161–170 of 1001 posts
Adults can't dismiss experts and expertise all the time on every topic (climate, health, economy) and worship know-nothings, and expect their children to invest time and effort to learn stuff. The kids may become dumber but they aren't stupid.
You think they are better at detecting the know-nothings than the adults?
There's a longer trend but also a clear inflection point around the rise of mobile phones and social media. N=1 but we delayed getting a phone for our kid until a few months after she turned 13, which was a good choice because now we wish we'd gone longer. We can see how social media and app snacking clearly have negative effects on attention span, attitude, etc. Also choosing to close schools during COVID was as cat…
We've got one locked-down shared phone for our kids, for scheduling stuff with friends and calling & texting relatives or whatever. We almost have a teen so we'll see how long we can keep that up, but we only relented that much within the last year and a half, zero phones before that (which seems like it should be normal, but there are a lot of e.g. 4th grade classrooms out there where most of the kids have phones, s…
Great onservation and great Fussell reference.
Some/much of the content in Class is a bit dated now, but imho it is still very directionally correct.
Having learned a bit about adult developmental psychology, many of his observations are found in and predictable by modern cognitive psychology.
The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. A major societal shift needs to happen for this to be reversed. It's many factors... the parents, the food system, various inequalities, social media, technology, healthcare... the solution is multi-pronged. But if I had t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't like the comparisons to other schools or cultures where memorization is the priority. What kids do with what they learn in school matter more than whether or not they memorized a calc function. Besides, who cares if you know cal functions in a post-phone, post-AI world. You look that shit up now.
At the early stages memorization is essential for some subjects. I still benefit greatly - like many - from very early having to memorize the complete lower multiplication table (12x14, 15x15 and all that, the 20-square). I actually need that in daily life all the time (and I'm old and skeptical about teaching too much stuff that just drowns kids and prevents deeper understanding because they are always chasing the n…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't like the comparisons to other schools or cultures where memorization is the priority. What kids do with what they learn in school matter more than whether or not they memorized a calc function. Besides, who cares if you know cal functions in a post-phone, post-AI world. You look that shit up now.
Why think when your phone or the AI can do it for you? I imagine there are a few people in this forum who might have some thoughts about that.
The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. A major societal shift needs to happen for this to be reversed. It's many factors... the parents, the food system, various inequalities, social media, technology, healthcare... the solution is multi-pronged. But if I had t…
The level of tolerance for phone use in the classroom in the last decade blows my mind. It would be like letting kids pull out a GameBoy back in the 2000s, which where I was would have it promptly confiscated.
It’s not that we all got a lecture about no video games in school. It just very self-evidently wasn’t a place you would play video games. It would be like getting a pizza delivered to you at the doctor’s office. Just absurd.
I remember a kid with a Game Gear on the elementary school bus and even that being, well, unusual enough I remember it. Kind of similar to how kids will always remember seeing someone’s family pet run on the bus, because it blows their minds that it can even happen.
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The Obama administration reversed this in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015. Many of the schools with the most funding per student, like Washington D.C. and NYC currently underperform. NYC has a spending of $36-40k per student with only 56% ELA, ~47% Math. Washington DC has $27k-31k of spending per student and only 22% proficient in reading and 16% in Math. Charter schools have been the best bang for the…
> Charter schools have been the best bang for the buck. That is a lot easier when you can require a transcript from the prospective student, review it, and say, "Uh, no thank you". There's a private technical college near here that offers EMT and paramedic training. They "guarantee" "100% success in certification and registration" for their students. How do they get there? They boot students out after they fail ( I'm…
I believe this is not only restricted to Catholic schools though they are the most common. Most religious schools have higher scoring students.
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Jonathan Haidt has a lot of good material on this. He is leading the charge in encouraging parents to delay giving their child a phone until high school and not allowing them to have social media accounts until age 16. https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/story/author-sugge...
How do Asian countries and top-performing countries deal with this? We should do whatever they do. On that note, we should also segregate kids by academic desire and achievement like Japan and China. The bullies and underachievers hold back those who are academically excellent. We do this in limited instances, but not enough to really count.
The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. A major societal shift needs to happen for this to be reversed. It's many factors... the parents, the food system, various inequalities, social media, technology, healthcare... the solution is multi-pronged. But if I had t…
The majority of the public school system has devolved into day-care, not education. Most parents just watch TV, stare at their phones and don't want to be bothered by anything that requires effort. A major societal shift needs to happen for this to be reversed. It's many factors... the parents, the food system, various inequalities, social media, technology, healthcare... the solution is multi-pronged. But if I had t…
1. We pay teachers like shit and treat them even worse. Even if you wanted to do a good job as a teacher, it's fundamentally impossible because:
2. Our schools are structured and run by busybodies that have absolutely no business being within 100 yards of a school. Curricula is set by politics and ideology, not established science. We have book bans and helicopter parents suing teachers for talking about dinosaurs or evolution or even for simply existing as a queer person in any capacity.
Teachers have been fleeing in droves for years, and many states and locales are further reducing the qualifications required to teach, leading to a downwards sprial.
There's also the intentional and systematic disassembling of our education system by the federal government, as a means of voter suppression. This whole situation was created on purpose to keep Americans dumb and complacent.
America is fucked six ways from Sunday and it's hard to even think about a way out of this mess. It's going to take several generations for our society and government to recover, if it ever does.