Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
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Just let people take the algebra or calculus or whatever module, when they feel like it. There would still be some sort of minimum requirement so that you can write a decent email, but there would be no reason to lock people in year groups.
Year groups are still important socially, but there will be plenty of time with people in your year regardless, because the big hump of people will follow along most courses at the same rate.
The theme the author is alluding to is the industrialization of education: shove a bunch of kids through, make sure there's an acceptable defect rate, let them out into society. But we don't have to live like that anymore. If you look at jobs, they don't really map to education these days, so there's not much point in making an assembly line of kids who can solve quadratic equations and write 5-paragraph essays.
Plunging young children into an anarchical learning environment with nothing but YouTube to guide them won't end well. But if you add guidance that encourages their strengths and tolerates their weaknesses, I speculate that net learning will exceed that of today's school system.
All sorts of approaches are possible with 5 students per teacher, but not 10, and with 10, but not with 20—let alone 25 or more.
Which means that a wide roll-out would require one or both of: more spending on training; more spending on salaries to increase the quality of the candidate pool.
A top-quintile teacher may be way more effective than a middle-quintile teacher, to the point that entire education frameworks and strategies are viable for them that aren't for the middle quintile, but the trouble is only 20% of your teachers are top-quintile. Ditto admin. You'd be amazed at how mediocre admin can completely ruin a good plan.
I wouldn't be so quick to attribute those two events, which happen around the same time, as causal. I know a few teachers of young children and the things they love about their jobs is just that curiosity you're talking about. Unless you think it just takes a few years for the system to really beat them down, it's not exactly synchronous.
When thinking back on sitting through all the boring classes on subjects I wasn't interested in feels like it was a lot more of a me "problem". I find most of that stuff interesting now or at least appreciate that I had the exposure to it. It seems to me that I was much more interested in play and/or social development at the time.
That really depends on the environment a child grew up in. When I see parents who delegate their child rearing to an iPad with Cocomelon on 24/7 I'm quite sure that kid won't benefit from unstructured self-paced anything.
While I'm fantasizing, the second unrealistic requirement is affordable. ;-)
It's always vying with Cambridge for the top place on student satisfaction.
Also there is limited ability to vary your pace according to difficulty. Once you start a unit there is a schedule you need to follow to be ready for the end of period exams. In fact I'd argue that without that schedule pressure many people would struggle to complete each unit.
You can vary the number of units you take in a year but that's before you really know how difficult the work is. I had to abandon one unit so I could focus on Topology as it was much harder than I expected. It would have been nice to just take a bit longer but that option wasn't available.
Wish they had math degrees.
Disagree. Year groups perpetuate immaturity. They are also very socially unnatural, a mere byproduct of going for scale in the education system. That is fine, but if we can achieve scale without year groups (which we could under your proposal), that would be better.
Beyond that, kids are around mixed age groups plenty. For me it was at afterschool programs, summer camps, dance classes, bowling, family (sibling, cousins), and playing with neighborhood kids.
This is true, this is a harsh truth.
You can see the effect in actual (real world) consequences: no one cares if you learn nothing at school and no teacher is ever fired for low learning outcome in their students. But the immediate moment a student gets hurt, for any reason, then hell is unleashed on the teacher, lawyers get involved, a the teachers is now actually risking something.
School is glorified babysitting, until university when you're on your own, age brackets mostly don't matter, and the burden of learning is onto you (professors don't care).
as a parent of a 12 and 9 year old i mostly agree. You really have to augment and reaffirm the material being taught in school outside of the school setting and with a different approach. It takes a lot of work to nurture and grow a love-of-learning vs just "did you do your homework? yes? good.". No parent is perfect though, it takes a lot of effort and trial/error to learn what works and doesn't work with your particular kid.
After you left High School, was there ever a time in your life when you hung out with people of exactly the same age? The fact that everyone spends 13 years of their youth doing it now is an artifact only about 100 years old.
