6 ms·

When are we going to come out and admit that our schools are not providing our society with what it needs or wants? For a large chunk of HN, schools served us

by csa 9y ago

When are we going to come out and admit that our schools are not providing our society with what it needs or wants? For a large chunk of HN, schools served us relatively well. But for a huge chunk of the US, school is just a waste of time. At best, it's free childcare for parents. Preparing everyone to college is overkill (n.b. having a way for everyone who wants to go to college an affordable way to go to a good school is +++++EV... totally different issues). Mandatory schooling should be for fundamentals in reading, communication (speaking and writing), and math -- if you want to get cheeky, teach them disciplinary approaches to history and science by using examples that currently exist in their communities. Most people don't need literature. Most people don't need algebra (or higher). Most people don't need history (esp. as it's currently taught). Most people don't need science (again, esp. not as it is currently taught). Why are we teaching these things on people who don't care about and will not use these potential skills? The resource sink is disgusting. We could easily educate people to a functional level by 8th grade. Then let people join the real world if they want. Let them work rather than keep them in a glorified prison. If they at some point decide they want more schooling, give them easy access cheaply. This would be much cheaper than all the wasted high school resources we have now, and many of those resources could be funneled towards people who actually want to learn at the secondary and tertiary levels, even if it's not on a classic timeline. It's time for a rethink of education -- our current system is ridiculously bad.

