How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses

let&#x27;s have some dissenting opinion here.<p>not all kids are equal. not all kids <i>want</i> to learn. in each and every discussion over this topic people bring up quotes by very smart people, like kubrick, sagan, etc. on how organised learning is not needed, a young mind wants to learn, grows like a flower, all by itself, even better without the shackles of structured education.<p>i call bullshit. this is biased through the people stating these arguments. if you&#x27;re a genius or borderline genious then of course the standardized school system is not for you. if you&#x27;re smarter and faster than your teachers the whole thing can&#x27;t work.<p>but the vast majority of kids is not like that. yes, some people are plain dumb. nothing to do, not a bad thing, pure nature. might be great at something, sports, fine manual labor, but simply not good with high mental tasks. some kids don&#x27;t like reading, it&#x27;s too hard and does not bring any value to them, nothing sticks, no mental images are formed. just letters stuck together.<p>this romantic view of humans is the root of a lot of failed social experiments. from open school systems (montessori, waldorf,...) to the new humans that communism wanted to create.<p>the modern school system is built to provide a base level of education, targeted for the medium range intellect. learn basic skills, through repetition - tried and tested method, from sports to art to education. reading, writing, counting, calculating. if you&#x27;re one of those kids that taught yourself how to read at age 4, well, guess what, your experience in school will be subpar. but just don&#x27;t go around and push for school reform to have schools fitted for your style of self learning. the vast majority is not like you.

“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.” ― Stanley Kubrick

The article reports, without references, &quot;So in 2011—when Paloma entered his class—Juárez Correa decided to start experimenting. He began reading books and searching for ideas online. Soon he stumbled on a video describing the work of Sugata Mitra, a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University in the UK. In the late 1990s and throughout the 2000s, Mitra conducted experiments in which he gave children in India access to computers. Without any instruction, they were able to teach themselves a surprising variety of things, from DNA replication to English.&quot;<p>Where are the publications about this? How much peer review have they had? We have discussed Mitra&#x27;s work here on HN before. What is the latest news about follow-up on his studies? I would be delighted to hear about new and more effective methods of helping young learners learn (I am a teacher of young learners) and I am especially interested in following up on the research to make sure that it is accurate.<p><a href="http://www.epsiloncamp.org/RepetitionPractice.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.epsiloncamp.org&#x2F;RepetitionPractice.php</a><p>(Above link is an example of my following up on educational research claims. I do this continually.)<p>AFTER EDIT: I find by Google Scholar search that most of Mitra&#x27;s publications on education research are reposted on his own Hole-in-the-Wall website.<p><a href="http://hole-in-the-wall.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hole-in-the-wall.com&#x2F;</a>

Interesting how the public school &quot;reform&quot; movement in the US cuts hard against this sort of experimentation --- in particular, by mandating curricula, and evaluating students and schools by performance on cookie-cutter tests that make no room for individual interests or variation.

Children want to learn, and if you dont beat out their love of learning by forcing them into a box that hardly anyone fits in, their inherent need to understand the world comes out. Its almost... logical.

There have always been techniques and methods available to vastly improve the outcomes of students. The problem is that education is a very political subject and the winds shift as quickly as the politicians do.<p>Education is a favorite pet issue of every wanna-be FDR and for whatever reason, they can&#x27;t just let teachers do their jobs. They have to tell them what they can and can&#x27;t teach, what targets they have to meet, create arbitrary and senseless metrics of merit.<p>So forgive me if I&#x27;m unimpressed with this so-called solution to education. Would it be better than what we have now? Sure it will, virtually anything would be that reduces the amount of oversight in the system. Could you sell it to the public? Not a snowball&#x27;s chance in hell. It wouldn&#x27;t last a year.

&quot;One SIMPLE TRICK to radically change educational outcomes!!&quot;<p>it&#x27;s amazing that people still actively publicize idiotic self promoters and charlatans like Mitra.

I always find it a little sad to reflect on education because I think we can unleash a generation of geniuses.<p>I don&#x27;t think it even takes a radical teaching method. I think it takes a radical reordering of priorities.<p>Instead of glorifying athletes and closet organizers famous for making sex tapes ... we need to glorify education, hard work, and resourcefulness. And parents need to reinforce the message by rewarding&#x2F;encouraging those traits.

