6 ms·

So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system being reinvented for the better or do school boards just keep bumbling along like before? Do zero-tol

So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system being reinvented for the better or do school boards just keep bumbling along like before? Do zero-tolerance policies really work? Why are students falling behind in mathematics compared to the rest of the world? Does overloading of take home work produce better test scores, or does it just consume free time and stress out kids? Are teachers ever going to be paid more? What about later start times for high schools? There's so many things that can be questioned.

xwdv 5y ago
It is obvious what will happen. The education system will crumble, inequality will grow, and to make up for having a poorly educated work force we will adopt more automation or AI-assisted tasks with very structured workflows to reduce cognitive requirements. Only elites will be able to afford giving their children strong educations and social experiences, presumably with other elite children. This will allow some children to pursue high status high skill careers while the rest must settle for whatever they can grab. At the same time, children will increasingly grow to be emotionally underdeveloped, leading to poor romantic relationships filled with toxicity, leaving them perpetually unsatisfied with life and cynical of others. Poor quality breeding will become rampant and add to the problem.
- tester756 5y ago
  >Only elites will be able to afford giving their children strong educations and social experiences How about learning from the Internet?
  - xwdv 5y ago
    Doesn’t work very well with young children.
    - redisman 5y ago
      Today I learned how to alt-tab into Minecraft all day while still getting marked as attending!
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      It works for 10-year-olds, and I'd say it works for younger children too. The problem is needing supervision (curiosity leads to doing some very harmful things, and that's not even considering bouts of malice…). If children want to learn, and they can learn, there's no stopping them (except with video games, television, toys, a field, a garden, a paved area, a woodland, the fact that books make a loud noise every time you close them, other children… but apart from the first two, I see no problem with that).
      - mholm 5y ago
        > It works for 10-year-olds No. It works for some 10-year-olds. Few, even. The school system is not intended to educate a few children, it is intended to educate all the children in the country. Even the poorest and least motivated. You cannot just throw children into a room with an adult and computers and tell them to learn.
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        It could well be selection bias, but I've seen the least-interested (middling-motivated) 10-year-olds rapidly learn when something that interests them is placed in front of them, and they're not expected to do anything with it. (Specifically, Scratch, with a “you could make a game” directive, after a quick back-and-forth game design session.) The existing school system isn't doing a particularly great job of educating those kids. Is the goal for kids to pass exams and then forget most of it by adulthood? Or is it for kids to gain basic life skills, find out what interests them, and have the environment to pursue their interests? (Almost everyone finds some “work”-type things interesting.) Note: I'm not saying that my system would work for everyone; I'm challenging the suggestion that the existing system works for most people. Some people require interactive (rather than book) teachers to learn well, but that doesn't mean that “You Must Learn This, Then This, Then This” is an effective approach.
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  I was with you until you got to the... breeding... thing.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - xwdv 5y ago
    Humans breed like any other animal, not sure why people take offense to pointing out biological processes. Mates get selected based on environmental factors and fitness, and increasingly, social status. In the future, rich girls still won’t marry poor boys.
    - alxjrvs 5y ago
      Feels to me like you're completely discounting an "Uptown girl" scenario. There are many instances where one might be looking for a downtown man (disclosure: That's what I am.)
    - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
      Are you sure? The definitions of fitness are very vague here, and not just measured on wealth. There are plenty of wealthy women with less-wealthy boytoys and trophy husbands. There are increasingly plenty of hardworking breadwinning women with stay at home dads. A man who lives to work and has no real domestic skill is increasingly unattractive.
    - w0de0 5y ago
      Humans are by an OOM or more the most complex creatures to arise from raw natural selection; about us we have constructed a fractal diversity of society and culture. Humans are animals, yes, but they have long transcended the ordinary pressures of environment and selection. In a stupor, trying to comprehend our exceptionalism, we intuitively and nonsensically describe much human behavior as "unnatural." Your crude reduction of human reproductive choice denies myriad past choices made in free will, subsuming both the terror of power and the rare true love to biochemical animism. Go far enough down this path and you will assign to animal spirits the abstract free will you deny, accidentally recreating primitive religion & symbolic thought, thus elaborately disproving yourself. We're obviously animals. That's a place to start, but not an insight. Contending otherwise is insight to the soul and pain of the speaker, not their society. The end, the ur-insight: a universal theory which succinctly predicts homosexuality, Dennis Kuchinich's marriage, the Ptolemaic family tree, the fate of the Sabine women, and Kate Upton's romance.
