Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Next question from @gasca. Asked a number of ones. I think the one I’ll pick is, “We talked about university curriculum, but if you could do whatever you wanted, how would you change elementary, middle school, high school curricula?” I don’t think I know enough to say, but intuitively, it strikes me as somewhat absurd that we group together children all of the same age. There’s an obvious staggering problem. But ideally you would want younger children always to be interacting with older children, and older children to take on a partial role of teacher and mentor, older peer. The idea that there’s the second grade, the third grade, the fourth grade — in my gut, I feel that has to be wrong, and you’re inducing the kids to bring out the worst in each other. I don’t know how to fix that, but that’s where my attention would point — on that assumption that you group by age seems barbaric. Somewhat related to that, you’re thinking about how do you spot talent. You also think a lot about mentorship, and you’ve set up programs that are, to some extent, about mentorship and trying to identify talent. Have you thought much about the role of parenting in bringing out the potential in a child, either for good or for bad?…

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