14 ms·

This story had an amazing effect on me as a child and before it begins, yes I have a disability (though a so called invisible disability - I have type 1 diabete

This story had an amazing effect on me as a child and before it begins, yes I have a disability (though a so called invisible disability - I have type 1 diabetes and epilepsy). It isn't that we should turn a blind eye to the disabled, as many use it as a parable for. Many disabled do need extra help, but that help comes in the form of lifting up, not pushing down those who are able. The able should be encouraged, in their own way. Everyone needs to excel in an area that is their own and have a space to grow (oh God, I've turned into a hippy =/). I worry that this parable, the true meaning of this parable, has been washed-out over the years to be used only as a sword and not the shield it was meant to be.

geysersam 4y ago
Interesting. I've always felt the story to be a bit of a straw man. Don't we always celebrate and idolize ability, beauty etc?
- josephcsible 4y ago
  There have been school districts lately that have been getting rid of advanced math classes in the name of equality.
  - pydry 4y ago
    This is probably a vain attempt by management to put a shine on a cost cutting exercise. There is a poisonous ideology at work in the background but ultimately defunding schools comes from a desire for more inequality, not less.
    - woooooo 4y ago
      Who do you mean by management, here? The superintendent, the school board, the city council or the voters?
    - Wolfenstein98k 4y ago
      "A desire for more inequality"? That smacks of "good people support Policy X, even if it achieves the opposite of its goals in the long run. To acknowledge that and oppose Policy X, even on its own merits, makes you evil in intent." Few people actually have desires like "I want more inequality", even if they oppose a policy which intends to decrease it.
      - prottog 4y ago
        A lot of the modern American progressive argument presupposes the validity of its own assumptions. It's entirely circular logic. > oppose a policy which intends to decrease [inequality] Of course, there is very little discussion on whether said policies do actually end up decreasing inequality; much like how the Great Society "War On Poverty" arguably increased poverty.
      - pydry 4y ago
        >Few people actually have desires like "I want more inequality It's dressed up differently. They talk about cutting "bloated" public sector budgets or the necessity of austerity. Nobody calls themselves anti choice or pro death or pro war either but lots of people are.
        Wolfenstein98k 4y ago
        You can believe in those things for reasons other than "wanting more inequality". Your political opponents believe what they say, not some nefarious strawman you think they're secretly thinking.
  - mmmpop 4y ago
    Equity, not equality. Big difference in modern parlance.
    - esja 4y ago
      It's remarkable how Equity was just smuggled into "Diversity, Equity & Inclusion", without people realising that it doesn't mean the sort of equality that the majority supports.
      - seneca 4y ago
        It was on purpose. It started as "Diversity and Inclusion", and anyone who questioned it was shouted down as racist. Once any opposition was squashed, they slip in the "Equity", which was really the point the whole time. Marxism using racial politics as a smoke screen.
    - choko 4y ago
      It's all double-speak for Marxism, or equal outcomes for everyone.
      - e_i_pi_2 4y ago
        AFAIK Marxism isn't about equal outcomes, but it is opposed to enforced classes. So a Marxist would likely argue you shouldn't have lower and advanced courses separate, but you'd still have one course with a distribution of grades. The teacher would just focus more on the kids that need more help to improve the mean of the distribution, where our current method would create unnatural multi-modal distributions If you're opposed to Marxism you should also know "double-speak" comes from a book written in support of socialism[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Spanish_Civil_War_and_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Spanish_Civil_Wa...
        hcurtiss 4y ago
        >"double-speak comes form a book written in support of socialism" LOL - whut? Did you read a different 1984? Orwell's thoughts on governance was complicated, and changed over time, but in no way was 1984 some kind of endorsement of socialism. Also, Marxism is not socialism. https://www.thecoldwire.com/socialist-vs-marxist/#:~:text=The%20main%20difference%20between%20Socialism%20and%20Marxism%20is,go%20towards%20benefiting%20the%20community%20as%20a%20whole https://www.thecoldwire.com/socialist-vs-marxist/#:~:text=Th....
