"Poor children in developing nations often drop out after a year or two because their families don’t see the relevance of the education they’re getting. These youngsters are more likely to stay in school than their counterparts in conventional schools."
Reaffirming that success in school is largely due to parental support -- including approval of the methods.
It seems that these children are being provided education packaged in such a way that their presumably under-educated parents will accept in order to maximize parental involvement which maximizes positive outcomes -- a fantastic application of creative eduction: teach the parents and the children.
I wonder if children attending schools where the majority of their classmates' parents have an education at the 90th percentile have the best outcomes. That's the promise of private schools for the children of the ultra-wealthy, right?
The thing I don't like about the parental support argument is that I don't see it offering any avenues for improvement.
I have a hard time believing that these massive multi-billion dollar organizations full of trained professionals apparently can't have any impact on outcomes because it's pre-determined before the students step into the classroom.
Imagine trying to transport an incredibly fine and delicate crystal ball from Earth to Jupiter. You don't need to spend billions of dollars to create the crystal, you need to spend billions of dollars to not smash it. School may be similar for a child's intellectual development.
There are various studies that show inner-city kids do much better when they attend various full time summer education programs. I have a strong feeling the benefit is not what these programs provide, but what they prevent: time spent in dysfunctional neighborhoods and households.
This is just a thought on why multi-billion dollar organizations might run into decreasing marginal return on education dollars spent to help the children uneducated families.
> The thing I don't like about the parental support argument is that I don't see it offering any avenues for improvement.
It actually does. Namely, you need to improve parental situations in order to improve the child's situation. A better societal support structure for the parents means that their kids will do better in school, because the parents will have the time, space, and motivation to provide the necessary support.
It's something of a circular argument (which is not exactly rare in societal problems like this), and it may arguably be non-optimal, but it's a valid avenue for improvement.
There are dozens of 'democratic schools' (many of which do self-describe as 'sudbury' schools) operating - http://sudburyschoolofatlanta.org/ is the one near me.
Every decade or so someone comes along and makes a "new kind of school" based around the concept of self-directed, community supported learning [1] and thinks it's new.
Montessori[2] wrote the book on this approach, has been around a long time and has been rigorously studied in practice.
This is not a novel concept. What we need to be doing is getting away from the hierarchical institutional model for governance which drives most schools into being either pre-jail or pre-industry subsidized holding pens for children while adults go do "real work."
Making schooling "democratic" while the rest of a nation remains un-democratic is like pissing in the ocean.
the sense of community, your body leaving you to rejoin the great beyond. the barrier between self and other is always murky - and taking a piss in the ocean brings that murkiness right up to the front of your awareness.
Summerhill and Montessori are worlds apart. At Montessori, you're supposed to like what you do. At Summerhill (and Sudbury schools), you do what you like.
> At Montessori, you're supposed to like what you do. At Summerhill (and Sudbury schools), you do what you like.
False. Montessori is: there are a number of age-appropriate exercises scattered around the classroom. Every day you come into school and play with which ever ones you want, in whatever order you want. Source: I went to Montessori, and my mother taught Montessori.
I too went to a Montessori school, and later a Sudbury school (the original in fact), and even later staffed at a Sudbury school (they don't have teachers per se, another way they differ from Montessori).
As you describe, you had to choose from a set of pre-canned, "age-appropriate" exercises (a whitelist). Can you see how this is quite different from being able to spend your time however you want? (except for specific rule violations, i.e. a blacklist)
Not only that, but in my experience there were also quotas. Though at any given time I could choose what I did at the Montessori school, I had to eventually do a certain amount of math, reading, and so on.
Yeah. Since you bring it up... In my country we have this idea of self-governance units in school; students elect their president who is responsible for working toward their common interest; also each class has an elected president, vice-president and a treasurer. When I was in my school years, those were mostly administrative functions - chores, I'd say. But I'm observing my former high school now, and in recent year, the election of school-level president turned from a simple voting into real-life politics. Candidates run huge school-wide political campaigns, with posters, meetings, videos and social media activity; they lie and make promises they don't fulfill, have huge staffs and engage in political back-stabbing. They mimic the worst parts of democracy. And I really don't think this is progress...
One of the top reforms I'd like to give to schools is to provide "student senates" and the like with actual, meaningful sums of money somehow so that they can legitimately practice governance. Playing token figurehead really doesn't teach them anything I want them to learn.
I say this as someone who ended up being friends with a lot of these people throughout my life. While in community college, the senate actively pursued agendas, it would be more accurate to describe them as a students' union than a senate. Valuable, but still not actually a senate of any kind.
Most of these friends who were in these positions? They were doing it because it would look good on the resume. Oh, that wasn't the only reason, and they were all good people whose character and intentions I'd vouch for. But still. And this, frighteningly, is the strongest similarity to adult politics: public office as stepping stone to industry status.
It seems to me that both in business and in politics, bad intentions drive out good intentions. If you're trying to make an actual, honest change you quickly get outcompeted/outvoted by people who see the field as a stepping stone to their other goals (be it making themselves rich or gaining high status), and who don't give a damn about how much damage they leave behind - just as long as they get what they want and escape the fallout.
