Not school or homeschool, but modular learning
manisharoses.medium.com
manisharoses.medium.com
"Tracking" was supposed to mitigate this to some extent, but it tends to be a) used across the board for multiple subjects and b) used as a means of sorting students into winners (who are richly rewarded with status and additional opportunities) and losers (who are deprived of rewards and benefits rather than offered additional help and assistance.)
Universities use a modular approach to great effect: you can usually take any course (even graduate courses) if you've completed the prerequisites. And there are multiple ways of fulfilling graduation requirements.
A limitation of the university approach is that for a given course in a given term, everyone in the course is usually still in lock-step. Sometimes this is mitigated by offering multiple versions of a course with different time scales (usually an "accelerated" version for people who are familiar with the material and/or want to devote more time per week.)
In high school, the majority of your schedule was in required classes. In college, the vast majority was in major courses / electives.
At my local school, there was an extra early bird period in the morning if you wanted to take an extra class. We could also take classes from the local community college and have them count as both high school credit and college credit (today, the high school I went to has moved and is now sharing a property line with the community college, so it makes it very easy for students to go back and forth). My niece just graduated from high school two years ago and she's pretty close to finishing her bachelor's, because she had earned a lot of college credit already. For motivated students it really works out great.
For my school district, the general tendency is that you had a "core" of mandatory classes where your choice was at best "do you want the hard or easy version of the class", although math in particular was tracked somewhat more independently of grade level. In addition, there is a set of elective slots, and degree requirements might strongly push you to certain electives (in particular, foreign language elective requirements are probably pretty common).
Doubling-up on two sciences in one year wouldn't be normally possible, at least on the standard end-of-year sign-up-for-the-next-grade forms, but it is possible to do so if you bitch long and hard enough at a school counselor for special dispensation.
However, this is no longer possible now for my younger siblings enrolling at the same public high school. Apparently the school now put much more strict limit on pre-requisite and what classes students can take at which year. There is now much less flexibility.
This is not due to significantly increased student body size , but mainly for "equity" in education outcomes -- i.e. holding back the advanced students to accommodate the less advanced students. It makes very little sense, but that is California!
If most people opt out of basic math classes, society will be worse off.
I think if we could fine-tune instruction to skill levels, while still requiring a strong foundation in each subject, we would be much better off in the education scene.
i believe the reverse is true. taking a statistics class will advance your language skills, because you learn a lot more by application than by theory. and there is no reason that these language skills need to be learned in isolation before you can apply them.
so maybe this slows down your learning for a bit, but even that is hardly provable because of different learning speeds of each student which likely vary far more than than the variation that language classes or the lack thereof would introduce.
actually, the whole concept of classes for your native language doesn't make sense in this context. learning your native language permeates everything. you learn language in every class, be it math, biology, sports or whatever. a dedicated native language class at best fills in gaps such as learning grammar, linguistics and literature. but it is not, and should not be a prerequisite to learning anything else.
the situation is a bit different when the language being used to teach is not your native language. a certain foundation in the language is necessary before you can follow classes, so a number of language classes are a prerequisite in that case
People love to wave English around as the most useless class of them all, but when taught correctly it’s really the most important. It influences how we consume media, how we write, and how we communicate with one another. All of those skills are incredibly important in all other classes and I think having a concentrated environment to learn them is valuable.
case in point, digesting information and thinking critically are things that should be taught in all classes. i actually find it problematic if a teacher expects that it is some other teachers job to teach any skills that are necessary in their own class. this is just an unnecessary division of learning, when, as i believe, integrated learning should be more effective. this culminates in the concept of project based learning where the whole concept of subject classes disappears and is replaced with interdisciplinary projects that cover all skills necessary to complete a project.
I think this is the most important point in most discussions about education.
I feel that everyone I know has had classes or professors that they either really disliked or really liked, but I also feel that there is a strong chance that many of the cases were not due to them not simply enjoying the subject matter, but instead the content being taught poorly. No matter how well we optimize the selection and ordering of classes, it is of no use if the content is not taught well.
For what it's worth, I thought all of my English learning was pretty atrocious.
