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[flagged]

Aurelius3 5y ago
An idea only worthy of medieval scholasticism. I would hope that as a society we have evolved from such a war like perspective on education, as if the student and the teacher are at odds and the teacher must triumph over the students in a final "educational" victory, when in reality the ideas are simply hamfisted and pushed onto the student, while no true learning or discussion exists.
- 0x4d464d48 5y ago
  "An idea only worthy of medieval scholasticism." If that were so there wouldn't need to be education in the first place. Change comes kit and parcel with learning and experience. Just learning _how to learn_ to truly grasp arcane and rigid topics is difficult in it's own right. E.g. learning to challenge your own intuition and recognizing when you're using heuristics to take cognitive shortcuts. Buffing out the rough edges to ones thinking and practice of a skill is exactly what education is designed to do which is why I find Rorty's writing here lazy and uninteresting. The question of "how much education should be required to function in a society and what should its content be" is more than fair. Its the tone of thos piece as if the discovery of education presenting a friction point for others is profound and paradoxical which I find vapid.
mgaunard 5y ago
Any teaching that assumes that the student is a biggot that needs to be corrected, and that the student should just accept his truth on the basis of his/her authority as a teacher, is obviously a fairly bad way of teaching. The teacher should make the knowledge he wants to impart approachable and use an angle that the student can accept so as to convince him/her.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  the quote does not make any assumption about bigotry of the student, but rather of the parents.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Indeed. If the parents are concerned about the book being part of the curriculum because the author is black, Jewish, homosexual, or any ‘other’ (rather than on the contents of the book), it seems to be a fairly accurate assumption. “Look, we literally can’t force your child to do anything. If they prefer to sit non-disruptively and receive a zero in that part of the curriculum, that works for us.”
    - Jensson 5y ago
      Often it happens like this: Teacher: Your kid needs to read a book by a black author. Parent: Why do my kid need to read a book by a black author? I don't think that is a good way to pick books. Teacher: So you say you refuse to let your kid read any books by black people? Stop being such a bigoted racist! Society isn't tolerant enough to tolerate people like you!
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        Do you think that teacher’s first line is actually “often” the way such a controversy starts?
        Jensson 5y ago
        Yes. How else would it start? The teacher decides that the kids needs to read a book for racist reasons, eg because the skincolor of the books author is what the teacher wants it to be. Teachers associations often writes such goals in their agenda, this isn't a conspiracy theory, they say that this is why they do it openly themselves. Then when people protest that the protesters gets called racists. Maybe there are some real racists out there, but I believe that this version is overwhelmingly more common. I have seen it many times, so I have no reason to believe that the "racism" the author refers to anything more than this sort of "racism". Edit: Can you give a single case where teachers first didn't pick a book because the author was black but instead that it made the most sense to use that book, and parents still complained in the past 5 years?
- brippalcharrid 5y ago
  Many teachers, professors and daycare workers have been trained to believe that this is an absolute, fundamental ground truth about their students and the air that they breathe; this is an increasingly prevalent worldview in the sphere of education, and we're likely to see further developments as it strengthens its hold.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    I’m curious to know the basis of your assertions, to try to get a better idea of this situation from your point of view. First, the idea that many have been trained to believe this. What is this training specifically they are receiving? How many teachers/professors/daycare workers are receiving this training and where? By whom? Is the basis of this belief something you read or personal knowledge of teachers and professors in your life? Secondly the idea that this worldview is increasingly prevalent: do you have any data on this, that teachers and daycare workers increasingly believe their students are bigots? When did this belief start increasing? How fast is it increasing? If we know it’s increasing we must have a measure on how much and how quickly. Is it a lot rapidly, or not so much over a long time? I’m seeing a lot of strong conclusive statements in this thread without a lot of accompanying evidence. I’m sure your statements are rooted in well-researched evidence or at least personal experience with the educational community, so I’m just curious to see exactly what so I can incorporate them into my own point of view.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Interestingly this is the top article on The Atlantic at the moment: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/universities-forced-consensus-kyle-rittenhouse/620809/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/universiti... It’s an interesting trend where suddenly the universities are not only trying to find the truth, but apparently they have a monopoly on it.
      - ModernMech 5y ago
        Is that really a new trend though? Academia has always fancied itself to be an arbiter of truth. Religion as well, which is why a tension exists between the two, and people like to cast Academia as a religious order (they are not wrong to do so).
- dhoe 5y ago
  That's not what teaching is. What you're thinking of is called selling.
- enaaem 5y ago
  Sounds like a religion to me. We are born in sin and need to be saved.
- atoav 5y ago
  You should assume that your students don't know many perspectives on different lifes, nations, cultures, professions, etc. not because they are intolerant, but because how should they know something that they haven't been in contact with their whole lives? So you teach them about the world not because you think they are stupid, but because it is your task to teach them about the world they live in, with the hope that they will make good citizens that in turn are capable of decent choices that create a liveable society for all. You teach them in order to not have them turn into ignorant people. Political groups that tell you that teaching facts about society and history have the goal of bringing their propaganda into the schools.
cobbzilla 5y ago
