(Okay, everyone, we know that Ozy Is Not An Education Reform Specialist Or A Teacher And Has Actually Not Even Taken Sociology of Education Yet Despite It Being Offered Every Year, right? Please take this as more “food for thought” than “serious policy suggestion.”)
Right now, schools try to cram in a lot of stuff. Anyone remember the American history classes that never got past the Civil War? Biology classes that never got around to covering vertebrates? World History classes that have a week for Greece and Rome or a day for Vietnam? Math classes where half the textbook could have been blank white pages, because you’re certainly not addressing any of it?
Not just that, but a lot of the stuff schools teach is totally useless. I spent three years in middle school learning how to write five-paragraph essays and four years in high school learning how to write literary criticism. I find it amazing that I spent seven years of my life learning how to write the only two genres that absolutely no one in the world wants to read. I mean, Jesus, I could have spent seven years working on my sonnet skills. At least that would get me laid.
Let me be clear: I’m not blaming teachers for this shit. Most teachers are good people doing the best they can in an absolutely crappy incentive system.
“Our students should learn about Important Subject X!” is popular and “maybe we should take some of this out of the textbook?” leads to cries of dumbing down education. So textbooks have more information than you could possibly teach to a bunch of bored freshmen no matter how good a teacher you are. Someone decided that reading and writing ought to be taught in the same class and “students write about what they’re reading” is a natural way to synthesize that. Someone else decided that a single essay in a prescribed and absurdly artificial format* should be the sole way of assessing how well students are doing at writing, and you cannot blame people for responding rationally to incentives.
But the problem remains: students are being taught things they don’t need to know, and not being taught things they need to know, and this is a terrible way to run an educational system.
I suggest triage. Create a bare minimum list of things that people absolutely need to know– things that are highly effective in making people happier and better citizens, that either you or people around you will seriously regret your not knowing– and concentrate on teaching that. My preliminary list:
- How to read.
- How to write a clear sentence and paragraph.
- Some foreign language fluently. Probably more than one.
- Basic arithmetic.
- Statistics.
- How to assess information for quality (statistics is related to this).
- The scientific method.
- Basic science: how evolution works, what the atom theory is, etc.
- Civics.
- Basic psychology.
- Et cetera, I highly doubt this list is complete.
“But Ozy?” I hear you say. “What about the love of learning, knowledge for its own sake? Don’t you value that?” Of course I do. I read textbooks for fun. But the love of learning cannot be coerced. You can’t make someone be passionate about learning world history because you passed a law that says everyone in tenth grade has to learn about world history. And even if that magically worked, they would probably be endlessly frustrated that you only spent a week on Greece and Rome.
Once you teach people the absolute basics, they can go where their passions take them: solving math problems, doing experiments, going to Shakespeare performances, writing poems, playing drums, programming, learning everything there is to know about the Abbasids. If people do things they care about, they are more likely to actually remember them a decade later; furthermore, it teaches important skills like How To Find Things Out that are way more important than a half-remembered quadratic equation.
Some people think people wouldn’t learn unless you coerced them. I highly doubt this. Humans’ comparative advantage is intelligence; we evolved to be thinking animals. It is really a sign of success at… something… that schools have managed to convince so many people that learning is boring and sucks. Besides, I highly doubt Hypothetical Would Rather Sit On Her Ass Than Learn To Play Drums Or Something Lady would be much good at learning things in a regular school system either.
So basically I propose modified unschooling! With a caveat that some things are important enough that everyone has to learn them even if they don’t want to! Okay.
*People who didn’t spend three years learning how to write a five-paragraph essay, you cannot imagine how terrible they are. Imagine the guidelines an Overly Literal Genie who’s read too much Strunk and White would give for writing an essay. “There must be an introduction, a conclusion, and three paragraphs of evidence. The introduction contains two sentences of hook, two sentences of transition, and a thesis statement which says exactly what the next three paragraphs are going to say…”
Learning a foreign language is about 100x harder than anything else on that list yet has only a fraction of the utility compared to some of the other stuff on there (especially for English speakers). I say this as someone with a French passport and actual French family members; there’s extremely little pushing me to learn the language. I’d actually sooner learn Japanese.
On top of that, no school environment is well suited to learning a foreign language. Hands-down the best way to learn a language is from constant contact with native speakers, you can wind up fluent in a single year.
I agree that the foreign langauge is a bit of a red herring. OTOH a very small amount of foreign language training (Like maybe one year of high school class) might be useful, especially in a country like the US that has a large minority that often speaks another language.
I agree that high school teaches way too many specific facts in compulsory classes (including electives where there is a choice but not enough of a choice to matter.) and often is too college-preparatory for stuff that will not even be useful in college due to the variety of college majors…
Plus stuff that is not all that academic-related is kind of disappearing.
-Stuff I would include:
-Math should go a little further (in high school), with geometry and basic algebra. Basic level high school courses however should eschew proofs (although students should know what a proof is) and emphasize doing things the way people actually do them: i.e. with freaking computers.
-A Tech class. Would be 1 high school class, teach broad shallow range of stuff: electronics, hand tools, how to paint an object, how to fix clothing, some ultra-basic computer programming.
-I totally agree about the thing where we teach too many specific scientific facts and not enough rationality/sci method. I also think that we need a class where its’ hammered into students just how scientists can discover stuff that wasn’t known before, perhaps with a lab where students actually end up coming up with something new (maybe recreating Galileo’s or Newton’s gravity experiments?) without knowing it ahead of time. Modern scientific facts should be strictly an elective. My high school required two scientific facts classes, and honor students not interested in science would take more. Better to have scientific method and scientific thinking.
-Agree on the psychology.
