Good education is complex. To do things right, you have to do many details right. If just a few of them are missing, the whole thing may start falling apart.
It is good to be reminded than an important or helpful piece is missing. The sad thing is that the following internet discussions often quickly move from “X is missing, we need to somehow integrate X into the system” to “just throw all the other useless pieces away and focus on X, that will fix everything”. I am not saying it will happen here—this is LessWrong after all—just that this is a typical thing that happens. If someone would make a specific LessWrong site for educators, this effect should be one of the minor sequences.
So, it would calm down the anxious people like me, if all proposals of changes in education included an upper bound of the proposed change. Like: how much time do you think it would be appropriate to spend in a typical elementary school teaching… in this specific case, the method of loci… assuming that we still have to teach the thousand other things (you know, like math and science and stuff). Would it be a new subject? Or just a lesson or two? (Or perhaps a new subject called “Meta”, where this would be just a lesson or two among other learning-how-to-learn techniques, and the whole subject would be one hour per week during one year? And perhaps another year on a high school, to refresh the memories.)
Now if we agree on an estimate that a lesson or two should be enough for the method of loci, then it gives us a specific time frame, which is good for proposing specific solutions. Assuming you have a lesson or two for teaching the method of loci, how would you do it? -- And please note that these lessons are actually quite easy to try in real life: Just do it with volunteers in the afternoon. That’s not good enough to scientifically measure the impact of the method, but you get some rough estimates by asking the same students a year later whether they still use the technique, and whether they actually even remember it.
Good education is complex. To do things right, you have to do many details right.
I’m curious as to what examples of good education you are basing this on. If there’s somewhere out there providing good education, I’d be very interested in their methods and product. Or is this perhaps based on theory?
Just my experience of many things that can go wrong. Many people notice just one of them and suppose that this is the problem of education, and if you optimize for fixing it, everything will automatically be allright. The most popular example among non-teachers on internet is “creativity”, I believe. Just throw everything out of the window, maximize for “creativity” and you are done. Even worse, those people usually can’t even taboo “creativity” and tell you what specifically they mean and how specifically would they optimize for it. It’s just an applause light; in best case, they will give you a hyperlink to some TEDx talk with some smart kid doing something that happens to be creative and say: more of this. Silently assuming that if you would put all children into exactly the same situation, you would get exactly the same results, reliably.
And by this I am not saying that “creativity” (however we define it) is bad; merely that it is just one important goal among many. Not merely guessing the teacher’s password is another value, obvious for a LW reader. It is good to give students freedom to explore the topics they are interested about; but we should also take care they don’t have huge blind spots in areas that for whatever reason didn’t catch their interest. It is good to teach them to find their own sources in books or online; but there is also a lot of pseudoscience and other bullshit out there. This whole process has to be done within some financial constraints. Putting more students together, we need to take care about some social issues, e.g. to prevent bullying. We need a way to deal with actively malicious students. We need some system of evaluation, at least for feedback while studying; some people think it is a good idea to also include certification. Etc. And don’t forget that children are diffferent and what works perfectly for one of them can fail horribly for another.
Like: how much time do you think it would be appropriate to spend in a typical elementary school teaching… in this specific case, the method of loci… assuming that we still have to teach the thousand other things (you know, like math and science and stuff). Would it be a new subject?
The idea of teaching the method of loci is that it will make it easier for the students to store information in their brain.
assuming that we still have to teach the thousand other things (you know, like math and science and stuff).
Few of the things taught are essential. There no reason why every student needs to learn calculus or trigometry.
I think go and look for all the information that most adults forget it. I have interacted with a few Go students from Korea. They went to a school that focused mainly on teaching them Go instead of teaching the usual subjects. The whole curriculum is Go.
They still survive as adults. Schools attempt to teach a lot that isn’t essential and which students forget anyway soon afterwards.
My abilities of using Word wouldn’t be worse if there wouldn’t have been classes in school trying to teach students to use the program.
The first step to do something about education is to recognize that a huge part of what goes on in schools is either teaching stuff that gets forgotten after the next test or it’s about teaching birds to fly.
But you wouldn’t even do something as revolutionary as scrapping the existing curriculum. It’s easy to throw enough year dates at students in history classes that a student who doesn’t use mnemonics for them utterly crashes but a student who uses mnemonics can follow.
Then you do two years of that kind of history education for 9 and 10 year olds with the teacher reiterating mnemonics constantly.
