Traps set by the machine

[LHX]

it seems that the only real crime is disrespect


and it always gets punished eventually

[Verbal Mike]

so, now we're not talking about the every entire school system everywhere?

cause i think it's rather a gross overgeneralization to say that The school system no longer serves [any?] goals set forth by the ideology that brought it into being, and instead [exclusively??] manufactures ideologies that demand it keeps on existing.

if you want to argue that there's a whole lot of bad crappy schools out there that simply make people jump through hoops to give them a paper, sure.

your local mileage may vary, and even then it can depend on the teachers you get.

'The school system', as you illustrated, is too abstract a thing to exclusively do anything. The point is, that the reason we have schools is because schools teach us we need schools -- not because we necessarily need them.
Sadly though, having had the chance to hear a lot about the school systems in a good 7 or 8 countries and a little about probably another ten, it sounds to me that 'the school system' is an apt generalization. The "school systems" in the Western world are very really acting as just one big system; no trend in education in the last decade has been purely local. Both forces of change and of reaction seem to be more or less synchronized across the board.

Now, naturally there are many people within the school system who still operate on the old "schools teach people things that are good to have taught to you" maxim, but this has not, for a very, very long time, been the force keeping the institutions of schooling going. And that maxim is itself today nothing but a product of the school system's own meme factory. In other words, the people within the school system who believe the school system is mainly supposed to teach people for their own good, believe this entirely because that very school system taught this to them and to their parents. And this same maxim has, meanwhile, evolved a couple of offspring -- "people can't learn without school", "useful things are good to have taught", "teachers know what it would be good to teach you" -- and similar justifications for the existence of these institutions. Again, the primary reason anyone believes these statements are true, is that schools have been teaching them as True.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

so, now we're not talking about the every entire school system everywhere?

cause i think it's rather a gross overgeneralization to say that The school system no longer serves [any?] goals set forth by the ideology that brought it into being, and instead [exclusively??] manufactures ideologies that demand it keeps on existing.

if you want to argue that there's a whole lot of bad crappy schools out there that simply make people jump through hoops to give them a paper, sure.

your local mileage may vary, and even then it can depend on the teachers you get.

Well, I'm not, in my first foray into this discussion, talking about every entire school system everywhere. I can't speak for St. Verbatim. I'm only talking about the elements of our (Portland Public) school system where I've seen the kind of thing he's talking about.

[LMNO]

I have to disagree about what the school system is for. The school system is a self-preserving machine. It no longer serves the goals set forth by the ideology that brought it into being, but instead manufactures ideologies that demand it keeps on exitsting. It is a vicious runaway factory utilizing society to maintain its existence.

[Cain]

Atomised individualism

Game Theory

Explanations upon request

[LMNO]

Game Theory understood.
Atomised individualism needs clarification.


Additionally, the following claims need verification:

1. The school system no longer serves the goals set forth by the ideology that brought it into being.
2. The school system exclusively manufactures ideologies that demand it keeps on exitsting.
3. The school system is a vicious runaway factory (clericification emphasis: "vicious" and "runaway").

[Cain]

The right belief that the individual is the most important starting point for understanding social phenomena, but the wrong belief that society does not exist or exerts no influence upon the individual.  People who believe in the latter tend to end up reading Ayn Rand books and acting like complete pillocks, or end up like Maggie Thatcher and Milton Friedman and ruin peoples lives.

[LMNO]

How does that factor in the Madness of Crowds, or, "If the majority of people don't want war, why does war happen?"

[Cain]

How does that factor in the Madness of Crowds, or, "If the majority of people don't want war, why does war happen?"

They all spontaneously came to a rational decision at the same time.

Duh.

[LMNO]

How does that factor in the Madness of Crowds, or, "If the majority of people don't want war, why does war happen?"

They all spontaneously came to a rational decision at the same time.

Duh.

[AFK]

so, now we're not talking about the every entire school system everywhere?

cause i think it's rather a gross overgeneralization to say that The school system no longer serves [any?] goals set forth by the ideology that brought it into being, and instead [exclusively??] manufactures ideologies that demand it keeps on existing.

if you want to argue that there's a whole lot of bad crappy schools out there that simply make people jump through hoops to give them a paper, sure.

your local mileage may vary, and even then it can depend on the teachers you get.