  - flatline 4y ago
    Like the sibling poster said this is probably a cost cutting measure. However, I really hate the dichotomy of “special ed” vs “gifted/advanced” that permeates education. Every student has special educational needs, and by that I mean not just academics. I excelled in school with no real effort and never got the support I needed in other areas because, clearly, I was doing great. I now have a 2e kid that goes to a Waldorf type school and gets like zero academic assistance (not really needed) but a ton of social/emotional support he needs. Eventually he’ll be in some more mainstream school where he can take advanced courses. I have a girl with ADHD and an 88 IQ - she just squirrels out as soon as she sees a problem that she cannot answer without some thought. She is sharp as a tack and does well in school because she has had to learn good study habits, but her support comes in the form of special ed to help give her a distraction-free environment in which to study. I do think there is a push not to equalize everyone but to actually address individual needs, and those may draw resources from areas like advanced courses. Boredom in school for bright kids can definitely be a problem but I’m not sure it’s the end of the world. The kids who want to excel generally will, and can often just be advanced a grade or two. The rigid structure of class groupings by age is anachronistic and maybe like 50% appropriate. There are better ways to structure education.
    - hedora 4y ago
      Here in California, the people setting the next generation math curriculum explicitly reject the idea that some children are better in some subjects than others (0% of the people responsible for creating the math standards studied math). Their original proposal would ban all but remedial coursework, so your kids would get the same treatment as everyone else (by intentionally lowering everyone's achievement; especially the special needs and gifted kids). I can only assume the people pushing this are trying to sabotage the school system, but they claim to have good intentions, and hide behind all sorts of woke double speak. In other news, the schools no longer fund science or art classes. Instead, the parents pay the public school $1000's per year per student (tax deductible) so we can have those programs. Also, the facilities are crumbling and have all sorts of obvious health and saftey issues. This is in an extremely affluent part of the state and a top ranked school. My kids will be fine (the parents at the school happily throw money at the problems -- it's cheaper than private school, after all), but I don't see how kids in poorer districts will be able to pretend to have a middle school education, regardless of whether they earn a California high school diploma, or not.
  - kikokikokiko 4y ago
    Brazilian guy here. In Brazil, state of Sao Paulo, some years ago the government wanted to implement a gifted students program, and it was DEFINITELY shut down for "politically correct" reasons, no "cutting costs" involved. But anyways, Brazil is not known worldwide as a smart celebrating country. Carnaval celebrates asses, not brains.
    - geysersam 4y ago
      There's a difference between not providing extra resources to educate "gifted" students, and spending effort actively inhibiting their development. I feel what you describe falls in the first category, while the situation in the story falls in the second.
      - kikokikokiko 4y ago
        There was no extra costs involved per se. To "educate" the gifted children, you will incur some costs, be it on a regular public school or on a school dedicated to nurture this kids special abilities. What the political groups wanted, and in the end got, was a policy of not acknowledging that there are innate differences between children, and some are "better" than others. It doesn't matter that these kids, that frequent public schools in Brazil, are 100% poor. There is no rich kids in public schools in Brazil, I guarantee you that. The result is, this poor kids could have had a real jump start to their lives, but no. 10 years later they never had a chance, just stayed rotting in the garbage dumpsters the governments call public schools down here. It's the dangers of tabula rasa arguments, if you do not see reality in realities terms you end up hurting people.
  - z7 4y ago
    Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27040373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27040373
  - geysersam 4y ago
    Do you have a source for this claim? Sounds incredible.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      Here's one: https://stanforddaily.com/2022/04/07/stanford-and-cal-professors-level-accusations-as-debate-over-state-math-curriculum-rages/ https://stanforddaily.com/2022/04/07/stanford-and-cal-profes... > the reformed framework attempted to remedy achievement gaps by urging public schools to remove certain accelerated math tracks from middle school education. Boaler’s guidelines have become a basis for a statewide push to move these classes, specifically Algebra I, out of middle school.
