The EdTech Revolution Has Failed
afterbabel.com
afterbabel.com
The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured.
We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth. It's such a crying shame.
I guess that IS the point of standards, but we really should be experimenting more on the fringes.
However, we should be seeing visible progress towards this goal, and frankly, if anything, the system continues to be moving in the other direction, lowering bars to try to get everyone into the exact same level long after it should be clear that lowering the bar still isn't even achieving that goal, even as it destroys everything around it in the process.
The system isn't even trying to customize skill-based education, beyond a bit of clearly-ineffectual lip service.
To be clear, most engineers at FAANG would describe their own companies as a "large bureaucracy", yet, the engineers at these places are highly skilled, "complex, multifaceted individuals". Their hiring strategy has demonstrated this time and time again on HN discussions. It is insanely hard to get hired into these places. There must be at least 10 qualified candidates for each role. And, weirdly, I would say that almost all of the most highly skilled software engineers that I have known in my career are also the most dynamic. By definition, that makes them fungible because they can learn new skills so quickly.
My expected outcome for all of this is that the gap between rich and poor students will grow, as only rich students will continue to have decent student:teacher ratios (their ratios already tend to be a ton better than public school kids). Paid tutoring will become common somewhat farther down-market than it currently is, as more people choose to pay extra just to cover what their tax money used to, but no longer does.
That is bad. I have to say no teacher I had a problem when I learned things ahead of time. Some less good teachers were not actually encouraging, but they certainly did not think it was a problem.
That said, IMO the school system does not cope well with kids who are not going at the average speed. This is one reason i home educated my kids. We need to change how schools work to take advantage of ed tech (and a lot of other opportunities - you can learn at your own pace from books, like I did)
I dropped out of college in 2012 and was one of the very lucky few who managed to find software engineering work almost immediately [1].
I had a bit of a complex about not having a degree, and a few times I tried going back only to drop out again because I would get bored; by the time I had gone back, I already knew enough stuff to be qualified as an engineer, and as such I didn't feel like I was getting a lot out of school and I would paradoxically do pretty poorly because I was half-assing everything.
It wasn't until I found out about WGU in 2021 where I actually decided to finish my degree, primarily because WGU lets me work at my pace. Since I already knew a lot about computer science, I was able to speed through the classes that would have been very boring to me, and I finished my degree really quickly as a result. I don't feel like my education is appreciably worse than people who did things in a traditional brick and mortar school, but I'm not 100% sure if I'm a test for this.
It made me realize that, at least for people like me, EdTech can be extremely powerful stuff. School can be a lot more engaging when it's personalized, instead of the frustrating "one size fits all" of traditional lecturing.
[1] I say "lucky" because I think it was exactly that: luck. Yeah I learned this stuff on my own for fun but finding an employer who was willing to hire someone without credentials was never guaranteed and I feel extremely fortunate to have accidentally timed my dropout about perfectly.
EDIT: For those confused, WGU means "Western Governors University" in this case.
I was involved with a study by the Center for Game Science (University of Washington), led by Zoran Popovic (of Foldit fame), with over 40 000 kids in the US, Norway and France participating, from grade 1 to the end of high school. I think the numbers were 93% of kids managing to achieve mastery in solving an equation for x in one hour and a half of this, starting from first principles in their learning (it didn't matter what they knew before or didn't).
This was met by downright hostility from some schools systems, with the institutions saying in essence "it's impossible kids learn like this", ignoring empirical evidence in the process. Teachers on the other hand, thought it was great and had a profoundly positive impact on their students. Nordics seemed to be less averse to letting their students progress along this path. Ultimately the company that had developped the game went towards more traditional school publishing with paper methods + digital tools, which in my opinion is vastly less efficient, but that has the huge benefit of being something school systems know how to buy and implement.
This is meaningful when looking at the promise of edtech, because a lot of what's called edtech is frankly of poor quality, but some things are pure gems, and saying edtech has failed like the author of this article is not only misguided but dangerous in the extreme for the kids, often from underprivileged backgrounds, who benefit the most from this kind of cooperative, adaptive, and gamified approaches.
These approaches don't feel like school, they don't feel complicated, and kids can just have fun and explore and learn logical rules, verbalize what they are doing with one another and help one another, progress at their own pace, and end up learning stuff considered "hard" when it really isn't, like math, physics, chemistry, etc, ie logical ruleset that can be represented with meaningful manipulatives and made into a fun learning journey.
Here's a 5 minutes vid the center for Game Science published at the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdrraeJyhoQ Some numbers here: https://dragonbox.com/about/algebra-challenge
I tend to throw “lucky” in there too when telling the tale of how I got my foot in the door— it’s hard not to, considering my jobs before that were call center rep, bus boy and dishwasher at restaurant, camp counselor. Tech changed my entire life.
When I dropped out, I assumed that my job options were limited to minimum wage work, so I applied to McDonald's, Lowes, Target, Walmart (as a cashier), Aldi, and a few other places in one day (driving around the Orlando area). When I got home, sort of on a whim I applied to junior-level Coldfusion+Flash job I saw on Craigslist, thinking that there's no chance but it also didn't cost me anything to apply.
The only job that called me back was the software job, which I thought was bizarre, but it's what kickstarted the career.
In hindsight, I think the reason none of the others called me back was because they saw some college and they were afraid that I would quit the second that I went back to school.
I learned two important lessons that day: 1) The typical Wayne Gretzky "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take", and 2) the less qualified you are for a job, the more willing a company is to overlook a lack of qualifications.
I'd like to elaborate on point 2 because I don't see it mentioned much.
The conventional wisdom for finding a job (qualified or otherwise) is to see what's in demand and learn that skill (e.g. something popular like Java), but then you hit a problem: everyone is applying to that job. There are lots of people who learned Java from school or work, and you're competing with all of them. 2012-dropout-tombert would be applying for the same job as a 4.0-GPA'd-Harvard-Graduate, and as such the company will almost always choose the latter.
When I applied to the Coldfusion job, I accidentally discovered that because it was (even in 2012) a pretty niche bit of tech, no one applied to it. I didn't really know Coldfusion either, but the fact that I applied at all was an artifact of me not having the option to work in a more popular platform, and I was able to learn it quick enough to where it wasn't really a problem.
I mean, like most careers its had its ups and downs. 2023 was an exceptionally awful year for me (like many, many people in tech), but this year has been pretty alright.
Happy for you that you found your niche!
I never got confirmation on this, but I am about 95% sure that I was the only person who applied to the Coldfusion job. Compare that to Target, where there was literally a queue of people applying at the terminal in the store.
I’ve been declined for enough jobs to know that you can be declined for the dumbest reasons, or no reason at all, so trying to reason about it is an exercise in futility, but I am pretty sure that a lack of applicants is the reason I got the coldfusion job
Why do you think that was related to the degree?
My salary history, in some abstract units, is 15, 50, 100, 600 (yes, that was good), and 50 (not just earning ten times less, but also working about half the hours, very happy with it).
I can't help but see 25% as really insignificant: I've never experienced such a small change! And I don't even have a degree.
There are jobs that require a degree, and there are jobs that require a degree from MIT. This will get you in the first door, but not the second.
Also consider GaTech's OMSCS, though there are CS entrance requirements.
I didn't really go to school with the expectation of making more money; I already had a decent job at a FAANG, and finishing my degree hasn't really translated to "more" money. In the "killing the inferiority complex" and "proving to myself that I'm not an idiot" sense, it was definitely worth the money to me.
I'm not at a FAANG anymore, but I really like my current job, and while I'm not 100% sure on this, I'm pretty convinced that the interview for it wouldn't have happened if I didn't have at least some form of a bachelors.
I also had a lot of fun doing the degree, but that's harder to quantify.
But I'm not going to sit here and bullshit you, it's not a perfect degree. I've been trying to break into the finance world for a couple years [1], and finance people really care about which school you went to; most of them seem to simply not have even heard of WGU, and it appears that the rule of finance work is "if I haven't heard of the school, it's not a good school" and then they decline you. Finance jobs want a fancy expensive university; whether or not they're right to do so is orthogonal to that fact.
I was doing a PhD at University of York (distance), but I've since dropped that and am doing their online masters in computer science. York is honestly an extremely decent school, and their online masters is perfectly fine and fairly reasonably priced (about 11,000 British Pounds total I believe, about $14,000). I'm hoping that that can "cleanse" my WGU degree in the eyes of finance.
Outside of finance, as far as I'm aware no one has really given a shit about where I got my degree outside of the "is it accredited?" question, which it is.
[1] I want lots of money, finance jobs on Wall Street can pay pretty well.
I really hope this isn't just an ad or something because I'd really love if there was a decent way for me to get a degree without having to go back to a college campus at 35
Feel free to email me if you have any specific questions, I think you and I might be pretty similar in this regard.
I still get feelings of skepticism that it actually does anything every once in a while. Despite the overwhelming evidence from my wife, my coworkers, and my life in general that it absolutely does.
Check out /r/WGU and /r/WGU_CompSci
There are edge cases, but if you didn't have the grades and SATs to do real college you're not going to be competitive in this market. I'd take a WGU grad but would put that degree under a VA Tech, RPI, UC Davis, etc. for sure, and way under Stanford or MIT (or Cambridge, or one of the better IIT campuses, etc.).
Honestly this whole thread seems like submarine ads
I don't really know any other WGU graduates in person, so it's hard for me to say the quality of student is "worse" and than anywhere else.
Obviously I am biased, but I don't think I'm appreciably dumber than the average student who went to a brick and mortar school, but admittedly I'm a pretty weird dude who did use WGU as a "rubber stamp" school for me. I finished quickly, though I don't feel like the work was "easier" than when I was learning shit at Florida State, outside of me being a decade more experienced in it.
I'll agree there's definitely selection-bias with WGU for students who underperformed in high school, which can translate to poor work performance. Hell, I underperformed in high school due to at the time undiagnosed Major Depressive Disorder, so I am grateful for something like WGU existing.
It's tough to say. I think if you're in a position like I was, WGU is fine. It is there to demonstrate that you have a Bachelor's worth of CS knowledge; if I were 18 again and had had medication for depression, I would probably apply to some of the nicer public UK schools (e.g. University of York, Manchester, etc.), if I'm being honest, but until someone invents a time machine I'm stuck with the world as it is, not how I want it to be.
For the most part, my career was fine. I had a job at Apple as a senior software engineer at the time (though I didn't really enjoy the job itself).
Part of it was just a bit of an inferiority complex over insecurity of not having a degree. People were generally very polite about it, but internally it felt like every bad thing happened to me in my career was because of the lack of a degree; every comment felt like it was loaded with passive aggression, even if that wasn't true.
Kind of the straw the broke the camel's back was actually a bit funny; I had applied for a job as an engineer at Microsoft Research, and I was declined for it. It was far from the first time I had been declined for a job, obviously, but in this case it was the first time that the declination specifically said "declined because you don't have a degree". In the nearly a decade of working as a software person prior to that, I had never explicitly been told that my lack of degree was the reason for a rejection.
That rejection coincided with another milestone: my 30th birthday. I had told myself I'll finish my degree "next year" for nearly a decade, and now I wasn't in my 20's anymore. Obviously there's no real difference between 29.99 and 30 years old, but it just kind of hit me like a ton of bricks. I registered for WGU that day.
There are probably numerous other reasons, I did want to transition to a more theoretical role as well, but those are the main ones.
I, too, dropped out of college, but finding employment as a programmer back in the mid-90s required very little luck. It became difficult to justify the time and expense of further education when my career already seemed to be launching, ready or not.
Funny that you mention MSR - I also applied there, back in 2007, and they are also the only people who have ever turned me down for lack of a degree! (Though I still got an offer out of it, after they passed my information along to devdiv...)
I obviously don't blame them for declining me, they don't owe me a job, but I still find it a bit amusing that in my entire career exactly one entity has declined me for that reason, or at least only one has been brave enough to state that that was the reason why. I'm sure a lot of the places that never got back to me might have declined me for a lack of a degree behind the scenes, but I was never made aware of it.
I'm not throwing shade on you, my degree from 1982 was 1 year too early to make certification in my field and I have worked for 42 years in software and systems without charter status.
I am however cautious of using the word. I call myself a computer scientist even when what I do is systems and network engineering.
Generally when people have asked what I am, I just say something kind of hand-wavey like "Eccentric" or something.
Today, I was listening to the Lex Fridman podcast with John Carmack. It reminded me that John Carmack does not have a university degree, yet, he is one our generation's globally recognized masters of software optimisation. There are few in the world who can do what he does, and he has no uni degree, nor (I assume!) any "national certifications". Michael Abrash is similar.
On a personal note: (US) Wall Street has similarly ineffective gatekeeping with the Series 7 & 63 exams: My father called it "toilet bowl knowledge" when I studied for it. He said: "Once you are finished the exam, you can flush away that knowledge. You will never use it again." He is right about more than 90% of the "knowledge" required to pass those exams.
The EUR ING certificate from Engineers Europe can be awarded to those who have attained a degree in engineering, but also for those with "no exemplifying formal qualifications, but will have engaged in professional Career Learning and peer review via the individual route".
https://www.engineerseurope.com/what-eur-ing-certificate
Since Engineers Europe is a private organization (albeit one that is widely recognized), I would imagine that individual European countries have their own rules about when someone can call themselves an engineer. I am pretty sure that Germany only requires a degree for instance. Looser still are the rules in Britain: the UK does not require any certification at all for the basic term 'Engineer', although there are more specific titles that are strictly protected (ICTTech being one of them, and yes they really do use that silly abbreviation, obligatory italics included). Theoretically, a country could refuse to recognize certifications from Engineers Europe, but that would not exactly endear them to the European Commission or to other European countries!
Those gatekeepers might not accept a John Carmack or a Palmer Luckey (or Bill Gates or Larry Ellison or Vitalik Buterin, etc, etc), but how many of their certificate-holders have done any comparably significant engineering work?
For the _vast majority_ of others, certification allows employers to have externally-validated trust in an engineer who mightn't stand out as obviously.
I like to imagine that such people would have found a way to emigrate and make their impact abroad. Either way, the cost to Germany itself (and Europe generally) has been immense.
But keep in mind those are legal compliance tests...WTF?
In short words, they give the legal basis for why in finance we have to follow a sales script as it then covers the legal boilerplate mess...
On the other hand in the late 1980s I had a chance to be in the Turtle Trading class in Chicago....obviously that would have been more helpful as I think the success rate was over 50% for students of that pratical turtle trading class.
This applies to CS degrees too. But while there's immense amounts of churn in the hot language/UI framework of the day, the basics like algorithms and data structures barely change.
I don't think its a big deal that the same words are used in job titles in different industries. The second anyone reads the job description or follows up with a question will understand the domain someone works in.
I usually go with "I work in software" and non-software people equate all of that to "IT", much like I classify Doctors as "medicine" and there are different disciplines.
For years the social stigma about being a high-school dropout got to me, and I was determined to enter University as an adult student and get my CS degree.
The problem was that I already had steady work as a software developer. And the entire reason I wanted to go to school in the first place was to level up those skills. It didn't help that, in my late teens / early 20s, I was working for a dot-com startup and we had coop students from the local University, and they weren't being taught anything that I didn't already know or understand.
