Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal
danmeyer.substack.com
danmeyer.substack.com
I would suspect almost nobody (Gates, Kahn, etc) suggest having an entirely asocial education experience.
As we can figure out how to replicate the effects of tutoring with technology, we should see massive improvements in education outcomes.
I mentor a robotics team that’s attached to a set of high school courses. One of the best things I’ve seen when it comes to bureaucracy is that the three teachers who basically run those courses were handed a budget and bought exactly what they needed. A mitre saw, 3D printers, a plasma cutter, etc.
A smart board is $3000. Another teacher is $66,397.
You can buy 20 boards per year for the _salary_ (ignoring benefits and other non-payroll costs) of a single teacher.
https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/education/k-...
https://oaklandside.org/2022/01/12/oakland-schools-are-facin...
So this cost 13% of one years spending in a mid-size district.
On the other hand the rich person has a strong incentive to succeed - avoiding ridicule and getting more recognition. The public employee on the other hand gets no recognition, or ridicule, and is spending someone else's money.
If we could combine the incentives of the rich person with the knowledge of the public workers that understand the programs that work, we could have something on our hands.
I would argue that Zuckerberg couldn't care less what the world thinks of him. Otherwise he would have been rather embarrassed by the Meta project. I would put Elon Musk and X up as another example of a very rich person who seems unperturbed by ridicule.
>The public employee on the other hand gets no recognition, or ridicule,
So politicians don't have a need for recognition and to avoid ridicule?
What they're doing isn't working. Even they would tell you there's a results crisis. Children aren't learning. They certainly aren't becoming well-prepared for adult life in an efficient manner. They're barely even being supervised and kept out of trouble. The school-to-prison pipeline is getting worse, not better.
These people may "know what they're doing," but they also know what they're doing isn't accomplishing the goals they have for it.
Knowing how to do something that isn't working isn't a benefit, and is certainly not a reason to give them money.
That suggests 'they' do know what they are doing, they are just denied the resources to do it
Agreeing on a solution when the results don't bear out that that solution actually solves the problem doesn't make them right.
Historically the main way that labor productivity has been improved was through technology. Without that you get Baumol’s cost disease.
In fact you could tax the money off Zuckerberg and then he would have to give up on other ridiculous personal projects like the multi- billion dollar metaverse shambles. That would free up loads of people who have wasted years of their lives as a billionaires play thing
Very unlikely.
We are short of good teachers as it is. Adding more teachers basically means you’re pulling from the bottom of the barrel, so overall instruction quality will decrease.
Plus, lots of people don’t actually want to be educated, so no sense in broadly spending money on those folks (large percentage of the population).
Ask the good teachers what would make the job more attractive to them.
I can make wild guesses...
* Better pay. (Seems 100% obvious to a techbro forum.)
* Better administrations.
* Better career flexibility.
* No colleagues of the crappy variety.
* Less curricula mandated by politicians.
* Students taught well in prerequisite classes.
* Families helped with difficulties that translate to behavior problems.
* Covid sensitivity (e.g., no forbidding mask use in a classroom of germ factories during a pandemic).
...but you really have to ask the good teachers, not guess.
If you're leaning towards being a teacher, wouldn't it benefit your kids more to teach them now, while they're still young?
It’s best for their own kids if mom/dad makes good money and can pay for things like private school or tutoring.
Depending on what your undergrad is (preferably STEM), there are plenty of districts that will hire you, let you teach on a provisional license with a crash course, and pay for you to get your teaching qualification.
See this article for some examples:
https://edsource.org/2022/what-you-need-to-know-to-become-a-...
In CA, the term of art to look for is “intern” or “internship” (even though the pay is either regular teacher pay or close to it).
if the pay was better
I've been talking with him about maybe gathering the necessary data (it's available upon request but the district records people aren't exactly a sane API, you get PDF's with hundreds of pages). If I do that analysis to confirm his claim, I'll send you a link to it.
But even without the budget information, we can just look at headcount. What ratio of teachers to admin would you consider unhealthy? How many assistants to the vice principal do there need to be before it starts to look like a retirement program for people who can't be bothered to teach anymore?
> As [soon as] we can figure out how to replicate the effects of tutoring with technology, we should see massive improvements in education outcomes.
As soon as we can figure out how to replicate social context and emotional support with technology, ...
