At the lower income levels the only thing taught is boredom, authority, and pointless busywork.
Adult Literacy in the United States: https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp
It's not perfect, but from the most remote deserts of Arizona to rural Appalachia, to Compton, to rural Colorado, our public school system chugs away.
By hood or by crook, or by underfunded inner-city/rural public school, we're teaching a hell of a lot of kids to read and write, multiply and divide. Skills that many parents can't teach on their own, and that most kids wouldn't go out of their way to learn if you left them alone.
I attended elementary through middle-school at a district too poor to offer a high-school chemistry class, and still learned my times tables and how to write a paragraph. I even went on to Community College, a state school, a state-school masters, and an MD on scholarship. Sure, I didn't get the chance to take AP classes, and I didn't have some fancy robotics class, but I just can't bring myself to bash the public school system that got me to where I am. Sure, I didn't get everything a kid growing up in Pasadena got, but California has a robust-enough public-education system through the Community Colleges and UC/Cal-State system that it wasn't a dealbreaker in the least.
I don't know what district you attended, but if you took nothing away other than 'boredom, authority, and pointless busywork,' I'm curious as to how exactly we are debating this point in written English.
I think it's a slap to the face of a lot of teachers doing their best, as well as their students, to say that kids in disadvantaged districts learn nothing other than how to sit still and listen to authority. I learned quite a bit, in fact.
I have to agree. In fact, I was explicitly told as much by my high school Physics teacher after I openly said that I thought the school's "Excellence Program" wasn't particularly challenging.
His take was that he realized that it was easy for me, but there were some teachers who were trying as hard as they could to give the students a good education while the rest dismissed us as being a bunch of unreachable ghetto kids that they were wasting their time on. Sure, I was a 17 year-old punk kid but he was right: I was basically crapping on the people who were trying to make a difference and at the same time putting down a lot of my classmates who were working as hard as they could to get good grades, many of them in very difficult life circumstances.
I guess I don't have a point other than to say I agree with yours :-)
And please don't post in the flamewar style to HN generally. We're trying for something different here.
He edited his post and added a lot of words that made it seem a lot less pedantic after the fact.
The original post I received was pretty bare bones originally and gave me a completely different impression than what is written now.
But I definitely overreacted to what was written, even originally.
--
"As bad as you make it sound, they are teaching kids stuff, even at less-than-wealthy school districts.
https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp
By hood or by crook, or by underfunded inner-city/rural public school, we're teaching a hell of a lot of kids to read and write.
I attended elementary through middle-school at a district too poor to offer a high-school chemistry class, and still learned my times tables and how to write a paragraph."
Don't worry about it too much—we appreciate your good intentions. It's just best to review one's comments and edit out anything that might come across as a swipe. (That's what I do.) Remember that comments are 1000x more likely to sound that way to readers—especially the particular reader being addressed—than to the person posting the comment.
Best of luck.
I don't think our system is the best, most effective, or even, in many cases anything above the bare minimum. There are probably a lot of interesting alternatives out there, and I would love to see some sort of change because I absolutely despised high school.
But, the bare minimum is good enough to get kids prepped to continue within the public higher-education system, and they can more-or-less take it from there.
Even if you go to a terrible high-school, it is generally functional enough for you to enter a community college, no SAT required. From community college, you can transfer to a good state school. The mechanism exists to take kids from mediocre schools, get the ones who are interested up-to-speed in a less chaotic environment, and put them into a state university, without them being super-geniuses or 1,000% intrinsically motivated or something.
It's not perfect, but it's a government program that gets millions and millions of kids who'd rather be playing Fortnite or hanging out at the skate park to at least learn the bare minimum in a somewhat standardized way.
The socioeconomic limitations on kids trying to progress through that system is a different thing, and that's a hurdle that I don't know that we have functional systems in place to deal with.
I have a feeling that pointless busywork always grows to however much people can bear, so maybe if school didn't condition people to be so tolerant of it, we'd have less of it.
And no matter where I've gone, from Honduras to Pakistan, to Germany, to San Bernardino, folks have been waiting in lines for things, and doing stuff that didn't really matter.
Doing stuff that sucks seems to be an unfortunate consequence of social organization for all of us normal folks who can't pay to skip the line.