Is this any different than Popper’s paradox of tolerance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#Discussions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#Discussio...
- Aurelius3 5y ago
  A purely intolerant society would necessarily also have to have some tolerance, or else it would collapse upon itself when there is no acceptable in group. Thus a natural stable zone in between total tolerance and total intolerance exists. Karl Popper's and Richard Rorty's views on tolerance are only rationalizations which attempt to position democracies intolerance as somehow justifiable in the name of "tolerance". What is stopping an autocratic regime from stating the exact same thing? They are intolerant towards x group or y idea to preserve tolerance to w group or z idea. Truthfully humanity has a certain capacity for tolerance, as defined by a zone between total tolerance and total intolerance. This capacity may have increased over time (although I would argue for technological reasons, not for cultural of philosophical reasons), but it will never reach total intolerance or total tolerance. They have both deluded themselves in the hubristic and elitist view that our shifting of the tolerance zone is in some way a testament to an increase in potential tolerance or tolerance "capacity", and have come up with such schizophrenic arguments which claim that a tolerant society must be intolerant. While natural law continues to prove them wrong and they themselves prove their positions wrong.
- skrebbel 5y ago
  Popper at least has the decency to call it a paradox. This quote fully assumes that anyone that does not agree with the author on everything is intolerant and deserves to be excluded. I have a hard time imagining that that's what Popper meant.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    The "paradox" is only that people incorrectly assume that an inclusive society accepts all sort of behaviors. It is in no way a real paradox.
Jensson 5y ago
"We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours." This is exactly what you shouldn't do. As long as you can talk to people you should. These people are talking, they aren't out there being violent or murdering people, they are just sitting there talking, if you attack verbally them like this then their kids will hate you as well. Like "my parents aren't racist, they just want us to get the best books we can get instead of just forcing us to read books based on the skin of the authors", do you really think that view is so intolerant that we need to create a huge rift in society to fight it? I don't.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  > "We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours." More like "we are inclusivist therefore we cannot tolerate intolerance such as yours".
  - lordloki 5y ago
    The people refusing dialog are the one who are most intolerant. That is the intolerance that shouldn't be tolerated.
    - koheripbal 5y ago
      Exactly, they do not understand that when dialogue becomes forbidden, violence becomes inevitable.
      - ABCLAW 5y ago
        Violence becomes inevitable... because people are can't call black people subhuman in public without being censured? That's one hell of a take.
    - echopurity 5y ago
      Racism and fundamentalism are refusals of dialog. That's the point.
    - 5y ago
anandrew 5y ago
> credentials which we liberals have been making steadily more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. They're excommunicating a lot more than just those: Diversity Statements Required for One-Fifth of Academic Jobs - https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-statements-required-for-one-fifth-of-academic-jobs/ https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-...
- LogonType10 5y ago
  They basically want you to swear loyalty to the Party, and even after that, if you're a straight white cis male your diverse experiences are judged insufficient and you won't get hired. Universities are no longer grounds for intellectual exploration; they're factories, and professors are assembly line workers pushing out tiny variations from the accepted ideology du jour.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    This a caricature, a misrepresentation of the process, and not how this "basically" works at all. As a straight white cis male academic (who had to write a diversity statement when I was hired, who is involved in hiring other faculty, and who reads a lot of DEI statements) what you write here does not match my experience or the experience of my colleagues, who are majority straight white male and cis. The purpose of the DEI statement during hiring is not to filter out straight white cis males. It is to filter out people who haven't put sufficient thought into incorporating diversity into their teaching practice, no matter who they are. This is important to universities because professors necessarily encounter a diverse classroom. Issues of race, gender identity, and sexual orientation are important for a professor to consider so that they may create a safe learning environment for all students. This does not limit intellectual exploration in any way - it relates to discharging the duties of teaching, not the content taught. Sometimes these issues can feel abstract, but in the classroom they are concrete, and I want colleagues who have thought these things through. It does not matter that you are a straight white cis male, and judging by the makeup of our faculty, it's not an impediment for them getting hired.
dang 5y ago
Please don't start flamewars on HN. We're trying to avoid that hell here, and you pushed this thread straight into it. Inflammatory quote plus snarky one liner is definitely against the site guidelines. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on.
- 0x4d464d48 5y ago
  "We're trying to avoid that hell here, and you pushed this thread straight into it." Was it I who pushed this thread into a flame war or the other commenters? I only intended to point out that education, by its nature, changes people which inevitably leads to friction with other people who don't like that change or what that change enables which is not new. The origin of the word "erudition" highlights that point quite well.
  - dang 5y ago
    The bulk of the fault lies at the root of the subthread, yes. If you had actually pointed out what you say you intended to point out, that would have been much better. What you actually posted was an inflammatory quote plus a snarky one liner, and the expected value of that is a flamewar [1]. I realize it's not so easy to make intent explicit, because it seems obvious to you (by "you" I mean all of us, of course)- the problem is that it exists in your head where no one else has access to it - therefore the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate [2]. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22expected%20value%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=disambiguate%20burden%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

