I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling
https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2026/05/27/revolutionize-schooling/I'm not exempting myself from this. I was an adjunct lecturer for two semesters. I did have some fun with it, but it was way harder than I thought it would be, and I think that university is probably considerably easier than elementary or high school.
I had students that I knew were smart that I was forced to fail. They would grasp the subjects quickly when I was speaking, they would ask good questions during class...and then they would simply never study or do the homework I assigned them, and then they would do terrible on tests and I'd be stuck having to give them a bad grade. They were smart students, but they didn't want to be there.
Now when I see people talking about how they're going to "revolutionize" school, most of the time I just assume that they've never actually taught anyone anything, or least never been required to teach someone who really isn't interested in learning.
I did, however, have a teacher who taught an advanced subject and I found his instruction so good that I did not have to bother with homework and assignments if I was happy with B grades — as I wasn't particularly motivated, only occassionaly did I put in the effort for an A.
I could, however, see the level of preparation that he put into it. When students confronted him with a difficult task, he'd not attack it right away but instead prepare for it for the next class so he'd provide the most effective instruction (it was not about being embarrased to show how exploration is sometimes messy because he'd quote that as the reason he won't do it right away). He was also so focused that he kicked out a school director when he tried to interrupt class with some sales pitch for whatever.
Not everybody could score a B grade just out of his instruction, but nobody was failing a class because the instruction was so good.
I will also openly admit: I had exactly one instructor like this in my life, so it is a high bar to clear ;)
This is key. If you are interested in a subject, the learning will come more or less automatically. Different ways of teaching still have substantial impact on how efficiently you learn, but you automatically gravitate towards the more efficient methods since you want to learn this out of interest in the subject. Without interest, this is an uphill battle.
And that is the gripe with traditional schooling. The methods may work well for intetested students, but they really kill interest. If I'm evaluated all the time, pressure on me, my interest tanks.
The difference between something I have to do versus something I want to do is absolutely key.
Even in the case of a college degree some are better than others
You can't force a brain to think what you want it to think. I couldn't even force myself to think what I wanted to think. I began to imagine my thinking brain as if it were a pet rhino that did as it pleased. Over time I learned a lot of tricks and hacks to function in the technical world and perform reliably. But it was a long journey.
I teach for a living now-- but I only teach the willing.
I care about teaching my students leadership, because all real problems are political. What exactly is the "test" for this?
To me, revolutionizing school looks beyond "problem solving," because the parents and students who are excited about the thing they call "problem solving" - it's invoked in the article, it's talked about by many of the other comments - basically solves no real problems. The revolution will redefine what "problem solving" means.
I don't think that's true at all. A lot of problems are purely technical. Once someone figures out the technical part, you realize the politically savvy people waiting on the sidelines for a solution were always a dime a dozen.
here's a simple one: what is the right answer for how to use a road? more parking? more bike lanes? exclusive use for busses? we do not bid on roadway land, there is no market solution to this. you can come up with a lot of metrics for efficiencies and optimize for them, but which metrics matter? journey times? environmental impact? there are real disputes about waymos, it isn't enough to invent autonomous vehicles, there must be leadership on adopting technology. these are all political issues. okay, and you probably spend 30m to an hour on roadways every day of your life, you can't say, this isn't a real problem.
the greatest irony is it is exactly the families with this fairly myopic "all problem solving is math problem sets" point of view who disengage from political life, and despite their fixation on cultural hegemony, they have disproportionately little representation in politics. to be real, the reason parents care about math is because money. which should tell you everything you really need to know about its power to "solve problems."
How children learn is not how adults learn.
Conversely, I remember mom giving me M&Ms for getting math flash cards right as a small kid. For some reason, I always liked math...
The one most important goal many beginning (or bad) educators miss is making students care before going all explainy. My subjects are very practical (Media technology, Electronics) and I have repeatedly seen students who understand a theoretical explaination and then fail utterly to apply what was explained in a practical situation. Coincidentally the latter makes most of them care instantly.
