I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

scotthyoung.com

311 pointsandrewstuart540 comments

I'm not the first person to state this, but it bears repeating: nearly everyone thinks that they know the right way to teach, and most people don't.

I'm not exempting myself from this. I was an adjunct lecturer for two semesters. I did have some fun with it, but it was way harder than I thought it would be, and I think that university is probably considerably easier than elementary or high school.

I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

Now when I see people talking about how they're going to "revolutionize" school, most of the time I just assume that they've never actually taught anyone anything, or least never been required to teach someone who really isn't interested in learning.

I never taught myself, so take this with a grain of salt (though I do think it is extremely hard to do well).

I did, however, have a teacher who taught an advanced subject and I found his instruction so good that I did not have to bother with homework and assignments if I was happy with B grades — as I wasn't particularly motivated, only occassionaly did I put in the effort for an A.

I could, however, see the level of preparation that he put into it. When students confronted him with a difficult task, he'd not attack it right away but instead prepare for it for the next class so he'd provide the most effective instruction (it was not about being embarrased to show how exploration is sometimes messy because he'd quote that as the reason he won't do it right away). He was also so focused that he kicked out a school director when he tried to interrupt class with some sales pitch for whatever.

Not everybody could score a B grade just out of his instruction, but nobody was failing a class because the instruction was so good.

I will also openly admit: I had exactly one instructor like this in my life, so it is a high bar to clear ;)

I was lucky to attend a liberal arts college with a large and extremely pedagogy focused mathematics department, and all of my math classes there were like this. Engaging lectures, if I listened and wrote down everything on the board I would be able to get a B on the exams, even if I skimped on practice. Made it all the way to measure theory this way. They included in class group practice integrated with the lectures, which definitely helped.

St. Olaf College for those wondering.

schooling has to be designed around "average" teachers. Having someone who is gifted at teaching is great, but there wouldn't be many teachers if that was the standard. I often think when people idealize what schooling should be like it always seems like they are imagining teachers who are gifted.

> I did, however, have a teacher who taught an advanced subject and I found his instruction so good that I did not have to bother with homework and assignments if I was happy with B grades

This comment made me roll my eyes. :) Giving students high grades for little effort is a cheat code for being considered a great teacher. Most everyone working in academia knows that.

> teach someone who really isn't interested in learning.

This is key. If you are interested in a subject, the learning will come more or less automatically. Different ways of teaching still have substantial impact on how efficiently you learn, but you automatically gravitate towards the more efficient methods since you want to learn this out of interest in the subject. Without interest, this is an uphill battle.

And that is the gripe with traditional schooling. The methods may work well for intetested students, but they really kill interest. If I'm evaluated all the time, pressure on me, my interest tanks.

The difference between something I have to do versus something I want to do is absolutely key.

Yes, but as an university level educator I have to stress that the vast majority of students suck at understanding what they will need to know to be good at the juicy bits that interested them in the first place. Our task isn't just to teach them what they are interested in. Our task (among others) is to prepare them for a life after university in their profession(s) while giving them the practical skill of learning new subjects themselves. For example: Nearly nobody wants to do the math stuff, but nearly everybody will profit from knowing it after the fact (at least in the field I am in). Education is more than knowledge, but if we talk about knowledge it is the systematic accumulation of interlinked ideas and concepts that after a few years turn someone who had no idea into someone who can excell in their field. Nobody who likes to work on cars likes doing taxes, but nearly everybody who lives off working on cars will need to know how to do them. So the question will be, can a society afford to teach people only the fun bits?

I personally think I would fail my students on a personal level if I let them go through my education and have them ill-prepared for the world that faces them outside. I have worked as a freelancer in the field I am teaching for years so I know very well what I wish someone would have thought me. You can sell a lot of dry stuff by tying it to a practical application that makes them see the use more clearly. That works pretty well and student like it. Real education should feel like gaining a superpower. That means practical applications are crucial, you should basically build the theory around solving actual problems and not the other way around. Pure theorizing should also have its place for those who like it of course.

But I would advice a little bit of caution to hold too strong thoughts about teaching if you have never done so for at least some period yourself. It is much harder and exhausting to do in practise than most people think it is. Especially with big group sizes some things we wish were possible are not necessarily so.

To a large extent, the onus is on the teacher to generate interest. Most teaching until uni is mostly forced upon students.

I think the challenge that teachers have is that being “interested “ in something is a skill in itself. I never played a clarinet when I was a kid, maybe I would have like it, but never did that. If we assume that being interested is a function of household income/structure/ happiness than things get even worse.

Well, we've all been students, haven't we? And most of us probably have experience with ways of teaching us that worked, and ways that didn't. Of course we're all going to have an opinion.

I don't have any grand theory of education, but I have some stories of what worked for me and what didn't.

I learned English from a guy with a radical method: the "direct method" or "natural method". After the first lesson explaining what he was going to do, he spoke only English in class. The textbook also had only English (vocabulary was taught with pictures). This was about third grade elementary school. This worked great for me, I always had top marks in English. German, by comparison, was always taught to me in the traditional method with grammar lists etc. durchfürgegenohneum, ausbeimitnachseitvonzu, and I still remember that crap and I still absolutely suck at German.

So one "revolutionary", running his own radical program (he would never have been allowed to do that today), helped me. I think we should let people try things.

I'd agree with this conclusion from another angle as well. It seems slightly odd to me that people think there must be a single "right" way to teach. What works for one student, one group of people, doesn't necessarily work well for another.

And it also goes the other way as well. One form of pedagogy might work excellently for one teacher, yet he may do abysmally at another. What's "right" for him may be wrong for another teacher. By striving for something like homogeneity you disadvantage not only students, but also teachers.

This is all even more true in current times as educational outcomes continue to decline even as ever more money is pumped into education, and teacher churn rates are at record highs, with many completely leaving the profession.

I was one of those students. I refused to do homework after the age of 11 (I cited the 13th amendment). Quit school as soon as it was legal to do so. I wrote about this in Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar. Now approaching my 60th birthday, I feel certain I was suffering from undiagnosed ADHD.

You can't force a brain to think what you want it to think. I couldn't even force myself to think what I wanted to think. I began to imagine my thinking brain as if it were a pet rhino that did as it pleased. Over time I learned a lot of tricks and hacks to function in the technical world and perform reliably. But it was a long journey.

I teach for a living now-- but I only teach the willing.

I was too. That's why it was so frustrating to me.

Teachers would like me, I don't think that any of them thought I was an idiot, but I wouldn't do my homework and they'd be stuck giving me middling-to-bad grades.

I eventually more or less figured out how to force myself to learn things I didn't care about, and I did eventually get my bachelors and a masters, but that wasn't until my 30's.

Sounds too familiar. But I survived at school and I think that it helped a ton that I went to school at sixties (Soviet Union) – explicit teaching, homework and grades since age six, order in classrooms etc allowed me to practice handling my brain with babysteps since early age. If I look at classes my grandkids are put in – no way I'd survived in such chaotic and noisy environment with so few rules.

> Over time I learned a lot of tricks and hacks to function in the technical world and perform reliably.

Honestly, these are the most important things to learn. I spend a lot of time with my kids talking about ways to get your brain to do what you want.

In America being willing historically depending on where you live still isn't enough for getting an education, healthcare or voting depending on where you live. But no worries there is a country on the other side of the world moving upwards.

There's also this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ which claims data shows students being forced to "figure it out" is not the best way to learn. Most HNer disagree with this.

That's exactly quoted at the start of the article?

"Problem-based learning tends to do worse than traditional schooling in medical education. An influential meta-analysis by Albanese and Mitchell, for instance, found that students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students. "

Problem-based learning is exactly the "figure it out" method.

Seems to me that "figure it out" works better for learning depth of knowledge than it does for breadth of knowledge. That is, I can figure out the computer graphics tricks I need in order to get my project to draw fast, even if they're fairly deep and sophisticated tricks. I'm less likely to figure out, say, the humanities portion of a college education.

Why? At least for me, focused goals motivate more than diffuse ones. I could treat "the humanities" as a bunch of focused goals, but there would be a large number of them. That takes a fair amount of motivation.

What they need to figure out is what topics peaks their interest. Kids need exposure to a broad spectrum early, get interested, and then have mentors that know how to run with it and harness that motivation. Later on these kids can tolerate learning more mundane, boring stuff if that brings them closer to a goal they have set for themself. But motivation has to come first!

As someone who have been teacher for some time - students being forced to "figure it out" is the worst way to learn. For every subject you teach explicitly there is always a ton of knowledge to discover if students choose to do it, but being forced to do it very clearly damages students.

https://scienceoflearning.substack.com/p/no-explicit-instruc...

One of my sons is one of those. He's smart, tends to creative pursuits, and while he will research and learn on his own about stuff he's interested in, put him in a classroom setting, for something he doesn't really care about, and he just won't do the work.

I was one of those kids.

Did well in class, participated, and my grades trended downwards as the school year went on.

A lot of it was undiagnosed ADHD, which didn't work well with the repetitive nature of much public schooling. OK, let's do polynomials. Start with two terms...then three...then four...and on and on. I lost interest after three. Of course, then I didn't study or practice and did poorly on tests.

I grasped the concepts, but couldn't be bothered to study.

I had the same problems in other subjects. I'm a big history nerd. I could write a huge essay on the causes of WW1, but instead the tests were "what was the date of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand...".

We also read the Hobbit as a grade 8 class book. First question on the test? "Name all the dwarves that were at Bilbo's party...". It took me a decade to re-read it and get into Lord of the Rings.

I've actually thrived in the "real world" because I can quickly grasp concepts and with a combination of grit managed to make a great tech career. I was lucky with timing though. Had I been born a 5 years later, the career path wouldn't have worked.

> put him in a classroom setting, for something he doesn't really care about, and he just won't do the work.

Coming from a family of people assumed to be like this, and having friends in similar situations. Rarely are they actually disinterested in the subject, but are disinterested in how it was taught and self conscious of their perceived understanding of the subject. It's easier to say you don't care when it comes up.

I'm guessing your past this option but you could try a Montessori classroom -- less structured and allows children to chase their own pursuits. My sense is its stronger for years 1-6 as opposed to later years. Also it doesn't feel like Montessori tries to grind down the children - school/teachers dependent for sure (same could be said for other systems).

I signed up for software carpentry instructor training at the SciPy conference in 2015. I expected to learn about their curriculum. Instead, I found that they taught pedagogy. There were articles to read in advance. I should have taken that class before I spent 15 years teaching at university rather than afterwards.

What aspects of pedagogy did you find most relevant? It does seem sad that in our industry, one where practical learning is necessary, that learning how to learn isn't really taught well. Often the worse ways to learn are those that seemed to be encouraged, mostly because it's the easiest way to monetize content.

From experience (with a moody teenager), can confirm; I think this is less teaching methods and more personal development.

Younger children will conform more easily to e.g. structured education, teacher / parent authority, and basically do what they are told/asked to do. But at college / uni ages, you're dealing with young adults, some of which are only doing an education still because it's expected of them by parents/society. Or even when they want to be there, the motivation to do the work may not be there. yet.

It's difficult because their brain is still at high learning capacity, so one has to capitalize on that. But they also have other interests, like sleeping until midday and spacing out for ages.

Younger children will do what they are told more easily, but making learning a chore they do because they are told to rather than a joy will kill their love of learning and that is what causes the lack of motivation later on.

based on your description, one reasonable way to 'revolutionize' school might simply allow people (who don't want to be there) to leave.

That might be fine for someone in the wrong college degree, but I - as a tax payer - need every sixth grader to learn essential the same things. I need kids to grow up able to provide life support for themselves so I can retire as by body fails from old age. I'm investing in the future of many kids I otherwise don't know or care about because making their life better makes mine better.

Even in the case of a college degree some are better than others

Depending on what you mean by "school" I'd disagree. Voluntary tertiary education makes sense, not all chosen professions may need or benefit from a degree.

But primary education needs to be a requirement for every child. Coming from a country with a large illiterate population, it's easy to see how hard their lives are compared to folks with an education but similar socio-economic backgrounds.

Now obviously implementing universal primary education and the details can be debated and need to be context specific.

They were already at a University. None of the students were required to be there. They all had the ability to just leave.

There has been a shift towards too many jobs requiring a tertiary education.

But good luck reversing that trend.

After 20 industry years, I've been teaching CS for the last 7. I sincerely hope that I figure it out before I retire. :) Doing this job effectively is more challenging than anything I've done in my career. I've read a lot about teaching, and it's amazing how much of it doesn't resonate for me. What has been the absolute best is sitting in on other instructors' classes and learning from them. And being completely flexible in how I teach--there really is no single solution to everything. "Be like water".

As for the students who don't apply themselves, I know exactly who you are talking about, of course. And often they're among the most capable people in the class. There's also no single thing that works here. But I've had some success with asking them point-blank, "What's your plan for passing this class?" But that doesn't work with everyone.

Yeah, honestly if I were to do the lecturing again, I would probably get some training first.

I, like a lot of people, thought it would be relatively easy for me because I've always been relatively good at explaining things to people on an individual level. For example, at previous jobs I was the person who was there to help explain functional programming concepts to people from different backgrounds, and I was often tasked as being the "theory guy" for the junior engineers when they were having trouble optimizing.

But there were some problems with my thinking. First, sort of by definition if someone is asking for help they're kind of invested with paying attention and understanding the concept. Second, there's a pretty big difference between explaining something to a single person (especially a person you already kind of know) and an entire class of ~15-20 people, all of which are different humans with different histories and backgrounds.

