The well-behaved students. Good teachers are wasted on troublemakers and class clowns, regardless of their IQ. And if a dim student who scores poorly on IQ tests knows how to sit quietly and behave themself, I think good teachers will help them a lot.
It is entirely natural for children to “clown around” in a boring setting, and their lack of interest / trouble focusing reflects a societal (and school) failure to make school engaging and give them the appropriate challenges and direct feedback to keep their attention. Many of the greatest human breakthroughs were made by people who were squirmy and distractible as children, who had difficulty with the formal school curriculum, or who were ostracized by their classmates for one reason or another.
Every child deserves attention from good teachers. Good teachers with enough resources can provide a significant benefit to these students and integrate them into a smoothly functioning classroom. Assigning troublesome students to weak or unsympathetic teachers is a tremendous “waste” of human talent.
That's backwards. A school that doesn't engage its students has failed at its most important goals, and the very best schools have always striven to be engaging. Often this was done in unconventional ways, such as directing the youngest students to memorize their pre-set "lessons" word for word and be able to literally chant them back to the teacher. Similarly "direct" yet effective instructional methods were just as common wrt. practical exercises and problem solving. There was no space for the modern fashionable truism that "constructing" one's education from scratch, with practically no involvement from an outside educator, is the only possible source of engagement.
Given that society itself doesn't bend much, I'm inclined towards the latter.
Or, what do you think of Montessori education?
Sure, for the same reason that adults take coffee breaks. This doesn't seem to contradict what I said. In fact it's a very clear delineation between recreation and work. The problem is when children (or adults) behave as though they're on recess when they're supposed to be working.
> Or, what do you think of Montessori education?
I'm no expert, but it doesn't seem as though the educator/pupil ratios required to make it work are scalable.
Why do people always mention this like it isn't a niche educational experience that already self-selects for the children of well-off, white parents? Montessori is almost as relevant to the public education discourse as Catholic schools imo.
Forcing children to spend the majority of their lives working against their will leads to problems, especially among non-conformists.
Locking a child in their room is imprisonment, yet is widely used punitively at the whim of parents. Beating children is assault, yet operant conditioning is effective and also widely practiced towards children. It's also permitted in most jurisdictions if undue harm is not caused.
> among non-conformists
Why do we need these, exactly? What benefit are individuals who have not been appropriately conditioned to work, suffering, and self-sufficiency?
This ideology sounds an awful lot like fascism to me, or maybe some kind of psychopathy.
If you start looking around at the highest-leverage contributions to humanity throughout history, a disproportionate number of them come from people who weren’t “appropriately conditioned to work, suffering, and self sufficiency” (typically without getting anything for their trouble beyond satisfying their own curiosity). So if all you care about is some kind of personal benefit, then someone (often a teacher) nurturing and encouraging those people has been directly responsible for a significant part of your material well being.
But many of us recognize humans as ends in themselves, rather than tools for our personal aggrandizement or slaves to the collective.
If you take a harder look at the disproportionate contributors you mention, you'll find that they were motivated to persist at problems for very long hours, often for many years without respite, and for very little reward beyond satisfying their own impulses. None of this indicates poor work ethic, or a reluctance to take responsibility for one's own actions and their consequences.
There are plenty of geniuses who did terribly in work/academia, etc, or who were literally outcasts from society.
There is proof of this everywhere. The vast majority of humans throughout history never engaged in such a system, and plenty of contemporary humans don't either.
What is your ideology?
It's true, in previous eras children were put straight to work as soon as they were useful. This has been true in every agrarian society across all cultures. Society increased in complexity to the point that it's quite hard to become an independent adult if you go straight to work as a young child, hence the need for an education. However the goal has always been the same: condition yourself (skills, mindset, habits, behaviour, etc.) as required to become a functional, independent contributor to society.
What is new and unusual is the idea that children should have a "childhood" of recreation, protected from the realities of work and life.
Attending an educational institution as a child is much preferable to working on a farm, or in a mine, don't you think?
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Libertarians are all about individuals making their own choices regardless of whether or not that's the optimal outcome for society as a whole.
This dude is the opposite, a total collectivist.
Why do we need non-conformists? I don't care about what you need or what society needs. You lack compassion for the individual.
They aren't hurting anyone by choosing a different life path. They can survive the world just fine without having the official educational path shoved down their throat.
Not really? They don't get to make their own decisions about any meaningful aspect of their lives, and can be lawfully imprisoned, punished, and controlled by their parents. Children have just a few more rights than pets. This has been true for all of history.
> And children / adults aren't a binary thing
Yes, they are. Off the top of my head: once you are legally able to make and be held responsible for your own decisions, can't be punitively confined against your will without due process, are able to enter into legal agreements, and do not need a guardian, you are an adult. Until then, you are a child. These things normally happen around the age of majority, which is 18 in most places [1].
I'm not suggesting that children never be given the opportunity to make their own choices, quite the opposite in fact. I'm suggesting that children be conditioned to the realities of work and life from an early age. The capability to tolerate dull, monotonous, boring work is essential to accomplish just about anything. This is the skill of delaying gratification, and its importance can hardly be overstated.
> They can survive the world just fine without having the official educational path shoved down their throat.
Just how much education do you think is optional to "survive in the world just fine"? Literacy? Numeracy?
If it aims to be effective at education, it should.
> It's not recreation, it's work.
That's very true of what a lot of schooling is, largely because it evolved from a model aimed at indoctrination of a compliant population rather than education. But, nominally at least, the goal of the modern system is not to be work as a means of indoctrinating people to work.
> The problem seems to be that we've lost the value of working hard and pushing through things we find dull and uninteresting
Or, maybe, the problem is that while it is easy to make material dull and uninteresting, that's far from optimal from an educational perspective.
> Real world success is not like that - it's work
Real world success is mostly been born on third base and constructing a narrative about the hard-work of hitting a triple.
It would be ideal if each class was so engaging as to enrapture each student but that just isn't realistic.
Murder, rape, and eating your children is natural. That's not a good justification. Perhaps there is a way to help children rise above these base instincts instead of giving into them?
The idea that you should stimulate kids to the point where boredom is impossible, or that we should excuse harmful behavior if the kid was bored / upset, is just silly. It only sets the kids up to fail; to live a life where they can't focus on tasks and they lash out whenever they are in a bad mood.
In general, you should not impose external rewards and punishments in education, to the extent possible. They block students’ focus, creativity, and problem solving, and undermine learning, literally interfering with memory formation.
This is a subject of incredible amounts of research in psychology and education, and has been demonstrated over and over in a wide variety of contexts.
> idea that you should stimulate kids to the point where boredom is impossible
Nobody ever suggested this. Only that class should be engaging and teachers should try to earn students’ attention instead of demanding it under threat.
> excuse harmful behavior [...] sets the kids up to fail
Nobody ever suggested “excusing harmful behavior”.
The proposal was that students who are wiggly or have trouble focusing should be thrown out of class because it is a “waste” for good teachers to teach them. I think this would be harmful, would be failing those students, and misses the point of education.
What sets kids up to fail is being treated as though they are worthless or being told so. Having access to good teachers does not “set kids up to fail”.