School, at least beyond elementary education, isn't about knowing all the arbitrary points that you learn. It about learning to learn. The problem, however, is that you can't simply teach people how to learn, so the content you cover in classes is simply a proxy for the real "meat" of education.
Some might argue that you can apply this by teaching only classes in a student's focus area, but I argue that being exposed to historical information, statistics, math, computer science, biology, etc. has made me a much more well-rounded human and I possess the skills necessary to understand just about any concept presented at a sub-journal level. That's a skill I've noticed not many have, and it has proven incredibly valuable.
(And then, there are the really radical departures — Unschooling, for example).
Universities will require one class in a number of different fields to market themselves as liberal arts schools, but don't pretend like one algebra course gives a person all the math skills they will need in their life.
The High School degree, like the higher education degree, should require a set of unit from various subjects to be completed. The only difference is how those classes are consumed by the student.
Let kids take what they’re interested in and put off what they’re not, so long as they eventually do it. What could possibly go wrong? In university, if you clown your schedule, you just don’t graduate until you sort it out. Are we going to have the backbone to do that to high school kids, especially if we find that wealthy, college-track kids manage the flexibility just fine while other students struggle to get the guidance to help them navigate the flexible schedule? I doubt we would.
I doubt this. The overwhelming majority of people never use anything more complicated than algebra. Most people probably don’t even use algebra in an average year. And primary math instruction is an enormous waste of time. You can teach a twelve year old the entire primary math curriculum in well under a 100 hours. It would be great if we could make more of the population numerate but most Americans can’t name the three branches of government[1]. You’re not going to get them to learn statistics.
[1] Not a knock on Americans. The US has a great education system. People are people everywhere and most of them don’t care about nerd stuff that they find neither interesting nor useful.
Also not a knock on Americans. The US has many great things, but the education system isn't one of those. Sure, there are excellent educational and academic institutions in the US, but that alone doesn't make the country's education system great.
Switzerland has a great education system. There are almost no private schools because public schools do a great job. All universities are almost free and they are still among the top academic institutions globally (e.g., ETH). Furthermore, those who want to learn a trade early on can do apprenticeships combined with schooling instead of going to university and still have a great career. If they wish to go to university later, they can go to a university of applied sciences (Fachhochschule) or catch up on some requiremnts and go to a university.
The best-known US institutions -- Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. -- are riding based on having been fantastic institutions in the sixties, eighties, nineties, and even early 00's. I think it will be decades before reputation catches reality, but at some point, it will happen.
It turns out massive endowments and fundraising didn't make schools better; they misaligned incentives, brought in the wrong types of people into leadership positions, brought in conflicts-of-interest, and led to all sorts of corruption.
The second-tier seem to still be doing okay -- the WPIs, Georgia Techs, state schools, and so on -- but the elites populate their faculty ranks, and you can see culture slowly creeping in.
More money doesn't always make things better. Go figure.
TL;DR: If you went to top-20 school, and you're asked for donations, donate to a local state school, an HBCU, an educational not-for-profit doing good work in your community, or elsewhere.
And COVID19 in the US can be summarized as: Policymakers and citizens don't understand exponents, let alone differential equations.
A key reason that America doesn't have a great education system is exactly what you've expressed; people don't have any faith that America even COULD have a great education system. That's kinda across the board; America doesn't do big things anymore.
US whites do better than whites in every country bar Estonia. US Asians do better than every country bar Singapore and the fake Chinese results. US Hispanics do much better than any Western Hemisphere Hispanophone nation. Looks pretty good.
> And COVID19 in the US can be summarized as: Policymakers and citizens don't understand exponents, let alone differential equations.
This does not make the US look particularly bad. Everywhere else in the Western world but Israel is run by clowns too. Even Australia and New Zealand have shown themselves clowns, with their incredibly botched vaccine regime.
There have been long term studies done on kids that grew up in unschooled households. They tended to do fine in college, but were no better or worse off. They tended to score slightly higher on emotional evaluations and also tended to be slightly more predisposed to entrepreneurship and the arts (and less interested in careers with more rigid structure like science and engineering).
I'd be interested to see the data on outcomes though. From the (fairly large) number of unschooling people I've met, the results seem to be much more extreme. People are either working upper-class white collar jobs or chronically unemployed.
