Comedy and Everything Else

[CaptainBreakfast]

I heartily agree with Keith. What bums me out even more is the fact that the type of education that Keith describes is mandated by the government. By law, you have to send your kid to a giant facility where his/her self worth and esteem will be determined by a letter on a piece of paper, where his/her creativity and desire to learn will have to hide or die, where his/her own identity will eventually be summed up as a function rather than a person.

[scamboogah]

I heartily agree with Keith. What bums me out even more is the fact that the type of education that Keith describes is mandated by the government. By law, you have to send your kid to a giant facility where his/her self worth and esteem will be determined by a letter on a piece of paper, where his/her creativity and desire to learn will have to hide or die, where his/her own identity will eventually be summed up as a function rather than a person.

It's almost as if it's preparing you for the job market or something!

[bridgetosolace]

It's almost as if it's preparing you for the job market or something!

It's almost as if preparing you for repetitive and meaningless tasks is a valuable goal!

[CaptainBreakfast]

Yay society!

[Keith Whitener]

The architects of the system don't really care about education. You can tell by their strict adherence to the false dichotomy of right and wrong. When you care about progress, you focus on that which is best because such terms fail us when we recognize the complexity of reality.

[brewcaster]

something something something
Capitalism

[James Morris]

I guess this is the everything else part of the thread.

[scamboogah]

By law, you have to send your kid to a giant facility where his/her self worth and esteem will be determined by a letter on a piece of paper.

This isn't true, by the way. Lots of people home school their kids, and if you want to send him off to a drum circle all day and call that math class, you have that right.

I mostly agree with Keith's point as well. It just seemed like it was being used as a springboard to advocate goofy hippie ideals of what education should be.

If everyone was taught that repetitive labor was something you should never do, there wouldn't be any goods and materials in the world, and I would be etching this comment into a rock hoping a cat would come nearby so I'd have something to eat for dinner.

[Keith Whitener]

I mostly agree with Keith's point as well. It just seemed like it was being used as a springboard to advocate goofy hippie ideals of what education should be.

What goofy ideals? That schools should not be for memorization but for cultivating critical thinking skills? Yeah, real loopy.

[bridgetosolace]

I mostly agree with Keith's point as well. It just seemed like it was being used as a springboard to advocate goofy hippie ideals of what education should be.

If you think about it, our current school system only prepares you in the sense that it makes you do things you don't want to do. It's horrible logic to think that because you'll have to do do stuff against your will later, it's okay to make you do stuff you don't want to do now.

How many jobs actually require that you use more than 20% (random number out of ass) of what you learned in school? How many people actually REMEMBER more than 20% of what you learned? I'm a year out of high school and I've already forgotten most of the history I learned. And I really liked my history class!

The things that stick with you in school aren't the facts, which is where the emphasis lies in education today, but rather mental skills you develop to sort and interpret facts. Critical thinking is the most important aspect of education, and it's not something you can cram for before a test or forget a few weeks later.

Critical thinking, since it really applies to every aspect of your life, really does prepare you for the work force. Even the most menial tasks can be improved by some level of critical thinking.

You still learn facts when you emphasize critical thinking, it's just that information as a goal is fundamentally flawed and short sighted.

I've posted a few links to him before, which I'm sure have been tl;dr'd, but he's a great communicator and thinker.

http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/welleducated.htm

What does it mean to be well-educated?

(note that I'm not really disagreeing with you so much as commenting, so there's no need for you to say 'I never said that our current school system was good!', I know)

[scamboogah]

What goofy ideals? That schools should not be for memorization but for cultivating critical thinking skills? Yeah, real loopy.

I think part of the problem is that I currently live near areas like Berkeley and Santa Cruz, where even critical thinking is seen as brainwashing. It seemed to me that this conversation was veering toward the ideal that no one should ever be judged, and that every child should be revered as a gifted artist. A place where one will never have a need for knowing how bureaucracy works.

This is a theory that I totally disagree with. In my experience, households with limited expectations, judgemental school systems, and mediocre teachers often produce the most creative minds whereas children of hippies in Berkeley and Santa Cruz are usually conservative douchebags or socially retarded fools with heads full of everything except how to get and keep a job.

[bridgetosolace]

It seemed to me that this conversation was veering toward the ideal that no one should ever be judged, and that every child should be revered as a gifted artist. A place where one will never have a need for knowing how bureaucracy works.

Grades are a negative influence on student's intellectual lives, but that doesn't mean that there's no form of evaluation in a good school. Just that the evaluation should be substantive and meaningful rather than shallow and useless.

Should ever child be revered as a gifted artist? No, of course not. But that doesn't mean that every child shouldn't be given the chance to be treated like one. I for one have no interest in visual art and would never would have voluntarily pursued it in my schooling. A good school then wouldn't force me to paint something and treat me like I'm a great painter

And I'm not sure what you mean by the bureaucracy. You mean that they're developing kids that don't know that bureaucracy will fuck them? So we should fuck them earlier when it isn't necessary? That's retarded. There's also the aspect that fucking students earlier just breeds complacent morons that don't contribute to bettering the system.

And if "even critical thinking is considered brainwashing", then hey, those school systems are bad too.

This is a theory that I totally disagree with. In my experience, households with limited expectations, judgemental school systems, and mediocre teachers often produce the most creative minds

So we should stifle our children's creativity in hopes that they'll end up being creative anyway? Just because it happens doesn't mean that's how it should happen.

