Overall, I enjoyed this, both because I found the topic interesting and because it was well written. But I’m extremely dubious of the hopeful nature of it wrt learning during the pandemic. I honestly don’t know a single other student who felt they learned more during the pandemic than during a normal year. Now maybe that’s because of compounding factors like mental health taking a dumpster dive for students, but from everything I’ve read and everyone I’ve talked to, online learning was basically an unmitigated failure.
So my question is, does anyone have quantitative data suggesting that the online learning imposed by the pandemic was beneficial to some students?
I think part of the reason it failed is that adults often think school is for learning, but for many kids, it is for friends and an odd type of amusement of sitting still, tuning out lectures, then running around on asphalt, then sitting again. The information does not make the top five goals, even if the kid “does” well. They are floating along with the group activity. I was stunned to discover this. Kids can get decent grades and be remembering some things and have no meta-concept of self as learner. At all.
the pandemic gave me oodles of time i would normally have lost commuting and sitting in mind-numbing class. to say i learnt more during this time than i did in high school would be a gross understatement. outside of online school, that is.
tbf there's probably other factors that contributed to this increased learning (maturity, resources, really bad high school lol), but i still maintain that the extra time was the main reason.
But online school during the pandemic was all the bad things of school and more bad things on top. Our children would have been expected to be on screen at least some of every half hour for six hours a day. They would have been just as trapped, but with all the costs of bad technology (bad connections, kids who don’t mute, rules about backgrounds, etc.) and no hanging with friends to at least ease some of the pain. So we pulled them out, sold our house and travelled while teaching them more than they would have learned in school, in about two hours a day.
My son commented at some point that his online school managed to keep all the unpleasant parts of school (homework, boring lectures, busywork, regimented schedules), while dispensive with most of the fun parts (seeing your friends, working together, having a personal interaction with the teacher, hanging out after school).
Data point here. I ask my son to do the "mastery challenge" and "two level ups" from Khan Academy every day. He does it in minutes. He is finishing the 4th grade curriculum and he is a third grader. Smart kid, not Feynman. He then does some reading, some writing, and is free to enjoy his day. He knows a hell of a lot more about science than I could possibly imagine when I was his age. His writing is worse than mine, as is his grammar skills (a completely overrated skill, IMO). He is a happy kid this way.
We found the Montessori curriculum weirdly rigid, at least in the early years. There was a long checklist of things they had to demonstrate proficiency at. Maybe I misunderstood how it worked. They also told us that our children, 5 and 6, were “too old” to start Montessori. Two was the best age apparently.
My children started Montessori at age 18m, now 5 and 7 and I 💯 agree the Montessori method is too rigid. Yes, the kids have freedom of movement and choice of activities and that is good. However, each material they can work with can be used in only one way and it’s at the teacher discretion when they are shown “the way”. Before they are shown, they may not touch it. They also have a long list of (the same) knowledge that each child must possess. There is some time spent on passion work but not nearly enough.
I am a parent of two children, presently aged 9 and 11; as a result, I am preoccupied with things exactly like this. Overall, the conclusions of the book seem consistent with what I have observed of their learning. A nice, well written review.
"It’s really easy to catch up when you need to (did you know you can just look up what the powerhouse of a cell is?)."
- sometimes I wonder what to do about this. Many of my students are just barely literate and numerate in 11th grade, and sometimes not even then. How are they supposed to look things up, or tell if what they're looking up is true, or apply it to their unique circumstances?
Does that mean school was just a complete waste of time, as they've learned nothing we wanted them to learn? Did they learn anything or just other things? Should we keep trying with these students or just let them drop out at whatever age it seems like education is pointless for them?
Certainly they are learning English a lot faster in school than in their community, where no one speaks English. I do hope we can have reforms, but Texas has decided students need to pass certain tests to graduate, so here we are.
I was also a bit skeptical of that line. First, it's easy for well-educated people to look up whatever they need to know...but only if you have first developed high-level literacy skills, and the skill of learning properly from what you're reading. And those skills are developed by...tasks like being given a book about the cell and told to learn what's in it.
So, sure, if you'd never learned about mitochondria in particular, that would be no tragedy, but if you didn't at least do a whole bunch of learning of a sort relevantly *similar* to the kind of learning you do when learning about mitochondria, then you might not have developed the mental skills needed to effectively learn about mitochondria if you ever wanted to.
What evidence is there that people are unable to seek out information on their own, about subjects they care about, until they've mastered "the skill of learning properly from what you're reading" by seeking out information on subjects they don't care about?
This seems like one of those things we take for granted even though our own experiences ought to make us skeptical.
An interesting thing I see coming out of this discussion is that sometimes just having a community library isn't enough. Maybe with the edutainment apps, internet resources to read through learning like Khan academy students can have more freedom than they get a lot earlier. One thing is I don't mean to make it out like all of my students are illiterate - 27% got an A on the district wide final - but I'm also not the kind of teacher to trap or bore them. They can read whatever they want if they already understand the material! Maybe there's some way to make sure that's standard practice so school isn't boring for high achievers.
I couldn't get at our local (very small) library until I was eight or nine, it operated on limited opening hours, and I wasn't allowed join until that age. And reading my way through the twelve shelves of kids' books (I can still see them in my mind's eye) meant that I wasn't allowed near the adult shelves (including non-fiction) until a different librarian took pity on me when I was twelve and let me have an adult card.
The wonders of the Internet and a computer in every home (not to mention a smartphone in every hand at increasingly young ages) masks the fact that a lot of people didn't have access and still don't, and even if circumstances have changed so that now it is possible to 'teach yourself', there are still many, many people out there who can't write grammatically, can't spell and yes that matters because they can't express what they want to say, or understand material if it isn't spoon-fed and pre-digested for them, so they *don't* 'teach themselves', they rely on listicles and material.
How many of you believe Tariq Nasheed's current documentary (with specially commissioned accompanying art), for example? And yet I am quite sure that "buck breaking happened" will rapidly be an article of faith and yet another grievance as fodder for the BLM movement and associated progressivist demands. Worse still, ordinary Black people are going to believe invented history as truth. But hey, it's no big deal, you can teach yourself this never happened! Because suddenly you will develop a disinterested desire to learn about history, research skills, ways to get around finding out that "this academic article is paywalled", and the like! If you didn't have this interest before, you won't get it now, unless you are very motivated to get it. And when "another horrible thing happened during slavery" is the thing, you are not going to be motivated to disprove it, especially when you're being told constantly that "systemic racism and toxic Whiteness are the reasons for everything bad in your life".
I think I got the point you were making, but I have no idea what race dynamic things you're talking about are...I'm not sure if that means I'm escaping mind killing topics or just uneducated.
"They can read whatever they want if they already understand the material! Maybe there's some way to make sure that's standard practice so school isn't boring for high achievers."
The thing is that in any art or skill, there's a high level of boredom involved in mastery. I can't remember the exact quote or track it down, but C.S. Lewis uses an analogy about how the difference between the romantic idea of reading about Robin Hood or the Odyssey and so on, and the pains the schoolboy has to take in learning grammar until he is then able to read easily and fluently, and that it's like that for a lot of things in life: we have to put in the toil and the drudge before we can enjoy the fruits.
I'm sure Olympic medallists don't enjoy every single moment of all the training they have to do, but if they want to be good enough to get that gold medal, even if they enjoy racing or rowing or gymnastics or swimming, they have to go through years of "get up at ungodly hours, stick to this diet, do these many hours of training, spent all my spare time working on this".
So that even for naturally gifted students, there will be some amount of drudgery that they can't avoid, and if you let them skip it, you're allowing weak spots in the foundation. It's even more necessary for less able students who will grumble about "why do I have to learn this, I will never need it".
Maybe if we didn't expect mastery of ancient Greek texts translated by people who aren't bestselling authors, kids wouldn't be pushed away.
Shouldn't the goal instead be to get everyone to journeyman-level general reading? Can't it be pursued by having kids just read things they are interested in and are slightly more complex than the last thing they read?
Nothing done in mandated education should come close to being compared to Olympic medalists. Very few people need to be the best of the best.
Especially if you want to get *really* good. To really master, say, a musical instrument, requires a lot of tedious practice, and the law of diminishing returns starts to kick in hard.
That's always been my beef with "make learning a game!" Sometimes it isn't fun, or at least not the most fun available with the resources at hand. That doesn't mean that the rewards are not necessarily worth it.
Jesse, if you've arrived at this hour of your life on earth and still don't realise that there's a huge and vital difference between "I want this" and "I need this", then this entire conversation is pointless and we're not going to get any further. Your argument is "let the kids decide if they want to only eat candy instead of vegetables". You hope that the kids get sick of pure candy after a week and start eating broccoli and turnips as well. Well, we've got a constant argument over "the obesity epidemic" to demonstrate that some people will stick to a candy-only diet regardless of ill-effects.
Deiseach, are you being uncharitable on purpose? I hope so, because if after all of these comments you genuinely think *that's* my argument, I fear we aren't speaking the same language.
Dividing the intellectual world into "candy" vs. "turnips" is unrealistic. When there's a visible benefit in learning something, you don't have to force-feed it to people: they want that benefit too. No one groans "when are we ever gonna use this?" when they're learning to read or add. Driver's ed classrooms are filled with teenagers who want to be there. Plenty of people make careers out of doing work that they became good at because they enjoyed it.
The subjects that have to force-fed are the ones that students don't perceive as offering much benefit -- the ones that won't pay off until many years later, if at all; or whose purported benefits are vague and insubstantial ("a touch of class"); or which can easily be picked up later if the need arises.
Goddamn plenty, if you've ever worked in a school for disadvantaged kids or early school leavers programme or adult literacy classes?
Which all of the above I have done. Your basic error is "I was a smart kid with supportive parents and resources for learning; I learned best this particular way; I didn't like certain subjects and had an interest in others; school didn't suit me; THEREFORE the way I would have preferred to have been taught SHOULD BE the way ALL school is done, because surely all kids are like me!"
No, they're not. And even if they are, they don't live in the same circumstances. I came out of the womb able to read, as near as damn it, and I was *starved* for books due to the circumstances of my early childhood. Were it not for school, and access to the materials there, I would have had *nothing*. You *can't* learn by teaching yourself when the only bloody materials to hand in your home are the willow trees down the yard. And there are kids who have access to resources and won't learn unless the equivalent of "standing over them with a stick in your hand" happens. Sometimes you do need to be made do some things for your own good. One of the perils of being smart or good at something means, as another comment mentioned earlier, that if you can't solve a problem fast you give up on it. Learning to stick at something even if you find it boring or dull or "I can't do this" is valuable teaching, including "you can solve this by hard work and don't have to give up if the answer doesn't flash into your mind in a blaze of inspiration".
So long as the young person has *something* they're interested in which would require similarly high-level reading, that would suffice. But if the young person happens not to be interested in learning about *anything* that would require that type of reading, I think that is likely to be a problem. At that point, the goal should be to awaken an interest in some such subject before then making them read about it...not to just let them do their own thing and watch videos instead.
Learning from what you're reading is a skill the readers of this blog are likely to take for granted; it seems trivial. I certainly took it for granted, until I started teaching at the college level. It turns out that someone's ability to effectively read light easy texts (most fiction, internet garbage) doesn't mean that they have the ability to effectively read informational texts and actually carry the information away with them. A significant percentage of my students will sincerely seek out information on subjects they want to know about...but aren't able to properly process complex sentences or complex paragraphs, so the ideas they walk away with are not what the text was saying.
That's...a very bad situation to be in. And I don't see any way to prevent it from happening that doesn't involve making sure they have to do a bunch of informational reading, at steadily increasing levels of complexity and sophistication, when they're young enough for their brains to be malleable.
"It turns out that someone's ability to effectively read light easy texts (most fiction, internet garbage) doesn't mean that they have the ability to effectively read informational texts and actually carry the information away with them."
True. But you're seeing that in college students, which means that 12 years of reading textbooks before college still wasn't enough to prepare them for reading at a high level.
That sounds like maybe it's a problem with the students, not the amount of reading they've been assigned.
Judging from the response I get when I ask them to read more than a few pages of reading per week--in college--I don't believe their schooling involved large amounts of reading, at least not reading of anything even moderately complex and challenging. *My* K-12 education involved large amounts of reading, but things seem to have changed.
What's the response - are they actually *surprised*, like they would be if they weren't used to getting reading assignments? Or are they upset, like they would be if they'd been struggling through reading assignments their whole lives and can't wait to be done with them?
I suspect nothing has changed, you're just seeing it from the other side: the same proportion of your peers were struggling when you were in school, and the teachers saw it but you didn't.
I like reading. I read a lot. I like writing. I write a fair amount. I majored in English. I was homeschooled and read constantly.
I got to college in the 2000s and in the gen ed courses found I was assigned 20-50 pages of reading per week per class (or its equivalent in math) while working a job and adjusting to living on my own and building a social life. And even that wouldn't have been so bad, except for the writing was terrible.
Sure, there were a few Henry Jameses out there where the reading was a breeze, and sometimes you'd get a professor with a flair for writing assign his own textbook. Instead, most non-fiction books were not written with an eye for engaging the audience or winnowed by a marketplace of consumers, and a lot of the fiction was written before modern techniques were developed. This was not helped by following it up with a lecture where you sat there and had someone explain it all to you.
This isn't to say that reading poor writing isn't a skill. It gives you access to brains that might be good at things other than writing. I'm not sure if the way college goes about it is effective in teaching that skill. What it ended up teaching me is that I didn't have to crack a book to make an A, so I stopped and returned to spending my spare time reading more important works like Strunk's Elements of Style or Card's Characters and Viewpoint.
>What evidence is there that people are unable to seek out information on their own
If anecdotal evidence would do, you can look at any public forum.
Loads and loads of trivial questions that could be looked up in seconds get reposted regularly by people that are apparently unable to seek out information on their own.
And that's people who have the vocabulary (and presumable some model of the world described by that vocabulary) to formulate the question correctly. What about people who would not have these models and relevant vocabulary without school?
How do you look up mitochondria if you don't even know that there are cells?
Not trying to defend the current education system that appears to be fundamentally broken, but I feel like some of the critics are a little too optimistic.
Yes, all the information is out there, but it's not trivial to find it, even harder to learn it on your own, and people are not that good at either.
"Loads and loads of trivial questions that could be looked up in seconds get reposted regularly by people that are apparently unable to seek out information on their own."
I'm not sure this is evidence of the same thing.
I mean, there's a cliche about informal tech support, where a tech-savvy young adult goes home for the holidays, the family begs him to fix a computer problem, and he saves the day by typing the error message into Google and trying the first suggestion. I've been there myself. But it isn't just uneducated people who can't Google their own error messages -- it happens with relatives who have post-graduate degrees, too.
It's a strange phenomenon, but if I had to guess, I'd say it can be hard for people unfamiliar with a field to know which search results are trustworthy or useful, so they'd rather ask an expert and move on than sift through a bunch of conflicting material. They *could* read every source in full, and eventually pick up enough context to know which to rely on, but if the subject otherwise holds no interest for them, they'd be doing a lot of extra work just to learn (and then forget) what the expert already knows.
"How do you look up mitochondria if you don't even know that there are cells?"
You're talking about getting an introduction to domain knowledge here, and the point I was responding to was something else -- it was that people won't be able to absorb information about things they care about unless they're first forced to absorb information about things they don't care about. In other words, "How can you look up cocktail recipes if you've never looked up the powerhouse of the cell?"
I'm a little shocked to see this question. People being unable to parse and evaluate information they have looked up seems like a central problem of our information age, and one that's likely to rip our society apart if we don't figure out a solution. How else can wave after wave of destructive disinformation spread across social media if not for people caring and wanting to know yet not being able to "learn properly from what they are reading"?
Do the majority of McDonald’s workers need to know these things? What are the chances that the cashier who gave me the wrong change count on her first day knows anything from her biology class? Yet these are the majority of people: unskilled labor. Generations who think education is boring and dumb. Yet if they were left to their devices in a classroom full of learning, what would they do with that boredom? What could they have found? Would they have come to love that free learning? Maybe not. Maybe they would still be giving change poorly until they were sent to the back to flip burgers with millions of other unskilled workers around the globe. And that is ok, as long as they had moral and ethical instructions somewhere in there (something schools often skip these days).
The original is "did we need to know that the mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell, when this isn't even particularly true and not the most relevant information about mitochondria?"
But the wider point there is that learning that snippet of information also means you have learned about cells and that cells have parts, and what cells are, and (let us hope) the difference between bacteria and viruses, and why anti-biotics work, and what they don't work for, and so on.
Scrapping biology classes unless little Johnny or Susie is interested in nature studies means hello, people who believe in the vibrational ability of crystals to fix what ails them down the line!
Yeah, I think this is more complicated than he suggests. I was terrible at biology (or I guess not good - I had a B average but struggled), but the main takeaway I got is that the body is enormously complicated and I should listen to experts and doubt anyone who makes simplistic claims when it comes to life sciences.
That's probably how it goes for most people, and to me it's a point against the importance of drilling random info into children. Johnny and Susie are highly unlikely to use their mastery of high school biology to evaluate medical advice they get from a doctor.
I think we have to decide whether school is a kind of 'generalised strength training' for children's ability to learn, or whether the subject matter itself is important. If it's the former, then a lot of space for reform opens up. If it's the latter, perhaps we should look more closely at the future usefulness of the knowledge acquired and at the various psychological opportunity costs incurred. (learned aversion to structured learning, random petty tortures of kids, etc., as touched upon in the review)
> Johnny and Susie are highly unlikely to use their mastery of high school biology to evaluate medical advice they get from a doctor
Probably not, but maybe a high-school level of biology is at least enough to get them to believe medical advice they get from a (randomly selected) doctor over medical advice they get from a random youtube video, which is overall an improvement.
For a somewhat topical example, I have what is basically only a high-school level knowledge of biology, which means that I don't really understand the immune system at all, but when somebody explains to me how an mRNA vaccine works I can say "Oh right, cool, I basically get the idea" rather than "ack, sorcery!" which probably enables me to make slightly better decisions than I otherwise might.
Counterpoint: practically, believing "my metabolism is enormously complicated" is how people stay obese, and believing the simplistic "calories-in-calories-out" is how people get to whatever weight they want. And most of the people saying calories-in-calories-out are non-experts (non-academic, anyway)
On the other hand, people saying that as enormously complicated a system as the human metabolism may be, it can't violate the underlying principle of "calories, in, calories out" are drawing on understanding of basic physics and chemistry which is taught in high school (but many students fail to absorb.)
I don't think any of that is necessarily true. I would expect that many people who can parrot "the mitochondria is [sic] the powerhouse of the cell" would respond with a blank stare when asked what a cell is and spend a lot of money on crystals.
What do you think about "scrapping biology" but keeping the scientific method, and extending it to the lesson of "some maps reflect the territory and some don't; some beliefs have better predictive power than others."
Is that not enough to then derive the utility of biological sciences vs crystals?
If inability to look things up is the major complaint, perhaps we spend time on that using the terrible method of teaching, but not on mitochondria. If they speak a different language, they can just look it up in their native tongue. If they have bad grammer... google doesn't usually mind.
Every physician can tell you the harm that "Dr. Internet" does to high-quality healthcare. Every genuine expert in subject field X trying to teach something to a 21st century n00b can tell you how tiresome it is to have to unwind a whole passel of factoids and Internet theories as plausible as phlogiston and the geocentric Solar System, thanks to the ability to "just look things up."
Besides which, the ability to just look things up isn't new. In 1940 my father could also just look things up by asking the guy on the barstool next to him. Now thanks to the Internet, we can ask random guys on barstools all over the world. w00t!
Given the state of cutting edge medical knowledge (replication crisis anyone?), and given that the average physician is, by definition, quite far from the cutting edge except maybe on a few sub-topics...i would show a little bit less disdain to dr internet. I reserve my disdain to physicians that do not take time to answers questions or get angry when they do not get the respect they expect from their patient for their expertise, when the subject at hand is the patient health and possibly life. It's not the majority, but a very significant minority.
I have MRSA. Most people do, but it doesn't express. It expresses in me. Even with going to multiple doctors, consulting the internet, a couple of college biology classes I still to this day don't know if it's something different about me or about the staph that I'm colonized with. (Everything I hear/read says it's me, but the way medical professionals treat me, they act like it's the staph)
I spent about two years going to several doctors (sometimes because mine wasn't in) while they tried to deal with it. It was very painful and often left me on crutches for a week at a time. They started recommending surgery.
Then I decided to go to a specialist (my doctor never recommended it, it was common staph, why would I need to go to a specialist? Surgeries for staph are normal.)
The specialist said to stop going to the doctor. Gave me some at-home ways to treat it that were more than just "use soap". Helped me learn how to identify what it looked/felt like if it got too bad and I should go to the doctor/emergency room. Then said I was welcome to come back to her if I had follow-up questions but likely we'd never see eachother again. And she was right. The expressions almost immediately were less severe. They never progressed to a severe outbreak ever again. I never used the crutches again. I stopped going to the doctor for staph.
I have a similar story for a plantar wart and has the added tidbit of the specialist mocking the GP for just being an overpaid nurse practitioner with the power to prescribe antibiotics. That time only took me 3 months to decide to go to the specialist.
And another story with a numb patch of skin, but I decided to go to the specialist after only one week. He also mocked GPs. Hey at least I can start to learn. Maybe next time I'll skip the GP altogether.
So how much biology do we need to identify that the doctors most people go to aren't genuine experts in subject field X where X is not how to prescribe antibiotics? Because if more biology classes would provide this then perhaps everyone needs to get an MD or PhD so they can correctly identify that they still don't know enough, and neither do most MDs.
I know I'm unusual in this, but I wish I'd been institutionalized *more* as a child--assuming the right particular choice of institutional activity. I wish someone had locked me in a room and forced me to do math olympiad problems all day, the way certain other governments supposedly do it, instead of forcing me to do much easier work half the time and letting me do nothing whatsoever of value on the internet the other half. I would've been happier at the time and I would be better at my job today. I was beset with massive akrasia and incapable of aligning my actions with my personal goals and desires, and well aware of it; all I wanted, even in the moment, was someone to tie me to the mast. I don't understand why I'm alone in feeling this way, because I don't think I'm alone in having been terrible at choosing how to spend my time when I was young.
It could be one of those problems where the compromise solution is worse than going all out into one or the other. Half-assed institutionalisation might be worse than both child liberation and competent institutionalisation.
Same, really. I am still basically crippled by my own inability to force myself to do anything not immediately enjoyable. If I could be made even a tiny bit more disciplined / less "akrasic", I would pay thousands upon thousands.
For what it's worth, I've had this problem all my life, finally turned to medication a few years ago, and....it mostly worked. It took years to make the appointment -- as I think Unit of Caring put it, "how the fuck does anyone with ADD get diagnosed?" -- but the state of being-able-to-work went from "something that strikes a few times of year like a bolt of lightning, that I have to ride when it comes because it won't come again soon" to "something I can reach roughly half the time just by taking my meds."
(I thought about not posting this because it's hardly news and you'd probably already tried it, then I realized that no, someone with my problem probably has *not* already tried it, because doing things is hard)
(also, I started with Adderall, found it worked well but murdered my sleep, asked for Dexedrine after reading Scott's amphetamine post, and so far it still works and doesn't hurt my sleep nearly as much. Not medical advice, etc. etc. Just a case report.)
