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Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

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Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#111

Post by hintymad »

yonaguska wrote: post #48
hintymad wrote: post #38

> "just let the kids learn by themselves" This has been the central theme of progressive education movement in the US. IIRC, Jo Boaler has been advocating that kids could discover most of the maths by exploring and learning by themselves. I fundamentally disagree with this belief, though. It took thousands of years for our greatest minds to simplify our maths to its current incarnation. Discovering "everything" by my…

I disagree, the most productive moments in my math education were spent "discovering" patterns while trying to solve problems, having been given just enough tools to attempt the problem. Credit to Szeszlér Dávid goes to those formative experiences. The next lesson, after we spent time "discovering" and likely failing, we would be given the last tool we needed to solve the problem. That discovery process cemented the…

Some discovery, for sure. But not every pattern, right? For instance, not every axiom of Euclidean geometry, not how to solve cubic function, not the entirety of conic curves? Of course, these are just some examples and which ones to discover and which ones to teach are subject to discussion.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#112

Post by LudwigNagasena »

season2episode3 wrote: post #70
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are those “basic skills”?

I'd venture a guess that they're talking about the "three R's": reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic.

AFAIK NCLB is concerned with far more stuff than those three R’s.

And anyway one should wonder just how much tinkering with school system can push you forward, at some point you should realize that education is not only dependent on the school environment.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#113

Post by lupire »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #82
TaupeRanger wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck in a classroom of 30 kids of wildly varying abilities and interests doing "self paced exploration". Maybe 1/100 kids would actually choose to learn any traditional school subject. Structured learning is required for the other 99/100 to learn important and valuable parts of human knowledge that they wouldn't pursue otherwise.

Schools used to be designed exactly this way, with kids of varying ages/abilities all in the same room learning and teaching each other. It's actually quite successful and more aligned with how we are wired to learn (tribal/community style). The Prussian model we use currently was not designed to create more educated people, it was designed to most efficiently create factory workers. That's an important factor to kee…

All those 18th Century Prussian factories?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#114

Post by lupire »

zozbot234 wrote: post #62
theptip wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a bit of a strawman. I don’t know Jo Boaler but I have never encountered the idea that students could rediscover everything from scratch. It’s clearly a dumb idea. A much more common position is that self-paced exploration — but using the latest textbooks and also a variety of teaching styles — could interest students much more than “no child left behind” style common curricula which constrain both th…

"NCLB" curricula focus on the basics for a reason - we're failing to teach those basic skills. Maybe we need a system that's not so terrible for the "average" below-students (as opposed to those who expressly get skilled teaching attention as 'special-needs' cases).

We are failing to teach those basic skills not because of bad schools, but because of bad home environments (food, safety, etc)

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#115

Post by hintymad »

giantg2 wrote: post #44
nus07 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. Which countries are dominating STEM education? Israel, Russia, China , India and a few others which have strict schedules, competition and discipline. Looking at the failing US model I am starting to believe that finding your path and self motivation may work for 5% while leading the other 95% to slacking , cheap entertainment and failure.

Discipline is dead here (US). Very few people have discipline as adults, so the kids don't learn it either. Society doesn't value it, so it generally doest pay off. I used to show up early to work, took my responsibilities seriously, and not take shortcuts. Guess what? I get paid the same either way, so what's the point? We're "fat and happy", so something would have to change culturally.

I used to think so too, but I changed my view after seeing how high schools work here in the bay area. The schools here are super demanding, and students work crazy hours. It looks to me that the US schools are great for top students: demanding projects, strict disciplines, wide selection of extracurricular activities, abundant resources like AP courses and college programs, access to world-famous labs, professors and engineers, well-designed co-op programs with top companies, and of course, tiger parents who demand high achievements. On the other hand, we had public schools in Baltimore whose median GPA is below 0.5 out of 4. A stark contrast of two worlds.

That why it pains me to see that progressives thought that lowering standards would help students in need. The three years of Covid showed exactly the opposite.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#116

Post by hot_gril »

There are things I learned in school and didn't understand their importance for a while. That's fine. But it hurts to see kids learning some things they will never use, or missing more important things.

English/reading is way overemphasized, and overly focused on emotional fictional literature. Sorry, I don't give a damn how Juliette feels; maybe I can pretend to care for a year, but 9 years? It didn't matter later in life that I got Bs in English, despite it actually being a useful subject. Maybe this is where the US curriculum differs from other countries the most.

