Apple’s Longtime Education VP Shares Frustrations With Slow Pace of Change
19th September 2018
The real problem with education is that the school system is stuck in the ‘factory model’ from the Middle Ages that pushes through an age-batch of kids every year and hopes that one size fits all. And the real problem with the age-batch process is that teachers spend most of their time working with the laggards in hopes of getting a reasonable chance for every kid to move forward with his or her age-batch, which leaves the bright kids (and even a lot of the normal kids) bored rigid and looking for trouble to get into.
Some ‘progressive’ schools are using resources like Khan Academy to ‘flip’ the school day: Kinds watch well-crafted instructional videos at home and then spend the school day working through exercises and projects, with teachers available to ‘coach’ those with difficulty. But you won’t see any major public school adopting this model because (a) the teachers aren’t qualified to do that and (b) that isn’t what they signed up for, as their unions will be quick to tell you.
What we really need is individualized instruction where somebody could be fifth grade in English and fourth grade in French and seventh grade in math and nobody has a problem with that. But it isn’t going to happen so long as government schools are the Microsoft of elementary education and educational unions are the Facebook of government schools.
September 20th, 2018 at 09:42
One of the reasons we chose to home school our son was that he was very precocious in math but very late learning to read. If we had put him in first grade when he was six, he would have been labeled dyslexic and shunted off into special ed, even though was doing math at a fourth grade level. So we kept him home and indulged his love of math, continued to read aloud to him, and let him spend hours every day building things (building was always his first love). He was almost eight before reading finally clicked with him, and then he quickly made up for lost time. Today he’s a successful independent contractor and almost everyone who knows him says he’s one of the smartest people they’ve ever met. I shudder to think where he’d be today if we’d gone the public school route with him.