There was an article in Quillette yesterday by Lawrence Krauss: Tales From the Gulag . Everyone should read it. This essay is an attempt to cover the ways in which the progressive model in education has shaped and contributed to the current paradigm. It may only be of interest as a historical footnote, an explanation of how we got here- and I know that there are many other reasons for our collective insanity, not the least of which are social media and the elevation of politics to the extent that it displaces so many other once common passive activities in our minds, such as watching sports- but I haven’t seen much on the role of child-centred education in this debacle.
For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, it is an aspect of progressive education, contrasted with the more traditional teach-led classroom. You will no doubt have seen classrooms laid out with groups of desks, rather than facing the teacher. Although the teacher still provides a basic framework for the class, most of the learning is meant to be accomplished by the children examining source materials and exploring knowledge for themselves. Quite apart from it being an inefficient process which inevitably means that progress through the curriculum occurs at a snails pace and teachers have to rush in the final semester/term (with the inevitable result that they complain about teaching for tests), it is a sign of just how thoroughly postmodernism has corrupted the educational field.
The thinking goes that if children discover knowledge for themselves through exploration, it will necessarily be less corrupted by oppressive Western Patriarchal Whiteness. Nevermind that it makes knowledge-rich K-12 education all but impossible. Nevermind that it increases social stratification, income inequality and racial disparities in educational attainment- because inevitably affluent, highly educated and more often white two parent families are best able to compensate for the damage inflicted by poorly calibrated progressive education. Nevermind that it often results in the feckless and atrocious comment by teachers that ‘I learn more from my kids, than they learn from me’ (here’s hint- if that’s your experience, you are doing it wrong and should probably leave the profession!)
But perhaps the worst effect is that it fails to inculcate the message through repetition and osmosis that some people are possessed of superior knowledge, wisdom and experience and others should by instinct shut up and try to learn from them. Worse still, it imparts the repeated lesson that everything in life is effortless and easy, and that if others judge your efforts to be wanting, you have somehow been cheated of your rightful due. As though becoming a scientist were as easy as donning a lab coat, or becoming an able advocate in a courtroom could be judged by your ability to spar on Twitter.
Recently, I was listening to a rather nice sounding young woman phone into one of the better podcast radio shows in the UK. To her credit she had done a little bit of due diligence. Whatever the subject matter at hand, she had obviously read a few Grauniad and Independent articles and had even taken the time to find one study which best encapsulated her viewpoint. But when the host challenged her position she became quite distraught. She explained that she had done her research and she didn’t understand why he was being so mean to her. Quite gently and with a degree of kindness, he explained that one study was only one study, and that there were countless studies on the subject matter, many of which had conclusion which contradicted hers (quite apart from the lack of viewpoint diversity in the social sciences).
It may seem as though I exaggerate the problem with progressive education, but Claire Fox Director of Academy of Ideas, an organisation which promotes a public space where ideas can be contested without constraint, and author of the books I Find That Offensive! and I Still Find That Offensive!, recently highlighted the fact that British university lecturers were being advised by their professional body to not give lectures with uninterrupted periods of lecture longer than 11 minutes (one imagines power points and surveying the audience, both count as means of breaking up the monotony).
Think about the implications in terms of the learning kids have been habituated towards earlier in their education. I know it’s easy to blame the attention grabbing power of children’s TV and colourful tablet content, but this means that they haven’t spent significant amounts of time simply sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher impart knowledge. Think of the damage to attention span which results. Plus, it’s not by accident that the Dunning-Kruger Effect seems to be getting worse. Some industry experts have observed that starting with millennials it appears that subsequent generations may have more than one peak of overconfidence in relation to Dunning-Kruger. A major in this phenomenon is doubtless learning style as well as the overemphasis on self-esteem and confidence in education, which is tantamount to setting kids up for a very big fall once they enter the world of work. This is the best graphic depiction I could find of the two peak scenario, but would stipulate that the first peak in the grown-up mountain leads to a far greater dip than illustrated.
