> “I think the skills that should be emphasized are how do you think for yourself? How do you develop critical reasoning for solving problems? How do you develop creativity? How do you develop a learning mindset that you're going to go learn to do the next thing?”
In the Swedish schoolsystem, the idea for the past 20 years has been exactly this, that is to try to teach critical thinking, reasoning, problem solving etc rather than hard facts. The results has been...not great. We discovered that reasoning and critical thinking is impossible without a foundational knowledge about what to be critical about.
I think the same can be said about software development.
I'm glad my east Asian mother put me through Saturday school for natives during my school years in Sweden.
The most damning example I have about Swedish school system is anecdotal: by attending Saturday school, I never had to study math ever in the Swedish school. (same for my Asian classmates) when I finished 9th grade Japanese school curriculum taught ONLY one day per week (2h), I had learned all of advanced math in high school and never had to study math until college.
The focus on "no one left behind == no one allowed ahead" also meant that young me complaining math was boring and easy didn't persuade teachers to let me go ahead, but instead, they allowed me to sleep during the lecture.
It's like this in the US (or rather, it was 20 years ago. But I suspect it is now worse anyway)
Teachers in my county were heavily discouraged from failing anyone, because pass rate became a target instead of a metric. They couldn't even give a 0 for an assignment that was never turned in without multiple meetings with the student and approval from an administrator.
The net result was classes always proceeded at the rate of the slowest kid in class. Good for the slow kids (that cared), universally bad for everyone else who didn't want to be bored out of their minds. The divide was super apparent between the normal level and honors level classes.
I don't know what the right answer is, but there was an insane amount of effort spent on kids who didn't care, whose parents didn't care, who hadn't cared since elementary school, and always ended up dropping out as soon as they hit 18. No differentiation between them, and the ones who really did give a shit and were just a little slow (usually because of a bad home life).
It's hard to avoid leaving someone behind when they've already left themselves behind.
I'm gonna add another perspective. I was placed, and excelled, in moderately advanced math courses from 3rd grade on. Mostly 'A's through 11th grade precalc (taken because of the one major hiccup, placing only in the second most rigorous track when I entered high school). I ended that year feeling pretty good, with a superior SAT score bagged, high hopes for National Merit, etc.
Then came senior year. AP Calculus was a sh/*tshow, because of a confluence of factors: dealing with parents divorcing, social isolation, dysphoria. I hit a wall, and got my only quarterly D, ever.
The, "if you get left behind, that's on you, because we're not holding up the bright kids," mentality was catastrophic for me - and also completely inapplicable, because I WAS one of the bright kids! I needed help, and focus. I retook the course in college and got the highest grade in the class, so I confirmed that I was not the problem; unfortunately, though, the damage had been done. I'd chosen a major in the humnities, and had only taken that course as an elective, to prove to myself that I could manage the subject. You would never know that I'd been on-track for a technical career.
So, I don't buy that America/Sweden/et al. are full of hopeless demi-students. I was deemed one, and it wasn't true, but the simple perception was devastating. I think there is a larger, overarching deficit of support for students, probably some combination of home life, class structure, and pedagogical incentives. If "no child left behind" is anathema in these circles, the "full speed ahead" approach is not much better.
> The, "if you get left behind, that's on you, because we're not holding up the bright kids," mentality was catastrophic for me
Your one bad year doesn't invalidate the fact that it was good to allow you to run ahead of slower students the other 9 years. It wasn't catastrophic for you, as you say yourself you just retook the class in college and got a high grade. I honestly don't see how "I had a bad time at home for a year and did bad in school" could have worked out any better for you.
> So, I don't buy that America/Sweden/et al. are full of hopeless demi-students. I was deemed one.
A bad grade one year deemed you a hopeless demi student? By what metric? I had a similar school career (AP/IB with As and Bs) and got a D that should have been an F my senior year and it was fine.
They seem to lament ending up in humanities instead of a technical path. The fact that the humanities is just categorized as for less smart people and technical people are all smart is a problem in itself.
Many bright people end up in humanities and end up crushed by the societal pressure that expects them to be inferior, a huge waste.
This is probably the right solution. It seems in reality nobody does this since it is expensive (more teachers, real attention to students, etc). Also if there is an explicit split there will be groups of people who "game" it (spend disproportional amount of time to "train" their kids vs actual natural talent - not sure if this is good or bad).
So, it feels to me ideally within the same classroom there should be a natural way to work on your own pace at your own level. Is it possible? Have no idea - seems not, again primarily because it requires a completely different skillset and attention from teachers.
> should be a natural way to work on your own pace at your own level
Analogous to the old one-room-school model where one teacher taught all grade levels and students generally worked from textbooks. There were issues with it stemming from specialization (e.g., teaching 1st grade is different than teaching 12th). They were also largely in rural areas and generally had poor facilities.
