“A Question of Silence”: Why We Don't Read Or Write About Education
December 31, 2019 4:06 PM   Subscribe

Nothing in the public debate on schooling suggests that education matters. Whether test scores do or don’t measure learning; whether schools should be privatized; whether Wikipedia will replace the teacher; whether we will ever escape Algebra; whether we can measure the ways in which kids of color “fail” or “succeed” on exams; whether to teach like a “champion”, a “guide”, or a “pirate”; whether the arts are a right or a privilege: all these questions owe their importance to the system of schooling that turned them into questions in the first place. The entire debate keeps folding back onto itself. It takes its own parameters for granted. The more one asks such self-referential questions (without, say, asking what on earth sets “success” apart from “failure”), the more one contributes to the education system as is—a system that has stagnated for seven generations.

It’s a bloody mess trying to distinguish a trivial discourse on education from a significant one (whereas in most other areas of culture, to make such a distinction is just a plain mess). This is because no matter the state of the discussion, we know that education matters. The evidence of its importance is derived not from books but from lived experience. Education matters because seven hours a day, five or six days a week, people sit in classrooms; because there is real confusion and anger about why schools teach what they teach; because working class students and students of color are attacked by a compulsory system that purports to serve them; because succeeding in school often entails forfeiting the right to develop integrity; because it seems there have been more school shootings in the last twenty years than school walk-outs; because, whether it ever pans out or not, education carries the promise of grace, intelligence, and social behavior, et cetera, et cetera.

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posted by jshttnbm (62 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
Interesting piece, though I'm surprised there is no mention of Rudolph Steiner or Waldorf education. Which is a significant omission.
posted by shnarg at 4:49 PM on December 31, 2019


To be clear, however, in every revolutionary period, the radical Left has shown an active interest in adult education. The labor movement was inadvertently an educational undertaking. If for decades the Left did not manage to extract a theory of education from its own work, it was not the activists’ fault. But when it came to schooling—the education of children and youth—the Left could not be bothered until the mid-1960s.

Oh boy is this ignoring some important historical movements.

I am certainly convinced, after reading this, that the author's educational experiences have left something to be desired.
posted by eviemath at 5:27 PM on December 31, 2019 [27 favorites]


It's an old piece and it's all over the place. It doesn't make much sense, frankly.
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 8:06 PM on December 31, 2019 [9 favorites]


Free education for everyone came in at the same time as children were being forced out of the factories. When children entered the factories initially they entered them with their family members, and the family was hired as a unit. The head of the family would get a contract with the factory owner who owned the machinery and the family as a unit would work on the machines to fulfill a production order. This came about during the transition from cottage industries to factory industries. Originally if the family had weaving as a trade they would all participate in the various tasks required to operate the loom. When the price of the product fell so much that families could not afford their own loom they moved to work for a capitalist who rented the loom to the family. For awhile the machinery was often set up in the family home but moving the machinery to the factory meant that not only could it be powered, but the factory owner could charge more rent. Factory owners not only charged the family to rent the machine, but also charged them for storing it.

When the workers began to organize for better conditions they asked for a reduction of hours to hours that were more in the capacity of the kids. They wanted everyone to only have to work eight to ten hours and the rates or the wages for those hours to be sufficient to support the family.

Rather than grant the family the reduction in hours and the increase in wages the people in power came up with the solution of only reducing the hours the children could legally work, or banning them from the factory outright. This way they could continue to require the adults to work the longer hours. But of course as soon as you took the kids out of the factory, even if only for part of the day they were being essentially unsupervised. Children, were of course used to working then, and the work the kids in those families did was an essential part of their own maintenance. A kid's wages were often what was used to provide them with clothing. There was universal incomprehension about what the children should be doing if the law denied them the possibility of work.

The solution to enforced, unsupervised idleness was school, and it amply justified keeping the kids out of the factories. They would be supervised by a schoolmaster and they would be learning important skills that were useful to the working class - reading, writing and arithmetic. Schooling had to be free as it already cost the family in the lost productivity of the children.

It is worth noting that Sunday schools were able to provide children with a comparable education as the compulsory schools. Where Sunday schools were close at hand, most families that could sent their children there. The Sunday schools taught reading and writing, which was a skill that most children could pick up decently in about three years of attending school for a few hours every Sunday.

There had been initial gains in the reduction of work hours. Once the kids were sent to schools the work hours for the teenagers and adults went back up and the subsistence wages required the additional time to earn.

School serves the essential purpose of dividing up the family, so that the workers were hired as individuals. It reduced the bargaining power of the family comprised of several individuals to the bargaining power of a single individual. When an entire family worked together, they could compensate for a member being sick or slow and spell each other in order to take breaks to eat and relieve themselves, and assisted each other in ensuring that the work was done correctly without penalizing mistakes. Supervision went from control of the family to that of the factory owner who appointed foremen or managers who were willing to penalize workers. Factory owners were able to dictate the rate at which the workers did their work and refuse to let them take breaks or assist each other.
posted by Jane the Brown at 8:33 PM on December 31, 2019 [43 favorites]


The 'school exists to give children something to do' story is rather simplistic - there's been a long, long tradition of intellectuals and activists pushing for better and more comprehensive education programs, and even today, free, effective public education is still critical to increasing social mobility and reducing inequality. (It's no coincidence that as inequality increases in a country, expensive private schools become more numerous.) Schools were started because social pressures to end child labour pushed us there, but it's been adopted worldwide, even in countries without capitalist factories, because having a population who are exposed to a lot of different ideas are used to thinking abstractly is a public good. We made it useful.

(The story above, where families were hired as a unit, obscures an interesting detail: because families were hired as a unit, you only ever started a family with people in the same profession. Marrying for love is a thoroughly modern luxury.)
posted by Merus at 10:59 PM on December 31, 2019 [19 favorites]


Free education for everyone came in at the same time as children were being forced out of the factories.

