I am trying to find out what are the most cost-effective ways of (early) education. I have a 4-year-old daughter and that gives me about ~2 more years to figure this out and I am trying to put together as much material as I can. Given the age of my daughter, I’d like to “solve” something like K-12 for now, but I guess some things may be applicable at any age.
I am familiar with Bryan Caplan’s main theses formulated in the Case Against Education or Robin Hanson’s Elephant in the Brain arguing that education is mostly about signalling and stuff. I therefore partly understand what’s wrong and I am now trying to make my findings actionable and unsurprisingly, it seems pretty hard. I also do realize that there is very little research indicating that specific parental choices have much long term impact.
The important attributes of the ideal solution:
comply to rationalists mindset—understanding and applying basic CFAR-like style of reasoning or at least knowing and applying a 5-year-old version of how beliefs work, bugs-are-for-solving idea
follow scientific/experimental approach (I know it’s overlapping), not being afraid of finding the right explore vs. exploit balance
the educators should grasp at least basics about how to learn and teach effectively, such as Learning how to learn related concepts or even as little as this post
not to waste the time of my kid (like on signalling, or studying things just to forget them after “exam”), generally trying to reduce the stupid parts about the current education system as much as possible
make students excited about the real world (I love Joy in the merely real)
convey what it is like to be a human (like, emotions exist and you can learn about yourself from them or deal with them)
convey important concepts about the world (for example altruism, cost-effective analysis, probability, or even markets or signalling)
teaching students things that are actually useful on the job market
not-USA-specific—we are living in Central Europe. It’s of course still good to point to things that work well somewhere as an inspiration for replication locally.
I do realize it’s a lot to ask, but I don’t aim for perfection. I believe the current system is so badly broken and inadequate (seems that almost everyone agrees on this fact) that even with a little effort invested we can get better outcomes after a few months of preparation.
For example, one of the solutions could be starting a small home-schooling group with good tutors (Blooms 2SD problem hints towards this direction). I know it sounds ambitious to find someone satisfactory given the requirements but I believe I am in a good position in finding people who are half-way through and with some training, we would get there. I realize that K12 is not only about education but also about things like finding a peer group, which could be supplied via other channels (like afternoon activities) or switching into a regular school for some time. All these options are on the table, the goal is to find the most cost-effective solution. (An interesting discussion from a public-spending perspective on slatestarcodex)
The questions I have:
Do you know about anyone trying this (successfully or not, small or large scale, …)?
Do you know about any relevant resources or programs for younger kids (e.g. something similar to this, or research similar to the already mentioned Bloom problem)?
Would you be interested in researching this or do you know anyone who would be willing to do so? (I am happy to pay)
Any idea if there are any attempts to put together such a curriculum?
Any good prompts to ask, such as “How much are you able to pay for a 10% increase in happiness for your daughter”?
Do you think it’s dangerous? Should I really, really not forget about some aspect?
Anything else comes to your mind?
B2D shows clear superiority of 1-1 over 1-many but I think it neglects something even better: 1 to self. IMO, issues with 1 to many teaching result from high semantic distance: teacher is either too far ahead of student or are teaching things the student already knows. Thus, they’re always stuck either frustrated or bored. 1-1 teaching eliminates that because a tutor knows what the student does or not know; they can teach with continuous low semantic distance that isn’t frustrating.
I think 1-self teaching goes beyond tutoring because:
1. you know what you don’t know so if you need some preceding information you can find that for yourself (in large part thanks to the internet)
2. teaching is centered around the idea that a teacher knows what you should know better than you do. In many cases, I don’t think this makes much sense. If I want to learn how to make x thing, getting a general education on the field x falls into (field y) doesn’t make sense. Learning a bunch of useless things in field y is a waste of my time. If I’m deciding what to learn by myself, I can make sure that I’m not only learning things efficiently but that I’m choosing what to learn effectively.
