Global '100-year gap' in education standards | Hacker News Reader

Global '100-year gap' in education standards

bbc.com

48 pointstokenadult44 comments

> But the real question is what can be done to close the gap? Can some of the evolutionary steps be skipped to make more rapid progress? Can there be entirely different models that would accelerate change?

When I travelled through Ghana a few years back, the teaching methods struck me as being a hundred years out of date. Oversized classes where most learning happens through droning repetition and where corporal punishment is still the norm - you can see the historical origins of the Prussian military who wanted to create obedient citizens.

The developing countries could in theory learn from our mistakes and train their educators to use better teaching methods while skipping most of the trial and error.

So in that sense I expect them to be able to catch up much quicker.

> The developing countries could in theory learn from our mistakes and train their educators to use better teaching methods while skipping most of the trial and error.

Are you suggesting that there aren't people in developing countries who know about these mistakes?!

It is not a trial-and-error evolution that's going on. There are systemic problems that prevent the implementation of education best practices. It is more a case of steering a huge ship [1] than ignorance about 'best practices.' Some of these systemic problems were never present in the developed world to learn from, in the first place.

Honestly, the trivially easiest part is 'learning from the developed world's mistakes'. The real problem is in fixing systemic issues.

It is funny to see commenters on online-forums swooping in with simplistic solutions. There are respectable and rigorous, evidence-driven efforts to address problems in education [2]. Guess what? It's a hard problem.

[1] J. Dreze, A. Sen, "Putting Growth in its Place," http://www.outlookindia.com/article/putting-growth-in-its-pl... [2] Annual State of Education Report: http://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publications/ASER%20Reports/A...

> Are you suggesting that there aren't people in developing countries who know about these mistakes?!

Given your use of interrobang I guess you are offended by my earlier post, but I think you are reading something between the lines that I did not write.

You're citing an article that rails against "growth-mediated development" which has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm talking about, other than "are there economic means available to re-educate our teachers", which is also not something I'm talking about. I'm talking about how teachers teach. Your second source comes closer to this point but is more focused on the goals than the means.

I'm probably biased, being an educator myself who spends a lot of time trying to come up with better ways of teaching my classes, but how you are being taught is just as important as how long. And a lot of that depends on the ideas teachers have about how education works. We know a lot more know about how the mind learns than we did a hundred years ago, and what makes a good educator. For example, the need to be unconditionally respectful [0].

I'm not "suggesting that there aren't people in developing countries who know about these mistakes", I'm sharing my own observation that the majority of teachers I met in Ghana follow a model of how to educate children that is a century out of date.

So I'll just cite my finishing sentence again, emphasizing the delimiting part that you seem to have missed the first time:

> So in that sense I expect them to be able to catch up much quicker.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvgbvtxYRX4

Obviously in terms of quality of education there is a huge gap between developing and developed counties. But I wonder can you measure this gap in terms of the number of years spent in education?

There are two measures identified in the article -- one is skills attained, the other is number of years spent in school. Averages of both are fairly standard measures of the national education systems. The skills attained one is probably the more important, since it's an outcome measure that more directly measures what education is supposed to avertive, the years in school one is an indicator of access and retention that can often help explain the skill measures.

No, not quality, quantity. Quality is a lot more tricky to measure, and while a lot can be said about it, making broad statements like 'x year gap' aren't super meaningful.

But quantity, sure. And that's kind of what the article gets at. Universal and free public school for example isn't all that old, and while it's fortunately present almost everywhere on the planet today, the average length of studying differs a lot.

Kids in low-income countries current go to school between the ages of about 5 to 11, and then quit. Whereas in OECD countries, kids are generally obligated by law to stay in school until age 18 or so (used to be 16-17 but it's shifting up a bit nowadays).

That's a 7 or so year gap of teenage education that's completely missing for the vast majority of kids in low-income countries.

The 100 year gap in the article concerns the notion that in the year 2100, kids in low-income countries will have bridged this gap. By then, even today's low-income country kids will get more than 10 years of education, which developed countries get today, bridging the gap.

