A More Natural Learning Cycle

This is Part 3 of Rule 5: Teach More Practical Arts. Part 2 is here.

Practical applications make for good practice of the general mental tools. We now need to answer the question: which practical applications? For those who love liberty, the answer is obvious: let the children decide! Children naturally play at assorted careers, starting in preschool. Bulldozer operator, policeman, garbage man, soldier, cowboy, and paleontologist were favorite career choices for young boys of my age cohort.

After playing around, children often want to decide what they are good at and specialize "too early." Let them. Let them make career mistakes early while the stakes are low. Besides, if you look at the careers of those who made it into the history books, many did specialize "too early." Early specialization is often a prelude to greatness, even for polymaths. George Washington started his surveying career at sixteen. He is better known for his subsequent careers...

I don't know what play careers Washington had -- if any -- before he took up surveying, but it is very common and natural for children to specialize multiple times during their elementary school years. This should be allowed, and harnessed for teaching the more general mental tools. Our liberal arts model gets replaced by something like this:

So how would education look for the model above? Well, for example, that seven year old aspiring paleontologist needs to be able to read phonetically in order to pronounce all those dinosaur names. The study of dinosaurs leads into using large numbers -- they lived a LONG time ago. There is motivation to learn geology, astronomy, meteorology, continental drift. There could be lessons on laser range finding (which is how continental drift was verified), and on general anatomy (paleontologists need to study the skeletons of modern animals in order to extrapolate from fossilized bones to possible dinosaur appearance).

Or how about the teenager who aspires to be a guitar hero? There could be lessons in music theory and the physics of musical instruments. There could be lessons about room acoustics and the physics of guitar strings. Guitar heroes need to know enough accounting to avoid the Tax Police, and the One Hit Wonder needs to master enough financial skills to stretch that lump sum income over a lifetime.

Or how about the student athlete? Nutrition and health lessons are obviously useful. Trigonometry and basic physics are useful for optimizing a football route or determining the optimal trajectory for sinking basketballs. A successful athlete needs to be a public speaker, and knowledgeable enough in finance to turn a short lived career into a lifetime income.

I'll end this with a personal example. When I was young I dreamed of becoming an astronaut. In elementary school I checked out all the available books on astronomy and planetary science; I could rattle off the names of all the moons known at the time -- a skill since lost. I then discovered the joys of science fiction, which improved my reading skills significantly. I also got the political bug reading Robert Heinlein's stories, which led to high school debate, studying economics, and a decade long deep dive in Libertarian activism. I eventually realized that the truly interesting planets are outside our solar system so I got to studying physics, eventually getting a PhD. My love of science fiction reached the point where I tried writing it myself back in high school. The act of actually writing stories made literature classes occasionally tolerable: writing made literary analysis relevant. I never got good enough at science fiction to get published for money, but maybe all that writing practice made my future writings better. (I'll leave that as a judgment for the reader.) It definitely made typing class relevant, and typing proved to be an extremely useful skill when I ended up writing software for a living.

One early specialization led to many learning paths, some of which proved very useful for my eventual salary paying career, and also this book.

Do note: my early dream of becoming an astronaut was in fact a bad career choice. I would have been an absolutely terrible astronaut! I lack the constitution required for the job. My spatial orientation ability is well below median; I would have also been a terrible airplane pilot. I also tend to be a bit sloppy and absent minded. Space is very unforgiving; survival requires diligent adherence to tedious checklists. But dreaming the astronaut dream was not a waste! Going deep on one subject led to going deep on others.

What if we were to let student career and hobby interests drive the curriculum? I foresee several possible benefits:

1. Greater intellectual engagement. Intellectual output is a function of both raw brain power and interest in the subjects at hand. Answer the question "Why bother?" to the students' satisfaction and the students will work harder. (Or is that play harder?)

2. Less discipline problems. If students spend more time studying things that they are more interested in, they won't need as much therapeutic punishments. Given how we've taken the paddles away from the teachers, this is a very important benefit.

