Mission: The economist Eric Hanushek has shown that if the USA could replace the worst 7% of K-12 teachers with merely average teachers, it would have the best education system in the world. What if we instead replaced the bottom 90% of teachers in every country with great instruction?
The Company: Online learning startups like Coursera and Udacity are in the process of showing how technology can scale great teaching to large numbers of university students (I’ve written about the mechanics of this elsewhere). Let’s bring a similar model to high school.
This Company starts in the United States and ties into existing home school regulations with a self-driven web learning program that requires minimum parental involvement and results in a high school degree. It cloaks itself as merely a tool to aid homeschool parents, similar to existing mail-order tutoring materials, hiding its radical mission to end high school as we know it.
The result is high-quality education for every student. In addition to the high quality, it gives the student schedule flexibility to pursue other interests outside of high school. Many exceptional young people I know dodge the traditional schools early in life. This product gives everyone that opportunity.
By lowering the cost of going home-school, this product will enlargen the home school market and threaten traditional educrats while producing more exceptional minds.
With direct access to millions of students, the website will be able to monetize through one-on-one tutoring markets, college prep services, and other means.
Course material can be bootstrapped by constructing a curriculum out of free videos provided through sources like the Khan Academy. The value-add of the Company will be to tailor the curriculum to the home-school requirements of the particular state of the student.
My background: I cofounded a company that’s had reasonable success. I’m not much of a Less Wrong fan—I find the community to be an intellectual monoculture, dogmatic, and full of blind spots to flaws in the philosophy it preaches. BUT this is an idea that needs to happen, as it will provide much value to the world. Contact me at firstname lastname gmail if you have lots of money or can hack. Or hell, steal the idea and do it yourself. Just make it happen.
Modern compulsory schooling seems to have at least three major sociological effects: socializing its students, offloading enough caregiver burden for both parents to efficiently participate in the workforce, and finally education. For a widespread homeschooling system to be attractive, it’s either going to need to fulfill all three, or to be so spectacularly good at one or two that the shortcomings in the others are overwhelmed. Current homeschooling, for comparison, does an acceptable job of education but fails at the other two; consequently it’s used mainly by people with very strong objections to the curriculum or other aspects of the school system. That’s a small and inelastic market, and you aren’t going to enlarge it much without some significant incentives.
Socialization could be addressed by integrating access to hobby groups, sports teams, Scouting-like services and what have you into the program’s structure; you’d probably have to push this hard to overcome the perception gap, but it ought to be doable. Some facility for students to self-organize into study groups might also help at the high school level, but it’s unlikely to be practical at younger ages.
Offloading caregiver burden is a trickier problem. There seems to be a time/money tradeoff here: you can reduce or eliminate parental involvement during working hours if they’re willing to pay for tutoring services and similar resources, but those aren’t cheap, and both routes make homeschooling less attractive relative to traditional schooling. Study groups again would help here, but I don’t think they can substitute for an expert human without some exceptional cleverness.
The market is most likely still larger than sufficient for the enterprise to be worth it. I only have personal WAG estimates to rely on, but it’s pretty hard to get market data on a currently-counterfactual service that people have never even seen.
Anecdotally, out of a sample size of over 60 high school students, at least 8 (including myself) had confirmed to me they would definitely jump right on any alternative form of education that would still be officially recognized, since here homeschooling is very, very difficult to get approved and recognized as equivalent to a standard education. A single institution that you just sign up, and work through the material, and perhaps attend meetings to socialize, but that isn’t bogged down by all the problems of shitty teachers and teacher-politics and crappy coursework? That would have (and still does) sounded like an utopian dream by comparison to the dreary and painful system we were stuck in.
Of course, that’s just the students themselves, and parents are a different problem to solve too. However, 10-15% of high school students is not a small market. I’m quite certain (.98) that there are at least twice as many people with strong objections to the curriculum or other aspects as there are who actually do use current alternatives, simply by factoring in the amount of people held back by legal / institutional restrictions that require the child to go through regular compulsory education. From what I understand, bypassing this hurdle is exactly the primary service of this hypothetical company.
