7 ms·

The point of our system is that (as much as is possible) education is not limited to the 'elites' and 'intelligentsia.' Rather, it is distributed in a (relative

The point of our system is that (as much as is possible) education is not limited to the 'elites' and 'intelligentsia.' Rather, it is distributed in a (relatively) egalitarian fashion amongst not just those who call for war and revolution, but those who rot in the trenches and die upon the bayonet. School is excellent at building the cohesive fabric of a society, including teaching it's boredom, authority, and pointless busywork.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> School is excellent at building the cohesive fabric of a society, including teaching it's boredom, authority, and pointless busywork. I have a feeling that pointless busywork always grows to however much people can bear, so maybe if school didn't condition people to be so tolerant of it, we'd have less of it.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  I dunno, I haven't see a whole lot of bearing at the DMV, but there's not an epidemic of concerned citizens showing up with molotovs and burning their local branch to the ground. Minneapolis' third precinct, sure, they burned that sucker right to the ground. But not the DMV, the icon of pointless bureaucracy. And no matter where I've gone, from Honduras to Pakistan, to Germany, to San Bernardino, folks have been waiting in lines for things, and doing stuff that didn't really matter. Doing stuff that sucks seems to be an unfortunate consequence of social organization for all of us normal folks who can't pay to skip the line.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/the_raised_nail_gets_hammered_down_management_proverb https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/the... See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
cheschire 6y ago
You must be mostly exposed to those areas where the schools get mid-to-high ratings. Education is absolutely limited based on income level. At the lower income levels the only thing taught is boredom, authority, and pointless busywork.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  As bad as you make it sound, they are teaching kids stuff, even at less-than-wealthy school districts. Adult Literacy in the United States: https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp It's not perfect, but from the most remote deserts of Arizona to rural Appalachia, to Compton, to rural Colorado, our public school system chugs away. By hood or by crook, or by underfunded inner-city/rural public school, we're teaching a hell of a lot of kids to read and write, multiply and divide. Skills that many parents can't teach on their own, and that most kids wouldn't go out of their way to learn if you left them alone. I attended elementary through middle-school at a district too poor to offer a high-school chemistry class, and still learned my times tables and how to write a paragraph. I even went on to Community College, a state school, a state-school masters, and an MD on scholarship. Sure, I didn't get the chance to take AP classes, and I didn't have some fancy robotics class, but I just can't bring myself to bash the public school system that got me to where I am. Sure, I didn't get everything a kid growing up in Pasadena got, but California has a robust-enough public-education system through the Community Colleges and UC/Cal-State system that it wasn't a dealbreaker in the least. I don't know what district you attended, but if you took nothing away other than 'boredom, authority, and pointless busywork,' I'm curious as to how exactly we are debating this point in written English. I think it's a slap to the face of a lot of teachers doing their best, as well as their students, to say that kids in disadvantaged districts learn nothing other than how to sit still and listen to authority. I learned quite a bit, in fact.
  - cheschire 6y ago
    That's a lot of words to support your pedantry. What did your own personal anecdote add to your point? I suppose you prefer I use lots of words in place of the hyperbolic word "only" to satisfy your need for an equal level of granular evaluation of the unsuccessful education of kids in inner city locations. What you've described as successful teaching describes learning through about 3rd grade. So one would hope that yes, after 12 years of school, kids would learn four years of basic skills.
waterhouse 6y ago
> The point of our system is ... It seems to me that, to responsibly make a statement of that form, you would have to look at when the system was created and look at the motivations of the people who created it (or made significant changes to the system and its objectives). If we're talking about the compulsory education system, that means looking at when the compulsory education laws were first passed, and what was said by those advocating the laws (and, possibly, deciding if they were telling the truth and if they had additional motivations). Can you honestly say you've looked into that? Do you even know when compulsory education laws were passed in your state (U.S. or otherwise)? I'm not really picking on you specifically—I had to look it up (1874 in California). I stress this because, while ostensibly school is for "education", if you point out that it's not doing that nearly as well as it could, ten people will say "Well, really school is for X", and you'll get about five different values of X, some of which contradict each other. This is the hallmark of people making up rationalizations for something they truly don't understand. (To take an example, even for something like compliance—I do imagine that employers use "suffered through school without getting kicked out" as a sign of compliance, but if you imagined an institution optimized for providing that signal, I suspect making it through one month of military boot camp is a stronger signal of that, and obviously way more efficient than spending 12 years in school. Or if you want compliance without that kind of physical stress, then some variant of extreme ascetic monk training would probably do it.) Murray Rothbard says that compulsory education in Europe was first established by Protestant Reformation leaders—Martin Luther and his followers, and John Calvin—and that their primary motive was to promulgate their religious ideas and suppress religious heresy; and that the Calvinist Puritans brought this approach to America (starting with Massachusetts and more generally New England). "Only a year after its first set of particular laws, the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1642 enacted a compulsory literacy law for all children. ... In 1647, the colony followed up this law with the establishment of public schools. The major stress in the compulsory education was laid on the teaching of Calvinist-Puritan principles." Doing my own research, I verify that Massachusetts's 1647 laws[1] required that parents "once a week (at the least) catechize their children and servants in the grounds & principles of Religion" in the very next sentence after the requirement to "[e]nable them perfectly to read the English tongue". As for what animated the educationists who successfully established compulsory public education in most of the American states in the mid-late 1800s, Rothbard describes it in the following link. Rothbard is an ideological libertarian, but he forms his arguments from plenty of primary and secondary sources which he cites. https://mises.org/library/education-free-and-compulsory-1/html/c/26 https://mises.org/library/education-free-and-compulsory-1/ht... [1] https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-laws-and-liberties-of-massachusetts/ https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-law...

