this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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chapotraphouse
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Memorization predates capitalism. So I'd look for reasons in pre-capital societies
Well they probably didn’t have access to books and the internet. Nowdays it really seems like school is just supposed to churn out workers. At poor schools kids are taught to knuckle down and eat shit, at elite schools kids are taught that life is a game where you work out which rules to follow and which to bend.
a large portion of my education was "shut up and do what you're bloody well told"
to such an extent that part of me does despite my knowing better resent people who won't
Yeah, I think one of the reasons a lot of children end up resenting education so much is that there’s no explanation of why they might want to learn something. How interesting could subjects like maths and science be if they included a historical/philosophical component - if when you learned geometry for example you also learned about Pythagoras and the ancient Greeks. Simultaneously there’s no real education about life, about what it is beyond work, or how to be a good person or form values and pursue desires in the world. To the extent school teaches you about life, it’s punitive and fearful (don’t take drugs, don’t have sex etc) which often ends up making people rebel against themselves and against the idea of education itself. So much of the way we bring up youth is designed to constrain and mutilate and reduce people into docile Workers and Consumers. What it boils down to is creating passive rather than active human beings, ie there is no intent to cultivate agency.
Admittedly it seems to be improving somewhat nowdays, at least in my country I know a lot of schools spend time teaching kids about wellness for example. Although it is a bit sad that we have to teach kids what are basically techniques for dealing with trauma.
that would slow it down quite a bit though. Are you sure you aren't just more interested in history and philosophy than maths. Because I did get taught historical context along with my maths and science lessons and found it hopelessly boring.
Maths would do better to be taught as the creative subject it is. I had a really fun maths teacher who taught us how once you understand how an equation works you can apply it to solve a variety of problems in interesting ways.
I think the way schools teach obedience is less in the subjects themselves but the constructed social atmosphere. The calling people sir, the being grouped into classes and forced to stand in lines, we had one PE teacher that would make us do punishments from WW1 for backtalking (there's some historical context for you!) the fact it was a collective punishment also didn't help
Would you say that you'd extrapolate that sort of thinking to lots of other things in life?
yeah I think that would be fair to say. why do you ask
I guess that explains your past opposition of me proposing and imposing a proposed bilingual policy....
Sorry for before...
Sure, but different students approach maths in different ways. Some prefer applied math with clear, preferably cool, use cases. You want to teach those the rocket equation and orbital mechanics first.
Other's want everyday or civil applications. Or historical context of how the problems were developed.
Still others want pure math and proofs and the really abstract stuff and how it fits into modern bleeding edge math.
And still others are reading Russell and Whitehead at age 13 and should have math taught from a philosophy perspective.
yeah but there are limited resources per student (although we grossly underprioritise education children are our future)
I'm not an expert on this stuff though I'm just basing my thinking on my own school experience
It would slow it down, although I don’t think that matters much - if kids have a good foundation for learning they can easily make up for lost time when specialising at university. But you’re right that I probably just enjoy philosophy more than maths. I suppose in an ideal world there would be different options for kids with different needs to choose from. And certainly a good teacher is most important of all - everyone seems to have that same experience of one or two rare teachers who showed them that education didn’t have to be confusion and drudgery.
I have the feeling that the current generation of kids are nicer, or have a nicer social atmosphere, than when I went to school (I’m a millenial). My school had a really hierarchical and cut throat kind of atmosphere even among the students themselves, and I wonder how much of that was a reflection or product of the system we were put into by the teachers.
I agree that letting kids chose what to study is a good thing but I think that's more for older kids for a number of reasons.
1 - they need some experience with the subject to know if they like it and it would be a shame if they gave up on maths or history entirely because of a bad impression at the very beginning stage when if they got to know the subject better they might love it
2 - young children if left to their own devices probably won't do the early childhood work they need to. Children mature as they age and I would argue it's abusive to give them responsibility for their decisions before they are old enough to make them properly
3 - society and the children themselves do need them to have a baseline level of knowledge in various subjects.