Man it's almost like a system designed to pump out Prussian civil servants and deliver basic literancy to rural children isn't suoer relevant anymore.
posted by The Whelk at 3:27 PM on September 4, 2013 [46 favorites]

Amen. I was an extremely curious kid who read all the time, yet hated school with a burning passion. It's some kind of miracle that I became a professor. (Though my school was unusually prison-esque...in fact, if you saw it, you'd probably guess that it was, in fact, a prison.)

Every time I hear a proposal to lengthen the school day or year, I feel something just shy of physical pain. Heaping on more of something vile, sould-deadening and ineffective is not a good solution.

I'm not sure that the Sudbury Valley system would work in the rather more Lord-of-the-Flies-ish setting of the Missouri Ozarks...but, for the love of God, something needs to be done...
posted by Fists O'Fury at 3:31 PM on September 4, 2013 [16 favorites]

I was the sort of kid who should have loved school, and for a while I did. But the longer I stayed in school the more it turned into a grind wherein I learned to keep my head down, do the bare minimum required to achieve the results I desired, and just Play. The. Game.

Depending on who you ask, this is either a failure or a triumph of the system.
posted by The Card Cheat at 3:33 PM on September 4, 2013 [18 favorites]

This is such a fluff piece. Learning is difficult. There's a point where no matter what subject you want to learn and master, the novelty wears off and you simply have to have the discipline and fortitude to see it through. Anybody can be a dilettante at any subject, but it takes years of fortitude, discipline and being trained rigorously to learn something well enough to be paid to do it.

Furthermore, the Sudbury system is something that is exponentially more expensive than any current alternative and I don't see it being a serious possibility in any place without a shitload of money (upper class only!) to facilitate such experimentation.

Not to say I don't think that our current education system requires a lot of revamping, but expecting children to self-direct learning into something cohesive, and on a wide enough level to achieve long-term and region-wide application and validity? Not going to happen.
posted by kurosawa's pal at 3:37 PM on September 4, 2013 [47 favorites]

The blueprint still used for today’s schools was developed during the Protestant Reformation, when schools were created to teach children to read the Bible, to believe scripture without questioning it, and to obey authority figures without questioning them.

Sure, in that literacy for most of history was based around that of religious texts - also known as the most widely distributed, and culturally relevant piece of literature available.

Was this meant to disarm liberals for the oncoming homeschooling sell?

My understanding is, it didn't start with the Reformation; sticking kids in a room and telling them things has been around since antiquity. The main difference since then is that as of this century it's not solely limited to children of the elites, and our notion of what consists of "basic literacy" has expanded considerably.

I'm not even disagreeing with the author's premise - schools can be pretty terrible places, and there is something soul crushing about the whole experience. And insert caveat here on how it targets the median and often fails to help kids from extremely shitty home lives.

That said, it's been an outrageous success. We live in an age of mass literacy! My grandmother, alive today and not all that old either, comes from a time where basic literacy was still reserved for a minority of the population and it totally blows my mind how much things have changed.

I think schools are doing OK. They could be less oppressive.

But given the correlation between a child's cognitive skills and the amount of stress in the lives of it's parents, I'm skeptical whether we wouldn't see a bigger bang for our buck by championing a better safety net.
posted by pmv at 3:39 PM on September 4, 2013 [54 favorites]

This article is interesting, but I really want to look at more than the author's one article on this. He has a throwaway line about diversity, but a private school in Framingham screams moderate to high Social/Economic Status. What percentage of students from the surrounding area in the same SES also went to college? The outcomes study is interesting but does not have a comparison group. (True control groups are generally thought of as impossible in education studies, so researchers generally try to find a comparable group.)

Also, as with all teaching (or unteaching) methods, this will work for some, but not all students. The current method is ghastly, but I know that if I had not been in classes until I was in sixth grade, the psychologist advice to my parents ("Don't think about college, just try to keep him out of jail.") when I was six might have been more relevant.

How well would the students of Sudbury do if they were all drawn from families that were more concerned with where the next meal was coming from then making sure the kids were productive/thoughtful all day?

Finally, I am a math person. I know that there is a general thought that anyone can learn math, there are people who are bad at math, just bad math teachers, but there are some people to whom math comes more easily. I am one of them. I know that I would not have made it through Trigonometry, let alone Calculus in high school if I had been self-directed. I know there are people who can, but they are fewer and farther between than those of us who could get it in high school.

On preview, kurosawa's pal said it better.
posted by Hactar at 3:42 PM on September 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

Self-directed learning sounds like a great way to have a nation of experts on Pokemon.
posted by entropicamericana at 3:42 PM on September 4, 2013 [30 favorites]

Self-directed learning sounds like a great way to have a nation of experts on Pokemon.

I have a very, very jaded view of the US education system at this point and am wondering if a nation of Pokemon experts with basic literacy, numeracy, and science backgrounds would be worse than what we're currently getting.

It would certainly be more fun, and enjoying what time we have certainly seems like a great goal.

Especially when so much specialization and training is done just before or as you become really ready for the working life.
posted by Slackermagee at 3:48 PM on September 4, 2013 [7 favorites]

Self-directed learning sounds like a great way to have a nation of experts on Pokemon.

Wait. Are you just talking about kids being good at the video game OR a more in-universe comparison to Ash Ketchum, basically an army of ten year olds heading out into the world and doing whatever the heck they like. Not that the latter wouldn't necessarily lead to the former though...
posted by FJT at 3:50 PM on September 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

It would certainly be more fun,

Well, by all means, if it's more fun..

Especially when so much specialization and training is done just before or as you become really ready for the working life.

What what about the basic set of knowledge people were once expected to have to be a functioning adult citizen in the world? History, civics, math, et cetera...

Wait. Are you just talking about kids being good at the video game OR a more in-universe comparison to Ash Ketchum, basically an army of ten year olds heading out into the world and doing whatever the heck they like. Not that the latter wouldn't necessarily lead to the former though...

I'm talking about kids spending their time of useless minutia and trivia instead of important and useful things.
posted by entropicamericana at 3:56 PM on September 4, 2013 [3 favorites]

I'm talking about kids spending their time of useless minutia and trivia instead of important and useful things.

Thanks to No Child Left Behind, we don't have to imagine what that might look like. We can go ask college freshmen.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:59 PM on September 4, 2013 [28 favorites]

If a childhood running through the long grass constantly getting attacked by sparrows and rats and trying to toughen up my turtle by yelling at it til it beats the crap out of other kids' beloved pets while an identically dressed couple pull increasingly elaborate schemes to steal my mouse and/or give the guy excuses to crossdress while chasing me in a cat shaped balloon is wrong, I don't want to be right.
posted by emmtee at 3:59 PM on September 4, 2013 [40 favorites]

I know a lot of people who love self-directed learning and are utterly convinced that doing boring drills is the death of curiosity and creativity. The counterexample of learning to play the piano always come to my mind. To be a creative piano player, you have to have gone through the extremely tedious discipline of scales and practicing the same songs over and over again. Putting this premise to the empirical test, it doesn't seem like rote learning is necessarily the enemy of creativity. It seems more that some rote learning is necessary so that you can be creative at all, and you're probably not going to get a genius composer by putting a piano in a room and telling the kids to go wild with it.

I think there's also a significant short-term disadvantage to this viewpoint, which is that kids can't easily tell the difference between a parent adopting a "self-directed" educational style, and them simply being uninterested in the kid's education. Some parents are so terrified of treading on their child's autonomy and they back off so far that they end up sending the message of "Do what you want! Nothing you do matters to me."
posted by AlsoMike at 3:59 PM on September 4, 2013 [15 favorites]

Reading through, I noticed that the author avoids a discussion of the issue of childhood poverty, as well as a look at our rather anti-intellectual culture. Any argument about the problems that our schools face that ignores those two topics is one that I refuse to take seriously.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:59 PM on September 4, 2013 [19 favorites]

Tuition at Sudbury: admissions interview, $50; visiting week, $250; annual tuition for the first child in the family, $8200; and a sliding scale for siblings.

So, similar to tuition at a Catholic school, out of reach for students in the area where I used to teach.

One of the reasons private schools work so well is that they can pick their students and ask students who are having problems to leave. Also, the parents are usually motivated and involved in their children's education. Public schools are required to serve everyone. When I see people advocating homeschooling as solution for everyone, I think about the parents working two jobs and wonder what they are supposed to do.
posted by betweenthebars at 4:02 PM on September 4, 2013 [19 favorites]

I'm still wondering how there used to be time for civics and music and art, and now there's not.
posted by Benny Andajetz at 4:03 PM on September 4, 2013 [11 favorites]

I noticed that the author avoids a discussion of the issue of childhood poverty

This. It makes me insane, especially in other forums (this article being discussed on Hacker News is enough to drive me to murder), that these discussions always center on some version of the myth of the noble, curious, childlike savage (and how that figure is being failed by our Prussian-originated prison-industrial education sausage factory), while ignoring the huge role that poverty and relative economics plays. Over on HN, they're busy slapping themselves on the back for being child-loving enough to homeschool, which is difficult on a Silicon Valley salary but some sacrifices are worth making.
posted by fatbird at 4:04 PM on September 4, 2013 [10 favorites]

Articles like this come out so reliably every few years, it sort of brings to mind the joke about a group of people who've gone from actually telling the joke to referring to them by number.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 4:05 PM on September 4, 2013 [5 favorites]

I don't disagree the classroom needs work. But we need to do the reform within the public school system, not abandon it.

