Not one bit.
I've posted various comments before where I detailed the fallacies and fundamental issues (some deliberately implanted from the beginning, others mutating later on) with the compulsory schooling system and how the classroom model is ineffectual.
Remember: education != schooling. Never forget that. This is one of the most common misconceptions of our time.
What does blows my mind is just how thoroughly the masses have accepted public school curricula as the only true and legitimate form of education. People like you blow my mind. I don't mean to be smug or arrogant, I'm glad you're awakening.
Fact of the matter is compulsory schooling originated to instill obedience in the context of the Prussian militarist regime, later becoming adopted by industrial moguls in the USA during the late 19th century, due to the necessity of cheap and easily disposable labor.
Here are some books to read:
John Taylor Gatto: Dumbing Us Down, Weapons of Mass Instruction and The Underground History of American Education.
Charlotte Iserbyt: the deliberate dumbing down of america.
Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society.
John Holt: Anything at all, but particularly How Children Fail and How Children Learn.
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Besides Sudsbury schools, there's several other alternative school models: anarchistic free schools and democratic schools. Look those up, as well.
Ultimately, what people need to realize is that autodidacticism is the most efficient form of learning. Yet schooling has killed the will to autodidact for many people, or has delegitimized it in favor of formal schooling and credentials.
I call bull.
I can learn from a math teacher in an hour what would take me possibly years, or a lifetime for that matter, to discover on my own.
During 2 years of college lecture classes one can learn what took philosophers and eventually mathematicians nearly 2000 years to discover.
But what about the arts?
Again, same story. Thousands of years of progress and theory can be summed up and taught in just months. (A wee bit of practice may then be required to master certain skills! ;) )
Yes some self directed learning is valuable, and indeed almost every class I took had aspect of self guided learning in it. Teachers loved leading us halfway to the goal, pointing us in a general direction, and then letting us go forth and discover the answer for ourselves.
Now do I think how public schools are currently ran is ideal? Heck no, far from it. No Child Left Behind was a huge damaging blow to the American educational system.
But what I always wanted out of school was more direction, not less. I passionately hated assignments where students had to go off and make their own video presentations and other such activities.
Yet in theory, giving presentations is of some value, it requires the students to acquire information on their own, summarize it into a communicable form, and then share that information with others. (I just despised how much class time was devoted to watching very bad presentations...)
But hey, that sounds like self guided learning, at a public school no less!
One thing to remember is that trying to dictate any one educational style is going to fail some non-trivial percent of students.
As I said in another comment, I did horrible in unstructured classes. More structure would have been my desire. IMHO school would have benefited from having 2 hours set aside just for an open study room for students to do HW in. But that is mostly because as a kid, left to my own devices, I would go home and play games rather than study. Heck I'd read a month's worth of reading assignments on the bus home, then never do the book reports!
Likewise for finding study groups. As someone with social anxiety (which was much worse as a kid!) asking the class to form groups would result in me hiding in a corner somewhere. Suffice to say I never was good at getting language practice in either!
But lab classes, oh wow I rocked at those. Love'd them. On a related note, questions come up as to the suitability of unstructured learning for certain topics. E.g. How would unstructured learning have students do genetic modifications of bacteria? Or play with explosives? Both are some of my fondest memories from high school! Both involved very explicit step by step instructions written down that we followed to the letter! (For good reason!)
I guess my overall point is that ideologues of any type tend to have a drum and enjoy beating it, much to the determent of someone somewhere else.
I would be surprised if this is true, unless you can't read. Usually the reverse is true. (Which is not to discount the value of guidance, but real learning happens with you, not anyone else; in an hour (or less), you can find out about a good book or problem to study from a math teacher, which could take years of searching on your own, but the learning doesn't happen by you listening to them talk, especially in math.)
This is an oddly phrased rebuttal. I don't think anybody is saying that you should try to re-play 2000 years of math, science, and philosophy discoveries ex nihilo. Rather, the suggestion is that you don't need an instructor to discover (or summarize) Euler, Newton, and Plato. You can do it on your own.