- I note that some European school systems separate out the tech school, hard science university, and soft science / humanities students before entering high school. This is probably an improvement on the US system and provides some of what you want.
- You might not like this, but I would: Some culture stuff. Would include some music stuff perhaps, as well as some very practical etiquette stuff – for multiple situations and subcultures so everybody can be on the same page, whatever form of dancing is a thing at the current time. How to do a job interview. Formal and casually formal clothing. Would also probably add some boundaries and social stuff, ways to deal with trouble in friend groups. Would provide a correct re-calibration reference for people who grew up with abusive families and think it’s normal, also. Hopefully even the playing field for people who don’t know how to do X for whatever reason.
I rarely comment here (although an avid reader), but I just wanted to interject to say that I couldn’t disagree with Volte more – learning languages at school is the only way to guarantee that the majority of the population has exposure to cultures outside their own and nothing can open minds and horizons faster. Its the way European nations manage to achieve such high levels of foreign language fluency among their populations – which is btw the primary reason that allows English speakers to get away with not bothering to learn foreign languages themselves. I don’t doubt that American schools do not go about the business of teaching foreign languages properly, but that does not mean that it cannot be done.
In any case, it is factually incorrect that contact with native speakers can allow you to learn a language from scratch – that is a nice myth that makes the process sound fast and almost effortless, but ignores the very, very painful reality of being suddenly emerged in an environment where you cannot communicate with those around you (not to mention that learning a language is often necessary in order to be afforded the opportunity to move to the country and be exposed to native speakers in the first place – it’s harder to get hired by a Finnish company if you do not speak Finnish).
Re foreign languages… I’ve studied English, French and Spanish in school. I only use English. I’m a philosopher, and English is the common language used all over the world by scientists and scholars of all subjects. Spanish and French are not.
It takes a VERY long time and LOADS of practice to become fluent enough in a foreign language to actually hold proper conversations about important topics with other people in said language, not just ask for directions to the museum or order a beer. I studied English for nine years in school and watched subtitled TV programs and movies where people spoke English every other day throughout most of my life, but still, it wasn’t until I actually lived in a student doorm with a majority of exchange students and was forced to speak English every day that I became more or less fluent (although my spoken accent is still terribly funny, because of all the mixed influences from exchange students from various countries – I have a Swedish-Russian-Bulgarian-Dutch-French-Polish-German-American-British accent that I’ll probably never get rid of). Swedes are supposed to be among the best English speakers in the world (except, of course, for peoples whom have English as their mother tongue). Everyone studies English for nine years in school and watches movies and TV programs in English all the time in my country. And yet, most Swedes have great difficulties when it comes to actually conversing in English about, say, political matters or other slightly more complex topics. You gotta be in an environment where you actually speak the language everyday (foreign country or exchange-student-filled doorm) or use the language at work in order to actually become fluent. That’s what it takes, for everyone except a few exceptionally talented individuals.
Now, considering English is the lingua franca of today’s world (and no, that might not be FAIR towards people from non-English-speaking countries, but that’s the way it is) I can’t honestly recommend that native English speakers go learn another language. I think that for the vast majority of English speakers it wouldn’t be worth the effort. Sad but true.
Adding: I didn’t mean that merely living in that doorm would have made me fluent in English; I mean that in order to be fairly fluent in another language you might need a) MANY years of study, and b) an environment where you’re forced to actively use said language ON TOP of all the studying.
I think part of the problem with history is that they keep going back to US History again and again. Instead of “History of the Americas” one year, “History of Europe and the Middle East” another year, “History of Eastern and SE Asia” the third year, and “History of Africa and Australia” the 4th year. Or a series of history classes in which each year you learn about a different time period, all over the world. The way things are set up now is really boring and contributes to a generation that knows NOTHING about the outside world. I love history, but I hated history class with a flaming passion.
On the foreign language topic: Living amongst native speakers might be the best way to become -fluent-, but in my experience is not the best way to -learn- a language. I’m currently living in a foreign country (teaching English, hah) and the only thing I could say prior to arriving was “Thank you”. After 3 months I know some basic commands (come/go/sit/wait/stop/give me x, etc) and greetings/partings, along with a handful of miscellaneous words and phrases, but unless I study on my own time for a significant period every day, or hire a tutor, I’ll be lucky if I can have a decent conversation by the end of the year. I have a coworker who’s been here years (dating native speakers the whole time) and still hasn’t moved beyond what I would imagine is not even A1 level. Today at a staff meeting I stared intently at a coworker, hoping some magical switch would turn and I would suddenly understand more than 3 words out of the five minutes she’d been talking. Alas, no such luck.
I believe that at an older age (obviously kids are a different story- 3 year olds are pretty amazing learners via immersion) some background in a classroom or via self-study is necessary. Personally speaking, I studied German for ~4 years before moving to Austria, and was near fluency after 10 months there. (Although to contradict myself, I studied Spanish for ~7 years before moving to a Spanish-speaking country for 6 months where I floundered ridiculously at things as simple as ordering a sandwich. No one ever teaches you what “White or wheat?” is going to sound like in Spanish class! It probably didn’t help that while all of my friends there were natives, they are all 100% bilingual and prefer to talk to me in English T_T)
In any case, I agree with Christina that being plunked down in a bunch of native speakers will NOT magically make you fluent, but also with Dvärghundspossen that it IS the best way to achieve fluency after studying for a bit. However, I think it is worthwhile for native English speakers to learn another language, if only to be able to empathize with people trying to learn theirs (I feel quite bad about how I dealt with immigrant shoppers while working retail (generally by handing them off to someone with more patience) now that I’m in their places more or less).
-The language should be specifically Spanish in US schools. And at the high school level it should be a lot more conversational/practical and a lot less worrying about whether the grammar is perfect.
