"Student as nigger" - Essay on problems with schools and teaching (1969)

"Occasionally, a class is unbelievably faithful to the traditional seating plan. They sit mournfully facing an empty altar and they sprain their necks trying to see me and the other students. I curse and mutter but they hold firm. It's almost as though they're saying:, "Screw you, you bastard, you're going to have to tell us to move." And I swear to myself I won't."

Oddly enough I couldn't help but think about Jacob on Lost when I read that paragraph.

In general, I agree with the themes, but, you know what, I'm really happy someone taught me that a mole is 6.0210^23, and that G is 6.6710^-11. I appreciate being able to write a complete sentence, and feel sorry for those who can't communicate in written format.

So, if that makes me a slave to the system, so be it. What the author fails to appreciate, is that perhaps some of us will have a happier life being lead through a system, not everyone is going to be an entrepreneurial learner. We certainly do lose some freedom, and to some degree propagate a system of enslavement - but it serves some of us fairly well.

I realize the author is writing on a higher plane, but it's also interesting how some of his thoughts compare to PG's: "It would be well if we stopped lying to ourselves about what compulsory schooling does for our children. It temporarily imprisons them; it standardizes them; it intimidates them. If that's what we want, we should admit it."

I thought it was a good read, but maybe that's because I'm listening to Eminem's "I'm not Afraid" on repeat. :-)

Well, I was going to comment on the attention-whoringly inflammatory title, but I note it was written in 1969 when the word you-know-what was several orders of magnitude less inflammatory than it is now, so I hope we can move past that.

The main problem with the rest of the article is that it's so exaggerated that it's hardly worth engaging with.

The link goes to a different essay from the book. The actual titular essay is here: http://ry4an.org/readings/short/student/

The only discernible point of this essay is that you shouldn't travel back in time to 1969 and enroll at Cal State LA.

I have been in actual class, in the last 3 years, where this text was used as the opening reading. It was a course on pedagogy. The teacher was using it as a lightning rod, a discussion piece. The teacher used it, I think, to quickly sort the class in to the types of people she had in her classroom.

To be blunt, I love this essay. And, there seem to be few of you engaging in the ideas. Yes, its easy to look at it and say utopia, never going to happen. And, yet, it's easy to say well if this was the case, no one would learn anything, but come on, dig in.

I think the point is, and it's one that paul graham him self has made in his book, Hackers and Painters, is that students are trying to learn real things, but in most cases they are just sitting there being talked at. Not in all cases, but most cases.

I don't think he is trying to say that things like chemistry, and physics aren't important, but he is making the point that giving people a choice is more important.

Before I make my passionate case for the way I like to learn, its important to state that I realize that there are as many ways to learn as there are colors. We can probably sort people in to a small number of effective buckets, but diversity is the name of the game.

I don't practice anything passionately that was taught to me in school. Programming, cooking, writing. They tried to teach me writing, but they tried in an English teacher way, and I don't write, or think like an English teacher.

The things I choice to care about, and I chose to get better at, I do best.

And, I can hear you already, you liberal education people, yelling, "but if you don't force people to learn lots of things, they won't ever do it by themselves.", bull shit, of course there are going to be people who refuse to learn anything, but come on, life is a bell curve, most people would probably choose to learn, a moderate amount of things ,in moderation, and that is fine.

The damage we are doing, as argued by the essay, is that by forcing everyone to learn the same things, determined by people other then the people learning, is that we are probably turning many, otherwise eager to learn people, off of learning for ever, because they are forced to learn things they don't care about, and a lot of things they really don't care about.

So, come on, lets engage on the subject matter.

Hackers, and Painters http://books.google.com/books?id=B4dk0tYPrckC&printsec=f...