But an even worse aspect of this exploratory method of education, is that it allows for the insertion of biased source materials which far surpass any biases which a teacher would normally state if they were teaching a class. The downstream consequences can be quite catastrophic. A couple of years back, I was researching the topic of soil sequestration in relation to climate change. Some may groan when I mention YouTube in the same sentence as research, but believe it or not, if you have trained your algorithm to select for topics like engineering, climate, agriculture, genetics or chronic physical aggression there is a world of rarely viewed highly technical content which can be used as signposts for further research on Google or DuckDuckGo! At least so far, YouTube seems to have escaped much of the curation, de-ranking and burying under an avalanche of Left-leaning white noise which is typical of Google’s heavier handed curation- at least in most technical realms other than politics or culture.
Anyway, I was researching and I came across a video designed for children which looked at soil sequestration, specifically in terms of ‘traditional’ farming in Africa. For those who are more informed on the subject, either through personal experience or by reading high quality source material, they will know that young people in Africa have been fleeing subsistence farming in Africa for decades. Although the cities don’t always deliver on their promise, they do at least afford a slightly better life as a baseline, if for no better reason than your children can study under streetlamps. But quite often, a job in a factory or industrialised nursery, can lead to a life which is immeasurably better than the one they left behind.
But you wouldn’t know all this from the video on soil sequestration for children I watched. Quite apart from the fact that modern intensive farming practices are better for the climate than either organic or subsistence farming, because their much higher yields allow huge tracts of land to be put back to fallow, through wilding and the regrowing of forests. Of course, it is possible in isolation to create more traditional models which have similar yields, but forcing 30% of any industrialised societies working population back to the fields, when 1% or 2% is the current norm, is likely to have major implications, not least in terms of food prices for the poor. But more generally this exploration method of education is giving kids a picture of the world which lets them imagine this:
When I more accurate picture would be this:
It even appears that there may be an ongoing effort to rewrite history in this regard. Many will have heard mention of climate refugees, and to be fair there are people who have been displaced from their local regions because of weather changes and changes in climate. But the overwhelming majority of people who have left the land for the cities in Africa (and other places) have done so because they are fleeing the overly romanticised traditional farming which many in the West might laud, but a more accurate picture would assess in many cases to be subsistence farming and a life of unrelenting poverty. I noticed it particularly in this video from The Economist: See what three degrees of global warming looks like .
To be fair, it does say that climate change is ‘one of the reasons’ why people are moving to the cities- but framing of the video makes it seem like the main reason- when the lure of economic opportunity, paired with escaping what is in most instances subsistence poverty, is obviously far more compelling. One wonders whether this will be a growing narrative in the decade to come- as the media desperately tries to supress the fact that people in the Developing World desperately want more capitalism, not less of it.
And perhaps the area where this exploratory approach to learning is most apparent is in the absolute despair and hopelessness young people feel in relation to climate change. Inviting children to explore media and source materials is perhaps the worst thing one could do if the mental health of children and teenagers were your chief consideration. Don’t get me wrong, although many will disagree, as far as my research has shown climate change is a serious long-term problem which requires we shift to more sustainable means of mass consumption, but it neither a threat to the continued existence of the human species, nor a threat to human civilisation.
The problem is that even climate scientists are prone to quoting the worst case scenarios of RCP & SSP 8.5 (because they are more interesting for the purposes of science and effect), when the overwhelming majority of climate scientists would admit that these scenarios strain credulity. To quote Substack’s own The Honest Broker, acknowledged climate expert Roger Pielke: ‘The extreme scenarios RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 account for more than 40% of all scenario mentions across the 3,000+ page report. Add in the extreme scenario SSP3-7.0 and the total gets to over 50%.
