When it comes to education, the majority of parents think the school has 80% responsibility and the parents have 20%. This is sort of written into our social contract with the state.
But in my opinion (and people are free to disagree) the parents have 80% and the school has 20% responsibility when it comes to a child's education. The main benefit of school is social adjustment and social grounding.
My kids (13, 14) do their schoolwork and also have approx 8 hours of online 1v1 tutoring per week, typically one hour per evening and a Saturday morning session (both play for football teams, two night training and a weekend game, I find there is plenty of time to do stuff).
I don't follow the national curriculum for this tutoring. Standardised test results are Fool's Gold.
Usually I set up a 6 - 9 month block for a topic and we pick things like Singapore maths, python, AWS certificates, a language, architectural drawing.
I had a Microsoft SysAdmin teach my 14 year old python.
I had a teacher from Hwa Chong Institute teach my kids math.
Anything they express any kind of interest in, we just lean right into that. I think I've definitely had the most value when following / rewarding their curiosity. If the whole thing is a bit alien to you then do it yourself in the beginning, pick something you want to learn about and then hire an online tutor to teach you the skill. Try and learn some next level maths or an entry level coding language, or whatever you're interested in.
I will go and scout the internet for someone who is already in that space to do some 1v1 tutoring. Sweet spot is typically a young professional in their mid / late 20's who is likely underpaid at the coalface and is saving for first house, someone who still has a fresh memory of school. "Hey my kid is interested in this space? Would you mentor them 1 hour per week after dinner on a Tuesday? I'll pay you."
£25/hr on the international market, gets you excellent people (maybe £1,000/yr per topic). Maybe £5 - 10k a year for the whole budget, if you are considering public school and the fees are the main concern I would 100% recommend this path instead. It's a bit of work for you to manage their calendar and recruit folks, but these are either skills you already have or should probably practice.
In my mind, classrooms are 19th century social constructs and are really obsolete for their original purpose of education, they remain a good vehicle for the authorities to undertake social engineering, and for kids to socially adjust to groups and teams. But then again team sports are much better vehicles for learning teamwork than classrooms. Classrooms are useful for primary school, where it's mostly free daycare and social learning and classrooms are also valuable once you get to university and the people in the room have been filtered for interests and capability. But the part in the middle where teenagers are compelled to do things they have no real interest in, honestly it's just a huge waste of everyone's time. It's a system that rewards cognitive obedience and kills curiosity stone dead.
I think secondary schools, as a model, are probably a net negative in terms of socioeconomic value, they just generate a bland human soup of resource, as an employer for difficult things I find it deeply irritating that we put teenagers through this. I think what we are really missing is genuine diversity of models for developing people. The standardised everything education is meh. It is gamed to the point that the qualifications are actually worthless to hiring managers.
My experience of secondary school was that I learnt very little for 4 years, it was nowhere near challenging enough and spent most of my time playing sports and strategy video games and socialising and still walked away with top marks.
Tertiary education is better, but has too much filler. It acts more like a class filter than a value adding system. Listen to the job market, we need more people studying medicine, science and engineering and a lot fewer people studying humanities. Sorry, but we all know it's true.
I think we should take Oxbridge, put it online and export it as a service whilst in the opposite direction we should recruit young upward professionals from all around the world to mentor our early/middle teens 1v1.
I think this could be a centrepiece for creating a competitive strategic advantage for UK PLC and making the UK a global epicentre of human capital and soft power. But I doubt it would work as a public service. Probably doesn't scale beyond 20,000 kids before your drop off the cliff in terms of quality of tutors.
If you want your kids to offer extremely high value add in the 21st century, is paying a high fee for a stuffy Victorian education model really much of an investment? As someone who has hired dozens of phd folk for very difficult jobs, I would argue no. Public school might get your kids above the water line of the iceberg, but they are still stranded and adrift in the 21st century. Get them off the iceberg, it's going to melt they are going to drown.
Thank you. This article touched on a topic really dear to me. I am a child of Russian Mathematics Academics but I grew up and went to a state funded grammar school in Manchester. My Farther is mathematician at the University of Manchester, he was one of the people you contacted when you tried to set up Russian style maths schools. I believe he even helped to draft a program for the school. You may recall the names: Dr Theodore Voronov, Prof.Alexandre Borovik, Prof Andrei Voronkov and Dr Hovhannes Khudaverdian.
Along side my regular department of education curriculum. I experienced the Russian tradition of Super Curricular Circles as My parents and many other Russian exPats set up a Saturday "Russian School". We had lessons in mathematics, Physics, biology, Russian and Art taught by the parents who were experts in those subjects. So I am in a unique position to compare both:
Unlike my farther, I am not particularly Mathematically gifted yet thanks to the Russian maths lessons I was able to keep up with the UK curriculum with ease. In Year 4 I was already working with Long division, multiplication tables, decimals. By the time I was in year 6 I was comfortable with algebra.
The UK system depends so much on Rote learning. Rote learning can be a useful tool but only if the idea that is drilled in is understood by the pupils. The classic example is the times table. In Russia it is still learn of by heart from a young age.
But what Russian maths taught me in comparison to UK is how to think threw problems. The best example is geometry. I started to learn geometry axioms at 12 in Russian school beginning with pythagorus . Our homework was to use the axioms to come up with basic proofs ourselves. It was tough at the time but when I figured them out for myself I learned them forever because they were my proofs.
I was staggered that at GCSE maths we were given the proofs the learn BY ROTE!! A great big sheet was handed out and we were told to learn them for the test. Bear in mind this was at a grammar school which is rated outstanding and supposedly specialises in science. How is that useful for the students.
Again, I want to emphasise that I was not mathematically gifted but I was able to achieve these things because Russian Maths pushed and challenged me in interesting ways. Solving proofs myself was engaging and fulfilling.
My father despaired when the Russian style maths schools that you were working on were blocked. They are not elitist quite the opposite: children who were taught maths from primary school age like me did not need much extra help to pass the 11plus maths. With the current UK curriculum children need rich parents with lots of tutoring to even attempt it.
