education is primarily a barrier to entry: true or false

so i work as a teacher, in a slightly-more-affluent-than-usual suburb in a southern californian city. i could tell you median income and all that stuff but i won't. anyway, i've noticed a prevailing attitude among both my peers (other teachers) and students. simply put, the idea is that education is not actually anything useful. rather it is just a barrier to entry.

for example, there is the idea that engineers don't actually "do math" or "do physics" as you might do them in high school or college courses. instead you do other stuff, that you learn on the job. ditto with lawyers not "doing law school" or doctors not "doing biology".

instead, things like calculus, science and engineering degrees, college writing courses, hell, college in general, these are all basically just hoops that we make people jump through.

the more "conservative" take on this idea is that these are things that are at least somewhat related to the profession, or at least measure some sort of basic job competence, ie a lawyer has to learn how to read and understand complicated language

a more radical version of this view is that these are purely artificial barriers, designed more or less to suss out your socioeconomic background or parent's educational level

just throwing it out there as an educator, wondering whether this is really a prevalent attitude or if i just hang out with a bunch of slackers and hippies

a more radical version of this view is that these are purely artificial barriers, designed more or less to suss out your socioeconomic background or parent's educational level

gonna say it's more a test of yr ability/willingness to jump through hoops, useful skill for modern life imo

possibly-related:

my dad was an engineer, now he is an executive at a very large engineering company that produces gas turbines for petroleum industry

he once told me that they have a unofficial policy of just throwing out any resumes from recent ivy league grads, MIT grads, caltech grads, etc and skipping down to the resumes from state school / community college transfers

when i asked him why, he said that anybody they've ever hired from these places turned out to be really good at taking notes and tests but turned out to be mediocre at *actual work* (whatever that means at my dad's place of employment, which i have never spent time at) and also somewhat insufferable to boot

If "useful" means "pathway to tenure via publishing journal articles, serving on committees, and handling other bureaucratic drudgery," then education is certainly that. It goes without saying that education doesn't produce brilliant teachers -- some of the dumbest clucks I've met in my life were education or English majors.

Where you got your law school degree certainly matters as an entry.

law probably not v comparable to an industry where stuff gets made tho tbf

working with a bunch of engineers I can say that nobody in my office subscribes to this idea. there are things you can learn on the job, sure, but to be an engineer you have to go to engineering school and like, understand how shit works.

he once told me that they have a unofficial policy of just throwing out any resumes from recent ivy league grads, MIT grads, caltech grads, etc and skipping down to the resumes from state school / community college transfers

also this is pretty lol - not that it's wrong (our hiring definitely targets specific schools that we know have decent engineering departments that emphasize our field)

i agree that the education system in many countries is only tangentially related to preparing young people to work in specific careers. i think that most education systems are the result of an uneasy compromise between a state's needs for socialisation, preparation for work and vaguer cultural and developmental aspirations. i agree that success within existing educational systems is more often than not heavily influenced by factors of class, culture, race and upbringing.

but i believe that even the very flawed education systems that exist are very, very important, and a measure of any state's right to consider itself civilised.

ok but does a "better" law school degree imply a better lawyer?

the idea that people are pushing seems to go something like this:

1) mathematics (for example) is used as an artificial barrier in our society

2) as educators, we measure proficiency in mathematics (on the SAT, say) and use that as a barrier for "elite jobs" (like brain surgeon) or "elite schools" (like ivy leagues)

3) but that proficiency in "school mathematics" doesn't actually make you a better brain surgeon or even a better math professor, since the skills a brain surgeon draws upon or a math professor draws upon don't even remotely relate to the skills that get you a high score on the SAT math section

4) therefore mathematics just serves as an artificial barrier to keep out people who don't have college-educated parents that help w/ homework or at least rich ones that can afford a math tutor for you

3) but that proficiency in "school mathematics" doesn't actually make you a better brain surgeon or even a better math professor, since the skills a brain surgeon draws upon or a math professor draws upon don't even remotely relate to the skills that get you a high score on the SAT math section

I don't think this is true. math, for example, requires a lot of attention, abstract reasoning, patience, methodical step-by-step approach to problem-solving, etc. All those things are related to brain surgery

incidentally my dad was an engineer and usually unimpressed by people that came into the job from university compared to those who'd learned as apprentices. but that could just as easily be an indictment of the standard of education at the particular institutions rather than the value of education.

also, working class men in their 60s not thinking education is all that, shocker.

Noodle Vague otm in general

xp

math, for example, requires a lot of attention, abstract reasoning, patience, methodical step-by-step approach to problem-solving, etc. All those things are related to brain surgery

yeah, dismissing maths because no job involves doing much school-level maths is just a denial of "transferable skills"

I have a suspicion this thread will devolve into a bunch of us (me included) attacking people way dumber than us who have succeeded despite a degree in psychology, English, engineering, law, etc.

the fact that qualifications don't prove much about how good somebody will be at a job is - amongst other things - a failure of those specific qualifications, not the concept of education

xposts to shakey - of COURSE the engineers say that, they want to keep the plebes out! they "won" the game!

also, as a math teacher, i can tell you that not all of the A+ students in my class exhibit those qualities! in fact, some of the "best" math students are just blazingly fast at doing calculations in their head and can memorize equations and procedures in two minutes, but aren't at all attentive, patient, methodical, etc

i think that most education systems are the result of an uneasy compromise between a state's needs for socialisation, preparation for work and vaguer cultural and developmental aspirations

this video sort of touches on those points and gives a very good five minute summary of how education got where it is today - but then gets into this "divergent thinking" pie-in-the-sky stuff that i can't really get behind

it is a popular video w/ teachers who espouse the ideas i am talking about

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

The truth lies somewhere within an amalgamation of all those views, as synopsized in the OP.

Some professions require exacting technical training, whether it happens in college prior to employment or on the job makes no odds, but making the applicant take on the expense of as much of that training as they are willing to take on just makes sense for employers.

For a large slice of jobs (mostly non-professional) that educational credential is just a crude indicator of ability and a convenient way to make a first cut line, below which no one will be considered. The biggest headache and time waster when employing someone is sifting through all the available warm bodies to discover the few who best meet your requirements. Anything which reduces the amount of wasted time in this process is a huge boon to the employer.

I'd say the university system is designed to weed out those opposed to success through the Usual Channels.

being someone in a profession for which I was in no way at all prepared in terms of formal education, it is really clear to me which skills I picked up in school that have been essential to my livelihood as an adult and not all of them were related to the specific content I was taught. For example, working on the school newspaper with a really good journalism teacher taught me a lot about how to write and frame an argument or a proposal (which has proven directly applicable to my job) but then at the indirect level the newspaper was also where I learned how to use a computer and various software applications etc. - which was tangential to journalism at the time per se but absolutely essential by the time I entered the workforce. There are lots of things like this, I notice them all the time. The fact that I have even been able to succeed at all in the industry I'm in is, I'm positive, directly related to the fact that I had the wherewithal to make it through college and develop some critical thinking skills along the way. I don't think I would have been able to adapt to the requirements of my job or even understand what we do otherwise.

i think this less true in the professions than in society at large but overall i think its p true

i've watched that "Changing Paradigms" video before. iirc i agreed with a lot of its analysis but also tuned out when it got to the "what happens next" bit. i do think the question of "which has to change first, society or its education system" is a bit of a chicken and egg puzzle tho, if you happen to be a person who thinks either or both of those things needs to change.

of COURSE the engineers say that, they want to keep the plebes out! they "won" the game!

eh I don't think it's just self interest. if you wanna know how an HVAC system works, you kinda need to take a bunch of classes in HVAC systems, you know? When we hire graduates right out of school the first thing we look at is do they have coursework relevant to the industry - do they know how PV systems work, do they know how lighting systems work. Very practical, specific things. A lot of this can be learned on the job, but it's cheaper to hire someone who at least understands the basics!

I'd say the university system is designed to weed out those opposed to success through the Usual Channels.

you mean blacks and latinos?

yeah but you're talking about a technical certificate, shakey, not a university degree

no I'm talking about BS and MS degrees in engineering. these are degrees handed out by universities. technical certificates are different (and don't require degrees!)

