REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

The Role of Education

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Saturday, August 26, 2017 23:07
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Tuesday, July 18, 2017 12:52 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Listening to NPR as usual, they had on Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor for the California Community Colleges, speaking about the Community College's strategic vision for the future.

http://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2017/07/17/58009/ca-community-co
lleges-board-sets-new-goals-to-grow
/

He spoke about all of the difficulties of that Community College students face: Having to work and study at the same time, the high percentage of students who drop out before completion, the lack of clear course requirements for graduation - leading to students taking too many credits (more about that in a bit*) etc.

The entire goal of this new CA Community College strategic plan was how to more efficiently feed better-trained students into the CA workplace.

This makes sense for the colleges, the students, and business in a very limited context. I believe that everyone should have a skill when leaving school, whether a trade or a profession.

However, given the clusterfuck that is our politics/ government today, it would be nice if they added one more requirement: The ability to ask insightful questions.

A course on debate, rhetoric, or logic might help. Not only might it help us be better-informed citizens, but also help us guide our personal lives better.

There was just something about the relentless focus on turning out worker-droids that I found disturbing, especially coming from a college "strategic vision". So short-sighted, can hardly be called "strategic". more like "tactical".

* One of the problems I hear about is the lack of scheduling for relevant coursework. For example, when I took chemistry, I was required to take basic chemistry (yanno, Chem 101, 102), basic Differential Equations, basic Physics, etc. all in my first year. The problem is, nowadays, Chem 101 might be available, but Math 101 might not be available until the following year; leading me to "cool my heels" by taking Sociology or some such. A lot of college students wind up needing five years to get a four-year degree because of lack of appropriate instructors.

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Tuesday, July 18, 2017 11:34 PM

RIVERLOVE


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Listening to NPR as usual,






That is why you fail.

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Wednesday, July 19, 2017 12:30 AM

WISHIMAY


Yoda would listen to NPR. I've heard some of the best stories ever from them.

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Friday, August 18, 2017 2:35 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by Riverlove:
Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Listening to NPR as usual,



That is why you fail.

Post of the week for RWED.

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Friday, August 18, 2017 2:48 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Listening to NPR as usual, they had on Eloy Ortiz Oakley, chancellor for the California Community Colleges, speaking about the Community College's strategic vision for the future.

http://www.scpr.org/programs/take-two/2017/07/17/58009/ca-community-co
lleges-board-sets-new-goals-to-grow
/

He spoke about all of the difficulties of that Community College students face: Having to work and study at the same time, the high percentage of students who drop out before completion, the lack of clear course requirements for graduation - leading to students taking too many credits (more about that in a bit*) etc.

The entire goal of this new CA Community College strategic plan was how to more efficiently feed better-trained students into the CA workplace.

This makes sense for the colleges, the students, and business in a very limited context. I believe that everyone should have a skill when leaving school, whether a trade or a profession.

However, given the clusterfuck that is our politics/ government today, it would be nice if they added one more requirement: The ability to ask insightful questions.

A course on debate, rhetoric, or logic might help. Not only might it help us be better-informed citizens, but also help us guide our personal lives better.

There was just something about the relentless focus on turning out worker-droids that I found disturbing, especially coming from a college "strategic vision". So short-sighted, can hardly be called "strategic". more like "tactical".

* One of the problems I hear about is the lack of scheduling for relevant coursework. For example, when I took chemistry, I was required to take basic chemistry (yanno, Chem 101, 102), basic Differential Equations, basic Physics, etc. all in my first year. The problem is, nowadays, Chem 101 might be available, but Math 101 might not be available until the following year; leading me to "cool my heels" by taking Sociology or some such. A lot of college students wind up needing five years to get a four-year degree because of lack of appropriate instructors.

your thread title didn't specify which level of education.

The role of education.
1. To control what enters impressionable minds.
2. To keep the population dumbed down enough to require 16 years to accomplish 7th grade material. Yes, college graduates still cannot pass an 8th grade exam from 1895. Some college graduates cannot even read, let alone could comprehend.
3. To prevent and prohibit youngsters from developing insightful questions, or critical thinking, logic - otherwise they will all become conservatives and the iron grip of liberals on the uneducation system would collapse.
4. To encourage unmerited self esteem to gloss over the previous 3 items.

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Friday, August 18, 2017 4:38 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


JSF- you forgot to add:

1) To babysit junior and juniorette because mom, or mom and dad, have to work.
2) To acclimatize youngsters to a centralized authoritarian competitive environment
3) To keep "excess" workers out of the workforce

Just to get a little philosophical here, for millenia, children learned from their parents. Whether they were learning how to chip flints or make fire or plow a straight furrow or raise chicks or spin yarn or pick cotton, kids learned their survival skills from mom and dad.

