All of Thoughts On Education's Comments + Replies
AMA: Jason Crawford, The Roots of Progress
I'm interested in the role of education in progress, particularly childhood education. I believe that accelerating education and promoting early graduation of students is key for progress in many different domains chiefly by counteracting the burden of knowledge (https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2_BurdenOfKnowledge.pdf). I also believe that many people discount how much more efficient education could be made.
What are your thoughts on childhood (birth to around age 18) education as it relates to progress and do you know people involved with ... (read more)
31yGreat topic. A few thoughts on the relationship between progress and education.
Historically, the most notable thing about education is that children now get a
lot more of it
[https://ourworldindata.org/global-education#the-evolution-of-education-outcomes]
. Global literacy rates were 12% in 1800 and 86% in 2016. Average years of
schooling was 3.7 in the US in 1870, and is 13.4 years in 2017. A lot of this
was driven by rising incomes: when families get wealthier, children don't have
to work, and the family can afford to send them to school.
This directly represents progress: it is better for individual well-being to be
literate and have at least a basic education. It also drove progress: a more
educated workforce can be more productive, and has more human capital for R&D.
However, this trend is largely tapped out. Now that most people go to school,
and most are literate, there isn't more much more progress to made on those
dimensions. (You could even argue that we've gone a bit too far: too many people
going to college, and spending too much money / taking on too much debt for it.)
Further, another notable thing about education is that we haven't made much
progress in how we teach or (as far as I can tell) in the quality of outcomes.
(If anything, my impression is that outcomes have slipped.) Except for teaching
more math and science, today's public education is not that far from the
one-room schoolhouses of the 19th century. Many more radical and innovative
ideas have been proposed (e.g., Montessori), and have gotten some traction, but
are still niches.
I think there is a lot of room for innovation in pedagogy, but very few are
focused on this. My friends at Higher Ground Education
[https://www.tohigherground.com/] / Montessorium [https://montessorium.com/] are
working on this (their private high school, the Academy of Thought and Industry
[https://thoughtandindustry.com/], commissioned me to create a progress course
[https://thoughtandindustry.com/programs/p
I'd love to hear from Montessorium/ Higher Ground Education. I have been following some of what they post online with great interest. I've also talked to Simone Collins a bit about The Collins' Institute a while back and saw that Malcolm Collins spoke at the most recent Great Rethink in Education conference that Montessorium and Joe Connor put on.
I'll also add that probably more people are focused on innovation in pedagogy than you may believe. Some of them end up fighting for clear, systematic explicit instruction in phonics which doesn't feel very innova... (read more)