Grouping by age as done in traditional education as of 2020 is useless.
Rather, we should group students by subject of interest; e.g. natural sciences, social sciences, a sport, etc., just like in any working adult organization!
This way, younger students can actually actively learn from and collaborate with older students about, see notably Jacques Monod's you can learn more from older students than from faculty.
This becomes even more natural when you try to give students must have a flexible choice of what to learn.
This age distinction should be abolished at all stages of the system, not only within K-12, but also across K-12, undergraduate education and postgraduate education.
This idea is part of the ideal that the learning environment should be more like a dojo environment (AKA Peer tutoring, see also dojo learning model), rather than an amorphous checkbox ticking exercise in bureaucracy so that "everyone is educated".
Perhaps, even more importantly, is that we should put much more emphasis on grouping students with other students online, where we can select similar interest amongst the entire population and not just on a per-local-neighbourhood basis.
Never trust an experiment that is not supported by a good theory Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 1970-01-01
Not the usual bullshit you were expecting from the philosophy of Science, right?
Some notable quoters:
- Jacques Monod has the exact quote as presented here: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22042272/, though presumably it was in French, TODO find the French version
- youtu.be/AYC5lE0b8os?t=41 A Computational Whole-Cell Model Predicts Genotype From Phenotype- Markus Covert by "Calit2ube" (2013), see also: Section "Whole cell simulation"
- the book Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) mentions a few incidents of this involving Feynman, see e.g. chapter "New Particles, New Language" where he and fellow theorist Hans Bethe immediately spot problems with experimentalists' data in suspicious results