None of this is particularly new. Tutors and "crammers" make regular appearances in older British fiction. The writer Sidney Smith got his start as tutor to a nobleman's son, and facetiously or otherwise suggested that such work was a good step up to a bishopric (though Smith's clerical career not got past dean).
Just over ten years ago, the NY Times had an article about a disappointed parent suing a tutoring company. I forget what her beef was, but she had paid out $35 thousand in the course of a year.
That seems entirely plausible. That's in the same territory as boarding school prices for one kid (some are more expensive, of course, but it's around the same price as that sort of thing), so clearly there exist people willing and able to pay that much for their kids' education. Hell, with a couple kids you can break that much per year at a cheap-end-of-mid-priced day school.
I have seen this kind of thing directly. Kids in private school who take their homework to the “tutoring session” where the tutor basically does it for them. My own kid did tutoring for beer money while in school.
I don’t think the article is fundamentally fictional, though clearly some of the retelling has been dressed up a bit.
Why is it fiction? People who are rich enough to pay an entire yacht crew are not going to worry about $50K a year for a tutor to try and make their lazy waste-of-space child at least have half a chance of creating their own success when they are older.
If the kid is lazy waste of space and the tutor can make the difference, paying one just sounds like good parenting.
Also, a lot of these kids are smart and hardworking and motivated. The money are an additional advantage and parents having resources to ensure they stay motivated and active is advantage too.
But, the assumption that they are all dumb or lazy is wrong.
Of course rich people pay for tutors. Of course some rich people have stupid expectations. But the whole setup reads like it's the start of a Chuck Palahniuk novel and that makes me certain the author is full of s**.
One of the most important competitive advantages in modern world is motivation to do things on your own. And all this tutoring that kids are forced to be doing by adults is killing it.
So true but this youngster doesn't sound like someone who needs to win, he is already made. All he (or his parents) want is to look like they are successful by saying, "Little Johnny got 15 GCSEs".
As a new parent I'm really torn on this topic. On the one hand building resiliency and self-motivation need to happen through self-directed activities. On the other hand, Sitting on a couch watching Netflix probably isn't the most efficient way to build these skills.
I found that heavy amounts of discussion of the "why" for any activity, and then instilling confidence in that person that they're capable of doing the thing that they've already agreed to the "why" for, is a necessary prerequisite for their self directed activities to be productive ones.
The problem with most kids and adults I know is they either lack a depth of reasoning for why they ought to be doing something better, or lack the confidence that they'd be able to accomplish it if they put their mind to it.
If you can't come up with a convincing "why" for them, then you should reflect on how sustainable forcing them to do that thing will be once they have independence.
There were a lot of things my mom expected of me (similar to these kids with tutors). Some of them I agreed with, some of them I didn't.
When I finally got my independence at 18, guess which ones stuck, and which ones (where a lot of time and effort was put into cultivating them) evaporated?
Talk to your children deeply about the why, and, as the saying goes, they'll suffer almost any how.
I think it goes beyond simple academic test results -- even successful parents take pride in their children's accomplishments, so they want to be able to say "Johnny grew up to be a successful lawyer and he's going to take over the family business". So they are doing what they can to set their children up for success.
Unless they are uber-wealthy, then they'll just say "Johnny is sailing our yacht around the Mediterranean (and when we say "sailing", we mean there's an 8 person crew running the boat)"
> important competitive advantages in modern world is motivation to do things on your own
.. but if you don't have that?
Besides, tutoring can be a bootstrap to that, especially in young people. I've found myself that exercise is so much more likely to happen if it's not on my own, such as a regular personal trainer appointment. The more it becomes a habit, the more I feel like doing some more on my own as well.
I was a private tutor for a long time. My market segment often leaned toward the "rather wealthy," although not anything like this. However, the struggle to motivate is very real. Each child or teen (or even young adult) comes with their own package of bad coping skills, strengths and deficits, motivations (or lack thereof), and so on. Each one has a history.