As a result, I think prioritizing large behavioral spaces where your daughter can make mistakes and figure things out by herself is better than any rigid system forcing her to learn things she doesn’t want to. (Note: you might think that having her educated in depth on some topic and having lots of knowledge is useful. Free learning leads to higher coherence which in turn makes knowledge more applicable and better retained. No matter how well your daughter is taught trigonometry, if she learns it independent of her own desires the ability will likely stick to being useful only for useless math problems.)
I highly recommend reading any of the articles in I would never send my kids to school; particularly the ones you find yourself disagreeing with the most.
I would also check out Sudbury or democratic schools, which are schools with high behavioral space and very low in coercion.
The people at the bottom here mentioned in further reading could also be helpful.
I’m vaguely trying to work on looking at 1-self learning as a means for solving B2D (thanks for the acronym by the way) better than 1-1 learning. I have no formal science background but I’ve started talking with a professor who found it very interesting. Hopefully we can find something concrete though I have no idea how we’d test it right now.
Unfortunately, I’m too confident in my own views and there are a lot of priors I’m guessing we don’t share that might make some of this not make sense. Please bring them up and I will try to answer them though most answers could probably be found in some way on supermemo.guru.
This is the approach advocated by Scott Young in the book Ultralearning. You build out a learning project for the thing you actually want to learn, learn by doing, and you fill in obvious gaps that are ‘rate-limiting’ to the learning ‘reaction’ as you go along. Learning by working on the end result that you actually want directly also sidesteps the issues with transfer learning—students are typically able to apply the abstract classroom skills they’ve been taught to real world situations.
I see you link to SuperMemo and ask about it a lot. Do you use that software, and do you generally subscribe to Wozniak’s ideas?
Interesting about ultralearning, I will need to skim that in more detail some point. Without spaced repetition/incremental reading, that looks like the best method of learning to me. I get the feeling this is why my generation (2000s onwards) lack practical skills, we almost never learn for a purpose so we end up lacking the notion that we can do things yourselves. There are plenty of things I really wanted to do (like building a table from scratch [I really love big tables]) that I never did because I had no experience and had never had any experience that would tell me where to start.
Regarding SuperMemo, yes, I use the software and incremental reading extensively (if you have an interest in learning it, I would happily teach you). I would go insane learning without it, especially because I have ADHD and incremental reading makes managing what to learn easy.
I also subscribe heavily to Woz’s ideas. I like them because they tend to be much closer to global maximas (e.g. free running sleep) because societal/academic norms do not restrict his views.
A lot of them, especially about learning, really changed my life. Though I also love what he has written about sleep, stress, ADHD, addiction amongst other things.
His book touches on spaced repetition (he’s a big proponent of the testing effect) and other things. It’s really about how to put together effective learning projects, from the research phase, through execution.
I am interested in IR, but I don’t have a windows machine (MacOS/Linux) and don’t think the overhead of maintaining a VM would be worth it. Do you IR everything you read online, or do you reserve it for materials in your field? I mostly take notes in roam, and add particularly salient things that I think I’ll want to remember to anki.
Noted. The SuperMemo wiki has always seemed quite unwieldy to me, but I’ll take closer to what he says to say on topics outside of spaced repetition.
Oh I didn’t know that. Raises priority a bit then.
If you use IR well, in my opinion it would increase long-term potential by at least 1,5-2 times. If you don’t trust me and take my claim at say 1.2 times, I think even then it’s worth the time investment of trying a VM and trying SM for a while to verify the claim (I don’t think there are any other interventions that would improve long-term potential as much as SM).
I’m actually using it on a Mac in parallels and it works pretty well. VMWare on Linux is also mostly good though in the end I ended up switching from Linux because VMWare has this weird behavior where it exists fullscreen everytime you change workspaces. It drove me crazy. You can run SM through wine with this with a few constraints. I haven’t tried it personally though.
