What is a “good education?” Here’s 3 popular theories.
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 6 июн 2024
- Learning facts vs. learning skills vs. learning ideas. What's the best education? Talking about the philosophy of Mortimer Adler, John Dewey, and E.D. Hirsch.
In addition to the writings of the men themselves, some interesting books about Alder in particular I recommend are "A Great Idea at the Time" by Alex Beam, and "The Dream of a Democratic Culture" by Tim Lacy.
Thanks to @MrBettsClass @ADoseofBuckley and Ben Kielesinski of TikTok fame for the voiceover work.
SUBSCRIBE: ruclips.net/user/jjmccullough?...
FOLLOW ME:
🇨🇦Support me on Patreon! / jjmccullough
🤖Join my Discord! / discord
🇺🇸Follow me on Instagram! / jjmccullough
🇨🇦Read my latest Washington Post columns: www.washingtonpost.com/people...
🇨🇦Visit my Canada Website thecanadaguide.com
Some music by:
Craig Henderson- / @craighendersonmusic
ComradeF- / comradef ,
HASHTAGS:
Good education and a good diet are similar in that both need a moderate amount of all 3. Skills, ideas, and facts & fat, protein and carbohydrates. Its illogical to think one is better than the others. That is what fad diets are essentially.
Zap
Well Dewey's idea of education includes all 3, but the ultimate "purpose" should always be to become more skilled. A more skilled person is more valuable to society, and a society of valuable people is happier (and safer too). If there is a problem with public education today, it's a lack of skill. Students graduate with a lot of knowledge about a lot of things, but completely unskilled in any of those things. Private schools seem to have solved this problem somehow, with American private school educated students being some of the most skilled kids in the world.
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Yeah I totally agree with you. Also different subjects use different learning methods. History is very fact based, math is skills based, and English is ideas based
Exactly! Learning skills such as reading and writing is necessary to function in my adult life. But so is cooking and cleaning. And understanding some basic facts allows me to communicate much better. If any of these was missing from my education, I would not be a functioning adult
What do you call the “university professor spends as little time as possible ‘teaching’ and then runs back to their lab so they can get those grants” theory of education because that is the one most of my profs adhered to
I think there is actually a philosophy underlying this as well. To rephrase it charitably, it's the philosophy that one learns best from those who are doing cutting edge work in the field, whether or not they put a lot of effort into teaching you. Actually, medieval guilds were a bit like that, it's the apprenticeship setup. This is also how PhD students learn almost universally. I am not sure I had many explicit teaching sessions with my PhD advisor where he tried to impart wisdom or knowledge to me. It was all just trying to do things that he knew how to do, observing him, and asking questions and getting feedback. Of course it's not a good experience for an undergraduate who is taking intro-level classes, so this philosophy is not suitable for "general liberal arts" education (and is perhaps out of scope for JJ's discussion), but it's quite suitable for specialized training and education. If you do encounter this as an undergraduate, and I am sure most of us did, you can get better value out of it by running after the professor as they run to their lab :)
I’d call it “following incentives”. For university faculty, job performance and promotion opportunities depend primarily on the quantity and “impact factor” of their published research output, and on their ability to secure grants to do that research, so that’s what they spend their time on. My sense from working with academics for more than twenty years is that teaching is generally looked down on as technician-level work that won’t do much for your career. Consequently, even professors who really enjoy teaching can’t afford to spend too much time doing it if they want to get ahead. As they say in academia: “publish or perish”.
@@williamwueppelmann5982 Sure, that's the take from the professor's point of view. But there's a sort of educational philosophy behind it from the point of view of society.
It’s called “N/A”
You learned from professors who were meaningfully advancing the fields they taught? Wow, that sounds like a blessing to me
This reminds me of Aristotle's classification of knowledge:
1) episteme (scientific knowledge)
2) techne (skill and crafts)
3) phronesis (practical wisdom)
As much of a cop-out as it sounds, the real answer probably is "all three in a healthy balance." Usually, when someone is angry about the education system, it has more to do with the worry that one of these three is being excluded. I would say facts and skills were the big two emphasizes in my school, so I gravitate towards Adler-esque "idea" learning just because I found that was missing in my life. At the same time I acknowledge the problems with a strict "ideas-based" education and like a lot of people I think Adler's Great Books list is pretty narrow and baised.
@@insertnamehere3106yeah, also it doesn’t help the education system teaches garbage so you end up thinking fact based knowledge is garbage
@@insertnamehere3106 I think you've made a wise response. I also feel that the great ideas were neglected in my public school experience, so I gravitated heavily to Adler's philosophy after high school. (I even have the entire set of Great Books of the Western World stacked by my bedside.) I suppose that if facts were neglected instead, my pedagogical philosophy would have drifted toward Hirsch.
I've also thought a lot about these pedagogical arguments in light of Christian education. I attended youth group at my church from 6th-12th grade, and while there was a lot of emphasis on practical ethical application (WWJD, love your neighbor, "how does this passage apply to my life?", etc.), both biblical literacy and theological grounding were abysmally lacking.
Many of my peers understood that Jesus loves them and that should affect how they treat people, which is good, but most were completely ignorant of the rest of the Bible, and their faith was only so deep as sentimentality rather than grounded in objective, knowable truth.
@@insertnamehere3106Not in a strict balance, but in a logical harmony with each other. Think of a pyramid: facts are the base, with skills in the middle and ideas at the top. You need many fact to properly inform your skills, and many skills to provide pertinent experiences, about which you can then have a modest set of informed ideas. This is an oversimplification of course, but a dysregulation of these relationships make for a deformed mind.
@xandercorp6175 You probably have a good point there. "Balance" might not have been the best word
You specialize in certain skills to survive. You learn ideas so that we all survive. A foundation of facts are the way you get to both.
