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Education must go beyond the mere production of words

ncregister.com

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Re: Education must go beyond the mere production of words

#61

Post by jdmichal »

michaelsbradley wrote: post #46
jdmichal wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with vernacular liturgy, the goal is internal contemplation and ideally application. What's even the point of going if you're intending to just be talked to? No one is keeping attendance.

It’s not so much a matter of Latin versus vernacular, more the way it goes as a whole. Let’s compare an average daily Mass (e.g. 8 AM on a ferial day at St. Joe’s, no music) in the Novus Ordo with a TLM Low Mass. Let’s assume that in either form it lasts about 45 minutes. In the N.O., from start to finish, the priest is in a kind of dialogue with the people, accentuated by the versus populum arrangement that has beco…

Apologies. I think there was a confusion of terms. There's only one church in my county I know of that even offers traditional mass, and it is in Latin. I admit to only having attended once, because I felt too disconnected.

My only point was that, in my mind, active participation is even more so mental than physical. I'm sure you understand this from your scare quotes around the same term. I appreciate your deeper understanding of these processes and your attempts to share such.

EDIT: I think graemep's first paragraph in this response does a much more eloquent job of making the same point as in my head.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47901851

Re: Education must go beyond the mere production of words

#62

Post by mncharity »

> More oral defense of arguments. [...] More [...] work in which students must explain not only what a result shows but what it does not.

More rough-quantitative reasoning? Fermi questions. Especially if done by collaborative iterative bounding "Who can suggest another soft/hard upper/lower bound? ... What do you think of that argument?"

In contrast to a plug-and-chug theme, illustrated by an ideal gas law problem in a popular textbook, which despite years of use, and qc passes for multiple editions, has numbers for solid Argon. Reality checking, a feel for reasonable values, a "Is this approximation plausible here?", being pervasively "not on the exam".

Re: Education must go beyond the mere production of words

#63

Post by yawnxyz »

croemer wrote: post #32

Ironic that the article seems to be at least partially LLM generated. Lots of negative parallel constructions (it's not x, but y) and "not merely". Also short sentence bursts and colons. Also, Pangram says 100% AI generated (some sections with high confidence): https://www.pangram.com/history/af8d47c1-dcbd-48ed-83a8-eda6...

no idea why you were downvoted, but I stopped reading after the first few paragraphs thinking it's almost 100% AI constructed. Very strange article

Re: Education must go beyond the mere production of words

#64

Post by eloisant »

graemep wrote: post #52
bluefirebrand wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a European, I don’t know what a Public school means It means "school paid for by taxes", which, as a European is probably the sort of school you attended Private school is a school you have to pay to attend

In the UK it means a type of (established, large, non-profit) what Americans call a private school. We call the latter in general independent schools.

In the rest of the world "public school" vs "private school" is pretty clear, I think you guys in UK are the only one to call private schools "public school" and public schools "state school".

Re: Education must go beyond the mere production of words

#65

Post by bluecheese452 »

obscurette wrote: post #34
stogot wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compulsory education actually reduced US literacy levels after it was introduced, and it’s also not its original stated goals, nor is today any better at literacy 54% of adults lack proficiency in literacy Public schools have failed to “educate” https://map.barbarabush.org/

As a European, I don’t know what a Public school means. But if it refers to the kind of school environment you can find on YouTube by searching for “gen alpha teachers,” then I’m surprised those schools still exist at all.

As an American it means a public school.

Re: Education must go beyond the mere production of words

#66

Post by WalterBright »

graemep wrote: post #50
lokimedes wrote: post #13

The concept of “absorptive capacity” our ability to gain from the information presented to us, is a key factor in education. If we humans remain agents of our own lives (which I find axiomatic) we still need education to interact with AI, to ask the right questions and to make sense of the results.

Yes, you definitely need to absorb some information, but you also need to understand an process it. There is a bias in education to memorising facts over teaching concepts and skills. It has certainly got worse in the UK over the last few decades as a result of pressure on schools to get high grades, which has lead to teaching the exam rather than the subject. I might be biased by the small sample closest to me: my k…

> Learning how to do a calculation without understanding it.

I was able to do the math to solve quantum mechanics problems. But I didn't understand QM.

Re: Education must go beyond the mere production of words

#67

Post by jfengel »

mncharity wrote: post #62

> More oral defense of arguments. [...] More [...] work in which students must explain not only what a result shows but what it does not. More rough-quantitative reasoning? Fermi questions. Especially if done by collaborative iterative bounding "Who can suggest another soft/hard upper/lower bound? ... What do you think of that argument?" In contrast to a plug-and-chug theme, illustrated by an ideal gas law problem in…

Terrible word problems bug me. They seem to say, "this isn't actually useful in the real world, and we couldn't come up with even one realistic example."

I know some of it is the result of the incremental way we teach, such that there isn't any meaningful use of this step until it's combined with others. Still, students can only find the amount of fence required for a field before concluding that it does not in fact matter.

Re: Education must go beyond the mere production of words

#68

Post by WalterBright »

rdevilla wrote: post #4

I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware, and what kinds of information are better off sitting in a silicon cache somewhere in the cloud. On one extreme LLMs do 100% of your thinking, and your brain understands nothing other than how to function as a transport layer from/to the data center and other humans. On the other you have the technophobic tendencies of Anathem's avo…

> I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware

It's curious that most game shows require a vast knowledge of useless trivia rather than reasoning skills.

Re: Education must go beyond the mere production of words

#69

Post by WalterBright »

zozbot234 wrote: post #39
rdevilla wrote: post #4

I wonder what kinds of information are worth keeping resident in human carbon wetware, and what kinds of information are better off sitting in a silicon cache somewhere in the cloud. On one extreme LLMs do 100% of your thinking, and your brain understands nothing other than how to function as a transport layer from/to the data center and other humans. On the other you have the technophobic tendencies of Anathem's avo…

Repetition of basic knowledge is actually a big part of a successful education, Even schoolkids in the earliest grades can actually learn surprisingly complex subjects by heart simply by blabbing everything back word-for-word. Problem solving skills can then be built up on these basics.

I started out memorizing the times tables. I eventually discovered the pattern, and discarded memorizing.

Re: Education must go beyond the mere production of words

#70

Post by WalterBright »

kaashif wrote: post #21
globnomulous wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's one thing to memorize arguments in favour of a position. It's another to actively defend your positions against those aggressively invested in proving you wrong. John Stuart Mill argued that only the latter activity produces the real understanding that allows an argument, or a tradition, to be renewed and kept alive across generations against constant attempts at refutation. If you are regurgitating a stance i…

Yeah, memorization is very underrated. Memorization increases the size of the building blocks you can use. Mathematics is where I see this most clearly. Why memorize hundreds of theorems? Because then you can just cite them on the fly when doing real mathematics. If you had to re-derive everything, you'd be stuck doing undergrad level math forever.

I never memorized the trig identities, but used them so much I knew them anyway.
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