If a lot of kids are behind, or struggling, dealing with the social aspects of school (do you fit in? Do you have friends?) and rigor of work (wake up at 8am, power through a 8 hour a day, 40 min lunch break), then there’s no point in saddling them with that extra burden.
We don’t give kids the flexibility that we ourselves need to distance ourself and focus on things from time to time. When you don’t provide that, they will do what all of us do, disassociate and approach things in a ‘whatever, life sucks’ way.
I guess there might also be a bias in terms of which types of children parents are inclined to home-educate, although I imagine most families do home-ed all their children. I sometimes wonder if mine had been the other way round if the decision might have gone the other way - I think school suits my oldest much more than my youngest.
I'm increasingly finding myself considering some form of alternate schooling for my children.
The public schools in my area are sub-par. Quality public schools exist, but are zoned and therefore my children are not permitted unless we move (expensive and non-desirable).
Private schools are absurdly expensive, we've decent public metrics in Australia and they're frequently no better than a decent public school. Worse, they're essentially universally dead set on trying to indoctrinate children into one cult or another.
My wife is a primary school teacher. She's incredibly hands on and is renowned for her ability to form relationships, and take a special interest in her students' wellbeing. She's demonstrated her ability to function independently, by taking existing resources and expanding them; having recently launched a small well-being book + play subscription for young children (https://mybookbag.com.au/).
I'm quite interested in teaching, hands-on learning and mentoring myself. I've worked from home for the last 7 years and will continue to do so.
I've a 3 year old daughter with Type 1 Diabetes, and I don't much trust her care to others, at least while she's too young to take a more active role in her own care.
I'm aware my situation is perhaps uniquely ideal for some form of "home schooling", and yet I'm still extremely hesitant to take the idea seriously. Socialisation is of course a concern, but I think it's more the stigma and also lack of data/oversight.
Is there anyone here with much experience in alternate education structures that has any insight to share?
I'm joking, but the point is, socialization in public school can take some horrible forms. (At least, it can in the US. Maybe schools in Australia are more sane.) That socialization isn't necessarily a good match for adult society, either, or even for university.
Socialization is still a concern. But socialize your children to adult society. They don't need to be socialized to public school society.
This is one such concern that I have. Do you think this comes down to the "adult society" you're being integrated into?
If you don't mind my asking, do you think you know the motivation for the way you were raised/educated in the manner you were raised?
I imagine there are a wide variety of reasons as to why parents home school, and that the outcomes vary significantly based upon those motivations.
My homeschooled kids can't communicate in emoji-talk, it's true. But they easily interact with both adults and other homeschooled children on both small-talk and meaningful conversational levels. That's more valuable in the long run.
> Socialization is still a concern. But socialize your children to adult society. They don't need to be socialized to public school society.
I was homeschooled and my parents explicitly went for this approach. It's a great way of turning out a materially successful miserable loner; perfect adult-pleasers who've never had real friends. You may think you're only cutting them off from bullying or emojispeak or whatever, but what you're really eliminating are opportunities to learn the dynamics of peer relationships. And no, socialization with other homeschooled kids doesn't count.
Parents tend to vastly underestimate the importance of cultural fluency in the formation of peer relationships, and I think that's a tragic detriment to a lot of kids, especially the ones (like me) who internalize the sort of bullshit elitist attitudes that often inform non religious decisions to homeschool. And yes - my parents weren't religious and were highly educated on all the trendiest homeschooling topics.
I'm obviously fairly steamed about this and deeply personally biased, so take my words with a grain of salt. This isn't intended as a personal attack in any sense.
Fluency in the culture is crap. Are we really supposed to be glad our kids know all the Cardi B songs?
So, the older generations’ complaint about popular musicians since at least Elvis’ hips.
I think your responses have made my point way more eloquently than I could do myself, so I guess I'll leave it here.
I urge you to consider that fitting into the culture isn't worth it if the culture is bad. You may not see the culture's taste in music as bad, which is fair, but I am sure in other cultures (say in highly restrictive and conservative cultures) you'd be ashamed to be culturally literate (antebellum south? Jim Crow era?).
OP predicts your reply, just replace "bullying or emojispeak" with Cardi B in his original post.