-There really, really needs to be a standard for having “basic life skills” classes. Kids should not come out of school knowing the names of twelve Roman emperors but not how to apply for a job or rent an apartment or cook basic foods.
-I learned the scientific method in school, but I don’t think anyone ever explained what it meant. Like, that observation and experimentation are the foundations of knowledge itself, not just specific tasks you only apply to Designated Sciency Subjects that end in “ology.” And that something that ends in “ology” but hasn’t been rigorously studied isn’t science at all.
-I want a Critical Thinking class. A full semester of “Sometimes people you trust are wrong, and in fact, sometimes we the teachers are wrong.” And while I’m at it: “All authority is arbitrary. Not all authority is wrong, but all authority is just people making decisions and they’re not necessarily better or smarter people than you.” I know full well that one would never fly in public school, but it does make me sad how long I perceived Authority and Rules as abstract, omniscient forces of nature instead of just a system some people agreed on.
-AUGH FUCK FIVE PARAGRAPH ESSAYS SO VERY MUCH. I had to write them in high school, and God it was painful. Teaching kids to write in a way that no one on Earth would ever want to read is not building any kind of skill. I don’t think my writing classes (even in college) ever clearly got across the idea that the point of writing is to communicate with a reader.
Dvärghundspossen,
Your assertion that non-anglophones should not bother with other languages may apply in some places, but not in Canada, anyway. Here, for many jobs in the public service (federal, and in some provinces as well) it is a requirement that one be bilingual in both French and English. Bilingualism is controversial at times for this very reason, where some anglophones claim that it is a tactic for the Francophone minority to hoard the good jobs because they are, on average, more likely to be bilingual.
So, yes, the knowledge of another language is rather important in Canada, specifically French
I’m glad to see statistics up there (hey, I’m a mathematician.) One good thing about reducing the curriculum as well is that it will allow people to learn enough about a subject to actually use it. Even by the end of most college stats classes, students do not know enough to, say, analyze the accuracy of a poll, understand the statistical reliability of a scientific study or even just informal survey, etc. etc. Given more time to teach, teachers could get students to the point where they are fluent enough to have the subject become a tool of their lives, not just some arcane set of formulae memorized in fear.
That said, the “statistics” class would probably have to teach a fair amount of algebra (and potentially some precalc, even calc) along the way — no area of math can go far at all without at least high-school level algebra (well, until you get to the graduate level, where we remove numbers from our study entirely
)
As for language, I’m with Krause – fluency is a steep requirement. Not everyone is good at everything, and for some of us, this means foreign languages (and I really did try, several times). Requiring true fluency is on par with making advanced topology and tensor mathematics required for all HS students.
More generally, though, not every field fits into the “no/few facts” method, with biology being a big one. Unlike physics, where everything can be derived from first principles using sufficiently advanced math, biology requires knowing a vast amount of facts to even make it understandable.
Take evolution, the fundamental principle of all biology. To actually understand it, you need to know how inheritance works (requiring extensive education of DNA, mitosis & meiosis, cell biology, and of course mutation), ecology (differential fitness, food chains, climate, etc), and preferably also the diversity of life (all domains and phyla) and paleontology (since history informs the present). None of these can be derived from first principles – you cannot start with F=ma and end up with how DNA works. Not that there aren’t principles, especially where physics and biology intersect (my field, biomechanics), but even those principles are contingent, with plen of taxa breaking the rules.
I do agree that the current system is too oriented to fact-cramming, but don’t dismiss the importance of those facts. Do students need to memorize every step and component of the Krebs cycle (cellular method for turning food into energy)? No. Should they have to memorize at least the major invertebrate phyla, and appreciate that vertebrates are a tiny fractions of a percent of living species? Absolutely.
Additionally, I’m highly skeptical of “unschooling”. Yes, human brains were evolved to learn. But they weren’t evolved to learn science or history or math – they evolved primarily in the context of maximizing reproductive fitness and a complex social environment. Give students free reign to spend their intellectual energies as they will, and they’ll spend those energies in exactly the same way as our primate ancestors did – social potion jockeying, manipulations, status-seeking, undermining rivals, etc. The same stuff kids obsess about outside of modern school, because it’s what their brains evolved to do. “Unschooling” will work on kids who would have been nerds, geeks, or otherwise social outcasts in regular school simply because they either don’t value or have been excluded from these social games, but apply it to “regular” students and watch how quickly it becomes Lord Of The Flies.
This isn’t “regular people suck”, but just a recognition that human intelligence evolved for social interaction in a complex society, and that’s what is the default priority and interest. Look at the popularity of soap operas and drama relative to nature documentaries, or the circulation of People vs Functional Ecology. How many novels or plays are mostly or exclusively about the social relationships between the character or groups of characters? I’m willing to change my mind with enough evidence, but so far the positive stories of un schooling I’ve heard are all centered on a highly atypical sample of students. Those who’ve been taught since birth (directly or by example) to value intellect, knowledge, and learning, and whose own interests lie in that direction, will always pursue knowledge on their own, regardless of their environment. That such kids learn well in unschooled environments says more about the kids than the method.
This is utterly bogus. Knowing how to say something in French does not tell you anything about French culture. And even if it did it certainly wouldn’t be the ONLY way to expose people to another culture. My interest in Japan started the first day I flipped over my Nintendo and read the words “Made in Japan”, it was driven out of sheer curiosity. I still dont know the language but I easily know more about Japanese culture than my own French cousins know about British culture, despite their fluency.
This boggles my mind. Is there anyone here who knows a second language that wouldn’t admit that their skills improved dramatically once they actually started having to speak it all the time rather than a couple times a week in a classroom?
I’m not suggesting you start totally from scratch, but that CAN be done too. How else would babies learn their first language?
