alt Hacker NewsI'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
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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
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.
> 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.
- "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.
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.
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.
>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.
Big tech in schools is just an attempt to get their users hooked young.
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
> 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.
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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 :))
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.
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.
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