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As my grandmother used to say, you can't fool dogs and children. >> As Jack, a 13-year-old student at a school in a post-industrial town in the UK, explained:

As my grandmother used to say, you can't fool dogs and children. >> As Jack, a 13-year-old student at a school in a post-industrial town in the UK, explained: ‘They’re trying to teach us to choose what we want but then not letting us choose anything at all.’ Students are very quick to see through their teachers' bullshit as they have years of practice by the time they are adolescents. The current convention seems to be that if students can't life-hack their school then there must be something wrong with them. That lack of self-reflection on the part of teachers and schools is telling, and probably a big reason for student anxiety in the first place.

Asooka 6y ago
Yep. Mindfulness helps to lower your self-inflicted stress and worries, but it is not a solution when you have a concrete issue, like being where you don't want to be, with people you don't want to be with, doing what you don't want to do. Put another way, mindfulness doesn't mend bone, nor put food on the table.
op03 6y ago
Well you need to cut them some slack. Schools, teachers and parents are in a very difficult position these days because of how fast things are changing. They are constantly overloaded with info about what's good for the kid. Even developmental psychologists,pedagogy experts and edu depts get overloaded and feel pressure to pass opinions on everything under the sun without serious evaluation. Learning takes Time. So evaluation of any method takes time. But the pressure to try X Y or Z builds up so quickly that anyone pushing back can easily be labeled a dinosaur and kicked out the room. And its all happening in the useless attention arms race type environment the tech sector has created where what and who gets propped up depends on whose TED talk got more views, how much time they self promote, and 'what can scale faster'. Such an environment will keep producing a whole lot of failed experiments.
- twodave 6y ago
  All this bearing in mind we haven’t really seen any sustainable improvement in test scores in the last ~50 years. What is even the point of having an education arms race while the same people groups average pretty much the same aptitude for the tests? SAT scores for language have worsened while math has remained fairly consistent since the 70s, which suggests to me that those scores are loosely (if at all) related to educational strategy. I may not have a popular opinion, but I think our focus should be more on supporting families to raise their children instead of what amounts in my mind to free day care, especially for children 10 and under.
  - watwut 6y ago
    Wait, drop out rates are down. People are more likely to finish education then they used 50 years ago. Maybe the top who goes to college did not raised up that much, but average if you include low performers did.
    - twodave 6y ago
      I haven’t seen that data, and it is a fair point. Still, I would argue that at least part of that shift is a result of changes in employability. When my parents were in school, a college degree was not yet considered a pre-requisite for so many people who are entering the work force. In fact, neither of my parents had a degree, yet we were able to live comfortably on just my father’s income. And for those who still carry that view, the situation is much worse today than it was then.
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    > SAT scores for language have worsened while math has remained fairly consistent since the 70s, which suggests to me that those scores are loosely (if at all) related to educational strategy. how is this possible? aren't SAT scores curved to achieve a normal distribution?

Asooka 6y ago

Yep. Mindfulness helps to lower your self-inflicted stress and worries, but it is not a solution when you have a concrete issue, like being where you don't want to be, with people you don't want to be with, doing what you don't want to do. Put another way, mindfulness doesn't mend bone, nor put food on the table.

op03 6y ago

Well you need to cut them some slack. Schools, teachers and parents are in a very difficult position these days because of how fast things are changing. They are constantly overloaded with info about what's good for the kid. Even developmental psychologists,pedagogy experts and edu depts get overloaded and feel pressure to pass opinions on everything under the sun without serious evaluation. Learning takes Time. So evaluation of any method takes time. But the pressure to try X Y or Z builds up so quickly that anyone pushing back can easily be labeled a dinosaur and kicked out the room. And its all happening in the useless attention arms race type environment the tech sector has created where what and who gets propped up depends on whose TED talk got more views, how much time they self promote, and 'what can scale faster'. Such an environment will keep producing a whole lot of failed experiments.

twodave 6y ago
All this bearing in mind we haven’t really seen any sustainable improvement in test scores in the last ~50 years. What is even the point of having an education arms race while the same people groups average pretty much the same aptitude for the tests? SAT scores for language have worsened while math has remained fairly consistent since the 70s, which suggests to me that those scores are loosely (if at all) related to educational strategy. I may not have a popular opinion, but I think our focus should be more on supporting families to raise their children instead of what amounts in my mind to free day care, especially for children 10 and under.
- watwut 6y ago
  Wait, drop out rates are down. People are more likely to finish education then they used 50 years ago. Maybe the top who goes to college did not raised up that much, but average if you include low performers did.
  - twodave 6y ago
    I haven’t seen that data, and it is a fair point. Still, I would argue that at least part of that shift is a result of changes in employability. When my parents were in school, a college degree was not yet considered a pre-requisite for so many people who are entering the work force. In fact, neither of my parents had a degree, yet we were able to live comfortably on just my father’s income. And for those who still carry that view, the situation is much worse today than it was then.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  > SAT scores for language have worsened while math has remained fairly consistent since the 70s, which suggests to me that those scores are loosely (if at all) related to educational strategy. how is this possible? aren't SAT scores curved to achieve a normal distribution?