In professional school, I used to marvel at how my peers were so much harder working than I was. Four or five days a week, they'd grind it out until close to bedtime, then get up and do it again.
It occurred to me that they had a secret advantage that I didn't. They didn't have lives. If my peers weren't working, they were either shopping, watching TV, or going to bars. (Internet was just starting to become a thing.) None of these were all that riveting, so they might as well put in the work.
Me, I had a ton of interests, things I wanted to learn or read about, stuff I wanted to do. Just that none of them were taught in any school I attended.
Schools don't primarily teach children to be disciplined. They teach children the skill of placating dictators, and any disciplinary skills taught are a rare and entirely coincidental byproduct.
I guess my perspective is - what I enjoyed at the time was programming, if you'd given me a chance I'd have been doing programming all day, and that would in fact have left me massively better off today than learning and immediately forgetting things I would never need again.
What strikes me as different from my case is that the kinds of pressures school exerts didn't make me all that more disciplined. They made me panic, freeze, close up. I wouldn't have minded some tying to the mast either, but that wasn't it.
And what's to say that being tied to the mast wouldn't have just resulted in suicide or a the hikikomori life and not increased productivity as an adult?
Or perhaps the school/office drone life punctuated by despair, binges and mistresses.
Or maybe genuine happiness. Who knows? Anyone done studies on this?
This reasoning relies on the unsupported and implausible assumption that training kids to rely entirely on coercion for 100% of their motivation will make them good at finding non-coercive means of motivation once the coercion is removed.
I'm not good at finding non-coercive means of motivation anyway. Really can't imagine how I could be worse at it if I had been required to work harder in childhood, certainly not so much worse as to make up for all the time I wasted.
The reality is that I engage in a lot of productive, enjoyable intellectual activity for my job, stuff that makes me genuinely happy, and I know I'll immediately stop the moment I stop being pressured to do it by authority figures. The only actual difference between me today and me as a child is that today they expect more of me, and the right things.
Maybe to more intrinsically motivated commenters, this just means I don't deserve the cool job I have. But I think it's better for society that I do it than that I do nothing. And I don't think my personality type is particularly unusual, either.
Decent article. However, it seems like the book is focused primarily on younger kids, while the reviewer kind of lumps together their experience as a fifth grader with their experience as a homeschooled high-schooler. I think the system the reviewer describes -- students largely setting their own curricula in an environment designed to make that easy -- could work alright for 13+ or so. But frankly, claims like "It's really easy to catch up when you need to" are just absurd in the context of younger kids. I say this for two primary reasons:
1) Some things are literally easier to learn when your brain is a little sponge. The most obvious example is language. What else qualifies? I don't know, but neither does the author, and without some serious evidence I'm not about to endorse a world in which many kids are as capable of understanding arithmetic as I am of understanding Dutch.
2) Who's to say they'll catch up on knowledge when they need to? Take history, for example: it's easy enough to catch up on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict; it's been going on for less than 100 years, after all. But scroll through Twitter and you'll find any number of people who've clearly formed strong views on the matter without knowing the first thing about history, or worse, knowing only what they've been told by partisans. I don't want adults who don't know or care that the US had a civil war. The stuff younger kids learn is really basic and fundamental -- so much so that we take it for granted.
All that's clear by now is that nobody really knows how to run a school. Unfortunately, that includes a lot of reformers.
Younger kids used to learn basics and fundamentals. Now in some places it is not that. They learn opinions about trends described by opinion makers, from historical fiction. (Parent here.)
Eh, maybe. I grew up in the rural south in the seventies and eighties and was taught that slavery was not the primary cause of the civil war.
The Iran hostage crisis happened when I was in sixth grade. I remember seeing video of Iranians burning American flags and thinking "that's crazy - we're the good guys!" I didn't learn about the coup we sponsored in the fifties until much, much later.
Which isn't to say I'm now on the side of the Islamists, but clearly when I was younger I didn't realize I was absorbing a particular point of view.
Good point. I was too cynical in my comment; I meant the kids aren't always getting the drill/support necessary to retain the basic names/dates of history. I "did" a semester of 7th grade social studies/history last fall due to the pandemic and saw that there, and it was a standardized curriculum. Narratives/cause and effect rise out of a decent timeline of events, and getting the events in reverse order, or not knowing them, influences the plausibility/usefulness of the narrative. Also if they don't learn names and dates, people are set up for surprise later, the Spanish-American war being a good example (the what? we did what where?). Then learning some unfamiliar dates can destabilize the whole narrative; we go from being the good guys to being the bad guys. When the whole time there were elements of both, but without the knowledge of names, dates and timelines none of that is clear.
If you start out with a scaffolding of dates you can fill in some ideas and then more dates and more ideas. With the dates (and the dates of enough things!) you can analyze the narratives and see what works where. I was in sixth grade or thereabouts when Reagan bombed Libya, got to school and it was an epic "Oh s***" how can that be a good idea. Then when there was intervention in Libya again there was a pattern to connect it to, it wasn't a one-off.
The combination of unfavored aspects of history being repressed, and people not learning enough dates to construct a timeline to evaluate the meaning of events, leads to weird conclusions. Who talks about Chiapas anymore, or subcomandante Marcos? But are they unimportant, no, a range of consequences follows from every event.
Just read Gilley's article on colonialism.
There's always a point of view, but stacking it with more names and dates makes it both more robust and easier to re-evaluate later.
As an aside, Slavery actually wasn't the primary cause of the civil war. If you claimed it was in 1860s, the Union would of course call you "Southern Propagandandist" and claim that the war was only that of "preserving the Union" and has nothing to do with the institution of slavery. I doubt Southern State curriculum goes into much detail if they claim slavery wasn't the cause of the war. Most history taught in American schools is nonsense anyways, "Useful Histories" as one might call it. If you want to read primary sources for the American Civil War, I recommend George Lunt's Origin of the Late War 1865. If there's one book about the civil war you're read, it's this one. If you are willing to read more, I recommend Edgar Lee Master's Lincoln the Man 1931, if you want to understand slavery, Slave narratives : http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/WPA/wpahome.html
collected during FDR's time is useful (though reliability of each single story is doubtful). If you want to read something subversive, you can read George Fitzhugh (1850s) https://mises.org/wire/george-fitzhugh-honest-socialist, where he claims and I kid you not slavery is a great institution because it is similar to socialism. This can be seen as a desperate attempt to court the North before an impending war, but I encourage you to read his arguments with an open mind (lol). That said there may be a use to dumb down history for the masses, creates a sense of community and shared origin and if I were home-schooling my child (which I'm not because I want them to have a normal life in this society) I wouldn't force my child to read primary sources or read anything other than the prescribed curriculum unless he shows an enthusiastic interest in the study of history and wants to delve deeper into it.
I realised I didn't actually give the reasons for the Civil War apart from suggesting references. It was in no sense a moral war that had anything to do with slavery (But the Emancipation Proclamation??? - I'll get to that) The best way to explain it is by analogy. The first World War, would it have happened without the assassination? No. Was it a moral war to end the militarism and establish democracies (of course not) even though that was the end result. Take WW2 instead, is it likely we would enter WW2 without Pearl Harbour? No, FDR of course famously promised in his reelection speech that he would not lead a wary American Public into another world war. Yet after beating Germany, Nazism was replaced by a liberal democracy so was it a moral war to end nazism and establish democracy (of course not).
The reason people get confused with the civil war is they can only see America as a whole and for them slavery was not an institution of just the South, it was an institution of America. This was simply not the mindset of those living in the 1800s. The Southerners strongly believed America was a legal document that binded the states, not a new metaphysical nation. States had their own constitution, their own supreme courts, their own slogans etc, (their own flags in some cases). Modern Historian David Potter (https://www.amazon.com/Impending-Crisis-1848-1861-David-Potter/dp/0061319295) himself writes: "Against the defenders of this doctrine, the defenders of nationalism did not come off as well as they might have, partly because they accepted the assumption that the nature of the Union should be determined by legal means, somewhat as if it were a case in the law of contracts." So the nationalists i.e., the Unionists themselves thought America was a legal Union and not a nation, imagine that!. They may not have seen themselves as France vs Germany (owing to the same language, customs etc) but certainly neither side saw themselves as one binding country as we do now. Now the reason for the war becomes very clear, The Fort Sumter Attack just like Kaiser invaded Belgium, Hitler invaded Poland, Japan bombed Hawaii, most people clearly know the cause of those wars but not this! For example if Hitler didn't invade Poland WW2 might have never happened, no historian disagrees, it's the same here. In fact if Virginia left the Union by vote (as it almost did in 1861), we might have still had a confederacy to this date. (Though I doubt if slavery would still exist as an institution).
If nothing else (and there is much else), the various ordinances of secession by the Confederate states are rather convincing as to the threat of abolition of slavery being the primary cause of the war. They outright state as much.
Reducing the causes of these grand historical events to their most proximate triggers strikes me as a bit myopic, if you'll forgive my saying so. A bit like claiming that the cause of the October Revolution was really the government raid on the Worker's Path newspaper offices.
There were lots of people involved in the war, with lots of different motives. But I feel comfortable saying that secession was the cause of the war, and slavery was the cause of secession.
The question to ask is not whether the North and South hated each other (they of course did), US and Japan hated each other from quite a while before WW2. The question is whether they were on a collision course to start a war without Fort Sumter, (whether US would fight Japan without Pearl Harbour). While in WW2 the case is clear, US would in no way start a war without provocation, even in the Civil War a fair reading gives the same picture. Consider the fact that after the South started to seccede Lincoln proposed the 13th amendment in 1860 https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/proposed-thirteenth-amendment-prevent-secession-1861) that would enshrine slavery in the constitution in the Southern states. (ironically it was later used to end slavery after the war) Why did he propose that? As a last ditch effort to avoid the Civil War, his compromise was that slavery wouldn't extend to the newly formed States and South had to cease all claims of seccession but the South was too distrustful of the North (especially after Dredd Scott) to agree to join back the Union. What was Lincoln's breaking point, the one thing he would in no way argue with and would be a non starter of any proposed deal? It was not slavery, slavery was the one thing he kept promising he wouldn't end in the South if they came to some deal. It was however recognising the South's Independence, that he would never do. When Senators like John Pendleton Kennedy proposed to create a separate Southern Confederacy of states that would be different from the union in 1860, he would have none of it. The seccession was illegal and he did not consider the states to have secceeded even if they claimed so. I suppose with these assumptions we can come tonthe conclusion that if the South kept behaving like free states then without Fort Sumter eventually a war would occur. If South joined back the Union then without Fort Sumter the war wouldnt happen though activism to end slavery would go on and possibly like the civil rights slavery would end through votes alone. My view though is that if the Lincoln presidency passed other presidencies would be more open to a seccession and the war would have possibly never happened. While these counterfactual can never be proven, I do think it's a reasonable view considering the mindset of all the sides at that time
Actually, a school superintendent at a district in upstate New York, I believe, once manages to run an experiment where he had the kids taught zero math until 6th grade. They caught up in one year with similar or superior performance to the kids who had been learning it the whole time. It’s not a settled matter, but I think the ability to catch up is vastly underrated.
Some of this may be path-dependence. When a 6th grade education (elementary education) was the limit of what most people would be guaranteed to have, ensuring knowledge of fundamental arithmetic by its conclusion was probably essential.
Now, though, I have no idea. It may make sense to try and use the time for what its best for.
This sent me down quite a rabbit hole! The man's name was Louis P. Benezet, this experiment took place in the 1930s, and it's a pretty interesting story. However, it's not true that he taught zero math -- he just tried to replace formal math with "natural math," such as estimating distances and lengths, reasoning about concepts in plain language, etc. So these kids were still developing a number sense in class, just without extensive symbol manipulation or memorization.
Benezet's schtick was more about holistic understanding vs mindless symbol manipulation, not early learning vs catching up. I don't think this is a very good argument for abandoning the teaching of math -- just, at best, changing how it works. (And perhaps not even that... in the decades since, math education has gone through a lot of changes in the pursuit of Teaching For Understanding with mixed results.)
"At the end of the day, students were allowed to take home any unsold books. We were told that any we didn’t take would be destroyed, sent to a landfill. This was probably true (it viscerally horrifies me to this day), but if it was a lie it was a really clever tactic."
I want to talk about this, because it goes with a theme in Double Fold, which in turn matches a certain strain I've identified in myself and other 'smart' people. I am a person who loves books and owns approximately zero of them. This bothers me occasionally, which continually surprises me because I am profoundly unsentimental.
I have many more photographs of, say, paywalled NYT cooking articles on my phone than I do of family. I love my family dearly, more than just about anything, but I have no need to totemize them them with photos and memorabilia and so on. So it is with my intellectualism and books, for the most part. Still, my lack of family photos bothers me never, while my lack of books bothers me sometimes. I think this is just that people like me (graduate education, high paying job, knowledge work, etc.) are expected, in some ways above all else, to own and love and otherwise perform the sacred ideology of books.
But I don't, and can't, and won't, because they're not useful. They're heavy, bulky, hard to use, expensive, take up space, and have only one real advantage over digital (it's harder to flip back and forth with one than the other). They are, in a word, sentimental. I don't think it's healthy or reasonable to have such a reaction as the author to the potential destruction of some wood pulp. Obviously, this kind of reaction isn't all bad because it can and does have the second-order effects the author describes (broadening the mind, etc.)
This brings us to Double Fold. I wonder what percentage of readers here on ACX thought the problem with the policy being derided in Double Fold was with its nature versus its implementation. That the process of scanning and switching to microfiche/digital with concomitant destruction was begun way too early and with far too much hubris appears indisputable, and that many important works and a substantial portion of the historical record were potentially lost forever. But these are, fundamentally, implementation problems. Of course, an implementation problem can be so great that it calls the entire policy into question, as indeed is the case with Double Fold.
But let's say the process only began in, say, 2000, by which time technology sufficient to create high-quality, durable, searchable, digital copies of books was widespread. Would we still have a problem with destruction? I wouldn't (excepting of course books which are legitimate artifacts and/or works of art), but I'd strongly suspect that a lot of people, including Double Fold's target audience, would. I struggle to think of a rational reason for this, which strikes me as pure sentimentality and/or totemization.
This issue came up in the most trivial fashion possible during the early part of the pandemic, when there was a burst of thinkpieces on the subject of 'the shelf' that was behind you in Zoom calls, as though this were, should be, and could be your whole identity. And indeed, I think this kind of thinking, seen in the review of Double Fold, and the quoted text, that perpetuates this idea. As Freddie says, you aren't the shit you like. The shit you like is at best (or maybe worst) a crutch.
Let me explain a bit. I broke my ankle many years ago and it's never quite fully recovered. Not really a big deal, but occasionally it flares up and I consider wearing a brace. I've talked to my doctor a few times about it, and I'm always told to avoid braces and such because the ankle will come to depend on the brace. That's how I feel about book ideology for a huge swathe of people my age and class. Instead of having real identities (or so it seems to me) people have bullet point lists, which is all they have to extract meaning from. It seems to make them, at the very least, unhappy, and seems to predispose them to many other issues, such as toxic fandom (or its reverse; look at the JK Rowling controversy viz HP fandom) and mob culture on social media.
I have no advice on what to do instead. I don't have this problem, but I don't know what I do instead, or what I did differently back when that set me on a different course. But I am happy. In saying this, I'm not trying to flex. I'm trying emphasize that this is a pathology and it contributes to misery, which I would like there to be less of.
I genuinely prefer physical books over digital books, because I find physical books easier to read and the information easier to retain. Additionally, it's far easier to get distracted when reading something on a computer/phone (although Kindles do exist) than when reading a physical book. The only purpose for which I prefer digital books is when I'm looking for something to reference (e.g., a quote, or how often a certain word is used); when I'm first reading, physical books are far preferable.
Destroying physical books can be a problem because the Internet does not last forever either. Part of the negative reaction to destroying such books is due to the fact that, all else equal, more redundancy is better; if one is destroyed, the other remains.
I’ve read a few thousand paper and ink books and a few hundred digital books. It’s just not the same experience.
The vibe is much more intimate with a physical copy. If you enjoy the book and it enters your personal hall of favorites, you’ll find a prominent spot for it on one of your shelves. You’ll look at it from time to time and it will call you back over the years for a second, third or fourth reading.
(Note: Four times is not the limit. You can certainly go higher for the handful that you love the most)
You can develop a healthy lifetime relationship with a physical book. It’s Isn’t a pathology and quite a bit of joy is experienced rather than misery.
I suspect preferences for physical vs digital books are somewhat an artifact of what people are used to. I find physical books kind of confusing and off-putting now that I have been on digital books for most of my life, even though I grew up with the physical versions - people who are growing up with digital books are quite likely to never develop the preference for physical books even if given the chance later to try them?
Have you tried a kindle with a e-ink screen? I totally get not liking digital books on traditional screens, but e-ink is basically physical book, but with word lookup, page saving, fits in a (big) pocket, with 20k books on it. I'm a big fan.
Yeah, I’ve had a Kindle PaperWhite for a few years. I use it often. I really like the translation feature for authors that insert dialogue in other languages.
I just checked mine now and I have 345 books on “the cloud”. It is an undeniable space saver too.
Pressed Post too soon. Even with those advantages I still think it’s not the same experience. You can’t develop the same passion for an ebook that you can for a favorite in physical form. I know that I’m talking about emotion here but good fiction does generate an emotional response. I suppose it is a bit weird to develop an attachment to an object, but it is a pleasant weirdness
‘ Jimmy Fallon gave me a Kindle. He actually gave it to me as a present. I said: “I know you gave me this because I don’t have one. You know what else I don’t have? A Bentley.”’
So I much prefer physical books to digital, although I have a great ebook reader and do have a lot of ebooks.
Principally this is because I read a lot of books, somewhere between 50 and 100 per year, and if I was paying ebook list price I would be paying between four and eight times as much per volume with no advantage to me. I think anyone who claims ebooks are cheaper than paper is probably quite uninformed about eBay, Amazon’s used book options, and used book stores in general—on my best trip last year my wife and I came away from our favorite store with twenty volumes for twenty dollars. The only competition to paper as far as price goes is Project Gutenberg.
I also disagree that ebooks are easier to use. You didn’t provide any reasoning here but I assume that you mean it’s easier to look up information. I suppose this is true if you are wholly unfamiliar with the book and searching for keywords, but if you’re not sure what you’re looking for or if it’s a reference text that you use often, paper is much easier up to a certain page limit, due to your ability to skim and flip quickly and locate physical sections without internal referents. Ease of use is balanced further by the fact that while paper books are harder to carry, ebooks require a power source and are more delicate.
Valid advantages are storage space and weight: if you’re out of shelf space, you’re out. That said, I end up donating or reselling a lot of books over the years as I determine what I will and won’t re-read, and this is another advantage of paper over digital because an ebook cannot be resold, whereas many used books can be resold for a significant fraction of their cost.
But anyway, I guess my main counter argument to your comment is that you have projected this hyper-online ‘ideology of books’ across all readers of paper books in a way that doesn’t map to reality. The fetishization of book-as-object or book-as-personality is only a part of it, and ebooks and audiobooks are also part of this personality-defining, bullet-point construct with vapid, cannibalistic fandoms and Instagram photos of ‘what I’m reading lately.’ Having no physical shelves doesn’t make you immune; what makes you immune is, like me and my wife, not having Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr or whatever is trendy now. You have misidentified the risk and cause completely.
You say “I’m not meaning to flex,” but honestly until you said that I didn’t think you were; now I suspect that on some level you do feel a moral superiority to the ‘pathological’ hoarders of outmoded paper books. If you didn’t you would see that the debate between paper and digital (does there even need to be one?) is orthogonal to reading versus fetish-reading. That you aren’t able to see may speak more to the doom-and-gloom perspective of our society, which continually assumes that preference issues like this are symptomatic of disease, but it doesn’t make your thesis any more true.
Paper books matter because one can inadvertently encounter a physical object more easily, in my experience, than one can inadvertently encounter a data object. For example I found a book on a free shelf, an analysis of a hypothetical (at the date of publication) US presidential election runoff between Hillary Clinton and *Condoleezza Rice*. Would I have ever looked for it? No. Was it extremely interesting? Yes.
When I walk the physical stacks in the library I always find a book or paper source which is at least as important as whatever the digital search gave me; I use digital search to reveal a few general classification codes and then go look through the surrounding shelves. Digital search is more likely to provide what I am expecting, because I choose the keywords; physical search provides a whole block of writing on the topic with a variety of opinions. Encountering the unfamiliar is an important part of learning and knowledge.
Besides, electronic stuff can be deleted. Burning all the copies of a book is harder to do.
> They're heavy, bulky, hard to use, expensive, take up space, and have only one real advantage over digital (it's harder to flip back and forth with one than the other). They are, in a word, sentimental. I don't think it's healthy or reasonable to have such a reaction as the author to the potential destruction of some wood pulp.
Note that the book review says this account happened on the order of thirty years after 1958, when any computing devices you might read on were still heavier, bulkier, harder to use, etc. than books. The computer my school had in the classrooms back then was an Apple IIe—a computer that displayed its text in monospace on a screen 40 characters wide—used almost exclusively for educational games from MECC. The Internet was not yet part of the culture; the World Wide Web didn't exist in 1988. If their school was anything like mine, their library didn't even use a computer to track books back then, much less deliver them.
It's certainly valid to be less inclined towards physical-book worship today, given our experience with the alternatives we have. But an incident like the one described would have carried greater weight in the past, when one's access to information was far more greatly limited to the contents of nearby books and brains than it is now.
In addition to reasons others have said (less distractable, more information retained, physically more enjoyable to hold in hand and display on shelves), I prefer paper books because it is easier to find things in them. Paper books have spatial dimensions to them; every word has a position on a page, and every page has a position in the book. It is in fact often easier to find something by remembering "this section was about a third of the way through the book, near the top of the left-hand page, in a paragraph with such-and-such a shape" than by ctrl+F searching for a direct quotation. E-books actually screw with this intuition; a "page" is just all the upcoming words that fit on the screen, so a word's position is recalculated often. For example changing the font moves the words around, but changing it back doesn't always put the words back.
I have a kindle paperwhite that I take with me traveling: Paper can't compete with silicon for weight, volume, and durability. But that's about the only time I prefer digital books to physical.
> But I don't, and can't, and won't, because they're not useful.
They're very useful in an apocalypse! I think your assessment of their utility is based on the optimistic assumption that civilization will never go backwards. Not just in an apocalyptic sense, that's of course the most extreme example, but there are many ways for civilized norms to go backwards. Witness all the shadow editing done to published articles these days. Think about a few years ago when Amazon was remotely deleting ebooks from people's devices.
Can't do any of that with real books. They are a form of distributed, durable knowledge that stands in opposition to the increasing centralization of knowledge and information we're seeing today (which is ironically the opposite of the intended vision of the internet).
Books used to be very expensive and to own them was (is?) a huge status symbol. It's not surprising there is an obsession with them and a strong feeling to preserve them when for most of them you could throw it out and pick up a used copy if you ever happened to want it again in the future.
