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I’m going to do a write up of how I think education curriculum should be reformed. For context: I went through highschool in Ontario, Canada. The way it worked was from kindergarten to grade 8, we’d have a set curriculum every kid in the grade followed, with lots of english and math classes, some science classes, history, geography, French, and gym, and one each of art, music, and health classes a week. Then starting in grade 9, which is highschool, we are given two elective choices, where we choose a minimum of one between art, drama, and music, and the second may also be a general technology course or a general business course. Each year of high school there are more electives choices offered and fewer mandatory courses, with the priorities of what the school system requires us take being the same as elementary school. There were also choices between more difficult and easier options for some classes like math, english, and science as well. Universities and colleges would also require higher level math and sciences for STEM programs too, and there is a standardised literacy test needed to graduate.
I think a lot of people when talking about school want to just add more requirements without thinking about what to cut. It’s very easy to say “all kids should learn to program” or “all kids should have PE every day”, but if you’re adding you either have to keep kids there longer, or cut something. First, I think the elementary school program is basically good, I wouldn’t change anything there. Maybe take a little of time out of science and add it to more PE.
For highschool, I would start more drastically reworking it. First, I would basically replace English with history in the mandatory curriculum for everyone who is literate. Learning about Shakespeare and studying themes in classic novels, while not completely useless, is less useful than learning about real historical events. You gain the same “critical thinking” skills analysing what motivated the people in WWI to conflict as you do analysing what motivated the people in Hamlet to conflict, plus it actually happened, giving it substantially more value. The same english classes will be kept as optional electives, like how history is optional in higher grades now. Science will only be mandatory in grade 9, and computer science will be mandatory in grade 10.
Gym class will be mandatory every year. There is a crisis in how unfit people are today. I recently joined the military. They have drastically reduced requirements, shortening basic training from 13 weeks to 8 weeks, and the weighted march from 13km to 5km. Because people weren’t fit enough to pass. A great many jobs, even today, still require physical fitness, and gym class offers more professional preparement than just about any other possible class other basic literacy. On top of that, being healthy is just healthy, and that’s good for every single person.
There will be extra emphasis on making sure every single person who graduates is literate and numerate. I wouldn’t really require anything else to hand out a highschool diploma, but if they can’t do basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, they don’t get the diploma. They’re stuck in adult night classes until they can or they give up. Ontario high schools also require 40 hours of volunteer community service which I like and anywhere else that doesn’t have that should implement it.
It might be a good idea to have a class on how to get the most out of AI too because it’s looking like that’s becoming an ever more important skill, but it’s changing so fast I don’t know.
It is a bit interesting to me that very, very few educational reform proposals I hear ever mention that we should be teaching and implementing epistemics as a core, fundamental aspect of any well-rounded curriculum. It seems almost self-evident and yet...
It's cliche to say that "education should be about teaching you how to think, not what to think," but I think that's actually a pretty decent goal. I'm not say you completely excise the 'rote memorization' aspects, but perhaps also provide the tools that make that rote memorization useful.
Seriously. Shouldn't we be able to at least ensure that someone who graduates high school has the ability to consider the truth-value of a statement and at least weigh whether they should incorporate the statement into their beliefs about the world or not? That they're able to make predictions based on limited evidence and reject falsehoods when there are actual consequences on the line.
And working off the assumption that not many students will be capable of autistically applying Bayes' Theorem to every new piece of evidence they encounter, it would still be pretty useful to teach the variety of heuristics that have a proven track record and teach the more blatant fallacies to avoid, and provide them with ample opportunities to learn in a controlled environment how to detect when people are lying or when the evidence isn't strong enough to support the purported conclusions, and to notice when someone is just trying to manipulate them.
Epistemics is like the ONE truly useful branch of philosophy, so it seems like making students slog through Ethical, Political, and Aesthetic philosophers without addressing the foundations of knowledge is a backwards approach to 'classical' education.
