This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue.
You DON'T measure knowledge.
You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning.
> maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
pity that academics and teachers often disagree and, most of all, that schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say.
Teachers are not doctors, doctors practice medicine, teachers do no operate in such a stressful environment, they "educate" young people and is is often the case that it means they impose or suggest their opinions (because they can, nothing prevents them) and families see that kind of "education" unfit for their kids.
And they have all the rights in the World to be listened too, even if they are technically wrong or I disagree with them (I completely disagree on catholic schools for example).
The experts are there to find a solution to their problems, not to build hypothetical perfect solutions in a void.
Also: teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead. In my country (and practically all other countries in Europe) they are like bus drivers, they are fulfilling an obligation required by State laws under the State government but also offering a service the people paid for to the State.
Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics, we should look at places where the system is proven to work and copy it: see Finland.
CONTROVERSIAL
On a last note, there's a topic I believe it's the most important, that will quite certainly cause uproar.
If your youngest students die in school shot by someone just a bit older than them, the society you live in have failed in every possible way.
The fact that the system is broken is a joke compared to that.
> Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics, we should look at places where the system is proven to work and copy it: see Finland.
I did an education degree, and come from a family of educators. Every educator and academic I've talked to (I can't remember an exception) wanted our system to be more like Finland's. The people pushing back against changes in that direction were not teachers, but politicians, parents and high-up administrators.
>Teachers are not doctors
Indeed. And you wouldn't tell a doctor how to do their job, even if you had spent years as a patient. People in the education system have opinions that are informed by years of experience in the field and decades of research. With respect, I'm thinking you are an example of the type of person described by the comment you're replying to: not much experience inside the system but confident in your opinion of how to fix it.
> schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say.
My country, and yours too I think, pays for health care with taxes along with education. Again, does that mean you and I get to tell a doctor how to do their job?
> teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead
Teachers existed long before mandatory attendance laws. Also, what point are you trying to make with this statement? That because they are necessary by law, their professional opinion is negligible?
> doctors ask patient how do they feel all the time.
And teachers _constantly_ monitor how their students are doing - "feedback from their customers" if you want to put it that way. Talking with them during or after class to see how things are going, assessments on homework, projects and tests, parent-teacher interviews, individual learning plans, collaborations between teachers... I would venture to say "making sure a student is doing well" takes up most of the time of the job.
A patient complaining to their doctor about some treatment not working is not telling the doctor how to do their job. Your first comment made a claim about how student assessments should be done. This is something at the heart of pedagogy and has been studied and experimented on. The analogy to health care would be like if you declared the ways in which doctors should screen for cancer. Nobody without medical training would ever think to make such a claim, but many people seem quite confident in making similar claims about how the education system should work, as you did in your first comment.
I'm not even making an argument about whether you are right or wrong. There are many ways in which assessments can change for the better (educators would be the first to agree with you there). But to then go on and say "you shouldn't measure knowledge, only student satisfaction" without really showing an understanding of how knowledge or satisfaction are currently - or potentially could be - assessed... are you up to date with recent literature on these concepts? Do you have experience performing these kinds of assessments?
I'm still not sure what point you are making with your second section in this comment so I won't try to respond.
> And teachers _constantly_ monitor how their students are doing
They actually don't do it, not constantly, nor as a way of improving teaching.
They monitor their output, but rarely listen to what the student have to say.
In the end it's not their job, their job is to teach what they are told to teach, they rarely go on a limb for their students.
Because their salary does not depend on it.
But as personal story I've always had a conflict with my Italian teacher in high school, I've always been an A student, even after high school, but she hated my temper, so I've always been graded C (I believe it means sufficient in some parts of the World, for us is 6 in a scale from 3 to 10) and when in our latest test I've submitted the assignment of her favorite and she submitted mine, she was graded 9 and I was graded 6, again!
I won't tell you what color her face was when we told her the truth.
You are going through all of this, no matter what, there's always gonna be some bad teacher and yo can't do anything about it.
And since the mentality is "don't tell a professional how to do their job" it's always the student's fault.
That's why I think student should be asked if they are satisfied of their teachings, not of their grades or about how much fun they are having, but of the people teaching.
> I would venture to say "making sure a student is doing well" takes up most of the time of the job.
I'm glad it was like that for you.
It isn't so common in places I know.
In my country they spend 12, 15 maximum, hours - by contract - a week in school as high school teachers, that is when students need it the most.
Let's start by making them work 30 hours a week, it's one of the few jobs left where presence is fundamental, but we still keep treating teachers like those poor souls who have to grade a bunch of four pages written tests, like if computers have not been invented yet. It takes them weeks usually.
> A patient complaining to their doctor about some treatment not working is not telling the doctor how to do their job
I think I have not been clear: they are not complaining, they are being asked questions and depending on their answers the doctor can (should) understand if the treatment is working as intended and not causing too many contraindications .