The solution in my case was to weave the theory together with something practical tangible. If everybody knows what they are working towards, and you weave in small practical tasks where it has to be applied that knowledge serves a purpose and students are much, much more willing to understand.
When you then go all meta and details after they understood what it is for and how it is used that worked much better than front loading the a struct stuff.
So (1) the dumb explainations that avoid them hurting themselves or breaking things, geared towards "this is what we need in 5 minutes", (2) applying the dumb thing to a practical solution, (3) theory how does it actually work, (4) another practical thing, this time armed with knowledge, watching out for details that we now notice because of knowing the theory.
Students soak that up like sponges. But teaching is hard, especially if the knowledge levels of the students in a group are disparate or you have students that aren't actually fit to receive education for mental reasons in that moment.
Literacy rates are tanking as a result; Mississippi went from 49th to 1st in literacy by ditching the new-fangled whole word contextual style and going hard into phonics. Get them hooked on phonics again, then teach them Greek & Latin! Spanish/French/German/whatever should be the *second* foreign language they learn, gated behind Greek & Latin being their first. It was a huge disservice to my education that the 'dead' languages were not offered to me in [junior] high school. I can only conclude that the curriculum and test writers only want literate-enough workers who can't critically think but who can [barely] read and follow written instruction.
This exact failure in 1960 California replacing phonics with whole word recognition led to backlash, including one teacher, Barbara Baker, who in 1963 formed Challenger Schools to emphasize phonics, academics starting in kindergarten, curiosity, and beyond minimum standards achievement/excellence.
It is possible to fix school. It needs understanding learning, and also being willing to revisit learning design at every level. How to bring meaning in?
Without meaning you could have all your fancy chromebooks and chatbots but you won't move the needle (as we are seeing)
We are actually trying to change schooling (but with a tiny experiment, knowing that scaling does not happen without changes and cultural context)
https://blog.comini.in/p/schooling-has-a-meaning-crisis-para...
You can throw all the money, new techniques and technology you want to at the problem. It will not get better without fixing that fundamental issue.
My wife is a public school teacher and I’ll never forget the time early on that an administrator tried to say she could deal with a kid who was absent more than half the time by making her classes “more engaging”. That kid reported rarely sleeping more than two nights under the same roof.
It seems obvious to me that the answer should be yes. So the follow ups should be figuring out how to move a student from an unwilling participant to a willing participant.
I think about three strata of students. The stubbornly unwilling, the coaxable, and the eager. It is pretty easy to design education for the eager. And discussing how to optimize that is a completely different discipline than the discussion about how to coax. The discussion about moving the unwilling to the coaxable is another topic on its own.
Having a mixed class of unwilling, coaxable, and eager in a classroom with a mantra of "no child left behind" is a huge mistake in the same way it would be a mistake to have one teacher in a mixed classroom for Geometry, Alphabet, and Orchestra.
I have a real issue dividing kids up along these lines. I've found that virtually all young kids love to explore and learn things, and if anything schooling can extinguish this innate desire when it becomes a source of stress.
When rubber hits the road with a learning objective, I think the two most important axis are: how much does the student want to learn (this), and how easy is it for the student to learn (this)?
Both can depend on a variety of factors... For example a masters student paying their own way mid career maybe really wants to learn as much as they can, but a specific research report assigned during a busy work week, and some family emergency, etc. may mean they treat the assignment as "I just need to get this done" instead of "I want to get as much as I can out of this", and one way that can show up is how much they depend on an LLM to do the work for them...
In any case, people who wanted to learn were easy to deal with. The other two motivations could be used to coax the person to learn, but they required different approaches.
The kids that study and apply themselves, I don't think it's so much that they can see they understand the benefits of linear algebra at the time, it's that their parents and the social network they're a part of sends them signals that this is what they should do to be successful and they're rewarded for doing well in school.
The other argument about teaching "advanced math" is the same as why Cristiano Ronaldo spends a significant part of his training in the gym lifting weights? Ever seen Ronaldo take out a barbell and start doing squats during a game? One should reflect on this.
the number of adults i've met who cannot add two fractions together is depressing.
at some point each of them had decided "i'm just bad with numbers, hahaha" and they gave themselves permission to stop trying math. worse, society gives you a pass at not knowing math. we need to apply the same constant social pressure to mathematics skills that we do for learning to read.