Economics should be part of the standard curriculum. Plenty of average people participate in an economy every day without understanding it, other than having street smarts.

Math class is seemingly based around the final destination of Calculus AB or BC, but calculus is overly specific if you think about it. Sure, teach the basics, but don't drill the kids for months on solving integrals with trig sub for one. There are so many other math subjects that get ignored.

Math proofs are basically nonexistent in high school. Everything is just thrown at you then becomes a game of memorizing algorithms and crunching numbers. I get why so many kids don't like it.

History is OK but usually lacks connection to current events.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#117

Post by zozbot234 »

lupire wrote: post #114
zozbot234 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"NCLB" curricula focus on the basics for a reason - we're failing to teach those basic skills. Maybe we need a system that's not so terrible for the "average" below-students (as opposed to those who expressly get skilled teaching attention as 'special-needs' cases).

We are failing to teach those basic skills not because of bad schools, but because of bad home environments (food, safety, etc)

Or maybe it's both? There's research showing that students can do a lot better when they're randomly assigned to a higher-quality school.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#118

Post by zozbot234 »

hot_gril wrote: post #116

There are things I learned in school and didn't understand their importance for a while. That's fine. But it hurts to see kids learning some things they will never use, or missing more important things. English/reading is way overemphasized, and overly focused on emotional fictional literature. Sorry, I don't give a damn how Juliette feels; maybe I can pretend to care for a year, but 9 years? It didn't matter later i…

> and overly focused on emotional fictional literature

Isn't that what people read for fun? If you have to teach reading and grammar, I'm sure that there are worse choices.

And you do need some serious background in Calculus for most college-level STEM fields, including probability/statistics/data science.

I do agree that the social sciences (including Econ, but not only!) are seriously missing in school education, and it's quite silly to teach so much history/literature/natural science/math even as we ignore them altogether.

Teaching math proofs is really, really hard. Even most college math majors don't really learn them all that well. Maybe if proof assistants develop to the point where it can be a fully "gamified" subject, it could work in K-12.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#119

Post by TaupeRanger »

SQueeeeeL wrote: post #93
TaupeRanger wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small class sizes don't just help, they are essential for this type of setup, which is why it can never work at scale and will not be relevant to 99% of kids in the country. There simply aren't enough teachers.

Their easily could be, we just can't imagine as a society putting this much effort into caring for the young. Especially those of the wrong skin color. The US is the wealthiest country in the world, we could easily change some of the governments wealth distribution to educate all students 8:1

Still no. You would need to triple the number of teachers and greatly increase the number of rooms across almost all public schools in America to get those kinds of numbers. There simply aren't enough people, or enough space to do so. The only viable solution is to find a better way of educating children in these larger groups.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#120

Post by hot_gril »

zozbot234 wrote: post #118
hot_gril wrote: post #116

There are things I learned in school and didn't understand their importance for a while. That's fine. But it hurts to see kids learning some things they will never use, or missing more important things. English/reading is way overemphasized, and overly focused on emotional fictional literature. Sorry, I don't give a damn how Juliette feels; maybe I can pretend to care for a year, but 9 years? It didn't matter later i…

> and overly focused on emotional fictional literature Isn't that what people read for fun? If you have to teach reading and grammar, I'm sure that there are worse choices. And you do need some serious background in Calculus for most college-level STEM fields, including probability/statistics/data science. I do agree that the social sciences (including Econ, but not only!) are seriously missing in school education, a…

> Isn't that what people read for fun? If you have to teach reading and grammar, I'm sure that there are worse choices.

My classmates and I always read books for fun, and none of them were the kinds of books in English class. They were more adventurous things like Narnia, Artemis Fowl, Harry Potter, and Ender's Game. Also seemed like the girls could tolerate the English class books a lot better, which felt unfair. Looking back, the only time I enjoyed the books was the one year I had a male English teacher picking them.

> And you do need some serious background in Calculus for most college-level STEM fields, including probability/statistics/data science.

Sure I remember using calculus in those college fields, but it didn't require what I'd call a serious background in it. Students could just beef up their calculus skills on-demand if needed. I especially never used all that training in solving complicated integrals by hand, which was seemingly half of Calculus BC.

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