Graph from the article explaining what they mean by the gap:

http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/media/images/82466000/png/_...

    Kids in low-income countries current go to school 
    between the ages of about 5 to 11, and then quit.
    Whereas in OECD countries, kids are generally obligated
    by law to stay in school until age 18 or so (used to be
    16-17 but it's shifting up a bit nowadays).

How recently do you mean by "nowadays"? At least in Israel I'm pretty sure school till 18 has been the "default" for 50+ years and I was under the impression this is not unusual for a western country (I've been living in Austria and Germany for almost a decade now & I don't believe I know anyone who spent less than 12 years in school).

The only countries I know about are Norway, Sweden and the UK and in non of those countries are you required by law to stay in school for the last 2 (UK) or 3 (Norway, Sweden) years.

In Illinois, the law says you only have to go to school until you're 16. Doesn't mean most people don't go to school for longer, 16 is just the earliest you can drop out by law.

In the UK for example in 1880 it was compulsory until age 10, and by 1996 by age 16. It's relatively recent that it's shifting to 18. [0]

In the largest EU countries like Germany, France, it's still 6-16, UK up to 17. Wiki may already be outdated and it may already be 18, but that goes to show that compulsory education to 18 is a pretty new phenomenon.

For example, the UK said 17 by 2013, and 18 by 2015, up from 16 less than a decade earlier.

As for France, as I mentioned it's 16, but it can be as little as 14 if you take up apprenticeship or work in your parents' company, there are exceptions that exist.

In Germany 18 is the default if you go and do your abitur, sure (probably everyone among your friends with whom you talk to about their studies has done it.) but if you get your Hauptschulabschluss you can be done at 16 or even 15. Again this is likely changing and may already have, but quite recently so.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education

As for Israel, as far as I know it's been age 5 to 15 (k10) since 1949, and this was amended as recently as 2009 for k12.

I stand corrected!

Three generations to move a population of 1.6 billion from 4 to 11 years of schooling?

That doesn't seem all that bad. Rapid development is great, but development generally over the course multiple generations.

I am wondering what is the cause and what is the effect here. Do people become more educated because they become wealthier or do they become wealthier as they become more educated?

I'd say it is both, a country is developped by its people and its people developped by the country. We created wealth which permitted better education which permitted better wealth and so on

I took a class on international economic development when in grad school. The class spent some time going through the various theories of economic development, and what has and hasn't worked in terms of aid programs. One of the surprises in the class I learned was that education isn't a big driver for economic development. That's not to say education isn't important, but that if you make a huge effort to education your population, the payoff isn't going to be that great, other factors need to be considered.

Interesting. This would seem to suggest that wealth drives education. Of course the problem is now how to make the world wealthier.

I think the take away was that you need to give citizens the freedom to meet each other's needs instead of forcing top down solutions, make it easy to start businesses, and don't protect entrenched interests (e.g., tax cuts and regulations that protect current industry). I may be remembering that through a lens of my own political leanings, but what I learned in that class helped shape those political leanings as well.

I seem to remember that stable institutions are the most important. Infrastructure, policing, that kind of thing.

Yes, I think you're right on those as well. I remember stable macroeconomic policies being a big one too. We went through some fairly convincing studies showing how damaging hyperinflation and unserviceable government debt can be to an economy.

My point was that, as long as the politics are fairly conventional, the quality of execution of policies are orders of magnitude more important than whether those policies lean left or right.

On a macro level over the long run I find that hard to swallow. Economic development is essentially "learning to do more with less". Economic growth IS learning.

Paleolithic humans had all the basic resources we have today, except they lacked our education.

Education seems to be just one cog in the overall scheme of a functioning, productive society. Without well managed public and private sectors in place to take advantage of an educated, skilled workforce and economic policies which truly benefit the developing country, the likely outcome will be large scale brain-drain.

I see what you mean. Without the rule of law, effective policing, healthcare, transportation networks, etc, investment in education meets resistance to use. The best Intel engineer can't make microchips if sent back to a Paleolithic beach. She's still missing civilization.