I am a millennial and I grew up in an affluent Northern CA suburb and this (the thesis of the OP) has been the prevailing viewpoint among my parents, peers, counselors, etc. I bought into it, and I don't think it was necessarily helpful to legitimize my dwindling prospects and go to a community college with the dismissal of education as so much gatekeeping. Having gotten through college confident that education was something designed to maintain the class structure and thus no big deal, I now wish I had done it differently. It's really self defeatist for this to be the prevailing attitude without any sort of will or responsibility for reform to lessen the correlation between class and education, but maybe I am just deflecting myself from personal responsibility in saying that. Interesting thread question tho.

xpost are you talking about HVAC design or maintenance?

the engineers i know don't seem to do much in the way of detailed mathematical work tbph, software ppl i know even less, tbph, yet the maths components of their courses were by far the heaviest and toughest parts

xpost to shakey - i thought you meant you worked somewhere that did facilities work, ie electricians, HVAC repair guys, etc ... it sounds more like you're in the "civil engineering" end of things

i come down more on the "barrier to entry" side. stuff on the national curriculum in high school bears remarkably little relevance to stuff i need to know in my everyday life or career (even at the time i found this frustrating, esp w/r/t subjects i couldn't stand like chemistry), and university was such a disaster for me academically that the fact that i possess a degree on paper really is just a hoop i've just about climbed through rather than an indication of my knowledge or proficiency in a field. the lessons i've learnt in ~life~ have been infinitely more valuable - i'm never, ever surprised when i read about people succeeding in journalism without formal qualifications.

i don't think this is ideal but our educational system, even at its best, doesn't seem designed to help people maximise their potential within it.

I'd say the university system is designed to weed out those opposed to success through the Usual Channels.

you mean blacks and latinos?

you mean the New Majority?

i don't see how that's relevant

I agree with i_got_loaded: this is a horrible, short-sighted and frankly idiotic view of the function and value of traditional education.

the grounding in mathematics, science (chemistry & biology), history, language provided by basic high-school education is both hugely valuable and a decent general measure of willingness and ability to do hard cognitive work of the sort required to succeed in fields like law, engineering and medicine. of course there are outside factors that can impede/obscure or aid/enable that "willingness and ability", and these should be better addressed by an educational system that makes it its mission to provide a high quality of education to all americans. nevertheless, the basic approach is a good one, and it deserves respect, especially from the people who provide it.

I don't get your yuk. I teach at a university whose students consist mostly of Hispanics and blacks.

the grounding in mathematics, science (chemistry & biology), history, language provided by basic high-school education is both hugely valuable and a decent general measure of willingness and ability to do hard cognitive work of the sort required to succeed in fields like law, engineering and medicine. of course there are outside factors that can impede/obscure or aid/enable that "willingness and ability", and these should be better addressed by an educational system that makes it its mission to provide a high quality of education to all americans. nevertheless, the basic approach is a good one, and it deserves respect, especially from the people who provide it.

argument could be made that a properly managed apprenticeship in any given field could provide the same chance to show a general measure of willingness to do hard cognitive work that is more relevant and valuable in a given direction without handicapping many people with gradings in subjects that they have no interest in nor faculty.

any system setting out a framework allowing for education/training/improvement in a fair and equal manner deserves respect, not sure that this is limited to the current educational system as discussed.

robin hanson has a whole thing like this where he basically says that education is designed to teach students how to behave appropriately in professional society + suss out who is good at that kind of behavior and who is not.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/08/school-isnt-about-learning.html

he has a ton of posts about it tho -- it's one of his big things

that's cool alfred, i was just pointing out that on a national level blacks and latinos are "weeded out" of higher education 20% more than other students and i was wondering if you thought it was because of their attitude toward jumping through hoops

the grounding in mathematics, science (chemistry & biology), history, language provided by basic high-school education is both hugely valuable and a decent general measure of willingness and ability to do hard cognitive work of the sort required to succeed in fields like law, engineering and medicine

^^ is this based on research or what?

the grounding in mathematics, science (chemistry & biology), history, language provided by basic high-school education is both hugely valuable and a decent general measure of willingness and ability to do hard cognitive work of the sort required to succeed in fields like law, engineering and medicine

valuable, maybe; a measure of ability to do cognitive work, definitely not. more like a measure of how important school grades were to a person when they were a teenager

IIRC the only variable that correlated to success in engineering classes at UC schools was your 9th grade algebra results

not whether you were in calculus or algebra ii as a senior, not what your SAT math score was, etc etc

here's some other relevant posts:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/12/on-schools-function.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/11/true-believers-in-school.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/07/investing-in-school-signals.html

xpost to shakey - i thought you meant you worked somewhere that did facilities work, ie electricians, HVAC repair guys, etc ... it sounds more like you're in the "civil engineering" end of things

close - energy engineering. which sort of requires a combination of design and repair skills (ie you need to know how an optimally functioned system is designed, and also how to retrofit an existing poorly functioning system to function as best as possible)

many xp

you write a very strident paragraph contenderizer, but i'm not convinced it's any less ideological than the views i laid out in the OP

argument could be made that a properly managed apprenticeship in any given field could provide the same chance to show a general measure of willingness to do hard cognitive work that is more relevant and valuable in a given direction without handicapping many people with gradings in subjects that they have no interest in nor faculty.

yeah, wouldn't disagree w this at all.

i take a lot of issue with "the basic approach is a good one" but conty does like to go for bat for the tried and tested values of the 18th century so

course in an ideal world career guidance would be worth a fuck to a 16 yr old, or college wouldn't take place til you were 22 and had already learned IT basics anyway

dude, what could possibly be wrong with a system that asks you to take the most important exams of your life just as you're discovering alcohol and sex?

robin hanson has a whole thing like this where he basically says that education is designed to teach students how to behave appropriately in professional society + suss out who is good at that kind of behavior and who is not.

― Mordy, Wednesday, March 14, 2012 4:33 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, left that part out, but it's obviously another part of what the contemporary educational system is designed to do, relative to professions like law, medicine and engineering: prepare people for the demands not only of the "professional" workplace, but for the sort of education that will specifically prepare them for that workplace. in part, high school is where you get to demonstrate that you're willing to apply yourself simply because that application is requested of you, and i'd argue that that, too, is hugely valuable.

I am seeing how students increasingly regard their education as a service commodity e.g. "I paid $600 for these credits and I better get a good grade." It doesn't help that my university has used gobbledygook like "results-oriented student excellence," like we're in charge of making good tacos or something. So, yes, I do see students who regard education as an annoyance to circumvent. To a degree I don't blame them.

apprenticeship is actually the model that a lot of education reformers like to use these days (one popular pedagogical approach is called cognitive apprenticeship)

i like the idea but i feel like its going to be even harder to provide that than a decent school aystem

It sucks to teach math, chemistry, history, and I dunno Virgil to students who regard college as the means by which to acquire a piece of paper that signifies "You're okay to start your own business."

dude, what could possibly be wrong with a system that asks you to take the most important exams of your life just as you're discovering alcohol and sex?

well sure, growing up is hard. we segue into "real life" just as we're losing our minds hormonally, figuring out who we are and want to be, and exploring a vast and dangerous world. the fact that this is true is not, however, the fault of the educational system.

I am seeing how students increasingly regard their education as a service commodity e.g. "I paid $600 for these credits and I better get a good grade."

happening a lot in the UK too now that students are paying the full cost of their degrees

dude, what could possibly be wrong with a system that asks you to take the most important exams of your life just as you're discovering alcohol and sex?

oh i fuckin wish i was, iirc, discovering parental committal & possibly taco fries

It sucks to teach math, chemistry, history, and I dunno Virgil to students who regard college as the means by which to acquire a piece of paper that signifies "You're okay to start your own business."

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 14 March 2012 23:45 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it might do, yes, but from their POV it might suck to have to hear about these things and be graded on your interest in them when you know your career plans don't include them

I am seeing how students increasingly regard their education as a service commodity e.g. "I paid $600 for these credits and I better get a good grade."

