The Nordic countries have the best schools in the world.
Private schools are banned.
Well except for Sweden. They introduced vouchers in the 90s and as soon as they did, their rankings started rolling like dung down a hill.
One advantage of the private schools is they can kick out students they cannot manage easily, while the public schools have to keep everyone. Some recent strutural changes in the public shools are said to have declined their quality, enough so that many government ministers, even of the left wing, are sending their children to the private schools.
I guess it's one of those Nordic myths -- like high minimum wage (there is none in Denmark).
they did that before too :) couldnt possibly expect the politicians to send their kids to the same filthy schools as the plebs now could we? :)
What parents are doing is laundering their agency through a testing regime. It's part of the process of the absolution of responsibility of consequence.
As an aside, it's clear that parents aren't mature enough to be approached socratically. I regret their schools taught them to read and write. They clearly don't want to learn.
Fortunately it doesn't look like you've been making a habit of this (at least not from a quick look at the account's recent posts in other threads), so this should be easy to fix. If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to using HN as intended, we'd appreciate it.
You've done this in other threads too, unfortunately (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35469483 was particularly bad). We have to ban accounts that post like this, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on, we'd appreciate it.
My intentions aren't epistemologically accessible to you.
> As an aside, it's clear that parent commenters aren't mature enough to be approached socratically. I regret their schools taught them to read and write. They clearly don't want to learn
You have a licensing clause on your comments. I regret that your school didn't bully you enough to realize you shouldn't be an ideologically grotesque nerd.
Feel free to respond once you've decided we're done with ad-homs and self defeating arguments.
You can bully me here. Let's see what you got.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Teachers becoming disciplinarians is where they become authoritarian, exploitive arbiters of ones future earning potential.
Definitely. Let's start stack ranking[0] in kindergarten and expel (and make that stick nationwide!) the bottom 10% every year.[1]
By the time students get to high school, we'll have best schools in the world!
Those who have been expelled had already reached their intellectual peak, especially those in primary school. amirite? /s
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve
[1] Please use this is a "clear indicator of intent to parody" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
it doesn't cost more for a teacher to open up an algebra book and teach from that instead of from the pre-algebra book. unless there are scheduling difficulties which somehow prevent one classroom's worth of students from being crammed into the same room in the same slot, the imagined lack of money isn't going to impact the contents of the curriculum.
this isn't like when we thought we needed to cram schools full of computers and they were going to cost money. one math class is an expensive as another to teach. we don't even need new textbooks. hell, we probably don't even need textbooks, just have them do exercises online or something.
On the contrary, I'm sure that a teacher who understands algebra well enough to teach it competently costs much more than the other kind, on account of being so rare.
Education is a collective action problem. Parents care more about their own child's education than the education of other children. This should not be surprising, and it cannot be changed.
That's the problem. We're dealing with the critical theory definition of equity, which they define as the intentional redistribution of opportunity and resources along identity group lines to correct for present and historical injustices, as well as opportunities those groups have already had.
Critical theory and social justice adopts a distorted view of reality. Leave it to a school in San Francisco to show everyone what happens in real life when administrators adopt a policy based on that distorted view of reality -- inequality is only increased.
Also, among those who aren’t willfully ignorant, it’s well known that increasing resources increases inequality. The classic example is height: when resources are low everyone is short. But when resources are plentiful then those with the genes for height tower above those without.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Those who were short didn't fare worse in absolute terms. They only look worse off by comparison.
Essentially, if something is a zero-sum game (e.g. there are only so many jobs around, if you get a job someone else won't), then even if someone isn't doing worse absolutely, they can still do worse overall relatively speaking.
Which isn't to say that we should be giving short people stilts and cutting the legs off tall people, but it's worth recognising that these topics are complex, and even if we're only talking about absolute benefits, people can still lose out relatively speaking.
My obligation is to my children. I'm happy to entrust them to a system if I have faith in it, or the people running it. If I don't...it would be downright irresponsible.
In reality, the political leaders in charge of this societal reordering will themselves become the next upper class, and you can bet with certainty they'll give their own kids the best education and opportunities they can (which will be better than what they offer the masses).
I get really scared when I hear anyone promise utopia. Literally every large-scale society that did turned into a hellscape after a while, and the idea itself never worked.
