Comment by WillAdams
8 hours ago
It kills me that education is not a solved problem --- we have many of the same hurdles which the Greeks faced, and apparently, one of the best schools which I ever attended is no longer run as it once was (classes were divided between academic and social, the latter were attended at one's age level (homeroom, phys. ed, social studies, &c.) and academic classes were attended at one's grade level with teachers at the combined elementary/high school also being accredited as faculty at a nearby college and students being able to continue on to university level study until such time as they had attended their 12th year of education, with the possibility of being awarded not only a high school diploma, but also a college degree, or at least being afforded a transcript of college-level studies to apply at the school of their choice.
One thing which I started with my own children which seemed promising was to read biographies of notable individuals in chronological order as bedtime reading --- since it was a difficult list to compile, I started on a smaller subset of U.S. Presidents which worked well (though I was surprised that there was no child-friendly biography for a couple of them in the local library system necessitating ordering) --- I also tried to read a more formal, adult-oriented biography in advance to anticipate questions. Unfortunately, my wife's schedule changed when we got to Truman and the effort was abandoned due to a changing evening schedule. Note that this was in addition to having read all the C.S. Lewis Narnia books, _The Hobbit_ and _The Lord of the Rings_, Susan Cooper's _The Dark is Rising_ pentalogy and many, many other more traditional book choices.
The big thing in child-rearing is to offer the child chances and experiences and age-appropriate choices --- the line in _The Simpsons_ where Homer tells Bart that it's okay that he failed at learning while wrongly phrased does have a kernel of truth in it.
I’d argue that education is not a problem that can be solved. Because it involves people and people learn differently and different generations learn differently.
The way to make an idea relatable today is different from 100 or 1000 years ago. The lessons may be timeless, but gaining the lesson is a personal experience.
The conclusion I currently have is that “education starts in the home”. School teaches information that everyone should know but the process starts within a household and community. So I don’t see a generalized solution for education.
In what way is education not a solved problem? We know how to get great educational results. People either don't care or actively hate the solutions.
What would it even look like for education to be “solved”? I think if you put 10 people in a room and asked them what the purpose of education was, you’d get 10 different answers.
A good education is not being provided to every child who is in need of one --- that happening would be a solution to the problem of education, that it does not, is the problem.
It's mostly an socioeconomic problem, at least for US public education. People don't want to pay for other people's kids.
We demonstrably pay plenty for other people’s kids, at least through high school (and often Community College) - the resulting education isn’t poor because of lack of funds.
2 replies →
How to get great educational results is to have a good teacher, or, better, a good individual tutor, and, most importantly, a good student. Also, there are some techniques that help, but those don't matter very much by comparison to how good the teacher is, whether they're teaching a class or an individual, and how good the student is.
There are three reasons this doesn't make education a solved problem:
1. Often, students are not interchangeable, in the sense that the problem we are interested in is how a particular person can get educated, rather than how someone can get educated. So knowing that the quality of the student matters most of all doesn't give us much of an attack on the problem, at least after you solve the obvious problems like iodine deficiency, lead poisoning, kwashiorkor, starting classes at 7 AM, and your best students getting sent off to death camps. Even these are often out of the control of the would-be education reformer. So "have the best students" is the most important thing we know about how to get great education, but it doesn't make education a solved problem.
2. It's difficult to tell which teachers or tutors are good, partly because student quality is so much more important than teacher quality (so a single particularly good or bad student can make a teacher appear particularly good or bad, an effect that is even larger for tutors, and overall student populations are also variable, for example because of admission requirements or brain drains), and partly because the bad teachers and tutors have strong incentives to fudge the signal. Generally speaking, those running educational institutions are drawn from among the worst teachers, compounding this problem. So, although "use the best teachers and tutors" is a thing we know about how to get great educational results, but when we don't know who the best teachers and tutors are, it doesn't make education a solved problem.
3. There aren't enough really good tutors to tutor more than a tiny fraction of students individually, so even if you can get the best tutors to teach (forbidden by law in many places, for example by teacher-licensing requirements, and often economically unappealing for the tutors) you're still left with the important question of what to do with the majority of the population. So "tutor individually rather than teaching a group" and "use really good tutors" are things we know about how to get great educational results, but it doesn't make education a solved problem, even when we know who those tutors are.
4. Plausibly, there is some way that we could still get much better educational results than the best tutors tutoring the best students today. Many of the things that students today do to improve their educational results, such as consulting Wikipedia, memorizing vocabulary with spaced repetition systems like Anki, or reading books, are things that were not technologically possible at some point in the past.
None of these problems are a result of people not caring or actively hating the solutions.