61–70 of 548 posts
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I did not. Reading comprehension is key.
I agree with their interpretation. "Be more ambitious" isn't a solution to poverty. There are plenty of ambitious people to compete with at every income level.
I said "do", as in "to perform an action". Ambition might lead you to do things, but that's not what I address.
Now, "what they need to know" differs by caste.
The high caste learn how they deserve their privileged position, how to perpetuate their position, and who are the key players.
The medium caste learn how to set up or run business and merchant operations, how to be an exec, how power works, who are the key players within their field, and how to cultivate their networks.
The low caste learn how to do the jobs they're destined for, how to take orders, how to climb the ladder (somewhat), and hopefully how to politick at work.
The bottom caste are lucky to learn anything beyond reading, writing, and a smattering of arithmetic. They might learn a few things to help them in their jobs, but there's really no point since they're easily replaced anyway.
Education follows our birth caste. That's all we're raised to realistically aspire to, and that's also all the higher castes will allow for you unless you get VERY lucky (i.e. someone wasn't paying attention), or someone throws you a bone (scholarship or the like - and even then you're limited in how far you can rise without resentful pushback). New money is always frowned upon for at least a few generations.
Most of us are in the bottom two castes. Medium is reserved for the 2% whose families are wealthy and influential enough. I doubt you know anyone in the high caste.
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You haven't gotten an explanation because people who advocate for "school choice" systems don't want the bad schools to get better. They just don't want their kids to interact with people who go to the bad school.
That describes why people pay for private school more than it describes why people would support vouchers. The theory is that "school choice" would mean everyone would flee the worst schools and they'd be compelled to clean up their act or dissolve.
You have to ask if the majority of 'educated' people actually do things of value. Perhaps we should simply follow a Lysenkoist approach of simply handing out a diploma to one and all. Forgive me for the old man moment, but I was just musing about how little my life has changed since the 1970s. Noticeable differences: TVs have more pixels, airliners look the same but are slower, you can order manufactured goods from y…
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I'm not American, but the core flaw that I've never had explained away for me in voucher or "school choice" systems is how "bad" schools get better. E.g., school in my district is bad. They don't have enough resources, or their teachers are bad. People begin taking their kids out of the school which means the school now has less money. Assuming they could fire teachers at will, they can't even now afford the "better"…
The failing schools will also get fewer students going for them. Money per student will be the same as it always was, and quite often with a better student/teacher ratio as well.
It will cost more per student, which leaves less money available for teachers so the student/teacher ratio would get worse. The facilities will not be kept up as required. Programs will be cut.
Also ignored in your analysis is that generally when school choice is available, the students most likely to leave a school are the high performers and the most likely to stay are the low performs and students with special needs, who are more expensive to educate and were previously subsidized by the high performers. If you compare the services provided to special needs students at a school in a wealthy area to the services provided to special needs students at a school in a poor area, there will be a massive difference in quality.
This one seems kind of tough to quickly summarize, since it covers so much. I guess the final paragraph does a decent job: Education, training in cognitive and noncognitive skills, nutrition, health care and parenting are all among the building blocks of human capital, and evidence suggests that continuing investments that combat economic hardship among whites and minorities — and which help defuse debilitating confl…
As a Bangladeshi immigrant who married into a white American family, it’s really hard for me to not notice the devastation mainstream American culture has racked on the ability to develop human capital. My younger siblings in law, who are in their early 20s live in towns (these are mainly white, working to middle class towns) where everyone’s parents are divorced, drug use doesn’t get you a beating from your dad (who often isn’t there), etc. Kids can’t get their feet under them because their home situations are always changing. For boys this is particularly bad, because their natural inclination is to cause trouble and the only thing that can keep them in control is a network of older men. (My dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh and remarked that he couldn’t do anything anywhere in the village without word getting back to his father.)
Money can paper over a lot of problems, I’ll give you that. But it seems to me that if Americans were as poor as Bangladeshis, their society would totally collapse. The culture isn’t suited for survival or upward mobility.
