I've posted various comments before where I detailed the fallacies and fundamental issues (some deliberately implanted from the beginning, others mutating later on) with the compulsory schooling system and how the classroom model is ineffectual.
Remember: education != schooling. Never forget that. This is one of the most common misconceptions of our time.
What does blows my mind is just how thoroughly the masses have accepted public school curricula as the only true and legitimate form of education. People like you blow my mind. I don't mean to be smug or arrogant, I'm glad you're awakening.
Fact of the matter is compulsory schooling originated to instill obedience in the context of the Prussian militarist regime, later becoming adopted by industrial moguls in the USA during the late 19th century, due to the necessity of cheap and easily disposable labor.
Here are some books to read:
John Taylor Gatto: Dumbing Us Down, Weapons of Mass Instruction and The Underground History of American Education.
Charlotte Iserbyt: the deliberate dumbing down of america.
Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society.
John Holt: Anything at all, but particularly How Children Fail and How Children Learn.
----------
Besides Sudsbury schools, there's several other alternative school models: anarchistic free schools and democratic schools. Look those up, as well.
Ultimately, what people need to realize is that autodidacticism is the most efficient form of learning. Yet schooling has killed the will to autodidact for many people, or has delegitimized it in favor of formal schooling and credentials.
I'm a recovering internet asshat, and want to post two great techniques to improve the tone:
1. Talk about the topic exclusively. It's best to avoid talking about yourself and especially how you were right. Also, avoid speaking to your audience as if on stage. (Ie, "This is my point. Never forget that", can be "This is the point."). This may be against intuition, but it works to remove ego on all sides and focus on the conversation.
2. Always try to say "yes, and" before you say no. Agreeing with the point and building on it is generative. Blocking hurts.
I feel a TV show pitch coming on (I'm sure it's been done).
A small group of people are chosen with a similar job/background - all professors of Physics say, or all refuse collectors, or all high-school drop-outs, ...
Those people are then given a challenge to do something that is known to be outside of their locus of experience - make a souffle, do a science demonstration, play a musical instrument. One is given a professional educator with the relevant experience of the field and a budget of money for resources, the other is given nothing except the same money for resources (which can not in this case be people).
A prize is offered for the best results (in order to try to account for poor will-power; perhaps the prize is split between trainer and trainee if they win). The results are recorded for the entertainment of the masses.
"what people need to realize is that autodidacticism is the most efficient form of learning."
Grand claims require grand evidence. Until then what we have is the widespread observation that compulsory schooling appears to have outcompeted it's competitors everywhere.
I appreciate everything you've said. Obviously not everyone will have their mind blown by these observations if they're already well informed on much of this.
My point was more toward the general public and the idea that such a radically different educational environment is preparing students for success in college and wide range of jobs should be at least inspire some curiosity...
I understand, and I apologize for my arrogant tone.
However, I felt as though the general tone expressed in this blog post was quite condescending. It's as if you've discovered some deeply hidden and arcane mystery of life that you're now willing to share with the unwashed, and you express shock at how their minds could not be blown by such a proposition.
Then, you are posting this on HN, so it was only a matter of time, anyway. I hope I saved a fellow ostentatious bloke the work.
In the end, thanks for spreading awareness of this.
Yea, I know. It's tough to strike the right tone in the blog post and in the end the format was structured to be readable and get attention as I really do just want people to think about these ideas more, even if in the end they don't agree with them.
> Ultimately, what people need to realize is that autodidacticism is the most efficient form of learning.
I call bull.
I can learn from a math teacher in an hour what would take me possibly years, or a lifetime for that matter, to discover on my own.
During 2 years of college lecture classes one can learn what took philosophers and eventually mathematicians nearly 2000 years to discover.
But what about the arts?
Again, same story. Thousands of years of progress and theory can be summed up and taught in just months. (A wee bit of practice may then be required to master certain skills! ;) )
Yes some self directed learning is valuable, and indeed almost every class I took had aspect of self guided learning in it. Teachers loved leading us halfway to the goal, pointing us in a general direction, and then letting us go forth and discover the answer for ourselves.
Now do I think how public schools are currently ran is ideal? Heck no, far from it. No Child Left Behind was a huge damaging blow to the American educational system.
But what I always wanted out of school was more direction, not less. I passionately hated assignments where students had to go off and make their own video presentations and other such activities.
Yet in theory, giving presentations is of some value, it requires the students to acquire information on their own, summarize it into a communicable form, and then share that information with others. (I just despised how much class time was devoted to watching very bad presentations...)
But hey, that sounds like self guided learning, at a public school no less!
One thing to remember is that trying to dictate any one educational style is going to fail some non-trivial percent of students.
As I said in another comment, I did horrible in unstructured classes. More structure would have been my desire. IMHO school would have benefited from having 2 hours set aside just for an open study room for students to do HW in. But that is mostly because as a kid, left to my own devices, I would go home and play games rather than study. Heck I'd read a month's worth of reading assignments on the bus home, then never do the book reports!
