» Rebuttal to the Alpha School review defending the existing educational system

Navi Kabra:

Today, the opposition gets a chance. Here’s an article that could be seen as a rebuttal¹ to the Alpha School review, which essentially argues that all these exciting new experimental schools are bound to fail because they fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of schools.

I think this article has some significant flaws, rambles a bit in the middle, and seems a little contradictory in a few places, but it does make a bunch of good points. So here are some interesting excerpts.

The primary point the review makes is this:

In the same way that democracy is the worst form of government ever invented except for all the others, conventional school is the worst form of motivating students to learn except for all the others.

On to the main points of the argument. First, schools aren’t primarily for learning:

What do schools do? Your first thought might be that schools exist to maximize learning. Observing 100 random classrooms may disabuse you of that notion. It sure doesn’t seem like school is doing a good job of maximizing learning. So what are schools doing?

So what are schools for, then?

School isn’t designed to maximize learning. School is designed to maximize motivation.

This might seem like a silly thing to say. During those 100 classroom visits you might have seen a lot of classrooms with a lot of students who don’t look very motivated. The core design of our schools – age-graded classrooms where all students are expected to learn more or less the same curriculum – are the worst form of motivation we could invent…except for all the others. While school is not particularly effective at motivating students, every other approach we’ve tried manages to be worse. School is a giant bundle of compromises, and many things that you might intuitively think would work better simply don’t.

The important thing to remember is that, when I talk about school, I’m talking about tens of millions of students and a few million teachers in the US. You might say to yourself, “I wasn’t very motivated in school.” Sure, I believe you. The goal isn’t to motivate you, it’s to motivate as many students as possible, and to do it at scale. If you have a boutique solution that works for your kid in your living room, that’s nice, but that isn’t likely to scale to the size at which we ask our education system to operate.

While we all complain about how bad schools are, we can pretty much all agree that school does make some difference:

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