In a lot of European countries, a robust social safety net is the great equalizer. You don't get locked up to work in order to afford healthcare, food, etc. - and are thus more free to take chances. Furthermore, strong labor laws have compressed salaries towards the mean, so people are not locking themselves into poverty by working low-wage / low-skill work, but there's a difference enough that people are incentivize…
If Europeans are more free to take chances, why is there substantially less innovation in Europe?
I don't think Europe is "worse" than the US. I think Europe is optimized for the poor whereas the US is optimized for the middle class and above. There are good arguments for both of these situations. In the US, it is widely felt that the system should serve the tax payers. Europeans, on the other hand, seem to have a lot more solidarity with the poor who, for whatever reason, don't pay significant taxes. Additionally (and controversially), I think a significant amount of the European attitude comes down to ethnic solidarity. European countries are ethnostates and the US isn't.
One interesting thing is that Europeans benefit from American innovation. They have iphones, windows pcs, use google, etc like everyone else.
Controlling education is a political life source for the Democratic party in the U.S. One of the largest, if not the largest, unions is the teacher's and they are a major donor to the Democratic party. Thankfully, the one good thing about the shutdowns has been the ability for parents to observe a couple things: * how little the school system cares about the child * the indoctrination and political ideas being passed…
I'm not American, but the core flaw that I've never had explained away for me in voucher or "school choice" systems is how "bad" schools get better. E.g., school in my district is bad. They don't have enough resources, or their teachers are bad. People begin taking their kids out of the school which means the school now has less money. Assuming they could fire teachers at will, they can't even now afford the "better"…
I expect that you have to try it and add controls as necessary. Not only are these systems too complicated to model in any simple way, but have multiple players each with their own demands. It's a strategy problem as much as simply channeling some money.
It seems to me that the end game always becomes one of segregation of 'good' vs. 'bad' students. The teaching part isn't purely an aside, but matters less than you might think. So, you have to ask how important it is for the good to drag along the bad (or visa versa) and how detrimental it is to produce schools that are, in essence, jails.
Controlling education is a political life source for the Democratic party in the U.S. One of the largest, if not the largest, unions is the teacher's and they are a major donor to the Democratic party. Thankfully, the one good thing about the shutdowns has been the ability for parents to observe a couple things: * how little the school system cares about the child * the indoctrination and political ideas being passed…
Alright. You rendered your entire point to "hurr, left wing bad" but with just many more words. For anyone else, take a look at who keeps cutting funding to education and funneling funds to profit oriented companies before you let this guy play this kind of disingenuous game here. Especially as Reason's positions often carry the Libertarian bent of "fuck you, got mine" as the motivation to further erode the equal pla…
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In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking. I've met plenty of people who have a learned helplessness when it comes to, say, math. I've studied alongside classmates who could't spend as much time studying as me, simply because they had to support themselves with part-time or full-time work just to keep their head above water.…
> In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking. I don't know how we're defining deep thought and critical thinking but it's important to recognise that people have limitations to their intellect and for some people that ceiling is very low. If we assume that you have some kind of software job since you're on HN - there are many…
I disagree with the idea that somehow, innate intelligence sets the bar so low. There's definitely a bar somewhere, but I'd argue that most of our jobs (even in tech) don't come anywhere close to reaching that limit.
I'd argue that most of us here are of pretty average intelligence, it's just that our life circumstances have pushed us into a role where we get to exercise our brain muscles.
One thing is that having good teachers helps immensely. For a a lot of people I meet, when they reflect on their high school math and programming classes, the story is always the same: They had a lousy teacher that had them do everything by rote memorization, without explaining the underlying principles. They got the impression that that's what the whole field is like, and that they weren't smart enough, so why even bother. Occasionally, they'll be interested in hearing me explain what I do, and their response is always the same: "Wow. I wish someone had it explained it that way to me before."