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You can train boys to possess those masculine strengths just as you can train girls to possess their feminine strengths. This was the norm for a long time. “Gentlemen”, “virtuous”, “holy” depending on the period. There is a lot of time wasted in schools on less valuable materials. (We need every single person to learn science? The 95% of people who will never use the periodic table must spend a year memorizing it? There’s not a better way to select the scientifically-inclined at an early age, like by IQ and interest?)
The deal for women is that, instead of spending the 18,000 mostly-worthless hours in classrooms before graduating college, and instead of working a stressful occupation, you learn the fun skills that are valuable for happiness and not going extinct. You can probably accomplish this with only 500 hours if you use interesting and memorable material. Then maybe some of the remaining 17,500 hours can be spent on the things that are required for homemaking, like working with calendars and fiscal tables and babies. That leaves 16,000 hours totally free for women. They also don’t have to do the 80,000 hours of stressful work that the average person does. With that amount of time they can learn to promote happiness through their spirit and conduct, which actually comes naturally to women who are outside of the Western media / educational landscape. It is in a woman’s nature to see Punch the Monkey— which is a terrible name for a monkey — dealing with the alienated modern conditions of his enclosure, and feel the harm-reduction empathy response to shower the monkey in nurturing love while feeding him treats. It is not difficult to switch the object of this behavior from monkeys to husbands and children, as they have a number of similarities.
“Many husbands were not honorable or good around the house”, but bosses suck, and teachers suck. Some woman just killed herself through self-immolation after an affair with her boss in Congress. No one has a stronger biological motive to care about a woman than her husband, certainly not her boss or coworkers, and if the woman is pleasant to be around and helpful, then you are maximizing the odds of female felicity.
You had to memorize the periodic table? We had to learn how to use it, what the rows and columns meant(not that I remembered), that sort of stuff. But it was about learning to use a reference and not about memorizing the reference, that would obviate the point of having a reference.
My memory is hazy but I do think we had to memorize at least some of the table.
Was it the part that went, "there's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, ..."?
To the tune of "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General?"
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I think making anyone memorize the periodic table is a bit silly in the age of
pocket supercomputersphones, and I'm not at all against the idea of teaching more practical/homemaking skills in schools - but the point of teaching everyone science is not solely to benefit those who will grow up to be scientists. It's not supposed to be "a way to select the scientifically-inclined at an early age", so even if I have my own misgivings about the current system, that's not a fair criterion to judge it by.As I see it, teaching science to everybody including the kids who are not in a million years going to go into science has two main purposes, benefiting both the individuals themselves and society as a whole.
Firstly, it serves to make sure that ~all citizens have a basically sane idea of how the world works - you need laymen to have a layman's understanding of science to develop the intuition that science makes sense even if the specifics go over their heads, lest they think that any nerd spouting sufficiently complex and formal-sounding jargon, whether he's a scientist or an ayatollah, should be listened to just the same. Or indeed, lest they start thinking that both can be safely ignored because it's all Greek to them either way. If you don't teach girls basic science, what you're going to get is a whole lot more superstitious, gullible women who believe in astrology and homeopathy and the most bone-headed religious bullshit you can imagine. (Ditto "low-IQ boys".) The world can barely function with the current levels, the last thing we need is to stop vaccinating idiots against woo.
Secondly, it trains kids to actually use their heads and work. Exercises that involve actual reasoning rather than rote memorization are best, but even with the latter, whether they're memorizing the periodic table or the phonebook, they're at least exercising their long-term memory, attention span, and ability to just sit down with boring unpleasant work for hours and focus. That's not nothing, particularly in the age of ipad babies. And if we're going to give them boring learning exercises for the overall betterment of their intellects, we might as well make them learn boring true things like science rather than go with the phonebook.
It also helps people recognize medical quackery for what it is, so if they have cancer or arthritis they won't waste time and money on ointments that "draw the toxicity out of the body" or whatever.
Uh, does it? Lots of people use woo-woo crap despite being more than scientifically literate enough to know better; I would expect the correlation between alternative medicine and scientific literacy to be near 0(or even, as in the case of creationism, running the opposite way you'd expect).
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Yes. And AI makes this only more stark. The reality is, working memory can only work with what's already in the brain as background. Knowing facts as well as frameworks for understanding, especially in science, literally enable higher thinking. There's limits of course, and we can debate what a sensible "baseline" is, but science instruction in basic chemistry, physics, biology, and to some extent math (that's a whole other conversation) is absolutely essential. And similar arguments apply to basic reading, history, geography, and bits and pieces of the humanities. If anything, recent research has actually underscored that especially US education has shied a little too far away from memorizing and internalizing facts, because you do need that baseline as I said to do anything more complex.
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