This is an odd/strawman take. Personalized education in the form of tutoring is consistently the biggest intervention in education, don't have the definitive studies handy but there are many (here is one https://edworkingpapers.org/sites/default/files/ai20-267.pdf).
I would suspect almost nobody (Gates, Kahn, etc) suggest having an entirely asocial education experience.
As we can figure out how to replicate the effects of tutoring with technology, we should see massive improvements in education outcomes.
Tutoring is not personalised learning. It's personalised teaching.
The success of tutoring is the ability of the tutor to completely understand where the child is at, to figure out what the blockage is and to work at unblocking that specific thing.
For example, if the student "knows something", but it happens to be false, then spotting that, and removing it, is the key to unlocking the future learning. Or identifying a weakness in times tables may unlock the ability to do more advanced algebra.
A good tutor doesnt really teach new things. They pave the road already taught, critically filling in the potholes and removing the speed-bumps.
FWIW, when I was doing tutoring, which was not “remedial,” I found that my expectations of what was needed of me were kind of completely backwards, and what students actually needed could be better likened to athletic coaching. They needed
- a cheerleader who could celebrate success,
- a sounding board for “how could I do this better” when they brought it up,
- for me to back the fuck off when they don't, because however it makes sense in their head is valid even if it doesn't make sense in mine,
- someone who recognizes “come game-time (exams), I won't be in the room, so you'll have to be able to do this without me,” and thus focuses them on adequate results over and over again, “is this the right answer, can we check it quickly, can we see anything about it that makes us understand the problem in a simple way now” etc.
- and honestly just that “pairing pressure” to not fall behind, to keep skills in practice.
I found that “teaching new things” had to be confined to only like 10% of a given session, if that. The job really was “paving the road already taught,” except that's kind of not the right metaphor because roads are centrally planned e.g. by the teacher, it's more the road currently used, which corresponds often but not always to the road the teacher preferred to teach.
It sounds like the tutoring you were doing was supplemental to your students' primary source of education. That's probably mostly what the parent was referring to as remedial tutoring, as opposed to an education primarily delivered through tutoring.
good stuff, sounds smart, thanks for sharing. i'm going to be raising my boy in a pretty competitive school district and have been trying to come up with a plan for tutoring, definitely going to steal these ideas.
Yes, I picked up on that too. It's one of those phrases that sounds clever and insightful on first read, but you realize it's just incorrect if you think critically.
Actually, a tutor can be someone who plans and guides your learning process, as you described. But there is nothing to stop you as the student from inverting it, designing and planning your own leaning goals, and then going to a tutor for specific advice.
I do this for foreign languages. I plan out everything and my own syllabus and goals, and hire a tutor for speaking practice. I give instructions and context to the tutor so they can best help me.
Well, it is a fact that Zuckerberg (and Gates') personalized education projects didn't work. Replicating the effects of tutoring with technology was exactly what they tried to do. If there were such massive gains to be had, why didn't they at least manage to capture some gains?
You don't have a theory to answer that. The article writer does. In their view, learning is a social activity, and kids don't like to sit in a room with dozens of others each with their own personalized algorithmic "teacher".
That's not really all that surprising. If it was only about personalization, it would be easy enough to do that with far simpler technology than modern computers.
The article writer's theory also neatly and immediately suggests an explanation for why personal tutoring still works, when automated custom tutoring manifestly hasn't so far. That's because it is social. Even if it's just you and your overworked homeschooling parent, you care because they care.
Personalization isn't key. Personalization from a tutor works because it's hard and costly, and convinces the student that this matters.
That's just a theory. It's not necessarily right, but it does present a convincing explanation for what we observe, and in particular the observation worth repeating, that no one can seem to get algorithmic personalized education to work, no matter how rich and clever they are.
And from my personal experience with teachers (including my parents) I have often heard from them that the challenge isn't explaining, it's to get the students to care.
Well said, and it rhymes with many of the mistakes we have made in the past. We discount the social, the emotional, the storytelling... Often they're what matters.
It also rhymes with common parenting folk wisdom that having "the wrong friends" is detrimental to grades.
>the challenge isn't explaining, it's to get the students to care.
This.
The reason not one student learned French in my four years of mandatory French classes is that we didn't want to know french. We didn't know any french people. We didn't care about french songs or movies.
OTOH, when telenovelas became a local fad, every girl had a clique of Spanish speaking 13 year olds.
The actual problem in that case is: How do you teach french/philosophy/whatever to a class full of kids who don't want to learn that stuff? Maybe they want to pass exams and get grades. Maybe you can rejigger discipline mechanisms to motivate them... but that is never going to get you to good.
I'd reword your French example a bit. I had the proverbial four years of high school French which I cared about and performed at probably about a median level (which is to say fairly well) of my high school subjects in general.
Especially in a pre-Web world though, absent pestering my parents to arrange some sort of exchange student situation--which would have gone well beyond my level of caring for any other subject and may or may not have been practical--I was probably never going to get to a high level of French proficiency without some sort of immersion.
After about age 10, children are more influenced by their peers than by parents or teachers. If friends aren't interested in learning then they won't care either.
Not yet, anyway. It might be possible with an AI that modelled human psychology. I don't think that's an impossible goal. In fact I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen within 10 years (climate change and war permitting.)
The problem is that people like Gates and Zuckerberg are fully paid up members of the "You can't let people use technology without exploiting them" group.
So AI-assisted personalised teaching would come with a cost - a corporate learning and skills profile of the pupils.
Which would inevitably be sold to other corporates.
From a market point of view that kind of information would be immensely valuable for hiring and HR.
But it would be it would be apocalyptically disastrous from the point of view of personal freedom and political accountability.
And no doubt the service would be tiered, so a minimal unsophisticated model would be available to almost everyone, while more sophisticated and effective models would require a paid subscription.
Teaching is one of those professions where you can see what cultures really value. In the US it's clearly not open access to high quality education.
Automated tutoring won't change that unless cultural values change too. Without that, it will just recreate the current situation with added social costs.
> Personalization isn't key. Personalization from a tutor works because it's hard and costly, and convinces the student that this matters.
> That's just a theory. It's not necessarily right, but it does present a convincing explanation for what we observe
Far from it. We observe that people who already believe that they need to learn something do better with individual tutoring.
> and in particular the observation worth repeating, that no one can seem to get algorithmic personalized education to work, no matter how rich and clever they are.
People got algorithmic personalized education to work quite a long time ago. It's called a book. The algorithm is "when the student asks about something, tell them". And it works very well, just like it always has.
What people aren't getting to work is forcing students who don't want to know things to know those things anyway.
You do need one tutor for each student, though. While students can tutor each other in some cases and while being a tutor can itself be a great learning experience, in many educational contexts one-on-one tutoring is hard to scale. Hence the persistence of large classes, and hence the continued search for technological solutions.