No, it's much older than that.
The first free taxpayer-supported public school in North America, the Mather School, was opened in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1639.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:17 AM on January 1, 2020 [11 favorites]


It's an oldish article and while it does raise some interesting questions, it only hints at the huge elephant in the room: the economy of educational research. Education is a highly politicized field. Not in the sense that there are a few Marxist professors, Marx bless them, but in the sense that it's on the top of the agenda for politicians, along with healthcare and jobs. That is never a good thing for a discipline as it leads to perverse incentives. This means that the bulk of the funding is narrowly targeted to subjects that politicians and pundits feel are relevant, with no or little relation to what is important in research or practice. And that again means that to get tenure, most people must follow those money, which never leads to foundational, philosophical examinations. You will rarely find critical thinking in a university department of education. Try assyriology, or theoretical math.

He mentions that critical thinkers will get fired. And that is true of that sort of academic environment. But you won't be fired for your politics, you'll be fired because you will have no friends or supporters. Almost all your colleagues will be riding the gravy train, and your mere existence is an affront to their careers. If you raise your voice at the faculty meeting, you will embarrass them.

Another problem, from the point of view of critical theory, is that he is apparently writing about the US (or Anglo?) educational system, and somehow critical of the fact that a bunch of German and French theorists in the 20th century didn't engage with the problems he sees there. In spite of actually having attended English and US institutions, I know very little about their history. I do know that on the (Western) European continent, universal education predates the industrial revolution with about a hundred years, at least (more in France) and is even today strongly associated with the rise of democracy. The systems are different across the continent, where for instance the French system has a huge emphasis on equality and secularism based on the principles of the French Revolution, the German system has a strong emphasis on trade and technology which makes sense, given the economic and political priorities of the country, and the Danish has a big emphasis on freedom of thought based on the principles of the Danish peaceful "revolution" of the mid-nineteenth century which influenced the other Scandinavian countries. These are very quick generalizations, of course. All the systems across the continent have different blends of ideology and have made different choices when it comes to representing those ideologies. Those German and French philosophers may have seen the school system from a very different perspective than that of contemporary America.
And again, there are external factors that are not accounted for in the article. I have this pet theory that the reason the Finnish system is so successful, even compared to the other Scandinavian countries, is that Finland is less spatially segregated than many other countries. The school districts mostly house people of all social classes and immigrants are naturally integrated with children who are native speakers of Finnish and Swedish. They also have very fine educational research and practice, but not way off what is done elsewhere. Obviously, though, the international success of the Finnish system means that they are under less political pressure which will also lead to better research.

Today, American educational research is very important in an international context because of the hegemony of the English language and American research in general. Which is obviously insane. It reminds me of once I wanted to meet with my local political representative about hospitals and her staff told me I'd have to wait because she was on a study trip to the US, to look at hospitals. I laughed out loud, but it was true. The outcome of that trip was that they bought a data-management system that doesn't work in the context of universal care. Equivalent "studies" are made within education. In that context, the article and its core critique remains very relevant.

snarg mentions Steiner and Waldorf, and I'd like to add in A. S. Neill, and the Summerhill school, because it had a huge influence here in Denmark post WWII as part of the reaction to Facsism and Nazism. Many writers blamed the authoritarianism of the school system for the rise of authoritarian politics and private schools were started. Today, the Danish public school system has strong elements of progressive education, I think because it fitted with the above-mentioned liberal ideas from the 19th century. Neill was inspired by Steiner and Waldorf, but didn't like the spiritual dimension of those schools.
posted by mumimor at 4:31 AM on January 1, 2020 [18 favorites]


Reading everyone's excellent comments, it strikes me that there seems to be a difference between education systems founded on fully democratic principles like Finland and Denmark and education systems founded on an managing-class/labouring-class split like Great Britain and many parts of the US. (A spit deeply informed by race in the US, of course.)

I'm not intimately familiar with the story here in Canada, but I do know that part of what made Canada what it is was the failure of United Empire Loyalists who fled from the American Revolution and started the Family Compact to permanently dominate Canadian politics via private schools as had been done in America and Great Britain. Those private (read "public" if you're British) schools to train the executive class loomed large in American and British politics for a long time. Eton and Rugby, Choate and Groton, Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale.

That's not to say that we here in Canada completely escaped the overwhelming influences of educational theory coming out of Great Britain and America, on either the private school or education-industry-prison complex fronts. Now I'm wishing I knew more about all this...
posted by clawsoon at 5:24 AM on January 1, 2020 [4 favorites]


I was considering posting an ask metafilter question on this topic! I am well educated - a masters degree in organizational psychology and love to read deep tomes on science and politics.

But, I don't know the difference between my own mental skills and those of someone who, perhaps, didn't graduate high school.

We tell a story that a college degree is just a piece of paper, proof that we are rich enough to diserve a well paying job.

We make arguments that STEM / STEAM /STEARM education doesn't teach what people need to know about civics, relationships, life skills, emotional skills, etc.

In some ways, the messages I take in from leftist, queer, poc advocates, etc is "the lived experience of the oppressed supersedes what white people can learn through education."

Just look at how business school graduates are mocked.

So. My question. What is the value of an education? What is the difference in lifestyle, decision making process, capabilities, skillset, etc of someone with no, or less, formal education?
posted by rebent at 5:57 AM on January 1, 2020 [5 favorites]


Just look at how business school graduates are mocked.

wont sombebody think of the MBAs
posted by lalochezia at 6:23 AM on January 1, 2020 [13 favorites]


A formal education puts you on common intellectual and cultural ground with the peer set that had the same or similar education as you did, in addition to imbuing you with fundamental skills like math, language and (hopefully) critical thinking. There is also the collateral advantage of years of socialization with a larger cohort than you would encounter otherwise.

It is axiomatic that everyone here who is conversing eloquently has benefited from a quality education of some sort. "Why educate?" is not a major discussion point because it is so incredibly obvious that even asking it seems to kill brain cells.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:40 AM on January 1, 2020 [5 favorites]


"Why educate?" is not a major discussion point because it is so incredibly obvious that even asking it seems to kill brain cells.

I think the question is more "how to educate", where some point out that sometimes self-education can be as good as formal education, not least because some institutions tend to confirm existing privilege and exclude students from backgrounds with less educational experience or experience from outside the majority culture.

