Ask HN: Why aren't education systems based on Wikipedia?
If I would have browsed this list [0] in school, I would feel totally overwhelmed with the topics while being outside school and having seen many concepts on Wikipedia like Topographic map, I now feel comfortable reading those concepts. I feel like schools are making everything to avoid students curiosity. Is it just me or education system besides nurseries could just let the students browse *independantly* Wikipedia at home or in school, to learn about everything? and then talk with other students about what they learned, without mandatory evaluation of content but maybe teacher evaluation of students attitude so students don't interfere with the curiosity with things like "IRL shitposting" and mockeries.
This kind of online-based education system shouldn't be seen as minority or 'retarded' thing like they often seem in Western countries from my experience, but a local normal.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_graphical_methods
16 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 43.6 ms ] threadWikipedia is a decent resource but I wouldn’t base an entire education on it.
Google makes it very hard to find similar quality links. Any tip? I love Wikipedia table of content, templates [0] and "external links" section.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Academic_publishing
There’s more to learning than surfing the web. Most important things we learn in life don’t come from reading web sites.
Part of the job of the educational system is to teach kids to do independent research while maintaining appropriate levels of incredulity, which can be very difficult if not consciously and rigorously skeptical. They don't always do a good job, but abandoning classroom education in favor of self-study is probably not a proper solution for the vast majority of students.
Wikipedia seems to be quite good on article diversity [0]
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Shares-of-articles-in-ea...
> It's not accepted as a proper reference source for a reason!
Wikipedia is not a source in itself. It's even a principle of the website [1]. The sources are linked in most cases. If not, the source is null.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_a_r...
> teach kids to do independent research
From my own scholar experience, searching books and the web was mostly a "bad practice"; even self teaching or asking ourselves questions to conduct was misregarded.
> abandoning classroom education in favor of self-study
Successful self-teaching (self-teaching activity that leads to progress and evolution maybe) is from my experience mostly found in priviliged economic groups but with a various range of mindsets and family background (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autodidacts)
Yes, Wikipedia has good diversity of articles, but not necessarily good quality of articles. Anything that might be political, controversial, open to interpretation, etc., has a good chance of being biased one way or another. Math and science articles are generally very high quality though.
So if access to info was all it took schools would have never been invented.
Access to info is just one piece. The other piece is a good guide/teacher who knows which routes through the ever expanding library of knowledge are fruitful and which ones to avoid. Justly randomly meandering around is a very inefficient and time consuming way of working out what the right paths are.
Third piece which most people sweep under the carpet, and most critical to Learning is practice. The brain hardly ever registers anything deeply without repetition. And creating an environment where that practice is happening is not straight forward. Its more tempting to go look at something novel than to read the same thing again and again till its on your finger tips. Good teachers create such environments. The Internet is great in the access to info dept, but there are other pieces to the story for Learning to happen.
That's what I thought untig using Wikipedia a lot. With books information is hardly linked, difficult to save. With Wikipedia, it's super easy to bookmark or copy link in Notes.
> Justly randomly meandering around is a very inefficient and time consuming way of working out what the right paths are.
School and innovation is mostly about meandering around for many years. I find general knowledge notions (geography and history) very useful to attack mathematics, physics or biology notions for example. I think what's very important there is how we link the Wikipedia knowledge and its sources in some "virtual palace".
> again and again till its on your finger tips. Good teachers create such environments
From my experience in school and college, we have the lecture one or a few times and no more. Wikipedia + Google/Lectures + Notebooks make it fun for me to go back to enhance my own notes: add an explaination image, some notes, add a link.
But Today I think lot of kids (and adults) are getting lost because of the sheer amount of info. Lot more needs to be done to improve it.
Prohibit something without explaination sounds like nursery or at least lack of confidence in the students, to me.
Although, I feel like professors don't teach enough the methods, I still don't understand why some students perform well in essay exams.
But I'd include some mandatory minimal content. Some topics are important in spite they may look boring.
1 teacher for many students seems to be a mass education requirement implemented at some time to protect the local elite who has highly educated parents and friends for home teaching or can afford private teachers. I don't have a clean source for this though, mostly personal experience.
> But I'd include some mandatory minimal content.
Most people, particularly young people, seem to have a speicifc curiosity naturally triggered over time with Youtube recommendations (ie. History of their country, a Pysics channel, or anything). What minimal content would you advise or can you think of as a general minimal content requirement?
Nah. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explaining by people that don't like to pay taxes. To increase the teacher to student ratio from 1/25 to 1/5, you must increase the the taxes like x5, or at least x3 or x4, some costs like school cleaning are not linear. People prefer to pay less taxes, government prefer to spend the money elsewhere. Classes are as big as possible.