No, that's not just a problem for parents. Those expelled kids will turn to other activities, which will be probably crime. This is a sure-fire way to create hardened teenage criminals. Yes, penning "bad" kids with "good" is also a bad deal, but expelling them completely and then hoping their parents would deal with it somehow is short-sighted. And the society at large probably won't condone killing kids who fail at school.
Creating a separate school for such kids is a middle-ground solution, and it has been tried in USSR. They've been known as "idiots' schools" among the general population, and carried a big stigma, but at least they kept the trouble kids off streets for a part of the day without interfering with normal kids. The problem with those schools, as far as I understand, is that they treated all failing kids the same. But some of those were just dyslexic, while others were mentally ill, and others just lacked proper motivation due to unfortunate upbringing or other circumstances. It feels like THIS problem could have been solved with more resources and attention paid to each case, but there are never enough of those to go around.
I will add new choices every friday. I didnt want to add all options beforehand because the roster isnt fixed yet (for example, we got this honorable review turned into a contender this week).
If you want to bet that the winner will be neither of the current choices you can bet on "Other" and your bet will be converted to any new choice added in the future automatically
Gotcha. My intuition says that the odds for the first two reviews will be a lot higher now, just by lack of specific other choices at the moment. I've read all the finalists already, and I still think AlphaSchool will win, but I think I can get better odds (in the sense of lower probability and therefore more margin) later on.
Are all the finalists listed somewhere? I've probably read all the finalists, because I read most of the review submissions (and almost all the reviews which were not of works of fiction,) but I don't know which made it to the finals apart from the two which have been posted so far.
For what it's worth, I had one specific frontrunner among my votes, and it wasn't either of the ones posted so far.
It looks like all my top-scoring reviews made it onto the list, but there are a few there which surprise me, which made it into the finals or honorable mentions despite my giving them unexceptional scores.
I don’t think schools are that good at creating strong motivation but it’s true that they provide an overall structure that semi-forces many kids to learn something. However I think we’re at the point that we can offer the equivalent of one-on-one tutoring for every student. “Unstructured learners” can learn directly from books, but better personalized learning along with a supporting social structure can help everyone.
The issue will be how the personalised learning forces kids to complete as much as they can (instead of confusing lack of interest with being stupid and not making them do much). "Motivation" is being used in slightly the wrong way in this essay; many (most?) children don't want to learn whatever the school's trying to teach them, and if given the opportunity to slack off they will (these are the "low structure" kids); school motivates them by forcing them to sit in a classroom and not focus on anything else, but it doesn't make them more motivated in general. With personalised learning, they'll learn at a snail's pace because they don't care about advancing through the material. Or the personalised system will declare that they should be working faster based on [brain scans/genome testing/extrapolation from some kind of reasoning test] and force them to learn at a somewhat arbitrarily faster pace, in which case they may as well be in a classroom.
I hope that personalized learning will not only mean different speed (although that alone is already a huge improvement over status quo), but also different choice of topics.
What I would like to see is some core "everyone needs to know this", followed by tons of optional topics. So that for an average child, 50% of school would be optional topics, and for a gifted child maybe even 90%. (Every year, you would have to gain at least X core credits, and at least Y total credits.) You should totally have specialized topics, such as "classification of dinosaurs".
The advantage of computer teaching is that those topics could *accumulate* over time: maybe the first year there wouldn't be much of a choice, but 10 years later you could have tons of optional topics. (The system should be open, something like SCORM.)
A lot (a majority?) of people don't want to learn anything that could even very loosely be considered education, and if you ask them to pick they'll either look for the easiest option or the easiest option that gets them whatever score they need.
There's also a more abstract point that if there's only some stuff that everyone needs to know, why are we forcing them to learn more? Unless the optional topics include "go and play in the woods," "Starcraft," or "scroll Instagram" you just seem to be trying to force lots of children into something they don't want to do for no great reason.
> if there's only some stuff that everyone needs to know, why are we forcing them to learn more?
The reasons for learning are various. You need some skills to be able to have a job (e.g. reading, writing, basic math, using a computer). You need some skills to be able to take care of yourself and your family (cooking, health care, finance). You need some skills to be a good citizen (parts of history). And finally... some things are interesting, and it seems like a pity when a person living in the 21st century doesn't know them (Earth and other planets, things made out of atoms, living things made out of cells, basically how this entire universe around you works).
Of course, the boundaries are fuzzy, and maybe people would object against the last category in general, but I think that it actually corresponds to some human needs (and if the education does not satisfy it, the people will instead look for pseudoscience and conspiracy theories to fill the vacuum).
A part of this is "this gives a clear benefit to you", and a part of this is "this gives the people around you a benefit of not living with someone who hurts themselves and others by ignorance". Some people are in between, like if you can't get a good job, in short term it hurts you, but in long term it also hurts people around you (they have to pay you money to keep you alive, you can turn to crime, you can vote for a politician who blames the others for your bad luck).
You're making assumptions about the environment 10-20 years from now. Perhaps writing will be obsolete, except for niche groups. Perhaps AI will take what you say, and convert it into an "elegant" speech.
This is the same problem at learning to do a trade, only generalized. There are very few blacksmiths anymore.
Personally, I've almost given up predicting what people should learn to do, so perhaps what they should learn is what they want to learn. But also perhaps not. I still find arithmetic useful, even though I was never very good at it. (I was much better at algebra than at arithmetic...but unless you count programming as algebra, I haven't used it in decades.) The only thing I'm relatively certain people should learn is how to get along with other people.
But that's all stuff that, for the sake of argument, everyone needs to know. It's the "pick between these n options" stuff where it seems odd that "none" can't be a choice.
The reason that young people are told to learn lots and lots of things is that voters or legislators or "educational professionals" believe they are things that "everyone should know".
Elementary school is a combination of basic skills (readin', writin', and "rithmetic) and fun things (whales!). Middle and high school tends to be simpler versions of college courses, because of course everyone should be prepared for college.
"Your government lies to you" is a very important thing that everyone should know. School won't teach it, though (we used to teach this, it was effective at inspiring better critical thinking).
Does it matter that someone wrote a nobel prize winning paper on World of Warcraft?
The "optional topics" can very well include "video editing" and other skills to "become an influencer" (how to shake your tits, maybe?). "A practical guide to lockpicking" (as a life skill) could also be included.
"How to game design" is probably going to get more people interested in economics and human behavior. Not that every gamer would take it.
And here we have a "big source of problems" -- school doesn't want to teach what kids natively want to learn. School has to try to coerce, bribe and brainwash kids into wanting to learn topics that are relatively unnatural.
Motivation is the parent's job, not the school's. If a kid doesn't want to learn then he's probably gonna have a bad life. You'll do more net harm wasting bureaucratic resources trying to reach that kid than you will by shoving him out of the way so the smart kids can learn.
You're talking about the vast majority here, would you prefer them to get no education at all, the whole school system dedicated to the 5%? Can't we do it the other way around: a school system for the majority and one-on-one tutoring or online learning for the motivated 5%?
The vast majority already don't get any education at all. I say we stop pretending that they are. Total government spending on education is in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars per year, and most of that is on maintaining the kabuki theater that everyone can learn. Just accept that it's not reasonable to have our current education goals. Optimize for the top 20% because that's who makes the economy go. The rest can be tracked into low-cost high-efficiency warehouses where modest but achievable goals can be hit: learn to read, basic arithmetic, some cultural indoctrination, and maybe teach a trade. Everything else is just a waste of taxpayer dollars in my view.
You are almost entirely wrong that the top 20% is what makes the economy go. Our economy is built on the backs of relatively cheap educated workers. Schools do such a good job of this that these people are invisible to you. But read back to the post-war period when all this stuff was booming -- it wasn't being taken for granted then.
That may have been true in 1950, but in my view part of the reason for the GDP/median wage decoupling in the 70's is that it's increasingly not true. We have an increasingly complex economy and fewer and fewer people can meaningfully contribute to it. I actually think that 20% figure is generous: it's the entrepreneurs and innovators in the top 5% (or 1%) who really matter and that is reflected in the increased share of total wealth that they now hold relative to 1970. The "backs of relatively cheap educated workers" are actually the other 15% of the top 20. Below the top 20% or so and you're not actually dealing with knowledge workers. They may have a mediocre college degree but they're essentially just moving boxes around, answering telephones, filing paperwork, etc. They actually don't need the education, it's simply an aspirational status marker. That's why real salaries for non-STEM degree holders haven't really moved in 40 years.
> Our economy is built on the backs of relatively cheap educated workers. Schools do such a good job of this that these people are invisible to you. But read back to the post-war period when all this stuff was booming
Maybe in the pre-war period. I read some early 20th century math textbooks as part of a discussion of what exactly "new math" meant. And they are of interest to the modern reader, mostly because of their explicit positioning as a way for the adult reader to improve his life by developing a salable skill. (That skill being basic arithmetic - addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.) The idea is 𝗻𝗼𝘁 that you buy the book so you can force a child to read it. The idea is that you are a breadwinner with a terrible job, and you hope to get a better job by working your way through a book you purchased at the store.
The cheap "educated" workers of today aren't using any skills that are taught after 5th grade. Why do we want them to stay in school past the point where they can write and add?
I think the 20% number is being generous here. Economic growth comes from innovation and technology driven by the top of the top and (to Michael's point) implemented by the majority who need to be able to read, write, do sums and carry out the countless manual and interactive tasks with a smile.
Agreed. My point is that the white-collar hoi polloi below the top 20% don't need any real educational training apart from basic literacy and numeracy, and that can be attained much more efficiently than it is now.
That's only true if you assume the existing economy is continuing. It's true that the part that contributes to economic growth is small. 20% is probably a wild overestimate, depending on how you measure it. But that growth can only exist on the back of the existing economy. Which depends on almost every else.
This is a midwit idea. Assume that most of the jobs of the 20% can be effectively done by AI. Now, how do you get geniuses out of the "smart" kids? You don't, most of them are very, very dumb -- and very invested in not getting smarter.
15yo US public school students have about a 65% literacy rate judging by the NAEP. If you have high expectations you can say that's terrible in all sorts of ways, but I don't think it's really defensible that absent schooling those numbers would be a lot lower.
I don't know what your mental model is where the top 20% "makes the economy go," but it's very difficult to do anything without a literate workforce (especially as literacy is a prerequisite to engage with computer systems).
Again, that's the wrong sort of motivation. This isn't "make the child have the characteristic of being motivated," it's "at this moment get the child to be doing something;" loosely, it's the difference between filling up your car and towing it. Unless the plan is to have parents come to school and stand over their children, it can't be the parents' job.
I would argue that the ability to engage in difficult, goal-directed behavior is a basic life skill. That absolutely is the responsibility of the parents. It's their job to impose long-run consequences on a child's failure to fulfill its responsibilities. That's the basic feedback loop that educates a child's character. "If I don't learn this material then I don't get my iPad for the next month ... I'd better work hard." The school's job is to provide a well thought-out educational framework. The parent's job is to make sure the child engages with it. Schools understand education, parents understand their children. It only makes sense to assign each party the task that they're most suited to.
Presumably the parents won't do it, because they themselves aren't equipped to engage in difficult, goal directed behaviour (of which instilling traits in your children is an example). I don't see what the issue is with schools trying to do this and get more out of students and making up for deficiency in the parents. Putting aside the question of whether character is trainable or simply genetic, making people more productive on the margins seems to be a straightforward positive; treating it as some kind of moral lesson about the parents seems pointless.
> I don't see what the issue is with schools trying to do this and get more out of students
The issue is that, in my view, they're incapable of doing that except for the types of students for whom it's largely unnecessary (i.e. moderately high IQ students). Tasking schools with solving an unsolvable problem is the WAR IS PEACE of education policy. It does nothing but a) hand them the political license to request funding increases in perpetuity and b) prevent society from having the difficult but potentially-productive debate about what to do with the vast majority of essentially-uneducable people.
The post-industrial economy has been running away from most people for 50 years now and we've been in deep political denial about that fact for almost as long. We paper it over with high-minded nonsense like "no child left behind", "college is for everyone", or with employment laws that make it very difficult to fire useless white collar workers. In my view the coming tsunami of AI-induced white collar unemployment will soon bring that denial into unavoidable contact with reality and the wake-up call will be very nasty indeed. It might have been lessened had we been able to have the uncomfortable debates all the while.
It really needs both parties. It can't JUST be the school's job, but it also can't JUST be the parent's job. Ideally it would also include motivation by some kids in the grade above them. (But how to keep that from being abusive?)
I think the bigger problem with older children motivating younger children is how you motivate the older children to motivate the younger children. It's nice if you've got it started, but whatever you can use to bootstrap it would probably be better applied directly to the younger children.
This is a useful distinction between "make the child have the characteristic of being motivated" and "at this moment get the child to be doing something."
I don't think I had much executive function/internal locus of control/intrinsic motivation until I moved out of my parents' house at age 26 after graduate school. I want to foster in my kids that characteristic of being motivated much earlier than I got it, but my expectations are modest due to my own experience.
I am willing and able to homeschool my kids in theory. But in practice, I don't think I will ever homeschool my oldest (currently about to start second grade). He has even less executive function and working memory than I did as a kid. It's a struggle to even get him to put on his shoes. I have enough chores and other directives at home to be the bad cop for that I prefer to outsource the academic bad copping to a teacher. Sure, I still teach him a lot - e.g. we do fractions for fun while cooking together - but I prefer not to be responsible for bringing him up to standards with e.g. handwriting. That's what my tax dollars are for.
I was homeschooled through seventh grade, and in retrospect I think it had a negative effect on my relationship with my mother, for the same reason. She had to constantly bug me to do my schoolwork.
It's better for kids to resent their teachers than their parents.
Fortunately, despite being an odd kid like I was, and despite being academically way ahead of his classmates, my oldest seems to enjoy having the chance to fit in in a group environment with clear expectations. Great! Off to school you go.
I mourn the time he's wasting in school, but I think he'd waste the entire family's time if we had to try to motivate him in a homeschool setting.
My secondborn, on the other hand, may not be as academically minded as the first, but he procrastinates less, and he doesn't like large groups of kids. I'm seriously considering homeschooling him for kindergarten.
Schools are very, very bad at creating strong motivation. We don't kill children who fail arithmetic, do we? The change in illiteracy rates is due to the "strong motivation" that cellphones (and computers in general) give to learning a Life Skill (reading/writing).
I was tripped up by that too in an otherwise very polished review. After learning the term, I decided maybe in some contexts I'm a low-structure learner, such as this book review contest. I hadn't read this review earlier; in fact I hadn't even noticed it; in fact I read only a handful of the reviews; in fact I could scarcely get through glancing at the titles of the reviews because the structure of the Google doc was a bit too low for me. Now I've read it precisely because it was presented for all to read, today's assignment. I don't have much to say on the subject, but will get enjoyment out of the responses others in "the class" share.
Interestingly, school itself did not function this way for me.
Lack of definitions is a weak point of this essay.
I found the very concept of “high-structure learners” to be gerrymandered. If anything, it seems to describe “students who use a lot of school resources for whatever reason” rather than a group with other qualities in common.
High-structure learners are described thusly:
A) “Some will be diagnosed with dyslexia, though a strong course of synthetic phonics will reduce that number.”
B) “The high-structure learner has a hard time. They’re the student showing up to office hours all the time, using the tutoring center, using all the support they can find.”
C) “And then high-structure learners, who are in the habit of avoiding schoolwork whenever they can.”
Those three groups of people use high amounts of different school resources for different reasons.
People with dyslexia come in a variety of levels of IQ, executive function, and motivation. It's not school motivational structure they need so much as, apparently, phonics and other resources.
People who show up to office hours, use the tutoring center, and use all the support they can find are highly motivated and organized, whatever else may be said about them. In this example they're also struggling with the difficulty of the material.
People “who are in the habit of avoiding schoolwork whenever they can” are the opposite of the second group above. They may or may not be smart, but they're severely unmotivated and possibly disorganized.
Grouping them all together as “high-structure learners” doesn't seem to be a very useful categorization for purposes other than “hey, we need to budget for some fraction of a specialist for this student.”
Honestly, I think smart students with typical motivation or organizational skills would also benefit from more school resources. They just aren't allocated as many because they can pass standards without them. And passing standards seems to be the primary metric of school success.
The reason the 10th percentile IQ uses more school resources than the 90th percentile is a supply-side decision. The reason is that we've decided that supporting the 10th percentile to reach their potential is more important or tractable than supporting the 90th percentile to reach their potential.
Naming a group based on how many resources they are given by the system should be kept in perspective as a category that exists only after that resource allocation, not beforehand as a natural category. It doesn't cut reality at the joints, it describes a school policy.
I think your assumptions are wrong. In my experience, high performing students are given far more resources than less performing ones, esp. if between schools differences are taken into account. From the teacher's perspective, probably most attention goes to the students that answer the most questions during lecture.
Based on my own experiences, I think the underlying thread is that there is a body of students who are dis-incentivized by low structure, and work harder and perform better when more structure is present. The reasons why they act this way may vary, but the end result is very similar.
By the way, one assumption that I would like to see explored is that high structure students are necessarily lower performing. They are less cost-efficient from society's perspective, but I can think of no reason why a high structure student couldn't out-perform everyone else if the structure they need is provided.
I think this was great read after the previous review. I don't know if the order was intentional or not, but the contrast makes it a perfect companion.
> You might think that we’ve found the solution to tracking. We just need to get all the no- and low-structure learners together and let them move much faster. Here’s the issue. The no-structure learners will always be bored, as long as we are committed to putting them into classrooms where everyone learns the same thing. And those classrooms where everyone learns the same thing are exactly what the low-structure learners need. As soon as you create a higher track there will be a ton of demand for it. Parents will insist that their kid join. And as it grows, it won’t be able to accelerate very quickly. You still need the structure of a classroom where everyone is learning the same thing, and that just isn’t a very efficient way to teach.
I think this might be the fate of every innovative school that tries to serve the unstructured learners. As a school suited for the top 5% of unstructured learners starts attracting a more general student body, largely due to its success at producing high-performing students, it will be forced to adopt more generalized structured learning to accommodate for those new students. Administrators will justify every step as simply adjusting their teaching style and structure to work for larger groups, and at the end of the day you end up with a different, but not revolutionarily different structure to what was already available in the school market.
Maybe the only solution is an eternal pattern of innovation --> decay --> innovation. At least it gives us something interesting and difficult to worry about! Or maybe AI will genuinely be transformative, allowing for extremely tailored learning that identifies what style works for each student, and gives them more of that. Such a thing would only be possible by throwing large amounts of resources at the problem, which is impracticable now.
This doesn't pass the sniff test for me - Olympiad winners are almost all universally no structure learners, yet they almost all find university (an environment where everyone in a class learns the same thing) much better than high school. They aren't bored, so long as the material being learned is appropriately challenging.
What stops schools from refusing to lower their standards, at least if they’re private and not dependent on government handouts? Why couldn’t they keep on having the same insane entrance requirements and hardcore “get X on the next exam or you’re out” policies for decades in a row?
Anecdotally, Montessori motivated my children much better than public schools have. In Montessori, in particular, children don't all learn the same things. They are encouraged to work on the things that they want to. All children are taught the same works, but what children work on are largely self-motivated. This worked quite well for us, and also worked very well for the parents that I speak to for their children.
It would be valuable if you could describe in more detail how the Montessori system works (in practice, that is). My first question is what is the student/teacher ratio? It seems intuitively plausible that if a student gets plenty of attention from a teacher constantly assessing what the student is motivated about right now, and carefully feeds them all of the curriculum over time, that would work well. But it wouldn't scale.
There’s a lot of information online and I’m not an expert. (Also any school can call itself Montessori so likely a wide range in what schools actually do). Relatively large classes, with (usually) one teacher and often one assistant, student ages span three grades. The room is full of different ‘work’, and the children are allowed to choose what they do but only after they have been trained how to use/do a particular piece of work. Each piece of work often has different levels, which the kids progress through. (Search Montessori beads for an example of math work). Older children often teach younger children how to use certain pieces of work. I think lots of folks think that Montessori students have more freedom than they do — it’s a highly structured environment that nonetheless allows the children to make decisions for themselves within that structure. Lots of emphasis on using and putting away the work in a prescribed way. Like most private schools it ends up being very selective in who attends and who teaches. I also don’t know anything about how it operates past third grade (US). Most Montessori schools stop at third grade or earlier. My sense is that it works well for no, low, and high structure students described in this review because it is in a classroom with lots of structure.
There is such thing as certified Montessori school, but most "Montessori schools" out there are not.
> Older children often teach younger children how to use certain pieces of work.
This is one of the crucial components missing from traditional schools. Kids can teach each other... that is, if you allow them. Some older kids will be happy to gain status by teaching the younger ones, and many younger ones will be happy to get attention from the older ones.
Traditional school bans this, and then people complain about the ratio of teachers to students. Well, it's the school system that made the ratio artificially low in the first place! Sometimes the easiest way to get out of the hole is to stop digging.
I think the obvious question is, if you delegate teaching to people who are only limitedly accountable to you, how do you ensure it's happening properly? I vaguely recall that the biggest obstacle is that supervision costs make it fail to save teacher attention on net.
One possibility is to alternate classes taught by a teacher with classes taught by older students (kinda like at university: professor and assistants). The teacher will notice if the kids keep getting something wrong.
You could also alternate the older students, so that if one explains something incorrectly, the other has an opportunity to fix it.
A different possible approach is to have computer exams that ask you whether you have received instruction from another student. If you pass the exam correctly, the other student also gets a small reward. But if many students taught by the same student keep making the same errors, the question is added to older student's spaced repetition schedule.
Mmpfh. I was modelling this as (an) older student(s) teaching a very small group of younger students. Small group dynamics are much better for learning. Say one or two older students and four or five younger students. Sort of a structured kid gang.
I think it would be a function of practice, with students getting better at it the more times they get to do it. After all, we face the same issue with the teachers themselves, and we address that by training teacher very carefully, and adhering to standards. A school could do the same thing with it's students.
"it won't scale" is a bad argument, to me, and dismisses.the opportunity to solve a problem. The teacher:student ratio is about 1:12 at the lower elementary classroom my son thrived in. In his public school it's about 1:20.
Strongly agree with this comment as I was thinking of my children’s Montessori experience while reading this review. I would add, though, that Montessori is highly structured it’s just that much of the structure is hidden from the children and done in a way that allows the children to work independently and to choose (within in a carefully designed structure) what to work on and when.
Yeah, maybe this was one of the iterative improvements possible within the well-structured school environment. We just need to teach public schools how to structure the learning in slightly different ways. Encouraging high agency is definitely a goal, not just motivation while in the classroom.
I'm skeptical if only bc Montessori is significantly more popular for 3-6 year olds than teenagers. If teenagers were more suited for it, I suspect this would have shown up already in the existing market for schools.
It just seemed to me that apart from shop or atuomotive class or home ec, the interior of a school - [and my fairly brutalist in effect if not in design middle and high schools dated from the advent of central air-conditioning in the South so had virtually no windows, and none in many classrooms, which I admit confounds the issue for me] - is not a great way to interact with or learn about the real physical world, nor about one's interests and possible aptitudes within it.
It seems to me that a high school chemistry or physics lab -- even a windowless one -- is a vastly better way to learn about the real physical world than what you seem to be envisioning.
College distorts the market - Montessori-esque high schools exist, like North Star, but parents want their high schooler to go somewhere that will get them into a good college, and being an early adopter of a Montessori high school presents a big risk.
I think the best model for teenagers is not Montessori, but paramilitary organizations, like Scouting (without the baggage). Put the high performing students in charge of project teams, after training them well (much like they will experience in real life in any corporate setting). Above them, the highest performing students are in charge of the project team leaders. This almost exactly reverses the typical pecking order in high school, which is probably a feature.
Montessori schools have a high selection effect. They tend to end up with a lot of the no-structure and low-structure learners, because those are the students who succeed in that sort of environment. High-structure learners are less likely to be enrolled in a Montessori school, and less likely to stay once enrolled.
Very possible. Could the "gifted" program at school be cross-grade, and more like Montessori, then? The gifted programs I know of still segregate by grade, and the one for my oldest son is even more isolating (they are given study materials without even changing their classroom)
My child is self motivated. At public school, he is not motivated. At Montessori he was. This is a sample size of 1 so don't take it super seriously, but..
When I talk to other parents, they have similar great differentiated experiences with their children in Montessori. It's a great structured environment that teaches agency and independence. Highly recommend if you can do it.
I suspect public schools can learn at least something from Montessori schools.
Thanks for posting this, it helped me notice my obviously-false assumption that Montessori schools are full of kids that were highly motivated when they came in. Do you have a sense of whether the children there tended to enjoy learning before they started, vs if they were already fairly motivated but bored at normal schools?
Anectotally (or at least not verified), Montessori learners are the most satisfied/happy in life vs. "traditional schooling" the ones with the most academic (?) success. My assumption cause the former learn a joy of learning and are engaging in work self-directed and intrinsically motivated vs. the latter more experience in assessment-/testing "mastery"/ access to top tier higher education etc.
FYI Heres a o3-pro generated quick n dirty comparison of the "school-" vs. "alpha school" articles whoever is interested to compare these 2 reviews:
- @Scott Alexander: Is there a Montessori-/ Autonomy-supportive school review in the pipeline to complement the previous two "teaching-centered/explicit instruction" and the "21st century entrepreneurial-, tech-/building-centered" progressive schools?
- Do we have any evidence regarding longerterm outcomes like "performance/success" rate (whatever the latter means) and "joy of/ learning of learning competence/rate"?
- What ratio of priority would you give both criteria? Any differences between primary and secondary? e.g primare joy of learning vs. secondary acaemic success? the other way round? anything I forgot?
- Could the authors of both articles share some sort of reflection to which extent each school is suitable (pro and cons) for curious parents/students (higher education educated parents (?) that refelct the demographics of readers of ACX that might have more cultural, academic and economic capital and invest more in learning with "extracurricular child-led or parent coordinated learning" outside school vs. less educated families with less socio-economic capital for less enriching experiences outside school that public schools are catering for, too? so basically differences in target group?
- How would they (recommend to) complement the respective learning fields that their school are not catering to and deprioritizing? Humanities etc Alpha school vs. autonomy-supportive/ problembased/ entrepreneurial/ makerslab/ STEM learning the respective school is deprioritizing?
- How would they rate/what importance would they give "social capital/resources" the schools student body/ classmates/ peers represent for the kids? (depending on whats the goal is of the repsective peers they would be surrounded with)
- Whats each authors / readers vision of learning & education for their kids or at least so far what they have learned what would they consider their personal "success criteria" to choose a school for an enriching education journey"?
Also curious how the readers and commenters would define what constitutes a good school to them? What would be the criteria they would use for this school choice dilemma or review of a school?
I appreciate this review, but there were a whole lot of places where it was just stated that some particular intervention can't be done or won't work without any evidence. I noticed this most strongly about tracking. Tracking apparently doesn't work or can't be done...until high school I guess where it is much more common (and apparently works/is a good thing?)
This feels to me like someone working backwards from a conclusion and not actually being interested in solving the problems that even they admit exist in todays schools.
It's an interesting reflection to the alpha school review which was incredibly positive, to the point of probably overselling. I see these two reivews as the two sides of the school debate coin.
One side is convinced that large improvements are everywhere and ripe for the taking, and the other side things that improvements are the next thing to impossible.
Many of those points do have links attached. E.g., in regard to tracking, the text is "In the US this is typically called tracking or ability grouping. It’s a complex and controversial topic. The research base is hard to read because there are a lot of ideologically motivated researchers who are either for or against tracking and want to see the evidence a certain way. But the biggest theme in the research is that the effects are small. There are plenty of meta-analyses that find an effect near zero (here’s one example)." and the link is https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/00346543221100850
The problem is that the review isn't a literature review, it's pitching a thesis on why school has to be set up the way it is, and is trying to persuade readers of this by telling an epistemically-satisfying story that they can internalize. It does some parts of this successfully, but when it comes time to explain why a tracking-based system doesn't work, it instead retreats to throwing out a citation to a meta-analysis that says tracking in practice doesn't currently shift test scores much. But it doesn't really explain *why* that's the case (our social science isn't yet good enough to answer that with much confidence), and certainly doesn't make convincingly clear why its thesis implies that tracked classrooms can't work, because it's not obvious why they can't provide peer motivation.
It appears to be an entire full-length book; I don't think anyone is going to read it on the strength of a blog comment that doesn't provide context. Is there perhaps a good summary available?
> If a few of those 100 classrooms from our observation thought experiment were gifted schools or schools with an entrance exam, you might be surprised by what you see. They would be doing more advanced work than peers in regular schools, absolutely. But often only by a year or two. You’d see all the same inefficiencies of students all learning the same thing at the same pace.
Imagine a car manufacturer saying "We tried something new, but it only made our cars about 10% more fuel-efficient. They'll still contribute to global warming and to accidents. What a failure!"
Or imagine a programmer saying "I managed to increase performance by 10%, but it's still too slow. This proves that making it fast enough isn't possible so I'm going to undo my changes."
Or image a hospital saying "This new drug did increase chemotherapy success rate, but only by 10% or so. Lots of people still die of cancer. This clearly isn't the solution."
Crazy, yeah? So why does this sort of explanation always seem to pass muster in education?
> Or imagine a programmer saying "I managed to increase performance by 10%, but it's still too slow. This proves that making it fast enough isn't possible so I'm going to undo my changes."
That is definitely something that happens - I've done it myself. If you need a 10x improvement, 10% may as well be nothing and you're going to have to give up and try a different approach anyway. Or there may be high costs to the 10% improvement that outweigh the benefits (e.g. the 10% improvement often comes at the cost of much more complicated and difficult-to-maintain code or reductions in functionality).
Sure, I'm a programmer too so I know about that sort of thing. We'd need a 10x speed up if kids were dying of old age before learning to read. Or if we wanted 2nd graders to be doing calculus.
Because of the cost differential. Gifted schools are significantly more expensive per user than public ones (on the order of 10x the price or higher). The results are out of proportion to the cost.
Somehow I missed the "gifted schools" bit and thought it was talking about class splits like the honors track in my low-income neighborhood's high school, which was about a year or two ahead of the regular track in each subject by the end of senior year.
The problem with tracking is that it is poorly defined with respect to what it's supposed to accomplish. As the writer mentioned, the public and parents ask two incompatible goals of public schools: Improve the performance of all students vs. provide my children with a competitive advantage. Tracking is a policy that physically separates students by ability, thereby setting up an opportunity to provide those different groups of students with different resources (otherwise why do it?). Those members of the public and parents who support improving the performance of all students will have little reason to support tracking at all. Parents of low performing students will support tracking if it results in more resources being directed toward their children, parents of high performing students will support tracking if it does the reverse. So the political polarization is pretty much inherent in the nature of tracking itself.
New idea for a startup: instead of training AI to be great at teaching kids, train the AI to be great at motivating kids to learn. Make it create a psychological profile on every student, and do whatever it takes to convince the kid to learn. Some kids will be paid a dollar for every book they read, some kids will be put through stimulating educational games, some kids will be shamed into conformity, some kids will be put against each other to compete for high scores, some kids will be spanked by a robot.
I think the essay strongly implied that AI could never be great at motivating low-structure and high-structure kids. They need the presence of peers doing the same thing.
In other words, "personalized learning" just won't work for most young people.
The essay acknowledged that 1:1 tutoring works, it just didn't dwell on that because you obviously can't do it for every student if the tutors have to be trained humans. Human-level AI could change that.
Maybe I'm assuming too much but it seemed to me that he thought "human-level AI" could never work as well as a "trained human" because, well, it just isn't human. There's something about an actual person that is necessary. I suppose I'm reading between the lines of passages like this:
"One form of learning that has been shown to be particularly effective is deliberate practice. Deliberate practice involves being pushed outside of your comfort zone, focusing on specific, concrete goals to improve performance, and getting consistent feedback. One common characteristic of deliberate practice is that it isn’t particularly fun. Most contexts where deliberate practice is common, like sports and music training, involve expert, individualized coaching. The coach is mostly there for motivation. The coach does other things as well, but the most important thing a coach can do is motivate you to train. Deliberate practice isn’t common in school learning, but it’s a good reminder that motivation is the key to lots of forms of learning in and out of school. Learning isn’t always going to be a ton of fun. In the absence of one-on-one tutoring for every student, conformity is the best tool we have to create the motivation necessary for learning."
I doubt this is because motivation requires learning from someone with an immaterial soul. It seems more likely to be something like, a human tutor actually pays attention to whether you're learning or just tuning them out, and can respond accordingly. Digital learning systems that have been deployed at scale thus far can't do this.
So, given -- for the sake of argument -- an AI that has eyes, and can walk around, and even spank the child. You don't think it could motivate your child, even with fire or bullets?
That's pretty much what I was thinking. A human can and eventually will tell you "Don't waste my time", while an AI can't do that convincingly.
I suspect this is also why coaching works to the extent it does. Both that the coach will say "Don't waste my time" and that you will get cut from the team if you do.
I'd also think that a human tutor can better serve as a model of behavior in a way an AI can't. A human child can aspire to be as good as or surpass their human coach, not as easy for their AI one. Operating words here "not as easy," not saying it's night and day or impossible.
It's not the immaterial soul that matters. Human coaches can do so many things that today's llms can't; Be confrontational, offer consequences, get their own data and not just rely on the students account of things, ask the student to come back if they walk away from the keyboard.
I could see ai doing all that at some point but it's very different from today's llms
Until we make big step forwards in agency an ai tutor is very similar to a mooc from a structure standpoint. It can deliver interesting, ability relevant, interest relevant material... But only if the student chooses to engage
This doesn't pass the sniff test: plenty of games use techniques that do not require 1:1 human attention or even good AI, such as randomized rewards and careful operant conditioning to get kids hooked even in an absence of peers doing the same thing.
And you can have an environment of peers doing the "same thing" (self-paced school) even though each may be working at a different level and pace.
You and I have different noses :) I completely agree that games do this. The question is whether the same things will work for school. So far, no one has been able to make it happen. I very strongly suspect that this is because playing a game whose reason for being is enjoyment is very different than playing a game whose reason for being is teaching you something you probably aren't very interested in. That describes most school subjects for most young people.
Even video games themselves vary widely in how well they can "get kids hooked". Many come on to the market and sell poorly and lose money.
I'm not a gamer but is grind cutting down 1000 trees to get the xp needed to get the next level up in tree cutting skill any more intrinsically exciting then grinding 1000 flash cards to get to the next level in Spanish vocab. My impression was that most gamers don't find those bits of the game fun but still do them
My nose is willing to be retrained when some organization can actually make educational software that young people willingly spend as much time on as a video game they like.
There was an award winning STD game a while back...
Mavis Beacon was something I really liked as a kid (the game part of it, with the windshield and spats).
A friend of mine learned driving from racing games.
Yes, kids will willingly spend time on educational software (particularly if you're willing to extend it to "Papers Please" and other forms of "teaching critical thinking" via "those facts don't add up.").
Problem: Cutting 1000 video trees doesn't require any learning. Now, if you had to learn which trees to cut, when and where it was best to cut them, and advanced techniques to cut down so many trees....
How about Solus-like genre, where you try to beat an enemy 100 times, and have to learn his every trick, memorize every pattern, and find your strategy? I mean, they're not everyone's cup of tea, but they are HUGELY popular (much more so than I would have expected, having a very low tolerance for any kind of repetitiveness myself). Of course, that's not the same thing as learning to do math, but it's not entirely unlike learning to play an instrument, for example - a bit of memorization, a bit of muscle memory.
Hasn't alpha school been able to make it work with "GT bucks"? I think it could be even more effective with the brightly colored gambling mechanics/lootboxes that less ethically concerned gaming companies use. Alpha school's implementation appears to be a compromise between what is maximally effective (brightly colored hyperstimulating loot boxes, odd prices which always leave you with a non-trivial amount of the virtual currency as "change", etc) and what appeals to the notions of the parents (keep in mind how bribery of any kind is less popular than corporal punishment).
We will have to make some radically retrained LLM's if we want to be able to shout at the kids. But I guess that anyway is something we need to teach them before they can become middle managers. Might need to unlearn the spanking bit from the manager bots, though...
Do NOT do this. Children will be sent to school-as-gulag, and if they fail, ritually humiliated... if they really fail, they may not return in the same shape as when they left.
(I mean, seriously. It's possible to teach a sub-6-month old child not to cry. That's... motivated teaching, by necessity).
If there was a path by which AI could be trained to boost motivation, we would be flourishing well beyond schools. The human condition inasmuch as I’ve observed it is that most people aren’t motivated most of the time-whether adult or child. Possessing consistent daily motivation is a small miracle fueled by disposition and aligning “natural interest” with “available possibilities” and “willingness to struggle.”
Can AI make us more willing to struggle? So far, it seems more the opposite.
One problem is that self-determination is highly motivating. Which disincentivizes listening to the instructions some authority figure wants you to follow...
To be a bit more specific and ambitious, make that startup cultivate intrinsic motivation. This is most likely a multi-stage process that requires reinforcement and personalization over months or years, but you could start seeing progress much sooner.
The only way to do this is via inventing a significantly improved version of Adderall that actually targeted “motivation” instead of “focus” or perhaps via building nanobots that would rewire human brains to be more productive. No amount of text on a screen could make one particularly productive, unfortunately - unless enforced by real world consequences for non compliance, aka “school”.
That assumes we know what motivates individual students (or human beings in general). I know of no research to support that assumption. You could try things at random, I suppose, but that seems inefficient. Otherwise, I know of no "General Theory" of motivation that predicts individual variation.
Really interesting article. The motivation issue is really what things boil down to when you look at any content online about learning, beit coding, math, music, art, language... the most popular videos on YouTube are all about issues with *sticking with it*, with not *picking up your phone again* instead of doing the things you want to learn.
I don't think learning most things is very difficult if you genuinely put two hours a day of some combination of actual concentrated practice (doing the thing) and study (learning why you still suck at the thing and what you're doing wrong).
There are some smaller issues with plateauing / dunning kruger if you do nothing but practice and zero study-- you end up in the Tim Buckley zone, famous webcomic artist who copy pasted the same lazy face onto all of his characters for like a decade. I think webcomic artists so often plateau in ways that are easily lampooned because they are stuck on a regular schedule to keep their fans happy, and they already have a dripfeed of people telling them with every update that they're already wonderful and don't need to improve.
If you do nothing but study, you have the 'swimming on a tatami mat' issue, you can watch a thousand hours of painting theory videos and not get any better at painting.
(Also, language learning is different and doesn't work how most people think, you need to spend like 80% staring at target-language subtitled telenovelas or anime you can barely understand, or scraping through easy reader books aimed at toddlers, and you have to give these boring activities as close to your full attention as possible for hundreds of hours, so that your brain builds an intuitive understanding of how the language sounds and works in normal situations.)
But as long as you pay mind to those potential pitfalls, **the big big big issue is motivation.** It's *getting* that 2 hours a day of study and practice.
And the only silver bullet I'm aware of, when it comes to motivation, is having a desperate *need* to learn something, a 'sink or swim' type situation where you literally have no other option but to do it (I think this is the environment that Tiger Moms try to cultivate for their kids, and it obviously often backfires when they get older and realize that everything is made up and the points don't matter).
Language learners do this without realizing it as kids when they grow up in a new country, or want to interact with the majority English speaking Internet and just learn by necessity as they spend hundreds and then thousands of hours in that environment.
If you don't have that desperate *need*, then the only other solution is to make sure you have a significant amount of tolerance for frustration and feeling 'low status' because you can't draw a circle or watch an episode of Crayon Shin Chan (think Japanese caillou but funnier and dirtier - yes, it is a kids show) without English subtitles, and make a real serious habit, OR, as the review describes, find yourself a group of like minded peers around your skill level and stick to them like glue, keeping each other accountable.
Otherwise... learning is fucking hard. We've got phones and porn and video games, why would you spend 2 hours a day fucking around in Blender or drawing badly or watching anime you can't understand, making tiny incremental progress towards some imagined goal 10,000 hours in the future that won't feel anything like you imagine it will, once you actually get there?
We tell people, over and over again, that it's okay to just be a lump. to not be creative, to not do new things.
We can hold each other to higher standards, "What did you create today?" ("I worked out how two plot threads were going to collide, and it's going to be great!")
Interesting that despite coming from almost exactly the opposite perspective as the Alpha school review, they actually have the same conclusion—that secretly the key to school is motivating students. I liked the distinction between high-, low-, and no-structure learners. I’m definitely a low-structure learner, who has always kind of beaten myself up about not being a no-structure learner. Put me in any kind of class and I will do all the assignments and quickly learn the material. But when I try to learn things on my own from pure interest I always peter out after a few weeks at most. The times I’ve had success have usually been when I signed up for an actual class with teachers and other students. After reading this review, I feel like I need to just accept this about myself and sign up for more classes when I want to learn things.
I'm guessing that you mean that students could cheat with ChatGPT, and that would remove the incentive to learn the material? If I'm understanding the Alpha school approach properly, I don't think that cheating that way would be easy. ( _Is_ that what you mean? ) If I'm understanding the Alpha approach correctly, (setting aside the home school option), there were very frequent quizzes in the classroom, where cheating would require having access to to the LLM in the middle of a quiz. If the kids are required to put away their phones during the school day, and not fire up an LLM tab in the middle of a lesson+test, this should be feasible to prevent.
I mean it in the narrow sense: The students would use ChatGpt to do the homework which we were paying them for. Then they would fail the subsequent tests.
Of course we could try to pay them for doing well on tests, but that is a much much harder thing to pull off.
>Alpha schools have their own in-house currency. Alpha has “Alpha bucks”; GT School has “GT bucks”. My understanding is that they work a little differently on each campus, but the overall philosophy is the same. This review will focus on the details of the GT system since it is what I know best.
>If the students complete their 2-hour learning “minimums” each day they earn about 10 GT Bucks. They get additional bonuses for every lesson they complete beyond their minimums. They also get a bonus if they finish their minimums within the scheduled time (vs going home and doing them later), additional bonuses if the entire class completes their minimums during the allotted time, and weekly bonuses for hitting longer term targets.
>They only get credit if they both complete their lessons AND get 80% or higher on the problem sets within the lesson. If they get 79% they still move on (with the questions they missed coming back later for review), but they don’t get the GT bucks associated with the lesson (this stops gaming where the kids rush through the lessons just to get “bucks”)
The fine-grained, prompt, pay for the testing built into the problem sets in the lessons looks sensible to me (and this is a place where their software helps). Do you see a stumbling block here?
Exactly, I believe Alpha might be pulling this off, but they have also invested a lot of work in refining their methods.
Also, the stumbling block they will meet once they try to scale is slow students realizing that they are waaaay poorer than the fast students even though they work just as hard. I am willing to bet 50 Alpha Bucks that an immediate effect of this will be a large share of students self-handicapping and refusing to engage in the alpha economy. It is better to be a rebel outside the system than an underpaid worker inside it.
> they actually have the same conclusion—that secretly the key to school is motivating students
The difference is that the Alpha school review concludes that kids should be motivated by learning opportunities and rewards, while this review concludes that we need to sacrifice the learning opportunities of the no-structure learners to motivate the high-structure learners by their presence. The effect on high-structure students may be comparable, but the effects on no-structure students are dramatically different.
Yup! And, bluntly, the no-structure students are _important_ (making the assumption that AI doesn't totally take over). They aren't _all_ of the future decision-makers, nor are _all_ future decision-makers no-structure students, but I expect there to be a lot of overlap, and, for our society as a whole, it help a lot if future decision-makers are well-informed.
My friend the "no structure" learner was very afraid as a child, that his parents would sell his house for a handful of beans. This led him to acquire money and jobs at what most people would call an "alarming rate" for a child.
Many Thanks! I'm not following how this ties in to the previous comments. I'm guessing that maybe you are making the point that self-motivated ("no structure") learners can still conclude unrealistic things, and that additional learning does not solve all problems???
But is it good for all of our decision-makers to reach adulthood having never operated in a structured environment, or been exposed to low or high structure learners?
We don’t (and can’t) live in a no structure society!
Many Thanks! I think you are misunderstanding what the Alpha school does. I would describe it as (more-or-less) lightly structured rather than unstructured.
>been exposed to low or high structure learners
From the description in the Alpha school review, I don't think that the students are physically separated, but rather are each working on lessons at their own pace in the same classroom.
Eliminating putting students in lockstep, (provided that Alpha schools scale) is eliminating _years_ of pointless delay for the average student in the Alpha system.
My comment was not intended a remark on Alpha school, as I’m not familiar with it. Rather, your implication that we’d necessarily be better off if our decision makers were given less structure is not something we can take for granted, IMO.
Many Thanks! At the very least, wasting the _time_ of the no structure learners is a huge cost. I'm mostly hopeful about the Alpha school model here. What is hugely wasteful in the conventional schools is the lockstep classes - particularly if they just lump everyone of the same age together and force the faster learners to sit through the pace of the slower ones.
I suspect there are few true “no structure” learners, or rather, there are very few people who can learn *all subjects* with no structure, who might turn into one-topic savants with serious gaps elsewhere if left to their druthers. There are also learners who may be able to get to a pretty high level with no structure, but hit a ceiling that requires some structure to break through.
"this review concludes that we need to sacrifice the learning opportunities of the no-structure learners to motivate the high-structure learners by their presence."
This strikes me as a failure in reading comprehension. I just can't square your comment with:
" I hope I’ve been clear that I don’t think schools are perfect. They are designed to maximize motivation, but motivation is hard to maximize, and schools don’t do a great job. Is there a better way? Maybe. But to design a better education system, we first need to understand what the current system does well."
Great review! This crystallized my own observations about school and my place in the rationalist community. The rationalist community is filled with no-structure learners like Zvi Mowshowitz and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and consequently much of the prevailing wisdom doesn't work as well for low-structure learners like me. For instance, I spent a while trying to read textbooks on my own like LessWrong perennially suggests, and I made some gains but lost interest once the material got uncomfortably difficult.
One thing this review doesn't go into that I definitely observed in my own education is that accelerated learning can be pretty traumatic for someone who's used to not needing much structure and is suddenly thrust into a situation where they need to avail themselves of all the structure just to keep up.
The review is great at describing the needs of the learners who needs structure. But the suggestion that the no-structure learners should be sacrificed to them is triggering as fuck.
I need to calm down, and maybe in a week I will be able to write a reply that will consist of something other than screaming...
And we have people in the comments here arguing, in all seriousness, that 95% of learners should be sacrificed on the altar of giving the 'important people' a better school experience. Lots of screaming to go around...
First, I am not convinced that the high-structure learners are actually 95% of the population. I even suspect that school is changing many kids into high-structure. Small kids are naturally curious, and the curiosity usually disappears when they enter school -- that is the place where they learn to associate learning with boredom or stress. My *pessimistic* estimate would be that 80% of the students are high-structure. That leaves at least 20% of those who could do better. That is a lot of kids.
Second, I am not convinced that it actually helps the high-structure kids if you force everyone else to study their way. Even the author admits that it mostly stops working around high school. So the benefits seem to be short-term compared to the losses.
Finally, if you want that someone cure cancer in the future, that person is very likely to be among those 20% whose learning is currently sacrificed to make the 80% temporarily feel better. So if we calculate the victims of both approaches, you should include all people who will die of cancer and other preventable things on one side.
1) I thought the author said that high-structure learners were 80% or less of the population, with no-structure learners being about 5% and low-structure learners the rest.
2) Small kids are indeed naturally curious, but not about all things. Much of elementary school is things they are interested in, either intrinsically or because it will help them understand the world better and succeed in it--say, reading and writing. But puberty changes what they are interested in, at the same time that school becomes more "academic".
he writes that "gifted schools or schools with an entrance exam, they would be doing more advanced work than peers in regular schools, absolutely. But often only by a year or two."
So he argues that it wouldn't make a huge difference. I read about kids finish high school at 12, but that's probably so uncommon that you wouldn't find enough of them in a large city to have a dedicated school (except in the larges chinese cities).