[flagged]

An idea only worthy of medieval scholasticism. I would hope that as a society we have evolved from such a war like perspective on education, as if the student and the teacher are at odds and the teacher must triumph over the students in a final "educational" victory, when in reality the ideas are simply hamfisted and pushed onto the student, while no true learning or discussion exists.

0x4d464d48 5y ago
"An idea only worthy of medieval scholasticism." If that were so there wouldn't need to be education in the first place. Change comes kit and parcel with learning and experience. Just learning _how to learn_ to truly grasp arcane and rigid topics is difficult in it's own right. E.g. learning to challenge your own intuition and recognizing when you're using heuristics to take cognitive shortcuts. Buffing out the rough edges to ones thinking and practice of a skill is exactly what education is designed to do which is why I find Rorty's writing here lazy and uninteresting. The question of "how much education should be required to function in a society and what should its content be" is more than fair. Its the tone of thos piece as if the discovery of education presenting a friction point for others is profound and paradoxical which I find vapid.

mgaunard 5y ago

Any teaching that assumes that the student is a biggot that needs to be corrected, and that the student should just accept his truth on the basis of his/her authority as a teacher, is obviously a fairly bad way of teaching. The teacher should make the knowledge he wants to impart approachable and use an angle that the student can accept so as to convince him/her.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
the quote does not make any assumption about bigotry of the student, but rather of the parents.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Indeed. If the parents are concerned about the book being part of the curriculum because the author is black, Jewish, homosexual, or any ‘other’ (rather than on the contents of the book), it seems to be a fairly accurate assumption. “Look, we literally can’t force your child to do anything. If they prefer to sit non-disruptively and receive a zero in that part of the curriculum, that works for us.”
  - Jensson 5y ago
    Often it happens like this: Teacher: Your kid needs to read a book by a black author. Parent: Why do my kid need to read a book by a black author? I don't think that is a good way to pick books. Teacher: So you say you refuse to let your kid read any books by black people? Stop being such a bigoted racist! Society isn't tolerant enough to tolerate people like you!
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Do you think that teacher’s first line is actually “often” the way such a controversy starts?
      - Jensson 5y ago
        Yes. How else would it start? The teacher decides that the kids needs to read a book for racist reasons, eg because the skincolor of the books author is what the teacher wants it to be. Teachers associations often writes such goals in their agenda, this isn't a conspiracy theory, they say that this is why they do it openly themselves. Then when people protest that the protesters gets called racists. Maybe there are some real racists out there, but I believe that this version is overwhelmingly more common. I have seen it many times, so I have no reason to believe that the "racism" the author refers to anything more than this sort of "racism". Edit: Can you give a single case where teachers first didn't pick a book because the author was black but instead that it made the most sense to use that book, and parents still complained in the past 5 years?
brippalcharrid 5y ago
Many teachers, professors and daycare workers have been trained to believe that this is an absolute, fundamental ground truth about their students and the air that they breathe; this is an increasingly prevalent worldview in the sphere of education, and we're likely to see further developments as it strengthens its hold.