I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level.
The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured.
We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth. It's such a crying shame.
I dropped out of college in 2012 and was one of the very lucky few who managed to find software engineering work almost immediately [1].
I had a bit of a complex about not having a degree, and a few times I tried going back only to drop out again because I would get bored; by the time I had gone back, I already knew enough stuff to be qualified as an engineer, and as such I didn't feel like I was getting a lot out of school and I would paradoxically do pretty poorly because I was half-assing everything.
It wasn't until I found out about WGU in 2021 where I actually decided to finish my degree, primarily because WGU lets me work at my pace. Since I already knew a lot about computer science, I was able to speed through the classes that would have been very boring to me, and I finished my degree really quickly as a result. I don't feel like my education is appreciably worse than people who did things in a traditional brick and mortar school, but I'm not 100% sure if I'm a test for this.
It made me realize that, at least for people like me, EdTech can be extremely powerful stuff. School can be a lot more engaging when it's personalized, instead of the frustrating "one size fits all" of traditional lecturing.
[1] I say "lucky" because I think it was exactly that: luck. Yeah I learned this stuff on my own for fun but finding an employer who was willing to hire someone without credentials was never guaranteed and I feel extremely fortunate to have accidentally timed my dropout about perfectly.
EDIT: For those confused, WGU means "Western Governors University" in this case.
I dropped out around the same time, and one other key thing I’ve noticed is the tech bootcamps hadn’t completely taken over yet, so there was less of a flood of other entry level people to fight for every single opening. You would even get a call back sometimes applying cold (no internal referral).
I tend to throw “lucky” in there too when telling the tale of how I got my foot in the door— it’s hard not to, considering my jobs before that were call center rep, bus boy and dishwasher at restaurant, camp counselor. Tech changed my entire life.
I dropped out and became an engineer at almost the exact same time. I've thought about going back for a degree but I was always so horribly bad at school that it's scared me off. I was bad at it mainly for undiagnosed ADHD reasons that I'm now getting successfully treated, but I'm still worried that if I went back the same things would just happen again. I'd join a class, I'd already kind of know what they're teaching (or think I did), I'd get bored and be unable to pay attention, I'd suddenly find myself MASSIVELY behind.
I really hope this isn't just an ad or something because I'd really love if there was a decent way for me to get a degree without having to go back to a college campus at 35
A big difference though between how you're able to leverage online learning as an adult with at least some real-world life experience vs. what a 3rd-grader can do.
I am a strong advocate for zero technology in schools until high school.
One thing that is rarely mentioned is that schools that issue technology to students and use it in the classroom now need to have a hardware, software, and network support person at every school. These jobs use funds that could otherwise be used to pay for more instructional staff, reduce student-teacher ratios, provide more special-needs instructional specialists, etc.
In some economies, to be an engineer means a chartered engineer, which demands completion of a formal assessment by the national engineering council.
I'm not throwing shade on you, my degree from 1982 was 1 year too early to make certification in my field and I have worked for 42 years in software and systems without charter status.
I am however cautious of using the word. I call myself a computer scientist even when what I do is systems and network engineering.
Could I politely suggest writing out the full acronym the first time, and then using WGU subsequently? It'd be a good deal more considerate of non-U.S. readers.
Also tangential, but do you feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth out of the WGU program? I have also been employed as degree-less an engineer for a long time (I have a BA in an unrelated subject), and I’ve occasionally thought about going back to get a BS or a masters in comp sci. Partially for the signaling aspect, and partially to fill in any knowledge gaps that I’m unaware of. WGU’s pacing and pricing sound great. I’ve also heard that it can sometimes be a questionable resume signal. Any thoughts?
I had a similar experience but I dropped out of high school.
For years the social stigma about being a high-school dropout got to me, and I was determined to enter University as an adult student and get my CS degree.
The problem was that I already had steady work as a software developer. And the entire reason I wanted to go to school in the first place was to level up those skills. It didn't help that, in my late teens / early 20s, I was working for a dot-com startup and we had coop students from the local University, and they weren't being taught anything that I didn't already know or understand.
Eventually I came to the opinion that, at least for me (not necessarily for others), formal education institutions amount to little more than institutional child abuse. For hyper-independent and high IQ students, particularly those with aspergers (I've never been diagnosed, but even my mother says it would put my childhood into perspective), class rooms are not a positive experience.
And I can't honestly look back at my time in public school and identify a single subject that I learned in class, as opposed to independently. According to my parents I was literate before entering kindergarten and I taught myself maths and history as an adult because school taught me to hate both (I don't hate either now, but the way they were taught in school divorced them from our day to day lives, created busy work and the impression that what we were being taught was irrelevant and unnecessary).
I tried online learning for a little bit in order to get my GED but I abandoned that as well because it still felt like boring busy work.
EdTech seems like it might offer the solution to younger children with my personality type. But honestly, I personally learn best by reading books, experimenting (hands on learning) and having goals that I actually care about and can relate to. If school had taught us to prepare a tax return, balance a household budget, that history gives us predictive "power" by examining how humans dealt with certain situations historically, if English class focused on effective communication rather than trying to guess at metaphors and hidden messages in the writings of dead authors who can't be asked to comment on that conjecture... maybe I wouldn't have loathed the experience so much and felt like I was just in a prison for children.
In other words, my personal experiences with EdTech has seen these trying to take a standard public school curriculum and package it in a digital "work at your own pace" format. Whereas my issue with school was at least in large part the curriculum itself. The pace was a factor too ... just not the only one by far.
WGU was a customer when I was at Learning Objects, they always impressed me visionary and outcome oriented. glad to hear a positive anecdote more than 10 years later.
WGU BSCS grad here as well. Regular brick & mortar schools never worked for me, but WGU clicked and let me finally get my degree. Now I’m working on my MSCS with CU Boulder, which although being managed via Coursera has the same feel overall as WGU. In some ways I can see how some think EdTech failed… but I do think there are players in the space that are doing good things
What was your motivation for getting the degree? It does not seem, from your story, that its absence blocked the growth of your career; were there subjects you wanted to learn for which self-education proved difficult, or does the credential itself have some value?
The incredibly frustrating thing about this is that this is always done in the name of "equity", but the result is that the system perpetuates the inequities that already exist. Because the public schools force kids into grade bands and don't allow children who are ahead to learn at their level, wealthy parents (and only wealthy parents) figure out ways to supplement or move their kids into schools that are appropriate for their level.
Only wealthy parents can afford to do that, while everyone else is stuck with whatever their local school offers or doesn't offer. This perpetuates generational inequalities in ways that the public school system is supposed to solve, all in the name of "leaving no child behind".
> wealthy parents (and only wealthy parents) figure out ways to supplement or move their kids into schools that are appropriate for their level.
Not true. AP courses and magnet schools are the sole way for working class/poor students to get ahead in life in the public school system. Myself and many friends took advantage of this, and zero had wealthy parents. Many had food scarcity levels of poverty at home but received excellent educations due to these programs existing.
Heck, private schools also participated in this - giving out test and grade based scholarship for exceptional students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds. Many friends participated in such programs, even to the point of working "jobs" for the school after classes to pay for their education. This is now seen as abusive to many.
The ironic and incredibly frustrating thing are now these programs are being systematically dismantled over the past 20 years in the name of "equity" with these trends only accelerating.
The one thing it DOES require is parents who care and give a shit about their kids. I suppose if you squint that's a form of wealth, but not what people mean when they talk about such topics.
+1. Folks pushing for equity haven't read (or too young to have read) "Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, and it shows.
Instead of handicapping those who are ahead, we should intervene with those who are falling behind. Instead of enforcing equal outcomes, instead prioritize offering equal opportunity for every student to get the highest quality of education.
> that this is always done in the name of "equity",
I never understood the rationale behind these progressives. Don't they have kids? Don't they know even twins may perform differently in school? I have two kids. They are only 1 year apart. They can access any educational materials as they want. Even if their school teachers were not good (they are very good, by the way), the kids would have access to excellent private teachers and tutoring. Yet, one handles maths with ease and has jumped three grades without even trying, but on the other hand does not like reading or writing. The other can barely keep up and I spend enormous amount of time just to make sure he can understand the fundamentals, but on the other hand he loved reading and is creative in writing.
This is a silly thing to say. There's no evidence that edtech was forced to band students to grade levels due to equity. It's just as likely it happened due to Bush's Leave No Child Behind, or out of a desire for administrators to follow rules.
People were like this even before equity was much of a concern.
I think it's sort of natural for teachers to view kids that are both too behind or too ahead as "problems". In both cases, there is an indication they've failed, and no one likes that.
It is not "always" done for that purpose; often people don't want children to learn things for other reasons, like wanting to have more control over them, not liking the implications of certain historical events, or having fanciful ideas about preventing their children from engaging in risky behaviors by pretending they don't exist.
The best school which I ever attended rigorously divided academic and social classes --- academic classes (reading/English/math/science) were attended at one's ability level, while social classes (homeroom, phys. ed., social studies) were attended at one's grade level.
There was a 4 year cap up through the 8th grade (so I was a 4th grader attending 8th grade English, math and science classes), and after that, the cap was lifted and students could begin taking college courses in 8th grade --- some of the teachers were accredited as faculty at a nearby college, and if need be, arrangements were made for students to travel to the college, or professors from there to travel to the school.
It was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and simultaneously be awarded a 4 year college degree.
Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court declared the system illegal because it conferred an unseemly advantage on the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no equivalent compensation for students who were not.
>conferred an unseemly advantage on the students who were able to take advantage of it,
Meanwhile private school...
Its all crabs in a bucket. Instead of suggesting that more schools do this to boost education, let's tear town the successful ones and pretend we're a meritocracy.
That's "equity" for you. We can't be unfair and give someone something that makes them better. It's easier to keep the top kids down than it is to lift the bottom kids up.
To be fair, it is less about "keeping top kids down" and more about "let's use our very scarce resources helping the bottom kids". Put that way it seems less malicious, and more like probably the right thing to do over all, while still being extremely frustrating if you are, or are the parent of, a 'top kid'. I know that in Seattle, I've been very frustrated with all the talk and promise of our school to provide enrichment to kids like mine who are able to learn quickly and are ready for more advanced learning opportunities, only to discover that it is haphazard, often in name only, and there isn't time or interest in providing more.
But it's not because of some drive for 'equity'. I've talked with teachers (as friends, not in a school setting). They're doing what they can with the resources they have.
Equity really isn't the ideology doing this, except in a few cases, it's something else. I'd speculate the dominant effect is that people tend to dislike and resist what they have a hard time imagining: there's a strong bias towards easily-administrated uniformity, and ppl tend to enforce what they know and what they were brought up in themselves
I find that an uncharitable take of equity. You can also make someone like that grow stronger so that they have more to contribute to society. “Strongest shoulders carrying the heaviest burden” and all that (it’s a Dutch saying about the Dutch tax system).
