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Education education education. The silver bullet. I know silver bullets don't exist, but educating just doesn't seem to get the societal positive attention it

Education education education. The silver bullet. I know silver bullets don't exist, but educating just doesn't seem to get the societal positive attention it so thoroughly needs and deserves. Where the silver bullet fails is the "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it realise its thirsty" analogy. School and education have been conflated in a detrimental way, and the reputation of schooling needs urgent repair. During Covid it seemed as if teaching was on the brink of earning more respect, but it was very quickly forgotten and probably only got the attention for reasons of childcare as opposed to education. All implications of the above are a sad indictment of where society has found itself. Additionally, if we follow the path of assuming everyone is a moron, we very quickly reach The Nanny State. This is the current pendulum swing.

MisterBastahrd 4y ago
As a child, you spend 8 hours a day in class and then you potentially have 16 hours a day of indoctrination time with family. We are taught to respect our parents, and so to a good child who respects his parents, it goes without saying that the child would also respect his parents' beliefs. Your teacher is ephemeral. They are your teacher for a year and then you will almost always move on and have no more of a relationship with them. Parents are forever. There are plenty of stupid and abusive parents.
- doubleg72 4y ago
  This is pretty much it.. you can't make parents be parents unfortunately.
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  Totally aware, as I have a number of teachers that are part of my close and extended family. The caveat, somewhat, is that good teachers (true scotsmen) can be closer to a parental and positive influence on a child than a stupid or abusive parent almost exclusively because the (good) teacher is not stupid and abusive. There's a glaring "no true scotsman" fallacy in my logic above, but my point is that stupid and abusive creates its own opportunity for improvement. My vicarious and anecdotal experience seems to bear this out (but having said that, my vicarious and anecdotal experience comes through teachers who are dedicated, experienced, and committed to the outcomes of the children, which is rarer than it should be). There's no escaping the trauma of bad parents, but the ability to present the opportunity for a brighter future can help immeasurably. Hope. It can be better than it is.
- brnaftr361 4y ago
  Yeah well that's kind of an unfortunate consequence of the complete deferral of responsibility on to the state. It takes a village but the liability for the well-being of any given child is so dispersed they may as well have no caretakers whatsoever. And with the rapid advance of technology nobody has a plotted demonstrably universal plan for cultivating an individual. And we never did, but the inexorable complications added by the face-peeling pace of technological advancement is leaving parents, the state, teachers, and whatever remainder else of the village totally blind insofar as divining inputs and the resulting outputs as it concerns the "education" system. I'll let you factor in the massive populations, strife, inequity, massive social changes and etc... And it's a pretty terrible bureaucracy no matter what your perspective may be. It's rife with failure in the noteworthy aspects where it is overly-rigid, and equally so in the areas where no rules or regulations exist. Large parts of it are given to Goodhart's Law, so the results aren't actually as one would hope for them to be, erstwhile it alienates many children in various ways, pressing them into a perpetual ennui, anxieties fit only for consenting adults, social isolation, undesired social exposure, and at the end of it all it's quite probable due to many factors, they will walk away just as vacuous as they would have been if they were pressed through some much more comfortable alternative. The glum reality of it all is, is that it is little more than the facade, and mostly it serves the purpose of childcare these days. But more importantly your insipid comment that, God forbid, someone actually give the child some basis for moral structure is itself precisely what I mean to communicate when I speak of the deference - throughout my attainment I was never once given any meaningful education on