Rethinking Education
Problems
Problems have bottlenecks. To solve problems, you need to overcome each bottleneck. If you fail to overcome just one bottleneck, the problem will go unsolved, and your effort will have been fruitless.
In reality, it’s a little bit more complicated than that. Some bottlenecks are tighter than others, and some progress might leak through, but it usually isn’t anything notable.
Education
There is a lot wrong with education. Attempts are being made to improve it, but they’re glossing over important bottlenecks. Consequently, progress is slowly dripping through. I think that it’d be a better use of our time to take the time to think through each bottleneck, and how it can be addressed.
I have a theory of how we can overcome enough bottlenecks such that progress will fall through, instead of drip through.
Consider how we learn. Say that you want to learn parent concept A. To do this, it’ll require you to understand a bunch of other things first
My groundbreaking idea: make sure that students know A1…An before teaching them A.
The bottlenecks to understanding A are A1…An. Some of these bottlenecks are tighter than others, and in reality, there are constraints on our ability to teach, so it’s probably best to focus on the tighter bottlenecks. Regardless, this is the approach we’ll need to take if we want to truly change education.
How would this work?
1) Create a dependency tree.
2) Explain each cell in the tree.
3) Devise a test of understanding for each cell in the tree.
4) Teach accordingly.
Where does our system fail us?
When you’re in class and the teacher is explaining A when you still don’t get, say A2 and A5.
When you’re in class and the teacher is explaining A, when she never thought to explain A2 and A5.
When you’re reading the textbook and you’re confused, but you don’t even know what child concepts you’re confused about.
When you memorize for the test/assignment instead of properly filling out your dependency tree.
When being too far ahead or behind the class leads to a lack of motivation.
When lack of interest in the material leads to lack of motivation.
When physical distractions divert your attention (tired, uncomfortable, hungry…).
My proposal
I propose that we pool all of our resources and make a perfect educational web app. It would have the dependency trees, have explanations for each cell in each tree, and have a test of understanding for each cell in each tree. It would test the user to establish what it is that he does and doesn’t know, and would proceed with lessons accordingly.
In other words, usage of this web app would be mastery-based: you’d only proceed to a parent concept when you’ve mastered the child concepts.
Motivation
Motivation would be another thing to optimize.
One way to do this would be to teach things to students at the right times. Lack of interest is often due to lack of understanding of child concepts, and thus lack of appreciation for the beauty and significance of a parent concept. By teaching things to students when they’re able to appreciate them, we could increase students’ motivation.
Another way to optimize motivation would be to do a better job of teaching students things that are useful to them (or things that are likely to be useful to them). In todays system, students are often times forced to memorize lots of details that are unlikely to ever be useful to them.
By making teaching more effective, I think motivation will naturally increase as well (it’ll eliminate the lack of motivation that comes with the frustration of bad teaching).
Pooling of resources
The pooling of resources to create this web app is analogous to how resources were pooled for Christopher Nolan to make a really cool movie. When you pool resources, a lot more becomes possible. When you don’t pool resources, the product often sucks. Imagine what would happen if you tried to reproduce Batman at a local high school. This is analogous to what we’re trying to do with education now.
How would this look?
I’m not quite sure. Technically, kids could just sit at home on their computers and work through the lessons that the web app gives them… but I sense that that wouldn’t be such a good idea. It’d probably be best to require kids to go to a “school-like institution”. Kids could work through the lessons by themselves, ask each other for help, work together on projects, compete with each other on projects etc.
Certificates
I envision that credentials would be certificate-based. You’d get smaller certificates that indicate that you have mastered a certain subject. Today, the credentials you get are for passing a grade, or passing a class, or getting a degree. They’re too big and inflexible. For example, maybe the plant unit in intro to biology isn’t necessary for you. Smaller certificates allow for more flexibility.
Deadlines
Deadlines are a tough issue. If they exist, there’s a possibility that you have to cram to meet the deadline, and cramming isn’t optimal for learning. However, if they don’t exist, students probably won’t have the incentive to learn. For this reason, I think that they probably do have to exist.
My first thought is that deadlines should be personalized. For example, if I moved 50 steps and the deadline was at 100 steps, the next deadline should be based on where I am now (step 50), not where the deadline was (step 100).
My second thought is that deadlines should be rather loose, because I think that flexibility and personalization are important, and that deadlines sacrifice those things.
My third thought, is that students should be given credit for going faster. In our one-size-fits-all system now, you can’t get credit for moving faster than your class. I think that if you want to work harder and make faster progress, you should be able to and you should be given credentials for the knowledge that you’ve acquired. Given the chance, I think that many students would do this. I think this would allow students to really thrive and pursue their interests.
Tutoring
I think that it’d be a good idea to require tutoring. Say, in order to get a certificate, after passing the tests, you’d have to tutor for x hours.
Tutoring helps you to master the concept, because having to explain something will expose the holes in your understanding. See The Feynman Technique.
Tutoring allows for social interaction, which is important.
Social Atmosphere
The social atmosphere in these “schools” would also be something to optimize. It’s not something that people think too much about, but it has a huge impact on how people develop, and thus on how society develops.
I’m not sure exactly what would be best, but I have a few thoughts:
The idea of social value is horrible. In schools today, you grow up caring way too much about how you look, who you’re friends with, how athletic you are, how smart you are, how much success you have with the opposite sex… how “good” you are. This bleeds into our society, and does a lot to cause unhappiness. It should be avoided, if possible.
Relationships are based largely on repeated, unplanned interactions + an environment that encourages you to let your guard down. I think that schools should actively provide these situations to students, and should allow you to experience these situations with a variety of types of people (right now you only get these repeated, unplanned interactions with the cohort of students you happen to be with, which limits you in a lot of ways).
Rationality
I propose that rationality be a core part of the curriculum (the benefits of making people better at reasoning would trickle down into many aspects of life). I think that this should be done in two ways: the first is by teaching the ideas of rationality, and the second is by using them.
The ideas of rationality can be found right here. Some examples:
Your beliefs have to be about anticipated experiences.
Don’t commit the fallacy of gray.
Understanding that you should optimize the terminal value.
Don’t treat arguments like war.
Disagree by refuting the central point.
After the ideas are taught, they should be practiced. The best way that I could think of to do this is to have kids write and critique essays (writing is just thought on paper, and it’s often easier to argue in writing than it is in verbal conversation). Students could pick a topic that they want to talk about, make claims, and argue for them. And then they could read each others’ essays, and point out what they think are mistakes in each others’ reasoning (this should all be supervised by a teacher, who should probably be more of a benevolent dictator, and who should also contribute points to the discussions).
I think that some competition and social pressure could be useful too; maybe it’d be a good idea to divide students into classes, where the most insightful points are voted upon, and the number of mistakes committed would be tallied and posted.
Writing
Right now, essays in schools are a joke. No one takes them seriously. Students b.s. them, and teachers barely read them, and hardly give any feedback. And they’re also always on english literature, which sends a bad message to kids about what an essay really is. Good writing isn’t taught or practiced, and it should be.
Levels of Action
Certain levels of action have impacts that are orders of magnitude bigger than others. I think that improving education this much would be a high level action, and have many positive effects that’ll trickle down into many aspects of society. I’ll let you speculate on what they are.
Excuse me if I’m misunderstanding your ideas here, but isn’t this, almost bullet for bullet, exactly what Khan academy is doing?