- 29800795 5y ago
  Your first paragraph is the set-up to the novel Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- w0de0 5y ago
  You have described, accurately if glibly, the situation in the West prior to the Industrial Revolution and globalization, which have brought world-historical growth in economic, educational, and spiritual quality-of-life for non-elites. Over the past ~150 years, our society has been remade; higher education is hardly the esoteric province of the aristocracy and clergy it was ~700 years ago in Europe, and as you imagine it will "obviously" soon again be. There's no doubt the elite retain advantages of birth. Perfect meritocracy seems at odds with humans' intuitive creation of entrenched hierarchy and autonomic drive to empower and extend one's specific genetic legacy. But even when beset by imperfection, corruption, hypocrisy, etc, a Western non-elite human's life is not likely to turn out "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," as is it would have in almost any other age. A peasant in Lancashire c. 1350 could reasonably bet many of his children would die, and those that did not would live almost entirely the same life as his own. A working-class American can make the opposite bets just as reasonably. All this to say: I'm no Whig historian, but it is impossible to deny tangible and massive improvements in the average human's access to education and general quality of life over the past several generations. It is therefore absurd to make "obvious" predictions such as you have, contrary to a pervasive, macro trend, without providing some insightful analysis. (William Gibson's Cassandra cries should not be used as primary evidence...) We rich, lucky ones, likely as not great-grandchildren of semi-literate factory peons, seem, generally, to exist in a cynical milieu which thoughtlessly assumes inevitable dystopia (an anti-Whig history!). But recent negative trends in, for instance, the Gini co-efficient, are minuscule vibrations within a relentlessly positive curve [https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality].
29800795 5y ago
>So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system being reinvented for the better or do school boards just keep bumbling along like before? The type of conservatives that wield the most power in the US Senate are skeptical of public education. This is their golden chance to finally dismantle it, creating a patchwork of federally funded religious private schools.
Spooky23 5y ago
No. You have 1st world America and 3rd world America. The 1st world kids will be fine. Some of them will struggle and carry some emotional baggage forward. The ones who have nothing will have a little less. Society will hold them in as much regard as they do now, maybe a little less if helping them requires more taxes.
bmitc 5y ago
I think COVID is the inflection point that puts the U.S. behind compared to other countries who have a more collective culture and less extremism in politics. I have seen nearly every aspect of life in the U.S. take a major hit. Nearly no one cares about anything, and the attitude of taking care of me myself and I seems rampant. I have been worried about children since day one, from social disorders to education. We have several generations that basically missed out on two years of schooling from pre-school through university levels. That can't be good in one to three decades time, even if we i prove the issues tomorrow.
- dqpb 5y ago
  China seems to be doing great. Economy is way up, Covid cases almost non-existent, decisive education reforms, strong new military alliances. Based on the news being fed to me, it’s almost as if the pandemic didn’t even happen to them.
ianbicking 5y ago
"So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system being reinvented for the better" I don't really see how this would happen, or even how they connect. Covid is keeping our schools from even being schools. It's displaying the flaws in our larger system, but it doesn't really speak at all to what's good or bad in the classroom itself. EXCEPT that we've had a natural experiment where kids are removed from the classroom, and it turns out classrooms are pretty good educational environments compared to remote school or ad hoc home school! If anything this indicates we don't need to reinvent our schools, we just need to reinvent our school HVAC. (We also aren't reinventing school HVAC, which is disappointing because of all the options in front of us that's about the easiest.)
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  The connection to covid is pretty loose but when people are driven to questioning what the very purpose of schools are (education or state sponsored childcare so both parents can work and contribute to the economy?), I think connection is fair.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  > and it turns out classrooms are pretty good educational environments compared to remote school or ad hoc home school! I'm not sure that was ever in doubt, but it doesn't mean classrooms are good environments for learning. "It's better than (almost) nothing" is where we're at now.

