But then they’d have to admit that some people have different skill sets, then they’d have to admit that some contributions to society are more valuable than others, then they’d have to give up on their Marxist victim narrative.
“Human brings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. If they are equal they are not free”. Solzhenitsyn
What? That’s crazy talk. What parent wouldn’t be happy when their 7 year old age home and was assessed as having the optimal strengths to pursue a career as a fast food worker? What parent wouldn’t be thrilled their star athlete all state football 15yo had decided and qualified for school training as an adult entertainer? And I’m sure all the parents of the kindergarten class have the money for space camp when their kids decide they all want to be astronauts. I see no possible problems here or social issues that could arise like job markets or over specialization, mid caragorization, controversy over altitude testing etc. I mean- so many college grads get out of school after 4 years to find their knowledge base obsolete or outdated, I’m sure that what they learned in middle school would still be valid in a specialized career path when they went to work in 8-10 years.
Then raise their funding. US schools are barely making it now with the cookie cutter stuff. You want individual attention then support a tax increase to be used solely by education.
Yeah. Most places I look now days everyone is talking about how well they are paid, how easy good jobs are to find, and all the extra money they have. Raising taxes enough to basically pay for skilled private tutors for every child in America wouldn’t likely put a strain on any of them. Plus they’d be thrilled in a decade when kids basically raised for a specific job with a tailor made education entered the workforce and started competing against them for jobs using the education they paid for. I see no chance that could go wrong, or that certain areas might get more funding and better quality programs than others based on socio economic factors. No chance of corruption, and finding a way to ensure uniform quality across millions of specialized tailored education programs and track all the teacher/student pairs to ensure no abuses would be a breeze too.
The school district next to mine had to cut their school week down to just 4 days and also cut their days down to about 6 hours. I’m sure even with a substantial raise in taxes dedicated to education there would be so many holes to fill that nothing overall would change. As in the kind of system the post suggests wouldn’t appear but at least my school wouldn’t have desks falling through the floor.
Yes. It would be nice to see schools brought up to a reasonable standard before we sunk millions or billions into radical changes. I mean, if the government invested $200 million on high speed bullet trains but didn’t have enough money to upgrade and keep up the train tracks- what good does it do asides bragging rights? If you can’t even finance free lunch programs, after school programs, music, social studies, basic supplies and facilities, but you have invested a ton on teachers who don’t have what they need to do their jobs, and can’t make a decent wage, what then? And how do you attract the high numbers of dedicated and skilled teachers you’d need if the compensation package makes a fast food manager job look competitive?
succinct and true. Plus redundant since we already have a system of post high school education designed to allow you to find and tailor the education of your choosing, with school and private resources to help you determine the path you’d like. The general ed you receive pre college isn’t meant to do anything except give you a well rounded basis and tools to explore the world and find your way as a citizen of basic competence. After that your life is in your own hands and success or failure are by your own merits (well... barring prejudices etc...) how can someone else tell you what you should do or what you want to do with your life? You’re given enough education to try and find that for yourself.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful? An entire civilization of specialists, trained for a task since almost birth? Their paths and dates decided when they aren’t even old enough to not wet the bed? The thing is specialists have a narrow knowledge base. See- the generalist knowledge you get in school is designed to create well rounded people who can make reasonable assessments of a wide range of subjects, and have the skills to pursue specialized educations to suit their strengths and needs in college and trade school. If you begin training a child on a futuristic technology like programming COBOL- wow, they will graduate to find... COBOL is basically dead and obsolete. Huh. Well, maybe they want to learn about auto mechanics! Oh wait. They are experts at carborators, but cars stopped using those and only the... GENERALIST automotive knowledge they learned is useful. Drat. That’s without addressing the cost or other factors of this.
That’s a fair assessment for specialization but there is opportunity to tailor education methods to individuals. Humans can’t do it but computer systems can (I hesitate to say AI). If we put each kid in a program that adapts and confirms to their learning capabilities and optimizes their retention we could maximize potential. The eduction could still be generalized and, of course, we’d still have a disparity of intelligence between individuals but at least they would get a truly equal education.
I agree in concept. There’s certainly something distopian and unsettling about computers raising children, and we are a long way off from developing technology capable of doing a good job of assessing and building human strengths. Barring a true quantum computer, just to build the model we would at the very least need to almost perfect our understanding of how the human mind works, and quantify and identify hard and soft skills and traits for various careers. That’s before even developing a system that could be dynamic enough to utilize and apply that to humans. I feel like by the time we had that technology we wouldn’t likely need it as machines could do most all the specialized tasks.
