181–190 of 191 posts
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It makes me sad how little we value education beyond gainful employment.
It makes me sad that people who think education is for something other than gainful employment are in charge of the government-mandated education people are forced to dedicate their childhoods to.
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It makes me sad how little we value education beyond gainful employment.
It makes me sad that people who think education is for something other than gainful employment are in charge of the government-mandated education people are forced to dedicate their childhoods to.
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It makes me sad that people who think education is for something other than gainful employment are in charge of the government-mandated education people are forced to dedicate their childhoods to.
That's a thing that you say that you don't really believe, because there are obvious other goals for mandatory public education; for instance, instilling our civic values.
Also, ever since we started making schools actively hostile to religion, I question how appropriate it is as a vehicle for teaching civic values.
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That's a thing that you say that you don't really believe, because there are obvious other goals for mandatory public education; for instance, instilling our civic values.
My post was ambiguous. I think education is “for” gainful employment in that it’s the overriding purpose. Basic socialization is obviously another, and there is some element of instilling civic values. I strongly disagree, however, that compulsory schooling should be a vehicle for teaching kids a variety of things that school boards think is important for “well rounded” people. It becomes too much of a vehicle for sh…
Basic numeracy also has value outside of making people more employable, and a reason that there's a nascent movement to replace Algebra 2 with something closer to a basic course on statistics and critical data thinking.
I attended 12 years of Catholic school and while some of my Jesuit high school religion classes were interesting, they were not an especially good use of my time (although they did give me a nuanced understanding of Islam that became valuable for understanding the world later on, which I appreciate). I'd probably have been better off in the public high school my kids went to. And I went to an atypically disciplined and college-focused religious school.
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The fine arts are great, after you've put food on the table and a roof over your head. Most people are much happier to have stable employment than esoteric knowledge. The economy and society are better for it too. School's primary purpose is to prepare people to be functioning members of society.
It's sad that people equate employment to being "functioning members of society." Your job is just one thing you do in society. Education is about teaching children how to think, communicate, and act as much as giving them specific tools for future careers. Never mind the plethora of studies that have found links between arts education and performance in other educational/vocational areas. It's hardly esoteric.
It seems at least possible that this might be due to schools that are better funded tend to offer more arts education, and the better funding would also presumably increase the quality of the education in other areas. Without seeing the studies, it seems hard to conclude that the arts education is the cause of the better performance in other areas.
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My post was ambiguous. I think education is “for” gainful employment in that it’s the overriding purpose. Basic socialization is obviously another, and there is some element of instilling civic values. I strongly disagree, however, that compulsory schooling should be a vehicle for teaching kids a variety of things that school boards think is important for “well rounded” people. It becomes too much of a vehicle for sh…
I think it's pretty important to hammer in basic US civil concepts like the meaning of the First Amendment, what roles we're expected to vote for, the separation of church and state, stuff like that. My understanding is that we have an unusually stable constitutional order (relative to other countries) and I assume public education is a big part of that. Basic numeracy also has value outside of making people more emp…
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It makes me sad that people who think education is for something other than gainful employment are in charge of the government-mandated education people are forced to dedicate their childhoods to.
People like you are why so many Americans come out of school with no understanding of debt or compound interest any longer. It's great for the owner class and the bankers, not so great for the "gainful employment" class.
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People like you are why so many Americans come out of school with no understanding of debt or compound interest any longer. It's great for the owner class and the bankers, not so great for the "gainful employment" class.
Personal attacks are not allowed here, and we ban accounts that do that, so please don't do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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I'm just exploring an idea here but I wonder if the point is that practicing language skills (writing, reading, presenting) are as important as practicing technical skills (computer science, chemistry, math). I might argue that in the business world, we call those language skills soft skills and that they are VERY important in the success of software developers. A great developer who can't communicate or express thei…
Yep, I (easily) spend less than half my time programming. The rest is writing and talking, sometimes to relate facts and sometimes to persuade. I think these skills are more important than just knowing how to write code after a relatively small number of years of experience (maybe 5 to 10). (Unfortunately we don't know how to interview for this and still give people at this level the same coding focused interviews, b…
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Being a Perl lover, I wonder if I should actually take a look at Scala? I've always been turned off it (and Clojure) because I don't care for the JVM, but maybe a good enough language can make dealing with the JVM tolerable? I do already like Groovy (and have been using it for my day job, since it's one of the scripting options for Dell Boomi), so it wouldn't be the first case I've encountered of "I don't like the JV…
The type signatures that look like line noise might be a turn off coming from scripting langs unless you appreciate static expressiveness.