RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms • Hacker News Board

Re: RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms

#11

Post by bugsy » Tue, Oct 19, 2010, 7:07 AM UTC

For more detail on the background of factory education and the reason for it, and a bit more details on alternatives, check out John Taylor Gatto's works. He's a former NY state educator of the year who came to realize that school as we know it is bad for people.

Transcript of one interview:

http://www.ttfuture.org/files/2/pdf/gotto_interview.pdf

mp3 of another interview:

http://jari.podbean.com/mf/web/ja8dm2/LivingHero19--JohnGatt...

He also has a couple books in particular "Dumbing Us Down" and "Weapons of Mass Instruction".

Re: RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms

#12

Post by bugsy » Tue, Oct 19, 2010, 7:13 AM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #10

JeffL wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concrete suggestions: Don't treat schooling like a factory. Don't group students by age. Don't teach around the concept of there just being one answer. Don't segregate people into two tracks: academic and working. A lot of the things he's talking about are the same as what Maria Montessori advocated. If I have kids I plan on sending them to a Montessori school if I can afford it.

Those are more like concrete anti suggestions. They're things to not do, not things to do . They say what to get away from, which nearly anyone can agree on, but not on what to go towards , which few agree on, which is a big reason why they're not changing.

The best way to improve your chance of success in business is to avoid doing all the things that ensure failure, nearly all of which are well known. There is no specific plan that will give a high chance of success, but there are many specific plans for failure. Learning is the same way. But don't make the mistake of thinking that the above list of things not to do were arrived at by accident. They were not. They are intended to create failure.

Re: RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms

#13

Post by JeffL » Tue, Oct 19, 2010, 8:34 AM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #10

JeffL wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concrete suggestions: Don't treat schooling like a factory. Don't group students by age. Don't teach around the concept of there just being one answer. Don't segregate people into two tracks: academic and working. A lot of the things he's talking about are the same as what Maria Montessori advocated. If I have kids I plan on sending them to a Montessori school if I can afford it.

Those are more like concrete anti suggestions. They're things to not do, not things to do . They say what to get away from, which nearly anyone can agree on, but not on what to go towards , which few agree on, which is a big reason why they're not changing.

Do treat schooling as character development and a place to grow children into adults. Do this by having a flexible curriculum so kids can study what's interesting to them.

Do mix age groups so that older kids can teach younger kids and thus learn the material better themselves, and younger kids can look up to the more successful older kids. If age groups are mixed, then there's might be less room for thuggery.

Do teach that there are multiple answers by having more open-ended and creative assignments.

By the way, the elementary school I went to had a special one-month period one year called "mini-course" month or something like that, where everyone could choose one of the many offered mini courses and do just that every day. This was when I got to go to the small computer lab all day every day for a month and learn basic and a database program on Apple II's. Perhaps one of the best months of my life, and incredibly enriching. You would probably never see anything like this if scoring well on a standardized test is the most important measure of a school.

Re: RSA Animate – Changing Education Paradigms

#14

Post by araneae » Tue, Oct 19, 2010, 1:08 PM UTC

dpatru wrote: post #7

araneae wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. I really like his point about the schooling being a factory, with people going through based on date of manufacture. I absolutely think it would be awesome if you could go through your grades at your own pace, in different subjects. A software based approach to learning would be excellent for this. But of course this is completely antithetical to his latter point, which is that group based learning/problem-sol…

> You can't have groups if everyone is going at their own pace. Isn't this how adults learn? (And children too, when out of the classroom.) If you want to learn something new, say how to program in Haskell, what do you do? You probably don't try to find an institution to which you pay a lot of money and which offers you in return a seat in a room along with thirty others like you in which an instructor talks to you f…

Well, that's how I learned programming, and to this day I haven't managed to collaborate with anyone on anything.

My friends that did group projects in a class, by comparison, are quite good at it.