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Theres a reason American slaves weren’t allowed to read or write. Why little girls in Afghanistan aren’t allowed to go to school past 3rd grade.
What’s going to happen when you can’t read agreements or reports. And just have to believe what someone else tells you it says.
?
Sometimes advances in technology do mean that things that they teach in school are outdated and can probably safely be removed.
I’d say cursive writing is one of those things. Writing in general is important, and obviously kids need to learn how to write upper case and lower case block letters. But, with computers everywhere, a whole secondary set of characters that is designed to be linked together seems useless.
I also do think that schools probably focus too much on memorization. I absolutely hated history in school because that’s how it was taught. Memorize the name of these battles and the dates and then regurgitate them for the test. I didn’t actually learn anything meaningful. What would have been much more useful and much more interesting would have been to learn more of the backstory. What was going on in the country that led it to go to war. Were they trying to distract from something, or get the people to unite against a common enemy? Were they supremely confident that they could easily win and gain important territory or resources? Were they backed into a corner?
I’d support not memorizing as many things because it’s true that you can look them up (of course, AI is not how you should ever look anything up because it might just ‘hallucinate’). I think most teachers would agree. But, it’s also a lot harder to write and grade a good test when you’re not doing names and dates. So, I assume that’s another big part of the reason that memorization is the focus.
You know they don’t teach typing anymore either. Yeah Ive got 3 nieces and a nephew. None of them can use a keyboard properly. They type with their index fingers.
When did you go to school? I don’t think I’d consider everything about the education I received to be ideal but by the time I was in high school it was very much not about memorisation and history in particular was taught basically exactly like what you described as what you would have preferred it to have been.
Cursive was interesting. I went to a lot of schools because my family moved around a lot. In Primary school, in the 90s cursive was inconsistently taught, and inconsistently valued and by the time I had reached the 6th grade it was simply considered obsolete and sometimes even actively prohibited because they wanted you to dispense with the idea.
As I moved to new schools around this time I noticed nobody else did cursive, also my cursive looked bad since I hadn’t really mastered it and also been taught about 3 or 4 different varieties of the “correct” way at different schools with no acknowledgement of there being different systems in existence. So I gave it up and printed like all my compatriots but then in French class in highschool the text book had a section on french culture showing “french writing” that they presumably taught there and I liked how it was kind of more complicated and daintier than the versions I’d learned so I tried to imitate those stylistic differences for fun and out of boredom in class. I now voluntarily write cursive for the hell of it because it’s more interesting and fun to do. I do this in my own bastardised hand learned in multiple different schools with multiple half remembered “standard” systems plus a few elements of the French system that I cherry picked from that text book all those years ago and a couple of things I looked up online because I wondered if some things might look better from other systems. Don’t know why, just kinda like it.
This is why I masturbate.
In the Uber or in school?
Por que no los dos?
I never thought this would need saying, but the point of writing essays in school is not the final product.
That essay will almost never be good enough to be relevant or published; no one expects it to be. The goal is to engage with the material, and learn to synthesise and present your ideas logically.
We must grade the process of writing an essay, never the final product; especially not based on how “good” an essay that final product is.
We’ve got to stop and ask ourselves why people don’t have AI complete video games for them, but do so for essays. It’s because in one case, the value is in the process, while in the other, the value is believed to be the result, but it shouldn’t be.
If people understood this, it would make no sense having AI write students’ essays. You can blame people for wanting to take shortcuts, but I believe our society and culture at large play a much bigger role in that trend.
very well said
Waay back in high school I had a teacher who just aimed for getting an essay written at all. He had one assignment per week: a 5 paragraph essay due every Friday.
If you turned one in: automatic 75%, baseline. Turn in garbage each week? C grade free. He even said you could turn the same essay in each week. 75%. C.
If you missed it, 0% no make-up work.
A lot of the class failed.
You’re right, but there’s no easy way to grade the effort without looking at the final result. That’s how you end up with a school system that prioritizes test results so much it ends up teaching students how to pass a test instead of learning and processing information.
Oral exams are decent, but teachers have too many students
Yeah but the point of American school isnt to teach kids to learn and use information. Its too produce obedient and detail oriented workers. Memorizing and regurting information correctly only to dump it for the next project is much more profitable.
I never thought this would need saying, but the point of writing essays in school is not the final product.
Surely people don’t really think that? I say that, and then I think about some of the colossally stupid things I’ve heard people say and say about education.
God forbid they learn how to think, when LLMs can do it (kind of) for them
Exactly. School isn’t really about memorizing facts, it’s about learning and going Critical Thinking Skills. That’s how humans are supposed to think, and without it, people substitute chaotic thinking that makes them susceptible to manipulation.
