I think Scott's main new contribution in this post is the succinct presentation of this dilemma: "If school teaches you some fact, then either you’ll never encounter it again after school, in which case you’ll quickly forget it. Or you will encounter it again after school, in which case school was unnecessary; you would have learned it anyway."
Answering this dilemma should be at the heart of determining what we believe the purpose of education is.
Scott's best answer is that perhaps "school starts a virtuous cycle by helping you learn something long enough that you can put yourself in situations where you can re-encounter it in the future." And he concludes that maybe this is true for reading and basic math, but that leaves little justification for schooling to be continued past about fourth grade.
I think what Scott misses here is that his model implicitly frames "encountering facts" as a passive process. In reality, very few facts work this way. Instead, most facts are invisible or meaningless except to a well-prepared mind.
So I would suggest that the purpose of education is to teach us to leverage the paradigms that humanity has constructed to make sense of the world in deeper and more meaningful ways than we could invent on our own. (And from what I know of Egan, I suspect he would agree.)
I like this! I also think school provides a sampler of topics, so that you can find out what sparks your interest, what community of inquiry you want to cleave to, and thus what facts/patterns of thoughts will be reinforced through your career/leisure reading/friendships for the rest of your life.
I’m approaching all this as a parent, not an educator, and certainly not an education researcher. Which is to say I’m out of my depth. But I thought the skills point was brushed aside with not enough evidence. Maybe the evidence does exist and I just don’t know it. I wouldn’t expect school to be great at inserting facts into brains and we don’t need it to be. Google it. People criticize memorization for a test to just then forget it all. But being able to memorize facts for a short term project is a really helpful skill. I would expect school to impart learning skills like this. I’m sure teaching skills could be improved but I’m wondering if it is really as bad as Scott’s post seems to claim. For example, he mentions how he has forgotten Spanish as an example of a lost skill. I took Spanish too. As someone good at memorizing and regurgitating facts on a test, i got A’s. I can now say ‘hola.’ A classmate started hanging out at the Hispanic student club, made friends, and truly learned Spanish. For her, speaking Spanish was a skill she learned and it wouldn’t surprise me if she still knows Spanish decades later. I learned vocabulary facts. Since her learning was outside the classroom, is this an example of a failure of education? Maybe in part, but I did learn the useful skill of how to quickly pick up key points about a language in order to get through a situation where it is needed. That seems far more useful in a career setting than speaking one specific language Im not likely to encounter.
I think there’s a level at which our society is obsessed with the question of who is smarter. We have this fierce competition going on to prove we have something smart to say, something knowledgeable. This competition dominates the workplace and one way you can think of schools is as setting the stage for that by fixing a set of facts everyone can be expected to know. By this light math is useful for solving problems, sure, but it’s super useful when trying to demonstrate intellectual superiority. The goals of school are multiple, but prep for a productive life in the workforce is paramount, and to the degree that the labor environment is twisted and dysfunctional, schools are going to reflect the same twists and dysfunctions, or they wouldn’t be attended. Based on this view, any fact taught by school and retained by everyone losses much of its value. The goal is to differentiate. The differential forgetting across people is a feature, not a bug. We just have to thank our lucky stars not all the facts taught are useless, because useless facts are just as good at doing this job as useful ones.
This is more random thoughts than directed criticism:
1- It's interesting that in a lot of commentary I've read people mention that grades up through, vaguely, junior high (lots of people stopped at 8th grad in the past) might be useful, because they teach you to read, and the sort of math you actually might do. But interestingly several of the home schoolers I know, homeschooled up until high school and then sent their kids to high school. But perhaps there's not a contradiction there. Home school was about learning and high school plus college is about signalling.
2- I have been impressed by what I've seen of Egan (as filtered through you) that there is a lot of attention on returning and building on topics in a structured fashion. This does seem better designed to help children actually retain knowledge. That said, I think, as Scott pointed out, having a more formal system of spaced repetition would probably make a big difference.
3- You touched on this in your review, but an important questions is what do we imagine that schools should be doing? As Freddie deBoer points out frequently. A lot of our expectations for school are simply unrealistic. And while there are great examples of people succeeding with all manner of schooling, expecting that at some point we will find the master key that allows every kid to succeed is never going to happen.
Is too much taught at a premature age? I read somewhere that in some elementary school in the mid 20th century math that was laboriously taught for years to young children can be picked up in 6 months by 6th graders. I also remember David Harriman talking about teaching science and said something to the effect that young kids' brains can't grasp the concepts. I forget the exact age group that he was talking about. I vaguely remember it was 6th grade and under.