> I've long thought that schools should just let people go at whatever pace they want.
I'm pretty sure Montessori schools do something like this.
But for little kids, it seems to matter a bit. You can tell kids change fast, so plus minus a year at a young age matters.
> so no, plus or minus a year does not matter even for a 3 year old kid.
Anyone who has kids is going to disagree with this.
the age difference matters for the development of each individual kid, but it us rather useless as a measure to compare the development of different kids.
in the first few years, the development of each kid is so different that no two kids of the same age are alike. you can have a four year old with the maturity of a two year old, or a three year old going on five. a wider age range allows children with the same level of maturity to play together regardless of the individual age.
also younger kids learn from older kids with allows them to mature faster.
this difference in maturity continues, but as the kids are older it just matters less, because the material being taught in school does not depend on the level of maturity but only on what they already learned regardless of how mature they are.
At the moment I have a kid who is asking me about chemistry, and I can't just wait 5 years for him to get to that age where they teach people specifically chemistry (as opposed to general science). There's no reason I can't tell a 9 year old about valencies and that kind of thing, so why does school wait with it?
Not enough staff (teachers) to differentiate instruction that finely.
A lot of stuff sounds like a great idea until you're looking at a classroom of 18-28 students and everyone else around you is trying to deal with a similar-sized class of their own. Special-ed kids might get help down to having one entire adult just to help and follow around that single kid all day (!) but there's no stomach for spending that kind of money to help kids who are ahead, or to reduce class sizes so regular classroom teachers can realistically do a better job of differentiation. Best most places get are very-part-time gifted programs.
that would require that all children develop at exactly the same pace which is simply not happening like that.
see my other comment.
i do agree with the socialization.
i don't know how they handle the transitions from one group to the next though. maybe an extra slow kid that hasn't mastered the whole material in 3 years will tack on an extra time.
and i think that faster kids will spend the extra time teaching younger kids.
i also expect that in a 3 year period is is more likely for kids to catch up because they are probably not continuously slow. (keep in mind that montessori originally developed the material for kids with (learning-)disabilities) so learning at a slow pace is actually less of a problem, if it is a problem at all.
There are plenty of people that adapt it to older children, but the 3 years batches are the first thing to go away.
At the other extreme, I've seen attempts to get ride of the synchronicity at university undergraduate courses. It's almost trivial there and seems to have no downsides.
the term "montessori" is not protected, so many schools claim to use montessori, but aren't really.
from https://montessori-ami.org/about-montessori/montessori-12-18
The school for adolescents is for young people ages 12 through 18. Sometimes the young people are divided into two groups of 12 to 15 and 15 to 18 and sometimes all six years interact in one environment, depending upon the size of the school.
so in fact instead of the batches going away, they may grow to an even wider age range. the same for elementary.
At the other extreme, I've seen attempts to get rid of the synchronicity at university undergraduate courses. It's almost trivial there and seems to have no downsides.
that's how universities work in austria and germany. and it makes a lot of sense. the older you get the less the actual age matters for what you learn.
I just started at the beginning of February and have already knocked out an entire course in the past 10 days, it's honestly the best experience I've ever had with schooling. I like to work at my own pace because my motivation to get things done comes in bits and spurts, so I like to take advance of the upswings of my motivation levels and will manically get as much done as I can it fades and then take a week off to just chill, which did not work very well when I was enrolled at a more traditional university.
None of their degree programs ABET accredited, if that matters to you.
Great for high achieving, high conscientiousness kids, but it isn't going to work for a lot of kids, especially those without academic support at home. The last two years have been an approximate experiment in this; in the sense that kids who didn't want to participate had an easy out. What we saw is the bottom fall out.
