More pedagogy- schools from ACX

Again, unnamed reviewer, on why schools are the best we’ve got.

from here on ACX

“Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” - Winston Churchill

“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” - G.K. Chesterton

Psychological research consistently shows that humans are conformist creatures. We instinctively align our behaviors to group norms. Classic studies like Asch’s line experiments, where 75% of participants denied obvious truths to match group answers, remind us that humans are social and prioritize conformity. This tendency isn’t just peer pressure, it’s evolutionary wiring. For our ancestors, conforming boosted survival by maintaining group harmony and reducing conflict. Today, this manifests in classrooms where low-structure learners thrive on collective routines. Conformity explains why personalized learning often fails. Most students need the social scaffolding of lockstep instruction, even when it’s inefficient. Conformity isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s the best one we have.

If we know there are no-, low-, and high-structure learners, then the key question becomes: what internal levers predict who ends up where?

I see three main factors. First is intrinsic motivation. This isn’t a review of self-determination theory, but the short version is that some students have a lot of intrinsic motivation, others have less, and some have little at all. Second is the set of habits students bring to school. When you observe students in school, one thing that’s often striking is how some students are in the habit of completing assignments, reading when they’re asked to read, solving math problems on a worksheet when asked, and so on. Others don’t have those habits. You’ve got no-structure learners, who would happily do that learning on their own. Low-structure learners, for whom the basic structure of school and class is enough to keep positive habits going. And then high-structure learners, who are in the habit of avoiding schoolwork whenever they can. Finally, there’s fluid intelligence. Students with a high processing speed and high working memory capacity are better at learning without much structure. They have the mental tools to connect the dots and figure things out with less structure. Students without those cognitive capacities need additional structure in order to learn.

Those elements are self-reinforcing. Motivation tends to beget motivation. Habits become stronger over time. Students with less fluid intelligence learn less in school, which exacerbates the consequences of less fluid intelligence. This doesn’t mean that a kid can’t change their trajectory. It’s possible to change habits, and to develop new sources of motivation. A broad base of knowledge helps to mitigate a lack of fluid intelligence. Motivation and habits are context-specific, so students might have a different profile in a different subject. But on average, students tend to stay about where they are in the no-structure, low-structure, and high-structure spectrum.

Students don’t always neatly fall into one category or another. They can shift over time, or be very intrinsically motivated yet have other challenges that require a lot of structure. Students can have different profiles in different subjects. Still, this broad taxonomy is a useful way to understand why tactics like personalization work for some students and not others, and why the basic structure of school has lasted so long.

One way to interpret the design of school is that it’s trying to provide just enough structure to get students to learn the basics of the school curriculum. Putting kids in front of a computer on their own isn’t going to do the trick.

Schools are given a huge challenge. The goal isn’t to educate the students who are easiest to teach, or most eager to learn. The goal is to educate everyone. The core challenge of compulsory public education is motivation. The best solution we’ve found is to send kids to school beginning at age 5 (or earlier if we can), before they can reliably form long-term episodic memories. Talk to a typical high school student, and they have literally been going to school as long as they can remember. We group students by age in part because it’s the easiest way to organize the system. The system motivates high-structure learners to keep up with their peers, though that motivation does gradually fade over time. Grouping by age also provides just enough structure for low-structure learners to stay on track – not that it’s particularly efficient, but it can help schools be reasonably confident that those low-structure learners will get a broad foundation in the school curriculum. In the same way that democracy is the worst form of government ever invented except for all the others, conventional school is the worst form of motivating students to learn except for all the others. All that leads to the obvious, inevitable problems. Some students are ready to move faster, some students need more support. Schools and teachers often try to help, and occasionally experiment in bold ways, but there’s this enormous gravity that pulls back toward the conventions of a typical school. It’s easy to point out these obvious challenges and claim that school is broken, that we should blow up the system and invent something better. It’s much harder to ask why the fence is there, and understand it before taking it down.

Here’s something you have to remember. It’s easy to cherry-pick in education. If you want to start a school to prove that penguin-based learning is the future, that penguin meditation and penguin-themed classrooms are superior to the stuffy, traditional, obsolete schools we have now, you can. It’s simple. Find a way to only accept no-structure and very low-structure learners. Then start your school. Do your penguin meditation, make sure there’s a basic structure for learning core academic skills, and you’re set. The results will be great, you can publish articles about the success of your method, if you’re lucky you’ll get some of that sweet sweet philanthropy money.