Eventually I came to the opinion that, at least for me (not necessarily for others), formal education institutions amount to little more than institutional child abuse. For hyper-independent and high IQ students, particularly those with aspergers (I've never been diagnosed, but even my mother says it would put my childhood into perspective), class rooms are not a positive experience.
And I can't honestly look back at my time in public school and identify a single subject that I learned in class, as opposed to independently. According to my parents I was literate before entering kindergarten and I taught myself maths and history as an adult because school taught me to hate both (I don't hate either now, but the way they were taught in school divorced them from our day to day lives, created busy work and the impression that what we were being taught was irrelevant and unnecessary).
I tried online learning for a little bit in order to get my GED but I abandoned that as well because it still felt like boring busy work.
EdTech seems like it might offer the solution to younger children with my personality type. But honestly, I personally learn best by reading books, experimenting (hands on learning) and having goals that I actually care about and can relate to. If school had taught us to prepare a tax return, balance a household budget, that history gives us predictive "power" by examining how humans dealt with certain situations historically, if English class focused on effective communication rather than trying to guess at metaphors and hidden messages in the writings of dead authors who can't be asked to comment on that conjecture... maybe I wouldn't have loathed the experience so much and felt like I was just in a prison for children.
In other words, my personal experiences with EdTech has seen these trying to take a standard public school curriculum and package it in a digital "work at your own pace" format. Whereas my issue with school was at least in large part the curriculum itself. The pace was a factor too ... just not the only one by far.
Could I politely suggest writing out the full acronym the first time, and then using WGU subsequently? It'd be a good deal more considerate of non-U.S. readers.
West Georgia University?
Washington, George Understanding-Builder?
But they rarely use the full name, even on their own site.
WGU = Western Governors University
Sibling comment already stated this, but I'll just say I was referring to Western Governors University. I have added an edit to the post to clarify.
I edited the post to clarify.
My anecdote: I was expelled from a vocational school my senior year, thanks to EdTech I returned and finished the year within a month
I am a strong advocate for zero technology in schools until high school.
One thing that is rarely mentioned is that schools that issue technology to students and use it in the classroom now need to have a hardware, software, and network support person at every school. These jobs use funds that could otherwise be used to pay for more instructional staff, reduce student-teacher ratios, provide more special-needs instructional specialists, etc.
That said, I'm a fan of forcing kids to check any phones at the door.
By the way, check out the School product line from Constructor Tech (disclosure: I work for this company on a different product): https://constructor.tech/solutions/schools?tag%5B0%5D=16. They are backed by hard science, and their founder made a scientific career while researching this topic. Evidence shows they are working, especially for kids lagging behind classmates.
Can you give examples? Are we talking evolution or addition?
Grades have been steadily decreasing across the board, while enrolment in private education has skyrocketed (private schools do not have to accept difficult students). The private education is particularly surprising as Denmark has a very strong tradition of public education, where private education was viewed as something for the "elites" of society (e.g. royalty), now it's becoming more and more common.
Many, many adults are extremely emotionally unprepared to accept the possibility that they may be wrong and a child may be right; they start from the assumption that this is an impossibility, and reason backwards from there.
Or, in the case where they do in fact know that the child is right, they nonetheless decide to prioritize asserting authority over demonstrating how a mature adult should handle being wrong. And thus do students learn bad examples of what to do when they're wrong.
Not GP but I can share a personal experience from high school: I was extremely advanced in English class. Like would literally finish a 45min exam in 10min and get an A.
This caused problems for the teacher. For one I was constantly bored and disruptive of others around me because I was bored and needed friends to chat with. But this made their grades suffer (it’s okay I did their exams too, lol).
Another big problem for her was that teaching me was a pain in the ass. I was clearly fluent in English but couldn’t be arsed to follow today’s lesson. My essays were a pain to grade because she could never tell if I was using a weird word I picked up from Tolkien or the internet, or just used the wrong word. She had to use a dictionary. During class sometimes I’d pull her on tangents discussing the nuanced meaning of a word she was teaching and none of the rest of the class could follow. Etc.
Basically I was a pain in the ass because the class was too easy and teenage boys aren’t known for their good classroom behavior.
The best advice that teacher gave me before the matura exam (like SATs) was this: Ok Swiz I know you think you’re a wiseass, but the matura commission won’t pull out a dictionary, they’ll just mark your answer wrong. Tone it down.
And if you think “Wow that teacher failed to control a problem student”, I think she did the right thing. It’s very easy to crush someone’s spirit if you don’t let them explore and pursue a thing they’re clearly talented in.
After watching a documentary about Conic Section I asked my math teacher "When are we going to learn about Ellipses and Hyperbolas?" This was in year 7 (so age 12/13), We were learning about perimeter and area at the time I found it dead easy.
He patiently explained to me that we needed to build up to those topics and it wasn't something we could just skip ahead to. looking back on it I think he handled me pretty well. He didn't discourage me and he justified things in a way that 12 year old me could understand that there was a reason we covered the topics in the order that we did.
Conic sections would end up being taught in 11th Grade when I was 17.
Some teachers were cool with this, but most of them would yell at me for not paying attention, and a couple specifically called me out for reading ahead on the basis that I thought I was too good for the class.
But it's not because of some drive for 'equity'. I've talked with teachers (as friends, not in a school setting). They're doing what they can with the resources they have.
Is it worth it to spend monumental effort trying to get not very bright children to meet some minimum requirement
OR
is it more worth it to just encourage and lift up brighter students.
I don’t think there’s a clear answer, but what we have isn’t it.
The answer is entirely clear but it's uncomfortable.
Society is moved forward by the top percentile, not by even the "average". You can only help those who wish to help themselves, and expending massive resources on kids who are not there to learn (or cannot) has had predictable results.
Some evil folks in history have used this exact strategy of crippling the "top kids" of a group for their genocidal plans. It's highly effective.
The best thing you can do is make sure those "top kids" are identified early and tracked into the proper classes regardless of socioeconomic background. Yes, this means segregating students based on ability earlier than later. Doing this ends up helping those "bottom kids" once they reach adulthood since society is better overall for everyone.
It’s only the right thing if you assume equity as a starting position though. We already know, rather robustly, that the weakest and most disruptive students can consume far more than their share of limited resources and produce correspondingly limited outcomes.
Another theory goes that we should provide more resources to the best and brightest students so that they go on to become great leaders and experts in their fields and then improve society for everyone. This may be called the “rising tide lifts all boats” theory. It was the predominant one in the US for much of the 20th century and earlier, and it arguably led to the US’s position as a global leader in science, technology, and industry.
I'd call it "trickle down" theory. Or "horse-and-sparrow theory" (feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat)
Have some kids, pick the one that seems like they'll be the most successful, put all of the family's limited resources into that one kid. If that kid goes on to become successful, they are expected to help lift up the rest of the family.
Another view is that I've paid back in taxes alone, many multiples of what my education cost the city.
> feeding a horse a huge amount of oats results in some of the feed passing through for lucky sparrows to eat
Yeah well the current strategy being employed is starve all the horses and leave the bodies in the field to rot.
The harsh truth is bell curves exist. Some people are just better are things than others.
Imagine a scenario with three classrooms:
One classroom is full of kids who can be taught 3 years of a subject in one year
A second classroom has kids who can be taught 1 year of a skills in a subject in 1 year.
The third classroom is kids who are remedial and if great effort is put in, they'll be taught one year of skills in two years.
The no-shit-sherlock strategy is to assign a teacher to each classroom.
What we are doing instead is one of two strategies:
1. Mix all the students together, and watch as the kids who would be advanced drop out of school due to boredom, and the kids who need remedial help drop out because they aren't learning anything.
2. Fund classroom 2 as normal, take resources that would've been spent on classroom 1, and give it to classroom 3, causing incremental improvements, and again failing the kids who would be in classroom 1.
Both strategies are downright stupid and inefficient.
Not only that, these strategies also cause funding problems. Now the parents of kids who would have been in classroom 1 pull their kids out of school, causing a reduction in funding for everyone. Next, parents who would have kids in classroom 1 don't even move to the city, causing a reduction in the overall economy for the city, so now there is even less money for social and academic programs to help disadvantaged students.
To be clear, I'm not naming the subject here because students should be independently evaluated on each subject. Someone may need remedial math help but be great at writing.
I wouldn't commit a kid who struggles with math in 3rd grade to a life in the trades. I suppose HN has an over-represention of former gifted student commenters- but being intelligent doesn't make one better than others, or better suited for greater expectations, more deserving of resources, or more likely to succeed. Intelligence is just one aspect out of the many you can measure a human by - resilience, resourcefulness, grit, propensity to self-destruction, proneness to addictions, self-delusion, confidence, being an insufferable dick, laziness, are among the things I've seen people exhibit to their own detriment (or success) - regardless of what their baseline intelligence was. Society does better when it nurtures all the positives, and not just putting all eggs in the "very intelligent" basket.
The smartest students I knew are doing very mundane jobs that can be (and are) done by far less smarter folk - the one in academia is trying to leave. I'm less smart, but I pay more on taxes than most of them - one exception is the executive at a dating app. She's probably a genius as she never had to study at all: but that's not exactly a role that moves society forward, is it?
Edit: oh, and Elon Musk was a B student.
The only issue here is with the attitude that a career in the trades is somehow inferior to getting a degree. It is not. I have many friends and family who work in the trades. They are intelligent, hard-working, resourceful people who take tremendous pride in the quality of their work. They both produce and repair useful things (houses, cars, factories, and countless other pieces of equipment). They are the backbone of our society.
They also happen to earn a lot more money than many other people I know who have degrees and work those "mundane jobs" you mentioned. Why? Because there's a huge shortage of labour in the trades and people who enter that career have far more bargaining power than they did back in the early-mid 20th century. It's also reflected in the way we simply don't build the way we used to. China built an incredible high speed rail network all over their country in just a few decades at minimal cost. The US can't even manage to build one high speed link between San Francisco and LA without spending more than the GDP of most countries on the project while facing countless delays.
It's one of our greatest shames that we in the West have developed such an elitist culture that we look down on the people who build things.
I made no such claim - the word I used (commit) was chosen with care, and is neutral.
> They also happen to earn a lot more money than many other people I know who have degrees and work those "mundane jobs" you mentioned.
While trades are a decent choice; let's not overly romanticize them. The ones making decent money are those who are self-employed (basically effectively consultants) and those in unions with a monopoly (like the longshoremen). The working stiffs aren't doing that great, especially if the work is hard on the body, then it means their career is going to be much shorter than the average desk jockey, and they will have considerable health costs later.
Is the roofer going to suffer a lot later in life? Yes. Is the CNC operator going to have problems down the line? Probably not.
> The ones making decent money are those who are self-employed (basically effectively consultants) and those in unions with a monopoly (like the longshoremen).
Most office workers outside of tech are not doing so great either in regards to pay. Customer service roles are even worse.
Students should be re-evaluated every year. I've been at the bottom of classes and the top of classes in the same subject!
Also as others have pointed out, please stop crapping on the trades. I've met plumbers who are damn good at math calculations (needed for complex hydroponic heating systems!). Not to mention plenty of people in the trades learn to run their own businesses, with all the different skills that requires.
> but being intelligent doesn't make one better than others, or better suited for greater expectations, more deserving of resources, or more likely to succeed.
I didn't say any of that.
I said that right now schools are allocating 0 resources to students who are gifted, which is just as messed up as allocating 0 resources to students who need extra help. And as a reminder a child can be in both groups at the same time.
I never "crapped" on the trades like you imagined I did, they are a perfectly fine career choice.
> I wouldn't commit a kid who struggles with math in 3rd grade to a life in the trades.
Which has a lot of implications:
1. That someone who is bad at math has to go into the trades, ignoring that many trades require quite a bit of math and that plenty of college degree programs hardly require any math at all 2. That kids are being told in 3rd grade that they have to go into the trades based on math scores, as if that is some sort of "punishment". I know you said that you used the word "commit" to be neutral, but it is less than neutral when used in comparison to the unspoken alternative of non-trade jobs which are silently implied (in the very least through the American cultural lens) to be "better".
Also you didn't reply to the actual meat of my comment:
1. Schools have cut funding to gifted programs, denying resources to students who need them 2. The same students can be gifted in one area and behind in another, meaning resourcing isn't some binary "lift these students up and put these students down" decision.
Also I'd add that gifted programs typically require very little additional funding, if any. In a large district a gifted program just takes a bunch of students out of other classrooms and puts them into a classroom together. There is no additional cost for teachers, it is just a shuffling of what classroom students are in.
This means aside from the incremental cost of bussing students to a school with a gifted program classroom, there isn't even a resourcing issue for gifted programs!
The choice isn't "gifted programs or remedial education programs". That entire narrative is not based in reality and it only exists to cause arguments between different advocacy groups.
None of which I expressed in my brief comment, but you're projecting from what others have said or done. You are arguing against a stereotypical position I do not hold, and I have no desire keep explaining how I don't hold the position you insist on ascribing me to.
What you’re missing here is that we’ve been sold on this idea of “one size fits all” education as the only just model. This means forcing the weakest, most disruptive students up to a standard (especially in math and science) they can’t realistically meet. Instead of allowing these kids to find their true calling in some skilled trades such as plumbing, electrical, welding, or construction, we force them to go to university where they’re guaranteed to fail (or drop out trying). And in the process we saddle them with a mountain of student loans!
I'm not convinced that resources are actually that scarce (the US has the second-highest amount spent per pupil among OECD countries). I think your teacher friends are doing the best with what they are being given by school boards, which is different. In many cities, the school board is considered a key stepping stone into bigger and better offices (city council, boards of supervisors, mayor, etc), which means it often attracts folks who are trying to leverage their positions to take stances on issues that have nothing to do with education. I think attacking gifted programs / tracking is one example of this, which are cast as perpetuating inequality, despite evidence that they help students across the board.
So why does the richest country on the planet have "very scarce resources" only when it comes to educating its kids ? Of course, that very same public school has a stadium that is easily several times larger than facilities provided for Olympic level athletes in a poor country like India. That same school has a music program with a huge ballroom, recording studio, fancy musical instruments...bass sax, harps, bassoons and contrabassoons, double bass, violas...like literally, even a top of the line Bollywood studio doesn't have half of this. USA has chosen to prioritize just about everything other than basic classroom stem education. Then when you ask the math teacher why the kids don't know their logarithms and trig tables, he is like...well we have calculators and chromebooks. I have spent multiple years trying to engage with school board officials in public schools here in the mid-west. The most reasonable, unemotional, takeaway after all this engagement is that Americans are simply not interested in classroom education. They don't have teacher, don't have the time to teach, don't care for books or chalkboards...its simply not their thing. That's fine. I do hope all of this hyper-investment in music and sports produces some world class track and field athlete who can run a mile under three minutes while playing the bassoon.
Seattle has cancelled a bunch of their music programs as well.
A couple years ago they also cancelled, a very successful, STEM program in schools that primarily served economically disadvantaged students, because the school district couldn't afford to pay their portion of the program's cost.
There was a court ruling in Washington state a decade or so ago that said the state government has to fund schools and that school districts and cities are forbidden from raising more than a pittance of additional funding for teachers and academic activities.
