It is somewhat of a catch-22, because any student who has those values already internalized can extract a ton of value even from an archaic educational system. Particularly if it is difficult and can create a sense of shared purpose to excel among the students.
Maybe it is more down to what we consider virtuous as a society, and the rest follows. Again, catch-22, education can have a significant role in that, but it cannot carry the whole burden either.
My whole family is in teaching and pedagogical research. I also have quite a few younger cousins. It is obvious that the situation has changed a ton in the last 20 years (at least in EU public education) and keeps changing rapidly, perhaps too rapidly.
There is much more emphasis on group assignments, forcing students to learn how work together (or how to deal with people who don’t want to do shit, with minimal leverage on them). Also many more open-ended assignments and exams, that force you to take some initiative, actually understand and engage with the subject, and then make you get good at expressing yourself both in writing and orally. And grit is always part of it if the bar is kept high, which is a complex issue on its own.
It’s just much harder to teach well like this, and it has been pushed on teachers haphazardly. Good teachers are better, bad teachers are worse. Same with students to an extent, there’s a bigger burden on them to actively engage, and it is easier to get away with not doing so because evaluation is more fuzzy, and group work can be avoided. At some point you do need to learn some facts, this model relies more on imparting the skills and values for students to then be able to learn anything they need, but they do have to then go and do it, otherwise you end up worse-off in aggregate.
Teaching facts and making sure students memorized them is clearly worse, but it is much easier to do effectively and systematically at scale. Education is at the end of the day a mass-production factory of adults.
It’s a very hard question and lots of people are dedicating their lives to figuring it out.
oersted|1 year ago
Maybe it is more down to what we consider virtuous as a society, and the rest follows. Again, catch-22, education can have a significant role in that, but it cannot carry the whole burden either.
My whole family is in teaching and pedagogical research. I also have quite a few younger cousins. It is obvious that the situation has changed a ton in the last 20 years (at least in EU public education) and keeps changing rapidly, perhaps too rapidly.
There is much more emphasis on group assignments, forcing students to learn how work together (or how to deal with people who don’t want to do shit, with minimal leverage on them). Also many more open-ended assignments and exams, that force you to take some initiative, actually understand and engage with the subject, and then make you get good at expressing yourself both in writing and orally. And grit is always part of it if the bar is kept high, which is a complex issue on its own.
It’s just much harder to teach well like this, and it has been pushed on teachers haphazardly. Good teachers are better, bad teachers are worse. Same with students to an extent, there’s a bigger burden on them to actively engage, and it is easier to get away with not doing so because evaluation is more fuzzy, and group work can be avoided. At some point you do need to learn some facts, this model relies more on imparting the skills and values for students to then be able to learn anything they need, but they do have to then go and do it, otherwise you end up worse-off in aggregate.
Teaching facts and making sure students memorized them is clearly worse, but it is much easier to do effectively and systematically at scale. Education is at the end of the day a mass-production factory of adults.
It’s a very hard question and lots of people are dedicating their lives to figuring it out.
kenjackson|1 year ago
4ntiq|1 year ago