It seems to me that, to responsibly make a statement of that form, you would have to look at when the system was created and look at the motivations of the people who created it (or made significant changes to the system and its objectives). If we're talking about the compulsory education system, that means looking at when the compulsory education laws were first passed, and what was said by those advocating the laws (and, possibly, deciding if they were telling the truth and if they had additional motivations).
Can you honestly say you've looked into that? Do you even know when compulsory education laws were passed in your state (U.S. or otherwise)? I'm not really picking on you specifically—I had to look it up (1874 in California).
I stress this because, while ostensibly school is for "education", if you point out that it's not doing that nearly as well as it could, ten people will say "Well, really school is for X", and you'll get about five different values of X, some of which contradict each other. This is the hallmark of people making up rationalizations for something they truly don't understand.
(To take an example, even for something like compliance—I do imagine that employers use "suffered through school without getting kicked out" as a sign of compliance, but if you imagined an institution optimized for providing that signal, I suspect making it through one month of military boot camp is a stronger signal of that, and obviously way more efficient than spending 12 years in school. Or if you want compliance without that kind of physical stress, then some variant of extreme ascetic monk training would probably do it.)
Murray Rothbard says that compulsory education in Europe was first established by Protestant Reformation leaders—Martin Luther and his followers, and John Calvin—and that their primary motive was to promulgate their religious ideas and suppress religious heresy; and that the Calvinist Puritans brought this approach to America (starting with Massachusetts and more generally New England). "Only a year after its first set of particular laws, the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1642 enacted a compulsory literacy law for all children. ... In 1647, the colony followed up this law with the establishment of public schools. The major stress in the compulsory education was laid on the teaching of Calvinist-Puritan principles." Doing my own research, I verify that Massachusetts's 1647 laws[1] required that parents "once a week (at the least) catechize their children and servants in the grounds & principles of Religion" in the very next sentence after the requirement to "[e]nable them perfectly to read the English tongue".
As for what animated the educationists who successfully established compulsory public education in most of the American states in the mid-late 1800s, Rothbard describes it in the following link. Rothbard is an ideological libertarian, but he forms his arguments from plenty of primary and secondary sources which he cites. https://mises.org/library/education-free-and-compulsory-1/ht...
[1] https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-law...
Do you figure I'm making a good point, or do you disagree? If I'm wrong, what is the point of school? Why does every country do it?
Again, curious to hear your thoughts.
Some simply thought education was good and weren't bothered by the coercion.
Some subscribed to the absolutist State view going back to Luther and Calvin—people saying things like "in these schools the precepts of morality and religion should be inculcated, and habits of subordination and obedience be formed", "that a teacher must lead his students to accept the existing government", "the children belong to the State and not to their parents", etc.
And some had egalitarian aims along the lines of what you describe. "The vigorous championing of the public school's leveling role appeared again and again in the educationists' literature. Samuel Lewis particularly stressed that the common schools would take a diverse population and mold them into "one people;" Theodore Edson exulted that in such schools the good children must learn to mingle with the bad ones, as they will have to do in later life", and others are cited too.
Although you may be surprised at how far they go. Rothbard says that Owen and Wright—Wikipedia identifies them as utopian socialists—had very extreme plans involving the State raising all children away from their parents in a uniform environment, as the logical conclusion of making the childhoods of the rich and the poor be totally equal; those are the only two he cites advocating this, but he claims they were very influential, the essays published with approval by a great many newspapers, etc. Could be.
Back to what you said: The "including teaching it's boredom, authority, and pointless busywork"—well, authority yes, but the boredom and busywork seem pretty clearly not part of the original plan. I think that's an accident which has developed since then. Which brings me to this point:
Supposing that the above describes the state of affairs in the mid-1800s, a great deal of time has elapsed since then. Private companies with clear goals develop cancer (that is, pockets of people acting selfishly at the organization's expense and subverting the organization's usual methods of enforcing its objectives) on smaller timescales than that. You should expect some ... evolution.
Generally, I expect incentives to direct the evolution of an organization. If we consider the "customers" of an organization to be those who decide if it gets funding, then the customers of a public school are primarily the voters or the politicians they elect, not the students or the parents—except insofar as those can influence voters. (Also, sometimes a school is allocated funds proportional to the number of students, so students voting with their feet could be a force; on the other hand, switching schools involves hassle, losing one's entire social group, and likely a longer commute, so it's likely not used often.)
