Naked Science Forum
General Discussion & Feedback => Just Chat! => Topic started by: smart on 17/03/2018 01:50:25
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Our so-called "modern" education system is profoundly stupid, deficient, and boring to hell. We might urgently need to redefine or invent new ways to teach kids to become better thinkers.
I really understand easily now why we precipitate kids into full-time employment instead of teaching them the proper scientific method.
I don't regret at all to have studied very little when I was at school.
Without any radical changes, our education system essentially sucks and is a waste of time.
tk
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I don't regret at all to have studied very little when I was at school.
It shows
I really understand easily now why we precipitate kids into full-time employment instead of teaching them the proper scientific method.
That's rather ironic coming from you, given your profound resistance to the scientific method..
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I do agree that modern education is kinda frustrating. It should be reformed for sure. It should be aimed to develop each one potential. For me everybody has a talent and potential to be genius but the problem is how to find and make it work in highly competitive environment. The problem is that people can't make proper decision what to learn in higher education. You just have to learn what lecturer gave you. i agree that you can use different internet sourse
in your spare time to educate your self. But you still supposed to use so much time just to keep on your university studies. It drastically decreases your possibilities of being successful in certain field.
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My biggest problem with it is the memorisation method of teaching. This is unhealthy and stifles actual thought, such as if you are working through long complicated calculations you feel tired and withdrawn, thus the memorisation of education has the same effect. You either end up with dejected people or people who are more prone to mental instability. It just aint healthy, and impedes the development of peoples education.
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Most people cannot enter prestigious work. And most of the time it is not because of a failure in our educational system, it's because we are all born with unique minds, some "better" than others. And those of us that can't land those jobs or produce great families live our lives in guilt and self-loathing.
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I think the forge of the English enlightenment would be a good thing to study as a springboard, to new thought that looks for the better and not the dark.
A viewing of the Christian History of Europe, with some studies in Jewish roots, is helpful. Because in there is a message of hope and benevolence, law and grace, that so was so misconstrued that people often prefer to be atheist as a result of the theist essence of thought. Being conscience, goodness, love, wisdom and freedom.
The Enlightenment, the Church and Hope. How we achieved our justice and peace, and how we can advance. In the classics there is Socrates.
Turing was post enlightenment but this was hard on him anyway, a war hero, post war suicided after being found homosexual and sentenced to seven years in prison or chemical castration. Further changes a few decades later were better.
Highs and lows, slavery and freedom. Economic highs and lows. Means to success with understanding of past failures. John Newton and William Wilberforce, the kindness of the Gospel finally makes it through to competent economics, human rights, animal rights, free education, apologetics, helped by a formerly evil man. Defence worked.
Demographics, which families are having one child each and which are having five... The future people of Britain. Peace with Russia. Terrorism, Human trafficking. Guns, drugs.
Agriculture. Music history, market and composition.
The developing world, agriculture, water, energy, demographics, Pentecostalism, Islam, Buddhism and terrorism.
Human psychology and the internet... drugs, memory, paced reading and comprehension, logic, masses.
Some first thoughts here.
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Most people cannot enter prestigious work. And most of the time it is not because of a failure in our educational system, it's because we are all born with unique minds, some "better" than others. And those of us that can't land those jobs or produce great families live our lives in guilt and self-loathing.
The system that ended up resulting from all the confusion of the centuries, was a justice system, very man made. Politically correct. People are afraid to speak up for the faulty for fear of being accused of themselves harbouring secret faults. There is sense of some being good and some evil. It does not leave rooms for shades of grey. There is the secret confessional system. Human emotions like same, guilt, inferiority. A rejection of Biblical justice and grace. In which the sinner is select. The changed life has taste more than the error free, becoming salt of the Earth.
I know good health and repute is ideal. But recovery is charitable. We don't find it in socialism, maybe more in Wilberforce, but he was old world and strict. Somehow I think it is in democracy. This could sadly mean people want less human rights or go to extremes of strict versus gracious, or the foul accepted. But education could lift the low down tent to order.
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The problem is illustrated by the Unschooling movement where children aren't forced to do any learning at all but are just left to do whatever they want (so long as they aren't causing trouble). Such children by the time they're of school leaving age have the same quantity and standard of qualifications as children who went through the school sausage grinder. There is a big difference between the two groups though, because the Unschooled children are better balanced psychologically, have a much wider range of skills and are better socialised (if they aren't too isolated from other children).