'The school system', as you illustrated, is too abstract a thing to exclusively do anything. The point is, that the reason we have schools is because schools teach us we need schools -- not because we necessarily need them.
Sadly though, having had the chance to hear a lot about the school systems in a good 7 or 8 countries and a little about probably another ten, it sounds to me that 'the school system' is an apt generalization. The "school systems" in the Western world are very really acting as just one big system; no trend in education in the last decade has been purely local. Both forces of change and of reaction seem to be more or less synchronized across the board.

I think you're being overly general and overly cynical.  The school systems in the Western world are NOT acting as one big system.  Each state funds their states' education systems as do local municipalities.  Local school boards make decisions on matters of spending and education, not the federal government.  Yes, the Feds do have the NCLB act for education standards, and yes it has caused many problems and many teachers are unhappy with it.  HOWEVER, I also know many teachers who are very innovative and learn how to work around NCLB in a way that engages students and makes sure they are prepared with knowledge that they will use beyond a bubble sheet. 

Part of my job entails working in various school systems in the State of Maine.  I can tell you first hand that what you say is not true and is grossly over-generalized.  I've seen where different school systems employ different tactics when it comes to education.  They aren't operating at the beck and call of some Phantom National Superintendent. 

Kids need to go to school because they can't teach themselves Physics and Chemistry.  They can't teach themselves how to be critical thinkers and problem solvers.  They can't teach themselves how to do Algebra and Geometry.  Because an industrialised economy REQUIRES a diversified work force.  And the only way that happens is when kids go to High School, get a layer of base knowledge, and then a certain percentage of them go on to get an additional layer of base knowledge (e.g. Bachelor's, Associates degrees, etc.)  It's no different then back in the old days when young people took up apprenticeships to learn how to be a blacksmith, or a tailor, or a bookmaker. 

Now, naturally there are many people within the school system who still operate on the old "schools teach people things that are good to have taught to you" maxim, but this has not, for a very, very long time, been the force keeping the institutions of schooling going. And that maxim is itself today nothing but a product of the school system's own meme factory. In other words, the people within the school system who believe the school system is mainly supposed to teach people for their own good, believe this entirely because that very school system taught this to them and to their parents. And this same maxim has, meanwhile, evolved a couple of offspring -- "people can't learn without school", "useful things are good to have taught", "teachers know what it would be good to teach you" -- and similar justifications for the existence of these institutions. Again, the primary reason anyone believes these statements are true, is that schools have been teaching them as True.

Call me crazy, but I want to make sure my Brain Surgeon learned his trade from an accredited University and not some article on Wikipedia. 

[LMNO]

Things I learned in School that helped me even though I really didn't want to learn it at the time:


Grammar
Sentence Structure
Algebra
Physics
Chemistry
Techniques for effective subversion*
Allegories in books like Moby Dick, Dubliners, et al
Spanish
Acoustics
Signal Flow
"Black Box" analysis
Musical counterpoint/fugue composition
The quadratic equation

Please note that without the benefit of the school system, these topics, being of no interest to me at the time, would have never been studied. 



*Independent study

[Verbal Mike]

I think you're being overly general and overly cynical.  The school systems in the Western world are NOT acting as one big system.  Each state funds their states' education systems as do local municipalities.  Local school boards make decisions on matters of spending and education, not the federal government.  Yes, the Feds do have the NCLB act for education standards, and yes it has caused many problems and many teachers are unhappy with it.  HOWEVER, I also know many teachers who are very innovative and learn how to work around NCLB in a way that engages students and makes sure they are prepared with knowledge that they will use beyond a bubble sheet. 

Part of my job entails working in various school systems in the State of Maine.  I can tell you first hand that what you say is not true and is grossly over-generalized.  I've seen where different school systems employ different tactics when it comes to education.  They aren't operating at the beck and call of some Phantom National Superintendent.

I didn't mean schools nationwide or Western-worldwide are in any way organizationally united. I mean they operate on the same principles and seem to function as one large multinational organism or organization. This is in a away obvious, but it's surprising to me sometimes to see how changes in education happen more or less at the same time in very different places. Some time in the last year or two, when I still lived in Israel, it somehow came to my knowledge that Britain had decided, or was deliberating, making it mandatory to stay in school until the age of 18. The very same topic was briefly in the news that week in Israel too, but I think the proposal there didn't pass. And then it came to my attention not long afterwards that the same proposal is being considered here in Germany. I think it hasn't come to a vote yet. (Not entirely sure about all the details here.)

