May 12 2013: Check out the documentary High School by Frederick Wiseman. The teaching techniques used there might be reduced in effectiveness in a primary school because prepubescents are limited in their capacity for abstract reasoning, but I'm not certain. Teaching the habit of rational argument as the way that people fundamentally convey knowledge and thought to one another (perhaps through having 2 teachers for each class, who collaborate through constructive argumentation with each other in front of the class) would surely be vastly beneficial. Every single class needs to be framed as critical thinking applied to the subject at hand. Persuasion and answering of questions rather than trying to teach by fiat. This requires good teachers with good personalities, of course. It would never work with a teacher who gets offended by a student challenging them, or one unwilling to cede that they don't know the answer to a question. Re-form the classes to concentrate on critical thinking and eliminate all of the prison-like controls that are not directly conducive to education (supported by evidence-based research, of course, and evolving as research evolves). Destroy the artificial arbitrary rules of schools and expect students to conduct themselves as people would in real life - no dictating what they wear and obsessing over who was kissing in the halls before class. There are reasons these things are not laws in general society, and schools are part of general society, and students react like actual PEOPLE. Treat them like prisoners who must be controlled compulsively, and they will act like prisoners.
May 12 2013: You make a good point, but there is a significant challenge to the idea that education should happen throughout society. Since World War II western societies have grown more and more anti-intellectual with as time has passed. Learning, knowledge, and reason are seen as personal character flaws. Those who know are seen as arrogant and potentially dangerous. Anyone who suggests that one thing is right, and another is wrong, is seen as elitist, judgemental, and ideological. It's so subsumed in our culture that it's not even an issue that is debated any longer, it has been accepted as foundational. Those with intellectual skill are socially retarded, have dangerous hubris, and are fundamentally worse people than those who rely on intuition. All of the flaws of reasoning that humans are prone to are enshrined. Smearing the speaker to defeat a proposed idea, ignoring counterevidence and overstating collaborative evidence, assuming correlation and causation are the same thing, using tricks of language to persuade people emotionally rather than rationally, encouraging abandonment of "abstract principles" in favor of expediency, etc are the ways the "good people" in society now conduct themselves. So a few hundred thousand doctors tell you to get your kids vaccinated? A lady down the street knows someone who has an autistic kid and she KNOWS the vaccines did it.
There is no crisis of lack of information, or lack of access to education. We live in a golden age for that. The problem is that society despises the practice of reason. They see it as a significant character flaw. They see it as restrictive and dangerous. Until that changes, society simply cannot be a place where learning happens everywhere. Learning takes a back seat to having to pledge allegiance, to agreeing with people to prove you like them and are like them, to following your gut or following the other guy following his.
May 12 2013: Two words: Critical Thinking. The great documentarian Frederisk Wiseman produced 2 documentaries back in the late 1960s that are sadly overlooked. They are titled "High School" and "High School 2". I highly recommend that everyone see them. Not just people interested in education, but every single human being. At least the first one at a minimum. Wiseman profiled 2 different schools. In the first, he documented a school from a low income latino neighborhood which took a "radical" approach to education. Every class, every single one, every single grade, was taught centered around critical thinking. Teachers did not give dictation - they gave persuasive argument. They did not denounce challenges from the students out of a compulsive need to control, they addressed the challenges honestly.
Critical thinking underlies all actual learning. Memorizing a fact is very difficult for humans, and very useless. Memorizing does not integrate concepts into a reinforcing framework, it simply hangs a piece of information unrelated in the mind - and it cannot last long with no mooring foundation. An idea taught through argument inherently becomes integrated. It sticks. It's fantastically invigorating, and unbelievably effective at accomplishing education. That low income school? They went on to have the highest college graduation rate (not just college attendance, but receipt of a degree) of any school in the country. The experimental school produced vibrant, engaged learners.
The second documentary, High School 2, follows a "standard" school in an upper middle class neighborhood and shows how schools take enthusiastic, interested adolescents and grind them down to middle-aged lifeless accountants in the remarkably short span of a few years. It shows a school much like most schools where the students become disinterested in everything and learning dies. And since the 1990s we've layered prison-like control on top of that... and we wonder why some snap...
Oct 31 2012: You are in luck. We are currently living in an era where you really don't need an employer. Consider the service that employers provide, and have provided for hundreds of years. They aggregate workers physically, and they distribute the end result to customers.
