How ‘Deprogramming’ Kids from How to ‘Do School’ Could Improve Learning

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/12/how-deprogramming-kids-from-how-to-do-school-could-improve-learning/

by ColinWright • 12 years ago

113 73 12 years ago

blogs.kqed.org

jdmichal• 12 years ago

And they rose to the challenge. “I think the kids were just waiting to be let loose and to be treated like adults,” Holman said.

This part struck me. It wasn't that long ago in human history that these "kids" would have been considered adults. Fourteen, which should correspond roughly to the beginning of American high school, would have been the year they would have started apprenticeship and taking on real adult responsibility. And that's assuming they were even going to a skilled trade; unskilled trades like farmers would be outright working by that point. We see this transition point in cultures that have preserved it as tradition, such as bar/bat mitzvahs, quinceañeras, and débutante and cotillion balls.

coenhyde12• 12 years ago

I agree. In recent times we have been training young adults to behave like kids. That behavior sticks and you are left with a dysfunctional adult.

Chronic30• 12 years ago

We're also left with many extraordinary hard working and intelligent adults.

jarcane2• 12 years ago

In Finland, mandatory primary and secondary schooling ends at 16, after which point you can choose to either go into a trade /apprenticeship school, or an academic school (high-school/university), or not go at all. And all of it is free (though there's rumors they might start charging tuition for university in a couple of years). The schools themselves also go to great lengths to ensure that everyone graduates on the same 'level,' even in the lower schools.

The result is one of the most well-educated and trained workforces in the world. It's also an incredibly competitive job market, because almost everyone applying has the equivalent of at least a two-year degree, and if it's an academic profession, probably a Master's. Almost no union will take you as well if you haven't finished a trade school or higher school. There's talk now of them making post-secondary education mandatory as well for two years, because anyone who doesn't go into trade school or high school is more or less fucked on the job market. The kids who don't want to go to school after 16 wind up on unemployment and living with their parents because there's almost zero chance of getting any kind of employment without further education.

It's been interesting to see and learn how degree inflation works on the market here. In one sense this is a lot like the states, where in many fields now, anything less than a Bachelor's degree is useless. In another sense though, unlike the states this hasn't resulted in the 'diploma mill' effect, where those Bachelor's degrees have become utterly devalued and useless because they more or less hand them out to anyone willing to keep showing up for four years.

And as well, there are more options here for trades instead of going into academics, so it's not like there aren't options if you don't go into university. There are trade school courses in everything: I know a bloke who went to school for two years just to be a waiter. So unlike the states, where that diploma mill inflation can feel limiting because there's only so many academic subjects available, it seems like there's a lot more viable different routes to pursue towards finding a career.

chii3• 12 years ago

a bloke who went to school for two years just to be a waiter.

that seems quite excessive - shouldn't on the job training work just as well?!

InclinedPlane• 12 years ago

Currently there is a lot of concern about "child rearing" but very, very little about raising a child to adulthood. So much so that for most people it tends not to occur until the mid to late 20s these days, and then only sort of by accident/osmosis.

Today we decry "child labor" but there is a lot that the traditional apprenticeship model had going for it. For one it gave young adults important job skills and introduced them to the job market, which not only jump starts one's career and financial self-sufficiency but also inculcates responsibility, belonging, and self-esteem (because teens see that they are capable of doing valuable work, capable of learning in a way that produces tangible results, etc.) But there's a subtle aspect to the apprenticeship system which also helps teens transition to adulthood, and that's the interaction of adults and "children" on a peer level.

At the moment you have an almost pathological system, anyone that a teenager interacts with who is over 18 is basically in a different world. And most of the time those people are authority figures. For the most part teens look to their peers for cues on how to behave, with predictable results. With an apprenticeship model you don't have that same arbitrary age-based segregation; apprentices, workers, and "masters" all work together, spend time together, and so on. They often become friendly, and often the younger apprentices would pick up cues on how to behave from those who are older and more mature, because in that context they are their peers.