3. More students ready for their careers on time. If students play at various career choices while young, the odds of their knowing what they want to pursue when they grow up will happen before they grow up. Indeed, many more will be able to start work straight out of high school.

4. Students learn liberty from an early age. Test driving possible career paths and choosing which subjects to dive in deeply are productive and meaningful exercises in liberty. Freedom is rather more than choosing your hairstyle or your favorite band. Freedom is something to exercise in the real world, and not just during leisure time.

That fourth point may prove to be critical to restoring a free society. Those who excel in getting good grades today are those who are compliant with authorities. To a significant degree, the Democratic Party has become the Teacher's Pets party.

However, some compliance with authority is required for a civilized society. And there are some serious problems with this model -- and its extreme, Unschooling. To these objections we turn next.

Order of Operations and Other Objections

What I have written so far might sound suspiciously like a call for Unschooling. Rest assured, I don't advocate going that far. There are problems with Unschooling: kids don't know what they don't know, so they need some knowledge pushed in their direction. This is especially true for subjects that require a large overhead before there is much payoff, like early reading or mathematics in general.

But I think that less than half the school day should be devoted to such teacher-push instruction. Our next hack at a flowchart might look like this:

This diagram includes both student-driven and teacher-pushed learning. The exact ratio is a bit fuzzy. Most students will be interested in some of the core mental tools and liberal arts arcana. So not all of the liberal arts need to be teacher pushed. Also student driven deep dives can provide motivation for some of the basics. The aspiring writer might find literary analysis to be interesting. The aspiring physical scientist might want to push ahead in mathematics. The aspiring mechanic, engineer, or artist might enjoy some early geometry lessons in order to master drafting and perspective.

The core mental tools still get taught, but at significantly different rates and times. Let the aspiring lawyer lag in math while learning Latin. Let the non verbal math nerd study algebra in 7th grade and Shakespeare in college.

Our current system stifles our students' strongest talents while young, and then calls for catch up starting in the junior year of college. This can be too much specializing during the endgame! A bit of active rest is nice, even for upperclassmen and grad students. Some art, music, or history can be a nice break from studying tensors and quantum mechanics.

Another potential problem with Unschooling might be a lack of drill and/or deliberate practice. Mastery requires focused work on the weak parts of your strengths. I will admit that to this day I am lax with the drill and deliberate practice when learning a new skill, and I read too far into textbooks without working enough problems when trying to learn new branches of math or physics. Even as an adult with an advanced degree, I could use some externally applied discipline.

But even children can recognize the need for coaching and drill, especially when they are going deep on subjects of their choice. Just watch any high school coach coaching a varsity team. Even bad and rowdy students will buckle down and do repetitive and downright painful drill in order to win glory on the court or playing field. Or consider students of the piano or guitar. Lessons are generally but once a week; the rest is honor system at home practice. Pick up a guitar magazine featuring long haired, dope smoking, womanizing party animals on the cover. Those free spirited stage improvisers talk about hours of practicing scales. Student driven learning will involve plenty of drill.

Allowing more student driven learning will not only break the standard order of operations between subjects -- such as that aspiring lawyer learning statistics late in the game -- it can also mean breaking the order of operations within subjects.

For example, do you need to have great spelling before writing that first practice novel? How about perfect grammar and punctuation? The answer is a screaming NO! Children are creative and like to play Make Believe. Writing stories is a form of Make Believe. Some adults pay thousands of dollars to attend writer's workshops in an attempt to free themselves from writer's block acquired in grade school. Maybe the order of learning is backwards -- at least for some students.

How about art, drafting, and engineering? Is is necessary to go through a complete course in Euclidean Geometry in order to use a trig table? The ancient Babylonians didn't. Trig tables can be generated by physical measurement -- no need for the calculus required to derive the power series used by your calculator. Of course, an aspiring engineer or scientist should eventually learn rigorous geometry, maybe even earlier than the standard curriculum calls for. But usage of basic geometric results can be motivators for future studies in rigor.