It wasn't until the advent of large centralized factories, when production moved from the home/farm to the factory/city that "what to do with the working-class kids during work hours" became a problem. (The wealthy had nannies and tutors.)

Children sometimes worked in factories along with their mother or in the mines with their father; or were packed into poorhouses; or sold bits of scavenged coal, flowers, or themselves; or formed roaming gangs that engaged in pick-pocketing, smuggling, and drugs, until compulsory schooling* was introduced (USA approx 1900, *did not apply to blacks).

Taking a lesson from the "efficiencies" of the factory, schooling became more and more centralized, standardized, and regulated. Schools looked like nothing so much as a factories for producing widgets



and although modern architecture is prettier, the same idea lies behind it: process, sort, and grade as many children as possible for as little money as possible.

All of this had unintended consequences. The goal of education is no longer to "educate" - which IMHO in the broadest sense is to teach children how to learn for a lifetime - but to become "useful", "compliant", and "employable" in a competitive authoritarian society. To sit down and accept what's being said (yanno, swallow dogma and advertising equally well and without question).

Also, with a student-teacher ratio of 35 (or more) to one, and the separation of parents from their child's education, children are left to socialize each other into their own youth subculture.

Schools DO teach actual useful skills - reading, writing (sort of), and arithmetic. Schools should also be prepared to teach an actual trade or profession. But I think they waste a lot of their time teaching "scientific facts" when they should teach the scientific method, and rather than teaching algebra they should teach how to be rational (to ratio) in real life - distinguish the large from the small, the important from the trivial. And definitely focus on teaching some form of logical thinking- either rhetoric or debate would be a useful start.




-----------
By the way, GSTRING, I predicted your response PERFECTLY
* ... and then you'll say I'm "too wordy". And then you will - as always- refuse to address the pertinent points, and respond with even more lies and even more bullshit personal attacks.*

And voila! Here it is http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=61835&mid=1
035581#1035581

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Friday, August 18, 2017 4:52 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by COMDAT:
Yes, now it's not easy for students: the need to pay for study and, as a consequence, job search, makes such disappointing statistics. Of course, there are problems in our educational system and they need to be solved systematically. But, all the same, it's possible and necessary to get an education in such conditions. There are resources, like https://buyessay.org/college-essay.html, that offer their services (writing an essay, article review or presentation) in order to slightly "unload" the students and focus on them in specific areas.

If you have good reading comprehension and decent visualization skills, you can get educated ANYWHERE. Even online or from a library.

Of course, your education will not be recognized and won't have any impact on your job prospects without that almighty diploma/ certificate,

I'm just pointing out that "education" is an entirely separate concept from getting a degree; it's possible to be extremely well-educated (no, I don't mean having a dozen degrees; I mean to have learned a lot about a lot of things) and not be able to find a job on the basis of that knowledge.

In order to survive AND be well-educated, you have to run your intellectual life on dual tracks. By all means, get that diploma, BUT ALSO pursue knowledge for knowledge's sake. That extra knowledge won't get you more money, but it will help you see the bigger picture and make more rational life choices.



-----------
By the way, GSTRING, I predicted your response PERFECTLY
* ... and then you'll say I'm "too wordy". And then you will - as always- refuse to address the pertinent points, and respond with even more lies and even more bullshit personal attacks.*

And voila! Here it is http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=61835&mid=1
035581#1035581

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Friday, August 18, 2017 5:34 PM

6STRINGJOKER


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
If you have good reading comprehension and decent visualization skills, you can get educated ANYWHERE. Even online or from a library.



LOL... tell that to people like reaverfan who feel that if you don't have a good dose of liberal brainwashing for 4 or more years from a university than you are too uneducated to have a conversation with.


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Friday, August 18, 2017 5:43 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


The two most intelligent people that I know are both extremely well-educated and woefully under-degreed (one in philosophy and one in sociology). It also helps that they both have near-eidetic memories. Fortunately for both of them, they managed to work their way in to professions which make use of their prodigious talents.

Just pointing out (again) that education and degrees aren't synonymous.

But, for us mere mortals, a degree does help in landing a decent job.