Not quite, in my limited experience, just one hour tutoring per week makes a huge difference. If this generalizes well we could have more of a 1 to 30 ratio.
Even homeschooling falls into the personalized education bucket, and the data I've seen seems to indicate that parents with no educational background are actually able to outperform public schools.
Personal anecdote here: my homeschooling experience, with a curriculum that accelerated learning in certain areas, and had plenty of data showing that their students outperformed public school students, did not properly prepare me for college or the “real world.” This is ignoring the religious indoctrination that was behind the whole of it. Even though my wife is a teacher, we chose not to home school our children because of my experience with it.
I am completely in sync with your point. Bit I feel there are multiple (different) goals in play here, and the outcomes vary greatly based on the goal chosen.
For example, covid showed that a primary goal for many is simply day care. Child has to be looked after while parents work. If they actually learn things that's a bonus.
Prep for college, and college admission, is another goal. Learn how to effectively take tests, how to memorise somewhat-random material, how to write an essay. Learn to analyse reading material and discuss Hamlet's indecision.
Or Teach the child how to learn. Let them follow what interests them. Explore the world. Visit museums, art galleries, build a bicycle. All great, some useful, but none of the rigidity and discipline required when entering the work-force. (Ironically, probably the most learning, while at the same time the least empowering.)
Or what about trades? Wouldn't it be useful if the school taught plumbing, or how to wire a plug, or how to fix home appliances, or how to paint a wall?
So don't feel bad about being home-schooled. You will have gained some head-starts, and missed out on others. (There are plenty of kids who went to school, and that also did little to prep them for college or the work-place).
The best prep for today work-place, is, well work. A summer job, or weekends at MacD will help you with that skill set. (Or your first couple jobs after college).
To prep for college you need a college-aimed curriculum, coupled with strong analytical, summary, and essay writing skills. You need to learn "what's being taught" regardless of what it is. (Which is why the best college advice is to pick a major you enjoy, because you'll be depending a Lot of time with it.)
Yes, we all had different school experiences. Some good some bad. To some degree we all succeed or fail at life in spite of, not because of, school.
Although this is correlated with homeschooling, the movement is much larger in 2023. Also remember the alternative is state or corporate indoctrination. When I think about all the ridiculous ideas and fads I was taught in public school, maybe it wouldn't be so bad to leave childhood with some stories about Moses and Abraham instead.
I am with John Stuart Mill when it comes to education: Free choice for everyone, with the state setting the minimum threshold when it comes to curriculum and quality. Modern US homeschooling does not comply with that idea, as there are no standards today.
I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t think the confounding factor of who and why home schooling parents choose to home school can be easily dismissed.
The simple fact that social activity needs to be fostered in a different, but not necessarily worse way, alone means a minority approach is going to cause problems, not to mention that fringe parents are likely to pass their fringe qualities on, especially when doubling down with their child’s education.
Interesting, because I think I can too, but for a positive reason. They stand out to me as the ones more immune to groupthink, and when I encounter them in public, there's something about their style or level of interest and engagement that separates them from the government-trained masses.
Yeah totally. Instead their tricked into spending all of their money on tithing, or so socially awkward that they can't get a job to make money in the first place.
Could be that parents who are able to homeschool have the financial means to not have to work. Kids from affluent places tend to do better relative to those with lesser means. Solving this is very challenging, but there are clear correlations between socio-economic classes when it comes to education.
I've never thought of tutoring as an "intervention", rather as complementary, but considering how ineffectively some subjects were taught to me in the classroom, I wouldn't disagree that it'd be a useful complete intervention.
If you don't have access to a tutor, it's basically up to blind luck whether you're able to learn from the resources available.
Could we reproduce the effects of tutoring by getting rid of all the government contracts for school paraphernalia like smart boards and hiring lots of teachers while giving them reliable access to basic necessities?
Also interesting that $100m would have bought 1,506 teacher years. It makes me think that philanthropy doesn't work as well as some would make out. This is another example of rich people wasting money on things they know nothing about. If it had been paid in tax it could have been spent on more teachers by people who do know what they are doing. This would have had a real benefit for kids even with some degree of inefficiency and waste.
> This is another example of rich people wasting money on things they know nothing about. If it had been paid in tax it could have been spent on more teachers by people who do know what they are doing.
On the other hand the rich person has a strong incentive to succeed - avoiding ridicule and getting more recognition. The public employee on the other hand gets no recognition, or ridicule, and is spending someone else's money.
If we could combine the incentives of the rich person with the knowledge of the public workers that understand the programs that work, we could have something on our hands.
> On the other hand the rich person has a strong incentive to succeed - avoiding ridicule and getting more recognition.
I would argue that Zuckerberg couldn't care less what the world thinks of him. Otherwise he would have been rather embarrassed by the Meta project. I would put Elon Musk and X up as another example of a very rich person who seems unperturbed by ridicule.
>The public employee on the other hand gets no recognition, or ridicule,
So politicians don't have a need for recognition and to avoid ridicule?
What they're doing isn't working. Even they would tell you there's a results crisis. Children aren't learning. They certainly aren't becoming well-prepared for adult life in an efficient manner. They're barely even being supervised and kept out of trouble. The school-to-prison pipeline is getting worse, not better.
These people may "know what they're doing," but they also know what they're doing isn't accomplishing the goals they have for it.
Knowing how to do something that isn't working isn't a benefit, and is certainly not a reason to give them money.
Sometimes teachers actually want non-basic necessities like smart boards. We just need to give them what they want, not prescribe to them yet a different approach.
I mentor a robotics team that’s attached to a set of high school courses. One of the best things I’ve seen when it comes to bureaucracy is that the three teachers who basically run those courses were handed a budget and bought exactly what they needed. A mitre saw, 3D printers, a plasma cutter, etc.
> Could we reproduce the effects of tutoring by getting rid of all the government contracts for school paraphernalia like smart boards and hiring lots of teachers while giving them reliable access to basic necessities?
Very unlikely.
We are short of good teachers as it is. Adding more teachers basically means you’re pulling from the bottom of the barrel, so overall instruction quality will decrease.
Plus, lots of people don’t actually want to be educated, so no sense in broadly spending money on those folks (large percentage of the population).
I would quit my job in an instant to become a high school teacher if the pay was better. But more than I want to teach, I want to be able to support my family. I save most of what I make in my tech job, and I'll look at becoming a teacher 20 years from now after the kids are on their own.
> Unfortunately, I don't have four years to get a teaching degree, let alone a master's degree, let alone $50,000 to pay for one.
Depending on what your undergrad is (preferably STEM), there are plenty of districts that will hire you, let you teach on a provisional license with a crash course, and pay for you to get your teaching qualification.
I was a teacher for a while and the main fustration we had was class size. Large classes (maybe more than 20 pupils but 15 was really nice size) were really hard to control and engage whereas smaller classes were always a pleasure.