The biggest problem with school is it teaches the approved knowledge of the present where the more valuable thing to learn is the bigger picture of how this knowledge was generated, some of the many missteps along the way and reasons for possibly accepting our current knowledge. It's a lot harder and takes more time to weave the history with current knowledge. But that's what is required for a full appreciation of a topic and more importantly, to learn what thinking actually involves. In some ways, I think school as it is currently practiced is actually harmful because it encourages superficial thinking and pattern matching on surface information.
Learning takes time and shouldn't be rushed. The school year is a mad dash to cram a ridiculous amount of information into nine months. It's not a surprise that superficially touching a bunch of topics communicates the idea that what is being taught isn't that important. The world that people have created is amazing and the amount of thought and work by millions of people is awe-inspiring, but hardly any student leaves school with that visceral appreciation.
I wonder if VR goggles would be helpful in that regard in the future. If students could see 3D reenactments of Tico Brahe laboriously recording the positions of the planets for 10 years, the methods and difficulty of generating knowledge would be better appreciated. This is where generative AI could perhaps help in the future, if the hallucination issues are ever solved.
I think the point of school isn't to just assemble a collection of facts, but to teach people how to learn/navigate uncertainty. You want a basic scaffolding of facts so you don't need to rederive the world from scratch, but, more than that, you want a lot of open-ended projects that require you to apply/stretch the tools you have to build something you can evaluate the soundness of.
At younger ages, I think there should be a lot of physical building, where the feedback loop of reality is tighter. In college, I benefited a lot from being part of a philosophical debating society (no judges, no prizes, you only argue for what you actually think), and it changed how I did my reading in all my actual classes.
I wasn't just reading to retain information, I was always curious about how a novel, a history, a bit of computer science might fit into a long running argument I was having about how to live. I asked more of the facts I was exposed to.
Suppose that brain has fixed capacity and built in heuristics for keeping just the facts and skills actually used in daily life. Not a very crazy assumption from engineering standpoint. Now, the role of scool is not so much to cram more info into brain, as that's impossible. Rather the goal is to increase speed of the process of ingestion (and by necessity: garbage collection) of knowledge. School teaches you to learn. It's meta. And that meta skill is what is actually needed to be, say, a developer who needs to keep up with new js frameworks and ai progress, or an accountant keeping up with tax code changes, or a doctor updating on new research. Not so useful for jobs with more steady work patterns. Seems to match the reality of who ends up in which profession based on school finished.
Here is a great insight: "If we want to foster intrinsic motivation in our students, it’s a good idea to consider what made people fall in love with these ideas in the first place. First love is always the purest and most innocent. Modern textbooks are like arranged marriages forced upon the students. But history always has the true love story."
Hmmmm. I think relying on culture to teach science and history can have a lot of implications as they reflect our inherent biases (of course so do our current school structures)
A better vision for schools in my mind
Is that beyond literacy and math, the science history and language taught is
1. As close to objective truth as possible
2. Providing multiple view points in areas of disagreement. Great way to invite students to make their own assumptions research
3. Curriculum building incorporating multiple view points and perspectives that truly represent the school population/country population.
4. Asking more questions (both of teachers and students) than giving answers, esp about historical events
5. Of course making it engaging and accessible, inviting curiosity
6. Understanding developmental assynchrony and trying to provide facts and expectations in a way that work for the neurodiverse kids AND teachers AND parents
I think about job fit. If there's school for less time or no school, kids would presumably start working from a younger age and through inertia some would stick in those industries. If school forces them to choose later once they've been exposed to more types of work, maybe they choose industries in which they have a better fit. Across a whole population, this seems important.
I know lots of 15 yo kids who would love to ditch school to work instead and only very few (~5%) would be doing something they enjoy rather than what appeals at the time. I personally would have made worse choices at 15 than I did at 18, and would have benefitted from delaying the decision further.
I think Scott's main new contribution in this post is the succinct presentation of this dilemma: "If school teaches you some fact, then either you’ll never encounter it again after school, in which case you’ll quickly forget it. Or you will encounter it again after school, in which case school was unnecessary; you would have learned it anyway."
Answering this dilemma should be at the heart of determining what we believe the purpose of education is.