Likewise for finding study groups. As someone with social anxiety (which was much worse as a kid!) asking the class to form groups would result in me hiding in a corner somewhere. Suffice to say I never was good at getting language practice in either!
But lab classes, oh wow I rocked at those. Love'd them. On a related note, questions come up as to the suitability of unstructured learning for certain topics. E.g. How would unstructured learning have students do genetic modifications of bacteria? Or play with explosives? Both are some of my fondest memories from high school! Both involved very explicit step by step instructions written down that we followed to the letter! (For good reason!)
I guess my overall point is that ideologues of any type tend to have a drum and enjoy beating it, much to the determent of someone somewhere else.
> I can learn from a math teacher in an hour what would take me possibly years, or a lifetime for that matter, to discover on my own.
I would be surprised if this is true, unless you can't read. Usually the reverse is true. (Which is not to discount the value of guidance, but real learning happens with you, not anyone else; in an hour (or less), you can find out about a good book or problem to study from a math teacher, which could take years of searching on your own, but the learning doesn't happen by you listening to them talk, especially in math.)
> I would be surprised if this is true, unless you can't read. Usually the reverse is true.
I, and many other students, pre-read our mathematics text before class started.
It was of about 0 usefulness. I'd say maybe 10%-15% comprehension.
Steps to solve a problem were always cut out, and always seemingly the ones that we needed most to see. Example problems were either too complex or too simple. And explanations of complex topics were poorly written all around.
A good professor comes in, sees where we are having problems at. Discusses the topics in ways we can relate to, helps guide us down the path of understanding. Demonstrates techniques on the board at various levels of difficulty, ensuring we can see not only how is an idea applied to a trivial problem, but also how it is applied within a larger framework as well.
I am someone who loves to read, and who learns really well from reading. But when it comes to math I don't think I ever got any comprehension from a mathematics textbook by itself. Typically after a lecture was given, maybe 80% of the book would make sense. Sometimes, on a few chapters, 100%. Eventual understanding of what the book said came only after mastery of the technique, from which I could work backwards to figure out what the book was doing.
Then there is the fact that applying a concept is a huge part of understanding it. Application and practice are what take a shakily understood idea that will be soon forgotten and turn it into an understanding of a new way of thinking that will stick with the student for life.
A good professor can see what areas of understanding their class is struggling with and assign problems appropriately, helping to ensure that students come away from their schooling with life long knowledge.
And of course on top of this there remains the fact that different people have different abilities of reading. One of the smartest people I know is dyslexic, it is faster for him to have someone else read the text to him than for him to read it himself!
Naturally I know people who were able to just read their math textbook and understand everything in it. Kudos to them! For the rest of the students though, who were all actively asking questions and engaging with the professors during classes, it seems that they most certainly gained value out of class lectures!
Indeed, office hours were also popular. The typical rule in study groups I attended was we'd spend 2-3 hours trying to understand a concept together before we marked it down as "ask the professor about it".
That's interesting. For me, in the only somewhat hard math class I took in college, the class meetings were mostly useless. All that I learned came from solving the problems.
For me, solving the problems cemented the concepts. Some problems I couldn't solve, I'd ask another student for help, they'd explain the remainder of the concept that I was failing to grasp, and things would make sense. If they didn't go to prof next day for help.
Basically the professor would show off the technique in various usages, I'd take copious step by step notes, and then try to apply those same techniques to problems given. A really good problem set builds up difficulty and slowly expands upon the initial base techniques.
This is in strict contrast to how CS is taught. Although CS is still largely "throw in pool, hope students figure it out". IMHO I think I learned more in CS from discussions after class with the prof than from most classes, and I also think many other students would agree with me. :)
It's honestly something that i found out entirely through self-experience. I'm a self-taught Perl developer who spent 5 years to reach a proficient level. I managed to get another developer with little Perl experience to nearly my level within 6 months by handing him two excellent books and reading his code and pointing out issues in his algorithms and semantics.
The local maxima i am aware of here are:
1. Outdated books. When i learned Perl i wasted a lot of time on books that are now known widely to be objectively bad, but are still recommended widely. The ones i recommended allowed learning with little friction.
2. Algorithmic and semantic problems that have to be resolved through lengthy investigation sessions long after they're implemented. I spent a LOT of time figuring out what doesn't work well in the long run. He's been able to skip those and spend his time more productively on problems that i haven't encoutered or solved yet.
I'm not trying to toot my horn here and i think i'm not a good teacher. But the advantages he had from me being available were staggering.
> I spent a LOT of time figuring out what doesn't work well in the long run. He's been able to skip those and spend his time more productively on problems that i haven't encoutered or solved yet.
This is one thing teachers are really good for!
I'm sure some students would figure out not to sure GOTO after awhile, but, well, think of all those wasted years! Easier to just explain to them the problems upfront!
