Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having been brought up in a positive environment, yet full of sarcasm, I'm not sure I buy this argument. Yes, there must be a balance. But sarcasm and negativity are part of our everyday life as adults and we should learn how to handle them.
The best way to handle sarcasm and negativity is, in my opinion, to reduce contact and/or interaction. To not reward such behavior and instead choose to associate with positive people. The problem is that school-kids are forced into repeated, unsupervised interactions where they are often deliberately and persistently targeted by aggressors. Out of curiosity, what purpose does sarcasm serve you? What do you get out o…
An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society
101–110 of 198 posts
Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having been brought up in a positive environment, yet full of sarcasm, I'm not sure I buy this argument. Yes, there must be a balance. But sarcasm and negativity are part of our everyday life as adults and we should learn how to handle them.
The best way to handle sarcasm and negativity is, in my opinion, to reduce contact and/or interaction. To not reward such behavior and instead choose to associate with positive people. The problem is that school-kids are forced into repeated, unsupervised interactions where they are often deliberately and persistently targeted by aggressors. Out of curiosity, what purpose does sarcasm serve you? What do you get out o…
Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society
#103My spouse is a classroom educator. Her school participates in Great Expectations program. http://www.greatexpectations.org/ It is a character development program "that provides teachers and administrators with the skills needed to create harmony and excitement within the school atmosphere" There are 8 Expectations at the elementary level 1. We will value one another as unique special individuals 2. We will not laugh…
In many ways the trend if for the US over the last 200 years to become less ethical the more formally religious it is. (As measured by things like church attendance.) If you can site some counter evidence I would be interested in reading it.
According to Gallup, 91% of Americans in 1948 claimed to be Christian, compared to 69% in 2016. [0] I would assume "formally religious" is tracks similarly. Personally, I think we are less ethical, but since I wasn't around in 1948, hard to say.
I think ethics is related to your value of what is right and wrong. In 1948 people by and large had a "Christian" outlook on what is right and wrong and why. In 2016, the more popular claim is moral relativism, namely that there is no absolute right or wrong. Given that I can make up right and wrong and they only apply to me and not you, that seems to be a recipe for unethical behavior. In fact, I'm not sure "ethics" is a meaningful word if you subscribe to moral relativism.
Say what you like about "formally religious," but I think it offers a much better framework for ethics than the moral relativism we have now.
Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society
#104Standardized tests are a lousy way of deciding things. But at least they're better than non-standardized tests. At my university (SFU, in Canada) admission to most faculties is based on high school grades. That's grades awarded by high schools -- we used to have province-wide grade 12 exams, but for almost all subjects those were abolished a few years ago. It's widely recognized at the post-secondary level that a 90%…
Now of course we can ask if it's the best way to distribute this resource, and I think it depends to some extent on what you think is the mission of the college. At least in Wisconsin, there has been a traditional idea that the college exists to serve the development of the entire state. (The Wisconsin Idea). Politically, it gives people in the far corners of the state a stake in supporting public higher ed.
Of course that's just one take on the mission of one school.
Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
My school wasn't rife with it. Maybe only half my teachers used sarcasm, mockery and negativity towards students.
Half of teachers being outright hostile to students is far too many, in my opinion. How does this behavior positively impact the lives of their students? Do they not understand the psychological damage they can be inflicting? Do they simply not care?
Teachers are just other people too. The sooner teenagers recognise it fully, the better placed they'll be to choose their own way rather than have it chosen for them.
Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
In many ways the trend if for the US over the last 200 years to become less ethical the more formally religious it is. (As measured by things like church attendance.) If you can site some counter evidence I would be interested in reading it.
Sounds like you have an axe to grind, especially since you cite no evidence yourself... How would you measure "less ethical," anyway? Are we more ethical now than 200 years ago or less, in your view? According to Gallup, 91% of Americans in 1948 claimed to be Christian, compared to 69% in 2016. [0] I would assume "formally religious" is tracks similarly. Personally, I think we are less ethical, but since I wasn't aro…
What does this mean to you?
Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society
#107I see many parallels with the post and my own experience. I got my PhD in math and taught many college math courses during that time. I was always saddened at the number of students that essentially viewed math as just an exercise in the memorization of algorithms (memorize differentiation and integration rules and chug away at problems). I would avoid teaching this way and instead give them fewer, "deeper" problems…
there is definitely two distinct intelligences. one that relies on knowledge and memorization and one in reason. Much of math is taught the knowledge way, similiar to history or biology, and a certain type of person excels at this. However, a different set excel at the reasoning approach. i don't think one approach can teach all people howeverZ
I don't need 2+2=4 - I could reason it out from first principals (where did I get them from?). However when I'm solving a larger problem it helps to know that 2+2=4 without having to figure it out or put it in a calculator.
This is why all arguments fail to hold weight with me. You cannot have just one. You have to have facts to reason from, and you have to have reasoning ability to use those facts with.
Now I will grant that you can have facts alone. They won't do you any good but you can have them. We can argue about which facts in particular are worth knowing (do you need to know cursive), since there is only so much time in a lifetime to learn facts eventually you need to choose to not learn some facts. It means you cannot reason from those facts, but some facts are not as useful as others. 2+2=4 is a universal fact that should be early on the list of facts to know (bushmen would disagree - it isn't useful to their world). Where was the battle of Bunker hill fought - useless in Australia, part of our shared cultural heritage in the US.
Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society
#108The ancient Western word for this is virtue : to cultivate virtues as part of an education. It's not a novel concept, but it rather got shot in the head in the postmodern revolution in education, and we're a lesser society for it.
I'm not familiar with the idea that there was a 'postmodern revolution' in education (or even what that would look like?) What changes are you referring to?
Historically in the US, the complaints are more from the conservative POV, but I'd not let that deter you. Bloom's Closing of the American Mind is probably one of the more famous ones. The Sokal Hoax was a famous shot of the matter.
There's more than a small amount of "gerroff my lawn" in the critiques, but the substance is more than just moaning about "kids these days", it's a deep philosophical worldview difference that has ramifications across society.
Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society
#109While standardized tests are criticized for rewarding general intelligence at the expense of other strengths, it seems that college admissions has been steadily devaluing general intelligence over the years. Correspondingly, the alphabet tests increasingly reward rote memorization, diligence, and repeated practice at the expense of general intelligence. When I was in college the most disturbing trend was students who…
Yeah, people with law degrees are probably overrepresented in politics, but pre-med?
Re: An alarm about the influence of standardized tests on American society
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, and this type of moral education is actually done in schools. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and we had a unit on water conservation; a unit on energy efficiency; a play we wrote about rainforest destruction, endangered species, and global warming; recurrent reminders to recycle; programs for anti-drug and anti-smoking initiatives; sex ed; and pervasive lessons on respecting each other and authority. I haven't h…
That's a good analysis , particular the part about defectors . And under that analysis, it seems that wisdom education , even of the deeper style that Buddhists or Christians do , will likely to fail, because a single defectors amplified by tech could do so much damage. So are there any solutions to that?
The one place, in a capitalist market economy, where values have a place is in the endpoint, at the consumer. Consumer markets really depend only on values; by definition, they are those goods that people buy because they value them inherently, not those that they buy to achieve another goal. The rest of the economy self-adapts to produce those goods as efficiently as possible, which often means production practices that people would find morally repugnant.
If people trained themselves to a.) seek out as much information as possible about the supply chains of the companies they buy from and b.) not buy from them if the externalities introduced by the company aren't in accord with their values, then the market would self-adapt to reflect those preferences. It effectively creates a market for intelligent entrepreneurs to do the right thing, by influencing consumption desires so that there's a profit potential in being good.
There are still some very significant challenges in bringing this information to the consumer, and in people integrating all that information into their choices. A lot of the benefits of market economies is that they condense a lot of information from each stage of the production process into one number, a price, which propagates throughout the value chain so that self-interested actors end up producing a good in the most maximally efficient way. If you want to encode moral judgments and pass them through the value chain, you need a lot more information to go from producer to consumer. And businesses have a lot of incentive to cheat and conceal this information, so accurately recording & transmitting it is challenging.
Actually, I just had a crazy half-baked idea around using vectors instead of scalars for prices and encoding this information in a cryptocurrency, but the margin of this HN comment is too small to contain it. Maybe someone else can run with it.