Khan Academy doesn’t come close to executing the dependency tree thing thoroughly enough. There are a lot of concepts that are unexplained, and Khan Academy doesn’t test to see what you know before teaching you. When I refer to the dependency tree, I mean for it to have concepts on a much smaller scale than the typical calculus, precalculus, algebra, trig etc. An even smaller scale than this. I apologize for not being able to effectively communicate the type of scale I’m trying to refer to.
There are definitely some parallels with Sal’s ideas though. For example, mastery based learning, learning from a web app, learning at your own pace and at your own convenience, and having smaller certificates. I’m not trying to “steal” his ideas or anything. I just see a huge bottleneck that is preventing progress (the absence of dependency tree driven education), and thought it’d be worth writing about.
Your inability to effectively communicate the kind of scale you had in mind might be because we don’t actually know what the prerequisite tree looks like at that scale, and just finding out would be a major step forward for educational science.
It’s also not clear that any unique dependency tree even exists at such a fine-grained scale, because there exist multiple different ways of accomplishing a goal. Feynman talked about this, when recounting the episode where he learned that he counted time by mental speech, whereas his friend counted time by watching a visualization of a tape with flowing numbers:
Similarly, komponisto had an explanation of how he understood speed, and how that made it hard for him to understand some kinds of problems, because his mental concept of speed was a nonstandard one.
So there’s unlikely to exist any single dependency tree, because at such a fine-grained level, it’s likely that different people will have multiple different ways of comprehending any single concept. If my comprehension of “counting” is some specific variant X, then that might make some follow-up concept so obvious as to not even be worth explaining, while making some other follow-up concept hard to understand even with explanation. Whereas if my comprehension of counting was based on variant Y instead, then the pattern might be reversed.
I think you can see this assumption in constructivist teaching methods, which start out from the assumption that everyone filters their learning through and bases it on their existing knowledge, which will be different for everyone. Thus, rather than there being a pre-existing curriculum with a clear dependency tree that the teacher tries to transfer into the heads of the learners, the methods instead
Thus, instead of the teacher trying to chart out the exact fine-grained dependency tree, the students are encouraged to work on the problems in such a way that they themselves find the ways of learning the topic that are suitable for their pre-existing knowledge and ways of conceptualizing the world. You do still have some dependency tree, of course, but it’s at a higher level than the one you seem to be talking about.
Maybe, but consider how often in todays system a teacher or textbook doesn’t explain something that they should. Even if the dependency tree wasn’t perfect, it’d still be much much better than what we have today.
Possibly. But you were selling this as one of the most important things to focus on if we wish to improve education. Given the immense effort that this would require, it’s massively unobvious that this would be the most cost-effective thing to concentrate on right now.
I would put stuff like improving motivation by making the content of the teaching more relevant to people’s daily lives, breaking down the artificial distinctions between subjects, applying the educational and motivational techniques that the makers of commercial videogames have developed, etc. etc. as things that were more useful to focus on at this moment. If the students are motivated enough, they can work out the problems themselves, even if not all of the inferential steps were completely explained.
It is one of the most important things and extremely cost effective
Given enough data, the dependency tree can be inferred implicity from and we can also learn to accurately identify when a student doesn’t understand a concept. I’m actually working on this exact problem right now
adamzerner said that he wanted a really fine-grained dependency map, at an even lower level than this. Are you also talking about such a level of fine-grainedness? I agree that dependency maps on the level of that map are likely to be cost-effective, it’s the more fine-grained ones that I was skeptical of.
If you are talking about an even lower level than the one displayed in that map, I’d love to hear more about it.
It is possible to detect correlations between questions (or even individual steps) and to implicitly determine skills at an even more fine grained level than that—given sufficient data. We aren’t aiming to get that specific right at the moment—indeed, we mightn’t have collected enough data yet to do that—but there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to do that
Having tagged data is extremely useful for designing these kinds of algorithms, but we would only require a proportion of the data to be tagged. So it wouldn’t be anywhere near as costly as you expect
Ohh, the Big Data approach. That makes sense, and also explains why it would be possible to do cost-effectively now when previous attempts haven’t gotten very far. Not sure why I didn’t think of that. Okay, formally retracting my skepticism.
One of the first things that the paper mentioned was that Feynman died on Feb 15th.
Boo, Death.
This is the beginning of a very good idea. Happily, many, many highly-competent educational researchers have had it already, and some have pursued it to a fair degree of success, particularly in constrained domain fields (think science, technology, engineering, maths, medicine). It certainly seems to be blooming as a field again these last 5-10 years.
Potentially-useful search terms include: intelligent tutoring systems, AI in Education, educational data mining.
One particularly-nifty system is the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Centre’s Datashop, which is a shared, open repository of learner interactions with systems designed to teach along these lines. The mass of data there helps get evidence of what sequence of concepts actual learners find helpful, rather than what sequence teachers think they will.
To add that keyword list: Adaptive learning, educational big data.
I am learning Math and Physics after a long break. I found putting together the sequence of things I need to learn has been quite difficult.
Several times I found I had spent a lot of time on something that was not really needed. This is particularly the case with Math as a prerequisite for physics. The mathematicians seem to want you to learn a lot more Math than you need eg Rings, Category theory and Topology may be useful for physics at some stage. But not for me yet.
Conversely I found that I was short on some unexpected topic once or twice eg Linear Algebra was in one case not listed as a prerequisite but would have been very useful.
Others have commented on various difficulties in coming up with a single dependency graph. I do think you have underestimated the difficulties of this.
Overall this post is a bunch of plausible ideas but in need of a) More research on the state of the art b) A test in a real learning situation. It is a cliche in the startup world that ideas are cheap, tested ideas with proof by execution are potentially far more valuable.
Thanks a lot for the references!! I’ll read up.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic as well. This comment is very helpful! Thank you!
Given that I’m already involved in the creation of similar system (Docademy.com), I figure I’ve finally found a thread on here where I have something to contribute :).
On the Dependency Tree
First some thoughts on your concept of a dependency tree. I started out thinking this would be the way to go, but I quickly ran into the problem others have mentioned on this thread: There’s no one dependency tree. When looking at concepts like basic math, it’s easy to think so, but the concept falls apart when you try to come up with a dependency tree for World History, the dependencies depend on the individual teacher.
The elegant solution to this is to tag individual learning resources (such as a video or chapter) with dependencies. The system will never give you a learning resource that requires B1 to learn B2 if you don’t know B1, but will serve up other learning resources that teach B2 WITHOUT needing an understanding of B1. This solves all the problem of your dependency tree solution, but has none of the down sides inherent in the rigidity of it.
On The Standardization of Education
I am also in the camp that the standardization of education is a net negative to society and the individual. My research shows that the most effective individuals are those who specialize in the things that they are good at, rather than trying to be well rounded.
However, that doesn’t change the fact that there might be certain skills which would be generally good to have. In that case, once you’ve solved the problem of being able to measure each skill individually, it’s trivial for companies and organizations to simply not accept people who don’t have these general skills. This would work similar to how modern Applicant Tracking Systems work, but it would allow you to get much more fine grained with the skills, and would have the benefit of being in a standardized format, rather than trying to parse variously formatted resumes.
After that, the free market would take care of the rest. If a group of skills truly allowed people to be generally more effective, the companies that screened for these skills would outcompete the companies that did not, and eventually they would be generally required for someone who wanted to function in society.
