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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?’

#221

Post by pjscott »

derleth wrote: post #199
dkokelley wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming is not as ubiquitous as you or I would like to think. In fact, I would say that most people use less than 10% of a computer's capacity at work or home (not to say they don't max out memory or tax the CPU, but that they don't 'unlock' the computer to its potential). Also, if you can tune engines effectively, you can better influence the cars you drive, and most people use one every day. Shouldn't auto shop…

Education isn't about making people average. It's about trying to elevate them a bit above. I wouldn't be averse to adding auto shop in (except for the practical matter that modern cars aren't as friendly to shade-tree mechanics as cars of decades ago) but I still think computer programming is more important. It's more important because, frankly, being able to use a computer really well means you can do things the co…

Education isn't about making people average. It's about trying to elevate them a bit above.

I wish this were so, but if you look at most education systems, they seem to be designed with a goal of ubiquitous mediocrity. There's a lot of focus on bringing everybody up to minimal standards of not totally sucking, but anybody who isn't in the bottom 1/3 of the class is usually neglected.

At least, that's the way I remember it, and the way politicians usually talk about it. Remember "No Child Left Behind," where the goals were all based on improving education for the worst-performing students?

(It wasn't all bad. I got so bored that I learned a lot of computer stuff, which turned out to be a spectacularly good use of my time.)

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

#222

Post by kamens »

kenjackson wrote: post #128
gdfsnob wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you automatically declare an organization like Cato, which comprises a lot of living and dying Nobel Laureates (10 in fact) and read by a large number of PhDs in economics from our top universities, not HN worthy and "political propaganda"? It's a little absurd to make such a claim without substantiating your argument.

To be clear, my pronouncement of it not being HN worthy has nothing to with it being from Cato. But purely with the content of the article. Let me explain. It opens with an unattributed quote. One that is somewhat surprising given what I've seen from the teachers and educators I know who have seen Khan Academy. While some complain about things like the rigor of the exercises, I've never heard the complaint about need…

I made the original statement in question. I actually felt it was important to not attribute this to any particular teacher. Criticize me all you like for this, but teachers have enough on their plates without worrying about being attacked for trying to figure out how to help kids have the best experience possible in whatever system they'll be using for the next few years.

From the teacher's perspective of trying to help a student not have a year of miserable experience, this is a legitimate concern. That's the core of the problem.

This quote is not about a teacher trying to hold a kid back. So it really doesn't matter who it came from.

It's about a teacher who, even though he/she is passionate and fearless enough to put significant effort into working with a system as new and scary as the Khan Academy, is still constrained by the momentum of an entire educational system that directly contradicts many of the self-paced goals of Khan Academy.

That's an important challenge to acknowledge. And unless they're in some crazy special circumstance, even the most fearless teachers in the world can't yet escape it.

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

#223

Post by jshen »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #218
jshen wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I could make a better product than apple wouldn't that be a good thing? Too bad I can't.

Are you trying to claim that it is impossible to do a better job than public schools? If not, I simply don't understand your comment.

It's not a question of whether it's possible, it's a question of whether it's probable.

Here's my theory. We should privatize prisons. The competition between companies to build and manage prisons will lead to innovations in rehabilitation techniques, and innovations in efficiency of inmate management. We'll get a system that releases prisoners who don't end up back in prison and it will be cheaper than our current system all because of the magic of competition and the profit motive.

Except we've tried this experiment, and the results are clear. The profit motive has lead to the prison industry lobbying government to get laws that send more people to prison, and to private prisons giving kickbacks to judges to send kinds to prison for first time minor offenses.

The incentive created by privatization is to create more profit, not to create a better school or prison.

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

#224

Post by dkokelley »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #205
dkokelley wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two best things about being home schooled for me were A: The ability to work my own schedule. If I wanted to double up on school one day, I could. Then the next day I could skip school and work on a hobby or project. This brings me to B: The ability to focus my studies on things that interested me. For me, this included Battlebots (I made one) and aviation. Aviation was an early career choice that didn't quite ma…

Could you describe what you mean by "home schooled" a little more. For example: > I was able to do things like take the day off of school to copilot with my uncle // Confuses me because when you're copiloting with your uncle you're being home-schooled; you're not having the day off from education you're just doing it differently (right!). Presumably where you are just being educated at home doesn't fit the definition…

You're right. In a way, I was able to get school out of the way so I could learn.

There are still requirements to meet. We had standardized testing every year, and coursework to complete. My point is that I could get the formal stuff out of the way at my own pace, and actually do interesting things like learn about aerodynamics first-hand. At a public school, this would have been more difficult to do.

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

#225

Post by nitrogen »

jshen wrote: post #97
losvedir wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Are we allowed to include universities?

Hm, interesting question. I was thinking specifically of primary education, most people never go to a private college and it's a very different situation. For example, my wife is a teacher, and one of her biggest challenges is dealing with kids with severe behavior problems. They disrupt the entire class, but these kids still need an education. If you remove those kids from the class the rest of the kids benefit, but…

This seems to create a perverse incentive in a private system. Private schools will do everything they can to be selective about there students, because their ultimate goal isn't to educate the nation as a whole, and that seems like the wrong goal to me.

Why does there have to be an ultimate goal that is shared by every single education institution? Top-tier children deserve a top-tier education every bit as much as misbehaving children deserve the best education they can manage. Instead of having a single educational goal, why not start with the following three goals, and move from there?

