Education

Meandering thoughts

There is a great deal of dissatisfaction and anxiety around education. Tiger moms burning out their kids. Bright kids hating school and learning bad work habits. Worries about perpetuating poor socioeconomic status. A lot of kids who see most of their school years as a daytime prison, that did little or nothing to help them navigate the world of taxes, mortgages, and business. Dissatisfactions have lead to burgeoning alternatives to mass public education: unschooling, homeschooling, rigorous and exclusive private schools, religious schools, and alternative schools following different models of learning.

Wishlist

This is a list of things in no particular order that I think would improve education. They may contradict each other. Keep in mind this stack is called ‘Notes’ not fully thought out and well argued proposals.

1. Direct Instruction: Learning facts before you try to think critically about them. I had a fantastic spanish teacher in high school, and her magic sauce was mostly having students repeat stuff a lot, and write a lot of similar sentences as homework. Explaining stuff like conjugation tables was secondary to this. She got recruited to a prestigious private school in the area after winning awards.

2. Marius Mules: I see public schools have mostly issued kids cheap laptops. Instead of reducing their burden this means kids carry around laptops and chargers in addition to the textbooks and notebooks that I carried. And the number of classes has crept from six to 7 or 8. The kids are bent over under heavy loads. Instead the kids should only be given cheap one use workbooks to carry around and they do their work in them with pencil. Save the colorful, in-depth, multimedia presentations for the lecture, or online additional resources. Laptops can still be issued to kids but as a poverty no access at home measure.

3. Shorter more intensive classes. Right now classes are all a semester or perhaps two semesters in length and to cover all the topics though neccesary this means there has to be lots of classes. I believe the average class time right now is 40 minutes, which just means hall time is about 20% of the education day. I believe the brain does better focusing on fewer things more often. Six-eight weeks long seems about right, and it would be good if the more difficult topics had sessions twice or day, or twice a day some days of the week. Or even possibly three times a day.

4. Pass only classes. Instead of grades you pass the class when you have demonstrated mastery. This would go along well with real time adaptive ‘smart’ testing. Such a system would be easier to implement with the six to eight week class cycle above, instead of the semester to a school year length class.

5. Homework should be abolished for all but older teens. Given the varying levels of domestic chaos and paternal support kids receive this is an unfair system that handicaps those who otherwise might be most motivated to find a way out through education.

The Big Picture

There are a lot of misunderstandings around education and how humans develop so let’s start with a list of facts:

1. The first few years of schooling (up to age 7-10) likely has no effect in the long run. Kids who had a stimulating and structured life without school can and will catch up to grade level within a year or at most two. There have been many documented attempts to improved educational outcomes by starting at risk kids early, and all beneficial effects have disappeared in a few years.

2. Brain mass (.4 correlation with raw mental capacity when controlling for gender*, so a decent proxy) is maximized around age 14 or so (probably age 12 for women.) Before that gains from brain growth easily swamp any gains from learning. The common wisdom that the brain doesn’t finish growing until early to mid ‘20s is simply wrong. Certainly, maturity and basic wisdom takes a lot longer to acquire than just growing raw brainpower, but in that case its not the passage of time, but actually going out have experiences and making mistakes that leads to the improvement.

   

   https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278262609002000

   There is evidence that the connectome continues to increase to about age 40, and that is probably as close as we are going to get to physically measure ‘wisdom’. (Human lifespan changes in the brains functional connectome. Nature)

   Executive Function is sometimes mentioned by the smarter set to defend the brain isn’t mature until age 25. This has been studied and the actual age Executive Function plateaus is 16 on average.

   (*I subscribe to the theory that the larger male brain mass is mostly redundancy, so they can better survive a hit to the head, which also explains the heavier face and skulls that is another well attested sex difference.