This was good for the first few years, all schools in the state finally became fully funded, not just the schools in rich areas, but recently the state has been underfunding schools and now every major school district in the state is having financial problems.
In our public school, there are multiple math classes already with people randomly assigned to one of them, and both advanced and regular classes are taught by the same teachers. So there is very little extra cost to have more advanced math classes - shuffle kids around and allow teachers to teach one of the classes faster. And yet we only one advanced half-class, despite dozens of students wanting to go there.
Why? Our school management is explicitly against that. I've talked to them directly, and they admitted that they are very much against any "out of the grade" behavior, the teachers are not allowed to give more advanced material. It was all in the name of equity of course.
Seattle used to have one of the nation's best gifted programs. Back in the 90s it was ran in a racist fashion, gifted schools only existed in wealthy neighborhoods and poor and minority families had to fight like hell to get kids into the gifted program.
The easy solution was to offer gifted classes in schools throughout the city, and to offer free gifted program testing to all students in the district.
Washington state actually recently passed the later into law, all students can get tested for free during the school day, removing one large barrier to entry. The law was passed just in time for the Seattle School District to dismantle the city's gifted program.
On top of this, the city got rid of their bussing program, moving back to a neighborhood schools model. While this saved the district money on bussing, it is also a return to a racist system that was dismantled for good reason generations ago. Is it actual segregation? No, but you don't have to squint very hard to see how it looks awfully similar...
> But it's not because of some drive for 'equity'. I've talked with teachers (as friends, not in a school setting).
The school board's removal of the gifted resources was driven by "equity".
That "equity" drive has also seen the test scores of disadvantaged minority students continue to decline. Not only that, now the kids who have a real opportunity to escape generational poverty, are no longer being given those resources.
I say this as a kid who grew up in Seattle in the 90s to a family that was working class poor, and as someone who benefited immensely from Seattle's once great gifted program.
Better would have been to let the faster person learn something else tangentially related to the course so that they stay engaged but they don't disengage because they're simply ahead of the rest of the class on the next topic - which is just frustrating for everybody.
Alternatives exist for self-directed study and the tutorial system but that's presumably not what they're building for.
At high school and more so in universities, there are distinct classes at different levels, and prerequisites for those classes, and students at different levels. Bring that system to all grades, rather than just having "age N = grade X" as one giant class with pressure for uniformity.
If content someday emphasizes science as a richly interwoven tapestry, and heavily leverages implicit curriculum, this might become straightforward. The chemistry problem, that's also implicitly teaching cellular biology and supply chain dynamics, enables tangents on those too. The K-2 intro mittens, with tangents on thermal budgets, and spacesuit dexterity limitations, and winter camping clothing 101, and knitting how to, and so much more.
If OP regrets our handling of current curriculum, there's seemingly an enormous additional level of despair available, in education's profoundly impoverished opaque window into the beauty of the world.
Do you spend money (mostly) on bringing kids up to average, and any kid average or above average basically stays where they are, as far as the school's efforts are concerned?
Do you spend equally per child, aiming to uplift each of them by the same amount?
...
Many options. Equity is the first one.
The examples I've seen, in New York, Seattle, and LA, all cited equity as the reason.
Edit: I'm responding here to the comment "It's easier to keep the top kids down than it is to lift the bottom kids up."
> It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating. .... Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade
This sentiment that "they shouldn't be" learning advanced things is not an equity argument—it's probably the kids' OWN parents complaining! I certainly agree that the equity-based shutdowns in highly-progressive cities are a problem, but that's really a very limited case; this thread is really about an entirely different phenomenon.
Yes, some of these were shut down. It wasn't because of "equity". It was because of something called "budget cuts."
"NYC to eliminate gifted and talented school program that opponents say segregated students"
"this new, equitable model"
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/08/us/new-york-gifted-and-talent...
And indeed, the CNN article is the only actual reporting claiming that NYC was eliminating this program.
You would think that something of this magnitude would have been reported in the hometown paper if it were true...But the NYT reports that NYC actually expanded the program by over 1100 seats...(https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/nyregion/nyc-gifted-talen...)
"instead implement an accelerated instructional model in Fall of 2022 that will serve all approximately 65,000 kindergartners"
"Officials plan to train all 4,000 kindergarten teachers in this accelerated learning instruction"
When a classmate at the same age is covering material that someone else did three years ago, you will get the tension from both sides, in the same way that it's not all that great socially to be on a traditional school and take classes 3 years ahead.
This issue disappears with all adult students, but around puberty, we are short tools whenever we don't have large enough cadres that we can just put all the kids fast at a given class all together.
This is why parents are unhappy: it's OK to skip most math classes entirely and only do state-mandated minimum... but skipping _basic_ math classes and jumping straight to advanced ones is not allowed.
It sort of "fits" but it just doesn't explain very much on its own
But one should understand what that term means before doing so.
This seems quite the opposite - promoting mandatory equality (equality of outputs in fact) rather than equity (which would explicitly account for giving students different paces to learn at, and grade accordingly)
There are plenty of problems with the US education system -- among them this typically SV $$$-eyed idea that "tech solves everything" -- but investments to raise up the educational standards of low-income or underserved communities is not one of them.
Finland has one of the most equitable societies in the world.
This means the amount of effort it takes to "raise up" a poor kid in Finland to have the same resources as a well to do kid is much less than it is in America.
> but investments to raise up the educational standards of low-income or underserved communities is not one of them.
School districts cannot solve structural issues within American society, but we expect them too.
If kids are starving, or being beaten, or otherwise abused, the teachers get judged if those students do poorly on standardized tests.
The problem is kids who don't get enough to eat, the problem is that there are kids who stay awake at night scared for their lives.
But as a society we've chosen to ignore all of that and worry about test scores instead.
The gatekeeping element seems to have developed in tandem with / response to the signalling hypothesis [1]. Simply put, if kids are trying to do the minimum necessary to get by, we raise the bar on the minimum standard until we're satisfied. Teachers (K-12 at least) respond with grade inflation, adding lots of noise to the signal, and we in turn respond with standardized testing in an attempt to clean up the noise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
Only wealthy parents can afford to do that, while everyone else is stuck with whatever their local school offers or doesn't offer. This perpetuates generational inequalities in ways that the public school system is supposed to solve, all in the name of "leaving no child behind".
Instead of handicapping those who are ahead, we should intervene with those who are falling behind. Instead of enforcing equal outcomes, instead prioritize offering equal opportunity for every student to get the highest quality of education.
I don't think it's an issue of a person's politics, Republicans tried the exact same thing with No Child Left Behind. Is the more important thing the individual rising to their highest potential, or is the more important thing the system where economic factors have created a cycle where only children of middle-class or better families are given the environment to rise and those kids run with the flywheel and become the middle-class parents.
I was literally never not going to be successful, I think I'm reasonably intelligent but that by far wasn't the biggest factor. My parents made damn sure I was on the gifted track, always got A's, and was set up to get into an in-demand major at a prestigious university. Was I actually that special or was I just the chosen one, in that I was chosen?
You can only be like "that's not true of everyone <anecdote>" but the exceptions fall away in the aggregate where your success is frighteningly well predicted by your zip code.
The top-level-commenter's point is that this is not necessarily the case anymore—the whole promise of educational technology was that we could finally scale individual intervention to every child, but efforts to do so have met with stiff resistance. I also work in EdTech and I've seen exactly what the OP is talking about.
We're at the point where we could extend the flywheel to more children than ever by integrating it into the public school systems instead of having it be something that upper-middle class parents have to provide as a supplement, but the culture has so thoroughly embraced the idea that "getting ahead" is unfair that we're not allowed to systematize it even when doing so would benefit poor students the most.
I'm curious what exactly this "unfair"ness is. (I'm being genuine, my partner works in EdTech but I don't and I have very little idea what happens behind the scenes.) My impression in my low-income school was that the parents barely had any idea what was going on and if anything pressured their kids to leave school asap so they could get jobs and bring money home.
The question is: do you help more folks graduate or do you help the 5% of stars succeed? I don't think it's as easy a choice as you make it out to be once you stop identifying with the gifted students (this is my primary annoyance with HN comments about most topics these days: it's just the commenter opining about themselves, disinterested in taking a systemic view on the issue).
I think you may have interpreted my use of the word "equity" to mean something along the lines of "woke", but I meant it in the strictest sense: The red tape that OP is talking about was put in place in the name of ensuring equal opportunities for all children, but has actually accomplished the opposite.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42110149
The crutch isn't the EdTech itself. The numerous examples regarding WGU's success for some self-driven training here suffices to suggest the tech isn't the issue.
It's the metrics required as part of legislation such as NCLB that effectively bind administrations to ensure adherence to a common curriculum, regardless of capacity or competence.
This effectively imposes Goodhart's law, since the only way to meet these measures on scale is to teach to the test, and only the test.
This ensures that no actual deep learning occurs for those falling back, while hamstringing those who master the subject matter early since there is no mechanism for rewarding early mastery.
Not true. AP courses and magnet schools are the sole way for working class/poor students to get ahead in life in the public school system. Myself and many friends took advantage of this, and zero had wealthy parents. Many had food scarcity levels of poverty at home but received excellent educations due to these programs existing.
Heck, private schools also participated in this - giving out test and grade based scholarship for exceptional students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds. Many friends participated in such programs, even to the point of working "jobs" for the school after classes to pay for their education. This is now seen as abusive to many.
The ironic and incredibly frustrating thing are now these programs are being systematically dismantled over the past 20 years in the name of "equity" with these trends only accelerating.
The one thing it DOES require is parents who care and give a shit about their kids. I suppose if you squint that's a form of wealth, but not what people mean when they talk about such topics.
The reason parents look for extra lessons is because most schools can’t challenge students because they group too many students of varying intelligence and interest level into the same class. My public school district does 1 on 1 mentors for students, but only if they score higher than ~144 on an IQ test in grade 2 or 3, which is ridiculous, but these students do get that extra challenge and support with no extra cost. Schools need smaller cohorts to best support kids of all levels, and we’ll continue to fail the majority of kids until we reorganize our schools.
My advanced class placement started far earlier than high school. 5th grade is when I recall being put into the advanced track along with others of demonstrated ability. I'd say from my memory maybe 1/3rd of those students could be described as wealthy by any sort of the word. But they'd be more middle class vs. working class in retrospect. They just seemed wealthy in comparison at the time.
The one thing that had near 100% correlation was highly involved parents - even if they were single moms who never had time to be directly involved. All the kids were held accountable at home. I never had outside tutoring, and few of my peers did either. It was all in-school education, where we were removed from normal classes for a few subjects but otherwise part of our grade level for everything else like social studies or gym. Plenty of time spent with said friends at various houses doing homework together though.
I totally agree this needs to happen at a very young age. I was able to test out of the public high school in 10th grade due to being tracked the way I was in grade school and junior high. High school due to no advanced courses being available was an utter waste of time. Those programs that got me there have now been long-removed in the name of equity. This is the one political topic I will speak out on, since it's outright evil what we are doing kids in the name of fairness.
You really couldn't come up with a better plan to cripple a society than what we are doing to public education.
We're well off enough to provide what he needs, but we're also painfully aware that the public school system is not going to and that most people don't have the means to do what we can do for him. I agree that that's a new trend and not something that has always been true of public education in the US.
> Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth.
This is the behavior that I'm referring to. I'm not talking about political fights about what goes into the curriculum in the first place, I'm talking specifically about efforts to keep children from getting ahead along whatever the curriculum is already defined to include.
I never understood the rationale behind these progressives. Don't they have kids? Don't they know even twins may perform differently in school? I have two kids. They are only 1 year apart. They can access any educational materials as they want. Even if their school teachers were not good (they are very good, by the way), the kids would have access to excellent private teachers and tutoring. Yet, one handles maths with ease and has jumped three grades without even trying, but on the other hand does not like reading or writing. The other can barely keep up and I spend enormous amount of time just to make sure he can understand the fundamentals, but on the other hand he loved reading and is creative in writing.
Equity my ass.
I think it's sort of natural for teachers to view kids that are both too behind or too ahead as "problems". In both cases, there is an indication they've failed, and no one likes that.
What do you think is behind the threats? Do the teachers fear being replaced or is it coming from a different set of people?
OK but we've known this since, when, the 60s? Look at all the academic research on the adoption (or lack thereof) of programmed instruction, programmed learning, etc.
If we didn't already know this before the "EdTech Revolution" then of course the industry would get a pass, but the fact that we already knew what would happen and why is what makes it a scam.
This is only truly possible if we trust educators enough to allow them to use a different approach with a child. The system we have has leaned heavily toward “trust nothing”. Parents and teachers all want the best for their students but at the same time we demand that everyone stick to the prescribed curriculum lest something unapproved should enter a classroom. This is how you get “McDonalds” results: Consistent and maybe somewhat average overall.
I remember having to painfully sit through multi-hour presentations in which they'd explain how to use a hamburger menu to find the app settings, and half the participants furiously scribbled down notes so they wouldn't get lost later when they needed to find the settings without guidance, on their home computer.
This was only a decade ago and I doubt it's much better now. People who go into teaching aren't exactly the best & brightest most of the time. And the results speak for themselves.
not a teacher nor related to but i heard around 400 hours of pedagogy podcasts, be it the science of it, small-talk about teaching & sometimes edtech software that seriously, most of the time just sounded as apps coming from the next guy trying to be the next silicon money maker by offering what Google Docs offers but in a fancy app or in the most complex cases, what Matrix/Discord offers for free or what Emacs org-mode could accomplish without diving far from the basics it provides. there was good apps & often these were backed/based by novel & evidence based ways of teaching
What are the good apps? In what direction do you think educational software should go?
i never liked school and actually what made avoid it as much as possible (to the point i proposed to my parents to work as a minor apprentice in the construction field because my plans were to quit school) was a 8° grade math teacher saying after my question about why that formula came to be, something like "you need a university degree at least to understand this"; so a neat direction i would like to see education taking is slowing down the amount of stuff we throw at students throat... maybe emotional intelligence/awareness, cooperative behavior (like knowing how to give someone a good feedback) & tech literacy! would be so cool if more people had the basic knowledge of getting some Arduino/ESP32 libraries at Github and hooking up into a board for small things, like a paddle Atari controller or just a cute LED thing as adornment/gift for a loved one (which i think to do that, lots of concepts can be taught); as well critical thinking so we don't have people lured to modern bullshit, like "buying this new fancy iPhone meanwhile i don't even understand what a shutter or aperture control serves, nor i use apps fancier than iMessage and Instagram" etc.
We built a product specifically for student-centric work where educators could assess student progress (think Hattie's Visible Learning and similar lines of thinking) and compare student growth against their own previous work. We encouraged educators to quickly tailor the tasks to individual student needs.
Educators (and pedagogues) loved it. But we couldn't gain traction with the buyer persona: Administrators asking "what's in it for me?" Data on improved outcomes wouldn't be immediate, so it was a no buy.
This was exacerbated by Google and Microsoft giving away their office productivity suites repackaged as classroom tools to ensure future market capture. Because you totally want your 8-year-old becoming a Word or Docs or Excel expert right?
So yeah, we have a reality where students don't have really great EdTech—they have tech that's masquerading as EdTech, picking up all the low-hanging fruit and leaving the hard problems of education unsolved (or unexplored).