1. Maximize the maximum outcome. In other words, allow gifted students to move as fast as they want.

2. Improve the mean outcome. If the mean education level of the nation rises, one can expect the mean productivity level to rise as well.

3. Minimize the negative cases. Provide intensive remedial (in the strictest sense of the root word "remedy") solutions to raise the worst case students to the highest possible level.

Actually, I suppose these three goals could be summarized into a single goal:

1. Maximize the individual outcome of each individual student. This would be like the reverse of the "rising tide floats all boats" metaphor. If every student reaches his or her maximum potential, then the nation as a whole reaches its maximum potential.

That should be the singular focus of any education system. Any other metric will fail to optimize certain students' outcomes, which by definition fails to optimize the mean outcome. I would be very happy if nobody ever had to be told to slow down to keep with the class again, as I was multiple times in my public school education.

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

#226

Post by yummyfajitas »

jshen wrote: post #223
yummyfajitas wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trying to claim that it is impossible to do a better job than public schools? If not, I simply don't understand your comment.

It's not a question of whether it's possible, it's a question of whether it's probable. Here's my theory. We should privatize prisons. The competition between companies to build and manage prisons will lead to innovations in rehabilitation techniques, and innovations in efficiency of inmate management. We'll get a system that releases prisoners who don't end up back in prison and it will be cheaper than our current s…

We don't need to theorize. We already have a privatized education system in the US - college. Could you explain why it would be a bad thing to make primary education more like college?

Also, if you feel the US college system is so bad, should we try to make our college system more like our primary education system? If not, why not?

Your comparison to prisons is silly since a) non-privatized prisons have similar incentives and similarly lobby for more prisoners (google CA prison guard unions), b) prisoners don't get to choose their prison (unlike schools), and c) private prisons are not rewarded based on rehabilitation.

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

#227

Post by Jach »

chopsueyar wrote: post #145
sequoia wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By no means universal, merely a reflection of my experiences. For example, I was an exchange student for a year and when I came back I was told I'd get no credits for it because I couldn't produce a report card , so I was held back (i.e. punished for studying in a diff. country for a year). Same year: moved from another state, forced to take freshman "earth & environmental sciences" because it's a state requirement.…

This is not limited to public schools. I experienced something similar after transferring from a private university, taking six full semesters of a computer engineering curriculum, only to be required to attend community college to take intro to computers, among others, before I was allowed to enroll in a public university. So, six years of fulltime classes for an undergraduate degree is my experience .

I'm in a similar situation, though I'm going to stick it out and finish the CE degree at my private school. I've heard other students call up University of Washington who once the people there heard the name of my school, they laughed and said "Yeah we won't accept your credits even though your classes are harder than ours and your school average is 20-credit semesters." The main issue there is accreditation. For my school to get the same level of accreditation as universities, basically the only thing that needs to change is the power structure and possibly a few more required "soft" classes. We have a pretty decent Dictator even if he has his faults, the analogy is something like the difference between Python with a BDFL and C++ with a committee.

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

#228

Post by Jach »

fleitz wrote: post #123
sequoia wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By no means universal, merely a reflection of my experiences. For example, I was an exchange student for a year and when I came back I was told I'd get no credits for it because I couldn't produce a report card , so I was held back (i.e. punished for studying in a diff. country for a year). Same year: moved from another state, forced to take freshman "earth & environmental sciences" because it's a state requirement.…

The key with the public school system is to leverage your statistical power. When I was in school I told them I wasn't going to take all the optional blocks and instead would have spares. They said that it was a school policy blah blah blah. I told them that the School Act defined no such requirement and being older than 16 I was no longer required to be in school at all so they could either let me have empty blocks…

...So I guess they let you stay? That seems like a risky game to me, I didn't think schools really cared about their students individually, just on an aggregate "x% graduated so we get funding" level. When I finished 8th grade, with 7th and 8th being full years of 4.0 GPAs every quarter, my junior high decided to kick me out instead of letting me go into 9th grade because I lived in the neighboring city and they didn't like that. The city JH and HS I went to after though were better anyway.

I kind of wish I took the GED as soon as I could have, would have saved many years. I had the unfortunately lucky 'problem' of liking a lot of my teachers and classes though. Basically what I hated were the prerequisites and the required things like art/p.e./poorly taught history which I had already learned in junior high that I had no interest in those things. (I actually liked weight lifting in p.e., but the running and 'games' I didn't like.) (It's especially bad that many of the required subjects in high school are near-replicas of what was required in junior high since most students had forgotten what they learned by then and when a Ceramics course is available to fill an art requirement the teacher has to construct it for those who suck at art, while the good ceramics people still have to take it to get to Ceramics 2.)

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

#229

Post by grandalf »

jshen wrote: post #223
yummyfajitas wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you trying to claim that it is impossible to do a better job than public schools? If not, I simply don't understand your comment.

It's not a question of whether it's possible, it's a question of whether it's probable. Here's my theory. We should privatize prisons. The competition between companies to build and manage prisons will lead to innovations in rehabilitation techniques, and innovations in efficiency of inmate management. We'll get a system that releases prisoners who don't end up back in prison and it will be cheaper than our current s…

The main difference is that with prisons, the "customer" is the government. Inmates do not have a voice in society, and they are routinely raped and tortured (and often murdered) in both private and public prisons.

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

#230

Post by jholman »

klbarry wrote: post #146
jholman wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-cons…

Please see my above post on persuasion as a rebuttal, it also applies in part to this post.

Forgive my density, but I actually fail to see how.
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