We might expect this to mean that schools would tend to implement policies that make things pleasant for school employees at the expense of students, as long as they can't be turned into public relations disasters. Continually increasing the homework load, starting school extra-early for teenagers despite decades of research about sleep schedules showing that's a bad idea, and assigning busywork (either in the sense of "literally to keep the students busy while the teacher can sit and relax", or in the sense of "make all 20 students do an extra 5 problems because of the 1-2 people who need the practice") are all examples of this. (Note that, for all these, opposition can be dismissed as "the complainers are lazy bums".) I've had a case where a teacher—a nice guy and a smart guy, I liked and respected him—told me that, if he made an exception to implement my request, he'd have 100 parents beating down his door with their own requests—so, keeping his negotiating position with parents was more important than designing a better program for his student (well, from his incentives, it was more important).
It could be worse. The book "Little Soldiers"—based on what I've read[1] about it—depicts what is apparently considered good practice in modern Chinese education. Students starting at age 3 are required to sit very still and do a delicate and pointless task over and over, and are yelled at whenever they mess up—all to establish "discipline" as early as possible. Parents are expected to fawn over the teachers and, under the table, to buy them gifts. This seems pretty clearly the end state of "optimized for school employees at the expense of students and parents" (well, I guess I could imagine it going even farther...). It seems American parents are more unruly and have a better negotiating position than that.
But generally, beware of ascribing purpose to any particular part of school. If the school was laid out in a coherent design by one person, and it's relatively young and small, and has good competition—then maybe you can expect most of it to be part of the plan. But public schools that have existed for a long time... When you experience busywork, it's not the taste of egalitarianism; it's the taste of organizational cancer.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/cz48fp/litt... and the discussion at https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-lit...
Would you then consider it possible to draw a link between that and a tractable concept of the 'point' of school.
It may also be different from "why parents choose to send their kid to school", because parents' perception of their choices may be incorrect—I think it often is.
And, of course, it'll be different for different kids. You say "the average", but as some say, the average human has one ovary and one testicle; taking an average across disjoint groups may not make much sense. A high school diploma is one of the most cited reasons for going to high school (not K-8), but that would really only matter if the high school itself is a brand name, which is rare (you probably have to be rich, talented, or lucky to get in); otherwise a GED should work equally well for college. For the upper middle class trying to get into elite colleges, an upper middle class high school will offer plenty of extracurriculars with which students can pad their applications. For socially adept poor kids that manage to live in rich districts, mingling with the rich kids may be useful. For kids with terrible home environments, school may be a decent escape. For kids that fit well into the social environment and aren't bothered by all of school's problems, it may be fun, good for making friends, and even a decent educational option. I think most of the above groups don't overlap much (except the "socially adept poor kids" obviously "fit well into the social environment"), and forming a picture of school's "average target student" wouldn't look like a real student and would probably mislead more than enlighten.
For kids in reasonable home environments, who are irritated by school's problems, who have friends and sports or other group activities they do outside school, who have access to libraries and now the internet and Wikipedia and free online courses, which are getting better while school seems to get worse due to its cancer... it's probably not the best choice (the kid's individual traits like motivation and curiosity may be deciding factors here), and as trends proceed that will become more clearly and generally the case. Parents' impressions of the available options are probably decades out of date.
As for the incentives that face parents themselves: for many, public school is primarily publicly funded daycare; for some parents, there is no reason other than avoiding punishment from truancy laws. Honestly, I suspect the strongest motivators in practice are social conformity—not sending your kids to school would be shameful or weird, make you stick out and become a magnet for criticism—and ignorance of alternatives.
Most haven't heard of unschooling, and probably think homeschooling is for Christian fundamentalists who hate evolution, or for geniuses; those who know more still usually assume that it requires a parent to act like a full-time tutor, and haven't considered options like "set up books and textbooks and ask your child once a day what they learned and if they have any questions". Some have thought that far and think their child would never be productive without constant supervision; the homeschooling advocate's response is that your child has spent years being taught that "education" = "adults imposing boring unpleasant crap on you", and it may take many months for that to fade away, but their motivation should improve eventually; still, it seems possible to me that there's significant intrinsic individual variation in motivation and curiosity that would make the difference.