I agree with a whole lot of this.
Humans are born curious creatures. We are reinforced by novelty, by learning and experiencing new things from the off. Humans are the most advanced learning machines in the known universe.
And then somehow, we screw it up. Children who enter school curious and eager to learn quickly lose interest. They don’t grow out of it. We screw it up.
Education needs to be reformed with this in mind. The challenges of the future (and indeed the jobs of the future) require creative, critical thinking. The industrial/agrarian model just won’t do any more.
We also live in a world with ever widening access to Facts. As internet access spreads, knowing Facts becomes way less useful than Being Able To Distinguish Bullshit from Actual Facts when you go searching.
Education should be skill based. And the skills I’d teach are (in broad strokes and no particular order)
“Learning as a Skill/Practice”
- Reading
- Mathematics/Numeracy (with the focus on being able to understand how numbers are used practically and in argument. Statistics would be core at High School level)
- Critical Thinking and the Scientific Method.
- Finding Knowledge (Internet searching, libraries etc.)
- The Universe Is Awesome Class, in which teachers devote some amount of time to cool and interesting things in the world. (Primary School level)
* Special Interest Classes (Your “Facts” classes, but more research
based than rote learning based. Learn to Do Science, or Do
History, and then use those skills to find out interesting things.
– Secondary Level)
“Communication skills”
- Writing
- Argument
- Social psychology.
- Social Awareness and Culture.
- Foreign Language (Slow and steady over the whole school lifetime. Spanish would be the best target in the US. Mainland Europe already does this very well, so steal their model.)
“Self skills”
- Body Awareness
- Mindfulness
- Psychology
- Relationships and Sex (This could hopefully build pretty well on the whole “communication” part of the curriculum)
The school model needs to be refocused around learning as the core Activity. The disciplinary model of 90% of schools is “do good and we ignore you, do bad and be punished”, which only serves to make the school a punisher in and of itself. Learning and Curiosity need to be actively reinforced, until the naturally reinforcing contingencies of learning take hold. (See Murray Sidman, Coercion and It’s Fallout, or Susan Schneider, The Science of Consequences)
“it is factually incorrect that contact with native speakers can allow you to learn a language from scratch”
“This boggles my mind. Is there anyone here who knows a second language that wouldn’t admit that their skills improved dramatically once they actually started having to speak it all the time rather than a couple times a week in a classroom… How else would babies learn their first language?”
Volte, Cliff’s statement is 100% true. Mere contact is not sufficient to learn any vaguely complex skill. It requires dedicated Practice – as in you have to be doing it, and doing it in the right direction.
So, being dumped in Lands Foreign isn’t going to allow you to learn a language by Osmosis. You would need to actively practice, with people actually helping you do so, by correcting, clarifying, and helping out with vocabulary you don’t know. And doing it from scratch is going to be amazingly difficult, even with a dedictaed native teacher.
But the important point is that you’d need a teacher, or teachers, even in that ideal environment. So having a teacher, or teachers, in a non-ideal environment (i.e. schools) is an excellent start and the only vaguely pragmatic one if you want to teach lots of people a language.
Oh, and babies learn their first because they have a teacher, or teachers. There is no magic Language Acquisition Device in the brain.
I don’t think you need to know all that to understand the basics of evolution. The underlying premise is that variation and selection lead to change. Beyond that, it’s worth knowing some details so that people understand that evolution isn’t aiming at a goal and some of it is random.
nancylebovitz: It depends what you mean by “understand”. Having a superficial, glib knowledge can be achieved without those, but true, actual understanding? No. Impossible. Even your own short summary bears only superficial resemblance to the actual process, ignores huge and vital parts of it, and attempting to generalize or extrapolate from it would lead to wildly incorrect answers (for example, without emphasizing heritability, your summary could easily be extrapolated to Lamarkism).
It’s the difference between knowing that a computer uses RAM and knowing *why* a computer uses RAM. An education that only reaches the former level isn’t a real education, and is no different from being taught facts by memorization.
I see your point here – deep understanding of lots of concepts requires a lot of factual knowledge.
The question, however, is where you put educational priorities on the timeline – For the purposes of educating children, the focus should be on providing the skill set necessary to take all those facts and sythensize them into actual understanding.
As you progress along the educational track, you can turn in a more factual direction, designed to create that deep understanding. But there’s no point in going there until the skill set is solid. So certainly at primary level, mere facts should be de-prioritzed.
(Also, it’s impossible to teach a bunch of Learning Skills without the use of actual facts, so these skill based curricula would naturally involve a lot of factual information being learned – what’s being suggested is a refocus of prioroties)
I second the culture stuff majorly. A lot of what I’m about currently wouldn’t have been made possible without being introduced to a lot of basics in high school. Here in the US, though, the focus is stupidly limited to the “seat of western civilization” kinds of crap when several semesters of going through the history of the Americas would be far more beneficial to us for various reasons, the chief of which is that it situates us in the world based on where and who we actually are as a nation and not just who we like to think we are.
But that has a lot to do with the fact that history books are practically half propaganda, especially when written by an oppressor people trying to convince everyone why they’re so great.
Yeah… Although in the why a computer uses RAM analogy, high school seems to be teaching a simplified-to-uselessness CMOS mask design and integrated circuit/microfabrication class that somehow manages to ignore the *design*. We should be teaching the idea of a turing machine. I think we could get away with a lot less biology facts than we are teaching, and that there is no convincing reason to make people know the invertebrate phylla (though they should know of the comparative rarity of vertebrates.)