In modern society mere survival is guarantied after that it just a question of improving your standard of living and filling time in a entertaining way.
That's a great way of explaining how connected these things are
As a teacher, Mr. Beat should have a lot to say about this matter, which I don’t think has a simple solution: how to pass down knowledge to the next generation
You should make a video taking about the evolution of your teaching philosophy.
Kind of a leap there. Physics tends to be the opposite, where you actively wash out constants and such and leave that for the final step. The facts are observations or measurements and are thus consequences of a process that must be consistent.
Teacher here (25 years), mostly middle with some high school. When I design a curriculum it aims to be around 60% fact oriented and then either 20% each for ideas and skills or, more likely, 25-30% ideas and 15-10% skills. This was a great video and I can't add much to it except to consider this -- an interest in facts and lists seems hardwired in students (particularly boys). Year after year I meet kids who are either mythology nerds or dinosaur nerds (they go in and out of fashion) and occasionally jet plane nerds, car nerds, great battles of history nerds and, of course, the perennial sports nerds. What they all have in common is that they share a fascination with lists and data for their own sake. My non-specialist take on this (I'm a history teacher not a science teacher) is that this interest in collecting and classifying raw data is evolutionarily adaptive and is, thus, a force with which to be reckoned. So, if you're going to design a curriculum, you should figure out ways to co-opt this impulse rather than to fight against it.
Maybe an end of year project combines the list making with arguments skills.
Make a presentation ranking the 5 most consequential US Presidents explaining why they were important.
you must get so many comments about how you've been teaching since the nineteen-hundreds!
hs student here, education has definitely been a place ive been considering (tho theres definitely other jobs id probably try first) and i think this is a pretty spot-on look at people. i find people are very curious naturally and ultimately one of the problems i see is often education just doesnt encourage people to be curious, and i think the great thing that ive seen come out online is a growing way to do so. (you can just look at math videos to see this, especially stuff like summer of math exposition or 3b1b, theyre probably one of my biggest inspirations)
As someone in highschool I find it interesting how I never realized that these teaching philosophies are present in my School within different classes and different "difficulties" like for example in my AP classes which are needed to get into better forms of post-secondary education which will expactantly bring you to white collar career's are much more ideas-based than the base classes which are more skills-based which will bring you to a more blue collar line of work presumably and I wonder if this signifes how our society's perceived importance of teaching strategies differs based on what you do for a living. Classes such as small engines, mechanics, woodworking, cooking are way more practical and skills based than the sciences, english, and law which are more theoretical and fact-based/ideas-based it seems like the more abstract your classes are and the further away from entering the work force you are the less you're taught practical life skills/skills that could be used in a job
I think this is an important observation.
Yeah very insightful, I recently graduated college and am gonna think about how this affected my education
I think there's a strong argument to be made that people of low or average intelligence probably won't get much out of engaging with philosophic ideas, but definitely are served by knowing a strong foundation of facts, how to find new facts, and how to organize and think with those facts.
@@JorenMathews You also cannot really get much hands-on experience with personally manipulating complex population-based abstractions like society, the economy, etc. Smaller, simpler, mechanical systems are much more amenable to the attitude of "just make your own toy version and, bam, now you have a working idea of how the real thing works out there in the field" than larger, more complex, abstract systems.
Glad to see someone in high school watching a video like this one. Sounds like you've got a good handle on what they're teaching you, and why. There's this false dichotomy between blue collar and white collar labor. Life doesn't work that way. It's about ideas, but it's also about putting ideas into action. FYI, my son was an average student in college, but at his job interviews they were more interested in his experience supervising the loading of trucks at night for UPS than his grades. He got hired because they needed someone who could handle the 3-dimensional world, not because of his skill at abstract thought. As you've heard before, follow your heart and the money will follow you. Or, putting it another way, find a cliché that works for you and go for it...
I recently had an example of Cultural Literacy (or, rather, illiteracy) when my neighbor had some friends over from Canada (I live in California).
We were talking, and they mentioned living near a Mennonite community. That led to a discussion about the churches in their hometown, and I learned, to my utter bewilderment, that neither of them had ever heard of Martin Luther before!
I patiently explained to them who Martin Luther was and how he started the Protestant Reformation, and they actually responded by saying, "I thought that was King Henry VIII."
They then asked how I knew all this, and I said that I learned it in school.
"So you went to some kind of Christian school?"
"No, just normal, secular, public school. They taught me this in history class because of its many impacts on Europe afterwards."
They looked at me like I had grown a third eyeball out of my forehead, and acted like they suspected I might have been making all of this up.
By the way, they were older than me.
The Canadian public education is infamous among its own citizens. Both in the terribleness of the curriculum and in how bad the region based outcomes can be. I came from a small hick town in the middle of nowhere and yet somehow we have one of the highest rankings in the province (BC) when I was in school. Additionally I actually learned about doing taxes which seemed to be skipped in many other parts of the province. The small town schools still focus on school being prep for getting a job/career later in life while the cities are more loosey-goosey about exploring ideas and learning about yourself or some garbage. My one friend literally moved 70km out of the city and when she got to her new highschool learned there was a bunch of mandatory credits/classes she was missing for graduation that her original school never bothered to mention to her.
My work consists of people who grew up all over the province, and all of us younger families are all keen on homeschooling, which I find very heartening. Even the non-political young family workers say that the public school just doesn't provide a good enough quality education.
When I was considering homeschooling my children, I read a number of books about different approaches. One was based on how the ancient Romans taught, which, as I recall, was a combination of all three-however, not at the same time. Elementary school was for facts, then, as you got older, you grappled with the bigger stuff. The idea was that as you developed and grew as a person, your ability to abstract grew as well. And you could build upon the fact-based knowledge you gained to grapple with the abstractions.