It is disappointing when adults assume the worst about their own children and knowingly condemn them to years of misery; they could be correct, but what a thing for a parent to believe... One can also ask: if you really believe that, then how do you expect them to do well in college or in a career? Maybe they assume the motivation will automatically improve as the frontal lobe finishes growing (which is possible), and that faking it until then will get them into a place where they might develop hitherto unseen qualities and do well. To which I merely sigh, shake my head, and say life should be so much better than that, and for many reasons it's worth the risk of trying it the right way.
Kids can take the California High School Proficiency Exam, leave high school at 16, do two years at a community college, and transfer out to a state school.
I wound up taking a bunch of community college classes at night, my high school accepted the credits, and let me leave a year early.
Only a handful of kids seem to actually follow-through with it, but it's totally doable if you're organized, willing to work, and really want out.
Yep. Though I didn't do any college after that. I messed around with mathematics and programming for about 5 years, then made a serious effort to find a programming job, and have been working since then.
I didn't know about the CHSPE until 9th grade, though, when my sister told me about it (because she had a friend who used it too). Before then, my impression was that there was no feasible alternative to school. Certainly no one at school mentioned it.
Also, you're not allowed to take the CHSPE until either age 16 or in the second semester of 10th grade. Which strikes me as stupid. Seems to me that, if you manage to pass it at a younger age, then that is a stronger proof that you're smart/hardworking and shouldn't be stuck taking 9th grade or 8th grade or whatever. (I imagine most of my peer group could have passed it in 6th grade; it is really a test of basic minimum competency.)
What would you attribute your deep intrinsic motivation to? It's admirable.
Another is probably high self-opinion and wanting to prove I was the best. In elementary school, I entered the chess club; there was a five-week tournament (one game per week), and I studied chess books my mom gave me and by the end of the tournament was the strongest player in the school. (I only tied for first place in that tournament, but I had improved enough by the end that I believe I won all subsequent rematches against the guy I lost my first game to.) Upon entering middle school, I took a Mathcounts test to determine who would be on the school team, and I got the highest score in the school (which was actually kind of a fluke, because I had a friend who generally outperformed me at arithmetic-based contests and did so at the actual Mathcounts events—but I tended to beat him at proof contests later on). I did lots of math contests, and generally did "rather well". The pinnacle of that was qualifying for the math olympiad camp in 9th grade, from which the U.S. International Math Olympiad team is selected (although people below 12th grade have a lower bar, and aren't in the running for the team unless they've met the higher bar; my achievement isn't that impressive). So my self-opinion had some justification.
Regarding calculus textbooks, in the summer after 7th grade I went to one of my sisters and said, "You know, I've heard of this thing called calculus, but I don't know what it is"; she gave me my oldest sister's calculus textbook (Ostebee and Zorn), and I read through chapters, and did problems out of the the chapters until I figured I understood it, and moved onto the next chapter. (I didn't go through all the chapters—towards the end it did multidimensional stuff that just got boring.) With this as my sole calculus education, I later chose to take a calculus round of a math contest, and got a "decent" score (IIRC it might have been in the top 10%). :-)
So, for quite a long time, I wasn't actually sure that I'd ever met anyone who was smarter than me. (My abovementioned friend was certainly close, and was better at some things.) At the math olympiad camp, I did meet people who were clearly significantly better than me at math contests. I figured that a certain amount of that was due to drilling, which was something I didn't do (I mean, I went to math club and did whatever they put in front of me, but I didn't practice contests at home), which gave me a way to suspect that I might still be at least as smart as them. :-) I knew this was a self-serving line of thought, but I figured that, as long as I knew it was specious, it was harmless to indulge it and let it motivate me. I think Colin Percival is the clearest example of someone reasonably close to my age that I'd have to bow down to. (Though even then, if my education had been properly arranged, instead of wasting most of my K-10 years... Well, that is an experiment I hope to carry out multiple times in the next generation.)
The olympiad camp actually gave worksheets that they recommended we do throughout the year. I did not want to pursue that, or pure math in general (although I thought I was good, I didn't think I had a good chance of, say, proving the Riemann hypothesis, and anything less than that didn't seem worth it), and refocused on computer science. (I also had discovered Paul Graham's essays around 8th grade, Scheme in 9th grade, and took an AP CS class in 10th grade, whose curriculum included SICP—yeah, that teacher was pretty cool.) After leaving school, I did over 100 Project Euler problems, and did other "programming for math" stuff, although I drifted towards pure programming stuff (implementing languages, specifically).
