I think we've arrived at the point where we can just comfortably say that if you exist in the Valley ecosystem and start talking about educational achievement as a problem to be solved by some paradigm-altering piece of software or your new alternative-to-school website that you're just a bad guy now, forever trying to get revenge on all those teachers that made you read books with feelings in them instead of letting you play with your computer. They've reinvented the diploma mill just a few years after a bunch of diploma mills were shuttered, but now McKinsey is in the house to really figure out how to optimize the money vacuum.
As usual very thoughtful. SI is avery good idea but it won't be able to take the full load of support needed, a hybrid with Ai tutors maybe? I am not an advocate for screens and AI, but when i see LLMs (maybe not GPT but others) as tutors, it is pretty impressive for some subjects (English writing, languages, latin etc). I don't think we should discard them entirely.
I couldn’t agree more with everything you said. As you were laying out the Khan Ted Institute proposal, I thought of the failure of the MOOCs for exactly the same reason the Khan Initiative will fail, then, sure enough, you mentioned that too.
I started tutoring in 4th grade when my teacher asked me to help other students in the class, and I experienced the same takeaways as you did, that P2P mentoring provides positive feedback effects for both mentor and mentee. Based on my own experiences, I agree that the key is to figure out how to encourage P2P networks to facilitate the human connections needed to motivate people.
I think the reason we keep seeing so many tech ventures fail in this arena is that the tech entrepreneurs themselves are generally people who are motivated self-starters, and they think everyone else is too and that all people need is the infrastructure to facilitate their actions. In reality, the deep problems we see in society today generally involve not lack of infrastructure, but rather lack of motivation to do what they need to do to improve their lives, e.g., eat better, exercise more, sleep more, etc.
What you described in your conclusion regarding supplemental instruction is in essence the format (paradigm) that New Testament discipleship prescribes. You first learn something important, then you turn around immediately (i.e. without need of further formal education, teaching certificates, etc.) and begin to teach others what you learned. Part of what you teach them is for them to pass on what they learned to others (recursion). This naturally creates the need for course correction and refinement in your teaching, not to mention necessitating that your own lived experience matches up to your teaching (feedback). Of necessity, the teaching environment is strictly person-to-person (no CAD or AI), one mentor with a handful of students, and is thus highly relational in nature, often like from the coach to the players (Jesus had 12, er, 11... oh, a football team!). This simple pattern was largely lost on the Christian movement of the last two millennia, but it is precisely this pattern that is responsible for the greatest breakthroughs and people movements to Christ of the last 2-3 decades. None of those movements made the evening news, but the reality has been major incursions into lands where hostility against anything Christian is the norm. That's how effective this pattern is and has been. How could this not work for teaching in general, as long as the subject matter in question is worth one's time, and perhaps blood, sweat, and tears?
I think we've arrived at the point where we can just comfortably say that if you exist in the Valley ecosystem and start talking about educational achievement as a problem to be solved by some paradigm-altering piece of software or your new alternative-to-school website that you're just a bad guy now, forever trying to get revenge on all those teachers that made you read books with feelings in them instead of letting you play with your computer. They've reinvented the diploma mill just a few years after a bunch of diploma mills were shuttered, but now McKinsey is in the house to really figure out how to optimize the money vacuum.
As usual very thoughtful. SI is avery good idea but it won't be able to take the full load of support needed, a hybrid with Ai tutors maybe? I am not an advocate for screens and AI, but when i see LLMs (maybe not GPT but others) as tutors, it is pretty impressive for some subjects (English writing, languages, latin etc). I don't think we should discard them entirely.
I couldn’t agree more with everything you said. As you were laying out the Khan Ted Institute proposal, I thought of the failure of the MOOCs for exactly the same reason the Khan Initiative will fail, then, sure enough, you mentioned that too.
I started tutoring in 4th grade when my teacher asked me to help other students in the class, and I experienced the same takeaways as you did, that P2P mentoring provides positive feedback effects for both mentor and mentee. Based on my own experiences, I agree that the key is to figure out how to encourage P2P networks to facilitate the human connections needed to motivate people.
I think the reason we keep seeing so many tech ventures fail in this arena is that the tech entrepreneurs themselves are generally people who are motivated self-starters, and they think everyone else is too and that all people need is the infrastructure to facilitate their actions. In reality, the deep problems we see in society today generally involve not lack of infrastructure, but rather lack of motivation to do what they need to do to improve their lives, e.g., eat better, exercise more, sleep more, etc.
What you described in your conclusion regarding supplemental instruction is in essence the format (paradigm) that New Testament discipleship prescribes. You first learn something important, then you turn around immediately (i.e. without need of further formal education, teaching certificates, etc.) and begin to teach others what you learned. Part of what you teach them is for them to pass on what they learned to others (recursion). This naturally creates the need for course correction and refinement in your teaching, not to mention necessitating that your own lived experience matches up to your teaching (feedback). Of necessity, the teaching environment is strictly person-to-person (no CAD or AI), one mentor with a handful of students, and is thus highly relational in nature, often like from the coach to the players (Jesus had 12, er, 11... oh, a football team!). This simple pattern was largely lost on the Christian movement of the last two millennia, but it is precisely this pattern that is responsible for the greatest breakthroughs and people movements to Christ of the last 2-3 decades. None of those movements made the evening news, but the reality has been major incursions into lands where hostility against anything Christian is the norm. That's how effective this pattern is and has been. How could this not work for teaching in general, as long as the subject matter in question is worth one's time, and perhaps blood, sweat, and tears?