In any case, to my actual point -- discovering those motivations is one of the things for which I was paid. Often, children do not understand education. It has been a flat "do this" chore for them with some nebulous payout that will supposedly happen twice their lifespan away, when all around them they see images of people who did not go the conventional route to success.
Do you have any tips for hiring someone like yourself for tutoring. Honestly I feel like I’d be doing my kid a huge disservice by not hiring a tutor but hiring a good one is probably key.
That would be a hard ask. I've had kind of a knack for it, I was helping other kids since grade school.
What you want is someone who works for the child, not the parent. They should have a rounded education but also be willing to admit that they do not know something and must research. They should understand a decent amount of child psychology and how people process/retain information.
The most important competitive advantage is having the money to buy someone who knows how to do things for you. The second most is knowing people who have already bought someone good at the job.
It's why the rich don't manage their own money, make their own food, clean their own house, or care for/teach their own children. Instead they pay other people to do it for them.
Not really sure that is a proven advantage. I have always been self-motivated and had teachers who just left me to get on with it and marked anything I handed in to them. You still have to send out the right signals to people who don't know you.
There's no way to replicate the engagement that an actual teacher/tutor can provide. Some people can do just fine with self-directed study but I image most people aren't autodidacts.
Self-learning also comes with the pitfall that you may optimize for the wrong things.
When it comes to standardized tests/certain career expectations you are expected to have a broad understanding of the orthodox views on the evaluated topics.
I tutored for a short stint during my senior year of highschool (graduated in S2020, so this included the pandemic), through my Fall 2020 term at university.
This is pretty much exactly what I experienced. I was a member of an online marketplace, so I wasn't necessarily an "elite" tutor by any means, but I found that most of my students just needed instruction that was more tailored to them. A lot of them were working towards AP exams (computer science), so working with someone who had taken that exam, knew what was on it, and intimately understood how it was graded proved rather valuable, at least from what the parents reported back to me.
You can't automate the human interaction out through tech.
That's like expecting coffee vending machines to have made baristas obsolete.
As an adult I can do self study just fine and since I work in tech that's expected of me, but as a kid I was way too thick to learn the school curriculum on my own.
A guide is more important than ever. Information is properly assimilated through some mental schema. When teachers talk about teaching people "how to learn", they're talking about helping a student to form those schemata (as well as specific techniques, etc.)
Yeah, many engineering and science fields are much more than just software, for example, so it's important to get access to and experience with various hardware equipment and even get to contribute on cutting edge work usually funded by various companies from industry.
I think the main value of a tutor is having someone with a mental model of what you know and don't know. This has two important consequences. One: If you are missing a prerequisite piece of knowledge the tutor can easily notice that and fix it. If you were on your own it could be a long hunt for the missing piece. And if you misunderstood something, it can take even longer to fix as you don't know that you don't know. Two: The pace can be adjusted so that you practice until you get something, and no longer. Moving at a set pace is frustrating if the pace is too quick, and boring if it is too slow.
Yes! The thing that was missing in the original article was answering the most important question in all of this: Does Tutoring Work?
The implication left for a reader of the original article is that tutoring is mostly about exam-prep or that it is under-regulated, ineffectual, and a folly of the rich. But the truth is that the over-regulation of conventional time-based classroom learning is deeply flawed based on our understanding of how people learn. Throwing thirty teenagers in a room at 8am and having a tenured adult speak at them for 45 minutes on a subject is not a recipe for success, nor is moving everyone along at the same pace and calling the material complete after a semester of education regardless of the depth of understanding conveyed. We need intensive and personalized schooling with mastery based learning - and to answer the question of "where are we going to get that many teachers?" we need people to teach as part of how they learn. For some odd reason society only starts to embrace this in graduate school.
> we need people to teach as part of how they learn.
I've got a principle I came up with called LTD: Learn, Teach, Do.
