gog
9mo ago
Would you be willing to summarize one of the cases you use to teach critical thinking, just as an example of the sort of lessons you’re talking about?
gog
9mo ago
Thanks for engaging. It sounds like you agree with me that CT can't really be taught and that it's just subject matter knowledge.
I have some questions!
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When you say "objective," do you mean "impartial" or "in touch with noumenal reality," or something else?
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If you think, to take the mechanic example, that it's some blend of creativity/counterfactuals or whatever which exists on top of just brute knowledge, is there anything an omniscient car mechanic would be unable to do (with a car) if he lacked only the power of critical thought? Is critical thought an easier substitute for knowledge? A harder substitute?
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Paths from Status Quo A to SQ B seems too narrow a definition. Critical Thinking is invoked most often as a synonym for "epistemology," but that doesn't involve any transit from one SQ to another- it just tries to figure out what SQ A is. Is that use of the term "critical thinking" a mistake?
gog
11mo ago
It's not a story. I just have something that half-approaches the old liberal/renaissance-man education (literature, philosophy, general science, music, am swole, etc) and I see how it enriches my life and how the lack of it impoverishes the lives of pretty much everyone I meet. It took me YEARS of autodidacticism to get here, and other than teaching me some math, school did not help one bit. I got all this education at the expense of productive technical training, but I think I can arrange things so that my kid gets most of what I have before she starts technical training so she doesn't end up a wordcel like me. There's no way she'll get it a school though.
School is a colossal waste of a kid's time. I taught elementary school for years, and anyone of average intelligence or higher spends most of the day colouring while the teacher tries to coax a 0.1% improvement out of the sub-average kids. No one wants to do "more challenging work", so they just draw or read the crappy school-provided books. High school is the only place where you will be told that you MUST either learn calculus and quantum physics OR learn how to make jam. This reveals that the primary goal of the institution is not to transmit a considered body of knowledge to a student, but to occupy his time.
Socially, school teaches the wrong lessons. Kids spend most of the day being told not to socialize, and when they are allowed to socialize it's with a bunch of people exactly the same age, which is great for commiseration but bad for education. The main lessons in elementary school are that everyone has to obey the prettiest girl and that you must use authority figures as weapons against your enemies (relentless tattling). The main lesson in high school is that anarcho-tyranny is here and you'd better just accept it (this may not be such a bad lesson . . .)
Ex: Because we can't tell who is ripping the toilets off the walls, no one is allowed to leave class to go to the bathroom, but the toilet-rippers were never in class in the first place. Etc.
Teachers are generally not people you want your kid hanging around if you care about intellectual development. The education system is very much a welfare system for people with bachelor's degrees (I fully admit my participation in this) and is completely ideologically captured, so teachers are almost never the best and the brightest. This wouldn't be so bad if they confined themselves to showing the kid how to do math or explaining how chemical reactions work, but the daily grind is not enough for around half of all teachers. They are there to teach students "how to think, not what to think." THAT wouldn't be so bad if they showed literally any sign at all of possessing such knowledge themselves. It has been my UNIVERSAL experience, however, in numerous schools, at numerous conferences, in various parts of the country, that teachers do not have original thoughts and are incapable of judging a thought beyond the most rudimentary "That's just like, your opinion, man". The most philosophically inclined might sometimes drop a "correlation is not causation," but only with regard to the opinions of others, never their own. Their opinions are totally off-the-shelf, NPC platitudes. They are usually PMC/progressive platitudes, but the dissenting ones only ever rise to FoxNews-style "If a MAN acted like that he'd be in jail, but a woman got away with it" type of stuff. Luckily, such people will never teach your kid how to think, but they'll do their damndest to teach your kid what to think (whether they are successful is an open question- kids openly talk about how you just have to say the white guy in the story was bad and Mr #%^ will give you an A, so they see what's going on, but that just turns the school into the Junior Greengrocers) The rest of the teachers are grill-pilled, which doesn't set a great example for a developing intellect.
