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.
> we could get along just fine if 5% of us knew the powerhouse thing, and the other 95% had skipped bio class that year
I'm not sure I agree with this assessment. That would've been true in the society that trusts experts but that is a very different world from the one we live in. Look at the vaccine hesitancy or the prevalence of "alternative medicine" - even among people who were forced to learn at least part of biology and how our body system works it is too high, even though they have all the necessary knowledge to evaluate the situation. Without that knowledge the rate of them I expect to be almost the same "95% who skipped the bio class"
Literally everyone I talk to would tell you this. But I agree that there is strong selection bias present :)
Here is the thing though. Even if someone can't tell you exact facts about something - it's important to know that there are facts to know in this area. That's the main benefit from structured education. The worst mistakes comes not from inability to give answers, but from missing the knowledge that there are questions.
That specific fact is very much a meme - I would wager that a large majority of adult millenials/zoomers could tell you it, but not so much for people older. Of course, that's a bad example if you're interested in what people actually learned in biology, precisely because it's a meme.
I think that most rationalists, including Scott, and the author of this report, undervalue social interactions that happen orthogonally to school.
Those that are home schooled are often kept within a small family unit for their entire childhood. They often are able to participate in extra-curriculars with a small group of other, like-minded homeschool families. This might be once a month over a weekend, or maybe even up to 3 times a week for an hour or so. SOME homeschoolers have a "shared classroom" situation, where one parent will teach 5-7 students a subject, and it will rotate between houses, however this is uncommon, and those situations are often very similar to public education in tone and style. Extra curriculars are usually chosen by parents, not students, and are not optional.
Compare those social interactions with an in-person education. About 4 hours a day, between recess, group projects, free time, the time between classes, lunch time, plus an additional 2 hours of self-selecting extra-curriculars 1-5 days a week. Even during quiet lectures and videos, there's the passing of notes and chatting behind your teachers back.
Sure, students learn SO MUCH MORE in a home school setting. But who will have a greater impact on humanity, someone that knew calculus when they were 11, or someone that learns calculus when they are 20, but are able to build and support other humans, resolve conflicts, and has a strong friend group? Or, another way of putting it, who would you rather hire for a non-mathematical job?
My dream schooling setup is a group of pods. Students enter their pods, where they can self-select teachers and subjects from a large catalog. The teachers are competing with each other for 1: information retention, and 2: total views/ratings. So like youtube but with a subject-retention track. This would allow the best teachers to be seen by tons of students. After being released from their pods, the students would congregate by the subject they just viewed, and collaborate on group projects. Students can coordinated with each other what subjects they heard was good, and take classes at the same time to stay with friends.
Social interactions are great, but as you said, that's orthogonal to school. So why does the place where it happens need to be a school? I mean, if you want to encourage kids to socialize, why not clear away the mandated curricula and quiet lectures and just let them socialize?
No reason in particular. That would be fine too. I'm just suggesting that discussions of homeschooling or unschooling should not leave out social interaction from solutions.
This is probably a bigger problem than the schooling. Even those who are not specifically bullied can be in a sort of thrall, in groups where viciousness is tolerated.
When we speak of children being afraid of looking stupid isn't this mostly about fear of other kids?
Having kids regimented into a single age year is bad.
Raised as a homeschooler. This is not the experience I lived. This is not the experience of the hundreds of other families I interacted with growing up. This is not the experience of the thousands of other families in the other local orgs in our region. In fact, the few weeks I went to school I had such a difficult time dealing with how LITTLE social interaction I got compared to normal. A few minutes between/before/after classes just didn't compare.
It didn't compare to self-selected extracurriculars like soccer/fencing/theatre/mathletics, which usually involved an hour of the extracurricular 2-3 times a week (per topic) followed by an hour or two of socializing (with people my age, as well as older and younger). It didn't compare to the the fact that the "quiet lecture" period of my learning was probably less than two hours a day on average, and was definitely not very quiet. It didn't compare to homework not being a thing that existed and therefore plenty of time in the evenings/weekend to socialize. It didn't compare to group projects that consisted primarily of people who wanted to be there and contribute and pull their weight. It didn't compare to the lazy days where I did nothing but play Magic with four other kids for eight hours, or the vacations that happened outside of the traditional school vacation calendar, or the days of being turned loose at a local park to invent our own games and be collected six hours later.
Now as an adult I've met a small handful of people that went through homeschooling that's closer to what you describe, but they only did it for a couple of years.
Is there any research as to the ratio of actual homeschoolers that are closer to what you describe versus the experience in my community?
I don't have any research, obviously, but I find myself accused by your account. How did you spend so much time with other students when you were schooled at home? How did you interact with 100s of other families? How did you meet up with friends for lazy afternoons? Was your community of home schoolers in a very close proximity to each other?
My experience is that when homeschooled, physical distance is often a limiting factor. We lived in a neighborhood of 300 people, in a city of around 1MM people, and the homeschoolers of the greater metro were about a 30 minute drive. So, I would attest that given your description, while maybe you weren't at a traditional school, you had some kind of community schooling system set up?
It sure feels like a numbers issue - you could self select extra curriculars, let's say you wanted science Olympiad, a relatively niche one. My hometown of 1MM people had about 50 public school students that participater, across 4 schools, a few times a week after school. I'd estimate the homeschool population in my area to be about 1/100 the size of public schooling, but with a 10x likelihood of participating in extra curriculars. So that would be 5 people in that specific thing, but spread over a large region.
So, I guess it's possible, but that's just not the experience I had! A lot of spending time alone, wishing there were others my age to interact with, reading books and doing activities in relative solitude.
I lived a 30-minute drive from the local city (Austin, TX) which today has a population of about 1 million and a metro of just over 2. Of course this was 20-30 years ago so it was smaller then. And homeschooling less popular than today.
No community schooling system. Sure there were "co-ops" (is user quotes not to scare, but because I literally don't know how they functioned, just what they were called) in the area, but we didn't use them as they were expensive. Schooling was a home thing, plus an occasional outside class when an opportunity came up (like one of the parents teaching a chemistry class because that was their day job).
It involved a lot of commuting in at 7 am and not leaving until 5. A lot of being dropped off at another parent's house on one day and not being picked up until two days later (or the other way around). There was a physical paper newsletter when we started that turned into an online newsletter that turned into email groups that turned into Facebook groups after I left.
Soccer was Tuesday/Thursday morning (pick-up games). Park day was Thursdays. Dances were twice a year. Theatre was whatever rehearsal schedule was set. The teenagers usually had a monthly coffee-shop meetup. After I left the local hobby game store added a weekly homeschool day that I kind of started when I booked out 6 hours of their tables every other week. As far as what extracurriculars are available? It's a do-ocracy. One of the kids in the group was a math genius and loved it, so his mom did the mathlete thing to get him more opportunities to socialize. I liked ballroom dance so I set up informal classes for awhile. If you organized something you very likely could find other people who would jump at the chance to do something.
Now I'll admit, commuting wasn't a lot of fun, and that's the reason as an adult I've bought a house in the city and refuse to budge when a commute would be cheaper/larger. But compared to the alternative I sampled, it was so much better. At the time I supplemented with online interaction with other kids in the org (or outside) plus some evening hangs with kids in my neighborhood that went to public school (more of the former and less of the latter as I got older).
The picture you paint in this second comment is a lot closer to what I'd expect, so I suspect we had similar experiences but with different outcomes. I was homeschooled through 8th grade, and initially, public school was a little lonely, because you don't know anyone. Friendships take time! But once you are in school with your friends the social aspects do shine through. I'm glad you were able to see it fondly, though at a 30 minute drive, while you COULD socialize in evenings, I'd posit the total socialization is still much, much lower than in public schooling! But... It does take a year or two to get to know classmates where that really becomes a positive thing.
How much time did you really have between classes, lunch, etc? I mean quality time? Don't count after-school stuff, because I had just as much of that (or more as no homework). I'm at least somewhat charismatic. I had friends I hung out with constantly right off the bat for the few weeks I went to public school. 10 minutes between classes, an 30-40 minutes for lunch, maybe an hour combined for before class and after class. Maybe a few group projects? Maybe that changes in high school, but in elementary/middle school I didn't really see much there.
Again, compared to "9:30-10 Wednesday: hang out before book club. 10-11 discuss Harrison Bergeron. 11-1: play Marvel TCG with people and eat lunch. 1-3 Go to friend's house and discuss RPG design. 3-5: read. Sleep in car on the way in and back, because nobody's got time for sleep at night." <-Me at 11.
Also me at 11 on say a Monday: "Sleep until 11. 11-1: do a chapter or two out of textbook. 1-3: discuss rules of soccer with mom and why various ones are in place. 3-4: cartoons, 4-5: call friend and discuss Magic for an hour." So yeah, not much social interaction there until that evening I log on to the MUD and join up with the guild. Or hang out with my neighbor before he has dinner/homework/bed.
I mean, a lot of people think you never see anyone while homeschooling, but I dated, had long esoteric conversations, had rivals, got angry, made up, broke promises, had promises broken, etc. Just because some days of the week I didn't see my "city friends" through means other than phone/internet doesn't mean we didn't have hours and hours of social contact.
Now on the other hand I went to college as fast as I could, lived in a dorm, tried to spend as little time as possible not socializing and had a blast. So I'm not saying I wouldn't have preferred some kind of hippy boarding school situation.
I don't think you're being very honest with yourself about the amount of time socializing. Like, I'm sure you had days like the above, but surely you also had days in self-study. Your network must have been small some years.
With a 5 class rotation in middle school, plus lunch and recess, plus lots of group projects, I'd say from 7am-3pm, I'd say about half the time was active social interaction, very consistently, each day. So at minimum 20hrs/week. And we also had little / no homework.
I think you may be comparing a bit of your highlight real to the every day. We also had lock-ins, field trips, book clubs, and the like.
At the end of the day, we both had different lived experiences, and I'm so happy you were able to flourish in yours. I personally found my home schooling to be very isolating and lonely, even when I did have those playdates or shared experiences/clubs.
I think you are drastically underestimating the social opportunities available to homeschoolers.
Also implying that homeschoolers don't have strong friend groups is absolute nonsense, speaking as someone who was homeschooled and grew up around big extended friend groups among other homeschoolers in the area. There are many other ways to get into friend groups with non-homeschoolers too - sports, music, actually interacting with your neighbors just to name three.
Okay, I'm going to finish off by quoting chunks of Chesterton, from his "Autobiography", about his time at school:
III.—HOW TO BE A DUNCE
...As for Greek accents, I triumphantly succeeded, through a long series of school-terms, in avoiding learning them at all; and I never had a higher moment of gratification than when I afterwards discovered that the Greeks never learnt them either. I felt, with a radiant pride, that I was as ignorant as Plato and Thucydides. At least they were unknown to the Greeks who wrote the prose and poetry that was thought worth studying; and were invented by grammarians, I believe, at the time of the Renaissance. But it is a simple psychological fact; that the sight of a Greek capital still fills me with happiness, the sight of a small letter with indifference tinged with dislike, and the accents with righteous indignation reaching the point of profanity. And I believe that the explanation is that I learnt the large Greek letters, as I learnt the large English letters, at home. I was told about them merely for fun while I was still a child; while the others I learnt during the period of what is commonly called education; that is, the period during which I was being instructed by somebody I did not know, about something I did not want to know.
But I say this merely to show that I was a much wiser and widerminded person at the age of six than at the age of sixteen. I do not base any educational theories upon it, heaven forbid. This work cannot, on some points, avoid being theoretical; but it need not add insult to injury by being educational. I certainly shall not, in the graceful modern manner, turn round and abuse my schoolmasters because I did not choose to learn what they were quite ready to teach. It may be that in the improved schools of today, the child is so taught that he crows aloud with delight at the sight of a Greek accent. But I fear it is much more probable that the new schools have got rid of the Greek accent by getting rid of the Greek. And upon that point, as it happens, I am largely on the side of my schoolmasters against myself. I am very glad that my persistent efforts not to learn Latin were to a certain extent frustrated; and that I was not entirely successful even in escaping the contamination of the language of Aristotle and Demosthenes. At least I know enough Greek to be able to see the joke, when somebody says (as somebody did the other day) that the study of that language is not suited to an age of democracy. I do not know what language he thought democracy came from; and it must be admitted that the word seems now to be a part of the language called journalese. But my only point for the moment is personal or psychological; my own private testimony to the curious fact that, for some reason or other, a boy often does pass, from an early stage when he wants to know nearly everything, to a later stage when he wants to know next to nothing. A very practical and experienced traveller, with nothing of the mystic about him, once remarked to me suddenly: "There must be something rottenly wrong with education itself. So many people have wonderful children and all the grown-up people are such duds." And I know what he meant; though I am in doubt whether my present duddishness is due to education, or to some deeper and more mysterious cause.
...It was he who invented that severe and stately form of Free Verse which has since been known by his own second name as "the Clerihew" (his name is Edward Clerihew Bentley) or "Biography for Beginners"; which dates from our days at school, when he sat listening to a chemical exposition, with his rather bored air and blank sheet of blotting paper before him. On this he wrote, inspired by the limpid spirit of song, the unadorned lines,
Sir Humphrey Davy
Detested gravy.
He incurred the odium
Of discovering sodium.
...I have forgotten whether Mr. Mackenzie mentioned what always struck me as the most disturbing eccentricity of that eccentric; the open derision with which he spoke of his own profession and position, of those who shared it with him and even of those who were set over him in its exercise. He would explain the difference between satire and the bitterness of the risus sardonicus by the helpful parable, "If I were walking along the street and fell down in the mud, I should laugh a sardonic laugh. But if I were to see the High Master of this school fall down in the mud, I should laugh a sarcastic laugh." I chiefly mention his name here for another reason; because he once vented his scorn for what he called "the trade of an usher" in the form of a rhetorical question addressed to a boy: "Why are boys sent to school, Robinson?" Robinson, with downcast eyes and an air of offensive virtue, replied faintly, "To learn, sir." "No, boy, no," said the old gentleman wagging his head. "It was because one day at breakfast Mr. Robinson said to Mrs. Robinson, 'My dear, we must do something about that boy. He's a nuisance to me and he's a nuisance to you and he's a perfect plague to the servants.'" Then, with an indescribable extreme of grinding and grating contempt: "'So we'll Pay Some Man. . . .'"