On Standardized Tests
You correctly assume that it’s important to be able to quickly identify if someone is good at a subject. However, the type of standardized tests you mention, those that can be easily parsed by a computer, are only appropriate for a small subset of skills. Consider the following examples:
You correctly use expected value calculations when prompted to do so for a test, but completely fail to do so when making real life decisions.
You know most of the established theory about how to write good fiction, but your actual stories are boring, uninspired, and not engaging.
You know how to shoot a basketball, how to dribble, and how to pass perfectly. But when trying to combine these skills in a game, you can’t execute.
Ultimately, what these examples show is that for many skills, knowing how to do them in a way that can be easily measured by a computer is different then being able to actually use them in the real world. Rather, a more effective way to quickly measure someone’s merit in a particular skill would take a portfolio approach. Under each skill it would list:
The learning resources they had used to learn that skill.
The standardized tests they had completed in the skill.
Real world projects they had completed using the skills.
Testimonials from the people they had worked on those projects with, and the people they learned with, talking about theiir abilities in those skils
On Motivation
The final problem you mentioned is motivation. You mentioned two problems in motivation
1 . Kids don’t know their prerequisites when trying to understand a subject.
This is fixed with the method above.
2 . Kids don’t connect what they’re learning with what they can do with it.
If you accept my premise above, that education shouldn’t be standardized, I think you’ve actually got this backwards. If you look into the school models that are more self-directed, such as Waldorf, Montesorri, or Sudbury, you’ll see that the students don’t go looking for something to learn, then figure out how they can use it. Rather, they choose a goal, a project, or an experiment, then learn the skills they need in order to accomplish or create it.
Therefore this ideal school would have a list of goals, projects, and experiments to work on, which would be tied to skills. Students could choose the goal they wanted to accomplish (or create their own), and the system would suggest learning resources that would teach them the necessary skills.
I’d also like to add some of the other issues I see with motivation that you didn’t mention.
3 . The lecture method of learning is low immersion and a poor way to keep students engaged.
To fix this, the main role of teachers would be helping students through completing their actual projects, and the teaching would happen more informally, as part of helping them complete the project. If it was a more in-depth subject for which the student needed a book or lecture, the student could request that, but it would never be FORCED on them.
4 . There’s absolutely no incentive for good teachers that motivate students to use their skills; they get paid the same as the bad teachers, and can use the same skills for other jobs which are much higher paying.
If students are free to choose their own projects, one would assume that some of those projects will be profit generating. To solve this problem, you would allow teachers a small stake in every project for which a student used their skill, as a bonus on top of their regular salary. This would incentive them to motivate the students to use the skills they teach.
Anyways, I pretty much live and breath this stuff, and would love to discuss it more with anyone who’s interested. If you’re seriously interested in pursuing a venture that brings into reality the concepts I’ve discussed above, and see the implications for things like meritocratic voting, disrupting education, and disrupting hiring, feel free to PM on here and we’ll talk.
I don’t think it sets a good incentive, as it makes the teacher focus on getting students to do money making projects instead of the project that maximizes learning. It also creates a lot of complicated bureaucracy.
One of the problems with traditional high stakes testing is that it incentivizes almost the opposite. It causes teachers to focus on what is traditionally considered ’learning”, but ignores learning in a practical sense: Making sure students can use their knowledge in the real world, and are motivated to do so. I’d argue that using your knowledge to make money is in fact a good test for learning.
Do you have a suggestion for fixing the problem I mentioned that minimizes bureaucracy and provides proper incentives?
Hey Matt,
It’s nice to hear from someone interested in education!
I understand that dependency trees get fuzzy outside of things like math. My thinking behind it was basically that whenever I’m failing to learn something, the things preventing me are prerequisite pieces of information; doing a better job making sure the learner has the prerequisites would make learning more effective.
So I think I should have been clearer: I think that it’s impractical to really come up with a perfect dependency tree. My point really is that instruction always happens in a certain order, and that we could do a better job of choosing the order (when you teach what) by coming up with a useful dependency tree.
The downside of requirements is clear: the required lessons might not be what is best for you to learn. However, if you don’t require things, students may mistakenly forego opportunities to learn things that would be most beneficial for them (probably out of inexperience/immaturity). To me, this is a tricky trade-off and I’m not sure what the best way to handle it would be.
My loose intuition is that there should be much less requirements than there currently are, but still enough where you’d explore all the basic subject fields. What do you think the tradeoffs are, and why do you think they’re in favor of not standardizing? (I agree with what you said about having credentials for more specific skills, but there’s still the question of whether or not to require students to have certain skills.)
That makes sense, but all of the individuals you’re studying probably went through some sort of schooling that had some sort of requirements for them. So (presumably) your research shows that at a certain point, it’s best to focus your education rather than be well rounded. And there’s also the question of whether getting focused prevents you from exploring your interests.
I love that portfolio approach! And I agree that people often “understand” something, but completely fail to apply it in their lives (which I think is strong indication that they don’t really understand it) For example, expected value, opportunity cost, fallacy of gray, 80⁄20 principle etc.
This is an intriguing idea. I’ve thought about it before. My opinion isn’t strong, but I sense that there needs to be a balance: sometimes you should let kids do this, but sometimes learning needs to be more bottom up.
I think that this “top-down” learning has an important advantage in that it motivates students, and for that reason I definitely get the sense that there’s a place for it. However, learning things just for the purpose of a project leads to a lot of “holes”/”not a strong foundation”, as I’m all too familiar with.
I taught myself web development and design, and made a website. It’s basically been learn as I go. I’m always looking stuff up and trying to figure it out. I “jump around” a lot, and I think the average time it takes for me to figure something out would be way lower if I moved progressively through the dependency tree rather than jumping around so much.
I definitely agree with that. I didn’t talk about it because I wanted to focus on the big picture. In hindsight, I think I should have talked about it though.
I sense that most projects are unlikely to generate profit. Especially K-12. Maybe teachers would be more motivated if they had more time. Like right now they have to spend so much time on lessons and lectures and stuff, but if this was essentially done for them already, they’d have more time to help students with projects, and maybe that’d motivate them more.
Just because you have identified a real problem doesn’t mean that the first solution you can think of is good.
It wasn’t the first solution I thought of. I’ve thought through many others, and this is the best I’ve got.
Then why do you prefer that solution to the others you thought of? Articulating reasons why one alternative is better than another usually leads to a deeper understanding of the alternatives.
Sorry, I don’t have time to do such a comprehensive write up.
I think that the approach I mentioned of tagging resources with skill prerequisites effectively does this, but rather it ends up creating several different branching dependency trees, rather than just one. Consider that if your goal was to “create a nuclear reactor”, and you didn’t know basic math, the system would have to be smart enough to suggest a learning resource that teaches addition before suggesting a learning resource that teaches advanced nuclear physics.
The issue of finding the most efficient/useful dependency true is a separate, but important one. I think it’s probably best left to machine learning rather than human intuition. There are actually few organizations out there doing quite a bit of work on this already, Knewton is the one that first springs to mind.
I suspect my tendency to go towards no standards is a values/emotions based decision. I dislike the idea of one institution choosing the standards for everyone, as there’s too much opportunity to use that power to push a particular individual’s or group’s agenda.
However, the real answer here is that this needs to be tested in a lean manner, using randomized controlled trials. I have write ups for several systems of incentive’s or requiring liberal arts education, which I plan to test with Docademy, using different groups.
