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Goodbye, MIT

city-journal.org

61–70 of 120 posts

Re: Goodbye, MIT

#61
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer and the future is kids will be raised by the state and given an equal playing field. This frees parents to work/spend and ensures the only advantage exists at the gene level. We can selectively breed those traits away . The problem is we sent kids to school in the first place and ask them to follow a system designed for the average student but not the most typical.

Hope you don't mind it when people you don't like get to choose the curriculum. What happens when a fascist gets elected (again?) and decides it's time to make some adjustments to the school system? You seem to have a lot of trust in a system that hasn't earned it.

You don't get to choose your public school's curriculum now.

Re: Goodbye, MIT

#62
post #3

I feel genuinely conflicted about these topics. Part of me says “I agree with the letter authors completely. People should experience equal opportunity, equal Justice, and equal responsibility.” Another part of me says “that’s literally impossible (or incompatible) with different families raising their children with different circumstances.” Overall, I lean pretty strongly towards individual families raising their ch…

What’s the limiting principle or boundary condition of “equal opportunity”? Is every social institution required to compensate for all external inequalities? If so, how can each institution subjectively compensate for social inequalities without diminishing their respective core functions?

The point here is that institutions must provide equal opportunity within their own functional scope. But simultaneously, institutions must also maintain enough filtering criteria to ensure they do not abandon their core function.

MIT best serves general social questions of equal opportunity by accepting individuals based on some standard quantifiable baseline filtering criteria, and tackling such vast social questions through open and honest inquiry & research.

As a side note, perhaps institutions that are closer to problems like social inequality are best suited to serve them.

Re: Goodbye, MIT

#63
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The answer and the future is kids will be raised by the state and given an equal playing field." I read this as sarcasm, but I re-read it and am not so sure? I hope you're will to pay for that in blood because there will be war over it. We get that there's no such thing as a perfectly level playing field, but we're not going to allow children to be raised by the state to achieve what will be frankly in all likelihoo…

The general idea came to me when discussing equal pay for women and how kids affects a women's career. Thinking about ways to equalize education with kids frim different economic level. I came upon this idea. There are many benefits and many drawbacks. No matter how taboo this topic it feels like the natural evolution of putting the children first, equalizing poverty backgrounds, equalizing pay, increasing workforce…

Raising children is different from anything you do in the workplace. "Professional" abilities aren't the key metrics for this responsibility. The best "boost" I'm aware of for being good at the job is being raised by good loving parents and thus having a good model to then emulate when it becomes your turn. Sometimes people can find good models elsewhere, but the number of places one can do that today is pretty small — media and movies certainly don't.

From my research, the sociological numbers bear this out, good homes make better well-adjusted successful and able children who generally go on to make another generation of well-adjusted and successful children.

Broken families, single parents homes, have lower success rates.

If you want to create an environment where our most valuable resource is given the best shot, then we should be teaching about marriage, man+woman partnership, fidelity and faithfulness. We don't have any known better models for raising them — and it isn't even close.

Re: Goodbye, MIT

#64
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You described a bunch of failings of the school and then said: > The best school in the world can't 'fix' that. I find that puzzling. A good school will not have most of those problems. Doing well when the kids coming in is hard but doable.

Yeah no ... I described failings in the students - or rather, that wouldn't say 'failings' so much as 'contextually, utterly not prepared, willing or able in any way'. "A good school will not have most of those problems." Because a 'good school' is full of conscientious and prepared students, raised by conscientious and prepared parents with jobs and stability. There is nothing a 'decent group of well meaning teacher…

  An area won't improve in one year because you switch teachers, and this problem is really socially whole. You don't just switch teachers, you need to inject money into the local economy, invest in public spaces (green areas, children's playgrounds, etc.). And of course, in education as well. 

  But you gotta start regardless. We can't just shrug, though I feel like this problem is so complex it really requires a complete re-structuration of the way America handles its social structure. 

  I don't think the USA is going to solve these problems without a complete 180 degrees change in how you view the world, and that won't happen until the empire has completely collapsed. In that regard, I have quite a grim view of the future of America.

Re: Goodbye, MIT

#65
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The answer and the future is kids will be raised by the state and given an equal playing field." I read this as sarcasm, but I re-read it and am not so sure? I hope you're will to pay for that in blood because there will be war over it. We get that there's no such thing as a perfectly level playing field, but we're not going to allow children to be raised by the state to achieve what will be frankly in all likelihoo…

The general idea came to me when discussing equal pay for women and how kids affects a women's career. Thinking about ways to equalize education with kids frim different economic level. I came upon this idea. There are many benefits and many drawbacks. No matter how taboo this topic it feels like the natural evolution of putting the children first, equalizing poverty backgrounds, equalizing pay, increasing workforce…

"Why would you allow untrained professionals to raise our most valuable resource? "

I would start by saying that anyone who would even use that kind of language is living in a totally different dimension of reality than I, and so first, I'd have to bridge that gap.

Our children are not 'resources' and while teaching certainly requires a degree of professional demeanour, raising children has nothing to do with 'professionalism' per say.

For gosh sake ... life is about life (!) - the whole gosh darn point of 'the economy' is so that families can be families and communities, not the other way around, i.e. that they can be turned into 'proletariat resource factories'.

