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Comment by sopooneo | Hacker News Reader

The mantra of "student centered education" was almost deafening when I was teaching a few years ago. There is some merit to the idea, but I do not think it is the panacea it is sold as. Many of us on this board were held back by those around us, or were highly individual, but I bet that having a group around you that you can talk to and relate to that are studying the same material is very useful for most people.

Also, good teachers, teaching from good textbooks, to well fed, happy students is not done often. It's not a terrible approach.

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"Student centric eduction" does not have to be just single student + computing device. For E.g. I enrolled in the Udacity and Coursera classrooms. An awesome group of community TAs and Forums and study groups has emerged which surpasses the quality of at least the the average classroom in a third world country(my personal experience is from studying in one of the top 5 colleges in Bangalore).

Of course these students who enrolled were mostly self driven knowledge hungry programmers. I have no idea how it generalizes to something like learning long division or historical facts by students who would rather play video games than attend school.

But "student centered education" is definitely a boon to those who crave knowledge and who are not lucky enough to have the best teachers or the best text books to learn from.

I think you bring up a very good point that I hadn't really considered. If you filter for motivated students, a student centered approach might very well one of the best options.

I don't think we're disagreeing on your first point. A cooperative dynamic is hugely important for some personality types. I would argue that such a dynamic arises in student centric teaching.

As for your second point, I too was a teacher a few years ago. Great teachers can work wonders with a good textbook. For example there is a lot of great evidence/support for the Direct Instruction model which requires extraordinarily well curated material.

But the real question remains, how do we repair our STEM education system in this country (and many other parts of the world) for happier, more capable workers and a more competitive work force?

Student centric learning tools offer amazing potential for scalable and cost effective solutions.

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