I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling • Hacker News Board

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#511

Post by neutronicus » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 7:15 PM UTC

zchrykng wrote: post #505

neutronicus wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because native Mandarin speakers make up only 1% of American citizens. In the US you are very likely, at some point in your life, to encounter native Spanish speakers with poor English competency. Outside of higher education, you are very unlikely to encounter native Mandarin speakers with poor English competency.

... I'm not sure what part of "If you extend that logic to the world" you didn't understand.

The logic is inherently local.

The typical student does not emigrate or even travel that much, so you don't prepare them to encounter a human randomly selected from the population of the Earth, you prepare them to encounter a human randomly selected from the regions where they are likely to spend their lives.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#512

Post by RealityVoid » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 7:21 PM UTC

Edman274 wrote: post #452

bccdee wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not even mathematically possible to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers …yes, but it's totally possible to (by, say, 2036) train 100% of teachers to perform at a 90th percentile as compared to teachers from 2026. That's how improvement works, which is what people are describing here. > No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence What…

Okay, then by 2036 the curriculum and standards of teaching will have been updated too, the expectation of what teachers will be able to teach will have been updated too, the competence of students will have been updated, and the hidden expectation will still be that every teacher can do as well as the "gifted" teachers of 2036. You can predict that this is what will happen because this has been happening for the las…

> Okay, then by 2036 the curriculum and standards of teaching will have been updated too, the expectation of what teachers will be able to teach will have been updated too, the competence of students will have been updated, and the hidden expectation will still be that every teacher can do as well as the "gifted" teachers of 2036.

Yes? I don't understand what you're trying to argue here. Rising standards does shift expectations. But this all sounds good. So I really don't understand what you're trying to get at.

> if you believe that teacher performance is at all linked to student performance, then improving student test scores ought to draw from teachers getting better too, but that's not good enough

There are several confounding factors. It might be that teachers getting better led to better students, it might be that universal access to information led to better students. I think you're overreaching with the claim that if students get better, it means instructors got better. But, sure, let's imagine I agree. So? I am of the belief that there is a ton of room for improvement.

I think that your post stems from the belief of 2 things. That education is zero sum. And that education has a filtering function not a quality improvement function. Both of which, I deeply deeply disagree with.

I do agree in the abstract that the "human social ranking" will be just as stratified as today. But that does not preclude many many classes of improvements.

Again, sorry if I am reading too much into your position, but I feel as if you run on a set of assumption here that you expect I share with you and that to me, feel alien.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#513

Post by HDThoreaun » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 7:52 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #283

HDThoreaun wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the thing is if youre home schooling it's really easy to just never have your kid interact with someone they dont get along with. Thats the most important part of the socialization though. If you dont put effort into making your kids life a little uncomfortable Im not sure how theyll gain those skills.

As an adult, you can mostly choose to simply not interact with whomever you don't get along with, and this is exactly the right thing to do in that situation. Especially if the "not getting along" part involves severe abuse, as it often enough does among unsupervised kids. Why shouldn't kids get the same choice?

> you can mostly choose to simply not interact with whomever you don't get along with

Have you never had a job?

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#514

Post by bccdee » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 7:57 PM UTC

graemep wrote: post #450

bccdee wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a lot of people who believe this, and I think it just doesn't bear out. I am 4. I have many interests. I would love to read books about those interests, but in order to do this, I have to do phonics drills and practice sounding out words. But I am 4, and I do not have the cognitive skills to force myself to do unpleasant practice to acquire a skill which I will some day cherish. I must be made to learn. I am 1…

It does work in my experience. > I am 4. I have many interests. I would love to read books about those interests, but in order to do this, I have to do phonics drills and practice sounding out words. But I am 4, and I do not have the cognitive skills to force myself to do unpleasant practice to acquire a skill which I will some day cherish. I must be made to learn. My kids learned to read without being forced. They d…

I'm glad you've experienced success with these strategies, but unfortunately you can't generalize that.

> They did not do phonics, they learned to read whole words from flashcards.

Whole language learning is a perfect example of this: The fifth word on the Wikipedia page for whole language is "discredited." [1] It's been linked to systemic regressions in literacy among children. Clever kids with lots of support can succeed despite whole language methods, but in general, whole language is significantly worse than phonics. I'm glad it worked for your kids — hands-on attention from a parent is an excellent way to learn :) — but in the classroom, it is empirically much worse than the alternatives.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_language

> The problem is that making them do stuff is the default, not the exception.

It is great for kids to be intrinsically motivated & I think the course material should be as engaging as possible, but often the kids are disengaged regardless, and I'm skeptical that there's some special trick we can pull to make the majority of kids passionate about fourth grade math class. A lot of them just won't be that interested in long division, and I think it's better to make learning a smooth and efficient experience than to jangle enrichment opportunities in front of their faces like cat toys. Alternative approaches always irritated the hell out of me as a kid. "Aren't you inspired? Don't you feel creative?" No! Just tell me what's going to be on the test and let me do the work!

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#515

Post by aidenn0 » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 8:27 PM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #507

aidenn0 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was also one of those kids. Some of it was diagnosed ADHD (I was on Ritalin; I couldn't tell the difference, but my mom said it was huge; on almost every day I forgot to take it she would get a call from the school about my behavior), but much of it is something I still can't explain to this day. I was a voracious reader, but if the book was assigned for school, I wouldn't read it. Science was usually my best subje…

Oh man did I hate math up until algebra. It just seems like pointless memorization and rote work. Then with algebra suddenly I could see applications. "I can actually solve problems with this" and my grades went from Cs to As immediately. I still remember the test I took in 7th grade to qualify to take algebra in 8th grade. For reasons I don't understand I was in a panic for nearly the entire test. My hands were shak…

I'm there with you on seeing applications, but I never could bring myself to do math homework. Even today, I don't think I would even though I am 100% certain that doing practice problems is of huge benefit (every moment you're thinking about the mechanics of doing the math, you're not thinking about solving the problem that you're doing the math for).

