There are good reasons to believe that education could be a lot better than it currently is in most school systems. Freddie deBoer is, as he often is, confused about this.
Strong piece. The 2007 memory about "everything's already been invented" perfectly captures the absurdity of epistemic closure in real-time. What's especially sharp here is recognizing that deBoer's relativism collapses under its own weight when you test it against obviously bad pedagogical methods (picture books only, face-slapping algebra). The phonics example is concrete proof that pedagogical innovation isn't just selection bias theater. I've seen a similar pattern in software engineering where established practicioners dismiss new tooling as hype until adoption reaches critical mass, at which point it becomes "obviously correct" and they claim to have supported it all along dunno why pattern recognition fails so reliably in the face of genuine novelty.
Strong piece. The 2007 memory about "everything's already been invented" perfectly captures the absurdity of epistemic closure in real-time. What's especially sharp here is recognizing that deBoer's relativism collapses under its own weight when you test it against obviously bad pedagogical methods (picture books only, face-slapping algebra). The phonics example is concrete proof that pedagogical innovation isn't just selection bias theater. I've seen a similar pattern in software engineering where established practicioners dismiss new tooling as hype until adoption reaches critical mass, at which point it becomes "obviously correct" and they claim to have supported it all along dunno why pattern recognition fails so reliably in the face of genuine novelty.