Alpha seems to be doing a great job with every student. Some students are creating businesses, others are becoming thought leaders.
> So he argues that it wouldn't make a huge difference.
That's one of the many places where I disagree. Two years are a lot of time, especially during childhood when you can focus on learning because you are not distracted by your job or family. Imagine saving two years of elementary school (that you would spend bored, listening to teachers very slowly explaining stuff that you already know) and getting e.g. two extra years of university education instead.
I believe Scott has written at least two posts about school that I've read. Between those and the discussion it spawned it my impression was always that many around here (and on reddit) experienced the downsides of that rigid structure and none of the upsides. They then concluded that obviously compulsory schooling must be bad and evil, no qualifiers.
My own experience was markedly different. I have, at many points in my life, required external motivation for something I knew was good for me but that I couldn't motivate myself do. Much more so when I was younger still. I'm extremely convinced school would've been in the category "I should do that, it would be nice, but, oh videogames!". Looking back I'm very happy I was made to go.
A lot of the discussion around here has been around largely self-motivated people unhappy with how much school got in their way. I'm happy this review directly addresses that this is true, it does exist, but it's not malice, it's a tradeoff. And then goes on to explain that in detail.
Already waiting so read all the rebuttals and why, actually, school is just a socially acceptable way to imprison small humans who don't have the power to stand up for themselves.
Education is one of those things that everyone has an opinion on, because we were all educated in some way, and for the vast majority of people posting here, it was probably in schools. And as you point out, the typical posters here are not at all representative of the median American.
The simple fact is that compulsory education isn't going anywhere anytime soon, because parents need childcare. Unless an AI robot tutor/nanny can stay home with a five-year-old, it makes sense to have schools for kids to go to while their parents work.
Nannies aren't required to know anything needing teaching, just to supervise children. This will always make them more efficient when the goal is just to supervise rather than teach.
I would NOT. Current literacy rate has very little to do with school, and much more to do with cellphones and computers making "I can't read that" a serious hindrance to LIFE in general.
How come? Are you aware many teachers are taught that kids will teach themselves to read simply by being exposed to literature, and if not, it's the parents fault for not exposing them to enough literature at home? That's not much more effective than a nanny who doesn't teach at all. At least with the nanny, the parents would understand there kids isn't learning at school and would thus make an effort to teach their kids.
I agree. This article does a good job of laying out the challenges that reforms must wrestle with. "Schools" isn't something for you or your kids or your neighborhood. It's something for everyone, which makes it really, really hard to get it right and necessitates trade-offs. It's fine to argue that the wrong trade-offs are being made, but not engaging with them signifies lack of seriousness.
I think the "meeting student where they are is a failure" part needs its own article/review, because it's repeatedly relied on by this article but I don't think it has a strong foundation at all. Also it doesn't seem to pass my priors. From my own experiences, it's obvious that grouping students that have the same characteristics would be better than having too wide differences. It makes me starts to skim this review to get to the point fast, unlike previous review where 18k feels short. I guess the conclusion is generic enough that it shouldnt be 100% wrong, but I don't think the arguments really support it or stamp out denying questions.
The laziest fact check (asking Claude what the consensus is) seemed to confirm that the consensus is that tracking or grouping students does not improve the average attainment as any increase for people it works for ( I'm guessing you) is offset but people it didn't work for.
I agree the review could have been more persuasive on that point as it is quite central.
Do you priors not also tell you that grouping the lowest preforming students who need the most structure together would have a negative impact on them.
If you didn't mean tracking but meeting people where they are with personalised curriculums I think the problem is we don't know how to personalise curriculums without loosing the structure that kids need.
> Do you priors not also tell you that grouping the lowest preforming students who need the most structure together would have a negative impact on them
No? Such a class could be taught at their level rather than spending >95% of their time being checked out of concepts going over their head and <5% being taught one on one by the teacher on the topics they're weak in. Not to mention the psychological issues of feeling like the dumbest kid in the room.
I liked that the author put the thesis near the beginning. I'm not quite sure why—I think it helped me read better somehow. I wish more people would do that.
It’s a basic principle of good writing - put the thesis near the beginning, so that you can read everything in the context of where it is supposed to lead.
Scott gets a lot of mileage out of not following this principle. In many of his best articles the reader is being taken on a journey with no inkling of the destination.
Answering this question just for previous contest winners, I'd say that Lars's in 2021 did put the thesis first, Amanda's last year was less thesis-driven and more of an exploration, and that Erik's in 2022 had a twist ending. I tried to follow Erik's example in 2023, and got some criticism for it (but maybe that was just the inevitable spread of opinion?).
For Scott's literature reviews in particular, I think there are two reasons why it's okay for him not to lead with the conclusions:
- He once wrote: "There are two equal and opposite commandments for popular writing. First, you've got to sound like you're chatting with your reader, like you're giving them an unfiltered stream-of-consciousness access to your ideas as you think them. Second, on no account should you actually do that." If you write this way, and put your bottom-line conclusions at the beginning of the post, then it sounds like you wrote them before the rest of the post, which would be devastating for the credibility of a literature review. There are other, non-literature-review contexts where it's understood that you're presenting one particular perspective and so it's okay to open with it.
- The conclusions of a literature review (at least the way Scott does them) typically aren't a thesis that provides context for the rest of review. On the contrary, they're often somewhat murky, without as much of a clear takeaway as we'd like; it's epistemically virtuous not to sound more confident than you really are. Whereas if a particular thesis really is guiding your entire argument then it's easier to follow if you say so up front, especially if it's a complex statement that gets into some things that are inherently kind of fuzzy.
Scott also doesn't make the literature reviews longer than they need to be (notwithstanding the title), nor repeatedly tease the conclusions throughout the post body to keep people reading, which also makes it less annoying.
All that being said, I would not cite the twist ending of the ivermectin post as a positive example to follow; it was funny but ultimately didn't hold up and he subsequently recanted it.
“Beware heuristics that almost always work” is a good example of Scott’s “pile examples and convince by induction” approach, where the thesis is often not stated at the beginning (or sometimes at all).
I agree that that post does incline that way, but also when I started poking around to get some good examples, I realized that almost all of the prototypical examples I could find were from SSC - it seems that he may write this kind of article a lot less often these days. Here are some good examples I found:
But these are basically just selected at will from various lists of his top posts. It was his distinctive style to begin without any introduction and build up to a conclusion which might or might not be ever explicitly stated through a series of Roman-numeral denominated sections which were effectively lemmas.
It made for delightful reading because you were ready to be surprised by the next step of the argument at each point. But I think it could only work if you could make each sentence so enjoyable or insightful in its own right that people will read on without knowing the destination, or if you had an established reader base who knew that it would get somewhere worthwhile eventually.
Appropriate to the subject matter, I think it's a writing style that is somewhat more boring and less enjoyable to read, but that does a much job of conveying information.
One tangential point is "The common school movement emerged between 1830 and 1860." That's about the time of the Jacksonian Revolution, when the political philosophy of the United States went from a "republic" where the voters were the highest social classes and expected to wisely choose for everybody to a "democracy" when the voters were (conceptually) all adults. (Of course things weren't so pretty in practice, but there was a substantial broadening of voting, moving away from the idea that you had to *qualify* in some way.) There was also a high level of immigration. So getting everybody to think in generally the same ways about *everybody* as the body politic was starting to become important.
I like this review a lot. It does a good job arguing against the Alpha reviewer’s (even at the time obviously) crazy claim that the new system could work for 30-70% of students. But it does very little to persuade me against the weak-Alpha argument, which I read as mostly “hey, look at this awesome new system that takes the top 5% and helps them learn twice as fast.”
Honestly, I don’t think the author of this review would have any problem with that claim! For no-structure and maybe even some low-structure students, it’s a really excellent model. But this is definitely a good reminder of the commonsense truth that many people just suck at learning, and old-fashioned schools are set up to teach even them to read.
All that said, I think this author is too gloomy (or maybe just not excited enough?) about increased tracking. It’s true that many high schools already give talented students some opportunity to jump ahead, but it really tends not to be much, and there’s certainly a prevailing attitude where parents and administrators try to push anyone into advanced classes they can.
I’m not sure my experience generalizes super well, but I can tell you there’s at least one school where:
- Everyone takes the International Baccalaureate curriculum.
- Entry to the school is decided by lottery.
- Some students are encouraged to drop out when it becomes clear they can’t handle it.
- Many (*many*) others are not.
- Classes move at a snail pace and no-/low-structure learners (*cough* me and most of my social group *cough* maybe 10-20% of the school *cough*) get bored and play Geoguessr in Physics.
- The teacher doesn’t care because the smarties are still scoring at the top of the class on all the very-slow-moving quizzes.
- IB exams roll around and the school performs *terribly.* I mean, seriously, one of the worst in the world. We have *never* had a *single* student receive a 7 in Global Politics.
- Even the best students tend to be unprepared. We haven’t got results back yet, but I’m pretty sure I shat the bed on Chemistry and maybe Physics, and I have (genuinely smart and talented, way beyond my own ability, etc.) friends who shat on Math, Physics, Spanish, Biology, …
This is terrible! Obviously there should be more tracking and separating done, and it’s true that at many high schools there is, but there also are *plenty* where this is the story. AP/IB classes full of confused, slow, distracted, and distracting learners who mess things up for everyone else.
And even if most high schools aren’t like that, nearly every middle school is. I’ll admit it matters less in elementary, where everyone’s fine just playing with blocks or whatever, but most smart young people I talk to have middle-school horror stories. Bullying sometimes, but mostly just rowdiness, unpleasantness, loneliness, and boredom. School as an institution is probably good on measure—but that doesn’t mean we can’t make it massively better for the kinds of kids who’d be into Alpha.
Even just based on my own experiences as a student I think I agree with a large fraction of the claims made here. But, there doesn't seem to be any attempt to account for the costs of the incumbent approach, or at least there seems to be an underlying assumption that the costs are worth paying.
One is the cost of holding back the students who could be learning more. What would actually happen, in aggregate, if we let some fraction of students fail to learn anything, in exchange for letting some other fraction of students learn several times faster? What would happen if we let students choose to ignore (and fail to learn) subject A, but excel far beyond 'grade level' at subject B, until such time as they find a reason to put in the effort in subject A? I have no doubt this would cause some problems, but it would also do things like create a highly motivated population of scientists and engineers and doctors and lawyers and artisans whose careers are 10-20% longer than they would be under the current model, and they'd enter their most productive years with an extra 5-10 years experience under their belts.
Another is the cost of causing mental and physical health problems. It's a cost to force kids to sit still for hours in a row, and restrict their ability to go use the bathroom or move their bodies, and to crush their desire and motivation to do various things and explore various interests that would, for them, be valuable. It's a cost to force kids to be in the same room as people they can't stand or who treat them badly, for months or years. It's not clear how much, now or in the past, the loss of agency school demands is worth the extra learning some proportion of students will get in return.
And of course, there is the direct financial cost. K-12 schools employ 8 million people in the US. How many fewer teachers and staff would we need if most schooling were replaced with other forms of instruction, AI or MOOC-like otherwise? At the cost of how much learning, for how many students?
Relatedly, what would be the learning *benefit* of such replacement be, if it enabled people of any age to choose to start learning any subject at any time, without fear of social sanction for seeming to be 'behind' or in 'remedial' classes, or needing to go a bit slower, or wanting to study something unusual? What is the cost of us having this societal idea that a student is something you *stop being* after a certain age, unless you go 'back to school,' at a fairly high personal cost - of seeing education as a separate magisterium from the rest of life?
I've spent the last few years RVing full time. I don't have kids, but I've met (and read/watched content from) a lot of families that roadschool their kids. What you can't avoid noticing is that 1) They tend to sign each kid up for different forms of learning depending on their personality, because *that is what best motivates each kid to learn.* There's a lot of options out there these days. and 2) The kids themselves seem to be more mature, independent, and worldly on average. But also 3) Sometimes the kids express a desire to go (back) to regular school, and when they do the parents should, and often do, listen.
I agree strongly with this comment, and I disagree strongly with the fairly common view that because high performing students will do well in school and life anyway, it's okay to waste 70% of their time in school and several years of their life on a system that isn't designed for them.
To a small extent, the UK is closer to a personalized system (and most of the commonwealth countries have the same system). Students are placed into specialized tracks of their choosing at age 13. And people complete their law degrees, medical degrees and PhDs on average 2-3 years earlier.
It has it's costs though. It's very difficult to switch tracks and students are less well rounded. I knew some brilliant science students who didn't know what apartheid or communism were.
I don't see how the UK is personalized - a top US students can complete 2 or even more years of university in their desired field or fields, while a similarly talented UK student can not. There is no skipping first or second or third year university courses to jump into the good stuff like in the US, and research opportunities for undergrads are extremely scarce, even at Cambridge. At my mediocre regional state school I got two research opportunities my first semester just by attending seminars and talking to professors. That would be unthinkable in the UK, even at Oxbridge. And I have heard that PhDs in the UK often take as long as US PhDs (5 years) despite being shorter on paper.
Admittedly I have never been to an American high school and I didn't know that taking college courses is relatively common. Maybe I was wrong, and the US system is actually better for high performers.
However, my understanding is still that most students only start specializing at age 16-17 in the US (there is a fairly standardized curriculum before that, with a bit of flexibility at age 14-15). Whereas all students start specializing in the UK system at around age 13.
Maybe personalization is the wrong word for this, but it seems to me that the UK system is a bit more efficient for the average student. And I think that's born out in the fact that medical students and law students graduate 3 years earlier and PhD's graduate 2-4 years earlier (according to https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023#data
At my high school, we didn't take any official college courses, but we did take tons of AP courses, which provide college credit. IIRC, I entered college with 45-50 credit hours (not all of which contributed to my degree requirements, but it was really helpful to skip a lot of the low level courses). In college, you might typically take 15 credit hours per semester, so that's like 1.5 years of college credit *in high school*.
I don't think that's due to anything at the secondary school level, but rather the fact that undergrad is more specialized in the UK and medicine is a graduate degree in the US.
I think it's more accurate to say the US has a longer tail - 40% of US schools don't offer physics (compared to 7%-8% of UK schools which don't offer a dedicated physics course via triple science), but the best US schools offer way more than the best UK schools. Take a look at the course offerings at Thomas Jefferson High School: https://tjhsst.fcps.edu/academics
The U.S. public schools spend roughly 3x more per pupil today than they did in the 1950's, with no clear evidence of better results. So even if we don't tear down the fence, maybe we don't need to maintain such an expensive fence.
I know people who, thanks to tracking and gifted education, were able to graduate high school a year early or finish college in three years thanks to AP credits, or both. Isn't this a good thing.
It can be! I could have plausibly done both of those things, and didn't, in part because the ways things are set up today (or were 20 yrs ago? not sure) the more selective colleges don't like the former and don't allow the latter. Instead it just let me take more advanced courses sooner.
That's still basically the same outcome - being accelerated by one year. And considering you chose it over being able to graduate early from a normal university, it was even better than graduating early from a normal university.
From what I read inflation-sdjusted teacher salaries have increased very little since the 1960's. What has increased enormously is administrative costs & bureaucracy.
I don't think that graduation rates are a very good measure of results. I give more weight to the NAEP and other indicators of what students are actually learning.
One little-known factor is that we run a clandestine welfare state under the guise of our schools. A relative of mine is a “School Resource Officer”: she spends her days acting as a personal assistant and Santa Clause for low-functioning adults whose kids are in school, dispensing goods and handling life problems so that they can get it together enough to get their kids to the bus stop in the morning.
Wasn't the pandemic a test of the idea that we could replace schools with moocs.
All those high ability students were free to follow an coloege level course on machine learning instead of what ever the age appropriate math was. They could have done that but mostly the didn't, they played video games or similar.
The review was clear that just becuase someone is capable of more advanced content with structure it doesn't mean they can do it without structure and we don't have the resources to provide structured learning that is tailered to an individual.
In what sense were they free to do that? Sure, a lot of the logistical barriers to doing so vanished, but those were already pretty surmountable (schools have library computers and such); the bigger problem is that school authorities do not encourage them to do that, and that didn't change.
There was a group that were at home all day with a laptop and could choose what to study. The school will tell them do x. Many students did not do x but I don't think very many of them didn't do x becuase they were doing something harder becuase that would be more appropriate for them.
I didn't have kids during the pandemic so I'm just guessing but shouldn't a massive reduction in the amount of monitoring by teachers while holding time supposed to be studying constant show some kind of benefit to all these kids that are being held back from the system. If they really would flourish without school chaining them to the slowest student why wouldn't they flourish during the pandemic? Maybe they did but and I just don't know about it
Because they were still being told to do the same things as before! The conscientious kids did the same work they were previously doing in person, because that's what the school authorities told them to do, while the non-conscientious ones goofed off. Neither of those groups is going to do a bunch of difficult work that the school authorities don't want them doing, even if they hypothetically could. The brightest kids going slower than they could is mostly a curriculum-management thing, not a classroom-management thing, and while the pandemic shut down classrooms, it didn't shut down curricula.
I don't think it was? To me that feels a bit like saying that randomly chucking people out of airplanes is a test of how well parachutes, hang gliders, and helicopters work.
No one educated the teachers *or* the students on what they could or should do. No one retrained the teachers who'd only ever taught in person. No one set up infrastructure to enable anyone to enact any sort of considered plan. No one taught students and parents about what resources were available to them outside whatever their default was. No one tried to optimize lesson plans for online delivery. No one tried to provide the students with the kinds of coaching that, realistically, are needed to counter the effects of many years of being accustomed to being slowly spoon-fed information and discouraged (subtly or overtly) from studying unapproved subjects or learning in unapproved ways. No one tried to replace the in-person social interaction that schools facilitate, or provide counseling to mitigate its sudden and unexpected loss. They mostly just tried to have the same teachers talk at the same students except through a small screen, with none of the usual school structure to enforce compliance.
Edit to add: I do think this supports that the OP is (narrowly) right about the structure of school optimizing motivation, either for the median student or for some lower-than-median percentile. You remove that structure without warning and replace it with almost nothing, and it doesn't go well.
I actually think it would be a fascinating study to compare these covid era results to those of students who were deliberately already being home schooled, roadschooled, or unschooled starting before 2020, and also to any who switched from their district's default remote learning to other options partway through the pandemic. I haven't looked to see if anyone has done that.
Personally, I know exactly 2 people who were high school students at that time. One was already being homeschooled; her life didn't change much. The second decided to stay remote (I don't remember the details of what kind of remote program she enrolled in) after her peers went back to in person school; her grades went up significantly compared to before the pandemic.
I was disappointed that the effect of parents was never discussed. I still remember working with my mom regularly through high school; she provided detailed comments and corrections on every paper I wrote. I did the same for my daughter and included math / sciences in the interactions. We both became very successful technologists. Friends tell me that the parents who attend parent teacher conferences typically have successful kids. Perhaps we need to improve the education results by making the parents more responsible for success?
Kids don’t get to play football unless the parents do certain things? Require volunteer parent activities? Recognition for outstanding involved parents?
Some of it is just expectations. I think the emphasis is on “schools must educate the kids” rather than “parents must educate the kids and the schools will help”.
The parents you need to motivate are the ones who aren't already very invested in their kids' academic success. None of those ideas sound like they would work on those parents.
If you think it’s hard to motivate students, who actually have to be in the place where you’re working, it’s going to be even harder to motivate the parents, who spend almost no time there.
One additional thought on why MOOCs have such a low completion rate: I started listening to one about ten years ago, and the first ten minutes was the professor covering minutia about attendance, grading, etc. It was literally just a filmed lecture with no edits. I very quickly returned to buying college lectures from The Teaching Company.
I don't know how typical I am, but I am a MOOC non-completer. I did the entire class, every single assignment and lecture, until I got to the "final project" at the end. I was taking the class as an adult with a job just to learn. The skills were useful but I didn't care about or need a certification. The final project seemed like a lot of work so I just decided not to do it.
I've done two which I valued a lot but never finished. The lectures and associated problems helped me learn what I was trying to learn, but at that point rather than do the official final project I had my own projects to apply what I had learned on. The completion certificate just didn't have any value.
What if the top 5% were taught to maximize learning and the rest to maximize motivation? The layman can benefit a lot from civility and motivation. But one Einstein can change civilization.
The education system in America is socialist and oddly enough public schools at communist countries seem better at identifying and supporting outstanding academic talent at an early age.
Such a system for public schools was tried in Britain in the 1950's. Students scoring high on tests was packed into special schools around age 11-12. I think there was a huge back clash when upper class parents realized that not all their children were making the cut. Only when the elite schools are expensive do we accept them...
From my understanding, it was actually too successful - even the lower class grammar school students were dominating university admissions and the job market and even upper class independent students to the extent that it threatened to upend tradition British class structures. Hence, the British elite pushed to ban it.
The fact that homeschooling exists and is legal in all 50 states is basically a tacit avenue for the top 5% - look at Laura Deming, Erik Demaine, Alexandr Wang. I suspect many more were but haven't been directly asked about it in a public media environment.
Very interesting review. I do want to take partial issue with this:
>There’s ample evidence that we can’t actually teach critical thinking divorced from content.
My issue with that statement is that people often incorrectly infer therefrom that students must master or memorize content before being asked to think critically. But that is not actually true; a student can "analyze Han and Roman attitudes toward technology" using the set of documents here: https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/apc/ap07_world_hist_frq.pdf -- including using evidence to support a thesis,; analyzing how the evidence might be incomplete or misleading; and what additional evidence might be useful to test the student's thesis.
Yeah, it shouldn’t be learn some content and *then* learn to critically think about it. Rather, it’s that you learn to think critically as a byproduct of learning some content. You have to be aiming at the content in order for the critical thinking to come.
It’s like how you clear your mind in yoga as a byproduct of paying attention to your breath, not by first paying attention to your breath and then clearing your mind.
Right, I should be more careful. It’s not a mere byproduct of learning content - it’s a byproduct of learning content in particular ways. But there has to be some content that you’re learning.
Critical thinking is not context free. Thinking critically in something like physics looks very different than doing so in history.
Looking for gaps is great... But if you don't actually know anything about what you're reading, it becomes almost impossible to do so reliably. Heck, without background knowledge, *just reading* becomes really really hard.
>Thinking critically in something like physics looks very different than doing so in history
It actually doesn't. The basics are essentially the same. There are extra challenges in the social sciences because evidence is more difficult to obtain and verify, and causation is vastly more complex, but they aren't all that different.
Re your broader point, you are arguing with a strawman. As I said, "My issue with that statement is that people often incorrectly infer therefrom that students must master or memorize content before being asked to think critically." That does not imply that complete ignorance would not be an impediment.
There's a huge gulf between complete ignorance and enough context and internalization of context to reason effectively. And "impediment" isn't right--it's almost a total block. You simply cannot follow a basic math reasoning model unless your grasp of basic math facts is at automatic levels. If you don't know the context of a historical fact, realizing that something doesn't fit or is anachronistic is going to not be possible.
I taught high school science for 7 years. No, the skills (beyond basic reading) don't really transfer well. Especially since at that level no one is reading any of the original sources. They're reading heavily digested, simplified things designed to teach lessons. Rarely in a way that actually works.
Edit: there are non-skill habits of thought that transfer. A certain skepticism. But the actual tactical skills are pretty unique and context bound.
Again, you are arguing against a bit of a strawman. My comment was meant to refute the oft-expressed notion that factual MASTERY is necessary for critical thinking. I think we both agree that that isn't so.
>I taught high school science for 7 years. No, the skills (beyond basic reading) don't really transfer well.
I taught high school social studies for 15 years, and worked with colleagues in the sciences on critical thinking issues, and found that there was a great deal of overlap.
>no one is reading any of the original sources.
I don't understand. Reading original sources is not necessary for students to engage in critical thinking. Any evidence can be used.
This review believes, but doesn't quite state explicitly: the purpose of school is to maximize motivation *for the high-structure learners*. This review seems to be telling us that we have to put everyone in the same classroom because this is the only way to get those high-structure learners to learn. I think the author would agree with a statement like: "we're going to sacrifice the learning of the top X% of the student body, because teaching them really slowly in the same classroom is the only way to keep the bottom kids learning at all."
The review at one point discusses something called "leveled reading", but dismisses it, because it "reduces the achievement of the readers who struggle the most". Great, but what does it do for the other readers? We never find out. (There's a link, but the linked article has no numbers in it.)
I can sort of understand this as a philosophy, but also I can completely understand why anyone with a smart kid would try to pull their kid out of it.
I kept looking for the part where the author explained “and here’s why it’s bad for us to pull the no-structure kids out of this terrible system” and as far as I could tell, it’s basically “it helps the high structure kids, so you have to torture the no structure kids”.
Umm, what?
I’m totally here for the basic idea that the middle quintiles are fairly well served by school. But I reject categorically the idea that the top quintile should be sacrificed on the altar of motivating the lower quintiles.
That wasn’t my read of it. More that there is no known, scalable way to maximize for low structure kids. Home schooling is an option for most of them if they have the resources. But that’s just putting the onus back on the parents, not a “system.”
I really can’t tell whether the claims made that you can’t optimize [stuff] are where [stuff] is the floor, the ceiling, or the integral over all students. It seemed to me the claim was that you can’t optimize the integral, because the author made clear that tracking kids by achievement “only” improves learning by a few grade levels.
“Only” was doing a ton of work, there, but it strongly implied that the author agrees that tracking is helpful for top-quintile students.
All the research I’ve seen shows that doing loose tracking clearly does improve outcomes for those that are at the top, it just has monetary and “reduces motivation for those left behind” costs.
But the author is slippery on who they’re optimizing for.
I suspect that for a lot of kids who would describe school as “torture” or “being sacrificed on an altar” with a straight face, the issue is less that they are super geniuses that could learn at a near infinite pace if removed from the burden of standard schooling* than rather that they are book smart kids that struggle with structure and with socialization.
It’s not discussed in the article, and I’m not saying that modern schooling is the perfect way to achieve it, but there is almost certainly value in immersing no-structure kids in a structured, socially heterogeneous environment for at least some of their education.
*we do have some off-ramps for these geniuses already - nothing is really stopping them from doing a self-paced online or homeschool curriculum and starting Stanford at 14 or whatever, but the rarity of students who go that route and actually end up achieving substantially more than the valedictorians of the standard schools must be considered.
"but there is almost certainly value in immersing no-structure kids in a structured, socially heterogeneous environment for at least some of their education"
As someone who was one of those kids, that reads an awful lot like "but there is almost certainly value in immersing non-swimming kids in deep water".
Your faith that "immersion" will result in everyone learning the self-discipline and social skills you feel are important, is sadly misplaced. And the fact that you aren't even trying to explain *how* this process is supposed to work and why a public school is a good place for this to work, leaves me pretty confident that you don't have anything but blind faith to go on.
And I'm going to stop now, before I find myself throwing ban-worthy insults your way. A sign of my inadequate socialization, no doubt - feel free to blame my high school teachers and administrators.
That’s an extremely hostile response from you, especially considering the much harsher language I was reacting to. (Torture? Sacrificial altars?) The immersion I had in mind was language learning, not drowning children. Obviously. You’re smart enough to know that so I’m disappointed by your remarkably uncharitable response.
My actual point is fairly anodyne: one learns to socialize by practicing socialization (as one learns to do most things by doing them), and right now children do most of that practice in school among their age peers. Hopefully you are not asking me to prove the validity of “one learns through practice” from first principles, as I would argue the burden of proof is with someone challenging that prior.
It’s clearly not perfect, but any system that replaces it with unstructured, independent learning will need to find an alternative to provide this. There are likely many possible avenues to do this, and optimizing them would require careful study (and it’s unlikely every child would have the same optimum strategy). Likewise with “structure” by which I mean basically “the ability to adapt and excel in situations optimized for preferences other than my own, with people who are significantly different than me”, or more bluntly “be a team player and do what you’re told”. Which is a good skill for anyone who doesn’t want to be a pariah (and doesn’t win the startup lottery to get fuck-you money).
> one learns to socialize by practicing socialization
In my experience, social environments outside of school are far more forgiving and properly aligned than those within school, making them much better environments to learn/practice socialization. Being kind, vulnerable, authentic are excellent traits for the real world, but students are socially rewarded for being thick skinned, uncaring, mean, etc.
> right now children do most of that practice in school among their age peers
That feels like circular logic - of course most social learning occurs via the dominant (legally mandated) form of socialization. That's because it's dominant (partly due to cultural pressure, party due to legal pressure), not necessarily because it's effective.
> There are likely many possible avenues to do this, and optimizing them would require careful study
Let's be careful not to hold alternatives to a higher standard than the incumbent. Perhaps Frederick the Great really did put careful study into optimizing the social outcomes of his system (although from what I can tell it just seemed like his best initial guess - the empirical science of education was obviously quite undeveloped back then), but even then, his ideal social outcomes aren't our ideal social outcomes.
That’s mostly fair, although I do think a radical change should be held to a higher standard to some degree (in the spirit of a Chesterton’s Fence framing, per the OP here). I don’t think Frederick invented the idea of “children spending lots of time with other children”. And I don’t mean to use circular logic - I’m just saying that if you are going to remove the main source of their socialization, you need a plan to replace it. Covid isolation/all Zoom school didn’t seem to work well on this front, for example.
To the extent that social environments outside of school are more “property aligned”, I think one’s thoughts on that are heavily influenced by one’s perception of their own school experience. Objectively it’s probably mixed.
At any rate, I’d have strong priors against “no structure at all” being very good for any but a handful of kids, particularly if it’s paired with isolation from other age group peers.
Notably, the “Alpha School” alternative discussed in the previous post still has a lot of structure despite being self-paced, and they spend their afternoons in more social/team settings with their peers.
Speaking from my own experience as someone who would have been pegged in the “no structure” group (and who hung around many others), at least through high school, I probably did need some structure pushing me to peer group socialization, precisely because I wasn’t particularly good at it and needed the practice. (And the failure mode of a lot of “no structure” kids is that they shy away from the stuff that doesn’t come easily to them).
I'm afraid I agree with John, and found his tone reserved compared to my reaction.
I had no friends in public school, despite it being sold as "good for socialization," and was bored out of my mind. The fact that I was interested in things that my classmates weren't resulted in physical violence that the administration ignored. Silly assemblies like pep rallies were aggressively loud and I was naturally beaten because my lack of enthusiasm caused my class not to "win the spirit stick" whatever the hell that meant.
That's twelve years I could have been doing things that interested me.
Algebra? Use it every day, learned it when I was 10. Physics? I'm an engineer. It will be a cold day in Helheim should I ever read Emerson again—attempts as an adult got the same reaction as when I was in school, "This idiot is 'Great?' He can't even write a coherent paragraph."
It was only 15 years later when the internet became a thing and I could interact with the OTHER Embedded Systems Nerds that I found anything resembling a tribe outside of work.
Public school wasted a dozen years of my life. I'd not wish it upon my worst enemy or politician, but I repeat myself.
Yes, I got the obvious allusion to immersion language learning. Now I kind of want to drop you off in some distant city where nobody understands English, nobody cares about you, and not even a phrasebook to help, and see how long before you starve or freeze or get thrown in jail. Outside of very early childhood, "immersion" language learning doesn't work reliably without *some* degree of preparatory instruction, formal or informal. Priming the pump, so to speak. Maybe a good phrasebook will be enough.
Somehow, my schools never handed out that phrasebook, and they certainly never taught a class on the subject. Nor did they make any effort to check and see if I was learning these social skills. And I don't think that's at all unique to my school. They just assumed this would magically *happen* without their having do do anything about it. And sometimes it does. Maybe most of the time it does.
And if you're immersion-learning a language for fun or for personal development, maybe "mostly this works, if it doesn't, meh, c'est la vie" is adequate. But if you're teaching something *important*, then that's not good enough. If you actively take on responsibility for teaching something important, if you advertise yourself as being the One Proper Place to learn this vital skill, and particularly if you impose a mandate that every parent pay for this vital service of yours whether they want to or not, that every child submit for six or seven or eight hours a day. then that's definitely not good enough. And if you're now admitting that all that "reading, writing, and arithmetic" stuff was just a smokescreen that you really suck at, but these here social skills are *really important* and that's what you're teaching...
...then you damn well better *teach* them. If you're going to trust that the magic of "immersion" will make it all happen, then you need to *check and make sure that's happening*. Because all I see is schools demanding a captive market for their dubious "service", and then just assuming that their "customers" will provide that service for each other so long as they are confined in the same space.
This does not work nearly as well as you think it does. I don't know what your connection to the education system is; maybe you're just a satisfied customer stepping up as their apologist because their shtick worked for you. That's enough to earn you a healthy dose of my disdain, because you're an apologist for fraud and it's a fraud that hurt me when I was too young to defend myself.
You’re assuming a lot of things and projecting a lot of positions on me that are not true. This is clearly not a topic on which we’re going to be able to converse productively, if I’m not allowed to express even moderately positive positions on the possible value of the public school system for the sake of argument without being sneered at and insulted by you.
In reality we are probably more similar than you seem to think. I strongly suspect our degrees of professional separation can be counted on one hand, perhaps with a couple fingers left over. I am hardly an “apologist” for the “fraud” of the education system, and to the extent the “schtick” worked for me it did so with a fair amount of effort on my and my parents’ part to carve out a unique path within that system. I am under no illusion that it is perfect (or close to it) or that there are within the system highly variable and in some cases extremely negative experiences even for academically successful students.
I assure you my posts were not meant as the personal attack you are interpreting them as. I sincerely apologize for triggering whatever past trauma you are reacting to here, and wish you the best.
The author does discuss at several points the failure points of educational systems that segregate the highest performing or lowest-structure learners. The final restatement of that line of argument can be found by searching for "cherry picking" in the section "The Thesis, Again". This argument is developed earlier in the text than that.
My read is that the author is saying that failure in the context of educating individual students for systems that segregate based on academic performance involves 1) a regression towards the mean as more and more parents/students want to be part of the highest performing systems, and/or 2) lack of scale for tiny systems that try to avoid this affect, and/or 3) lack of educational benefits to all students from being part of an educational system with diverse learning styles and attainment levels.
I went and read that paragraph again, and I didn't see anything about "failure points" of educational systems that segregate the highest performing or lowest-structure learners. The paragraph was arguing that those systems are harder to measure in comparison to the current system, because they tend to perform much better (for the high-performing kids that are in them). That's different from claiming the system failed.
I'd ask that you state your argument clearly in your own words, rather than ask me to go read text that doesn't actually say what you're claiming it does.
That paragraph is at the end, it helps summarize the points made so far in that vein. I did mention this in my comment. Earlier in the piece, the author lays out a failure mode scenario. I don’t think I can state this any better in my own words, so I do feel like I should make sure you have seen those earlier passages?
Here is a key on on this topic:
“You might think that we’ve found the solution to tracking. We just need to get all the no- and low-structure learners together and let them move much faster. Here’s the issue. The no-structure learners will always be bored, as long as we are committed to putting them into classrooms where everyone learns the same thing. And those classrooms where everyone learns the same thing are exactly what the low-structure learners need. As soon as you create a higher track there will be a ton of demand for it. Parents will insist that their kid join. And as it grows, it won’t be able to accelerate very quickly. You still need the structure of a classroom where everyone is learning the same thing, and that just isn’t a very efficient way to teach.
A good illustration of this point is to visit a gifted or exam school. If a few of those 100 classrooms from our observation thought experiment were gifted schools or schools with an entrance exam, you might be surprised by what you see. They would be doing more advanced work than peers in regular schools, absolutely. But often only by a year or two. You’d see all the same inefficiencies of students all learning the same thing at the same pace. You’d see lots of bored students who could be going faster. You’d see a bunch of students who you’re surprised are in this school at all. It’s the reality of the system we have.”
You didn't find the meta-analysis linked by the author to be useful? It's confusing to me that you complain about a lack of experimental evidence without discussing the meta analysis that the author presented. I can't tell if you have some problem with that or whether you noticed it at all. I don't find this conversation with you interesting or productive. What I think I understand that you have fundamental issues with the rigor of this piece. Maybe you can find someone else to talk to about your concerns but I'm going to move along. Thank you for your time.
Because “high-structure learners” suck at learning, all schools must be made dumb and boring for everyone. No Child Left Behind because we are racing to the bottom.
For me school was demotivating so I'm not buying any of this. I learned a lot in this life but none of the things that stuck with me were learned in a classroom.
Responding to this but there are many takes with similar sentiment. People seem to be missing or downplaying that intelligence is orthoginal to required structure and that structure needs vary between subjects and other variables not just between people.
Most people acx readers will be above average intelligence and the sentiment in this thread is that they were one of the people thrown under the bus for the sake of less intelligent people.
I like to think of myself as above average intelligence but there was no way on earth I would have gone through the material to pass my higschool exam in German without being forced to go to classes and do homework.
A common criticism of the rationalise community is we think we're inventing things from first principles and ushering in a new age but really we've just rediscovered an old theory that was tried and found not to work. That is exactly the kind of result I would expect from an intelligent person who was a no structure learner at first principles, high abstraction topics and a high structure learner at history/ academia.
So yes everyone here you probably are smart but it's unlikely that you are all completely no structure learners. Consider that before you throw away school because it benefits others and not you consider
There’s a lot of trivia I learned because it was fun. Some of it was motivated by peers, or girls, or status. The stuff that was actually important I learned because I felt that I needed it.
Yes, people vary in what areas of the human enterprise they find fascinating. There’s this unspoken assumption that it’s a problem if some smart kids don’t learn X.
Structure is a questionable concept so I can't say much about it but IQ and educational achievement are strongly correlated. Of course IQ alone is not everything. Conscientiousness and educational achievement are also strongly correlated.
What interventions improve conscientiousness would have been a more interesting topic.
Is mass education such an intervention? Does it beat an angry mom wielding a slipper? After all billions of humans learned all kinds of things before Dewey bestowed his ideas on us.
For example the way certain stone tools were knapped stays consistent for tens of thousands of years even as the species making them change, suggesting a significant degree of cultural transmission even long before the apparition of homo sapiens.
Nobody is throwing away the school, unfortunately. The educational process only becomes longer, more expensive and more compulsory. Schooling starts at 4 years old and for many lasts 20 years or more.
I enjoyed the essay, I agree with other commenters that the timing of this post works to its benefit.
I've noticed a number of comments so far suggesting different interventions to improve motivation. My read of the education literature (not an expert but did take a PhD field course in Economics of Education) is that basically almost every intervention under the sun has been tried and all of the ones that showed promise have disappointed once the programs have been scaled up. This includes interventions like paying students, paying parents, giving parents more information, behavioural nudges, etc.
I think one thing that tends to go underappreciated by those of us no longer in school is that genuine "learning" actually is fairly uncomfortable/hard. It's difficult to consistently stay outside of your comfort zone and encounter failure. Just think of how little "new" material the average adult actually learns once they're finished with their schooling.
On top of this I believe most adults have an inflated view of their own ability to learn. They equate learning some new procedure/process at their workplace to learning new content in school, but the two really aren't comparable. This has been made worse by graduate programs that are aimed at working professionals but still award a degree (i.e. MPP/MBA/etc.). These programs are often cash cows, they involve very little learning for most of the students. They tend to contain courses with 2nd year undergraduate course material, but the grading is done on the inflated graduate course curve. As a result, graduates end up getting a false view of what learning is really like.
>basically almost every intervention under the sun has been tried and all of the ones that showed promise have disappointed once the programs have been scaled up. This includes interventions like paying students, paying parents, giving parents more information, behavioural nudges, etc.
Any comments on whether there are differences in the "paying students" attempt(s) in the literature and the Alpha school results?
My knee-jerk ignorant guess is that the Alpha school is able to take advantage of recent software, which I'm guessing lets them do finer-grained rewards than older attempts, but this is purely a guess. What do you see? Or do you just expect that the Alpha school case is very likely to fail to scale, which is yet to be seen?
The Alpha school approach includes (1) hiring more teachers (more precisely, having a lower ratio of students to teachers), and (2) paying teachers more to get better quality teachers.
Paying more in teaching salaries doesn’t doesn’t scale from a resource perspective unless there is a political change that would allow spending significantly more money on education.
Getting better teachers by paying more doesn’t scale unless the money actually improves the pool of teachers; otherwise it just results in more money chasing the same pool of teachers, meaning spending more money for the same result. Hiring more teachers doesn’t scale if it means increasing the applicant pool by hiring people who currently could not get hired as a teacher. Hiring better teachers implies that you can distinguish between good and bad teachers when hiring, so the Alpha school approach may not scale if the average school administrator is not as good as (and cannot be taught to be as good as) the people running Alpha school at making this distinction.
The teacher issue is the one that stood out to me, but that’s just one reason that the Alpha school approach might fail to scale. I’m not saying that the approach won’t scale, just that the long history of educational innovations failing to scale means that the odds are against it.
>(1) hiring more teachers (more precisely, having a lower ratio of students to teachers), and (2) paying teachers more to get better quality teachers.
was indeed one of the inputs they used in their main school, though the review also described several other offshoots, including a homeschooled one (albeit less effective).
>Paying more in teaching salaries doesn’t doesn’t scale from a resource perspective unless there is a political change that would allow spending significantly more money on education.
True, but one teacher teaching 10 students, who are learning at twice the rate of normal students is saving the equivalent of the time of 10 students (for the same amount of learning produced). If we value a student's time at minimum wage, it would not be unreasonable to be willing to pay very roughly 10 times the minimum wage for this service. Yeah, I know, the politics doesn't work that way, but, to me, this suggests that the political decision is making a mistake.
It would be helpful to have an empirical test of how well the Alpha system works with _just_ the "AlphaBux" plus the software, but ordinary quality and quantity of teachers.
I think the real question might be, can they close the loop? Is alpha school hiring their own former students as teachers, and if not, how long will it be until they can? What external dependencies are involved, what skills or personal traits do they require, but fail to generate?
Many Thanks! Sure, if the Alpha school approach becomes pervasive, yes, it does need to close the loop. Is there any reason to think that it wouldn't? It seems like a more efficient way to teach approximately the same material (plus whatever they learn in the time saved) as traditional schools.
I don't have enough of a theoretical framework to confidently say one way or the other. That uncertainty is a big part of what makes it seem like a worthwhile question. Hm... it'd be a conveniently objective thing to observe, so maybe somebody should set up a prediction market on the subject?
If they do manage to reliably close the loop, that probably solves the price issue as well - student loans, basically, with a guaranteed option to pay off the balance by working for the school directly (upon attaining necessary qualifications, which could be a clearly visible progress bar ticking away from day one), rather than being cast adrift into the wider job market.
Aren't the teachers only allowed to really engage the students in the afternoons, when academics are over? In that case, the teacher ratio wouldn't really impact the learning experience
My view (based on the ACX posted essay and again I'm not an expert) is that Alpha school would be unlikely to scale. It's got a lot of red flags including self-selection of pupils, selection of teachers, very high cost, and a very metric-based evaluation.
Generally though I do like the idea of incorporating more gamification in school work, and I like the idea of expanding the use of relatively cheap technology. As some other commenters have noted one weak part of this essay is that it doesn't touch on the costs of these interventions as much.
Take Khan Academy as an example. Sure, it may only help a small % of the student population, and let's assume it's true that this % is already motivated to learn. Even granting all of that, the cost of creating video lectures/tutorials is so cheap it's mind-numbing that Sal Khan beat out almost every school district to it. I feel similarly with software like Duolingo or using AI for tutoring.
>My view (based on the ACX posted essay and again I'm not an expert) is that Alpha school would be unlikely to scale.
You may be right. Hopefully we will find out over time.
>Generally though I do like the idea of incorporating more gamification in school work, and I like the idea of expanding the use of relatively cheap technology. As some other commenters have noted one weak part of this essay is that it doesn't touch on the costs of these interventions as much.
Agreed!
As part of my response above to Kenneth Almquist:
>It would be helpful to have an empirical test of how well the Alpha system works with _just_ the "AlphaBux" plus the software, but ordinary quality and quantity of teachers.
>Take Khan Academy as an example. Sure, it may only help a small % of the student population, and let's assume it's true that this % is already motivated to learn. Even granting all of that, the cost of creating video lectures/tutorials is so cheap it's mind-numbing that Sal Khan beat out almost every school district to it.
Agreed! At the very least we should not be _actively_ impeding the 5% of the student population who are self-motivated by forcibly wasting their time.
Actually learning is natural to humans, and most of us can learn quickly when the material is directly related to a specific, immediate need or gain (as long as the gap difficulty is not too large). Perhaps the problem in school is about how to motivate kids to learn abstract material not seen as immediately relevant to their lives.
What kind of concepts/material do you have in mind? Truthfully, I think I disagree that most of us can learn quickly. Outside of relatively trivial things I think learning is difficult for people, even in situations where they have an immediate need.
For example consider learning a new language. Many people profess a motivation to learn a different language, there are plenty of resources out there, there is even often an existing common link between a language they already know and the one they want to learn. Yet most adults fail/struggle greatly in this pursuit. Most of the ones that learn tend to learn slowly. You might say that a lot of adults find success if they move to a place where the language is spoken, but that is an incredible amount of cost/exposure time needed to learn. Yet even in that scenario you find many people that struggle to learn despite their being clear benefits to learning (e.g. 1st generation immigrants who never really learn English)
For example, it is quite hard to learn a language at school, but if they drop you in a foreign country where nobody speaks your language you will probably start picking up the local lingo in a couple of weeks.
A couple of weeks of several hours per day of practice/effort comes surprisingly close to the contact hours of a high school course, especially given the high school course can't give each student on demand access to native speakers the way you get in a foreign country.
An example of something I think many young people can learn quickly is the feelings and motivations around some social dynamic they are in. Ask them to recount how Alice felt when Bob said to Charlie what Alice said to David and she found out about it—and they can tell you.
People learn little new "material" as adults because it's not rational for them to learn random facts with little important for their lives. Almost all relevant life skills and professional skills are learned outside of school - and people learn this pretty efficiently because qhat they're learning is actually valuable.
Note also that school mostly gives short term learning. Facts initially memorized through years of schooling will be forgotten when no longer relevant. The exception is actually relevant skills like reading and writing and basic math, which will be continually used throughout one's life
Direct Instruction worked exceptionally well once scaled up in the largest controlled educational experiment in history. If you missed that, it makes me wonder what else you've missed.
This was a wonderful review, and as many commenters have said, a nice contrast to the Alpha School review.
A point I was waiting for that never came, was that the same student can be no structure, low structure or high structure in different domains. And that students can even move between categories over time.
Speaking for myself, I was solidly no structure at mathematics (I participated in the international math olympiad almost completely with self study), and high structure at writing - I just had no motivation. That was, until I took a philosophy of religion course in college and was able to write about things I actually cared about, and had opinions on. Suddenly I was no structure and able to ace writing assignments while actually enjoying writing.
And so, I'm unpersuaded by the assertion that a more personalized approach can't work for a typical low to high structure student. We haven't found an approach that consistently works, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
This is close to my experience. I was good and self-taught at all the topics I was interested in: maths & sciences, really. I was bored in languages and literature… until I found some I was interested in (mostly philosophy and classical studies) and it turned out I was good at writing too.
This is what I find about getting philosophy grad students to learn math. A lot of them never thought they were good at math, but once they see that a philosophical question that they care about depends on something mathematical, they start to pay attention to that mathematical thing and start to improve.
>once they see that a philosophical question that they care about depends on something mathematical
I'm curious, what sort's of mathematical things do they find philosophical questions depend on? My knee-jerk guess is Gödel's incompleteness theorems and maybe Cantor's diagonalization argument??? Other examples?
My work is in formal epistemology, so I'm often showing that thinking about concepts like knowledge, and justification of belief, works better when you think about it in terms of probability. I personally was most interested in algebra and logic as an undergrad, and not interested in real analysis, but ended up teaching myself a lot more real analysis when I realized how central it was to thinking about conceptual issues for probability.
But you get other things in other areas of philosophy.