^ a good attitude, imo. encourages the sort of work that's likely to result in success (i.e., good grades).

and financial success

well yr self-fulfilling prophecy came true

Panglossian!

it might do, yes, but from their POV it might suck to have to hear about these things and be graded on your interest in them when you know your career plans don't include them

oh yeah! We're finally seeing the results of "democratizing" the educational system. It's neither bad nor good imo. If "society" requires a college degree for most anything then we must become degree mills.

It sucks to teach math, chemistry, history, and I dunno Virgil to students who regard college as the means by which to acquire a piece of paper that signifies "You're okay to start your own business."

it's pretty sad that the idea of learning for learning's sake has such little purchase right now, because that's pretty much the only "utility" of many courses, at high school and above.

then again that doesn't apply across the board, making a 15-yr-old who dislikes chemistry and knows at that point that their adult life will not involve any of it sit through lessons is just going to alienate them from the system and reinforce the idea that they're just doing it for a piece of paper.

It sucks to teach math, chemistry, history, and I dunno Virgil to students who regard college as the means by which to acquire a piece of paper that signifies "You're okay to start your own business."

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 14 March 2012 23:45 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it might do, yes, but from their POV it might suck to have to hear about these things and be graded on your interest in them when you know your career plans don't include them

― truth fromgbs (darraghmac), Wednesday, March 14, 2012 4:48 PM (21 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, but if you know that your career plans do not require such things, in any way shape or form, and you are in a school that does require them, then the only real problem is that you've chosen the wrong school. i mean, basically the only thing you really need to start a business is a line of credit.

but when the school in question is high school ... ?

it's pretty sad that the idea of learning for learning's sake has such little purchase right now,

did it ever? Seriously! ILE is one of the few communities in which I've encountered people like me who used to read and write because they gave him pleasure.

i agree with noodle vague upthread (v. beautifully put). some rough thoughts: there is this idea that logic, reasoning, critical thinking and other side effects of learning math and science will serve someone just for being those skills, directly applied to life, but i think it's more about learning how to perform these skills in a setting, i.e., what takes precedence for success is how able someone is to meet and perform the requirements necessary to gain membership in a group. sometimes those requirements are "hard" rather than "soft" or whatever but i still think this is a big reason why secondary education and "the field" (knowledge/production/market work) exhibit so many disconnects, those two cultures require two different performance profiles, with different amounts of element overlap.

i think education culture, in the u.s. at least, has many tangled and contradictory aims and claims. the impulse contenderizer is spouting above for one. the idea that pure education is about a kind of personal liberation, which needs to be majorly questioned and sorted out because it ends up being a cover for a lot of hypocrisy.

lots of x-posts of course

yeah, but if you know that your career plans do not require such things, in any way shape or form, and you are in a school that does require them, then the only real problem is that you've chosen the wrong school. i mean, basically the only thing you really need to start a business is a line of cred

The subjects I mentioned are part of most colleges' core curriculum.

but when the school in question is high school ... ?

fair point, but i'm good with everybody having to learn to crawl, even if they're pretty damn sure that they have no intention of ever walking

it's pretty sad that the idea of learning for learning's sake has such little purchase right now

this ties in with what Alfred's saying and what i said about the different values in education systems. i definitely think that education as a value in itself is being pushed out in favour of consumerism and the needs of employers, but ironically in the UK at least we still seem pretty bad at creating an education system that's meeting the actual needs of employers

do u guys ever feel like with something like education that so many words have already been written about the topic that anything you had to say about it would just be a drop in the ocean?

so the UK still produces business students who can write actual compound sentences? Wow.

i definitely think that education as a value in itself is being pushed out in favour of consumerism and the needs of employers, but ironically in the UK at least we still seem pretty bad at creating an education system that's meeting the actual needs of employers

ha otm the UK's speciality really is in pitching for a compromise and ending up with the worst of both worlds

hey, look! matt responded to one of my posts without directly calling me a racist. red letter day...

'learning for learning's sake'

i mean, i dunno, does nobody else even find this a troublesome concept to begin with? learning what? decided by whom? to what end? there's more baggage there than is assumed, and i think the attitude of 'learning what someone else finds interesting for someone else's sake' probably turns a lot more off the idea of education than many other factors discussed itt

has anyone mentioned yet that the current US educational system is a frankenstein's monster hodgepodge of remnants from the transition between agrarian + industrialization?

"like we're in charge of making good tacos or something."

frankly, i would have liked to have gone to taco-U... i guess that does speak to an apprenticeship-envy.

gonna say it's more a test of yr ability/willingness to jump through hoops, useful skill for modern life imo

dude, what could possibly be wrong with a system that asks you to take the most important exams of your life just as you're discovering alcohol and sex?

otms

so is society mayyyne xp

learning for learnings sake implies not grading

^^

i guess by learning for learning's sake we're talking about the idea that a broad base of general knowledge and skills might be important for kids developmentally. i wdn't argue that it can be done in a very ham-fisted and counterproductive fashion, but as a general idea i'm good with it. sometimes kids have to do things against their natural inclinations which are mostly eating jelly babies, watching tv and beating on weaker kids?

the quality of one's education is much more a function of one's attitude toward it than it having taken place in any particular scenario. there are limits to this, of course, (yes, engineers and scientists) but no, ppl do not need a college degree to be social media specialists and seo rock stars.

a degree is much more a symbol of having undergone a process than that process actually involving learning.

eating jelly babies, watching tv and beating on weaker kids?

see, p sure two out of these three things are valuable life experience and can lead to future success

also in the UK at least there is way too much emphasis on grading in situations where it doesn't matter.

obviously if you want to do brain surgery or airline piloting as an adult then some sort of certificate of competence wd be in order.

also one of the problems with this education system (and a lot of our discussion) is that it takes ability as a given rather than subject to growth - it confuses snapshots w/ maps

CA/PA

^ also where most of my college nights went tbf

noodle vague how can watching tv be a natural inclination when tv is made by man

so are jelly babies

we naturally engage with our environment, inc jelly babies

nah i don't really buy the "kids are savages" mentality but "kids are not the best judges of their own long-term self-interest" is pretty uncontroversial. i mean, people are not the best judges of etc. on the whole

ya that's a good route to what tho, elitism at best in the educational system, inc classics as a part of a vocational education

shit that's a rubbish post, i'll tear it apart myselg if u gimme a minute

i wd tend to argue that if at 15 you've decided you're really not interested in Chemistry that might be as much about how you've been taught and other extraneous factors as anything - the problem is still intrinsic to the educational system rather than "education" as a concept itself

nobody arguing against 'education' as a concept tho!

I don't know if education is a barrier for entry but taking all the state and national-level BS tests are...

the education system exists within a wider social context true, so you have a point there darragh but we shd be offering opportunities and experiences to kids throughout their time in school, even if they don't take them - if they're not interested, find something interesting to pull them in! rather than just being like "okay you want to be a spot-welder well we'll just learn spot-welding and some basic literacy and numeracy from here on"

totally agree!

just not- well you've tried this and hate it and aren't any good at it but it's curricular and you've to do it, even at a less-than-useless level, for another four years

whether that's spot-welding or maths

i come across a lot of poor practice that i won't elaborate on in a public forum but teachers and students are only human i guess

what you guys think of montessori-style?

teachers are only human, students are the most digusting savages tho tbf

xp

when i had a training session on it from some practitioners i thought it seemed very anal re. the orderliness of the classroom but i liked a lot of the philosophy

another real value of high-school education that sometimes gets overlooked in discussions like this is that education creates an environment and then measures people's ability to adapt to and succeed within it. to that extent, it both (passively) teaches students how to suss out and satisfy the environment's demands, and screens for those who can or will not do this. the environment is both curricular and social, and though it's not a perfect match, i think it does a reasonably good job of approximating and preparing for both university-level study and for some generic vision of "the modern workplace".