The main barrier in the US to track separation is manpower. Public School teachers are underpaid and treated like shit, and schools don't get enough funding which further reduces the number of teachers.
Teachers just don't have the time in the US to do multiple tracks in the classroom.
You can have a multi-track high-school system, like in much of Europe. Some are geared towards the academically inclined who expect to go to university, others hold that option open but focus on also learning a trade or specialty (this can be stuff like welding, CNC, or hospitality industry / restaurants etc.), while others focus more heavily on the trade side, with apprenticeship at companies intertwined with the education throughout high school, and switching to a university after that is not possible by default, but not ruled out if you put in some extra time).
Or you can also have stronger or weaker schools where the admission test scores required are different, so stronger students go to different schools. Not sure if that's a thing in the US.
This was the way all schools worked in my county in florida, at least from middle school on. Normal/Honors/AP split is what pretty much every highschool did at the time. You could even go to a local community college instead of HS classes.
> Also if there is an explicit split there will be groups of people who "game" it (spend disproportional amount of time to "train" their kids vs actual natural talent - not sure if this is good or bad).
The idea of tracking out kids who excel due to high personal motivation when they have less natural aptitude is flat out dystopian. I'm drawing mental images of Gattaca. Training isn't "gaming". It's a natural part of how you improve performance, and it's a desirable ethical attribute.
>But you aren't supposed to choose either or. Instead, you split the students in different groups, different speeds.
This answer is from the US perspective. I've lived in several states now, and I know many of teachers because my partner is adjacent to education in her work and family. This is what I've learned from all this so far:
This is an incredibly easy and logical thing to both suggest, conceptualize, and even accept. In fact, I can see why alot of people don't think its a bad idea. The problem comes down the following in no specific order:
- Education is highly politicized. Not only that, its one of the most politicized topics of our time. This continues to have negative affects on everything to proper funding of programs[0]
- This means some N number of parents will inevitably take issue with these buckets for one reason or another. That can become a real drain of resources dealing with this.
- There's going to be reasonable questions of objectivity that go into this, including historical circumstances. This type of policy is unfortunately easy enough to co-op certain kids into certain groups based on factors like race, class, sex etc. rather than educational achievement alone, of which we also do not have a good enough way to measure objectively currently because of the aforementioned politicized nature of education.
- How to correct for the social bucketing of tiered education? High achieving kids will be lauded as lower achieving ones fall to the background. How do you mitigate that so you don't end up in a situation where one group is reaping all the benefits and thereby getting all the social recognition? Simply because I couldn't do college level trig when I was in 8th grade doesn't mean I deserved limited opportunities[2], but this tiered system ends up being ripe for this kind of exploitation. In districts that already have these types of programs you can already see parents clamoring to get their kids into advanced classes because it correlates to better outcomes.
[0]: I know that the US spends in aggregate per student, approximately 15,000 USD per year, but that money isn't simply handed to school districts. If you factor specialized grants, bonds, commitments etc. the actual classroom spending is not working with this budget directly, its much smaller than this. This is because at least some your local districts funding is likely coming from grants, which are more often than not only paid out for a specific purpose and must be used in pursuant of that purpose. Sometimes that purpose is wide and allows schools to be flexible, but more often it is exceedingly rigid as its tied to some outcome, such as passing rates, test scores etc. There's lots of this type of money sloshing around the school system, which creates perverse incentives.
[1]: Funding without strict restrictions on how its used
[2]: Look, I barely graduated high school, largely due to alot of personal stuff in my life back then. I was a model college student though, but due to a different set of life circumstances never quite managed to graduate, but I have excelled in this industry because I'm very good at what I do and don't shy away from hard problems. Yet despite this, some doors were closed to me longer than others because I didn't have the right on paper pedigree. This only gets worse when you start bucketing kids like this, because people inevitably see these things as some sort of signal about someones ability to perform regardless of relevancy.
Yeah, all that stuff in the end boils down to: rich parents will find a way to have it their way. Whether private schools or tutors or whatever.
Every ideological system has certain hangups, depending on what they can afford. In the Soviet communist system, obviously a big thing was to promote kids of worker and peasant background etc., but they kept the standards high and math etc was rigorous and actual educational progress taken seriously. But there was Cold War pressure to have a strong science/math base.
Currently, the US is coasting, relying on talent from outside the country for the cream of the top, so they can afford nonsense beliefs, given also that most middle-class jobs are not all that related to knowledge, and are more status-jockeying email jobs.
It will likely turn around once there are real stakes.
>Currently, the US is coasting, relying on talent from outside the country for the cream of the top, so they can afford nonsense beliefs, given also that most middle-class jobs are not all that related to knowledge, and are more status-jockeying email jobs.