This always frustrates me with the debate around how to help developing economies. Widespread education isn't really needed until pretty late in an economy's development. Widespread education is only necessary in a post-industrialized economy. Developing nations will do fine with basic literacy/numeracy until their economies are sufficiently advanced as to require higher levels of education to advance.

How does a developing nation become post-industrialized with basic literacy/numeracy. Honest question.

Foreign investments + a small elite that can order people around. The education level in Britain during the industrial revolution was pretty low, and it follows that any higher would be unnecessary for a developing country.

It would be different if you wanted to skip the sweatshop-stage, but I don't think any country of any size really has.

Making use of higher education requires an economy in which they are useful, and to build such an economy requires enormous capital expenditures in infrastructure, manufacturing goods etc. What good are skills, if you have neither the tools of the trade nor the problems to apply them to?

I would add to that the majority of citizens in the US were illiterate up until the early 1900s. The country was pretty deep into the industrial revolution at that point.

\curious What are the big drivers?

AFAIK corruption is a fundamental problem with aid; and micro-finance has worked well.

What were the example countries looked at in that class? Land reform is plainly a crucial factor for general economic development. (Japan, south Korea, and Taiwan all had that after World War II.) But I have also seen discussions of education that point out that GENERAL provision of good primary education (those same three countries) far outperforms providing higher education only to members of the elite (many countries in Africa and Latin America). I'm not sure that I buy that general provision of sound primary education makes little difference. I have lived in east Asia, and I get the distinct impression that it makes a LOT of difference.

I think it was across the board, but there might have been some nuances regarding level of education (primary vs higher) to it as well...it was a while back. I also remember being skeptical how exactly education level is measured in each country.

The evidence is at best neutral for education boosters which is really weird. Education increases as the economy grows but it doesn't seem to have any effect on economic growth itself.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/10/did_nations_tha....

Did Nations that Boosted Education Grow Faster?

No. Each dot in the graph below represents a nation: Change in education on the x-axis and change in per capita GDP growth on the y-axis. Between the 60's and the 90's every country in this sample boosted its average years of education--it was a golden age of alleged human capital investment. Some nations boosted schooling more, some less. How did that turn out?

That guy bothers me.

What he doesn't account for is that, most likely, a place that would have to invest in education is not a developed nation in the first place. However, whatever you produce and especially export to the developed countries most likely comes from low-skilled labour to begin with, because that's how capitalism organised its centre/periphery-model of outsourcing labour costs. A boost in education does nothing to change the underlying power relations and economic networks that govern generation of wealth, since you still have to rely on exporting products that come from cheap labour, whether your workers can now read/write or not. This is especially true for an increasingly more globalised world, and since the numbers only take into account anything past 1960, I get the feeling he is omitting rather a lot that would have to be addressed.

The graph is odd. According to the label, the Y axis is change in economic growth (probably meaning change in change in GDP). Honestly, I don't find it that surprising that the dots are all over the place. Economic growth is a variable that depends on a lot of things, you can think of it as G = f(education) + N, where N is basically random noise with a variance that is likely quite a bit higher than differences in f(education). So then if you measure G in 1960 and again in 2000, you really aren't measuring anything about f(education), you're only measuring noise.

It would be much more interesting to see a comparison of educational standards and GDP growth (not change in GDP growth) over that time period. But even such a graph would be fraught with problems, mainly due to the effect of less developed countries having an easier time in "catching up" to developed countries.

Anyway, as it stands I would basically throw that article in the garbage bin. Usually, I would give the author the benefit of the doubt and take more time to think about why my interpretation may be wrong, but this is an economist (maybe?) writing on a website with "economics and liberty" in the title. That's a huge warning sign for crack-pottery with an agenda.

The graph is "odd" because it's looking for causality not correlation. If more developed countries are more educated all it proves is that education is a normal good and that people consume more of it as they get richer. That would prove nothing about whether education causes economic growth.

Your point about noisy measurements, such as it is, applies to all macroeconomic measurement. If you're willing to proclaim radical scepticism about all macroeconomics fine. Otherwise this is just an isolated demand for rigour.

