Wilson Grant Fisk
Elite Member
- Nov 10, 2012
- 15,677
- 46,846
Respect for this Student
- Thread starter Veyron
- Start date
Yes, actually Denmark to be exact. I feel a little arrogant now, as I did not realize how much difference there is in education, even in developed countries. I've always had a very liberal view on politics, but I might not have realized the long-term consequences of a society where everyone isn't able to do everything and social mobility isn't just as easy.
If education and those who educate students really is that bad, I'm very glad some people stood up to the system like the one in the op. I recall having a very bad teacher when I was around 13-14 years old, and my class "made" the school give us a new teacher by complaining. I'd imagine it wouldn't be as easy when the alternative isn't much better and when it seems to be frowned upon to stand up to ones teachers (as no one supported the very brave guy in the video).
UrsuAke
Power Member
- Sep 28, 2011
- 747
- 1,045
The point of threads like this is that we can have an intelligent conversation on a forum that is overrun with discussions like "help, she's coming home to visit, what should I do" or "how to tell her that I love her"...
I find this sort of threads like a breath of fresh air, the faith in BHW restored and all that.
gold service
Failed to resolve dispute
- Sep 19, 2013
- 5,934
- 608
I Always Respected Him!
PardeusSemora
Newbie
- Nov 27, 2013
- 23
- 11
Is the educational system (in the U.S) trash? To some extent.
Things were easier in the 1500s? Tell me more about plagues wiping out entire populations and mass revolts as a result of corrupt politics. Tell me all about how effortless it was to open schools, and nurseries, and any kind of institution that was meant to educate the masses. You think the church got big off the backs of poor peasants who thought lightning was a sign from God? I'd wager it had more to do with the educated aristocracy. Nothing, except maybe dying was easier in the 1500s.
Did you know that the educated are more likely to join cults and other things of that nature? I'm being serious, look it up.
In essence, you are presenting people here with a conspiracy theory formulated by your opinion of the media and by misguided statements about the 1500s and its societal structure? wut? has u taken h1story classes b4 brah?
procam - Teachers don't get paid shit in the states, man. The good ones make 50k per year year.
Things were easier in the 1500s? Tell me more about plagues wiping out entire populations and mass revolts as a result of corrupt politics. Tell me all about how effortless it was to open schools, and nurseries, and any kind of institution that was meant to educate the masses. You think the church got big off the backs of poor peasants who thought lightning was a sign from God? I'd wager it had more to do with the educated aristocracy. Nothing, except maybe dying was easier in the 1500s.
Did you know that the educated are more likely to join cults and other things of that nature? I'm being serious, look it up.
In essence, you are presenting people here with a conspiracy theory formulated by your opinion of the media and by misguided statements about the 1500s and its societal structure? wut? has u taken h1story classes b4 brah?
procam - Teachers don't get paid shit in the states, man. The good ones make 50k per year year.
Last edited:
UrsuAke
Power Member
- Sep 28, 2011
- 747
- 1,045
You understood... NOTHING!
Read again, but this time, read all the words, and have the courtesy not to take sentences out of context. The 1500's remark you so eloquently tied to all what I said, was added as an anecdote only to empower the statement that a stupid group of people can be easily controlled by authority compared to an intelligent group. I never said in 1500 things were easier from the day to day living stand point, it was easier from the authority stand point. Authority as in king, duke, feud lord, and so on so forth.
And ya brah, I has tooking h1sto ray class. Paid with monkey from papal too so I has know finances as well Sir!
maheshsingh
Junior Member
- Jan 14, 2013
- 134
- 31
I rarely had a teacher who really cared about the grades their student got and worked on improving them.
Hybrid12346
Junior Member
- Jun 25, 2013
- 155
- 155
Haha, what a stereotype. People expect teachers to be able to motivate and show kids the light in the subjects they teach. Teachers don't have much control on what they teach though. Most is curriculum based, so it is hard to find motivation when you're being told what to hand the student to learn for the day. it's pretty fucked up because most schools only care about the results on state tests, so that is all teachers end up teaching towards.
And as for inflated paychecks, go teach Special Ed. for a few years and tell me if the 32,000 a year was worth it. People expect to have the top of the line teachers, but they don't want to pay them. So why would an up-and-coming intelligent academic choose teaching when he could choose a career that he will start off at 70k a year? Now I'm not saying pay ALL teachers this money because some are in fan shit shows and do nothing to deserve it, but it is very difficult to have the time to evaluate every teacher in the school, and if you base pay off state tests strictly then that is all the teacher will teach for and the class would be terrible in terms of education if you are basically learning to only pass a test instead of learning the subject.
