41–50 of 91 posts
Unfortunately, the current conservative/nationalistic government has been trying to get it shut down. They use the guide of "tough on crime" of course, but they have been opposing money for people of lesser means for a long, long time.
What do they spend taxpayers money for instead?
Many other things of course. But these are some of the areas where the difference is largest compared to the opposition.
Damn that sounds awesome! As a Swede myself I feel like I missed out, and I wonder why I never saw anything like this in my youth? My best theory is there wasn't much in the very rural area where I grew up. There wasn't much of anything other than nature to be fair, so that kinda makes sense I guess...
Sure there were, but the organized study circles in Sweden are tightly knit to workers movement, usually there is an house in a village somewhere ment for this purpose. If there are at least 1000 people living there you are guaranteed find one (usually pretty big with that population). The same was (is?) available in the US, I know there where "workers education centers" in NYC where you could learn arts etc before t…
Most popular movements had/has their own study orgamisation.
In rural Sweden it's just as likely to be Vuxenskolan, the study branch of the agrarian movement (Centern, 4H, hushållningssällskapet)
ABF would be the workers study org, Medborgarskolan the conservatives.
There are 10 national organsiations in all.
> A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. I wonder if this quote is still something we beli…
This is not to say that the material learnt/shared is an unqualified good. The ability of each individual to freely exchange that knowledge and assess it in their context is.
> A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. I wonder if this quote is still something we beli…
As fas our belief in the quote, it's clear there exists a subset of the population that doesn't believe this quote to be correct. We're seeing a renaissance of anti-intellectualism, where people reject basic science; brag about not reading books; segregate themselves into their own echo chambers; instead of facts informing beliefs, beliefs inform "facts."
A basic example is that diseases we've all but eradicated are seeing a resurgence thanks to trading vaccination for pox/covid/measles/etc parties.
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It's easy to say something like this, but without any actual examples, complaints, studies or anything it just detracts from actual conversations.
In regions with depopulation there are disused buildings, unoccupied school rooms, and even churches in some cases. This is not a thing in big cities, and there are no facilities freely available to anyone. It is possible to get subsidised rooms/studios through "study circles" for music or theatre (for example), under certain conditions for accountability. "Folk high school" is equivalent to community college.
I thought a community college was just a college/university that aimed to serve the local community and its needs, rather than having terribly high research ambitions?
If so, it's completely different from folk high schools (in Norway, at least). They have no grades and no exams, and they serve 18-19 year olds from elsewhere than their local community. It's very rare to go to your own community's folk high school. Unlike all other education levels in Norway, folk high schools are boarding schools by default.
Also, because they struggle somewhat with popularity, they're quite focused on hobby or "useless" skills, from art to horse sports. There's even some esports offerings in recent years. They need to draw students in, and for most students with a traditional goal in mind such as becoming a nurse or an accountant, they would be a poor investment of a year, so they can't really offer very "practical" courses.
Young people go there to live their dream career for a while, get some more time to figure out what they can actually do as a career, and "make friends for life", a phrase you'll find a lot in folk high school promotional material. It's pretty much code for "find a serious boyfriend/girlfriend". Rare for arenas where that's the goal, they're typically rather gender balanced, or even with women slightly overrepresented.
> A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. I wonder if this quote is still something we beli…
Those "who want to learn it from them" must make the assessment. Any less is censorship of the teacher, which, in my mind, is an unqualified evil. This is not to say that the material learnt/shared is an unqualified good. The ability of each individual to freely exchange that knowledge and assess it in their context is.
In regions with depopulation there are disused buildings, unoccupied school rooms, and even churches in some cases. This is not a thing in big cities, and there are no facilities freely available to anyone. It is possible to get subsidised rooms/studios through "study circles" for music or theatre (for example), under certain conditions for accountability. "Folk high school" is equivalent to community college.
Yeah, right after reading this I started thinking about how to start such a circle in my area, and realized it's not possible because a key factor is a free space young people can adopt and re-imagine. In a densely populated city this is immensely hard to happen spontaneously, any such space will most likely be quickly occupied by homeless people, which feels more urgent than education and exploration.
Excellent article, and a very interesting look into how a society may accelerate its development. Perhaps maker spaces are born of a similar ethos, though of course very stem driven. Unfortunately it seems that as formal education has become more institutionalised and more necessary as a marker for employability, doing anything remotely 'bookish' in your free time has become almost definitively 'uncool'. A shame.
It sounds like you're comparing the situation outlined in the article to somewhere you're familiar with when you say 'bookish' is 'uncool'. Where is that?
More broadly speaking, even when I was growing up being a "nerd" (what the kids would say instead of bookish) was always uncool. It's practically a trope in American media since we had media as such. Smart, brainy kids are juxtaposed against the "cool" jocks and popular crowd.
The idea of the study groups getting the participants polished on the social aspects of life sounds good.
For STEM, let's see: First, here at Hacker News, what fraction of the readers got good at writing code in C/C++ before they had any formal classroom instruction from an established education system, high school, college, etc.? I anticipate, a big fraction.
Lesson: In learning C/C++, and a lot of closely related topics, say, quick sort, maybe matrix inversion, the beginnings of using relational data base as "the key, the whole key, nothing but the key", some of the details of virtual memory as Zuck spouted out as he walked out of class in the movie The Social Network, commonly that learning has been done by people mostly on their own.
Next, a college prof has to keep up and hopefully push ahead, but there's essentially no formal education classroom instruction for doing that. So, the prof has to do that on his (her, here and below) own.
Lesson: Self teaching is fundamental right to the top of the education system. Soooo, self teaching is not incidental, strange, etc.
For graduate study in the STEM fields, been there, done that. Fact of life: The university, department, profs, etc. can provide a lot of guidance and direction, often crucial since otherwise a student might waste time wandering in poor directions, but, bluntly, the student needs lots of hours of self study outside of class.
Lesson: Soooo, even in a program in formal education, a lot of self teaching is crucial.
Broadly in US society, there is a lot of self learning: E.g., a good chef who has a terrific lasagna, pizza, Italian rum cake, coconut cream pie, ..., likely learned how to do that mostly on their own or, say, from an employer who learned it on their own, likely not from some formal classroom education. Same for lots of jobs -- auto repair, plumbing, roofing, brick laying, many aspects of farming, parenting, ....
Lesson: Self teaching is crucial in our whole society, and a lot of people are good at it.