I don’t have a particular field (I am in university but I don’t care about it very much), I learn based on what I find interesting and applicable. I’ve found a lot of golden nuggets I otherwise would never have with incremental reading. I tend to just import everything I see that looks shiny but it’s still manageable because of SuperMemo’s priority system. I’ll probably never get to all the things I import because of the rate of new things vs. rate of review but I’m slowly making peace with that. At the least, priority system makes it possible to import as much as you want but still be certain that you focus most of your time on the things that matter more.
Roam seems pretty nice to me and I really wish there was an SM plugin to replicate graph connection functionality. I write a lot in SuperMemo and while it is extremely useful to be able to write things incrementally, graph view would be likely a better way to work on things.
For SuperMemo documentation, I would definitely agree. It is not fun figuring it out on your own. From recent experiences teaching people, I think being taught 1-1 is a far easier way to get started with it. I can generally teach people in 1-2 hours what it took me around a fair while (at least a month) to figure out.
For other subjects on supermemo.guru blog, I think the articles are pretty good though not many people seem to be aware of them which is unfortunate.
Just a note that 1-self only works for people with:
Enough call-it-willpower (many people need an outside motivator to do hard things)
Enough general intelligence/knowledge to be able to generate ideas like “I could look this up by typing XYZ into google”
See my response below about unknown unknowns.
An umbrella term for this style of learning (and systems that support it) is “self-directed education”. You can find places that practice this low-coercion and self-directed style here. There are a small handful of places in Central Europe that might fit the bill.
These places often serve as a refuge for kids that don’t fit in the conventional school model, so you often encounter a high rate of neuro-atypicality. There are lots of kids that might have earned themselves a diagnosis in a school setting who are thriving in an environment that can bend to their needs.
I think your last point about lack of shared priors is a big one here. The OP seems intent on designing/engineering the perfect education, when the answer from this perspective will require a lot of letting go.
Thanks for the tip and links. Unfortunately, it doesn’t show much in Prague (but still gives me a hint about what to look for even if some school isn’t registered in the linked project).
Hm… I don’t think I would have issues of having to do so. I am trying to understand how to think about this, and this simply didn’t occur to me before. In fact, it seems that me and my girlfriend are currently rather at the side of trying to figure out how to do this in self-directed-way, but it’s still in early stages.
Hey Raj. Thanks a lot for an insightful post, it’s definitely that sort of things I was looking after, regardless if I immediately agree with them or not.
1-self learning: How I read it so far is that instead of selecting “the way” first and optimizing it later, instead it might be a good idea to focus on learning how to learn by yourself first, recognizing what’s the most effective in any given case, be it via internet or an actual human resource such as a tutor.
By the way, my solely main motivation for her to know English was the access to much better materials so she can learn by herself.
A quick search shows that there are some very reasonably priced democratic schools around. So great to see there are some options like this (at least, I will be able to get some references or even visit them myself)
I think your post does make sense to me on this level. I think I have to first go through the linked material, which will surely take some time to process (thanks!).
I’m happy to hear that!
Sort of, though this is mostly my vague theory. I think the ultralearning thing that Panashe mentioned could be a useful framework though I’m not super familiar with it. People like Peter Gray who are experts on homeschooling/self directed learning could also be worth looking into.
Yeah, that’s a pretty important long-term skill. It would be really challenging to have be able to freely learn whatever you want without access to the English internet.
Awesome. One thing to be careful of is that people think schools are important for socialization. I like Seymour Papert’s answer to that:
Nothing bothers me more than when people criticize my criticism of school by telling me that schools are not just places to learn maths and spelling, they are places where children learn a vaguely defined thing called socialization. I know. I think schools generally do an effective and terribly damaging job of teaching children to be infantile, dependent, intellectually dishonest, passive and disrespectful to their own developmental capacities
I’ve found the above criticism fairly true for my experience with school. I ended up with a lot of not great socialization habits that took a long while to unravel.
It feels like I’m going on a bit too much but one other heuristic to consider: try to do for your daughter what you would have liked as a child rather than what you as a parent think you should do. It’s very easy to assume that you know better than your child, and you do, but coercion is really bad. Trying to influence choices by making them appealing is far healthier than forcing things which I think younger you probably would have appreciated too.
