Effective children education

1. you know what you don't know so if you need some preceding information you can find that for yourself (in large part thanks to the internet)

2. teaching is centered around the idea that a teacher knows what you should know better than you do. In many cases, I don't think this makes much sense. If I want to learn how to make x thing, getting a general education on the field x falls into (field y) doesn't make sense. Learning a bunch of useless things in field y is a waste of my time. If I'm deciding what to learn by myself, I can make sure that I'm not only learning things efficiently but that I'm choosing what to learn effectively.

This is the approach advocated by Scott Young in the book Ultralearning. You build out a learning project for the thing you actually want to learn, learn by doing, and you fill in obvious gaps that are 'rate-limiting' to the learning 'reaction' as you go along. Learning by working on the end result that you actually want directly also sidesteps the issues with transfer learning - students are typically able to apply the abstract classroom skills they've been taught to real world situations.

I see you link to SuperMemo and ask about it a lot. Do you use that software, and do you generally subscribe to Wozniak's ideas?

Just a note that 1-self only works for people with:

1. Enough call-it-willpower (many people need an outside motivator to do hard things)
2. Enough general intelligence/knowledge to be able to generate ideas like "I could look this up by typing XYZ into google"
3. See my response below about unknown unknowns.

An umbrella term for this style of learning (and systems that support it) is "self-directed education". You can find places that practice this low-coercion and self-directed style here. There are a small handful of places in Central Europe that might fit the bill.

These places often serve as a refuge for kids that don't fit in the conventional school model, so you often encounter a high rate of neuro-atypicality. There are lots of kids that might have earned themselves a diagnosis in a school setting who are thriving in an environment that can bend to their needs.

I think your last point about lack of shared priors is a big one here. The OP seems intent on designing/engineering the perfect education, when the answer from this perspective will require a lot of letting go.

Hey Raj. Thanks a lot for an insightful post, it's definitely that sort of things I was looking after, regardless if I immediately agree with them or not.

1-self learning: How I read it so far is that instead of selecting "the way" first and optimizing it later, instead it might be a good idea to focus on learning how to learn by yourself first, recognizing what's the most effective in any given case, be it via internet or an actual human resource such as a tutor.

By the way, my solely main motivation for her to know English was the access to much better materials so she can learn by herself.

I would also check out Sudbury or democratic schools, which are schools with high behavioral space and very low in coercion.

A quick search shows that there are some very reasonably priced democratic schools around. So great to see there are some options like this (at least, I will be able to get some references or even visit them myself)

there are a lot of priors I'm guessing we don't share that might make some of this not make sense. Please bring them up and I will try to answer them though most answers could probably be found in some way on supermemo.guru.

I think your post does make sense to me on this level. I think I have to first go through the linked material, which will surely take some time to process (thanks!).

Hi. Thanks a lot for a really nice write-up. 

It seems that the regulations in the Czech Republic are actually legally "workable", i.e. it's possible to teach kids close to self-directed without having to do a lot of "compulsory curriculum" (i.e. my estimate is <5%). It also seems there is a "subculture" of families doing this and I managed to get to some people who know how to deal with this.

My conclusion is that there is no simple answer.

I don't aim for a simple answer and I do not expect there is some. But as I said, the current system seems so broken that just answering "try not to harm" is a good substitution question. Also, it doesn't really seem that kids would learn [and retain] that much [useful knowledge] compared to "watching youtube videos".

I have concluded that school reproduces more than knowledge. It reproduces culture.

It does so indeed, but that culture doesn't seem to be very worthwhile to me. I am rather tempted to risk this one, as the main thing it signals doesn't seem to be that problematic to pick up later. I.e. homeschooled kids doesn't seem to have issues when they want to switch to formal education, and at "worst" they pay a year or two of whatever-made-them-happy-or-stronger-in-other-ways for that (again, e.g. watching videos :-) ). I have read/heard this claim quite a lot, and I am less and less convinced that this aspect of schooling is positive.

I also think that some other benefits can be supplied in other ways and even more effectively. For example a good social network - it's vastly superior/efficient to learn a few networking skills and just infiltrate e.g. some organizations, events or groups with a "good network". It's unlikely that it's your random class that is "good social network", and e.g. I have literally 0 friends from my primary and secondary school (I have a lot from university though - but anyone can do the uni I did if they want).