P.s. In my personal biased opinion the way History is taught in England is even worse than maths. I personally have tutored GCSE and A level History for a few years and despaired at the state is is in. Jumping from topic to topic, century to century (ww1, Tudors, ect) is horrible for children. All historical context is missing. The most popular GCSE history topic is Germany 1918-1945 but how can you even teach that if a lot of the students never learned about ww1? 80% of my students did not know what Prussia was!
Madness. Worse still, I am not sure what to do about it.
I have a plan to sideline the school education system - make it all irrelevant - for which I'm trying to get traction. I've been corresponding with Tyler Cowen about it - it's partly Bryan Caplan influenced. Tyler thought it was a good plan but that I needed better allies over here. I come from a sink school where my lazy teachers blocked me from applying to Oxbridge, but ended up a Cambridge fellow by 25 anyway. Not many people have the luck to get through the system so as to see if from both sides and understand what is and isn't needed to fix the problems - as shown by the terrible design and predictable, measurable failure of schemes like Uni Connect from the OfS.
I just got my super-bright home schooled kid through A levels at 16. They're a disaster, with mark schemes that now penalise the exceptionally smart in favour of helping posh midwits get A*s. The only exam prep I could think to give my child was to regularly hit her over the head with a rock. We have to make the whole thing irrelevant, and I have a cheap and quick way of doing so.
I would love to pick your brains about this. Could I send you what I sent Tyler?
I know you'll like my plan, I know it's a game-changer, and that your advice would really help it work, so I'm going to shamelessly persist in trying to get your attention.
Also I did have one REALLY good maths teacher who had been an MD at JP Morgan etc, then retired with bucket loads of money. Had enough money not to care what the head of department, head teacher, governors etc said and basically just told them all to fuck off and did it how he wanted to. He got the best grades in the school every year and was everyone's favourite teacher by a mile. Used to sit with him at lunch/break/after school everyday and quiz him on finance, investment, maths, life and he would answer every question and tell me all sorts of stories, most of which any other teacher would have been fired for telling because they were actually informative but they couldn't fire him because he couldn't be financially threatened and they couldn't risk losing the average raising grades he got.
Brigid, I would be interested to hear more about this. I have similar aims. Was academically gifted and wanted to do Oxford PPE but dropped out of A-Level because I was disillusioned with the system and hadn't got in to Oxford because the digital entrance exam didn't work (never got to do an exam) and no one from my state school did anything for me to get an exam. Never got an interview, no one cared except me. I said I wanted to handle it, pressure oxford myself, teachers said they had to handle it but did nothing. Couldn't understand why I was CRITICISED by teachers for "wasting time" reading more interesting things and basically for being too ambitious. Anyway, with no A-Levels I now advise a science foundation, an Ambassador and a bunch of corporates. Am "successful" by most useless measures of success. Clearly it was a sham, I just spent my whole time reading what I wanted when I was at school and started working for in a start-up office when I was 13, interned for people after school, got the train to London. Didn't have any nepotism but learnt how to reach out to people and get them meet/talk with me, develop mentor relationships. That was a much more useful education, reading what I wanted + working where I wanted at 13-18 + finding my own mentors. Shaped my views strongly.
Hi - I'm really keen to build a network of interested people - in my experience folk who have hacked the school system are *very motivated to help others do the same. And this is a strength. Part of my idea is to build an "old boys'" (and girls) network of mentors and connections based on shared experience of being a smart kid in a crap school. It's a uniquely isolating experience, and it's really hard to get over the feeling that you can't expect anyone to help you out.
I also had the one good teacher - maths (stats). Changed the way I see the world. Maths is the one subject it's hard to master with no good teaching. The rest can be figured out by smart kids for themselves - but getting into university on the strength of that real grasp of a subject is another matter. School was essentially invented for a situation where most people didn't have access to books. The internet makes a lot of it redundant once literacy and numeracy are sorted. Universities know school qualifications are useless - the first years of uni are about un-teaching all the habits of anti-learning drilled into kids for school exams.
Interestingly my educational ideology is distinctly anti-internet, anti-digital. Which is counter to most common sense thinking on progressive educational models. I put this in part down to my personal aim. I'm uninterested in building a scalable educational solution. That's not a critique of those who aim otherwise but I would rather build one incredible school than try solve a mass problem. Eton is a prime example, Eton being done the way it was done has created 20 prime ministers god knows how many CEOs, MPs, Ambassadors etc etc. The problem is the way they are taught makes them flawed thinkers in most cases and so while it creates a lot of successful individuals, it creates few innovators. Off the top of my head: Boyle, Orwell, Maynard-Keynes, Huxley (to a lesser extent John Pawson in architecture) are the only old Etonians that shifted thinking in a major way. But even then, Orwell dropped out and Boyle didn't go to Uni. Pawson also dropped out. However, the premise remains the same. Rather than trying to fix a whole system which contains infinite complexities and elements outside of control, create one good REALLY good school. In this fashion I would argue for creating a school that creates critical thinkers/experimental makers. I argue against digital/internet because I think ignoring the fact of tactile benefit is really dangerous Sure you you can teach people to be creative through digital means but much better to have them learn through having access to a studio where they have all the resources/tools they need to make things in a self-led manner (See Jony Ive here) . Likewise with even those inherently internet heavy/digital led subjects - I think you can create a much better computer scientist by developing someone who thinks in a unique and "free" way and then at a certain point they can interact with the digital in a much more unique and expansive manner. Feynman says similar things on learning science. I have nothing to back this up, it's a hypothesis. Summerhill, A.S.Neill is a major reference point to me for how more education should be but his ideas missed the major next steps. He got all the parts on freedom right but then lessons were more or less conventional led by more or less conventional teachers. I wouldn't approach it that way. Firstly, even the idea of subjects is a deplorable premise to me. There is no subject that isn't also every other subject. Breaking down this idea that maths is maths and art is art etc is crucial to people being able to see matters more effectively. Most subjects are an inherent part of other subjects. Teaching by seminar series/self-led but nurtured projects, investigations would be a good start. Rather than having subjects, having subject matter that is taught truthfully. Breaking things down into subjects isn't truthful. You might have a module taught on AI that is part neuroscience, part maths, part computer science, part physics. It's not even parts though, it's not a pie chart. More like mixing colours and getting a new colour. It's about just teaching things for what they are. Physics could be seen as poetry as much as it is physics. If you truly understand physics, it's no different to the awe of poetry or art etc, but it's taught as "science", so no, it's not allowed to be taught like you would teach someone to appreciate a painting by caravaggio or piece of music by bach. Ridiculous. Teach a kid to understand physics like teaching them how to appreciate a work of art and they might actually appreciate physics. Seminars/modules are chosen by students in the manner of summerhill (if you're not familiar, they can basically do what the fuck they want, result? they choose to learn) but a large part i creating a culture of self led but nurtured intellectual/creative curiosity, projects can be chosen in any matter and nurtured by tutors like how architecture students at Uni have "crits" thought provoking questioning then get back to work and improve the repeat. A huge cultural resource should be made available, a tangible library of books, music, film etc where students have a natural SELF LED (summerhill) culture of exploring what they want and then have oxbridge style tutorials to discuss what they've read and their impressions are challenged and further reading can be advised, new ideas generated. Being at school should be like having the research/work freedom of being at AllSouls but 10x better. Certainly age distinctions are insane. There would be no age barriers (again summerhill). This would ideally cross over on the same campus as the world's top minds/creators essentially doing the same thing on a professional level (funded to do whatever they want) like what Dom tried to do with ARIA based on XEROX /DARPA etc except with a much broader remit than just science/tech, including anything, again breaking down subject matter but with the caveat that they are the tutors and that the students can just wonder over to their work and get involved/contribute if they want. I'm only scratching the surface of my ideaology here because I can only write so much rn but this is the very, very basic premise written crudely and I haven't read back.