The phrase “extreme scenario” might be a little difficult to understand in the abstract. So let me explain what an extreme scenario looks like, and why it is obviously, undeniably implausible. All of RCP8.5, SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0 assume that the world is going to massively increase consumption of coal in the future. The scenarios project that we will replace natural gas with coal, we will replace nuclear with coal, we will replace wind and solar, we will even chose to abandon gasoline for cars and use coal-to-liquid as fuel. If that sound ridiculous — it is!’
Yet these are the scenarios schoolchildren will be asked to confront when they are asked to investigate climate change in the classroom, and more than likely they will encounter them through either the irresponsibly alarmist and catastrophised lens presented by prestige media- or by sourcing dark green environmentalist websites which are convinced we are heading towards Climate Armageddon unless we revert to some form of superficially pastoral and idyllic style of living, which masks the sheer brutality of the poverty imposed by devolving to ‘traditional’ subsistence farming.
Plus, its not as though children or teenagers are schooled in the often callous disregard for personal feeling which is inherent to the Scientific Method. The disconfirmation which refutes and disputes faulty methodology and conclusions does not come naturally. If anything, the classroom is likely to lead to a collaborate method of information sharing which is counterproductive to the search for high quality knowledge. It is little wonder that millennial and later generations are so prone to two peaks of Dunning-Kruger when they have been presented with a view of the acquisition of expertise and knowledge which is as fallacious as it is misinformative.
Ironically, the one area where this approach to education has led to conflict, highly charged debate and contention is in the realms of politics and culture. But this too is a function of the exploratory approach to education. Because if, from day one, you have been taught to find your own knowledge- never once substantially criticised for falling far short of the mark, with only the occasional gentle chiding for drawing incorrect or erroneous conclusions- then it is going to make you cocksure full of yourself when you research politics for yourself and draw entirely the wrong conclusions with a degree of certitude which is astounding. Worse still, the apparent obstinacy of your opponents may lead you to falsely believe that is not so much that they have bad ideas, but rather that they must be bad people.
Liberal, progressives and conservatives all make valid points on occasions. Losing the ability to debate and discuss problems with a broad range of viewpoints not only restricts the range of ideas you can choose from, but also makes you less able to persuade- because it robs one of the generosity which comes from having the humility to concede to the occasional point, to which people naturally tend to respond. Our education system has done a cruel disservice to our younger people. It’s one the key reasons why, as they continue to populate DEI bureaucracies, they feel entitled to dismiss, castigate and cancel professors with a great deal more expertise and knowledge than they possess, for the simple reason that the exploratory approach to education can inculcate the illusion that one is always right- or that the benefits of expelling dissenting viewpoints outweighs the costs. Nothing could be further from the truth- as we can clearly see with the abject and almost complete degradation of the fields of the humanities, education and social sciences.
An excellent and thoughtful piece. This takes me back to Ivan Illich and 'De-schooling society'. Schooling is a difficult subject to get right mainly, I think, because the emphasis is on education. The socialization and preparation for future society is rather swept under the carpet.
To introduce child-centred learning before the age of 16 is really taking a risk. Whilst there are children who are mature enough to benefit from this approach they are in a minority. Most need the structure and formal style of the more traditional approach. As a noted child psychologist once explained to me most children actually welcome structure and limits and respect and value those teachers who give these elements to them.
Excellent comment. I know this may seem like an odd comparison, but there are great parallels between children and dogs. Dogs with authoritative masters are always happier- because they love the systems of rewards which stem from good behaviour- a play at a certain time, a treat when they come when called and a lengthy fuss last thing at night.
Humans and dogs are quite similar in many ways- we are both deeply social animals, even though humans have learned to cooperate in more creative and abstract ways. I feel as sorry for dogs with bad owners as I do for children with parents who don't have the skills. Although on balance, the dogs are only nervous and unhappy because they don't have boundaries, the children are being set up for a world which wont like them.
I read The Knowledge Gap in 2019, and it is ‘tumbling down the rabbit hole’ ( https://www.breakingthecode.com/why-i-care-so-much-about-phonics/ ). Thank you for so eloquently expanding on a thought that has consumed me for two years: American education pedagogy explains the biggest share of the problems in our society . Not all, but damn.