Also, I hated school at the time, but looking back, it really wasn't that bad and certainly not worse than most other challenging but necessary and rewarding things in life.

I also feel like people really exaggerate how uniquely bad being in school is a lot these days, in much the same way kids exaggerate the difficulty and/or inconvenience of anything that keeps them from just letting their undisciplined attentions wander aimlessly from one trivial distraction/entertaining sense-experience to the next if left to their own devices.
posted by saulgoodman at 4:06 PM on September 4, 2013 [7 favorites]

I know it's not a trendy opinion right now. Hell, public school enrollment is down something like 30% this year in my state, with (completely unaccountable and ungraded) private online schools now in the mix. But I think we're making huge mistakes when it comes to education and the public system right now.
posted by saulgoodman at 4:09 PM on September 4, 2013

The thing is that there is a vast difference between education reform and education "reform". Guess what's getting sold to us?
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:12 PM on September 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

Re: HN discussion et al., there always seems to be a strong current of "Well I'm a pretty great person, if only schools had been even better at catering to what I needed/wanted/now think I needed then, then everyone would come out great." Nevermind so much as acknowledging the myriad of problems that affected others but not themselves personally.
posted by kiltedtaco at 4:15 PM on September 4, 2013 [4 favorites]

This reminded me of something from The Third Teacher, a book about rethinking the design of educational environments. Sir Ken Robinson compares schools to factories:

"The whole process of public education came about primarily to meet the needs of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the current system just doesn't represent the interests of the industrial model, it embodies them. To begin with, there's a very strong sense of conformity. Second, the pedagogical model is based on the idea of transmission. Teachers teach and students learn. That's buttressed by the idea that the efficient way to do this is to educate kids by age - as though the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture. And the third big feature is the hierarchy of subjects - You have science and math at the top, and languages, then the arts further down. [...] The school buildings represent all of that. You have separate facilities for different subjects. The classroom arrangements are people sitting facing the front where someone's speaking to them. And there are large examination rooms. It's the factory model."
posted by oulipian at 4:16 PM on September 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

Furthermore, the Sudbury system is something that is exponentially more expensive than any current alternative and I don't see it being a serious possibility in any place without a shitload of money (upper class only!) to facilitate such experimentation.

Hmm.

Sudbury annual cost per student: $8200
US spending per student: $10,559
MA spending per student: $13,941
posted by crayz at 4:16 PM on September 4, 2013 [15 favorites]

The problem with talking about education reform is that everyone thinks they are an expert because all of us went to school. And everyone was bored to tears by school. This does not make you an expert. Some of us have actually studied education reforms and even hold advanced degrees on the subject. This is a fluff piece that barely scratches the surface; every assertion he makes makes me want to rebut with 2 or 3 conditionals and counter arguments. And shame on me for not doing so but I have class to teach in about 30 minutes and still have prep to do.
posted by zardoz at 4:19 PM on September 4, 2013 [34 favorites]

I loved school. I got a perfect attendance trophy almost every year. And a plaque for straight A's. I loved reading, writing, math, theater, and science.

I liked going to school. I used to pretend it was my job. I had this little skirt-suit when I was 7 or 8 even, haha.

I was such a weird little kid with such a vivid imagination. Good times.
posted by discopolo at 4:19 PM on September 4, 2013 [11 favorites]

You're comparing tuition charged to dollars spent, which is not appropriate, considering that most private schools have various funding sources other than tuition. It also ignores the cost incurred by public schools which must take all students vs. private schools that can decline to take students with special needs (and thus extra expense).
posted by kiltedtaco at 4:26 PM on September 4, 2013 [21 favorites]

Some of us have actually studied education reforms and even hold advanced degrees on the subject... every assertion he makes makes me want to rebut with 2 or 3 conditionals and counter arguments.

The author is a psychologist and professor emeritus at Boston College and has specialized in educational and developmental psychology and written and spoken at length on the topic. Wanting to rebut isn't the same as actually doing so.
posted by crayz at 4:28 PM on September 4, 2013 [10 favorites]

crayz: Such a comparison ignores all the little things that Sudbury does that allows them to work so cheaply. For example, they interview prospective students, and exclude any that would not "fit" their model. They also rely on engaged parents to supply a basic modicum of entry skills, as well as a supportive home structure. Remove these things, and one of two outcomes occur - either it gets much more expensive to run the model (since now you have to pay for the stuff you were taking for granted), or the model just collapses.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:29 PM on September 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

The counterexample of learning to play the piano always come to my mind. To be a creative piano player, you have to have gone through the extremely tedious discipline of scales and practicing the same songs over and over again.

I play piano at a fairly high amateur level, and this does not reflect my own experiences. Piano technique is a lot of work, but contrary to common impression, it does not have to be tedious. In many of my readings about piano technique, tedium and rote are harmful. There's a big misconception about this. Music is a lot of work, but "a lot of work" is qualitatively different in its meaning.
posted by polymodus at 4:37 PM on September 4, 2013 [10 favorites]

I'd add that in general, piano is a very poor example to model education after, precisely because the majority of it is passed down traditionally without support by research or science. There are books and piano schools (Taubman, Fink) that in many ways reconceptualize piano training in a more modern way (for example deriving principles from human musculoskeletal mechanics and even neurology), and it is for deep reasons that these approaches actually are, emphatically, anti-rote learning.
posted by polymodus at 4:45 PM on September 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

I viscerally hate pieces like this and the majority of comments to them and here's why: the 22:3 ratio as it applies to publicity and complaint.

if an event happens to someone, they will tell 22 people if it is negative and only 3 if it is positive.

I'm a middle school teacher and my class isn't oppressive, soul-crushing or boring. I take responsibility for student learning, not just teacher teaching and I do it through imposing a bizarre sort of order. The problem with a lot of people is that they haven't been shown the positive effects of order - all they see is the idiots who mistake order for control.

Literacy, Numeracy and Competency - all things that can be taught very easily - contribute positively to a generally benevolent social order. However too many people see the authorities who oversee these things for what they are:

The frustrated mildly wealthy who serve the extremely wealthy who won a popularity contest to be in control of education for a region. And the moment they hear the word 'control' they think positive control - not order.

I'm sick of otherwise intelligent people shitting all over an education system that most likely (ymmv, a very small number of people had trauma that was worse than 'mean teacher' and 'boredom') does nothing but benefit them, even decades after they left it.

If you want to 'reform education' - reform how its leaders are chosen and how it is sold to the people on the street. If people understood exactly how much they all benefit from their neighbors having some basic knowledge and the skills to use it - they would be more likely to support the system.
posted by Fuka at 4:50 PM on September 4, 2013 [25 favorites]

This is such a fluff piece. Learning is difficult. There's a point where no matter what subject you want to learn and master, the novelty wears off and you simply have to have the discipline and fortitude to see it through.

Yes. But you don't have to make it MORE difficult. All children come with a bright and inquisitive zest for learning that, typically somewhere between the ages of four and twelve, somehow wears off of most kids. Some of that is peer pressure and socialization, but a lot of it is SCHOOL.

Anybody can be a dilettante at any subject, but it takes years of fortitude, discipline and being trained rigorously to learn something well enough to be paid to do it.

Getting paid well enough to do things is not the purpose of primary school. (It's also not the purpose of all higher education.)

>Self-directed learning sounds like a great way to have a nation of experts on Pokemon.

I have a very, very jaded view of the US education system at this point and am wondering if a nation of Pokemon experts with basic literacy, numeracy, and science backgrounds would be worse than what we're currently getting.

THIS. You would not believe how motivated Pokemon players can be, and to become a really good player requires math skills you would not expect.

I'm talking about kids spending their time of useless minutia and trivia instead of important and useful things.

Everything is trivia to someone. I agree that history, civics, basic science, math, etc need to be learned by children. But ALL of these things are inherently interesting, even entertaining, if presented in the right way. Not a lot of people are interested in learning how to present them the right way. I knew this when I was TEN, and I remember telling it to teachers who failed to understand.

I'm still wondering how there used to be time for civics and music and art, and now there's not.

A-FUCKING-MEN.
posted by JHarris at 4:50 PM on September 4, 2013 [7 favorites]

Education was one of the many, many, many things I had to study while writing my thesis paper about gameplay and its relation to the mind. While I'm sure there are people here who have studied this far more in depth than I have, let me pitch in my two cents because I'm a simpleminded person who uses small and parseable words.

Learning and mistake-making go hand in hand. It's by fucking up that we develop our experiences, which is the point at which we stop resorting to academic knowledge and start really understanding the material we're given. And the problem with schools in America, in all the situations I've seen, is that they view fucking up as a bad thing, to be penalized even during practice material.