Teachers hate learning. Hatehatehate it. Teachers love credentials, and believe that since they got a credential twenty years ago, the matter is settled. English classes study the 4 books the teacher studied in university. History classes repeat historiography from the nineties. Gym teachers are 10 years behind the times with regard to exercise science. I asked a biology teacher where the chromosome pairs actually ARE in the cell because I had been wondering, and she literally did not understand the question- she just drew the same diagram of the 23 pairs that every textbook contains. A week later she came back with an answer after a bunch of research. Good for her, I guess, but had the question never occurred to her? I spent a year learning Latin. It's a niche interest, sure, but my coworkers absolutely could not understand why anyone would learn something just for the fun of it. "So teachers are normies and you're a half-aspie weirdo?" I guess. But in a billion-dollar system that claims to foster intellectual development, I think it's reasonable to expect a little more intellectualism.
gog
11mo ago
She's 3. We're working on reading one day at time. You can't do anything really until the kid can read.
gog
11mo ago
There was a lot of enthusiasm at the start, then a period of much conflict from ages 7-8, and now we're out a more neutral "I'd better get this done," which I'm happy to accept.
gog
11mo ago
Teaching in a traditional setting is what convinced me that homeschooling is necessary.
My kid is 9 and has been homeschooled the whole time. She is far ahead of grade 4 (she just finished gr 8 math, but math is pretty a priori, so it's easier to push than history or something) and she isn't that much weirder than the other kids. I'm not even sure her weirdness is from homeschooling- it might just be hereditary. I am a public highschool teacher, and quite apart from the low-balled curriculm and culture war stuff, just talking to other teachers is enough to make me prefer death in the street to sending my kid to school, at least until 10th grade (I'll consider it then).
Social interaction is absolutely the biggest problem. We live in Canada, in the reddest part of the country (although blue is the colour of the red tribe here, and red is the colour of the blue tribe), so there is no shortage of homeschooling families but they are a)weird as hell and b)hyper individualists who prefer to opt out rather than to work within a system. I don't blame them, that's why we homeschool too, but the result is that the slightest disagreement over vaccines, or theology, or which video games kids are allowed to play, leads to ghosting. These are people who REALLY fear that their kids will develop the wrong values, so they try to find people with perfectly matched values. This works great for Mormons, but not for anyone else.
The next part of the problem is that virtually all social interaction is mediated by mothers and determined by their relationships to each other. Just dropping your kid off at their friend's house is pretty rare. If the kids are hanging out, the moms are hanging out too, so the moms have to be friends. Sometimes they form Mom Groups. Often these groups become Machiavellian dens of intrigue and betrayal, and now your kid's friend just doesn't exist anymore. If you try to organize stuff yourself, it freaks out the moms.
So maybe you sign your kid up for soccer or swimming or something so they can make friends there with some normal kids. The problem is that no other parents thinks of these places as incubators of friendship- that's what school is for. So if you suggest that your kids hang out together sometime, people act like you just invited them to a threesome.
Now, my kid has like 4 friends, and I went to school and had like 4 friends too, so maybe she's not missing out, but maybe she is. I tell myself that it's a tradeoff- you can't count on getting a liberal arts education at university anymore, and you shouldn't try anyway because of the costs, so this way I can give her something like that between ages 12-17, and then she can go get technical training and in any case, who still talks to their elementary school friends?
So if you're opening yourself up to "You kept me isolated throughout my entire childhood," you want to be able to say "No I didn't but also, look at the education you received."
Math is easy. Push Khan Academy. My kid starts Algebra 1 next month, and she's 9. That's not prodigious, but it's pretty good. She'll understand it at least as well as the average kid in Algebra 1. I pushed her pretty hard, pretty young, which led to a lot of rage from me and I don't recommend it and I wont do it with my other kid. Eventually I figured out that as long as her age matches the grade level (9 years old = grade 9 math) everything works okay. If we creep beyond that (because you can advance through this stuff really fast when you aren't doing a crossword about fractions every Friday) she muddles through but it's just not worth it. This takes about 45 minutes per day.
Reading is easy. Teach your kid to read early. My one kid could read by 3, the other one is taking a little longer, but will be semi-fluent by 4. This literally adds years to the kid's info-absorbing life and boosts vocab hugely. This isn't just a party trick, since vocab limits comprehension of text. Push reading fiction to learn words and culture, and non-fiction to build a model of the world. Building an accurate model of the world is the most important way schools fail children. This takes about an hour per day.