-----------
By the way, GSTRING, I predicted your response PERFECTLY
* ... and then you'll say I'm "too wordy". And then you will - as always- refuse to address the pertinent points, and respond with even more lies and even more bullshit personal attacks.*

And voila! Here it is http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=61835&mid=1
035581#1035581

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Saturday, August 19, 2017 9:15 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
JSF- you forgot to add:

1) To babysit junior and juniorette because mom, or mom and dad, have to work.
2) To acclimatize youngsters to a centralized authoritarian competitive environment
3) To keep "excess" workers out of the workforce

Just to get a little philosophical here, for millenia, children learned from their parents. Whether they were learning how to chip flints or make fire or plow a straight furrow or raise chicks or spin yarn or pick cotton, kids learned their survival skills from mom and dad.

It wasn't until the advent of large centralized factories, when production moved from the home/farm to the factory/city that "what to do with the working-class kids during work hours" became a problem. (The wealthy had nannies and tutors.)

Children sometimes worked in factories along with their mother or in the mines with their father; or were packed into poorhouses; or sold bits of scavenged coal, flowers, or themselves; or formed roaming gangs that engaged in pick-pocketing, smuggling, and drugs, until compulsory schooling* was introduced (USA approx 1900, *did not apply to blacks).

Taking a lesson from the "efficiencies" of the factory, schooling became more and more centralized, standardized, and regulated. Schools looked like nothing so much as a factories for producing widgets



and although modern architecture is prettier, the same idea lies behind it: process, sort, and grade as many children as possible for as little money as possible.

All of this had unintended consequences. The goal of education is no longer to "educate" - which IMHO in the broadest sense is to teach children how to learn for a lifetime - but to become "useful", "compliant", and "employable" in a competitive authoritarian society. To sit down and accept what's being said (yanno, swallow dogma and advertising equally well and without question).

Also, with a student-teacher ratio of 35 (or more) to one, and the separation of parents from their child's education, children are left to socialize each other into their own youth subculture.

Schools DO teach actual useful skills - reading, writing (sort of), and arithmetic. Schools should also be prepared to teach an actual trade or profession. But I think they waste a lot of their time teaching "scientific facts" when they should teach the scientific method, and rather than teaching algebra they should teach how to be rational (to ratio) in real life - distinguish the large from the small, the important from the trivial. And definitely focus on teaching some form of logical thinking- either rhetoric or debate would be a useful start.
1

those 3 are good adds, but sometimes it is difficult to differentiate between the primary purpose and secondary, tertiary, or further derivativations.

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Sunday, August 20, 2017 12:03 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


I admit, I haven't thought about education all that much.

But my first thought is to look at it in terms of what we do.

We mandate that all the children are taken out of the home (except the very youngest) and collect them in large numbers for hours a day, days a week, months a year, for nearly 2 decades. We pay for the smallest number of caretakers we can get away with, and provide the most minimal of resources possible to get the job done. That job is 'education' which consists of teaching them a few useful skills - reading, writing, and arithmetic - and also the forced memorization and regurgitation of facts.
After that, we take the successes and move them into a higher level of a very similar process. And we take the successes of that process and make them do it to themselves.
We seem to have no interest in the failures.

I have been reading about new things people want to do to make learning 'better' - For example, using AI in grammar, middle and high schools to evaluate the students learning 'style', and to pitch just the right difficulty of lesson to keep the student engaged. Another is using magnetic fields to alter the brain's ability to process, connect, and remember information. And so on.

It strikes me that people look on learning as programming - they want better tools to program the brain. They seem to forget that the brain is inside a biological creature, formed by evolution to focus on biologically important goals.

While I haven't been thinking about education, I've been thinking about the attempt to assembly-line mass produce genius. It seems to forget that genius is genius because it breaks free from existing mental equations, not because it easily conforms to them.




Trump is not the problem. He set himself against the Deep State's agenda. And the Deep State's been heading for WWIII for years.
As for you, you're just a Deep State useful idiot, furthering its agenda. So I hope you enjoy cesium in your coffee. You've earned it.

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Sunday, August 20, 2017 12:09 AM

6STRINGJOKER


I think it's funny that outside of some highly skilled professions, pretty much exclusively related to science and math, most people that make it all the way through college don't command much of a salary, or end up with anything that makes them even close to irreplaceable in any field. More people will end up paying off that college education 20 or 30 years after they got it than not.

Then on the flip side a lot of the people who head up large corporations in CEO type positions are college dropouts or just never went. Many successful people who started their own business also never went to college.


School for most kids is daycare and for most young adults is just killing time in a safe environment. I think it does more harm than good for a lot of people, but with no other real alternatives out there right now what are you going to do?

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Sunday, August 20, 2017 12:16 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

I've been thinking about the attempt to assembly-line mass produce genius. It seems to forget that genius is genius because it breaks free from existing mental equations, not because it easily conforms to them.- KIKI


Hmmm, KIKI, interesting thoughts.

