Friday (kinda) on-topic. Your brain on public schools

[luzribeiro]

It was frightening at times, hilarious at others, unbelievable for most of the time. I kind of find it hard to believe that college students didn't know where Mexico and Canada are. But... who knows. Call it selective reporting if you like, or a true sample of the general public... I'd rather be interested to hear your suggestions about the reasons for this situation. If, as we've recently discussed here, the availability of leisure time and access to information should result in a more educated, informed, and critically thinking public, then why isn't that happening in reality?

A nearly hour-long video ahead. Watch at your own risk.

Watch on YouTube

My suggestions for the particular US phenomenon of public ignorance and stupidity (please correct me where I'm wrong):

1) Excessive opulence and prosperity tends to lead to complacency and decadence. Access to information is of secondary importance here. In short: having everything at your disposal makes you lazy, not hungry for skills and knowledge.

2) Historically inherited, culturally determined proneness of US society to self-isolation at an everyday "commonfolk" level, despite the relatively recent interventionist/internationalist drives at the "elitist level", stemming from its economic, and hence geopolitical expansion. In short: America's geographic isolation defines its approach to the world, which is generally characterized by clumsy ignorance, garnered with a bit of messianic exceptionalism.

Be my guests, go ahead and prove me wrong / dismantle my points.

Comments

[oportet]

We've been prosperous for well over a century, seems like this dropoff is more the last 2-3 decades. I try not to side with the 'burn it all down' crowd, but when it comes to our education system, I'm starting to think that's the way to go, although I know we dont have the stomach for it.

[asthfghl]

Well, my dad, may he rest in peace, had a drinking problem for decades. But things only got real bad in the last couple of years. See where I'm going with this?

[oportet]

Yes, but there was a time you couldn't make it to 5th grade, let alone high school, let alone college, without knowing basic geography. A time where an average kid could snap you an answer to 35x10 without having to fill up two pages with boxes and notches. A time before no child left behind where if you didnt get it, if you disrupted class, if you didnt complete assignments, etc. - your ass got left behind.

Our standards may have been slowly been dropping for generations, but there was definitely an off the cliff moment/series of moments more recently.

[asthfghl]

That's what I'm talking about, quantitative accumulation tends to lead to qualitative alterations, and that often happens relatively suddenly, when a critical point had been surpassed.

[garote]

And what was that “critical point”?

[asthfghl]

Damned if I know. For us, it must've happened sometime in the late 90s (see my comment below). Yeah, it does take that short.

[asthfghl]

We used to mock Americans for being insanely dumb. But now we've become just as dumb as them. After having embraced their lifestyle, or at least copied it somewhat. The irony.

[johnny9fingers]

It’s all of us. And maybe it’s not America per se; maybe it is the kind of capitalism we operate within; of which the US is merely the most developed/most decayed example.

[asthfghl]

Maybe.

[johnny9fingers]

Look, the uk has traditionally valued education out of all proportion to the way most other nations do. We have the oldest schools in the world, and school means something... but only in the private sector. Before the abolition of the Grammar schools - secondary schools which were essentially crammers for university for the top 20% of the ordinary working population - Oxbridge entrance was majority state school - not Eton, Westminster, Winchester, or Harrow etc.

When even we have fallen under the “Let them be uneducated” meme (which is rather a Marie Antoinette way of putting it) then other folk won’t be too far behind. It’s not about culture, it’s about folk not being prepared to pay for general education through their taxes, coupled with restrictive oversight. We don’t let teachers teach, we also evaluate them, make sure they are fully cognisant of all necessary directives, expect them to comply with oversight... and then we sack experienced teachers when they become too expensive because of seniority.

In the UK the flight of the middle classes into private education happened at the same time as Grammar schools all became comprehensives, but without the resources of the comprehensive private schools like Eton or Harrow.

And our polity has suffered from not educating its folk. But we won’t be the last for which this is true.

[johnny9fingers]

And the other thing is that the nations with better all around educational results all appear to have Social-Democrat mixed-economy policies. Whereas there is something malfunctioning at the heart of the Anglo-Saxon version of capitalism when it comes to education and social welfare. The same is not true of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, or Finland.

