Thread by @greg_ashman

Why are we stuck with such mediocre K-12 education systems in the Western world? Why do they not compete with those of the Far East?

Let me explain 🧵

Not long after the emergence of mass education in the nineteenth century, there came a reaction.
'Progressive education' sought to remedy what adherents thought were the wrongs of the nineteenth century school house: Too much structure. Too much memorisation. Too much discipline.
Intellectuals joined organisations such as America's Progressive Education Association (PEA) and drew on ideas of enlightenment philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who placed his own five children in an orphanage).

They meant well, but educational progressivists threw out the good with the bad.
Structure helps learning.
If students haven't remembered anything then they haven't learned anything.
The absence of discipline leads to a lack of safety.

We now know structured learning is particularly important.
Unstructured approaches involving project work or inquiry learning, where students attempt to solve problems or figure out concepts for themselves, overload the working memory of novices, leading to little learning taking place.

Cognitive load theory, developed by Professor John Sweller and others from the 1980s onwards, has demonstrated this effect and its consequences in hundreds of controlled studies.
Most of these studies have involved school-aged students learning typical curriculum content.
Cognitive load theory should be taught to all student teachers.
(And contrary to a common myth, it does not claim the mind is like a computer)

From the 1960s onwards, a new ingredient was added to the progressivism mix—critical pedagogy.
Paulo Freire applied Marxist principles to the education of peasants in South America. The express intention was to raise their consciousness of oppression.
Bizarrely, his 1970 book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, is still one of the most commonly assigned texts in U.S. graduate courses in the field of education.

Critical pedagogy brought a focus on equity.
Equity sounds like a good thing. We are all in favour of equality of opportunity, but that's not what it means. Equity means equality of outcome.
Adherents worry about any gaps that appear in the outcomes for different groups of students (apart from when they are to the disadvantage of supposed oppressor groups) and this works against the pursuit of excellence.

This is the underlying reason behind otherwise mystifying experiments in California that have involved capable children being prevented from taking eighth grade algebra. Or experiments in watered-down high school mathematics courses such as 'data science'.
These initiatives don't even work on their own terms because privileged students opt out of the public system or get tutors.

What a lot of participants on both sides of this debate do not realise is that we can potentially teach K-7 mathematics much more effectively if we apply what researchers already know about the science of learning.
We can teach to the point where most students can cope with algebra.
Sweating over whether to offer eighth grade algebra then becomes redundant.

The same toxic mix of romantic ideas about unstructured learning and maladaptive notions of equity have led to the decades-long scandal of early reading instruction across the English-speaking world.
The English writing system is complex and hard to learn, but we have been making it harder.
This drives *inequity* because it is the most disadvantaged who fail to learn to read when we use ineffective methods.

Why is the science of learning routinely ignored? The whole system is set up to ignore it. Academics do not gain acclaim within the field for researching it. Instead, their focus lies elsewhere.
Just this week, two academics who train teachers in Australia set out a manifesto that included a demand to:
"Equip pre-service teachers with the tools to recognise injustice and advocate for social, cultural, racial, economic and environmental equity."
The agenda is about making teachers political activists.

Prospective teachers cannot avoid this.
The college and university courses that train new teachers exert control over the sector because most jurisdictions require teachers to prove they have these qualifications to be able to teach.
Politicians are under the understandable but mistaken impression that they mean something.
Instead, these courses often prioritise unstructured learning and equity activism over the practicalities of classroom management or the science of learning.

Despite often being transparently and explicitly political in their aims, education academics will mock those who criticise this activism for attempting to start a supposed 'culture war'.
In the recent Australian election, the leader of the opposition was mocked for suggesting he wanted to end indoctrination in schools.

In England, free schools and academies are special types of school that were set up to serve disadvantaged communities or replace failing schools.
They were given the freedom to employ teachers without traditional university qualifications.
The government now wants to take that freedom away as part of a new bill.
Katharine Birbalsingh, head of the country's most successful free school, is leading a campaign against the changes.

Free schools and academies are part of a series of reforms that form a natural experiment.
As Scotland and Wales have doubled-down on progressive education, England, under its previous government, changed tack.
The results are compelling.

Why does the Far East do so well in international assessments when compared with the English-speaking world?
Part of it is clearly a cultural commitment to education.
However, it also helps that these countries don't have the toxic baggage of the west. It's not that they are necessarily applying the latest science, they have the freedom to apply common sense.

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