Lots of People in Education Disagree with the Premise of Maximizing Learning

I am very doubtful of the suggestions that those arguing against testing and spaced repetition are just not trying to help people grow.

My 6 month old is currently learning a whole host of things, and we are doing repetition and watching his growth -- so no disagreement on the premise that these things are good. But we are also making great pains to ensure that he is playing, is always happy doing new things, and doesn't have to continue if he gets overwhelmed and/or bored. We do this because the mentality of someone when learning is a huge factor in what they get out of the activity.

I had the impression that the current push against testing and repetition is because it ended up with children hyper-focussed on "passing the test" skills but not spending the time to question things too deeply and gain that understanding that actually helps the workforce (like Feynman noticed in Brazil).

I get what this piece is trying to say, but it's ignoring the fact that schools are trying to maximize learning with pupils who often don't want or care about learning (unlike with athletes or musicians who are generally learning their craft by choice).

A significant part of teaching disinterested students (not just in a grade school but in general) is about making the subject interesting enough that students will want to spend time on learning and continue to delve further in their free time.

If you're trying to teach someone web development, would you have them churn through a stack of predetermined bootcamp-style projects, or would let them try to build something they have personal interest in? I bet the latter method would turn out much better for the student in the long run.

This article is a bit terse, but at least it hits one thing: math is a different subject than most, math is a skill - just like a sport or learning an instrument (or learning a foreign language, for that matter) and mastering a skill is different than acquiring knowledge about a subject.

The problem is we don't point out that difference to students and inform them how that difference should change their approach. For example, I told my kids that math is a skill, and like all skills, practice is required for mastery. It's not math homework, it's math practice. That's not a cutesy statement, either. They understood that even if they had no homework assigned, they should still spend a few moments practicing their math. That approach paid-off in spades!

I thought this was going to be about the no-child-left-behind mindset, which results in teachers spending most of their time focusing on the slowest learners and very little time on students who are already at/above grade level. That mindset is certainly common in our school, and learning for the latter students is closer to flatlined than maximized.

Maximizing learning via SR is interesting, but it seems like it's the furthest thing from our kids' teachers' minds.

East Asian education culture (i.e. cram schools / high stakes testing) has shown you can always maximize learning at the expense of happiness. And work hours. And it works well to develop STEM talent. People with aptitude are naturally going to excel while those who aren't can still drill acceptable levels of competence, even if they hate it. If your life/future depends on knowing math, a surprising amount of people with no love for math will end up being decent at math.

I would point out that "repetition" is not all equal. Education has a tendency to front load lots of repetition which creates boredom and disengagement. The spacing of repetition is often poorly done and rarely individualized.

Part of what makes "spaced repetition" so effective is that the spacing is customized based on performance and you aren't forced to keep frequently practicing the things you know well and can focus that effort on the things that aren't quite clicking.

As testing becomes more standardized, it does a worse job of assisting with the education process and serves only as a measurement tool. Tying funding to standardized test results turns them into a gamifies metric that actively makes education worse.

Edit: I believe an important goal of education should be to instill joy in and desire for learning. These are important for the kinds of self directed practice that are key to making progress because we have a some natural sense for what challenges us and what doesn't. This should be supplemented by experts explaining how skills link together and build on top of each so we know how to learn a skill that is currently too hard to practice directly.

There are likely many, many definitions of what "maximizing learning" means. And that drives different approaches to education. Not "whether education should seek to maximize students’ learning."

That could be taken as a fairly naive statement -- there are countless successful examples of non test-driven education out there.

What are these “parameters” by which performance is measured?

You’re all programmers, you all set parameters all the time that are completely arbitrary, you design the systems through which actions are performed. What does it mean to be a great musician, to be able to write music as good as Mozart? But Mozart never wrote anything as good as Mozart! To be great means breaking the boundaries of all values, to create something that goes beyond being merely “good enough”; good enough according to some standard set by somebody else.