Scott's best answer is that perhaps "school starts a virtuous cycle by helping you learn something long enough that you can put yourself in situations where you can re-encounter it in the future." And he concludes that maybe this is true for reading and basic math, but that leaves little justification for schooling to be continued past about fourth grade.
I think what Scott misses here is that his model implicitly frames "encountering facts" as a passive process. In reality, very few facts work this way. Instead, most facts are invisible or meaningless except to a well-prepared mind.
The mental framework that is required to notice and interpret a fact is what Thomas Kuhn calls a paradigm. (Admittedly, I've never read Kuhn's book. Most of what I know about it comes from a review by - who else? - Scott Alexander: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/08/book-review-the-structure-of-scientific-revolutions/.)
So I would suggest that the purpose of education is to teach us to leverage the paradigms that humanity has constructed to make sense of the world in deeper and more meaningful ways than we could invent on our own. (And from what I know of Egan, I suspect he would agree.)
I like this! I also think school provides a sampler of topics, so that you can find out what sparks your interest, what community of inquiry you want to cleave to, and thus what facts/patterns of thoughts will be reinforced through your career/leisure reading/friendships for the rest of your life.
I’m approaching all this as a parent, not an educator, and certainly not an education researcher. Which is to say I’m out of my depth. But I thought the skills point was brushed aside with not enough evidence. Maybe the evidence does exist and I just don’t know it. I wouldn’t expect school to be great at inserting facts into brains and we don’t need it to be. Google it. People criticize memorization for a test to just then forget it all. But being able to memorize facts for a short term project is a really helpful skill. I would expect school to impart learning skills like this. I’m sure teaching skills could be improved but I’m wondering if it is really as bad as Scott’s post seems to claim. For example, he mentions how he has forgotten Spanish as an example of a lost skill. I took Spanish too. As someone good at memorizing and regurgitating facts on a test, i got A’s. I can now say ‘hola.’ A classmate started hanging out at the Hispanic student club, made friends, and truly learned Spanish. For her, speaking Spanish was a skill she learned and it wouldn’t surprise me if she still knows Spanish decades later. I learned vocabulary facts. Since her learning was outside the classroom, is this an example of a failure of education? Maybe in part, but I did learn the useful skill of how to quickly pick up key points about a language in order to get through a situation where it is needed. That seems far more useful in a career setting than speaking one specific language Im not likely to encounter.
I think there’s a level at which our society is obsessed with the question of who is smarter. We have this fierce competition going on to prove we have something smart to say, something knowledgeable. This competition dominates the workplace and one way you can think of schools is as setting the stage for that by fixing a set of facts everyone can be expected to know. By this light math is useful for solving problems, sure, but it’s super useful when trying to demonstrate intellectual superiority. The goals of school are multiple, but prep for a productive life in the workforce is paramount, and to the degree that the labor environment is twisted and dysfunctional, schools are going to reflect the same twists and dysfunctions, or they wouldn’t be attended. Based on this view, any fact taught by school and retained by everyone losses much of its value. The goal is to differentiate. The differential forgetting across people is a feature, not a bug. We just have to thank our lucky stars not all the facts taught are useless, because useless facts are just as good at doing this job as useful ones.
This is more random thoughts than directed criticism:
1- It's interesting that in a lot of commentary I've read people mention that grades up through, vaguely, junior high (lots of people stopped at 8th grad in the past) might be useful, because they teach you to read, and the sort of math you actually might do. But interestingly several of the home schoolers I know, homeschooled up until high school and then sent their kids to high school. But perhaps there's not a contradiction there. Home school was about learning and high school plus college is about signalling.
2- I have been impressed by what I've seen of Egan (as filtered through you) that there is a lot of attention on returning and building on topics in a structured fashion. This does seem better designed to help children actually retain knowledge. That said, I think, as Scott pointed out, having a more formal system of spaced repetition would probably make a big difference.
3- You touched on this in your review, but an important questions is what do we imagine that schools should be doing? As Freddie deBoer points out frequently. A lot of our expectations for school are simply unrealistic. And while there are great examples of people succeeding with all manner of schooling, expecting that at some point we will find the master key that allows every kid to succeed is never going to happen.
I think Father Guido already figured this out: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4
...that was gorgeous. (How had I not seen this before?) NAILED it.
Is too much taught at a premature age? I read somewhere that in some elementary school in the mid 20th century math that was laboriously taught for years to young children can be picked up in 6 months by 6th graders. I also remember David Harriman talking about teaching science and said something to the effect that young kids' brains can't grasp the concepts. I forget the exact age group that he was talking about. I vaguely remember it was 6th grade and under.
