Outlier is doing the same thing but on the college level: why deal with a mediocre local math teacher if you can get taught by the best?
Because…you actually can’t. Static media (like books and non-interactive lectures) scales easily, but that’s not teaching (even if, especially in large lower-division courses, that’s what university faculty essentially does.)
Human interactivity, which is what teaching fundamentally is, doesn’t scale, which is why those large lecture classes typically also have smaller TA-led “discussion sections” or sonething similar. And, in many cases, as well as not scaling, it works a lot better in person than remotely.
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> It was not ineffective, though individual tutoring would've been the gold standard even back then.
Then it doesn’t scale very well.
Learning is the anchor, not teaching. Teaching is defined relative to learning. Anything that enables, delivers, structures or otherwise makes learning happen.
For me, classroom teaching was never helpful. I zoned out in classes from first class to university (where I just didn't attend lectures). I had a little private tutoring in 12th class that was very helpful. In college, small group tutorials where we reviewed homework problems also worked for me. The majority of "teaching" hours were entirely irrelevant.
Past very early grades, I would estimate the useless/useful ratio of teaching hours at <10%... maybe <5%. I don't think my experience is unique.
Anyway, I did benefit from educational structure. Essays, exams, teachers nagging. I don't think online-only would have worked for me. I needed eyes on me, and parents wouldn't have been sufficient.
If I were to design an educational system for child me it would have: (1) 0 hours of large class time. (2) 1-2 hours per day of intense small group learning. (3) 1-2 hours per day of private or semi private tuition. (4) self paced learning with a coach encouraging progress.
Isn't this exactly what the person was saying?
We need some kind of institution to facilitate social interactions between children. Till date that has been the function of schools.
Moving away from this model, without proper deliberation, is sure to cause problems afterwards. And then we’ll all look back and ask why the world’s feeling more isolated than ever.
As long as high schools are facilities that push some people to extreme actions I think the 'social education' you would get there is too expensive for society as a whole.
Dealing and managing with other people who are incompatible with your ethics and morality is an important skill to learn. Not only does it help you learn asseriveness and diplomacy it also allows one to gain an insight into your own personal bias and teaches you how to respond and not react. A lot of grown, so called 'adults' still need to learn this skill set from my observations in day to day life.
Long story short my high school allowed gave credit for working, and going to a Communty College.
Once I got to the CC it was relief. My classmates were a lot older, but that was great. Their was no BS. I made great friends.
I didn't like high school much. I was respected because I was a good athlete, but hated high school. I also got a few brownie points because I survived a fight with the ultimate school bully. I went to the same school that our CA governor went to. He was ahead of me, but only graduated because his parents helped him out along the way. I could go on, but don't have the energy tonight. He is very open about his learning difficulties.
O.k. so back to my high school memories. My acne was so bad, I just wanted to hide. My hormones were crazy. I remember having to get to the school at 7:00 for no reason other than listening to some disenfranchised tenure teacher rattle on about their gripes in life. The only thing I liked about high school was a kind biology teacher, and looking at those cheer leaders.
Even at the time, I thought those four years in high school could have been condensed to two year if properly administrated.
If I had a kid, and they hated high school like myself, I would walk them into a CC admissions office.
I would argue that segregating children by age for schooling purposes is a relatively modern idea that probably runs counter to tens if not hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
My kids are all homeschooled, including parent taught as well as online education, and have friends of different ages with caring parents that are all very involved. They have outside activities including, music, PE, play time with friends at the park, zoo trips, museums etc.
I took a few classes there, and from what I remember, the primary mode of instruction was a janky early-2000s webapp that presented excerpts and quiz questions from a textbook. There were teachers and lectures, but a lot of kids didn't show up to those, and class sizes were relatively small. (I was frequently the only kid who dialed in to the conference call for my French conversation class, so I got a lot of one-on-one time with the teacher.) Social events like clubs were primarily handled through web forums that I didn't spend much time in because I wasn't a full-time student at the school.
The marketing copy here makes it sound like Khan World School is fundamentally the same model, but hopefully Khan Academy's online textbooks are a little less janky.
I don't believe so there is huge problems with hybrid/offline learning at scale with distractions, social interactions etc that cannot be fundamentally solved by Khan Academy.
But having a 'master teacher' is something I definitely welcome because my education, like so many others, varied year to year, on say math, because of educator quality.
Khan's 'reverse school' is something I wish I could have experienced growing up as I think it would personally have worked for me.
Right, we are all graduated from Harvard here.
Part of the problem is that many people take undergraduate lectures as a reference point and then think "well, there's no reason this couldn't be recorded, have interactive quizzes added, and then be better than physically attending a lecture of 200 people". That isn't wrong per se but mega lectures are barely teaching as it is and we should not be seeking to replicate them!
I know people bang on about the (much misunderstood) 2 sigma problem but I'm going to do it as well. Regardless of the exact result, we know a few things:
First, we know that intensive 1:1 tutoring moves the mean performance up by two standard deviations.
Second, we know from other research that there is a correlation between class size and performance.
That is obviously linked in that as classes get smaller, teaching styles can get progressively closer to 1:1 tuition. A class with ten people in it has room for a substantial amount of brief 1:1 interventions, especially if there are no behavioural problems in the group (so the teacher is not diverting massive amounts of time to classroom management) whereas a class of 30 makes that much more difficult.
Conclusion from that, plus the fact that undergraduate classes are often taught by research experts with no teaching nor mentoring in pedagogic technique, is that the undergrad chalk-on-board lecture with 200 students is at the far end of effective use of time from 1:1 tuition. So if tuition is the most "taught" of the learning styles, a large lecture is all the way over on the opposite end with "just read a textbook".
In fact, universities know this which is why they supplement lectures with grad-student led problem solving / discussion sessions, seminar groups, and small group tutorials. Some universities, for some subjects, use only small group tutorials (e.g. Oxford colleges for many humanities subjects) and lectures if they exist are very much optional. Most universities do not have the resources to do very much of this except for more advanced subjects but this has nothing to do with these techniques only being appropriate for such subjects - small group classes are also the most effective way of teaching Intro Calculus or Introduction to the Novel. Arguably they might be even more important in that context.
So the modern formulation of the two sigma problem to me is as follows: given that we can currently duplicate the (very bad) mega lecture format using technology, how much of the performance from actual teaching (the purest form of which is 1:1 tuition) can be captured using something less resource intensive?