In addition to my other comments, I’d like to ask what your overall goal is for grade-school education. (It seems to me that most of your arguments are about grade school and not college.
I’d like to amplify that point. Educating people who mostly want to be educated is very different to educating people who mostly don’t want to be there.
This is one of the most important things in education. Sometimes a completely opposite strategy is required. For example, if students want to learn, you can give them necessary resources and let them study at their own speed. If students don’t want to learn, using this strategy they would learn nothing. Similarly, if students want to learn, it is good to have a debate about the topic. If they don’t want to learn, they will only use the debate to waste time.
We could separate the students who want to learn from those who don’t, and use different strategies for these groups. Problem is, how to separate them. If you ask students, some students will mistakenly believe they want to learn (for example, they would say they want to learn about computer science, when in reality they only enjoy playing computer games). Some of them will lie to make a good impression; or their parents will make them lie.
A possible approach would be to use some costly signalling. For example, to offer “advanced lessons” for volunteers in the afternoon, and later separate the students who participated in these advanced lessons. But this will only work once; when your method becomes known, again, even people without interest in the topic will “volunteer” for the advanced lessons.
It seems your first paragraph outlines a solution for the second paragraph. First spend some time teaching students using a method that works well for motivated learners and poorly for unmotivated learners. Then give a placement test measuring how much they learned. Put the people who did well in the placement test into a group that teaches motivated students, and the people who did poorly into a group that teaches unmotivated students.
I’d like to amplify that point. Educating people who mostly want to be educated is very different to educating people who mostly don’t want to be there.
This is one of the most important things in education. Sometimes a completely opposite strategy is required. For example, if students want to learn, you can give them necessary resources and let them study at their own speed. If students don’t want to learn, using this strategy they would learn nothing. Similarly, if students want to learn, it is good to have a debate about the topic. If they don’t want to learn, they will only use the debate to waste time.
We could separate the students who want to learn from those who don’t, and use different strategies for these groups. Problem is, how to separate them. If you ask students, some students will mistakenly believe they want to learn (for example, they would say they want to learn about computer science, when in reality they only enjoy playing computer games). Some of them will lie to make a good impression; or their parents will make them lie.
A possible approach would be to use some costly signalling. For example, to offer “advanced lessons” for volunteers in the afternoon, and later separate the students who participated in these advanced lessons. But this will only work once; when your method becomes known, again, even people without interest in the topic will “volunteer” for the advanced lessons.
It seems your first paragraph outlines a solution for the second paragraph. First spend some time teaching students using a method that works well for motivated learners and poorly for unmotivated learners. Then give a placement test measuring how much they learned. Put the people who did well in the placement test into a group that teaches motivated students, and the people who did poorly into a group that teaches unmotivated students.