(2020-01-27) Hartmann What's Gone Wrong In Schooling

Mason Hartman: What’s Gone Wrong in Schooling? How to train a human parrot.. this is how much of our toolkit for evaluating learning in children works... A child subjected to these protocols will become a complex parrot.

Worse, because we can’t admit to ourselves that we’re in the business of training human parrots, we don’t offer children the tools that might at least allow them to succeed as parrots. We evaluate and reward rote memorization, but we don’t teach the proven mnemonic strategies; we reward shallowly-disguised plagiarism, but we don’t provide guidance for rephrasing others’ work.

What is it to know something?

How would a person come to actually understand combustion? Roughly the same way that humanity did: through a curiosity-driven, outcome-directed process of investigation and experimentation. The advantage that language gives us isn’t the ability to transfer facts into an empty-bucket mind, it’s the ability to offer simulated observations and experimental results.

A good teacher... will recognize that learning is not and can never be something done to a person, that the real substance of teaching is done by the learner himself

To build out his model, he must be able to notice where he’s confused

All learning is ultimately play.

How did we get here?

The “factory model of education” (factory schooling) makes little sense as a frame for understanding what’s occurring in schools, because schools are not efficiently producing anything.

how is this system adaptive? In other words: how does it serve the real (stated or unstated) incentives of the people who are necessary for it to persist?

the adoption of the Prussian model for compulsory education was in large part an indoctrination project — explicitly so, by many accounts. It was a useful early tool for the faithful replication and spread of Protestant Christianity, which as a matter of doctrine placed the responsibility for interpretation of the scriptures (and thus salvation) on the individual

What do the teachers, administrators, and support staff believe they’re doing? Generally something like “teaching critical thinking,” which is in most cases the educator’s equivalent to “combustion.” As the economist Bryan Caplan details in his explosive 2018 book, teachers rarely provide a concrete description of any aspect of “critical thinking,” and insofar as they can, the evidence we have does not demonstrate that schooling imparts it

The power of play

*Zoom out a little bit, and you might notice something that gives away the game: infants, toddlers, and older children are incredible learning machines. A child will learn her first language (or languages, if available) purely by osmosis, by surrounding herself with the noises of family life, mimicking what she hears and seeing how others respond to her. If she has the opportunity, she’ll easily learn to walk and run, use electronics, sing, and play musical instruments.

She’s capable of learning all of this with no explicit instruction; she only needs to observe others and experiment through play.*

The vogue in education is to hamper this process in the name of greater efficiency. If we already know the answers, why not just tell them to the children? A child can be made to sit down and copy what you tell him, after all. He can’t be made to play any particular game in earnest.

But beneath its peeling edges, an uncomfortable truth can’t be fully obscured: that the system we’ve created is labor-efficient childcare, not education.