The idea is to prioritize activities where I can be doing all three at the same time. An example would be pair programming with a junior on a new problem where I don't know how to solve every part of the problem. "Learn on the job together with a team, and share learnings as you go" is basically the kind of work that I mean. I've found LTD activities are awesome in so many ways. You build up the team around you, grow as an individual, and get shit done all at the same time.
I'm increasingly against activities which focus strongly on only one of these(school being the main example).
teaching is a very effective method of learning. in one community that i am part of it is emphasized that most of the benefits of teaching go to the teacher.
as for a school model, montessori groups children in age-groups spanning 3 years, and older children there routinely teach the younger ones.
Montessori schools are so weird. I'm convinced they're mostly buzzwords to get rich parents to send their kids there - at least around here. I know a couple of teachers and all of them say that the Montessori schools around us don't actually follow most of the philosophies of Montessori.
In our area they seem to be for over-achievers. Want your 4 year old to learn to read, write, and do math? Send them to a Montessori. At least, that's the reason all the parents I know send them there.
the problem is that the name "montessori" is not protected, and schools take advantage of that.
so you have to look closely if the teachers are actually trained and certified by one of the training schools that actually provide proper montessori training, and whether the classrooms have the proper environment.
>Throwing thirty teenagers in a room at 8am and having a tenured adult speak at them for 45 minutes on a subject is not a recipe for success
The problem here is that getting enough money to hire more teachers per student is like pulling teeth. The problem that we as a society are solving isn't "how can we achieve the best overall educational outcome?" It's "how can we avoid a disastrously uneducated population with a budget of $X?" I'm not entirely sure we're doing a good job on that one either, though.
Right - but part of the difficulty and expense in hiring teachers is that we've segmented it off as an expert population with high barriers to entry. If everyone who learned was also expected to teach, you scale the teaching population with the learner population. You can actually see the dynamics of this play out with flight training, since you get your CFI at ~300hrs total flight experience but nobody will hire you with less than ~1,000hrs, so you have this massive pool of certified teachers with 300 - 1,000hrs of experience available to teach as a consequence of the design of the system.
I wonder if you could get some positive results by using students as tutors. Imagine if a certain number of hours per week, you paired up students in grade X with students in grade X-1, to have the older students help the younger ones to learn the material they leaned the previous year. This would also help cement that knowledge in the older group. Then you also have time where the students in grade X are tutored by students in grade X+1, through the same process. During this time, the teachers' jobs would be to provide support.
The biggest problem with public instructions is bullying and everything being targeted at minimum competence. Some 12 year old prodigy graduated college and high school at the same time because the pandemic and remote learning letting him zoom ahead at a ridiculous pace.[1]
Bullying is bad, but I definitely knew my role wasn't to be strong but rather academic. That line "nerds will be their boss" was my incentive. (Although I don't personally want to be a manager)
Sure it would be great to get rid of bullying, but I wonder if it's inherent in humans.
I'd focus on things we can control like that minimum competence problem you described.
that's in interesting angle with the grad school advisor reality. Very true, never thought about how an "advisor" would function throughout the entirety of one's education.
There was definitely a lot lost when the pandemic happened. The social cues, the personal interaction, the ability to get a student to focus was greatly diminished. I always think about how the number of people who want to work remotely is an interesting contrast to how many people want to learn one on one in person.
I believe students have said okay to remote one to many educators, with things like online university. But especially in math and chemistry and physics, people want in person tutoring.
Every student's case mentioned made it seem like the goal of tutoring is for the student to acquire elite status and prestige by going to highly selective schools through the planning by their neurotic parents. The material learned was less relevant.
I want to teach my students how to follow their passions, how to strive for the life they want, rather than for hollow symbols of success.
It seems like hollow symbols of success are what the parents and institutions have agreed to create though. The number of schools and slots for students has apparently not changed much but the number of students across the globe who are competing for slots in a few, elite western schools has gone up enormously. That drives the value of the degree up through scarcity which seems to be what people want for their children, is ways to be more elite than their peers.
