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Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

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Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#91

Post by ravenstine »

auslegung wrote: post #7
hourago wrote: post #4

> But our society is disintegrating, and in such a society, the only successful people are self-reliant, confident, and individualistic — because the community life that protects the dependent and the weak is dead. Too many people has apocalyptic views of the world. And to push for individualistic behavior when you think that your society is disintegrating seems to just accelerate any problems that may exists. 30 yea…

> you need some war-level trauma to stop children curiosity See inner city, ghetto living experiences

True, though I'm not so sure I would even assume that wealth facilitates curiosity. Perhaps it doesn't get in the way as the trauma of ghetto life, but there's plenty of well off children who grow up totally uninspired to do anything but walk the beaten path before them, let alone actually learn about things with no clear financial benefit (modern college notwithstanding).

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#92

Post by Consultant32452 »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #87
Consultant32452 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schools used to be designed exactly this way, with kids of varying ages/abilities all in the same room learning and teaching each other. It's actually quite successful and more aligned with how we are wired to learn (tribal/community style). The Prussian model we use currently was not designed to create more educated people, it was designed to most efficiently create factory workers. That's an important factor to kee…

Sure...when you pay for good schools with small class sizes you get better education. The point is that this doesn't work for 99% of children who are going to be in classes of 25-35 kids, and I wouldn't count the child of a smart HN reader as representative of the average "Montessori" kid.

My daughter's Montessori school had similar class sizes, 25-30. The kids were loosely grouped by age with ~4 years range in the same room. She was not uniquely successful, though I will acknowledge any private school will tend to be self-selected.

And you still missed that we had multi-age schoolhouses for generations that were successful.

If you want to argue for smaller classroom sizes, I'm on board, but you won't get a single vote from me for school funding until you're ready to completely upend the Prussian model. It converted our public schools into literal prisons for children and is a scourge on this Earth.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#93

Post by SQueeeeeL »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #81
fiziks_hckr wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've taught in schools from all corners of San Francisco, and can't agree more with majority of what was said in this article, except maybe the money part*, I'll leave a footnote for this. One day when I was volunteering at one of these schools, a student came up to me showing a picture of a robot how cool it was. When I mentioned that it was relatively easy to build, he got super stoked, told his friends and before…

Small class sizes don't just help, they are essential for this type of setup, which is why it can never work at scale and will not be relevant to 99% of kids in the country. There simply aren't enough teachers.

Their easily could be, we just can't imagine as a society putting this much effort into caring for the young. Especially those of the wrong skin color. The US is the wealthiest country in the world, we could easily change some of the governments wealth distribution to educate all students 8:1

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#94

Post by zozbot234 »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #87
Consultant32452 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schools used to be designed exactly this way, with kids of varying ages/abilities all in the same room learning and teaching each other. It's actually quite successful and more aligned with how we are wired to learn (tribal/community style). The Prussian model we use currently was not designed to create more educated people, it was designed to most efficiently create factory workers. That's an important factor to kee…

Sure...when you pay for good schools with small class sizes you get better education. The point is that this doesn't work for 99% of children who are going to be in classes of 25-35 kids, and I wouldn't count the child of a smart HN reader as representative of the average "Montessori" kid.

Class sizes in traditional schools were not always small. However, large classes would be taught differently, usually based on the students memorizing their daily "lessons" and chanting them out word-for-word. These "direct instruction" methods have only fallen out of use relatively recently as teachers sometimes felt them to be somehow demeaning, compared to more formal or intuition-driven teaching practices.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#95

Post by SQueeeeeL »

ravenstine wrote: post #89
hourago wrote: post #4

> But our society is disintegrating, and in such a society, the only successful people are self-reliant, confident, and individualistic — because the community life that protects the dependent and the weak is dead. Too many people has apocalyptic views of the world. And to push for individualistic behavior when you think that your society is disintegrating seems to just accelerate any problems that may exists. 30 yea…

> I have yet to see a child that is not curious, you need some war-level trauma to stop children curiosity. I hope you're right and I'm wrong, but that doesn't reflect my experience at all. Some children are indeed curious, but I wouldn't say anywhere near most. Saying that only serious trauma stops curiosity comes off as overly optimistic, but what do I know. After all, would you make the same statement about adults…

Pretty sure it applies with adults to, in my experience, those who aren't curious about the world have had many awful experiences with family, jobs, relationships. Pretty much everyone under capitalism will have some pretty substantial trama in their life.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#96

Post by calculatte »

thebooktocome wrote: post #76
calculatte wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When has the government in previous generations officially called concerned parents "domestic terrorists" for voicing their opinions at public meetings? You don't get to wave off everything at whim when there are real concerns out there. A large percentage of the population would disagree with you that "disintegration" is not happening.

Well, that particular incident was not mentioned in the parent comment. But since you’ve brought it up, what else do you call an organized campaign to assault, threaten to assault, vandalize the private property of, threaten the family of, defame, and/or falsely level criminal charges against public officials? https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/01/13/school-b... “At an Illinois school board meeting, a man…

Governments don't make blanket statements about all parents in response to "a man" getting arrested. Activist school boards working with government enforcement are directly destroying lives. This isn't some "old people yelling at clouds" that you make it out to be.

There's a reason so many school boards are being flipped. It's a response to the obvious hostility towards parents and people are actually waking up to it. Your downplaying and strawmanning of the situation shows that you actually don't know what's going on.