Hit your targets, maybe you’ll be good. We should not be raising kids to be “good enough”…infact, let them be terrible! I’d rather they be awful at everything in every concievable way then hit the same targets over and over again.

Understanding is better than memorizing, learning to learn by yourself instead of learning a small and uneven set of things, increasing the amount of things that you know that you don't know as focusing in a small set of increasingly obsolete knowledge.

We are not at an age of information scarcity, quite the opposite. There are things that you must learn, like basics of reasoning, critical thinking and learning. But there are a lot of things, specially new ones in the current acceleration of events, that you should be able to learn by yourself.

Yes, spaced repetition and regular testing are effective in a purely mechanical sense. They’re good ways to acquire knowledge and skills. But, it’s really worth noting second order considerations. Does the median student enjoy the testing and repetition enough to be motivated to do them? Do they understand the utility or applications of the skill? Are you even teaching the right set or sequence of skills? I think these considerations have gotten more traction in recent years, possibly at the cost of acquiring the skills themselves. That said, I don’t think the cynicism in the article about teachers just wanting fun easy activities is warranted. They have to consider other things than the most mechanically effective methods of learning.

This dicussion omits very non-politically correct points: - there is a strong ideology shared by lots of people in education, - equality is a lie.

A certain mainstream ideology denies these points, so it goes against elitism. The end result is mediocrity.

Keep in mind that lots of people in education at one point did not believe that letters corresponded to sounds.

As much as we all hate to admit it, the field of education has not been shown capable of policing itself.

Spaced repetition should be automated by inserting it into the most popular games that education authorities can license in bulk. So students get to play their favorite games for free but they have to do spaced repetition learning to get to the next level in the game. Doesn't require school buildings or teachers.

Teachers should be incentivized based on the grades gained by their students during their tutelage. So grades gained = grade after - grade before summed over all students.

Waldorf schools work. There is no testing, there are no grades until high School.

Lots of the silicon valley elite send their kids to Waldorf schools.

Are they all completely unaware of the effectiveness of deliberate practice?

I rather doubt it.

I think they are aware that motivation is what really matters.

My three kids all went to Waldorf School and never had grades until they entered high school at a public school.

None of them ever made anything less than an a+ in any class in a public school.

This was transitioning cold straight out of Waldorf with no testing to a public school.

They all got into very good colleges and are performing extraordinarily well at college. (My oldest daughter graduated from Stanford with a CS degree and straight A's)

Motivation, motivation, motivation.

Mathematics is mostly not that useful. Unfortunately most useful skills are not explicitly taught by our education system.

Negotiation. Cooperation. Compromise. Communication. Soft-skills are poorly taught and hard to learn. We mostly learn these skills subconciously. Even when trying to learn them conciously it is difficult.

Mathematics hasn't been of much use to me over decades of working in software. 90% of my degree in electronic engineering was mathematics (I didn't know better). Some skills needed for my software practice: (a) focusing on the right problem (b) talking to users (c) concentrating on usability (d) design skills (e) negotiation, (f) obstinacy in the face of problems outside of my control (g) choosing who to work with.

University level mathematics is clearly required in some software domains.

The book systemantics claims that systems exist to perpetuate themselvesand not to perform the function for which they were created.

This is working as expected for the school systems which were created to make drones for the factories and to appease the Communist revolutionaries in the 1800s.

Completely misses the point. Rote learning teaches you to do circus performances. So you can do math now, so what? You don't know what it is, how it works, or how or where to use it.

> And there are plenty of teachers who are incentivized to use easy, fun, low-accountability, hard-to-measure practice techniques that keep students, parents, and administrators off their back.

I've been visiting schools in London and I've noticed that teachers/headmasters "sell" their schools with claims that their schools are "inclusive" or use "play based learning" or "great activities" etc. Everything and anything, but being serious about learning. I kind fo get the impression that the approaching to schooling is to get kids off parent's backs. Like "we'll take them, they'll have fun, don't worry about it". Extremely frustrating.

If anyone has here experience with schools in London, shoot me an email and lets talk? (email in profile)