Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
cato-at-liberty.org
Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
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Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
#2It doesn't surprise me at all. The incentives are all wrong. Teachers are incentivized to push students to the next grade with as little fuss as possible. They aren't ever asked to help kids improve themselves... Only to make sure they learned the minimum required knowledge.
That teachers would ask that students be kept ignorant just to make their job easier does not surprise me a bit.
To be clear, not all teachers are asking this. Some teachers really care about the students. I had quite a few good teachers in school, and only a few bad ones. But my perception is that that balance has been changing. Lower pay, more work, and general bad conditions have been driving the good teachers to go elsewhere while the bad ones stay to collect a paycheck.
Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
#3I suppose it's a Cato blog post, but I was hoping for a more interesting discussion than just a random call for private education, with a market-will-solve it assertion. People learning at different paces and on their own is a fairly interesting problem highlighted here, but I think it's wishful thinking to claim that the perfect answer is already known.
It's not entirely clear to me that private schools would cater to individuals, or group by ability in the way that tutors do. There are other market forces at work, such as the preference of many students and their parents for students to be grouped with those of a similar age--- and the dislike of many parents for their students to be seen as "behind". There are also administrative/cost problems with individual attention that weigh in favor of uniformity. For example, if there are a few students who learn "too fast", the optimal business solution for an education provider might be to say, "fuck 'em, 5% of the students isn't where my money is coming from". Or, it might be to generally go by age but have a smallish exception pool; the age-groups-plus-'gifted'-class model that many public schools already use might cover enough of the skills variance, while being much cheaper to administer than a fully individualized model.
At the very least, I don't think it's entirely obvious what the results would be. The bits of evidence we do have don't seem super-encouraging. For-profit universities, for example, appear to have decided that a mass-production model is the best business strategy. And existing private K-12 schools don't seem to have adopted an ability-based model, instead using traditional age-based classes. Is there a reason that, if market incentives would indeed cause such an outcome, they wouldn't have already caused it? It's true that the private-education market is currently effectively restricted to wealthier families, but it's still quite large.
Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
#4Really interesting, shocking quote from the original article, but the Cato free-market spin is questionable and not terribly well suited to Hacker News, IMO. The original Wired piece is great, though.
Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
#5The article identifies a strong problem, but:
> "This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly."
Without any arguments to support it, the libertarian approach is served as the only solution.
Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
#6It's a very bad way of putting it - but I think there's a valid discussion needed around whether schools should enforce 'rounded' education - I think the question is essentially what should we do students who are at 10th grade maths and 5th grade social science?
Should we allow earlier education specialization? (ie move them up grades but accept they'll be lacking in some areas) Or keep them in 5th grade until they are sufficiently good in all areas - maybe allowing them skip classes they're already excelling in so they have more free time for self-study?
I imagine allowing 5th graders to attend 10th grade maths only say (or more general any student being in a mix of any level in any subject) becomes impractical to schedule.
UPDATE: and as other people pointed out that's ignoring all the potential social advantages of being roughly grouped by age
Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
#7I suppose it's a Cato blog post, but I was hoping for a more interesting discussion than just a random call for private education, with a market-will-solve it assertion. People learning at different paces and on their own is a fairly interesting problem highlighted here, but I think it's wishful thinking to claim that the perfect answer is already known. It's not entirely clear to me that private schools would cater…
I read somewhere that Khan is intending on starting a private school where all ages will share classrooms.
Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
#8Really interesting, shocking quote from the original article, but the Cato free-market spin is questionable and not terribly well suited to Hacker News, IMO. The original Wired piece is great, though.
I'm probably the biggest libertarian you'd meet (that doesn't live in his or her mom's basement) and I feel like HN is pretty friendly to my thinking.
Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
#9I suppose it's a Cato blog post, but I was hoping for a more interesting discussion than just a random call for private education, with a market-will-solve it assertion. People learning at different paces and on their own is a fairly interesting problem highlighted here, but I think it's wishful thinking to claim that the perfect answer is already known. It's not entirely clear to me that private schools would cater…
I read somewhere that Khan is intending on starting a private school where all ages will share classrooms.
Would be very interested if you could find a link (had brief unsuccessful look myself)
Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’
#10The article identifies a strong problem, but: > "This attitude is a natural outgrowth of our decision to operate education as a monopoly." Without any arguments to support it, the libertarian approach is served as the only solution.
I'm not always a big fan of Cato but a short blog post isn't really the place for a full dissertation on libertarian education perspectives.