1. There is no one-size-fits-all plan that could possibly work for education. Everyone is different (duh)
Why is that? All able-bodied humans have brains, mouths, eyes, arms etc all of which work in much the same way. If you are making clothing, you don't say "everyone is different", you make clothes based on the same pattern in a relatively small range of sizes.
For people who have specific disabilities, we should make adjustments, but I don't understand why a single way of teaching would not work for most people. Leaving aside whether schools are the best way of teaching.
Because they can pay the substantial premium involved. Collectively, our interest in having as many people as possible moderately well-educated rather than just having a few who are outstandingly well-educated imposes constraints.
our interest in having as many people as possible moderately well-educated rather than just having a few who are outstandingly well-educated
I am compelled to note that our existing socioeconomic, and thus educational, systems operate pretty much the other way around: the revealed judgment of capitalism is that it's better to have a small elite of outstandingly well-educated rich people who can confidently exploit the mob of mostly ignorant masses.
1) Because the same effect and the same processes are displayed at the post-secondary level where capitalist forces operate more strongly than social-democratic ones.
2) Because the capitalists control the government, at this point, so government action is a good indicator of what the capitalist class thinks is best.
There may indeed be a Platonic ideal of the one-size-fits-all school, but does not mean it is discoverable by central planners, especially central planners subject to the political incentives of the education establishment.
So even though "Everyone is different" may be a canard, it may still be the case that the only practical way to improve schools is through a distributed process of trial and error on a diverse set of teaching methods.
And there will be many people for whom those clothes don't really fit (feel, appearance, etc.). A lot of people will simply make do. But many other will alter the clothing or switch to tailor-made clothing. . .or a different pattern with a different range of sizes.
This is a misleading and irrelevant comparison. Yes, the vast majority of the population has 2 arms, 2 legs, etc. that allow enable clothes manufacturers to follow the same template. But this definitely does not imply that this conclusion is extensible to education.
Have you ever worked in a software development company? You've probably noticed that some of your coworkers work better by being isolated and solving things on their own. Others prefer teaming up with a more experienced developer to guide their work. Some need a very detailed spec upfront, while others are fine filling in the holes as they go along.
Would you force the guy who thrives while doing pair programming to work on his own? Sure, he might get some work done, but he won't be as happy nor as productive as he is pair programming.
And the kicker is that those things change throughout people's careers.
Education is exactly the same. You can force everyone in the same mold, but all it will lead to is people performing sub optimally and becoming frustrated. Should education ignore that?
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It's even worth it to take a step back and ask ourselves what the goal of school education should be. The average parent or teacher will probably answer that it is to develop the child's skills and knowledge in a way that will enable him to attend a good college, to secure a good job, and to live their life comfortably.
The more we advance in society, the more we realize that this definition was perhaps sufficient 50 years ago (when it was very common and accepted to stop your studies after high school), but it is becoming less and less so. As our society starts to be comfortable with notions such as minimum basic income, that many jobs can and should be automated, that there will inevitably be more able-minded able-bodied adults than there are jobs available in the future and so on, we need to revisit what the purpose of education from ages ~3-18 should be.
Things we probably want education "of the future" to be about:
- creating citizens that have the means and the tools to instruct themselves and understand the world and society around them
- enabling the children and teenagers to build & live a fulfilling and constructive adult life (we might have to accept at some point that some people are fine playing the saxophone 10 hours a day, while some are fine programming 10 hours a day - one is not necessarily better than the other)
- building the skills to relate to your peers and help them to work towards the previous 2 points. Having worked in educational settings (think boarding school style, with everyday life mixed with instruction) where teenagers would be in regular contact with younger children (for example helping them during programming workshops etc.), I've noticed how much good it does to everyone involved. The younger kids love having someone just a tiny bit older than they are helping them out, and a lot of teenagers appreciate being handed some responsibilities. The current school system is very much a one way street (teachers teach and enforce rules, students sit down and listen), and it's far from ideal.
>If you are making clothing, you don't say "everyone is different", you make clothes based on the same pattern in a relatively small range of sizes.
Oh wow, you must have a common body shape/type. That range of sizes is actually kinda large, and there is "specialty" size ranges, for example, plus size, petite, big and tall. Bras especially have a giant range of sizes, and I still know woman who have to get custom made bras, and these are woman with natural breasts.
I personally don't fit into off the shelf clothing, period. I've never seen a pair of pants that fit me, I just make due with what is closest, and I've gotten used to constantly adjusting my pants, it is second nature to me.