This is hugely important because it jump-starts the process of gaining responsibility and maturity for teens as they transition to adulthood, and provides an extended network of people beyond just one's immediate family who can be consulted for advice on various questions that tend to present themselves when one is growing up.

When I was a teen I was considerably more mature than the average of folks around me and for the longest time I didn't realize exactly why. I'm sure some of that is just my own personality, but recently I figured out that part of it had to do with the fact that I ended up spending a lot more time interacting with and working with adults than is normal for most teens and children. To me, it didn't feel weird to be hanging out with adults or working alongside adults as a peer when I was 10 or 14 or what-have-you, and that made the transition to adulthood fairly non-eventful. Sure, I struggled with plenty of the normal problems that everyone faces in their 20s (what to do with your life, how to build a career, etc.). But I didn't struggle with the same issues a lot of newly minted 18 year olds struggle with for years, such as how to be a responsible person, how to do work or learn of your own volition instead of being forced into it, and so on.

Unfortunately, that sort of thing is if anything almost actively discouraged today due to an excessive fear of child predators. And while we've perhaps incrementally affected the prevalence of sexual abuse of minors, if we even have, we've definitely stunted the development and maturation of millions upon millions of people over several generations, which unimaginably enormous negative consequences.

I don't know what the answer is to these problems but I do know that the current system is broken to an almost pathological extent, it should be one of our highest priorities to fix it.

coenhyde12• 12 years ago

Our current school system is moronic and this is not an exaggeration. It is the worst possible teaching system I could possibly imagine. Instead of trying to improve the system it should be scrapped entirely.

Here is what is wrong with the current system:

- Grading is harmful. A pass should be 100%/A+. You should not be able to progress until you understand the subject matter 100% as future learning depends on you having a complete understanding of previous content.

- Grouping students by the year they were born is harmful. Some students progress faster than others. By grouping students this way, some students are held back while others are dragged forward; not understanding vital content.

- Grouping a student's progress for all subjects into a single metric is harmful. Eg. grade 1,2,3, etc. Every student will have a natural tendency to be good and bad at certain subjects. Maybe they are good and Physics but bad at English, or vise versa. By grouping a student's progress in all subjects into a single metric a student might be held back in the subjects they are good at or not understand vital content in the subjects they are bad at.

Here is what I imagine a good education system would look like:

- Students progress through subjects independently of their peers and the other subjects they are studying.

- Subject assessment would happen at much smaller increments and students do not progress until they understand that content block 100%.

- Students graduate school when they have reached a certain level of competency in all subjects. This could take an arbitrary amount of time. e.g. it might take one student 3 years but another 8. But once a student graduates they will be competent.

P.S I used to run an company that developed learning management systems, so I have thought about this stuff a bit and developed a hatred for the current education system.

cbd1984• 12 years ago

Students progress through subjects independently of their peers and the other subjects they are studying.

The usual objection to this is people's aversion to having children at vastly different levels of physical development in the same classroom. Personally, I don't know whether to buy that argument, but it sounds worth expanding upon.

Students graduate school when they have reached a certain level of competency in all subjects. This could take an arbitrary amount of time. e.g. it might take one student 3 years but another 8. But once a student graduates they will be competent.

OK, but at age eighteen, physically preventing them from leaving is against the law, and will likely be punished.

I'm only half-joking:

At some point, the law recognizes people as full adults, and it is much more difficult to legally restrain an adult, even if they're reading at a fifth-grade level.

Personally, I think the answer to that is more and better trade schools, and increased governmental public works programs, but such ideas went from being All-American in the 1930s to Socialism in the 1950s, and we're still not quite past that yet.

jerf• 12 years ago

"All-American in the 1930s to Socialism in the 1950s, and we're still not quite past that yet."

Socialism was "All-American" in the 1930s. Then history happened and it garnered itself a rather nasty reputation, which it went to great, great effort to earn fair and square.

voxic11• 12 years ago

I don't think he is saying people should be forced into school if they don't graduate by 18. just that they can't graduate (get a diploma) until they actually learn all the material.

coenhyde12• 12 years ago

Your first point is a concern. Maybe there can be some kind of "social class time" where students spend time with kids their own age. Since they are learning more efficiently there is probably time for this :).

