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Why default to blaming the students/employees? The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest an

Why default to blaming the students/employees? The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees. I'm not saying there's no problem with overconsumption of cheap media. But I think we're too quick to jump to blaming individuals. We can just as much flip the question around and ask what educators and employers are doing to keep students engaged and feeling motivated by what they do.

cardamomo 4y ago
David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" comes to mind as a well written critique of the kinds of jobs you seem to be describing. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullsh...
- DocTomoe 4y ago
  Sure. But there are also plenty of very necessary jobs which are not permanently engaging. Airline pilots tend to do love aviating, but spend most of their flight standing by in case the autopilot goes awry. Most medical doctors don't have a massive catastrophe happening around them all of the time. Artisan bakers still have to knead dough. All in all, most work generally is boring rather than fulfilling.
  - askafriend 4y ago
    I think in all your examples aspects of the work may indeed be incredibly boring, but that doesn't mean it's not ultimately rewarding, fulfilling, or motivating. At least in the case of pilots, doctors, and bakers.
- pqwEfkvjs 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. I just spent last 10 hours reading it, but I need to stop to get some sleep now.
ivanche 4y ago
Not every one, and maybe not even majority, of our actions can be "engaging" and "motivated". When you finish the school and start working, don't expect that all work will be engaging or that someone exists in the company to motivate you. Probably nobody is engaged while doing grocery shopping or running errands. Deep work? It is _not_ fun, trust me, but often very rewarding _in the end_.
throw_m239339 4y ago
> The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees. I disagree. A business isn't a summer camp or a YMCA, and while schools should obviously help a student to find their own way, it also exists to instruct without the teacher being required to act like a tik tok influencer in front of a class of 30+ students. What with the constant infantilization of employees or students in US? My boss or my teacher aren't there to entertain me like I'm in a daycare.
- treyfitty 4y ago
  I’ve heard people refer to work (half jokingly) as “adult daycare.” At face value, I dismissed it, but if you think about it from a societal perspective, it’s not completely false. Most of us are toiling away so that society keeps running. It’s like being in a fiefdom and our overlords need to supply bread & circus for our pleasure- difference being were being issued tokens to find bread & circuses on our own.
truncate 4y ago
My personal opinion is that this somewhat leads individuals to become entitled and less independently driven. And where does this end? People should be able to dig into things that are not always rainbows and unicorns. Inspiration is always nice though, but I don't like the idea of being spoonfed and just wrapping everything in nice shiny packages.
stereolambda 4y ago
I don't think we need to think of it on the basis of blame at all, on the societal level. Individually, I think you have a better life if you have or learn conscious control of your attention. But on a large scale, if the population doesn't have immunity, it is a problem to deal with somehow. Either by "engaging" or changing the structures of institutions. But we have to have some methods of doing this, which are hard to come by when the problems are new. The methods of engaging me employed by modern video games and fast-cut video platforms seem off-putting to me. More importantly I don't see how we can do anything meaningful when communicating like this. Life is largely search, not only exploitation of rewards. If I was a teacher maybe I'd come up with some strategy, probably a compromise, but don't treat it as a thing they don't do just because they're lazy. It's like expecting that all people will deal with smog by designing and building their own air cleaning devices.
- imgabe 4y ago
  Hmm, we kind of did deal with smog by requiring everyone to get their own air cleaning device (catalytic converters). They didn’t have to design and build it themselves though.
eezurr 4y ago
When you see a polished video clip on the net, it's the cumulated result of an hour or more work for less than a minute of your time. Simply put, it doesn't scale.
- tzs 4y ago
