This alienates kids from their developing inner agency.
If you have 20-30 kids in the classroom, and an externally given list of goals to achieve, this puts a constraint on agency.
Also, some kids have an aversion against practicing stuff. Often the smart ones—they sometimes identify as “intelligent”, and it is a part of their self-image that they are supposed to learn things by mere understanding; anything that resembles work means for them that they have failed, because they were supposed to learn it without working hard. I knew very smart kids who just couldn’t learn a foreign language, because the idea of “memorizing by repetition” horrified them, and… nothing else worked. Their less smart classmates already learned the languages by practicing.
There are schools that try to maximize agency. And there is also unschooling, with the same goal. I suspect that kids who learn this way, will usually miss all the stuff that has very long inferential distances—because to get there, you need to walk a long way, and not each step is intrinsically exciting. (Reminds me of people in Mensa who can spend endless hours debating relativity or quantum physics, but never find time to read a textbook and fix their elementary misconceptions.)
So… yeah, I would seek some compromise between agency and knowledge. I might be convinced otherwise by some research that would show that average unschooled kids are more successful along some dimension than average school kids. It seems to me that unschooling is more enjoyable, but does not typically translate into following one’s own educational goals or projects.
Basically anyone who was inspired by Piaget called their thing “constructivism”.
If the label is diluted to uselessness, we need some new way to talk about the useful parts. One possibility is to just list the useful parts individually, without having an umbrella term. Not sure how well this would work… I guess I would need to compile the list first.
So… yeah, I would seek some compromise between agency and knowledge.
To each their own. I don’t value any knowledge so dearly that it’s worth sacrificing chunks of children’s agency to make sure they have said knowledge. The willingness to make that trade is key to the lifecycle of that which would create unFriendly AI.
If the label is diluted to uselessness, we need some new way to talk about the useful parts. One possibility is to just list the useful parts individually, without having an umbrella term.
Well… if you look above, you’ll see that you were the one who introduced the label!
As I said, I gave up using “constructivism” to describe things in this space years ago.
If you have 20-30 kids in the classroom, and an externally given list of goals to achieve, this puts a constraint on agency.
Also, some kids have an aversion against practicing stuff. Often the smart ones—they sometimes identify as “intelligent”, and it is a part of their self-image that they are supposed to learn things by mere understanding; anything that resembles work means for them that they have failed, because they were supposed to learn it without working hard. I knew very smart kids who just couldn’t learn a foreign language, because the idea of “memorizing by repetition” horrified them, and… nothing else worked. Their less smart classmates already learned the languages by practicing.
There are schools that try to maximize agency. And there is also unschooling, with the same goal. I suspect that kids who learn this way, will usually miss all the stuff that has very long inferential distances—because to get there, you need to walk a long way, and not each step is intrinsically exciting. (Reminds me of people in Mensa who can spend endless hours debating relativity or quantum physics, but never find time to read a textbook and fix their elementary misconceptions.)
So… yeah, I would seek some compromise between agency and knowledge. I might be convinced otherwise by some research that would show that average unschooled kids are more successful along some dimension than average school kids. It seems to me that unschooling is more enjoyable, but does not typically translate into following one’s own educational goals or projects.
If the label is diluted to uselessness, we need some new way to talk about the useful parts. One possibility is to just list the useful parts individually, without having an umbrella term. Not sure how well this would work… I guess I would need to compile the list first.
To each their own. I don’t value any knowledge so dearly that it’s worth sacrificing chunks of children’s agency to make sure they have said knowledge. The willingness to make that trade is key to the lifecycle of that which would create unFriendly AI.
Well… if you look above, you’ll see that you were the one who introduced the label!
As I said, I gave up using “constructivism” to describe things in this space years ago.