Although this is correlated with homeschooling, the movement is much larger in 2023. Also remember the alternative is state or corporate indoctrination. When I think about all the ridiculous ideas and fads I was taught in public school, maybe it wouldn't be so bad to leave childhood with some stories about Moses and Abraham instead.
This isn't true. Home schoolers in many states still have to pass state standards test - the only check of quality on the public school.
And empirically the standards are higher if you measure performance on ACT/SAT.
The simple fact that social activity needs to be fostered in a different, but not necessarily worse way, alone means a minority approach is going to cause problems, not to mention that fringe parents are likely to pass their fringe qualities on, especially when doubling down with their child’s education.
For example, covid showed that a primary goal for many is simply day care. Child has to be looked after while parents work. If they actually learn things that's a bonus.
Prep for college, and college admission, is another goal. Learn how to effectively take tests, how to memorise somewhat-random material, how to write an essay. Learn to analyse reading material and discuss Hamlet's indecision.
Or Teach the child how to learn. Let them follow what interests them. Explore the world. Visit museums, art galleries, build a bicycle. All great, some useful, but none of the rigidity and discipline required when entering the work-force. (Ironically, probably the most learning, while at the same time the least empowering.)
Or what about trades? Wouldn't it be useful if the school taught plumbing, or how to wire a plug, or how to fix home appliances, or how to paint a wall?
So don't feel bad about being home-schooled. You will have gained some head-starts, and missed out on others. (There are plenty of kids who went to school, and that also did little to prep them for college or the work-place).
The best prep for today work-place, is, well work. A summer job, or weekends at MacD will help you with that skill set. (Or your first couple jobs after college).
To prep for college you need a college-aimed curriculum, coupled with strong analytical, summary, and essay writing skills. You need to learn "what's being taught" regardless of what it is. (Which is why the best college advice is to pick a major you enjoy, because you'll be depending a Lot of time with it.)
Yes, we all had different school experiences. Some good some bad. To some degree we all succeed or fail at life in spite of, not because of, school.
If you don't have access to a tutor, it's basically up to blind luck whether you're able to learn from the resources available.
This is a loaded statement. I'm sure many parents are great at home schooling their kids but there are many who are also terrible at it and home schooling shouldn't be the solution. Parental involvement is always better for educational outcomes and often times the solution is for parents to just be more in the loop with their kids' education. Unfortunately, oftentimes, parents decide to completely change things and send their kids to a private school or homeschool instead of minor course corrections with how they engage with their kids' education.
You don't need fancy foreign math syllabuses or newfangled gadgets
The success of tutoring is the ability of the tutor to completely understand where the child is at, to figure out what the blockage is and to work at unblocking that specific thing.
For example, if the student "knows something", but it happens to be false, then spotting that, and removing it, is the key to unlocking the future learning. Or identifying a weakness in times tables may unlock the ability to do more advanced algebra.
A good tutor doesnt really teach new things. They pave the road already taught, critically filling in the potholes and removing the speed-bumps.
You've confused tutoring with remedial tutoring.
- a cheerleader who could celebrate success,
- a sounding board for “how could I do this better” when they brought it up,
- for me to back the fuck off when they don't, because however it makes sense in their head is valid even if it doesn't make sense in mine,
- someone who recognizes “come game-time (exams), I won't be in the room, so you'll have to be able to do this without me,” and thus focuses them on adequate results over and over again, “is this the right answer, can we check it quickly, can we see anything about it that makes us understand the problem in a simple way now” etc.
- and honestly just that “pairing pressure” to not fall behind, to keep skills in practice.
I found that “teaching new things” had to be confined to only like 10% of a given session, if that. The job really was “paving the road already taught,” except that's kind of not the right metaphor because roads are centrally planned e.g. by the teacher, it's more the road currently used, which corresponds often but not always to the road the teacher preferred to teach.
I do this for foreign languages. I plan out everything and my own syllabus and goals, and hire a tutor for speaking practice. I give instructions and context to the tutor so they can best help me.
You don't have a theory to answer that. The article writer does. In their view, learning is a social activity, and kids don't like to sit in a room with dozens of others each with their own personalized algorithmic "teacher".
That's not really all that surprising. If it was only about personalization, it would be easy enough to do that with far simpler technology than modern computers.
The article writer's theory also neatly and immediately suggests an explanation for why personal tutoring still works, when automated custom tutoring manifestly hasn't so far. That's because it is social. Even if it's just you and your overworked homeschooling parent, you care because they care.
