The does everything wrong by the usual standards of rational epistemology, but will be warmly received anyway.
Wherever two or three Rationalists are gathered together, they will moan about the education system. But not in a very rational way. It’s a topic that rationalists are predictably irrational about. They don’t build up a step by step fact based critique, they make sweeping ,emotive claims about how generally terrible it is.
The hard problem of education is how to educate everybody. (Or what to do with them otherwise) That’s the problem governments face. It’s easy for smart people to come up with educational methods that work for smart people. Smart people can educate themselves with a library and a computer. That’s good enough for the top 20% , but what about the bottom 20%, who aren’t naturally academic, and don’t have parents capable of home schooling? I have heard no suggestion from the rationalsphere.
Maybe part of the solution is having more specialized schools. In Russia we have math schools, biology schools, sport schools and so on. Basically some subjects would get strong focus and the rest would be quietly neglected. The kids love it, I’ve heard from many friends how they felt disengaged in regular school, then moved to a specialized one and everything clicked. Maybe the system could be pushed further, by having schools focused on manual trades, commerce, etc.
math schools, sports school, etc. are just one of a million solutions. What is missing is free choice to quit bad solutions to motivate change towards good solutions. The author of the text bemoans imprisonment in the system that does not work. If he got no sports school on the horizon, he should be able to just walk away and stop wasting his/her young life
What is missing in this world is free choice to quit bad solutions to motivate change towards good solutions. Educational freedom is a rare species and millions of kids suffer bondage. To be free, you need to live in a system that allows of true unschooling (e.g. some US states), have your parents approve, and then have them eat up all related administrative burdens. You can also “disappear in the system”, rebel, fake illness, etc. For most kids, free choice in learning is a fake privilege in name only. School choice equates to freedom if schooling is not compulsory, and the school is chosen by you, not your parent. Plus the option to quit at any minute. As for homeschooling, it is usually implemented as freedom of learning as long as you run through compulsory material. You are free to chose the table and the spoon, but the state determines what’s on the plate.
Well, school isn’t prison, anymore than time is money or property is theft etc.
If the complaint is that kids have to go to school, hey, kids live pretty controlled lives. For example, did I have the power to move to a different apartment? No, it was up to my parents. Does that mean my parents’ apartment was a prison for me? Uhhh...
It’s better to focus on real problems, like the fact that school often feels boring and pointless. That’s what specialized schools try to solve, and often succeed.
If your parents coerced you to live with them against your will, I condemn that. Children should have the right to walk away if they did not feel good at home. This practice also has a rich tradition. Did you see a chimp chasing its baby in a jungle and yelling “get back to the nest, you little snot”?
Your answer indicates a confusion between rights and duties in society. Your life with your parents was your right and probably a choice, or at least a necessity. For most children school was made into a obligation/burden. While life imposes constraints on your living condition, governments coerce children to learn against their will. Life with parents has millions of years of evolutionary tradition among smart animals. Going to school is a recent invention that is Stalinist in nature. Analogy between school and prison is excellent for this is exactly how many if not most children feel. On the other hand, in a healthy setting, kids would not move out from their parents early for sheer convenience of being sheltered and pampered and taken care of.
To say “schools existed for millennia” is monumentally misleading as it brushes away the problem of coercion of compulsory schooling. Instead of using the all-encompassing term “school”, you can then be more accurate by speaking of the Prussian education system, i.e. the cancer of modern education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
“Chores” can indeed be totalitarian unless they come from natural necessity or contract. There is a world of difference between “I must clean up my room because it is hard to move around”, and “Mom says I must clean the floor because aunt Betty is coming” (implying “I do not care about the floor, and even less about Aunt Betty witch”). A contract might say: “You will get your $3 allowance if you make sure garbage is never piling up”.
An arbitrary ban or limit on XBox is also totalitarian. Limits could come from contract, e.g. “I will buy you XBox as long as you promise never to play after 7 pm”.
I don’t think freedom is the main factor here, because kids aren’t fully developed. They start out with many desires that are bad for themselves and others: to eat lots of sweets, to watch lots of youtube, to torment each other. At some point growing up, kids learn self-control and start making decisions that actually make them better off. But until that point, parents are responsible for what’s good for the kid, and giving kids freedom to make themselves worse off is a bad idea.