It's probably not surprising then that bribery happens. The schools aren't really selling an education anymore and the parents aren't really looking for one either.
Well, elite jobs typically go to people who can show these hollow symbols of success, so as long as that's true, there will be demand for "elite status" and "prestige". The elite jobs are not hiring for what material was learned--they're hiring based on your membership in the club and your pedigree. Fix the demand for hollow symbols and maybe they become less important. Good luck getting Goldman and McKinsey to stop looking for Harvard on resumes though.
I attended an "elite" boys school back in the 1990s. It was a doctor and lawyer factory. Everyone went to university and most got advanced degrees. But I talked to a teacher there recently. The students are now so wealthy that they are hard to motivate. Doctors have to touch sick people. Lawyers have to go work in an office. The students at my old school today don't dream of success. They all pass, they all do well, but they aren't performing like they used to. They know they will all go work for daddy's real estate/banking firm. Why bother even trying?
My old school is now no longer the top in the country, slipping to 4th last time I looked. The student body is smart, but simply doesn't try as hard at anything anymore. I don't blame them.
although genuine, this analysis is sort of 2D cutout characterization, which feeds class stereotypes in another way.. "When I was in school, I had to walk 2 miles every day, uphill both ways! .. you people are less motivated" sort of applies
Modern life has the number of human signals daily, increased to stratospheric levels.. this is new, very new. It is not clear how intelligent, social people are changing under this communications environment.
other points omitted for the sake of brevity, but not the whole story here..
Perhaps bank accounts, transactions, credit reports, grades, should be public information, physical measurements, medical history, etc should be public information.
That way we, we do not have to play these signaling games and can focus resources elsewhere.
The fact that an experience is stereotypical doesn't meant it is also inaccurate.
Students today do not have it easier. They are working less hard at school because they need to work harder in other areas. Grades don't matter. Everyone gets strait-As so as long as you meat that standard there is little point in trying harder. Even Going to a good school matters less and less. The things kids have to do today are very different than I faced. For me, grades were enough. For today's kids grades are only the starting point. For instance, social media presence is now very important. I never had to deal with that when I was applying to universities.
“I was speechless when a school official asked me about all the clubbing and party pictures I posted on my Facebook Account. In hindsight, I think I got rejected from that school because they might have thought I will do the same once I join school."
"According to a 2017 survey administered by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, 11% of respondents said they "denied admission based on social media content" and another 7% rescinded offers for the same reason."
"According to the 364 colleges across the United States we recently spoke with, 25 percent tell us that they have visited an applicant’s social media page, such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to learn more about them*."
In SF/NYC/LA, maybe. In any city with less than a million people, they are much more frequently upper-middle to upper class.
Additionally, despite often being mentioned in the same breath/status, doctors and lawyers follow very different distributions of compensation. Attorney pay is shockingly bimodal: the ambulance chaser firm advertising on the back of the city bus is paying first-year associates <60k, if that, then there’s a huge gap, and then more prestigious law firms can offer 200k+, even in cities like Nashville, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas, etc.
A while back I was curious to see what the 10 most expensive houses in my bay area (east bay) city were. They were all up on the hills of course. With some more search I found out the owners and what they do and 9 out of 10 were doctors and one was a CEO of a company.
This seems to be another element of the "overproduction of elites" theory by Peter Turchin that was discussed here a few days ago.
In a world where the upper middle and upper class has grown to all time high numbers, there is ever more adepts for prestigious titles and prestigious jobs.
But the Oxfords and Harvards of the world do not multiply themselves, and they have no incentive to. If the product that they sell grows in value and price, why should they do anything to reduce that value again?
We often criticize greed of capitalists, but top class universities seem to be engaged in something very similar, while mostly escaping the negative attention.
Prestigious universities get a lot of negative attention for precisely this, at least in some circles. MBAs used to be a no brainer, but the return on their investment has plummeted and much of the value that is retained by the few that retain it is tied up in the exclusivity of the brand.
