I prefer to live among educated people, thank you. I prefer my peers to go through forced history lessons, forced math lessons so they don’t tank my government, and biology lessons so they don’t tank the health system. Yes they won’t be able to determine their gender, but that will give me grandkids, thank you very much.
Same goes for piano or sports. Yes we need to pull people upwards, otherwise we’ll all become fat americans.
> at best they'd only make it a bad approximation of what we, our (older) generation, best think that that world should be.
Also, this part in GP doesn't feel exactly right to me. The problem doesn't seem to be in education, but rather lack of systematic resistance in current systems of society against humans weaponizing the system as tools to hamper progress of humanity as means to win minor inner struggles which is stupid. But the world doesn't seem to be moving in a wrong direction, only slowly.
Asian kids in 80s dreamed of bunches of permanent artificial space habitats running on fusion reactors. Still do. We've only gotten ground based fission reactors and space motor homes since then. But at least we are moving in that direction, just slower than at the ideal rate.
China's just done a humanoid robot marathon event. The winner completed the race. They're definitely in the future. US is, in a state not in line with site guideline to describe. And the latter is supposed to be more correct state than the other? How is that possible?
All that praise for education and yet you've fallen for the tabloid-fueled conspiracy theory that transgender science is a hoax
Is the "transgender science" you talk about more like biology, i.e. describing how things are, or more like anthropology, i.e. describing what some (sub)cultures believe? Those are not the same things.
But yes, much of what Foucault taught us about the arbitrariness of being a human in a culture does still ring true. No, it doesn't discount the hard evidence from biology and psychology.
I'd say the same thing applies to math, where one can't really start understanding math until said kid is already an adolescent (unless they're a young Euler or something), so it always baffles me when I see parents filling their young kids with (fancy) arithmetics, most probably making said kids future therapy patients, all the while lauding themselves (the parents do, that is) that they're teaching their kids "maths".
Related, one of the best maths teachers I've had (this was back in high-school, in the mid-90s) was very quick to point out that we should forget almost all "maths" we had learned in elementary school, and the he very soon started to explain to us the definition of the real numbers. Or maybe this is just an Eastern-European thing, who knows? Maybe further West they do confuse arithmetics with maths until the Uni' years.
Sometimes, it is possible to create a less abstract version of a more abstract thing, and thus introduce the seeds of the concept to children much younger. For example, "solve the equation 2x+1=7" is abstract, but "Peter decided to use a # symbol for a specific number, and he didn't tell us which one, but we found in his notes that # + # + 1 = 7; can you figure out which number is # ?" is simple to understand for a very young child, even if the child can only solve it by trial and error.
This is such an arbitrary and random choice. I don't give a ** if your child can play piano. It's negligible if you compare it with other hobbies.
Teach them (and me) how to pay taxes, do community service, partake in social events instead. I also don't want to live in a world where robots go to work for 40 hours, go home wasted and repeat for 40 years as they do in so many East Asian country. Its a stereotype yes, but you can't deny its unhealthy.
You don't replace enjoyable things with unenjoyable things and expect the child to become a well-adjusted adult. You give them alternative enjoyable things.
Managing a child's burgeoning dopamine regulation system is a primary function of a parent. Abdicating that function for quick fixes is a form of neglect, in my opinion, just like feeding kids sugary cereals.
Without that exploration the kids won't make the world their world, at best they'd only make it a bad approximation of what we, our (older) generation, best think that that world should be.