I feel like that has got to be the best approach, and achieves the balance you mentioned at the end.
Yeah, the education system and the whole industry with “helping” people loves just slapping one idea and sticking to it no matter peoples unique circumstances. We all are totally different, so we should have totally different methods for stuff.
thats how it was historically. college used to be like exclusively for either religion or for philosophy. its why there are a ton of small old liberal arts colleges, because that used to be all colleges taught
The classical approach has gained quite a bit of traction over the last decade. The Trivium and Quadrivium are reasonable ways to divide up the three methods J. J. mentions here. Like another commenter mentioned, the liberal arts were the primary purpose of higher education (doctors were all originally theologians or philosophers, not physicians).
Ironically Roman education was infamously terrible, for example children were taught to rigorously memorise the shapes of all the letters of the alphabet before they where taught even their respective sounds or any words. Marcus Aurelius famously said in Meditations that not going to school was one of the best things that happened to him in his entire life, and he was profoundly thankful for it.
Kinda.
Youngish children (discounting Piaget's cognitive development model) are actually okay with abstraction, and if those modes of thinking aren't nurtured early on, later abstract thinking becomes quite stilted.
As a teacher I've always favored making sure my students have the skills to learn new facts and ideas in the future with other teachers and/or self improvement. Things like logic skills to help detect biases, lies and propaganda, and sort dross from useful information.
I don't think that's a good way to go about that goal. When you educate people on biases they don't become any better detecting they're own biases. They just use it as a rhetorical weapon against people they disagree with.
As to logic. What dose that matter if people just don't know things? You can be as logical as you want, but if you start with garbage you'll get garbage. Logic might get you form point A to point B, but if point A is wrong it doesn't matter how logical you where. Point B is also, probably, wrong.
If you want to teach people how to learn new facts a steady foundation of facts seems better than teaching them about methods that can as easily reinforce bad ideas as they can reinforce good ones.
I think JJ made a video before that about it.
he said how, if he read a translation of some newspaper in a random country he knows little about
he wouldn't be able to understand anything.
like, which party would add and which party woiuld want to remove some details
something like "the republican party of the us obviously would want to make the past look better" is obvious in the us, but what if you dont know that context. And in fact, most realistically such idea that other countries would even ahve a "conservative party" is wrong.
there's a lot of obvious biases to filter out, and you just can't even do that. So, only by knowing facts you could make sense of things, otherwise you'd be too confident and think you can make an idea out of no information.
@@myself2nooneyeah
Well what is “lies and propaganda”? It seems nowadays it’s just anything you don’t agree with, a lot of this talk of lies is rooted in somehow being fact based even though it isn’t at all, and somehow not following the science aka the narrative makes you crazy
What do you consider "lies and propaganda" specifically.
while i ascribe to a combination of ideas. I think Dewey had a very important point. I am severely dyslexic and learned to read when i was 13. The only reason i learned to read was because of my interest in Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Getting the basic skills and more importantly the love of learning is the most important achievement. I have since broadened my experience through University and other sources, but never would have if i had not been allowed to pursue my interests.
I feel like between Dewey and Hirsch is the right approach to something resembling the optimal approach but in the near future with the aid of AI education will be far more responsive to individual development and interest.
Kinda agree. If the kid has no interest in anything they will just do “enough” to get by or cheat/not care about failure.
I think while the other two points are needed to be educated Dewey’s idea let the kid grow an interest in education and where and how to find the information yourself when needed
In this video I learnt 3 different things: facts about education systems (names, years, basic descriptions), philosophical ideas that led to these schools of thought forming and also how to apply and practice these educational styles in my life.
Thanks J.J. for the multi-dynamic approach to education.
I had an idea the other day about our cultural trash canon. Items like a tire, can, coffee cup, and banana peel. It'd be cool to hear your perspective on this cannon and why the items are there. Thanks for the great vids!
Edit: Lol, I thought "cannon" looked weird. Thanks all for your great thoughts!
That's actually an interesting one, why certain items are so commonly found in the garbage. They say you can learn a lot about a culture based on what items they throw away
I'd add to that list an apple core and fish bones (that was common in a lot of older cartoons but not sure if it still is).
Maybe replace coffee cup with coffee grounds
At first reading, I misinterpreted "cultural trash cannon" as a sort of gun spewing out low-brow culture trivia. lol
OK, I know this is pedantic, but I think you mean "canon" and not "cannon". A "canon" is a collection of items considered to be the standard, that everyone should know, whereas a "cannon" is a piece of heavy artillery. I think "cultural trash cannon" could be a T-shirt gun dispensing shirts covered with corporate logos.
Having worked in tv production- where cultural literacy is all important, as high school teacher - where skills based learning is all important, and now studying instructional psychology - where the idea of great books and philosophers is all important, I can say that I have an appreciation for what all three have helped me to learn.
The missing piece in all of this is the role of the learner. Each individual is different and will resonate with different learning approaches. On top of this, each person will change throughout their life - I certainly have.
Recognizing that all approaches have value and even if you find one better or worse for you now, that may change over time, is an essential part of being a lifelong learner.
for me it's skills because I don't know who William F Buckley, but I can understand that he was an intellectual that interview Mortimer J Adler.
I haven't watched A Dose of Buckley in about a decade, and it was extremely surreal to hear his voice in an educational video (instead of an edgy comedy video), reading lines that are deeply off-brand for him. Very bizarre. I'm even kind of surprised that JJ would be friends with him or like his work, they have extremely contrasting energies.
Same. That was so jarring to hear Buckley speaking so formally and calmly.
