Comment by ChaitanyaSai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChaitanyaSai | Hacker News Reader

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It's more of a dance than a balance because the way we learn is going from the whole to the parts and back. Meaning first does not mean asking/getting them to grasp something complex. It is about showing and creating a world where the thing in question matters and has value. Teaching alphabet first without being able to show why (not explain) is absolutely wrong. The way we bringing meaning is by reading to them, creating a place where reading clearly has evident value because we derive value, fun, joy. There's a reason the US has a literacy crisis despite billions spent, access to tech and decades of research into how to introduce the mechanics of learning to read (phonics). How we introduce phonics with meaning is not a question that's asked because schooling philsophies often implicitly mirror the latest neuroscience trend (behaviorism, spare the rod spoil the child, cognitivism, it's not meaning it is the cogntive skills)

Also, there's really little value in criticism without having anything constructive to offer. How would you arrive at a balance?

> There's a reason the US has a literacy crisis despite billions spent, access to tech and decades of research into how to introduce the mechanics of learning to read (phonics).

I thought that the reason the US had a literacy crisis is because Phonics was specifically removed from the schools and replaced by ineffective methods

Phonics wasn't introduced for the longest time, and that makes it worse. But systematic phonics too can be bad when the focus is on narrow skills. Why in the world should I care about these artificial sounds (phonemes) is the question the mind naturally asks. And that needs to be addressed without just jump from drill to drill dressed up in fun. Interstingly this early focus on mechanics in both literacy and math can lead to a "hidden curriculum" where the most meaningful lesson is that the world has things I simply do not understand and I need to follow this ritual. And that leads to learned helplessness and so on.

I'll ignore the first paragraph because it's clearly someone just staring at a wall trying to be insightful without regard for any actual conversation

For your last line I have two points

1. Your point about micro schooling is meaningless. Education is a scaling problem . Yeah of course if you could surround every kid with 3 smart kids and 1 teacher, education is easy!

2. I don't have to pretend to have a solution to arrive at a balance. I think it is a hard problem. You are the one who seems to have the solution, so propose it here (but you can't, you just want to sound insightful)

scaling is definitely a hard challenge and made harder because we want to standardize whatever the product is. Does anyone know? But it isn't just us. There's a hundred year history of alternative education showing essentially this. Self-directed learning (Sudbury, Summerhill) work (even if small) because of this.

I understand the impulse to paint me as "wanting to sound insightful" but I am too old for that, and upvotes here are definitely not meaningful enough for me to care about that :)

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