Personalization isn't key. Personalization from a tutor works because it's hard and costly, and convinces the student that this matters.
That's just a theory. It's not necessarily right, but it does present a convincing explanation for what we observe, and in particular the observation worth repeating, that no one can seem to get algorithmic personalized education to work, no matter how rich and clever they are.
And from my personal experience with teachers (including my parents) I have often heard from them that the challenge isn't explaining, it's to get the students to care.
It also rhymes with common parenting folk wisdom that having "the wrong friends" is detrimental to grades.
>the challenge isn't explaining, it's to get the students to care.
This.
The reason not one student learned French in my four years of mandatory French classes is that we didn't want to know french. We didn't know any french people. We didn't care about french songs or movies.
OTOH, when telenovelas became a local fad, every girl had a clique of Spanish speaking 13 year olds.
The actual problem in that case is: How do you teach french/philosophy/whatever to a class full of kids who don't want to learn that stuff? Maybe they want to pass exams and get grades. Maybe you can rejigger discipline mechanisms to motivate them... but that is never going to get you to good.
Especially in a pre-Web world though, absent pestering my parents to arrange some sort of exchange student situation--which would have gone well beyond my level of caring for any other subject and may or may not have been practical--I was probably never going to get to a high level of French proficiency without some sort of immersion.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/a-matter-of-person...
The problem is that people like Gates and Zuckerberg are fully paid up members of the "You can't let people use technology without exploiting them" group.
So AI-assisted personalised teaching would come with a cost - a corporate learning and skills profile of the pupils.
Which would inevitably be sold to other corporates.
From a market point of view that kind of information would be immensely valuable for hiring and HR.
But it would be it would be apocalyptically disastrous from the point of view of personal freedom and political accountability.
And no doubt the service would be tiered, so a minimal unsophisticated model would be available to almost everyone, while more sophisticated and effective models would require a paid subscription.
Teaching is one of those professions where you can see what cultures really value. In the US it's clearly not open access to high quality education.
Automated tutoring won't change that unless cultural values change too. Without that, it will just recreate the current situation with added social costs.
> That's just a theory. It's not necessarily right, but it does present a convincing explanation for what we observe
Far from it. We observe that people who already believe that they need to learn something do better with individual tutoring.
> and in particular the observation worth repeating, that no one can seem to get algorithmic personalized education to work, no matter how rich and clever they are.
People got algorithmic personalized education to work quite a long time ago. It's called a book. The algorithm is "when the student asks about something, tell them". And it works very well, just like it always has.
What people aren't getting to work is forcing students who don't want to know things to know those things anyway.
Idk if any technology, institutional framework or other fix can ever achieve that standard. They don't necessarily have to. Its still useful to have a comparative standard.
There will always be a difference between learning to (say) pole jump & hammer throw by self coaching, vs training under an olympic coach. You can, however, use that coaches' methods and standards to teach a cheap, recreational class.
The mechanism is complex, but recreational field athletics is better (farther/higher) by existing in a world where olympic training exists. They'd be even better in a world where those trainers coach middle aged normies, to remove the "youth and talent" factors.
I suspect, for example, that small groups or 1-v1 can comfortably pace a primary school curriculum with a small fraction of the desk hours. That in itself is a "performance gap" with potentially actionable crossover.
I was learning a heck of a lot more outside of school in the late 90's, teaching myself how to make websites, than I was learning inside of school.
The self directed autodidact thing is the stereotypical Bay Area, romanticized narrative and all the 'education disruptors' seem to come out of the exact same circle. It's not surprising to me at all that Zuckerberg had to write the 100 million off, most professionals just come out of decent schools with a good social learning environment.
It's not that computer people are better, smarter, or more passionate than other professionals. It's just that the barrier to entry (in the 1st world) is just based on your interest level.
So with that availability combined with the rapid prototyping ability of breadboards I’m not surprised that plenty of electronics hobbyists could exist.
This is in contrast with something like chemistry, where going online and learning a different approach to solving problems might help you understand the material better but probably won't get you ahead in class.
I'm gonna be honest here, if we're talking about the tech industry, learning to deal with "pointless platform and environmental obstacles" without getting so frustrated you quit is probably the chief skill.
I know a lot of devs that don't have any idea what the stack or the heap are or why they're important. But being able to track down that one of your dependencies is listening to a magical environment variable that you stepped on and that's why everything is wonkey is an important skill that you have to have.