I also think I took things a bit more personally than I should have. I didn't have any training or practice, and I just jumped right into the teaching part. I think I did "ok" given that, but that's not exactly reassuring..."My professor for the class I paid money for wasn't quite as bad as he could have been."

We know what works: a 1:5 staff to student ratio. At that ratio, method matters less. Beyond that, it's a productivity problem.

Yep, known as Bloom's Two Sigma Problem[1]. Like most hard problems we know the solution, but lack the appetite to implement.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

With AIs as most staff, this should be very reachable.

> I just assume that they've never actually taught anyone anything

I care about teaching my students leadership, because all real problems are political. What exactly is the "test" for this?

To me, revolutionizing school looks beyond "problem solving," because the parents and students who are excited about the thing they call "problem solving" - it's invoked in the article, it's talked about by many of the other comments - basically solves no real problems. The revolution will redefine what "problem solving" means.

Got to disagree, there's been a cohort of teachers pursuing that avenue of thought and all it's led to is colleges that shout down anything that'd pierce the monoculture and employees so politicized they lose some utility in actually doing the useful work that the company or entity exists to perform.

It's a side effect, perhaps, of the modern "main character syndrome". An electrician doesn't need political "leadership". He needs to know how to wire a house quickly, efficiently, and above all, safely. He doesn't need extensive training on how to help bring about a proletariat revolution. That's an example from the trades, but same in the white collar world; my employers accountants weren't hired because of any activism, but because they know accounting rules and regulations so the rest of the business doesn't have to think about those things as much.

If anything, modern generations need reminders that 99.99% of us are NPC's and the best thing we can do for the world, our families and those around us are to be really good, competent NPC's.

Let me also point out we landed on the moon without that view of education. People, on the moon, with all the technological and institutional advances necessary to make that happen.

>because all real problems are political

I don't think that's true at all. A lot of problems are purely technical. Once someone figures out the technical part, you realize the politically savvy people waiting on the sidelines for a solution were always a dime a dozen.

> I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

Yeah, I was that student. It was undiagnosed ADHD (because nobody thinks to go send the kids who aren't literally jumping around the place shouting for an assessment, I'm ADD without so much of the hyperactivity). Put me in a classroom where literally all there is to do is getting on with the work and I'll be mostly ok, or at least give a good appearance of being so. Once I got home though I simply wasn't going to sit down and focus on doing homework, it wasn't a case of refusing too or anything, I always had the intent of doing it, but then the morning it was due would come round and somehow it hadn't happened.

Anyway, I did fine. Through some merciful coincidence the thing I was interested in doing turned out to be a lucrative career choice in an industry populated by people with the same sort of brain. That was almost entirely fluke though, it would be nice if instead of people just shrugging and going "huh, guess he's not interested in learning" we could improve education to better accommodate people who don't fit exactly down the median path.

I'd start by doing away with with homework which really is some grade A bullshit - if my employer decided to turn around and go "oh, by the way, now the work day is over here's some extra work I'd like you to get done in your own time" they wouldn't be my employer for very long. How about we instead make time during the school day for kids to sit down and do the (incredibly valuable) bit of applying what they're learning to some concrete tasks?

> How about we instead make time during the school day for kids to sit down and do the (incredibly valuable) bit of applying what they're learning to some concrete tasks?

This is great in theory, but then you have students who complete those tasks in half the time allotted, who then proceed to distract the rest of the class.

No easy one size fits all to the hw problem unfortunately.

There's a huge difference between things people are forced to learn and stuff they want to learn. Life does tend to make you learn a few things by force, but that can also kill off one's taste for a subject.

Conversely, I remember mom giving me M&Ms for getting math flash cards right as a small kid. For some reason, I always liked math...

As a math teacher myself I want to say... A parent taking an interest and spending some quality time with their child over a subject can have a huge impact on their motivation to learn. Props to your mom.

There's an art to making learning fun. I thought I had that skill, but I do not, at least not intrinsically. Maybe I could learn it, but since I was only a lecturer for about a year, I never really developed it.

I am not going to pretend I know how to make seemingly-boring subjects interesting, but a lot of things do need to be learned that aren't always fun.

I've always liked math [1], but I know a lot of people don't. Even still, I think having basic and intermediate math skills is important. I have no idea how to make math fun for people that actively don't like it.

[1] And I don't think I was given M&Ms for it :(

I think the problem with your argument is that you are placing teaching as something done to students at the centre of your view, rather than something done by students. It assume classroom learning. That rules out any really different approach. The fundamental problem is trying to revolutionise schooling rather than learning.

> They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

Then they should not be there. That is the fundamental problem. Especially at that level why is anyone there who is not even motivated enough to study? Someone might not like ever undergraduate level course they need for a degree, but they should be able to push themselves through the boring stuff.

At school level, its difficult to make things work in a classroom setting with a fixed curriculum. Once I took my kids out of school they largely learned what they found interesting until they started studying towards doing exams. I made sure they learned core skills around reading, writing and maths, but they still had a say in what to do and how. A lot of it can be done by pursuing other subjects or hobbies. With the exams they had a choice (discussed, and they had to do maths and English language) but they had a choice) of what subjects to do and made choices that suited them, including some less common subjects (such as astronomy and Latin). Again, motivated and requiring very little actual teaching (they both entirely taught themselves Latin, and did other subjects with minimal help - although we did have tutors for English literature and classical civilisation, and varying amounts of parental help with other subjects).

A lot of the best universities (in the UK, at least) have tutorial systems that rely heavily on small groups rather than lectures (Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, St Andrews - that I know of). A lot more individual attention is a long proven method of getting better results.

At school level it might look very expensive, but that is balanced by needing a lot less time per student. A few hours of one to one a week is cheaper than school.

I always felt that large urban centers should concentrate on specialized schools. In large cities there is a critical mass of students to fill specialized schools such as ones for; biology, programming, electrical, automotive etc...

Many students have an interest and want to pursue it. It's only through self-motivation that people really learn.

There was a study of where hockey players come from, they tend to come from cities of approx. 50,000 people. Large enough for schools to offer many different types of programs in schools, but small enough that a teacher knows each student and their family, and can help a motivated student train. In many large urban centers teachers don't live in the same communities that their students are from, and can't offer that extra oversight. This is why in large urban centers, it would be better to start to specialize early.

All roads lead to the same destination. Eventually you'll need to know a bit of history, math, etc. no matter where you start from. So beginning in a specialization doesn't exclude other knowledge.

Sometimes it's better to have an in-depth knowledge of one subject, if a student starts early and focuses on one thing, they'll be ahead of their peers.

The point of a fixed curriculum is that there is a minimal level of knowledge on various subjects that we should expect all of our fellow citizens to have. Maybe you find biology very boring, but that still doesn't mean you should be able to finish school without knowing that living organisms have cells that power them, that all animals have hearts, that plants do photosynthesis etc. It's alright to not like history, but you should still have some idea of what the Roman empire was or about the Second World War. It's ok to hate physics, but it's not ok to have no idea about Newton's laws of motion or about the notions of pressure, volume, and temperature and how they relate to each other in gasses.

Knowing Latin doesn't compensate for lacking knowledge about the fundamental details of the world we live in and share.

> nearly everyone thinks that they know the right way to teach, and most people don't.

It's typical for people to accumulate many examples of how "not to teach", and it's natural to extrapolate those experiences into ideas of "how to teach". To your point though, most people don't know how to do things they aren't practiced in, and some don't even know how to do things they are practiced in.

> They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class [...] but they didn't want to be there.

> [...] isn't interested in learning.

I highly doubt these students weren't interested in learning. By your own account they were engaged during class.

No teaching style is going to be able to fit to all students equally.

I was taught (when teaching for the military, actually) that leadership/teaching/etc. often talk about toolboxes but neglect a VERY important one.

You shouldn't just have a toolbox of things you've picked up from your best examples, that you've been taught, etc. It's possibly more important to have another toolbox of broken tools from all the terrible bosses, reactions to situations you've witnessed, etc.

This way when you go to do something and it's not in your toolbox, you can pull out that box of broken/bad tools and see if it's there. Otherwise we perpetuate bad leadership (and teaching IS leadership) through intentional ignorance (forgetting the lessons those bad situations gave us).

Absolutely.

I regularly think about to how difficult it would have been to teach the younger me (while trying to stick myself in my kids' perspective).

Any well intended notion of "I wonder what sort of teacher would have ignited a passion for learning" is quickly replaced by the understanding that such a person likely didn't exist.

I was lazy up until I wasn't, which was largely a reaction to being lazy in the first place.

Fast forward a few decades and I am a serial workaholic who is continually making up for lost time.

Nowadays I wonder what it will take to motivate my offspring.

It's the circle of liiiiiife......

Almost all such attempts start with the flawed assumption that there is One True Way to teach literally every person in the same cookie cutter fashion.

The fact that the dozens or hundreds of different teaching styles have great success with some but not all is not considered past "some is not all therefore it's a failure".

Individual humans can be radically different and have completely different needs. It's astounding how many people refuse to realize this.

"The A students lead the C students who direct the B students"

I thought I might be able to reach them, because I was never an A student. I was always kind of the underachiever who teachers knew was smart but would get mediocre grades because I wouldn't do the homework. I passed high school because I have a good enough memory to remember what was being taught in class and do fine on tests, but I'd still get middling-to-bad grades in high school because I wouldn't consistently do the homework.

To be clear, I do not blame the teachers at all for this; I do not think they took any joy giving me bad grades.

But because I was someone who knew what it was like to be a smart academic underachiever, I thought I might have luck reaching the students who I saw falling into the same negative patterns I had.

I do think I reached at least one, but I think most of them I did not. It's ok, teaching is hard. I hope a better teacher came along in these students' lives and helped them out.

I had the opposite experience. I saw college kids who didn’t know where the F5 key was on the first day write smart matlab and python programs by the midterms.

I don’t think I’m exceptional at all. I was always behind and that probably reflected pretty poorly on me. But all it took to teach was preparing interesting examples and then spending time with subgroups and individuals.

I bet a lot of people think I’m catastrophically wrong, probably just got lucky.

That's true. I'm frustrated for example in how they teach math at my kids school. They don't do rote memorization of how to multiply. No quizzes, no reciting... they teach the conceptual parts of it which is fine, but without memorizing I feel they will never have fluency. And my daughter never did get fluency in math now I'm drilling my younger son every day.

Yes, and I probably was that student in school.

The thing is -- grades looked to me like a silly attempt in gamification. I did not really care about grades, but I care about learning. So you might have taught them good, and they will carry it to their lives, they just don't care to show it off in the form of grades.

Now, an admission tests grades are way different deal, of course.

Both my parents were teachers so I thought I had some idea, but it wasn't until I ventured into the middle school to assist a teacher with a coding class (probably this was 10 years ago now) that I learned something about education.

Also, there is no 'right way to teach', but there are 'right ways of teaching'. This difference being that people can respond very differently to the same approach, so many approaches are needed to be effective.

I was one of these "smart students" but it really wasn't that I did not want to be there. I was a lazy, or complacent, f*ck. I've have had to learn how to learn and how to have discipline late(r) in life.

How to teach isn't always aligned with how to learn.

How children learn is not how adults learn.

That's an odd comment below to see die from crm9125.

I'm not sure what's so offensive about it?

If it was downvoted, what interests could want to draw attention away from those sentences, and why?

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crm9125 13 hours ago [dead] | parent | prev | next [–]

Also there are about 2 billion children on earth, each with their own different idiosyncrasies. Good luck finding the grand unified theory of pedagogy for that.

This is a really interesting framing to me. You say "forced," would you have preferred to give them a better grade even though they didn't do the work because they were smart?

I said "forced" because there's a grading framework that I had to follow and there was no amount of flexibility within that framework that made it so I could pass them... Especially since they didn't leave the class really understanding the subject.

I knew they were capable of understanding what I was teaching, and I even made it very clear to students that if they are having trouble with the homework they can bother me and I will help them through it, and I will spend whatever amount of time it takes. A few students actually took me up on that, and they really did improve as a result, but some of the students simply seemed content on failing.

I take it as a personal failing; if a person is smart enough to pass my class and didn't, then I didn't do a good enough job making it interesting.

Forced, presumably, by the student themself.

I am teaching for at the university level for 6 years now, with 5 courses per year.

The one most important goal many beginning (or bad) educators miss is making students care before going all explainy. My subjects are very practical (Media technology, Electronics) and I have repeatedly seen students who understand a theoretical explaination and then fail utterly to apply what was explained in a practical situation. Coincidentally the latter makes most of them care instantly.

The solution in my case was to weave the theory together with something practical tangible. If everybody knows what they are working towards, and you weave in small practical tasks where it has to be applied that knowledge serves a purpose and students are much, much more willing to understand.

When you then go all meta and details after they understood what it is for and how it is used that worked much better than front loading the a struct stuff.

So (1) the dumb explainations that avoid them hurting themselves or breaking things, geared towards "this is what we need in 5 minutes", (2) applying the dumb thing to a practical solution, (3) theory how does it actually work, (4) another practical thing, this time armed with knowledge, watching out for details that we now notice because of knowing the theory.

Students soak that up like sponges. But teaching is hard, especially if the knowledge levels of the students in a group are disparate or you have students that aren't actually fit to receive education for mental reasons in that moment.

I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.

I think you need to go a level up. Forget the people that flunked the class. Did the people that get good grades learn anything? Really? Do you think they still know it?

Was learning the point for anyone or any institution involved?

I think for at least a couple of the students, they really did learn the subject well.