When our firstborn was in kindergarten and had trouble with his peers, I was very worried about how he would fare in school. I was considering setting up a homeschooling school. Not real homeschooling because Germany has mandatory schooling but using a legal construct that uses a private school as ‘adapter’ between multiple co-home-schooling parents. I had already researched the requirements and written (parts of) the application. But it turned out that our son had no problems in school—quite the opposite. Part of the reason probably was that he had an extremely experienced and caring teacher who also allowed me to offer some activities in the class (I was the “fried of numbers” in the class).
Anyway, your idea of a teaching community sounds quite like what I had in mind with my homeschooling school (though regulations would have set significant parts of the curriculum). I understand that you want to teach the ‘valuable’ parts of the curriculum like active reading and writing skills, math, and the scientific method plus some more useful stuff that is left unspecified.
Over time, I have discussed multiple times how education can be improved. We have taught our kids many things that are not part of the school curriculum, and I have made clear which aspects I judge to provide little long term value. Talking about the process with my kids (my oldest is now in 10th grade) has also informed my views. He has his own opinions on it. Now, with COVID19, he had the opportunity to study more self-directed and enjoyed it (and invested much more effort in some school projects than before).
My conclusion is that there is no simple answer. Do we understand why school is the way it is? Is it some Chesterton’s Fence? I think so. Especially after a lengthy discussion, I have concluded that school reproduces more than knowledge. It reproduces culture. It does so partly by creating a shared experience, a shared vocabulary, and shared methods of working together. And shared social networks. Sure, a big part is signaling. But the structure that the signaling supports—fitness for work in the corporate world—is highly interconnected with everything else. Can we get rid of it without breaking a lot of things? Maybe. It is worth a try for sure. Let’s experiment and learn.
The other aspect is that you and I might have good ideas about which curriculum would be best. But that is informed by our predisposition—which our kids may or may not share. The world is evolving fast. We may be well-adapted to the current state (hopefully, after not too painful learning experience). But that doesn’t mean that passing our tools on to our kids makes them well-equipped for the future also. The jobs we have now didn’t exist when we were kids (at least mine didn’t). Many of today’s well-paying professions didn’t exist before the age of the internet. At least not in the form we see them now. As usual, the future arrives with leaving things superficially unchanged—but things did change. And they will do so in the future too. Maybe even faster.
I talk a lot with my older son about how I do not know which future job will be best for him. I can only provide ideas and support, and he has to figure out most of it. I’m not worried. He is so rational and seems to take up many of my suggestions quickly. I am more concerned about his younger brother, who watches YouTube videos without end. But who am I to judge? When I was his age, I was reading copious amounts of science fiction. Many would have judged this a waste of time. And I played around with these computer things (that was in the 80s). Who knows? Maybe his fluency in these memes and the English he is picking up from it will be useful for him. I think his older brother will benefit from the rationality skills too. But I can’t force the tools. I will keep talking with them. Talking helps.
Hi. Thanks a lot for a really nice write-up.
It seems that the regulations in the Czech Republic are actually legally “workable”, i.e. it’s possible to teach kids close to self-directed without having to do a lot of “compulsory curriculum” (i.e. my estimate is <5%). It also seems there is a “subculture” of families doing this and I managed to get to some people who know how to deal with this.
I don’t aim for a simple answer and I do not expect there is some. But as I said, the current system seems so broken that just answering “try not to harm” is a good substitution question. Also, it doesn’t really seem that kids would learn [and retain] that much [useful knowledge] compared to “watching youtube videos”.
It does so indeed, but that culture doesn’t seem to be very worthwhile to me. I am rather tempted to risk this one, as the main thing it signals doesn’t seem to be that problematic to pick up later. I.e. homeschooled kids doesn’t seem to have issues when they want to switch to formal education, and at “worst” they pay a year or two of whatever-made-them-happy-or-stronger-in-other-ways for that (again, e.g. watching videos :-) ). I have read/heard this claim quite a lot, and I am less and less convinced that this aspect of schooling is positive.
