education is primarily a barrier to entry: true or false

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