Ironically, we also rely on talent from outside the country to undercut wages and worker protections on the low end, which also allows us to afford even more nonsense beliefs.
I think we've worked ourselves into a sort of topsy-turvy paradigm where academic and cultural deviance from a certain range is punished severely, but a non-existent ceiling on wealth/floor on poverty are just assumed to be natural and correct. And it really should be the opposite, not least of which because extreme wealth and poverty seem to exacerbate the contraction of the acceptable academic/cultural range, and the punishments for being outside of that range.
> I was placed, and excelled, in moderately advanced math courses from 3rd grade on.
In the school district I live in, they eliminated all gifted programs and honors courses (they do still allow you to accelerate in math in HS for now, but I'm sure that will be gone soon too), so a decent chance you might not have taken Calculus in HS. Problem solved I guess?
I'm not sure when this changed, but in school for me in the 1970s and early '80s the teachers (at least the older ones) were all pretty much of the attitude that "what you get out of school depends on what you put into it" i.e. learning is mostly up to the student. Grades of "F" or zero for uncompleted or totally unsatisfactory work were not uncommon and students did get held back. Dropout age was 16 and those who really didn't care mostly did that. So at least the last two years of high school were mostly all kids who at least wanted to finish.
> It's like this in the US (or rather, it was 20 years ago. But I suspect it is now worse anyway)
I'm sure it's regional, but my oldest kid started school in SoCal 13 years ago, and it is definitely worse. Nearly every bad decision gets doubled-down on and the good ones seem to lack follow-through. I spent almost a decade trying to improve things and have given up; my youngest goes to private school now.
We are experimenting with our daughter this year: Our school system offers advanced math via their remote learning system. This means that during math class, my kid will take online 6th grade math instead of the regular in-person 5th grade math.
We will have to see how it goes, but this could be the advanced math solution we need.
Sure! as far as I know, it's somewhat standardized and the east asian countries all have it (Korea, China, Japan). I know this because the Chinese Saturday School was close by. It's usually sponsored by the embassy & in the capital cities, or places with many Japanese families. (London, Germany, Canada afaik)
Because it's only once a week, it was from 09:00 - 14:00 or similar. The slots was: Language (Japanese), Social Studies (History, Geography, Social systems) and then Math. They usually gave homework, which was a little up to the parent to enforce. Classes was quite small: elementary school the most, but no more than 10. Middle school was always single digit (5 for my class). Depends on place and economy: When the comapnies Ericsson (Sweden) and Sony (Japan) had a joint division Sony-Ericsson, many classes doubled.
Class didn't differ so much from the normal school in Asia. Less strict. But the school organized a lot of events such as Undoukai (Sports Day), Theater play, and new years/setsubun festival and other things common in Japanese schools. It served as a place for many asian parents to meet each other too, so it became a bit of a community.
Because lack of students the one I went to only had from 1th to 9th grade. In London and bigger cities I heard they have up until high-school. But in Japan, Some colleges have 帰国子女枠 (returnee entrance system) so I know one alumni that went to Tokyo Uni after highschool.
Personally, I liked it. I hated having to go one extra day to school, but being able to have classmate to share part of your culture (before internet was wide-spread) by sharing games, books, toys you brought home from holiday in Japan was very valuable.
Related to the "critical thinking" part of the original article: It was also interesting to read two history books. Especially modern history. The Swedish (pretending to be neutral) one and the Japanese one (pretending they didn't do anything bad) as an example, for WW2 and aftermath. Being exposed to two rhetoric, both technically not a lie (but by omission), definitely piqued my curiosity as a kid.
You mentioned that these classes were good enough that they made swedish classes a breeze in comparison. What differences in teaching made Saturday school so much more effective?
You did mention class size, and the sense of community, which were probably important, but is there anything else related to the teaching style that you thought helped? Or conversely, something that was missing in the regular school days that made them worse?
>What differences in teaching made Saturday school so much more effective?
I do think the smaller class and feeling more "close" to the teacher helped a lot. But also that the teachers were passionate. It's a community so I still (20 years later) do meet some of the teachers, through community events.
I can't recall all the details, to be honest, but I do think a lot repetition of math exercises and actually going through them step by step helped a lot to solidify how to think. I feel like the Japanese math books also went straight to the point, but still made the book colorful in a way. Swedish math books felt bland. (something I noticed in college too, but understandable in college ofc)
In the Swedish school, it felt like repetition was up to homework. You go through a concept, maybe one example, on the whiteboard and then move on. Unless you have active parents, it's hard to get timely feedback on homeworks (crucial for learning) so people fell behind.
Also probably that curriculum was handed to the student early. You knew what chapters you were going through at what week, and what exercises were important. I can't recall getting that (or that teachers followed it properly) early in the term at Swedish school.
