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If you roll a dice and it comes up 1 you're not justified saying it's a loaded dice. If you roll it a hundred times and it comes up 1 more than half the time, y

If you roll a dice and it comes up 1 you're not justified saying it's a loaded dice. If you roll it a hundred times and it comes up 1 more than half the time, you're right to be suspicious of it. I think the mother and the student have definitely failed. That said, the school is producing many such failures. At some point blame needs to transcend individuals and start attaching to the system or context those individuals are in.

macspoofing 6y ago
>At some point blame needs to transcend individuals We're not anywhere near that point. Half the people here place no responsibility on the parent. At all. So maybe we should actually try this 'individual responsibility' thing before blaming the system, or aliens, or the Illuminati.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  The individuals are to blame, for sure, but so is the institution (at least) for failing so many students. Imagine a single teacher who fails 80% of his class while most teachers fail only 5-10%. Perhaps the single teacher is just unlucky that 80% of his students have no "individual responsibility" - or maybe there are other issues at play. This is even more true, I think, when it is not a single teacher whose class is failing but a school's, and, I expect, a large part of that school system is failing. We should investigate and understand why and a satisfactory answer is not that one particular mother and child were derelict.
candybar 6y ago
I agree that the problem is systemic but it's a bit more complicated than this - the reason why such a high percentage of the students are failing is likely because the parents of the students that wouldn't fail have disproportionately opted out of this school, whether by moving or through charter/private schools, which makes things even more difficult for the school administrators and the teachers. The real systemic issue is that nearly ever competent and rational actor is incentivized to run away from the problem. This applies to parents, teachers and administrators. No one's life gets better by taking this problem head on and making things incrementally better, so the only people who are left to deal with the problem are the ones who don't realize how bad things are, don't care or don't have the means to move away.

macspoofing 6y ago

>At some point blame needs to transcend individuals We're not anywhere near that point. Half the people here place no responsibility on the parent. At all. So maybe we should actually try this 'individual responsibility' thing before blaming the system, or aliens, or the Illuminati.

ALittleLight 6y ago
The individuals are to blame, for sure, but so is the institution (at least) for failing so many students. Imagine a single teacher who fails 80% of his class while most teachers fail only 5-10%. Perhaps the single teacher is just unlucky that 80% of his students have no "individual responsibility" - or maybe there are other issues at play. This is even more true, I think, when it is not a single teacher whose class is failing but a school's, and, I expect, a large part of that school system is failing. We should investigate and understand why and a satisfactory answer is not that one particular mother and child were derelict.

candybar 6y ago

I agree that the problem is systemic but it's a bit more complicated than this - the reason why such a high percentage of the students are failing is likely because the parents of the students that wouldn't fail have disproportionately opted out of this school, whether by moving or through charter/private schools, which makes things even more difficult for the school administrators and the teachers. The real systemic issue is that nearly ever competent and rational actor is incentivized to run away from the problem. This applies to parents, teachers and administrators. No one's life gets better by taking this problem head on and making things incrementally better, so the only people who are left to deal with the problem are the ones who don't realize how bad things are, don't care or don't have the means to move away.