You missed personal finance in that list.
I'm not sure if you are recommending doing away with regular curriculum completely or supporting it with your curriculum. I am all for latter because that's the change which is feasible, former is not.
A new school curriculum
11–20 of 88 posts
Re: A new school curriculum
#12"How to be a friendly, well-liked person" is not a "social skill." "How to use the Internet to learn: Google, Wikipedia." This is "learning about learning" to you?
> "How to be a friendly, well-liked person" is not a "social skill."
Why not?
Re: A new school curriculum
#13You missed personal finance in that list. I'm not sure if you are recommending doing away with regular curriculum completely or supporting it with your curriculum. I am all for latter because that's the change which is feasible, former is not.
I'm guessing that'll go under "organization". I think these topics are intentionally general to cover a bunch of stuff.
Re: A new school curriculum
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even more cynically: to paraphrase from George Carlin's last comedy special in 2008, public education will never get better because the powers-that-be don't want a well-rounded populace capable of critical thinking. "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"
You don't need to resort to a conspiracy to explain the massive dysfunction in the US educational system. It explains itself: education is a mess, so smart critical people are rare, so it is hard to get them to teach and even harder to keep them teaching in the presence of overbearing and awful governance. The field of education research is also a mess on the level of 1910s psychology, and that's not helping the qual…
> education is a mess, so smart critical people are rare, so it is hard to get them to teach
I'm not sure I agree with this. If our schools were 10x as effective and we produced 10x as many smart people, I think we'd be having the same conversation. It would just be about how hard it is to recruit people to teach quantum computer programming when you can make 5 times as much working in the teleportation industry (facetious example, please don't debate the physics of this).
Re: A new school curriculum
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even more cynically: to paraphrase from George Carlin's last comedy special in 2008, public education will never get better because the powers-that-be don't want a well-rounded populace capable of critical thinking. "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"
You don't need to resort to a conspiracy to explain the massive dysfunction in the US educational system. It explains itself: education is a mess, so smart critical people are rare, so it is hard to get them to teach and even harder to keep them teaching in the presence of overbearing and awful governance. The field of education research is also a mess on the level of 1910s psychology, and that's not helping the qual…
> The field of education research is also a mess on the level of 1910s psychology, and that's not helping the quality of schools either.
The faddish education "research" stuff that ends up being implemented in schools and used as material for professional development is often on the level of bad pop-business books, for the same reasons that bad pop-business books are so common and so widely read, I suppose.
Actually it's kind of like pop-parenting books and bad pop-business books had a baby and that baby is education books. They are, in the lingo of our times, hot garbage.
Admin, principal through superintendent, are largely careerist political types with shockingly poor reasoning and critical thinking skills considering most of them have been granted a PhD—another problem: for a bunch of reasons including demand outstripping legitimate supply by a large margin and a whole pile of bad incentives, education degrees on all levels are about 99% bullshit and there's no shortage of morons who shouldn't have been able to achieve a bachelor's in anything running around with graduate degrees and an ego to match—so they're terrible at evaluating this stuff and quite gullible, while also being very certain of any decisions they make. It's a recipe for disaster.
Re: A new school curriculum
#16Cynical opinion: School is first and foremost a place where kids are kept so they're busy. Much like compulsory military service is a place where young adults are kept so they're busy. The answer to "Why aren't schools as good as they could be?" is mostly "Because they are as good as they need to be."
Even more cynically: to paraphrase from George Carlin's last comedy special in 2008, public education will never get better because the powers-that-be don't want a well-rounded populace capable of critical thinking. "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"
The most cynical of us follow it down the rabbit hole to Foucault:
"The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class."
Re: A new school curriculum
#17> there are mental techniques, such as the memory palace, which enhance your ability to store and remember knowledge by 10x (not an exaggeration!). how did we miss that in school? Memorizing is pretty useless for doing anything except for passing highschool tests, and it can stop you from learning for real because it replaces understanding and independent derivation with recall. Of all the people I remember passing c…
Like your display name suggest,
Remembering people's name/face/"where you've first met" is one of those social abilities that can get you very far in life.
So yeah, remembering is kinda something you should practice.
Re: A new school curriculum
#18"How to be a friendly, well-liked person" is not a "social skill." "How to use the Internet to learn: Google, Wikipedia." This is "learning about learning" to you?
Kids used to have to be taught how to use the library. Card catalogue, Dewey decimal system, all that. The kinds of things one may find at a library other than books. People aren't born knowing this stuff and may not realize what can and cannot be gained from a resource, or how to go about getting it, if they aren't told at some point.
Hell, you have to teach kids about book features like captions and tables of contents and indices and footnotes and, believe it or not, kids aren't always great at picking up that knowledge even when taught.
Re: A new school curriculum
#19> there are mental techniques, such as the memory palace, which enhance your ability to store and remember knowledge by 10x (not an exaggeration!). how did we miss that in school? Memorizing is pretty useless for doing anything except for passing highschool tests, and it can stop you from learning for real because it replaces understanding and independent derivation with recall. Of all the people I remember passing c…
So much this. I like the metaphor of tree-trunk learning https://lifehacker.com/elon-musk-on-learning-new-things-view... — every bit of knowledge you can't connect to first principles or internalized second principles just falls down.
The mentioned memoization techniques are like synthetic trees for real leaves, but these tend to rot extremely quick.
Point in case:
I had two history teachers I can remember. One only because he was the most boring teacher I ever had and because of him I dreaded history forever. I can't recall a single thing about his class other than he talked about stone age people once. He made us remember lots of dates with weird mnemonics and I forgot every single one of them.
The other teacher was the best I ever had. She visualized the international politics leading from the age of industrialization in Europe to WW1 and WW2 so vividly in causalities, entities and relationships that I can recall the important development over 300 years of central European history any time. I don't have any year numbers for it, but it's one clear, coherent and logical story.
It's been 20 years since I sat in her class.
Re: A new school curriculum
#20This is a common complaint that confounds me. Did other people go to schools with radically different curricula?
I had multiple teachers discuss note taking habits, using a planner, how to approach reading a book, using mnemonics, and using the internet for research projects.
I had a health class that discussed good eating and exercise habits.
I remember being encouraged to find an after school club/activity and a day where career counselors came to class.
We had multiple arts and gym classes.
I remember a section of an English course where we covered professional skills such as public speaking and drafting emails.
Many of my classes required group projects.
I had multiple science classes that covered evolution and the cell.
Nearly everyone of the author's bullet points raised my eyebrows and left me wondering what their science/health/gym/English classes covered. I think the author fails to realize how much of what they want is already incorporated.
Edit: Corrected punctuation.