I think (hope) we're also starting to see a reaction to this. For example google is offering free education and at least claiming to consider their graduates as equal to university graduates.
The Economist starts writing daring pieces again. It seems that the mainstream media in Britain starts to realize the mess they have created in the last decade and throws around the rudder.
It’s not an Economist article, it’s an 1843 article. 1843 is an Economist spinoff that focuses on “culture.” It let’s them take risks while preserving their core product.
Probably because of British influence, private tutors are a commonplace in India. Being raised there, my parents though encouraged me to just work hard myself and not rely on external tutors. There were, however, a few years where I did get tutoring for a few subjects that I needed help with- and my experience has been great! Especially, for the 12th standard (high school) Physics where I got >90% in the board exam. The tutor knew his stuff and the pattern of the 'board exam' well.
On the other hand, I have had peers who rely on private tutoring almost entirely and almost neglect what is being taught in schools. And I have known parents who see schools as a necessary evil.
There is also, the world of preparing for 'entrance exams' (including IIT-JEE) which is where I have seen tutoring to the extreme. Students who 'drop-out' (still enrolled on paper but not attending in-person) of regular school starting as early as 8th standard (grade) and move to cities where there are mini-economies based on such preparatory institutes. They only go back to their home-towns to write the final exams which is usually subset of what they would learn at the institutes anyway. But the sacrifice they make to be away from family for most parts of the year and the hours they spend staring at a book is admirable.
Note: Please don't take this as a generalization of what happens in India- just what I saw growing up in New Delhi.
I picked this up from my time watching those British period pieces, so this might be an assumption based on a fictional telling of the past, but hasn't this concept of being a private teacher/tutor been around for hundreds of years?
As these shows always showed the aristocracy, the aspiring hero/heroin had their private teachers "guiding them to greatness".
I also found it cynical that instead of aspiring to get a PhD to earn a mediocre salary(in comparison) at FANNG, one could navigate the field of being the private tutor to the already-rich and probably earn more.
Random person: "What do you do for a living that has made you so wealthy?"
Elite Hong Kong tutor: "I tutor 12 year olds privately on mathematics."
> And if you call FAANG salaries mediocre (in comparison)
The wording of the sentence wasn't ideal, but GP was implying you could potentially make a lot more as a private tutor than you would at a FAANG. I'd argue that is a bit of rose colored glasses as there are far more making 200k a year at a FAANG than there are million dollar a year making private tutors.
Is that because of a shortage of PhDs? Isn’t there a significant surplus of aeronautical engineers?
I personally know several aeronautical engineers (with doctorates) struggling to find work in their industry.
I know two folks with BAs in Environmental Science working as Product Managers (unrelated to environment sustainability).
Having goals we have yet to achieve doesn’t show a lack of specialists.
If anything the gap is in lower-level education.
Are our high schools emphasizing the urgency of the climate crisis? Are they emphasizing the need to live sustainably? Are they encouraging space exploration?
> I mourn that the default aspiration for getting a PhD isn't staying in academia and advancing science.
It almost certainly is for the vast majority of grad students. There are just way more newly-minted PhDs than tenure-track jobs, especially if you add some (reasonable) constraints like location, R1 university etc.
The article quotes someone paying her £70/hour for the tutoring. Given that's also contract rates, and there's no other perks from the company (such as bonus or healthcare, but admittedly healthcare may be less of an issue in the UK), that's not all that favorable to a FAANG employee's compensation, as I understand it.
I appreciate how this comment respects the fact that your knowledge is spotty and possibly fictionalized. I'm always scared to ask questions or make assumptions based on things I half know from narratives and period pieces etc. Something I can learn from.
Earn more than a FAANG PhD? In the article they wrote about salaries of around 70£/h and that's not good at all. The average freelance programmer in Germany already makes 90€/h. Sure there are some tutors who make 250/h but those are people who are already in the upper echelons of society and have access to top clients.