...The idea that I had come to school to work was too grotesque to cloud my mind for an instant. It was also in too obvious a contrast with the facts and the result. ...To one very distinguished individual, my own personal debt is infinite; I mean, the historian of the Indian Mutiny and of the campaigns of Caesar--Mr. T. Rice Holmes. He managed, heaven knows how, to penetrate through my deep and desperately consolidated desire to appear stupid; and discover the horrible secret that I was, after all, endowed with the gift of reason above the brutes. He would suddenly ask me questions a thousand miles away from the subject at hand, and surprise me into admitting that I had heard of the Song of Roland, or even read a play or two of Shakespeare. Nobody who knows anything of the English schoolboy at that date will imagine that there was at the moment any pleasure in such prominence or distinction. We were all hag-ridden with a horror of showing off, which was perhaps the only coherent moral principal we possessed. There was one boy, I remember, who was so insanely sensitive on this point of honour, that he could hardly bear to hear one of his friends answer an ordinary question right. He felt that his comrade really ought to have invented some mistake, in the general interest of comradeship. When my information about the French epic was torn from me, in spite of my efforts, he actually put his head in his desk and dropped the lid on it, groaning in a generous and impersonal shame and faintly and hoarsely exclaiming, "Oh, shut it. ... Oh, shut up!" He was an extreme exponent of the principle; but it was a principle which I fully shared. I can remember running to school in sheer excitement repeating militant lines of "Marmion" with passionate emphasis and exultation; and then going into class and repeating the same lines in the lifeless manner of a hurdy-gurdy, hoping that there was nothing whatever in my intonation to indicate that I distinguished between the sense of one word and another.
...One day I was frozen with astonishment to find my name in an announcement on the notice-board, saying that I was to be accorded the privileges of the highest form, though I did not belong to it. It produced in me a desire to be accorded the privileges and protection of the coal-cellar and never to come out again. At the same time I learned that a special branch of the highest form had actually been created for my two principal friends, in order that they might study for History Scholarships at the Universities. All this seemed like the very universe breaking up and turning topsy-turvy; and indeed all sorts of things happened about this time that seemed to be quite outside the laws of nature. I got a prize, for instance; what was called the Milton Prize for what was called a prize poem; I imagine it was about as bad as all other prize poems, but I am happy to say that I cannot recall a single syllable of it. I do, however recall the subject, not without a faint thrill of irony; for the subject was St. Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit who preached to the Chinese. I recall these things, so contrary to the previous course of my school life, because I am not sorry to be an exception to the modern tendency to reproach the old Victorian schoolmaster with stupidity and neglect and to represent the rising generation as a shining band of Shelleys inspired by light and liberty to rise. The truth is that in this case it was I who exhibited the stupidity; though I really think it was largely an affected stupidity. And certainly it was I who rejoiced in the neglect, and who asked for nothing better than to be neglected. It was, if anything, the authorities who dragged me, in my own despite, out of the comfortable and protected atmosphere of obscurity and failure. Personally, I was perfectly happy at the bottom of the class.
...But all this time very queer things were groping and wrestling inside my own undeveloped mind; and I have said nothing of them in this chapter; for it was the sustained and successful effort of most of my school life to keep them to myself. I said farewell to my friends when they went up to Oxford and Cambridge; while I, who was at that time almost wholly taken up with the idea of drawing pictures, went to an Art School and brought my boyhood to an end."
At the opposite end of traditional school is the Sudbury Valley School (sudval.org), a 50-year-old student-governed community where the students can do whatever they want all day, within the bounds of the student-created written law.
I've tried to read as much as I could about democratic schools at one point. Unfortunately, there's not much resources out there. In any case, my (to a large extent unfounded) feeling was that while the concept may work fine sometimes, it faces the same problem that all democracies do. It needs an established, working culture that new kids learn from older kids and perpetuate later on themselves. In other words, if we tried to do this on scale, some schools would become little Switzerlands but other would be more like little Syrias.
The Sudbury Valley School began with an extensive constitution (based on America's) spelling out the structure of the student-run judiciary and legislative branches. But, as you say, the school has an extensive unwritten culture, passed from older kids to younger. A process may easier by the fact that some students are at the school from age 4 to 18.
I know one kid who did Sudbury for a few years. The bullying there was intense, and didn't stop when she left. It even involved false reports to police (just a light swatting).
Likely a local problem, but mob rule can be harsh.
I'm disappointed to hear that. The student judiciary meets every morning. It addresses issues as minor as littering or one four-year-old calling another a "poopie head", so a complaint about bullying would have been a big deal.
The school has a book of written laws that concerns everything, including what's an offensive t-shirt, where gum-chewing is allowed, and what the proper treatment of captured toads shall be, so I wouldn't call it "mob rule"
And the local Sudbury, or Sudbury-descended school may be very different than good ol' SudVal. Just saying it's not perfect and relating the experience of the only person I knew that attended one. It's been 3-4 years since she left and she deleted her social media accounts and changed email addresses and phone numbers, but if any of them catch wind of her new accounts the bullying starts up again. I've seen the evidence. It's quite nightmarish.
I was an exemplary student by any standard, coming out #1 of my year out of a few thousand high school students and never particularly suffering from school, but holy crap did I learn more _useful_ stuff from table-top RPGs, wargames, and fiddling around with dad's early IBM PCs.
English language? Geography? Statistics? History? Computers? Estimation of risk? Economics? That's all from hobbies, and while I still _remember_ that stuff, I couldn't solve a matrix if my life depended on it these days.
This was a great review, although it did make me think "what is the most interesting or useful fact about mitochondria if it isn't that they are the cell's powerhouse?". After a few minutes thought, I decided maybe most interesting was their plausible origin as symbiotic prokaryotic cells, and the most useful was that they were passed down only through the maternal line and have their own DNA, allowing us to do funky sequencing to see when our ancestors might have left Africa.
I was lucky enough to go to what in the US would be a Gifted program school (a state-funded grammar school, in the UK), and thrived in a heavily competitive, test-oriented environment. None the less, I think it very likely that if we'd had Khan Academy and Wikipedia instead, I'd have still actually learned a lot more.
And the last paragraph really hit home - it reminded me that good reviews aren't just plot summaries. The whole system of child education in many countries is captured by those heavily invested in the status quo, so how might we break free? Is anybody trying to, even? Are there startups or large public investments being made to replicate something like Neal Stephenson's Primer from "The Diamond Age" - full closed-loop automated learning systems, guided by feedback from the students, to maximise learning in a broad domain?
> What would happen if we let kids choose how to allocate more of their time, and gave them the support and resources we could? What if the free daycare provided by state schools wasn’t as coupled to regimented instruction, but still included books, computers, and adults who would help explain things if asked?
This section reminds me of Ivan Illich's learning webs and other learning strategies.
Also worth considering how many resources are currently locked off to children which were not in previous times. If you read accounts by people like Suzanne Simard or Wendell Berry who grew up among loggers or teamsters (in the old fashioned, driving animals sense) they were taught their professions from a very young age, very aggressively, and without much heed to the dangers.
Urbanisation (and a concomitant set of complex phenomena) have made these practices too "dangerous", and so children nowadays are often insulated from learning in certain places (like garages, factories, workshops). As Holt puts it: "We separated children from adults and learning from the rest of life."
Whether that's a good or a bad thing is subject to some debate, but the classroom definitely deprives children of certain types of knowledge - to me, classrooms seem to privilege knowledge-that versus knowledge-how (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-how/).
In physical education we would sometimes go running around the track. 1000m, 2000m etc. I absolutely hated it because I had no endurance. My classmates were also usually much better at it (because many of them were playing soccer in a club), which made it worse.
And what kind of baffles me now is that it never even occurred to me that I could just go running on my own out of class. Knowing what I know now, even a tiny bit would have improved my endurance a lot. I might even have started to enjoy it like I do now.
But it never crossed my mind. I had never even considered that I could improve on my own out of school and make these classes much less miserable for me. Not entirely sure why that happened, but I find it sad.
Yea exactly. Like, the impression that sitting in school and having somebody teach you and give you homework is what learning _is_. At least for the topics that are taught in school.
But thankfully it didn't really apply to math for me, and even less to computer science and programming. I was interested in CS and programming long before we ever touched that in school, so that probably helped.
I was very unfit in school, which probably damaged my long-term fitness too.
The tendency for gifted students to assume "If I'm not immediately good at something then it must be stupid and useless anyway" should not be underestimated.
That happend to me so hard with writing. Because I wasn't really good at it and didn't enjoy it, I managed to convince myself that it wasn't important anyways.
I really wish there weren't this death spiral in school of being bad at a topic -> constantly getting negative feedback and bad grades -> being even less motivated.
We were doing a baseball unit in gym, and I got a lot better because (by accident one day) I showed up a few minutes early and swung the bat at a ball. But there's no time for doing that for everyone if you are trying to get through a full inning in a class period.
"[...]while the benefits of schooling are ambiguous, some of the costs are not."
This is really cogent and concise, perhaps the most powerful single sentence in the post. I'm going to make sure to repeat it any time I end up in a discussion about school.
Thank you for this review. I haven't actually read the book, but I'm familiar with the concept and with John Holt. We "unschool" our son (I waited for the word to come up in the review, but perhaps he hadn't coined that word or even concept yet when he wrote this particular book) and I continually feel this pressure from the culture around me, the message of which is--I'm afraid this is true, and I'm not saying anyone has said this, it's a vibe in the air--that he's not miserable enough! We limit cartoons to twenty minutes morning and evening, he plays no video games yet at 7, and we give him a "lesson" at some point each morning and each afternoon, usually on a topic of his choice. We've used Khan Academy and other things. I've done some chemistry with him (he found a picture of an atom on a bookmark the other day, counted the electrons, and identified it as carbon on his periodic table), we're working on a timeline of European & American history, he had a period of being obsessed with astronomy, he's a voracious reader, he's currently making good progress in learning to read French (which I've taught him through speaking it a little each day since he was a toddler--and through not allowing him to find out cartoons in English existed till he was almost six!) His dad, who does his math, recently told me he's got the multiplication table memorized now and is working on longer multiplication and division. It's weird--writing this list is starting to make me sound like the opposite kind of parent, the one who signs their kid up for every Gifted thing they can, but here's the corrective: this happens in about two hours a day. An hour in the morning, an hour in the afternoon. The rest of his time he spends playing elaborate imaginative games with his friends, making elaborate Lego creations, and inventing elaborate new ways to race marbles. And though we're desultorily continuing our lesson times over the summer, if his friends are unexpectedly available during lesson time, lesson is generally canceled. Even during the school year, more often than not.
And I hear a legion of shadowy people (or, if I dare open my mouth in, say, a comment section of a parenting advice column, real internet commenters) saying "He plays most of the day?? You are failing so hard!" The list of his achievements doesn't really mollify them; imagine what a kid like that could achieve if you actually made him work!
Honestly, though, I don't think my son is a genius. I think he's fairly smart, like me & my husband. I'm an occasional reader of this blog, whose eyes glaze over when I hit a post that's full of charts and tables. I read for the book reviews, the fun stuff, the moments when Scott gets personal or hilarious or both. (LOVED the Arabian Nights review.) This is my first comment, mostly because the intellectual company intimidates me. I'm not in STEM, I write fiction and farm. My husband can do a thing or two with Linux but he's not a genius either. My brother is a genius, so I have some sense of how geniuses act (I'm awfully sorry but I wouldn't want to have to raise one, particularly), and I haven't seen it in my son. So honestly, I think the shadowy legion is wrong. I think he's working approximately to his real capacity. I think in a space like this his achievements aren't all that noteworthy... but maybe the ease with which he's made them is.
There was absolutely no need to ruin his life for this stuff. None at all.
> he found a picture of an atom on a bookmark the other day, counted the electrons, and identified it as carbon on his periodic table
Elements are distinguished by the number of _protons_, not electrons. (So, technically, a 'naked' proton is (ionized) hydrogen!)
But, counting the electrons is _usually_ a good heuristic as most illustrations or examples are for electrically neutral atoms, and I believe that's mostly true in the real world too.
(I also very much agree with the rest of your comment!)
Nice to see another unschooler in the comments! (Well, we are not complete unschoolers I think, as we limit the amount of screen time, but he is mostly free to choose what he learns).
The difficulty we currently have with our 8 year old is that he gets hyperfocused on something to the point of obsession, and now I feel that my primary duty as a parent is to help him learn mental health hygiene, in a sense, slow down his learning, rather than push more... Not a problem I thought we'd be having when my wife convinced me to go along this path.
I think everyone's a bit different in that regard. I always studied my weakest subjects. Went to an advanced math and science academy for my first couple of years of college when liberal arts is my strong suit. I ended up a smart manager instead of a smart engineer. But there's definitely room for more smart engineers out there, and if I had focused more on what I had been good at, I probably would have ended up with a PhD and been researching some weird culture instead of running a business. I'm happy where I am, but just saying it's okay to learn differently. And that's one of the great things about home/unschooling.
I wish I could find a way to give that gift to kids in normal schools.
Oh man, I'm so with you on the screen time thing; I don't hold with the idea that you can't limit screen time and be a true unschooler, honestly. There's an enormous difference between saying "you must do this work for hours" and "you can only do this fairly addictive leisure activity a little a day." (And don't get me started on the people who think meals should follow the unschooling model, it's a bit much.)
That hyperfocus thing is what my brother used to do! I was using the term genius pretty loosely in my comment, but I do think it's a sign of strong intelligence, and I think you're absolutely right to work more for balance than for hyper-achievement. You're looking at how to raise the whole person. We had one period that was similar, when ours was obsessed with astronomy... and yeah, it went too far. I had this feeling some of the adults in his life (eg my parents) encouraged it; he was only 5, he'd been boring up till now, and finally he was into something prestigious. But it was too much. When the amount of attention he got for it was reduced, he got interested in other things.
