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Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’

cato-at-liberty.org

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Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’

#111

Post by gdfsnob »

bendotc wrote: post #104
gdfsnob wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cato free-market spin is questionable and not terribly well suited to Hacker News" As if Hacker News is somehow more qualified on economic issues than Cato, which has 10 Nobel Laureates? F. A. Hayek Milton Friedman James M. Buchanan Robert Mundell Edward C. Prescott Douglass C. North Vernon L. Smith Gary S. Becker Ronald Coase Thomas C. Schelling http://www.cato.org/people/nobel-index.html

You seem to be arguing against a point I didn't make. I didn't say that "Hacker News is more qualified on economic issues than Cato" as you put it. I said that I found the case made in this blog post to be questionable and that this political content is not well-suited to Hacker News. I was not impeaching the intellectual output of the Nobel laureates associated with the Cato institute, but I do have to note here tha…

"the Cato free-market spin is questionable and not terribly well suited to Hacker News, IMO"

Sorry, but you dismiss Cato because of its "free-market spin" and then call its main thesis "questionable", when 10 Nobel Laureates, who probably know far more than us on economic issues, are associated with Cato. I'd also note that Paul Krugman, Delong, and Sachs -- all very prominent Democratic supporters -- are very pro free market as indicated on the links you'll find on their Wikipedia pages.

Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’

#112

Post by gamble »

pnathan wrote: post #57
j_baker wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how it worked at my university. I had some choice as far as what order I could take classes in, but everything still worked at the same pace no matter what.

Um. You can be taking freshman-level courses your senior year. Or, if you are up to the challenging, junior level courses your freshmen year.

> junior level courses your freshmen year

Not if the upper-level courses have prerequisites, which is typically the case in STEM programs. In my EE program the courses were scheduled so that it was impossible to graduate in less than four years. Most courses beyond freshman year had only one or two sections, taught during a specific semester.

Liberal arts may be different.

Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’

#113

Post by hugh3 »

vnchr wrote: post #17

I think the innocence behind that statement comes from the difficulty a teacher will face if s/he must teach students with diverse learning needs (child A is learning timestables while child B has moved on to trigonometry). That said, I think a teacher should suck it up for the sake of students in this sort of situation. At worst, we find ways to reorganize teachers and students based on students' self-progress.

Clearly students need to be placed into classes based on their ability. There is no goddamn reason why student A and student B should be in the same class, or even at the same school.

Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’

#114

Post by hugh3 »

jmtame wrote: post #28

That is why the for-profit Asian tutoring industry groups students by performance, not by age. There are “grades,” but they do not depend on when a student was born, only on what she knows and is able to do. I just interviewed Andrew Hsu for Startups Open Sourced and he mentioned this was very important in education. He had scored so high on his IQ test at 6 years old he was classified as "genius" and received 3 B.S.…

I'm sorry, but how the hell do you recieve three BS degrees at the age of sixteen (unless you mean BS degrees, which I'd imagine they'd really have to be...)

Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’

#115

Post by jshen »

grandalf wrote: post #98
jshen wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a binary choice. I think capitalism is great for most things, and bad at some things. Education happens to be one of those things. If I buy a $30 bottle of pills that are supposed to make me lose weight, well I lost $30 and I learned my lesson. If I send my kid to a fucked up school it might take years for me to realize it was fucked up, and the stakes are much higher. A bit of back story. I'm the…

Fair enough, but many US colleges and universities are private and are the best in the world. I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion. In today's public schools, many kids can't read or do basic math, so it's hard to imagine something worse. Also, the monopoly system is the only reason parents can't easily switch their kid to a different school. If th…

"If this were an option, parents would be much more critical."

I seriously doubt it. Just look at all the sham private colleges that exist right now. Also, I think the problem with our kids isn't the school system, but a culture that doesn't value hard work and education.

Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’

#116

Post by jholman »

grandalf wrote: post #86
jshen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private schools will lead to a marketing driven education system that preys on peoples ignorance. Here's a simple thought experiment. Look at all the education systems around the world, and ask if the ones with the best results are private or public.

Your argument is essentially "marketing is bad". Which is a shadow argument for "capitalism is bad". Take an ad for the Macbook Air. It shows a stylish person happily using the Air to do something fun. Now consider an ad for a private school that shows a child happily benefitting from something he/she learned at the school being advertised. Maybe the ad shows a graduate getting accepted into a prestigious college or…

For myself, I think advertising as it currently exists is a massive negative for society, and I think capitalism is a net win (perhaps marginal). So I insist that "marketing is bad" is NOT a shadow argument for "capitalism is bad".