- I agree with the idea of ‘unschooling’ only being effective for nerds and other self-driven people. While I do think that both the compulsory minimum and expected-of-the-dedicated high school days could be shorter, my view is that the stuff we are talking about should be compulsory classes, and then students get a variety of other classes (ideally with a ton of very easy use of local community college courses to expand it). THese would include college-preparatory science with much more facts, and only people who want to be there, and writing and rhetoric, or maybe there would be some kind of independent-study thing where diligence would be enforced but the subject would be up to the student.
-Critical thinking is important. Unfortunately, it’s actually more risky than people think, since you can use arguments to justify anything to the untrained.
Ozy, have you read John Taylor Gatto or John Holt? They were both famous teachers and reformers who argued many of the things you argue above. Gatto was this master high school teacher who got all of the “problem” students and taught them with great success. He also wrote the very famous essay “The Seven Lesson School Teacher” where he basically argues that the entire structure of K12 education is detrimental to learning, and a book called “The Underground History of Education” where he argues that our school system was not designed to create good critical thinkers, and that we’re all crazy for thinking it could accomplish those goals.
Holt was (I think?) a very successful 5th grade teacher, and he is very big on the idea that people–especially kids–are natural learners, and it’s all about just creating an environment that encourages that and providing the resources.
It’s been YEARS since I read either of them, so I’m not up for a full review/comprehensive critique of their ideas, but you might be interested in taking a look. A bunch of Gatto’s stuff is available free online.
MCA, while I agree that there are plenty of critiques of unschooling, particularly in its “purist” form, I don’t think your understanding of unschooling or your characterization of human intelligence/learning is accurate.
(full disclosure: my education up until college was basically “modified unschooling.”)
As far as human intelligence goes, two things: Humans are naturally curious. Yes, we have a lot of brainpower that seems to be exceptionally well-wired for social interactions, but we are also tool-users and environment-masterers. I would argue that one of the things that separates us from other primates is how effectively we use tools and shape our environments. Primates do these things too, but not nearly with the success or to the extent that we do.
And as far as social jockeying – there is a fair amount of research that says school *as it is currently set up* promotes social jockeying in a pretty intense way. People like Holt argue that the reason “the average” kid is more into the social jockeying and not into learning precisely because schools are non-conducive to learning for most kids*. Also, there is the question of how much these “average” kids (those more into the social jockeying than learning) are actually retaining this information. I know in biology, for example, there is much woe in how little people retain from their highschool biology class.
*whether or not these kids would be “nerds” if schools were set up differently is something I have never seen research on, but there is pretty clear research that schools make these traits worse.
I don’t think “pure” unschooling is the answer, because there are too many specific things that are just really fuckin’ useful to know, but I do think schools need to be redirected away from standardized testing en masse, and that the school environment might be TOO highly structured.
First paragraph: “Primates do these things too” should be “Other primates do these things too.” Whoops.
Re evolution I’d say that creationists are very rare here, but LOTS of people has a sort of quasi-religious view on evolution and nature, according to which Evolution has a goal it strives towards, and Nature can INTEND this or that, and so on.
theLaplaceDemon: I think the thing missing is data. I’m 100% willing to accept your viewpoint if there is data showing that, with a substantially less structured day, kids don’t just go all Soap Opera on us. But I’m skeptical, and need data.
Dvar: True, disabusing people of such silly ideas should be a core purpose of school
MCA: I mean, given that you’re arguing for an alternative hypothesis and not just a null, I could say the same thing to you
I would argue that the research that is out there on tool use among animals, as well as early development, contradicts your hypothesis, but it certainly isn’t enough to say anything conclusively.
But yes, you’re right that there is a serious lack of systematic study in how we should organize our education system, and what would be best for the majority of kids.
theLaplaceDemon: yes, but is our tool use what was selected on, or just a byproduct of other selective forces that led to increased brain size? Given the expense of building and maintaining brain tissue (~40% of our resting metabolism), there would have to be commensurate huge fitness advantages, which I’m not sure the increased resource acquisition from tools would confer. But anyhow, we are getting quite off-topic.
I think a common agreement that extends beyond this commenting community is that more unstructured time would be good, but something I don’t often see discussed is the logistics and expense side. Large, structured classes, cramming facts, and frequent testing may be sub-optimal, but they’re cheap, and if there’s one thing we can learn from a huge number of past ballot initiatives, it’s that for all people claim to want a better educational system, they aren’t willing to put their money where their mouths are and actually PAY for a better system.
“one thing we can learn from a huge number of past ballot initiatives, it’s that for all people claim to want a better educational system, they aren’t willing to put their money where their mouths are and actually PAY for a better system.”
Isn’t that where activism and mind changing comes into play?
I don’t think it’s really that hard an argument to sell, even from an economic/pragmatic perspective. The economic benefit is long term (which makes democratically elected governments not terribly incentivised to do it, since whoever happens to be in office when the changes work will get the credit) but significant, in that your country will have a workforce that is flexible and capable of retraining quickly (which will be increasingly important in the future as technology continues to change faster and faster). This makes jobs.
Part of the problem progressives face is the prevailing attitude that things won’t change (because people don’t want it, won’t pay, don’t care etc.) so the effort to be truly activist about it is wasted (and scary, because social disapproval!). It’s not (I believe) that people don’t want change, they just don’t expect it so don’t work for it with their own energy. (There’s also an element of fear of change – what if we spend all the effort, suffer the transition period etc. and it doesn’t work? Better to stick with a crappy status quo and say things won’t change)
I’m pretty skeptical. The idea works great if one not going to college or is going into social sciences or humanities, but without rigorous schooling people would be horribly unprepared for higher education in heavily specialized/technical fields like mathematics and music performance. Children aren’t old enough to make informed decisions about their futures yet, so I think education should keep those doors open as long as possible. If that means a lot of people end up with a half-remembered quadratic formula or a plastic recorder they never play, I’m okay with that. Better to have something you don’t need then to need something you were never given.