Where are we going to manifest more teachers from? In the current labor market, there are a lot more openings than job-seekers. You can always get more people into a specific job by raising wages, but that mostly that’s just a bidding war that redistributes the labor shortage to whoever can afford the least. It can raise labor force participation, but there is not so much juice to squeeze there. Kind of like how higher home prices don’t fix a housing shortage.
Historically the main way that labor productivity has been improved was through technology. Without that you get Baumol’s cost disease.
You could use the people that are currently wasting their time on Zuckerberg's project, since he is laying them off anyway.
In fact you could tax the money off Zuckerberg and then he would have to give up on other ridiculous personal projects like the multi- billion dollar metaverse shambles. That would free up loads of people who have wasted years of their lives as a billionaires play thing
Lower gatekeeping requirements would solve it. Higher wages would solve the problem locally. Keeping gatekeeping requirements and increasing supply by paying for training and creating more training spaces. A % of education budget could be allotted to this yearly.
Many school districts with teacher shortages have already eliminated gatekeeping requirements. They will hire new teachers with just a relevant Bachelor's degree, then pay them while they obtain a proper teaching credential.
All I can cite is my wife's boss, a teacher and very left wing, who nearly got fired for talking about it.
I've been talking with him about maybe gathering the necessary data (it's available upon request but the district records people aren't exactly a sane API, you get PDF's with hundreds of pages). If I do that analysis to confirm his claim, I'll send you a link to it.
But even without the budget information, we can just look at headcount. What ratio of teachers to admin would you consider unhealthy? How many assistants to the vice principal do there need to be before it starts to look like a retirement program for people who can't be bothered to teach anymore?
Can anyone explain how smartboards work, who creates the software, etc. My kid is in pre-k and he likes smart boards but i suspect that’s because of very limited screen time at home. Are smartbords detrimental in any way having that they’re not excessively used? I wish I could see them myself but am not allowed in the school.
I think good tutoring should/does demonstrate the standard. It shows us what education can do, when the limiting factor is (ideally) the students' ability to learn instead of resources available to teach.
Idk if any technology, institutional framework or other fix can ever achieve that standard. They don't necessarily have to. Its still useful to have a comparative standard.
There will always be a difference between learning to (say) pole jump & hammer throw by self coaching, vs training under an olympic coach. You can, however, use that coaches' methods and standards to teach a cheap, recreational class.
The mechanism is complex, but recreational field athletics is better (farther/higher) by existing in a world where olympic training exists. They'd be even better in a world where those trainers coach middle aged normies, to remove the "youth and talent" factors.
I suspect, for example, that small groups or 1-v1 can comfortably pace a primary school curriculum with a small fraction of the desk hours. That in itself is a "performance gap" with potentially actionable crossover.
In learning, like in every activity, motivation plays a big role. Competition and approval among peers is a huge motivation for kids and young adults, far more than remote career earnings plans their parents have in mind. That component lacks in online or at home education.
When I see that total amateurs (ie, parents) can home school their kids more effectively than school in a fraction of the time, I just don't understand why we can't improve traditional schooling more easily.
> total amateurs (ie, parents) can home school their kids more effectively than school
This is a loaded statement. I'm sure many parents are great at home schooling their kids but there are many who are also terrible at it and home schooling shouldn't be the solution. Parental involvement is always better for educational outcomes and often times the solution is for parents to just be more in the loop with their kids' education. Unfortunately, oftentimes, parents decide to completely change things and send their kids to a private school or homeschool instead of minor course corrections with how they engage with their kids' education.
I received some woodworking and metalworking lessons at school. These were helpful but not super helpful. These are still skills that find use in my everyday life.
I got my electronic skills from a technical club where we had soldering equipment, stuff to make PCBs, a lot of salvaged electronic components to not be afraid to accidentally fry one, and some adult guidance. I learned most from older kids who I could watch working on their stuff. This is something a school keeps missing.
Real human societies do not consist of thin slices of people of the same age, and kids are wired to learn by watching and imitating, not just by listening and following instructions. Schools keep ignoring this, sadly.
Mixed aged classrooms are kind of a pilar in Montessori like schools.
the idea is that, as you mature, it is also part of your development to teach and guide others, you have mastered something when you can teach it. Equally younger kids learn not only from the teacher but by example and mentoring from older students.
From my experience it really teaches older kids to act responsibly, forces more emotional maturity and just not be dicks to younger kids, and for younger kids it really accelerates their learning.
When I entered my brand-new junior high school in 1965, they had expensive metal shops and wood shops, but they should have offered an electronics lab (which could have been stocked for far less than a metal/wood shop).
When I entered high school in 1968, all the girls went to home economics classes and the guys took drafting and/or auto shop. Still no electronics.
In 1969 I stumbled upon free self-guided programming access to a 360/67 (punched cards, WATFOR) at the local military base and spent the next two years teaching myself as much programming as I could, while my high school remained oblivious to the computer revolution.
When I got to college in 1971 they only offered graduate degrees in computer science; undergraduates interested in CS were expected to take "math sciences".
Apparently it takes a while for education systems to realize where the future is headed.
Not my experience. I went to a university, got a CS degree, got a job. Just looking at my coworkers that seems to be by far the most common path. We didn't even have a PC at home for the longest time when I was a kid.
The self directed autodidact thing is the stereotypical Bay Area, romanticized narrative and all the 'education disruptors' seem to come out of the exact same circle. It's not surprising to me at all that Zuckerberg had to write the 100 million off, most professionals just come out of decent schools with a good social learning environment.
For what it's worth, a lot of us CS autodidacts from the 1980's didn't grow up in the Bay Area. Bill Gates is from Seattle, Johns Carmack and Romero from flyover country, etc. You could learn this stuff anywhere.
What defines the Bay Area is the VC gold rush fever that took root here. But the VCs at this point want Stanford graduates.
The funny thing is that the early VC gold rush investments mostly went to companies founded by older workers who gained their experience working in the military-industrial complex and its suppliers. You can trace a lot of early Silicon Valley history back to military radar and communications research that started during WW2.
I think self learning is a natural part of CS education. Even if your first experience with a computer was in college, you still probably ended up spending a good amount of time banging your head against the wall and trying out many different things in order to learn the concepts that you were taught. In my opinion, learning to learn (ie, reading documentation, asking questions, collaborating with others, Googling, etc.) is just as if not more important than the actual material that you're learning in CS.
This is in contrast with something like chemistry, where going online and learning a different approach to solving problems might help you understand the material better but probably won't get you ahead in class.
In retrospect I don't think I learned much of value by banging my head against the wall trying to work around defects in the shitty Sequent Dynix Pascal compiler used in my CS1 course. I wonder how many students get so frustrated dealing with pointless platform and environmental obstacles that they can't learn the core material effectively?