Re your second point. It's just a graduation, no one is forced to stay in school.

hibikir• 12 years ago

More than their physical development, is their emotional development. My son was quite capable of passing 2nd grade math tests when he was 4. If all we looked at was academics, he really should not have been anywhere near a kindergarten class. However, he was not emotionally mature enough to move up three grades. How much you can teach at once, the kids tolerance for repetition whenever they already understand what has been explained, their reactions to frustration and happiness... Having kids of different ages that are ready for the same material is challenging.

I think the future is more automated, independent learning. At my kid's school, a good chunk of the math curriculum is taught by computer. They go to a lab, and get to play math games that change according to their success with what they've been presented already. So if a kid has trouble adding small numbers, he'll get more of those problems than a kid that has that figured out, and can move forward to adding large numbers, multiplication, division, or whatever else still challenges him, regardless of his age.

This also handles attention span issues. If a kid can be challenged with new exercises and learn for an hour and a half straight, great. If another one has trouble learning new material late in a class, he will do worse, and face easier material as the class goes along.

gress5• 12 years ago

What 'trades' do you think will prepare people to be economically self-sufficient?

zo1• 12 years ago

"A pass should be 100%/A+. You should not be able to progress until you understand the subject matter 100% as future learning depends on you having a complete understanding of previous content."

As much as I can see the value in that, it'll never fly. Because, as I'm sure you know, we live in a society of "equals". Therefore, the system you propose will violently shatter that illusion for the general public and mainstream collective-thought.

And this will happen because you will very quickly see so many fail miserably and a few plowing through the material. Both due to innate general intelligence, affinity for particular skills/topics as well as plain old determination. We don't all have equal amounts of all, no matter how much we get told otherwise by individuals blaming externalities.

And I'll just go ahead and add that I believe I'd be one of the many that would very quickly fail in such a system. At least, until I realized the seriousness of the situation and decided to sit my ass down and study with determination and not rely on any supposed inner ability/gift/talent.

coenhyde12• 12 years ago

I addressed this in a comment above but i'll repeat some of it. What I am imagining is a system with a much more granular assessment model that can be done at the student's own pace, and retaken until they get 100%. If you failed an assessment, it's not a problem. You can spend the next 10min relearning the content and retaking the test. This way you actually learn the content that you didn't know, instead of just getting a grading and moving on.

watwut2• 12 years ago

Frankly, I do not see value in it, especially when it comes to things like history, geography etc. Even in math you do not need to be able to solve those super-hard triple star olympiad like exercises. You just need to be able to solve normal ones.

The only other option is that the weaker or average student will not even see those hard exercises exist and I not sure how would that help him.

That approach makes sense only if you mean to become expert in that subject. It does not make sense to demand that in everything.

eli_gottlieb• 12 years ago

- Grading is harmful. A pass should be 100%/A+. You should not be able to progress until you understand the subject matter 100% as future learning depends on you having a complete understanding of previous content.

Expert practitioners with decades of experience will often still make one or two mistakes, a couple of "derps", if given a child's exam. This is a broadly good idea, but you need to allow some margin of error for the noisiness of real cognition.

fixedd• 12 years ago

Anecdote: My second grader's teacher sent home school work last week where she "corrected" his correct answer on a spelling test to something that wasn't even a word. She also accidentally a word in her little "good job" blurb at the top.

People make mistakes.

Qwertious• 12 years ago

That line wasn't very clear, but I don't think it referred to the actual test/exam, just understanding the subject.

coenhyde12• 12 years ago

This is true, but the assessments are very small (10min-30min of learning content assessed) that can retaken as many times as required until the student knows the content.

dagw4• 12 years ago

A pass should be 100%/A+

That sounds ridiculous. No one understands their subject matter 100%. I mean take a question like "What where some of the root causes of the start of World War I". A perfectly reasonable question for a 14 years old to spend 30 minutes on in a history exam, but also one that they could spend the next 30 years of their life on and still not answer completely.