"Father arrested at school board event says they tried covering up his daughter’s rape by man in girl’s bathroom"

"Round Rock ISD police force arrests parents at their homes"

"Dissident Parents Targeted by School Board in Arizona"

Not to mention the numerous instances of school admins promoting discrimination, violence, and their biased political agendas.

https://www.projectveritas.com/news/exposed-greenwich-ct-ass...

https://www.projectveritas.com/news/prestigious-nyc-private-...

https://www.projectveritas.com/news/nyc-assistant-principal-...

This isn't education. It's indoctrination backed by authoritarianism.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#97

Post by vkou »

scarmig wrote: post #90
vkou wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> capitalism is what has lifted the most people out of poverty This is false. Access to cheap energy, in the form of fossil fuels is what has lifted the most people out of poverty, not capitalism. Without burning through millions of years of oil and coal in the span of a few centuries, we'd all still be farming and eating mud, regardless of which economic system were in play. Remove capitalism, and industrialized soc…

Feudal and socialist systems had access to cheap energy, and they weren't nearly as successful at raising people out of poverty. In the case of classic centrally planned socialist states, they were likely worse for the environment during development than comparable capitalist states (cf USA vs USSR).

The USSR (When it was not actively in the middle of an existential war) was a dramatically more prosperous society than any other point in the region's history. As it turns out, rising tides lift all boats, and industrialization, whether in planned economies, or otherwise, is what lifts people out of poverty.

But that industrialization can't happen without cheap energy. Energy is the critical factor, here.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#98

Post by ravenstine »

grendelt wrote: post #10
Spivak wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing more sure to kill your love of anything than to have it be taught at school. Like come on, we were stuck in the boredom cube for 6ish hours a day, the alternative is nothing and most of us still didn't pay attention.

> than to have it be taught at school. than to have it be taught IN A BORING WAY WITHOUT CONTEXT Learning my multiplication tables was fun when it was turned into a race with my friends. Memorizing the state capitals and abbreviations was fun when it was turned into a game. You can turn most anything into a fun way of learning it with just a modicum of effort. One problem is too many teachers get beat down to only te…

> If education was better funded in order to pay teachers very competitive wages

I see it as a chicken-or-the-egg problem. Are teachers paid less because they suck, or do they suck because they're not paid well?

Putting aside wages, does education really need more funding? What exactly is more expensive about teaching the fundamentals now than 50 years ago?

> you'd attract more can-do teachers

That would be possible not by merely increasing teacher pay. One of the biggest complaints by most teachers is that they are not allowed to deviate from the state sponsored lesson plan. Why would anyone who is qualified to be teaching children be inspired to be a mouthpiece for the state and nothing more? Teachers shouldn't be getting lesson plans from the state. Their students should either pass the exams or the teachers get fired. Yes, I'm using the word fired here, because I don't believe in teachers being protected from fucking up the minds of children. Maybe teachers who are actually qualified to teach children will find that inspiration in having their prestige be on the line, and the truly evil teachers out there wouldn't last as long if they weren't effective at educating.

Who were the best teachers you had? I bet they weren't the ones who just read out of a textbook and did whatever the state guidelines told them to do. Usually the best teachers and professors are so interested in their subject matter that they can effectively convey information and its importance without reading notes verbatim. We need more teachers like that, but when I was growing up there might have been one of those in every 10. Hopefully it's better than that now, but I don't see why it would be.

As long as the system itself is rotten, it really doesn't matter what pay teachers. The way the that the education system in America is constructed does not attract virtue. It attracts those who can fit well into bureaucracy and do what they're told in exchange for protection. There are still good teachers within that system, but I need more than one hand to count how many lazy, stupid, and sadistic teachers I've encountered.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#99

Post by yamtaddle »

notch656a wrote: post #57
vkou wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> capitalism is what has lifted the most people out of poverty This is false. Access to cheap energy, in the form of fossil fuels is what has lifted the most people out of poverty, not capitalism. Without burning through millions of years of oil and coal in the span of a few centuries, we'd all still be farming and eating mud, regardless of which economic system were in play. Remove capitalism, and industrialized soc…

What's your proposed mechanism for incentivizing me to efficiently provide energy to customers without capitalism? To invest in the capital intensive industries necessary to refine and extract this energy? Are you thinking a form of anarchism without property rights kind of situation, or more of a command economy?

Any of the systems used before the idea of capitalism was conceived would probably have done OK at reducing poverty, given incredibly cheap energy.

Meanwhile, capitalism would have done very little to reduce poverty, without all that dirt-cheap energy.

I think the poster's point was that, even if capitalism helped, the cheap energy from fossil fuels was the absolutely necessary part. Personally, I'd not be surprised if modern capitalism doesn't even work so well without cheap, abundant energy. Is it so effective when almost all your energy is human and animal, with a little water power on the side? I dunno. Maybe not much more effective than other approaches. Maybe even less effective.

Re: Why Schools Don’t Educate (1990)

#100

Post by jppope »

RankingMember wrote: post #34

> My children watch fifty-five hours of television a week, according to recent reports. Would love to have been able to see a source on that whopper- even in the days before most had computers, I don't see any reporting showing ~8 hours a day of consumption for children.

quick google search: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-...

I know that the US census had the average at like 6 hrs a day. No matter what the real number is... its a lot

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