Let's go with the piano scale practicing example, because what's happening when a child plays scales is widely misunderstood. If you're telling your kid to hit the notes in proper order and yell at them when they make a mistake, you'd better believe that you're either teaching your kid to resent piano-playing or you're restricting them to a super-mechanical mode of performance which is all technique and no heart. But connect scales with playing actual pieces of music, which is how every halfway-competent music instructor I've had works, and your kid isn't playing the scales for the scales. They're playing the scales for the songs. All those progressions and modes of performance are there in order for them to realize a piece of music. And then they play two hours of scales a day and fuck up a whole bunch of times, but they're working towards playing those scales perfectly, and as time goes on their vision of that music becomes more and more realized.

Compare that to your average math class, where a kid's given a series of operations that they're made to mechanically apply to fifty new problems a day. If they mess up, they get a worse grade. If they succeed, well, they haven't really learned anything. Detached from context, math is boring and pointless—no wonder most kids learn to hate it, and the few that do well at it rarely go on to study math at an advanced level. All the math majors I know agree unanimously that the math we learn in grade school is nothing like what academic mathematics is really like. It's a farce. So are all the other major courses that get taught in public American classrooms.

Teaching to the test only makes things worse. It reduces each subject to its absolute least essential components. History becomes about dates, not motivations and social forces. English becomes about poetic techniques and vocabulary words, not storytelling and rhythm and beauty. Science becomes... I have no fucking clue what science becomes, because I was so burnt out by what I learned in high school that I never learned what science really is. Not to any degree that I'm proud of, anyway. Tests either reward you for doing something pointless or they teach you that the subjects you're learning about are goddamned pointless. Neither case teaches you a thing.

Kids aren't idiots. They're not very educated and they're not very wise, but kids are sharp from a very early age. They know the difference between bullshit and honesty, just like they know the difference between real work and fake work. Labor that achieves some kind of result, that's work. It sucks sometimes and you mess it up a lot, but in the end you have something to show for it. The fake work you get in school... what does it matter if you mess up? It affects a worthless number on a worthless piece of paper. What does it matter if you get something wrong? It impacts nobody. Nobody besides you, and I'm sure I'm not the only kid who decided that if this shit was going to affect my life in some way, then to hell with it all, I was going to hunt and find real things to do somewhere else. And that's just what I did.

Models like Summerhill, which is my inspiration and personal favorite, wouldn't work on a large scale, especially not if we're using test scores to determine how effective various methods are. But they point to the problem with modern education, which is that it's unreal. It doesn't teach the things it pretends to teach, and kids can tell the difference.

It makes people unhappy, it teaches them nonsense, and it convinces many of them that some of the most fascinating things in the world are in fact the least pleasant. It is problematic, to say the least.

The people I read for my thesis all pointed out that one of the appeals of a video game is how it makes you invest actual effort into a thing, it lets you make horrible mistakes, and it gives you some kind of reward for making it to the end. There have been experiments with making school programs more gamelike—challenges to overcome rather than tests to be graded once and permanently, more open-ended approaches to how students acquire information rather than stuffing them in a classroom whether they like it or not. That sort of thing. It's pretty effective, and results in kids following their own path more but within the constraints of their various subjects. Lots of unique mistakes made, which leads to lots of unique lessons learned. It also gives teachers more freedom and lets them focus on the important matter of "where do I want these kids to get to" rather than "how do I occupy these kids every five minutes for an hour every single day", which, as a guy whose girlfriend is currently teaching a bunch of middle schoolers and is burnt out every day because of it, sounds like paradise.

It's relatively simple once you operate from the perspectives that kids should have goals, and they should have the freedom to make mistakes. Theoretically it should be achievable within a public school structure, if we could only find politicians who aren't absolute idiots as far as education is concerned. Seriously, it's astonishing how lopsided the whole education discussion is in America. Both sides are horribly wrong. I don't know a single politician who's making the points that seriously need to be made.
posted by Rory Marinich at 4:51 PM on September 4, 2013 [28 favorites]

This sounds an awful lot like the current right wing argument for defunding public schools dressed up in some weak Slate.com "progressiveness". My ears perked up when he mentioned that ridiculous example from Sugata Mitra.
posted by codacorolla at 4:53 PM on September 4, 2013 [3 favorites]

If Nintendo up and delivered a goddamn Pokemon MMO already then you'd better believe you could use it as an aid for teaching math, literature, and history. The sophistication an enthusiast develops around their given passion can be remarkable, and absolutely can aid them in forming an understanding of the greater world they live in.
posted by Rory Marinich at 4:55 PM on September 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

All schools are different. My son goes to public school that is very different in almost all possible ways than the Catholic schools I went to 30 years ago. I loved learning, hated most of my teachers and the system and many of the values it espoused. My son loves learning, loves school, loves his teachers (we do too), and his principal is the most gifted administrator I have ever known. No school is going to work for everybody, and even the concept of school maybe won't work for everybody. But the concept of professionals educating classes of students as a state-provided right is a very good thing, no joke.
posted by rikschell at 4:56 PM on September 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

The fake work you get in school...

This is exactly the sort of mostly-uninformed comment that makes me baby-punchin' angry.

Not even most teachers give fake work. We are told from day one to give authentic, respectful work and have been for decades now. The only discipline that uses worksheets in my system is the one that needs it - maths.

I teach students how to collect information (on life science) and use information. Up until this past year I had a 100% pass rate on the statewide standardized without ever once teaching to the test. The only reason I didn't keep my 100% pass rate is I was saddled with too much extra stuff - from people who won popularity contests and from myself - that I wasn't able to invest as much of my own time into my work.
posted by Fuka at 4:57 PM on September 4, 2013 [8 favorites]

I'd just like to come out and say that I'm very sympathetic with the article. It is a fluff piece, but that's more a function of its philosophical and speculative content, than any malicious intent. One of the key assumptions that author holds seems to be that education and the structure of society are intrinsically intertwined—you cannot change one without also changing the other—and therefore it does not literally make sense to analyze "education" in isolation. That explains why the Sudbury project can seem so problematic, the typical objections raised being that it is ineffective, biased, doesn't scale, etc (and conversely to someone like me, the example is nevertheless interesting and inspiring). Because, on the other hand, given the philosophical/political statements made in the article—e.g. the paragraph about unpleasantness in life—what more can serve as evidence or motivation for societal change and alternatives at this point in history? I think if people read the article with the sense for merely the ideas that it is trying to suggest, it would come across much more palatably. The author is not one-sidedly saying that actually existing teachers aren't doing a valuable thing; he is voicing the need for an intellectual space with which some of us can start thinking about the future.
posted by polymodus at 5:09 PM on September 4, 2013

“You would not believe how motivated Pokemon players can be, and to become a really good player requires math skills you would not expect.”

David D. Friedman wrote in detail about why and how he homeschooled his two youngest children. Some interesting bits from the second post:

Our son likes D&D and other games with dice rolling, so was interested in learning how to figure out the probability of getting various results. It turned out that the same author and illustrator had produced a book on simple probability theory—How to Take a Chance—so we got it and he read it multiple times. The result was a ten year old (I'm guessing—we didn't keep records) who could calculate the probability of rolling 6 or under with three six-sided dice. For the last few years his hobby has been creating games. At the Los Angeles World Science Fiction Convention he had an interesting and productive conversation with Steve Jackson of Steve Jackson games concerning a game Bill had invented; currently one of his ambitions is to get a board game commercially published by age sixteen. [...]

We discovered that Bill had taught himself to type when the family was playing a networked game on the home network—Diablo or Diablo II—and misspelled words started appearing on our screen. He needed to type because he played games online and wanted to be able to communicate. Later he wanted to learn how to spell so that he wouldn't look stupid to the people he was communicating with. His sister spends a good deal of time on World of Warcraft, some of it writing up battle reports and other essays to be posted on suitable web sites. She too wants her writing to look good and so consults, usually with her mother, on how best to say things.

posted by mbrubeck at 5:10 PM on September 4, 2013 [7 favorites]

I'm talking about kids spending their time of useless minutia and trivia instead of important and useful things.

That's always been the American approach to education. How many kids only read Harry Potter, or the Hunger Games, or Twilight, or other similar mass-produced popular fiction?
posted by Apocryphon at 5:14 PM on September 4, 2013

School is a prison

Sure, the confinement, the repression, the rigid schedule, the cafeteria food, the gangs, the drugs, the constant threat of physical violence, the minuscule allotment for physical exercise, the communal showers, the biding of time, and pretty much everything else.

But other than that, it's fine.
posted by Sys Rq at 5:16 PM on September 4, 2013 [11 favorites]

No matter how much self-directed learning is allowed, students will still be faced with college entrance exams and corporate demands for their education. Although I agree that nobody should be required to take three years of math to graduate from high school (because most will soon forget the math and remember to hate it instead), I would make other classes mandatory, such as environmental science. And I wouldn't call it reform by merely allowing people to pursue other avenues for their own reasoning development, because it still demands that they find something to pursue and be tested on.
posted by Brian B. at 5:20 PM on September 4, 2013

Wow, interesting.