Yes, it's astronomy for us too! The only thing he's talking about is quasars and stupendously large black holes for the last month. One the one hand, of course, I'm happy, and I used this to teach him more math (motivating math was more difficult when he was into Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket).
But recently, after watching a bunch of kurzgesagt videos he's had difficulty falling asleep and something bordering on anxiety attacks. So today we had a conversation about not watching kurzgesagt for a few weeks... Some crying was involved... I don't know how necessary it was, but he does seem to be feeling better.
Reading lot of slate star codex made me somewhat ambivalent about all parenting techniques. But sometimes doing something with confidence, even if you're not completely sure deep down, is helpful for your kid's sense of security. In any case, that's what I tell myself in these situations.
HOLY COW, my kid likes kurzgesagt too! But listen, I definitely think you were wise there. I did something very similar (I'll sometimes let him have one but I have to approve the topic, since some of them are totally fine & I can usually tell by the title) because kurzgesagt, fascinating and colorfully made as it is, is very clearly made for grownups, very much including ones who get a thrill from dark & disturbing speculations. I can definitely believe it could disrupt a kid's sleep. Youtube is great but EVERYTHING is on there so I monitor.
The astronomy thing is cool. I definitely think kids have a drive to learn what the world around them is like from a very young age. I remember being amazed at the teaching techniques my kid used *on himself* when he first started learning the solar system--he played that we were visiting each of the planets, in order, always in the same spots in the living room, over and over... he was four, and I couldn't have made him memorize a list of things if I'd tried, but he knew the planets by heart in order from that day on...
(BTW does he ever watch Kids Learning Tube on Youtube? Sort of grating to adults but my kid LOVED it during his astronomy period--the planets have huge eyes and sing very, very detailed songs about themselves, chock-full of facts stuffed awkwardly into a rhyme scheme...)
Thank you for the recommendation! We'll check out Kid Learning Tube. My son (he's 8 btw) really liked the 6 book series about George by Stephen and Lucy Hawking (the first 5 books are great; the last book, written by Lucy after her father passed away, is a bit weird - George travels to the future and finds himself in Trump-inspired dystopia - but he still loved it).
We've been trying to find something similarly engaging about space, but couldn't.
I was raised homeschooled but my wife wasn't. She got a teaching degree, but decided not to teach. She's the primary caregiver/educator in the house. She also struggles with the fact that there's less than two hours direct education per day given and I have to keep reassuring her it's normal because it's so out of the ordinary compared to school life.
I believe I was told at some point (nice sources there, eh?) that the "sweet spot" for an hour of teaching, the part where you can actually impart knowledge and expect the kids to absorb it, is 15-20 minutes long. Of the rest, some of it goes into practicing the new skill in some way and a good bit is lost in transitions, classroom discipline & interaction, etc. (Not that classroom interaction is useless, at all; one of the things I feel like my son may truly be missing out on is a good class discussion, and I'm trying to think how to make something like that happen outside school...) If you consider how much of that "sweet spot" may be hit-or-miss in a classroom of thirty kids compared to the individualized teaching you can give at home (in other words, when teaching your own kid, ten minutes of teaching may genuinely be ten minutes of learning, which overall is rare--hope that's coherent, I'm sleep-deprived), maybe that could end up explaining the huge direct-teaching-time disparities we're experiencing between homeschool and school.
I have always been interested in many topics more or less related to classical school subjects. The way Holt describes student's performance matches me. In school, for example, I had to learn French for a couple of years. Even when I peaked in French, I couldn't read or speak basic French (got good grades anyway). On the other hand, I was fascinated in all sorts of sciences and was way ahead as a teenager (I'll never forget the day I understood how the constant speed of light leads to all sorts of strange phenomena). Overall, this sounds all great to me. I enjoyed reading it.
However, after reading, there remain two bits of thinking. The first bit seems obvious (and it's touched upon in the article and some comments). To be successful in the world, you need to have a model of how the world works. This includes all subjects taught in school and more. Probably the composition of typical school subjects is outdated and some should be exchanged. For example, I think understanding how computers work and how to program is more important than understanding an old theater play (I am not talking about language understanding in general). Teaching about law, taxes and insurance could certainly be more prominent too, as these topics are a growing part of reality. Let's go back to the idea of building a model of the world. There was the topic of "mitochondria as the powerhouse of the cell". Even if this way of thinking is true in part it still fills white areas of the map. Maybe one student becomes interested in bodybuilding. They can build on this knowledge by learning more about how certain cells work. Without even the idea that your body consists of cells they could spend years trying to gain muscle without any success just because they ignore basic principles. I like to stress here that a biology class and bodybuilding don't seem to have too much connection for a student.
Let me give another personal example: recently, I wanted to understand why planes fly. I wanted to understand aerodynamics (in a non-mathematical way). There are videos on YouTube that communicate it wrongly (air moving faster above the wing than below...). However, I could easily distinguish the wrong explanation from a valid one (a wing creates lift by accelerating air downward). Why could I distinguish and understand so easily? Because this information fits previous understanding (air consists of particles with mass, Newton's laws, and what not).
This brings me to the second bit of thinking, which is connected to the first one. In short: forming a model of the world takes time. I could understand basic aerodynamics easily because I learned something in the past. I could teach that to a student. They would easily learn to answer in a test that air is accelerated downward and thus creates lift. But do they really understand when there is barely anything to connect this to? Will they remember this in five years? I know that I'll never forget this principle because it fits into an existing model. Maybe the student will forget what they learned in the aerodynamics class. Then, school seems like a waste of time. However, the next time they learn something about Newton's second law they could be more likely to understand it because there is already some idea of accelerating a mass (the reverse order of teaching seems more plausible). To me, it seems that an imprecise and broad overview is in favor of early specialization (by self-teaching what I randomly like). Creating this broad model is hard because teachers need to place points of knowledge and try to connect them.
The Snake Kid example is reminiscent of David Deutsch’s answer when asked how a child could possibly become a scientist if she didn’t learn maths as a kid:
I think with a few important differences/caveats, teenagers (15+ ) are women are basically in the early 19th century are basically in the same boat.
Sociological factors of weird schooling are set up as biological truths. For example, if adults were sleep deprived, forced into high school and stripped of most of their agency, I would expect similer behavior.
Basically the whole legal concept of minor starts off well grounded in reality, but by 17 years old and 364 days at the latest, its become absurd and unjust.
I'm glad I could help push this review to finalist, it resonates with my personal experiences and definitely pushed my thoughts in an anarchist direction, which doesn't happen often.
I recall hearing somewhere about archaeological evidence of ancient autonomous children societies that lived alongside the adult societies, and which made their own rules, cooperated, and even stood up to the adults together. I can imagine that would do a lot for learning, since one of the big motivations of learning is the idea that what you learn can actually change something. Removing overprotective, domineering helicopter parents (I'm not resentful at all) would do a lot to increase that motivation.
I think also some African (and possibly elsewhere) tribes have initiations into formal adulthood, where the boys live apart for a while and learn what they need to be recognised as adult members of the society, such as this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebollo_la_banna
What you're describing sounds more like "Peter Pan and the Lost Boys" but I'd need more details before coming to a conclusion.
Working in education made me induct many of these concepts. As did gifted teachers and another old thinker named dabrowski whose excitability theory was and still is a pretty valuable way I’d argue to think about intelligences. Led me to many of these holt conclusions. I’m trying to work on these concerns in academia and I can’t help but find that the let them learn vs fundamentals isn’t a dichotomy with appropriate organization. The problem is that so little has been placed in recognizing and relaying accreditation across that spectrum. We can design for “fitness” but as much as we attempt to incentive competencies, the institutional difficulties (especially in tandem with marginalization and/or poverty) are going to leave people thrown out. This lack makes difficulties that stem into overspecialization and adult difficulties in access and exertions as well. Simultaneously the ability and resource to actually overcome, let alone prosper, is dependent on luck far more than incentive. Clearly people are incentivized, but their capacities to engage or perform are curtailed not by incentive, but by capacity. You can’t just study bc you want to as an adult, the desire does not fall into structure in my society. It’s outsourced, privatized, algorithmic, increasingly dissociated from community (usually one of THE most easily healthy incentives is student desire to be present in desired relationships and status after all, barring they are relatively healthy in and in recognition of their associations). Sadly, it’s been more upkeep of the capacities and less the engagement of the selves so observantly maintained. Also, these rigors confound things into schedules of learning when understanding is easily not linear across perspective for any wild variety of competing reasons. Yet capacity is policed and demanded
Covid made it clear how much school is about childcare and not learning. There was much more gnashing of teeth about how schools being closed made life harder for parents than about how schools being closed prevented children from learning things.
Alas, one of the most unfortunate things that can happen to a theory is to have it put into action. In this case, the hypothesis that taking kids out of school and letting the Internet work its magic has been tried all across the country over the past year, and the results are unequivocally awful.
Student accomplishment measured by any reasonable metric has dropped like a stone[1]. Enrollment in parochial and private schools that promise *more* in-person classtime and *less* online education has soared. Anecdotally, in every family with school-age children I know, both parents and students have come to hate online education, and want nothing more than to go back to the actual classroom. There are indeed a precious few who feel liberated, and whose learning has accelerated, but they are a tiny minority.
Of course, one can make the usual socialist apologia -- "It just hasn't been done RIGHT" -- and that may well be true -- but then, I imagine if *classroom* education were "done right" we wouldn't have books written about how awful it is.
Classroom education by the type of people who go into education is, indeed, generally a regrettable experience, an ordeal. But *so far* nobody has been able to come up with anything to replace it that isn't techno-fanboi delusion ("the Internet! Youtube videos! MOOCs!") -- every one of which, when actually tried, have turned out to be deeply disappointing -- or that isn't wholly impractical for anyone other than the leisure class (home-schooling, high-resource academies). Like democracy, classroom education may be the worst possible system -- except for any other yet imagined.
The problem is that kids are forced to sit through zoom sessions even more torturous than in-person schooling. There is an arms race between our friends’ setting up new website blockers on their 8 year old’s computer and him trying to circumvent them during class. They recently put him on medication as he keeps getting distracted during class and teachers complain. When they let him be (during school breaks) he just reads lots of books and is so much happier; when school starts, he's like a different person. My heart bleeds seeing this.
In contrast, our experience with kids during last year and a half made me much more confident in our decision to homeschool.
My mother is a public school teacher. What she saw was not taking kids out of school and letting the internet work its magic. It was taking kids out of school and then trying to do the exact same thing they were doing before except while wearing oven mitts. Oh and also changing everything nearly every week. Not changing anything important like curriculum or methods of delivery. Just changing things like who would be teaching the kids, or what order the classes would be in, or what room they would be sitting in for the kids who came on-campus to learn remotely.
At least with socialism they had a revolution before installing new bosses same as the old bosses.
To state the obvious, different people learn differently and therefore no one system or on teaching style will ever suit everyone. I have been teaching for 21 years, and I am convinced that the real problem is not getting enough of a mention in this discussion: if we somehow remove the link between education and future income (UBI?), everything related to school and education would improve dramatically.
Speaking of general education, I am delighted to announce that 41 years after I sat it, I would still get a decent result in my Leaving Cert according to this quiz (I only messed up which English paper was the one with drama/poems as distinct from the essay, oh the shame!) 😁
I had a revelation as a high school sophomore that gave me a much better attitude about learning. My English teacher decided that our class should spend essentially an entire semester reading In Cold Blood (Capote) aloud in class. This melted my brain. I read the (very short) book in a day or two at home and decided (out of spite) to read the unabridged Les Miz next. So I spent my English class time reading that and whenever called upon to read aloud, looked up and asked "where are we?"
Whatever fear I had of the teacher, grades, etc., kind of went away after that. I still studied and succeeded, but I had taken control of my education and never gave it back.
The vision of self-directed learning, with the only parental/institutional controls limited to what apps are allowed on tablets seems like a fun experiment, but doesn't answer my longstanding question about differences among schools. Why are some schools so much more effective at turning out grade-level skills and college graduates than others, even controlling for student body composition? Why can't we have more of those effective schools and do something to fix or close the rest?
"Society does not depend on universal lifelong literacy in cell biology; we could get along just fine if 5% of us knew the powerhouse thing, and the other 95% had skipped bio class that year."
I disagree with this, because the point of a common education is more than just the utility of the information transferred. It also creates a common culture that's able to talk to itself more easily. If only 5% of people know what mitochondria, then I can't make a casual analogy like "search is the mitochondria of Google" and expect anyone to get it. That may seem like a silly complaint, but it seems more significant when you read 19th century political writings and see them quoting Homer in Greek and trusting that it succinctly communicates a sophisticated concept. I really do think having the culture share a common set of concepts helps enable productive public dialogue.
> 19th century political writings and see them quoting Homer in Greek and trusting that it succinctly communicates a sophisticated concept
Those writings never had a large audience! Even given that most _college_ students 'learned' Greek, almost no one even went to (let alone graduated from) college.
If anything, your example seems more like what's more obvious nowadays – people naturally gravitate to communities bound by shared interests and, e.g. make casual analogies based on common understanding of those interests.
That's because very few people were educated, and fewer still engaged in public debate. In any case, it in no way contradicts the principle that the level of discourse is dependent on the degree of shared culture. The fact that vastly more people are now a) educated (or perhaps 'educated') and b) able to participate in the public dialogue, only serves to underscore the need to foster a shared culture.
Yes, people naturally have a tribal instinct. That's not good in a multiethnic society. One of the purposes of a common education is to broaden the scope of one's perceived tribe to include all those within the polity, not simply those who share some arbitrary set of demographic facts. Or do you think our country has benefitted from rising factionalism?
I'm very much unsure how to think about the benefits, and costs, of "a shared culture". Firstly, because it seems _very_ important as to _which_ 'culture' it is we could/would/should share!
Personally, I feel very alienated from _most_ cultures, but not because I disagree about 'object-level' claims, e.g. the Earth is flat versus the Earth is (approximately) a sphere, but because I disagree with the reasoning (and motivation) that seem to underly those claims.
I'm also overall pretty unsure about the _optimal_ amount of cultural diversity that we should accept, or even promote. I certainly am very unsure that it's bad that we 'allow' the 'Amish' to continue to exist for one.