As a professor at a university, it's obvious that I believe education is good. But I have to work on a daily basis to improve inclusion and dialogue in my class because the whole system works towards authority and hierarchy.
posted by mumimor at 6:53 AM on January 1, 2020 [7 favorites]


I really don't enjoy watching the left fall into the same abyss the right has, where knowledge is no better than no knowledge, and "we're all entitled to our own opinion" rather than being excited about learning new things that we did not previously know.

Self-education is great, but so is admitting that some things are very difficult and take years of hard work to learn and understand, and that hard work is often best completed under the tutelage of someone who knows the thing already and may even have training in how best to teach that thing.
posted by hydropsyche at 7:03 AM on January 1, 2020 [31 favorites]


Here is some positive data from Statistics Canada about the effect of mandatory schooling:
According to a new statistical analysis, mandatory school laws that extended the minimum time young people had to stay in school substantially increased adult incomes for the students affected, and substantially decreased their likelihood of being unemployed.

Between 1920 and 1990, students who were required to attend an extra year of school experienced an average increase in annual income of about 12%.

The study, based on historical census data, also found that students who were compelled to stay on in school were more likely to work and more likely to speak both French and English. These laws also kept more people out of low income, and out of low-paying occupations requiring manual labour.
This doesn't say anything about civic participation or happiness or social justice or any of that, of course, and there's a thoughtful counterpoint to that last phrase:
“If you want a living wage, get a better job” is a fascinating way to spin “I acknowledge that your current job needs to be done, but I think whomever does that job deserves to be in poverty.”
posted by clawsoon at 7:19 AM on January 1, 2020 [17 favorites]


I have conflicting thoughts about the points rebent and hydropsyche raised. Like... I wouldn't want to learn engineering from a great educator who doesn't know engineering, but it's also the case that many engineering professors are notoriously bad as educators. It's probably not a coincidence that the guy who said, "The only education is self-education" was a STEM professor. A lot of STEM education assumes that your family gave you all the motivation and emotional management skills you need to complete punishing courses of work, and if you fail it's not a problem with the university but a problem with you.

I'd also hesitate to learn civics and politics only from people who have no understanding of oppression beyond abstractions they've read about. I wouldn't have said that 20 years ago when I was actually in university, but I've learned a lot since then, much of it from people who had experiences that I didn't.
posted by clawsoon at 7:42 AM on January 1, 2020 [6 favorites]


if you fail it's not a problem with the university but a problem with you.

Haha! One of my colleagues showed our boss that we have really good results in a class we run together, and the boss just said: you are putting too much work into it. Didactics are not big at a tech university.
posted by mumimor at 7:58 AM on January 1, 2020 [6 favorites]


The proverbial elephant in the room regarding education, as it is for so many other things, is of course mortality. It takes a great deal of time and effort to educate someone in a new subject, whether that person is oneself or another, but when all is done the newly educated person will only be able to act upon their new knowledge for perhaps seventy or eighty years at most, after which all of their ability and knowledge will simply vanish. Furthermore, each human is born as a blank slate, and if we want to establish a baseline of knowledge that each human is expected to possess, we must reteach the same information over and over and over again from first principles. This is a massive inefficiency of duplicated effort. Simultaneously, the amount of information existing in the universe is increasing at ever-accelerating rates; it is already impossible for one person to learn the sum total of humanity's knowledge, and I doubt whether it is possible even for all of humanity to learn that totality of information, leaving untold quantities of data languishing forgotten, unread and unconsidered. Until we solve these problems, any education schema we devise will be nothing more than a superficial patch that improves the situation incrementally, at best.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:07 AM on January 1, 2020 [7 favorites]


My large, urban school district is undergoing a “Comprehensive District Design” process in which school boundaries, educational models, and resource distribution are all in the air. One of my questions to the school board has been “You say that middle schools are better for 6-8 graders than K-8 schools - can you cite your sources and help me understand what you know?” Unsurprisingly, nobody has answered that question. And, reading this article, I understand why. The administrators aren’t making this decision based on outcomes-based research; they are making it based on a system-wide lack of resources. But if they were making it based on pedagogical reasons, how would I trust the research?

I’ve tried to find the research myself, but I’m approaching it as a parent with a masters degree in public health with cohort studies, randomly controlled experimental trials, etc. It’s a totally different mindset than academics/intellectuals embedded in the field of education.

As I explained to my husband after I emerged from a rabbit hole of public school vs. charter school outcomes research, there are really several main questions: What is the best educational model for my individual child? What is the best model for a large district like Minneapolis (a racially segregated, largely low-income district where students of color are leaving the district schools in large numbers)? Are those models the same, and if not, why? I don’t know if any of that information exists, or how to access it.
posted by Maarika at 8:14 AM on January 1, 2020 [10 favorites]


The FPP link seems to be trying to get at ideas around philosophy of education. From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation of educational aims and interventions.

Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial; some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.

This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.
posted by eviemath at 8:31 AM on January 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


One of my questions to the school board has been “You say that middle schools are better for 6-8 graders than K-8 schools - can you cite your sources and help me understand what you know?” Unsurprisingly, nobody has answered that question.

Well, there are considerable ethical issues with randomized studies when you are doing research on children, and there are always a huge number of external factors at play when you try to measure quality of education. A Danish study that tried to factor in things like social and economic status and percentage of immigrants was totally blasted this year when it turned out that the results were ridiculously different from year to year. I certainly believe that this is in part because educational scholarship is not always world class. But it is also an indicator of how difficult it is.
On a more practical note, they did this in my youngest daughter's school district and the outcome was generally good. This school district has over time transformed itself from being literally the worst in our city to being one of the best and most popular, and IMO it comes down to two main elements: the first is a level of gentrification. We can never be fully gentrified because of the large amount of public housing here, but in 1996 there was an urban renewal effort that led to a new type of inhabitants in about half of the apartments. The second element is a huge effort from the parents. A large group of parents met informally at a local playground in 2000 or 2001, and decided to take over the school board and also to lobby the city for improvement of the public spaces near one of the schools, which were, and still are used for drug dealing. With better visibility and lighting, at least the pushers stay away during school hours.
posted by mumimor at 8:37 AM on January 1, 2020 [4 favorites]


We make arguments that STEM / STEAM /STEARM education doesn't teach what people need to know about civics, relationships, life skills, emotional skills, etc.