Also, as long as you can keep the total cost of the company’s services for one child equal or under the current standard costs of compulsory education without sacrificing superior education quality, the inherent scalability of the proposed teaching techniques will mean that as your clientbase grows, your ability to provide workspaces, study groups and competent staff increases, which would further expand the market and clientbase, and then…
Yeah, lots of optimistic and positive thinking there. However, I’d really like to do what I can to save other people from the depressive ugh field that I got stuck into throughout high school—an ugh field that eventually killed my hopes of “things getting better” by the time I got to cégep and realized that even there, perfect answers with clear, written reasoning on a math test was still only worth 75% if you didn’t have the right passwords (though I didn’t think of it in these particular terms at the time, but that’s what it was).
A good solution to those problems would have meant less time wasted in high school, and not dropping out of cégep, for this particular individual. Which, incidentally, also means I wouldn’t have gotten this job with a ton of free time to read LessWrong, but that’s another story.
Relative to what? Do you think kids are better socialized at school than at work, staying with grandparents, or whatever else they would be doing if they weren’t in school? It seems implausible that kids are going to be socialized efficiently by hanging out with a bunch of other non-socialized persons, rather than persons that are already socialized.
In Harlow’s monkey experiments, the most destructive thing to deprive monkeys of is contact with peers at a young age. Monkeys that don’t spend time with other young monkeys as children tend to grow up psychotic and wildly dysfunctional.
Fortunately, there are plenty of places outside of school where young humans can socialize with other young humans (especially if a lot of them aren’t going to school!) - parks, martial arts dojos, neighborhoods, etc.
I was homeschooled, and, yes, that’s true—but, it’s really not the same level of exposure as being surrounded by other people your own age for the majority of every day. When I got to college, there was a massive relative deficit in basic social skills that I had to make up rather quickly.
Because the way you interact with small children is wildly, radically different from the way that either adults or children interact with their own peers. This is also a trend I’ve observed much more widely than just myself. Homeschooled children come out weird unless their parents are very, very aggressive about socialization, much more so than most people would consider reasonable.
“Socialization” needs to be broken down a bit more, I suspect.
The trouble is that school-related socialization is very different from adult socialization. When you’re locked in a box with other people for eight hours a day, you get to know them and make friends for geographic reasons.
Adults don’t have that opportunity, though, and do have many other opportunities. Approaching someone because the teacher assigned you to do a group project together is different from approaching an attractive person at a bar.
It seems to me that homeschooling is better at teaching adult-style socialization (finding places where friends are likely, and then making friends there), which is way more useful than school-style socialization. But homeschooling typically doesn’t include the sheer amount of socialization that school does, instead filling it with things are educational or fun. Which… seems like an acceptable tradeoff, to me.
I wish I could find some science on the subject, but all I can find with some cursory googling is one study with a 30-child sample size, and a bunch of angry homeschooling parents defending themselves against the accusation. I will simply say that, in my experience, I have not observed your predictions to be accurate.
There’s a LOT of low-level socialization stuff that you mostly pick up by peer immersion (even near-neurological stuff like reading facial expressions). And then there’s the confidence factor. It’s easier to go into adulthood talking to people your own age if you’ve been talking to dozens or hundreds of people your own age every day your whole life. If you haven’t, you’re missing numerous social cues, and a good deal of confidence.
I mean, I came out relatively normal, minus some initial awkwardness—but what you hear, frequently, is ’Oh, you’re homeschooled? And you talk?” Which is not a particularly good sign.
So, a big part of the trouble with science on this subject is the selection effects. Parents have to choose to homeschool their kids, or put their kids in Montessori schools, or so on.
Another issue is that, well, social troubles are everywhere. I know lots of people whose social lives collapsed after college, because they don’t know how to maneuver socially as an adult.
So there are two cores that I’m confident in, with no commentary on how successfully they’re approached in the real world:
Prussian-style schools socialize students in the way they were designed- to be soldiers who form bonds with people they need to form bonds with and to respect authority.
Deliberate socialization of modern adults should reflect the lives of modern adults- which include frequent moves to new locations, access to the Internet, and specialization of taste. Social skills should be treated as skills, which take instruction and practice just like other skills like math.
I’m more familiar with “unschooled” children, who in my experience don’t have these sorts of problems. I don’t think any of their parents were particularly aggressive about socialization (or about anything) but they seemed to find plenty of opportunities to interact with people of all ages.
I really don’t think it’s helpful for children to socialize with lots of other children in an environment with few authority figures. They learn how to be brutal with each other and make up their own status games, rather than learning to be decent members of society.
I was being optimistic and hoping it was something else (like general objection to your overall position in related context.) As a standalone comment it seems straightforward. Status games are what allows humans to form vaguely functioning ‘societies’ in the first place. Being considered a “decent member of society” means competing at least passably well in the status game centered around moral judgement and norm enforcement.