I absolutely agree that this would be optimal...though I think perhaps it's mainly the top couple of percent who would most benefit. Stopping age segregation is an obvious way of helping a slightly wider range of kids benefit from a shared experience. As DC says above, it's trying to cater for the middle and bottom all the time which clogs everything up.
But then... how do you fill the school with those kids, rather than the kids with the most ambitious and best-resourced parents? There's fantastic work by Hoxby and Avery (https://www.nber.org/papers/w18586) in the US showing that tens of thousands of the brightest kids never apply to a good uni and are just off the map of outreach schemes and left without the connections to get anywhere. That is a massive waste of human capital. I want to reach those kids ....either with mentoring or an alternative route to university. Maybe they could go there early. A network to connect those lost kids with each other and with mentors might pan out in something like the ideal you suggest. My eldest child educated herself, with me as a polymathic tutor... she made contact with the top experts and practitioners in her fields of interest and effectively had one-on-one tutoring from them. It was remote... but interactive and personalised and creative.
This is where I have to disagree - many times University is the problem and not the solution. A very small part of society should go there. However their need to be alternatives built that are equally prestigious but that have a non-academic focus on excellence.
I agree with all that. 90% of folk who are at university don't want to learn and aren't up to it. BUT half the people who should be there aren't. This isn't a contradiction.
Me please- have set up preschool in London that closed last year after 33 years. Work w homeschooled children.Had a spec ed kid who really wasn't; they just couldn't make him fit so that was LOTS of learning to juggle and work outside all the boxes.
In any essay-based or discursive subject there are algorithmic essay plans that students are given to learn by rote - and the standard required is INCREDIBLY basic - the specimen perfect answers would have gained a C grade back in the day. The requirement is to spell everything out in very basic terms, several times over. If you make an actually argument, or say anything beyond the taught snippets for regurgitation, you will be severely penalised. I do a bit of tutoring of students hoping to get in to Oxford or Ivy League schools. My main job is to talk to them about their best ideas and then drill them in how never to write thoughtfully in an exam. I had a student receive a C grade for a coursework essay which would easily have been publishable as a research paper - but she hadn't gone through the argument in simplistic and repetitive baby steps as is required.
The reason for this is that the 'market' between the exam boards means that successful schools have a lot of pull and can ask for exams that are easily taught to. A private school wants to be able to guarantee all pupils an A*. They therefore need exams that require accurate gaming and rote learning but not intelligence.
it's not like this in University - yet! A hell of a shock for the first years to find independent thought and research is required. But for this reason there's absolutely no reason we should stick with A levels. Universities would prefer to use other qualifications or metrics for admission - in fact they already do on the margins - and I want to show smart kids how to access these.
Feynman's account of the process during the 60s made for depressing reading. That's what it was like *then*? Add a few more generations of atrophy, and here we are I suppose.
Speaking of building outside the state system: we had a brief and highly successful period of charter schools in New Zealand, before they were done away with as a high priority by the incoming Ardern government. Not enough control. Too elitist.
As someone with near-term plans to begin a family and who’s scouring any and all materials looking for a way my coming young uns might conceivably be educated so that they’re half-ready for the challenges that await them in mid-century, this reading list is an absolute goldmine.
The wider philosophy is true to my own experience of the British education system (both sides), and also to my feeling for the amount of ripe-for-capture alpha in developing specialised ‘tools for thinking’ apt for our day and age. There’s already a mostly-unheralded reasoning deficit that’s setting in among younger generations; any system that manages to even partially implement a more metacognitive strategy with specific epistemological techniques will make a massive difference. Have written on them before and will be doing much more in the coming time.
Education is such a miserable story. One of the few achievements of this Tory government was your DoE reforms, the fact that Gove got endlessly attacked in the Guardian was proof of what a good minister he was.
Dom, do you have a window into the psychology of the education egalitarians? When you look at people like Polly Toynbee, Fiona Miller and Melissa Benn (fanatical supporters of the current system), do you think there is some coherent argument in their heads or is it just self-serving corruption? It frightens me how passionate these individuals and their supporters get on this subject when any objective study of the British school system can see its failing in its current form? I remember the arguments between Richard J Evans and Niall Ferguson on History teaching and how Evans remains such a committed supporter of the current system despite the dire lack of widespread historical knowledge among the population.
for Fiona M et al, 'equality' (vaguely defined, always shifting) is top.
everything about reality gets distorted to serve this prime emotional driver.
so one can't talk to them.
if you start and discuss things like corruption of standards and show them exams from decades ago they just run off at a tangent about how the world has changed, the world was much more unequal then blah blah.
the vast majority have no interest in any objective discussion of standards and supported the huge coirruption from the DfE
‘Can We Survive Technology?’ (essay by von Neumann) sheds light on the importance of politicians needing to understand science and technology. The combination of politics and science is inherently destructive in its current form because neither group has any understanding of the other. The future of education must be the replication of Plato’s Academy!!!