(That, and there’s also the class issue that children with well-off parents are both more likely to be encouraged to learn things on their own and to have access to extracurricular activities designed to foster love of learning than children in poverty)
MCA: To the first part, who knows? There are interesting arguments on both sides, but both sides rest of pretty shaky foundations as well (as with most ideas about the evolution of complex human behaviors). But of course, none of that is really relevant, because our disagreement isn’t so much about evolution as it is about the modern psychology that is implied by that evolutionary history – and modern psychology is what will functionally answer the structured/unstructured question, not evo bio. And yes we are waaaaay off topic. Whoops.
Yeah, I’ve often struggled how to reconcile educational reform ideas – even broadly popular ones, like low student:teacher ratios – with the need for pragmatic solutions. I actually think that in an ideal world, education would be much better funded and considered as sacrosanct as military currently is in the US. But we don’t live in that world, and it’s certainly not going to happen overnight, and in the meantime you have kids that need education and parents who need childcare, so…
I’d like to suggest that there be something on there about thinking and speaking precisely. This doesn’t necessarily need to be its own class, of course.
For instance, parts of it could potentially fit well in “critical thinking” — imagine “spot what’s wrong with this argument” exercises where you have to notice, oops, these potentially different things have been conflated.
Other parts could go under “scientific method” — you need to come up with a model of this phenomenon, and you had better be precise just what the pieces of that model are and how they interact, or else you just have a big fuzzy mess that can’t actually predict anything!
To a large extent what I actually want to convey is an implicit understanding of *logic*, in the mathematical sense — that there’s a difference between “P implies Q” and “not P implies not Q”, for instance.
But actually going and teaching real proof-based mathematics (or formal logic… ew) sounds like a bad idea, for a large number of reasons which are largely pretty obvious so I won’t go into here. And anyway what I wanted wasn’t “correct reasoning”, it was “precise thinking”. Which, OK, are pretty closely related. But what I wanted was for people to be able to *understand* and *make* precise statements. I guess to get an understanding of what you’d ordinarily call mathematical language — except not for mathematics, but rather as a tool for clarifying your own thoughts.
It seems to me that there’s one other thing besides mathematics that requires such a level of precision, and that’s programming. And teaching kids programming might actually be a good idea, for multiple reasons! (Like, teaching kids that yes, they have the power of automation at their fingertips!) And while most people may not care about a good proof, a program, well, that’s something you can actually run on your actual computer.
And the great thing is — you can’t bullshit the compiler. It doesn’t care what you *meant* to write. Which is after all one of the lessons I would hope to convey — that when you are trying to solve an actual problem, it’s not good enough to get a fuzzy idea and then say “you know what I meant”. (Though obviously a fuzzy idea can be a good start.) And that if you can’t express a thought clearly, there’s a good chance it’s because it’s not a clear thought yet.
(Unfortunately every time I’ve seen programming taught in school the teacher has somehow managed to make it terribly boring. But that might just be a problem with school in general.)
Hell, combine this with the “scientific method” idea. How can you tell when you’ve really got a precise model? When you can program it, that’s when! Scott Aaronson put it well: “Computation is clarity.”
…this might be asking a bit much of the students. I don’t know.
Eddy, I think you underestimate the amount of creative and critical thinking you need in STEM to be successful – with one exception, I think that people can catch up on the “facts” part of a field pretty quickly, provided that they are used to thinking and learning.
The one exception is that I do think a certain amount of foundational math is really useful to have. Not for the “fact” aspect – I have often forgotten the quadratic formula, and relearned it when it became relevant. But getting comfortable with numbers and how they work, particularly when they are abstracted a little bit into variables, is something that takes time to learn and helps you in innumerable ways later on. Of course, I also think the standard way math is taught can be pretty awful (some teachers pull it off, but a lot don’t), but reforming math education is a whole different topic.
Uh…. but there is such a device. Babies need to be “taught” in the sense that they aren’t born able to compose sonnets, they need to hear adults speaking languages to acquire it; and its helpful (although not necessary) that caregivers instinctually engage in various behaviours that aid their learning, which could be categorised as a form of “teaching”. But they will learn language without the latter, and most definitely without any formal, structured lessons, primarily just by hearing language, and by having their own early language utterances corrected by other speakers. And this is because (based on the current evidence, with very high degree of confidence) they have specific neural mechanisms for learning language, mechanisms that notable fade over time.
On the OT: great post, pretty much full agreement here.
Writing In Cursive.
Come on, education systems. It’s 2013!
@Volte: “This is utterly bogus. Knowing how to say something in French does not tell you anything about French culture. And even if it did it certainly wouldn’t be the ONLY way to expose people to another culture.”
Except that’s not actually what I said? Knowing how to say “good morning” in French does not teach you anything about French culture, I’ll agree. Reading Madame Bovary in the original however does give you at least an inkling. And I’m skeptical as to how else you can truly get to really understand a foreign culture if you don’t speak the language. I’m sure you can collect a lot of information, in the same way that archeologists can about Ancient Egyptian culture, but I don’t believe you can really have a clue about how the people think and how society operates. If you don’t speak the language you will forever be an outsider peering in and fumbling to piece together any real understanding.
“This boggles my mind. Is there anyone here who knows a second language that wouldn’t admit that their skills improved dramatically once they actually started having to speak it all the time rather than a couple times a week in a classroom?”
You’re shifting goalposts – your initial statement was that immersion was the best way to learn a language and could render you fluent within a year. Not true at all. Obviously talking regularly to natives (or non-natives for that matter) improves your skills, but first you need to learn the basics through study.
“I’m not suggesting you start totally from scratch, but that CAN be done too. How else would babies learn their first language?”
