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!
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presents, it seems pretty obvious that the foundations of our educational system and our educational philosophies are out of date.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?
Hi Gordon, thanks for the comment. My general preference is for small, incremental changes rather than radical reforms, but those are both interesting proposals. I'd have to look more deeply into the research on them before coming to a firmer view, though. Perhaps a topic for a future post...
How do you square the Flynn Effect with new research showing that genes associated with intelligence are being selected against? Are we getting more or less intelligent?
Well, the Flynn effect is an environmental effect, so one possibility is that genes and environment are pulling in opposite directions: environment up, genes down.
One of the practical reasons not to skip students based purely on ability is that, as long as we have mass schooling, age is the most efficient way to sort students of similar social maturity. This is entirely a personal anecdote, but I attended high school with a student who had been skipped several grades. He was extremely socially immature for a high school freshman (I would say he was about as socially mature for a 14 year old and as a 5 year old would be compared to a 10 year old). Probably as a result, he didn’t do very well academically, even though he was obviously very intelligent. I do wonder if he ever found his way, as his academic future didn’t look very auspicious.
The elite used to hire private tutors and governesses for their kids. Obviously we can’t do this at scale, but we should throw every technological resource, including AI, into figuring out how to make individualized learning work, and grant degrees based on attainment.
Yeah, I’ve heard similar anecdotes. But problems like that aren’t confined to people who skip, and the question is whether they’re more common among skippers - which we can’t judge from anecdotes.
My mother was routinely called in when I was in preschool and kindergarten to discuss my performance which outpaced the other children radically. I was one of those kids who drew in three point perspective at 4 or 5, spoke 4 languages as a baby, and plowed through dozens of books a week through childhood.
I tended to scare adults and learned quickly to modulate my apparent intelligence.
I’ve found that what you mentioned for “intelligence” gaps is happening again.
I seem to hold a very clear model of what LLM AI’s operate with in my head (I hold very large complex models and patterns in memory easily). I built LLM AI’s out of curiosity in the early 90’s. It has enabled me to speed up and broaden my work thousand-fold. I can use AI effortlessly do the work of large teams of software and process engineers who take months, in hours.
It’s beginning to unsettle my teams, when there’s a complex question or challenging piece of business now and I can solve it deterministically in software in minutes or hours.
Only a few partners know that I can handle multiple complex delivery projects simultaneously now, and can outpace all our offshore software delivery teams.
That’s what’s going to happen the next few years with others like me.
Smarter people are gong to explode with possibilities with AI. I know of very few people who are tapping the information - my Niece (venture capital guru) has begun bypassing normal business analytics to get very focused results in minutes and not weeks for looking at companies.
The first generation of students are leaving college having always had AI. The smartest will be breakaway stunning, a dimension nobody has ever seen.
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!
Yep, raising up everyone as much as possible seems like the best bet to me, even if it means a somewhat larger gap between top and bottom.
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?
Hi Gordon, thanks for the comment. My general preference is for small, incremental changes rather than radical reforms, but those are both interesting proposals. I'd have to look more deeply into the research on them before coming to a firmer view, though. Perhaps a topic for a future post...
How do you square the Flynn Effect with new research showing that genes associated with intelligence are being selected against? Are we getting more or less intelligent?
Well, the Flynn effect is an environmental effect, so one possibility is that genes and environment are pulling in opposite directions: environment up, genes down.
One of the practical reasons not to skip students based purely on ability is that, as long as we have mass schooling, age is the most efficient way to sort students of similar social maturity. This is entirely a personal anecdote, but I attended high school with a student who had been skipped several grades. He was extremely socially immature for a high school freshman (I would say he was about as socially mature for a 14 year old and as a 5 year old would be compared to a 10 year old). Probably as a result, he didn’t do very well academically, even though he was obviously very intelligent. I do wonder if he ever found his way, as his academic future didn’t look very auspicious.
The elite used to hire private tutors and governesses for their kids. Obviously we can’t do this at scale, but we should throw every technological resource, including AI, into figuring out how to make individualized learning work, and grant degrees based on attainment.
Yeah, I’ve heard similar anecdotes. But problems like that aren’t confined to people who skip, and the question is whether they’re more common among skippers - which we can’t judge from anecdotes.
I haven’t read deeply on this topic, but apparently there’s little evidence that skipping is harmful (e.g., https://doi.org/10.1007/s10212-022-00614-z) - including in its effects on social development (e.g., https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/edu0000500).
This is more evidence that the Blank Slate Fallacy is alive and well.
My mother was routinely called in when I was in preschool and kindergarten to discuss my performance which outpaced the other children radically. I was one of those kids who drew in three point perspective at 4 or 5, spoke 4 languages as a baby, and plowed through dozens of books a week through childhood.
I tended to scare adults and learned quickly to modulate my apparent intelligence.
I’ve found that what you mentioned for “intelligence” gaps is happening again.
I seem to hold a very clear model of what LLM AI’s operate with in my head (I hold very large complex models and patterns in memory easily). I built LLM AI’s out of curiosity in the early 90’s. It has enabled me to speed up and broaden my work thousand-fold. I can use AI effortlessly do the work of large teams of software and process engineers who take months, in hours.
It’s beginning to unsettle my teams, when there’s a complex question or challenging piece of business now and I can solve it deterministically in software in minutes or hours.
Only a few partners know that I can handle multiple complex delivery projects simultaneously now, and can outpace all our offshore software delivery teams.
That’s what’s going to happen the next few years with others like me.
Smarter people are gong to explode with possibilities with AI. I know of very few people who are tapping the information - my Niece (venture capital guru) has begun bypassing normal business analytics to get very focused results in minutes and not weeks for looking at companies.
The first generation of students are leaving college having always had AI. The smartest will be breakaway stunning, a dimension nobody has ever seen.