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Comment by skywhopper | Hacker News Reader

The image comparing the classroom layout in 1915 vs 2015 is misleading, but also silly. The US educational system has served a lot of people very well throughout those 100 years using exactly that setup. Such rhetorical strategies drive me nuts. Lots of things are different, but change for change's sake is never a good idea.

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Look how nice that 1915 room is! It's really a place designed to make the occupants feel ennobled. The ceiling is 20 feet high and there are huge windows. The 2015 classroom looks like a real wrist-slitter.

Change for the sake of change can reveal good ideas. Every time I hear someone talk like this, I can't help but think of what we wouldn't have now if we kept sticking with things that "just worked."

In my opinion, introducing change that isn't a patently bad idea will always be a step towards something positive. If the change proves that an old idea is still the better idea, then we will have a better defined idea.

I have to disagree a bit here. It's true that the system has worked for many people, but you can not tell me that it's perfect. There are multiple styles of learning and comprehension that each individual is predisposed to. It's possible that this school has found another teaching style that improves on that model. It is encouraging that a school system is willing to allow it's educators to work with changing that model and adapting to better suit their population. Perhaps this design isn't the best for X% of the students in the class, but maybe it reaches more students in the class as a whole? The article is pretty light on detail, so i'm completely speculating on my own here.

I think the argument he's making isn't that it's perfect but instead that this logic doesn't hold. Old techniques are not inherently bad. They're only bad if we actually did discover something new in the meantime. In this case I think we have learned since then, but the article doesn't say that; it just says the old stuff is old and thus bad.

The multiple learning styles theory has been largely debunked.

https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/edu-a0037478.pdf

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/need-know-learning-styles-myth-...

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/finding_common_ground/2014/04...

http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/12/the-myth-of-learn...

http://psi.sagepub.com/content/9/3/105.abstract

and I particularly like the concluding paragraph of this article:

http://anniemurphypaul.com/2013/10/forget-about-learning-sty...

Boy, I don't. I find it repulsive. I'm naturally a "deep learner" by that classification system, but the author of that blog seems to be implying that everyone has a choice in the matter, which does not match my observations.

If it's actually true that people can be divided into those categories, it would be interesting to look more deeply, to understand why people differ in this way. Otherwise, you're just pointing at yourself and saying "look how smart I am!"

What surprised me was how sad the children looked on the 1915 photo. Like they're in detention or something.

There are cultural differences around smiling so its possible that they are trying to look serious and studious - assuming that the US attitude to smiling has changed over the years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smile#Cultural_differences

NB On my first visits to the US 20+ years ago I was surprised at how you would get big beaming smiles* from people for no apparent reason... but then again I'm from a notoriously dour part of a dour country.

[*] I of course eventually realised that people were giving me big beaming smiles because they were paid to!.

Certainly the US attitude towards smiling has changed with regards to camera technology. I'm too lazy to look up primary referents on the subject right now, but long shutter times encouraged people not to smile to avoid grotesque photos and then as shutter times got faster photographers began to eventually "mandate" smiles to prove that they had better cameras until eventually it was weird in the US not to smile in a planned photo.

Considering the picture was taken indoors, at night, with 1915 film technology, all of the people in the picture would have to hold perfectly still for several seconds. That might affect their countenance.

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