[cambaceres]

> “I think the skills that should be emphasized are how do you think for yourself? How do you develop critical reasoning for solving problems? How do you develop creativity? How do you develop a learning mindset that you're going to go learn to do the next thing?”

In the Swedish schoolsystem, the idea for the past 20 years has been exactly this, that is to try to teach critical thinking, reasoning, problem solving etc rather than hard facts. The results has been...not great. We discovered that reasoning and critical thinking is impossible without a foundational knowledge about what to be critical about. I think the same can be said about software development.

[NalNezumi]

I'm glad my east Asian mother put me through Saturday school for natives during my school years in Sweden.

The most damning example I have about Swedish school system is anecdotal: by attending Saturday school, I never had to study math ever in the Swedish school. (same for my Asian classmates) when I finished 9th grade Japanese school curriculum taught ONLY one day per week (2h), I had learned all of advanced math in high school and never had to study math until college.

The focus on "no one left behind == no one allowed ahead" also meant that young me complaining math was boring and easy didn't persuade teachers to let me go ahead, but instead, they allowed me to sleep during the lecture.

[StableAlkyne]

> no one left behind == no one allowed ahead

It's like this in the US (or rather, it was 20 years ago. But I suspect it is now worse anyway)

Teachers in my county were heavily discouraged from failing anyone, because pass rate became a target instead of a metric. They couldn't even give a 0 for an assignment that was never turned in without multiple meetings with the student and approval from an administrator.

The net result was classes always proceeded at the rate of the slowest kid in class. Good for the slow kids (that cared), universally bad for everyone else who didn't want to be bored out of their minds. The divide was super apparent between the normal level and honors level classes.

I don't know what the right answer is, but there was an insane amount of effort spent on kids who didn't care, whose parents didn't care, who hadn't cared since elementary school, and always ended up dropping out as soon as they hit 18. No differentiation between them, and the ones who really did give a shit and were just a little slow (usually because of a bad home life).

It's hard to avoid leaving someone behind when they've already left themselves behind.

[kace91]

>I'm glad my east Asian mother put me through Saturday school for natives during my school years in Sweden.

I’m curious, could you share your Saturday school‘s system? I’m very interested in knowing what a day of class was like, the general approach, etc.

[Epa095]

And still (or maybe because?) the resulting adults in Sweeden score above e.g Korea in both numeracy and adaptive problem solving (but slightly less than Japan). The race is not about being best at 16 after all.

https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?plotter=h5&prim...

https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?plotter=h5&prim...

[JustExAWS]

I have as much of a fundamental issue with “Saturday school” for children as I do with professionals thinking they should be coding on their days off. When do you get a chance to enjoy your childhood?

[siva7]

It's better to leave no one behind than to focus solely on those ahead. Society needs a stable foundation and not more ungrateful privileged people.

[rkomorn]

Most of what I remember of my high school education in France was: here are the facts, and here is the reasoning that got us there.

The exams were typically essay-ish (even in science classes) where you either had to basically reiterate the reasoning for a fact you already knew, or use similar reasoning to establish/discover a new fact (presumably unknown to you because not taught in class).

Unfortunately, it didn't work for me and I still have about the same critical thinking skills as a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau.

[jve]

I don't know if I have critical thinking or not. But I often question - WHY is this better? IS there any better way? WHY it must be done such a way or WHY such rule exists?

For example in electricity you need at least that amount of cross section if doing X amount of amps over Y length. I want to dig down and understand why? Ohh, the smaller the cross section, the more it heats! Armed with this info I get many more "Ohhs": Ohh, that's why you must ensure the connections are not loose. Oohhh, that's why an old extension cord where you don't feel your plug solidly clicks in place is a fire hazard. Ohh, that's why I must ensure the connection is solid when joining cables and doesn't lessen cross section. Ohh, that's why it's a very bad idea to join bigger cables with a smaller one. Ohh, that's why it is a bad idea to solve "my fuse is blowing out" by inserting a bigger fuse but instead I must check whether the cabling can support higher amperage (or check whether device has to draw that much).

And yeah, this "intuition" is kind of a discovery phase and I can check whether my intuition/discovery is correct.

Basically getting down to primitives lets me understand things more intuitively without trying to remember various rules or formulas. But I noticed my brain is heavily wired in not remembering lots of things, but thinking logically.

[Saline9515]

On the contrary, the French "dissertation" exercise requires to articulate reasoning and facts, and come up with a plan for the explanation. It is the same kind of thinking that you are required to produce when writing a scientifically paper.

It is however not taught very well by some teachers, who skirt on explaining how to properly do it, which might be your case.

[darkwater]

> Unfortunately, it didn't work for me and I still have about the same critical thinking skills as a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau.

Why do you say so? Even just stating this probably means you are one or a few steps further...

[biztos]

I’ve heard many bad things said of the Beaujolais Nouveau, and of my sense of taste for liking it, but this is the first time I’ve seen its critical-thinking skills questioned.

In its/your/our defense, I think it’s a perfectly smart wine, and young at heart!

[jech]

> the same critical thinking skills as a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau

I'm loving this expression. May I please adopt it?