EDIT: maybe I'm misjudging your tone. If so, my bad.
Please, I'm basically begging you: don't adopt an obnoxious stance when you're arguing an important point.
Not because you're wrong, but because you're mostly right.
A small group of people are chosen with a similar job/background - all professors of Physics say, or all refuse collectors, or all high-school drop-outs, ...
Those people are then given a challenge to do something that is known to be outside of their locus of experience - make a souffle, do a science demonstration, play a musical instrument. One is given a professional educator with the relevant experience of the field and a budget of money for resources, the other is given nothing except the same money for resources (which can not in this case be people).
A prize is offered for the best results (in order to try to account for poor will-power; perhaps the prize is split between trainer and trainee if they win). The results are recorded for the entertainment of the masses.
So, Endemol, call me ...?
Grand claims require grand evidence. Until then what we have is the widespread observation that compulsory schooling appears to have outcompeted it's competitors everywhere.
My point was more toward the general public and the idea that such a radically different educational environment is preparing students for success in college and wide range of jobs should be at least inspire some curiosity...
However, I felt as though the general tone expressed in this blog post was quite condescending. It's as if you've discovered some deeply hidden and arcane mystery of life that you're now willing to share with the unwashed, and you express shock at how their minds could not be blown by such a proposition.
Then, you are posting this on HN, so it was only a matter of time, anyway. I hope I saved a fellow ostentatious bloke the work.
In the end, thanks for spreading awareness of this.
If by industrial moguls you mean thousands of locally-elected school boards in rural, agrarian small towns. During the period that public schools caught on in the U.S., the society was still a thoroughly decentralized Jeffersonian republic. Democratic centralism had not yet won any level of government, let alone the present nationalized education swamp.
Autodidacticism only works for people who are highly intelligent, who have attention easily captured by books, and who have strong verbal skills. The other 99.5% of people need teachers. The Sudbury school produces graduates who have gaping holes in their knowledge, on whatever topics did not aggressively capture their attention.
Some students do well in structured environments, some do really well in unstructured environments, there is no one right solution for everybody.
Claiming that any one technique works for all demonstrates a lack of empathy for how others think and learn.
I know that for me, I received failing grades in the few classes I took that were unstructured. Heck the same applied for online classes. Trivial material, but lack of forced time to participate (e.g. go to a classroom and listen to a lecture) means I would just give up on the class and not do anything.
The comparison of a private school in Massachusetts (Sudbury) with public schools nationwide is poor.
And this is the single statistic on which the thrust of the article is based.
There is no need for that since most people with an interest in the topic and the general techie-community type of intellect will be able to answer almost any possible interesting question on the topic for themselves and even quickly disprove your claims without needing any further information besides what you provided.
The very first wrong thing is your conclusion, quote:
> these students go on to have success in college and jobs
So far you've only shown college enrollment, which has nothing to do with success in or after college, as it is, looking at the entire USA, completely a matter of cashflow.
Further, your claim that there is no disadvantage is disproved by yourself when you state a data point that puts the "success" of that school below what would be expected from a private school.
In other words, to answer your titular question of:
> How Does This Not Blow Your Mind?
It doesn't because we don't possess your biases and do not easily delude ourselves into your conclusions.
Next time you try to prove something, please bring along actual numbers and comparisons.
I can certainly appreciate that this might not actually be "mind-blowing", but personally I think even the college-acceptance rates are a surprising result.
The point is that you claim they are successful past college entrance (without qualifying in relation to what they are so) without providing ANY EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER.
Furthermore you just now conflated "acceptance" with merely "going on to" college and in the process ignored the number of those who didn't even try to get in and also ignored the simple fact that getting into a college (ANY COLLEGE) in the USA has literally nothing to do with student ability.
I was in public Montessori schools from preschool through 8th grade. We had scheduled lectures for maybe two hours a day and the rest of the school day was spent working on whatever project or assignment you wanted to.
Due dates were due dates and this type of schooling encouraged individual agency and personal responsibility. If you wanted to you could sit around and talk to your friends all day and not work on / learn anything, but if you didn't complete all of your work before deadline you faced consequences. But "homework" was just whatever you wanted or needed to work on at home to meet deadlines.