Writing is less easy: Get the kid to write poetry and descriptive stuff, emulating the style of distinctive things they have read. There is a book called "Writing Power" by Adrienne Gear which has a lot of good tips for making a kid's writing suck less. This varies hugely. Writing about a trip to Disneyland takes 15 minutes, writing a 12-line poem can take an hour.
Science is easy: Science up to like grade 7 is just general knowledge. If the kid reads a lot, you're good. We follow our province's curriculum as a minimum standard, but it's stuff like "opposite poles attract, similar poles repel." Pretty simple stuff. We do this as the opportunity arises. Maybe an half an hour per day when we're doing it.
History is easy: History up to grade 12 is just bien-pensant propaganda. If your kid reads a lot, you're good. My kid is now at the age where we watch a lot of pop history videos, and we also read The Story of The World, which is a homeschooling classic and is a good starting point for building the model. We cover our province's curriculum in about 10 minutes every year just to be safe: "What happened to the Indians?" "Everyone was mean to them." "Was residential school a good thing?" "I'd say no." Done. This mostly is covered by reading time and conversations in the car.
Gym: BJJ and lots of swimming and biking. She has no idea what to do with a basketball or a baseball. I'd sign her up if she asked, though.
If your wife has a PhD, the above is probably all you need to do. We tried The Good and The Beautiful, which might be good for older kids, for for a small kid it was a lot of "Write 4 facts about Switzerland" and "Memorize this poem of dubious artistic merit that was clearly chosen for no other reason than its memorizability." It's made for stay-at-home essential-oil-selling moms with no real education of their own, and is pretty good for those situations. My wife sorta falls into that category so she gets my kid to do a lot of Duolingo and stuff like that, but I supervise most of the real work.
It's a ton of work. I help my kid with her math in the morning before I go to work and check her writing when I get home and ask her about the books she's reading and read classic stuff to her at night and show her the movies of cultural importance that she can understand. But when it goes well, the pride is indescribable, and we share enough of a common language that when she asks something like "What came before God" I can explain most of the debate pretty quickly in terms she can understand and she wails in frustration as she realizes that some things are not just unknown but unknowable because she really does understand the problem. This might happen if she went to a regular school, but the . . . intellectual(?-she's 9?) . . . relationship wouldn't be there, it would be- if it existed at all- between her and a childless 30-year-old wine-aunt teacher who obsessively watches The Bachelor. There's a fine line between "Why have kids if you're going to have someone else raise them?" and "I'll keep your body in the freezer so we'll never be apart," but I think all this effort and interaction and conflict leads to a better parent-child relationship, and I wouldn't want to cede that to an appointee of the state. Many parents have ceded that relationship with their kids to me without even knowing it ("I asked my mom about this stuff, but she doesn't know anything"), and I don't feel good about it.
gog
11mo ago
India also has, by Western standards, a very strong culture/very strong cultures and family structures. North America has basically no traditional culture at all and is extremely socially atomized, which makes school the chief influence on kids after Tiktok. So if you care about transmission of cultural values, public schools are unattractive and will in many cases actively work to subvert the values of the families whom teachers consider their culture war enemies. I am a teacher, and I see it every week, if not every day. Add to this the fact that schools in North America are expected to teach nearly nothing, and fail even at that, and homeschooling starts to look okay.
Americans had slavery, and institutionally confessed to it during the civil rights era, which gave bien-pensants a huge opportunity for performative guilt, righteous feeling, and financial grift. Canadian bien-pensants never had a similar stick to wield. Even residential school, which absolutely sucked, could not compare with the horrors of slavery. How are you supposed to condemn your political enemies in the 2020s if you can’t prove their historical analogues were racist? Then George Floyd happened, and turbocharged every aspect of the situation, including Canadian atrocity-envy. So when they found these “graves,” people jumped on it hard and in about 3 days the narrative was permanently burned into the minds of everyone in the respectable classes. After about a week, news websites started quietly walking back the story -no retractions, mind you, just stealth edits, but the damage was done.
