School isn't just about learning; it's also about signaling that you've learned, of course. Beyond that, it's about making society work, in such a way that parents can do what they need to do all day. Arnold Kling, in The Dark View of Schooling, notes
I do believe that technological improvements can make signaling a lot easier, in K-12 as much as in How testing could transform higher education:
If you want to know if a kid has grasped 10th grade math, start him on the Khan Academy 11th grade sequence and see how quickly he reaches "mastery". Of course you probably need humans to rate English composition, if not reading comprehension, but you can go a long ways without adult humans involved -- let ten kids write short essays to summarize some information, each of them answers ten sets of multiple-choice questions, and they get comprehension scores based on how well they answered, but composition scores based on how well their readers answered. (Is this a bad idea? Probably; I just thought of it. There are lots of possibilities.) The testing tools for this probably won't come very quickly, and they won't come at the same pace in all subject/skill areas, but they're coming. I'm less confident that we'll get a substitute for the "day jail for kids." Many parents will want to know that their kids are somewhere being supervised -- the sort of "off in the woods, probably building a dam" that went over well enough in the late 50s (when I went along with my elder siblings) is probably gone forever.
Or on the other hand, maybe not.
Bryan Caplan thinks that schooling is not about education. He thinks instead it is about signaling.
Bryan’s view is benign compared with John Holt.
society demands of schools, among other things, that they be a place where, for many hours of the day, many days of the year, children or young people can be shut up and so got out of everyone else’s way. ... That is an important part of what schools are for. They are a kind of day jail for kids.
I do believe that technological improvements can make signaling a lot easier, in K-12 as much as in How testing could transform higher education:
having a well-calibrated measurement would put a lot more focus on learning the material and much less on how you learned it. No one will care too much which book you read, which online class you took, or what exercises you did. Those are all just ways to learn. Second, this would truly democratize education—the self taught Bangladeshi is on equal footing with the legacy Harvard admittee.
If you want to know if a kid has grasped 10th grade math, start him on the Khan Academy 11th grade sequence and see how quickly he reaches "mastery". Of course you probably need humans to rate English composition, if not reading comprehension, but you can go a long ways without adult humans involved -- let ten kids write short essays to summarize some information, each of them answers ten sets of multiple-choice questions, and they get comprehension scores based on how well they answered, but composition scores based on how well their readers answered. (Is this a bad idea? Probably; I just thought of it. There are lots of possibilities.) The testing tools for this probably won't come very quickly, and they won't come at the same pace in all subject/skill areas, but they're coming. I'm less confident that we'll get a substitute for the "day jail for kids." Many parents will want to know that their kids are somewhere being supervised -- the sort of "off in the woods, probably building a dam" that went over well enough in the late 50s (when I went along with my elder siblings) is probably gone forever.
Or on the other hand, maybe not.
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