You use the metaphor of ‘Social Media as Architecture’ and I think that architecture has something to offer in improving education.
In A Pattern Language Christopher Alexander (disclaimer: my favorite book on architecture and more) calls it the Network Of Learning (links to a page with resources on the patterns). He writes:
In a society which emphasizes teaching, children and students—and adults—become passive and unable to think or act for themselves. Creative, active individuals can only grow up in a society which emphasizes learning instead of teaching.
and recommends
Instead of the lock-step of compulsory schooling in a fixed place, work in piecemeal ways to decentralize the process of learning and enrich it through contact with many places and people all over the city: workshops, teachers at home or walking through the city, professionals willing to take on the young as helpers, older children teaching younger children, museums, youth groups traveling, scholarly seminars, industrial workshops, old people, and so on. Conceive of all these situations as forming the backbone of the learning process; survey all these situations, describe them, and publish them as the city’s “curriculum”; then let students, children, their families and neighborhoods weave together for themselves the situations that comprise their “school” paying as they go with standard vouchers, raised by community tax. Build new educational facilities in a way which extends and enriches this network.
Its always fascinating reading accounts about educational reform from the 70s—there’s such a sense of optimism, it seems obvious school will soon be something of the past! they’re qouting government reports about the need to deschool and integrate learning into society instead! I think Venezuela had a department of Unschooling or some such. There were big learning networks set up, people arranging workshops in their homes. And then—what happened really? The learning networks collapsed under their own growth, they couldn’t afford administration and facilities, claims Holt. Why did the attempts at reform retreat and collapse? From the 80s onward, it seems all energy was directed into homeschooling – that is exiting the system. I’m all for that, there’s a lot of value in bottom up reform, but there’s been little progress on the infrastructure needed to make self-directed learning truly effective at a societal level. I have a hole in my historical understanding here.
You may want to contact Roland Reichart-Mückstein from OPENschool in Austria. He has spent a lot of thought on that subject, and gave a lesson at a LessWrong meetup a few years ago, specifically mentioning this weird thing about how many “revolutionary new ideas about education” were already described in books printed half a century ago… and yet, seemingly, nothing happened. I am not sure I remember his explanations correctly, which is why I am telling you to contact the source.
The rest of the comment is just me speaking my own opinions. First, I think the problem with school system is that it is trying to accomplish many things at the same time, while being dishonest about the constraints and tradeoffs involved, which is why the results are mediocre. (A bit like the difference between Linux software which “tries to do one thing, and do it well” and Windows software which “tries to make a half-assed job at everything, to tick many checkboxes on the feature list”.) For example, an essential part of school system is babysitting, so that both parents can go to work. This is quite obvious, especially in the COVID-19 situation, when the schools were closed for a few months, and yet it is almost a taboo to mention that. Many attempts to improve education are doomed to fail because they somehow endanger the task of babysitting. Like, all attempts to educate online.
Then you have the contradictory goals of teaching high-status abstract knowledge, or useful but low-status skills. The perfect student is a future professor or a government bureaucrat; skilled in abstract knowledge and paperwork. Everything else feels like a compromise on the noble ideals. Teaching for actual jobs feels dirty. (A good argument can be made about less abstract skills becoming obsolete sooner. Yes, that is a good point, but it is not the full story. Memorizing the works of Shakespeare is not an abstract deep truth about the universe or human soul; it is merely a high-status kind of knowledge.) You can teach software development online, but educators will hold their nose, because doing something so directly useful is really low-status. STEM is low-status, humanities are high-status, get over it.
Another conflict is whether the school is supposed to help everyone, or separate the wheat from the chaff. The elementary school is more of the former, later schools are more of the latter. Giving knowledge to everyone is a noble ideal, but there is also a social demand to have people selected and certified for intelligence and obedience, because that is what the employers and the governments want. From this perspective, having many students fail at school is a feature, not a bug! If no students or almost no students fail, then the school itself fails at the task of filtering them. Which is why if you hypothetically found a system that can perfectly teach anyone anything, you would find a surprising resistance that people couldn’t articulate properly but would feel strongly about. At the end of the day, we want educational system to preserve the inequalities between the social classes; to split the population into the educated caste and the non-educated caste. The educated caste wants to publicly invite everyone into their ranks, but it also wants to see most of them fail, so the educated ones can feel better about their own position at the top of the ladder. (“We generously gave the chance to everyone; it is not our fault that those people were too lazy and stupid, so now their role is to serve us.”) If you succeed to teach everyone software development skills, what will happen with the salaries of the software developers? How will middle-class parents make sure that their kids all get middle-class jobs?
School doesn’t scale well, because babysitting doesn’t scale well. If you need too many teachers, you will get many incompetent ones, because being picky is not compatible with having to hire tens of thousands. If you find a better way to teach, the problem may be that the incompetent ones will be unable to do it well. The current system is set up to work well with incompetent teachers; the competent ones may do their job better, but that is optional.