I think you’re right, that when the children are younger, they’re less likely to be skilled enough to generate profit. However, if you’re tracking exactly from whom they learn, and exactly what prerequisites they needed to learn their subjects, it’s possible to create a trickle down effect, so that the teacher who taught you addition when you were 4 gets a small stake in your project to build a nuclear reactor when you’re 24.
I also agree that less planning would motivate teachers more. I’ve volunteered and worked in schools for years, and this is a common complaint.
I ultimately think that you need to both raise the economic incentives, and lower the disincentives. The adherence rate for teachers after 5 years is 54%, and to raise that number to where it needs to be will require several large changes in how the teaching profession operates.
Hmm. I’m not sure that this is such a good idea, given that the motivation that one has for teaching seems to be strongly based on social rather than market motives, and introducing market incentives to a situation governed by social incentives has been known to just screw things up.
For example, my best friend has a daughter, and I’ve been giving her various books and games that either I used to enjoy, or which feel like they might be fun and useful for learning a mathematical mindset. I do this out of a general desire for her to have fun with them, learn useful things, and come to love science. Now if you told me that I’d get a cut out of her future earnings, it seems quite possible that that notion would start dominating my thoughts whenever I thought of giving something to her, and I’d start thinking stuff like “well, I could buy her this board game, but it’s kinda expensive and any individual game is unlikely to have a big impact by itself, so would it be a good investment? Probably not.” And she’d be worse off as a result.
It seems easy to imagine similar failure modes that would start cropping up once you encouraged teachers to, in effect, start thinking in terms of “how could I profit from this kid” rather than “what would be the best for this kid”. For instance, they might focus all of their efforts on the kids who showed the most talent and were already the most likely to succeed. They could even actively try to encourage the low-talent kids to drop out, so that they’d have more time to focus on the more promising ones. Or they could encourage their students towards careers that generally cause people to be unhappy but pay well, or teach the students attitudes towards life that promoted a focus on money above all else. Or, like those Israeli parents who started being more late once a fine was introduced and they could thus pay off their guilt for being late, some of the teachers might start thinking, “well if this kid doesn’t do well in life later on, I’m already paying the cost in the form of getting less money from them, so I don’t need to feel guilty about giving them a bad education”. Et cetera.
Intuitively at least, it would feel like a better idea to raise the social incentives, not the financial ones. Part of the reason why I’m happy to give my friend’s daughter stuff is that she’s not just any random child who I’ll never see again: she’s my best friend’s kid, which means that I should be hearing about how she’s doing for as long as I live. Maybe she’ll some day become fantastically successful at something, and then credit part of her success to the role I played in her life. Attempts to replicate this effect could involve making individual teachers responsible for their students for a longer time (so more “you’ll have this teacher for the next six years”, less “you’ll have six different teachers over the next six years”), or even just providing a means for the teachers to stay in some kind of contact with their students even when the teacher’s no longer teaching them.
I think this is true, and it’s something I have a lot about. What behaviors would this reward system actually incentivize?
I figured there would be two strategies teachers could use to maximize profit. One would involve as you said, focusing on the top students and taking them under your wing, making sure YOU are the one who teaches them as much as possible.
The other would be to instead focus on motivating and effectively teaching as many kids as humanly possible, regardless of their perceived potential, and simply playing the odds.
Other possible strategies would involve apprenticeship, in which your apprentice’s work would effectively pay for your retirement, or company training, in which even if an employee was not loyal, you could still make money from them after they left you.
I figured that these strategies were close enough to how I would desire teaching to work anyway, that it was worth a shot.
One downside would be that it would cause teachers to compete to teach kids, instead of working together to get the best learning outcome.
That being said,, there’s a lot being taken for granted above, not the least of which is that people won’t figure out some way to game the system. I’m open to split testing this approach, like I am with everything in Docademy. Do you( or any other commenter) know of any ideas to substantially increase the social incentives for teaching such that it could measurably change the turnover rate? I haven’t hit upon any yet, but I’m open to any suggestions thrown my way.
I would guess that being a teacher is a lot more fun if you don’t have to give students grades. Especially for someone who tries to be really fair grading seems to produce a lot of unnecessary work.
As far as the system goes in Germany, I think we just pay our teachers a higher salary and we have a low turnover rate. It might be that simply paying every teacher a decent salary is the way to go.
Filling your taxes is a nontrival skill in a country like Germany. It’s not taught in most German schools at all. Still most people succeed in filling their tax returns.
Hi Christian,
I’m not sure how this is relevant, it may be that I’m just missing your point here.
One thing that is a useful distinction to make here is that “school” in the classic sense of the word doesn’t apply to the system I’m talking about. If you learn something such as doing taxes, either through formal means, or through informal means, the goal of this system is to be able to track that you learned that, and show others that you can use it in meaningful ways. Moreover, if you haven’t learned it, the system should suggest efficient ways for you to do so.
The general argument is that you shouldn’t engage in what Nassim Taleb calls teaching birds to fly.
If you take a bunch of young doves and try to teach them to fly, you may pat yourself on the back when they indeed start flying. You might think that you are a great teacher because the doves actually fly.
I was once at a Barcamp where a teacher talks about her troubles of teaching young student how to use the technology of a Wiki. She made a good argument that every adult should be able to operate a Wiki.
Editing Wiki’s is something I learned on the side when I had the need to do so. People learn to fill their taxes when they have a a need to do so.
I think you want two things in an education system. One is project based learning. The second is good learning of basics that you need for higher level skills.
Still trying to connect this to your original comment. Can you give an example of where you think my system would be insufficient, and what alternative you’re suggesting?
I think the part that I quoted suggests that you get a list of what skills companies require and then work through that list teaching all those skills.
I think that’s a bad idea. Yes, companies might want their employees to be able to use a Wiki. On the other hand you don’t have to go out and specifically teach the skill.
I think we’re in agreement here. My point there was that companies decide what skills they require for a position, and that if they decide to screen for generally useful skills such as rationality or self-control, this may give them a leg up on the competition (which would ultimately lead to every competitor screening for these same skills.) It was a response to azerners arguments for a standardized curriculum.
I tend to think that screening for a skill that someone can learn in an hour (like a Wiki) will limit your options and lead to less options for candidates, but who knows. Perhaps screening being very specific would cause you to only get candidates who had specifically groomed themselves for your position,and were therefore more motivated than the usual.
My point being that the free market will ultimately make these decisions and weed out what skills are useful to screen for, this system merely enables the companies to screen those skills n a more objective way than the traditional hiring process.
The interesting thing is that learning to use a Wiki isn’t the kind of skill that a school teacher considers to be easily teachable in an hour to her average student.
Seeing the plight of a teacher who tries to be modern and tech the kids to use modern technology has made me question the extend to which schools teach anything useful.
Okay, I’m in agreement with letting the market decide which skills employers want to hire for.
I think that both of you are assuming an average computer-proficient person when making estimates of how hard it is for someone to learn to use a wiki. An average person in general, or an average computer-phobic person, could have a much harder time.
E.g. one of my friends, who’s definitely quite intelligent but has issues with computers, did eventually learn to use wikis, but not before three or four different people had tried to teach them to her. (Or possibly she did learn them on each occasion but then completely forgot about them in the intervening time—I’m fuzzy on the details.)
A lot of being rational is about being able to admit that you made a mistake. Rationality is not about being good at shooting down the mistakes other people make.