      - LtWorf 4y ago
        Basically they do that to kill force people who can to send their kids to private schools.
      - geysersam 4y ago
        Strange indeed! Difficult to understand the motivation. How would removing advanced tracks from public schools (with disproportionately more minority students) help equality?
    - tigeba 4y ago
      The district where my kids attend have suggested this on a few occasions. Frequently advanced math is the target. The district has hired a consultant that is charged with professional development for educators in the district. Among other things, the consultant makes claims that tracking is "... a racialized system of exclusion.” and compares it to Apartheid on multiple occasions. The rationale is explicit: "The biggest problem with tracking–by a million miles — is the equity issue." In my opinion combatting inequity in this way, by eliminating a resource that students need to succeed, is an example of “leveling down” or "Harrison Bergeroning" the situation if you will.
  - bnralt 4y ago
    Story from a local school: Parents of the more advanced math students in the grade requested some sort of more advanced math opportunities for their kids. School didn't provide any. When several of the kids used a more advanced math concept they had learned outside of school to solve a problem, the teacher told them to not do it that way because they hadn't learned it yet. The school does provide extra classes for kids who they think are behind in one area or another. And if a kid has a lot of issues, a class will even get an extra teacher that just focuses on that kid. Children who perform below grade level or have issues are getting extra attention from the school (great), but children who already know what's being taught are expected to just sit there quietly and waste their time (not so great).
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      Note the contrast between that and the athletic department, where schools are absolutely delighted to get a kid with an aptitude for sport, and push him hard to achieve.
      - MichaelCollins 4y ago
        Art classes seem the same, art and music teachers always seem eager to give special attention to kids who do much better than their peers.
        WalterBright 4y ago
        Of course. Very few teachers take any interest in the students who do well in math. In fact, they'll often find them annoying. Yes, there are some teachers who do take an interest and do their best for those students. They just aren't the norm, and they don't get much support from the administration.
        HarryHirsch 4y ago
        Only in America, but that's because the math teachers are nitwits.
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    In my highschool there were honors courses, but no AP courses. The school district wanted to replace honor courses with AP courses so that students might earn course credits for college. However the school district was in a working class town were most adults did not have college educations. The introduction of AP courses was fiercely opposed by many of these people, ostensibly because they didn't think it would be fair that taxpayers would have to pay for college credits, when they themselves never went to college. Crab bucket mentality. It's real.
  - e_i_pi_2 4y ago
    My school had a lot of different levels of math in particular, I took a lot of the highest courses and loved my teachers, but with the stories I've heard from other students it seems like the school would give the best teachers to the best students, so people already doing bad would only do worse. So I do see some value in removing that because it incentivizes the school to not care about the lower level courses as much. I think a better overall solution would be something like what Khan academy was going for - you can have a bunch of kids at different levels in the same class, and then you can also rely on them to help teach each other more. I think this was the main way schoolhouses were run before the industrial revolution. Then you're not limiting anyone, and you're also not encouraging the weird social effects that come from trying to section off people into discrete buckets
  - mcguire 4y ago
    The cynical among us might suspect the real reason to be budget.
    - rahimnathwani 4y ago
      It's not due to lack of budget. For example, in San Francisco, the school district spends $22k per student per year. That figure doesn't include capex.
- pjc50 4y ago
  What constitutes "ability" and "beauty", and what is acceptable/permitted to idolize, is extremely culturally specific. And the story explores a world with a very different view of those.
  - Animats 4y ago
    No, as we learned when morphing started to work, beauty is average. If you average a large number of faces, you get one most humans think is beautiful.[1] Non-beauty seems to be a defect-sensing system. [1] https://petapixel.com/2013/05/28/what-averaged-face-photographs-reveal-about-human-beauty/ https://petapixel.com/2013/05/28/what-averaged-face-photogra...