PardeusSemora
Newbie
- Nov 27, 2013
- 23
- 11
Pretty much.
Teachers these days, at least here in Georgia, US. have it kind of rough. Paid positions are being eliminated and as a result this creates a stressful environment wherein teachers have had to take up multiple positions in order to be safe from being fired - Math* teachers becoming involved in after-school activities like sports, etc. just so they can be seen as indispensable.
UrsuAke - I read your post. I don't think you understood my response, and that's ok. I am happy for you in that you have become successful and knowledgeable. We need more people working hard to achieve their goals, like you. Maybe that's the real problem, not enough hard workers.
Chicilikit
Supreme Member
- Dec 21, 2010
- 1,298
- 401
Hehe that guy is my hero, I had few terrible teachers, but I was also visiting sme really terrible schools where kids did not make it easy to them to teach us something. Well, still I do not uderstand why sometimes this job do people people who has zero talent for teaching and actually you can see how much they hate the job.
Sunday Lunch
Junior Member
- May 28, 2011
- 191
- 164
I am not going to disagree with your theory completely but, I will point out that when you go from a non performance related pay to a system that is performance related although you may think the first thing that will happen is performance will improve you're just as likely to increase massaging of figures.
So an example in the UK would be where we have several exam boards and schools opt to go with the exam board which is most generous in its marking policy.
Another example, and this is more general, is where teachers do not educate the student to be creative or think independently but instead train them relentlessly to answer areas they think will come up in an exam, multiple choice style questions. If you have two teachers and one is providing a broad education to their student and the other is strictly drilling them for one exam in all likelihood the second teachers pupil will perform better, it doesn't mean they have been better at their job in producing a student ready to move onto the next level of education.
So here's a link to a US example - http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/20/the-debate-over-teacher-merit-pay-a-freakonomics-quorum/
Another example in the UK of massaging figures, although I am sure there are numerous globally, hospitals were asked to improve upon patient times, the time it takes a doctor to see a patient from the point they enter a hospital to the point a doctor had examined them. Now the normal thinking would be that doctors would improve their performance rate once they had targets that were measurable against their peers.
What actually happened....
When hospitals were extremely busy and the time it was taking to see a doctor was long, instead of bringing patients into the hospital they would keep them sat in the ambulance for as long as possible so that they hadn't 'entered' and therefor didn't count until they had.
If doctors are getting involved in massaging figures no one is safe.
So an example in the UK would be where we have several exam boards and schools opt to go with the exam board which is most generous in its marking policy.
Another example, and this is more general, is where teachers do not educate the student to be creative or think independently but instead train them relentlessly to answer areas they think will come up in an exam, multiple choice style questions. If you have two teachers and one is providing a broad education to their student and the other is strictly drilling them for one exam in all likelihood the second teachers pupil will perform better, it doesn't mean they have been better at their job in producing a student ready to move onto the next level of education.
So here's a link to a US example - http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/20/the-debate-over-teacher-merit-pay-a-freakonomics-quorum/
Another example in the UK of massaging figures, although I am sure there are numerous globally, hospitals were asked to improve upon patient times, the time it takes a doctor to see a patient from the point they enter a hospital to the point a doctor had examined them. Now the normal thinking would be that doctors would improve their performance rate once they had targets that were measurable against their peers.
What actually happened....
When hospitals were extremely busy and the time it was taking to see a doctor was long, instead of bringing patients into the hospital they would keep them sat in the ambulance for as long as possible so that they hadn't 'entered' and therefor didn't count until they had.
If doctors are getting involved in massaging figures no one is safe.
madoctopus
Supreme Member
- Apr 4, 2010
- 1,388
- 3,709
I could write a book on education, including what to do to make it work regardless of the country or social system. Wouldn't change shit.
Jazzc as usual hit the nail on this subject in a very compact form. Very few here noticed that or understood it. Education, just like a lot of other areas of life, doesn't work precisely because there is an intrusion into the system. The system does not function in a natural way, based on "economic/resource" laws. The system is being "managed". Same goes for health, social security, infrastructure, everything really. Only systems that work properly are those who are not managed but self-adapt naturally (e.g. Internet is a good example, even though it is still being managed, just a lot less). Jazzc translated this as a problem of performance based earnings - tie up a teacher's earnings to the results.