A couple students took me up on my offer to do private tutoring [1], and I do think that they benefited from it. A couple of them would even ask interesting follow-up questions [2].

Of course, there's a pretty strong selection-bias there: if they are actively looking for help from a professional, they probably have some interest in the subject matter, so it's difficult to know how much I helped compared to them just looking things up on Google and/or doing the homework, but I would like to think that I helped at least a little more than they would have had otherwise.

[1] On my own free time; I wasn't given any direct budget for office hours.

[2] e.g. one person became extremely interested multithreading and multiprocessing, and so I pointed him to the ZeroMQ guide and walked him through some basic farmout patterns...I should see how he's doing actually, I think he has a lot of potential.

If your goal is high academic achievement, the only real answer is a stable home life, parent-enforced discipline and high parental expectations (note I said expectations not involvement - highly “involved” parents can be worse than the neglectful ones). That’s it. That’s the big secret. Show me a school full of tired/neglected/hungry/unruly students and I’ll show you a school full of students that are going to be almost impossible to teach effectively. There will be exceptions of course, but kids who aren’t parented properly at home will struggle massively to learn at school.

You can throw all the money, new techniques and technology you want to at the problem. It will not get better without fixing that fundamental issue.

I find it endlessly frustrating that this doesn’t get more prominence - there are studies from the early 20th century showing that the biggest factors in performance were things like housing and food stability, dentistry and glasses, etc. but fixing those problems drags up enough unpleasant societal choices that a lot of people prefer not to talk about it.

My wife is a public school teacher and I’ll never forget the time early on that an administrator tried to say she could deal with a kid who was absent more than half the time by making her classes “more engaging”. That kid reported rarely sleeping more than two nights under the same roof.

My wife too was a public school teacher for a decade, and resigned from sheer frustration and exhaustion. It became abundantly clear toward the end of her tenure that no amount of effort or technique was going to make the situation better. It’s really a completely broken system.

The primary reason I became a software engineer at middle age was to make enough money and have good enough health insurance that she could have the freedom to leave a job that was killing her mentally and physically.

I agree and I have the evidence needed to back up your claims. Stable home life? checked. Parent-enforced discipline? checked. High parental expectations? checked. Through some involvement though, to some degree: we as parents always show real and positive interest on what our children are doing and learning without really interfering unless they explicitly ask for it, and I believe this helps dearly. I learned by doing, trying at first to get involved too much - proved to be a mistake which he corrected it by himself, jumping from an IT career to chemistry in notime and shortly hitting silver at international chemistry olympics. I never try to interfere anymore but just be there, always ready to talk about it and offer the emotional grounding they so much need. Kids will flourish. My elder is on his way to what seems to be a strong, well built medical career and my 6yr old oh boy, she's ready set.

Parent-modeled discipline is arguably just as important. The strengths and struggles in a young person are quite often some analog of the strengths and struggles of their parents. Dealing with the distractions of life and focus on what is truly valuable is a respectable challenge at any age. The expectations and enforcement can be high, but if that is missing, kids are going to struggle and school is going to feel like pretend.

This should be the top comment.

It makes me _irate_ when the solution is "just throw more money at the problem, that will fix education!"

Like, irrationally mad. It is lazy. It is soulless. It is callous. It is arrogant. It is detached from reality.

"Education will fix the problems in schools!" is circular logic.

My pet theory, and this will bet destroyed here, is that we should have developed birth control for males a loonnngg time ago. Accidental kids that have dad peace out on them usually never get a fair shake at life.

Some problems suffer negative economies of scale and simply cant be outsourced.

There is not enough money in the economy to pay for all the domestic work that productive people do for themselves.

Parenting is a good example of this.

Well I for one am always in favor of arbitrary humans having better ways to voluntarily attenuate their own fertility, full stop.

We may have a depopulation shock problem on our hands at the moment, but trying to encourage more accidental births isn't the way to solve that: we need to increase social and financial incentives for forming families and pull away as many of the social and financial barriers thereupon that we can. Not to increase population but to better slow the free-fall of it decreasing so badly that it upsets the actuarial tables.

While I have no way to assess whether better male birth control options would directly positively impact education in particular, I see zero ways it could negatively impact it.

One revolution that backfired massively: the departure from phonics reading to some sort of contextual whole-word one, where students were reprimanded for trying to sound the word out. By extension the loss of basic Greek & Latin has had a terrible impact; at least teach just enough to learn that most English words are compounds of simpler Greek/Latin words strung together (like German's adjectiveadjectiveadjectivenoun construction), which is very useful when either encountering an unfamiliar word and for constructing potentially new words.

Literacy rates are tanking as a result; Mississippi went from 49th to 1st in literacy by ditching the new-fangled whole word contextual style and going hard into phonics. Get them hooked on phonics again, then teach them Greek & Latin! Spanish/French/German/whatever should be the *second* foreign language they learn, gated behind Greek & Latin being their first. It was a huge disservice to my education that the 'dead' languages were not offered to me in [junior] high school. I can only conclude that the curriculum and test writers only want literate-enough workers who can't critically think but who can [barely] read and follow written instruction.

I fully agree on phonics, but teaching Greek and Latin before any modern language? That seems deeply weird as an idea. Especially since Greek (by which I assume you mean Ancient Greek) is a pretty isolated language, with relatively little relation to any modern language except modern Greek. Another huge issue with Ancient Greek and Classical Latin is that they have extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language, which makes them very daunting to English speakers especially.

Note also that Greek words used in English are almost exclusively scholarly words (like "metaphor", "diagnosis", "theology"), they are not popular borrowings like many Latin words ("difficult", "pork", "to count").

It's not even really about learning Greek or Latin as a true spoken language. It's about known the roots of the linguistics for understanding why a word is even created in the first place.

English is a really messy language but there are many simple underlying roots that can tell you what the word means with context clues after hearing it for the first time.

Also learning the International Phonetic Alphabet is probably another huge boon for comprehension, the nicer books often include IPA spelling for crazy off the rip words

In the US, it seems like malpractice to teach anything before Spanish IMO. 14% of the country are native Spanish speakers. It's hard to imagine a return on any other foreign-language instruction that would match improving communication between 45 million residents of the country and everyone else, to say nothing of improving communication with citizens of the other countries actually sharing a land mass with the US.

> Classical Latin [has] extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language

…I know almost nothing about this topic, but this doesn’t line up with what people who know Latin have told me. They’ve frequently cited the language’s simple grammar as something they like about it.

We had, spread over the course of our 8th grade English class (Thanks Ms Wilson), about 500 greek and roman roots to memorize, and weekly quizzes. These were not graded curricula, they were for extra credit because it was the teacher's personal program. No grammar, no conjunctions or conjugations, no sentence construction, just the two biggest veins that PIE has contributed to English nouns and verbs. Rote memorization.

I found I already could guess about 2/3 of them from being a recreational reader, but it helped a good deal even so. With the combination of a few years of Spanish and random etymological crawls through Wikipedia, I'm firmly in the top few percentiles of English vocabulary competence.

I don't think they're talking about learning greek or latin before english, it sounds like they're talking about putting more time into learning etymology which is incredibly useful.

I think there's huge value to learning Latin, but that's because it was the core language of European civilization for millennia more than because it's a gateway to English.

Ancient Greek is a very difficult language. It takes a solid decade of work to learn, and the payoff is you get to read a few - admittedly brilliant - authors. I would not automatically prefer that to being able to talk to everyone in the Spanish-speaking world - or to learning la belle langue. Also, I don't think Greek was ever learnt by the majority of pupils.

In a 1940 Massachusetts public school, my blue collar grandfather was required to take Latin, immersive French, and was graded on handwriting. Latin plus a foreign language like Mandarin, Hindi, or Spanish should be the table stakes minimum standard. English composition, creative writing, and reading classics should also be nonnegotiable essential requirements too.

My brother took Latin and I took French in high school and I found French to be much more actually useful in improving my vocabulary and understanding. I went to a Catholic high school and we learned some snippets of Koine Greek as part of studying the Bible. None of these were time effective at learning English at all and more English classes would've been much more effective (especially at the level most high schoolers are at).

My high school was more classical than most and it was not a better way to teach English.

Education boards and school districts in America keep making the same exact mistakes over and over again: throwing away proven methods casually for experimental fads.

This exact failure in 1960 California replacing phonics with whole word recognition led to backlash, including one teacher, Barbara Baker, who in 1963 formed Challenger Schools to emphasize phonics, academics starting in kindergarten, curiosity, and beyond minimum standards achievement/excellence.

The whole-word learning "revolution" was based on a lie and misunderstood science. It set back a generation of kids and made them feel dumb because of a stupid group of educators.

Very interesting. I do know that duolingo makes a great effort into trying to simplify the learning process to reduce friction, but still structured learning is really great for learning the rules, while duolingo is better for unstructured practice with some learning, like the article mentioned about the kid and the app I believe short circuiting to the reward.

It's way more comprehensive than just phonics:

- Mandatory screening of students in grades K-3, three times a year, using approved assessment tools, to monitor how early reading skills are developing

- Focused efforts to improve curriculum quality in schools— for phonics and other aspects of literacy

- Large-scale efforts to train teachers

- Retention policies to hold back students who aren’t reading successfully by the end of third grade

Lifted directly from https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/is-mississippi-cooking-the-...

It's also worth saying a lot of the gains evaporate when you factor in learning loss from COVID and Mississippi suddenly screening/helping kids for dyslexia (etc). But, still there's something to learn, just not simply phonics.

I believe this is something that is no longer done. On top of that, one of the early major proponents of it has admitted it was a failure, but I forget their name. The school my kids are at are not using this system. Obviously it's a data point of one, but I don't think most schools are doing this anymore.

I credit randomly deciding to take Latin in high school as a huge change in the trajectory of my life. It didn’t even happen all at once. Just a little different perspective on how words are formed. Oh they’re often combination of simple root words.

Right after I graduated the one Latin teacher they had retired and that was it.

As someone who took both a 4 year latin curriculum and a year of koine Greek in HS: unqualified no.

Really wish I were fluent in Spanish or Japanese or really anything spoken.

IMO, the best questions around revolutionizing school should address whether children should be coerced into learning something.

It seems obvious to me that the answer should be yes. So the follow ups should be figuring out how to move a student from an unwilling participant to a willing participant.

I think about three strata of students. The stubbornly unwilling, the coaxable, and the eager. It is pretty easy to design education for the eager. And discussing how to optimize that is a completely different discipline than the discussion about how to coax. The discussion about moving the unwilling to the coaxable is another topic on its own.

Having a mixed class of unwilling, coaxable, and eager in a classroom with a mantra of "no child left behind" is a huge mistake in the same way it would be a mistake to have one teacher in a mixed classroom for Geometry, Alphabet, and Orchestra.

> I think about three strata of students. The stubbornly unwilling, the coaxable, and the eager.

I have a real issue dividing kids up along these lines. I've found that virtually all young kids love to explore and learn things, and if anything schooling can extinguish this innate desire when it becomes a source of stress.

> I have a real issue dividing kids up along these lines. I've found that virtually all young kids love to explore and learn things, and if anything schooling can extinguish this innate desire when it becomes a source of stress.

This is a very bold claim. I don't think most kids are curious about the multiplication tables

Why learn multiplication tables when everyone carries a computer around with them? My kids never did (ineffective school plus later home education) and are good at maths as adults. A previous HN discussion contained this post

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48395840

and ultimately this about a successful experiment in other approaches to maths:

https://www.inference.org.uk/sanjoy/benezet/1.html

The claim was that "virtually all young kids love to explore and learn things", not that "virtually all young kids love to explore and learn multiplication tables".

I think a lot of kids can be motivated for that by having a game out of counting in multiples (e.g . Have them count by 4s, 5s, etc). Which is good enough for practical purposes.

> I don't think most kids are curious about the multiplication tables

Which is exactly why they stopped teaching them in US curriculum under No Child Left Behind.

They may refuse to learn multiplication tables (a popular subject if I remember right, reciting them as far as we could, a competition) while memorizing baseball stats.

Kids will learn anything that gives them social standing or self-worth in another way, whatever it takes to be a cool kid.

While my experience relates to learning in higher-ed, I completely agree with those three categories... Though a helpful nuance may be that it's a spectrum, not hard boundaries, and every subject/exercise can have a distinct relationship with the learner and context.

When rubber hits the road with a learning objective, I think the two most important axis are: how much does the student want to learn (this), and how easy is it for the student to learn (this)?

Both can depend on a variety of factors... For example a masters student paying their own way mid career maybe really wants to learn as much as they can, but a specific research report assigned during a busy work week, and some family emergency, etc. may mean they treat the assignment as "I just need to get this done" instead of "I want to get as much as I can out of this", and one way that can show up is how much they depend on an LLM to do the work for them...

When I was involved in higher education, people talked about three motivations: passing the class, being good at whatever is being measured, and learning the topic. Those were not distinct categories but separate axes, and they were understood to be situational rather than inherent qualities of the person. We didn't care much about the people who scored low on all three axes. Education was free, and if you didn't have the motivation, you were probably better off doing something else.

In any case, people who wanted to learn were easy to deal with. The other two motivations could be used to coax the person to learn, but they required different approaches.

I used to believe this until I got kids myself.

There is no stress, they just don’t want to “explore” things they see as non-urgent.. basically everything you need like writing, reading and calculating properly.

No amount of coaxing, gamification or whatever works consistently. The only thing that got my smartest kid through anything is by force. Not too much, but still, they need some amount of coercion no question about it. Anyone that denies this I find very, very hard to take seriously.

