I suspect that most thinking about education is prone to various flavors of the Just World Fallacy, so I'd advise you to be especially cautious around that.
For instance, you might think that if you point out an outcome that everyone seems to agree the educational system should achieve, and then point out that this outcome isn't being achieved at all effectively, then people in charge will wake up to that fact and this will be enough to effect change in the system.
This fails, because it omits the hypothesis that the most prized outcomes of the educational system aren't the ones that are generally admitted and discussed. (In particular, I have come to suspect that the most valued outcome among people in charge is to ingrain compliance, so that people who go through school and higher ed are trained to show up for work and not complain too much.)
For instance, you might think that if you point out an outcome that everyone seems to agree the educational system should achieve, and then point out that this outcome isn't being achieved at all effectively, then people in charge will wake up to that fact and this will be enough to effect change in the system.
This is not what I expected when you mentioned the Just World fallacy. If you notice an outcome that everyone seems to agree the educational system should achieve, and notice that it is not being achieved at all effectively, that may be because there is no practical way to do so. Now that's an unjust world.
In particular, I have come to suspect that the most valued outcome among people in charge is to ingrain compliance, so that people who go through school and higher ed are trained to show up for work and not complain too much.
Which people in particular do you think are consciously optimizing for this?
I read the first article, and I have two questions.
First, what evidence is there that these people played an important role in the development of the school system. The article makes a good case if these were actually the influential people here, but it is clearly arguing for a specific conclusion, so I cannot trust it on this without further evidence. The implication that Carnegie was involved in this is particularly surprising, since his philanthropic creation of public libraries seems to pursue the opposite goal. Also, all the quotes were, as far as I recall from Americans. Do other countries have better public school systems, did they have their own evil plans, or did they copy blindly from the US?
Second, what is maintaining the current system? The people quoted mostly lived decades ago, but you seem to imply that inertia is not the only thing preventing reform.
Here's another example, which should even more clearly make my point: many teachers I remember from childhood used to give out graded papers in class. They would:
If you wanted to design a system so as to maximize humiliation (ETA: within the bounds permitted in routine situations, see below), that is pretty much the way you'd go about it.
Now you would not necessarily consciously think to yourself "I'm doing things this way so as to humiliate most kids and encourage social shunning of the few getting top grades". That isn't the kind of things we allow to have running through our minds.
If you had any conscious thoughts about this at all, they might have to do with "holding up the bright kids as examples to the rest" and "giving each their due".
But "the meaning of a message is the response it elicits": even though a teacher's conscious motivations may not include humiliation, if humiliation routinely occurs as a result of their actions we must entertain the hypothesis that it is a fully endorsed outcome of the system.
Now if you take a step back from just "grades", one tiny component of the system, and look at the bigger picture? One thing that quickly becomes apparent is that the system has one adult in charge of twenty to forty kids, and it is in the nature of kids to be unruly. And this is supposed to last for hours on end. So we should not be surprised that the system includes provisions (more than one) whereby the teacher is encouraged to assert their authority over the kids, to somehow "keep them in line".
If you wanted to design a system so as to maximize humiliation, that is pretty much the way you'd go about it.
I would include more nakedness if I was maximising humiliation.
Ever heard of hazing rituals? Ever heard of spanking?
Public nudity is one of our society's taboos, making it both a potent tool for ingraining compliance and one that therefore cannot be used in routine situations. The fact that it has been used on a regular basis in hazing rituals is telling.
As for partial public nudity, in the form of spankings, it used to be a routine form of punishment; both in homes and in schools. Its demise (and relegation to pornographic fantasies, or so I hear) is relatively recent.
Those were rhetorical questions. (If LW had a Dark Arts penalty jar I'd be putting in a dime in it.)
That they were trying to be rhetorical was obvious. Yet the rhetorical meaning made no sense as a reply to their context.
Both hazing and spanking involve full or partial nudity, contributing to their ickiness, and in my cultural experience at least, both have a moderately strong association with the school system.
I mentioned those because you seemed to point to the absence of nakedness, in the "teacher giving out graded papers" situation, as an objection to my argument that the school system appeared to have maximum humiliation as an outcome. Implicit in that argument was "maximum given the constraints of the situation" (and I've amended my comment to make that explicit). Hazing and correction are two situations where the context allows more humiliation, and that's precisely what we see: so I see those two as counter-objections to your objections.
Does that help make sense of that comment?
(I could, of course, also be wrong or just plain confused. In this particular case I didn't think I was.)
If you wanted to design a system so as to maximize humiliation (ETA: within the bounds permitted in routine situations, see below), that is pretty much the way you'd go about it.
Humiliation and praise can serve as motivation factors, not necessarily to train compliance.