The company is in the process of folding, and I'm hoping to re-release the software as true open source sometime in the future once all the legal / corporate shutdown stuff is finished.
as a parent I find it confusing that I'd consider getting upset if my kid was learning 6th grade history as a 3rd grader (or 2nd grade art as a 3rd grader). what actual examples are there?
the only examples of parents being upset about learning I'm aware of lately is, like, critical theory and marxism
But sex ed and the like is definitely something that gets parents upset, as is the general concept of "they're teaching my child things they're not telling me about", whether that's critical theory, sex ed, evolution, or anything with the word gender in it.
Others have given their own experiences in this thread -- some teachers are encouraging, others get frustrated.
A charitable way to read what you are saying is, "kids are not sufficiently challenged in school." But you are railing against an antagonist that is kind of vague. What, specifically, are you talking about?
are you US based?
so of the Nordic countries have implementing thins similar to what you describe as their normal form of education
There was a 4 year cap up through the 8th grade (so I was a 4th grader attending 8th grade English, math and science classes), and after that, the cap was lifted and students could begin taking college courses in 8th grade --- some of the teachers were accredited as faculty at a nearby college, and if need be, arrangements were made for students to travel to the college, or professors from there to travel to the school.
It was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and simultaneously be awarded a 4 year college degree.
Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court declared the system illegal because it conferred an unseemly advantage on the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no equivalent compensation for students who were not.
The State Supreme Court stuff is my hazy recollection of letters my parents received from other folks who were still living there when the school system was changed.
There were debates about whether military children attending base schools were receiving benefits not available to children in the local civilian school systems. This issue could have come up in various ways, such as in cases where military dependents might have access to college-level classes or subsidized education while local students did not.Meanwhile private school...
Its all crabs in a bucket. Instead of suggesting that more schools do this to boost education, let's tear town the successful ones and pretend we're a meritocracy.
The problem is that people who succeed in tech are able to effectively educate themselves, alone, without a dedicated human teacher supervising them or a group of student peers. (You need this skill to succeed in tech, learning new APIs/languages from written materials and online videos.)
The techies who build/fund EdTech wrongly assume that everyone could do this if only they had access to the learning materials, or if the tech vaguely simulated a teacher (an interactive textbook).
But for most students, fitting in with peers and earning the respect of their teacher is the only reason they're bothering to learn at all.
(For kids especially, adult career prospects feel so remote that it scarcely seems worth the trouble, whereas earning respect right now is a very, very concrete problem!)
Banding kids into grades is the only thing making most kids succeed. I guess that is a "crying shame," but it's a tragedy, not a policy failure.
Everyone could do it if they were taught to teach themselves, it's funny we've almost come full circle back to the original intention of public education and universities.
I believe (almost) everyone can teach themselves something provided they have the material to learn from (videos, books, teachers, etc.).
This is because if people can't truly be taught to teach themselves there's no larger point in schooling unless you have only exceptional teachers throughout. Mediocre and bad teachers, which are far more common, make it so students end up having to teach parts of the material to themselves (which unfortunately leads to a tonne of rote memorisation) - this to me is where the true benefit of public education and standardised testing is, not the information retained.
The point of school was never fill our heads with facts we will never use in the workforce - most blue collar work is learnt on the job (or can be taught in short time), and white collar work is (generally*) done by those who learnt to teach themselves (as proved by them earning something like a college degree in spite of the bad and mediocre teachers).
* I say generally because there are white collar jobs that don't require it. And there are rote-memorisers who have such good memory they can make it into these positions, generally though upon hitting the workforce they stagnate, leave, or learn to learn (ever had an incompetent middle manager who only knew how to follow procedure?)
Not by magic, though. Those who take an interest in tech are forced to learn how to educate themselves in order to fulfill their interest in tech. The same story applies to many other interests. Of course, it is possible one will never develop any interests...
> But for most students, fitting in with peers and earning the respect of their teacher is the only reason they're bothering to learn at all.
But is socialization the only thing most children can take an interest in, or does sticking children in these rigid school environments take away from them discovering other interests? In other words, is this just a symptom of them being in the wrong environment, rather than the nature if it?
Furthermore, if socialization really is the only interest, why can't it still be used to force learning how to educate oneself? If fitting in and admiration are a compelling reason to learn in general, why would it not be equally compelling towards learning how to learn?
> Banding kids into grades is the only thing making most kids succeed.
Of course, that questions if most kids should succeed. What for? Being from the most educated region in the most educated nation, it's not clear what we actually get for it. The popular tropes don't hold up. Other parts of the world are much more progressive, economically vibrant, healthier, etc. It is hardly the worst place in the world, but a relative backwater compared to other much less educated places.
You don't have to go back many generations to find populations not exposed to much, if any, formal education and they don't seem to have ended up any worse off than the average person today. I expect there is a strong case to be made that people with a vision can leverage educational resources as a force multiplier to propel themselves well beyond what those earlier generations could have ever dreamed of been capable of, but for the average Joe just trying to fit in...? Perhaps we are missing the forest for the trees.
I'm just saying age is an arbitrary indicator for every category I can think of, and most situations would benefit from using a more relevant metric. In situations where size matters the most, let the huge 10yo play with the 11 or 12yos and the tiny one be with the 8 or 9yos. When I was 11, for safety reasons my karate instructor had me start training with the adult women who were closer to my size. In situations where intellectual ability is the relevant factor, you might have even a broader reach. If my parents hadn't refused, my kindergarten principal wanted to have me in 3rd grade by the end of my first year and doing two a year after that. Sitting through 13 full years of classroom instruction instead of 5 or 6 was miserable. Somebody you share interests with might happily overlook the fact that you're a couple years younger and still want to be friends. It's at least more likely than that someone will overlook the fact that you have absolutely nothing in common because, hey, you were born within a couple months of each other!
It seems like it is possible - probably enough people on this thread could make that investment
If all children do not perform roughly the same, ideologues will not think that people have naturally different talents and abilities, but instead think there are implied violations of laws protecting against discrimination in education. That being said, I'm sure homeschoolers and people not indoctrinated, even those with lesser abilities, will really appreciate this approach.
I my experience, I can give material that is way out of their comfort zone, but it's my job to make it interesting enough and make enough bridges so that everyone can learn the material well, no matter the starting point.
(note: university level, but I also teached numerous times for schools)
So when they have an app with for example a qcm in front of them, the first times they try to do well, then they learn that if they randomely click buttons, at some point the app validate the answer, even if they didn't read the questions/answers.
So you get a group of young people that after school, just spend 10min randomely clicking on a app without any purpose, and after that they can go play.
I've got students that were from a private school, everyone was doing that, and their level was extremely bad.
I cannot help but think that we shouldn't be forcing kids to learn if they don't want to learn -- and rather than try to force every kid to be "grade level", we should go back to 1-room schoolhouses (for elementary levels, at least) and teach each student at their own pace.
All of which because they uniquely used tablets and qcm for all their work. This was a general issue with their capacity of concentration, memorization, and overall learning.
They were able to understand a simple concept, for example symmetries of objects, after a lot of work, but forget about it the following day. I helped them through some years. They are doing better now.. But they didn't catch up what they should be able to do as functioning adults.
If you don't teach to a child to study, he will never do it, studying is not fun per se, if it's not motivated, the random probability that one does it alone is extremely small, and even then. You fail him for not providing him a good education.
Now I hear you, you are talking about preschool and, clearly I think that prematurely forcing them to study has no purpose, they should start studying when they are ready to it, but we do not have a way to know when it is.
I'm on the camp of making study as fun as possible, not by creating random games around the work, but instead by providing lot of context and unexpected examples that motivate the creation of the theory. In this way, I think education can start pretty soon.
I like to have my student study because they are intrigued instead of having them study because they 'need to'. Which is counterproductive no matter the age.
That problem is that parents who want to expose their children to more knowledge and better education have no voice -- of any kind. A small group of parents objecting to something violating their niche belief will absolutely nullify the voices of any number of parents thinking otherwise.
There needs to be greater ability on the part of educational organizations to be able to parse the unencumbered learners from these minority case.
So brutal. Thanks for doing what you can.
The best way to move an "average" is to improve the big mass slightly below average.
The worst off and best off are too small to affect the average--so nobody cares about them. QED.
The problem is that ed-tech is being shoehorned into an existing dysfunctional system. It's trying to help the education system do more of what it was already doing, just with computers.
The underlying problem is that the structure of the education system is absolutely stupid and shit. We've just been so used to that for so long that we don't notice it anymore.
If schooling was good, ed-tech would be a big enabler of that, helping students learn at their own pace, guiding their coursework in the right direction, linking it to career paths, all kinds of things.
But currently ed-tech is just enabling and feeding more of the same slop, just digital instead of paper. That's the problem.
But I can understand it from the teacher's perspective too; They have 30 kids, no extra budget and few resources. They have 20 or so average kids, and a handful of stragglers and a handful of people out in front, and are trying to meet ALL of their needs. Any of those three groups could use up all the time on a specific topic, so you end up stealing some time from one to deal with the others. If there are good monitoring from EdTech software it can help, but lots of teachers are not super techie so things have to be approachable.
It's definitely a space with more nuance and certainly more potential.
This is an issue that started to bother me while in high school, or perhaps even in junior high, and have realized over the years that people learn at different rates, that what should matter is knowledge and mastery and not grades, and that a failure in a class or several shouldn't be permanently incorporated into a "GPA" that also doesn't really capture the true essence of someone's knowledge and mastery.
In the past year, I have been learning a lot about autism and ADHD -- in no small part because I have come to realize I have both -- and I cannot help but come to the conclusion that regardless of why an individual student is different -- whether it be autism, ADHD, life-event-driven depression (eg from a death in the family or a divorce), or high or low or late-blooming intelligence, or even mere boredom that needs to be overcome by the "right spark" -- the school system as currently instituted can handle none of this -- and what's worse, any student who cannot conform to this, even if temporarily, is permanently considered flawed somehow.
There are too many profitable incentives to poor education that are conspiring to perpetuate it. An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable. Power generally resides with those who benefit from an ill-educated populace, so anything that would actually help educate children and people at large is discouraged.
I'll repeat what others have said here. Giving teachers the means with which to properly work with their students, and investing in students at a more individual level, is what's needed. Sadly, my refrain with regards to public education is that is has become little more than glorified babysitting. Those that succeed do so in spite of the system, and not because of it. Meanwhile, students that suffer from one or more disadvantagements (poverty, disability, social issues, mental or physical health issues, and so much more) tend to just...suffer more. And then they fall into cycles where preventable issues repeat or enhance into the next generation. They'll still spend all of their little income excessively, so profit is still to be had, or they'll end-up in prison, which, again, thanks to privatization, is also immensely profitable, so no problem there, right?
The system is setup to fail because that's what's profitable in the long run for those seeking such profits. And because they can lobby, and use their wealth to influence politics, it won't change. Something else needs to happen first.
Tho I’m no history buff. Maybe some civilization had really great public schools? Designating only a small portion of your population as True Pure Citizens does tend to help with stuff like that
I want to believe this but I can't honestly imagine someone actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.
As for actively misinforming poor people, that is the day job (campaigning) for countless politicians, who usually spend less than half their time drafting or voting on legislation.
I'm reminded of the quote
> “No one involved in an extralegal activity thinks of themselves as nefarious. I'm a businessman, okay?" - Quark, DS9 S6E25
I don't believe anyone nefariously sits there and says "lets make sure people aren't educated" but I genuinely believe there are people who say "I did this thing and people keep voting me in to keep doing that thing or keep paying me to do that thing, so I'm going to continue doing it that way"
Populism is exactly this - misinforming poorly educated people with bad scary words, "others", "easy" fixes.
> Inflation is bad! Crime is bad! We'll just deport 20 million "others" and everything will be allright!
Or:
> Let's send all the money we're spending on the EU on the NHS, 350 million pounds per week more for the National Health Service!
In some countries, like the US, there are active efforts to sabotage education, or at least cripple it - by reducing funding to a point where educators have to spend their own money for supplies, get burned out, have poverty-level wages, etc. Those can't be accidental.
Just curious, how would you describe the motivations of a stereotypical sleazy car salesman offering predatory loan rates: A hard working person doing what they need to do to survive, or a con artist trying to find more victims? Only one of those choices represents reality, and you should really be wary of anyone who would suggest the other choice.
To expand this more globally - anything that requires human interaction fails at scale. Healthcare, trade skills, education, housing, etc. is all "failing" to some degree no matter how much technology we throw at it. The costs continually go up and the value isn't paired to it.
A market relies on the participants having visibility and ability. They need to see the alternatives, understand them deeply, and have access to them. Turns out you can't do that in a bunch of markets, education being one of them. So, it can never be a true free market.
There is a strong tendency to recognize "market failure" as a problem -- but it is rather rare to see people discuss "regulatory failure". Yet there is this endless cycle of increasing regulation, where a politician or bureaucrat identifies a problem with the market -- real or imagined -- and then offers a solution. That solution the situation even worse, but politicians and bureaucrats will blame this on "market failure", and then insist on another solution ... and so it goes.
Yes, it's true that some regulation is necessary. But how much effort is put into place to make sure that the regulations put in place do what they are supposed to do? What effort is put into place to identify the nasty side effects of otherwise good regulations? The assumption that all regulations exist because the alternative is worse is deeply flawed.
And that's even before we get into the fact that regulations have their limits: people can handle only so many rules, particularly if they are onerous, and will start ignoring regulations when it's the only way to get things done. An example of this is a report from the FAA, where they identified around 2,000 pilots who didn't report disqualifying health conditions. Why? Because the conditions were quickly resolved, and their livelihoods depended on flying, so they didn't want to go through the hassle of waiting three months for their license to fly to be cleared again. What's worse, of the 2,000 or so pilots who did this, only 4 or so had serious-enough conditions that they shouldn't have been flying!
Yes.
> There's evidence that Colonial/Revolutionary-Era American populace was highly educated
I've never seen this evidence, but to speculate: probably since the colonist were, well, colonists, and literally building every industry from the ground up, they had to be.
After this though, in the 19th century, we knew most people could not read or write.
> an education system designed to produce loyal soldiers and interchangeable worker widgets
True, but worker widgets who can read.
> There is a strong tendency to recognize "market failure" as a problem -- but it is rather rare to see people discuss "regulatory failure"
I experience the opposite, but granted I live in Texas. The default mode is regulations are bad, and the less the better.
> The assumption that all regulations exist because the alternative is worse is deeply flawed
It's not an assumption, it's an observation. When it comes to education and others.
The thing is the free market relies on there being a free market. Not every market can be a free market. That's a problem. I've already explained how education can never be a free market above, but another example is healthcare. I can't compete in healthcare because of the HUGE time investment in schooling. I also have zero choice as a consumer - I just go to the nearest hospital. There's also no visibility in price because you have to diagnose me first, and that can be wrong or things can pop up later.
Healthcare is not, and will never be, a free market. Even now the US has a largely socialized healthcare system, it just so happens to be the worst socialized healthcare system. Primarily because we've handed it off to the private sector, who have incentives to actually make it worse. Meaning, insurance thrives when you receive less care. The inefficiency is built into the profit motive, and you can't get around it.