Interestingly the slightly less cerebral one is easier to guide through gamification. I guess the smarter you are the easier you see through BS. It’s easier to just learn to suck it up and Do The Thing instead of “learning is fun”. It isn’t and it doesn’t matter.

Then think of them as the same child in different phases between "extinguished innate desire" and "loves to explore and learn things".

I’m curious about homeschooling and alternative methods of schooling so this is of interest to me. By “virtually all” I assume you mean “all but those developmentally delayed”. Have you run a program that uses your principles or have you tested your thesis in some way that you are willing to share?

Real talk: which kids have you interacted with? What social class? What ethnicity? What household structure (nuclear, multigenerational, single parent, single parent plus intermittent partner, divorced with shared custody, dirtbag but grandparent covering)?

I've found that the people who are more optimistic about kids tend to live in a particular category of socioneconomic bubble.

Ignoring whatever you mean by injecting "ethnicity" into the question, I've interacted kids in all of those socio-economic situations and think both that GP's point about innate curiosity is true, and that GGP's unwilling / coaxable / eager concept is a reasonable framework. That's not to say that I'm necessarily optimistic - socio-economic difficulties create absolutely enormous challenges to learning - just that I've never encountered a group of kids, regardless of background, where there weren't students in each of those (unwilling / coaxable / eager) sets.

It's hard to convince kids why they should learn advanced abstract math, beyond what is necessary to calculate the tip on a restaurant bill. The number of high school students who will use advanced math beyond high school is very small, but those that do will have high impact, which is both in society's interest and their own interest as high earners.

The kids that study and apply themselves, I don't think it's so much that they can see they understand the benefits of linear algebra at the time, it's that their parents and the social network they're a part of sends them signals that this is what they should do to be successful and they're rewarded for doing well in school.

I will bet that the number of adults who ever engage in coloring or painting as adults is extremely small. Probably less than the number of full time scientists, engineers, finance professionals etc. Yet no one complains that we are forcing students to do art in school, even when many students don't particularly like doing art. Why? Because we recognize that developing general artistic ability in humans is important, so we need art classes.

The other argument about teaching "advanced math" is the same as why Cristiano Ronaldo spends a significant part of his training in the gym lifting weights? Ever seen Ronaldo take out a barbell and start doing squats during a game? One should reflect on this.

Math is a tool for solving problems, and people will do work to create value that they will share with you for helping them solve a problem which will ultimately create even more value.

In short, math is a powerhouse tool for carrying society forward.

Art, while cool to look at and experience, has a pretty low efficacy in terms of "motivating people to do work, or removing obstacles, to carry society forward"

In short, starving artists.

There is also the whole thing where art is an abstract concept with a subjective definition, and a solar cell sporting new tech with 33% efficiency objectively being better than one with 24% efficiency.

Art class as part of public education is not completely uncontrovertial.

It grew out of a time where basic artistic skills were expensive to learn, and could be a real class differentiator (and had some employment benefits).

That's now a fair bit less true; but still continues to prevent these things becoming the sole domain of private schools.

Never had art in school.

Did do writing although a lot was extracurricular.

re: not teaching math to kids is a pet peeve of mine.

the number of adults i've met who cannot add two fractions together is depressing.

at some point each of them had decided "i'm just bad with numbers, hahaha" and they gave themselves permission to stop trying math. worse, society gives you a pass at not knowing math. we need to apply the same constant social pressure to mathematics skills that we do for learning to read.

When young people ask me why they should learn math, I point out that managing your money requires math, and there are plenty of people who will steal from you if you are unable to recognize it.

An inability to understand compound interest is classic.

They're even proud of it, heaven help us. How many posts on HN by SWEs have we seen saying that people didn't lose any skills of importance when calculators became widespread?

Motivation to learn has nothing to do with practicality. That was definitely that way for me, especially when I was young.

I know full well that languages are necessary and useful ... and were. I still found learning languages the most boring thing in the world. I liked abstract math despite thinking it is not necessary useful - I did not cared. I could go on, but relation between interesting and useful was never all that straight forward.

> kids why they should learn advanced abstract math

Could you clarify what do you mean by 'kids' and 'advanced math' here?

I personally believe we should stop believing advanced math is meaningful for everyone. Especially stop trying to push them down to high school curriculum.

When I say advanced math I mean anything involved with "what exactly is a ___ (vector space, real number, group, set, etc)".

> It's hard to convince kids why they should learn advanced abstract math, beyond what is necessary to calculate the tip on a restaurant bill.

When I was just a bit younger, I detested what I'm about to say, but now know as the "reality".

Your argument is focused on rationalism. You're trying to give kids/teenagers real world reasons to learn something.

People are rarely motivated by reason. They are motivated by emotions.

If you look, you'll find plenty of examples of very "rational" adults (college professors included) who clearly know something to be true, will admit to it, but will still go the emotional route.

As a parent, I looked into the research on changing/shaping children's behavior. And the key things that stood out:

1. If you know enough adults who do equivalently bad things even while they know the harm in it, don't expect kids to behave based on reason.

2. Focus on (positive) emotions. Give kids incentives. They shouldn't clean up the table because it will keep the house clean. They should clean it up because they'll get a (short term) positive reward.

3. Focus on building the ritual as a habit, and separate it from any semblance of morality. The brain needs to get accustomed to the actual behavior. The rationale can be added (now or when older), but if you focus too much on rationale without the habit, you'll get someone like me, who realizes a lot of behaviors are good for me, but won't do them because "my brain isn't wired for it".

Getting back to kids learning algebra, or whatever: Their lack of incentive isn't because they can't connect to practical skills in life.[1] The reason they don't want to do it is because it is not a valued skill amongst their peers. And it's also not a valued skill in American society.

That's why high school kids in Eastern Europe or East Asia tend to know this a lot better. If you can't multiply two numbers on paper, you're an idiot. Everyone will know you're an idiot. As much an idiot as not being able to read properly. So you learn it because you know that it's just a baseline intelligence marker you should have by a certain age. You don't whine about it any more than you'd whine about how to properly eat food without spilling it. Sure, once they're older and reflect back, they may say "I never needed algebra", but it doesn't bother them. Knowing it is merely part of being cultured.[2]

Now being motivated by shame is really not a great way to get people to do something, and that's not what I'm encouraging. The point is that it's a broader societal problem. Why should they learn it if they see no one else values it?

I wrote more about this about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065640

[1] Think about all the useless things kids can be good at. Did they have to rationalize why they should learn them?

[2] This is why California, in particular, had a strong push back regarding calculus not being taught in high schools. There's a strong and relatively wealthy Asian/immigrant community in those places, and they've tried to maintain the value of being decent at math. (All the stuff about impacting university education is fluff. I used to work at a university, and they had remedial programs for incoming students who didn't know algebra/pre-calculus. It adds to the time to graduate, but by and large is successful - it's OK if you go into engineering without being exposed to calculus).

Here's my take: school math past the basic arithmetic will be useless in life for the majority of people. Any non-trivial school-level-related math question can be easily solved within 10-20 seconds by a Google search.

That's also why all the examples of math's usefulness become ridiculous stories like: "imagine yourself getting stuck on an uninhabited island and having to calculate the triple integral to find the volume of a barrel of water".

No. The real use of school-level math/physics/chemistry/language is in laying the _foundation_ and training the brain.

And it doesn't really matter what exactly you want to use for mental training. Every structured activity is fine, as long as it engages the brain.

Even pointless tasks like memorizing scriptures help. There are studies that show that religious students who spent a lot of time on rote memorization, and later switch to other disciplines, in the end do quite well with their studies.

Here's the thing. Learning is hard. There's no going around it. You'll need to grind through practice problems, write essays, memorize facts, etc.

And you need to do that. It trains your brain. If you simply rely on calculators, LLMs, and Google Search, then you likely can forget about doing advanced science.

It doesn't mean that you have to _master_ everything. Far from it. But you need to apply real effort to various subjects to train yourself.

Having multiple parallel tracks for different types of students is controversial. Schooling tends to be cyclical with periods with more tracking is popular shifting to periods of less tracking and more classroom mixing. It really depends on what you want to optimize for. More tracking benefits the highest achievers. Less tracking raises the bottom and the average but at the cost of not maximizing the outcome of the top.

I find these arguments ignore one of the most obvious and important parts of school: discipline/behavior.

A really small number of disruptive kids will destroy the learning of the entire middle. The top kids will figure it out at home and survive, or their parents will separate them through brute-force - a few borderline high achievers will probably be brought down too.

In the poorer neighborhoods around me the school performance is actually shameful and the kids are being subjected to the worst of their peers constantly, destroying their ability to succeed. Many will (hopefully) drop out/get arrested by late middle/early high school but the damage they do to their entire neighborhood along the way is massive.

Cohorting the highs and the well-behaved middle would probably work out just fine but unless you can eliminate the disruptive and the very-behind it's just the worst of all worlds.

Do you find it controversial to have different tracks for Geometry, Swim, and Orchestra students? These are different types of students.

Arithmetic, Algebra, and Statistics are different classes should be taught separately.

"Please wake up and take your headphones off and answer my question even though you don't plan on passing any of your classes" and History are different classes with different types of students. Trying to conduct both classes at the same time using the same teacher is folly. You will be forced to abandon one or both of the students. You might argue that you should abandon them it turns every other day so they both get something out of the class. But that means they will each get half or less out of the class than they would have if you separated the classes. It is highly likely that you will frustrate both students to the point of impediment.

"Having multiple parallel tracks for different types of students is controversial."

It shouldn't be. The research overwhelming says its a good practice. The type of people who say this type of thing are the exact type of ideologically motivated people who are destroying school systems in blue districts. Ironically this group both hates private schools and creates the environment that pushes parents to pay for private schools. I've personally seen the bad consequences of schools that do this and I know people who aren't here anymore because of it. So please, for the love of god, stop talking about topics you know nothing about.

It's not that easy. The status quo is that having multiple tracks creates terrible incentives among teachers: no teacher wants to teach the "bad" track, so they get stuck with the worst teachers and the worst educational outcomes over time. (This occurs not just because many remedial students have very real behavioral issues that deter the best teachers from engaging with them, but also notably because the progressive education establishment is dismissive of teaching methods that actually help those students learn effectively, and doesn't train general-ed educators in the use of such methods.)

> The research overwhelming says its a good practice.

I disagree. From what I've read, the data is more mixed. More tracking optimizes for the top achievers. Less tracking optimizes for the lower and middle. Less tracking probably maximizes average metrics.

> The type of people who say this type of thing are the exact type of ideologically motivated people who are destroying school systems in blue districts. Ironically this group both hates private schools and creates the environment that pushes parents to pay for private schools. I've personally seen the bad consequences of schools that do this and I know people who aren't here anymore because of it.

I agree. However, I think the counter solution these people imagine is a similar scenario as described here <https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/sd3in2/...>.

> So please, for the love of god, stop talking about topics you know nothing about.

Let's be civil. There is no need to attack me personally. You're welcome to disagree with my ideas, share your opinion, and present support. I think a reasonable person can find support for both opinions.

>figuring out how to move a student from an unwilling participant to a willing participant.

I've been giving chemistry lessons since I was a teenager, and quite early this became my first order of business after that alone was responsible for turning a D student into a B student in one session.

For that first non-mathematically inclined student who was having so much trouble, this had to be accomplished before any of the specific concepts and problems could be properly addressed in the course they were enrolled in.

All that was accomplished in two hours was gradual but progressive reversal of attitude, not unlike what I was accustomed to in ramping up to more advanced subject matter, but we never got around to that during the first session.

The next week they had a very positive attitude and were going to call me later with some challenging equations for some help.

Wasn't necessary, the very next week they got a B on their own initiative, were so excited and passed everything after that with no further problems. It was probably the most thankful student I ever tutored.

If you had the budget for two teachers, I’d utilize them as one teaching in the traditional way, and the other spending 1:1 times with each student (20 students in a class → 1-1:30 hr / student).

If we had budgets that allowed for one teacher per ten students, I imagine many problems in education would already be solved.

There is no correlation between better educational outcomes and higher teacher pay. Washington has the highest teacher pay and the smallest classrooms yet is below average in educational outcomes. Stop this canard, it just isn't true. US Schools have plenty of money, they just don't spend it wisely. In fact, both Mississippi and Louisiana have better outcomes than Washington state despite the fact they have half the spend per student.

Budgets are a region-specific thing.

In the USA there are approximately 50 million students aged 5-18. If you paid for each student to get 1:1 attention one day a week, you would need one teacher per five students in schools that meet five days a week. Let's use that number because it reduces 50 million students nicely to 10 million teachers. Let's pay each teacher $70K/year. That would cost $700 billion per year.

The USA military spent $100 billion per year in Afghanistan.

If the USA provided the 1:1 attention only in 1st Grade and 3rd Grade, they could fund it with the same commitment they made in Afghanistan with a lot fewer deaths. The USA persisted in Afghanistan for 20 years. Shall we experiment with education for 10 years and see if we get a better result than we did in Afghanistan?

I believe 1:1 is fundamentally different than ever 1:2 ratio. So, even if you can have 3 person classrooms, I don't think it would be the same as 1:1 time.

As soon as you are working with more than one student, you have to teach the common denominator, which may or may not (more often not) be the thing that will most help any of the students.

In 1:1, you can identify were the specific gaps in skill, knowledge are and tailor the session to close them. Personalized.

Plenty of places have relatively high teacher pay, relative high staffing (for instance 1 teacher + 1 assistant per 25 children is standard here - not quite 1/10 but pretty close). The educational outcomes are bad and getting worse.