Any evidence to back that up? If you wanted to design a system to result in maximum student motivation, and you had done even a modest amount of research on the topic of motivation, I'm pretty sure you would not do it that way.
Evidence to back up what? That threat of humiliation when failing exam can motivate people to learn more? I find it obvious. At least it works for me.
I don't say it's the optimal way to motivate. That doesn't exclude the possibility (quite probable in my opinion) that most people in charge (from teachers to education ministry bureaucrats) who consciously endorse the practice think it is.
It even seems to me that motivation is essential part of your hypothesis. The praise and humiliation aren't indiscriminate, they serve as reward and punishment. The questions are what is rewarded more, whether learning or compliance, and what certain people believe is the main purpose.
(I think that school rewards both learning and compliance, just don't think that mere existence of humiliation and praise is evidence for either being more important.)
Almost anyone defending the usefulness of grades, to start with; e.g. recent ministers for education in my country. Any number of teachers I know. Typical example: not getting full marks on a math exam because of "sloppy presentation", such as forgetting to write in the day's date.
Note I didn't claim it was conscious; you can cling to something desperately and never admit it even to yourself.
To what extent do you think that it is conscious?
Your first example sounds like status quo bias. I cannot tell what causes your second example (and I notice that I am confused). What do you think causes teachers to act like this?
compelled of their own accord
Is Orwellian double-talk, if they are being compelled it can hardly be "of their own accord".
This whole post is so vague that there is no real substance there to respond to. If you want useful feedback you need to break it down and be more concrete.
compelled of their own accord Is Orwellian double-talk
Not necessarily, If I hire someone to yell at me every time I get distracted from work they are compelling me to work more, but I went into the situation of my own accord.
Youth additional capability, coolness, connection, charm, caring and contributions are vital elements for healthy youth development. Based on this theoretical implication, engaging students in school activities would encourage these characters towards their activism, now and then. Since I am assignment writer at Assignment Help Empire. Hence, the perception of teachers would unmask the role of schooling on this ground.
learning can at times be quite difficult. Why is it difficult? It challenges our world views, which can be a very scary thing, particularly for people whose world views have remained essentially unchanged for decades.
Learning is difficult because it needs effort which isn't immediately rewarded, not because it is scary. What worldviews are challenged if one learns painting, skiing, playing piano, calculus, group theory, Chinese, C++ ... ? From my experience, learning the worldview changing facts is usually among the easiest things, for their significance is easily recognised. Motivated cognition may lead one to reject the facts, but they have to be (and usually are) learned and remembered before rejection.
What is really difficult: learning a complicated skill which challenges nothing, inspires nothing, takes a long time to master and is useful, but difficult to be excellent at.
A [censored] Approach to Education
An Approach to Education
I invite the LW community to help me identify where my thinking about education is wrong here...
I disagree with the applicability of the criticisms of others when they said that the post is vague. The post represents a way of thinking about the problem, and so it is possible to say where the thinking went wrong and where it didn't. Vagueness is something that is more of a sin for a proposed solution.
So here is where I think the thinking went wrong:
While it is necessary to continue to improve our educational systems for youths
Not necessarily. Maybe the best thing to do is have is children be home schooled from ages 6-12, followed twenty to forty yeas of academia. It might be that spending money on children's education isn't efficient for meeting any goals.
for it is adults who make the decisions
Not most of them. Their biggest impact is influencing children.
Why is it difficult? It challenges our world views, which can be a very scary thing
It's also difficult because math is hard.
How can we create an environment that fosters a pull model of education?
Make them pay dearly for it, because people value things they spent money on! I say this because it is the opposite of what you concluded based on different, valid considerations, but there are a lot of human biases that interact to make certain approaches more likely to succeed even though those approaches also have their own drawbacks.
Once these...will crystallize...Once their...Then they will
Conjunctions. The more steps there are, the more steps for people to choose other than as you would have them choose, or for events to otherwise not work out.
The very people who most need education have very little money to devote to it
Education can be great for individuals without being good for a society. To the extent what is achieved is signaling one's relative worth, society loses from educational investment, even as individuals gain from it and those who don't have it could most use it.
First, I want to second what billswift said: your post is vague and insubstantial. You also don't cite evidence for your claims, many of which seem wrong or non-obvious to me.
I advocate a "pull model" of education: adults must be compelled of their own accord to seek knowledge, because learning can at times be quite difficult. Why is it difficult? It challenges our world views, which can be a very scary thing, particularly for people whose world views have remained essentially unchanged for decades.
The very people who most need education have very little money to devote to it, even if they desire it. Their education must cost only as much as the individual feels he or she can afford, otherwise they will simply not show up.