Why are those two things so valuable? Well, prior to the Internet, computers, and modern automation technology, producing a product was impossible without physical aggregation of workers. That is no longer true. With automation technology and computers, a single worker can be tremendously productive. And when multiple workers are needed, online collaboration is in many ways superior to being crammed in an open-plan office (a setup which has proven dozens of times to reduce productivity, but is amenable to corporate politics so it gets reproduced everywhere).
How about distribution? Well, do you have less access to FedEx, UPS, the USPS, DHL, and other shipping means than corporate entities do? Nope. Distribution is a solved problem. It's available cheap and easy from anywhere to anywhere. And since we're talking about quantities of goods necessary to provide a living to 1 person, logistics isn't even a very common problem.
Make no mistake, there are still challenges. Getting word of your product or ability to provide a product to customers who want to buy it is a hurdle that still exists in most industries. This is rapidly changing. More and more online services which enable people to find individuals or small teams to do work for them and vice versa come online every day.
Employers scalp over 90% of every transaction between a worker and a customer. That used to be justifiable since the services they provided were so valuable. This becomes less justifiable by the hour. Workers produce so much value so fast today that salaries are entirely unrelated to value produced which will drive more and more people to work freelance. Give it consideration if it is amenable to your situation!
Oct 30 2012: I learned the value of many aspects of the childs mind before I ever grew up. I've found this to be magnificent. Preserving the useful aspects of such things without simply throwing it away because other adults look down on it has been very rewarding.
Making irrational demands is how innovation happens. I don't want a laptop whose battery lasts 5% longer. I want one whose battery lasts as long as the entire device is useful. Setting your sights on goals like that are very often far more productive than aiming at 5% incremental increases.
The techniques of reason can be taught to almost any child. If they can grasp the language, they can grasp reason. And reason is what people need to learn anything and do anything. Adults believe in value in authorities handing down truth and ignoring any doubts or questions that come from less knowledgable people. And that has been the backing behind every huge tragedy accidentally introduced by people insisting that their views were rational and being able to enforce their views through authority rather than making rational appeals to others.
Age discrimination has replaced race and gender as the socially accepted means of prejudice. Such unthinking approaches to other human beings is always wrong. You likely see it as completely acceptable to exert extreme control over the lives of younger people. That is exactly how racists and sexists of the past felt. They did not see the question worth even considering for a very long time. Why are we doing this again? Why are we acceding to this well-established and extremely destructive intuitive impulse? As we did when we fought against racism and sexism, we will have to fight people who don't want to admit to themselves that their best intentions are causing savage harm to other human beings. We'll have to face people promising that society itself will unravel if these prejudices are abolished.
Oct 6 2012: Age has replaced race as the primary characteristic that people in society feel comfortable basing prejudices on. 'Everyone' knows that children are stupid and incapable, that they can't do anything without adults, that if left to their own devices they will never learn anything useful, and that things they don't know already are somehow dangerous for them to have contact with.
Oct 6 2012: Critical thinking. Nothing is more important than teaching children how to think and how to figure things out. This demands a lot of parents and teachers. Teaching critical thinking and logic themselves is not too difficult, but the child will immediately start USING it in their life. If you haven't put any rational thought into the ways you restrict and regulate their life, you will very soon find the student losing all respect for you (which is only appropriate if you haven't bothered to be rationally rigorous with something so severely important as manipulating the freedom of another person). "Because I said so" has never been, and will never be, an adequate answer to any question. Critical thinking and logic, however, opens the entire world to a child.
Without critical thinking and logic, a child (or adult) is doomed to muddling through life trying to trick themselves into being confident in the things they know. It leaves them guessing and following their gut - some of the best ways to guarantee they will be wrong about everything. Winning an argument or figuring things out seems almost frivolous in our culture. After all, you will be protected from crime, vaccinated against disease, and receive most all of the benefits of the intellectual approach to life that those who came before us were wise enough to create. Knowing how to think, however, is nothing short of a matter of life and death. Thanks to intellectuals, dangerous consequences of irrationality are not close at hand in our society, but living still requires effort. And that effort is wasted when it is not expended rationally. Today the dangers are more personal, and they threaten to leave people depressed, anxious, neurotic, and paranoid - dangers as real as polio or malaria. Critical thought is the toolset that enables anyone, even children, to protect themselves from this. The assurance that anyone can check the correctness of their own thinking is nothing short of life-saving.
Sep 22 2012: People toy with the idea of distributed power generation, where a home may one day be able to generate the power necessary to run.