What you say is exactly the mythology created by the system of schooling and adult controlled education. It is based on ignorance of brain science, and results in serious health and mental damage to millions of children. “Kids are not fully developed” stands at the core of the problem. Young brains are perfectly structured to adapt to the modern world using the same or better learning algorithms than those employed by the adult brain. We destroy those algorithms at school and generate an impression of ineptitude that deepens the problem. When communism was failing, communist tightened controls to get closer to perfection. So do schools. “Kids start out with many desires” fails to appreciate the power of biological instincts that protect the young organism from harm and external interference. We ruin that at school and with harmful “self-control”. “Start making decisions” implies that a toddler who takes things it its mouth is incapable of decision making. The opposite is true. Those decisions lead to learning and adaptation. We steal it by authoritarian parenting. “Make them better off” is an illusion. Decisions made after years of being deprived of decision-making are inferior and lead to addictions, depression, suicide, and the like. “Freedom to make themselves worse” is not much different to saying: “let’s put birds in cages to make sure they do not hurt themselves”. Evolution created a fantastic computing device: the brain. What we do is that we tinker with that device and produce unhappy societies. “The true face of the enemy” is a perfect parallel between what we do to children, what communists did to societies and what Orwell feared in 1984. All we need is a bit of understanding and appreciation of human biology and brain science.
I think culture, which includes teaching of kids by adults, is also a pretty fantastic computing device, and works better than letting every generation relearn everything in the school of hard knocks.
The ultimate solution to good education is rich culture to which a young brain adapts. As for the computing device, there is only one in the equation: the brain. Culture is just data. Teaching is programming. Exploration and adaptation are based on computing. If you want a smart kid, let her compute the reality on her own!
I think the assumption that people can’t learn for themselves is sort of a catch 22. If you put people in a place where they’re taught to learn from being taught, how can you expect them to be able to learn for themselves?
In terms of suggestions, me and author of this post have started on a project related to that and should hopefully have something in not too far future.
I’m not saying it makes it impossible for people to learn for themselves. I’m saying that your argument that bottom 20% couldn’t learn for themselves is flawed because for the majority of people in coerced learning environments it’s not obvious that they could learn by themselves.
The answer is constitutional freedom of learning. This changes nothing except for the right to make educational choices. The “bottom 20%” may continue using the old decrepit system, or just quit and do better things (e.g. get a job, apprenticeship, or get good in computer games). Google: Declaration of Educational Emancipation. That’s the panacea to all problems mentioned here. Leave the jail door open! The prisoners will know what to do
The essence of freedom is choice. The best way to make people seek idleness is to keep forcing them to do things against themselves. Do you know a healthy kid who will do nothing? Doing nothing is a symptom of injury. Exhaustion or helplessness. We keep emasculating will by coercion and obedience, and then the threat of “doing nothing” becomes an argument against freedom. There is no law against homelessness, and seeking homelessness is not considered a societal threat.
Yes. Many. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most people in this community, who claim that they’re self-motivated learners who were stunted by school would have been worse off without the structure of a formal education. One only needs to go through the archives and look at all the posts about akrasia to find evidence of this.
They don’t build up a step by step fact based critique, they make sweeping ,emotive claims about how generally terrible it is.
For the record, the other side doesn’t make any better arguments. (And sometimes they go horribly insane, like when you are in the middle of a pandemic, where the #1 health recommendation is “avoid rooms with other people”, but some countries insist that kids must spend their days in a classroom, otherwise the sky would fall.)
But I agree, we are supposed to do better.
That’s good enough for the top 20% , but what about the bottom 20%,
Admitting that there are differences would be a good starting point.
How about this? The government would create a standard “what our citizens are required to know”. This knowledge would be tested by organizations independent from schools. If you pass the test—if you get as many points as an average school student, who is also tested by an organization independent from their school, -- you don’t have to attend school. Also, you get educational credentials for passing the tests, regardless of school attendance.
Shortly, make homeschooling conditional on doing as good job as the school system on average.