I have a few memories of public school from the Sixties in Southern California, mostly good.

- In first grade, Mrs. Mills taught us to read! Never mind that I already knew how, she made it official!

- In second grade, Mrs. Evinstad taught us cursive writing, which made me feel grown up, and I loved her for it

- In third grade, Mrs. Rubendahl taught me... I don't remember, except that I thought she was cool

- In fourth grade, with Mrs. Gerardi, ditto.

- Fifth grade was Mrs. Preston, who ran the glee club. She told students who couldn't sing very well to pipe down by getting in their face and pressing her index finger to her pursed lips.

- Sixth grade was Mrs. Gorlick. That was the year Kennedy was assassinated, and I only remember that one day with her. She didn't cry. Well, and, as I learned later, she sent me for special testing to see if I was a genius. I wasn't, as she was pleased to tell me when I clowned around in class.

- My seventh grade English teacher, Mrs. Erdmann, was my first experience of academic injustice. On a test, we were to correct the wrong word by giving the right one. "She shook the thermometer until it busted." I said that the correct word was "broke," but she said, no, it "burst." But, but, but, I said, a thermometer cannot burst, but she said, more or less, fuck off.

- My ninth grade chemistry teacher, Mr. Purvis, threw water on his students. "How much water is in this one-liter beaker?" If a student was stupid enough not to answer "one liter," he doused the whole row. He also wanted to see all of our work on homework problems. "The only place for brevity is in the swimming pool."

In short, I pretty much loved public school, I learned and I thrived.

I feel bad for kids today.
posted by Short Attention Sp at 5:21 PM on September 4, 2013 [3 favorites]

I don't want to be insulting to the dedicated teachers who are reading this. I did reasonably well in school and I fucking hated almost every minute of it. My opinion may stem from too many years of Junior college and it may also be the result of having gone to school in the days of yore.

Teachers should not teach their core competence at the high-school and early undergrad levels. The calculus or poetry or history or biology teacher is in their position because they like and are adept at their subject. A large segment of teachers do not understand what it is like to not understand their subject. What is blazingly obvious, fun and a source of esteem for the teacher is blindingly opaque, frustrating and a source of frustration for the student.

I was a corporate trainer for a while and what I learned is that teaching is at least as much about not understanding as it is about having a command of the ideas being taught. Of all the jobs I've had teaching is the most difficult.
posted by vapidave at 5:22 PM on September 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

Over on HN, they're busy slapping themselves on the back for being child-loving enough to homeschool, which is difficult on a Silicon Valley salary but some sacrifices are worth making.

Cost of living and rent in SV/SF is notoriously high, as numerous squabbles on MeFi threads have established, so you can take your classism and your privilege and shove it.
posted by Apocryphon at 5:24 PM on September 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

This essay is unconvincing and draws unfounded conclusions, careening from paragraph to paragraph between anecdotal evidence and tangential scientific findings.

On the other hand, it's pretty clear where he learned how to write like this.
posted by condour75 at 5:27 PM on September 4, 2013

Teachers should not teach their core competence at the high-school and early undergrad levels.

Indeed. People who are not adept in their field would have much better outcomes.

A large segment of teachers do not understand what it is like to not understand their subject.

It's a shame there are not entire tracts of education dedicated to teaching these blights on our society how to do this. Why the hell is this the default assumption about teachers?

I was a corporate trainer for a while and what I learned is that teaching is at least as much about not understanding as it is about having a command of the ideas being taught.

This is nonsense. Of course, corporate america invented the idea that "you don't need to know what you're managing to be a good manager," so I could see how that would translate to education. Metaphorically, I mean.

And, I know of what I speak: I worked in corporate america and was trained by a corporate trainer. Not a lie.
posted by absalom at 5:32 PM on September 4, 2013

I recently listened to this panel discussion type thing on making great teachers and thought it was fascinating.
posted by kavasa at 5:49 PM on September 4, 2013

I was homeschooled through elementary school and played a lot of Pokemon. And did a lot of other things like making forts outside and swim team.

I still play Pokemon. It's fun and it inculcates an interest in evolution and biology for many. It also teaches skills I've used in programming and project management.

Say what you want about homeschooling. It had its advantages and disadvantages and I'd probably prefer a hybrid approach for my own kids. But don't trash Pokemon.
posted by melissam at 5:51 PM on September 4, 2013

Self-directed learning sounds like a great way to have a nation of experts on Pokemon.

Honestly not sure how this would be worse than having a nation of experts on mortgage-backed securities trading, arms design, cigarette manufacturing, advertising... the world is being driven headlong into the shitter by extremely focused and well educated go-getters. Maybe if a few of them spent more time playing games and seeing wonder in the world around them...

Anyway, kids become experts on Pokemon only because of adults who became experts on shovelling crap into kids' eyeholes, working alongside adults taught to be experts on getting parents to waste their money on baubles. And those parents were educated into creating and passing on a life with a strict division between "work" (serious, boring, hard, emotionless) and "leisure" (pointless, harmless, fun, overindulgent).

Kids are into inane crap because that's what we give them, and we pursue rigorous educations in giving it to them as efficiently as we can. And then we end up too busy to help kids get anything of real worth or value out of the hobbies we foist on them - which is, as mbrubeck pointed out, totally possible.

I'm a believer in quality public education as the least horrible option we've got right now, since most people can't afford to homeschool, and certain kinds of religious nutters should probably be encouraged to socialize their kids regardless. But let's not fool ourselves. If the industrial education model were some sort of prophylactic against mass idiocy, we'd know by now.
posted by Mike Smith at 5:53 PM on September 4, 2013 [6 favorites]

This is a shoutout to Mr. Paul Hetland who taught AP Economics at the Rochester School for the Arts as if it was an upper-level college seminar. He had a top-notch educator and had been a professional in the field he taught. He treated his students like colleagues instead of tedious children.

I was in his classroom on 9/11, and throughout the rest of the year AP Ec was our nexus to the world of current events. Yes, a lot of what we learned was typical textbook knowledge. But his talents as an educator made it very clear that the schematic textbook material we were learning was a necessary entry point to a world of events that was both the foundation and the consequence of everything happening around us. I especially remember watching Manufacturing Consent in that classroom and listening to Mr. Hetland's Peace Corps stories.

I'm sure there are means other than 9/11 to make schooling feel real and important.
posted by Nomyte at 5:53 PM on September 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

David D. Friedman wrote in detail about why and how he homeschooled his two youngest children.

Well...saying that "he" homeschooled them is a bit of a stretch.

My wife hasn't worked since our daughter was born, and my job gives me quite a lot of free time and flexibility...With both parents working, you would need someone to keep an eye on the kids in working hours--perhaps a non-working member of another home schooling couple.

But that's kind of the whole idea with homeschooling; unpaid female labor is generally a feature, not a bug. The men's job is pontificating about our creativity-stifling educational system.

I'm sure he teaches them a lot about global warming hype, though.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 6:10 PM on September 4, 2013 [13 favorites]

He treated his students like colleagues instead of tedious children.

I taught high school social studies for a while in Canada, and also taught just about everything, from preschool to middle school to high school to college to corporate classes in Japan. I also ran a tutoring service where we helped kids get into good high schools and good universities.

Education is definitely a social indicator. Generally speaking, societies that have more education have better life expectancy and health outcomes. So, the North American primary and secondary school system can be called a real success, since life expectancy has generally increased since the end of World War II.

On the other hand, approaches to education tend to swing like a pendulum, from learner-centric (kids sit in groups and "there are no tests") to more "traditional" (students sit in rows and take standardized tests).

Whenever one system appears to be failing to work, the pendulum swings the other way.

As a rule of thumb, if you want to see what will be happening in your school district in the next five years, take a look at what is happening in California. They tend to lead the way in innovation (or, as the case may be, entropy).

One thing I wanted to say is that everyone tends to idealize the innate ability of children to learn.

The fact of the matter is, some kids are good at school (the kids who are really good at school become teachers), but some are not good at school. For this second group, at least in Canada (and the same is true in Japan), up until 20 or 30 years ago, they would drop out and go and work in construction or on a fishing boat or in the woods at age 15.

You can't do that now. Now you have an entire cohort of kids who are not successful in school being forced to be in school.

It's not that they are dumb. There are environmental factors - they come from families that don't place much value on education, they come from home environments that are highly dysfunctional, they just don't like book learning.

They might also be late bloomers - we don't all hit our developmental milestones at the same time, and if you haven't progressed beyond Piaget's "concrete operational" phase, you are going to be in trouble in high school.

So when I was teaching social studies, it was a major accomplishment to get these kids to focus and just read the damn textbook.

I don't know what the solution is. In Canada, an ageing population is placing more and more strain on provincial budgets. There's less money for education. There are also structural issues with our education system, which was developed when the cohort of students, in comparison with the rest of the population, was large.

Now we have proportionally fewer students (40,000 fewer than a decade ago in British Columbia), but still a costly infrastructure, including the admin apparatchiks who drive around in BMW's...

It would be nice to treat class like a seminar, but with lower-operating students, mayhem is often the result.