Now if we agree on an estimate that a lesson or two should be enough for the method of loci, then it gives us a specific time frame, which is good for proposing specific solutions.
You can teach the basic concept in a lesson or two but you don’t teach the skill of actually using mnemonics on a habitual basis in that timeframe.
Connotational disclaimer.
Good education is complex. To do things right, you have to do many details right. If just a few of them are missing, the whole thing may start falling apart.
It is good to be reminded than an important or helpful piece is missing. The sad thing is that the following internet discussions often quickly move from “X is missing, we need to somehow integrate X into the system” to “just throw all the other useless pieces away and focus on X, that will fix everything”. I am not saying it will happen here—this is LessWrong after all—just that this is a typical thing that happens. If someone would make a specific LessWrong site for educators, this effect should be one of the minor sequences.
So, it would calm down the anxious people like me, if all proposals of changes in education included an upper bound of the proposed change. Like: how much time do you think it would be appropriate to spend in a typical elementary school teaching… in this specific case, the method of loci… assuming that we still have to teach the thousand other things (you know, like math and science and stuff). Would it be a new subject? Or just a lesson or two? (Or perhaps a new subject called “Meta”, where this would be just a lesson or two among other learning-how-to-learn techniques, and the whole subject would be one hour per week during one year? And perhaps another year on a high school, to refresh the memories.)
Now if we agree on an estimate that a lesson or two should be enough for the method of loci, then it gives us a specific time frame, which is good for proposing specific solutions. Assuming you have a lesson or two for teaching the method of loci, how would you do it? -- And please note that these lessons are actually quite easy to try in real life: Just do it with volunteers in the afternoon. That’s not good enough to scientifically measure the impact of the method, but you get some rough estimates by asking the same students a year later whether they still use the technique, and whether they actually even remember it.
I’m curious as to what examples of good education you are basing this on. If there’s somewhere out there providing good education, I’d be very interested in their methods and product. Or is this perhaps based on theory?
Just my experience of many things that can go wrong. Many people notice just one of them and suppose that this is the problem of education, and if you optimize for fixing it, everything will automatically be allright. The most popular example among non-teachers on internet is “creativity”, I believe. Just throw everything out of the window, maximize for “creativity” and you are done. Even worse, those people usually can’t even taboo “creativity” and tell you what specifically they mean and how specifically would they optimize for it. It’s just an applause light; in best case, they will give you a hyperlink to some TEDx talk with some smart kid doing something that happens to be creative and say: more of this. Silently assuming that if you would put all children into exactly the same situation, you would get exactly the same results, reliably.
And by this I am not saying that “creativity” (however we define it) is bad; merely that it is just one important goal among many. Not merely guessing the teacher’s password is another value, obvious for a LW reader. It is good to give students freedom to explore the topics they are interested about; but we should also take care they don’t have huge blind spots in areas that for whatever reason didn’t catch their interest. It is good to teach them to find their own sources in books or online; but there is also a lot of pseudoscience and other bullshit out there. This whole process has to be done within some financial constraints. Putting more students together, we need to take care about some social issues, e.g. to prevent bullying. We need a way to deal with actively malicious students. We need some system of evaluation, at least for feedback while studying; some people think it is a good idea to also include certification. Etc. And don’t forget that children are diffferent and what works perfectly for one of them can fail horribly for another.
The idea of teaching the method of loci is that it will make it easier for the students to store information in their brain.
Few of the things taught are essential. There no reason why every student needs to learn calculus or trigometry.
I think go and look for all the information that most adults forget it. I have interacted with a few Go students from Korea. They went to a school that focused mainly on teaching them Go instead of teaching the usual subjects. The whole curriculum is Go.
They still survive as adults. Schools attempt to teach a lot that isn’t essential and which students forget anyway soon afterwards.
My abilities of using Word wouldn’t be worse if there wouldn’t have been classes in school trying to teach students to use the program.
The first step to do something about education is to recognize that a huge part of what goes on in schools is either teaching stuff that gets forgotten after the next test or it’s about teaching birds to fly.
But you wouldn’t even do something as revolutionary as scrapping the existing curriculum. It’s easy to throw enough year dates at students in history classes that a student who doesn’t use mnemonics for them utterly crashes but a student who uses mnemonics can follow.
Then you do two years of that kind of history education for 9 and 10 year olds with the teacher reiterating mnemonics constantly.
You can teach the basic concept in a lesson or two but you don’t teach the skill of actually using mnemonics on a habitual basis in that timeframe.