The only way to expect 100% pass rates on exams is to write stupidly easy exams with pointless multiple choice like "What year was the battle of the Somme". A question which doesn't prove any understanding att all.

coenhyde12• 12 years ago

It does sound ridiculous if you put that requirement in the context of the current education system. What I am imagining is a system with a much more granular assessment model that can be done at the student's own pace. So if a student fails to get 100%, they should spend the next 10min relearning the content and retaking the assessment.

mponw• 12 years ago

The school system is not moronic at all. It is _designed_ to preserve our society's status quo by conditioning students into gradually losing their "naive" ideals and any independent thought (check out Disciplined Minds by Jeff Schmidt). As you have already weakly implied, the kind of teaching you envision will only happen in alternative organizations.

alextgordon• 12 years ago

You should read this: http://www.supermemo.com/help/fi.htm

Learning to 100% is a fallacy. It is more efficient to learn to about 90% - 95%.

Future learning does not always depend on past learning. You don't need to have memorised the double angle formulas in order to start learning group theory.

Really the whole problem of when/what to learn has been comprehensively solved by supermemo et al. The unsolved problems are in formulation of learning material.

coenhyde12• 12 years ago

No, students should remember 90-95%. Of course it is impossible to retain 100%, this is not what I expect. Assessment would happen at a granular level and retaken as many times as required. If a student fails the assessment, they can relearn what they don't understand and retake the test when they are ready. If they forget the content then so be it, but they will reassessed many times in the future on the same content. I should also mention that the questions they receive each time they take the test would be slightly different with different answers.

learnstats22• 12 years ago

- Subject assessment would happen at much smaller increments and students do not progress until they understand that content block 100%.

I don't think this is a good idea at all. It sounds extremely discouraging.

This system is lovely for people always at the top of the class, who get to thrive with exactly the knowledge and content they need (assuming they have stored it in long-term memory, rather than storing it just long enough to pass through the immediate barrier), but it's terrible for everyone else.

You see this pattern already in compulsory education: 'I don't really get this topic' becomes 'I can't do this topic' becomes 'I can't do this subject' becomes 'Why would I bother?'.

It's a lot of work for student and teacher to get back from this point, if they ever manage to. Your system encourages this, and so almost nobody will graduate your system in 8 years; anyone who faces such overwhelming blockades will naturally drop out rather than overcome them. I contend that your idea is worse than the existing system.

One of the best ways to get a student to understand content they are completely stuck with is to introduce and apply it as part of a more advanced topic or more practical context, i.e. just move them on from the part they are stuck with and let them continue, coming back to earlier topics where relevant (and as a necessary reminder to the others). The existing system works well in this respect, at least.

nshepperd3• 12 years ago

I don't think this is a good idea at all. It sounds extremely discouraging.

On the contrary, struggling to get everything done by next week and scraping by with a 55% pass mark is extremely discouraging.

Being able to take as much time as you like to understand the content until you get it all 100% sounds much more encouraging to me.

By way of anecdata, a researcher who had experimented with this approach in australian schools for teaching math came to my faculty and gave a seminar last year. He and his organization found that the students were, as predicted, vastly more encouraged by the mastery learning approach. Actual learning rates were also on average 2x as fast.

You see this pattern already in compulsory education: 'I don't really get this topic' becomes 'I can't do this topic' becomes 'I can't do this subject' becomes 'Why would I bother?'.

Only because we are forced to progress without even trying to fix "I don't really get this topic".

dbecker• 12 years ago

Can you point to any evidence to support these opinions/claims? (I don't mean that to be snarky, but rather that I would find it more interesting and compelling)

coenhyde12• 12 years ago

Only anecdotal evidence. I spent half a decade building Learning Content Systems for the assessment model I describe. But we used it to teach Certificate 3 in Carpentry and other building related trades. It worked VERY well. We won many national awards. But it is my belief that this assessment and learning model could be applied to most subjects. Checkout https://bluedogtraining.com.au/ if you are interested learning more about what we did.

codingdave• 12 years ago

"developed a hatred for the current education system"

You might want to take a step back and return to these thoughts once your hatred has subsided. I think you will then better be able to have an unbiased evaluation of the good and bad of multiple education options. Because right now you are going to far to a totally different extreme, which can be ripped apart just as well as our current model.

coenhyde12• 12 years ago

It's pretty hard to appreciate and comprehend a completely new education system from a HN post. I don't mind it being "ripped apart", mostly because the concerns are legitimate and I omitted information to address those concerns in my original comment. If I addressed every issue initially it would have been a 100k word comment.