   **What I’m calling raw brainpower is more or less fluid intelligence. Crystalized intelligence is another matter and peaks later. A dirty summary is fluid intelligence is how quick you can learn something or figure somthing out, crystallized intelligence is a measure of what you have already learned or figured out. If its a domain thats the same today as it was twenty years ago, crystallized intelligence (i.e. experience) is much better than fluid (i.e. potential).)

3. On general education attainment tests designed for kids of all ages, the year that is the most effective at boosting test scores is for 10 years old. And it appears that the last few years of high school often don’t move the needle at all, only improving the scores of the top two quintiles or so.

4. #3 is difficult to understand in light of #2. I think what is happening here is when adolescence kicks in, kids switch from a social mode focused on the teacher to a social mode focused on their peers. They then focus on schooling if it meets their own goals, and not because teacher wants them to. And doing well in high school, rather than just getting by, is realistically beneficial only to college bound and capable kids (roughly the top 25%). Kids are developing a rational self-interest which may or may not include academia. Expanding college enrollent to 40% has been accompanied by a declining value of a college education.

5. One on one tutoring is ten times more effective than classroom education. Perhaps there is an opportunity for AI tutoring here. I’m sure someone must be working on it, though it hasn’t come up on my feed. I suspect the AI companies are dazzled by AGI (or greater than anthro) and are not creating AIs specialized to do well in specific roles such as tutor.

6. Education is a great determination of life success; however it appears that it reveals traits more than develops them. The psychometrics that most predict life success are Conscientiousness and IQ. They predict life success better than educational achievement. They also predict educational achievement, which suggests educational achievement is merely a proxy for IQ and conscientiousness. Other psychometrics with predictive power such as ‘grit’ often turn out to be a less accurate derivative of one of the big two. Grit, for instance, is a watered-down version of conscientiousness.

7. Sorting trumps education. In the natural experiments of mandatory public schooling increases, the 8th or 9th grade was when proveable society wide benefits failed to materialize from more years. (See #3) In cases where the years a degree required was increased or decreased, graduates from just before or after the change had similar trajectories within that career as graduates with a different number of years. Uni dropouts who completed most of a degree program had careers more like secondary school or high school grads and not at all like those who got that final year of education to complete diploma requirements.

8. The public school system has an inherent contradiction in its two roles of 1. Educating, and 2. Sorting students as to skill level and capacities. Sorting is in much more demand, but I assume we still need #1. The ‘demand’ for sorting is to get the product but also to game the system.

I’ve picked these up from serious researchers and thinkers in the field, but I haven’t kept track of the studies they are drawing from. I’ve only included those I can easily find and have intentions of adding the others as I reencounter them again.

&c.

Assortment and Meritocracy.

This causes problems and abuses. Assortment happens despite being odious to our democratic sensibilities, the efforts to quash it has simply led to it being done in a shadowy, inefficient, and corrupt way. As a student I noticed the administrators’ kids always seemed to have surprisingly good grades and do exceptionally well in student government.

That said, I see a strict adherence to meritocracy, above all other considerations as harmful. First off, the big two of IQ and conscientiousness aren’t great at predicting life success, they are just much better than anything else we have. Given that, maybe we should practice a little humility and not be so cocksure that we know who is going to be the most productive members of society. Besides which we don’t know the future. We hope a skilled technocrat, or brilliant scientist is what we need, but perhaps it will be an obsessive, socially tone-deaf nerd, or perhaps it will be a U.S. Grant whose ‘firm grasp of the obvious’ and willingness to accept personal risks and casualties is what was needed to end a bloody and interminable war.

Academics Focused Public School

Mandatory years of schooling can be curtailed, starting later and ending earlier perhaps with some private (or selective) years of schooling. Teachers and administrators form a potent political force that would oppose this. They could be mollified by switching to tutor-centric model of education instead of a class based-assembly line mode, to preserve jobs while increasing effectiveness.

The path to becoming a teacher involves at least some 1-1 tutoring. I have an idea that tutoring several kids this way for several years before lecturing would be more satisfying and informative than getting an advanced degree to teach a large class.

