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The problem I have with the Prussian model is that it’s pretty much a failure at teaching people how to approach problems and solve them without having to be hand held. If anything, I think it actually teaches people not to think.
In a typical Prussian school, the students sit at desks while the teacher lectures on some subject. They’re then given worksheets on the specific material to drill the exact thing the lecture covered. These worksheets have no problems that reference anything outside the lesson given, and only very rarely ask for application of the material or anything going above and beyond, or requiring the students to reason from facts given to a logical conclusion.
Science and math classes are taught much the same way. The students have “lab” classes, but even up to senior in high school (or possibly non-majors science courses in college) nothing done could be called an experiment— they’re at best demonstrations of something already covered in class and of course you have to get the right results. So students graduate with really weird ideas of how science works — mistakenly believing that science is a set of knowledge something like psychics belief in Akashic Records. The science exists and people in lab coats know The Science and so on. Except that science is a process of trying to figure things out, it’s discovered by seeing something and trying to prove yourself wrong on that front. Mathematics is a system for describing the universe and a tool for figuring things out. Most people don’t understand that because the Prussian system isn’t interested in having kids do experiments.
What classical education does, is teach, in every subject is how to think. How to take apart a text and understand it, how to think and argue logically, how to ask questions and find answers to them. They learn how to seek truth rather than simply waiting for the authorities to hand it to them. And I think, especially with AGI teed up within the next 20 years, the future belongs to people who can think, invent, and lead, and those who only learn to repeat the same things their teacher told them are correct answers will be lost in a world where the only jobs humans are doing are original creative thinking jobs. They haven’t been taught to do that, and learning later is very difficult.
I think the exact subject matter should be brought up to date for the twenty first century, but the method works and has produced the greatest thinkers of the last several centuries.
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