A conversation with Bill Gates on the future of education | Hacker News Reader

A conversation with Bill Gates on the future of education

chronicle.com

33 pointsilamont17 comments

I live in a school district that pioneered this year giving half of the high school freshman class ("ninth graders") Apple iPad tablets at the beginning of the school year. I attended the school board meetings during which the program was evaluated. After a lot of gee-whiz demonstrations ("look what you can do with an iPad") and a rather incredible statement by our school district's curriculum director that soon the district will no longer need to buy textbooks, because students will download instructional materials onto their iPads for free, the district decided to give ALL high school students iPads from now on.

So I think Gates is right where he is asked this near the end of this interesting interview:

"Q. Tablet computers are big these days. The Surface tablet was just released by Microsoft last week, and iPads are all over campuses, but it doesn't sound like your approach has been to give devices to students and hope things change that way. What do you think needs to happen for factors like tablets to really make a difference? Or is that not even part of the equation?

"A. Just giving people devices has a really horrible track record. You really have to change the curriculum and the teacher. And it's never going to work on a device where you don't have a keyboard-type input. Students aren't there just to read things. They're actually supposed to be able to write and communicate. And so it's going to be more in the PC realm—it's going to be a low-cost PC that lets them be highly interactive.

"But the device is not the key limiting factor at this point, at least in most countries. If we ever get the curriculum to be super, super good, then the access piece, which is the most expensive part, will be challenging, requiring special policies to let people get access. The device, you'll be able to check out of the library a portable PC, so I don't see that as the key thing right now."

Perhaps someday Real Soon Now, voice input may partly replace keyboard input (I'm trying that on this computer I use in my office), but I think Gates's essential point is correct that students need tools for producing content a LOT more than they need more tools for consuming content. And they still need adult guidance (which may not have to be every-weekday guidance from professional teachers in brick-and-mortar schools with compulsory attendance) to choose content to consume wisely and to be helped through the initial steps of learning to produce content.

> students will download instructional materials onto their iPads for free

My son spent a lot of time carrying heavy books to and from school (it's not usual for Brazilian schools to have lockers, so books are never left at the school). Ebooks would have made his bag a lot lighter over the years. It's also cheaper to distribute electronic books than physical ones and that savings can be put to better teacher training, more/better/deeper materials and so on. A final factor is that all students have easy access to Wikipedia. While not authoritative in every subject, it's an impressive resource.

That's one of the reasons I like the OLPC project so much. It's a e-reader if you want to read, a laptop if you want to type, and a mesh router all the time. While not as flashy as an iPad, it gets the job done better for a fraction of the price.

> Ebooks would have made his bag a lot lighter over the years.

Agreed. I can't imagine that there is a reason for paper textbooks anymore. Even if it's a one-time, non transferable purchase, charge each student (or school per student) like $10. The textbook folks make a decent profit and the students get new, current books every year.

> It's also cheaper to distribute electronic books than physical ones

This is where I'm not so sure we can do this yet. The lowest-end Barnes & Noble Nook (Simple Touch) is $99. That's not expensive to me but still might be out of reach of low income families. Half that (or subsidize) and I think we'll be perfect, no more heavy textbooks for kids and millions of public domain books available for reading.

Remember every student receives a set of books every year. Even if you distribute them very efficiently, you'll have the cost of transportation every year coming back. If you give every student a US$100 device they can use for many years, you'll end up spending much less during the education of the student.

That's one of the reasons to adopt OLPC like products.

Tablets will hopefully open the system to bottom-up innovations in personalized education. then content will come, and pressure and support for teachers to use those innovations will come.

He says that in poor areas then if not as many kids had to make it to campus that would be a good thing. But I expect in a lot of circumstances that is dead wrong. It's their insane home environments that are the biggest problem for a lot of those kids.

Poor areas have more urgent problems. I believe machine-assisted education has its place, but cannot replace an educator. Keep in mind the educator is someone who understands education, not necessarily math or history. Machines can act as multipliers for teachers, as Udacity exemplifies so well.

It's not clear to me why it is presumed in these articles that Bill Gates is an expert in education, more than any other person, like say a parent with kids in an actual public school system, or Salman Khan and Sebastian Thrun, both who are doing effective and innovative radical experiments and who have a lot of actual data and experience in finding what works.

The Gates Foundation does a huge amount of research into education, making him a much better representative of the state of the art than people who have taken specific approaches to reform.

What you call research I call agenda driven grants that presuppose something and then run a contrived and canned kangaroo court style test study to prove what the agenda presumed.

One presumption the foundation promotes is that not enough people have college degrees and that more people need college degrees.

Another presumption the foundation promotes is that nationwide standardized testing and the uniform curriculum that requires is the best way to ensure teaching is high quality.

Another presumption the foundation promotes is that colleges should have high graduation rates and it is wasteful when they do not.

The foundation then provides grants for people to promote agendas which the foundation has predetermined.

That's not research.

I don't think your characterization is fair. Read this:

http://www.gatesfoundation.org/highschools/Documents/met-fra...

It's a reasonably enlightened approach to outcomes measurement that doesn't rely solely on high-stakes testing. They track:

* Measure 1: Student achievement gains on assessments

* Measure 2: Classroom observations and teacher reflections

* Measure 3: Teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge

* Measure 4: Student perceptions of the classroom instructional environment

* Measure 5: Teachers’ perceptions of working conditions and instructional support at their schools

The report associated with the MET program is indeed rigorous research based on this framework. You may disagree with it, but at least represent it accurately.

It explicitly states it starts with premises they are assuming to be true.

You have a nice list but there's one thing you forgot to mention, and intriguingly it's the key new innovation in this project: dystopian police state panoramic cameras installed in 100% of classrooms and a central website run by ETS to upload monitoring videos for evaluation by technocrats.

There is no evidence that this is going to help teaching. The assumption is that it will, and the project is funding tests to demonstrate that it is effective, which will be the finding of the "study", because the desired outcome is always the finding of these studies; they are as unbiased and without a desired outcome as pharmaceutical studies to show the safety of a new erection pill.

Gates has no teaching experience and no academic credentials in education. We should listen to him because... he's rich? Any 22 year old first year teacher is more qualified to set education policy.

Interestingly, one thought is that "credentials" may not be as importsant in the future --it will be more about what you can demonstrate rather than what certification one has achieved.

Gates may have not finished his schooling and may not be an educator, but he does talk to educators and people who know education. I think that's where he's getting his foundation for his ideas from.

> "credentials" may not be as importsant in the future

He still has no experience in education. Trust me it's not something you learn from talking to educators and people who know education. I have spent years of my early career developing educational software and would not dare to imply I am as qualified as the educators and psychologists who worked with me.

jeez ahi, that is an incredibly narrow-minded view of the way things actually are.

Gates has spent years and many millions of dollars on tinkering with education and running experiments (some randomized controlled experiments) on education, which I'm sure he read the results of at least some of them. Given how easily 22 year olds can fool themselves, I'd venture to suggest that Gates after internalizing just one RCT of education has learned more than that 22 year old.

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