Yeah aside from being vocally Canadian I can't think of too many things Buckley and JJ have in common, but I guess they probably got together when they were both vocally against Bill C-13
I want to focus for a moment on math, because math education in the US (my home country, not JJ's) has long been the subject of controversy, and this facts/skills/ideas trichotomy is actually really useful for explaining it.
The very short version: Math education in the US has historically focused mostly on a mixture of facts and skills, but every several decades or so, a reformer will propose moving more towards the ideas end of the spectrum. This is always controversial, because most people have very little understanding of mathematical ideas and/or wrongly believe that math does not consist of ideas in the first place. Children ask their parents to help with some "New Math" homework, and the parents have no idea what to do with it, because they were never taught about any of the ideas that the homework is trying to teach. There is also the problem that many math teachers are in the same boat as the parents, so they can't even teach the material properly.
At the same time, the reformers sort of have a point. If you don't teach ideas, then you end up with students who can (for example) apply the law of cosines to a diagram, but can't solve a three-line word problem about some tall building casting a shadow. They know what to write on the test to make their teacher happy, but they have no idea how to apply it outside of the classroom.
Much of what you say is applicable and true here in Brazil too, math education seems very similar.
Rarely does math teaching focus on ideas and concepts and more on "solving" and "formulas", no attention is paid to why things are in that discipline, the ideas. Mathematics gets a lot of that around here because it's considered something "exact" or a tool and not a discipline of knowledge. A better perspective on the subject only exists if you continue to study it after high school.
I feel like "New Math" is onto something, but it puts the cart before the horse.
I think the unorthodox/"New Math" methods should be taught _after_ the traditional methods, not before them.
As a teacher in the US, my main criticism is that we focus on “critical thinking” without having them commit things to memory. I’ve noticed my own students struggle to think critically on why the North and South started to develop in different directions when they barely remember anything about what either of them were like.
On the Great Books thing, at least where I teach, this idea is pretty much gone. Unless you’re just into some of the authors, we basically won’t use them as often. For example, when I taught an English class, I specifically picked books written after World War 2 since I taught in a Title 1 school. I thought that more modern books would be more relevant to them. And based on why my students said in a survey with another teacher, I was one of their more memorable teachers because of this.
I like a lot of what Adler is talking about. I’m in college, political science major, and I never wanted to read Augustine, Plato, or the Gita, but I’ve been forced to in my first few years of college, and I feel like once you push past the difference in language, their ideas really are things I’ve grappled with in my head, but I wasn’t able to form my thoughts about them until I discussed the readings with my peers. We think of how modern-day issues interact with the main ideas, and I just find it really helpful as a guide in my own life.
The Prince by machiavelli is also transformative. You never look at politics the same way again
I was 100% not expecting a JJ/Buckley collab, but I'm absolutely here for it!
They are actually the same person
Especially after they had quite divergent ideas about the Canadian media bill. Glad to see that while they disagree on some things they're still able to collab
I was Classically educated, and I’m really grateful I was.
One aspect of it is Great Books, though the list is not confined to the original list. I really think it is important that children read lots of old books, even if they don’t retain all the information. The in-class discussions about the books encourage students’ development of what they believe and provides a place to use reasoning skills. This, combined with Classical ed’s focus on logic and writing, makes it great for inculcating the nearly universally important skills to read, write, and reason well.
I've always wondered why we learn such weird at school (E.g. Sheakspear, dinosaurs, old Boris atom model) when there was no reference to how it would be applied to my life. I think the issue is when teachers often put their subject into practice with no conext to kids who have no idea what they are learning would be applied to them in life which can be a parenting issue as well. What frustrates me the most is that education is more based on popularity rather than asking how is this actually impacting and helping move humans forward or how relevent it should be. For example, it seems the media pushes forward things like emphasizing computer coding as the only way to advance in life when we all know there are so many other things that are important as well that we take for granted like who cleans our stuff or creates our food. One thing I learned in life is that it's better being skeptical at first and then be really accepting since some decisions are irreversible as we're learning with climate change.
JJ's clear facial telegraph that even he is mystified by the fact that Wisdom magazine ever existed is worth the subscription to this channel.
As a teacher in training, I find this topic truly fascinating. I believe it my duty to educate my students into well-rounded citizens able to fully participate in and appreciate democracy. Education, at its essence, should therefore be a dynamic blend of gaining knowledge, mastering skills, and embracing culture. While the contemporary narrative (in teacher training in Switzerland) often places the most importance on skill-centric learning, it's crucial to appreciate the equal significance of a well-rounded education. Knowledge is the anchor of critical thinking, skills are the practical manifestation of wisdom, and cultural insights foster empathy and global awareness. Without knowledge, the learner cannot learn any skills at all, but without skills, having that knowledge is equally useless. However, it is just as important to consider the young people's abilities and help them build up their knowledge and skills step by step.
Didn’t know Buckley and J.J. were friendly. Ultimate crossover
Great episode. My hunch as a viewer is JJ himself wrestles with all 3 of these concepts as he continues on his journey, and continues to challenge and inspire his viewers. Hirsch makes the most sense to me, btw. Anyway, mind = blown.
I stand by the "big ideas" theory. I've found understanding those larger concepts to allow me to better apply the other stuff, like tools and facts, without having to understand them as much.
I do too, but ideas should not be limited to a finite canon of works
I think it can work for a lot of people but sadly I think it fails in one major way. The books regardiled as great in a society will as JJ pointed out will have ideas that appeal to a segment of the population. And for some their path in life and experiences will mesh well with the lessons to be learned in whatever ideas based education they receive. Let's call these the normal people.
Assuming that the education system is really well run and for 90% of the population the education works. I would worry that such an education would leave those who need different ideas whose life is sufficiently different would be much worse off because they would exist in a desert of alternative viewpoints and may be regarded as lesser by the normal people.
