[Ebrey]

[IIOIOOIOO]

[Adilegian]

[SplashBeats]

as for the college v self education argument, some people just learn better verbally.

i mostly go to every single lecture i can, and barely pay attention to text, as i find that asking questions and entering into a dialogue with someone is a much better means of learning things for me.

that, and my university helped me figure out what i really wanted to do with my life, and i'm pursuing it with burning vigor.

[Broco]

Joe, since your approach is the exact opposite of mine (I skipped lectures and relied entirely on the textbook), I'd be interested in hearing your results in this reading speed test, to test my theory about reading speed correlating with preference for reading or listening.

[CubaLibre]

To both gambrinus and Broco, I'll respond that in actuality I agree more with Adilegian than the radical way I put my views. I'm just cynical and bitter, is all.

As far as self-education is concerned, obviously the most important educational tool is dialectic. This has been known for 2500 years and the great crime of public education (primary, secondary, and university) is that it basically compeltely eschews it for top-down authoritative indoctrination, which has never really taught much of anything of value to anyone ever. (Maybe - maybe - military discipline.)

So, what you really want is a mentor - a few mentors, actually. Apprenticeships in some kind of real-life work (not necessarily a craft trade, although that's wonderful too) is invaluable. Just someone to talk to about the books that you read and art you consume. It's no coincidence that intelligent kids, with no other outlets for their curiosity, end up congregating on forums like these with like-minded individuals and debating the relative merits of the ideas they experience. Mentors are difficult to find these days outside of school environments because schools have so completely put a strangehold on the public's conception of what education ought to be. There's been a slowly growing backlash, however.

So um... plug
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[Broco]

Uhh, the settled parts of the sciences are fairly well-suited for top-down transfer of information. It would be a waste of time to encourage students to challenge claims that are firmly proven. Experiments are commonly presented to stimulate interest and to teach the experimental method, but in general there is no time to prove even half of what is claimed. And this is not a betrayal of the principles of science, either; science would go nowhere without trust for the results accumulated by the community.

Though you are still half-right in that students must still be personally engaged instead of passive receivers -- the way that is done in the sciences is by presenting specific problems to which they can apply the (ex cathedra) general principles.

[SplashBeats]

[Broco]

Okay, that's far over average. So much for my hypothesis then.

[internisus]

[CubaLibre]

[Broco]

Paradigm shifts are a little bit overrated. Kuhn himself identified "normal science", the incremental addition of details to an existing model, as the main task of scientists and something which is anyway necessary for the foundation for the shifts to be in place. It is not the role of our educational system to develop radical thinkers, since a small number of them will emerge regardless (and a small number is what is sufficient).


Also. There is an obvious resource allocation problem to your proposed teaching method. Where do you propose finding a dialectic teacher for every single student? I think it would be feasible to do that for only a small number of the most promising and dedicated students. Also, the teachers with such a method must be highly erudite and intelligent for it to be better than a standardized curriculum, so the average high-school teacher wouldn't do -- it should be reserved to university professors only. Oh wait, I just described grad school.

[CubaLibre]

They already have them: parents, elders, professionals and craftsmen of the community. Oh wait, I just described the educational system of the pre-Civil War era.

That these people would take it upon themselves to teach children is impossible to imagine in "today's world" only because today's world is predicated upon an educational system that has a vested interest in disintegrating these very relationships - for the very reason that they create idiosyncratic, critically thinking people.

The "average high school teacher" is literally an expert in nothing (except schooling). It is therefore literally impossible for them to teach anything (except the lessons of school: immaturity, irresponsibility, cravenness, sloth, herd mentality). At least the neighborhood plumber is an expert in something. That means he can teach it - or at least that you can learn it from him (and those may be two different things).
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[Broco]

You have it exactly upside down, critical thinking is needed more than ever in modern professions -- there is an increasingly large class of less prestigious professionals ("knowledge workers") such as programmers and non-M.D. medical specialists that require a lot of reasoning in their daily tasks. Elementary and high school strongly foster critical thinking on average by teaching literacy, which was at a far lower level on average prior to public education. You are frustrated with it because the system is inflexible and not willing to accelerate for the sake of the very best students -- to a large extent a result of political pressures, "no child left behind" etc -- so you had the experience of extreme understimulation. I had the same experience. But you overextrapolate to everyone else.