If you use other students for that problem instead of other teachers, you'd swap a budgetary problem for a bootstrap problem.

The upshot for this is that the benefit is as much for the student doing the teaching as the one doing the learning. Teaching has a much greater effect on _retention_ than listening reading or even doing, which is the majority determinant underlying the primary school curriculum.

There are a whole host of secondary benefits to this (as well as lots of logistical challenges): the students are doing something useful, teaching, and we pay teachers if you wanted to expend budget there I suspect it would have great effect, as would any other form of ~~bribery~~, I mean, incentivisation; socialising, especially if you have the teaching being done across different classes (which you would want to do because you want the teacher to know more than the student).

This is even a more interesting idea! I guess similar to the teacher assistant system in higher education. One version of this could be students a year ahead teaching the previous year's students. In elementary school it might be tricky, because besides interest, there are issues are classroom discipline and behavior which might be beyond the capabilities of an 8th year old.

The answer is, as it's always been, aggressive tracking. Easier said than done because most school administrators and education policymakers base a lot of their self worth out of being "good people" and being liked by everyone. Having to give up on some kids is unthinkable to them. Simply giving up on all of the kids in a way that decouples the outcomes from their direct actions is much preferable and lets them sleep easy.

Why is it obvious to you that children should be coerced into learning something?

Let's say that you have some curriculum C that you think is vital for children to learn, and you want as many children as possible to learn C.

Even ignoring ethics, it's not obvious to me that attempting to coerce all children into learning C is the best way to accomplish your goal!

I'm not the parent comment author, but my guess is that they probably meant persuade or inspire as much if not more than coerce. Most respectful interpretation and all...

Why is it obvious that an educator should do their best to teach a student something even when they don't want to learn? Well for one, it's their job, and two... Children especially are not good judges of which knowledge and skills will benefit them later in life.

> Children especially are not good judges of which knowledge and skills will benefit them later in life.

This. If children knew what was best for them, they wouldn't need teachers or parents.

When I was in college, the courses were laid out for particular majors. Electives were few. I trusted the college that they knew what they were doing in deciding the curricula, because I sure didn't.

I'm sorry if I was uncharitable. That certainly was not my intention. The only usage of "coerce" I'm aware of is in direct opposition to "persuade" or "inspire," and I'm not aware of any serious debate about whether children should be persuaded/inspired/encouraged to learn things.

In broad strokes, learning leads to better life outcomes just like brushing your teeth leads to better health outcomes, or any other example you may prefer. Brushing teeth is a chore so a child won't generally pick it up all by themselves without some nudging. If you don't do the nudging you're essentially letting a child be free, yes, but also willingly letting them end up worse off when they're too young to know any better. Learning is the same.

> just like brushing your teeth leads to better health outcomes

This is very context dependent. If you grow up surrounded by a typical western/industrial/post-industrial diet, then yes, it almost certainly does.

But you could also change the food environment.

Hopefully the analogy/metaphor that connects this to schooling is reasonably obvious.

Forget children. I regularly coerce adults - junior members of my team - to learn properly things they don't care to learn too much. Both for the benefit of the organization (society in the case of children) and for their own benefit.

I agree this is the fundamental question and disagreement. I certainly don't think coercion is ethical.

We "coerce" children to do all sorts of things. We make them go to sleep. We make them learn to use the toilet.

I don't either - I'm am anarchist. But, ever hear the saying, "against all authority except mommy?" Kids need some level of coercion just to keep them alive. They have to be made to even eat sometimes.

Why not?

In a way, I think coercion is a requirement to be ethical. Ethics is determined based on what current society believes to be the right thing to do. We see that there are a variety of different cultures and ethics around the world, which would indicate that humans wouldn't just automatically follow a universal set of rules.

Thus to be ethical in your society, usually means you must follow the rules determined by a collective group of your nations ancestors or you will be shunned/jailed/harmed/etc. Which is essentially coercion. "Act this way or be punished."

Schooling has been trying for ever to institutionalize and standardize learning without really understanding what learning is. In that absence, we've focused on learning proxies, which are tests. And tests resulted in a focus on mechanics. Meaning was and is an intangible so it got leached out. Everything school does starts at the wrong end of meaning > motiviation > mechanics > measurement.

It is possible to fix school. It needs understanding learning, and also being willing to revisit learning design at every level. How to bring meaning in?

Without meaning you could have all your fancy chromebooks and chatbots but you won't move the needle (as we are seeing)

We are actually trying to change schooling (but with a tiny experiment, knowing that scaling does not happen without changes and cultural context)

https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...

Im definitely in this camp.

It seems like the biggest frustration from the teachers’ part with modern schooling is lack of engagement from the students. This is clearly telling us something.

Sure some students have not even had their basic needs met, which is a separate issue. But those that have and still don’t engage tells us that their brains have probably assigned the information they’re receiving as “having little or no value”, i.e. meaningless.

I bet if you were to lead a class of teenagers on the subject of relationships or friendship, or even how to host a successful party, suddenly you’d see a lot more engagement. Why? Because it’s actually relevant to their every day existence.

In highschool, at least, you have to somehow elevate the meaning of your subject to be more interesting than the movie theatre/concert/video game system they have in their pocket.

Kids will make eye contact with you and nod along as you teach, but they are wearing air pods and can't hear you over their spotify playlist.

Im not sure I can be more interesting than Taylor Swift, Call of Duty, MrBeast, and texting with friends all at the same time. You need the student to be a little bit receptive to even have the opportunity to convince them what you are teaching is relevant to them.

Just ban the phones from schools. Because with that you cannot compete. Instant gratification vs hard work?

I think math bas be slowly transforming more and more into word problems and scenarios. You might think oh yeah this engages the student by showing them reality, but I actually found it incredibly boring and useless, it served as a distraction from the actual numbers that I think are important to learn too.

Part of the goal there is not only "relatability" (demonstrating how this could be useful in reality) but "applicability" (demonstrating HOW to distill a math problem out of some potentially messy real world anecdote).

I have legit seen real world adults do things like say "Well, I got ten widgets because I know that's enough for two people. But there's gonna be four coming so.. uh.. 10+2=12, I'll bring 12 widgets"

Have you ever heard of John Taylor Gatto? If not, you may want to look into his books. They will help you realize that schooling and learning/education are mutually exclusive and even that schooling is counterproductive because its primary objectives are hostile to the objectives of education, real learning as a human.

The worst people in the world created schooling and the education system for their own narrow, selfish, greed and profit driven objectives. Is so deeply engrained, with the very “educators” themselves often not even realizing that through their having also done through the system, they are actually just enablers of an abusive and toxic, soul crushing system … which is precisely what it was designed for; because after all, “the purpose of a system is what it does”, and “ no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”; both the words of a great steward of systems thinking, Stanford Beer.

Unschooling works for a fraction of kids, and at some stages of their life.

How big is that fraction? In my experience being around a bunch of home schoolers (and adjacent, and school system), some of whom were more in or out of unschooling, I think it's small enough that it should be a rarely considered option.

There are some kids where it will work _really_ well. I've interacted with a couple. There are a lot of kids where it really doesn't work, especially in a distraction rich environment.

Thanks, I have. And it resonated a whole lot! He was working within a very entrenched system. Systems have a way of achieving equilibria and then all the parts trying their best to maintain it (unions, lobbies etc) School is a practical necessity and there's a lot of good that's possible. It's easier to start outside of the system, but also consequently much harder to scale unless we build tools to help systems to stabilize.

If the purpose of a system is what it does, then what does the system of "not going to school" do?

If schooling and learning/education are truly mutually exclusive then who is the most learned and educated person you can point to that never stepped foot in a school? And how do those rare examples compare against the breadth of modern PHD holders?

There are a non-negligible fraction of kids that are kept out of school, homeschooled, etc. If school was as bad for learning as you suggest then one would expect those kept out of it to demonstrate higher-than-average aptitude.

School system was created to increase productivity.

It is also and equalizer. Unschooled kids from bad backgrounds now start even lower.

You might be interested in the experience of hackerspaces, and the "learn by doing":

https://github.com/zoobab/educode

https://www.educode.be/doku.php/educode_2019/conferences/hac...

Thanks!

Understanding learning should start by understanding how much it depends on mechanics.

I don't fully understand your comment but I think an issue with schooling is that tests are the meaning of schools - that is, test results and graduating are the objective of an education.

This is the disconnect I've always found growing up, I get told this is how you calculate angles, but besides the test, there's never the why. Granted this is a bad example because at least that one had a practical, real life application example (calculating the height of a tower in the distance based on distance + angle of the ground to the top from where you're standing), but things just get more and more abstract later on.

The best teaching was always projects and internships, because they start with an objective and meaning (= build software that does this), and what knowledge you need follows from that.

I mean sure you need some basic knowledge before you can work backwards from an end goal, but surely they can teach said basic knowledge without it just being "this is how you solve this test problem"?

You may be saying the same thing in different words. Scores and graduation may be the objective for some - but that doesnt this is an effective motivation for many.

If you have ever been stuck doing a project you didnt want or like, you may relate.

> Meaning > motivation > mechanics > measurement.

You might propose that getting a good measurement is the meaning, but saying that doesn't mean a student has really or fully bought into this idea and find it compelling. i.e Their heart may not be in it.

"test results and graduating are the objective of an education"

No. The objective is for you to learn a specific topic. Tests are how we tell if you have learned it. Graduating is proof that you have learned it.

I was a horrible student as a child, and in my 20s I strongly held the belief that education was broken. Now that I'm a few decades older I wonder if my problem was not education but life. I did not fit in at most schools, and that had a negative effect on my desire and ability to learn. That's what led me to teach myself computers as a teenager...education and online socialization combined. Win/win.

I think the author is right that education isn't the problem, but they don't really discuss is the social element of schools. Bullying. Ostrification. I'm not really sure how schools are expected to fix that.

There’s something lopsided about education for boys. The system appears to favor girls heavily. There’s projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population. I think this is a systemic issue with school being built to favor a certain philosophy that isn’t well thought out for 50% of the population.

It's not that the system favors a particular gender. The system favors personality traits like self-regulation, organization, and conscientiousness. These traits develop earlier on average in girls than in boys.

i'm not sure if it's an issue of the educational system, but for at least several decades there has been a societal push to correct historical gender imbalances by encouraging girls to do well in school, go to college (especially STEM), get a career.

This has resulted in kids seeing a lot of messaging along the lines of "Girl Power! Girls can do anything!". Which to an adult looks like a shift in the tides of history, but for one of the kids that's all they've ever seen and i think that has an effect.

> There’s projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population.

We're well past that. In fact, the gender gap in college graduation is now worse than it was when Title IX was passed. But because the gap favors women no one gives a shit -- many 'progressives' even celebrate it and continue to insist we need all these programs specifically to get women into college.

> projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population

Projections? Aren’t we already there in reality? That future is today.

What philosophy? The gender based outcomes people never seem able to come up with any coherent explanation of what they think the problem is other then to play to stereotypes.

The explanation that I’ve seen floated is behavioral. Boys are active and physical and don’t focus as easily as girls, who are more amenable to sitting quietly and paying attention. The idea is that the current predominant K12 style favors students in the latter behavior group.

I have two kids in K12 and I don’t think it’s that simple. Not that I have a good explanation of my own, mind you.

What confuses me is that the education system, especially the college track, was designed for men and boys. Lots of colleges didn’t even admit women, and they were largely excluded from learned professions like medicine, law, the ministry, engineering, etc.

I haven’t really seen a good argument for what changed. I guess it’s possible that the school system was originally designed to teach young men skills, like quiet study and deference to authority, that women either learn more naturally or get reinforced in other contexts, and the schools no longer effectively teach those skills but still reward them.

> What philosophy?

They might be referring to the TED Radio Hour "Beyond the manosphere" by Richard Reeves. I think it was on NPR a while ago, I looked it up because the "school isn't designed for boys but girls" sounded familiar.

This.

A math test is a math test is a math test.

What's the math teacher supposed to do?

I hate to be that guy, but I think it should be pointed out that asian boys don't seem to have much of a problem. If there's a gender bias, why do they succeed?

So the issue with this take imo is that one of the primary goals of schooling is to socialize kids and force them to interact with others they dont get along with. There needs to be some conflict among the students so that they can gain and practice conflict resolution skills that are absolutely vital. I agree that the current system can be improved, it's just not clear how.

My issue with saying socializing is one of the primary goals is that schools leave kids to figure it out on their own. Hard to know how schools are performing at that goal when it is going unmeasured.

Schools do better than home schooling. Those kids constantly do great on tests but it doesn't take long to figure out they are lacking socially.

I don't know how to teach socialization other than kids figure it out, but I'm open to the idea.

Any time you try to randomly assort 30 children of the same calendar age into a room with a single (or even several) teacher, it's going to be bad for nearly everyone except those in the very middle of the curve. A very narrow portion of that middle too. It can't not be. And if the teacher tries to cater to the slow kids and the "gifted" kids even a little, then the middle-of-the-curve children will suffer for that too.

The problem isn't "education"... everyone not destined to be a feral caveman needs one. The problem is "public schools". The idea itself is wrong, and it can't be made to work. But our single-minded pursuit of it to the detriment of all other alternatives just compounds the trouble.

Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.

> Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.

Because that's how language works. Stop being a pompous self-righteous ass and take responsibility for your own words.

> Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.

Isn't this admission a sign that you should be more clear on the intent of the comment? There are many countries with well-functioning public school systems.

> The problem is "public schools". The idea itself is wrong, and it can't be made to work.