EDIT: Also my hatred will not subside. It's been 3 years since I was in that business and my opinion isn't any less absolute. The current system is broken, very broken and it is crazy to me that we continue to support it. Even this thread is an example why change is difficult. An education system is very complex and new idea's are interpreted in the context of the current system, so it makes it very difficult to explain without writing a white paper. And ain't nobody got time for that.

beagle33• 12 years ago

Anyone who finds this interesting and is not aware of the Montessori[0] approach should definitely look at it. It is basically the same underlying idea, consistently applied from toddler age. It seems to be effective, if you measure by "people famous for the right reasons"[1], such as Bezos, Brin, Page and Wales.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education

[1] http://www.mslf.org/famous-montessori-students/

sytelus• 12 years ago

Are you recommending Montessori beyond k-1? Are it even available for that stage? One thing that made me wonder was if these "famous" people only went to Motesorri pre-school or all the way through in higher grades. The reason I'm asking is because if it's only preschool then benefit seems to be too high and questionable.

js2• 12 years ago

The Montessori my kids attended in NC went through middle school. I believe the Montessori my first child started at in CA went through high school.

zarify• 12 years ago

I went through a Montessori school until year 7, and I think it was very good for me, although I'm not sure how well it would have suited high school for me (the school I was at offered until year 12 but there were very few students who were there last year 7).

beagle33• 12 years ago

I am not recommending it, I'm merely pointing at it.

I do not have any knowledge about it (neither myself nor my own children), other than what I've read. I do subscribe to the idea, though.

rimantas• 12 years ago

I am sure you will find plenty of famous people educated traditional way. And where is the list of not famous people who were educated using Montessori method?

beagle33• 12 years ago

I don't have the statistics so I'm not going to argue.

But the question is a question of probability and information divergence. If 0.0001% of the population was Montessori educated, but 1% of famous people were (whatever your definition of "famous" is), then it is greatly informative. If 0.0001% of famous people are, then it is not informative.

And note that even if informative, it might not be a causal relationship - it could be that the "causal" relationship is "parents who are open to alternative education systems", or "parents who can afford alternative education systems and are willing to", and the Montessori link is incidental. I do not know and I don't think anyone really does.

Regardless, I find those educational principles much more logical than the traditional ones, and would thus prefer them if given the chance.

pinaceae• 12 years ago

careful. montessori and waldorf pupils tend to come from wealthy families. success in later life might have no basis on their schooling at all.

coldtea2• 12 years ago

It seems to be effective, if you measure by "people famous for the right reasons"[1], such as Bezos, Brin, Page and Wales.

Mostly because parents who fork for such schools are already rich and well educated.

Animats• 12 years ago

There's a delightful article which I can't find at the moment about a mother who did her middle school daughter's homework alongside her for a week. Her daughter advised her "memorize, don't understand". There's not enough time for understanding.

ColinWright• 12 years ago

It was a father:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/my-daugh...

jacalata• 12 years ago

He never really explained why his daughter couldn't start homework before 8pm, which I thought displayed a curious lack of acknowledgement that it was a late time to start - homework she started at 4pm (like I had to at her age) wouldn't be cutting into her 8 hours of sleep even if it took 4 or 5 hours. Is she doing required school activities? Watching TV at home alone because her parents are at work? Doing three kinds of dance lessons they signed her up for? Although he does at one point mention that "she already worked on Spanish that afternoon" so I'm not sure if she does and he didn't count that time? Just seemed like he was being a little myopic about the issue.

How ‘Deprogramming’ Kids from How to ‘Do School’ Could Improve Learning

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