You could imitate the adults, surely, with some adjustments conveyed verbally? Unless all the adults around you are playing weird status games and you get swatted down for doing their “I am a grownup” status moves.
The status games that adults play with each other are different from the status games they play with kids, and different from the games kids play with each other. Adults have power and responsibility that kids don’t have, so to some extent, yes, kids are swatted down for “playing grownup.” If you tried to fix that, you may well end up with alternate problems—when kids get into the college world where there’s STILL a difference between peers and authority-figures, they may end up having trouble negotiating the differences.
On top of that, a homeschool environment is simply radically different in nature than college. You usually have a small number of adults interacting with a small number of kids, which changes the kind of attention and flexibility kids have with their “adult peers.”
Some of this is a matter of conflict with a particular set of social norms—a society with different expectations of kids AND adults could hypothetically be a radical improvement over typical western societies. But it’s a non-trivial problem to solve and it’s not solved by just telling parents “treat your kids like peers” (because there are good reasons not to do that as well, children DO need authority figures of some sort)
The general belief is that school provides socialization, and that homeschooled kids who lack that tend to have poor social skills. Even if that wasn’t true, it’s a widely-shared belief, and a startup of this kind will need to address the fact that people believe in it.
I don’t think schools are likely to do a much better job of socializing their students than the various mechanisms in place before compulsory schooling; they probably do do a better job of conditioning students to accept a certain type of authority figure, but that’s an argument that doesn’t have any place in a business plan.
Those aren’t the alternative here, though. The alternative is homeschooling or whatever improvement on contemporary homeschooling we can produce. And having known a few homeschooled kids in my time, I’d have to say that no, they aren’t socialized as well on average as conventionally educated students. I’d speculate that this is due mainly to missing out on a large set of potential social contacts—many themselves poorly socialized, of course, but also including quite a few adults involved with the school system or with schoolfriends. That’s all anecdotal, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a controlled study and am not sure how you’d design one.
Do you think kids are better socialized at school than at work, staying with grandparents, or whatever else they would be doing if they weren’t in school?
That way they only socialize with adults (unless they have siblings), not with other children (with ages similar enough to consider them their peers).
Voluntary meetups for website users could provide a similar effect.
offloading enough caregiver burden for both parents
Yep, this one is the real problem. Free childcare in a noble disguise of education, this is why we like our school system! A possible solution would be cooperating with various existing child care systems—they provide the child care, you provide additional interesting content they can use.
To the best of my (limited) knowledge, while there are currently various computerized exercises available, they aren’t that good at offering instruction of the “I don’t understand why this step works” kind, and are often pretty limited (e.g. Khan Academy has exercises which are just multiple choice questions, which isn’t a very good bad format). One could try to offer a more sophisticated system—first, present experienced teachers/tutors with a collection of the problems you’ll be giving to the students, and ask them to list the most common problems and misunderstandings that the students tend to have with such problems. Then attempt to build a system which will recognize the symptoms of the most common misunderstandings and attempt to provide advice on them, also offering the student the opportunity to ask it themselves using some menu system or natural language parser. (I know some existing academic work along these lines exists, I think applying Bayes nets to build up a model of the students’ skills and understanding, but I couldn’t find the reference in the place where I thought that I had read it.)
Of course, there will frequently be situations where your existing database fails to understand the student’s need. So you combine this with the chance to ask help online, either on a forum with other students, or one-on-one with a paid tutor in an interactive chat session. As the students’ problems are resolved, the maintainers follow the conversations and figure out a way for the system to recognize the new problems in the future, either automatically or via the “ask a question” menus.
In particular, the system would be built so that having e.g. forgotten some of the prerequisites in a previous course wouldn’t be a problem—if that happened, the system would just automatically lead you to partially rehearse those concepts enough that you could apply them to solve the current problem. At the same time, it could be designed that all of the previous knowledge was being constantly drawn upon, thus providing a natural method for spaced repetition.
This method is naturally most suited for math-like subjects with clear right/wrong answers. But if one wanted to get really ambitious, they could eventually expand the system so as to create a single unified school course that taught everything that’s usually taught in high school, abandoning the artificial limits between subjects. E.g. a lesson during which you traveled back in time to witness an important battle (history), helped calculate the cannon ball trajectories for one of the sides (physics), stopped to study a wounded soldier and the effects of the wounds on his body (human biology), and then finally helped the army band play the victory song (music)… or something along those lines. Ideally, there’d be little difference between taking a school lesson and playing a good computer game.