If anything I find most new tech employees were henpecked students from elite families being browbeat to study something lucrative.
What defines the Bay Area is the VC gold rush fever that took root here. But the VCs at this point want Stanford graduates.
When i was growing up (medium sized town early 2000s) i read all the computer books in my library. There was like 4, i remember one was a redhat for dummies, another was on vrml 1.0 (this was a bit outdated at the time), i dont remember the others. Sure there was some info on the internet, but it was few and far between. Random home pages by and large weren't even remotely on the level of a wikipedia article let alone a text book.
Now a days, if i want to learn about computer things, there are like a billion resources. Text based tutorials, youtube videos, almost anything you can imagine. And that is just the googlable ones. If i am willing to do something a tiny bit illegal, i can get basically any book ever published from libgen.
The available resources the modern person has is just staggering.
While there were certainly fewer books in the late 90s and early 00s, they were well put together and comprehensive, often reference-style works. You could learn an entire programming language from having access to a single book.
When I entered high school in 1968, all the girls went to home economics classes and the guys took drafting and/or auto shop. Still no electronics.
In 1969 I stumbled upon free self-guided programming access to a 360/67 (punched cards, WATFOR) at the local military base and spent the next two years teaching myself as much programming as I could, while my high school remained oblivious to the computer revolution.
When I got to college in 1971 they only offered graduate degrees in computer science; undergraduates interested in CS were expected to take "math sciences".
Apparently it takes a while for education systems to realize where the future is headed.
I got my electronic skills from a technical club where we had soldering equipment, stuff to make PCBs, a lot of salvaged electronic components to not be afraid to accidentally fry one, and some adult guidance. I learned most from older kids who I could watch working on their stuff. This is something a school keeps missing.
Real human societies do not consist of thin slices of people of the same age, and kids are wired to learn by watching and imitating, not just by listening and following instructions. Schools keep ignoring this, sadly.
the idea is that, as you mature, it is also part of your development to teach and guide others, you have mastered something when you can teach it. Equally younger kids learn not only from the teacher but by example and mentoring from older students.
From my experience it really teaches older kids to act responsibly, forces more emotional maturity and just not be dicks to younger kids, and for younger kids it really accelerates their learning.
I was a smart, bookish kid with ADHD who was last in school decades ago. It seems like such hubris to even think I have any answers about how to fix the school system in 2023 let alone my personal experiences would have some bearing on optimal modern educational methods.
The problems with the system are obvious: lack of discipline, bad teachers, bad curriculum, not focusing on merit, not focusing on grades, lazy enforcement of rules, not focusing on a learning environment. Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems. They also had the fewest schooling hours of any school in the district and almost no homework.
It was ran by a genius who cared and was willing to say "no" to the dogma of his teaching peers.
Ah, the old standards. These are the same reasons schools were failing 50 years ago.
> Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems.
Actually it does, Colorado pays below average for teachers. If I paid below average for developers, I'd probably have bad developers.
How is that explained?
My high school was exceptional due to a confluence of factors leading to a great staff but it has faded in the past 40 years and is now only average in our province.
> bad teachers
Perhaps if teaching offered higher salaries, you would get better teachers. Why would a talented teacher work in a US state school if they could instead get a job in the tech industry or work in a foreign private school?
Prioritizing teacher pay is a must, but their teachers are also not outrageously payed.
It's a matter of priority. Teacher pay should be a priority.
Thats good. Grades are like scrum story points
Irrelevant imaginary metric.
After all, universities were born in the high to late middle ages out of the conviction that knowledge found its unifying point in the Word of God's revelation of Jesus, but today the vast majority of (western) universities have long abandoned the pursuit of truth. Theology, once seen as the queen of the sciences, is generally regarded as less useful and less true than fiction writing.
+ A decline in respect for teachers and the institution of teaching
+ Lower qualifications required to become a teacher relative to the general population[0]
+ More classroom hours and larger class sizes
+ The previous factors plus lower pay have been driving a systemic brain drain for decades, which forms a positive feedback loop to drive respect down even further
+ Greater opportunities elsewhere, along with the removal of studentships and incentives, make teaching less useful as a socioeconomic stepping stone
+ Inability for students who don't want to be in school to leave and get a job
+ Parents who are uninvolved in discipline or who actively counter it
+ Inability to remove disruptive students from classrooms, which is getting worse over time, as alternative pathways to school are no longer viable and disabled schools are shutting down[1]
+ An increasingly hostile environment where clearly false allegations are "taken seriously" to the point of not supporting accused teachers even after they're exonerated[2]
+ Far fewer men in the classroom than women, which has (unfair) effects on the perception of teaching as a "caring profession"[3] and on collective bargaining, as well as practical matters like boys lacking role models, and a worsened ability to verbally (or even physically) stop really disruptive students[4]
[0] The actual requirements have gone up, but a bachelor's is relatively less prestigious than a diploma used to be. 50 years ago about 30% of people stayed in school, while it's up around 80% now. The US stats are very different, of course, and this might not apply there.
