What if We Gave Toddlers an 'F' in Walking? (Why Math & Science Ed is Absurd)

From a systemantic perspective, the "purpose of a system is what it does" not what it says it does.

A large number of people are chasing a small (and decreasing) number of good opportunities so a major function of education is to weed people out and make them blame their failures on themselves, not to maximize the development of human talent.

We have a "meritocracy" that occasionally allows an exceptionally talented person to rise, generally allows the mediocre to inherit the status of their parents, and sometimes puts the kibosh on non-housebroken children of the elite.

Athletic coaching tends to be a lot more honest. Few of us expect to be judged on how we do in PE classes and extracurricular sports, we do it for fun, and hopefully give it our best. Good coaches work in that spirit.

Now, if you're one of the lucky people who'll go far in sports, performance is open ended (the top score isn't 100%) and, unlike schoolwork, you need unique training to develop your potential.

Most teachers are put in a situation where metaphorically they have 10 weeks to teach 30 toddlers to walk. They may be painfully aware that learning isn't a straight line, but the system limits what they can do about it.

Montessori is different. Kids stay in a mixed-age classroom for 2 or 3 years, and have a system conducive to self-paced learning. If you can get to Beverly, MA tonight there's an open house that will amaze you: http://www.stoneridgecms.org/

When I took math in elementary school, in the 80s, it was self paced. You really didn't get an F, you just kept studying a topic until you could pass it at 90%. On the other side, if you could pass a pre-test, you could skip the topic. It really enjoyed, because I could learn some topics in an hour, which would normally be 10 hours of boring instruction.

It was a little more work for the teachers, since the system admitted that kids were at a variety of levels, but it was roughly a normal distribution, where a whole classroom of kids were on normal pace, some were a little bit ahead or behind, and a few were way ahead or behind. It seems like adaptive learning software could make this even easier.

Sure you can, it's been done, it's not rocket science.

The problem with today's school system in America (and likely elsewhere throughout the industrialized world) is that it's very much aimed at teaching the wrong people the wrong things in the wrong way (and that's when teaching doesn't take a back seat to day-care). The main goal is for everyone to memorize as much of a broad swath of "material" as possible, it's very much a teaching-to-the-test least-effort system. It's not geared toward maximizing each individual student's learning. Nor is it geared toward teaching competency and fully mastering basic yet key skills. Nor is it geared toward teaching useful skills that are key building blocks in the workplace, as a member of society, and as a functioning citizen of a democratic republic.

The steps necessary to improve this situation are fairly straightforward. As a start, reduce class sizes and hire better teachers, which is possible without increasing per-student expenditures provided the bloat in non-teaching staff and unnecessary expenditures is cut back (per-student spending has more than doubled in the last 3 decades, adjusted for inflation, the money has not gone to improving education, it has been frittered away). End the farce of overstuffed curricula. There is a monomania about covering as much material as possible, so long as students can retain enough to pass a test, but students don't retain much of the material and when the fundamentals are neglected they miss out on that too. Take the basics back to basics, emphasize the fundamentals (reading, writing, mathematics, fundamental science), learning them, knowing them, mastering them. Continue to refresh and test students on those fundamentals throughout their entire K-12 educations. And provide enough funding to allow gifted students to work at a faster pace, either within existing classes or in classes of their own.

I could go on, but that's a good start. Unfortunately, the biggest impediments aren't knowing how to improve, it's all of the interests and bureaucracy protecting the status quo.

Sure you can: have more flexible pacing. Don't tie the different subjects' timelines together. There's no need to specifically have 5th grade reading, 5th grade math, and 5th grade history that all must be done at the same time. Have multiple tracks. Have many subjects be entirely optional.

Since when is education about only learning the things that a student, in their current ignorance, project they'll need far into the future? Trig and calculus are trivial, learn them. (I'd argue that a solid understanding in both would make personal finance a lot better a subject too.) In any case, my high school offered all of those classes, with personal finance being required and trig being taught along the way in several required math courses.

Creative writing? I'd settle for plain old English composition. This is no "those darn kids" gripe - I get emails from people in their 30s and 40s that are excruciating to read and require a follow-up call just to find out what they were trying to say.

Learning trig and calculus are very beneficial in that it teaches thinking skills that are applicable to a wide variety of useful life skills.

When you're raising a brilliant kid and want him to have a good academic work ethic, you have to hold him to standards that don't have any other pragmatic justification. They raised their standards to a level that made him work hard in school, which is perfectly appropriate. There are other things they could have done, such as home-schooled him, pushed him to excel at academic extracurriculars (if they were available), or forced him to abandon his friends and attend university early, but they may not have been aware of those options, and pushing him to do well in school is a decent approach. Holding a kid that smart to "reasonable" standards means allowing him not to work at all, which means he's in for a big shock when he gets to the real world and realizes that sitting around being 20% smarter than everybody else isn't actually rewarded (or rewarding).

He doesn't say precisely what he's complaining about. Since everything else seems to have worked out well for him, I can only speculate that maybe he has some personal problems he attributes to the way he was raised -- but who doesn't? It's much easier to understand how our own problems could have been avoided than to imagine the problems we would have had if we were raised differently.

P.S. Any other mistake parents make -- like making a kid feel deficient or unloved -- is separate from holding them to high standards and making them work hard. If a kid's feeling of being loved or being a valid human being hinges on what his parents say about his grades, they've screwed something else up already, and they can't fix it just by giving a thumbs-up to his grades.

P.P.S. Just wanted to clarify I'm not presuming to talk about details of the real Kim here; I'm talking about a situation we've extrapolated from a few words in the article, which is as good as hypothetical.