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  I’m curious to know the basis of your assertions, to try to get a better idea of this situation from your point of view. First, the idea that many have been trained to believe this. What is this training specifically they are receiving? How many teachers/professors/daycare workers are receiving this training and where? By whom? Is the basis of this belief something you read or personal knowledge of teachers and professors in your life? Secondly the idea that this worldview is increasingly prevalent: do you have any data on this, that teachers and daycare workers increasingly believe their students are bigots? When did this belief start increasing? How fast is it increasing? If we know it’s increasing we must have a measure on how much and how quickly. Is it a lot rapidly, or not so much over a long time? I’m seeing a lot of strong conclusive statements in this thread without a lot of accompanying evidence. I’m sure your statements are rooted in well-researched evidence or at least personal experience with the educational community, so I’m just curious to see exactly what so I can incorporate them into my own point of view.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Interestingly this is the top article on The Atlantic at the moment: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/universities-forced-consensus-kyle-rittenhouse/620809/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/universiti... It’s an interesting trend where suddenly the universities are not only trying to find the truth, but apparently they have a monopoly on it.
    - ModernMech 5y ago
      Is that really a new trend though? Academia has always fancied itself to be an arbiter of truth. Religion as well, which is why a tension exists between the two, and people like to cast Academia as a religious order (they are not wrong to do so).
dhoe 5y ago
That's not what teaching is. What you're thinking of is called selling.
enaaem 5y ago
Sounds like a religion to me. We are born in sin and need to be saved.
atoav 5y ago
You should assume that your students don't know many perspectives on different lifes, nations, cultures, professions, etc. not because they are intolerant, but because how should they know something that they haven't been in contact with their whole lives? So you teach them about the world not because you think they are stupid, but because it is your task to teach them about the world they live in, with the hope that they will make good citizens that in turn are capable of decent choices that create a liveable society for all. You teach them in order to not have them turn into ignorant people. Political groups that tell you that teaching facts about society and history have the goal of bringing their propaganda into the schools.

cobbzilla 5y ago

Is this any different than Popper’s paradox of tolerance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#Discussions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#Discussio...

Aurelius3 5y ago
A purely intolerant society would necessarily also have to have some tolerance, or else it would collapse upon itself when there is no acceptable in group. Thus a natural stable zone in between total tolerance and total intolerance exists. Karl Popper's and Richard Rorty's views on tolerance are only rationalizations which attempt to position democracies intolerance as somehow justifiable in the name of "tolerance". What is stopping an autocratic regime from stating the exact same thing? They are intolerant towards x group or y idea to preserve tolerance to w group or z idea. Truthfully humanity has a certain capacity for tolerance, as defined by a zone between total tolerance and total intolerance. This capacity may have increased over time (although I would argue for technological reasons, not for cultural of philosophical reasons), but it will never reach total intolerance or total tolerance. They have both deluded themselves in the hubristic and elitist view that our shifting of the tolerance zone is in some way a testament to an increase in potential tolerance or tolerance "capacity", and have come up with such schizophrenic arguments which claim that a tolerant society must be intolerant. While natural law continues to prove them wrong and they themselves prove their positions wrong.
skrebbel 5y ago
Popper at least has the decency to call it a paradox. This quote fully assumes that anyone that does not agree with the author on everything is intolerant and deserves to be excluded. I have a hard time imagining that that's what Popper meant.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  The "paradox" is only that people incorrectly assume that an inclusive society accepts all sort of behaviors. It is in no way a real paradox.