There is an academic field around this called intelligent tutoring systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system). The biggest company with an ITS, as far as I know, is Carnegie Learning, which provides entire K-12 curricula for it: books, teacher training, software. CL has had mixed evaluations in the past, but I think a fair conclusion at this point is that ITS significantly improves learning outcomes when implemented in an environment where they are able to use software as it’s intended to be used (follow the training, spend enough time, etc).
As far as I know there isn’t anything quite like this in a widely deployed online system with community discussion as you suggest. Grockit (http://grockit.com) is a social test prep site that is familiar with the ITS community and uses some principles. Khan Academy is continuing to improve, but I can’t say whether they will reach the state of the art as far as intelligent tutors go. I’d say there’s definitely an opportunity for more ITS in online learning now, but it isn’t easy to build.
This method is naturally most suited for math-like subjects with clear right/wrong answers.
Having worked with online homework systems in mathematics for the past three years, let me say a thing—even in mathematics, there are only clear right/wrong answers in trivial cases. It may be mostly anecdotal, but there is weak evidence that the written correspondence between professor and student that manually-graded homework provides is important to the learning process in mathematics.
Peer pressure and the desire to surpass your heroes seem like a large part of why teachers and other students are so important however. If at some point a teaching simulator of this caliber is created, we could integrate a ranking system where you are automatically connected with people at a similar level to compete, and you can level up by helping people with problems as well (To continue the idea of gamification to its logical extreme...)
The systems which let people learn in competetive games like starcraft are amazing, and if they were properly applied to useful education at least some people would benefit tremendously.
Your approach—targeting home-schoolers who are “nonconsumers” of public K-12 education—is exactly the approach advocated by disruption theory and specifically the book Disrupting Class. Using public education as analogous to established leaders in other industries, disruption always comes from the outside because the leaders aren’t structurally able to do anything other than serve their consumers with marginal improvements.
ArtofProblemSolving.com is one successful example that’s targeted gifted home-schoolers (and others looking for extracurricular learning) in math. I’m sure there are others. EdSurge.com is a good place to look for existing services, which you can sort by criteria including common core/state-standards aligned (you do have to register for free to get the list of resources). I also have thought about services that build on top of Khan Academy, but I wouldn’t underestimate their ability to improve in that area. They just released a fantastic computer science platform. But they are a non-profit, so their growth depends, I suppose, on Bill Gates’ mood and other philanthropy. To get to full disruption, it might take a for-profit with, as you suggest, monetization through tutoring and other valuable services.
This Company starts in the United States and ties into existing home school regulations with a self-driven web learning program that requires minimum parental involvement and results in a high school degree.
The nice thing about this is that it works on an existing market, while leveraging the successful tactics discovered through hard work by Coursera & the like to bring advances to the domain.
Of course, techniques designed for university courses may not precisely transfer.
I’m skeptical about ‘leveraging’ videos from Khan Academy for a for-profit education system. Makes it sound half-baked.
This idea may fit with the general spaced-repetition enthusiasm I am seeing in other proposals.
It cloaks itself as merely a tool to aid homeschool parents, similar to existing mail-order tutoring materials, hiding its radical mission to end high school as we know it.
I’m skeptical about ‘leveraging’ videos from Khan Academy for a for-profit education system. Makes it sound half-baked.
Some selected public or private schools are already doing this, with great results from what little data I’ve seen. The feedback from the children themselves, at the very least, is impressive—the vast majority of them allegedly report (in less sciencey words) a vast improvement in their reasoning skills and their enthusiasm, motivation and enjoyment of mathematics, sciences, and studying in general.
Unfortunately, this is still on an extremely insignificantly small scale, with only a handful of teachers spread out over 4-6 schools doing this, some of them with direct collaboration from Khan Academy IIRC.
...you just jinxed it! Now congress is going to pass a new bill forbidding online aids to count towards compulsory education requirements for home schooling, and otherwise hamper the idea by whatever means necessary.
After all, what better propaganda system is there than a bunch of gullible “teachers” who regurgitate everything you tell them to and whom children look up to as absolute authorities?
Tagline: Coursera for high school
Mission: The economist Eric Hanushek has shown that if the USA could replace the worst 7% of K-12 teachers with merely average teachers, it would have the best education system in the world. What if we instead replaced the bottom 90% of teachers in every country with great instruction?