They also focused on different thing. For example the multiplication table, in Japan you're explicitly taught to memorize it and are tested on recall speed. (7 * 8? You have 2 seconds) in Swedish schools, they despised memorization so told us not to. The result is "how to think about this problem" is answered with a "mental model" in Japanese education and "figure it out yourself" in the Swedish one. Some figured it out in a suboptimal way.
But later in the curriculum it obviously help to be able to calculate fast to keep up, so those small things compounded, i think.
Okay, you gotta spill - what's some stuff Sweden was pretending to be neutral on?
(As a poorly informed US dude) I'm aware of Japan's aversion to the worse events of the war, but haven't really heard anything at all about bad stuff in Sweden
I'm a Brit who speaks Swedish, and recently watched the Swedish TV company SVT's documentary "Sweden in the war" (sverige i kriget). I can maybe add some info here just out of personal curiosity on the same subject.
There were basically right wing elements in every European country. Sympathisers. This included Sweden. So that's what OP was getting at in part. Germany was somewhat revered at the time, as an impressive economic and cultural force. There was a lot of cultural overlap, and conversely the Germans respected the heritage and culture of Scandinavia and also of England, which it saw as a Germanic cousin.
The documentary did a good job of balancing the fact that Sweden let the German army and economy use its railways and iron ore for far longer than it should have, right up until it became finally too intolerable to support them in any way (discovery of the reality of the camps). Neutrality therefore is somewhat subjective in that respect.
They had precedent for neutrality, from previous conflicts where no side was favoured, so imo they weren't implicitly supporting the nazi movement, despite plenty of home support. It's a solid strategy from a game theory perspective. No mass bombings, few casualties, wait it out, be the adult in the room. Except they didn't know how bad it would get.
In their favour they allowed thousands of Norwegian resistance fighters to organise safely in Sweden. They offered safe harbour to thousands of Jewish refugees from all neighbouring occupied countries. They protected and supplied Finns too. British operatives somehow managed to work without hindrance on missions to take out German supplies moving through Sweden. It became a neutral safe space for diplomats, refugees and resistance fighters. And this was before they found out the worst of what was going on.
Later they took a stand, blocked German access and were among the first to move in and liberate the camps/offer red cross style support.
Imo it's a very nuanced situation and I'm probably more likely to give the benefit of the doubt at this point. But many Danes and Norwegians were displeased with the neutral stance as they battled to avoid occupation and deportations.
As for Japan, I'd just add that I read recently on the BBC that some 40% or more of the victims of the bombings were Koreans. As second class citizens they had to clean up the bodies and stayed among the radioactive materials far longer than native residents, who could move out to the country with their families. They live on now with intergenerational medical and social issues with barely a nod of recognition.
To think it takes the best part of 100 years for all of this to be public knowledge is testament to how much every participant wants to save face. But at what cost? The legacy of war lives on for centuries, it would seem.
And who were the teachers? Did it cost money, how much? How long ago? I guess the students were motivated and disciplined? Who were the other students? Natives, you mean swedes?
Sorry, by natives I meant Japanese Natives; A school for japanese kids (kids of japanese parents). Although I read that in Canada they recently removed that restriction, since there's now 3rd and 4th generation Canadian that teaches Japanese to the kids.
The teachers was often Japanese teachers. Usually they did teaching locally (in Sweden) or had other jobs, but most of them with a teaching license (in Japan). My Mother also did teaching there for a short time, and told me that the salary was very very low (like 300$ or something, per month) and people mostly did it for passion or part of the community thing.
I did a quick googling and right now the price seems 100$ for entering the school, and around 850$ per year. Not sure about the teachers salary now or what back then.
Other students were either: Half-Swedish/Japanese, settled in Sweden. Immigrants with both parent Japanese, settled in Sweden. Expats kids (usually in Sweden for a short time, 1-2 years, for work) both parent Japanese. The former two spoke both language, the latter only spoke Japanese.
And still (or maybe because?) the resulting adults in Sweeden score above e.g Korea in both numeracy and adaptive problem solving (but slightly less than Japan). The race is not about being best at 16 after all.
Probably attributable to a time lag as the Korean GDP per capita in the 1960's was close to sub-Saharan African levels + military junta rule that stymied liberal education for a good cohort of the population. Countries like Spain also show similarities to Korea and when looking at youth scoring, things tend to be more equal.
I have as much of a fundamental issue with “Saturday school” for children as I do with professionals thinking they should be coding on their days off. When do you get a chance to enjoy your childhood?