All of the classic diagonalization arguments (I count Cantor, Tarski, Gödel, and Turing as giving versions of it) end up being relevant for lots of thinking about meaning, mind, and language, as well as for understanding mathematics and computation. And in my department, a lot of people learn to code because they realize that making computational models of information flow in scientific communities is going to help them address the questions they're interested in for scientific epistemology.
And, in my experience, the environment matters! I attended a grade school and high school that believed that humans were sinful, kids were the worst sort of humans, and that everything they were teaching us was beneath them. And then I attended a brand new college that was trying to revolutionize engineering education and viewed students as important co-creators and suddenly I needed vastly less structure to learn.
Seems to me the real question is 'why did we spend so much time solving quadratic equations in school?' Really -- who cares what the solution to the equation of a parabola is? Are people continually coming up to you and saying, quick, quick, where is this parabola equation going to cross the y axis? Yeah, right, never. We spent so much time on it in school was because it was complicated enough that you had to spend some time learning it -- ie, we learnt it because it was a great way to use up time.
>you don’t know which of the kids will end up using it
But that's true of all kinds of skills, most of which aren't required in most high schools. Javascript. Spanish. Football. Automotive repair. Playing the French horn. Why is algebra, a skill that not only is useless to most adults but also seems to be particularly painful to many students, mandatory, when those other things aren't?
The obvious difference is that there's a much broader variety of skills that have algebra as a prerequisite. If you don't learn it, they're *all* closed off, and that's a bigger risk than passing up the opportunity to get good at the French horn.
Then we could explain to kids how algebra is used in different fields so they can make up their own minds, instead of teaching it as a meaningless exercise in shuffling letters back and forth across an equals sign. As it is, you can study algebra for years without ever learning that it has uses. No wonder most kids want nothing to do with it.
Lots of things do indeed "have algebra as a prerequisite" but there is a real question how much algebra is necessary and how much it is simply a hoop you have to jump through, a signal of Bryan Caplan's unholy trinity of "smarts, conscientiousness, and conformity".
Huh? We do in fact make all kids take PE, music, programming, and languages. At least my school did and my kids school does. So…your comment doesn’t make sense to me.
Also, algebra…in high school? That’s a middle school subject at best. Late elementary school maybe.
Yeah, kids are required to take a certain number of electives each year. But they have a lot of leeway in deciding which electives. For example, my high school required us to take language classes, but allowed us to choose which languages. I went with Latin, which has a lot less practical use than Spanish. I would guess that a lot more American adults use Spanish in their everyday lives than algebra. So why is algebra required when Spanish isn't?
>That’s a middle school subject at best. Late elementary school maybe.
What country are you from, and is your school a public or private school? Most American schools are not that accelerated. We typically start algebra between seventh and ninth grade (ages 12-14). I believe I started in eighth grade. Wikipedia calls algebra a high school level course, so I don't think my experience was unusual. I'm glad I didn't start in elementary school - I struggled enough in math as it was.
Education Realist estimates that about half of young people agree with the tee shirt, "And then Satan said, 'Put the alphabet in math.'"
They have tremendous difficulty making the change from concrete to abstract. Many can correctly answer, "What number do I have to take away from 12 to get 7?" but they just fog over at, "If 12 minus X equals 7, what is X?" For most of us here, the second is obviously the same as the first, and maybe even a little easier to solve if we write it down. It certainly is the same logically, but it is very much not the same to many people.
With enough drill, and easy enough tests, they can pass an algebra course, but they will never be able to use it outside the classroom.
I agree with this, and would go further. There’s very little that kids learn beyond age 13 that will be useful in life to most of them. It’s far better for them to learn something that’s interesting than to struggle with a skill that they will never use.
I loved maths and found calculus easy at 15. Anyone who intends to study science would do well to learn it. But most people don't need to learn algebra.
I loved that stuff, though. It was sort of a mystical experience to me, seeing the different conic sections, what you got if you cut a cone at different angles, and how it connected to the algebra. It felt like I was seeing some deep truth about how the universe made sense. I actually still remember the long messy formula for solving all quadratics, as well as the algebra tricks for playing around with the quadratic equations in a way that gets them to make the answers transparent. I got a hell of a lot out of learning that stuff, even though I con't think of a time it's been of practical use to me.
The correct answer is that the last time the federal government set a unified curriculum was back in world war 2, where ballistics and orbital mechanics required quadratics and conic sections all leading to calculus, for the sake of catching up to the soviets militarily. Since then things have gelled but most forgot why, ala the parable of the woman who cut off the chicken's feet before cooking. Only difference is the woman in the parable admitted she didn't know instead of making up nonsense reasons that could just as well apply to any other untaught topic.
A thoughtful antidote to reform enthusiasts. Still I'm a bit puzzled. On the one hand schools exist to maximize motivation. But it seems that none of the three groups you've identified have their motivation enhanced. The unstructured are bored, the low structured develop a few habits but never catch fire; the high structured group loses steam the longer they stay in school. Many grow to hate school and learning. So whose motivation is augmented?
If I am told, "Do this unpleasant thing or I will cause you pain", I have not had my intrinsic motivation increased. But I have had my motivation to actually do it increase. He's talking about the second meaning of motivation.
I was surprised by the claim that deliberate practice doesn't work. Maybe we just aren't doing it right.
Sports are incredibly popular as a leisure activity. And during sports, even at an amateur level, you are generally being pushed to the edge of your abilities against people of a similar skill. You're constantly adapting, learning and then trying again with improved skill and knowledge. That's deliberate practice.
Several other popular leisure activities have a similar structure - chess and other board games, online pvp video games. Even solo activities like climbing or art where you are challenging yourself to do better rather than competing against another person.
Getting into a flow state can be very motivating. But it's tricky, it only works when you have incremental goals that are just within reach. If you push too far beyond that, then it becoming demotivating.
If I'm understanding the reviewer aright, I don't think they're saying that deliberate practice doesn't work — just that it's really hard to do it, b/c deliberate practice is hard and painful. (For what it's worth, K. A. Ericsson — the progenitor of "deliberate practice" as a concept — wrote in the book "Peak" that there's an only-slightly-inferior move he dubbed "purposeful practice" that is much easier to do in schools. Less autonomy needed.)
One minor correction - the text says that the high-structure students are the ones who are constantly in office hours. This is definitely wrong - the high-structure students are the ones who *should* be in office hours, but the fundamental problem is that there’s nothing that makes them come.
I have far more formal education than most barn cats, but a typical disdain for academic credentials. Beethoven never got an MFA. The only use I can discern for art school is so British musicians can drop out of it.
Still, how many of us insist on a self-taught brain surgeon? A Khan Academy trained aerospace engineer to design our airplanes? A really motivated amateur to operate a power grid?
Great article. I see that many commenters have said that giving more opportunities to high-performing students is not necessarily a problem. I enthusiastically agree.
In England, in 1944, the government set up a tripartite system where 11-year-olds took an IQ test, called the ‘11+’. The highest scoring 10%(ish) were sent to a grammar school which aimed to send those kids to university. The rest went to a Secondary Modern, which taught less academic subjects.
By the 1960s, it became obvious that this system was too successful, and society was becoming divided into middle-class kids who passed and working-class kids who didn’t. One unexpected problem was that the smarter working-class kids were passing, which left fewer smarter working-class kids to represent them in politics etc. The government shutdown this ‘selective’ system in the 1960s and replaced it with a ‘comprehensive” system.
Two counties stuck with the selective system and I lived in one. I passed the 11+ and went to a grammar school. I’ve had a very successful life. My brother failed the 11+, and went to work on a building site. He has had a very successful life too. It would have done him no good to stay in school for more years, learning calculus and Shakespeare.
Living in the midst of a construction project that was supposed to take one year and now is into its third, beset by incompetence, I wonder how much brain drain from the trades has contributed to this kind of dysfunction. I of course support upward mobility but it also perhaps has its undesirable side effects.
I reviewed this before it was promoted, rating it low.
I have a variety of complaints, but the main issue I had was, I felt that the concept of "motivation" as pushed in this review wasn't actually well defined, and that this was used to push a class of Motte/Bailey. It starts by stating that schools aren't really about learning, and presents "motivation" as the new optimization target. It quickly asks "Motivation for What?" but the section doesn't actually address this question at all. It's roughly implied that it actually means "motivation to learn", which in turn maximizes learning.
Which ruins the entire thesis, because now he's back to arguing "best of all possible worlds" and "actually, this is the best way to accomplish learning". But, he doesn't present evidence for this case and actually, the evidence is starkly opposed to this case. You can't just handwave all of the evidence saying that traditional American schools are not very effective, and then conclude that traditional American schooling is the best possible education system.
Which is all to say, I don't think the author is actually being coherent, with the primary culprit being, replacement of standard terminology with non-standard terminology, then switching between the meaning of the standard terminology and non-standard terminology as necessary to win the argument.
I agree. I don't think "motivation" is nearly as meaningful a term as we tend to feel it to be. We all know what it feels like to fail to do a task we know we should do, so we call our difficulty doing it lack of "motivation." But if you real dig into what's the difference between people who do the task vs. people who don't what you find isn't that one had 2 lbs of "motivation" and the other only had 3 oz. of the stuff. The differences you find are that the person who does the task has developed a habit of doing this kind of task; and/or the person who does the task has immediate good or bad consequences depending on whether they do it or no; and/or that the person who does the task thinks of it in a different way from the person who avoids doing it.
(I'm a psychologist, and one of my specialties is procrastination and stuckness.)
You put this better than I did, and nailed what I think is the main trouble with this one.
"motivation for what?" is still an unanswered question. The essay starts with this very clear and direct style and then somehow veers off into nowhere the moment it needs to be maximally clear. Almost as if it's trying to obfuscate the fact that the author isn't confident enough in their thesis to actually be explicit about what they mean.
Yes, the author means motivation to learn, and learning is always the optimisation target. He claims that age-based cohorts are the best way to maximise learning. He argues for this by claiming that many alternatives to traditional schooling have been tried, and that all have failed when they were scaled up. He mentions several examples - more detail would always be nice, but he hasn’t just hand-waved this step.
He claims that motivation is the reason that those alternatives performed better at small scale, as well as the reason they fail at large scale. Unless I missed it, the no-/low-high-structure learners are the author’s own approach to describing motivation. He shows that the concept can be used to describe a handful of situations. I think this is coherent, and doesn’t rely on unclear definitions.
"Age-graded" is mentioned a lot in this review. In the past, older students taught younger students in a "one room schoolhouse", with adult supervision. Maybe it doesn't scale, or doesn't develop motivation as well?
Oldest siblings have stronger personalities, are more of leaders (my observation). They practice being leaders with their younger siblings. They could (hopefully often do) care for their younger siblings as they lead them. They are sometimes a bit, or more than a bit, pathological. Optimistically, they just don't know better. We don't teach leadership and being responsible for other people in school (proportional to learning "material"). Youngest siblings don't practice leadership and care with younger siblings. Maybe it would be good to teach leadership and care, since many or most people end up being leaders to some extent, formally or informally. Having older students teach younger ones could help with that, perhaps. Also, perhaps teachers can delegate some of their workload to students. Students and teachers then would have more time for one-on-one tutoring for those who need it.
Great piece. While you allude briefly to this, I wanted to emphasize it more: students aren’t all one thing. I was a no-structure learner when it came to reading and writing. I could have learned those skills alone on a desert island. But I was a low-structure learner when it came to math. I needed somebody to walk me through it. So I needed school. I think a lot of students are like me; they might not need formal schooling for one area/topic, but they do for others. Some students need it for everything, but I think it is the rare, rare person who is no-structure across the board.
- when you keep nagging and threatening someone to study, because that is the only way to get information inside their head (and the person keeps fighting you all the time),
- when you help someone overcome distraction and procrastination, by giving them a time and place to learn (and the person may be annoyed for the first 5 minutes, but then enjoys it),
- when you give someone the right books and tell them the right words (and the person enjoys the help from the start),
We should distinguish between kids who actively resist learning, and kids who want to learn but need some kind of support. Both are "a structure", but of a different kind.
A pretty good review which rhymes very well with my own experience on the other side of the Atlantic.
I am starting to come up with a theory that normal schools actually are there to impart 'common knowledge', the knowledge that we know others know. Kind of like what you gain from an oracle saying at least one person have blue eyes.
The schools as we know was originally made so nations could organize their economies for war, which required some kind of common outlook on things.The countries that didn't got colonized by ones who did, and they then copied their own school systems.
I wonder what a world where we to loose this kind of common knowledge would look like. Right now everyone understands 'in democracy you have to hold fair elections', most people have heard of separation of powers even if they can't quite explain the concept, and some few people know about comparative advantage in production. Let us imagine this moved one step to the right, so most people had heard something about elections and only 10% knew courts are supposed to be independent of the normal government. Even if the smartest people were even smarter than they are now, I still think society in that world would be inherently unstable.
I think that this piece gets a lot of things very right about schooling. It's refreshingly clear and close to my own view. (Though it does in fact seem to be making the case that school is maximizing learning, when you take low- and high-structure children into account.)
For further evidence that age-graded schooling is doing something important in modern society, I'd also point to the lack of interesting variation among countries in terms of how they educate their kids. You don't really get the sense that there are competing systems out there.
I do think that there's a danger in slipping from "here is why things are the way they are" to "things HAVE to be the way they are." The piece makes some caveats in this direction, which I appreciated.
That said, I do find myself thinking that if AI tutors ever get as good as some people think they can be, we might figure out interesting ways to make it feel like "we're all doing the same thing" in the classroom while students are getting personalized tutoring. My students often love doing a bit of lightly-personalized practice with software (Deltamath). It's not that hard to imagine a better version of that software that teaches extension content during that block of time.
And at the college level, would it be that weird to have a "lecture" where the professor is setting the stage for a personalized lecture? Maybe you are assigned to a large biology lecture, no matter what bio class you're taking, so that the students present are taking many different courses. Class begins with a brief talk or exercise on a topic of broad interest, and then out come headphones and computers for some magic robot tutoring.
This is all sci-fi at the moment, and honestly I think it will be for the forseeable future, but I do wonder if there are other motivational structures that are possible.
>> "It's refreshingly clear and close to my own view."
Agreed! Michael, could you share how Deltamath "lightly personalizes" math practice?
>> "And at the college level, would it be that weird to have a "lecture" where the professor is setting the stage for a personalized lecture? ... Class begins with a brief talk or exercise on a topic of broad interest, and then out come headphones and computers for some magic robot tutoring."
I wonder if an even more motivating (just to stick to the theme o' the review) version of that might be that the professor opens up with a simple (but big, conceptually rich) question, then students go to their AIs for a fast, individualized dialogue to try to figure out the answer. (Something like this is what I do with my science classes for gifted kids, except minus the AI.)
Deltamath is math practice software. It isn't adaptive in any sense to input. But the way it works is really simple: the teacher selects a skill for kids to practice, kids have to get 5 (or some other number) questions correct to complete the skill. There are (very simple) worked examples available to reference. This is great software for me.
> For further evidence that age-graded schooling is doing something important in modern society, I'd also point to the lack of interesting variation among countries in terms of how they educate their kids.
Many countries use multi-age classrooms in rural locations, much as the US used to. These include Switzerland, Japan, and Finland. 12% of Japanese elementary schools use multi-age classrooms.
I agree with the reviewer that if you define “personalized education” as completely self-directed learning then it will certainly be unsuccessful as a K-12 core academics ed model for almost every student. You cannot just stick some IXL loaded iPads in a room and hope the kids decide to work on math. But I see no reason why customized instruction, practice problems and testing for a specific student’s level must mean a self-directed learning environment with no rewards, accountability, structure, public visibility or recognition. This doesn’t have to look like someone signing up to take a MOOC during their spare time on a whim.
At one extreme, personalized ed may not be self-directed at all. It could be an academic tutor assigning you daily learning modules to work on, setting deadlines, handing out grades based on your performance relative to their goals, etc. The difference from regular school being that your assignments are customized to you - you have a tutor not a mass lecturer. The promise of today is that technology can enable a tutor working together with well-designed apps to coach a substantially higher number of students at the same time than would be possible in paper-and-pen days.
My impression is that Alpha is somewhere in the middle, allowing the students (perhaps with parents?) to set some learning speed goals and make some choices. But clearly there is a lot of accountability with all the testing. And they have a rewards systems they are developing with some controversy. It is interesting that the Alpha review independently came to the conclusion that their motivation system was a big part of what is driving success with that school model so far. I am sure much can be learned from sports, music and other non-academic activities about motivation models that don’t involve putting a bunch of kids of mixed ability in a room together to learn in lock-step. The Scouts use things like badges, for example.
One thing I didn’t understand from this review is how all the students being the same age was part of the motivation of the current school system. I understand the practical logistics behind this design, but how it relates to motivation was not clear. Is it more motivating for an 8th grader to sit completely lost in a math class watching same age peers easily answer the teacher’s questions than it is for the same 8th grader to sit beside a 6th grader who is equally unsure how to find an LCM?
I think your critique might be glossing over two problems: one, that “motivation” (underdefined in this essay imo) for many students comes from “being in a room with peers who are doing the same things”, i.e. individualized approaches won’t work as well for most. And two, scale: Surely, having some sort of human-first tutoring setup has to have the potential to increase learning (maybe not 2 sigma, but still significantly). But that doesn’t scale at all. Additionally, many results in education research look better because the adults involved are highly committed and competent. Once you try to scale successful programs, the effect sizes usually shrink.
Exactly how close in age, how identical the activity and how much of the day in lock-step are required for this motivation effect to hold true? There are undoubtedly peer dynamics at work in a school that help get kids to conform to the norms of sitting, listening, etc. (or, in some schools, toxic norms that drive more misbehavior). There is some peer pressure to keep up too. But, I am not convinced this powerful aspect of motivation necessitates the current 19th century system design.
Primarily, I disagree that a hybrid in-person/computer-based tutoring model is completely unscalable. Up until maybe ten years ago that was certainly true, as the tech component was not good enough. But consider a thought exercise for middle school, a point at which children can certainly use technology and are currently still rigidly kept in age-leveled classes with limited to no tracking.
We’ll start with the status quo.
I live in Massachusetts in a racially mixed, not particularly affluent town of somewhat below average students with one public middle school. There is nothing special about it, and the numbers I will quote are very typical in the state. Looking up the DOE stats for this middle school, I see that in 2024 they employed 12.9 classroom teachers per student, and 28% of the students are labeled as special education (the state average is even higher — 42%!) When you include all the special ed instructors in the mix, you have 11.7 teaching FTEs per student (I have excluded ESL staff). I know the person who leads special ed at this school, and he reports that a large majority of these students are labeled as having a learning disability, and, within that group, a large portion are basically just bottom quartile IQ cases who struggle at school. When people report how well the current model works to educate students, let’s not forget the large special ed apparatus that is in place to supplement the much vaunted “everyone together” classroom experience. Plus the school reports that 21% of students are “chronically absent”, which I am sure meshes wonderfully with keeping everyone going at the same pace. Finally, the average class size is actually 16.7, suggesting the classroom teachers are actively teaching ~3/4 of the time.
Focusing on one subject, math, as an example, we all have a pretty good idea how resources are currently used. Students spend ~4 hours in math class a week. Keeping the calculations easy, we will assume every 48 students in a grade require 3 teaching FTEs to work 4 hours a week each teaching an identical grade-level math class to 16 students. At the same time, there is one teaching FTE who is inactive for 4 hours. Let’s call this traditional model A.
Assume we have the exact same resource constraints at our alternative school, but we choose to deploy them differently. Students spend 50 minutes a week in a small tutorial of 5 students, matched for math progress level and ability. This may be one long session for stronger students or 2 x 25 minute sessions for the rest. It takes two teaching FTEs (each 4 hours) to get through all 48 students. The third FTE is used to supervise 38 students who are not in their tutorial at any given time. They use this time (total 3h10m per week) to work independently on their computer math app (roughly 50 minutes per day, if no tutorial) which provides customized instruction followed by practice problems. They have minimum progress goals set by their tutor. Their tutorial time would focus on explaining points of confusion, working on problems together, and receiving feedback and encouragement. The last FTE is assumed to be inactive for 4 hours as before. This is model B.
Because tutoring is less draining than classroom teaching, your inactive teacher may be at least partially usable, which can reduce ratios a bit further. You may also be able to direct some of the special ed headcount towards supervising app time. Because students are working independently, it really isn’t important to group the students in self-study rooms by age. Nor does the supervising FTE necessarily have to be a subject expert. It may make more sense to group the students by ability to concentrate. More hyperactive cohorts can be supervised by a PE / drill sergeant type who whips them up to put in 20 minutes of work, break for 10 minutes of activity then a final 15-20 minute push. One of the learnings from homeschooling (or Alpha School) is that ~30 minutes on a math app per day is likely perfectly adequate to keep pace with the standard curriculum for most students. Ideally, math would not have homework.
You only need to employ model B for core academics (math and English are strong candidates, plus possibly a portion of science and social studies). It would probably take up about half the school day. The rest can be traditional, age-grouped cohorts for PE, arts, electives, various projects, etc., if you want. Obviously trying to transition an existing school to Model B is extremely difficult. It’s a huge change. But for new schools, private or charter, it is a viable model that does not need to be more expensive than a Massachusetts public school.
My current beliefs after reading both recent entries on education:
1) I still believe that we could get much better at educating our top quintile of students.
2) I think economic growth and breakthrough innovation comes from the top tier of this top tier
3) I think the 80% could learn just as well or better and for less if we focused on getting them the basics and allowing them to shift to an apprenticeship type model where desired.
4) I think AI coaches supplemented with group activities and human teachers will lead to amazing breakthroughs in the near future (for self motivated learners)
5) I am extremely skeptical about the ability of the current education establishment to redesign how education can or should work. They and their way of thinking are more of a hindrance, on net, than a help.
I am probably wrong on one or more of these though.
I went to a selective high school that had internal tracking in every mandatory subject: math, science, English, and social studies all had advanced and regular classes. Students who were in one advanced class were typically in advanced classes for all those subjects, including me. One year I was dating someone in a regular English class and attended it with him during a free period (as one does). I was surprised to see that there was daily homework, about a paragraph of writing per night, plus regular quizzes on the content of the readings. The class didn't seem to be doing well in either regard. I was also a bit surprised by the silence of the class, and how happy (or at least accepting) the teacher seemed to be that I was participating in the class despite not actually being enrolled.
In advanced English classes we wrote 1-2 essays per book (with no homework most days besides reading and having thoughts on the reading) and the conversation never stopped and infrequently went off-topic. Occasionally we finished books ahead of time because everyone had read ahead. Similarly, in advanced science classes, students often read unassigned material and asked teachers for additional conceptual guidance, sometimes after class. (Teachers also seemed to be nicer, and more interested in helping interested students, in the advanced track. Regular track teachers were more likely to have reputations for being mean.) None of this stuff was graded, whereas each daily bit of homework in regular classes seemed to be an effort to tip students over the passing line.
It's clear in that the advanced track served students who needed less structure at least in those subjects (if not overall), but it also seemed that the regular track served to whitewash the performance of lower-performing students. "Look at these 18 paragraphs they've written this semester", you could say, "they've done 65% of the work." And maybe that adds up to 65% understanding of the books read or narrative devices discussed or self-expression opportunities afforded.
As a 'low-structure learner', I've found that one of the reasons motivation is hard without structure is that plenty of entities are willing to make you spend a lot of time on bullshit – if they aren't paying anything for a teacher. I've taken stupid classes, but I've done a lot more stupid online modules. Teachers are expensive, and that's a honest signal that someone has at least some real investment in teaching you something worth learning.
The most promising alternative to public school that I've seen is a thing called modular learning -- at least the version developed and practiced by Jeremy Howard (tech genius -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Howard_(entrepreneur)) and a woman named Manisha Snoyer. It's homeschooling done in a way with some structure, curated materials, and some shared online classes and learning experiences with other families who are taking the approach.
I'm not suggesting it as a solution for the problem of how to educate all kids -- though who knows, it might work -- but it does seem to me like a flexible approach that could be adapted to work for many kids.
School isn't quite like Chesterton's fence where it's been around so long we forgot why it was created. Instead (as you note paragraphs after invoking the fence), mass education is relatively recent. The reason people are often impressed by old timey written tests is because a smaller fraction of the population was taking such tests.
IQ is increasingly heritable with age. Just as school effects fade out during summer vacation, so do such effects when students eventually graduate from school. Thus gains from school are temporary. Per James Flynn, gains in IQ over time don't appear to be gains in g either, so it can be difficult to generalize effects of such gains from other effects of IQ.
> Classic studies like Asch’s line experiments, where 75% of participants denied obvious truths to match group answers
75% did that at least once, but that's out of 12 incorrect answers from a larger set of 18 and "The average participant gave in to the group three times out of 12" https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/conformity-mythhtml
> Schools spend a huge fraction of their resources on special education, providing the structure and systems that those students need.
Why? They aren't a huge fraction of the students, and if we think of spending as an investment, there isn't that much of a return for it. The focus should be on cutting costs since there is such little benefit. Similarly, the most disruptive students might be abandoned for the benefit of the rest https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/helpful-inequalityhtml
> Maybe the best way education can contribute to all of these causes is to focus on providing a broad, basic education to as many children as possible, and maybe our current system is the best idea we’ve had so far for doing so.
What is the reason for believing either of those things? As you acknowledge, the later purposes were added after the system was first created for the earliest purpose, and it would be astonishingly lucky if it were the case that it just happened to serve those later purposes it wasn't originally designed for. Recall also that the original political purpose of shoring up democracy preceded the rise of schools of education and critical theory such that my mom was required to study (distillations of) Pedagogy of the Oppressed to teach Special Ed. There isn't just conservation in the school system, there is also rot https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/what-makes-stuff-rothtml
My problem with this review, which could well be right in some respects, is that there is a lot of speculation without appropriate empirical evidence. For starters, much of the evidence cited on the effects of tracking does not even measure tracking in the sense that many ACX readers will be thinking of and the few I know of that do tell a slightly different story.
If you open the linked meta-analysis and look at some of the individual studies, you will see that the studies on overall achievement typically look at the effects of separating students at the high school level into different schools where they often learn totally different curriculums, relative to comprehensive schools. However, those comprehensive schools track their students according to ability internally. For example, every UK comprehensive high school (11-18 for foreign readers) continues to group their students by ability, but a study like Hanushek and Woessman (2006) is treating us as stopping tracking when we move from grammar schools to comprehensive. All that really happened is that we abolished the substandard secondary modern vocational schools. I never shared a Maths, English, or Science classroom with anyone in the bottom two thirds of the ability distribution during high school, but all these studies will say that I wasn't tracked. Theoretically, the move to comprehensives could improve the ability matches between students and their classroom peers. If some students are late developers or richer parents game the admissions system, you could have bottom half ability students stuck in the higher school who get left behind and top half ability students stuck in the lower school with no opportunity to progress.
Meanwhile, the randomised trials that I am aware of that actually measure tailoring the classroom according to ability show very different results, with the caveat that they are all from developing nations. One set of evidence comes from the teaching at the right level randomised trials in India (link: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22746). The cleanest example here comes from Haryana where they grouped students together by ability across year groups for an hour a day for a whole year for Hindi lessons and students progressed by 0.15 standard deviations relative to control. That is likely close to a whole year's typical learning (source: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/impactevaluations/simpler-way-communicate-learning-gains). The Uttar Pradesh intervention did make use of outside volunteers in their teaching alongside ability grouping, but the effects were four times as large! There have also been computer-assisted interventions for Maths that target students by ability level to substantial effect (https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/122/3/1235/1879525). The other example comes from Kenya where Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer randomly assigned schools to track students by ability for 18 months and found that learning improved by around 0.2 standard deviations (link: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.101.5.1739) - about a year's extra learning again. This study, although likely not subject to publication bias, is a bit weaker as it's merely p<0.05 rather than p<<0.01 like the Indian interventions.
I'd also add that I think there are other areas that I think are poorly evidenced or not evidenced. The three things that stand out are the claims that education quality doesn't matter much, learning loss wasn't that heavily driven by length of school closures, and that you can't group by ability rather than age group. The first isn't true between this study of the UK that also outlines 4 US studies in Table 1 (https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/2023-09/WP202324-Exploiting-discontinuities-in-secondary-school-attendance-to-evaluate-value-added_0.pdf), there are meaningful causal differences in quality between schools. Additionally, the school vouchers study mentioned in the deBoer package is about sending poor students to wealthy private school going badly, which could very well be due to them being low ability students there who can't keep up with their peers. I quibble the learning loss point because the length of school closures was enough to fully explain learning losses in the one study I have seen (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20210748). My uncertainty on the unevidenced age group part is that i) grouping by ability rather than age did work in Haryana and ii) you can also spin arguments about why doing so may improve student effort. Maybe students falling behind would work harder to keep up with their friends who are moving up, or low ability students would stop acting out in an effort to show off if the only people they can show off to are several years younger. I don't know because it's almost never tested.
Finally, I'd also throw significant doubt on the likelihood of the linked meta study to even measure the thing it is measuring accurately when it cites Manning and Pischke (2006) as evidence of the effects of tracking (in the separate schools, not classes sense) on education inequalities when just reading the abstract of their paper would tell you that their argument is that you cannot reliably estimate any causal effects using the available data.
Sorry if there are any sloppy mistakes or omissions. I've only spent about an hour on this post and have relied on studies I was already familiar with in my work as a labour and education economist and although I have read all of the studies at some point, not all of them were read forensically. I also have not proof read this, so some parts may be unclear.
What a thoughtful pushback to the too-cheery hype of educational reform! (And I say this as an educational reformer.)
>> "Schools... are designed to maximize motivation, but motivation is hard to maximize, and schools don’t do a great job."
I really appreciate the reviewer's identification of motivation as the bottleneck. Indeed, if the problem were anything else, then the spread of libraries should have led to the messianic age of education!
The reason I think massive improvement in education is possible is that there's a reservoir of motivation already inside schools that has not yet been systematically tapped: the content of the curriculum.
Math, science, history, and so on — down to spelling and, I don't know, small engine repair — are made up of innumerable small bits that have fascinated people in the past (that's how they got in the curriculum). The trouble is that they're pressed flat and delivered as unpalatable by the time they get to the classroom. The revivification of academic content is the best hope we have for an educational revolution that scales. (As a plus, it also doesn't require we figure out how to revolutionize a system that's been impervious to 100 years of reform. In any case, this is what I was trying to get at with my ACX book review in 2023.)
The reviewer comes across as a wise and careful thinker. If they're reading, I'd love to chat — feel free to reach out to me! (I won't compromise your anonymity.)
Who exactly was fascinated by those things in the past? Wasn't it a highly selected group, for any given topic? So this doesn't seem to tell us much about whether we can get the general population to engage with them.
Sharp point! But it also works the other way: we can look to see what aspects of the topic motivated them, so we're not working from zero. If this seems abstract, feel free to give an example of something in the K–12 curriculum that most people find dull, and I'll see if I can show how it can be re-humanized. (This is what I do for a living...)
If I were going to pick an example I'd say trigonometry, but my doubts aren't about whether someone can tell a story about making it engaging to most students, they're about whether this can be done in real life at scale.
Trig's a great example of a math topic that's filled with irony and even wackiness (it was created to measure the height of the stars as they moved around the flat Earth: see mathematician James Tanton https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoBaXWXBi2d4g0eTnAvk3lMJdh0CaMvC6&feature=shared) but which virtually all the life has now been choked out of. If you know a high school math teacher who'd like to talk about bringing this to their classroom with normal kids, feel free to have them ping me privately. (Helping teachers scale this, and creating schools where this is done regularly, is my profession.)
Again, *at scale*. Highly motivated teachers who want to do weird experimental things without institutional support in order to better engage their students are not representative. It's great that you're helping them and their students but the applicability to national-level curriculum design needs to be demonstrated.
Yup. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as the old folks say — or "bricks and mortars schools, or it didn't happen" as the kids say. The two paths that one can take are (2) to spread methods through an extant system, and (2) to start an alternative system and show it scales. We're taking both approaches in different countries, and are seeing successes!
I dispute your claim that schools are successfully bringing knowledge to even the low self-motivation students, because they often don't work to even teach in the first place. It's not just the "learning loss" like what Scott talks about where he forgot pretty much everything he doesn't use or see reinforced in pop culture; I've tutored multiple students in calculus classes who can't find the area of a rectangle. If their evaluations were working at all they wouldn't have been advanced to this class in the first place.
How is this possible? Imagine a teacher fails to teach anyone anything at all (standardized tests and personal experience both confirm this can happen). Students who fail would be held back a year, but holding back children would anger parents a lot, so they are sent to the next year anyway with a fake grade. Obviously, children are considered people with agency, so even if they are able to learn the subject elsewhere on their own they are still sent into the class, by the police if necessary, even if their teacher does nothing but scream into their faces and get really angry at people who ask clarifying questions, like Ms. Mandeville. (The actual name of one of my teachers!)
Most of the time schools aren't that obviously bad, I admit. Possibly most schools "merely" teach things that end up forgotten while making kids hate learning enough that they stop being curious about the topic if they started out curious. But the school system is so dysfunctional that it can't even detect if anyone learned anything at all.
Yeah. There's a lot of kids whose basic skills in math are below what I'd expect from a 3rd grader. Who pull out calculators to multiply a one digit number by 2. Or to divide a multiple of 10 by 10.
This review rubs me the wrong way quite a lot; unfortunately, I can't give it the time it would deserve, so here is a short version. I will start with the parts that I agree with, to get it out of the way.
1) I fully agree that you can't "teach critical thinking" divorced from content. It is one of those things that sound great but when you look for substance behind the words, you won't find any. (Called "applause lights" in the Sequences.) How could someone think critically about e.g. World War 2, if that person had no idea when the war happened, who participated in it, and other similar encyclopedical knowledge. What would their opinions be based on, if not facts? A random edgy tweet, or a convincing (for someone who doesn't know any of the facts) article on a blog?
It actually works the other way round. You get some data in your head, and sometimes they connect, maybe in a way you did not expect. (And you cannot simply look them up on Google, because you do not know what will connect to what.)
I would even go further and say that, as far as I know, we do not have any evidence that "critical thinking" can be taught *at all*. I think there was an experiment with some university students who studied critical thinking, which showed that after passing the exams they were not any better at critical thinking compared to their classmates who didn't attend those lessons. (Also, "knowing about biases can hurt people" in the Sequences; we all probably know people who only learned the techniques of "critical thinking" superficially so that they can use them to reject inconvenient arguments.)
2) I agree about the self-reinforcing nature of motivation + study habits + skills/knowledge. (But I disagree that the third one is "intelligence".) Even getting slightly ahead of your peers can start the feedback loop where people praise you for your skills, you feel good about the topic in general, which makes you more willing to study it further, which further increases your skills, etc. And there is an equivalent opposite loop where falling slightly behind your peers makes it all feel hopeless, because you would have to work hard only to become average, which is no big success.
But from my perspective, this makes separating children at school by their physical age a horribly bad idea. That's how you create the losers! I mean, if someone is e.g. literally retarded, that is going to be obvious no matter what. But if someone is merely a few months behind their peers, the school system makes it super visible by contrasting them with their peers every day and giving them bad grades. (To compare with the life of adults, no one cares if you e.g. get your driving license one year later.)
3) Yes, it is easy to create an awesome school by having a random idea (anything that is not actively very harmful) and selecting only for good students. Good students create great learning environment, and you can then attribute that to your excellent idea, or your excellent teachers, or whatever. This can create a self-sustaining loop, when the school becomes famous, so many students apply, so the school can keep choosing the best ones.
This shouldn't be taken as a proof that good ideas are impossible. But it invites a lot of skepticism about ideas even after you have seen a successful school that follows them: maybe the true success is in the constellation of the students, not in the idea.
...okay, and now the remainign 90% that I disagree about...
For starters, I roll to disbelieve in the studies on increasing IQ. That doesn't even pass the smell test: IQ is defined *relatively* to people of the same age, with the average being 100. So if the school attendance is mandatory, and the average of the kids in the first grade is IQ 100, and the average of the kids in the second grade is IQ 100, and so on... where the hell is that 1-5 IQ points per year increase? Does not make sense, mathematically.
(Or do you mean that the kids in the second grade are smarter relatively to the kids in the first grade? Yeah, that's called "growing up"; I am sure it happens a lot outside the school, too.)
The repeated topic in this review is that almost all kids need some kind of external support / motivation / pressure / direction / structure / whatever we may choose to call it; and that although some kids only need a little or none, most kids need a lot. Without the system, the kids who need a lot of the external force would utterly fail. And... that's true... but it also seems irrelevant when comparing the existing school system to the alternatives, except for those that advocate zero use of external force, such as unschooling, some specifically American misinterpretations of constructivism, and the naive idea that if you give computer lessons to the kids you will never need to check whether they have actually turned on the computer and actually clicked on the lessons. But those are far from the only possible alternatives.
The original experiments with MOOCs failed, as far as I know, mostly because they were done in a way "here is the digital content, make sure to finish it before the end of the semester", and most students ignored it until one week before the end of the semester... and then it was too late to learn in before the exams. Yes, that specific approach to using MOOCs fails. But instead of rejecting the digital education completely, I think the proper lesson is to make sure that the students keep doing the lessons during the semester. Which, once you think about it, is trivial to implement: at the end of each week, check how many % of the semester have passed, how many % of content each student completed, send them an e-mail if they are behind, and send an e-mail also to their teacher is they are significantly behind.
These days, many MOOCs require you to proceed at a predetermined speed, which is horrible for an adult person who is not a student, doesn't have a predictable schedule, and just wanted to study something in their free time out of curiosity... but it addresses the problem for the students who use those MOOCs at school. There are often also forums where the virtual classmates can discuss the lessons and ask each other questions.
Similarly, the main problem with COVID-era remote education, in my opinion, was that people were totally unprepared for it. You had an improvized Zoom call where the kids didn't even hear the lesson properly, and... often, that was all. Yep, didn't work. But if you knew e.g. one year in advance that you will have to spend a few months teaching remotely, there is so much you could do better. For starters, you could prepare sheets with exercises, and deliver them by mail to students' homes. (Or, depending on the socioeconomic class, just send them some PDFs and tell them to print them.) You could prepare a nice video of the explanation, with clear image and sound, and upload it to YouTube. (If multiple teachers did this, you could also send your students links to other teachers explaining the same topic, so maybe they would benefit from having the same thing explained in several ways.) But more importantly, this could all be connected: watch a video... keep answering related questions on the paper... communicate in chat... and then do an automated exam. Maybe this wouldn't work perfectly, but I think it would work much better than mere improvised Zoom calls.
"In general, research has found that leveled reading reduces the achievement of the readers who struggle the most. We might intuitively think that reading an easier book would benefit students who have weaker reading skills, but that intuition seems to be wrong."
My intuition would suggest to give everyone an easier text first, more complicated text later, after they can read the easier text correctly. Where can I go collect my Nobel prize for education?
As a sidenote, giving up at the first failure seems like a repeated pattern in debates about education. Imagine someone talking about e.g. cooking the same way: "Once I tried to cook a soup. It was too salty. The idea of 'cooking a soup' is debunked. Anyone who suggests that you can cook a soup at home is clearly wrong, they should read my report instead." I find it ironic that the school system is so bad at learning. Then again, school has practically redefined "learning" to mean "memorizing the words of the authority", so perhaps the idea of learning by experimenting is at a blind spot of most experts on the school system.
Another sidenote, even the words "no-structure", "low-structure", "high-structure" rub me the wrong way, because they are so... structure-centric. It's like calling a bird outside the cage a "no-cage bird", which kinda suggests that the cage is the bird's natural habitat, and it's the absence of the cage that makes this specific bird weird. I would prefer an opposite perspective, e.g. to call the students high-agency, low-agency, and no-agency... or some word other than agency, but the focus should be on the quality that makes learning happen (and which, when low or missing, can be substituted by the structure).
"incremental rehearsal is a highly-structured way to teach students multiplication facts."
Well, that kinda sounds like something a computer could help with, just saying.
"The no-structure learners will always be bored, as long as we are committed to putting them into classrooms where everyone learns the same thing."
Wrong. There is a vast difference between "learning the same thing" and "learning the thing that you already know... at an excruciatingly slow speed... every day... for years". Both can be boring, but it's not the same quality; given the choice, I would choose the first one in a heartbeat.
Also, maybe we shouldn't teach the boring things, or we shouldn't teach them the boring way? Why are we even doing that? Yeah, because that's the only way that works well with the high-structure students. Basically, the students who resist learning require an approach that is almost the *opposite* of someone who wants to learn. It's like, for the student who wants to learn, you build the track; for the student who doesn't want to learn, you build the barriers along the track so that he can't escape.
"[Kids at gifted school] would be doing more advanced work than peers in regular schools, absolutely. But often only by a year or two."
Well, a year or two is a lot. Imagine coming to the university two years earlier. For example, if a person wants to spend a fixed number of years at school, how much more they could learn if they could replace two years at elementary school listening to the stuff they already know, with two extra years of university education? The same cost for the educational system; much better outcome.
From my perspective, the problem with many gifted schools is that they focus too much on intelligence, and fail to notice things such as love of learning. If you combine intelligence with love of learning, you get magic. If you combine intelligence with the lack of love of learning, you get bored students sitting in the class for gifted kids.
Note that the love of learning is *not* the same as "no-structure". Those are two different dimensions. If you make a voluntary class, the people who will come are those who love to learn, and prefer to have some structure for that. I know many people like that.
"The core challenge of compulsory public education is motivation. The best solution we’ve found is to send kids to school beginning at age 5 (or earlier if we can), before they can reliably form long-term episodic memories."
Are you insane?! School is typically the thing that *kills* motivation in children. Small children are curious about everything, they can't stop asking question. It is school that makes them associate learning with boredom. It is school that associates learning with punishment (even if merely verbal and social).
"The system motivates high-structure learners to keep up with their peers, though that motivation does gradually fade over time."
So we basically sacrifice motivation of some kids to create motivation for other kids... and even that doesn't work well in long term. Cool!
"Maybe the best way education can contribute to all of these causes is to focus on providing a broad, basic education to as many children as possible, and maybe our current system is the best idea we’ve had so far for doing so."
Maybe the current system is the best for those children who don't have a hope to achieve anything beyond the basic education. And maybe those children are a majority of the population, like maybe even 80% of it, although I doubt it.
It would still make sense to have a separate track for the remaining 20%. And high school is too late.
As a former teacher, it was my experience that the class is often slowed down by one or two kids who are either clearly uncooperative, or somehow damaged. Maybe those schools were not representative for the population at large, and the actual ratio is different at other places; I don't know. Sometimes, if such child became sick for a few weeks, the classroom experience changed dramatically in their absence... and then immediately reverted back. As a result, sometimes 18 out of 20 students cannot get the education they might get. And this is considered perfectly acceptable. It is democratic, inclusive, insert your favorite buzzword... Yes, you can get a dramatically better school by simply *not* admitting kids like this, and then people complain that this is cheating. From my perspective, it is sanity. Instead of complaining that it is unfair when only a few schools do it, all schools should be doing it. (That is, except for a few selected schools that would be specialized for kids like this.)
Basically, we are trying to make the school same for everyone, and then it barely serves the lowest common denominator. All improvements will be criticized that they only work for a certain subset of students. But from my perspective, that's okay. The students who can get a better system, should get a better system; different systems for different students. And the students who couldn't work in a system different from the current one, should stay in the current one. But they should not be allowed to drag everyone else down.
"Another sidenote, even the words "no-structure", "low-structure", "high-structure" rub me the wrong way, because they are so... structure-centric. It's like calling a bird outside the cage a "no-cage bird", which kinda suggests that the cage is the bird's natural habitat"
I think an underlying theme of the review is that education IS unnatural. In the same sense as, "Listening and speaking are natural; reading and writing are not natural." I can't remember the exact quote but someone in the comments said something like, "If education were natural, libraries would have made schools unnecessary."
Since education is unnatural, we should expect what makes schools work to also seem unnatural.
Almost no one has love of learning everything. Lots of people have love of learning something. But for most people, it's a love of non-academic things. They love learning about certain sports or pop music or ... The amount some people know about their local sports team or Taylor Swift is astounding.
Yes, little kids are sponges. But the knowledge they want is generally concrete, or obviously useful. And many of them have lots of trouble with more unnatural things--like reading and writing! School doesn't kill their curiosity. What young people are curious about changes and, particularly after puberty, school moves away from what they are naturally interested in.
I wish near the very beginning of the review, the author had said something like: When I talk about motivation here, I do not mean liking to do something. I mean getting someone to actually do it. Looking at it in the worst possible way, If someone comes up to me on a dark, deserted street, points a gun at me, and says, "Your money or your life", I am very motivated to give him any money I have.
The end of your comment made me think of the quote often attributed to Thomas Sowell, "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." A "democratic, inclusive, insert your favorite buzzword" classroom/school is not going to do as well for good students as a separate school or track. But it does better for the middling and poor ones. The author and the commenters seem to have different estimates of how big those groups are and how much they are helped or hurt in different systems.
Without making any claims about whether any particular teaching technique works, it seems pretty clear to me that "critical thinking divorced from content" is a coherent concept and in principle is learnable. Our esteemed host made the case for it better than I could, nearly a decade ago (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/04/contra-hallquist-on-scientific-rationality/):
"If we want to get all hypothetical, we can imagine some kind of theorizing contest between a totally irrational person with an encyclopaedic knowledge of cell biology, versus a very rational person who knows nothing at all about the subject. Who would win? Well, who cares? Whoever wins, *we lose*. We lose because I want the people working on curing cancer to be good at both cell biology *and* thinking clearly, to know both the parts of science specific to their own field and the parts of science that are as broad as Thought itself. I have *seen* what happens when people know everything about cell biology and nothing about rationality. You get AMRI Nutrigenomics [1], where a bunch of people with PhDs and MDs give a breathtakingly beautiful analysis of the complexities of the methylation cycle, then use it to prove that vaccines cause autism. By all means, know as much about methylation as they do! But you’ve also got to have something they’re missing!"
I agree that critical thinking is a thing, and that it principle it should be learnable. But unless we already have a specific technique that works, saying "our school will focus on critical thinking (at the expense of knowledge)" is wishful thinking.
I suspect that the actual critical thinking starts somewhere at the emotional level. You need a *desire* to know the truth... even if it contradicts your existing beliefs... even if admitting that your existing beliefs were wrong will cost you some status. The cost of being smart is that you sometimes seem stupid (e.g. when you are the only student in the classroom who raises hand and asks "sorry, I didn't understand this, could you please explain it in greater detail", when in fact most of your classmates didn't understand it either), and for most people their image and self-image is too precious to give up (I suspect it might require a little bit of autism).
To be clear, I was just arguing with your World War II example, which I think was flawed. I agree that in practice most discussion of "critical thinking" in education policy is hot air. It's just that this is really bad since there *is* a real thing there (and no, I don't know how to fix it).
> Yes, it is easy to create an awesome school by having a random idea (anything that is not actively very harmful) and selecting only for good students. Good students create great learning environment, and you can then attribute that to your excellent idea, or your excellent teachers, or whatever. This can create a self-sustaining loop, when the school becomes famous, so many students apply, so the school can keep choosing the best ones.
If tracking + any not-terrible idea leads to great gains, then tracking on its own must do so as well. Sounds like a great argument for tracking to me.
Indeed; the actual problem is *how* to select the kids.
Using the analogy to adults, if you select people by an IQ test, you won't get a community of scientists and entrepreneurs. Instead, you will get Mensa.
Similarly, I would like to see classes selected by the ability *and* willingness to learn. Because I have seen classes that were only selected by the ability alone, and those included some students who wanted to be a part of the elite, but also wanted to do as little as possible, so at the end, teachers had to fight against resistance.
The advantage of the "weird schools" is that parents usually cooperate (because they are the ones who chose to try the weird school in the first place), and there is less stigma in concluding that "sorry, our school is probably not a good fit for your child".
This only addresses one piece of the problem but -- what if in order to vote people had to demonstrate decent knowledge of structure of government, the last 100 years of history, laws, political parties, taxes, treaties, voting, and let's say 3 current issues? AI can generate lots of tests and ensure that they are of equivalent difficulty, and score them, both multiple choice items and short answer.