But I'm all for _sharing_ culture, if not exactly excited about _having_ a 'shared' culture. (In slogan form: 'culture _should_ be appropriated!'.)
For further context, my role model in terms of 'culture conflict' is Daryl Davis, and his behavior (and 'philosophy') seem very different than almost everyone in terms of how they wage 'culture war'.
(I also find 'flat earth' theories/beliefs/aliefs _fascinating_, e.g. if I didn't already 'know' that the earth is round, how could I discover that myself, let alone convince others of that?)
I think this is probably trying to solve the wrong problem, or at least a different problem to the one I care about -
"What approach to education will produce the optimal outcomes for motivated, able children of educated middle-class parents who are able to devote informed effort and if need be money to their children's education?"
rather than
"What approach to education, if taken by the state, will result in the best overall outcomes for the population as a whole?"
I think there are a lot of possible explanations for the success of e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michaela_Community_School, but my guess is that its approach to education - which is kind of diametrically opposite Holt's - is probably part of it. I think I'd have /hated/ attending it, and if I had the option of sending my children to a school with a different philosophy and an intake where that was working well (which is correlated with, but not the same as, a predominantly middle-class intake) I'd far rather take that, but I think that as a fall-back for areas with predominantly poor, deprived children it may well be a better option, especially if the state can't be persuaded to spend as much as I'd like per child (which seems unlikely in most of the US).
I think that the answer to the former is that lots of approaches will produce reasonable outcomes but getting the latter right is both hard and important.
I've heard a lot of educators talk about poor discipline in their classroom. I wonder how much the success of the school is in their teaching method versus giving students that can comply with those rules a community to learn in (by removing those who cannot or will not).
The US version is sending trouble-making kids to boot camp schools. At a statistical level, do those work? Do they have a higher rate of child abuse that should be seen as a part of their cost?
"you can just look up what the powerhouse of a cell is"
How do you do that if you don't even have a concept of the cell having a powerhouse? This is precisely the kind of thing that is hard to look up, since you need to know beforehand that there is something to look for.
Thumbs up for John Holt! I enjoyed the review and it gives good overview of the main themes. I would recommend people skim through the book for themselves, as you are bound to find something that you find particularly insightful. Some stories which stood out to me:
* a boy who could keep track of bowling score in local bowling alley, but for whatever reason could not do basic arithmetic in school; even if the arithmetic was phrased in terms of a bowling scenario!
* a girl who cried when finding out how 'once' is pronounced. message of story was how most adults/teachers take many non-trivial and non-logical facts for granted, but talk about it and teach it to kids as if they are totally logical and obvious. This girls reaction is an immediate consequence of this, but long-term has potential effect of kids having expectation that things make sense drilled out of them
* various stories of kids struggling to learn very basic things, and various exercises and tasks that Holt tried to help them. i find it useful to see what i take for granted in terms of basic skills!
This analysis is a good example of what I think of as the mainstream "online culture" criticism of public schools in America (and so it makes sense that the author cites Paul Graham as an avatar of that critique).
I was also a "gifted" student in mainstream, non-"gifted" public schools in Cambridge, MA, which probably provided more challenge at the top end than most public school systems (I took AP classes in high school, I got pulled out with a few other kids in 6th grade for somewhat advanced algebra, etc.).
What I will say is that the "force feeding" aspect wasn't often my problem; sure, I drew pictures during French class and got in trouble, which is stupid because I aced the tests whether I was drawing or not. The problem was teacher quality and enthusiasm. My French teacher didn't really want to be teaching 12 year-olds French. My science teacher didn't really love science or have passionate scientific opinions or hate people who do sloppy science. On the other hand, my 7th grade English teacher truly, absolutely had a passion for helping 12 year-olds find their voice as fiction authors, and wouldn't you know it, I blossomed as a fiction writer that year and enjoyed every minute of her class. My teacher in a mixed 2nd and 3rd grade class loved teaching long division and was thrilled to include me as a 2nd grader and to see me start to understand why the algorithm worked. You could have made me take any subject from Talmudic debate to ice fishing to snail categorization and if the teacher truly freaking loved doing it and teaching it, I would have loved every minute of it.
Remember too that this was an influential book, and we've had over thirty-five years since the author DIED in which reforms have been made. I'm sure some for better, some for worse, and most for naught. While a lot of the problems in today's schools are similar, don't forget he's writing about schools in the 1950s and 60s.
The boat captain's licensing exam is a kind of educational coercion, but ultimately it's the ocean that grades harshly. And when the person in charge of a large commercial vessel fails, he is not the only one who dies. I think it's completely fair that people driving container ships need to know some things they'd maybe rather not. And probably required for the standard of living we expect that more people drive container ships than are born with a love for all the relevant facts.
There are hundreds more examples where that came from. So it seems important that children learn the meta-skill of learning what they don't particularly want to.
> it seems important that children learn the meta-skill of learning what they don't particularly want to
Strong agree; in fact, I think it should be a central focus of education to identify subjects that seem initially tedious or irrelevant, but which are ultimately valuable. A sort of "Karate Kid" approach: yes, you're waxing cars now, but look, that makes you able to defeat the Cobra Kai!
Seriously though, I do wonder how well licensing exams line up with skill at performing a particular job. If you found the 100 best people in America to pay to talk to for an hour about your psychology, how many would actually have a psychology degree? I'm a computer programmer, and more than half of the best programmers I've worked with didn't even major in computer science, let alone go to grad school. But if "computer programmer" were a government-licensed profession in 1950, I'm sure we'd be stuck with that licensing regime today, and I feel confident we'd be worse for it.
I wish we had a much more open, linear, stepped structure of licensing, with a heavier emphasis on doing the profession than on knowing the backstory. Make the initial levels something people can achieve with a few months' focused experience in high school.
Howard was almost certainly talking solely about white kids, and the fact is that any review that doesn't mention this (or fails to mention whether he discussed race) is failing to observe that the book is basically useless for American education policy.
Some of the commenters are mentioning class and ability, which is good, but let's be really clear: if you are reading and posting here, then American education did not fail you, and your problems are not what American education cares about.
Now, I agree that perhaps they should. I think we should be doing more to challenge our bright kids, although not in manners that Asian schools OR the bright bored people who wail about unhappy they were in K-12 (a group so overrepresented at this site it's a cliche).
But unless or until you can answer these questions:
1) How can American K-12 education challenge all children adequately without creating formal paths that show clear racial disparities?
2) What job training can our lowest ability kids (regardless of race) benefit from, and how can we ensure that other aspects of American policy (immigration) aren't selling them short?
3) How can we restrict college attendance to a certain tested ability level without creating formal paths that show clear racial disparities?
If your answer is "we can't", then you should formally acknowledge that US education is pretty amazingly great.
If your answer is "we should", well, go get the lawsuits going and get back to me.
In short, there's no fix, Howard was dated when he began, and certainly by 1982, and while the review is fine in a cocoon, any review that reefuses to acknowledge reality is just perpetuating the problems involved in discussing American education.
Your points are legitimate, but I don't see that anyone here besides you has really suggested implications for public education policy from this review (if they did, maybe you should have responded to them). My sense is that people here were either reading this as parents trying to make choices about their kids' education, as teachers trying to think about how to improve their own performance on the margin, or as merely intellectually curious people reflecting on their own experiences.
I guess someone here probably needed to say that intellectual curiosity is not a human universal and half the population is of below-average intelligence, but for the most part I don't think these facts are very relevant to how people are using this review.
The main function of school is *not* learning. Any learning is secondary. The main goal of school is socialization and regimentation.
Start the day at 8:25 with roll call, then the Pledge, then English starts at 8:35. English lasts for precisely 50 minutes until 9:25, then another 50 minutes is set aside for arithmetic. At 10:15, the first grade gets a break for recess. Bells mark each division of time.
In the higher grades, the socialization and regimentation are fine-tuned to the track that the student is placed on. Kids on the college prep track are given a bit more freedom, and their classwork is geared to more independent thinking and less rote performance of tasks than their peers on the "business/vocational" or "general/industrial" tracks.
A couple of my teachers more or less told me as much. John Taylor Gatto wrote entire books dismantling the subject. Like a lot of anarchist and adjacent writing, Gatto is brutally accurate when it comes to describing and decrying power and the way it works in the real world. The problem is that he doesn't offer much in the way of concrete solutions other than "tear down the schools and let kids educate their little selves".
Learning to show up and respond when called is an important life skill. Lots of people here will say they can show up whenever and no one cares, but that's because they've climbed high enough up the career ladder that they've forgotten how essential those skills are.
This one is my new front-runner in the book review contest! Interesting, important, unusually heartfelt, and clearly written. (So far the reader choices seem to be as good as, if not better than, the curated ones.) My main reservation is that both the reviewer and the author seem to have some substantial, not-precisely-rational precommitments and there's not much statistical evidence around to shore them up-- everything is anecdotal or common-sense reasoning. But overall I felt this to be necessary given the subject matter, maybe even more a feature than a bug. Also, the reviewer does a good job of being circumspect about noting possible biases and counterarguments. Very well done-- I'm glad I got to read it!
I feel like time spent in a lecture ought to be limited to a few hours a day, perhaps increasing slightly for older ages. Think about it - at work, about how many hours of meetings can you handle in a day before your brain melts down? (for me, about 2.5). In college, about how many hours do you spend per day actually sitting at a desk and taking notes? (my experience was about 3 hours a day, maybe 4 at the high end).
These types of activities have value, but tend to take a lot out of us. As adults, we recognize that we realistically only have a few (maybe up to four?) hours a day of this sort of thing before the returns start diminishing rapidly. I think most kids are probably even less suited for this sort of self-controlled environment (though natural human variation assures that some people will thrive in almost any scenario you come up with).
I don't think we need to throw out the idea of directed learning entirely - we just need to pull the reins a bit. It seems to me that the most important parts of reading, writing, and arithmetic could be taught through occasional lectures and a reasonable number of directed activities. That can leave plenty of time for undirected socializing, individual projects, sports, creative pursuits, etc.
This would in some sense be a radical change, but not nearly as radical as unschooling, homeschooling, or other ways of abandoning "official" education systems entirely. And I think it would lead to happier, smarter kids.
The 4-H children at New York State Fair (and all other fairs) compete in various arenas, e.g. plant identification, crafts, and public speaking. The homeschooled kids are maybe 5% of the population (because they're more likely to join 4-H in the first place) but win 25% of the ribbons. They have the free time to pursue their interests, which translate into winning competitions.
The review summarizes well, though the many anecdotes in the book really drive the arguments home with a quick skim.
As far as I know, Democratic (Sudbury) education is the only organized alternative that addresses all of of the issues that Holt describes in a non-ideological way. Separate from the benefits that it confers to students precisely because of this, though, it treads water in a unique reputational swamp: mainstream parents and observers tend to conflate it with Waldorf, free schooling etc (i.e. "radical and weird"), while proponents of the better-established alternatives tend to skip the conflation and proceed straight to the labelling ("radical and irresponsible").
There's a related macro-issue that falls outside the scope of the book: school curricula having become primary drivers of cultural continuity/evolution, however aspirational or (in)coherent. Talk about a can of worms though :)
> The idea of painless, non-threatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don't do what you want. You can do this in the old-fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words, infringement of liberty, or physical punishment. Or you can do it in the modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly, by withholding the acceptance and approval which you and others have trained the children to depend on; or by making them feel that some retribution awaits them in the future, too vague to imagine but too implacable to escape. You can, as many skilled teachers do, learn to tap with a word, a gesture, a look, even a smile, the great reservoir of fear, shame, and guilt that today's children carry around inside them. Or you can simply let your own fears about what will happen to you if the children don't do what you want, reach out and infect them. Thus the children will feel more and more that life is full of dangers from which only the goodwill of adults like you can protect them, and that this goodwill is perishable and must be earned anew each day.
This quote is a big gut punch... and I have a hot take. If coercion requires fear, and we just actually need coercion, then it's better for everyone's soul if do it directly, barbarically, overtly. We don't have to do weird epicycles of politeness: I'm abusing you for the good of all, and you are being abused. Everyone knows the deal. You grow up, you also keep doing it. But never under the brainwashed delusion that it's not happening. It's dark, but there's something forthright and refreshing about it, no?
ps. I'm not sure how positive reinforcement interacts with the basic claim, but I find it plausible that you can have coercion without fear if you get the positive incentives right.
I would have appreciated a more critical review. AFAIK, Holt's ideas are not evidence-based and mostly people in the rationalist community like it on the basis of it goes along with their personal experience that "school is bad". But in terms of evidence, there's plenty showing direct instruction does work... what little evidence we have (and it's not great quality) is that "unschooled" kids are in fact performing worse than public school kids on average and that some direct instruction is required, if attainment standards are to be met. This doesn't mean that for many kids, this isn't stressful or unpleasant... it would be nice if the most effective method of learning/teaching was also the most pleasant one, but sadly reality does not always bend itself in such a manner.
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.
> we could get along just fine if 5% of us knew the powerhouse thing, and the other 95% had skipped bio class that year
I'm not sure I agree with this assessment. That would've been true in the society that trusts experts but that is a very different world from the one we live in. Look at the vaccine hesitancy or the prevalence of "alternative medicine" - even among people who were forced to learn at least part of biology and how our body system works it is too high, even though they have all the necessary knowledge to evaluate the situation. Without that knowledge the rate of them I expect to be almost the same "95% who skipped the bio class"
Honestly, what percentage of adults could tell you even this about the mitochondria? Probably more than 5%, but surely not a majority.
Literally everyone I talk to would tell you this. But I agree that there is strong selection bias present :)
Here is the thing though. Even if someone can't tell you exact facts about something - it's important to know that there are facts to know in this area. That's the main benefit from structured education. The worst mistakes comes not from inability to give answers, but from missing the knowledge that there are questions.
That specific fact is very much a meme - I would wager that a large majority of adult millenials/zoomers could tell you it, but not so much for people older. Of course, that's a bad example if you're interested in what people actually learned in biology, precisely because it's a meme.