ethics, or civics, on value or right and wrong. It was rule and law, but never the Rule of Law. And that does not make an upright person. And science does little to inform morality, and droll literature did little to inform us of the myriad moral conundrums inexorably a part of real life. Just because you disagree with it does not make it wrong, that is arrogance. I would say that I was fortunate to have an upstanding parental figure who fought against all odds to raise me singlehandedly and did so with the most couth methods imaginable - hard and ceaseless labor - but unfortunately I'm in an arena where civility we're so won't to brag about exists only as shibboleth, and I and my like have to dance with backbiting vipers who are more than willing to use uncouth methods to gate or otherwise swallow whole anyone who has some sense of dignity, fairness, accountability, or empathy. And they do so from the bastions of these monolithic bureaucracies hidden behind gilded titles and moats of texts and rules and laws - fictions. But by God maybe if we had teachers willing to step out of the relativistic framework, institutions that respected thousand-year old proven frameworks, even just a human ecology class - by God maybe there wouldn't be so many snakes in the system. And it's not some isolated incident, I can point to highly visible instances like the GFC or the recent congressional insider trading debacle or the countless instances of corporate misbehavior... Because nobody "indoctrinated" the shitheels at the helm of these catastrophic fuckups.
- jimbokun 4y ago
  Very few people grow up to believe exactly everything their parents believe. If anything, peers have been shown to be more influential on beliefs than parents.
orange_fritter 4y ago
I agree but as with basically all things... it's messy. North Korea believes deeply in education. I fear that only once one political party's view of heresy has been solidly ingrained in the education system, will we then see education getting any funding again. It seems that since tribalism and fear of enemies is the most powerful political motivator, we can only invest in systems that reinforce a tribalism-based tool of manipulation. Because of such crystallization, in America, critical thinking has become fairly close to heresy, and any tid bit of questioning of your own group's inflexible logic must be couched in "please don't hate me, I'm on your side" first. Those of us that enjoy being contrarian to our friends are getting less and less boost in social media, and most political messaging now contains a bite of "the other side, your fellow Americans, are corrupt/evil/incompetent." I just don't know how we can shake this situation but I think free speech isn't the problem at all, it's the incentives around our speech.
- BLKNSLVR 4y ago
  Yes, the blank word "education" means essentially nothing. I think most people on HN (including yourself) understand my intention, however you are absolutely correct that "education" can mean wildly varying things if they have pre-conceived outcomes to which "education" is being directed. cough Vocational education and training centers cough [0] My definition is along the lines of independent thought, critical thinking, alternative perspectives, the scientific method, (stretching here: mathematics as a language of observed behaviour). Teaching them to fish rather than giving them a fish. Anything other than blind acceptance, or at least providing a sense of judgement to know when blind acceptance may be justified. And none of this is easy because 1) once a child is of school age they've already got a firm base of blind acceptances that, basically, work against their own education, and 2) independent thought and critical thinking means a lot of asking "why?" and lots of asking of "why?" takes up precious[1] curriculum teaching time. [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps [1]:Precious to school and education board/department management KPIs that have no provable basis in positive real-world outcomes for either society or the individual
TexanFeller 4y ago
> Education education education. The silver bullet. Something like 25% of the population has an IQ <90. Education cannot take such people very far. I support almost absolute free speech nonetheless.
Dudeman112 4y ago
>if we follow the path of assuming everyone is a moron, we very quickly reach The Nanny State What if everyone actually was a moron? In that hypothetical, would we just pretend it's not the case to not get the nanny state?