I would strongly recommend looking into John Taylor Gatto's "An Underground History of American Education", at least as a starting point. Indeed, that is where I learned that a literacy drop between WWI and WWII raised eyebrows, but when it came to the Vietnam era, the Army had to investigate "How can so many people fake illiteracy?" and found that the answer was "They aren't faking it."
> After this though, in the 19th century, we knew most people could not read or write.
Now it's your turn: I'd like to see your evidence for this.
> True, but worker widgets who can read.
That's assuming that everyone (including educators and politicians) think reading is important.
>> There is a strong tendency to recognize "market failure" as a problem -- but it is rather rare to see people discuss "regulatory failure"
> I experience the opposite, but granted I live in Texas. The default mode is regulations are bad, and the less the better.
Have you considered the possibility that what is happening in Texas is an attempt to recognize harmful regulations, and weed them out so that people can have more freedom to function?
>> The assumption that all regulations exist because the alternative is worse is deeply flawed
> It's not an assumption, it's an observation. When it comes to education and others.
I cannot help but worry that your observations are cherry-picked. There's plenty of regulatory fail to observe for the few who look to observe it.
> The thing is the free market relies on there being a free market. Not every market can be a free market. That's a problem. I've already explained how education can never be a free market above, [ed: I can't find that explanation] but another example is healthcare. I can't compete in healthcare because of the HUGE time investment in schooling. I also have zero choice as a consumer - I just go to the nearest hospital. There's also no visibility in price because you have to diagnose me first, and that can be wrong or things can pop up later.
> Healthcare is not, and will never be, a free market. Even now the US has a largely socialized healthcare system, it just so happens to be the worst socialized healthcare system. Primarily because we've handed it off to the private sector, who have incentives to actually make it worse. Meaning, insurance thrives when you receive less care. The inefficiency is built into the profit motive, and you can't get around it.
I have both experienced and seen what health care in Great Britain is like, and based on the statistics I hav come across over time, to this day, to suggest Great Britain's health care is better than America's is a big stretch. Something similar can be said of Canadian health care (Pittsburg, PA, has more MRI machines than all of Canada!), and certainly, Cuba's awful health care system should be considered "socialized". To the degree that American health care is better than these systems, it's largely because of the private aspects of it -- and what's worse, to the degree that it's harmful, it is because of government regulations that kill competition. How is it that the law requires that I have the freedom to choose where I want my car repaired, but that I must find an "in-network" doctor? Why can I purchase auto insurance from any company in any State, but I must have insurance sold in my home State? How the heck are these specific kinds of restrictions supposed to make health care better?!?
Many of the concerns you gave about health care apply to the car repair market too -- both in terms of insurance and in terms of car repairs and maintenance. Why is it that mostly-privatized car repair is market-friendly, but health care is not?
Conservatives, in the past few years, have fallen into a new sphere of lunacy. Anti-vaccine, anti-education, anti-workplace safety, anti-everything.
I don't have the patience to stamp out every single opposition people come up with.
To me, the "problem" that you, and others, have with education is that the government is involved. Sorry, that is not an argument. Just as blindly supporting something makes one a sheep, blindly opposing something also makes someone a sheep.
Our education is as successful as it is due to our government, and that is not up for debate. I've already explained the problem with free markets and why some services, such as healthcare and education, do not apply to a market and literally cannot.
As a thought experiment, consider what makes a free market a free market. Now consider the feasibility of implementing that into healthcare and education (hint: impossible). Now, assume it is possible, and consider the consequences of it. How many millions of people would need to die before you start caring?
As for free market health care and education: Are they really impossible, though? And if it's "purely" impossible, is it really impossible to introduce some fundamental free-market reforms, like school choice, or the ability to choose your own doctor?
As for "government-run education being successful" -- ever since I started school in the 1980s, government-run schools have been in crisis mode -- indeed, it's what's led to things like the Department of Education and No Child Left Behind. What's more, there is no evidence things are improving, and plenty of evidence that it's been degrading over time.
How many children's futures are you willing to cut off at the kneecaps until you finally admit that government education, particularly in the United States, has serious problems?
What do you mean by "fails"? It doesn't have the zero-marginal-cost dynamic favored by the investor class of the tech industry?
Don't confuse "you can't scale human interactions" with "human interaction fails at scale". The former is talking about the venture-capital-accelerated winner-takes-all business strategy, the latter is a misunderstanding of civil societies and living a rewarding life because you can only envision such things through the lens of owning a zero-marginal-cost process.
Who installs pipes, builds walls, installs electrical conduits? Humans.
> just collect rent checks from tenants in a pretty hand-off manner
Dwellings still require regular power, heat, security, support and regular maintenance. Those all require human beings.
- higher income people spend more money. The middle and upper class is by far the largest market and source of tax revenue.
- poverty generally turns areas into low trust higher theft spots that need expensive security.
- high income places generally have good public schools because a majority do know how important education is
- this requires a pretty vast conspiracy of people saying “keep people dumb so we can profit”, which I haven’t heard of at all
I think the much simpler explanation is that there is no accountability for inept pockets in the education system. Schools can’t really be punished for sucking and parents can’t move their kids in most states without just switching to private. There is no feedback loop for broken schools.
This is a reactionary take.
Math, science, and basic language skills do not lead to political upheaval, and are incredibly valuable skills to the capital class. Leadership would be more apt to propagandize social studies and suppress dissent.
China easily comes to mind as a counter argument.
I'd apply Hanlon's razor: education languishes due to poor funding, lack of competition, and low salaries that attract mediocre teachers. We don't even properly fund development for blue collar jobs! Also the problem compounds since one generations students become the next generations teachers.
I mean, cultural revolution was still going on 50 years ago lol
They aren't economic idiots, they just know most American voters mistrust any economic concept more complex than "taxes bad. China bad. jobs good."
Tariffs have pros/cons, as does any other policy proposed by the two candidates. And the most tricky thing when computing the effects of these policies is: "what is the quantity we're trying to optimize for?" - where the "welfare of the people" is not really a measurable thing.
Who exactly are you talking about?
Since babysitting is essentially required in our current social framework, why do we need physical schools with in person teachers. It seems to me that we could have babysitting facilities spread to lots of small commercial spaces with in person babysitters for kids who are doing school on computers with synchronous teachers online.
I realize that the model I’ve laid out here is simplistic, but it would solve so many problems that it seems worthwhile to flesh it out and mitigate the issues.
Very wrong. Education only camouflages stupidity, it does not remove it. And then part of education is indoctrination to trust authority (eg. trust the science).
That said, basic education reading/writing/simple math/science is indeed valuable.
You are arguing that low intelligence is innate, unchangeable. Which sounds very much like saying stupidity is genetic.
Why, do think otherwise?
Everyone has to live and grow within unjust societies. Some groups will suffer from racism, others may benefit. So it's going to be hard to prove much of anything without a lot of twins and decades of natural experiments.
The eugenics movements and Nazi experiments have also made the whole subject taboo.
Finally IQ is quite arbitrary and the tests evolve over time too.
I know this.
>Finally IQ is quite arbitrary and the tests evolve over time too.
The IQ test may be flawed, but is the concept flawed?
Can you see any downside in not acknowledging differing intelligence among individuals?
(we know the downside of acknowledging it - right from the Natzis, to individuals who may not try hard enough to achieve something)
And oh well - there are both twin studying and studies on kid adopted by their non-biological parent. Given the taboo, it may not be easy to find them.
Hmm... not quite... ( 2 different things with overlaps, and remember I never used the term genetic)
>there's now substantial evidence in the other direction.
Links, please. ( would be surprised if it overturned all past observations)
Innate: Albino kid born to black parents ( mutation, etc..) So here Albinism is innate to kid but not inherited.
That's a black and white definition ( for the sake of conversation). There can be intermediate states. For example even if the kid's skin is black there can be variation in skin tone, so slight mutation, but still largely inherited.
tptacek , I'm not sure why you are hung up so much on the specifics, haven't we veer well past the main topic? My getting the definition of heritability, innateness etc. in this should not matter beyond a certain point. I understand that if we were experts debating a certain tropic definitions matter. Quirks , physical trait, depression, mental illnesses, and by extension IQ would run in families, this was common knowledge in the pre-modern era. ( and probably is still so in many parts of the an on urbanized world). Ofcourse one has to separate out the external factors like common food habits (that was common to these families) would impact psychological traits.
If you don't understand what heritability means, (a) you shouldn't be using it to make points about the connections between phenotypical groups of people and their measured IQ, and (b) the links I have for you aren't going to do you any good.
So what term would you use to describe individuals inheriting trait from their parents eg, skin color ? especially the colloquial term.
(and again aren't we veering way off topic?)
Edit/Addendum - I looked at the colloquial definition of heritability/heritable, I think I'm essentially correct: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/heritability , https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/heritable . You need not reply. I have a feeling that our discussion is missing the forest for the trees. (And yes you can have your gotcha moment)
And if I may defend myself most terms with a formal definition start out being used colloquially and later if/when adapted scientifically may have a more nuanced definition. And after it is adapted scientifically the word continues being used colloquially. Isn't it generally assumed that when 2 people talk the colloquial is assumed? Unless they both decided to use the formal definition, or they are both experts in the subjects.
A distant second is the format we used during COVID: writing with a tablet using xournal, and streaming it via zoom (loosely like Khan academy). This is of course only my personal experience/opinion, but also informed by vast amounts of student feedback.
EDIT: I agree with the different perspectives from the responses, and should have qualified that I meant it for subjects one typically learns at a university, like calculus or linear algebra. One-on-one tutoring, self-learning can work even better or complement the above and skills, e.g. playing a musical instrument should be approached totally differently.
We can't expect teachers to provide a good environment for students who are good at self paced learning, and students who need structure in the same classroom. But we might be able to have classrooms that lean one way or another...
Nah. The people expect EdTech to allow children to find their own suitable learning style with only babysitter oversight. But no teacher wants to "demote" themselves to being a babysitter, nor do the administrators want to become seen as running a daycare, so you end up with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42116365.
The best two are self teaching and one to one teaching.
Both are, of course, "boring classical setups" but both can be improved by technology. My daughter had one to one teaching over video in subjects that we would have struggled to find a tutor for locally (classical civilisation, for example). Self teaching is hugely improved by access to more materials - this does not need fancy tech, but just websites and videos can help a lot.
Did she actually allow this kid to disrupt the entire class for 10 minutes? Isn't there a responsibility to all the other students that they should have a reasonable learning environment?
I remember being sent to the office for a lot less than that.
- Schools in nicer areas are sometimes in the middle of some dumbshit half-implemented (the other parts made admin uncomfortable) "discipline plan" that the superintendent got sold on at some damn district-paid drinking vacation away from the family... er, I mean, education conference, which may lead to insane crap like letting a kid scream in the classroom for ten minutes (sending them to the office might get the teacher in trouble for not following the plan). Half-implemented plainly-doomed-to-fail admin-driven plans for discipline, or for education approaches to any or all subject areas, are often a factor in stupid crap schools do.
Don't kids get expelled anymore? How the hell could you feel comfortable sending your kid to a school that is so full of violence? That's crazy.
If not, then your wife's experience doesn't say anything about how well the Little House/Christmas Story model works.
Indeed, I would go so far as to suspect that this is likely a failure of the "integrate kids no matter what, and force them to learn at the exact same pace, no matter what" style of schooling that has become so ubiquitous in modern society.
Personally I feel like my education/learning only really started to take off when resources like EdX and Coursera became available. I did reasonably well at uni but was not motivated with others deciding what I had to learn and when. Lectures tended to be slow paced and often boring, so I zoned out instead of being pulled in (I passed my exams by working through the problem sets in the textbooks, I skipped most lectures).
When I got the ability to play/pause/skip/1.5-2x videos, and when I could choose what subject to learn like a kid in a candy shop, I did start consuming lectures much more aggressively. Still, I think well designed problem sets and assignments actually do the bulk of the work when it comes to learning/teaching, and I regularly skip the lectures and dive right to those.
Not saying that your method doesn't work, or that it shouldn't work for you, but its suitability depends on the topic, the student, and the setting.
I learned math from khan academy, and physics from my textbooks. When I exams were coming up, I would skip every single lecture to read my textbooks and do practice problems.
Did that all the way through physics undergrad, and I never would have graduated via the standard lecture + questions method.
Maybe my professors were mediocre, but I think I’m just not built for classrooms!
I had 14 years of this method and personally, it made me not like any school at all. It makes sense for Math and Grammar, but for most other disciplines (Life Sciences, Geography, Science) I think it's harmful to say at least.
At the time that I got access to Encarta 95 [1] for me was the tipping point that I could explore any topic and navigate until where my curiosity got me.
The missing part of the actual EdTech for me it's that they try to emulate the hiperpassive method of learning of a class with the only difference tgar the people are in the computer.
Now with augmented reality and virtual reality, it's a shame that we still do not have more immersive classes. For instance, would be great to have a class about dinosaurs with some kind of immersion, understand the cell's lifecycle using some VR, see the human body in more specific details, or even learn art via complete immersion.
Beyond that, I find I learn infinitely better by doing than by being lectured to. By being challenged by a set of problems that grow over time.
Beyond that tutoring blows lectures out of the water. I was failing calc e in normal semester, I dropped. My moms bit the bullet and bought me 3 weeks of tutoring over the summer (much shorter semester). I then aced summer calc 3 which is generally much harder. It was amazing how well me being able to guide the lesson to where I was having trouble versus the lecturer keeping on track worked for me. I've learned this lesson as a mentor as well, teaching is for the student, not the teacher.
tl;dr what works for you sucks for me, don't tell me how I learn.
What if a teacher starts telling what the best way to write software for a large codebase that 1000s of engineer contribute to is, based on their experience of writing ten lines of code to some toy problem that teacher once faced.
Think about it. That’s what you just did here. The better thing to do is state your experience as your experience and leave opining on optimal teaching pedagogy to those best equipped to study and understand it, which sure is as well isn’t you
Just like I'll say that spaced repetition seems like a good theory that I'm having trouble (with adhd) putting into practice esp while taking classes and holding down a job. Or that I liked the approach the class took during lectures by talking with a small peer group, but could see that it didn't work for many shy people and seemed to take a lot of lecture time. Overall they were interesting and I'd try them again.
These are my own observations I am not professing to be an expert in education.
> A pre-Covid survey exploring how US students aged 8-18 utilize digital technologies both inside and outside of school provides the answer (values below are per week) ...If we extrapolate and consider a typical U.S. academic school year of 36 weeks, these numbers suggest that students spend 198 hours annually using digital devices for learning purposes, and 2,028 hours annually using those same exact tools to jump around between scatter-shot media content.
It's like arguing that a student who likes reading Harry Potter, or Comic Books 2 hours a night is forming habits against the idea of using books for learning. Students who play games or watch movies are not alcoholics using beer for buoyancy studies.
Not only this, it groups listening to music on a computer as an independent recreation activity, and not something that students will do concurrently with homework or other tasks outside of class, double dipping on recreation hours. As if listening to music isn't a boon for learning, which it easily can be.
> It's like arguing that a student who likes reading Harry Potter, or Comic Books 2 hours a night is forming habits against the idea of using books for learning.