The school is not optimal for learning, because the school follows many different goals.
I love the architecture sketched by Christopher Alexander. And it is surprisingly evidence-based and he is transparent about which patterns he is confident in and which less so.
You use the metaphor of ‘Social Media as Architecture’ and I think that architecture has something to offer in improving education.
In A Pattern Language Christopher Alexander (disclaimer: my favorite book on architecture and more) calls it the Network Of Learning (links to a page with resources on the patterns). He writes:
and recommends
Its always fascinating reading accounts about educational reform from the 70s—there’s such a sense of optimism, it seems obvious school will soon be something of the past! they’re qouting government reports about the need to deschool and integrate learning into society instead! I think Venezuela had a department of Unschooling or some such. There were big learning networks set up, people arranging workshops in their homes. And then—what happened really? The learning networks collapsed under their own growth, they couldn’t afford administration and facilities, claims Holt. Why did the attempts at reform retreat and collapse? From the 80s onward, it seems all energy was directed into homeschooling – that is exiting the system. I’m all for that, there’s a lot of value in bottom up reform, but there’s been little progress on the infrastructure needed to make self-directed learning truly effective at a societal level. I have a hole in my historical understanding here.
You may want to contact Roland Reichart-Mückstein from OPENschool in Austria. He has spent a lot of thought on that subject, and gave a lesson at a LessWrong meetup a few years ago, specifically mentioning this weird thing about how many “revolutionary new ideas about education” were already described in books printed half a century ago… and yet, seemingly, nothing happened. I am not sure I remember his explanations correctly, which is why I am telling you to contact the source.
The rest of the comment is just me speaking my own opinions. First, I think the problem with school system is that it is trying to accomplish many things at the same time, while being dishonest about the constraints and tradeoffs involved, which is why the results are mediocre. (A bit like the difference between Linux software which “tries to do one thing, and do it well” and Windows software which “tries to make a half-assed job at everything, to tick many checkboxes on the feature list”.) For example, an essential part of school system is babysitting, so that both parents can go to work. This is quite obvious, especially in the COVID-19 situation, when the schools were closed for a few months, and yet it is almost a taboo to mention that. Many attempts to improve education are doomed to fail because they somehow endanger the task of babysitting. Like, all attempts to educate online.
Then you have the contradictory goals of teaching high-status abstract knowledge, or useful but low-status skills. The perfect student is a future professor or a government bureaucrat; skilled in abstract knowledge and paperwork. Everything else feels like a compromise on the noble ideals. Teaching for actual jobs feels dirty. (A good argument can be made about less abstract skills becoming obsolete sooner. Yes, that is a good point, but it is not the full story. Memorizing the works of Shakespeare is not an abstract deep truth about the universe or human soul; it is merely a high-status kind of knowledge.) You can teach software development online, but educators will hold their nose, because doing something so directly useful is really low-status. STEM is low-status, humanities are high-status, get over it.
Another conflict is whether the school is supposed to help everyone, or separate the wheat from the chaff. The elementary school is more of the former, later schools are more of the latter. Giving knowledge to everyone is a noble ideal, but there is also a social demand to have people selected and certified for intelligence and obedience, because that is what the employers and the governments want. From this perspective, having many students fail at school is a feature, not a bug! If no students or almost no students fail, then the school itself fails at the task of filtering them. Which is why if you hypothetically found a system that can perfectly teach anyone anything, you would find a surprising resistance that people couldn’t articulate properly but would feel strongly about. At the end of the day, we want educational system to preserve the inequalities between the social classes; to split the population into the educated caste and the non-educated caste. The educated caste wants to publicly invite everyone into their ranks, but it also wants to see most of them fail, so the educated ones can feel better about their own position at the top of the ladder. (“We generously gave the chance to everyone; it is not our fault that those people were too lazy and stupid, so now their role is to serve us.”) If you succeed to teach everyone software development skills, what will happen with the salaries of the software developers? How will middle-class parents make sure that their kids all get middle-class jobs?
School doesn’t scale well, because babysitting doesn’t scale well. If you need too many teachers, you will get many incompetent ones, because being picky is not compatible with having to hire tens of thousands. If you find a better way to teach, the problem may be that the incompetent ones will be unable to do it well. The current system is set up to work well with incompetent teachers; the competent ones may do their job better, but that is optional.
The school is not optimal for learning, because the school follows many different goals.
Thank you for a bunch of good recommendations!
I’ve been meaning to read Alexander, and now I will. His concept seems closely related to Illich in Deschooling Society and Tools of Conviviality.
I love the architecture sketched by Christopher Alexander. And it is surprisingly evidence-based and he is transparent about which patterns he is confident in and which less so.
I have commented about him on LW here and here.
The books are hard to get and expensive. I suggest reading the online version here.