You can't imagine how shocked I was in when I entered a traditional American high school and felt like a prisoner. Not allowed to speak or socialize (unless to ask a question of the instructor), move out of my seat, or do what I wanted. Just frozen in a chair listening to a teacher speak for hours on end. I was always the student who would raise their hand to ask a question, answer the teacher's question, or give my opinion because I was starving for any form of social interaction during classes.
That anyone has the capacity to see a traditional western high school as anything BUT prison daycare is what shocks me. It speaks to the ability of normalization to blind us to extreme circumstances.
Capitalism and the tragedy of the commons are the sole reason that our education system is so lecture-based, non-interactive, socially suffocating, creativity-draining, and non-personalized. Why would we spend more money, human capital, and time on improving the education system when it doesn't directly increase the GDP? What market force pushes us to improve education? What shareholder will benefit? This is the failure of a political and economic system that places too little emphasis on improving the public good.
My CAD/CAM teacher permitted me to spend an entire semester messing around with Photoshop. He would simply check in on me once a week. Without question, the skills I learned in those months got me my first industry job 3 years later.
The vast majority of my teachers followed the mediocre status quo that you describe, but there certainly was no mandate to teach that way. I know the problem is far more complex than individual teacher engagement, but that's what it boils down to. Anything that can be done to inspire teachers and keep them happy (better pay wouldn't hurt) should have a positive effect on education. The teachers that had the best impact on me cared the most about teaching, simple as that.
First off, this is a private school. Right off the bat, we'd expect their educational achievement to be higher, simply down to social class, which is directly correlated. So we can establish that educational attainment at this school is in line with other private schools.
This being the case, the conclusion we can draw from this school is: "children with middle-class parents who are involved in their education can achieve better outcomes than the public school average when they attend well-funded private schools, even with an alternative educational model." Phrased like that, if's pretty obvious.
The Sudbury model is also not the claimed "educational environment where the students can do what ever they want, when ever they want all day long" - that's a bit of a misrepresentation. It's an educational environment where children are provided the tools and support to plan their own education, and are required to be involved in that process.
I absolutely, thoroughly believe that the Sudbury model is an excellent approach to providing a much more well-rounded education for children. However, it requires lots of funding, excellent educators, and is arguably not any more suitable for every child than the current flawed system is.
Formal education and curricula are something I found exceptionally useful as a child, though I of course recognise the limitations there, and I'm pretty envious of the Sudbury model. But I wonder if a more general-purpose model may be effective. I attended a state comprehensive school in the UK, but had a couple of excellent teachers who were happy to provide materials and support for additional or alternative self-directed learning in areas where it was obvious I was bored or disinterested. That worked really well, and I can totally see that a basic curriculum and standardised attainment, combined with flexible opportunities for students who want to take more control of their learning, could be very effective.
Of course, all of this relies of excellent, well-paid educators. And sometimes these can be hard to come by.
1) There are no requirements for students to be "involved in the process of planning their own education". They are only required to be attend school a certain number of hours per year (I'm not sure the exact number), and serve time on the judicial committee. There are no requirements at all around any educational goals.
2) Sudbury Valley School operates on less money per-pupil than neighboring public schools.
3) The only requirement for adults who work as staff members is that they are capable of treating students as equals.
I went to a [non US] high end private school & learned pretty quickly that education is a matter of "you get what you pay for".
Perhaps its country specific, but locally the private schools crush the public ones into fine dust. Plus (local) private schools tend to attract the kids of the elite...which comes with some seriously high caliber connections.
Sudbury Valley is a private school, but it is much less expensive ($8k vs $25k+) than many other private schools and does not attract only elite students. In fact many students turn to Sudbury Valley after struggling with public schools or even being expelled from public schools.
Unlike most private schools Sudbury Valley will accept all students as long as they want to be there and agree with the educational philosophy (e.g. adults will not force your student to do anything)...
this doesn't blow my mind at all. that means a 5th of the students aren't going on to college.
i'm pretty sure your standard, stereotypical east coast prep school named after a dead white guy could beat that number easily.
and as long as your metric for success is acceptance into college, that's probably going to be true.