Swords are similar. In many ways not as practical as other tools, but symbols of wealth and status.
Japan has those dolls modeled after the monarchy that they collect as status symbols, right?
I'm often told that collecting cars is an upper-working-class thing that stems from the car being a integral and expensive tool at one point and the ability to afford more than one is a status symbol.
I bet there's a number of other things in our culture that used to be very expensive and require protection/care that are overvalued know or have an aura of being cool/rich/etc. because of it.
I strongly prefer digital books to physical for most purposes (though for things like recipes or rulebooks, there are advantages to physical). I still felt like Double Fold made a strong case. There is a difference between a consumer product packaged for broad distribution and a historical artifact intended for future study. A physical artifact, produced for a specific purpose at a specific moment in time, encodes an enormous amount of unintended information. If the original artifact is destroyed and replaced with a digital copy, only the elements of it that are considered "important" at the moment of destruction will be preserved. This deprives future generations the ability to truly return to the original and see it for themselves.
As a general principle, it is bad to make a copy of something and then dispose of the original. Making the copy is good - copies can be distributed more widely, indexed with metadata and made searchable, etc. But that doesn't excuse throwing away the original. Copies are never perfect, and it is easy to miss something that future generations will decide is much more important than you ever expected it to be.
I think this is mostly right, but there are some serious benefits from having a peer group studying the same things you are, being able to discuss and bounce ideas off your peers and friends, and learning skills is best with direct instruction rather than directions to the library.
The larger problems with this come from the general incentives involved in all this. School Is Not About Education and all that jazz. Schools provide child warehousing, accreditation, and socioeconomic segregation. Whether these are good or not, it'd take pretty some pretty interventionist policy on childrearing to actually break the system.
I'm also vaguely concerned with internet attention economy Baby Youtube Hell-type issues but I'm not at all sure how confident in that being a problem I should be. And online learning hasn't seemed to be great, in terms of either enjoyment or education, but I suspect (or possibly just hope) that's because it's replicated all the problems of mainstream mass education with none of the benefits.
Overall great review, of a book with a great vision. I wish I could be less cynical about it.
I mean, I believe this is why the author wants children to get more involved in job-related activities. Learn the thing you want to learn directly, effectively.
Very enjoyable review in which I shared many of the opinions and feelings as the author.
Much like the author, I feel that changing the institution is fairly impossible, even during the pandemic. The societal view that more education is always good is a feeling that's so ubiquitous that most anti-schooling opinions are immediately dismissed (even if the same people will admit that much of what is taught in school is a waste of time).
Most adults stop caring about school once they graduate and have the "I did it, so you have to do it too" attitude, which is very difficult to change.
I was also hopeful at the beginning of the pandemic that it would force substantial innovation in schooling and that schooling would improve as a result. I don't think that has happened. The inertia in schooling institutions is as strong as ever, even though these institutions of standardization and control make even less sense online.
Why are you optimistic that this is a good time for institutional innovation? Have you seen any evidence of this innovation since the pandemic started?
The reviewer gets at an obvious but overwhelming truth, (the kind that we like to avoid confronting so as to avoid despair) as have many others who've thought about education and pedagogy. The discussion around Scott's experience of school as a prison brought up some of the same observations. Kids are different. Sometimes very different. Different capacities, interests, cognitions, intuitions, emotional ranges and regulations, personalities, etc. What works for one kid, can be torture for another. Something experienced as trauma for kid A can be exactly what kid B needs to thrive.
Obviously, when you stick all this diversity into a single institution and try to standardize everything, the kids whose pegs more or less fit the hole of standardization will be ok, the ones who don't fit will be forced to fit despite their suffering, or abandoned to fate.
If this is indeed one of the fundamental problems with institutional schooling and a source of its' lackluster results, then by definition there can be no "standard" solution - only something that tailors an optimal pedagogy to each child based on their individual map of attributes and evolves with them as they mature.
It's worth noting that this is how kids from wealthy households are educated. For every weakness, deficiency, or "abnormality", a specialist is brought in, a tutor is hired, an unconventional intervention made - resources are reallocated as needed.
I'm not sure if this premise is actually true, but if it is, how could such an approach scale to a societal level?
I... mostly disagree with this. Your comment sounds like it's at least vaguely based on the concept of "learning styles". A lot of bad psychologists have made a lot of non-falsifiable theories about learning styles over the years. I'm skeptical.
In life, there are things that are just more interesting than others. A Solar Eclipse is just more interesting than a lunar eclipse. People fly and drive and celebrate solar eclipses. Lunar eclipses happen and a few people take notice, but many may not.
On youtube, one video can be designed to be incredibly engaging and fun. It's just simply more interesting than other videos. A 3 hour lecture on youtube is unlikely to go viral - a mark rober video is.
In school, when we talk about different learnings styles and how "What works for one kid, can be torture for another" is just... so rare. Kids will answer surveys about learning styles or take quizzes, but more often than not, all kids prefer INTERESTING learning to uninteresting learning. If you showed kids options for three curriculums - watching a star wars explanation of gravity, going to a museum to learn about gravity, or learning gravity from a schoolbook, the kids might answer differently. Maybe kid A already understands gravity, so they want it as short as possible. Maybe kid B knows that usually, videos about science aren't interesting, so he'll try the museum. Maybe kid C knows that taking a whole day for the museum would mean he misses out on seeing his crush, so he'd rather not.
It sounds like kids A, B, and C, might have different learning styles, but they are just all trying to choose the most interesting thing. There's probably one answer that really is the most interesting. The museum could be a more-boring classroom, or it could be a free-reign for the kids to run around and explore. That video could be a 30 minute dull boring explanation of gravity, or it could be a comedy slapstick that lasts 5 minutes but gets the point across.
All three kids are trying to FIND the most interesting thing, and are just choosing differently based on their priors about how things went before.
So... in general, when teaching children - try to let theme try everything, and THEN decide which is their preference. But just... make a decision about which one is probably the most interesting. It's probably not something that requires them to sit down and shut up.
I think you'd agree that some kids like structure more than others (just like some adults like structure more than others), or at least that some kids are more motivated (just like some adults are more motivated than others). To go back to your example, perhaps a better way to think about it is if they did all three, and surely you wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a single option that was the most interesting, especially if we included a whole classroom-full of students. The fact that there are some things that are strictly more interesting than others does not mean that all things or even a majority of things are comparable. Just because a poset doesn't consist of n uncomparable things doesn't mean it's a totally ordered set of n things.
Well some 'styles' probably exist, e.g. preferences for interactive learning or sitting quietly and listening to the teacher; I'm the one who's always preferred sitting and listening and only later asking questions to any interactive games, but I know people who totally hate the sitting and listening part.
> In school, when we talk about different learnings styles and how "What works for one kid, can be torture for another" is just... so rare.
I don't think it's as rare as you imply. It's well known that girls do better than boys in schooling all the way up at least through high school. Is it because girls, on average, are inherently much better than boys cognitively, or is it because girls' natural dispositions are just so much better suited than boys's dispositions to those environments, and so they're more comfortable, they receive fewer punishments, they're rewarded more, etc.?
Consider also that twice as many boys as girls are diagnosed with ADHD and medicated. Plenty of studies have shown that more physical and outdoor activities helps ADHD, so do these boys actually have a problem or is the environment we're forcing them into actually the problem?
I'm not sure I would call this "learning styles" per se, but it's clear that environmental factors matter, and it's also clear that the distribution of environments that work best for kids don't all cluster around some common mean.
In a sense, the schooling environment is kinda-sorta necessary, as it's a microcosm of how society expects you to behave when you're an adult: sit down, shut up, do your work and then eventually you'll be permitted to go home and enjoy a carefully scheduled slot of free time where you can be yourself. In that sense, it's important to learn those behaviours in order to be "functional" in modern society. In another sense, normalizing this kinda seems shitty and unnecessary to an extent.
I mentioned Carol Gilligan to my mother (former Latin teacher) and her response was, in paraphrase, "Well, duh, boys get more teacher attention and patriarchy has jack-all to do with it. Boys are harder to keep on task, more prone to acting out, and less inclined to please authority. So of course they're going to get more attention, if for no other reason than the teacher has to say 'Sit down and shut up, Marius!'"
I mean, I feel this doesn't go into the cynical answer: "school teaches kids the only vital life skill in today's society - to half-assedly do something they don't care about eight hours a day." I'm not convinced this is actually false, and it kind of scares me.
Yup, if nothing else, institutionalized school is training for the institutionalized workplace. Wasn't that the explicit purpose when the modern school paradigm was first instituted?
Amusingly, I was raised in a situation very close to his optimal solution: homeshooled, with parents determined to encourage us in whatever flights of interest we had (as long as we got a bare minimum done in important subjects.) That worked out great for me (and all 3 of my siblings) academically. But two out of the four of us struggled with conforming to the insitutionalized workplace for 2-3 years at the beginning of our careers.
We got to college without having ever learned to hate school, and with excellent problem solving skills. And with CONFIDENCE in those skills. We excelled academically. In order from oldest to youngest:
1) 2 STEM bachelor degrees in 3 years
2) 2 STEM bachelor degrees in 4 years
3) 3 STEM bachelor degrees in 4 years
4) One teaching degree from a high intensity program that included a ton of hands-on experience at an associated private school.
That's great! None of us will ever suffer from a resume that blends in to the crowd.
On the other hand, for the two of us that really struggled with the industrialized regularity... Losing or almost losing your first two jobs out of college because you look lazy SUCKS. A LOT. And had some significant mental health impacts.
It's really a mixed bag professionally. Big upside, big downside.
I was thinking that 50% chance at "struggling with conforming to the insitutionalized workplace for 2-3 years" sounds a lot better than 100% chance at 14 years in school (with its downsides listed in the book review).
But I hadn't considered the mental health impact of going through the former, I'm guessing, worsened by the relative loneliness / uniqueness of the situation? In school, at least you're all suffering together and the problem isn't personal.
There's a big cascade effect here. There's enough signaling-basin effects in many industries that if you fail to get by in the institutionalized workplace *once*, your entire career is in jeopardy and you have almost no way to recover. This is especially true if it's your first job out of school: your résumé now instantly goes in the bin every time. And as for a professional network helping you out of that, well, first of all, do they really want to take the risk of recommending you? And secondly, if you didn't go the “normal” route, who's going to have gotten to know you? The normal people with connections were all busy doing normal things with each other!
As a former student of what I believe to be a pretty conventional American grade-school experience, I don’t feel like having endured it for 13 years increased my tolerance for dull 8-hour workdays any. If anything, I just arrived to the workforce pre-burnt out.
If we want schools to exist for this purpose then we should still severely decrease the amount of school we have. It seems likely to me that such patience skills could be learned in between 1-3 years of practice (90% CI).
To be honest, this is my most legitimate-feeling worry about my unschooled kid. Will the workplace kind of destroy him? I mostly hope he'll find a way through life that doesn't require a cubicle--and be better equipped to do so by the flexibility he's learning.
Some years ago, they were remodeling offices on my floor, and I had to office in the conference room for a couple of days.
I didn't like it.
For one thing, I couldn't goof off or read ACTen without other people being able to read over my shoulder. Even when I actually was working, sort of, it might look like I was slacking off when in fact I was turning some idea over in my head, looking at it from different angles while waiting for inspiration to hit. I'm not one to care for others' opinion, but I didn't need my slackerdom to become public knowledge, either.
At first, I felt bad for the secretaries. Once the remodel was finished, I could go back to my office and shut the door. They couldn't. They were in the panopticon their entire working lives. I don't know how they could stand it.
Then I started asking questions. That's when things went from bad to worse. "So, why do *I* have an office? Why am I not subject to endless surveillance?" Because I don't need HR to supervise me, to make sure I am on-task. I am so well trained that I do it myself, I am my own hall monitor, he lives rent-free, inside my head.
I agree. People treat knowledge, experience, and intelligence as although they are the same thing, but they aren't. Children can be intelligent while not having specific knowledge or experience.
It's a legitimately tough problem. You can have an intellectually mature child who nonetheless will have a melt-down over you, the adult, refusing to let them watch the movie that you *know* will give them nightmares for a week (and if they go behind your back and watch it with their friends, they do indeed end up having that week of nightmares).
Kids are powerless and ignored, but often for good reasons. The times when they should be listened to, and taken into account, and are not - those are the faults of the system. But there is no perfect system, and just as often there are times they *should* be ignored: does anyone remember being a child and thinking "when I'm grown-up, I'm going to do this and this and this" and then you get older and realise why you can't do this and this and this, or why it would be bad for you?
"You can have an intellectually mature child who nonetheless will have a melt-down over you, the adult, refusing to let them watch the movie that you *know* will give them nightmares for a week (and if they go behind your back and watch it with their friends, they do indeed end up having that week of nightmares)."
Sure, but how often is that kid going to say "You're right, that was a mistake, I shouldn't have watched it, I'll take your advice next time"?
On one level, the disagreement may be about whether or not the movie is going to give them nightmares, but on another level, it's about who gets to decide whether the risk of nightmares is worth taking.
"But there is no perfect system, and just as often there are times they *should* be ignored: does anyone remember being a child and thinking "when I'm grown-up, I'm going to do this and this and this" and then you get older and realise why you can't do this and this and this, or why it would be bad for you?"
Personally, I don't, but I think that's beside the point - no one expects children to be experts on adult life. However, they *are* experts on their own lives, at least more so than most of the people who try to dictate how they spend their time.
Kids are "experts on their own lives"???? Seriously? As adults, many of us struggle with finding fulfillment. We constantly seek advice and read self-help books or look to meditation or mindfulness and wisdom of the ages. Operating in an environment that doesn't match our evolutionary history is difficult.
"However, they *are* experts on their own lives, at least more so than most of the people who try to dictate how they spend their time."
Kids at the time have never been adults. Adults have been kids, and sometimes do remember how they felt and thought in that dim and distant past, and why they do have the right to dictate how the child spends its time.
"On one level, the disagreement may be about whether or not the movie is going to give them nightmares, but on another level, it's about who gets to decide whether the risk of nightmares is worth taking."
Granted, a burned hand dreads the fire and experience is the best teacher, and sometimes no warnings will work as well as having to suffer the consequences. On the other hand, if you saw a young child reaching out to touch a hot surface, would you try to stop them or would your attitude be "it's about who gets to decide if the risk is worth it! I warned them about hot surfaces, that's the end of my involvement!"
And in the end, it comes down to "When you're eighteen, you'll be adult enough to make your own stupid choices and live with the consequences. But you're nine. And your stupid choice means that the consequences are you screaming awake out of nightmares for an entire week, waking up your siblings, disturbing the house, and your parents having to spend time awake settling you back down and getting you and them back to sleep, when they need to work in the morning and don't need seven nights of disturbed sleep".
"On the other hand, if you saw a young child reaching out to touch a hot surface, would you try to stop them or would your attitude be "it's about who gets to decide if the risk is worth it! I warned them about hot surfaces, that's the end of my involvement!""
Of course you let them touch the hot surface! Right? How else would they learn if your instruction failed them before?
More non-permanent hard lessons = better!
Wow - I think you need to have more respect for children. If you calmly explain to them consequences for an action (watching a scary movie) and they still choose it, then what was the point of the explanation? Either try to persuade them, or forbid them, but don't hold the pretense that you should be doing both. You really can't let them hurt themselves and then help them afterward? You don't even know if they'll scream in their sleep... maybe they'll think it's funny and they are a scary movie lover at heart!
"Adults have been kids, and sometimes do remember how they felt and thought in that dim and distant past, and why they do have the right to dictate how the child spends its time."
This is pretty broken logic. If you are 30, does that mean you remember what it's like to be 25, and so you can dictate a 25 year olds' time?
Don't get me wrong - kids make mistakes in life, and it's the parents job to use some wisdom to prevent them from making permanent ones. But you're not doing your relationship OR your child's skills at making decisions any favors, by taking away their agency.
"Kids at the time have never been adults. Adults have been kids, and sometimes do remember how they felt and thought in that dim and distant past, and why they do have the right to dictate how the child spends its time."
Elsewhere in the thread, you claimed I was making the basic error of assuming that everyone's youth was like mine and therefore I know what's best for all young people, "because surely all kids are like me!"
And yet here, you're saying adults must know what's best for children because they can remember what their own childhoods were like.
Hmm. Could it be I'm not the one making assumptions?
I was raised in a free range way and recognize the value in that. But kids need to learn the operating system that works best for the hardware they were born with. That cultural transmission takes a ton of time and effort, and if most adults are working 40+ hours a week then you need to pay someone to spend time with the children. The internet and books are no substitute for society, and kids are not really welcome in society (these days I can't even bring my kids to work and I could use their labor). In the modern age, a big part of parenting is limiting media consumption since there are teams of neuromarketing experts competing to make cyberspace more and more addictive. The "burned hand is the best teacher" argument doesn't fit here, it is an example of a perfect evolutionary match with our environment. Toxic social media environments, bad diet (tons of obese kids these days), overwork, being indoors all the time are examples of evolutionary mismatch that often have to be countered with culture.
The internet is a wonderful educational resource if you can tell the difference between legitimate stuff and crackpots. But even many adults can't tell the difference; what chance do children have?
The ideal, I suppose, would be supervised internet time, but there aren't enough teachers to look over every kid's shoulder at once.
It's hard to convince an adult that their politics are wrong, but that's not what I had in mind.
A year or two ago I saw some videos about Neandertals, and then YouTube recommended another video on the same topic. This recommended had some pretty surprising ideas which did not line up with my previous knowledge of the topic. Was he a proper scientist who disagreed with his colleagues, or a crackpot who disagreed with the real scientists because he didn't know what he was talking about? I saw clear signs of the latter, but I wouldn't expect a child to.
I've been nerd-sniped by one of those excerpts. Granite is not made of calcium carbonate; it's quartz and a few other minerals (which also aren't calcium carbonate). And further, you do see limestone dissolving in the rain; that's how you get limestone caves (and hard water). As it turns out calcium carbonate is very weakly soluble in pure water but much more soluble in weak acid (including water with dissolved CO2).
Which, not to blow my own trumpet, I knew when reading the excerpt and so could figure out that Holt was full of hot air on this.
But the larger point is - what *else* is he full of hot air about? He tried making a clever point but was mistaken on basic facts which we (most of us) learned in exactly those pedestrian geography classes in primary school with lists of materials. So he's undercutting his own thesis with this anecdote.
As usual, I take a contrary view on the topic of school: I think that, for average people such as myself, guided education is the only way to go. I am simply not smart enough to learn complex subjects in-depth on my own; nor am I smart enough to discover entire new areas of learning by simply reading random books. I understand that many children *are* that smart, but I don't think that abandoning 99.5% of the population in favor of the 0.5% of the geniuses is a worthwhile tradeoff.
In high school, I was exposed to math, biology, physics, chemistry, literature, and foreign languages. I hated all of that stuff (except maybe for physics), since it took time away from what I really wanted to do: program computers. At the time, I thought I was being pretty clever about weaseling out of all those "pointless" subjects. Now, my lack of background knowledge in many of these areas haunts me every day. I was able to remedy some of this lack through self-study, but I really wish that I could go back in time, slap my young self upside the head, and tell him, "Hey ! Idiot ! You're skipping out on entire disciplines of human knowledge ! Shouldn't you at least try them out first ? Oh and BTW you'll be working in bioinformatics for most of your life, so learn statistics already".
By the time I got to college to major in CS, I thought I was pretty hot shit. I could program better than most people I knew, and I had actual, paid, full-time work experience as a programmer under my belt. It took just one class to make me realize that I knew *nothing*. All the awesome programs that I had written had obvious structural flaws. All the cool tricks I'd figured out had names dating back to practically antiquity. All the problems I thought to be unsolvable were very easily solved. More importantly, there was a whole dimension of theory to CS which, if properly understood, would make the actual programming almost trivial.
Could I have figured out all that stuff on my own, if only I were a little bit smarter ? Sure, but I wasn't, and I didn't. Someone had to teach me. Would it have been better if that someone was a personal tutor, whose educational program was tailored to my unique aptitudes ? Yes, probably, but my parents weren't millionaires, so school was the next best thing.
"More importantly, there was a whole dimension of theory to CS which, if properly understood, would make the actual programming almost trivial."
Have you ever worked with people fresh out of college who had plenty of credentials, but no experience shipping real projects? Theory is great, but it doesn't take away the need to know how to write and debug code.
"Could I have figured out all that stuff on my own, if only I were a little bit smarter ?"
Who says you have to do it all on your own?
Just being able to talk to other people who share your interests, and learn things from them (either directly or by seeing how they've been learning), is a huge improvement.
Like you, I was into programming as a kid, and I resented every minute I had to spend in school doing anything else. I taught myself what I could, but I didn't actually start getting *good* at it until I got internet access. Suddenly, there was a world of other people's code to read, open source games to hack on, and chat rooms where I could talk about programming with people who knew more than me.
Self-directed learning doesn't have to mean sitting in a dark cave and figuring everything out from first principles. We can give kids access to resources and communities that will help them learn when they need it, without force-feeding them a bunch of stuff they don't even want to learn in the first place.
> Have you ever worked with people fresh out of college who had plenty of credentials, but no experience shipping real projects? Theory is great, but it doesn't take away the need to know how to write and debug code.
Yes, and in my experience, it's easier to teach them how to ship code -- as compared to teaching them how to write code that makes any kind of sense at all. It's not enough to just say, "your algorithm is O(N^2), fix it using memoization", you need to spend a few weeks just on that sentence alone to really let it sink in. Fresh graduates who can understand that sentence have (in my experience) a much smoother onboarding process.
> Just being able to talk to other people who share your interests, and learn things from them (either directly or by seeing how they've been learning), is a huge improvement.
Asking strangers for advice on the Internet is a strategy that has, shall we say, a very wide standard deviation in terms of success metrics.
I have an 11 year old son and my experience with him and my own education makes me agree with a lot of things in this review. However, I am also skeptical about some key points and it is hard for me to embrace the "home schooling for the win" at the moment.
1) Schools in China, Korea and Russia are super strict with a lot of homework and little improvisation. This obviously has a lot of downsides, but it is hard to argue that those schools produce a lot of talented students. Yes, it might ruin theirs mental health in the process, but the "result" will be achieved.
I have recently seen "Over the limit" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8184202/) a sports documentary about young professional gymnasts. The amount of verbal and mental abuse they have to suffer is surreal. BUT this methods, barbaric as they are, have produced a lot of champions. Now, I am not saying this is the only way to raise a champion, but it is a viable option.
2) My son (and i was just like him around that age) gives up easily. He is decent in math, thinks pretty quickly and can grasp most of the concepts. But if he can't solve a problem in 15 seconds he gives up. If you tell him his answer is wrong and "you have to think a little bit more on this one" he'll just pretend to be thinking, but will give up. It takes good 5 minutes of "I can't do it" to get back to solving the problem. And then he can solve it in a minute of actual hard thinking. But he would never ever do it himself.
Humans are lazy, myself included. We don't like to be wrong or to work. Especially as kids. And it's not just math. Same thing in sports. It is often unpleasant and hard to take that first step, to learn a new concept. My son likes rock climbing now, but it took him a few weeks to like it. I've pushed him a bit at first and now he is happily on a climbing team and enjoys it. Without that push there would be no sport in his life.