Education, like everything else really, is a service. Like web hosting. Problem is, if web hosting would function like the educational system you'd have this:
You order a hosting plan for $40/mo. In fact it shouldn't really cost more than $5/mo but somehow it does. You pay it though. The web hosting site tells you the features include 99.9% uptime, 5000 GB of traffic, 100GB storage, free .com domain for life, support for PHP, Python and Ruby, MySQL and PgSQL. In order to pay for it the $40/mo you have to go and manually send money over Western Union, you can't order online. Then, after you bought the hosting you get your site up but you realize you actually have no PHP. You kinda have it but is so badly configured that you can't get WordPress to run on it. And there's no MySQL or PgSQL and when you inquire with support about this issue you are replied with "you can just use Excel to store your data, there's no need for MySQL". Eventually you get a static .html site up but during upload you get an error at 5MB storage saying you exceeded your allocated space. You ask support about it and they reply "stop bugging us, how do you dare! We offer 100GB storage but you must send us an 100GB HDD if you want that much.". Then after a month, you realize the site is down for quite a while because it exceeded 10MB transfer. So you complain to them and they delete your account. You then complain to the International Web Hosting association and they reply "it's your fault for being lazy and not putting more effort into building a dedicated server yourself and sending it to the hosting company already setup with your site on it and optimized and with at least 500GB storage free for whatever they might need to put in that space".
That's how the educational system is. If it would be hosting or anything else business related you'd feel cheated and robbed. But somehow when it's about education, health, etc. people just take it for granted.
The reason stuff doesn't work is there are layers and layers of things that work towards stuff not working. I'll explain a few.
Do you think it's complicated to have a working system, whatever that is - education, health, etc? It isn't. Problem is there's no incentive for that. It would simply be social and would stop being profitable for a few people. At the core, governments are legalized mafia-like organizations. That's not because of the government itself but because of the people in it. There are centers of power, influence and control. These are from weak&wide ones (the clerks you have to bribe) to powerful&narrow ones (people controlling the world more or less). The way to have a working system is to build it to satisfy the requirements. Thing is, current systems already do that. Problem is, like somebody already noted, the requirements are not of the masses but of those few at the top. So the system works perfectly for them but not so well for us. That's the core problem.
Specifically related to education, in order for it as a system to work, then it must be setup in such a way that it works regardless of the teacher (good or awful) and regardless of the student (smart or stupid). A smart student is likely to learn even if he has a bad teacher and a good teacher is likely to teach even a stupid student. Problem is, most students are not amazingly smart and teachers are mostly bad. But this isn't just like that. They get to that point through an involution. The student is a former child and as all children he's creative and curious. But he is educated and everything positive in him is slowly killed. New "software" is etched into his mind and after years the way his mind functions is extremely different than it used to... in a very bad way. From all those children, some eventually end up becoming teachers. So it's a destructive cycle of the man and it's mind and soul. That's another onion layer.
The above layers, together with a bunch of other layers, are why stuff doesn't work. In a nutshell it can be translated as "lack of interest" - either on purpose and with a goal (those in high positions have no interest in making your life nice, but the opposite), or because of ignorance (the teacher has no incentive to be good). Hence, those who have the power to change something in a top-to-bottom approach, will not do it because it is in their advantage to do the opposite. On top of that, those who can change something from bottom-to-top are only human and unless they are of a very rare breed - extremely resistant to social programming and other negative elements - they will collapse into ignorance and the "rat race / mouse wheel" effect.
If, those in position of power over laws and decisions would actually want to, it would be very simple to fix the educational system regardless of how bad or assholes the teachers are. You simply make it a 100% natural service provider type of system where you take the power from the hands of the teachers. And on top of that you completely eliminate diplomas and titles and grades which now are an instrument of control and authority in the hands of teachers. So essentially what would be left would be the service and the price for it. You pay $X to learn Y skill. No grades, no diploma no nothing. And nobody would ask you for them to hire you, employers would just test you themselves, which is what happens now anyway with any company that demands quality and not just a piece of paper. So, as with any service, if you pay and don't feel you receive what you payed for, you request refund or simply drop out after a month. There would be nothing to force you (need of diploma) to stay there in a system that doesn't work for you. So, this would push the balance of power from teachers (service providers) to students (service consumers) as it is normal and healthy to be. That in turn would be an incentive because teachers would have to compete and raise up to certain requirements/standards that are real and affect them and not just on a piece of paper (laws) they don't care about and can't be enforced upon them. What would happen is those teachers who suck but have the ability to be good, will put the effort and become good. Those who are just bad and can't adapt would have to find a different job.
