151–160 of 491 posts
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They are old enough to drive certain vehicles and old enough to buy alcohol. If we trust them with that surely we can let them do things during the day without constant adult supervision.
> They are old enough to drive certain vehicles and old enough to buy alcohol Hopefully not at the same time.
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At least used to. Last few years Finland's PISA scores as measured by the OECD have plummeted and now they are just a bit above average but nowhere near what they used to be.
What do you think are the factors that caused this fall?
* Finland is a gerontocracy and recent governments have made significant cuts to education and the general wellbeing of younger generations.
* Modern schools are increasingly built like open plan offices with dozens of students crammed into "learning spaces" instead of traditional classrooms. This reduces building costs and is also sold as a trendy new innovation in pedagogy.
* Special needs and gifted students are no longer put into special classrooms where they can receive the extra attention and care they need. Instead, they are put in with the other kids to the benefit of no one except the state budget, but at least it feels more "inclusive" to some research professor in their ivory tower.
* The amount of immigration and share of children speaking Finnish as a second language is rising and they are statistically more likely to perform worse (https://yle.fi/a/74-20018233, https://yle.fi/a/74-20016772).
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I've read the same comment from you as a response to three different comments. I will just answer here: "There is substantial evidence to suggest that education influences intelligence.[3]" (From Wikipedia) [3] Baltes, P., & Reinert, G. (1969). Cohort effects in cognitive development in children as revealed by cross sectional sequences. Developmental Psychology, 1, 169-177.
Why do you think I am "against learning"? I am saying that school is terrible at teaching . If the goal of schooling is that students learn then the school system I was in was a total failure. The moment I entered university I learned much more and much faster.
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Trust is by far most often given and earned (or lost) post facto. In fact, that's an essential characteristic of a society. > Depends on what. I can't even trust the 40 year developers in my team at work. "Hacky if foreach loop will fix later" Whenever people make statements like this, I always wonder what their peers think of them. This dismissive attitude is so off-putting.
I don't trust them and they prove to me I can't. They don't own to their mistakes nor fix their problems. Now your left with a code base forever with tech debt because of a hacky foreach if loop. You're telling me you've never worked with anyone who does half arsed work? Where you need to pick up their slack? Lucky you. Because if you can't do a proper job at least on elementary level then what do you do then when th…
This sounds like you have some very specific trauma around a very specific "foreach if loop", because I would personally never throw around such a specific-but-not-specific example of tech debt. Tech debt is extremely contextual.
If the goal of school is to develop children into young adults with good reasoning and analytical skills, a basic wholesome world and social model and some practical skills and basic physique, smartphones seem to contribute little and distract a lot from those aims.
the goal of school and what it is used for are different thing. School is childcare
I am confused by people who use this as a derogative.
I learned drafting, how to type, welding, library science, color theory, woodworking, BASIC programming, the internal anatomy of a piglet, resume writing, how to play the cello, calculus, and how to sing the names of all 50 US states in alphabetical order in middle school and high school.
That is not childcare.
edit: forgot darkroom photography, yearbook editing, extemporaneous speaking, and Robert's Rules of Order.
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> I had the direct comparison when I went to university. It became very clear that I was learning much more and faster. Sure, but this should be expected. If you filtered out all children with low interest/performance/support in preschool and just threw them onto a playground, learning rate could also be much faster in school for the rest. But if you want a solid baseline of reading/writing/math/general education for…
> I'm very confident that early discrimination/segregation ("gifted" and "idiot" tracks in school) is a net negative for society and encourages unethical outcomes on top. I'm curious about this, can you elaborate more? My feeling is that in a class of 25 kids grouped by age being taught by 1 single teacher, it's basically impossible that the teaching pace and style is adequate for more than a handful of them. You're…
By doing "early segregation" you make this more difficult because that "common baseline" no longer exists; you'd expect to get significantly more people that struggle with language and basic math as a result (in exchange for better outcomes in your "gifted" track).
Furthermore, you are sorting people into social buckets in a way that is really bad for social cohesion (inevitable, all the white kids with rich parents are gonna end up in the "gifted" schools). Everyone is gonna grow up in a echochamber, basically.
Finally, this is going to lead to restrictions on a young adults options, that I find really unpalatable to blame on the affected children: Can you honestly argue that people don't deserve the chance to study medicine at university just because their parents did not tutor, push and mentor them sufficiently? Equality of opportunity as a principle is gonna be nigh impossible to preserve in such a system.
I do not dispute that you could teach children faster and better with individual tutoring and customized programs, but that would be cost-prohibitive, and I see currently no realistic way to get there without above consequences.
Maybe AI will solve it :P
Is it possible to fight Internet addiction without banning stuff? While it helps to ban smartphones during school, it won't stop these kids from logging on for 5 to 7 hrs after school. We need to find ways to make people (not just kids) more resilient to Internet addiction without resorting to widespread bans, which are both hard to implement, unlikely to keep people away long term and dangerous for other reasons.
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>then the whole system is malicious right? Where did I say that the intentions were bad? >Because you had a bad time, then the whole system is malicious right? No. In university the expectations were drastically higher. If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university, then it failed at that for everyone . The mismatch can not be attributed to me. >But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the…
All students at university were unprepared from school or only some, i.e., performance of different schools, classes, etc. would be heterogeneous?
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Cars exist and are foundational to modern living yet we do not push kids to learn to drive until their later teenage years. Some countries wait until they are 18 and others choosing a couple years sooner.
Kids still get to walk with cars around, ride bikes, drive motorcycles usually a few years before majority, they also ride cars and are usually familiar with how they work way before driving. I'm actually of the option we should have a smartphone category/setup at the same positioning as bikes are to cars, it would even benefit adults the same way not everyone wants a car.
Is it possible to fight Internet addiction without banning stuff? While it helps to ban smartphones during school, it won't stop these kids from logging on for 5 to 7 hrs after school. We need to find ways to make people (not just kids) more resilient to Internet addiction without resorting to widespread bans, which are both hard to implement, unlikely to keep people away long term and dangerous for other reasons.
As much as we would like to tout some individualised solution for this, there's no way for all individuals to be trained to resist products designed for maximising its usage. There are armies of smart people being paid to think about ways that will make users be "engaged" with their products for as long as possible for it to be profitable, armies of experts in user behaviour, developers that can churn out good quality digital products, designers who can make the experience feel smooth. It's all geared to be addictive since the incentive is to capture as much attention as possible.
Is it possible to fight gambling addiction, alcohol addiction, nicotine addiction, drugs addiction, without banning them? Yup, it's costly, relies on a lot of regulation, control from the State on what kind of behaviour these companies can engage, and so on.
The addictive thing is not the smartphone but what it gives access to, without a conversation about what kind of regulations could curtail the addictive side of the real culprit, social media, there's no way out on an individual basis.
Banning smartphones in schools is akin to banning cigarettes' commercials, you aren't banning the stuff completely but at least trying to curtail its reach. We need more of this, social media has a lot of benefits so I don't think it should ever be outright banned, we do need more talk about its downsides and potential mitigations on a societal level.