Well, it seemed to me that you *were* suggesting that, but in any case babies learn in very different ways to adults – and more to the point, an adult cannot learn the way a baby can. Indeed, even babies do not learn through osmosis – as a rule, they are surrounded by an army of loving and patient adults intent on painstakingly grooming their language skills and celebrating each new word. Good luck finding a colleague or supermarket cashier or even friend (I mean, how would you even make such a friend when you don’t speak the language?) who’s willing to expend the same amount of energy on getting you to speak their language. But basically, both YcmY and Anthony are right here.
And I say all of this btw as somebody who was raised bilingual and who thereafter has only managed to acquire a passive understanding of a further three languages *despite* living in a foreign country surrounded by native speakers for the past 5 years, mainly due to my own lack of effort in the classroom – indeed when I was following classes my ability to talk in the language of my current location was much higher than they are now that I only rely on exposure. I should also point out that my parents put a lot of thought and effort into making sure my sister and I were able to learn both their languages as children – it is not something that happens automatically even with babies and I have plenty of friends also raised in bilingual environments who never managed to achieve full fluency in both languages: a proper system and consistent effort is indispensable.
Btw, I don’t mean to be snippy, but I’m curious – have you ever learned a foreign language? It sounds like you haven’t.
For the rest, Dvärghundspossen and Mori said it better than I could.
@MCA: “As for language, I’m with Krause – fluency is a steep requirement. Not everyone is good at everything, and for some of us, this means foreign languages (and I really did try, several times). Requiring true fluency is on par with making advanced topology and tensor mathematics required for all HS students.”
Fluency is indeed a steep requirement. But there are benefits to learning the building blocks of foreign languages beyond being able to converse eloquently on philosophy with native speakers. I for one am constantly boggled at how difficult my monoglot (mainly I’m afraid American) friends find parsing menus and signposts in languages they don’t speak, while I can muddle my way through a tax declaration… Moreover, understanding the syntax and grammar and appreciating the beauty of foreign languages allows for a deeper understanding of the mechanics of your own – which is why so many poets and authors cultivate at least a passive understanding of foreign tongues. Then there’s the practical advantage of being able to collect information and appreciate works from different cultures and then compare and contrast with your own – which can simply be an enriching experience or (for many professions) a very useful tool. And of course, the juggling of multiple languages provides excellent exercise for the brain allowing it to build cognitive reserves to battle deterioration – for example, there have been plenty of studies documenting that bilinguals have higher resistance to Alzheimer’s.
This isn’t a zero sum game where you’re either fluent or a failure.
Okay, I’m changing my mind on learning another language if you’re an English-speaker… Learning French if you’re Canadian – that’s obvious, should have thought of that, it’s like Finnish people learn Swedish (since they have a large Swedish-speaking minority in Finland). And maybe Americans learning Spanish is a similar thing.
@Christina: I don’t dispute there is value in learning and even reaching fluency in foreign languages, just as I’m sure you don’t doubt or dispute the value of learning or even mastering physics or mathematics. But you admit fluency is a steep requirement, and the post and comments thread have all focused on reducing the amount and rigidity of school requirements. Just as you can justify raising the language requirements, I can justify raising the science requirements, and others the literature and history requirements, and then we’re right back where we started, with a packed schedule of required courses and no time for independent study.
Plus, as I said, different people have different aptitudes. I’ve struggled with every language I’ve ever tried to learn, but got a degree in rocket science without studying or even trying very hard. Why hobble hypothetical-me with a steep and possibly unachievable language requirement, while those whose proficiencies are the reverse face no such obstacle?
IMHO, part of the problem is that, when designing a curriculum, everyone thinks there should be more of their particular subject, and adding content at the textbook or requirement level requires only a modest time and effort investment from a few experts. Thus, information accumulates, requirement rise, and textbooks thicken, without corresponding increased in time or teachers.
I should clarify that I’m not against language requirements, just against requiring fluency.
There are certainly many good reasons to learn a foreign language. But that doesn’t really set it apart from plenty of other “Our students should learn about Important Subject X!” arguments. Especially if the target is “to fluency” or “[r]eading Madame Bovary in the original.”
I’m not playing favorites here. Foreign language is what people seem to be talking about, and I agree with people pointing out that “to fluency” is a rather high bar compared to the other things on the list (depending on just how much statistics you’re going to learn, I suppose). But I suspect other things on the list fall into the “Important Subject X!” trap, including “what the atom theory is.”
Heh, I’ll admit you’ve got me there MCA – except of course that, to be honest, I don’t really agree with the precise of this post at all. I don’t doubt that the way we currently go about trying to teach can be improved, but I don’t actually have a problem with exposing children to a variety of subjects. And I certainly disagree that people – and most especially children – should be allowed to limit themselves solely to the subjects for which they have the most aptitude. As much as I would hate to hobble you, I’m afraid I very much believe in the value of a well-rounded mind – although a legal expert myself by training for example, my favourite subjects at school were algebra, geometry and chemistry (which in the school system I followed were taught at pretty high levels) and I would similarly expect a physicist to have had a least some minimal exposure to the humanities in a way that would e.g. allow them to express themselves correctly and eloquently in their field or understand the historical context within which their subject evolved. I never liked physics or music theory, both of which made me feel as though my brain was made of wool, but I don’t regret being forced to tackle them – perhaps at the time cheerlessly, but for the most part ultimately successfully. Sometimes in life we have to do things we don’t enjoy, but which are good for us and that in itself is an important lesson to learn – one, I would argue, without it’s difficult to develop the good judgement which as an adult can allow you to decide what is a challenge to be faced and what a pointless task to be avoided.