Oh sorry I thought that every time the word "school" appeared in the review the writer meant "Government." Like that "school" was just a slang term. I misunderstood the whole review! Oh dear I am such a silly.
Is your point that if we disenfranchised the ignorant then we could just give up on educating unmotivated students, because their ignorance can't hurt their fellow citizens? I do not think that that follows. In a highly complex information-age society, externalities are everywhere, not just in electoral politics. You want the people you transact with in the marketplace, or who live next door to you or pass you on the street, to have a baseline understanding of how the world works and of our shared culture; it doesn't always matter, but sometimes it does. And being uneducated puts you yourself at a disadvantage as well, as it makes it harder to tell when you're being duped. Yes, there's a lot of waste and uselessness in the K-12 curriculum, both for unmotivated students and for motivated ones, but this does not move me to give up entirely on the concept of a universal baseline education, albeit maybe a smaller one than we presently have.
Also, disenfranchising a large fraction of the population would mean that elected officials would be free to entirely disregard their interests, and that seems *extremely* bad and I would have to see a damned strong case that it was worth the cost.
Importantly DK is assuming an ultimate point to school, inside the perceptive point that it's about "motivation." Motivation for what; learning; this elides the point.
Consider different functions of schools:
1) Teach kids useful information that will make them more effective and productive adults.
2) Day care. Get kids out of the way so the adults can work.
2a) Divert kids away from worse activities like watching TV all day, drug use, unprotected sex, crime.
3) Produce a ranking of the kids relative to each other.
4) Stealth social services. A square meal a day, and put kids in contact with some caring adults.
5) Produce entertainment: school plays, band, quiz bowls, beauty pageants, sporting events.
6) Wealth transfer from prosperous blue areas to unproductive red areas via teacher, administrator and staff salaries and spending on school infrastructure.
7) Political indoctrination, e.g. the Revolutionary War is an origin story for the US meant to create political cohesion.
I agree with DK's cogent point well-made that school is structured for motivation across the whole population. But the "motivation" is for "perpetuation of school". Schools have evolved to perpetuate schools, unsurprisingly.
Upsettingly for people who like to envision better schools, not going to school turns out to be quite bad. Smartphones in schools are undoing a chief purpose of modern schools, to stop kids from watching TV all day. Smartphones have put TV right into schools. Movements to ban phones in school are very good.
The Federal Reserve, of all people, did a careful study of how kids spend their non-school time, and found that diverting kids from bad activities like watching TV was important:
The idea of “high structure kids” and “low structure kids” is important to a lot of the author's argument. How established and validated are these categories?
There are some dimensions on which almost everybody falls into one of a few categories: gender, blood type, eye color, handedness. But on most dimensions people are distributed in some approximation of a bell curve: most people are in the middle, and a considerably smaller number are quite a bit above or below the middle range. So in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'd expect that most kids are medium-structure.
And then, on the dimensions on which variance takes the bell shape, a lot of them turn out to be situation-specific. For instance, consider aggressiveness. If you look at most people across a variety of situations, you will see a lot of variation in how aggressive they are. They might be very aggressive chess players, driving grimly towards the endgame, but very casual when playing tennis, chatting about this and that while they play. They might push very hard in work discussions when certain issues come up that they care a lot about, but shrug and say “whatever” about other issues. They might be very irritable with other drivers, but patient and gentle with their teenage daughter even when she’s being quite difficult. In fact there are not many “qualities” at all on which people's scores are fairly stable across different situations. Intelligence is pretty special because it is one of those qualities. There is a lot less variation across situations: People able to remember and recite a long string of digits also tend to have large vocabularies, and to be good at mental math and at reasoning, and to have la large store of general knowledge. So in the absence of evidence that how structure-dependent somebody is stays the same across settings and situations, I'd expect that most kids vary quite a lot.
So unless there’s some pretty solid evidence that most kids are either high structure or low structure, and that they stay in whatever category they’re in across a lot of situations, then a lot of the author's train of thought about schooling and what works is unfounded. Is there in fact some well-validated psychometric measure of high/low structure, one that shows the distribution tends towards being bimodal and that kids’ high- or low-structure membership tends to stay the same across school subjects?
I’m told one-room schools were even better than grouping by age, because you could hear the lessons from higher grades before you got there. My father’s family was from a tiny rural fishing village. When he moved to California at 16, they were years ahead of their piers in education.
In a quick search on my phone I did not find studies assessing whether there were such advantages.
She links to the the DeBoar essay, and I'd like to comment on that here.
He makes a distinction between black/white, poor/rich, etc. But he looks at evidence combining all those groups. When you look at it for only birth to preschool aged disadvantaged minority kids, the evidence shows positive environmental changes and educational interventions have a much stronger effect on lower SES children than higher. Heckman estimates a ROI of $9/1. So yes, forget K-12 school. The work should start with low-income pregnant mothers. It should include home visiting programs from before birth until at least preschool. It should include high quality year-round childcare/preschool so those mothers have a chance to become wealthier and move to a better neighborhood, or at least have more time to spend on being good parents rather than subsistence.
The older students get, the more we spend on them. This continues in that we spend much more on the elderly than infants. We need to flip that.
Those high-structure children mostly aren't born that way.
But they come back later in : more likely to graduate, earn more over lifetime, less likely to be incarcerated, less welfare, etc. And when they have kids, those benefits get passed on.
Clearly something good is happening; whether it can be measured in grades or tests shouldn't matter.
I had enough experience and self confidence that I was quite willing to argue with teachers and principals. I have a Ph.D. - Physics/Engineering and my wife has a Masters in Teaching, so we could support our kids as needed. When my daugher was not learning math when she started middle school - it was all repetition I raised hell and had her jumped a grade for her math class. I made more problems for the principal the next year about the lack of challenge. When she went to high school I met the principal and had a discussion. She told me what the state expected, I told her that I did not care - that I did not expect her to graduate from high school and that she did not have to graduate to go to a university. I was prepared to home school her as needed, but that I much preferred her to be in appropriate classes at the high school. We worked out a reasonable solution.
I had a no-structure daughter and a low-structure younger son. Both on the spectrum, with my daughter much more so. She hated the social games at school and when she was in 7th grade told me that she liked learning but hated school and wanted to minimize her time in it. I switched her to half online school, going to the high school for the first period math class, and doing the rest of her morning at the middle school before coming home to spend her afternoon in front of a screen racing through her online classes. She skipped 8th grade, and then did honors 9th and 10th grade before dropping out and going to the state university to study engineering. She did calculus for college credit in 10th grade. She was much happier at the university.
My son needed some structure, so he did the college prep / honors track followed by the Running Start program so that he was one class shy of his associates when he graduated from high school. I was surprised at how well he did at accounting competing with adults. After his first quarter at the University he became a junior and went into the business school to do a MIS focus. He needed the class structure and assignments and would then go under his own power.
My son did not take to reading quite as early as my daughter, but by third grade he was consuming books by the pile (thank you Captain Underpants). But by the time they went to middle school their reading levels were both well into the high school range. I am sure this was helped by the fact that video entertainment at home was VERY limited and reading was all but unlimited - Kindles glow in the dark, allowing reading under the bed spread when you are supposed to be asleep.
I think that the LLM tools are going to be a godsend for the no-structure students.
As for gifted programs typically being only a year ahead, I think that a major factor for this is the high mobility of students. Each year you get more bright students who are transferring in and have not had the opportunity to advance as far. If you started tracking by the beginning of middle school and had a stable student population you could advance several years more in consecutive classes such as math and some of the sciences. But the continual movement of students hinders this.
How exactly did you "raise hell" or jump her a grade without permission?
You're also lucky to live in Washington - it's the only state I know that requires schools to allow part time homeschool enrollment in academic school classes like math - although personally I would consider math the easiest to outsource, and English (which needs feedback) to be the hardest
I had been giving and her brother my own problem sets to supplement the school work even earlier. The schools were teachng the lattice method and I taught the traditional method for long division and multiplication to both kids. My son was not really happy at having to learn both. But in later classes they found that the traditional method would work with polynomials as well.
I went in and talked to the principal, who moved her to the 8th grade math class in the middle school, which starts at 6th grade. He expected her to do badly and drop back. The middle school did not have an advanced enough math class for her in 7th grade so she and a handfull or two of other students had to go to the high school for the first period math class and then be taken by their parents to the middle school.
I had her do Geometry by correspondence via Gifted Learning Links over the summer after 7th grade. This meant that I had to relearn the subject, which I had not studied for 50 years - it was easier to ask me occasional questions than her teacher.
She did home study for her afternoon classes, I think History, Civics, and one other class, I don't remember. She skipped 8th grade and I had her do pre-calculus via gifted learning links over the summer before 9th grade.
We were not planning on early admission to the university. We were planning on Running Start in 11th grade and she knew she was headed into the pure or applied sciences, so she wanted to have mastered calculus by the start of Running Start, 11th grade.
If students going the STEM route are going to take advantage of Running Start they have to take calculus in 11th grade / start of Running Start - at the latest. Which is what my son did.
Fascinating, thank you ! Reading this I have to wonder : how did you supervise her ? Did both of her parents work ? Work independently / from home ? How did you find the time to get her to the high school and back ?
I had a somewhat flexible work schedule. First period in high school started at 7:30 AM, so I could get her back to school and be at work within core hours, I just had to work later. English gave her more 'correct' poets to read, I gave her Kipling. When she had to recite her favorite poem in English class she recided Kipling's 'IF'.
If the instruction is individualized (see private tutoring or LLM's) you can be that far ahead.
If the teaching is classroom oriented you have to have enough students at a level to fill a classroom. Tracking in a large school may give you one or two advanced classes in a subject.
I went to school in England, and there was an enormous difference between the top stream and the bottom stream — and this was at a grammar school where we were already the top 10% of students. It wasn't just that we learned at different speeds. We learned different things and took different exams.
Private tutors might work for rich kids, but I was a poor kid.
I think that this is where LLM's are going to be valuable. They should be far far cheaper than private tutoring and should be ideal for students who need little or no external structure. I would suspect that classes can be managed with LLM supplementation that will work well with students that need a modest amount of external structure.
You cannot force a student to learn something, but you can givem them the opportunity and encouragement, the rest is up to them.
I'm quite unimpressed by this one. Not the content itself -- it's fine and makes decent claims with decent evidence -- but I think it's not very well written. Little things that frustated me about it:
1) the headings don't seem to match the content. The section on "Motivation" near the top asks the question "motivation for what?" but never plainly answers this, instead veering off into a tangent about IQ for a few paragraphs. Why did you write it this way?
2) Lots of things never explained. "Remember the MOOC craze"? the essayist asks. No, please enlighten me as to what a MOOC is, I've never heard of this. Oh, you're just...going to assume I know what a MOOC is, or be able to guess it based on context? Thanks essayist, that's very kind of you.
3) Too much duplication. I think it was a mistake to put the thesis at the top, because it makes it obvious how little actual content or actual original ideas are in the essay. It could be about 1/3rd of its length and contain all the main points argued in it without losing much content.
The claim of the essay is that "School is designed to maximize motivation" as opposed to maximizing learning. But this claim is never really argued for. Instead, what we get is an argument is that school is designed to maximize the motivation to learn, and then the essay details a bunch of sort of adjacent points relating to the history of schools, failed attempts at improving the school system and various other foibles.
I was kind of disappointed in this. I was expecting, based on the thesis, to read an essay about how school makes people better at motivating themselves to, for example, work. Maybe people who have gone to school are more prepared to put in an 8-hour workday. I would be kind of skeptical of such a claim but I was interested in reading the argument, and perhaps becoming convinced, or at least, updating my priors.
Instead, no, it's an essay which claims that school uses peer pressure to motivate kids to learn, and not very well, and then basically predicts that nothing will ever change, mainly because nothing ever has changed, despite repeated attempts at doing so.
Of course, it is false that nothing has ever changed. A LOT of things about school have changed. Schools provide lunch to students who can't afford it. Grades are not publicly disclosed. Reading is (almost always) taught using Phonics, which really is MUCH more effective than other methods. Schools MUST now enroll all children, not just white ones. Also, teachers aren't allowed to hit children! Let me say that again: TEACHERS AREN'T ALLOWED TO HIT CHILDREN ANYMORE. Given that these are only the changes I know of as a layperson, I am sure there are many, many more.
A good option for many "no-structure learners" (and some "low-structure learners") are programs in the Liberated Learners network (https://liberatedlearners.net/). With one exception (that I know of), the programs are not incorporated as regular private schools; instead, students are legally homeschooled and use the activities in the program to fill out the requirements on their state homeschooling paperwork. I went to the original Liberated Learners program (North Star: https://www.northstarteens.org/) and also taught a six-month programming class at another one (LightHouse Holyoke: https://www.lighthouseholyoke.org/).
Interestingly, it has an aside on multiple choice testing being bad to assess deep knowledge but it's hard to replace at scale. But that was in 2020. We're now in the age of LLMs, and I think that this is where AI can make a big difference! Not in personalized teaching, but in much better assessment. Replace all multiple choice with open questions at the end of a course. Maybe even add open ended questions at the end of each session! Let students write with pen. Auto scan it, let AI assess.
The article doesn't really have a clear thesis, but instead jumps around between a few different senses of "critical thinking". I wrote in another comment (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-school/comment/132193201) that I find it fairly obvious that there's such a thing as cross-domain critical thinking that in principle is learnable. I agree that I'd probably bet against the success of any particular proposal to teach it at scale, but I also can't help but feel that the educational system hasn't tried *that* hard to crack this (since there isn't even a consensus that this in particular, and not various adjacent things, is a priority).
I thought this one of the best written essays I have read, regarding a topic about which I have not given much thought. The initial framing analogizing to Churchill’s democracy and Chesterton’s fence kept in check my biases to disagree, and to eventually come to accept the thesis when considering how to “deliver” education “at scale.” The author addressed the topic of how we teach without straying to the more contentious topic of what we teach. I don’t know the criteria of the contest or if an unpaid subscriber is entitled to vote, but it gets my vote.
Many decades ago, I was blessed with 90% great public school teachers while my brother only one year younger and attending the same schools drew only about 40%. I suspect the author is a great teacher.
Mobile apps and social media manage to motivate kids to spend a lot of time on them, even to the point of adiction, so there is hope that somebody will figure out how to use the same motivational or reward paths to actually teach them something.
This review is grounded in an epidemiological view of education - in other words, what happens to the overall population. That's why separating some no-structure learners is considered cherry picking rather than segmentation. Sure, the review seems to suggest, those few learners will often learn more and be happier, but hey, we have the other X% of the population over here doing the same or slightly worse than before, so did we accomplish anything? Meanwhile, the Alpha School review takes the opposite perspective, of one parent and/or school, and in that case the success of the individual learner is the foreground consideration.
The other thing I noticed is that intrinsic motivation is taken as a given, which I consider incorrect. Motivation varies by task and environment. Some kids may love math and dislike writing, or for that matter love math puzzles but be indifferent to standard math instruction. I think assuming a set level of motivation basically concedes the entire game. One key is to best tap into the intrinsic motivation of each kid. Often this is quite difficult - if the kid just wants to play basketball, even framing academic subjects in terms of basketball often won't really scratch that same itch. But nevertheless, that's probably the most important task in education. How to get kids to actually care about what they're learning to the degree possible.
From this review's scale perspective, success at activating intrinsic motivation is basically impossible to improve on. The system is doing the best it can at scale, and it is what it is. I have sympathy for that perspective, but it assumes we can't effectively disaggregate the system and solve the problem for smaller cohorts of students. Instead, I think we just haven't personalized education enough yet. More dakka! https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoreDakka
Yeah. I find the totalizing attitude (must work for everyone to be useful) to be depressing. Let a thousand educational systems bloom. Break the monopoly. Let there be little-more-than-warehouses for those who show no ability or desire to want to learn. Let parents seek and find places suited to their kids without having to also pay for a legacy system. Etc.
The highlighted text in the link about reading on screens being less effective than reading on paper doesn’t support the claim in the text. I’m skeptical the physical medium itself (vs easy access to distractions) has any impact, so I would be curious to see a longer form exposition on the argument and evidence.
There are some things I value in this review (the role of motivation, and the place of a structure to motivate people, is vital!) and some that I find quite frustrating.
In particular, the section on ability grouping breezing by it dismissively is understandable based on glancing at meta-analyses in the field but really does not do the topic justice. Every university that has published "research" supporting the idea of detracking has selective admissions, screens students out of programs, expects people to come prepared to high-level courses, so forth. Nobody suggests putting MIT physics majors and remedial community college math students together in the same rooms and having them learn the same things. Nobody suggests in athletics that top athletes benefit from missing out on competitive varsity teams and playing against low-level competition. It's only in the specific context of K12 education, where people have a deep philosophical divide over the purpose of school, that researchers on one side of that divide have been putting out junk research for long enough to confuse an issue on which nobody should be confused.
From Ethel Cornell in a 1936 review of the literature on ability grouping, with apologies for the wall of text:
"There seem to have been, even from the earliest attempts at a better classification of pupils, two conflicting ideas regarding the objectives of democratic education. This conflict is still evident, both in the studies undertaken to evaluate ability grouping and in the more theoretical discussions and critiques. One theory is that a democratic education should fulfill the same educational content to all. The science and knowledge of the extent of individual differences has affected the traditional grade organization based upon this theory to the extent of modifying the speed at which it can best suit the variety of illustrative materials of instruction, without questioning the basic assumption of a set of minimum essentials for all.
"The other theory is that education cannot be democratic unless it varies the educational pattern, the content, and the goal, as well as the speed and the method, to fit the varying needs, both present and future, of its pupils. Advocates of the former theory attack classifications based on the latter, on the ground that they create class distinctions that are contrary to democratic ideals. Advocates of the latter point to our present lack of social leadership in places where it should be expected, to the general sloppiness of thinking of the average adult, to our tendency to favor demagogues and super-salesmen, as the consequences of a theory that one educational goal can serve democratic interests.
"The failure to recognize these conflicting convictions about the relation of individual differences to democratic ideals and to educational purposes has led to much of the difficulty of evaluating the results of ability grouping. When ability grouping has been undertaken against the background of the first theory, it has been defined and conceived as a refinement of grading.¹ When it has been undertaken against the background of the second theory, it has been conceived as a new type of organization and classification of pupils, cutting across and supplanting, rather than supplementing, the traditional grade system."
In short: we have never all been pushing towards the same thing. People have had two incompatible visions of education, and the grouping literature is incredibly messy based on those different theories. You wouldn't believe, for example, how many studies that find grouping "doesn't work" do so on the basis of grouping with no modification of curriculum whatsoever. There's a philosophical divide, and people on one side of that divide are overwhelmingly dominant in the relevant field. That has led to a great deal of confusion!
In related fields, there is no such confusion. The literature on acceleration is overwhelmingly in agreement that it works for students who are ahead of their peers (see eg https://ncrge.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/982/2022/12/ch2-A-Nation-Empowered-Vol2-2.pdf ). Researchers like Chen-lin and James Kulik who include programs like that in their meta-analyses conclude unambiguously that they help (see eg https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1983-08855-001 ). When districts try to "detrack," they reliably find things become worse and they revert, so even as a position against ability grouping is the accepted wisdom in education schools, teacher's associations, and other education institutions, the overwhelming majority continue to find some reason to group.
As soon as Stanford is convinced that its selective admissions provide it or its students no value and gets rid of them, I will take its education department seriously when they say that ability grouping lacks evidence. As-is, the debate is one of the most confused in all of public policy, and I'm frustrated to see an essay in this space treat it so uncritically.
>It's only in the specific context of K12 education, where people have a deep philosophical divide over the purpose of school, that researchers on one side of that divide have been putting out junk research for long enough to confuse an issue on which nobody should be confused.
This sounds dangerously conspiratorial. Next thing you know, the literature on the black white IQ gap will be a lie. And perhaps the brain will turn out to not really develop until 25. And what about COVID research?
In an earlier post I expressed doubt that the concept of structured vs. unstructured learners, which is important to the writer's case, actually captured an important determinant of which kid learns under what conditions. I looked online for an article addressing this question, and found one about such "learning styles" ideas. Authors surveyed the research on various "learning styles" for evidence that they have been shown to be valid predictors of who learns under what conditions, and concluded that most have not been tested.
<The learning-styles view has acquired great influence within the education field. . . .
The authors of the present review were charged with determining whether these practices are supported by scientific evidence. We concluded that any credible validation of learning-styles-based instruction requires robust documentation of a very particular type of experimental finding with several necessary criteria. First, students must be divided into groups on the basis of their learning styles, and then students from each group must be randomly assigned to receive one of multiple instructional methods. Next, students must then sit for a final test that is the same for all students. Finally, in order to demonstrate that optimal learning requires that students receive instruction tailored to their putative learning style, the experiment must reveal a specific type of interaction between learning style and instructional method: Students with one learning style achieve the best educational outcome when given an instructional method that differs from the instructional method producing the best outcome for students with a different learning style. In other words, the instructional method that proves most effective for students with one learning style is not the most effective method for students with a different learning style.
[In] our review of the literature we found virtually no evidence for the interaction pattern mentioned above, which was judged to be a precondition for validating the educational applications of learning styles. Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.>
I'm aware that it's consensus in the field that "learning styles" have been debunked, but it seems to me that more clarity is needed on what exactly that means. In particular, I've definitely ever had an easier or harder time understanding something depending on how it was presented; that, by itself, falsifies the strongest version of the claim that there's no such thing as learning styles. Presumably there's a weaker version that survives this critique, but I've had a hard time figuring out what it is.
My headaches lessen when New Age Norton holds his hands above my head and wiggles them. . That by itself falsifies the claim that energy healing is a bogus treatment.
I suppose it's possible that, when something is explained differently the second time and you understand it, this isn't causal but instead some other factor happened to be different the second time. But does anyone actually believe that this is true in all cases?
The claim of “learning styles” is that you belong to a specific category of learner, so that you understand things better when you hear them explained (auditory) while someone else understands them better when presented visually (visual).
This is by and large not true, but that doesn’t mean that some ways of presenting things aren’t better than others.
For instance, learning the layout of an electric circuit should happen by looking at the plan. You will understand it better through visual representation than if someone described it to you. But that doesn’t have anything to do with your personal learning style.
Growing up in a region that had several tracked classes as part of the standard, government mandated curriculum makes the way Americans talk about this seem almost laughable, like Europeans talking about air conditioning, or New Yorkers talking about putting rubbish in containers. Basic, widespread ideas like "practice reading on books only a little harder then you're comfortable with" or "only try to teach calculus to people who have learned the prerequisites" are treated as bizarre alien ideas that could only possibly be accepted with overwhelming evidence.
I don't per se disagree that school isn't likely to have drastic and fundamental changes - but there are lots of ways to better target teaching to each students actual abilities that don't require that.
I am not convinced. The point of public school does not seem to be to motivate kids, that just seems like one outcome. The author even later states the point of public schools: to offer a cohesive and consistent education. I think in that regard it's pretty clear public school is a failure.
The unstated point of modern public schools seems to be more of a daycare than anything else. That seemed to be the common refrain during the pandemic: the challenge of childcare and supervision, and was even the motivation in some cases to offer telework. To me, the solution seems to be to offer kids more trust and more opportunities to do things outside of school earlier. If learning is happening anyway and these kids need supervision, apprenticeships and other learning opportunities seem a lot more attractive.
really appreciate the piece. opened my eyes to why age-graded classrooms have been so dominant. i would like to argue that every instance of "democracy" could more accurately be replaced with "electocracy", since elected politicians just want to be able to more certainly maintain their power. just my opinion as a sortition advocate :)
"The high-structure learner has a hard time. They’re the student showing up to office hours all the time, using the tutoring center, using all the support they can find. Maybe they push through, maybe they can’t cut it and switch to a major in communications."
I'm not convinced this is true. My limited understanding of the literature is that the students who struggle the most are not the students that go to office hours. Maybe this just means (unsurprisingly) that going to office hours makes you perform better. But in any case, I would like to see some evidence about this claim before I believe it.
Yeah. The kids who need the extra credit are the ones who never do it. The ones that need the office hours never come unless literally forced by a parent or other teacher. That's my repeated experience across multiple levels of teaching.
> We can understand why school sports are such a powerful and enduring phenomenon: motivation is the core challenge of school, and conformity is our best solution. Team sports are a great mechanism to motivate young people, so we attach sports to school to capture a bit of that motivation.
Do we? Sports aren't mandatory in American schools, and "American-style" school sports are actually a very weird and unusual concept internationally - most countries divorce competitive sports from school entirely.
It's clear that it means maximise motivation *overall*, so if the majority are high structure learners that's equivalent to your wording. Useful to make it explicit though as it highlights the trade-off.
Firstly, it's daycare. That's why even the worst school, the "nobody ever graduates" school, is considered "still barely functional" and not "In need of Fumigation" (sorry, bad joke). If, however, you had a school where the kids "broke out" and were seen across town playing in the construction site -- you better BELIEVE that school would be taken to task by the lawyers.
Secondly, it's purpose is to teach people not to think. Instead, school incentivizes reciting, believing, and most importantly -knowing- the answer. School tries its hardest to create know-it-alls, people who believe exactly what they've been taught, and never find fault with it (children who find fault with history class write essays that are hard to grade, and do not demonstrate proper understanding of the source material given by the teacher).
> Every year, I would complain that I hated school. Every year, my mother would repeat some platitude like “Oh, when summer comes around you’re going to be so bored that you’ll be begging to go back”. And every year, summer vacation would be amazing, and I would love it, and I would hate going back to school with every fiber of my being. I understand this is pretty much a consensus position among schoolchildren. This has left me forever skeptical of arguments of the form “Oh, if you had freedom you would hate it”.
I think many commenters kinda miss the essence of this essay's argument, and I think it's because they miss one assumption - admittedly, perhaps not stated clearly enough - underlying said argument.
Which is - the purpose (as in the POSIWID adage, which, perhaps ironic, given we're on Scott's turf) of the school is socially determined, and answers to the needs of society as a whole. The corollary of which being - apparently, the value of maximizing the knowledge/skill/intelligence of future workforce - both in terms of its sum and of the minimum which can be reasonably expected from a random unskilled worker off the street - is higher than the value of maximizing individual brilliance.
"B-b-but it's individual brilliance that moves technology, science and industry forward! Without it, we'd be stuck on a much lower civilizational level!" - in a way, yes, but bear two things in mind. First - someone still needs to implement technological advances. If tradesmen couldn't read and count, we'd also be stuck, with civilization as we know it limited to a few select elite/intelligentsia outposts, and severely retarded by requiring intellectual elites to perform tasks that can now be performed by most people. Second - brilliance truly is individual, there's no reliable way to teach it in school, and no obvious causal link between (early) education and pushing the frontier of human knowledge.
It would be hard to quantify and prove that, as society as a whole, we are losing anything by not fast-tracking brilliance at an early point where it's still far, far away from being capable of meaningfully contributing. It would probably be much easier to quantify this for individual life outcomes, and I don't think anyone, not the essay's author in particular, begrudges individual parents wishing the best for their individual children. (Even if it's a zero sum game, which it probably is. That's a systemic issue, and the point here is that the system just doesn't care.)
Well, if a thing makes a lot of people unhappy, it might be "wrong" in the sense that we should try to make it better, no? Maybe we can't. But we should try.
This isn't bad, but it's nearly 8,000 words long. That's better than the least, which was nerly 18,000 words long. Scott, please impose a limit on the size of these.
The important, nuanced point is that school is the best system designed for education *everyone*. To the extent the macro (government level) goal is exactly that, there seems to be three ways to better accomplish it: technology, culture, or at-home learning.
These might all seem like obvious things to say, but importantly i'm agreeing with the author's take here, "People will continue to try to disrupt the status quo. There will be plenty of tinkering around the edges. Some of that tinkering will catch on at a broader scale. But there will be an inevitable gravity back to the status quo."
We can argue about vouchers, public v private, topics worth teaching, etc but the harsh reality is that helping *everyone* learn is a difficult problem that is more foundational and requires a similar type of solution.
If tech / AI can bring personal, engaging tutors to everyone that could be revolutionary.
If America had a culture that revered academics and learning similar to some other countries, that would be a step change increase.
Lastly if parents took upon themselves the obligations of their kids' education by recognizing the suboptimal school system, that could be tremendous. This would likely be the closest we can get to personalized tutors at scale. Notably this is practically hard given how many families need dual incomes but would be a solution none the less.
I think you pointed out something that a lot of people are overlooking in their critique of the essay - that it is trying to look at the best solution for all students, regardless of ability. Given ACX’s audience, I’m sure the idea of sticking to a status quo is unpleasant. I don’t fully agree with it myself. But I think to (as in the Alpha School review) focus on what experimental education can do for students who may be no/low structure and, more importantly, have parents with a vested interest in maximizing their children’s learning, is a very myopic view of education that seems to push that 5% of learners higher rather than serving as a true solution. Factor in that most of the people sending children to such schools are likely highly-educated and/or wealthy themselves, and it feels like such projects are a means of widening the education and achievement gaps between rich and poor children.
For the record, I’m not saying we should discourage high-achieving students from challenging themselves - I think they’re likely to do that independently regardless of education. Rather, I believe that more experimental education offerings should focus on the students struggling the most, many of whom are at risk for worse lifelong outcomes as a result.
This is something that I have tried to pound into the vouchers/homeschool/ancap types here and everywhere: Some kids will learn no mater what. Some kids will learn if you put them in a class room.
Most kids need to be threatened with actual factual punishment up to and including physical punishment (not necessarily a beating, but being restricted to a room with no company, no entertainment, and not being allowed to leave. You might even say it resembles a prison.) to not call their teacher a slur and go on they phone, or hit them with a chair or something.
I say most, and I mean most. 70%+. School used to apply the threats, which was shitty and bad. We stopped that, and let parents do the threatening (mainly spurred on by schools actually expelling students, threatening the parents with paying for daycare ), which worked well enough. We are at the stage now where there are no threats; because schools have had the ability to threaten voted away from them.
We need to bring back the threat of state backed violence if we want schools to do better.
I am in higher education and one of my main concerns is that the students I receive are not prepared to do the work required and sometimes seem surprised that they are failing. I glossed part of your article, but I did not notice anything about the whether the overall learning pace is correct or a discussion about failing students who do not keep up. So I apologize in advance if I missed this.
I have lamented the quality of some of my students, and early on took advice from more senior professors to the effect of "don't work harder than your students do at trying to get them to pass your class." This warning was appalingly preemptively reinforced when during my own class on Teaching Principles in Higher education, the books I was assigned contained all sorts of suggestions vignettes I considered akin to spoon feeding and wiping noses--working harder than the students to try to get them to understand the material.
I honestly don't know what the pressure is on public school teachers to pass on bad product to the next grade, but I raised three very bright and strong willed children who did what they did and didn't want to do in school. I tried to help them at times. I threatened consequence other times. A few times, I told the teacher we were working too hard on this and to give them the appropriate grade, even if it meant non progress. Thinking about being in high school after their peers had gone on seemed to be the best motivation.
It also seemed to me that when I was in high school, being called college material meant something. Now nearly every high school student seems to believe that if they do not go to college or join the military--which provides a lot of college money, they are throwing their life away.
As for parents who ask for additional assignments for their children. I have been concerned that even when parents have strong goals for their children, they remain passive in their implementation. Instead, I assigned topics myself when I thought it was beneficial for them to learn something. I gave us a chance to talk about deeper subjects and also let them know that I didn't just flush my book learning when I got out of school.
It frustrates me to no end that finding a drug that would increase *motivation* (not to be confused with *focus*, which can be obtained via Adderall) isn’t considered a project of worldwide importance, on par with solving climate change, curing cancer and preventing asteroids from hitting the planet. So many of our problems are a simple result of lacking motivation, this essay illustrates just one aspect of this.
Imagine a world where all 9 billion humans had the same motivation as Elon Musk. I’d take that over a world where we’ve cured cancer.
My students finish all of AP Physics through C by age 15, all of AP calculus too, followed by AP Stats and then Advanced Math. They are not "a year or two ahead." They are doing things most students can't do at all, ever. You would not even believe what a hardworking, bright student can accomplish with the right curriculum, teachers, and environment. The peers supply at least half the motivation.
Freddie de Boer's book was full of nonsense. There are whole schools in Baltimore where not a single student is even minimally functional. And he pretends to believe that this is because of the students. It would not have made any difference at all, he says, if they had gone to other schools. They are all just hopeless -- every single one of them. That is the de Boer message in a nutshell.
I think the quote at the beginning of this review is very informative as to the midset of the author. Just like how many people like to yell "democracy is the best we have" and then proceed to ignore all aspects of governance done better by other countries (be they differently structured democracies or otherwise) so too does the author seem to ignore education systems in other countries which have better filtering, some using the very categories of structure which the author explains in this review.
Instead, they set up a false dichotomy: either we put everyone together as we do now, or we have hyper-personalized teaching which only works for the 5% of no-structure learners. Education systems of other countries which sort kids after elementary-, or middle- school, or which otherwise combine conformity cohorts with personalisation, are ignored so that we can say "this is the best we have".
I, too am a teacher, and I can confirm the essay writers personal experiences in the classroom. That said, there are two additional points to be made:
1) There is a very simple way to provide more personalized instruction to more students: hire more teachers and reduce the national average student to teacher ratio. I didn't say it was cheap...
2) I've seen research that indicates that a mixed student body improves the performance of the lower achieving students. This is because they feel some incentive to emulate the higher performing students. I have found that the best way to make sure the higher performing students get something out of this is to put them in charge of a small student team. Teaching something improves the learning of that something, and moderate responsibility is intrinsically motivating. One problem is that we don't teach instructional methods to high school students, and we really should (it will serve them very well later in life).
2) Yup. The author bangs on about motivation, mentions the existence of school sports, but never explicitly makes the connection that you can use that same social/competitive pressure to get the kids starting something akin to bootstrapping.
I think this is a case of "Be careful what you wish for." Think about what we are asking schools to do with respect to students: figure out how to "motivate" them such that they want to do what they are told by authority figures. Bear in mind that these students will, almost inevitably, take those behavioral tendencies with them into adulthood. Think about being one of those former students, one who is now so used to doing what you are told that you do not question it. And now decide who you regard as so trustworthy and corruption-proof that you are willing to trust them with that kind of power over you.
There may or may not be a cost-efficient way to motivate most students to delver high performance for arbitrary tasks. But do we really want this, even if it's possible?
Causing someone to want to think for themselves is a contradiction in terms.
Well, the first time I read this, I thought it was pretty good. Something like a B+, maybe A-?
Then I went through it a couple of times. That first impression didn't last very long. Sorry.
The actual structure of the piece is fine. The model no-, low- and high-structure learners seems to be fine. It would appear to be correct, useful.
The problem is;
"Two commonalities you might notice are that first, in the vast majority of classrooms, the students are grouped by age and taught the same content."
From early on. Unfortunately, the only explanation given for those two observations seems to be;
"Lumping everyone together and asking them all to learn the same curriculum seems to work better at scale than anything else we’ve tried."
And;
"We group students by age in part because it’s the easiest way to organize the system."
Oh. Bit of a cop-out, that.
The author seems to have failed to get into the guts of the system, it's history, evolution and purpose, and developed a model which if it is correct, can only be so by accident.
The same issue crops up here;
"The common school movement emerged between 1830 and 1860. ... the primary rationale was the importance of a common education system for democracy. Democracy felt fragile in the first half of the 19th century, and universal public education was the solution."
So, assuming there's some truth in that observation, then how does it actually explain age-grouping and same-content? The author likely goes for another cop-out - that the reader has actually read Larabee's book.
This means that the thesis, "School is designed to maximize motivation", can't be supported. Which is a shame, as still seems to be a nice way of thinking about schools and schooling.
Makes sense on the teaching part of school role. But I do not think this is the only thing schools do. Probably not even the main thing... The three other things schools do are, I believe:
- Daycare. A way to avoid children and young adults roams in the society at large, which is mandadory since industrialisation and women in the workforce: There is simply nowhere else to go for children and young adults. If this is true, you should expect school to be organized similar to other places segregating some people from the general populace. Prisons are prime example. And indeed.... ;-) I think this is in fact the primary goal of schools, post WW2 in the western world.
- Training children to fit in an external, relatively abstract and societal-imposed hierarchy structure. Something clearly needed in modern society, but not that similar to family structures and small peer groups where hierarchy is set by direct competition and alliances. So we should expect emphasis on discipline, rules, uniforms,....above what would be needed just to get the school as an organisation running....hum...yep :-) It was the primary role of schools at the time school obligation was created in many western countries, around WW1. Probably not a coincidence, as it was the transition to modern nation states and modern war with general conscription. Went from primary to secondary goal after WW2, because daycare was even more important. If you are unkind or talking about some states, you can call this role "state indoctrination"...
- Initial sorting of children into society-approved roles: leaders, entertainers, workers (with different skillsets),...This is a task that is sometimes acknowledged (maybe using emphemism like "social skills learning" or "socialisation"), and (kind of like the teaching task) I do not think it works that well....well, it sort of works but not in a way that is that controlled by the school or society at large. Too many factors interplay with that: the peer hierarchy naturally coming out of groups of age-sorted youngs, the families behind not accepting in the least to be kept out of this process (no surprise, it's THE thing families are about regarding children), partial contradiction with goal 2. So yeah, no prediction here except it's one of the thing where many complaints will keep piling, even more than lack of learning. And you have neverending bullying/harassment stories with the assorted complaints and corrective measures indeed.....
Reading this, i’m not sure how to connect the idea of kids with no/low/high structure needs with the critique of ability grouping. If you have groups of kids who just need the basic structure of school to do well (or less), why not identify them, put them in a classroom together, have them learning more advanced material? This is basically how magnet and gifted programs work, and I’d be very surprised if it were the case that the graduates of these programs hadn’t mastered more difficult material than non-magnet counterparts, even if you control for the students’ native abilities.
It feels that "personalized learning" solutions failed just like heavier-than-air machines failed to take flight until suddenly they succeeded. Yeah, a typewriter with some kind of standardized testing addon isn't going to cut it. Current-gen AIs - STILL with standardized testing addon! - probably don't, either. But I'm entirely unconvinced that giving each student an endlessly patient teacher who can explain things in 100 different ways without getting tired, who can try to find an unique motivation, and grade answers on something different than simplistic formal criteria isn't going to make everyone happier and more educated.
One problem with tech-driven approach to learning is testing. Past-gen machines, and even current-gen algorithms rely on multiple-choices tests. Which are complete, utter bullshit which was only invented to lessen teacher's workload a bit. Sure easier to grade exams when you don't have to understand what the student did to get that answer. That shit, however, doesn't fly in higher education, or at least it didn't in my time. You had to explain everything you did to a professor, and answer questions which probed your understanding of the material beyond remembering formulas. What I'm very much surprised at, is why nobody talking about how technology - AIs - potentially can do that, but for school students. Not just check if the student can come up with the right number, but check if he really understand how that number comes to be, what it means (in case of applied math, like statistics or physics or chemistry), and how is it related to real life. And if the student doesn't understand some of it, the AI should be able to explain.
The real problem with personalized teaching, imo, is that you a) have to invent GOOD personalized teaching, b) make it scale without overspending. The only thing I agree with this review about, is that most of current new solution for education fail when you try to scale them using underpaid, overloaded, often just bad teachers, while the existing solution works (for a certain definition of "works") under these constraints. Those high-structure learners who struggle so much? I bet you could do wonders with them, if you could find them a teacher that's "right" for them. Unfortunately, we can't even define "right", much less actually provide each kid with his ideal teacher. But that SEEMS like a problem AI MIGHT solve, being (in theory) endlessly adaptable and (in reality) endlessly patient. Of course, "creating" AI teacher doesn't just mean sticking a kid behind a tablet with a LLM. For one thing, currently available LLMs aren't specialized for teaching, and actually might be quite bad at it, because of many thing, from "helpful assistant" personality to lack of authority to hallucinations. But is it REALLY impossible?
One thought I have is that it would take a literal revolution, in the end, to change the education system. Revolutions are singularity moments for societies, when future cannot be easily predicted, and where inertia of past institutions stop being a guarantee of their immortality. We'll see which country gets there first (unless, of course, AIs eat us all before that, but I choose to be a wilful optimist in this regard).
I don't know if this is frowned upon or not, but why are there a lot of LLM-looking comments in the replies here? I've seen at least 3 separate posters whose style looked really chat gpt or whatever.
From my experience of growing up using internet since 9, the YouTube teaching structure basically is way superior than schools from it's high competitiveness, creators are encouraged or pressured to one up their communication efficiency, meanwhile school system don't have such competitive feedback system in place, in YouTube market viewers vote by losing engagement and views and thus incomes to the content creators.
My ideal concept of school now is utilising it's physical system and enclosed chamber environment (where politics and previous generations are unable to pre set a value into the area through the authority of being "experienced").
It should function like debate college of Victorian era or greek public philosophical debates where mind and ideas clashes in there to naturally evolve the thinking, with the teacher's job being a monitor to stop barbaric tribe-like reputation race to happen.
This problem is even more apparent in Asian countries where students are not encouraged to talk but simply hear and absorb the lecture from the teachers
From my experience of growing up using internet since 9, the YouTube teaching structure basically is way superior than schools from it's high competitiveness, creators are encouraged or pressured to one up their communication efficiency, meanwhile school system don't have such competitive feedback system in place, in YouTube market viewers vote by losing engagement and views and thus incomes to the content creators.
My ideal concept of school now is utilising it's physical system and enclosed chamber environment (where politics and previous generations are unable to pre set a value into the area through the authority of being "experienced").
It should function like debate college of Victorian era or greek public philosophical debates where mind and ideas clashes in there to naturally evolve the thinking, with the teacher's job being a monitor to stop barbaric tribe-like reputation race to happen.
This problem is even more apparent in Asian countries where students are not encouraged to talk but simply hear and absorb the lecture from the teachers
No, that's not just a problem for parents. Those expelled kids will turn to other activities, which will be probably crime. This is a sure-fire way to create hardened teenage criminals. Yes, penning "bad" kids with "good" is also a bad deal, but expelling them completely and then hoping their parents would deal with it somehow is short-sighted. And the society at large probably won't condone killing kids who fail at school.
Creating a separate school for such kids is a middle-ground solution, and it has been tried in USSR. They've been known as "idiots' schools" among the general population, and carried a big stigma, but at least they kept the trouble kids off streets for a part of the day without interfering with normal kids. The problem with those schools, as far as I understand, is that they treated all failing kids the same. But some of those were just dyslexic, while others were mentally ill, and others just lacked proper motivation due to unfortunate upbringing or other circumstances. It feels like THIS problem could have been solved with more resources and attention paid to each case, but there are never enough of those to go around.
Good morning, I made a manifold market for this years contest!
https://manifold.markets/BayesianTom/who-will-win-acxs-everythingexceptb
Will "other" turn into specific reviews as time goes on, or are the choices fixed?
I will add new choices every friday. I didnt want to add all options beforehand because the roster isnt fixed yet (for example, we got this honorable review turned into a contender this week).
If you want to bet that the winner will be neither of the current choices you can bet on "Other" and your bet will be converted to any new choice added in the future automatically
Gotcha. My intuition says that the odds for the first two reviews will be a lot higher now, just by lack of specific other choices at the moment. I've read all the finalists already, and I still think AlphaSchool will win, but I think I can get better odds (in the sense of lower probability and therefore more margin) later on.
Are all the finalists listed somewhere? I've probably read all the finalists, because I read most of the review submissions (and almost all the reviews which were not of works of fiction,) but I don't know which made it to the finals apart from the two which have been posted so far.
For what it's worth, I had one specific frontrunner among my votes, and it wasn't either of the ones posted so far.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-387, point 3.
Thanks, I missed that last time.
It looks like all my top-scoring reviews made it onto the list, but there are a few there which surprise me, which made it into the finals or honorable mentions despite my giving them unexceptional scores.
I don’t think schools are that good at creating strong motivation but it’s true that they provide an overall structure that semi-forces many kids to learn something. However I think we’re at the point that we can offer the equivalent of one-on-one tutoring for every student. “Unstructured learners” can learn directly from books, but better personalized learning along with a supporting social structure can help everyone.
The issue will be how the personalised learning forces kids to complete as much as they can (instead of confusing lack of interest with being stupid and not making them do much). "Motivation" is being used in slightly the wrong way in this essay; many (most?) children don't want to learn whatever the school's trying to teach them, and if given the opportunity to slack off they will (these are the "low structure" kids); school motivates them by forcing them to sit in a classroom and not focus on anything else, but it doesn't make them more motivated in general. With personalised learning, they'll learn at a snail's pace because they don't care about advancing through the material. Or the personalised system will declare that they should be working faster based on [brain scans/genome testing/extrapolation from some kind of reasoning test] and force them to learn at a somewhat arbitrarily faster pace, in which case they may as well be in a classroom.
I hope that personalized learning will not only mean different speed (although that alone is already a huge improvement over status quo), but also different choice of topics.
What I would like to see is some core "everyone needs to know this", followed by tons of optional topics. So that for an average child, 50% of school would be optional topics, and for a gifted child maybe even 90%. (Every year, you would have to gain at least X core credits, and at least Y total credits.) You should totally have specialized topics, such as "classification of dinosaurs".
The advantage of computer teaching is that those topics could *accumulate* over time: maybe the first year there wouldn't be much of a choice, but 10 years later you could have tons of optional topics. (The system should be open, something like SCORM.)
A lot (a majority?) of people don't want to learn anything that could even very loosely be considered education, and if you ask them to pick they'll either look for the easiest option or the easiest option that gets them whatever score they need.
There's also a more abstract point that if there's only some stuff that everyone needs to know, why are we forcing them to learn more? Unless the optional topics include "go and play in the woods," "Starcraft," or "scroll Instagram" you just seem to be trying to force lots of children into something they don't want to do for no great reason.
> if there's only some stuff that everyone needs to know, why are we forcing them to learn more?
The reasons for learning are various. You need some skills to be able to have a job (e.g. reading, writing, basic math, using a computer). You need some skills to be able to take care of yourself and your family (cooking, health care, finance). You need some skills to be a good citizen (parts of history). And finally... some things are interesting, and it seems like a pity when a person living in the 21st century doesn't know them (Earth and other planets, things made out of atoms, living things made out of cells, basically how this entire universe around you works).
Of course, the boundaries are fuzzy, and maybe people would object against the last category in general, but I think that it actually corresponds to some human needs (and if the education does not satisfy it, the people will instead look for pseudoscience and conspiracy theories to fill the vacuum).
A part of this is "this gives a clear benefit to you", and a part of this is "this gives the people around you a benefit of not living with someone who hurts themselves and others by ignorance". Some people are in between, like if you can't get a good job, in short term it hurts you, but in long term it also hurts people around you (they have to pay you money to keep you alive, you can turn to crime, you can vote for a politician who blames the others for your bad luck).
You're making assumptions about the environment 10-20 years from now. Perhaps writing will be obsolete, except for niche groups. Perhaps AI will take what you say, and convert it into an "elegant" speech.
This is the same problem at learning to do a trade, only generalized. There are very few blacksmiths anymore.
Personally, I've almost given up predicting what people should learn to do, so perhaps what they should learn is what they want to learn. But also perhaps not. I still find arithmetic useful, even though I was never very good at it. (I was much better at algebra than at arithmetic...but unless you count programming as algebra, I haven't used it in decades.) The only thing I'm relatively certain people should learn is how to get along with other people.
But that's all stuff that, for the sake of argument, everyone needs to know. It's the "pick between these n options" stuff where it seems odd that "none" can't be a choice.
The reason that young people are told to learn lots and lots of things is that voters or legislators or "educational professionals" believe they are things that "everyone should know".
Elementary school is a combination of basic skills (readin', writin', and "rithmetic) and fun things (whales!). Middle and high school tends to be simpler versions of college courses, because of course everyone should be prepared for college.