- Dracophoenix 4y ago
  Not always. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome People are fickle in their adulation.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
    Oh. Hi! :-) 8minutes faster U!
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  People certainly interpret it as a straw man, but if it was that, I'm really not sure why the author would have decided that Harrison would be declaring himself king, getting a beautiful queen, appointing an aristocracy, being weirdly and unnecessarily violent or literally flying.
- hbosch 4y ago
  >Don't we always celebrate and idolize ability, beauty etc? It's a complex terrain to navigate, I think. The German term "schadenfreude" comes to mind, specifically, in direct contrast to that. For example, would you say the Kardashian family is celebrated or despised?
- aasasd 4y ago
  Accusing a ‘science fiction’ story of strawmanning is pretty weird. Moreover, ‘Harrison Bergeron’ can easily be paralleled to Bulgakov's ‘Heart of a Dog’, which is a direct jab at the early Soviet Union. However, idk if Vonnegut was interested in that or read Bulgakov.
- swayvil 4y ago
  Consider the bloodsoaked frenzy that surrounds any celebrity who steps out of line. Consider, in social media, our quaint tradition of "voting". Suppressing the smart and stupid alike. Enforcing conformity to the norm above all.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Americans idolize athletic skill and beauty, but look down on intellectual achievement. "nerds"
  - MrZongle2 4y ago
    That's an unnecessary large brush. There are 300 million of us. Are we all the same?
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      When I say "people like ice cream" and you say "not all people like ice cream" I reply "I didn't say all." "All" is a modifier for a reason. For example, people are demanding that the SATs should not be used to evaluate students academic ability, because it's unfair that some students do better on the test than others. Have you ever seen anyone advocate this sort of thing for the school sports program? How about it being unfair and inequitable that top athletes have a leg up on college admissions? Did any PE teacher shower attention on me or the other inept students to bring us up to speed? Nope. The attention was all on the top 2 or 3 athletic students. The rest of us were just an annoyance. (I'm not saying this to complain, as my interests were elsewhere, just illustrating an example.)
      - choko 4y ago
        Using the term "people" or "men" or "women" without a quantifier is misleading. I could say "people think the earth is flat" and it doesn't matter if it's one person or one billion people but the difference is very important.
        WalterBright 4y ago
        > Using the term "people" or "men" or "women" without a quantifier is misleading If I say "people have two legs" and you reply saying what about amputees, that's a debate tactic, not a misinterpretation. If I say "people are amputees" that would be a false statement. > I could say "people think the earth is flat" and it doesn't matter if it's one person or one billion people but the difference is very important. The term "people" by itself means people in general. Not all people, and not one person in a billion. English is neither a mathematics nor a programming language, and should not be treated as such.
WorldMaker 4y ago
I had a teacher that loved to use Harrison Bergeron as a useful discussion point on the complex difference between "Equality" and "Equity", and my understanding is that is also what Vonnegut intended. (The nihilistic modern Libertarian interpretation of "it's not even worth trying to accommodate differently abled people because Harrison Bergeron said so" seems quite contrary to a lot of Vonnegut's other works.) I appreciate that today we have less likely to be confused with nihilism memes on "equality" versus "equity" such as this now classic: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/94/b9/cf/94b9cff6e57f8bff9db127a2114ce404.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/94/b9/cf/94b9cff6e57f8bff9db127a21... I think it is a shame that we've almost lost some access to good humor/satire/farce such as Vonnegut's in what increasingly feels like a Post-Poe's Law Singularity world where the internet makes it painfully obvious how much "most" people associate any given satire with its most facile arguments and miss the forest for the trees, miss the punchline, or miss the general point.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > The nihilistic modern Libertarian interpretation of "it's not even worth trying to accommodate differently abled people because Harrison Bergeron said so" That isn't what Libertarians think.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    Anyone I've ever heard it from was a Libertarian, so it seems fair to use that as a label. I don't know or care if it is a "party plank" shared by "all Libertarians" or "true Libertarians" or "true Scotsmen", it's not relevant to my point.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      You're not hearing it from this libertarian. Libertarianism is not code for rude, thoughtless, meanness, uncharitable, stealing, defrauding, enslaving, etc. It's code for people doing what they want to, as long as they don't hurt others. For example, I follow recommendations for making my web sites more usable for people using screen readers. Not because anyone makes me do it - I'm happy to do it.