> I wonder how many students get so frustrated dealing with pointless platform and environmental obstacles that they can't learn the core material effectively?
I'm gonna be honest here, if we're talking about the tech industry, learning to deal with "pointless platform and environmental obstacles" without getting so frustrated you quit is probably the chief skill.
I know a lot of devs that don't have any idea what the stack or the heap are or why they're important. But being able to track down that one of your dependencies is listening to a magical environment variable that you stepped on and that's why everything is wonkey is an important skill that you have to have.
I think it's overblown, but consider most other fields, even most other STEM fields, and how often people working in them come from a hobbyist background. How many hobby chemists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, etc. are there? Those are more expensive, dangerous, or involved to get into as children. Today's future software engineers already have everything they need to do pretty much anything that a full time professional would do at work.
It's not that computer people are better, smarter, or more passionate than other professionals. It's just that the barrier to entry (in the 1st world) is just based on your interest level.
I think that's true of a lot of those fields, but a counterexamples is the many electronics tinkers in the first half the 20th century that occupied that same culture that computers do now.
RadioShack was a pretty good resource for those hobbyists. I was also an electronics hobbyists as a kid, and RadioShack was a critical part of that. Today I don’t think they sell any discrete components. They used to have shelves upon shelves.
So with that availability combined with the rapid prototyping ability of breadboards I’m not surprised that plenty of electronics hobbyists could exist.
To be fair to other industries, the barrier to entry of being a hobbiest chemical or mechanical engineer before going to school is a bit higher. Unless I’m underestimating the number of folks with laboratories in their parents basements. ;)
Agree that university -> CS degree is the most common path to tech but I don't think this is a romanticization of Bay Area lore. I also grew up without PCs and grew up poor but was self taught with computers because I had a ton of time on my hands in a shitty school district that wasn't challenging. Most of my peers spent their time drinking, sleeping around, and doing drugs in my bad neighborhood but I also know kids who learned instruments and became athletes with their time.
If anything I find most new tech employees were henpecked students from elite families being browbeat to study something lucrative.
Signal to noise ratio was a lot better back then I think. Nowadays you're more likely to find the likes of ThePrimagen than Beej, if you even make it past the sea of content farm tutorials.
I think the overall increase in resources more than compensates for the noise.
When i was growing up (medium sized town early 2000s) i read all the computer books in my library. There was like 4, i remember one was a redhat for dummies, another was on vrml 1.0 (this was a bit outdated at the time), i dont remember the others. Sure there was some info on the internet, but it was few and far between. Random home pages by and large weren't even remotely on the level of a wikipedia article let alone a text book.
Now a days, if i want to learn about computer things, there are like a billion resources. Text based tutorials, youtube videos, almost anything you can imagine. And that is just the googlable ones. If i am willing to do something a tiny bit illegal, i can get basically any book ever published from libgen.
The available resources the modern person has is just staggering.
So much of what's available is unstructured and disjointed, answering questions without any sort of method or system, not to mention frequently harmful in being both written with certainty and incorrectness.
While there were certainly fewer books in the late 90s and early 00s, they were well put together and comprehensive, often reference-style works. You could learn an entire programming language from having access to a single book.
half the iOS developers I've known were making software before the App Store existed ... but to your point about "iOS class", wasn't there any more general "this is how you use C/C++" classes? Objective-C was already 24 years old when the App Store came to exist ...
Computer science wasn't ubiquitous in grade schools back in the aughts, and it still isn't. According to this "foundational computer science" is offered in only 53% of public high schools in the US: https://advocacy.code.org/stateofcs
Yup, my high school's "CS" courses were: typing, Microsoft Office, and HTML. The only programming lesson I got was from doing one chapter of "Learn Visual Basic in 24 hours" that I bought. I didn't know what programming even meant until I went to college and CS was the degree for "computer people". Even then, I thought it was going to be about becoming a sysadmin, not a programmer.
Even the ones that did have one may not have had a teacher who really knew the material. My highschool would recruit a math teacher and have them take the computer programming course the summer before our classes would begin. They were always happy to discover a couple students already knew enough material to help the other students.
P(enter tech industry | self-taught with computers) is high but the inverse P(self-taught with computers | enter tech industry) isn't. That distinction is important.
I think all these billionaires are caught up in the idea that the next Einstein is wasting their time in traditional schools, mostly based on the billionaires memory that their time was wasted at school and their belief that they were geniuses whose time was wasted.
I was a smart, bookish kid with ADHD who was last in school decades ago. It seems like such hubris to even think I have any answers about how to fix the school system in 2023 let alone my personal experiences would have some bearing on optimal modern educational methods.
It is interesting, though, because this is how a lot of adults with flexibility work: In a coffee shop or coworking space, sometimes using headphones, on their own laptops, around other people but not collaborating or interacting that much with them.
But then, most of us wouldn't work in a coffee shop full of restless kids or teens.
The first things these people with far more money than capability for introspection miss is that education is not about that next Einstein. It is about integrating the median student.
If you want to find diapered brilliance, you should probably be building a network of talent spotters, or something like Fast Grants. Not attempting to build robot tutors.
Oh boy. I feel like people who are active in the education policy world will come for you with pitchforks for suggesting that.
Arguably the median student is exactly what public school kinda does fine with today. Such kids basically learn what they need to and probably get into an ok college and have a decent chance in life.
However, the parents of the kids with learning disabilities or neurodivergent brains are screaming that it doesn’t work for their kids, who are absolutely floundering and cannot learn in the “median kid” environment. Meanwhile the parents of the gifted kids, the ones who truly are having their time wasted “learning” with those far beneath their own abilities, are also complaining bitterly that their kids aren’t being challenged enough, and they resent any attempts to temper the speed of the curriculum to allow the bottom half of the class to finish grasping the material. Neither of these groups is well-served - and it seems like any changes made to help one of them frequently hurts the other.
(I don’t have any answers for any of these groups, which is why I’m not involved in telling anyone how to do education!)
> Arguably the median student is exactly what public school kinda does fine with today
That's pretty much what I meant. It was a descriptive claim, not a normative one.
> I feel like people who are active in the education policy world will come for you with pitchforks for suggesting that.
None of them are directly active in ed policy, but academics are overrepresented in my circle of friends. I know. There are even some not terrible for them to reject my claims. I'm just someone outside looking in, I don't have their priors. (Or their expertise.)
> Students do not believe that their classmates are liabilities. Much more often students like their classmates and do not feel limited by them and would rather learn with them if the option were available.
I went to a public middle school that's the among the lowest funded in the State of Colorado, yet it has frequently ranked in the top 10 in the State of Colorado (frequently in the top 1 or 2 for math and reading) and it's the top rated school in the city. It's also located in Pueblo, a town of historic poverty relative to the rest of Colorado.
The problems with the system are obvious: lack of discipline, bad teachers, bad curriculum, not focusing on merit, not focusing on grades, lazy enforcement of rules, not focusing on a learning environment. Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems. They also had the fewest schooling hours of any school in the district and almost no homework.