"Your government lies to you" is a very important thing that everyone should know. School won't teach it, though (we used to teach this, it was effective at inspiring better critical thinking).
When did we teach this and what changed?
Does it matter that someone wrote a nobel prize winning paper on World of Warcraft?
The "optional topics" can very well include "video editing" and other skills to "become an influencer" (how to shake your tits, maybe?). "A practical guide to lockpicking" (as a life skill) could also be included.
"How to game design" is probably going to get more people interested in economics and human behavior. Not that every gamer would take it.
> The "optional topics" can very well include "video editing" and other skills to "become an influencer" (how to shake your tits, maybe?).
That skill is in such incredible demand that schools don't bother to teach it; you have to pay for dance classes yourself.
And here we have a "big source of problems" -- school doesn't want to teach what kids natively want to learn. School has to try to coerce, bribe and brainwash kids into wanting to learn topics that are relatively unnatural.
Motivation is the parent's job, not the school's. If a kid doesn't want to learn then he's probably gonna have a bad life. You'll do more net harm wasting bureaucratic resources trying to reach that kid than you will by shoving him out of the way so the smart kids can learn.
You're talking about the vast majority here, would you prefer them to get no education at all, the whole school system dedicated to the 5%? Can't we do it the other way around: a school system for the majority and one-on-one tutoring or online learning for the motivated 5%?
The vast majority already don't get any education at all. I say we stop pretending that they are. Total government spending on education is in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars per year, and most of that is on maintaining the kabuki theater that everyone can learn. Just accept that it's not reasonable to have our current education goals. Optimize for the top 20% because that's who makes the economy go. The rest can be tracked into low-cost high-efficiency warehouses where modest but achievable goals can be hit: learn to read, basic arithmetic, some cultural indoctrination, and maybe teach a trade. Everything else is just a waste of taxpayer dollars in my view.
You are almost entirely wrong that the top 20% is what makes the economy go. Our economy is built on the backs of relatively cheap educated workers. Schools do such a good job of this that these people are invisible to you. But read back to the post-war period when all this stuff was booming -- it wasn't being taken for granted then.
That may have been true in 1950, but in my view part of the reason for the GDP/median wage decoupling in the 70's is that it's increasingly not true. We have an increasingly complex economy and fewer and fewer people can meaningfully contribute to it. I actually think that 20% figure is generous: it's the entrepreneurs and innovators in the top 5% (or 1%) who really matter and that is reflected in the increased share of total wealth that they now hold relative to 1970. The "backs of relatively cheap educated workers" are actually the other 15% of the top 20. Below the top 20% or so and you're not actually dealing with knowledge workers. They may have a mediocre college degree but they're essentially just moving boxes around, answering telephones, filing paperwork, etc. They actually don't need the education, it's simply an aspirational status marker. That's why real salaries for non-STEM degree holders haven't really moved in 40 years.
> Our economy is built on the backs of relatively cheap educated workers. Schools do such a good job of this that these people are invisible to you. But read back to the post-war period when all this stuff was booming
Maybe in the pre-war period. I read some early 20th century math textbooks as part of a discussion of what exactly "new math" meant. And they are of interest to the modern reader, mostly because of their explicit positioning as a way for the adult reader to improve his life by developing a salable skill. (That skill being basic arithmetic - addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.) The idea is 𝗻𝗼𝘁 that you buy the book so you can force a child to read it. The idea is that you are a breadwinner with a terrible job, and you hope to get a better job by working your way through a book you purchased at the store.
The cheap "educated" workers of today aren't using any skills that are taught after 5th grade. Why do we want them to stay in school past the point where they can write and add?
I think the 20% number is being generous here. Economic growth comes from innovation and technology driven by the top of the top and (to Michael's point) implemented by the majority who need to be able to read, write, do sums and carry out the countless manual and interactive tasks with a smile.
Agreed. My point is that the white-collar hoi polloi below the top 20% don't need any real educational training apart from basic literacy and numeracy, and that can be attained much more efficiently than it is now.
That's only true if you assume the existing economy is continuing. It's true that the part that contributes to economic growth is small. 20% is probably a wild overestimate, depending on how you measure it. But that growth can only exist on the back of the existing economy. Which depends on almost every else.
This is a midwit idea. Assume that most of the jobs of the 20% can be effectively done by AI. Now, how do you get geniuses out of the "smart" kids? You don't, most of them are very, very dumb -- and very invested in not getting smarter.
15yo US public school students have about a 65% literacy rate judging by the NAEP. If you have high expectations you can say that's terrible in all sorts of ways, but I don't think it's really defensible that absent schooling those numbers would be a lot lower.
I don't know what your mental model is where the top 20% "makes the economy go," but it's very difficult to do anything without a literate workforce (especially as literacy is a prerequisite to engage with computer systems).
Again, that's the wrong sort of motivation. This isn't "make the child have the characteristic of being motivated," it's "at this moment get the child to be doing something;" loosely, it's the difference between filling up your car and towing it. Unless the plan is to have parents come to school and stand over their children, it can't be the parents' job.
I would argue that the ability to engage in difficult, goal-directed behavior is a basic life skill. That absolutely is the responsibility of the parents. It's their job to impose long-run consequences on a child's failure to fulfill its responsibilities. That's the basic feedback loop that educates a child's character. "If I don't learn this material then I don't get my iPad for the next month ... I'd better work hard." The school's job is to provide a well thought-out educational framework. The parent's job is to make sure the child engages with it. Schools understand education, parents understand their children. It only makes sense to assign each party the task that they're most suited to.
Presumably the parents won't do it, because they themselves aren't equipped to engage in difficult, goal directed behaviour (of which instilling traits in your children is an example). I don't see what the issue is with schools trying to do this and get more out of students and making up for deficiency in the parents. Putting aside the question of whether character is trainable or simply genetic, making people more productive on the margins seems to be a straightforward positive; treating it as some kind of moral lesson about the parents seems pointless.
> I don't see what the issue is with schools trying to do this and get more out of students
The issue is that, in my view, they're incapable of doing that except for the types of students for whom it's largely unnecessary (i.e. moderately high IQ students). Tasking schools with solving an unsolvable problem is the WAR IS PEACE of education policy. It does nothing but a) hand them the political license to request funding increases in perpetuity and b) prevent society from having the difficult but potentially-productive debate about what to do with the vast majority of essentially-uneducable people.
The post-industrial economy has been running away from most people for 50 years now and we've been in deep political denial about that fact for almost as long. We paper it over with high-minded nonsense like "no child left behind", "college is for everyone", or with employment laws that make it very difficult to fire useless white collar workers. In my view the coming tsunami of AI-induced white collar unemployment will soon bring that denial into unavoidable contact with reality and the wake-up call will be very nasty indeed. It might have been lessened had we been able to have the uncomfortable debates all the while.
Long-run consequences are, in general, termed child abuse. Incentives, of course, as you mention, are different.
Taking a kid's iPad away is abuse?
It really needs both parties. It can't JUST be the school's job, but it also can't JUST be the parent's job. Ideally it would also include motivation by some kids in the grade above them. (But how to keep that from being abusive?)
I think the bigger problem with older children motivating younger children is how you motivate the older children to motivate the younger children. It's nice if you've got it started, but whatever you can use to bootstrap it would probably be better applied directly to the younger children.
This is a useful distinction between "make the child have the characteristic of being motivated" and "at this moment get the child to be doing something."
I don't think I had much executive function/internal locus of control/intrinsic motivation until I moved out of my parents' house at age 26 after graduate school. I want to foster in my kids that characteristic of being motivated much earlier than I got it, but my expectations are modest due to my own experience.
I am willing and able to homeschool my kids in theory. But in practice, I don't think I will ever homeschool my oldest (currently about to start second grade). He has even less executive function and working memory than I did as a kid. It's a struggle to even get him to put on his shoes. I have enough chores and other directives at home to be the bad cop for that I prefer to outsource the academic bad copping to a teacher. Sure, I still teach him a lot - e.g. we do fractions for fun while cooking together - but I prefer not to be responsible for bringing him up to standards with e.g. handwriting. That's what my tax dollars are for.
I was homeschooled through seventh grade, and in retrospect I think it had a negative effect on my relationship with my mother, for the same reason. She had to constantly bug me to do my schoolwork.
It's better for kids to resent their teachers than their parents.
Fortunately, despite being an odd kid like I was, and despite being academically way ahead of his classmates, my oldest seems to enjoy having the chance to fit in in a group environment with clear expectations. Great! Off to school you go.
I mourn the time he's wasting in school, but I think he'd waste the entire family's time if we had to try to motivate him in a homeschool setting.
My secondborn, on the other hand, may not be as academically minded as the first, but he procrastinates less, and he doesn't like large groups of kids. I'm seriously considering homeschooling him for kindergarten.
> but I prefer not to be responsible for bringing him up to standards with e.g. handwriting. That's what my tax dollars are for.
What standards? There isn't even a public expectation that anyone's handwriting should be readable.
Schools are very, very bad at creating strong motivation. We don't kill children who fail arithmetic, do we? The change in illiteracy rates is due to the "strong motivation" that cellphones (and computers in general) give to learning a Life Skill (reading/writing).
Minor editorial comment: "low-structure learners" is referenced once before it is defined.
I was tripped up by that too in an otherwise very polished review. After learning the term, I decided maybe in some contexts I'm a low-structure learner, such as this book review contest. I hadn't read this review earlier; in fact I hadn't even noticed it; in fact I read only a handful of the reviews; in fact I could scarcely get through glancing at the titles of the reviews because the structure of the Google doc was a bit too low for me. Now I've read it precisely because it was presented for all to read, today's assignment. I don't have much to say on the subject, but will get enjoyment out of the responses others in "the class" share.
Interestingly, school itself did not function this way for me.
Lack of definitions is a weak point of this essay.
I found the very concept of “high-structure learners” to be gerrymandered. If anything, it seems to describe “students who use a lot of school resources for whatever reason” rather than a group with other qualities in common.
High-structure learners are described thusly:
A) “Some will be diagnosed with dyslexia, though a strong course of synthetic phonics will reduce that number.”
B) “The high-structure learner has a hard time. They’re the student showing up to office hours all the time, using the tutoring center, using all the support they can find.”
C) “And then high-structure learners, who are in the habit of avoiding schoolwork whenever they can.”
Those three groups of people use high amounts of different school resources for different reasons.
People with dyslexia come in a variety of levels of IQ, executive function, and motivation. It's not school motivational structure they need so much as, apparently, phonics and other resources.
People who show up to office hours, use the tutoring center, and use all the support they can find are highly motivated and organized, whatever else may be said about them. In this example they're also struggling with the difficulty of the material.
People “who are in the habit of avoiding schoolwork whenever they can” are the opposite of the second group above. They may or may not be smart, but they're severely unmotivated and possibly disorganized.
Grouping them all together as “high-structure learners” doesn't seem to be a very useful categorization for purposes other than “hey, we need to budget for some fraction of a specialist for this student.”
Honestly, I think smart students with typical motivation or organizational skills would also benefit from more school resources. They just aren't allocated as many because they can pass standards without them. And passing standards seems to be the primary metric of school success.
The reason the 10th percentile IQ uses more school resources than the 90th percentile is a supply-side decision. The reason is that we've decided that supporting the 10th percentile to reach their potential is more important or tractable than supporting the 90th percentile to reach their potential.
Naming a group based on how many resources they are given by the system should be kept in perspective as a category that exists only after that resource allocation, not beforehand as a natural category. It doesn't cut reality at the joints, it describes a school policy.
I think your assumptions are wrong. In my experience, high performing students are given far more resources than less performing ones, esp. if between schools differences are taken into account. From the teacher's perspective, probably most attention goes to the students that answer the most questions during lecture.
Based on my own experiences, I think the underlying thread is that there is a body of students who are dis-incentivized by low structure, and work harder and perform better when more structure is present. The reasons why they act this way may vary, but the end result is very similar.
By the way, one assumption that I would like to see explored is that high structure students are necessarily lower performing. They are less cost-efficient from society's perspective, but I can think of no reason why a high structure student couldn't out-perform everyone else if the structure they need is provided.
Something to think about.
Freddie, if you're out there please respond
I would like to boost the deBoer bat signal!
I think this was great read after the previous review. I don't know if the order was intentional or not, but the contrast makes it a perfect companion.
> You might think that we’ve found the solution to tracking. We just need to get all the no- and low-structure learners together and let them move much faster. Here’s the issue. The no-structure learners will always be bored, as long as we are committed to putting them into classrooms where everyone learns the same thing. And those classrooms where everyone learns the same thing are exactly what the low-structure learners need. As soon as you create a higher track there will be a ton of demand for it. Parents will insist that their kid join. And as it grows, it won’t be able to accelerate very quickly. You still need the structure of a classroom where everyone is learning the same thing, and that just isn’t a very efficient way to teach.
I think this might be the fate of every innovative school that tries to serve the unstructured learners. As a school suited for the top 5% of unstructured learners starts attracting a more general student body, largely due to its success at producing high-performing students, it will be forced to adopt more generalized structured learning to accommodate for those new students. Administrators will justify every step as simply adjusting their teaching style and structure to work for larger groups, and at the end of the day you end up with a different, but not revolutionarily different structure to what was already available in the school market.
Maybe the only solution is an eternal pattern of innovation --> decay --> innovation. At least it gives us something interesting and difficult to worry about! Or maybe AI will genuinely be transformative, allowing for extremely tailored learning that identifies what style works for each student, and gives them more of that. Such a thing would only be possible by throwing large amounts of resources at the problem, which is impracticable now.
This doesn't pass the sniff test for me - Olympiad winners are almost all universally no structure learners, yet they almost all find university (an environment where everyone in a class learns the same thing) much better than high school. They aren't bored, so long as the material being learned is appropriately challenging.
University is extremely sorted by ability, with people who are almost all 18+. It’s a completely different demographic than high schools themselves.
Also, this may just be anecdotal, and/or your vibe on the matter.
exactly! The Tyranny of the Marginal User
https://nothinghuman.substack.com/p/the-tyranny-of-the-marginal-user (in this case the tyrany of the unmotivated learner)
What stops schools from refusing to lower their standards, at least if they’re private and not dependent on government handouts? Why couldn’t they keep on having the same insane entrance requirements and hardcore “get X on the next exam or you’re out” policies for decades in a row?
Anecdotally, Montessori motivated my children much better than public schools have. In Montessori, in particular, children don't all learn the same things. They are encouraged to work on the things that they want to. All children are taught the same works, but what children work on are largely self-motivated. This worked quite well for us, and also worked very well for the parents that I speak to for their children.
It would be valuable if you could describe in more detail how the Montessori system works (in practice, that is). My first question is what is the student/teacher ratio? It seems intuitively plausible that if a student gets plenty of attention from a teacher constantly assessing what the student is motivated about right now, and carefully feeds them all of the curriculum over time, that would work well. But it wouldn't scale.
There’s a lot of information online and I’m not an expert. (Also any school can call itself Montessori so likely a wide range in what schools actually do). Relatively large classes, with (usually) one teacher and often one assistant, student ages span three grades. The room is full of different ‘work’, and the children are allowed to choose what they do but only after they have been trained how to use/do a particular piece of work. Each piece of work often has different levels, which the kids progress through. (Search Montessori beads for an example of math work). Older children often teach younger children how to use certain pieces of work. I think lots of folks think that Montessori students have more freedom than they do — it’s a highly structured environment that nonetheless allows the children to make decisions for themselves within that structure. Lots of emphasis on using and putting away the work in a prescribed way. Like most private schools it ends up being very selective in who attends and who teaches. I also don’t know anything about how it operates past third grade (US). Most Montessori schools stop at third grade or earlier. My sense is that it works well for no, low, and high structure students described in this review because it is in a classroom with lots of structure.
> any school can call itself Montessori
There is such thing as certified Montessori school, but most "Montessori schools" out there are not.
> Older children often teach younger children how to use certain pieces of work.
This is one of the crucial components missing from traditional schools. Kids can teach each other... that is, if you allow them. Some older kids will be happy to gain status by teaching the younger ones, and many younger ones will be happy to get attention from the older ones.
Traditional school bans this, and then people complain about the ratio of teachers to students. Well, it's the school system that made the ratio artificially low in the first place! Sometimes the easiest way to get out of the hole is to stop digging.
I think the obvious question is, if you delegate teaching to people who are only limitedly accountable to you, how do you ensure it's happening properly? I vaguely recall that the biggest obstacle is that supervision costs make it fail to save teacher attention on net.
One possibility is to alternate classes taught by a teacher with classes taught by older students (kinda like at university: professor and assistants). The teacher will notice if the kids keep getting something wrong.
You could also alternate the older students, so that if one explains something incorrectly, the other has an opportunity to fix it.
A different possible approach is to have computer exams that ask you whether you have received instruction from another student. If you pass the exam correctly, the other student also gets a small reward. But if many students taught by the same student keep making the same errors, the question is added to older student's spaced repetition schedule.
Mmpfh. I was modelling this as (an) older student(s) teaching a very small group of younger students. Small group dynamics are much better for learning. Say one or two older students and four or five younger students. Sort of a structured kid gang.
I think it would be a function of practice, with students getting better at it the more times they get to do it. After all, we face the same issue with the teachers themselves, and we address that by training teacher very carefully, and adhering to standards. A school could do the same thing with it's students.
"Adhering to standards" sounds difficult when you have to work with whatever arbitrary students you have.
"it won't scale" is a bad argument, to me, and dismisses.the opportunity to solve a problem. The teacher:student ratio is about 1:12 at the lower elementary classroom my son thrived in. In his public school it's about 1:20.
Strongly agree with this comment as I was thinking of my children’s Montessori experience while reading this review. I would add, though, that Montessori is highly structured it’s just that much of the structure is hidden from the children and done in a way that allows the children to work independently and to choose (within in a carefully designed structure) what to work on and when.
Yeah, maybe this was one of the iterative improvements possible within the well-structured school environment. We just need to teach public schools how to structure the learning in slightly different ways. Encouraging high agency is definitely a goal, not just motivation while in the classroom.
s/was/is/
The essay did say it wasn't optimal, so maybe Montessori just has something to teach public schooling here more than it disproving the general thesis.
Maybe we've got it all backward. Maybe instead of Montessori for grade schoolers, we ought to make high school Montessori-ish, as well as voluntary.
ETA: I'm inevitably thinking of the forced time spend indoors in high school, with so many people.
I'm skeptical if only bc Montessori is significantly more popular for 3-6 year olds than teenagers. If teenagers were more suited for it, I suspect this would have shown up already in the existing market for schools.
It just seemed to me that apart from shop or atuomotive class or home ec, the interior of a school - [and my fairly brutalist in effect if not in design middle and high schools dated from the advent of central air-conditioning in the South so had virtually no windows, and none in many classrooms, which I admit confounds the issue for me] - is not a great way to interact with or learn about the real physical world, nor about one's interests and possible aptitudes within it.
It seems to me that a high school chemistry or physics lab -- even a windowless one -- is a vastly better way to learn about the real physical world than what you seem to be envisioning.
College distorts the market - Montessori-esque high schools exist, like North Star, but parents want their high schooler to go somewhere that will get them into a good college, and being an early adopter of a Montessori high school presents a big risk.
I think the best model for teenagers is not Montessori, but paramilitary organizations, like Scouting (without the baggage). Put the high performing students in charge of project teams, after training them well (much like they will experience in real life in any corporate setting). Above them, the highest performing students are in charge of the project team leaders. This almost exactly reverses the typical pecking order in high school, which is probably a feature.
Montessori schools have a high selection effect. They tend to end up with a lot of the no-structure and low-structure learners, because those are the students who succeed in that sort of environment. High-structure learners are less likely to be enrolled in a Montessori school, and less likely to stay once enrolled.
Very possible. Could the "gifted" program at school be cross-grade, and more like Montessori, then? The gifted programs I know of still segregate by grade, and the one for my oldest son is even more isolating (they are given study materials without even changing their classroom)
Not to be argumentative, but did the Montessoris school motivate your children or were they self-motivated?
>Montessori motivated my children
>what children work on are largely self-motivated
My child is self motivated. At public school, he is not motivated. At Montessori he was. This is a sample size of 1 so don't take it super seriously, but..
When I talk to other parents, they have similar great differentiated experiences with their children in Montessori. It's a great structured environment that teaches agency and independence. Highly recommend if you can do it.
I suspect public schools can learn at least something from Montessori schools.
Thanks for posting this, it helped me notice my obviously-false assumption that Montessori schools are full of kids that were highly motivated when they came in. Do you have a sense of whether the children there tended to enjoy learning before they started, vs if they were already fairly motivated but bored at normal schools?
No. Pretty normal kids and friends as far as I can tell
Anectotally (or at least not verified), Montessori learners are the most satisfied/happy in life vs. "traditional schooling" the ones with the most academic (?) success. My assumption cause the former learn a joy of learning and are engaging in work self-directed and intrinsically motivated vs. the latter more experience in assessment-/testing "mastery"/ access to top tier higher education etc.
FYI Heres a o3-pro generated quick n dirty comparison of the "school-" vs. "alpha school" articles whoever is interested to compare these 2 reviews:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PaSM_JX14KiWJ_rTP8fLuoGuGm9pdXg9tB2DRVf67w0/edit?usp=sharing
I would love to explore:
- @Scott Alexander: Is there a Montessori-/ Autonomy-supportive school review in the pipeline to complement the previous two "teaching-centered/explicit instruction" and the "21st century entrepreneurial-, tech-/building-centered" progressive schools?
- Do we have any evidence regarding longerterm outcomes like "performance/success" rate (whatever the latter means) and "joy of/ learning of learning competence/rate"?
- What ratio of priority would you give both criteria? Any differences between primary and secondary? e.g primare joy of learning vs. secondary acaemic success? the other way round? anything I forgot?
- Could the authors of both articles share some sort of reflection to which extent each school is suitable (pro and cons) for curious parents/students (higher education educated parents (?) that refelct the demographics of readers of ACX that might have more cultural, academic and economic capital and invest more in learning with "extracurricular child-led or parent coordinated learning" outside school vs. less educated families with less socio-economic capital for less enriching experiences outside school that public schools are catering for, too? so basically differences in target group?
- How would they (recommend to) complement the respective learning fields that their school are not catering to and deprioritizing? Humanities etc Alpha school vs. autonomy-supportive/ problembased/ entrepreneurial/ makerslab/ STEM learning the respective school is deprioritizing?
- How would they rate/what importance would they give "social capital/resources" the schools student body/ classmates/ peers represent for the kids? (depending on whats the goal is of the repsective peers they would be surrounded with)
- Whats each authors / readers vision of learning & education for their kids or at least so far what they have learned what would they consider their personal "success criteria" to choose a school for an enriching education journey"?
Also curious how the readers and commenters would define what constitutes a good school to them? What would be the criteria they would use for this school choice dilemma or review of a school?
There was a third review about schooling (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a3q0Z2tuPLLbDeg5-pfEffkajGjrfPDwE7ZMs7uaWQs/preview?tab=t.0#heading=h.47ckuhwxd0vq) that maybe had some of what you want, but it didn't make the finals.
I appreciate this review, but there were a whole lot of places where it was just stated that some particular intervention can't be done or won't work without any evidence. I noticed this most strongly about tracking. Tracking apparently doesn't work or can't be done...until high school I guess where it is much more common (and apparently works/is a good thing?)
This feels to me like someone working backwards from a conclusion and not actually being interested in solving the problems that even they admit exist in todays schools.
It's an interesting reflection to the alpha school review which was incredibly positive, to the point of probably overselling. I see these two reivews as the two sides of the school debate coin.
One side is convinced that large improvements are everywhere and ripe for the taking, and the other side things that improvements are the next thing to impossible.
Many of those points do have links attached. E.g., in regard to tracking, the text is "In the US this is typically called tracking or ability grouping. It’s a complex and controversial topic. The research base is hard to read because there are a lot of ideologically motivated researchers who are either for or against tracking and want to see the evidence a certain way. But the biggest theme in the research is that the effects are small. There are plenty of meta-analyses that find an effect near zero (here’s one example)." and the link is https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/00346543221100850
The problem is that the review isn't a literature review, it's pitching a thesis on why school has to be set up the way it is, and is trying to persuade readers of this by telling an epistemically-satisfying story that they can internalize. It does some parts of this successfully, but when it comes time to explain why a tracking-based system doesn't work, it instead retreats to throwing out a citation to a meta-analysis that says tracking in practice doesn't currently shift test scores much. But it doesn't really explain *why* that's the case (our social science isn't yet good enough to answer that with much confidence), and certainly doesn't make convincingly clear why its thesis implies that tracked classrooms can't work, because it's not obvious why they can't provide peer motivation.
Just wanted to applaud such an analytic critique. This is spot on.
Counterpoint: https://files.nwesd.org/website/Teaching_Learning/HiCap/2015-16%20meetings/NationEmpowered%20Vol2.pdf
This is good reading: https://files.nwesd.org/website/Teaching_Learning/HiCap/2015-16%20meetings/NationEmpowered%20Vol2.pdf
It appears to be an entire full-length book; I don't think anyone is going to read it on the strength of a blog comment that doesn't provide context. Is there perhaps a good summary available?
This book (written for a non academic audience of teachers and parents) includes 20 brief points on page 15 of the PDF: https://files.nwesd.org/website/Teaching_Learning/HiCap/2015-16 meetings/NationEmpowered Vol1.pdf
Just upload it to GPT o3 or Gemini 2.5 / NotebookLM. It’s a very outdated complaint at this point, even if highly sensible in the past :-)
Give me a reason to commit even that much effort (not you personally, the person who provided the link).
This part really stuck out to me:
> If a few of those 100 classrooms from our observation thought experiment were gifted schools or schools with an entrance exam, you might be surprised by what you see. They would be doing more advanced work than peers in regular schools, absolutely. But often only by a year or two. You’d see all the same inefficiencies of students all learning the same thing at the same pace.
Imagine a car manufacturer saying "We tried something new, but it only made our cars about 10% more fuel-efficient. They'll still contribute to global warming and to accidents. What a failure!"
Or imagine a programmer saying "I managed to increase performance by 10%, but it's still too slow. This proves that making it fast enough isn't possible so I'm going to undo my changes."
Or image a hospital saying "This new drug did increase chemotherapy success rate, but only by 10% or so. Lots of people still die of cancer. This clearly isn't the solution."
Crazy, yeah? So why does this sort of explanation always seem to pass muster in education?
> Or imagine a programmer saying "I managed to increase performance by 10%, but it's still too slow. This proves that making it fast enough isn't possible so I'm going to undo my changes."
That is definitely something that happens - I've done it myself. If you need a 10x improvement, 10% may as well be nothing and you're going to have to give up and try a different approach anyway. Or there may be high costs to the 10% improvement that outweigh the benefits (e.g. the 10% improvement often comes at the cost of much more complicated and difficult-to-maintain code or reductions in functionality).
Sure, I'm a programmer too so I know about that sort of thing. We'd need a 10x speed up if kids were dying of old age before learning to read. Or if we wanted 2nd graders to be doing calculus.
Because of the cost differential. Gifted schools are significantly more expensive per user than public ones (on the order of 10x the price or higher). The results are out of proportion to the cost.
Somehow I missed the "gifted schools" bit and thought it was talking about class splits like the honors track in my low-income neighborhood's high school, which was about a year or two ahead of the regular track in each subject by the end of senior year.
The problem with tracking is that it is poorly defined with respect to what it's supposed to accomplish. As the writer mentioned, the public and parents ask two incompatible goals of public schools: Improve the performance of all students vs. provide my children with a competitive advantage. Tracking is a policy that physically separates students by ability, thereby setting up an opportunity to provide those different groups of students with different resources (otherwise why do it?). Those members of the public and parents who support improving the performance of all students will have little reason to support tracking at all. Parents of low performing students will support tracking if it results in more resources being directed toward their children, parents of high performing students will support tracking if it does the reverse. So the political polarization is pretty much inherent in the nature of tracking itself.
So motivation is the key to educational success?
New idea for a startup: instead of training AI to be great at teaching kids, train the AI to be great at motivating kids to learn. Make it create a psychological profile on every student, and do whatever it takes to convince the kid to learn. Some kids will be paid a dollar for every book they read, some kids will be put through stimulating educational games, some kids will be shamed into conformity, some kids will be put against each other to compete for high scores, some kids will be spanked by a robot.
I think the essay strongly implied that AI could never be great at motivating low-structure and high-structure kids. They need the presence of peers doing the same thing.
In other words, "personalized learning" just won't work for most young people.
The essay acknowledged that 1:1 tutoring works, it just didn't dwell on that because you obviously can't do it for every student if the tutors have to be trained humans. Human-level AI could change that.
Maybe I'm assuming too much but it seemed to me that he thought "human-level AI" could never work as well as a "trained human" because, well, it just isn't human. There's something about an actual person that is necessary. I suppose I'm reading between the lines of passages like this:
"One form of learning that has been shown to be particularly effective is deliberate practice. Deliberate practice involves being pushed outside of your comfort zone, focusing on specific, concrete goals to improve performance, and getting consistent feedback. One common characteristic of deliberate practice is that it isn’t particularly fun. Most contexts where deliberate practice is common, like sports and music training, involve expert, individualized coaching. The coach is mostly there for motivation. The coach does other things as well, but the most important thing a coach can do is motivate you to train. Deliberate practice isn’t common in school learning, but it’s a good reminder that motivation is the key to lots of forms of learning in and out of school. Learning isn’t always going to be a ton of fun. In the absence of one-on-one tutoring for every student, conformity is the best tool we have to create the motivation necessary for learning."
I doubt this is because motivation requires learning from someone with an immaterial soul. It seems more likely to be something like, a human tutor actually pays attention to whether you're learning or just tuning them out, and can respond accordingly. Digital learning systems that have been deployed at scale thus far can't do this.
I'm thinking more like "requires someone composed of meat". Seriously.
Though I'd love to see what happens with a digital learning system that does the things you describe a human tutor as doing.
So, given -- for the sake of argument -- an AI that has eyes, and can walk around, and even spank the child. You don't think it could motivate your child, even with fire or bullets?
A human tutor can yell at you for tuning out in a way that an AI cannot.
For maximum effect, the tutor should be physically present where the student is.
Does Zoom tutoring not work okay in practice? I thought it was already pretty common.
Correct. If you can't hurt its feelings, it's not a teacher, it's a textbook.
That's pretty much what I was thinking. A human can and eventually will tell you "Don't waste my time", while an AI can't do that convincingly.
I suspect this is also why coaching works to the extent it does. Both that the coach will say "Don't waste my time" and that you will get cut from the team if you do.
I'd also think that a human tutor can better serve as a model of behavior in a way an AI can't. A human child can aspire to be as good as or surpass their human coach, not as easy for their AI one. Operating words here "not as easy," not saying it's night and day or impossible.
Depends on how error prone (or humorous) the AI is, I suppose.
It's not the immaterial soul that matters. Human coaches can do so many things that today's llms can't; Be confrontational, offer consequences, get their own data and not just rely on the students account of things, ask the student to come back if they walk away from the keyboard.
I could see ai doing all that at some point but it's very different from today's llms
Until we make big step forwards in agency an ai tutor is very similar to a mooc from a structure standpoint. It can deliver interesting, ability relevant, interest relevant material... But only if the student chooses to engage
What do you think is missing from LLMs that's preventing them from being able to do that stuff?
This doesn't pass the sniff test: plenty of games use techniques that do not require 1:1 human attention or even good AI, such as randomized rewards and careful operant conditioning to get kids hooked even in an absence of peers doing the same thing.
And you can have an environment of peers doing the "same thing" (self-paced school) even though each may be working at a different level and pace.
You and I have different noses :) I completely agree that games do this. The question is whether the same things will work for school. So far, no one has been able to make it happen. I very strongly suspect that this is because playing a game whose reason for being is enjoyment is very different than playing a game whose reason for being is teaching you something you probably aren't very interested in. That describes most school subjects for most young people.
Even video games themselves vary widely in how well they can "get kids hooked". Many come on to the market and sell poorly and lose money.
I'm not a gamer but is grind cutting down 1000 trees to get the xp needed to get the next level up in tree cutting skill any more intrinsically exciting then grinding 1000 flash cards to get to the next level in Spanish vocab. My impression was that most gamers don't find those bits of the game fun but still do them
My nose is willing to be retrained when some organization can actually make educational software that young people willingly spend as much time on as a video game they like.
There was an award winning STD game a while back...
Mavis Beacon was something I really liked as a kid (the game part of it, with the windshield and spats).
A friend of mine learned driving from racing games.
Yes, kids will willingly spend time on educational software (particularly if you're willing to extend it to "Papers Please" and other forms of "teaching critical thinking" via "those facts don't add up.").
Most games teach math, many games teach reading.
Prodigy does this.
Problem: Cutting 1000 video trees doesn't require any learning. Now, if you had to learn which trees to cut, when and where it was best to cut them, and advanced techniques to cut down so many trees....
....people would stop playing the game.
How about Solus-like genre, where you try to beat an enemy 100 times, and have to learn his every trick, memorize every pattern, and find your strategy? I mean, they're not everyone's cup of tea, but they are HUGELY popular (much more so than I would have expected, having a very low tolerance for any kind of repetitiveness myself). Of course, that's not the same thing as learning to do math, but it's not entirely unlike learning to play an instrument, for example - a bit of memorization, a bit of muscle memory.
Hasn't alpha school been able to make it work with "GT bucks"? I think it could be even more effective with the brightly colored gambling mechanics/lootboxes that less ethically concerned gaming companies use. Alpha school's implementation appears to be a compromise between what is maximally effective (brightly colored hyperstimulating loot boxes, odd prices which always leave you with a non-trivial amount of the virtual currency as "change", etc) and what appeals to the notions of the parents (keep in mind how bribery of any kind is less popular than corporal punishment).
We will have to make some radically retrained LLM's if we want to be able to shout at the kids. But I guess that anyway is something we need to teach them before they can become middle managers. Might need to unlearn the spanking bit from the manager bots, though...
Do NOT do this. Children will be sent to school-as-gulag, and if they fail, ritually humiliated... if they really fail, they may not return in the same shape as when they left.
(I mean, seriously. It's possible to teach a sub-6-month old child not to cry. That's... motivated teaching, by necessity).
If there was a path by which AI could be trained to boost motivation, we would be flourishing well beyond schools. The human condition inasmuch as I’ve observed it is that most people aren’t motivated most of the time-whether adult or child. Possessing consistent daily motivation is a small miracle fueled by disposition and aligning “natural interest” with “available possibilities” and “willingness to struggle.”
Can AI make us more willing to struggle? So far, it seems more the opposite.
One problem is that self-determination is highly motivating. Which disincentivizes listening to the instructions some authority figure wants you to follow...
To be a bit more specific and ambitious, make that startup cultivate intrinsic motivation. This is most likely a multi-stage process that requires reinforcement and personalization over months or years, but you could start seeing progress much sooner.
If you could explain exactly how we an cultivate intrinsic motivation starting with participants who lack it...
...you just might earn a Nobel prize. No one knows how to do that.
The only way to do this is via inventing a significantly improved version of Adderall that actually targeted “motivation” instead of “focus” or perhaps via building nanobots that would rewire human brains to be more productive. No amount of text on a screen could make one particularly productive, unfortunately - unless enforced by real world consequences for non compliance, aka “school”.
That assumes we know what motivates individual students (or human beings in general). I know of no research to support that assumption. You could try things at random, I suppose, but that seems inefficient. Otherwise, I know of no "General Theory" of motivation that predicts individual variation.
Really interesting article. The motivation issue is really what things boil down to when you look at any content online about learning, beit coding, math, music, art, language... the most popular videos on YouTube are all about issues with *sticking with it*, with not *picking up your phone again* instead of doing the things you want to learn.
I don't think learning most things is very difficult if you genuinely put two hours a day of some combination of actual concentrated practice (doing the thing) and study (learning why you still suck at the thing and what you're doing wrong).
There are some smaller issues with plateauing / dunning kruger if you do nothing but practice and zero study-- you end up in the Tim Buckley zone, famous webcomic artist who copy pasted the same lazy face onto all of his characters for like a decade. I think webcomic artists so often plateau in ways that are easily lampooned because they are stuck on a regular schedule to keep their fans happy, and they already have a dripfeed of people telling them with every update that they're already wonderful and don't need to improve.
If you do nothing but study, you have the 'swimming on a tatami mat' issue, you can watch a thousand hours of painting theory videos and not get any better at painting.
(Also, language learning is different and doesn't work how most people think, you need to spend like 80% staring at target-language subtitled telenovelas or anime you can barely understand, or scraping through easy reader books aimed at toddlers, and you have to give these boring activities as close to your full attention as possible for hundreds of hours, so that your brain builds an intuitive understanding of how the language sounds and works in normal situations.)
But as long as you pay mind to those potential pitfalls, **the big big big issue is motivation.** It's *getting* that 2 hours a day of study and practice.
And the only silver bullet I'm aware of, when it comes to motivation, is having a desperate *need* to learn something, a 'sink or swim' type situation where you literally have no other option but to do it (I think this is the environment that Tiger Moms try to cultivate for their kids, and it obviously often backfires when they get older and realize that everything is made up and the points don't matter).
Language learners do this without realizing it as kids when they grow up in a new country, or want to interact with the majority English speaking Internet and just learn by necessity as they spend hundreds and then thousands of hours in that environment.
If you don't have that desperate *need*, then the only other solution is to make sure you have a significant amount of tolerance for frustration and feeling 'low status' because you can't draw a circle or watch an episode of Crayon Shin Chan (think Japanese caillou but funnier and dirtier - yes, it is a kids show) without English subtitles, and make a real serious habit, OR, as the review describes, find yourself a group of like minded peers around your skill level and stick to them like glue, keeping each other accountable.
Otherwise... learning is fucking hard. We've got phones and porn and video games, why would you spend 2 hours a day fucking around in Blender or drawing badly or watching anime you can't understand, making tiny incremental progress towards some imagined goal 10,000 hours in the future that won't feel anything like you imagine it will, once you actually get there?
We tell people, over and over again, that it's okay to just be a lump. to not be creative, to not do new things.
We can hold each other to higher standards, "What did you create today?" ("I worked out how two plot threads were going to collide, and it's going to be great!")
Interesting that despite coming from almost exactly the opposite perspective as the Alpha school review, they actually have the same conclusion—that secretly the key to school is motivating students. I liked the distinction between high-, low-, and no-structure learners. I’m definitely a low-structure learner, who has always kind of beaten myself up about not being a no-structure learner. Put me in any kind of class and I will do all the assignments and quickly learn the material. But when I try to learn things on my own from pure interest I always peter out after a few weeks at most. The times I’ve had success have usually been when I signed up for an actual class with teachers and other students. After reading this review, I feel like I need to just accept this about myself and sign up for more classes when I want to learn things.
I noticed this too. I wonder at what point "just literally pay kids to do schoolwork" will enter the Overton window of education reform.
Alas, ChatGpt closed that option before we could even start.
I'm guessing that you mean that students could cheat with ChatGPT, and that would remove the incentive to learn the material? If I'm understanding the Alpha school approach properly, I don't think that cheating that way would be easy. ( _Is_ that what you mean? ) If I'm understanding the Alpha approach correctly, (setting aside the home school option), there were very frequent quizzes in the classroom, where cheating would require having access to to the LLM in the middle of a quiz. If the kids are required to put away their phones during the school day, and not fire up an LLM tab in the middle of a lesson+test, this should be feasible to prevent.
I mean it in the narrow sense: The students would use ChatGpt to do the homework which we were paying them for. Then they would fail the subsequent tests.
Of course we could try to pay them for doing well on tests, but that is a much much harder thing to pull off.
Many Thanks!
>Then they would fail the subsequent tests.
True!
>Of course we could try to pay them for doing well on tests, but that is a much much harder thing to pull off.
I'll quote a fairly long block from the Alpha School review https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school to explain how they make it work:
>Alpha’s Incentive Programs
>Alpha schools have their own in-house currency. Alpha has “Alpha bucks”; GT School has “GT bucks”. My understanding is that they work a little differently on each campus, but the overall philosophy is the same. This review will focus on the details of the GT system since it is what I know best.
>If the students complete their 2-hour learning “minimums” each day they earn about 10 GT Bucks. They get additional bonuses for every lesson they complete beyond their minimums. They also get a bonus if they finish their minimums within the scheduled time (vs going home and doing them later), additional bonuses if the entire class completes their minimums during the allotted time, and weekly bonuses for hitting longer term targets.
>They only get credit if they both complete their lessons AND get 80% or higher on the problem sets within the lesson. If they get 79% they still move on (with the questions they missed coming back later for review), but they don’t get the GT bucks associated with the lesson (this stops gaming where the kids rush through the lessons just to get “bucks”)
The fine-grained, prompt, pay for the testing built into the problem sets in the lessons looks sensible to me (and this is a place where their software helps). Do you see a stumbling block here?
Exactly, I believe Alpha might be pulling this off, but they have also invested a lot of work in refining their methods.
Also, the stumbling block they will meet once they try to scale is slow students realizing that they are waaaay poorer than the fast students even though they work just as hard. I am willing to bet 50 Alpha Bucks that an immediate effect of this will be a large share of students self-handicapping and refusing to engage in the alpha economy. It is better to be a rebel outside the system than an underpaid worker inside it.
Very much agreed!
>I wonder at what point "just literally pay kids to do schoolwork" will enter the Overton window of education reform.
is exactly counter to
>But we will do our best to keep them moving along with their peers because _that’s the best idea we have_ to motivate them.
[emphasis added]
The Alpha school results strongly show that, yeah, we _do_ have a better option for motivating learning.
( In retrospect, having read both reviews, it is a pity that the two authors didn't write a combined essay on both lines of evidence. )
the 2-hour-learning / alphaschool team is experimenting with that https://www.learnandearn.school/
Same! I'm really curious what the publisher of this piece would think of that facet of Alpha School!
I've been wondering myself, also, if there is some way I can apply the lessons of motivation to myself in doing online schooling.
> they actually have the same conclusion—that secretly the key to school is motivating students
The difference is that the Alpha school review concludes that kids should be motivated by learning opportunities and rewards, while this review concludes that we need to sacrifice the learning opportunities of the no-structure learners to motivate the high-structure learners by their presence. The effect on high-structure students may be comparable, but the effects on no-structure students are dramatically different.
Yup! And, bluntly, the no-structure students are _important_ (making the assumption that AI doesn't totally take over). They aren't _all_ of the future decision-makers, nor are _all_ future decision-makers no-structure students, but I expect there to be a lot of overlap, and, for our society as a whole, it help a lot if future decision-makers are well-informed.
So, maybe we should ask how we create more no-structure learners? Besides giving the existing ones better learning opportunities
Many Thanks!
>So, maybe we should ask how we create more no-structure learners?
Ideally, yes, if possible. I don't know if this has been studied, or how successful or unsuccessful attempts along these lines have been.
My friend the "no structure" learner was very afraid as a child, that his parents would sell his house for a handful of beans. This led him to acquire money and jobs at what most people would call an "alarming rate" for a child.
Many Thanks! I'm not following how this ties in to the previous comments. I'm guessing that maybe you are making the point that self-motivated ("no structure") learners can still conclude unrealistic things, and that additional learning does not solve all problems???
In general, a lot of it is sublimated sex drive. So, um, more cheerleaders?
But is it good for all of our decision-makers to reach adulthood having never operated in a structured environment, or been exposed to low or high structure learners?
We don’t (and can’t) live in a no structure society!
Many Thanks! I think you are misunderstanding what the Alpha school does. I would describe it as (more-or-less) lightly structured rather than unstructured.
>been exposed to low or high structure learners
From the description in the Alpha school review, I don't think that the students are physically separated, but rather are each working on lessons at their own pace in the same classroom.
Eliminating putting students in lockstep, (provided that Alpha schools scale) is eliminating _years_ of pointless delay for the average student in the Alpha system.
My comment was not intended a remark on Alpha school, as I’m not familiar with it. Rather, your implication that we’d necessarily be better off if our decision makers were given less structure is not something we can take for granted, IMO.
Many Thanks! At the very least, wasting the _time_ of the no structure learners is a huge cost. I'm mostly hopeful about the Alpha school model here. What is hugely wasteful in the conventional schools is the lockstep classes - particularly if they just lump everyone of the same age together and force the faster learners to sit through the pace of the slower ones.
> we need to sacrifice the learning opportunities of the no-structure learners to motivate the high-structure learners by their presence.
Fantastic summary!
Maybe there's no 'no-structure' learners, they are just faster learners that need a much more accelerated (but still structured) curriculum
I suspect there are few true “no structure” learners, or rather, there are very few people who can learn *all subjects* with no structure, who might turn into one-topic savants with serious gaps elsewhere if left to their druthers. There are also learners who may be able to get to a pretty high level with no structure, but hit a ceiling that requires some structure to break through.
"this review concludes that we need to sacrifice the learning opportunities of the no-structure learners to motivate the high-structure learners by their presence."
This strikes me as a failure in reading comprehension. I just can't square your comment with:
" I hope I’ve been clear that I don’t think schools are perfect. They are designed to maximize motivation, but motivation is hard to maximize, and schools don’t do a great job. Is there a better way? Maybe. But to design a better education system, we first need to understand what the current system does well."
Great review! This crystallized my own observations about school and my place in the rationalist community. The rationalist community is filled with no-structure learners like Zvi Mowshowitz and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and consequently much of the prevailing wisdom doesn't work as well for low-structure learners like me. For instance, I spent a while trying to read textbooks on my own like LessWrong perennially suggests, and I made some gains but lost interest once the material got uncomfortably difficult.
One thing this review doesn't go into that I definitely observed in my own education is that accelerated learning can be pretty traumatic for someone who's used to not needing much structure and is suddenly thrust into a situation where they need to avail themselves of all the structure just to keep up.
The review is great at describing the needs of the learners who needs structure. But the suggestion that the no-structure learners should be sacrificed to them is triggering as fuck.
I need to calm down, and maybe in a week I will be able to write a reply that will consist of something other than screaming...
And we have people in the comments here arguing, in all seriousness, that 95% of learners should be sacrificed on the altar of giving the 'important people' a better school experience. Lots of screaming to go around...
First, I am not convinced that the high-structure learners are actually 95% of the population. I even suspect that school is changing many kids into high-structure. Small kids are naturally curious, and the curiosity usually disappears when they enter school -- that is the place where they learn to associate learning with boredom or stress. My *pessimistic* estimate would be that 80% of the students are high-structure. That leaves at least 20% of those who could do better. That is a lot of kids.
Second, I am not convinced that it actually helps the high-structure kids if you force everyone else to study their way. Even the author admits that it mostly stops working around high school. So the benefits seem to be short-term compared to the losses.
Finally, if you want that someone cure cancer in the future, that person is very likely to be among those 20% whose learning is currently sacrificed to make the 80% temporarily feel better. So if we calculate the victims of both approaches, you should include all people who will die of cancer and other preventable things on one side.
1) I thought the author said that high-structure learners were 80% or less of the population, with no-structure learners being about 5% and low-structure learners the rest.
2) Small kids are indeed naturally curious, but not about all things. Much of elementary school is things they are interested in, either intrinsically or because it will help them understand the world better and succeed in it--say, reading and writing. But puberty changes what they are interested in, at the same time that school becomes more "academic".
he writes that "gifted schools or schools with an entrance exam, they would be doing more advanced work than peers in regular schools, absolutely. But often only by a year or two."
So he argues that it wouldn't make a huge difference. I read about kids finish high school at 12, but that's probably so uncommon that you wouldn't find enough of them in a large city to have a dedicated school (except in the larges chinese cities).
Alpha seems to be doing a great job with every student. Some students are creating businesses, others are becoming thought leaders.
> So he argues that it wouldn't make a huge difference.
That's one of the many places where I disagree. Two years are a lot of time, especially during childhood when you can focus on learning because you are not distracted by your job or family. Imagine saving two years of elementary school (that you would spend bored, listening to teachers very slowly explaining stuff that you already know) and getting e.g. two extra years of university education instead.