  I don't think that is necessarily true. If I spend hours making a video clip and put it up on YouTube it would be true, because no one follows me on YouTube. The most views anything I ever posted got was just over 100, which was a short video of something weird that happened when I set my water bottle on top of my car that I no longer remember enough college physics to explain [1]. Second most was a water pipe like at the building my office was in [2]. That got a bit over 80. Third has a little over 50. That was some chestnut backed chickadees landing on my hand to eat peanuts [3]. That's closely followed by some antics of a Douglas squirrel and an Eastern Gray squirrel on my front deck [4]. (BTW, if anyone watches the one with the chickadees, try watching in slow motion or single stepping. Some of them have cool poses that go by way to fast at normal speed to see). I'm not actually sure why any of those have more than a handful views as they were put there to share with friends. There are a couple in the 30s, which are the only ones I actually tried to get anyone other than friends to look at. Those are videos of my bike's rear tire on a stand, with a weight on the rim, rotated and allowed to swing back and forth. I posted those to a bicycling group, and asked if it was possible to determine from how long it took the oscillations to damp if my hub was in need of lubrication. Everything else has been in the single digits. So yeah, if I put any effort into a video (which I think only the leak and the chickadees one involved anything more than just selecting one continuous clip from something filmed in one take on my phone) it doesn't scale. But what about people who do get a lot of views? If someone spends an hour on a video and a million different each spend a minute watching it that has scales pretty well. There are lots of people that can spend an hour on a video and probably get people spending years worth of time watching. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODjTBPPAFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODjTBPPAFg [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUoSotRRVqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUoSotRRVqg [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShPgZhSbxU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShPgZhSbxU0 [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIF7ZLbl_FM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIF7ZLbl_FM
imgabe 4y ago
This just reeks of entitlement. “Entertain me and engage me! Let no moment of my life ever be touched by confusion or struggle! Spoon feed me everything I can ever want or need!” Ultimately, it’s not the school’s problem if you don’t learn, it’s yours. You’re the one who’s going to have to go through life not understanding math and whatnot. So if you care to have any agency and control over your own life you better figure out how to learn what you need to know, whether it’s engaging or not. As for jobs, they’re hiring you to do work, not to be entertained. Don’t like it? Move along to something else then. The people who feed you an endless stream of engaging content that keeps you mindlessly consuming are not doing it with your best interests at heart.
- askafriend 4y ago
  Don't worry about me. I work very hard, made it through difficult programs at top schools, made (and continue to make) significant contributions at leading companies and my compensation is probably top 0.01% in the world. I'm familiar with hard work and struggle, having come from nothing. In fact the only thing that was handed to me was values around education and how important it is - I still believe in that deeply. I still disagree with your framing. Let's take this example: > As for jobs, they’re hiring you to do work, not to be entertained. Don’t like it? Move along to something else then. You don't see the problem here? Losing talent is not a winning strategy. If I'm a company leader, I take it as MY responsibility to create a place where people want to work and work hard towards goals they see as meaningful. If people don't see personal growth and a path to bettering their life or others' through work - what is the purpose of sacrifice and hard work? There is none. Having employees that are working purely from a place of fear and not being able to pay bills is scraping the bottom of the barrel. In short - I will bet against your version of leadership any day. I think it's anti-leadership and I would love to have you as a competitor company. > The people who feed you an endless stream of engaging content that keeps you mindlessly consuming are not doing it with your best interests at heart. I don't disagree with you here. We're in complete agreement. I just think this point gets over-emphasized and my original point doesn't get talked about enough - which is why I originally commented. > Ultimately, it’s not the school’s problem if you don’t learn, it’s yours. You’re the one who’s going to have to go through life not understanding math and whatnot. Also want to respond to this. I agree with you here as well. However I think there is a distinction between school and education. It is the environment of school that I'm talking about in particular and the way some subjects are taught (History is a pet peeve of mine. As an adult, I LOVE history and learning about history - I do it in my free time. In school, history education is fundamentally broken IMO).
tzs 4y ago
One reason to at least first suspect something other than educators is that education hasn't changed all that much in a long time. As far as I can tell at least the way elementary school and high school worked when I was in them circa 1970 is the same way it had been working for at least 20 years before that and the way it continued to work for the next 50 years until we had a year of pandemic disruptions. When you've got something that has worked pretty much the same for 70+ years and something appears to go wrong in the last several years it makes sense that your primary suspects should be things that changed around the time that it started to go wrong.

cardamomo 4y ago

David Graeber's "Bullshit Jobs" comes to mind as a well written critique of the kinds of jobs you seem to be describing. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullsh...