Jensson 5y ago

"We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours." This is exactly what you shouldn't do. As long as you can talk to people you should. These people are talking, they aren't out there being violent or murdering people, they are just sitting there talking, if you attack verbally them like this then their kids will hate you as well. Like "my parents aren't racist, they just want us to get the best books we can get instead of just forcing us to read books based on the skin of the authors", do you really think that view is so intolerant that we need to create a huge rift in society to fight it? I don't.

goodpoint 5y ago
> "We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours." More like "we are inclusivist therefore we cannot tolerate intolerance such as yours".
- lordloki 5y ago
  The people refusing dialog are the one who are most intolerant. That is the intolerance that shouldn't be tolerated.
  - koheripbal 5y ago
    Exactly, they do not understand that when dialogue becomes forbidden, violence becomes inevitable.
    - ABCLAW 5y ago
      Violence becomes inevitable... because people are can't call black people subhuman in public without being censured? That's one hell of a take.
  - echopurity 5y ago
    Racism and fundamentalism are refusals of dialog. That's the point.
  - 5y ago

anandrew 5y ago

> credentials which we liberals have been making steadily more stringent by doing our best to excommunicate racists, male chauvinists, homophobes, and the like. They're excommunicating a lot more than just those: Diversity Statements Required for One-Fifth of Academic Jobs - https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-statements-required-for-one-fifth-of-academic-jobs/ https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-...

LogonType10 5y ago
They basically want you to swear loyalty to the Party, and even after that, if you're a straight white cis male your diverse experiences are judged insufficient and you won't get hired. Universities are no longer grounds for intellectual exploration; they're factories, and professors are assembly line workers pushing out tiny variations from the accepted ideology du jour.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  This a caricature, a misrepresentation of the process, and not how this "basically" works at all. As a straight white cis male academic (who had to write a diversity statement when I was hired, who is involved in hiring other faculty, and who reads a lot of DEI statements) what you write here does not match my experience or the experience of my colleagues, who are majority straight white male and cis. The purpose of the DEI statement during hiring is not to filter out straight white cis males. It is to filter out people who haven't put sufficient thought into incorporating diversity into their teaching practice, no matter who they are. This is important to universities because professors necessarily encounter a diverse classroom. Issues of race, gender identity, and sexual orientation are important for a professor to consider so that they may create a safe learning environment for all students. This does not limit intellectual exploration in any way - it relates to discharging the duties of teaching, not the content taught. Sometimes these issues can feel abstract, but in the classroom they are concrete, and I want colleagues who have thought these things through. It does not matter that you are a straight white cis male, and judging by the makeup of our faculty, it's not an impediment for them getting hired.

dang 5y ago

Please don't start flamewars on HN. We're trying to avoid that hell here, and you pushed this thread straight into it. Inflammatory quote plus snarky one liner is definitely against the site guidelines. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on.

0x4d464d48 5y ago
"We're trying to avoid that hell here, and you pushed this thread straight into it." Was it I who pushed this thread into a flame war or the other commenters? I only intended to point out that education, by its nature, changes people which inevitably leads to friction with other people who don't like that change or what that change enables which is not new. The origin of the word "erudition" highlights that point quite well.
- dang 5y ago
  The bulk of the fault lies at the root of the subthread, yes. If you had actually pointed out what you say you intended to point out, that would have been much better. What you actually posted was an inflammatory quote plus a snarky one liner, and the expected value of that is a flamewar [1]. I realize it's not so easy to make intent explicit, because it seems obvious to you (by "you" I mean all of us, of course)- the problem is that it exists in your head where no one else has access to it - therefore the burden is on the commenter to disambiguate [2]. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22expected%20value%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=disambiguate%20burden%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...