I am all for rigorous proofs and good grammar. My beef is with downplaying and pushing back applications before the relevant rigor and grammar are mastered. Do teach some grammar and spelling along the way whether the student wants it or not. Just don't destroy the joy of every other subject or project by giving them grammar and spelling grades. Order of mastery varies by student.

Allowing order of master to vary by student, however, breaks the Conveyor Belt model of education bigly. I can easily envision teachers cringing at my words as they contemplate how much student driven learning breaks the current system.

And yes, I do mean to replace the current system. I hated it back in the day. But as a responsible reactionary, I am not going to break it and merely hope something better takes its place. Instead, I am going to propose several alternatives. I will propose a few top down management changes to enable teachers and students to find their favorite alternative. And with that manager's hat in place I'll start with metrics.

A Dynamic Alternative to Letter Grades

How do you grade students when they are going at different rates? Should the student who is attempting hard material with a high error rate get a lower grade than the student who sticks to easy problems? Without the age-based Conveyor Belt, letter grading is ludicrous.

So let's just drop standard letter grading in the public schools entirely. And ditch the Conveyor Belt with it; it's dispiriting. Look at learning from a dynamic perspective: how much has the student learned? Replace letter grades with Levels of Mastery.

The concept is not new. It's how imaginary characters are scored in role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. It's also how characters are scored in video games. You don't need compulsory education laws, paddles, or Adderall to make kids play video games! Level based scoring can be downright addictive.

Level based scoring is capitalism compatible. It recognizes that people have different talents, interests, and priorities; and that's OK. There is less envy: students compete mainly against themselves, much as joggers compete with old run times, or weight trainers with previous weight/rep numbers.

The system might be too autistic. Intellectual competition can be a good thing -- between peers of similar talents. So throw in some spelling bees, science fairs, chess tournaments, etc. Thinking under pressure can be a useful skill. (It is definitely useful for taking high stakes standardized tests! Such tests measure in part the ability/willingness to use Daniel Kahneman's System 2 thinking while under time pressure.)

But for the most part, the battle cries for intellectual mastery should be "Practice makes better," and "More knowledge is useful."

With Levels of Mastery replacing letter grades, there is no such thing as GPA. So how can colleges compare students from different schools? Answer: that's what the standardized tests are for! And, by the way, standardized tests often use level based vs. letter based grading.

OK, America is having some bad experiences with standardized testing as I write this. Powerful tools misused can be powerful bad. Such is the case for the testing that came from No Child Left Behind. These tests set a national curriculum, and a bad one at that. They set a quota for a fixed set of subjects for each grade. The tests implicitly mandate that kids go broad and shallow. Learn enough of the government monitored subjects to pass the test. Don't spend time going deep on what is currently interesting.

For year-to-year progress, niche based standardized tests could be used to make sure that the teachers are teaching something. These tests would be narrower but deeper. An middle school student interested in knights in shining armor would get quizzed on medieval history at a much deeper level than a a student who merely takes "History."

College admissions tests can be broader. While it is true (and desirable) that high school seniors will be a bit more unbalanced than under the present system, these imbalances will be a bit blurrier than in the early years. As I already wrote, children naturally test drive multiple careers and hobbies. And for each interest, there are tie-ins to more general mental tools. In the longer run some of the lumpiness will smooth out. Indeed, if school become more fun, then the love of learning will carry over past the formal education years. Not all characters in Plato's dialogues were young. And Stoic philosophy was originally the ancient world's equivalent of modern self-help/airplane books.

Beyond the Conveyor Belt

So we have a scoring system that's outside the age based Conveyor Belt model. How about the actual teaching? This is where things get hard and armchair reformers (like yours truly) can be supercilious jerks if we're not careful. I see several options, but I cannot say which is best without further testing.