Really happy to see this one made it.
I believe Scott has written at least two posts about school that I've read. Between those and the discussion it spawned it my impression was always that many around here (and on reddit) experienced the downsides of that rigid structure and none of the upsides. They then concluded that obviously compulsory schooling must be bad and evil, no qualifiers.
My own experience was markedly different. I have, at many points in my life, required external motivation for something I knew was good for me but that I couldn't motivate myself do. Much more so when I was younger still. I'm extremely convinced school would've been in the category "I should do that, it would be nice, but, oh videogames!". Looking back I'm very happy I was made to go.
A lot of the discussion around here has been around largely self-motivated people unhappy with how much school got in their way. I'm happy this review directly addresses that this is true, it does exist, but it's not malice, it's a tradeoff. And then goes on to explain that in detail.
Already waiting so read all the rebuttals and why, actually, school is just a socially acceptable way to imprison small humans who don't have the power to stand up for themselves.
Education is one of those things that everyone has an opinion on, because we were all educated in some way, and for the vast majority of people posting here, it was probably in schools. And as you point out, the typical posters here are not at all representative of the median American.
The simple fact is that compulsory education isn't going anywhere anytime soon, because parents need childcare. Unless an AI robot tutor/nanny can stay home with a five-year-old, it makes sense to have schools for kids to go to while their parents work.
Nannies would be cheaper than teachers.
Yeah, but would a nanny have 30 kids to supervise?
Nannies aren't required to know anything needing teaching, just to supervise children. This will always make them more efficient when the goal is just to supervise rather than teach.
I would predict that the literacy rate would be sharply lower under such a system.
I would NOT. Current literacy rate has very little to do with school, and much more to do with cellphones and computers making "I can't read that" a serious hindrance to LIFE in general.
How come? Are you aware many teachers are taught that kids will teach themselves to read simply by being exposed to literature, and if not, it's the parents fault for not exposing them to enough literature at home? That's not much more effective than a nanny who doesn't teach at all. At least with the nanny, the parents would understand there kids isn't learning at school and would thus make an effort to teach their kids.
I agree. This article does a good job of laying out the challenges that reforms must wrestle with. "Schools" isn't something for you or your kids or your neighborhood. It's something for everyone, which makes it really, really hard to get it right and necessitates trade-offs. It's fine to argue that the wrong trade-offs are being made, but not engaging with them signifies lack of seriousness.
I think the "meeting student where they are is a failure" part needs its own article/review, because it's repeatedly relied on by this article but I don't think it has a strong foundation at all. Also it doesn't seem to pass my priors. From my own experiences, it's obvious that grouping students that have the same characteristics would be better than having too wide differences. It makes me starts to skim this review to get to the point fast, unlike previous review where 18k feels short. I guess the conclusion is generic enough that it shouldnt be 100% wrong, but I don't think the arguments really support it or stamp out denying questions.
The laziest fact check (asking Claude what the consensus is) seemed to confirm that the consensus is that tracking or grouping students does not improve the average attainment as any increase for people it works for ( I'm guessing you) is offset but people it didn't work for.
I agree the review could have been more persuasive on that point as it is quite central.
Do you priors not also tell you that grouping the lowest preforming students who need the most structure together would have a negative impact on them.
If you didn't mean tracking but meeting people where they are with personalised curriculums I think the problem is we don't know how to personalise curriculums without loosing the structure that kids need.
> Do you priors not also tell you that grouping the lowest preforming students who need the most structure together would have a negative impact on them
No? Such a class could be taught at their level rather than spending >95% of their time being checked out of concepts going over their head and <5% being taught one on one by the teacher on the topics they're weak in. Not to mention the psychological issues of feeling like the dumbest kid in the room.
I liked that the author put the thesis near the beginning. I'm not quite sure why—I think it helped me read better somehow. I wish more people would do that.
It’s a basic principle of good writing - put the thesis near the beginning, so that you can read everything in the context of where it is supposed to lead.
And yet not all reviews in previous years followed this principle. Some of those reviews even won!
Scott gets a lot of mileage out of not following this principle. In many of his best articles the reader is being taken on a journey with no inkling of the destination.
Which ones do you have in mind? That might shed light on when this technique is and isn't appropriate.
Answering this question just for previous contest winners, I'd say that Lars's in 2021 did put the thesis first, Amanda's last year was less thesis-driven and more of an exploration, and that Erik's in 2022 had a twist ending. I tried to follow Erik's example in 2023, and got some criticism for it (but maybe that was just the inevitable spread of opinion?).
Here's one I remember, with a hilarious mid-article twist https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/ivermectin-much-more-than-you-wanted
For Scott's literature reviews in particular, I think there are two reasons why it's okay for him not to lead with the conclusions:
- He once wrote: "There are two equal and opposite commandments for popular writing. First, you've got to sound like you're chatting with your reader, like you're giving them an unfiltered stream-of-consciousness access to your ideas as you think them. Second, on no account should you actually do that." If you write this way, and put your bottom-line conclusions at the beginning of the post, then it sounds like you wrote them before the rest of the post, which would be devastating for the credibility of a literature review. There are other, non-literature-review contexts where it's understood that you're presenting one particular perspective and so it's okay to open with it.
- The conclusions of a literature review (at least the way Scott does them) typically aren't a thesis that provides context for the rest of review. On the contrary, they're often somewhat murky, without as much of a clear takeaway as we'd like; it's epistemically virtuous not to sound more confident than you really are. Whereas if a particular thesis really is guiding your entire argument then it's easier to follow if you say so up front, especially if it's a complex statement that gets into some things that are inherently kind of fuzzy.
Scott also doesn't make the literature reviews longer than they need to be (notwithstanding the title), nor repeatedly tease the conclusions throughout the post body to keep people reading, which also makes it less annoying.
All that being said, I would not cite the twist ending of the ivermectin post as a positive example to follow; it was funny but ultimately didn't hold up and he subsequently recanted it.
“Beware heuristics that almost always work” is a good example of Scott’s “pile examples and convince by induction” approach, where the thesis is often not stated at the beginning (or sometimes at all).
I sort of feel like in that case it didn't much matter either way because it was easy to see almost from the beginning where it was going.
I agree that that post does incline that way, but also when I started poking around to get some good examples, I realized that almost all of the prototypical examples I could find were from SSC - it seems that he may write this kind of article a lot less often these days. Here are some good examples I found:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/07/social-justice-and-words-words-words/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/
But these are basically just selected at will from various lists of his top posts. It was his distinctive style to begin without any introduction and build up to a conclusion which might or might not be ever explicitly stated through a series of Roman-numeral denominated sections which were effectively lemmas.
It made for delightful reading because you were ready to be surprised by the next step of the argument at each point. But I think it could only work if you could make each sentence so enjoyable or insightful in its own right that people will read on without knowing the destination, or if you had an established reader base who knew that it would get somewhere worthwhile eventually.
Appropriate to the subject matter, I think it's a writing style that is somewhat more boring and less enjoyable to read, but that does a much job of conveying information.
One tangential point is "The common school movement emerged between 1830 and 1860." That's about the time of the Jacksonian Revolution, when the political philosophy of the United States went from a "republic" where the voters were the highest social classes and expected to wisely choose for everybody to a "democracy" when the voters were (conceptually) all adults. (Of course things weren't so pretty in practice, but there was a substantial broadening of voting, moving away from the idea that you had to *qualify* in some way.) There was also a high level of immigration. So getting everybody to think in generally the same ways about *everybody* as the body politic was starting to become important.
I like this review a lot. It does a good job arguing against the Alpha reviewer’s (even at the time obviously) crazy claim that the new system could work for 30-70% of students. But it does very little to persuade me against the weak-Alpha argument, which I read as mostly “hey, look at this awesome new system that takes the top 5% and helps them learn twice as fast.”
Honestly, I don’t think the author of this review would have any problem with that claim! For no-structure and maybe even some low-structure students, it’s a really excellent model. But this is definitely a good reminder of the commonsense truth that many people just suck at learning, and old-fashioned schools are set up to teach even them to read.
All that said, I think this author is too gloomy (or maybe just not excited enough?) about increased tracking. It’s true that many high schools already give talented students some opportunity to jump ahead, but it really tends not to be much, and there’s certainly a prevailing attitude where parents and administrators try to push anyone into advanced classes they can.
I’m not sure my experience generalizes super well, but I can tell you there’s at least one school where:
- Everyone takes the International Baccalaureate curriculum.
- Entry to the school is decided by lottery.
- Some students are encouraged to drop out when it becomes clear they can’t handle it.
- Many (*many*) others are not.
- Classes move at a snail pace and no-/low-structure learners (*cough* me and most of my social group *cough* maybe 10-20% of the school *cough*) get bored and play Geoguessr in Physics.
- The teacher doesn’t care because the smarties are still scoring at the top of the class on all the very-slow-moving quizzes.
- IB exams roll around and the school performs *terribly.* I mean, seriously, one of the worst in the world. We have *never* had a *single* student receive a 7 in Global Politics.
- Even the best students tend to be unprepared. We haven’t got results back yet, but I’m pretty sure I shat the bed on Chemistry and maybe Physics, and I have (genuinely smart and talented, way beyond my own ability, etc.) friends who shat on Math, Physics, Spanish, Biology, …
This is terrible! Obviously there should be more tracking and separating done, and it’s true that at many high schools there is, but there also are *plenty* where this is the story. AP/IB classes full of confused, slow, distracted, and distracting learners who mess things up for everyone else.
And even if most high schools aren’t like that, nearly every middle school is. I’ll admit it matters less in elementary, where everyone’s fine just playing with blocks or whatever, but most smart young people I talk to have middle-school horror stories. Bullying sometimes, but mostly just rowdiness, unpleasantness, loneliness, and boredom. School as an institution is probably good on measure—but that doesn’t mean we can’t make it massively better for the kinds of kids who’d be into Alpha.
Even just based on my own experiences as a student I think I agree with a large fraction of the claims made here. But, there doesn't seem to be any attempt to account for the costs of the incumbent approach, or at least there seems to be an underlying assumption that the costs are worth paying.
One is the cost of holding back the students who could be learning more. What would actually happen, in aggregate, if we let some fraction of students fail to learn anything, in exchange for letting some other fraction of students learn several times faster? What would happen if we let students choose to ignore (and fail to learn) subject A, but excel far beyond 'grade level' at subject B, until such time as they find a reason to put in the effort in subject A? I have no doubt this would cause some problems, but it would also do things like create a highly motivated population of scientists and engineers and doctors and lawyers and artisans whose careers are 10-20% longer than they would be under the current model, and they'd enter their most productive years with an extra 5-10 years experience under their belts.
Another is the cost of causing mental and physical health problems. It's a cost to force kids to sit still for hours in a row, and restrict their ability to go use the bathroom or move their bodies, and to crush their desire and motivation to do various things and explore various interests that would, for them, be valuable. It's a cost to force kids to be in the same room as people they can't stand or who treat them badly, for months or years. It's not clear how much, now or in the past, the loss of agency school demands is worth the extra learning some proportion of students will get in return.
And of course, there is the direct financial cost. K-12 schools employ 8 million people in the US. How many fewer teachers and staff would we need if most schooling were replaced with other forms of instruction, AI or MOOC-like otherwise? At the cost of how much learning, for how many students?
Relatedly, what would be the learning *benefit* of such replacement be, if it enabled people of any age to choose to start learning any subject at any time, without fear of social sanction for seeming to be 'behind' or in 'remedial' classes, or needing to go a bit slower, or wanting to study something unusual? What is the cost of us having this societal idea that a student is something you *stop being* after a certain age, unless you go 'back to school,' at a fairly high personal cost - of seeing education as a separate magisterium from the rest of life?
Edit to add:
I've spent the last few years RVing full time. I don't have kids, but I've met (and read/watched content from) a lot of families that roadschool their kids. What you can't avoid noticing is that 1) They tend to sign each kid up for different forms of learning depending on their personality, because *that is what best motivates each kid to learn.* There's a lot of options out there these days. and 2) The kids themselves seem to be more mature, independent, and worldly on average. But also 3) Sometimes the kids express a desire to go (back) to regular school, and when they do the parents should, and often do, listen.
I agree strongly with this comment, and I disagree strongly with the fairly common view that because high performing students will do well in school and life anyway, it's okay to waste 70% of their time in school and several years of their life on a system that isn't designed for them.
To a small extent, the UK is closer to a personalized system (and most of the commonwealth countries have the same system). Students are placed into specialized tracks of their choosing at age 13. And people complete their law degrees, medical degrees and PhDs on average 2-3 years earlier.
It has it's costs though. It's very difficult to switch tracks and students are less well rounded. I knew some brilliant science students who didn't know what apartheid or communism were.
I don't see how the UK is personalized - a top US students can complete 2 or even more years of university in their desired field or fields, while a similarly talented UK student can not. There is no skipping first or second or third year university courses to jump into the good stuff like in the US, and research opportunities for undergrads are extremely scarce, even at Cambridge. At my mediocre regional state school I got two research opportunities my first semester just by attending seminars and talking to professors. That would be unthinkable in the UK, even at Oxbridge. And I have heard that PhDs in the UK often take as long as US PhDs (5 years) despite being shorter on paper.
A concrete example is Evan Chen, who was able to take graduate courses at Berkeley as a high school student: https://blog.evanchen.cc/2016/05/27/fill-in-the-blank/
Admittedly I have never been to an American high school and I didn't know that taking college courses is relatively common. Maybe I was wrong, and the US system is actually better for high performers.
However, my understanding is still that most students only start specializing at age 16-17 in the US (there is a fairly standardized curriculum before that, with a bit of flexibility at age 14-15). Whereas all students start specializing in the UK system at around age 13.
Maybe personalization is the wrong word for this, but it seems to me that the UK system is a bit more efficient for the average student. And I think that's born out in the fact that medical students and law students graduate 3 years earlier and PhD's graduate 2-4 years earlier (according to https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023#data
and
https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2017/jun/02/why-dont-we-value-academics-age-and-experience)
At my high school, we didn't take any official college courses, but we did take tons of AP courses, which provide college credit. IIRC, I entered college with 45-50 credit hours (not all of which contributed to my degree requirements, but it was really helpful to skip a lot of the low level courses). In college, you might typically take 15 credit hours per semester, so that's like 1.5 years of college credit *in high school*.
I don't think that's due to anything at the secondary school level, but rather the fact that undergrad is more specialized in the UK and medicine is a graduate degree in the US.
I think it's more accurate to say the US has a longer tail - 40% of US schools don't offer physics (compared to 7%-8% of UK schools which don't offer a dedicated physics course via triple science), but the best US schools offer way more than the best UK schools. Take a look at the course offerings at Thomas Jefferson High School: https://tjhsst.fcps.edu/academics
The U.S. public schools spend roughly 3x more per pupil today than they did in the 1950's, with no clear evidence of better results. So even if we don't tear down the fence, maybe we don't need to maintain such an expensive fence.
I know people who, thanks to tracking and gifted education, were able to graduate high school a year early or finish college in three years thanks to AP credits, or both. Isn't this a good thing.
It can be! I could have plausibly done both of those things, and didn't, in part because the ways things are set up today (or were 20 yrs ago? not sure) the more selective colleges don't like the former and don't allow the latter. Instead it just let me take more advanced courses sooner.
That's still basically the same outcome - being accelerated by one year. And considering you chose it over being able to graduate early from a normal university, it was even better than graduating early from a normal university.
Definitely, 100% agreed.
Schooling is more expensive becuase everything labour intensive is more expensive and we spend more on special education.
High school graduation rates are flat but high school drop out rates are not and neither is the minimum requirements to graduate
From what I read inflation-sdjusted teacher salaries have increased very little since the 1960's. What has increased enormously is administrative costs & bureaucracy.
I don't think that graduation rates are a very good measure of results. I give more weight to the NAEP and other indicators of what students are actually learning.
One little-known factor is that we run a clandestine welfare state under the guise of our schools. A relative of mine is a “School Resource Officer”: she spends her days acting as a personal assistant and Santa Clause for low-functioning adults whose kids are in school, dispensing goods and handling life problems so that they can get it together enough to get their kids to the bus stop in the morning.
What sort of goods are dispensed and life problems are handled?
Wasn't the pandemic a test of the idea that we could replace schools with moocs.
All those high ability students were free to follow an coloege level course on machine learning instead of what ever the age appropriate math was. They could have done that but mostly the didn't, they played video games or similar.
The review was clear that just becuase someone is capable of more advanced content with structure it doesn't mean they can do it without structure and we don't have the resources to provide structured learning that is tailered to an individual.
In what sense were they free to do that? Sure, a lot of the logistical barriers to doing so vanished, but those were already pretty surmountable (schools have library computers and such); the bigger problem is that school authorities do not encourage them to do that, and that didn't change.
There was a group that were at home all day with a laptop and could choose what to study. The school will tell them do x. Many students did not do x but I don't think very many of them didn't do x becuase they were doing something harder becuase that would be more appropriate for them.
I didn't have kids during the pandemic so I'm just guessing but shouldn't a massive reduction in the amount of monitoring by teachers while holding time supposed to be studying constant show some kind of benefit to all these kids that are being held back from the system. If they really would flourish without school chaining them to the slowest student why wouldn't they flourish during the pandemic? Maybe they did but and I just don't know about it
Because they were still being told to do the same things as before! The conscientious kids did the same work they were previously doing in person, because that's what the school authorities told them to do, while the non-conscientious ones goofed off. Neither of those groups is going to do a bunch of difficult work that the school authorities don't want them doing, even if they hypothetically could. The brightest kids going slower than they could is mostly a curriculum-management thing, not a classroom-management thing, and while the pandemic shut down classrooms, it didn't shut down curricula.
I don't think it was? To me that feels a bit like saying that randomly chucking people out of airplanes is a test of how well parachutes, hang gliders, and helicopters work.
No one educated the teachers *or* the students on what they could or should do. No one retrained the teachers who'd only ever taught in person. No one set up infrastructure to enable anyone to enact any sort of considered plan. No one taught students and parents about what resources were available to them outside whatever their default was. No one tried to optimize lesson plans for online delivery. No one tried to provide the students with the kinds of coaching that, realistically, are needed to counter the effects of many years of being accustomed to being slowly spoon-fed information and discouraged (subtly or overtly) from studying unapproved subjects or learning in unapproved ways. No one tried to replace the in-person social interaction that schools facilitate, or provide counseling to mitigate its sudden and unexpected loss. They mostly just tried to have the same teachers talk at the same students except through a small screen, with none of the usual school structure to enforce compliance.
Edit to add: I do think this supports that the OP is (narrowly) right about the structure of school optimizing motivation, either for the median student or for some lower-than-median percentile. You remove that structure without warning and replace it with almost nothing, and it doesn't go well.
I actually think it would be a fascinating study to compare these covid era results to those of students who were deliberately already being home schooled, roadschooled, or unschooled starting before 2020, and also to any who switched from their district's default remote learning to other options partway through the pandemic. I haven't looked to see if anyone has done that.
Personally, I know exactly 2 people who were high school students at that time. One was already being homeschooled; her life didn't change much. The second decided to stay remote (I don't remember the details of what kind of remote program she enrolled in) after her peers went back to in person school; her grades went up significantly compared to before the pandemic.
I was disappointed that the effect of parents was never discussed. I still remember working with my mom regularly through high school; she provided detailed comments and corrections on every paper I wrote. I did the same for my daughter and included math / sciences in the interactions. We both became very successful technologists. Friends tell me that the parents who attend parent teacher conferences typically have successful kids. Perhaps we need to improve the education results by making the parents more responsible for success?
How would you propose to do that?
Kids don’t get to play football unless the parents do certain things? Require volunteer parent activities? Recognition for outstanding involved parents?
Some of it is just expectations. I think the emphasis is on “schools must educate the kids” rather than “parents must educate the kids and the schools will help”.
The parents you need to motivate are the ones who aren't already very invested in their kids' academic success. None of those ideas sound like they would work on those parents.
If you think it’s hard to motivate students, who actually have to be in the place where you’re working, it’s going to be even harder to motivate the parents, who spend almost no time there.
One additional thought on why MOOCs have such a low completion rate: I started listening to one about ten years ago, and the first ten minutes was the professor covering minutia about attendance, grading, etc. It was literally just a filmed lecture with no edits. I very quickly returned to buying college lectures from The Teaching Company.
There exist MOOCs that are better-designed than this and their completion rates still aren't all that high.
I don't know how typical I am, but I am a MOOC non-completer. I did the entire class, every single assignment and lecture, until I got to the "final project" at the end. I was taking the class as an adult with a job just to learn. The skills were useful but I didn't care about or need a certification. The final project seemed like a lot of work so I just decided not to do it.
I think that's more sustained engagement than is typical.
I've done two which I valued a lot but never finished. The lectures and associated problems helped me learn what I was trying to learn, but at that point rather than do the official final project I had my own projects to apply what I had learned on. The completion certificate just didn't have any value.
What if the top 5% were taught to maximize learning and the rest to maximize motivation? The layman can benefit a lot from civility and motivation. But one Einstein can change civilization.
The education system in America is socialist and oddly enough public schools at communist countries seem better at identifying and supporting outstanding academic talent at an early age.
Such a system for public schools was tried in Britain in the 1950's. Students scoring high on tests was packed into special schools around age 11-12. I think there was a huge back clash when upper class parents realized that not all their children were making the cut. Only when the elite schools are expensive do we accept them...
From my understanding, it was actually too successful - even the lower class grammar school students were dominating university admissions and the job market and even upper class independent students to the extent that it threatened to upend tradition British class structures. Hence, the British elite pushed to ban it.
The fact that homeschooling exists and is legal in all 50 states is basically a tacit avenue for the top 5% - look at Laura Deming, Erik Demaine, Alexandr Wang. I suspect many more were but haven't been directly asked about it in a public media environment.
Very interesting review. I do want to take partial issue with this:
>There’s ample evidence that we can’t actually teach critical thinking divorced from content.
My issue with that statement is that people often incorrectly infer therefrom that students must master or memorize content before being asked to think critically. But that is not actually true; a student can "analyze Han and Roman attitudes toward technology" using the set of documents here: https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/apc/ap07_world_hist_frq.pdf -- including using evidence to support a thesis,; analyzing how the evidence might be incomplete or misleading; and what additional evidence might be useful to test the student's thesis.
Of course, a student with lots of background knowledge will do a better job than a student without background knowledge, but that background knowledge is not necessary for the student to become more proficient at higher-level thinking ("higher level" being a reference to Bloom's Taxonomy https://citt.ufl.edu/resources/the-learning-process/designing-the-learning-experience/blooms-taxonomy/)
Yeah, it shouldn’t be learn some content and *then* learn to critically think about it. Rather, it’s that you learn to think critically as a byproduct of learning some content. You have to be aiming at the content in order for the critical thinking to come.
It’s like how you clear your mind in yoga as a byproduct of paying attention to your breath, not by first paying attention to your breath and then clearing your mind.
>Rather, it’s that you learn to think critically as a byproduct of learning some content.
I don't think that is quite right. Critical thinking does not automatically come as a byproduct of learning content; it must be independently learned. It comes from addressing questions above the level of mere recall and comprehension. Eg https://facultycenter.ischool.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Revised-Blooms-Questions-Starter.pdf
Right, I should be more careful. It’s not a mere byproduct of learning content - it’s a byproduct of learning content in particular ways. But there has to be some content that you’re learning.
Critical thinking is not context free. Thinking critically in something like physics looks very different than doing so in history.
Looking for gaps is great... But if you don't actually know anything about what you're reading, it becomes almost impossible to do so reliably. Heck, without background knowledge, *just reading* becomes really really hard.
>Thinking critically in something like physics looks very different than doing so in history
It actually doesn't. The basics are essentially the same. There are extra challenges in the social sciences because evidence is more difficult to obtain and verify, and causation is vastly more complex, but they aren't all that different.
Re your broader point, you are arguing with a strawman. As I said, "My issue with that statement is that people often incorrectly infer therefrom that students must master or memorize content before being asked to think critically." That does not imply that complete ignorance would not be an impediment.
There's a huge gulf between complete ignorance and enough context and internalization of context to reason effectively. And "impediment" isn't right--it's almost a total block. You simply cannot follow a basic math reasoning model unless your grasp of basic math facts is at automatic levels. If you don't know the context of a historical fact, realizing that something doesn't fit or is anachronistic is going to not be possible.
I taught high school science for 7 years. No, the skills (beyond basic reading) don't really transfer well. Especially since at that level no one is reading any of the original sources. They're reading heavily digested, simplified things designed to teach lessons. Rarely in a way that actually works.
Edit: there are non-skill habits of thought that transfer. A certain skepticism. But the actual tactical skills are pretty unique and context bound.
Again, you are arguing against a bit of a strawman. My comment was meant to refute the oft-expressed notion that factual MASTERY is necessary for critical thinking. I think we both agree that that isn't so.
>I taught high school science for 7 years. No, the skills (beyond basic reading) don't really transfer well.
I taught high school social studies for 15 years, and worked with colleagues in the sciences on critical thinking issues, and found that there was a great deal of overlap.
>no one is reading any of the original sources.
I don't understand. Reading original sources is not necessary for students to engage in critical thinking. Any evidence can be used.
This review believes, but doesn't quite state explicitly: the purpose of school is to maximize motivation *for the high-structure learners*. This review seems to be telling us that we have to put everyone in the same classroom because this is the only way to get those high-structure learners to learn. I think the author would agree with a statement like: "we're going to sacrifice the learning of the top X% of the student body, because teaching them really slowly in the same classroom is the only way to keep the bottom kids learning at all."
The review at one point discusses something called "leveled reading", but dismisses it, because it "reduces the achievement of the readers who struggle the most". Great, but what does it do for the other readers? We never find out. (There's a link, but the linked article has no numbers in it.)
I can sort of understand this as a philosophy, but also I can completely understand why anyone with a smart kid would try to pull their kid out of it.
I’m pro-smart kid too.
So much this.
I kept looking for the part where the author explained “and here’s why it’s bad for us to pull the no-structure kids out of this terrible system” and as far as I could tell, it’s basically “it helps the high structure kids, so you have to torture the no structure kids”.
Umm, what?
I’m totally here for the basic idea that the middle quintiles are fairly well served by school. But I reject categorically the idea that the top quintile should be sacrificed on the altar of motivating the lower quintiles.
That wasn’t my read of it. More that there is no known, scalable way to maximize for low structure kids. Home schooling is an option for most of them if they have the resources. But that’s just putting the onus back on the parents, not a “system.”
I really can’t tell whether the claims made that you can’t optimize [stuff] are where [stuff] is the floor, the ceiling, or the integral over all students. It seemed to me the claim was that you can’t optimize the integral, because the author made clear that tracking kids by achievement “only” improves learning by a few grade levels.
“Only” was doing a ton of work, there, but it strongly implied that the author agrees that tracking is helpful for top-quintile students.
All the research I’ve seen shows that doing loose tracking clearly does improve outcomes for those that are at the top, it just has monetary and “reduces motivation for those left behind” costs.
But the author is slippery on who they’re optimizing for.
I suspect that for a lot of kids who would describe school as “torture” or “being sacrificed on an altar” with a straight face, the issue is less that they are super geniuses that could learn at a near infinite pace if removed from the burden of standard schooling* than rather that they are book smart kids that struggle with structure and with socialization.
It’s not discussed in the article, and I’m not saying that modern schooling is the perfect way to achieve it, but there is almost certainly value in immersing no-structure kids in a structured, socially heterogeneous environment for at least some of their education.
*we do have some off-ramps for these geniuses already - nothing is really stopping them from doing a self-paced online or homeschool curriculum and starting Stanford at 14 or whatever, but the rarity of students who go that route and actually end up achieving substantially more than the valedictorians of the standard schools must be considered.
"but there is almost certainly value in immersing no-structure kids in a structured, socially heterogeneous environment for at least some of their education"
As someone who was one of those kids, that reads an awful lot like "but there is almost certainly value in immersing non-swimming kids in deep water".
Your faith that "immersion" will result in everyone learning the self-discipline and social skills you feel are important, is sadly misplaced. And the fact that you aren't even trying to explain *how* this process is supposed to work and why a public school is a good place for this to work, leaves me pretty confident that you don't have anything but blind faith to go on.
And I'm going to stop now, before I find myself throwing ban-worthy insults your way. A sign of my inadequate socialization, no doubt - feel free to blame my high school teachers and administrators.
That’s an extremely hostile response from you, especially considering the much harsher language I was reacting to. (Torture? Sacrificial altars?) The immersion I had in mind was language learning, not drowning children. Obviously. You’re smart enough to know that so I’m disappointed by your remarkably uncharitable response.
My actual point is fairly anodyne: one learns to socialize by practicing socialization (as one learns to do most things by doing them), and right now children do most of that practice in school among their age peers. Hopefully you are not asking me to prove the validity of “one learns through practice” from first principles, as I would argue the burden of proof is with someone challenging that prior.
It’s clearly not perfect, but any system that replaces it with unstructured, independent learning will need to find an alternative to provide this. There are likely many possible avenues to do this, and optimizing them would require careful study (and it’s unlikely every child would have the same optimum strategy). Likewise with “structure” by which I mean basically “the ability to adapt and excel in situations optimized for preferences other than my own, with people who are significantly different than me”, or more bluntly “be a team player and do what you’re told”. Which is a good skill for anyone who doesn’t want to be a pariah (and doesn’t win the startup lottery to get fuck-you money).
> one learns to socialize by practicing socialization
In my experience, social environments outside of school are far more forgiving and properly aligned than those within school, making them much better environments to learn/practice socialization. Being kind, vulnerable, authentic are excellent traits for the real world, but students are socially rewarded for being thick skinned, uncaring, mean, etc.
> right now children do most of that practice in school among their age peers
That feels like circular logic - of course most social learning occurs via the dominant (legally mandated) form of socialization. That's because it's dominant (partly due to cultural pressure, party due to legal pressure), not necessarily because it's effective.
> There are likely many possible avenues to do this, and optimizing them would require careful study
Let's be careful not to hold alternatives to a higher standard than the incumbent. Perhaps Frederick the Great really did put careful study into optimizing the social outcomes of his system (although from what I can tell it just seemed like his best initial guess - the empirical science of education was obviously quite undeveloped back then), but even then, his ideal social outcomes aren't our ideal social outcomes.
That’s mostly fair, although I do think a radical change should be held to a higher standard to some degree (in the spirit of a Chesterton’s Fence framing, per the OP here). I don’t think Frederick invented the idea of “children spending lots of time with other children”. And I don’t mean to use circular logic - I’m just saying that if you are going to remove the main source of their socialization, you need a plan to replace it. Covid isolation/all Zoom school didn’t seem to work well on this front, for example.
To the extent that social environments outside of school are more “property aligned”, I think one’s thoughts on that are heavily influenced by one’s perception of their own school experience. Objectively it’s probably mixed.
At any rate, I’d have strong priors against “no structure at all” being very good for any but a handful of kids, particularly if it’s paired with isolation from other age group peers.
Notably, the “Alpha School” alternative discussed in the previous post still has a lot of structure despite being self-paced, and they spend their afternoons in more social/team settings with their peers.
Speaking from my own experience as someone who would have been pegged in the “no structure” group (and who hung around many others), at least through high school, I probably did need some structure pushing me to peer group socialization, precisely because I wasn’t particularly good at it and needed the practice. (And the failure mode of a lot of “no structure” kids is that they shy away from the stuff that doesn’t come easily to them).
I'm afraid I agree with John, and found his tone reserved compared to my reaction.
I had no friends in public school, despite it being sold as "good for socialization," and was bored out of my mind. The fact that I was interested in things that my classmates weren't resulted in physical violence that the administration ignored. Silly assemblies like pep rallies were aggressively loud and I was naturally beaten because my lack of enthusiasm caused my class not to "win the spirit stick" whatever the hell that meant.
That's twelve years I could have been doing things that interested me.
Algebra? Use it every day, learned it when I was 10. Physics? I'm an engineer. It will be a cold day in Helheim should I ever read Emerson again—attempts as an adult got the same reaction as when I was in school, "This idiot is 'Great?' He can't even write a coherent paragraph."
It was only 15 years later when the internet became a thing and I could interact with the OTHER Embedded Systems Nerds that I found anything resembling a tribe outside of work.
Public school wasted a dozen years of my life. I'd not wish it upon my worst enemy or politician, but I repeat myself.
Yes, I got the obvious allusion to immersion language learning. Now I kind of want to drop you off in some distant city where nobody understands English, nobody cares about you, and not even a phrasebook to help, and see how long before you starve or freeze or get thrown in jail. Outside of very early childhood, "immersion" language learning doesn't work reliably without *some* degree of preparatory instruction, formal or informal. Priming the pump, so to speak. Maybe a good phrasebook will be enough.
Somehow, my schools never handed out that phrasebook, and they certainly never taught a class on the subject. Nor did they make any effort to check and see if I was learning these social skills. And I don't think that's at all unique to my school. They just assumed this would magically *happen* without their having do do anything about it. And sometimes it does. Maybe most of the time it does.
And if you're immersion-learning a language for fun or for personal development, maybe "mostly this works, if it doesn't, meh, c'est la vie" is adequate. But if you're teaching something *important*, then that's not good enough. If you actively take on responsibility for teaching something important, if you advertise yourself as being the One Proper Place to learn this vital skill, and particularly if you impose a mandate that every parent pay for this vital service of yours whether they want to or not, that every child submit for six or seven or eight hours a day. then that's definitely not good enough. And if you're now admitting that all that "reading, writing, and arithmetic" stuff was just a smokescreen that you really suck at, but these here social skills are *really important* and that's what you're teaching...
...then you damn well better *teach* them. If you're going to trust that the magic of "immersion" will make it all happen, then you need to *check and make sure that's happening*. Because all I see is schools demanding a captive market for their dubious "service", and then just assuming that their "customers" will provide that service for each other so long as they are confined in the same space.
This does not work nearly as well as you think it does. I don't know what your connection to the education system is; maybe you're just a satisfied customer stepping up as their apologist because their shtick worked for you. That's enough to earn you a healthy dose of my disdain, because you're an apologist for fraud and it's a fraud that hurt me when I was too young to defend myself.
You’re assuming a lot of things and projecting a lot of positions on me that are not true. This is clearly not a topic on which we’re going to be able to converse productively, if I’m not allowed to express even moderately positive positions on the possible value of the public school system for the sake of argument without being sneered at and insulted by you.
In reality we are probably more similar than you seem to think. I strongly suspect our degrees of professional separation can be counted on one hand, perhaps with a couple fingers left over. I am hardly an “apologist” for the “fraud” of the education system, and to the extent the “schtick” worked for me it did so with a fair amount of effort on my and my parents’ part to carve out a unique path within that system. I am under no illusion that it is perfect (or close to it) or that there are within the system highly variable and in some cases extremely negative experiences even for academically successful students.
I assure you my posts were not meant as the personal attack you are interpreting them as. I sincerely apologize for triggering whatever past trauma you are reacting to here, and wish you the best.
The author does discuss at several points the failure points of educational systems that segregate the highest performing or lowest-structure learners. The final restatement of that line of argument can be found by searching for "cherry picking" in the section "The Thesis, Again". This argument is developed earlier in the text than that.
The author *mentions* that they think tracking doesn’t scale up, but then argues without defining their terms on what failure means.
My read is that the author is saying that failure in the context of educating individual students for systems that segregate based on academic performance involves 1) a regression towards the mean as more and more parents/students want to be part of the highest performing systems, and/or 2) lack of scale for tiny systems that try to avoid this affect, and/or 3) lack of educational benefits to all students from being part of an educational system with diverse learning styles and attainment levels.
I went and read that paragraph again, and I didn't see anything about "failure points" of educational systems that segregate the highest performing or lowest-structure learners. The paragraph was arguing that those systems are harder to measure in comparison to the current system, because they tend to perform much better (for the high-performing kids that are in them). That's different from claiming the system failed.
I'd ask that you state your argument clearly in your own words, rather than ask me to go read text that doesn't actually say what you're claiming it does.
That paragraph is at the end, it helps summarize the points made so far in that vein. I did mention this in my comment. Earlier in the piece, the author lays out a failure mode scenario. I don’t think I can state this any better in my own words, so I do feel like I should make sure you have seen those earlier passages?
Here is a key on on this topic:
“You might think that we’ve found the solution to tracking. We just need to get all the no- and low-structure learners together and let them move much faster. Here’s the issue. The no-structure learners will always be bored, as long as we are committed to putting them into classrooms where everyone learns the same thing. And those classrooms where everyone learns the same thing are exactly what the low-structure learners need. As soon as you create a higher track there will be a ton of demand for it. Parents will insist that their kid join. And as it grows, it won’t be able to accelerate very quickly. You still need the structure of a classroom where everyone is learning the same thing, and that just isn’t a very efficient way to teach.
A good illustration of this point is to visit a gifted or exam school. If a few of those 100 classrooms from our observation thought experiment were gifted schools or schools with an entrance exam, you might be surprised by what you see. They would be doing more advanced work than peers in regular schools, absolutely. But often only by a year or two. You’d see all the same inefficiencies of students all learning the same thing at the same pace. You’d see lots of bored students who could be going faster. You’d see a bunch of students who you’re surprised are in this school at all. It’s the reality of the system we have.”
Thanks. I agree that this is an attempt to describe failure points of educational systems that use tracking.
I'm afraid I don't find it very convincing, due in part to the lack of experimental evidence. But I do appreciate that the author tried.
You didn't find the meta-analysis linked by the author to be useful? It's confusing to me that you complain about a lack of experimental evidence without discussing the meta analysis that the author presented. I can't tell if you have some problem with that or whether you noticed it at all. I don't find this conversation with you interesting or productive. What I think I understand that you have fundamental issues with the rigor of this piece. Maybe you can find someone else to talk to about your concerns but I'm going to move along. Thank you for your time.
Because “high-structure learners” suck at learning, all schools must be made dumb and boring for everyone. No Child Left Behind because we are racing to the bottom.
For me school was demotivating so I'm not buying any of this. I learned a lot in this life but none of the things that stuck with me were learned in a classroom.
Responding to this but there are many takes with similar sentiment. People seem to be missing or downplaying that intelligence is orthoginal to required structure and that structure needs vary between subjects and other variables not just between people.
Most people acx readers will be above average intelligence and the sentiment in this thread is that they were one of the people thrown under the bus for the sake of less intelligent people.
I like to think of myself as above average intelligence but there was no way on earth I would have gone through the material to pass my higschool exam in German without being forced to go to classes and do homework.
A common criticism of the rationalise community is we think we're inventing things from first principles and ushering in a new age but really we've just rediscovered an old theory that was tried and found not to work. That is exactly the kind of result I would expect from an intelligent person who was a no structure learner at first principles, high abstraction topics and a high structure learner at history/ academia.
So yes everyone here you probably are smart but it's unlikely that you are all completely no structure learners. Consider that before you throw away school because it benefits others and not you consider
Why was it important that you learn German?
There’s a lot of trivia I learned because it was fun. Some of it was motivated by peers, or girls, or status. The stuff that was actually important I learned because I felt that I needed it.
Yes, people vary in what areas of the human enterprise they find fascinating. There’s this unspoken assumption that it’s a problem if some smart kids don’t learn X.
I don’t buy it.
Girls =/= peers?
Structure is a questionable concept so I can't say much about it but IQ and educational achievement are strongly correlated. Of course IQ alone is not everything. Conscientiousness and educational achievement are also strongly correlated.
What interventions improve conscientiousness would have been a more interesting topic.
Is mass education such an intervention? Does it beat an angry mom wielding a slipper? After all billions of humans learned all kinds of things before Dewey bestowed his ideas on us.
For example the way certain stone tools were knapped stays consistent for tens of thousands of years even as the species making them change, suggesting a significant degree of cultural transmission even long before the apparition of homo sapiens.
Nobody is throwing away the school, unfortunately. The educational process only becomes longer, more expensive and more compulsory. Schooling starts at 4 years old and for many lasts 20 years or more.
BTW how is your german now?
I enjoyed the essay, I agree with other commenters that the timing of this post works to its benefit.
I've noticed a number of comments so far suggesting different interventions to improve motivation. My read of the education literature (not an expert but did take a PhD field course in Economics of Education) is that basically almost every intervention under the sun has been tried and all of the ones that showed promise have disappointed once the programs have been scaled up. This includes interventions like paying students, paying parents, giving parents more information, behavioural nudges, etc.
I think one thing that tends to go underappreciated by those of us no longer in school is that genuine "learning" actually is fairly uncomfortable/hard. It's difficult to consistently stay outside of your comfort zone and encounter failure. Just think of how little "new" material the average adult actually learns once they're finished with their schooling.
On top of this I believe most adults have an inflated view of their own ability to learn. They equate learning some new procedure/process at their workplace to learning new content in school, but the two really aren't comparable. This has been made worse by graduate programs that are aimed at working professionals but still award a degree (i.e. MPP/MBA/etc.). These programs are often cash cows, they involve very little learning for most of the students. They tend to contain courses with 2nd year undergraduate course material, but the grading is done on the inflated graduate course curve. As a result, graduates end up getting a false view of what learning is really like.
>basically almost every intervention under the sun has been tried and all of the ones that showed promise have disappointed once the programs have been scaled up. This includes interventions like paying students, paying parents, giving parents more information, behavioural nudges, etc.
Any comments on whether there are differences in the "paying students" attempt(s) in the literature and the Alpha school results?
My knee-jerk ignorant guess is that the Alpha school is able to take advantage of recent software, which I'm guessing lets them do finer-grained rewards than older attempts, but this is purely a guess. What do you see? Or do you just expect that the Alpha school case is very likely to fail to scale, which is yet to be seen?
The Alpha school approach includes (1) hiring more teachers (more precisely, having a lower ratio of students to teachers), and (2) paying teachers more to get better quality teachers.
Paying more in teaching salaries doesn’t doesn’t scale from a resource perspective unless there is a political change that would allow spending significantly more money on education.
Getting better teachers by paying more doesn’t scale unless the money actually improves the pool of teachers; otherwise it just results in more money chasing the same pool of teachers, meaning spending more money for the same result. Hiring more teachers doesn’t scale if it means increasing the applicant pool by hiring people who currently could not get hired as a teacher. Hiring better teachers implies that you can distinguish between good and bad teachers when hiring, so the Alpha school approach may not scale if the average school administrator is not as good as (and cannot be taught to be as good as) the people running Alpha school at making this distinction.
The teacher issue is the one that stood out to me, but that’s just one reason that the Alpha school approach might fail to scale. I’m not saying that the approach won’t scale, just that the long history of educational innovations failing to scale means that the odds are against it.
Many Thanks! Yes,
>(1) hiring more teachers (more precisely, having a lower ratio of students to teachers), and (2) paying teachers more to get better quality teachers.
was indeed one of the inputs they used in their main school, though the review also described several other offshoots, including a homeschooled one (albeit less effective).
>Paying more in teaching salaries doesn’t doesn’t scale from a resource perspective unless there is a political change that would allow spending significantly more money on education.
True, but one teacher teaching 10 students, who are learning at twice the rate of normal students is saving the equivalent of the time of 10 students (for the same amount of learning produced). If we value a student's time at minimum wage, it would not be unreasonable to be willing to pay very roughly 10 times the minimum wage for this service. Yeah, I know, the politics doesn't work that way, but, to me, this suggests that the political decision is making a mistake.
It would be helpful to have an empirical test of how well the Alpha system works with _just_ the "AlphaBux" plus the software, but ordinary quality and quantity of teachers.
I think the real question might be, can they close the loop? Is alpha school hiring their own former students as teachers, and if not, how long will it be until they can? What external dependencies are involved, what skills or personal traits do they require, but fail to generate?
Many Thanks! Sure, if the Alpha school approach becomes pervasive, yes, it does need to close the loop. Is there any reason to think that it wouldn't? It seems like a more efficient way to teach approximately the same material (plus whatever they learn in the time saved) as traditional schools.
> Is there any reason to think that it wouldn't?
I don't have enough of a theoretical framework to confidently say one way or the other. That uncertainty is a big part of what makes it seem like a worthwhile question. Hm... it'd be a conveniently objective thing to observe, so maybe somebody should set up a prediction market on the subject?
If they do manage to reliably close the loop, that probably solves the price issue as well - student loans, basically, with a guaranteed option to pay off the balance by working for the school directly (upon attaining necessary qualifications, which could be a clearly visible progress bar ticking away from day one), rather than being cast adrift into the wider job market.
Aren't the teachers only allowed to really engage the students in the afternoons, when academics are over? In that case, the teacher ratio wouldn't really impact the learning experience
My view (based on the ACX posted essay and again I'm not an expert) is that Alpha school would be unlikely to scale. It's got a lot of red flags including self-selection of pupils, selection of teachers, very high cost, and a very metric-based evaluation.
Generally though I do like the idea of incorporating more gamification in school work, and I like the idea of expanding the use of relatively cheap technology. As some other commenters have noted one weak part of this essay is that it doesn't touch on the costs of these interventions as much.
Take Khan Academy as an example. Sure, it may only help a small % of the student population, and let's assume it's true that this % is already motivated to learn. Even granting all of that, the cost of creating video lectures/tutorials is so cheap it's mind-numbing that Sal Khan beat out almost every school district to it. I feel similarly with software like Duolingo or using AI for tutoring.
Many Thanks!
>My view (based on the ACX posted essay and again I'm not an expert) is that Alpha school would be unlikely to scale.
You may be right. Hopefully we will find out over time.
>Generally though I do like the idea of incorporating more gamification in school work, and I like the idea of expanding the use of relatively cheap technology. As some other commenters have noted one weak part of this essay is that it doesn't touch on the costs of these interventions as much.
Agreed!
As part of my response above to Kenneth Almquist:
>It would be helpful to have an empirical test of how well the Alpha system works with _just_ the "AlphaBux" plus the software, but ordinary quality and quantity of teachers.
>Take Khan Academy as an example. Sure, it may only help a small % of the student population, and let's assume it's true that this % is already motivated to learn. Even granting all of that, the cost of creating video lectures/tutorials is so cheap it's mind-numbing that Sal Khan beat out almost every school district to it.
Agreed! At the very least we should not be _actively_ impeding the 5% of the student population who are self-motivated by forcibly wasting their time.
Agreed on both points
Actually learning is natural to humans, and most of us can learn quickly when the material is directly related to a specific, immediate need or gain (as long as the gap difficulty is not too large). Perhaps the problem in school is about how to motivate kids to learn abstract material not seen as immediately relevant to their lives.
What kind of concepts/material do you have in mind? Truthfully, I think I disagree that most of us can learn quickly. Outside of relatively trivial things I think learning is difficult for people, even in situations where they have an immediate need.
For example consider learning a new language. Many people profess a motivation to learn a different language, there are plenty of resources out there, there is even often an existing common link between a language they already know and the one they want to learn. Yet most adults fail/struggle greatly in this pursuit. Most of the ones that learn tend to learn slowly. You might say that a lot of adults find success if they move to a place where the language is spoken, but that is an incredible amount of cost/exposure time needed to learn. Yet even in that scenario you find many people that struggle to learn despite their being clear benefits to learning (e.g. 1st generation immigrants who never really learn English)
For example, it is quite hard to learn a language at school, but if they drop you in a foreign country where nobody speaks your language you will probably start picking up the local lingo in a couple of weeks.
A couple of weeks of several hours per day of practice/effort comes surprisingly close to the contact hours of a high school course, especially given the high school course can't give each student on demand access to native speakers the way you get in a foreign country.
Yes, but I think the motivation is more important.
An example of something I think many young people can learn quickly is the feelings and motivations around some social dynamic they are in. Ask them to recount how Alice felt when Bob said to Charlie what Alice said to David and she found out about it—and they can tell you.
But we're hardwired for this, but not for the subjects.learned in school, so it's a bit of an unfair example.
Any example can be a videogame rules, where the players are motivated to learn to win it.