The Company: Online learning startups like Coursera and Udacity are in the process of showing how technology can scale great teaching to large numbers of university students (I’ve written about the mechanics of this elsewhere). Let’s bring a similar model to high school.
This Company starts in the United States and ties into existing home school regulations with a self-driven web learning program that requires minimum parental involvement and results in a high school degree. It cloaks itself as merely a tool to aid homeschool parents, similar to existing mail-order tutoring materials, hiding its radical mission to end high school as we know it.
The result is high-quality education for every student. In addition to the high quality, it gives the student schedule flexibility to pursue other interests outside of high school. Many exceptional young people I know dodge the traditional schools early in life. This product gives everyone that opportunity.
By lowering the cost of going home-school, this product will enlargen the home school market and threaten traditional educrats while producing more exceptional minds.
With direct access to millions of students, the website will be able to monetize through one-on-one tutoring markets, college prep services, and other means.
Course material can be bootstrapped by constructing a curriculum out of free videos provided through sources like the Khan Academy. The value-add of the Company will be to tailor the curriculum to the home-school requirements of the particular state of the student.
My background: I cofounded a company that’s had reasonable success. I’m not much of a Less Wrong fan—I find the community to be an intellectual monoculture, dogmatic, and full of blind spots to flaws in the philosophy it preaches. BUT this is an idea that needs to happen, as it will provide much value to the world. Contact me at firstname lastname gmail if you have lots of money or can hack. Or hell, steal the idea and do it yourself. Just make it happen.
Modern compulsory schooling seems to have at least three major sociological effects: socializing its students, offloading enough caregiver burden for both parents to efficiently participate in the workforce, and finally education. For a widespread homeschooling system to be attractive, it’s either going to need to fulfill all three, or to be so spectacularly good at one or two that the shortcomings in the others are overwhelmed. Current homeschooling, for comparison, does an acceptable job of education but fails at the other two; consequently it’s used mainly by people with very strong objections to the curriculum or other aspects of the school system. That’s a small and inelastic market, and you aren’t going to enlarge it much without some significant incentives.
Socialization could be addressed by integrating access to hobby groups, sports teams, Scouting-like services and what have you into the program’s structure; you’d probably have to push this hard to overcome the perception gap, but it ought to be doable. Some facility for students to self-organize into study groups might also help at the high school level, but it’s unlikely to be practical at younger ages.
Offloading caregiver burden is a trickier problem. There seems to be a time/money tradeoff here: you can reduce or eliminate parental involvement during working hours if they’re willing to pay for tutoring services and similar resources, but those aren’t cheap, and both routes make homeschooling less attractive relative to traditional schooling. Study groups again would help here, but I don’t think they can substitute for an expert human without some exceptional cleverness.
The market is most likely still larger than sufficient for the enterprise to be worth it. I only have personal WAG estimates to rely on, but it’s pretty hard to get market data on a currently-counterfactual service that people have never even seen.
Anecdotally, out of a sample size of over 60 high school students, at least 8 (including myself) had confirmed to me they would definitely jump right on any alternative form of education that would still be officially recognized, since here homeschooling is very, very difficult to get approved and recognized as equivalent to a standard education. A single institution that you just sign up, and work through the material, and perhaps attend meetings to socialize, but that isn’t bogged down by all the problems of shitty teachers and teacher-politics and crappy coursework? That would have (and still does) sounded like an utopian dream by comparison to the dreary and painful system we were stuck in.
Of course, that’s just the students themselves, and parents are a different problem to solve too. However, 10-15% of high school students is not a small market. I’m quite certain (.98) that there are at least twice as many people with strong objections to the curriculum or other aspects as there are who actually do use current alternatives, simply by factoring in the amount of people held back by legal / institutional restrictions that require the child to go through regular compulsory education. From what I understand, bypassing this hurdle is exactly the primary service of this hypothetical company.
Also, as long as you can keep the total cost of the company’s services for one child equal or under the current standard costs of compulsory education without sacrificing superior education quality, the inherent scalability of the proposed teaching techniques will mean that as your clientbase grows, your ability to provide workspaces, study groups and competent staff increases, which would further expand the market and clientbase, and then…
Yeah, lots of optimistic and positive thinking there. However, I’d really like to do what I can to save other people from the depressive ugh field that I got stuck into throughout high school—an ugh field that eventually killed my hopes of “things getting better” by the time I got to cégep and realized that even there, perfect answers with clear, written reasoning on a math test was still only worth 75% if you didn’t have the right passwords (though I didn’t think of it in these particular terms at the time, but that’s what it was).
