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Roger Boyd's avatar

The aim should be to attain a highest average level as possible, with specific intervention for outliers. When I was in primary school I had difficulty reading and the head mistress took all the “bad readers” and made sure that we could read. In junior school I excelled in math and the head master had a special class for the math over achievers. Such an approach is the best of all worlds. This was in the 1960s and early 1970s in the UK, things may of course have changed since then!

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Gordon Raup's avatar

Russel Warne’s “Education’s Elephant in the Room” is a compelling post. Thanks for sharing.

The author does a compelling job of showing that our educational system is doing a far worse job of helping our students thrive than it could. Also, that there is strong resistance in the system to the findings of psychology regarding intelligence and the effects of individual differences.

To his credit, he does this without attacking the teachers and school administrators that have caused this to happen. Or more accurately that have continued to resist change as more and more evidence piles up. This is more generous than I probably could be.

The resistance from the education community seems closely related to the ideological echo chamber pervading the education industry. Admitting there are non-environmental differences between individuals would puncture the blank slate foundation of leftist/socialist/communist thought. It would also raise the chilling thought that our current polarization is in large part caused by the left’s resistance to accepting this science. Was it Stewart Smalley who said: “If I got this wrong, what else did I get wrong?” Perhaps they can't bear to go down that road.

With the coming of AI in addition to the compelling scientific studies Warne presents, it seems pretty obvious that the foundations of our educational system and our educational philosophies are out of date. They were developed in a much different world with much difference needs than our own.

So I was surprised, and now I’m referring to the last section of Warne’s post, that his proposed correctives were not much more than tweaks to the current educational system. For example: “Struggling students should get extra help and tutoring, while gifted students should receive advanced classes and opportunities for acceleration. We should encourage educators and policy makers to accept, and perhaps even embrace, individual differences.”

Rather than tweaks, it seems we need to experiment with substantially different approaches to find what works best for our times. Two approaches I’ve been following are:

• Mastery-Based Learning: Only promoting the child once mastery of the subject matter is achieved. However, it seems that this approach is only partially implemented as reports reference the children still being within a couple of years of each other in high school.

• 2-hour Learning as invented by the Alpha School. Individualized AI-based training for two hours followed by 4-6 hours of passion directed self-discovery led by Guides, not Teachers.

What do you think about these approaches? The latter seems the only one really implementing the findings that Warne discussed. Are there others?

Beyond that, any thoughts about how we get past the strong resistance from teachers, Teacher Unions, and School Boards?

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