Our educational system is destructive and flawed. Yes, some students still end up being creative, but that's in spite of their schooling, not because of it.

EDIT: I think I got rid of the main strawman. If I didn't, feel free to point it out.

[Keith Whitener]

Bridget, please hold the straw man arguments at bay, or we'll all start using them and then we'll become pros and put all the tv pundits out of work and unemployment will go up. Do you want more homeless?! IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT?

I think Scammy just thought I was heading in that direction because, as he explained, he is surrounded by people who preach wrong minded education reform. I'm not for super coddling. That's a form of abstinence only education. Feelings get hurt in this world; teach how to deal with hurt feelings.

I think that by not cultivating real critical thinking skills that we are not preparing people for real world discourse and problems. I say we're only as old as we act and the latter is why this country is run by 15-year-olds.

[nathansmart]

JimmyJimmy: Do you get the feeling that people on here want to do away with unions or reform them? That might help frame the debate a little.

[KeithTalent]

The straw man I see is Scammy's portrait of what these crazy Berkeley hippies want. I want to see an article about this person from the community, who is taken seriously, quoted as saying "Oh la di dah let's treat every child as a GIFTED artist and give them hugs instead of grades and teach them not to pay their bills! And they should all float to school on lilypads!"


I had a teacher in high school (North Carolina) who told the class we were still on the gold standard. I argued of course. There's nothing that bugs me more than being told I'm wrong about a fact I know is correct. I even told him what fucking YEAR it happened. (actual exchange: "Well then what's Fort Knox for?" "Tourists." Teacher gives some sarcasm, an "oh please" if I recall, which sets me off "What do you think they'd do? 'Hey guys we're not on the gold standard anymore, time to start casting gold out into the streets!'")

I had to give up because the teacher wouldn't budge and the rest of the class obviously didn't give a damn. I was still steamed, so I went to an Econ teacher and borrowed his textbook. Later that week I tried to get my teacher to read the relevant paragraph aloud for the class. He read it silently and admitted to me that I was right, but said nothing to the class. Better to let 'em stay ignorant than admit a personal mistake! Unbelievably, the same exact thing happened to a friend of mine...different teacher, same school. [/irrelevant]

[KeithTalent]

edit: As if that post weren't bad enough of course it double-drops.

Any time you think I'm a jerk on this board you can read the above post and be glad you didn't know me in high school.

[JimmyJimmy]

Wow, Keith's post is just about the smartest thing I have read about education in a long time. Well done sir, thanks for sharing.

[JimmyJimmy]

I was referring to this post:

If we're talking the fault of the American education system, I'd say the whole pedagogy is at fault from the fact that students are all taught the same thing in the same way regardless of their interest or their learning styles at a pace most often dictated by the slowest student or simply the teacher's whims to the very curriculum itself. The curriculum is redundant, but most of it is forgotten. I've seen Glory three times! I've memorized and forgotten all about WW2 on three separate occasions! Maybe it's our consumerist culture that makes people think that the amount of stuff you "have" in your brain, the trivia you know, is how smart you are, as opposed to critical thinking skills, which can't be measured by rattling off dates or formulas.

Children are naturally curious, but the why questions decrease significantly once they enter academia. Grades and quotas are not the answer, but they're the easiest tool which is why they're employed. The emphasis is on memorization at the expense of understanding and critical thinking, which, again, is because it's easier to quantify multiple choice than essays. And essays are revised, while the strict grading leaves no room for revision. Then there's the arts, which are drastically cut, leading to people being unable to express themselves to others and, most importantly, unable to express themselves to themselves.

People are social animals. It is their experiences with others that create the persons that they will be, and yet school does not focus on socializing people except for preparing them for a life time of employment and alienation. Teachers are just people, and often not even special people. I've personally been compared to Hitler, have had a friend compared to Ted Bundy, and when I wrote a research paper--which got an A--called Faults of the American Education System, the faculty member I met with said in a sarcastic tone, "If you don't like it, leave. That's like telling a depressed person, "Hey, if you're so sad why don't you just kill ourself?"

A wrong answer in the class room can make people feel insecure and unwilling to participate, but most teachers lack the faculties to deal with or identify such issues. Most people lack the same skill set, so it's no surprise. The sort of people who I meet as education majors makes me apprehensive about the future.

Teacher morale is affected by all of this as well. I've seen and spoken with plenty of teachers/professors who are jaded and themselves apathetic due to student apathy. But where does that apathy come from? The schools themselves.

If people say, "It would require too many teachers to teach well," how is that a problem? Where else are our resources spent if not on educating people? Unemployment is on the rise, but we're firing teachers. People join the military just for the money, they don't care about the cause. Smart people, not just the uneducated poor the military usually gets involved. College grads who can't find work in cubicle farms or tanning salons are joining the armed services. Put them in schools instead.

[rajagiri4]

it's good joke.

[nathansmart]

I haven't finished listening yet but I have a friend who has a sister that always brought up something in their life that they both have HUGE disagreements on when they talked on the phone. He dealt with it by mentioning to her that he didn't want to discuss it anymore because all it did was put a strain on their relationship. After he said that to her, anytime that the subject came up in conversations he would immediately say that he's gotta run (for whatever reason) and end the conversation IMMEDIATELY.

Now, when they talk, it doesn't happen.