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The majority of children, and I say this as having been one of them, are not self-motivated self-directed learners.
Maybe because you've been trained out of it? I'd argue that every person is a self-directed learner: A toddler learns to walk, to speak by imitating his environment - the motivation for this comes from him. So why should it be any different for a 12 year old?
If I'd been allowed to self-direct in middle and high school, I'd have played video games for 16 hours a day, barely taking breaks to eat and sleep.
The fact that you would have played video games all day seems to me to be a kind of cry for help. Video games are the least adult-directed activity there is, in a world where children can no longer go outdoors and find others to play with, freely, away from adults, as they once did.
In a world like the one I imagine, learning, expanding your skills, is as enticing as video games. What attracts you to video games is not a dopamine rush (otherwise the effect of educational games wouldn't be so disappointing), but the feeling that you personally brought about what happened in this game.
And we can replicate that in an educational context as well, but not through stupidly gamifying what currently exists. But simply giving children the opportunity to approach everything in a self-directed way.
And this can also take place in a school, which, however, would no longer resemble the one we have today.
And by the way, video games are actually quite a good way to learn all kinds of skills. I've recently come across a paper by Benoit Bediou and his colleagues (2018) that reviewed all of the recent research (published since 2000) concerning the cognitive effects of playing action video games.
The analysis of the correlational studies indicated, overall, strong positive relationships between amount of time gaming and high scores on tests of perception, top-down attention, spatial cognition, multitasking, and cognitive flexibility (ability to switch strategies quickly when old ones don’t work anymore).
Other research by Linda Jackson and her colleagues (2012) has found significant positive correlations between amount of time playing video games and every aspect of creativity measured by Torrance’s Tests.
There is also a paper that has shown significant positive correlations between video gaming and the personality characteristic referred to as openness to new experiences (Chory & Goodboy, 2011).
I want to note for you that the rhetoric in this tripped my internal alarm for manipulation, and irritated me (though I'm self aware enough to know that's not what you meant, and am not irritated with you).
1. Pure appeal to authority / ethos2. It is an attempt to prove too much; I am asked here to ignore all the smart famous people who feel helped by school
Fair point. The post wasn't necessarily meant for the rationalist community, but I thought it wouldn't hurt to share it here.
It's my first attempt in a long time to write about things other than the start-up I'm currently building in the crypto space, so I certainly appreciate your input and will perhaps incorporate some of it in future posts. And I also apologize for doing this anonymously, but some things I express are perhaps not what I'd want people googling my name to read.
The part where you say "Albert Einstein also intuitively understood what needs to be done to change this" is just conjecture, unless we somehow know that Einstein is correct through other means than just what you've said there. I need more evidence than the guesses of a physicist and a LessWrong poster[1] on education, and this unbacked claim feels almost like a taunt at the current state.
What Albert Einstein basically said are two things:
One needs stimulation [of the intellect] and the freedom to pursue your own [intellectual] interests. Both arguments are supported by scientific literature.
Intrinsic motivation has been shown to play a significant role in deep learning experiences (Bodkyn, C., & Stevens, F. (2015). And intrinsic motivation can not arise from coercion or fixed curricula.
Andy Matuschak describes this more eloquently than I can do:
Some “educational” activities have intrinsically meaningful purposes, but in most educational environments, the primary concern is cause others/oneself to know something, which is generally not an intrinsically meaningful purpose (contra Enabling environments’ activities directly serve an intrinsically meaningful purpose).
A fixation on learning outcomes is a fixation on what would normally be the effect of a deeper cause: an intrinsically meaningful purpose involving that material. By attempting to produce the effect without the cause, the teacher makes the students into dependents. He’s the source not only of expertise but also of purpose. In such a relationship, the teacher’s role is defined by his superiority. This often manifests as (unintentional) condescension.
Internally-modulated learning is self-actualizing; externally-modulated learning is self-abnegating. Students sense the abnegation and often respond either by disengaging or by shrinking their sense of intellectual responsibility. Both of these behaviors magnify the asymmetry between the teacher and student, which in turn magnifies (intentional or unintentional) sense of superiority the teacher conveys.
Deep understanding requires (and is a result of) intense personal connection. Condescension and external dependence are unlikely to produce such a connection. Often, the teacher/author themselves doesn’t have such a connection to the material, which makes the condescension worse (see Authored environments are significantly colored by authors’ motivations)
Now we're coming to your last point, which I don't really buy:
Finally, a lot of these people are really old and education now is a lot less abusive in many ways than it used to be! I was not hit at all in school growing up, and that's probably a large jump over what those guys had. It's just 1 more reason not to take their word over everyone else's.
When I talk about coercion, then this has nothing to do with corporal punishments. It is purely about intellectual coercion.
Let's take again what I wrote in the post above about the 5 basic freedoms in an educational context - I don't think a single one of them is being met by most schools today.
In the context of education, this means the freedom to choose what to learn, where to learn it, with whom to learn it, as well as how to learn it — and, perhaps most importantly, if to learn at all.
It's a characterization of agency that challenges the systems and structures of most schools. Today, just as it did 70 years ago.