Does that make sense?
Anyway I stand by the maximising education for everybody. I agree that learning subjects I like and understand allow me to gain some understanding in stuff I struggle with. I used to find carpentry difficult but programming taught me to plan and pick problems apart into simpler tasks. I might not be the best with my hands but I can work around it now
@@Jonas_M_M They have to by necessity, simply because time is finite if nothing else.
Could you provide a concrete example? Im trying to understand how reading Shakespeare made you understand drills better.
everyone laugh at the Adlerite
Another commentator below gave his rankings for the relative importance of these three approaches. That inspired me to give my own (differing) rankings, and the reasons for them.
1. Facts
2. Skills
3. Ideas
Facts is first because, for example, you can't really learn how to solve an algebraic equation (skills) if you don't know your times tables (facts). And Ideas is last because it is the least concrete, and needs both a mature mind and a foundation in facts and skills to really pursue.
The British Columbia curriculum is built around these three pillars. Curricular content (facts), curricular competencies (skills), and big ideas (ideas). As a teacher, it's pretty clear to me that this is the best way. There are things students needs to know. There are also things students need to be able to do. There are also big picture ideas students need to understand. The marriage of these philosophies of education is the reigning philosophy of education in British Columbia, and most certainly in my classroom. Thank you for the video; I very much enjoyed it.
Regardless of individual views, the greatest tragedy of modern education is the general disinterest of pupils regarding any educational material. I have noticed this myself in school, most times we read classic literature or in science courses explored more complex topics, most people just wanted to "get through this crap". I would go so far, that most people learned not to like reading from badly executed courses on school literature with pointless test questions, e.g. "chapter 9 starts on what page?"
Curiosity and the will to learn gets punished instead of rewarded, especially if you happen to correct a certain type of stuck-up teacher, and this is a crime to education.
@Luxfalcon: "Curiosity and the will to learn gets punished instead of rewarded, especially if you happen to correct a certain type of stuck-up teacher, and this is a crime to education." Sadly, as a teacher, I know this is true. Sometimes the problem is not that the teacher is "stuck up", but that they are not very smart, and they don't have the capacity to hand la student who wants to go further than they have planned.
@@BS-vx8dgThat is true indeed and something I personally experienced. I had an elective course that lead up to a Cambridge English certificate, where I scored a C2 level, which is about as high as it gets. Meanwhile in my mandatory English course in our school (German Gymnasium/High School), I earned mediocre to low marks in written exams. How? I never pushed the teacher because she was annoying to begin with, but when entire paragraphs get marked red with a question mark beside it, my best guess would be inability to understand?
I mean, I don't believe my English is perfect, but the discrepancy there just seems beyond believable.
@@Luxfalcon "when entire paragraphs get marked red with a question mark beside it" Two possible explanations: The teacher is lazy, or the teacher is not up to the job. Both are depressing thoughts.
Hey man, I've been learning English for the entire 20 years I've been alive, and mine isn't perfect either. I have learned german for 4 years, and I wish it was as good as your English. I understand there are at least a few factors out of my control on that, but it makes me sad that I don't even think I could answer basic questions about my hobbies and job without sounding like a moron.
@@metroplexprime9901 I agree, metroplex!
I think having me read the Adler quote made the most sense for me since I'm also very stubborn, but upon watching the entire video I suppose I probably prefer Dewey's theories if only one could be chosen, or a combination of Dewey and Hirsch. I think that teaching a "thirst for knowledge" is more important than just shoving facts into a person's head and forcing them to regurgitate them, and then claiming a person is smart or dumb based on that (I would bet there are plenty of very good Jeopardy players who lack common sense), and I agree with Hirsch regarding... almost a monoculture is what he's talking about, of things being "common knowledge" and that you can reference them in conversation... but understanding context helps with what Hirsch is concerned about (your example of William F Buckley for example, a person not familiar with him could take from the context that he's "some sort of famous journalist or something?" and they wouldn't be FAR off, but with a thirst for knowledge they could Google if they really wanted to know more).
This was a jaw dropping cameo 😂 it caught me off guard with your seriousness, like "no way"
Wow great to hear Buckley in this!
Having gone through the education system all the way to PhD level it’s interesting how the different types of learning become more/less important at different times. In primary school I learned skills like reading and writing in order to learn facts. In secondary school I learned facts in order to learn abstract ideas. At bachelor’s I learned abstract ideas, I guess for the benefit of being able to think abstractly in the real world. Then at PhD I learned mostly practical skills to test abstract ideas.
Theory #4: Incentivize yourself with a five minute jelly bean break after every thirty minutes of work
Do I get one ore multiple Jelly Beans each break?
This struck a real chord with me. I'm a big "facts guy" and every week at our local pub trivia my friends will be astounded by the answers that I pull out of my rear end. And every week I feel obligated to say "I'm not smart - I've just memorized a bunch of facts that don't add up to anything."
I spent this whole video waiting for a SkillShare ad to pop up, but to my surprise, it never did! I'm shook.
This was great. I do think the answer will be “some of all of these”, though I’d say I’m probably more of a facts guy.
I do have a peeve about the canard “Why learn (algebra/Shakespeare/the Indian Wars)? When am I ever going to use that.” Well, ok, but if you go down that route too far, you may find you don’t really know anything.
I watch your videos because you reflect on the way you think and see the world. You posit many questions as well as giving answers. You are thoughtful without being pretentious. I’m glad RUclips has been a success for you. Everyone thinks differently and learns in different ways. Trying to standardize the learning process is invariably flawed for someone in some way. Thanks for your work.
Here here!
