Comment by AlienRobot
7 hours ago
Another modern problem with education is that every student has a smartphone now, which they bring to the class, then they get distracted by it.
7 hours ago
Another modern problem with education is that every student has a smartphone now, which they bring to the class, then they get distracted by it.
"Modern" education isn't modern at all. It's a leftover from industrialization, aiming at producing easily controllable worker drones.
"Elites" fearing the "plebs" to question them on things they have no good answers for is what constrains active development of actual modern scientific concepts of pedagogy taking hold. You only get to research what is being paid for.
Look at the, pretty obvious, natural human child-mode of learning: playing games.
Just not escapist nonsense games. Games that model relevant aspects of reality in an engaging way. Where you can fail without real-life consequences and learn from it while enjoying yourself.
I mean they are doing some things over at the Alpha School to work on gamification of education that is actually useful for the modern human, but they get a ton of hate for what they are doing, despite the test results speaking for themselves
(they bribe kids, and the lessons are individualized through software).
Playing games as a biological creature optimized to live on plains is great, your body has a lot of the lessons already encoded in DNA.
When it comes catching up to the last 10,000 years of human development everything tends to get a bit trickier. Play is a good way at learning, but as you get to higher concepts you have to learn but are hard to game it gets a lot trickier.
Trying to easily wrap this up as the elites vs you is highly reductive. Before that age you' have spent most of your time and effort making food and clothes, not active research into the world.
They're not wrong though, like, it is a creation of the industrial era, and honestly, the "elites vs all of us" isn't exactly crazy. Mcgraw Hill is literally owned by Apollo Global Management, don't just take my word for it, look up the relationship the management there had with Epstein.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy even, it could just be that terrible incentives across the board result in terrible outcomes lol
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> Look at the, pretty obvious, natural human child-mode of learning: playing games.
> Just not escapist nonsense games. Games that model relevant aspects of reality in an engaging way. Where you can fail without real-life consequences and learn from it while enjoying yourself.
In a lot of ways, that’s math contests and games like Around The World.
And that’s exactly the type of thing modern educational philosophies have eliminated.
For some reason it’s perfectly fine to have little Johnny show that’s he can run a race faster than the next kid, but he can’t show that he can solve math problems faster.
This is highly optional. You can lock phones up at the start of the school day or at the start of class
But you may be still trying to teach kids that are going through a form of withdrawal for several hours because it's not managed outside school.
How do you take the phone from a child refusing to give it up? (It Needs parent buy-in, which is not guaranteed)
My sons' school makes it a requirement of continued enrolment.
>How do you take the phone from a child refusing to give it up? (It Needs parent buy-in, which is not guaranteed)
It's not just a good idea. It's the law[0].
[0] https://www.governor.ny.gov/eliminating-distractions-new-yor...
Maybe more and more teachers care less and less about training students to take tests, and care more about actually educating students in the subject matter. So maybe the plunging test scores are are simple as “students are worse at taking tests.”
Seems conflicting. If they’re “actually educating” the students, they should know the material and have no problem on a test?
Not necessarily. Test taking is a skill in its own right. The PISA test is for example 4 hours long, and students might not have the endurance to stay focused reading text that doesn’t matter and answering questions they don‘t care about for 4 whole hours.
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