bllguo 9y ago
I agree with the general sentiment that education needs to be overhauled but I feel that you undervalue literature and history. Hopefully someone comes along that is more qualified than I am to speak about this. There must be better ways to teach algebra and higher math, science, history, literature, etc. But to say they are useless is bonkers to me. Especially at a time where menial jobs are at great risk due to outsourcing and automation. The solution has to be more and better education, not less. I don't know how you expect people who know basic math, reading, and writing to succeed.
- pirocks 9y ago
  >I agree with the general sentiment that education needs to be overhauled And that's the core of the problem. Everyone wants change, just not the same change as the next guy.
  - bllguo 9y ago
    A problem, but not the core of it all. People have been compromising, and adjusting positions based on expert opinion, for quite awhile. I just wanted to raise the issue about the livelihood of the lower economic class.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  > Especially at a time where menial jobs are at great risk due to outsourcing and automation. This is what is so frustrating to me. Tons of people on this site say "more people should be going to college because the lower class is getting screwed," but fail to acknowledge that an enormous chunk of the population is mentally unable to obtain a degree, and that higher degree attainment rates doesn't help the issue because it devalues the degree and makes it where young people basically must get a degree to get a good job, forcing an entire generation into massive amounts of debt before even starting their career. Instead of expecting the half of the population with IQs lower than 100 to suddenly get an advanced degree and move to a large city, we need to do something about the negative effects that globalization and capital concentration have had on our nation. We need to make it so that quality of life for our lower class goes up as time goes on, not down.
  - bllguo 9y ago
    Right. These people are getting hammered. We have to find a way to let them be productive at something that isn't simple enough to be done by machines or laborers in developing countries. College is not feasible for them, but neither is neutered education.
- csa 9y ago
  > but I feel that you undervalue literature and history Fair enough. I said folks don't "need" history and lit, but I probably should have said that they don't want them or care about them as they are currently taught. As I mentioned, I think the history should be primarily local, and primarily focused on learning how to think and learn about history rather than just memorizing a bunch of facts. I think literature should be salient to the audience rather than the (relatively) high-brow art that is the current canon. That would mean that "poetry" would probably look at more contemporary music lyrics (e.g., rap, country, rock, etc.). "Drama" would look at whatever TV series are popular rather than Shakespeare. This is the kind of stuff that people who are usually not interested in education would be very much engaged with. Even something as off the wall as Judge Judy could be used to teach some basic law/civics. > There must be better ways to teach algebra and higher math, science, history, literature, etc. But to say they are useless is bonkers to me. They are useless as currently taught because most of the learners and their communities completely do not care about them -- the content is completely disconnected from many learners' day-to-day existence. Not only that, but for many learners who do show some interest in these topics, they will likely be ostracized. As such, teaching these subjects better within the current paradigm (i.e., oriented towards college prep) is a bridge to nowhere. None of these subjects will be highly engaged with by a learner until that learner's peers think that these subjects are important. At that point, learning can and will happen. Sadly, most people are not in a proper/efficient education setting at that point. Feel free to follow up -- this topic needs to be discussed more by intelligent people. Your reply brought up several great points.
mulmen 9y ago
I disagree with you here. I think it is a social benefit to expose everyone to a variety of disciplines. How many chemists or engineers or astronauts or authors found their calling in a classroom? I would wager there are a lot of them. Is it the only way? No, but for a lot of people it is how they find their way in life. Giving everyone access to this kind of exploratory environment can yield huge benefits to society. Could we do a better job teaching these topics? Absolutely. Does that mean we should just give up in the name of maximizing resource efficiency? Not really, we have the resources, we just need to spend them properly. I think it is unreasonable to expect that people will come to higher or secondary education on their own. Some will but for a lot of people they may go through life never realizing their potential because nobody challenged them and they never knew what was possible.
- csa 9y ago
  > I disagree with you here. I think it is a social benefit to expose everyone to a variety of disciplines. How many chemists or engineers or astronauts or authors found their calling in a classroom? I would wager there are a lot of them. Is it the only way? No, but for a lot of people it is how they find their way in life. Interestingly, I think that we are in agreement here. Your underlying assumption is that the learner is someone who is already motivated to learn and lives in a community that values education. For these folks, sure, expose them to a wide range of ideas. In the US, that covers maybe 30% of the population. What about the other 70%? > Giving everyone access to this kind of exploratory environment can yield huge benefits to society. Again, I think we agree here. Access should be universal. That said, it should also be easily and cheaply accessible outside of the classic timeline (i.e., 5-18 years of age). Note that providing access and actually having the learners learn are two completely different things. Access is fairly good right now, but learning is really low for a big chunk of the population since the available content lacks relevance for their lives. Note that I am not just talking about skill development for jobs, but also the developing universal critical thinking skills that resonate with the learners within their living contexts. The resources used for child-care-masked-as-education could be used for post 8th grade learning for people who find themselves in a (often working) community that values things like more-than-basic knowledge of math, science, history, etc. > I think it is unreasonable to expect that people will come to higher or secondary education on their own. Some will but for a lot of people they may go through life never realizing their potential because nobody challenged them and they never knew what was possible. I guess my question is why do we think most people need secondary or higher (tertiary) education now. If they don't "come to it on their own", will it matter? For the most part, I don't think it will matter. As for the "realizing potential" comment, I still think that you are still thinking in terms of people and communities that are already oriented towards higher ed. The other 70% or so go to school because they have to, and many of them will actively snub efforts to help them "realize their potential" because it will alienate them from their community. Again, I really think that there needs to be cheap/free high quality education available to all throughout a liftetime. That said, I don't think we should force an anachronistic college-oriented curriculum down the throats of those who have no need or negative need for that type of education.