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not some kind of work-maniac like Isaac Newton. I've spent plenty of time playing computer games, and still do. But I have some reflexes that have served me well. (1) Whatever you're doing, do it well. If you're doing it well, see if you can do it even better. (2) Keep an eye out for opportunities to practice your skills. When I got irritated at repetitive Youtube comments, I used curl/egrep/sed/sort/uniq to count how many of them matched a particular format. When I felt frustrated about limitations in EV Nova or Civilization II or other games, I did some work towards reimplementing them myself—which, in the case of EV Nova, led me down a rabbit hole of researching real-time garbage collection, which occupied my productive efforts for some years. When I set an alarm clock, it is a shell command of the following form:
~> sleep (math "3600 * 8 - 600"); pelimusa
I was in the weeds of implementing my idealized real-time GC in x64 assembly (which may have been a bad idea, but I had my reasons, and I didn't have anyone whose opinion I trusted advising me against it; at least I learned a lot), and eventually my family started putting pressure on me to start earning money. So I did. I got a referral to Google—which turned me down, by the way, which... lowered my opinion of them :-P—and then to a few other places. I've been working at a medium-sized Silicon Valley tech company since then.
Today, in my job, the things that motivate me are pride, curiosity, and lolz. Pride could be summarized as proving to myself that I'm the best (however I might choose to define it), and that those who have invested in me made the right choice. Curiosity is self-explanatory. Lolz is when I use absurd means (like overwriting executables in /usr, or piping "yes" into installation programs, or running "kill -STOP; kill -CONT" in a loop to slow down a program) because they're actually a very effective and quick path to what I want.
Beyond my job, I want to fix things for future generations, perhaps to prove that I'm right that there was a better way. John Holt tried to reform school, ran into the cancer (as well as the astonishingly common view that children are no damn good), and concluded you had to work outside school. Seems about right to me.
Civilization II has taught me that exponential growth is the most powerful strategy ever. If I can create several people like me, each of whom creates several more, and so on, then that can achieve a lot more than I might do myself. (I am being 70% serious.) Even if they're not as smart, raising them properly (i.e. no goddamn school, plus find them some cognitive peers, and generally have an intellectually rich household) may more than make up for that: the improved education and non-isolation (my social development was certainly hampered by growing up 99% around kids I couldn't relate to, which may have made the difference in my squandering some opportunities) and possibly improved motivation (having 6+ hours a day forcibly wasted is very demotivating). In the worst case, they'll still carry my genes and can try again with the next generation.
I encourage smart and motivated people to try this too. At some point we may figure out how to directly increase intelligence (that would be one of the projects I would hope a kid of mine tackles); for now, the most obviously workable approach is to find a suitable genius (with no severe mental health or personality issues) who is willing to give you their genetic material. That may take the form of marrying them, if you're lucky. Once you have the kids (plural; one of the easiest ways to have peers is to have them at home, although you can't guarantee they'll be friends), the default approach of unschooling seems best: buy good books and intellectually stimulating toys, help them meet friends, maybe experiment with 1:1 tutoring if you have the resources and they like it, support them in activities they seem interested in, but fundamentally just make sure they are fed and watered and loved, and trust to their natural curiosity and to luck. (There is going to be a large luck component. Another reason to have multiple kids.)
In the general population there appears to be very little critical thinking, ability to regulate emotions, cost benefit analysis, consideration of opportunity cost, probabilistic thinking, nor even a rudimentary understanding of the scientific method, political and legal system.
The real issue is with the politicians, and the fact we don't have proportional representation. There is a significant percentage of the population with no real representation. I do not relate with either Tories or Labor and I don't think either has my best interests at heart.
Nor do most voters. They have to keep FPTP because they know that otherwise, most people won't vote for them; the last 4 times the UK had nationwide elections held under a more proportional system, most voters voted for parties other than labour of the Conservatives.
> I don't think either has my best interests at heart.
Most people agree with you!