geysersam 4y ago

Interesting. I've always felt the story to be a bit of a straw man. Don't we always celebrate and idolize ability, beauty etc?

josephcsible 4y ago
There have been school districts lately that have been getting rid of advanced math classes in the name of equality.
- pydry 4y ago
  This is probably a vain attempt by management to put a shine on a cost cutting exercise. There is a poisonous ideology at work in the background but ultimately defunding schools comes from a desire for more inequality, not less.
  - woooooo 4y ago
    Who do you mean by management, here? The superintendent, the school board, the city council or the voters?
  - Wolfenstein98k 4y ago
    "A desire for more inequality"? That smacks of "good people support Policy X, even if it achieves the opposite of its goals in the long run. To acknowledge that and oppose Policy X, even on its own merits, makes you evil in intent." Few people actually have desires like "I want more inequality", even if they oppose a policy which intends to decrease it.
    - prottog 4y ago
      A lot of the modern American progressive argument presupposes the validity of its own assumptions. It's entirely circular logic. > oppose a policy which intends to decrease [inequality] Of course, there is very little discussion on whether said policies do actually end up decreasing inequality; much like how the Great Society "War On Poverty" arguably increased poverty.
    - pydry 4y ago
      >Few people actually have desires like "I want more inequality It's dressed up differently. They talk about cutting "bloated" public sector budgets or the necessity of austerity. Nobody calls themselves anti choice or pro death or pro war either but lots of people are.
      - Wolfenstein98k 4y ago
        You can believe in those things for reasons other than "wanting more inequality". Your political opponents believe what they say, not some nefarious strawman you think they're secretly thinking.
- mmmpop 4y ago
  Equity, not equality. Big difference in modern parlance.
  - esja 4y ago
    It's remarkable how Equity was just smuggled into "Diversity, Equity & Inclusion", without people realising that it doesn't mean the sort of equality that the majority supports.
    - seneca 4y ago
      It was on purpose. It started as "Diversity and Inclusion", and anyone who questioned it was shouted down as racist. Once any opposition was squashed, they slip in the "Equity", which was really the point the whole time. Marxism using racial politics as a smoke screen.
  - choko 4y ago
    It's all double-speak for Marxism, or equal outcomes for everyone.
    - e_i_pi_2 4y ago
      AFAIK Marxism isn't about equal outcomes, but it is opposed to enforced classes. So a Marxist would likely argue you shouldn't have lower and advanced courses separate, but you'd still have one course with a distribution of grades. The teacher would just focus more on the kids that need more help to improve the mean of the distribution, where our current method would create unnatural multi-modal distributions If you're opposed to Marxism you should also know "double-speak" comes from a book written in support of socialism[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Spanish_Civil_War_and_socialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Spanish_Civil_Wa...
      - hcurtiss 4y ago
        >"double-speak comes form a book written in support of socialism" LOL - whut? Did you read a different 1984? Orwell's thoughts on governance was complicated, and changed over time, but in no way was 1984 some kind of endorsement of socialism. Also, Marxism is not socialism. https://www.thecoldwire.com/socialist-vs-marxist/#:~:text=The%20main%20difference%20between%20Socialism%20and%20Marxism%20is,go%20towards%20benefiting%20the%20community%20as%20a%20whole https://www.thecoldwire.com/socialist-vs-marxist/#:~:text=Th....