One of my favourite books on education is Seven Myths about Education by Daisy Christodoulou- it's only a short bool, just over a hundred pages long, but it does a pretty good job of covering Cognitive Load Theory at a very basic level and is actually quite hilarious in at least a couple of instances. I am also a greater admirer of British Headteacher Katherine Birbalsingh- here is her talking about how smartphones increase the divisions between rich and poor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G91eUJCeTY - it is a short segment of a longer podcast available at Triggernometry.
Her digital detox campaign was pretty prophetic given the recent Facebook revelations- but her reason for doing it was because of the harms it inflicted on children's ability to study and achieve with their schoolwork, as well as the fact that several teenagers in her area had died as a result of insulting the wrong people over social media. The moral panic of the almost non-existent threat of child abduction is crazy when one considers the far more substantial threat of unsupervised access for teenagers to the internet and from social media.
Same thing happened to me two years ago, Exhausted - but wait. In the CPD last week, we were asked to study how a "knowledge-rich curriculum" could improve students' learning. Is the pendulum beginning to swing back?
Well, that sounds great! It looks like somebody higher up the chain has either been paying attention to few highly influential headteachers (like Katherine Birbalsingh here in the UK), or they've done a more in-depth reading of Cognitive Load Theory. Key is the understandable that working memory is puny and, in order to perform most cognitively challenging tasks, one needs to draw upon useable knowledge stored in long-term memory.
So I’m probably one of your younger readers who most recently went through public school. Luckily, I had some rigorous teachers and two parents who pushed my sister and I hard academically. But I did encounter plenty of Dewey-inspired progressive education. Emphasis on “letting children learn independently” etc.
My 4th grade teacher in particular was in to this (she was fired after 1 year). We sat in those desk pods you mentioned and generally got to fool around a lot. Her favorite thing was having us do “Nature Watch,” which was supposed to be instructional time outside, learning about the environment. Us kiddos knew better. We had recess twice! Just the second recess, we got to play in the creek instead of on the playground. Even better!
Anyway, I’m probably in the camp of being gifted with too much overconfidence myself. At least I know about Dunning-Kruger. Hopefully if I can laugh at myself a little I’ll turn out all right in the end.
Well, when I talk about educational theorists and teachers it's important to acknowledge that educational ideas only filter through in a generational manner, because a lot of the older or better teachers only pay lip service to the theory coming through, and instead focus on what works with their kids.
I know a Canadian progressive teacher called Jeremy who often still reads my work and his care for his kids means that he is always looking for ways to improve his style and content- so it is important to recognise the human and individual in the mess of ideology. He taught me a lot about not judging a whole bloc of people just by their labels- his view of the ideology was as an empathy-building tool (which would be fine if that was all that it was, or even what its main goal was).
A good example of the way theory only influences slowly is Finland. It is often held up as the gold standard of progressive education (by Michael Moore, for example), but in fact they hit their zenith in performance when their teaching was a fair bit more traditional, and since progressive educational ideas have become more influential, their PISA scores have started to decline. The generally progressive model examples held up in documentaries are not the ones responsible achieving the outstanding results- for that we need to look to the more rural and parochial schools into which progressive ideas are filtering more slowly.
Unfortunately, this is also a source of the inequality in K-12 as well. Because teachers tend to usually migrate out to the suburbs and rural areas as they grow older. Don't get me wrong- the teachers who can stick it out in the inner city can be exceptional, because a lot educating educators tends to focus more on theory rather than practice, it leads to a sink or swim dynamic, and only those who can swim tend to stick it out for any length of time.
But wanting to teach 'empathy' rather than Maths, English and Science is comparing the cake to the icing, and often false dichotomies such as the differentiation between skills and knowledge (a skill is just knowledge which it is easier to demonstrate and then get someone to imitate) can actually hamper educational efforts. In reality the difference lies between knowledge and facts- the former is useful, the latter is only useful for the purposes of learning memorisation (it doesn't matter what you memorise, just that you learn to memorise).