Honestly, I think the revolution in education has already started even though is slow and not seen for what it is. It's the Internet and the Web. But this only covers the knowledge so far and rather poorly and in an unstructured way. It does not cover the incentive for the people to gain back their curiosity to learn something or provide them with enough incentive to learn something instead of spending half a day on Facebook or YouTube watching funny cat vids. In other words, we have the technology, we just haven't got to use it to the full potential.
Personally, I will never send my kids to school. I will make it an option. You wanna go to school? Then go ahead and have fun. But the learning will happen at home. As a parent I wont send them to school expecting to learn something but just because and if they want it as a social thing, to meet kids and have fun. That also means I understand it is my responsibility as a parent to educate them. I will not force them to go to school or demand from them high grades or them to listen to the teacher and that alone should be a huge advantage for them because at least i know i'm not killing their creativity and not filling them with bitterness and stress. Also, I really think the key is not in managing to convince/force a kid to become what you think is best for him but instead to recognize what he truly loves and is naturally compatible with and support him in doing that. I don't care how dumb a passion might seem, if you totally love it you can make good money from it. You just need some common sense and basic money management skills.
Jazzc as usual hit the nail on this subject in a very compact form. Very few here noticed that or understood it. Education, just like a lot of other areas of life, doesn't work precisely because there is an intrusion into the system. The system does not function in a natural way, based on "economic/resource" laws. The system is being "managed". Same goes for health, social security, infrastructure, everything really. Only systems that work properly are those who are not managed but self-adapt naturally (e.g. Internet is a good example, even though it is still being managed, just a lot less). Jazzc translated this as a problem of performance based earnings - tie up a teacher's earnings to the results.
Education, like everything else really, is a service. Like web hosting. Problem is, if web hosting would function like the educational system you'd have this:
You order a hosting plan for $40/mo. In fact it shouldn't really cost more than $5/mo but somehow it does. You pay it though. The web hosting site tells you the features include 99.9% uptime, 5000 GB of traffic, 100GB storage, free .com domain for life, support for PHP, Python and Ruby, MySQL and PgSQL. In order to pay for it the $40/mo you have to go and manually send money over Western Union, you can't order online. Then, after you bought the hosting you get your site up but you realize you actually have no PHP. You kinda have it but is so badly configured that you can't get WordPress to run on it. And there's no MySQL or PgSQL and when you inquire with support about this issue you are replied with "you can just use Excel to store your data, there's no need for MySQL". Eventually you get a static .html site up but during upload you get an error at 5MB storage saying you exceeded your allocated space. You ask support about it and they reply "stop bugging us, how do you dare! We offer 100GB storage but you must send us an 100GB HDD if you want that much.". Then after a month, you realize the site is down for quite a while because it exceeded 10MB transfer. So you complain to them and they delete your account. You then complain to the International Web Hosting association and they reply "it's your fault for being lazy and not putting more effort into building a dedicated server yourself and sending it to the hosting company already setup with your site on it and optimized and with at least 500GB storage free for whatever they might need to put in that space".
That's how the educational system is. If it would be hosting or anything else business related you'd feel cheated and robbed. But somehow when it's about education, health, etc. people just take it for granted.
The reason stuff doesn't work is there are layers and layers of things that work towards stuff not working. I'll explain a few.
Do you think it's complicated to have a working system, whatever that is - education, health, etc? It isn't. Problem is there's no incentive for that. It would simply be social and would stop being profitable for a few people. At the core, governments are legalized mafia-like organizations. That's not because of the government itself but because of the people in it. There are centers of power, influence and control. These are from weak&wide ones (the clerks you have to bribe) to powerful&narrow ones (people controlling the world more or less). The way to have a working system is to build it to satisfy the requirements. Thing is, current systems already do that. Problem is, like somebody already noted, the requirements are not of the masses but of those few at the top. So the system works perfectly for them but not so well for us. That's the core problem.
Specifically related to education, in order for it as a system to work, then it must be setup in such a way that it works regardless of the teacher (good or awful) and regardless of the student (smart or stupid). A smart student is likely to learn even if he has a bad teacher and a good teacher is likely to teach even a stupid student. Problem is, most students are not amazingly smart and teachers are mostly bad. But this isn't just like that. They get to that point through an involution. The student is a former child and as all children he's creative and curious. But he is educated and everything positive in him is slowly killed. New "software" is etched into his mind and after years the way his mind functions is extremely different than it used to... in a very bad way. From all those children, some eventually end up becoming teachers. So it's a destructive cycle of the man and it's mind and soul. That's another onion layer.
