I agree entirely with this article. From my own experience, I did a lot of abstract maths in undergrad and really hated it because I couldn't figure out what all these Groups, Topologies, Normed Vector Spaces, etc were all about. What was the use of learning all these things without some practical application? It was only later on when I started to learn more about the people behind these theories, and the challenges that motivated them, that it became more interesting. The founders of all this knowledge were trying to get one thing or the other done, and this is what motivated them to construct these mind bending abstractions.
I think it is a lot more effective to give students challenges rather than knowledge. When they get stuck (and they will get stuck eventually), then give them the knowledge they need to overcome their obstacles. Of course, you never know, without having some pre-determined way of solving something, the students might end up discovering a smarter ways of solving the same problems!
The "Manhattan Academy" mentioned in this article is a Montessori school. Expensive Montessori private school for my own children is my startup motivator. My day job would be enough otherwise.
You can see some example Montessori materials here:
I'm only one data point, so you should probably take this with a grain of salt. I went to a Montessori school from kindergarten through third grade, and I can't stress enough how badly that specific Montessori school failed. Teachers were distant, more like babysitters than having any kind of structure. Any project we wanted to work on was fine, but most of us didn't do anything (the equivalent of pretending to work at work). We'd have to keep track of what we did in journals and get them signed by a teacher, so most of us made up stuff and forged the teacher's signature. I don't remember learning any mathematics at all back then. In fact, I'm positive that it wasn't until fourth grade that I got into basic math. I don't know if that's normal, but my father had been teaching me math outside of school from a very early age, so I was still strong in it. It's a very strange school system.
My final observation is that my Montessori school was so small! I was a shy kid, and going to a small school from K-3rd grade, then another small school from 4th-8th grade, did not help me to become a social person one bit. If you do something against the group, everyone will hate you, resulting in more shyness. Even at third grade.
You probably should evaluate your child. Is s/he shy? If so, it may be a benefit to send them to a larger school. I'm not saying that it will cure them of shyness, but it may help.
I'll totally respect any decision you make though :)
My kids are not shy, and math-wise they're ahead of where I was at the same age. I went on to get a math degree from MIT. Your story is the first time I've heard of a Montessori school being so unstructured. Do you know if it was accredited?
I don't know, sorry.. I am sure that it was the Montessori system though. They even had pictures of Dr. Montessori hanging on the walls. I haven't really looked back into that time in my life, 'til now. I'm not upset, I turned out fine, I just personally feel that in a bigger school I could have become social more quickly by interacting with a wider variety of other kids.
As with everything, different implementors may be better/worse at the same thing. I've certainly seen that with my girl (who was in Montessori as a youngster).
Also, no one approach is perfect for everybody. As frightening as it may sounds, some people need more "structure" than others.
One way to improve the learning environment for public schools is to centralize the process using technology, then nudge the process in a different direction.
But we must test to make sure that the new direction is a better one.
I have to disagree with you, and vehemently. Centralization is exactly the problem.
I was lucky enough to be educated in an International Baccalaureate program that stressed interaction between students and teachers, convivial debate rather than lecture, and analytic essays instead of rote recall. The strength of the program came from its decentralization, relying on good teachers rather than central planning. The teachers and students worked together, as collaborators.
Technology is a wonderful thing, but in education, it generally gets in the way of the greatest teacher: intellectual discourse. A teacher and 10-20 students talking with each other[1] is an optimal model for learning. Educational technology generally takes the personal interaction out of things, and certainly makes the process less engaging.[2]
[1] Very different from a teacher talking to, or at, students.
[2] I'm talking about secondary education. For primary ed, technology can be very useful. But that is a very different environment.
Well, I see now that there are two kinds of centralization.
1) The system is top-heavy, and administrators pick out what teachers teach. This is centralized planning.
2) The content that teachers generate (assignments, quizzes) is put into a centralized pool, which other teachers can browse through to come up with new ideas for their teaching. This is centralized content.
I'm sorry I wasn't clear, but I didn't mean centralized planning, I meant centralized content. If there is some way to know what a teacher taught and how well it worked which other teachers could use as a reference, then it becomes a memory. Teachers can improve upon other teachers' previous works.
Right now, each public school teacher is almost universally independent. My idea is that as each assignment is completed online, the assignment goes into the memory pool. Teachers can browse all content. Students and teachers can rate and comment on the assignments. This seems like it would encourage good collaboration and interaction.
I think we're considering fundamentally different paradigms. In my education, there were effectively no assignments, and certainly none that could be completed online. Consider my senior English or Latin classes: the only "assignments" were to read, and occasionally to write, generally on a self-generated topic.
