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A new school curriculum

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Re: A new school curriculum

#2

Post by ThePadawan »

Cynical opinion: School is first and foremost a place where kids are kept so they're busy. Much like compulsory military service is a place where young adults are kept so they're busy.

The answer to "Why aren't schools as good as they could be?" is mostly "Because they are as good as they need to be."

Re: A new school curriculum

#3

Post by whatshisface »

>there are mental techniques, such as the memory palace, which enhance your ability to store and remember knowledge by 10x (not an exaggeration!). how did we miss that in school?

Memorizing is pretty useless for doing anything except for passing highschool tests, and it can stop you from learning for real because it replaces understanding and independent derivation with recall. Of all the people I remember passing classes, the person who understood the least I later found out had the ability to recall anything the professor wrote on the board. Clearly with that ability you would never have to learn anything to get As.

Also, the author should add the idea of capitalizing sentences to their curriculum somewhere. ;)

Re: A new school curriculum

#4

Post by Dirlewanger »

ThePadawan wrote: post #2

Cynical opinion: School is first and foremost a place where kids are kept so they're busy. Much like compulsory military service is a place where young adults are kept so they're busy. The answer to "Why aren't schools as good as they could be?" is mostly "Because they are as good as they need to be."

Even more cynically: to paraphrase from George Carlin's last comedy special in 2008, public education will never get better because the powers-that-be don't want a well-rounded populace capable of critical thinking.

"It's a big club, and you ain't in it"

Re: A new school curriculum

#5

Post by whatshisface »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #4
ThePadawan wrote: post #2

Cynical opinion: School is first and foremost a place where kids are kept so they're busy. Much like compulsory military service is a place where young adults are kept so they're busy. The answer to "Why aren't schools as good as they could be?" is mostly "Because they are as good as they need to be."

Even more cynically: to paraphrase from George Carlin's last comedy special in 2008, public education will never get better because the powers-that-be don't want a well-rounded populace capable of critical thinking. "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"

You don't need to resort to a conspiracy to explain the massive dysfunction in the US educational system. It explains itself: education is a mess, so smart critical people are rare, so it is hard to get them to teach and even harder to keep them teaching in the presence of overbearing and awful governance. The field of education research is also a mess on the level of 1910s psychology, and that's not helping the quality of schools either.

Re: A new school curriculum

#7

Post by j45 »

You may be interested to learn more about the work of Dr Taddy Bleacher.

While he is not hitting every item on your list, his organization provided over 600k street children with a highly diverse education based on developing whe whole student and not just a scholastic portion.

Recent talk: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kvcgBOizjN0

Re: A new school curriculum

#8

Post by shantly »

whatshisface wrote: post #3

> there are mental techniques, such as the memory palace, which enhance your ability to store and remember knowledge by 10x (not an exaggeration!). how did we miss that in school? Memorizing is pretty useless for doing anything except for passing highschool tests, and it can stop you from learning for real because it replaces understanding and independent derivation with recall. Of all the people I remember passing c…

Memorization sure looks incredibly important to, say, mathematics, a topic in which practitioners often push back against memorization-based learning yet certainly appears to be pretty damn memorization-heavy. I know they're not deriving every theorem from first principles every time they apply it, nor starting from scratch every time they recognize a pattern that allows for a leap toward a solution, and discussion of mathematics sure appears to require having a huge mental mapping (memorized) of names of things to what they are and what they're used for, not to mention memorization of a large number of symbols.

On a more practical note, lots of memorized knowledge appears to be the primary thing the big tech companies want out of candidates, plus highish general intelligence (ability to quickly spot similarities between one problem and another so you can apply a memorized solution, chiefly).

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