1. The school system has been broken for many years. Learning from people who are not passionate about what they teach is the main concern I have. You can easily tell the difference of "engaged" students who have a great teacher they will remember forever vs. "disengaged" students who will be able to tell you how bad their teacher was. I think Montessori-esq / curiosity driven schooling is the future given 2/3 the world is on the internet and there's actually exciting, inspiring, and engaging teachers around the world doing an amazing job. (i.e. Khan from Khan Academy really paved the way here)
2. These rules work because there's a significantly smaller portion of the population who truly knows themselves and embraces their eccentric characteristics. We typically lose our identity when going through a formal means of schooling because we want to fit in and thus be "average". Even those valedictorians are quite "average" outside of working harder to get perfect grades. How many do you know that went on to do the amazing things expected of them? Usually it's the people who were eccentric and didn't do so well in school.
Have you ever come across some topic of history or biology that just seemed soo boring at the time it was taught in school. But only years later watching some random YouTube video explaining it and now you realise how interesting it has always been.
I do know YouTube-based learning has it's flaws, but I find it much more enjoyable to engage with vs. the 9-5 teachers/professors I had growing up. The YouTube essayists are often way more passionate and informed on their topics as well.
Then you get the value of a community coming along for the ride... In school there wasn't a comments section where discourse can happen regarding the subject being discussed/instruction. I get that YouTube comments are often horrible, but for many of the educational stuff I've watched good/insightful/corrective comments do seem to trickle to the top.
Also - there's the "my time" aspect of it. This is _huge_ in comparison to normal education. I can move the slider back and listen to a part over and over again - sometimes topics are tough for me and I need to hear it 3-4 times. I can put the video on 1.25/1.5x if I want to bump the pacing up. I can study/learn when I personally learn best which tends to be late at night.
Finally there's the technical aspect of it. I didn't go to a nice college - I went to a very expensive private school in the midwest. I went for both design and computer science. With 100% confidence I can say that every topic that I studied from math, to programming, to electronics, to art history, Adobe Suite... _all_ of it has more up-to-date and functionally better instruction on YouTube available 100% for free. This sounds like an exaggeration - I promise you it is not.
Yes - YouTube learning has it's problems... but anecdotally I have learned so much. I have saved money fixing my own cars. I have jumped into topics that would have _never_ interested me before. I have improved skills professionally. It's a resource that I now can't imagine going without!
The Montessori "curiosity-driven" approach definitely stuck with me. I'm always interested in reading and learning about how anything works, and to get my hands on some introductory way of doing it myself. But I don't have the drive to turn that into any bigger successes. I skated through public school and never really learned to work hard, and I'm now that "average" valedictorian as you describe - pretty good 9-to-5 software job, but I'm not going to be achieving anything bigger.
I find my greatest satisfaction in small self-contained challenges. Things like competitive board games, Rubik's-cube type puzzles, juggling. Where I can hold the entire activity in my head. But then I lose interest when it reaches a level of complexity that requires a more disciplined and organized approach. I ascribe these tendencies to having the Montessori education early to be curious and hands-on about everything, but then the public school education which just teaches to the next test and doesn't train for anything bigger.
I wish though, that I was more organized and ambitious. I always want to accomplish more instead of just dabbling in a million different things and never producing anything very large.
It's in every part of the design:
- The focus on getting things "right" rather than exploring why things are wrong.
- The grading the discourages exploration and challenging oneself.
- The endless back and forth about how children fail assignments. Other than in very special circumstances, the teacher is the one having failed if the children on aggregate are not performing as well as they should.
- The way "learning" is defined as "remembering what the teacher wants to hear".
I could go on. It's crazy. When the children of today become adults, they won't, generally, need to become obedient factory workers. They will need to be creative free thinkers in knowledge jobs. School robs them of opportunities to learn that.
Montessori is a small win, but my years in Montessori was also plagued by some of the above. In particular, even though teachers were not allowed to set formal grades on assignments, they came up with their own pretty transparent improvised grading systems. (For example, it was clear that "Excellent" > "Outstanding" > "Great" > "Very good" > "OK". I still have a deeply rooted sense of this hierarchy and feelings connected to it, some 25 years later.)