So the analogy in education should be smth like "what's your favorite Renaissance author, and why?" not "What's the date that changed the life of Machiavelli forever?" (real question from a real questionnaire)
There is no talking to them, nobody grades them for liking profoundly horror movies and writing beautiful essays about them, because it's not "part of the teaching program"
> The analogy to health care would be like if you declared the ways in which doctors should screen for cancer. Nobody without medical training would ever think to make such a claim, but many people seem quite confident in making similar claims about how the education system should work, as you did in your first comment.
I haven't said anything of the sorts.
I am simply saying that if half of the class is getting bad grades in maths you should blame the teacher, not the students.
But bad teachers are allowed to teach anyway, because they are not responsible for their bad teachings.
At least in my country they can't be fired even if they are literally doing nothing.
> without really showing an understanding of how knowledge or satisfaction are currently - or potentially could be - assessed... are you up to date with recent literature on these concepts? Do you have experience performing these kinds of assessments?
I have a few ideas.
For example monitor what subjects show the worst grades or the highest rates of absence from school the day of a test.
These are all basic symptoms of fear and anxiety.
It doesn't take a Nobel prize to understand basic human emotions.
Let's try to understand why, the subject could be really hard or the students really stupid or it could be the teacher. Anyway, being stressed by school it's not something that motivate students.
you could simply ask them to grade their teachers anonymously a couple of times a year.
Internet forums are full of cry for help from students not understanding why they are asked such silly questions and what's the point.
We could monitor those forums, for example...
Unsurprisingly when these kinds of discussions come up, unions complain and go on strike.
And I am all in favor for unions, I have been union delegate in companies I've worked for, but school unions, they are a corporations, at least here.
I've talked to some of them, of course what I'll say is anecdotal I don't pretend to know everyone of them, but when asked why they don't want teachers to be paid better instead of a lot of teachers badly paid who don't do anything important for __education__, they told me blatantly that they prefer two jobs at current wages than one job paid double. They can spin it as a victory. They also told me that if newer teachers are paid better, old timers are going to complain ans tart asking for the same pay (it's kinda impossible here to pay two people different wages for the same job, especially if it's for the public) and that better salaries would encourage more prepared teachers to start teaching and that would look bad for the rest of them.
That's the state of our education system, I hope it is different in all the other countries but according to my friends living all over Europe it's kinda the same everywhere, especially during COVID crisis, where families where left to solve problems schools would not solve, because they couldn't get teachers to get vaccinated or to go to school.
Except, of course, for a few exceptions, that I already mentioned.
But, back on topic, if people studying the subject have no idea, well, that's a problem, don't you agree?
If we wanna keep grading people and "judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree", I think pedagogy is not doing a great service to future generations.
Let's not forget that teachers quote pedagogists when it favors them, but when it goes against their interest, they criticize them saying that "they are talking from their ivory towers. they don't know what's like being a "street" teacher"
Not all is lost or grim, teachers still fight against school commoditization, they still fight against schools as furnaces that generate young workers/consumers, but there's still a lot of conservatorism disguised by idealism.
> Do you have experience performing these kinds of assessments?
As a matter of fact I do.
I wanted to be a teacher, I was discouraged by how limited the space for new ideas was.
In my family, that is very big as I've said, there are teachers.
All of them keep doing it because it's a safe job and the salary is granted, none of them is satisfied of the work they are doing and would gladly do something else, if they had the opportunity.
They all feel like are doing nothing substantial to help the students and that the students know it, but going against the status quo would cost them too much. They tried, they've been burnt, they gave up.
So to get rid of the guilt they grade everyone good, at least they are not unpopular.
That is a lot to sort through and I'll try to pick out the points that are relevant to the discussion we started.
> I haven't said anything of the sorts. I am simply saying that if half of the class is getting bad grades in maths you should blame the teacher, not the students.
Yes, this is exactly what you said:
> "This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue. You DON'T measure knowledge. You should measure the satisfaction of the students."
You quite explicitly made a claim about how teachers should assess students. Then I suggested that maybe you should take a step back and question whether you are qualified to make such claims. Now, it seems like you've doubled down, and written a diatribe which superficially touches on a half dozen issues in education. I'm simply pointing out this irony: that the commenter you first replied to was lamenting how so many people outside the field of education feel qualified to make claims about pedagogy. Even if their expertise is limited to, for example:
> I wanted to be a teacher... In my family... there are teachers
Personally I always loved STEM topics, and would go out of my way to learn about them. This ended poorly for me in school, as I ended up being incredibly bored in the STEM classes, as they were filled with content I already knew. Then the other topics I didn't love, and largely did not like to experience them. So in the end my satisfaction was miserable, and I dropped out of 7th grade.
Eventually I got a GED and went to college for CS, but it was that time in-between those two that even allowed that to happen. I needed time to explore the world, find what I wanted to know, and figure out how school can help me get there.
As someone on the other end of the hiring table now, I don't even care about knowledge. Knowledge tells me how far you've got. I don't care how far you've got, I want to know how quickly you pick up the material based on the job I'm hiring for. I care about acceleration. While the two can be correlated, it's not precise. There's not a single hiring test that I can do to figure out someone's acceleration. What I do know, that testing the farthest on some topic as a metric, like leetcode does, it's going to fail every single jack of all trades programmer.