This is not my whole plan to fix education, of course. Just the part that is easiest to explain and doesn’t require too much work (which arguably could go wrong). The other part would be creation of free and accessible educational materials (like this or this), to be used either at school or at home. My educational utopia would not have the school/homeschooling binary, but rather “knowledge” as the central concept, and various organizations that would help you achieve it in different ways, and of course you are allowed to try it on your own or create your own organization. (Some of those organizations might resemble the schools as we know them now. They just would be once concept among many, not privileged by law.)
This is a good summary of my objections in a very different form from what I stated below.
I would even go further: I highly doubt the top 20% are all able to learn by themselves with a library and a computer (and almost everyone would at least need directions on what to study). And the bottom 20% is more like the bottom 50%.
Why would a kid need a direction on what to study? With access to modern technology, all she needs is just to look around and make choices? Did you hear of Hole in the Wall experiments. Bottom 20% may refer to socioeconomic conditions, but for kids with access to the web that concept starts volatilizing and a poor kid may outstrip the privileged one. The idea of “needing direction” is born at school when kids are lead by hand for many years and never learn how to navigate life on their own. That directionless free choice is their best lesson
Google for Sugata Mitra, and do not be swayed by the “school lobby” that found lots of (petty) holes in the Hole. Basic idea behind Mitra reasoning is correct as evidence by decades of experience of democratic school. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimally_invasive_education
1 Children can self-organize in groups with no adult intervention.
2 Children teach themselves in small groups how to use a computer with basic Windows functionalities and English language.
Takeaway message:
Remoteness affects the quality of education.
Educational technology should be introduced into remote areas first.
Values are acquired, doctrine and dogma are imposed.
Learning is (most likely) a self-organizing system.
coined term: Outdoctrination: An educational technology and pedagogy that is digital, automatic, fault-tolerant, minimally invasive, connected, and self-organized.
The does everything wrong by the usual standards of rational epistemology, but will be warmly received anyway.
Wherever two or three Rationalists are gathered together, they will moan about the education system. But not in a very rational way. It’s a topic that rationalists are predictably irrational about. They don’t build up a step by step fact based critique, they make sweeping ,emotive claims about how generally terrible it is.
The hard problem of education is how to educate everybody. (Or what to do with them otherwise) That’s the problem governments face. It’s easy for smart people to come up with educational methods that work for smart people. Smart people can educate themselves with a library and a computer. That’s good enough for the top 20% , but what about the bottom 20%, who aren’t naturally academic, and don’t have parents capable of home schooling? I have heard no suggestion from the rationalsphere.
Maybe part of the solution is having more specialized schools. In Russia we have math schools, biology schools, sport schools and so on. Basically some subjects would get strong focus and the rest would be quietly neglected. The kids love it, I’ve heard from many friends how they felt disengaged in regular school, then moved to a specialized one and everything clicked. Maybe the system could be pushed further, by having schools focused on manual trades, commerce, etc.
math schools, sports school, etc. are just one of a million solutions. What is missing is free choice to quit bad solutions to motivate change towards good solutions. The author of the text bemoans imprisonment in the system that does not work. If he got no sports school on the horizon, he should be able to just walk away and stop wasting his/her young life
What is missing where? Some countries allow homeschooling. Some countries allow school choice. Etc.
What is missing in this world is free choice to quit bad solutions to motivate change towards good solutions. Educational freedom is a rare species and millions of kids suffer bondage. To be free, you need to live in a system that allows of true unschooling (e.g. some US states), have your parents approve, and then have them eat up all related administrative burdens. You can also “disappear in the system”, rebel, fake illness, etc. For most kids, free choice in learning is a fake privilege in name only. School choice equates to freedom if schooling is not compulsory, and the school is chosen by you, not your parent. Plus the option to quit at any minute. As for homeschooling, it is usually implemented as freedom of learning as long as you run through compulsory material. You are free to chose the table and the spoon, but the state determines what’s on the plate.
If the problem is that School is Prison, having a choice of prison is not a solution.
Well, school isn’t prison, anymore than time is money or property is theft etc.
If the complaint is that kids have to go to school, hey, kids live pretty controlled lives. For example, did I have the power to move to a different apartment? No, it was up to my parents. Does that mean my parents’ apartment was a prison for me? Uhhh...