Well, that's one difference between the child's world and the adult's world; bad intentions appear to be pretty rare, but even the best intentions are stymied by ineffectuality. That might be an idealization of the under-18 crowd, though.
My strategy can be summed up as, if you teach kids real civics, you provide stronger support for those with good intentions. I can't speak for other countries, but in America, I think that the knowledge of civics is rare to none; even on Hacker News, supposedly a bastion of intelligent and experienced people, you find egregious mistakes on basic constitutional theory. That's not really their fault: they've been trained to misunderstand how government works by, well... politicians with bad intentions.
Of course in China and Korea, schools are run like dictatorships and the students there outperform most of the world. The type of school isn't the issue, it's the involvement of the parents. Try this self governing concept at some inner city school where being "smart" is considered "acting white." The problem with schools is sometimes structural, but nearly always cultural. Look at achievement levels of first gen Asian American student whose parents often arrived in the U.S. not speaking a word of English and with just the clothes on their back. Also compare DC schools that spend almost $30k per year per student and yet DC schools aren't even in the same universe as Sidwell Friends where tuition is $35k per year. How is Sidwell able to be an ultra elite school providing top notch education while DC schools spend just $5k less and are models of failure? My point is that money and new styles of doing things doesn't compensate for disengaged parents and certain cultures that don't value education as highly.
US ranks number 1 among OECD nations in annual expenditure per student by educational institutions, and yet they produce one of the least educated students in OECD nations. Why is this the case? If funding is the problem as "experts" say it is, why is it that countries that spend fractions of what US spends yield better students?
It seems like you are right. It's just another year, another scheme to ask for more money in education.
> and yet they produce one of the least educated students in OECD nations. Why is this the case? If funding is the problem as "experts" say it is, why is it that countries that spend fractions of what US spends yield better students?
No problem. Start "tracking" like many of those countries. Flunk a test at age 12 and no college for you. Easy. Now we don't have to bother with all those "useless" students.
Politics, lack of trust in teachers and standarized tests, which tend to average-out everyone - i.e. they bring everyone up to a mediocre level, at the cost of eliminating those actually good at something.
> A 1992 World Bank evaluation of Colombia’s schools concluded that poor youngsters educated this way — learning by doing, rather than being endlessly drilled for national exams — generally outperformed their better-off peers in traditional schools.
Given learning by 'doing' is known to be worse I wonder if they have hit some sort of local maxima.
"Given learning by 'doing' is known to be worse I wonder if they have hit some sort of local maxima."
I'm curious - would you be able to expand on this? I find that I prefer learning by doing projects, building, etc as opposed to reading/problem sets/etc. Has there been research to compare the two approaches?
1) You copied the wrong definition for cooperative.
It's "a farm, business, or other organization that is owned and run jointly by its members, who share the profits or benefits."
2) The article mentions John Dewey, but doesn't really get into who he is. I strongly recommend reading his book, "Democracy and Education".
As a taste:
"A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity."
I left the farm/business one out intentionally because I thought it might bring some confusion.
I still stand by my point; cooperative is a much less ambiguous term for this, and I think what John Dewey describes is one as well.
Words are important and taken on face value people may extrapolate that it's the government type, democracy, that will bring better education. When in my opinion it's a cooperative environment, peer review, meaningful engagement and a sense of ownership.
Edit: For me a democratic schooling would be voting for the teacher you would like to have; which will be the popularity contest most such competitions devolve to.
> Words are important and taken on face value people may extrapolate that it's the government type, democracy, that will bring better education. When in my opinion it's a cooperative environment, peer review, meaningful engagement and a sense of ownership.
The problem here, I think, is that the notion of democracy is largely misunderstood. Many people are afraid of the term because it's been abused so badly.
Your description of a "cooperative" isn't any different from a democracy. So the issue isn't which word is better. It's whether you want to improve all of society or just schools.
> Edit: For me a democratic schooling would be voting for the teacher you would like to have; which will be the popularity contest most such competitions devolve to.
I think that's a massive conflation of "democracy" with "election". There's a school near where I live where the teachers pitch classes and the students vote on which ones are offered for the quarter (might have the interval wrong). This is democratic to me.
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[ 899 ms ] story [ 1518 ms ] threadReaffirming that success in school is largely due to parental support -- including approval of the methods.
It seems that these children are being provided education packaged in such a way that their presumably under-educated parents will accept in order to maximize parental involvement which maximizes positive outcomes -- a fantastic application of creative eduction: teach the parents and the children.
I wonder if children attending schools where the majority of their classmates' parents have an education at the 90th percentile have the best outcomes. That's the promise of private schools for the children of the ultra-wealthy, right?
I have a hard time believing that these massive multi-billion dollar organizations full of trained professionals apparently can't have any impact on outcomes because it's pre-determined before the students step into the classroom.
This is just a thought on why multi-billion dollar organizations might run into decreasing marginal return on education dollars spent to help the children uneducated families.