How can it be that such children can learn as much without going to school (or by going to schools where they are free to walk out of classes whenever they want)? What generally happens is that they fall behind in their school-type learning, but catch up later on, and that reveals a missed opportunity - there must be a better way where you mix the two systems, because many of them don't bother to start learning to read until they're ten. I strongly dislike both approaches for that reason - one wastes 95% of children's time (for the first half of the time they're in school, though it isn't so terrible later on when the teaching becomes a bit more serious), and the other system doesn't attempt to push or even encourage children to learn anything.
The way to fix the problem is to split education and childminding into two different compartments and not combine the two things into a bloated package that pretends to be all about education when in reality the amount of teaching it provides to children struggles to reach even five minutes a day throughout primary/elementary school. A lot of the time while children are working hard in school, they are learning precisely nothing from it - it's just empty work to keep them quiet, and it's a massive theft of their childhood. We need to have a system where children are free to attend school when it suits them, provided that they're learning at an acceptable rate. If they fall behind the required schedule, they would lose that freedom, but so long as they stay ahead of it, they can walk out of any class (and right out of the school if their parents agree to this and have alternative childminding options open to them) whenever they reckon their time's being wasted by fake education (which is most of the time). Children who are home-schooled should not be shut out of the school system either - they should be free to come and go in exactly the same way, and if they're failing to keep up with the schedule set for them (which should be individualised to some degree to take into account learning difficulties), they should be forced to attend school until they've caught up with where they should be. These learning requirements wouldn't be oppressive - hardly anything need be demanded of them because hardly anything is achieved normally anyway, the bar being set so low.
We don't have any real ambition for children, so we let them rot for years learning next to nothing, and we actively prevent them from learning by sticking them into classes where they spend most of their time being taught what they already know and all sorts of things that they will learn automatically anyway just from watching TV, surfing the net, and from ordinary life at home. We should be providing them with access to the best, most efficient learning and getting out of their way so that they can get on with it. Half of children could be doing university-level work by the time they're 12 without having to make any sacrifices to other important parts of their lives - it would merely be a reallocation of some of their wasted time to doing serious learning instead of merely playing at learning.
There is one important subject that isn't being systematically taught at all though, and that's reasoning. We are bringing up generation after generation of irrational thinkers who are trained to regurgitate established beliefs without having any idea about how to think for themselves. This may be hard to put right because there doesn't appear to be any standard way of doing this kind of teaching other than through philosophy classes (which rely heavily on the quality of the teacher leading the children), but the best way of training people to think for themselves that I know of is simply to feed them a mixture of good and bad information while making them fully aware that a lot of it is false and that is designed to trick them, so it then becomes an important task for them to avoid being laughed at for buying into a pile of nonsense. You start with something that sounds plausible, but more and more contradictions come into play over time until it becomes sufficiently broken that every child recognises that it's wrong. The sooner a child works out that they're being sold dud ideas, the better they'll feel, so there's a strong drive to improve these skills. You can also start with things that sound implausible, but which don't produce contradictions and don't break as a result, so again the ones who are fastest at recognising it as valid will be the winners while the rest realise that they need to up their game. This approach guarantees that they will develop critical thinking skills rather than just being passive absorbers.
I doubt this will be fixed by governments though - none have ever done much to improve education, no matter how much money they've thrown at it. They have no vision, and they can't even recognise that the system is so enormously wrong. This is only going to be fixed by AGI when every child has direct one-to-one access to the best, most logical teacher of all, but the irony of it is that the very thing that will make education ten times more effective than it is today will also make the need for most of that education redundant - it will no longer lead to jobs because everything will be done by intelligent machines.
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Our education system is going to collapse in the next 10-15 years. I just hope it doesn't bring the whole country down with it. Let's face it, education isn't as worth it now as it was 30-40-50 years ago and the prices are just going up. It's not going to last.
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Could your educators revert to a former method that worked?
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It's possible that our educators were only doing what their political masters wanted.
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/new-ofsted-inspection-framework-whats-changing-for-schools/
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I know that experience is important, but it's worth thinking about how much additional material is needed.
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If everyone was taught to think critically, society would collapse.
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society would collapse.
It already did.
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You are confusing the return to sound Victorian values of (concupiscence, corruption and incompetence in government; starvation, addiction and endemic disease everywhere else) with collapse. Not so, my friend. This is a recognisable structure in which everyone knows his place. The hideous alternative is a decline via meritocracy to socialism and anarchy.