Also, it teaches us how to interact with other humans, so our first instinct isn’t just to KILL them.
That’s why we go to school.
At least it should be this way, the reality might be different sometimes:/
I love how some people are ready to just give up on everything now that AI can do it
When they filmed the movie ‘Van Helsing’ in Prague they needed one hundred couples who knew how to ballroom dance. Everyone thought this was going to be difficult to set up, but it turned out that literally every extra they hired could waltz. Back in Soviet days, the country didn’t have a lot of money for sports equipment, but every school had a record player. They taught the kids ballroom dancing for the Physical Education requirement.
To graduate from my (American) high school, you needed a given number of gym points, and you were given one gym point per day of gym class. But, I learned, you earned one and a half gym points per day of dance class! I figured this was a great scam: I already hated gym class, so I’d get my points out the way faster.
Fast forward a couple of months, and I’m working harder than I ever was in gym class, I’m enjoying myself more, and I’m hanging out with girls in leotards first thing every school day. There was literally no downside.
Clearly, the system working as intended.
We went to dance classes all throughout I think eight grade and learned a few of the classical dances. Waltz, Foxtrott, Cha-Cha, Tango. That’s Eastern Germany in the early 2000s.
Dance classes in a normal German secondary school? Wow, we never had that. We had a private dance school for couple dancing in town, it was popular at about age 13.
It wasn’t in school, it was an after school thing at a dancing school. It was relatively affordable - I think it was at least in part paid for by the ministry of education - and we all went there together after regular lessons. I never heard of anyone not attending.
Now I’m imagining Mel Brooks doing a black-and-white German Expressionist scene of nine year olds in tuxedos and gowns doing the tango.
My middle school in the us made us learn to waltz in gym class. I’m ass at it, but it was fun.
My elementary school PE did a couple weeks every year where we did square dancing and line dancing. I guess that’s the southeastern US coming in. Sometimes we did some other more traditional English dance where the boys and girls would be in rows facing each other where there were some set steps and then the couple at one end would dance down between the lines to the other end, there would be more steps and then the next couple would move, and so on. It was like something out of a Jane Austen movie.
You can thank Henry Ford’s bigotry for that.
No, really. He hated seeing his employees dance to jazz (the popularity of which he blamed on ‘the Jews’, because of course he did), so much so that he pushed to have “proper” dances taught in public schools, dances that were old-fashioned even in his time.
I learned square dancing in high school in Ohio. I was the only boy in a class of all girls, because I had broken my wrist and couldn’t play basketball. I would love to tell the story of how this helped me get girls, but I was much too big of a loser to take advantage of the situation.
What the fuck man I got told off for six years because I didn’t know how to jump rope
I mean I also got publicly humiliated by my inability to run far or fast so often it fucked with my head. But we had 6 months of learning to dance before returning to the shame gauntlet
We got line dancing -_-
Just as the Lord Jesus commanded to Noah
Every kid in Scotland is taught how to ceilidh. Some of us even learn to enjoy it!
Street clothes or gym shorts?
Is this where I subscribe for more Van Helsing facts?
Why learn to read and write while there’s speech recognition and text-to-speech apps nowadays?
I’m sorry, but can you please attach the youtok link to your comment. I need to hear what you said, since I can’t read…
Best I can do is TickTube.
Its also important we see their ghoulishly over expressive face, so that we know what to think.
“Don’t let AI write anything for you. Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health”
(via)
We can’t have people forming their own ideas.
I warned ya! Didn’t I warn ya? That colored chalk was forged by Lucifer himself.
tsk tsk
Only idiots read books, smart people think for themselves!
People reliant on LLMs are just participating in an any% dementia speedrun. It’s a social experiment, of sorts.
More like:
Claude solve this for me
It goes in the square hole.
Thanks Claude. Still doesn’t seem to be working though as the corners on the object are in a different place to the corners on the hole. It’s like they’re rotated. Can you break this down for me, step by step? Or is this impossible?
Sheesh. Spoilers, man.
sigh… how can one be so dumb? has to be a troll… right? pretty please.
Nope, this is a common thought amongst those impressed by AI. And I can relate coz when I was in school, no one would give a good answer to why I needed to do any arithmetics without a calculator.