DocTomoe 4y ago
Sure. But there are also plenty of very necessary jobs which are not permanently engaging. Airline pilots tend to do love aviating, but spend most of their flight standing by in case the autopilot goes awry. Most medical doctors don't have a massive catastrophe happening around them all of the time. Artisan bakers still have to knead dough. All in all, most work generally is boring rather than fulfilling.
- askafriend 4y ago
  I think in all your examples aspects of the work may indeed be incredibly boring, but that doesn't mean it's not ultimately rewarding, fulfilling, or motivating. At least in the case of pilots, doctors, and bakers.
pqwEfkvjs 4y ago
Thanks for sharing this. I just spent last 10 hours reading it, but I need to stop to get some sleep now.

ivanche 4y ago

Not every one, and maybe not even majority, of our actions can be "engaging" and "motivated". When you finish the school and start working, don't expect that all work will be engaging or that someone exists in the company to motivate you. Probably nobody is engaged while doing grocery shopping or running errands. Deep work? It is _not_ fun, trust me, but often very rewarding _in the end_.

throw_m239339 4y ago

> The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees. I disagree. A business isn't a summer camp or a YMCA, and while schools should obviously help a student to find their own way, it also exists to instruct without the teacher being required to act like a tik tok influencer in front of a class of 30+ students. What with the constant infantilization of employees or students in US? My boss or my teacher aren't there to entertain me like I'm in a daycare.

treyfitty 4y ago
I’ve heard people refer to work (half jokingly) as “adult daycare.” At face value, I dismissed it, but if you think about it from a societal perspective, it’s not completely false. Most of us are toiling away so that society keeps running. It’s like being in a fiefdom and our overlords need to supply bread & circus for our pleasure- difference being were being issued tokens to find bread & circuses on our own.

truncate 4y ago

My personal opinion is that this somewhat leads individuals to become entitled and less independently driven. And where does this end? People should be able to dig into things that are not always rainbows and unicorns. Inspiration is always nice though, but I don't like the idea of being spoonfed and just wrapping everything in nice shiny packages.

stereolambda 4y ago

I don't think we need to think of it on the basis of blame at all, on the societal level. Individually, I think you have a better life if you have or learn conscious control of your attention. But on a large scale, if the population doesn't have immunity, it is a problem to deal with somehow. Either by "engaging" or changing the structures of institutions. But we have to have some methods of doing this, which are hard to come by when the problems are new. The methods of engaging me employed by modern video games and fast-cut video platforms seem off-putting to me. More importantly I don't see how we can do anything meaningful when communicating like this. Life is largely search, not only exploitation of rewards. If I was a teacher maybe I'd come up with some strategy, probably a compromise, but don't treat it as a thing they don't do just because they're lazy. It's like expecting that all people will deal with smog by designing and building their own air cleaning devices.

imgabe 4y ago
Hmm, we kind of did deal with smog by requiring everyone to get their own air cleaning device (catalytic converters). They didn’t have to design and build it themselves though.

eezurr 4y ago

When you see a polished video clip on the net, it's the cumulated result of an hour or more work for less than a minute of your time. Simply put, it doesn't scale.