Cherry-picking isn’t always that blatant. If you just manage to get a few more low-structure learners and fewer high-structure learners in your school it will make a difference. Your test scores will look better than the school down the street. Schools spend a huge fraction of their resources on special education, providing the structure and systems that those students need. Just having fewer students who need that level of resources will free up time and energy to focus on everyone else, and the selection effects will make it look like you’re doing a good job. The difference doesn’t have to be huge to help the school do a little better.

What if we were brutally honest when a family enrolls their child in school? Here’s what we would say:

If your child is a no-structure learner, they will be bored here. They will probably learn some things, but they will often sit in lessons where they know everything the teacher is teaching, and they’ll spend a lot of their time sitting around waiting for other students to catch up. If your child is a low-structure learner, they will still often be bored as our school isn’t very efficient, but the structure and routine will ensure they get a basic level of literacy and numeracy. Maybe they’ll like school, probably because of gym class and being around their friends, maybe they won’t, but they’ll learn some things. That said, the school you pick doesn’t matter too much. Your child will learn about as much anywhere else. If your child is a high-structure learner, they will need a lot of very structured teaching. Our teachers vary widely: some are good at providing that structure, others aren’t. Your child will gradually fall behind, and will perpetually feel a bit dumb and a bit slow compared to everyone else. But we will do our best to keep them moving along with their peers because that’s the best idea we have to motivate them. Hopefully, with some help, they’ll graduate high school on time. There’s a risk they just won’t have the skills, or they’ll be discouraged by constantly feeling dumb and just give up. Oh, and we aren’t very good at understanding what causes students to be motivated. It’s absolutely correlated with socioeconomic status, so it would be helpful if you’re rich, but there’s a lot of variability and plenty of rich kids need that structure too.

Maybe the best way education can contribute to all of these causes is to focus on providing a broad, basic education to as many children as possible, and maybe our current system is the best idea we’ve had so far for doing so. If education chased every fad that came along, it might be in much worse shape. It was only a few years ago that a lot of people were arguing that we should teach more kids to code. Now it looks like coding might be one of the first jobs AI can do for us. For the last few decades, many thought leaders have advocated that we reorient our education system away from antiquated content that kids can look up on Google, and instead teach critical thinking. There’s ample evidence that we can’t actually teach critical thinking divorced from content. And education seems to increase IQ, so maybe we’re already teaching critical thinking by giving students a broad, basic education.

The reality is that elementary and middle schools haven’t changed much over time. High schools, however, are the place where the drive to motivate students breaks down. At that point, low-structure and high-structure students are pretty far apart from one another. High schools handle this in a variety of ways. Some high schools specialize, either as test-in schools or schools with a particular theme. Private high schools play a role supporting high-achieving students. And at comprehensive public high schools, there is more tracking and separate experiences for students. An increasing number of high schools offer community college courses through dual enrollment, as well as a wide variety of electives. Other students move into a vocational track, with some remediation in core literacy and numeracy skills and coursework designed for careers rather than college.

This is logical if we look at school as a system designed to maximize motivation: by the time students reach high school, the gaps in academic knowledge have widened to a point where it isn’t practical to keep students in the same classroom. Most elementary and middle schools promote students socially, at least if they put some effort in. But in high school, students need to amass credits and/or pass exams to graduate, and keeping everyone in the same classroom learning the same content won’t get some students the credits they need. We see what you would expect: motivation plummets. Remember those 100 classrooms you imagined visiting? Some of them would be lower-level high school classes. Those are often sad classrooms to spend time in. Students aren’t doing very much, expectations are clearly low, there isn’t much learning happening. Schools often explicitly create easier avenues to graduate for some students, through credit recovery programs or similar ways to give credit to students who aren’t putting in much effort. It’s logical that motivation plummets: students are no longer motivated by staying with their grade-level peers.

We can understand why school sports are such a powerful and enduring phenomenon: motivation is the core challenge of school, and conformity is our best solution. Team sports are a great mechanism to motivate young people, so we attach sports to school to capture a bit of that motivation.

We can understand why, despite lots of hype, AI hasn’t revolutionized education. Most AI applications pay little attention to motivation, and try to personalize learning in exactly the ways personalized learning has failed. AI may yet transform education, in any number of ways. But in the short term, AI has been naive about motivation in exactly the same way as all the other education transformations that have fallen short.

We can understand why there have been so many attempts to revolutionize schools, but they have struggled whenever they try to scale. If you have the right group of students, lots of things might seem to work. When you try to scale them to meet the true needs of universal education, they will run into the same roadblocks education has always struggled with. Then, the education system will be blamed for being obsolete, and we will continue to invent new approaches to education that ignore the same basic challenges of motivation.