On the subject of adaptive testing - I am a director of well known education not for profit. We have a single adaptive reading assessment to assess reading ability from EYFS to KS2 (soon to be upgraded to assess using speech recognition ai...) I'd be interested to see if we could repurpose that into a maths assessment as well. We don't have any speciality in maths so would need help on content, but we have the systems, have relationships with 1000s of schools for one thing or another, and know how to build assessments and measure performance. Let me know if interested.
There is a dynamic version that we use for assessing pupil's level at the start of tutoring or other intervention. We also quietly advocate teaching by stage not age (uphill battle!), but for schools that follow that, they can use this to re-assess levels on a regular basis to regroup children by stage.
Dominic, I have an intense interest in your policy outlook for education and elsewhere. I have been discussing your latest piece with a successful ex KMS student. Recently he has been busy setting up his old school with a network of potential teachers, backers, and policy reformers. One of them includes a highly successful man who helped found and run a notable quant fund. Happy to put you in contact.
Apologies in advance as this comment is not directly related to your post, but this nonetheless feels the best place to put it.
I am a 20 year old second year PPEist at Oxford, and honestly, I have a feeling I am 20-30 years away from becoming you. My course is almost entirely useless, and seems to have an enormous amount of assumptions baked in which based on my own cognitive differences I simply do not share, and that seem entirely alien to me. I’ve also found it difficult to connect with many of my peers, and have yet to really find anyone who seems to share my perspectives and degrees of cognitive difference.
The more I read of your writing, the more I get the sense that, while individual views and perspectives may differ, you nonetheless approach things with an attitude and mindset that seems similar to my own in a way that I have yet to observe in others. You also have the advantage of vastly more experience both in operating the world in general, and also in the world of policy making which I seek to one day enter. With that in mind, while I recognise that this is an unorthodox request, as someone who it would seem is likely to have a unique insight into my situation and perspectives, I would enormously appreciate any help and advice you are able to offer?
I can try but it’s difficult to frame things in a direct Q/A format. Is there a way in way in which we can have a more direct conversation (eg DMing through a burner account on Twitter/Facebook or something) as that would be an easier way to communicate the issues?
I had sent the email multiple times but had no response, so it seemed at the time like you had given up. I have just sent another email with the same heading - to clarify, it is dmc2.cummings@gmail.com, correct?
My own dyscalculia mind has been perpetually frustrated at how maths is taught in the UK. Schooling in 70/80s was wholly inadequate for me, despite some good teachers trying their best for me, and heaven knows I definitely tried for them. Low passed my GCSE x2 and then ran away from maths.
In workplace colleagues and clients had no idea. Would get compliments on being good at figures. I just learnt to harness what I was good at (organising, tech) and applied it to figures (spreadsheets, pre-meeting prep) and worked it out.
About 2 years ago I did Functional Skills Maths whilst off work due to sporting injuries. Turns out not only could I do maths in a learning setting but I could actually enjoy it. Searching out extra resources online for additional practise.
We should make the baseline for maths the Functional Skills qualification not GCSE. By all means offer both, especially for those learners with a passion or career need for academic maths.
This is backed up by Chief Examiners and moderators. They have long pointed out by the time we currently offer Functional Skills people have to have failed GCSE at least twice. But by then their confidence is shattered and they’ve little to no interest in going again.
And that’s why I remain perpetually frustrated with DfE’s approach to maths. We have the answers, we already have the syllabus and papers, but DfE prefer to remain committed to failing students when they could be building them up, giving them skills for life, and (dare I say it...) perhaps even have students enjoy maths.
Really thought provoking post. My lad is 6 in February and in a (really great) local primary.
Need to start taking the education seriously and backfilling what seems to be a poor educational system.
Conflict for me is there’s only so much time in the day and im building a business so it’s drawing a lot of time. Building out a curriculum based on these resources is, whilst a beautiful thought, something I’ll start then stop cause life gets in the way.
Curious to get the feedback of the many smart people here on two options that come to mind:
1. Get him on Khan Academy kids - complete, then move to Khan Academy proper and make his way through the maths track.
- Actually doing myself (as pulling myself up by my bootstraps as Dom was famously quoted on and Sal Khan really is an incredible tutor.
- It’s self-paced so again avoids boredom.
- Pluuus their AI support tutor goes lives soon (if not already so).
2. For the real world, putting him in Kumon.
- But I’m getting mixed feedback on this from people I know.
- Some absolutely rave about it and a number I know have gone into become scholars. But others says it’s wrong as purely learn by rote.
- What are your thoughts on Kumon here? Is there any data/reports that outline th efficacy of the program?
Thanks for guidance Dominic. Will look at the first maths challenge and push forward with the Khan efforts. Latest post on circles looks really encouraging - would certainly sign up for.
When it comes to education, the majority of parents think the school has 80% responsibility and the parents have 20%. This is sort of written into our social contract with the state.
But in my opinion (and people are free to disagree) the parents have 80% and the school has 20% responsibility when it comes to a child's education. The main benefit of school is social adjustment and social grounding.
My kids (13, 14) do their schoolwork and also have approx 8 hours of online 1v1 tutoring per week, typically one hour per evening and a Saturday morning session (both play for football teams, two night training and a weekend game, I find there is plenty of time to do stuff).
I don't follow the national curriculum for this tutoring. Standardised test results are Fool's Gold.
Usually I set up a 6 - 9 month block for a topic and we pick things like Singapore maths, python, AWS certificates, a language, architectural drawing.
I had a Microsoft SysAdmin teach my 14 year old python.
I had a teacher from Hwa Chong Institute teach my kids math.
Anything they express any kind of interest in, we just lean right into that. I think I've definitely had the most value when following / rewarding their curiosity. If the whole thing is a bit alien to you then do it yourself in the beginning, pick something you want to learn about and then hire an online tutor to teach you the skill. Try and learn some next level maths or an entry level coding language, or whatever you're interested in.
