Education

What are the greatest problems that plague the education system today?

The field of education is riddled with a certain kind of progressive platitude that disguises the deeply ironic fact that it itself is the greatest perpetrator of epistemic harm against the children it purportedly claims to serve.

Phrases like “Student-centered”, “21st century skills”, “deeper learning”, and “competency-based education” provide a cursory but essential shield against criticism that, if allowed to penetrate, would quickly identify and cause to topple the flimsy foundations upon which the legitimacy of the ‘expert’ pedagogue rests.

Dispense of your naive inclination to take these aphorisms at face value and instead take a cynical look at how the system actually functions.

Child-centered learning The presence of an authority figure necessarily constrains an individual’s ability to “think freely”, insofar as the responsibility of belief formation is outsourced to an external agent. The submission of the individual to authority constitutes a permanent and predictable blinding of his senses, and produces a lifelong dependency and disability that prevents him from full development.

Kids are not taught to teach themselves. The absence of autodidacting learning being the default, and in general the presumption that everything is dictated to the kid. Kids are not taught to learn. Imagine being sent to school and reading for eight hours a day. Then kids go into the world and treat learning as something that happened to them in the context of school, as opposed to being a process that is behind every serious action they take for the rest of their lives.

It’s persvonal. The problems that turn our beloved childhood ‘education’ into a sequence of workouts, a babysitting factory, and a joke of a genuine learning process have beset us and, if nothing is done, all that come after us. It’s critical that you and I both come to a clear understanding of what, precisely, the problems are - reading this will be a solid step in that direction.

What problems? Let’s open at the largest scale. The what. What is learned? an

Problems List

Authority
1. The judgement of what’s worth thinking about and what’s not comes from authority.
  1. These are hard problems being solved for you
  2. Partly solved for you because giving you a set of people or ideas that are “objectively” correct is easier to measure
  3. Inability for people to decide what’s worth thinking about for themselves
2. A few smart people decide what the best ideas are and everyone memorizes them. (Too much agency here?)
  1. You learn to learn/memorize, not to rederive
    1. The right answers are taught, instead of the process for generating answers
  2. Not understanding the principles that allow you to come up with the ideas yourselves
  3. Less variance in thought leading to substantially less collective growth and innovation
3. Solutions
  1. Freedom. There’s natural variation in allowing thinkers
Genuine interest destroyed by incentives
1. This is extremely destructive. If true, it means that the entire education systems is making it harder for people to learn, and taking desire to learn and crushing it.
2. This is a devastating critique that would leave us without important foundations to our education system. The system is founded on this principle that by grading and measuring students we’ll improve their ability to learn. If that process is killing the ability to learn, the system is destructive to exactly the skills it supposedly exists to create.
3. Many studies showing that when you take behavior someone likes and then give them incentives to do it, once you take the incentives away they don’t do it. This is devastating to self-learning.
4. Alan Moore’s opinion sums this up, though if this is real this possibly is the most important argument against the current system, and in favor of alternate systems like Montessori Schools.
  1. Alan Moore; "All too often education actually acts as a form of aversion therapy, that what we're really teaching our children is to associate learning with work and to associate work with drudgery so that the remainder of their lives they will possibly never go near a book because they associate books with learning, learning with work and work with drudgery."
5. Solutions:
  1. Montessori schools?
  2. JN: “I think schools should just be libraries where kids hang out”
  3. The chapter in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance where Bob Pirsig tries to not give grades in a class
Intellectual Conformity and Imitation
1. Education System Selects for Obedience / Conformity
  1. There’s massive monotony in the initial stages - kids do all kinds of nonsense, filling out worksheets or doing random abstract work without motivation given.
  2. Selects for conformity, because the only reason to believe that this “education” is worthwhile is that all the adults tell you that it is. Displays a willingness to waste your own time because you were told to by someone else.
  3. People who fail to do these nonsense tasks have “behavioral problems” and are kicked out. They end up selling drugs or involved in crime due to their lack of credentials, and so are selected out of the parts of society that have real power.
Creativity
1. Creativity is punished in the incentive structure. It’s a distraction from memorizing the relevant content or getting the solution to given problems, and creativity leads to poorer performance when the goal is to optimize for solving the solutions in the taught way
2. Creativity killed because it doesn’t seem fair to grade people on things that aren’t “objective”
3. There’s optimization for measureable things that leads to overfitting in most teaching.
Misaligned Status Hierarchies
1. The only socially accepted “Learning” comes from institutions and authority
  1. You can’t tell people you learned by doing projects with your friends on sunday morning
  2. Everything has to be validated by some authority, certified / accredited
  3. We don’t teach people to teach themselves, because it won’t be accredited
Refusal to cover critical topics
1. Social
  1. Body Language
  2. Verbal communication
  3. Relationship Management
  4. Social Exploration
  5. Influence
2. Meta
  1. Autodidactism
  2. Self Reliance
3. Lifestyle Design
4. Motivation
5. Happiness
Teaching to the test as overfitting
1. Incented teachers teach kids particular content that will lead to high scores, rather than more general and long-term investment in independent thinking ability
Ivy League Students
1. Many sectors completely unrepresented as destinations for elites
2. Extremely insecure around intelligence, use academic performance as a way of keeping score and determining status along an intelligence hierarchy
3. Selected for being status seeking and conformist, they naturally seek out the highest status occupations in their social group
4. Extremely tracked life, with everything set up in a system in front of them. Trained to work within systems, not to create them or to work outside them.
5. Heavily tracked into particular occupations (what are the chances that the best choice for 40% of harvard seniors is finance + consulting?)
6. Learning to do well on an exam and promptly forgetting, in line with the incentive structure
7. Grades as a way of keeping score
8. Artificial Exclusivity as signalling value
9. Questionable genuine value add from elite institutions - mostly a strong signal of being able to manipulate systems.
Schools Optimizing for Rankings
1. Creates a place in a status hierarchy, leads to artificial exclusion and other perverse incentives
Debt Leading to Conformist Behavior
Easiest way to pay off debt is to get a job in the workforce
Workforce participation as akin to slave labor, where the worker must be there against penalty in social terms (like living with parents) and (all in their heads, but feared) penalty on basic needs (without food, without housing)
Schools as mostly babysitting for kids
Benefit: Especially for poor neighborhoods with high crime, some charter schools try to increase the hours and days per week; part of this is so that kids don’t have time to feasibly live on the “corners”, get into trouble, be too connected with the people selling drugs or commit crimes themselves. The school is incentivized, rightly, to cut off the more profitable short-term options of crime, which have status within their local subcultures, so that they do not consider school as secondary or split their devotion. Instead, the students consider school as the primary source of learning and have to substitute the t
Schools don’t get people to grow and self-improve.
Failure to teach the students to question and search through their values
Leads to a winner take all competitive system defining students’ values by default as whatever best conforms to the group’s or society’s notions of high status (wealth, class, etc).
Schools (like many bureaucracies, and law in totum) define the spectrum of possibilities by the corner cases.
All implemented ideas need to be scalable in a monolithic system
Personalized treatment is extremely difficult to scale
Disconnected from reality and inability to parse causality

