Carefully Educated to Be Idiots
hilarylayne.com
hilarylayne.com
What youtube educators don't get is every time a student suffers a setback some one has to take responsibility and sit there with them till they get over the obstacle. Views and Likes don't provide that signal of how many are lost or stuck.
Books and Libraries have existed long before Edu systems or Youtubers emerged, but kids and adults can easily get lost in that jungle if they don't have a feedback loop for guidance and support system when they stumble. Design of that system can be co-opted by Commercial and Political interests. Power corrupts all systems. But then there is always a counter reaction to pull the system back. Boundaries and balance emerge. It's a long slow process.
People maybe frustrated about how long it takes for trees to grow, but whether they are interested in designing a botanical garden or a healthy forest a good sign they will fail is when frustration starts turning into resentment.
The only way to prevent that happening is to stay humble at how complex it all is. Go into the garden. Get your hands dirty. Get one plant to flourish.
Pedagogy is a science in itself and it got corrupted for political reasons.
From my position, I am very concerned that people no longer have access to books and libraries.
Go walk into your local university library and try to get access to a journal article. Good luck.
This is as opposed to when I was a child--I could walk into the local library, pull an actual paper periodical off the shelf and run copies off on the photcopiers--all without so much as an ID. I could get access to the microfiche and take copies as well. If I wanted, I could get a library card to any of the local libraries for free.
If I look at the current situation, I'm extremely worried that a young me of today would have no path to where old me of today sits right now.
The problem is sorting the wheat from the chaff, politically biased material, and a framework for methodically learning given the ocean of available information.
I hope we solve it.
Adult me does. But if I were a poor child today, would I really have access to much more? I'm not convinced.
As a better recent example, I was trying to figure out how jeweler's used to historically do threads on screws for watches. I had to run down a copy of "Practical Benchwork for Horologists" and eventually had to buy it, sight unseen since the libraries I had access to couldn't cough it up.
For people in the future, apparently there has been a paperback reprint of it. Answering my question about threads: the book devotes a bunch of pages to showing how to build a power feed for your jeweler's lathe.
The harsh reality is - we don’t need a zillion teachers. What we need is a high quality production team, including great teachers, who can produce high quality content that all can consume. A teachers role should shift from direct transmission to helping understanding the content.
this is the "naive approach" and the exact problem of the current "mass education" system but simply made worse.
there is a lot of research about education and learning out there and I think we should listen to those people. The real problem though is that quality education would cost a lot of money, and not many would (want to) pay...
And it is conceived for kids and they routinely seem to take smart kids and enable them to learn advanced math.
I think you are correct that individual instruction is still necessary and just passive consumption of content is not the way. But there are solution that make the system much much more efficient.
From their quoted section:
> We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or of science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embr}-o great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.
And then the removed section, which effectively negates the (facial) point of the previous statement:
> We are to follow the admonitions of the good apostle, who said, ''Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low degree." And generally, with respect to these high things, all that we shall try to do is just to create presently about these country homes an atmosphere and conditions such, that, if by chance a child of genius should spring up from the soil, that genius will surely bud and not be blighted.
This is a really, REALLY common quote (with the latter part deliberately omitted) in lots of places complaining about the way the US education system works, as well as antigovernment movement people.
I certainly will not claim the US education system isn't broken, but using such a deliberate, malicious out-of-context quote casts a pall over anything else the author has to say, particularly given it's long, storied history in antigovernment propaganda.
I would definitely recommend that everyone read it.
They were dealing with some very big problems at the time (such as rampant disease), and were seeking ways to improve America's primitive and ad-hoc education system.
Did it work? It certainly missed the mark in a number of ways, but overall it's a damn sight better than it was!