That's not necessarily the reason. OP probably was letting faster kids jump ahead but that doesn't really do anything helpful for a class that's going through a topic together step by step.
Better would have been to let the faster person learn something else tangentially related to the course so that they stay engaged but they don't disengage because they're simply ahead of the rest of the class on the next topic - which is just frustrating for everybody.
Alternatives exist for self-directed study and the tutorial system but that's presumably not what they're building for.
But one should understand what that term means before doing so.
This seems quite the opposite - promoting mandatory equality (equality of outputs in fact) rather than equity (which would explicitly account for giving students different paces to learn at, and grade accordingly)
Nonsense. Equity is not to blame. Finland has arguably the most equitable education system in the world and it's ahead of the US.
There are plenty of problems with the US education system -- among them this typically SV $$$-eyed idea that "tech solves everything" -- but investments to raise up the educational standards of low-income or underserved communities is not one of them.
This is because education is more about gatekeeping and politics than trying to maximize human capital development. We all ostensibly want it to be about human capital but our attitudes and behaviour towards education at the political level show otherwise.
The gatekeeping element seems to have developed in tandem with / response to the signalling hypothesis [1]. Simply put, if kids are trying to do the minimum necessary to get by, we raise the bar on the minimum standard until we're satisfied. Teachers (K-12 at least) respond with grade inflation, adding lots of noise to the signal, and we in turn respond with standardized testing in an attempt to clean up the noise.
I've never seen a teacher that was comfortably capable with even 50% of whatever EdTech they're handed. How are they supposed to maximize the use of it?
I remember having to painfully sit through multi-hour presentations in which they'd explain how to use a hamburger menu to find the app settings, and half the participants furiously scribbled down notes so they wouldn't get lost later when they needed to find the settings without guidance, on their home computer.
This was only a decade ago and I doubt it's much better now. People who go into teaching aren't exactly the best & brightest most of the time. And the results speak for themselves.
No doubt that there have been poor teaching experiences, but I would counter that my experience with EdTech teachers has been amazing and empowering. Really don't think we can tar all the teachers with the "EdTech sucks" brush.
not a teacher nor related to but i heard around 400 hours of pedagogy podcasts, be it the science of it, small-talk about teaching & sometimes edtech software that seriously, most of the time just sounded as apps coming from the next guy trying to be the next silicon money maker by offering what Google Docs offers but in a fancy app or in the most complex cases, what Matrix/Discord offers for free or what Emacs org-mode could accomplish without diving far from the basics it provides.
there was good apps & often these were backed/based by novel & evidence based ways of teaching
I think the Lysenkoism of our age is all people are equally intelligent and equally good at all things, thus one size fits all education is an ideological imperative. There are too many unacceptable facts that lead to conclusions that contradict this ideology in the kind of approach you're talking about.
If all children do not perform roughly the same, ideologues will not think that people have naturally different talents and abilities, but instead think there are implied violations of laws protecting against discrimination in education. That being said, I'm sure homeschoolers and people not indoctrinated, even those with lesser abilities, will really appreciate this approach.
> The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are.
This is only truly possible if we trust educators enough to allow them to use a different approach with a child. The system we have has leaned heavily toward “trust nothing”. Parents and teachers all want the best for their students but at the same time we demand that everyone stick to the prescribed curriculum lest something unapproved should enter a classroom. This is how you get “McDonalds” results: Consistent and maybe somewhat average overall.
What i also observed was that gamification of learning is violently opposed .The protestant work ethics demand that children suffer jaded while learning, the intrinsic motivation of games be damned. Then the dull overpriced app looses against the tiktok experience and a surprised pikachu face appears. Cant have minecraft with chemistry crafting cause the fun "has no place in school"
> We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
Can you give examples? Are we talking evolution or addition?
> Can you give examples? Are we talking evolution or addition?
Not GP but I can share a personal experience from high school: I was extremely advanced in English class. Like would literally finish a 45min exam in 10min and get an A.
This caused problems for the teacher. For one I was constantly bored and disruptive of others around me because I was bored and needed friends to chat with. But this made their grades suffer (it’s okay I did their exams too, lol).
Another big problem for her was that teaching me was a pain in the ass. I was clearly fluent in English but couldn’t be arsed to follow today’s lesson. My essays were a pain to grade because she could never tell if I was using a weird word I picked up from Tolkien or the internet, or just used the wrong word. She had to use a dictionary. During class sometimes I’d pull her on tangents discussing the nuanced meaning of a word she was teaching and none of the rest of the class could follow. Etc.
Basically I was a pain in the ass because the class was too easy and teenage boys aren’t known for their good classroom behavior.
The best advice that teacher gave me before the matura exam (like SATs) was this: Ok Swiz I know you think you’re a wiseass, but the matura commission won’t pull out a dictionary, they’ll just mark your answer wrong. Tone it down.
And if you think “Wow that teacher failed to control a problem student”, I think she did the right thing. It’s very easy to crush someone’s spirit if you don’t let them explore and pursue a thing they’re clearly talented in.
My guess is that the kids were learning ahead of the rest of the class and it made the teacher's life harder to keep track of where each kid is, or had to field questions outside of her expertise since often elementary school teachers only know enough to teach elementary school
In primary school there was a teacher who straight up hated me because I did the exercises too fast and this would cause extra work for him to keep me busy.
This is the very question that crossed my mind when I saw this headline (albeit at a different site): was this a failure of EdTech, or was it a failure of our highly structured and inflexible school system?
This is an issue that started to bother me while in high school, or perhaps even in junior high, and have realized over the years that people learn at different rates, that what should matter is knowledge and mastery and not grades, and that a failure in a class or several shouldn't be permanently incorporated into a "GPA" that also doesn't really capture the true essence of someone's knowledge and mastery.
In the past year, I have been learning a lot about autism and ADHD -- in no small part because I have come to realize I have both -- and I cannot help but come to the conclusion that regardless of why an individual student is different -- whether it be autism, ADHD, life-event-driven depression (eg from a death in the family or a divorce), or high or low or late-blooming intelligence, or even mere boredom that needs to be overcome by the "right spark" -- the school system as currently instituted can handle none of this -- and what's worse, any student who cannot conform to this, even if temporarily, is permanently considered flawed somehow.
I've always thought it would be interesting to have a education system that focused primarily on the best outcome for the brightest students and focused the vast majority of resources on the top 5% or so. I wonder if the total impact made (gdp, research contributions, etc) by a cohort of students this way would be higher vs spending resources to slightly bring up the average on a large number of students that never make much of themselves.
"Holding kids back" is not the reason EdTech fails at scale.
The problem is that people who succeed in tech are able to effectively educate themselves, alone, without a dedicated human teacher supervising them or a group of student peers. (You need this skill to succeed in tech, learning new APIs/languages from written materials and online videos.)
The techies who build/fund EdTech wrongly assume that everyone could do this if only they had access to the learning materials, or if the tech vaguely simulated a teacher (an interactive textbook).
But for most students, fitting in with peers and earning the respect of their teacher is the only reason they're bothering to learn at all.
(For kids especially, adult career prospects feel so remote that it scarcely seems worth the trouble, whereas earning respect right now is a very, very concrete problem!)
Banding kids into grades is the only thing making most kids succeed. I guess that is a "crying shame," but it's a tragedy, not a policy failure.
> everyone could do this if only they had access to the learning materials, or if the tech vaguely simulated a teacher
Everyone could do it if they were taught to teach themselves, it's funny we've almost come full circle back to the original intention of public education and universities.
I believe (almost) everyone can teach themselves something provided they have the material to learn from (videos, books, teachers, etc.).
This is because if people can't truly be taught to teach themselves there's no larger point in schooling unless you have only exceptional teachers throughout. Mediocre and bad teachers, which are far more common, make it so students end up having to teach parts of the material to themselves (which unfortunately leads to a tonne of rote memorisation) - this to me is where the true benefit of public education and standardised testing is, not the information retained.
The point of school was never fill our heads with facts we will never use in the workforce - most blue collar work is learnt on the job (or can be taught in short time), and white collar work is (generally*) done by those who learnt to teach themselves (as proved by them earning something like a college degree in spite of the bad and mediocre teachers).
* I say generally because there are white collar jobs that don't require it. And there are rote-memorisers who have such good memory they can make it into these positions, generally though upon hitting the workforce they stagnate, leave, or learn to learn (ever had an incompetent middle manager who only knew how to follow procedure?)
You're absolutely right, even in this thread there's a ton of "I was able to teach myself, so clearly everyone would be geniuses if only the system didn't hold them back" posts. It's the same thing that led to a lot of the problems with the OLPC project (check out the book "The Charisma Machine" if you're interested in that subject).
> The problem is that people who succeed in tech are able to effectively educate themselves
Not by magic, though. Those who take an interest in tech are forced to learn how to educate themselves in order to fulfill their interest in tech. The same story applies to many other interests. Of course, it is possible one will never develop any interests...
> But for most students, fitting in with peers and earning the respect of their teacher is the only reason they're bothering to learn at all.
But is socialization the only thing most children can take an interest in, or does sticking children in these rigid school environments take away from them discovering other interests? In other words, is this just a symptom of them being in the wrong environment, rather than the nature if it?
Furthermore, if socialization really is the only interest, why can't it still be used to force learning how to educate oneself? If fitting in and admiration are a compelling reason to learn in general, why would it not be equally compelling towards learning how to learn?
> Banding kids into grades is the only thing making most kids succeed.
Of course, that questions if most kids should succeed. What for? Being from the most educated region in the most educated nation, it's not clear what we actually get for it. The popular tropes don't hold up. Other parts of the world are much more progressive, economically vibrant, healthier, etc. It is hardly the worst place in the world, but a relative backwater compared to other much less educated places.
You don't have to go back many generations to find populations not exposed to much, if any, formal education and they don't seem to have ended up any worse off than the average person today. I expect there is a strong case to be made that people with a vision can leverage educational resources as a force multiplier to propel themselves well beyond what those earlier generations could have ever dreamed of been capable of, but for the average Joe just trying to fit in...? Perhaps we are missing the forest for the trees.
Man, No Child Left Behind left a larger mental scar than I ever imagined. "learning they shouldn't be"? I never would have gotten fast tracked in math, and by extension gotten into a decent engineering school, if that's how my teachers thought. Then university wonders why kids are less prepared.
Personally I have bad experience with edTech because when a student is young, he is not disciplined enough to do hard things alone or even just annoying things, and studying can be both.
So when they have an app with for example a qcm in front of them, the first times they try to do well, then they learn that if they randomely click buttons, at some point the app validate the answer, even if they didn't read the questions/answers.
So you get a group of young people that after school, just spend 10min randomely clicking on a app without any purpose, and after that they can go play.