It was ran by a genius who cared and was willing to say "no" to the dogma of his teaching peers.
> Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems
> bad teachers
Perhaps if teaching offered higher salaries, you would get better teachers. Why would a talented teacher work in a US state school if they could instead get a job in the tech industry or work in a foreign private school?
> lack of discipline, bad teachers, bad curriculum, not focusing on merit, not focusing on grades, lazy enforcement of rules, not focusing on a learning environment.
Ah, the old standards. These are the same reasons schools were failing 50 years ago.
> Note that money doesn't appear in the list of problems.
Actually it does, Colorado pays below average for teachers. If I paid below average for developers, I'd probably have bad developers.
You said it yourself "Genius Principal"! What happens when they retire? Sure, occasionally you will get excellence despite a lack of resources but that's sheer luck.
My high school was exceptional due to a confluence of factors leading to a great staff but it has faded in the past 40 years and is now only average in our province.
My parents were both teachers, though not in the US, and they point to:
+ A decline in respect for teachers and the institution of teaching
+ Lower qualifications required to become a teacher relative to the general population[0]
+ More classroom hours and larger class sizes
+ The previous factors plus lower pay have been driving a systemic brain drain for decades, which forms a positive feedback loop to drive respect down even further
+ Greater opportunities elsewhere, along with the removal of studentships and incentives, make teaching less useful as a socioeconomic stepping stone
+ Inability for students who don't want to be in school to leave and get a job
+ Parents who are uninvolved in discipline or who actively counter it
+ Inability to remove disruptive students from classrooms, which is getting worse over time, as alternative pathways to school are no longer viable and disabled schools are shutting down[1]
+ An increasingly hostile environment where clearly false allegations are "taken seriously" to the point of not supporting accused teachers even after they're exonerated[2]
+ Far fewer men in the classroom than women, which has (unfair) effects on the perception of teaching as a "caring profession"[3] and on collective bargaining, as well as practical matters like boys lacking role models, and a worsened ability to verbally (or even physically) stop really disruptive students[4]
[0] The actual requirements have gone up, but a bachelor's is relatively less prestigious than a diploma used to be. 50 years ago about 30% of people stayed in school, while it's up around 80% now. The US stats are very different, of course, and this might not apply there.
[1] Not that disabled students are all disruptive, but one historical way to remove or manage disruptive students was to slap an autism/ADHD diagnosis on them, qualifying them for a classroom helper or to go to a special school.
[2] This may just have been a single incident that happened to a family friend, but it was bad.
[3] E.g. an underpaid one.
[4] My parents talk more in terms of senior teachers helping with classroom control in a wing, but grudgingly admit that it occasionally helps if some of those senior teachers are large and look strong.
Such as the politicization of everything, or the abandoning of teaching basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills in favor of woke political agendas, or perhaps due to the hollowing out of cultural/religious consensus and the corresponding doubt's that there is any unifying factor in the academy.
After all, universities were born in the high to late middle ages out of the conviction that knowledge found its unifying point in the Word of God's revelation of Jesus, but today the vast majority of (western) universities have long abandoned the pursuit of truth. Theology, once seen as the queen of the sciences, is generally regarded as less useful and less true than fiction writing.
So yeah. Having all the children at same starting point and having a good teacher walk them through with great pedagogy is going to work. yes. and be social
What happens when kids don't get it that lesson, or that week. How do they catch up?
Personalised learning is much more "personalised catch up".
One thing that struck me recently on "The rest is politics" podcast is old Etonian Rory Stewart explaining that his (posh private) school he would get up about 8 and go to bed about ten and the whole day was full of structured learning / events. That (top) private schools might get better results simply because there is 2x or 3x as much teaching going on.
Perhaps the answer to school is simple - spend 2x to 3x more. we might not like it. But maybe it seemed ridiculous to pay for schools and books for Victorian children in Dickens' day as well
Some schools assign way too much of what is basically memorization, producing students who are very good at memorizing things and not very good at applying them.
Also, students need breaks. “Cram schools” which simply assign too much work and put too much pressure, produce anxious students without emotional skills who burn out and in some cases also turn to be bad at real-world tasks (because they spend all their time learning how to get good grades, taking shortcuts and not “learning” the material).
But a long school day full of sports, student bonding, interesting hands-on or “applied” work, and the boring essentials, seems like it would produce better students.
Or the reverse. Some kids could work through a whole year of math in a single day. School hours feel like prison time, ltterally watching the wall clock ticking second by eteral second going completely crazy from boredom. These days kids have phones, I know. Back then, you sneaked in books, then got punished with more prison time (detention) when caught.
Admissions into the most competitive universities.
> because there is 2x or 3x as much teaching going on
Harvard and MIT are full of kids that burnt themselves out in private schools, cram schools, crazy California & New Jersey public high schools. They were so tired, they did lazy stuff in college and after graduation, squandering their outstanding gifts and great opportunities. Could be as many as 1 in 3 students, and in my opinion, it's rising!
Also, would it really be great to run a schools program - perhaps even a residential one, perhaps even compulsory, perhaps singling out groups of particularly behind demographics - and forces their kids to spend way longer in school?
These ideas have been tried. People have this flawed thing they do, they think the stuff they like is the future and the stuff they don't like is the past. The future is an objective reality, and more often than not, it's the most visibly troubled communities. San Francisco, where I live, is the future, not the past, of chaos in public schooling, every community will have to transit its problems on a journey to improving schools, whereas your "old Etonian" is literally the past, and what we ought to be doing is dealing with "San Francisco" today, because that's how you'll help Chicago, New York, etc. in the future.
Yes! These kinds of initiatives are not focusing on tutoring the ”ahead” kids as some think, they are about tutoring the “behind” kids because teachers cannot possibly overcome multiple grade level differences using classroom differentiation. So as you say, the teaching example in the article is entirely missing the point.
The real question is whether you can get Bloom’s 2-sigma effect without a human tutor (for social accountability) when the student is disinterested. I think it will take more than just a chatbot to make a student feel like somebody cares whether they get it or not.
The concentration of wealth with the few is an abomination. It means that a few, with their idiosyncrasies are determining the future of the rest. Their biases are amplified instead of averaged out by the opinions of the many. It's not a harbinger of a sane society. And we're seeing the results everywhere.
From the rise of the alright funded by the thiels and musks and putins. To the money burnt of useless educational startups.
> Small children will touch a hot stove only once yet billionaires will fund personalized learning initiatives again and again and again and we might wonder why.
The author doesn't answer and I don't have an answer either. But the interesting observation is that billionaires don't learn from experience. This is a sure sign of ideology at work.
The author doesn't answer because that "question" is blatant and manipulative nonsense. Don't fall for it.