I don't know if I agree. If you look at many of the most influential positions in many institutions, it's far and away majority filled by valedictorians, first-in-class, degree havers. Very few times will there be a highschool drop out neurosurgeon, or never graduated college politician. Even the technical geniuses in code of our time often came from wealthy backgrounds, attended MIT or another well regarded technical school or had direct tutelage/mentorship from someone else with that background. You can obviously point to examples, so-and-so dropping out of Harvard... but at that point they were already in Harvard which one doesn't get to do if they sucked shit at school.
Not all kids with good grades go on to do awesome things. But it makes sense that many of the best and brightest, the 'eccentric' ones, happen to have an easy time in school.
I'm not sure I agree about online. One thing that Covid forcing everybody online really drives home is that the psychological change of mode to a "place of learning" really matters.
I saw this in several of my friends with children. They initially tried to make education at home functional--they did okay. Two of them then got a teacher and created a little "pod" (4 students max) in their local area with a couple of other parents. Their children did MUCH better.
This was for younger children (5-8 years old).
It makes me cringe to look back at my high school essays, like I was trying to write with a thesaurus. Thankfully, senior year, a friend who went on to write professionally edited one of my essays. He crossed out almost every adverb, and over words like "utilize", he wrote "use".
It made me realize that myself, along with many students, mask their points with language because they have nothing to say, or are afraid to say it clearly (which is a separate problem altogether).
Someone who's had three years of practice writing free-form persuasive essays about the non-school approved topic that they spend all their time thinking about (the NFL, girls, video games, etc.) is going to have a much easier time picking up the structured five-paragraph essay format than someone who was forced to write a bunch of five-paragraph essays about books they hated.
All of the greatest essays I read now are random in length, style, topic, and presentation--why did I have to write somewhere between 50-100 structured essays about books and historical events I didn't care a whit about when Aldo Leopold was out there just dashing off whatever he was thinking about? The progression went like this:
1. I hated writing about historical events and books.
2. I graduated college.
3. I started reading unstructured essays about topics I cared about.
4. I started writing unstructured essays about topics I cared about.
5. I started writing about historical events and books.
You're right about high schoolers using needlessly complicated writing, but this isn't why. A high schooler would use needlessly complicated writing even if he was eager to share his ideas about a topic.
The reason is that K-12 schools teach this style of writing as an aesthetic. Other parts of the aesthetic include scattering your stories with "symbols," so that they mean something other than they appear to, and exaggerating your and your characters' emotions.
A student who grows up immersed in this aesthetic would not secretly prefer a more simplistic writing style, any more than a person who grows up eating American food would secretly prefer Indian food.
Your friend was inducting you into the aesthetic of modern journalists and bloggers, but if he was instead reading the academic humanities, or if he was a time traveller from the 1950s, he would have been perfectly happy with "utilize."
Of course, plain language is better at conveying information, so I'm fully on that train myself--now that I've spent some time out of high school. But it's normal to adopt the aesthetics of your surroundings, and it's not a sign of masking anything or being afraid.
In life, you are given the test, and then the lesson.”
People seem to think teachers can just deliver into you excellence, but excellence comes from within, and hopefully you are in an environment which permits you to grow and develop under your own personal efforts and dedication (i.e. stable home environment, warmth, food, etc.).
You can have many failures without much consequence on your life but a few have massive consequences on your life.
Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy as meritocrats. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion.
In school, you learn that hard work is rewarded (with some noise) and that cheaters eventually get caught. The system isn't perfect, and there's definitely some corruption in admissions decisions later on, due to the socioeconomic fuckery that infects everything... but the attempt to be a meritocracy is at least clearly there. If you are treated unjustly by the system, you can at least appeal to the concept of meritocracy, and you have a chance of winning.