> I managed to get another developer with little Perl experience to nearly my level within 6 months by handing him two excellent books and reading his code and pointing out issues in his algorithms and semantics.
Part of this is natural ability as well. I have a friend who much to my dismay is not a software engineer, but who only dabbles.
I was able to explain lambdas and closures to him in a couple of minutes over IM, and he was almost immediately able to see their uses.
Meanwhile, I know experienced software engineers who cannot fathom the purpose of a Lambda, and a few friends I know who are just not intelligent enough (?) to comprehend on a deep level how lambdas and closures work.
Now all this said, the college professor who was supposed to teach us functional programming did such as piss poor job at it that I ended up not understanding basic FP concepts until I started using them in C# and reading about how they are implemented in the CLR. (Part of this is because Eric Lippert is a damn good writer...)
I think the text book we had at the time defined them solely in terms of mathematical constructs. Ugh.
During 2 years of college lecture classes one can learn what took philosophers and eventually mathematicians nearly 2000 years to discover.
This is an oddly phrased rebuttal. I don't think anybody is saying that you should try to re-play 2000 years of math, science, and philosophy discoveries ex nihilo. Rather, the suggestion is that you don't need an instructor to discover (or summarize) Euler, Newton, and Plato. You can do it on your own.
Just because the elapsed time was 2000 years does not imply 2 years of study at a fixed hourly class time is a meaningful metric for what we're talking about.
The history of discovery and how ideas were constrained in the ancient world and the time it took to discover ideas is not related to the fixed-time dedicated study of the topic. The connection is totally meaningless.
Some measure of units of information would be meaningful. Discussing discovery and the established discipline as isolated things (or describing how they could be connected in that context) is meaningful.
That's your preference, and I respect it. But writing a long rant attempting to prove that your personal preference is true for everyone is silly. I personally have taught myself the vast majority of what I know. So you are wrong.
EDIT: maybe I'm misjudging your tone. If so, my bad.
My overall message is that the original poster's line
> Ultimately, what people need to realize is that autodidacticism is the most efficient form of learning.
Is making a huge statement about everyone and every possible topic to learn!
He is making an absolute statement about human psychology of all things. Thankfully absolutes statements are easy to disprove, only a single counter example is needed!
> I personally have taught myself the vast majority of what I know.
Well I'd say that I also taught myself the vast majority of what I know! :) But to be fair that is because I spend multiple hours per day reading! That said, I'd also argue that self directed reading is not the most efficient way of learning. On more than one occasion I have spent days reading up on topics and then only been enlightened after having a 10 minute conversation with a friend!
Likewise, all the mathematics and the vast majority of the science I know comes from instructors at school. I am good at math[1] (heck I love math!), and I was likely in the top 20% of students to pick up on stuff in class, but by no means could I have taught myself! Thankfully I went to a community college where classes were small and resembled a back and forth discussion between students and the professor, so it wasn't a strict "lessons from up top" type of learning either.
Which kind of is my overall point, some topics require a different learning style! Rote memorization is actually really good for learning some types of material.
Likewise, for all those math classes, group discussions after class where we all brought our understandings together to form one cohesive whole, was when everything really clicked. The lecture for an hour got us started and gave us the foundation, two hours of study group dedicated to solving actual problems with what we had just learned is what brought full comprehension.
There is no one catch all solution for the entire population. If we were going to be truly civilized about it, we'd design tests to discover how people best learn, and put them into classes accordingly. Heck make it tests per topic even, how I learned writing is different than how I learned math!
[1] Well used to be good at it, back when I still used it in school. :)
I'd be interested to know roughly what sort of employment/positions you've taken up over the years for the purpose of an extension of the timeline you've started here, if you're willing to share.
I only got through college with the help of my GF at the time. No way I would have even gone to class without her! Graduated major in CS, minor in Mathematics.
Right now I am a Software Engineer in a crazy start-up like team that has insane deadlines and crazy big dreams. Every day is nuts, I am running around trying to keep some semblance of order, and I love it. :) I'm always being pushed outside my comfort zone (C# developer thrust into deep embedded development!) and being challenged on all sides.
The thing is though, even now, I am not good at doing my own projects on the side. If it is part of work, I'll have fun finding an awesome way to solve problems, I am good at being pragmatics about applying the latest software engineering trends balanced with actually getting things done, so I am typically pretty close to the forefront of Cool Stuff(tm). But I regret not having the self control needed to do coding on my own time. The dopamine hit from Video Games (and from novel content) is just too great.
> Fact of the matter is compulsory schooling originated to instill obedience in the context of the Prussian militarist regime, later becoming adopted by industrial moguls in the USA during the late 19th century, due to the necessity of cheap and easily disposable labor.
If by industrial moguls you mean thousands of locally-elected school boards in rural, agrarian small towns. During the period that public schools caught on in the U.S., the society was still a thoroughly decentralized Jeffersonian republic. Democratic centralism had not yet won any level of government, let alone the present nationalized education swamp.