Also, kids have known and talked graphically about sex since the days of Elvis. I've been told even the ancient greeks knew what sex was.
You don't have shared experiences or languages. There's usually only a small amount of children who share what you experienced, and you don't always understand when they are joking, or how to deal with situations, or even what they are saying. And many times the kids you do know are weird or worse than those your parents think they are protecting you from.
I know plenty of homeschooled kids who are now perfectly happy, well adjusted adults. The only thing I can see that they have in common is a tendency to think for themselves.
Most of them are now homeschooling their kids. And their kids are also happy and well adjusted— much more so than the kids I went to school with.
(I’m a maladjusted product of mostly standard education, so take this with a grain of salt.)
They don't need to be socialized to any particular public school society, but they do need to be socialized to the society of children. This is not adult society, and the difference is important. Sibling relationships are important but necessarily unusual, it's also necessary to go beyond this.
If you try to inculcate adult society only in your children, I think you are doing them a great disservice.
Also a great piece in the Atlantic about how Black families are opting out of school due to institutionalized racism. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/the-ri...
A film I really like on this topic is Class Dismissed. It shows the journey of two girls who leave school and it's really amazing to watch them relax, get more at ease with themselves and make friends over the course of the film.
As a first step, I would recommend looking up a local group (or at least one in your state, since requirements vary) and talk to parents who have already done it.
“Illinois HOUSE is a statewide network of support groups for people involved in homeschooling. We provide email and phone support about issues related to Illinois homeschooling. Common questions include how to withdraw a child from public school, what the school district needs from homeschooling families and how to deal with officials who ask for more than they’re entitled to receive. We have member groups throughout the Chicago suburban area and more spread across the state.”
Metro-East Secular Homeschoolers
“This is a group to make like-minded connections with other homeschoolers (or those considering homeschool!) in the Metro-East area.”
Pekin/Peoria Area (Illinois) Secular Homeschool Families
“Any PARENT/GUARDIAN of a child 5-18 that is homeschooling in the Pekin/Peoria area is welcome to join this group. Our purpose is to connect and support other secular homeschool families in the area.”
QCA Secular Homeschool Group
“QCA Secular Homeschoolers is primarily geared toward families who are homeschooling for reasons other than religion and who are looking for an alternative to religious homeschool groups.”
Secular Homeschoolers of Bloomington-Normal
“We are an inclusive homeschool group that respects and values diverse perspectives. Our purpose is to connect and support Bloomington-Normal area homeschooling families in a non-faith based group for field trips, shared lessons, book clubs, and online discussions.”
Westside H.O.U.S.E.
“We are an inclusive, non-sectarian network of homeschool families who meet to enjoy activities together, share experiences and lend support to one another. Our chapter serves families throughout Greater Chicago and the Western Suburbs.”
It's true that the first mistake most homeschooling parents make is to try and recreate the public/private school system in their home. Few find success down that path.
The primary goal of schooling is to teach your children how to learn. If we provide them with the skills to learn whatever they'll need to be productive adults, they'll be more prepared for whatever the career market looks like when they're ready to join the workforce.
Yes, that looks mostly like Reading/Writing/Arithmetic as grade schoolers but there's so many more options once they reach Jr. and Sr. High School. Internships and apprenticeships can be incredibly valuable as well as entrepreneurial opportunities. My sons learned things running a mobile car detailing service than could have ever been taught them in a classroom setting.
There are opportunities for learning every day if we take the time to do share them with our children: grocery shopping, going to the bank, purchasing a vehicle, resolving a dispute with a neighbor.
Questions from kids are one of the best ways to teach them to learn, especially if you don't know the answer. What better example is there than when you get to reply "I don't know. Let's find out together."
I agree with your comment 100% - if we go on holiday/ vacation they have to help in understanding the trade off of what options we chosse based on the costs and the organisation eg transportation etc..
We also teach our kids to project manage their own educational and general activities (with costs)
yes they make mistakes, but they see the real world implications of the mistakes - from getting away with it, to having to cancel stuff (and still pay for it)
It's great if you have intelligent parents who know when to say "I don't know," but if you aren't an expert on a given subject, you should bring in a private tutor. This means that for most parents, once your kid hits highschool you can't teach them anything outside of whatever you have a bachelor's in, so to homeschool effectively you'd have to just pay for a bunch of private tutors for each subject and then you're not really homeschooling anymore.
