"The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."
-- John Adams in a letter to his wife Abigail
I'm sure many people would love to have their children study the arts and humanities and develop profound insights into human nature and life itself. Unfortunately, many people are stuck studying mathematics and other subjects like it in the hopes of having a decent career.
If they can’t do well on tests designed to measure skills the students have been failed. They have not learned skills. The US education system is quite good at teaching skills. A large majority of countries do worse. The skills that PISA tests are a prerequisite for almost any more rarefied learning that is often held up as the real purpose of education.
Being able to read for meaning, extract information, combine knowledge from two texts, distinguish between what is stated and what’s implied, even to figure out something is implied, all of those are the kinds of things we expect an educated person to be able to do. PISA tests them. Trying to make people care about academic subject matter is very difficult because most people do not care and do not find it useful. Thus they forget most of what they learn in school. Insofar as education is forcing the tastes of one class on everyone else it can burn. Most people don’t care, just like most academics don’t care about sports. Forcing sports on them would also be an injustice.
> Trying to make people care about academic subject matter is very difficult because most people do not care and do not find it useful. Thus they forget most of what they learn in school. Insofar as education is forcing the tastes of one class on everyone else it can burn. Most people don’t care, just like most academics don’t care about sports. Forcing sports on them would also be an injustice.
Ah, yes, we should teach less science to everyone because that would be like forcing every academic to play sports. Perhaps physical and science education should be provided for every student? Education does not come at the expense of sports. If anything, the opposite is often true.
People are naturally curious. Shuffling them into the confines of some narrow and often purposeless maze fucks that up. That's a considerable portion of TFA, the institutional curricula stunted their interest in biology.
My curiosity was drugs, drugs lead me to biology, lead me to chemistry, physics - but it was independent study. Political challenges from my partner got me interested in history and anthropology, but it was all independently structured.
I think if the institution gave all these little knobheads enough autonomy to actually derive, from themselves, some real interest, they would ultimately end up intersecting with all the sciences, it's actually inevitable. Instead they're just forcefed a bunch of information they don't have a relationship with.
Sports is biology and mechanics is molecular biology and kinesiology and so on. It doesn't matter where you start, you track into that shit. Passion the latitude it lends to the people possessed by it is what allows us to push deeper and deeper. Not stunting intellectual growth by conditioning people into a state of repulsion at the premise of learning.
Yes, yes. Education is multifaceted in its consequences. Merit depends upon objective testing. Common culture and high trust society depend in large amounts upon education and schooling. With the quality of schooling available, shortage of teachers and quality teaching personnel due to abuse and low salaries, political interference with teachers handling their own material, religious indoctrination in charter schools, and the amount of students requiring remedial classes in college. Of course, more data and parameters can be considered, but I don't think anyone can consider the broad state of secondary and primary education in the US as "healthy" or "improving."
I don't think you can objectively test. When you do test you're making a singular data point that doesn't reflect ability, necessarily, but instead a coincidence of factors at a given point in time. The data point is arbitrary, even if the test is scored against the distribution.
Take, for instance, a FT-working non-trad that scores above the mean. The mean who predominately consists of students who are FT-students. Should some respect not be paid to the considerable handicaps suffered by the non-trad? How do you even begin weight that?
Of course this is multiplied a million times over in several dimensions.
Or is it something a little more profound?