These are all pretty much on my wish list.

I loved school (but mostly hated college). It's probably because I went to a good one; I was lucky.

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The funny thing is, MMOs are decades ahead of even Khan Academy when it comes to making systems like this work, just at the level of feedback and large-scale structure. Getting people to self-organize, progress, learn, and master skills. Most of the skills involved are useless, of course, although I suspect we're going to have a generation of brilliant capitalists who learned basic micro and arbitrage by playing the auction houses.

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I specifically taught my autistic/ADHD nephew money-handling with the WoW auction house.

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As an additive comment, adaptive difficulty is crucial in the martial arts and in physical learning.

You want to target physical learning to about 30% failure.
20% failure and less, the student doesn't learn, just goes through the motions.
50% failure and above, just an exercise in failure. With nothing positive to attach to and things coming too fast to understand, the student comes away with no lesson. The only thing that can possibly be learned is how to persist in a place of failure.

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Where are these numbers from?

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Personal experience and the teachings of my instructors.
I'm sure you could find it somewhere more official, they aren't secret.

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This syncs up with my experience teaching kids soccer. Matches where the kids win big, they don't learn anything. Matches where they lose big, they don't learn anything. The tight matches, the ones where they are evenly matched up with their opponent, those are the ones where the kids learn the game.

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If you're not getting your ass handed to you regularly, and if you're not winning occasionally, you're in the wrong league.

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Well the 8 straight hours a day format exists cause it has to match the adult format. The kids need to be somewhere while the parents are working. So its a babysitter as much as a prison.

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That's a distinction without much of a difference, though.

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I think it's valuable to distinguish between the two, or less specifically between various degrees of how we treat people because we judge society or them to be better off in custody. I think kids are an example of far too much restriction on a not particularly dangerous or risked group, but eg, someone with severe paranoid hallucinations is far safer and less dangerous when kept imprisoned.

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I would love to go to that school.

Speaking as a former Troubled Youth, I think the skill trees would be particularly useful in special ed. They'd have to reward hippy dippy stuff like social skills and emotional progress, though.

I'm not saying my special ed teacher wasn't great (she was actually awesome) but grumpy teenage shoplifters and arsonists would probably have spent less time sleeping through Behavioral Disorder Class if we got redeemable skill points for doing stuff like "greeting classmates appropriately," or "carving only compliments into desk."

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i wish i had written this

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There are basically three kinds of incentives to learn something:
1. Learning something itself is fun.
2. Desire to do something that requires you to learn something.
3. getting rewarded for learning something.

Except the third doesn't actually work. Because it doesn't reward the actual learning of something, but the pressing of the right buttons of the reward system. I know someone who learns economics at school. He knows all the words of economics jargon and he can rattle of their definitions, but talking with him about economics feels quite creepy because he doesn't actually know their meaning on a level that enables his mind to catch implications and make predictions. It's like asking someone if they want an apple and they answer that apples are sweet fruit of green, yellow, or red color.

The classical school system and your proposal focus mostly on the third kind of incentive. Probably because the first and second kind are mostly orthogonal to any learning institution. I agree with your goal do design a school that is actually fun for children and to keep education secondary. I just think you are not taking it far enough.

A school can optimize on the second kind of incentive by providing low barrier opportunities to use knowledge. But don't focus to much on the learning. If Khan academy can help children to archive their goals they will find it on their own just fine.

If a child spends all their time playing video games you can't do much to make them learn something else. You can't teach a rock how to read, and the _only_ reason you can teach most children how to read is because they want to read.

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I'm as big a fan of intrinsic motivation as anyone, but I think it's overly idealistic to throw out an intermediate proposal such as Rev's because it doesn't get everything 100% right on the first try. We have no idea how many kids would be intrinsically motivated even under ideal conditions. It could be a very small number, especially if nothing is changing outside of school.

Edited at 2013-02-05 09:44 pm (UTC)

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I am not saying people should only learn things they are intrinsically motivated to learn. I am saying there are two kinds of extrinsic motivation, getting a reward by having a certain bit of knowledge, and getting a reward by convincing some entity that you've learned something. The first kind is perfectly fine and effective, but the second leads to gaming the system and fake learning.

