Topic: Primary and secondary education (Read 1667 times)

This this this this and some more of this.  Kids don't become people when they turn 18; kids aren't property until they turn 18; kids aren't yours or ours and theirs or his, they're people, they were always people, and they should be treated as they are, people, or else they'll grow up thinking they're dogs.  Treat someone like an animal, they'll assume the role of an animal.  There's a disturbing connection between people even in their 40's and above and the way they act like children facing their parents when it comes to the relationship between the citizen and the state.  You break a kid in early, and tell them to listen to you or you'll beat them, like they're not human, like they're a dog needing discipline, and yeah, they'll be obedient lap dogs, and they'll keep that behavior up until the day they die, or until they break out of it of their own accord, as is the case with many of us who were hit when we were younger.  Force teaches people that they're not people, that they're subjugate to a higher power, whether it's the parent, the state, or God itself; that they're second to something else, that there's some real or abstract entity that is above them in every sense of the word.  The worst part is, we don't need to teach someone how to be a person; they're like that already.  We suffocate the logic that a kid is human by telling him he has to do this or that or he'll be punished; you basically turn that human being off, and introduce coercion, as in, "Do this behavior and you'll be punished, but do this other behavior and you'll be rewarded."  This is dog logic.  People logic works as follows: "Do this behavior and you'll be hurting people, but do this behavior and people will be glad you did it."  As all of these conversations boil down to, it's the difference between force and voluntarism.  It's behavior directed by one's own empathy, not behavior directed by another's hand.  It's the difference between freedom and slavery, and it all starts with a freshly created human being.

I seriously don't understand this logic. Kids are people too. After primary/secondary school, we are the same person we were when we were in school.  People aren't forced to learn but they still decide to do it because it benefits themselves. It's not like "fuck yes! I'm out of school! I don't have to learn anything ever again!" No.

I'm gonna say it again. Kids are people too. If we gave them a reason to learn, then they would learn. They aren't some second-class mentally retarded subspecies that need to be forced to do things they don't want to do. If we treated children like people and not children, then they'd behave like people.

Using coercion to educate people is not and has never been the solution, no matter how young the people in question are.

They're both figuring odds. Yes, insurance actuary is (much) more complex, but it's the same basic principle.

This just tells me you don't know much about insurance  I wish it was the same.

Just because the job is boring doesn't mean learning the skills for that job has to be.

For instance: The skills you use in insurance actuary are the same skills you use in determining the odds in a game of chance, such as D&D.

You'd be surprised how much you can learn by playing.

I think that's the part no one has really figured out yet. Used to be you were forced to learn how to work a farm to survive - not fun. Now it's being forced to learn how to do office work - still not fun. When is the fun supposed to come in?

Well, that's a big part of letting a kid learn... providing them the sources, making it fun, and learning along with them.

I think we should force them to learn how to learn, and then provide them with materials and sources to learn from. I think kids are lazy. I also think "letting them learn" shirts parenting and educator responsibility by suggesting that as long as they know how to learn, they're on their own, instead of providing them with tools. My bias comes from me growing up and being surrounded by lazy American kids, and watching them be completely wiped out in education and skills by Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Russian/Ukrainian kids.

Then again, I guess as long as America can sustain being lazy, and competing in the world by continuing to import immigrant labor (I don't mean for farming, I mean for all the top management and research positions in top businesses), then it'll be ok. But my fear is that fewer and fewer educated immigrants are choosing to come to America.

One of the many pitfalls of a democracy, unfortunately.

I find comfort in the fact that technology can and has undermined this system and I hope that it will be gone in my lifetime.

It's odd knowing we have all the answers on how to fix "this" or "that" but not being able to go through with them; there's no button that says "do this", but instead, millions upon millions of people whose minds would need swaying.  All I could really do is raise my kids in this fashion and explain to others (not now, of course, as no parent would listen to the parenting advice of the childless) why one method trumps another.

I approve of this. We should teach kids how to learn, and then let them learn.

I think that at the fundamental level there should be no education system at all. I mean, in the society we have now it wouldn't work if we just took the education system away because there would be a high increase in unemployment; but if we got rid of concepts like "child ownership", child labor laws and minimum wage laws I think it would have a favorable effect on society as a whole.

If you think about it for a second, when are we learning? All the time. So why should we have this huge chunk of our lives set apart to learn irrelevant things that 90% of the time we don't care about and actually do things that would benefit the well being of ourselves and others?

Let say we never had elementary/middle/high school. Then we would have been working, exploring and playing for the first 20 years of our lives. We'd learn about how to manage our finances at a much younger age and we'd have so much more time to decide what we want to do with our lives. When we get to the age of 18 or 20 or whenever most people finish their education we would already have a bit of money and real-world experience under our belt and would be able to retire at a much younger age.

Plus we wouldn't have these impoverished parents living on food stamps and welfare because their kids would also be generating income to the household instead of just being huge money suckers, which essentially means less of a workload for everyone, since kids wouldn't be wasting their efforts on useless homework assignments and actually contributing the economy.

Kids would effectively be less spoiled, mature and responsible as well since they aren't getting things handed to them on a silver platter for the first two decades of their lives.

OK, you want actual ideas.  Since I'm not a parent and don't really have anything invested in education, other than I believe it is lifelong and should be pleasurable (it mostly is for me), I'll just say that I think it should be and can be a pleasurable experience for children too.   And I don't think that fits the current paradigm.

So what's your preference then?