People learn little new "material" as adults because it's not rational for them to learn random facts with little important for their lives. Almost all relevant life skills and professional skills are learned outside of school - and people learn this pretty efficiently because qhat they're learning is actually valuable.
Note also that school mostly gives short term learning. Facts initially memorized through years of schooling will be forgotten when no longer relevant. The exception is actually relevant skills like reading and writing and basic math, which will be continually used throughout one's life
Direct Instruction worked exceptionally well once scaled up in the largest controlled educational experiment in history. If you missed that, it makes me wonder what else you've missed.
This was a wonderful review, and as many commenters have said, a nice contrast to the Alpha School review.
A point I was waiting for that never came, was that the same student can be no structure, low structure or high structure in different domains. And that students can even move between categories over time.
Speaking for myself, I was solidly no structure at mathematics (I participated in the international math olympiad almost completely with self study), and high structure at writing - I just had no motivation. That was, until I took a philosophy of religion course in college and was able to write about things I actually cared about, and had opinions on. Suddenly I was no structure and able to ace writing assignments while actually enjoying writing.
And so, I'm unpersuaded by the assertion that a more personalized approach can't work for a typical low to high structure student. We haven't found an approach that consistently works, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
This is close to my experience. I was good and self-taught at all the topics I was interested in: maths & sciences, really. I was bored in languages and literature… until I found some I was interested in (mostly philosophy and classical studies) and it turned out I was good at writing too.
This is what I find about getting philosophy grad students to learn math. A lot of them never thought they were good at math, but once they see that a philosophical question that they care about depends on something mathematical, they start to pay attention to that mathematical thing and start to improve.
>once they see that a philosophical question that they care about depends on something mathematical
I'm curious, what sort's of mathematical things do they find philosophical questions depend on? My knee-jerk guess is Gödel's incompleteness theorems and maybe Cantor's diagonalization argument??? Other examples?
My work is in formal epistemology, so I'm often showing that thinking about concepts like knowledge, and justification of belief, works better when you think about it in terms of probability. I personally was most interested in algebra and logic as an undergrad, and not interested in real analysis, but ended up teaching myself a lot more real analysis when I realized how central it was to thinking about conceptual issues for probability.
But you get other things in other areas of philosophy.
All of the classic diagonalization arguments (I count Cantor, Tarski, Gödel, and Turing as giving versions of it) end up being relevant for lots of thinking about meaning, mind, and language, as well as for understanding mathematics and computation. And in my department, a lot of people learn to code because they realize that making computational models of information flow in scientific communities is going to help them address the questions they're interested in for scientific epistemology.
Many Thanks!
And, in my experience, the environment matters! I attended a grade school and high school that believed that humans were sinful, kids were the worst sort of humans, and that everything they were teaching us was beneath them. And then I attended a brand new college that was trying to revolutionize engineering education and viewed students as important co-creators and suddenly I needed vastly less structure to learn.
Which college was that? Olin?
Yep
Seems to me the real question is 'why did we spend so much time solving quadratic equations in school?' Really -- who cares what the solution to the equation of a parabola is? Are people continually coming up to you and saying, quick, quick, where is this parabola equation going to cross the y axis? Yeah, right, never. We spent so much time on it in school was because it was complicated enough that you had to spend some time learning it -- ie, we learnt it because it was a great way to use up time.
I’m sure you've seen the SMBC comic.
Student: Will we ever use any of this algebra?
Teacher: You won’t, but one of the smart kids might.
So why force everyone to learn it if only a handful of smart kids will ever use it? Why not make it an elective?
Because you don’t know which of the kids will end up using it?
You could go the German route, with strong and near irreversible early tracking. I’m not convinced that’s better.
>you don’t know which of the kids will end up using it
But that's true of all kinds of skills, most of which aren't required in most high schools. Javascript. Spanish. Football. Automotive repair. Playing the French horn. Why is algebra, a skill that not only is useless to most adults but also seems to be particularly painful to many students, mandatory, when those other things aren't?
The obvious difference is that there's a much broader variety of skills that have algebra as a prerequisite. If you don't learn it, they're *all* closed off, and that's a bigger risk than passing up the opportunity to get good at the French horn.
Then we could explain to kids how algebra is used in different fields so they can make up their own minds, instead of teaching it as a meaningless exercise in shuffling letters back and forth across an equals sign. As it is, you can study algebra for years without ever learning that it has uses. No wonder most kids want nothing to do with it.
Lots of things do indeed "have algebra as a prerequisite" but there is a real question how much algebra is necessary and how much it is simply a hoop you have to jump through, a signal of Bryan Caplan's unholy trinity of "smarts, conscientiousness, and conformity".
Huh? We do in fact make all kids take PE, music, programming, and languages. At least my school did and my kids school does. So…your comment doesn’t make sense to me.
Also, algebra…in high school? That’s a middle school subject at best. Late elementary school maybe.
Yeah, kids are required to take a certain number of electives each year. But they have a lot of leeway in deciding which electives. For example, my high school required us to take language classes, but allowed us to choose which languages. I went with Latin, which has a lot less practical use than Spanish. I would guess that a lot more American adults use Spanish in their everyday lives than algebra. So why is algebra required when Spanish isn't?
>That’s a middle school subject at best. Late elementary school maybe.
What country are you from, and is your school a public or private school? Most American schools are not that accelerated. We typically start algebra between seventh and ninth grade (ages 12-14). I believe I started in eighth grade. Wikipedia calls algebra a high school level course, so I don't think my experience was unusual. I'm glad I didn't start in elementary school - I struggled enough in math as it was.
No school I've heard of makes all kids play the french horn. Algebra:french horn::math:music
Education Realist estimates that about half of young people agree with the tee shirt, "And then Satan said, 'Put the alphabet in math.'"
They have tremendous difficulty making the change from concrete to abstract. Many can correctly answer, "What number do I have to take away from 12 to get 7?" but they just fog over at, "If 12 minus X equals 7, what is X?" For most of us here, the second is obviously the same as the first, and maybe even a little easier to solve if we write it down. It certainly is the same logically, but it is very much not the same to many people.
With enough drill, and easy enough tests, they can pass an algebra course, but they will never be able to use it outside the classroom.
I agree with this, and would go further. There’s very little that kids learn beyond age 13 that will be useful in life to most of them. It’s far better for them to learn something that’s interesting than to struggle with a skill that they will never use.
I loved maths and found calculus easy at 15. Anyone who intends to study science would do well to learn it. But most people don't need to learn algebra.
You could say the same thing about probability and statistics, only it's clearly far more useful for the majority.
I loved that stuff, though. It was sort of a mystical experience to me, seeing the different conic sections, what you got if you cut a cone at different angles, and how it connected to the algebra. It felt like I was seeing some deep truth about how the universe made sense. I actually still remember the long messy formula for solving all quadratics, as well as the algebra tricks for playing around with the quadratic equations in a way that gets them to make the answers transparent. I got a hell of a lot out of learning that stuff, even though I con't think of a time it's been of practical use to me.
The correct answer is that the last time the federal government set a unified curriculum was back in world war 2, where ballistics and orbital mechanics required quadratics and conic sections all leading to calculus, for the sake of catching up to the soviets militarily. Since then things have gelled but most forgot why, ala the parable of the woman who cut off the chicken's feet before cooking. Only difference is the woman in the parable admitted she didn't know instead of making up nonsense reasons that could just as well apply to any other untaught topic.
A thoughtful antidote to reform enthusiasts. Still I'm a bit puzzled. On the one hand schools exist to maximize motivation. But it seems that none of the three groups you've identified have their motivation enhanced. The unstructured are bored, the low structured develop a few habits but never catch fire; the high structured group loses steam the longer they stay in school. Many grow to hate school and learning. So whose motivation is augmented?
If I am told, "Do this unpleasant thing or I will cause you pain", I have not had my intrinsic motivation increased. But I have had my motivation to actually do it increase. He's talking about the second meaning of motivation.
I was surprised by the claim that deliberate practice doesn't work. Maybe we just aren't doing it right.
Sports are incredibly popular as a leisure activity. And during sports, even at an amateur level, you are generally being pushed to the edge of your abilities against people of a similar skill. You're constantly adapting, learning and then trying again with improved skill and knowledge. That's deliberate practice.
Several other popular leisure activities have a similar structure - chess and other board games, online pvp video games. Even solo activities like climbing or art where you are challenging yourself to do better rather than competing against another person.
Getting into a flow state can be very motivating. But it's tricky, it only works when you have incremental goals that are just within reach. If you push too far beyond that, then it becoming demotivating.
If I'm understanding the reviewer aright, I don't think they're saying that deliberate practice doesn't work — just that it's really hard to do it, b/c deliberate practice is hard and painful. (For what it's worth, K. A. Ericsson — the progenitor of "deliberate practice" as a concept — wrote in the book "Peak" that there's an only-slightly-inferior move he dubbed "purposeful practice" that is much easier to do in schools. Less autonomy needed.)
One minor correction - the text says that the high-structure students are the ones who are constantly in office hours. This is definitely wrong - the high-structure students are the ones who *should* be in office hours, but the fundamental problem is that there’s nothing that makes them come.
I have far more formal education than most barn cats, but a typical disdain for academic credentials. Beethoven never got an MFA. The only use I can discern for art school is so British musicians can drop out of it.
Still, how many of us insist on a self-taught brain surgeon? A Khan Academy trained aerospace engineer to design our airplanes? A really motivated amateur to operate a power grid?
Smh as a motivated amateur operating a power grid.
Or that dude who did a couple of lobotomies on stray dogs for practice now removing your brain tumor.
They asked me if I knew anything about power plants. I said as much as anyone I'd ever met.
Great article. I see that many commenters have said that giving more opportunities to high-performing students is not necessarily a problem. I enthusiastically agree.
In England, in 1944, the government set up a tripartite system where 11-year-olds took an IQ test, called the ‘11+’. The highest scoring 10%(ish) were sent to a grammar school which aimed to send those kids to university. The rest went to a Secondary Modern, which taught less academic subjects.
By the 1960s, it became obvious that this system was too successful, and society was becoming divided into middle-class kids who passed and working-class kids who didn’t. One unexpected problem was that the smarter working-class kids were passing, which left fewer smarter working-class kids to represent them in politics etc. The government shutdown this ‘selective’ system in the 1960s and replaced it with a ‘comprehensive” system.
Two counties stuck with the selective system and I lived in one. I passed the 11+ and went to a grammar school. I’ve had a very successful life. My brother failed the 11+, and went to work on a building site. He has had a very successful life too. It would have done him no good to stay in school for more years, learning calculus and Shakespeare.
I wrote more about this here:
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/11
Living in the midst of a construction project that was supposed to take one year and now is into its third, beset by incompetence, I wonder how much brain drain from the trades has contributed to this kind of dysfunction. I of course support upward mobility but it also perhaps has its undesirable side effects.
I reviewed this before it was promoted, rating it low.
I have a variety of complaints, but the main issue I had was, I felt that the concept of "motivation" as pushed in this review wasn't actually well defined, and that this was used to push a class of Motte/Bailey. It starts by stating that schools aren't really about learning, and presents "motivation" as the new optimization target. It quickly asks "Motivation for What?" but the section doesn't actually address this question at all. It's roughly implied that it actually means "motivation to learn", which in turn maximizes learning.
Which ruins the entire thesis, because now he's back to arguing "best of all possible worlds" and "actually, this is the best way to accomplish learning". But, he doesn't present evidence for this case and actually, the evidence is starkly opposed to this case. You can't just handwave all of the evidence saying that traditional American schools are not very effective, and then conclude that traditional American schooling is the best possible education system.
Which is all to say, I don't think the author is actually being coherent, with the primary culprit being, replacement of standard terminology with non-standard terminology, then switching between the meaning of the standard terminology and non-standard terminology as necessary to win the argument.
I agree. I don't think "motivation" is nearly as meaningful a term as we tend to feel it to be. We all know what it feels like to fail to do a task we know we should do, so we call our difficulty doing it lack of "motivation." But if you real dig into what's the difference between people who do the task vs. people who don't what you find isn't that one had 2 lbs of "motivation" and the other only had 3 oz. of the stuff. The differences you find are that the person who does the task has developed a habit of doing this kind of task; and/or the person who does the task has immediate good or bad consequences depending on whether they do it or no; and/or that the person who does the task thinks of it in a different way from the person who avoids doing it.
(I'm a psychologist, and one of my specialties is procrastination and stuckness.)
You put this better than I did, and nailed what I think is the main trouble with this one.
"motivation for what?" is still an unanswered question. The essay starts with this very clear and direct style and then somehow veers off into nowhere the moment it needs to be maximally clear. Almost as if it's trying to obfuscate the fact that the author isn't confident enough in their thesis to actually be explicit about what they mean.
Yes, the author means motivation to learn, and learning is always the optimisation target. He claims that age-based cohorts are the best way to maximise learning. He argues for this by claiming that many alternatives to traditional schooling have been tried, and that all have failed when they were scaled up. He mentions several examples - more detail would always be nice, but he hasn’t just hand-waved this step.
He claims that motivation is the reason that those alternatives performed better at small scale, as well as the reason they fail at large scale. Unless I missed it, the no-/low-high-structure learners are the author’s own approach to describing motivation. He shows that the concept can be used to describe a handful of situations. I think this is coherent, and doesn’t rely on unclear definitions.
"Age-graded" is mentioned a lot in this review. In the past, older students taught younger students in a "one room schoolhouse", with adult supervision. Maybe it doesn't scale, or doesn't develop motivation as well?
Oldest siblings have stronger personalities, are more of leaders (my observation). They practice being leaders with their younger siblings. They could (hopefully often do) care for their younger siblings as they lead them. They are sometimes a bit, or more than a bit, pathological. Optimistically, they just don't know better. We don't teach leadership and being responsible for other people in school (proportional to learning "material"). Youngest siblings don't practice leadership and care with younger siblings. Maybe it would be good to teach leadership and care, since many or most people end up being leaders to some extent, formally or informally. Having older students teach younger ones could help with that, perhaps. Also, perhaps teachers can delegate some of their workload to students. Students and teachers then would have more time for one-on-one tutoring for those who need it.
Great piece. While you allude briefly to this, I wanted to emphasize it more: students aren’t all one thing. I was a no-structure learner when it came to reading and writing. I could have learned those skills alone on a desert island. But I was a low-structure learner when it came to math. I needed somebody to walk me through it. So I needed school. I think a lot of students are like me; they might not need formal schooling for one area/topic, but they do for others. Some students need it for everything, but I think it is the rare, rare person who is no-structure across the board.
There are different types of "structure":
- when you keep nagging and threatening someone to study, because that is the only way to get information inside their head (and the person keeps fighting you all the time),
- when you help someone overcome distraction and procrastination, by giving them a time and place to learn (and the person may be annoyed for the first 5 minutes, but then enjoys it),
- when you give someone the right books and tell them the right words (and the person enjoys the help from the start),
We should distinguish between kids who actively resist learning, and kids who want to learn but need some kind of support. Both are "a structure", but of a different kind.
Yeah, they "high-structure vs. low-structure" thing seems suspect to me on various grounds. This is one: what counts as structure?
A pretty good review which rhymes very well with my own experience on the other side of the Atlantic.
I am starting to come up with a theory that normal schools actually are there to impart 'common knowledge', the knowledge that we know others know. Kind of like what you gain from an oracle saying at least one person have blue eyes.
The schools as we know was originally made so nations could organize their economies for war, which required some kind of common outlook on things.The countries that didn't got colonized by ones who did, and they then copied their own school systems.
I wonder what a world where we to loose this kind of common knowledge would look like. Right now everyone understands 'in democracy you have to hold fair elections', most people have heard of separation of powers even if they can't quite explain the concept, and some few people know about comparative advantage in production. Let us imagine this moved one step to the right, so most people had heard something about elections and only 10% knew courts are supposed to be independent of the normal government. Even if the smartest people were even smarter than they are now, I still think society in that world would be inherently unstable.
I think that this piece gets a lot of things very right about schooling. It's refreshingly clear and close to my own view. (Though it does in fact seem to be making the case that school is maximizing learning, when you take low- and high-structure children into account.)
For further evidence that age-graded schooling is doing something important in modern society, I'd also point to the lack of interesting variation among countries in terms of how they educate their kids. You don't really get the sense that there are competing systems out there.
I do think that there's a danger in slipping from "here is why things are the way they are" to "things HAVE to be the way they are." The piece makes some caveats in this direction, which I appreciated.
That said, I do find myself thinking that if AI tutors ever get as good as some people think they can be, we might figure out interesting ways to make it feel like "we're all doing the same thing" in the classroom while students are getting personalized tutoring. My students often love doing a bit of lightly-personalized practice with software (Deltamath). It's not that hard to imagine a better version of that software that teaches extension content during that block of time.
And at the college level, would it be that weird to have a "lecture" where the professor is setting the stage for a personalized lecture? Maybe you are assigned to a large biology lecture, no matter what bio class you're taking, so that the students present are taking many different courses. Class begins with a brief talk or exercise on a topic of broad interest, and then out come headphones and computers for some magic robot tutoring.
This is all sci-fi at the moment, and honestly I think it will be for the forseeable future, but I do wonder if there are other motivational structures that are possible.
>> "It's refreshingly clear and close to my own view."
Agreed! Michael, could you share how Deltamath "lightly personalizes" math practice?
>> "And at the college level, would it be that weird to have a "lecture" where the professor is setting the stage for a personalized lecture? ... Class begins with a brief talk or exercise on a topic of broad interest, and then out come headphones and computers for some magic robot tutoring."
I wonder if an even more motivating (just to stick to the theme o' the review) version of that might be that the professor opens up with a simple (but big, conceptually rich) question, then students go to their AIs for a fast, individualized dialogue to try to figure out the answer. (Something like this is what I do with my science classes for gifted kids, except minus the AI.)
Deltamath is math practice software. It isn't adaptive in any sense to input. But the way it works is really simple: the teacher selects a skill for kids to practice, kids have to get 5 (or some other number) questions correct to complete the skill. There are (very simple) worked examples available to reference. This is great software for me.
Magic robot tutoring can be the homework.
Magic robot tutoring can be the homework.
> For further evidence that age-graded schooling is doing something important in modern society, I'd also point to the lack of interesting variation among countries in terms of how they educate their kids.
Many countries use multi-age classrooms in rural locations, much as the US used to. These include Switzerland, Japan, and Finland. 12% of Japanese elementary schools use multi-age classrooms.
I agree with the reviewer that if you define “personalized education” as completely self-directed learning then it will certainly be unsuccessful as a K-12 core academics ed model for almost every student. You cannot just stick some IXL loaded iPads in a room and hope the kids decide to work on math. But I see no reason why customized instruction, practice problems and testing for a specific student’s level must mean a self-directed learning environment with no rewards, accountability, structure, public visibility or recognition. This doesn’t have to look like someone signing up to take a MOOC during their spare time on a whim.
At one extreme, personalized ed may not be self-directed at all. It could be an academic tutor assigning you daily learning modules to work on, setting deadlines, handing out grades based on your performance relative to their goals, etc. The difference from regular school being that your assignments are customized to you - you have a tutor not a mass lecturer. The promise of today is that technology can enable a tutor working together with well-designed apps to coach a substantially higher number of students at the same time than would be possible in paper-and-pen days.
My impression is that Alpha is somewhere in the middle, allowing the students (perhaps with parents?) to set some learning speed goals and make some choices. But clearly there is a lot of accountability with all the testing. And they have a rewards systems they are developing with some controversy. It is interesting that the Alpha review independently came to the conclusion that their motivation system was a big part of what is driving success with that school model so far. I am sure much can be learned from sports, music and other non-academic activities about motivation models that don’t involve putting a bunch of kids of mixed ability in a room together to learn in lock-step. The Scouts use things like badges, for example.
One thing I didn’t understand from this review is how all the students being the same age was part of the motivation of the current school system. I understand the practical logistics behind this design, but how it relates to motivation was not clear. Is it more motivating for an 8th grader to sit completely lost in a math class watching same age peers easily answer the teacher’s questions than it is for the same 8th grader to sit beside a 6th grader who is equally unsure how to find an LCM?
I think your critique might be glossing over two problems: one, that “motivation” (underdefined in this essay imo) for many students comes from “being in a room with peers who are doing the same things”, i.e. individualized approaches won’t work as well for most. And two, scale: Surely, having some sort of human-first tutoring setup has to have the potential to increase learning (maybe not 2 sigma, but still significantly). But that doesn’t scale at all. Additionally, many results in education research look better because the adults involved are highly committed and competent. Once you try to scale successful programs, the effect sizes usually shrink.
Exactly how close in age, how identical the activity and how much of the day in lock-step are required for this motivation effect to hold true? There are undoubtedly peer dynamics at work in a school that help get kids to conform to the norms of sitting, listening, etc. (or, in some schools, toxic norms that drive more misbehavior). There is some peer pressure to keep up too. But, I am not convinced this powerful aspect of motivation necessitates the current 19th century system design.
Primarily, I disagree that a hybrid in-person/computer-based tutoring model is completely unscalable. Up until maybe ten years ago that was certainly true, as the tech component was not good enough. But consider a thought exercise for middle school, a point at which children can certainly use technology and are currently still rigidly kept in age-leveled classes with limited to no tracking.
We’ll start with the status quo.
I live in Massachusetts in a racially mixed, not particularly affluent town of somewhat below average students with one public middle school. There is nothing special about it, and the numbers I will quote are very typical in the state. Looking up the DOE stats for this middle school, I see that in 2024 they employed 12.9 classroom teachers per student, and 28% of the students are labeled as special education (the state average is even higher — 42%!) When you include all the special ed instructors in the mix, you have 11.7 teaching FTEs per student (I have excluded ESL staff). I know the person who leads special ed at this school, and he reports that a large majority of these students are labeled as having a learning disability, and, within that group, a large portion are basically just bottom quartile IQ cases who struggle at school. When people report how well the current model works to educate students, let’s not forget the large special ed apparatus that is in place to supplement the much vaunted “everyone together” classroom experience. Plus the school reports that 21% of students are “chronically absent”, which I am sure meshes wonderfully with keeping everyone going at the same pace. Finally, the average class size is actually 16.7, suggesting the classroom teachers are actively teaching ~3/4 of the time.
Focusing on one subject, math, as an example, we all have a pretty good idea how resources are currently used. Students spend ~4 hours in math class a week. Keeping the calculations easy, we will assume every 48 students in a grade require 3 teaching FTEs to work 4 hours a week each teaching an identical grade-level math class to 16 students. At the same time, there is one teaching FTE who is inactive for 4 hours. Let’s call this traditional model A.
Assume we have the exact same resource constraints at our alternative school, but we choose to deploy them differently. Students spend 50 minutes a week in a small tutorial of 5 students, matched for math progress level and ability. This may be one long session for stronger students or 2 x 25 minute sessions for the rest. It takes two teaching FTEs (each 4 hours) to get through all 48 students. The third FTE is used to supervise 38 students who are not in their tutorial at any given time. They use this time (total 3h10m per week) to work independently on their computer math app (roughly 50 minutes per day, if no tutorial) which provides customized instruction followed by practice problems. They have minimum progress goals set by their tutor. Their tutorial time would focus on explaining points of confusion, working on problems together, and receiving feedback and encouragement. The last FTE is assumed to be inactive for 4 hours as before. This is model B.
Because tutoring is less draining than classroom teaching, your inactive teacher may be at least partially usable, which can reduce ratios a bit further. You may also be able to direct some of the special ed headcount towards supervising app time. Because students are working independently, it really isn’t important to group the students in self-study rooms by age. Nor does the supervising FTE necessarily have to be a subject expert. It may make more sense to group the students by ability to concentrate. More hyperactive cohorts can be supervised by a PE / drill sergeant type who whips them up to put in 20 minutes of work, break for 10 minutes of activity then a final 15-20 minute push. One of the learnings from homeschooling (or Alpha School) is that ~30 minutes on a math app per day is likely perfectly adequate to keep pace with the standard curriculum for most students. Ideally, math would not have homework.
You only need to employ model B for core academics (math and English are strong candidates, plus possibly a portion of science and social studies). It would probably take up about half the school day. The rest can be traditional, age-grouped cohorts for PE, arts, electives, various projects, etc., if you want. Obviously trying to transition an existing school to Model B is extremely difficult. It’s a huge change. But for new schools, private or charter, it is a viable model that does not need to be more expensive than a Massachusetts public school.
This framing of school reminded me of Mike Saint-Antoine's recent article on military training:
https://www.mikesblog.net/p/how-to-make-a-tribe
Awesome insights!
My current beliefs after reading both recent entries on education:
1) I still believe that we could get much better at educating our top quintile of students.
2) I think economic growth and breakthrough innovation comes from the top tier of this top tier
3) I think the 80% could learn just as well or better and for less if we focused on getting them the basics and allowing them to shift to an apprenticeship type model where desired.
4) I think AI coaches supplemented with group activities and human teachers will lead to amazing breakthroughs in the near future (for self motivated learners)
5) I am extremely skeptical about the ability of the current education establishment to redesign how education can or should work. They and their way of thinking are more of a hindrance, on net, than a help.
I am probably wrong on one or more of these though.
I went to a selective high school that had internal tracking in every mandatory subject: math, science, English, and social studies all had advanced and regular classes. Students who were in one advanced class were typically in advanced classes for all those subjects, including me. One year I was dating someone in a regular English class and attended it with him during a free period (as one does). I was surprised to see that there was daily homework, about a paragraph of writing per night, plus regular quizzes on the content of the readings. The class didn't seem to be doing well in either regard. I was also a bit surprised by the silence of the class, and how happy (or at least accepting) the teacher seemed to be that I was participating in the class despite not actually being enrolled.
In advanced English classes we wrote 1-2 essays per book (with no homework most days besides reading and having thoughts on the reading) and the conversation never stopped and infrequently went off-topic. Occasionally we finished books ahead of time because everyone had read ahead. Similarly, in advanced science classes, students often read unassigned material and asked teachers for additional conceptual guidance, sometimes after class. (Teachers also seemed to be nicer, and more interested in helping interested students, in the advanced track. Regular track teachers were more likely to have reputations for being mean.) None of this stuff was graded, whereas each daily bit of homework in regular classes seemed to be an effort to tip students over the passing line.
It's clear in that the advanced track served students who needed less structure at least in those subjects (if not overall), but it also seemed that the regular track served to whitewash the performance of lower-performing students. "Look at these 18 paragraphs they've written this semester", you could say, "they've done 65% of the work." And maybe that adds up to 65% understanding of the books read or narrative devices discussed or self-expression opportunities afforded.
As a 'low-structure learner', I've found that one of the reasons motivation is hard without structure is that plenty of entities are willing to make you spend a lot of time on bullshit – if they aren't paying anything for a teacher. I've taken stupid classes, but I've done a lot more stupid online modules. Teachers are expensive, and that's a honest signal that someone has at least some real investment in teaching you something worth learning.
Teachers are paid with "house money" so there's not much of an incentive there.
The most promising alternative to public school that I've seen is a thing called modular learning -- at least the version developed and practiced by Jeremy Howard (tech genius -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Howard_(entrepreneur)) and a woman named Manisha Snoyer. It's homeschooling done in a way with some structure, curated materials, and some shared online classes and learning experiences with other families who are taking the approach.
Website: https://www.modulo.app/about-modulo
Substack: https://teachyourkids.substack.com
I'm not suggesting it as a solution for the problem of how to educate all kids -- though who knows, it might work -- but it does seem to me like a flexible approach that could be adapted to work for many kids.
Here's a podcast interview with Jeremy Howard where he talks about how he and his wife ended up homeschooling, and his observations of how his daughter was affected by different learning environments, and his own developing theories of how kids learn and what helps and what hinders. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jeremy-howards-journey-from-traditional-schools-to/id1702759553?i=1000629636175
School isn't quite like Chesterton's fence where it's been around so long we forgot why it was created. Instead (as you note paragraphs after invoking the fence), mass education is relatively recent. The reason people are often impressed by old timey written tests is because a smaller fraction of the population was taking such tests.
IQ is increasingly heritable with age. Just as school effects fade out during summer vacation, so do such effects when students eventually graduate from school. Thus gains from school are temporary. Per James Flynn, gains in IQ over time don't appear to be gains in g either, so it can be difficult to generalize effects of such gains from other effects of IQ.
> Classic studies like Asch’s line experiments, where 75% of participants denied obvious truths to match group answers
75% did that at least once, but that's out of 12 incorrect answers from a larger set of 18 and "The average participant gave in to the group three times out of 12" https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/conformity-mythhtml
> Schools spend a huge fraction of their resources on special education, providing the structure and systems that those students need.
Why? They aren't a huge fraction of the students, and if we think of spending as an investment, there isn't that much of a return for it. The focus should be on cutting costs since there is such little benefit. Similarly, the most disruptive students might be abandoned for the benefit of the rest https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/helpful-inequalityhtml
> Maybe the best way education can contribute to all of these causes is to focus on providing a broad, basic education to as many children as possible, and maybe our current system is the best idea we’ve had so far for doing so.
What is the reason for believing either of those things? As you acknowledge, the later purposes were added after the system was first created for the earliest purpose, and it would be astonishingly lucky if it were the case that it just happened to serve those later purposes it wasn't originally designed for. Recall also that the original political purpose of shoring up democracy preceded the rise of schools of education and critical theory such that my mom was required to study (distillations of) Pedagogy of the Oppressed to teach Special Ed. There isn't just conservation in the school system, there is also rot https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/what-makes-stuff-rothtml
My problem with this review, which could well be right in some respects, is that there is a lot of speculation without appropriate empirical evidence. For starters, much of the evidence cited on the effects of tracking does not even measure tracking in the sense that many ACX readers will be thinking of and the few I know of that do tell a slightly different story.
If you open the linked meta-analysis and look at some of the individual studies, you will see that the studies on overall achievement typically look at the effects of separating students at the high school level into different schools where they often learn totally different curriculums, relative to comprehensive schools. However, those comprehensive schools track their students according to ability internally. For example, every UK comprehensive high school (11-18 for foreign readers) continues to group their students by ability, but a study like Hanushek and Woessman (2006) is treating us as stopping tracking when we move from grammar schools to comprehensive. All that really happened is that we abolished the substandard secondary modern vocational schools. I never shared a Maths, English, or Science classroom with anyone in the bottom two thirds of the ability distribution during high school, but all these studies will say that I wasn't tracked. Theoretically, the move to comprehensives could improve the ability matches between students and their classroom peers. If some students are late developers or richer parents game the admissions system, you could have bottom half ability students stuck in the higher school who get left behind and top half ability students stuck in the lower school with no opportunity to progress.
Meanwhile, the randomised trials that I am aware of that actually measure tailoring the classroom according to ability show very different results, with the caveat that they are all from developing nations. One set of evidence comes from the teaching at the right level randomised trials in India (link: https://www.nber.org/papers/w22746). The cleanest example here comes from Haryana where they grouped students together by ability across year groups for an hour a day for a whole year for Hindi lessons and students progressed by 0.15 standard deviations relative to control. That is likely close to a whole year's typical learning (source: https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/impactevaluations/simpler-way-communicate-learning-gains). The Uttar Pradesh intervention did make use of outside volunteers in their teaching alongside ability grouping, but the effects were four times as large! There have also been computer-assisted interventions for Maths that target students by ability level to substantial effect (https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/122/3/1235/1879525). The other example comes from Kenya where Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer randomly assigned schools to track students by ability for 18 months and found that learning improved by around 0.2 standard deviations (link: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.101.5.1739) - about a year's extra learning again. This study, although likely not subject to publication bias, is a bit weaker as it's merely p<0.05 rather than p<<0.01 like the Indian interventions.
I'd also add that I think there are other areas that I think are poorly evidenced or not evidenced. The three things that stand out are the claims that education quality doesn't matter much, learning loss wasn't that heavily driven by length of school closures, and that you can't group by ability rather than age group. The first isn't true between this study of the UK that also outlines 4 US studies in Table 1 (https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/2023-09/WP202324-Exploiting-discontinuities-in-secondary-school-attendance-to-evaluate-value-added_0.pdf), there are meaningful causal differences in quality between schools. Additionally, the school vouchers study mentioned in the deBoer package is about sending poor students to wealthy private school going badly, which could very well be due to them being low ability students there who can't keep up with their peers. I quibble the learning loss point because the length of school closures was enough to fully explain learning losses in the one study I have seen (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aeri.20210748). My uncertainty on the unevidenced age group part is that i) grouping by ability rather than age did work in Haryana and ii) you can also spin arguments about why doing so may improve student effort. Maybe students falling behind would work harder to keep up with their friends who are moving up, or low ability students would stop acting out in an effort to show off if the only people they can show off to are several years younger. I don't know because it's almost never tested.
Finally, I'd also throw significant doubt on the likelihood of the linked meta study to even measure the thing it is measuring accurately when it cites Manning and Pischke (2006) as evidence of the effects of tracking (in the separate schools, not classes sense) on education inequalities when just reading the abstract of their paper would tell you that their argument is that you cannot reliably estimate any causal effects using the available data.
Sorry if there are any sloppy mistakes or omissions. I've only spent about an hour on this post and have relied on studies I was already familiar with in my work as a labour and education economist and although I have read all of the studies at some point, not all of them were read forensically. I also have not proof read this, so some parts may be unclear.
Here's a good review on acceleration for gifted learners, which is only feasible with tracking: https://files.nwesd.org/website/Teaching_Learning/HiCap/2015-16%20meetings/NationEmpowered%20Vol2.pdf
What a thoughtful pushback to the too-cheery hype of educational reform! (And I say this as an educational reformer.)
>> "Schools... are designed to maximize motivation, but motivation is hard to maximize, and schools don’t do a great job."
I really appreciate the reviewer's identification of motivation as the bottleneck. Indeed, if the problem were anything else, then the spread of libraries should have led to the messianic age of education!
The reason I think massive improvement in education is possible is that there's a reservoir of motivation already inside schools that has not yet been systematically tapped: the content of the curriculum.
Math, science, history, and so on — down to spelling and, I don't know, small engine repair — are made up of innumerable small bits that have fascinated people in the past (that's how they got in the curriculum). The trouble is that they're pressed flat and delivered as unpalatable by the time they get to the classroom. The revivification of academic content is the best hope we have for an educational revolution that scales. (As a plus, it also doesn't require we figure out how to revolutionize a system that's been impervious to 100 years of reform. In any case, this is what I was trying to get at with my ACX book review in 2023.)
The reviewer comes across as a wise and careful thinker. If they're reading, I'd love to chat — feel free to reach out to me! (I won't compromise your anonymity.)
Who exactly was fascinated by those things in the past? Wasn't it a highly selected group, for any given topic? So this doesn't seem to tell us much about whether we can get the general population to engage with them.
Sharp point! But it also works the other way: we can look to see what aspects of the topic motivated them, so we're not working from zero. If this seems abstract, feel free to give an example of something in the K–12 curriculum that most people find dull, and I'll see if I can show how it can be re-humanized. (This is what I do for a living...)
If I were going to pick an example I'd say trigonometry, but my doubts aren't about whether someone can tell a story about making it engaging to most students, they're about whether this can be done in real life at scale.
Trig's a great example of a math topic that's filled with irony and even wackiness (it was created to measure the height of the stars as they moved around the flat Earth: see mathematician James Tanton https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoBaXWXBi2d4g0eTnAvk3lMJdh0CaMvC6&feature=shared) but which virtually all the life has now been choked out of. If you know a high school math teacher who'd like to talk about bringing this to their classroom with normal kids, feel free to have them ping me privately. (Helping teachers scale this, and creating schools where this is done regularly, is my profession.)
Again, *at scale*. Highly motivated teachers who want to do weird experimental things without institutional support in order to better engage their students are not representative. It's great that you're helping them and their students but the applicability to national-level curriculum design needs to be demonstrated.
Yup. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, as the old folks say — or "bricks and mortars schools, or it didn't happen" as the kids say. The two paths that one can take are (2) to spread methods through an extant system, and (2) to start an alternative system and show it scales. We're taking both approaches in different countries, and are seeing successes!
I dispute your claim that schools are successfully bringing knowledge to even the low self-motivation students, because they often don't work to even teach in the first place. It's not just the "learning loss" like what Scott talks about where he forgot pretty much everything he doesn't use or see reinforced in pop culture; I've tutored multiple students in calculus classes who can't find the area of a rectangle. If their evaluations were working at all they wouldn't have been advanced to this class in the first place.
How is this possible? Imagine a teacher fails to teach anyone anything at all (standardized tests and personal experience both confirm this can happen). Students who fail would be held back a year, but holding back children would anger parents a lot, so they are sent to the next year anyway with a fake grade. Obviously, children are considered people with agency, so even if they are able to learn the subject elsewhere on their own they are still sent into the class, by the police if necessary, even if their teacher does nothing but scream into their faces and get really angry at people who ask clarifying questions, like Ms. Mandeville. (The actual name of one of my teachers!)
Most of the time schools aren't that obviously bad, I admit. Possibly most schools "merely" teach things that end up forgotten while making kids hate learning enough that they stop being curious about the topic if they started out curious. But the school system is so dysfunctional that it can't even detect if anyone learned anything at all.
Yeah. There's a lot of kids whose basic skills in math are below what I'd expect from a 3rd grader. Who pull out calculators to multiply a one digit number by 2. Or to divide a multiple of 10 by 10.
But they're passed through with great grades.
This review rubs me the wrong way quite a lot; unfortunately, I can't give it the time it would deserve, so here is a short version. I will start with the parts that I agree with, to get it out of the way.
1) I fully agree that you can't "teach critical thinking" divorced from content. It is one of those things that sound great but when you look for substance behind the words, you won't find any. (Called "applause lights" in the Sequences.) How could someone think critically about e.g. World War 2, if that person had no idea when the war happened, who participated in it, and other similar encyclopedical knowledge. What would their opinions be based on, if not facts? A random edgy tweet, or a convincing (for someone who doesn't know any of the facts) article on a blog?
It actually works the other way round. You get some data in your head, and sometimes they connect, maybe in a way you did not expect. (And you cannot simply look them up on Google, because you do not know what will connect to what.)
I would even go further and say that, as far as I know, we do not have any evidence that "critical thinking" can be taught *at all*. I think there was an experiment with some university students who studied critical thinking, which showed that after passing the exams they were not any better at critical thinking compared to their classmates who didn't attend those lessons. (Also, "knowing about biases can hurt people" in the Sequences; we all probably know people who only learned the techniques of "critical thinking" superficially so that they can use them to reject inconvenient arguments.)
2) I agree about the self-reinforcing nature of motivation + study habits + skills/knowledge. (But I disagree that the third one is "intelligence".) Even getting slightly ahead of your peers can start the feedback loop where people praise you for your skills, you feel good about the topic in general, which makes you more willing to study it further, which further increases your skills, etc. And there is an equivalent opposite loop where falling slightly behind your peers makes it all feel hopeless, because you would have to work hard only to become average, which is no big success.
But from my perspective, this makes separating children at school by their physical age a horribly bad idea. That's how you create the losers! I mean, if someone is e.g. literally retarded, that is going to be obvious no matter what. But if someone is merely a few months behind their peers, the school system makes it super visible by contrasting them with their peers every day and giving them bad grades. (To compare with the life of adults, no one cares if you e.g. get your driving license one year later.)
3) Yes, it is easy to create an awesome school by having a random idea (anything that is not actively very harmful) and selecting only for good students. Good students create great learning environment, and you can then attribute that to your excellent idea, or your excellent teachers, or whatever. This can create a self-sustaining loop, when the school becomes famous, so many students apply, so the school can keep choosing the best ones.
This shouldn't be taken as a proof that good ideas are impossible. But it invites a lot of skepticism about ideas even after you have seen a successful school that follows them: maybe the true success is in the constellation of the students, not in the idea.
...okay, and now the remainign 90% that I disagree about...
For starters, I roll to disbelieve in the studies on increasing IQ. That doesn't even pass the smell test: IQ is defined *relatively* to people of the same age, with the average being 100. So if the school attendance is mandatory, and the average of the kids in the first grade is IQ 100, and the average of the kids in the second grade is IQ 100, and so on... where the hell is that 1-5 IQ points per year increase? Does not make sense, mathematically.
(Or do you mean that the kids in the second grade are smarter relatively to the kids in the first grade? Yeah, that's called "growing up"; I am sure it happens a lot outside the school, too.)
The repeated topic in this review is that almost all kids need some kind of external support / motivation / pressure / direction / structure / whatever we may choose to call it; and that although some kids only need a little or none, most kids need a lot. Without the system, the kids who need a lot of the external force would utterly fail. And... that's true... but it also seems irrelevant when comparing the existing school system to the alternatives, except for those that advocate zero use of external force, such as unschooling, some specifically American misinterpretations of constructivism, and the naive idea that if you give computer lessons to the kids you will never need to check whether they have actually turned on the computer and actually clicked on the lessons. But those are far from the only possible alternatives.
The original experiments with MOOCs failed, as far as I know, mostly because they were done in a way "here is the digital content, make sure to finish it before the end of the semester", and most students ignored it until one week before the end of the semester... and then it was too late to learn in before the exams. Yes, that specific approach to using MOOCs fails. But instead of rejecting the digital education completely, I think the proper lesson is to make sure that the students keep doing the lessons during the semester. Which, once you think about it, is trivial to implement: at the end of each week, check how many % of the semester have passed, how many % of content each student completed, send them an e-mail if they are behind, and send an e-mail also to their teacher is they are significantly behind.
These days, many MOOCs require you to proceed at a predetermined speed, which is horrible for an adult person who is not a student, doesn't have a predictable schedule, and just wanted to study something in their free time out of curiosity... but it addresses the problem for the students who use those MOOCs at school. There are often also forums where the virtual classmates can discuss the lessons and ask each other questions.
Similarly, the main problem with COVID-era remote education, in my opinion, was that people were totally unprepared for it. You had an improvized Zoom call where the kids didn't even hear the lesson properly, and... often, that was all. Yep, didn't work. But if you knew e.g. one year in advance that you will have to spend a few months teaching remotely, there is so much you could do better. For starters, you could prepare sheets with exercises, and deliver them by mail to students' homes. (Or, depending on the socioeconomic class, just send them some PDFs and tell them to print them.) You could prepare a nice video of the explanation, with clear image and sound, and upload it to YouTube. (If multiple teachers did this, you could also send your students links to other teachers explaining the same topic, so maybe they would benefit from having the same thing explained in several ways.) But more importantly, this could all be connected: watch a video... keep answering related questions on the paper... communicate in chat... and then do an automated exam. Maybe this wouldn't work perfectly, but I think it would work much better than mere improvised Zoom calls.
"In general, research has found that leveled reading reduces the achievement of the readers who struggle the most. We might intuitively think that reading an easier book would benefit students who have weaker reading skills, but that intuition seems to be wrong."
My intuition would suggest to give everyone an easier text first, more complicated text later, after they can read the easier text correctly. Where can I go collect my Nobel prize for education?
As a sidenote, giving up at the first failure seems like a repeated pattern in debates about education. Imagine someone talking about e.g. cooking the same way: "Once I tried to cook a soup. It was too salty. The idea of 'cooking a soup' is debunked. Anyone who suggests that you can cook a soup at home is clearly wrong, they should read my report instead." I find it ironic that the school system is so bad at learning. Then again, school has practically redefined "learning" to mean "memorizing the words of the authority", so perhaps the idea of learning by experimenting is at a blind spot of most experts on the school system.
Another sidenote, even the words "no-structure", "low-structure", "high-structure" rub me the wrong way, because they are so... structure-centric. It's like calling a bird outside the cage a "no-cage bird", which kinda suggests that the cage is the bird's natural habitat, and it's the absence of the cage that makes this specific bird weird. I would prefer an opposite perspective, e.g. to call the students high-agency, low-agency, and no-agency... or some word other than agency, but the focus should be on the quality that makes learning happen (and which, when low or missing, can be substituted by the structure).
"incremental rehearsal is a highly-structured way to teach students multiplication facts."
Well, that kinda sounds like something a computer could help with, just saying.
[...CONTINUED...]
"The no-structure learners will always be bored, as long as we are committed to putting them into classrooms where everyone learns the same thing."
Wrong. There is a vast difference between "learning the same thing" and "learning the thing that you already know... at an excruciatingly slow speed... every day... for years". Both can be boring, but it's not the same quality; given the choice, I would choose the first one in a heartbeat.
Also, maybe we shouldn't teach the boring things, or we shouldn't teach them the boring way? Why are we even doing that? Yeah, because that's the only way that works well with the high-structure students. Basically, the students who resist learning require an approach that is almost the *opposite* of someone who wants to learn. It's like, for the student who wants to learn, you build the track; for the student who doesn't want to learn, you build the barriers along the track so that he can't escape.
"[Kids at gifted school] would be doing more advanced work than peers in regular schools, absolutely. But often only by a year or two."
Well, a year or two is a lot. Imagine coming to the university two years earlier. For example, if a person wants to spend a fixed number of years at school, how much more they could learn if they could replace two years at elementary school listening to the stuff they already know, with two extra years of university education? The same cost for the educational system; much better outcome.
From my perspective, the problem with many gifted schools is that they focus too much on intelligence, and fail to notice things such as love of learning. If you combine intelligence with love of learning, you get magic. If you combine intelligence with the lack of love of learning, you get bored students sitting in the class for gifted kids.
Note that the love of learning is *not* the same as "no-structure". Those are two different dimensions. If you make a voluntary class, the people who will come are those who love to learn, and prefer to have some structure for that. I know many people like that.
"The core challenge of compulsory public education is motivation. The best solution we’ve found is to send kids to school beginning at age 5 (or earlier if we can), before they can reliably form long-term episodic memories."
Are you insane?! School is typically the thing that *kills* motivation in children. Small children are curious about everything, they can't stop asking question. It is school that makes them associate learning with boredom. It is school that associates learning with punishment (even if merely verbal and social).
"The system motivates high-structure learners to keep up with their peers, though that motivation does gradually fade over time."
So we basically sacrifice motivation of some kids to create motivation for other kids... and even that doesn't work well in long term. Cool!
"Maybe the best way education can contribute to all of these causes is to focus on providing a broad, basic education to as many children as possible, and maybe our current system is the best idea we’ve had so far for doing so."
Maybe the current system is the best for those children who don't have a hope to achieve anything beyond the basic education. And maybe those children are a majority of the population, like maybe even 80% of it, although I doubt it.
It would still make sense to have a separate track for the remaining 20%. And high school is too late.
As a former teacher, it was my experience that the class is often slowed down by one or two kids who are either clearly uncooperative, or somehow damaged. Maybe those schools were not representative for the population at large, and the actual ratio is different at other places; I don't know. Sometimes, if such child became sick for a few weeks, the classroom experience changed dramatically in their absence... and then immediately reverted back. As a result, sometimes 18 out of 20 students cannot get the education they might get. And this is considered perfectly acceptable. It is democratic, inclusive, insert your favorite buzzword... Yes, you can get a dramatically better school by simply *not* admitting kids like this, and then people complain that this is cheating. From my perspective, it is sanity. Instead of complaining that it is unfair when only a few schools do it, all schools should be doing it. (That is, except for a few selected schools that would be specialized for kids like this.)
Basically, we are trying to make the school same for everyone, and then it barely serves the lowest common denominator. All improvements will be criticized that they only work for a certain subset of students. But from my perspective, that's okay. The students who can get a better system, should get a better system; different systems for different students. And the students who couldn't work in a system different from the current one, should stay in the current one. But they should not be allowed to drag everyone else down.
Wow, that was well-said. A few thoughts:
"Another sidenote, even the words "no-structure", "low-structure", "high-structure" rub me the wrong way, because they are so... structure-centric. It's like calling a bird outside the cage a "no-cage bird", which kinda suggests that the cage is the bird's natural habitat"
I think an underlying theme of the review is that education IS unnatural. In the same sense as, "Listening and speaking are natural; reading and writing are not natural." I can't remember the exact quote but someone in the comments said something like, "If education were natural, libraries would have made schools unnecessary."
Since education is unnatural, we should expect what makes schools work to also seem unnatural.