I am so quick to dismiss Rev's proposal because there are already schools[1] that aren't prison farms for children and i don't see how Rev's proposal improves upon them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school

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Do you have any data on outcomes for Sudbury students?

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Just anecdotally.

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That makes it difficult to evaluate the Sudbury system's value. Obviously I don't have any data for Nintendo School, since it doesn't exist. However...

I am saying there are two kinds of extrinsic motivation, getting a reward by having a certain bit of knowledge, and getting a reward by convincing some entity that you've learned something. The first kind is perfectly fine and effective, but the second leads to gaming the system and fake learning.

Can you name an actually existing system that accomplishes the first kind?

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Life is such a system. We learn lots of stuff without intrinsic motivation because it lets us do things we want to do. For example most people have zero intrinsic motivation to learn how to use a computer, they learn it anyway because it gives them the reward of being able to chat with their friends.

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Life is a system which sometimes rewards learning things. It's completely neutral on the subject of cheating and lying, though. If you can cheat or lie of fake your way adequately, Life doesn't care. There are certainly cases where You Actually Need To Know, but they're amazingly thin on the ground. Good social skills, for instance, can often be used to get other people to do essentially everything that requires knowledge for you.

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It is my impression that traditional tests for knowledge let you get away with far more lying and cheating than life as a whole.

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How would you test that impression?

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I don't know.

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I think you're pretty much correct in terms of optimizing learning. As you point out, though, the current school system solves several other problems. Your system is clearly not intended to address those problems but it is, I think, worth noting that it does not address them.

Schools are actually pretty awful at being daycares. The schedule of "care" offered by the school rarely overlaps in any convenient way with the modern parent's work schedule. Your system could certainly do as good, worse, or a better job. That's really just a matter of when you choose to lock and unlock the doors to the facility.

There are also norming things that happen in the modern school system. Shared experiences are valuable in a society, witness the difficulties experienced by the home schooled. The largest difficulty with your system on this front is that it would seem to produce people with somewhat varying educations at wildly varying times of their life. The bright, motivated kids for the whom the system works very very well are popping out at age 10, and the ones at the other end of the curve may never come out. Even in the middle of the curve you're going to have students who have defeated the last boss at ages of, let us guess wildly, ages 13 through 23. I don't know what problems this causes, but I dare say they're non-trivial.

I do recognize that these are problems you have explicitly chosen not to address, so it is perhaps unfair to belabor them here.

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Good point about the rather arbitrary schedule of 'care'.

Well, the skill tree approach implies different students would qualify in different things at different times. There's no one 'end boss', rather a minimal trunk of essential qualifications and a large set of elective specializations. Rather than graduating with a single piece of paper that says 'I sat in a room for thirteen years without dying or killing people', students would emerge with a list of qualifications: something like O- and A-level qualifications under the GCE system, but in more detail), or like scouting merit badges.

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This is touched on in the excellent book 'Ready Player One' where basically the world collapses and interconnected series of MMOs is extremely prominent.

Physical schools mostly close and kids go to virtual school in a no-conflict MMO instance.

(I just like your referring to graduating high school as having 'defeated the last boss.')

Edited at 2013-02-05 07:24 pm (UTC)

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"Shared experiences are valuable in a society, witness the difficulties experienced by the home schooled."

Examples of each?

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Parental abuse can also be an important bonding experience between siblings. /eyeroll

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Ugh, I had some earlier reply based on misreading your question.

Do you want examples of shared experiences? Examples of the value of them? Examples of the difficulties experienced by the home schooled? The referent if "each" is not clear to me, in short.


Edited at 2013-02-05 10:43 pm (UTC)

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All of the above.

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Examples of shared experiences include pretty much any culture's coming-of-age rituals, of which examples abound. "Walkabout" "Cotillion" and so on.

Examples of the value? That's harder to get a handle on, but at the very least it gives us all something to talk about over beers. There seems to be an immense amount of sociology out there on various social bonding, a little googling will turn up a more or less endless sequence of titles of papers.

Similarly, there are endless studies on the social difficulties, or lack thereof, experienced by home-schooled children. Since this is a hot button topic, clarity is nearly impossible to achieve here. There are anecdotes which suggest that some students who are home schooled have social difficulties when integrating back in to main stream educational systems of workplaces. Whether they are statistically relevant, I cannot say. I certainly experienced trouble re-assimilating into a mainstream educational system after a year of home schooling, for instance. In my opinion, being schooled in a mainstream facility that year would have provided me with fairly specific value on the norming front. To wit, I would have been more normal, the succeeding year, and had an easier time socially in the 10th grade.