[diggan]

> In the Swedish schoolsystem, the idea for the past 20 years has been exactly this, that is to try to teach critical thinking, reasoning, problem solving etc rather than hard facts. The results has been...not great.

I'm not sure I'd agree that it's been outright "not great". I myself am the product of that precise school-system, being born in 1992 in Sweden (but now living outside the country). But I have vivid memories of some of the classes where we talked about how to learn, how to solve problems, critical thinking, reasoning, being critical of anything you read in newspapers, difference between opinions and facts, how propaganda works and so on. This was probably through year/class 7-9 if I remember correctly, and both me and others picked up on it relatively quick, and I'm not sure I'd have the same mindset today if it wasn't for those classes.

Maybe I was just lucky with good teachers, but surely there are others out there who also had a very different experience than what you outline? To be fair, I don't know how things are working today, but at least at that time it actually felt like I had use of what I was thought in those classes, compared to most other stuff.

[dsign]

This is, in my opinion, quite accurate.

In the world of software development I meet a breed of Swedish devs younger than 30 that can't write code very well, but who can wax Jira tickets and software methodologies and do all sort of things to get them into a management position without having to write code. The end result is toxic teams where the seniors and the devs brought from India are writing all the code while all the juniors are playing software architect, scrum master an product owners.

Not everybody is like that; seniors tend to be reliable and practical, and some juniors with programming-related hobbies are extremely competent and reasonable. But the chunk of "waxers" is big enough to be worrying.

[Frieren]

> The results has been...not great.

Sweden is the 19th country in the PISA scores. And it is in the upper section on all education indexes. There has been a world decline on scores, but has nothing to do with the Swedish education system. (That does not mean that Sweden should not continue monitoring it and bringing improvements)

From Swedish news: https://www.sverigesradio.se/artikel/swedish-students-get-hi...

- Swedish students skills in maths and reading comprehension have taken a drastic downward turn, according to the latest PISA study.

- Several other countries also saw a decline in their PISA results, which are believed to be a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic.

[whizzter]

Considering our past and the Finnish progress (they considered following us in the 80s/90s as they had done but stopped), 19th is an disappointment.

Having teenagers that's been through most of the primary and secondary schools I kind agree with GP, especially when it comes to math,etc.

Teaching concepts and ideas is _great_, and what we need to manage with advanced topics as adults. HOWEVER, if the foundations are shaky due to too little repetition of basics (that is seemingly frowned upon in the system) then being taught thinking about some abstract concepts doesn't help much because the tools to understand them aren't good enough.

[cess11]

One should note that from the nineties onwards we put a large portion of our kids' education on the stock exchange and in the hands of upper class freaks instead of experts.

[tmcdos]

I have heard that in Netherlands there used to be (not sure if it is still there) a system where you have for example 4 rooms of children. Room A contains all children that are ahead of rooms B, C, D. If a child from room B learns pretty quickly - the child is moved to room A. However, if the child leaves behind the other children in room B - that child is moved in room C. Same for room C - those who can not catch up are moved to room D. In this way everyone is learning at max capacity. Those who can learn faster and better are not slowed down by others who can not (or do not want to) keep the pace. Everyone is happy - children, teachers, parents, community.

[kace91]

I think there’s a balance to be had. My country (Spain) is the very opposite, with everything from university access to civil service exams being memory focused.

The result is usually bottom of the barrel in the subjects that don’t fit that model well, mostly languages and math - the latter being the main issue as it becomes a bottleneck for teaching many other subjects.

It also creates a tendency for people to take what they learn as truth, which becomes an issue when they use less reputable sources later in life - think for example a person taking a homeopathy course.

Lots of parroting and cargo culting paired with limited cultural exposition due to monolingualism is a bad combination.

[staticelf]

> The results has been...not great.

Well, I kind of disagree. The results are bad mainly because we have a mass immigration from low education countries with extremely bad cultures.

If you look at the numbers, it's easy to say swedes are stupid when in the real sense, ethnic swedes do very well in school.

[throw8349498]

> what to be critical about

Media can fill that gap. People should be critical about global warming, antivax, anti israel, anti communism, racism, hate, whitr man, anti democracy, russia, china, trump...

This thing is bad, imhate it, problem solved! Modern critical thinking is pretty simple!

In future goverment can provide daily RSS feed, of things to be critical about. You can reduce national schooling system to a single vps server!

[oerdier]

Check out E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s work, e.g.'Why Knowledge Matters'.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

Here is the thing though.

You can’t teach critical thinking like that.

You need to teach hard facts and then people can learn critical thinking inductively from the hard facts with some help.

[0points]

Indeed, the swedish school system is an ongoing disaster.

[JackFr]

I think that’s a disingenuous take. Earlier in the piece the AWS CEO specifically says we should teach everyone the correct ways to build software despite the ubiquity of AI. The quote about creative problem solving was with respect to how to hire/get hired in a world where AI can let literally anyone code.

[Salgat]

The problem is, in a capitalist society, who is going to be the company that will donate their time and money to teaching a junior developer who will simply go to another company for double the pay after 2 years?