The important thing about Dunning-Kruger is to never be afraid to admit what you don't know. Even in my core areas, I learn new stuff every day.
I think it’s also fair to say that (and I speak from experience), few teachers are fully onboard with the progressive model and few are fully on the traditional model. Most teachers don’t know an insane amount of theory, but they’ve picked up ideas here and there. Thus, their teaching will be influenced by a mix of both. I certainly encountered teachers who wanted try experiments but also were willing to force us to do traditional assignments.
The problem is not enough kids are learning their times tables and not enough are being taught phonics- don't get me wrong whole word should be taught as well, but the chances of developing into someone who reads for pleasure are severely limited if you haven't been taught phonics. It also advantages children with highly educated parents- because they naturally teach phonics at bedtime, which is unfair for children whose parents don't have the time resources or educational level.
Right. My parents had advanced degrees and I was reading well before I went to school because of their influence.
Just as it happens, one of my memories from memorizing times tables in 3rd grade is a bit of an anecdote that runs counter to your point (though I think it’s the exception that proves the rule). One kid who struggled with discipline issues throughout childhood was very good with the times tables when we had to learn them. He was better than me (quicker). But of all the kids in the class, he was one of the ones who didn’t go to college, ended up working some random job and doing a lot of drugs (he occasionally was in trouble with the law I think). But his problem wasn’t intelligence (he was smart), it was discipline and a lack of work ethic. One of those kids who always has to rebel against “the system” or “the man.”
Because, ultimately tests are the only way to judge how capable an education system has rendered it's children. To be fair, it doesn't measure such things as creativity, but then it is a rare teacher indeed who can even begin to foster creativity- because you have to be at least capable of achieving modest commercial success yourself in order to be at all capable of teaching somebody else how to be a creative.
Personally, it wouldn't be appropriate to pass on my occasional successes in the realms of erotic fiction to a teenager- they might blow a gasket. The one exception I've found so far is poetry- I had one English teacher who was a published poet herself, who was quite useful in training me in the craft- but it almost impossible for anyone to make any money at poetry. The rare exceptions can be counted on two hands.
Of course, there are other things a teacher can impart. Critical thinking, a sense of gratitude and a sense of duty if they are smart- but many of these things are no longer fashionable. The one type of activist I do admire are those who work on individual cases of injustices.
The other thing we need to do is provide vocational training for kids who don't do well academically, preferably at 14 when they are not thoroughly disillusioned and when there is still the chance for soft coercion. Not only would it expose them to positive male role models, but the reason why there are such disparities by ethnicity is because communities with high rates of productive fathers are able to operate an informal kind of social safety net. Sine have referred to this problem as missing Einstein's- employment creates the conditions for stable families and stable families create the chance for higher parental engagement, as well as significantly reducing all manner of negative factors for cognitive development.
Plus, it would really help millennials desperate to buy and home a start a family- with more compact and bijou three bedroom starter homes, plus a libertarian system of planning it would be possible to create a lot of value in Western economies, create trade professional blue collar work and do it all without threatening the value boomers and Gen Xers have invested in their homes. Cul-de-sac style housing estates are also better for the purposes of planning public transport systems- less distance to walk than suburban sprawl. The are also safer places for children to roam freely- there is whole movement for free range play, because it essential for raising children into healthy, happy adults.
Education has been incredibly slow to improve itself with tech. I've wondered why we don't create really great lesson plans with videos, games, self-testing and more that are engaging, can be repeated, don't require you to be sitting still in a boring classroom at a fixed time and being limited by the slowest of the kids (or pushed forward by smart ones before you understand), and can go from basic to very complex. Professional created materials should stand the test of time and all could benefit from them.
