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The Catherine Project: A new experiment in liberal education

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Re: The Catherine Project: A new experiment in liberal education

#161

Post by olau »

selimthegrim wrote: post #132
DoreenMichele wrote: post #64

When I first moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, my husband drove the family to see San Francisco one day. It was the most beautiful and inspiring big city I had ever seen. We stopped at the bookstore on the way home and I bought a bunch of books related to my interest in urban planning and read them while convalescing. One book was a collection of excerpts from various urban planning tomes. Another was a book calle…

>Another was a book called Seeing like a state I think you'll find James Scott has a strong HN fanbase

Here's a little anecdote regarding Seeing like a state. I read the book some years ago, then afterwards as chair of a kindergarten had a state-like experience with the local municipality.

They wanted to use a language test on all recently turned 3 year olds in the municipality because someone had told them that a bunch of the children starting in school ended up in trouble because they did not have good language skills.

Now, the school curriculum had recently changed to be much more intellectual in the first year. So you might think that perhaps something had gone awry in the school end - but no, see, the problem is here, our kindergartens clearly suck, let's just measure 3 year olds (!) so we can identify the bad kindergartens/children and fix them.

That's seeing like a state mentality in a nutshell. Having read the book, it was just so obvious.

I talked to several kindergarten leaders who hated that test because it had clear false negatives (kindergarten pedagogues are there because they love the children, anything that goes against that makes them want to die) and made parents nervous for no good reason, but try explaining that to the responsible manager at the municipality. He obviously thought I was just being dumb.

Luckily, the municipality made a mistake, because after a lot of digging it turned out they didn't actually have the authority to demand the tests.

For the record, I think the right thing to do here would be to strengthen the caring culture for misfits in the kindergartens - often, but not always, the children with language trouble have other troubles. And then look holistically at the curriculum in the schools. If it's not working out for them with the children they get, they need to do something else. It's like when you make a program and your intended users are too dumb to figure it out, well, chances are you messed up.

Re: The Catherine Project: A new experiment in liberal education

#162

Post by theonething »

andrew_ wrote: post #150
theonething wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> often being a "member" of the church requires providing some form of formal support, such as tithing This sounds very suspect to me. Do you have any sources for this assertion? I've never heard of a church requiring any form of support, tithe etc to be a member or at all. I've been attending church and have been a member of several for 20+ years.

I'm in my 40s and attended a Baptist Church in my youth that required formal members to tithe. It was the primary reason my parents stopped taking us there. > Do you have any sources for this assertion? Don't be that person. Take or leave the anecdote, but don't make an asinine request of evidence for something clearly anecdotal.

> clearly anecdotal.

Take a look again at their statement

> but often being a "member" of the church requires providing some form of formal support, such as tithing

note the word "often". How is that clearly anecdotal? If the commenter had framed it as their own experience at a church they attended, I'd have no problem believing them. But clearly that's not the case. They are making a general assertion about most (or many) churches.

And please be a bit more respectful and charitable. It's more conducive to discussion and common decency.

Re: The Catherine Project: A new experiment in liberal education

#163

Post by DeathArrow »

>naturally higher education has been hiring more administrators to hire consultants to figure out how to attract what we’ve grown used to calling its customer base

That easy. Concentrate on subject matter and not on politics. If I'd want to study humanities, then I'd want to gather more knowledge in areas such as ancient and modern languages, literature, philosophy, history, archaeology, anthropology, not become a political activist.

Re: The Catherine Project: A new experiment in liberal education

#164

Post by theonething »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #143
theonething wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> often being a "member" of the church requires providing some form of formal support, such as tithing This sounds very suspect to me. Do you have any sources for this assertion? I've never heard of a church requiring any form of support, tithe etc to be a member or at all. I've been attending church and have been a member of several for 20+ years.

Just a quick, non-exhaustive web search: http://ascensionfairview.org/contribute/parish-membership/ (Orthodox) $450/year https://www.templeshalom.org/dues (Jewish) $3,950/year (based on 2 adult household) https://www.buddhistchurch.org/membership (Buddhist) $44/month https://beulahbaptist.org/flc/membership/ (Baptist) $30/month As I said, few churches (or others houses of worship) will charge you a fee for attending…

Thanks for your response. Out of the four you listed, the only church in the traditional sense of the word is the Greek Orthodox parish. The next two are Jewish and Buddhist temples and the fourth one is community/health center offering things like ballroom dance lessons.

But if we expand the scope to houses of worship, then temples are included.

I think I've heard of churches charging nominal fees for church membership, but not requiring tithing. Tithing is very different from membership fees. It should be strictly voluntary. That's been my experience and observation.

I've worked as office staff of a church and I'm currently treasurer of the church I'm a member of now.

Re: The Catherine Project: A new experiment in liberal education

#165

Post by rubidium »

WalterBright wrote: post #155
jacobolus wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know for a fact that I don't learn if there aren't exams and grades. The Wikipedia page about you says: “[Walter Bright] taught himself computer programming from the type-in programs in BASIC Computer Games” citing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28574770 as a source. Was there a series of formal tests and grades involved there? Or do you disagree with your own claim that you learned computer programming fro…

I didn't learn programming from a classroom. I have audited some programming classes, and learned very little, because I never did the exercises nor took the exams. I know that there are some unicorns who learned math on their own. But I haven't encountered one in the real world. (Ok, so I know one - Hal Finney. But that man was simply so smart, he learned it by flipping through the book, i.e. it was effortless for h…

I went to a high school with no grades. It was great. My peers and i wanted to learn and we did. And there was no grade hype/complaining/competition. It works.

