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I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

scotthyoung.com

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Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#311

Post by ChaitanyaSai »

zoobab wrote: post #240
ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #228

Schooling has been trying for ever to institutionalize and standardize learning without really understanding what learning is. In that absence, we've focused on learning proxies, which are tests. And tests resulted in a focus on mechanics. Meaning was and is an intangible so it got leached out. Everything school does starts at the wrong end of meaning > motiviation > mechanics > measurement. It is possible to fix sch…

You might be interested in the experience of hackerspaces, and the "learn by doing": https://github.com/zoobab/educode https://www.educode.be/doku.php/educode_2019/conferences/hac...

Thanks!

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#312

Post by ChaitanyaSai »

roysting wrote: post #237
ChaitanyaSai wrote: post #228

Schooling has been trying for ever to institutionalize and standardize learning without really understanding what learning is. In that absence, we've focused on learning proxies, which are tests. And tests resulted in a focus on mechanics. Meaning was and is an intangible so it got leached out. Everything school does starts at the wrong end of meaning > motiviation > mechanics > measurement. It is possible to fix sch…

Have you ever heard of John Taylor Gatto? If not, you may want to look into his books. They will help you realize that schooling and learning/education are mutually exclusive and even that schooling is counterproductive because its primary objectives are hostile to the objectives of education, real learning as a human. The worst people in the world created schooling and the education system for their own narrow, self…

Thanks, I have. And it resonated a whole lot! He was working within a very entrenched system. Systems have a way of achieving equilibria and then all the parts trying their best to maintain it (unions, lobbies etc) School is a practical necessity and there's a lot of good that's possible. It's easier to start outside of the system, but also consequently much harder to scale unless we build tools to help systems to stabilize.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#313

Post by rustcleaner »

One revolution that backfired massively: the departure from phonics reading to some sort of contextual whole-word one, where students were reprimanded for trying to sound the word out. By extension the loss of basic Greek & Latin has had a terrible impact; at least teach just enough to learn that most English words are compounds of simpler Greek/Latin words strung together (like German's adjectiveadjectiveadjectivenoun construction), which is very useful when either encountering an unfamiliar word and for constructing potentially new words.

Literacy rates are tanking as a result; Mississippi went from 49th to 1st in literacy by ditching the new-fangled whole word contextual style and going hard into phonics. Get them hooked on phonics again, then teach them Greek & Latin! Spanish/French/German/whatever should be the *second* foreign language they learn, gated behind Greek & Latin being their first. It was a huge disservice to my education that the 'dead' languages were not offered to me in [junior] high school. I can only conclude that the curriculum and test writers only want literate-enough workers who can't critically think but who can [barely] read and follow written instruction.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#314

Post by vjulian »

hunterpayne wrote: post #102
vjulian wrote: post #48

How best to teach and effective teaching are problems solved long ago. It’s unaffordable for most. What’s being discussed here is how to optimize mass education so that it’s least bad and is effective for a majority or least a substantial portion of children.

"It’s unaffordable for most." Utter nonsense and the educational data says its nonsense. If what you say were true, the highest performers in STEM fields would be from the richest areas. In fact, the opposite is true, the majority of the highest performers come from middle of the road places. You are trying to make this about money. Its not about money. Its about the negative consequences of ideology and politics.

Scratching my head: The majority of high-performers would absolutely not come from the richest areas. The very rich are relatively very few in number.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#315

Post by jordanpg »

> If you had asked me this question years ago, I probably would have agreed with you.

It is breathtaking to consider how many strong opinions of the young are like this. Strong opinions voiced every day around here. Strong opinions that change with time and experience and osmosis.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#316

Post by dash2 »

rustcleaner wrote: post #313

One revolution that backfired massively: the departure from phonics reading to some sort of contextual whole-word one, where students were reprimanded for trying to sound the word out. By extension the loss of basic Greek & Latin has had a terrible impact; at least teach just enough to learn that most English words are compounds of simpler Greek/Latin words strung together (like German's adjectiveadjectiveadjectiveno…

I think there's huge value to learning Latin, but that's because it was the core language of European civilization for millennia more than because it's a gateway to English.

Ancient Greek is a very difficult language. It takes a solid decade of work to learn, and the payoff is you get to read a few - admittedly brilliant - authors. I would not automatically prefer that to being able to talk to everyone in the Spanish-speaking world - or to learning la belle langue. Also, I don't think Greek was ever learnt by the majority of pupils.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#317

Post by brian8620 »

With education, there's always someone trying to build a better mouse trap. When it comes down to it though, the basics still apply. In my opinion the single largest factor in education today (In this country) is the student's home environment. If the student isn't being set up for success at home, any attempts to re-vamp, redo, or otherwise modify the educational system that student learns from is doomed. If the student's family isn't reinforcing the importance of school, the authority and respect teachers should be given, and helping in meaningful ways, they are not setting up their child for success.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#318

Post by lnenad »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #287
anon-3988 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a real issue dividing kids up along these lines. I've found that virtually all young kids love to explore and learn things, and if anything schooling can extinguish this innate desire when it becomes a source of stress. This is a very bold claim. I don't think most kids are curious about the multiplication tables

They may refuse to learn multiplication tables (a popular subject if I remember right, reciting them as far as we could, a competition) while memorizing baseball stats. Kids will learn anything that gives them social standing or self-worth in another way, whatever it takes to be a cool kid.

> "Kids will learn anything that gives them social standing or self-worth in another way, whatever it takes to be a cool kid."

"nerds" would disagree with you. I think the point that OP was trying to make is the three groups are dynamic based on the topic. So the groups are not the same for biology, maths and for literature.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#319

Post by bluGill »

somenameforme wrote: post #263
vintermann wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we've all been students, haven't we? And most of us probably have experience with ways of teaching us that worked, and ways that didn't. Of course we're all going to have an opinion. I don't have any grand theory of education, but I have some stories of what worked for me and what didn't. I learned English from a guy with a radical method: the "direct method" or "natural method". After the first lesson explaini…

I'd agree with this conclusion from another angle as well. It seems slightly odd to me that people think there must be a single "right" way to teach. What works for one student, one group of people, doesn't necessarily work well for another. And it also goes the other way as well. One form of pedagogy might work excellently for one teacher, yet he may do abysmally at another. What's "right" for him may be wrong for a…

Humans are not so different from one other that we need different ways. However there are a lot of ways that work and it is very hard to run a real study to figure out which is best. You cannot isolate all the variables (several of the different ways claim teacher quality is important - just one variable that is hard to isolate)

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#320

Post by simiones »

rustcleaner wrote: post #313

One revolution that backfired massively: the departure from phonics reading to some sort of contextual whole-word one, where students were reprimanded for trying to sound the word out. By extension the loss of basic Greek & Latin has had a terrible impact; at least teach just enough to learn that most English words are compounds of simpler Greek/Latin words strung together (like German's adjectiveadjectiveadjectiveno…

I fully agree on phonics, but teaching Greek and Latin before any modern language? That seems deeply weird as an idea. Especially since Greek (by which I assume you mean Ancient Greek) is a pretty isolated language, with relatively little relation to any modern language except modern Greek. Another huge issue with Ancient Greek and Classical Latin is that they have extremely complex grammars compared to any modern European language, which makes them very daunting to English speakers especially.

Note also that Greek words used in English are almost exclusively scholarly words (like "metaphor", "diagnosis", "theology"), they are not popular borrowings like many Latin words ("difficult", "pork", "to count").

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