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"'Walkabout' 'Cotillion' and so on."

Walkabouts involve real physical danger -- probably a niche market at best in the current or near future educational climate (at least until society universally accepts we're all running ancestral software or figures out a way to update that software). Cotillions can be redesigned -- school dances don't *have* to be single-age affairs.

"something to talk about over beers."

See Rev's comment above. People are just as likely to bond over how monstrously shitty high school was for them. We can probably do without this.

"the social difficulties, or lack thereof, experienced by home-schooled children. "

Are these difficulties *more* difficult than those faced by conventionally schooled children? I'm operating on the assumption that homeschooling builds intrinsic motivation, which in turns improves adaptability -- or at the very least the ability to create alternatives for oneself.

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I'm not actually interested in having an argument about tangential issues, I was just raising some points that I felt were worth thinking about. Sorry.

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I'm gonna be the guy to piss on the fire: "Adaptive difficulty means smart kids don't do a year's work in a month and then sleep the rest of the year, and slow kids aren't crushed."

In a perfect world where kids will work with the system that way, sure. But this is also easily gamed. Smart, lazy kids will figure out exactly how to use the system such that they don't have to do any work that challenges them.

You might even think that isn't a problem, but it is.

I know exactly how my youngest boy would approach this, and that would be "faking dumb" until he really was dumb, because "I don't need to learn this if I just cruise" right up until "uh-oh, I have no idea what the teacher is saying anymore" and then hiding their problem until even a basic test looks entirely Greek.

You end up with the smartest kids lagging so far behind their peers on basic knowledge skills they should have, skills they are capable of doing but end up completely not ready to handle conceptually, because they put in the minimum work and slacked as much as they could to avoid the hard stuff. Which sets them up with a lifetime skillset of not being able to accomplish anything of value in the real world.

This is a problem because kids in general suck at understanding "getting a good education is good for you", since they literally don't have the mental hardware to work out how that is true for themselves (and I do mean literally, in that the parts of the brain that handle rational decision making and impulse control don't finish developing until early adulthood).

(Proof? Plenty of biology. Also, having been one, being a kid is like being drunk all the time, where "Hey, watch this!" always SEEMED like a good idea at the time.)

Hence my feeling (and experience as kid and parent) is that using unrelated incentives ("more play time") as rewards for learning something are a hard sell. Again: a fuzzy concept of time and limited impulse control. (Hell, it's hard enough for a lot of adults to deal with learning or doing something they don't see the immediate value or enjoyment in.)

And all of this is more true the younger the kid is. Some of this would not be as much of an issue for older teenagers as it would for tweens (but that's not a hard-and-fast rule).

"Kids don't do much of that shit outside school."

As a kid who was bullied non-stop his entire childhood, Rev, I'm sorry but I'm going to be blunt: that's a pantload. Kids are shitty, in or out of school.

Being stuck together in a building all day may not help, but it has nothing to do with why kids behave that way towards each other. They behave according to simple primate social dynamics. Kids form cliques that have power struggles no matter where they are, and dominant personalities seek to diminish and control other personalities.

So those are my two issues with that, and consider much of the rest of it a good skeleton of improvement. Though I believe on-hand teachers/facilitators will still be necessary, if for no other reason than to lead/encourage group discussion of lecture items.

For example, have you read the studies about education working better as a group project -- rather than a lecturer teaching the material, the students are encouraged to discover, apply, and discuss the answers to information and problems from the studied field together?

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I know exactly how my youngest boy would approach this, and that would be "faking dumb" until he really was dumb, because "I don't need to learn this if I just cruise" right up until "uh-oh, I have no idea what the teacher is saying anymore" and then hiding their problem until even a basic test looks entirely Greek.

That's how it works already.

For example, have you read the studies about education working better as a group project -- rather than a lecturer teaching the material, the students are encouraged to discover, apply, and discuss the answers to information and problems from the studied field together?

Yeah, that's been debunked hard. One student does the work, the rest copy.

Edited at 2013-02-07 06:24 pm (UTC)

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