Also, depriving your kid of the socialization they'd get from more traditional non-cult schools in the US is almost universally seen as bordering on child abuse by people who grew up homeschooled, so keep that in mind moving forward. Learning how to be likeable is already difficult enough for kids who have social opportunities all day every day. The stigma absolutely did not come out of nowhere. It's unfortunately common for homeschoolers to leave the house and present as if they have autism or some other social learning disability. For some reason it isn't taught as a learnable skill, but I think nearly everyone would agree that it takes practice. There will be obvious differences between a kid that practices 2 hours per day instead of 30 minutes a week.
Edit: I'd also caution anyone against giving too much credence to the stories of parents who homeschooled their children but were never homeschooled themselves. Parents and children often end up having wildly different perspectives on this subject.
A bigger issue is that teaching (and teaching kids even moreso than adults) is itself a skill, and a skill lots of people with degrees don't have even in their degree field. The most successful homeschool parents I've known haven't used private tutors or been omnicompetent, but have been professional educators. Who, for those who weren't professional educators of children to start with, spent a lot of effort learning about child development abd childhood education to be successful at homeschooling.
some of us prefer to socialize outside of school with kids that actually share our interests rather than being forced to interact with kids that we have nothing in common with.
school comes with bullying, peer pressure and a lot of other negatives in socialization that only the "normal" kids will get through relatively unscathed.
i count myself lucky that i only experienced mild bullying and being an outsider completely eliminated any issues of peer pressure for me as i simply had no need or desire to fit in.
there are plenty of other alternatives where you can socialize. be it boy/girl scouts, music classes, some sports or other activities.
of course, if you didn't get to participate in those either, then you really did miss out. i am sorry for that. your parents failed you at that point. however, if you think that school would have helped you, i would not be so sure about that.
So does real life. People need experience dealing with these situations. IMO, it would be better to deal with them at school where you have parents & teachers to fall back on, rather than than waiting until you are an adult without nearly as much support.
As an adult, you usually have the option of walking away.
> People need experience dealing with these situations.
I think kids need to be taught the kind of self-respect such that they know when it is appropriate to deploy a healthy "go fuck yourself". Not clear that state schooling does a great job of this - indeed, if it's teaching them anything, it seems to be you are going to get bullied and you have no choice butto put up with it.
all i learned about bullying in school is to distance myself from those idiots and subconsciously i probably also learned to avoid making friends. i don't see how that was helpful. i didn't experience real socialization until i entered university where i found actually like-minded individuals with common interest. and it's not true that there is less support when you are an adult. on the contrary. the friends i made in university were my support. i didn't have that before.
i am not complaining, my school experience wasn't that bad. but i seriously doubt that any form of home schooling would have been worse.
I picked up social skills extremely quickly when I started college, but the first two years were absolutely abysmal to such a degree that I genuinely believed for a period that I had undiagnosed autism. I ended up turning out pretty gregarious and I'm probably average to above-average at making connections and coming off as normal by now, but an enormous amount of suffering could have been avoided. The social situations I was afforded as a child didn't provide nearly enough opportunity to learn and fail.
I had a glimpse of what the alternative would have been like because I got to take drivers' ed at a public school. You might think putting your kid in cub scouts or homeschool co-op is a substitute but it really isn't. If your kid only hangs out with homeschool kids they only get to see how the weird kids act. And if they're in cub scouts they're automatically at a disadvantage because a lot of the other kids are going to already know each other from school.
A lot of people like you come into the conversation asking to hear about the experiences of grown homeschooled children, but once they say something you don't like you suddenly turn into an expert on the subject because their lived experiences aren't representative of whatever you imagine homeschooling is like.
if we compare your and my story then apparently your homeschool experience matches my public school experience. how does that fit together?
i am not claiming that homeschooling would have been better for me, but only that it would not have been any worse.
it really depends on the individual character. maybe public school would have been better for you because it appears you are a social person, and all you lacked was an opportunity to learn those skills. i wasn't social to begin with, and what i needed was a group of equal peers. so yes, hanging out with other wierd kids would have been exactly what i needed, because i would have allowed me to make friends with someone. i could not get that from public school, because i was the only wierd kid there.
