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DanArmak comments on Stupid Questions January 2015 - Less Wrong
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I have a developing opinion that I'm not quite sure how to word.
It seems that schools all over the world are teaching the same lessons, but are all trying to recreate the wheel. I sense that it'd be more efficient if a bunch of effort and resources went in to each lesson, and that lesson was made available for everyone.
Elon Musk gave a good analogy (paraphrasing)
I sense that there is some sort of economic logic/terminology that applies here and that better articulates what I'm trying to say.
My attempt at explaining it a bit more formally. Consider a lesson on mitosis. Say you have 100 classrooms you need to teach this lesson to. And say you have 100 employees. I think it'd be more efficient for those 100 employees to work at creating an optimal lesson, and then providing that lesson (via a website or something) to students. Given that the lesson can (largely) be delivered via software, it's non-rivalrous (my consumption doesn't take anything away from your consumption), and thus can be distributed to everyone at no marginal cost.
Anyway, I hope I did a good enough job explaining such that someone can recognize what I'm trying to say. I'd be really happy if anyone was able to help me further my understanding.
Is the following a correct restatement of your point?
We already have regional or state standardization of (some) subjects, exams, textbooks, and homework assignments (which are often given out of textbooks), and (in MOOCs and in computer-facilitated learning) actual lessons. All of these things have increased in use over time. Should we go even further in that direction and also standardize individual lesson scripts, in grade school as well as college? Is anything stopping or delaying this development apart from sheer inertia?
That would not be very efficient, because 100 employees working on the same (small) task would be inefficient, might get bogged down in politics, and the quality of the result would be dragged down to the level of the average employee (everyone-must-contribute mentality) or below it (designed-by-committee issues).
Naively, we might expect the following to be a strict improvement on current practice: let each employee build their own lesson, then discard 99 of the results, and let all 100 employees teach the best lesson any of them built. (Of course you'd need to try out all 100 lessons first to figure out which one is the best.) This is an extension of the current standardized curricula and textbooks to lesson plans and maybe to actual lessons a la MOOCs and computer teaching software. If instead of 100 employees you take all the employees across the world, and you let small self-selected groups work together, the result might be promising.
On the other hand, a teacher needs to adapt the lesson to the class. They need to understand it well enough themselves to teach well, to answer questions and help students with particular problems. They need to encourage or even force students to pay attention, study, and not interfere with one another. All of these things can't be standardized because they require realtime reactions to student behavior.
I don't have any answers here, I'm joining you in asking the question.
Somewhat. I'm not saying that lessons should be standardized in the same way that textbooks and exams are currently standardized. I don't think enough resources are being applied towards textbooks and exams (considering how widely used they are, even a small improvement would have a big effect because it'd be multiplied by the amount of people it touches).
My central point is, "I sense that there is a more abstract economic principle behind what I'm trying to say. Can anyone help me to articulate/understand it?".
You're right. The 100 employees example was bad.
I agree. I don't think that lessons can be so good that we don't need teachers (yet). I think that there will still be holes in the students' knowledge after/while going through the lesson, and the most efficient way (right now) to identify and address these holes is to use a human.
It looks like your point could be summarized, in economics jargon, as: education is now a field where the superstar effect should apply.
Thank you! I think that's getting closer to what I'm thinking. But it isn't quite the same thing.
The superstar effect seems to be explaining a phenomena, whereas I'm trying to make an argument as to how resources can be allocated most efficiently. The superstar effect says, "you see these high salaries among, say singers, because technology has enabled them to reach large audiences, and technology has enabled consumers to easily listen to the best singers" (please correct me if my understanding is flawed).
I'm trying to do something similar, but from what I understand, slightly different. I'm trying to answer the question, "Why is this more efficient? Why is there an opportunity for firms to create and capture value?".
I sense that equilibrium is a relevant concept. You invest in the resource until the marginal benefit is <= the marginal cost. Investing into a resource that serves a large market has a large marginal benefit because the effects are multiplied by the size of the market.
Edit: I spent the whole day thinking about it and at some point the thoughts started flowing, so I wrote up a post. Thanks again for referring me to The Superstar Effect!