Just my experience of many things that can go wrong. Many people notice just one of them and suppose that this is the problem of education, and if you optimize for fixing it, everything will automatically be allright. The most popular example among non-teachers on internet is “creativity”, I believe. Just throw everything out of the window, maximize for “creativity” and you are done. Even worse, those people usually can’t even taboo “creativity” and tell you what specifically they mean and how specifically would they optimize for it. It’s just an applause light; in best case, they will give you a hyperlink to some TEDx talk with some smart kid doing something that happens to be creative and say: more of this. Silently assuming that if you would put all children into exactly the same situation, you would get exactly the same results, reliably.
And by this I am not saying that “creativity” (however we define it) is bad; merely that it is just one important goal among many. Not merely guessing the teacher’s password is another value, obvious for a LW reader. It is good to give students freedom to explore the topics they are interested about; but we should also take care they don’t have huge blind spots in areas that for whatever reason didn’t catch their interest. It is good to teach them to find their own sources in books or online; but there is also a lot of pseudoscience and other bullshit out there. This whole process has to be done within some financial constraints. Putting more students together, we need to take care about some social issues, e.g. to prevent bullying. We need a way to deal with actively malicious students. We need some system of evaluation, at least for feedback while studying; some people think it is a good idea to also include certification. Etc. And don’t forget that children are diffferent and what works perfectly for one of them can fail horribly for another.
Just my experience of many things that can go wrong. Many people notice just one of them and suppose that this is the problem of education, and if you optimize for fixing it, everything will automatically be allright. The most popular example among non-teachers on internet is “creativity”, I believe. Just throw everything out of the window, maximize for “creativity” and you are done. Even worse, those people usually can’t even taboo “creativity” and tell you what specifically they mean and how specifically would they optimize for it. It’s just an applause light; in best case, they will give you a hyperlink to some TEDx talk with some smart kid doing something that happens to be creative and say: more of this. Silently assuming that if you would put all children into exactly the same situation, you would get exactly the same results, reliably.
And by this I am not saying that “creativity” (however we define it) is bad; merely that it is just one important goal among many. Not merely guessing the teacher’s password is another value, obvious for a LW reader. It is good to give students freedom to explore the topics they are interested about; but we should also take care they don’t have huge blind spots in areas that for whatever reason didn’t catch their interest. It is good to teach them to find their own sources in books or online; but there is also a lot of pseudoscience and other bullshit out there. This whole process has to be done within some financial constraints. Putting more students together, we need to take care about some social issues, e.g. to prevent bullying. We need a way to deal with actively malicious students. We need some system of evaluation, at least for feedback while studying; some people think it is a good idea to also include certification. Etc. And don’t forget that children are diffferent and what works perfectly for one of them can fail horribly for another.