And the rest of being rational is making sure that the future likelihood of making the same kind of mistake is as low as possible!
Yes, just because one recognizes a mistake doesn’t mean that one has already updated.
I disagree.
Just getting a personal pet project is frequent advice for people who want to start to learn to program. Working on the project leads you to learn the things that are necessary to solve the problem.
You also should explain how this interacts with what you say about essay writing. To me it seems like you advocate two distinct ideas that sound reasonable on the surface without having thought deeply about how they interact with each other.
Mu: (I agree with both of you).
Make a dependency Map of topics.
Have students tackle projects and learn what they need along the way.
Teach students A1 before teaching them A.
3 requires 1. 3 is not necessarily optimal, since it still implies a set curriculum. IOW, teachers teaching to students instead of students learning what they need. 2 is made more efficient by 1. If I’m trying to learn how to do a high-level thing like build a machine learning algorithm, normally, schools would require me to take calculus and statistics courses beforehand, however, I could just learn what a gradient is (and all the pre-reqs for that like partial derivatives).
moved to Discussion (writing quality insufficient for Main)
Meaning the ideas, or my ability to communicate them? Tell culture—hit me hard.
Uhm, both.
The main ideas of the article -- (1) you must teach the prerequisites first; (2) it could be useful to make an explicit “knowledge tree”; (3) you should test whether the knowledge was properly understood—are good. But the ideas (1) and (3) are what almost every teacher already knows and does. So you’re kinda reinventing the wheel here. It’s worth mentioning it explicitly to people who already don’t know. But those who teach, already do (which doesn’t mean they always follow it; people compartmentalize).
Even the idea (2) is known on an intuitive level; most teachers would probably think about it as a linear sequence, not a directed acyclic graph; or at best case a very simple graph consiting of long linear parts. But that’s because in a typical school, you teach linearly. To use the graph structure fully, you would have to allow each student to progress individually… but then you can’t have in the same classroom, listening to the teacher. So the full use of the graph requires individual learning, which could be achieved by a web application, as you say. (And the Khan Academy already does this.)
So, the ideas are good, but you are trying to sell them as something new, which they are certainly not.
Then you jump across many topics in a very simplified way. E.g. the part about motivation is… well, do you believe that progressing through a “tech tree” is the thing that makes a real difference between a motivated and unmotivated student? Because you could write such “tech tree” even for things which are taught in schools now. I believe it would be a nice thing to have, but it would make almost zero difference. You ignore other relevant facts, for example the large inferential distances and uncertainty. It’s difficult to see how knowing the “2 + 2 = 4” contributes to anyone’s dreams. (And even if it does, they may object that it’s enough to write that fact on a piece of paper, and they don’t have to memorize it. And the only problem with that is that at some moment the heap of such papers would just become too big to handle.) On the other hand, motivation can be created by completely irrational things, e.g. role-playing with small children that they are “pirates, lost in the magical Island of Numbers (and they must solve the problems to get back to their pirate ship)”.
If you propose a common project, I applaud the attitude, but you haven’t done your homework. Also it seems like you underestimate the size of the project. How long would it take you with, say, 10 volunteers? Twenty years? At least you could outsource the creation of the rationality curriculum to CFAR.
My advice:
Start with something smaller. (It is okay to keep in mind the big picture. But focus on one thing at a time.)
Research what already exists.
Write an article about what you found (focusing on only that topic) and ask for more info. In the discussion people will tell you about dozen other things you missed. Research them, and write another article.
If you completed all the parts, and the Singularity is not here yet, start the project. Now you have the necessary information.
Possible starting points: (A) Has someone already created the “tech trees”? Where can I find them? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How could I improve them? When I discuss my ideas of the improvement with a real teacher, what is their first reaction? (B) What web based teaching programs are out there? What are their similarities and differences? What are their successes and failures?
Both of these topics can be interesting on your own, and if you want to do a project, you certainly wouldn’t waste your time, because (A) means researching your product, and (B) means researching your competitors and learning from their failures. Which a successful project would have to do anyway.
EDIT: Another thing, be specific. Create a “tech tree” for a selected subject or two you know. (Feel free to steal ideas from Khan Academy.) Maybe you will discover some less obvious issues—for example that to create a proper tree of knowledge you would have to split the information into too many parts. For example are “solving quadratic equations (without complex solutions)” and “solving quadratic equations (with complex solutions)” two different nodes, or just one? Is “finding rational solutions of quadratic equations” worth creating a separate node? Or is it just a subset of “finding rational solutions of polynomial equations” node?
Seeing a visual representation of that “tech tree” probably would. One thing lacking in school is a clear communication of the intended skills to master and progress towards that mastery.
The tree would need to be able to be displayed at multiple levels of hierarchical composition.
Anyone know what Khan Academy already has in this regard? Or other educational software?
That really should have been his starting point—study what’s already been done.
I am not doubting that seeing the visual representation of the “tech tree” would make some students somewhat more motivated. But I am thinking about many other things which make students unmotivated (such as: the student’s parents are preparing for a divorce right now, and the student cannot focus on learning at school), so I doubt how many % of the total “unmotivation” can be fixed specifically by showing the students the “tech tree”. 5%? I’m probably being too optimistic here.
This. I don’t know if they have other subjects than math processed in this way.
That Khan Academy tree is pretty demotivating for me, and it’s actually less math than I know (it looks like it only goes up through derivatives in a more traditionally structured series of classes). Now imagine that there are similar, more comprehensive trees for every major field of knowledge. To truly face the fact that you will only ever be able to learn a tiny fraction of any given field is pretty depressing. Of course, this is partially a reflection of the scale at which the tree is made and the way it’s presented, but motivation is not at all a sure thing.
First, if that reality depresses you, you need an attitude adjustment. I got a PhD in EE which taught me that neither I nor anyone else knows squat. That’s just the way reality is.
Second, the graph isn’t enough without identifying levels of competency against some standard, which could be population statistics, or grade level. That’s what’s needed for education—realistic goals, and a way to track progress toward completing them.
That should be sufficient for schooling. After that, experts could recommend material based on desired specialties.
In tough times, the advantage of habits of achievement and monitoring developed in good times should provide significant help, if not a guarantee of success, which I don’t think anyone promises or expects.
Well, yes and no. There are methods (usually called within-class groups) that allow students to progress at different paces while being in the same classroom. These methods usually depend a lot on small-group instruction and peer helping. So no, they won’t be simply listening to the teacher, at least not all at the same time.
Maybe, but probably at level 1, maybe level 2, but surely not level 3.
I don’t see anyone else emphasizing the importance of the dependency tree and of making sure that at a small enough level, students know the prerequisite information.
At a small enough level, yes. But I don’t think we’ll really be able to understand this level well enough to use it. So I think that the idea is just something to keep in mind when thinking about how to motivate students.
Not at all! If I thought that this could be done with 10 volunteers I’d be trying to do it right now. I think that this would need hundreds, probably thousands of people. Consequently, I think that the best thing I could be doing is making enough money to (help) pay for all of this, so I’m starting a startup: http://www.collegeinsideview.com/.
When I was a student, teaching other students privately math, I automatically started explaining any topic by testing whether they understand the prerequisites. -- I started one step before the new topic, and if they failed the test, I backtracked another step before the failed test. I didn’t have a complete map in my mind, but at each moment I simply thought: “what are the immediate prerequisities for this?”.