I am so glad I read this piece. I am off to improve Louisiana as a result of what I learned here. Cheers! And thank you deeply to the writer.
I think that most rationalists, including Scott, and the author of this report, undervalue social interactions that happen orthogonally to school.
Those that are home schooled are often kept within a small family unit for their entire childhood. They often are able to participate in extra-curriculars with a small group of other, like-minded homeschool families. This might be once a month over a weekend, or maybe even up to 3 times a week for an hour or so. SOME homeschoolers have a "shared classroom" situation, where one parent will teach 5-7 students a subject, and it will rotate between houses, however this is uncommon, and those situations are often very similar to public education in tone and style. Extra curriculars are usually chosen by parents, not students, and are not optional.
Compare those social interactions with an in-person education. About 4 hours a day, between recess, group projects, free time, the time between classes, lunch time, plus an additional 2 hours of self-selecting extra-curriculars 1-5 days a week. Even during quiet lectures and videos, there's the passing of notes and chatting behind your teachers back.
Sure, students learn SO MUCH MORE in a home school setting. But who will have a greater impact on humanity, someone that knew calculus when they were 11, or someone that learns calculus when they are 20, but are able to build and support other humans, resolve conflicts, and has a strong friend group? Or, another way of putting it, who would you rather hire for a non-mathematical job?
My dream schooling setup is a group of pods. Students enter their pods, where they can self-select teachers and subjects from a large catalog. The teachers are competing with each other for 1: information retention, and 2: total views/ratings. So like youtube but with a subject-retention track. This would allow the best teachers to be seen by tons of students. After being released from their pods, the students would congregate by the subject they just viewed, and collaborate on group projects. Students can coordinated with each other what subjects they heard was good, and take classes at the same time to stay with friends.
Social interactions are great, but as you said, that's orthogonal to school. So why does the place where it happens need to be a school? I mean, if you want to encourage kids to socialize, why not clear away the mandated curricula and quiet lectures and just let them socialize?
No reason in particular. That would be fine too. I'm just suggesting that discussions of homeschooling or unschooling should not leave out social interaction from solutions.
I was bullied daily through twelve years of public school. Do not recommend. Would not try again.
Social interactions were just about as big a negative as I can imagine.
This is probably a bigger problem than the schooling. Even those who are not specifically bullied can be in a sort of thrall, in groups where viciousness is tolerated.
When we speak of children being afraid of looking stupid isn't this mostly about fear of other kids?
Having kids regimented into a single age year is bad.
As was I. I learned a lot from the experience.
The best teachers might not necessarily reach the most students, because many students might not be interested in learning from the best teachers.
Raised as a homeschooler. This is not the experience I lived. This is not the experience of the hundreds of other families I interacted with growing up. This is not the experience of the thousands of other families in the other local orgs in our region. In fact, the few weeks I went to school I had such a difficult time dealing with how LITTLE social interaction I got compared to normal. A few minutes between/before/after classes just didn't compare.
It didn't compare to self-selected extracurriculars like soccer/fencing/theatre/mathletics, which usually involved an hour of the extracurricular 2-3 times a week (per topic) followed by an hour or two of socializing (with people my age, as well as older and younger). It didn't compare to the the fact that the "quiet lecture" period of my learning was probably less than two hours a day on average, and was definitely not very quiet. It didn't compare to homework not being a thing that existed and therefore plenty of time in the evenings/weekend to socialize. It didn't compare to group projects that consisted primarily of people who wanted to be there and contribute and pull their weight. It didn't compare to the lazy days where I did nothing but play Magic with four other kids for eight hours, or the vacations that happened outside of the traditional school vacation calendar, or the days of being turned loose at a local park to invent our own games and be collected six hours later.
Now as an adult I've met a small handful of people that went through homeschooling that's closer to what you describe, but they only did it for a couple of years.
Is there any research as to the ratio of actual homeschoolers that are closer to what you describe versus the experience in my community?
I don't have any research, obviously, but I find myself accused by your account. How did you spend so much time with other students when you were schooled at home? How did you interact with 100s of other families? How did you meet up with friends for lazy afternoons? Was your community of home schoolers in a very close proximity to each other?
My experience is that when homeschooled, physical distance is often a limiting factor. We lived in a neighborhood of 300 people, in a city of around 1MM people, and the homeschoolers of the greater metro were about a 30 minute drive. So, I would attest that given your description, while maybe you weren't at a traditional school, you had some kind of community schooling system set up?
It sure feels like a numbers issue - you could self select extra curriculars, let's say you wanted science Olympiad, a relatively niche one. My hometown of 1MM people had about 50 public school students that participater, across 4 schools, a few times a week after school. I'd estimate the homeschool population in my area to be about 1/100 the size of public schooling, but with a 10x likelihood of participating in extra curriculars. So that would be 5 people in that specific thing, but spread over a large region.
So, I guess it's possible, but that's just not the experience I had! A lot of spending time alone, wishing there were others my age to interact with, reading books and doing activities in relative solitude.
I lived a 30-minute drive from the local city (Austin, TX) which today has a population of about 1 million and a metro of just over 2. Of course this was 20-30 years ago so it was smaller then. And homeschooling less popular than today.
No community schooling system. Sure there were "co-ops" (is user quotes not to scare, but because I literally don't know how they functioned, just what they were called) in the area, but we didn't use them as they were expensive. Schooling was a home thing, plus an occasional outside class when an opportunity came up (like one of the parents teaching a chemistry class because that was their day job).
It involved a lot of commuting in at 7 am and not leaving until 5. A lot of being dropped off at another parent's house on one day and not being picked up until two days later (or the other way around). There was a physical paper newsletter when we started that turned into an online newsletter that turned into email groups that turned into Facebook groups after I left.
Soccer was Tuesday/Thursday morning (pick-up games). Park day was Thursdays. Dances were twice a year. Theatre was whatever rehearsal schedule was set. The teenagers usually had a monthly coffee-shop meetup. After I left the local hobby game store added a weekly homeschool day that I kind of started when I booked out 6 hours of their tables every other week. As far as what extracurriculars are available? It's a do-ocracy. One of the kids in the group was a math genius and loved it, so his mom did the mathlete thing to get him more opportunities to socialize. I liked ballroom dance so I set up informal classes for awhile. If you organized something you very likely could find other people who would jump at the chance to do something.
Now I'll admit, commuting wasn't a lot of fun, and that's the reason as an adult I've bought a house in the city and refuse to budge when a commute would be cheaper/larger. But compared to the alternative I sampled, it was so much better. At the time I supplemented with online interaction with other kids in the org (or outside) plus some evening hangs with kids in my neighborhood that went to public school (more of the former and less of the latter as I got older).
The picture you paint in this second comment is a lot closer to what I'd expect, so I suspect we had similar experiences but with different outcomes. I was homeschooled through 8th grade, and initially, public school was a little lonely, because you don't know anyone. Friendships take time! But once you are in school with your friends the social aspects do shine through. I'm glad you were able to see it fondly, though at a 30 minute drive, while you COULD socialize in evenings, I'd posit the total socialization is still much, much lower than in public schooling! But... It does take a year or two to get to know classmates where that really becomes a positive thing.
How much time did you really have between classes, lunch, etc? I mean quality time? Don't count after-school stuff, because I had just as much of that (or more as no homework). I'm at least somewhat charismatic. I had friends I hung out with constantly right off the bat for the few weeks I went to public school. 10 minutes between classes, an 30-40 minutes for lunch, maybe an hour combined for before class and after class. Maybe a few group projects? Maybe that changes in high school, but in elementary/middle school I didn't really see much there.
Again, compared to "9:30-10 Wednesday: hang out before book club. 10-11 discuss Harrison Bergeron. 11-1: play Marvel TCG with people and eat lunch. 1-3 Go to friend's house and discuss RPG design. 3-5: read. Sleep in car on the way in and back, because nobody's got time for sleep at night." <-Me at 11.
Also me at 11 on say a Monday: "Sleep until 11. 11-1: do a chapter or two out of textbook. 1-3: discuss rules of soccer with mom and why various ones are in place. 3-4: cartoons, 4-5: call friend and discuss Magic for an hour." So yeah, not much social interaction there until that evening I log on to the MUD and join up with the guild. Or hang out with my neighbor before he has dinner/homework/bed.
I mean, a lot of people think you never see anyone while homeschooling, but I dated, had long esoteric conversations, had rivals, got angry, made up, broke promises, had promises broken, etc. Just because some days of the week I didn't see my "city friends" through means other than phone/internet doesn't mean we didn't have hours and hours of social contact.
Now on the other hand I went to college as fast as I could, lived in a dorm, tried to spend as little time as possible not socializing and had a blast. So I'm not saying I wouldn't have preferred some kind of hippy boarding school situation.
I don't think you're being very honest with yourself about the amount of time socializing. Like, I'm sure you had days like the above, but surely you also had days in self-study. Your network must have been small some years.
With a 5 class rotation in middle school, plus lunch and recess, plus lots of group projects, I'd say from 7am-3pm, I'd say about half the time was active social interaction, very consistently, each day. So at minimum 20hrs/week. And we also had little / no homework.
I think you may be comparing a bit of your highlight real to the every day. We also had lock-ins, field trips, book clubs, and the like.
At the end of the day, we both had different lived experiences, and I'm so happy you were able to flourish in yours. I personally found my home schooling to be very isolating and lonely, even when I did have those playdates or shared experiences/clubs.
Sorry, not accused. Confused*
I think you are drastically underestimating the social opportunities available to homeschoolers.
Also implying that homeschoolers don't have strong friend groups is absolute nonsense, speaking as someone who was homeschooled and grew up around big extended friend groups among other homeschoolers in the area. There are many other ways to get into friend groups with non-homeschoolers too - sports, music, actually interacting with your neighbors just to name three.
Okay, I'm going to finish off by quoting chunks of Chesterton, from his "Autobiography", about his time at school:
III.—HOW TO BE A DUNCE
...As for Greek accents, I triumphantly succeeded, through a long series of school-terms, in avoiding learning them at all; and I never had a higher moment of gratification than when I afterwards discovered that the Greeks never learnt them either. I felt, with a radiant pride, that I was as ignorant as Plato and Thucydides. At least they were unknown to the Greeks who wrote the prose and poetry that was thought worth studying; and were invented by grammarians, I believe, at the time of the Renaissance. But it is a simple psychological fact; that the sight of a Greek capital still fills me with happiness, the sight of a small letter with indifference tinged with dislike, and the accents with righteous indignation reaching the point of profanity. And I believe that the explanation is that I learnt the large Greek letters, as I learnt the large English letters, at home. I was told about them merely for fun while I was still a child; while the others I learnt during the period of what is commonly called education; that is, the period during which I was being instructed by somebody I did not know, about something I did not want to know.
But I say this merely to show that I was a much wiser and widerminded person at the age of six than at the age of sixteen. I do not base any educational theories upon it, heaven forbid. This work cannot, on some points, avoid being theoretical; but it need not add insult to injury by being educational. I certainly shall not, in the graceful modern manner, turn round and abuse my schoolmasters because I did not choose to learn what they were quite ready to teach. It may be that in the improved schools of today, the child is so taught that he crows aloud with delight at the sight of a Greek accent. But I fear it is much more probable that the new schools have got rid of the Greek accent by getting rid of the Greek. And upon that point, as it happens, I am largely on the side of my schoolmasters against myself. I am very glad that my persistent efforts not to learn Latin were to a certain extent frustrated; and that I was not entirely successful even in escaping the contamination of the language of Aristotle and Demosthenes. At least I know enough Greek to be able to see the joke, when somebody says (as somebody did the other day) that the study of that language is not suited to an age of democracy. I do not know what language he thought democracy came from; and it must be admitted that the word seems now to be a part of the language called journalese. But my only point for the moment is personal or psychological; my own private testimony to the curious fact that, for some reason or other, a boy often does pass, from an early stage when he wants to know nearly everything, to a later stage when he wants to know next to nothing. A very practical and experienced traveller, with nothing of the mystic about him, once remarked to me suddenly: "There must be something rottenly wrong with education itself. So many people have wonderful children and all the grown-up people are such duds." And I know what he meant; though I am in doubt whether my present duddishness is due to education, or to some deeper and more mysterious cause.
...It was he who invented that severe and stately form of Free Verse which has since been known by his own second name as "the Clerihew" (his name is Edward Clerihew Bentley) or "Biography for Beginners"; which dates from our days at school, when he sat listening to a chemical exposition, with his rather bored air and blank sheet of blotting paper before him. On this he wrote, inspired by the limpid spirit of song, the unadorned lines,
Sir Humphrey Davy
Detested gravy.
He incurred the odium
Of discovering sodium.
...I have forgotten whether Mr. Mackenzie mentioned what always struck me as the most disturbing eccentricity of that eccentric; the open derision with which he spoke of his own profession and position, of those who shared it with him and even of those who were set over him in its exercise. He would explain the difference between satire and the bitterness of the risus sardonicus by the helpful parable, "If I were walking along the street and fell down in the mud, I should laugh a sardonic laugh. But if I were to see the High Master of this school fall down in the mud, I should laugh a sarcastic laugh." I chiefly mention his name here for another reason; because he once vented his scorn for what he called "the trade of an usher" in the form of a rhetorical question addressed to a boy: "Why are boys sent to school, Robinson?" Robinson, with downcast eyes and an air of offensive virtue, replied faintly, "To learn, sir." "No, boy, no," said the old gentleman wagging his head. "It was because one day at breakfast Mr. Robinson said to Mrs. Robinson, 'My dear, we must do something about that boy. He's a nuisance to me and he's a nuisance to you and he's a perfect plague to the servants.'" Then, with an indescribable extreme of grinding and grating contempt: "'So we'll Pay Some Man. . . .'"