among the most basic lessons taught and screened for in high school are "get along" and "do what's required". these are basic workplace survival skills for almost any kind of career, imo. in order to succeed at most jobs, you have to subordinate your own desires the expectations of a rather narrow role. regardless of what field you eventually choose, you will probably have to spend years doing mundane shit that doesn't intrinsically fascinate you in order to acquire the advanced skills that will allow you to succeed in the long run. you will have to dress appropriately, treat your supposed superiors with deference, do boring work whose utility you don't fully comprehend, and avoid conflict with your peers. high school teaches just these things.

also, i think it's kind of a good thing that high school education isn't based on what kids think they're going to want to do with the rest of their lives. as others have pointed out, our teenage years probably aren't the best time to be making long-term life decisions. therefore, i think it's good that high school education aims in general for broad-based "college preparedness" of the sort that suits just about any eventual career path.

education creates an environment and then measures people's ability to adapt to and succeed within it

so does, well, anything that would replace it nobody is advocating teen anarchy here

thought this thread was going to be about sex

i think that one of the best things that educational institutions teach students is (pace Howard Stern) when to shut up and to sit down.

i was about to literally say the same thing, but not in approbation

I don't mind the general college-prep drift of US high school education, but the whole 'learning a manual trade' aspect of high school (e.g. welding or auto repair) has completely gone to hell locally and I suspect nationally, too. It needs to be revivied and strengthened, imo. There are a substantial number of students who respond well to this sort of trade-school emphasis, but who find the whole college-prep side of school unbearable. A lot of them drop out or tune out.

that these are purely artificial barriers, designed more or less to suss out your socioeconomic background or parent's educational level

this is wildly otm

he once told me that they have a unofficial policy of just throwing out any resumes from recent ivy league grads, MIT grads, caltech grads, etc and skipping down to the resumes from state school / community college transfers

dude obviously doesn't work for a large law firm or a hedge fund ... where such people are hunted after like foxes on an english moor (and by people with the same type of mindset, too).

among the most basic lessons taught and screened for in high school are "get along" and "do what's required

yeah i mean if we want to teach this to kids we could just send them coal mines

the problem w/ 'barrier to entry' is that it sorta suggests that it's a system that was designed from above. in some cases that's true, but not that many. a md is definitely a 'barrier to entry' to the medical field - legally, you cannot be a doctor without an md. it's a profession that requires tons of technical skills and a small mistake can kill somebody, having a strict barrier to entry is probably a good thing, though people might argue that there are better ways to go about it than the system we have set up today.

for the most part education doesn't provide highly technical skills and doesn't get you past *legal* barriers to entry. it's better understood as a collection of ~signals~ and the job market / society responds to those signals, sometimes creating what effectively adds up to a barrier to entry in the collective response.

if mark zuckerberg wanted to work for a tech company, despite not having a college degree, I imagine he could get a job. if he wanted to be a lawyer, he'd still have to go to school and pass the bar. if he wanted to be a mechanic, he'd still have to learn technical skills.

I've linked this before, but this is my favorite writer on the subject:
http://www.quickanded.com/2011/05/is-higher-education-a-bubble-fraud-conspiracy-ponzi-scheme-part-ii.html

that's a great article

i think the argument in the OP is that school these days is 90% #1, 2 and 3, which (like most ivy league grads i know) are of dubious value to anybody

Why is it that students can graduate from MIT and Harvard, yet not know how to solve a simple third-grade problem in science: lighting a light bulb with a battery and wire? Beginning with this startling fact, this program systematically explores many of the assumptions that we hold about learning to show that education is based on a series of myths

http://www.learner.org/resources/series26.html

^^ this is from the annenberg foundation, btw, so steer clear if you hate liberal bullshit

yeah i mean if we want to teach this to kids we could just send them coal mines

yeah, but i didn't say that's all we're teaching. the college/white collar workplace prep environment part is just as crucial.

uh

college and the white-collar workplace have little in common

speaking of which, which white-collar workplace are you referring to?

the only interchangeable white-collar workplace i can think of is admin

white-collar workplace rules taught in high school:

1) do what the boss says
2) don't get in fights on school (work) property
3) timeliness and neatness count
4) dress appropriately and speak with deference to your supposed "superiors"
5) etc, etc, etc.

college and the white-collar workplace have little in common

i'd say that they have a huge amount in common, having spent a good deal of my life in both.

xp to my own post

I missed mordy's post upthread but I'm generally in agreement w/ robin hanson on this / said more or less the same thing / as does kevin carey

colleges are totally different from one another. and even different programs at the same college are totally different from one another! I don't think you can really make any generalizations about colleges as such. I think its more, and this has been discussed on ilx plenty before, that if enough of yr. applicants have degrees, and given that a degree is going to have some correlation with capacity as a first-order filter, then you might as well not even consider the applicants without it.

College students sleep in and sometimes cut classes and basically make their own hours. The #1 rule of workplaces (white collar and otherwise) is pretty much show up on time and don't leave early. And you can't put your head on your desk and sleep if you get bored while somebody is talking. Also college students can dress pretty much however they want. Meanwhile the #2 rule of white collar workplaces is look somewhat together.

but as I said this is a total generalization and I know there are colleges and b-school depts w/in colleges that make a big deal about being on time and dressing sharp and etc.

well the institution wasn't *designed* as something to signal the perfect office worker, it just slowly grew into a signal that's used in that way. if employers got a say, 'being on time' would be an important part of getting your college degree, cause that tells them more than the fact that you got a B+ in anthropology.

another important point of connection between high school, college and the white-collar workplace (including blue-collar management and the "professions"): emphasis on paper and computer work.

WTF are you even talking about

mechanics handle 10x as much paper (in triplicate no less) than most white-collar workers i know

also these

white-collar workplace rules taught in high school:

1) do what the boss says
2) don't get in fights on school (work) property
3) timeliness and neatness count
4) dress appropriately and speak with deference to your supposed "superiors"

are also the rules at "mcdonalds"

also if by "computer work" you mean "word processing" then i gotcha but i guess you've never been to a bank?

ah i'm sorry man

i have no idea why i am taking such a nasty tone

it's just that you're saying so much does not compute stuff and in such an authoritative tone that it makes my temples pound

your tone is fine, contenderizer is just being willfully obtuse & argumentative for the billionth time

I've been made fun of behind my back for caring too much about the content of my classes. It's definitely still not cool to appear to be enthusiastic about anything except money.

i'm perhaps being argumentative, in that i'm stating things rather bluntly, but it's my experience of the white collar workplace that paper and computer work really are central to it, much more so than at the blue collar jobs i've had. note that i was including management, office/admin stuff and the professions in "white collar".

some of the blue collar work i've done: cleaning sites & offices of various sorts, groundskeeping, light carpentry, drywall, bus driving, prep cook, register jockey

white collare work i've done: database design & maintenance, technical writing, manuscript evaluation, contract checking, qa/qc, accounting, research

^ perhaps skews my perception of things

white-collar workplace rules taught in high school:

1) do what the boss says
2) don't get in fights on school (work) property
3) timeliness and neatness count
4) dress appropriately and speak with deference to your supposed "superiors"
5) etc, etc, etc.

i was awesome at all of these things at high school and completely useless at them in a white-collar workplace

in school i don't think even i would've guessed i had a latent problem with authority but i found i was pretty unable to tolerate my "superiors" talking to me rudely in the office

anyway, what i'm saying is, i find it pretty depressing if those are the things we're meant to take from our school experience

nobody in a workplace should talk rudely to colleagues, it's fucking unprofessional imo

it's pretty endemic ime

well yeah here too but it's unacceptable i think. not the occasional "had a bad day" snap but a general level of disrespect and sense of hierarchical entitlement

ughhhh workplace hierarchies and the multiple little ways in which people attempt to reinforce them ALL THE TIME that have nothing to do with your actual job or the work you're meant to be doing. at my last job there was a senior guy who was always throwing his weight around in a really argy-bargy at the junior staff, always little menial stuff about why is your desk so untidy or why is there no paper in the printer. it takes two seconds to put the paper in the printer, fucking do it yourself, as i snapped at him once. when he tried to make a fuss about why i was speaking to him like that i was just like, you may be ~senior~ staff but i don't actually report to you. do it yourself. this kept on happening so my own boss eventually just moved my desk so i wasn't anywhere near him.