One approach would be to emulate many homeschools. Have the students do mostly self-study with the teacher being available for answering questions, helping with "homework", and grading papers. The homeschool market has funded some excellent materials to facilitate this approach. Stanley Schmidt's Life of Fred books are absolutely incredible -- at least for students who enjoy some pretty silly humor. Then there are the thousands of online lectures available on the Internet. One especially nice feature of this model is that Socratic instruction comes naturally. It doesn't take special talent or training to go into Socratic model when helping a student work a math problem. Socratic classroom lectures are much more challenging.

This model has been used successfully, and in a once failing school north of Detroit at that. Clintondale High School has students take recorded lectures home and then the students do the "homework" at the school. It appears to be working according to PBS.

Whether this flipped model allows students to self pace in a public school environment is still to be determined. If the lecture series is planned out in advance, then students can definitely self-pace when it comes to watching lectures. Ditto for working problems. The potential nightmare for teachers, however, is grading different papers for different students. Answering questions about different problem sets might also be too much work. Some experimentation is in order.

Another approach for allowing student self-pacing would be the Lancaster Model: have older students tutor younger students. This is a proven model, and it worked for poor students during the ugly early phases of the Industrial Revolution. Tutoring helps the older students lock in and clarify what they have already learned. It provides leadership experience. And it can be readily mixed with the flipped model above.

Finally, we could keep the Conveyor Belt Model but update it a bit. Way back in 1940 Robert Heinlein wrote the science fiction short story "The Roads Must Roll" which featured a transportation system consisting of immense conveyor belts. People stood on moving roads. To get on a high speed "road", passengers would step from belt to belt, where each belt moved a bit faster than the previous belt. The idea is quite silly and incredibly dangerous for actual physical transport, but it might work as a model for student driven learning. Have traditional classrooms running at different speeds and let students shift tracks based on how well they are doing.

To a limited degree, schools had this when I was young. Students were divided into groups by intelligence/talent. The smart group moved faster than the less smart group, etc. (That, and the smart group got to do more side projects, aka "enrichment", in order to prevent too much spread.) In theory, students could change groups based on their grades, though it was rare in practice. And someone who failed too many subjects had to repeat the entire year for all subjects.

The old system was crude. The tracks were by overall ability, not by subject ability. And both the option to change track and the penalty of having to repeat were on an annual basis. (There was also the possibility of summer school to try to forestall failing a grade.)

Suppose we were to go to a true semester or quarter system for grade school just as we do for college courses. If you fail a semester or quarter, you repeat that semester or quarter vs. an entire year. Indeed, even a smaller span makes sense for younger students since a quarter is a larger fraction of a lifetime at that age. Maturity changes on a month by month basis for six year olds.

And let the tracks be by subject. Recognize the fact that there are poets who are poor at math and mathematicians who mumble like Boomhauer in King of the Hill. These semester, quarter, or even smaller tracks need some gaps between them so those attempting a faster track can do a bit of prep, and students struggling to stay on a track can do some catch-up. Those who are snug in their current tracks could go all in with student driven projects during these gaps.

Such a parallel Conveyer Belt system does require an important change from how many schools operate: it produces terrible scheduling issues if teachers are specialized. Scheduling is fairly easy if teachers are completely unspecialized: just have everyone do language arts at the same time, mathematics at the same time, etc. This is perhaps overoptimistic. But if we have two periods available for each of the core curriculum tracks, and they aren't overlapping, the system might work. It does mean that core curriculum teachers would need to do side subjects. This might actually be fun for many teachers!

Manage the Manageable

I have proposed a lot of changes to the educational system. Some testing might be a good idea. Any readers running a private school are encouraged to take some of these ideas out for a test drive. Ye might find some of the ideas relevant for home school as well. (I have done a bit of testing myself in this environment.)

Hubris tempts me to call for testing the ideas in the public schools as well. Given how screwed up many schools are, why not? Come to think of it, educational fads get forced down the throats of teachers on a regular basis. What's another few fads?

The answer is rather Public Choicy: if the teachers and/or administrators of a school hate a new idea from above, the idea probably won't work. (I heard from a teacher that there was even a study on this, but I don't have the source.)