The reality is as humans we love to learn things. Focus providing an environment that delivers that and the motivation is not a big issue.

Re: The Catherine Project: A new experiment in liberal education

#166

Post by krageon »

glial wrote: post #61

Interesting to see the deep skepticism in the comments. I attended St John's College - which is probably as close as a "real" school can get to the Catherine Project - and loved every minute. Grades were not given, and there were no professors or lectures. Seeing criticism about the business model and lack of tests, worry about educational fads, etc, is missing the point, in my opinion. Consider the possibility that…

Given that these types of schools (at least in Europe) have a long history of delivering students not ready for jobs or subsequent education, the scepticism is entirely warranted.

Re: The Catherine Project: A new experiment in liberal education

#167

Post by zhdc1 »

ModernMech wrote: post #152
zhdc1 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the flip side, if people are invariably reporting that it changed their life and shaped their perspective of the world, who are you to say that the money was wasted or the experience was overpriced? What exactly is the fair market rate for a formative experience? Is there any reason to believe that university is any less formative outside of the states?

Your reply to me is a little vague, so I'm going to go ahead and make the argument I think you're making implicitly, and you can tell me if I'm wrong: Universities overseas are less expensive than in the US, yet the experience is the same, therefore US universities are overpriced. That's certainly a valid point. But really what I'm trying to get at here is that calling someone else's experience "overpriced", when the…

> I'm not saying these things aren't going on outside of academic institutions, but there is an endless supply of creative energy and intellectual curiosity on college campuses, and that is an important resource for society.

I'm not arguing against the value of a university education. My point, which you acknowledge, is that the rest of the world manage to educate their students, while providing a similarly formative experience, without costing the equivalent of a year's salary or more for each year of education.

> But really what I'm trying to get at here is that calling someone else's experience "overpriced", when the premise is they have self reported that the experience was "formative", is more a statement of one's own values than a fair assessment of the actual experience of that individual.

I'm challenging whether those same students would have received a less formative experience without luxury dormitories, catered meal plans, or unused rock climbing walls. This is a very valid question, and while it's impossible to prove counterfactuals, one good thought experiment would be to ask whether a student who graduated from a first tier public research university in 1990 or 2000 received any less of an education or formative experience than a student who graduated in 2020. After controlling for advancements in technology and pedagogy, I'm not sure you can answer yes to this. And if you can, I'm not sure you can attribute whatever benefits to the miscellaneous luxuries they currently have access to.

Re: The Catherine Project: A new experiment in liberal education

#168

Post by krageon »

theonething wrote: post #162
andrew_ wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in my 40s and attended a Baptist Church in my youth that required formal members to tithe. It was the primary reason my parents stopped taking us there. > Do you have any sources for this assertion? Don't be that person. Take or leave the anecdote, but don't make an asinine request of evidence for something clearly anecdotal.

> clearly anecdotal. Take a look again at their statement > but often being a "member" of the church requires providing some form of formal support, such as tithing note the word "often". How is that clearly anecdotal? If the commenter had framed it as their own experience at a church they attended, I'd have no problem believing them. But clearly that's not the case. They are making a general assertion about most (or…

> be a bit more respectful and charitable

Helping people see that their behaviour is not acceptable in a relatively mild manner is very respectful. The charitability thing is not really all that relevant here, because the words were not taken in a bad light - both of you agree on what was said. What you don't agree on is whether or not it should have been said, which no amount of charitable reading will fix.

Re: The Catherine Project: A new experiment in liberal education

#170

Post by ModernMech »

zhdc1 wrote: post #167
ModernMech wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reply to me is a little vague, so I'm going to go ahead and make the argument I think you're making implicitly, and you can tell me if I'm wrong: Universities overseas are less expensive than in the US, yet the experience is the same, therefore US universities are overpriced. That's certainly a valid point. But really what I'm trying to get at here is that calling someone else's experience "overpriced", when the…

> I'm not saying these things aren't going on outside of academic institutions, but there is an endless supply of creative energy and intellectual curiosity on college campuses, and that is an important resource for society. I'm not arguing against the value of a university education. My point, which you acknowledge, is that the rest of the world manage to educate their students, while providing a similarly formative…

> one good thought experiment would be to ask whether a student who graduated from a first tier public research university in 1990 or 2000 received any less of an education or formative experience than a student who graduated in 2020.

I will say, as someone who went to university during the period you indicate, it was called overpriced and not worth it at that time as well.

Your counterfactual is a valid question, but I think it’s also irrelevant. As I said in my last post, the price one pays for any given university can vary wildly from full ride to full sticker price. Your argument seems to be that the sticker price is higher than the median salary in America, and higher than in other countries, therefore it’s overpriced. But again, those who make a median wage in America aren’t paying sticker price for college. I went to the most expensive university in the country at the time and paid 30% sticker price, making it more affordable than the public university down the street. My roommate paid sticker price because he came from a wealth family and didn’t qualify for any support. We both would report that our experiences were formative, yet not overpriced.

So you see it’s impossible to make any blanket statements about this. It’s really specific to the individual.

Anyway, that’s all I really have to say on the matter. I welcome your reply but I think my opinion is stated exhaustively.

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