tzs 4y ago
I don't think that is necessarily true. If I spend hours making a video clip and put it up on YouTube it would be true, because no one follows me on YouTube. The most views anything I ever posted got was just over 100, which was a short video of something weird that happened when I set my water bottle on top of my car that I no longer remember enough college physics to explain [1]. Second most was a water pipe like at the building my office was in [2]. That got a bit over 80. Third has a little over 50. That was some chestnut backed chickadees landing on my hand to eat peanuts [3]. That's closely followed by some antics of a Douglas squirrel and an Eastern Gray squirrel on my front deck [4]. (BTW, if anyone watches the one with the chickadees, try watching in slow motion or single stepping. Some of them have cool poses that go by way to fast at normal speed to see). I'm not actually sure why any of those have more than a handful views as they were put there to share with friends. There are a couple in the 30s, which are the only ones I actually tried to get anyone other than friends to look at. Those are videos of my bike's rear tire on a stand, with a weight on the rim, rotated and allowed to swing back and forth. I posted those to a bicycling group, and asked if it was possible to determine from how long it took the oscillations to damp if my hub was in need of lubrication. Everything else has been in the single digits. So yeah, if I put any effort into a video (which I think only the leak and the chickadees one involved anything more than just selecting one continuous clip from something filmed in one take on my phone) it doesn't scale. But what about people who do get a lot of views? If someone spends an hour on a video and a million different each spend a minute watching it that has scales pretty well. There are lots of people that can spend an hour on a video and probably get people spending years worth of time watching. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODjTBPPAFg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODjTBPPAFg [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUoSotRRVqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUoSotRRVqg [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShPgZhSbxU0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShPgZhSbxU0 [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIF7ZLbl_FM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIF7ZLbl_FM

imgabe 4y ago

This just reeks of entitlement. “Entertain me and engage me! Let no moment of my life ever be touched by confusion or struggle! Spoon feed me everything I can ever want or need!” Ultimately, it’s not the school’s problem if you don’t learn, it’s yours. You’re the one who’s going to have to go through life not understanding math and whatnot. So if you care to have any agency and control over your own life you better figure out how to learn what you need to know, whether it’s engaging or not. As for jobs, they’re hiring you to do work, not to be entertained. Don’t like it? Move along to something else then. The people who feed you an endless stream of engaging content that keeps you mindlessly consuming are not doing it with your best interests at heart.

askafriend 4y ago
Don't worry about me. I work very hard, made it through difficult programs at top schools, made (and continue to make) significant contributions at leading companies and my compensation is probably top 0.01% in the world. I'm familiar with hard work and struggle, having come from nothing. In fact the only thing that was handed to me was values around education and how important it is - I still believe in that deeply. I still disagree with your framing. Let's take this example: > As for jobs, they’re hiring you to do work, not to be entertained. Don’t like it? Move along to something else then. You don't see the problem here? Losing talent is not a winning strategy. If I'm a company leader, I take it as MY responsibility to create a place where people want to work and work hard towards goals they see as meaningful. If people don't see personal growth and a path to bettering their life or others' through work - what is the purpose of sacrifice and hard work? There is none. Having employees that are working purely from a place of fear and not being able to pay bills is scraping the bottom of the barrel. In short - I will bet against your version of leadership any day. I think it's anti-leadership and I would love to have you as a competitor company. > The people who feed you an endless stream of engaging content that keeps you mindlessly consuming are not doing it with your best interests at heart. I don't disagree with you here. We're in complete agreement. I just think this point gets over-emphasized and my original point doesn't get talked about enough - which is why I originally commented. > Ultimately, it’s not the school’s problem if you don’t learn, it’s yours. You’re the one who’s going to have to go through life not understanding math and whatnot. Also want to respond to this. I agree with you here as well. However I think there is a distinction between school and education. It is the environment of school that I'm talking about in particular and the way some subjects are taught (History is a pet peeve of mine. As an adult, I LOVE history and learning about history - I do it in my free time. In school, history education is fundamentally broken IMO).

tzs 4y ago

One reason to at least first suspect something other than educators is that education hasn't changed all that much in a long time. As far as I can tell at least the way elementary school and high school worked when I was in them circa 1970 is the same way it had been working for at least 20 years before that and the way it continued to work for the next 50 years until we had a year of pandemic disruptions. When you've got something that has worked pretty much the same for 70+ years and something appears to go wrong in the last several years it makes sense that your primary suspects should be things that changed around the time that it started to go wrong.