Then again, that‘s not going to happen as it would eventually destroy whole industries and populist voter bases.
I smell a non-profit I should do one day…
Then again, that‘s not going to happen as it would eventually destroy whole industries and populist voter bases.
I smell a non-profit I should do one day…
Remember, these are the people who require your drivers ed instructor to tell you to go 55 on I95 where the traffic goes 85. They're optimizing for covering their own butts while nominally educating people. They don't really care about truly education people so those people can go do to what will result in the best outcome for them.
They'll do something self serving and asinine like tell students you should make minimum payments on high interest debt rather than ask for a financial hardship extension/reduction for government services/fees/fines (which in many cases are legally required to take that into account).
Besides, the alternatives to public education are all worse.
There are millions of people who went to charter schools, private schools or were home schooled who would take issue with his last sentence. They got fine educations. I'm a big believer in good parents making up for bad schools but you can't just hand wave away the productivity of all the professionals involved in schooling by saying "their parents cared they would have turned out fine wherever they went" (which is the typical retort).
Catholicism has fewer cultural proscriptions than what the predominant waspy culture wanted. For example, Catholic schools in native American reservations didn't seek to undo Indian culture. This state of affairs was not acceptable and there was a chance said children would become catholic.
Thus, the WASPs, unable to organize schooling in their own churches for their children at an affordable price (a problem which still exists today.. catholic schools are empirically cheaper than other christian schools), turned to the government as the only way to combat the papists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_public_education_in...
I am not anti public school, but I just take issues with the idea that public schools original purpose was for equality. As Thomas Sowell points out in "education in america", catholic schools do better than public ones for minorities even when accounting for socieconomic factors. This is probably why minorities disproportionately favor vouchers.
Public schools leading to equality is today a 'fact' asserted with little empirical data and any attempt at refutation is met with all kinds of accusations.
I didn't say it was.
> For example, Catholic schools in native American reservations didn't seek to undo Indian culture.
Are you sure about that?
> Public schools leading to equality is today a 'fact' asserted with little empirical data
I know of no person who asserts that fact.
Yes. Whether it was the California missions or the Jesuit missions of Canada, by far the missionaries were better than the other European authorities. Perfect? No. Better... Yes
This is a good article detailing the original approach of the church before the authorities started getting involved. It's not what you think it is.
https://forheavenssake46778317.wordpress.com/2021/06/08/resi...
But with all respect, you don't in fact know what I think.
That's fair. I shouldn't have said that.
Re the blog post... it cites several books and scholarly texts, and mainly chooses which ones to present. Now of course, that's a form of bias, but the books and source materials are explicitly listed and I believe they paint the picture even clearer than the blog post.
In the case of speeding it is well known that higher speeds leads to more traffic deaths so we can easily calculate the death toll of people going 85 instead of 55 and implement appropriate measures to reduce that.
Just because everyone ignores or despises a law, it doesn't necessarily make it unjust or wrong.
Even with many young men, you are not cool, not a rebel, not “boys will be boys”, not “just this once”, none of that “I live nearby”. You are a bloody idiot, mate, and a wanker.
But there is a very practical point that if the "governed" are not listening, than the "governor" had better! Revolutions and civil wars have occurred over such.
Also too often "popular" is conflated with "visible/noisome support". See the gay marriage here in Australia. Lots of noise on both sides, it took a referendum to prove that 61% supported it.
Aside: my experience is it has been socially unacceptable to drink drive for 25+ years for everyone I know. You and I are having different life experiences!
Hope yours is a good one, cheers!
Things aren't always so simple when second level effects are accounted for.
Several reports point out that when the 55 speed limit was repealed, traffic deaths increased. Here are a couple of citations:
1) "Rising speed limits over the past 25 years have cost nearly 37,000 lives, including more than 1,900 in 2017 alone, a new study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety shows ... For the new study, Charles Farmer, IIHS vice president for research and statistical services, analyzed the effect of changes in the maximum posted speed limit in every state from 1993 to 2017. ... Farmer found that a 5 mph increase in the maximum speed limit was associated with an 8 percent increase in the fatality rate on interstates and freeways " - https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/speed-limit-increases-are-t...