Autodidacticism only works for people who are highly intelligent, who have attention easily captured by books, and who have strong verbal skills. The other 99.5% of people need teachers. The Sudbury school produces graduates who have gaping holes in their knowledge, on whatever topics did not aggressively capture their attention.
I am willing to bet that the parents of children at this school are educated (likely have college degrees) and have a strong focus on education.
Some students do well in structured environments, some do really well in unstructured environments, there is no one right solution for everybody.
Claiming that any one technique works for all demonstrates a lack of empathy for how others think and learn.
I know that for me, I received failing grades in the few classes I took that were unstructured. Heck the same applied for online classes. Trivial material, but lack of forced time to participate (e.g. go to a classroom and listen to a lecture) means I would just give up on the class and not do anything.
So it would kind of be more meaningful to not compare to the national average but to private schools targeting the same socio-economic situations, but with a traditional curriculum.
Again the point is not to show that Sudbury Valley is better, but rather just that the complete lack of curriculum is clearly not producing horrible results.
Children who have been raised to value learning will, in all likelihood, value learning. This is not a surprise!
I would also be curious to see the breakdown of what fields those students go into.
Some people are capable of self-learning in certain fields where as others are not. A great example of this is math, we all have heard stories (or know the person, or are the person!) of someone who can learn math on their own straight from a text book. Then there are others who learn best from an interactive discussion about math with a teacher. And then there are those who learn best about math from a discussion within a peer group!
If you look at our current teaching system, it tries to target all three learning styles to varying degrees.
Hearing stories about some wonder-kid in 7th grade who taught himself everything up to calculus in a single summer by reading on his own doesn't really help the discussion around setting national educational policy, because that kid is, to say the least, an outlier.
Writing is similar. Having an instructor guide students in areas to learn can be very valuable. Left to their own devices and being told to just write poems for a few hours a day for some length of time, I am betting most students wouldn't stumble upon haiku(s?) on their own!
>because that kid is, to say the least, an outlier. //
One of the major problems as I see it is that pretty much all kids are outliers in some way but en masse education tends to ignore this and force uniformity to a great extent (much greater than necessary IMO).
Please, can you give more insight about the school, instead of this short info "No curriculum - 80% went to college". What happens to 20%, are they completely uneducated because they didn't want to learn? Do they past some official mandatory tests? How exactly do they learn, who teaches them? You mentioned no classes if not requested, maybe 90% of knowledge gaining happens on that requested classes? How often do students get expulsion? What happens if some student don't want to do anything or don't even show up in school?
I'll do my best to write more posts getting in to the specifics, but my observation so far is that none of the extreme possibilities happen. There are problems. There are expulsions. Not many, but they do happen. The students don't magically learn everything on their own, but they do seem to develop in to competent, thoughtful, curious adults on their own...
Thanks for interesting blog posts. Answers to those questions help to understand what's good or bad about that system. Or any educational system. It's interesting, do they develop into curiosity, or they had it from the beginning.
There's no silver bullet in education, it's very complex thing. And to disregard traditional system on any ground could be too hasty. I've attended two schools. Both traditional system, but second one (last 2 years of education) had good reputation and to get there you had to pass exams (not very hard though). 100% of my class got into college (not US). And much less people from my first school did. The main difference was all the students in my class got in that school specifically because they wanted to go to higher education (also good teachers :).
I think the main problem is that these days we tend to look at this as a purely quantitative matter, when it's largely a quality matter.
We largely abandoned the enlightenment ideas of a humanist education. One whose purposes it isn't to drill people into fulfilling norms, but that enables them to live fulfilled lives where they can express themselves and grow into the kind of educated citizen being able to judge on political matters beyond who you'd like to drink a beer with more.
8k is not nearly as unreasonable as you make it sound. 157/wk is the price of a decent-but-not-top-flight daycare that many two-income families would be used to paying for to begin with. Certainly the income will be more than the median, but not necessarily as much more as you'd think.
I also suspect (given others comments that it's a private school) that when they do have lessons, they have very small class sizes, making it far easier to learn/be taught.
The point of the post was not to claim that Sudbury Valley is for everyone or is better than other educational environments necessarily. It was more to observe that I'm surprised that people are not more curious about such a different environment. I would expect people to have more questions and want to learn more...
Montessori schools are somewhat of a middle ground between what this article describes and traditional school.
I was in public Montessori schools from preschool through 8th grade. We had scheduled lectures for maybe two hours a day and the rest of the school day was spent working on whatever project or assignment you wanted to.
Due dates were due dates and this type of schooling encouraged individual agency and personal responsibility. If you wanted to you could sit around and talk to your friends all day and not work on / learn anything, but if you didn't complete all of your work before deadline you faced consequences. But "homework" was just whatever you wanted or needed to work on at home to meet deadlines.
