491–500 of 510 posts
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Lithuania and Poland say hello: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_... >
That's 2014 data. Here's 2022 Poland data. https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/population-with-tertiary-educat... Lithuania doesn't have free college https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
My bad. I assumed free college is standard in that region.
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> That’s the current theory and it fails I do not see such evidence, maybe it fails in san francisco but that can have thousands of reasons. Everything I've read here points me to the fact that the public education is not good/comprehensive enough and too inflexible. I am honestly a bit shocked what i've read here, this is definitely not my experience with public education, like not at all. San francisco is rich, peo…
> Everything I've read here points me to the fact that the public education is not good/comprehensive enough and too inflexible. Well … yeah. It’s education at scale. Anything at scale will be inflexible by definition. > San francisco is rich, people make a lot of money there. And there’s a lot of funding. The median per student funding in the SF school board is something on the order of 2 or 3 times the median US fu…
Maybe agree to disagree because I don't see that.
> ~$22k
wow...this is honestly insane. I wonder how many full-time teacher positions per class this could afford. What's the most comprehensive schools education you can get there? In germany there's been the recent rise of all-day options at schools (school until 4pm covering lessons, homework and studying for exams and optional topics like school orchestra or more intense sports). 22k should pay for that and this would help overworked or overwhelmed parents. My girlfriend and her sister was raised by a single mother and went to one when it was still the exception (roughly ~40% are enrolling at all day schools right now, but it really started nation wide ~2002). It was quite different to my experience at a "normal" school class. She liked it.
I struggle to imagine how you can raise two daughters, work a full time job in a competitive housing market (so you can't really reduce your hours because the rent is high) while finding the time to invest enough time into the education of your children. At least the amount of time my parents have put in would be straight up impossible (one was working full time, the other reduced to 50% so afternoons there was always one present at home).
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Every free college country sends less of their people through college than the US. Is that the outcome we want? Fewer educated?
> Every free college country sends less of their people through college than the US. Really? Says who? Because the OECD certainly doesn’t seem to think there’s any significant difference. https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/population-with-tertiary-educat... https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/adult-education-level.htm
So the mean and median is around 20% less people with tertiary educations.
When you say no significant difference, what is your threshold? 50% less people educated? 20% is a huge difference.
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>Schools - and this is a problem in the UK as well - are incentivised to optimise for evenly distributed mediocrity, instead of allowing people to reach their potential. and that is the crux of the problem --- the best school would be one which would help students explore what they are interested, find what best suits them, and then best prepare them to be successful at that. I disagree w/ separation though --- this…
> I disagree w/ separation though --- this really should be achievable in a single building/system. It should be achievable in a single building/system. And it would be great to have the funding, expertise, and coherent strategy to build a school system which helps students explore what they're interested in and find what suits them, and helps students in a personalised way. However, to execute that you would need th…
(and I say that as an Asian-American who was bussed in to an inner-city Indianapolis school, taking a bus which went past a school I had previously walked to)
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Yes but they also generally don't offer bullshit degrees that people obtain and then end up working at McDonalds. Germany, Switzerland, Belgium all come to mind as countries with free or near-free education that while they don't graduate the same % of their population through tertiary eduction it's not for lack of available opportunity but rather many people choose not to pursue tertiary eduction. This is actually a…
Sure. I'm not saying their approach is bad or wrong, I'm supportive of it. I'm just observing that it results in far fewer people getting degrees. Agreed that this may be for the best.
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> Access to education has brought lots of people out of poverty Sure. And if schools had anything to do with education, maybe they could do that here too. But you're also commenting in a thread where there is a link to credible (uncontested, uncontroversially attested) reports that the schools are shutting down education. Purportedly to help make everyone equal. It's arguable what the cause of this is, the reasoning…
It's not that many schools and they stopped the policy again... To my mind, the outrage is somewhat exaggerated. You could call it "outrage fetishism about culture war issues". Also an opportunity for "smart people" to feel good about "how they managed to learn things despite having to go to school" and how much better they think they could organize the school system, or how much smarter they would have been if no sc…
And they'll start it again eventually. Maybe in a different district or a different state. This isn't the kind of thing they give up on easily or quickly, and they're not the sort to learn from their own failed experiments.
> and how much better they think they could organize the school system
No one could organize it. I couldn't. It's beyond any reform, beyond fixing. It is an intractable problem. Well, if you assume that its purpose is education.
If we examine its true, unspoken purpose, it is working far better than it ever has, and improves year to year. It is a mechanism for the government to raise children from the earliest age on up through adulthood, with parents have as little influence on that process as can be cheaply afforded.
My wife and I homeschool.
> But, crucially, they are willing to scrap what doesn't work and try something else.