But, you wont get innovation very quickly if the government funds so much of it (with regulatory strings attached), and worse, directly operate it in choice-free schools for the young.
Probably the best innovation that can help is automated marking facilities for children with consolidation homework, via phones and tablets. It would save the teacher a lot of time, it gives them a clear metric for when their lesson plans aren't penetrating, and gives the school a great means of tracking progress with the curriculum.
There should also be a bespoke online library for lessons online- which teachers could use it model their own lessons where appropriate. In the Seven Myths about Education book I mention earlier in the comments, an example was given of a lesson which earned high praise from Offsted (to UK's inspectorate of schools and classroom teaching). Kids were asked to make puppets for a Shakespeare play (I think it was Romeo and Juliet). Which is fine- but what the inspectors failed to recognise was that the kids were learning more about making puppets than they were about Shakespeare...
An excellent and thoughtful piece. This takes me back to Ivan Illich and 'De-schooling society'. Schooling is a difficult subject to get right mainly, I think, because the emphasis is on education. The socialization and preparation for future society is rather swept under the carpet.
To introduce child-centred learning before the age of 16 is really taking a risk. Whilst there are children who are mature enough to benefit from this approach they are in a minority. Most need the structure and formal style of the more traditional approach. As a noted child psychologist once explained to me most children actually welcome structure and limits and respect and value those teachers who give these elements to them.
Excellent comment. I know this may seem like an odd comparison, but there are great parallels between children and dogs. Dogs with authoritative masters are always happier- because they love the systems of rewards which stem from good behaviour- a play at a certain time, a treat when they come when called and a lengthy fuss last thing at night.
Humans and dogs are quite similar in many ways- we are both deeply social animals, even though humans have learned to cooperate in more creative and abstract ways. I feel as sorry for dogs with bad owners as I do for children with parents who don't have the skills. Although on balance, the dogs are only nervous and unhappy because they don't have boundaries, the children are being set up for a world which wont like them.
I read The Knowledge Gap in 2019, and it is ‘tumbling down the rabbit hole’ ( https://www.breakingthecode.com/why-i-care-so-much-about-phonics/ ). Thank you for so eloquently expanding on a thought that has consumed me for two years: American education pedagogy explains the biggest share of the problems in our society . Not all, but damn.
For people new to this area I recommend Natalie Wexler’s very readable book, or at least articles by Robert Pondiscio: https://www.commentary.org/articles/robert-pondiscio/how-us-schools-became-obsessed-with-race/
Oh wow! I'm a big Robert Pondiscio fan myself- have you read: https://www.the74million.org/article/pondiscio-i-just-wrote-a-book-about-success-academy-charter-schools-it-does-not-support-your-preferred-narrative-i-hope-you-hate-it/ ? The title is 'Pondiscio: I Just Wrote a Book About Success Academy Charter Schools. It Does Not Support Your Preferred Narrative. I Hope You Hate It'. Just about sums it up.
One of my favourite books on education is Seven Myths about Education by Daisy Christodoulou- it's only a short bool, just over a hundred pages long, but it does a pretty good job of covering Cognitive Load Theory at a very basic level and is actually quite hilarious in at least a couple of instances. I am also a greater admirer of British Headteacher Katherine Birbalsingh- here is her talking about how smartphones increase the divisions between rich and poor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G91eUJCeTY - it is a short segment of a longer podcast available at Triggernometry.
Her digital detox campaign was pretty prophetic given the recent Facebook revelations- but her reason for doing it was because of the harms it inflicted on children's ability to study and achieve with their schoolwork, as well as the fact that several teenagers in her area had died as a result of insulting the wrong people over social media. The moral panic of the almost non-existent threat of child abduction is crazy when one considers the far more substantial threat of unsupervised access for teenagers to the internet and from social media.
Phew! InFORMative. :)
I have got to say this has been my experience. I got my students to exceed on their standardized tests only
To be reprimanded during a data walk “too much teacher talk”.