MisterBastahrd 4y ago

As a child, you spend 8 hours a day in class and then you potentially have 16 hours a day of indoctrination time with family. We are taught to respect our parents, and so to a good child who respects his parents, it goes without saying that the child would also respect his parents' beliefs. Your teacher is ephemeral. They are your teacher for a year and then you will almost always move on and have no more of a relationship with them. Parents are forever. There are plenty of stupid and abusive parents.

doubleg72 4y ago
This is pretty much it.. you can't make parents be parents unfortunately.
BLKNSLVR 4y ago
Totally aware, as I have a number of teachers that are part of my close and extended family. The caveat, somewhat, is that good teachers (true scotsmen) can be closer to a parental and positive influence on a child than a stupid or abusive parent almost exclusively because the (good) teacher is not stupid and abusive. There's a glaring "no true scotsman" fallacy in my logic above, but my point is that stupid and abusive creates its own opportunity for improvement. My vicarious and anecdotal experience seems to bear this out (but having said that, my vicarious and anecdotal experience comes through teachers who are dedicated, experienced, and committed to the outcomes of the children, which is rarer than it should be). There's no escaping the trauma of bad parents, but the ability to present the opportunity for a brighter future can help immeasurably. Hope. It can be better than it is.
brnaftr361 4y ago
Yeah well that's kind of an unfortunate consequence of the complete deferral of responsibility on to the state. It takes a village but the liability for the well-being of any given child is so dispersed they may as well have no caretakers whatsoever. And with the rapid advance of technology nobody has a plotted demonstrably universal plan for cultivating an individual. And we never did, but the inexorable complications added by the face-peeling pace of technological advancement is leaving parents, the state, teachers, and whatever remainder else of the village totally blind insofar as divining inputs and the resulting outputs as it concerns the "education" system. I'll let you factor in the massive populations, strife, inequity, massive social changes and etc... And it's a pretty terrible bureaucracy no matter what your perspective may be. It's rife with failure in the noteworthy aspects where it is overly-rigid, and equally so in the areas where no rules or regulations exist. Large parts of it are given to Goodhart's Law, so the results aren't actually as one would hope for them to be, erstwhile it alienates many children in various ways, pressing them into a perpetual ennui, anxieties fit only for consenting adults, social isolation, undesired social exposure, and at the end of it all it's quite probable due to many factors, they will walk away just as vacuous as they would have been if they were pressed through some much more comfortable alternative. The glum reality of it all is, is that it is little more than the facade, and mostly it serves the purpose of childcare these days. But more importantly your insipid comment that, God forbid, someone actually give the child some basis for moral structure is itself precisely what I mean to communicate when I speak of the deference - throughout my attainment I was never once given any meaningful education on ethics, or civics, on value or right and wrong. It was rule and law, but never the Rule of Law. And that does not make an upright person. And science does little to inform morality, and droll literature did little to inform us of the myriad moral conundrums inexorably a part of real life. Just because you disagree with it does not make it wrong, that is arrogance. I would say that I was fortunate to have an upstanding parental figure who fought against all odds to raise me singlehandedly and did so with the most couth methods imaginable - hard and ceaseless labor - but unfortunately I'm in an arena where civility we're so won't to brag about exists only as shibboleth, and I and my like have to dance with backbiting vipers who are more than willing to use uncouth methods to gate or otherwise swallow whole anyone who has some sense of dignity, fairness, accountability, or empathy. And they do so from the bastions of these monolithic bureaucracies hidden behind gilded titles and moats of texts and rules and laws - fictions. But by God maybe if we had teachers willing to step out of the relativistic framework, institutions that respected thousand-year old proven frameworks, even just a human ecology class - by God maybe there wouldn't be so many snakes in the system. And it's not some isolated incident, I can point to highly visible instances like the GFC or the recent congressional insider trading debacle or the countless instances of corporate misbehavior... Because nobody "indoctrinated" the shitheels at the helm of these catastrophic fuckups.
jimbokun 4y ago
Very few people grow up to believe exactly everything their parents believe. If anything, peers have been shown to be more influential on beliefs than parents.

orange_fritter 4y ago

I agree but as with basically all things... it's messy. North Korea believes deeply in education. I fear that only once one political party's view of heresy has been solidly ingrained in the education system, will we then see education getting any funding again. It seems that since tribalism and fear of enemies is the most powerful political motivator, we can only invest in systems that reinforce a tribalism-based tool of manipulation. Because of such crystallization, in America, critical thinking has become fairly close to heresy, and any tid bit of questioning of your own group's inflexible logic must be couched in "please don't hate me, I'm on your side" first. Those of us that enjoy being contrarian to our friends are getting less and less boost in social media, and most political messaging now contains a bite of "the other side, your fellow Americans, are corrupt/evil/incompetent." I just don't know how we can shake this situation but I think free speech isn't the problem at all, it's the incentives around our speech.

BLKNSLVR 4y ago
Yes, the blank word "education" means essentially nothing. I think most people on HN (including yourself) understand my intention, however you are absolutely correct that "education" can mean wildly varying things if they have pre-conceived outcomes to which "education" is being directed. cough Vocational education and training centers cough [0] My definition is along the lines of independent thought, critical thinking, alternative perspectives, the scientific method, (stretching here: mathematics as a language of observed behaviour). Teaching them to fish rather than giving them a fish. Anything other than blind acceptance, or at least providing a sense of judgement to know when blind acceptance may be justified. And none of this is easy because 1) once a child is of school age they've already got a firm base of blind acceptances that, basically, work against their own education, and 2) independent thought and critical thinking means a lot of asking "why?" and lots of asking of "why?" takes up precious[1] curriculum teaching time. [0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps [1]:Precious to school and education board/department management KPIs that have no provable basis in positive real-world outcomes for either society or the individual

TexanFeller 4y ago

> Education education education. The silver bullet. Something like 25% of the population has an IQ <90. Education cannot take such people very far. I support almost absolute free speech nonetheless.

Dudeman112 4y ago

>if we follow the path of assuming everyone is a moron, we very quickly reach The Nanny State What if everyone actually was a moron? In that hypothetical, would we just pretend it's not the case to not get the nanny state?