I don’t think indigenous communities themselves set out to scam anyone, but, speaking generally, they are plagued with widespread dysfunction and are grievously (and even understandably) addicted to copium, and so are prone to scamming themselves. There is always a hunger strike, or 500km awareness walk, or traditional hunting camp for kids going on. While these absorb enormous effort, they never change anything, which eventually leads to the conclusion that all the effort is in fact a defence against change, a way of telling yourself change is impossible because you’ve tried lots of solutions. The grave story is the best copium of all: “They were literally murdering our children to exterminate us; who could recover from that?”
For these two reasons, the grave thing is likely to stick around for a long time.
gog
1yr ago
Just checked my kid's copy of The Giant Peach. The centipede sings about the fat aunt. We got it at Costco, in a boxed set. They still seem to be selling it sometimes. Act now!
gog
1yr ago
Oh, they still cast a lot of stones back in the day. But nowadays there's a much more pernicious sense of self-righteousness that I think comes from the loss of the idea that everyone is evil/fallen.
gog
1yr ago
My kid was doing gr 7 math questions on khan academy the other day, and one of the questions was “The word ‘latinx’ first appeared in [dictionaries or Google or something] in 2007. How many years has it been in use?” It was the most hamfisted attempt. I would have expected something like “the Latinx population of the US is…”
It seems like a weaponized use/mention distinction, which is weird, because normally use/mention gets pulled out to defend apparent wrongthink.
I fully endorse voting with your money with regard to woke art, but if the movie isn’t ideological (which remains to be seen), why do you care about the producer? I don’t know about film crew ranks, but if the best boy (whatever that is) held values antithetical to yours would you be bothered? What about the key grip (again, whatever that is)? Costume designer? Casting director? Keep moving up the chain until it matters. Why is that the point where a worker’s political beliefs ruin the movie for you?
In the old Christian view of the world, everyone was equally evil and equally deserving of damnation, but I think that worldview allowed for greater nuance in weighing people’s moral worth. You either had to bite the bullet and say that no one had any moral worth, or make pretty fine distinctions, along the lines of “OF COURSE we’re all equally bad, but we kill people in battle, and that other guy kills prisoners.” Nowadays, though, without that blanket condemnation of every human, it’s easy to fall into “but that guy is BAD and I don’t want to help him/pay him/give him a platform/etc.”
My brother in Christ, EVERYONE is bad. Your plumber cheats on his wife, your mechanic watches child porn, your hairdresser spreads rumours, your kid tortures frogs. You give them all money without a second thought. It sucks, but it is the fallen nature of humanity. If the movie is a wokefest, skip it no matter what the producer thinks, but if this specific bad executive producer can executively produce a good movie, why the isolated demand for purity?
On another note, yousaid it was an ethical dilemma, but ethical dilemmas involve competing obligations. You have only one obligation- to not support this guy, but mentioned shame and feeing emasculated. That’s not an ethical dilemma, it’s a psychological one. It sounds (sounds, that’s all), like you’re trying to preserve an ideal of who you are as resisting in some measure the decline of western society. A noble goal, but we’re fretting over a spiderman cartoon, so the battle is lost. They’ve gotten into your head, and whether you see the movie or not, you think watching spider man movies is really important, which is a win for Marvel marketing over the long run. Do not resist the decline, propel the recovery. Step one is to stop watching marvel movies and go out and act on the world. . If you already act, act more.
gog
1yr ago
Okay- I see where the miscommunication is. The question was not "what is this image?" The question was "Now that the entire section on the French revolution is over, show that you understand the overall course of the revolution by saying something about this image, which you have never seen and know nothing about." These types of questions are popular here. If a kid said something like "Well, it looks like what the 3rd estate wanted, but the priest is now holding scales of justice and is happy, so the artist seems to like priests, but they killed a lot of priests in the Terror, and for some reason the noble is just accepting that he now supports the peasants, but there was a counter-revolution and a lot of exile" that would be great, and worse answers would be less great. But instead the kids say "Well, this is clearly the reverse of the image I HAVE seen, and the teacher told me that that was France before the revolution. This must therefore be France afterward." To reason like that shows no knowledge of the revolution at all, and even suggests ignorance, since the situation depicted, if it existed at all, only existed for a short time in the early stages. Such an answer is straight-up guessing the teacher's password. When you try to explain that to the teachers (not Lesswrong, but that the answers do not show understanding) they are unable to comprehend even the possibility of the problem, let alone specific instances of it.