As someone else pointed out, it's not clear that school helps with this. The kid who went to school and didn't learn this is not at all an outlier. There are quite a few in every class. What would be interesting is if there is research to indicate which suffers more: The kid who doesn't learn this and has to go through school, or the homeschooled kid who doesn't learn this and doesn't have to deal with it in school.
Agreed on the tutor thing at high school, although for many homeschooled kids I know, it was usually one of:
1. Send kids to a regular high school (i.e. don't home school those years)
2. Lots of schools in this area have programs that allow homeschooled kids to attend classes in the areas their parents cannot teach. Of course, rules on this vary from state to state.
The rebuttal to your point is so simple and obvious it's really hard to take you seriously. Socializing is a skill that can be practiced. If you have fewer opportunities to practice, you're less likely to get better. The children that are bad at socializing despite going to public school do not show that public school doesn't teach socializing, it means they didn't learn as much from their practice. For all you know, poorly-socialized public school children would have otherwise ended up living in their parents' basements until 45 or turned into serial killers if they were homeschooled. Public schooling doesn't need to guarantee good outcomes to be the more desirable choice.
The school environment is a very artificial one, and not very comparable with much in the adult world. Those who stick to the rules learned there tend not to do well (also found out the hard way). For years I've tossed the idea in my head to write a blog post of all the life lessons one learns in school that lead to poor performance at work. Likewise, I'd like to write another post on all the lessons from school that often do translate to the work environment (because it was so ingrained in us), but which leads to suboptimal working conditions.
I can't obviously discount your experience, and my school experience was actually quite good - but just as you are aware of the downsides of home schooling, I'm aware of the downsides of schools.
If we go beyond anecdotes and to research, I believe most research is in favor of home schooling - both academically and socially.
There's also a huge and obvious problem with studying homeschooling. Part of the disadvantage is that each homeschool environment will be radically different because it's impossible to control for what a given home life is, the type of parent that would homeschool their child, and the sort of education they otherwise would have had if they weren't homeschooled. It's also really easy to track down all the homeschoolers that ended up going to college because that data is already gathered. It's a lot harder to track down all the homeschoolers that never left their parents basement or work the night shift at the 7/11 because they barely learned how to read, so you really can't say that "statistically" it's better or worse. Of course the data will be skewed so homeschoolers seem like higher performers.
My kids were involved in music, which is a popular activity among homeschool families, so we got to know quite a few people that way, and socially, the kids resembled their parents. Kids with competitive parents, tended to be competitive, kids with laid back parents were laid back.
If you can do all that, and you can plug your kiddo into frequent social activities for her emotional wellbeing (homeschooling can be terribly lonely, especially for a teenager!), then I think it's a good option.
[1]I get that other school options don't guarantee these things won't happen. I get that socially awkward people go to public school. I'm just saying that if you go this route, you'll have no one to blame but yourself if things go wrong. That might be a worthy risk if your other options suck.
EDIT: The guy with 15 years of homeschooling experience had it EXACTLY right--do not attempt to recreate the public school experience. My mom even went so far as to create a classroom with desks the first year, God bless her.
Imagine the advantage you get getting there 2-3 years ahead of most people.
IME, there isn't much. You get to college a few years early, it's a kind of awkward experience, and then life happens.
Some of my friends lost a year or two due to the adjustment.
Other friends ended up in boring low-risk careers and regret not being mature enough at graduation to know what they wanted to do (switching majors, grad school, starting a company, etc.)
In the best case you start the career that you would've had anyways 2-3 years earlier.
I've met a lot of people who got started on life early (you probably have too). Most look back on it as having no material effect on their lives. A few consider it the worst decision they ever made.
Some people imagine a huge financial difference, but retirement is a long game and other variables dominate. A $10K difference in your salary at your first position, or getting laid off at an unlucky time, or choosing to optimize for something other than income, or buying randomcoin at the right/wrong time, or having your rsus vest in the right quarters, etc. are all going to have a larger financial impact than an extra 2 years in the labor market over a 30+ year career.