I've got students that were from a private school, everyone was doing that, and their level was extremely bad.
There is value in asking the question "when should an individual start studying anyway?" I don't have a link at hand for a discussion of studies comparing no pre-school to "play" pre-school" to "rigorous" pre-school -- and the studies find that the children who go through the rigorous pre-school -- usually 5.5 hours of instruction -- are ahead of their peers in the first grade, even out by third grade, and then fall behind. The study that followed kids into adulthood found that they had a higher rate of criminal activity.
I cannot help but think that we shouldn't be forcing kids to learn if they don't want to learn -- and rather than try to force every kid to be "grade level", we should go back to 1-room schoolhouses (for elementary levels, at least) and teach each student at their own pace.
Montessori worked on this problem, and did a fairly good job, but somehow it's still under the radar that we could revolutionise our educational system according an already proven model.
Montessori is more of a brand. People definitely perceive it to be the way you are describing, but really, if there were something old and certain, it would be widely used. On the flip side, there are lots of pedagogical practices that are proven, and this article is trying to show you how they are probably being disrupted by cell phones.
> the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level.
OK but we've known this since, when, the 60s? Look at all the academic research on the adoption (or lack thereof) of programmed instruction, programmed learning, etc.
If we didn't already know this before the "EdTech Revolution" then of course the industry would get a pass, but the fact that we already knew what would happen and why is what makes it a scam.
I understand your frustration, but how does the software manage students that are behind versus students that are way ahead?
Like I'd imagine this would be deeper learning for a kid that's ahead, where they can really deep-dive a topic and maybe do some more advanced concepts.
But I can understand it from the teacher's perspective too; They have 30 kids, no extra budget and few resources. They have 20 or so average kids, and a handful of stragglers and a handful of people out in front, and are trying to meet ALL of their needs. Any of those three groups could use up all the time on a specific topic, so you end up stealing some time from one to deal with the others. If there are good monitoring from EdTech software it can help, but lots of teachers are not super techie so things have to be approachable.
It's definitely a space with more nuance and certainly more potential.
They're not just banded into a range based on their grade. They're banded into a grade based on their age, even though "being within a year of the same age as somebody" becomes essentially meaningless as soon as you're out of school.
Yes but that’s because you (mostly) stop physically growing once you are out of school. Banded within a year is meaningless for adults, a 25 yr old isn’t that different than a 30 year old but a 5 year old and a 10 year old are distinctly different. They are at different points in their development physically, emotionally and mentally. They socialize differently and have different needs. I’m not saying they can’t interact but there is some value in keeping children together by developmental stage and developmental stage is fairly age specific.
> We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
That problem is that parents who want to expose their children to more knowledge and better education have no voice -- of any kind. A small group of parents objecting to something violating their niche belief will absolutely nullify the voices of any number of parents thinking otherwise.
There needs to be greater ability on the part of educational organizations to be able to parse the unencumbered learners from these minority case.
Another instance where technical solution is not the solution for people problem. We can make all bells and whistles but if people won’t use it there is nothing more that can be done unfortunately.
> I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level... and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be"
A charitable way to read what you are saying is, "kids are not sufficiently challenged in school." But you are railing against an antagonist that is kind of vague. What, specifically, are you talking about?
I love the idea of individual pacing of kids educational journies - if you do have the syllabus and software to take every kid individually through school, is it impossible for us to fund the school for five years - and after years of every kid walking out with top grades there might just be some social proof
It seems like it is possible - probably enough people on this thread could make that investment
The problem is that it should be the present. Oh, I've been an engineer for a while and I know the system can't turn on a dime, it would take some time.
However, we should be seeing visible progress towards this goal, and frankly, if anything, the system continues to be moving in the other direction, lowering bars to try to get everyone into the exact same level long after it should be clear that lowering the bar still isn't even achieving that goal, even as it destroys everything around it in the process.
The system isn't even trying to customize skill-based education, beyond a bit of clearly-ineffectual lip service.
I'm just very curious as I'm passionate about teaching, how do you evaluate 'their level'?
I my experience, I can give material that is way out of their comfort zone, but it's my job to make it interesting enough and make enough bridges so that everyone can learn the material well, no matter the starting point.
(note: university level, but I also teached numerous times for schools)
I worked in EdTech research, it's a shitshow. Indeed the focus is on institutional learning while the power of tech is to empower people outside formal education. The amount of wishful thinking is unbelievable, protocols are often very weak, hard problem aren't addressed and focus is on what is easy to measure. There is so much potential, but it's vastly underexploited.
> We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
are you US based?
so of the Nordic countries have implementing thins similar to what you describe as their normal form of education
This is why I hear stories every year at my kids school about home school kids enrolling, then being place in math classes 1-2 years ahead of the max possible for somebody who had been in the school system to start with.
This has been the case for a long time. I was one of those kids who usually "got it" the first time I saw it, and then remembered it. So lectures usually moved much too slowly for me. In an effort to not be bored, I would usually sit quietly and read ahead in my textbook.
Some teachers were cool with this, but most of them would yell at me for not paying attention, and a couple specifically called me out for reading ahead on the basis that I thought I was too good for the class.
I skipped out complete uni classes and followed an analogue online. Maurice Herlihy had its concurrency and multithreading classes online for a while. I passed my c&m course with it, we also used his book
We built a product specifically for student-centric work where educators could assess student progress (think Hattie's Visible Learning and similar lines of thinking) and compare student growth against their own previous work. We encouraged educators to quickly tailor the tasks to individual student needs.
Educators (and pedagogues) loved it. But we couldn't gain traction with the buyer persona: Administrators asking "what's in it for me?" Data on improved outcomes wouldn't be immediate, so it was a no buy.
This was exacerbated by Google and Microsoft giving away their office productivity suites repackaged as classroom tools to ensure future market capture. Because you totally want your 8-year-old becoming a Word or Docs or Excel expert right?
So yeah, we have a reality where students don't have really great EdTech—they have tech that's masquerading as EdTech, picking up all the low-hanging fruit and leaving the hard problems of education unsolved (or unexplored).
The company is in the process of folding, and I'm hoping to re-release the software as true open source sometime in the future once all the legal / corporate shutdown stuff is finished.
Yes the problem isn't so much ed-tech, which by the way we all use everytime we Google or ChatGPT how to do something.
The problem is that ed-tech is being shoehorned into an existing dysfunctional system. It's trying to help the education system do more of what it was already doing, just with computers.
The underlying problem is that the structure of the education system is absolutely stupid and shit. We've just been so used to that for so long that we don't notice it anymore.
If schooling was good, ed-tech would be a big enabler of that, helping students learn at their own pace, guiding their coursework in the right direction, linking it to career paths, all kinds of things.
But currently ed-tech is just enabling and feeding more of the same slop, just digital instead of paper. That's the problem.
> It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
That is bad. I have to say no teacher I had a problem when I learned things ahead of time. Some less good teachers were not actually encouraging, but they certainly did not think it was a problem.
That said, IMO the school system does not cope well with kids who are not going at the average speed. This is one reason i home educated my kids. We need to change how schools work to take advantage of ed tech (and a lot of other opportunities - you can learn at your own pace from books, like I did)
can you give an example of someone being upset and what the thing they'd learned that they "shouldn't?"
as a parent I find it confusing that I'd consider getting upset if my kid was learning 6th grade history as a 3rd grader (or 2nd grade art as a 3rd grader). what actual examples are there?
the only examples of parents being upset about learning I'm aware of lately is, like, critical theory and marxism
This is a problem that has been around for years, perhaps decades. One memorable example comes from "To Kill a Mockingbird", where the teacher complained about the main character Scout having learned to read before her 1st grade -- when Atticus had nothing to do with it, because she learned how to read on her own at the age of 4.
Others have given their own experiences in this thread -- some teachers are encouraging, others get frustrated.
I doubt they were talking about any kind of "adult" content. The situation they're referring to is more like "your second grader should be focused on multiplication, not long division."
As someone who's worked in EdTech for around two decades, I know why people think this. It's what a lot people here have already said. Education is what is failing, EdTech didn't magically solve this. Just like money, you can't just throw tech at education and expect it to solve anything.
There are too many profitable incentives to poor education that are conspiring to perpetuate it. An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable. Power generally resides with those who benefit from an ill-educated populace, so anything that would actually help educate children and people at large is discouraged.
I'll repeat what others have said here. Giving teachers the means with which to properly work with their students, and investing in students at a more individual level, is what's needed. Sadly, my refrain with regards to public education is that is has become little more than glorified babysitting. Those that succeed do so in spite of the system, and not because of it. Meanwhile, students that suffer from one or more disadvantagements (poverty, disability, social issues, mental or physical health issues, and so much more) tend to just...suffer more. And then they fall into cycles where preventable issues repeat or enhance into the next generation. They'll still spend all of their little income excessively, so profit is still to be had, or they'll end-up in prison, which, again, thanks to privatization, is also immensely profitable, so no problem there, right?
The system is setup to fail because that's what's profitable in the long run for those seeking such profits. And because they can lobby, and use their wealth to influence politics, it won't change. Something else needs to happen first.
> An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable.
This is a reactionary take.
Math, science, and basic language skills do not lead to political upheaval, and are incredibly valuable skills to the capital class. Leadership would be more apt to propagandize social studies and suppress dissent.
China easily comes to mind as a counter argument.
I'd apply Hanlon's razor: education languishes due to poor funding, lack of competition, and low salaries that attract mediocre teachers. We don't even properly fund development for blue collar jobs! Also the problem compounds since one generations students become the next generations teachers.
> It's what a lot people here have already said. Education is what is failing, EdTech didn't magically solve this.
To expand this more globally - anything that requires human interaction fails at scale. Healthcare, trade skills, education, housing, etc. is all "failing" to some degree no matter how much technology we throw at it. The costs continually go up and the value isn't paired to it.
To put a name on this, it's the Baumol effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect. Essentially, as productivity increases in most industries (from automation), it drives up labor costs in the industries that can't be automated (healthcare, education, performing arts, etc), which drives up the price of those services (healthcare), or drives down the quality to find a market clearing price (increasing student to teacher ratios).
> anything that requires human interaction fails at scale
What do you mean by "fails"? It doesn't have the zero-marginal-cost dynamic favored by the investor class of the tech industry?
Don't confuse "you can't scale human interactions" with "human interaction fails at scale". The former is talking about the venture-capital-accelerated winner-takes-all business strategy, the latter is a misunderstanding of civil societies and living a rewarding life because you can only envision such things through the lens of owning a zero-marginal-cost process.
Is not the absolute cost that goes up per se. It’s the cost relative to cost of things that scale. Education, nursing care, even doctoring all have significant human to human interaction at a personal level for there to be success. When the cost of other things like commodities drop 100x, those human interactions services don’t and therefore become relatively more expensive even despite massive productivity gains those fields
I understand education and healthcare, but how do trade skills and housing require human interaction? For housing especially, a lot of foreign/remote investors can own houses and just collect rent checks from tenants in a pretty hand-off manner. Housing is supply-limited, sure, and heavily regulated, sure, but I don't think it requires human interaction, and certainly not to the scale of education or healthcare.
