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.
Nor did the inventor of the pledge expect it to be used for anti communism.
But ultimately I don’t want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the public education system goes away the proletariat will suffer for it. Fascists are attempting to move the Overton window towards that. The solution as I see it is re-examining, reimagining, and reforming public education to serve the masses. But a big part of that is reconvincing the proletariat that education is valuable in its own right rather than just as job training.
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.
Which is a good philosophy outside of the military! That’s the same thing the Puritans wanted, for people to not be reliant on a few to do their thinking for them.
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learned to learn, and have critical thinking, things schools should be teaching (but often avoid in favor of quickly outdated ‘job skills’ or similar because some political ideologies do better with the poorly educated).
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
In hindsight, I do think the right approach is not to use calculators till secondary school (about 14~15 years of age). Having a feel for numbers and how they should behave under addition/multiplication/exponentiation and ability to mentally do two digit calculations as you said is critical, and should be an “automatic” capability
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.
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.
Counting to 100 is like learning to read. Yes both are basic tools needed to learn English or math.
Do I need to know that the Ming Dynasty ruled from 1368 to 1644? Is anything about the Ming Dynasty relevant to my life? I cannot remember the other handful of dynasties so I guess the Ming Dynasty could be the only one needed to function.
Yes history is important and definitely worth telling people. But having them memorize stuff that you can look up in a textbook is dumb.
I could walk into any high school level history class and pass the test if it was open book and if I had enough time I’d probably find all the answers.
Anyone couldn’t walk into a Calculus class and pass the test with it being open book if they didn’t know how to do Calculus. Yes they could read the whole chapter and learn to do it then pass the test. But there’s no looking up the answers in the book. It’s not memorizing.
We know this is necessary because of cultures that are missing whole concepts like particular colors. The idea of right and left. So on.
Cultures are not missing whole concepts like particular colors or left and right. They just express it differently.
Light red is pink. But a light blue is still light blue, maybe baby blue or sky blue.
Russia has the word голубой for light blue. It’s equivalent to our pink. Are we missing the whole concept of light голубой? No.
The cultures understand them being a different color and even more so they understand how it’s a mix or part of a color group. Being able to point and say “orange” when equal red and yellow are mixed isn’t a necessary skill. Like what would you say if something was a mixture of equal parts green and yellow? You could say chartreuse. If you didn’t know that word are you really missing out on everything chartreuse?
The right and left thing I think you’re referring to the tribe that uses cardinal directions? Thinking in terms of cardinal directions instead of left or right is a bit bizarre and I don’t know exactly how deep it goes. Like if i wanted to tell you to hang the picture to the right of the fireplace, I would have to know the cardinal directions of your house? Cardinal directions are extremely useful to use in English. East side wall of your house tells you exactly what wall it is. Left or right doesn’t mean anything unless I say something like “facing your house”. If I knew your fireplace was on your north wall I could easily say “Hang the picture east of your fireplace” meaning hang it to the right.
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 upgrade
edit I said Global because it’s not a specific country problem
sigh… how can one be so dumb? has to be a troll… right? pretty please.
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.
Nor did the inventor of the pledge expect it to be used for anti communism.
But ultimately I don’t want us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If the public education system goes away the proletariat will suffer for it. Fascists are attempting to move the Overton window towards that. The solution as I see it is re-examining, reimagining, and reforming public education to serve the masses. But a big part of that is reconvincing the proletariat that education is valuable in its own right rather than just as job training.
Hear, hear!
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”.
Which is a good philosophy outside of the military! That’s the same thing the Puritans wanted, for people to not be reliant on a few to do their thinking for them.
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).
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
In hindsight, I do think the right approach is not to use calculators till secondary school (about 14~15 years of age). Having a feel for numbers and how they should behave under addition/multiplication/exponentiation and ability to mentally do two digit calculations as you said is critical, and should be an “automatic” capability
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.
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.
Counting to 100 is like learning to read. Yes both are basic tools needed to learn English or math.
Do I need to know that the Ming Dynasty ruled from 1368 to 1644? Is anything about the Ming Dynasty relevant to my life? I cannot remember the other handful of dynasties so I guess the Ming Dynasty could be the only one needed to function.
Yes history is important and definitely worth telling people. But having them memorize stuff that you can look up in a textbook is dumb.
I could walk into any high school level history class and pass the test if it was open book and if I had enough time I’d probably find all the answers.
Anyone couldn’t walk into a Calculus class and pass the test with it being open book if they didn’t know how to do Calculus. Yes they could read the whole chapter and learn to do it then pass the test. But there’s no looking up the answers in the book. It’s not memorizing.
Cultures are not missing whole concepts like particular colors or left and right. They just express it differently.
Light red is pink. But a light blue is still light blue, maybe baby blue or sky blue.
Russia has the word голубой for light blue. It’s equivalent to our pink. Are we missing the whole concept of light голубой? No.
The cultures understand them being a different color and even more so they understand how it’s a mix or part of a color group. Being able to point and say “orange” when equal red and yellow are mixed isn’t a necessary skill. Like what would you say if something was a mixture of equal parts green and yellow? You could say chartreuse. If you didn’t know that word are you really missing out on everything chartreuse?
The right and left thing I think you’re referring to the tribe that uses cardinal directions? Thinking in terms of cardinal directions instead of left or right is a bit bizarre and I don’t know exactly how deep it goes. Like if i wanted to tell you to hang the picture to the right of the fireplace, I would have to know the cardinal directions of your house? Cardinal directions are extremely useful to use in English. East side wall of your house tells you exactly what wall it is. Left or right doesn’t mean anything unless I say something like “facing your house”. If I knew your fireplace was on your north wall I could easily say “Hang the picture east of your fireplace” meaning hang it to the right.
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 upgrade
edit I said Global because it’s not a specific country problem