The Decaying Evolution of Education...

[LizzieMaine]

I was told there'd be pizza.

 

[MikeKardec]

Take every one of those kids and put them to work in a factory for a year. They'll learn things there they never imagined in school.

I was in an acting class for quite awhile with a wonderful actor and comedian named Alanzo Boden, he's fairly popular on talk shows and the like. The two of us were the "old men" in the class but it was always wonderful to see what he would do with a scene and what he could pull out of some of the kids he would perform with. He'd been around the comedy circuit and he'd worked for Lockheed as a mechanic on, you know ... classified stuff. Not just a year but a career as a dude who wrenched on things where if you got something wrong, your pilot died. He didn't just bring talent to his acting he brought a life.

I was told there'd be pizza.

There is, but it's just Fading Fast's avatar. Virtual pizza.

 

[JimWagner]

As long as the 2 major political parties in this country are havens for mutually incompatible and extreme ideologies obsessed with never agreeing on anything at all except the need to "beat the other party" at all costs as if they are sports teams things are simply not going to improve. Solving the country's problems just isn't what they are about, if they ever were.

The minor parties are just as bad. Just different sets of loonies.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, "A pox on all their houses."

 

[ChiTownScion]

Take every one of those kids and put them to work in a factory for a year. They'll learn things there they never imagined in school.

Quite true. Marx's observations regarding workers being reduced to nothing more than inanimate and fungible means of production have a lot more relevance than a mere homework reading assignment when you've worked a minimum wage production job turning out components for products you'll never encounter outside of the plant.

 

[philosophygirl78]

As one of the Minutia makers I must say I totally agree with you. My flame is a fog of ice. On the other hand, I assume we are all having a good time.

I think what @Bolero meant is that we were getting off topic (to put is elementary)... Which is inevitable to happen in forums.. I think alot of great ideas came out of this thread.

Education is not an easy topic to discuss. It ties into pretty much every aspect of society. This is my first online forum so I have nothing to compare it against. But it was recommended by a very well respected professor friend, so I am glad I am here.

 

[philosophygirl78]

Take every one of those kids and put them to work in a factory for a year. They'll learn things there they never imagined in school.

That would not remove education from the scenario... Simply place it in a different context. Which could more easily perhaps lead to a degenerate system...

 

[LizzieMaine]

Thread drift is a long and hallowed tradition at the Lounge. Somebody could throw out a comment here about whether or not Tom Brady deflated those footballs, and somebody else would find a way to tie it in to the decaying evolution of education. We're like that here.

 

[tonyb]

Thread drift is a long and hallowed tradition at the Lounge. Somebody could throw out a comment here about whether or not Tom Brady deflated those footballs, and somebody else would find a way to tie it in to the decaying evolution of education. We're like that here.

Indeed we are. We occasionally get a self-appointed cop, but such characters typically get the hang of things around here or decide this place isn't for them.

 

[Bolero]

Thread drift is a long and hallowed tradition at the Lounge. Somebody could throw out a comment here about whether or not Tom Brady deflated those footballs, and somebody else would find a way to tie it in to the decaying evolution of education. We're like that here.

You've hit the nail right on the head with that comment and BTW I meant no personal direction with my remarks re minutia... it just seems to come into all the various forums/threads...
I agree there is a lot of informative info to ponder here.
I am surprised that other than education as a general subject no one has sounded off on the Teachers of today as compared to those of the 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's, a whole new subject...
side note*** when I was in early HS we used Slide Rules in Math and Physics, I remember very well my first hand held calculator....OMG

 

[Lean'n'mean]

Everything is subjective...

Precisely.

 

[Lean'n'mean]

And, after he succeeded in leading a class revolution, he probably racked up the largest mass murder rate of any human being on earth ever, which means he topped Stalin and Hitler, two other revolution leaders.

Which is why those who want a revolution should be careful what they wish for..........."Today's victims will become tommorrow's executioners"..

 

[Lean'n'mean]

One of the great ironies of history is that those who set out to create a Heaven on Earth ended up unleashing the exact opposite instead.

That's probably because the vision imposed by psychopathic military dictators, isn't everyone's idea of heaven...

 

[Lean'n'mean]

Thread drift is a long and hallowed tradition at the Lounge. Somebody could throw out a comment here about whether or not Tom Brady deflated those footballs, and somebody else would find a way to tie it in to the decaying evolution of education. We're like that here.