What you're describing is price discrimination. The main effect of price discrimination is to extract much more of the consumer surplus than would otherwise be possible.
Youth additional capability, coolness, connection, charm, caring and contributions are vital elements for healthy youth development. Based on this theoretical implication, engaging students in school activities would encourage these characters towards their activism, now and then. Since I am assignment writer at Assignment Help Empire. Hence, the perception of teachers would unmask the role of schooling on this ground. [url=http://www.assignmenthelpempire.co.uk]Assignment Help Empire[/url] Assignment Help Empire [url=
I suspect that most thinking about education is prone to various flavors of the Just World Fallacy, so I'd advise you to be especially cautious around that.
For instance, you might think that if you point out an outcome that everyone seems to agree the educational system should achieve, and then point out that this outcome isn't being achieved at all effectively, then people in charge will wake up to that fact and this will be enough to effect change in the system.
This fails, because it omits the hypothesis that the most prized outcomes of the educational system aren't the ones that are generally admitted and discussed. (In particular, I have come to suspect that the most valued outcome among people in charge is to ingrain compliance, so that people who go through school and higher ed are trained to show up for work and not complain too much.)
For instance, you might think that if you point out an outcome that everyone seems to agree the educational system should achieve, and then point out that this outcome isn't being achieved at all effectively, then people in charge will wake up to that fact and this will be enough to effect change in the system.
This is not what I expected when you mentioned the Just World fallacy. If you notice an outcome that everyone seems to agree the educational system should achieve, and notice that it is not being achieved at all effectively, that may be because there is no practical way to do so. Now that's an unjust world.
I invite the LW community to help me identify where my thinking about education is wrong here...
While it is necessary to continue to improve our educational systems for youths, we must do a better job of focusing our energies on educating adults, for it is adults who make the decisions about how our society runs, and how we educate our youths. If adults are not sufficiently educated, then youths will not be sufficiently educated.
What kind of educational program do adults require? I advocate a "pull model" of education: adults must be compelled of their own accord to seek knowledge, because learning can at times be quite difficult. Why is it difficult? It challenges our world views, which can be a very scary thing, particularly for people whose world views have remained essentially unchanged for decades.
On the whole, however, the model we currently employ for education is a "push model": we tend to tell people what they must learn in order to be educated. And in the name of efficiency we pre-construct programs of study. But the push model is impractical. It does not account for the range of human experience and desire. To try to force a person to learn probability and statistics, for example, when they have not yet developed a healthy desire to learn it is too stressful and does not allow their minds to be open to reflecting on and integrating the new concepts. The time for a person to learn a given topic is when they begin to ask questions about it.
How can we create an environment that fosters a pull model of education? First, we can offer a series of courses in multiple disciplines that people can sample. This would consist of a broad range of courses in the arts, sciences and humanities. Rather than lasting for several months at a time, they would last for only a few weeks---long enough for the student to get a sufficient introduction to the topic. And they would be fun. For example, people could get a sense of what they can gain from learning probability and statistics by giving them play money at the beginning of a class and having them gamble on some well-constructed games. Then they can be taught some simple, but perhaps non-intuitive mathematical "tricks" that would allow them to be more successful as they play the games.
By sampling a broad range of topics while engaging in discussions about issues facing current society they will both identify things they are talented at and things they would like to see changed in the world. Once these have become clear, with sufficient mentorship the thing they want to focus their studies on will crystallize for them. Once their focus has crystallized, it is time to work with them to build an individualized, interdisciplinary program of study in which everything they study is directly related to what they wish to accomplish, and they understand the connection. Then they will spend some period of time acquiring the skills they need to accomplish their goals.
How should they acquire these skills? By and large we offer only a single model of teaching and learning---lecture, exam, grade (often followed by forgetting; see Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4)---although some people are making a lot of money convincing large groups of people that online learning is the way to go, but it appears that few people actually learn well this way. The real point---and people who study education know this, they just don't implement it because the current system is so entrenched---is that people process information in different ways, and we must provide an environment for people to learn in the way they process information.
As people acquire the skills they need, they must put them to use in order to maintain them. This will be done by having them engage in projects that are directly related to what they wish to accomplish. This will also give them practical experience in the world.
What should be the cost of such an education? This depends on the economic situation of the individual. We live in a stressful world. The very people who most need education have very little money to devote to it, even if they desire it. Their education must cost only as much as the individual feels he or she can afford, otherwise they will simply not show up.
Will this create a world in which everyone, or even most people, understand topics like probability and statistics? Maybe, maybe not. But if a large group of people learn even a little more about a wide range of topics, and learn to enjoy and respect learning and knowledge, then we will be far more likely to be living in a more rational world.
Ok, there you go. Have at it.