In some ways, the messages I take in from leftist, queer, poc advocates, etc is "the lived experience of the oppressed supersedes what white people can learn through education."


Notice the context here. The lived experience of oppression doesn't necessarily make one better educated about, say, Newton's laws of physics, the periodic table and properties of chemical elements, or the ins and outs of molecular biology. It does tend to give one experiential knowledge about the workings of systemic oppression, which may lead to a better understanding or knowledge base than one could acquire through, say, four years of academic study intermittently or tangentially relating to the same issues. I say "may" because learning from one's own experiences requires some self-reflection - which is a skill that can also be picked up experientially outside of a formal academic setting, but which is separate from merely having experience with the wrong end of systemic oppression.
posted by eviemath at 8:38 AM on January 1, 2020 [6 favorites]


Just a warning that the page linked above triggered a tab with an exploit to pop up in Firefox. Not being a security geek, I'm running my anti-virus utilities and not going back to it. From Sucuri scanner:
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http://theamericanreader.com/a-question-of-silence-why-we-dont-read-or-write-about-education/
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posted by diode at 8:49 AM on January 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


"Why educate?" is not a major discussion point because it is so incredibly obvious that even asking it seems to kill brain cells.

Not at all! There have been an extremely wide variety of answers to this question over time, that lead to many different "how" systems of formal education. Are you educating people to be participatory democratic citizens? Are you educating people to prepare them for roles within a workforce in a given economic system? Are you educating children of the elite(*) to be rulers, and don't care much about the rest of the kids? (* Elite = male Greek citizens in Socrates' and Plato's time, or was a much more restricted group in certain monarchies, may be expanded to include women and others of a given economic class in some more modern societies, etc.) Are you educating to inculcate a specific value system (religious, political, cultural - whether that be conservative like church Sunday schools or reeducation camps during the Chinese Cultural Revolution; or progressive as a Frierian approach or something like the Highlander Center)? To undo a loss of culture/cultural genocide from past colonial educational policies (such as residential schools)? Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers are formal educational projects. So, in a different way, are online propaganda efforts or cult indoctrination programs. The FPP article is correct in noting that education is far, far more broad than the formal school systems (public or private) we have in different countries in the present day, and that this breadth is not necessarily often reflected in policy discussions around education in modern Western countries. But the article still misses a lot of what has been written or discussed on the topic.
posted by eviemath at 8:53 AM on January 1, 2020 [9 favorites]


In 1991, John Taylor Gatto wrote The Six Lesson Schoolteacher.
Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. My license certifies me as an instructor of English language and literature, but that isn't what I do at all. What I teach is school, and I win awards doing it.
Teaching means many different things, but six lessons are common to schoolteaching from Harlem to Hollywood. You pay for these lessons in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what they are:

The first lesson I teach is: "Stay in the class where you belong." I don't know who decides that my kids belong there but that's not my business. The children are numbered so that if any get away they can be returned to the right class. Over the years the variety of ways children are numbered has increased dramatically, until it is hard to see the human being under the burden of the numbers each carries. Numbering children is a big and very profitable business, though what the business is designed to accomplish is elusive.
A year later, he updated it to The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher, which covers many of the same points but is organized a bit differently. The original six:
  1. Stay in the class where you belong. ...The lesson of numbered classes is that there is no way out of your class except by magic.
  2. Turn on and off like a light switch. ...The lesson of bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything?
  3. Surrender your will to a predestined chain of command. ...Rights in such things cannot exist for schoolteachers; only privileges, which can be withdrawn, exist.
  4. Only I determine what curriculum you will study. (Rather, I enforce decisions transmitted by the people who pay me). ... This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do.
  5. Your self-respect should depend on an observer's measure of your worth. ...The lesson of report cards, grades, and tests is that children should not trust themselves or their parents, but must rely on the evaluation of certified officials. People need to be told what they are worth.
  6. They are being watched. ...The lesson of constant surveillance is that no one can be trusted, that privacy is not legitimate.
He continues: "It is the great triumph of schooling that among even the best of my fellow teachers, and among even the best parents, there is only a small number who can imagine a different way to do things."
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 9:18 AM on January 1, 2020 [12 favorites]


In my line of work, years of education is a common metric you’ll see reported in the first data table in a typical paper or presentation. Once I went to a talk and saw that the range reported for that particular study included zero. “What on earth does that mean?” I wondered. It’s certainly not the case that a person who has never been to school hasn’t learned anything, at least not in general. Years of education is a proxy for several things, and possibly not for the same thing for all values it can take on. This fact makes me think “why do we educate?” really is a live question.
posted by eirias at 9:58 AM on January 1, 2020 [1 favorite]


In 1991, John Taylor Gatto wrote The Six Lesson Schoolteacher.

That is some seriously distorted libertarian perspective. There's some banal elements of truth in some of the roots of it from which he's coaxed into a twisted logic of the glory of INDIVIDUALISM above all, despite all evidence showing how that actually works in practice. (It mostly doesn't.)
posted by gusottertrout at 10:15 AM on January 1, 2020 [5 favorites]


My parents were teachers as were many of their siblings. They all started out in the early sixties as fairly conventional, but were radicalized over the course of the decade. All my favourite teachers right through university seemed to be fairly radical. I came to think that teachers and teaching were generally radical. I had originally sought a career in politics, but I found it impossible to build anything for myself while my parents dominated the local scene. Needing paying work, I decided on teaching. I was quite surprised at how disciplined and reactionary the whole system was, and how ill-suited I was for it. My radicalism was tolerated, but it certainly wasn’t shared. I realized that the education system was not the haven for radicals that I had always imagined it to be, that it required hard work and dedication and conformity. In short, it is a job. Now, I can dig that I need to conform to a system that I despise, but I have no interest in imposing it on kids. I guess you could say that a good teacher brings the kids to accept the system and make it work for them, but I certainly wasn’t that kind of teacher. And there are far easier ways it make money if that is all you want from a job. I came to see that my parents’ radicalism was not born of, but rather was an outlet from their teaching. I have come to see the kind of teaching that interests me as a kind of guerrilla activity, making posts on the Internet and whispering in the ears of young people. The current system will continue on its way, and will provide benefits to the many. A new system will only take form against and outside this existing system. In short, it is not worthwhile to criticize the existing system: it stands condemned. All those who cannot abide it should devote themselves not to reform, but to building alternatives, be they ever so humble.
posted by No Robots at 10:28 AM on January 1, 2020 [7 favorites]


While Gatto's proposed solutions are heavy on liberterian "just let everyone do their own thing and it will all work out" propaganda, his analysis of the problems are spot-on. Public school in the US isn't designed to teach children how to be self-sufficient, creative, thriving adults. It's designed to teach them to take orders and accept their assigned place in the hierarchy. All other aspects of education are secondary to that, and it takes very little poking to turn up long lists of examples of studies that show students would learn better if you removed a lot of the forced, artificial classroom structure.