colechristensen 9y ago
I'm not going to say that education is great as it is, but the worst attitude you can come across from a student or a person in general is the question "When am I ever going to need this?" The most important point of school isn't accumulating facts or skills but teaching students _how to think_. How to reason, how to solve problems, the absorption of a diversity of ideas and topics. To expose everyone to the knowledge, and skills to be free in society. It isn't a trade skill to teach them precisely and only the things they will need for a specific job. The thing they teach wrong very early to very many people is that learning is labor, and the key to success is following rules from an authority. Back to the main point I'm trying to make is that school is about teaching children how to think. You don't achieve this by sending them to a seminar about thinking, you do this by exposing them to history, art, literature, mathematics, and all the rest. You learn how to think sideways by being exposed to knowledge and challenged to remember and analyze and master many different subjects in many different ways. It's been pushing increasingly more and more towards achieving certificates, honors, and test scores, and these things are poisonous to actual quality learning and as an effect quality life. Just like in technology, optimizing for a poor metric makes you worse off than if you did nothing... and what YOU want to do is optimize for an even worse metric, myopic utility.
- saint_fiasco 9y ago
  > The most important point of school isn't accumulating facts or skills but teaching students _how to think_. How to reason, how to solve problems, the absorption of a diversity of ideas and topics. This is a rationalization. The real reason people learn literature, algebra and so on is a mixture of practical application and historical accident. If the reason they teach algebra really were to teach "how to reason" they would teach actual mathematical logic. That's what they teach Computer Science students who actually need to know how to reason to do their jobs. If the reason they teach literature really were to teach "how to think" they would teach how to properly read non-fiction books, not just fiction. If they really wanted to teach "critical thinking" they would teach actual rhetoric. We can't expect to just teach kids a bunch of arbitrary useless things and expect that, as a pure side effect, they will end up learning what we want them to learn.
- FiveSquared 9y ago
alexasmyths 9y ago
Basic, decent, somewhat cross-discipline education is the cornerstone of civilization. Yes - it's to some extent daycare, yes, maybe too much focus on 'University for Everyone', yes, maybe too much focus on standardized education ... But getting everyone reasonably literate and 'through high school' - is probably the #1 thing any nation could do to improve the standard of living in their citizenry.
- csa 9y ago
  > Basic, decent, somewhat cross-discipline education is the cornerstone of civilization. Totally agree. This can be done by 8th grade. In fact, it was mostly done by 8th grade in the US until about 100 years ago. > But getting everyone reasonably literate and 'through high school' - is probably the #1 thing any nation could do to improve the standard of living in their citizenry. You say this based on what? In every high school I have interacted with (usu. as an observer or researcher), high school is largely a holding pen for those who are not college bound (and even for many who are). There is very little education happening in the classroom since the content is largely decoupled from the learners' day-to-day existences (both present and perceived future). The course content is largely college prep or reheated versions of middle school curricula. The main focus is usually on some sort of preparation for a test (of questionable validity) that the school will be judged on. As I have mentioned before, schools (esp. high schools) serve most HN folks and their communities to a more or less acceptable standard. The other 70% of the (US) folks... I really don't think so.
JustSomeNobody 9y ago
We definitely need history and science otherwise people vote for politicians who also don't understand history and science.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  Agreed, but it's a bipartisan habit to invoke the word "science" when you're in effect trying to call your opponents stupid. And it's a bipartisan habit to crush your opponents arguments under the weight of "history". As in "standing in the way of progress" or invoking historical bogeymen to end arguments (as opposed to making valid points). All of the above are fallacious yet effective. Of course, good science and history classes would help explain those fallacies. Point being, we need to be careful that we're not just indoctrinating people into our particular bad habits.
- csa 9y ago
  Maybe? A few comments: - The politicians you refer to tend to be very well educated. It's not a lack of science and history classes that formed their opinions on these matters. - Some of the most racist and global warming denying people I know come from STEM backgrounds (mostly the TEMs, less the Ss, but still...). Smart people are just as capable (if not more so) than less smart people at experiencing cognitive dissonance/compartmentalization. - Disciplinary approaches to science, history, and lit definitely need to be taught. They can be taught (and should be taught) in K-8. The classes in high school are largely college prep and often have little or no focus on the fundamentals of the discipline -- in fact, they often kill the passion of those who entered with passion due to this lack of disciplinary focus. - We need WAY more education on critical thinking about politics. I think that the current levels of ignorance even among educated folks is a threat to our democracy.
nradov 9y ago
Skilled building trades like carpentry require at least basic algebra and geometry. Failure to teach science effectively leads to ignorant voters who believe that anthropogenic global climate change and evolution through natural selection are lies.
- csa 9y ago
  > Skilled building trades like carpentry require at least basic algebra and geometry. Great. Have that be part of carpentry training. Again, this type of training should be cheap/free and of high quality. I imagine a class of carpenters in training would be an incredible class to teach. > Failure to teach science effectively leads to ignorant voters who believe that anthropogenic global climate change and evolution through natural selection are lies. I guess your wiggle word there is "effectively". Note that there are plenty of highly educated people who are ignorant voters, climate change deniers, and creationists. People seem to think that more and/or better education will change this -- it largely won't. What matters for most people is what their community (esp. family) believes. The escape velocity required to break from those community beliefs is extremely high and generally involves the learner leaving that community to join another. This is a human condition and is not likely to change. I personally think the best we can do is teach disciplinary approaches to topics such as science to everyone, and let them come to heir own conclusions. As a simple example, if a community of creationists are ever going to change, that change will come from within. Change will not come from consistent brow beatings from high-browed outsiders.