We live, we have our communities, our culture, our institutions, our faith, our celebrations, our hopes, our fears, our failures, our conquests, our rituals. The economy can be a part of that. Stopping really bad acting (i.e. abuse) is always good. The state has a role even in education, obviously.

But the language you are using is the same type of culturally secular language that totalitarian systems adopted and resulted in dramatic failure.

If you want to see what that looks like, visit non-Moscow Russia, the parts that were designed in built in the latter part of the 20th century. Or better yet, Poland, because they will not romanticize that era in a perverse way and give you an earful.

The 'best' schools in the world, in Finland, if one could describe their approach it would be 'Communitarian' more than anything. Yes, they have standard European views on equality and somewhat higher taxation, but they are not 'top down secular equality socialists'. Instead, they value teachers as a culture. They value reading, education, intellectualism, they work as local communities. We would consider them 'somewhat progressive' in many ways, but they are not what we would call 'woke'. Their method of education is not anything special, it's downright ancient if anything. They are not what we would nominally call 'capitalist' either, they have a blended communitarian + regulated free-market + socialization in certain sectors and definitely national strategic cooperation between state, established families/wealth, industry.

They are a great example, there are others, though ideas and rhetoric are always good, there's no need to roll back to 100 year old ideas that have been essentially discredited.

Re: Goodbye, MIT

#66
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hope you don't mind it when people you don't like get to choose the curriculum. What happens when a fascist gets elected (again?) and decides it's time to make some adjustments to the school system? You seem to have a lot of trust in a system that hasn't earned it.

You don't get to choose your public school's curriculum now.

Yes; that that's a problem. It's one of the big reasons why people choose to put their kids through private school, or even to homeschool.

Re: Goodbye, MIT

#67
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer and the future is kids will be raised by the state and given an equal playing field. This frees parents to work/spend and ensures the only advantage exists at the gene level. We can selectively breed those traits away . The problem is we sent kids to school in the first place and ask them to follow a system designed for the average student but not the most typical.

Hope you don't mind it when people you don't like get to choose the curriculum. What happens when a fascist gets elected (again?) and decides it's time to make some adjustments to the school system? You seem to have a lot of trust in a system that hasn't earned it.

> What happens when a fascist gets elected (again?)

The Biden administration is the most fascist government the US has ever had. Their integration with BLM and antifa rioters is the same as the Bolsheviks in WW1 and Mussolini's fascists in WW2 - in fact, our current (incompetent) VP helped bail out rioters.

The reason for Biden's Open Border policy is to pack enough new potential Democratic voters so that the US will have a one-party political system. Asking for voter ID pales in comparison to allowing 2 million illegal aliens into the country (and funding them) in 2021 alone.

Re: Goodbye, MIT

#68
post #12
post #3

I feel genuinely conflicted about these topics. Part of me says “I agree with the letter authors completely. People should experience equal opportunity, equal Justice, and equal responsibility.” Another part of me says “that’s literally impossible (or incompatible) with different families raising their children with different circumstances.” Overall, I lean pretty strongly towards individual families raising their ch…

The answer and the future is kids will be raised by the state and given an equal playing field. This frees parents to work/spend and ensures the only advantage exists at the gene level. We can selectively breed those traits away . The problem is we sent kids to school in the first place and ask them to follow a system designed for the average student but not the most typical.

This was written by a non-parent.

Re: Goodbye, MIT

#69

How long can a country endure if it continues to cripple learning, muzzle truth and persecute some of its most talented and capable individuals in the name of childish, incoherent ideology? Not long. The stage of history doesn't care how many followers you have on Twitter, or how many people's lives you can destroy in the name of your religion masquerading as science. In the coming years, the US MUST LEAD. It must sh…

Society is a pendulum. Give it time. We move in decades.

Re: Goodbye, MIT

#70
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even that won’t do it. Kids show up to kindergarten with wildly different abilities to even “take turns” and participate conversationally. Kids who had less adult conversational interaction as toddlers won’t get the same out of school even with the teachers being in rotation. There’s disagreement as to whether the gap is 30 million words, but it seems quite likely to be well into the millions. https://www.edutopia.or…

All of these replies seem to co-mingle the concepts of equal opportunity and equal outcome. The foundation of a free society is personal responsibility. Personal outcomes in such a system are pretty much guaranteed not to be the same (equal), since different people will use their freedom in different ways. Sucks for kids of irresponsible parents, who truly don't have self-autonomy. But then again, our society is full…

Exactly. Outside of the state taking away children from their parents at birth and raising them there will never truly be equal opportunity. Even then there are genetic differences which give some more opportunity than others: I got blessed by flat ass feet and bad joints from my parents. I will never be able to be an athlete and will always be somewhat limited in the physical endeavours I can persue. Being tall and attractive is directly correlated with better life outcomes, but if you are ugly or short you are just out of luck.

The real question which needs to be answered is where do institutions need to draw the line for equal opportunity? Do institutional services need to be a zero sum game? Can we offer the same services to everyone — education, healthcare, UBI — where providing services to certain individuals is not at the expense of other individuals?

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