>An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism,
Very wrong. Education only camouflages stupidity, it does not remove it. And then part of education is indoctrination to trust authority (eg. trust the science).
That said, basic education reading/writing/simple math/science is indeed valuable.
> There are too many profitable incentives to poor education that are conspiring to perpetuate it. An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable. Power generally resides with those who benefit from an ill-educated populace, so anything that would actually help educate children and people at large is discouraged.
I want to believe this but I can't honestly imagine someone actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.
> actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.
I'm reminded of the quote
> “No one involved in an extralegal activity thinks of themselves as nefarious. I'm a businessman, okay?" - Quark, DS9 S6E25
I don't believe anyone nefariously sits there and says "lets make sure people aren't educated" but I genuinely believe there are people who say "I did this thing and people keep voting me in to keep doing that thing or keep paying me to do that thing, so I'm going to continue doing it that way"
I can almost admire how you manage to think that but that is just ignoring reality. Politicians have created entire media giants that are designed to either lie to you and trigger an emotional response within you. Maybe not out of pure maliciousness but they benefit from doing it.
In the US, it's easy to imagine, or just see, politicians actively opposing expansion of the currently-poor education system. Some actively seek to further defund it (see school vouchers).
As for actively misinforming poor people, that is the day job (campaigning) for countless politicians, who usually spend less than half their time drafting or voting on legislation.
> I want to believe this but I can't honestly imagine someone actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.
Populism is exactly this - misinforming poorly educated people with bad scary words, "others", "easy" fixes.
> Inflation is bad! Crime is bad! We'll just deport 20 million "others" and everything will be allright!
Or:
> Let's send all the money we're spending on the EU on the NHS, 350 million pounds per week more for the National Health Service!
In some countries, like the US, there are active efforts to sabotage education, or at least cripple it - by reducing funding to a point where educators have to spend their own money for supplies, get burned out, have poverty-level wages, etc. Those can't be accidental.
That's because you aren't viewing it in the proper context and think that the result of the action is isolated. I can't honestly imagine that you couldn't come up with a single incentive for misinforming people on topics in such a way that would result in your own benefit.
Just curious, how would you describe the motivations of a stereotypical sleazy car salesman offering predatory loan rates: A hard working person doing what they need to do to survive, or a con artist trying to find more victims? Only one of those choices represents reality, and you should really be wary of anyone who would suggest the other choice.
Focusing solely on the “babysitting” aspect of your post:
Since babysitting is essentially required in our current social framework, why do we need physical schools with in person teachers. It seems to me that we could have babysitting facilities spread to lots of small commercial spaces with in person babysitters for kids who are doing school on computers with synchronous teachers online.
I realize that the model I’ve laid out here is simplistic, but it would solve so many problems that it seems worthwhile to flesh it out and mitigate the issues.
Well put, all around! If it makes you feel better, state-funded education has, as a rule, pretty much always been babysitting. As we fight together for a brighter future, I think it’s important to know that we’re building something new and glorious, not restoring some natural status quo.
Tho I’m no history buff. Maybe some civilization had really great public schools? Designating only a small portion of your population as True Pure Citizens does tend to help with stuff like that
I don’t think this is the case for several core reasons:
- higher income people spend more money. The middle and upper class is by far the largest market and source of tax revenue.
- poverty generally turns areas into low trust higher theft spots that need expensive security.
- high income places generally have good public schools because a majority do know how important education is
- this requires a pretty vast conspiracy of people saying “keep people dumb so we can profit”, which I haven’t heard of at all
I think the much simpler explanation is that there is no accountability for inept pockets in the education system. Schools can’t really be punished for sucking and parents can’t move their kids in most states without just switching to private. There is no feedback loop for broken schools.
"There are too many profitable incentives... Power generally resides with those who benefit... The system is setup to fail because that's what's profitable in the long run for those seeking such profits. And because they can lobby, and use their wealth to influence politics, it won't change. Something else needs to happen first."
The teaching method I find best is a teacher explaining and writing with chalk on the blackboard, and the students taking handwritten notes on paper, asking whenever something is not clear. In other words, the most boring classical setup possible. Of course all the nuances and little details make all the difference: board picture, structure, teacher personality, pacing, choice of topic, interaction, motivation, excitement, etc.. It is not guaranteed to work, but as a format it is workable, and I found nothing so far that is better either as a student (long time ago) or as a prof at a top university (for some time now).
A distant second is the format we used during COVID: writing with a tablet using xournal, and streaming it via zoom (loosely like Khan academy). This is of course only my personal experience/opinion, but also informed by vast amounts of student feedback.
EDIT: I agree with the different perspectives from the responses, and should have qualified that I meant it for subjects one typically learns at a university, like calculus or linear algebra. One-on-one tutoring, self-learning can work even better or complement the above and skills, e.g. playing a musical instrument should be approached totally differently.
Seems like there might be some survivorship bias here, right? You teach students who made it to a top university because they thrived in the classical setup which is the most common one. Presumably your preferred teaching style aligning well with the classical approach also helped get you to that position.
Personally I feel like my education/learning only really started to take off when resources like EdX and Coursera became available. I did reasonably well at uni but was not motivated with others deciding what I had to learn and when. Lectures tended to be slow paced and often boring, so I zoned out instead of being pulled in (I passed my exams by working through the problem sets in the textbooks, I skipped most lectures).
When I got the ability to play/pause/skip/1.5-2x videos, and when I could choose what subject to learn like a kid in a candy shop, I did start consuming lectures much more aggressively. Still, I think well designed problem sets and assignments actually do the bulk of the work when it comes to learning/teaching, and I regularly skip the lectures and dive right to those.
Not saying that your method doesn't work, or that it shouldn't work for you, but its suitability depends on the topic, the student, and the setting.
I learned math from khan academy, and physics from my textbooks. When I exams were coming up, I would skip every single lecture to read my textbooks and do practice problems.
Did that all the way through physics undergrad, and I never would have graduated via the standard lecture + questions method.
Maybe my professors were mediocre, but I think I’m just not built for classrooms!
My wife had one kid scream for 10 minutes yesterday and another throw a chair. Another just sat there and didn't do a thing for 7 hours. The Little House/Christmas Story model hasn't been able to work for a long time.
> My wife had one kid scream for 10 minutes yesterday
Did she actually allow this kid to disrupt the entire class for 10 minutes? Isn't there a responsibility to all the other students that they should have a reasonable learning environment?
I remember being sent to the office for a lot less than that.
There was a story in the NY Times a few months back about a basically one room schoolhouse in Alta Utah. Of course that's a small and mostly homogeneous community and, as I recall, it was unclear from the article how well students were learning other than presumably becoming good skiers.
If not, then your wife's experience doesn't say anything about how well the Little House/Christmas Story model works.
Indeed, I would go so far as to suspect that this is likely a failure of the "integrate kids no matter what, and force them to learn at the exact same pace, no matter what" style of schooling that has become so ubiquitous in modern society.
I have no doubt it is the best option. For certain people. But why impose a single way to learn, when there is no such a thing as a "single size fit them all" learning experience? All the more when there are alternative options.
There is. There is a ton of alternative schools, homeschooling is legal in most of places in the world etc. The problem is that people expect teachers adopt to every single pupil. It's not possible.
> The teaching method I find best is a teacher explaining and writing with chalk on the blackboard, and the students taking handwritten notes on paper, asking whenever something is unclear. In other words, the most boring classical setup possible.
I had 14 years of this method and personally, it made me not like any school at all. It makes sense for Math and Grammar, but for most other disciplines (Life Sciences, Geography, Science) I think it's harmful to say at least.
At the time that I got access to Encarta 95 [1] for me was the tipping point that I could explore any topic and navigate until where my curiosity got me.
The missing part of the actual EdTech for me it's that they try to emulate the hiperpassive method of learning of a class with the only difference tgar the people are in the computer.
Now with augmented reality and virtual reality, it's a shame that we still do not have more immersive classes. For instance, would be great to have a class about dinosaurs with some kind of immersion, understand the cell's lifecycle using some VR, see the human body in more specific details, or even learn art via complete immersion.
The best two are self teaching and one to one teaching.
Both are, of course, "boring classical setups" but both can be improved by technology. My daughter had one to one teaching over video in subjects that we would have struggled to find a tutor for locally (classical civilisation, for example). Self teaching is hugely improved by access to more materials - this does not need fancy tech, but just websites and videos can help a lot.
Worth noting that this is fine for academic subjects (although highly dependent for success on student interest), but doesn't work at all for skill based subjects.
You would enjoy Cliff Stoll's writings on this topic. He hates technology in the classroom, and still firmly believes teachers with chalkboards and flashcards are superior to any technology in the classroom. I disagree with him only in so much as technology allows for media that can help simplify some things, but agree with him that nothing beats a good teacher.
I find chalk on a blackboard one of the worst ways to learn. This isn't 1890 anymore. Much better are more modern prepared lectures with much more complex and interesting slides than what a teacher can draw with chalk in the time of a class, and with a lot more detail and scale with the magic of a modern projector. this also lets the notes and videos be reviewable before and after the fact. Very helpful. Hell even overhead projectors were a lot better than most chalk on board classes I went to pre electricity.
Beyond that, I find I learn infinitely better by doing than by being lectured to. By being challenged by a set of problems that grow over time.
Beyond that tutoring blows lectures out of the water. I was failing calc e in normal semester, I dropped. My moms bit the bullet and bought me 3 weeks of tutoring over the summer (much shorter semester). I then aced summer calc 3 which is generally much harder. It was amazing how well me being able to guide the lesson to where I was having trouble versus the lecturer keeping on track worked for me. I've learned this lesson as a mentor as well, teaching is for the student, not the teacher.
tl;dr what works for you sucks for me, don't tell me how I learn.
What if a teacher starts telling what the best way to write software for a large codebase that 1000s of engineer contribute to is, based on their experience of writing ten lines of code to some toy problem that teacher once faced.
Think about it. That’s what you just did here. The better thing to do is state your experience as your experience and leave opining on optimal teaching pedagogy to those best equipped to study and understand it, which sure is as well isn’t you
I mean, I’d argue the chalkboard method often can’t visualize things as well as modern educational stuff like 3blue1brown, which is the kind of thing I often supplement for my relatively dry university material. For tons of things, well-produced videos are more effective, especially when compared to a class with maybe a hundred fifty people in it where questions are discouraged during lecture.
