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People are getting disillusioned by education; partly because of politics, but also because there's a good reason not to trust the experts. Phonics and memoris
by wisty 2y ago
People are getting disillusioned by education; partly because of politics, but also because there's a good reason not to trust the experts.
Phonics and memorising times tables in schools should be as controversial as hand washing in hospitals, but they aren't, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that a very average layperson can see.
If a doctor or nurse or scientist says something is "evidence based", it works (most of the time). If a teacher or teaching academic says "evidence based", they mean they have some kind of evidence behind it, like in that Simpson's episode ('Well, your honor, we've got plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are 'kinds' of evidence.')
Teaching as an academic discipline has been basically spun out of whole cloth. Universities didn't (really) study education until governments told them to teach it, so they got a ragtag bunch of PhD thesis done, and the best way to do this is to use a very "philosophical" approach, and a very thin actual evidence base. Then they have to teach this to student teachers, most of whom are not really equipped to assess evidence. Then the student teachers who are great at the kind of essays that any student teacher can "engage with" will end up being the next generation of professors.
Schools are run by teachers (who are badly trained) and politicians the public service (which generally defers to the universities). Yes there is a more conservative "evidence based" movement, but even it is nowhere near good enough.
- rTX5CMRXIfFG 2y ago[flagged]
- wisty 2y agoPlease try to be civil. I mentioned phonics, do you agree with what I said on it or not?
- zhdc1 2y agoReintroduction of phonics has been pushed - hard - by academia.
- wisty 2y agoEventually and it was massively controversial within academia. There were studies that showed it worked, but studies are positivist and for many education academics, positivist is an insult. That's why it took literally generations and a political war to soak into academia at large after the science was uncontroversial.
- lelanthran 2y agoWhat's wrong with phonics? Look-see as the only other alternative that I know of has awful results. What did you have in mind?
- miningape 2y agoExactly, this kind of BS "eduction" the teachers receive doesn't really equip teachers with the knowledge to teach anything beyond 12 years old. I believe any subject teacher (i.e. mathematics, physics, english, etc.) should hold at least a bachelors in that subject alongside with a teaching/pedagogy degree. Every bad teacher I've had only had the teaching degree, the best teachers I've had only had a PhD in their subject. Not bad as in dislike - there were plenty of good, competent teachers whom I disliked.
- programjames 2y agoI dislike this notion of "degrees" as proxies for the ability to get the job done. Why not just... interview people. Let them teach a class or two, and see how it goes. Just like with every other job.
- maxehmookau 2y ago> because there's a good reason not to trust the experts I hate this. Where else do we get knowledge from if not experts and academics in their fields? That's how humans grow our collective knowledge. People learn, gather evidence, build knowledge and then share it. The people who have done the learning over many years are called "experts". Those are the people I want to learn from, no? > conservative "evidence based" movement Evidence should not be political. You can either prove something, or you cannot. It is neither conservative, nor liberal.
- pie_flavor 2y agoWhen the experts say that algebra should not be taught in 8th grade, and the experts say that guessing at words instead of sounding them out is a better way to learn to read, and the experts say that calc can be replaced with 'data science' which is actually just data literacy, and so on and so forth, I'm not really interested in how the precise definition of 'experts' actually refers to something about 'growing our collective knowledge'. I'm more interested in staying away from all that. It's a fun gotcha to say things like 'well evidence either is or isn't', but it doesn't change the material reality of who's doing what and what they're likely to be doing in the near future. Public schooling is fucked, the group of people saying 'listen to the experts' is the group of people making it worse, a lot of it is explicitly political, and your best options for guaranteeing that you avoid it are homeschooling or parochial school, regardless of what words and rhetoric can be said about it.
- maxehmookau 2y ago> your best options for guaranteeing that you avoid it are homeschooling Accepting your premise that "public schooling is fucked" (I disagree) there's absolutely zero guarantee that homeschooling is any better for any particular child. It's a completely random chance whether your parent, or whichever potentially untrained person, is going to provide you with an education that sets you up for society, work and the wider world. Public schools at least have defined curricula, governance structures, complaints procedures, _accountability_ in some form.
- e12e 2y ago> Phonics and memorising times tables in schools should be as controversial as hand washing in hospitals, but they aren't, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that a very average layperson can see. Hand washing at hospitals is controversial (again)?
- wisty 2y agoNeither should be controversial.