It’s not really the subject of the article, but debating whether tutoring/teaching/education works, as a lot of posts here seem to be (without too much of a scooby what they’re talking about, if I may say so…), is really as daft as debating whether eg. computer programming works... Teaching is a real skill and, to say the least, it isn’t always easy, especially to pick up as a ‘side-hustle’. It has its own learning curve. That goes for both private tuition and teaching in schools/universities. Different teachers/teaching/learning styles suit different pupils. Trying to teach a subject soon shows up whether you really know it well, but you can really know a subject and be terrible at teaching it… I thought what was interesting about the article is that it highlights what can be a problematic power dynamic between parents/tutors, especially if you are inexperienced/unsure of yourself as a tutor/teacher (or financially precarious, as all the tutors/teachers I’ve ever known are), that is, you can end up pandering to what the parents/pupils think they want (or what a certain curriculum/bureaucracy demands), rather than working in the best, long-term interests of the pupil… But most parents/kids are brilliant and this isn’t a problem… Again, it really depends… A lot of practical/intuitive psychology/varied communication skills, patience and understanding are required to be a good teacher IMHO. and again, you get better in these respects over time… There are a heck of a lot of advantages to teaching one-on-one, especially with increasing class sizes/budget cuts in public institutions at least/vastly differing abilities/concentration levels of students… In an ideal world students would understand how lucky/privileged they were to get private tuition, though as you might imagine that’s not always the case… Being a great teacher is sometimes unavoidably about ‘teaching’ more than just the subject you are teaching, if that makes any sense, as is maybe highlighted at the beginning of the article…
I know a lot is people here are judging but when I read this the first question that comes to mind is how do I hire a good tutor for my kid. The second is Why aren’t there a bunch of startup getting into the business. Public schools are clearly failing kids so tutors could be a really good bridge to fill the gap.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadI don’t think the article is fundamentally fictional, though clearly some of the retelling has been dressed up a bit.
Also, a lot of these kids are smart and hardworking and motivated. The money are an additional advantage and parents having resources to ensure they stay motivated and active is advantage too.
But, the assumption that they are all dumb or lazy is wrong.
The problem with most kids and adults I know is they either lack a depth of reasoning for why they ought to be doing something better, or lack the confidence that they'd be able to accomplish it if they put their mind to it.
If you can't come up with a convincing "why" for them, then you should reflect on how sustainable forcing them to do that thing will be once they have independence.
There were a lot of things my mom expected of me (similar to these kids with tutors). Some of them I agreed with, some of them I didn't.
When I finally got my independence at 18, guess which ones stuck, and which ones (where a lot of time and effort was put into cultivating them) evaporated?
Talk to your children deeply about the why, and, as the saying goes, they'll suffer almost any how.
Unless they are uber-wealthy, then they'll just say "Johnny is sailing our yacht around the Mediterranean (and when we say "sailing", we mean there's an 8 person crew running the boat)"
What is being purchased is the right to feel that they worked hard enough to deserve what they are certain to get anyway.
.. but if you don't have that?
Besides, tutoring can be a bootstrap to that, especially in young people. I've found myself that exercise is so much more likely to happen if it's not on my own, such as a regular personal trainer appointment. The more it becomes a habit, the more I feel like doing some more on my own as well.
In any case, to my actual point -- discovering those motivations is one of the things for which I was paid. Often, children do not understand education. It has been a flat "do this" chore for them with some nebulous payout that will supposedly happen twice their lifespan away, when all around them they see images of people who did not go the conventional route to success.
What you want is someone who works for the child, not the parent. They should have a rounded education but also be willing to admit that they do not know something and must research. They should understand a decent amount of child psychology and how people process/retain information.
Finding folks like that, I dunno!
It's why the rich don't manage their own money, make their own food, clean their own house, or care for/teach their own children. Instead they pay other people to do it for them.
Apprently not.
When it comes to standardized tests/certain career expectations you are expected to have a broad understanding of the orthodox views on the evaluated topics.