For people who have specific disabilities, we should make adjustments, but I don't understand why a single way of teaching would not work for most people.
Most Africans have an IQ in the 80s, barely above mentally retarded. Most of them can barely be trained to even go through the motions of algebra, let alone use it to solve problems in new situations.
"College material" kids need to graduate high school with a mastery of algebra so they can learn calculus, which they will be expected to use unbidden to solve novel problems they encounter in other areas.
It seems unlikely to me that the vocational training of the dull can be combined with the education of the near-genius. It is like trying to teach carpentry and structural engineering at the same time.
Kids also have a gigantic range of self control. About 1 in 20 are profoundly delayed, being an average of 3 years behind "normal" in planning and self control. (This is called ADHD to pathologize it, but nothing that common can possibly be a true disorder.) So a typical freshman high school classroom will have pne student who can barely keep their shit together well enough to glue macaroni to construction paper. And will have one student, usually a girl, who operates on a fully adult level.
And then there are the variations in memory. One student learns the entire course in 20 hours, while another has to grind out practice for 150 hours.
There is simply no way for a single process to handle the range of human variation well.
Even the body is like this. My ideal bicycle could permanently cripple another normal person of the same height. Ditto for shoes.
I have recommended before that you read better scientific literature on this subject, but you still come here to HN with ignorant opinions like this. For onlookers, I'll recommend the latest review articles on the topic again. You should read them this time.
OK, let's read. Your first paper quotes an optimistic black IQ deficit of 0.33 sigma. Assume strong STEM students are at the 2 sigma level, which is a percentile rank of 97.72% of whites. If whites are 75% of the population, then 1.71% of the population could be a white strong STEM student.
For blacks at 2.33 sigmas, the percentile rank is 99.01% applying to 15% of the population, meaning 0.1485% of the population could be a black strong STEM student.
Those percentages are in an 11.5 ratio, but the actual population ratio is 5. So blacks are about half as likely to be bright as whites. But in US public schools, they must get good grades at about the same rate to avoid "racism" and "disparate impact". The only way to do this is by severely watering down the curriculum.
This is exactly what I was saying about a one-size-fits-all school being unworkable.
The normal distribution is a harsh mistress. The area under the tail drops off very fast, so a small difference in a subgroup translates into overwhelming victory or overwhelming defeat.
Now let's revisit your -0.33 sigma black deficit. For the strong potential STEM students calculated above, the black:white ratio is about 10%. That means we would expect 2 blacks in every university STEM class, and 1 in a typical all-team engineering meeting. In reality the number is far lower. (I've only had two reasonably bright black colleagues ever.) You find equally few blacks in hands-on intellectual jobs like owning a chain of gas stations. So the -0.33 sigma number does not pass the everyday experience test.
Speaking of recommended reading, you could profitably spend a few minutes studying a normal distribution Z table. The normal distribution is a harsh mistress.
> Most Africans have an IQ in the 80s, barely above mentally retarded. Most of them can barely be trained to even go through the motions of algebra, let alone use it to solve problems in new situations.
trying to debate this guy on the merits is absurd - he's not some misguided IQ guy but, as you'll see if you look at his other comments, a hardcore racist. blocking is the only productive thing you can do here
This is a discussion of science. Kindly take your partisan political posturing elsewhere.
The science on IQ shows that European Jews > far east Asians > Caucasians > Africans. There is still some uncertainty about the exact numbers and rankings, but there is zero controversy about the existence of the intelligence hierarchy.
In a few years we will resurrect the Neanderthals, who had larger brains than any living human race. It is entirely possible that in 50 years they will be winning all the physics Nobel prizes.
An extremely basic knowledge of statistics would show you that for a set of overlapping bell curves with a reasonably sized standard deviation, a difference of a few percent in the median is far too little to make a statement like "Group X > Group Y" on with a straight face. Most people you'd pick at random from any group will be fairly average, and geniuses are uncommon, but exist, in all the groups. Even differences of a standard deviation are fairly trivial compared to the differences that exist within each group; it's not like intelligence medians vary by 5 standard deviations between ethnic groups within one country...
Underprivileged students from minority backgrounds can do quite well at calculus - some teachers, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Escalante , dedicated years to trying, with quite impressive results. This has been demonstrated again and again at schools with poor track records. Simply having a competent teacher and an environment that isn't entirely hostile to learning can do far more than many people tend to realize.
