[HN Gopher] Learning For Mastery (1968) [pdf]
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Learning For Mastery (1968) [pdf]
Author : throwaway71271
Score : 86 points
Date : 2023-09-01 08:38 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (files.eric.ed.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (files.eric.ed.gov)
| abdellah123 wrote:
| This is a marvelous piece of analysis of the "current"
| traditional educational landscape. Seems like things only got
| worse over 40 years ...
|
| Treating the problems of education indeed transcends the school
| and actually requires a great deal of political will and power.
| "Education" must guide politics and have power over it.
|
| And such a deep change in perspective and "economics" is just not
| conceivable within the realms of the modern society as it is now.
| It requires a deep change in method and people. And the latter
| circles back to education, which makes it a hopeless loop ...
|
| The only way to break it is to do "education" outside the realms
| of school, to target a "minority" (to be practical not to
| segregate), and to fight and work for a change that will make
| education central and at the top of society.
|
| P.S: By Education, I don't merely mean instruction. It's a
| holistic and profound change in a human being ... that it aims to
| create
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| > 40 years
|
| Sadly its almost 60 years :)
|
| Education tendencies seem to be incredibly latent and they have
| huge inertia. For example in The Netherlands the amount of
| languages you speak used to be a measure for intelligence, so
| most schools teach 4 languages from the age of 12 (out of 9
| subject 4 are languages). In the same time, languages are the
| easiest to test, and also the easiest to progress a mass of
| people. The easiest thing to test (and show improvement and
| etc) in the bloom pyramid is memory.
|
| You surely have people trying their hardest, like Julius
| Miller: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s9psf01ldo (1964) or
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3szmCF8-L8 but the system does
| not seem to respond to them/
|
| But it seems the education institution is not trying to teach
| people anything.
| eru wrote:
| > Treating the problems of education indeed transcends the
| school and actually requires a great deal of political will and
| power. "Education" must guide politics and have power over it.
|
| Isn't the problem that we are mixing education and politics in
| the first place?
|
| We should probably separate education and the state just as
| much as we separate church and state.
|
| (The touch of politics seldom enhances the quality of anything.
| The further your chosen activity is from politics, the easier
| it is to improve quietly improve it.
|
| Eg even just to stick to learning: Wikipedia and StackOverflow
| are great. And so are lots of great how-to books and freely
| available videos. They are as far removed from politics as it
| gets.)
| red_admiral wrote:
| If you look at everything from "Monicagate" (not the Clinton
| one!) to the recent moderator strike over AI-generated
| answers, StackOverflow is not as apolitical as you suggest?
|
| But to engage with your main point - I agree, and we can take
| Germany as an example here.
|
| During the Nazi period, everything was put in service of
| politics, so in math class you'd answer questions like
| "calculate how many extra hard-working German families we
| could support if we the state didn't have to spend so-and-so-
| many Reichsmarks per Jew".
|
| Since 1945, there's been a strong tradition to keep politics
| out of math and science education in Germany, and this seems
| to be mostly holding even in face of "social justice"
| pressure.
|
| Keeping politics out of "is Phonics a good teaching method?"
| would also have been a great idea in the English-speaking
| world.
| eru wrote:
| > If you look at everything from "Monicagate" (not the
| Clinton one!) to the recent moderator strike over AI-
| generated answers, StackOverflow is not as apolitical as
| you suggest?
|
| Sure, and Wikipedia also has its own politics.
|
| Yet, it's relatively easy to avoid both of them, if you
| want to.
|
| It's hard to avoid the political pressures on government-
| run and/or government-funded education.
| atoav wrote:
| I teach at a German University and I have never in a decade
| perceived even the slightest scintilla of any student
| creating "social justice pressure" in any of my or the
| classes of my collegues.
|
| Whenever there _was_ a social justice topic that made the
| waves, it was typically about some prof who legitimately
| acted like full blown asshole and thought everybody else
| has to put up with their ego -- if anything disrupted
| education in that case, it was them, and the student 's
| demands were basically a totally understandable demand to
| not have that guys ego get into the way of their education.
|
| As I am working at a liberal art school you would think I
| probably have witnessed the worst already, but I didn't.
| Concerns about "social justice"-people putting pressure on
| us always come from people who got no idea and are out of
| the educational field for a while. As of now I am nearly
| convinced that this is probably a collective mind virus
| that is 99% fiction (and the 1% where it is true has so
| little impact it doesn't even matter).
| adolph wrote:
| > As I am working at a liberal art school you would think
| I probably have witnessed the worst already, but I didn't
|
| _There are these two young fish swimming along and they
| happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who
| nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?"
| And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then
| eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes
| "What the hell is water?"_
|
| https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/
| abdellah123 wrote:
| I meant the needs of the education should guide "political"
| decisions.
|
| A simple example is that the education budget (percentage)
| should be in two digits!!