Could you clarify what do you mean by 'kids' and 'advanced math' here?
I personally believe we should stop believing advanced math is meaningful for everyone. Especially stop trying to push them down to high school curriculum.
When I say advanced math I mean anything involved with "what exactly is a ___ (vector space, real number, group, set, etc)".
When I was just a bit younger, I detested what I'm about to say, but now know as the "reality".
Your argument is focused on rationalism. You're trying to give kids/teenagers real world reasons to learn something.
People are rarely motivated by reason. They are motivated by emotions.
If you look, you'll find plenty of examples of very "rational" adults (college professors included) who clearly know something to be true, will admit to it, but will still go the emotional route.
As a parent, I looked into the research on changing/shaping children's behavior. And the key things that stood out:
1. If you know enough adults who do equivalently bad things even while they know the harm in it, don't expect kids to behave based on reason.
2. Focus on (positive) emotions. Give kids incentives. They shouldn't clean up the table because it will keep the house clean. They should clean it up because they'll get a (short term) positive reward.
3. Focus on building the ritual as a habit, and separate it from any semblance of morality. The brain needs to get accustomed to the actual behavior. The rationale can be added (now or when older), but if you focus too much on rationale without the habit, you'll get someone like me, who realizes a lot of behaviors are good for me, but won't do them because "my brain isn't wired for it".
Getting back to kids learning algebra, or whatever: Their lack of incentive isn't because they can't connect to practical skills in life.[1] The reason they don't want to do it is because it is not a valued skill amongst their peers. And it's also not a valued skill in American society.
That's why high school kids in Eastern Europe or East Asia tend to know this a lot better. If you can't multiply two numbers on paper, you're an idiot. Everyone will know you're an idiot. As much an idiot as not being able to read properly. So you learn it because you know that it's just a baseline intelligence marker you should have by a certain age. You don't whine about it any more than you'd whine about how to properly eat food without spilling it. Sure, once they're older and reflect back, they may say "I never needed algebra", but it doesn't bother them. Knowing it is merely part of being cultured.[2]
Now being motivated by shame is really not a great way to get people to do something, and that's not what I'm encouraging. The point is that it's a broader societal problem. Why should they learn it if they see no one else values it?
I wrote more about this about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48065640
[1] Think about all the useless things kids can be good at. Did they have to rationalize why they should learn them?
[2] This is why California, in particular, had a strong push back regarding calculus not being taught in high schools. There's a strong and relatively wealthy Asian/immigrant community in those places, and they've tried to maintain the value of being decent at math. (All the stuff about impacting university education is fluff. I used to work at a university, and they had remedial programs for incoming students who didn't know algebra/pre-calculus. It adds to the time to graduate, but by and large is successful - it's OK if you go into engineering without being exposed to calculus).
That's also why all the examples of math's usefulness become ridiculous stories like: "imagine yourself getting stuck on an uninhabited island and having to calculate the triple integral to find the volume of a barrel of water".
No. The real use of school-level math/physics/chemistry/language is in laying the _foundation_ and training the brain.
And it doesn't really matter what exactly you want to use for mental training. Every structured activity is fine, as long as it engages the brain.
Even pointless tasks like memorizing scriptures help. There are studies that show that religious students who spent a lot of time on rote memorization, and later switch to other disciplines, in the end do quite well with their studies.
Let's say that you have some curriculum C that you think is vital for children to learn, and you want as many children as possible to learn C.
Even ignoring ethics, it's not obvious to me that attempting to coerce all children into learning C is the best way to accomplish your goal!
And you need to do that. It trains your brain. If you simply rely on calculators, LLMs, and Google Search, then you likely can forget about doing advanced science.
It doesn't mean that you have to _master_ everything. Far from it. But you need to apply real effort to various subjects to train yourself.
I think the author is right that education isn't the problem, but they don't really discuss is the social element of schools. Bullying. Ostrification. I'm not really sure how schools are expected to fix that.
