Originally posted as a Twitter thread on January 02, 2022
Normalizing/destigmatizing home schooling — as well as appending social, athletic and other “non-academic” parts of the school experience — feels both (a) necessary (school closed!) and (b) a solution to the country’s increase in woke nonsense (eg: https://sfist.com/2021/02/10/sf-school-board-votes-to-permanently-end-merit-based-admissions-at-lowell-high/ )
I realize this sadly isn’t practical for many households (single-parent, or both parents at work, etc) where school doubles as child-care. But “remote school” has no child-care and has adopted no advances in INDIVIDUALIZED instruction — something the internet can uniquely do
That’s the worst part of this whole “Zoom school” experience. It could have been a great step forward for 1-1 “mastery learning,” which DRAMATICALLY changes educational outcomes — this has been tested, proven, and known for decades:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
Instead, Zoom-school got rid of the good — the social experience (learn how to get along with peers in the real world!) — and did nothing to use the unique nature of what 1-1 learning/technology can accomplish. It just moved the mediocre part online, making it even worse…
Add in the hyper-inflation of education costs, and we are getting much less result for much more $$$…now with free degraded mental health outcomes given social separation! There’s a free and arguably better version of Zoom school called Khan Academy
Hopefully as credentials get unbundled from education the higher education monopoly will falter… https://x.com/arampell/status/1105667061986914305
But K-12 is far more foundational and less credential oriented. Pedagogy and social interaction matter. The internet has limitless free content, and experts from all over who can offer individualized instruction catered to the EXACT level of each pupil…
I’ve been astonished how much my kids have learned (far in excess of the one-size-fits-most school curriculum) from free online content (eg 3Blue1Brown on YouTube)… and sites like Wyzant that aggregate experts from around the world in ANY topic for 1-1 on-demand instruction
I used to think school choice / vouchers was the solution, and it certainly WOULD be helpful during Covid as public schools shut but private schools stayed open — a huge blow for lower income families. Imagine if this had happened 36 years ago:
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/14/us/reagan-proposes-vouchers-to-give-poor-a-choice-of-schools.html
But now I’m much more convinced that a vibrant, technology-first homeschooling option is the counterweight we (parents) really need given the panoply of problems with the established education system/culture (cost, outcome, lower-the-ceiling v raise-the-floor mentality, etc)
Historically, home-schooling had (has?) a stigma attached to it — it’s just not “normal” and how will kids fare without normal social experiences attached?
But this is going to change — both because the offline keeps getting worse (or shut!) and the online — the “strong” form being the online native — keeps getting better. My partner @cdixon applies strong v weak to tech writ large here:
https://cdixon.org/2019/01/08/strong-and-weak-technologies
Online-native education — provided the offline accoutrements are solved! — will also hopefully bring true equality of opportunity to students anywhere and everywhere. That’s a future we should all want to strive for.
Fin.