What worries me more than billionaires funding learning initiatives is how many people fall for this kind of "reasoning" when it's about something they're primed to not like - where they'd reject it in any other context.
I mean, seriously. Small children will touch a hot stove only once, yet try to walk despite repeatedly tripping up. Obviously they don't learn from experience.
When small children fall over, the furthest they usually fall is a couple of feet. It might make them cry, but it won't lea ve them with injuries, like a hot stove will.
And you can make a small child cry without hurting them at all, e.g. by saying "Boo!".
what would have happened if Mark Zuckerberg saw the failures of other social networks and "learned from experience" and didn't create Facebook? these billionaires keep trying precisely because they've succeeded in areas where others have failed, so they believe they can do it again. are they always right? no, but eventually someone will come up with something that works. if no one ever tries, no one ever will.
What failures did he learn from? The other two social networks at the time, Friendster and Myspace were both hugely popular still when he launched Facebook.
Even setting that aside, your premise doesn’t hold: you can’t “learn from experience” by watching others. The whole point of the phrase is that you have to do it yourself to learn.
They're not the same ideas, they don't look a priori stupid, and you won't know for sure until you try.
The only stupid thing is following this absurd "argument" from the article. Kids, stoves. Seriously, what the fuck? Giving up on things after first negative experience is no way to live a life - literally, you would not survive to adulthood if you followed that brilliant idea.
Wishful thinking. "Don't say we can't travel the stars, maybe someone will come up with FTL, you never know until your try, look at the wright brothers", etc.
At some points you have to stop trying stupid things.
Here the stupid idea is thinking education is a solo activity while in truth it's a social one. A 50's multiple choice quiz on papers is the same as a quiz on computers. It's a very small part of what learning is about.
I run a small science club where the kids learn and experiment in small groups guided by tutors who enjoy the stuff. And I'm running out of money fast: I cannot charge much for the courses and workshops (those without money run along free of charge anyway) and I need to spend money on rent, materials and especially the tutors. And the last expenditure is growing linear with the amount of classes I offer and is easily the biggest.
People in business, especially in tech business, try to set things up in a way where you can automate stuff away and it's easy to see schools and classroom education as a great opportunity to try the same approach.
> But the interesting observation is that billionaires don't learn from experience.
This is my personal speculation, but self-learning can be extremely helpful for people with a lot of investment in a specific topic and high intrinsic motivation - a description likely to fit most people that made a vast fortune by themselves and their usual peer group. This is probably a serious filter bubble making them believe that self-learning is the way forward for everyone, since it worked for (nearly) everyone they know.
> The author doesn't answer and I don't have an answer either.
The answer is in the analogy: the billionaire didn’t get burned. If the child touched the stove but it was merely warm, they wouldn’t learn to avoid it.
Losing millions when you have billions is not a big deal.
Yes...but, in the bigger picture: For self-absorbed, A-list young billionaires, the educational outcomes for the little kids were never all that important. Their never-miss-it-anyway $1e8 bought boatloads of arbitrary power over little people, ~8 years of favorable PR, cool talking points when hanging out with their uber-rich social set, and other things that were valuable to them.
I'll admit that there's a flip-side viewpoint here: If you're a billionaire, in a society that very obviously has a lot of problems, and all you've got for tools and skills is a billion-dollar hammer that you're real handy with...well, okay - try hitting some things with your hammer. When the world is screwed up badly enough, even kinda-clueless change has a decent chance of improving something...right?
I suspect most humans with a billion dollars under their belt would be quite inclined to believe they can succeed where others have failed. After all, most people "fail" to become billionaires like they did.
Yes...but your phrasing suggests that is a rational belief. Vs. I'd attribute it far more to over-inflated self-esteem. Anybody who is both rational and has made it to billionaire has failed many times, at a wide variety of things. And knows the world is vastly more complex than any human actually understands.
I don't think it is possible to have a true understanding of what these (tax exempt) foundations are really intending - we only have what they tell us, which is a form of spin.
As far as I am concerned, these foundations are about paving the way for commercial interests - their job is to prepare the ground with a view to the long term benefits that the corporate side will then reap. They are simply structuring society for their benefit; it's not for the love of Man.
In this particular case, how would personalised learning work, with all the collectivisation that is planned and being implemented? Perhaps the intent was to personalise within narrow bands to give the illusion of an individual personalised education..
No, these wealthy few are not paltry compared to governments, they used to be. But not anymore. Plus, they took control the government through corruption.
Wikipedia is mostly a success of the many, both with the many contributing content and editing and by the many contributing the funds to operate. If it wouldve been funded by someone like gates, it'd be a corrupt for profit ad ridden platform. Not because gates is evil, mind you, it's because gates bias leads him to believe for profit enterprises are the solution for everything.
Anyway, i agree experimentation is needed, that's why I was talking about averaging out biases.
I just don't agree that the darwinistic model that caused wealth to concentrate to be the best model to achieve this.
That wealth is mostly an unhelpful value based on number of shares in businesses multiplied by that business's share value today. Those businesses are valuable because they do useful things. We can't release that wealth to pay for things. This is the problem with the word "wealth".
Well yes you can sell shares, maybe not all of them at once if you have enough. Still not sure what your point is, that doesn't mean wealth is not extremely unevenly distributed.
"can do things others can't" isn't the thing we want to stop, though. Wealth isn't bad for those who focus on creating value, just as strength isn't bad for those who are in the gym 6 days a week.
Is that the right statistics here though? Billionaire classes ability to spend should be compared with governments ability to spend. This is not same as wealth.
> The few with money are still a fairly large class. They are also paltry in wealth as compared to the masses aka govt spending.
Governments must spend much more of their treasure chest (when they have one) than billionaires and are scrutinized more heavily. Risks are not the same. Ultra rich are way more capable of corrupting governments than the masses which gives them even more power.
I'm of the opinion that money concentrated in few hands actually leads to better big projects.
Sure, some will fail, but it's better than the alternative, which is everything run by committee.
Committee 's tend to never manage to agree on any big bets - and therefore all resources get ploughed into low risk mundane things with no ongoing benefit. The town hall gets repainted frequently, rather than resources being spent building a cathedral.
If you reduce the social organizational structure aka the government system of democracy to "mass voting" or "voters opinion" you pretty much end up in an incentive structure where being "irrational" i.e. doesn't cost you or or in the words of Caplan:
>when it is [relatively] cheap to believe something (even when it is wrong) it is rational to believe it.
"Engineering" (manipulation of the environment) is the most intuitive for humans to sort out irrational beliefs.
"Science" is a method of eliminating human bias (preconceived notions) beforehand as much as possible as to maximize the space of possibilities in terms of technology ("knowledge").
"Anarchy" in the realm of social order in its most basic form minimizes the abuse of power of the few by optimizing structures of hierarchical order.