This is pretty much exactly what I experienced. I was a member of an online marketplace, so I wasn't necessarily an "elite" tutor by any means, but I found that most of my students just needed instruction that was more tailored to them. A lot of them were working towards AP exams (computer science), so working with someone who had taken that exam, knew what was on it, and intimately understood how it was graded proved rather valuable, at least from what the parents reported back to me.
That's like expecting coffee vending machines to have made baristas obsolete.
As an adult I can do self study just fine and since I work in tech that's expected of me, but as a kid I was way too thick to learn the school curriculum on my own.
The implication left for a reader of the original article is that tutoring is mostly about exam-prep or that it is under-regulated, ineffectual, and a folly of the rich. But the truth is that the over-regulation of conventional time-based classroom learning is deeply flawed based on our understanding of how people learn. Throwing thirty teenagers in a room at 8am and having a tenured adult speak at them for 45 minutes on a subject is not a recipe for success, nor is moving everyone along at the same pace and calling the material complete after a semester of education regardless of the depth of understanding conveyed. We need intensive and personalized schooling with mastery based learning - and to answer the question of "where are we going to get that many teachers?" we need people to teach as part of how they learn. For some odd reason society only starts to embrace this in graduate school.
I've got a principle I came up with called LTD: Learn, Teach, Do.
The idea is to prioritize activities where I can be doing all three at the same time. An example would be pair programming with a junior on a new problem where I don't know how to solve every part of the problem. "Learn on the job together with a team, and share learnings as you go" is basically the kind of work that I mean. I've found LTD activities are awesome in so many ways. You build up the team around you, grow as an individual, and get shit done all at the same time.
I'm increasingly against activities which focus strongly on only one of these(school being the main example).
as for a school model, montessori groups children in age-groups spanning 3 years, and older children there routinely teach the younger ones.
In our area they seem to be for over-achievers. Want your 4 year old to learn to read, write, and do math? Send them to a Montessori. At least, that's the reason all the parents I know send them there.
so you have to look closely if the teachers are actually trained and certified by one of the training schools that actually provide proper montessori training, and whether the classrooms have the proper environment.
The problem here is that getting enough money to hire more teachers per student is like pulling teeth. The problem that we as a society are solving isn't "how can we achieve the best overall educational outcome?" It's "how can we avoid a disastrously uneducated population with a budget of $X?" I'm not entirely sure we're doing a good job on that one either, though.
[1]https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/27/us/12-year-old-graduating-hig...
Sure it would be great to get rid of bullying, but I wonder if it's inherent in humans.
I'd focus on things we can control like that minimum competence problem you described.
I believe students have said okay to remote one to many educators, with things like online university. But especially in math and chemistry and physics, people want in person tutoring.
I want to teach my students how to follow their passions, how to strive for the life they want, rather than for hollow symbols of success.
It seems like hollow symbols of success are what the parents and institutions have agreed to create though. The number of schools and slots for students has apparently not changed much but the number of students across the globe who are competing for slots in a few, elite western schools has gone up enormously. That drives the value of the degree up through scarcity which seems to be what people want for their children, is ways to be more elite than their peers.
It's probably not surprising then that bribery happens. The schools aren't really selling an education anymore and the parents aren't really looking for one either.
My old school is now no longer the top in the country, slipping to 4th last time I looked. The student body is smart, but simply doesn't try as hard at anything anymore. I don't blame them.
Modern life has the number of human signals daily, increased to stratospheric levels.. this is new, very new. It is not clear how intelligent, social people are changing under this communications environment.
other points omitted for the sake of brevity, but not the whole story here..
That way we, we do not have to play these signaling games and can focus resources elsewhere.
Students today do not have it easier. They are working less hard at school because they need to work harder in other areas. Grades don't matter. Everyone gets strait-As so as long as you meat that standard there is little point in trying harder. Even Going to a good school matters less and less. The things kids have to do today are very different than I faced. For me, grades were enough. For today's kids grades are only the starting point. For instance, social media presence is now very important. I never had to deal with that when I was applying to universities.