As a math teacher, my suggestion to the students is during practice to try to do calculations without a calculator to invoke a bit of number sense so when they use calculators be able to notice in the result if they did a wrong input. It happens to input “14” instead of “41” . I feel like able to do mental arithmetic with double digit numbers can be helpful
I think it’s reactionary, too. A version of “anything to trigger the libs”. If so many people weren’t against AI, OOP might have taken a moment to think before they type. As it stands, they reached for the first hot argument to get their opinion out. And I don’t mean to absolve them from anything here, just analyzing.
Realistically, schools were designed to provide a trainable workforce that could read well enough to learn new tasks and do enough math to make sure the factory machines were properly maintained.
Many people these days don’t read a single book after they get out of school. The AIs are just making things happen faster.
From a broader perspective “school” has been a thing since before Socrates and humanity pendulums between “a broad education is the foundation for a strong populace” and “we need a giant pool of disposable labor”.
And the US public education philosophy is similarly inconsistent. At the earliest it was Puritans who wanted everyone to be able to read the Bible for themselves and so pushed for literacy. At times it has been guided specifically by the business economy but it’s inaccurate to say that schools were designed to produce factory workers.
Yeah, hell modern universal public education was partly a result of the working class fighting like hell for it
On the other hand, a lot of good ideas ended up getting co-opted to serve the State.
I don’t think the IWW was planning on ahving kids learn the Pledge of Allegiance.
Modern universal public eduction has its roots in prussian model and the idea was very much to make effective and loyal workforce. Im not saying modern education has the same ulterior motivations, but things like standarized curricula and grading are coming from there.
IIRC the goal wasn’t to have a loyal workforce, but to have an army that isn’t dependent on a small number of elites.
Basically “we won’t stop with the death of our officers, our soldiers can step up to the occasion”.
The people who don’t respect the value of school generally performed very poorly in school.
We mature too late in life to realize thats the last time anyone will ever teach us for free.
Life is teaching you all the time (for free) if you but listen.
Especially if you’ve learned to learn, and have critical thinking, things schools should be teaching (but often avoid in favor of quickly outdated ‘job skills’ or similar because some political ideologies do better with the poorly educated).
They do have a point. School should be about learning and developing critical thinking skills rather than memorizing who the 30th president was.
I know my schooling had a ton of memorization. Funny to think about now that I know I have Aphantasia because I always excelled in math and science because they are less about memorization and more about learning a concept to apply.
They need to teach kids how to use AI. It’s like people that won’t let you use a calculator in math. “You aren’t always going to have a calculator in your pocket”
I’ve always been a big supporter of open book/note tests
There is no reason I should be able to recite as much of the Canterbury Tales as I can.
Facts are how you build up everything else. It pretty hard to reason about complex math if you don’t understand how to count to 100. It’s pretty hard to reason about how societies move in waves and cycles if you don’t memorize something about history.
I think people don’t understand that you don’t just start doing abstract work. You build it a bunch of facts that you memorize and then you can start building higher level things like patterns and abstractions.
I know this from trying to teach my child basic concepts like what money is. What exactly is a day. How magnet work. The entire concept of estimation. These are trivial to adults, but these are hard won concepts that were build from concrete ideas for my child.
We know this is necessary because of cultures that are missing whole concepts like particular colors. The idea of right and left. So on.
I got a bad grade in history class because I couldn’t remember exact dates, only rough timeframes, like “world war 2 ended 1945” but I couldn’t say “8th May 1945”. This kind of stuff happened a lot of times in many different classes in different ways.
The statement is dumb but I it does have a hint of true. With new technologies comes a new way of life and this should be reflected in education. The traditional educational system was created when no technologies existed and children and parents lifes were very different.
That’s why every kid has “ADHD”. They live in a different reality! siting down in a class for hours listening to a boring class and then having a test on what was said does not fill todays kids needs anymore. The global traditional.school system needs an urgent upgradeedit I said Global because it’s not a specific country problem
Who needs facts when you have GrokAI teacher!
Now students don’t need traditional teachers at all with fabulous lesson plans like, “Was the Holocaust even real?”
That’s why I like GorkAI.
It’s as dumb as I am (and I’m pretty dumb)
Typical Gorkist. Where’s my Mrok AI??
The only war is gym class war.
If everyone has one of these “automobiles” do people ever walk or run anymore
I don’t have one. I walk everywhere. I am both privileged and in constant danger.
Yes, but for recreation. For fun.
Oh Emmett
Not really, actually
Wow the same people who don’t trust vaccines because they read words on a computer screen and it became their belief with zero critical thinking now want all of it done that way for everyone’s every desire
Parasites.
Don’t worry, it’s about to vote for y’all, too.
Everything’s fiiiine. 😶🔥🔥🔥🔥🥵