3) "You can just google anything now". It is true. You can google any fact there is. However, there is too much information on the internet. Want to google proof that earth is flat? There are plenty of links. Vaccines will turn you into a lizard? Thousands of links. All kinds of conspiracy theories are out there.
You need basic education, as well developed logical thinking to be able to tell the difference between real information and conspiracy theories. And most people can't do that. Especially kids.
Let's say you know absolutely nothing about history. And you google something about "Romans in Britain" and you click on a link and it says: "Rome was in control of Britain in 1500 AD and blah blah this happened". If you don't know anything about history, then you won't notice that anything is wrong. If you do know a little bit about history, then you'll probably understand this is wrong.
Without basic block of information and without connections between them you won't be able to tell if it is some lunatic spewing his conspiracy theories or if it is a real thing. The basic blocks, that you learn in school, will help you detect bullshit even if the topic is far from your expertise. You need some kind of structure with basic facts in place. Without it googling will do more harm than good.
2) I think there may be more to it than laziness. Talented kids often are so used to relying on their talent that they have trouble learning to add effort when their talent is not enough.
Agreed, the question is where they learned that laziness. I'd wager that at least some of it is because they were rarely challenged since they could rely on talent to keep them ahead of their peers.
The problem with "you can just Google it!" is that you don't know what you don't know. If you don't even know how to ask the question, you won't know to go look for an answer. It's one thing to go "I have no idea when the Battle of Waterloo was, I don't need to know, I'll just Google it if I ever need to know", but if you have no notion that there even was a battle?
How about "I don't need to learn how to multiply or divide, I can just use a calculator"? If you have no idea of the basic concepts, then even using a calculator won't help you with "okay, this *has* to be wrong, I must have screwed up the input somewhere".
That's where wikis come in. Who among us hasn't sat down to look up something concrete on Wikipedia, and two hours later had 60 tabs open about things we never even knew existed?
That's a different matter. That's being interested, curious and engaged. Not all adults are, not all children are. Some people, child or adult, will look up the one thing they need to know, and once they have that factoid, will go no further. There are rich sources of information out there that will forever be barren to them, since nobody is 'making' them do it.
You could not drag me with horses to be interested in the goings-on of the Kardashians and their ilk, yet by cultural osmosis alone I am aware of some of it. For me, mathematics is the same thing as pop gossip about celebs - I am not interested and would find it torture to have to sit through a class. I'm sure some kids who love maths feel the same about a foreign language, history, or art class. If I had my way as a kid, I would never, ever have gone beyond the "what I'd learned by the time I was seven" in maths. Well, like it or lump it, I had to take maths classes all the time I remained in school, and in general that was a benefit to me; even if I've forgotten nearly every single thing, from the simplest to the most complicated, I ever learned. Because now I know where my deficits lie, and I am also aware of real-life applications of principles I learned where at the time my attitude was "I'll never use this!"
Same way for the subjects you didn't like. At least now you know if you have no talent for or interest in music, etc. And now sometimes you may be surprised at "oh, this is where it comes in useful!" where at the time you were being made learn it in school, you were sure "I will never, ever need to know this!"
"Well, like it or lump it, I had to take maths classes all the time I remained in school, and in general that was a benefit to me; even if I've forgotten nearly every single thing, from the simplest to the most complicated, I ever learned. Because now I know where my deficits lie, and I am also aware of real-life applications of principles I learned where at the time my attitude was "I'll never use this!""
That reminds me of this bit from _Against Tulip Subsidies_: "Whenever some people without skin in the game are allowed to make decisions for other people, you end up with a bunch of elderly doctors getting together, think “Yeah, things do seem a little classier around here if we make people who are not us pay $200,000, make it so,” and then there goes the money that should have housed all the homeless people in the country."
Sure, it's nice to live in a society where most people know where their deficits lie -- within the handful of subjects they encounter in school, at least -- but it hardly seems worth the cost of making every young person spend 12 years of their lives being subjected to what you've just described as torture.
"Same way for the subjects you didn't like. At least now you know if you have no talent for or interest in music, etc."
Well, no, not really -- because like so much of school, what was presented as "music" there has little to do with my experience of music in the greater world. In school, what I learned was mainly that I don't like playing the recorder or singing Christmas carols and Disney showtunes. Outside of school, on the other hand, I learned that I like playing the piano, guitar, and singing karaoke even if I'm not great at any of them.
I didn't need to be forced to go through the motions for years in that class, or in any other, to know that I wasn't enjoying it. A week would've been plenty.
"And now sometimes you may be surprised at "oh, this is where it comes in useful!" where at the time you were being made learn it in school, you were sure "I will never, ever need to know this!""
That would be ironic, wouldn't it? But so far, it's never happened to me, and it's been long enough that I'm confident it never will. My sense of what would be useful later in life was actually pretty accurate.
Totalitarian elite sport programs are unconcerned if they produce 1000 broken children, crippled by injury and abuse for every champion. I wouldn’t recommend it if your focus is an individual child.
Without basic knowledge, it is easy to Google and believe in bad information. Also, the knowledge of fundamentals enable one to know there are more things one should Google about and choose more precise search terms.
However, about the point (1). It is good to remember that optimizing for performance is sports is optimizing for a very arbitrary goal which often has little to none practical use. (The arbitrariness is especially true about the sports like gymnastics where the winners are determined by votes given by a jury, but many other sports have rules.) The difficulty of the training for the championship implicitly flows from the concept of competition: the elite competitions are interesting to watch and draw spectators and money, because it is difficult to win a competition against other devoted practitioners.
For us mere mortals who presumably have different objectives for their lives, it is important to consider the differences in the end goals when considering the differences in the methods to obtain the said goals. Sports are games, and carry a well-defined definition of good performance (feature of games, the arbitrary rules render them legible).
Outside sports, the rules and victory conditions of the "game" tend to be more murky and less well-defined and constantly changing.
I think the elephant in the room in debates about education is that some kids are smart, other kids less so, and what would work for one group does not work for the other. Without clearly separating those cases I don't think much of anything useful can be said.
What you said is technically correct, but I feel you're trying to imply "and therefore smart and less smart kids must be taught with different methods", and it really does not follow. Once we accept that smart kids learn more because they're smart, we can give up on the notion that the less smart kids just need a different approach to catch up. They won't catch up. (I mean, it is possible different kids do require different approaches to do the best they can, but innate intellectual disparities are precisely the reason not to start with this assumption.)
It might also be the case that some kids are better at some subjects, and other kids are better at other subjects. Yes, obviously some kids are smarter overall, but it's not easy to tell which ones are which. You could, for example, give everyone a math test and then give up on everyone who scored below average -- but what if they could've been good at literature, or computer programming, or whatever ?
I didn't say we should give up on the less smart kids (or to make such a judgement based on one exam really). I don't know exactly how the educational system should work, but I imagine something giving kids more agency, which would allow them to naturally self-select into an education that works for them (the nerdy kids would opt to study math/Latin/whatever, and the jocks wouldn't). I know some places already have such systems to some extent, but where I grew up we didn't and I wish we had.
> Once we accept that smart kids learn more because they're smart, we can give up on the notion that the less smart kids just need a different approach to catch up. They won't catch up.
I don't think that follows either. Child prodigies rarely end up being that much better than other smart kids by the time they become adults, they typically just ramped up faster. The regular smart kids catch up eventually.
I agree with the general notion though: don't tie a kids' rate of progress to their peer group, they should ideally be able to progress at their own pace.
Tests and classroom questions are artificial and resemble almost nothing in real life except for other artificial constructs. Interviews resemble classroom questions... but they're equally artificial environments. This means the entire thing is broken from top to bottom because we judge successful programs by testing.
Real life, productive work is almost always project based. Plumbers have the project of fixing a pipe. Accountants have the project of preparing a budget. CEOs have the project of expanding a new division (and probably several others besides). People care about what you accomplish, not whether you personally memorized the tools necessary to accomplish it. When I told my first boss I kept a cheat sheet of things I needed to know he took it away... so he could copy it and give it to the next person recruited into the team.
I'm not all that confident about letting kids just choose what they want to do. Giving them a mixture of control and choice within that control is probably best. (You have to do math but you can choose the math you find most interesting type stuff.) But I think school should be rearranged around projects. Those projects can be guided and can require showing work. But project based learning both more closely resembles real life and, in my experience, drives a lot more engagement.
Then again, I'm pretty firmly of the school that school is at best somewhat about education. Education is the legitimizing action of school but it's not realistically what gets treated as a priority.
Firstly, all of the jobs you named are pretty high skill, and require some degree of secondary education more tailored to the job. But a lot of people’s jobs just involve what might be uncharitably called mindless drudgery. As has been mentioned in another post, the structure of school, with directed learning in things we often don’t want to learn, obeying orders from the teacher, and conforming to a strict schedule, probably do prepare us fairly well for the workplace. And sure, if we didn’t learn that in school, people would probably learn within 2-3 years; however the people who end up working those sorts of jobs do not typically have the financial resources to last that long.
Secondly, for both plumbers and accountants at least I’m going to bet there’s a fair bit of memorization involved. Never have I called a professional to do something and had them say “give me a few minutes to research how to do this.” If they did, firstly it would hurt their pay per hour, but also it would make me pretty dubious that I actually wanted them try to fix it. It’s like how in math, yes, you can use a calculator for everything. But calculators have a higher rate of typos than basic mental math, and they also take about twice as long, so in order to succeed at higher level math, you do typically need a lot of the lower level stuff down completely
1.) They all require some skill granted. But I'd include hair stylists and cooks in there and other relatively low paid professions. More importantly, these types of jobs are the majority of the economy AND the ones where it's hardest to pick it up on the job. McDonalds can train a line cook to do their rote, automatic process very quickly even to 15 year olds (who don't have a high school degree). Clothing factories can take completely uneducated peasants from Bangladesh and get them up and working in a month. It's not apparent to me that we, as a society, need to subsidize these skills.
Besides, these types of jobs will become less common with automation. The famous case is factories. They used to be full of rote labor and some still are but a lot more have moved to where most people operate machines, a project rather than a rote repeated action.
2.) Yes, you do need to memorize facts. The flaw with this argument is the idea that you don't learn rote facts while doing project work. I'm not saying that you don't need to learn rote facts or how to do tasks. But you learn rote facts and how to do tasks in projects. If a plumber has done twenty plumbing jobs then on job twenty one he's likely to know which pipes showed up in twelve of those jobs. And how he had to fit them. (And this is actually how plumbing is trained, mostly, by the way.) People commonly say things like, "I'd guess it needs a replacement pipe but let me come over and take a look." Or, "That should fix it. But let's keep an eye on it. Here's my number if the problem happens again." Personally, I'd have a lot less confidence with someone if I called them up and they were completely sure of their answer without taking a look.
I am not attacking theoretical education here. I am attacking paper/interview testing.
So, rereading your post, my post, and your response, I wonder if I then misunderstood you. So perhaps rather than addressing the specifics, I’ll just lay out my views that are fairly relevant and we can see if we’re actually in agreement.
1) Standardized testing (and by extension most testing/interview formats) often fails to assess knowledge well.
2) Something about school is bad, but it’s hard to pin down.
3) being able to memorize things is an important skill, though the degree and density of that memorization vary depending on what field you enter
4) Most fields that require more skills/training than what you learn in school then can adapt you to that specific field, so it’s mainly baseline general skills that are important in K-8 education (high school is a good time to start specializing if you want to imo)
5) A lot of the almost totalitarian format, for better or for worse, helps many students be better prepared for their future jobs
(1) "I asked him to name some common materials made of calcium carbonate. He named limestone, granite, and marble. I asked, "Do you often see these things dissolving in the rain?"
(2) "Holt gives an anecdote of a fifth grader caught sneakily reading a science book when he was supposed to be learning about “Romans in Britain.” By forcing him to put the book away, the teacher traded an hour of high quality science education for an hour of low-quality history education, during which the child is less engaged and will remember less."
(a) How do you know the science book was any good? If it was a cheap, pop science for kids book it could have been full of trashy outdated misinformation. You can't say 'trading an hour of high-quality science education for an hour of low-quality history education', unless you're smuggling in the assumption 'STEM subjects objectively superior and good, Humanities useless waste of time that could go to STEM'
(b) Listen, I *was* that kid with the book under the desk (uh, it was Roman History in my case, funnily enough) and I later learned that my teachers turned a benign blind eye because they figured I was doing okay enough in class, and that I wouldn't be reading rubbish. But I am fully on-board with the teacher yanking the book away and *forcing* the kid to sit up and pay attention because this is History class not Science class, since I've just read yet another dumb take on social media due to historical illiteracy, and I don't want 'but history is boring!' kid to be propagating said dumb takes in another fifteen years time when they leave school and then uncritically swallow any old nonsense because some rando online blorped it out
"and I don't want 'but history is boring!' kid to be propagating said dumb takes in another fifteen years time"
I get where you're coming from, but if he were interested in history, he'd be paying attention already. Taking the science book away isn't going to make him start caring about history - certainly not enough to retain that day's lesson for the next 15 years. At best, you might get him to remember a few dates just long enough to write them down on the quiz, and then immediately forget them.
Or you could teach science and Roman history together, as a good holistic education does. There's a lot if basic science that the Romans were pretty good at, and a lot of fun stuff they did that was plain wrong. If you can't have fun with that and engage both the science kid and the history kid, you may need to change toothless in designs. It's not even radical: why do you think schools long before Holt always had drawing in lessons if not to engage the kid who liked to scribble not write? Good teachers, especially at primary level, teach in themes not subjects and get much better learning, both the testable type but also the actual knowledge acquired.
Incidentally, one output of this seems to be a surprising number of young Britons know the theory of how to construct a good Viking longship. Should there be a major breakdown of civilisation, please take this as a warning...
I don't want Science Kid to be interested in history, at least not as he is interested in science. I'd love if it happened, but it's not necessary. I want him to have some basic knowledge that even bored, inattentive, and forgetful kids can have drilled into their heads - that is where rote learning comes in - so that when he's twenty he is not a complete goof being conned by the latest meme that Europeans never had soap until their African slaves taught them how to make it, for instance.
Seriously? Someone said that? Since most Europeans (including the British) didn't have African slaves, I guess the export of soap from the Americas to Europe funded the slave trade then?
My point here is that rote learning won't tell you much about soap, and anything it did would likely be forgotten by those not interested. Learning how and how the Vikings washed the blood off (they seem to have been a pretty clean bunch) might give a better chance of recollecting that soap existed in the medieval period. Plus it's a lot more fun, and showing how to make soap the traditional way would upset all sorts of parents...
It is a genuine thing trotted out on social media. I would love to believe the people using it (I saw it again just a couple of days ago) are being sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek, but I also fear they really do believe it, because of the whole 'aura of victimhood' that oppressed peoples engage in (I'm sympathetic to this, Irish history indulges in it too) and as some kind of compensatory mechanism (if we so smart, how come the Evil White Guys beat us and ruled the world?) but there we're getting into the morasses of Freudian psychology which I am not qualified to opine about.
"Solomon claimed not to know anything about magic, which didn’t exist in her native home. But how could that be, the other slaves wondered, when she could mix together powders to cure their sicknesses better than any physician; when she could make predictions of the weather that always came true; when she could construct all manner of wondrous contraptions from the simplest of objects? Even the plantation manager claimed she was “a Negro of curious intellect,” and listened to her suggestions on crop rotations and field systems. The slaves well knew the many agricultural reforms at Mount Vernon, for which their master took credit, was actually Solomon’s genius. They often asked why she didn’t use her remarkable wit to get hired out and make money? Certainly, that’d be enough to buy her freedom.
Solomon always shook her head, saying that though she was from another land, she felt tied to them by “the consanguinity of bondage.” She would work to free them all, or, falling short of that, at the least bring some measure of ease to their lives. But at night, after she’d finished her mysterious “experiments” (which she kept secret from all) she could be found gazing up at the stars, and it was hard not to see the longing held deep in her eyes. When George Washington wore Solomon’s tooth, he dreamed of a place of golden spires and colorful glass domes, where Negroes flew through the sky on metal wings like birds and sprawling cities that glowed bright at night were run by machines who thought faster than men. It both awed and frightened him at once."
It's tempting to cite Black Panther (either the comic or the movie) in this context. The wierd thing is it's a very one-sided conversation. Most of us evil colonial oppressors will happily believe that the groups we evily colonially oppressed were actually advanced civilisations. Thst the actual colonialists did not does not mean we need to have the argument now...
One thing I realised from watching the whole Black Panther reaction is that it's not a power fantasy, it's a status fantasy. People really really don't like the idea that their ancestors have always been history's losers. For those of us whose ancestors were history's winners, it's hard to understand what it's like to be on the other side of that.
>I get where you're coming from, but if he were interested in history, he'd be paying attention already.
People with dumb historical hot takes aren't interested in history per se, they're interested in history in as much as it serves politics, and they're interested in politics in as much as it helps Group A gain power over Group B.
> You can't say 'trading an hour of high-quality science education for an hour of low-quality history education', unless you're smuggling in the assumption 'STEM subjects objectively superior and good, Humanities useless waste of time that could go to STEM'
He's not saying science is higher quality than history. He's saying the kid is going to get more knowledge out of whatever happens to interest him at the moment than he would out of some other subject.
A noble goal, but you assume the argument. If schooling were inoculation against nonsense, then the online randos wouldn’t be reproducing it. We’re four generations deep into compulsory mass schooling. If it were going to work, it would have already.
All through K-12 and college I hated English class and kinda sucked at it. Then when I was 29 and contemplating going back to college for a career change out of tech, I took the SAT again and got a perfect score on the verbal. I blame this apparent incongruity on the mismatch between my interests and what English teachers forced me to read and write about. I couldn't care less about psychoanalyzing fiction characters and authors. Plus there might only be 100 words worth saying on the literal subject of the writing prompt, and one would have to digress pretty far to fill up the required N pages. This mandatory bullshitting to fill up the page offended my sense of honesty. And it wasn't just my school. When I saw the example essays for the writing section of the SAT, they were all drivel, but the longer the drivel the higher the score. Quantity is more legible than quality, so the system optimizes quantity.
I think it was a Paul Graham essay which explained school "English" classes to me; at some point in the past there were separate classes for "composition" and "literature", but these got merged into a single subject at some point with the result that we spend an inordinate amount of time on the fairly arbitrary task of writing essays about literature (a fairly facile and surface-level analysis thereof).
Composition is a really important skill and facile literary analysis isn't, but I wish that I had understood at the time that this was a Karate Kid exercise where I'm doing something boring (writing dumb three-paragraph essays about John fucking Donne poems) to develop a skill I actually want (writing about stuff I find interesting and useful).
I love John Holt and it’s great to see him still being read. As a parent and a teacher I’ve learned huge amounts from him. Particularly as a teacher now, he alerted me to just how much kids use a wide and inventive range of techniques to get around the learning requirements. For me, the best part of teaching is offering the students lots of different approaches but making sure that whatever kind of learning they use, they still end up knowing the stuff...
The point about fear does seem to be right, though. Ultimately some form of coercion has to be applied. That’s the other aspect of good teaching: minimizing the negatives.
Bryan Caplan wrote about his experiences with unschooled kids, kids allowed to learn however they fancied with the adult answering questions they had. He found them about as knowledgeable about most things as other kids except that they tended to be weak in math. He proposed letting kids learn however they wanted except requiring a certain amount of mandatory math education.
Which is interesting since even the *math* part seems like something that can easily be picked up in later years at no loss to the student, as per the Benezet experiment
Socialization is what schools are for more than learning. LEarning rules and how to break them. Finding friends and learning about trust and distrust of those. Seeing how social structure is truly an imagined space with arbitrary rules might be the most important one. Those with the imagination to believe they can change the world might have first realized the world is a giant game of playing “house” in which some adults get to make the rules while the cool ones skate ever so carefully on the edge of those rules and do what they want. ;)
I'm shuddering at the idea of being graded on my social skills. That could have been a lot worse that what I actually experienced.
What actually taught me some social skills (aside from indirect effects of body work, I think) was being in science fiction fandom where people were inclined to like me.
Yeah, learning socialisation in school is a bit like learning to swim in a piranha-infested river instead of a swimming pool.
The amazing thing about the adult world, compared to school, is how _nice_ everybody is. As an adult you find that everyone you meet will politely overlook the fact that you're funny-looking or have a speech impediment or are wearing an unfashionable brand of shoes, rather than bullying them into tears (at least if you're not a cast member on a show starting with The Real Housewives Of).
Adult socialisation is so freaking easy compared to being a kid in the range 10-16.
As an adult who didn't go to public school (more than a few weeks), compared to my peers I seem far better equipped to navigate various social/legal/business rules. Not saying some of that isn't what I'm bringing to the table compared to them, but I'm saying I'm not seeing any evidence that school socialization makes people any better equipped to handle the adult world.
Overall, I enjoyed this, both because I found the topic interesting and because it was well written. But I’m extremely dubious of the hopeful nature of it wrt learning during the pandemic. I honestly don’t know a single other student who felt they learned more during the pandemic than during a normal year. Now maybe that’s because of compounding factors like mental health taking a dumpster dive for students, but from everything I’ve read and everyone I’ve talked to, online learning was basically an unmitigated failure.
So my question is, does anyone have quantitative data suggesting that the online learning imposed by the pandemic was beneficial to some students?
I think part of the reason it failed is that adults often think school is for learning, but for many kids, it is for friends and an odd type of amusement of sitting still, tuning out lectures, then running around on asphalt, then sitting again. The information does not make the top five goals, even if the kid “does” well. They are floating along with the group activity. I was stunned to discover this. Kids can get decent grades and be remembering some things and have no meta-concept of self as learner. At all.
the pandemic gave me oodles of time i would normally have lost commuting and sitting in mind-numbing class. to say i learnt more during this time than i did in high school would be a gross understatement. outside of online school, that is.
tbf there's probably other factors that contributed to this increased learning (maturity, resources, really bad high school lol), but i still maintain that the extra time was the main reason.
But online school during the pandemic was all the bad things of school and more bad things on top. Our children would have been expected to be on screen at least some of every half hour for six hours a day. They would have been just as trapped, but with all the costs of bad technology (bad connections, kids who don’t mute, rules about backgrounds, etc.) and no hanging with friends to at least ease some of the pain. So we pulled them out, sold our house and travelled while teaching them more than they would have learned in school, in about two hours a day.
+1
My son commented at some point that his online school managed to keep all the unpleasant parts of school (homework, boring lectures, busywork, regimented schedules), while dispensive with most of the fun parts (seeing your friends, working together, having a personal interaction with the teacher, hanging out after school).
This is as far as it gets from quantitative data, but it seems plausible.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-cruel-reality-of-online-school-in-a-12th-floor-flat/
Data point here. I ask my son to do the "mastery challenge" and "two level ups" from Khan Academy every day. He does it in minutes. He is finishing the 4th grade curriculum and he is a third grader. Smart kid, not Feynman. He then does some reading, some writing, and is free to enjoy his day. He knows a hell of a lot more about science than I could possibly imagine when I was his age. His writing is worse than mine, as is his grammar skills (a completely overrated skill, IMO). He is a happy kid this way.