2) "Long-Term Effects of Repealing the National Maximum Speed Limit in the United States" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2724439/
> We examined the long-term effects of the 1995 repeal of federal speed limit controls on road fatalities and injuries in fatal crashes. ... We found a 3.2% increase in road fatalities attributable to the raised speed limits on all road types in the United States. The highest increases were on rural interstates (9.1%) and urban interstates (4.0%). We estimated that 12 545 deaths (95% confidence interval [CI] = 8739, 16 352) and 36 583 injuries in fatal crashes (95% CI = 29 322, 43 844) were attributable to increases in speed limits across the United States."
But that's after it was repealed.
Going back to when the law was put into place, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law#Saf... states "The limit's effect on highway safety is unclear."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5005740/ shows "Joinpoint analysis of trends in motor vehicle traffic fatality rates, all ages, by sex, 1968 to 2010" in figure 2 you can see the decrease in fatalities after the law was put into place in 1973, followed by a regression to a decreasing mean.
This is in agreement with Wikipedia's statement "Although the vast majority of states reported fewer traffic deaths in 1974 compared with 1973, there were in fact three states where traffic deaths actually increased ... According to the National Research Council, there was a decrease in fatalities of about 3,000 to 5,000 lives in 1974, and about 2,000 to 4,000 lives saved annually thereafter through 1983".
It therefore doesn't appear that traffic deaths increased with the enactment of the National Maximum Speed Law.
Roads designed for 30, 55 and 85 miles are completely different beasts with different lane width, straight segments length, turn radius, traffic calming elements, etc.
Puting an autobahn and plunking a 50 mph limit there is a recipe for all-out "speeding."
People ignore the sign if the sign doesn't match the road design.
A lawyer got the county to up the speed limit on a boulevard I drive, after he got mad over a ticket.
(I don't know the details. It's something to do with Speed Traps I think? I remember seeing an angry Lawyer, and felt he had a right to be pissed in a local newspaper.)
That is, the contract that needs to be revisited is the contract which says that we prefer private cars over mass transit, walking, and bikes; that we prefer zoning over mixed use; that we prefer sprawl over density; that we design roads the encourage people to speed; that we mandate parking minimums; etc.
While I think you think the contract to revisit in the one which says people are breaking the law by following the speed of traffic instead of the speed limit.
Tbf, I have no idea what the average level of financial literacy is. But I worked in financial services and I can confirm that: having a lot of cash from a job in which you are supposed to have financial literacy (corporate lawyer, accountant, etc.) and/or working in financial services in which you have completed exams on financial literacy...does not mean you have financial literacy/will make reasonable decisions.
It shifts your view of reality significantly when you are in your early 20s, just out of college having to explain basic elements of finance to: a financial adviser managing $100mm of other people's money, a corporate lawyer worth ~$10mm, [insert other horrific situations].
...there is no other way to gain knowledge apart from learning, it is not some innate skill. But that supposes that people designing the course know what they are doing, this is a fairly ambitious assumption given that anyone who has financial competence is, generally, not designing courses for the state govt.
And, ofc, lack of information isn't why people make poor financial choices. One of the flaws of financial regulation (and economics) is assuming that if everyone had perfect information, they would make the same decision. This is equivalent to the guy who has a view on the death penalty and thinks anyone who disagrees with them does so because they don't have the "correct information". The issue isn't information, people know they shouldn't take out the high-interest loan when they have to speak to some sleazy guy in an ill-fitting suit at a strip mall (these heuristics work well). People take out these loans because of poverty and a lack of options (particularly in the US, massive unbanked population, large banks won't deal with poor people, unconscionable level of arbitrary fees that fine poverty). Unless the course teaches people how not to be poor, it is flushing money down the drain.
(A side-note for the target reader: the reason why rich people make bad decisions also isn't bad information...it is usually a combination of greed and studying to get stupid i.e. subjects like economics. Wealthy people only see upside, they will believe utterly ludicrous shit that makes no sense because...hey, they are wealthy, and they got wealthy through those smarts (as an example, every wealthy investor I have ever met has gone through the "goldbug" phase...it is amazing how consistent this is). Again, you can't teach it. Ironically, if you combined the paranoia of a poor person with the risk tolerance of a risk person, you would actually have someone who makes decent decisions...but those two attributes tend not to be found within one individual.)
Pretty sure learning about interest was part of the curriculum.
I went to a shitty public school in the middle of nowhere and they taught us to budget, handle bank accounts, etc. We even had fake jobs with fake bills and had to make a household budget. They even offered a class with fake babies that girls had to carry around to teach them parenting skills.
