Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School • Hacker News Board

Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School

#31

Post by rprospero » Fri, May 04, 2012, 2:46 PM UTC

ap22213 wrote: post #11

When I was a poor kid from the rust belt, I dreamed of becoming an adult and getting a Phd. and talking deeply with the intellectual elite. I never got that Phd. but I became happily upper middle class, and thus got to hang out with a lot of Phds., often from good schools. Not surprisingly, many of them came from upper-class areas, and upper middle class or wealthy families. What surprised me of this bunch was the ge…

I'm also a rust belt kid and, while I wouldn't say I grew up poor, we were decidedly middle class. I would have qualified for Harvard's free tuition program, to put things in perspective.

I'm also in a PhD program and my experience here is slightly different than your own. Specifically, I'm probably the median in terms of economic backgrounds among the graduate students in my program. Yes, there are some students from upper middle class and wealthy families, but I know just as many grad students who were living on welfare before going to college. Heck, even out of the professors, more of them are sons of farmers and bakers than of bankers or doctors.

I should include my own samples biases here. First, I'm at a large, state school, not a private institution. Sopooneo has already commented that that could make a difference. Also, the majority of my social group is in the physics department, so I'm not sure how well this extends outside the sciences.

Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School

#32

Post by PaperclipTaken » Fri, May 04, 2012, 2:52 PM UTC

rglover wrote: post #4

I wish I could recall the name, but I read an essay on the general concept of this topic not too long ago. Essentially the author referenced how schools are stratified into a series of groups: lower class, lower middle class, upper middle class, and elite (not sure if these are 100% accurate). The author explained (from a series of in-person observations) the differences in education at each of the various levels. Ch…

I can relate to this based on my experiences from high school. I don't think that things are structured like this intentionally. (I think that few teachers and principal's would intentionally hold back the lower class students) But, if you have a kid who tends to do his homework less, think school is 'not cool,' and in general doesn't like authority (something I feel was more prevalent among the poorer students in my education), you get a much stronger attitude of 'sit down and do your homework' from the teachers.

Then you have the upper level classrooms, where assignments were almost never turned in late, and students generally had less animosity towards authority in general. They still disobeyed and did creative things and whatnot, but they did it out of curiosity, and not because they were trying to irritate the teachers.

Actually, I'm thinking of several cases specifically in my class where students held visible animosity towards these teachers. These students consistently had the lowest grades in the class.

Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School

#33

Post by loganfrederick » Fri, May 04, 2012, 2:54 PM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #28

kitsune_ wrote: post #17

Errr? I don't know what schools are like in the Unites States, but I was probably taught the exact opposite of what is presented in this Forbes Article. For instance: "The people in charge have all the answers." > My history teacher would like to have word with you.

This is a great observation. The list is bewildering to me as well. I think the author is trying to play up this strawman of conservative authoritarianism and perhaps reflects her upbringing but I don't think its typical of the American educational experience. "The best and brightest follow the rules" bothers me the most. From a young age I've been taught by the establishment that inventors and industrialists who pur…

There is the danger that your own upbringing is also used as anecdotal evidence.

From my experience in what I'd guess is a stereotypical suburban American public school, going against the norm is not widely supported. It's not so much that it's frowned upon, but more that it's outside "the system" and administrators don't know how to manage people/students trying to break away from the norm, which is their job.

This leads to situations where a student trying to do his/her own thing can't because our society and school systems are filled with red tape that slows down, not enhances, free-thinking.

I do agree that the article is mostly fluff though.

Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School

#34

Post by PaperclipTaken » Fri, May 04, 2012, 2:56 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #15

rglover wrote: post #4

I wish I could recall the name, but I read an essay on the general concept of this topic not too long ago. Essentially the author referenced how schools are stratified into a series of groups: lower class, lower middle class, upper middle class, and elite (not sure if these are 100% accurate). The author explained (from a series of in-person observations) the differences in education at each of the various levels. Ch…

From what I can see, there is also a pretty strong correlation in the UK between the "rank" of a school and the amount of time pupils spend playing sports (particularly rugby) as part of the curriculum - presumably for the perceived leadership/team-building that these sports are believed to promote.

At my high school, and at my college as well, the sports players are generally looked down upon by the 'gifted' or 'AP' students. I don't know how sports players compare to the average student, but the average GPA on our cross country and track teams always shocked me a little. Few of my friends ever got below 3.5, and the sports teams often had averages below 2. The football team (by rumor, I never actually saw the numbers) was the lowest gpa sport in our school.

Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School

#35

Post by joedev » Fri, May 04, 2012, 2:59 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #13

joedev wrote: post #5

"On average, a four-year degree is the equivalent of an investment that returns 15.2% a year." - http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/30/a-college-degree-r... Stay in school kids.

I'm not a fan of this kind of interpretation because it treats everyone as an equal. People derive joy from different things in life. Some people work to live and will only do the bare minimum to get by in order to fulfill their real joys. Those people are less likely to go to college, and are less likely to earn high incomes, because the passion isn't there. Others live to work. These people love what they do. They…

"Your earning potential is essentially given to you at birth"

Interestingly the data shows otherwise. Factors such as parents' education, where one lives, age, race, family structure, IQ are measured and factored in. Two stats techniques are commonly applied. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) is more traditional while Instrument Variables (IV) is a newer approach which attempts to account for statistical errors such as omitted and unknown variables in order to more strongly determine causality.

