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It would be cheap and extraordinarily simple to put 1000-student cohorts into different conditions and conclusively determine what is actually effective. It boggles my mind that such simple research hasn’t been done to conclusively put the issue to bed. What are we paying academics to do exactly? What are we paying the education bureaucrats to do? They have completely lost the plot. Fire all of them and replace them with a dozen highly motivated bloggers and we might actually get some conclusive answers to all of our questions. If some theorist has a new theory in education, let him prove it (double-blind controlled). Allot some money. Fuck, if you didn’t want to experiment on American kids, open up two schools in Nigeria for $400.
My God, even just paying kids to do an hour-long computer-driven program to determine the time-efficient benefit… like this shit costs nothing… fire every pedagogue and start over…
If you are looking at a dysfunctional system and wondering why people don't just do some tests, find what works, and do that, please understand that this is not how any of these systems work. "We need more data" is almost always an excuse to ignore results the people involved don't like the implications of, not an actual request for the rigorous sifting of knowledge from ignorance or bias. Whether it's teaching methods or school discipline or policing or any of a thousand other areas, they aren't wrecking things because they don't know better. They're wrecking things because they want to, and don't care about the consequences because they don't believe they'll suffer from them.
Well more correctly they’re wrecking things because they have a goal in mind that is served by wrecking things, and that goal does not line up with the stated goal of the organization.
It’s pournelle’s law, but it may not be the needs of the bureaucracy being served. It may simply be a calculation that upper class women feeling high status is more important than the success of poor children, which every society makes. It may be a decision that the most important thing is to listen to the experts, even if those experts are very knowably and obviously wrong(in this case because they are simply ignorant), and that it’s worth sacrificing good outcomes for to honor that rule. This, too, has abundant historical precedent. And it may be that they drink their own koolaide and no one ever points out the results, which, again, has abundant historical precedent. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to callousness, sycophantic underlings, and a need to feel right.
A fair correction. Mine made it sound like wrecking is a terminal goal, which in most cases is not accurate.
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Society is itself a bureaucracy.
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