You can't imagine how shocked I was in when I entered a traditional American high school and felt like a prisoner. Not allowed to speak or socialize (unless to ask a question of the instructor), move out of my seat, or do what I wanted. Just frozen in a chair listening to a teacher speak for hours on end. I was always the student who would raise their hand to ask a question, answer the teacher's question, or give my opinion because I was starving for any form of social interaction during classes.
That anyone has the capacity to see a traditional western high school as anything BUT prison daycare is what shocks me. It speaks to the ability of normalization to blind us to extreme circumstances.
Capitalism and the tragedy of the commons are the sole reason that our education system is so lecture-based, non-interactive, socially suffocating, creativity-draining, and non-personalized. Why would we spend more money, human capital, and time on improving the education system when it doesn't directly increase the GDP? What market force pushes us to improve education? What shareholder will benefit? This is the failure of a political and economic system that places too little emphasis on improving the public good.
Distributed fairly evenly from K to 12, I enjoyed a handful of passionate teachers that conducted class in a more Montessori fashion, all at public schools. At the very least, they permitted me to guide my own curriculum.
My CAD/CAM teacher permitted me to spend an entire semester messing around with Photoshop. He would simply check in on me once a week. Without question, the skills I learned in those months got me my first industry job 3 years later.
The vast majority of my teachers followed the mediocre status quo that you describe, but there certainly was no mandate to teach that way. I know the problem is far more complex than individual teacher engagement, but that's what it boils down to. Anything that can be done to inspire teachers and keep them happy (better pay wouldn't hurt) should have a positive effect on education. The teachers that had the best impact on me cared the most about teaching, simple as that.
The one in Massachusetts is the original Sudbury school. Families literally move across the country to enroll their children at that school, so I'd say it's a pretty special case.
I mentioned in the blog post that it is an apples to oranges comparison for a lot of reasons. The point is that clearly the complete lack of curriculum is not placing these students at any significant disadvantage. That alone I think it a mind-blowing idea given how radically different the educational environment is compared to traditional schools.
The thing that blows my mind is how so many accept industrialized schooling methods as some sort of long-term facet of humanity.
The truth is its been around for about 100 years give or take. It was instituted by the large monopolist who bribed politicians to force tax-payers to subsidize their worker training.
The purpose is not to create "intelligent, creative thinkers" - its purpose is to create obedient factory workers who can place the round peg in the round hole.
I haven't yet seen any studies showing specific comparisons, but they seem to do well, enjoy college, and graduate. Again the point is not that Sudbury Valley does significantly better at preparing students for college/jobs but that it clearly is not doing a poor job of this, which I think is a significant observation given how different the environment is.
Sudbury Valley does not self-select students. It is a private school, but if you can afford the relatively low tuition ($9k a year) and want to go there you can. There is no selection process other than making sure the family is on board with the educational philosophy.
I think you've just described what 'self-selection' is: the school is not selective, but the students who choose to attend the school may not be representative of the general population
I agree. The students at Sudbury Valley and the families are not representative. That said, there is no application process outside of making sure you want to be there and your family is on board. They are not filtering out lower-performing students at all.
But it is certainly possible that this model would fail miserably when applied more generally. I don't think that can be the null hypothesis, though...
I have 6 kids. One, my 10 yo daughter is mostly at home due to long term illness. School attendance, 10%, ish. In education tests, she is in the top 10%. My conclusion? Kids learn. Its what they do.
No, Im not sure what the point of school is, except as a babysitting service for working parents. IMHO, its just an imposition of authority and structure on kids, so that adults can more easily do as told in.... authority and structure. Or some such snarky anti-society as we have it now thing. You know...
I do wish we could start again with a blank sheet of paper.
It's not surprising at all, it's a facet of a world system that is no longer relevant. But look at other things such as labor laws and unions, if you propose changing them people will yell at you because of the perception that they benefit workers. The same way that schools benefit students. But neither is true. Unions are exclusionary of entry level workers, they benefit people who already have good jobs and training often to the detriment of workers who don't. And laws which force employers to provide benefits to "full time workers" generally just encourage businesses to keep some workers part time, forcing those people to work multiple jobs to earn more money.
Similarly, an excess of business regulation tends to force small companies out of business and promotes the creation of large corporations (due to economies of scale with respect to regulatory compliance). These effects are probably not intended but that's rather irrelevant when they are still happening.
I bring these up because they are more controversial than the idea that institutionalized public schooling in the "prussian" model is harmful. It's difficult to overcome ingrained biases and prejudices. If you find it troublesome to consider the idea that unions aren't an unalloyed good then you shouldn't be surprised that a lot of people have a hard time reconsidering the value of the current educational system.
> I would expect people to have more questions and want to learn more...
There is no need for that since most people with an interest in the topic and the general techie-community type of intellect will be able to answer almost any possible interesting question on the topic for themselves and even quickly disprove your claims without needing any further information besides what you provided.
