
What's Gone Wrong in Schooling? - nkurz
https://www.perell.com/fellowship-essays/whats-gone-wrong-in-schooling
======
socialdemocrat
As a father of two with a great interest in education I got to say I think
this article beautifully articulated everything that is wrong with modern
schooling.

Sadly judging by various comments here I don't think most people really grasp
what the author is talking about. Not that it is odd. I also failed to grasp
this most of my life.

In fact I ridiculed play oriented schooling. It was not until I became a
father myself I got to observe for myself how children learn and see what a
disaster school was that I finally understood what a lot of these "radicals"
where actually talking about.

It is spurred me to discuss this with many other parents. I see so many of the
same problems. School really has a nasty habit of killing the joy of learning.
In its defense it is an okay substitute when parents have no love of learning
themselves and don't encourage creativity and curiosity in their own children.

The key problem I see is that schools obsess about teaching X amount of
material. Rather than focus on understanding. A child struggling with learning
concepts in math will choose memorization as an efficient strategy because
covering all the needed material by actually learning to understand it would
take too long time.

This sort of quantity obsession means memorization almost always gets picked
over genuine understanding. Actually learning to think critically and clearly
is not prioritized. Sure they always claim that is prioritized. But priority
implies something else is prioritized less. And that is never the case.
Regardless of the flowery words, getting through the whole curriculum is
always prioritized above all else.

~~~
conanbatt
Have you looked into Montessori schooling? It seems to address this very topic
very well, albeit being so alternative a school gives some jitters.

~~~
socialdemocrat
Absolutely considered it. It was a kind of school type I used to mock when I
was younger. I viewed it as a stupid hippie school. Only after having kids did
I realize how prejudice and narrow minded I had been.

I am very focused on science and mathematics myself. I view those as some of
the most important subjects. That give me some reluctance towards Montessori
as they seem very focused on the arts.

I like a lot of the philosophy of Montessori, but I supposed I would want more
play centered around developing logical and scientific thinking. But I say
this as someone who knows minimal about Montessori.

Here are some examples of what I would have liked to see more of:

We play a bunch of board games at home, and I have seen the kids get to
practice a lot of math playing these games. Just exchanging money and adding
dice numbers practice a lot of arithmetic. You can see they enjoy this much
more than doing exactly the same calculations on paper without any context.

I think a lot of early year education in e.g. mathematics could utilize board
games more actively.

~~~
em-bee
or roleplaying games like dungeons and dragons. because of its theme it is
pushed into a corner as nerd culture, but if you look at it from another
perspective it can also be summed up as improvisation and math. dungeons or
monsters are not actually required.

------
pjc50
Compare Feynman (1985): [https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-
education](https://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education)

> I discovered a very strange phenomenon: I could ask a question, which the
> students would answer immediately. But the next time I would ask the
> question – the same subject, and the same question, as far as I could tell –
> they couldn’t answer it at all!

(He proceeds to discuss the difference between rote learning of phrases and
the ability to visualise a physical system and have insights into it. Along
with a bonus example of a textbook that includes only one experimental result,
which is fake and gives the wrong answer)

~~~
segfaultbuserr
Eliezer Yudkowsky from LessWrong has similar essays on education, they were a
quite amusing read.

Fake Explanations (2007) [0]:

> _Once upon a time, there was an instructor who taught physics students. One
> day the instructor called them into the classroom and showed them a wide,
> square plate of metal, next to a hot radiator. The students each put their
> hand on the plate and found the side next to the radiator cool, and the
> distant side warm. And the instructor said, Why do you think this happens?
> Some students guessed convection of air currents, and others guessed strange
> metals in the plate. They devised many creative explanations, none stooping
> so low as to say “I don’t know” or “This seems impossible.” And the answer
> was that before the students entered the room, the instructor turned the
> plate around._

> _Consider the student who frantically stammers, “Eh, maybe because of the
> heat conduction and so?” I ask: Is this answer a proper belief? The words
> are easily enough professed—said in a loud, emphatic voice. But do the words
> actually control anticipation?_

> _Ponder that innocent little phrase, “because of,” which comes before “heat
> conduction.” Ponder some of the other things we could put after it. We could
> say, for example, “Because of phlogiston,” or “Because of magic.”_

> _“Magic!” you cry. “That’s not a scientific explanation!” Indeed, the
> phrases “because of heat conduction” and “because of magic” are readily
> recognized as belonging to different literary genres. “Heat conduction” is
> something that Spock might say on Star Trek, whereas “magic” would be said
> by Giles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer._

> _[...] They simply moved their magic from one literary genre to another._

Guessing the Teacher's Password (2007) [1]:

> _[...] And when I finally understood, I realized that the whole time I had
> accepted the honest assurance of physicists that light was waves, sound was
> waves, matter was waves, I had not had the vaguest idea of what the word
> “wave” meant to a physicist._