The above layers, together with a bunch of other layers, are why stuff doesn't work. In a nutshell it can be translated as "lack of interest" - either on purpose and with a goal (those in high positions have no interest in making your life nice, but the opposite), or because of ignorance (the teacher has no incentive to be good). Hence, those who have the power to change something in a top-to-bottom approach, will not do it because it is in their advantage to do the opposite. On top of that, those who can change something from bottom-to-top are only human and unless they are of a very rare breed - extremely resistant to social programming and other negative elements - they will collapse into ignorance and the "rat race / mouse wheel" effect.
If, those in position of power over laws and decisions would actually want to, it would be very simple to fix the educational system regardless of how bad or assholes the teachers are. You simply make it a 100% natural service provider type of system where you take the power from the hands of the teachers. And on top of that you completely eliminate diplomas and titles and grades which now are an instrument of control and authority in the hands of teachers. So essentially what would be left would be the service and the price for it. You pay $X to learn Y skill. No grades, no diploma no nothing. And nobody would ask you for them to hire you, employers would just test you themselves, which is what happens now anyway with any company that demands quality and not just a piece of paper. So, as with any service, if you pay and don't feel you receive what you payed for, you request refund or simply drop out after a month. There would be nothing to force you (need of diploma) to stay there in a system that doesn't work for you. So, this would push the balance of power from teachers (service providers) to students (service consumers) as it is normal and healthy to be. That in turn would be an incentive because teachers would have to compete and raise up to certain requirements/standards that are real and affect them and not just on a piece of paper (laws) they don't care about and can't be enforced upon them. What would happen is those teachers who suck but have the ability to be good, will put the effort and become good. Those who are just bad and can't adapt would have to find a different job.
Honestly, I think the revolution in education has already started even though is slow and not seen for what it is. It's the Internet and the Web. But this only covers the knowledge so far and rather poorly and in an unstructured way. It does not cover the incentive for the people to gain back their curiosity to learn something or provide them with enough incentive to learn something instead of spending half a day on Facebook or YouTube watching funny cat vids. In other words, we have the technology, we just haven't got to use it to the full potential.
Personally, I will never send my kids to school. I will make it an option. You wanna go to school? Then go ahead and have fun. But the learning will happen at home. As a parent I wont send them to school expecting to learn something but just because and if they want it as a social thing, to meet kids and have fun. That also means I understand it is my responsibility as a parent to educate them. I will not force them to go to school or demand from them high grades or them to listen to the teacher and that alone should be a huge advantage for them because at least i know i'm not killing their creativity and not filling them with bitterness and stress. Also, I really think the key is not in managing to convince/force a kid to become what you think is best for him but instead to recognize what he truly loves and is naturally compatible with and support him in doing that. I don't care how dumb a passion might seem, if you totally love it you can make good money from it. You just need some common sense and basic money management skills.
Veyron
BANNED
- Jun 3, 2013
- 1,451
- 1,307
Wow, thanks for the post. Definitely agree with you on the schooling aspect, that should be left up to the child. If a parent has the time, capability and where with all to home school the student and that's what he/she wants, then I think home schooling is the best option.
Veyron
BANNED
- Jun 3, 2013
- 1,451
- 1,307
Yeah I feel that's what the main issue is, teachers only caring about the paycheck and not the education of the students.
funkybunker
Supreme Member
- May 14, 2013
- 1,264
- 1,812
It doesn't help that we publicize how great Founders (Facebook, Coco Chanel, Walt Disney etc) didn't go to college. This does prove we don't always need college to reach our goals..however as always, we warp it's lesson into one of "well I don't need school to make it big, it will magically happen".
There are exceptions to every rule. Just because amazing people don't always finish school doesn't mean school doesn't help us. But now with that in mind, people blow it out of proportion and see no reason to improve themselves, convinced they'll make it rich without even knowing how.
There are so many reasons more; but this is one I've noticed strongly. Retarded radio music hasn't helped either.
There are exceptions to every rule. Just because amazing people don't always finish school doesn't mean school doesn't help us. But now with that in mind, people blow it out of proportion and see no reason to improve themselves, convinced they'll make it rich without even knowing how.
There are so many reasons more; but this is one I've noticed strongly. Retarded radio music hasn't helped either.
ChapoGuzman
BANNED
- Jun 7, 2013
- 294
- 188
procam
Senior Member
- Jan 5, 2010
- 883
- 328
