Comment by hiAndrewQuinn
3 days ago
Personally, I would hate this. As a student I far preferred PDFs, etc. because I could quickly make Anki cards out of them, strip mine them for insights and good practice problems and then just burn them into my long term memory over the next few months. We should be teaching children about spaced repetition systems and helping them instill the one habit actually proven to help them remember what they learn, not banishing them back to the Carboniferous Era!
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted, and I stand by what I said. :) Your kid's inability to focus should not be the reason my kid can no longer remember his material. That's a separate problem which can be solved with an approach as simple as "turn off the modem".
Nah -- the schools should teach to the average student and address the average problems. I don't begrudge the school system for not catering to me when I went through it.
No one is really average. Even people who are average overall are not average in every skill and every subject. /classroom This is an intrinsic problem with classroom teaching. There is an HN discussion about home education (or "homeschooling" as people misleadingly call it) at the moment...
Schools need to teach everyone basic skills for life in society. Whatever those are. In lower grades that is about the same for everyone, but as you move on schools need to push kids to where they will do well. I took metal shop in school, but I was always on the college track and so this was just a fun class I only took because I have one block that nothing else fit in - for all other kids in that class it was essential to their future life and they knew it.
The average student shouldn't be expected to remember more than 5% of what they learn through school because teaching them to use a computer program for half an hour is too hard? That's bleak.
_if_ teaching them to use a computer program for half an hour is too hard.
> Your kid's inability to focus should not be the reason my kid can no longer remember his material.
The books are brought back (at a cost) because the kids have proven to learn better from books, or a mix of mediums. They haven't, and won't, use only physical or only digital material. They'll use a mix.
You need to measure long term remembrance of the material, not short-term learning. A 5% increase in the speed of children learning a fact for the first time doesn't matter if the fact has disappeared from all their brains 6 months later, but to accomplish the latter at scale, there's no substitute - you need some kind of spaced repetition system. Otherwise you may as well have not taught the fact at all, and let them spend the time having fun or getting some exercise instead.
Is your idea that 6 to 15 year olds are going to suddenly discover Anki cards on their own and start using them? How high is that %?
I think you should focus more on teachers introducing Anki cards and less on not throwing screens out then, in a sense. I mean, the fact that screens supports something that isn't currently being widely used anyway isn't a very strong argument to keep them.
(And well, the argument against introducing it is that likely very small % of 6 to 15 years are able to or motivated to follow a system like that.)
And the school system already provide ample spaced repetition because there is repetition each year from previous year (at least in Norway, sure Sweden is similar).
The status quo in Norway is horrible, screens have destroyed education system (I have two kids going through it).
I am sure there are better ways to use screens and that is what the proponents always say. But the burden of proof should have been on those introducing screens not the other way around.
There is so much being lost now; ability to concentrate, ability to use a paper and pen as an extension of your brain (as I often do when solving a tough problem).
I don’t think education is purely about remembering facts.
For one, often we teach things initially in simple terms as a way of building up to more complicated explanations. Failing to forget the simpler facts would be a learning failure to a degree.
Secondly, we want people to learn what to do with facts, how to handle and interpret new information, focusing solely on recall doesn’t cover this either.
Optimizing repetition for things we do want to be remembered is certainly a useful technique, but it isn’t the only or perhaps even primary goal of education.
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I have no idea what the actual science referenced here is on this but I'm sure whatever they used to convince people to spend that much money is based on science that isn't just "the tests go better" but actually "the learning is better".
And spaced repetition has been part of education since forever hasn't it. Yes it's slightly easier with a PDF. But you'd have to assume they thought of that too...
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What would stop a kid from doing the same with physical books rather than PDFs?
You can't screenshot a physical book nearly as easily as a PDF. That's an issue for making flashcards out of a whole host of useful informational visuals, not to mention stuff that is just plain hard to communicate in plain text.
Downvotes should not be for disagreeing with content!!
I suppose it depends on how you think of free speech:
1. Free speech means I should be able to say anything (or in this case vote in any manner) that's legal, and that's the only consideration.
2. Free speech is a foundation for a higher level goal of a society that also values etiquette, respect, and discretion.
That is quite literally what they are for!
Downvotes is for removing thoughtless comments and spam.
I try to upvote someone making a well thought out argument that brings clarity to the discussion even if I disagree with it.
And I try to downvote something I agree with if it was stated in an incoherent manner.
I don't begrudge them for downvoting. They are, nonetheless, wrong in their belief that a return to printed books makes long term sense.
Do you have any reasons for this beyond ease of reproducing portions of the text to drill yourself to remember it verbatim?
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