There's a dilemma here, because in order to find ways to improve education, we have to try stuff, right? But how do we remedy the situation when those experiments fail? That's less related to the Montessori thing, but it's interesting to think about.
Or worse, know we need a remedy when no one is even checking for success or failure?
Thankfully the US is well on its way to dismantling the Department of Education. So no stuffy bureaucrats getting in the way /s
You're exactly right, though. OLPC failed mostly because it didn't think to teach the teachers how to use the laptops as classroom tools (not that they would have succeeded otherwise). Countries that had the infrastructure to do the onboarding themselves were relatively well-set up to teach their kids anyway.
If this is interesting to you, I highly recommend Morgan Ames' The Charisma Machine.
seems they missed that figuring out the laptop and integrating it into the curriculum are two different things.
i read your post btw, one thing i am wondering about is that you wrote that countries didn't improve electricity in schools because OLPC claimed that this wasn't necessary.
my own speculation is that they simply didn't enough research and didn't expect that the situation would be so bad. it is also my understanding that the hand crank was dropped early because the laptop could not handle the physical stress of cranking, it would break apart. but then a separate hand crank charger was eventually produced after all: https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Hand_Crank but if i did the math right then it would still take an hour to charge the battery with that.
since there was no hand crank the need for electricity was already well known before any deployment, and part of the deployment efforts included improving the electricity infrastructure.
Oh yeah, they had their heads miles up their own asses. That's absolutely a major part of the story. Idealism led to hubris.
The hand crank is a big part of the story, though its role is more complicated than you might expect. It wasn't a silver bullet. Some developing nations, like Paraguay, had decent electrical infrastructure, but their OLPC deployments still went poorly due to lack of training and lack of maintenance/repair programs.
Also, it takes very basic physics to prove that the hand crank could never have been the silver bullet in the first place. My math in the essay agrees that no child-operated hand crank was ever going to be sensible.
Almost 100% pass rate to college, mostly the best colleges. Did the education provided there affect this? Likely, but it was much more the self selection of having the best students that were doing a SAT like test to get in.
Which should make no sense because the teachers themselves work odd years in one school, even years in the other school.
The finding here is, competitive parents have an impact on the college approval rates of their children. Get them to all send their kids to the same school, that school gets better approval rates, regardless of the teachers.
Peers make a huge difference. Before university, I split my high school between two schools - one that was near the top academically, and one that was quite poor. The latter did have some smart students intellectually, but almost none did well academically because it wasn't valued by their peers.
Then I went to a very average state university for undergrad, and a top school for graduate studies. The difference wasn't that high in terms of teaching (the average school actually had much better teachers, but offset it by low expectations). The real difference was in the peers.
You like engineering? You like coding? Want to do some cool side project? Very hard to find someone like you in that average university.
Then when I started working, I started tutoring some middle school kids. The kids seemed totally capable mentally, and I was trying to figure out how they can't retain simple facts like number of months in a year. Until finally it hit me. They don't have problems learning things. It's just that no one in their orbit (peers or parents) care if they know these things. When I was a kid, I'd be an idiot amongst my fellow students if I didn't know it. So I did. Everyone did.
But if you're around people who think it's OK not to know how many days are in a year, chances are you won't know it, no matter how intelligent you are.
I strongly believe that peers are important and choosing school based on the type of peers is a valid choice. As another (more positive) example, we live in HK in a multilingual family (I speak French, my wife speaks Cantonese), my son goes to an international school in English and Mandarin. Most of his classmates speak at least 2 languages, many speak 3. In that environment, it's easy for my son to see value in speaking multiple languages and he's never rejected one language. I have a friend whose daughter is in France in a monolingual school where her peers don't value speaking multiple languages. As a result she's ashamed and refuses to speak Cantonese.
Or maybe Cantonese is less fashionable in France than French is in Hong Kong?
Rudolf Steiner would say all that early learning is harmful and they should have been playing and imagining spiritual things.
What would those be and how do we measure them?
There are studies that show Montessori students tend to have better executive function, better working memory, and no significant difference in creativity. I'm not aware of any that look at lifetime income or anything like that.
Think you mean to say that if you are well be enough to send your child to a private school...I try not to pull out the "privilege" card but good grief.
This is a similar but separate effect. Rich, uncaring parents can raise unachieving idiots.
It’s easier to be caring with resources. But plenty of public school difference-in-outcome studies have found a signal from parental participation that I believe remained after adjusting for income.
My parents cared enough to find ways to get me into private schools on grants and scholarships.
My neighbors had just as many if not more opportunities to do so but did not care enough to do so for their children.
Yes, it’s caring. Education as a top priority for poor families is the number one way a parent can give their kid a better life than they had. Most do not even try.