[1] Not that disabled students are all disruptive, but one historical way to remove or manage disruptive students was to slap an autism/ADHD diagnosis on them, qualifying them for a classroom helper or to go to a special school.
[2] This may just have been a single incident that happened to a family friend, but it was bad.
[3] E.g. an underpaid one.
[4] My parents talk more in terms of senior teachers helping with classroom control in a wing, but grudgingly admit that it occasionally helps if some of those senior teachers are large and look strong.
I guess only a non-genius would ask: are schools failing? How do you know, and under which metric do you consider them failing?
The first things these people with far more money than capability for introspection miss is that education is not about that next Einstein. It is about integrating the median student.
If you want to find diapered brilliance, you should probably be building a network of talent spotters, or something like Fast Grants. Not attempting to build robot tutors.
Oh boy. I feel like people who are active in the education policy world will come for you with pitchforks for suggesting that.
Arguably the median student is exactly what public school kinda does fine with today. Such kids basically learn what they need to and probably get into an ok college and have a decent chance in life.
However, the parents of the kids with learning disabilities or neurodivergent brains are screaming that it doesn’t work for their kids, who are absolutely floundering and cannot learn in the “median kid” environment. Meanwhile the parents of the gifted kids, the ones who truly are having their time wasted “learning” with those far beneath their own abilities, are also complaining bitterly that their kids aren’t being challenged enough, and they resent any attempts to temper the speed of the curriculum to allow the bottom half of the class to finish grasping the material. Neither of these groups is well-served - and it seems like any changes made to help one of them frequently hurts the other.
(I don’t have any answers for any of these groups, which is why I’m not involved in telling anyone how to do education!)
That's pretty much what I meant. It was a descriptive claim, not a normative one.
> I feel like people who are active in the education policy world will come for you with pitchforks for suggesting that.
None of them are directly active in ed policy, but academics are overrepresented in my circle of friends. I know. There are even some not terrible for them to reject my claims. I'm just someone outside looking in, I don't have their priors. (Or their expertise.)
> Students do not believe that their classmates are liabilities. Much more often students like their classmates and do not feel limited by them and would rather learn with them if the option were available.
It is interesting, though, because this is how a lot of adults with flexibility work: In a coffee shop or coworking space, sometimes using headphones, on their own laptops, around other people but not collaborating or interacting that much with them.
But then, most of us wouldn't work in a coffee shop full of restless kids or teens.
> But then, most of us wouldn't work in a coffee shop full of restless kids or teens.
Also, COVID remote learning kind of showed most kids can't work without external systems.
What happens when kids don't get it that lesson, or that week. How do they catch up?
Personalised learning is much more "personalised catch up".
One thing that struck me recently on "The rest is politics" podcast is old Etonian Rory Stewart explaining that his (posh private) school he would get up about 8 and go to bed about ten and the whole day was full of structured learning / events. That (top) private schools might get better results simply because there is 2x or 3x as much teaching going on.
Perhaps the answer to school is simple - spend 2x to 3x more. we might not like it. But maybe it seemed ridiculous to pay for schools and books for Victorian children in Dickens' day as well
Some schools assign way too much of what is basically memorization, producing students who are very good at memorizing things and not very good at applying them.
Also, students need breaks. “Cram schools” which simply assign too much work and put too much pressure, produce anxious students without emotional skills who burn out and in some cases also turn to be bad at real-world tasks (because they spend all their time learning how to get good grades, taking shortcuts and not “learning” the material).
But a long school day full of sports, student bonding, interesting hands-on or “applied” work, and the boring essentials, seems like it would produce better students.
The real question is whether you can get Bloom’s 2-sigma effect without a human tutor (for social accountability) when the student is disinterested. I think it will take more than just a chatbot to make a student feel like somebody cares whether they get it or not.
