Comment by wisty
4 days ago
People are getting disillusioned by education; partly because of politics, but also because there's a good reason not to trust the experts.
Phonics and memorising times tables in schools should be as controversial as hand washing in hospitals, but they aren't, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that a very average layperson can see.
If a doctor or nurse or scientist says something is "evidence based", it works (most of the time). If a teacher or teaching academic says "evidence based", they mean they have some kind of evidence behind it, like in that Simpson's episode ('Well, your honor, we've got plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are 'kinds' of evidence.')
Teaching as an academic discipline has been basically spun out of whole cloth. Universities didn't (really) study education until governments told them to teach it, so they got a ragtag bunch of PhD thesis done, and the best way to do this is to use a very "philosophical" approach, and a very thin actual evidence base. Then they have to teach this to student teachers, most of whom are not really equipped to assess evidence. Then the student teachers who are great at the kind of essays that any student teacher can "engage with" will end up being the next generation of professors.
Schools are run by teachers (who are badly trained) and politicians the public service (which generally defers to the universities). Yes there is a more conservative "evidence based" movement, but even it is nowhere near good enough.
> Phonics and memorising times tables in schools should be as controversial as hand washing in hospitals, but they aren't, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that a very average layperson can see.
Hand washing at hospitals is controversial (again)?
Neither should be controversial.
Exactly, this kind of BS "eduction" the teachers receive doesn't really equip teachers with the knowledge to teach anything beyond 12 years old.
I believe any subject teacher (i.e. mathematics, physics, english, etc.) should hold at least a bachelors in that subject alongside with a teaching/pedagogy degree. Every bad teacher I've had only had the teaching degree, the best teachers I've had only had a PhD in their subject. Not bad as in dislike - there were plenty of good, competent teachers whom I disliked.
I dislike this notion of "degrees" as proxies for the ability to get the job done. Why not just... interview people. Let them teach a class or two, and see how it goes. Just like with every other job.
> because there's a good reason not to trust the experts
I hate this. Where else do we get knowledge from if not experts and academics in their fields? That's how humans grow our collective knowledge. People learn, gather evidence, build knowledge and then share it. The people who have done the learning over many years are called "experts". Those are the people I want to learn from, no?
> conservative "evidence based" movement
Evidence should not be political. You can either prove something, or you cannot. It is neither conservative, nor liberal.
When the experts say that algebra should not be taught in 8th grade, and the experts say that guessing at words instead of sounding them out is a better way to learn to read, and the experts say that calc can be replaced with 'data science' which is actually just data literacy, and so on and so forth, I'm not really interested in how the precise definition of 'experts' actually refers to something about 'growing our collective knowledge'. I'm more interested in staying away from all that. It's a fun gotcha to say things like 'well evidence either is or isn't', but it doesn't change the material reality of who's doing what and what they're likely to be doing in the near future. Public schooling is fucked, the group of people saying 'listen to the experts' is the group of people making it worse, a lot of it is explicitly political, and your best options for guaranteeing that you avoid it are homeschooling or parochial school, regardless of what words and rhetoric can be said about it.
Don't forget the we can't teach the 4 operations in first year of primary school. Meanwhile, all the books from 1950 have them by lesson 2 and school was mandatory at that time.
We homeschooled our kid for a few months due to her marvelous classmates, teacher and director, she wrote and learnt more than 4 years worth of study in Switzerland. Unfortunately she is highly sociable and we couldn't give her the constant "stream of kids" all day long.
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> your best options for guaranteeing that you avoid it are homeschooling
Accepting your premise that "public schooling is fucked" (I disagree) there's absolutely zero guarantee that homeschooling is any better for any particular child. It's a completely random chance whether your parent, or whichever potentially untrained person, is going to provide you with an education that sets you up for society, work and the wider world.
Public schools at least have defined curricula, governance structures, complaints procedures, _accountability_ in some form.
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I think to avoid arguments on the term "experts", just replace every instance of it with "so-called experts".
There is a very simple rebuttal to this: In almost every high $$ trial the defense and prosecution will both call expert witnesses. These experts will then directly contradict and disagree with each other. Which of these experts should be trusted? It was an expert who testified that cigarettes are good for you, an expert who testified that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and an expert who verified that Oxycontin is not addictive. Those are not the people you want to learn from, no.
We celebrate countless outsiders like Galileo and Darwin who have disrupted the consensus of "experts" and were considered highly political at the time. History simply does not defend the infallibility of "experts", and does support the idea that you should not blindly trust a person who claims expertise.
Everybody should look into the work of Philip Tetlock and consider reading his book Superforecasters. There is a mountain of scientific evidence to show that the more a person considers themselves an expert in a topic the more vulnerable they are to making assumptions and being proven wrong as time progresses.
I believe op meant conservative as in less radical and more willing to acknowledge that their ideas have flaws rather than the GOP.
Education theory is divided among educational progressive and conservatives, it doesn't entirely align with political parties.
Educational progressivism is actually more antiquated than conservatism - the classic progressives were 19th century while the conservatives were 20t century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_education
Large groups of experts in a non-science can be wrong. Either the Vatican University theology department, or a Baptist theology department would be at least one example.
> I hate this. Where else do we get knowledge from if not experts and academics in their fields?
Knowledge is generated via examination of reality itself. "Experts" are merely people who have conducted the most thorough examination of reality. Relying on them is a convenience to speed up acquisition of useful knowledge, but not a necessity.
The world is full of people claiming to be experts, but who are, variously:
* charlatans or hucksters evoking the outward trappings of expertise but lacking genuine understanding;
* people who may have valid knowledge in one area pretending to expertise in other areas;
* people who may have valid knowledge, but whose motivations are primarily driven either ideological commitment, pecuniary interests, rent-seeking, or other perverse incentives;
* and people who may have valid knowledge, but mistakenly conflate empirical knowledge with normative authority, and believe that knowing what "is" entitles them to make "ought" decisions for others.
Genuine experts in empirical fields should be in the business of presenting evidence and arguments that stand on their own merits, and empowering others to make better-informed decisions. Reliance on experts should be based entirely on the quality of the information they bring to the table, and not on trust per se.
Anyone who cites their own putative expertise as a reason for why they should not have to explain themselves or justify their conclusions -- or, especially, who cites expertise as a basis for claiming authority over others -- absolutely should not be trusted.
The combination of is-ought conflation and the expertise-as-authority mindset is both incredibly dangerous and extremely prevalent in our society today. People with domain knowledge in a technical field often mistakenly think they are qualified to universalize value judgments about normative matters that relate their empirical field, and think they are entitled to use force to impose those value judgments onto others.
When confronted with this sort of hubris, it's entirely understandable why some people choose to eschew involvement with these putative experts even if it means potentially having less reliable empirical information to work with.
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Please try to be civil. I mentioned phonics, do you agree with what I said on it or not?
Reintroduction of phonics has been pushed - hard - by academia.
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What's wrong with phonics? Look-see as the only other alternative that I know of has awful results.
What did you have in mind?