As a kid, the "fun" about Saturday school fluctuated. In the beginning it was super fun, after a while it became a chore (and I whined to my mom) but in the end I enjoyed it and it was tremendously valuable. The school had a lot of cultural activities (sport day, new years celebration / setsubun etc) and having a second set of classmates that shared a different side of you was actually fun for me. So it added an extra dimension of enjoyment in my childhood :)
Especially since (back then) being an (half) asian nerd kid in a 99.6% White (blonde & blue eyed) school meant a lot of ridicule and minor bullying. The saturday school classes were too small for bullying to not get noticed, and also served as a second community where you could share your stuff without ridicule or confusion :)
The experience made me think that it's tremendously valuable for kids to find multiple places (at least one outside school) where they can meet their peers. Doesn't have to be a school, but a hobby community, sport group, music groups, etc. Anything the kid might like, and there's shared interest.
It teaches kid that being liked by a random group of people (classmates) is not everything in life, and you increase the chance of finding like-minded people. Which reflect rest of life better anyway (being surrounded by nerds is by far the best perk of being an engineer)
I know 2 class mates (out of 7) that hated it there, and since it's not mandatory they left after elementary school. So a parent should ofc check if t he kids enjoy it (and if not, why) and let the kid have a say in it.
There is a huge difference between not wanting to be around people who don’t agree with you about the benefits and drawbacks of supply side economics and not wanting to be around someone who disrespects you as a person because of the color of your skin.
Neither he (half Asian) or I (Black guy) owe the latter our time or energy to get along with. Let them wallow in their own ignorance.
That's a very bad-faith take on what I wrote. I'll self-quote:
>The experience made me think that it's tremendously valuable for kids to find *multiple places* (at least one outside school) where they can meet their peers.
Most people don't neatly fit in to "one" category. Trying to find many places you could meet peers can open up your mind (and also people around you)
For many, coding can be fun and it's not an external obligation like eating veggies or going to the gym (relatedly, some also enjoy veggies and the gym).
Some people want to deeply immerse into a field. Yes, they sacrifice other ways of spending that time and they will be less well rounded characters. But that's fine. It's also fine to treat programming as a job and spend free time in regular ways like going for a hike or cinema or bar or etc.
And similarly, some kids, though this may not fully overlap with the parents who want their kids to be such, also enjoy learning, math, etc. Who love the structured activities and dread the free play time. I'd say yes, they should be pushed to do regular kid things to challenge themselves too, but you don't have to mold the kids too much against what their personality is like if it is functional and sustainable.
But it is a false dichotomy. You can both offer resources to the ones behind and support high achievers.
The latter can pretty much teach themselves with little hands on guidance, you just have to avoid actively sabotaging them.
Many western school systems fail that simple requirement in several ways: they force unchallenging work even when unneeded, don’t offer harder stimulating alternatives, fail to provide a safe environment due to the other student’s disruption…
Maybe you can have all quiet and focused students together in the same classroom?
They might be reading different books, different speed, and have different questions to the teachers. But when they focus and don't interrupt each other, that can be fine?
Noisy students who sabotage for everyone shouldn't be there though.
Grouping students on some combination of learning speed and ability to focus / not disturbing the others. Rather than only learning speed. Might depend on the size of the school (how many students)
For what it's worth, that's how the Montessori school I went to worked. I have my critiques of the full Montessori approach (too long for a comment), but the thing that always made sense was mixed age and mixed speed classrooms.
The main ideas that I think should be adopted are:
1. A "lesson" doesn't need to take 45 minutes. Often, the next thing a kid will learn isn't some huge jump. It's applying what they already know to an expanded problem.
2. Some kids just don't need as much time with a concept. As long as you're consistently evaluating understanding, it doesn't really matter if everyone gets the same amount of teacher interaction.
3. Grade level should not be a speed limit; it also shouldn't be a minimum speed (at least as currently defined). I don't think it's necesarily a problem for a student to be doing "grade 5" math and "grade 2" reading as a 3rd grader. Growth isn't linear; having a multi-year view of what constitutes "on track" can allow students to stay with their peers while also learning at an appropriate pace for their skill level.
Some of this won't be feasible to implement at the public school level. I'm a realist in the sense that student to teacher ratios limit what's possible. But I think when every education solution has the same "everyone in a class goes the same speed" constraint, you end up with the same sets of problems.
Counterintuitive argument:'No one left behind' policies increase social segregation.
Universal education offers a social ladder. "Your father was a farmer, but you can be a banker, if put in the work".
When you set a lower bar (like enforcing a safe environment), smart kids will shoot forward. Yes, statistically, a large part of succesful kids will be the ones with better support networks, but you're stil judging results, for which environment is just a factor.
When you don't set this lower bar, rich kids who can move away will do it, because no one places their children in danger voluntarily. Now the subset of successful kids from a good background will thrive as always, but succesful kids from bad environments are stuck with a huge handicap and sink. You've made the lader purely, rather than partly, based on wealth.