Isn’t this a big part of the Montessori Philosophy? Just letting children choose their learning within some reasonable limits ?
I was surprised this wasn't discussed explicitly, tbh. But I guess it's out of the scope of a book review -- just a related curiosity.
We found the Montessori curriculum weirdly rigid, at least in the early years. There was a long checklist of things they had to demonstrate proficiency at. Maybe I misunderstood how it worked. They also told us that our children, 5 and 6, were “too old” to start Montessori. Two was the best age apparently.
My children started Montessori at age 18m, now 5 and 7 and I 💯 agree the Montessori method is too rigid. Yes, the kids have freedom of movement and choice of activities and that is good. However, each material they can work with can be used in only one way and it’s at the teacher discretion when they are shown “the way”. Before they are shown, they may not touch it. They also have a long list of (the same) knowledge that each child must possess. There is some time spent on passion work but not nearly enough.
I am a parent of two children, presently aged 9 and 11; as a result, I am preoccupied with things exactly like this. Overall, the conclusions of the book seem consistent with what I have observed of their learning. A nice, well written review.
"It’s really easy to catch up when you need to (did you know you can just look up what the powerhouse of a cell is?)."
- sometimes I wonder what to do about this. Many of my students are just barely literate and numerate in 11th grade, and sometimes not even then. How are they supposed to look things up, or tell if what they're looking up is true, or apply it to their unique circumstances?
Does that mean school was just a complete waste of time, as they've learned nothing we wanted them to learn? Did they learn anything or just other things? Should we keep trying with these students or just let them drop out at whatever age it seems like education is pointless for them?
Certainly they are learning English a lot faster in school than in their community, where no one speaks English. I do hope we can have reforms, but Texas has decided students need to pass certain tests to graduate, so here we are.
I was also a bit skeptical of that line. First, it's easy for well-educated people to look up whatever they need to know...but only if you have first developed high-level literacy skills, and the skill of learning properly from what you're reading. And those skills are developed by...tasks like being given a book about the cell and told to learn what's in it.
So, sure, if you'd never learned about mitochondria in particular, that would be no tragedy, but if you didn't at least do a whole bunch of learning of a sort relevantly *similar* to the kind of learning you do when learning about mitochondria, then you might not have developed the mental skills needed to effectively learn about mitochondria if you ever wanted to.
What evidence is there that people are unable to seek out information on their own, about subjects they care about, until they've mastered "the skill of learning properly from what you're reading" by seeking out information on subjects they don't care about?
This seems like one of those things we take for granted even though our own experiences ought to make us skeptical.
An interesting thing I see coming out of this discussion is that sometimes just having a community library isn't enough. Maybe with the edutainment apps, internet resources to read through learning like Khan academy students can have more freedom than they get a lot earlier. One thing is I don't mean to make it out like all of my students are illiterate - 27% got an A on the district wide final - but I'm also not the kind of teacher to trap or bore them. They can read whatever they want if they already understand the material! Maybe there's some way to make sure that's standard practice so school isn't boring for high achievers.
I couldn't get at our local (very small) library until I was eight or nine, it operated on limited opening hours, and I wasn't allowed join until that age. And reading my way through the twelve shelves of kids' books (I can still see them in my mind's eye) meant that I wasn't allowed near the adult shelves (including non-fiction) until a different librarian took pity on me when I was twelve and let me have an adult card.
The wonders of the Internet and a computer in every home (not to mention a smartphone in every hand at increasingly young ages) masks the fact that a lot of people didn't have access and still don't, and even if circumstances have changed so that now it is possible to 'teach yourself', there are still many, many people out there who can't write grammatically, can't spell and yes that matters because they can't express what they want to say, or understand material if it isn't spoon-fed and pre-digested for them, so they *don't* 'teach themselves', they rely on listicles and material.
How many of you believe Tariq Nasheed's current documentary (with specially commissioned accompanying art), for example? And yet I am quite sure that "buck breaking happened" will rapidly be an article of faith and yet another grievance as fodder for the BLM movement and associated progressivist demands. Worse still, ordinary Black people are going to believe invented history as truth. But hey, it's no big deal, you can teach yourself this never happened! Because suddenly you will develop a disinterested desire to learn about history, research skills, ways to get around finding out that "this academic article is paywalled", and the like! If you didn't have this interest before, you won't get it now, unless you are very motivated to get it. And when "another horrible thing happened during slavery" is the thing, you are not going to be motivated to disprove it, especially when you're being told constantly that "systemic racism and toxic Whiteness are the reasons for everything bad in your life".
I think I got the point you were making, but I have no idea what race dynamic things you're talking about are...I'm not sure if that means I'm escaping mind killing topics or just uneducated.
"They can read whatever they want if they already understand the material! Maybe there's some way to make sure that's standard practice so school isn't boring for high achievers."
The thing is that in any art or skill, there's a high level of boredom involved in mastery. I can't remember the exact quote or track it down, but C.S. Lewis uses an analogy about how the difference between the romantic idea of reading about Robin Hood or the Odyssey and so on, and the pains the schoolboy has to take in learning grammar until he is then able to read easily and fluently, and that it's like that for a lot of things in life: we have to put in the toil and the drudge before we can enjoy the fruits.
I'm sure Olympic medallists don't enjoy every single moment of all the training they have to do, but if they want to be good enough to get that gold medal, even if they enjoy racing or rowing or gymnastics or swimming, they have to go through years of "get up at ungodly hours, stick to this diet, do these many hours of training, spent all my spare time working on this".
So that even for naturally gifted students, there will be some amount of drudgery that they can't avoid, and if you let them skip it, you're allowing weak spots in the foundation. It's even more necessary for less able students who will grumble about "why do I have to learn this, I will never need it".
"The thing is that in any art or skill, there's a high level of boredom involved in mastery."
That hasn't been my experience at all.
Maybe if we didn't expect mastery of ancient Greek texts translated by people who aren't bestselling authors, kids wouldn't be pushed away.
Shouldn't the goal instead be to get everyone to journeyman-level general reading? Can't it be pursued by having kids just read things they are interested in and are slightly more complex than the last thing they read?
Nothing done in mandated education should come close to being compared to Olympic medalists. Very few people need to be the best of the best.
Especially if you want to get *really* good. To really master, say, a musical instrument, requires a lot of tedious practice, and the law of diminishing returns starts to kick in hard.
That's always been my beef with "make learning a game!" Sometimes it isn't fun, or at least not the most fun available with the resources at hand. That doesn't mean that the rewards are not necessarily worth it.
The fact that I teach in a school where many of the kids can't or won't do that even at the age of 16+?
Really? What's something you've seen 16+ year old students trying to learn from a book and failing because they don't know how to learn from books?
Are you sure it's something *they* want to learn, and not just something *you* think they ought to learn?
Jesse, if you've arrived at this hour of your life on earth and still don't realise that there's a huge and vital difference between "I want this" and "I need this", then this entire conversation is pointless and we're not going to get any further. Your argument is "let the kids decide if they want to only eat candy instead of vegetables". You hope that the kids get sick of pure candy after a week and start eating broccoli and turnips as well. Well, we've got a constant argument over "the obesity epidemic" to demonstrate that some people will stick to a candy-only diet regardless of ill-effects.
Deiseach, are you being uncharitable on purpose? I hope so, because if after all of these comments you genuinely think *that's* my argument, I fear we aren't speaking the same language.
Dividing the intellectual world into "candy" vs. "turnips" is unrealistic. When there's a visible benefit in learning something, you don't have to force-feed it to people: they want that benefit too. No one groans "when are we ever gonna use this?" when they're learning to read or add. Driver's ed classrooms are filled with teenagers who want to be there. Plenty of people make careers out of doing work that they became good at because they enjoyed it.
The subjects that have to force-fed are the ones that students don't perceive as offering much benefit -- the ones that won't pay off until many years later, if at all; or whose purported benefits are vague and insubstantial ("a touch of class"); or which can easily be picked up later if the need arises.
Goddamn plenty, if you've ever worked in a school for disadvantaged kids or early school leavers programme or adult literacy classes?
Which all of the above I have done. Your basic error is "I was a smart kid with supportive parents and resources for learning; I learned best this particular way; I didn't like certain subjects and had an interest in others; school didn't suit me; THEREFORE the way I would have preferred to have been taught SHOULD BE the way ALL school is done, because surely all kids are like me!"
No, they're not. And even if they are, they don't live in the same circumstances. I came out of the womb able to read, as near as damn it, and I was *starved* for books due to the circumstances of my early childhood. Were it not for school, and access to the materials there, I would have had *nothing*. You *can't* learn by teaching yourself when the only bloody materials to hand in your home are the willow trees down the yard. And there are kids who have access to resources and won't learn unless the equivalent of "standing over them with a stick in your hand" happens. Sometimes you do need to be made do some things for your own good. One of the perils of being smart or good at something means, as another comment mentioned earlier, that if you can't solve a problem fast you give up on it. Learning to stick at something even if you find it boring or dull or "I can't do this" is valuable teaching, including "you can solve this by hard work and don't have to give up if the answer doesn't flash into your mind in a blaze of inspiration".
"Were it not for school, and access to the materials there, I would have had *nothing*."
I'm sorry to hear that. I think everyone agrees it's valuable for kids to have access to learning materials.
"And there are kids who have access to resources and won't learn unless the equivalent of "standing over them with a stick in your hand" happens."
They won't learn anything at all? Or they won't learn the things you think they ought to learn?
So long as the young person has *something* they're interested in which would require similarly high-level reading, that would suffice. But if the young person happens not to be interested in learning about *anything* that would require that type of reading, I think that is likely to be a problem. At that point, the goal should be to awaken an interest in some such subject before then making them read about it...not to just let them do their own thing and watch videos instead.
Learning from what you're reading is a skill the readers of this blog are likely to take for granted; it seems trivial. I certainly took it for granted, until I started teaching at the college level. It turns out that someone's ability to effectively read light easy texts (most fiction, internet garbage) doesn't mean that they have the ability to effectively read informational texts and actually carry the information away with them. A significant percentage of my students will sincerely seek out information on subjects they want to know about...but aren't able to properly process complex sentences or complex paragraphs, so the ideas they walk away with are not what the text was saying.
That's...a very bad situation to be in. And I don't see any way to prevent it from happening that doesn't involve making sure they have to do a bunch of informational reading, at steadily increasing levels of complexity and sophistication, when they're young enough for their brains to be malleable.
"It turns out that someone's ability to effectively read light easy texts (most fiction, internet garbage) doesn't mean that they have the ability to effectively read informational texts and actually carry the information away with them."
True. But you're seeing that in college students, which means that 12 years of reading textbooks before college still wasn't enough to prepare them for reading at a high level.
That sounds like maybe it's a problem with the students, not the amount of reading they've been assigned.
Judging from the response I get when I ask them to read more than a few pages of reading per week--in college--I don't believe their schooling involved large amounts of reading, at least not reading of anything even moderately complex and challenging. *My* K-12 education involved large amounts of reading, but things seem to have changed.
What's the response - are they actually *surprised*, like they would be if they weren't used to getting reading assignments? Or are they upset, like they would be if they'd been struggling through reading assignments their whole lives and can't wait to be done with them?
I suspect nothing has changed, you're just seeing it from the other side: the same proportion of your peers were struggling when you were in school, and the teachers saw it but you didn't.
I like reading. I read a lot. I like writing. I write a fair amount. I majored in English. I was homeschooled and read constantly.
I got to college in the 2000s and in the gen ed courses found I was assigned 20-50 pages of reading per week per class (or its equivalent in math) while working a job and adjusting to living on my own and building a social life. And even that wouldn't have been so bad, except for the writing was terrible.
Sure, there were a few Henry Jameses out there where the reading was a breeze, and sometimes you'd get a professor with a flair for writing assign his own textbook. Instead, most non-fiction books were not written with an eye for engaging the audience or winnowed by a marketplace of consumers, and a lot of the fiction was written before modern techniques were developed. This was not helped by following it up with a lecture where you sat there and had someone explain it all to you.
This isn't to say that reading poor writing isn't a skill. It gives you access to brains that might be good at things other than writing. I'm not sure if the way college goes about it is effective in teaching that skill. What it ended up teaching me is that I didn't have to crack a book to make an A, so I stopped and returned to spending my spare time reading more important works like Strunk's Elements of Style or Card's Characters and Viewpoint.
>What evidence is there that people are unable to seek out information on their own
If anecdotal evidence would do, you can look at any public forum.
Loads and loads of trivial questions that could be looked up in seconds get reposted regularly by people that are apparently unable to seek out information on their own.
And that's people who have the vocabulary (and presumable some model of the world described by that vocabulary) to formulate the question correctly. What about people who would not have these models and relevant vocabulary without school?
How do you look up mitochondria if you don't even know that there are cells?
Not trying to defend the current education system that appears to be fundamentally broken, but I feel like some of the critics are a little too optimistic.
Yes, all the information is out there, but it's not trivial to find it, even harder to learn it on your own, and people are not that good at either.
"Loads and loads of trivial questions that could be looked up in seconds get reposted regularly by people that are apparently unable to seek out information on their own."
I'm not sure this is evidence of the same thing.
I mean, there's a cliche about informal tech support, where a tech-savvy young adult goes home for the holidays, the family begs him to fix a computer problem, and he saves the day by typing the error message into Google and trying the first suggestion. I've been there myself. But it isn't just uneducated people who can't Google their own error messages -- it happens with relatives who have post-graduate degrees, too.
It's a strange phenomenon, but if I had to guess, I'd say it can be hard for people unfamiliar with a field to know which search results are trustworthy or useful, so they'd rather ask an expert and move on than sift through a bunch of conflicting material. They *could* read every source in full, and eventually pick up enough context to know which to rely on, but if the subject otherwise holds no interest for them, they'd be doing a lot of extra work just to learn (and then forget) what the expert already knows.
"How do you look up mitochondria if you don't even know that there are cells?"
You're talking about getting an introduction to domain knowledge here, and the point I was responding to was something else -- it was that people won't be able to absorb information about things they care about unless they're first forced to absorb information about things they don't care about. In other words, "How can you look up cocktail recipes if you've never looked up the powerhouse of the cell?"
I'm a little shocked to see this question. People being unable to parse and evaluate information they have looked up seems like a central problem of our information age, and one that's likely to rip our society apart if we don't figure out a solution. How else can wave after wave of destructive disinformation spread across social media if not for people caring and wanting to know yet not being able to "learn properly from what they are reading"?
Do you think the people who can't evaluate information they've looked up simply weren't assigned enough drudge work in school?
I think that's unlikely, since most of them went through the same school experience as the rest of us.
Therefore, I conclude that drudge work in school is not the solution to that problem.
Do the majority of McDonald’s workers need to know these things? What are the chances that the cashier who gave me the wrong change count on her first day knows anything from her biology class? Yet these are the majority of people: unskilled labor. Generations who think education is boring and dumb. Yet if they were left to their devices in a classroom full of learning, what would they do with that boredom? What could they have found? Would they have come to love that free learning? Maybe not. Maybe they would still be giving change poorly until they were sent to the back to flip burgers with millions of other unskilled workers around the globe. And that is ok, as long as they had moral and ethical instructions somewhere in there (something schools often skip these days).
The original is "did we need to know that the mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell, when this isn't even particularly true and not the most relevant information about mitochondria?"
But the wider point there is that learning that snippet of information also means you have learned about cells and that cells have parts, and what cells are, and (let us hope) the difference between bacteria and viruses, and why anti-biotics work, and what they don't work for, and so on.
Scrapping biology classes unless little Johnny or Susie is interested in nature studies means hello, people who believe in the vibrational ability of crystals to fix what ails them down the line!
Yeah, I think this is more complicated than he suggests. I was terrible at biology (or I guess not good - I had a B average but struggled), but the main takeaway I got is that the body is enormously complicated and I should listen to experts and doubt anyone who makes simplistic claims when it comes to life sciences.
That's probably how it goes for most people, and to me it's a point against the importance of drilling random info into children. Johnny and Susie are highly unlikely to use their mastery of high school biology to evaluate medical advice they get from a doctor.
I think we have to decide whether school is a kind of 'generalised strength training' for children's ability to learn, or whether the subject matter itself is important. If it's the former, then a lot of space for reform opens up. If it's the latter, perhaps we should look more closely at the future usefulness of the knowledge acquired and at the various psychological opportunity costs incurred. (learned aversion to structured learning, random petty tortures of kids, etc., as touched upon in the review)
> Johnny and Susie are highly unlikely to use their mastery of high school biology to evaluate medical advice they get from a doctor
Probably not, but maybe a high-school level of biology is at least enough to get them to believe medical advice they get from a (randomly selected) doctor over medical advice they get from a random youtube video, which is overall an improvement.
For a somewhat topical example, I have what is basically only a high-school level knowledge of biology, which means that I don't really understand the immune system at all, but when somebody explains to me how an mRNA vaccine works I can say "Oh right, cool, I basically get the idea" rather than "ack, sorcery!" which probably enables me to make slightly better decisions than I otherwise might.
Haven't most adults in the US completed high-school level biology? Isn't random medical advice on Youtube still popular?
Counterpoint: practically, believing "my metabolism is enormously complicated" is how people stay obese, and believing the simplistic "calories-in-calories-out" is how people get to whatever weight they want. And most of the people saying calories-in-calories-out are non-experts (non-academic, anyway)
On the other hand, people saying that as enormously complicated a system as the human metabolism may be, it can't violate the underlying principle of "calories, in, calories out" are drawing on understanding of basic physics and chemistry which is taught in high school (but many students fail to absorb.)
Absolutely, but that interdisciplinary big-picture understanding is not something that's usually taught in schools.
I don't think any of that is necessarily true. I would expect that many people who can parrot "the mitochondria is [sic] the powerhouse of the cell" would respond with a blank stare when asked what a cell is and spend a lot of money on crystals.
What do you think about "scrapping biology" but keeping the scientific method, and extending it to the lesson of "some maps reflect the territory and some don't; some beliefs have better predictive power than others."
Is that not enough to then derive the utility of biological sciences vs crystals?
If inability to look things up is the major complaint, perhaps we spend time on that using the terrible method of teaching, but not on mitochondria. If they speak a different language, they can just look it up in their native tongue. If they have bad grammer... google doesn't usually mind.
Every physician can tell you the harm that "Dr. Internet" does to high-quality healthcare. Every genuine expert in subject field X trying to teach something to a 21st century n00b can tell you how tiresome it is to have to unwind a whole passel of factoids and Internet theories as plausible as phlogiston and the geocentric Solar System, thanks to the ability to "just look things up."
Besides which, the ability to just look things up isn't new. In 1940 my father could also just look things up by asking the guy on the barstool next to him. Now thanks to the Internet, we can ask random guys on barstools all over the world. w00t!
Given the state of cutting edge medical knowledge (replication crisis anyone?), and given that the average physician is, by definition, quite far from the cutting edge except maybe on a few sub-topics...i would show a little bit less disdain to dr internet. I reserve my disdain to physicians that do not take time to answers questions or get angry when they do not get the respect they expect from their patient for their expertise, when the subject at hand is the patient health and possibly life. It's not the majority, but a very significant minority.
I have MRSA. Most people do, but it doesn't express. It expresses in me. Even with going to multiple doctors, consulting the internet, a couple of college biology classes I still to this day don't know if it's something different about me or about the staph that I'm colonized with. (Everything I hear/read says it's me, but the way medical professionals treat me, they act like it's the staph)
I spent about two years going to several doctors (sometimes because mine wasn't in) while they tried to deal with it. It was very painful and often left me on crutches for a week at a time. They started recommending surgery.
Then I decided to go to a specialist (my doctor never recommended it, it was common staph, why would I need to go to a specialist? Surgeries for staph are normal.)
The specialist said to stop going to the doctor. Gave me some at-home ways to treat it that were more than just "use soap". Helped me learn how to identify what it looked/felt like if it got too bad and I should go to the doctor/emergency room. Then said I was welcome to come back to her if I had follow-up questions but likely we'd never see eachother again. And she was right. The expressions almost immediately were less severe. They never progressed to a severe outbreak ever again. I never used the crutches again. I stopped going to the doctor for staph.
I have a similar story for a plantar wart and has the added tidbit of the specialist mocking the GP for just being an overpaid nurse practitioner with the power to prescribe antibiotics. That time only took me 3 months to decide to go to the specialist.
And another story with a numb patch of skin, but I decided to go to the specialist after only one week. He also mocked GPs. Hey at least I can start to learn. Maybe next time I'll skip the GP altogether.
So how much biology do we need to identify that the doctors most people go to aren't genuine experts in subject field X where X is not how to prescribe antibiotics? Because if more biology classes would provide this then perhaps everyone needs to get an MD or PhD so they can correctly identify that they still don't know enough, and neither do most MDs.
If their literacy is that bad then you should probably be working on reading instead of other subjects.
I know I'm unusual in this, but I wish I'd been institutionalized *more* as a child--assuming the right particular choice of institutional activity. I wish someone had locked me in a room and forced me to do math olympiad problems all day, the way certain other governments supposedly do it, instead of forcing me to do much easier work half the time and letting me do nothing whatsoever of value on the internet the other half. I would've been happier at the time and I would be better at my job today. I was beset with massive akrasia and incapable of aligning my actions with my personal goals and desires, and well aware of it; all I wanted, even in the moment, was someone to tie me to the mast. I don't understand why I'm alone in feeling this way, because I don't think I'm alone in having been terrible at choosing how to spend my time when I was young.
It could be one of those problems where the compromise solution is worse than going all out into one or the other. Half-assed institutionalisation might be worse than both child liberation and competent institutionalisation.
Same, really. I am still basically crippled by my own inability to force myself to do anything not immediately enjoyable. If I could be made even a tiny bit more disciplined / less "akrasic", I would pay thousands upon thousands.
For what it's worth, I've had this problem all my life, finally turned to medication a few years ago, and....it mostly worked. It took years to make the appointment -- as I think Unit of Caring put it, "how the fuck does anyone with ADD get diagnosed?" -- but the state of being-able-to-work went from "something that strikes a few times of year like a bolt of lightning, that I have to ride when it comes because it won't come again soon" to "something I can reach roughly half the time just by taking my meds."
(I thought about not posting this because it's hardly news and you'd probably already tried it, then I realized that no, someone with my problem probably has *not* already tried it, because doing things is hard)
(also, I started with Adderall, found it worked well but murdered my sleep, asked for Dexedrine after reading Scott's amphetamine post, and so far it still works and doesn't hurt my sleep nearly as much. Not medical advice, etc. etc. Just a case report.)
In professional school, I used to marvel at how my peers were so much harder working than I was. Four or five days a week, they'd grind it out until close to bedtime, then get up and do it again.
It occurred to me that they had a secret advantage that I didn't. They didn't have lives. If my peers weren't working, they were either shopping, watching TV, or going to bars. (Internet was just starting to become a thing.) None of these were all that riveting, so they might as well put in the work.
Me, I had a ton of interests, things I wanted to learn or read about, stuff I wanted to do. Just that none of them were taught in any school I attended.
Schools don't primarily teach children to be disciplined. They teach children the skill of placating dictators, and any disciplinary skills taught are a rare and entirely coincidental byproduct.