Why do we not apply this to agriculture? Why do we continue to insist on producing food on giant farms and trucking it everywhere? There have been tremendous technological improvements in agriculture over the past century, but it is applied exclusively to huge corporate farms. Why isn't it being applied to small gardens? My dream would be to convert my garage into a food machine. An utterly automated system which manages the production of enough food for me to survive on. I see no technical restriction that would prevent this from being possible. The only problem is that all of the products needed are priced to only be affordable by Monsanto and Monsanto-owned farms.
Give every family their own farm in their garage or in a small part of their back yard. Aeroponics, automation, genetically engineered plants, but aimed to save families thousands of dollars a year in food costs, not to mention all the environmental savings gathered by not needing herbicides, pesticides, and international distribution networks.
Sep 22 2012: Teaching people how to ask the right questions, and how to approach problems from different perspectives in order to find innovative solutions is the thing most CEOs say they wish schools would teach children. Luckily, we actually do have a great teacher for this. Videogames. Videogames are tremendously important educational tools. And I don't mean edutainment crapware. I mean the actual videogames that kids already like to play. The very act of playing a videogame of any kind is an exercise in asking the right questions in order to suss out the details and dynamics of an arbitrary system. In every one, you have to try many approaches, see what works and what doesn't, try new things to try to improve, etc. You get instant feedback, you can try things which seem stupid without humiliation or condescension, you learn how to min-max optimize often complex systems. No course in school teaches system dynamics, but almost every job in existence today involves exactly this. Either discovering how to navigate in an information system or else creating a new information system for other people to navigate.
Sep 22 2012: Most certainly the most important thing which needs to be taught but which is not is critical thinking. Critical thinking should not simply be taught, but should be the entire basis for every single course taught. Research has shown it to be radically effective not only at teaching, but at keeping people engaged and interested in learning. See the documentary "High School" by Wiseman for a stunning example of how amazingly successful this approach is. It is nearly abusive that we do not teach every single topic in a framework of critical thinking. He also made another documentary called "High School 2" which shows a 'regular' school where the students are broken, perform poorly, have all excitement and interest ground out of them and confident adolescents are crushed into soulless accountants.
I do think that Sex Ed should be a year-long course which covers the whole of human sexuality, from its history and sociology through the biological aspects, on to the psychological and social aspects - which things are the way they are purely because society makes them that way and which are actually natural - and on through the wide variety of fetishes, the role of sex in different types of relationships, the fluidity of sexual orientation, and the nature of sex as a basic bodily function.
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A comment on Conversation: Ken Robinson Primary School
A comment on Conversation: "...education doesn't go on in ... rooms of our legislative buildings. It happens in classrooms..." Is classroom the only place?
There is no crisis of lack of information, or lack of access to education. We live in a golden age for that. The problem is that society despises the practice of reason. They see it as a significant character flaw. They see it as restrictive and dangerous. Until that changes, society simply cannot be a place where learning happens everywhere. Learning takes a back seat to having to pledge allegiance, to agreeing with people to prove you like them and are like them, to following your gut or following the other guy following his.
A comment on Conversation: What can we do? - an open letter to teachers - promoting the flipped learning
Critical thinking underlies all actual learning. Memorizing a fact is very difficult for humans, and very useless. Memorizing does not integrate concepts into a reinforcing framework, it simply hangs a piece of information unrelated in the mind - and it cannot last long with no mooring foundation. An idea taught through argument inherently becomes integrated. It sticks. It's fantastically invigorating, and unbelievably effective at accomplishing education. That low income school? They went on to have the highest college graduation rate (not just college attendance, but receipt of a degree) of any school in the country. The experimental school produced vibrant, engaged learners.
The second documentary, High School 2, follows a "standard" school in an upper middle class neighborhood and shows how schools take enthusiastic, interested adolescents and grind them down to middle-aged lifeless accountants in the remarkably short span of a few years. It shows a school much like most schools where the students become disinterested in everything and learning dies. And since the 1990s we've layered prison-like control on top of that... and we wonder why some snap...
A reply on Talk: Adora Svitak: What adults can learn from kids
Why are those two things so valuable? Well, prior to the Internet, computers, and modern automation technology, producing a product was impossible without physical aggregation of workers. That is no longer true. With automation technology and computers, a single worker can be tremendously productive. And when multiple workers are needed, online collaboration is in many ways superior to being crammed in an open-plan office (a setup which has proven dozens of times to reduce productivity, but is amenable to corporate politics so it gets reproduced everywhere).