In class, similarly, there was very little pre-planned content. In Latin, we simply went through the previous night's translation, line by line, with discussion breaking out whenever someone was perplexed or intrigued by something.
In English, there was perhaps a bit more planned content, but not much: the teacher would have something to talk about, and start out talking about it, but within 5-10 minutes we would have moved out of the prepared material into our own discussion.
Now, in the sciences, yes, there is definite content, and there, surely, there would be value in a central content store, but it would need to be developed outside the institutional structure, or your 2) would rapidly become 1). (Yes, I'm a bit jaded: I went to an amazing program, but it was housed at a horribly administered school.)
"I think we're considering fundamentally different paradigms."
Yes, I agree. I'm passionate about somehow improving the lives and education of the average public high school student. My hypothesis is that the answer is increasing the availability of student-student, student-teacher, and teacher-teacher communication, with the memory pool to store previous content. The internet is a wonderful thing, however programs like Blackboard fail to take into account group interaction. (They claim they do, but their groups are isolated to individual classrooms; I'm talking about networking across the entire world.)
"...but it would need to be developed outside the institutional structure, or your 2) would rapidly become 1)."
Exactly. This is why I feel it can only be created by a commercial entity, possibly a corporation.
Also, I agree that your method of learning is superior, however the entity that creates this must accept that public schools teach in a certain way and change very slowly.
Another problem is dealing with online predators. Any kind of social software created for schools is going to create huge waves of uproar unless people are sure that predators, real or imagined, can't communicate with students. I'm thinking that in order to communicate with other students, you must be a part of a classroom that has at least a certain amount of students and has a certain amount of content. Stifling communication is unsettling, but I don't see another way.
"public schools teach in a certain way and change very slowly."
I can certainly agree with you about that. IB has been around for 30 years, and just got any foothold in American 10 years ago. I was lucky enough to go to one of the early public IB schools.
Public education is way behind, especially in technology. I just made "my first website" in a CS class 3 weeks ago. And I built it with the same HTML code I taught myself at age 9.
I also am not a huge fan of the amount of "busy work." This is just the work that professors are required to give you to fulfill some degree requirement. Almost nothing I've learned in college has been applicable to any of my business-related work, although I don't think we can hold an undergraduate degree up to much glory.
The question is whether that is a problem. I for one don't really think that traditional secondary ed is the right place for teaching tech. Tech moves too fast.
We need to fix the school systems to more effectively cover their domain: sciences and humanities. Technology, however, is best learned as we learn it: free-form, self-directed, online. There is no need to merge that into curricula.
(Note, there's a difference between technology and CS: CS is algorithmics, theory; it's a branch of math, really. Technology is applied: websites, programming languages, things of this sort. Any curricular approach to technology is doomed to constantly lag the tech education available extracurricularly.)
There are two distinct classes of work that are called "busy work". The first is heinous, the second is often loathed, but great.
There's real busywork: work assigned just to take your time, create something to grade. That's crap, it should go away. (And in my collegiate experience, largely has.)
Then there's "impractical stuff": people often malign work they do that doesn't directly apply to the real world, but I think that it is often worthwhile. Consider MIT's famed 6.001: few of its students ever use Scheme, or any functional language, professionally, but the work in Scheme is never the less worthwhile. (Disclosure, I love functional languages.)
One thing I'm hoping is that if teachers use the service I described above, they'd be less inclined to create busy work - it would be obvious to the rest of their community that that's what they're creating, and so they'd have an incentive to not do that.
Unless they make all their content private and don't participate in the community, which is an option too.
Enter my "open source" biz plan for leveraging media -- and situation comedy in particular -- to establish the most popular online market for customized education.
See OpportuniTV.com for details. Two (de facto) reviews of earlier versions of the site's content:
"I just spent about an hour surfing around with a bit of amazement."
Josh Peterson
Co-Founder/CEO
43Things.com (an Amazon.com company)
December 12, 2004
"Frank, you are a good man. Have you thought about joining this team? Your only alternative, of course, is venture capital. But their usual models require getting rid of the 'originator' within the first eighteen months. With Netscape it took a little longer, but you get the idea."
Randy Hinrichs
Manager, Learning Sciences and Technology Group
Microsoft Research
December 1998
I think it is a lot more effective to give students challenges rather than knowledge. When they get stuck (and they will get stuck eventually), then give them the knowledge they need to overcome their obstacles. Of course, you never know, without having some pre-determined way of solving something, the students might end up discovering a smarter ways of solving the same problems!