xwdv 5y ago

It is obvious what will happen. The education system will crumble, inequality will grow, and to make up for having a poorly educated work force we will adopt more automation or AI-assisted tasks with very structured workflows to reduce cognitive requirements. Only elites will be able to afford giving their children strong educations and social experiences, presumably with other elite children. This will allow some children to pursue high status high skill careers while the rest must settle for whatever they can grab. At the same time, children will increasingly grow to be emotionally underdeveloped, leading to poor romantic relationships filled with toxicity, leaving them perpetually unsatisfied with life and cynical of others. Poor quality breeding will become rampant and add to the problem.

tester756 5y ago
>Only elites will be able to afford giving their children strong educations and social experiences How about learning from the Internet?
- xwdv 5y ago
  Doesn’t work very well with young children.
  - redisman 5y ago
    Today I learned how to alt-tab into Minecraft all day while still getting marked as attending!
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    It works for 10-year-olds, and I'd say it works for younger children too. The problem is needing supervision (curiosity leads to doing some very harmful things, and that's not even considering bouts of malice…). If children want to learn, and they can learn, there's no stopping them (except with video games, television, toys, a field, a garden, a paved area, a woodland, the fact that books make a loud noise every time you close them, other children… but apart from the first two, I see no problem with that).
    - mholm 5y ago
      > It works for 10-year-olds No. It works for some 10-year-olds. Few, even. The school system is not intended to educate a few children, it is intended to educate all the children in the country. Even the poorest and least motivated. You cannot just throw children into a room with an adult and computers and tell them to learn.
      - wizzwizz4 5y ago
        It could well be selection bias, but I've seen the least-interested (middling-motivated) 10-year-olds rapidly learn when something that interests them is placed in front of them, and they're not expected to do anything with it. (Specifically, Scratch, with a “you could make a game” directive, after a quick back-and-forth game design session.) The existing school system isn't doing a particularly great job of educating those kids. Is the goal for kids to pass exams and then forget most of it by adulthood? Or is it for kids to gain basic life skills, find out what interests them, and have the environment to pursue their interests? (Almost everyone finds some “work”-type things interesting.) Note: I'm not saying that my system would work for everyone; I'm challenging the suggestion that the existing system works for most people. Some people require interactive (rather than book) teachers to learn well, but that doesn't mean that “You Must Learn This, Then This, Then This” is an effective approach.
giraffe_lady 5y ago
I was with you until you got to the... breeding... thing.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- xwdv 5y ago
  Humans breed like any other animal, not sure why people take offense to pointing out biological processes. Mates get selected based on environmental factors and fitness, and increasingly, social status. In the future, rich girls still won’t marry poor boys.
  - alxjrvs 5y ago
    Feels to me like you're completely discounting an "Uptown girl" scenario. There are many instances where one might be looking for a downtown man (disclosure: That's what I am.)
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    Are you sure? The definitions of fitness are very vague here, and not just measured on wealth. There are plenty of wealthy women with less-wealthy boytoys and trophy husbands. There are increasingly plenty of hardworking breadwinning women with stay at home dads. A man who lives to work and has no real domestic skill is increasingly unattractive.
  - w0de0 5y ago
    Humans are by an OOM or more the most complex creatures to arise from raw natural selection; about us we have constructed a fractal diversity of society and culture. Humans are animals, yes, but they have long transcended the ordinary pressures of environment and selection. In a stupor, trying to comprehend our exceptionalism, we intuitively and nonsensically describe much human behavior as "unnatural." Your crude reduction of human reproductive choice denies myriad past choices made in free will, subsuming both the terror of power and the rare true love to biochemical animism. Go far enough down this path and you will assign to animal spirits the abstract free will you deny, accidentally recreating primitive religion & symbolic thought, thus elaborately disproving yourself. We're obviously animals. That's a place to start, but not an insight. Contending otherwise is insight to the soul and pain of the speaker, not their society. The end, the ur-insight: a universal theory which succinctly predicts homosexuality, Dennis Kuchinich's marriage, the Ptolemaic family tree, the fate of the Sabine women, and Kate Upton's romance.
29800795 5y ago
Your first paragraph is the set-up to the novel Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
w0de0 5y ago
You have described, accurately if glibly, the situation in the West prior to the Industrial Revolution and globalization, which have brought world-historical growth in economic, educational, and spiritual quality-of-life for non-elites. Over the past ~150 years, our society has been remade; higher education is hardly the esoteric province of the aristocracy and clergy it was ~700 years ago in Europe, and as you imagine it will "obviously" soon again be. There's no doubt the elite retain advantages of birth. Perfect meritocracy seems at odds with humans' intuitive creation of entrenched hierarchy and autonomic drive to empower and extend one's specific genetic legacy. But even when beset by imperfection, corruption, hypocrisy, etc, a Western non-elite human's life is not likely to turn out "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," as is it would have in almost any other age. A peasant in Lancashire c. 1350 could reasonably bet many of his children would die, and those that did not would live almost entirely the same life as his own. A working-class American can make the opposite bets just as reasonably. All this to say: I'm no Whig historian, but it is impossible to deny tangible and massive improvements in the average human's access to education and general quality of life over the past several generations. It is therefore absurd to make "obvious" predictions such as you have, contrary to a pervasive, macro trend, without providing some insightful analysis. (William Gibson's Cassandra cries should not be used as primary evidence...) We rich, lucky ones, likely as not great-grandchildren of semi-literate factory peons, seem, generally, to exist in a cynical milieu which thoughtlessly assumes inevitable dystopia (an anti-Whig history!). But recent negative trends in, for instance, the Gini co-efficient, are minuscule vibrations within a relentlessly positive curve [https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality].

