Andy Matuschak: evaluation

Transcript context

…Sure, let me ask you a more specific question. This child grows up and is now 12. At this point, you have taught arithmetic, reading and everything. Do you proceed and say you have to learn your biology, you have to learn chemistry, or do you just say, what are you interested in? Are you interested in Roman history? Oh, let's learn about the aqueducts. Or is there an actual curriculum that proceeds until they get to college? Yeah, this is really challenging. One of the heroes of the reform school movement is this philosopher named John Dewey, and he has a lovely book called Experience and Education, sort of written near the end of his time, looking back on all of his efforts to reform schooling in a kind of unschooling-ish direction. He was never as extreme as that, but broadly looking for freedom on the child's part. And he makes this wonderful argument that because these kids don’t have a fully developed prefrontal cortex, certainly don’t have a fully developed kind of sense of self, to let them do whatever it is that their whim commands them to do in any given moment is actually not freedom, but rather is chaining them to whatever that impulse is. It makes them the subject of these tides of impulse. And I think that's a pretty compelling argument. It doesn't authorize tyranny, but it also suggests that, you know, you got to be a little bit skeptical about the planning or the plans of 12-year-olds, I guess. How skeptical should one be? I don't know. I think I would probably have stronger opinions on that if I had a 12-year-old. But my instinct as a foolish non-parent would be something of a mix. I would be interested in exposing the 12-year-old to lots of topics and possibilities. I would be voluble in expressing the consequences of any particular actions. Like if they just want to compose music all day, we could talk about like, well, what does that mean? What kind of life does that look like? I would try to be non-coercive in this as much as possible. And I think to some extent, the child should be allowed to feel the consequences of their choices. This is complicated by the fact that, again, I'm not wealthy, but any child of mine would have chances. If they made some weird choice about a career path when they're 13 and so they didn't get into Harvard or whatever, that would be okay. They could be 24 and finally figure it out then, or 32 and finally figure it out then. It would probably turn out fine. This doesn't seem like reliable guidance. You should notice I'm feeling very confused about it. Yeah, no worries. So one question I have is historically, and maybe even to the modern day, it seems like improving education has been a very intractable problem. And you did reference this earlier when we were talking about gearing towards median student versus whatever percentile you're working with. But I don't know. Do you feel like there's been progress even in the percentile you're gearing your stuff towards? And if not, what is the explanation for the relative stasis? I mean, this is something you talked about. We have so many new tools with IT. What explains the broader sort of stagnation here?…

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