> _There is an instinctive tendency to think that if a physicist says “light
> is made of waves,” and the teacher says “What is light made of?” and the
> student says “Waves!”, then the student has made a true statement. That’s
> only fair, right? We accept “waves” as a correct answer from the physicist;
> wouldn’t it be unfair to reject it from the student? Surely, the answer
> “Waves!” is either true or false, right?_

> _[...] And this leads into an even worse habit. Suppose the teacher asks you
> why the far side of a metal plate feels warmer than the side next to the
> radiator. If you say “I don’t know,” you have no chance of getting a gold
> star—it won’t even count as class participation. But, during the current
> semester, this teacher has used the phrases “because of heat convection,”
> “because of heat conduction,” and “because of radiant heat.” One of these is
> probably what the teacher wants. You say, “Eh, maybe because of heat
> conduction?”_

> _This is not a hypothesis about the metal plate. This is not even a proper
> belief. It is an attempt to guess the teacher’s password._

[0]
[https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5uZQHpecjn7955faL/p/fysgqk4CjAwh...](https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5uZQHpecjn7955faL/p/fysgqk4CjAwhBgNYT)

[1]
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-t...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NMoLJuDJEms7Ku9XS/guessing-
the-teacher-s-password)

~~~
paganel
And physics is somewhat "understandable", as in given enough inputs (some
measured physical stuff + some maths) one could say that from a certain point
on he/she "understands" physics, but what should we do when it comes to social
sciences?

Take history for example, we don't actually know the exact reason for why
Hitler came to power. Was it the fault of the Weimar democracy? Was it the
fault of the Nazis themselves only? A combination of the two? Some other third
factor? And, most importantly, can that happen again? We actually do not know,
and we're talking about one of the most important events of the 20th century,
an event that directly caused the death through extermination of millions of
people. And if you extend that line of reasoning to other similar events you'd
discover that we are in the dark there, too (afaik we still have no direct
proof for what caused by Great Depression, we're not even sure why the Great
Depression "stopped" or when exactly it "stopped").

Which is to say that we're navigating in the dark most of the time when it
comes to education, saying that we "understand" some stuff is only the
exception, not the rule.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
Great commentary.

The idea that insights on history, society, future and humanity can be
obtained by studying existing history and extrapolating it, is called
historicism. Unfortunately, we don't actually know whether it works or it's a
completely misguided school(s) of thought. It's simply impossible to do any
controlled experiment on the history and society.

From time to time, I'll imagine how many of our serious social problems can be
completely solved if it's possible to simulate the past and future accurately
using a sandbox, allowing hypothesis and policies to be tested. And it's not a
new idea in SciFi, for example, Isaac Asimov's Psychohistory is one.

------
Already__Taken
Classes are too big.

If I dump my GCSE computer science classes that's 16,13,25,19,21. In a 60
minute lesson if you waste no time logging on/off or presenting that's at best
4.5minutes per student and worst 2.5min.

How much do you think you can debug over an hours worth of problems given 4
minutes. Including reading and figuring out the problem before explaining.

So we plan to put a child in a room with a teacher knowing pretty much full
well it's at best a 50% chance they'll be the one to get help with a question.

Individual play is individual problems, which needs individual help. Much
deeper there is a conflict with education and day-care.

That's just CS of course, the non-gcse sizes are:
26,27,29,28,26,28,29,31,27,28,27,26,30 if you were wondering.

~~~
mfer
Research has been done on this. There is a sweet spot range. Too few or too
many decreases results. This is looking at grade school classes. Not sure how
this plays out at the university level where the expectations are different
and teachers have office hours to discuss questions outside of class

~~~
mr_gibbins
I can answer that one for you having recently taught a semester of
postgraduate database systems to a cohort of just 6 students.

It was a blast. I followed a pre-planned course of lectures, but due to the
low class sizes it didn't work out that way a lot of the time. An example,
following a question about relations, I ended up doing a chalk n' talk on set
theory and explained how set theory could be represented as first-order logic.
Filled the wall full of Greek letters and drilled down into the topic. Then
started talking about axioms. The students joined in - you could see them
taking an interest, as the conversation had turned. In the event we spent 90
minutes (it was a 60 minute session) working through axiomatic set theory on
the board. I had to look things up as we went. It was great, the students
learned a ton (and some of the content turned up in their assignments, too) -
I learned a fair bit, as Feynman will attest, there's nothing like teaching a
topic to make you understand it better yourself - and it was productive and
interesting.

I'm not sure I could repeat the same trick with a cohort of 20 or 30.

------
lopmotr
Even in America, education isn't like that, is it?. I've done a college
entrance exam from there and it was full of questions that required problem
solving, understanding, and intelligence, not naming concepts. I even remember
being surprised how it managed to avoid using the names of concepts in the
questions and described scenarios instead.

I've been a teacher in other countries and it's not like that there either. No
test would ever ask that question about combustion. Even not knowing a word
wasn't penalized - if the student could convey the idea with a picture or
slang or whatever, that would be fine too.

Whenever I had the freedom to, I'd make my tests open-book or bring-your-own-
notes. I'd also give them any formulas they'd need. Rote memorization wasn't
going to help them.

