There's a lot to be desired in schools (In the US at least and I assume Canada) but one thing schools do do is bring people from many different backgrounds together for long periods of time.
That in and of itself is educational for the world students will eventually enter. It creates some level of shared experience and social cohesion and underlying social reality. It's not done very well admittedly with a lot of time wasting and poor education and lowest denominator and propaganda flavor of the decade, but the principal still applies.
The thing I'm afraid of with parent and neighbors doing the socializing exclusively is reality bubbles and a fracturing of shared culture.
Reality bubbles are very much here already. For example, there was a fun study showing that Ivy League students who graduated from a public high school had markedly lower opinions of the ability of an average person than did Ivy League students who graduated from a private high school.
> one thing schools do do is bring people from many different backgrounds together for long periods of time.
As our communities become less diverse, our schools follow. At least in Canada from my experience having lived all over the place. For example, a White suburb leads to white schools, and the house value of the suburb is always roughly the same so the socioeconomic status of the students is pretty close. There’s no bussing kids from different areas around to achieve diversity targets.
One teacher broadcasting to thousands does scale. The best course material being taught to all does scale. Teachers assistants working with small 5-6 person groups scales better than 1 to 30.
My teachers stood up and explained a topic. We read further, did homework and were marked on tests and projects. There may be a period after the lecture where we could try to get help. Perhaps going after class might get you extra help but most teachers seemed to be involved in coaching after class.
Where does teaching come in? The lecture or the help after?
A teacher with a small number of students can interact with all students. A teacher with a large number of students cannot. Is teacher/student interaction valuable? I’d say yes. Student to student interaction is also valuable.
We had much more back and forth, discussion and such. And teacher would know you personally somewhat and would communicate with you personally when ypi had trouble.
The class was giving feedback to teachers, verbal and non verbal.
The verbal feedback needed because teachers had to wing it like a standup comedian wouldn't be necessary because each lesson would have been vetted and choosen as the best material.
Having to slowdown the entire class because you need help helps you but not a percentage of the class. Going quicker for you hurts a different segment.
MIT OCW is the worst example of scaling great teaching. Just filming a teacher at the front of a classroom with poor audio and video and no interaction, no community, no feedback.
better to consider something like Coursera (live teachers, material access is not an issue as everything is delivered in the course) or Khan Academy / Duolingo where there is no teacher but interactive learning modules and immediate quizzing/feedback. Even Masterclass, which at least features engaging performances by the celebrity teacher.
MIT OCW videos are 100x more well made where the professors explain complex topics in a simple way and is pretty enjoyable to follow through.
Coursera on the other hand has courses which are almost always quite poor and basic in quality and mostly tailored to make students “feel” like they learnt something (when mostly they just learnt the basics in a random way) so that they don’t apply for a refund.
MIT doesn’t have any of that
And is pretty enjoyable to go through ,
Maybe the difference is because of the high quality experiences of their professors
But I’d take MIT OCW over Coursera any day.
I think Edx might be a better comparison , they tend to have better quality content than coursera.
That in and of itself is educational for the world students will eventually enter. It creates some level of shared experience and social cohesion and underlying social reality. It's not done very well admittedly with a lot of time wasting and poor education and lowest denominator and propaganda flavor of the decade, but the principal still applies.
The thing I'm afraid of with parent and neighbors doing the socializing exclusively is reality bubbles and a fracturing of shared culture.