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Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

economist.com

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Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

#141

Post by oppositelock »

jwr wrote: post #49

I am Polish, I live in Poland, and I found the article's praise for our education system strange. My opinion of it is much lower. I regularly worry about teaching my children to think for themselves — because I believe this is something the schooling system actively discourages. I also don't think that recent reforms did much to improve education, and I don't see why anyone could think they did. I would approach this…

Agreed. I went to some school in Poland before the reforms mentioned in the article, but have much family who went afterward. I don't think it's the school that teaches critical thought, it's society.

Poland has been through a lot of BS. There was constant government propaganda for generations and you never knew who you could trust, so people learned to use their brains to keep themselves safe. Until communism fell, it was a poor country with shortages of pretty much everything, so people had to learn to fix and tinker with things, because they couldn't go out to buy new ones. Kids played differently than they do in the US, with little in the way of toys and lots of imagination and in mixed age groups.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the differences are cultural, and maybe that hardship breeds more critical thought than plenty. I'm not advocating hardship by any means, but I think it's very important to teach kids to play creatively and hopefully, this will carry on through school. It's disingenuous to say that school reform and funding are responsible for critical thought.

Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

#142

Post by _delirium »

kevincrane wrote: post #7
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #2

Growing up, I declined to participate in the educational system (primarily to avoid harassment at school) and instead spent all of my time learning to program video games at home. So I would sleep through class, go home, and try to write Pong. My academic performance was nonexistent, but I came out of it with a career. I was wondering, was anyone else's childhood experience similar? Highschool felt at best a dungeon,…

I feel like I'm in the minority here (backed up by a similar discussion on reddit today), but I really enjoyed high school. I liked the classes, I felt like I knew what I was doing with life when I graduated and went on to college, and then there's the whole social thing that people seem hit/miss on. I made a ton of lifelong friends in high school, played on sports teams all 4 years, and evolved from a shy little kid…

I didn't hugely enjoy school socially, but I did find the classes, well, educational. I learned a lot of things on my own or from parents as well, but in high school I had basically a few hours a day set aside to studying stuff that I might not otherwise have studied, from math to U.S. history to art theory. I also got better at communicating an argument in short (2-5 page) essay form, which has been a useful skill later in life.

One additional aspect is that, while many classes were too easy/slow-paced for me, the fact that they weren't for everyone else made that a useful experience too. For one it was interesting to understand what people found easy or hard to get. For another I would often help other students with their homework, which was good practice in how to explain subjects understandably, basically in how to do tutoring.

Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

#143

Post by mathattack »

JackFr wrote: post #116
mathattack wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My 2 cents... Being able to question your education system is a sign that you're doing something right. I hated my (good public) high school. I could write pages and pages of things they did wrong. Then I went to college. Most of the people praised their high schools. I really felt that my school must have been at the bottom of the heap. As soon as the first set of grades started coming out, I realized how much bette…

Critical thinking is important, but only in so far as you know something. Its extraordinarily disappointing to be engaging someone in a discussion and while their logic and rhetoric are solid, he doesn't know that (1) Japan is an island; (2) the US and the Soviet Union were allies in WWII; [Note -- those were two different people in two different conversations.]

I once had to deal with someone working in the test prep industry that had two ivy league degrees and couldn't get the population of the US within 200 million. It was striking that this was someone who represented the pinnacle of our education system, training the next generation to get into the elite.

E.D. Hirsch [1] has written a lot about needing to know content in order to properly reason. Some of this goes by classical education, elsewhere it's cultural literacy [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._D._Hirsch,_Jr.

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_literacy

Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

#144

Post by notahacker »

davidvaughan wrote: post #61
dnautics wrote: post #26

Was I the only one who found no evidence in this article about 'teaching children to think'? There was some discussion about metrics (such as PISA) but that is not, to me, any sort of evidence about the ability to think.

No, you weren't the only one. The only reality-based test mentioned in this review was whether Okies could get a "basic" job in a factory, and an assertion that this would require critical thinking skills (with the implication that such skills would be of the sort taught at school). However, I think Ripley may give more in her book. An NYT review suggests she discusses how American school-leavers "lack the knowledge…

Anyone with any critical thinking skills should question the example of outsourcing manufacturing to Poland as an endorsement of Poles' critical thinking skills.

The alternate hypothesis - that the Polish education system is much more effective at producing drones who are efficient and motivated when performing menial tasks for low pay - has much to recommend it.

Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

#145

Post by saraid216 »

peteretep wrote: post #90
collyw wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a number of good friends who are teachers, including maths, and they talk about it a lot. While you may not think your system is good, it sounds like the UK system is encouraging mediocrity. For example, when I was at school 20 years ago, we had to memorise formulas for common thing ( speed = distance over time, and similar). Apparently the kids are given the formulas in exams now. There doesn't appear to be s…

I have also memorised the formulas for d/s/t and f/a/p but struggle to see how these translate in to academic excellence of any type, or even why giving them to someone is encouraging mediocrity. There is (imho) nothing of value in memorizing simple formulas, and everything in the value of knowing how and when to apply those formulas, or where to Google for them.

I have no idea what academic excellence even is.

Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

#146

Post by herge »

oppositelock wrote: post #141
jwr wrote: post #49

I am Polish, I live in Poland, and I found the article's praise for our education system strange. My opinion of it is much lower. I regularly worry about teaching my children to think for themselves — because I believe this is something the schooling system actively discourages. I also don't think that recent reforms did much to improve education, and I don't see why anyone could think they did. I would approach this…

Agreed. I went to some school in Poland before the reforms mentioned in the article, but have much family who went afterward. I don't think it's the school that teaches critical thought, it's society. Poland has been through a lot of BS. There was constant government propaganda for generations and you never knew who you could trust, so people learned to use their brains to keep themselves safe. Until communism fell,…

By that measure, Africa must be a hot-bed of critical thought!

Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

#147

Post by saraid216 »

kiba wrote: post #3
sillysaurus2 wrote: post #2

Growing up, I declined to participate in the educational system (primarily to avoid harassment at school) and instead spent all of my time learning to program video games at home. So I would sleep through class, go home, and try to write Pong. My academic performance was nonexistent, but I came out of it with a career. I was wondering, was anyone else's childhood experience similar? Highschool felt at best a dungeon,…

It seems that America has a higher rate of maverick learners than other countries. It may be due to availability bias that I would know more American mavericks more than Asian mavericks. However, in the manga and anime that I watch, I do not know of any of the maverick learner archetype. It seems to be a trope that the smartest student usually have the highest score.

It's also because America has a culture of encouraging mavericks. This is seen as more individualistic, ergo morally better. Every system set up in America is effectively doomed to perceived failure because you're not really considered doing well until you're circumventing or beating it in some way.

Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

#148

Post by saraid216 »

charlieflowers wrote: post #133
hrktb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely enjoyed school from primary sections to university, but now as a parent I feel more and more that the school is also there to act as a buffer between the parents and children and push society's values down the kid's throat, for better or worse. i.e. Sitting 8 hours a day in school is a way to make it normal to sit 8 hours a day in a cubicle. I don't know if I'd want my child to go through that and be able…

I feel that way too, so we're homeschooling our fifth grade daughter. BUT -- she hates it and fights us every step of the way, because she feels she would have more friends if she were in school like a "normal" kid. And she probably would. If you're not on the "normal" track, it is hard to make relationships in the American culture today. Kids don't seem to meet and play in the yard like they used to. So we're mullin…

In Seattle, there is this place: http://pscs.org/

You might be able to find something similar in your geographic area, hopefully?

Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

#149

Post by saraid216 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #95
pgeorgi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know lots of kids that knew reading and writing before they entered school. Second year level calculation, too. Of course the writing is quite crude, but motor control improves with age not with schooling. The main thing in common I could discern so far is that the parents encourage curiosity and use those skills themselves.

> I know lots of kids that knew reading and writing before they entered school. There are kids who don't know reading/writing before school? o_0. I thought it's what parents are for.

There's no institutional system that teaches parents to be competent. Unsurprisingly, many parents are not competent.

Re: Only a few countries are teaching children how to think

#150

Post by lists »

>>Yet international rankings now put the country’s students well ahead of America’s in science and maths (the strongest predictor of future earnings), even as the country spends far less per pupil.This sentence is exemplary of most, if not all, of the discussion about education reform. Another cue are the explicit goals of the Common Core standards, expressly designed to further economic competitiveness of America's youth.

But what about our children's ability to make informed decisions using qualified evidence?

This is different from so-called 'critical thinking', which is so vaguely defined whenever it comes up, or 'creativity', which lacks a rigorous method to appreciate its application.

These informed decisions I'm talking about not only affect our youth's ability to make decisions about their own lives (because no matter your education system, practical experience is other than doing well in school), but also their ability to make decisions about the state we live in collectively. There's little out there teaching people how to make informed decisions about areas they have no expertise in, and yet, must make a decision.

Politicians are voted in for dubious populism rather than the sensibility of their policy programme. Most responses to social issues continue to spiral around ideology and prejudice. America needs a lot more than just an effective STEM education regime.

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