And you get two awful side effects on top:
- you're not teaching the bottom kids that violating the safety of others implies rejection. That's a rule enforced everywhere, from any workplace through romantic relationships to even prison, and kids are now unprepared for that.
- you've taught the rest of the kids to think of the bottom ones as potential abusers and disruptors. Good luck with the resulting classism and xenophobia when they grow up.
There will always be a gap between kids who are rich and smart (if school won't teach them, a tutor will) and kids who are stupid (no one can teach them). We can only choose which side of this gap will the smart poor kids stand on. The attempts to make everyone at school equal put them on the side with the stupid kids.
Not sure if counterintuitive or not, but once you have such social mobility-based policies in place ("Your father was a farmer, but you can be a banker, if put in the work") for a few generations, generally people rise and sink to a level that will remain more stable for the later generations. Then even if you keep that same policy, the observation will be less social movement compared to generations before and that will frustrate people and they read it to mean that the policies are blocking social mobility.
You get most mobility after major upheavals like wars and dictatorships that strip people of property, or similar. The longer a liberal democratic meritocratic system is stable without upheavals and dispossession of the population through forced nationalization etc, the less effect the opportunities will have, because those same opportunities were already generally taken advantage of by the parent generation and before.
Ridiculous. Progress, by definition, is made by the people in front.
No one is saying to "focus solely on those ahead," but as long as resources are finite, some people will need to be left behind to find their own way. Otherwise those who can benefit from access to additional resources will lose out.
"Progress is made by the people in front" is plausibly true by definition.
"Progress is made by the people who were in front 15 years earlier" is not true by definition. (So: you can't safely assume that the people you need for progress are exactly the people who are doing best in school. Maybe some of the people who aren't doing so well there might end up in front later on.)
"Progress is made by the people who end up in front without any intervention" is not true by definition. (So: you can't safely assume that you won't make better progress by attending to people who are at risk of falling behind. Perhaps some of those people are brilliant but dyslexic, for a random example.)
"Progress is made by the people in front and everyone else is irrelevant to it" is not true by definition. (So: you can't safely assume that you will make most progress by focusing mostly on the people who will end up in front, even if you can identify who those are. Maybe their brilliant work will depend on a whole lot of less glamorous work by less-brilliant people.)
I strongly suspect that progress is made mostly by people who don't think in soundbite-length slogans.
Although in a global world, it's not clear that it's best for a country to focus on getting the absolute best, IF if means the average suffers from it. There is value in being the best, but for the economy it's also important to have enough good enough people to utilise the new technology/science(which gets imported from abroad), and they don't need to be the absolute best.
As a bit of a caricature example, if cancer is completely cured tomorrow, it's not necessarily the country inventing the cure which will be cancer free first, but the one with the most doctors able to use and administer the cure.
If everyone can't get a Nobel prize, no one should!
The so-called intelligent kids selfishly try to get ahead and build rockets or cure cancer, but they don't care about the feelings of those who can't build rockets or cure cancer. We need education to teach them that everyone is special in exactly the same way.
This is a false dichotomy though, as I linked previously in this thread, adult Sweeds are above Koreans, and only slightly below Japanese in both literacy, numeracy, and problem solving.
Personally I think it's easy to overestimate how important it is to be good at something at 16 for the skill at 25. Good university is infinitely more important than 'super elite' high school.
So, here's a time machine. You can go back to a time and place of lasting, enduring stability. There have been been numerous such periods in recorded history that have lasted for more than a human lifetime, and likely even more prior to that. (Admittedly a bit of a tautology, given that most 'recorded history' is a record of things happening rather than things staying the same.)
It will be a one-way trip, of course. What year do you set the dial to?
Ok, please surrender your cellphones, internet, steam, tools, writing, etc... all those were given to you by the best of the crop and not the median slop.
Most of what I remember of my high school education in France was: here are the facts, and here is the reasoning that got us there.
The exams were typically essay-ish (even in science classes) where you either had to basically reiterate the reasoning for a fact you already knew, or use similar reasoning to establish/discover a new fact (presumably unknown to you because not taught in class).
Unfortunately, it didn't work for me and I still have about the same critical thinking skills as a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau.
I don't know if I have critical thinking or not. But I often question - WHY is this better? IS there any better way? WHY it must be done such a way or WHY such rule exists?
For example in electricity you need at least that amount of cross section if doing X amount of amps over Y length. I want to dig down and understand why? Ohh, the smaller the cross section, the more it heats! Armed with this info I get many more "Ohhs": Ohh, that's why you must ensure the connections are not loose. Oohhh, that's why an old extension cord where you don't feel your plug solidly clicks in place is a fire hazard. Ohh, that's why I must ensure the connection is solid when joining cables and doesn't lessen cross section. Ohh, that's why it's a very bad idea to join bigger cables with a smaller one. Ohh, that's why it is a bad idea to solve "my fuse is blowing out" by inserting a bigger fuse but instead I must check whether the cabling can support higher amperage (or check whether device has to draw that much).
