Well met.

(If you haven't, do read Wendell Berry's "What are People For?" or any of his work. His writing is so fine!)

> there's no panacea in returning to an agrarian, village life as you seem to suggest.

I agree, I'm pointing out that complexity itself has become the problem of the day (in my opinion.) FWIW, I just acquired some land on which to experiment with a high-tech, ecologically-harmonious lifestyle. Fingers crossed. When I was a young man I read in an old Taoist book about a farmer who was so content with his life that he had never even been to the next village over, even though he lived so close to them he could hear the cries of their rooster. At the time it gave me a feeling of dull horror. Now, nearly fifty, I envy that farmer and hope to reach his level someday before I die. Times change.

> Why should we not listen to educational research (other than we have precious little of it to listen to)?

Well, there it is: paucity of reliable data and research. Further, and to my point (why I'm jerking your chain) there's the problem with the very idea that education can be researched.

The growth of the human mind cannot be represented by a single scalar value. At least not for any admirable end, eh? It doesn't matter whether that scalar value is graduated in five increments ("A" through "F") or fifteen (A+, A, A-, ... F-, does anyone actually use F-? Hehe.) or a hundred (per cent), it's just silly.

It was understood, at least I formed the impression as a child, that the A-F grade system was a dufus solution to a problem nobody was actually trying to solve. Schools are part of the anthropological machinery that societies use to get the kids to behave like the adults. Any educational value they have is a side-effect.

You cannot actually educate a child outside of a deep, sustained (20-30 years), one-to-one relationship between a caring adult who is sane mentally and emotionally and the child. [edit to add: well, really I suspect it takes at least a whole village, eh? Where are you gonna find a whole village of mentally and emotionally sane people on Earth in this day and age, huh?] To a first approximation this is pretty much the most important human activity. All others rely on it, eh? Education is the process of growing humans out of talking primates.

So again, the mind that conceives of measuring the "mastery" of the human mind using a single scalar value is the mind of a fool, and in my view is automatically disqualified from having their views and ideas considered at all, let alone taken seriously. He's not "sane mentally and emotionally" and should not be let anywhere near children or schools!

To me, once you get away from physics, most science seems to be a kind of cargo-cult. Chemists and biologists are mostly okay, but sociologists, psychologists, economists, etc. are not actual scientists in my view. They do not do science, they ape it. So maybe you want to back away from this conversation? I won't be offended. That's why I told you. So you don't waste your time. :) (I also "believe in" Neurolinguistic Programming.)

But getting back to my point: you can't measure learning by a single scalar value; the idea is pernicious and counter-productive.

Corollary: people who believe such a silly thing, and who somehow get a hold of kids to experiment on, will go right ahead and plug them into talking "learning machines", and they will believe they do it "for their own good". Not to put too fine a point on it: your life is my horror story.

(I was educated in public school in San Francisco. Fair warning: you're not going to be able to change my mind about how much of a bad idea modern schooling is. I'm still feeling the effects three decades later.)