29800795 5y ago

>So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system being reinvented for the better or do school boards just keep bumbling along like before? The type of conservatives that wield the most power in the US Senate are skeptical of public education. This is their golden chance to finally dismantle it, creating a patchwork of federally funded religious private schools.

Spooky23 5y ago

No. You have 1st world America and 3rd world America. The 1st world kids will be fine. Some of them will struggle and carry some emotional baggage forward. The ones who have nothing will have a little less. Society will hold them in as much regard as they do now, maybe a little less if helping them requires more taxes.

bmitc 5y ago

I think COVID is the inflection point that puts the U.S. behind compared to other countries who have a more collective culture and less extremism in politics. I have seen nearly every aspect of life in the U.S. take a major hit. Nearly no one cares about anything, and the attitude of taking care of me myself and I seems rampant. I have been worried about children since day one, from social disorders to education. We have several generations that basically missed out on two years of schooling from pre-school through university levels. That can't be good in one to three decades time, even if we i prove the issues tomorrow.

dqpb 5y ago
China seems to be doing great. Economy is way up, Covid cases almost non-existent, decisive education reforms, strong new military alliances. Based on the news being fed to me, it’s almost as if the pandemic didn’t even happen to them.

ianbicking 5y ago

"So, is Covid the shock that leads to the education system being reinvented for the better" I don't really see how this would happen, or even how they connect. Covid is keeping our schools from even being schools. It's displaying the flaws in our larger system, but it doesn't really speak at all to what's good or bad in the classroom itself. EXCEPT that we've had a natural experiment where kids are removed from the classroom, and it turns out classrooms are pretty good educational environments compared to remote school or ad hoc home school! If anything this indicates we don't need to reinvent our schools, we just need to reinvent our school HVAC. (We also aren't reinventing school HVAC, which is disappointing because of all the options in front of us that's about the easiest.)

monkeybutton 5y ago
The connection to covid is pretty loose but when people are driven to questioning what the very purpose of schools are (education or state sponsored childcare so both parents can work and contribute to the economy?), I think connection is fair.
notreallyserio 5y ago
> and it turns out classrooms are pretty good educational environments compared to remote school or ad hoc home school! I'm not sure that was ever in doubt, but it doesn't mean classrooms are good environments for learning. "It's better than (almost) nothing" is where we're at now.