I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
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I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
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Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
#2I was a horrible student as a child, and in my 20s I strongly held the belief that education was broken. Now that I'm a few decades older I wonder if my problem was not education but life. I did not fit in at most schools, and that had a negative effect on my desire and ability to learn. That's what led me to teach myself computers as a teenager...education and online socialization combined. Win/win.
I think the author is right that education isn't the problem, but they don't really discuss is the social element of schools. Bullying. Ostrification. I'm not really sure how schools are expected to fix that.
Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
#3I was a horrible student as a child, and in my 20s I strongly held the belief that education was broken. Now that I'm a few decades older I wonder if my problem was not education but life. I did not fit in at most schools, and that had a negative effect on my desire and ability to learn. That's what led me to teach myself computers as a teenager...education and online socialization combined. Win/win. I think the auth…
There’s something lopsided about education for boys. The system appears to favor girls heavily. There’s projections that college student populations will have shrinking male population. I think this is a systemic issue with school being built to favor a certain philosophy that isn’t well thought out for 50% of the population.
Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
#4> ed-tech games have a fairly low density of actual useful learning. I can attest to this: eager to give my son a head start on the phonetic skills involved in reading, I tried a few different iPad games with him. He mostly messed around randomly until he got the reward, largely ignoring the educational content to fixate on the cute cartoon characters.
I feel like defaulting to an ipad game is the wrong move here.
We solved this in the 90's! https://archive.org/search?query=emulator%3A%28*%29+jumpstar...
Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
#5My own preference would be to build educational experiences on three pillars:
1. experiences. Intuition comes from experiences, and IMO an under-appreciated amount of 'education' is building strong intuitions. Experiences can include project work (including struggling!), travel & reading (what it's like to be someone else), sports and music (what it's like to build skills over time and work as a team).
2. practice. So much of what we can do - from language to mathematics - is a composition of rote behaviors, responses, and habits. It's impossible to become skilled without practice.
3. building habits of mind. This includes scientific thinking, applying mental models (I like this list here: https://fs.blog/mental-models/), pro-social behavior (listening, conversing). Much of science & math is having an available set of mental models, understanding how/where to apply them, and recognizing when a new one is needed.
My preference would be for traditional subjects to be taught with these firmly in mind: when thinking about biology, for example, what are the rote skills that must be learned? What intuitions should students achieve, and what experiences will enable them? What habits of mind produce an orientation, attitude, or set of thought processes conducive to practicing the science and art of biology?
I think this doesn't contradict the author.
Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
#6I've long held the belief that well-meaning adults who complain about "school these days" are mostly just talking about their own educational experience - either to complain about how they felt about it as a child (20+ years ago) or to elevate their nostalgia over whatever they imagine happens in classrooms now.
Educational professionals appear terminally prone to fads and magical thinking, but it's the people outside the school - parents and other adults - who seem to have the clearest conviction about things they know little about. Appeasing ignorant people makes bad public policy.
Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
#7- "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.
Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
#8I was a horrible student as a child, and in my 20s I strongly held the belief that education was broken. Now that I'm a few decades older I wonder if my problem was not education but life. I did not fit in at most schools, and that had a negative effect on my desire and ability to learn. That's what led me to teach myself computers as a teenager...education and online socialization combined. Win/win. I think the auth…
Any time you try to randomly assort 30 children of the same calendar age into a room with a single (or even several) teacher, it's going to be bad for nearly everyone except those in the very middle of the curve. A very narrow portion of that middle too. It can't not be. And if the teacher tries to cater to the slow kids and the "gifted" kids even a little, then the middle-of-the-curve children will suffer for that too.
The problem isn't "education"... everyone not destined to be a feral caveman needs one. The problem is "public schools". The idea itself is wrong, and it can't be made to work. But our single-minded pursuit of it to the detriment of all other alternatives just compounds the trouble.
Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.
Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
#9You should be skeptical of all revolutions. Not saying they shouldn't happen but you do need to keep a close watch.
Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
#10IMO, the best questions around revolutionizing school should address whether children should be coerced into learning something.
It seems obvious to me that the answer should be yes. So the follow ups should be figuring out how to move a student from an unwilling participant to a willing participant.
I think about three strata of students. The stubbornly unwilling, the coaxable, and the eager. It is pretty easy to design education for the eager. And discussing how to optimize that is a completely different discipline than the discussion about how to coax. The discussion about moving the unwilling to the coaxable is another topic on its own.
Having a mixed class of unwilling, coaxable, and eager in a classroom with a mantra of "no child left behind" is a huge mistake in the same way it would be a mistake to have one teacher in a mixed classroom for Geometry, Alphabet, and Orchestra.