The very first wrong thing is your conclusion, quote:
> these students go on to have success in college and jobs
So far you've only shown college enrollment, which has nothing to do with success in or after college, as it is, looking at the entire USA, completely a matter of cashflow.
Further, your claim that there is no disadvantage is disproved by yourself when you state a data point that puts the "success" of that school below what would be expected from a private school.
In other words, to answer your titular question of:
> How Does This Not Blow Your Mind?
It doesn't because we don't possess your biases and do not easily delude ourselves into your conclusions.
Next time you try to prove something, please bring along actual numbers and comparisons.
Ok, so would you predict that most of those who get accepted to college flunk out or are unable to get jobs?
I can certainly appreciate that this might not actually be "mind-blowing", but personally I think even the college-acceptance rates are a surprising result.
The point is that you claim they are successful past college entrance (without qualifying in relation to what they are so) without providing ANY EVIDENCE WHATSOEVER.
Furthermore you just now conflated "acceptance" with merely "going on to" college and in the process ignored the number of those who didn't even try to get in and also ignored the simple fact that getting into a college (ANY COLLEGE) in the USA has literally nothing to do with student ability.
I apologize. I don't have specific stats to share on the college success. The books published by the school have a lot of anecdotal evidence regarding the students having success in college. They don't seem to have universal success or significantly greater success then their peers from other schools, but they do seem to be able to handle and graduate from college and have gone on to a wide-range of jobs.
I should not have simplified the argument to claim that they have universal success.
Cheers for taking my criticism and actually considering it. I hope it will influence your future writing positively. :)
Also, now that i think of it, let me make a recommendation. Please either read, or listen to the audiobook, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" about Richard P. Feynman. The latter part of the book discusses how even NASA accidentally deluded itself into making gross mistakes in the use of statistics and, if i remember correctly, describes at the very end a general philosophy and attitude towards science that would greatly improve your ability to contemplate and argue scientific matters.
It doesn't blow my mind, and this article doesn't really scratch the surface.
First off, this is a private school. Right off the bat, we'd expect their educational achievement to be higher, simply down to social class, which is directly correlated. So we can establish that educational attainment at this school is in line with other private schools.
This being the case, the conclusion we can draw from this school is: "children with middle-class parents who are involved in their education can achieve better outcomes than the public school average when they attend well-funded private schools, even with an alternative educational model." Phrased like that, if's pretty obvious.
The Sudbury model is also not the claimed "educational environment where the students can do what ever they want, when ever they want all day long" - that's a bit of a misrepresentation. It's an educational environment where children are provided the tools and support to plan their own education, and are required to be involved in that process.
I absolutely, thoroughly believe that the Sudbury model is an excellent approach to providing a much more well-rounded education for children. However, it requires lots of funding, excellent educators, and is arguably not any more suitable for every child than the current flawed system is.
Formal education and curricula are something I found exceptionally useful as a child, though I of course recognise the limitations there, and I'm pretty envious of the Sudbury model. But I wonder if a more general-purpose model may be effective. I attended a state comprehensive school in the UK, but had a couple of excellent teachers who were happy to provide materials and support for additional or alternative self-directed learning in areas where it was obvious I was bored or disinterested. That worked really well, and I can totally see that a basic curriculum and standardised attainment, combined with flexible opportunities for students who want to take more control of their learning, could be very effective.
Of course, all of this relies of excellent, well-paid educators. And sometimes these can be hard to come by.
1) There are no requirements for students to be "involved in the process of planning their own education". They are only required to be attend school a certain number of hours per year (I'm not sure the exact number), and serve time on the judicial committee. There are no requirements at all around any educational goals.
2) Sudbury Valley School operates on less money per-pupil than neighboring public schools.
3) The only requirement for adults who work as staff members is that they are capable of treating students as equals.
Implement it in a ghetto, achieve similar similar stats and then it'll blow my mind.
I went to a [non US] high end private school & learned pretty quickly that education is a matter of "you get what you pay for".
Perhaps its country specific, but locally the private schools crush the public ones into fine dust. Plus (local) private schools tend to attract the kids of the elite...which comes with some seriously high caliber connections.
That would be more mind-blowing, I agree, but that's an enormously high bar that no one is achieving.
Sudbury Valley is a private school, but it is much less expensive ($8k vs $25k+) than many other private schools and does not attract only elite students. In fact many students turn to Sudbury Valley after struggling with public schools or even being expelled from public schools.
Unlike most private schools Sudbury Valley will accept all students as long as they want to be there and agree with the educational philosophy (e.g. adults will not force your student to do anything)...
I probably shouldn't have included that stat. The point was not to say that Sudbury Valley was sending 100% of their grads to MIT or something, but rather to note that I think people would predict far lower numbers of college-going graduates if they tried to predict the outcomes of a school that had not requirements and no curriculum at all...
