what we mean by "be a catalyst".

Very interesting. Anything having to do with disrupting the current model excites me to no end.

Have a few more questions if you don't mind:

1. What's your motivation for doing this?

2. Is there a particular level of education (or type of subject) you're targeting? Would you find the product more geared towards being effective in some subjects than others, or generic enough for any?

3. Is UBC somehow part of this project?

4. Could I play with it (I'm in no way affiliated with UBC)?

I went to a school that operates that way:

http://www.parker.org/

And what are your thoughts on the method?

Generally very positive, though perhaps not for the reasons you'd imagine.

Basically everything you learn in grade school will be useless in real life. This is not because you don't learn anything: it's because you have not experienced enough by high school to have a reasonable chance of knowing what you want to specialize in, and you have to specialize for your adult life. So the fruits of that deliberate practice will be useless whether you learn stuff or not.

Instead, I found that the project-based curriculum was useful because:

1.) It shows you that there is more depth to things than simply doing what you're told and regurgitating what you've learned.

2.) It trains you to take initiative and be responsible for your own education, and later your career. There's a huge difference between learning stuff and doing stuff, and projects help bridge the gap.

Both of these skills are invaluable later on, when you do know what you want to do.

I did not mean to imply otherwise, certainly; my apologies if you thought so. My point is more inline with your last sentence than trying to claim that we need some sort of research breakthrough. I think we pretty much have all the pieces in hand (not just your research, but the basic programming, the beginnings of decentralized curricula, etc), enough for rough engineering consensus, and we can work the rest out as we go.

No, no, this is just a subject about which I am very enthusiastic and just wanted it explicitly written somewhere that a good candidate solution to the education problem is in fact already here. Many places on the internet I find that people simply think it's hopeless, etc. tl;dr I'm just excited to tell anyone who will listen :)

Working with project based learning is not all joy and bubbles.

1) learning is the product of the work Just wait until you get industrial sponsorship of the project. Learning gets less focus.

2)students learn from doing Assuming the students have the initiative to DO. Young people often need leadership and direction provided by a leader type figure to drive them to make the attempt. Else, many of them will wander about aimlessly waiting for a peer leader to emerge -- which may never happen and the project stalls.

I am not disinclined to project based learning; but it is not a complete panacea for the current educational system.

You're correct. It relies on good teachers and motivated students. I am still in training; I enjoy my PBL experiences because I have a knack for engaging students; my peers who don't have the same rapport tend to hate it, which is then reflected in the success of the lessons

A lot of the problem is that practicing something is not only not encouraged but actively discouraged. Getting a CS student to code, a chemist to experiment, a physicist to experiment and a builder to build isn't hard. Throw them the equipment and say "Here, check this out!" and they'll go at it oldschool. Usually that doesn't happen, instead A) all equipment is kept away except during mandated times and for mandated purposes and B) they're held in classes and lectures long after they've gone "Ok, cool. Let's play with this for a bit and we'll do more theory later" so that they're pretty much sick of all of it at the end of the day. This is the most discouraging thing about the current system. You have to have the option of pacing yourself and also have the space to grow. I'd play in the CS labs in the wee AM. I'd borrow the machine shop. The cafeteria usually left the rest of the coffee out, me and my friends would sit and do electronics problems or calculus all night, perhaps take a break to learn sign language or how to tap out a proper 4/4 beat. No one complained because that's excellent - you're learning! Exactly what a university is there for!

Think bigger - what kind of 12-year-olds will come out?

Consider 8-hour school days: 3 hours in lunch/PE/hallways leaves 5 hours of group lectures. If the teachers spent the whole time in tutoring individual students in their 30-person classrooms, that's 10 minutes for you each day.

What happens when you get hours of individualized learning alternated with deliberate practice? Years of school compressed into months. With half of every day left over for socializing, athletics and exploration.

Its not really hard to imagine a better system - almost anything would be better.

I agree, but I suspect we'll discover that while we may indeed be extending childhood for no really good reason under the current regime, that it will also never really be feasible to have 12-year-olds that are ready to be high-functioning members of our society and call them "done" with schooling. (And I didn't even say "independent" high-functioning members of society.) But they could certainly be much further down that road than they are today.

I meant the 20-year-old more as just as an arbitrary line in the sand, not that everybody will be "in the system" all the way up to that date necessarily.

I am not sure custom curricula are a good idea. Education is more about how it's learnt and less about what is learnt. Beware of technology's cognitive biases too, see how TV is transforming education into entertainment. Computers have their own biases, just see the difference between today's teenagers and teenagers from 15 years ago.

I think the problem is that it won't work for all people. The system actually seems to work well for the average person. However, a country like the USA, can benefit from attracting these kind of people (Investors, Infrastructure, Big companies, Networks...) and it seems like it's already doing so to some extent.

The system actually seems to work well for the average person.

I think on the basis of international comparisons that the United States school system, at least, is not serving average learners well, because they only reach the achievement levels of BELOW-average persons in several other countries, including countries that were much poorer than the United States only a generation ago.

http://timss.bc.edu/PDF/t03_download/T03_M_Chap1.pdf

(The several national comparison charts in this publication, by the way, are excellent examples of best practice in showing statistical data. The take-home point is that average students in the United States score like bottom end students in the best-performing countries, and even top-end students in the United States score only like average students in those countries.)

I am afraid that the system will never change it would not surprise me if schools still used the same teaching methods they use today, a couple of centuries from now.

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