17-09-13-JS On getting more great teachers to be more common:

Talking with Alex _____ MBA 2018 HBS
1. For my kid, if I had to choose (1) a great teacher and no edtech tools or (2) all the Edtech gadgets and tools in the world and an okay/good teacher, I would absolutely pick the great teacher.
2. How do we get that in every school?
3. JS: A lot of the most successful parts of Edtech have been platforms to
  1. In the way that film and online distribution can scale up at near-zero cost

Ontology of education

Country
1. Domestic (US)
2. International
  1. Income class
Approach
1. Systemic approaches
  1. Unions
  2. Organization
2. Tech (Edtech)

Sources:

Unreal on higher education: https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/c49rdmlweaaa4if.jpg
1. ```
 2. ANOVA - a blog on education by Frederick Deboer
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2. Came highly recommended by Scott Alexander (SSC)
3. http://fredrikdeboer.com/ANOVA/
4. Some data suggests education spending doesn’t seem to do anything for GDP growth
5. From a paper called, I believe, Does Education Matter for Economic Growth?
6. ```
 3.      4.      5.       4. Brian Tomasik talking about getting interested in education once he had a “why”
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  1. From a post shared by Tomasik on Tomasik’s wall:
  2. I have no idea who Brian Tomasik is, but I came across this quote of his and think it’s perfect (especially for those of you struggling with figuring out a meaning to your life):
  3. "Before I cared about making a difference in the world, I played video games and often disliked doing homework. Once I realized that I had enormous potential to reduce suffering by others, I became a better student, in part because I knew good grades would help me be more successful in attaining a lucrative or influential career [with which to reduce suffering], but also because when you want to make the world better, you really have to know how it works. What before had been dry facts and unmotivated theories were now valuable pieces of information -- gold nuggets of data and insight waiting to be harvested."
  4. — Brian Tomasik
  5. So then I looked him up, and found out that he helped start a think tank (the Foundational Research Institute) dedicated to reducing involuntary suffering. So interesting.
  6. https://foundational-research.org/
  7. ```
    5. 
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The Truism

Postmodernism.

Epistemic Anxiety

Anxiety is the symptom of the deeper problem: the isolation of a child from the physical world and thus the deprivation of their senses and the atrophing of their capacity to navigate their reality and make sense of it on their own.

The anxiety feeds into greater dependence on management in and by existing institutions, and readers a generation inadequate to the type of self actualization allowing individual growth and exploration, rather than the movement of the herd.

Symptoms Not knowing how to look truth in the eye and acknowledge its existence and modify your behavior NOt knowing how to express deference to the truth, but approaching with the arrogance that you know better than nature, than the objective world The extraordinary cowardice of being unable ore unwilling to properly contend with the truth

A disbelief that the ‘truth’ will stay stable enough for you to complete yoru investigation of it

The next news cycle The culture war The person who outargues you that you don’t have enough real world experience The world around you is too permeable for you to know how to protect yourself from the outside memes They attack your intellectual integrity and cause you to be unable to contribute anything at all as an independent being.

How does this kind of anxiety emerge? Why do you believe that things are knowable? How do you know that your perspective in a world filled with dissent is worthwhile.

Source: Original Google Doc