I doubt I was the first person to think about this. Does the fact that I don’t remember anyone explaining this to me explicitly (before I came to university) make it somewhere between the levels 2 and 3?
You know what all teachers do in summer, before the school year starts? They prepare the sequence in which they will explain the topics during the year. (At least if they teach for the first time, because later they usually reuse the stuff from the previous year.)
As I said, they probably don’t think about this as a “directed acyclic graph”, but rather as a “linear sequence where some parts can be reordered” (because most of them are not computer science people). The idea that the topics have some prerequisites, and you need to explain them in the proper order, is out there at least for decades.
Let’s just say American education isn’t as good as Slovak.
I agree with Eliezer that this shouldn’t be in Main, but I think your “ability to communicate” is fine.
I read the first 1⁄3 of the post and then skimmed the rest, because I think that you yourself are “glossing over important bottlenecks”.
As I see it, for you the main problem with education is that students don’t learn effectively in schools and you try to treat this problem. However, you should be asking: how did this problem appear? What could be done to solve the real problems? And those are in fact more difficult questions and require much deeper changes than creating a dependency tree and applying it to the students.
Creating and following a dependency tree with pupils implies that you consider 5-, 6- or 7-year-old children who enter the school system tabula rasas, which is not true. What is more, during my pedagogy studies one of the lecturers mentioned that 7-year-old children may be 2 years ahead or behind in development in any area (gross motor, fine motor, memorization, social skills, knowledge, you name it) and these differences are normal. This in turn means that the primary school teacher has to manage and teach not a uniform group of tabula rasa children, but a highly differentiated collective of individuals ranging in mental age from 5 to 9 years.
If you are not starting with a uniform group, you cannot follow a dependency tree, because each child is in a different place of this tree. First you would have to sort the children, so that each group is at some level of your tree. But how would you do that? As I said, sorting by age is one of the worst ideas, it has only one advantage: it’s cheap. You don’t even have to see the kid, you just find one number about her and decide about her life. So, maybe do some tests? (now let’s just not talk about how much it would cost and how much time it would take). Sure, but now you can clearly see that some of those kids can read but not count and some can count but not read, so you should either put them in separate classes or order them to go to different classes for different subjects (the former unrealistic and the latter being very frowned upon in elementary schooling; my country even tries to forbid separation of lessons with bells for 7-9-year-olds).
Suppose that you in fact solved that problem and have a group of children on a very similar level in the area that you are going to teach them. Soon you notice one more phenomenon. The same differences that made some of your pupils start education a year earlier and some a year later cause the kids to learn at a different pace. You could be working with some of the pupils on harder problems, advance your tree faster than the average set by bureaucrats, but other kids need more explanation, more time practicing before they advance. If you comply with the needs of the faster kids, the slower ones will completely stop learning, because they will stop understanding what is going on. If you accomodate the slower kids, the faster ones will get bored and unmotivated to learn anything. How do you solve this problem? My lecturers said that teachers should teach the lesson at such a pace that 3⁄4 of the class can understand it, effectively stiffling half of the class. Maybe you would divide the class further?
But then, how many times can you divide the class without forcing half of the adult population to work as teachers?
This comment is already longish, but let me point to another problem. When learning anything, a dependency tree is an oversimplification.
From Glossary of language teaching terms and ideas
Active vocabulary: Vocabulary that students actually use in speaking and writing.
Passive vocabulary: Vocabulary that students have heard and can understand, but do not necessarily use when they speak or write.
When learning a language, students commonly have much larger passive vocabularies than active. Some textbooks are designed in a way that is supposed to minimize this difference, but at the same time they offer an extremely slow pace of learning. I observe that this concept of active and passive knowledge applies to any field of study. It’s quite intuitive: you first have to learn about something before you can use your knowledge. Following a dependency tree means that you cannot expand your passive vocabulary in a given field of study before you master active vocabulary of the lower level, and this in turn slows down you learning. You can learn about multiplication and division when you have not yet mastered calculating addition and subtraction; you only need to understand the concepts of addition and subtraction, have them in your passive vocabulary.
These are just two sample problem with education, but as a newbie, I only wanted to point that you’re missing your own point, not solve the whole mess of institutionalized education.
I work for an educational maths company and we are working on implementing a fine-grained Knowledge Graph as are a number of our competitors.
I can’t see a government successfully implementing all of this by itself. Fortunately, intelligent online tutoring software has really taken off because of Khan Academy. Charter schools will be the first to structure their lessons to take advantage of the flexibility this software provides in terms of having students working at their own rates. Eventually, I imagine that educational departments will notice that this works and restructure themselves around this model too, but this will be a slow process.
Good to hear!
Bad idea. Putting all resources in a single project is stupid. We want diversity.
It’s especially bad because it means a single person can’t focus on solving part of the problem in a way that actually pays his bills when all his efforts are focused on contributing to the one perfect educational web app.
A few weeks ago a somewhat similar idea came into my mind while thinking through resources I’d have liked to have and ways to improve education (I think what started me off was the way that many concepts taught in early parts of school turn out to be incorrect simplifications?). I dumped some extremely rough notes into my ideas file (at the end of this post), and mostly concluded that it was an immense project which would require many years of focus to become really useful, and unless it got a lot of momentum would easily stall. On the other hand, this kind of resource could if built properly be amazing. On the other other hand, Khan Academy has many of the elements of the resource I imagined, and building from scratch is very likely more effort than encouraging them to add features or just helping build on the existing project.
Some comments on your suggested implementation: Human knowledge is really really big. Even just the bits taught in schools. Trying to rewrite each part in curriculum form before it becomes useful seems like it would cause a project like this to lose steam quickly. One way around this would be to collect existing high quality educational material online and link to it/include it directly from sources which you have arrangements with, allowing contributors to focus on building the dependency tree. If and when it becomes beneficial, switching to producing content may be better.
If I understand correctly (from the talk of deadlines, tutors, qualifications, social atmosphere, essays, classes), you would like to change the way formal education works? Building an educational resource external to the schooling system seems vastly more realistic than enacting radical change on large institutions without extremely strong evidence of the new methods of teaching working. It could possibly work to start a new school (in the UK there’s a lot of attention on “free schools” these days, which, so long as enough parents support an idea, can teach in much less orthodox ways and still get funding), but that’s also a massive project, and one which requires plenty of interest from parents otherwise you don’t have students.
Concretely, how could you get people to invest the effort required to build this? At minimum, if you’re trimming it down to just a web app and dependency tree which primarily links out to existing resources, you need a significant amount of programmer and web dev effort plus a good number of active, reliable people with good understanding of each domain covered building the web of knowledge. Paying the non-technical users to write/collect is not going to work unless you have immense funding, and even then there are many pitfalls (see Knol and Encarta). Not paying users means you’ve got to have something which is very user friendly, stands out in a big way to important volunteers, has a good base of existing example content, and ideally offers something back to them like StackOverflow does with their jobs program. And even if you have those features, mainly volunteer can flop easily.