I say all this already knowing that even if we taught all students how to ascertain truth, the real lesson of high school is how to navigate complex social environments and to identify where you are situated in the hierarchy and, from that, what beliefs you need to adopt and which signals you need to send in order to maintain or improve your status.
And that's a core of human psychology that has been engrained into us over millions of years, so any lessons about how to think better will, in most cases, be suborned to the innate need to fit in with and protect the tribe.
So it's not like I expect teaching epistemics to produce a generation of enlightened thinkers, it just seems like its a bare minimum that ought to be done to ensure education isn't merely brainwashing/propagandizing with some math and science tacked on.
(Yes, I know that from the perspective of the state and ideological actors, the brainwashing is in fact that point)
Something that has always ticked me off about the medical curriculum, and which is likely a global problem, is that while doctors are occasionally trained to consider potential applications of Bayesian reasoning, we're not taught it explicitly.
So we're told, "if you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras" in the context of always considering the most common potential causes for a presentation, or confronted with questions like X disease has a prevalence of Y%, test A has a sensitivity B and specificity C, given a positive test result, what are the odds that the person testing positive actually has the disease and so on.
But the generalized thought process? Not a fucking peep.
And there's no reason that people should even enter med school without knowing Bayes' theorem, the math isn't even complicated.
One thing I like about this particular aphorism is that there's a meta lesson. "Think Horses, not Zebras... unless you happen to be in a location where Zebras are more common." If you happen to be in Eastern Africa, for instance.
Because I think physicians are pretty good at applying the basic "its usually the simplest, common explanation, don't overthink it" logic but then apply it to everything and outright dismiss explanations that are more esoteric.
There's also the risk-aversion that comes when you can be sued for malpractice if you do anything other than give the most common and accepted advice.
Another reason to teach explicit Bayesianism, because that takeaway comes with it!
Plenty of tests reveal the equivalent of a news reel going "authorities report an escape of 22 zebras from the local zoo after the paddock was left open", or your neighbor swearing some of those ill-tempered horses had stripes on them.
Malpractice claims are still thankfully a rarety in India, but I suppose you can still mitigate most of the risk by providing both the "recommended" advice as well as your particular suggestions and leave it to the patient to choose, assuming you document this well. There's nothing much stopping a pissed-off patient litigating against you really, not if they want to.
I do suspect that most US doctors are more risk-averse than necessary, but teaching them Bayesianism would help them figure out the optimal course of action for their particular risk tolerance.
Exactly.
I hear a lot of accounts on twitter of people who WANT their doctors to start giving them some of the more out-there suggestions for therapies or drugs or procedures that could fix [problem] but get frustrated because they have to navigate the standard process first and most doctors won't deviate from the script much, even when asked nicely. Some people resort to homebrews out of frustration, even.
It shouldn't be difficult for intelligent risk-seekers to hook up with intelligent doctors who understand risk and to mutually agree to try out more radical options, with some safety precautions in place.
The FDA is at least part of the problem, granted.
One of the under-appreciated perks of being a doctor is that, when you go see a doctor, they're far more likely to indulge such concerns.
For example, UK guidelines for contraception, which are also used in India, mildly frown on using IUDs in nulliparous women who want a family down the line. Yet when my girl and I went to see a gyno, we were able to convince her to approve and insert one, since I could convincingly argue that despite it being UKMEC 2 (meaning it works, doesn't do any harm, but is ~overall held to not be the best choice for that demographic, which would be UKMEC 1 like OCPs or implants), we know what we were getting into. Or various psychiatric consults I've had to do myself.
I'm sure the same is true for lawyers consulting lawyers in other niches, or mechanics seeing mechanics and so on. You get a sense of palpable relief from knowing that you don't have to rehash the basics.
Sadly short of having a medical degree or experience in an allied field, there are few signals, costly or otherwise, that declare the same thing to a doctor who has to also consider the deficit in both knowledge and common sense in the average patient. I certainly wish it were otherwise, or that there was something like a short questionnaire or form you could fill out to declare yourself the equivalent of a sophisticated investor in medicine, who is willing to step outside the norm without crying about it later if it fails.
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