- flatline 4y ago
  Like the sibling poster said this is probably a cost cutting measure. However, I really hate the dichotomy of “special ed” vs “gifted/advanced” that permeates education. Every student has special educational needs, and by that I mean not just academics. I excelled in school with no real effort and never got the support I needed in other areas because, clearly, I was doing great. I now have a 2e kid that goes to a Waldorf type school and gets like zero academic assistance (not really needed) but a ton of social/emotional support he needs. Eventually he’ll be in some more mainstream school where he can take advanced courses. I have a girl with ADHD and an 88 IQ - she just squirrels out as soon as she sees a problem that she cannot answer without some thought. She is sharp as a tack and does well in school because she has had to learn good study habits, but her support comes in the form of special ed to help give her a distraction-free environment in which to study. I do think there is a push not to equalize everyone but to actually address individual needs, and those may draw resources from areas like advanced courses. Boredom in school for bright kids can definitely be a problem but I’m not sure it’s the end of the world. The kids who want to excel generally will, and can often just be advanced a grade or two. The rigid structure of class groupings by age is anachronistic and maybe like 50% appropriate. There are better ways to structure education.
  - hedora 4y ago
    Here in California, the people setting the next generation math curriculum explicitly reject the idea that some children are better in some subjects than others (0% of the people responsible for creating the math standards studied math). Their original proposal would ban all but remedial coursework, so your kids would get the same treatment as everyone else (by intentionally lowering everyone's achievement; especially the special needs and gifted kids). I can only assume the people pushing this are trying to sabotage the school system, but they claim to have good intentions, and hide behind all sorts of woke double speak. In other news, the schools no longer fund science or art classes. Instead, the parents pay the public school $1000's per year per student (tax deductible) so we can have those programs. Also, the facilities are crumbling and have all sorts of obvious health and saftey issues. This is in an extremely affluent part of the state and a top ranked school. My kids will be fine (the parents at the school happily throw money at the problems -- it's cheaper than private school, after all), but I don't see how kids in poorer districts will be able to pretend to have a middle school education, regardless of whether they earn a California high school diploma, or not.
- kikokikokiko 4y ago
  Brazilian guy here. In Brazil, state of Sao Paulo, some years ago the government wanted to implement a gifted students program, and it was DEFINITELY shut down for "politically correct" reasons, no "cutting costs" involved. But anyways, Brazil is not known worldwide as a smart celebrating country. Carnaval celebrates asses, not brains.
  - geysersam 4y ago
    There's a difference between not providing extra resources to educate "gifted" students, and spending effort actively inhibiting their development. I feel what you describe falls in the first category, while the situation in the story falls in the second.
    - kikokikokiko 4y ago
      There was no extra costs involved per se. To "educate" the gifted children, you will incur some costs, be it on a regular public school or on a school dedicated to nurture this kids special abilities. What the political groups wanted, and in the end got, was a policy of not acknowledging that there are innate differences between children, and some are "better" than others. It doesn't matter that these kids, that frequent public schools in Brazil, are 100% poor. There is no rich kids in public schools in Brazil, I guarantee you that. The result is, this poor kids could have had a real jump start to their lives, but no. 10 years later they never had a chance, just stayed rotting in the garbage dumpsters the governments call public schools down here. It's the dangers of tabula rasa arguments, if you do not see reality in realities terms you end up hurting people.
- z7 4y ago
  Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27040373 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27040373
- geysersam 4y ago
  Do you have a source for this claim? Sounds incredible.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    Here's one: https://stanforddaily.com/2022/04/07/stanford-and-cal-professors-level-accusations-as-debate-over-state-math-curriculum-rages/ https://stanforddaily.com/2022/04/07/stanford-and-cal-profes... > the reformed framework attempted to remedy achievement gaps by urging public schools to remove certain accelerated math tracks from middle school education. Boaler’s guidelines have become a basis for a statewide push to move these classes, specifically Algebra I, out of middle school.
    - LtWorf 4y ago
      Basically they do that to kill force people who can to send their kids to private schools.
    - geysersam 4y ago
      Strange indeed! Difficult to understand the motivation. How would removing advanced tracks from public schools (with disproportionately more minority students) help equality?