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Iirc , the stats show the more school budget the worse
| education.
|
| If you put "free" money into something the parasites will
| gather. Systems exist to extend themselves, not yo provide
| the service for which they were created (systemantics).
| [deleted]
| eru wrote:
| And I am saying that there shouldn't be an education item
| in the government's budget in the first place.
|
| (Just to be clear, I'm all for giving poor people money, so
| they can spend it as they see fit. Be that education or
| food or entertainment etc. By contrast, rich people don't
| need government hand-outs.)
| gausswho wrote:
| Disassembling public education would have substantial
| societal externalities. If education is anything you want
| it to be, why not graduate from DraftKings Precocious
| Kids HIgh School?
| eru wrote:
| Sorry, I don't understand the second sentence.
|
| Yes, I agree that public education has substantial costs.
| Both direct costs to the victims and societal
| externalities. Disassembling the monster would hopefully
| stop some of them.
| gausswho wrote:
| So if up to an individual, what do you think they would
| choose for their education if there were no mandates
| agreed upon by their government. DraftKings is a gambling
| titan that could offer a very profitable option.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/56fzWyOxhJg (super short
| argument)
|
| Milton Friedman had some free market arguments for the
| school system.
| gyulai wrote:
| I do not at all think that, if government wasn't in the
| business of setting those standards, the standards would
| turn out lower.
|
| Reputation would follow the institutions, and graduating
| from an institution that set lows standards wouldn't have
| any signalling power to prospective employers, so
| students wouldn't want to enroll there.
|
| What you actually see in countries that have both a
| private and public education system is that the private
| institutions compete on the grounds of who sets the
| highest standards, not on who offers the most riskless
| opportunity to students to get the degree, irrespective
| of how low an effort they put in or how incapable they
| are.
|
| If you're talking of a huge number of small institutions
| in combination with high mobility, then maybe reputation
| at the level of the individual institution wouldn't do
| the trick, but you would probably see certification and
| quality assurance agencies pop up to establish brands and
| enforce standards around them.
| gausswho wrote:
| Well put. I recognize your argument, but ultimately don't
| share your faith that private certification bodies will
| do a better job than a government body such as the
| Department of Education (as long as such an organization
| is not intentionally devolved with unmeriting stooges). I
| may switch opinion depending on if we are speaking about
| schools/universities vs. jobs/trades. But it isn't one or
| the other. An institution can have a reputation as well
| as have standards to meet determined by a government
| department, and I would likely advocate that a hybrid
| approach is better than one or the other.
|
| Measuring up a student/candidate who was home schooled or
| self-taught works for some schools/vocations more than
| others. Having certification/accreditation of some sort
| streamlines the selection process. Whether such quality
| is best defined by the market-driven private certifiers
| or the government will depend on what type of education
| we're talking about, and even then will be muddied by
| one's belief in the efficacy of free markets vs
| democratic governance, which is a whole other can 'o
| worms.
| hooverd wrote:
| Could you define politics here? I don't see how you could
| separate "politics" from education other than by just not
| teaching history or anything that touches on social issues.
| trane_project wrote:
| My implementation of mastery learning (along with other related
| ideas): https://github.com/trane-project/trane/
|
| It bothered me enough that there was not something like this
| already available, when the idea seemed so simple, that I ended
| up doing it myself. The user experience is not very polished yet,
| but I managed to turn the courses in here
| https://improviseforreal.com/learning-materials into courses for
| this software that can teach you ear training and to improvise on
| any instrument in all keys, all modes, and most common chord
| progression. Currently, I am doing it for piano, but I've only
| reached about 15% of the total jam tracks so far. Obviously, I am
| not distributing the tracks myself.
|
| I am pretty sure the main issue is that there's no one funding
| implementing these ideas. We've known about mastery learning,
| spaced repetition, interleaving, etc. for decades, but it's not
| all been put together into a coherent system. Something like
| https://mathacademy.com/ is similar, but it's not open sourced
| and cannot be used to create your own materials. No need for LLMs
| or anything fancier to be involved when there's so much low-
| hanging fruit that's not been implemented yet. The core of my
| software is just a depth-first search over a graph, lol.
| begueradj wrote:
| There is also "The Improvement of the Mind" book, by Isaac Watts.
| It even shaped one of the great minds of science: Michael Faraday
| totetsu wrote:
| Is this a counterpoint to the openai ai for education discussion?
| drhodes wrote:
| A more legible copy with selectable text:
| https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED053419.pdf
| dang wrote:
| Ok, let's change to that from
| http://www.researchforteachers.org.uk/sites/default/files/Do...
| above. Thanks!
| gyulai wrote:
| "researchforteachers dot org dot uk" sounds like it might be an
| interesting organization that I'd like to know more about, but
| the domain root is just a login mask. Does anyone have details on
| who is behind and what else they offer to the general public
| besides a scanned PDF of an interesting article?
| isaacfrond wrote:
| tl;dr if you provide each student with the appropriate kind and
| quality of instruction and the amount of time available for
| learning then the majority of students will achieve mastery.
| thechao wrote:
| I had two of my kids in a mastery school. The school didn't
| "do" mastery very, well, but it's a lot better than public
| school. Students learn different parts of a subject at
| different rates. By tuning the time the kids had to learn a
| sub-subject, they could fully master the subject, and at an
| accelerated pace compare to public school.
|
| If I could get Khan-academy + peer socialization + baby sitting
| "in one room", I think that'd be ideal.
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