gwern comments on Interesting critique of British education by outgoing advisor (warning: some politics) - Less Wrong

18 Post author: bramflakes 12 October 2013 04:43PM

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Comment author: Vaniver 13 October 2013 01:24:49AM 8 points [-]

I see a lot of internal contradictions in this, but I can't tell if that's because I'm misreading it or not. For example, when I read this:

In particular, it is suggested that we need an ‘Odyssean’ education so that a substantial fraction of teenagers, students and adults might understand something of our biggest intellectual and practical problems, and be trained to take effective action.

My reaction hinges on the numerical interpretation of "substantial" (whose emphasis is mine). Is it 5%, compared to a current <1%? Then yeah, that seems doable. Is it a 20%? Then no, that doesn't seem doable, and seeking to write a class on integrative systems thinking that the 80th percentile student can survive is probably going to make it a worthless class.

Although they would not put it like this, most prominent people in the education world tacitly accept that failing to develop the talents of the most able is a price worth paying to be able to pose as defenders of ‘equality’.

To the extent that this report is an attack on the doomed quest for equality and a proposal to educate students according to their talents, I am entirely in favor.

Given the lack of empirical research into what pupils with different levels of cognitive ability are capable of with good teachers, research that obviously should be undertaken, and given excellent schools (private or state) show high performance is possible, it is important to err on the side of over-ambition rather than continue the current low expectations.

Agreed that this research should obviously be undertaken. But I think wording this as "err on the side of over-ambition" is a mistake; the current philosophy of equality errs on the side of over-ambition, and in some sense that is its root problem! If you have the "ambitious" goal of putting every child through university, the only result is the debasement of the university degree to something of no value. The necessary change is reducing ambitions down to something realistic- educate each child as far as it makes sense for them to go- and once you accept that individuals have different limits, then it becomes possible to make the full use of each child.

Programmes in America have shown that ‘adolescents scoring 500 or higher on SAT-M or SAT-V by age 13 (top 1 in 200), can assimilate a full high school course (e.g., chemistry, English, and mathematics) in three weeks at summer residential programs for intellectually precocious youth; yet, those scoring 700 or more (top 1 in 10,000), can assimilate at least twice this amount…’ (Lubinski, 2010).

Yep. But again, note the fractions here- students that are 1 in 200! That hardly seems like a substantial fraction to me.

Comment author: gwern 14 October 2013 05:19:54PM 8 points [-]

I think your reading is being uncharitable; 'substantial' doesn't refer to any particular amount, just that the amounts are meaningful, which will be context-specific. (I also like the term because it isn't deceptively conflated with a technical meaning, like 'significant' is - significant could mean either substantial/import/large or meets an arbitrary p-value).

The way I see it, he's stating that basically 0% of students are trained the way he would like them (surely true), that 0% is not optimal (also surely true but I'm not sure what the optimal percentage is), and that right now, we don't even have good ideas of what is possible for the various qualities of student because the research simply hasn't been done aside from some suggestive anecdotes (true).

That hardly seems like a substantial fraction to me.

There's something like 15 million high school students in the USA; that's 75,000 students. How many of them are in gifted summer programs?

Overall, this manifesto was quite a read. Reading it gave me a weird sort of feeling - I didn't learn very much that was new, but it's a little shocking to see someone cover in a single place so many topics of interest to me in a competent manner and with an attitude & writing style similar to my own.

Comment author: Vaniver 14 October 2013 06:48:21PM 2 points [-]

I think your reading is being uncharitable

I hoped so too, but didn't have time to read the whole work (which might have settled my concerns).

How many of them are in gifted summer programs?

The range 5,000 to 25,000 seems like a decent 50% interval to me. So yeah, it could be higher. The real issue, in my mind, is not summer but the rest of the year; it seems odd to me that we don't have boarding schools for students that are 1 in 10,000, where they can learn about a high school course a week, or do things like this.

Comment author: gwern 14 October 2013 07:39:53PM *  4 points [-]

The real issue, in my mind, is not summer but the rest of the year; it seems odd to me that we don't have boarding schools for students that are 1 in 10,000, where they can learn about a high school course a week, or do things like this.

The impression I get from his discussion of the French & Russian elite schools is that the summer courses may be better considered part of the filter for admission into those sort of schools; specifically, footnote #150:

The network of Russian maths and physics schools initiated by Kolmogorov (one of the 20th Century’s leading mathematicians) educated many faculty members of western universities (and Grigori Perelman, who solved the Poincaré Conjecture in 2003). The experience of these schools is that 1) they must take great care in selecting pupils (e.g a summer school system); 2) they need complete freedom over the curriculum and testing (Kolmogorov had students learning set theory, non-Euclidean geometry, topology, and other subjects not in a usual school curriculum; the Novosibirsk school used Feynman’s famous Lectures as their textbooks); 3) ideally they are integrated in the life of a university with academics teaching maths and sciences. These schools gave me the idea to copy them in England.

This makes sense since cognitive testing has known measurement error, which while very low, is still problematic if you're trying to select the top 1% (or higher) of students* for these expensive schools (and because intelligence itself changes over time, so a single test means regression to the mean), and it may either spark enthusiasm for going to the advanced schools or test the child's attitudes toward it - not much point in enrolling a kid who doesn't want to be there, right?

* for example, apparently the Termite study missed out on two Nobelists because they were under the filter by some tiny amount on the test; if Terman had been able to afford a larger sample or had a slightly better test, his results would have been much more impressive, especially since Nobelists are one in millions.

Comment author: Vaniver 14 October 2013 08:40:30PM 1 point [-]

The impression I get from his discussion of the French & Russian elite schools is that the summer courses may be better considered part of the filter for admission into those sort of schools; specifically, footnote #150:

Agreed that seeing someone in class is useful information, and that this is a good feeder system for elite schools. But to the best of my knowledge there is not a quality national network of elite math and science schools in the US, just a collection of local magnet schools.

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