[fardo]

> On-the-job observations done by someone with way more experience

This feels like it puts a potential hard cap on quality growth by discouraging mixups or experimentation that might improve education, but wouldn’t please an old-guard for one reason or another, and discourages alternative class styles which the judge doesn’t approve of.

Both of those seem like potentially serious problems in education, given that its structure has with few exceptions been effectively stagnant over the last several hundred years. You therefore may be mistaking “evaluating the success at implementing the widely accepted method” for an “evaluation of quality”.

[vundercind]

The institution of widespread public education that looks anything like what we have now isn’t something I’d describe as having meaningfully existed for hundreds of years, let alone as having been stagnant that whole time.

[fardo]

I would. Most modern systems of education have their roots in 1748, and either are derived from or inspired by reforms to the Prussian educational system to guarantee free and compulsory elementary school education between the ages of 5 and 14 as taught by secular professional teachers for the full populace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

If you mean the university and college levels, they have interesting differences from the 18th century, but are recognizably similar in regards to basically everything besides cost and curriculum differences we'd expect due to changes in societal needs, technical advancements, and changing interests.

[vundercind]

I wouldn’t date the current system prior to one-room schoolhouses becoming uncommon. That’s an enormous change.

If we’re going back farther than that, then I’m really having a hard time seeing where the stagnation comes in—I don’t agree with that even past that point (gifted education alone is only just now starting to develop into something halfway useful, and that’s a very recent change in just one small part of primary and secondary education) but if we’re going farther back, then… what?

[gregw2]

Didn’t grades only start around 1900?

Letter grades are an 1897 invention and only at one college to start with: https://studysoup.com/blog/uncategorized/history-of-the-lett...

[gopher_space]

The structure you're seeing allows for plenty of freedom per classroom and per institution. It's been stagnant in exactly the same ways automotive design has been stagnant, and for largely the same reasons.

Your line of thinking makes sense, and your questions were more or less answered last century. I think this would be a useful conversation to have with a GPT...

> You therefore may be mistaking “evaluating the success at implementing the widely accepted method” for an “evaluation of quality”.

because that conjecture alone is an entire topic of study in several disciplines.