51–60 of 167 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most kids get into sex and drugs because they're bored. And here I was thinking that sex and drugs are loads of fun, regardless of whether you're bored or not.
Both are true. When you're bored you get into dumber kinds of fun.
Gingrich is right in that the institution is a failure. However, his proposed solutions merely reinforces those institution. A big part of the problem comes from the shift in meaning of the words "teachers", "students", "homework", "responsibility", etc. As the author from the Wharton article says:
"Consider this one example from my recent experience. I attended a conference of school counselors, where the latest ideas in the realm of student counseling were being presented. I went to a session on the development of self-discipline and responsibility, wondering what these concepts mean to people embedded in traditional schooling. To me, self-discipline means the ability to pursue one's goals without outside coercion; responsibility means taking appropriate action on one's own initiative, without being goaded by others. To the people presenting the session, both concepts had to do solely with the child's ability to do his or her assigned class work. They explained that a guidance counselor's proper function was to get students to understand that responsible behavior meant doing their homework in a timely and effective manner, as prescribed, and self-discipline meant the determination to get that homework done. George Orwell was winking in the back of the room."
I just thought of an alternative solution, one that does not necessarily require a lot of political clout. The solution is something parents can implement directly without having to lobby for legislation. Simply, the parents has their kids pass their GED by the time they are 13. They may be required by different laws to also pass the different standardization tests, but depending on the circumstances, studying for the material in the GED should be enough. This can probably be done over the age normally reserved for middle school.
A 13-year-old with a high school diploma (via GED) has a lot more social clout within the adult world than a middle-school kid. He may not be legally able to vote, or drive, or smoke, or drink, and he'd get in trouble with underage-sex laws. However, he would not be considered a high-school dropout.
The options open up from there. The parents probably should choose an apprenticeship, whether that be something as humble as a janitor, or something more aspiring such as a researcher, a programmer, an entreprenuer, a soldier, a fireman, etc. A more traditional college track would still available.
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I don't know. I'm almost certain we'd lose something in that alternate world as well. In particular, we'd lose a tolerance for the diversity of the world. College is tremendous for that: it's the one thing it's tremendous for. You realize what radically different sorts of people there are in the world. Without that, if you're born and raised in a suburb then there's a good chance you never realize what you're missing…
> You realize what radically different sorts of people there are in the world I would argue the exact opposite. The majority of college educated people I know have never had a friend of less than middle class origins. The statistics show we have a society of increasing class stratification; people never marry down anymore, for example. College and credentialism is also reinforcing an elitist attitude to manual labor.…
It depends on the college that you go to. Some colleges don't let anybody of less-than-middle class in.
people never marry down anymore, for example.
You'll have to clarify this a bit more. People marrying down wasn't ever common, to my knowledge. And, this is my biased and bigoted opinion, but people in similar classes often have the same values, and this is why cross-classing never works so well. For instance, I tend to be attracted to people who are very logical and very expressive. I find myself attracted to the gap right in between programmers and actresses, because that's where people share similar values to myself. That might be shown as a sign of bias on my part, and it is, but it's a bias that can't be fixed, because elsewhere people and I are less compatible. I'd assume the same to be true across social boarders: people who go to certain places in society all have similar traits. Forgive me if I sound ignorant: I'm not at all knowledgeable in this field.
I've even seen several posts on this board that implicitly assume someone who works with their hands must be inferior to a "knowledge worker."
I don't look down on people who work with their hands. At the same time, though, I think that the power to create original things is the best power we've got. To be fair, few people ever do this, regardless of position. If you look at hackers as a whole, we're no better.
Hispanics are WAY underrepresented, and probably always will be. You're not going to come to any sort of understanding of chicano culture by going to college.
True. But I was talking more about people based on location. People of similar classes and skin color will be radically different based on where they come from. And some people never realize that until they get to college. It's not a huge change, not as huge as it could be, but it's a change and I'd argue that it's good for most college students.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both are true. When you're bored you get into dumber kinds of fun.
Nuthin dumb about it done right.
Therefore, it's "dumb" in that it requires no effort whatsoever on your part. And if you come to rely on that stuff for entertainment, then you're not gaining anything as you go. As opposed to its being used sparingly, in which case you're off doing more productive things.
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If high STD and drug use rates tell us anything, it's that these young people are, on average, too immature to assume adult roles. Or that they have nothing better to do?
Sex and drugs are not activities exclusive to adults (nor should they be). Kids DO have better things to do, and for them (as well as adults) it's usually sex/drugs/rock&roll that are the 'better things'.
That said, if the purpose of "adolescent" institutions such as high school and college is to prevent people from indulging in these things until they're ready, then they're a massive fail.
The first two stages are an unnecessary waste for most people, since they end up going through a lot more schooling than is useful for them, and could be abolished. For the third stage, I really don't see an easy fix, because we're talking about an extremely deep social problem. Closing the high schools and the mediocre colleges is only going to dump people into the "failure to launch" period early and prolong it, possibly to an even later age than now.
Adolescence was invented in the 19th century to enable middle-class families to keep their children out of sweatshops. But it has degenerated into a process of enforced boredom and age segregation... The fact is, most young people want to be challenged and given real responsibility. They want to be treated like young men and women, not old children. Where have we heard this before? http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Is this starting to become like "I, for one, welcome our new X overlords?" is on Slashdot? PG wrote everything. Let's take that as a given. Now can we move on? I'm not trying to be persnickety, but your comment adds absolutely nothing to the discussion and sounds like fanboy tripe. If PGs article was on here, we could talk about that. But it's not. AFAIK, every one of PG's articles has already appeared on here and we…
"X and Y are the same" is a lesson we all learned on Sesame Street, and isn't much worth discussing.
Rather than give some kind of credit to PG for anticipating NG, I wanted to point out how weird it is for the two of them to be agreeing. Gingrich is respectful of tradition and has a politician's instincts for rationalization and euphemism. Graham has said (along with everything else) that groups of people are inherently dumb and lazy, and is almost contemptuously truthful.
There's plenty of real intellectual content in there if you take the time to dig for it, and much of it is cool and subversive...
It is naive to assume that "adolescence" was a concept invented out of the blue, then deliberately experimented by some politics, it never works this way. The opposite is true : at some point we needed a word to describe a change in society, and a new cultural phenomenon that didn't exist before. Then was born the concept of adolescence and the teenager, wich is a worldwide phenomenom in Occident and other parts of t…
It wasn't invented out of the blue, but it was an evolved creation of politics. In classic democratic fashion, a lot of factions were pushing their own agenda that ended up making the country as a whole worse off. The education establishment has continually upped the drop out age. Labor unions ( in alliance with wealthy parents) pushed for stricter child labor laws to reduce competition for jobs. Aristocratic progres…
Please provide citations of serious studies of these trends you talk about; this analysis seems facile and frankly misleading, even as a first-order approximation, but I’m not an expert so I’d be glad to be convinced otherwise. In particular, “indoctrination” of immigrants is going to be hard to establish as a primary goal of the education system, and the benefits of credential laws and the technical training institutions that go along with them in fields such as medicine, engineering, and so forth are hard to overstate.
The real purpose of high school is keeping the roving hordes of teenagers off the street. Teenagers have no judgement (I certainly didn't), and we would like to have some method of keeping them occupied. Unfortunately, where before that method involved actual learning, nowadays schools are basically just low security prisons. Furthermore, Newt is completely off when he claims that all adolescents want more responsibi…
Teenagerdom has come to be the no man's land of life, the purgatory.