You do a fine job of describing what I think is wrong with ads (that most ads consist primarily of false information, often conveyed via subtle signals that the consumer processes non-consciously). I also absolutely agree that making the consuming public aware of the options open to them in the market is beneficial to society. I agree that there's a tension here: if you want to absolutely ban all of the downside of the former, you also lose the upside of the latter. Thank god my disgusting bathwater is gone, but where's my baby?

However, it's completely preposterous to say that the only alternatives are completely unrestrained advertising on the one hand, and a government-sponsored consumer-reports on the other. The latter sounds like an experiment I'd like to see run, actually, but not enough to endorse it in my own economy, so I guess that shows how much faith I have in it. But we already live in a compromise: manufacturers of known social ills like tobacco, alcohol, and gambling, have restrictions placed on how they can advertise. We already have laws on false advertising, especially around food and drugs, and also laws on clarity in packaging (which is a form of advertising). I think that if there were public will to do so, we could iteratively, gradually, over years and years, successively tighten the requirements for truth in advertising.

I think it's plausible and practical that this might get us to a societal state where the standard for advertising is informative, useful, and much much less manipulative.

Or maybe it wouldn't get us there, because getting legislation right is a bitch (especially in the US, apparently). But I see no support for your out-of-hand dismissal of the existence of practical, plausible alternatives to laissez faire.

Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’

#117

Post by gdfsnob »

Symmetry wrote: post #106
gdfsnob wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Cato free-market spin is questionable and not terribly well suited to Hacker News" As if Hacker News is somehow more qualified on economic issues than Cato, which has 10 Nobel Laureates? F. A. Hayek Milton Friedman James M. Buchanan Robert Mundell Edward C. Prescott Douglass C. North Vernon L. Smith Gary S. Becker Ronald Coase Thomas C. Schelling http://www.cato.org/people/nobel-index.html

I wouldn't use the present tense when some of those guys are dead.

Well, only 2 are dead, and those two (Hayek and Friedman) are probably the most famous libertarian economists/thinkers. I think it would be safe to assume they would support the article above.

Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’

#118

Post by Magnin »

_delirium wrote: post #3

I suppose it's a Cato blog post, but I was hoping for a more interesting discussion than just a random call for private education, with a market-will-solve it assertion. People learning at different paces and on their own is a fairly interesting problem highlighted here, but I think it's wishful thinking to claim that the perfect answer is already known. It's not entirely clear to me that private schools would cater…

My parents actually pulled us out of PRIVATE school and put us into PUBLIC school because we were outpacing the curriculum, being bored, and losing interest.

My sister got to 4th grade in the private school and suddenly didn't want to go to school anymore. She wasn't challenged. The private school's solution when my parent's talked to them was to assign my sister MORE BUSYWORK. The public school had an actual gifted & talented program we were able to exploit.

It wasn't all roses though- my mom had yell at several Administrators to get us the programs to challange us (my brother was in AP Calc, the highest math available, his freshman year of HS). It's true though: the biggest indicator of success in school is parental involvement.

Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’

#119

Post by randallsquared »

_delirium wrote: post #3

I suppose it's a Cato blog post, but I was hoping for a more interesting discussion than just a random call for private education, with a market-will-solve it assertion. People learning at different paces and on their own is a fairly interesting problem highlighted here, but I think it's wishful thinking to claim that the perfect answer is already known. It's not entirely clear to me that private schools would cater…

I think it's wishful thinking to claim that the perfect answer is already known.

Markets aren't the answer; they're a method for finding the answer, or (more likely) multiple answers.

Re: Could You Modify It ‘To Stop Students From Becoming This Advanced?’

#120

Post by jshen »

hugh3 wrote: post #110
grandalf wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough, but many US colleges and universities are private and are the best in the world. I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion. In today's public schools, many kids can't read or do basic math, so it's hard to imagine something worse. Also, the monopoly system is the only reason parents can't easily switch their kid to a different school. If th…

I think your worry about someone starting a school that is actually a sham are very much out of proportion. The only concern I'd have would be with religious schools which might teach BS instead of real stuff. But an appropriate level of government intervention in setting the curriculum and standard examinations would hopefully negate this problem. "Final question for one million points: roughly how old is the Earth,…

If the government sets the curriculum and standards then why have private schools? They will just cost more because they need to make their 15% margin.
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