I really hate titles that don't say anything about the topic, sadly they are more and more frequent on HN, I now stopped reading or upvoting those posts and I hope more people will do the same to these attention seekers
I've thought about it a bit. I realize the title is annoying on Hacker News, but I think the title is ok within the general context of my blog for those who read it regularly.
I'll think about another title, and I'm sorry (sort-of as I've enjoyed the debate here) for the sensationalist title on Hacker News, but I don't think it's a huge deal outside of this specific context...
The purpose of modern school system is to prepare children to be good factory workers. Long work day, doing what you're told, sitting still and being a good little worker.
would be interesting to hear more about those who actually go there, the reasoning of their parents, whether they assembly otherwise to study a 'sort of' curriculum and so forth... these quick snapshot paragraphs are a great teaser but naturally too light-weight in detail, would love to see a longer article on it.
There's a lot of literature out there from the founders of the school. Generally speaking they do engage in a lot of self-directed learning, but I think if you walked around the school you would not say that they were spending their time engaged in learning the way most of us think about it.
I'll be writing more about it. This was meant as a teaser, but I don't mean to leave it there. As I spend more time at the school I'll have more observations to share.
Generally speaking they seem to do similar activities to what I do on the weekends, with my free time. I might read a book, play a video game, learn something new, visit with friends, etc. That roughly describes what I've seen from them in the time I've spent at a Sudbury Valley school in the Bay Area.
I don't think it's reasonable to assume that these students have any higher IQs than the neighboring public schools. I have not found any evidence to suggest that.
I was in a similar program in 7th and 8th grade; self-assessments, no-grades, frequent field-trips... I think I was in the 18% that it didn't work for though...
It doesn't surprise me. If you assume that the school system doesn't exist. And I asked you how you think people learn best and to design a system around it, this is not how you'd do it.
Several major points spring to mind:
1) Learning - once you're done with route-memorisation nonsense - is the process of discovering that what you assumed was wrong or incomplete. What's standardised testing? The punishment of being wrong or giving an answer that's more or less complete than the tester wanted.
It's hardly surprising that a culture that grows around punishing failure would be hostile to learning.
There's research backing that up. We know that people who are rewarded for finding out that they're wrong, over time, start to dramatically outperform people who are rewarded for finding out that they're right. The former group continually seek to find out that they're wrong, which they can only do by pushing the boundaries, the latter group largely stick to what they already know.
2) Effort can only take you so far in anything. This is a common enough theme here that can probably stand without support. No-one wants to hire someone who doesn't like the job, we expect them to do everything half-arsed. It's not going to be magically different for education.
So, what are the odds that someone's going to be deeply interested in everything? I've never met such a person. I've met people who are happy enough to listen but they don't go off and learn about the subject on their own afterwards.
What's even the expected return on making everyone learn everything? We need a few generalists, granted, but we'll get a few generalists anyway from people who are interested in multiple subjects. Someone who doesn't enjoy maths, what's the point of making them learn trig, or linear algebra? What's the point in making someone who wants to be a Scientist take art? Can it even be said to be learning if they're just doing it because they have to? Skills that aren't practised wither. I've met people who got quite reasonable GCSE results, at some point they were able to do the things in the subjects they got, and can't even work out a percentage anymore. Give them a basic grounding; add up, divide, work out a percentage; and the rest? Not their problem. They're not going to learn it properly in the first place and it's questionable how much use they'd have out of it if they did.
The vast majority of the time spent on someone's education is just pointless filler subjects that do little more than punish someone with boredom and failure. Offering no economic or cultural benefit in return. Just try having a discussion with someone about the underlying causes of the Opium Wars, or the Boer Wars, or ask them why World War 1 started, or... Then try having a discussion with them about the religious practices of Buddhists, or Jews. There's a very limited set of living knowledge in most people - far beneath that which you'd expect just going off of exam results and taught subjects. The two should approach each other, and it seems to me the logical way to do this is to reduce taught knowledge unless an economic or cultural case can be made for attempting to run things in the other direction.
3) This ties into 2 but is a little different: We have utterly no respect for diversity. The downside of having a standardised grade system is that there's a cutoff point where investing more in a student stops being worthwhile. You have a student getting a B, do you focus on getting them up to an A or do you focus on getting the D student up to a C so that they count in your students getting A-C stats? You have a student getting an A, do you work to further engage them or do they just cease to be worth your time? It makes far more sense, under that incentive system, to focus that effort on the people who are under-performing - and who will probably not retain and go on to use the knowledge.
The consequence of having a set test is you have teaching set to the test. You have a space of things that you expect people to know, and they may fill it to various degrees but at the end of the day if you take a group of people that achieved good results, they're all going to know more or less the same stuff.
Strength in groups comes from diversity, new ways of looking at things, new questions, different answers. Over specialisation creates weaknesses - cultural blind-spots. If you know the same as me, then I don't need you as anything more than something to carry out my orders. You make me stronger only in so far as you're an instrument of my will. There's no point having a discussion with you, because you'd only be able to tell me what I already know.