Almost no one has love of learning everything. Lots of people have love of learning something. But for most people, it's a love of non-academic things. They love learning about certain sports or pop music or ... The amount some people know about their local sports team or Taylor Swift is astounding.
Yes, little kids are sponges. But the knowledge they want is generally concrete, or obviously useful. And many of them have lots of trouble with more unnatural things--like reading and writing! School doesn't kill their curiosity. What young people are curious about changes and, particularly after puberty, school moves away from what they are naturally interested in.
I wish near the very beginning of the review, the author had said something like: When I talk about motivation here, I do not mean liking to do something. I mean getting someone to actually do it. Looking at it in the worst possible way, If someone comes up to me on a dark, deserted street, points a gun at me, and says, "Your money or your life", I am very motivated to give him any money I have.
The end of your comment made me think of the quote often attributed to Thomas Sowell, "There are no solutions, only trade-offs." A "democratic, inclusive, insert your favorite buzzword" classroom/school is not going to do as well for good students as a separate school or track. But it does better for the middling and poor ones. The author and the commenters seem to have different estimates of how big those groups are and how much they are helped or hurt in different systems.
Without making any claims about whether any particular teaching technique works, it seems pretty clear to me that "critical thinking divorced from content" is a coherent concept and in principle is learnable. Our esteemed host made the case for it better than I could, nearly a decade ago (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/04/contra-hallquist-on-scientific-rationality/):
"If we want to get all hypothetical, we can imagine some kind of theorizing contest between a totally irrational person with an encyclopaedic knowledge of cell biology, versus a very rational person who knows nothing at all about the subject. Who would win? Well, who cares? Whoever wins, *we lose*. We lose because I want the people working on curing cancer to be good at both cell biology *and* thinking clearly, to know both the parts of science specific to their own field and the parts of science that are as broad as Thought itself. I have *seen* what happens when people know everything about cell biology and nothing about rationality. You get AMRI Nutrigenomics [1], where a bunch of people with PhDs and MDs give a breathtakingly beautiful analysis of the complexities of the methylation cycle, then use it to prove that vaccines cause autism. By all means, know as much about methylation as they do! But you’ve also got to have something they’re missing!"
[1] http://www.heartfixer.com/AMRI-Nutrigenomics.htm
I agree that critical thinking is a thing, and that it principle it should be learnable. But unless we already have a specific technique that works, saying "our school will focus on critical thinking (at the expense of knowledge)" is wishful thinking.
I suspect that the actual critical thinking starts somewhere at the emotional level. You need a *desire* to know the truth... even if it contradicts your existing beliefs... even if admitting that your existing beliefs were wrong will cost you some status. The cost of being smart is that you sometimes seem stupid (e.g. when you are the only student in the classroom who raises hand and asks "sorry, I didn't understand this, could you please explain it in greater detail", when in fact most of your classmates didn't understand it either), and for most people their image and self-image is too precious to give up (I suspect it might require a little bit of autism).
To be clear, I was just arguing with your World War II example, which I think was flawed. I agree that in practice most discussion of "critical thinking" in education policy is hot air. It's just that this is really bad since there *is* a real thing there (and no, I don't know how to fix it).
> Yes, it is easy to create an awesome school by having a random idea (anything that is not actively very harmful) and selecting only for good students. Good students create great learning environment, and you can then attribute that to your excellent idea, or your excellent teachers, or whatever. This can create a self-sustaining loop, when the school becomes famous, so many students apply, so the school can keep choosing the best ones.
If tracking + any not-terrible idea leads to great gains, then tracking on its own must do so as well. Sounds like a great argument for tracking to me.
Indeed; the actual problem is *how* to select the kids.
Using the analogy to adults, if you select people by an IQ test, you won't get a community of scientists and entrepreneurs. Instead, you will get Mensa.
Similarly, I would like to see classes selected by the ability *and* willingness to learn. Because I have seen classes that were only selected by the ability alone, and those included some students who wanted to be a part of the elite, but also wanted to do as little as possible, so at the end, teachers had to fight against resistance.
The advantage of the "weird schools" is that parents usually cooperate (because they are the ones who chose to try the weird school in the first place), and there is less stigma in concluding that "sorry, our school is probably not a good fit for your child".
This only addresses one piece of the problem but -- what if in order to vote people had to demonstrate decent knowledge of structure of government, the last 100 years of history, laws, political parties, taxes, treaties, voting, and let's say 3 current issues? AI can generate lots of tests and ensure that they are of equivalent difficulty, and score them, both multiple choice items and short answer.
Sorry, what problem does this solve? The post isn't about governance quality.
Oh sorry I thought that every time the word "school" appeared in the review the writer meant "Government." Like that "school" was just a slang term. I misunderstood the whole review! Oh dear I am such a silly.
Is your point that if we disenfranchised the ignorant then we could just give up on educating unmotivated students, because their ignorance can't hurt their fellow citizens? I do not think that that follows. In a highly complex information-age society, externalities are everywhere, not just in electoral politics. You want the people you transact with in the marketplace, or who live next door to you or pass you on the street, to have a baseline understanding of how the world works and of our shared culture; it doesn't always matter, but sometimes it does. And being uneducated puts you yourself at a disadvantage as well, as it makes it harder to tell when you're being duped. Yes, there's a lot of waste and uselessness in the K-12 curriculum, both for unmotivated students and for motivated ones, but this does not move me to give up entirely on the concept of a universal baseline education, albeit maybe a smaller one than we presently have.
Also, disenfranchising a large fraction of the population would mean that elected officials would be free to entirely disregard their interests, and that seems *extremely* bad and I would have to see a damned strong case that it was worth the cost.
Certain races would do much better than others. That would not be a good look. And AI-generated does not mean bias-free.
%s/democracy/communism/g
Importantly DK is assuming an ultimate point to school, inside the perceptive point that it's about "motivation." Motivation for what; learning; this elides the point.
Consider different functions of schools:
1) Teach kids useful information that will make them more effective and productive adults.
2) Day care. Get kids out of the way so the adults can work.
2a) Divert kids away from worse activities like watching TV all day, drug use, unprotected sex, crime.
3) Produce a ranking of the kids relative to each other.
4) Stealth social services. A square meal a day, and put kids in contact with some caring adults.
5) Produce entertainment: school plays, band, quiz bowls, beauty pageants, sporting events.
6) Wealth transfer from prosperous blue areas to unproductive red areas via teacher, administrator and staff salaries and spending on school infrastructure.
7) Political indoctrination, e.g. the Revolutionary War is an origin story for the US meant to create political cohesion.
I agree with DK's cogent point well-made that school is structured for motivation across the whole population. But the "motivation" is for "perpetuation of school". Schools have evolved to perpetuate schools, unsurprisingly.
Upsettingly for people who like to envision better schools, not going to school turns out to be quite bad. Smartphones in schools are undoing a chief purpose of modern schools, to stop kids from watching TV all day. Smartphones have put TV right into schools. Movements to ban phones in school are very good.
The Federal Reserve, of all people, did a careful study of how kids spend their non-school time, and found that diverting kids from bad activities like watching TV was important:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/how-do-children-spend-their-time-time-use-and-skill-development-in-the-psid-20200526.html
The idea of “high structure kids” and “low structure kids” is important to a lot of the author's argument. How established and validated are these categories?
There are some dimensions on which almost everybody falls into one of a few categories: gender, blood type, eye color, handedness. But on most dimensions people are distributed in some approximation of a bell curve: most people are in the middle, and a considerably smaller number are quite a bit above or below the middle range. So in the absence of evidence to the contrary, I'd expect that most kids are medium-structure.
And then, on the dimensions on which variance takes the bell shape, a lot of them turn out to be situation-specific. For instance, consider aggressiveness. If you look at most people across a variety of situations, you will see a lot of variation in how aggressive they are. They might be very aggressive chess players, driving grimly towards the endgame, but very casual when playing tennis, chatting about this and that while they play. They might push very hard in work discussions when certain issues come up that they care a lot about, but shrug and say “whatever” about other issues. They might be very irritable with other drivers, but patient and gentle with their teenage daughter even when she’s being quite difficult. In fact there are not many “qualities” at all on which people's scores are fairly stable across different situations. Intelligence is pretty special because it is one of those qualities. There is a lot less variation across situations: People able to remember and recite a long string of digits also tend to have large vocabularies, and to be good at mental math and at reasoning, and to have la large store of general knowledge. So in the absence of evidence that how structure-dependent somebody is stays the same across settings and situations, I'd expect that most kids vary quite a lot.
So unless there’s some pretty solid evidence that most kids are either high structure or low structure, and that they stay in whatever category they’re in across a lot of situations, then a lot of the author's train of thought about schooling and what works is unfounded. Is there in fact some well-validated psychometric measure of high/low structure, one that shows the distribution tends towards being bimodal and that kids’ high- or low-structure membership tends to stay the same across school subjects?
I’m told one-room schools were even better than grouping by age, because you could hear the lessons from higher grades before you got there. My father’s family was from a tiny rural fishing village. When he moved to California at 16, they were years ahead of their piers in education.
In a quick search on my phone I did not find studies assessing whether there were such advantages.
>tiny rural fishing village.
>piers.
I giggled.
😂
She links to the the DeBoar essay, and I'd like to comment on that here.
He makes a distinction between black/white, poor/rich, etc. But he looks at evidence combining all those groups. When you look at it for only birth to preschool aged disadvantaged minority kids, the evidence shows positive environmental changes and educational interventions have a much stronger effect on lower SES children than higher. Heckman estimates a ROI of $9/1. So yes, forget K-12 school. The work should start with low-income pregnant mothers. It should include home visiting programs from before birth until at least preschool. It should include high quality year-round childcare/preschool so those mothers have a chance to become wealthier and move to a better neighborhood, or at least have more time to spend on being good parents rather than subsistence.
The older students get, the more we spend on them. This continues in that we spend much more on the elderly than infants. We need to flip that.
Those high-structure children mostly aren't born that way.
And yet all the gains from Head Start and various pre-school programs wash out by third grade.
But they come back later in : more likely to graduate, earn more over lifetime, less likely to be incarcerated, less welfare, etc. And when they have kids, those benefits get passed on.
Clearly something good is happening; whether it can be measured in grades or tests shouldn't matter.
Do they? I was under the impression that when you control for selection effects, there is no significant long-term effect.
I had enough experience and self confidence that I was quite willing to argue with teachers and principals. I have a Ph.D. - Physics/Engineering and my wife has a Masters in Teaching, so we could support our kids as needed. When my daugher was not learning math when she started middle school - it was all repetition I raised hell and had her jumped a grade for her math class. I made more problems for the principal the next year about the lack of challenge. When she went to high school I met the principal and had a discussion. She told me what the state expected, I told her that I did not care - that I did not expect her to graduate from high school and that she did not have to graduate to go to a university. I was prepared to home school her as needed, but that I much preferred her to be in appropriate classes at the high school. We worked out a reasonable solution.
I had a no-structure daughter and a low-structure younger son. Both on the spectrum, with my daughter much more so. She hated the social games at school and when she was in 7th grade told me that she liked learning but hated school and wanted to minimize her time in it. I switched her to half online school, going to the high school for the first period math class, and doing the rest of her morning at the middle school before coming home to spend her afternoon in front of a screen racing through her online classes. She skipped 8th grade, and then did honors 9th and 10th grade before dropping out and going to the state university to study engineering. She did calculus for college credit in 10th grade. She was much happier at the university.
My son needed some structure, so he did the college prep / honors track followed by the Running Start program so that he was one class shy of his associates when he graduated from high school. I was surprised at how well he did at accounting competing with adults. After his first quarter at the University he became a junior and went into the business school to do a MIS focus. He needed the class structure and assignments and would then go under his own power.
My son did not take to reading quite as early as my daughter, but by third grade he was consuming books by the pile (thank you Captain Underpants). But by the time they went to middle school their reading levels were both well into the high school range. I am sure this was helped by the fact that video entertainment at home was VERY limited and reading was all but unlimited - Kindles glow in the dark, allowing reading under the bed spread when you are supposed to be asleep.
I think that the LLM tools are going to be a godsend for the no-structure students.
As for gifted programs typically being only a year ahead, I think that a major factor for this is the high mobility of students. Each year you get more bright students who are transferring in and have not had the opportunity to advance as far. If you started tracking by the beginning of middle school and had a stable student population you could advance several years more in consecutive classes such as math and some of the sciences. But the continual movement of students hinders this.
How exactly did you "raise hell" or jump her a grade without permission?
You're also lucky to live in Washington - it's the only state I know that requires schools to allow part time homeschool enrollment in academic school classes like math - although personally I would consider math the easiest to outsource, and English (which needs feedback) to be the hardest
I had been giving and her brother my own problem sets to supplement the school work even earlier. The schools were teachng the lattice method and I taught the traditional method for long division and multiplication to both kids. My son was not really happy at having to learn both. But in later classes they found that the traditional method would work with polynomials as well.
I went in and talked to the principal, who moved her to the 8th grade math class in the middle school, which starts at 6th grade. He expected her to do badly and drop back. The middle school did not have an advanced enough math class for her in 7th grade so she and a handfull or two of other students had to go to the high school for the first period math class and then be taken by their parents to the middle school.
I had her do Geometry by correspondence via Gifted Learning Links over the summer after 7th grade. This meant that I had to relearn the subject, which I had not studied for 50 years - it was easier to ask me occasional questions than her teacher.
She did home study for her afternoon classes, I think History, Civics, and one other class, I don't remember. She skipped 8th grade and I had her do pre-calculus via gifted learning links over the summer before 9th grade.
We were not planning on early admission to the university. We were planning on Running Start in 11th grade and she knew she was headed into the pure or applied sciences, so she wanted to have mastered calculus by the start of Running Start, 11th grade.
If students going the STEM route are going to take advantage of Running Start they have to take calculus in 11th grade / start of Running Start - at the latest. Which is what my son did.
Fascinating, thank you ! Reading this I have to wonder : how did you supervise her ? Did both of her parents work ? Work independently / from home ? How did you find the time to get her to the high school and back ?
I had a somewhat flexible work schedule. First period in high school started at 7:30 AM, so I could get her back to school and be at work within core hours, I just had to work later. English gave her more 'correct' poets to read, I gave her Kipling. When she had to recite her favorite poem in English class she recided Kipling's 'IF'.
That gifted programs are a year ahead highlights two problems:
1) Why are there even gifted programs? Why not just have tracking (streaming in England)?
2) Why only a year ahead? I could easily have been four years ahead when I was at school.
If the instruction is individualized (see private tutoring or LLM's) you can be that far ahead.
If the teaching is classroom oriented you have to have enough students at a level to fill a classroom. Tracking in a large school may give you one or two advanced classes in a subject.
I went to school in England, and there was an enormous difference between the top stream and the bottom stream — and this was at a grammar school where we were already the top 10% of students. It wasn't just that we learned at different speeds. We learned different things and took different exams.
Private tutors might work for rich kids, but I was a poor kid.
I think that this is where LLM's are going to be valuable. They should be far far cheaper than private tutoring and should be ideal for students who need little or no external structure. I would suspect that classes can be managed with LLM supplementation that will work well with students that need a modest amount of external structure.
You cannot force a student to learn something, but you can givem them the opportunity and encouragement, the rest is up to them.
I'm quite unimpressed by this one. Not the content itself -- it's fine and makes decent claims with decent evidence -- but I think it's not very well written. Little things that frustated me about it:
1) the headings don't seem to match the content. The section on "Motivation" near the top asks the question "motivation for what?" but never plainly answers this, instead veering off into a tangent about IQ for a few paragraphs. Why did you write it this way?
2) Lots of things never explained. "Remember the MOOC craze"? the essayist asks. No, please enlighten me as to what a MOOC is, I've never heard of this. Oh, you're just...going to assume I know what a MOOC is, or be able to guess it based on context? Thanks essayist, that's very kind of you.
3) Too much duplication. I think it was a mistake to put the thesis at the top, because it makes it obvious how little actual content or actual original ideas are in the essay. It could be about 1/3rd of its length and contain all the main points argued in it without losing much content.
The claim of the essay is that "School is designed to maximize motivation" as opposed to maximizing learning. But this claim is never really argued for. Instead, what we get is an argument is that school is designed to maximize the motivation to learn, and then the essay details a bunch of sort of adjacent points relating to the history of schools, failed attempts at improving the school system and various other foibles.
I was kind of disappointed in this. I was expecting, based on the thesis, to read an essay about how school makes people better at motivating themselves to, for example, work. Maybe people who have gone to school are more prepared to put in an 8-hour workday. I would be kind of skeptical of such a claim but I was interested in reading the argument, and perhaps becoming convinced, or at least, updating my priors.
Instead, no, it's an essay which claims that school uses peer pressure to motivate kids to learn, and not very well, and then basically predicts that nothing will ever change, mainly because nothing ever has changed, despite repeated attempts at doing so.
Of course, it is false that nothing has ever changed. A LOT of things about school have changed. Schools provide lunch to students who can't afford it. Grades are not publicly disclosed. Reading is (almost always) taught using Phonics, which really is MUCH more effective than other methods. Schools MUST now enroll all children, not just white ones. Also, teachers aren't allowed to hit children! Let me say that again: TEACHERS AREN'T ALLOWED TO HIT CHILDREN ANYMORE. Given that these are only the changes I know of as a layperson, I am sure there are many, many more.
A good option for many "no-structure learners" (and some "low-structure learners") are programs in the Liberated Learners network (https://liberatedlearners.net/). With one exception (that I know of), the programs are not incorporated as regular private schools; instead, students are legally homeschooled and use the activities in the program to fill out the requirements on their state homeschooling paperwork. I went to the original Liberated Learners program (North Star: https://www.northstarteens.org/) and also taught a six-month programming class at another one (LightHouse Holyoke: https://www.lighthouseholyoke.org/).
I really enjoyed reading the link to this article on how critical thinking can't be taught independently of content:
https://www.aft.org/ae/fall2020/willingham
Interestingly, it has an aside on multiple choice testing being bad to assess deep knowledge but it's hard to replace at scale. But that was in 2020. We're now in the age of LLMs, and I think that this is where AI can make a big difference! Not in personalized teaching, but in much better assessment. Replace all multiple choice with open questions at the end of a course. Maybe even add open ended questions at the end of each session! Let students write with pen. Auto scan it, let AI assess.
The article doesn't really have a clear thesis, but instead jumps around between a few different senses of "critical thinking". I wrote in another comment (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-school/comment/132193201) that I find it fairly obvious that there's such a thing as cross-domain critical thinking that in principle is learnable. I agree that I'd probably bet against the success of any particular proposal to teach it at scale, but I also can't help but feel that the educational system hasn't tried *that* hard to crack this (since there isn't even a consensus that this in particular, and not various adjacent things, is a priority).
How do we create more no-structure learners then? How do we turn more high-structure learners into low-structure learners?
Is there any reason to think this is more tractable than meeting high-structure learners where they are?
I thought this one of the best written essays I have read, regarding a topic about which I have not given much thought. The initial framing analogizing to Churchill’s democracy and Chesterton’s fence kept in check my biases to disagree, and to eventually come to accept the thesis when considering how to “deliver” education “at scale.” The author addressed the topic of how we teach without straying to the more contentious topic of what we teach. I don’t know the criteria of the contest or if an unpaid subscriber is entitled to vote, but it gets my vote.
Many decades ago, I was blessed with 90% great public school teachers while my brother only one year younger and attending the same schools drew only about 40%. I suspect the author is a great teacher.
Mobile apps and social media manage to motivate kids to spend a lot of time on them, even to the point of adiction, so there is hope that somebody will figure out how to use the same motivational or reward paths to actually teach them something.
This review is grounded in an epidemiological view of education - in other words, what happens to the overall population. That's why separating some no-structure learners is considered cherry picking rather than segmentation. Sure, the review seems to suggest, those few learners will often learn more and be happier, but hey, we have the other X% of the population over here doing the same or slightly worse than before, so did we accomplish anything? Meanwhile, the Alpha School review takes the opposite perspective, of one parent and/or school, and in that case the success of the individual learner is the foreground consideration.
The other thing I noticed is that intrinsic motivation is taken as a given, which I consider incorrect. Motivation varies by task and environment. Some kids may love math and dislike writing, or for that matter love math puzzles but be indifferent to standard math instruction. I think assuming a set level of motivation basically concedes the entire game. One key is to best tap into the intrinsic motivation of each kid. Often this is quite difficult - if the kid just wants to play basketball, even framing academic subjects in terms of basketball often won't really scratch that same itch. But nevertheless, that's probably the most important task in education. How to get kids to actually care about what they're learning to the degree possible.
From this review's scale perspective, success at activating intrinsic motivation is basically impossible to improve on. The system is doing the best it can at scale, and it is what it is. I have sympathy for that perspective, but it assumes we can't effectively disaggregate the system and solve the problem for smaller cohorts of students. Instead, I think we just haven't personalized education enough yet. More dakka! https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoreDakka
Yeah. I find the totalizing attitude (must work for everyone to be useful) to be depressing. Let a thousand educational systems bloom. Break the monopoly. Let there be little-more-than-warehouses for those who show no ability or desire to want to learn. Let parents seek and find places suited to their kids without having to also pay for a legacy system. Etc.
The highlighted text in the link about reading on screens being less effective than reading on paper doesn’t support the claim in the text. I’m skeptical the physical medium itself (vs easy access to distractions) has any impact, so I would be curious to see a longer form exposition on the argument and evidence.
There are some things I value in this review (the role of motivation, and the place of a structure to motivate people, is vital!) and some that I find quite frustrating.
In particular, the section on ability grouping breezing by it dismissively is understandable based on glancing at meta-analyses in the field but really does not do the topic justice. Every university that has published "research" supporting the idea of detracking has selective admissions, screens students out of programs, expects people to come prepared to high-level courses, so forth. Nobody suggests putting MIT physics majors and remedial community college math students together in the same rooms and having them learn the same things. Nobody suggests in athletics that top athletes benefit from missing out on competitive varsity teams and playing against low-level competition. It's only in the specific context of K12 education, where people have a deep philosophical divide over the purpose of school, that researchers on one side of that divide have been putting out junk research for long enough to confuse an issue on which nobody should be confused.
From Ethel Cornell in a 1936 review of the literature on ability grouping, with apologies for the wall of text:
"There seem to have been, even from the earliest attempts at a better classification of pupils, two conflicting ideas regarding the objectives of democratic education. This conflict is still evident, both in the studies undertaken to evaluate ability grouping and in the more theoretical discussions and critiques. One theory is that a democratic education should fulfill the same educational content to all. The science and knowledge of the extent of individual differences has affected the traditional grade organization based upon this theory to the extent of modifying the speed at which it can best suit the variety of illustrative materials of instruction, without questioning the basic assumption of a set of minimum essentials for all.
"The other theory is that education cannot be democratic unless it varies the educational pattern, the content, and the goal, as well as the speed and the method, to fit the varying needs, both present and future, of its pupils. Advocates of the former theory attack classifications based on the latter, on the ground that they create class distinctions that are contrary to democratic ideals. Advocates of the latter point to our present lack of social leadership in places where it should be expected, to the general sloppiness of thinking of the average adult, to our tendency to favor demagogues and super-salesmen, as the consequences of a theory that one educational goal can serve democratic interests.
"The failure to recognize these conflicting convictions about the relation of individual differences to democratic ideals and to educational purposes has led to much of the difficulty of evaluating the results of ability grouping. When ability grouping has been undertaken against the background of the first theory, it has been defined and conceived as a refinement of grading.¹ When it has been undertaken against the background of the second theory, it has been conceived as a new type of organization and classification of pupils, cutting across and supplanting, rather than supplementing, the traditional grade system."
In short: we have never all been pushing towards the same thing. People have had two incompatible visions of education, and the grouping literature is incredibly messy based on those different theories. You wouldn't believe, for example, how many studies that find grouping "doesn't work" do so on the basis of grouping with no modification of curriculum whatsoever. There's a philosophical divide, and people on one side of that divide are overwhelmingly dominant in the relevant field. That has led to a great deal of confusion!
In related fields, there is no such confusion. The literature on acceleration is overwhelmingly in agreement that it works for students who are ahead of their peers (see eg https://ncrge.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/982/2022/12/ch2-A-Nation-Empowered-Vol2-2.pdf ). Researchers like Chen-lin and James Kulik who include programs like that in their meta-analyses conclude unambiguously that they help (see eg https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1983-08855-001 ). When districts try to "detrack," they reliably find things become worse and they revert, so even as a position against ability grouping is the accepted wisdom in education schools, teacher's associations, and other education institutions, the overwhelming majority continue to find some reason to group.
As soon as Stanford is convinced that its selective admissions provide it or its students no value and gets rid of them, I will take its education department seriously when they say that ability grouping lacks evidence. As-is, the debate is one of the most confused in all of public policy, and I'm frustrated to see an essay in this space treat it so uncritically.
>It's only in the specific context of K12 education, where people have a deep philosophical divide over the purpose of school, that researchers on one side of that divide have been putting out junk research for long enough to confuse an issue on which nobody should be confused.
This sounds dangerously conspiratorial. Next thing you know, the literature on the black white IQ gap will be a lie. And perhaps the brain will turn out to not really develop until 25. And what about COVID research?
"Detracking" is silly on its face. Grades are tracks, so if tracks don't work, why have grades at all?
In an earlier post I expressed doubt that the concept of structured vs. unstructured learners, which is important to the writer's case, actually captured an important determinant of which kid learns under what conditions. I looked online for an article addressing this question, and found one about such "learning styles" ideas. Authors surveyed the research on various "learning styles" for evidence that they have been shown to be valid predictors of who learns under what conditions, and concluded that most have not been tested.
<The learning-styles view has acquired great influence within the education field. . . .
The authors of the present review were charged with determining whether these practices are supported by scientific evidence. We concluded that any credible validation of learning-styles-based instruction requires robust documentation of a very particular type of experimental finding with several necessary criteria. First, students must be divided into groups on the basis of their learning styles, and then students from each group must be randomly assigned to receive one of multiple instructional methods. Next, students must then sit for a final test that is the same for all students. Finally, in order to demonstrate that optimal learning requires that students receive instruction tailored to their putative learning style, the experiment must reveal a specific type of interaction between learning style and instructional method: Students with one learning style achieve the best educational outcome when given an instructional method that differs from the instructional method producing the best outcome for students with a different learning style. In other words, the instructional method that proves most effective for students with one learning style is not the most effective method for students with a different learning style.
[In] our review of the literature we found virtually no evidence for the interaction pattern mentioned above, which was judged to be a precondition for validating the educational applications of learning styles. Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.>
Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6053.2009.01038.x
I'm aware that it's consensus in the field that "learning styles" have been debunked, but it seems to me that more clarity is needed on what exactly that means. In particular, I've definitely ever had an easier or harder time understanding something depending on how it was presented; that, by itself, falsifies the strongest version of the claim that there's no such thing as learning styles. Presumably there's a weaker version that survives this critique, but I've had a hard time figuring out what it is.
My headaches lessen when New Age Norton holds his hands above my head and wiggles them. . That by itself falsifies the claim that energy healing is a bogus treatment.
I suppose it's possible that, when something is explained differently the second time and you understand it, this isn't causal but instead some other factor happened to be different the second time. But does anyone actually believe that this is true in all cases?
The claim of “learning styles” is that you belong to a specific category of learner, so that you understand things better when you hear them explained (auditory) while someone else understands them better when presented visually (visual).
This is by and large not true, but that doesn’t mean that some ways of presenting things aren’t better than others.
For instance, learning the layout of an electric circuit should happen by looking at the plan. You will understand it better through visual representation than if someone described it to you. But that doesn’t have anything to do with your personal learning style.
Growing up in a region that had several tracked classes as part of the standard, government mandated curriculum makes the way Americans talk about this seem almost laughable, like Europeans talking about air conditioning, or New Yorkers talking about putting rubbish in containers. Basic, widespread ideas like "practice reading on books only a little harder then you're comfortable with" or "only try to teach calculus to people who have learned the prerequisites" are treated as bizarre alien ideas that could only possibly be accepted with overwhelming evidence.
I don't per se disagree that school isn't likely to have drastic and fundamental changes - but there are lots of ways to better target teaching to each students actual abilities that don't require that.
I am not convinced. The point of public school does not seem to be to motivate kids, that just seems like one outcome. The author even later states the point of public schools: to offer a cohesive and consistent education. I think in that regard it's pretty clear public school is a failure.
The unstated point of modern public schools seems to be more of a daycare than anything else. That seemed to be the common refrain during the pandemic: the challenge of childcare and supervision, and was even the motivation in some cases to offer telework. To me, the solution seems to be to offer kids more trust and more opportunities to do things outside of school earlier. If learning is happening anyway and these kids need supervision, apprenticeships and other learning opportunities seem a lot more attractive.
This was a much better review than the other one, although I would have liked more empirical data linked. The penguin school example was really good.
really appreciate the piece. opened my eyes to why age-graded classrooms have been so dominant. i would like to argue that every instance of "democracy" could more accurately be replaced with "electocracy", since elected politicians just want to be able to more certainly maintain their power. just my opinion as a sortition advocate :)
This isn't a review, it's an argument.
I think the whole "review" concept was generally interpreted pretty loosely.
"The high-structure learner has a hard time. They’re the student showing up to office hours all the time, using the tutoring center, using all the support they can find. Maybe they push through, maybe they can’t cut it and switch to a major in communications."
I'm not convinced this is true. My limited understanding of the literature is that the students who struggle the most are not the students that go to office hours. Maybe this just means (unsurprisingly) that going to office hours makes you perform better. But in any case, I would like to see some evidence about this claim before I believe it.
Yeah. The kids who need the extra credit are the ones who never do it. The ones that need the office hours never come unless literally forced by a parent or other teacher. That's my repeated experience across multiple levels of teaching.
> We can understand why school sports are such a powerful and enduring phenomenon: motivation is the core challenge of school, and conformity is our best solution. Team sports are a great mechanism to motivate young people, so we attach sports to school to capture a bit of that motivation.
Do we? Sports aren't mandatory in American schools, and "American-style" school sports are actually a very weird and unusual concept internationally - most countries divorce competitive sports from school entirely.
It's clear that it means maximise motivation *overall*, so if the majority are high structure learners that's equivalent to your wording. Useful to make it explicit though as it highlights the trade-off.
What is the purpose of school?
Firstly, it's daycare. That's why even the worst school, the "nobody ever graduates" school, is considered "still barely functional" and not "In need of Fumigation" (sorry, bad joke). If, however, you had a school where the kids "broke out" and were seen across town playing in the construction site -- you better BELIEVE that school would be taken to task by the lawyers.
Secondly, it's purpose is to teach people not to think. Instead, school incentivizes reciting, believing, and most importantly -knowing- the answer. School tries its hardest to create know-it-alls, people who believe exactly what they've been taught, and never find fault with it (children who find fault with history class write essays that are hard to grade, and do not demonstrate proper understanding of the source material given by the teacher).
Scott on school:
> Every year, I would complain that I hated school. Every year, my mother would repeat some platitude like “Oh, when summer comes around you’re going to be so bored that you’ll be begging to go back”. And every year, summer vacation would be amazing, and I would love it, and I would hate going back to school with every fiber of my being. I understand this is pretty much a consensus position among schoolchildren. This has left me forever skeptical of arguments of the form “Oh, if you had freedom you would hate it”.
( https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic-jobs-against-hijacking-utopia/ )
I think many commenters kinda miss the essence of this essay's argument, and I think it's because they miss one assumption - admittedly, perhaps not stated clearly enough - underlying said argument.
Which is - the purpose (as in the POSIWID adage, which, perhaps ironic, given we're on Scott's turf) of the school is socially determined, and answers to the needs of society as a whole. The corollary of which being - apparently, the value of maximizing the knowledge/skill/intelligence of future workforce - both in terms of its sum and of the minimum which can be reasonably expected from a random unskilled worker off the street - is higher than the value of maximizing individual brilliance.
"B-b-but it's individual brilliance that moves technology, science and industry forward! Without it, we'd be stuck on a much lower civilizational level!" - in a way, yes, but bear two things in mind. First - someone still needs to implement technological advances. If tradesmen couldn't read and count, we'd also be stuck, with civilization as we know it limited to a few select elite/intelligentsia outposts, and severely retarded by requiring intellectual elites to perform tasks that can now be performed by most people. Second - brilliance truly is individual, there's no reliable way to teach it in school, and no obvious causal link between (early) education and pushing the frontier of human knowledge.
It would be hard to quantify and prove that, as society as a whole, we are losing anything by not fast-tracking brilliance at an early point where it's still far, far away from being capable of meaningfully contributing. It would probably be much easier to quantify this for individual life outcomes, and I don't think anyone, not the essay's author in particular, begrudges individual parents wishing the best for their individual children. (Even if it's a zero sum game, which it probably is. That's a systemic issue, and the point here is that the system just doesn't care.)
This is a very famous 1977 paper in sociology: "The effects of education as an institution": https://kieranhealy.org/files/misc/meyer-effects77.pdf
A lot of the comments share a common theme of "This way of designing school did/would have made me unhappy, therefore it is wrong."
Well, if a thing makes a lot of people unhappy, it might be "wrong" in the sense that we should try to make it better, no? Maybe we can't. But we should try.
This isn't bad, but it's nearly 8,000 words long. That's better than the least, which was nerly 18,000 words long. Scott, please impose a limit on the size of these.
I wish this author had collaborated with the Alpha school author. Would have been interesting to see what they think.
Thank you for this! As a high school teacher of 5 years, this has given me a lot to think about
chung
The important, nuanced point is that school is the best system designed for education *everyone*. To the extent the macro (government level) goal is exactly that, there seems to be three ways to better accomplish it: technology, culture, or at-home learning.
These might all seem like obvious things to say, but importantly i'm agreeing with the author's take here, "People will continue to try to disrupt the status quo. There will be plenty of tinkering around the edges. Some of that tinkering will catch on at a broader scale. But there will be an inevitable gravity back to the status quo."
We can argue about vouchers, public v private, topics worth teaching, etc but the harsh reality is that helping *everyone* learn is a difficult problem that is more foundational and requires a similar type of solution.
If tech / AI can bring personal, engaging tutors to everyone that could be revolutionary.
If America had a culture that revered academics and learning similar to some other countries, that would be a step change increase.
Lastly if parents took upon themselves the obligations of their kids' education by recognizing the suboptimal school system, that could be tremendous. This would likely be the closest we can get to personalized tutors at scale. Notably this is practically hard given how many families need dual incomes but would be a solution none the less.
I think you pointed out something that a lot of people are overlooking in their critique of the essay - that it is trying to look at the best solution for all students, regardless of ability. Given ACX’s audience, I’m sure the idea of sticking to a status quo is unpleasant. I don’t fully agree with it myself. But I think to (as in the Alpha School review) focus on what experimental education can do for students who may be no/low structure and, more importantly, have parents with a vested interest in maximizing their children’s learning, is a very myopic view of education that seems to push that 5% of learners higher rather than serving as a true solution. Factor in that most of the people sending children to such schools are likely highly-educated and/or wealthy themselves, and it feels like such projects are a means of widening the education and achievement gaps between rich and poor children.
For the record, I’m not saying we should discourage high-achieving students from challenging themselves - I think they’re likely to do that independently regardless of education. Rather, I believe that more experimental education offerings should focus on the students struggling the most, many of whom are at risk for worse lifelong outcomes as a result.
This is something that I have tried to pound into the vouchers/homeschool/ancap types here and everywhere: Some kids will learn no mater what. Some kids will learn if you put them in a class room.
Most kids need to be threatened with actual factual punishment up to and including physical punishment (not necessarily a beating, but being restricted to a room with no company, no entertainment, and not being allowed to leave. You might even say it resembles a prison.) to not call their teacher a slur and go on they phone, or hit them with a chair or something.
I say most, and I mean most. 70%+. School used to apply the threats, which was shitty and bad. We stopped that, and let parents do the threatening (mainly spurred on by schools actually expelling students, threatening the parents with paying for daycare ), which worked well enough. We are at the stage now where there are no threats; because schools have had the ability to threaten voted away from them.
We need to bring back the threat of state backed violence if we want schools to do better.
I am in higher education and one of my main concerns is that the students I receive are not prepared to do the work required and sometimes seem surprised that they are failing. I glossed part of your article, but I did not notice anything about the whether the overall learning pace is correct or a discussion about failing students who do not keep up. So I apologize in advance if I missed this.
I have lamented the quality of some of my students, and early on took advice from more senior professors to the effect of "don't work harder than your students do at trying to get them to pass your class." This warning was appalingly preemptively reinforced when during my own class on Teaching Principles in Higher education, the books I was assigned contained all sorts of suggestions vignettes I considered akin to spoon feeding and wiping noses--working harder than the students to try to get them to understand the material.
I honestly don't know what the pressure is on public school teachers to pass on bad product to the next grade, but I raised three very bright and strong willed children who did what they did and didn't want to do in school. I tried to help them at times. I threatened consequence other times. A few times, I told the teacher we were working too hard on this and to give them the appropriate grade, even if it meant non progress. Thinking about being in high school after their peers had gone on seemed to be the best motivation.
It also seemed to me that when I was in high school, being called college material meant something. Now nearly every high school student seems to believe that if they do not go to college or join the military--which provides a lot of college money, they are throwing their life away.
As for parents who ask for additional assignments for their children. I have been concerned that even when parents have strong goals for their children, they remain passive in their implementation. Instead, I assigned topics myself when I thought it was beneficial for them to learn something. I gave us a chance to talk about deeper subjects and also let them know that I didn't just flush my book learning when I got out of school.
It frustrates me to no end that finding a drug that would increase *motivation* (not to be confused with *focus*, which can be obtained via Adderall) isn’t considered a project of worldwide importance, on par with solving climate change, curing cancer and preventing asteroids from hitting the planet. So many of our problems are a simple result of lacking motivation, this essay illustrates just one aspect of this.
Imagine a world where all 9 billion humans had the same motivation as Elon Musk. I’d take that over a world where we’ve cured cancer.
My students finish all of AP Physics through C by age 15, all of AP calculus too, followed by AP Stats and then Advanced Math. They are not "a year or two ahead." They are doing things most students can't do at all, ever. You would not even believe what a hardworking, bright student can accomplish with the right curriculum, teachers, and environment. The peers supply at least half the motivation.
Freddie de Boer's book was full of nonsense. There are whole schools in Baltimore where not a single student is even minimally functional. And he pretends to believe that this is because of the students. It would not have made any difference at all, he says, if they had gone to other schools. They are all just hopeless -- every single one of them. That is the de Boer message in a nutshell.
I think the quote at the beginning of this review is very informative as to the midset of the author. Just like how many people like to yell "democracy is the best we have" and then proceed to ignore all aspects of governance done better by other countries (be they differently structured democracies or otherwise) so too does the author seem to ignore education systems in other countries which have better filtering, some using the very categories of structure which the author explains in this review.
Instead, they set up a false dichotomy: either we put everyone together as we do now, or we have hyper-personalized teaching which only works for the 5% of no-structure learners. Education systems of other countries which sort kids after elementary-, or middle- school, or which otherwise combine conformity cohorts with personalisation, are ignored so that we can say "this is the best we have".
I, too am a teacher, and I can confirm the essay writers personal experiences in the classroom. That said, there are two additional points to be made:
1) There is a very simple way to provide more personalized instruction to more students: hire more teachers and reduce the national average student to teacher ratio. I didn't say it was cheap...
2) I've seen research that indicates that a mixed student body improves the performance of the lower achieving students. This is because they feel some incentive to emulate the higher performing students. I have found that the best way to make sure the higher performing students get something out of this is to put them in charge of a small student team. Teaching something improves the learning of that something, and moderate responsibility is intrinsically motivating. One problem is that we don't teach instructional methods to high school students, and we really should (it will serve them very well later in life).
2) Yup. The author bangs on about motivation, mentions the existence of school sports, but never explicitly makes the connection that you can use that same social/competitive pressure to get the kids starting something akin to bootstrapping.
I think this is a case of "Be careful what you wish for." Think about what we are asking schools to do with respect to students: figure out how to "motivate" them such that they want to do what they are told by authority figures. Bear in mind that these students will, almost inevitably, take those behavioral tendencies with them into adulthood. Think about being one of those former students, one who is now so used to doing what you are told that you do not question it. And now decide who you regard as so trustworthy and corruption-proof that you are willing to trust them with that kind of power over you.
There may or may not be a cost-efficient way to motivate most students to delver high performance for arbitrary tasks. But do we really want this, even if it's possible?
Causing someone to want to think for themselves is a contradiction in terms.
Well, the first time I read this, I thought it was pretty good. Something like a B+, maybe A-?
Then I went through it a couple of times. That first impression didn't last very long. Sorry.
The actual structure of the piece is fine. The model no-, low- and high-structure learners seems to be fine. It would appear to be correct, useful.
The problem is;
"Two commonalities you might notice are that first, in the vast majority of classrooms, the students are grouped by age and taught the same content."
From early on. Unfortunately, the only explanation given for those two observations seems to be;
"Lumping everyone together and asking them all to learn the same curriculum seems to work better at scale than anything else we’ve tried."
And;
"We group students by age in part because it’s the easiest way to organize the system."
Oh. Bit of a cop-out, that.
The author seems to have failed to get into the guts of the system, it's history, evolution and purpose, and developed a model which if it is correct, can only be so by accident.
The same issue crops up here;
"The common school movement emerged between 1830 and 1860. ... the primary rationale was the importance of a common education system for democracy. Democracy felt fragile in the first half of the 19th century, and universal public education was the solution."
So, assuming there's some truth in that observation, then how does it actually explain age-grouping and same-content? The author likely goes for another cop-out - that the reader has actually read Larabee's book.
This means that the thesis, "School is designed to maximize motivation", can't be supported. Which is a shame, as still seems to be a nice way of thinking about schools and schooling.
Makes sense on the teaching part of school role. But I do not think this is the only thing schools do. Probably not even the main thing... The three other things schools do are, I believe:
- Daycare. A way to avoid children and young adults roams in the society at large, which is mandadory since industrialisation and women in the workforce: There is simply nowhere else to go for children and young adults. If this is true, you should expect school to be organized similar to other places segregating some people from the general populace. Prisons are prime example. And indeed.... ;-) I think this is in fact the primary goal of schools, post WW2 in the western world.
- Training children to fit in an external, relatively abstract and societal-imposed hierarchy structure. Something clearly needed in modern society, but not that similar to family structures and small peer groups where hierarchy is set by direct competition and alliances. So we should expect emphasis on discipline, rules, uniforms,....above what would be needed just to get the school as an organisation running....hum...yep :-) It was the primary role of schools at the time school obligation was created in many western countries, around WW1. Probably not a coincidence, as it was the transition to modern nation states and modern war with general conscription. Went from primary to secondary goal after WW2, because daycare was even more important. If you are unkind or talking about some states, you can call this role "state indoctrination"...
- Initial sorting of children into society-approved roles: leaders, entertainers, workers (with different skillsets),...This is a task that is sometimes acknowledged (maybe using emphemism like "social skills learning" or "socialisation"), and (kind of like the teaching task) I do not think it works that well....well, it sort of works but not in a way that is that controlled by the school or society at large. Too many factors interplay with that: the peer hierarchy naturally coming out of groups of age-sorted youngs, the families behind not accepting in the least to be kept out of this process (no surprise, it's THE thing families are about regarding children), partial contradiction with goal 2. So yeah, no prediction here except it's one of the thing where many complaints will keep piling, even more than lack of learning. And you have neverending bullying/harassment stories with the assorted complaints and corrective measures indeed.....
Reading this, i’m not sure how to connect the idea of kids with no/low/high structure needs with the critique of ability grouping. If you have groups of kids who just need the basic structure of school to do well (or less), why not identify them, put them in a classroom together, have them learning more advanced material? This is basically how magnet and gifted programs work, and I’d be very surprised if it were the case that the graduates of these programs hadn’t mastered more difficult material than non-magnet counterparts, even if you control for the students’ native abilities.
It feels that "personalized learning" solutions failed just like heavier-than-air machines failed to take flight until suddenly they succeeded. Yeah, a typewriter with some kind of standardized testing addon isn't going to cut it. Current-gen AIs - STILL with standardized testing addon! - probably don't, either. But I'm entirely unconvinced that giving each student an endlessly patient teacher who can explain things in 100 different ways without getting tired, who can try to find an unique motivation, and grade answers on something different than simplistic formal criteria isn't going to make everyone happier and more educated.
One problem with tech-driven approach to learning is testing. Past-gen machines, and even current-gen algorithms rely on multiple-choices tests. Which are complete, utter bullshit which was only invented to lessen teacher's workload a bit. Sure easier to grade exams when you don't have to understand what the student did to get that answer. That shit, however, doesn't fly in higher education, or at least it didn't in my time. You had to explain everything you did to a professor, and answer questions which probed your understanding of the material beyond remembering formulas. What I'm very much surprised at, is why nobody talking about how technology - AIs - potentially can do that, but for school students. Not just check if the student can come up with the right number, but check if he really understand how that number comes to be, what it means (in case of applied math, like statistics or physics or chemistry), and how is it related to real life. And if the student doesn't understand some of it, the AI should be able to explain.
The real problem with personalized teaching, imo, is that you a) have to invent GOOD personalized teaching, b) make it scale without overspending. The only thing I agree with this review about, is that most of current new solution for education fail when you try to scale them using underpaid, overloaded, often just bad teachers, while the existing solution works (for a certain definition of "works") under these constraints. Those high-structure learners who struggle so much? I bet you could do wonders with them, if you could find them a teacher that's "right" for them. Unfortunately, we can't even define "right", much less actually provide each kid with his ideal teacher. But that SEEMS like a problem AI MIGHT solve, being (in theory) endlessly adaptable and (in reality) endlessly patient. Of course, "creating" AI teacher doesn't just mean sticking a kid behind a tablet with a LLM. For one thing, currently available LLMs aren't specialized for teaching, and actually might be quite bad at it, because of many thing, from "helpful assistant" personality to lack of authority to hallucinations. But is it REALLY impossible?
One thought I have is that it would take a literal revolution, in the end, to change the education system. Revolutions are singularity moments for societies, when future cannot be easily predicted, and where inertia of past institutions stop being a guarantee of their immortality. We'll see which country gets there first (unless, of course, AIs eat us all before that, but I choose to be a wilful optimist in this regard).
I don't know if this is frowned upon or not, but why are there a lot of LLM-looking comments in the replies here? I've seen at least 3 separate posters whose style looked really chat gpt or whatever.
From my experience of growing up using internet since 9, the YouTube teaching structure basically is way superior than schools from it's high competitiveness, creators are encouraged or pressured to one up their communication efficiency, meanwhile school system don't have such competitive feedback system in place, in YouTube market viewers vote by losing engagement and views and thus incomes to the content creators.
My ideal concept of school now is utilising it's physical system and enclosed chamber environment (where politics and previous generations are unable to pre set a value into the area through the authority of being "experienced").
It should function like debate college of Victorian era or greek public philosophical debates where mind and ideas clashes in there to naturally evolve the thinking, with the teacher's job being a monitor to stop barbaric tribe-like reputation race to happen.
This problem is even more apparent in Asian countries where students are not encouraged to talk but simply hear and absorb the lecture from the teachers
From my experience of growing up using internet since 9, the YouTube teaching structure basically is way superior than schools from it's high competitiveness, creators are encouraged or pressured to one up their communication efficiency, meanwhile school system don't have such competitive feedback system in place, in YouTube market viewers vote by losing engagement and views and thus incomes to the content creators.
My ideal concept of school now is utilising it's physical system and enclosed chamber environment (where politics and previous generations are unable to pre set a value into the area through the authority of being "experienced").
It should function like debate college of Victorian era or greek public philosophical debates where mind and ideas clashes in there to naturally evolve the thinking, with the teacher's job being a monitor to stop barbaric tribe-like reputation race to happen.
This problem is even more apparent in Asian countries where students are not encouraged to talk but simply hear and absorb the lecture from the teachers