Copy from the blackboard please, and get a gold star for filling in the blanks.
posted by KokuRyu at 6:15 PM on September 4, 2013 [8 favorites]

But that's kind of the whole idea with homeschooling; unpaid female labor is generally a feature, not a bug. The men's job is pontificating about our creativity-stifling educational system.

I think we can discuss home-schooling without gender politics. Why do we hand our kids over to the state for edumacation? It's often an economic choice. Who has the luxury of a household with only one earner? I work and my wife stays at home, but only until our youngest starts school.
posted by KokuRyu at 6:18 PM on September 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

I think we can discuss home-schooling without gender politics.

I have yet to encounter a woman homeschooling advocate who works full-time while her husband does the actual homeschooling (and describes the arrangement as "we" homeschooling the kids.)
posted by Ralston McTodd at 6:25 PM on September 4, 2013 [10 favorites]

I’ve been teaching in a public high school for seven years. This article, while interesting and certainly full of compelling ideas, describes a socio-economic monoculture with no place for the kids for whom going to school is their only interaction with structure, positive relationships, and adult role models, let alone their only decent meal.

As for homeschoolers, who are largely Christian families in my area, and the kids whose parents permit them to enroll in online education, they are often far worse off socially when they inevitably return to school 1-3 years down the road when mom or dad can longer maintain the structure needed for success in such an environment. And the public schools end up with the higher educational costs associated with the requisite remediation and support of these kids upon their return.
posted by vkxmai at 6:41 PM on September 4, 2013 [6 favorites]

Three words: John Taylor Gatto.

Not gonna bother with the link. Just google him if you don't know.
posted by localroger at 6:58 PM on September 4, 2013 [6 favorites]

Copy from the blackboard please, and get a gold star for filling in the blanks.

I don't understand the connection between the part of my comment that you quoted and your cavalier screed. You may be conflating supportive teaching and condescending teaching.

I also assure you that there are plenty of other people — teachers even — who have arrived at conclusions different from yours. Excusing, expecting, and fostering low achievement just may be the most toxic use of Piaget, the Sigmund Freud of educational psychology.
posted by Nomyte at 6:59 PM on September 4, 2013

Not sure what you're on about there absalom [perhaps you are frustrated] but plucking a sentence from a paragraph and using that as the basis for your argument is at best lame and at worst disingenuos.

Tell me how we can improve education.
posted by vapidave at 7:13 PM on September 4, 2013

There's a lot to be said for letting kids self-direct their learning through things they're actually interested in, and that's pretty much all of the parts of school that I really liked; the stuff that was standardized course material was OK and there were parts of general education that interested me but I had topics I really liked and wanted to learn about and did on my own and I learned way more from those than I did in class.

I also had a lot of busy-work in school-- particularly in high school-- and I generally blew all of it off. I got Cs for most of high school because I ignored most of the homework and fucked around on the internet and did NaNoWriMo, and now I'm a really fucking good researcher because I'm great at looking stuff up online and I learned to type and write pretty well from participating in online discussion from such a young age.

Anyway I tended toward As and Bs in college for everything but the low-level classes that were taught like high school because I was learning things I actually cared about and was interested in, and not in the way that those things were offered in HS. In HS, if you liked, say, writing poetry, you could take a Creative Writing class and maybe do poetry like 1/4 of the time. In college, you can usually take a dedicated poetry class. The work was never boring and I almost always saw the use of it. I still regret not dropping out after my sophomore year, getting my GED and spending a few years at community college learning stuff I actually gave a shit about.

And that goes back to the Pokemon thing, I guess. If you can get a bunch of kids to learn to learn about stuff, do research, math, etc by doing probabilities and learning to make decks and balancing stuff in them and creating strategies on what elements you should have based on the likelihood of the build of your opponent's decks... that sounds pretty good. Reports on Nintendo, creative projects in game design, maybe some Japanese language training. Pokemon school sounds great.
posted by NoraReed at 7:24 PM on September 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

My local school board had $2 mil in surplus funds this school year. The top five items are sports related, one of them being a new $1.2 mil locker room for the men's polo team at a high school in a very affluent part of the district. The 6th and summarily dismissed item was air conditioning for classrooms. It was 93 degrees today. Can we have that discussion instead?
posted by Brocktoon at 7:40 PM on September 4, 2013 [7 favorites]

I think we can discuss home-schooling without gender politics. Why do we hand our kids over to the state for edumacation? It's often an economic choice. Who has the luxury of a household with only one earner? I work and my wife stays at home, but only until our youngest starts school.

I know many homeschoolers and I don't know a single homeschooler where the father is the primary educator. That includes non-religious hippy-dippy homeschoolers, who are actually the majority amongst my acquaintance. Data point.

I know many stay at home parents including several fathers. Most of the families I know have chosen the route of being ridiculously involved in the improvement of our kids' public school over homeschooling or private schooling.

I have always seen the choice as partially economic, but mostly philosophical. The hippie families I know who send their kids to Waldorf do so with great sacrifice to their bottom line, but so do a lot of the families I know who send their kids to public school but have one parent who does not work outside the home who is thus able to put in a ton of man-hours helping make the school trains run on time.

There's a significant amount of privilege either way, but many families are able to create the luxury of one parent being at home, and even with that said, I still haven't heard much about home schooling managed by fathers.
posted by padraigin at 7:55 PM on September 4, 2013 [4 favorites]

A few more tidbits because again, this specific brand of libertarian blindspot drives me nuts.

Ridiculous Thesis: We're crushing children by making them perform mathematical operations.
- in reality, they have to practice. performing mental tasks aids in neuronal pruning which improves proficiency in those tasks. it is exactly like musical scales, sports drills and every other form of practice.

I'm really sorry that for some kids its boring, but frankly its as much to do with their home environment than the school. Those kids were never taught to entertain themselves or make things fun for themselves. Someone above pointed this out: sometimes learning something can be hard work and schools are willing to sit with you while you do the hard work.

Not every mommy and daddy is willing to let you struggle for a good long while. Not everyone is dedicated, disciplined and trained like a good teacher.

Ridiculous Thesis: The authoritarian structure of schools teaches children to just 'accept their fate,' and 'stifles their growth.'
- in reality, a lot of them aren't going to amount to much if you shoot everything through that awesome 'Movie Happy Ending Filter' that you're using. Not everyone has an einstein or mozart inside of them. Sometimes, compulsory education is there to make sure they don't wreck things for other people. Sometimes, kids come to schools pre-damaged and we're at least giving them a baseline of knowledge so they can function if they're able to repair themselves.

Here's a novel idea - what if we did away with compulsory education? Where would the vast majority of kids end up?

Do you think they would use their 'natural inquisitiveness' to learn how to read, write, perform enough math to function in a technological society? Do you think they could figure out how to read a guide to what foods are poisonous? To cure or prevent minor infections? These are all things they're able to do because of school - whether or not the 'schools are destroying our children' set wants to admit it or not. For every parent who's able to nurture functional children, there are a pair who aren't 100% there.

While I don't want to be a surrogate parent and I don't feel that's the role of schools - there are things that compulsory schooling does that is indispensable to a functioning society.

I can't help but think that a huge amount of this blowback against schools is a lack of foresight and empathy.
posted by Fuka at 7:58 PM on September 4, 2013 [12 favorites]

People seem to have no idea how regressive most of these self-directed and home-school education models are. Poor people--hell, most middle class people--do not have the time or resources to ensure their kids actually get complete, deep, self-directed education in the subjects that interest them.

What's worse, now many kids won't end up having the same opportunities we did to step however briefly outside our own family's cultural bubbles as a result. Maybe these kids participate in social groups and programs with other home schoolers, but those kids are likely to come from similar cultural backgrounds that have similar outlooks and values. That's a bug, not a feature, no matter how much more comfortable people may feel "sticking with their own kind."

Public schools may not be valuable for teaching kids "to tolerate unpleasantness, because life after school is unpleasant," true enough, but such a simple lesson doesn't reflect the tiniest fraction of what I got out of my school experience anyway, so I don't accept that's what schools in the general case do. And what public schools are most certainly valuable for is ensuring that everyone has a chance to see what the world looks like from outside their own family and its extended social network's cultural bubble and mix with people from diverse backgrounds, with differing skill sets, aptitudes, beliefs and attitudes, just like the many, many people they're likely to encounter in their lives as independent adults if they expect to participate in society at all.
posted by saulgoodman at 8:08 PM on September 4, 2013 [4 favorites]

The Card Cheat loved Big Brother...
posted by j_curiouser at 8:10 PM on September 4, 2013

I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about this article. These are not libertarian ideas and these are not simplistic "models" to be copied. Further upthread:

Three words: John Taylor Gatto.

Agree, and there's a huge quantity of research, not only within educational psychology but in philosophy (not limited to philosophy of education) and economics (a major early text), and certainly other fields (for instance mathematicians and scientists have written about how their bodies of knowledge are maintained, changed, and transmitted), that examine ways in which education could be organized very differently from what we have today. What the author calls "self-directed learning" follows specifically from the sociological theory of autonomy ("Autonomy and relatedness as fundamental to motivation and education"). Research approaches also diverge, for instance in "Situated cognition and the culture of learning" the authors look at education organized around mentorship/apprenticeship. Much of this doesn't have immediate, broad applicability, but the ideas and concepts are valuable, since everybody agrees that education needs to change.

