Hack Education

Yes, and I wrote that to point out that emteycz's comment about "compulsory daily school attendance", which wasn't true in colonial MA, still isn't true now in the US, so if that's the key point for what the Prussian model means, then we don't have it.

> they do follow an industrial model that teaches conformity

I earlier pointed to http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model and its objections to that characterization of the history of US education.

See the section starting "Sal Khan is hardly the only one who tells a story of “the factory of model of education” that posits the United States adopted Prussia’s school system in order to create a compliant populace. It’s a story cited by homeschoolers and by libertarians ... the history of schools doesn’t map so neatly onto the history of factories (and visa versa). As education historian Sherman Dorn has argued, “it makes no sense to talk about either ‘the industrial era’ or the development of public school systems as a single, coherent phase of national history.”"

I'll ask you - what do you mean by "conformity" and "obedience to authority"? As an example to test an extreme case, if your children decided to set fire to the house, to see what would happen, would you prevent them? If so, is that enforcing obedience to authority or conformity?

We can look back to colonial MA to see that part of "conformity" and "obedience to authority" was that children should be taught religions beliefs and the laws of the colony.…

This problem has been around for a long time. Like many other HN users, years ago in primary school I became a problem for my teachers because the curriculum was too easy for me.

The school dealt with it by sitting me in front of a big box of color-coded dossiers called the SRA Reading Laboratory [1, 2] and telling me "read these at your own pace". The boxes looked just like this: https://sites.google.com/view/objects-of-school-days-past/sra-reading-kit. The school may well have had them kicking around since the 1960s.

The trouble was that "at your own pace" was code for leaving me alone in front of a box. I don't recall the reading being either interesting or particularly hard. It solved the problem for my teachers, since I wasn't the type to act out in class. But the real lessons I got out of it were lessons in isolation and drudgery.

Look back, what I clearly and badly needed was contact with an adult who could teach me things. That didn't happen, and in fact happened very little in my later school years as well. Was it the schools' fault? They simply didn't have the resources to give me the human contact I needed.

Surely all agree that children need human contact, empathy, connection, meaningful teaching. But let's not use those principles to avoid facing how resource-constrained this problem is. What happens in practice is that many children end up with nothing, or next to nothing, as happened to me long ago.

My point with this anecdote is this: I don't think I…

As a founder working in edtech, I'm glad to see a light shined on these practices, which are surprisingly pervasive. My company has received mass emails from teacher-bloggers asking if we want to submit our products for reviews or find out about sponsored posts. When I replied to inquire about product reviews, they responded with information about how I could sponsor a post. As it turns out, their entire site is a bunch of sponsored posts, masquerading as an unbiased source of information and reviews.

I'm not saying this doesn't happen in other industries. But it is frustrating to see so much of it in education — to the point where I have asked myself: is this just how all the successful companies became successful? Is this just the way the game is played?

Hopefully articles like this one will help set a trend toward better behavior. It sounds like teachers could get in a bit of trouble, both ethically and legally, if they're promoting products without appropriate disclosure. But they probably just figure that anything that companies ask them to do is ok for them to do. Now parties on both sides are on notice that much of what is going on is not legal.

For anyone interested in reading more about the dark-ish underbelly of edtech, check out http://www.hackeducation.com. No affiliation — just a fan.

Communities of convergence, aggregation...students and educators communicating more effectively, more foreign language translations of content, sharing & combining what's been mentioned here as well as

Khan Academy + Bittorrent
http://www.hackeducation.com/2011/02/11/khan-academy-and-bittorrent-partner-to-distribute-educational-videos/

Gaming: http://www.phibetaiota.net/2010/09/video-visions-of-the-gamepocalypse-possible-futures-waking-up-thinking-and-creating-a-better-world/ + http://web.cs.wpi.edu/~rich/courses/imgd404x-c11/playable.html

http://hackety-hack.com

http://cnx.org

http://www.writework.com

http://www.fhsst.org

http://www.unclasses.org

http://www.coursehero.com

http://www.varsitynotes.com

http://www.livemocha.com (language)

http://openstudy.com

Connecting educators & students to communicate more effectively using these and more:

http://edublogs.org

http://www.connectedprincipals.com

http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/blogs/index.html

http://piratepad.net

http://primarypad.com

http://typewith.me

http://sync.in

http://sketchpad.cc

> I just dont understand how did we end up here

The push to get children familiar with appliance computers as opposed to general purpose computers goes at least as far back as the 1980s with Apple.

So how we ended up here is basically nearly half a century of lobbying from computer manufacturers to promote proprietary computation appliances that children have limited or no control over.

> we studied the law and it turned out that there was a law already on the books... that said that if you donated a piece of scientific instrumentation or computer to a university for educational and research purposes you can take an extra tax deduction.... We thought that if we could apply that law, enhance it a little bit to extend it down to K through 8 and remove the research requirements so it was just educational, then we could give a hundred thousand computers away, one to each school in America.

Steve Jobs, quoted in https://hackeducation.com/2015/02/25/kids-cant-wait-apple

So I have been teaching Computer technology to kids in schools and also to non-techies as a hobby for a while.

I urge you to NOT start with technology. From her interests, identify something that can be augmented with programming first.
[for example, she wants to share her hobby via a blog]. Just show her what is possible in that instance with knowledge of coding. From there work backwards to show what she needs to learn to achieve this goal. You will find her lot more motivated.

I talked about this with Hack Education's Audrey just yesterday. Some more thoughts captured by her here:
http://www.hackeducation.com/2012/03/06/harry-shah/