Not to mention the fact that most people will not get a degree in rocket science. I firmly believe that basic education should not just seek out the few with an obvious talent for one particular subject, but offer a good foundation in a variety of subjects for all.
“IMHO, part of the problem is that, when designing a curriculum, everyone thinks there should be more of their particular subject, and adding content at the textbook or requirement level requires only a modest time and effort investment from a few experts.”
Meh. My basic premise is that learning is valuable in itself. For most people a spattering of knowledge – or more to the point, a basic training of the brain in a variety of different ways of thinking – will be useful. More areas of knowledge, whether a language, science or practical skill, require a great deal of time and effort to master completely – but they yield great benefits even if you don’t end up teaching them at a university level.
“I should clarify that I’m not against language requirements, just against requiring fluency.”
Obviously, I’d agree.
Also, fwiw, fluency is a relative notion. I currently live in the Netherlands, a country whose people’s “fluency” in English is often admired by outsiders. And although it is true that on the whole the Dutch speak excellent English, they speak excellent English _for non-native speakers_. You’re still likely to end up gesticulating wildly or resorting to broad descriptive language or (even better) learning the Dutch term yourself when you try to explain what you want to your hairdresser or dentist.
As an ESL teacher I’m trying to refuse teaching the 5 paragraph essay — it’s how I was first taught to write, and I’m glad to have left it far behind. As a teacher, most of my truly productive work is correcting method and ‘un’teaching bad habits.
Specifically regarding your list, I have no idea how you’re going to measure gaining fluency in a foreign language but see some utility. Math skills are of course significantly easier to gauge, but we need to teach them with more than one learning style in mind (wiki Howard Gardner if you require a reference point). I.e. the textbook is not the only way for us to visualize mathematics.
Personally I advocate a skills-based approach. I don’t know every detail of how it is to work, but developing a student portfolio rather than a grade sheet provides opportunities for helpful feedback. What did I ever learn from getting an A — only that my performance was good enough, not how to improve or address the weaknesses the class overlooked. Skill sets like real world (4 dimensional) physics problems, sustained dialogue, and other problem-solving contexts give teachers (tutors/guides) the opportunities to nip and tuck what isn’t terribly effective. In the process we’re likely to see what doesn’t belong in a paragraph.
Christina: I think it’s an issue of degree. Everyone agrees students should be exposed to diverse subjects, get well-rounded, and not specialize too early. But the key questions are how much gen ed., for how long, and what subjects? And it’s made more difficult because, IMHO, those answers can differ for different kids.
I do think we need more flexibility in who needs to do what and in general, but i also think we need to examine how much mere exposure that isn’t retained actually accomplishes. Did my HS english classes really benefit me at all if I can’t recall anything about them at all?
@MCA
“Did my HS english classes really benefit me at all if I can’t recall anything about them at all?”
I would argue indubitably yes. Populations with high school attendance flourish in a way with which those with low attendance cannot compete. You don’t have to use each and every skill and remember when and where you gained it for your education to be of value. It entirely possible – and indeed highly likely – that your English classes benefited you in ways of which you are simply not consciously aware. It should also be pointed out that gaining a skill is generally a very boring process that requires a lot of practice and repetition – which might make them less enjoyable for uninterested pupils, but doesn’t mean they’re not having an effect.
For the rest, I guess we agree, although I’m a bit suspicious of this: “And it’s made more difficult because, IMHO, those answers can differ for different kids.” I just think that in practice this can end up meaning that the poor, lower class kids get a worse education than the rich kids who display immediate aptitude because they have of course already been receiving an informal education by parents with greater means and time… In a state-funded system I’d much rather err on the side of equality.
“But they will learn language without the latter, and most definitely without any formal, structured lessons, primarily just by hearing language, and by having their own early language utterances corrected by other speakers. ”
“Just” by hearing language and having it corrected?
This is my giant problem with Nativist arguments. If you’re advancing a Poverty of Stimulus argument you’re just not paying attention to the the amount of, and complexity of, language interactions that go on between parents and children in the critical period. There is definite teaching going on.
“And this is because (based on the current evidence, with very high degree of confidence) they have specific neural mechanisms for learning language, mechanisms that notable fade over time.”
That evidence isn’t as strong or confidence inspiring as you might think. Sure, there are neural architectures that are used to learn language – but I don’t believe the evidence supports the hypothesis that they contain actual information on grammar in them at birth. (Which is a pillar if the Language Acquisition Device/ Universal Grammar position).
[For the record; I'm 4-5 days away from handing in my Psychology PhD thesis, which involves not a small amount of language related material in it, so I do know what I'm talking about here. I also know a lot of other psychologists will disagree with me, so you'll find plenty of sources that say both what I'm saying and the precise opposite, often citing the same or similar evidence. ]
What high schools really need, I think, are some classes on how to be a functional person.
Stuff like basic home ec, how to look for a job or apartment, how to balance a budget.
I know college graduates who still can’t sew a button onto a shirt, write a check, or find a place to live. And I spent my freshman year of college teaching my classmates how to wash their own clothes and dishes, and how to microwave popcorn without literally setting fire to the microwave.
I largely agree with you, though I think more structure than “unschooling” is probably necessary. We teach a lot of stuff badly, and instead we should focus on teaching the important stuff (mostly skills, plus some key information) very well, and then go from there.
But mostly, I’m commenting to say HOLY HELL FUCK THE 5-PARAGRAPH ESSAY. In middle school, I was reading classic novels and essays by Annie Dillard and David Sedaris (not for school, but in my blessed gifted-kids summer camp and on my own)… and being forced to write like an idiot. I got into so many stupid fights with my teachers over the fact that I KNEW how to write BETTER, but I had to keep ‘proving’ that I was capable of writing in a stupid, stupid format that is absolutely painful to read.