The original question was whether one-size-fits-all classrooms can work.
Most people you'd pick at random from any group will be fairly average, and geniuses are uncommon, but exist, in all the groups.
Our civilization has come this far by cultivating genius. A billion average people sweeping floors will never discover penicillin or invent the transistor. And geniuses are radically less common in some groups.
An extremely basic knowledge of statistics would show you that for a set of overlapping bell curves with a reasonably sized standard deviation, a difference of a few percent in the median is far too little to make a statement like "Group X > Group Y" on with a straight face.
Genius lies at the upper end of the spectrum, where the normal curve drops off steeply. A small difference between group averages becomes a huge difference at the top end, thanks to the steepness. It is basic statistics that the elites are dominated by whatever groups have a small advantage at the average. (This is why airlines are so paranoid about quality control. If a company lets its average slip a little, it will kill most of the people who die in air travel, which turns out to really hurt bookings even if their average is a zillion times safer than cars.)
So if you design classrooms to "leave no Group Y child behind"—as the U.S. has done—you will necessarily leave behind all Group X elites. Thus answering the original question of whether uniform education works.
Yes, there are African geniuses. The problem is that they are really, really rare. So rare that a typical school has zero of them.
Obviously, one size fits all classrooms don't work - but this must not be used as an excuse to further existing inequalities. I hear a lot more horror stories about people being discouraged from sufficiently challenging material than being pushed into it - http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1lrvit/what_memor... has a lot of examples, to pick one random internet thread from this week. One thing that we can fully agree on is that NCLB is horrible policy. Uniform education, with no catering to the genuine interests and capacities, is stupid; only a few alternatives, like not educating the majority of people, or basing education on statistical arguments about amorphous groups rather than individual merit, are stupider.
Our civilizations, for the most part, don't cultivate genius, unfortunately. And geniuses aren't radically less common in some groups, unless you mean groups like "people who suffered severe childhood malnutrition". Normal schools aren't really set up to deal with people with IQs more than a standard deviation, or perhaps two standard deviations, from the norm.
If you define genius to be an IQ of 160+, and model it as a Gaussian with a standard deviation of 15, most schools have no geniuses of any race. If you take a more-reasonable fat-tailed distribution, many schools still don't.
My personal, anecdotal bias: the best school I went to was quite small, and had several geniuses - including a black one. There weren't many black kids, but the ones who were there were exceptional; I wouldn't be surprised if they had the highest average IQ of any ethnic group at the school (and yes, there were plenty of Asian and Jewish students, from several countries).
There are differences in average intelligence between groups, but not in the way I think you're claiming. First of all, the IQ delta between Jews in the US and other white people has collapsed since 1960, and the overrepresentation of Jews in highschool and college level academic competitions has also collapsed. This isn't due to Jews becoming less intelligent on average but rather the average white child becoming more intelligent thanks to the Flynn effect[1]. And you're grouping all white people together, but back in the day all the poor subsistence farmers immigrating from Ireland and Italy and Eastern Europe had IQs in the 80s too. Of course, their children born and raised in US cities had roughly the same IQs as other white people. And during the cold war the IQs of the people in West Germany pulled more than 10 points ahead of the people in East Germany, but with reunification IQs have converged again.
All of which is to say, we have strong evidence of differences in IQ between groups, but we have pretty much no evidence of genetic IQ differences between groups. We know that environmental factors[2] play a huge role in population level IQ and are quite sufficient to explain the differences we can observe. Could one group have a genetic advantage? Sure, but I don't feel I have any reason to believe it's white people who are naturally smarter than black people as opposed to vice versa.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
[2]Well, there's vitamin D deficiency but that's so easily fixed by nutrition that I'm calling it an environmental factor despite the role genetics plays.
Thank you. I didn't go into these points in my post for fear of covering too much ground, but you have written them up well. Lead, nutrition, and environment are all big factors.
There is. They are one of the few parts of psychology that are based on hard data. University admissions test are, in fact, mostly tests of IQ. So are military recruiting tests. (The military is super serious about weeding out people dumb enough to crash a boondoggle.)
Why is that? All able-bodied humans have brains, mouths, eyes, arms etc all of which work in much the same way. If you are making clothing, you don't say "everyone is different", you make clothes based on the same pattern in a relatively small range of sizes.
For people who have specific disabilities, we should make adjustments, but I don't understand why a single way of teaching would not work for most people. Leaving aside whether schools are the best way of teaching.