Do you have an alternative idea in mind?

It might have worked in the very distant past. I learned that there was once a monitorial system of education where a single teacher might be in charge of many students, but only because the teacher would get a lot of help from skilled students who would teach what they had learned to other students in their charge.

Isn't this just solved by better student teacher ratios, which you could totally have in public schools if they were funded better and societally we valued teachers more?

What are private schools doing that you couldn't implement in public schools with adequate political will and money?

Your question is easily resolved by looking up how much American schools are funded, compared to historical funding, other countries' funding, and their relative successes.

Outcomes aren't any better with lower ratios. The best-funded public schools have funding higher than anywhere else, in the world, and have poor outcomes... it's not a funding problem. And it's difficult to "value teachers" when we learn of these outcomes, it runs counter to human nature.

Private schools are (excepting the truly 0.01% which are the most elite schools meant for the children of billionaires and statesmen) are nothing more than public schools dressed up in $20,000/yr tuition so that the upper middle class can feel special. They draw personnel from the same pool of teachers, they use the same textbooks and pedagogy. They are essentially public schools with a new label. But that you think I might be talking about private schools shows how you can't even really think about alternatives. You don't have the mental language to do so.

Meh, it's not like before public schools most children had access to tutors tailored to their individual needs.

Badly misquoting Churchill, public schools are the worst form of education, except for all the other forms.

I think I should also gently suggest here that the issue could also be expectations. The idea that you put 30 random children in a class and that therefore there must be some who are "gifted", and there must be some who are "slow".

I don't know man? I'm just saying that sometimes sure, all the kids in your neighborhood could be above average. But most of the time, all the kids in a class are just average. And now the poor teacher has to explain to irate parents that their kid's not any more special than the other kids in the class. (Only we don't. We acquiesce to their insanity and label average at best kids as "gifted" and then have everyone be shocked when those kids don't gain admission to Ivies. Ma'am, that kid was lucky to get into his/her state flagship. And even at that state flagship, s/he probably ain't gonna be majoring in ChemE or anything if you want my honest opinion.)

Sure, you can have slow kids in a class. But, really? 30 random kids? Is it statistically likely that any are "slow"? Or is it more likely you're dealing with no good parents who don't work with their children at home? Then those same parents come to berate the teachers for not doing enough to teach a fourth grader addition and subtraction. With absolutely no reflection on why a fourth grader, with no learning disability, doesn't understand addition and subtraction.)

I don't envy teachers because these are the attitudes they have to deal with.

Public Service Announcement: No people, your children aren't "gifted". And it's very unlikely that your kids are "slow". Your kids are very likely, (horror of horrors), just average. Every one of them.

If we can just get past those things we can start looking at some of the real issues.

Don't have kids huh...gifted is just a classification for those with test scores in the top 1-5%. So if you have 100 kids, there is a pretty high likelihood you have 1-5 gifted kids (yes its not that simple, whatever).

And the research on the topic says that tracking (the idea you are criticizing here), improves educational outcomes. What to know the real problem with education? Its people like you who don't have kids and know nothing about the education system driving their own ideology and biases into the system. You have no stake in this, yet you want your opinion heard despite the fact that you put no effort into learning about the topic of education other than going through the system yourself which hardly counts.

PS You don't even know the term for the thing you are criticizing.

PPS By definition, every kid can't be average. So you don't understand statistics either.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education yet, which basically argues for a revolution in the other direction - get rid of almost all schooling because almost none of it passes a sane cost benefit analysis. It's very well researched, and the author has a long track record of being happy when he moves people even marginally towards his views.

The praise here for Direct Instruction is akin in many ways to a lot of the research Caplan draws on, especially his findings that generally, most work related knowledge is built at work, by actually performing the job.

https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...

I cannot imagine coming to a place that has a reputation of having higher educated people, and presenting that education is a waste of time. All research has some levels of agenda behind it, and it would be very easy to steer anything the author presents into a direction he wishes. On the contrary, literally every country on earth benefited greatly from education and the results are very visible in all aspects of human development (HDI, GDP, pollution, literacy, etc...), most recently China, and even more recently India. Both had huge numbers of illiterate people, compared to both advancing at an incredible pace when a large emphasis was put on education.

My reading of it is not that Bryan thinks education (aka learning) is a waste of time, but that much of what we call 'education' in the US, particularly with respect to higher education (4 year colleges) is just signaling. Very little is being learned. It's just a very expensive and time-consuming way to sort people based on skills and attributes they already had.

Of course, the above paragraph isn't perfectly accurate. It's based on my impression of a book I read a couple of years ago, polluted with my own biases, other things I've read on the topic etc.

I strongly disagree (having not read the book and having my own biases). History teaches us that any education is better than no education. Formal education is very far from just booklernin', you also learn *how to learn*, you develop social skills, you network, you start understanding how to deal with administration stuff, how to deal with failures and many other skills...

No country has perfect education, but what we call education is very useful for becoming a society participating human.

> long track record of being happy when he moves people even marginally towards his views

Most cranks are.

Caplan is a radical libertarian bent on annihilating what few functioning social institutions we have left.

1. the best teachers (of anything) rarely convey information or skills in any direct sense. Instead, they create the conditions where (willing) students will (or are at least more likely) to have experiences that cause them to learn.

2. John Holt (look him up)

3. I always wanted to offer people the chance to both leave and return to K-12 education. Lots of kids want out as teenagers, and we should make that possible but only if we make equally easy to come back when they realize the downsides.

4. Almost every child is a willing, in fact, overachieving learner. The fact that they fail to be interested in a topic is a reflection of things other than their capacity and capabilities for learning.

My experience was pretty contrary to points (1) and (4). My best teachers/professors directly conveyed information or skills. I found most students did the bare minimum to pass their classes (where "pass" = "not get their parents mad"). I tried to get a CS club started at my highschool and basically no one was interested, not even my friends.

Now, I did have a great coach in middle school who "created the conditions where willing students will learn", but I don't think she would have been a good teacher. She was great at organizing club meetings, finding the right materials to study, utilizing intraclub competition to motivate everyone, and getting her former students to come back and teach in highschool. I'm sure there was a lot more going on behind the scenes that she just knew how to do right, which made the club a whole lot better. But she wasn't a teacher. Closer to an administrator, but I think "coach" in the (m)athletic sense makes the most sense.

And, this is probably why my computer science club was not the success I envisioned. Yes, people are generally underachievers, but I also did not have the coaching skills to create the conditions where people wanted to overachieve.

> 1. the best teachers (of anything) rarely convey information or skills in any direct sense. Instead, they create the conditions where (willing) students will (or are at least more likely) to have experiences that cause them to learn.

When I was an international ESL teacher, this was known as “guided discovery,” the goal being that students organically uncover the rules that govern the specific domain being taught.

It works quite well because it transforms what would otherwise be a passive curriculum from more of a spectator sport into an active, participatory learning experience.

You are projecting. Those things are true of teachers who worked the best for you specifically. In some classes, these can work. Unless you have a high tracked class of kids with engaged and pro-education parents, it won't. It also tends to work better with kids in a specific age range, generally 10 to 14. But its not universal and don't project it into public policy that tries to maximize educational outcomes for the majority/all of the students. It also tends not to work for certain fields, like math for example. Its better for fields like history where debating viewpoints is part of the field instead of the scientific method.

Those things were not true of the teachers who worked the best for me specifically. I cite them based on stuff I've read during 40-50 years of reading about education and what actually works and how it works.

People do not, as a general rule, "learn" stuff by people telling them stuff. The retention rate is incredibly low, the comprehension is even lower. Now, it is often the case that good learning environments in our culture combine being told stuff with the sort of experiences that really lead to knowledge and skill acquisition. But everything I've read suggests that it is the latter, not the former, that generates the results we're hoping for.

Also, it may not be obvious, but sometimes testing is a critical part of those successful educational experiences. Nobody learns their times tables because a teacher told them the times tables ... but if you put children in an environment where they can both experience the patterns (or not) in the tables and where there is suffficient incentive to memorize either the tables or some heuristics, then they learn them.

I don't think there's any way to revolutionize schooling on average. I do think that there are ways to make it dramatically better for specific kids. Pull up the tails of the distribution and you do improve the average, but not by a whole lot, since most kids by definition will still be...average.

I went to a charter school, and one with a very different (project-based) educational philosophy. The charter school was founded by, among others, a business leader who had previously exited a startup he founded. He thought it would revolutionize education for his kids. Instead, his kids did extremely poorly at this school, and ended up going back to their normal public schools, where they did great.

I ended up going to work for his next company as my first job out of high school, and he was recounting this story to my boss, who was a grizzled childless 50-something programmer without a dog in this fight. The school founder had soured on charter schools by then, and said somewhat sarcastically "Well, they work for some kids." My boss was like "Maybe that's the point, that the kids who they work for get to attend a school that works for them."

Random thoughts:

- Education should probably be an area where methods are chosen conservatively based on what is proven. It's easy to forget that a change in curriculum will affect thousands or millions of kids and could have a life-long impact on them. We'd pillory someone who suggested testing new drugs on thousands or millions of kids even though the effects might be far less pronounced or long-term than a few years under a poorly designed curriculum that embraces bad methods.

- Neither should we give up on finding better methods. Education has undergone significant changes that have almost certainly turned out for the better. How well would a kid perform if they were put through a typical 18th century study of the classics? Latin mastery is not the passport to success it once was.

- The quality of teachers really matters. In Canada, teaching generally requires a university degree in education or a university degree with additional education in teaching. Salaries are decent in most provinces. There are still lots of bad teachers out there. I can't imagine what it's like in places where standards and pay are lower. Perhaps we should put as much effort into developing better teachers as we do into developing better teaching methods.

> The quality of teachers really matters. In Canada, teaching generally requires a university degree in education or a university degree with additional education in teaching. Salaries are decent in most provinces. There are still lots of bad teachers out there. I can't imagine what it's like in places where standards and pay are lower. Perhaps we should put as much effort into developing better teachers as we do into developing better teaching methods.

This is a double edged sword, though. You have extremely knowledgeable people who can't teach because they have an actual degree in their subject matter but not in education. Also stuff like PE teachers teaching physics because they have the required education degree already and they can't find any physicists with them.

    > In Canada, teaching generally requires a university degree in education or a university degree with additional education in teaching.

This is true in all highly developed countries at this point. Many also require an advanced degree within X years of starting.

With education, there's always someone trying to build a better mouse trap. When it comes down to it though, the basics still apply. In my opinion the single largest factor in education today (In this country) is the student's home environment. If the student isn't being set up for success at home, any attempts to re-vamp, redo, or otherwise modify the educational system that student learns from is doomed. If the student's family isn't reinforcing the importance of school, the authority and respect teachers should be given, and helping in meaningful ways, they are not setting up their child for success.

I think a bad home environment will limit a students performance more than bad classroom instruction.

Bad decisions at the state level can hurt the academic performance for thousands and thousands of students.

Both are very bad problems that should be addressed.

I absolutely agree. There are so many prongs to a complete education; mandates, curriculum changes, social and political injections, funding issues (particularly taxpayers needing to see a return on their educational investment), and so many more. One bad systemic decision can set off downward spirals in one, some, or all of these.

Derek Muller from the Veritasium channel gave a great (and funny) talk[1] about how AI will not revolutionize education and I'll quote my favorite part: "The world is full of heavy objects; yet not everyone is ripped". Meaning that what fails with AI in education is also what fails in education without AI: lack of motivation that a good coach could provide. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70

The mistake of the modern man is that he is more wise and clever than his ancestors, and that because of this he is able to re-invent all institutions from first principles. In the process, he destroys many load-bearing ideas and institutions and ends up with a more fragile, less successful, and generally more damaging replacement.

I am a bit surprised that not in the subject article nor anywhere else in this thread, as of my writing this, does there seem to be any mention of John Taylor Gatto or any of his books.

He is a bit of a polarizing figure because he was a teacher of 26 years in NYC and was awarded the NY teacher of the year award two months before he published his famous resignation letter “I Quit, I Think”[1]

For anyone who is at all interested in education or the system will be aware that there is an scene crisis in the teaching profession and teachers are quitting left and right, to a degree that it is a serious civilization ending risk. I’m not even going to start talking about all of it because there is no way to do it justice, but suffice it to say, when the system of teaching the next generation collapses, your civilization/society/country will simply just stop functioning.

Maybe some of it can be eventually overcome where AI teaches your children instead of some government apparatchik type, but that’s a whole different set of problems caused by a solution.

“… we need to realize that the institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate"; that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It's just impossible for education and schooling to be the same thing." - John Taylor Gatto

[1] https://saintkosmas.org/gatto-i-quit-i-think

John Gatto's books and talks are all very insightful. His old website had the full text of The Underground History of American Education for free.

Archive.org crawled the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/johntaylorgatto.... (check the versions from maybe 10 years ago...)

IIRC he had a stroke, and finally passed away. Now https://JohnTaylorGatto.com redirects to his youtube channel.

> ed-tech games have a fairly low density of actual useful learning. I can attest to this: eager to give my son a head start on the phonetic skills involved in reading, I tried a few different iPad games with him. He mostly messed around randomly until he got the reward, largely ignoring the educational content to fixate on the cute cartoon characters.

I feel like defaulting to an ipad game is the wrong move here.

We solved this in the 90's! https://archive.org/search?query=emulator%3A%28*%29+jumpstar...

I'm skeptical about efforts to discuss changing schools (not even "revolutionizing" them) without even mentioning Ivan Illich or Paulo Freire.