Same thing happened to me two years ago, Exhausted - but wait. In the CPD last week, we were asked to study how a "knowledge-rich curriculum" could improve students' learning. Is the pendulum beginning to swing back?
Well, that sounds great! It looks like somebody higher up the chain has either been paying attention to few highly influential headteachers (like Katherine Birbalsingh here in the UK), or they've done a more in-depth reading of Cognitive Load Theory. Key is the understandable that working memory is puny and, in order to perform most cognitively challenging tasks, one needs to draw upon useable knowledge stored in long-term memory.
Not very constructive in their criticism- were they?
So I’m probably one of your younger readers who most recently went through public school. Luckily, I had some rigorous teachers and two parents who pushed my sister and I hard academically. But I did encounter plenty of Dewey-inspired progressive education. Emphasis on “letting children learn independently” etc.
My 4th grade teacher in particular was in to this (she was fired after 1 year). We sat in those desk pods you mentioned and generally got to fool around a lot. Her favorite thing was having us do “Nature Watch,” which was supposed to be instructional time outside, learning about the environment. Us kiddos knew better. We had recess twice! Just the second recess, we got to play in the creek instead of on the playground. Even better!
Anyway, I’m probably in the camp of being gifted with too much overconfidence myself. At least I know about Dunning-Kruger. Hopefully if I can laugh at myself a little I’ll turn out all right in the end.
Well, when I talk about educational theorists and teachers it's important to acknowledge that educational ideas only filter through in a generational manner, because a lot of the older or better teachers only pay lip service to the theory coming through, and instead focus on what works with their kids.
I know a Canadian progressive teacher called Jeremy who often still reads my work and his care for his kids means that he is always looking for ways to improve his style and content- so it is important to recognise the human and individual in the mess of ideology. He taught me a lot about not judging a whole bloc of people just by their labels- his view of the ideology was as an empathy-building tool (which would be fine if that was all that it was, or even what its main goal was).
A good example of the way theory only influences slowly is Finland. It is often held up as the gold standard of progressive education (by Michael Moore, for example), but in fact they hit their zenith in performance when their teaching was a fair bit more traditional, and since progressive educational ideas have become more influential, their PISA scores have started to decline. The generally progressive model examples held up in documentaries are not the ones responsible achieving the outstanding results- for that we need to look to the more rural and parochial schools into which progressive ideas are filtering more slowly.
Unfortunately, this is also a source of the inequality in K-12 as well. Because teachers tend to usually migrate out to the suburbs and rural areas as they grow older. Don't get me wrong- the teachers who can stick it out in the inner city can be exceptional, because a lot educating educators tends to focus more on theory rather than practice, it leads to a sink or swim dynamic, and only those who can swim tend to stick it out for any length of time.
But wanting to teach 'empathy' rather than Maths, English and Science is comparing the cake to the icing, and often false dichotomies such as the differentiation between skills and knowledge (a skill is just knowledge which it is easier to demonstrate and then get someone to imitate) can actually hamper educational efforts. In reality the difference lies between knowledge and facts- the former is useful, the latter is only useful for the purposes of learning memorisation (it doesn't matter what you memorise, just that you learn to memorise).
The important thing about Dunning-Kruger is to never be afraid to admit what you don't know. Even in my core areas, I learn new stuff every day.
I think it’s also fair to say that (and I speak from experience), few teachers are fully onboard with the progressive model and few are fully on the traditional model. Most teachers don’t know an insane amount of theory, but they’ve picked up ideas here and there. Thus, their teaching will be influenced by a mix of both. I certainly encountered teachers who wanted try experiments but also were willing to force us to do traditional assignments.
The problem is not enough kids are learning their times tables and not enough are being taught phonics- don't get me wrong whole word should be taught as well, but the chances of developing into someone who reads for pleasure are severely limited if you haven't been taught phonics. It also advantages children with highly educated parents- because they naturally teach phonics at bedtime, which is unfair for children whose parents don't have the time resources or educational level.