The problem isn't "education"... everyone not destined to be a feral caveman needs one. The problem is "public schools". The idea itself is wrong, and it can't be made to work. But our single-minded pursuit of it to the detriment of all other alternatives just compounds the trouble.
Of the 50 people who end up reading my comment above, every one of you will read it a different way, and it's unlikely very many of you will read it as intended.
The praise here for Direct Instruction is akin in many ways to a lot of the research Caplan draws on, especially his findings that generally, most work related knowledge is built at work, by actually performing the job.
https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/d...
2. John Holt (look him up)
3. I always wanted to offer people the chance to both leave and return to K-12 education. Lots of kids want out as teenagers, and we should make that possible but only if we make equally easy to come back when they realize the downsides.
4. Almost every child is a willing, in fact, overachieving learner. The fact that they fail to be interested in a topic is a reflection of things other than their capacity and capabilities for learning.
Now, I did have a great coach in middle school who "created the conditions where willing students will learn", but I don't think she would have been a good teacher. She was great at organizing club meetings, finding the right materials to study, utilizing intraclub competition to motivate everyone, and getting her former students to come back and teach in highschool. I'm sure there was a lot more going on behind the scenes that she just knew how to do right, which made the club a whole lot better. But she wasn't a teacher. Closer to an administrator, but I think "coach" in the (m)athletic sense makes the most sense.
And, this is probably why my computer science club was not the success I envisioned. Yes, people are generally underachievers, but I also did not have the coaching skills to create the conditions where people wanted to overachieve.
When I was an international ESL teacher, this was known as “guided discovery,” the goal being that students organically uncover the rules that govern the specific domain being taught.
It works quite well because it transforms what would otherwise be a passive curriculum from more of a spectator sport into an active, participatory learning experience.
I went to a charter school, and one with a very different (project-based) educational philosophy. The charter school was founded by, among others, a business leader who had previously exited a startup he founded. He thought it would revolutionize education for his kids. Instead, his kids did extremely poorly at this school, and ended up going back to their normal public schools, where they did great.
I ended up going to work for his next company as my first job out of high school, and he was recounting this story to my boss, who was a grizzled childless 50-something programmer without a dog in this fight. The school founder had soured on charter schools by then, and said somewhat sarcastically "Well, they work for some kids." My boss was like "Maybe that's the point, that the kids who they work for get to attend a school that works for them."
- Education should probably be an area where methods are chosen conservatively based on what is proven. It's easy to forget that a change in curriculum will affect thousands or millions of kids and could have a life-long impact on them. We'd pillory someone who suggested testing new drugs on thousands or millions of kids even though the effects might be far less pronounced or long-term than a few years under a poorly designed curriculum that embraces bad methods.
- Neither should we give up on finding better methods. Education has undergone significant changes that have almost certainly turned out for the better. How well would a kid perform if they were put through a typical 18th century study of the classics? Latin mastery is not the passport to success it once was.
- The quality of teachers really matters. In Canada, teaching generally requires a university degree in education or a university degree with additional education in teaching. Salaries are decent in most provinces. There are still lots of bad teachers out there. I can't imagine what it's like in places where standards and pay are lower. Perhaps we should put as much effort into developing better teachers as we do into developing better teaching methods.
Here some links for the lazy ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedagogy_of_the_Oppressed
Just to note: I was taught 3 different writing systems and my ability to write on a whiteboard is rubbish
Parents want their kids to get into college, admins want to keep the parents at bay, teachers are trying to get by, unions want teacher protections, etc. There's no QBR where people look at the stats and iterate.
I feel like defaulting to an ipad game is the wrong move here.
We solved this in the 90's! https://archive.org/search?query=emulator%3A%28*%29+jumpstar...
Like have school open from 7 - 6 with the same amount of teaching but lots more recess so that parents can drop their kids off in the morning and pick them up after work. Also, have schools available in the summer so parents can drop the kids off while they go off to work.
1. experiences. Intuition comes from experiences, and IMO an under-appreciated amount of 'education' is building strong intuitions. Experiences can include project work (including struggling!), travel & reading (what it's like to be someone else), sports and music (what it's like to build skills over time and work as a team).