The authour is on fact an economist and he references two different economics papers in the post, with links in support of his argument. And of course he has an agenda. Everyone has an agenda. The agenda of the agendaless is continuation of the status quo. Neutrality is an illusion.

now what were the giant advances in education attained during the last hundred years? Can anyone explain that?

The giant advances in the developed world include--but are not limited to--building economies where more people people had the luxury of having access to more years of education and the luxury of devoting time to it.

Thank you. You are right that now there is a higher percentage of people who finish high school and college. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_U...

However now you need a BA for almost every job; even if you don't need this level of skill for the job in question. One also hears lamentations with regards to grade inflation etc, so it is not clear how much of an improvement there was in 'real terms'.

Mass universal literacy. The first society with close with that was Puritan New England in the 1600s. Now the only parts of the world that don't have mass literacy are the Bottom Billion countries, shitholes like Afghanistan or most of Africa.

Also, abstract thought more generally. The Flynn Effect (secular increases in unnormed IQ scores) is basically what happens when everyone gets to Piaget's Formal Operations stage.

Thank you. i thought that a hundred years ago basic literacy was already a solved problem (at least in the US and Europe).

Now you mentioned the Flynn Effect; are there any studies that do check if the improvement in IQ scores is correlated with an improvement in performance of piagetian tasks?

However you are right that now there is a higher percentage of people who finish high school and college. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_U...

Hopefully as more developing nations gain access to the internet, our global education standards improve with the new technological access those countries get. The ability to provide education to parts of the world that might not have access to high quality teachers or schools via Skype or other programs will allow for rapid advancements worldwide in education.

Unfortunately things don't work that way.

I am from Brazil for example, here the education laws are extremely rigid: Homeschooling is a crime (literally, if you try to homeschool your kids you are sent to jail), and the curriculum is defined by law and extremely rigid.

No matter how much internet you stuff here, as long those laws are enforced, people are forced to have crap education.

Feynman article about that (written in the 50s by the way, things got worse since the article was written, not better): http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education

The notion that education reform can't ever happen in Brazil, or that no education is allowed outside of the classroom as long as it's in addition to (rather than replacing) the regular classroom, are both false. In fact, that reform is already at play and it's been a big topic in Brazilian media the past years. It's no longer banned, although you still need to put your kid in an accredited school, which means that homeschooling is legal, but forgoing 'regular' education is not. It may not practically change anything, but it shows things are already slowly shifting.

For example I've personally ran a modestly successful software business and never took a CS class in school. I'll never consider myself an actual software engineer but I've built, sold and shipped software products to large companies with self-taught skills, and could have become a full fledged software engineer if I delved deeper. And those skills cost me absolutely nothing, were attained completely through the internet and were in addition to a college degree in a completely different field.

I don't see how Brazilians don't have and can't have similar experiences.

Anyway I appreciate your frustrations and internet education is still really nascent, I agree it's not a suitable replacement today for classroom education. But let's be fair here, we're talking about an article here that expects the education gap to be bridged by the year 2100, so the notion that internet education can accelerate that (not to 2016, but say to 2050) is entirely feasible in my opinion.

And that'd be gigantic, two whole generations earlier? If you're wondering how significant a single generation can be, a generation is about 25 years, and every year 130 million kids are born. Two generations of kids having improved education is literally empowering over 6 billion people who have had access to improved education. One of the big hopes of the 21st century are the inventions of the billions of people who'll be empowered by that. Look how far we've gotten with a few hundred million educated people.

Anyway I'm hopeful :)

I think it is not that bad. Article measures standard as "years of study" which is irelevant. Western school system also has lot of problems (drug medication abuse, criminalizing children for normal behavior, teaching irelevant stuff), it is not that hard to provide better average quality of education.

Actually, no, the article refers both to years of study and skill measures, and notes that both are low in the developing world.

If it was just years of study that were low, you'd perhaps have a point; perhaps you were confused by not reading the article and only looking at the graphic.

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