161–170 of 225 posts
Do we have the courage to do what's necessary to fix education in the United States? That is: - abolish teachers unions - fail / keep back students who don't meet standards, in a completely objective fashion with no regard for racial / ethnic / gender sensitivities
Maybe read TFA. It has supporting evidence for the actual causes, not imaginary ones.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's moving away from long-form reading and writing. The kids (as usual) are adapting faster than us oldies The article specifically references this. The problem isn’t they can’t read and write. It’s that their brains are measurably less powerful. If what we’re getting is everyone over 30 today having a permanent economic and living-standards advantage over everyone younger, so be it. What we’ll actually get is the…
Define "power". If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are. But we deal with more information in a day than they would in a year. It's hard to say because we can't experiment, but I would expect they would be completely confused by the sheer amount of shit that we deal with routinely. The next generation are just fur…
They just wrote and spoke differently. You’ll notice a lot of 18th-century writing is also shorter; most of the Federalist Papers fit on one page, and serialised novels were about to become a thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Define "power". If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are. But we deal with more information in a day than they would in a year. It's hard to say because we can't experiment, but I would expect they would be completely confused by the sheer amount of shit that we deal with routinely. The next generation are just fur…
> If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are They just wrote and spoke differently. You’ll notice a lot of 18th-century writing is also shorter; most of the Federalist Papers fit on one page, and serialised novels were about to become a thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can attest to this. I grew up outside of the US, where starting in middle school, there are national exams that determine what field of study you are going to end up in. A higher score is needed for STEM majors; the rest who pass end up in Arts and Business. If you fail, your only option is manual labor. For students who don't come from "privilege" it was sink or swim, and those who survived the waves actually dese…
I think this is a more important comment than people might take it for. We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change. Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The ric…
DEI quotas make it hard to bring along a whole team of boot lickers.
Or in the case of this administration, window lickers.
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Yes. You can’t put equity before excellence or you erode both. Passing students to avoid “disparate impact” to me is highly ignorant and often deeply racist.
It is easier to make that call when you’re not at risk of being sued.
> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow. Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which…
politicians don't even read bills anymore, they are too large
We really need to make high school diplomas mean something again. However, this means something like a 35% fail rate. Unfortunately, the populace would not accept that and so every credential gets inflated to worthlessness. 90%+ of all people in undergrad and 50% of grad school probably shouldn’t be there. They just want the credential, to get the job, to get the money. This is understandable but there is no interest…
> the populace would not accept that What is your evidence for this? It seems like there is growing frustration with the realization that we may have an economically useless cohort about to hit the real world.
I think the growing frustration is real, but it's coming more from employers than the populace in general.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can attest to this. I grew up outside of the US, where starting in middle school, there are national exams that determine what field of study you are going to end up in. A higher score is needed for STEM majors; the rest who pass end up in Arts and Business. If you fail, your only option is manual labor. For students who don't come from "privilege" it was sink or swim, and those who survived the waves actually dese…
I think this is a more important comment than people might take it for. We all want meritocracy. Really. But the problem is that meritocracies are never really meritocratic. The problem is that it's actually really hard to measure these things. It looks simple at first glance, but once you dive into things it starts to change. Let's change your example above and ignore cheating. Let's say there's no cheating. The ric…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you try reading an 18th Century novel, the prose is really difficult to parse. They were used to reading much more difficult text than we are They just wrote and spoke differently. You’ll notice a lot of 18th-century writing is also shorter; most of the Federalist Papers fit on one page, and serialised novels were about to become a thing.
I'm more thinking of Dickens - long run-on sentences, with points stretched over sub clauses. It's difficult, and that was the pulp of the day.
long yes, run-on no.