31–37 of 37 posts
There is also "The Improvement of the Mind" book, by Isaac Watts. It even shaped one of the great minds of science: Michael Faraday
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> Treating the problems of education indeed transcends the school and actually requires a great deal of political will and power. "Education" must guide politics and have power over it. Isn't the problem that we are mixing education and politics in the first place? We should probably separate education and the state just as much as we separate church and state. (The touch of politics seldom enhances the quality of an…
Could you define politics here? I don't see how you could separate "politics" from education other than by just not teaching history or anything that touches on social issues.
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I meant the needs of the education should guide "political" decisions. A simple example is that the education budget (percentage) should be in two digits!!
You're misinformed here. The biggest per-student spender on education in the developed world is the US: > In 2019, the United States spent $15,500 per full-time-equivalent (FTE) student on elementary and secondary education, which was 38 percent higher than the average of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries of $11,300 (in constant 2021 U.S. dollars). At the postsecondary leve…
But concretely, it always 'sounds good' to ask for bigger education budgets. No matter the size of the existing budget.
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Sorry, I don't understand the second sentence. Yes, I agree that public education has substantial costs. Both direct costs to the victims and societal externalities. Disassembling the monster would hopefully stop some of them.
So if up to an individual, what do you think they would choose for their education if there were no mandates agreed upon by their government. DraftKings is a gambling titan that could offer a very profitable option.
I know noting about DraftKings, but if they would choose to offer an education option that people like, who am I to judge?
What makes you think they would be able to offer an appealing education option?
(And: I sense some sarcasm here. So to pre-empt that: what makes you think people would eg rather study at DraftKing where you imply they don't learn anything, compared to not waste time and money on studying anything at all?
Ie how would DraftKing be better than literally nothing for people who don't want an education in the first place?)
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I do not at all think that, if government wasn't in the business of setting those standards, the standards would turn out lower. Reputation would follow the institutions, and graduating from an institution that set lows standards wouldn't have any signalling power to prospective employers, so students wouldn't want to enroll there. What you actually see in countries that have both a private and public education syste…
Well put. I recognize your argument, but ultimately don't share your faith that private certification bodies will do a better job than a government body such as the Department of Education (as long as such an organization is not intentionally devolved with unmeriting stooges). I may switch opinion depending on if we are speaking about schools/universities vs. jobs/trades. But it isn't one or the other. An institution…
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I teach at a German University and I have never in a decade perceived even the slightest scintilla of any student creating "social justice pressure" in any of my or the classes of my collegues. Whenever there was a social justice topic that made the waves, it was typically about some prof who legitimately acted like full blown asshole and thought everybody else has to put up with their ego — if anything disrupted edu…
> As I am working at a liberal art school you would think I probably have witnessed the worst already, but I didn't There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” htt…
This is not about fish and water, this is about people who aren't there telling me that my floor is wet and every day I check it is dry as a bone. As someone who grew up rurally I always hated it when the city folk told me how it is to grow up there — they had no idea. This is the same.
Btw.: your username doesn't inspire neutrality on that topic, as it reminds me of a certain political figure that ran my country into the ground with his megalomania and insanity in the first half of the past century.
"researchforteachers dot org dot uk" sounds like it might be an interesting organization that I'd like to know more about, but the domain root is just a login mask. Does anyone have details on who is behind and what else they offer to the general public besides a scanned PDF of an interesting article?