5 ms·

Schools are just a place for warehousing kids; even people who take no interest in education know this from personal experience back from when they were a kid.

by baazaa 4y ago

Schools are just a place for warehousing kids; even people who take no interest in education know this from personal experience back from when they were a kid. Exactly 0 of 627 college students can answer simple questions like 'What is the name of the mountain range that separates Europe from Asia?' or 'What is the last name of the author of The Brothers Karamazov?'. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2013/09/10/10-questions-that-most-college-students-cant-answer-but-you-probably-can/?sh=e4046cd1dba3 https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2013/09/10/... The striking thing is that the dismal career prospects hasn't stopped bright ambitious people trying to get into academia. Whereas In Australia you can just look at entry-scores for teaching degrees to see that only people who did poorly in school go into teaching nowadays. So sure, pay and conditions have some influence but it's not a sufficient condition to explain what's happened in teaching. Pretty sure if researchers could get the job security and entitlements of teachers we'd have no problem finding bright people trying to get into research. But that's because research is more intrinsically rewarding and higher status. Child-minding just fundamentally isn't a job which requires much talent, the job is steadily degrading to the status and pay which one would expect for a semi-skilled occupation. The teachers' unions are doing a valiant job fighting a rear-guard action to prevent that decline, through rampant credentialism to buttress the 'professional' status of the job. But it's an uphill fight, politicians aren't going to push for tax hikes to fund teacher salaries when every voter knows full-well that regardless they're still going to have to teach their kids themselves or get tutoring if they want their kid to actually learn anything.

xwdv 4y ago
> Exactly 0 of 627 college students can answer simple questions like 'What is the name of the mountain range that separates Europe from Asia?' or 'What is the last name of the author of The Brothers Karamazov?'. These simple questions that are just recitation of facts are worthless. I don’t even know the answers to these. The only questions that measure anything useful are critical thinking type questions, consider simple things any CS student should be able to answer such as “Describe the design for a roles based authentication system” or “Describe an implementation of a communications bus between multiple systems in a micro services architecture”
- baazaa 4y ago
  Critical thinking is such a nebulous term there's not even an agreed-upon way of measuring it, much less old tests of it to compare against. It's largely been used by the educational establishment to justify why students come out of 13 years of compulsory schooling functionally innumerate and illiterate. Oh sure they don't know anything, but their critical thinking skills are off the charts! If we use the slightly better-defined term of problem solving skills, there's no worse way of teaching that than putting a teacher up in front of 20 students teaching a standardised curriculum and giving out standardised tests. In the CS context, most students first learn how to think through a problem when they learn to code. What were they doing in school? Certainly not thinking through problems. Edit: Also you completely misunderstood the import of those two questions. Anyone with a passing familiarity with world literature can answer the Dostoyevsky question, and anyone with a passing familiarity with geography or Russian history can answer the Urals question. You're note supposed to memorise the answer, the answer comes naturally if you're not pig-ignorant about the world. I wouldn't expect most students to know them, I sure as hell would expect more than 0.00% to know them. Kids know nothing because schools imbed extreme anti-intellectualism into even the brightest of kids.
deleted 4y ago
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by baazaa 4y ago

xwdv 4y ago

> Exactly 0 of 627 college students can answer simple questions like 'What is the name of the mountain range that separates Europe from Asia?' or 'What is the last name of the author of The Brothers Karamazov?'. These simple questions that are just recitation of facts are worthless. I don’t even know the answers to these. The only questions that measure anything useful are critical thinking type questions, consider simple things any CS student should be able to answer such as “Describe the design for a roles based authentication system” or “Describe an implementation of a communications bus between multiple systems in a micro services architecture”

baazaa 4y ago
Critical thinking is such a nebulous term there's not even an agreed-upon way of measuring it, much less old tests of it to compare against. It's largely been used by the educational establishment to justify why students come out of 13 years of compulsory schooling functionally innumerate and illiterate. Oh sure they don't know anything, but their critical thinking skills are off the charts! If we use the slightly better-defined term of problem solving skills, there's no worse way of teaching that than putting a teacher up in front of 20 students teaching a standardised curriculum and giving out standardised tests. In the CS context, most students first learn how to think through a problem when they learn to code. What were they doing in school? Certainly not thinking through problems. Edit: Also you completely misunderstood the import of those two questions. Anyone with a passing familiarity with world literature can answer the Dostoyevsky question, and anyone with a passing familiarity with geography or Russian history can answer the Urals question. You're note supposed to memorise the answer, the answer comes naturally if you're not pig-ignorant about the world. I wouldn't expect most students to know them, I sure as hell would expect more than 0.00% to know them. Kids know nothing because schools imbed extreme anti-intellectualism into even the brightest of kids.

deleted 4y ago

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