Brain Training to maximize returns

A part of this mess could be solved by heavy use of computers, but it wouldn't be easy. For example every subject could have defined its "tech tree" (the structure of lecture dependencies), and for each student the computer would remember which lectures they already passed.

SRS can tell you very exactly what a student knows and what he doesn't know. It's much better than looking at which lectures a student attended to know where they are at.

I completely agree. It's just easier to organize education this way. Imagine a school with dozen teachers, dozen subjects, a few hundred students, where each student wants to learn different parts of different subjects at different pace.

Sudbury Valley School is effectively such a place, that's why I used it as example. If you force every school to perform well on yearly standardised tests a school like Sudbury Valley School is practically impossible.

You take a bunch of assumptions about how schools should organise themselves for granted. Standardized testing and curricula force schools to play according to those assumptions. That prevents experimentation with different core assumptions about what school should be about.

Take an issue like emotional management. Even CFAR thinks it's a highly valuable skill to learn. It's not something that a modern standard test where a student tries to score high measures meaningfully.

I could imagine a school where nearly all subjects that get taught are different from the subjects that get taught in our Western curriculum and that still provide kids with meaningful skills for their live.

Reading and basic math could be taught on the side in one our per day in a optimized computer program.

But there would be probably a lot of "holes" in the student's schedules, when for all lectures given at this moment the student already attended them, or didn't attend the prerequisities. There could be some activities for these "holes", such as doing a homework, or an unstructured discussion with other students.

I think we probably want that ever student spends a hour or day on a SRS system anyway. I think looking at Anki 2.X is very interesting. There are so many raw edges and unexplored issues that you could optimize to make it more effective.

We shouldn't live in a world where the mnemosyne database sits around for years without any researcher analysing it and applying some modern math to build a good model around learning.

I really don't understand it. I mean from an academic perspective, the data is there. The mnemosyne guys are open to sharing it. Math talent is there. If you throw good math at learning, it seems like you can get a decent paper out of it. Possibly even a paper that highly cited, when you add some mathematical technique to it that nobody before used on learning.

Calculating SRS repetition dates could be a problem with the same priority as designing computers that play Go or maybe even on the level of protein folding.

The fact that few people care about the problem illustrates well how little interest there is in approaching new ways of learning. I think that lack of diversity between most school is a cause. Getting rid of standarized curricula and standardized testing would open the possibility of schools trying out approaches that differ very much from each other. Different school persuing different concepts then opens up resources to figure out how different ways of learning work.

I think lectures could be replaced by videos and interactive material, and teachers could take more the role of an instructor instead of a lecturer. I think it's easier to be a high quality instructor than a high quality lecturer so this kind of centralization of lecturing would be good. Because students would have different strengths and weaknesses, it could be arranged that they also instruct each other.

This is pretty much the premise behind Khan Academy. There's tech trees with motivating level ups, videos, interaction, I think also peer instruction.