Right. My parents had advanced degrees and I was reading well before I went to school because of their influence.
Just as it happens, one of my memories from memorizing times tables in 3rd grade is a bit of an anecdote that runs counter to your point (though I think it’s the exception that proves the rule). One kid who struggled with discipline issues throughout childhood was very good with the times tables when we had to learn them. He was better than me (quicker). But of all the kids in the class, he was one of the ones who didn’t go to college, ended up working some random job and doing a lot of drugs (he occasionally was in trouble with the law I think). But his problem wasn’t intelligence (he was smart), it was discipline and a lack of work ethic. One of those kids who always has to rebel against “the system” or “the man.”
Why do you think PISA scores are a good measure of the difference in quality between school systems?
Because, ultimately tests are the only way to judge how capable an education system has rendered it's children. To be fair, it doesn't measure such things as creativity, but then it is a rare teacher indeed who can even begin to foster creativity- because you have to be at least capable of achieving modest commercial success yourself in order to be at all capable of teaching somebody else how to be a creative.
Personally, it wouldn't be appropriate to pass on my occasional successes in the realms of erotic fiction to a teenager- they might blow a gasket. The one exception I've found so far is poetry- I had one English teacher who was a published poet herself, who was quite useful in training me in the craft- but it almost impossible for anyone to make any money at poetry. The rare exceptions can be counted on two hands.
Of course, there are other things a teacher can impart. Critical thinking, a sense of gratitude and a sense of duty if they are smart- but many of these things are no longer fashionable. The one type of activist I do admire are those who work on individual cases of injustices.
The other thing we need to do is provide vocational training for kids who don't do well academically, preferably at 14 when they are not thoroughly disillusioned and when there is still the chance for soft coercion. Not only would it expose them to positive male role models, but the reason why there are such disparities by ethnicity is because communities with high rates of productive fathers are able to operate an informal kind of social safety net. Sine have referred to this problem as missing Einstein's- employment creates the conditions for stable families and stable families create the chance for higher parental engagement, as well as significantly reducing all manner of negative factors for cognitive development.
Plus, it would really help millennials desperate to buy and home a start a family- with more compact and bijou three bedroom starter homes, plus a libertarian system of planning it would be possible to create a lot of value in Western economies, create trade professional blue collar work and do it all without threatening the value boomers and Gen Xers have invested in their homes. Cul-de-sac style housing estates are also better for the purposes of planning public transport systems- less distance to walk than suburban sprawl. The are also safer places for children to roam freely- there is whole movement for free range play, because it essential for raising children into healthy, happy adults.
Education has been incredibly slow to improve itself with tech. I've wondered why we don't create really great lesson plans with videos, games, self-testing and more that are engaging, can be repeated, don't require you to be sitting still in a boring classroom at a fixed time and being limited by the slowest of the kids (or pushed forward by smart ones before you understand), and can go from basic to very complex. Professional created materials should stand the test of time and all could benefit from them.
But, you wont get innovation very quickly if the government funds so much of it (with regulatory strings attached), and worse, directly operate it in choice-free schools for the young.
Probably the best innovation that can help is automated marking facilities for children with consolidation homework, via phones and tablets. It would save the teacher a lot of time, it gives them a clear metric for when their lesson plans aren't penetrating, and gives the school a great means of tracking progress with the curriculum.
There should also be a bespoke online library for lessons online- which teachers could use it model their own lessons where appropriate. In the Seven Myths about Education book I mention earlier in the comments, an example was given of a lesson which earned high praise from Offsted (to UK's inspectorate of schools and classroom teaching). Kids were asked to make puppets for a Shakespeare play (I think it was Romeo and Juliet). Which is fine- but what the inspectors failed to recognise was that the kids were learning more about making puppets than they were about Shakespeare...
have you heard of Synthesis: https://www.synthesis.com/approach
It's still pretty young, but a cool idea and start
Looks great!