Traps set by the machine

[AFK]

I think a school or university CAN be a part of the Machine.  It certainly is a device that lends itself to that sort of thing.  And it's by design of course.  In a way a school is a lot like an assembly line.  They both have to "process" a lot of material at once.  When you have schools with 1000 or more kids, the tendency for that system is going to be one of homogenization. 

HOWEVER, teachers and instructors are the variable that can really determine how Machine-like the education institute really is.  Of course, the other important variable is the individual kids themselves.  If you have teachers that go beyond the state-sanctioned curriculum, who don't simply have a teach-by-numbers approach, kids will have a good shot at coming out with themselves still intact. 

[LMNO]

Indeed.  At college, the student body was split into several parts I have identified just 5 minutes ago:  Those that treated it like a trade/vo-tech school, those that treated it like a way to learn about weird shit they will probably never use, and those that treated it like a 4-year vacation from reality.


I chose doors 2 and 3.  To be quite honest, I should have at least peeked into door 1.

[Triple Zero]

Schools are definitely part of the machine. The school system isn't about giving you the skills you need to work. It's about socializing you so that you'll fit in at the workplace. A high school, bachelors, masters degree represents that you're willing to jump through that many hoops.

uhm what??

i got a high school and a bachelors degree, i'm still working on my masters, and i got those pieces of paper because i know a lot of stuff, not because i jumped through hoops.

okay, for the most part i wasn't even consciously awake, until a couple of years before i got my bachelors.

i don't know about "skills needed to work", because it's pretty obvious i don't have those either, but to call it jumping through hoops, i just dropped things i didn't care about as much, quick and soon as possible. finally got my highschool diploma with just Dutch, English (those 2 were mandatory), Math A (easy, vectors, probability etc), Math B (harder, integrals, trig, etc), Physics, Chemistry and Biology. then went on to university and mess around with computer programming and moar math. please point out the part where i was jumping through hoops instead of learning stuff i am interested in.

[Cramulus]

please point out the part where i was jumping through hoops instead of learning stuff i am interested in.

I did not say it was either you're learning OR you're jumping through hoops. You can be learning stuff that you're interested in WHILE you're doing all the song and dance required to get your degree. In the end, your degree is not based on the skills you learned, but the number of credits you have, etc.

That's why when you apply for a job, the employer looks at the degree, and uses that as a thumbnail for how hard of a worker you'll be. Most jobs do not expect that when you're hired, you already know how to do your job. Employers expect that you'll learn that stuff as you go.

I learned skills in college which are useful to me no matter what my job is, but I certainly didn't take any college courses on doing clinical research or editing textbooks!

i got a high school and a bachelors degree, i'm still working on my masters, and i got those pieces of paper because i know a lot of stuff, not because i jumped through hoops.

I disagree. You learned a lot of stuff in the process, but in the end you have the degree because you took X number of credits, you did your homework, you showed up for exams, and you generally did what the professor asked. You couldn't get the degree unless you were willing to "do what it takes" to get that degree.

[Triple Zero]

please point out the part where i was jumping through hoops instead of learning stuff i am interested in.

I did not say it was either you're learning OR you're jumping through hoops. You can be learning stuff that you're interested in WHILE you're doing all the song and dance required to get your degree. In the end, your degree is not based on the skills you learned, but the number of credits you have, etc.

except that the credits you have are based on the learning of skills. it is just intended a system for being able to somehow measure a student's progress.

now i probably should agree with you that this system can be crooked as hell, but i am also of the opinion that this is not always the case. for example (and i am aware that this is the case for the dutch system, yours works differently) the credits (ECTS) are supposed to be directly proportional to the amount of work in hours you spend on a course. if this doesn't line up, there will be complaints from the students and the student union will make a huge fuss out of it (which has various degrees of success in solving the problem, but that's another story).

i can go on, but the point is that the system itself is there to facilitate learning skills, not jumping through hoops.

That's why when you apply for a job, the employer looks at the degree, and uses that as a thumbnail for how hard of a worker you'll be. Most jobs do not expect that when you're hired, you already know how to do your job. Employers expect that you'll learn that stuff as you go.

I learned skills in college which are useful to me no matter what my job is, but I certainly didn't take any college courses on doing clinical research or editing textbooks!

i guess i'm just lucky to be studying something that actually allows me to get a job in the area i studied for. although even when i get a job in IT, i don't think i'll be using more than 20% of the stuff i learned. although.. some courses build on eachother, it's hard to give an exact figure it's also quite impossible to even think of a job that would include the full curriculum of a 5-year study Computer Science

i got a high school and a bachelors degree, i'm still working on my masters, and i got those pieces of paper because i know a lot of stuff, not because i jumped through hoops.