It’s better to focus on real problems, like the fact that school often feels boring and pointless. That’s what specialized schools try to solve, and often succeed.
If your parents coerced you to live with them against your will, I condemn that. Children should have the right to walk away if they did not feel good at home. This practice also has a rich tradition. Did you see a chimp chasing its baby in a jungle and yelling “get back to the nest, you little snot”?
Your answer indicates a confusion between rights and duties in society. Your life with your parents was your right and probably a choice, or at least a necessity. For most children school was made into a obligation/burden. While life imposes constraints on your living condition, governments coerce children to learn against their will. Life with parents has millions of years of evolutionary tradition among smart animals. Going to school is a recent invention that is Stalinist in nature. Analogy between school and prison is excellent for this is exactly how many if not most children feel. On the other hand, in a healthy setting, kids would not move out from their parents early for sheer convenience of being sheltered and pampered and taken care of.
Schools have existed for millennia, at first for children of rich parents, then expanded to everyone in the last few centuries.
Children also feel that having to do chores is totalitarian, and getting only 1 hour of xbox per day is super totalitarian.
To say “schools existed for millennia” is monumentally misleading as it brushes away the problem of coercion of compulsory schooling. Instead of using the all-encompassing term “school”, you can then be more accurate by speaking of the Prussian education system, i.e. the cancer of modern education:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
“Chores” can indeed be totalitarian unless they come from natural necessity or contract. There is a world of difference between “I must clean up my room because it is hard to move around”, and “Mom says I must clean the floor because aunt Betty is coming” (implying “I do not care about the floor, and even less about Aunt Betty witch”). A contract might say: “You will get your $3 allowance if you make sure garbage is never piling up”.
An arbitrary ban or limit on XBox is also totalitarian. Limits could come from contract, e.g. “I will buy you XBox as long as you promise never to play after 7 pm”.
I don’t think freedom is the main factor here, because kids aren’t fully developed. They start out with many desires that are bad for themselves and others: to eat lots of sweets, to watch lots of youtube, to torment each other. At some point growing up, kids learn self-control and start making decisions that actually make them better off. But until that point, parents are responsible for what’s good for the kid, and giving kids freedom to make themselves worse off is a bad idea.
What you say is exactly the mythology created by the system of schooling and adult controlled education. It is based on ignorance of brain science, and results in serious health and mental damage to millions of children. “Kids are not fully developed” stands at the core of the problem. Young brains are perfectly structured to adapt to the modern world using the same or better learning algorithms than those employed by the adult brain. We destroy those algorithms at school and generate an impression of ineptitude that deepens the problem. When communism was failing, communist tightened controls to get closer to perfection. So do schools. “Kids start out with many desires” fails to appreciate the power of biological instincts that protect the young organism from harm and external interference. We ruin that at school and with harmful “self-control”. “Start making decisions” implies that a toddler who takes things it its mouth is incapable of decision making. The opposite is true. Those decisions lead to learning and adaptation. We steal it by authoritarian parenting. “Make them better off” is an illusion. Decisions made after years of being deprived of decision-making are inferior and lead to addictions, depression, suicide, and the like. “Freedom to make themselves worse” is not much different to saying: “let’s put birds in cages to make sure they do not hurt themselves”. Evolution created a fantastic computing device: the brain. What we do is that we tinker with that device and produce unhappy societies. “The true face of the enemy” is a perfect parallel between what we do to children, what communists did to societies and what Orwell feared in 1984. All we need is a bit of understanding and appreciation of human biology and brain science.
I think culture, which includes teaching of kids by adults, is also a pretty fantastic computing device, and works better than letting every generation relearn everything in the school of hard knocks.
The ultimate solution to good education is rich culture to which a young brain adapts. As for the computing device, there is only one in the equation: the brain. Culture is just data. Teaching is programming. Exploration and adaptation are based on computing. If you want a smart kid, let her compute the reality on her own!
I think the assumption that people can’t learn for themselves is sort of a catch 22. If you put people in a place where they’re taught to learn from being taught, how can you expect them to be able to learn for themselves?
In terms of suggestions, me and author of this post have started on a project related to that and should hopefully have something in not too far future.
It didn’t stop me being able to self teach.