Here's another quote from the same text:
As for the school house, we cannot now even plan the building, or rather, group of buildings. Quite likely we would not recognize the future group if the plan were put before us to-day, so different will it be from the traditional school house. For of one thing we may be sure : Our schools will no longer resemble, in their methods and their discipline, institutions of penal servitude. They will not be, as now, places of forced confinement, accompanied by physical and mental torture during six hours of the day. Straitjackets, now called educational, will no longer thwart and stifle the physical and mental activities of the child. We shall, on the contrary, take the child from the hand of God, the crown and glory of His creative work, by Him pronounced good, and by Jesus blessed. We shall seize the restless activities of his body and mind and, instead of repressing them, we shall stimulate those activities, as the natural forces of growth in action. We shall seek to learn the instincts of the child and reverently to follow and obey them as guides in his development; for those instincts are the Voice of God within him, teaching us the direction of his unfolding. We will harness the natural activities of the child to his natural aspirations, and guide and help him in their realization. The child naturally wishes to do the things that adults do, and therefore the operations of adult life form the imitative plays of the child. The child lives in a dreamland, full of glowing hopes of the future, and seeks anticipatively to live to-day the life of his manhood.
So we will organize our children into a little community and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the home, in the shop, on the farm. We shall train the child for the life before him by methods which reach the perfection of their adaptation only when the child shall not be able to distinguish between the pleasures of his school work and the pleasures of bis play.
"[...]THEY’VE GOT YOU BY THE BALLS! They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want.
They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest.
That’s right.
They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.
They don’t want that.
You know what they want?
They want OBEDIENT WORKERS. OBEDIENT WORKERS. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.[...]"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nyvxt1svxso
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/comedy/george-carlin-dumb-amer...
And it was a resounding success. They got everything they wanted and then some. Look at HN, a community that considers itself broadly smarter than the average citizen/voter. Even it's knee jerk reaction is to solve any given problem using "more system" (typically public, but often private as well).
This sounds like the frustrated research log of someone lacking research skills. An undergrad-level annotated bibliography from someone interested enough to gather sources, but undiscerning enough to tell the good ones from the bad.
It goes:
> We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply. We are to follow the admonitions of the good apostle, who said, ''Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low degree." And generally, with respect to these high things, all that we shall try to do is just to create presently about these country homes an atmosphere and conditions such, that, if by chance a child of genius should spring up from the soil, that genius will surely bud and not be blighted.
It's almost like you're using a deliberately malicious selective quote that completely changes what the author is trying to say.
For others who are wondering, the full, non-sinister text of Gates can be found here:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/context-people-yield-themse...
It's very much worth a read, at the very least to gain some perspective on how life was back then, and the problems they were trying to solve.
That is, on its own, a red flag.
There are such random grandiose statements too like "There is no part of modern education that helps children." What does that even mean?
A plant meticulously cloned and grown within constrained pot sizes, to exact specifications, given nutrient pellets at exact regular intervals, and grown under meticulously calculated artificial lighting will form a completely different plant than one that grows in the absolute wild.
But one that grows in the wild is growing as is required for it's own perpetuation and flourishment with it's place in the environment.
Our education systems are increasingly and perhaps for quite some time now been far too much of the former.
And that many (myself included) educated under that former kind of system are now not adjusted for thriving as PLANTS_IN_THE_WILD (Humans as humans, not as [half-baked, politically-expedient, last-thursday-created metric] achiever).
Be sure to get your electrolytes!
It was just your analogy and opinion right?
Pretty much every time somebody ”does their own research” it means that they don’t know what they are talking about and have nothing of value to give.
Also let me add that when I agree that "doing your own research" is likely to have bad results, that reason for that is that most people are stupid, not that thinking critically is bad.
First, and most common is an emotional cause. Falling in love with a theory, settling on it, emotionally, before you even start digging, will make you weight data differently. Extremely smart people will fall pray to this and, again, this is not an intellectual issue, it's an emotional one. I think pursuit of truth is an emotional endeavor as much as it is an intellectual one.
The second one is plainly bad data. Here you can arrive very easily even if you are extremely smart and you are emotionally developed to let yourself get out of your way. Getting data is expensive, so a lot of times we avoid gathering it ourselves Bad data will ruin you and taint your conclusion. People closes to practicing something are most capable of surmounting this because they are capable of gathering their own data.
I agree with this.