> Personally I always loved STEM topics, and would go out of my way to learn about them. This ended poorly for me in school, as I ended up being incredibly bored in the STEM classes, as they were filled with content I already knew.
Thanks for posting this.
This was my experience as well, with the added malus that when I went into school, people were still saying things like "what do I need maths for?" or "a computer will never write the next Dante" and things like that, so not only it was frustrating, it was borderline painful and lonely.
Then I discovered kids, I don't have kids on my own, but I have a very big family and I am grateful for being surrounded by people younger than me of any age from 3 to 20.
I saw them being entertained by the most boring stuff just because it was new to them and build up from there, at an incredible pace, and become young experts, with all the limits of being inexpert and also being kids, in a very short time.
I realized that what kept them motivate was a feedback loop that needed no external validation: knowing more about that thing made them happily satisfied and so they kept doing it. They don't care about understanding things the wrong way, eventually they'll get it right, they don't care about not doing any mistake, eventually they'll learn to make new mistake, they just wanna learn more and experience more.
What you call "acceleration".
I saw most of them struggle in school because they were bored, they were getting good grades, most of them at least, they were kin to put up the work necessary to get them, but their motivation started lacking, until they arrived to university and chose something that could (potentially) assure a good job or would make their parents happy.
It's a sad state of things, if I think about it, but it's also a "great filter" and we should strive to make education something that adapts to people receiving it (I'm not talking about schools for the gifted or smth like that) and not the other way around.
When I was in my 30s a friend of mine married a woman from Finland, who was living in Sweden, and then they moved back there when they had kids. I've visited them on many occasions and when I saw how they intend school there I was astonished.
They are not tracked, they are not tested, there is no standardized grade scale, there is virtually no homeworks, they do not compete, they learn by playing and are simply thought that you have to get the basics rights to go on and then helped to follow their paths.
I think that, in general, it makes happier adults.
> You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
> Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning.
But if they aren't actually improving and learning, their satisfaction and desire to continue with what they were getting isn't desire to keep improving and learning.
Self-improvement theater is as much a thing as security theater, and it's something we probably want to be able to distinguish from actual education.
> But if they aren't actually improving and learning, their satisfaction and desire to continue with what they were getting isn't desire to keep improving and learning.
good for them.
In which way this is an obstacle for those who want to?
>This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue.
>You DON'T measure knowledge.
>You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
>Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning.
What is satisfaction going to get you? As a student, I would have been very satisfied to have great marks while enjoying each night of the week, unfortunately I had to work and skip parties.
"You should measure the satisfaction of the students"
OK. Then how do you measure competency? Right now, a medical diploma indicates that the person took all the requisites and passed all the tests to be a practicing physician. If you only measure student satisfaction, how do you which medical student is ready to treat real patients and which isn't?
> Right now, a medical diploma indicates that the person took all the requisites and passed all the tests to be a practicing physician.
exactly! because it is required by regulations.
> If you only measure student satisfaction, how do you which medical student is ready to treat real patients and which isn't?
there is a high chance than an unsatisfied medical student is gonna be an equally unsatisfied doctor, even if they check all the boxes.
let's be clear: satisfaction is not a measure of how much they are having fun.
just like if you go to the gym you're not more satisfied if they give you free candies and hot dogs and couches with Netflix, but you end up being fatter and less fit than before.
This is not the issue, this is the root cause of the issue.
You DON'T measure knowledge.
You should measure the satisfaction of the students.
Because the most valuable asset a developed country needs to protect is the will of the members of their society to keep improving and learning.
> maybe we should start by rolling back this common conception that when it comes to schools, everyone’s opinion matters an equal amount, and then listen to the teachers and academics.
pity that academics and teachers often disagree and, most of all, that schools are public and payed by people's taxes in many developed countries in the World, so people have a right to say.
Teachers are not doctors, doctors practice medicine, teachers do no operate in such a stressful environment, they "educate" young people and is is often the case that it means they impose or suggest their opinions (because they can, nothing prevents them) and families see that kind of "education" unfit for their kids.
And they have all the rights in the World to be listened too, even if they are technically wrong or I disagree with them (I completely disagree on catholic schools for example).
The experts are there to find a solution to their problems, not to build hypothetical perfect solutions in a void.
Also: teachers are there because students are forced to go to school, so they serve, they do not lead. In my country (and practically all other countries in Europe) they are like bus drivers, they are fulfilling an obligation required by State laws under the State government but also offering a service the people paid for to the State.
Maybe instead of listening to "our" teachers and academics, we should look at places where the system is proven to work and copy it: see Finland.
CONTROVERSIAL
On a last note, there's a topic I believe it's the most important, that will quite certainly cause uproar.
If your youngest students die in school shot by someone just a bit older than them, the society you live in have failed in every possible way.
The fact that the system is broken is a joke compared to that.