I tend to think we don’t focus enough on skills, especially in universities. For example my art degree was not big on teaching actual painting skills, but more into discussing why someone had painted what they had. I think facts are also useful and should be the next focus, and then ideas and philosophy build on those two things.
History of art degree?
I am from eastern europe, where education is still very fact-focused, and I had the opportunity to spend a year in the US. I have to say, the skill-based approach that was popular there clicked a hell od a lot better for me.
I think it’s important to balance the 3; as ideas form a basis to create facts and facts can be used to improve skills.
I'm fascinated by the areas of which all of these things overlap. I am an instructional designer by trade so I mostly focus on teaching skills, but I think for some people: learning history can inform philosophy and open some doors for other things too.
I bought the book you held on screen at 13:09 shortly after you made your first video about E.D. Hirsch's ideas. I was an education major at the time and I thought it was especially important to me then. I still think it's important now that I'm just a history major. It's a good book
Really excellent piece of content that helps give context to modern day debates about education. I myself am plenty guilty of consuming edutainment content that I am already like (mostly history, geopolitics and current events). and the personal benefit of this has it's limits. Sometimes I wish I was better at handyman stuff so I could make more money.
I love these types of videos from you, JJ! It was the insights into different countries and flags that brought me here, but I was surprised by how much variety this channel offered, and how it has influenced my life in different areas. Thank you so much!
That’s so awesome to hear 😊
As an Italian, I found watching this video very interesting. Here we have a very “strict” public education system: we can choose when we finish middle school (when we are 13/14) among a series of different high schools that focus on a certain topic (classical antiquity, science, human studies, languages ecc), but also more pratical schools that focus on things like cooking, hosting or navigation. This, however, is our only chance to make a choice (the subjects you study in these schools are always the same and the only thing that changes is the general focus and a small number of predefined courses) Our system is very focused on studying facts and to some extent the ideas that come from a series of great books, and we can’t really choose what kind of subject we want to study. Here knowledge and culture are seen as something fixated you have to aspire to and not as skills you build throughout your life. This results in a general distrust against education by a large number of italians who were failed by a system that praises you if you conform to it but completly abandons you if you don’t fit in that general standand of knowledge.
Thanks so much! You’re always working hard to give us educational content
In defense of some fact based learning at least in the early stages of one’s education, I think it’s an important foundation to be able to build upon in later years. It’s well known that if you have no idea about a topic, starting learning on that topic is difficult, bordering on impossible. So as adults, we are more likely to stay away from it and remain illiterate to that topic. However, if a well-rounded early fact based education is in place, it opens the door to adult learning more easily on any topic.
Coming from an "education is for employment" specifically from a science perspective. One of my friends works for at a government biology lab and they will no longer accept co-op students from UBC because post COVID they have dropped lab requirements for the first 2 years of the biology program; SFU still has those requirements, so they will still accept their co-op students. So according to one hiring manager, not enough skills are being taught.
My own experience (I am a chemist) is that I was taught a lot of theories that only work in idealized settings and wasn't prepared for real world applications. My most useful learning moments mostly occurred in high school where I was given open-ended projects and was allowed to develop problem solving skills.
That is interesting to hear, because I think those of us with an art background tend to think that everything that happens in the science department is very practical and skills focused.
Another meta education video! Maybe one day these will take their place alongside American Cultural Canon videos as a pillar of your channel.
I think these are really interesting videos for the channel. Would love more.
I’m an ideas and facts guy, and for years on RUclips that’s all I learned, history and philosophy videos. Then I realized I was kind of a helpless man; there’s a lot of things I couldn’t do that I’d like to do. I’m getting a summer job at an auto shop so I’m going to learn how to fix cars and check things I didn’t know existed (legit didn’t know how to check my oil previously). I’m also going to take a carpentry course and have been becoming conversational in two languages (one I was studying in school, but had never taken seriously before. Now I am and have progressed a lot. The other is definitely a work in progress)
I think becoming balanced and recognizing the things we focus less on can make a big difference.
Did you seriously get buckly to do a narration for you?
Two of the best Canadians in one video?
This is the greatest video in the history of youtube.
I just heard Buckley's voice like "I need to see if I heard what I just heard"
@derickmarin223 I guess even if they didn't agree on certain topics, mainly when it came to Canadian programs, they could still be civil and collab together.
as an individual, im an ideas guy, but as a teacher im a skills guy. the key with skills though, is that you need ideas and facts in order to learn most skills
I find it funny that this video came up while I am in the midst of reading Adler’s book “How to Read a Book” while sitting in my basement surrounded by Adler’s Great Books collection which was my grandpa’s
I'm a sucker for ideas, and then facts, but my actual educational pursuits are almost entirely skill based.
Great work! A well communicated and descriptional educational video! I love this style of video from you, JJ
Skills based is probably the most important to me. I think it's incredibly important to have the other two and I still practice all 3 long after high school but I think application of skills is actually the most impactful to daily life. You could be clueless about Descartes but if you don't know how to file taxes, fix minor mechanical problems, balance a budget, or cook something you're screwed. Obviously you can pay other people to do it like with anything but things like that can genuinely save you time and money which is all we got at the end of the day.
I would honestly say all three approaches of education are interconnected in many ways.
Thank you for being the best, JJ!
You're amazing JJ! I hope you're safe and well, thanks for your work 🖖
Cool video! Wasn't expecting Buckley to read the quote about ideas.
Another banger video, J.J! I like both fact-based and ideas-based learning, though I know life skills are equally important. Your channel offers a bit of both via the cultural literacy videos and political ones, so I like that. I should probably be watching more skills-based content...but I usually only seek those out when I need to know how to do some particular thing. 😄 Thanks so much!😊✌️
That was SO interesting. I feel so lacking in the historical basis of so many areas of knowledge. I find your videos always teach me something very relevant and informative. Thank you.