If you like stats check out this review of the literature: http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/card/papers/return-to-school... which concludes that studies "Taken as a whole, however, the findings from the recent IV literature are remarkably consistent with Griliches' (1977) assessment of a much earlier set of studies, and point to a causal effect of education that is as big or bigger than the OLS estimated return, at least for people whose schooling choices are affected by the supply-side innovations that have been studied so far."

There are real economic reasons why governments invest in their citizens' schooling. It's not just because it sounds like a nice idea. The increased income potential of someone going to school pays off for a government higher earnings which is a primary indicator of an economy's health.

Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School

#36

Post by joedev » Fri, May 04, 2012, 3:02 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #10

joedev wrote: post #5

"On average, a four-year degree is the equivalent of an investment that returns 15.2% a year." - http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/30/a-college-degree-r... Stay in school kids.

How much of that is due to having more knowledge, and how much is classism? i.e. having upper class parents is probably a very high return aswell. Also that only really works once. If spent 40 years, doing 10 4 year degrees, by this logic, I'd be a multibillionare right? Something is wrong with this theory.

"having upper class parents is probably a very high return as well"

True, which is why the studies account for factors such as family education and family income in order to attempt to isolate the impact of the one factor being measured: the subject's education level.

Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School

#37

Post by randomdata » Fri, May 04, 2012, 3:16 PM UTC

joedev wrote: post #35

randomdata wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan of this kind of interpretation because it treats everyone as an equal. People derive joy from different things in life. Some people work to live and will only do the bare minimum to get by in order to fulfill their real joys. Those people are less likely to go to college, and are less likely to earn high incomes, because the passion isn't there. Others live to work. These people love what they do. They…

"Your earning potential is essentially given to you at birth" Interestingly the data shows otherwise. Factors such as parents' education, where one lives, age, race, family structure, IQ are measured and factored in. Two stats techniques are commonly applied. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) is more traditional while Instrument Variables (IV) is a newer approach which attempts to account for statistical errors such as om…

Factors such as parents' education, where one lives, age, race, family structure, IQ are measured and factored in.

I would classify those as luck factors. They don't really address what I was speaking to.

Even if you believe college counts, someone with the fanciest of PhDs is going to really struggle to out-earn high school dropouts if he or she is not willing to work on the job. And that is the point. College is not the driver, it is the person. A person can leverage college to find themselves in better standing, but there are a million other ways to do the same.

Just blindly going to college is not going to improve anything with respect to income. You have to be someone who is cut out to earn more, and if you are that person, you will find a way, college or not.

Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School

#38

Post by PaperclipTaken » Fri, May 04, 2012, 3:21 PM UTC

There's a big difference in how students are taught and what students are thought to think from school to school, which is mostly correlated with income bracket. It's not that our leadership structure or general society has this 'keep the poor down' mentality, it has to do with the general mentality of the teachers and the general mentality of the students.

Think of the demographics of the teachers. In low income areas, the teachers are much more likely to be people that grew up in poor income areas themselves. Generally, that also means that they will be less familiar with higher-level concepts like 'when given lined paper, write the other way.' Even if they've heard these quotes and can tell you what they mean, they are less likely to be able to answer questions like 'Why 5 paragraphs?' and 'When in real life am I going to use the Pythagoras theorem?'

In high income areas, you are much more likely to get teachers that come from high income families themselves, which means they are much more likely to have gone to a reputable school. My high school (William Fremd High School) is seated in a high income area, and actually had several teachers (2 or 3) with Oxford level degrees. Many teachers in the English department actively rejected the idea of a 5 paragraph model, and told you to write the essay 'until it was done.' Many of the teachers, having been through some level of engineering school themselves, could tell you that the Pythagoras theorem is very important to things like Architecture and mechanical engineering, and that the seemingly useless mathematics you are learning actually have very powerful real life applications.

Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School

#39

Post by UK-AL » Fri, May 04, 2012, 3:25 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #24

ktizo wrote: post #22

I always suspected that the way that schools were set up was borrowed heavily from the old establishments for training the children of the lower ranks of the aristocracy in how to be military officers. The regimentation and rote of your average maths classroom was obviously never designed for teaching the subject, yet is the main memory of the experience for most people, rather than what is supposedly being taught.

Ironically, schools that were set up like that produced more literate and numerate kids, i.e. Grammar schools. In fact these were a key route to social mobility for bright but poor kids. They were killed off by politicians who relied on the lower classes for their votes...

Except many exist today, and there mostly populated by the middle class with ridiculously low levels of poor people. Like 1% on free school meals and majority were tutored for the entry test? Most poor people can't afford tutors.

With stats like that, they REINFORCE class structure, not break it.

And do poor people want to pay for the education of the elites? Which is what current grammars effectivly do.

Re: Dangerous Things You Were Taught In School

#40

Post by tgrass » Fri, May 04, 2012, 3:26 PM UTC

randomdata wrote: post #26

tgrass wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opportunity cost does not have to be more than one's liesure time. I worked thirty hours a week as a waiter in engineering undergrad and was a part time single dad. I averaged 17K a year. This is not unusual.

Opportunity is opportunity. If you weren't in school, you could have worked 30 hours per week as waiter plus the time you were studying. Realistically, if we assume you work for minimum wage, you're going to be around $200K short by the time you finish a four year program, and that does not include any costs associated with actually going to school, which could easily run you another $100K+, depending on the circumst…

This is incorrect. It is unlikely the average individual will work more than forty hours, so the opportunity cost is realistically the difference: 10 hours. At 7.25 an hour, pre-tax annual that's a mere $4k, for a four year degree that's $16K. Out of undergrad I went from a possible annual income of $20K (qualified for nothing but waiting tables) to $50K. The opportunity costs were paid for in the first six months.