I also agree that a program of specialized learning- presenting information in an optimum way for each student to digest and assimilate it- would be more reasonable than tailoring curriculum and getting to a specialized path: at least until they were older. But the challenge of accurately identifying how to best teach, and what their strengths are and capabilities would still be there. I was in calculus and started seeing a home school teacher while on medical leave in high school. I convinced him I couldn’t do long division and spent a semester getting credit for calculus while doing basic math. But likewise I was put in ESL classes as a young child because they thought I was mentally handicapped and didn’t have any other programs for “slow learners.” So that’s two points where love humans made a major failure to asses potential. Either if not corrected could have drastically changed my future.
Then again- my college entrance exam put me beyond their highest level math, despite the fact that I studied the night before and still don’t completely intuitively grasp some higher mathematics that test says that I was proficient in. That’s years later after advanced in understanding of learning and testing. So we are way far off in my mind, and that same principal could be used with prejudice and applied to various groups. There have been several studies and revisions based off certain standardized tests favoring certain groups, when those groups were shown through functional skill tests to be at least equally matched. So there’s still room for bias as well.
Psst. Hey kids, wanna buy some.... homeschool? heh heh. Seriously though, parents, if this type of education is important to you, Google "John Holt" or "unschooling."
There are lots of activities outside class to improve your skills or talents you know. You name it, schools usually have it: computers, sports, science, music, language, martial arts. Don't blame schools for your laziness to study standard set of knowledge. You still have lots of time to pursue your actual interests!
As someone who is currently studying education I can say that the new approach to education is much more holistic. But because not many people decide to become teachers it takes a lot of time to be implemented everywhere. Please do also keep in mind #bethechangeyouwanttosee. Things don't change unless you help them change ^^
A better solution would be to make more things available, emphasize useful subjects in schools, and take away the stigmas associated with certain occupations. Easier said than done, but a more viable option than this.
It's not happening quickly and actively enough because people are used to instant gratification, as in they point out a problem (without actively being part of the solution) and expect it to happen immediately. Which is fine, but also keep in mind that there's a a bigger picture to take into consideration.
These are fairly recent changes, with, as I've mentioned before, too few people taking an interest in becoming new generation teachers. Older generation teachers are already used to the rote learning methods that, to them, were proven to be effective in getting their students to remember things.
And because there are too few new generation teachers and many older generation teachers already in place, I'm sure you can understand why it may take some time to replace an old system with an entirely new system.
You are absolutely welcome complain that it isn't happening quickly enough, you have every right to. But if you have to at least take all aspects into consideration
It would be nice if some of the obstacles were taken away, and incentives put in. Pay teachers better, pay them better if they got extra higher education. Hire more of them so that kids can get more attention. Try not to make too big of a deal out of grades. Pay people in jobs that are seen as lesser more money. Some of these problems can be solved with legislation. Is there something wrong with pointing out these problems, spreading awareness of them, and asking for solutions? We'd like solutions to happen quicker because time matters.
The problem with what is quick is that it ain’t always best. Paying teachers more and then hiring more teachers, offering incentives for teachers to pursue higher education- great in theory. Where does the money come from though? It either needs shifted from other budgets, or generated through taxes or other means. What effects will that have in other areas? What problems will that create? If we just pick a budget that looks like it’s got a lot of money and cut it- what happens when we find out that money was necessary and now there are bigger problems? If we pay teachers more to get more training, how do we know more is better? Science. The best trained employee isn’t always the best employee at the job, and at a point you may be overtrained. It’s great that your barista took chemistry and knows the order and details of a perfect coffe- but is there any advantage to the end results? Also- if there is one- is it proportional to the cost, or for 50% cost can you get 90% of the results?
People always want action and results now. People also tend to act on large matters as if they are the same as choosing a color of toothbrush- trivial and easy to correct with no real consequence for getting it wrong. We like to think any change is better and that it couldn’t be worse than it is. It can always be worse. In a space capsule you don’t react in haste when something goes wrong. You act with deliberate purpose. Panic and desperation plays tend to make things worse. As for grades- perhaps. But it’s arbitrary. Some system is needed to gauge performance and progress and adjust. The current system is flawed, but even multi billion dollar businesses use teams of analysts to try and quantify performance metrics from data, and it always ends up subjective interpretation because finicky realities aren’t easily expressed in simple to understand numbers or letters. You don’t want to need 8 years of school and a team just to understand how you did on a test.
“Human brings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. If they are equal they are not free”. Solzhenitsyn
These are fairly recent changes, with, as I've mentioned before, too few people taking an interest in becoming new generation teachers. Older generation teachers are already used to the rote learning methods that, to them, were proven to be effective in getting their students to remember things.
And because there are too few new generation teachers and many older generation teachers already in place, I'm sure you can understand why it may take some time to replace an old system with an entirely new system.
You are absolutely welcome complain that it isn't happening quickly enough, you have every right to. But if you have to at least take all aspects into consideration