The greatest achievement of the Great Books series was the Syntopicon. It's a two volume set containing a summary of the whole. For each of the 102 "Great Topics", you'll find several pages summarizing the writers, a page listing subtopics to investigate, then several more pages of indexes telling you where to find what the authors said on each subtopic. It gives you a powerful method to interrogate the texts at whatever level of detail you choose. Adler was Editor in Chief, but the Committee of Consultants was broad, including such luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Stephen Jay Gould, and William F Buckley himself. Nor was the committee entirely white, with Buddhist philospher Hajime Nakamura of Japan, and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz of Mexico.
It's too bad NOET is no longer available but John Trekker has been working on an open source digital version that can pull quotes with his Mortimer client. One could have looked up the Great Idea (of the Western World) of Education. Hopefully chatGPT and LLM's can be designed to emulate the Syntopicon digitally and won't hallucinate about the subject.
I sat down on the bus and pulled up this video as my designated bus ride listen, and when i looked at the dude sitting next to me, he was ALSO watching this video on phone!
I was part of a zoom-based great books seminar program that recently went defunct. We followed Adler's ideals very closely as laid out in How to Read a Book, focusing on critically engaging with the ideas with the 3 questions: what is the author saying, is it true, and if so, what of it. It's telling that these groups tend to fizzle out rather than grow. It's hard, and requires people to already be sympathetic to Adler's list and ideals. While I still value and agree with much of what Adler laid out in the book, you simply can't force someone to engage with a text that way, they'd have to be convinced that it was worthwhile first. A lot of people also felt lost without knowing the context of the writers (starting with the Iliad made it particularly hard as the book starts at the end of a long war, and the background is never revealed in the text itself. That's why I'd say the progress of education should go from the fact-based method. Even the great ideas could be covered in this way, to prepare the way for active engagement with the text of the great thinkers. Then, those who are willing would be prepared to move on to the great books project.
Thanks for this, JJ. This is a very stimulating set of ideas. I have had to try and build an intellectual life that at different times has emphasized different areas of learning: facts, skills and Ideas.
I made a presentation for school based on this video. I truly believe this to be one of your masterpieces.
You are very kind. I wish it had more views
My philosophy is two fold:
A) Learning how to learn, anything can be practiced and understood; internalizing the methods of aquiring and understanding new information is really important to gaining new skills, the core skill in learning i see most lacking in people is the understanding that failure is part of the process and the more you fail, the more attempts you have made, and the more you will learn.
B) Learning is a collective experience, if you don't know something. Then it us absolutely practical to ask your friends, they may even help you understand certain topics better and you intern will help them with other topics. "Weaponizing inherent human tribalism" for education purposes is lack as a "brain hacking tool"
My education, and my viewing on RUclips, encompassed/encompasses all aspects of which you speak in this video.
This was very eye-opening. I've experienced all three types of education and none of them really felt right. Parents should definitely be able to teach their kids about the world too, but they're often not educated themselves.
7:49
Much appreciated surprise Buckley cameo. One of the first youtubers I got heavily invested in about 11 years ago. Time flies.
I want education in all three--facts, ideas, and skills. It flies in the face of the desire to be well-rounded to want otherwise.
Love the vids JJ
Ah! J.J! I cannot even begin to tell you just how much I love your content! Keep it up! Your fellow Canadian Friend!! (New Brunswick) 🍁🦫🏒🍁
Such a fun thing to hear Buckley on your channel. 2 GOAT Canadian RUclipsrs imho
I have always heard that going to university for a bachelor's (undergrad) teaches a new way to think. I feel like this is the transition into more ideas thinking, while lots of primary and secondary education is facts and skills. This kind of tracks with what you are saying while still conceding that all three are important to a "well rounded" education.
I'm partal to the last one. Not only dose it have the virtue that we can more easily talk to one another. It also protects you form otherwise persuasive retoric to know at least a little about a lot.
I much rather enjoy watching videos about stories, people, places and facts but think that practical skills are most important although sometimes a little boring to learn about.
Pedagogical analysis JJ is my favourite JJ
This one of my favorite videos you’ve made. The philosophy of education is so intresting.
Thanks so much! I like it too!
I love the content man.
I have found that the more you are taught "how" to learn and assess things the more adaptable you become and the wider array of things you can understand inherently - without need for exterior input/guidance.
Teach someone the mechanics of learning and they can then apply those mechanics in whatever way they want that benefits them. The downside of self-directed learning though is getting really niche in your view of things/the world. It can leave you susceptible to echo chambers or confirmation bias.
It would be great to teach children how to learn. THEN teach them a vast array of things and see where they are drawn. If they prefer one category, perhaps there would be a curriculum catered to that personality type. We, with age, would need to put guard rails in place a bit to ensure the base level of learning/awareness were done. But even those topics taught from the vantage of the person's desired learning and showing them the "why" of it mattering to them is crucial to retaining attention.
Seth Godin in a Finland talk mentions that school isn't to learn. It is to teach enough that people come out compliant and able to do the basics. He also points out the lack of leaders in the world vs managers. I buy into that view, though couldn't put it that succinct definition before his insight.
What my dream world is - we get the best teachers in each topic. Have a competition. See who is the most riveting by vote. Those teachers create a curriculum and teach it virtually. There would be categories by age/grade. Then the curriculum is delivered virtually, with hands-on instructions for in-person teachers to facilitate.
During the pandemic, I wondered why nothing large provincially moved in this direction. I.E: top teachers do riveting talks, normal teacher handles the breakout room and side chat questions.
People like yourself who give a palatable awareness of the world beyond our current view - perfect! This content could be used as a component. We just need to isolate whether studying a book for 50 years and just coming to a better understanding is worth the average person's time. You can try to understand humanity at a distance if you are drawn there. But most people expect you to get a social contemporary reference.