2. practice. So much of what we can do - from language to mathematics - is a composition of rote behaviors, responses, and habits. It's impossible to become skilled without practice.
3. building habits of mind. This includes scientific thinking, applying mental models (I like this list here: https://fs.blog/mental-models/), pro-social behavior (listening, conversing). Much of science & math is having an available set of mental models, understanding how/where to apply them, and recognizing when a new one is needed.
My preference would be for traditional subjects to be taught with these firmly in mind: when thinking about biology, for example, what are the rote skills that must be learned? What intuitions should students achieve, and what experiences will enable them? What habits of mind produce an orientation, attitude, or set of thought processes conducive to practicing the science and art of biology?
I think this doesn't contradict the author.
I'll take 1-on-1 mentoring over better computers, books, clubs, sports, or anything else the budget is spent on.
Please hire more teachers.
Educational professionals appear terminally prone to fads and magical thinking, but it's the people outside the school - parents and other adults - who seem to have the clearest conviction about things they know little about. Appeasing ignorant people makes bad public policy.
PS I know this is one event, it was also part of a consistent pattern of similar events. The school administrators had no problem admitting this in public and were proud of it.
Was this true when you were a kid? Why do you think it changed? Because when I was a kid and a kid was bad, the teacher would make the parent come to class until the kid started behaving. Do you think this would work today? And why would some teachers be opposed to it?
If it wasn’t actually useful information, how would you know? How would you discover that?
As you say, it’s a bit of a black box unless you volunteer in the classroom (as my spouse did).
In Japan, at least in primary school, boys can get away with anything, as "boys will be boys." Girls must take care of others (first) and themselves (second). If girls misbehave, write sloppily, forget things, and so on, it is much more addressed than if a a boy does the same.
What’s being discussed here is how to optimize mass education so that it’s least bad and is effective for a majority or least a substantial portion of children.
Utter nonsense and the educational data says its nonsense. If what you say were true, the highest performers in STEM fields would be from the richest areas. In fact, the opposite is true, the majority of the highest performers come from middle of the road places. You are trying to make this about money. Its not about money. Its about the negative consequences of ideology and politics.
without a large corpus your pretrain is doomed to fail
Your post-train tricks hardly pays off if your base model doesn't scale.
If we test students with standardized tests of their knowledge of facts and simple routines, I'm 100% convinced that direct instruction works better. I'd like to see if it's better also on aspects like student welfare, ability to reason and solve complex problems, creativity and innovation.
It _is_ possible that direct instruction also works better in these metrics, I just think this should be made explicit.
But this part misses the point:
"As someone who makes use of AI quite a bit in my own learning, I can say that it’s still relatively weak at having a good model of an individual’s skill gaps and conceptual weaknesses."
It seems like he is expecting a chat-based LLM to maintain a model of the user's skill tree. But it wo:
- create a detailed skill tree for whatever subject
- have the user try to apply the skills
- store the user's mastery level for each node, in some structured format
This isn't something ChatGPT is going to do if you just starting chatting with it.
But you can design a system to do it, which is what the Math Academy folks have done.
Edtech tools don't have to have user-facing AI. They can use AI under the hood, or use no AI at run time at all.
- The hard part about education has little to do with learning and a whole lot to do with socioeconomic realties.
- Education and learning is a public good. Any for-profit initiative (ed-tech) will not be incentivized to improve learning outcomes. There's no money in it. Any successful company that looks like it's selling learning is not really selling learning. (access, prestige, a promise to earn more $$$, compliance)
I did not read the article. I just have thoughts. Got edtech nerd-sniped.
I think we all know this to not be true. We've all had a super engaging teacher or task in which we learned quickly and efficiently without it feeling hard. I've learned far more through natural interest or through pursuing a goal than I have forcing myself to engage with a subject.
>Any for-profit initiative (ed-tech) will not be incentivized to improve learning outcomes. There's no money in it.
