3 ms·
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the problem is always scale. The modern system of American education really was born out of idealism, in fact the sam
by knzhou 7y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the problem is always scale. The modern system of American education really was born out of idealism, in fact the same ideals that the comments here are using to attack it. It doesn't even matter what you start with. When you scale, you end up with mass education, i.e. a system tasked with the job of actively taking care of almost every American child for 40 hours a week, whether they want it or not. There is no way to have that without the inevitable accompanying problems.
- natmaka 7y agoIndeed, and Leopold Kohr explained it clearly. Is is also related to velocity. Modern education also enforces 'scale': "We have been educated in the worship of the bulk, of the large, of the universal, of the colossal, and have come away from the minuscule, the completeness and universality on the smallest scale the individual, which is the protoplasm of all social life."
- thundergolfer 7y ago> There is no way to have that without the inevitable accompanying problems. What are these problems and why are they inevitable? Mass education in the USA is public education, and if the USA had a good national curriculum and accompanying system of teaching why would it necessarily produce indoctrination? If you're conflating the necessary standardisation of mass education with indoctrination well that's just wrong. Having a shared epistemic foundation is the basis for a free democratic society not the undermining of it. The English language is itself a shared epistemic foundation and yet mass literacy campaigns are obviously not a tool of indoctrination. They are tools of freedom and empowerment.