...The idea that I had come to school to work was too grotesque to cloud my mind for an instant. It was also in too obvious a contrast with the facts and the result. ...To one very distinguished individual, my own personal debt is infinite; I mean, the historian of the Indian Mutiny and of the campaigns of Caesar--Mr. T. Rice Holmes. He managed, heaven knows how, to penetrate through my deep and desperately consolidated desire to appear stupid; and discover the horrible secret that I was, after all, endowed with the gift of reason above the brutes. He would suddenly ask me questions a thousand miles away from the subject at hand, and surprise me into admitting that I had heard of the Song of Roland, or even read a play or two of Shakespeare. Nobody who knows anything of the English schoolboy at that date will imagine that there was at the moment any pleasure in such prominence or distinction. We were all hag-ridden with a horror of showing off, which was perhaps the only coherent moral principal we possessed. There was one boy, I remember, who was so insanely sensitive on this point of honour, that he could hardly bear to hear one of his friends answer an ordinary question right. He felt that his comrade really ought to have invented some mistake, in the general interest of comradeship. When my information about the French epic was torn from me, in spite of my efforts, he actually put his head in his desk and dropped the lid on it, groaning in a generous and impersonal shame and faintly and hoarsely exclaiming, "Oh, shut it. ... Oh, shut up!" He was an extreme exponent of the principle; but it was a principle which I fully shared. I can remember running to school in sheer excitement repeating militant lines of "Marmion" with passionate emphasis and exultation; and then going into class and repeating the same lines in the lifeless manner of a hurdy-gurdy, hoping that there was nothing whatever in my intonation to indicate that I distinguished between the sense of one word and another.
...One day I was frozen with astonishment to find my name in an announcement on the notice-board, saying that I was to be accorded the privileges of the highest form, though I did not belong to it. It produced in me a desire to be accorded the privileges and protection of the coal-cellar and never to come out again. At the same time I learned that a special branch of the highest form had actually been created for my two principal friends, in order that they might study for History Scholarships at the Universities. All this seemed like the very universe breaking up and turning topsy-turvy; and indeed all sorts of things happened about this time that seemed to be quite outside the laws of nature. I got a prize, for instance; what was called the Milton Prize for what was called a prize poem; I imagine it was about as bad as all other prize poems, but I am happy to say that I cannot recall a single syllable of it. I do, however recall the subject, not without a faint thrill of irony; for the subject was St. Francis Xavier, the great Jesuit who preached to the Chinese. I recall these things, so contrary to the previous course of my school life, because I am not sorry to be an exception to the modern tendency to reproach the old Victorian schoolmaster with stupidity and neglect and to represent the rising generation as a shining band of Shelleys inspired by light and liberty to rise. The truth is that in this case it was I who exhibited the stupidity; though I really think it was largely an affected stupidity. And certainly it was I who rejoiced in the neglect, and who asked for nothing better than to be neglected. It was, if anything, the authorities who dragged me, in my own despite, out of the comfortable and protected atmosphere of obscurity and failure. Personally, I was perfectly happy at the bottom of the class.
...But all this time very queer things were groping and wrestling inside my own undeveloped mind; and I have said nothing of them in this chapter; for it was the sustained and successful effort of most of my school life to keep them to myself. I said farewell to my friends when they went up to Oxford and Cambridge; while I, who was at that time almost wholly taken up with the idea of drawing pictures, went to an Art School and brought my boyhood to an end."
Thanks - I really enjoyed reading that.
At the opposite end of traditional school is the Sudbury Valley School (sudval.org), a 50-year-old student-governed community where the students can do whatever they want all day, within the bounds of the student-created written law.
I've tried to read as much as I could about democratic schools at one point. Unfortunately, there's not much resources out there. In any case, my (to a large extent unfounded) feeling was that while the concept may work fine sometimes, it faces the same problem that all democracies do. It needs an established, working culture that new kids learn from older kids and perpetuate later on themselves. In other words, if we tried to do this on scale, some schools would become little Switzerlands but other would be more like little Syrias.
The Sudbury Valley School began with an extensive constitution (based on America's) spelling out the structure of the student-run judiciary and legislative branches. But, as you say, the school has an extensive unwritten culture, passed from older kids to younger. A process may easier by the fact that some students are at the school from age 4 to 18.
I know one kid who did Sudbury for a few years. The bullying there was intense, and didn't stop when she left. It even involved false reports to police (just a light swatting).
Likely a local problem, but mob rule can be harsh.
I'm disappointed to hear that. The student judiciary meets every morning. It addresses issues as minor as littering or one four-year-old calling another a "poopie head", so a complaint about bullying would have been a big deal.
The school has a book of written laws that concerns everything, including what's an offensive t-shirt, where gum-chewing is allowed, and what the proper treatment of captured toads shall be, so I wouldn't call it "mob rule"
And the local Sudbury, or Sudbury-descended school may be very different than good ol' SudVal. Just saying it's not perfect and relating the experience of the only person I knew that attended one. It's been 3-4 years since she left and she deleted her social media accounts and changed email addresses and phone numbers, but if any of them catch wind of her new accounts the bullying starts up again. I've seen the evidence. It's quite nightmarish.
I was an exemplary student by any standard, coming out #1 of my year out of a few thousand high school students and never particularly suffering from school, but holy crap did I learn more _useful_ stuff from table-top RPGs, wargames, and fiddling around with dad's early IBM PCs.
English language? Geography? Statistics? History? Computers? Estimation of risk? Economics? That's all from hobbies, and while I still _remember_ that stuff, I couldn't solve a matrix if my life depended on it these days.
(Also, this review is my winner so far.)
This was a great review, although it did make me think "what is the most interesting or useful fact about mitochondria if it isn't that they are the cell's powerhouse?". After a few minutes thought, I decided maybe most interesting was their plausible origin as symbiotic prokaryotic cells, and the most useful was that they were passed down only through the maternal line and have their own DNA, allowing us to do funky sequencing to see when our ancestors might have left Africa.
I was lucky enough to go to what in the US would be a Gifted program school (a state-funded grammar school, in the UK), and thrived in a heavily competitive, test-oriented environment. None the less, I think it very likely that if we'd had Khan Academy and Wikipedia instead, I'd have still actually learned a lot more.
And the last paragraph really hit home - it reminded me that good reviews aren't just plot summaries. The whole system of child education in many countries is captured by those heavily invested in the status quo, so how might we break free? Is anybody trying to, even? Are there startups or large public investments being made to replicate something like Neal Stephenson's Primer from "The Diamond Age" - full closed-loop automated learning systems, guided by feedback from the students, to maximise learning in a broad domain?
> What would happen if we let kids choose how to allocate more of their time, and gave them the support and resources we could? What if the free daycare provided by state schools wasn’t as coupled to regimented instruction, but still included books, computers, and adults who would help explain things if asked?
This section reminds me of Ivan Illich's learning webs and other learning strategies.
Also worth considering how many resources are currently locked off to children which were not in previous times. If you read accounts by people like Suzanne Simard or Wendell Berry who grew up among loggers or teamsters (in the old fashioned, driving animals sense) they were taught their professions from a very young age, very aggressively, and without much heed to the dangers.
Urbanisation (and a concomitant set of complex phenomena) have made these practices too "dangerous", and so children nowadays are often insulated from learning in certain places (like garages, factories, workshops). As Holt puts it: "We separated children from adults and learning from the rest of life."
Whether that's a good or a bad thing is subject to some debate, but the classroom definitely deprives children of certain types of knowledge - to me, classrooms seem to privilege knowledge-that versus knowledge-how (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-how/).
In physical education we would sometimes go running around the track. 1000m, 2000m etc. I absolutely hated it because I had no endurance. My classmates were also usually much better at it (because many of them were playing soccer in a club), which made it worse.
And what kind of baffles me now is that it never even occurred to me that I could just go running on my own out of class. Knowing what I know now, even a tiny bit would have improved my endurance a lot. I might even have started to enjoy it like I do now.
But it never crossed my mind. I had never even considered that I could improve on my own out of school and make these classes much less miserable for me. Not entirely sure why that happened, but I find it sad.
I think school can give an impression that if you don't learn something in school, you can't learn it.
Yea exactly. Like, the impression that sitting in school and having somebody teach you and give you homework is what learning _is_. At least for the topics that are taught in school.
But thankfully it didn't really apply to math for me, and even less to computer science and programming. I was interested in CS and programming long before we ever touched that in school, so that probably helped.
I was very unfit in school, which probably damaged my long-term fitness too.
The tendency for gifted students to assume "If I'm not immediately good at something then it must be stupid and useless anyway" should not be underestimated.
That happend to me so hard with writing. Because I wasn't really good at it and didn't enjoy it, I managed to convince myself that it wasn't important anyways.
I really wish there weren't this death spiral in school of being bad at a topic -> constantly getting negative feedback and bad grades -> being even less motivated.
We were doing a baseball unit in gym, and I got a lot better because (by accident one day) I showed up a few minutes early and swung the bat at a ball. But there's no time for doing that for everyone if you are trying to get through a full inning in a class period.
"[...]while the benefits of schooling are ambiguous, some of the costs are not."
This is really cogent and concise, perhaps the most powerful single sentence in the post. I'm going to make sure to repeat it any time I end up in a discussion about school.
Thank you for this review. I haven't actually read the book, but I'm familiar with the concept and with John Holt. We "unschool" our son (I waited for the word to come up in the review, but perhaps he hadn't coined that word or even concept yet when he wrote this particular book) and I continually feel this pressure from the culture around me, the message of which is--I'm afraid this is true, and I'm not saying anyone has said this, it's a vibe in the air--that he's not miserable enough! We limit cartoons to twenty minutes morning and evening, he plays no video games yet at 7, and we give him a "lesson" at some point each morning and each afternoon, usually on a topic of his choice. We've used Khan Academy and other things. I've done some chemistry with him (he found a picture of an atom on a bookmark the other day, counted the electrons, and identified it as carbon on his periodic table), we're working on a timeline of European & American history, he had a period of being obsessed with astronomy, he's a voracious reader, he's currently making good progress in learning to read French (which I've taught him through speaking it a little each day since he was a toddler--and through not allowing him to find out cartoons in English existed till he was almost six!) His dad, who does his math, recently told me he's got the multiplication table memorized now and is working on longer multiplication and division. It's weird--writing this list is starting to make me sound like the opposite kind of parent, the one who signs their kid up for every Gifted thing they can, but here's the corrective: this happens in about two hours a day. An hour in the morning, an hour in the afternoon. The rest of his time he spends playing elaborate imaginative games with his friends, making elaborate Lego creations, and inventing elaborate new ways to race marbles. And though we're desultorily continuing our lesson times over the summer, if his friends are unexpectedly available during lesson time, lesson is generally canceled. Even during the school year, more often than not.
And I hear a legion of shadowy people (or, if I dare open my mouth in, say, a comment section of a parenting advice column, real internet commenters) saying "He plays most of the day?? You are failing so hard!" The list of his achievements doesn't really mollify them; imagine what a kid like that could achieve if you actually made him work!
Honestly, though, I don't think my son is a genius. I think he's fairly smart, like me & my husband. I'm an occasional reader of this blog, whose eyes glaze over when I hit a post that's full of charts and tables. I read for the book reviews, the fun stuff, the moments when Scott gets personal or hilarious or both. (LOVED the Arabian Nights review.) This is my first comment, mostly because the intellectual company intimidates me. I'm not in STEM, I write fiction and farm. My husband can do a thing or two with Linux but he's not a genius either. My brother is a genius, so I have some sense of how geniuses act (I'm awfully sorry but I wouldn't want to have to raise one, particularly), and I haven't seen it in my son. So honestly, I think the shadowy legion is wrong. I think he's working approximately to his real capacity. I think in a space like this his achievements aren't all that noteworthy... but maybe the ease with which he's made them is.
There was absolutely no need to ruin his life for this stuff. None at all.
This sounds wonderful, and you sound like a wonderful parent! Kudos.
Oh, thank you!
> he found a picture of an atom on a bookmark the other day, counted the electrons, and identified it as carbon on his periodic table
Elements are distinguished by the number of _protons_, not electrons. (So, technically, a 'naked' proton is (ionized) hydrogen!)
But, counting the electrons is _usually_ a good heuristic as most illustrations or examples are for electrically neutral atoms, and I believe that's mostly true in the real world too.
(I also very much agree with the rest of your comment!)
Ha, I hadn't thought of that! I'll point it out to him, it'll reinforce the lesson on ions.
Nice to see another unschooler in the comments! (Well, we are not complete unschoolers I think, as we limit the amount of screen time, but he is mostly free to choose what he learns).
The difficulty we currently have with our 8 year old is that he gets hyperfocused on something to the point of obsession, and now I feel that my primary duty as a parent is to help him learn mental health hygiene, in a sense, slow down his learning, rather than push more... Not a problem I thought we'd be having when my wife convinced me to go along this path.
I think everyone's a bit different in that regard. I always studied my weakest subjects. Went to an advanced math and science academy for my first couple of years of college when liberal arts is my strong suit. I ended up a smart manager instead of a smart engineer. But there's definitely room for more smart engineers out there, and if I had focused more on what I had been good at, I probably would have ended up with a PhD and been researching some weird culture instead of running a business. I'm happy where I am, but just saying it's okay to learn differently. And that's one of the great things about home/unschooling.
I wish I could find a way to give that gift to kids in normal schools.
Oh man, I'm so with you on the screen time thing; I don't hold with the idea that you can't limit screen time and be a true unschooler, honestly. There's an enormous difference between saying "you must do this work for hours" and "you can only do this fairly addictive leisure activity a little a day." (And don't get me started on the people who think meals should follow the unschooling model, it's a bit much.)
That hyperfocus thing is what my brother used to do! I was using the term genius pretty loosely in my comment, but I do think it's a sign of strong intelligence, and I think you're absolutely right to work more for balance than for hyper-achievement. You're looking at how to raise the whole person. We had one period that was similar, when ours was obsessed with astronomy... and yeah, it went too far. I had this feeling some of the adults in his life (eg my parents) encouraged it; he was only 5, he'd been boring up till now, and finally he was into something prestigious. But it was too much. When the amount of attention he got for it was reduced, he got interested in other things.
Yes, it's astronomy for us too! The only thing he's talking about is quasars and stupendously large black holes for the last month. One the one hand, of course, I'm happy, and I used this to teach him more math (motivating math was more difficult when he was into Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket).