So a blend, but varying in how it is applied custom to the child. Imagine how many leaders and world changers were stifled in their pursuit of true understanding and eventual potential...
I am an intelligent person (not just my account lol), and I loved math in school. I had a teacher (Gr9 advanced) who destroyed my love of it due to forcing me to learn it his way even though I understood it another way it had been taught. That was my first 69% (even near to it). Next year I got a 51% as I had missed a crucial building block year under a different method, and couldn't reconcile the gap. I stopped math.
The point is, forcing minds to learn only works if there is a proper motivation. Finding out what motivates an individual rather than a group can be a lot more advantageous for individuals and society.
Great content JJ.
I never thought about facts as a way to more effectively communicate with other people. Very interesting!
That’s why some encyclopedias like the German Brockhaus were marketed as a ‘conversation lexicon’ in the olden days
I think that I switch between these sets of knowledge from time to time. Sometimes I am interested in philosophical discussions, sometimes I just want to know exactly how something is done or works, and sometimes I like to learn simple facts that may or may not benefit me. It's hard to tell which of these I lean towards the most, but I'm sure it is a function of my current goals and moods. My college had "general" education classes on generally applicable broad topics, i.e., English prose, various sciences, American institutions, humanities, "quantitative literacy" like calculus, and creative arts. They justified this by claiming that it would help us broaden our horizons and make us into "lifelong learners", so we would gain an interest in learning beyond school. I guess the idea is that if we keep learning on our own, we can better adapt to the challenges life throws at us.
I'd like to wonder on where I fall on this scale, when near all of my content viewed is scientific, space, biology, paleontology, or archaeology focused, of which I am attempting to start a career in... And yet, still I view and love this channel, and others that talk on the more social subjects as a whole.
Having Buckley in the video is a wild crossover
JJ uploads? You know its a good day 👍
Love the Buckley cameo!!!
I was surprised to hear the voice of another great Canadian RUclipsr in this video!
Loving the bomber jacket man! Cool stuff!
I think learning a new language is a good analogy for how education in general should work. First you focus on learning a lot of words (facts) that you must learn how to say and put into sentences (skills), so that you can eventually start communicating your thoughts and engage in complex communication with others to actually achieve things (ideas). You will get nowhere if the first thing you try to do to learn a new language is to read a book in that language or to try to write a speech in that language.... since you don't know either what words to use or how to use them.
Having said that, you do a little bit of all three from the very beginning, and you never stop doing any of them. It's just that the focus changes somewhat throughout your learning journey. That's why I don't think it makes much sense to talk about these as philosophies for a "good education" in general- it really depends a lot on the level of education of the students, and on the specific subject you're talking about. When dealing with students who know almost nothing about the subject (such as teaching little kids about almost anything), you first have to focus on doing a fact dump. To more advanced students, you teach them how those facts relate to each other and to their lives so that they can start using them in simple ways, and for the most advanced students you teach them how to think about those facts in more complicated and abstract ways.
I love all 3. Can't choose, but I'd say it all should culminate into the capacity to form and correctly understand metaphor.
I'm a mix of a facts and ideas person. I want to learn about the fields that interest me in a way that feels motivated. Like, I'm not just learning a list of facts but also know why the field is the way it is, why these are the important facts and how I might have discovered them. This is best seen in math and philosophy where you can go very far with just some definitions. Other fields like history seem closer to a laundry list but stuff like historical methods asks me to think about how we should do history without necessarily having to know the whole field. I've seen friends describe this sort of approach through Dewey's lens, so maybe you could also say I'm a mix of all three approaches. When it comes to other people, something like Dewey's approach mixed in with specialisation sounds nice. I'm speaking here about high school and above. If you're not at all interested in literature or most philosophy, you should have the option to not learn about those things. There are some fields that basically everyone has to know, though, e.g. some math, ethics, civics, econ, etc., so that democracy can function well.
As you stated, we need all three and need find the right balance. I also see it as a road map though. Facts act as a basis, a common understanding we can pull from and apply as we move to the skills phase, learning new things and able to rely upon facts while discovering new ones for ourselves along the way. This is what creates the 'love of learning stage' and allows us to share our discoveries and have them challenged or accepted. Then we go to the ideas phase, where we can apply our facts and methodology to formulate greater ideas that can challenge some commonly held facts or skills. It seems a little backwards, but it creates a feedback loop where they all feed on one another to create a more holistic education.
hey JJ, great video as always. I do however, feel that you should venture into the terrain of teaching us practical skills as well particularly on how to do proper independent research and form arguments .
Great video JJ
When you were introducing the three philosophies, asking us if we preferred such and such, I said yes to all 3! And I believe my RUclips watching reflects that. I watch travel story channels, channels that discuss atheism and the ethics of veganism, and also on my subscription list are a few vegan chefs, for just a few examples.
One of the schools of thought that I feel is equally as predominant as the three you outlined is that education is our way of supporting the social and cultural development of youth. It's the time with caring adults and peers that helps the child develop, regardless of the specific content of the lesson. A good education is one that simulates that dynamics of the society that that child will operate in, at a pace that supports development.
I am a middle school Math teacher. Facts are often used as hooks to get students engaged in thinking about the bigger ideas. There is sort of a continuum from discreet facts to thoughtful reasoning. On the other hand, the subject itself offers specific methodologies on how to solve types of problems.
But at the end of the day, kids remember and talk about how they felt in my class far more then the specific facts, ideas, or methods.
I like to think of this as an ideas channel! 💖
I didn't expect to hear Buckley do voice over in this vdeo
As a 22 year old JJ raised my critical thinking abilities!