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

I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

scotthyoung.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 559 posts

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#381

Post by maldusiecle »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #265

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education yet, which basically argues for a revolution in the other direction - get rid of almost all schooling because almost none of it passes a sane cost benefit analysis. It's very well researched, and the author has a long track record of being happy when he moves people even marginally towards his views. The praise here for Direct Instruction is…

> long track record of being happy when he moves people even marginally towards his views

Most cranks are.

Caplan is a radical libertarian bent on annihilating what few functioning social institutions we have left.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#382

Post by simiones »

graemep wrote: post #248
tombert wrote: post #70

I'm not the first person to state this, but it bears repeating: nearly everyone thinks that they know the right way to teach, and most people don't. I'm not exempting myself from this. I was an adjunct lecturer for two semesters. I did have some fun with it, but it was way harder than I thought it would be, and I think that university is probably considerably easier than elementary or high school. I had students that…

I think the problem with your argument is that you are placing teaching as something done to students at the centre of your view, rather than something done by students. It assume classroom learning. That rules out any really different approach. The fundamental problem is trying to revolutionise schooling rather than learning. > They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there. Then they should not be there…

The point of a fixed curriculum is that there is a minimal level of knowledge on various subjects that we should expect all of our fellow citizens to have. Maybe you find biology very boring, but that still doesn't mean you should be able to finish school without knowing that living organisms have cells that power them, that all animals have hearts, that plants do photosynthesis etc. It's alright to not like history, but you should still have some idea of what the Roman empire was or about the Second World War. It's ok to hate physics, but it's not ok to have no idea about Newton's laws of motion or about the notions of pressure, volume, and temperature and how they relate to each other in gasses.

Knowing Latin doesn't compensate for lacking knowledge about the fundamental details of the world we live in and share.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#383

Post by mapt »

simiones wrote: post #320
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 Eu…

We had, spread over the course of our 8th grade English class (Thanks Ms Wilson), about 500 greek and roman roots to memorize, and weekly quizzes. These were not graded curricula, they were for extra credit because it was the teacher's personal program. No grammar, no conjunctions or conjugations, no sentence construction, just the two biggest veins that PIE has contributed to English nouns and verbs. Rote memorization.

I found I already could guess about 2/3 of them from being a recreational reader, but it helped a good deal even so. With the combination of a few years of Spanish and random etymological crawls through Wikipedia, I'm firmly in the top few percentiles of English vocabulary competence.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#384

Post by ryanmcbride »

simiones wrote: post #320
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 Eu…

I don't think they're talking about learning greek or latin before english, it sounds like they're talking about putting more time into learning etymology which is incredibly useful.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#385

Post by bluGill »

somenameforme wrote: post #341
bluGill wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Why do you think? For an example of something in support of my argument, China (and a number of other East Asian countries) use a very hardcore memorization + training routine. And they are having literally the best educational outcomes in the world from it, but such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.

Are they having the best results from that? I've seen the claim of other countries using that and having book smart kids who can't think. (Whatever that means)

There is a common want to make the grass greener. However it isn't always and most people don't know.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#386

Post by conductr »

lan321 wrote: post #285
conductr wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shouldn’t force interest. But have high expectations across the board and just realize disinteresting topics will just take more effort and or be more time. It’s virtually impossible to make every subject interesting for every student. The interest, at least through high school, should come from disciplinary action. And not from the school, from parents. Bad grades should result in punishment. It’s should be the p…

As with everything, there's a balance. I've had teachers who can make interesting content boring and ones who can make boring content interesting, even if they have to make themselves interesting in the process. Just like you can only make your lecture so interesting, a parent can only punish their child so much until the child has nothing to lose anymore or their choice becomes boredom with effort VS boredom. Both s…

Sure, there's truth in that, but I've not seen a lot of evidence that teachers are the problem. Especially at a macro scale. For decades, they shoulder all the blame. We need to have a large level set / reality check on the parenting side of the equation. It's a cultural phenomenon that largely, in the US anyways, we don't care about education the way we say we do. We just want to buy it and check a box.

This time of year there's always a wave of videos that hit the internet that are basically outraged parents that their kids are not passing the year or graduating. The fact they are surprised by this at the end of the school year is usually not a lack of effort on the school's part and I feel this is a good indication of how aware/engaged many parents are.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#387

Post by shimman »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #329
dash2 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In a 1940 Massachusetts public school, my blue collar grandfather was required to take Latin, immersive French, and was graded on handwriting. Latin plus a foreign language like Mandarin, Hindi, or Spanish should be the table stakes minimum standard. English composition, creative writing, and reading classics should also be nonnegotiable essential requirements too.

I have a book that says it's intended as a science book focusing on biology for around elementary aged students, it's from the 1890s and the material is something I'd expect high schoolers to start learning not 4th graders!

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#388

Post by Silamoth »

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.

Did you read TFA? It explicitly mentions Bloom’s 2 sigma problem. The best quality education, based on the data, is private tutoring with mastery learning. That is unaffordable for most. Nothing about the data indicates that “ideology and politics” are having a negative effect on education.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#389

Post by simiones »

amluto wrote: post #380
simiones wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Classical) Latin nouns have one of 3 genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and each noun has 12 possible forms (6 cases * 2 numbers); pronouns follow similar rules; and the adjectives modifying a noun have to agree with it in case, gender, and number (so typically a single adjective has 36 possible forms). Verbs vary by voice (active/passive), mood (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, infinitive, participle, g…

> All modern Romance languages have universally merged or dropped various of these features. Wikipedia informs me that Romanian is a Romance language and has retained some of it. Also, the Slavic languages have largely retained most or all of what you’re describing, although they are not classified as Romance languages.

I am a Romanian native, so I know quite a bit about it :D . Romanian has kept the major features, but it still dropped a lot. For example, instead of 6 noun cases, Romanian only has 3, of which only 2 are commonly used (the third, vocative - "hey, you, bird!" - is quite rarely needed; and even when it is, it's usually replaced with the nominative by most speakers - we commonly say "pisica rea!" instead of "pisico rea!" for "bad cat!"). There are also fewer verb tenses in Romanian than Classical Latin, and some are formed with auxiliary verbs instead of being truly separate verb forms. Also, the neuter gender, while technically existing in Romanian nouns, is simply masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, there is no unique third form for adjectives or articles.

Slavic languages also have a case system (I think it's possible that this is part of why Romanian kept the Latin case system, as there was quite a bit of Slavic influence in Romanian), but they didn't "retain" it from Latin, as they are not Romance languages at all - they simply share this linguistic feature; Latin and Old Slavonic are by no means the only languages with a case system.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#390

Post by stevenwoo »

rustcleaner wrote: post #334
burnt-resistor wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a 1940 Massachusetts public school, my blue collar grandfather was required to take Latin, immersive French, and was graded on handwriting. Latin plus a foreign language like Mandarin, Hindi, or Spanish should be the table stakes minimum standard. English composition, creative writing, and reading classics should also be nonnegotiable essential requirements too.

[flagged]

I haven’t gotten to Bleak House, yet, but find I have to read Dickens with certain level of focus, and there are often so many characters that I had to reread to memorize them and picture them in my mind, for instance the party of friends we meet in The Pickwick Papers or the diverse set of people and locations in the first few chapters of A Tale of Two Cities - it’s the use of in media res maybe contributing to my off balance (and this was a book I already read once a long time ago).
Post reply on HN