6 ms·

Very nice article. All the schools (at least what I have seen) today create literates and many are not even good at that. Education is meant to give a pupil t

by jyothi 18y ago

Very nice article. All the schools (at least what I have seen) today create literates and many are not even good at that. Education is meant to give a pupil the strength, confidence and a value system to lead life. "A potter's son learnt pottery. That was true education." Today, we want equal opportunity and choices, let us create an open education system where pupils can/be guided to choose anything they want to learn which would enable them to live better. PS: Especially the Indian Education as Ramanujan rightly points out in his Biography "The indian education system was devised to create slaves". All over the world Indians, at least at high school level, are known to be smart at Math, it is a myth. They are better clerks. That is what it was meant to create then when the British Raj ruled here in India.

albertcardona 18y ago
A book by John Taylor Gatto explains the origin of [modern] school. Briefly: during the industrial revolution in the 1800s, industrial owners realized children were "wasting" their time playing around. If instead they could be pre-trained to be better workers ... so they designed modern school and institutionalized it.
- davidw 18y ago
  This seems to be one of those theories that sounds nice, but is in reality just someone's politics creeping into their view of history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education#History I personally loathed school, was homeschooled for a year by my mother who was desperate to get me out of a shitty system, and am certainly no fan of said system, but this article and the debate here remind me why I'm not so enthusiastic about non-startup/hacker material: you guys' comments are, so far, on the whole, not terribly insightful on the subject. I mean, it is a bad system in many ways, but so are other things like democracies and free markets. That doesn't mean they aren't the best that we currently have. Just look at places where people don't have the guarantee of an education, if you want an example of what things could be like. Tons of kids in Africa would love to have the "crappy" education that is on offer in the US or Europe, because it would be the beginnings of a way out of the poverty in which they live. Can it be improved? Certainly, but "just git the dadburn gummint outta the way" is, to put it mildly, a bit simplistic for something that even folks like Friedman more or less concede is a merit good ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_good ). It's easy to point out the (many) flaws in the current system, which probably wasn't that pleasant for many of us here. More difficult is coming up with something that could take its place, provide an educated populace, and best allocate people to the educational paths that would serve them best, and of course does all this in a way that is reasonably cost effective, all with a "clientèle" that may very well be quite immature in terms of making important decisions. This is no easy task.
  - albertcardona 18y ago
    True. Please note: "modern school": a tax-sponsored child care system that free parents for work, and ensures minimal literacy and composed conduct in public.
  - whalliburton 18y ago
    If you had read the article in question you would see that there is much more depth and analysis and yes ideas for a possible change than your caricature. As for your "kids in Africa", Illich talks much in this article about the young in Latin America and the damaging effects of compulsory education on those children. Please read. But in case your too busy, I'll try and summarize: You take your "kids in Africa", whom probably, as you state, all would "love" to attend American schools and believe the American dream. Let's not forget that many of them would probably love to eat at MacDonalds every meal too, but that not necessarily the best thing either. Now, what happens to the those kids that cannot pass 12 years of compulsory education (he only uses 4 in the Latin case, but your talking USA) and are now inside a system that requires passing those 12 years. They are now seen as failures and most will internalize that branding. Not nice. The point I'm trying to make, is, yea, call many of the comments "not insightful", but unless you read the article in question, your only displaying flippant ignorance to call it out for lacking insight.
    - davidw 18y ago
      > Let's not forget that many of them would probably love to eat at MacDonalds every meal too, but that not necessarily the best thing either. It would beat starving, I bet. > The point I'm trying to make, is, yea, call many of the comments "not insightful", but unless you read the article in question, your only displaying flippant ignorance to call it out for lacking insight. I read some random samplings, and it just seems way too handwavy, and full of random assertions, rather than, say, hard facts, for my tastes. To take his idea of matching people up for learning: might work ok for adults, but it's not going to function to give kids a basic education, unless they're already in a school, and in that case it's still compulsory education.
  - bokonist 18y ago

by jyothi 18y ago

albertcardona 18y ago

A book by John Taylor Gatto explains the origin of [modern] school. Briefly: during the industrial revolution in the 1800s, industrial owners realized children were "wasting" their time playing around. If instead they could be pre-trained to be better workers ... so they designed modern school and institutionalized it.

davidw 18y ago
This seems to be one of those theories that sounds nice, but is in reality just someone's politics creeping into their view of history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education#History I personally loathed school, was homeschooled for a year by my mother who was desperate to get me out of a shitty system, and am certainly no fan of said system, but this article and the debate here remind me why I'm not so enthusiastic about non-startup/hacker material: you guys' comments are, so far, on the whole, not terribly insightful on the subject. I mean, it is a bad system in many ways, but so are other things like democracies and free markets. That doesn't mean they aren't the best that we currently have. Just look at places where people don't have the guarantee of an education, if you want an example of what things could be like. Tons of kids in Africa would love to have the "crappy" education that is on offer in the US or Europe, because it would be the beginnings of a way out of the poverty in which they live. Can it be improved? Certainly, but "just git the dadburn gummint outta the way" is, to put it mildly, a bit simplistic for something that even folks like Friedman more or less concede is a merit good ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_good ). It's easy to point out the (many) flaws in the current system, which probably wasn't that pleasant for many of us here. More difficult is coming up with something that could take its place, provide an educated populace, and best allocate people to the educational paths that would serve them best, and of course does all this in a way that is reasonably cost effective, all with a "clientèle" that may very well be quite immature in terms of making important decisions. This is no easy task.
- albertcardona 18y ago
  True. Please note: "modern school": a tax-sponsored child care system that free parents for work, and ensures minimal literacy and composed conduct in public.
- whalliburton 18y ago
  If you had read the article in question you would see that there is much more depth and analysis and yes ideas for a possible change than your caricature. As for your "kids in Africa", Illich talks much in this article about the young in Latin America and the damaging effects of compulsory education on those children. Please read. But in case your too busy, I'll try and summarize: You take your "kids in Africa", whom probably, as you state, all would "love" to attend American schools and believe the American dream. Let's not forget that many of them would probably love to eat at MacDonalds every meal too, but that not necessarily the best thing either. Now, what happens to the those kids that cannot pass 12 years of compulsory education (he only uses 4 in the Latin case, but your talking USA) and are now inside a system that requires passing those 12 years. They are now seen as failures and most will internalize that branding. Not nice. The point I'm trying to make, is, yea, call many of the comments "not insightful", but unless you read the article in question, your only displaying flippant ignorance to call it out for lacking insight.
  - davidw 18y ago
    > Let's not forget that many of them would probably love to eat at MacDonalds every meal too, but that not necessarily the best thing either. It would beat starving, I bet. > The point I'm trying to make, is, yea, call many of the comments "not insightful", but unless you read the article in question, your only displaying flippant ignorance to call it out for lacking insight. I read some random samplings, and it just seems way too handwavy, and full of random assertions, rather than, say, hard facts, for my tastes. To take his idea of matching people up for learning: might work ok for adults, but it's not going to function to give kids a basic education, unless they're already in a school, and in that case it's still compulsory education.
- bokonist 18y ago