This seems to cross over with AI ... the "mass production of genius". At the same time that TPTB are promoting artificial intelligence, they're attempting to stamp it out in people.



-----------
By the way, GSTRING, I predicted your response PERFECTLY
* ... and then you'll say I'm "too wordy". And then you will - as always- refuse to address the pertinent points, and respond with even more lies and even more bullshit personal attacks.*

And voila! Here it is http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=61835&mid=1
035581#1035581

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Sunday, August 20, 2017 12:20 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:

Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
I think it's funny that outside of some highly skilled professions, pretty much exclusively related to science and math, most people that make it all the way through college don't command much of a salary, or end up with anything that makes them even close to irreplaceable in any field. More people will end up paying off that college education 20 or 30 years after they got it than not.

Then on the flip side a lot of the people who head up large corporations in CEO type positions are college dropouts or just never went. Many successful people who started their own business also never went to college.


School for most kids is daycare and for most young adults is just killing time in a safe environment. I think it does more harm than good for a lot of people, but with no other real alternatives out there right now what are you going to do?

I agree. JSF and I agree on "the role of education" but our emphasis is different. I see "the role of education" as primarily driven by the economic interests of the very wealthy, while JSF sees "the role of education" as being driven by politics/ ideology. In the end, I don't think you can separate politics and economics.

-----------
By the way, GSTRING, I predicted your response PERFECTLY
* ... and then you'll say I'm "too wordy". And then you will - as always- refuse to address the pertinent points, and respond with even more lies and even more bullshit personal attacks.*

And voila! Here it is http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=61835&mid=1
035581#1035581

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Sunday, August 20, 2017 7:16 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6stringJoker:
I think it's funny that outside of some highly skilled professions, pretty much exclusively related to science and math, most people that make it all the way through college don't command much of a salary, or end up with anything that makes them even close to irreplaceable in any field. More people will end up paying off that college education 20 or 30 years after they got it than not.

Then on the flip side a lot of the people who head up large corporations in CEO type positions are college dropouts or just never went. Many successful people who started their own business also never went to college.

School for most kids is daycare and for most young adults is just killing time in a safe environment. I think it does more harm than good for a lot of people, but with no other real alternatives out there right now what are you going to do?

I agree. JSF and I agree on "the role of education" but our emphasis is different. I see "the role of education" as primarily driven by the economic interests of the very wealthy, while JSF sees "the role of education" as being driven by politics/ ideology. In the end, I don't think you can separate politics and economics.

we also forget that in some places schools are merely juvenile detention, where thugs and bullies prevent "success". For these, the Betsy DeVos factor could be a Godsent, allowing freedom of school choice to multiply or accelerate the successes.

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Thursday, August 24, 2017 2:00 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by Wishimay:
Yoda would listen to NPR. I've heard some of the best stories ever from them.

yep. NPR puts out wonderful fiction, usually during their news or discussion periods.

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Saturday, August 26, 2017 3:38 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
JSF- you forgot to add:

1) To babysit junior and juniorette because mom, or mom and dad, have to work.

3) To keep "excess" workers out of the workforce

Reviewing this, these 2 are actually contradictory. Or from contradicting forces.

#1 is the doubling of the workforce for the same pay. Prior to the 50s, one breadwinner per family was normally adequate. But after Rosie the Riveter enjoyed being in the workforce so much, economics revealed that having 2 workers per family meant that the pay (at societal or community level) only needed to be distributed so that each got half of what was needed to support a family - therefore everybody effectively got half pay, and the workforce obtained twice the number of workhours (less overall overtime).

#3 is opposite that.

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Saturday, August 26, 2017 6:20 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


True. But there are SO MANY unemployed that if they couldn't keep them occupied with meaningless college courses ... or sedated with video games and social media ... there would be a revolution.

-----------
By the way, GSTRING, I predicted your response PERFECTLY
* ... and then you'll say I'm "too wordy". And then you will - as always- refuse to address the pertinent points, and respond with even more lies and even more bullshit personal attacks.*

And voila! Here it is http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=61835&mid=1
035581#1035581

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Saturday, August 26, 2017 11:07 PM

JEWELSTAITEFAN


Quote:

Originally posted by SIGNYM:
True. But there are SO MANY unemployed that if they couldn't keep them occupied with meaningless college courses ... or sedated with video games and social media ... there would be a revolution.

or we opened up the jobs absorbed by 11 million illegal aliens, they might have something to do as well.

But keeping them occupied is certainly more important than providing education or vocational training.

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