This is largely just anti tech puritanism. I cant comment on the psych and neurological arguments, but the following line of reasoning
> A pre-Covid survey exploring how US students aged 8-18 utilize digital technologies both inside and outside of school provides the answer (values below are per week) ...If we extrapolate and consider a typical U.S. academic school year of 36 weeks, these numbers suggest that students spend 198 hours annually using digital devices for learning purposes, and 2,028 hours annually using those same exact tools to jump around between scatter-shot media content.
is incredibly silly, given that it is counting time on device outside of class (things that students are allowed to do) against effectiveness of in class usage.
It's like arguing that a student who likes reading Harry Potter, or Comic Books 2 hours a night is forming habits against the idea of using books for learning. Students who play games or watch movies are not alcoholics using beer for buoyancy studies.
Not only this, it groups listening to music on a computer as an independent recreation activity, and not something that students will do concurrently with homework or other tasks outside of class, double dipping on recreation hours. As if listening to music isn't a boon for learning, which it easily can be.
No, it's saying that if you use the same device to entertain yourself and to do homework, and you use it for entertainment 10x as often as you use it for homework, you'll get distracted then you're doing homework.
> It's like arguing that a student who likes reading Harry Potter, or Comic Books 2 hours a night is forming habits against the idea of using books for learning.
Books are separate objects, they are not a platform. It's saying that if you put a child's homework as a two page insert into a great comic book, the rest of the comic book will distract from the annoying, difficult insert.
The opposing theory is that the proximity of homework to comics will somehow make the homework fun. Homework is going to be hard and annoying no matter what you do, if it's not hard you're not learning anything from it.
The Harry Potter and comic book argument also works for paper newspapers, the same object contains good, informative articles, opinion pieces etc, but also the comics page.
I am arguing that thinking that the same object cannot be used in two contexts is incredibly reductive and essentialist. They are stacking the books (by double counting time listening to music etc) to prove the idea that they are insistent on, that computers (which the article generalizes from desktops to chromebooks to iPads to smart watches) are essentially bad for learning, when this is not necessarily the case.
Students will continue to learn using computers, just as I will, because they are ridiculously effective for doing so.
IMO the correct analogy would be a physical object where you could switch back and forth between Harry Potter and books used for learning. If that were the case I'd agree with you. But here we are talking about two separate distinct physical objects, the Harry Potter book and, for example, a biology book.
When a person is reading the latter they can't easily switch to HP, but I can do that while learning anything in my computer. It's as easy as doing ctrl + T + red + enter and I get to the infinite entertainment that is Reddit thanks to the browser autocomplete, for example.
Switching to nonsense with physical books is as easy as having two books in your bag/desk, or reading a physical newspaper with a comics section. Treating the ability to switch context quickly as essentially bad for learning is reductive, especially when the ability to add more context (searching unknown words, useful videos, articles etc) can obviously be incredibly useful.
Stopping the ability to do ctrl+T+reddit.com also prevents the huge amount of info the rest of the informative internet can provide.
The article also includes smart watches as computers, and personally as a Apple Watch user, the amount that this device can distract is incredibly low, and obvious to viewers like a teacher.
The argument Jared makes in the body of his article ("The argument I’m making is that digital technologies so often aren’t used for learning that...") is less bold and sweeping than the one in the title ("The EdTech Revolution Has Failed").
It's true that edtech hasn't (yet) created an educational utopia, as some people may have imagined or hoped. But there are educational technology tools that my son (8yo) uses several times per week, that undoubtedly help him to learn important stuff:
1. Math Academy (truly amazing for 4th grade math all the way to first year of undergrad: https://www.bit.ly/ma-way)
2. Skritter (for learning to write Chinese characters)
3. Anki (flashcard program).
4. Octostudio (for learning to code, by the same folks as MIT Scratch)
#1 and #2 are both much more efficient (learning per unit of time) than any other method I've seen. They (along with #3) use spaced repetition and retrieval practice as part of their secret sauce.
But they are also highly domain-specific. Math Academy relies on thousands of hand-crafted math problems, all designed within a (hand-crafted) graph of topics that students must master. Skritter has tools that give people (adults or children) an easy on-ramp to learning the broad strokes of each character, and more advanced modes that train more precision.
I'm an adult user of Math Academy. I have a bachelor's in Math and I'm working through the Mathematical Foundations series to brush up on material from all the lectures/assignments I skipped and fill in the cracks of my knowledge. I absolutely love it.
I used it for 2 months during spring last year (averaging over an hour per day). I have chosen not to prioritize math study for now, but I also absolutely love it.
As others commented, the article doesn't really talk about edtech, but about introducing smartphones/tables/computers in curriculum in a way that makes it harder to limit their use both at school and at home. From my kids' experience, I agree with the article.
But I also want to touch on products. Had a startup in the space[0], and we only achieved commercial success once we started gaining customers outside of EdTech.
EdTech is hard, in that it combines enterprise-like sales with scrappy startup-like budgets. On top of that, you're selling to people who are far removed from the user experience (heads of districts vs students and teachers). End result is stuff like Blackboard, who everyone hates, but it's everywhere.
I've seen a ton of interesting, promising startups that tried to engage students and help with learning (in various ways), only to never hear about them again.
I've also seen (& heard from) a lot of teachers with great ideas, who basically need to do grassroots campaigns and teach each other tips & tricks, because they're not really supported by their organizations.
I think people, and society in general, need to be a lot more careful about buying into hype, and prematurely adopting hyped tech.
Would you buy (or fly in) a "revolutionary" new jet, that (by the way) hasn't been tested, but it's makers are really hopeful it will be safe and perform better than other jets?
IMHO, changes in education need to be studied for at least ten years, then rolled out slowly with much more skeptical study. First you've got "balanced reading" that de-emphasized phonics and reduced literacy (but I'm sure resulted in massive textbook sales and prestige for a few education academics), and now you've got EdTech screens that have hurt students' learning (but probably made some VCs rich). Implementation's got to slow down until we actually are sure the shit actually works better.
i think part of the reason computers swept into classrooms so quickly is that we had a generation of old folks seeing their jobs get computerized and they (correctly) felt that computer-literacy would be essential for a huge swath of the workforce.
however, this group also had a very hard time learning how to use computers later in their career and felt "wow, this is really hard. we need to be very proactive about teaching this to kids".
it was well intentioned, but i think they really REALLY
overestimated the need for 'teaching computer literacy' because:
a) we've gotten a lot better with UX so computers are easy to use
b) the older generations difficulty was more related to unlearning old ways and transitioning rather than difficulty inherent to computers
> need to be studied for at least ten years, then rolled out slowly with much more skeptical study.
If you have ever been involved with education students doing studies you know that methodology here is the pretty lacking, and it’s hard to consider what could be done better (other than stop pretending these surveys mean anything).
I think we need to stop pretending that there is some magic technique that’s going to 5x performance.
>> need to be studied for at least ten years, then rolled out slowly with much more skeptical study.
> If you have ever been involved with education students doing studies you know that methodology here is the pretty lacking, and it’s hard to consider what could be done better (other than stop pretending these surveys mean anything).
I don't know exactly what you mean by "surveys," but I thinking the decision should be a default no, and whatever "innovation" is being pushed should get rolled out slowly enough that public debate can nip bad ideas in the bud. I'm specifically thinking of an article I read awhile back where a parent (who knew she was a bad reader) was flabbergasted that her kid was actually being explicitly taught the same bad reading strategies she used as part of a "balanced" reading curriculum.
I under if you had no more than 10% of schools using something like "balanced reading" for 20 years, before it could be rolled out. I'm hoping their underperformance and criticism from parents and dissenting educators could get the idea scrapped before it became the mainstream, saving the students in the other 90% of schools from being harmed by it.
> I think we need to stop pretending that there is some magic technique that’s going to 5x performance.
Yeah, and I think we also need to stop pretending new is better. The idea that kids being subjected to "innovation" may be getting harmed more than they're being helped, needs to be made prominent in these debates.
What is missing in edtech is a concept of progress and partial correctness and guess work. The primary input in edtech is multiple choice. This is selected so a person does not need to evaluate the answer making it cheaper. But leads to kids guessing. Starting a blank line to write a response is what really kicks the brain in. There is no easy way out.
We could replicate the same blank page and grayscale human response to questions. But then we have not made a cheap factory that reduces costs. Its the typical fast, good, cheap conundrum. Everyone keeps picking cheap and getting mad when it does not work.
Or, almost as bad, kids learning to approximate the answer. I aced too many multiple-choice physics exams in my GCSEs because the multiple choice was A) 1,000,000 B) 1,000 C) 100 D) 10. Without knowing the formula I was able to eyeball which numbers looked obviously wrong and just select the closest.
IIR, that problem-solving method is called "Fermi estimation" - after the Nobel-prize-winning physicist who was particularly skilled at doing it. Perhaps you're smarter than you give yourself credit for?
At least from what I remember in A-level physics, a lot of the multi-choice answers usually had 2 sets of answers, both of which were ambiguous and could be the correct answer. A few questions even had answers where they were all the same answer, just with the digits either transposed or the decimal point being different. Stuff like
Readit News
The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured.
We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.
Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth. It's such a crying shame.
I dropped out of college in 2012 and was one of the very lucky few who managed to find software engineering work almost immediately [1].
I had a bit of a complex about not having a degree, and a few times I tried going back only to drop out again because I would get bored; by the time I had gone back, I already knew enough stuff to be qualified as an engineer, and as such I didn't feel like I was getting a lot out of school and I would paradoxically do pretty poorly because I was half-assing everything.
It wasn't until I found out about WGU in 2021 where I actually decided to finish my degree, primarily because WGU lets me work at my pace. Since I already knew a lot about computer science, I was able to speed through the classes that would have been very boring to me, and I finished my degree really quickly as a result. I don't feel like my education is appreciably worse than people who did things in a traditional brick and mortar school, but I'm not 100% sure if I'm a test for this.
It made me realize that, at least for people like me, EdTech can be extremely powerful stuff. School can be a lot more engaging when it's personalized, instead of the frustrating "one size fits all" of traditional lecturing.
[1] I say "lucky" because I think it was exactly that: luck. Yeah I learned this stuff on my own for fun but finding an employer who was willing to hire someone without credentials was never guaranteed and I feel extremely fortunate to have accidentally timed my dropout about perfectly.
EDIT: For those confused, WGU means "Western Governors University" in this case.
I tend to throw “lucky” in there too when telling the tale of how I got my foot in the door— it’s hard not to, considering my jobs before that were call center rep, bus boy and dishwasher at restaurant, camp counselor. Tech changed my entire life.
I really hope this isn't just an ad or something because I'd really love if there was a decent way for me to get a degree without having to go back to a college campus at 35
I am a strong advocate for zero technology in schools until high school.
One thing that is rarely mentioned is that schools that issue technology to students and use it in the classroom now need to have a hardware, software, and network support person at every school. These jobs use funds that could otherwise be used to pay for more instructional staff, reduce student-teacher ratios, provide more special-needs instructional specialists, etc.