Admissions into the most competitive universities.
> because there is 2x or 3x as much teaching going on
Harvard and MIT are full of kids that burnt themselves out in private schools, cram schools, crazy California & New Jersey public high schools. They were so tired, they did lazy stuff in college and after graduation, squandering their outstanding gifts and great opportunities. Could be as many as 1 in 3 students, and in my opinion, it's rising!
Also, would it really be great to run a schools program - perhaps even a residential one, perhaps even compulsory, perhaps singling out groups of particularly behind demographics - and forces their kids to spend way longer in school?
These ideas have been tried. People have this flawed thing they do, they think the stuff they like is the future and the stuff they don't like is the past. The future is an objective reality, and more often than not, it's the most visibly troubled communities. San Francisco, where I live, is the future, not the past, of chaos in public schooling, every community will have to transit its problems on a journey to improving schools, whereas your "old Etonian" is literally the past, and what we ought to be doing is dealing with "San Francisco" today, because that's how you'll help Chicago, New York, etc. in the future.
I don't think it is possible to have a true understanding of what these (tax exempt) foundations are really intending - we only have what they tell us, which is a form of spin.
As far as I am concerned, these foundations are about paving the way for commercial interests - their job is to prepare the ground with a view to the long term benefits that the corporate side will then reap. They are simply structuring society for their benefit; it's not for the love of Man.
In this particular case, how would personalised learning work, with all the collectivisation that is planned and being implemented? Perhaps the intent was to personalise within narrow bands to give the illusion of an individual personalised education..
It is ok that many of these fails. Some will work (wikipedia, khan academy etc). We should only require that things are being tried.
Anyway, i agree experimentation is needed, that's why I was talking about averaging out biases. I just don't agree that the darwinistic model that caused wealth to concentrate to be the best model to achieve this.
E.g. "The richest 10% of the global population own 76% of all wealth." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59565690
Or
Table 4-5: "Wealth shares and minimum wealth of deciles and top percentiles for regions and selected countries, 2021", p.140 https://www.credit-suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/ab...
If you own 3% of Alphabet, you can do things others can't.
Even if (and big if!) we say that wealth/power-alone doesn't make people think differently, you're sampling from a much smaller population.
And I'd need some convincing on "I don't know how much a gallon of milk costs" not changing a person's perspective.
Governments must spend much more of their treasure chest (when they have one) than billionaires and are scrutinized more heavily. Risks are not the same. Ultra rich are way more capable of corrupting governments than the masses which gives them even more power.
> Small children will touch a hot stove only once yet billionaires will fund personalized learning initiatives again and again and again and we might wonder why.
The author doesn't answer and I don't have an answer either. But the interesting observation is that billionaires don't learn from experience. This is a sure sign of ideology at work.
I'll admit that there's a flip-side viewpoint here: If you're a billionaire, in a society that very obviously has a lot of problems, and all you've got for tools and skills is a billion-dollar hammer that you're real handy with...well, okay - try hitting some things with your hammer. When the world is screwed up badly enough, even kinda-clueless change has a decent chance of improving something...right?
That's not enough. Repeating the same stupid ideas again and again and again without learning from past failures is not a viable approach.
The only stupid thing is following this absurd "argument" from the article. Kids, stoves. Seriously, what the fuck? Giving up on things after first negative experience is no way to live a life - literally, you would not survive to adulthood if you followed that brilliant idea.
At some points you have to stop trying stupid things.
Here the stupid idea is thinking education is a solo activity while in truth it's a social one. A 50's multiple choice quiz on papers is the same as a quiz on computers. It's a very small part of what learning is about.
The world would be a much better place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
Even setting that aside, your premise doesn’t hold: you can’t “learn from experience” by watching others. The whole point of the phrase is that you have to do it yourself to learn.
What worries me more than billionaires funding learning initiatives is how many people fall for this kind of "reasoning" when it's about something they're primed to not like - where they'd reject it in any other context.
I mean, seriously. Small children will touch a hot stove only once, yet try to walk despite repeatedly tripping up. Obviously they don't learn from experience.
And you can make a small child cry without hurting them at all, e.g. by saying "Boo!".
Tell me you've never had small children without telling me you've never had small children
This is my personal speculation, but self-learning can be extremely helpful for people with a lot of investment in a specific topic and high intrinsic motivation - a description likely to fit most people that made a vast fortune by themselves and their usual peer group. This is probably a serious filter bubble making them believe that self-learning is the way forward for everyone, since it worked for (nearly) everyone they know.