Corporate is easier, in the sense that the work is almost never demanding, and the evaluation thereof is invariably political... but if you go in expecting a meritocracy, because that's what 16-20+ years of schooling had you believing you would find... then oh boy are you going to be disappointed when you see what it's actually like. If a professor played favorites the way the average corporate manager does, he'd be fired.
Corporate is also a lot noisier. In school, you might get a B when you should have gotten an A, once in a while, but over time the noise cancels out. In corporate, you can get fired, and have your income turned off, for all kinds of stupid political reasons.
But to say that work is not demanding and evaluation always political is very big generalization. Some hard projects go to people that can handle them ( or can't if you don't like them ). When that big project is over, there seems to be a very clear indication, who MVPs are ( even if they do not have 'in-group' status ). So some level of meritocracy exists. It is hardly perfect, but it is there.
On the other hand, school-wise I had a very wide range experiences, which kinda taught me that 'people tend to believe what they want to believe', by which I mean that teachers that think you are a good student will let you be a good student.
I am writing this as I am sipping coffee preparing mentally for this year's projects.
From what I've witnessed consulting, this varies greatly by company size. I once heard a Vice President of major bank explain it like this: "Look, beyond a certain size, almost nothing you can do will save or destroy a company. At that point, people mostly go to work to play politics. Occasionally, as a side effect of the political maneuvering, work sometimes gets done."
But at a 50 person company, or even a 500 person company, it's possible for single person to make a huge difference. And yes, if the company is competent, then saving the day will cut through the politics to a remarkable extent.
To some extent, this must also be true at a Fortune 500 company. But there, most of the people will the ability to "save the day" will usually be in upper management. The big tech companies may be an exception this: Google has their two "level 11s", and Microsoft had the massively talented team that they used to catch up to Netscape Navigator in the 90s.
From working at a big company, this is accurate.
> But at a 50 person company, or even a 500 person company, it's possible for single person to make a huge difference.
That's true, and you still might be stuck fighting politics to do it.
Yeah, politics are kind of built into the human condition. You can't avoid them entirely, and even if you could, I'm not sure it would actually be a good thing. You need to able to convince people, to recognize them and boost them up when they're doing good work, and to get groups onto the same page. And all of this involves "politics" to some extent.
But a company's politics might be relatively healthy, or completely poisonous. Or anything in between. The best organizations are the ones where the overall goal is important, and where ethics are important, and where the politics are mostly positive-to-neutral.
Finally, if you want to save the day, you have to convince someone to take a risk on your plan, and your ability to implement it. After a couple of successes, this can become easier the next time. But there's politics involved in that, too.
But there, most of the people will the ability to "save the day" will usually be in upper management. The big tech companies may be an exception this: Google has their two "level 11s", and Microsoft had the massively talented team that they used to catch up to Netscape Navigator in the 90s.
The tech companies are not exceptions. You don't become a "level 11" at Google without playing political hardball. In a big company, the CEOs won't even know who you are, certainly not enough to invest in your career or give you opportunities (such as taking on Netscape in the '90s), unless you're willing to go lawful evil and collect some scalps.
I wanted to reflexively say no, but then I remembered Equifax breach. Now that I think about it, I mostly worked for regional entities, but never really big ones.
In corporate, there's just as much noise, but rather than getting smoothed out over time, it accelerates. In corporate, some guy can turn off your income, even though you're good at your job, because a manager wants to show off that he "can make tough decisions" and impress his own manager--either to get a promotion, or to get into someone's pants. It's random and bad things happen for no good reason, and we're prime to just accept that this is "just business" but we shouldn't have to. We can build better systems, by far, than the ones we've got.
My experience has been that yes, both professors and managers have favourites: they tend to favour those who have positive, unselfish, engaged attitudes. And sure, that is itself selfish: positive, unselfish, engaged people are more pleasant to work with. And I have also found that those who complain the loudest — I include myself in that number, in my lesser moments — are those who are not engaging with the system as it is, rather than the system as they wish it would be.