*hugs freelance lifestyle with no boss and no senior staff and no hierarchies*

and the thing is, i'm fully aware that was actually a fairly decent workplace environment and a good company to work for, as these things go. some of the places i temped at, my god, inhuman

i think that one of the best things that educational institutions teach students is (pace Howard Stern) when to shut up and to sit down.

― kurwa mać (Polish for "long life") (Eisbaer), Thursday, 15 March 2012 01:05 (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i will never forget the first time i visited a university i was applying to (as a high school senior), to, i dunno, somehow soak up its ambience and see if i wanted to join its gestalt, and i attended a class (it was a lecture) and NO ONE WAS TALKING TO EACH OTHER while the professor spoke!!!! you could hear a pin drop! the only place i'd been in my life that was similar was church.

How did this fall of sna so quickly? Ilx is growing up.

'ilx is growing up' = cause this didn't cause a clusterfuck or 'ilx is growing up' = lol kids who cares?

I think it's an interesting subject

The first one. I think it's an interesting subject, too.

i'm perhaps being argumentative, in that i'm stating things rather bluntly, but it's my experience of the white collar workplace that paper and computer work really are central to it, much more so than at the blue collar jobs i've had. note that i was including management, office/admin stuff and the professions in "white collar".

― Fozzy Osbourne (contenderizer), Thursday, March 15, 2012 3:57 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

luv u bro but you are mind-bogglingly relentless on all subjects

great thread tho, good convo

i want to make it clear that i disagree w/ the OP and i value the idea of a comprehensive liberal arts & sciences education for everyone, but that i also see (from the inside) that a lot of what is said and done in the name of (not only providing that education but also assessing it) is really counterproductive and based more in tradition and expedience than outcome

otmfm

I tried to write a post on how all this applies to law school, but I was boring the shit out of myself and had to stop.

Turn it into a law school entrance essay.

white-collar workplace rules taught in high school:

1) do what the boss says
2) don't get in fights on school (work) property
3) timeliness and neatness count
4) dress appropriately and speak with deference to your supposed "superiors"
5) etc, etc, etc.

i'd think that these are some of the Industrial Revolution-era skills that the guy in the cartoon was talking about (also responding to bells). And some white collar workplaces probably still operate in that way, but a lot of them have changed.

I guess at least to answer the question above, I don't think you actually get a significantly better legal education at a "top" law school than at some mid-range law school, like, IDK, Michigan as opposed to Rutgers. With the caveat that at a top law school you may find your fellow students tougher to compete with (after all, they competed harder than everyone else to get the top grades and LSAT scores that got them there in the first place) and there may be a certain professional advantage to being forged in that kind of fire. Neither reall train you to practice but i don't see how they could

i think i might fail all of those rules miserably tbh

i excelled at #5

true but #1-5 were also the aims of public education pretty much since french revolution times and the one-room log schoolhouse

the industrial revolution and the french revolution were fairly contemporaneous, weren't they?

its all connected imo

masons ran both

they want u to be dumb so they make $$$

i mean

have a lot of thoughts, will try to make sense
i also teach math.  my school is 98% latino, title I, one of the poorest districts in the state and has been for decades (in fact, parents from my district have been at the center of a seminal supreme court case that basically upheld that equitable resources for school districts is not the fed govt's problem)

is another way to look at this question "is education primarily a signaling device and not terribly predictive of what someone is capable of doing?"

i don't know.  i see lots of bright kids who are years behind their age peers in more affluent communities who are in an environment that doesn't stress that they are to be successful in school. and i see them entering a workforce with a tenuous grasp of formal english and being denied opportunities because of that.  if their environment placed a greater emphasis on their success in school, could they have the communication skills to succeed in the white collar workforce?

if they were as computationally fluent as their age peers, might they find engineering or upper level science coursework more accessible, as a challenge they can overcome rather than a sea of implausibly dense formulae and concepts?

i havent been teaching very long.  i love what i do.  i just don't know to what extent a teacher/school/education system can do to redress the economic disparity between my kids and their peers who expect to be successful in school.

I've frequently heard it argued that the essential cause of the disparity of resources is overrreliance on the property tax to fund school districts; rich neighborhoods get nice schools, poor neighborhoods get crap schools, and often districts aren't big enough to even out the natural disparities. Would be curious to hear feedback on that.

I think that secondary education is probably where it (generally, for non-technical careers) starts shifting from primarily a human capital thing to a social behavior + capability signal thing. like, I think that an upper-middle class kid from a family w/ smart people could probably drop out of high school at the end of his junior year, never go to college, and still be about as capable when it comes to writing / math / doing basic analytical things as a lot of people I know who did go to college. this also can depend wildly on the hs tho, as we don't really have as strong national standards for secondary education as some places.

that is true, with a lot of added historical political stuff in the mix, like white flight and sprawl etc. etc. it's also *interesting* that poor schools and rich schools are held to the same standards under no child left behind or whatever they call it now under obama, but the federal government doesn't cover the disparity in funding.

i pretty much always agree with m bison in these threads. i am invested in education being a real thing but i am not sure how to do it, and the culture of a lot of the schools i've been in testifies to what v4hid and matt p say itt.

xp

i should have said are supposed to be held to the same standards

totally a factor. you pay a pct of whatever your home is worth, if your property aint worth shit you pay v little ergo you rely more on federal and state money to compensate. your live a half million dollar home, your district gets hella funds plus your parents probably have enough $ to send you to washington DC for school trips or pay for private lessons for band or math tutors or lots of other "enrichment" outside the M-F school week.

xp

yeah and in the wealthier suburbs, parents have the leisure time and capital to directly raise money for the school even when property taxes aren't raised, etc.

also you're surrounded by kids w/ (generally) more stable families and parents who went to college

basically when i am king of texas i scrap the property tax altogether and replace it with a low progressive state income tax that is equitably distributed per student and theres a picture of me with two middle fangahs to any1 who complains.

property tax rates vary a lot though! And then there are special assessments and such that are earmarked for particular things. You could have a community with high property values that does not contribute very much to public education.

feel like the notion of education-as-not-v-useful-for-everyday-life trickles down to my kids and its an utterly toxic one

also you're surrounded by kids w/ (generally) more stable families and parents who went to college

― iatee, Thursday, March 15, 2012 11:01 PM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i am going to leave the stable family thing to the side for a second, but yeah, parents who are invested in and understand the whole world of not only secondary but higher education are huge. a lot of the kids at the city school i student taught at last year had parents who were, at best, suspicious of school, which i can only imagine was mindnumbing and overtly racist when they experienced it as opposed to the version their kids were getting which was mindnumbing and semi-covertly racist.

on the other hand there's the depreciation of the value of education generally in an uncertain economy. it made it even harder to convince kids what they were doing in my classes was important iirc.

i mean, it was often hard to convince myself, too

I've interviewed about 60-75 of my students this year, most have stable two-parent homes. i think it has everything to do with the parents unease with the work their kids do beyond a certain level (a lot of them have not completed beyond 8th or 9th grade education themselves).

the kids on my debate team/academic teams def see value in college, tho. its a chance for them to get out of their neighborhoods and have opportunities their parents never did. the economy has always been shitty when so many around you are doing p self-destructive things. but i don't think you'll be seeing them complaining about waiting tables in NYT quiddites pieces tho.

like, I think that an upper-middle class kid from a family w/ smart people could probably drop out of high school at the end of his junior year, never go to college, and still be about as capable when it comes to writing / math / doing basic analytical things as a lot of people I know who did go to college.

any reason we wouldn't just automatically assume the same were true of any other socioeconomic group?

it certainly seems true to me considering teachers. i have known and worked with teachers from places like Princeton, Columbia, Harvard, etc even stanford and also a bunch of people from state schools and community colleges also working in the same environment and I wouldn't say we were exactly the same in our communication styles I saw no correlation is effectiveness and "educational prestige"

any reason we wouldn't just automatically assume the same were true of any other socioeconomic group?