Gatto's also fond of the "98% of Massachusetts was literate before public schooling" statistic. (Looking into that turns up that "literacy" at the time was probably measured by "can you write your own name?") So his claims of "school has added zero value to America" are deeply suspect. However, his descriptions of the real lessons of schools are valid, especially in relation to the fact that no public school shifts kids between grades mid-year. At no point can a teacher say, "this child has learned everything the 4th grade has to offer, but it's only March; put them in 5th grade for the next few months."

The public and mainstream-private school systems in the US are designed to produce conformity, not education. Grade levels are based on age, not what a child knows or is able to learn. With the starting points of "must have 5+ hours of classroom time per day" and "room full of kids within 18 months of their own age, with a single adult authority figure, who gives direction but does not decide the curriculum," it's no wonder education reform efforts keep floundering. They're not starting from "how can we best allow students to reach their educational potential," but from "how can students learn better within the current structure?" And the answer is: most of them can't.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 11:07 AM on January 1, 2020 [9 favorites]


Gatto's analysis has some shallow relevance, but the extent of his rant far overshadows the limited merits in his diagnosis as his focus on individualism completely mistakes the scope of the issue, which is why such a simplistic bullet point list just won't do.

Numbered classes are the problem? What number exactly is he referring to? I'd hope income, but then that only makes a more individualist approach to education more difficult since income is a key factor in which schools are successful. Trying to get around that by putting more emphasis on individual learning styles, abilities, choices or whatnot misses the point that privileged children will succeed in even greater number for having greater resources and background far more likely to have connections to a history of familial success in learning and life. Not all parents are equally equipped to help their children learn and not all students will place the same importance on gaining useful skills among many other issues.

The lesson of the bells? Yeah, how upsetting. Imagien having a planned start and end time to a school day and the different things taught within that day. Students should be able to come and go as they please and have teachers there, no matter what time, ready to teach them the things they want to learn for as long as those particular things interest them. That's surely will provide good base for dealing with the society that so rarely relies on clocks.

The teacher controls what is studied on behalf of the school board or other authorities? Does anyone think allowing every teacher to teach what they want on whim would provide a better basis for education for a wide and varied group of students? Teachers, like students, vary widely in their abilities and interests. how many stories does one have to read about really awful teachers to understand that there needs to be some systematization of curriculum otherwise it'll be luck of the draw, over what any kid learns from teachers following their own bliss. Some surely would do well, but most? And, really does anyone think this would be good for all?

There are of course school boards that are invested in belief sets that are harmful as well, so the problem is bigger than what the student wants to learn, what the teacher wants to teach, what the school board wishes to be taught, and what parents want for their kids. Trying to simplify it is just silly as the problem is immense for a society that seeks to teach all kids some basic skills and knowledge despite the kids having such different backgrounds and abilities of their own. Likewise one's own sense of understanding isn't a great basis for judging a grasp of an issue or problem solving ability. The very worst people often have the strongest sense of self importance and value of their abilities, that don't make them right. I'd hope a certain occupant of the White House would make that point evident.

And ffs of course you are going to watch students, they are underage and need to be monitored for their own safety among other things. The question is how much monitoring is needed and how it is approached. That they can't wander about at will is hardly authoritarian.

These aren't simple problems and pretending they are is just ridiculous, but that's how libertarians roll. If you need to imagine an entirely different society as your starting point for
your solution, then you don't have any solution at all, just propaganda.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:32 PM on January 1, 2020 [10 favorites]


It's uncommon that someone will write you the check that's used to destroy them, and a huge portion of current ed science research comes from the NSF. The NSF has both 'equity' and 'equality' concerns, and is a large organization with many different people and agendas within it, but at its base it's about producing technology for military and economic competitiveness.

Grants that are seriously looking at dismantling the structures that keep the NSF solvent are unlikely to get funded, and funded work that takes that tack in analysis is likely to be a serious demerit against the PIs receiving subsequent funding. After the recession massively cut research spending across the board, that leverage has only increased. PIs are responsible for: their tenure case (and then promotion case) with a serious onus if they fail to achieve that; the lives of themselves and their families; the lives of their grad students who are probably relying on grants for full funding to pull them from pure poverty to semi poverty; and the health of their department, with the attendant concerns about reputation for the type of research that might go against the wishes of a major funding agency.

The FPP covers all of this in brief, and says that it's an excuse that most PIs paper over by throwing lip service to more radical approaches in a few readings in their course syllabus, or some sort of palatable mildly radical language in a paper here or there, but it doesn't change the fact that the system is heavily invested in keeping people productive but not radical, and that there isn't a whole lot of money in supporting radical counter-efforts. If there was a countervailing force that supported radical educational research, then there might be less horrific material pressure on ed science researchers to only answer the questions that the NSF deems fit to have answered.
posted by codacorolla at 12:32 PM on January 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


Does anyone think allowing every teacher to teach what they want on whim would provide a better basis for education for a wide and varied group of students? 

Universities, for better and for worse.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:42 PM on January 1, 2020 [5 favorites]


I'm curious to know if there's anything that can be done about parents who "only want the best for their children" and thus work together to concentrate resources in the richest school districts and/or in private schools. Many of the faults of the education system in terms of inequality arise from faults of those parents. How to change that?
posted by clawsoon at 12:43 PM on January 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


I'm curious to know if there's anything that can be done about parents who "only want the best for their children" and thus work together to concentrate resources in the richest school districts and/or in private schools. Many of the faults of the education system in terms of inequality arise from faults of those parents. How to change that?