[asthfghl]

I dunno. Viking tradition or something.

[johnny9fingers]

Yeah, but we have a tradition of education. One that stretches back thirteen centuries. Only the Irish predate us in valuing educational culture on these islands, and they let things slip in the 5th century. :)

We always were a nation of clerks as much as shopkeepers. The reason why the largest per capita circulation of newspapers happened in Britain was that we had the largest per capita literate population. Schools and education have always been really big things here; which is why we can export a particular kind of schooling to the rest of the world; and even import pupils into the UK to our boarding schools. But in the process we have denied places to those of our own who were deserving but too poor to pay the fees - the antithesis of the origins and founding of all of the Great English Public Schools. And we removed the stepping stone of the Grammar school system for the middle class professionals and the bright achievers from the working classes. And we were meant to value education as a nation. Even France, a deliberately intellectual society, destroyed its education system on a rotational basis to fit in with ideology.

Until recently, we let the teachers teach, with all the problems that gave us - child abuse of various kinds, extreme pressure on gifted pupils, incorrect mentoring fostering dependence, etc & etc. But it also gave us prodigies made from ordinary folk. We need to find a way to do just that without the collateral damage of our previous barbaric practices

Shakespeare was educated at a Grammar school. But we don't want to produce any more Shakespeares, evidently. And I'd say we got that from the Americans and from the form of capitalism we have practised since Thatcher. But it will be exported further if the US is, in this regard, allowed to win the moral and economic argument.

[asthfghl]

And we have a tradition of friendly hospitality, and yet we're currently a bunch of inhospitable, primitive, chauvinistic assholes. Times change, and people too.

[johnny9fingers]

So we fight for the right change, not the wrong one.

Preserve the best, and change what's needed to make everything else better.

[garote]

My nephew knows an extraordinary amount about Pokemon. It helped him make friends at school. When I was a kid I had Doom 2 maps memorized stone cold and could run through them at great speed. That helped me make friends at school. My Dad memorized baseball stats on trading cards when he was a kid. Helped him make friends at school. Lord knows what my grandfather memorized out in the dirt in Oklahoma; probably Bible verses. I could make a case that it was better to know that stuff than to know where Mexico is.

But on the other hand, all that stuff is obsolete now. Pokemon, Doom 2, baseball stats, even the freaking Bible, by and large. And the sheer volume of "useless" - or at least short-lived - things to learn has grown as well. What's amazing to me is that we can still crowd in some good long-term learning amongst all this garbage!!

So perhaps what we need is to turn up the volume on the things that have lasting value. Well, the smartphone revolution is still ongoing. Here's a prediction: In ten years, parents will be able to instruct their kid's smartphones - using conversational dialogue - so they're preprogrammed to only display particular educational content and communicate with particular people. Forget these confusing boxes and checklists and rules: A parent will just say "Hey, phone, make sure Jimmy finishes his math lessons every day, before you let him go on Instagram." And the phone will say "Alright."

And while this technology slowly locates its ass with its hands, here's another angle for you to consider:

What matters is how young people treat the Mexicans and Canadians that they're bound to encounter much sooner than later.

If that interaction goes well, then maybe they should concern themselves with where crap is on unlabeled maps. Assuming they ever run into an unlabeled map.

Just after the Civil War, when bands of renegades were still roaming around the states plundering their neighbors, my great-grandmother's uncle spent most of an entire year sleeping inside a hollow log in the woods behind his mother's farm, because a posse would come by on the regular and rob his mother, then demand all the men and boys come out - whereupon if they presented themselves, they'd be shot - because they were Germans, and everybody knew all the fucking Germans objected to slavery on moral grounds, the bastards. He had to forage for food, sometimes stealing it from neighbors, instead of hunting, because even though he'd been let out of the army with his firearm, if he discharged it they'd immediately start searching the woods.

Now maybe those bastards trying to kill him could find Germany on a map. Probably not. Didn't matter much either way.