I will go and scout the internet for someone who is already in that space to do some 1v1 tutoring. Sweet spot is typically a young professional in their mid / late 20's who is likely underpaid at the coalface and is saving for first house, someone who still has a fresh memory of school. "Hey my kid is interested in this space? Would you mentor them 1 hour per week after dinner on a Tuesday? I'll pay you."
£25/hr on the international market, gets you excellent people (maybe £1,000/yr per topic). Maybe £5 - 10k a year for the whole budget, if you are considering public school and the fees are the main concern I would 100% recommend this path instead. It's a bit of work for you to manage their calendar and recruit folks, but these are either skills you already have or should probably practice.
In my mind, classrooms are 19th century social constructs and are really obsolete for their original purpose of education, they remain a good vehicle for the authorities to undertake social engineering, and for kids to socially adjust to groups and teams. But then again team sports are much better vehicles for learning teamwork than classrooms. Classrooms are useful for primary school, where it's mostly free daycare and social learning and classrooms are also valuable once you get to university and the people in the room have been filtered for interests and capability. But the part in the middle where teenagers are compelled to do things they have no real interest in, honestly it's just a huge waste of everyone's time. It's a system that rewards cognitive obedience and kills curiosity stone dead.
I think secondary schools, as a model, are probably a net negative in terms of socioeconomic value, they just generate a bland human soup of resource, as an employer for difficult things I find it deeply irritating that we put teenagers through this. I think what we are really missing is genuine diversity of models for developing people. The standardised everything education is meh. It is gamed to the point that the qualifications are actually worthless to hiring managers.
My experience of secondary school was that I learnt very little for 4 years, it was nowhere near challenging enough and spent most of my time playing sports and strategy video games and socialising and still walked away with top marks.
Tertiary education is better, but has too much filler. It acts more like a class filter than a value adding system. Listen to the job market, we need more people studying medicine, science and engineering and a lot fewer people studying humanities. Sorry, but we all know it's true.
I think we should take Oxbridge, put it online and export it as a service whilst in the opposite direction we should recruit young upward professionals from all around the world to mentor our early/middle teens 1v1.
I think this could be a centrepiece for creating a competitive strategic advantage for UK PLC and making the UK a global epicentre of human capital and soft power. But I doubt it would work as a public service. Probably doesn't scale beyond 20,000 kids before your drop off the cliff in terms of quality of tutors.
If you want your kids to offer extremely high value add in the 21st century, is paying a high fee for a stuffy Victorian education model really much of an investment? As someone who has hired dozens of phd folk for very difficult jobs, I would argue no. Public school might get your kids above the water line of the iceberg, but they are still stranded and adrift in the 21st century. Get them off the iceberg, it's going to melt they are going to drown.
100%
Dear Dominic,
Thank you. This article touched on a topic really dear to me. I am a child of Russian Mathematics Academics but I grew up and went to a state funded grammar school in Manchester. My Farther is mathematician at the University of Manchester, he was one of the people you contacted when you tried to set up Russian style maths schools. I believe he even helped to draft a program for the school. You may recall the names: Dr Theodore Voronov, Prof.Alexandre Borovik, Prof Andrei Voronkov and Dr Hovhannes Khudaverdian.
Along side my regular department of education curriculum. I experienced the Russian tradition of Super Curricular Circles as My parents and many other Russian exPats set up a Saturday "Russian School". We had lessons in mathematics, Physics, biology, Russian and Art taught by the parents who were experts in those subjects. So I am in a unique position to compare both:
Unlike my farther, I am not particularly Mathematically gifted yet thanks to the Russian maths lessons I was able to keep up with the UK curriculum with ease. In Year 4 I was already working with Long division, multiplication tables, decimals. By the time I was in year 6 I was comfortable with algebra.
The UK system depends so much on Rote learning. Rote learning can be a useful tool but only if the idea that is drilled in is understood by the pupils. The classic example is the times table. In Russia it is still learn of by heart from a young age.
But what Russian maths taught me in comparison to UK is how to think threw problems. The best example is geometry. I started to learn geometry axioms at 12 in Russian school beginning with pythagorus . Our homework was to use the axioms to come up with basic proofs ourselves. It was tough at the time but when I figured them out for myself I learned them forever because they were my proofs.
I was staggered that at GCSE maths we were given the proofs the learn BY ROTE!! A great big sheet was handed out and we were told to learn them for the test. Bear in mind this was at a grammar school which is rated outstanding and supposedly specialises in science. How is that useful for the students.
Again, I want to emphasise that I was not mathematically gifted but I was able to achieve these things because Russian Maths pushed and challenged me in interesting ways. Solving proofs myself was engaging and fulfilling.
My father despaired when the Russian style maths schools that you were working on were blocked. They are not elitist quite the opposite: children who were taught maths from primary school age like me did not need much extra help to pass the 11plus maths. With the current UK curriculum children need rich parents with lots of tutoring to even attempt it.
P.s. In my personal biased opinion the way History is taught in England is even worse than maths. I personally have tutored GCSE and A level History for a few years and despaired at the state is is in. Jumping from topic to topic, century to century (ww1, Tudors, ect) is horrible for children. All historical context is missing. The most popular GCSE history topic is Germany 1918-1945 but how can you even teach that if a lot of the students never learned about ww1? 80% of my students did not know what Prussia was!
Madness. Worse still, I am not sure what to do about it.
Thanks yes I remember!
As you say the way English schools now work is often horrific.
I have a plan to sideline the school education system - make it all irrelevant - for which I'm trying to get traction. I've been corresponding with Tyler Cowen about it - it's partly Bryan Caplan influenced. Tyler thought it was a good plan but that I needed better allies over here. I come from a sink school where my lazy teachers blocked me from applying to Oxbridge, but ended up a Cambridge fellow by 25 anyway. Not many people have the luck to get through the system so as to see if from both sides and understand what is and isn't needed to fix the problems - as shown by the terrible design and predictable, measurable failure of schemes like Uni Connect from the OfS.
I just got my super-bright home schooled kid through A levels at 16. They're a disaster, with mark schemes that now penalise the exceptionally smart in favour of helping posh midwits get A*s. The only exam prep I could think to give my child was to regularly hit her over the head with a rock. We have to make the whole thing irrelevant, and I have a cheap and quick way of doing so.
I would love to pick your brains about this. Could I send you what I sent Tyler?