Here some links for the lazy ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed

I do think that there should be a mix of learning opportunity as some students do better with different types of instruction.

Some can read the textbook and just get it. Some need to talk about the subject.

Some need to ask a lot of questions.

There are so many factors that are at play. Structure is good it gives clear expectations. Students typically strive to meet clear objectives. If there is no clear objective they often struggle to achieve much.

A child’s home life plays largely into their ability to learn. Sleep and nutrition. Stress levels.

You can see it in a student if a family member is ill or if they have some sort of stress or struggles at home. They don’t perform at the level they would otherwise.

For some students grasping basic mathematics for is difficult. They can memorize the steps of solving certain problems but there is a disconnect between what they are doing and how it can be applied to other problems. These students can be sometimes helped with kinaesthetic learning. Suddenly when you are manipulating real things it makes sense.

I would say too much focus is put on teachers in a way as parents have nearly the same amount of input into a child’s learning process.

Do they respect and listen to the teacher. Are they showing up to school ready to learn and listen.

Teachers are not parents. They do sometimes fill that role or try to fill the void left by parents but this is not something teachers can realistically do for all of their students and stay mentally well.

There are definitely differences between countries and differences over time as well. The painful thing for some countries is that decades of highly polarized ideological debate on this combined with austerity has had measurably negative impact vs. countries that made different choices over time.

There's a growing cost of living and poverty crisis in some countries that probably is strongly correlated with education levels. That's also the urgent issue to address.

And there are issues with students not finishing school. Or students entering higher education without basic skills for math and literacy after actually completing high school. I know some Dutch universities have had to skill up students on basic high school math, for example. No longer being taught adequately, apparently.

And then separately you might wonder which skills are actually still relevant for people to have. People not speaking more than one language used to be a big problem in some countries. These days that's still not great but something you can compensate with using AI translations. Being able to calculate numbers is nice. But it's not the end of the world if people use a calculator for some things. But it is an issue if that's not a thing they can do.

Education was never about enlightenment and more about making sure workers were ready for a productive live factories and offices and making sure companies had access to people with a good base level education. Before the industrial revolution, most people would not spend a lot of time, or any amount of time, in schools.

My own preference would be to build educational experiences on three pillars:

1. experiences. Intuition comes from experiences, and IMO an under-appreciated amount of 'education' is building strong intuitions. Experiences can include project work (including struggling!), travel & reading (what it's like to be someone else), sports and music (what it's like to build skills over time and work as a team).

2. practice. So much of what we can do - from language to mathematics - is a composition of rote behaviors, responses, and habits. It's impossible to become skilled without practice.

3. building habits of mind. This includes scientific thinking, applying mental models (I like this list here: https://fs.blog/mental-models/), pro-social behavior (listening, conversing). Much of science & math is having an available set of mental models, understanding how/where to apply them, and recognizing when a new one is needed.

My preference would be for traditional subjects to be taught with these firmly in mind: when thinking about biology, for example, what are the rote skills that must be learned? What intuitions should students achieve, and what experiences will enable them? What habits of mind produce an orientation, attitude, or set of thought processes conducive to practicing the science and art of biology?

I think this doesn't contradict the author.

I've long held the belief that well-meaning adults who complain about "school these days" are mostly just talking about their own educational experience - either to complain about how they felt about it as a child (20+ years ago) or to elevate their nostalgia over whatever they imagine happens in classrooms now.

Educational professionals appear terminally prone to fads and magical thinking, but it's the people outside the school - parents and other adults - who seem to have the clearest conviction about things they know little about. Appeasing ignorant people makes bad public policy.

If you spend any amount of time listening to people complain about what is or isn't taught, you'll quickly discover that most things they hate aren't taught and the things they wish were taught are, at least in some form. Much of the rest is based on either outdated or misunderstood knowledge/beliefs.

Yes of course I don't actually hate what school is now. Not directly. How could I, I'm not even allowed to observe it! But I definitely hated what I had to do and it did not work for me. And that is useful information when I'm helping my kids.

Schools are nominally about learning but actually about a whole of other stuff -- it's a non-goal to get better or revolutionize it, so that's the main blocker for actually getting better at teaching students.

Parents want their kids to get into college, admins want to keep the parents at bay, teachers are trying to get by, unions want teacher protections, etc. There's no QBR where people look at the stats and iterate.

Ya know, one way we could "revolutionize schooling" that would make sense for our modern world is to set up schools that make sense when both parents work.

Like have school open from 7 - 6 with the same amount of teaching but lots more recess so that parents can drop their kids off in the morning and pick them up after work. Also, have schools available in the summer so parents can drop the kids off while they go off to work.

All the schools in my area have before and after school programs for parents that both work or single parents or any other reason you want your kids to be at school longer. I recall my school as a kid had it as well. There isn't traditional class work but it serves as additional recess before and after school as well as lets age groups mix. There is a lot of social learning that happens in that setting that is good for the kids.

I agree with all of that. The problem in our area - I realize every local (US) school system is different, which itself seems to me to be a problem - is that the after school program is enormously expensive. Our kid is skipping (public) TK to stay another year in his private (all day) pre-school because TK + after-school is only, like, $50 / month cheaper. Not sure why three hours of after-school costs the same as 7.5 hours of Montessori, but it does.

That's what we do here. Around my high school there are dozens of 'after school' classes where parents send their children to stay until 7~9pm.

Now the birthrate is literally the lowest around the world, at 0.7[0]. The other comment is spot on:

> 7-6? Why even have kids

Humans should create societies that are friendly to parents who take care of their children. Not societies that encourage parents to delegate their children to someone else, being it nannies, schools or governments. Otherwise people will eventually ask this question: Why even have kids?

[0]: to put a scale for how low 0.7 is: you might have heard that Japan has a low birthrate. And they are at 1.15.

7-6? Why even have kids

The kids don't have to be there the whole time. Just the school is open. So you can have school open at 7 for dropoff and the kids can play in the yard but school actually starts at 8:30 or 9:00. Same at the end, classes might end at 3:00 or 4:00 but the school is open with supervision until 6:00 and the kids can play in the yard until the parents come get them.

You expect teachers to work 12 hour days on top of being paid garbage?

You don't need the same teacher all day. You can have someone who watches the kids in the yard in the morning before classes start and a different person who watches after classes, and neither of those people necessarily need to be full class teaching teachers.

I don't pretend to know the solution to improving schools, but I'm pretty sure the answer is not EdTech or "more/better technology". The disastrous drop in academic abilities during COVID made it clear that classroom education is indeed necessary for children, and that EdTech's promises "software will teach the kids" were hollow.

Just as you should train for your body type and genetics, there's should be an assessment with incremental pivoting as to what and how you learn best that emphasizes your idiosyncrasies. Bias against boys should also be noted. They get reprimanded a LOT more and teachers are a LOT more forgiving to girls. Men falling out of the system is not by chance.

Where is this?

In Japan, at least in primary school, boys can get away with anything, as "boys will be boys." Girls must take care of others (first) and themselves (second). If girls misbehave, write sloppily, forget things, and so on, it is much more addressed than if a a boy does the same.

I think we should start by making exams that mirror work day performance: Presenting ideas, summarizing, reviewing a proposal and commenting etc. This is of course more expensive, but keeping exams inexpensive is one of the major problems in the age of AI.

Just to note: I was taught 3 different writing systems and my ability to write on a whiteboard is rubbish

I was wondering about all this a lot.

I was teaching a lot of stuff to students: physics, math, statistics (during my university times) now I teach programming and Machine Learning.

I am torn between instructional based approach, which has this advantage that gives people a set of minimal skills to start doing stuff by themselves and the project-based approach, which is probably more interesting, but is very hard to squeeze in a relatively short classes time and also might left gaps, even in the base areas, as there is no time to cover everything end-to-end (think of teaching people about for loop, as it helps working with lists, but do not mention a while loop).

So, there should be some ideal holy grail in between both ways of teaching: show them everything versus let them explore and invent everything by themselves.

The crux is that instructional-based approach works great if it is well tuned to the student's needs. The problem is that every student has different needs and capabilities, so it is hard to do something that will work for everyone. So something is too difficult for some people, while being too easy for others.

That's why we have Bloom's 2 sigma problem - 1:1 learning works orders of magnitude better than in-class learning.

Now, LLM AI enters the scene, as the article is mentioning - individualized instruction could be finally achievable and I am much less skeptical about that than the author, as I tested that on myself, the good thing is I can ask and ask for more and more details if I am not able to grok something and my "teacher" is always patient, has as much time as I need.

It does not mean that teachers are not needed, just the opposite, because the key problem is to know what to learn, LLM will just do what you ask for, nothing more, so one need to know what to ask about. But once someone is on the specific topic and problem, you can really go quite far with LLM as a tutor.

I would rather my kid was in a group of 10 students than 30. I remember very little time actually left for a teacher to help an individual child with all the kids to manage. Most people are scared to watch three kids at a time.

I'll take 1-on-1 mentoring over better computers, books, clubs, sports, or anything else the budget is spent on.

Please hire more teachers.

You should be skeptical of all revolutions. Not saying they shouldn't happen but you do need to keep a close watch.

Teachers are workers, underpaid teachers are mediocre workers and the result is mediocre teaching skills.

Now, being six hours straight on a torture chamber seating on a medieval torture device are not the best conditions for learning.

I remember in the nineties I went to Japan for a course and they had executive chairs for every student, a nice desk, two whiteboards for projecting slides, breaks every hour, bombarded with visuals it was the best learning experience ever, you never got bored.

And learning Japanese role playing different characters, that's how you learn a language for daily use. A student played as a cab driver, turned the seat around, and another in the back seat, asking to go to the airport, the academy, a restaurant, counting money in Japanese, paying, being thankful for everything. Unforgettable learning experience.

I think this is the part that often gets underestimated: school reform has to work with average teachers, average constraints, and students who may not be motivated in the first place. A model that only works when the teacher is unusually gifted is probably more of an inspiring example than a scalable system.

I think the author hit the right notes here; we do know how best optimize learning for high marks at a classroom-level, we do struggle with improving outcomes for students who need extra help, and we do bore students to tears when they outpace their peers. Over their lifetime of schooling, students regularly a standard deviation above or below subject-matter-expectations do breed resentment for the parts of the institution that inconvenience them, and we would probably do well to fix that if we want to avoid ending up recreating "Idiocracy" from first principles. I wish more folks were more reflective on their own opinions like this.

It's amazing to me how some of these techniques are part of certain cultures already.

Case in point:

In the book Angry White Pyjamas [0], the author is British and living in Japan.

He is going through the Tokyo Riot Police training which involves a lot of aikido training. He is also teaching English to high school students.

He points out that the techniques used for training aikido worked well with the students as well.

Specifically:

- show the technique

- have someone try out the technique

- talk about what they did well and what they didn't do well

- have everyone else practice

Highly recommend the book btw if you are interested at all in Japan, martial arts, living abroad etc.

0 - https://amzn.to/4v3rHdq

This goes back to something I’ve harped for years with friends and colleagues - the mistake of trying to revolutionize the education system is to treat it like an isolated case.

Schools are a function of families and the community. You can’t improve 1 without simultaneously improving all 3 at the same time. The key thing is family - because it’s actually the family that’s the bedrock and the first educator. Miss educating the family and the whole endeavors is lost.

After school, methodology, all these things, when you need to improve education you need to build a movement around doing so.

> Having never taught in a classroom or worked for even a single day in education, it’s a question I’m totally unqualified to answer.

Yes, but, you attended a school, no? You are more qualified to answer than you think.

> for the average student.

Who is the 'average student?' This is such a non-existent class I'm skeptical of it's invocation.

Not once is class size mentioned. Perhaps putting 30 randomly selected people in a room and then trying to move them lock step through a subject is complete folly?

Your schools are designed for administrative efficiency, not student outcomes, and "average people" simply do not exist.

The author cites 50-year-old education studies. It's exactly like citing 50-year-old papers about cancer research. They seriously need to update their views on what the state-of-the-art in pedagogy is.

Ahhhh but cancer treatment has gotten significantly better over the last 50 years.

Cancer research has a half-decent feedback mechanism that means fads eventually have to prove themselves or die out.

> they should be more rigorous about carefully defining the knowledge objectives of the class, thoroughly breaking down complex skills into components, and doing lots and lots and lots of practice

> As someone who makes use of AI quite a bit in my own learning, I can say that it’s still relatively weak at having a good model of an individual’s skill gaps and conceptual weaknesses

Why not spec out the curriculum and spec out the approach (regular quizzes, etc.), then use that to guide the AI? Make the skill gap an objective thing.

I've always wondered why we don't experiment a bit more around children teaching children. I appreciate it can be a bit of a can of worms but it would help the system be more self sustaining.

The only reason I'm interested in this approach is that education itself is a massive expense which is often deprioritised in budgeting due to the fact that children do not vote, so it relies on the voting of parents to coalesce around a party specifically seeking to invest, which is difficult and unreliable.

Very interesting... at face value it doesn't seem sustainable, extendable or consistent. Perhaps you need to elaborate more on what you mean about children teaching. That being said the "learn one, do one, teach one" model it great and I recall giving and receiving a lot of peer assistance when I was young.

children who are willing, teaching children of younger years certain skills they already know. Ofc they might need to learn some basics of how to teach in the first place. Its a bit meta but teaching as a first-class subject that is optional with hands on work during school would be really cool and be an incredibly strong indicator of people suitable for management/lead roles later up the track.

In my time at high school (UK equivalent) I don't remember receiving any peer assistance at all and its feels like we've missed a trick.

