Why is it hard to explain an effective education system?

This text is part of: "I would never send my kids to school" by Piotr Wozniak (2017)

Problem of schooling: why this book will fail

This book will largely fail in its grand mission. Most people will never discover it. The rest will consider it too long or too hard to read. Of the small fraction of those who will read the core message, many will disagree on multiple grounds, incl. emotional rejoinder to any attempt to destroy the comfortable status quo.

In this chapter, I list only a few difficulties in conveying the message. They can be summarized as: the problem is too complex to be easily grasped in a reasonable amount of time. There are many people out there who agree with me entirely. However, they have built the agreement by years of their own reading and experience.

I have spent two years collecting materials and writing. The main goal was to build an easily accessible database of short topics that can each do a bit of convincing in a small area of knowledge.

The good news that the revolution in education is underway, and it is exponential. Whatever we do, small investments bring big returns. Even if I freed only one kid from the coercive system, I would have no regrets. However, I know there will be many more.

Counterintuitive propositions

There is a huge problem with my propositions. Some of the suggestions flowing from neuroscience are counterintuitive. Most people are puzzled when I tell them: slow development might be good, no teaching might be good, computer games might be good, no schooling might be good, kid fighting might be good, skipping pre-school might be good, not answering kid questions might be good, social media might be good, etc.

We marvel at precocious kids, and those with straight As, while it is the kid with ADHD that might harbor most potential. We reward the acers and drug the creative types with Ritalin.

I mentioned that a child brain cannot send a message to an adult brain about its being different. Adults see kids as copies of themselves. That inevitable lack of empathy leads to an adult-centric interpretation of education, and it is one of the key mechanisms that results in an excruciatingly slow advancement of awareness of good educational practice. In conditions of ignorance, we rely on intuition. When intuition is wrong, we choose wrong solutions.

Idiosyncratic terminology

To combat the mythology of schooling, we also need to combat the terminology that carries myths like a deceptive ballast.

When speaking of education, I propose to step away from the old terminology that causes confusion and depreciation of free learning. In this text, I try to avoid terms such as "curiosity" (Edelman), "playfulness" (Gray), "deschooling" (Illich), "unschooling" (Holt), and many more. Those terms instantly evoke scorn derived from the rich schooling mythology. The discourse becomes impossible. The irrationality of schooling is magnified by the irrationality of mythmaking and then the irrationality of human emotional reflex that filters and warps the scientific message into an easy object of attack and ridicule. When genius minds of science are accused of being "sloppy", we need to employ the trick of pop science to affect pop culture. The Prussian education system is entrenched in pop culture. "School is good" is a pop culture dogma. Now a new approach with a new pop science must explain that this two-century-old school-praising claim turned into a heresy. Schools are bad and getting worse in proportion to all efforts to make them better with the use of the wrong optimization criteria.

I introduce new terminology that helps reasoning about the learning process. For example, I have always known about persistent or parasitic memories. They are easily born when employing tools like SuperMemo. Now I have given them a name to amplify the warning! I was rarely able to help others to provide meaningful feedback in those unnamed areas. Once I settled on a specific term: toxic memory, I received lots of mail from people who immediately identify the phenomenon and could provide examples!

Here are some terms which I propose to use instead of the old terminology:

• learn drive stands for the extract of neurophysiological aspects of curiosity, whose cultural connotations lead to serious misunderstandings and underappreciation of the neural mechanisms that lie at the root of effective education
• learntropy, which determines the attractiveness of an information channel, is a brain-based concept that, in the context of learning, should be used instead of the information-based concept of information entropy
• toxic memory is an entirely new term that can be easily studied with mathematical precision in SuperMemo. Toxic memory explains the dangers of hasty and incoherent learning
• push zone in place of the poorly understood zone of proximal development can help parents and teachers realize that coercion has no place in learning and development
• fundamental law of learning expresses an intuitive fact that learning must be pleasurable to be effective. The underlying truth is easily dismissed though. Our culture pays little respect to pleasure. It pays far more respect to the law. This law is here not for fun. It is to be obeyed, for without it, there will be no efficient education system
• natural creativity cycle expresses the interplay of creativity, deep thinking, and sleep in building the fabric of rich knowledge. Our culture disrespects sleep and does not understand the circadian cycle. If sleep can be presented as a necessary ingredient of the creative problem solving, it might at last gain sufficient appreciation
• free learning is self-directed and self-paced learning in conditions of freedom. It should be used instead of culturally negative terms such as unschooling or deschooling

Those new terms are needed to restore the true meaning of important concepts of neuroscience. We need to ditch the terminology of the last two centuries to build a new education theory underlying the Grand Education Reform.

Verbosity and bloatedness

I wish this book was shorter but each time I write a seemingly obvious statement (e.g. English rules the world, kids should be free, alarm clocks are unhealthy, best knowledge grows incrementally via emergence, etc.), I get claims, counter-claims, accusations and angry messages from all quarters, so I need to explain more details, and this process loops into infinite! This is a writer's Whac-A-Mole problem. So I have to live with the thought that 80% of people will give up reading those texts. Most of society will continue living with little idea of what the effective education system is.

Selective references

I keep hearing complaints that I do not provide references for many of the claims, incl. those that seem obvious (e.g. sleep is healthy, cramming is bad for memory, stress is injurious to the brain, homeschoolers have an excellent track record, etc.).

If you see literature references missing, inadequate, or selective, please write to me. I will provide more evidence. Some of the claims come from my own original research on memory, sleep, and learning. Those I will explain with the source of data or observation.

I apologize for editorializing. Some truths are born inductively, where a massive body of seemingly weak evidence combines into a strong generalization. I am never shy to express my opinion and present my models. They can always be adorned with references or explained incrementally upon feedback. Moreover, I explain elsewhere that even if I was wrong on a specific point, there is value to wrong models.