The idea of the early graduation is that people will use the time to experience the ‘real world’ including jobs. They will return to education when they have proper motivation or it fits their own goals. The goal of the mandatory education would then be to prepare them to be independent. In American that means being able to drive, some other things might be valuable such as knowing basic laws, taxes, probabilities and interest rates. Ages 15-16 would be a reasonable goal for people to be mostly independent. I see a lot of tuning out and chafing at the enforced childhood of our current system. Other enforced childhood things are the drinking age, age of consent, and so forth. For the most part these bans are just ignored and serve to turn people against law.

Perhaps public school can also include adult education. Offerings that might be of general interest, such as taxes or finances and interest rates. I like to think even pure ‘improving your mind’ classes might attract some interest, such as studying classic literature.

I see the problem of high school education being one of appropriateness and motivation. I think private education helps solve both problems: 1. choices allow people to put their own knowldge into the situation instead of just institutions mandating their path. 2. having to pay not only filters for but increases motivation. The old university model got this right of subsidized colleges made it possible for someone to put themselves through with menial labor. The sudent loan model in comparison is kind of a scam as young people don’t have that time orientation with debt.

Non-Academic Benefits of Public School

The immediate common reaction to the above would be I don’t want my kids at home, what am I supposed to do with them all day or somebody should do something about all these youths clogging up the streets. Public School does look an awful lot like day care, and if that is the real benefit it should guide us in how and what we do with schools. If it’s just daycare, it could be a lot more enjoyable than it is now. Though to be honest it appears to 3-4rth grade where kids begin to hate school, which also appear to the most valuable from the standpoint of general education.

Perhaps the real value of school is that it trains certain behaviors: arrive on time, sit quietly, shut up, don’t overtly disrespect the person officially in charge no matter how clownish. In other words, basic workplace discipline. This is the Prussian model of education, which historically was the roots of our school system.

Perhaps the real purpose of school is to serve as a universal cultural touchstone. We come from various religions, ethnicities, cultural milieu, what have you. The glue that makes our society have any sort of commonality is mandatory public schooling and movies. The high school movie is very formulaic: jocks v. nerds, football player and cheerleaders at the social apex, but others in the same social arena, going to the same classes, and all partying together. My high school in the 90s was not this. It had fractured socially into groups that usually did not have much to do with each other: Athletes yes, but also “honors” students, all going to the same advanced course offerings, goths, cowboys, cholos*, drama kids, band nerds, geeks (no true ‘nerd’ subgroup at my high school). Some of these groups are involved in the official ‘school pride’ stuff but didn’t have much to do with each other such as band and athletes.

*More of a cultural distinction than racial category, as this ethnicity mostly sorted themselves into one of other sub-cultures — just like I wouldn’t expect ‘Goths’ to actually be descended from the gothic volkswanderung.

So the high school movies ring false to me - but they still serve as a common culture reference because the things that happen in them also happened in subgroups and in everyone’s high school experience - first real romance and/or sex, a desire to fit in and be accepted, frustrated ambition, longing for the wider world.

Most alternative cultural commons are now fandoms - sports, movies, TV, all are distinct fandom decoupled from a common cultural stream. The upper levels of mandatory public education stand alone as the common experience in modern societies.

How different this is than most of human history. Youth during their formative years (which I imagine are 15-25 but 13-18 also works) spend most of their time together with minimal adult social interaction. Spending these years in the company of other youths rather than working with parents in the family business or alongside adults as apprentices, or what have you, must be quite anomalous. The effect would be blunted by the very young median age of pre-modern societies. I strongly suspect that this is foundational to our modern society and will persist until our society is fundamentally changed despite it being a non-starter academically speaking.

Personal Takeaway:

Education is how the game is played. If you have what it takes to get a degree with a high GPA its worthwhile to you to do so. The ‘useless’ years of high school (useless academically, there may be other benefits to society), are needed for you to signal to people that you have value and that you will play the game, unless you have figured out a way to start your own game or you have a different game you want to play.