Books are separate objects, they are not a platform. It's saying that if you put a child's homework as a two page insert into a great comic book, the rest of the comic book will distract from the annoying, difficult insert.
The opposing theory is that the proximity of homework to comics will somehow make the homework fun. Homework is going to be hard and annoying no matter what you do, if it's not hard you're not learning anything from it.
I am arguing that thinking that the same object cannot be used in two contexts is incredibly reductive and essentialist. They are stacking the books (by double counting time listening to music etc) to prove the idea that they are insistent on, that computers (which the article generalizes from desktops to chromebooks to iPads to smart watches) are essentially bad for learning, when this is not necessarily the case.
Students will continue to learn using computers, just as I will, because they are ridiculously effective for doing so.
When a person is reading the latter they can't easily switch to HP, but I can do that while learning anything in my computer. It's as easy as doing ctrl + T + red + enter and I get to the infinite entertainment that is Reddit thanks to the browser autocomplete, for example.
Stopping the ability to do ctrl+T+reddit.com also prevents the huge amount of info the rest of the informative internet can provide.
The article also includes smart watches as computers, and personally as a Apple Watch user, the amount that this device can distract is incredibly low, and obvious to viewers like a teacher.
It's true that edtech hasn't (yet) created an educational utopia, as some people may have imagined or hoped. But there are educational technology tools that my son (8yo) uses several times per week, that undoubtedly help him to learn important stuff:
1. Math Academy (truly amazing for 4th grade math all the way to first year of undergrad: https://www.bit.ly/ma-way)
2. Skritter (for learning to write Chinese characters)
3. Anki (flashcard program).
4. Octostudio (for learning to code, by the same folks as MIT Scratch)
#1 and #2 are both much more efficient (learning per unit of time) than any other method I've seen. They (along with #3) use spaced repetition and retrieval practice as part of their secret sauce.
But they are also highly domain-specific. Math Academy relies on thousands of hand-crafted math problems, all designed within a (hand-crafted) graph of topics that students must master. Skritter has tools that give people (adults or children) an easy on-ramp to learning the broad strokes of each character, and more advanced modes that train more precision.
This stuff is so exciting. He dips in and out of HN periodically when the subject comes up.
But I also want to touch on products. Had a startup in the space[0], and we only achieved commercial success once we started gaining customers outside of EdTech.
EdTech is hard, in that it combines enterprise-like sales with scrappy startup-like budgets. On top of that, you're selling to people who are far removed from the user experience (heads of districts vs students and teachers). End result is stuff like Blackboard, who everyone hates, but it's everywhere.
I've seen a ton of interesting, promising startups that tried to engage students and help with learning (in various ways), only to never hear about them again.
I've also seen (& heard from) a lot of teachers with great ideas, who basically need to do grassroots campaigns and teach each other tips & tricks, because they're not really supported by their organizations.
Would you buy (or fly in) a "revolutionary" new jet, that (by the way) hasn't been tested, but it's makers are really hopeful it will be safe and perform better than other jets?
IMHO, changes in education need to be studied for at least ten years, then rolled out slowly with much more skeptical study. First you've got "balanced reading" that de-emphasized phonics and reduced literacy (but I'm sure resulted in massive textbook sales and prestige for a few education academics), and now you've got EdTech screens that have hurt students' learning (but probably made some VCs rich). Implementation's got to slow down until we actually are sure the shit actually works better.
however, this group also had a very hard time learning how to use computers later in their career and felt "wow, this is really hard. we need to be very proactive about teaching this to kids".
it was well intentioned, but i think they really REALLY overestimated the need for 'teaching computer literacy' because: a) we've gotten a lot better with UX so computers are easy to use b) the older generations difficulty was more related to unlearning old ways and transitioning rather than difficulty inherent to computers
> Unfortunately for our Digital Immigrant teachers, the people sitting in their classes grew up on the “twitch speed” of video games and MTV. > They are used to the instantaneity of hypertext, downloaded music, phones in their pockets, a library on their laptops, beamed messages and instant messaging. > They've been networked most or all of their lives. > They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and “tell-test” instruction.
There's a lot more cheerful predictions:
> My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content. > After all, it's an idiom with which most of them are totally familiar.
I think the core fact that learning is fundamentally about curiosity and motivation, not "engagement", was (and continues to be) glossed over, or intentionally ignored by a lot of tech-pushers.
If you have ever been involved with education students doing studies you know that methodology here is the pretty lacking, and it’s hard to consider what could be done better (other than stop pretending these surveys mean anything).
I think we need to stop pretending that there is some magic technique that’s going to 5x performance.
> If you have ever been involved with education students doing studies you know that methodology here is the pretty lacking, and it’s hard to consider what could be done better (other than stop pretending these surveys mean anything).
I don't know exactly what you mean by "surveys," but I thinking the decision should be a default no, and whatever "innovation" is being pushed should get rolled out slowly enough that public debate can nip bad ideas in the bud. I'm specifically thinking of an article I read awhile back where a parent (who knew she was a bad reader) was flabbergasted that her kid was actually being explicitly taught the same bad reading strategies she used as part of a "balanced" reading curriculum.
I under if you had no more than 10% of schools using something like "balanced reading" for 20 years, before it could be rolled out. I'm hoping their underperformance and criticism from parents and dissenting educators could get the idea scrapped before it became the mainstream, saving the students in the other 90% of schools from being harmed by it.
> I think we need to stop pretending that there is some magic technique that’s going to 5x performance.
Yeah, and I think we also need to stop pretending new is better. The idea that kids being subjected to "innovation" may be getting harmed more than they're being helped, needs to be made prominent in these debates.
Typical education studies look at two classrooms/sets of kids, and then compare grades with and without X. It's a mess.
> Yeah, and I think we also need to stop pretending new is better.
Agreed. I think part of the problem is centralized curriculum control. There will always be someone fighting to put in there thing or make a sale.
We could replicate the same blank page and grayscale human response to questions. But then we have not made a cheap factory that reduces costs. Its the typical fast, good, cheap conundrum. Everyone keeps picking cheap and getting mad when it does not work.
Or, almost as bad, kids learning to approximate the answer. I aced too many multiple-choice physics exams in my GCSEs because the multiple choice was A) 1,000,000 B) 1,000 C) 100 D) 10. Without knowing the formula I was able to eyeball which numbers looked obviously wrong and just select the closest.
In fact, I’d go as far as to say I left the exam hall still none the wiser of what the actual formulae were!
IIR, that problem-solving method is called "Fermi estimation" - after the Nobel-prize-winning physicist who was particularly skilled at doing it. Perhaps you're smarter than you give yourself credit for?
A) 1.2e10 B) 1.2e9 C) 2.1e10 D) 2.1e11
As the parent of two kids in elementary and middle school, the one thing we learned from Covid is that children need live teachers. Yes, there are exceptional children who can self-teach with good materials (I have one such child) but most don't. And for those who do, you don't need fancy tech. I supplement my (advanced) child's education and primarily use books and pencils, and live coaching, as I've found those work better than any "adaptive" EdTech I've encountered. Finding it too easy? Just skip pages to the next chapter? Too hard? Find some extra review problems on the topic.
Have you tried Math Academy? From seeing my son using it, I'm guessing it's more effective than live coaching from a median middle school math teacher.
This isn't to say EdTech can't be useful, and my previous comment was perhaps a bit harsh. Khan Academy is great for drilling into specific subjects; my older child (now finished college) used it at home in HS as a supplement and it helped (scored in top 2% nationwide on SAT).
I just don't think EdTech __replaces__ teachers (which is what many edtech-utopians preach), and I'm not even sure it's a good classroom tool, but rather is a useful _supplement_ that allows _some_ students who are interested and good at certain subjects to forge ahead on their own, or maybe as homework. It's just a tool among others, not a "revolution in education" that's going to "raise scores for everyone".
I'm not even sure it's a good classroom tool, but rather is a useful _supplement_
I don't mind sitting down with him and books (he's 2 grades ahead).
At home, he's just over half way through Math Academy's 5th grade curriculum (which is roughly equivalent to 5th grade common core standards). He still comes to me with questions. Sometimes, I can give a great, personalized explanation just because I know him well, we have shared context etc. But usually he's just been too aggressive at skipping past the explanations or worked examples in the MA lesson, and I just tell him to scroll up and read. He does that and says 'oooh, now I get it...' and then he can continue on his own.
What I'm trying to say is: I also don't mind sitting down with my son with math books. But it's more effective for MA to be the core experience, and for me to be an on-call coach (i.e. for me to the supplement).
Coincidentally, my son is also in 3rd grade and also on Singapore 4A book at home :) He can't do math with the 4th grade class (not really an option at our school) but does 5th grade level with the apps they use in class (DreamBox, not sure which others).
> But usually he's just been too aggressive at skipping past the explanations or worked examples in the MA lesson, and I just tell him to scroll up and read.
Again, similar situation here; so I prefer to go over the concepts with him to make sure he's grasped them. His biggest problem is reading the problems too quickly. When he slows down and takes the time to think through he figures them all out -- and that's probably my most important contribution as his "coach" -- and also where you need a live person I think. It's like with sports -- many players are skilled enough that they don't need a coach to teach them skills, but they need a coach to learn how to use those skills.
> But it's more effective for MA to be the core experience, and for me to be an on-call coach (i.e. for me to the supplement).
Fair point. I should give it a try as an alternative (always useful to have different curriculums approaching problems from different angles, especially as the concepts get harder).
Math Academy is great (4th grade onward). Beast Academy online is also very good (up to 5th grade only).
Arguing about the effectiveness of edtech is like complaining there wasn't a viola on the Titanic's band.
Many schools here focus on such tricks (nix the tricks was a great book focusing on such things) as schools here are judged on pass/fail rates.
In general, exams are an excellent way to assess students en masse at their ability to remember similar problems but not inherent problem solving techniques. The latter I've found is possible to teach 1to1 but far harder with a class of varying abilities.
1. Schools are not equal. It's not fair to compare students when they usually have no choice over their teachers. 2. Exams cover an arbitrary syllabus controlled by undemocratic exam boards. 3. Topics are chosen by exam boards that can be examined not by importance. 4. Students who perform poorly under stress of exam conditions are punished for it. 5. Exams serve no real purpose. Children are not chickens being graded for sale. They're at best a weak signal of aptitude.
I would much prefer exams to serve as a prerequisite of sitting a future course rather than an assessment at the end. That way teachers can actually teach rather than continuously repeat the same content.
I've always had a difficult time wrapping my head around this acronym. What counts as "outer"? What counts as "inner"? And yes, when there are more than two items (not necessarily variables!) to be multiplied, you suddenly have to ignore this little trick, because now it's confusing to know what to do about the middle stuff -- and it doesn't take into account non-commutativity either.
And yes, some of the problem may be due to my (very recently diagnosed! at least, formally) autistic mind. But I cannot help but think that if someone with a PhD in math struggles with and largely ignores "FOIL", then the problem may be with the technique, and not with the people who don't understand it.
i think your problems with foil can be extended to the general way math is taught. at least for me, it was always full of tricks, little rules that can be broken sometimes, and i was constantly learning new things that made me realize my old teachers had taught us tricks to shortcut solutions.
Not op, but a few examples:
1. Test structures that reward good time management. The paper SAT is a good example of this. The early items in a section are (were?) easy, the middle items were medium difficulty, and the toughest items were towards the end. A good test take would manage their time so that they spent the most amount of time on questions that could improve their scores — later questions for high achievers, but the middle questions for folks who were missing a lot of questions in that range.
2. Test structures that reward endurance. Again, SAT is a good example. How often have examinees sat down in a multi-hour high-stakes testing situation before taking the SAT. “Not often enough to feel comfortable” is usually the answer. I have taken some foreign language proficiency tests that were also multi-hour long endeavors. I practiced answer old exam questions in a testing environment, so the tests were easy for me. Some of my peers did not, and fatigue seemed to be a part of their challenge.
3. I took some “issue spotter” tests in college. I had never heard of or seen an issue spotter test before. I bombed my first one. My professor kindly walked me through things he knew I knew the answers to that would what given me credit. I aced all future issue-spotter exams. Side note: familiarity with test/question format seems to matter for better students, but it largely doesn’t for unmotivated students. Many studies on familiarity with test/question format show no correlation, but my personal experience (as a test giver) is that this is due to lumping the unmotivated and ambivalent examinees with the folks who notice, care, and take action.
There are many more answers to your question, but the above are few decent examples.
If you’re the kind of person who’s going to put extra effort to add a few points to your results, you are also the kind of person more likely to do well in collage classes.
1. Examinee is aware of test prep and its potential benefits. Definitely not always true in low socioeconomic status (SES) families, especially ones with no family members who have been to college.
2. Examinee can afford said test prep courses and/or materials. Library and online are “free” options, but we are back to assuming that the examinee has easy access to a library and/or the internet and knows how to find said materials.
There are many, many students who would do well in college if they had some insight on how to do college. The US has a lot of wasted potential due to our public school focus on bringing up the low achievers to the exclusion of developing those with high achiever potential.
Some private schools and most public schools in “good” neighborhoods have programs and cultures that cater to those with high potential, but these schools only address a relatively small portion of the student population with high potential, imho.
Yeah, I guess.
I think the issue is that the folks best suited to get the most out of college don’t really need to prep much to absolutely crush the SAT.
Most people are just woefully underprepared.
> but the practice of studying for passing an exam of some kind is an absolutely invaluable skill
Yep. Learning how to study, learn, and prep for a test are good skills to have.
That said, for folks who have done well in a semi-rigorous school environment and read the right things (high-brow periodicals), very little test prep is actually needed to get them close to their theoretical max score.
There are a few catches, though:
- Some people in the US have an incredibly irrational fear of math.
- The math curriculum is super-slow and limited for those who like math, often turning them away from it (or at least the high school math classes).
- Most folks have no idea what university-level literacy looks like. Doing things like reading “high-brow” periodicals gives high school students most of the vocab and text structures covered in the SAT.
Actual tests include things like: Multiple choice questions were providing answers aids answering the question. Short responses / fill in the blank generally mean people can just regurgitate answers they don’t understand. Essay responses sound great, except you can’t answer many questions and essays writing is a separate skill which heavily influences final scores.
More broadly tests are time limited so can’t test skills that take long periods of time to demonstrate a major issue for say programming.
Every programming class I've taken, in high school or college, was project based where the main source of grade were actual programs I wrote which actually did something.
The one exception perhaps being the AP test for AP CS.
When I taught at university there was a disparity between exam grades and the physical body of work they had submitted over the years. You'd see the grade and be shocked the did so badly. The grade reflected proficiency in examinations, not in the subject.
Getting good grades in those exams requires that you know the criteria for evaluating each part of the exam and how to tailor your answer to that criteria. For example, if the exam asks you to write a short movie review you are expected to follow the formula for reviews and show that you can use certain specific grammar constructs.
If you know English well but you don't practice the exam before you will get a mediocre grade, simply because you didn't follow the tacit guidelines that you are expected to know.
Would be cool to see more open ended long running projects instead of the standard 'lecture > homework > test' pipeline. Kids are also given a crazy amount of leeway and teachers/parents will drag a negligent kid to their diploma. Even if a kid tried to fail they would be met with a bunch of counselors and special classes begging him to put forth a minimal effort. It might help if we moved the guardrails back a bit and let kids know that failure is a very real possibility.