A good solution to those problems would have meant less time wasted in high school, and not dropping out of cégep, for this particular individual. Which, incidentally, also means I wouldn’t have gotten this job with a ton of free time to read LessWrong, but that’s another story.
Relative to what? Do you think kids are better socialized at school than at work, staying with grandparents, or whatever else they would be doing if they weren’t in school? It seems implausible that kids are going to be socialized efficiently by hanging out with a bunch of other non-socialized persons, rather than persons that are already socialized.
In Harlow’s monkey experiments, the most destructive thing to deprive monkeys of is contact with peers at a young age. Monkeys that don’t spend time with other young monkeys as children tend to grow up psychotic and wildly dysfunctional.
Fortunately, there are plenty of places outside of school where young humans can socialize with other young humans (especially if a lot of them aren’t going to school!) - parks, martial arts dojos, neighborhoods, etc.
I was homeschooled, and, yes, that’s true—but, it’s really not the same level of exposure as being surrounded by other people your own age for the majority of every day. When I got to college, there was a massive relative deficit in basic social skills that I had to make up rather quickly.
Why were adults unable to teach you those social skills?
Because the way you interact with small children is wildly, radically different from the way that either adults or children interact with their own peers. This is also a trend I’ve observed much more widely than just myself. Homeschooled children come out weird unless their parents are very, very aggressive about socialization, much more so than most people would consider reasonable.
“Socialization” needs to be broken down a bit more, I suspect.
The trouble is that school-related socialization is very different from adult socialization. When you’re locked in a box with other people for eight hours a day, you get to know them and make friends for geographic reasons.
Adults don’t have that opportunity, though, and do have many other opportunities. Approaching someone because the teacher assigned you to do a group project together is different from approaching an attractive person at a bar.
It seems to me that homeschooling is better at teaching adult-style socialization (finding places where friends are likely, and then making friends there), which is way more useful than school-style socialization. But homeschooling typically doesn’t include the sheer amount of socialization that school does, instead filling it with things are educational or fun. Which… seems like an acceptable tradeoff, to me.
I wish I could find some science on the subject, but all I can find with some cursory googling is one study with a 30-child sample size, and a bunch of angry homeschooling parents defending themselves against the accusation. I will simply say that, in my experience, I have not observed your predictions to be accurate.
There’s a LOT of low-level socialization stuff that you mostly pick up by peer immersion (even near-neurological stuff like reading facial expressions). And then there’s the confidence factor. It’s easier to go into adulthood talking to people your own age if you’ve been talking to dozens or hundreds of people your own age every day your whole life. If you haven’t, you’re missing numerous social cues, and a good deal of confidence.
I mean, I came out relatively normal, minus some initial awkwardness—but what you hear, frequently, is ’Oh, you’re homeschooled? And you talk?” Which is not a particularly good sign.
So, a big part of the trouble with science on this subject is the selection effects. Parents have to choose to homeschool their kids, or put their kids in Montessori schools, or so on.
Another issue is that, well, social troubles are everywhere. I know lots of people whose social lives collapsed after college, because they don’t know how to maneuver socially as an adult.
So there are two cores that I’m confident in, with no commentary on how successfully they’re approached in the real world:
Prussian-style schools socialize students in the way they were designed- to be soldiers who form bonds with people they need to form bonds with and to respect authority.
Deliberate socialization of modern adults should reflect the lives of modern adults- which include frequent moves to new locations, access to the Internet, and specialization of taste. Social skills should be treated as skills, which take instruction and practice just like other skills like math.
I’m more familiar with “unschooled” children, who in my experience don’t have these sorts of problems. I don’t think any of their parents were particularly aggressive about socialization (or about anything) but they seemed to find plenty of opportunities to interact with people of all ages.
I really don’t think it’s helpful for children to socialize with lots of other children in an environment with few authority figures. They learn how to be brutal with each other and make up their own status games, rather than learning to be decent members of society.
Status games are a big, big part of the behavior most people consider to be ‘being a decent member of society.’
Why was this downvoted? For stating the obvious?
I was guessing for cynicism.
EDIT: Okay, now I’m simply confused.