The problem with teaching life skills is that they are not retained if they are not relevant to a person's situation. Kids don't have bills or jobs; money is an abstract concept to them. With this in mind, financial literacy should not be taught in schools, it should be taught to 20-30 year olds who long since left school.
They were extremely easy classes taught by not-the-best teachers (often gym teachers) but still pretty informative and I did learn how to sew pretty well.
My wife attended well-known private schools in the US and Korea and never learned these skills.
The man showed us his wallet full of credit cards, but I think (and hope) that we were all old enough to understand what was going on and simply feel a little bad for him. The moral of the anecdote, though, is that sometimes the code doesn't run the way you planned it to, and good ideas run through the wrong systems result in strange errors.
My father teaches so long as he stubbornly refuses to retire, and as of 5 years ago was still required to teach about floppy disks. He is in a non-tech field. I'm a product of my experiences, but I skeptically and open-mindedly remain on the 'damn gubmint' side for now.
As an example of this, when I took out student loans they were sold to me as "fixed interest" (literal words used and it was at the typical point where you have the option to pick a fixed interest or variable interest rate). My dad and I had a conversation about fixed vs variable interests and the risks involved. But to our surprise later we found that it was "fixed interest repayment option" and not "fixed interest repayment rate." I wouldn't say my family is financially illiterate, far from it actually. But there's still predatory behavior like this that preys on more "Swiss-cheese knowledge" that a non-expert would have and a lack of understanding all the legalize (and my dad has a JD).
So I do think we should make people more rounded in their knowledge, but we also need to do more and ensure that we curb predatory behavior. The disadvantage of making people more well rounded is that the excuse of "they should have understood" becomes more powerful. But no matter how good you are you're not going to beat a team of lawyers and psychologists that want to implement dark patterns. But then again, I think if people were more educated then this argument would be less contentious and we'd recognize that a single person is always going to be outclassed.
Any specialist worth their salt can mislead or scam a layman. In some idustries you go to jail, but in others its somehow an accepted practice.
media competency - part of history class, including evaluating sources, history of yellow journalism, etc.
scientific method - 6+ years of science class
cui bono - this is apparently a fancy term for motive, which was discussed during history class (specifically explaining the judicial branch)
negotiations, assertiveness, how to deal with bullies - a required part of working on group projects for 6+ years of life
mental health basics, mechanics of addiction - health class
Economics 101 is the only one on your list that was missing, and presumably a financial literacy course would cover this.
Similarly, science class tends to teach knowledge (including knowledge of the scientific method) but not actually applying the scientific method to any real-life scenarios. Even with science labs, students might use the scientific method during class only, without extending it to decision making in life.
Negotiations and stuff can be learned from group projects? No way. Group projects are primarily cooperative and students share the fruits of their combined labor. How does that relate to life scenarios like, negotiating a lease agreement with a landlord who has very different incentives? Or negotiating a job offer with a prospective employer when there is a clear mismatch in power between the two? It doesn't.
Best subjects for what?
The school system has always seemed aimless to me until you hit university where the goal more clearly is to either make you a great professional or a great researcher.
Edit: As an example of this, most Americans can recite both the pledge of allegiance and a canon of children’s rhymes — yankee doodle, mary had a little lamb, etc. Knowledge of which act as an immediate shibboleth to others that you on some level grew up American.
This is actually very important for a melting pot country of immigrants.
People say that schools are failing, but compared to their stated goals they seem to be humming along alright.
Preposterous
These are all, in principle, taught at most public schools. The problem is students don't learn them.
Edit: quick google suggests it still exists: https://education.alberta.ca/media/160199/calm.pdf
20% of teens in America are obese. I think you underestimate how much of a problem it is. Here's a source https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/childhood.html
> We need followups to adolescent health education in adulthood.
Sure, but having a basis in high school wouldn't hurt.
i learned a lot more in casual life advice from good teachers than i did from the teacher who was forced to teach a government defined "life advice" course. i wish there was a reliable way to impart that important advice to high-school students, but i don't think a government-enforced cirriculum is the way to do it.
I'm much more doubtful about the scope of the positive impact it would have.
I think it's roughly the idea that lack of culture is caused by a distribution problem. I think internet more than showed that improving distribution works only up to a limit.