So how about we allow public schools to play with these ideas? That's what we can safely mandate from above: give schools more permissions for level based grading, more student driven learning, and teaching practical arts early. I'll list some details on how to grant such permission in the paragraphs to follow.

Management starts with metrics. If we are going to monitor educational progress using standardized tests, let us do so in a manner which measures what was actually taught while allowing schools to teach students different useful things. That is, instead of one test for all students of a particular grade, have multiple subject tests for those who have supposedly reached certain levels of mastery. These tests should be deep; that is, they should be able to measure a fairly wide range of mastery. But these tests should be fairly narrow: arithmetic is not geometry or set theory.

Instead of a minimum quota of learning for a wide range of subjects for each grade, have a point based system for each subject/mastery combination. Measure how much stuff kids are learning. And yes, you could up the weight for core mental tools as a function of age so teachers have an incentive to keep students from lagging too much in subjects they are less interested in. That is, an eighth grade math whiz might get more points for getting his spelling up to fifth grade level than for learning second semester algebra.

Yes, this may sound complicated, but there are education professors and bureaucrats who love complicated. Give them a bone to chew on.

Such tests would also require either computers for taking the tests or printing out subtests locally. The model of reusable test booklets with fill-in-the-dot answer sheets does break down. But so what? Computers are cheap these days.

When choosing subjects to potentially test, remember to include basic life skills, finance and accounting, cool guy stuff, cool girly stuff, etc. And for subjects which aren't suitable for standardized testing, have teachers from nearby schools judge performances and exams. Or better yet, have adults working in the particular fields do the judging.

Another area where we can enable teachers to do more student-driven practical arts instruction would be to add more options for teaching certificate renewal courses. Instead of requiring that an already experienced teacher learn yet more educational gobbledygook in their field, let teachers expand on their own knowledge. That English teacher who played in the band might take some music classes in order to better teach a music class during student-driven periods. That history teacher might want to take some art classes. A math teacher might want to take some engineering classes -- or trade classes at the local community college.

Finally we could mandate some changes to facilities. Most of the classrooms I attended had cinder block walls. Durable? Yes! But cinder block walls acts as mirrors for sound. Imagine a candle in a room with mirrors for walls; the reflections of the candle provide lots of additional light. The same is true for a cinder block room. A few chairs can produce enough background noise so that kids feel like they can whisper below the background noise. Those whispers echo around the rooms raising the background noise levels. Whispers become mumbles. Mumbles become talking. Talking becomes loud talking. Then Teacher slams a weight on her desk and screams "SHUT UP!!!!"

This rising noise scenario played out hundreds of times during my school years. And I've experienced it as an adult as well, in bars, hospitality suites at political conventions, and even church parish halls. Conversely, I have never experienced it in a library. An occasional "Sssh" from the librarian did happen, but it happened while the noise level was still quite low. All those books acted as sound dampening material.

Teachers waste extraordinary levels of energy, and have to master intricate mind games just to keep classrooms quiet. Place sound dampening material on two non-facing walls, and teachers can focus more on teaching. (You also need an acoustic ceiling and/or carpeting for the z axis, but most classrooms already have this.)

Acoustic dampening is critical for teaching methods where teachers or older students act more as tutors than as lecturers. You really want to keep noises localized for such. (But acoustic dampening is also useful for traditional instruction. And for the case of the teacher who needs a bit of a boost to fill a dampened room with her lecture, amplifiers and microphones aren't all that expensive.)

Finally, allow state universities to use just standardized aptitude and achievement tests for admissions. GPA is evil for public schools where aptitude varies widely. Stop using it.

As far as I can tell, all of the above could be safely legislated at the state level. Schools which want to continue with the traditional Conveyor Belt liberal arts model would be free to do so. I predict that most schools would at least revert back to pre No Child Left Behind styles of instruction. The main difference is that Enrichment would be a bit more formalized.

Then again, if all this talk of standardized subtests and the like seems too top down and complicated, we could always just ditch such state and federal monitoring altogether and make school accountable to local parents instead. We'll explore that option in the next Rule.