  - tigeba 4y ago
    The district where my kids attend have suggested this on a few occasions. Frequently advanced math is the target. The district has hired a consultant that is charged with professional development for educators in the district. Among other things, the consultant makes claims that tracking is "... a racialized system of exclusion.” and compares it to Apartheid on multiple occasions. The rationale is explicit: "The biggest problem with tracking–by a million miles — is the equity issue." In my opinion combatting inequity in this way, by eliminating a resource that students need to succeed, is an example of “leveling down” or "Harrison Bergeroning" the situation if you will.
- bnralt 4y ago
  Story from a local school: Parents of the more advanced math students in the grade requested some sort of more advanced math opportunities for their kids. School didn't provide any. When several of the kids used a more advanced math concept they had learned outside of school to solve a problem, the teacher told them to not do it that way because they hadn't learned it yet. The school does provide extra classes for kids who they think are behind in one area or another. And if a kid has a lot of issues, a class will even get an extra teacher that just focuses on that kid. Children who perform below grade level or have issues are getting extra attention from the school (great), but children who already know what's being taught are expected to just sit there quietly and waste their time (not so great).
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Note the contrast between that and the athletic department, where schools are absolutely delighted to get a kid with an aptitude for sport, and push him hard to achieve.
    - MichaelCollins 4y ago
      Art classes seem the same, art and music teachers always seem eager to give special attention to kids who do much better than their peers.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        Of course. Very few teachers take any interest in the students who do well in math. In fact, they'll often find them annoying. Yes, there are some teachers who do take an interest and do their best for those students. They just aren't the norm, and they don't get much support from the administration.
        HarryHirsch 4y ago
        Only in America, but that's because the math teachers are nitwits.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  In my highschool there were honors courses, but no AP courses. The school district wanted to replace honor courses with AP courses so that students might earn course credits for college. However the school district was in a working class town were most adults did not have college educations. The introduction of AP courses was fiercely opposed by many of these people, ostensibly because they didn't think it would be fair that taxpayers would have to pay for college credits, when they themselves never went to college. Crab bucket mentality. It's real.
- e_i_pi_2 4y ago
  My school had a lot of different levels of math in particular, I took a lot of the highest courses and loved my teachers, but with the stories I've heard from other students it seems like the school would give the best teachers to the best students, so people already doing bad would only do worse. So I do see some value in removing that because it incentivizes the school to not care about the lower level courses as much. I think a better overall solution would be something like what Khan academy was going for - you can have a bunch of kids at different levels in the same class, and then you can also rely on them to help teach each other more. I think this was the main way schoolhouses were run before the industrial revolution. Then you're not limiting anyone, and you're also not encouraging the weird social effects that come from trying to section off people into discrete buckets
- mcguire 4y ago
  The cynical among us might suspect the real reason to be budget.
  - rahimnathwani 4y ago
    It's not due to lack of budget. For example, in San Francisco, the school district spends $22k per student per year. That figure doesn't include capex.
pjc50 4y ago
What constitutes "ability" and "beauty", and what is acceptable/permitted to idolize, is extremely culturally specific. And the story explores a world with a very different view of those.
- Animats 4y ago
  No, as we learned when morphing started to work, beauty is average. If you average a large number of faces, you get one most humans think is beautiful.[1] Non-beauty seems to be a defect-sensing system. [1] https://petapixel.com/2013/05/28/what-averaged-face-photographs-reveal-about-human-beauty/ https://petapixel.com/2013/05/28/what-averaged-face-photogra...
Dracophoenix 4y ago
Not always. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome People are fickle in their adulation.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y ago
  Oh. Hi! :-) 8minutes faster U!
