[somenameforme]

I'd agree with this conclusion from another angle as well. It seems slightly odd to me that people think there must be a single "right" way to teach. What works for one student, one group of people, doesn't necessarily work well for another.

And it also goes the other way as well. One form of pedagogy might work excellently for one teacher, yet he may do abysmally at another. What's "right" for him may be wrong for another teacher. By striving for something like homogeneity you disadvantage not only students, but also teachers.

This is all even more true in current times as educational outcomes continue to decline even as ever more money is pumped into education, and teacher churn rates are at record highs, with many completely leaving the profession.

[bluGill]

Humans are not so different from one other that we need different ways. However there are a lot of ways that work and it is very hard to run a real study to figure out which is best. You cannot isolate all the variables (several of the different ways claim teacher quality is important - just one variable that is hard to isolate)

[somenameforme]

Why do you think? For an example of something in support of my argument, China (and a number of other East Asian countries) use a very hardcore memorization + training routine. And they are having literally the best educational outcomes in the world from it, but such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.

[pc86]

> such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.

It definitely would fail but isn't it an order of magnitude more likely that's due to the parents, teachers' unions, and other factors rather than American students are neurologically different than Chinese students and therefore learn differently?

If they do have much better outcomes (I have no idea if this is the case or not), if you made that change in kindergarten today and moved it up through the end of high school with that class, I bet you'd see remarkable improvement in them compared to older cohorts.

[somenameforme]

Yeah, here [1] are the PISA outcomes. PISA is an international test that's generally the gold standard for comparison of educational outcomes on an international level. [1] Over the last testing year China was #2, the test prior #1. Singapore was #1 in the most recent period, and is around 75% ethnic Chinese.

Whether the differences are genetic or cultural is interesting but doesn't really matter. The reality is that they exist and are relatively immutable. For a very basic example, in China failing students fail. In American schools, failing students tend to be passed along. And such things are difficult to change, even if you could prove beyond any doubt that doing so would yield better outcomes for everybody.

[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...

[bluGill]

The real question is how you 'do at life'. Some tests are a proxy but not all. And even when it is, you can 'teach the test' and get worse results at life even though the test itself is good. Too often we are not sure what is a good proxy.

That is the grain of salt all education comparisons need to be made with.

[somenameforme]

They went from literally starving to death in the 60s to becoming one of the greatest, if not the greatest, power on Earth with a thriving and growing middle class - which is really the backbone of a nation. So I think it's safe to say that their life outcomes are on parity with their measurable educational outcomes.

[bluGill]

Are they having the best results from that? I've seen the claim of other countries using that and having book smart kids who can't think. (Whatever that means)

There is a common want to make the grass greener. However it isn't always and most people don't know.