But recently, after watching a bunch of kurzgesagt videos he's had difficulty falling asleep and something bordering on anxiety attacks. So today we had a conversation about not watching kurzgesagt for a few weeks... Some crying was involved... I don't know how necessary it was, but he does seem to be feeling better.
Reading lot of slate star codex made me somewhat ambivalent about all parenting techniques. But sometimes doing something with confidence, even if you're not completely sure deep down, is helpful for your kid's sense of security. In any case, that's what I tell myself in these situations.
HOLY COW, my kid likes kurzgesagt too! But listen, I definitely think you were wise there. I did something very similar (I'll sometimes let him have one but I have to approve the topic, since some of them are totally fine & I can usually tell by the title) because kurzgesagt, fascinating and colorfully made as it is, is very clearly made for grownups, very much including ones who get a thrill from dark & disturbing speculations. I can definitely believe it could disrupt a kid's sleep. Youtube is great but EVERYTHING is on there so I monitor.
The astronomy thing is cool. I definitely think kids have a drive to learn what the world around them is like from a very young age. I remember being amazed at the teaching techniques my kid used *on himself* when he first started learning the solar system--he played that we were visiting each of the planets, in order, always in the same spots in the living room, over and over... he was four, and I couldn't have made him memorize a list of things if I'd tried, but he knew the planets by heart in order from that day on...
(BTW does he ever watch Kids Learning Tube on Youtube? Sort of grating to adults but my kid LOVED it during his astronomy period--the planets have huge eyes and sing very, very detailed songs about themselves, chock-full of facts stuffed awkwardly into a rhyme scheme...)
Thank you for the recommendation! We'll check out Kid Learning Tube. My son (he's 8 btw) really liked the 6 book series about George by Stephen and Lucy Hawking (the first 5 books are great; the last book, written by Lucy after her father passed away, is a bit weird - George travels to the future and finds himself in Trump-inspired dystopia - but he still loved it).
We've been trying to find something similarly engaging about space, but couldn't.
I was raised homeschooled but my wife wasn't. She got a teaching degree, but decided not to teach. She's the primary caregiver/educator in the house. She also struggles with the fact that there's less than two hours direct education per day given and I have to keep reassuring her it's normal because it's so out of the ordinary compared to school life.
I believe I was told at some point (nice sources there, eh?) that the "sweet spot" for an hour of teaching, the part where you can actually impart knowledge and expect the kids to absorb it, is 15-20 minutes long. Of the rest, some of it goes into practicing the new skill in some way and a good bit is lost in transitions, classroom discipline & interaction, etc. (Not that classroom interaction is useless, at all; one of the things I feel like my son may truly be missing out on is a good class discussion, and I'm trying to think how to make something like that happen outside school...) If you consider how much of that "sweet spot" may be hit-or-miss in a classroom of thirty kids compared to the individualized teaching you can give at home (in other words, when teaching your own kid, ten minutes of teaching may genuinely be ten minutes of learning, which overall is rare--hope that's coherent, I'm sleep-deprived), maybe that could end up explaining the huge direct-teaching-time disparities we're experiencing between homeschool and school.
(sorry to respond, like, two days later)
I have always been interested in many topics more or less related to classical school subjects. The way Holt describes student's performance matches me. In school, for example, I had to learn French for a couple of years. Even when I peaked in French, I couldn't read or speak basic French (got good grades anyway). On the other hand, I was fascinated in all sorts of sciences and was way ahead as a teenager (I'll never forget the day I understood how the constant speed of light leads to all sorts of strange phenomena). Overall, this sounds all great to me. I enjoyed reading it.
However, after reading, there remain two bits of thinking. The first bit seems obvious (and it's touched upon in the article and some comments). To be successful in the world, you need to have a model of how the world works. This includes all subjects taught in school and more. Probably the composition of typical school subjects is outdated and some should be exchanged. For example, I think understanding how computers work and how to program is more important than understanding an old theater play (I am not talking about language understanding in general). Teaching about law, taxes and insurance could certainly be more prominent too, as these topics are a growing part of reality. Let's go back to the idea of building a model of the world. There was the topic of "mitochondria as the powerhouse of the cell". Even if this way of thinking is true in part it still fills white areas of the map. Maybe one student becomes interested in bodybuilding. They can build on this knowledge by learning more about how certain cells work. Without even the idea that your body consists of cells they could spend years trying to gain muscle without any success just because they ignore basic principles. I like to stress here that a biology class and bodybuilding don't seem to have too much connection for a student.
Let me give another personal example: recently, I wanted to understand why planes fly. I wanted to understand aerodynamics (in a non-mathematical way). There are videos on YouTube that communicate it wrongly (air moving faster above the wing than below...). However, I could easily distinguish the wrong explanation from a valid one (a wing creates lift by accelerating air downward). Why could I distinguish and understand so easily? Because this information fits previous understanding (air consists of particles with mass, Newton's laws, and what not).
This brings me to the second bit of thinking, which is connected to the first one. In short: forming a model of the world takes time. I could understand basic aerodynamics easily because I learned something in the past. I could teach that to a student. They would easily learn to answer in a test that air is accelerated downward and thus creates lift. But do they really understand when there is barely anything to connect this to? Will they remember this in five years? I know that I'll never forget this principle because it fits into an existing model. Maybe the student will forget what they learned in the aerodynamics class. Then, school seems like a waste of time. However, the next time they learn something about Newton's second law they could be more likely to understand it because there is already some idea of accelerating a mass (the reverse order of teaching seems more plausible). To me, it seems that an imprecise and broad overview is in favor of early specialization (by self-teaching what I randomly like). Creating this broad model is hard because teachers need to place points of knowledge and try to connect them.
The Snake Kid example is reminiscent of David Deutsch’s answer when asked how a child could possibly become a scientist if she didn’t learn maths as a kid:
https://curi.us/1706-david-deutschs-anna-story
See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday
I think with a few important differences/caveats, teenagers (15+ ) are women are basically in the early 19th century are basically in the same boat.
Sociological factors of weird schooling are set up as biological truths. For example, if adults were sleep deprived, forced into high school and stripped of most of their agency, I would expect similer behavior.
Basically the whole legal concept of minor starts off well grounded in reality, but by 17 years old and 364 days at the latest, its become absurd and unjust.
I'm glad I could help push this review to finalist, it resonates with my personal experiences and definitely pushed my thoughts in an anarchist direction, which doesn't happen often.
I recall hearing somewhere about archaeological evidence of ancient autonomous children societies that lived alongside the adult societies, and which made their own rules, cooperated, and even stood up to the adults together. I can imagine that would do a lot for learning, since one of the big motivations of learning is the idea that what you learn can actually change something. Removing overprotective, domineering helicopter parents (I'm not resentful at all) would do a lot to increase that motivation.
How could archaeology turn up evidence of that? What archaeological trace could it leave?
I certainly haven't heard of anything like that. Are you thinking of things like the Brauronia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_Artemis_at_Brauron
I think also some African (and possibly elsewhere) tribes have initiations into formal adulthood, where the boys live apart for a while and learn what they need to be recognised as adult members of the society, such as this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebollo_la_banna
What you're describing sounds more like "Peter Pan and the Lost Boys" but I'd need more details before coming to a conclusion.
Working in education made me induct many of these concepts. As did gifted teachers and another old thinker named dabrowski whose excitability theory was and still is a pretty valuable way I’d argue to think about intelligences. Led me to many of these holt conclusions. I’m trying to work on these concerns in academia and I can’t help but find that the let them learn vs fundamentals isn’t a dichotomy with appropriate organization. The problem is that so little has been placed in recognizing and relaying accreditation across that spectrum. We can design for “fitness” but as much as we attempt to incentive competencies, the institutional difficulties (especially in tandem with marginalization and/or poverty) are going to leave people thrown out. This lack makes difficulties that stem into overspecialization and adult difficulties in access and exertions as well. Simultaneously the ability and resource to actually overcome, let alone prosper, is dependent on luck far more than incentive. Clearly people are incentivized, but their capacities to engage or perform are curtailed not by incentive, but by capacity. You can’t just study bc you want to as an adult, the desire does not fall into structure in my society. It’s outsourced, privatized, algorithmic, increasingly dissociated from community (usually one of THE most easily healthy incentives is student desire to be present in desired relationships and status after all, barring they are relatively healthy in and in recognition of their associations). Sadly, it’s been more upkeep of the capacities and less the engagement of the selves so observantly maintained. Also, these rigors confound things into schedules of learning when understanding is easily not linear across perspective for any wild variety of competing reasons. Yet capacity is policed and demanded
Covid made it clear how much school is about childcare and not learning. There was much more gnashing of teeth about how schools being closed made life harder for parents than about how schools being closed prevented children from learning things.
Alas, one of the most unfortunate things that can happen to a theory is to have it put into action. In this case, the hypothesis that taking kids out of school and letting the Internet work its magic has been tried all across the country over the past year, and the results are unequivocally awful.
Student accomplishment measured by any reasonable metric has dropped like a stone[1]. Enrollment in parochial and private schools that promise *more* in-person classtime and *less* online education has soared. Anecdotally, in every family with school-age children I know, both parents and students have come to hate online education, and want nothing more than to go back to the actual classroom. There are indeed a precious few who feel liberated, and whose learning has accelerated, but they are a tiny minority.
Of course, one can make the usual socialist apologia -- "It just hasn't been done RIGHT" -- and that may well be true -- but then, I imagine if *classroom* education were "done right" we wouldn't have books written about how awful it is.
Classroom education by the type of people who go into education is, indeed, generally a regrettable experience, an ordeal. But *so far* nobody has been able to come up with anything to replace it that isn't techno-fanboi delusion ("the Internet! Youtube videos! MOOCs!") -- every one of which, when actually tried, have turned out to be deeply disappointing -- or that isn't wholly impractical for anyone other than the leisure class (home-schooling, high-resource academies). Like democracy, classroom education may be the worst possible system -- except for any other yet imagined.
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[1] https://gpl.gsu.edu/publications/student-achievement-growth-during-the-covid-19-pandemic/ among many others.
If online education has the same structure as conventional education, then it isn't the same thing as letting children pursue their own interests.
The problem is that kids are forced to sit through zoom sessions even more torturous than in-person schooling. There is an arms race between our friends’ setting up new website blockers on their 8 year old’s computer and him trying to circumvent them during class. They recently put him on medication as he keeps getting distracted during class and teachers complain. When they let him be (during school breaks) he just reads lots of books and is so much happier; when school starts, he's like a different person. My heart bleeds seeing this.
In contrast, our experience with kids during last year and a half made me much more confident in our decision to homeschool.
My mother is a public school teacher. What she saw was not taking kids out of school and letting the internet work its magic. It was taking kids out of school and then trying to do the exact same thing they were doing before except while wearing oven mitts. Oh and also changing everything nearly every week. Not changing anything important like curriculum or methods of delivery. Just changing things like who would be teaching the kids, or what order the classes would be in, or what room they would be sitting in for the kids who came on-campus to learn remotely.
At least with socialism they had a revolution before installing new bosses same as the old bosses.
To state the obvious, different people learn differently and therefore no one system or on teaching style will ever suit everyone. I have been teaching for 21 years, and I am convinced that the real problem is not getting enough of a mention in this discussion: if we somehow remove the link between education and future income (UBI?), everything related to school and education would improve dramatically.
Speaking of general education, I am delighted to announce that 41 years after I sat it, I would still get a decent result in my Leaving Cert according to this quiz (I only messed up which English paper was the one with drama/poems as distinct from the essay, oh the shame!) 😁
https://www.wlrfm.com/2021/06/11/quiz-do-you-think-you-can-improve-on-your-leaving-cert-results/?fbclid=IwAR2xFl5AxYcMaIPVCIE_ogStCvXBWEO0C69LUG2an0B4cC5a0kWFo2j3dLU
I had a revelation as a high school sophomore that gave me a much better attitude about learning. My English teacher decided that our class should spend essentially an entire semester reading In Cold Blood (Capote) aloud in class. This melted my brain. I read the (very short) book in a day or two at home and decided (out of spite) to read the unabridged Les Miz next. So I spent my English class time reading that and whenever called upon to read aloud, looked up and asked "where are we?"
Whatever fear I had of the teacher, grades, etc., kind of went away after that. I still studied and succeeded, but I had taken control of my education and never gave it back.
The vision of self-directed learning, with the only parental/institutional controls limited to what apps are allowed on tablets seems like a fun experiment, but doesn't answer my longstanding question about differences among schools. Why are some schools so much more effective at turning out grade-level skills and college graduates than others, even controlling for student body composition? Why can't we have more of those effective schools and do something to fix or close the rest?
"Society does not depend on universal lifelong literacy in cell biology; we could get along just fine if 5% of us knew the powerhouse thing, and the other 95% had skipped bio class that year."
I disagree with this, because the point of a common education is more than just the utility of the information transferred. It also creates a common culture that's able to talk to itself more easily. If only 5% of people know what mitochondria, then I can't make a casual analogy like "search is the mitochondria of Google" and expect anyone to get it. That may seem like a silly complaint, but it seems more significant when you read 19th century political writings and see them quoting Homer in Greek and trusting that it succinctly communicates a sophisticated concept. I really do think having the culture share a common set of concepts helps enable productive public dialogue.
> 19th century political writings and see them quoting Homer in Greek and trusting that it succinctly communicates a sophisticated concept
Those writings never had a large audience! Even given that most _college_ students 'learned' Greek, almost no one even went to (let alone graduated from) college.
If anything, your example seems more like what's more obvious nowadays – people naturally gravitate to communities bound by shared interests and, e.g. make casual analogies based on common understanding of those interests.
>Those writings never had a large audience!
That's because very few people were educated, and fewer still engaged in public debate. In any case, it in no way contradicts the principle that the level of discourse is dependent on the degree of shared culture. The fact that vastly more people are now a) educated (or perhaps 'educated') and b) able to participate in the public dialogue, only serves to underscore the need to foster a shared culture.
Yes, people naturally have a tribal instinct. That's not good in a multiethnic society. One of the purposes of a common education is to broaden the scope of one's perceived tribe to include all those within the polity, not simply those who share some arbitrary set of demographic facts. Or do you think our country has benefitted from rising factionalism?