gog
1yr ago
I can’t believe this has elicited such a response. Thanks for finding the original and clearing up the intent of the image. Looks like the idealism was because the revolution had just begun- not a cynic’s take, but the dream of a true believer. “The summer of 1789,” though, is in no way “France after the revolution,” any more than “The autumn of 1939” is “Germany after the Second World War.” “This is how things stood in France after the revolution was all over” is not a correct explanation of the picture, but that was the agreed-upon answer for 17 years.
gog
1yr ago
The priest on the peasant was a mistake. The image has a priest leading a noble, and a peasant riding the noble. It’s in the link someone posted above.
gog
1yr ago
It seems like a dream of the ideal post-revolutionary period, but it’s so rosy that it looks like a cynic’s satire of revolutionary aims. It certainly doesn’t depict post-revolutionary France, though.
gog
1yr ago
They had rich people, but not in the service of the poor, the poor did not proclaim “vive le roi,” and the clergy did not become vessels of revolutionary justice, as the image suggests.
gog
1yr ago
They show the kids the one you found and explain it, and then test “higher-order thinking” by showing the one I described, but the lesson is “different roles=reversed roles=opposite=after the revolution.” After the revolution, it was not the case that the peasantry and clergy were being supported by the nobles, but even if you didn’t know any of that, the chain of reasoning is still clearly fallacious.
gog
1yr ago
I’m a teacher in Canada. Points below about teachers finding phonics boring are true, although there is constant pressure from administrators and colleagues to be FUN, and phonics doesn’t make class fun.
It is impossible, however, to overstate the staggering stupidity of the average teacher. Intellectual mediocrity combined with everyone else in the room treating you like an authority (and shamelessly kissing your ass) is a really bad combination for self-awareness.
Examples:
-Test question shows a French peasant and a priest riding on a rich guy. Implication is that he is supporting them. Correct answer is “this image depicts France after the revolution.” I show up and point out that the nobility was destroyed (not esoteric knowledge) and largely the clergy too, and therefore this image cannot depict France after the revolution. Say it is more like some noble’s uncharitable take on the true motivations of the 3rd estate. Unanimous response from the entire department: “we’ve used it for 17 years, we’re not changing it.”
-kid gets shunted out of AP English for arguing that the accepted interpretation of a story is wrong. “It’s not what you’re supposed to think.”
-AP English teacher says a play is racist because it contains a song where a girl mocks the bumpkin townsfolk by listing all the stereotypes they expect her to fulfill, and agreeing to enact them because that’s all their tiny minds can understand. Teacher protests that stereotypes should never even be mentioned unless he (personally)is present to make sure kids think correctly about them.
-I teach French, but can also teach math. Have no degree in either. Fellow teachers universally baffled that, in the 20 years after university, I have learned other things to slightly above high-school level. I say “you can learn new things.” One says “NO, I CAN’T.”
-Gr 3 math teacher comes to me, kid is multiplying stuff like 71x83 incorrectly, but getting correct answer every time. He’s doing tens then ones, instead of ones then tens. She cannot understand how this can work, because she has never actually understood multiplication.
-At provincial gr 12 French immersion meeting, teachers unanimously lament that, after 12 years of relentless French instruction, kids can’t read French novels and they must be read to them. Final essays are 80% about hallmark-grade movie Intouchables, a black-guy cool/white guy uptight shlockfest. Teachers are SO happy. It’s the BEST movie, with SO many themes.
I could go on and on (“I showed my students this really good TED talk”), but if you are wondering “how did they not see that the kids weren’t learning,” the answer usually is “they were, on average, not smart enough to do anything other than follow a recipe.”
gog
1yr ago
“Functionally illiterate” means the exact opposite: that you CAN pass literacy tests (they kind they give up to grade 6, anyway) but can’t read well enough to read and understand something in day-to-day life.
I’m a teacher in Canada, where salaries often top out around 105k CAD. Teachers here are also distressingly low-g, low curiosity, low nuance. Realistic raises aren’t going to fix it.
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