This also seems obviously false. Suppose some company did figure out a way to make learning twice as fast/efficient and proved it with data, there would be tons of money in it. Duolingo is just one example that there is plenty of money to be had even with dubious claims and a product that doesn't actually work that well. The issue seems to be that no company has figured out how to make arbitrary knowledge interesting enough to a wide enough variety of people.
If you take the extreme, people would pay huge amounts of money for The Matrix download to your brain type learning. The problem isn't no money in it, the problem is no solution thus far.
I was teaching a lot of stuff to students: physics, math, statistics (during my university times) now I teach programming and Machine Learning.
I am torn between instructional based approach, which has this advantage that gives people a set of minimal skills to start doing stuff by themselves and the project-based approach, which is probably more interesting, but is very hard to squeeze in a relatively short classes time and also might left gaps, even in the base areas, as there is no time to cover everything end-to-end (think of teaching people about for loop, as it helps working with lists, but do not mention a while loop).
So, there should be some ideal holy grail in between both ways of teaching: show them everything versus let them explore and invent everything by themselves.
The crux is that instructional-based approach works great if it is well tuned to the student's needs. The problem is that every student has different needs and capabilities, so it is hard to do something that will work for everyone. So something is too difficult for some people, while being too easy for others.
That's why we have Bloom's 2 sigma problem - 1:1 learning works orders of magnitude better than in-class learning.
Now, LLM AI enters the scene, as the article is mentioning - individualized instruction could be finally achievable and I am much less skeptical about that than the author, as I tested that on myself, the good thing is I can ask and ask for more and more details if I am not able to grok something and my "teacher" is always patient, has as much time as I need.
It does not mean that teachers are not needed, just the opposite, because the key problem is to know what to learn, LLM will just do what you ask for, nothing more, so one need to know what to ask about. But once someone is on the specific topic and problem, you can really go quite far with LLM as a tutor.
what.
You can teach anyone over the age of 12 the PAIR troubleshooting process. I have seen people with drug abuse related mental health problems cope with it. Kids are sponges. Soooo I guess I am agreeing with the back half of this section not the front half.
>In short, whenever we have high-quality evidence that rigorously compares two teaching methods, the research invariably favors strong, direct instruction plus practice.1 Or, in other words, the exact stereotype of schooling that so many of the people asking me about school reform despise.
Yeah it all goes back to Mastership learning, which modern schooling doesnt look anything like, because scaling to it would be madness.
>project-building or acting like a scientist, it will probably be worse...Students are unmotivated.
I feel like a lot of the systems being criticized here are designed to motivate children. And then all your N=1 people talking about their successes online, convincing people to approach things like this are related to having very motivated children.
>Having never taught in a classroom or worked for even a single day in education, it’s a question I’m totally unqualified to answer.
Guy has at least 5 blog posts and a whole book on something he admits hes unqualified in.
He is a bit of a polarizing figure because he was a teacher of 26 years in NYC and was awarded the NY teacher of the year award two months before he published his famous resignation letter “I Quit, I Think”[1]
For anyone who is at all interested in education or the system will be aware that there is an scene crisis in the teaching profession and teachers are quitting left and right, to a degree that it is a serious civilization ending risk. I’m not even going to start talking about all of it because there is no way to do it justice, but suffice it to say, when the system of teaching the next generation collapses, your civilization/society/country will simply just stop functioning.
Maybe some of it can be eventually overcome where AI teaches your children instead of some government apparatchik type, but that’s a whole different set of problems caused by a solution.
“… we need to realize that the institution "schools" very well, but it does not "educate"; that's inherent in the design of the thing. It's not the fault of bad teachers or too little money spent. It's just impossible for education and schooling to be the same thing." - John Taylor Gatto
Yes, but, you attended a school, no? You are more qualified to answer than you think.
> for the average student.
Who is the 'average student?' This is such a non-existent class I'm skeptical of it's invocation.
Not once is class size mentioned. Perhaps putting 30 randomly selected people in a room and then trying to move them lock step through a subject is complete folly?
Your schools are designed for administrative efficiency, not student outcomes, and "average people" simply do not exist.
Just follow the people who invented kindergarten :))