I disagree. You learned a lot of stuff in the process, but in the end you have the degree because you took X number of credits, you did your homework, you showed up for exams, and you generally did what the professor asked. You couldn't get the degree unless you were willing to "do what it takes" to get that degree

that's like saying i'm jumping through hoops when i'm making my breakfast. cause i "do what it takes" to get that breakfast.

also, in most cases, with the courses i did, "doing what it takes [to pass the course]" corresponded pretty good with "doing what is takes [to learn the skill taught in that course]".
sure, if i were to be left to my own devices, i'd probably have taken a different road to learn those skills, but it's a balance between having a professor teach you things (they are useful, afterall) and doing everything on your own. there's not enough professors around to give everybody individual attention.

and, maybe even more importantly, if it wasn't for the system of homework, learning for exams etc, i might have thought "ah fuck it" and never even learned those skills in the first place! you may rightly call that jumping through hoops, if you like, but i found that subjecting myself to a littlebit of discipline can help me go that little extra mile.
the best example of this might be the course on Software Engineering, i absolutely hated it, was in fact a lot more "jumping through hoops" if you want, than most other courses. and you know? afterwards, this is probably the single most important course i have followed in my study years, as it will be *very* relevant to pretty much every IT job i might ever apply for. [and after having found that it's actually useful, i like the subject better, too]

[Requia ☣]

How much hoop jumping is going to vary based on the school and class.  IE, one college I looked at was going to make me take biology.  Or you can have a class with a curriculum that has nothing to do with the course in question, it was common in classes at the uni I went to for professors to require community service time.  Occaisionaly this made sense (enviornmental sciences, spend time helping recycling projects) other times the classes marjked as such made no sense at all.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

If we are all part of the Machine, isn't everything a trap/not a trap of the Machine?

[Triple Zero]

How much hoop jumping is going to vary based on the school and class.  IE, one college I looked at was going to make me take biology.  Or you can have a class with a curriculum that has nothing to do with the course in question, it was common in classes at the uni I went to for professors to require community service time.  Occaisionaly this made sense (enviornmental sciences, spend time helping recycling projects) other times the classes marjked as such made no sense at all.

yes i agree that this is often the case, but the point is, the school system isn't meant to be like that, it's meant to sort of work like what i wrote in the above post. my mum is some sort of high staff member whose job it is to "improve quality" [her job has no real name], currently at a cooperation of highschools, to make sure that schools are about learning skills that indeed prepare people for the work market, but not in the "sneaky" way as is suggested in this thread.

it's just that, as we all know, that big bureaucratic systems often don't work the way they're intended to work. and often do so in a very de-humanizing way.

de-humanizing. i think that's a key word in describing teh machine.

[Verbal Mike]

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.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

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.

Yes, that's pretty much my observation, about public k-12 schools anyway. There are good teachers, the experience doesn't HAVE to be all about processing into a good little drone, but that does tend to be the way it goes, and the system now exists to perpetuate the system.

[Triple Zero]

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.

[LHX]

psychologically speaking -

a lot of 'common sense' things seem to be traps

the 'old wisdom'

"you cant judge a book by its cover" mentality
"absence makes the heart grow fonder" mentality
"familiarity breeds contempt" mentality
"you cant teach a old dog new tricks" mentality


hear this kind of nonsense so much and in such unassuming circumstances that you start really taking it as some sort of truth

[LHX]

( sorry for interrupting the school-talk

speaking of that - it seems that a lot of it has to do with the particular faculty there at any given time

web forums could be a trap too - depending on where you are enrolled )

[GlompChomp]

I'm not sure where I stand on this. Although the ideology behind schools seems to be having a big, efficient, sterile, autonomous meat grinder for producing "willing to work" students, this doesn't always work as planned. As I'm still in high school, this thread only highlighted how real the hoop jumping is. Every school day I am bound to hear at least four (no, not one) comments from teachers about meeting the status quo. Scratch that, I actually hear more of that sort of talk from my peers. There's always a small pocket of kids intentionally slacking off, though. They are told daily about the consequences of not meeting expectations, but they don't seem to give a damn. Could be many personal reasons for them to decide doing nothing will do something, but hasn't the machine accounted for this group and given them some sort of menial task?

Burger flipping, nevermind 

Seems more like any ideology originally attached to education has been abandoned just to keep the whole thing afloat, though. I don't think anyone really has a handle on what schools are doing anymore. It's grown beyond a board of regulators to the point where it really is completely autonomous. Lately, all the U.S. Government has been capable of are ways to worsen education through adding more ways to measure people's worth. They don't really know how to make better worker bees, they're only capable of finding more ways to place a price tag on a student's head.

[GlompChomp]

And another trap, criminals. Who makes criminals? Poverty? Hard drugs? Mental disabilities? Laws make criminals.