Hacker News Reader

Comment by azinman2 | Hacker News Reader

My fear as well. Is there a better way to assess teacher quality, especially in challenging student environments?

First you have to define teacher quality. What should a good teacher provide to their students? Knowledge, ability, curiosity, safety, integrity, self-worth, honor, respect, kindness? Can these be quantified and compared against each other?

None of those other ways can be done without effort and extra costs. And as nowadays everything has to be done cheaper and quicker, it will stay as that.

Don't assess teacher quality. Eliminate poverty by eliminating capitalism, a system that literally depends on it.

> Eliminate poverty by eliminating capitalism, a system that literally depends on it.

Could you give an example of where this has worked?

Why even engage this sort of thing? It's just going to turn into a flame thread.

Just in case I had something to learn.

Apologies for the risk of conflagration :)

If you define pverty as earning less than 15 % of the median country wage and then pay 90 % of people 2 dollars a day and 10 % of the people infinity dollars a day you have no poverty by definition. Some variation of that is how every other system of government/economy has beaten poverty. There is no point engaging these people unless you are a psychiatrist trying to help them with their mental illness.

Even easier than that, simply define poverty as a property of capitalism and if anybody says that poverty also exists in your communist society, you throw them into the gulag for spreading capitalist propaganda.

Even in a non-capitalist society, you still need high quality teachers and ideally some way to measure them. And it's not like eliminating capitalism in any way would prove to end poverty.

if all you have is a hammer…

Assessing teacher quality sounds a lot less destructive. You know, fewer people getting summarily executed for "crimes" such as owning property, being disliked by their neighbors, etc. That kind of bloodshed is what makes commies so red.

HN guidelines:

  Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.

Please read guidelines link at bottom of page. So many of your past comments are simple anti-capitalist opinions that are not gratifying intellectual curiosity. Not a mod: just hoping for better discourse here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com