Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

fredrikdeboer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 185 posts

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#71

Post by jamescostian »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #52

Parents, teachers, and students are so focused on "education" as a pedigree and job pipeline that if they don't see an immediate connection between a topic and a paycheck they're like "Who cares?! Why are you wasting my kid's time on that?" When the whole thing is an exercise in competitive pedigreeing, of course it's going to be gamed. If it were more about human development, we'd be focusing on the deltas instead,…

As a student, I agree with many of the words you said but for different reasons. I've had a middle school teacher who told us about her own sex life during class. I've had a high school teacher who droned on and on about her divorce (to the point that everyone learned so little, almost no one passed the AP exams she was supposed to prepare us for) and put down religions - again, during class. College isn't a whole lot better, and elementary probably had similar stories that I can't remember.

We (students) all hated those teachers who wasted our time with things that wouldn't help us get further in the job pipeline. I'd like a little more gamification, because I'm in college and still dealing with too many profs who teach less and less about what people need to do their jobs and more and more stuff no one asked for.

There doesn't have to be an immediate connection between what a teacher says and the subject they are supposed to teach. Many fantastic teachers have inspired me and made me who I am by giving little pieces of unrelated advice. But the advice of a teacher is really, well, just the advice of some teacher. They aren't gods. Plenty of them give really bad advice. I just care about students learning to learn and developing critical thinking. Students can read literature for opinions on things unrelated to school subjects, and ponder on their own. They can watch movies, listen to songs, google things, or even talk to other students. But I don't think teachers should go even further out of class discussions than they already do.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#72

Post by terrahutte »

My school has a large Chinese international student body. The school is marketed as being diverse, but really those students are from wealthy families and can easily afford the 40k+ tuition. In the end, the campus isn't diverse, it is segregated. But at least the uni has more money for research.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#74

Post by thundergolfer »

glangdale wrote: post #46

This is a good article. I wish I could force everyone who pontificates on schooling in Australia to read it. We have an enormous private school system (part govt-funded, which is gross) that can get rid of students as they please. Then they go on to verbally dump shit on the public system, where they get to dump their problem students. Nice. We also have a real fetish for selective schools, which are essentially sele…

What's the problem with selective schools? I think mostly everyone is aware that selective schools are successful because of selection bias.

I went to Melbourne High in Victoria (all boys academic selective), and think my peers and I benefitted from leaving our original (mostly public) schools to go there.

Do you think the education system overall suffers from the 'extracting' of these students out of their original schools?

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#76

Post by mmirate »

gnaritas wrote: post #58
jstewartmobile wrote: post #52

Parents, teachers, and students are so focused on "education" as a pedigree and job pipeline that if they don't see an immediate connection between a topic and a paycheck they're like "Who cares?! Why are you wasting my kid's time on that?" When the whole thing is an exercise in competitive pedigreeing, of course it's going to be gamed. If it were more about human development, we'd be focusing on the deltas instead,…

They're not wrong to worry about that, it's a rough world out there and getting a good job is vastly more important to most people than "human development". Parents don't send their kids to college to become better people, they do it to make sure they have a skill that can lead to a career so they can survive on their own. Only the rich have the luxury of being concerned about something other than a job.

> Parents don't send their kids to college to become better people, they do it to make sure they have a skill that can lead to a career so they can survive on their own.

That's correct, yes, but it's not the whole story.

(Some of) us students hold the same opinions, regardless of whether or not our parents do.

Indeed, I would gladly shed any of the "good person" parts of my personality, if doing so gave me better aptitude in the field that I'm studying.

(Sadly, genetic engineering is still a pipe dream, and won't work on already-living humans anyway.)

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#77

Post by mmirate »

glangdale wrote: post #46

This is a good article. I wish I could force everyone who pontificates on schooling in Australia to read it. We have an enormous private school system (part govt-funded, which is gross) that can get rid of students as they please. Then they go on to verbally dump shit on the public system, where they get to dump their problem students. Nice. We also have a real fetish for selective schools, which are essentially sele…

Having been through the U.S. public school system (plus an IB diploma; too little, too late) ... your description of the Australian system makes me very much regret that I was not born+raised in Australia, as I am probably dumber for it.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#78

Post by gnaritas »

banach wrote: post #65
gnaritas wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not wrong to worry about that, it's a rough world out there and getting a good job is vastly more important to most people than "human development". Parents don't send their kids to college to become better people, they do it to make sure they have a skill that can lead to a career so they can survive on their own. Only the rich have the luxury of being concerned about something other than a job.

On the contrary. The less you have, the more you stand to benefit from appreciating other things than possessions.

No one said anything about possessions, you're projecting. We're talking about survival here, not consumerism.

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#79

Post by gnaritas »

oDot wrote: post #64
gnaritas wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not wrong to worry about that, it's a rough world out there and getting a good job is vastly more important to most people than "human development". Parents don't send their kids to college to become better people, they do it to make sure they have a skill that can lead to a career so they can survive on their own. Only the rich have the luxury of being concerned about something other than a job.

They are wrong to worry about that. The world is dynamic, and human development, the way I interpret it, will help the students deal with the world they go out to. Better people will deal with what comes their way. Maybe today it's a job, but tomorrow it'll be something else. Students who were only thought how to build software, will have a hard time dealing with life when robots starts building software instead of t…

Again, all easy things to worry about when you're not trying to just survive as most people are. Most people are worried about far more practical things that being "better people".

Re: Selection bias is the most powerful force in education

#80

Post by oldandtired »

TimPC wrote: post #66
oldandtired wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, let me ask you a question - Are you a teacher in any Australian school? Secondly, you have just pontificated on schooling in Australia - so, my second question is, if an article came out with different conclusions (with which you disagreed) would you be amenable to being force to read it as you are in the class of people who pontificates on schooling in Australia. There are good private schools and there are g…

I don’t think it’s negative to private schools to say the statistics reflect selection bias rather than apples-to-apples comparisons. I generally take people saying ‘I wish I could force people to read X’ as ‘I’m frustrated I always have to deal with people who don’t understand important concept from X’ and not ‘I actually want to hold a gun to someone’s head until they finish reading this.’ I agree on good and bad p…

The negative bias was the apparent opposition to some government funding. Whether government funding is appropriate is a matter for discussion, but for another day.

When I see or hear people saying "I wish I could force people to do blah blah blah", it has always been an indicator to mean that they only regard their own opinion as having any worth. If on the other hand, they say something like "this is well worth reading for the following reasons, blah blah blah", then its an indicator to me that there is a viewpoint that can be looked even if you don't agree.

As I do on a daily basis, I may encourage people to look at specific things and I can argue with the best/worst of them. But if someone has no inclination or desire (for whatever reason) to look at specific subjects that is their choice. I'll state my piece and if they are not interested then that's where it ends.

Ranking of schools has been attempted before and as far as I can tell, it hasn't really amounted to any valid standard test or measure. When I was in senior secondary school (many decades ago now), our deputy principal was heavily involved in the development of a standardised testing regime for all schools (private and public) in the state. As students, we had the opportunity to pin him to the wall and find out how it was supposed to operate. The upshot was that the system could be gamed in both positive and negative ways and that its sole purpose was to provide a measure by which students in the state could be culled from the higher education market. The comparison he gave was to compare what was happening in the USA at that time and how to prevent the worst aspects of the USA education from ever occurring here. In some senses that has been successful, but only in some areas.

Post reply on HN