End white supremacy?
posted by hydropsyche at 12:58 PM on January 1, 2020 [5 favorites]


The lesson of the bells? Yeah, how upsetting. Imagien having a planned start and end time to a school day and the different things taught within that day. Students should be able to come and go as they please and have teachers there, no matter what time, ready to teach them the things they want to learn for as long as those particular things interest them. That's surely will provide good base for dealing with the society that so rarely relies on clocks.

This feels a bit - I don't know if it's missing the point or getting the point but missing the point of the point.
posted by atoxyl at 1:06 PM on January 1, 2020 [10 favorites]


There's one group of employers I've worked for who didn't want their employees to pay attention to bells, who wanted their employees to follow their passion until the job was done no matter if the workday had ended hours before. All of those employers were exploitative assholes who took advantage of the enthusiasm of the young, and, almost as often, the vulnerability of workers in the country on work permits.
posted by clawsoon at 1:17 PM on January 1, 2020 [12 favorites]


I'm curious to know if there's anything that can be done about parents who "only want the best for their children" and thus work together to concentrate resources in the richest school districts and/or in private schools. Many of the faults of the education system in terms of inequality arise from faults of those parents. How to change that?

As I mentioned above, what probably worked in my school district was a controlled gentrification, followed up by political support for the new members of the school board. The decisions were made on a city level, but heavily incentivized by the state. It's extremely controversial, and some of the ways politicians try to replicate it in other places are openly racist. Where I live, there wasn't a racial bias, immigrant families stayed on without issue and were if anything more integrated after the renewal. The people who moved were typically those with substance abuse problems, who moved to other regions where they have to deal with the problems. The technical details of this are not replicable in a US context, so I won't go into them.
In spite of the real controversies, and the problems it has caused as a misunderstood example, I can see how everyone here's lives have been improved. Even those of the people who moved on. And for the regions where they formerly saw addiction as a big city problem they could dismiss? Well, now they are voting for the Social Democrats...
posted by mumimor at 1:19 PM on January 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


I definitely didn’t understand this article at all and after reading this discussion I’m definitely glad my kids are in a Montessori school.
posted by bq at 1:26 PM on January 1, 2020


This feels a bit - I don't know if it's missing the point or getting the point but missing the point of the point.

More denying the validity of the point for its basis in fantasy.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:36 PM on January 1, 2020


gusottertrout: If you need to imagine an entirely different society as your starting point for your solution, then you don't have any solution at all, just propaganda.

Yeah, I've never understood the MeFi popularity of trying to solve a problem by reducing it to a more insoluble problem. (There's a fine example dropped right here in this thread.)
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 1:49 PM on January 1, 2020 [2 favorites]


The lesson of the bells? Yeah, how upsetting. Imagien having a planned start and end time to a school day and the different things taught within that day.

The "lesson of the bells" is not "there is a start and end to the schoolday." It's "math will take 40 minutes, whether you absorb the lesson in ten and no longer need to concentrate on it, or whether you can't understand it at all and will need two hours to learn this particular thing." It's also, "if you love math, you are not allowed to spend an extra fifteen minutes on it and the same amount less on reading, nor vice versa."

Both of these situations only serve to undermine education but reinforce authoritarianism. They teach students who love math and students who hate it, that their actual interests are irrelevant, that they should not even want to study whatever they most care about.

It's not even, "quick students are rewarded." No, quick students are often bored, because if the rest of the class is doing math right now, students who have completed the math work are stuck with nothing. Maybe they can shift to reading - but then when the class is doing reading, they're, again, stuck with nothing to do.

And there are solutions to this that are not "oh, every student should just do whatever they want and teachers can teach whatever interests them most." The problem is not "there is an academic curriculum." The problem is, "the schedule is more important than the curriculum." It doesn't matter whether students learn today's math lesson; what matters is that the teacher spent 40 minutes on it.

The attempted "fix" for that has been testing, with all the well-noted problems of teaching to the test, forcing kids to memorize details and test-winning methods that have nothing to do with long-term acquisition of knowledge.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 2:24 PM on January 1, 2020 [14 favorites]


And there are solutions to this that are not "oh, every student should just do whatever they want and teachers can teach whatever interests them most." The problem is not "there is an academic curriculum." The problem is, "the schedule is more important than the curriculum." It doesn't matter whether students learn today's math lesson; what matters is that the teacher spent 40 minutes on it.

OMG, this is somewhat unrelated, but the discussion here and particularly the quote above helps me make sense of the catastrophe that is Agile in my workplace. The description above, that is exactly how we do projects where I work; in fact, we no longer do projects, we do cycles and sprints and lord knows what. The result is that the quality of the product has plummeted in just over 3 months since they introduced it and I reckon that I'll be unemployed in less than a year if they continue in this fashion, 'cause they'll have destroyed the product.

It starts in school and then it carries over... Honestly, I don't understand how our civilisation keeps going.
posted by doggod at 3:37 PM on January 1, 2020 [5 favorites]


It's "math will take 40 minutes, whether you absorb the lesson in ten and no longer need to concentrate on it, or whether you can't understand it at all and will need two hours to learn this particular thing."

I went to a lousy tiny public school 30ish years ago and my kids go to a high rated school now, and this doesn't describe how my or their classes ever worked. It does a decent job at describing how college worked, if you forget the generous office hours at my tier 2 state school. I think that is the difficulty of education, of the idea of standards, that none really exist. Does that mean that I or they were never bored at school or that I had to wait while others struggled? Of course not, but the threshhold for boredom among children is insanely low.

Also the students and they went to school with were and are amazingly creative, so yes I'd agree that public school does lean towards teaching submission to authority, but not particularly that heavily, compared to authoritative parenting styles.
posted by The_Vegetables at 4:40 PM on January 1, 2020 [3 favorites]


Hi, Harvey Kilobit. My point was that the reason so many people are so selfish about their children's education is a societal problem, not an educational problem. As a product of actually integrated public schools through busing, I am all in favor of an educational solution to the problem. But the white supremacists ended busing in Charlotte and prevented integration from ever even happening in the rest of the US, so it looks like we need a societal solution first, unfortunately.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:42 PM on January 1, 2020 [3 favorites]


I've observed over the years, and I've not seen much counter-evidence, that most people believe they know what schools (plural) are like, because they went to one. This is obviously a fallacy - despite our extensive experience at one or two schools, this no more qualifies us to have an informed opinion on education than I can judge the internet based on my experience at a single website.