I guess my perspective is - what I enjoyed at the time was programming, if you'd given me a chance I'd have been doing programming all day, and that would in fact have left me massively better off today than learning and immediately forgetting things I would never need again.
Lucky! If I'd been that kind of child, I'd probably be better off today no matter what my schooling had been like.
What strikes me as different from my case is that the kinds of pressures school exerts didn't make me all that more disciplined. They made me panic, freeze, close up. I wouldn't have minded some tying to the mast either, but that wasn't it.
And what's to say that being tied to the mast wouldn't have just resulted in suicide or a the hikikomori life and not increased productivity as an adult?
Or perhaps the school/office drone life punctuated by despair, binges and mistresses.
Or maybe genuine happiness. Who knows? Anyone done studies on this?
This reasoning relies on the unsupported and implausible assumption that training kids to rely entirely on coercion for 100% of their motivation will make them good at finding non-coercive means of motivation once the coercion is removed.
I'm not good at finding non-coercive means of motivation anyway. Really can't imagine how I could be worse at it if I had been required to work harder in childhood, certainly not so much worse as to make up for all the time I wasted.
The reality is that I engage in a lot of productive, enjoyable intellectual activity for my job, stuff that makes me genuinely happy, and I know I'll immediately stop the moment I stop being pressured to do it by authority figures. The only actual difference between me today and me as a child is that today they expect more of me, and the right things.
Maybe to more intrinsically motivated commenters, this just means I don't deserve the cool job I have. But I think it's better for society that I do it than that I do nothing. And I don't think my personality type is particularly unusual, either.
Decent article. However, it seems like the book is focused primarily on younger kids, while the reviewer kind of lumps together their experience as a fifth grader with their experience as a homeschooled high-schooler. I think the system the reviewer describes -- students largely setting their own curricula in an environment designed to make that easy -- could work alright for 13+ or so. But frankly, claims like "It's really easy to catch up when you need to" are just absurd in the context of younger kids. I say this for two primary reasons:
1) Some things are literally easier to learn when your brain is a little sponge. The most obvious example is language. What else qualifies? I don't know, but neither does the author, and without some serious evidence I'm not about to endorse a world in which many kids are as capable of understanding arithmetic as I am of understanding Dutch.
2) Who's to say they'll catch up on knowledge when they need to? Take history, for example: it's easy enough to catch up on the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict; it's been going on for less than 100 years, after all. But scroll through Twitter and you'll find any number of people who've clearly formed strong views on the matter without knowing the first thing about history, or worse, knowing only what they've been told by partisans. I don't want adults who don't know or care that the US had a civil war. The stuff younger kids learn is really basic and fundamental -- so much so that we take it for granted.
All that's clear by now is that nobody really knows how to run a school. Unfortunately, that includes a lot of reformers.
Younger kids used to learn basics and fundamentals. Now in some places it is not that. They learn opinions about trends described by opinion makers, from historical fiction. (Parent here.)
Eh, maybe. I grew up in the rural south in the seventies and eighties and was taught that slavery was not the primary cause of the civil war.
The Iran hostage crisis happened when I was in sixth grade. I remember seeing video of Iranians burning American flags and thinking "that's crazy - we're the good guys!" I didn't learn about the coup we sponsored in the fifties until much, much later.
Which isn't to say I'm now on the side of the Islamists, but clearly when I was younger I didn't realize I was absorbing a particular point of view.
Good point. I was too cynical in my comment; I meant the kids aren't always getting the drill/support necessary to retain the basic names/dates of history. I "did" a semester of 7th grade social studies/history last fall due to the pandemic and saw that there, and it was a standardized curriculum. Narratives/cause and effect rise out of a decent timeline of events, and getting the events in reverse order, or not knowing them, influences the plausibility/usefulness of the narrative. Also if they don't learn names and dates, people are set up for surprise later, the Spanish-American war being a good example (the what? we did what where?). Then learning some unfamiliar dates can destabilize the whole narrative; we go from being the good guys to being the bad guys. When the whole time there were elements of both, but without the knowledge of names, dates and timelines none of that is clear.
If you start out with a scaffolding of dates you can fill in some ideas and then more dates and more ideas. With the dates (and the dates of enough things!) you can analyze the narratives and see what works where. I was in sixth grade or thereabouts when Reagan bombed Libya, got to school and it was an epic "Oh s***" how can that be a good idea. Then when there was intervention in Libya again there was a pattern to connect it to, it wasn't a one-off.
The combination of unfavored aspects of history being repressed, and people not learning enough dates to construct a timeline to evaluate the meaning of events, leads to weird conclusions. Who talks about Chiapas anymore, or subcomandante Marcos? But are they unimportant, no, a range of consequences follows from every event.
Just read Gilley's article on colonialism.
There's always a point of view, but stacking it with more names and dates makes it both more robust and easier to re-evaluate later.
As an aside, Slavery actually wasn't the primary cause of the civil war. If you claimed it was in 1860s, the Union would of course call you "Southern Propagandandist" and claim that the war was only that of "preserving the Union" and has nothing to do with the institution of slavery. I doubt Southern State curriculum goes into much detail if they claim slavery wasn't the cause of the war. Most history taught in American schools is nonsense anyways, "Useful Histories" as one might call it. If you want to read primary sources for the American Civil War, I recommend George Lunt's Origin of the Late War 1865. If there's one book about the civil war you're read, it's this one. If you are willing to read more, I recommend Edgar Lee Master's Lincoln the Man 1931, if you want to understand slavery, Slave narratives : http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/WPA/wpahome.html
collected during FDR's time is useful (though reliability of each single story is doubtful). If you want to read something subversive, you can read George Fitzhugh (1850s) https://mises.org/wire/george-fitzhugh-honest-socialist, where he claims and I kid you not slavery is a great institution because it is similar to socialism. This can be seen as a desperate attempt to court the North before an impending war, but I encourage you to read his arguments with an open mind (lol). That said there may be a use to dumb down history for the masses, creates a sense of community and shared origin and if I were home-schooling my child (which I'm not because I want them to have a normal life in this society) I wouldn't force my child to read primary sources or read anything other than the prescribed curriculum unless he shows an enthusiastic interest in the study of history and wants to delve deeper into it.
I realised I didn't actually give the reasons for the Civil War apart from suggesting references. It was in no sense a moral war that had anything to do with slavery (But the Emancipation Proclamation??? - I'll get to that) The best way to explain it is by analogy. The first World War, would it have happened without the assassination? No. Was it a moral war to end the militarism and establish democracies (of course not) even though that was the end result. Take WW2 instead, is it likely we would enter WW2 without Pearl Harbour? No, FDR of course famously promised in his reelection speech that he would not lead a wary American Public into another world war. Yet after beating Germany, Nazism was replaced by a liberal democracy so was it a moral war to end nazism and establish democracy (of course not).
The reason people get confused with the civil war is they can only see America as a whole and for them slavery was not an institution of just the South, it was an institution of America. This was simply not the mindset of those living in the 1800s. The Southerners strongly believed America was a legal document that binded the states, not a new metaphysical nation. States had their own constitution, their own supreme courts, their own slogans etc, (their own flags in some cases). Modern Historian David Potter (https://www.amazon.com/Impending-Crisis-1848-1861-David-Potter/dp/0061319295) himself writes: "Against the defenders of this doctrine, the defenders of nationalism did not come off as well as they might have, partly because they accepted the assumption that the nature of the Union should be determined by legal means, somewhat as if it were a case in the law of contracts." So the nationalists i.e., the Unionists themselves thought America was a legal Union and not a nation, imagine that!. They may not have seen themselves as France vs Germany (owing to the same language, customs etc) but certainly neither side saw themselves as one binding country as we do now. Now the reason for the war becomes very clear, The Fort Sumter Attack just like Kaiser invaded Belgium, Hitler invaded Poland, Japan bombed Hawaii, most people clearly know the cause of those wars but not this! For example if Hitler didn't invade Poland WW2 might have never happened, no historian disagrees, it's the same here. In fact if Virginia left the Union by vote (as it almost did in 1861), we might have still had a confederacy to this date. (Though I doubt if slavery would still exist as an institution).
If nothing else (and there is much else), the various ordinances of secession by the Confederate states are rather convincing as to the threat of abolition of slavery being the primary cause of the war. They outright state as much.
Reducing the causes of these grand historical events to their most proximate triggers strikes me as a bit myopic, if you'll forgive my saying so. A bit like claiming that the cause of the October Revolution was really the government raid on the Worker's Path newspaper offices.
There were lots of people involved in the war, with lots of different motives. But I feel comfortable saying that secession was the cause of the war, and slavery was the cause of secession.
The question to ask is not whether the North and South hated each other (they of course did), US and Japan hated each other from quite a while before WW2. The question is whether they were on a collision course to start a war without Fort Sumter, (whether US would fight Japan without Pearl Harbour). While in WW2 the case is clear, US would in no way start a war without provocation, even in the Civil War a fair reading gives the same picture. Consider the fact that after the South started to seccede Lincoln proposed the 13th amendment in 1860 https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/proposed-thirteenth-amendment-prevent-secession-1861) that would enshrine slavery in the constitution in the Southern states. (ironically it was later used to end slavery after the war) Why did he propose that? As a last ditch effort to avoid the Civil War, his compromise was that slavery wouldn't extend to the newly formed States and South had to cease all claims of seccession but the South was too distrustful of the North (especially after Dredd Scott) to agree to join back the Union. What was Lincoln's breaking point, the one thing he would in no way argue with and would be a non starter of any proposed deal? It was not slavery, slavery was the one thing he kept promising he wouldn't end in the South if they came to some deal. It was however recognising the South's Independence, that he would never do. When Senators like John Pendleton Kennedy proposed to create a separate Southern Confederacy of states that would be different from the union in 1860, he would have none of it. The seccession was illegal and he did not consider the states to have secceeded even if they claimed so. I suppose with these assumptions we can come tonthe conclusion that if the South kept behaving like free states then without Fort Sumter eventually a war would occur. If South joined back the Union then without Fort Sumter the war wouldnt happen though activism to end slavery would go on and possibly like the civil rights slavery would end through votes alone. My view though is that if the Lincoln presidency passed other presidencies would be more open to a seccession and the war would have possibly never happened. While these counterfactual can never be proven, I do think it's a reasonable view considering the mindset of all the sides at that time
Actually, a school superintendent at a district in upstate New York, I believe, once manages to run an experiment where he had the kids taught zero math until 6th grade. They caught up in one year with similar or superior performance to the kids who had been learning it the whole time. It’s not a settled matter, but I think the ability to catch up is vastly underrated.
Some of this may be path-dependence. When a 6th grade education (elementary education) was the limit of what most people would be guaranteed to have, ensuring knowledge of fundamental arithmetic by its conclusion was probably essential.
Now, though, I have no idea. It may make sense to try and use the time for what its best for.
This sent me down quite a rabbit hole! The man's name was Louis P. Benezet, this experiment took place in the 1930s, and it's a pretty interesting story. However, it's not true that he taught zero math -- he just tried to replace formal math with "natural math," such as estimating distances and lengths, reasoning about concepts in plain language, etc. So these kids were still developing a number sense in class, just without extensive symbol manipulation or memorization.
Benezet's schtick was more about holistic understanding vs mindless symbol manipulation, not early learning vs catching up. I don't think this is a very good argument for abandoning the teaching of math -- just, at best, changing how it works. (And perhaps not even that... in the decades since, math education has gone through a lot of changes in the pursuit of Teaching For Understanding with mixed results.)
"At the end of the day, students were allowed to take home any unsold books. We were told that any we didn’t take would be destroyed, sent to a landfill. This was probably true (it viscerally horrifies me to this day), but if it was a lie it was a really clever tactic."
I want to talk about this, because it goes with a theme in Double Fold, which in turn matches a certain strain I've identified in myself and other 'smart' people. I am a person who loves books and owns approximately zero of them. This bothers me occasionally, which continually surprises me because I am profoundly unsentimental.
I have many more photographs of, say, paywalled NYT cooking articles on my phone than I do of family. I love my family dearly, more than just about anything, but I have no need to totemize them them with photos and memorabilia and so on. So it is with my intellectualism and books, for the most part. Still, my lack of family photos bothers me never, while my lack of books bothers me sometimes. I think this is just that people like me (graduate education, high paying job, knowledge work, etc.) are expected, in some ways above all else, to own and love and otherwise perform the sacred ideology of books.
But I don't, and can't, and won't, because they're not useful. They're heavy, bulky, hard to use, expensive, take up space, and have only one real advantage over digital (it's harder to flip back and forth with one than the other). They are, in a word, sentimental. I don't think it's healthy or reasonable to have such a reaction as the author to the potential destruction of some wood pulp. Obviously, this kind of reaction isn't all bad because it can and does have the second-order effects the author describes (broadening the mind, etc.)
This brings us to Double Fold. I wonder what percentage of readers here on ACX thought the problem with the policy being derided in Double Fold was with its nature versus its implementation. That the process of scanning and switching to microfiche/digital with concomitant destruction was begun way too early and with far too much hubris appears indisputable, and that many important works and a substantial portion of the historical record were potentially lost forever. But these are, fundamentally, implementation problems. Of course, an implementation problem can be so great that it calls the entire policy into question, as indeed is the case with Double Fold.
But let's say the process only began in, say, 2000, by which time technology sufficient to create high-quality, durable, searchable, digital copies of books was widespread. Would we still have a problem with destruction? I wouldn't (excepting of course books which are legitimate artifacts and/or works of art), but I'd strongly suspect that a lot of people, including Double Fold's target audience, would. I struggle to think of a rational reason for this, which strikes me as pure sentimentality and/or totemization.
This issue came up in the most trivial fashion possible during the early part of the pandemic, when there was a burst of thinkpieces on the subject of 'the shelf' that was behind you in Zoom calls, as though this were, should be, and could be your whole identity. And indeed, I think this kind of thinking, seen in the review of Double Fold, and the quoted text, that perpetuates this idea. As Freddie says, you aren't the shit you like. The shit you like is at best (or maybe worst) a crutch.
Let me explain a bit. I broke my ankle many years ago and it's never quite fully recovered. Not really a big deal, but occasionally it flares up and I consider wearing a brace. I've talked to my doctor a few times about it, and I'm always told to avoid braces and such because the ankle will come to depend on the brace. That's how I feel about book ideology for a huge swathe of people my age and class. Instead of having real identities (or so it seems to me) people have bullet point lists, which is all they have to extract meaning from. It seems to make them, at the very least, unhappy, and seems to predispose them to many other issues, such as toxic fandom (or its reverse; look at the JK Rowling controversy viz HP fandom) and mob culture on social media.
I have no advice on what to do instead. I don't have this problem, but I don't know what I do instead, or what I did differently back when that set me on a different course. But I am happy. In saying this, I'm not trying to flex. I'm trying emphasize that this is a pathology and it contributes to misery, which I would like there to be less of.
I genuinely prefer physical books over digital books, because I find physical books easier to read and the information easier to retain. Additionally, it's far easier to get distracted when reading something on a computer/phone (although Kindles do exist) than when reading a physical book. The only purpose for which I prefer digital books is when I'm looking for something to reference (e.g., a quote, or how often a certain word is used); when I'm first reading, physical books are far preferable.
Destroying physical books can be a problem because the Internet does not last forever either. Part of the negative reaction to destroying such books is due to the fact that, all else equal, more redundancy is better; if one is destroyed, the other remains.
I’ve read a few thousand paper and ink books and a few hundred digital books. It’s just not the same experience.
The vibe is much more intimate with a physical copy. If you enjoy the book and it enters your personal hall of favorites, you’ll find a prominent spot for it on one of your shelves. You’ll look at it from time to time and it will call you back over the years for a second, third or fourth reading.
(Note: Four times is not the limit. You can certainly go higher for the handful that you love the most)
You can develop a healthy lifetime relationship with a physical book. It’s Isn’t a pathology and quite a bit of joy is experienced rather than misery.
Oh, and who the hell is J K Rowling? Never heard of him.
I suspect preferences for physical vs digital books are somewhat an artifact of what people are used to. I find physical books kind of confusing and off-putting now that I have been on digital books for most of my life, even though I grew up with the physical versions - people who are growing up with digital books are quite likely to never develop the preference for physical books even if given the chance later to try them?
Perhaps so. I suppose we’ll know in a few decades.
Have you tried a kindle with a e-ink screen? I totally get not liking digital books on traditional screens, but e-ink is basically physical book, but with word lookup, page saving, fits in a (big) pocket, with 20k books on it. I'm a big fan.
Yeah, I’ve had a Kindle PaperWhite for a few years. I use it often. I really like the translation feature for authors that insert dialogue in other languages.
I just checked mine now and I have 345 books on “the cloud”. It is an undeniable space saver too.
Pressed Post too soon. Even with those advantages I still think it’s not the same experience. You can’t develop the same passion for an ebook that you can for a favorite in physical form. I know that I’m talking about emotion here but good fiction does generate an emotional response. I suppose it is a bit weird to develop an attachment to an object, but it is a pleasant weirdness
I love my Kindle but feel queasy about the fact that Amazon can take books back from you or change the content.
Fran Leibovitz on this topic:
‘ Jimmy Fallon gave me a Kindle. He actually gave it to me as a present. I said: “I know you gave me this because I don’t have one. You know what else I don’t have? A Bentley.”’
Huh.
So I much prefer physical books to digital, although I have a great ebook reader and do have a lot of ebooks.
Principally this is because I read a lot of books, somewhere between 50 and 100 per year, and if I was paying ebook list price I would be paying between four and eight times as much per volume with no advantage to me. I think anyone who claims ebooks are cheaper than paper is probably quite uninformed about eBay, Amazon’s used book options, and used book stores in general—on my best trip last year my wife and I came away from our favorite store with twenty volumes for twenty dollars. The only competition to paper as far as price goes is Project Gutenberg.
I also disagree that ebooks are easier to use. You didn’t provide any reasoning here but I assume that you mean it’s easier to look up information. I suppose this is true if you are wholly unfamiliar with the book and searching for keywords, but if you’re not sure what you’re looking for or if it’s a reference text that you use often, paper is much easier up to a certain page limit, due to your ability to skim and flip quickly and locate physical sections without internal referents. Ease of use is balanced further by the fact that while paper books are harder to carry, ebooks require a power source and are more delicate.
Valid advantages are storage space and weight: if you’re out of shelf space, you’re out. That said, I end up donating or reselling a lot of books over the years as I determine what I will and won’t re-read, and this is another advantage of paper over digital because an ebook cannot be resold, whereas many used books can be resold for a significant fraction of their cost.
But anyway, I guess my main counter argument to your comment is that you have projected this hyper-online ‘ideology of books’ across all readers of paper books in a way that doesn’t map to reality. The fetishization of book-as-object or book-as-personality is only a part of it, and ebooks and audiobooks are also part of this personality-defining, bullet-point construct with vapid, cannibalistic fandoms and Instagram photos of ‘what I’m reading lately.’ Having no physical shelves doesn’t make you immune; what makes you immune is, like me and my wife, not having Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr or whatever is trendy now. You have misidentified the risk and cause completely.
You say “I’m not meaning to flex,” but honestly until you said that I didn’t think you were; now I suspect that on some level you do feel a moral superiority to the ‘pathological’ hoarders of outmoded paper books. If you didn’t you would see that the debate between paper and digital (does there even need to be one?) is orthogonal to reading versus fetish-reading. That you aren’t able to see may speak more to the doom-and-gloom perspective of our society, which continually assumes that preference issues like this are symptomatic of disease, but it doesn’t make your thesis any more true.
"The only competition to paper as far as price goes is Project Gutenberg."
Which is some hellacious competition, and I also get a lot from LibGen.
Eh, great competition on one level, not even in the arena on another.
I threw out most of my books. I still have a couple dozen, but more for sentimental reasons than anything else.
I try to use the library as much as possible. I have and use e-books too, but I much prefer physical.
Paper books matter because one can inadvertently encounter a physical object more easily, in my experience, than one can inadvertently encounter a data object. For example I found a book on a free shelf, an analysis of a hypothetical (at the date of publication) US presidential election runoff between Hillary Clinton and *Condoleezza Rice*. Would I have ever looked for it? No. Was it extremely interesting? Yes.
When I walk the physical stacks in the library I always find a book or paper source which is at least as important as whatever the digital search gave me; I use digital search to reveal a few general classification codes and then go look through the surrounding shelves. Digital search is more likely to provide what I am expecting, because I choose the keywords; physical search provides a whole block of writing on the topic with a variety of opinions. Encountering the unfamiliar is an important part of learning and knowledge.
Besides, electronic stuff can be deleted. Burning all the copies of a book is harder to do.
> They're heavy, bulky, hard to use, expensive, take up space, and have only one real advantage over digital (it's harder to flip back and forth with one than the other). They are, in a word, sentimental. I don't think it's healthy or reasonable to have such a reaction as the author to the potential destruction of some wood pulp.
Note that the book review says this account happened on the order of thirty years after 1958, when any computing devices you might read on were still heavier, bulkier, harder to use, etc. than books. The computer my school had in the classrooms back then was an Apple IIe—a computer that displayed its text in monospace on a screen 40 characters wide—used almost exclusively for educational games from MECC. The Internet was not yet part of the culture; the World Wide Web didn't exist in 1988. If their school was anything like mine, their library didn't even use a computer to track books back then, much less deliver them.
It's certainly valid to be less inclined towards physical-book worship today, given our experience with the alternatives we have. But an incident like the one described would have carried greater weight in the past, when one's access to information was far more greatly limited to the contents of nearby books and brains than it is now.
In addition to reasons others have said (less distractable, more information retained, physically more enjoyable to hold in hand and display on shelves), I prefer paper books because it is easier to find things in them. Paper books have spatial dimensions to them; every word has a position on a page, and every page has a position in the book. It is in fact often easier to find something by remembering "this section was about a third of the way through the book, near the top of the left-hand page, in a paragraph with such-and-such a shape" than by ctrl+F searching for a direct quotation. E-books actually screw with this intuition; a "page" is just all the upcoming words that fit on the screen, so a word's position is recalculated often. For example changing the font moves the words around, but changing it back doesn't always put the words back.
I have a kindle paperwhite that I take with me traveling: Paper can't compete with silicon for weight, volume, and durability. But that's about the only time I prefer digital books to physical.
> But I don't, and can't, and won't, because they're not useful.
They're very useful in an apocalypse! I think your assessment of their utility is based on the optimistic assumption that civilization will never go backwards. Not just in an apocalyptic sense, that's of course the most extreme example, but there are many ways for civilized norms to go backwards. Witness all the shadow editing done to published articles these days. Think about a few years ago when Amazon was remotely deleting ebooks from people's devices.
Can't do any of that with real books. They are a form of distributed, durable knowledge that stands in opposition to the increasing centralization of knowledge and information we're seeing today (which is ironically the opposite of the intended vision of the internet).
Books used to be very expensive and to own them was (is?) a huge status symbol. It's not surprising there is an obsession with them and a strong feeling to preserve them when for most of them you could throw it out and pick up a used copy if you ever happened to want it again in the future.
Swords are similar. In many ways not as practical as other tools, but symbols of wealth and status.