There was always someone who didn't buy into the idea, and they were blamed for why it didn't work. "If only those people were gone, then this would work and we'd be happy."
So millions die or are sent to the gulag or whatever it's called, and the idea is still not working.
China no longer promises its citizens a utopia. All they promise is a country that is powerful on the world stage. They're getting there, but it's still happening via exploitation. And the back alleys of Beijing still ring with abject poverty.
You're conveniently ignoring the cultural revolution, which causes an ideological purity spiral resulting in millions dead.
China only began to prosper when they relaxed their economic policies and began to allow property/business ownership and international trade (especially with the West) back in.
Also: the way they lifted all those people out of poverty was basically by freeing them to lift themselves out of poverty, by adopting an essentially capitalist system. You could say: they simply stopped holding people in poverty.
This wonderful world already exists in the US. Poor people have access to Medicaid / Emergency Rooms. The debate about food insecurity is whether or not poor people can afford fresh vegetables (because living on rice, cheap meats and canned peas/beans is not nutritious enough). About living in the street - if you are living on the street when you can get a job as a limo driver for $30 / hour just by walking in then maybe is your fault???
Wow, this is a joke isn't it?
Marx is literally the godfather of critical theory, the Frankfurt school, post strcturalism and the rest of the fashionable nonsense cannon that parts of the left seem obsessed with.
There are people who don't understand sociology and are only vaguely aware of pathological cultural factors (or possibly, though they are aware of them, wish to deny their existence) and demand that these problems be solved with bureaucracy.
Bureaucracy is only able to crudely affect these, and only in the most totalitarian of regimes. Mao or Stalin might have been able to rid their countries of pathological cultural factors (of course, instead of doing such they were more concerned with ridding themselves of potential rivals). California cannot at this point in time do any such thing.
So one should strive to eliminate private schools as much as possible. I entrenches inequality.
The question really becomes not if we're spending enough, but what it is that we happen to be buying. How much of any given $1 you spend in taxes purchases textbooks, or pays teacher paychecks? Hell, how much on air conditioning in the summer so kids can concentrate on something other than the sweat dribbling down their foreheads?
How much is spent on the office building downtown that has nothing to do with teaching directly, but with people who manage the teachers? And with people who manage those managers?
> So one should strive to eliminate private schools as much as possible. I entrenches inequality.
If the only equality you can figure out how to manage is hammering down all the nails that stick out, what good is equality?
> If the only equality you can figure out how to manage is hammering down all the nails that stick out, what good is equality?
I have not said that, but opportunities should be well thought out and available to each child. I am also convinced that there is a balance to strike here, classes should be diverse to not entrench inequality too much. Of course young mozart just needs more musical education, young warhol more art and young einstein more math.
Public spending per pupil is quite high, when federal and state funding are both considered. Public students aren't being underfunded. The money's just not buying what you think it buys. Is that difficult to believe?
> I have not said that,
I don't know how to parse your first comment other than that. I don't want to live in the same country as someone who would deny my children the education I would provide for them, so that they can be turned into imbeciles in public schools. This is a deeply important issue for me. I will never allow mine to go near a public school.
There is no balance to strike. Let those who wish to do so, go their own way.
Mao did rid of the meritocracy-based education system, replacing it with an identity-based system. That is, if you're born with the right identity (blue-collar worker, peasant (not farmer, mind you), and soldier), then you get to go to the university without even any test. If you're born with the wrong identity (the right, the counter revolutionary, and farmer or any family who has property, the "rich", the "bad"), then you can't go to any college. The results? Just look at the 70s. What a fucking hell hole.
As a for Stalin or Soviet, they never gave up their elite education. In fact, elite officers had to be elite students as well. Those who are good at STEM could even get a little leniency when they made the so-called political mistakes.
Edit:- They get homework they need to turn in. Early on I had to spend sometime with my daughter to help her cope. But once she had her concepts down its been pretty smooth sailing.
Isn't this obvious result? The Russian School of Mathematics could manage to teach 10-year old kids basic algebra. And there's AOPS, there's Think Academy, and slew of local tutoring schools who can teach kids relatively advanced maths. Let alone many private schools. If I have the means, why would I not send my kids to such schools and therefore fuck up the funding of the public schools? Not that I want to, but it furiates me that the school administrators really hurt the kids who need public education the most in the name of equity. It also saddens me that the constituents are okay with such administrators.