Secondary education
The problem
Write intro sentence: Our current system for secondary education is not only ineffective, but damaging to student learning and success. Moreover, because young people are so impressionable and vulnerable at early ages, the effects of a poor approach to secondary education is challenging to correct later in life.
The evidence
Research from Yale University indicates that 75% of high school students report negative feelings toward school. Gallup found that nearly half of students report feeling actively disengaged.
How can students learn if they're disengaged and unmotivated? How can they approach life successfully if they're actively turned off by learning?
Motivation
The main assignment for any school is to help students love learning.
In reality, many school systems have chosen the path of least resistance and created a system that serves their own needs rather than those of their students.
So how do we create an environment in which students are motivated and love to learn?
1) Speak their language
Human beings differentiate greatly in what they were born to do. One child is born to be a runner and the other a mathematician, and they couldn't be any more different. However, all share one common language, that of morals and values.
This is why politicians often speak in morals and values rather than in particular policy points. When dealing with a constituency that is so profoundly different person to person, the fundamental language is not that of knowledge, but of values. It’s also why Nike seeks to have us identify with courage (“Just do it”) rather than the value of the product.
Values, then, are key to student motivation. By contrast, most high school students are not yet motivated by conversations about money or careers.
2) Focus on purpose
Training a person to be good at accomplishing a task is fundamentally a worthless activity unless that individual is intrinsically motivated to perform that task. They may once or twice comply, but without a greater sense of purpose, long-term efforts fall flat.
At the core of every action is motivation, a purpose, an internal why. Without addressing the why, everything else fails to land; nothing sticks. Such a lack of purpose is incredibly demotivating, whereas a person with a strong “why” will endure anything.
In our educational system, purpose should be a key driving force.
Digital societies as a solution
The role of values and morals cannot be underestimated. All people need a base-layer of values to function and children are no different. In fact, they are like sponges, extracting the values they crave from the environment in which they are placed. This means they will obtain them via:
A) their government school system
B) the media/friends, or
C) another chosen method.
Note that the family environment does not play a large role in value selection, especially in the teenage years. Twin reviews find that shared-family effects on values are small [1].
Choosing A can be disastrous. State manipulation of education creates a dangerous vulnerability to authoritarian control.
Option B is the automatic result of the decision not to make values part of the school curricula. The current chaos of our Western societies is the answer to the question, “what if you let society and the media teach children,” rather than being deliberate about that process.
But how can a society encourage their children to learn values without exposing that society to authoritarian control?
Digital societies offer a compelling third option. Freely chosen by their members, they allow more values to be embedded in the curriculum, while at the same time keeping fundamental consent at the core of education. This is option (C).
Agoran example
If Agora would choose to embed values in their educational approach, they may begin by teaching the Agora Ethos.
They would help students understand that in Agora people seek positive impact on the maximum number of people as the society's purpose. This helps students frame their specific gifts and abilities as ways to contribute positively to their society.
3) Time as motivation
The great irony of life is that every young person wants to be an adult and every adult would love to be a child again. What do young people want more than anything else? They want agency, responsibility, impact and to do something meaningful with their time. However, like prison guards, we keep them locked up, no matter how mature they are, no matter how much they prove themselves from K to 12.
Instead of utilizing this most potent form of motivation, to allow a young person to earn agency over their life, we cast it away in the name of protecting the students.
However, sheltering them from reality leaves them unprepared for the modern world.
The solution
We must allow young people to make forward progress by the standards they meet and the educational goals they accomplish, not just by their age. Students who work harder and act more mature should be allowed to graduate from high school earlier.
Educational tasks should allow students to earn time, and students could reach milestones like graduation earlier by proving maturity and effort.
4) Fun as motivation
The game development community has discovered that the key mechanism to release dopamine into the brain is discovery.
The player gets a sense of joy when they:
discover new strategies
unlock new mysteries
reveal deeper patterns.
Education is a process of constant discovery and yet students generally despise it. Why?
Force: Learning is forced upon them rather than being a process which respects their natural autonomy.
Uniformity: Following one's own curiosity is often discouraged in favor of rigid lessons.
Reward: Even video games understand that you must offer a reward at the end of each level. But one's reward for doing well at school is to be stuck in the same system for the same amount of time.