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
People certainly interpret it as a straw man, but if it was that, I'm really not sure why the author would have decided that Harrison would be declaring himself king, getting a beautiful queen, appointing an aristocracy, being weirdly and unnecessarily violent or literally flying.
hbosch 4y ago
>Don't we always celebrate and idolize ability, beauty etc? It's a complex terrain to navigate, I think. The German term "schadenfreude" comes to mind, specifically, in direct contrast to that. For example, would you say the Kardashian family is celebrated or despised?
aasasd 4y ago
Accusing a ‘science fiction’ story of strawmanning is pretty weird. Moreover, ‘Harrison Bergeron’ can easily be paralleled to Bulgakov's ‘Heart of a Dog’, which is a direct jab at the early Soviet Union. However, idk if Vonnegut was interested in that or read Bulgakov.
swayvil 4y ago
Consider the bloodsoaked frenzy that surrounds any celebrity who steps out of line. Consider, in social media, our quaint tradition of "voting". Suppressing the smart and stupid alike. Enforcing conformity to the norm above all.
WalterBright 4y ago
Americans idolize athletic skill and beauty, but look down on intellectual achievement. "nerds"
- MrZongle2 4y ago
  That's an unnecessary large brush. There are 300 million of us. Are we all the same?
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    When I say "people like ice cream" and you say "not all people like ice cream" I reply "I didn't say all." "All" is a modifier for a reason. For example, people are demanding that the SATs should not be used to evaluate students academic ability, because it's unfair that some students do better on the test than others. Have you ever seen anyone advocate this sort of thing for the school sports program? How about it being unfair and inequitable that top athletes have a leg up on college admissions? Did any PE teacher shower attention on me or the other inept students to bring us up to speed? Nope. The attention was all on the top 2 or 3 athletic students. The rest of us were just an annoyance. (I'm not saying this to complain, as my interests were elsewhere, just illustrating an example.)
    - choko 4y ago
      Using the term "people" or "men" or "women" without a quantifier is misleading. I could say "people think the earth is flat" and it doesn't matter if it's one person or one billion people but the difference is very important.
      - WalterBright 4y ago
        > Using the term "people" or "men" or "women" without a quantifier is misleading If I say "people have two legs" and you reply saying what about amputees, that's a debate tactic, not a misinterpretation. If I say "people are amputees" that would be a false statement. > I could say "people think the earth is flat" and it doesn't matter if it's one person or one billion people but the difference is very important. The term "people" by itself means people in general. Not all people, and not one person in a billion. English is neither a mathematics nor a programming language, and should not be treated as such.

WorldMaker 4y ago

I had a teacher that loved to use Harrison Bergeron as a useful discussion point on the complex difference between "Equality" and "Equity", and my understanding is that is also what Vonnegut intended. (The nihilistic modern Libertarian interpretation of "it's not even worth trying to accommodate differently abled people because Harrison Bergeron said so" seems quite contrary to a lot of Vonnegut's other works.) I appreciate that today we have less likely to be confused with nihilism memes on "equality" versus "equity" such as this now classic: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/94/b9/cf/94b9cff6e57f8bff9db127a2114ce404.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/94/b9/cf/94b9cff6e57f8bff9db127a21... I think it is a shame that we've almost lost some access to good humor/satire/farce such as Vonnegut's in what increasingly feels like a Post-Poe's Law Singularity world where the internet makes it painfully obvious how much "most" people associate any given satire with its most facile arguments and miss the forest for the trees, miss the punchline, or miss the general point.

WalterBright 4y ago
> The nihilistic modern Libertarian interpretation of "it's not even worth trying to accommodate differently abled people because Harrison Bergeron said so" That isn't what Libertarians think.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  Anyone I've ever heard it from was a Libertarian, so it seems fair to use that as a label. I don't know or care if it is a "party plank" shared by "all Libertarians" or "true Libertarians" or "true Scotsmen", it's not relevant to my point.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    You're not hearing it from this libertarian. Libertarianism is not code for rude, thoughtless, meanness, uncharitable, stealing, defrauding, enslaving, etc. It's code for people doing what they want to, as long as they don't hurt others. For example, I follow recommendations for making my web sites more usable for people using screen readers. Not because anyone makes me do it - I'm happy to do it.