And yeah, this "intuition" is kind of a discovery phase and I can check whether my intuition/discovery is correct.
Basically getting down to primitives lets me understand things more intuitively without trying to remember various rules or formulas. But I noticed my brain is heavily wired in not remembering lots of things, but thinking logically.
We don't have enough time to go over things like this over and over again. Somebody already analyzed/tried all this and wrote in a book and they teach you in school from that book how it works and why. Yeah if you want to know more or understand better you can always dig it out yourself. At least today you can learn tons of stuff.
We don't have enough time to derive everything from first principles, but we do have the time to go over how something was derived, or how something works.
A common issue when trying this is trying to teach all layers at the same level of detail. But this really isn't necessary. You need to know the equation for Ohms law, but you can give very handwavy explanations for the underlying causes. For example: why do thicker wires have less resistance? Electricity is the movement of electrons, more cross section means more electrons can move, like having more lanes on a highway. Why does copper have less resistance than aluminum? Copper has an electron that isn't bound as tightly to the atom. How does electricity know which path has the least resistance? It doesn't, it starts flowing down all paths equally at a significant fraction of the speed of light, then quickly settles in a steady state described by Ohm's law. Reserve the equations and numbers for the layers that matter, but having a rough understanding of what's happening on the layer below makes it easier to understand the layer you care about, and makes it easier to know when that understanding will break down (because all of science and engineering are approximations with limited applicability)
> How does electricity know which path has the least resistance? It doesn't, it starts flowing down all paths equally at a significant fraction of the speed of light, then quickly settles in a steady state described by Ohm's law.
> because all of science and engineering are approximations with limited applicability
Something I heard but haven't dig into, because my use case (DIY, home) doesn't care. In some other applications approximation at this level may not work and more detailed understanding may be needed :)
And yeah, some theory and telling of things others discovered for sure needs to be done. That is just the entry point for digging. And understanding how something was derived is just a tool for me to more easily remember/use the knowledge.
Are you being serious or is this satire? What an odd perspective to share on Hacker News. We're a bunch of nerds that take pleasure in understanding how things work when you take them apart, whether that's a physics concept or a washing machine. Or am I projecting an ethos?
On the contrary, the French "dissertation" exercise requires to articulate reasoning and facts, and come up with a plan for the explanation. It is the same kind of thinking that you are required to produce when writing a scientifically paper.
It is however not taught very well by some teachers, who skirt on explaining how to properly do it, which might be your case.
On the contrary, your OP claims that dissertations require a rehash of the references cited in class. A real dissertation exercises logic and requires mobilizing facts and verbal precision to ground arguments. It is also highly teacher-dependent: if the correction is lax or not properly explained, you won’t understand what the exercise really is or how you are supposed to think in order to succeed.
Perhaps you overestimate me (or underestimate Beaujolais Nouveau (though how one could underestimate Beaujolais Nouveau is a mystery to me, but I digress)).
But also, it takes a lot of actual learning of facts and understanding reasoning to properly leverage that schooling and I've had to accept that I am somewhat deficient at both. :)
One thing I've come to understand about myself since my ADHD diagnosis is how hard thinking actually is for me. Especially thinking "to order", like problem solving or planning ahead. I'm great at makeshift solutions that will hold together until something better comes along. But deep and sustained thought for any length of time increases the chance that I'll become aware that I'm thinking and then get stuck in a fruitless meta cognition spiral.
An analogy occurred to me the other day that it's like diving into a burning building to rescue possessions. If I really go for it I could get lucky and retrieve a passport or pet, but I'm just as likely to come back with an egg whisk!
I think all this stuff is so complex and multi-faceted that we often get only a small part of the picture at a time.
I likely have some attention/focus issues, but I also know they vary greatly (from "can't focus at all" to "I can definitely grok this") based on how actually interested I am in a topic (and I often misjudge that actual level of interest).
I also know my very negative internal discourse, and my fixed mindset, are both heavily influenced by things that occurred decades ago, and keeping myself positively engaged in something by trying to at least fake a growth mindset is incredibly difficult.
Meanwhile, I'm perfectly willing to throw unreasonable brute force effort at things (ie I've done many 60+ hour weeks working in tech and bunches of 12 hour days in restaurant kitchens), but that's probably been simultaneously both my biggest strength and worst enemy.
At the same time, I don't think you should ignore the value of an egg whisk. You can use it to make anything from mayonnaise to whipped cream, not to mention beaten egg whites that have a multitude of applications. Meanwhile, the passport is easy enough to replace, and your pet (forgive me if I'm making the wrong assumption here) doesn't know how to use the whisk properly.