A lot of the naysaying about the Sudbury or Sugata Mitra illustrations I see comes from thinking too concretely. The article is not literally advocating mimicry, which is obviously infeasible or impractical. He explicitly states in the article that what he is describing is not a panacea. I don't know how more clear an author can get than that. Secondly, the ideals he describe are not something he personally invented, but supported (and critiqued!) by a tradition of research by other people. And finally, there's a difference between skepticism and naysaying; a self-directed learner would be skeptical, healthily so, of following anything that the author might apparently be prescribing.
posted by polymodus at 8:18 PM on September 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

Respectfully, Fuka, it seems to me like you're reading things in the OP and subsequent comments that aren't there, and skipping nuance in them which are.
posted by Rory Marinich at 8:38 PM on September 4, 2013

The fake work you get in school... what does it matter if you mess up? It affects a worthless number on a worthless piece of paper. What does it matter if you get something wrong? It impacts nobody. Nobody besides you,

Well, to add a counterpoint, numbers and papers are a part of why I enjoy school much more than work. They gave quantitative and instant feedback on how I was doing. And, I don't know where the idea comes from that there's no failure in school, because throughout my K-12 education I swung wildly from C's and D's to B's and A's. Not only on individual assignment, but class grades too. And, the quote of what you said, can be applied to adult work too, I mean, what else is money but "worthless" numbers and paper that mainly only impacts yourself?
posted by FJT at 9:18 PM on September 4, 2013 [1 favorite]

Self-directed learning sounds like a great way to have a nation of experts on Pokemon.

No kidding around, my nephew basically taught himself to read and do some basic math playing pokemon. (Well, more specifically, it motivated him to learn that stuff so he could play the game -- my sister is the one that taught him).
posted by empath at 10:03 PM on September 4, 2013 [2 favorites]

Bottom line: The machine that grinds out "product" from educational systems, worldwide, is looking for a certain kind of person. The qualities that designate "an educated person" are fairly standard these days, along with a heavy dose of "personal qualities" that can be shown from extra-academic activity.

I don't know what kind of education system is best, but if someone is interested in adapting and surviving and succeeding in the 21st century, they had goddamn better start thinking hard about learning in a way that enables them to stay current with the rapidly evolving skill sets necessary for survival in a dynamic world economy. I know that sounds mundane, but its true.

I can honestly say that I have seen some very productive educational environments, all different in approach. I can also say that most of the others - the majority - are pathetic. (and surprisingly, money sometimes has little to do with quality, although at other times, it does)

Currently, I am very worried about the general quality of education in America; it's not well executed, and there are too many crappy schools. Along with that, there is a shrinking job market, with automation starting to take its toll.

In some ways, I think the best thing we can do for most learners is teach them the joy of learning, and following their curiosity to the end their inquiry - i.e. endless learning. That said, how does one instill that? I think that's the most important thing, going forward.
posted by Vibrissae at 10:25 PM on September 4, 2013 [3 favorites]

but if someone is interested in adapting and surviving and succeeding in the 21st century, they had goddamn better start thinking hard about learning in a way that enables them to stay current with the rapidly evolving skill sets necessary for survival in a dynamic world economy.

Sorry, this is just corporate bollocks.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:47 PM on September 4, 2013 [3 favorites]

They should teach "too big to fail" in Econ. I'm a white male that was never taught that "skill set".
posted by Brocktoon at 12:11 AM on September 5, 2013

Sorry, this is just corporate bollocks.

Lets see how that works out for you, unless you are one of those persons who has the gumption to make it on your own. Most people can't; they're indoctrinated within a system that takes generations to change. Maybe things will change faster than that; I don't know, but neither do you.

Preparing oneself to adapt, in as many ways as possible, is the smart thing to do. Everyone else, Darwin will take care of. Do I like it that way? Hell, no! But for now, that's the way it is.

And, try saying what you wrote (above) to the 100's of millions of students in Asia and South America and Africa - (those who are able to access education) who are working their asses off. YUO want to "uncompete" with them? That's fine, with them. One less in a shrinking pool.
posted by Vibrissae at 1:34 AM on September 5, 2013

There have been experiments with making school programs more gamelike—challenges to overcome rather than tests to be graded once and permanently, more open-ended approaches to how students acquire information rather than stuffing them in a classroom whether they like it or not.

But the style of learning that most games use is the total opposite of self-directed "unschooling" approaches and replicate almost every aspect of traditional schools: a fixed, relatively linear progression; challenges that you have to go through to progress to the next level; point systems that evaluate your performance and allow you to compare yourself against others; rewards for achievements; fake work in an artificial environment that never impacts the real world; and the game creators have total control every aspect of the environment while the player is relatively disempowered.

So I'm not sure why people who see kids highly engaged in video games would say to themselves, "We need school to be more like a game!" since it is already so much like a game. Adding more rewards in an artificial environment seems like the opposite direction that most people who are talking about intrinsic rewards and curiosity want to go, but somehow these differences are minimized and everyone gets together to have friendly chats about reforming the educational system.

To me, this demonstrates that although pedagogical issues are always at the forefront, the main concerns are actually over whether we should be forcing children to do things they don't understand and don't want to do. Many people in the "kids should be self-directed" camp have a very specific ideology about what kids do and don't want to do: they are spontaneous, creative, unstructured, and hate repetition, rote learning, structure and lectures. When kids spontaneously opt in to the "wrong" types of learning activities, they allow it to pass because it's obviously not coercive, but it doesn't alter their view of human nature.

I submit that the one thing that games have that schools generally don't is trust of the player/student. Kids are asked to do things and they don't understand why, but unlike schools, games work very hard to demonstrate the benefits of the struggle, discipline and repetition. I think the "self-directed" camp see the problem of motivation within their individualistic philosophical assumptions: students hate school because it's coercive and violates their autonomy, so we need to organize school so that essentially everyone does what they want. But kids are willing to do what other people want, if they trust them.

So to me, the problem of motivation is more of a problem of trust, not a problem of pedagogical technique. If you don't trust your parents, the teachers or the school, then you probably aren't going to be very motivated to do what they ask of you, regardless of what techniques they use.
posted by AlsoMike at 2:21 AM on September 5, 2013 [4 favorites]

Yeah, as others have mentioned, John Taylor Gatto. For me this topic begins and ends with Gatto.
posted by mikelieman at 5:13 AM on September 5, 2013

Learning is difficult. There's a point where no matter what subject you want to learn and master, the novelty wears off and you simply have to have the discipline and fortitude to see it through. Anybody can be a dilettante at any subject, but it takes years of fortitude, discipline and being trained rigorously to learn something well enough to be paid to do it.

Did anybody deny that, I wonder?
posted by Fists O'Fury at 5:38 AM on September 5, 2013

I will deny that learning is 'difficult'. I wouldn't qualify the characteristics which drove my expertise as 'fortitude, discipline and being trained rigorously'.

The Three Virtues
posted by mikelieman at 6:29 AM on September 5, 2013

If you think being in a traditional school is crushing and demoralizing to a student, try being a teacher in the system. Your worst asshole of a math teacher very likely didn't start out like that.
posted by Thorzdad at 6:43 AM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm a high school special education teacher and I'm an AWESOME teacher. Let me just get that out of the way because here's my experience with the Sudbury Valley School.

When my eldest kid was 3, I was horrified at what I perceived as the crapfest that was my local public school, so I went to SVS and spent a day there and interviewed the director and some of the "teachers."

Here's what I learned:

* if my kid wanted to go into the pond to see what the water was like, they wouldn't stop her;
* if it turned out that she actually couldn't swim and wasn't safe in the water, we would all make that discovery later, because she wouldn't be supervised;
* if my kids wanted to spend all their SVS time reading comic books or playing basketball, that would be fine;
* I asked...how will my kids learn about ideas that haven't occurred to them? How will they discover the elegance of math or German poetry or Latin or biology or class struggles or whatever, the SVS response was that the kids would learn about whatever interested them, and it wasn't the school's philosophy to direct their learning.

So sure...there's something to the idea of letting kids direct some aspect of learning, but when you don't even say to a kid, "Hey, here's some pretty awesome calculus," and open up new worlds and ideas to them, you're doing those kids a massive disservice and you can't cloak it by calling it an "alternative education," because there's no educating going on there, there are only reactions.
posted by kinetic at 7:50 AM on September 5, 2013 [9 favorites]

Regarding Gatto, I did read his one book that is freely available, and was terribly impressed by his arguments. Especially the ones where he starts treading into Dominionist territory, which are the ones that get glossed over by his supporters.