Just think of the fun Little Red Riding Hood would have missed out on if she hadn't wandered off the path.

 

[MikeKardec]

You've hit the nail right on the head with that comment and BTW I meant no personal direction with my remarks re minutia... it just seems to come into all the various forums/threads...
I agree there is a lot of informative info to ponder here.
I am surprised that other than education as a general subject no one has sounded off on the Teachers of today as compared to those of the 30's, 40's, 50's, 60's, a whole new subject...
side note*** when I was in early HS we used Slide Rules in Math and Physics, I remember very well my first hand held calculator....OMG

Thread drift is both educational and amusing AND the discipline to stay on topic has it's own benefits. This is a good group of people, I enjoy it all.

The place where education and our society really loses, and it's far from education's sole fault, is in finding a way to utilize and reinforce the inspiration and creativity and broad mindedness that we have as children and young adults. I did very poorly in grade school though I was a bright kid. My mind was just elsewhere ... on interesting things, getting it's own education, but losing what was being taught in school.

A better system, the next evolution that we need, might find a way to teach every kid up to an acceptable level in every class. The system as it was just didn't have time for me so I did poorly. Luckily, I had a father who was adamant about self education (he might also have been part of the problem because some of my distraction was learning other things) but I do remember that whether we did well in school or not many of my fellow students were both very good at some things and experimenting with others that a better educational system might have developed for the good of us all. Just think of all the abilities that kids you've known "grew out of." Such a waste. We'll never stop growing out of things but a bit more reinforcement before we do would be good.

Going to school in the '60s and '70s I remember that there were attempts to do as I'm suggesting. But most of them were so airy-farey and full of '60s BS that they couldn't really get out of their own way. The myth of what they wanted to do blinded them to actually doing it and then the whole situation devolved into a bunch of corrupt navel gazing. As always the goals of many things in the 1960s were appropriately lofty but we'd probably have been better off if they'd made sure we actually knew how to use a slide rule!

We can't trade away the fundamentals or train kids to believe they will always have research tools on hand like the internet. We should inspire inspiration, try to help young people (all the way through college) to not forget the things they have chosen to love. We have to stop letting kids exit the system without the basics they will need. I'm a big believer in equality of opportunity in our society in general, but not in the most basic areas of education there I'd really like to see an equality of result (without holding anyone back). It's a totally different system, I don't know how to accomplish it's multiple goals, but I really don't think it's beyond us intellectually. Politically, that's another story.

Per usual, I might change my mind at any moment and I don't say any of this to threaten anyone's feelings or beliefs, it's just what I happen to be thinking right now.

 

[HudsonHawk]

Thread drift is a long and hallowed tradition at the Lounge. Somebody could throw out a comment here about whether or not Tom Brady deflated those footballs, and somebody else would find a way to tie it in to the decaying evolution of education. We're like that here.

One of my all time favorite Peanuts strips is one where Charlie Brown is on the pitcher's mound, and Schroeder comes out talk. Schroeder says "I think we should throw this next guy a curveball". About then, the rest of the team gathers on the mound and the conversation turns to everything non-baseball. After a while, someone says "What do you think, Charlie Brown?" Old Chuck says "Well...frankly, I think he'd hit a curveball." Focused.

 

[p51]

I always chuckle when someone whines about how the thread went a different direction. Don't people like that know almost every conservation you've ever had for more than a few seconds did the same thing? Online, you can read it all, but how many times have you talked for a while and someone asks, "Hey, how'd we get on that subject?" and everyone then wonders the same thing?

I've often hear that bantered about, but I've yet to read any credible documentation to support it as fact.

One thing's for sure, he allowed a comical amount of his citizens to starve to death in more than one case of famine. Were it not for US U-2 spy planes getting photos of massive piles of dead people being buried in China, the world might not have ever known about it...

 

[LizzieMaine]

I had an interesting mix of teachers growing up -- several of my elementary school teachers had begun their careers in the '30s, several others in the '40s, and only two who started their careers in the '60s or '70s. My first-grade teacher, who began her career in 1936, had also been my mother's first grade teacher. In fact, she had been my mother's *babysitter.*

The older teachers were much stricter, but not always in a good way. The aforesaid first-grade teacher terrified my younger cousin so badly that he'd hide in the crawlspace under the house rather than go to school -- and ended up having to repeat the first grade, with a different teacher.