Every single one of the human enterprises is non-telic, a constant work in progress. My sense is that through its accelerated atomized structure and loss of power "the West" has lost itself in delusions and constant anxiety resulting in disproportionate numbers of megalomaniac leaders free of account and apathetic citizens giving up agency.
Everyone wants to live in "interesting times" but no one wants to live through it with one lifeline and a 52.5% chance of belonging to the bottom 1.2% in terms of credit points (wealth) and dependent on highly corrupt structures. I surely wouldn't play that game, so what do I care what my rational beliefs are (no participation) as long as every belief I fancy has an underlying cynicism it is a far effective short-term strategy to avoid being "scammed" which could potentially cost the lifeline.
I think about this on a number of levels a lot. I think things have changed a lot less than we tell ourselves (though they have changed a little bit, in that we are no longer bound to each other by feudal oaths - possibly for the worse).
The idea behind governments, even the most liberal, has always been that you give up some of your freedom in exchange for security against violence. This was also the primary motivator for swearing serfdom to a feudal lord. And the idea behind corporations is effectively giving up a large share of your labor value (the other part of serfdom) nominally in exchange for security against economic instability, in that you get a steady paycheck regardless of revenue fluctuations.
In practice, I think many people are finding that security is dubious since corporations lay off employees, but they don't understand what the tradeoff is that they made. Lack of loyalty by employers has then fueled lack of loyalty by employees, and overall the situation is more tenuous now for employees.
And for that matter when people complain about crime (and why crime against its own citizens is particularly heinous), they're complaining that the government is not holding up their end of the contract with protection from that. I'm not sure whether it's easier or harder today to find a different "lord" in the form of emigration. On one hand we're not bound by feudal oaths so leaving as such is usually pretty easy, but on the other hand the process of living somewhere long-term and changing citizenship can be very difficult on the other side depending where you go.
How are you measuring concentration billionaires have very little concentration of wealth compared to the budget did the countries they live in, it’s only when comparing to the average joe.
How is that engaging with what I said? There are many ways to fail. I pointed out one of them. Which is pretty dominant in our age.
Such a low effort reply...
You praised the decisions “averaged out by the opinions of the many,” which burn billions and billions of dollars in failed experiments every year. Happy to help.
"Rich people think thing that got them rich is good for everyone" should be a part of the zeitgeist by now. Individual attention and social learning doesn't "scale", so lets do the thing that does because "that's more efficient", the actual needs and desires of human beings be damned.
Somehow we forget that one of the most important aspects of learning is a clear understanding about why one does it and how it benefits us. This must be repeatedly reinforced over years, and close to zero people want that reinforcement in the hellish form of a gamified and entirely soulless piece of software.
Even taking the writers premise as true, it’s not scalable. Most teachers do not have the necessary capabilities, even with training, to run whole classroom engaged learning experiences. School is designed to meet the capabilities of teachers as much as it does the needs of students.
That said, most students don’t have the capacity to benefit from personalized learning either. The whole problem with the discussion of improving education is the assumption that a proper education process can increase the size of the “glass” by pouring in more “water.” Not everyone is capable of every type of thought, and that’s ok! Every type of person is valuable.
People who are unusually intelligent should be given free time to self teach, and if possible tutored. Traditional classrooms work well enough for everyone else, except for the drug issues.
Any student could achieve more with more individualized education. You can debate the resource efficiency of tutoring the less capable versus the highest achieving until the cows come home, but there are exactly zero students who reach their maximum possible learning potential by sitting in a classroom with 40 other students for 6 hours a day.
I think there's a need to distinguish between childhood education and adult education, in that a main role of childhood education is to facilitate socialization, it's not just reading writing and arithmetic. This is why small class sizes are much more important in K-12 education than at the college level (although college discussion groups led by a TA can be very helpful).
Also, personalized learning lacks some of the motizational pressure that attending a class with other people at a specified time imposes. Some people are self-disciplined and get by without this, but having a schedule helps a lot of people stay focused on their goals.
Where personalized (nowadays, LLMs) tools are incredibly helpful is if you take a course that's a bit above your level and for which you lack some of the necessary background. With LLM assistance, you might have to work twice as hard as other students in the course to keep up, but you at least won't be totally lost.
However, the old saw about leading a horse to water still applies. All the technology and assistance in the world won't help the unmotivated student learn much. If the broader culture doesn't value education, that's the first obstacle to overcome.
What about all the tutorials online that have taught countless people countless skills? Did that just never happen?
If I understand, the core argument in this article is that there is a social layer of learning. And that's probably true to an extent, but how does that completely dismiss the value of self-directed learning?
Self directed learning like this happens within the social constructs in areas where people are very interested at a time or have a specific need. My understanding of the article is that is more focused on the general approach to learning, where the social construct, and help, support, even understanding where compared to others you are, is helpful.
These self directed platforms can be useful in certain use cases but can’t replace the base education system with classrooms.
It’s not like we learned it for fun, we had to in order to pass. I don’t think I (nor anyone in my class) would ever learn strictly school related subjects (calc, chem and etc.) just for fun. And I went to an extremely competitive public school.
Everything else though, like programming, video editing, some crafts and etc. is an entirely different thing. I would definitely argue without former, I wouldn’t be somewhat well-rounded as I consider myself right now.
The kind of people who can self direct learning don't really need much schooling. I don't understand it but some people need the textbook read to them in a classroom to learn anything.
I would argue it helped older, more mature people who have greater self-discipline. Not only that but they are quite self motivated. They are great - for those people.
If you want to teach every child (which is what we do) then the classroom is by far a better model. Teachers do this every day. They set online tutorials and quizzes for homework.
Everyone here seems to have a valid perspective.
1. I now value personalization, especially after college when I grasped how continuous learning impacts my life.
2. I wouldn't have appreciated personalization before turning 21. I loved class rooms.
3. It's beneficial for billionaires to invest in philanthropy and gain exposure, but it's crucial to do due diligence when their actions can impact millions of lives.
I think the core issue where I strongly disagree with this article (and also what seems to be the disagreement why at least some tech billionaires have a completely different experience on education that leads them to finance such initiatives) is concentrated in the following paragraph of the article:
"I have tried to illustrate as often as my subscribers will tolerate that students don’t particularly enjoy learning alone with laptops within social spaces like classrooms. That learning fails to answer their questions about their social identity. It contributes to their feelings of alienation and disbelonging."
"I have tried to illustrate as often as my subscribers will tolerate that students don’t particularly enjoy learning alone with laptops within social spaces like classrooms.": I do agree, but (for me) the reason is not the laptops, but the classroom.
"That learning fails to answer their questions about their social identity. It contributes to their feelings of alienation and disbelonging.": Well, I felt alienated in school, and felt much more home hacking or on the internet (according to the HN comments to this article, this seems to be true for some tech billionaires, too)
I do not agree with this article at all. While I cannot speak for the service specifically, self learning is in my experience _the_ dividing factor between OK employees and great employees
Thus, investing in such a platform does not seem off to me.