I’ve heard many bad things said of the Beaujolais Nouveau, and of my sense of taste for liking it, but this is the first time I’ve seen its critical-thinking skills questioned.
In its/your/our defense, I think it’s a perfectly smart wine, and young at heart!
> In the Swedish schoolsystem, the idea for the past 20 years has been exactly this, that is to try to teach critical thinking, reasoning, problem solving etc rather than hard facts. The results has been...not great.
I'm not sure I'd agree that it's been outright "not great". I myself am the product of that precise school-system, being born in 1992 in Sweden (but now living outside the country). But I have vivid memories of some of the classes where we talked about how to learn, how to solve problems, critical thinking, reasoning, being critical of anything you read in newspapers, difference between opinions and facts, how propaganda works and so on. This was probably through year/class 7-9 if I remember correctly, and both me and others picked up on it relatively quick, and I'm not sure I'd have the same mindset today if it wasn't for those classes.
Maybe I was just lucky with good teachers, but surely there are others out there who also had a very different experience than what you outline? To be fair, I don't know how things are working today, but at least at that time it actually felt like I had use of what I was thought in those classes, compared to most other stuff.
In the world of software development I meet a breed of Swedish devs younger than 30 that can't write code very well, but who can wax Jira tickets and software methodologies and do all sort of things to get them into a management position without having to write code. The end result is toxic teams where the seniors and the devs brought from India are writing all the code while all the juniors are playing software architect, scrum master an product owners.
Not everybody is like that; seniors tend to be reliable and practical, and some juniors with programming-related hobbies are extremely competent and reasonable. But the chunk of "waxers" is big enough to be worrying.
Sweden is the 19th country in the PISA scores. And it is in the upper section on all education indexes. There has been a world decline on scores, but has nothing to do with the Swedish education system. (That does not mean that Sweden should not continue monitoring it and bringing improvements)
Considering our past and the Finnish progress (they considered following us in the 80s/90s as they had done but stopped), 19th is an disappointment.
Having teenagers that's been through most of the primary and secondary schools I kind agree with GP, especially when it comes to math,etc.
Teaching concepts and ideas is _great_, and what we need to manage with advanced topics as adults. HOWEVER, if the foundations are shaky due to too little repetition of basics (that is seemingly frowned upon in the system) then being taught thinking about some abstract concepts doesn't help much because the tools to understand them aren't good enough.
One should note that from the nineties onwards we put a large portion of our kids' education on the stock exchange and in the hands of upper class freaks instead of experts.
That is true. And I do not argue that education cannot be better and more fair. We saw how train privatization worked for Sweden. Education should not follow the same path.
But I have seen too many people arguing that education is collapsing and privatization is the answer. It is not. Improving the current system and removing private schools is the actual solution.
I have heard that in Netherlands there used to be (not sure if it is still there) a system where you have for example 4 rooms of children. Room A contains all children that are ahead of rooms B, C, D. If a child from room B learns pretty quickly - the child is moved to room A. However, if the child leaves behind the other children in room B - that child is moved in room C. Same for room C - those who can not catch up are moved to room D. In this way everyone is learning at max capacity. Those who can learn faster and better are not slowed down by others who can not (or do not want to) keep the pace. Everyone is happy - children, teachers, parents, community.
I think there’s a balance to be had. My country (Spain) is the very opposite, with everything from university access to civil service exams being memory focused.
The result is usually bottom of the barrel in the subjects that don’t fit that model well, mostly languages and math - the latter being the main issue as it becomes a bottleneck for teaching many other subjects.
It also creates a tendency for people to take what they learn as truth, which becomes an issue when they use less reputable sources later in life - think for example a person taking a homeopathy course.
Lots of parroting and cargo culting paired with limited cultural exposition due to monolingualism is a bad combination.
Media can fill that gap. People should be critical about global warming, antivax, anti israel, anti communism, racism, hate, whitr man, anti democracy, russia, china, trump...
This thing is bad, imhate it, problem solved! Modern critical thinking is pretty simple!
In future goverment can provide daily RSS feed, of things to be critical about. You can reduce national schooling system to a single vps server!
I think that’s a disingenuous take. Earlier in the piece the AWS CEO specifically says we should teach everyone the correct ways to build software despite the ubiquity of AI. The quote about creative problem solving was with respect to how to hire/get hired in a world where AI can let literally anyone code.
The problem is, in a capitalist society, who is going to be the company that will donate their time and money to teaching a junior developer who will simply go to another company for double the pay after 2 years?
In the Swedish schoolsystem, the idea for the past 20 years has been exactly this, that is to try to teach critical thinking, reasoning, problem solving etc rather than hard facts. The results has been...not great. We discovered that reasoning and critical thinking is impossible without a foundational knowledge about what to be critical about. I think the same can be said about software development.