I'm not throwing shade on you, my degree from 1982 was 1 year too early to make certification in my field and I have worked for 42 years in software and systems without charter status.
I am however cautious of using the word. I call myself a computer scientist even when what I do is systems and network engineering.
Could I politely suggest writing out the full acronym the first time, and then using WGU subsequently? It'd be a good deal more considerate of non-U.S. readers.
For years the social stigma about being a high-school dropout got to me, and I was determined to enter University as an adult student and get my CS degree.
The problem was that I already had steady work as a software developer. And the entire reason I wanted to go to school in the first place was to level up those skills. It didn't help that, in my late teens / early 20s, I was working for a dot-com startup and we had coop students from the local University, and they weren't being taught anything that I didn't already know or understand.
Eventually I came to the opinion that, at least for me (not necessarily for others), formal education institutions amount to little more than institutional child abuse. For hyper-independent and high IQ students, particularly those with aspergers (I've never been diagnosed, but even my mother says it would put my childhood into perspective), class rooms are not a positive experience.
And I can't honestly look back at my time in public school and identify a single subject that I learned in class, as opposed to independently. According to my parents I was literate before entering kindergarten and I taught myself maths and history as an adult because school taught me to hate both (I don't hate either now, but the way they were taught in school divorced them from our day to day lives, created busy work and the impression that what we were being taught was irrelevant and unnecessary).
I tried online learning for a little bit in order to get my GED but I abandoned that as well because it still felt like boring busy work.
EdTech seems like it might offer the solution to younger children with my personality type. But honestly, I personally learn best by reading books, experimenting (hands on learning) and having goals that I actually care about and can relate to. If school had taught us to prepare a tax return, balance a household budget, that history gives us predictive "power" by examining how humans dealt with certain situations historically, if English class focused on effective communication rather than trying to guess at metaphors and hidden messages in the writings of dead authors who can't be asked to comment on that conjecture... maybe I wouldn't have loathed the experience so much and felt like I was just in a prison for children.
In other words, my personal experiences with EdTech has seen these trying to take a standard public school curriculum and package it in a digital "work at your own pace" format. Whereas my issue with school was at least in large part the curriculum itself. The pace was a factor too ... just not the only one by far.
My anecdote: I was expelled from a vocational school my senior year, thanks to EdTech I returned and finished the year within a month
Only wealthy parents can afford to do that, while everyone else is stuck with whatever their local school offers or doesn't offer. This perpetuates generational inequalities in ways that the public school system is supposed to solve, all in the name of "leaving no child behind".
Not true. AP courses and magnet schools are the sole way for working class/poor students to get ahead in life in the public school system. Myself and many friends took advantage of this, and zero had wealthy parents. Many had food scarcity levels of poverty at home but received excellent educations due to these programs existing.
Heck, private schools also participated in this - giving out test and grade based scholarship for exceptional students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds. Many friends participated in such programs, even to the point of working "jobs" for the school after classes to pay for their education. This is now seen as abusive to many.
The ironic and incredibly frustrating thing are now these programs are being systematically dismantled over the past 20 years in the name of "equity" with these trends only accelerating.
The one thing it DOES require is parents who care and give a shit about their kids. I suppose if you squint that's a form of wealth, but not what people mean when they talk about such topics.
Instead of handicapping those who are ahead, we should intervene with those who are falling behind. Instead of enforcing equal outcomes, instead prioritize offering equal opportunity for every student to get the highest quality of education.
I never understood the rationale behind these progressives. Don't they have kids? Don't they know even twins may perform differently in school? I have two kids. They are only 1 year apart. They can access any educational materials as they want. Even if their school teachers were not good (they are very good, by the way), the kids would have access to excellent private teachers and tutoring. Yet, one handles maths with ease and has jumped three grades without even trying, but on the other hand does not like reading or writing. The other can barely keep up and I spend enormous amount of time just to make sure he can understand the fundamentals, but on the other hand he loved reading and is creative in writing.
Equity my ass.
I think it's sort of natural for teachers to view kids that are both too behind or too ahead as "problems". In both cases, there is an indication they've failed, and no one likes that.
There was a 4 year cap up through the 8th grade (so I was a 4th grader attending 8th grade English, math and science classes), and after that, the cap was lifted and students could begin taking college courses in 8th grade --- some of the teachers were accredited as faculty at a nearby college, and if need be, arrangements were made for students to travel to the college, or professors from there to travel to the school.
It was not uncommon for students to graduate from high school and simultaneously be awarded a 4 year college degree.
Apparently, the Mississippi State Supreme Court declared the system illegal because it conferred an unseemly advantage on the students who were able to take advantage of it, with no equivalent compensation for students who were not.
Meanwhile private school...
Its all crabs in a bucket. Instead of suggesting that more schools do this to boost education, let's tear town the successful ones and pretend we're a meritocracy.
But it's not because of some drive for 'equity'. I've talked with teachers (as friends, not in a school setting). They're doing what they can with the resources they have.
Better would have been to let the faster person learn something else tangentially related to the course so that they stay engaged but they don't disengage because they're simply ahead of the rest of the class on the next topic - which is just frustrating for everybody.
Alternatives exist for self-directed study and the tutorial system but that's presumably not what they're building for.
But one should understand what that term means before doing so.
This seems quite the opposite - promoting mandatory equality (equality of outputs in fact) rather than equity (which would explicitly account for giving students different paces to learn at, and grade accordingly)
There are plenty of problems with the US education system -- among them this typically SV $$$-eyed idea that "tech solves everything" -- but investments to raise up the educational standards of low-income or underserved communities is not one of them.
The gatekeeping element seems to have developed in tandem with / response to the signalling hypothesis [1]. Simply put, if kids are trying to do the minimum necessary to get by, we raise the bar on the minimum standard until we're satisfied. Teachers (K-12 at least) respond with grade inflation, adding lots of noise to the signal, and we in turn respond with standardized testing in an attempt to clean up the noise.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education
I remember having to painfully sit through multi-hour presentations in which they'd explain how to use a hamburger menu to find the app settings, and half the participants furiously scribbled down notes so they wouldn't get lost later when they needed to find the settings without guidance, on their home computer.
This was only a decade ago and I doubt it's much better now. People who go into teaching aren't exactly the best & brightest most of the time. And the results speak for themselves.
not a teacher nor related to but i heard around 400 hours of pedagogy podcasts, be it the science of it, small-talk about teaching & sometimes edtech software that seriously, most of the time just sounded as apps coming from the next guy trying to be the next silicon money maker by offering what Google Docs offers but in a fancy app or in the most complex cases, what Matrix/Discord offers for free or what Emacs org-mode could accomplish without diving far from the basics it provides. there was good apps & often these were backed/based by novel & evidence based ways of teaching
If all children do not perform roughly the same, ideologues will not think that people have naturally different talents and abilities, but instead think there are implied violations of laws protecting against discrimination in education. That being said, I'm sure homeschoolers and people not indoctrinated, even those with lesser abilities, will really appreciate this approach.
I guess that IS the point of standards, but we really should be experimenting more on the fringes.
This is only truly possible if we trust educators enough to allow them to use a different approach with a child. The system we have has leaned heavily toward “trust nothing”. Parents and teachers all want the best for their students but at the same time we demand that everyone stick to the prescribed curriculum lest something unapproved should enter a classroom. This is how you get “McDonalds” results: Consistent and maybe somewhat average overall.
Can you give examples? Are we talking evolution or addition?
Not GP but I can share a personal experience from high school: I was extremely advanced in English class. Like would literally finish a 45min exam in 10min and get an A.
This caused problems for the teacher. For one I was constantly bored and disruptive of others around me because I was bored and needed friends to chat with. But this made their grades suffer (it’s okay I did their exams too, lol).
Another big problem for her was that teaching me was a pain in the ass. I was clearly fluent in English but couldn’t be arsed to follow today’s lesson. My essays were a pain to grade because she could never tell if I was using a weird word I picked up from Tolkien or the internet, or just used the wrong word. She had to use a dictionary. During class sometimes I’d pull her on tangents discussing the nuanced meaning of a word she was teaching and none of the rest of the class could follow. Etc.
Basically I was a pain in the ass because the class was too easy and teenage boys aren’t known for their good classroom behavior.
The best advice that teacher gave me before the matura exam (like SATs) was this: Ok Swiz I know you think you’re a wiseass, but the matura commission won’t pull out a dictionary, they’ll just mark your answer wrong. Tone it down.
And if you think “Wow that teacher failed to control a problem student”, I think she did the right thing. It’s very easy to crush someone’s spirit if you don’t let them explore and pursue a thing they’re clearly talented in.
This is an issue that started to bother me while in high school, or perhaps even in junior high, and have realized over the years that people learn at different rates, that what should matter is knowledge and mastery and not grades, and that a failure in a class or several shouldn't be permanently incorporated into a "GPA" that also doesn't really capture the true essence of someone's knowledge and mastery.
In the past year, I have been learning a lot about autism and ADHD -- in no small part because I have come to realize I have both -- and I cannot help but come to the conclusion that regardless of why an individual student is different -- whether it be autism, ADHD, life-event-driven depression (eg from a death in the family or a divorce), or high or low or late-blooming intelligence, or even mere boredom that needs to be overcome by the "right spark" -- the school system as currently instituted can handle none of this -- and what's worse, any student who cannot conform to this, even if temporarily, is permanently considered flawed somehow.
The problem is that people who succeed in tech are able to effectively educate themselves, alone, without a dedicated human teacher supervising them or a group of student peers. (You need this skill to succeed in tech, learning new APIs/languages from written materials and online videos.)
The techies who build/fund EdTech wrongly assume that everyone could do this if only they had access to the learning materials, or if the tech vaguely simulated a teacher (an interactive textbook).
But for most students, fitting in with peers and earning the respect of their teacher is the only reason they're bothering to learn at all.
(For kids especially, adult career prospects feel so remote that it scarcely seems worth the trouble, whereas earning respect right now is a very, very concrete problem!)
Banding kids into grades is the only thing making most kids succeed. I guess that is a "crying shame," but it's a tragedy, not a policy failure.
Everyone could do it if they were taught to teach themselves, it's funny we've almost come full circle back to the original intention of public education and universities.
I believe (almost) everyone can teach themselves something provided they have the material to learn from (videos, books, teachers, etc.).
This is because if people can't truly be taught to teach themselves there's no larger point in schooling unless you have only exceptional teachers throughout. Mediocre and bad teachers, which are far more common, make it so students end up having to teach parts of the material to themselves (which unfortunately leads to a tonne of rote memorisation) - this to me is where the true benefit of public education and standardised testing is, not the information retained.