I know you'll like my plan, I know it's a game-changer, and that your advice would really help it work, so I'm going to shamelessly persist in trying to get your attention.
Yes pls do!
dmc2.cummings at gmail.com
Put Brigid in subject line
Also I did have one REALLY good maths teacher who had been an MD at JP Morgan etc, then retired with bucket loads of money. Had enough money not to care what the head of department, head teacher, governors etc said and basically just told them all to fuck off and did it how he wanted to. He got the best grades in the school every year and was everyone's favourite teacher by a mile. Used to sit with him at lunch/break/after school everyday and quiz him on finance, investment, maths, life and he would answer every question and tell me all sorts of stories, most of which any other teacher would have been fired for telling because they were actually informative but they couldn't fire him because he couldn't be financially threatened and they couldn't risk losing the average raising grades he got.
Brigid, I would be interested to hear more about this. I have similar aims. Was academically gifted and wanted to do Oxford PPE but dropped out of A-Level because I was disillusioned with the system and hadn't got in to Oxford because the digital entrance exam didn't work (never got to do an exam) and no one from my state school did anything for me to get an exam. Never got an interview, no one cared except me. I said I wanted to handle it, pressure oxford myself, teachers said they had to handle it but did nothing. Couldn't understand why I was CRITICISED by teachers for "wasting time" reading more interesting things and basically for being too ambitious. Anyway, with no A-Levels I now advise a science foundation, an Ambassador and a bunch of corporates. Am "successful" by most useless measures of success. Clearly it was a sham, I just spent my whole time reading what I wanted when I was at school and started working for in a start-up office when I was 13, interned for people after school, got the train to London. Didn't have any nepotism but learnt how to reach out to people and get them meet/talk with me, develop mentor relationships. That was a much more useful education, reading what I wanted + working where I wanted at 13-18 + finding my own mentors. Shaped my views strongly.
Hi - I'm really keen to build a network of interested people - in my experience folk who have hacked the school system are *very motivated to help others do the same. And this is a strength. Part of my idea is to build an "old boys'" (and girls) network of mentors and connections based on shared experience of being a smart kid in a crap school. It's a uniquely isolating experience, and it's really hard to get over the feeling that you can't expect anyone to help you out.
I also had the one good teacher - maths (stats). Changed the way I see the world. Maths is the one subject it's hard to master with no good teaching. The rest can be figured out by smart kids for themselves - but getting into university on the strength of that real grasp of a subject is another matter. School was essentially invented for a situation where most people didn't have access to books. The internet makes a lot of it redundant once literacy and numeracy are sorted. Universities know school qualifications are useless - the first years of uni are about un-teaching all the habits of anti-learning drilled into kids for school exams.
Interestingly my educational ideology is distinctly anti-internet, anti-digital. Which is counter to most common sense thinking on progressive educational models. I put this in part down to my personal aim. I'm uninterested in building a scalable educational solution. That's not a critique of those who aim otherwise but I would rather build one incredible school than try solve a mass problem. Eton is a prime example, Eton being done the way it was done has created 20 prime ministers god knows how many CEOs, MPs, Ambassadors etc etc. The problem is the way they are taught makes them flawed thinkers in most cases and so while it creates a lot of successful individuals, it creates few innovators. Off the top of my head: Boyle, Orwell, Maynard-Keynes, Huxley (to a lesser extent John Pawson in architecture) are the only old Etonians that shifted thinking in a major way. But even then, Orwell dropped out and Boyle didn't go to Uni. Pawson also dropped out. However, the premise remains the same. Rather than trying to fix a whole system which contains infinite complexities and elements outside of control, create one good REALLY good school. In this fashion I would argue for creating a school that creates critical thinkers/experimental makers. I argue against digital/internet because I think ignoring the fact of tactile benefit is really dangerous Sure you you can teach people to be creative through digital means but much better to have them learn through having access to a studio where they have all the resources/tools they need to make things in a self-led manner (See Jony Ive here) . Likewise with even those inherently internet heavy/digital led subjects - I think you can create a much better computer scientist by developing someone who thinks in a unique and "free" way and then at a certain point they can interact with the digital in a much more unique and expansive manner. Feynman says similar things on learning science. I have nothing to back this up, it's a hypothesis. Summerhill, A.S.Neill is a major reference point to me for how more education should be but his ideas missed the major next steps. He got all the parts on freedom right but then lessons were more or less conventional led by more or less conventional teachers. I wouldn't approach it that way. Firstly, even the idea of subjects is a deplorable premise to me. There is no subject that isn't also every other subject. Breaking down this idea that maths is maths and art is art etc is crucial to people being able to see matters more effectively. Most subjects are an inherent part of other subjects. Teaching by seminar series/self-led but nurtured projects, investigations would be a good start. Rather than having subjects, having subject matter that is taught truthfully. Breaking things down into subjects isn't truthful. You might have a module taught on AI that is part neuroscience, part maths, part computer science, part physics. It's not even parts though, it's not a pie chart. More like mixing colours and getting a new colour. It's about just teaching things for what they are. Physics could be seen as poetry as much as it is physics. If you truly understand physics, it's no different to the awe of poetry or art etc, but it's taught as "science", so no, it's not allowed to be taught like you would teach someone to appreciate a painting by caravaggio or piece of music by bach. Ridiculous. Teach a kid to understand physics like teaching them how to appreciate a work of art and they might actually appreciate physics. Seminars/modules are chosen by students in the manner of summerhill (if you're not familiar, they can basically do what the fuck they want, result? they choose to learn) but a large part i creating a culture of self led but nurtured intellectual/creative curiosity, projects can be chosen in any matter and nurtured by tutors like how architecture students at Uni have "crits" thought provoking questioning then get back to work and improve the repeat. A huge cultural resource should be made available, a tangible library of books, music, film etc where students have a natural SELF LED (summerhill) culture of exploring what they want and then have oxbridge style tutorials to discuss what they've read and their impressions are challenged and further reading can be advised, new ideas generated. Being at school should be like having the research/work freedom of being at AllSouls but 10x better. Certainly age distinctions are insane. There would be no age barriers (again summerhill). This would ideally cross over on the same campus as the world's top minds/creators essentially doing the same thing on a professional level (funded to do whatever they want) like what Dom tried to do with ARIA based on XEROX /DARPA etc except with a much broader remit than just science/tech, including anything, again breaking down subject matter but with the caveat that they are the tutors and that the students can just wonder over to their work and get involved/contribute if they want. I'm only scratching the surface of my ideaology here because I can only write so much rn but this is the very, very basic premise written crudely and I haven't read back.