2. everyone thinks proportional representation is excellent. the reason is usually a misunderstanding of the voting process. in reality it has drawbacks, same as first past the post. before the UK referendum a study was commissioned exploring the various types of voting. the conclusion was that all these systems have flaws and all these systems are similar. but the clarity and the definitive mandate a party gets from FPTP will make sure alternative voting will not be adopted anytime soon.
Many, many European countries have proportional systems in which it's very rare for one party to get a clear majority and governments are almost always coalitions. Would Norway, Sweden or the Netherlands really be better off under a system like FPTP that effectively disenfranchises a large majority of the electorate?
No, because AV is not a proportional system
> in reality it has drawbacks
There are lots of proportional systems, so it does not make senser to say "it has drawbacks".
> all these systems are similar
That's not true either.
My description of the unwashed masses applies to plenty of highly educated people too.
To the list, I would also add that people don’t seem to look at root causes of problems. This can be seen very clearly in the dysfunctional housing market. High rents are the fault of greedy landlords. As if landlords can just choose the price irrespective of the market! And a common objection to building more housing is that it wouldn’t be affordable. Using that logic, there would have been no point in planting potatoes during the Irish potato famine because they would be too expensive.
I am very pleased with the level of critical thinking and lively argument we get over the dining room table about the issues of the day. My youngest daughter hs just started GCSE history and sociology and I am being constantly schooled on the ills of society.
I would more blame the newspapers and other media for poor understanding of issues, which is mostly deliberate on the part of the Murdoch press.
Yes, totalitarian states have used education to indoctrinate masses to maintain order and power. Depends on who does the teaching and how it is taught, that is why critical thinking is key.
Given this prerequisite, is an educated population easier to be manipulated than an illiterate one?
Good question. Depends on how the education is done. If the education is done to instill the idea that one must "believe in science", instead of learning the facts and questioning them skeptically, if one is convinced that expressing dissent is harmful and akin to violence, if questioning the dominating framework is actively discouraged and dissenters are viciously attacked, if people are taught that there can be no honest disagreement, and any different of opinion is nothing but a power move in an oppression framework, if everybody is assigned their places and recommended opinions in advance, if they are instructed that any non-conforming opinion must be silenced and suppressed - then such "educated" people are much easier to manipulated than the illiterate ones.
An illiterate person knows they are illiterate - there's no way to hide that fact from themselves. They know there are places they must tread carefully for their knowledge has obvious limits. A mal-educated person thinks they know all the answers, and learned The Truth, and thus hold the keys to the universe. Moreover, they feel a moral duty to lord over lesser creatures and guide them to The Truth, for their own benefit. This is an ideal human brick for building the totalitarian barracks.
You spend 10 years telling John some stuff every day for hours and Jane is someone you just met.
Which one is easier to lie to?
Sounds to me like it completely depends on a lot of different things, but if you know what lie you want to tell ahead of time: obviously John is easier to lie to.
John might be 10 years into your lies, but he also might have caught on. You use different lies with Jane, who might not know better, and she listens wholeheartedly and with good faith.
If John is an adult and Jane isn't, Jane is easier even with the age difference. This is simply because of lack of knowledge and experience.
If one has more access to the outside world than the other, they are less likely to believe your lies.
If John knows you have mental health problems that causes you to lie and Jane doesn't, Jane is easier to lie to.
Maybe John is more suspicious of people and the world. Maybe John just shuts up to appease you, like folks that avoid talking politics with their families simply don't want to deal with things.
Are you someone younger? DO you have authority over them?
There are so many things that affect whether or not you can lie to someone.
You spend 10 years telling John and Jane some stuff every day for hours. John also gets told stuff for hours by a third party while Jane gets all information from you. Which one is easier to lie to?
School adds a third party so that the child isn't reliant on things taught by their parents.
Usually psychopaths and sociopaths are always moving so people don't know who they are and they can fool them easily.
What you are saying is if someone does trust you, you can lie to her easier, which is true, but then you will loose the trust and bond that took a long time to get.
And the math schools concentrate on isn’t particular useful in the context of a modern society. So what that you once memorized a geometric proof long enough to take a test if you don’t understand how interest works and how credit card companies take advantage of you.
If you can't learn from books or videos or online lectures or parents or tutors, I doubt generic schooling is really going to be able to help much either, but if it does great. People learn in different ways and different kids need different resources, but that's an argument against a one-size fits all public schooling system, not in favor.
