Students think the College Board is running a Reddit sting
If you think abstractly about pedagogy as a social science, it&#x27;s very obvious from seeing how much education is struggling with cheating that the field has had zero progress in the past century. We need to stop conflating social development, socialized childcare, and education systems.<p>Here&#x27;s my shitlist:<p>* Children should attempt hard problems that they can make progress on, but probably cannot solve. It is wrong that schools give nearly zero exposure to truly hard problems, and plenty of exposure to trivilally solvable problems. And no, making them tease out the meaning of a word-problem doesn&#x27;t qualify as difficulty. I mean give them a problem that makes them find a wikipedia page and learn on their own.<p>* Computers are here to stay. I remember when I was little, I was told that I wouldn&#x27;t always have a calculator on me. That is 
demonstrably false, I literally do not go anywhere without a computer in my pocket. Furthermore, that computer has a WolframAlpha app that can interface with server clusters running the most advanced computer algebra systems in existence. Why did I learn stoichiometry? <i>There is something deeply wrong with education if students could easily pass an AP Physics exam with access to WolframAlpha, and will (probably) have access to WolframAlpha in every practical application of their AP physics education, but are artificially prevented from having access during the exam.</i> Why don&#x27;t the tests correspond to real-world application of the subject? Oh, it&#x27;s more convenient for you to evaluate it this way? That&#x27;s tough shit, figure it out.<p>* Students should have an entire day dedicated to math, and then they should have an entire day dedicated to English, etc. Some students might get bored and tired, sure, because sometimes learning isn&#x27;t pleasant. But over and over on this site we hear that successful developers are the people who are able to maintain focus for long periods of time on difficult problems. Why do students waste 35 minutes a day switching classrooms?<p>* There is not enough differentiation of students. Advanced students have so much of their time wasted. The advanced 3rd graders should be hanging out with advanced 6th graders.<p>The way that the education system is collapsing from cheating and going online-only is nothing short of exciting to me. A lot had to go wrong for us to get to this point -- answer banks exist because everyone uses the same textbook and the same curriculum. Cheating with other students exists because group-work is the natural state of humans. Students aren&#x27;t excited about the work they do because they sense that there&#x27;s a magical oracle on the internet with the solution to the simple problems they&#x27;re solving.<p>It&#x27;s all going to fall apart and that&#x27;s something to celebrate. The thing that I&#x27;m most afraid of is that Americans have lost the ability to take risks at aggregate and think radically about redesigning institutions. All of these problems that I&#x27;m talking about are just as bad in every other country in the world. Some country is going to figure it out and they&#x27;re going to reap the rewards, and I&#x27;m afraid that America isn&#x27;t brave enough anymore to be the first.