There's only one real answer.

Give more money to schools and teachers so that classroom sizes are smaller and the children can be separated by learning ability and the lessons be catered towards them.

That's it.

There are existing successful education models that we could and should borrow from. Instead we keep trying to reinvent things as if we and we alone must be the ones to develop it. I don't even think it's that much of a mystery, it's just that the potential costs cause our system to refuse to head down that path and as a result we get what we deserve, so to speak.

Nobody speaking up for rote learning but embedding core knowledge for recall has a role. Simply having recall that 1+1=2 and then inductance, not Bertrand Russel day #1.

Same with literacy. Depoliticised it needs phonics and whole-word. And a shit tonne better teacher pupil ratios and more pay for kinder and primary.

The Jesuits mantra is about "until 12" for a reason.

We've known of a very good way to fix primary schools since 1907. Nearly 120 years. We simply do not want to do it because the labour and materials are more than we want to spend.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

Good teachers have a thorough understanding of what they are teaching. My guess is that most teachers in UK schools don't. From my undergraduate degree, many years ago, the only people who went into teaching were bottom of the class. For example after a 3 year maths degree a guy who was enrolled in a teacher training course after graduation did not know what a linear function was (y = Ax + C simply blew his mind). It's hard to attract talent because at best it's a lifestyle job that is kind of awful while you're doing it where the pay is low and the expectations are low, but gives you 1/3 of the year off as compensation. Unless your primary concern is a job that fits around childcare, then teaching is not the job for a capable person (pragmatically). Also 80% of the concern in schools now is "safeguarding", which from what I can tell assumes that everyone is a constant threat to everyone.

Learning is not supposed to be fun, the way playing games is supposed to be fun. Sitting alone with books for hours at a time and thinking on problems has a certain joy to it, but that's hard won. Kidding children into thinking that it is, is a huge disservice to them.

Some people looking for ways to extract wealth through the school system. There are always cuts at the classroom level but more money than ever at the admin level.

Some people are actively trying to sabotage the school system because the uneducated are easy to manipulate.

Any effort to change schooling needs to take those things into account.

comment is competely devoid of any logic or facts. pure emotion.

> If you had asked me this question years ago, I probably would have agreed with you.

It is breathtaking to consider how many strong opinions of the young are like this. Strong opinions voiced every day around here. Strong opinions that change with time and experience and osmosis.

>I’m skeptical of dramatic proposals to make school considerably more effective or efficient for the average student.

Whther you're skeptical or not, lots of the things that are ideal for the average student, can be a disadvantage for the above average student.

This is basically why the classical education movement exists. The fact that you can have remarkably better results using thousand(s) year old teaching methods/ideas than using 'modern' educational approaches is actually rather surprising.

Why is it surprising?

How best to teach and effective teaching are problems solved long ago. It’s unaffordable for most.

What’s being discussed here is how to optimize mass education so that it’s least bad and is effective for a majority or least a substantial portion of children.

"It’s unaffordable for most."

Utter nonsense and the educational data says its nonsense. If what you say were true, the highest performers in STEM fields would be from the richest areas. In fact, the opposite is true, the majority of the highest performers come from middle of the road places. You are trying to make this about money. Its not about money. Its about the negative consequences of ideology and politics.

Scratching my head: The majority of high-performers would absolutely not come from the richest areas. The very rich are relatively very few in number.

Did you read TFA? It explicitly mentions Bloom’s 2 sigma problem. The best quality education, based on the data, is private tutoring with mastery learning. That is unaffordable for most. Nothing about the data indicates that “ideology and politics” are having a negative effect on education.

Looking at WHO is pushing for change tells you most of what you need to know. Teachers? No. Students? No. Parents? Usually not. Technologists with something to sell? Bingo.

This article reads like how to train a LLM

without a large corpus your pretrain is doomed to fail

Your post-train tricks hardly pays off if your base model doesn't scale.

The problem is we keep learning that learning doesn't scale and there is nothing we can do about.

first you need to define « schooling », because you can’t put « schools » in the same bucket. ´technologists’ that aspire to reinvent « schools » generally refer to higher grades (usually > college).

I've really yet to see a coherent discussion about what's even _wrong_ with schooling. It's possible that coherent discussions are happening and I'm just not aware of them. I see two different patterns:

  - A list of complaints about what people did not like about school. eg: "The teacher yelled at me too often and then I became discouraged in this subject."

  - Working backwards from bad outcomes. "Numbers are getting worse. It must be that we're not _empathizing_ with kids enough!"

Neither seem to offer a real, coherent theory. The first argument totally fails to address if school is doing the most good for the most kids, and it was just a poor fit for you. The second problem is more general -- it's really difficult to build meaningful theories about complex systems.

The topic seems politically fraught enough (and for good reason, I suppose) that it's hard to imagine landing firmly on the correct answer. No matter how many good ideas you have, there will be so much complexity in the system, so many schools and systems that don't fit your model, that it will be possible to point to failure for any reform.

Big tech in schools is just an attempt to get their users hooked young.

It seems to me he contradicts his own thesis here: "The boring truth is that expertise in most subjects is largely a matter of having an enormous library of knowledge and skill. For example, if you want to learn a language, you need to learn a lot of words. Any method that tries to skip over the fact that there are tens of thousands of words to learn is doomed to failure. All skills are like this, it’s simply that the “atoms” of learning are usually less obvious than in languages."

...but we don't learn our first language, or any other, by first learning a few thousand words and only then speaking. We start using the very first words we learn, in real life situations, and add words as we need them. It's the real-world applicability and project-based method that he pronounces skepticism of elsewhere in the same piece.

Every coach of every sports team ever, knows that you need drills, but you also need to play actual games, to keep kids motivated to do those drills.

What this article and the comments here miss, is that the current system is already working optimally for the people it benefits. That's why it hasn't improved and why it won't improve.

The ruling class doesn't want the general population to be well educated critical thinkers. They want them to have just enough education to perform exploitable labor and engage in unquestioning consumption. They want them easy to manipulate and control. They want their children away from home all day so more parents can work instead of staying home raising them.

It isn't some giant conspiracy. It's loosely coupled, powerful people, with aligned interests guiding decisions, influencing opinion, and swaying sentiment bit by bit over decades.

He's broadly right. And you should read some of the people he mentioned, like Greg Ashman.

But this part misses the point:

"As someone who makes use of AI quite a bit in my own learning, I can say that it’s still relatively weak at having a good model of an individual’s skill gaps and conceptual weaknesses."

It seems like he is expecting a chat-based LLM to maintain a model of the user's skill tree. But it wo:

- create a detailed skill tree for whatever subject

- have the user try to apply the skills

- store the user's mastery level for each node, in some structured format

This isn't something ChatGPT is going to do if you just starting chatting with it.

But you can design a system to do it, which is what the Math Academy folks have done.

Edtech tools don't have to have user-facing AI. They can use AI under the hood, or use no AI at run time at all.

It's really just education - as well as industry - is over-regulated so there's no competition, ergo no cheaper higher quality offerings at a higher quantity

There is no regulation around education, as long as you don't claim to provide any accreditation or degree.

- "Learning made easy" is an oxymoron. Learning is biologically required to be hard. (brain needs a forcing function to get out of its default-mode and pay attention to the novel stimuli)

- The hard part about education has little to do with learning and a whole lot to do with socioeconomic realties.

- Education and learning is a public good. Any for-profit initiative (ed-tech) will not be incentivized to improve learning outcomes. There's no money in it. Any successful company that looks like it's selling learning is not really selling learning. (access, prestige, a promise to earn more $$$, compliance)

I did not read the article. I just have thoughts. Got edtech nerd-sniped.

>Learning is biologically required to be hard.

I think we all know this to not be true. We've all had a super engaging teacher or task in which we learned quickly and efficiently without it feeling hard. I've learned far more through natural interest or through pursuing a goal than I have forcing myself to engage with a subject.

>Any for-profit initiative (ed-tech) will not be incentivized to improve learning outcomes. There's no money in it.

This also seems obviously false. Suppose some company did figure out a way to make learning twice as fast/efficient and proved it with data, there would be tons of money in it. Duolingo is just one example that there is plenty of money to be had even with dubious claims and a product that doesn't actually work that well. The issue seems to be that no company has figured out how to make arbitrary knowledge interesting enough to a wide enough variety of people.

If you take the extreme, people would pay huge amounts of money for The Matrix download to your brain type learning. The problem isn't no money in it, the problem is no solution thus far.

There's a big missing point in this argument: it says "better" or "worse", "it works" or "it doesn't work", but does not specify how this is tested.

If we test students with standardized tests of their knowledge of facts and simple routines, I'm 100% convinced that direct instruction works better. I'd like to see if it's better also on aspects like student welfare, ability to reason and solve complex problems, creativity and innovation.

It _is_ possible that direct instruction also works better in these metrics, I just think this should be made explicit.

"Revolutionizing" is nonsense when the stuff we currently have isn't even implemented correctly. My personal assessment (from my own education and having worked in teaching positions) is that we need realistically quadruple the number of teachers and they should be paid double to attract and keep actual talent. Nobody is spending that much money. Trying to revolutionize it without massive increases in spending is pretty much a cope. You can find lectures from 20-30 years ago saying things like that and yet nothing was achieved at all.

>General problem solving abilities are neither learned nor taught... students learn these methods better when they’re explicitly taught...

what.

You can teach anyone over the age of 12 the PAIR troubleshooting process. I have seen people with drug abuse related mental health problems cope with it. Kids are sponges. Soooo I guess I am agreeing with the back half of this section not the front half.

>In short, whenever we have high-quality evidence that rigorously compares two teaching methods, the research invariably favors strong, direct instruction plus practice.1 Or, in other words, the exact stereotype of schooling that so many of the people asking me about school reform despise.

Yeah it all goes back to Mastership learning, which modern schooling doesnt look anything like, because scaling to it would be madness.

>project-building or acting like a scientist, it will probably be worse...Students are unmotivated.

I feel like a lot of the systems being criticized here are designed to motivate children. And then all your N=1 people talking about their successes online, convincing people to approach things like this are related to having very motivated children.

>Having never taught in a classroom or worked for even a single day in education, it’s a question I’m totally unqualified to answer.

Guy has at least 5 blog posts and a whole book on something he admits hes unqualified in.

I think educational reform has often been motivated by several different reasons.

1. The desire for a "royal road" to understanding. This is a bad motivation, because while there are more or less effective ways to learn, there is no royal road. You will spend your entire life trying to squirm out of doing what learning requires.

2. A utilitarian view of education. This is a tragedy of our times. People insist that their learning be "useful". Calculus is useless, because chances are that most people who learn it will never employ it for practical work. But this totally degrades what education is. It turns human beings into mere machines for proximately practical work. There is no theoretical desire for understanding things to understand reality better. This is false education, because knowing and understanding the truth are central purposes of a true education.

3. An "agnostic" view of the purpose of education. Without a destination, there can be no discussion of strategy or tactics, no discussion of progress or what is good education. The classical liberal arts had an answer. Sadly, much of modern education does not, at least not a clear, coherent, or healthy one. It is often an incoherent assortment of disconnected and disorganized material with no organizing principle. This is disrespectful to the student. Also, where motivation is concerned, classical education places a great deal of emphasis on acquiring the virtues that should always be cultivated in parallel with learning.

4. Bad execution in practice. Not all teachers are great. When you press people on why they hate a particular subject, how often is it the case that the subject itself wasn't the problem, but how bad the teacher was, either as a pedagogue specifically or as a person?

5. A failure to distinguish between pedagogical problems and the influence of the home environment. Parents are the first and primary teachers of their children. Students enter schools as products of their moral and social education at home. When the home is deficient, students may lack the appropriate dispositions needed for formal education. Sometimes a good mentor can help counteract some of these deficiencies, but the bulk of the responsibility rests on parents. With the disintegration of traditional community life into which family life is embedded, things become even more difficult.

We also mustn't ignore that learning occurs within human relations. That is why a good pedagogue is so valuable. His goodness is first goodness as a person. Pedagogical skill becomes intelligible, human, and more effective when the pedagogue is like a benevolent parental figure who acts as a guide, neither dominating the student nor spoiling him. A parental figure also responds to the particular needs of the student, because there is a relationship there. The students doesn't just become an alienated number in the classroom.

i honestly don't care what other people do, there's no way my children will be sitting in a desk for 8 hours a day instead of learning how to live their life and survive

school was a massive waste of potential

Revolutionizing education is easy. Ask teachers what they need and then give it to them. Unfortunately that's boring, obvious, and expensive. So hardly anyone does it.

The obvious low hanging fruit is that most Americans just need less school and should skip straight into vocational training which can start as early as 15-16. These kids don't need to ever be even close to calculus or physics. There's an epidemic of overly educated people and it's a tremendous waste of resources and broken expectations.

Just follow the people who invented kindergarten :))

I think kids have a right to be exposed to these ideas. Stratifying society even further, only exposing select sections of the population to advanced ideas in philosophy or science, will not help build a solid democratic society.

The reason schooling is hard to change - here in the US - is because the teachers unions and politicians work together to reduce hours, reliance on standards, eliminate "work" (homework isn't good for them!), and increase spend and pay. Government is incredibly inefficient at most tasks - on average things the government does cost twice as much - but it's incredibly terrible at education. Spending has increased - performance decreased ad infinium.

Many, perhaps most, of the teachers are underpaid. If spending more money isn't helping, there are probably too many middle-managers sucking up the money. Remove some of the middle-managers and divert their money to the teachers.

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