I was being optimistic and hoping it was something else (like general objection to your overall position in related context.) As a standalone comment it seems straightforward. Status games are what allows humans to form vaguely functioning ‘societies’ in the first place. Being considered a “decent member of society” means competing at least passably well in the status game centered around moral judgement and norm enforcement.
Maybe someone for some reason doesn’t like to read about status games in general.
Possibly because Mirror neurons—you have to have someone to imitate.
You could imitate the adults, surely, with some adjustments conveyed verbally? Unless all the adults around you are playing weird status games and you get swatted down for doing their “I am a grownup” status moves.
There’s a few problems with it -
The status games that adults play with each other are different from the status games they play with kids, and different from the games kids play with each other. Adults have power and responsibility that kids don’t have, so to some extent, yes, kids are swatted down for “playing grownup.” If you tried to fix that, you may well end up with alternate problems—when kids get into the college world where there’s STILL a difference between peers and authority-figures, they may end up having trouble negotiating the differences.
On top of that, a homeschool environment is simply radically different in nature than college. You usually have a small number of adults interacting with a small number of kids, which changes the kind of attention and flexibility kids have with their “adult peers.”
Some of this is a matter of conflict with a particular set of social norms—a society with different expectations of kids AND adults could hypothetically be a radical improvement over typical western societies. But it’s a non-trivial problem to solve and it’s not solved by just telling parents “treat your kids like peers” (because there are good reasons not to do that as well, children DO need authority figures of some sort)
The general belief is that school provides socialization, and that homeschooled kids who lack that tend to have poor social skills. Even if that wasn’t true, it’s a widely-shared belief, and a startup of this kind will need to address the fact that people believe in it.
I don’t think schools are likely to do a much better job of socializing their students than the various mechanisms in place before compulsory schooling; they probably do do a better job of conditioning students to accept a certain type of authority figure, but that’s an argument that doesn’t have any place in a business plan.
Those aren’t the alternative here, though. The alternative is homeschooling or whatever improvement on contemporary homeschooling we can produce. And having known a few homeschooled kids in my time, I’d have to say that no, they aren’t socialized as well on average as conventionally educated students. I’d speculate that this is due mainly to missing out on a large set of potential social contacts—many themselves poorly socialized, of course, but also including quite a few adults involved with the school system or with schoolfriends. That’s all anecdotal, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a controlled study and am not sure how you’d design one.
That way they only socialize with adults (unless they have siblings), not with other children (with ages similar enough to consider them their peers).
Voluntary meetups for website users could provide a similar effect.
Yep, this one is the real problem. Free childcare in a noble disguise of education, this is why we like our school system! A possible solution would be cooperating with various existing child care systems—they provide the child care, you provide additional interesting content they can use.
Related idea: semi-computerized instruction.
To the best of my (limited) knowledge, while there are currently various computerized exercises available, they aren’t that good at offering instruction of the “I don’t understand why this step works” kind, and are often pretty limited (e.g. Khan Academy has exercises which are just multiple choice questions, which isn’t a very good bad format). One could try to offer a more sophisticated system—first, present experienced teachers/tutors with a collection of the problems you’ll be giving to the students, and ask them to list the most common problems and misunderstandings that the students tend to have with such problems. Then attempt to build a system which will recognize the symptoms of the most common misunderstandings and attempt to provide advice on them, also offering the student the opportunity to ask it themselves using some menu system or natural language parser. (I know some existing academic work along these lines exists, I think applying Bayes nets to build up a model of the students’ skills and understanding, but I couldn’t find the reference in the place where I thought that I had read it.)
Of course, there will frequently be situations where your existing database fails to understand the student’s need. So you combine this with the chance to ask help online, either on a forum with other students, or one-on-one with a paid tutor in an interactive chat session. As the students’ problems are resolved, the maintainers follow the conversations and figure out a way for the system to recognize the new problems in the future, either automatically or via the “ask a question” menus.
In particular, the system would be built so that having e.g. forgotten some of the prerequisites in a previous course wouldn’t be a problem—if that happened, the system would just automatically lead you to partially rehearse those concepts enough that you could apply them to solve the current problem. At the same time, it could be designed that all of the previous knowledge was being constantly drawn upon, thus providing a natural method for spaced repetition.