by csa 9y ago

bllguo 9y ago

I agree with the general sentiment that education needs to be overhauled but I feel that you undervalue literature and history. Hopefully someone comes along that is more qualified than I am to speak about this. There must be better ways to teach algebra and higher math, science, history, literature, etc. But to say they are useless is bonkers to me. Especially at a time where menial jobs are at great risk due to outsourcing and automation. The solution has to be more and better education, not less. I don't know how you expect people who know basic math, reading, and writing to succeed.

pirocks 9y ago
>I agree with the general sentiment that education needs to be overhauled And that's the core of the problem. Everyone wants change, just not the same change as the next guy.
- bllguo 9y ago
  A problem, but not the core of it all. People have been compromising, and adjusting positions based on expert opinion, for quite awhile. I just wanted to raise the issue about the livelihood of the lower economic class.
TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
> Especially at a time where menial jobs are at great risk due to outsourcing and automation. This is what is so frustrating to me. Tons of people on this site say "more people should be going to college because the lower class is getting screwed," but fail to acknowledge that an enormous chunk of the population is mentally unable to obtain a degree, and that higher degree attainment rates doesn't help the issue because it devalues the degree and makes it where young people basically must get a degree to get a good job, forcing an entire generation into massive amounts of debt before even starting their career. Instead of expecting the half of the population with IQs lower than 100 to suddenly get an advanced degree and move to a large city, we need to do something about the negative effects that globalization and capital concentration have had on our nation. We need to make it so that quality of life for our lower class goes up as time goes on, not down.
- bllguo 9y ago
  Right. These people are getting hammered. We have to find a way to let them be productive at something that isn't simple enough to be done by machines or laborers in developing countries. College is not feasible for them, but neither is neutered education.
csa 9y ago
> but I feel that you undervalue literature and history Fair enough. I said folks don't "need" history and lit, but I probably should have said that they don't want them or care about them as they are currently taught. As I mentioned, I think the history should be primarily local, and primarily focused on learning how to think and learn about history rather than just memorizing a bunch of facts. I think literature should be salient to the audience rather than the (relatively) high-brow art that is the current canon. That would mean that "poetry" would probably look at more contemporary music lyrics (e.g., rap, country, rock, etc.). "Drama" would look at whatever TV series are popular rather than Shakespeare. This is the kind of stuff that people who are usually not interested in education would be very much engaged with. Even something as off the wall as Judge Judy could be used to teach some basic law/civics. > There must be better ways to teach algebra and higher math, science, history, literature, etc. But to say they are useless is bonkers to me. They are useless as currently taught because most of the learners and their communities completely do not care about them -- the content is completely disconnected from many learners' day-to-day existence. Not only that, but for many learners who do show some interest in these topics, they will likely be ostracized. As such, teaching these subjects better within the current paradigm (i.e., oriented towards college prep) is a bridge to nowhere. None of these subjects will be highly engaged with by a learner until that learner's peers think that these subjects are important. At that point, learning can and will happen. Sadly, most people are not in a proper/efficient education setting at that point. Feel free to follow up -- this topic needs to be discussed more by intelligent people. Your reply brought up several great points.