I absolutely agree that this would be optimal...though I think perhaps it's mainly the top couple of percent who would most benefit. Stopping age segregation is an obvious way of helping a slightly wider range of kids benefit from a shared experience. As DC says above, it's trying to cater for the middle and bottom all the time which clogs everything up.
But then... how do you fill the school with those kids, rather than the kids with the most ambitious and best-resourced parents? There's fantastic work by Hoxby and Avery (https://www.nber.org/papers/w18586) in the US showing that tens of thousands of the brightest kids never apply to a good uni and are just off the map of outreach schemes and left without the connections to get anywhere. That is a massive waste of human capital. I want to reach those kids ....either with mentoring or an alternative route to university. Maybe they could go there early. A network to connect those lost kids with each other and with mentors might pan out in something like the ideal you suggest. My eldest child educated herself, with me as a polymathic tutor... she made contact with the top experts and practitioners in her fields of interest and effectively had one-on-one tutoring from them. It was remote... but interactive and personalised and creative.
This is where I have to disagree - many times University is the problem and not the solution. A very small part of society should go there. However their need to be alternatives built that are equally prestigious but that have a non-academic focus on excellence.
I agree with all that. 90% of folk who are at university don't want to learn and aren't up to it. BUT half the people who should be there aren't. This isn't a contradiction.
Me please- have set up preschool in London that closed last year after 33 years. Work w homeschooled children.Had a spec ed kid who really wasn't; they just couldn't make him fit so that was LOTS of learning to juggle and work outside all the boxes.
Please add me to a list of people to keep updated with this project. Would love to help if I can.
Would like to hear more about your past and current experience...
> mark schemes that now penalise the exceptionally smart in favour of helping posh midwits get A*s
Can you elaborate, please?
In any essay-based or discursive subject there are algorithmic essay plans that students are given to learn by rote - and the standard required is INCREDIBLY basic - the specimen perfect answers would have gained a C grade back in the day. The requirement is to spell everything out in very basic terms, several times over. If you make an actually argument, or say anything beyond the taught snippets for regurgitation, you will be severely penalised. I do a bit of tutoring of students hoping to get in to Oxford or Ivy League schools. My main job is to talk to them about their best ideas and then drill them in how never to write thoughtfully in an exam. I had a student receive a C grade for a coursework essay which would easily have been publishable as a research paper - but she hadn't gone through the argument in simplistic and repetitive baby steps as is required.
The reason for this is that the 'market' between the exam boards means that successful schools have a lot of pull and can ask for exams that are easily taught to. A private school wants to be able to guarantee all pupils an A*. They therefore need exams that require accurate gaming and rote learning but not intelligence.
it's not like this in University - yet! A hell of a shock for the first years to find independent thought and research is required. But for this reason there's absolutely no reason we should stick with A levels. Universities would prefer to use other qualifications or metrics for admission - in fact they already do on the margins - and I want to show smart kids how to access these.
Brigid, are you able to share your project somewhere? I'm potentially very interested.
Feynman's account of the process during the 60s made for depressing reading. That's what it was like *then*? Add a few more generations of atrophy, and here we are I suppose.
Speaking of building outside the state system: we had a brief and highly successful period of charter schools in New Zealand, before they were done away with as a high priority by the incoming Ardern government. Not enough control. Too elitist.
Many such cases.
As someone with near-term plans to begin a family and who’s scouring any and all materials looking for a way my coming young uns might conceivably be educated so that they’re half-ready for the challenges that await them in mid-century, this reading list is an absolute goldmine.
The wider philosophy is true to my own experience of the British education system (both sides), and also to my feeling for the amount of ripe-for-capture alpha in developing specialised ‘tools for thinking’ apt for our day and age. There’s already a mostly-unheralded reasoning deficit that’s setting in among younger generations; any system that manages to even partially implement a more metacognitive strategy with specific epistemological techniques will make a massive difference. Have written on them before and will be doing much more in the coming time.
Hope you’re recovering well after your op.
Education is such a miserable story. One of the few achievements of this Tory government was your DoE reforms, the fact that Gove got endlessly attacked in the Guardian was proof of what a good minister he was.
Dom, do you have a window into the psychology of the education egalitarians? When you look at people like Polly Toynbee, Fiona Miller and Melissa Benn (fanatical supporters of the current system), do you think there is some coherent argument in their heads or is it just self-serving corruption? It frightens me how passionate these individuals and their supporters get on this subject when any objective study of the British school system can see its failing in its current form? I remember the arguments between Richard J Evans and Niall Ferguson on History teaching and how Evans remains such a committed supporter of the current system despite the dire lack of widespread historical knowledge among the population.
beliefs have an emotional hierarchy.
for Fiona M et al, 'equality' (vaguely defined, always shifting) is top.
everything about reality gets distorted to serve this prime emotional driver.
so one can't talk to them.
if you start and discuss things like corruption of standards and show them exams from decades ago they just run off at a tangent about how the world has changed, the world was much more unequal then blah blah.
the vast majority have no interest in any objective discussion of standards and supported the huge coirruption from the DfE
"If you want to understand the modern intellectual classes — media, academia and politics — this plugs you straight into their psychology." -
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/reading-list#:~:text=Notes%20from%20the%20Underground%2C%20Dostoyevsky.%20If%20you%20want%20to%20understand%20the%20modern%20intellectual%20classes%20%E2%80%94%20media%2C%20academia%20and%20politics%20%E2%80%94%20this%20plugs%20you%20straight%20into%20their%20psychology.
Simon Singh runs online maths circles: https://parallel.org.uk/circles worth a look.
I remember I saw a talk he gave at my school. Great guy. Enjoyed a few of his books when I was younger too!