i'm inclined to think (nb this is me trying to dig out why ""we"" might think that, not my personal opinion) that this is coming back to the question of class--"people in positions of authority" are predisposed by our culture to expect "better" from people with a prestigious background and "less" from someone whose environment was less prestigious. that's how that kind of thinking replicates.

i guess one reason might be

1) not as likely to be passing state tests

2) state tests determine or predict competence post-college

i was awesome at all of these things at high school and completely useless at them in a white-collar workplace

in high school i was a total delinquent with a "bad attitude" and disrespect toward authority figures. now i'm attentive, helpful, diligent, and i usually respect my superiors' wishes. the high-school me would never recognize the adult me. i have no idea when this change came about. i'm such a suck-up now!

any reason we wouldn't just automatically assume the same were true of any other socioeconomic group?

well people in other socioeconomic groups are statistically less likely to have been in the 'right' social/political/educational environments. it wouldn't be true for upper middle-class kids across the board either, but I was just using them as a group that's likely to have had 'the best education' an american can get up to that point.

what you're saying is true iatee but i wonder what it signifies when we say the "right" social / political / educational environment.

for example, ime hispanic working-class students have more responsibility at a younger age than their anglo middle-class peers. i don't have any research to back this up but i am pretty sure it is out there because it is something i have heard over and over again in california workshops on educational equity

so i wonder whether this would not also be an example of a "right" social environment - on the face of it, you would think giving them responsibility would give them a better affective make-up to do well in school.

and yet, the opposite seems to be true. hispanic students fail classes at something like 2x the average rate of anglo students, are disciplined more often, drop out more often, etc

so when we talk about the "right" environment, i wonder what we are talking about, and specifically how it affects cognition, skill development, knowledge base, etc

and how does that stuff impact how you do in a white-collar environment

re: communication skills

there are tens of thousands of tech workers in california who get along in complex technical fields w/ a limited grasp of english (think people from asia and europe on H1B visas)

there are also hundreds of thousands of non-tech-workers who speak worse english than my hispanic students and yet manage to run successful businesses

so what gives? why are those "poor communication skills" so much more debilitating in an academic setting? and why do we assume those academic difficulties are going to translate to difficulty at work?

I think a lot of the way we teach K-12 in the USA is aimed at training people to fill out & manage paperwork efficiently, & to a lesser degree to manage their time efficiently. The latter remains important but the former is now less so.

I also think that we're ill-served by the predominance of women in primary & secondary ed in the USA, since learning styles & attention levels & interests vary amongst genders & I think having more men involved in those levels of education would help recalibrate our attitudes to those. I also tend to think we should have a way smaller classes so that there could be more one-on-one teaching, less rote work, but that's the usual pro-ed line, throw money more at the problem. I think it's the right thing to do, though.

granted, those people have specialized knowledge that allows them to communicate with their peers.

for example, i may not be able to talk philosophy with teaching colleagues from israel (this is a specific example in my life, we do some professional collaboration w/ people in israel, egypt, mexico) but i can talk *teaching* philosophy very easily

and similarly i may have trouble talking about traveling abroad w/ my indian drycleaner or the banh mi shop owner or the mexican guys at the taco shop, but we have no trouble talking about my drycleaning or the banh mi or the taco i want (this is a specific thing i have done w/ all these people)

so i wonder whether or not teenagers (hispanic, black, asian, white, green purple i don't care) might not have things in common that would give them enough common ground to communicate and develop thinking skills along more equitable lines

it reminds of that old education debate between john dewey and that other guy

the other guy said that childhood education should be a preparation for adult life

john dewey said "education is a social process; education is growth; education is not a preparation for life but is life itself"

if we treat high school science class as preparation for being a professional engineer, then kids like me who have engineer parents will have a natural leg up (thinking about age eight, when i was trying to siphon water out of a fishtank using mouth and tube, my dad explained to me the idea of "hydraulic lock")

on the other hand, if we treat high school science class as an opportunity to learn science in a way where the kids have a more level playing field - making it not about learning specialized vocabulary and memorizing the names of the parts of the cell, but instead making it about "what do you notice about the world around you" and "how can we think about systems of things and categorizing things and making conclusions that are repeatable and confirmable" then maybe this is something that would help

i don't know, the problem is that the second type of science class i describe is in the "pie in the sky" stage, and if you back off of rote / procedural learning for a second in this current political climate you immediately open yourself up to accusations of not preparing our kids to compete w/ china or something like that

sorry, not responding to euler, just trying to explain my thoughts there

I don't have any data, either, but that jibes w my experience p well re: Latino working class kids. a lot of my students are reponsible for child or elder care or have jobs bc they have to. but I think it correlates some w their lack of success in school bc it's like, I have a type of job now that most of the ppl around me have so it's not a big deal if I cheese off school bc now I'm at least getting paid and contributing to my household and not wasting my time struggling at school

xp

yeah that rings true for me ... you can definitely see a difference between students w/ working-class parents who have made up their minds to go to college and those who haven't

xp re: communication skills

would u say those on h1b visas have a well-developed native language which facilitates their abilities to grasp the complexities of engineering or programming or what have you? thats my greater concern is that my students will leave school without ANY formal academic language proficiency.

but more to your point, i think if we want our education sys to produce citizens who can adapt to many employment environments, i think having the ability to communicate well is p paramount. im not sure comparing native US citizens with conversational fluency in two languages (or perhaps just one) to visa workers who have specialized academic training is nec apt. but i don't know enough abt "the typical h1b visa worker" to make an informed call on that.

that's a good point about the "well-developed native language"

on the other hand i wonder whether the complexities of engineering or programming are much more cognitively demanding than the complexities of landscaping, auto repair, construction, and many other "trades"

it is an old argument whether the professions we think of as "demanding" are really that "demanding", but my favorite take on it is an old one, howard beckers "a school is a lousy place to learn anything in", which contrasts the cognitive demands of high school w/ the cognitive demands of learning to be on a construction site.

www.bedspce.org.uk/mod2/BECKER2.pdf

I think what you're looking for as far as language is the idea of restricted and elaborated codes:

Not only that, but because it draws on a store of shared meanings and background knowledge, a restricted code carries a social message of inclusion, of implicitly acknowledging that the person addressed is "one of us". It takes one form within a family or a friendship group, and another with the use of occupational jargon within a work group. Its essential feature is that it works within, and is tuned to, a restricted community. Everyone uses restricted code communication some of the time. It would be a very peculiar and cold family which did not have its own language.

... in restricted code usage there is an expectation that others will indeed know what you are getting at, from a few key words ... Elaborated code spells everything out: not because it is better, but because it is necessary so that everyone can understand it. It has to elaborate because the circumstances do not allow speakers to condense. ("Condensed" might have been a better label for the restricted code.)

Restricted/condensed code is therefore great for shared, established and static meanings (and values): but if you want to break out to say something new, particularly something which questions the received wisdom, you are going to have to use an elaborated code. Bernstein's research argued that working-class students had access to their restricted code(s) - but middle-class students had access to both restricted and elaborated codes, because the middle classes were more geographically, socially and culturally mobile. I do not know of any recent research which attempts to check whether this is still true.

Because schools and colleges are:

* concerned with the introduction of new knowledge which goes beyond existing shared meanings

* relatively anonymous institutions which may not share many taken-for-granted meanings in their formal structures (although quite a lot in their informal structures within the staff and student groups)

- they need to use elaborated code. The bottom line is that if you can't handle elaborated code, you are not going to succeed in the educational system.

http://www.doceo.co.uk/background/language_codes.htm

YES. its that ability to code-switch that i am wanting my students to have, to be able to swing between foul-mouthed casualness and formal academic language.