I also think that some other benefits can be supplied in other ways and even more effectively. For example a good social network—it’s vastly superior/efficient to learn a few networking skills and just infiltrate e.g. some organizations, events or groups with a “good network”. It’s unlikely that it’s your random class that is “good social network”, and e.g. I have literally 0 friends from my primary and secondary school (I have a lot from university though—but anyone can do the uni I did if they want).
That kind of links to my previous answer. I am coming to a conclusion that the skills I would like to convey are rather very generic, blurry and meta. I want to teach her how to understand herself, her motivation, discipline, emotions, reasoning, goals and drive, how to understand other minds and how to model the world. I want her to understand how she can learn by herself whatever she wants to learn. It really seems to me that if we don’t want to learn something, then we should rather not learn it as we are not going to remember that anyway. And given the right tools and meta knowledge, we can learn almost everything in much shorter times than the “most common” path. Therefore, I don’t really care that much about the “object-level” curriculum. I think (but that’s still subject to a research) that the concepts important to me can be taught via mostly arbitrary picks in the real world (like nature or engineering) or just going outside and explicitly talk about that person kicking that soda machine. And I can’t imagine how these skills would not be useful or universal to time, at least on ~15 years from now scale, as they seem to be useful since eternity. I can imagine my job going obsolete—but I would use exactly these skills to find and learn something else which would be the best in that time for me.
How neurotypical is your child? Do you have someone who can spend 10-40 hours a week educating them (depending on the first answer), or the cash to hire someone for that amount of time?
1-on-1 instruction for the (child-dependent) sufficient amount of time each week can be applied by anyone with 1SD above average intelligence and a little bit of “how to teach” education. This is the simplest way to ensure someone learns all the key skills (Arithmatic, Algebra, Reading to learn, Writing to communicate, basic facts about history & science)
Once they are old enough to attend High School classes, if you have access to a large (400+ per grade level) school they can get some good specialized classes that would be harder to do with general tutors. Junior college classes are also an option, depending on maturity level.
Did you read about B2D linked by OP? This is what Bloom found (from wikipedia):
the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class”.[1]:4 Additionally, the variation of the students’ achievement changed: “about 90% of the tutored students … attained the level of summative achievement reached by only the highest 20%” of the control class.
I don’t think high school can hold a candle to that. All the content in any specialized class can be found online and learned at the leisure of the child rather than praying for a decent teacher that fits the kid.
Thanks @ericf!
She’s regular kid, so neurotypical. Goes to an English speaking kindergarten (so she speaks fluently two languages + we are starting with Spanish) where she does above average according to the teachers with behavior and socializing, although she prefer playing with teachers and older kids. Thanks to the fact that one of us didn’t have to work, we could spend a lot of time with her in the first 3 years and now she can read simple words and sentences (in English—how I hate its irregularities damn!) and do simple arithmetic already. That likely puts her in higher percentiles, but nothing super exceptional nor she shows signs of extremely high intelligence or capabilities. Frankly, she also doesn’t have anyone to inherit these from...
Fortunately for me, salaries for teachers are one of the lowest from the OECD. Depending on the efficiency, me paying a private tutor ~30h/week would be technically feasible and I would still have some money left, but it would be at the edge of what I could spend. I believe this cost could be shared through multiple kids if that was the way to go. I myself have masters in CompSci and my girlfriend masters in pedagogy (not the child development though, although I mean it means little here anyway), so homeschooling done by us is also an option but for me there is definitely much higher opportunity cost (and I wouldn’t enjoy it full time, same as my girlfriend).
Do you have any resources or even anecdotal evidence for this? It sounds true to me, but I would say it’s super obvious. Are you referring to e.g. Blooms 2SD?