No, they're willing to tone things down to avoid any PR backlash, and try again later when maybe those concerned are less attentive. All they have to do is be willing to try as many times as it takes, until they get lucky with the news cycle or the like.
I mean, from your perspective... why would they care if it didn't work? Do you imagine that the government (or any of its agencies or subdivisions as the case may be) loves these children? That it would grieve if a few thousand of them were permanently undereducated or miseducated by this? Would this committee cry itself to sleep every night regretting what it did wrong?
If it can't do these things, if it can't have regret or remorse of some sort when it does bad things, how can you imagine that it would ever stop doing bad things when those bad things cause it no inconvenience or problem?
>a position far more outrageous to my mind
I'd never say that about anything. There's nothing that I hold so sacred that I'd say "it's just outrageous that you want to get rid of X" or "are you mad that you'd say we should have Y?"
For me, I'd make good arguments outlining why there should be X, or that there should be a Y. And if you failed to agree, I'd try to understand what logic (or failure thereof) caused you remain unpersuaded.
When someone says something like this phrase though, all I can figure is that the status quo is important to them for irrational reasons. I've yet to hear a better hypothesis.
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It's not that many schools and they stopped the policy again... To my mind, the outrage is somewhat exaggerated. You could call it "outrage fetishism about culture war issues". Also an opportunity for "smart people" to feel good about "how they managed to learn things despite having to go to school" and how much better they think they could organize the school system, or how much smarter they would have been if no sc…
> t's not that many schools and they stopped the policy again. And they'll start it again eventually. Maybe in a different district or a different state. This isn't the kind of thing they give up on easily or quickly, and they're not the sort to learn from their own failed experiments. > and how much better they think they could organize the school system No one could organize it. I couldn't. It's beyond any reform,…
> Would this committee cry itself to sleep
It's possible to have working political systems achieving meaningful goals without anyone involved having to cry themselves to sleep. There's a lot of people who care about improving things (including those who implemented these policies). They really think they can make education better and they're really trying. Now, there will be disagreement about what the goals are and how to achieve any given goal. Over time, a democracy is very good at distilling these disagreements into policies that almost always aren't terrible (as opposed to "occasionally excellent" or something like that). The best way to get what you want is to take part in that process. I'm pretty sure trying to pretend "there's no such thing as society" and that you're living in an anarchy bites you in the back eventually (not that I think you're doing that).
> I'd never say [outrageous]
Maybe that word means something else to you than to me (I learned English in school). I would call a large part of this discussion and these comments here "public outrage". There is public outrage about a reform that made a few schools worse. The outrage lead to a change of policy. This is good and how a democratic process generally works. I also see "outrageous" as a spectrum, where you can of course discuss outrageous things but extraordinary claims (or proposals) require extraordinary evidence (or arguments). Arguing against schools is such an instance in my mind, comparable to arguing against medicine or rule if law (I assume at the very least 98% of people in my country would agree).
I'm aware of US education systems being called broken a lot. We call ours broken too but that only drives efforts to improve it, not giving up. My outside perspective is that the system you have is certainly preferable to no schools at all, that it's definitely possible to improve it, and that it will improve (over decades to centuries) assuming human civilization doesn't (partially) collapse.
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> What a wonderful world. It's totally within our capabilities and no one need suffer. I get really scared when I hear anyone promise utopia. Literally every large-scale society that did turned into a hellscape after a while, and the idea itself never worked. There was always someone who didn't buy into the idea, and they were blamed for why it didn't work. "If only those people were gone, then this would work and we…
Interesting, China has managed to lift a large proportion of its citizens in a very short time. I wasn't suggesting a Utopia, merely raising the bar so the minimum level is better than it is now, surely that should be the goal of every advanced country. The current levels of poverty are negatively influencing the next generation.
Also: the way they lifted all those people out of poverty was basically by freeing them to lift themselves out of poverty, by adopting an essentially capitalist system. You could say: they simply stopped holding people in poverty.
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> Every free college country sends less of their people through college than the US. Really? Says who? Because the OECD certainly doesn’t seem to think there’s any significant difference. https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/population-with-tertiary-educat... https://data.oecd.org/eduatt/adult-education-level.htm
From your data, median and mean among OECD with state paid tertiary education is 42% and 43%. US is 51.2%. So the mean and median is around 20% less people with tertiary educations. When you say no significant difference, what is your threshold? 50% less people educated? 20% is a huge difference.
If I too were to play the data cherry picking game, I could point out that Norway is at 55%.
How does that prove anything?
It just disproves your unfounded assertion:
> Every free college country sends less of their people through college than the US
I really fail to see how any of this proves any causality between free college and lower or higher education rates.
But it seems you enjoy shifting goalposts, so perhaps we should end it here?