How about distribution? Well, do you have less access to FedEx, UPS, the USPS, DHL, and other shipping means than corporate entities do? Nope. Distribution is a solved problem. It's available cheap and easy from anywhere to anywhere. And since we're talking about quantities of goods necessary to provide a living to 1 person, logistics isn't even a very common problem.
Make no mistake, there are still challenges. Getting word of your product or ability to provide a product to customers who want to buy it is a hurdle that still exists in most industries. This is rapidly changing. More and more online services which enable people to find individuals or small teams to do work for them and vice versa come online every day.
Employers scalp over 90% of every transaction between a worker and a customer. That used to be justifiable since the services they provided were so valuable. This becomes less justifiable by the hour. Workers produce so much value so fast today that salaries are entirely unrelated to value produced which will drive more and more people to work freelance. Give it consideration if it is amenable to your situation!
A comment on Talk: Adora Svitak: What adults can learn from kids
Making irrational demands is how innovation happens. I don't want a laptop whose battery lasts 5% longer. I want one whose battery lasts as long as the entire device is useful. Setting your sights on goals like that are very often far more productive than aiming at 5% incremental increases.
The techniques of reason can be taught to almost any child. If they can grasp the language, they can grasp reason. And reason is what people need to learn anything and do anything. Adults believe in value in authorities handing down truth and ignoring any doubts or questions that come from less knowledgable people. And that has been the backing behind every huge tragedy accidentally introduced by people insisting that their views were rational and being able to enforce their views through authority rather than making rational appeals to others.
Age discrimination has replaced race and gender as the socially accepted means of prejudice. Such unthinking approaches to other human beings is always wrong. You likely see it as completely acceptable to exert extreme control over the lives of younger people. That is exactly how racists and sexists of the past felt. They did not see the question worth even considering for a very long time. Why are we doing this again? Why are we acceding to this well-established and extremely destructive intuitive impulse? As we did when we fought against racism and sexism, we will have to fight people who don't want to admit to themselves that their best intentions are causing savage harm to other human beings. We'll have to face people promising that society itself will unravel if these prejudices are abolished.
A comment on Talk: Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves
'Everyone' is wrong.
A comment on Conversation: What are the best things to teach our own children?
Without critical thinking and logic, a child (or adult) is doomed to muddling through life trying to trick themselves into being confident in the things they know. It leaves them guessing and following their gut - some of the best ways to guarantee they will be wrong about everything. Winning an argument or figuring things out seems almost frivolous in our culture. After all, you will be protected from crime, vaccinated against disease, and receive most all of the benefits of the intellectual approach to life that those who came before us were wise enough to create. Knowing how to think, however, is nothing short of a matter of life and death. Thanks to intellectuals, dangerous consequences of irrationality are not close at hand in our society, but living still requires effort. And that effort is wasted when it is not expended rationally. Today the dangers are more personal, and they threaten to leave people depressed, anxious, neurotic, and paranoid - dangers as real as polio or malaria. Critical thought is the toolset that enables anyone, even children, to protect themselves from this. The assurance that anyone can check the correctness of their own thinking is nothing short of life-saving.
A comment on Talk: Tristram Stuart: The global food waste scandal
Why do we not apply this to agriculture? Why do we continue to insist on producing food on giant farms and trucking it everywhere? There have been tremendous technological improvements in agriculture over the past century, but it is applied exclusively to huge corporate farms. Why isn't it being applied to small gardens? My dream would be to convert my garage into a food machine. An utterly automated system which manages the production of enough food for me to survive on. I see no technical restriction that would prevent this from being possible. The only problem is that all of the products needed are priced to only be affordable by Monsanto and Monsanto-owned farms.
Give every family their own farm in their garage or in a small part of their back yard. Aeroponics, automation, genetically engineered plants, but aimed to save families thousands of dollars a year in food costs, not to mention all the environmental savings gathered by not needing herbicides, pesticides, and international distribution networks.
A reply on Conversation: What was not taught in school that you realize, REALLY should have been? (Why?)
A comment on Conversation: What was not taught in school that you realize, REALLY should have been? (Why?)
I do think that Sex Ed should be a year-long course which covers the whole of human sexuality, from its history and sociology through the biological aspects, on to the psychological and social aspects - which things are the way they are purely because society makes them that way and which are actually natural - and on through the wide variety of fetishes, the role of sex in different types of relationships, the fluidity of sexual orientation, and the nature of sex as a basic bodily function.