I run a small science club where the kids learn and experiment in small groups guided by tutors who enjoy the stuff. And I'm running out of money fast: I cannot charge much for the courses and workshops (those without money run along free of charge anyway) and I need to spend money on rent, materials and especially the tutors. And the last expenditure is growing linear with the amount of classes I offer and is easily the biggest.
People in business, especially in tech business, try to set things up in a way where you can automate stuff away and it's easy to see schools and classroom education as a great opportunity to try the same approach.
The answer is in the analogy: the billionaire didn’t get burned. If the child touched the stove but it was merely warm, they wouldn’t learn to avoid it.
Losing millions when you have billions is not a big deal.
The idea behind governments, even the most liberal, has always been that you give up some of your freedom in exchange for security against violence. This was also the primary motivator for swearing serfdom to a feudal lord. And the idea behind corporations is effectively giving up a large share of your labor value (the other part of serfdom) nominally in exchange for security against economic instability, in that you get a steady paycheck regardless of revenue fluctuations.
In practice, I think many people are finding that security is dubious since corporations lay off employees, but they don't understand what the tradeoff is that they made. Lack of loyalty by employers has then fueled lack of loyalty by employees, and overall the situation is more tenuous now for employees.
And for that matter when people complain about crime (and why crime against its own citizens is particularly heinous), they're complaining that the government is not holding up their end of the contract with protection from that. I'm not sure whether it's easier or harder today to find a different "lord" in the form of emigration. On one hand we're not bound by feudal oaths so leaving as such is usually pretty easy, but on the other hand the process of living somewhere long-term and changing citizenship can be very difficult on the other side depending where you go.
Sure, some will fail, but it's better than the alternative, which is everything run by committee.
Committee 's tend to never manage to agree on any big bets - and therefore all resources get ploughed into low risk mundane things with no ongoing benefit. The town hall gets repainted frequently, rather than resources being spent building a cathedral.
Maintenance isn't sexy or grand but it is good for the normal, everyday people who have to use the stuff to do the things.
Bigger infrastructure projects are often done by the state.
But for more frivolous, would never happen otherwise stuff, certainly a single deep pocket is a good thing to reach into.
Have you looked at the biases of the many recently?
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter
>when it is [relatively] cheap to believe something (even when it is wrong) it is rational to believe it.
"Engineering" (manipulation of the environment) is the most intuitive for humans to sort out irrational beliefs.
"Science" is a method of eliminating human bias (preconceived notions) beforehand as much as possible as to maximize the space of possibilities in terms of technology ("knowledge").
"Anarchy" in the realm of social order in its most basic form minimizes the abuse of power of the few by optimizing structures of hierarchical order.
Every single one of the human enterprises is non-telic, a constant work in progress. My sense is that through its accelerated atomized structure and loss of power "the West" has lost itself in delusions and constant anxiety resulting in disproportionate numbers of megalomaniac leaders free of account and apathetic citizens giving up agency.
Everyone wants to live in "interesting times" but no one wants to live through it with one lifeline and a 52.5% chance of belonging to the bottom 1.2% in terms of credit points (wealth) and dependent on highly corrupt structures. I surely wouldn't play that game, so what do I care what my rational beliefs are (no participation) as long as every belief I fancy has an underlying cynicism it is a far effective short-term strategy to avoid being "scammed" which could potentially cost the lifeline.
Somehow we forget that one of the most important aspects of learning is a clear understanding about why one does it and how it benefits us. This must be repeatedly reinforced over years, and close to zero people want that reinforcement in the hellish form of a gamified and entirely soulless piece of software.
The subtle hidden message is that rich people are idiots who misattribute their success to factors like dropping out of college or getting up at 6am.
That said, most students don’t have the capacity to benefit from personalized learning either. The whole problem with the discussion of improving education is the assumption that a proper education process can increase the size of the “glass” by pouring in more “water.” Not everyone is capable of every type of thought, and that’s ok! Every type of person is valuable.
People who are unusually intelligent should be given free time to self teach, and if possible tutored. Traditional classrooms work well enough for everyone else, except for the drug issues.
Also, personalized learning lacks some of the motizational pressure that attending a class with other people at a specified time imposes. Some people are self-disciplined and get by without this, but having a schedule helps a lot of people stay focused on their goals.
