Why is "Primary School" in quotes? Are you suggesting it isn't a primary school?
Zuckerbergs' New “Primary School”: Private but Free
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Re: Zuckerbergs' New “Primary School”: Private but Free
#12Why is "Primary School" in quotes? Are you suggesting it isn't a primary school?
The name of the school is "The Primary School"
Re: Zuckerbergs' New “Primary School”: Private but Free
#13That's great for the community, but in a larger sense we should question what the point is of amassing huge concentrated wealth and then giving a small part (or even a large part) back to make isolated positive impacts. Wouldn't it be better if it was impossible to amass that concentration of wealth in the first place? Then the token donations would not be necessary. This is not supposed to be a cynical post, but thi…
I think there's a good argument to be made that personally accumulated wealth spent on experimental projects such as this one is used better than if it were taxed and added to the relatively enormous federal budget. DoD yearly spend is greater than 10x of Zuck's net worth, after all.
You're pushing a false dichotomy of personal wealth or Federal income tax. It would be much easier and effective to simply preempt the concentration of such wealth in the first place by ensuring more equitable salaries across the workforce. No onerous redistribution necessary.
Re: Zuckerbergs' New “Primary School”: Private but Free
#14Why is "Primary School" in quotes? Are you suggesting it isn't a primary school?
It looks like the submitter (or a mod?) rewrote the title to try to make it clearer, and botched it. The actual title of the article is: "Inside Mark Zuckerberg's new school: Private, but free".
The name of the new school is "The Primary School". It looks like the title rewriter decided to try to put the name in the title, but left out the "The", resulting in the confusing title we now have.
A better rewrite, if the name must be incorporated, would have been "Inside Mark Zuckerber's new 'The Primary School': Private, but free" or "Inside Mark Zuckerber's 'The Primary School': Private, but free".
Re: Zuckerbergs' New “Primary School”: Private but Free
#15Interesting that the logo for The Primary School is nearly identical to that used by artist and printmaker Gustave Baumann[1]. I was just at a lecture about him today, and the speaker said it was probably taken from the International Order of Oddfellows who had some saying along the lines of "what you do with your hands, you should do with your heart".
[1] http://grainger-arts-and-crafts-studio.com/wp-content/upload...
Re: Zuckerbergs' New “Primary School”: Private but Free
#16If this works, can it be used as an example for better public schools? Even if it's more expensive, one can argue that the increased productivity of well educated kids outweighs the cost of their education.
Better models have been around for a long time, with traditional compulsory schooling being criticized by authors and educators such as John Taylor Gatto, John Holt, Ivan Illich, Charlotte Iserbyt, A.S. Neill and others.
There is no interest in them.
Zuck's approach appears to be only marginally better and almost entirely devoid of influence from alternative schooling.
Re: Zuckerbergs' New “Primary School”: Private but Free
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's a good argument to be made that personally accumulated wealth spent on experimental projects such as this one is used better than if it were taxed and added to the relatively enormous federal budget. DoD yearly spend is greater than 10x of Zuck's net worth, after all.
You're pushing a false dichotomy of personal wealth or Federal income tax. It would be much easier and effective to simply preempt the concentration of such wealth in the first place by ensuring more equitable salaries across the workforce. No onerous redistribution necessary.
How would you force employers to pay their employees equitable salaries? What if a job isn't worth that much to an employer?
Re: Zuckerbergs' New “Primary School”: Private but Free
#18If this works, can it be used as an example for better public schools? Even if it's more expensive, one can argue that the increased productivity of well educated kids outweighs the cost of their education.
same argument could be made for healthcare and higher education as well
Re: Zuckerbergs' New “Primary School”: Private but Free
#19Speaking of Facebook, does anyone know if this is true? https://www.youbetrayedus.org/facebook/
It's from "Fight for the Future", so it is at best highly questionable. They have a long history of exaggerating (I'm being very charitable in my choice of words) about bills. They believe that inaccurate information is fine as long as it gets people to click their links to send form letters to Congress.
See, for example, this other page at the same site: https://www.youbetrayedus.org/experian/
I asked them to back up a particular serious claim on that page in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10321374
Note the lack of a response. I also asked them several times on reddit where they were repeating the same thing. Again, no response.
Re: Zuckerbergs' New “Primary School”: Private but Free
#20If this works, can it be used as an example for better public schools? Even if it's more expensive, one can argue that the increased productivity of well educated kids outweighs the cost of their education.
Well if a single primary school needs 1 bln or anything close to it to operate that won't be scale able.
The question now would be how much improvement would there be due to actual new methods in delivering the education vs just pouring money onto the problem and cherry picking your students.
They did seem to open the school in a place that could benefit from it as far as the silicon valley area goes, EPO didn't receive as much benefit from the valley as some other areas, Belle Haven is a mixed bag with it being quite popular with silicon valley folks that are looking to find a big enough house for a family but can't afford more sought after locations.
The only grief I really have with this program is that they did not publish their acceptance policy online which doesn't bode well for transparency in that aspect, so cherry picking and gating might be a problem here as well.
Their management team and staff has more accreditations than some school districts combine probably, they have a huge capital investment, so the school should do rather well, but I'm really not sure how much impact it can have in the long term.