I guess everyone just gets a completely different education then…? The education system might have its issues, but providing a baseline bulk level of education to the entire population is not exactly straightforward.
Why is a baseline bulk level of education the goal? People are different, people live in a society where they can ask others for help. People don’t retain most of what has been crammed into their heads, and the fact that they were threatened with social exclusion if they didn’t cram it in gives many of them an unhealthy attitude towards knowledge that will take them decades to unlearn. Many subjects are propagandistic or taught in a way that makes them irrelevant for the rest of one’s life.
People learn how the mitochondria work but not how to recognize a stroke. How to write a formal proof about triangular equalities but not how to untangle a legal document. How to recognize a baroque painting but not how to make art you enjoy. How to compete at sports but not how to listen to what your body needs. How to memorize what an authority says but not how to pick apart lies.
So sure, let everyone follow a completely different education. Let them learn things at their own individual pace, let them focus on the things they care about and let them use their own interest as a guide. Maybe some will be functionally illiterate, but that is already the case.
Well, pre-recorded video should have LONG ago replaced in person lectures. And we could have had symbolic programs handles all exercises, exams, quiz most of the formulaic interactions that teachers use to bulk up their courses.
All those freed teaching hours could be pooled together to create the video content and refine it more and more.
Instead we’ve got teacher giving the same lecture 6 times a week. Exhausting and unnecessary.
Their efforts would be much better spent with rapid one on one tutoring of only those who need help.
And that was all BEFORE we had AI to offload most of the mundane tasks.
One of my family members participated in one such project, she wrote scenarios for a number of video lectures for schoolkids. It was bad, it was really fucking bad, and I could write an essay explaining why it was so, there’s a wide variety of reasons ranging across the technical, legal, administrative, etc. Just one example: you’re making a lecture about art? Yeah, go contact the copyright holders if they would be merciful enough to allow us to use the artwork in the video.
And your idea that the default approach should be that kids have no interaction with their teachers is honestly horrifying.
I work in industrial bureaucratic institution and yes, I wouldn’t expect any kind of good results or quality for a very long time if they suddenly pivoted to creative video making.
But we know it’s very possible, if you look at crash course or khan academt and the like, to have something not as tedious as book reading or sterile whiteboard live lectures.
We have computers, we have on demand video, we have AI, I’ve watched Khan academy and the countless others, it is not a tenable position to tell me this can’t be RADICALLY different because I’ve seen it. I know it can be better. We need to take out the old models and break the mold, the old business model is finished, has been finished for decades and decades but it lives on unchanged because of its own self-healing bureaucracy. It’s institutionalized way of doing things. This is the fuel behind the vapid and dangerous chainsaw wielding freaks who want to privatize it all.
It HAS to change and it has to STOP fighting against progress and change.
And for that we have to make this future livable for the people who will be working there.
I guess everyone just gets a completely different education then…? The education system might have its issues, but providing a baseline bulk level of education to the entire population is not exactly straightforward.
Why is a baseline bulk level of education the goal? People are different, people live in a society where they can ask others for help. People don’t retain most of what has been crammed into their heads, and the fact that they were threatened with social exclusion if they didn’t cram it in gives many of them an unhealthy attitude towards knowledge that will take them decades to unlearn. Many subjects are propagandistic or taught in a way that makes them irrelevant for the rest of one’s life.
People learn how the mitochondria work but not how to recognize a stroke. How to write a formal proof about triangular equalities but not how to untangle a legal document. How to recognize a baroque painting but not how to make art you enjoy. How to compete at sports but not how to listen to what your body needs. How to memorize what an authority says but not how to pick apart lies.
So sure, let everyone follow a completely different education. Let them learn things at their own individual pace, let them focus on the things they care about and let them use their own interest as a guide. Maybe some will be functionally illiterate, but that is already the case.
Well, pre-recorded video should have LONG ago replaced in person lectures. And we could have had symbolic programs handles all exercises, exams, quiz most of the formulaic interactions that teachers use to bulk up their courses.
All those freed teaching hours could be pooled together to create the video content and refine it more and more.
Instead we’ve got teacher giving the same lecture 6 times a week. Exhausting and unnecessary. Their efforts would be much better spent with rapid one on one tutoring of only those who need help.
And that was all BEFORE we had AI to offload most of the mundane tasks.
One of my family members participated in one such project, she wrote scenarios for a number of video lectures for schoolkids. It was bad, it was really fucking bad, and I could write an essay explaining why it was so, there’s a wide variety of reasons ranging across the technical, legal, administrative, etc. Just one example: you’re making a lecture about art? Yeah, go contact the copyright holders if they would be merciful enough to allow us to use the artwork in the video.
And your idea that the default approach should be that kids have no interaction with their teachers is honestly horrifying.
I work in industrial bureaucratic institution and yes, I wouldn’t expect any kind of good results or quality for a very long time if they suddenly pivoted to creative video making.
But we know it’s very possible, if you look at crash course or khan academt and the like, to have something not as tedious as book reading or sterile whiteboard live lectures.
There are simply not enough people for personal individual instruction on everything you need to know.
We have computers, we have on demand video, we have AI, I’ve watched Khan academy and the countless others, it is not a tenable position to tell me this can’t be RADICALLY different because I’ve seen it. I know it can be better. We need to take out the old models and break the mold, the old business model is finished, has been finished for decades and decades but it lives on unchanged because of its own self-healing bureaucracy. It’s institutionalized way of doing things. This is the fuel behind the vapid and dangerous chainsaw wielding freaks who want to privatize it all.
It HAS to change and it has to STOP fighting against progress and change. And for that we have to make this future livable for the people who will be working there.