Comment by growingkittens
2 days ago
I remember the same thing. That doesn't mean they knew how to teach us to "learn how to learn". Neither does it mean that the underlying education system supported that goal.
Same goes for user-centered design. Trying to make something user-friendly is one thing, successfully doing it is another. Large organizations are especially poor at user-friendly design because the underlying structures which support that goal don't exist. Organizational science is still in its infancy.
Not to mention successfully measuring success or failure. The overwhelming majority of people I know (from your average Joe to your tenured professor at elite universities, from philosophers to physicists[0]) underestimate the difficulty of measuring things.
Almost everyone treats any metric as they would a ruler or tape measure. Even your standard ruler is not as good of a measuring device as you probably think! But this becomes a huge mess when we start talking about any measurement of statistics or some other abstraction. People treat metrics and algorithms as black boxes, rather than tools. Tools still require craftsmen, who understands: when they work, when they don't work, when they can be used in a pickle, what can be substituted in a pickle, their limits, what new problems they create, and so on. It is incredible how much complexity there is to things that appear so simple. But then again, that's why you get things like an engineering manual on o-rings that is over a thousand pages. And even those aren't comprehensive.
I'm not suggesting we all need to be "master craftsmen", but I actually think we would all do better if we recognized that everything has more depth than might appear. If only to give people a moment of pause to question if they are actually doing things the right way. There's always a better way. The real trick is learning what's good enough and you'll never know what is good enough when everything is simple.
[0] The exception tends to be those that need to work with high precision, since with these jobs you tend to be forced to deal with this in an explicit manner. So more common among people like machinists or experimental physicists. Though sometimes this ends up worse as they can end up operating on vibes. I think it happens when intuitions are successful for too long and not enough meta-analysis is done to update them.
The US education system only has one mode, and thats to survive in a slim way with overworked staff and huge classrooms. 40 kids in a math class is seen as normal.
Everything you see of its character, including emphasizing tests and practice, follows from that. Talking about good UX is miles away.
It's a problem that goes beyond the United States, overworked staff, and constraints in general, although these are legitimate concerns. I studied in a non-US country, but the attention paid by teachers to pedagogy was virtually zero.
I mean, we had five years of English classes in high school, and by the end of high school, less than five out of 30 people in my cohort were able to string a couple of sentences together in English. And my class was made up of serious, studious young people. It seems to me that the time was not well spent, but did the teacher, a caring and generally competent person, reflect on the poor results? I highly doubt it.
Most teachers want to do better, but are stuck in a system where they're not able to. Overwhelmed with large classes, small budgets, ridgid programs, demanding parents, it's hard to also dedicate energy to reflection or student attention.
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