I'll be writing more about it. This was meant as a teaser, but I don't mean to leave it there. As I spend more time at the school I'll have more observations to share.
The truth is its been around for about 100 years give or take. It was instituted by the large monopolist who bribed politicians to force tax-payers to subsidize their worker training.
The purpose is not to create "intelligent, creative thinkers" - its purpose is to create obedient factory workers who can place the round peg in the round hole.
No, Im not sure what the point of school is, except as a babysitting service for working parents. IMHO, its just an imposition of authority and structure on kids, so that adults can more easily do as told in.... authority and structure. Or some such snarky anti-society as we have it now thing. You know...
I do wish we could start again with a blank sheet of paper.
Similarly, an excess of business regulation tends to force small companies out of business and promotes the creation of large corporations (due to economies of scale with respect to regulatory compliance). These effects are probably not intended but that's rather irrelevant when they are still happening.
I bring these up because they are more controversial than the idea that institutionalized public schooling in the "prussian" model is harmful. It's difficult to overcome ingrained biases and prejudices. If you find it troublesome to consider the idea that unions aren't an unalloyed good then you shouldn't be surprised that a lot of people have a hard time reconsidering the value of the current educational system.
Several major points spring to mind:
1) Learning - once you're done with route-memorisation nonsense - is the process of discovering that what you assumed was wrong or incomplete. What's standardised testing? The punishment of being wrong or giving an answer that's more or less complete than the tester wanted.
It's hardly surprising that a culture that grows around punishing failure would be hostile to learning.
There's research backing that up. We know that people who are rewarded for finding out that they're wrong, over time, start to dramatically outperform people who are rewarded for finding out that they're right. The former group continually seek to find out that they're wrong, which they can only do by pushing the boundaries, the latter group largely stick to what they already know.
2) Effort can only take you so far in anything. This is a common enough theme here that can probably stand without support. No-one wants to hire someone who doesn't like the job, we expect them to do everything half-arsed. It's not going to be magically different for education.
So, what are the odds that someone's going to be deeply interested in everything? I've never met such a person. I've met people who are happy enough to listen but they don't go off and learn about the subject on their own afterwards.
What's even the expected return on making everyone learn everything? We need a few generalists, granted, but we'll get a few generalists anyway from people who are interested in multiple subjects. Someone who doesn't enjoy maths, what's the point of making them learn trig, or linear algebra? What's the point in making someone who wants to be a Scientist take art? Can it even be said to be learning if they're just doing it because they have to? Skills that aren't practised wither. I've met people who got quite reasonable GCSE results, at some point they were able to do the things in the subjects they got, and can't even work out a percentage anymore. Give them a basic grounding; add up, divide, work out a percentage; and the rest? Not their problem. They're not going to learn it properly in the first place and it's questionable how much use they'd have out of it if they did.
The vast majority of the time spent on someone's education is just pointless filler subjects that do little more than punish someone with boredom and failure. Offering no economic or cultural benefit in return. Just try having a discussion with someone about the underlying causes of the Opium Wars, or the Boer Wars, or ask them why World War 1 started, or... Then try having a discussion with them about the religious practices of Buddhists, or Jews. There's a very limited set of living knowledge in most people - far beneath that which you'd expect just going off of exam results and taught subjects. The two should approach each other, and it seems to me the logical way to do this is to reduce taught knowledge unless an economic or cultural case can be made for attempting to run things in the other direction.
3) This ties into 2 but is a little different: We have utterly no respect for diversity. The downside of having a standardised grade system is that there's a cutoff point where investing more in a student stops being worthwhile. You have a student getting a B, do you focus on getting them up to an A or do you focus on getting the D student up to a C so that they count in your students getting A-C stats? You have a student getting an A, do you work to further engage them or do they just cease to be worth your time? It makes far more sense, under that incentive system, to focus that effort on the people who are under-performing - and who will probably not retain and go on to use the knowledge.
