alt Hacker NewsThere have been many wonderful ideas and concepts for education systems over the centuries. They have/had different, sometimes contradictory philosophies. Most fall short of their values and ambitions, regardless of what these are.
IMO, the pressures leading to degradation are all somehow linked to universalization:
(a) Resource constraints. Student/teacher ratios. The availability of good teachers, at scale. A great teacher is the ultimate lever. But great teachers in every class, with enough time and energy to invest in every student... very hard to achieve at national scale.
(b) Voluntary, self-motivated students who want to learn vs checked-out teenagers that just want to pass the exam with minimum effort... it's a massive difference. It's the difference between a world class gymnastics club and the PE class from an 80s teen movie. Even if half the class is highly motivated, it can't be like the gymnastics club when half the class is there involuntarily.
The visionary, optimistic concepts are usually focused on what students can achieve when motivated and willing. Universal, mandatory education rarely achieves this attitude.
(c) The bureaucracy required for scale. Decisions about teaching methods, standardized testing and whatnot... these can be performing terribly for years and decades before getting dropped. A department starts judging schools or teachers by standardized tests... and then a whole generation falls into a stale "teaching to the test" paradigm that disillusions both teacher and student.
"Why are we doing this" - because we have to.
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>IMO, the pressures leading to degradation are all somehow linked to universalization
Liberalism is fundamentally a universalist idea. I mean "liberal" in the original sense: the cultivation of free and indepdendent human beings capable of governing themselves. A democratic society can't survive for long without universal liberal education.
We need to distinguish between education and the education system. You make good points that the system as it is today doesn't scale as much as we might like. But that doesn't mean we should abandon the goal of universal education. Unfortunately, I think the solution requires something much broader and deeper than more schools and more teachers. It requires a culture that values learning and independent thinking, parents who bring up children who are curious and willing to learn, and institutions that uphold these values in society.
We made a lot of progress over the past few centuries, but now there's an increasing number of people who want to question and undermine the core values of liberalism and replace them with something either more elitist, more authoritarian, or both.
Mandatory education is still probably better than the alternative but it does seem to create a constant tension: the system has to serve students who want very different things from it
It is naive to think that gradeschool is all about education when it serves so many other social functions. Firstly, it is free daily child care, a concept that allows parents to be more productive workers. A school is the point where various government agencies have contact with children. Vacinations, nutrition and the general welfare of kids is daily inspected. If a kid is in trouble, a teacher is the most likely government employee to notice. But perhaps most importantly, school is a testing ground. Our society doesnt have the resources to turn everyone into doctors and astronauts. School is where we start sorting out who will be granted access to future education and who will not. It isnt about actually learning anything.
Having grown up in Germany I have firsthand experience how Humboldt's ideals fall short. I don't think I fully agree your explanation.
a) Teachers themselves went through this system, so if it's so great, it should produce plenty of great teachers
b) Now we are blaming the kids for the failure of the system?
c) Yes, absolutely, but is the bureaucracy really inevitable, or is it even contradictory to the original idea?
Anyhow, Humboldt's humanism was ideology from the start. It was a way to change as little as possible from christian values. Instead of God making humans all great now it is the great human mind and civilization.
By now, most of German academia is a bubble for humanistic fundamentalists, that have long lost their connection to reality.
> Universal, mandatory education rarely achieves this attitude.
As a former teacher I think that's very common, but a fatal error to assume that it's something that it's up to education to achieve this at all. It's up to student to decide what they want to achieve, what their motivation is, whether they are motivated at all etc. The point of education have always been to provide students tools.
Btw, what makes a great teacher? One of my most influential teachers was universally hated by the rest of the class.