^^^ this is a model for the use of literacy for me as well

AH GAH that sounds like the most fucked up classist idea though

"middle class students are capable of making new meanings and questioning received wisdom but working class students are not"

WTF

yeah i don't like the code-switching lingo because it seems like a really limited account of the language students speak with each other/at home.

i'm thinking about the ability to appropriate Boss Class language without buying it as a superior form of communication

which isn't the same as that elaborated code guff now i read it back

yeah i see your point on that being a classist idea.

so alternatively we could just say that different classes have different dialects, without needing to say anything about "expressive power"? i mean it's just as hard for me to slip into the dialect of a different class/ethnic group.

different classes have different discourses - those fluent in the dominant discourse like to believe it's dominant because it has advantages over the others

in my experience, too, whenever teachers brought up "code-switching" it was to hastily push the students' experiences, culture, identity to the side so as not to have to deal with it. i think i've said elsewhere on ilx that a lot of what the teachers did in the classroom was explicitly tell the kids they needed to take on "middle-class culture" in order to be successful and then model it for them, in pretty patronizing ways.

right

a chemistry teacher in his 70s once said to me "our job is tough because chemistry is the realm of the intellectually elite"

o_O

* concerned with the introduction of new knowledge which goes beyond existing shared meanings

* relatively anonymous institutions which may not share many taken-for-granted meanings in their formal structures (although quite a lot in their informal structures within the staff and student groups)

like one thing i've noticed is that hispanic, white and asian students seem equally adept at learning new knowledge and new meanings ...

when it has to do w/ pokemon, halo, warcraft, OFWGKTA, clothing brands, etc etc

i'd argue that a lot of the standards of written English are coded tho, and that the main reason to become fluent in formal written language is for pragmatic advantage

i have a horrible story at secondhand where another student teacher, who was teaching math at an urban charter school, had a cooperating teacher tell her class when some kids were talking through her lesson that "this is why black people aren't successful." she was white btw.

haha yeah "LOUD BLACK STUDENTS" is *the* racist bugaboo of the 90s, we studied the case of "LOUD BLACK STUDENTS" in one of our classes on equity

it basically just studied how LOUDNESS "codes" to teachers, when white kids were loud the teachers used words like "excited" and "squirrely" to describe them and when black kids were loud the teachers used words like "distracted" and "disruptive"

give us an example then

i mean maybe pokemon is less complicated than the periodic table you learn in HS but i doubt it, from what i can tell pokemon is intensely complicated

er sorry that was two posts that got merged, the "give us an example" is for noodle v

Take, say, sports -- that's another crucial example of the indoctrination system, in my view. For one thing because it -- you know, it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance. [audience laughs] That keeps them from worrying about -- [applause] keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives that they might have some idea of doing something about. And in fact it's striking to see the intelligence that's used by ordinary people in [discussions of] sports [as opposed to political and social issues]. I mean, you listen to radio stations where people call in -- they have the most exotic information [more laughter] and understanding about all kind of arcane issues.

you can guess who that is

he is otm though

Shakey is more erudite than usual there

(i just want to say, chomsky is OFFtm about the whole conspiracy aspect of this, as usual)

right, sports is another example

how can people who understand baseball statistics not be able to understand "real" statistics

how come people can do math in their head w/ dollars and cents but not w/ numbers or variables

because they're culturally conditioned to believe that they can't

ppl have no understanding of context

also many ppl can't do math in their head w/ dollars and cents, or maybe it's just the ppl I go out to dinner with

haha yeah and they are probably ivy leaguers too, right?

the one that trips me out is when the annenberg foundation went to harvard and interviewed a bunch of science majors leaving their graduation and just asked them "where does the mass of a plant come from as it grows" and 95% of them didn't know the answer

haha yeah and they are probably ivy leaguers too, right?

haha enough of them are for it to be embarrassing

like, dude you have an MD, why can't you divide by 5

on the other hand, if we treat high school science class as an opportunity to learn science in a way where the kids have a more level playing field - making it not about learning specialized vocabulary and memorizing the names of the parts of the cell, but instead making it about "what do you notice about the world around you" and "how can we think about systems of things and categorizing things and making conclusions that are repeatable and confirmable" then maybe this is something that would help

i don't know, the problem is that the second type of science class i describe is in the "pie in the sky" stage, and if you back off of rote / procedural learning for a second in this current political climate you immediately open yourself up to accusations of not preparing our kids to compete w/ china or something like that

― the late great, Friday, March 16, 2012 8:52 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, yeah. ideally, a good science curriculum does both: teaches about the scientific method in an accessible manner, and also drills important basic information into kids' heads so that they don't have to take high-school level classes in college. and i do think that high expectations and a strongly competitive emphasis on college prep are good things in a general sense. our schools should work to cultivate excellence wherever possible, as well as provide a basic level of educational service.

I'm not sure the code-switching thing has to be taken as classist/racist. business-speak is exactly as 'restricted' as the language inner-city kids use with each other. and people have access to 'elaborated' code and certain types of analytic thinking due to their life experience, not due to some innate ability. isn't the opposite be far more problematic?

wouldn't the opposite be*

re: discussion of "elaborated" vs. "restricted" codes

some social groups (of whatever "class") probably do promote the idea that "code-switching" is important, and that elaborated codes are important. others probably do not. to the extent that certain contexts - such as school, for instance - require a comfortable familiarity with elaborated codes, those who have such familiarity and/or can code-switch easily, may well be more successful in general. i do not see this as in any way a "classist" idea, even if it seems to be true that certain supposedly "lower class" cultural groups tend to stress the importance of restricted codes.

^ some questionable comma placement there

i also don't buy into the idea of a "restricted" vs "elaborated" code

chemists and auto mechanics both use complicated shorthand for what they do

yeah iatee i think the position you are taking is more reasonable than what i posted though. the quote above really made it sound like poor kids only have access to a language which makes it difficult for them to formulate new ideas as such.

Elaborated codes have a longer, more complicated sentence structure that utilizes uncommon words and thoughts. In the elaborated code there is no padding or filler, only complete, well laid out thoughts that require no previous knowledge on the part of the listener, i.e., necessary details will be provided. According to Bernstein (1971), a working class person communicates in restricted code as a result of the conditions in which they were raised and the socialization process. The same is true for the middle class person with the exception that they were exposed to the elaborated code as well.

FFS how is this not offensively classist?

haha yes, middle-class people speak w/o padding, in well laid out thoughts that require no previous knowledge, just like most real estate agents, land developers and investment bankers i know

ok this sounds much better

It is not primarily about restricted-code users' inability to understand elaborated code. They are exposed too much to the media for that (although some tabloid newspapers and radio stations affect a particular restricted-code style to suggest intimacy with their readers). It is however about their unfamiliarity with using it (speaking it rather than hearing it) to explain complex ideas.

Don't over-simplify: it's patronising. Remember that when teaching the misunderstandings may come not from your use of elaborated code, but from your use of your restricted code, adapted to your own speech community (jargon, abbreviations, etc.), rather than a properly and appropriately elaborated code.

this is a HUGE issue in science and math education - we call it "the expert blind spot", or "why your engineer dad got so frustrated trying to help w/ your math homework"

tbf i think that is saying that middle-class people can communicate in their own restricted code but were also exposed to the elaborated code and so can use that too?

but it's still offensively classist

FFS how is this not offensively classist?

it absolutely is, but i don't care about messengers. the basic idea, once removed from that sort of bullshit framing, strikes me as both valid and interesting. communication within groups of close peers does tend to be "restricted" in a sense. otoh, the kind of communication employed by most entry-level textbooks is relatively well "elaborated". it's code-switching that i'm most interested in, as an idea. i would imagine that those taught from a young age to be comfortable with a wide variety of code types and varying degrees of restriction and elaboration will have a leg up in school.

how can people who understand baseball statistics not be able to understand "real" statistics

how come people can do math in their head w/ dollars and cents but not w/ numbers or variables

because they find understanding the context easy, and because they ALREADY understand the context they can work out how to look at it in complicated ways?

whereas with "real" (textbook) stats and maths they have to understand the complications straight off

why your engineer dad got so frustrated trying to help w/ your math homework"

OMG ONLY 25 YEARS TOO LATE

would 'working class people are *more likely* to commuicate in restricted code than, idk, the children of academics' still be classist? like I agree that the way it's written there is pretty awful but if you look at this as a theory w/ soft edges and not "all working class people are always like this. all upper class people are always like this." it doesn't seem particularly offensive to me. like there's nothing magic or innate about access to elaborated code, it's just due to having life and cultural experience.