Unsurprisingly, the headline&#x27;s &quot;new&quot; teaching method isn&#x27;t particularly new (as the timeline sidebar in the article itself makes somewhat apparent). For example, the Sudbury Valley School [1] has been around since 1968 and is even more &quot;radical&quot;. No grades, no curriculum, no classes, no separation by age. The governance of the school is democratic, with all decisions -- including those regarding budget and staff -- decided by a body called the School Meeting which is composed of the staff and the students together, with one vote per person.<p>The Sudbury School of Atlanta has an interesting blog post [2] describing how the students can naturally pick up basic skills through participating in the management of the school, in this case by choosing and acquiring a school pet.<p>This Wired article is more about the undirected aspect, but the compelling thing to me about adding the democratic element (the oldest running example is the Summerhill School [3], established in 1921) is that the decisions being made affect the student, so the student has a motive to participate and learns as a by-product. Thus there&#x27;s a hope that children in general could benefit, not only those children who are particularly &quot;self-directed learners&quot;.<p>Additionally, the things they&#x27;re learning (reading, writing and arithmetic, but also teamwork, negotiation and leadership) are directly beneficial in society -- because the school itself is a microcosm of society.<p>It may not be a model that produces &quot;geniuses&quot;, but it does seem like a good model for producing adults&#x2F;citizens. (I have no personal experience with alternative schooling.)<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sudbury_Valley_School</a><p>[2] <a href="http://sudburyschoolofatlanta.blogspot.com/2012/11/sudbury-assignment-learn-math-reading.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sudburyschoolofatlanta.blogspot.com&#x2F;2012&#x2F;11&#x2F;sudbury-a...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Summerhill_School</a>

And who, in the role of mentor or teacher, has not discovered this to be an obvious truth? The difference between &quot;here is what you do to solve this&quot; and &quot;here is the problem and (possibly) some areas that it might be worth focusing on&quot;. Someone given the latter wil come away with knowledge. Someone given the former will come away with a set of steps to follow.<p>That aside, this long-winded series of human-interest anecdotes reminds me of why I stopped reading Wired. The whole thing could have been written in 1&#x2F;3rd the space.

Freedom in learning is so, so important. This case study illuminates that pretty well. It&#x27;s a great look into an example of allowing children to truly learn at their own pace, with gentle guidance regarding subject areas and provided with the resources they need to discover new knowledge. The story is heartwarming and a great read, and a useful comparison to the modern American style of education.<p>As others have pointed out, there is no magic bullet. This method would work incredibly well for 90% of subjects taught in elementary school. However, for non-English language learning, additional guidance would be needed - the teachers could nudge them towards Duolingo, various online multilingual dictionaries, etc. I do believe that this system could be used as the core of a new teaching paradigm, but it is not solely sufficient for a complete learning experience to the standards that we have come to expect in America.<p>For developing countries (which, sadly, Mexico bears much resemblance to), this could be an incredible tool. An internet-connected computer and guidance from involved teachers can easily produce students who are ready to help lift their countries out of economic malaise. In this way, I believe the internet can serve as the Great Equalizer many of us hoped it would someday become. If this method used alone is capable of producing students 70% as capable (by some nonexistent perfect metric) as those in first-world nations, that would still be an enormous leap forward for developing nations. I think these guys are really on to something in this regard.<p>I find it interesting that as our civilizations mature, we find ourselves oscillating back away from the industrialized American education system paradigms and towards a more holistic, broadly-focused educational strategy using qualitative methods rather than quantitative objectives. Students are not a homogeneous population, and historically we have tried to deal with this issue by ignoring it and cramming them all into the same mold, with minor variations. It makes me glad to see that we are starting to consider that we should instead allow for this variance by designing systems with broader definitions and qualitative goals, to allow the students to grow in the directions they are best suited or disposed to.

&quot;The exterior of his schools will be mostly glass, so outsiders can peer in.&quot;<p>That reminds me of one of the technical schools I saw in downtown Lima, Peru. It had a huge number of large glass windows on the front, and as I walked along the main street, I could peer in and see row after row of tables, each with several large Apple monitors, each with a student or two in front of it. It was massive.<p>I&#x27;d really like to go in there next time I visit and find out more about their techniques.<p>(Incidentally, several blocks away there was a high school named &quot;The Albert Einstein Institute&quot;. :)

This article tells an amazing and inspiring story. I love the burro tale and how it illustrates the positive attitude of these kids who really want to learn. I hope that everyone donates to <a href="http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/student-centered-movement/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2013&#x2F;10&#x2F;student-centered-movem...</a><p>Teachers like Sergio Juárez Correa are an example of what teachers should be doing, specially in rich countries like the US.

Aaawww nuts. Yes, education could be vastly improved, but you know what, my sons school <i>is</i> vastly improved over what I had.<p>Since 1913 when IQ tests started being nationally or internationally graded, the IQ median has been kept at 100. But without that smoothing the median level of 1913 would be 77 or so today, and the median today would be in the 130s<p>We have got smarter, or perhaps we have had mental tools passed onto us through education and social norms.<p>ref: err... a Ted talk recently released....

&gt; in 2010 only 50 percent of public school staff members in the US were teachers.<p>This has as much to do with schools hiring &quot;staffers&quot; and &quot;instructional assistants&quot; as a cost-cutting measure as it does with top-heavy public school bureaucracy. It&#x27;s akin to the &quot;associate&#x2F;adjunct professor&quot; fiasco in a college environment.

The real question is -- can we do this on a mass scale that the general populace can benefit from? The problem with getting kids to learn is <i>public education</i>, namely where one-size-fits-all is sacrosanct.

This is not new, Chomsky was educated the same way.