Each parent is going to have a preference on that. They will not necessarily agree. Nor is there one objectively "better" method. Thus, the market.

@hawkeye: Let me repeat this:

Frankly, we aren't going to have much of a discussion by just reiterating that free markets are good.  In addition, I'd like this discussion to also be open to people of other political persuasions.  How the overall system should be run and how an individual school should be run are two different questions, and I'd like to focus on the latter.

Taking into account emerging technologies today aimed at education (such as Khan Academy and Coursera,) I don't think it's a stretch for people of tomorrow to self-educate at home, when no other options are available/preferable.

Lets consider the teacher: say, Ms. Smith, gives the same lecture about basic Algebra each semester.  If she recorded this lecture, she wouldn't have to lecture anymore.  Thus, you wouldn't have to keep paying her to lecture; instead, one could refer to the video, with the drawback of being unable to ask questions (but every question about Algebra has been asked at least fifty times, so these should also be readily available as a FAQ.)  I believe this is exactly how Khan Academy works; one video, watched several times, educates a lot of people, or in the very least, acts as a refresher, or a precursor to a class.

The main argument against this is, "It could never replace the physical experience."  Which I cannot dispute; we haven't had the Internet for long to begin with, so there's still a lot of foggy areas that we cannot yet touch.  But a virtual class isn't impossible; we could have one right now, if we wanted.  All we'd need is a knowledgeable person and an audience, maybe a chat room with screen share.  But again, I have to refer back to Ms. Smith, who already recorded a class about this or that.  Hell, we're learning right now, just by talking to each other on this forum.

Problem is, this all cuts deep into profits made by businesses.  So as you said, we don't know.  Education could be free in the future, in another sense of the word; free because it's copyable and easily distributed, not the false sense of free today when directed at public schools paid by everyone.

I know the "leave it to the market" seems a bit arbitrary but it's the market process that brings the quality to a product or service.

If you have a monopoly without competitors there is no incentive for you to innovate.  In fact, the risks and costs associated with innovating make it prohibitive to do if there is no need to do so.  The people working in the industry would rather spend the money on themselves and keeping things the way they are because that's what they perceive to be working as they think that's the way it's always worked.   Thus they don't adapt to the changing marketplace.

What would schools look like in a competitive market?  Who knows?  We can speculate on it but I don't think anyone truly knows.   Advancing technology brings forth ways of doing things that people have never thought of and upends previous ways of doing things.  Education is no different in this regard.  This is another reason why the current system is so bad.  It's not flexible to change and has government force behind it to prevent it.

I don't think it would look anything like the current system.  I think there would be more flexibility, more mixing of ages, more students following their own paths to knowledge.  I think the regimentation of going through each year until you get to the final year and all that would end up in the trash heap.   More of a focus on dealing with real-life and all the problems it brings up.  Hell, they might even get taught about money and credit.

And really, when you start speculating don't you come up with your own ideas that you find interesting?  Other people do I'm sure as well.  So why do we all have to be jammed into one system?  Who's to say it is the best?  Anyone who wants to can stay in the current system but shouldn't we allow others to choose other paths if that's what they wish.  Education should be about freedom of choice, not being locked into one way of doing things whether you like it or not.

That would be a good direction; not all students learn at the same pace, and I believe all public schools acknowledge this as fact, yet refuse to make any reasonable changes to their system.  Really, all study is independent; the only thing a teacher can do is point a student in the right direction.  As the learning process is a completely individual activity, it is up to the individual to decide how they learn.  A teacher can do their absolute best and still cannot teach all students; it is up to the individual to take in that knowledge and understand it.  If we can assume that a lot of any individual's learning process occurs both in and out of school, and primarily without school once an individual decides they no longer want to attend school (lets say, when they turn 18, or maybe after they get a bachelor's), then it would be reasonable to also assume that the most important thing a teacher can impart in their students is how to learn without the need for a teacher.  However, this would be counter-productive to the business of education, as the point is to keep a student for life, not turn them into self-efficient think-tanks who can study completely independent from any institution (which is exemplified with how much learning material there is on just the Internet, not including downloadable textbooks and other more 'official' learning materials.)

So then schools would want to create a dependency effect...  At which point, it would be up to the populace to snuff out deliberate crippling.  Unless people realize this is bad, however, it would likely become a very popular business practice, as it is a good thing that colleges today are taking in students with a dependency on official school systems for their core influx of knowledge.  Instead, I imagine a school, as you said, to be a place to go to be free to explore your desire to understand, at ones own pace; in adulthood, it would be a quiet area with access to knowledge, but then we could call these highly advanced libraries, right?  Libraries with classes, where it's more so people coming together on a popular subject and ironing out the kinks of their understanding of said subject, possibly with a senior to ensure they're headed in the right direction (whereas instead today, this senior would simply preach to a mass.)  This, I believe, is the true vision of school, on all levels, from primary to postgrad.

Hm, it seems like offering that many activities at one school would be a little impractical.

But, I agree with you that letting the students direct some of their education is key.  I definitely think we need to focus more on independent study.  From what I've been hearing, some homeschoolers have had great success with more self-directed, independent studies.

What I envision is a general scaling down of education.  A school will basically consist of one responsible adult supervising a small group of kids as they study pretty much on their own at their own pace, with frequent class trips to places of interest in the local area.  I'd also like to see more of an effort to expose students to the "real world" at an earlier age, maybe having them organize community service efforts or something.