it's just due to having life and cultural experience.

well, certain types of life and cultural experience, right?

yes

i guess it is an open question, the extent to which a "real textbook" is an elaborated code and the extent to which it is a restricted code

i think "real textbooks" tend to basically be in "restricted code" from the start, because they start w/ "adult thinking" and work their way down toward "student thinking", whereas a "constructivist" teacher (like myself) would want to start w/ "student thinking" and work up to "adult thinking"

that would hopefully redress the gap between people who had been exposed to the restricted code of adult thinking (like me learning about hydraulic lock because i was lucky enough to have a mechanical engineer for a dad)

newer textbooks seem to be doing a better and better job of doing that ... the problem or drawback with that then is that it can be interpreted as doing a disservice to kids who already have an in to that "restricted code" which comes back to the question of whether education is a race with an end-goal (a race to the top?) or whether it's a life-long process w/ no "ahead" or "behind" in the race

the second idea is a tough one to sell though because we're used to comparing ourselves and our kids with other people and their kids

as a math teacher i always have a problem with that, because people are like "i want my kid to be in multivariate calculus by the time he is in 11th grade" and i want to be like "i got an A in that class at berkeley and i only really figured out the geometric proof of the pythagorean theorem at age 29"

people are like "i want my kid to be in multivariate calculus by the time he is in 11th grade" and i want to be like "i got an A in that class at berkeley and i only really figured out the geometric proof of the pythagorean theorem at age 29"

those two statement don't seem at all oppositional to me. they have their desires, and you have your experience.

yeah but their desires are based on a misunderstanding of the nature of mathematics and my experience is based on many years of professional and personal engagement w the field

their desire is for their kids to "get into good schools and have the choice of pursuing science & tech careers"

those two things are contradictory

baseball stats are pretty much just ratios, right? things like independence and covariance and sampling error and fat-tailed distributions and whatever don't figure in like they do once you dive into the "real" stuff. On the other hand, I do think we could make real stats more widely taught and accessible, and it would be very useful to people in all walks of life.

even the popular scientific press likes these "guys! power laws!" stories when often it turns out there aren't power laws involved at all, but other, less sexy distributions.

yeah but their desires are based on a misunderstanding of the nature of mathematics and my experience is based on many years of professional and personal engagement w the field

...their desire is for their kids to "get into good schools and have the choice of pursuing science & tech careers"

those two things are contradictory

― the late great, Friday, March 16, 2012 11:59 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

first line seems a bit presumptive, and i strongly disagree w the second. basically everyone i know that has a career in the sciences went to a "good school" (i.e., a high competitive one). and i know lots of people doing that kind of work.

My brother's finishing up his PhD in computer engineering and he got his undergrad at BYU-ID. The only people who are competing to get into there are Mormons who couldn't get into regular BYU.

Oh, one other thing I would say about law schools, is that for a large law firm (and maybe for a certain kind of smaller one too) it's partly a marketing thing to hire from "top" law schools, you know, so you can say to Citigroup "The associates we have working on your deal graduated from Harvard, Stanford, Columbia" etc. That said, I don't completely discount using law school as a proxy for ability. It's hardly a perfect proxy, but when you have to do a lot of hiring at once you go with the easiest measure that gives you the best odds of getting someone good. Someone from Brooklyn Law School might be smarter and harder working than someone from Harvard, but the odds are better that the opposite is true and how the hell are you going to choose otherwise? Interviews are notoriously bad determinants, and anything else would be too time-consuming. So you hire 20 kids from Harvard and one from Brooklyn rather than the other way around or 50/50. Yes, a few of the Harvard kids will turn out to be entitled little shits who don't want to do any work, and the BLS kid who just missed the cut might have been the dark horse who would have headed up a practice group one day, but they're still using the best and most cost-effective methods they have of choosing.

basically everyone i know that has a career in the sciences went to a "good school" (i.e., a high competitive one)

many people i know who work in the sciences went to third or fourth tier schools (or even community colleges) for undergrad and elite schools for graduate school

in fact one guy i know who is now a prof at davis was a HS dropout who did not start at a community college until 23 or 24, when he got tired of getting high all day

things like independence and covariance and sampling error and fat-tailed distributions and whatever don't figure in like they do once you dive into the "real" stuff

in high school it's ratios, standard deviation and possibly chi-squared

which should go great w/ baseball, video games, etc

also contenderizer i don't think it's presumptuous at all

i don't presume to know what my parents want, i know what they want

i don't presume to understand the difference between "school mathematics" (based on memorizing and repeating procedures) and "real mathematics" (based on intuition, persistence, looking for patterns, approaching new questions, approximating, combining approaches, etc), i know the difference

i mean it may not be widely true but it is true where i work, and given that it's a large part of the national dialogue about what constitutes good math education (specific pieces of info vs specific skills vs specific practices and habits) i think it's probably true across many schools

http://www.math.utah.edu/~pa/newton.gif

newton wrote that

i can tell you that what parents want re: math is high SAT scores and good state test results

the fastest way to good results is to teach to a test (ask anyone who teaches or has taught an SAT prep course), memorizing shortcuts and learning tricks

the problem is when you get to college, you realize suddenly that you need to be able to "reason judiciously", something our students get very little preparation for, even the "elite" students

i have always thought this is why there are declining numbers of american students at every level of science and math education - fewer students finish science degrees than start them, even fewer get into graduate degrees, even fewer get into and finish post-doctoral studies, etc etc

also the other side is that in countries that routinely kick our ass on math and science tests, the students are actually asked to learn fewer things than in american schools and they learn them more slowly ... but somehow they kick our ass when those students come to american school

they are also generally going to cost more to train at the undergrad level, so universities have little reason to push people into the fields

cost more? why?

i'm not following what you're saying iatee

I teach in the humanities at a public uni & a few years back had a Vietnamese immigrant who struggled hard with written & oral English, didn't understand well the Western debates on monotheism, etc. She ended up kicking every other student's ass. The difference was partly that she actually came to office hours, unlike the others. But I don't really know what else it was: intrinsic smarts? work habits? I dunno, but it was eye opening.

science students require expenive labs, interaction w/ higher-paid faculty, humanities students require chalkboards and grad student teacher who you're paying 15k a year

xp

not math faculty

yeah I mean it's not true across the board but it's a partial explanation why there's not internal pressure to make science ed more accessible at any given university. it costs money and doesn't bring immediate benefits, unless your university is starting out w/ a surplus of science resources.

well they do generally charge lab fees for the labs

trying to find a breakdown, I remember reading it somewhere
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/sciencecareers/2012/01/university-of-f.html

http://www.today.ucla.edu/portal/ut/bottom-line-shows-humanities-really-155771.aspx

science research otoh can bring in defense $$$$$ (and also other industry $$$$) while good luck getting grants for your novel interpretation of milton.

yes, on the research level the opposite is true

My late father was a mechanical engineer by training, but it's amazing how the field hasn't changed. Sure, they use computers a lot more. My dad worked part-time up to the last month of his life, he adapted to the CAD programs just fine!

Engineers must maintain their math schools their entire life! My dad used to sit down at night with a math book! I envied him, people think math is hopelessly dry, it's interesting if you view it as an expression of spatial relationships! If you're into art or design or photography you might want to maintain some math skills.

My dad put a lot of pressure on me to learn math. It keeps your brain sharp and doesn't have any ideological bullshit in it. I like doing the odd math problem.

We had a math test in design school and I got a C! I got a high score on my math SAT but I hadn't practiced in a while.

Math and science don't discriminate based on background, but sometimes a student's social climate discourages them from learning math. i.e., if you struggle with math you are stupid! Conceptually, it is easier than philosophy or literature...doing the problems is difficult.

This seems quite salient here:

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/23-8

here's an interesting one

http://nyti.ms/MN6Q8s

i am pretty sure nobody really answers the final question in the comments but i didn't read all of them

post secondary education facilitated entry ime ; )