Comment by MrsPeaches 4 days ago
Training wheels aim to maximise the utility of the bicycle (i.e. gears and pnumatic tyres) for a person of certain age, at the cost of learning how to actually ride a bike.
I feel there are lots of parallels in e.g. Maths education in the more generalised form:
In education, skills that allow you to utilise technology are prioritised and these are often directly opposed to skills needed for mastery.
> Training wheels aim to maximise the utility of the bicycle (i.e. gears and pnumatic tyres) for a person of certain age, at the cost of learning how to actually ride a bike.
I'm not sure this is actually true at all. Kids can go pretty fast on a balance bike. Probably as fast as on a bike with training wheels. And for kids that small, gears are mostly useless anyway.
I was subbing at my old high school for a few days in the fall and they assigned me to my old Spanish teacher’s class with the explicit instruction to make sure students could use their devices to refer to ChatGPT to fill in their worksheets.
I was flabbergasted.
THIS!
I'd even go further and say that training wheels optimizing for utility instead of mastery teaches the secondary skill first, so the child can pedal and add power without needing to learn to balance the bike. So, when the training wheels come off, they've got effectively nothing.
And this certainly applies to every other sort of teaching, where learning the mastery-related skills can seem so irrelevant at first.