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> School is excellent at building the cohesive fabric of a society, including teaching it's boredom, authority, and pointless busywork. I have a feeling that pointless busywork always grows to however much people can bear, so maybe if school didn't condition people to be so tolerant of it, we'd have less of it.

phobosanomaly 6y ago
I dunno, I haven't see a whole lot of bearing at the DMV, but there's not an epidemic of concerned citizens showing up with molotovs and burning their local branch to the ground. Minneapolis' third precinct, sure, they burned that sucker right to the ground. But not the DMV, the icon of pointless bureaucracy. And no matter where I've gone, from Honduras to Pakistan, to Germany, to San Bernardino, folks have been waiting in lines for things, and doing stuff that didn't really matter. Doing stuff that sucks seems to be an unfortunate consequence of social organization for all of us normal folks who can't pay to skip the line.
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/the_raised_nail_gets_hammered_down_management_proverb https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/the... See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron

cheschire 6y ago

You must be mostly exposed to those areas where the schools get mid-to-high ratings. Education is absolutely limited based on income level. At the lower income levels the only thing taught is boredom, authority, and pointless busywork.

phobosanomaly 6y ago
As bad as you make it sound, they are teaching kids stuff, even at less-than-wealthy school districts. Adult Literacy in the United States: https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp It's not perfect, but from the most remote deserts of Arizona to rural Appalachia, to Compton, to rural Colorado, our public school system chugs away. By hood or by crook, or by underfunded inner-city/rural public school, we're teaching a hell of a lot of kids to read and write, multiply and divide. Skills that many parents can't teach on their own, and that most kids wouldn't go out of their way to learn if you left them alone. I attended elementary through middle-school at a district too poor to offer a high-school chemistry class, and still learned my times tables and how to write a paragraph. I even went on to Community College, a state school, a state-school masters, and an MD on scholarship. Sure, I didn't get the chance to take AP classes, and I didn't have some fancy robotics class, but I just can't bring myself to bash the public school system that got me to where I am. Sure, I didn't get everything a kid growing up in Pasadena got, but California has a robust-enough public-education system through the Community Colleges and UC/Cal-State system that it wasn't a dealbreaker in the least. I don't know what district you attended, but if you took nothing away other than 'boredom, authority, and pointless busywork,' I'm curious as to how exactly we are debating this point in written English. I think it's a slap to the face of a lot of teachers doing their best, as well as their students, to say that kids in disadvantaged districts learn nothing other than how to sit still and listen to authority. I learned quite a bit, in fact.
- cheschire 6y ago
  That's a lot of words to support your pedantry. What did your own personal anecdote add to your point? I suppose you prefer I use lots of words in place of the hyperbolic word "only" to satisfy your need for an equal level of granular evaluation of the unsuccessful education of kids in inner city locations. What you've described as successful teaching describes learning through about 3rd grade. So one would hope that yes, after 12 years of school, kids would learn four years of basic skills.

waterhouse 6y ago

> The point of our system is ... It seems to me that, to responsibly make a statement of that form, you would have to look at when the system was created and look at the motivations of the people who created it (or made significant changes to the system and its objectives). If we're talking about the compulsory education system, that means looking at when the compulsory education laws were first passed, and what was said by those advocating the laws (and, possibly, deciding if they were telling the truth and if they had additional motivations). Can you honestly say you've looked into that? Do you even know when compulsory education laws were passed in your state (U.S. or otherwise)? I'm not really picking on you specifically—I had to look it up (1874 in California). I stress this because, while ostensibly school is for "education", if you point out that it's not doing that nearly as well as it could, ten people will say "Well, really school is for X", and you'll get about five different values of X, some of which contradict each other. This is the hallmark of people making up rationalizations for something they truly don't understand. (To take an example, even for something like compliance—I do imagine that employers use "suffered through school without getting kicked out" as a sign of compliance, but if you imagined an institution optimized for providing that signal, I suspect making it through one month of military boot camp is a stronger signal of that, and obviously way more efficient than spending 12 years in school. Or if you want compliance without that kind of physical stress, then some variant of extreme ascetic monk training would probably do it.) Murray Rothbard says that compulsory education in Europe was first established by Protestant Reformation leaders—Martin Luther and his followers, and John Calvin—and that their primary motive was to promulgate their religious ideas and suppress religious heresy; and that the Calvinist Puritans brought this approach to America (starting with Massachusetts and more generally New England). "Only a year after its first set of particular laws, the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1642 enacted a compulsory literacy law for all children. ... In 1647, the colony followed up this law with the establishment of public schools. The major stress in the compulsory education was laid on the teaching of Calvinist-Puritan principles." Doing my own research, I verify that Massachusetts's 1647 laws[1] required that parents "once a week (at the least) catechize their children and servants in the grounds & principles of Religion" in the very next sentence after the requirement to "[e]nable them perfectly to read the English tongue". As for what animated the educationists who successfully established compulsory public education in most of the American states in the mid-late 1800s, Rothbard describes it in the following link. Rothbard is an ideological libertarian, but he forms his arguments from plenty of primary and secondary sources which he cites. https://mises.org/library/education-free-and-compulsory-1/html/c/26 https://mises.org/library/education-free-and-compulsory-1/ht... [1] https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-laws-and-liberties-of-massachusetts/ https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-law...