Japan has those dolls modeled after the monarchy that they collect as status symbols, right?
I'm often told that collecting cars is an upper-working-class thing that stems from the car being a integral and expensive tool at one point and the ability to afford more than one is a status symbol.
I bet there's a number of other things in our culture that used to be very expensive and require protection/care that are overvalued know or have an aura of being cool/rich/etc. because of it.
Watches maybe?
I strongly prefer digital books to physical for most purposes (though for things like recipes or rulebooks, there are advantages to physical). I still felt like Double Fold made a strong case. There is a difference between a consumer product packaged for broad distribution and a historical artifact intended for future study. A physical artifact, produced for a specific purpose at a specific moment in time, encodes an enormous amount of unintended information. If the original artifact is destroyed and replaced with a digital copy, only the elements of it that are considered "important" at the moment of destruction will be preserved. This deprives future generations the ability to truly return to the original and see it for themselves.
As a general principle, it is bad to make a copy of something and then dispose of the original. Making the copy is good - copies can be distributed more widely, indexed with metadata and made searchable, etc. But that doesn't excuse throwing away the original. Copies are never perfect, and it is easy to miss something that future generations will decide is much more important than you ever expected it to be.
This is a brand new way of thinking about education for me. I intend to read this book. Good for Holt, good for empiric observation. Fascinating.
I think this is mostly right, but there are some serious benefits from having a peer group studying the same things you are, being able to discuss and bounce ideas off your peers and friends, and learning skills is best with direct instruction rather than directions to the library.
The larger problems with this come from the general incentives involved in all this. School Is Not About Education and all that jazz. Schools provide child warehousing, accreditation, and socioeconomic segregation. Whether these are good or not, it'd take pretty some pretty interventionist policy on childrearing to actually break the system.
I'm also vaguely concerned with internet attention economy Baby Youtube Hell-type issues but I'm not at all sure how confident in that being a problem I should be. And online learning hasn't seemed to be great, in terms of either enjoyment or education, but I suspect (or possibly just hope) that's because it's replicated all the problems of mainstream mass education with none of the benefits.
Overall great review, of a book with a great vision. I wish I could be less cynical about it.
I mean, I believe this is why the author wants children to get more involved in job-related activities. Learn the thing you want to learn directly, effectively.
Links are all broken. OP seems to have used the wrong sort of quotes, turned the result into absolute links, and then copied the result to here. (E.g., what should be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods has instead becoem https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/%E2%80%9Dhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods%E2%80%9D ; this mistake occurs for every link I have checked.) Please fix this.
Very enjoyable review in which I shared many of the opinions and feelings as the author.
Much like the author, I feel that changing the institution is fairly impossible, even during the pandemic. The societal view that more education is always good is a feeling that's so ubiquitous that most anti-schooling opinions are immediately dismissed (even if the same people will admit that much of what is taught in school is a waste of time).
Most adults stop caring about school once they graduate and have the "I did it, so you have to do it too" attitude, which is very difficult to change.
I was also hopeful at the beginning of the pandemic that it would force substantial innovation in schooling and that schooling would improve as a result. I don't think that has happened. The inertia in schooling institutions is as strong as ever, even though these institutions of standardization and control make even less sense online.
Why are you optimistic that this is a good time for institutional innovation? Have you seen any evidence of this innovation since the pandemic started?
The reviewer gets at an obvious but overwhelming truth, (the kind that we like to avoid confronting so as to avoid despair) as have many others who've thought about education and pedagogy. The discussion around Scott's experience of school as a prison brought up some of the same observations. Kids are different. Sometimes very different. Different capacities, interests, cognitions, intuitions, emotional ranges and regulations, personalities, etc. What works for one kid, can be torture for another. Something experienced as trauma for kid A can be exactly what kid B needs to thrive.
Obviously, when you stick all this diversity into a single institution and try to standardize everything, the kids whose pegs more or less fit the hole of standardization will be ok, the ones who don't fit will be forced to fit despite their suffering, or abandoned to fate.
If this is indeed one of the fundamental problems with institutional schooling and a source of its' lackluster results, then by definition there can be no "standard" solution - only something that tailors an optimal pedagogy to each child based on their individual map of attributes and evolves with them as they mature.
It's worth noting that this is how kids from wealthy households are educated. For every weakness, deficiency, or "abnormality", a specialist is brought in, a tutor is hired, an unconventional intervention made - resources are reallocated as needed.
I'm not sure if this premise is actually true, but if it is, how could such an approach scale to a societal level?
I... mostly disagree with this. Your comment sounds like it's at least vaguely based on the concept of "learning styles". A lot of bad psychologists have made a lot of non-falsifiable theories about learning styles over the years. I'm skeptical.
In life, there are things that are just more interesting than others. A Solar Eclipse is just more interesting than a lunar eclipse. People fly and drive and celebrate solar eclipses. Lunar eclipses happen and a few people take notice, but many may not.
On youtube, one video can be designed to be incredibly engaging and fun. It's just simply more interesting than other videos. A 3 hour lecture on youtube is unlikely to go viral - a mark rober video is.
In school, when we talk about different learnings styles and how "What works for one kid, can be torture for another" is just... so rare. Kids will answer surveys about learning styles or take quizzes, but more often than not, all kids prefer INTERESTING learning to uninteresting learning. If you showed kids options for three curriculums - watching a star wars explanation of gravity, going to a museum to learn about gravity, or learning gravity from a schoolbook, the kids might answer differently. Maybe kid A already understands gravity, so they want it as short as possible. Maybe kid B knows that usually, videos about science aren't interesting, so he'll try the museum. Maybe kid C knows that taking a whole day for the museum would mean he misses out on seeing his crush, so he'd rather not.
It sounds like kids A, B, and C, might have different learning styles, but they are just all trying to choose the most interesting thing. There's probably one answer that really is the most interesting. The museum could be a more-boring classroom, or it could be a free-reign for the kids to run around and explore. That video could be a 30 minute dull boring explanation of gravity, or it could be a comedy slapstick that lasts 5 minutes but gets the point across.
All three kids are trying to FIND the most interesting thing, and are just choosing differently based on their priors about how things went before.
So... in general, when teaching children - try to let theme try everything, and THEN decide which is their preference. But just... make a decision about which one is probably the most interesting. It's probably not something that requires them to sit down and shut up.
I think you'd agree that some kids like structure more than others (just like some adults like structure more than others), or at least that some kids are more motivated (just like some adults are more motivated than others). To go back to your example, perhaps a better way to think about it is if they did all three, and surely you wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a single option that was the most interesting, especially if we included a whole classroom-full of students. The fact that there are some things that are strictly more interesting than others does not mean that all things or even a majority of things are comparable. Just because a poset doesn't consist of n uncomparable things doesn't mean it's a totally ordered set of n things.
Well some 'styles' probably exist, e.g. preferences for interactive learning or sitting quietly and listening to the teacher; I'm the one who's always preferred sitting and listening and only later asking questions to any interactive games, but I know people who totally hate the sitting and listening part.
> In school, when we talk about different learnings styles and how "What works for one kid, can be torture for another" is just... so rare.
I don't think it's as rare as you imply. It's well known that girls do better than boys in schooling all the way up at least through high school. Is it because girls, on average, are inherently much better than boys cognitively, or is it because girls' natural dispositions are just so much better suited than boys's dispositions to those environments, and so they're more comfortable, they receive fewer punishments, they're rewarded more, etc.?
Consider also that twice as many boys as girls are diagnosed with ADHD and medicated. Plenty of studies have shown that more physical and outdoor activities helps ADHD, so do these boys actually have a problem or is the environment we're forcing them into actually the problem?
I'm not sure I would call this "learning styles" per se, but it's clear that environmental factors matter, and it's also clear that the distribution of environments that work best for kids don't all cluster around some common mean.
In a sense, the schooling environment is kinda-sorta necessary, as it's a microcosm of how society expects you to behave when you're an adult: sit down, shut up, do your work and then eventually you'll be permitted to go home and enjoy a carefully scheduled slot of free time where you can be yourself. In that sense, it's important to learn those behaviours in order to be "functional" in modern society. In another sense, normalizing this kinda seems shitty and unnecessary to an extent.
I mentioned Carol Gilligan to my mother (former Latin teacher) and her response was, in paraphrase, "Well, duh, boys get more teacher attention and patriarchy has jack-all to do with it. Boys are harder to keep on task, more prone to acting out, and less inclined to please authority. So of course they're going to get more attention, if for no other reason than the teacher has to say 'Sit down and shut up, Marius!'"
I mean, I feel this doesn't go into the cynical answer: "school teaches kids the only vital life skill in today's society - to half-assedly do something they don't care about eight hours a day." I'm not convinced this is actually false, and it kind of scares me.
Yup, if nothing else, institutionalized school is training for the institutionalized workplace. Wasn't that the explicit purpose when the modern school paradigm was first instituted?
Amusingly, I was raised in a situation very close to his optimal solution: homeshooled, with parents determined to encourage us in whatever flights of interest we had (as long as we got a bare minimum done in important subjects.) That worked out great for me (and all 3 of my siblings) academically. But two out of the four of us struggled with conforming to the insitutionalized workplace for 2-3 years at the beginning of our careers.
In your experience, is that as good a trade as it sounds?
I'm not sure; I don't know how good it sounds.
We got to college without having ever learned to hate school, and with excellent problem solving skills. And with CONFIDENCE in those skills. We excelled academically. In order from oldest to youngest:
1) 2 STEM bachelor degrees in 3 years
2) 2 STEM bachelor degrees in 4 years
3) 3 STEM bachelor degrees in 4 years
4) One teaching degree from a high intensity program that included a ton of hands-on experience at an associated private school.
That's great! None of us will ever suffer from a resume that blends in to the crowd.
On the other hand, for the two of us that really struggled with the industrialized regularity... Losing or almost losing your first two jobs out of college because you look lazy SUCKS. A LOT. And had some significant mental health impacts.
It's really a mixed bag professionally. Big upside, big downside.
I see. Thanks for your response!
> I don't know how good it sounds
I was thinking that 50% chance at "struggling with conforming to the insitutionalized workplace for 2-3 years" sounds a lot better than 100% chance at 14 years in school (with its downsides listed in the book review).
But I hadn't considered the mental health impact of going through the former, I'm guessing, worsened by the relative loneliness / uniqueness of the situation? In school, at least you're all suffering together and the problem isn't personal.
There's a big cascade effect here. There's enough signaling-basin effects in many industries that if you fail to get by in the institutionalized workplace *once*, your entire career is in jeopardy and you have almost no way to recover. This is especially true if it's your first job out of school: your résumé now instantly goes in the bin every time. And as for a professional network helping you out of that, well, first of all, do they really want to take the risk of recommending you? And secondly, if you didn't go the “normal” route, who's going to have gotten to know you? The normal people with connections were all busy doing normal things with each other!
You're basically toast.
As a former student of what I believe to be a pretty conventional American grade-school experience, I don’t feel like having endured it for 13 years increased my tolerance for dull 8-hour workdays any. If anything, I just arrived to the workforce pre-burnt out.
That's a terrible survival strategy in the modern world, and prepares the child for a lifetime of frustration and learned helplessness.
If we want schools to exist for this purpose then we should still severely decrease the amount of school we have. It seems likely to me that such patience skills could be learned in between 1-3 years of practice (90% CI).
To be honest, this is my most legitimate-feeling worry about my unschooled kid. Will the workplace kind of destroy him? I mostly hope he'll find a way through life that doesn't require a cubicle--and be better equipped to do so by the flexibility he's learning.
Some years ago, they were remodeling offices on my floor, and I had to office in the conference room for a couple of days.
I didn't like it.
For one thing, I couldn't goof off or read ACTen without other people being able to read over my shoulder. Even when I actually was working, sort of, it might look like I was slacking off when in fact I was turning some idea over in my head, looking at it from different angles while waiting for inspiration to hit. I'm not one to care for others' opinion, but I didn't need my slackerdom to become public knowledge, either.
At first, I felt bad for the secretaries. Once the remodel was finished, I could go back to my office and shut the door. They couldn't. They were in the panopticon their entire working lives. I don't know how they could stand it.
Then I started asking questions. That's when things went from bad to worse. "So, why do *I* have an office? Why am I not subject to endless surveillance?" Because I don't need HR to supervise me, to make sure I am on-task. I am so well trained that I do it myself, I am my own hall monitor, he lives rent-free, inside my head.
I don’t think kids are taken nearly seriously enough. I don’t know what to do about it, but I really sympathize with powerless and ignored kids.
I agree. People treat knowledge, experience, and intelligence as although they are the same thing, but they aren't. Children can be intelligent while not having specific knowledge or experience.
It's a legitimately tough problem. You can have an intellectually mature child who nonetheless will have a melt-down over you, the adult, refusing to let them watch the movie that you *know* will give them nightmares for a week (and if they go behind your back and watch it with their friends, they do indeed end up having that week of nightmares).
Kids are powerless and ignored, but often for good reasons. The times when they should be listened to, and taken into account, and are not - those are the faults of the system. But there is no perfect system, and just as often there are times they *should* be ignored: does anyone remember being a child and thinking "when I'm grown-up, I'm going to do this and this and this" and then you get older and realise why you can't do this and this and this, or why it would be bad for you?
"You can have an intellectually mature child who nonetheless will have a melt-down over you, the adult, refusing to let them watch the movie that you *know* will give them nightmares for a week (and if they go behind your back and watch it with their friends, they do indeed end up having that week of nightmares)."
Sure, but how often is that kid going to say "You're right, that was a mistake, I shouldn't have watched it, I'll take your advice next time"?
On one level, the disagreement may be about whether or not the movie is going to give them nightmares, but on another level, it's about who gets to decide whether the risk of nightmares is worth taking.
"But there is no perfect system, and just as often there are times they *should* be ignored: does anyone remember being a child and thinking "when I'm grown-up, I'm going to do this and this and this" and then you get older and realise why you can't do this and this and this, or why it would be bad for you?"
Personally, I don't, but I think that's beside the point - no one expects children to be experts on adult life. However, they *are* experts on their own lives, at least more so than most of the people who try to dictate how they spend their time.
Kids are "experts on their own lives"???? Seriously? As adults, many of us struggle with finding fulfillment. We constantly seek advice and read self-help books or look to meditation or mindfulness and wisdom of the ages. Operating in an environment that doesn't match our evolutionary history is difficult.
"However, they *are* experts on their own lives, at least more so than most of the people who try to dictate how they spend their time."
Kids at the time have never been adults. Adults have been kids, and sometimes do remember how they felt and thought in that dim and distant past, and why they do have the right to dictate how the child spends its time.
"On one level, the disagreement may be about whether or not the movie is going to give them nightmares, but on another level, it's about who gets to decide whether the risk of nightmares is worth taking."
Granted, a burned hand dreads the fire and experience is the best teacher, and sometimes no warnings will work as well as having to suffer the consequences. On the other hand, if you saw a young child reaching out to touch a hot surface, would you try to stop them or would your attitude be "it's about who gets to decide if the risk is worth it! I warned them about hot surfaces, that's the end of my involvement!"
And in the end, it comes down to "When you're eighteen, you'll be adult enough to make your own stupid choices and live with the consequences. But you're nine. And your stupid choice means that the consequences are you screaming awake out of nightmares for an entire week, waking up your siblings, disturbing the house, and your parents having to spend time awake settling you back down and getting you and them back to sleep, when they need to work in the morning and don't need seven nights of disturbed sleep".
"On the other hand, if you saw a young child reaching out to touch a hot surface, would you try to stop them or would your attitude be "it's about who gets to decide if the risk is worth it! I warned them about hot surfaces, that's the end of my involvement!""
Of course you let them touch the hot surface! Right? How else would they learn if your instruction failed them before?
More non-permanent hard lessons = better!
Wow - I think you need to have more respect for children. If you calmly explain to them consequences for an action (watching a scary movie) and they still choose it, then what was the point of the explanation? Either try to persuade them, or forbid them, but don't hold the pretense that you should be doing both. You really can't let them hurt themselves and then help them afterward? You don't even know if they'll scream in their sleep... maybe they'll think it's funny and they are a scary movie lover at heart!
"Adults have been kids, and sometimes do remember how they felt and thought in that dim and distant past, and why they do have the right to dictate how the child spends its time."
This is pretty broken logic. If you are 30, does that mean you remember what it's like to be 25, and so you can dictate a 25 year olds' time?
Don't get me wrong - kids make mistakes in life, and it's the parents job to use some wisdom to prevent them from making permanent ones. But you're not doing your relationship OR your child's skills at making decisions any favors, by taking away their agency.
"Kids at the time have never been adults. Adults have been kids, and sometimes do remember how they felt and thought in that dim and distant past, and why they do have the right to dictate how the child spends its time."
Elsewhere in the thread, you claimed I was making the basic error of assuming that everyone's youth was like mine and therefore I know what's best for all young people, "because surely all kids are like me!"
And yet here, you're saying adults must know what's best for children because they can remember what their own childhoods were like.
Hmm. Could it be I'm not the one making assumptions?
I was raised in a free range way and recognize the value in that. But kids need to learn the operating system that works best for the hardware they were born with. That cultural transmission takes a ton of time and effort, and if most adults are working 40+ hours a week then you need to pay someone to spend time with the children. The internet and books are no substitute for society, and kids are not really welcome in society (these days I can't even bring my kids to work and I could use their labor). In the modern age, a big part of parenting is limiting media consumption since there are teams of neuromarketing experts competing to make cyberspace more and more addictive. The "burned hand is the best teacher" argument doesn't fit here, it is an example of a perfect evolutionary match with our environment. Toxic social media environments, bad diet (tons of obese kids these days), overwork, being indoors all the time are examples of evolutionary mismatch that often have to be countered with culture.
The internet is a wonderful educational resource if you can tell the difference between legitimate stuff and crackpots. But even many adults can't tell the difference; what chance do children have?
The ideal, I suppose, would be supervised internet time, but there aren't enough teachers to look over every kid's shoulder at once.
For whatever reason, children largely seem better at this than adults in my experience.
Likely because younger people have higher fluid intelligence.
Not quite as OT as it may seem - I have read it that the educated are more prone to cognitive dissonance than the less educated.
They are more attached to ideologies and better at symbol manipulation to get the desired result.
It's hard to convince an adult that their politics are wrong, but that's not what I had in mind.
A year or two ago I saw some videos about Neandertals, and then YouTube recommended another video on the same topic. This recommended had some pretty surprising ideas which did not line up with my previous knowledge of the topic. Was he a proper scientist who disagreed with his colleagues, or a crackpot who disagreed with the real scientists because he didn't know what he was talking about? I saw clear signs of the latter, but I wouldn't expect a child to.
I've been nerd-sniped by one of those excerpts. Granite is not made of calcium carbonate; it's quartz and a few other minerals (which also aren't calcium carbonate). And further, you do see limestone dissolving in the rain; that's how you get limestone caves (and hard water). As it turns out calcium carbonate is very weakly soluble in pure water but much more soluble in weak acid (including water with dissolved CO2).
Which, not to blow my own trumpet, I knew when reading the excerpt and so could figure out that Holt was full of hot air on this.
But the larger point is - what *else* is he full of hot air about? He tried making a clever point but was mistaken on basic facts which we (most of us) learned in exactly those pedestrian geography classes in primary school with lists of materials. So he's undercutting his own thesis with this anecdote.
As an environmental chemist, I found that hilarious.
As usual, I take a contrary view on the topic of school: I think that, for average people such as myself, guided education is the only way to go. I am simply not smart enough to learn complex subjects in-depth on my own; nor am I smart enough to discover entire new areas of learning by simply reading random books. I understand that many children *are* that smart, but I don't think that abandoning 99.5% of the population in favor of the 0.5% of the geniuses is a worthwhile tradeoff.
In high school, I was exposed to math, biology, physics, chemistry, literature, and foreign languages. I hated all of that stuff (except maybe for physics), since it took time away from what I really wanted to do: program computers. At the time, I thought I was being pretty clever about weaseling out of all those "pointless" subjects. Now, my lack of background knowledge in many of these areas haunts me every day. I was able to remedy some of this lack through self-study, but I really wish that I could go back in time, slap my young self upside the head, and tell him, "Hey ! Idiot ! You're skipping out on entire disciplines of human knowledge ! Shouldn't you at least try them out first ? Oh and BTW you'll be working in bioinformatics for most of your life, so learn statistics already".
By the time I got to college to major in CS, I thought I was pretty hot shit. I could program better than most people I knew, and I had actual, paid, full-time work experience as a programmer under my belt. It took just one class to make me realize that I knew *nothing*. All the awesome programs that I had written had obvious structural flaws. All the cool tricks I'd figured out had names dating back to practically antiquity. All the problems I thought to be unsolvable were very easily solved. More importantly, there was a whole dimension of theory to CS which, if properly understood, would make the actual programming almost trivial.
Could I have figured out all that stuff on my own, if only I were a little bit smarter ? Sure, but I wasn't, and I didn't. Someone had to teach me. Would it have been better if that someone was a personal tutor, whose educational program was tailored to my unique aptitudes ? Yes, probably, but my parents weren't millionaires, so school was the next best thing.
"More importantly, there was a whole dimension of theory to CS which, if properly understood, would make the actual programming almost trivial."
Have you ever worked with people fresh out of college who had plenty of credentials, but no experience shipping real projects? Theory is great, but it doesn't take away the need to know how to write and debug code.
"Could I have figured out all that stuff on my own, if only I were a little bit smarter ?"
Who says you have to do it all on your own?
Just being able to talk to other people who share your interests, and learn things from them (either directly or by seeing how they've been learning), is a huge improvement.
Like you, I was into programming as a kid, and I resented every minute I had to spend in school doing anything else. I taught myself what I could, but I didn't actually start getting *good* at it until I got internet access. Suddenly, there was a world of other people's code to read, open source games to hack on, and chat rooms where I could talk about programming with people who knew more than me.
Self-directed learning doesn't have to mean sitting in a dark cave and figuring everything out from first principles. We can give kids access to resources and communities that will help them learn when they need it, without force-feeding them a bunch of stuff they don't even want to learn in the first place.
> Have you ever worked with people fresh out of college who had plenty of credentials, but no experience shipping real projects? Theory is great, but it doesn't take away the need to know how to write and debug code.
Yes, and in my experience, it's easier to teach them how to ship code -- as compared to teaching them how to write code that makes any kind of sense at all. It's not enough to just say, "your algorithm is O(N^2), fix it using memoization", you need to spend a few weeks just on that sentence alone to really let it sink in. Fresh graduates who can understand that sentence have (in my experience) a much smoother onboarding process.
> Just being able to talk to other people who share your interests, and learn things from them (either directly or by seeing how they've been learning), is a huge improvement.
Asking strangers for advice on the Internet is a strategy that has, shall we say, a very wide standard deviation in terms of success metrics.
I have an 11 year old son and my experience with him and my own education makes me agree with a lot of things in this review. However, I am also skeptical about some key points and it is hard for me to embrace the "home schooling for the win" at the moment.
1) Schools in China, Korea and Russia are super strict with a lot of homework and little improvisation. This obviously has a lot of downsides, but it is hard to argue that those schools produce a lot of talented students. Yes, it might ruin theirs mental health in the process, but the "result" will be achieved.
