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Comment by ChaitanyaSai | Hacker News Reader

We run a microschool and our single most important realization is this. We need to allow for meaning before mechanics. Schooling has a gravitational pull that inverts this because of our obsession with Measurement.

We learn, and we can learn relentlessly, when things matter. We are meaning makers. But when well-intentioned curriculum remove the process of making meaning and give you the final product, it just takes away reasons for learning. And no matter how we dress it up, this ends up staying shallow because it is only the surface level learning that is visible and measurable and held to account.

Meaning > Motivation > Mechanics > Measurement

This is the natural order we should try to preserve despite all the systemic pulls to measure as a poor proxy for asking "are we doing our job well"

Wrote about it here: https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...

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I'm a former middle school teacher and I think school needs to drop tests and grades entirely.

There is no safe amount of measurement and assessment in school. By design what you measure becomes what gets optimized.

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

I am from Brazil and highschool was hell because of college entrance exams. Everything we did was geared towards optimizing delivery time for exam knowledge/practice. We didn't even have PE after first year.

I was very lucky to be able to be engaged in that sort of environment, but at least 50% of my class was not.

It is unfortunate but it has a weird side-effect, the system really promotes ambitious people and endurance. Most of my "top-tier" uni class was middle class, the rich kids couldn't/wouldn't keep up. But that 50% of my high-school class really get the shaft in that system, but the ones that survived it were highly regarded in the job market by the degree alone.

Similarly in India. The college entrance exams (the biggest ones being JEE and NEET for engineers and doctors respectively) are the only thing you live and breathe from around the time you are 14 - 15 years old. Completely hollows you out.

OP here. IITian who went through that, absolutely loathed RG culture and how everything around exists to put blinders on you and focus on meaningless exams even after. Escaped to neuroscience right after. Our microschool exists because I would dearly love for that to be abolished. I think AI upending job markets and scoring processes might have an unintended good effect with regards to this.

Fellow IITian here OP. Would do anything to get those years back. Happy to know you found a better place to be :)

Yeah and this is how you end up with 6% of the country being concurseiros.

I guess studying to learn to pass exams is actually the correct objective, in Brazil, rather than gaining knowledge.

Didn't already Feynman criticize this?

It is unfortunate, but if it weren't like that it would be pure nepotism everywhere. Hopefully we can move to better systems as corruption reduces.

How you prevent meaning from becoming another thing adults manufacture for students

We already do, collectively! That's culture. And I think it is okay to demonstrate what we value because that's how we pass on interests. But this works when we also allow for the agency and autonomy to explore and pick. Culture exposes me to many different genres of art. I don't have to like all of them. The dangers are in trying to start with a defined, standardized curriculum and then manufacture meaning (fractions are a fantastic example) This is exactly where agency and autonomy matter. If school is all about carefully titrating monitoring learning on allowed paths, then we basically create bubbles where so much meaning is already disallowed. And yes, in these situations we will try to manufacture meaning. Adults manufacturing meaning is an interesting endeavour and I am not sure how and where it works. But it does, the military, cults, radical ideologies. Still processing what we learn from that!

this is all meaningless AI nonsense. maybe you can recommend reading dostoevsky before learning the alphabet for 4 year olds. or you can realize there's a balance and meaning first is not the right strategy either. good luck with your blog.

It's more of a dance than a balance because the way we learn is going from the whole to the parts and back. Meaning first does not mean asking/getting them to grasp something complex. It is about showing and creating a world where the thing in question matters and has value. Teaching alphabet first without being able to show why (not explain) is absolutely wrong. The way we bringing meaning is by reading to them, creating a place where reading clearly has evident value because we derive value, fun, joy. There's a reason the US has a literacy crisis despite billions spent, access to tech and decades of research into how to introduce the mechanics of learning to read (phonics). How we introduce phonics with meaning is not a question that's asked because schooling philsophies often implicitly mirror the latest neuroscience trend (behaviorism, spare the rod spoil the child, cognitivism, it's not meaning it is the cogntive skills)

Also, there's really little value in criticism without having anything constructive to offer. How would you arrive at a balance?

I'll ignore the first paragraph because it's clearly someone just staring at a wall trying to be insightful without regard for any actual conversation

For your last line I have two points

1. Your point about micro schooling is meaningless. Education is a scaling problem . Yeah of course if you could surround every kid with 3 smart kids and 1 teacher, education is easy!

2. I don't have to pretend to have a solution to arrive at a balance. I think it is a hard problem. You are the one who seems to have the solution, so propose it here (but you can't, you just want to sound insightful)

scaling is definitely a hard challenge and made harder because we want to standardize whatever the product is. Does anyone know? But it isn't just us. There's a hundred year history of alternative education showing essentially this. Self-directed learning (Sudbury, Summerhill) work (even if small) because of this.

I understand the impulse to paint me as "wanting to sound insightful" but I am too old for that, and upvotes here are definitely not meaningful enough for me to care about that :)

> There's a reason the US has a literacy crisis despite billions spent, access to tech and decades of research into how to introduce the mechanics of learning to read (phonics).

I thought that the reason the US had a literacy crisis is because Phonics was specifically removed from the schools and replaced by ineffective methods

Phonics wasn't introduced for the longest time, and that makes it worse. But systematic phonics too can be bad when the focus is on narrow skills. Why in the world should I care about these artificial sounds (phonemes) is the question the mind naturally asks. And that needs to be addressed without just jump from drill to drill dressed up in fun. Interstingly this early focus on mechanics in both literacy and math can lead to a "hidden curriculum" where the most meaningful lesson is that the world has things I simply do not understand and I need to follow this ritual. And that leads to learned helplessness and so on.

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