I'm very much unsure how to think about the benefits, and costs, of "a shared culture". Firstly, because it seems _very_ important as to _which_ 'culture' it is we could/would/should share!
Personally, I feel very alienated from _most_ cultures, but not because I disagree about 'object-level' claims, e.g. the Earth is flat versus the Earth is (approximately) a sphere, but because I disagree with the reasoning (and motivation) that seem to underly those claims.
I'm also overall pretty unsure about the _optimal_ amount of cultural diversity that we should accept, or even promote. I certainly am very unsure that it's bad that we 'allow' the 'Amish' to continue to exist for one.
But I'm all for _sharing_ culture, if not exactly excited about _having_ a 'shared' culture. (In slogan form: 'culture _should_ be appropriated!'.)
For further context, my role model in terms of 'culture conflict' is Daryl Davis, and his behavior (and 'philosophy') seem very different than almost everyone in terms of how they wage 'culture war'.
(I also find 'flat earth' theories/beliefs/aliefs _fascinating_, e.g. if I didn't already 'know' that the earth is round, how could I discover that myself, let alone convince others of that?)
I think this is probably trying to solve the wrong problem, or at least a different problem to the one I care about -
"What approach to education will produce the optimal outcomes for motivated, able children of educated middle-class parents who are able to devote informed effort and if need be money to their children's education?"
rather than
"What approach to education, if taken by the state, will result in the best overall outcomes for the population as a whole?"
I think there are a lot of possible explanations for the success of e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michaela_Community_School, but my guess is that its approach to education - which is kind of diametrically opposite Holt's - is probably part of it. I think I'd have /hated/ attending it, and if I had the option of sending my children to a school with a different philosophy and an intake where that was working well (which is correlated with, but not the same as, a predominantly middle-class intake) I'd far rather take that, but I think that as a fall-back for areas with predominantly poor, deprived children it may well be a better option, especially if the state can't be persuaded to spend as much as I'd like per child (which seems unlikely in most of the US).
I think that the answer to the former is that lots of approaches will produce reasonable outcomes but getting the latter right is both hard and important.
I've heard a lot of educators talk about poor discipline in their classroom. I wonder how much the success of the school is in their teaching method versus giving students that can comply with those rules a community to learn in (by removing those who cannot or will not).
The US version is sending trouble-making kids to boot camp schools. At a statistical level, do those work? Do they have a higher rate of child abuse that should be seen as a part of their cost?
"you can just look up what the powerhouse of a cell is"
How do you do that if you don't even have a concept of the cell having a powerhouse? This is precisely the kind of thing that is hard to look up, since you need to know beforehand that there is something to look for.
Thumbs up for John Holt! I enjoyed the review and it gives good overview of the main themes. I would recommend people skim through the book for themselves, as you are bound to find something that you find particularly insightful. Some stories which stood out to me:
* a boy who could keep track of bowling score in local bowling alley, but for whatever reason could not do basic arithmetic in school; even if the arithmetic was phrased in terms of a bowling scenario!
* a girl who cried when finding out how 'once' is pronounced. message of story was how most adults/teachers take many non-trivial and non-logical facts for granted, but talk about it and teach it to kids as if they are totally logical and obvious. This girls reaction is an immediate consequence of this, but long-term has potential effect of kids having expectation that things make sense drilled out of them
* various stories of kids struggling to learn very basic things, and various exercises and tasks that Holt tried to help them. i find it useful to see what i take for granted in terms of basic skills!
Note, I have read two of his books, How Children Fail and How Children Learn, so maybe the anecdotes i remember were from the second.
This analysis is a good example of what I think of as the mainstream "online culture" criticism of public schools in America (and so it makes sense that the author cites Paul Graham as an avatar of that critique).
I was also a "gifted" student in mainstream, non-"gifted" public schools in Cambridge, MA, which probably provided more challenge at the top end than most public school systems (I took AP classes in high school, I got pulled out with a few other kids in 6th grade for somewhat advanced algebra, etc.).
What I will say is that the "force feeding" aspect wasn't often my problem; sure, I drew pictures during French class and got in trouble, which is stupid because I aced the tests whether I was drawing or not. The problem was teacher quality and enthusiasm. My French teacher didn't really want to be teaching 12 year-olds French. My science teacher didn't really love science or have passionate scientific opinions or hate people who do sloppy science. On the other hand, my 7th grade English teacher truly, absolutely had a passion for helping 12 year-olds find their voice as fiction authors, and wouldn't you know it, I blossomed as a fiction writer that year and enjoyed every minute of her class. My teacher in a mixed 2nd and 3rd grade class loved teaching long division and was thrilled to include me as a 2nd grader and to see me start to understand why the algorithm worked. You could have made me take any subject from Talmudic debate to ice fishing to snail categorization and if the teacher truly freaking loved doing it and teaching it, I would have loved every minute of it.
Remember too that this was an influential book, and we've had over thirty-five years since the author DIED in which reforms have been made. I'm sure some for better, some for worse, and most for naught. While a lot of the problems in today's schools are similar, don't forget he's writing about schools in the 1950s and 60s.
The boat captain's licensing exam is a kind of educational coercion, but ultimately it's the ocean that grades harshly. And when the person in charge of a large commercial vessel fails, he is not the only one who dies. I think it's completely fair that people driving container ships need to know some things they'd maybe rather not. And probably required for the standard of living we expect that more people drive container ships than are born with a love for all the relevant facts.
There are hundreds more examples where that came from. So it seems important that children learn the meta-skill of learning what they don't particularly want to.
> it seems important that children learn the meta-skill of learning what they don't particularly want to
Strong agree; in fact, I think it should be a central focus of education to identify subjects that seem initially tedious or irrelevant, but which are ultimately valuable. A sort of "Karate Kid" approach: yes, you're waxing cars now, but look, that makes you able to defeat the Cobra Kai!
Seriously though, I do wonder how well licensing exams line up with skill at performing a particular job. If you found the 100 best people in America to pay to talk to for an hour about your psychology, how many would actually have a psychology degree? I'm a computer programmer, and more than half of the best programmers I've worked with didn't even major in computer science, let alone go to grad school. But if "computer programmer" were a government-licensed profession in 1950, I'm sure we'd be stuck with that licensing regime today, and I feel confident we'd be worse for it.
I wish we had a much more open, linear, stepped structure of licensing, with a heavier emphasis on doing the profession than on knowing the backstory. Make the initial levels something people can achieve with a few months' focused experience in high school.
Howard was almost certainly talking solely about white kids, and the fact is that any review that doesn't mention this (or fails to mention whether he discussed race) is failing to observe that the book is basically useless for American education policy.
Some of the commenters are mentioning class and ability, which is good, but let's be really clear: if you are reading and posting here, then American education did not fail you, and your problems are not what American education cares about.
Now, I agree that perhaps they should. I think we should be doing more to challenge our bright kids, although not in manners that Asian schools OR the bright bored people who wail about unhappy they were in K-12 (a group so overrepresented at this site it's a cliche).
But unless or until you can answer these questions:
1) How can American K-12 education challenge all children adequately without creating formal paths that show clear racial disparities?
2) What job training can our lowest ability kids (regardless of race) benefit from, and how can we ensure that other aspects of American policy (immigration) aren't selling them short?
3) How can we restrict college attendance to a certain tested ability level without creating formal paths that show clear racial disparities?
If your answer is "we can't", then you should formally acknowledge that US education is pretty amazingly great.
If your answer is "we should", well, go get the lawsuits going and get back to me.
In short, there's no fix, Howard was dated when he began, and certainly by 1982, and while the review is fine in a cocoon, any review that reefuses to acknowledge reality is just perpetuating the problems involved in discussing American education.
Who's Howard?
Your points are legitimate, but I don't see that anyone here besides you has really suggested implications for public education policy from this review (if they did, maybe you should have responded to them). My sense is that people here were either reading this as parents trying to make choices about their kids' education, as teachers trying to think about how to improve their own performance on the margin, or as merely intellectually curious people reflecting on their own experiences.
I guess someone here probably needed to say that intellectual curiosity is not a human universal and half the population is of below-average intelligence, but for the most part I don't think these facts are very relevant to how people are using this review.
If you don't think people in this thread are discussing policy, I don't know what to tell you.
The main function of school is *not* learning. Any learning is secondary. The main goal of school is socialization and regimentation.
Start the day at 8:25 with roll call, then the Pledge, then English starts at 8:35. English lasts for precisely 50 minutes until 9:25, then another 50 minutes is set aside for arithmetic. At 10:15, the first grade gets a break for recess. Bells mark each division of time.
In the higher grades, the socialization and regimentation are fine-tuned to the track that the student is placed on. Kids on the college prep track are given a bit more freedom, and their classwork is geared to more independent thinking and less rote performance of tasks than their peers on the "business/vocational" or "general/industrial" tracks.
A couple of my teachers more or less told me as much. John Taylor Gatto wrote entire books dismantling the subject. Like a lot of anarchist and adjacent writing, Gatto is brutally accurate when it comes to describing and decrying power and the way it works in the real world. The problem is that he doesn't offer much in the way of concrete solutions other than "tear down the schools and let kids educate their little selves".
> The problem is that he doesn't offer much in the way of concrete solutions
Also like a lot of anarchists...
Pretty much this.
Learning to show up and respond when called is an important life skill. Lots of people here will say they can show up whenever and no one cares, but that's because they've climbed high enough up the career ladder that they've forgotten how essential those skills are.
I forget where I first saw this, but I thought of it halfway through this review, even before getting to the line about mitochondria
https://i.redd.it/w5kd14iduoi61.jpg
Brief review-of-the-review:
This one is my new front-runner in the book review contest! Interesting, important, unusually heartfelt, and clearly written. (So far the reader choices seem to be as good as, if not better than, the curated ones.) My main reservation is that both the reviewer and the author seem to have some substantial, not-precisely-rational precommitments and there's not much statistical evidence around to shore them up-- everything is anecdotal or common-sense reasoning. But overall I felt this to be necessary given the subject matter, maybe even more a feature than a bug. Also, the reviewer does a good job of being circumspect about noting possible biases and counterarguments. Very well done-- I'm glad I got to read it!
I feel like time spent in a lecture ought to be limited to a few hours a day, perhaps increasing slightly for older ages. Think about it - at work, about how many hours of meetings can you handle in a day before your brain melts down? (for me, about 2.5). In college, about how many hours do you spend per day actually sitting at a desk and taking notes? (my experience was about 3 hours a day, maybe 4 at the high end).
These types of activities have value, but tend to take a lot out of us. As adults, we recognize that we realistically only have a few (maybe up to four?) hours a day of this sort of thing before the returns start diminishing rapidly. I think most kids are probably even less suited for this sort of self-controlled environment (though natural human variation assures that some people will thrive in almost any scenario you come up with).
I don't think we need to throw out the idea of directed learning entirely - we just need to pull the reins a bit. It seems to me that the most important parts of reading, writing, and arithmetic could be taught through occasional lectures and a reasonable number of directed activities. That can leave plenty of time for undirected socializing, individual projects, sports, creative pursuits, etc.
This would in some sense be a radical change, but not nearly as radical as unschooling, homeschooling, or other ways of abandoning "official" education systems entirely. And I think it would lead to happier, smarter kids.
Please fix the links. They all are to commonmark.org and only the later part of the URL is the intended link.
The 4-H children at New York State Fair (and all other fairs) compete in various arenas, e.g. plant identification, crafts, and public speaking. The homeschooled kids are maybe 5% of the population (because they're more likely to join 4-H in the first place) but win 25% of the ribbons. They have the free time to pursue their interests, which translate into winning competitions.
The review summarizes well, though the many anecdotes in the book really drive the arguments home with a quick skim.
As far as I know, Democratic (Sudbury) education is the only organized alternative that addresses all of of the issues that Holt describes in a non-ideological way. Separate from the benefits that it confers to students precisely because of this, though, it treads water in a unique reputational swamp: mainstream parents and observers tend to conflate it with Waldorf, free schooling etc (i.e. "radical and weird"), while proponents of the better-established alternatives tend to skip the conflation and proceed straight to the labelling ("radical and irresponsible").
There's a related macro-issue that falls outside the scope of the book: school curricula having become primary drivers of cultural continuity/evolution, however aspirational or (in)coherent. Talk about a can of worms though :)
> The idea of painless, non-threatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don't do what you want. You can do this in the old-fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words, infringement of liberty, or physical punishment. Or you can do it in the modern way, subtly, smoothly, quietly, by withholding the acceptance and approval which you and others have trained the children to depend on; or by making them feel that some retribution awaits them in the future, too vague to imagine but too implacable to escape. You can, as many skilled teachers do, learn to tap with a word, a gesture, a look, even a smile, the great reservoir of fear, shame, and guilt that today's children carry around inside them. Or you can simply let your own fears about what will happen to you if the children don't do what you want, reach out and infect them. Thus the children will feel more and more that life is full of dangers from which only the goodwill of adults like you can protect them, and that this goodwill is perishable and must be earned anew each day.
This quote is a big gut punch... and I have a hot take. If coercion requires fear, and we just actually need coercion, then it's better for everyone's soul if do it directly, barbarically, overtly. We don't have to do weird epicycles of politeness: I'm abusing you for the good of all, and you are being abused. Everyone knows the deal. You grow up, you also keep doing it. But never under the brainwashed delusion that it's not happening. It's dark, but there's something forthright and refreshing about it, no?
ps. I'm not sure how positive reinforcement interacts with the basic claim, but I find it plausible that you can have coercion without fear if you get the positive incentives right.
This is actually quite powerful.
I would have appreciated a more critical review. AFAIK, Holt's ideas are not evidence-based and mostly people in the rationalist community like it on the basis of it goes along with their personal experience that "school is bad". But in terms of evidence, there's plenty showing direct instruction does work... what little evidence we have (and it's not great quality) is that "unschooled" kids are in fact performing worse than public school kids on average and that some direct instruction is required, if attainment standards are to be met. This doesn't mean that for many kids, this isn't stressful or unpleasant... it would be nice if the most effective method of learning/teaching was also the most pleasant one, but sadly reality does not always bend itself in such a manner.