"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant [curiosity], aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom. Without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail." - Einstein
The solution
People are naturally opposed to do things that are imposed on them and naturally given to do things, they freely choose. The more autonomy is granted, the more room is created for fun to flourish.
The best way to motivate students is to cause them to drive their own educational process within reasonable constraints. This doesn't mean simply selecting their own lessons, but also being offered well-crafted interactive lessons in which initiative and creativity are rewarded.
5) Changing how we grade
The myth that a person's ability to answer a particular question on a test is a proxy for their overall intelligence is one that must immediately be ended.
The only aptitude demonstrated in answering a test question is the ability to answer that question and highly similar ones within the context of a test.
In reality, the totality and diversity of human intelligence is far beyond imagination. Just the difference between a world-class macroeconomist's ability and the skill required to answer a simple math question on a test is so disparate that no such question is a reasonable proxy for that ability.
By giving people a score toward their general ability based on a specific test, students get judged for not matching what somebody else wants them to understand.
The solutions
Every advanced society requires advanced education to succeed. The key to effective education is to cause the test to mimic the real-world reality as much as possible.
Examples:
The student business
A team of 11-12 year students could be placed together to create a new form of student-led business and their grade could be how much money they make by the end of the year. Groups of students could compare their results and share the things they've learned. This solution is not only highly gradable, but one that allows for tremendous autonomy and creativity while conforming the grade to real-world application.Ecosystem
A team of 7-8 year students could be set to create an ecosystem in a jar that produces fruit-bearing plants. The grade is based on how many fruits are created.
More weight on values
Every student has been on a team where several members of that team are undependable. Such students ride on the coattails of their more capable counterparts, all the way to a good grade.
Integrity, teamwork, and follow-through transfer across jobs, but they carry no grading weight in our current system.
Educational institutions not grading students for their only transferable skills is a serious mistake. Student peer reviews must absolutely play a key role in grading.
6) Better than metrics
The tyranny of bureaucrats
Especially in the higher echelons of educational institutions, a desire to understand the performance of students leads to stifling uniformity.
Such bureaucrats sitting at the top of these institutions, far removed from the individual student, create for them a straitjacket and hoops to jump through in the hope that they create meaningful metrics that will improve education. In reality, they stifle human freedom and creativity and foster a society of apathy.
Teachers themselves, although more predisposed to adjust to their students' needs, also depend on easy-to-grade tests.
Instead of focusing on uniform statistics, bureaucrats are actually ideally situated to use their time and resources toward designing creative scenarios like those mentioned above, which teachers can then tweak to fit their student cohort.
Why metrics fail
It must be understood that the very act of gathering metrics creates distortions which inhibit those metrics:
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." - Goodhart's Law
For example, in traditional grading systems, teachers begin teaching to the test rather than for the sake of their students understanding.
Metrics, a suggestion
Despite this, some metrics are always necessary. Rather than gathering purely grades, understanding students' willingness to learn is critical. And since a natural outcome of successful learning is joy, measuring enjoyment, within reason, may be a good starting point.
6) Personalized learning
Although unthinkably out of reach until recently, personalized learning on an almost individual basis is now possible thanks to AI. Embracing technology that helps the mathematician be the mathematician and the psychologist the psychologist, rather than conforming everyone to highly limited paths, is critical.
These personalized systems must be wrapped around fundamental non-negotiables, which in turn should be flexible and adjustable to changes in society.
7) Maintaining standards
The desire to leave no child behind is admirable, but should not be allowed to impede the ability of institutions to drive standards.
Some students choose to resist education despite being given every opportunity to improve. To think otherwise is to believe human beings have no free will. To shelter such students from the reality of consequences early is to simply have them fail more catastrophically later on.
Depending on their age, those students may be given the choice to work for a few years instead of studying, returning to school afterwards.
Standards cannot be maintained outside of being selective.
8) Teaching for education, not ego
Teachers who give lectures often find the self-expression relaxing and the art of passing on knowledge enjoyable. Unfortunately, students who are lectured at learn very little.
By analyzing examination scores across hundreds of science and engineering courses, researchers discovered that failure rates increase by 55 percent when the primary method of instruction is a passive monologue.
Crafting interactive lessons causes students to retain knowledge much more effectively. However, there is a whole well-researched field of pedagogy that covers this subject, so we don’t need to repeat it here.