~~~
astura
No, this author clearly has no experience with education but wants to sound
smart.

~~~
socialdemocrat
Ironically you are displaying the very problem he addresses. A smart-ass
"authority" simply asserting something which we should take as truth, because
there is an implication that "astura" has experience in education and knows
what he/she is talking about.

Ironically you prove his point. The problem today are too many astura style
assertions of truth "listen to me, I have experience!!!" instead of promoting
critical thinking and genuine understanding.

------
Izkata
I think it's actually worse than "parroting" as described in the first few
paragraphs: Back in highschool around 2005, I and a couple friends realized we
could get passing grades in multiple-choice tests just by getting a sense of
the teacher, and the style they'd use to invent the wrong answers. Didn't even
need to parrot anything.

~~~
clay10
I took the authors "play the game" line as including other aspects like this.
Parroting just being the larger theme.

------
grabbalacious
Most thoughtful people seem to agree that school is bad for creativity and
that real learning is led by curiosity.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY)

But we still have little idea how curiosity works exactly or how an
institution could be turned from an exam factory into something a bit closer
to a child's bedroom and computer at home, i.e. to a place of play.

For most of life we need _permission_ to play. Parents allocate 'screen time'.
At university one is effectively granted permission to do 'curiosity-led'
research by an external grant agency.

So what does institutionalised play look like? Perhaps something like a
university. Yet how much could university life be said to be 'following the
fun'?

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idvGlr0aT3c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idvGlr0aT3c)

~~~
jdbernard
I wanted to respond to just this statement:

 _For most of life we need permission to play. Parents allocate 'screen
time'._

I don't disagree with your larger point but in my experience the limitation on
screen time is an important protection of unstructured, self-directed play
(especially for younger kids).

~~~
emiliobumachar
Seconded. My kid will take however much screen time he's allowed. I usually
resort to authority to separate him from his screens. Otherwise, I can nudge
him away from screens to precious few choice activities, but I don't remember
ever seeing him disengaging a screen without nudging, except for physiological
needs.

------
avip
So... does this guy know anything about education systems? What's his
perspective? Was he a teacher for 25 years?

Why did I read this?!

~~~
kathe-rine
edit: my bad, I missed that this is a guest post; doesn't change my opinion of
Perell though. I'd genuinely recommend his newsletter.

He is an "essayist". I'm subbed to his newsletter because he's excellent at
finding good reading material, but his original writing is often
insufficiently informed (charitably) or arrogant (uncharitably), and in poor
style. This boggles the mind, since he sells online instruction in writing.

~~~
ema
FYI although this article is published on the website of David Perell it was
written by Mason Hartman who I believe goes by female pronouns.

~~~
kathe-rine
Ah, I missed that and thought this was Perell's work.

------
begemotz
I do not know which educational system the author is referring to but there
are aspects to this that ring true concerning education in America- both in
terms of what happens in many high schools and then what students come to
expect when they enter college (and in some cases are unpleasantly shocked,
but in other cases have their expectations fulfilled). And I _think_ i can
identify some of the literature(s) that influenced the writer. IN my opinion
though, the ideas are not new, nor do they really tell the full complex story
of education.

------
leftyted
The assumption here is that all children who enter schools are capable of
being curious and creative people but the system crushes it out of them.

I don't think so. I think schools transform students into parrots because
that's the only way to get most of the children to pass the tests. Educational
outcomes for children are primarily decided by parents, not schools.

------
germinalphrase
What even is this? An essay competition? A vague pitch for a nonexistent
product? The author clearly lacks the foundation to be making such
authoritative claims.

~~~
fredgrott
I do not know.. his UX design seems up to date in that he is applying human
behavior to UX

------
known
Asking "why" is a taboo for students in most schools

------
celticmusic
I don't understand why you would use the pronoun she in a context where the
pronoun them and they would be wholly appropriate.

~~~
organsnyder
It's become standard etiquette/respect/decency to use the pronouns preferred
by the subject. Yes, it's an adjustment for us "old" folks over ~30 or so, but
it gets easier with exposure and mindfulness.

~~~
celticmusic
hmmm, I wonder if a trans person would agree...

~~~
organsnyder
I haven't done any formal polling, but all the trans people I know prefer to
be addressed by the pronouns of their choosing.

~~~
celticmusic
what if the author is writing about a trans person, which preference takes
precedence? Did the author imply trans students don't exist when choosing to
use a gender-specific pronoun to describe the student body?

~~~
organsnyder
I'm not understanding what the difficulty is. Always use the pronouns
preferred by the person the pronouns are referring to. After that, basic
grammar rules apply.