Care to elaborate on this?
https://ischoolconnect.com/blog/effect-of-social-media-on-co...
"According to a 2017 survey administered by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, 11% of respondents said they "denied admission based on social media content" and another 7% rescinded offers for the same reason."
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/2019...
"According to the 364 colleges across the United States we recently spoke with, 25 percent tell us that they have visited an applicant’s social media page, such as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to learn more about them*."
https://www.kaptest.com/study/pre-college/college-admission-...
Additionally, despite often being mentioned in the same breath/status, doctors and lawyers follow very different distributions of compensation. Attorney pay is shockingly bimodal: the ambulance chaser firm advertising on the back of the city bus is paying first-year associates <60k, if that, then there’s a huge gap, and then more prestigious law firms can offer 200k+, even in cities like Nashville, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas, etc.
In a world where the upper middle and upper class has grown to all time high numbers, there is ever more adepts for prestigious titles and prestigious jobs.
But the Oxfords and Harvards of the world do not multiply themselves, and they have no incentive to. If the product that they sell grows in value and price, why should they do anything to reduce that value again?
We often criticize greed of capitalists, but top class universities seem to be engaged in something very similar, while mostly escaping the negative attention.
I think (hope) we're also starting to see a reaction to this. For example google is offering free education and at least claiming to consider their graduates as equal to university graduates.
You dont need Harward/Yale to tripple class, you need to stop looking at Harward/Yale exclusively when picking those career boosting clerkships.
Hopefully the continent will follow.
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/exclusive-china-unveil-t...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
On the other hand, I have had peers who rely on private tutoring almost entirely and almost neglect what is being taught in schools. And I have known parents who see schools as a necessary evil.
There is also, the world of preparing for 'entrance exams' (including IIT-JEE) which is where I have seen tutoring to the extreme. Students who 'drop-out' (still enrolled on paper but not attending in-person) of regular school starting as early as 8th standard (grade) and move to cities where there are mini-economies based on such preparatory institutes. They only go back to their home-towns to write the final exams which is usually subset of what they would learn at the institutes anyway. But the sacrifice they make to be away from family for most parts of the year and the hours they spend staring at a book is admirable.
Note: Please don't take this as a generalization of what happens in India- just what I saw growing up in New Delhi.
As these shows always showed the aristocracy, the aspiring hero/heroin had their private teachers "guiding them to greatness".
I also found it cynical that instead of aspiring to get a PhD to earn a mediocre salary(in comparison) at FANNG, one could navigate the field of being the private tutor to the already-rich and probably earn more.
Random person: "What do you do for a living that has made you so wealthy?"
Elite Hong Kong tutor: "I tutor 12 year olds privately on mathematics."
As a PhD at FAANG[1], I mourn that the default aspiration for getting a PhD isn't staying in academia and advancing science.
And if you call FAANG salaries mediocre, I don't even know what you'd call academia salaries :(
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[1] Formerly. Left for greener and less soul-draining pastures.
The wording of the sentence wasn't ideal, but GP was implying you could potentially make a lot more as a private tutor than you would at a FAANG. I'd argue that is a bit of rose colored glasses as there are far more making 200k a year at a FAANG than there are million dollar a year making private tutors.
I personally know several aeronautical engineers (with doctorates) struggling to find work in their industry.
I know two folks with BAs in Environmental Science working as Product Managers (unrelated to environment sustainability).
Having goals we have yet to achieve doesn’t show a lack of specialists.
If anything the gap is in lower-level education.
Are our high schools emphasizing the urgency of the climate crisis? Are they emphasizing the need to live sustainably? Are they encouraging space exploration?
And even if they did, the mars is not currently goal of those who provide funding. Nor should it be, honestly.
It almost certainly is for the vast majority of grad students. There are just way more newly-minted PhDs than tenure-track jobs, especially if you add some (reasonable) constraints like location, R1 university etc.