Can they? You can start having kids as soon as you find a spouse. College is a great time to date with the intention of finding a spouse. Going to college at 15 can make finding a spouse early in life considerably more difficult.
One concern I have is that an oft-given solution to socialization is "church," but we are not religious and do not plan to become so. This limits options somewhat, and also makes us unlike (our perception of) other home-school families.
Would be glad to hear other suggestions from others who might have had this experience (i.e., being non-religious homeschoolers).
If you just don’t religion, a small, local church might still be a good call, proving they’re amicable. Your kids are going to learn about religion one way or another. Look at this as an education into what religious people are really like.
Imagine if modular, rather than pipeline, was the default societal approach to structuring education?
(A personal aside: I'm interested in exploratory discussion of transformative improvement of preK-13 science content/progressions/interactives, using extreme domain expertise and SER mashups. Science and engineering are a richly interwoven interdisciplinary tapestry - what if they were taught like that? If anyone knows of settings for such discussion, I'd love to hear of it - thanks! Bonus fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUyVd1pO3nI 5-8-yr old picture book to vaccinate against natural selection misconceptions https://www.bu.edu/cdl/files/2017/10/Emmons_et_al-2017-Journ... )
Which understandably focuses on individual deployable innovations. Rather than on exploring mashups of multiple hard-to-deploy innovations, with interdependencies, regardless of how awesome their potential synergies.
For example, on better teaching of deep time, or genetics central dogma, or natural selection, separately. Rather than on say "if all of those, and more, were simultaneously done cutting-edge-research well or better, what possibilities might that open up for an evolution-rooted biology learning progression? How about in K-6?" Or "if we managed to successfully teach both size/scale down to atoms, and a novel atoms-up foundation, in K-2, neither of which have been done even in (quite unimpressive) research, what might a broad and modern material sciences preK-8 progression look like? Including atoms-dancing phonons, gels, multiscale structure, and so much more."
And instructors are understandably focused on the performance art of triage education of their students at hand, towards standardized exams and incremental outcomes, under severe resource constraints. And textbooks... sigh.
So there are few incentives for anyone to explore "what might this all look like, if it wasn't wretched". And the expertise requirements seem extreme - like "biology tome with a hundred authors" extreme, but with extensive collaboration also required, and for something much much smaller. There's hope, but it's non-trivial.
Whole-program learning progression rewrites in life-sciences professional education is perhaps the/a closest analogy. But even there, time and effort constraints severely restrict exploration. You can't afford to explore both how to successfully give med school graduate students a firm grasp of size, and how to use that to better teach physical biology. The absence of each denying incentive to the other. So basically neither happens, on a timescale of decades. But perhaps, if there were a clearer vision of what it might look like, of the payoff, there might be greater motivation to work towards it.
Intro: If youve been a long-time listener you might have heard me complain about my education. So much so that a guest at one time told me to stop. But I still think there should be a better way. Another person who feels that way is Elon Musk. He hired someone to create a whole new curriculum for his kids. Well, todays guest got to see inside that program and he was so blown away by it that he created a company that kids outside of SpaceX can get access to.
duration: 1:03h
Episode Download link (58 MB): https://mixergy.com/wp-content/audio/Chrisman-Frank-Synthesi...
Show Notes: https://mixergy.com/interviews/synthesis-with-chrisman-frank...
My family has been homeschooling for 15 years and my kids take science from one person, choir from another. The kids volunteer with me in the community and do a lot of following their interests along with their very basic requirements. Your grade is your age, not your academics so you go at your own pace for learning. We have had so much success with it that I recommend this approach highly.
Life and responsibility mostly get in the way.
Its hard enough to parent when you are trying to work full time and keep the house clean. No time for teaching left.
Those that have ample time to teach (young and single) are too disconnected or not incentivized to actually care.
By the time we can teach (old/retirement age), there is no longer a chance to make an inpact on those lives you love.
My church has a homeschool group and they have an open house every year where people sign up for classes independently offered by various tutors.
The tutors hold classes for multiple students
Technically it's homeschool because all children are out of the public school system and responsibility for their education has not been given to a private school.
But in reality, many kids take classes together with various tutors the church group organizes.