The biggest problem with school is it teaches the approved knowledge of the present where the more valuable thing to learn is the bigger picture of how this knowledge was generated, some of the many missteps along the way and reasons for possibly accepting our current knowledge. It's a lot harder and takes more time to weave the history with current knowledge. But that's what is required for a full appreciation of a topic and more importantly, to learn what thinking actually involves. In some ways, I think school as it is currently practiced is actually harmful because it encourages superficial thinking and pattern matching on surface information.
Learning takes time and shouldn't be rushed. The school year is a mad dash to cram a ridiculous amount of information into nine months. It's not a surprise that superficially touching a bunch of topics communicates the idea that what is being taught isn't that important. The world that people have created is amazing and the amount of thought and work by millions of people is awe-inspiring, but hardly any student leaves school with that visceral appreciation.
I wonder if VR goggles would be helpful in that regard in the future. If students could see 3D reenactments of Tico Brahe laboriously recording the positions of the planets for 10 years, the methods and difficulty of generating knowledge would be better appreciated. This is where generative AI could perhaps help in the future, if the hallucination issues are ever solved.
How do we go about creating an intellectual culture ? Both at home and more broadly ?
Yeah — "how DO we create an intellectual culture?" is really one of the questions that Scott's essay points us to. Thanks!
Cross posting my comment from Scott's post: https://substack.com/@leahlibrescosargeant/note/c-57101571
I think the point of school isn't to just assemble a collection of facts, but to teach people how to learn/navigate uncertainty. You want a basic scaffolding of facts so you don't need to rederive the world from scratch, but, more than that, you want a lot of open-ended projects that require you to apply/stretch the tools you have to build something you can evaluate the soundness of.
At younger ages, I think there should be a lot of physical building, where the feedback loop of reality is tighter. In college, I benefited a lot from being part of a philosophical debating society (no judges, no prizes, you only argue for what you actually think), and it changed how I did my reading in all my actual classes.
I wasn't just reading to retain information, I was always curious about how a novel, a history, a bit of computer science might fit into a long running argument I was having about how to live. I asked more of the facts I was exposed to.
Suppose that brain has fixed capacity and built in heuristics for keeping just the facts and skills actually used in daily life. Not a very crazy assumption from engineering standpoint. Now, the role of scool is not so much to cram more info into brain, as that's impossible. Rather the goal is to increase speed of the process of ingestion (and by necessity: garbage collection) of knowledge. School teaches you to learn. It's meta. And that meta skill is what is actually needed to be, say, a developer who needs to keep up with new js frameworks and ai progress, or an accountant keeping up with tax code changes, or a doctor updating on new research. Not so useful for jobs with more steady work patterns. Seems to match the reality of who ends up in which profession based on school finished.
Ork Ork. :-)
The real question is WHICH culture schooling is intended to reinforce…
Here is a great insight: "If we want to foster intrinsic motivation in our students, it’s a good idea to consider what made people fall in love with these ideas in the first place. First love is always the purest and most innocent. Modern textbooks are like arranged marriages forced upon the students. But history always has the true love story."
https://intellectualmathematics.com/blog/first-proofs-thales-and-the-beginnings-of-geometry/
Hmmmm. I think relying on culture to teach science and history can have a lot of implications as they reflect our inherent biases (of course so do our current school structures)
A better vision for schools in my mind
Is that beyond literacy and math, the science history and language taught is
1. As close to objective truth as possible
2. Providing multiple view points in areas of disagreement. Great way to invite students to make their own assumptions research
3. Curriculum building incorporating multiple view points and perspectives that truly represent the school population/country population.
4. Asking more questions (both of teachers and students) than giving answers, esp about historical events
5. Of course making it engaging and accessible, inviting curiosity
6. Understanding developmental assynchrony and trying to provide facts and expectations in a way that work for the neurodiverse kids AND teachers AND parents
I think about job fit. If there's school for less time or no school, kids would presumably start working from a younger age and through inertia some would stick in those industries. If school forces them to choose later once they've been exposed to more types of work, maybe they choose industries in which they have a better fit. Across a whole population, this seems important.
I know lots of 15 yo kids who would love to ditch school to work instead and only very few (~5%) would be doing something they enjoy rather than what appeals at the time. I personally would have made worse choices at 15 than I did at 18, and would have benefitted from delaying the decision further.