The main issue that I see is that most of the people complaining want our school system to focus on the top performers at the expense of everyone else. Meanwhile, they also want to ignore how our society as a whole shows contempt for education while publicly paying it lip service. Schools need to be fixed, but they need to be fixed for everyone. And we need to stop asking the impossible of them - if we as a society would take childhood poverty seriously and do something about it, a lot of our issues with education would be fixed.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:24 AM on September 5, 2013

Oops, I meant not terribly impressed with Gatto's arguments. To me, he came off as someone pining for the 50s, but in his case, that meant the 1850s.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:31 AM on September 5, 2013

I read a lot about SVS and self-directed learning and I'm a little disheartened to see the comments section devolve into the same knee-jerk sniping here that it does everywhere else. There are problems with the SVS model, but for the most part, they haven't been touched on here. A few quick points:

-"This is elitist! Poverty! etc.!" It is true that poverty is the number one barrier to kids being able to learn. No one disagrees with that. Obviously, a well-fed kid is going to do better than a hungry kid in any kind of school. I guess that if we could only think about one thing at a time, we should think about repairing the social safety net for poor families instead of experimenting with better educational models. But that is not the actual tradeoff we're facing here. It's true that most SVS model schools cater to wealthier families (though there are schools like this diverse big cities in NYC, for example - it's not only the suburbs) because it's wealthier families who tend to be willing to risk trying out these freeform experimental methods. No one knows what a public - or even charter - school version of SVS would look like, because no one has tried. There simply isn't a lot of evidence on the relationship between socioeconomic status and success at Sudbury Valley Schools. However, I do think it's worth examining the assumption that poor kids from 'bad' neighborhoods couldn't succeed at schools that afford students high levels of autonomy, and that they're better served by lockstep, highly rigid and even authoritarian models like KIPP. Both methods of education are experimental and relatively expensive, but one fits in with our stereotype of what poor kids need, and one doesn't.

-`"OMG, Discipline! Self control! When I was a young'un I learned math by BRUTE FORCE because my teacher stood over me with whip and now I'm an engineer." Here is the deal. No one at SVS says that you can accomplish great things without hard work and discipline, and by only doing things that are fun. To learn the piano, you have to practice. The question is whether you are more likely to learn how to play the piano because your teacher forces you to practice your scales, or because you decide that you want to learn to play the piano, and recognize that scales are necessary to achieve that goal, and so you do them, whether your teacher is paying attention or not. It's true that kids generally don't have the self-control and foresight to do this, but the whole point of SVS is to help them acquire that ability - in other words, to develop an internal locus of control. It is (relatively) easy to teach a kid math when they're trapped in a room with you for eight hours a day. SVS's goal is to create a kid who, if he needs to know math because, say, the SATs are looming, will go check those books out from the library on his own, study as much as he needs to in order to understand the basic principles, forms a study group of friends to help each other out, and calls in outside help in the form of tutors if necessary. And to a great extent, they seem to have accomplished this, which is something of a minor miracle in our age of helicopter parenting. It's not a coincidence, I don't think, that SVS was started in New England. Self-reliance and independence are the keywords here.

-Ahhh, no rules, lord of the flies, the kids are going to eat each other, it's chaos. There are a TON of rules at SVS. It's a crash course in how to be a responsible participant in local government. Listening to those kids talk about what happens in school meeting is like listening to a particularly wonky city council member rhapsodize about how this one change in the voting system is going to fix everything. Being a responsible and contributing member of society is an expected part of attending school there. You owe a lot more to your community at SVS than you do at a public school where the janitor swoops in to clean up after you. The kids hold each other accountable, and anyone who's spent two minutes with kids understands that they have a lot more influence over each other than adults have over them. Mixed-age learning is a huge part of SVS and it rarely gets discussed - the older kids take on a lot of responsibility for educating and caring for the younger kids. It's not just a bunch of Kindergartners running around bumping into each other and drooling. That's a big part of how kids "learn about ideas that haven't occurred to them yet" - along with reading books (which are everywhere at SVS) and going on the internet, and talking to adults as relative equals, and you know, being out in the world.

I'm not saying SVS is perfect, AT ALL. But I do think that people's reactions to hearing about schools like this tend to be reactive and somewhat thoughtless, and it's worth doing a bit more research before you dismiss the entire model out of hand.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 8:40 AM on September 5, 2013 [7 favorites]

AlsoMike: I know a lot of people who love self-directed learning and are utterly convinced that doing boring drills is the death of curiosity and creativity. The counterexample of learning to play the piano always come to my mind. To be a creative piano player, you have to have gone through the extremely tedious discipline of scales and practicing the same songs over and over again. Putting this premise to the empirical test, it doesn't seem like rote learning is necessarily the enemy of creativity. It seems more that some rote learning is necessary so that you can be creative at all, and you're probably not going to get a genius composer by putting a piano in a room and telling the kids to go wild with it.

In my first year of college, my first landscape architecture class started out with repetitive drawing of shapes: circles, squares and straight lines. Over and over and over. And our professor was clear about the goal: he wanted us to be able to draw a near-perfect circle without thinking about it, when we needed to do that. Because you'll be in a meeting, or throwing around ideas, and you won't have a computer handy, so if you can't depict your ideas clearly and accurately, you can't communicate with your client(s) and/or co-worker(s). Repetition builds the groundwork future creative endeavors.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:44 AM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

Also, my mother was a public elementary school teacher, and my wife is a public high school math teacher. I can't speak from first-hand experience of being a teacher, but I've lived with teachers for most of my life. Their general gripes are that people who have never taught are criticizing their broad profession in general terms, and applying regulations to students that would clearly not make sense if you spent a day in a classroom and tried to understand the realities of teaching 20-30 students.

The author, Peter Grey, is a research professor working in psychology. So I'll assume he's taught college courses, but those are hugely different from K-12. I really hope he has spent some time in lower grade "applied education" instead of approaching it from a purely theoretical approach. Better yet, I hope he spent time observing a variety of classes, instead of just citing research polling the happiness of students. Look away from the students, and focus on the teachers. Of course kids are happiest when hanging out with their friends and playing games. So are adults! But I have fond memories of certain classes, and there were classes I looked forward to attending throughout my K-12 education.

As for his anecdotal data, did he follow up with the families? Did he find out if that "one recent top graduate, [who explained] to a newspaper reporter why he was postponing college" talk about where the pressures to succeed came from? Was he "consumed with doing well" because he wanted to get into top schools, or his parents wanted him to? Did he feel broader societal pressures due to the highly competitive nature of college applications? Will non-"coercive" schooling really change any of that?

Mandatory schooling is an attempt to provide every school-aged child with a background in basic education. I appreciate that leaving unattended computers in a rural community will lure young children, illiterate to the wonders of education, but can you ensure that they get a well-rounded education? What if a student struggles with math, or has a reading disability that can be overcome with unfun repetitive hard work?

"More recently, two larger studies of graduates, conducted by the [Sudbury Valley] school itself, have produced similar results and been published as books." Really, you don't say. They found positive results in their own methods? Which they then sold in the form of books, to promote their schooling method Were their results peer-reviewed? Could these schools work for youth who don't trust authority?

And some Sudbury Valley model schools aren't accredited. How well does that work for kids going on to other schools? Sudbury Valley folks were debating accreditation, but apparently received accreditation. Pre-tertiary-education accreditation isn't overseen at a federal level, states set evaluation criteria.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:20 AM on September 5, 2013

"This is elitist! Poverty! etc.!" It is true that poverty is the number one barrier to kids being able to learn. No one disagrees with that. Obviously, a well-fed kid is going to do better than a hungry kid in any kind of school.

In discussions where this gets raised, "poverty" is really shorthand for a whole battery of issues that are most obvious in poor communities, but are not limited there, and the criticism this raises comes down to this: Every issue a child has outside of school comes into the classroom as a barrier to learning. It's not just "I'm hungry", it's "my father is sexually abusing me", it's "I'm being bullied", it's "my mom does drugs and doesn't clean up". Every theory starting from some idea of children as naturally anything starts by ignoring that the child who shows up in a classroom is very often a distilation of everything going wrong outside the classroom, and those problems dominate much more than any essential nature that a child has. Long before they get a chance to facilitate self-directed learning, they're doing pick-and-shovel work just to keep the child paying attention by understanding and mitigating all those issues.

Theories of education reform need to start with how you create an environment in which all of those externalities aren't dominating the educational experience. Then you can start talking about what children are "naturally".
posted by fatbird at 9:22 AM on September 5, 2013 [9 favorites]

I actually loved school when I was kid, and continued to for most of my post-secondary experience, although it was very different. I went to a small, rural school with 150 or so students from kindergarten to grade 12 all in one building. At the time, I felt disadvantaged because things like Advanced Placement, art classes past elementary, a full music program and other extra-curriculars weren't available.

Now, after meeting people in better-funded public schools, and even some really expensive private schools, I realize that I was actually really lucky, because I had teachers that were passionate about the subjects they taught in all kinds of quirky, nerdy ways (get my high school math teacher to tell you about the way we measure time, and why it should be metric like everything else, or get my high school social studies and drama teacher to tell you about the Meech Lake Accord - something that crossed his two disciplines, now that I type it out) and their passion for the subjects made for very little being taught to the test, and everything feeling important and necessary. And, more importantly, because we were geographically isolated from a lot of the politics of education, these teachers had a relatively high amount of freedom to adjust their teaching to each class. We still had provincial exams, and were prepared for them, but that seemed like an afterthought rather the main point. And the small community meant that most teachers had a good idea of the development path and interests of each of their students well before they taught them.