Of course we all go on to live very different lives, so this effect becomes less pronounced with age. Nonetheless, it's a major screw up.
4) A lot of your success in the current education system seems to hinge on your ability to visualise yourself enjoying future rewards and the reinforcement you get at home. There seem likely to be differences in people's brains in terms of how well they can be motivated by the potential of future rewards and lots of people have really shitty home lives. Ideally the reinforcement would take place in the classroom as per 1.
-------------------------------
So, let's wool-gather a bit: In really broad strokes, what qualities would we like an education system to have?
Help every child achieve their own strengths.
Things that are immediately rewarding, preferably in the social sense.
Things that allow people to experience environmental mastery.
Some structure for people who lack the ability to self motivate.
So:
No set classes that someone has to be in.
No set subjects beyond the very basics.
Optional projects (preferably group projects) rather than tests.
How might that look?
A child goes into school and is presented with a number of groups that are running around projects at the time. Want to try building a robot? They try putting a robot together, discover they need to understand more about maths, go see the maths teacher. They need to learn more about programming, go see the programming teacher. They need to learn about machining, they go see the design teacher. And there's a teacher overseeing the project, sharing in their success, urging them on.
Under that sort of system teachers become more coaches and advisers than they are the current lecturers and punishers.
Or - a child can go into school and opt for more or less the current set up. The maths teacher isn't going to be advising all the time after all. There'd be more time to focus on those children who want more guidance in their education... though to a certain extent the requirements of projects would impose structure in the knowledge that people were obliged to seek out. (I'm honestly not sure this is good for people, you will have to self-direct when you get out of education, but I'm not sure enough to head it off completely and I don't see a point in ruling it out - you could adjust the system later if it turned out to be a poor use of resources / those people were massively disadvantaged.)
...
Objections?
But where will the money come from?
It's actually not clear to me that this would be more expensive than the current system. Resources are currently pretty cheap, infrastructure for making things for projects is a one time cost that when you average it out's going to be pretty much negligible. It's not clear you'd need to employ more teachers.
But what about bad teachers?
Well, they're a problem that the current system shares too. They're just more readily apparent in this system. Which is good. Hire, train and fire - if someone's not living up to expectations - should be a fairly quick cycle.
What you're essentially saying when you're worried about the quality of teachers under such a system is that a child is going to run into the limitations of what the teacher knows, or that the teacher's not going to be bothered to spend time on them. Which is either fantastic or extremely worrying, but in any case is a clear signal in a way that waiting until they get their GCSE results isn't.
But if people don't take tests how do we assess them for work?
Well, look, two years out the gate it doesn't make a dang bit of difference for most things that you might want to do what your education was. I'm a Philosopher by education. I've worked in public policy research, sales, programming.... What's important is what jobs you've had and how well you've done them. Education should be approached in the same way. What did you do and how well did you do it? Write about your education on your CV as if it were another job and list your achievements. Not only is it less perverse for you it tells the person reading the thing a lot more about you. Fifteen years of work should not be summed up as 'GCSEs including English A, Science A and Maths A.' But that's how I see it on a lot of CVs.
#
Mind you, I'm not saying that a system you made up would look like this. There are probably a number of ways it could go, and a number of flaws that would need tuning. I'm just saying that if you start off thinking about how you'd teach people I end up in dramatically different places to the current school system - and consequently I'm not surprised in the least to learn that the school in OP's link doesn't seem to be doing any worse than comparable schools in the area. When you start looking at the paths not taken, it's like that for a lot of things.
Not one bit.
I've posted various comments before where I detailed the fallacies and fundamental issues (some deliberately implanted from the beginning, others mutating later on) with the compulsory schooling system and how the classroom model is ineffectual.
Remember: education != schooling. Never forget that. This is one of the most common misconceptions of our time.
What does blows my mind is just how thoroughly the masses have accepted public school curricula as the only true and legitimate form of education. People like you blow my mind. I don't mean to be smug or arrogant, I'm glad you're awakening.
Fact of the matter is compulsory schooling originated to instill obedience in the context of the Prussian militarist regime, later becoming adopted by industrial moguls in the USA during the late 19th century, due to the necessity of cheap and easily disposable labor.
Here are some books to read:
John Taylor Gatto: Dumbing Us Down, Weapons of Mass Instruction and The Underground History of American Education.
Charlotte Iserbyt: the deliberate dumbing down of america.
Ivan Illich: Deschooling Society.
John Holt: Anything at all, but particularly How Children Fail and How Children Learn.
----------
Besides Sudsbury schools, there's several other alternative school models: anarchistic free schools and democratic schools. Look those up, as well.
Ultimately, what people need to realize is that autodidacticism is the most efficient form of learning. Yet schooling has killed the will to autodidact for many people, or has delegitimized it in favor of formal schooling and credentials.