The point of school was never fill our heads with facts we will never use in the workforce - most blue collar work is learnt on the job (or can be taught in short time), and white collar work is (generally*) done by those who learnt to teach themselves (as proved by them earning something like a college degree in spite of the bad and mediocre teachers).
* I say generally because there are white collar jobs that don't require it. And there are rote-memorisers who have such good memory they can make it into these positions, generally though upon hitting the workforce they stagnate, leave, or learn to learn (ever had an incompetent middle manager who only knew how to follow procedure?)
Not by magic, though. Those who take an interest in tech are forced to learn how to educate themselves in order to fulfill their interest in tech. The same story applies to many other interests. Of course, it is possible one will never develop any interests...
> But for most students, fitting in with peers and earning the respect of their teacher is the only reason they're bothering to learn at all.
But is socialization the only thing most children can take an interest in, or does sticking children in these rigid school environments take away from them discovering other interests? In other words, is this just a symptom of them being in the wrong environment, rather than the nature if it?
Furthermore, if socialization really is the only interest, why can't it still be used to force learning how to educate oneself? If fitting in and admiration are a compelling reason to learn in general, why would it not be equally compelling towards learning how to learn?
> Banding kids into grades is the only thing making most kids succeed.
Of course, that questions if most kids should succeed. What for? Being from the most educated region in the most educated nation, it's not clear what we actually get for it. The popular tropes don't hold up. Other parts of the world are much more progressive, economically vibrant, healthier, etc. It is hardly the worst place in the world, but a relative backwater compared to other much less educated places.
You don't have to go back many generations to find populations not exposed to much, if any, formal education and they don't seem to have ended up any worse off than the average person today. I expect there is a strong case to be made that people with a vision can leverage educational resources as a force multiplier to propel themselves well beyond what those earlier generations could have ever dreamed of been capable of, but for the average Joe just trying to fit in...? Perhaps we are missing the forest for the trees.
So when they have an app with for example a qcm in front of them, the first times they try to do well, then they learn that if they randomely click buttons, at some point the app validate the answer, even if they didn't read the questions/answers.
So you get a group of young people that after school, just spend 10min randomely clicking on a app without any purpose, and after that they can go play.
I've got students that were from a private school, everyone was doing that, and their level was extremely bad.
I cannot help but think that we shouldn't be forcing kids to learn if they don't want to learn -- and rather than try to force every kid to be "grade level", we should go back to 1-room schoolhouses (for elementary levels, at least) and teach each student at their own pace.
OK but we've known this since, when, the 60s? Look at all the academic research on the adoption (or lack thereof) of programmed instruction, programmed learning, etc.
If we didn't already know this before the "EdTech Revolution" then of course the industry would get a pass, but the fact that we already knew what would happen and why is what makes it a scam.
But I can understand it from the teacher's perspective too; They have 30 kids, no extra budget and few resources. They have 20 or so average kids, and a handful of stragglers and a handful of people out in front, and are trying to meet ALL of their needs. Any of those three groups could use up all the time on a specific topic, so you end up stealing some time from one to deal with the others. If there are good monitoring from EdTech software it can help, but lots of teachers are not super techie so things have to be approachable.
It's definitely a space with more nuance and certainly more potential.
That problem is that parents who want to expose their children to more knowledge and better education have no voice -- of any kind. A small group of parents objecting to something violating their niche belief will absolutely nullify the voices of any number of parents thinking otherwise.
There needs to be greater ability on the part of educational organizations to be able to parse the unencumbered learners from these minority case.
A charitable way to read what you are saying is, "kids are not sufficiently challenged in school." But you are railing against an antagonist that is kind of vague. What, specifically, are you talking about?
It seems like it is possible - probably enough people on this thread could make that investment
However, we should be seeing visible progress towards this goal, and frankly, if anything, the system continues to be moving in the other direction, lowering bars to try to get everyone into the exact same level long after it should be clear that lowering the bar still isn't even achieving that goal, even as it destroys everything around it in the process.
The system isn't even trying to customize skill-based education, beyond a bit of clearly-ineffectual lip service.
I my experience, I can give material that is way out of their comfort zone, but it's my job to make it interesting enough and make enough bridges so that everyone can learn the material well, no matter the starting point.
(note: university level, but I also teached numerous times for schools)
are you US based?
so of the Nordic countries have implementing thins similar to what you describe as their normal form of education
Some teachers were cool with this, but most of them would yell at me for not paying attention, and a couple specifically called me out for reading ahead on the basis that I thought I was too good for the class.
What do you think is behind the threats? Do the teachers fear being replaced or is it coming from a different set of people?
We built a product specifically for student-centric work where educators could assess student progress (think Hattie's Visible Learning and similar lines of thinking) and compare student growth against their own previous work. We encouraged educators to quickly tailor the tasks to individual student needs.
Educators (and pedagogues) loved it. But we couldn't gain traction with the buyer persona: Administrators asking "what's in it for me?" Data on improved outcomes wouldn't be immediate, so it was a no buy.
This was exacerbated by Google and Microsoft giving away their office productivity suites repackaged as classroom tools to ensure future market capture. Because you totally want your 8-year-old becoming a Word or Docs or Excel expert right?
So yeah, we have a reality where students don't have really great EdTech—they have tech that's masquerading as EdTech, picking up all the low-hanging fruit and leaving the hard problems of education unsolved (or unexplored).
The company is in the process of folding, and I'm hoping to re-release the software as true open source sometime in the future once all the legal / corporate shutdown stuff is finished.
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So brutal. Thanks for doing what you can.
The problem is that ed-tech is being shoehorned into an existing dysfunctional system. It's trying to help the education system do more of what it was already doing, just with computers.
The underlying problem is that the structure of the education system is absolutely stupid and shit. We've just been so used to that for so long that we don't notice it anymore.
If schooling was good, ed-tech would be a big enabler of that, helping students learn at their own pace, guiding their coursework in the right direction, linking it to career paths, all kinds of things.
But currently ed-tech is just enabling and feeding more of the same slop, just digital instead of paper. That's the problem.
That is bad. I have to say no teacher I had a problem when I learned things ahead of time. Some less good teachers were not actually encouraging, but they certainly did not think it was a problem.
That said, IMO the school system does not cope well with kids who are not going at the average speed. This is one reason i home educated my kids. We need to change how schools work to take advantage of ed tech (and a lot of other opportunities - you can learn at your own pace from books, like I did)
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The best way to move an "average" is to improve the big mass slightly below average.
The worst off and best off are too small to affect the average--so nobody cares about them. QED.
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as a parent I find it confusing that I'd consider getting upset if my kid was learning 6th grade history as a 3rd grader (or 2nd grade art as a 3rd grader). what actual examples are there?
the only examples of parents being upset about learning I'm aware of lately is, like, critical theory and marxism
Others have given their own experiences in this thread -- some teachers are encouraging, others get frustrated.
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There are too many profitable incentives to poor education that are conspiring to perpetuate it. An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable. Power generally resides with those who benefit from an ill-educated populace, so anything that would actually help educate children and people at large is discouraged.
I'll repeat what others have said here. Giving teachers the means with which to properly work with their students, and investing in students at a more individual level, is what's needed. Sadly, my refrain with regards to public education is that is has become little more than glorified babysitting. Those that succeed do so in spite of the system, and not because of it. Meanwhile, students that suffer from one or more disadvantagements (poverty, disability, social issues, mental or physical health issues, and so much more) tend to just...suffer more. And then they fall into cycles where preventable issues repeat or enhance into the next generation. They'll still spend all of their little income excessively, so profit is still to be had, or they'll end-up in prison, which, again, thanks to privatization, is also immensely profitable, so no problem there, right?
The system is setup to fail because that's what's profitable in the long run for those seeking such profits. And because they can lobby, and use their wealth to influence politics, it won't change. Something else needs to happen first.
This is a reactionary take.
Math, science, and basic language skills do not lead to political upheaval, and are incredibly valuable skills to the capital class. Leadership would be more apt to propagandize social studies and suppress dissent.
China easily comes to mind as a counter argument.
I'd apply Hanlon's razor: education languishes due to poor funding, lack of competition, and low salaries that attract mediocre teachers. We don't even properly fund development for blue collar jobs! Also the problem compounds since one generations students become the next generations teachers.
I mean, cultural revolution was still going on 50 years ago lol
To expand this more globally - anything that requires human interaction fails at scale. Healthcare, trade skills, education, housing, etc. is all "failing" to some degree no matter how much technology we throw at it. The costs continually go up and the value isn't paired to it.
What do you mean by "fails"? It doesn't have the zero-marginal-cost dynamic favored by the investor class of the tech industry?
Don't confuse "you can't scale human interactions" with "human interaction fails at scale". The former is talking about the venture-capital-accelerated winner-takes-all business strategy, the latter is a misunderstanding of civil societies and living a rewarding life because you can only envision such things through the lens of owning a zero-marginal-cost process.
Very wrong. Education only camouflages stupidity, it does not remove it. And then part of education is indoctrination to trust authority (eg. trust the science).
That said, basic education reading/writing/simple math/science is indeed valuable.
You are arguing that low intelligence is innate, unchangeable. Which sounds very much like saying stupidity is genetic.
I want to believe this but I can't honestly imagine someone actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.
I'm reminded of the quote
> “No one involved in an extralegal activity thinks of themselves as nefarious. I'm a businessman, okay?" - Quark, DS9 S6E25
I don't believe anyone nefariously sits there and says "lets make sure people aren't educated" but I genuinely believe there are people who say "I did this thing and people keep voting me in to keep doing that thing or keep paying me to do that thing, so I'm going to continue doing it that way"
As for actively misinforming poor people, that is the day job (campaigning) for countless politicians, who usually spend less than half their time drafting or voting on legislation.
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Populism is exactly this - misinforming poorly educated people with bad scary words, "others", "easy" fixes.
> Inflation is bad! Crime is bad! We'll just deport 20 million "others" and everything will be allright!
Or:
> Let's send all the money we're spending on the EU on the NHS, 350 million pounds per week more for the National Health Service!
In some countries, like the US, there are active efforts to sabotage education, or at least cripple it - by reducing funding to a point where educators have to spend their own money for supplies, get burned out, have poverty-level wages, etc. Those can't be accidental.
Just curious, how would you describe the motivations of a stereotypical sleazy car salesman offering predatory loan rates: A hard working person doing what they need to do to survive, or a con artist trying to find more victims? Only one of those choices represents reality, and you should really be wary of anyone who would suggest the other choice.
Since babysitting is essentially required in our current social framework, why do we need physical schools with in person teachers. It seems to me that we could have babysitting facilities spread to lots of small commercial spaces with in person babysitters for kids who are doing school on computers with synchronous teachers online.
I realize that the model I’ve laid out here is simplistic, but it would solve so many problems that it seems worthwhile to flesh it out and mitigate the issues.