‘Can We Survive Technology?’ (essay by von Neumann) sheds light on the importance of politicians needing to understand science and technology. The combination of politics and science is inherently destructive in its current form because neither group has any understanding of the other. The future of education must be the replication of Plato’s Academy!!!
yes ive blogged on that essay many times - it shd be read by every teen
On the subject of adaptive testing - I am a director of well known education not for profit. We have a single adaptive reading assessment to assess reading ability from EYFS to KS2 (soon to be upgraded to assess using speech recognition ai...) I'd be interested to see if we could repurpose that into a maths assessment as well. We don't have any speciality in maths so would need help on content, but we have the systems, have relationships with 1000s of schools for one thing or another, and know how to build assessments and measure performance. Let me know if interested.
I’d be interested in learning more about the English test Tim. Are you able to send through further info?
https://fft.org.uk/literacy/reading-assessment-programme/
There is a dynamic version that we use for assessing pupil's level at the start of tutoring or other intervention. We also quietly advocate teaching by stage not age (uphill battle!), but for schools that follow that, they can use this to re-assess levels on a regular basis to regroup children by stage.
Huge thanks Tim. I'll investigate.
Dominic, I have an intense interest in your policy outlook for education and elsewhere. I have been discussing your latest piece with a successful ex KMS student. Recently he has been busy setting up his old school with a network of potential teachers, backers, and policy reformers. One of them includes a highly successful man who helped found and run a notable quant fund. Happy to put you in contact.
Hi - yes please!
dmc2.cummings@gmail.com
Put Kings Maths in subject
Apologies in advance as this comment is not directly related to your post, but this nonetheless feels the best place to put it.
I am a 20 year old second year PPEist at Oxford, and honestly, I have a feeling I am 20-30 years away from becoming you. My course is almost entirely useless, and seems to have an enormous amount of assumptions baked in which based on my own cognitive differences I simply do not share, and that seem entirely alien to me. I’ve also found it difficult to connect with many of my peers, and have yet to really find anyone who seems to share my perspectives and degrees of cognitive difference.
The more I read of your writing, the more I get the sense that, while individual views and perspectives may differ, you nonetheless approach things with an attitude and mindset that seems similar to my own in a way that I have yet to observe in others. You also have the advantage of vastly more experience both in operating the world in general, and also in the world of policy making which I seek to one day enter. With that in mind, while I recognise that this is an unorthodox request, as someone who it would seem is likely to have a unique insight into my situation and perspectives, I would enormously appreciate any help and advice you are able to offer?
i need more specific Qs!
I can try but it’s difficult to frame things in a direct Q/A format. Is there a way in way in which we can have a more direct conversation (eg DMing through a burner account on Twitter/Facebook or something) as that would be an easier way to communicate the issues?
email dmc2 dot cummings at gmail dot com - and put "oxford career advice from blog" in subject
Email has been sent
never saw this email
I had sent the email multiple times but had no response, so it seemed at the time like you had given up. I have just sent another email with the same heading - to clarify, it is dmc2.cummings@gmail.com, correct?
In case somebody is interested, another chain of Maths Circles in the UK
https://wesolveproblems.org.uk/maths-circles/
and a free maths problem database (under construction at the moment)
https://problems.org.uk
thanks
Some of these books are out of print and hard to find.
You can download the pdf of "Let's Play Geometry" from here: https://archive.org/details/ZhitomirskiShervinLetsPlayGeometry
DC,
Just listened to your Podcast with this guy Dwarkesh! I am not a historical subscriber to his Podcast, yet the algorithm still hit my feed!!
You came across really well!
Clearly you should be the face of the TSP!
p.s. like the way you pulled a politician special on answering his questions about TSP!
Fascinating article, thanks for sharing.
My own dyscalculia mind has been perpetually frustrated at how maths is taught in the UK. Schooling in 70/80s was wholly inadequate for me, despite some good teachers trying their best for me, and heaven knows I definitely tried for them. Low passed my GCSE x2 and then ran away from maths.
In workplace colleagues and clients had no idea. Would get compliments on being good at figures. I just learnt to harness what I was good at (organising, tech) and applied it to figures (spreadsheets, pre-meeting prep) and worked it out.
About 2 years ago I did Functional Skills Maths whilst off work due to sporting injuries. Turns out not only could I do maths in a learning setting but I could actually enjoy it. Searching out extra resources online for additional practise.
We should make the baseline for maths the Functional Skills qualification not GCSE. By all means offer both, especially for those learners with a passion or career need for academic maths.
This is backed up by Chief Examiners and moderators. They have long pointed out by the time we currently offer Functional Skills people have to have failed GCSE at least twice. But by then their confidence is shattered and they’ve little to no interest in going again.
And that’s why I remain perpetually frustrated with DfE’s approach to maths. We have the answers, we already have the syllabus and papers, but DfE prefer to remain committed to failing students when they could be building them up, giving them skills for life, and (dare I say it...) perhaps even have students enjoy maths.
The department of education should be abolished, the building burned and the ground salted.
twice
Really thought provoking post. My lad is 6 in February and in a (really great) local primary.
Need to start taking the education seriously and backfilling what seems to be a poor educational system.
Conflict for me is there’s only so much time in the day and im building a business so it’s drawing a lot of time. Building out a curriculum based on these resources is, whilst a beautiful thought, something I’ll start then stop cause life gets in the way.
Curious to get the feedback of the many smart people here on two options that come to mind:
1. Get him on Khan Academy kids - complete, then move to Khan Academy proper and make his way through the maths track.
- Actually doing myself (as pulling myself up by my bootstraps as Dom was famously quoted on and Sal Khan really is an incredible tutor.
- It’s self-paced so again avoids boredom.
- Pluuus their AI support tutor goes lives soon (if not already so).
2. For the real world, putting him in Kumon.
- But I’m getting mixed feedback on this from people I know.
- Some absolutely rave about it and a number I know have gone into become scholars. But others says it’s wrong as purely learn by rote.
- What are your thoughts on Kumon here? Is there any data/reports that outline th efficacy of the program?
Khan is good
I think Kumon is good but limited, it isn't a 'maths education' in the round
Id prioritise Khan.
Also look at First Maths Challenge and try to get him aimed at that
Thanks for guidance Dominic. Will look at the first maths challenge and push forward with the Khan efforts. Latest post on circles looks really encouraging - would certainly sign up for.