This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I do think the problem is that we can’t crack the problem of teaching. There are other issues.
First, doing it right means a lot more work for the administration, teachers, and students. If you want people to understand a topic, they must understand it more deeply than simply being able to repeat back the summary at the end of the chapter and do curated problem sets that never deviate from the examples in the textbook. To learn about history, you need to read a lot of history— cover the same events from multiple perspectives, read accounts from the various groups involved, and to write an attempt to answer questions about what is going on, what various factions believe and why they believe it, and how those beliefs shaped their actions. To understand science, you have to learn to ask questions and figure out how to find answers, you have to understand what the laws of physics actually mean. No one actually teaches this way because it’s a lot of work for everyone and because it doesn’t work at industrial scale, it’s expensive. It’s far far cheaper to lecture at a bunch of bored children out of a textbook, assign the problems at the end of the chapter and move on to the next lesson. You don’t need to spend time reading the answers or figuring out what they understand, just go grab the teacher’s guide, open up to the answers to the assignment and mark papers. Further, you can have much larger class sizes when the model is “lecture, assign homework,” rather than class discussion, essays writing, and reading multiple sources. To properly have a discussion in which everyone can participate, you can’t really have more than 10-12 kids in a room. In the traditional classroom, you can have thirty or more.
Second, having a population that is not well educated — at least beyond the ability to do whatever jobs the ruling class needs them to do — is beneficial for the ruling class. A population who can’t critically reason cannot question the narratives they encounter. A population trained on the Pavlov’s dog model of education where what matters is repeating back what the authorities told them is in no position to rebel even when it’s clearly in their best interests. A population that has no experience of looking into questions for themselves is sunk. They believe themselves educated, they have the appropriate credentials. They can do whatever job they are hired to do, but beyond such things, they can’t understand their world. And because they don’t understand it and don’t know how to fix the gaps, they revert back to what they learned in school, sit down, shut up, and obey the experts, and don’t question things.
Your response made me reflect on my own secondary education, where my school district certainly punched above its demographic weight in terms of educational quality. When I look back at it in terms of my personal experience, I remember specific teachers who were highly effective and probably had a profound impact on the way I think and reason about things. I also had plenty of teachers who were completely uninspiring and gave no indication during class that they had an IQ above room temperature (maybe they were different in their personal life). I actually don't think about the textbooks or exam structures at all, but maybe that's because it's a bit easier to remember human beings rather than pens and paper.[1]
In retrospect, I think what made those highly effective teachers exceptional is that they really seemed to know more than I could imagine even learning at that time in my life. They also seemed genuinely keen on sharing not just that knowledge, but in little ways their own personal philosophies on how to properly learn. Is the "industrial scale" version of this identifying these highly effective teachers at scale, properly compensating them, and just letting them loose on our youth?
Tying into the second paragraph of your response, I think I just got real fucking lucky that my father's blue collar job transferred him to a semi-rural Midwestern town that somehow managed to gracefully keep up with the regional transition from a populace working on assembly lines to working in cubicles. Our sister city across the county line didn't fair nearly as well: it smelled twice as shitty, had 75% of the median household income, and sent almost no one to our state's flagship university. The question it provokes: what's the incentive structure for the ruling class for organizing education in these two cities over the coming years?
My perspective comes from both my own efforts at self education and watching my sister in law teach at a public school.
The thing is that you can’t teach yourself using the standard industrial program intended for use in the public school system. It doesn’t work well to produce understanding of the material in the sense that you can use it to either understand other things or solve problems. You might be able to recognize a fact. You know the procedures to solve algebra equations but you don’t know how to think about them in ways that allow you to solve problems that tge text hasn’t presented yet. Nor can you use facts to draw logical conclusions. In short the method is wonderful if the goal is to get a very basic baseline of knowledge and don’t care if it the student understand it or learn to think for themselves about the information or to critically think about the sources being used.
Now having used a method similar to the older classical method, it works a lot better for producing and understanding of the material. If I learn how to do all the steps of algebra and mathematical calculations, then I should understand enough to approach a problem that’s just beyond what the text explicitly teaches. Or if I read a history and understand what all the actors are doing and why they are doing that, you can compare events and come to understand something about how those kinds of things happen. If you read literature in its historical context and culture you’ll have a better understanding of what the author was intending to get across.
The problem of course is that individual close study of a subject is almost impossible in a large classroom. Classrooms with 35 squirmy kids are simply not suited to have a discussion. They’re built for the lecture and textbook model that they were designed to accommodate. Classical education does not scale up to traditional school class sizes. The model is based on discussion, and beyond a certain class size you simply cannot have a discussion.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link