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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 wan

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"

whatshisface 7y ago
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.
- Mvhsz 7y ago
  > education is a mess, so smart critical people are rare, so it is hard to get them to teach I'm not sure I agree with this. If our schools were 10x as effective and we produced 10x as many smart people, I think we'd be having the same conversation. It would just be about how hard it is to recruit people to teach quantum computer programming when you can make 5 times as much working in the teleportation industry (facetious example, please don't debate the physics of this).
- shantly 7y ago
  > 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. The faddish education "research" stuff that ends up being implemented in schools and used as material for professional development is often on the level of bad pop-business books, for the same reasons that bad pop-business books are so common and so widely read, I suppose. Actually it's kind of like pop-parenting books and bad pop-business books had a baby and that baby is education books. They are, in the lingo of our times, hot garbage. Admin, principal through superintendent, are largely careerist political types with shockingly poor reasoning and critical thinking skills considering most of them have been granted a PhD—another problem: for a bunch of reasons including demand outstripping legitimate supply by a large margin and a whole pile of bad incentives, education degrees on all levels are about 99% bullshit and there's no shortage of morons who shouldn't have been able to achieve a bachelor's in anything running around with graduate degrees and an ego to match—so they're terrible at evaluating this stuff and quite gullible, while also being very certain of any decisions they make. It's a recipe for disaster.
decasteve 7y ago
The most cynical of us follow it down the rabbit hole to Foucault: "The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class."

whatshisface 7y ago

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.

Mvhsz 7y ago
> education is a mess, so smart critical people are rare, so it is hard to get them to teach I'm not sure I agree with this. If our schools were 10x as effective and we produced 10x as many smart people, I think we'd be having the same conversation. It would just be about how hard it is to recruit people to teach quantum computer programming when you can make 5 times as much working in the teleportation industry (facetious example, please don't debate the physics of this).
shantly 7y ago
> 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. The faddish education "research" stuff that ends up being implemented in schools and used as material for professional development is often on the level of bad pop-business books, for the same reasons that bad pop-business books are so common and so widely read, I suppose. Actually it's kind of like pop-parenting books and bad pop-business books had a baby and that baby is education books. They are, in the lingo of our times, hot garbage. Admin, principal through superintendent, are largely careerist political types with shockingly poor reasoning and critical thinking skills considering most of them have been granted a PhD—another problem: for a bunch of reasons including demand outstripping legitimate supply by a large margin and a whole pile of bad incentives, education degrees on all levels are about 99% bullshit and there's no shortage of morons who shouldn't have been able to achieve a bachelor's in anything running around with graduate degrees and an ego to match—so they're terrible at evaluating this stuff and quite gullible, while also being very certain of any decisions they make. It's a recipe for disaster.

decasteve 7y ago

The most cynical of us follow it down the rabbit hole to Foucault: "The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class."