And my extremely rough notes from the file with all my ideas which seem interesting but I’ll probably never do much with. If someone’s interested in any of the lines I can write up my actual thoughts on it, these were mostly to help me remember not actually explain my thoughts:
natural curriculum without stupid simplifications
nested knowledge
-starting from extremely basic statements a 5 year old can understand, building toward higher understanding with dependencies/inferential gaps filled.
crowdsourced, wikilike?
handling original research
degrees of acceptance in chunks of information (e.g. almost certain, very likely, useful approximation for x, )
handling conflicting possible knowledge, conflict warnings,
integrated QA system
-ask questions about each chunk of knowledge, these are organized/merged into a FAQ, or answered/redirected
domain-based reputation system
-based on useful edits and ratings from related knowledge
-general showed publicly, higher definition information to those who refine the system and people with higher rating
-fully recalculated on each change to system, arranged so this is socially okay
-gamification!
-general reputation includes typo fixes, organizational stuff, as well as directly building knowledge, but this is only minimally counted towards specific domain knowledge.
Absolutely. I think that it’ll take hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And lots of money. So I’m starting a startup in order to make enough money to get this going.
I thought about this, and I agree that it’d make more sense if there were only a few people working on the project. But I think that there’d be too much overlap in content, and it’d be too tough to create the system from what is currently available. So I think that execution would require producing content to avoid all of the bottlenecks.
Yes, but that’s separate from the web app (sorry, I should have made that more clear). Yes, bureaucracy sucks, but I think that if this web app was made, it’d be so clear that it’s better that schools would have to adopt. I could start off by providing it to people to use for free, and showing results. It might be tougher to get things like rationality, social atmosphere, tutoring etc. implemented. I think that they’re really important, so I’ll have to brainstorm hard about how I could make that happen.
You plan to earn enough money to pay hundreds of people? It’s not possible to do with high probability, and you have to be good enough to have even the small chance. A normal career may give better expected outcome, even though it won’t give that rather small chance of getting rich. (Read Graham’s essays, for example these two.)
1) I don’t necessarily have to make enough money to pay for the whole thing. Just enough to do enough to get other people interested enough to do the same.
2) I think I’ve got a solid chance at getting rich. This is my specific argument, and this is the general one.
This is not particularly convincing. You should take into account the a priori improbability of this event, so that getting to a “solid chance” would require much more than evidence that merely improves the estimate. See also base rate fallacy and attribute substitution (e.g. the question you need to answer is “What is the probability of success?”, but the question you end up answering might be “How good is my startup’s pitch?”).
These ideas are not exactly new but they aren’t exactly trivial either. Why are there so many downvotes then? This community confuses me sometimes in their voting behaviour.
I think part of the reason is the reputation adamzerner has. I’m thinking in particular of this earlier post, that convinced me that adamzerner is a very irrational person. This initial bad impression probably influenced what people thought of this article.
Fundamental Attribution Error? The heuristic of being mindful of the word “is” seems useful here.
Also, I read a lot of my old posts and cringe. If I saw a similar post by somebody other than myself, I would dismiss them as hopelessly irrational. Thus, I’m less quick about dismissing people as irrational.
But, I do agree that his reputation probably has contributed to how well received his posts are.
I agree with others that the Big Idea here is less exciting than adamzerner appears to think it is.
It seems plausible that learning prerequisites solidly first is a good technique. But it isn’t obviously best and I don’t see any evidence here that it is actually best. Another possibility is that actually it’s best to be exposed informally to ideas before you have all the background to understand them completely, so that (a) they will be more familiar when you see them “properly” and (b) they will give a bit more context when learning the prerequisites.
I have some (weak) anecdotal evidence that sometimes this learning order is effective.
I wonder about the motivational impact of never being allowed to work on something new until you’ve demonstrably mastered whatever the creators of your study scheme think are the prerequisites. I would imagine that in some cases it would be very bad, but I’ve seen no evidence either way.
IMO, having a road map ahead, even if it is blurry, helps to organize the immediate details. The map ahead will be blurry of necessity, as you don’t understand the details yet.
What probably would help for motivation is to see what people can do with the knowledge you’re trying to master—see what problems the knowledge will allow you to solve.
Metacademy already implements a dependency tree that starts at basic statistics and reaches to academic papers in machine learning.
Sudbury Valley student manage to learn without any deadlines. If you don’t learn because you are curious and motivated to know something but because there’s a deadline, you probably won’t learn well.
These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. You might be curious about something, but also e.g. constantly distracted by video games, with the deadline helping you to actually focus your effort and get started on the thing you’re curious about.
I’m not aware of any research that says that intrinsic motivation is stronger than extrinsic motivation, so I would question your second sentence. However, your first sentence pretty much sums it up… why have the extrinsic motivation when the intrinsic works fine already?
I haven’t said anything about strength of motivation.
I have said something about learning. Learning is about finding meaning in patterns. That works much better when you are curious.
Even if being curious doesn’t increase the amount of time spent learning or the amount of focus you have during that time, it still builds a better fundament for learning in a way that produces lasting knowledge that you won’t forget.
Makes sense, will have to think about it more.
I think that there are likely some problematic aspects to this idea. One is that the general “I learned X, therefore I can learn Y” seems really strongly applicable to all STEM-types of classes, but I think it would likely falter in English, History, and related subjects to some extent—for example, in history, there’s a lot of problems trying to organize how and what to learn that mean making a simple graphlike structure seems problematic. All events have preceding events and resulting events necessary to place them in their proper context. You can’t really understand World War 2′s causes without understand World War 1 and it’s resulting effects, and you can’t understand that without understanding.… etc. And while you could start all young children at “billions of years ago, the Earth …” and progress until you are teaching them recent history at the end of highschool, that will necessarily mean they will understand all the earliest stuff at a very low level of sophistication; and you can’t really teach the entire history of the world at varying levels of sophistication each year, or even every 3-4 years. And finally, there’s really no way to test “Does this student understand the history of the Opium Wars?” in an automatic way that is resistant to cheating and allows retries without being heavily proctored by actual physical humans standing over watching the testing and writing very carefully and doing the marking of essays, which rather defeats the benefits of a lot of this flexibility stuff for those fields. Also, these fields have a lot of required skills that all should be advancing together—history and politics and economics and so forth inform one another a great deal, for example. I have no idea how I would apply something like this to literature and reading skills, etc. either—the dependencies for these fields are far more fluid and less obvious than “Before you can learn subtraction you must learn addition”, and necessarily involve a variety of skills in. e.g. vocabulary, grammar, spelling, composition, and the like all rising in somewhat non-discrete ways. The extent to which learning how to spell “definitely” allows you to write memos is extremely non-obvious, to me at least.
Secondly, people don’t necessarily know and understand things perfectly because they passed a test on it some time ago. I personally have a very strong memory, and didn’t need to be retaught how to find the roots of a quadratic equation after the first time. However, I was personally taught that particular concept at least 3 times that I can recall in public schools, and even the third time I would say that more of my classmates NEEDED it than not, which is depressing but important to realize. I am not immune to it myself—I only retained permanently “how to invert a matrix and why it matters at all” on the second go-round of that concept, and I saw it at least half a dozen times. You have to try to deal with that sort of thing—perhaps retesting before each new concept? Or some time-based decaying proficiency individually for each student based on their history? Regardless, however you attack this problem it is going to be a problem for this sort of approach that ought to be considered.
