Comment by siva7
2 days ago
It's better to leave no one behind than to focus solely on those ahead. Society needs a stable foundation and not more ungrateful privileged people.
2 days ago
It's better to leave no one behind than to focus solely on those ahead. Society needs a stable foundation and not more ungrateful privileged people.
But it is a false dichotomy. You can both offer resources to the ones behind and support high achievers.
The latter can pretty much teach themselves with little hands on guidance, you just have to avoid actively sabotaging them.
Many western school systems fail that simple requirement in several ways: they force unchallenging work even when unneeded, don’t offer harder stimulating alternatives, fail to provide a safe environment due to the other student’s disruption…
You say we should provide those ahead a safe environment.. but that's what accelerates social segregation and leaves those other poor kids behind
That's a good point.
Maybe you can have all quiet and focused students together in the same classroom?
They might be reading different books, different speed, and have different questions to the teachers. But when they focus and don't interrupt each other, that can be fine?
Noisy students who sabotage for everyone shouldn't be there though.
Grouping students on some combination of learning speed and ability to focus / not disturbing the others. Rather than only learning speed. Might depend on the size of the school (how many students)
1 reply →
Counterintuitive argument:'No one left behind' policies increase social segregation.
Universal education offers a social ladder. "Your father was a farmer, but you can be a banker, if put in the work".
When you set a lower bar (like enforcing a safe environment), smart kids will shoot forward. Yes, statistically, a large part of succesful kids will be the ones with better support networks, but you're stil judging results, for which environment is just a factor.
When you don't set this lower bar, rich kids who can move away will do it, because no one places their children in danger voluntarily. Now the subset of successful kids from a good background will thrive as always, but succesful kids from bad environments are stuck with a huge handicap and sink. You've made the lader purely, rather than partly, based on wealth.
And you get two awful side effects on top:
- you're not teaching the bottom kids that violating the safety of others implies rejection. That's a rule enforced everywhere, from any workplace through romantic relationships to even prison, and kids are now unprepared for that.
- you've taught the rest of the kids to think of the bottom ones as potential abusers and disruptors. Good luck with the resulting classism and xenophobia when they grow up.
4 replies →
If everyone can't get a Nobel prize, no one should!
The so-called intelligent kids selfishly try to get ahead and build rockets or cure cancer, but they don't care about the feelings of those who can't build rockets or cure cancer. We need education to teach them that everyone is special in exactly the same way.
That sounds like a recipe for mediocrity.
Ridiculous. Progress, by definition, is made by the people in front.
No one is saying to "focus solely on those ahead," but as long as resources are finite, some people will need to be left behind to find their own way. Otherwise those who can benefit from access to additional resources will lose out.
"Progress is made by the people in front" is plausibly true by definition.
"Progress is made by the people who were in front 15 years earlier" is not true by definition. (So: you can't safely assume that the people you need for progress are exactly the people who are doing best in school. Maybe some of the people who aren't doing so well there might end up in front later on.)
"Progress is made by the people who end up in front without any intervention" is not true by definition. (So: you can't safely assume that you won't make better progress by attending to people who are at risk of falling behind. Perhaps some of those people are brilliant but dyslexic, for a random example.)
"Progress is made by the people in front and everyone else is irrelevant to it" is not true by definition. (So: you can't safely assume that you will make most progress by focusing mostly on the people who will end up in front, even if you can identify who those are. Maybe their brilliant work will depend on a whole lot of less glamorous work by less-brilliant people.)
I strongly suspect that progress is made mostly by people who don't think in soundbite-length slogans.
Although in a global world, it's not clear that it's best for a country to focus on getting the absolute best, IF if means the average suffers from it. There is value in being the best, but for the economy it's also important to have enough good enough people to utilise the new technology/science(which gets imported from abroad), and they don't need to be the absolute best.
As a bit of a caricature example, if cancer is completely cured tomorrow, it's not necessarily the country inventing the cure which will be cancer free first, but the one with the most doctors able to use and administer the cure.
Which of the two give us progress? Are you sure you wanna give up all progress for the sake of stability?
This is a false dichotomy though, as I linked previously in this thread, adult Sweeds are above Koreans, and only slightly below Japanese in both literacy, numeracy, and problem solving.
Personally I think it's easy to overestimate how important it is to be good at something at 16 for the skill at 25. Good university is infinitely more important than 'super elite' high school.
I'd rather live in a stable society than some tech utopia.
So, here's a time machine. You can go back to a time and place of lasting, enduring stability. There have been been numerous such periods in recorded history that have lasted for more than a human lifetime, and likely even more prior to that. (Admittedly a bit of a tautology, given that most 'recorded history' is a record of things happening rather than things staying the same.)
It will be a one-way trip, of course. What year do you set the dial to?
Ok, please surrender your cellphones, internet, steam, tools, writing, etc... all those were given to you by the best of the crop and not the median slop.
Go gather tubers in a forest
3 replies →
[dead]