None of the German Empire, Weimar Republic or Russian Empire were totalitarian states. If education is protective against indoctrination the effect is at best weak. A lively marketplace of ideas is no guard against organized thugs if the liberals are not willing to defend liberalism. Critical thinking is a red herring.
Weimar Republic also had highly militarized civil service, comited to military values rather then to democracy.
Russian Empire was dictatorship to large extend. Not as much as communism, but it was not democracy with political freedoms. The little reforms they had were basically too little too late. There were little of such a thing as citizen right in most places. Peasants also had huge illiteracy rates.
> How did educated, liberal society respond to such terrorism? What was the position of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party and its deputies in the Duma (the parliament set up in 1905)? Though Kadets advocated democratic, constitutional procedures, and did not themselves engage in terrorism, they aided the terrorists in any way they could. Kadets collected money for terrorists, turned their homes into safe houses, and called for total amnesty for arrested terrorists who pledged to continue the mayhem. Kadet Party central committee member N. N. Shchepkin declared that the party did not regard terrorists as criminals at all, but as saints and martyrs. The official Kadet paper, Herald of the Party of People’s Freedom, never published an article condemning political assassination. The party leader, Paul Milyukov, declared that “all means are now legitimate . . . and all means should be tried.” When asked to condemn terrorism, another liberal leader in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, famously replied: “Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!”
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-l...
Even on this website, merely questioning the validity of some of the aspects of the politically correct zeitgeist will get your post flagged and hidden from public consumption.
It’s funny how the people complaining about “cancel culture” (usually a roundabout way of complaining you can’t say racist things anymore) are completely fine with twisting especially history to benefit themselves.
As an external observer, this seems to me exactly the problem. Discourse is so polarized, that nobody can say "this thing that started as a reaction to overt racism has gone too far" without people replying "that just means you're racist".
The situation has come to where there are ridiculous abuses going on, and criticizing them is anathema because the initial purpose of the system being abused was to counter a bias.
Hell, even writing this comment, meta-analyzing the situation, I'm semi-afraid will have personal impact to me, which is pretty indicative of the problem.
A large part of it is signaling through terminology. If you use terms such as "cancel culture" and "liberals", it's pretty clear you're either a right-wing US citizen or someone who wishes they were one.
There are definitely people that are able to discuss certain social trends becoming a problem without using dogmatic terminology, which is where the conversation becomes interesting for all participants. As opposed to a horrifying journey plumbing the depths of polarised discourse.
So you can't say "cancel culture has gone too far" without signaling you're right-wing? I'm not up to speed with the exact politics, but I've heard the term in non-right wing contexts.
Seems to me like that would make it impossible to talk about things, which is what I'm seeing. How would you talk about Twitter canceling people without using the term "cancel culture?
Judging by the number of downvotes on a comment about this very thing, I'm not optimistic.
Which is an exact mirror of the professional world that most people will face later. School system is here to push a national narrative on people (which is not a bad point per se, as it builds cohesion), and prepare them to be mindless drone in a corporate environment. In short it serves society needs, not individuals.
You call it indoctrination. Someone else might equally call it social cohesion.
Whether or not critical thinking is on the agenda for a homeschooled student depends entirely on the teacher and the curriculum.
In Russia, peasants were largely illiterate. As in, unable to read and write. The revolution did came from people who were able to read and write, obviously, it is kinda hard to coordinate without that. For that matter, monarchy was kept by educated people too, simply because you cant keep bureaucracy without writing.
But it was not some kind of great education they would have. And their propensity for violence had more to do with how violent Russia was even before then with anything education.
The did much more than coordination. The intelligentsia was basically 100% responsible for the revolution in every aspect, starting from conceptualization (peasants would never come up with the idea of trying to apply Marxism to the real world and wouldn't even be able to imagine world other than the one in which tzar rules over them) through managing implementation to the post-revolution power capture. Peasants were merely ants, necessary for revolutionaries' plans to install themselves as new rulers of Russia (obviously, some of them had more lofty goals, but as usual the worst scoundrels quickly took over and the idealists were disposed of).
The monarchy, the military, the civil service, they were all "intelligentsia" too. "Liberal bourgeoisie" and capitalists were "intelligentsia" too. There were freaking 5 armies in Russia civil war. All 5 were led by people able to read and write. You all make it sound as if "intelligentsia" were uniformly Leninist or something. They were not, that is just the army that won. And I would be even super surprised if communists were the most educated of them all.