The consequence of having a set test is you have teaching set to the test. You have a space of things that you expect people to know, and they may fill it to various degrees but at the end of the day if you take a group of people that achieved good results, they're all going to know more or less the same stuff.
Strength in groups comes from diversity, new ways of looking at things, new questions, different answers. Over specialisation creates weaknesses - cultural blind-spots. If you know the same as me, then I don't need you as anything more than something to carry out my orders. You make me stronger only in so far as you're an instrument of my will. There's no point having a discussion with you, because you'd only be able to tell me what I already know.
Of course we all go on to live very different lives, so this effect becomes less pronounced with age. Nonetheless, it's a major screw up.
4) A lot of your success in the current education system seems to hinge on your ability to visualise yourself enjoying future rewards and the reinforcement you get at home. There seem likely to be differences in people's brains in terms of how well they can be motivated by the potential of future rewards and lots of people have really shitty home lives. Ideally the reinforcement would take place in the classroom as per 1.
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So, let's wool-gather a bit: In really broad strokes, what qualities would we like an education system to have?
Help every child achieve their own strengths.
Things that are immediately rewarding, preferably in the social sense.
Things that allow people to experience environmental mastery.
Some structure for people who lack the ability to self motivate.
So: No set classes that someone has to be in.
No set subjects beyond the very basics.
Optional projects (preferably group projects) rather than tests.
How might that look?
A child goes into school and is presented with a number of groups that are running around projects at the time. Want to try building a robot? They try putting a robot together, discover they need to understand more about maths, go see the maths teacher. They need to learn more about programming, go see the programming teacher. They need to learn about machining, they go see the design teacher. And there's a teacher overseeing the project, sharing in their success, urging them on.
Under that sort of system teachers become more coaches and advisers than they are the current lecturers and punishers.
Or - a child can go into school and opt for more or less the current set up. The maths teacher isn't going to be advising all the time after all. There'd be more time to focus on those children who want more guidance in their education... though to a certain extent the requirements of projects would impose structure in the knowledge that people were obliged to seek out. (I'm honestly not sure this is good for people, you will have to self-direct when you get out of education, but I'm not sure enough to head it off completely and I don't see a point in ruling it out - you could adjust the system later if it turned out to be a poor use of resources / those people were massively disadvantaged.)
...
Objections?
But where will the money come from?
It's actually not clear to me that this would be more expensive than the current system. Resources are currently pretty cheap, infrastructure for making things for projects is a one time cost that when you average it out's going to be pretty much negligible. It's not clear you'd need to employ more teachers.
But what about bad teachers?
Well, they're a problem that the current system shares too. They're just more readily apparent in this system. Which is good. Hire, train and fire - if someone's not living up to expectations - should be a fairly quick cycle.
What you're essentially saying when you're worried about the quality of teachers under such a system is that a child is going to run into the limitations of what the teacher knows, or that the teacher's not going to be bothered to spend time on them. Which is either fantastic or extremely worrying, but in any case is a clear signal in a way that waiting until they get their GCSE results isn't.
But if people don't take tests how do we assess them for work?
Well, look, two years out the gate it doesn't make a dang bit of difference for most things that you might want to do what your education was. I'm a Philosopher by education. I've worked in public policy research, sales, programming.... What's important is what jobs you've had and how well you've done them. Education should be approached in the same way. What did you do and how well did you do it? Write about your education on your CV as if it were another job and list your achievements. Not only is it less perverse for you it tells the person reading the thing a lot more about you. Fifteen years of work should not be summed up as 'GCSEs including English A, Science A and Maths A.' But that's how I see it on a lot of CVs.
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Mind you, I'm not saying that a system you made up would look like this. There are probably a number of ways it could go, and a number of flaws that would need tuning. I'm just saying that if you start off thinking about how you'd teach people I end up in dramatically different places to the current school system - and consequently I'm not surprised in the least to learn that the school in OP's link doesn't seem to be doing any worse than comparable schools in the area. When you start looking at the paths not taken, it's like that for a lot of things.
