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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

I would never send my child to a school with such a system. Just look at the quality you get from asking teenagers (or even college students!) to prepare presentations. Usually the result is so awful that you can't cover the topic in the exam and expect anyone to pass. I wouldn't want my child to be taught via a game of Chinese whispers. There is a reason why teachers have to be well educated, not only in the field they teach but also in teaching methods.

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> Just look at the quality you get from asking teenagers (or even college students!) to prepare presentations.

The counterpoint is that those teenagers suck because they missed out on years of practice because they were never given the opportunity to actually teach anyone anything meaningful before.

You are also presuming a high-stakes situation where mistakes are costly and go uncorrected forever. That is not realistic. Well-educated teachers are still vital, and a lesson gone bad presents even more teaching opportunities than a lesson gone well.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that we engage in a Lord of the Flies situation where the children are in charge. Rather, that children participate in a helpful way as a part of their own growth.

If an 8-year-old is helping a 6-year-old with math, then they are both learning, and the teacher is spending a lot less time watching either of them.

I think what we're seeing here is a general problem with outsourcing: you try to come up with a clean separation of responsibilities, but you end up with a costly mistake instead. In this case, thinking of all children as customers that are served by your employees, it would make a lot more sense to make it a collaborative effort between expert caregivers/teachers and students of various ages.

I would say go and have a look at a well run martial arts school. Ever wonder how a single "master" can teach a class of 30 people at different levels and ages without it being a complete mess?

I was on the fence for this argument, but your dojo analogy solidifies my complete agreement. Moreover, parents with lagging children often turn to tutors, many of whom (last I checked) are just slightly older children -- older enough that they know the material, and young enough that it's still fresh in their minds, educationally.

Offtopic, I can't help but wonder how much the tutoring reinforces what they were probably certain to forget anyway. In the same way that blogging about a subject reinforces your understanding of it (e.g., if you can't explain it, you don't know it), I suspect that tutoring a younger generation would help those tutors cement that knowledge more deeply into their minds than just retaining it long enough to pass whatever tests they're given in the short term.

At the end of the day though, your dojo analogy is most precise -- senseis don't just promote every student to assistant instructor. They carefully curate based on knowledge, discipline and behavior. Having every older child tutor the younger is probably unnecessary, and would likely lead to chaos, but if teachers chose only those students capable of helping out the younger children, even assuming some failure rate in selection, it would probably be a dramatic improvement over the current situation.

Maybe teachers are well educated in teaching methods (I don't know the full curricula needed to be a licensed teacher at various levels), but in my experience the variation in teaching styles wasn't very great, those that had variation were the most subject to parent and district and other faculty pressure to conform, and from what I hear it's only gotten more uniform. Teachers may have a job incentive to ensure enough of their students 'pass' the course and demonstrate enough understanding to move on, which can encourage different methods to try and reach more students, but students themselves have a larger incentive to learn the minimum required material somehow regardless of how the teacher teaches which will inflate the pass rate by the amount students can teach themselves what the teachers failed to teach (and little incentive beyond personal desire to learn anything beyond the minimum necessary to advance). And teachers, seeing a high pass rate for method A (which involves a ton of extra work in and out of class on their part) vs method B (which involves such minimum effort it could almost be a 9-5 job) which may have a slightly lower but still acceptable pass rate than A or C or D will in the absence of further motivation coalesce as a whole on B. In my experience very few teachers tried anything different than B. The idea you propose of students being asked to prepare a presentation with the expectation that the other students will only get that info in class from that presentation and will be tested on it later never happened to me for any class. Nor would I want it to, as it's just B (by nature of students teaching via prepared presentation) with the variation that it's even less work for the teacher because the student is doing the teaching. The times I learned from my fellow students (or they from me) were in study/homework sessions outside of class where we went over the source material, our notes, other sources, and talked to each other to try and explain what our teacher's lecture didn't. No one did presentations.

Presentations are a horrible way to teach (and learn).

I've learned eg cycling from practical demonstrations of my slightly older cousins.

This is highly dependent on the student. Some students learn quite well from lectures, some need an interactive discussion, others need to "do", and others still benefit from teaching to understand.

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