I eventually hit a wall with both ordinary differential equations and vector calculus[1], which forced me to switch from Physics to CS.

1: And I thought vector calculus was the coolest thing ever; you can use Gauss's theorem to derive Archimedes's Principle from integrating the partial-pressures over an arbitrary shape, which is one of the most elegant things I've ever seen.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#516

Post by galaxyLogic » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 8:32 PM UTC

eszed wrote: post #153

galaxyLogic wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing about it is the students should be given an explanations about why each topic is important for them to learn to be able to learn more advanced topics. Maybe briefly show how that adavanced topic will be taught and let them realize they can not possible even start to understand advanced topic because they are missing the more elementary pieces. Similarly why they can't got further without doing their homework. H…

Yes, to all of this. The pedagogical term for the concept in your final paragraph is "scaffolding", and it's critical. Teachers have to know how to break their subject down into digestible pieces, and then find the proper order in which to build it up again. Advanced mode: be able to break it down and build it up again in different ways, for students with different backgrounds or learning styles. (This is why many te…

Not much. I worked for an E-Learning company some years back when it was the trendy thing. So I started thinking are the courses we provide really helping students to learn? But turns out the business-model was mostly to provide compliance courses so that companies could prove yes they did train their employees in compliance so they could not be sued. The courses were made kinda easy to begin with because what was important was that employees could pass them without wasting too much paid work-time.

I also gave some presentations in IT-related conferences. People in conferences often get tired. So once as I entered the lectern I turned on a piece of music I had on my thumb-drive. It was the loudest hardest Rock'n'Roll I had. The audtorium had good loud-speakers. I think it woke the audience up. But soon I saw them nodding again. :-)

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#517

Post by Wowfunhappy » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 9:09 PM UTC

g3f32r wrote: post #353

zipy124 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly quoted at the start of the article? "Problem-based learning tends to do worse than traditional schooling in medical education. An influential meta-analysis by Albanese and Mitchell, for instance, found that students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students. " Problem-based learning is exactly the "figure it out" meth…

> students required more time studying, had worse exam scores and ordered more unnecessary tests compared to traditionally taught students. While I didn't do any additional looking into it -- this is often my biggest gripe. Is the _goal_ to have better exam scores and require less time studying or is the goal to be a better problem-solver holistically? When faced with a novel problem that neither the problem-based le…

If you're doing a large-scale study, exam scores are basically the only way to get quantitative data.

And, exams aren't that bad! A well-designed exam can't be passed by merely recalling information, because it will give you novel problems that require reasoning with the material on a deeper level.

Also, explicit test prep—where you basically teach strategies for cheating the test—universally sucks, but presumably that's not what the study is measuring.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#518

Post by psadri » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 9:12 PM UTC

nicwilson wrote: post #178

psadri wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had the budget for two teachers, I’d utilize them as one teaching in the traditional way, and the other spending 1:1 times with each student (20 students in a class → 1-1:30 hr / student).

If you use other students for that problem instead of other teachers, you'd swap a budgetary problem for a bootstrap problem. The upshot for this is that the benefit is as much for the student doing the teaching as the one doing the learning. Teaching has a much greater effect on _retention_ than listening reading or even doing, which is the majority determinant underlying the primary school curriculum. There are a w…

This is even a more interesting idea! I guess similar to the teacher assistant system in higher education. One version of this could be students a year ahead teaching the previous year's students. In elementary school it might be tricky, because besides interest, there are issues are classroom discipline and behavior which might be beyond the capabilities of an 8th year old.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#519

Post by psadri » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

Vinnl wrote: post #32

psadri wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had the budget for two teachers, I’d utilize them as one teaching in the traditional way, and the other spending 1:1 times with each student (20 students in a class → 1-1:30 hr / student).

If we had budgets that allowed for one teacher per ten students, I imagine many problems in education would already be solved.

I believe 1:1 is fundamentally different than ever 1:2 ratio. So, even if you can have 3 person classrooms, I don't think it would be the same as 1:1 time.

As soon as you are working with more than one student, you have to teach the common denominator, which may or may not (more often not) be the thing that will most help any of the students.

In 1:1, you can identify were the specific gaps in skill, knowledge are and tailor the session to close them. Personalized.

Re: I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling

#520

Post by eldaisfish » Fri, Jun 05, 2026, 9:35 PM UTC

graemep wrote: post #453

eldaisfish wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is exactly how you create a population that is mathematically illiterate and ripe for manipulation by foreign powers and marketing agencies. Our society and any democracy relies on a shared minimum level of competence. If you cannot compare costs per unit, do not understand basic biology, or cannot compare evidence, just because it does not interest you, you are cannot function in modern society.

Quite the opposite. A better education overall makes you better at maths, and more able to think critically. Killing kids love of learning is not the way to a better education. Drilling and memorising does not help you learn to think better. Engaging with things you are interested in does. I find it very frustrating that people just refuse to believe there cannot be a better way to do things despite all the evidence…

Respectfully, it is you who should be more open to learning history and the story behind how things ended up the way they are.

The modern education system is far from perfect, but it did not evolve in a vacuum.

These supposedly better ways to do things are how we ended up with disproven ideas like while language learning and a generation of kids who struggle to read.

Being able to opt out of calculus is not the same as being unable to add single digit numbers. I do not share your belief that a child or the average parents are anywhere near qualified to follow their interests and produce people who are competent members of society.