However, those are sort of nitpicks, really—there are several more fundamental problems. Overall, I don’t really see that this project will significantly advance the field of pedagogy relative to the resources it requires to even begin to attack it. A lot of your categories have no suggestion that I consider reasonable for even beginning to attack the roots of the problem as I see them. For example, your section on writing merely states that we should teach people to be good writers somehow, and your rationality section that we should teach them rationality somehow. I found personally that the majority of my teachers in school were not fundamentally extremely competent writers and powerful orators who were able to pass on their gifts of persuasive composition effectively, and similar limits applied for logic and rationality—there is a fundamental chicken and egg problem where you want a lot of people to learn X but there aren’t any teachers who currently even know X and little reason exists to suggest that they would be particularly good at teaching X*. And there are a huge number of students who learn best from a teacher, and whom I suspect would make little real progress if left alone. Independent learning works best, so far as I know, for prodigies who are very self-motivated by long-term goals, which characterization I suspect applies to rather less than 1% of the general student body of a typical modern school—Lesswrong’s audience is, I suspect self-selected for the sort of people for whom this idea might not be terrible, but there are a huge number of students who would quite simply cheat if left to their own devices with a system such as you suggest, or do minimal real learning but instead cram for tests immediately before taking the tests and then forget them. You could enforce proctoring of official tests to advance, but that seems like it would quickly become a bureaucratic nightmare and loses a lot of the flexibility and so forth you wanted in the first place.
Anecdotally: I personally went to all of my scheduled my classes through all my undergrad because I already knew by that time that I learned best by going to a class where I could listen to a presentation and ask questions, even when the class material was adapted directly from a book I already had in my possession from the first day of class and I had complete sample problems sets similar to those on the final exams as well as solutions. I rather suspect more students are like me in this regard than not, because the regular attendance rates of those classes was >90% even during extremely nasty weather, and they all had the book and problem sets too.
Link to “Good writing” is 410, deleted now.
There is a saying that education is what remains after you forget almost everything you have been taught. Point is, you sort of described a process without stating what end goal you want to achieve.
I think the whole idea of having a centralized curriculum is flawed and holds education back from developing. Schools should be free to teach whatever they consider to be useful for students.
Diversity is good and if children in different schools learn different useful skills that benefits society as a whole as every student can go on to apply their skills.
If you get rid of the whole idea of a curriculum teachers are suddenly free to innovate.
They are also free to teach e.g. young-Earth creationism. At least some degree of standardisation is beneficial, since it creates boundaries against worst excesses. Also, curriculum makes it easier for a beginning teacher to organise her classes, although this could also be arranged by having loose guidelines instead of strict curriculum.
There are many textbooks out there that are easily available for a teacher who wants to use them. A teacher doesn’t need a central authority to tell him what to teach to be able to find resources. Not having the central authority even makes it easier for market participants to create textbooks that teacher want to use.
I actually agree with you on all points, but I think you are underestimating how overwhelming things can be for a teacher just beginning her career. Without any central curriculum a teacher has to inspect textbooks much more carefully in order to find a book that would suit her needs. It’s a lot of extra work.
This is a smaller problem in math and science teaching and a larger one at humanities and social sciences. This problem could be alleviated by having teacher education include classes where you get familiarised with different textbooks and different approaches to teaching your subject.
Teaching a teacher about different approaches of teaching his subject seems fairly straightforward for teacher education for myself. I once tried to learn something about reading by looking at what an academic journal has to say. It spoke about fancy terms like Heideggers notion of meaning. I’m well educated despite having spent a lot of time in school and do have an idea of what Heideggers notion of meaning happens to be. On the other hand it’s useless for a teacher who wants to teach his students to read.
Teachers education could simply switch to teach the actual practice of teaching instead of trying to teach fancy educational theories and the problem would be solved.
I think that getting rid of curriculum provides a lot more benefits in the humanities and social sciences than it does in mathematics. To me it would make a lot of sense to teach students during humanities or social science classes nonviolent communication (NVC). It a fairly straightforward framework with decades of history. On the other hand I do know that your average high school teacher doesn’t have the skills for teaching it, so it’s impossible to just write it into a centralized curriculum.
Berlin has 12 districts. Each of those has a democratic representation. While my sister was in school there was a political change that lead to the voting age for that particular democratic representation be lowered from 18 to 16 years. There were a lot of people in her class that could vote because they were 16 but not 18.
A good political science teacher would have addressed that opportunity to actually teach how this kind democratic representation works. I use the term democratic representation because it’s not a parliament because it can’t make laws and I don’t know whether there a term in English that directly translates the German word. Her teacher didn’t because she was too busy teaching to the curriculum.
Most of the stuff she taught the student will probably be forgotten after 5 years. She missed a crucial chance of actually teaching students who were voting at the first time in their lifes how the institution for which they vote works and what it does.
Worse she had a fairly bad idea of what the political institutions in Berlin actually do. She knew how to teach the textbook or the curriculum but she failed at the crucial task of teaching her students of how politics works in reality. Even how it works on the basic level of what the formal responsibilities of the body for which they vote happens to be.
Teacher simply teaching to the curriculum is often like students guessing the teachers password. There no transfer of real knowledge.
I think that humanities teachers who just try to teach whatever the curriculum says instead of teaching what the think will be valuable knowledge for the students abandon their real responsibility as a teacher. When a student ask why he should learn something the answer should never be “Because the curriculum says so”.
Yes, there are costs to standardization. But there are also benefits. Standardizing the curriculum means that the work of preparing educational materials (such as textbooks) can be shared across many teachers. Students move between schools pretty often, and certainly they move between teachers within schools. Standardization makes it easier for students to move without getting completely lost. Standardization also allows easier assessment, which some people think is important.
You might be right that we should give up on the idea of a standardized curriculum, but it’s not the least bit obvious to me which way the cost-benefit tradeoff goes. It’s not even obvious to me how we could test this. You’d have to have some curriculum-agnostic way to know how well the education system was working, and I don’t know how to do that.
Thoughts on how this could be tested?
You are right that I’m calling to a revolution that’s not immediately obvious. Thank you for pointing that out. It might make sense for me to start a deeper project for making that case on a deeper level that mind produce an article.
Getting rid of a central curriculum would stop two teachers from using the same textbook. On the other hand it would make it easier for the people who write the textbook. The could simple write the textbook that they consider to be optimal for learning instead of having to focus on covering exactly what the specific curriculum of a school district or a particular state’s education policy lays out.
The people who write the textbook should decide what goes in it. Not a politician or bureaucrat that draws up a curriculum. If the textbook is good teachers are going to use it.
In the US, at the k-12 level, the school buys the textbook, not the teacher. The books are owned by the school, rented to the student, and used by several students over several years. Teachers turn over quickly, however, and so it would be quite costly if each time a new teacher starts teaching a course, the school has to buy a new set of books.
The increased costs of producing textbooks for every preference show up as acquisition costs, and the schools are reluctant to pay those costs simply to satisfy the preferences of teachers who might not be there next year or who might change their minds.
A student can choose whether to go to school A or B. I’m not opposed to schools making decisions about what to teach at school level.
It might be even good if it’s general knowledge that students who go to school A get taught from the Bayesian statistics handbook while school B rather teaches math like calculus.
Schools should be free to develop profiles of what they want to teach because of what they consider to be useful for students to learn. How much freedom a specific school gives individual teachers can be up to the school.
I think that when a school makes a decision to buy a particular textbook it has a lot to do with what kind of textbook the teachers at that school find helpful.
I think that if a school buys textbooks based on what a bureaucrat thinks instead of based on what the teachers who interact with the students on a direct basis think, that’s bad for education.
Given the way the post is written I don’t understand why you don’t list the social aspect under the section “Where does our system fail us?”
I think the dependency tree should at least in part be derivable from the data in Cyc.