Exorcising Us of the Primer

I've heard so many techie pitches for new, more enlightened ways of learning - and they all seem so detached from the realities of primary education that I don't even know how to process it.

I know of engineers who credit their success to being sent to a Montessori school or a Waldorf school, but I imagine the real reason is simply that their parents paid enough attention and had enough money to send them to a small, elite school of any kind.

I went to a big, ailing public school in a low-income neighborhood. The challenges faced by the teachers had nothing to do with fixing "authoritarianism" in education (something that this article gets hung up on). They were struggling to make sure the kids show up sober and that by the end of the day, at least some of them know how to read and write.

If you want to fix education and improve the society, the ROI on the low end is much better than on the high end. It's less about enlightenment and more about basic functioning in a society.

I'm reminded of what Neal himself said when asked about building the primer: "Kids need to get answers from humans who love them"

https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/vdt11/i_am_neal_st...

This reminded me so much of math tutoring, and so little of technology.

The tutor helps immerse the student; the tutor creates a rapid feedback loop for the student to test out ideas; the tutor scaffolds problems and adjusts to the student's pace and failures; the tutor ought to motivate the student.

I worry that these thought-pieces are too dreamy, and that there's unrealistic expectations for tech to solve teaching. Hopefully those in this space are grounded by real teaching experience.

Ultimately, I've found that the best learning happens with highly motivated students and/or with thoughtfully designed learning content. On well-designed content: I'm reminded of the recent HN post about map coloring, which was scaffolded into simple steps with basic interaction, and another post about Chile, which flowed smoothly with digestible writing and lots of images. The tech was largely irrelevant to those posts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40740021

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40856030

I loved this insight on the difficulty (and often futility) of trying to gamify learning:

“only after they’d satisfied the primary constraint of making something fun, or beautiful, or whatever, the designers figured out how to ensure people would learn what they need as they play. Most mechanisms are not fun. Good games come from a demanding selection process which works the other way around: first, find the fun. There’s no reason at all to believe that for any arbitrary abstract topic, one can always ‘find the fun’ which implicitly teaches it.”

it's amazing how this metaphor from fiction drove so much of how people in the field of education think about teaching, I had no idea Stephenson resonated outside tech. the author problematizing what he calls authoritarianism is freighted with some implicit ideas about truth and enlightenment that are predicated on some radical presumptions as well.

the best educated people are those who were mentored into a competence and that's not ever going to be evenly distributed. imo the primer was an expression of replicating that, hence the guiding structure the author criticizes. if you start with what are essentially gnostic ideas about unraveling the illusions of the culture by initiating people into critical mysteries vs. just giving them tools to practice with and guide them to adopt the implicit morality of competence, the primer is less problematized. I think the author may be bringing some prior critical ideas to it that are worth looking at objectively.

If we're to leave a beloved item from a story behind, discussing that items place in that story is not too be overlooked. [spoilers] The Primer is given to Nell who is able to rise above her station and save the world, with the help of some friends and the Primer. Who doesn't want to save the world? Outside of fiction that might be too grandiose an idea to express out loud, but it's a very alluring idea. To replace the Primer as the North Star, you'd need a new short story, of the kind Cory Doctorow writes, just not all pessimistic, of a New Advanced Knowledge Compendium, guiding a young adult, instead of an orphan child, to find meaning in life as a data scientist at a non-profit and not a FAANG. or something.

Thing is, we do manipulate children. They're children and malleable and we teach them a sorts of lessons, starting with potty training and where's appropriate to pee and poop, along with work ethic, honesty, the idea of personal property and intellectual property and not stealing or cheating. When to lie, when no to.

What's alluring about the Primer is the idea that there's a guide to life. Who hasn't made some sort of social faux pas and wished they hadn't done that? If only I'd learned about whatever, I wouldn't have done this embarrassing thing! A more thorough exploration of the Primer's allure needs to be done before it can be replaced.

This is about - a critique of - "The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer” ... futuristic interactive schoolbook, described in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. And ideas for what would be better.

(@dang, please give people-who-post extra points for making the title on HN more helpful than the original (as a general rule, with occasional exceptions))