Sorry, I am not entirely familiar with these as we are not US-based. Based on googling, is what you mean:
large schools having specialized classes: is it that once they are big enough, they can have some special programs like in-depth dive into, say, physics or something? Or do you have some specific classes in mind?
Junior colleges—we don’t really have that where I live, we only have universities, but I think it still applies—she could attend them as they are free to attend for anyone actually (at least lectures).
To be fair though, I am very skeptical I could find many good classes in these, but it’s surely an area I want to explore (although it’s not a priority now, given her age).
I translated what the median U.S.A. teacher has into generic language to come up with the tutor criteria. That is based on anecdotal data from observing n of approx. 50 and hearing first-hand of another n of approx. 100.
Yes, in the “good” school districts in the US that are big enough, there can be classes like Theater, Biotechnology, a full spread of AP/IRB classes, Computer Programming back in the ’90s, a school newspaper / tv station, an actual Film (ie movie creation) class, etc.
Free university lectures are good (and a step up from the widely available YouTube classes, for the in-person Q&A with other students), but in many cases there is physical equipment (science labs, performance venues, machine shops) that wouldn’t be available for free.
For a typical kid with high self-directedness, you probably only need 10 hr/week of professional guidance, plus continuing to have involved parents. The key point (I’m synthesizing this from How Children Learn and How Children Fail, by John Holt) is that the learner needs two things to succeed:
1. Access to a trusted authority, to get their questions answered (eg “how do I even get started with this?” or “Did I do this right?” or “What is this one tricky word?”)
2. Someone observing them while they work, to spot the unknown unknowns and answer the questions the student doesn’t even know they have.
Thanks for clarifying my questions.
It’s very much similar to what @Raj mentioned above, am I right? Seems that Holt advocates for self-driven learning, e.g. from a goodreads review:
Thanks for the tips though, those two books (How Children Learn | Fail) are definitely going on my reading list.
This is extremely important, because it seems to me that some opponents of current school system go to the opposite extreme and claim that any guidance is harmful. (As if the best way for the child to learn is to wait until they reinvent the entire civilization from scratch.)
I am very interested in this topic and I admire you all taking the time to share your detailed thoughts.
I think there is a massive opportunity in creating a k-12 home schooling version of Lambda School but targeted at general knowledge. Why not start by work together on it?
Let me know if you’d be interested and I would love to collaborate!
It’s great to see some support like this. Not just to help with motivation but also to see what the interest is.
I am interested as it’s probably clear from my question, but I don’t think I would be a good fit to actually put it together (or that it would be cost-effective). I would be happy to put and run some structure which could do this. I should emphasize though that I am not trying to create a generic program for everyone as I think that’s vastly harder and would IMHO need much more.
Yeah, I’ve been looking for support on the same topic just starting small.
For example, I have been gathering resources (i.e. just links) on education for children 0-5 as I have little to not understanding of what would be useful experiences for them. I’d love to collaborate with someone on what the big questions and the small.
Broad: what should you try to teach a child before they reach age 5? First and foremost, values? How to social with others? Intuition for mathematics?
Narrow: how much should you read to a child? What? Why?
Find the format here in the forum to not structure the information well for review/edit/extension. Perhaps a Google Doc?
Minor formatting note: you don’t need to enter extra spaces between paragraphs (the editor / formatting will add spaces for you. I fixed it here using Mod Powers, apologies if you actively preferred the wider spacing)
Fantastic.
Thanks.
Hi @kotrfa, thank you for your amazing post!
The topic of learning and schooling has become really dear to me, and I am in the process of digging into the existing knowledge to better understand the present issues, along with possible solutions.
I was curious to know about the solution you decided for your child, as far as I can read online private schooling seems the best option so far to provide a good knowledge to children.
Thank you in advance! :)
Hey. I decided on a private school with more of a “democratic approach”. I unfortunately wasn’t able to find suitable tutors etc.
I am also trying to process what ChatGPT-like platforms will do with the landscape. E.g. my partner is using coding almost exclusively with ChatGPT and it’s outstanding. Kids gonna follow IMHO.