Where personalized (nowadays, LLMs) tools are incredibly helpful is if you take a course that's a bit above your level and for which you lack some of the necessary background. With LLM assistance, you might have to work twice as hard as other students in the course to keep up, but you at least won't be totally lost.
However, the old saw about leading a horse to water still applies. All the technology and assistance in the world won't help the unmotivated student learn much. If the broader culture doesn't value education, that's the first obstacle to overcome.
If I understand, the core argument in this article is that there is a social layer of learning. And that's probably true to an extent, but how does that completely dismiss the value of self-directed learning?
These self directed platforms can be useful in certain use cases but can’t replace the base education system with classrooms.
If you want to teach every child (which is what we do) then the classroom is by far a better model. Teachers do this every day. They set online tutorials and quizzes for homework.
I'm not sure how many people have actually learned Calculus or European History or PHIL101 to the point of expertise...
Everything else though, like programming, video editing, some crafts and etc. is an entirely different thing. I would definitely argue without former, I wouldn’t be somewhat well-rounded as I consider myself right now.
"I have tried to illustrate as often as my subscribers will tolerate that students don’t particularly enjoy learning alone with laptops within social spaces like classrooms. That learning fails to answer their questions about their social identity. It contributes to their feelings of alienation and disbelonging."
"I have tried to illustrate as often as my subscribers will tolerate that students don’t particularly enjoy learning alone with laptops within social spaces like classrooms.": I do agree, but (for me) the reason is not the laptops, but the classroom.
"That learning fails to answer their questions about their social identity. It contributes to their feelings of alienation and disbelonging.": Well, I felt alienated in school, and felt much more home hacking or on the internet (according to the HN comments to this article, this seems to be true for some tech billionaires, too)
Thus, investing in such a platform does not seem off to me.
Another problem might be just the stupid statistics. 75% of any population are just followers, who only differ minimally from each other in no significant way (more in appearance than substance). Thus, 75% don’t need much personal learning beside what traditional teachers can already provide. The rest 25% can benefit greatly from personal learning and teaching but either they already doing that in some forms or they don’t build enough mass for a wider adoption.
can, can
Can't the author say anything more definitive than can?
> Whole class work can feel personal. I consider it proven by Liz. QED.
This is transparently misleading. Anybody who has been in school knows that every school has a couple of gifted, charismatic teachers who can make just about anything feel exciting and compelling to students.
Name a learning methodology that can't feel personalized and stimulating if you find the teacher charismatic. I just proved everything works. QED.
The "misunderstanding" in question is so much more interesting than that silly "$100M" angle.
My buttom line is personalized learning has existed for centuries and changing its medium from books to videos won't make it possible for more people.
Instead, the mission is to fix education as a whole and make it work for every person in the world. Which leads to looking in a complete different part of the solution space.
What do you think of this approach:
Gamify learning! Students get to learn sort of at their own pace but like gaming, they fall into different levels. Let them compete and be ranked against others at their level nationally but also be in different teams of less than 10 students at their school. Allow them to be at different levels for different subjects and attend regular in person classes with kids in their team/level.
The grade system stays, you still need to pass all the subjects to progress a grade, it just might for example take a 17 year old 5 years to move to grade 8 from 7 and 1 year to finish highschool because they sucked at math in the 7th grade and it took them 4 years to reach grade 8 level and the 1year to focus on math for grades 9-12, because they finished every other subject at every level and grade.
They could pair up and talk with students, mentors, teachers across the country to get exposure and pursue their passions.
I am sorry but I am shocked at how unimaginative technologists are getting. It's like the disruptor mindset is dying off.
Now did the CZI need to invest $100m to build that platform and could it scale, maybe not, but I wouldn't write the whole thing off as a failure.
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-schools-educ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fun_They_Had
https://www.bartlettschools.org/pdf/TheFunTheyHad.pdf
People have been debating the utility and potential isolation of automated personalized learning from before we even had real computers!
One month one way, one month the other way for an entire year. Have students vote and decide which one they actually like.
Personally addressing someone is sculpting and interjecting/communicating with their subjective understanding of that topic.
The flat, objective heirarchy on the internet can never deliver it.
Well it can, but getting subjective structures into tech and tech teaching, is an uphill battle.
Even if he lost this amount every month he'd take almost a century to get broke.
What do you think of this approach:
Gamify learning! Students get to learn sort of at their own pace but like gaming, they fall into different levels