I was reading on a sixth-grade level when I started school, and I found the teachers I had in my first years very irritating with their insistence on rote memorization and their simplistic "Dick and Jane" readers. There was no program for so-called "gifted students" in those days, and no provision for grade-skipping in our school district, so I was stuck at a grade level where I was bored, unhappy, and frustrated. This formed the opinion of formal education that I retain to this day.

I also had the disquieting experience of being taught "New Math" by teachers firmly rooted in "Old Math," who were as baffled by the new approach as I was. As a result, my mathematical capabilities stalled at a fourth grade level, and have never progressed beyond that point. I had, and still have, absolutely no interest in the subject -- which I blame directly on the way I was taught it by teachers who weren't adequately trained for it themselves.

I attended school in a small-town pinch-penny school district which never spent anything more than the bare minimum for facilities or equipment. My tenth-grade World History class was taught from a textbook published in 1937, which certainly had some interesting perspectives to offer on what European colonialism was bringing to the "savages," but it did fall a bit short when it came to World War II and beyond. The last thing covered in the book was the coronation of George VI, so anything after that I had to kind of pick up on my own.

I enjoy collecting school textbooks from the teens, twenties, and thirties. Some of them are still very much worth using -- a 1911-vintage civics textbook has a perspective on the obligations of the citizen to the greater society which is still quite valid today. But the geography and history texts leave a lot to be desired in how they frame the lessons they teach -- they're overtly racist, implicitly imperialist, and as much designed to indoctrinate the kids into a particular point of view as any book published today. In "The History of the Ancient World," by Dr. George Willis Botsford, a widely-used high school textbook published by Macmillan in 1911, and reissued in 1929, we read the following on page 4: "From the point of color three groups may be distinguished. The first is the Black or Negro race of central and southern Africa. They are lowest in intelligence, and have contributed practically nothing to the progress of the world. ...The third and most historically important is the White, or Caucasian race. To the White race are due practically all of the improvements of the past seven thousand years."

Think about that for a moment. That's quite literally the *first lesson a student learned* from this textbook. First day of school, first reading assignment -- the intellectual basis for worldwide White Supremacy. Imagine how many young minds that shaped. Imagine how many young souls that twisted and warped. And that's not even the worst thing in the book.

Now, Dr. Botsford was not some kind of fringe character. He was born in 1862, and clearly reflected the attitudes of his generation. He was, at the time he wrote this book, a professor of ancient history at Columbia, and one of the most widely respected historians of the time. Some of his works are still considered classics in the field. But nonetheless, there's little else in this particular book of his that couldn't have fit nicely into one of Dr. Goebbels' own textbooks.

That's the sort of "education" American kids were getting in the Era, and that's the level of indoctrination they had to overcome in later life. That many, but not all of them, were able to do so says far more for those groups who pressed hard *against* the education of the times than it does those who perpetuated it. I own an English translation of a Soviet history textbook from 1935 which is very similar in its style and level of indoctrination to an American book from the same era, only with certain perspectives reversed. It is, however, emphatically less racist.

 

[Bolero]

Heard it in a movie that I cant remember the Title..."Kill a few million people and you are a Conquering Hero,... kill a few and you are a psychopathic murderer" Context is everything of course and the statement was made re Romans and such...

 

[Harp]

The Cultural Revolution. Now that was a true decay of education.

The late Simon Leys' reflections, Mao and The Cultural Revolution and Chinese Shadows cast light toward darkness.

 

[JimWagner]

I was taught early on that formal education is to teach you how to actually think for yourself, give you a set of basic skills to enable you to continue your education on your own after you graduate, ideally for the rest of your life, and an appreciation for and an interest in a broad range of subjects and ideas. I was blessed with a number of teachers who taught to those standards and encouraged us to embrace that philosophy. And I've conducted my life accordingly.

What I see a lot today are academics who act, at least, as if knowledge you gain anywhere outside of the institutions they are part of is at best suspect and at worst worthless and invalid. They regurgitate facts and ideas they have been fed and little else. To many academics the word "autodidact" is a perjorative and represents someone who couldn't possibly know as much as they do about anything at all, not just their academic specialties. What arrogance!

Before I retired I spent 12 years working at a major university, rubbing sholders with academics every day. With rare exceptions they all acted that way.

The fact that so many academics act like that indicates a fundamental failure of the education system and its institutions.