mulmen 9y ago

I disagree with you here. I think it is a social benefit to expose everyone to a variety of disciplines. How many chemists or engineers or astronauts or authors found their calling in a classroom? I would wager there are a lot of them. Is it the only way? No, but for a lot of people it is how they find their way in life. Giving everyone access to this kind of exploratory environment can yield huge benefits to society. Could we do a better job teaching these topics? Absolutely. Does that mean we should just give up in the name of maximizing resource efficiency? Not really, we have the resources, we just need to spend them properly. I think it is unreasonable to expect that people will come to higher or secondary education on their own. Some will but for a lot of people they may go through life never realizing their potential because nobody challenged them and they never knew what was possible.

csa 9y ago
> I disagree with you here. I think it is a social benefit to expose everyone to a variety of disciplines. How many chemists or engineers or astronauts or authors found their calling in a classroom? I would wager there are a lot of them. Is it the only way? No, but for a lot of people it is how they find their way in life. Interestingly, I think that we are in agreement here. Your underlying assumption is that the learner is someone who is already motivated to learn and lives in a community that values education. For these folks, sure, expose them to a wide range of ideas. In the US, that covers maybe 30% of the population. What about the other 70%? > Giving everyone access to this kind of exploratory environment can yield huge benefits to society. Again, I think we agree here. Access should be universal. That said, it should also be easily and cheaply accessible outside of the classic timeline (i.e., 5-18 years of age). Note that providing access and actually having the learners learn are two completely different things. Access is fairly good right now, but learning is really low for a big chunk of the population since the available content lacks relevance for their lives. Note that I am not just talking about skill development for jobs, but also the developing universal critical thinking skills that resonate with the learners within their living contexts. The resources used for child-care-masked-as-education could be used for post 8th grade learning for people who find themselves in a (often working) community that values things like more-than-basic knowledge of math, science, history, etc. > I think it is unreasonable to expect that people will come to higher or secondary education on their own. Some will but for a lot of people they may go through life never realizing their potential because nobody challenged them and they never knew what was possible. I guess my question is why do we think most people need secondary or higher (tertiary) education now. If they don't "come to it on their own", will it matter? For the most part, I don't think it will matter. As for the "realizing potential" comment, I still think that you are still thinking in terms of people and communities that are already oriented towards higher ed. The other 70% or so go to school because they have to, and many of them will actively snub efforts to help them "realize their potential" because it will alienate them from their community. Again, I really think that there needs to be cheap/free high quality education available to all throughout a liftetime. That said, I don't think we should force an anachronistic college-oriented curriculum down the throats of those who have no need or negative need for that type of education.

colechristensen 9y ago

I'm not going to say that education is great as it is, but the worst attitude you can come across from a student or a person in general is the question "When am I ever going to need this?" The most important point of school isn't accumulating facts or skills but teaching students _how to think_. How to reason, how to solve problems, the absorption of a diversity of ideas and topics. To expose everyone to the knowledge, and skills to be free in society. It isn't a trade skill to teach them precisely and only the things they will need for a specific job. The thing they teach wrong very early to very many people is that learning is labor, and the key to success is following rules from an authority. Back to the main point I'm trying to make is that school is about teaching children how to think. You don't achieve this by sending them to a seminar about thinking, you do this by exposing them to history, art, literature, mathematics, and all the rest. You learn how to think sideways by being exposed to knowledge and challenged to remember and analyze and master many different subjects in many different ways. It's been pushing increasingly more and more towards achieving certificates, honors, and test scores, and these things are poisonous to actual quality learning and as an effect quality life. Just like in technology, optimizing for a poor metric makes you worse off than if you did nothing... and what YOU want to do is optimize for an even worse metric, myopic utility.