Isn't this just complaining about Goodhart's Law? I believe any exam will become a target no matter how well it is designed
There are so many opportunities to deliver personalized Ivy League level education in your native language of choice, for essentially pennies/free to everyone around the world on demand
The second question I have is about the outcome variable on these (but I realise I should probably just go read the damn research) - is it possible that letting people use phone teaches digital skills, at the cost of traditional spelling, for instance?
So they banned them again this year.
Policy so nice they did it twice.
EdTech is a baseless orthodoxy tied together with hardware sales, unproven software and anecdotes.
That said, i think it more true of governments than of parents. It increases the size of the workforce, therefore higher business profits and household income, therefore higher GDP.
Its pretty evidence in various attempts to increase time in school. talk about the "summer slump" in the US, or the government encouraging extended school days (drop off for "breakfast club", pick up after "after school" activities) in the UK.
This is the kind of thing that could only be said by somebody who is not a parent. There might be a minority of parents for whom this is true, but I know zero other parents who don't care whether their kids are learning.
Nobody said that.
While I don't think you deserve to be downvoted, the reason you are is that you are complaining about generalization ("the kind of thing that could only be said by somebody who is not a parent") while immediately generalizing, implicitly, that commenters on Hacker News are not parents. I am a parent, I care about my son learning, and the experiences I've seen for very young children (less than 5) are very close to daycare, even at the very best schools.
It isn't saying much that very young children learn best with one-on-one time with a very engaged adult, which isn't something you can do in daycare. Some people believe that learning occurs because of a specific ethnic heritage, using a pile of money, or a piece of technology. If these are your beliefs, then it can be hard to make any progress whatsoever.
The main utility of schools, despite the hyperbole on the internet, is to educate and cultivate a productive, adjusted society. Yes there is overlap with what parents do, yes there is overlap with daycare. But those are ancillary benefits, not the ultimate goal.
Some of the reasons they die are:
- students don’t control the budget for their spending, so their voice/progress has almost no impact on budgets
- parents in the US spend a tiny fraction of their deposable income on education (and also have almost no say in budgets)
- teachers have almost no say in budgets. In public schools, it’s none. In others, it’s performative if at all most of the time.
- administrators get promoted by doing a very specific set of small things, none of which include improving outcomes through addressing pedagogical innovation
This all adds up to: you can create an edtech startup that radically improves student outcomes and still run out of cash
Think about how many teachers are out there scrounging up and making up their lesson materials, tests, etc. because state/provincial bodies don't provide that content top-down, even as an optional resource for them to draw upon. Then teachers are told "also you need to accommodate all these special cases where students have distinct educational needs" but the basic easy stuff that could've been pre-made is consuming all the time they should've been able to spend "personalizing".
- Khan Academy
- playing games such as _Dragon Box_ (which teaches the principles of math and esp. algebra)
- reading and using books such as:
https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...
https://www.motionmountain.net/
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/...
and at the elementary level texts such as: _Just Grandma & Me_ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wanderfuls...
and how much of it is what else?
One of my kids got pretty damn good at Dragon Box in like... first grade, I think it was?
As far as I can tell this has had (years later) no effect on actually being able to understand algebra any better. The connection's not there. I can see why, too—doing it myself, it was sometimes hard for me to figure out how the various patterns of actions in the game connected to the mechanics of solving algebra problems, and that's with my already understanding that part pretty well. Even when it gets a little more explicit about which symbols are connected to what, later on, what actual mathematical operation or set of scribbles on paper does "drag this little box onto that other little box so it disappears" translate to?
My conclusion is it was good at making me feel like my kid was learning something, but not a great use of time for actually learning that. I think she got a ton more out of the couple times I sat down with her for five minutes to show her how something worked on paper, than hours and hours of Dragon Math.
This goes for other games that are supposed to teach place value and such, but make it really abstract and "fun". Maybe it's just my kids, but even when you point out that what they were doing perfectly well in the game is the same thing they're supposed to do on this worksheet for school, the presentation and mechanics are so different from "drag these colored blobs around" that the value the game provided was practically none. It didn't confer understanding, it taught a very specific kind of pattern recognition just for the game that the kids have trouble generalizing, same as Dragon Math.
[1]https://www.roblox.com/games/10489578087/Multiplication-Game
The issue is that the surrounding infrastructures would need to be much more competent than they currently are in education. I worked at an educational institution in the IT department, and the level of knowledge the IT staff had was abysmal. It was surprising that anything worked at all.
Additionally, not everything needs to be gamified. Somehow this notion that everything a child interacts with on a computer has to mimic a video game is a really narrow way of thinking. Instead, we could start with basic computer usage skills such as file management, and system configuration, and using core tools such as word processes and image manipulation software.
Instead of dumping kids into the world of Google which is a for-profit mechanism that is inherently designed to get people to click on stuff as much as possible, we actually as software developers need to re-think EdTech and have it be learning first.
If you care about your kids, control their access to the brain rotting aspects of technology like a tyrant.
Seymour Papert wrote "Mindstorms" about this very topic in the 80s when PCs were being put in classrooms. Back then, teachers took the multiplication tables they had been doing with pen and paper and just made kids do them on the computer. Teachers make the same mistake with iPads and iPhones. Papert's book talks about the right way to do it -- reformulate the entire concept of learning to include these new tools. Unfortunately, everything gets measured against the old standards, and when the new tools don't work as well to teach the old standards as the tools with which the old standards were designed to be taught, obviously the results are going to look bad.
My only guess is that they are there for the certs.
Though I am in favor of any suggestion that makes a teacher’s life easier.
However, I do have the controversial opinion that there should be no calculators allowed at all in K-12. So, I have some anti-tech bias.
As for the student engagement, I believe it depends on the passion and curiosity of a student, but I also recognize that most students simply don't want to work hard, and therefore they need certain healthy pressure, or at least a specific goal. Maybe EdTech can make quality teachers and homework accessible to millions, but it's just hard to keep students engaged. On the other hand, there are enough amazing free education materials in libraries and on the internet. The barrier to access them is really one's motivation.
My son's AP calculus 1 and 2 classes were all paper and books and run by dedicated teachers. I have never seen my son learn so much and put in so much effort. Other classes relying on "EdTech" are just babysitting with free grades. The teachers give up because they can't obtain a basic level of control of the student's use of the devices.
In my son's 12 years of education so far there has never been a class where the teacher had control of the technology - the Chromebooks. There was no switch the teacher had to turn the Chromebooks off or lock them. No ability to filter out games. The school district IT could never stay on top of the filters. Games are a constant presence.
Having these entertainment devices in the classroom just distracts from real learning and only serves to feed kid's behavioral data into Google's profiling algorithms.
I'll share that I saw how much EdTech was infested by folks trying to leverage "gamification", and I read Kentaro Toyama's "Geek Heresy". That, and other events like Sebastian Thrun admitting "We have a lousy product" (on MOOCs) was enough to disabuse me of any notion that our generation's EdTech hype would prove any different than its predecessors (education over TV, or via Radio).
The education guru of that company talked a lot about Estonia, Finland, and Singapore as models of the best education in the world (pre college). These countries get consistently good PISA scores. And guess what? Close to zero tech in education in these countries.
Some papers were released that showed fine motor control (eg pen and paper writing) has deep implications in cognitive development.
And then slowly we've started to see all the consequences of phones, tablets, social media etc on gen z and alpha. I don't think it's controversial to say kids should not be using these devices and there's plenty of research to prove it. Obviously schools in many countries are now banning them.
I read the first half and skimmed the second half because the author couldn't make a point somewhere in the giant wall of text. Even if there was a point in there, the subject is too broad which is another question I have...
Anyway, in a broad (meaningless) rebuttal, I wouldn't say EdTech has failed- everyone I know has learned how to do something real they didn't know how to do before from youtube. Easy examples: basic plumbing, basic electrical, playing guitar, playing drums, systems design, how to improve in their sports, software stuff... even my dad learned how to properly put up a gutter on their house recently.
What I'm observing it seems like people are learning more its probably just schools getting in the way.
You provided some examples of auto-didacts teaching themselves useful life skills via YT. I think these are good resources for such folks -- I know I've benefited from them myself -- but it's hardly in the same ballpark.
I use concepts like Dijkstra's algorithm and the Turing machine regularly in my job. They are very real to me - more real than any programming language - because I sat for hours taking paper notes off a whiteboard while some OG Computer guru discussed the topic.
If I didn't need tech to learn Computer Science, kids definitely don't need it to learn Algebra.
We can make a good house without metal fasteners using hand tools and nothing but muscles. But that doesn't mean that a house built using brushless power tools in 1/4 the time isn't also a good house.
More directly: I conceptually understand a lot of algorithms that I read about. For me though, the ones that I learned by coding them and running them are the ones I understand much better. Hand written notes on a lecture do not guarantee complete or correct understanding, and there is no mechanism for checking.
That being said, my mother learned how to program when they were still using punchcard decks. My ordeal wasn't special. Don't know if I learned any better than others, but I think the need to not have bugs on the first iteration was more important for me than for other people. I did not just tweak things until it worked.
And now we’ve gone past the usual endpoint where the metric becomes the goal. It seems that the ability to waste everyone’s time measuring the metrics has become the new goal.
Mind-boggling, seriously.
My 4th grader has some sound sensitivity issues, so he uses that as an excuse to go out in the hall and read a book or listen to an auto book on his school-supplied chromebook when the classroom gets too loud for him
Well, guess what he's been doing? Watching unfiltered youtube! He's clever and sneaky, so it's been an arms race at home to block youtube enough for him but still allow it to work on my Roku for me. Why does the school allow 4th graders to have unfettered access to youtube?
a) you can search anything at google, go to Videos and watch youtube with no limits, the url is still google.com
b) he did come up with an idea to screen record everything and then re-watch everything using Photos app. After that was blocked, apparently you can access same photos thru Camera.app :)
Right now, I have youtube filtered by MAC on my Roku. I would like to add granularity so that they can watch some youtube, but they make that too hard. So we all just share the living room TV right now so that I can just keep an eye on things.
I'm still getting outsmarted though. I have locked-down parental controls on Minecraft so that my two kids can play together but not invite or be invited to stranger's worlds. But somehow, I see other people in there. Microsoft parental controls leave a lot to be desired. I don't know how non-tech-oriented parents do it.
Though I do believe schools need an edu version of YouTube. YouTube kids is too childish for older students. But regular YouTube has too much inappropriate stuff on it. That's a tough one.
I honestly think people should stop trying to make sanitized versions of YouTube though. It doesn't really work (YouTube Kids is still a disaster and often inappropriate IMO), but all the extra rules and regulations severely inconvenience the creators and viewers who are happy with it as an entertainment platform.
I'm personally glad that they're circumventing these "protections." At least, they'll learn something along the way.
An example:
A student is taught how to calculate an integral with MathCAD on a school PC. They now know how to use MathCAD on Windows to calculate an integral. If the OS or software changes, they may lose that knowledge, and they may not understand the concept. They've effectively 'lost' knowledge due to time moving on.
Differently:
A student is taught how to calculate an integral with pencil and paper. Due to pencil and paper doing nothing without the student driving it, they must understand the steps to the process, and in doing so, will likely get to understanding why those are the steps. At the very least they may be curious about the steps, why they work, and why all are required. If you give them a PC, they'll likely be able to figure out how to use it, as they understand the concept. If you take away the PC, they'll still be able to use pencil and paper.
The distraction/multitasking angle is interesting too, but I really think education works best when you take all unnecessary power away from the student. They are forced to learn the concepts rather than get lost in all the peripheral details (PC, software, notifications, etc.) and understanding of fundamental concepts will rarely become useless. While understanding of computing platforms or software versions will very quickly become useless.
Tell kids to do open ended history/english research on a computer, they get sidetracked and waste time.
Tell the kids to do a computer thing on the computer (like use math as to solve this question), they have a much more focused task at hand and will use the computer as the teacher intended.
> In this article, I’m defining EdTech as any student-employed, internet-connected digital device; this includes computers, laptops, tablets, cell phones, and smart watches. I am not discussing or evaluating the use of digital devices by teachers.
Aren't there a huge swath of self-defined "EdTech" startups aimed at tools for teachers, and-or use in the class, perhaps exclusively by the teacher?
Edtech has failed in India because there is very little tech and even little education in the apps. Mostly edtech in India equates to exam preparation apps.
Other approaches like the duolingo gamification approaches have also failed to actually educate users though some of them have found success as startups.
This has lead to a disillusionment among parents about the edtech promise. Also, unfortunately the big successes of edtech(Byjus, Whitehat etc) turned out to be bad apples.
But lets take the positives. The main positive is that parents and kids are willing to try and there is a huge market. They just need the right product.
My takeaways are as follows:
1. Too many products try to reinvent the wheel with their own curriculum etc. This creates an extra burden for students who have to study these in addition to their course work. Given the paucity of time, guess what they drop?
2. Too much gamification and engagement farming. The emphasis on gamification instead of learning.
3. Most edtech is about putting videos online and adding quizzes. No emphasis on making the content actually interactive and engaging. In this day and age why shouldn't text books be interactive.
This is what I am focusing on and helping my wife do a startup in this space(I am unfortunately busy with running a SaaS startup, so I just help out of passion :))
So far, we have made the whole of CBSE(India's national curriculum) curriculum for math as an interactive textbook. But it's a long journey. There is no hurry. The revolution has just started :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
In general, people tend to learn most subjects through their own actions and continuous practice... and not through abstract imagination of some non sequitur that lecturers may not even fully comprehend. Only 1:17 people have the self discipline to do self-directed study... online that stat is likely more dismal... =)
Yet, we found Steve Brunton's book and many labs tended to engage people better than handouts:
https://www.youtube.com/@Eigensteve/videos
https://www.amazon.com/Data-Driven-Science-Engineering-Learn...
Thanks Steve =3
I don't disagree with the thrust of the article and it makes intuitive sense to me but it feels so substance free as to be unactionable. Yes multi-tasking is bad for individuals, yes kids spend a lot of time on media. Are there other interventions that are better? Are lower class sizes a bulwark against this? How does income and culture (anglosphere, asia, etc) affect this?
While perhaps they aren't as deep or worthy of academic analysis, their stronger engagement is undeniable, they still do messages worth listening to, and lays down the path for stronger appreciation for more subtle world later. Which makes sense, you don't start out in Tolkien in Fantasy, you'd probably put off 95% of potential readers into boredom. We go with Sanderson, or Patrick Rothfuss then we go on to more complex classics.
The fact that kids are forced to start with Shakespeare is insanity and the exact opposite, and then teachers disdain people who predictably get put of by that culture. Why don't they change it is a question beyond me.
An example:
- TED Talk alike video lessons (ok, without political biases), meaning teachers who craft lectio magistralis on video, mount them, improve them over time and share them, their colleagues and students will makes the best emerge;
- students see and take notes of the video lesson in the evening (the best moment for young brain), in the morning they arrange their note for an afternoon speech, a random selection of students will actually give the speech on what they learned to their teachers and their peers;
- FLOSS desktop as basic system needs, no mobile crap or webcrapplications in the soup, people have to learn technically sound systems not commercially interested modern-archaic crapware.