This method is naturally most suited for math-like subjects with clear right/wrong answers. But if one wanted to get really ambitious, they could eventually expand the system so as to create a single unified school course that taught everything that’s usually taught in high school, abandoning the artificial limits between subjects. E.g. a lesson during which you traveled back in time to witness an important battle (history), helped calculate the cannon ball trajectories for one of the sides (physics), stopped to study a wounded soldier and the effects of the wounds on his body (human biology), and then finally helped the army band play the victory song (music)… or something along those lines. Ideally, there’d be little difference between taking a school lesson and playing a good computer game.
There is an academic field around this called intelligent tutoring systems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_tutoring_system). The biggest company with an ITS, as far as I know, is Carnegie Learning, which provides entire K-12 curricula for it: books, teacher training, software. CL has had mixed evaluations in the past, but I think a fair conclusion at this point is that ITS significantly improves learning outcomes when implemented in an environment where they are able to use software as it’s intended to be used (follow the training, spend enough time, etc).
As far as I know there isn’t anything quite like this in a widely deployed online system with community discussion as you suggest. Grockit (http://grockit.com) is a social test prep site that is familiar with the ITS community and uses some principles. Khan Academy is continuing to improve, but I can’t say whether they will reach the state of the art as far as intelligent tutors go. I’d say there’s definitely an opportunity for more ITS in online learning now, but it isn’t easy to build.
The Wikipedia article is OK. One example of a recent paper is http://users.wpi.edu/~zpardos/papers/zpardos-its-final22.pdf which also shows some of the human work that goes into modeling the knowledge domain for an ITS.
Having worked with online homework systems in mathematics for the past three years, let me say a thing—even in mathematics, there are only clear right/wrong answers in trivial cases. It may be mostly anecdotal, but there is weak evidence that the written correspondence between professor and student that manually-graded homework provides is important to the learning process in mathematics.
In general I’m heavily skeptical of gamification.
Peer pressure and the desire to surpass your heroes seem like a large part of why teachers and other students are so important however. If at some point a teaching simulator of this caliber is created, we could integrate a ranking system where you are automatically connected with people at a similar level to compete, and you can level up by helping people with problems as well (To continue the idea of gamification to its logical extreme...) The systems which let people learn in competetive games like starcraft are amazing, and if they were properly applied to useful education at least some people would benefit tremendously.
Your approach—targeting home-schoolers who are “nonconsumers” of public K-12 education—is exactly the approach advocated by disruption theory and specifically the book Disrupting Class. Using public education as analogous to established leaders in other industries, disruption always comes from the outside because the leaders aren’t structurally able to do anything other than serve their consumers with marginal improvements.
ArtofProblemSolving.com is one successful example that’s targeted gifted home-schoolers (and others looking for extracurricular learning) in math. I’m sure there are others. EdSurge.com is a good place to look for existing services, which you can sort by criteria including common core/state-standards aligned (you do have to register for free to get the list of resources). I also have thought about services that build on top of Khan Academy, but I wouldn’t underestimate their ability to improve in that area. They just released a fantastic computer science platform. But they are a non-profit, so their growth depends, I suppose, on Bill Gates’ mood and other philanthropy. To get to full disruption, it might take a for-profit with, as you suggest, monetization through tutoring and other valuable services.
The nice thing about this is that it works on an existing market, while leveraging the successful tactics discovered through hard work by Coursera & the like to bring advances to the domain.
Of course, techniques designed for university courses may not precisely transfer.
I’m skeptical about ‘leveraging’ videos from Khan Academy for a for-profit education system. Makes it sound half-baked.
This idea may fit with the general spaced-repetition enthusiasm I am seeing in other proposals.
...And you just blew your cover. :)
Some selected public or private schools are already doing this, with great results from what little data I’ve seen. The feedback from the children themselves, at the very least, is impressive—the vast majority of them allegedly report (in less sciencey words) a vast improvement in their reasoning skills and their enthusiasm, motivation and enjoyment of mathematics, sciences, and studying in general.
Unfortunately, this is still on an extremely insignificantly small scale, with only a handful of teachers spread out over 4-6 schools doing this, some of them with direct collaboration from Khan Academy IIRC.
Nobody of any importance reads Less Wrong :)
...you just jinxed it! Now congress is going to pass a new bill forbidding online aids to count towards compulsory education requirements for home schooling, and otherwise hamper the idea by whatever means necessary.
After all, what better propaganda system is there than a bunch of gullible “teachers” who regurgitate everything you tell them to and whom children look up to as absolute authorities?
Fortunately, the United States has a strong evangelical Christian lobby that fights for and protects home schooling freedom.
Good point. I have a tendency to forget about them. Mind projection and all that.