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Let Teenagers Sleep

scientificamerican.com

231–240 of 497 posts

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#231

Its a common misconception that the goal of Education System is to educate. It's not, and the system will never accept 'improvements' that run contrary to it's purpose. In actuality education system serves four purposes: One: make both parents avaliable for the job market. For that it must supervise children during work hours, to make sure they aren't getting in trouble, drugs, or worst of all, into politics and prot…

Some of this is true, and some isn't. It is quite a mishmash. That said it is easy to find places in the world where kids aren't required to go to school, and those places aren't any kind of utopia.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#232

Its a common misconception that the goal of Education System is to educate. It's not, and the system will never accept 'improvements' that run contrary to it's purpose. In actuality education system serves four purposes: One: make both parents avaliable for the job market. For that it must supervise children during work hours, to make sure they aren't getting in trouble, drugs, or worst of all, into politics and prot…

You are grossly mischaracterizing the word "purpose". The purpose is to educate. Yet the flaws in the system are quite real, and you have called some of them out. But calling out the flaws and claiming they are the intended purpose is quite simply wrong. BTW, you can change who is in control - school boards are locally elected. Your vote has more power to change schools than almost anything else. If you want improvem…

The purpose of any system is what it does.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#233

Its a common misconception that the goal of Education System is to educate. It's not, and the system will never accept 'improvements' that run contrary to it's purpose. In actuality education system serves four purposes: One: make both parents avaliable for the job market. For that it must supervise children during work hours, to make sure they aren't getting in trouble, drugs, or worst of all, into politics and prot…

Nice that we can have a conversations here. Where did you learn how to read and write? English is not my main language, guess where I learned it.

I don't know your background, but we learned loads of things in school.

Go talk to some kids in the world that are unable to go to schools, and explain them how lucky they are.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#234

Its a common misconception that the goal of Education System is to educate. It's not, and the system will never accept 'improvements' that run contrary to it's purpose. In actuality education system serves four purposes: One: make both parents avaliable for the job market. For that it must supervise children during work hours, to make sure they aren't getting in trouble, drugs, or worst of all, into politics and prot…

I generally agree with your criticism of the education system as an instrument of filtering/segregation but I would argue school has some practical value. > Three - grade people into quality batches, based off their punctuality and ability to perform meaningless tasks to arbitrary and meaningless quality standards For example, doing math is a useful skill, not a meaningless task. > Four - because the management has g…

> For example, doing math is a useful skill, not a meaningless task.

I can't define trig relations, I sort of remember how to do multiple unknowns/linear algebra, can't even remember the definition of a quadratic equation and I couldn't do derivations if my life depended on it.

Funny thing is I used to know this stuff and actually used some of it when I was in to game dev. 10 years later anything that's above elementary school I'd probably need to Google or Wolfram.

> There are tons of literary references in everyday communication and you will be at a disadvantage if you don't know them (a "Scarlet Letter", "Big Brother", etc.)

You can look up idioms/references without reading the works.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno man, pre-civilisation and education wasn't exactly much fun either. I'd rather be a part of the system that basically gives us everything from food to iPhones and the Internet than fight against it (while avoiding predators in the wild). This is not to say that education, especially for boys and young men couldn't be made considerably better.

The older I get the more I'm realizing "pre-history", "pre-civilisation" are very Western European Concepts. Like when the Conquistadors "civilized" mexico Or when the Portuguese and French "civilized" West Africa.

Plus when the bombs go off over the Amazon warehouses, who lives? You, who can follow a Hello Fresh recipe reasonably well, or the paleoindian who can flint knap all the tools they need to process their calories?

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#236
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be two categorizations for students: highly creative students should be placed on a different path to adulthood, everybody else could use the current system. Highly creative people are more likely to be successful dropouts. To force highly creative people into this routine, is dictatorship of the mind. That's how it was for me. Edit: I upset the academics :)

Nice caste system you've got there

That's like, the opposite of a caste system

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#237

The real blame for early high school is extra-curricular sports. Basketball, Football, etc. For those sports to thrive, teams need to practice, in order for practice to be efficient, it needs to be at least an hour. So 2 hours are allocated (suit up, practice, suit down). In order for children to be able to commit to 2 hours extra of their time BEFORE their parents get home (5pm), class would have to end by 3pm. Now,…

6:15? Holy crap. High school here (Australia) starts at 8:50. And even then I think that's too early for natural teenage sleep patterns. My kids are lucky in that we're close enough to school that they can leave at around 8:15. When I was in high school I had to get the bus at 7:30, which was a real struggle. The idea of starting school at 6:15 is just pure insanity.

My public school in the US always started at 8:00.

I've never heard of a 6:15 start time.

Also, school was never a full 8 hours. So I'm confused about their reasoning.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#238

Its a common misconception that the goal of Education System is to educate. It's not, and the system will never accept 'improvements' that run contrary to it's purpose. In actuality education system serves four purposes: One: make both parents avaliable for the job market. For that it must supervise children during work hours, to make sure they aren't getting in trouble, drugs, or worst of all, into politics and prot…

#iam14andthisisdeep

On the more serious note, this crap which is so popular among the people who have zero understanding of what education is gets really tiresome.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#239

Its a common misconception that the goal of Education System is to educate. It's not, and the system will never accept 'improvements' that run contrary to it's purpose. In actuality education system serves four purposes: One: make both parents avaliable for the job market. For that it must supervise children during work hours, to make sure they aren't getting in trouble, drugs, or worst of all, into politics and prot…

I'm not sure how this makes since with "classroom" education far predating the modern era. See English boarding school stories or any number US girl coming-of-age stories. Certainly none of them justify the idea that education's purpose is to support two income families.

With that, I think you'd find that most leaders of politics and industry had some manner of classroom education. Homeschooling is not a common practice among the elite. It may still serve the purpose of "habituating chimps into highly unnatural behavior" but if so, it's behavior that is so commonplace as to be indistinguishable from "natural" behavior.

So I'm not sure how we can ascribe all these negative objectives to the Education System as few better methods have come along and found wide acceptance. There's the Waldorfs and the Montessoris and the variety of homeschool co-ops of course, but they are serve a pretty small percentage of students worldwide.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep

#240

Its a common misconception that the goal of Education System is to educate. It's not, and the system will never accept 'improvements' that run contrary to it's purpose. In actuality education system serves four purposes: One: make both parents avaliable for the job market. For that it must supervise children during work hours, to make sure they aren't getting in trouble, drugs, or worst of all, into politics and prot…

What a completely absurd and nonsense take. Where does this "purpose" get decided? Some secret cabal that controls the education system? Insane.

There are some flaws in our education system that are likely the result of the fact that it is huge, serves an incredibly diverse set of people, and thus is a very complex and difficult to manage system.

There's no secret back room of evil people controlling the populace via an imperfect education system. What a weird take.

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