Yet also, the Russia monarchy was not exactly stable democratic functioning place until Lenin started revolution by the end of WWI out of nowhere.
I honestly hate when people who are supposedly against communist somehow adopt communist framing in completely absurd ways, down to blaming "intelligentsia" for whatever they perceive bad and down to attributing whole of Russian civil war to communists. I would really like to see someone use the term intelligentsia for like American journalist, teachers, or programmers. Lets all assume that all college educated people in American hold the same opinions. It is that stupid term.
I would love to see analysis under which Stalin was intellectual. And people I mentioned (except maybe programmers) are not.
> "In Russia, before the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), the term intelligentsia described the status class of educated people whose cultural capital (schooling, education, enlightenment) allowed them to assume practical political leadership."
Yeah, pretty much anyone able to participate in politics. Which literally means every person participating in Russian politics is intelligentsia by this definition. Notably, while not all officers and capitalists participated, those who did would be counted as intelligentsia. And they did participate and even achieved some.
> "In Eastern Europe, intellectuals were deprived of political influence and access to the effective levers of economic development; the intelligentsia were at the functional periphery of their societies."
Can confirm that intellectuals were hated by communists.
Calling communists intelligentsia is one way to delegitimize them, precisely because of their disdain for this class. That was strong political point and rhetoric, but fails when you then try to make it a point about impact of education on person.
The Wikipedia article conflates intelligentsia with intellectuals, which I don't agree with (I'm Polish, so I have some long-ingrained intuitions regarding those terms). Stalin, as an educated non-wealthy person (he studied to become a priest), can easily be seen as someone who is a member of inteligentsia.
> Which literally means every person participating in Russian politics is intelligentsia by this definition.
Tzar family or many of the old aristocratic families were not a member of intelligentsia and would probably be offended by the association. The key factor of being in inteligentsia was (from Wiki): "people engaged in the complex mental labours". The higher classes didn't do any labor.
> The key factor of being in inteligentsia was (from Wiki): "people engaged in the complex mental labours".
Stalin was not engaged in the complex mental labors, outside of seminary he engaged in revolutionary politics basically.
The very same wikipedia has multiple definitions for inteligentsia - including specifically Russian one from pre-revolution I quoted. Which defines inteligentsia as people educated enough to engage in politics. Which does include Stalin and pretty much everyone else involved in Russian politics.
> Tzar family or many of the old aristocratic families were not a member of intelligentsia and would probably be offended by the association. The higher classes didn't do any labor.
I did not made that definition, wiki did.
Monarchy had more supporters then just Tzar and old aristocratic families. And again, old aristocratic families did actually engaged in ruling and leading. And then you have waste groups of lower aristocracy running smaller things. The country was under constant internal conflict and pressure. They did not done labor, they did politics a lot.
And group of people who had don't politics or who have been educated cant be reasonably reduced to "Stalin vs Tsar". Somehow, people pushing for reforms (too little too late success, but still) don't exist. Liberals dont exist. Capitalists dont exist or dont engage with politics. That is not even realistic. Monarchis trying for milder reforms dont exist.
But: that probably won't work for everyone. Furthermore the question remains how to do that when both parents have to work to make ends meet? Maybe even multiple jobs, as it is common for many nowadays? Also one can't overgeneralize this, as there are good teachers and schools, and bad ones. No matter what country or system or schooltype.
As always: it depends...
Germany was among the most highly educated countries in the world in the 1930s. The Russian Revolution was an elite phenomenon. In a country of peasants the Revolution was of and by the intelligentsia. Whatever else you might say about them they weren’t uneducated.
The German ban on home schooling is explicitly to prevent the formation of parallel societies. It would be hard to be clearer that the purpose of the “education” system is indoctrination.
If you want to teach things the best and most efficient way to do so is explicitly. The enormous majority of people do not generalize learning beyond its context. Whether transfer of learning even exists is a hot topic in psychological research. It is certainly not a strong effect. If school was to teach critical thinking it should be doing so explicitly. It doesn’t and there’s little reason to believe it’s especially good at it.
School is excellent at inuring children to boredom, obeying authority and pointless busywork.