By the time they get out of primary school most have had the curiosity that drives motivation beat out of them.
There have been many variations on this idea of "letting kids learn on their own". The basic issue is the one you highlight, which is that it works if the student is very self motivated. Most students aren't. Or rather, they're highly motivated to do other things.
In the early days they were using off the shelf curriculum software and layering their own steering AI over it.
It is a for-profit product which is sold to parents and state-level customers more than it is a school.
Most kids are motivated given the right environment. Enjoying learning is natural.
The AI element of what you describe does not appeal to me. The weekly testing and assignment to grades sounds a bit rigid too.
Considering how much one to one human tutoring 40k an year could buy that does not sound like good value.
However, I would fear that the issue with home-schooling would manifest: that the rarified atmosphere would render them incapable of engaging or coping with the brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs in their work and life in the 'real world'.
To writ, some of the most important lessons I learnt in school were to do with the concept of 'fairness', my own ability for emotional regulation, navigation of social hierarchies, and the symbols and signifiers of popular culture. The curriculum as a whole came a distant second.
N.B. Public (read:Private) schools in the UK are about £30k a year. Boarding schools hit about 50k in the UK/Ireland. 'New Age' or International schools for the children of diplomats and HNW ex-pats like Nord Anglia or similar go from about €/£20k upwards. 40k a year isn't outrageous in context, even outside of America.
This keeps coming up every time, and it's always pointed out that there is scant evidence supporting this view at a large scale.
Every motivated parent I know who homeschooled his kid didn't deal with these problems.
And plenty of those who went to a traditional school did. They aren't even outliers. I'm sure anyone who went to a regular school can think of kids in their class who exhibited the problems you mentioned.
No doubt, plenty of homeschooled kids do as well. Just as you have a distribution for regular schooled kids, you'll get a distribution for homeschooled kids. Claims that the distributions for the latter are skewed in the "wrong" direction are never presented with evidence.
> To writ, some of the most important lessons I learnt in school were to do with the concept of 'fairness', my own ability for emotional regulation, navigation of social hierarchies, and the symbols and signifiers of popular culture. The curriculum as a whole came a distant second.
I went to a regular school, and none of what you say applied to me. The curriculum/instruction came first, and learned little of the former. I'm sure I'll find classmates who'll say the opposite. This sounds like a classic case of post-hoc attributions.
Home school is best, private school if you can, public school if you must.
The lesson you should have learned would be that we should tear down the "brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs." We only tolerate these things as "normal" because people go through their lives not actively trying to tear them down and break them.
> The lesson you should have learned would be that we should tear down the "brutal reality of binary-minded Authority figures and hierarchical social constructs." We only tolerate these things as "normal" because people go through their lives not actively trying to tear them down and break them.
I was a product of an environment like that (magnet school with a lot of unstructured time and good access to resources), and it didn’t take me very long to run into the Binary Authoritarian Figures’ version of “you and what army?”, and they were largely correct.
There are ways to undermine parts of the establishment, sometimes even at scale, but the process is not always obvious or easy to access.
That’s a very uncharitable reading.
I have made my mark in the world by exploiting the Achilles’ heels of “authority figures” (which is usually just some form of a lack of empathy). I have caused a few to fall, I’ve made others reform, and I’m just an annoyance to many others. I have trained others to do the same.
That said, I could get whacked out of existence figuratively or literally if I crossed the wrong person or group.
There are others like me, but (as I mentioned before) we aren’t always easy to find.
I know the above may seem grandiose, but I’ve had a chip on my shoulder about these “authority figures” since I was a kid. I’ve done something about it, but I also didn’t choose to bang my head against a wall and call it progress.
Having been to a school like that, I agree with you. I had to learn those lessons quickly.
I largely opted out of being in the middle of that world, but I am still adjacent to it due to its ubiquitousness.
If you believe, as I do, that half of students only achieve half of their academic potential, then experiments like this are some of the most valuable work we could do in society.
But again, let me know how it goes in 25 years and my children can enroll my grandkids.
socioeconomic status (SES) is very often a huge confounder when it comes to anything from health issues, educational outcomes, and many other things. rich kids do better - the SES of the parents of Nobel Prize winners [0], young athletes [1], etc are all indicators of this
[0] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/nobel-prize-winners-far-...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S14668...
I think the most likely outcome is AI makes American education worse, not because if the technology, but because of the “leaders” building and implementimg it.
It doesn't mandate curriculums, choose technology, anything like that? Only recommendations.
They might have been able to monitor its effects but they wouldn't have been able to direct its use or non-use; that's not what they did.
Essentially it was/is an anti-discrimination organisation, making sure that states gave an education regardless of wealth/race/status.
If you don't understand, here's Trump's secretary of education explaining how it'll make our children excel: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xsRUk0dMJu4