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The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

(www.afterbabel.com)
346 points obscurette | 1 comments | 12 Nov 24 14:11 UTC | HN request time: 0.231s | source
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donatj ◴[12 Nov 24 15:41 UTC] No.42116365[source]▶
I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level.

The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured.

We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.

Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth. It's such a crying shame.

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dfabulich ◴[12 Nov 24 17:07 UTC] No.42117321[source]▶
"Holding kids back" is not the reason EdTech fails at scale.

The problem is that people who succeed in tech are able to effectively educate themselves, alone, without a dedicated human teacher supervising them or a group of student peers. (You need this skill to succeed in tech, learning new APIs/languages from written materials and online videos.)

The techies who build/fund EdTech wrongly assume that everyone could do this if only they had access to the learning materials, or if the tech vaguely simulated a teacher (an interactive textbook).

But for most students, fitting in with peers and earning the respect of their teacher is the only reason they're bothering to learn at all.

(For kids especially, adult career prospects feel so remote that it scarcely seems worth the trouble, whereas earning respect right now is a very, very concrete problem!)

Banding kids into grades is the only thing making most kids succeed. I guess that is a "crying shame," but it's a tragedy, not a policy failure.

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1. randomdata ◴[12 Nov 24 22:34 UTC] No.42120515[source]▶
> The problem is that people who succeed in tech are able to effectively educate themselves

Not by magic, though. Those who take an interest in tech are forced to learn how to educate themselves in order to fulfill their interest in tech. The same story applies to many other interests. Of course, it is possible one will never develop any interests...

> But for most students, fitting in with peers and earning the respect of their teacher is the only reason they're bothering to learn at all.

But is socialization the only thing most children can take an interest in, or does sticking children in these rigid school environments take away from them discovering other interests? In other words, is this just a symptom of them being in the wrong environment, rather than the nature if it?

Furthermore, if socialization really is the only interest, why can't it still be used to force learning how to educate oneself? If fitting in and admiration are a compelling reason to learn in general, why would it not be equally compelling towards learning how to learn?

> Banding kids into grades is the only thing making most kids succeed.

Of course, that questions if most kids should succeed. What for? Being from the most educated region in the most educated nation, it's not clear what we actually get for it. The popular tropes don't hold up. Other parts of the world are much more progressive, economically vibrant, healthier, etc. It is hardly the worst place in the world, but a relative backwater compared to other much less educated places.

You don't have to go back many generations to find populations not exposed to much, if any, formal education and they don't seem to have ended up any worse off than the average person today. I expect there is a strong case to be made that people with a vision can leverage educational resources as a force multiplier to propel themselves well beyond what those earlier generations could have ever dreamed of been capable of, but for the average Joe just trying to fit in...? Perhaps we are missing the forest for the trees.