Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non vitae sed scholae discimus. (Seneca, epistulae morales ad Lucilium 106, 11–12)
Er, mutatis mutandis!
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Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
11–20 of 117 posts
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#12Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#13School is a flawed meritocracy, but it actually makes efforts to be one.
Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy as meritocrats. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion.
In school, you learn that hard work is rewarded (with some noise) and that cheaters eventually get caught. The system isn't perfect, and there's definitely some corruption in admissions decisions later on, due to the socioeconomic fuckery that infects everything... but the attempt to be a meritocracy is at least clearly there. If you are treated unjustly by the system, you can at least appeal to the concept of meritocracy, and you have a chance of winning.
Corporate is easier, in the sense that the work is almost never demanding, and the evaluation thereof is invariably political... but if you go in expecting a meritocracy, because that's what 16-20+ years of schooling had you believing you would find... then oh boy are you going to be disappointed when you see what it's actually like. If a professor played favorites the way the average corporate manager does, he'd be fired.
Corporate is also a lot noisier. In school, you might get a B when you should have gotten an A, once in a while, but over time the noise cancels out. In corporate, you can get fired, and have your income turned off, for all kinds of stupid political reasons.
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#14I've long thought that schools should just let people go at whatever pace they want. This should be easier now with video classes. Just let people take the algebra or calculus or whatever module, when they feel like it. There would still be some sort of minimum requirement so that you can write a decent email, but there would be no reason to lock people in year groups. Year groups are still important socially, but th…
Young children are not famously good decision makers, and it's easy to imagine them making very limiting choices that they would later come to regret.
Young children are also famously voracious learners. That is, until institutions like schools get in the way.
Plunging young children into an anarchical learning environment with nothing but YouTube to guide them won't end well. But if you add guidance that encourages their strengths and tolerates their weaknesses, I speculate that net learning will exceed that of today's school system.
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#15I've long thought that schools should just let people go at whatever pace they want. This should be easier now with video classes. Just let people take the algebra or calculus or whatever module, when they feel like it. There would still be some sort of minimum requirement so that you can write a decent email, but there would be no reason to lock people in year groups. Year groups are still important socially, but th…
School is glorified babysitting until university. Actually learning is just a convenient but ultimately secondary use of that time.
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#16School is a flawed meritocracy, but it actually makes efforts to be one. Corporate is a deliberate non-meritocracy whose purpose is to ratify the inadequate descendants of an existing oligarchy as meritocrats. Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time; he punished people who said the trains were late. Corporate is the same: meritocracy by assertion--and only by assertion. In school, you learn that hard work is rew…
Corporate is weird. The tendency is to have an in-group and out group, but that is just normal human behavior. Nothing ground-breaking here.
But to say that work is not demanding and evaluation always political is very big generalization. Some hard projects go to people that can handle them ( or can't if you don't like them ). When that big project is over, there seems to be a very clear indication, who MVPs are ( even if they do not have 'in-group' status ). So some level of meritocracy exists. It is hardly perfect, but it is there.
On the other hand, school-wise I had a very wide range experiences, which kinda taught me that 'people tend to believe what they want to believe', by which I mean that teachers that think you are a good student will let you be a good student.
I am writing this as I am sipping coffee preparing mentally for this year's projects.
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#17I've long thought that schools should just let people go at whatever pace they want. This should be easier now with video classes. Just let people take the algebra or calculus or whatever module, when they feel like it. There would still be some sort of minimum requirement so that you can write a decent email, but there would be no reason to lock people in year groups. Year groups are still important socially, but th…
> Year groups are still important socially
After you left High School, was there ever a time in your life when you hung out with people of exactly the same age? The fact that everyone spends 13 years of their youth doing it now is an artifact only about 100 years old.
> I've long thought that schools should just let people go at whatever pace they want.
I'm pretty sure Montessori schools do something like this.
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#18I've long thought that schools should just let people go at whatever pace they want. This should be easier now with video classes. Just let people take the algebra or calculus or whatever module, when they feel like it. There would still be some sort of minimum requirement so that you can write a decent email, but there would be no reason to lock people in year groups. Year groups are still important socially, but th…
> Year groups are still important socially Disagree. Year groups perpetuate immaturity. They are also very socially unnatural, a mere byproduct of going for scale in the education system. That is fine, but if we can achieve scale without year groups (which we could under your proposal), that would be better.
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Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're describing is called "mastery learning," and it is a thing. Essentially, you can't progress from one module to the next without a certain minimum score on the current module (that's the "mastery" part). It works well in subjects like math, where there are a lot of dependencies between later and earlier modules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning
Where can I do a (respectable) on-line degree in this structure? While I'm fantasizing, the second unrealistic requirement is affordable. ;-)
The Open University. It’s reputable (although by no means in anyone’s top 10 rankings), let’s you go your own pace and the tuition isn’t too bad.
Re: Life, school, and the 80:20 rule (2019)
#20I've long thought that schools should just let people go at whatever pace they want. This should be easier now with video classes. Just let people take the algebra or calculus or whatever module, when they feel like it. There would still be some sort of minimum requirement so that you can write a decent email, but there would be no reason to lock people in year groups. Year groups are still important socially, but th…
> Year groups are still important socially After you left High School, was there ever a time in your life when you hung out with people of exactly the same age? The fact that everyone spends 13 years of their youth doing it now is an artifact only about 100 years old. > I've long thought that schools should just let people go at whatever pace they want. I'm pretty sure Montessori schools do something like this.
I found that it expanded a lot as I got older. In the early years people in the year above and below were like strangers. By the end of high school, I knew all the people in adjacent years, plus siblings. At uni there's only a few years there, so I guess it doesn't really count. Once I started worked it all stopped mattering, I have retired friends as well as ones that have just started work.
But for little kids, it seems to matter a bit. You can tell kids change fast, so plus minus a year at a young age matters.