Comment by dang
1 day ago
This problem has been around a long time. Like many other HN users, years ago in primary school I became a problem for my teachers because the curriculum was too easy for me.
The school dealt with it by sitting me in front of a big box of color-coded dossiers called the SRA Reading Laboratory [1, 2] and telling me "read these at your own pace". The boxes looked just like this: https://sites.google.com/view/objects-of-school-days-past/sr... and may well have been kicking around since the 1960s.
The trouble was that "at your own pace" was code for leaving me alone in front of a box. I don't recall the reading being either interesting or hard, but it solved the problem for my teachers, since I wasn't the type to act out in class. The real lessons I got out of it were lessons in isolation and drudgery.
Looking back, I badly needed contact with an adult who could teach me things. That didn't happen—not then, and not much in later school years either. Was it the schools' fault? They simply didn't have the resources to give me the human instruction I needed.
Surely all agree that children need human contact, empathy, connection, meaningful teaching. But it doesn't help children if we hold to those principles without facing how resource-constrained this problem is. If we do that, then many children end up with nothing, or next to nothing, as happened to me long ago.
Years later, when I read a little history, older novels, and the like, I learned how the nobility had educated their children: not just with dedicated personal tutors but different ones for different subjects. That's what one would do if one could afford entirely human, entirely interactive instruction, and of course it was only available to the 0.0001%. When I read those passages I felt envy and shame at not having what I would (to this day) call a real education, and those feelings have never entirely gone away.
My point with this anecdote is: I don't think I would have been worse off if they had sat me in front of a computer instead of a box of boring readings produced by education researchers. And if the computer had had software that could adapt to me and my interests, so much the better. At least I would have learned things, even though I still would have suffered from lack of human connection that, at that age, I was unaware how much I needed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Research_Associates
>Look back, what I clearly and badly needed was contact with an adult who could teach me things. That didn't happen, and in fact happened very little in my later school years as well. Was it the schools' fault? They simply didn't have the resources to give me the human contact I needed.
When I was in school I remember thinking, when the futuristic utopia we envisioned in the 2000s arrives, a great deal of people will teach. It will be normal for professionals in all fields to spend some portion of their time teaching. How could it be otherwise, in a civilization which intends to preserve its knowledge and wisdom?
I remember asking my math teacher for applications and she mumbled a non-answer with some embarrassment. It was only years later that I realized, well my god, she's never stepped foot outside of a school in her entire life, no wonder she doesn't know about applications. It would have been nice, I think, to have had some contact with folks who had!
(Later still, I realized that I had reinvented the father from first principles...)