Perhaps the problem is the mismatch between the class inherent composition (static, social but might be unequal) and the personal learning itself (inherently divers and dynamic). So instead of sitting in a static class, maybe the students should have their personal learning time, THEN convene per interests or social connections, for whatever they choose. This way, students will build themselves the social connections they wish.
Another problem might be just the stupid statistics. 75% of any population are just followers, who only differ minimally from each other in no significant way (more in appearance than substance). Thus, 75% don’t need much personal learning beside what traditional teachers can already provide. The rest 25% can benefit greatly from personal learning and teaching but either they already doing that in some forms or they don’t build enough mass for a wider adoption.
> Personalized learning can feel isolating. Whole class learning can feel personal.
can, can
Can't the author say anything more definitive than can?
> Whole class work can feel personal. I consider it proven by Liz. QED.
This is transparently misleading. Anybody who has been in school knows that every school has a couple of gifted, charismatic teachers who can make just about anything feel exciting and compelling to students.
Name a learning methodology that can't feel personalized and stimulating if you find the teacher charismatic. I just proved everything works. QED.
This article is misguided, because it compares self learning with the presence of a good teacher. For all kinds of reasons, there are places in the world where a child might be much better off watching a Khan Academy lecture than their local teacher. And the personalized learning approach is easily scalable, whereas replicating good human teachers is extremely hard. It's not that Zuckerberg and Gates are dumb, it's that they are working on a different problem than this person assumes.
People who are capable of learning on their own pace are already doing it and the ones that can't use this approach shouldn't hope that a software system is going to allow them to. For me the questions of which professor explains better or the suggestions of not taking a course because the proffesor can't explain, were always meaningless. I never relied on a professor's lecture for learning (but had to sit through them) and my method was possible because engineering is not opinion based (Obviously I did terrible when the course was a amalgamation of different subjects from multiple books). But people who don't have the motivation to start reading a 1000 page textbook by themselves wouldn't have the will to watch 100h of videos around the same topic. In fact it might be even worse for them just watching the videos and not paying any attention.
My buttom line is personalized learning has existed for centuries and changing its medium from books to videos won't make it possible for more people.
The problem with tech people in education is that they can only think in paradigms that can "scale". If Zuck's mission was to "build a better school" and scale that out with better trained and incentivized teachers (the non-scaling part), the approach would be radically different.
Instead, the mission is to fix education as a whole and make it work for every person in the world. Which leads to looking in a complete different part of the solution space.
Often, what lacks in these ideas is nuance and middle ground. The intent is right but the approach is lazy.
What do you think of this approach:
Gamify learning! Students get to learn sort of at their own pace but like gaming, they fall into different levels. Let them compete and be ranked against others at their level nationally but also be in different teams of less than 10 students at their school. Allow them to be at different levels for different subjects and attend regular in person classes with kids in their team/level.
The grade system stays, you still need to pass all the subjects to progress a grade, it just might for example take a 17 year old 5 years to move to grade 8 from 7 and 1 year to finish highschool because they sucked at math in the 7th grade and it took them 4 years to reach grade 8 level and the 1year to focus on math for grades 9-12, because they finished every other subject at every level and grade.
They could pair up and talk with students, mentors, teachers across the country to get exposure and pursue their passions.
I am sorry but I am shocked at how unimaginative technologists are getting. It's like the disruptor mindset is dying off.
My sister worked at Summit Shasta in Daily City (south of SF) as a teacher and then administrator. I can say that the school itself was quite a success, with a lot of local, low income students getting into Berkley, Carnegie Mellon, etc.
Now did the CZI need to invest $100m to build that platform and could it scale, maybe not, but I wouldn't write the whole thing off as a failure.
This is a user experience research failure as it didn't consider how Students view and benefit from interactive group learning. A few billionaires who prefer being alone projected their own personal values into everyone else... and apparently their needs and concerns about learning aren't the same.
I'm not sold on the idea that this is an either/or scenario. Classroom-based instruction is critical, imho, for social development, but having personalized learning as an option for areas of struggle (or areas of excellence) that proceeds at your own pace has been helpful for me (as an adult).
A common finding since it became feasible to estimate social network status is that a student's learning is split in half between the effort they personally put into learning (homework, showing up to class, etc) and their social network status (who they talk to, how many do they talk with, how frequently, etc). This should not come as a surprise as it's common knowledge, at least in stem, that you aren't going to solve the problems all by yourself, study groups help. What's wild about this is that I couldn't imagine Facebook plugs their employees into computers disconnected from others to complete their tasks. Why would you assume this would work for students?
Nice to hear from an actual teacher about education. Billionaires have the same issue as a lot of other people - they went to school once, had some beef with it, are now successful, and so they think they've got some insight. Its funny how we in the tech industry (rightly) bristle at some outsider like McKinsey claiming insight into our world but can't see the same hubris when we talk about education without any background or training in it. Well except - we went to school once.
>More students prefer learning in classes like Liz’s than plugged into their laptops with headphones, alone together. I have not proven this. It isn’t obvious to me how one would prove or disprove this, but I find evidence and experience pretty compelling here.
One month one way, one month the other way for an entire year. Have students vote and decide which one they actually like.
I know absolutely nothing about "education reform". I knew this thing was a grift instantly when it was announced. Mark Zuckerberg teams up with Chris Christie. What could possibly go wrong?? So shocking that this doesn't work out!
What’s the grift? He dumped in a ton of his own money and essentially had to write it off. Hubris sure, but where’s the money making scheme underneath this?
Personally, I think that learning on one’s own outside of an educational institution is perfect for those with the self-discipline for it. For everyone else, a traditional school environment may be the better choice.
I notice that this author is focusing on what students prefer, whereas the cited examples were focusing on what is more effective for learning. They may or may not align.
Has it ever occurred to them that not everyone can learn alone at their own pace?
Some people learn better alone others in groups as it acts as a pacemaker.
A quick search shows that Mark (I worked at FB where we were all encouraged to call him Mark instead of Zuck) has a net worth of ~$100 billion. So its basically a side bet. His real estate holdings are probably worth more.
Surely building your search engine required you to acquire new skills? Presumably your motivation to build a good search engine drove you to learn things you otherwise wouldn’t have.
Quite the opposite, I built the search engine as a means to learn something new, both in the skill acquisition sense but also just to learn more about the state of the Internet.
Like I'm very hands on with my learning. If I can't experience something myself and see it with my own eyes, even if that means building something from scratch, it just feels pointless.
I'm also probably a severe outlier in not being particularly motivated by goals in any aspect of my life.
I would suspect almost nobody (Gates, Kahn, etc) suggest having an entirely asocial education experience.
As we can figure out how to replicate the effects of tutoring with technology, we should see massive improvements in education outcomes.