The other aspect is that you and I might have good ideas about which curriculum would be best

That kind of links to my previous answer. I am coming to a conclusion that the skills I would like to convey are rather very generic, blurry and meta. I want to teach her how to understand herself, her motivation, discipline, emotions, reasoning, goals and drive, how to understand other minds and how to model the world. I want her to understand how she can learn by herself whatever she wants to learn. It really seems to me that if we don't want to learn something, then we should rather not learn it as we are not going to remember that anyway. And given the right tools and meta knowledge, we can learn almost everything in much shorter times than the "most common" path. Therefore, I don't really care that much about the "object-level" curriculum. I think (but that's still subject to a research) that the concepts important to me can be taught via mostly arbitrary picks in the real world (like nature or engineering) or just going outside and explicitly talk about that person kicking that soda machine. And I can't imagine how these skills would not be useful or universal to time, at least on ~15 years from now scale, as they seem to be useful since eternity. I can imagine my job going obsolete - but I would use exactly these skills to find and learn something else which would be the best in that time for me.

Did you read about B2D linked by OP? This is what Bloom found (from wikipedia):

the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class".[1]:4 Additionally, the variation of the students' achievement changed: "about 90% of the tutored students ... attained the level of summative achievement reached by only the highest 20%" of the control class.

I don't think high school can hold a candle to that. All the content in any specialized class can be found online and learned at the leisure of the child rather than praying for a decent teacher that fits the kid.

Thanks @ericf!

How neurotypical is your child?

She's regular kid, so neurotypical. Goes to an English speaking kindergarten (so she speaks fluently two languages + we are starting with Spanish) where she does above average according to the teachers with behavior and socializing, although she prefer playing with teachers and older kids. Thanks to the fact that one of us didn't have to work, we could spend a lot of time with her in the first 3 years and now she can read simple words and sentences (in English - how I hate its irregularities damn!) and do simple arithmetic already. That likely puts her in higher percentiles, but nothing super exceptional nor she shows signs of extremely high intelligence or capabilities. Frankly, she also doesn't have anyone to inherit these from...

Do you have someone who can spend 10-40 hours a week educating them (depending on the first answer), or the cash to hire someone for that amount of time?

Fortunately for me, salaries for teachers are one of the lowest from the OECD. Depending on the efficiency, me paying a private tutor ~30h/week would be technically feasible and I would still have some money left, but it would be at the edge of what I could spend. I believe this cost could be shared through multiple kids if that was the way to go. I myself have masters in CompSci and my girlfriend masters in pedagogy (not the child development though, although I mean it means little here anyway), so homeschooling done by us is also an option but for me there is definitely much higher opportunity cost (and I wouldn't enjoy it full time, same as my girlfriend).

1-on-1 instruction for the (child-dependent) sufficient amount of time each week can be applied by anyone with 1SD above average intelligence and a little bit of "how to teach" education. This is the simplest way to ensure someone learns all the key skills (Arithmatic, Algebra, Reading to learn, Writing to communicate, basic facts about history & science)

Do you have any resources or even anecdotal evidence for this? It sounds true to me, but I would say it's super obvious. Are you referring to e.g. Blooms 2SD?

Once they are old enough to attend High School classes, if you have access to a large (400+ per grade level) school they can get some good specialized classes that would be harder to do with general tutors. Junior college classes are also an option, depending on maturity level.

Sorry, I am not entirely familiar with these as we are not US-based. Based on googling, is what you mean:

1. large schools having specialized classes: is it that once they are big enough, they can have some special programs like in-depth dive into, say, physics or something? Or do you have some specific classes in mind? 
2. Junior colleges - we don't really have that where I live, we only have universities, but I think it still applies - she could attend them as they are free to attend for anyone actually (at least lectures).

To be fair though, I am very skeptical I could find many good classes in these, but it's surely an area I want to explore (although it's not a priority now, given her age).

It's great to see some support like this. Not just to help with motivation but also to see what the interest is. 

I think there is a massive opportunity in creating a k-12 home schooling version of Lambda School but targeted at general knowledge. Why not start by work together on it?

I am interested as it's probably clear from my question, but I don't think I would be a good fit to actually put it together (or that it would be cost-effective). I would be happy to put and run some structure which could do this. I should emphasize though that I am not trying to create a generic program for everyone as I think that's vastly harder and would IMHO need much more.

Hey. I decided on a private school with more of a "democratic approach". I unfortunately wasn't able to find suitable tutors etc.

I am also trying to process what ChatGPT-like platforms will do with the landscape. E.g. my partner is using coding almost exclusively with ChatGPT and it's outstanding. Kids gonna follow IMHO.