I’m not saying it makes it impossible for people to learn for themselves. I’m saying that your argument that bottom 20% couldn’t learn for themselves is flawed because for the majority of people in coerced learning environments it’s not obvious that they could learn by themselves.
The answer is constitutional freedom of learning. This changes nothing except for the right to make educational choices. The “bottom 20%” may continue using the old decrepit system, or just quit and do better things (e.g. get a job, apprenticeship, or get good in computer games). Google: Declaration of Educational Emancipation. That’s the panacea to all problems mentioned here. Leave the jail door open! The prisoners will know what to do
Will they have the option to do nothing?
The essence of freedom is choice. The best way to make people seek idleness is to keep forcing them to do things against themselves. Do you know a healthy kid who will do nothing? Doing nothing is a symptom of injury. Exhaustion or helplessness. We keep emasculating will by coercion and obedience, and then the threat of “doing nothing” becomes an argument against freedom. There is no law against homelessness, and seeking homelessness is not considered a societal threat.
The underclass is coming from somewhere, even with compulsory education.
Yes. Many. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most people in this community, who claim that they’re self-motivated learners who were stunted by school would have been worse off without the structure of a formal education. One only needs to go through the archives and look at all the posts about akrasia to find evidence of this.
For the record, the other side doesn’t make any better arguments. (And sometimes they go horribly insane, like when you are in the middle of a pandemic, where the #1 health recommendation is “avoid rooms with other people”, but some countries insist that kids must spend their days in a classroom, otherwise the sky would fall.)
But I agree, we are supposed to do better.
Admitting that there are differences would be a good starting point.
How about this? The government would create a standard “what our citizens are required to know”. This knowledge would be tested by organizations independent from schools. If you pass the test—if you get as many points as an average school student, who is also tested by an organization independent from their school, -- you don’t have to attend school. Also, you get educational credentials for passing the tests, regardless of school attendance.
Shortly, make homeschooling conditional on doing as good job as the school system on average.
This is not my whole plan to fix education, of course. Just the part that is easiest to explain and doesn’t require too much work (which arguably could go wrong). The other part would be creation of free and accessible educational materials (like this or this), to be used either at school or at home. My educational utopia would not have the school/homeschooling binary, but rather “knowledge” as the central concept, and various organizations that would help you achieve it in different ways, and of course you are allowed to try it on your own or create your own organization. (Some of those organizations might resemble the schools as we know them now. They just would be once concept among many, not privileged by law.)
This is a good summary of my objections in a very different form from what I stated below.
I would even go further: I highly doubt the top 20% are all able to learn by themselves with a library and a computer (and almost everyone would at least need directions on what to study). And the bottom 20% is more like the bottom 50%.
Why would a kid need a direction on what to study? With access to modern technology, all she needs is just to look around and make choices? Did you hear of Hole in the Wall experiments. Bottom 20% may refer to socioeconomic conditions, but for kids with access to the web that concept starts volatilizing and a poor kid may outstrip the privileged one. The idea of “needing direction” is born at school when kids are lead by hand for many years and never learn how to navigate life on their own. That directionless free choice is their best lesson
No. Any links/sources you have for these things would be interesting.
Google for Sugata Mitra, and do not be swayed by the “school lobby” that found lots of (petty) holes in the Hole. Basic idea behind Mitra reasoning is correct as evidence by decades of experience of democratic school. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimally_invasive_education
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRb7_ffl2D0
is a ted talk from Sugata Mitra about it
Basically, Mitra installed a computer in a wall with free, unrestrained access to local children.
Fairly quickly they got acclimated to it. I know I read a good description of it somewhere but can’t remember where for the life of me
I just watched the video. Here is an outline.
1 Children can self-organize in groups with no adult intervention.
2 Children teach themselves in small groups how to use a computer with basic Windows functionalities and English language.
Takeaway message:
Remoteness affects the quality of education.
Educational technology should be introduced into remote areas first.
Values are acquired, doctrine and dogma are imposed.
Learning is (most likely) a self-organizing system.
coined term: Outdoctrination:
An educational technology and pedagogy that is digital, automatic, fault-tolerant, minimally invasive, connected, and self-organized.