Yes, this is an entirely superficial example. Yes, I am making claims that I cannot necessarily prove. I'm telling you my biased, subjective impression of the situation, and I do not mean any of this as statements of fact. But my point is that the educations systems all over the Western world are seemingly acting in unison. There was, until about three years ago, a very strong trend across the board towards making educational settings more comfortable and lax. This included, in a great many places, less administrative resistance towards democratic schools (of all shapes and colors). And then rather abruptly, about two or three years ago (maybe four), this trend was replaced with policies demanding more testing, more grading, and altogether more machine-like efficiency in schools. Both trends had the students' best interests in mind and I won't try and take them apart or give examples unless you ask me to. The point is, that these things happened on an international scale in awe-inspiring harmony - regardless of who actually pays the teachers to teach.

Kids need to go to school because they can't teach themselves Physics and Chemistry.  They can't teach themselves how to be critical thinkers and problem solvers.  They can't teach themselves how to do Algebra and Geometry.  Because an industrialised economy REQUIRES a diversified work force.  And the only way that happens is when kids go to High School, get a layer of base knowledge, and then a certain percentage of them go on to get an additional layer of base knowledge (e.g. Bachelor's, Associates degrees, etc.)  It's no different then back in the old days when young people took up apprenticeships to learn how to be a blacksmith, or a tailor, or a bookmaker. 

Call me crazy, but I want to make sure my Brain Surgeon learned his trade from an accredited University and not some article on Wikipedia. 

I disagree with your view of the diversified work force. I certainly care where my brain surgeon learned to cut, but I frankly couldn't possibly care less how many foreign languages he speaks and what his GPA was in highschool. I believe the school system has taken the means to its original end - primarily testing and grading - and turned these in many ways into a means of their own. I recall anecdotes about good teachers who would teach interesting, fun, useful things all year and then come testing time they'd put that all aside and just crunch test material because their job was at stake.

But beside all that, I think the best thing for a diversified workforce is a diversified educational environment. People today switch careers almost as if they were undergarments. I makes little sense in the shifting environment of todays "real world" to put children in environments that teach them repetition, boredom, and the submission of their will and intuition to the demands of a bureaucracy. Sitting on chairs and copying stuff of a blackboard doesn't prepare you for life - only life does.

[Cramulus]

I disagree with your view of the diversified work force. I certainly care where my brain surgeon learned to cut, but I frankly couldn't possibly care less how many foreign languages he speaks and what his GPA was in highschool.

So you wouldn't prefer a doctor who got A's in high school over a doctor who got C's? Only where they went to med school matters?

You'll never have to make that choice - nobody who got C's high school went to a good med school. All those bullshit high school requirements are directly relevant to your choice of a doctor.

I makes little sense in the shifting environment of todays "real world" to put children in environments that teach them repetition, boredom, and the submission of their will and intuition to the demands of a bureaucracy. Sitting on chairs and copying stuff of a blackboard doesn't prepare you for life - only life does.

actually I think that stuff prepares people pretty well for a lifetime of retail purgatory or white collar slavery.

[Cain]

Yes, well the current British government is a control freak in all areas of public life right now, and operates under the current assumption that the population exist to serve the state, but that's a relatively modern innovation in UK political history, especially on the left.  It is also one hotly disputed by the grassroot levels of the party, and that only seems to be hanging on in the cabinet via luck alone.

I can tell you the short comings of the UK school system from experience.  The main one is that it is overly reliant on testing.  You can expect to sit roughly 15 nationally mandated tests a year from the age of 14 to 18.  The results on each test have knock-on effects on later learning options as well, so you are thrown in at the deep end early on, if you have aspirations of further education.  SAT tests affect your class placements for GCSEs which then affect what level you can do the exam at which determine your maximum result which then can determine which A levels you can do which affects what University's you can apply for.  That's another obsession of our government, testing something to destruction. 

Was it a method of control?  Of course.  Was it a very good one?  Not really.  It raised resentment among both students and teaching staff, and because of the lack of personnel to enforce the rules, teachers who wanted to circumvent the rules, did.  My philosophy teacher being the perfect example, who taught us to lie, steal, cheat and play the system for all it was worth.  Many other teachers were similar, if less extreme.  They let their students know perfectly well that what they were being told to do and how to do it was both arbitrary and pointless, and how they should play the system while not adhering to its every lunacy.  If anything, it forced the evolution of a relatively intelligent group of people in such ways as they were suspicious of authority and knew exactly when and how to play the game - and when to deviate from the rules and established norms when it was deemed expedient.