I have recently seen "Over the limit" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8184202/) a sports documentary about young professional gymnasts. The amount of verbal and mental abuse they have to suffer is surreal. BUT this methods, barbaric as they are, have produced a lot of champions. Now, I am not saying this is the only way to raise a champion, but it is a viable option.
2) My son (and i was just like him around that age) gives up easily. He is decent in math, thinks pretty quickly and can grasp most of the concepts. But if he can't solve a problem in 15 seconds he gives up. If you tell him his answer is wrong and "you have to think a little bit more on this one" he'll just pretend to be thinking, but will give up. It takes good 5 minutes of "I can't do it" to get back to solving the problem. And then he can solve it in a minute of actual hard thinking. But he would never ever do it himself.
Humans are lazy, myself included. We don't like to be wrong or to work. Especially as kids. And it's not just math. Same thing in sports. It is often unpleasant and hard to take that first step, to learn a new concept. My son likes rock climbing now, but it took him a few weeks to like it. I've pushed him a bit at first and now he is happily on a climbing team and enjoys it. Without that push there would be no sport in his life.
3) "You can just google anything now". It is true. You can google any fact there is. However, there is too much information on the internet. Want to google proof that earth is flat? There are plenty of links. Vaccines will turn you into a lizard? Thousands of links. All kinds of conspiracy theories are out there.
You need basic education, as well developed logical thinking to be able to tell the difference between real information and conspiracy theories. And most people can't do that. Especially kids.
Let's say you know absolutely nothing about history. And you google something about "Romans in Britain" and you click on a link and it says: "Rome was in control of Britain in 1500 AD and blah blah this happened". If you don't know anything about history, then you won't notice that anything is wrong. If you do know a little bit about history, then you'll probably understand this is wrong.
Without basic block of information and without connections between them you won't be able to tell if it is some lunatic spewing his conspiracy theories or if it is a real thing. The basic blocks, that you learn in school, will help you detect bullshit even if the topic is far from your expertise. You need some kind of structure with basic facts in place. Without it googling will do more harm than good.
2) I think there may be more to it than laziness. Talented kids often are so used to relying on their talent that they have trouble learning to add effort when their talent is not enough.
Agreed, the question is where they learned that laziness. I'd wager that at least some of it is because they were rarely challenged since they could rely on talent to keep them ahead of their peers.
The problem with "you can just Google it!" is that you don't know what you don't know. If you don't even know how to ask the question, you won't know to go look for an answer. It's one thing to go "I have no idea when the Battle of Waterloo was, I don't need to know, I'll just Google it if I ever need to know", but if you have no notion that there even was a battle?
How about "I don't need to learn how to multiply or divide, I can just use a calculator"? If you have no idea of the basic concepts, then even using a calculator won't help you with "okay, this *has* to be wrong, I must have screwed up the input somewhere".
That's where wikis come in. Who among us hasn't sat down to look up something concrete on Wikipedia, and two hours later had 60 tabs open about things we never even knew existed?
That's a different matter. That's being interested, curious and engaged. Not all adults are, not all children are. Some people, child or adult, will look up the one thing they need to know, and once they have that factoid, will go no further. There are rich sources of information out there that will forever be barren to them, since nobody is 'making' them do it.
You could not drag me with horses to be interested in the goings-on of the Kardashians and their ilk, yet by cultural osmosis alone I am aware of some of it. For me, mathematics is the same thing as pop gossip about celebs - I am not interested and would find it torture to have to sit through a class. I'm sure some kids who love maths feel the same about a foreign language, history, or art class. If I had my way as a kid, I would never, ever have gone beyond the "what I'd learned by the time I was seven" in maths. Well, like it or lump it, I had to take maths classes all the time I remained in school, and in general that was a benefit to me; even if I've forgotten nearly every single thing, from the simplest to the most complicated, I ever learned. Because now I know where my deficits lie, and I am also aware of real-life applications of principles I learned where at the time my attitude was "I'll never use this!"
Same way for the subjects you didn't like. At least now you know if you have no talent for or interest in music, etc. And now sometimes you may be surprised at "oh, this is where it comes in useful!" where at the time you were being made learn it in school, you were sure "I will never, ever need to know this!"
"Well, like it or lump it, I had to take maths classes all the time I remained in school, and in general that was a benefit to me; even if I've forgotten nearly every single thing, from the simplest to the most complicated, I ever learned. Because now I know where my deficits lie, and I am also aware of real-life applications of principles I learned where at the time my attitude was "I'll never use this!""
That reminds me of this bit from _Against Tulip Subsidies_: "Whenever some people without skin in the game are allowed to make decisions for other people, you end up with a bunch of elderly doctors getting together, think “Yeah, things do seem a little classier around here if we make people who are not us pay $200,000, make it so,” and then there goes the money that should have housed all the homeless people in the country."
Sure, it's nice to live in a society where most people know where their deficits lie -- within the handful of subjects they encounter in school, at least -- but it hardly seems worth the cost of making every young person spend 12 years of their lives being subjected to what you've just described as torture.
"Same way for the subjects you didn't like. At least now you know if you have no talent for or interest in music, etc."
Well, no, not really -- because like so much of school, what was presented as "music" there has little to do with my experience of music in the greater world. In school, what I learned was mainly that I don't like playing the recorder or singing Christmas carols and Disney showtunes. Outside of school, on the other hand, I learned that I like playing the piano, guitar, and singing karaoke even if I'm not great at any of them.
I didn't need to be forced to go through the motions for years in that class, or in any other, to know that I wasn't enjoying it. A week would've been plenty.
"And now sometimes you may be surprised at "oh, this is where it comes in useful!" where at the time you were being made learn it in school, you were sure "I will never, ever need to know this!""
That would be ironic, wouldn't it? But so far, it's never happened to me, and it's been long enough that I'm confident it never will. My sense of what would be useful later in life was actually pretty accurate.
Totalitarian elite sport programs are unconcerned if they produce 1000 broken children, crippled by injury and abuse for every champion. I wouldn’t recommend it if your focus is an individual child.
Without basic knowledge, it is easy to Google and believe in bad information. Also, the knowledge of fundamentals enable one to know there are more things one should Google about and choose more precise search terms.
However, about the point (1). It is good to remember that optimizing for performance is sports is optimizing for a very arbitrary goal which often has little to none practical use. (The arbitrariness is especially true about the sports like gymnastics where the winners are determined by votes given by a jury, but many other sports have rules.) The difficulty of the training for the championship implicitly flows from the concept of competition: the elite competitions are interesting to watch and draw spectators and money, because it is difficult to win a competition against other devoted practitioners.
For us mere mortals who presumably have different objectives for their lives, it is important to consider the differences in the end goals when considering the differences in the methods to obtain the said goals. Sports are games, and carry a well-defined definition of good performance (feature of games, the arbitrary rules render them legible).
Outside sports, the rules and victory conditions of the "game" tend to be more murky and less well-defined and constantly changing.
I think the elephant in the room in debates about education is that some kids are smart, other kids less so, and what would work for one group does not work for the other. Without clearly separating those cases I don't think much of anything useful can be said.
What you said is technically correct, but I feel you're trying to imply "and therefore smart and less smart kids must be taught with different methods", and it really does not follow. Once we accept that smart kids learn more because they're smart, we can give up on the notion that the less smart kids just need a different approach to catch up. They won't catch up. (I mean, it is possible different kids do require different approaches to do the best they can, but innate intellectual disparities are precisely the reason not to start with this assumption.)
It might also be the case that some kids are better at some subjects, and other kids are better at other subjects. Yes, obviously some kids are smarter overall, but it's not easy to tell which ones are which. You could, for example, give everyone a math test and then give up on everyone who scored below average -- but what if they could've been good at literature, or computer programming, or whatever ?
I didn't say we should give up on the less smart kids (or to make such a judgement based on one exam really). I don't know exactly how the educational system should work, but I imagine something giving kids more agency, which would allow them to naturally self-select into an education that works for them (the nerdy kids would opt to study math/Latin/whatever, and the jocks wouldn't). I know some places already have such systems to some extent, but where I grew up we didn't and I wish we had.
> Once we accept that smart kids learn more because they're smart, we can give up on the notion that the less smart kids just need a different approach to catch up. They won't catch up.
I don't think that follows either. Child prodigies rarely end up being that much better than other smart kids by the time they become adults, they typically just ramped up faster. The regular smart kids catch up eventually.
I agree with the general notion though: don't tie a kids' rate of progress to their peer group, they should ideally be able to progress at their own pace.
Part of Holt's point is that children are enthusiastic learners until they go to school.
Tests and classroom questions are artificial and resemble almost nothing in real life except for other artificial constructs. Interviews resemble classroom questions... but they're equally artificial environments. This means the entire thing is broken from top to bottom because we judge successful programs by testing.
Real life, productive work is almost always project based. Plumbers have the project of fixing a pipe. Accountants have the project of preparing a budget. CEOs have the project of expanding a new division (and probably several others besides). People care about what you accomplish, not whether you personally memorized the tools necessary to accomplish it. When I told my first boss I kept a cheat sheet of things I needed to know he took it away... so he could copy it and give it to the next person recruited into the team.
I'm not all that confident about letting kids just choose what they want to do. Giving them a mixture of control and choice within that control is probably best. (You have to do math but you can choose the math you find most interesting type stuff.) But I think school should be rearranged around projects. Those projects can be guided and can require showing work. But project based learning both more closely resembles real life and, in my experience, drives a lot more engagement.
Then again, I'm pretty firmly of the school that school is at best somewhat about education. Education is the legitimizing action of school but it's not realistically what gets treated as a priority.
"But project based learning both more closely resembles real life and, in my experience, drives a lot more engagement."
There is more of a move towards this, with assessment-based learning. https://www.teachingandlearning.ie/our-priorities/student-success/assessment-of-for-as-learning/work-based-assessment-exploring-the-challenge-of-consistency/
I mean, I think your claim has two main flaws.
Firstly, all of the jobs you named are pretty high skill, and require some degree of secondary education more tailored to the job. But a lot of people’s jobs just involve what might be uncharitably called mindless drudgery. As has been mentioned in another post, the structure of school, with directed learning in things we often don’t want to learn, obeying orders from the teacher, and conforming to a strict schedule, probably do prepare us fairly well for the workplace. And sure, if we didn’t learn that in school, people would probably learn within 2-3 years; however the people who end up working those sorts of jobs do not typically have the financial resources to last that long.
Secondly, for both plumbers and accountants at least I’m going to bet there’s a fair bit of memorization involved. Never have I called a professional to do something and had them say “give me a few minutes to research how to do this.” If they did, firstly it would hurt their pay per hour, but also it would make me pretty dubious that I actually wanted them try to fix it. It’s like how in math, yes, you can use a calculator for everything. But calculators have a higher rate of typos than basic mental math, and they also take about twice as long, so in order to succeed at higher level math, you do typically need a lot of the lower level stuff down completely
1.) They all require some skill granted. But I'd include hair stylists and cooks in there and other relatively low paid professions. More importantly, these types of jobs are the majority of the economy AND the ones where it's hardest to pick it up on the job. McDonalds can train a line cook to do their rote, automatic process very quickly even to 15 year olds (who don't have a high school degree). Clothing factories can take completely uneducated peasants from Bangladesh and get them up and working in a month. It's not apparent to me that we, as a society, need to subsidize these skills.
Besides, these types of jobs will become less common with automation. The famous case is factories. They used to be full of rote labor and some still are but a lot more have moved to where most people operate machines, a project rather than a rote repeated action.
2.) Yes, you do need to memorize facts. The flaw with this argument is the idea that you don't learn rote facts while doing project work. I'm not saying that you don't need to learn rote facts or how to do tasks. But you learn rote facts and how to do tasks in projects. If a plumber has done twenty plumbing jobs then on job twenty one he's likely to know which pipes showed up in twelve of those jobs. And how he had to fit them. (And this is actually how plumbing is trained, mostly, by the way.) People commonly say things like, "I'd guess it needs a replacement pipe but let me come over and take a look." Or, "That should fix it. But let's keep an eye on it. Here's my number if the problem happens again." Personally, I'd have a lot less confidence with someone if I called them up and they were completely sure of their answer without taking a look.
I am not attacking theoretical education here. I am attacking paper/interview testing.
So, rereading your post, my post, and your response, I wonder if I then misunderstood you. So perhaps rather than addressing the specifics, I’ll just lay out my views that are fairly relevant and we can see if we’re actually in agreement.
1) Standardized testing (and by extension most testing/interview formats) often fails to assess knowledge well.
2) Something about school is bad, but it’s hard to pin down.
3) being able to memorize things is an important skill, though the degree and density of that memorization vary depending on what field you enter
4) Most fields that require more skills/training than what you learn in school then can adapt you to that specific field, so it’s mainly baseline general skills that are important in K-8 education (high school is a good time to start specializing if you want to imo)
5) A lot of the almost totalitarian format, for better or for worse, helps many students be better prepared for their future jobs
(1) "I asked him to name some common materials made of calcium carbonate. He named limestone, granite, and marble. I asked, "Do you often see these things dissolving in the rain?"
Yes. The hell you think the whole thing about weathering is? https://www.internetgeography.net/topics/how-does-weathering-affect-limestone/
(2) "Holt gives an anecdote of a fifth grader caught sneakily reading a science book when he was supposed to be learning about “Romans in Britain.” By forcing him to put the book away, the teacher traded an hour of high quality science education for an hour of low-quality history education, during which the child is less engaged and will remember less."
(a) How do you know the science book was any good? If it was a cheap, pop science for kids book it could have been full of trashy outdated misinformation. You can't say 'trading an hour of high-quality science education for an hour of low-quality history education', unless you're smuggling in the assumption 'STEM subjects objectively superior and good, Humanities useless waste of time that could go to STEM'
(b) Listen, I *was* that kid with the book under the desk (uh, it was Roman History in my case, funnily enough) and I later learned that my teachers turned a benign blind eye because they figured I was doing okay enough in class, and that I wouldn't be reading rubbish. But I am fully on-board with the teacher yanking the book away and *forcing* the kid to sit up and pay attention because this is History class not Science class, since I've just read yet another dumb take on social media due to historical illiteracy, and I don't want 'but history is boring!' kid to be propagating said dumb takes in another fifteen years time when they leave school and then uncritically swallow any old nonsense because some rando online blorped it out
"and I don't want 'but history is boring!' kid to be propagating said dumb takes in another fifteen years time"
I get where you're coming from, but if he were interested in history, he'd be paying attention already. Taking the science book away isn't going to make him start caring about history - certainly not enough to retain that day's lesson for the next 15 years. At best, you might get him to remember a few dates just long enough to write them down on the quiz, and then immediately forget them.
Or you could teach science and Roman history together, as a good holistic education does. There's a lot if basic science that the Romans were pretty good at, and a lot of fun stuff they did that was plain wrong. If you can't have fun with that and engage both the science kid and the history kid, you may need to change toothless in designs. It's not even radical: why do you think schools long before Holt always had drawing in lessons if not to engage the kid who liked to scribble not write? Good teachers, especially at primary level, teach in themes not subjects and get much better learning, both the testable type but also the actual knowledge acquired.
Incidentally, one output of this seems to be a surprising number of young Britons know the theory of how to construct a good Viking longship. Should there be a major breakdown of civilisation, please take this as a warning...
I don't want Science Kid to be interested in history, at least not as he is interested in science. I'd love if it happened, but it's not necessary. I want him to have some basic knowledge that even bored, inattentive, and forgetful kids can have drilled into their heads - that is where rote learning comes in - so that when he's twenty he is not a complete goof being conned by the latest meme that Europeans never had soap until their African slaves taught them how to make it, for instance.
Seriously? Someone said that? Since most Europeans (including the British) didn't have African slaves, I guess the export of soap from the Americas to Europe funded the slave trade then?
My point here is that rote learning won't tell you much about soap, and anything it did would likely be forgotten by those not interested. Learning how and how the Vikings washed the blood off (they seem to have been a pretty clean bunch) might give a better chance of recollecting that soap existed in the medieval period. Plus it's a lot more fun, and showing how to make soap the traditional way would upset all sorts of parents...
It is a genuine thing trotted out on social media. I would love to believe the people using it (I saw it again just a couple of days ago) are being sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek, but I also fear they really do believe it, because of the whole 'aura of victimhood' that oppressed peoples engage in (I'm sympathetic to this, Irish history indulges in it too) and as some kind of compensatory mechanism (if we so smart, how come the Evil White Guys beat us and ruled the world?) but there we're getting into the morasses of Freudian psychology which I am not qualified to opine about.
For a similar approach in SF/Fantasy, see "The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington by Phenderson Djèlí Clark" https://firesidefiction.com/the-secret-lives-of-the-nine-negro-teeth-of-george-washington
"Solomon claimed not to know anything about magic, which didn’t exist in her native home. But how could that be, the other slaves wondered, when she could mix together powders to cure their sicknesses better than any physician; when she could make predictions of the weather that always came true; when she could construct all manner of wondrous contraptions from the simplest of objects? Even the plantation manager claimed she was “a Negro of curious intellect,” and listened to her suggestions on crop rotations and field systems. The slaves well knew the many agricultural reforms at Mount Vernon, for which their master took credit, was actually Solomon’s genius. They often asked why she didn’t use her remarkable wit to get hired out and make money? Certainly, that’d be enough to buy her freedom.
Solomon always shook her head, saying that though she was from another land, she felt tied to them by “the consanguinity of bondage.” She would work to free them all, or, falling short of that, at the least bring some measure of ease to their lives. But at night, after she’d finished her mysterious “experiments” (which she kept secret from all) she could be found gazing up at the stars, and it was hard not to see the longing held deep in her eyes. When George Washington wore Solomon’s tooth, he dreamed of a place of golden spires and colorful glass domes, where Negroes flew through the sky on metal wings like birds and sprawling cities that glowed bright at night were run by machines who thought faster than men. It both awed and frightened him at once."
It's tempting to cite Black Panther (either the comic or the movie) in this context. The wierd thing is it's a very one-sided conversation. Most of us evil colonial oppressors will happily believe that the groups we evily colonially oppressed were actually advanced civilisations. Thst the actual colonialists did not does not mean we need to have the argument now...
One thing I realised from watching the whole Black Panther reaction is that it's not a power fantasy, it's a status fantasy. People really really don't like the idea that their ancestors have always been history's losers. For those of us whose ancestors were history's winners, it's hard to understand what it's like to be on the other side of that.
>I get where you're coming from, but if he were interested in history, he'd be paying attention already.
People with dumb historical hot takes aren't interested in history per se, they're interested in history in as much as it serves politics, and they're interested in politics in as much as it helps Group A gain power over Group B.
> You can't say 'trading an hour of high-quality science education for an hour of low-quality history education', unless you're smuggling in the assumption 'STEM subjects objectively superior and good, Humanities useless waste of time that could go to STEM'
He's not saying science is higher quality than history. He's saying the kid is going to get more knowledge out of whatever happens to interest him at the moment than he would out of some other subject.
A noble goal, but you assume the argument. If schooling were inoculation against nonsense, then the online randos wouldn’t be reproducing it. We’re four generations deep into compulsory mass schooling. If it were going to work, it would have already.
All through K-12 and college I hated English class and kinda sucked at it. Then when I was 29 and contemplating going back to college for a career change out of tech, I took the SAT again and got a perfect score on the verbal. I blame this apparent incongruity on the mismatch between my interests and what English teachers forced me to read and write about. I couldn't care less about psychoanalyzing fiction characters and authors. Plus there might only be 100 words worth saying on the literal subject of the writing prompt, and one would have to digress pretty far to fill up the required N pages. This mandatory bullshitting to fill up the page offended my sense of honesty. And it wasn't just my school. When I saw the example essays for the writing section of the SAT, they were all drivel, but the longer the drivel the higher the score. Quantity is more legible than quality, so the system optimizes quantity.
I think it was a Paul Graham essay which explained school "English" classes to me; at some point in the past there were separate classes for "composition" and "literature", but these got merged into a single subject at some point with the result that we spend an inordinate amount of time on the fairly arbitrary task of writing essays about literature (a fairly facile and surface-level analysis thereof).
Composition is a really important skill and facile literary analysis isn't, but I wish that I had understood at the time that this was a Karate Kid exercise where I'm doing something boring (writing dumb three-paragraph essays about John fucking Donne poems) to develop a skill I actually want (writing about stuff I find interesting and useful).
I love John Holt and it’s great to see him still being read. As a parent and a teacher I’ve learned huge amounts from him. Particularly as a teacher now, he alerted me to just how much kids use a wide and inventive range of techniques to get around the learning requirements. For me, the best part of teaching is offering the students lots of different approaches but making sure that whatever kind of learning they use, they still end up knowing the stuff...
The point about fear does seem to be right, though. Ultimately some form of coercion has to be applied. That’s the other aspect of good teaching: minimizing the negatives.
Bryan Caplan wrote about his experiences with unschooled kids, kids allowed to learn however they fancied with the adult answering questions they had. He found them about as knowledgeable about most things as other kids except that they tended to be weak in math. He proposed letting kids learn however they wanted except requiring a certain amount of mandatory math education.
https://www.econlib.org/unschooling-math/
Which is interesting since even the *math* part seems like something that can easily be picked up in later years at no loss to the student, as per the Benezet experiment
First, I wouldn't put all that much faith in a single study as Scott recommends.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/12/beware-the-man-of-one-study/
Second just because you can pick up arithmatic quickly later doesn't mean the same is true of geometry, algebra, calculus, etc.
Yes.
Socialization is what schools are for more than learning. LEarning rules and how to break them. Finding friends and learning about trust and distrust of those. Seeing how social structure is truly an imagined space with arbitrary rules might be the most important one. Those with the imagination to believe they can change the world might have first realized the world is a giant game of playing “house” in which some adults get to make the rules while the cool ones skate ever so carefully on the edge of those rules and do what they want. ;)
I suppose it works for some people. I was bullied consistently and had no idea there was anything I could do about it. It wasn't good for me.
As a means of teaching socialisation, it's hit and miss...there's no assessment of how it's working because it's not an official goal.
I'm shuddering at the idea of being graded on my social skills. That could have been a lot worse that what I actually experienced.
What actually taught me some social skills (aside from indirect effects of body work, I think) was being in science fiction fandom where people were inclined to like me.
Why grade you on it, if you're not being taught it?
My assumption is that if it were an official goal, it would be taught and graded.
Yeah, learning socialisation in school is a bit like learning to swim in a piranha-infested river instead of a swimming pool.
The amazing thing about the adult world, compared to school, is how _nice_ everybody is. As an adult you find that everyone you meet will politely overlook the fact that you're funny-looking or have a speech impediment or are wearing an unfashionable brand of shoes, rather than bullying them into tears (at least if you're not a cast member on a show starting with The Real Housewives Of).
Adult socialisation is so freaking easy compared to being a kid in the range 10-16.
As an adult who didn't go to public school (more than a few weeks), compared to my peers I seem far better equipped to navigate various social/legal/business rules. Not saying some of that isn't what I'm bringing to the table compared to them, but I'm saying I'm not seeing any evidence that school socialization makes people any better equipped to handle the adult world.