I'd love to find some way to institutionalize the best parts of my school experience to the system as a whole, and while some things are system-wide (for example, Alberta has relatively competitive salary grids to attract and, more importantly, retain good teachers) there was so much that was unique and built on trust and community that I don't know how you could make it institutional.
posted by Kurichina at 9:34 AM on September 5, 2013

I am a dad who is the primary educator of our home-schooled child, whose mother is the primary breadwinner of our household. For those of you to whom I am apparently a mythical creature, feel free to ask me anything.
posted by slappy_pinchbottom at 10:07 AM on September 5, 2013 [3 favorites]

Maybe we should actually come clean and tell our kids that the purpose of education is to acquire a set of weapons that will help them to survive all-against-all economic warfare.
posted by No Robots at 10:35 AM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

In that case we should probably skip Pokémon and go straight to EVE Online.
posted by mbrubeck at 10:50 AM on September 5, 2013 [4 favorites]

I dunno. I've reduced Jr. Robots to tears many times playing Pokémon.
posted by No Robots at 11:00 AM on September 5, 2013

@fatbird. I get that. "Natural" is not a word I approve of. But I think they're separate issues. Yes, if we're expecting schools & teachers to pick up the slack where social services and law enforcement and therapists have failed, there is not going to be much space for self-directed learning...or, I'd argue, for very much learning at all. That doesn't mean the system we have now can't improve by taking these models into account, or that it's not worth thinking rigorously about alternatives to our current system...even if we don't have the means or willpower to expand and make it work for all children, regardless of circumstance, right away.


To answer filthy light thief's question, yes, SVS students often have huge problems with authority, to the extent that parents often only allow them to attend after they've washed out of every other available educational option. Often the kids have been labeled with learning disorders or behavioral disorders that make other kinds of schools unworkable for them. That's a kind of diversity in its own right and it's frustrating to me to see people dismiss this option out of hand because it runs counter to our own biases. What if a kid has a learning disorder that makes it hard for them to read? Sitting down with a kid, stigmatizing him as learning-disordered, and brute-forcing him through reading drills might work. Sure. But the SVS model suggests that no one is more invested in a child's ability to read than that child, especially if the kid is surrounded by friends and older children who are reading in order to play games, read books, and communicate with each other. There are people around him, both children and adults, who will help him if he asks, and lots of ways to learn to read other than the standard set of systems taught in schools. It's possible that this way of learning might also work. Evidence suggests it does.

The SVS model, on a theoretical level, makes sense to me. It jibes with what I understand of learning and from spending a lot of time with kids and watching how they learn and engage with each other. Other people might disagree and I think there are reasonable objections to be made. But dismissing it as simply "playing and having fun" without learning about what actually goes on in the school day-to-day is not a thoughtful position to take.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 11:07 AM on September 5, 2013 [3 favorites]

The author, Peter Grey, is a research professor working in psychology. So I'll assume he's taught college courses, but those are hugely different from K-12. I really hope he has spent some time in lower grade "applied education" instead of approaching it from a purely theoretical approach.

This is part of the problem with contemporary education - it's top-heavy with technocratic so-called "experts" who are paid consulting fees and administrator salaries while adding little of real value or capacity to the classroom environment. Get rid of one administrator being paid $250k a year and hire two classroom FTE's instead.
posted by KokuRyu at 1:18 PM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

they would drop out and go and work in construction or on a fishing boat or in the woods at age 15...You can't do that now. Now you have an entire cohort of kids who are not successful in school being forced to be in school.

Right, exactly 13 years of formal public ed is not for everyone. Some want more, some need more and some need and want less. In my Minnesota high school in the 90s we had two different "work programs" which seemed to work well for the kids who participated. I don't know the specifics, but I know they had reduced classroom time but still earned credit while learning on the job. There was also the option for juniors and seniors to take college classes.

These programs acknowledge the vast spectrum of kids with needs outside of SpEd and gifted/AP programs. To me, that is the biggest problem with public education, trying to fit all kids into one mold.
posted by soelo at 2:20 PM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

I think the "self-directed" camp see the problem of motivation within their individualistic philosophical assumptions ...

Many people in the "kids should be self-directed" camp have a very specific ideology about what kids do and don't want to do: they are spontaneous, creative, unstructured, and hate repetition, rote learning, structure and lectures ...

So to me, the problem of motivation is more of a problem of trust, not a problem of pedagogical technique ...

I can't speak for any real or imagined camp, but such characterization is skewed on a couple levels. The emphasis on autonomy (which is conceptually different than individualism) is no simplistic subjective assumption, but a result of working theories based in psychology, sociology and other fields (some examples I provided are upthread). One can criticize the theories—preferably after having read the papers, and they aren't hard to read—whereas it is a hasty ad-hominem to focus on people's apparent beliefs/convictions rather than the actual ideas. These are ideas which others here have said have complexity and nuance, and which are not reducible to and should not be thought of as "essentially everyone does what they want". Secondly, no one is rationally suggesting that autonomy should be privileged above and at the expense of other theoretically basic aspects of the individual (such as the concerns that keep cropping up in this thread about the importance of relatedness i.e. trust, and/or competence); the literature unambiguously models the dynamic between these three theoretically basic human needs. What is being put forward in an article like the OP is that the existing dynamic, for sociostructural reasons that we are generally aware of, are out of balance. These working theories are a basis for a reasoned and reasonable premise, and that is why experimental education projects are valuable in today's world.

I think that talking about trust already makes the discussion ideological. I'm pretty sure it was understood as far back as Plato that trust is an integral, intrinsic part of education; an implicit theory supposing that there exists a "pedagogical technique" that can be isolated from this "trust" or "motivation" needs to be more fully developed and critically thought out. Further, it should be pointed out that "self-directed" is, unfortunately, a misnomer: the related literature makes it clear that without the other there is no self, and this is where conditions about relatedness are relevant, and trust is a special case of that, and so on.

As a more general note, any accusation of ideology is problematic because ideology is in a sense inescapable. Ideology is insidious because it tends to lie unexamined, but at least there are these people who have tried to do their part in being systematic and scientifically-informed in their approach. If you still want to take the ideological angle on this, I think some familiarity with how Marx connects with their ideas would be useful (the book that I link upthread is basically just that).

tl;dr (Sorry AlsoMike, not saying this to you in particular) RTFL. (Read the literature). The context will add in a lot more sense, and it should assuage the oft-repeated concerns.
posted by polymodus at 2:25 PM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

RTFL. (Read the literature). The context will add in a lot more sense, and it should assuage the oft-repeated concerns.

If you have a point to make, then please make it. Gesturing loftily to "the literature" is not a useful contribution.
posted by AlsoMike at 4:59 PM on September 5, 2013 [3 favorites]

I want to add one other point:

One can criticize the theories—preferably after having read the papers, and they aren't hard to read—whereas it is a hasty ad-hominem to focus on people's apparent beliefs/convictions rather than the actual ideas.

I'm talking about a set of beliefs and cultural assumptions that quite a few people seem to share - some I have read online, others I know personally and am friends with. I am truly mystified as to how that could possibly be an ad hominem attack on your favorite scholars.
posted by AlsoMike at 5:25 PM on September 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

If you have a point to make, then please make it. Gesturing loftily to "the literature" is not a useful contribution.

Sorry, but I did. The tl;dr is given lengthy context in the prior paragraphs. Sorry for causing any confusion in not using the literal meaning of tl;dr, it was really just a postscript. Sorry!

I'm talking about a set of beliefs and cultural assumptions that quite a few people seem to share - some I have read online, others I know personally and am friends with. I am truly mystified as to how that could possibly be an ad hominem attack on your favorite scholars.

You parsed that sentence wrong, and so I hope that is why it was mystifying. In that sentence, I was talking about two different groups of people. Academic researchers have multiple working theories and concepts which I said should shed light on understanding this article and this issue and allay and reframe many common concerns. The ad hominem is where you constructed a "camp" of self-directed schooling educators who apparently have, anti-authoritarian tendencies, or whatever. I hope it's clear why to someone who doesn't know you, or share your experiences, your earlier statements would come across as quite problematic—for instance, that it was not supported with further detail or explanation; or, that such attributions by themselves have low explanatory power; or, that they distract attention away from understanding and the ideas, to reasoning about the people involved; or maybe these biased people and organizations exist (I wouldn't be surprised) but they are not remotely representative of the larger and diverse intellectual atmosphere that supports the thinking, and so on.

In making such an attribution, you attacked the second group of people's character, and I don't think you were being ironic or rhetorical there.

Just to be clear—the readings I cited above are not (!) my favorite scholars. You have been mistaken, but mea culpa because I didn't communicate better. Hope this is more agreeable to you.
posted by polymodus at 6:58 AM on September 7, 2013