It actually does. Namely, you need to improve parental situations in order to improve the child's situation. A better societal support structure for the parents means that their kids will do better in school, because the parents will have the time, space, and motivation to provide the necessary support.
It's something of a circular argument (which is not exactly rare in societal problems like this), and it may arguably be non-optimal, but it's a valid avenue for improvement.
Montessori[2] wrote the book on this approach, has been around a long time and has been rigorously studied in practice.
This is not a novel concept. What we need to be doing is getting away from the hierarchical institutional model for governance which drives most schools into being either pre-jail or pre-industry subsidized holding pens for children while adults go do "real work."
Making schooling "democratic" while the rest of a nation remains un-democratic is like pissing in the ocean.
[1]Summerhill, Waldorf etc... [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education
Not a bad idea, because it does no actual harm, and at the very least, relieves pressure on your bladder?
the sense of community, your body leaving you to rejoin the great beyond. the barrier between self and other is always murky - and taking a piss in the ocean brings that murkiness right up to the front of your awareness.
10/10
False. Montessori is: there are a number of age-appropriate exercises scattered around the classroom. Every day you come into school and play with which ever ones you want, in whatever order you want. Source: I went to Montessori, and my mother taught Montessori.
As you describe, you had to choose from a set of pre-canned, "age-appropriate" exercises (a whitelist). Can you see how this is quite different from being able to spend your time however you want? (except for specific rule violations, i.e. a blacklist)
Not only that, but in my experience there were also quotas. Though at any given time I could choose what I did at the Montessori school, I had to eventually do a certain amount of math, reading, and so on.
Congratulation.
One of the top reforms I'd like to give to schools is to provide "student senates" and the like with actual, meaningful sums of money somehow so that they can legitimately practice governance. Playing token figurehead really doesn't teach them anything I want them to learn.
I say this as someone who ended up being friends with a lot of these people throughout my life. While in community college, the senate actively pursued agendas, it would be more accurate to describe them as a students' union than a senate. Valuable, but still not actually a senate of any kind.
Most of these friends who were in these positions? They were doing it because it would look good on the resume. Oh, that wasn't the only reason, and they were all good people whose character and intentions I'd vouch for. But still. And this, frighteningly, is the strongest similarity to adult politics: public office as stepping stone to industry status.
My strategy can be summed up as, if you teach kids real civics, you provide stronger support for those with good intentions. I can't speak for other countries, but in America, I think that the knowledge of civics is rare to none; even on Hacker News, supposedly a bastion of intelligent and experienced people, you find egregious mistakes on basic constitutional theory. That's not really their fault: they've been trained to misunderstand how government works by, well... politicians with bad intentions.
It seems like you are right. It's just another year, another scheme to ask for more money in education.
No problem. Start "tracking" like many of those countries. Flunk a test at age 12 and no college for you. Easy. Now we don't have to bother with all those "useless" students.
Hope your kid passes.
Given learning by 'doing' is known to be worse I wonder if they have hit some sort of local maxima.
I'm curious - would you be able to expand on this? I find that I prefer learning by doing projects, building, etc as opposed to reading/problem sets/etc. Has there been research to compare the two approaches?
If as an adult you don't have a lot to learn doing is fun so why not. But if you want to train hard, back to boring.
There's different research out there, basically the doing side was introduced without research hence the scramble to work out the better method.
I think it is compounded by the fact experimental schools often do better, since they are putting in effort. A known performance enhancer.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/08/21/math-wars-rote-memor...
->
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n9/abs/nn.3788.html
Democracy: A system of government in which power is vested in the people, who rule either directly or through freely elected representatives.
Cooperative: 1. working or acting together willingly for a common purpose or benefit. 2. demonstrating a willingness to cooperate :
It's "a farm, business, or other organization that is owned and run jointly by its members, who share the profits or benefits."
2) The article mentions John Dewey, but doesn't really get into who he is. I strongly recommend reading his book, "Democracy and Education".
As a taste:
"A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity."
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=DewDemo....
I still stand by my point; cooperative is a much less ambiguous term for this, and I think what John Dewey describes is one as well.
Words are important and taken on face value people may extrapolate that it's the government type, democracy, that will bring better education. When in my opinion it's a cooperative environment, peer review, meaningful engagement and a sense of ownership.
Edit: For me a democratic schooling would be voting for the teacher you would like to have; which will be the popularity contest most such competitions devolve to.
The problem here, I think, is that the notion of democracy is largely misunderstood. Many people are afraid of the term because it's been abused so badly.
Your description of a "cooperative" isn't any different from a democracy. So the issue isn't which word is better. It's whether you want to improve all of society or just schools.
> Edit: For me a democratic schooling would be voting for the teacher you would like to have; which will be the popularity contest most such competitions devolve to.
I think that's a massive conflation of "democracy" with "election". There's a school near where I live where the teachers pitch classes and the students vote on which ones are offered for the quarter (might have the interval wrong). This is democratic to me.
Nevertheless, it's an appropriate remark.
[0] https://richardlangworth.com/democracy