The real trouble is that in a large enough organisation the system as it is may be so opaque that it really does defy understanding and consequently engagement.
Anyway, rather than assuming bad faith, try assuming good faith. But of course verify it, too!
No wonder why we are so messed up if this is the bar that we set and condone.
Corporate attempts to be meritocratic. They have every incentive to be. Executives want to hire the more effective people to perform tasks so they can maximize profits. They can be greedy or stupid, but not both. They can hire their friends and family, sure, and sometimes they do. But they have an incentive to make decisions on merit otherwise they would go out of business and be out-competed.
What incentive does a school have to reward hard work? The teachers and administrators don't get a bonus if they're school does well. Many don't even get evaluated and firing teachers is very difficult in the US. I knew plenty of teachers that would just phone it in year after year. Everyone knew this, but really couldn't do anything about it. Many do care because its the right thing to do, but it's not built into the system.
> [re schools] If you are treated unjustly by the system, you can at least appeal to the concept of meritocracy, and you have a chance of winning.
Yeah, I don't know your experience but I was treated unjustly in school. The disciplinarian (yes this was a real thing in my high school) was a tyrant. He would selectively yell at certain kids, humiliate others and apply uneven justice. What could I have done about it? Some parents complained sure but you're pretty much stuck there unless you want to pack your bags and move to a different town. In corporate world you just find another job. It's a lot easier than convincing your parents to move
> Corporate is easier, in the sense that the work is almost never demanding, and the evaluation thereof is invariably political
Not all jobs are bullshit jobs. Some jobs actually deliver some kind of value with a feedback loop
Yeah, you would think so. To some extent you are right. But I think corporations are still very inefficient and get away with promoting or hiring less than ideal candidates. Why do they not get out-competed? Because the competition is also flawed in similar ways.
Not where I work. They hire people who they think will make them look good, and it's not always by hiring the most productive. They'll deny promotions to their most effective workers out of fear they will leave. They block transfers.
Companies make a show of being meritocratic, but most of their rewards system fall apart under the smallest scrutiny. On average, those who self promote are more likely to get rewarded than those who do the better work. Some companies even formalize this by insisting the managers are not supposed to know who is better, and you have to convince them by writing your semi-annual review yourself.
Lots of managers who want "yes-men" who'll reward those who say "yes" and fail and punish those who correctly say "no".
My company used to pay at the top of the market for certain fields. Leaving the company would mean a pay cut.
They don't, but a lot of administrators like showing off scores and stats to their administrator friends from different schools. There definitely is an incentive, even if it's imperfect - optimized for objective stats not subjective learning.
I am a high school English teacher in the US. I have two to four performance reviews every school year (each entailing a pre & post meeting along with an in-class performance evaluation). I have tenure, but the only barrier to firing me between now and next September (barring fireable offenses) is a PIP which is ultimately based on subjective administrative reviews. If my boss doesn’t want me back next year, I won’t be.
Stories about ‘rubber rooms’ in NYC are hardly demonstrative of teaching conditions nationwide.
And anything can be asserted. Up is down, black is white, beautiful is ugly. And you'd better go along with it or you're out.
Call it hive-corporatism.
It seems to be a natural social formation.
Even among teachers, it isn't the case - there is internal politics as in every workplace.
Have you been near a grad school lately?
Here is some stellar feedback:
https://google.com/search?q="worst+professor"+https://www.ra...
Literally none of these fine folk have been fired. They have a job for life. For life. I can give you a long list of professors who have been utterly unethical in their dealings, but I could do nothing about it because they have tenure.
Whereas when corporate gets blackballed on their glassdoor, current employees bail, future employees won't bother to apply, word spreads & market justice is swift, stock ticker points down & to the right.
Now tell me who is meritocratic.
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
-Albert Einstein