Tho I’m no history buff. Maybe some civilization had really great public schools? Designating only a small portion of your population as True Pure Citizens does tend to help with stuff like that
- higher income people spend more money. The middle and upper class is by far the largest market and source of tax revenue.
- poverty generally turns areas into low trust higher theft spots that need expensive security.
- high income places generally have good public schools because a majority do know how important education is
- this requires a pretty vast conspiracy of people saying “keep people dumb so we can profit”, which I haven’t heard of at all
I think the much simpler explanation is that there is no accountability for inept pockets in the education system. Schools can’t really be punished for sucking and parents can’t move their kids in most states without just switching to private. There is no feedback loop for broken schools.
Who exactly are you talking about?
A distant second is the format we used during COVID: writing with a tablet using xournal, and streaming it via zoom (loosely like Khan academy). This is of course only my personal experience/opinion, but also informed by vast amounts of student feedback.
EDIT: I agree with the different perspectives from the responses, and should have qualified that I meant it for subjects one typically learns at a university, like calculus or linear algebra. One-on-one tutoring, self-learning can work even better or complement the above and skills, e.g. playing a musical instrument should be approached totally differently.
Personally I feel like my education/learning only really started to take off when resources like EdX and Coursera became available. I did reasonably well at uni but was not motivated with others deciding what I had to learn and when. Lectures tended to be slow paced and often boring, so I zoned out instead of being pulled in (I passed my exams by working through the problem sets in the textbooks, I skipped most lectures).
When I got the ability to play/pause/skip/1.5-2x videos, and when I could choose what subject to learn like a kid in a candy shop, I did start consuming lectures much more aggressively. Still, I think well designed problem sets and assignments actually do the bulk of the work when it comes to learning/teaching, and I regularly skip the lectures and dive right to those.
Not saying that your method doesn't work, or that it shouldn't work for you, but its suitability depends on the topic, the student, and the setting.
I learned math from khan academy, and physics from my textbooks. When I exams were coming up, I would skip every single lecture to read my textbooks and do practice problems.
Did that all the way through physics undergrad, and I never would have graduated via the standard lecture + questions method.
Maybe my professors were mediocre, but I think I’m just not built for classrooms!
Did she actually allow this kid to disrupt the entire class for 10 minutes? Isn't there a responsibility to all the other students that they should have a reasonable learning environment?
I remember being sent to the office for a lot less than that.
If not, then your wife's experience doesn't say anything about how well the Little House/Christmas Story model works.
Indeed, I would go so far as to suspect that this is likely a failure of the "integrate kids no matter what, and force them to learn at the exact same pace, no matter what" style of schooling that has become so ubiquitous in modern society.
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I had 14 years of this method and personally, it made me not like any school at all. It makes sense for Math and Grammar, but for most other disciplines (Life Sciences, Geography, Science) I think it's harmful to say at least.
At the time that I got access to Encarta 95 [1] for me was the tipping point that I could explore any topic and navigate until where my curiosity got me.
The missing part of the actual EdTech for me it's that they try to emulate the hiperpassive method of learning of a class with the only difference tgar the people are in the computer.
Now with augmented reality and virtual reality, it's a shame that we still do not have more immersive classes. For instance, would be great to have a class about dinosaurs with some kind of immersion, understand the cell's lifecycle using some VR, see the human body in more specific details, or even learn art via complete immersion.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG7hquyHncU
The best two are self teaching and one to one teaching.
Both are, of course, "boring classical setups" but both can be improved by technology. My daughter had one to one teaching over video in subjects that we would have struggled to find a tutor for locally (classical civilisation, for example). Self teaching is hugely improved by access to more materials - this does not need fancy tech, but just websites and videos can help a lot.
Beyond that, I find I learn infinitely better by doing than by being lectured to. By being challenged by a set of problems that grow over time.
Beyond that tutoring blows lectures out of the water. I was failing calc e in normal semester, I dropped. My moms bit the bullet and bought me 3 weeks of tutoring over the summer (much shorter semester). I then aced summer calc 3 which is generally much harder. It was amazing how well me being able to guide the lesson to where I was having trouble versus the lecturer keeping on track worked for me. I've learned this lesson as a mentor as well, teaching is for the student, not the teacher.
tl;dr what works for you sucks for me, don't tell me how I learn.
What if a teacher starts telling what the best way to write software for a large codebase that 1000s of engineer contribute to is, based on their experience of writing ten lines of code to some toy problem that teacher once faced.
Think about it. That’s what you just did here. The better thing to do is state your experience as your experience and leave opining on optimal teaching pedagogy to those best equipped to study and understand it, which sure is as well isn’t you
It's like arguing that a student who likes reading Harry Potter, or Comic Books 2 hours a night is forming habits against the idea of using books for learning. Students who play games or watch movies are not alcoholics using beer for buoyancy studies.
Not only this, it groups listening to music on a computer as an independent recreation activity, and not something that students will do concurrently with homework or other tasks outside of class, double dipping on recreation hours. As if listening to music isn't a boon for learning, which it easily can be.
> It's like arguing that a student who likes reading Harry Potter, or Comic Books 2 hours a night is forming habits against the idea of using books for learning.
Books are separate objects, they are not a platform. It's saying that if you put a child's homework as a two page insert into a great comic book, the rest of the comic book will distract from the annoying, difficult insert.
The opposing theory is that the proximity of homework to comics will somehow make the homework fun. Homework is going to be hard and annoying no matter what you do, if it's not hard you're not learning anything from it.
I am arguing that thinking that the same object cannot be used in two contexts is incredibly reductive and essentialist. They are stacking the books (by double counting time listening to music etc) to prove the idea that they are insistent on, that computers (which the article generalizes from desktops to chromebooks to iPads to smart watches) are essentially bad for learning, when this is not necessarily the case.
Students will continue to learn using computers, just as I will, because they are ridiculously effective for doing so.
When a person is reading the latter they can't easily switch to HP, but I can do that while learning anything in my computer. It's as easy as doing ctrl + T + red + enter and I get to the infinite entertainment that is Reddit thanks to the browser autocomplete, for example.
Stopping the ability to do ctrl+T+reddit.com also prevents the huge amount of info the rest of the informative internet can provide.
The article also includes smart watches as computers, and personally as a Apple Watch user, the amount that this device can distract is incredibly low, and obvious to viewers like a teacher.
It's true that edtech hasn't (yet) created an educational utopia, as some people may have imagined or hoped. But there are educational technology tools that my son (8yo) uses several times per week, that undoubtedly help him to learn important stuff:
1. Math Academy (truly amazing for 4th grade math all the way to first year of undergrad: https://www.bit.ly/ma-way)
2. Skritter (for learning to write Chinese characters)
3. Anki (flashcard program).
4. Octostudio (for learning to code, by the same folks as MIT Scratch)
#1 and #2 are both much more efficient (learning per unit of time) than any other method I've seen. They (along with #3) use spaced repetition and retrieval practice as part of their secret sauce.
But they are also highly domain-specific. Math Academy relies on thousands of hand-crafted math problems, all designed within a (hand-crafted) graph of topics that students must master. Skritter has tools that give people (adults or children) an easy on-ramp to learning the broad strokes of each character, and more advanced modes that train more precision.
This stuff is so exciting. He dips in and out of HN periodically when the subject comes up.
But I also want to touch on products. Had a startup in the space[0], and we only achieved commercial success once we started gaining customers outside of EdTech.
EdTech is hard, in that it combines enterprise-like sales with scrappy startup-like budgets. On top of that, you're selling to people who are far removed from the user experience (heads of districts vs students and teachers). End result is stuff like Blackboard, who everyone hates, but it's everywhere.
I've seen a ton of interesting, promising startups that tried to engage students and help with learning (in various ways), only to never hear about them again.
I've also seen (& heard from) a lot of teachers with great ideas, who basically need to do grassroots campaigns and teach each other tips & tricks, because they're not really supported by their organizations.
[0] https://blog.senko.net/the-story-of-a-web-whiteboard
Would you buy (or fly in) a "revolutionary" new jet, that (by the way) hasn't been tested, but it's makers are really hopeful it will be safe and perform better than other jets?
IMHO, changes in education need to be studied for at least ten years, then rolled out slowly with much more skeptical study. First you've got "balanced reading" that de-emphasized phonics and reduced literacy (but I'm sure resulted in massive textbook sales and prestige for a few education academics), and now you've got EdTech screens that have hurt students' learning (but probably made some VCs rich). Implementation's got to slow down until we actually are sure the shit actually works better.
however, this group also had a very hard time learning how to use computers later in their career and felt "wow, this is really hard. we need to be very proactive about teaching this to kids".
it was well intentioned, but i think they really REALLY overestimated the need for 'teaching computer literacy' because: a) we've gotten a lot better with UX so computers are easy to use b) the older generations difficulty was more related to unlearning old ways and transitioning rather than difficulty inherent to computers
If you have ever been involved with education students doing studies you know that methodology here is the pretty lacking, and it’s hard to consider what could be done better (other than stop pretending these surveys mean anything).
I think we need to stop pretending that there is some magic technique that’s going to 5x performance.
> If you have ever been involved with education students doing studies you know that methodology here is the pretty lacking, and it’s hard to consider what could be done better (other than stop pretending these surveys mean anything).
I don't know exactly what you mean by "surveys," but I thinking the decision should be a default no, and whatever "innovation" is being pushed should get rolled out slowly enough that public debate can nip bad ideas in the bud. I'm specifically thinking of an article I read awhile back where a parent (who knew she was a bad reader) was flabbergasted that her kid was actually being explicitly taught the same bad reading strategies she used as part of a "balanced" reading curriculum.
I under if you had no more than 10% of schools using something like "balanced reading" for 20 years, before it could be rolled out. I'm hoping their underperformance and criticism from parents and dissenting educators could get the idea scrapped before it became the mainstream, saving the students in the other 90% of schools from being harmed by it.
> I think we need to stop pretending that there is some magic technique that’s going to 5x performance.
Yeah, and I think we also need to stop pretending new is better. The idea that kids being subjected to "innovation" may be getting harmed more than they're being helped, needs to be made prominent in these debates.
We could replicate the same blank page and grayscale human response to questions. But then we have not made a cheap factory that reduces costs. Its the typical fast, good, cheap conundrum. Everyone keeps picking cheap and getting mad when it does not work.
Or, almost as bad, kids learning to approximate the answer. I aced too many multiple-choice physics exams in my GCSEs because the multiple choice was A) 1,000,000 B) 1,000 C) 100 D) 10. Without knowing the formula I was able to eyeball which numbers looked obviously wrong and just select the closest.
IIR, that problem-solving method is called "Fermi estimation" - after the Nobel-prize-winning physicist who was particularly skilled at doing it. Perhaps you're smarter than you give yourself credit for?
A) 1.2e10 B) 1.2e9 C) 2.1e10 D) 2.1e11