For instance, some of the core assumptions in the FPP and in this thread are really only valid for American schools, which do seem to be uniquely traumatic based on American pop culture*. Or take the jokes at the expense of 'new math', an attempt to make mathematics instruction more intuitive at the expense of breaking from what adults learned in school.

Similarly, the point about bells meaning that math (or maths) takes 40 minutes really only applies if the schooling system doesn't handle this in another way, such as assigning homework that takes as long as it takes to learn the lesson, or structures its curriculum in such a way that, say, the science and math classes cover related material at the same time.

I think this observation is at the root of the complaint of the FPP, when you strip away all the stuff that's just wrong - education is highly politicised because everyone's been to school, so everyone thinks they're an expert, which means it's hard to do serious reforms because you can't leave it to the actual experts.

* My favourite example of how fucked up America's schools are comes from an episode of The West Wing where map projections are treated as esoteric knowledge - and the issue isn't that "American kids don't learn about map projections" (it's a Year 8 subject here) but "American kids need to use a different map projection". I can't describe how surreal it is to watch a serious drama briefly take on the qualities of an educational program where grown-ass adults pretend to be learning about the letter T for the first time.
posted by Merus at 7:47 PM on January 1, 2020 [6 favorites]


Watching The West Wing likewise fails to make one an expert on American schools.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:52 PM on January 1, 2020 [3 favorites]


The problem is, "the schedule is more important than the curriculum." It doesn't matter whether students learn today's math lesson; what matters is that the teacher spent 40 minutes on it.

The problem is that you aren't teaching one child to learn a specific single thing, but trying to teach every single child in the US at the same time a group of things determined to be important. Since we live in the real world there are real constraints to how we can go about teaching, and time is one of them along with need to focus on efficiency in how best to deal with all children at a school coming from vastly different backgrounds.

School hours and how the school day is broken up is designed to try and teach kids the most needed stuff within a limited time frame and set demands for what should be passed on. Spending more time on one thing necessitates spending less time on other things and having different kids being taught together will always mean some will be ahead of others and some behind no matter what you do because people differ. That is the case for teachers as well, some won't be as effective as others to some or all of their students. The demands of teaching every child are enormous and that Gatto's bullet points don't begin to touch on, which is why they're a libertarian fantasy. Worrying about the best students being bored or not being moved up during the school year is such a comparatively minor concern over the students best fit to learn that it feels like a gripe more than an attempt to see the scale of the problem for all children.
posted by gusottertrout at 9:26 PM on January 1, 2020 [5 favorites]


I just looked Gatto up on Wikipedia and, surprise!, "His belief was privatization of education along with a free market system was the most viable option.[14]" he also ran for office under the Conservative Party of New York, supports home schooling and "began a public speaking and writing career, and has received several awards from libertarian organizations, including the Alexis de Tocqueville Award for Excellence in Advancement of Educational Freedom in 1997.[6]"
posted by gusottertrout at 11:08 PM on January 1, 2020 [6 favorites]


Because of this thread, I looked up how things are going in Sweden. I haven't looked for years, before I had many Swedish students, and now I have none. It turns out there is a reason for that: Sweden privatized their school system, and then it collapsed. When I started teaching at architecture school, we saw it as a big problem that Swedish students were out-competing Danish students at the admission tests. That has ended for reasons I only learnt now.
posted by mumimor at 1:07 AM on January 2, 2020 [4 favorites]


A bit of a tangent on bells. Little eirias goes to a school with no bells and zero minute passing periods. I think the idea was to get away from the constraints against which Gatto is chafing. However, thing I have discovered about this is that the expectations for timeliness don’t actually go away, because that would be an utterly insane approach when you are trying to herd a bunch of juvenile cats whose whereabouts you really do need to know. They just become secret expectations that people with any kind of executive function problem will fail at. And I would argue that being seven is itself a kind of executive function problem for many people. I have now started to give the side eye to “flexible” models of education because I think: what secret rules are you hiding under that mop of hippie hair?
posted by eirias at 7:24 AM on January 2, 2020 [11 favorites]


School hours and how the school day is broken up is designed to try and teach kids the most needed stuff within a limited time frame and set demands for what should be passed on. Spending more time on one thing necessitates spending less time on other things and having different kids being taught together will always mean some will be ahead of others and some behind no matter what you do because people differ.

This is an interesting tangent to because as to increase educational teaching time, in the mid-80s my state cut elementary physical education to only 2 days a week, which is still in place in my kids' school, though plenty of people ask for more PE for their energetic kids. This stuff is hard and people do ask questions about it.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:59 AM on January 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


I just watched this video about college admissions essays with this thread in mind and it made me wonder what the hell those essays say about the culture of education. Never having written one, they seem like some sort of weird selling of yourself, but I can't say I understand what they're about in the entire scheme of Western culture.
posted by clawsoon at 12:23 PM on January 2, 2020


how the school day is broken up is designed to try and teach kids the most needed stuff within a limited time frame and set demands for what should be passed on.

There are no national standards for what kids are supposed to know at which grade level. Some states have something like standards, but none of them have a rule of "multiplication tables are taught in the 3rd grade; any student who doesn't know them through 10x10 does not pass 4th grade."

And yet, without having any standards for "which details and principles of history must an 8-year-old learn in order to pass the third grade," schools have an amazing similarity of schedules, which is not flexible to the needs of any particular class of students. If a teacher has a class of math geniuses, the math section is not allowed to get shorter. If half the class is math geniuses and half are struggling, the teacher can't switch the lessons around so the strugglers get more time in math and less in whatever subject they're doing well in.

The process is more important than educating the actual children in the class.

having different kids being taught together will always mean some will be ahead of others and some behind

Certainly, not all students will understand the same things at the same rates. So why are they labeled in the same grade level? Why doesn't "3rd grade" mean "a child who knows 50-90% of this list of items, and 0-25% of this other list," rather than "a child who is 8 years old by a certain date?"