There is a theory - the paradox of abundance - that paradoxally after you reach this limit you actually decrease access to the ones that need it the most.
I'm someone who liked school for the most part, and even I treated it as a "just pay attention enough to pass the test" class.
None of this content will help if people don't simply learn to appreciate knowledge, and when they do none of the content will matter.
So, most Americans will know the difference between a period and an exclamation mark. That Lincoln was president during the civil war even if they can’t the battles. Mice come from mice not grain. Basically the kind of basic facts that seem inherent until you realize you needed to learn them somewhere.
And of course people who went further into Math, History, etc where building from foundations created in those years.
People then those same people who supposedly learnt biology become vaccine sceptics: this 'knowledge' is not knowledge that was every used and proved real to them, its just collection of words they remembered and regorgitated in an exam.
I'd add anger management (though perhaps mental health basics would cover this), practical logical fallacies, sunk costs, and basic law.
What gets cut? P.E? Foreign language? History? Math? Electives? English?
That being said, they fact that reading math scores are so low in many places my pre-supposed “advanced” topics life financial literacy.
I would require basic law, accounting, and economics classes.
35 years later, the ability to write English has probably had at least the same amount of positive influence over my career as my ability to write C++ or Javascript. I should probably apologize to my high school English teachers.
Most of it amounts to moving around for 30 min and you get graded on wether you brought a change of clothes.
Thats not to say PE couldn't be useful. Physical fitness was never my strong suit in highschool and PE did nothing to change that.
After making a good salary in a startup, I worked with a personal trainer and learned about muscle hypertrophy, starting strength and general strategies for conditioning along with diet with particular goals. Maybe if we taught that stuff in PE, it would be worth keeping around.
I'm torn on foreign language. I think everyone should be bilingual, at least. But how it's taught in US schools is mostly useless. I took Spanish every year from 7th grade through 12th, but my Spanish even just a few years later was conversationally useless. I think kids should be learning a second language pretty much immediately when they start going to school, and there should be an effort to ensure it gets used outside that language class. (Easy if they only teach a single second language, but harder if students/parents get a choice.)
We did have a home economics class at some point in either middle or high school. I don't remember it very well, but I think that could have been a good place to teach some basic financial literacy. What I do remember was a bunch of sewing projects, and while I do think sewing is an essential life skill (I still on occasion hand-sew things), I don't think learning how to sew a stuffed animal is more important than learning how debt works.
I would rather we fix foreign language education rather than just cut it. Besides, why not teach parts of these "life lessons" during foreign language class? Might be interesting to compare home economics in different cultures.
That's why it should be opt-in. The people that are capable of getting value from it (you) join in and the people guaranteed to get no value due to a lack of interest (me) can do something else.
The same thing shouldn't apply to critical/foundational classes like basic math. But foreign languages aren't that.
Btw, one of my English teachers, taught us also in Chemistry and did that in English for a year. That was 25 years ago.
The course teaches you things like paying your taxes, writing a check, how to vote, etc.
People still complain it doesn't exist. I still have old classmates that make this same "They didn't teach practical skills in school!" posts. They even took the damn class with me. It's maddening.
That is absolutely correct!
Alas, let's look at the bright side, learning all those topics you mentioned in you "Life School" are only one google search away, free (monetarily); they only require an investment of time.
People learn complex things like playing Fornite and Minecraft or understanding Baseball/Football and other sports the same way.
Maybe it's a matter of twisted modern darwinism?
This is my issue with these topics. Like most classes kids will do the bare minimum to pass and then forget it all.
He was getting up there in age and had horrible skin cancer but still literally sprinted down the halls after truants.
He is my all-time favorite teacher, although I actually don't remember that many life skills from him :)
Do It. I love this idea.
My question is something like, would a non-profit be considered as start up? Think of funding and long term sustainability of an idea.
To teach critical thinking to the students, you need teachers who are critical thinkers.
It does not matter if you are in USA or Zimbabwe, one thing is common everywhere. Smart people who can think critically are not encouraged or incentivized enough to take up teaching as a profession. As a result we end up with this mess of education systems everywhere. It will probably take some generational changes or visionary political leadership to change this.
Secondly, I can't read a health insurance policy and fully understand all of it's implications, and I doubt you can either unless you have some spesific traiing in the matter
What does this mean, exactly?