saint_fiasco 9y ago
> The most important point of school isn't accumulating facts or skills but teaching students _how to think_. How to reason, how to solve problems, the absorption of a diversity of ideas and topics. This is a rationalization. The real reason people learn literature, algebra and so on is a mixture of practical application and historical accident. If the reason they teach algebra really were to teach "how to reason" they would teach actual mathematical logic. That's what they teach Computer Science students who actually need to know how to reason to do their jobs. If the reason they teach literature really were to teach "how to think" they would teach how to properly read non-fiction books, not just fiction. If they really wanted to teach "critical thinking" they would teach actual rhetoric. We can't expect to just teach kids a bunch of arbitrary useless things and expect that, as a pure side effect, they will end up learning what we want them to learn.
FiveSquared 9y ago

alexasmyths 9y ago

Basic, decent, somewhat cross-discipline education is the cornerstone of civilization. Yes - it's to some extent daycare, yes, maybe too much focus on 'University for Everyone', yes, maybe too much focus on standardized education ... But getting everyone reasonably literate and 'through high school' - is probably the #1 thing any nation could do to improve the standard of living in their citizenry.

csa 9y ago
> Basic, decent, somewhat cross-discipline education is the cornerstone of civilization. Totally agree. This can be done by 8th grade. In fact, it was mostly done by 8th grade in the US until about 100 years ago. > But getting everyone reasonably literate and 'through high school' - is probably the #1 thing any nation could do to improve the standard of living in their citizenry. You say this based on what? In every high school I have interacted with (usu. as an observer or researcher), high school is largely a holding pen for those who are not college bound (and even for many who are). There is very little education happening in the classroom since the content is largely decoupled from the learners' day-to-day existences (both present and perceived future). The course content is largely college prep or reheated versions of middle school curricula. The main focus is usually on some sort of preparation for a test (of questionable validity) that the school will be judged on. As I have mentioned before, schools (esp. high schools) serve most HN folks and their communities to a more or less acceptable standard. The other 70% of the (US) folks... I really don't think so.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago

We definitely need history and science otherwise people vote for politicians who also don't understand history and science.

humanrebar 9y ago
Agreed, but it's a bipartisan habit to invoke the word "science" when you're in effect trying to call your opponents stupid. And it's a bipartisan habit to crush your opponents arguments under the weight of "history". As in "standing in the way of progress" or invoking historical bogeymen to end arguments (as opposed to making valid points). All of the above are fallacious yet effective. Of course, good science and history classes would help explain those fallacies. Point being, we need to be careful that we're not just indoctrinating people into our particular bad habits.
csa 9y ago
Maybe? A few comments: - The politicians you refer to tend to be very well educated. It's not a lack of science and history classes that formed their opinions on these matters. - Some of the most racist and global warming denying people I know come from STEM backgrounds (mostly the TEMs, less the Ss, but still...). Smart people are just as capable (if not more so) than less smart people at experiencing cognitive dissonance/compartmentalization. - Disciplinary approaches to science, history, and lit definitely need to be taught. They can be taught (and should be taught) in K-8. The classes in high school are largely college prep and often have little or no focus on the fundamentals of the discipline -- in fact, they often kill the passion of those who entered with passion due to this lack of disciplinary focus. - We need WAY more education on critical thinking about politics. I think that the current levels of ignorance even among educated folks is a threat to our democracy.

nradov 9y ago

Skilled building trades like carpentry require at least basic algebra and geometry. Failure to teach science effectively leads to ignorant voters who believe that anthropogenic global climate change and evolution through natural selection are lies.

csa 9y ago
> Skilled building trades like carpentry require at least basic algebra and geometry. Great. Have that be part of carpentry training. Again, this type of training should be cheap/free and of high quality. I imagine a class of carpenters in training would be an incredible class to teach. > Failure to teach science effectively leads to ignorant voters who believe that anthropogenic global climate change and evolution through natural selection are lies. I guess your wiggle word there is "effectively". Note that there are plenty of highly educated people who are ignorant voters, climate change deniers, and creationists. People seem to think that more and/or better education will change this -- it largely won't. What matters for most people is what their community (esp. family) believes. The escape velocity required to break from those community beliefs is extremely high and generally involves the learner leaving that community to join another. This is a human condition and is not likely to change. I personally think the best we can do is teach disciplinary approaches to topics such as science to everyone, and let them come to heir own conclusions. As a simple example, if a community of creationists are ever going to change, that change will come from within. Change will not come from consistent brow beatings from high-browed outsiders.