I know the solution isn't, "every school, every classroom, should decide each year what to teach and how to teach it." But the current system of "let's standardize class contents, lengths, and teaching materials across as many districts as possible, regardless of circumstances," is not working. And fixing it is going to require questioning the value of every single aspect of the public school system.

The whole system needs an overhaul, and it needs to start with (1) what is the end goal and (2) what methods can be used to get there.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:41 PM on January 2, 2020 [3 favorites]


Certainly, not all students will understand the same things at the same rates. So why are they labeled in the same grade level? Why doesn't "3rd grade" mean "a child who knows 50-90% of this list of items, and 0-25% of this other list," rather than "a child who is 8 years old by a certain date?"
As someone who was moved from 2nd grade to 4th or 5th, I can answer that. It was incredibly lonely and demoralizing. It wasn't just that as normal kids they didn't want to play with someone much younger, they actively resented me because I could match them academically. And I didn't get their stuff. I remember trying to explain cut-off jeans to my mum and failing, so the result was even more embarrassing than not owning the cut-offs everyone had. And don't even mention PE. When I moved schools and country again, my only wish was to be with someone my own age. That was far more important than having challenging math problems or interesting literature.
posted by mumimor at 12:51 PM on January 2, 2020 [5 favorites]


There are no national standards for what kids are supposed to know at which grade level. Some states have something like standards, but none of them have a rule of "multiplication tables are taught in the 3rd grade; any student who doesn't know them through 10x10 does not pass 4th grade."

Pennsylvania education standards by grade.
Colorado standards
Washington standards
Missouri standards

Etc.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:52 PM on January 2, 2020 [4 favorites]


And re: what is not working, it has been known for a long time that socioeconomic status is a far better predictor of academic and professional success than the quality of the school the child attends. So rather than saying "public school isn't working, burn it down" we should maybe be looking at what we can do to reduce wealth inequality? The "end white supremacy" quip above may seem like taking a bazooka to a knife fight, but the truth is that what drives our educational woes is not so much the educational system itself - plagued though it is by profiteers and a misguided overemphasis on test-driven metrics - but the society that it is attempting to educate. Also, funding public schools through property taxes is a horrible classist and racist system which just exacerbates inequality and creates snafus like California's Prop 13.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:10 PM on January 2, 2020 [5 favorites]


I’m shocked at the level to which almost all the problems called out in this thread are solved by the Montessori system.

1) multi-age classrooms remove age segregation and pro forma promotion, allow for a wide range of co-existing abilities in any subject

2) more flexible time policy allows children to focus in depth at length and allow students the opportunity to develop time management skills

3) flexible curriculum and lessons given to small groups (4 to 6) of students at a time allows the teachers (called guides) to deliver the appropriate level of challenge tailored to the level of the student

4) there’s basically no enforcement of authoritarianism

Sorry the Montessori system can’t solve income inequality. It would be nice.
posted by bq at 3:05 PM on January 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


There are no national standards for what kids are supposed to know at which grade level. Some states have something like standards, but none of them have a rule of "multiplication tables are taught in the 3rd grade; any student who doesn't know them through 10x10 does not pass 4th grade."

??? Granted the law only says that public school systems must have a rigorous academic content standard, and does not specify which rigorous academic content standard, but as a result of the ESSA reauthorization in 2015, 41 states use the Common Core.

Mandatory retention in the 3rd grade, based on reading proficiency, is still on the books in 16 states.
posted by Snarl Furillo at 5:30 PM on January 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


Sorry the Montessori system can’t solve income inequality. It would be nice.

Given that Jeff Bezos is a graduate I'd say it has made it measurably worse.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:54 PM on January 2, 2020 [2 favorites]


'm curious to know if there's anything that can be done about parents who "only want the best for their children" and thus work together to concentrate resources in the richest school districts and/or in private schools. Many of the faults of the education system in terms of inequality arise from faults of those parents. How to change that?

Make all the schools a lot better? Because at the moment it's only through massive inequality that the U.S. has any good schools at all.

The average American school is horrific. I know I sound like a broken record on this topic. There are high schools that don't even offer calculus. I say this to American parents and they just smile and nod, as if that's perfectly reasonable. I want to jump up and down and scream.

You want children that don't understand compound interest? This is how you get children who don't understand compound interest.

To be clear, I'm not saying if only people weren't so ignorant they'd just choose not to get themselves into ruinous debt. The way things are going, we'd probably do it anyway, because tomorrow's only worth worrying about after you get through today. But it'd be a little less heart-breaking if they weren't quite so surprised by how their debts snowball.

I don't mean to focus exclusively on calculus. That just happens to be an area where I know enough to get mad. I'm sure if I knew more about statistics I could rant about how bad our statistics education is, but sadly I never got any statistics at all, and my humanities education was even worse.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 9:59 PM on January 2, 2020


Pedantic note : One can - eg. I did - learn about compound interest as an algebra or precalculus topic.
posted by eviemath at 4:12 AM on January 3, 2020 [1 favorite]


There is some education research that suggests that socioeconomic class being a/the major predictor of students' (formal) academic success is a symptom/indicator of poor educational systems - that there are ways to educate students that help level the academic playing field.
posted by eviemath at 4:15 AM on January 3, 2020 [6 favorites]


eviemath: There is some education research that suggests that socioeconomic class being a/the major predictor of students' (formal) academic success is a symptom/indicator of poor educational systems - that there are ways to educate students that help level the academic playing field.

The article on the privatization of Swedish education linked above makes that point, though sadly in the direction of what happens when the education system gets worse:
Fridolin, who has a degree in teaching, says not only have scores in international tests gone down, inequality in the Swedish system has gone up. “This used to be the great success story of the Swedish system,” he said. “We could offer every child, regardless of their background, a really good education. The parents’ educational background is showing more and more in their grades.

“Instead of breaking up social differences and class differences in the education system, we have a system today that’s creating a wider gap between the ones that have and the ones that have not.”
posted by clawsoon at 5:37 AM on January 3, 2020 [4 favorites]


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