Try this and tell the results.
bonus point: there were some famous names in our groups, it was fun to see the spread between absolute noobs and cpp iso standard contributor
[0] for programming, questions + test suites are very effective to try various ideas and see what fails. for other subjects, like philosophy it might differ
But custom software and is very expensive, and doesn’t scale. Thousands of work hours to make 1 consumable hour. It’s like maintaining an MMO and adding new quests every week, but without the talented devs or interesting source material.
The real leverage offered by technology is creative tools that enable experiences which are impractical, like simulations, etc.
But it’s probably a tougher sell to administrations:
- no telemetry (surveillance)
- not an on rails experience you can drop a low performing kid in front of
But none of them address the structural problems / challenges with education. Teachers are burnt out, many teachers are terrible with tech, do not get enough support, the structure of education systems doesn't allow for flexibility. Parents aren't involved in many cases, kids are hungry, social worker type issues. Education IT is often underfunded, their IT workers get low pay so they leave. The list is endless.
But tech is dropped in like a bomb on a building that is supposed to help with renovation ...
Given the adversarial of systematic education, and their focus on discriminating into social status castes, the self-learning will have a dual advantage: Growth, enjoyment of learning, and a large advantage in the competitive aspect. Someone who's smart may score well on an evaluation; so will someone who's seen the material, and worked through the problems before.
It cannot be that so much govt money is spent without rigorous checks / very solid justification.
Education is in trouble in America, but that doesn’t mean a) the concept of technology has failed, or b) it’s in trouble everywhere. The edtech revolution can’t fail, it already happened for many hundreds of millions worldwide with the advent of Wikipedia, YouTube, and Kahn Academy.
To me, a lot of the companies in the space seem to be more concerned with how to maximize dollars sent to them and not as much about how things are improving or better with technology. Tech should be a tool to help the learning, it doesn't have to be each and every part, and I feel like the ultimate goal of at least some of the companies was to create an all-in-one solution for every problem.
I think the goal is to give kids screens so they’ll quit bugging their teacher
Which leaves you with your network as the place you have to manage all of that, which is a much bigger pain in the ass.
Reality is whitelisting can't work as you'll simply break websites. This has been my experience at several schools now. Websites may or may not load. And even if they do, they rarely work properly.
Irony is, students are clever enough to realise you can use translate websites to load anything with translation from English to English. No blocking at all!
Until you consider that almost all children in N.A. that are learning rely on Kahn academy & YouTubers to make up for the fact that their school’s can’t figure out how to replicate a great learning experience that is available for free.
Essentially, statistics will tell you how to gradually improve a system that you already have (conventional class-based school education), but won't tell you about the value of an entirely new system. It's a sort of 'local minima' problem like that.
The article admits as much, but fails to acknowledge the other solution to this conflict: instead of a 'phone-free school', why not change the school to support an electronic educational paradigm? Just as the Montessori method or the culture-rich concept of Kindergarten education are usually very valuable to those children who are lucky enough to experience them, there is already a wealth of evidence for interactive and electronic learning methods - not just a 'potential' as the article claims. The key difference between learning paradigms such as Montessori and Kindergarten and electronic education is that the former requires expensive (and safe) access to materials, and the latter is now almost free! The article claims: "However, if there are two or more options for engaging with learning material, then it is best to select the tool that will yield the best results." I ask, what justification is there to not select a tool that isn't perhaps the best, but it the best that society can afford? One-on-one tutoring with experts and fully-equiped laboratories would be wonderful, even better than electronic education, but that was never the offer. Historically progressive educational authorities are literally rejecting an educational opportunity that requires nothing except open minds.
P.S. An irrelevant but interesting nit-pick: the article mentions that you have to hold each word in memory as you read a sentence of English text, but this is untrue. Readers create a mental, semantic and emotional image while they read; dyslexic readers might struggle with the concept of a 'word' itself yet are still able to understand the meaning of a sentence.
I read this as I was waiting for unit tests to compile and run. Such a paradox.
Just my two cents, not claiming this is groundbreaking, but hoping to provoke insights from smarter and more experienced folks here:
- Education should be a blend of virtual and physical, working with both individuals and groups.
- Kids should be able to set their own pace but also have structured routes to accelerate when possible.
- Curriculum could be streamlined into core components: today, you can learn subjects like chemistry, physics, CS, math, and biology through various Python packages. So, why not start by learning a programming language?
Lots of this stuff gets built with very little thought on how it's supposed to integrate into a classroom setting. None of it even attempts to integrate with the student grading or scheduling system(s).
We expect public school teachers to be:
* Very well educated. * Emotionally mature and able to understand/handle emotionally immature students. * Very good at their jobs. * Able to understand the dizzying array of laws and regulations around education. * Handle the politics of education(around what can be taught or not, what books can be used, etc.) * Having students who were promoted from the previous grade, even if they can't do previous grade level things(like say HS students that still can't read). * Teach to a test. * Teach to an individual up to their ability. * Teach 30+ students at once at the lower grades. * In Middle School/High School teaching over 200 unique students in a day. * Dealing with unreasonable demands by some parents. * Some students having special needs, diets. * Having little to no classroom level funding. * Understand and be educated in the latest tech. * In some states teach students that are hungry. * In some states carry guns to protect from school shooters.
All while also being paid poorly, if not terribly.
Sure, I can totally see that working out well.
If we paid teachers like we paid any other professional job(lawyers, doctors, etc), I guarantee we will get much higher calibre teachers. Teacher pay in the US hasn't even kept up with inflation over the past decade. Not to mention salaries of all the support staff around teachers to help them thrive in the classroom.
“Degrees” not credible enough
1) that our theories about education are bad, and that we've been cargo culting traditional education and haven't made any significant changes in the process for hundreds of years,
2) our theories about how to handle the future of education with the new tools that we now have were doomed to failure because of that, and
3) with no theoretical foundation, charlatans tried to push a theory that sheer proximity to technology would have an emergent magical effect on education (while another set of charlatans push a theory that technology has a magical dampening effect on education.)
It's the same situation we're in with governance, or law. The English accidentally and clumsily developed a Parliament that worked, and the people who wiped the King's ass developed into a cabinet. It was productive. We then formalized it by examining what had been done and simply writing it down and sometimes streamlining it. We also do that explicitly in the common law, where we assume that every judicial decision ever made was correct, and concentrate on when they contradict each other to make changes. It's productive, but it's not theory; they're descriptions of history.
Covid was a test for Edtech, and it failed horribly. We need to ground education in reality: we're trying to force unwilling children to remember things. We need to focus on their wills, and their memories, and to come up with theory. We can experiment on adults, although the difference between adult education and children's education is that adults are self-motivated, so this would concentrate on memory methods. When focused on children, how can we give a child the discipline to feel like they want to participate in and contribute to the world? Does that have to do more with social services, the safety net, and giving children real responsibility earlier than with educational theory?
Recent interesting read for me was a failure and partial success trying to use spaced repetition in the classroom. His partial answer was that it was better when everyone shared the same screen and answered together, you move slower than you wish you could, and you don't demand that they remember forever. Also, from my reading, the expected schedule of schooling completely disrupted what he was trying to do. Schools have to be redone, not tweaked. People knew this in the 19th and early 20th century, even if they didn't manage to come up with a formula that worked.
Warning, lots of filler, but also lots of content: "Seven Years of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom" https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F6ZTtBXn2cFLmWPdM/seven-year...
> Seeing as the great majority of students spend over 80% of their digital device time using these tools to multitask, the automatic response for a great majority of students using these tools has become multitasking.. Unfortunately, when we attempt to employ digital devices for learning purposes, this primary function quickly bleeds into student behavior.
> This is why, when using a computer for homework, students typically last fewer than 6 minutes before accessing social media, messaging friends, and engaging with other digital distractions. This is why, when using a laptop during class, students typically spend 38 minutes of every hour off-task. This is why, when getting paid as part of a research study to focus on a 20-minute computerized lesson, nearly 40% of students were unable to stop themselves from multitasking. It’s not that the students of today have abnormally weak constitutions; it’s that they have spent thousands of hours training themselves to use digital devices in a manner guaranteed to impair learning and performance. It’s also that many of the apps being run on those devices were carefully engineered to pull young people away from whatever they were doing.
> And perhaps this is the key point: I’m not saying that digital technologies can’t be used for learning; in fact, if these tools were only ever employed for learning purposes, then they may have proven some of the most important academic inventions ever. The argument I’m making is that digital technologies so often aren’t used for learning that giving students a laptop, tablet, or other multi-function device places a large (and unnecessary) obstacle between the student and the desired outcome. In order to effectively learn while using an unlocked, internet-connected multi-function digital device, students must expend a great deal of cognitive effort battling impulses that they’ve spent years honing - a battle they lose more often than not. (of course schools do often try to implement blockers and restrictions, but this opens up an eternal cat-and-mouse struggle, and the mice are very good at finding ways to evade the cat.)
But again, if the effect was this strong, I'd really expect to see broader evidence (even just at a national level based of digital uptake).
Until then, folks can be reliant on the adults in their environments older than that age, if they haven't built up some abilities.
but it's not possible because the job requires all these gateway-drugs-to-distraction to be on the forefront of your workspace: * keep slack open in case you're needed in that support thread * keep a browser open so you can google the api docs for something (that's how i ended up here right now) * keep spotify playing in the background so you can drown out the noise of the open office/work-from-home-noise
That what you want them to be focusing on is no longer the path of least boredom like it was in the previous era; the path of least boredom goes through their mobile device.
People's ability and willingness to concentrate on something that interested in has not changed one iota. That sort of biological change takes hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
Observations of the behavior of people interacting with tech can easily support the wrong argument that people's attention spans have increased. Just look at how somebody can play the same game for 11 hours straight, right?
This is incorrect. There have been repeated studies that show a distinct decline in individuals ability to consume and process long-form text. Folks brains are literally remodeling towards ADHD-like behaviors.
I would expect, say, individuals not going to school past grade two showing a declined ability to multiply 12 by 11.
People's handling of long form text may be off from several decades ago, but it's still better than their illiterate ancestors 500 years ago.
https://longevity.stanford.edu/lifestyle/2024/05/30/what-exc...
During my brief stint working IT for private schools, with their SMARTBoards in every classroom, Meraki APs blanketing their 300 year old campus structures, and Chromebooks in the hands of every student, the feedback I got was that students hated having technology always with them (to the point of breaking their Chromebooks on purpose), while teachers would deliberately not report broken technology (like their SMARTBoards) so they could force kids off of electronics and into a textbook or journal. Despite the often adversarial relationship of students and teachers, both cohorts acted unconsciously towards the same outcome of less technology.
This early experience has also informed my perspective on the role of technology in the workplace as a force amplifier rather than mandatory toolset. It’s why I’m often fiercely resistant to any “new” technology coming in that doesn’t solve a problem we’ve already identified, as blindly expanding the IT estate just adds to the noise of the enterprise and detracts from the signals important to business.
Even the younger folks (20-30) I find community with outside of tech spaces bemoan the over reliance on technology in general. They aren’t luddites by any stretch of the truth, and they love BlueSky and Instagram and TikTok and all the usual social spaces where their friends are, but they’ve engaged in more active resistance to technology as a necessary component in everything they buy. This same cohort is often an ally at work, because they seek to push products or solutions that remove technology interactions from the daily grind through automation, rather than dragging in the latest toys like we (millennials) did.
I'd be shocked if that's not a significant part of why. Most folks will get more work done when their only alternatives are trashcan basketball or doodling, versus... the Web.
I suspect another cause is that a great deal of application of computer technology in organizations aims to improve a certain kind of legibility of processes, which is something management loves a great deal, but the cost of attaining this legibility is high enough (including in hidden or hard-to-track ways) that any benefits are neutralized or all-accounted-for costs actually go up.
[EDIT] A third cause is probably that median ability to use computers remains very low among office workers. There continue to exist offices where knowing how to copy-paste(!) for more than just bare text, or extremely-basic spreadsheet use beyond "put numbers in it" makes you a wizard. I'm not kidding.
I feel for kids nowadays. It was the wild west back then, everything was basically unrestricted and nobody had any clue of the consequences, but we didn't have companies actively trying to addict us to stuff.
No idea what the answer is.
In the case of Fukushima - getting entry and information on the inside of the reactor core eventually required U.S. developed robots, built for much more challenging and pragmatic environments.
With EdTech, for decades we knew that it was a backup option to solid in-classroom, instructor led, education. AFAIK, measured outcomes on non-traditional learning have nearly always lagged the classroom. But more and more institutions were turning to it because, quite frankly, its cheaper -- with student flexibility as the trailing, but strongly upsold, benefit.
The 100%, digital, EdTech event that was COVID has forced a reckoning. We finally have, at massive scale, real data (and not small or unusual situations) that comprehensively shows the tech either isn't ready, or never will be.
I personally don't understand why this seems to be such a surprise. Ever since I went through school, there was an attempt to shove technogadgets into classrooms that offered very minimal educational value over a teacher using their judgment, training, and experience to work with a student to learn a topic.
There's a part in this article that I think is the key problem:
> What he found was equal parts surprising and predictable: nearly everything has a positive impact on student learning.
I remember a specific "training" I received years ago as an adult. The instructor put each student through a comprehensive skills assessment. Then the students spent 8 weeks in a room with the resources we should have used for learning -- books, video, software, and so on -- but without any instruction of any kind. At the end of the 8 weeks we were all assessed again and voila! nearly all students had shown progress. Great success! and the instructor was free to continue doing next to nothing and doomscrolling Facebook most of the day in his best job ever. Providing no education whatsoever, but just access to resources, had a demonstrated positive outcome.
A lot of EdTech falls into this same sort of bullshit pile. It doesn't really do anything in particular, but will sometimes show the promise of improvement. Fingers are pointed to improperly trained educators, or lack of time with the technogadget, or some other reason other than the tech when searching for what's holding the tech back. What the deployers of EdTech are really measuring is not educational outcomes, but improvements to the bottom-line. If they were really focused on education, then EdTech would only be used where it should a learning effect at least as great as classroom instruction. But we know it generally doesn't, and yet here it is in our classrooms.
Source: Developed adult learning curriculum in advanced technical areas and delivered material to over 2,000 students who were required to have had at least an undergraduate degree and significant other job-specific training as prerequisites. Was also a "cursed" gifted kid in K-12.
-ed tech exists, by definition, on the greatest distraction machine heretofore known to humankind
-ed tech lets the tech do the grading, removing the ed from the loop. It abstracts away the teacher's mental model of my student's mind.
-ed tech is overwhelmingly short-response or multiple choice; this measures only the most basic forms of learning.
-there is rarely a physical artifact, making lessons and learning far more ephemeral. Often, I cant review previously-submitted work to see where my children have gone astray.
-ed tech has completely removed the physical aspects of education. Writing notes is better than typing notes is better than merely listening to a lecture, on a retention basis. Rather than actually submerge an object in a graduated cylinder of water to calculate its volume via displacement, its now a shitty online "experiment"
I could go on and on, and perhaps later I will in subsequent comments.
The more that I think of it. They are terminals that permit students to access random edtech platforms. Very little computing going on. Which is absurd when a potential computer is sitting right there in front of you in computer class.