You also seem to idealize the intellectual capacity of people of the past, possibly due to our bias towards discussing elite intellectuals from earlier eras (since they are the ones who left behind the classic texts we still read) instead of the huge mass of the uneducated. A focus on the silent majority shows low levels of literacy and reasoning ability (c.f. the Flynn effect).

As for the collapse of community, intimate relationships are disintegrated because it is more economically efficient to do so. It is necessary to foster the free movement of labor (i.e. ripping communities apart) as part of the process of specialization to increasingly narrow subfields and to get people with particular training to where they are economically needed. And there's a reason why "nepotism" is a dirty word today; intimate relationships get in the way of business. I am saddened by this personally, but from my point of view what is regrettable is the loss of valuable personal ties, not knowledge and intellectual ability which is steadily increasing across the board.

If you want a throwback to an earlier social model, that implies a throwback to an earlier economic structure as well, and the corresponding lower per capita GDP (not that this is an actual risk since there is no way to turn back the clock). There's a very real tradeoff here and the way American modernity does things has sounder reasons than you presume. And it's a change that happened largely from the bottom-up, with individuals in large numbers choosing to value prosperity over community.

[CubaLibre]

I disagree that compulsory schooling serves "average" people because that supposes that there is a such a thing as an "average" person. Most people are ordinary, but no one is average - that implies a metric against which they can be measured, a metric that is fundamentally impossible to ascertain against such broad concepts as "intelligence" or "education" across 300 million Americans in vastly different socioeconomic circumstances. Not everyone can be Einstein, but everyone has their own special genius which can only be unlocked by hard work on the part of the people who care about them the most, chiefly themselves. Compulsory schooling denies that self-education is even possible.

People these days might know more facts than our historical forbears, but the value of this "knowledge" is highly debatable. Historical literacy is norotiously hard to measure, but recall that people like Tocqueville regarded the sophistication of the common American as nothing less than a miracle. An aristrocracyless backwater where all the farmers argue like lawyers! The entire promise of the American revolution was that intelligence was not limited to an elite class of thinkers who can manage us better than we can manage ourselves, and yet that is exactly the kind of educational economy that the industrial revolution and compulsory schooling has produced.

You're absolutely right that our economic system is predicated on a rootless, immature workforce who is willing to be told exactly what to do and exactly how to do it, and then be told how they're doing it wrong, with no input of their own. And it's true that it has produced riches which are likely beyond the Founding Fathers' imagining - a perfectly predictable result, considering the Prussian model for our educational system. Gigantic corporate employment pyramids are the most efficient economic model (given a few factors that may be changing, which I point out below).

The promise of the American state was that NO principle, economic or political, will ever infringe the freedom of the people. In that sense, compulsory schooling and the industrial-government bureaucratic complex are a fundamental betrayal of the American revolution.

Whether or not this was inevitable, given the inherent weaknesses in this ideal which were exploited by the founders of the current system and the advance of technology, is beside the point now. I have two responses to your final observation.

First is that "turning back the clock" may not be so impossible, after a manner of speaking. The unsustainability of the global corporate economy is slowly creeping up on us. Peak oil and the end of cheap individual transportation might force us to fundamentally restructure our country to more strongly resemble a pre-Civil War organization. Of course, this new structure won't resemble it completely and will probably benefit a lot from the industrial developments made at the sacrifice of the common man's freedom. If we're lucky, it might approach a "best of both worlds" scenario. (This is like the "no industry > dirty industry > clean industry" progression in the environmental realm, but more broadly applied to economics in general.)

Second is that, the tradeoffs you describe are very real, and I can easily see how people might have chosen prosperity over autonomy (especially now that they are trained to as children). That doesn't mean it's right. I'd personally give it up in an instant. I don't expect everyone to be as willing as I am to do so, but I do expect that everyone look that choice directly in the face and make it honestly. These days, no one has a choice.
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[sync-swim]

college thread


I see the libertoid Running-University-Education-Under-A-Profit-Oriented-Business-Model-Fosters-Competitiveness-And-By-Default-Quality and social democrat Universities-Run-As-Public-Utilities-Fosters-Standardization-And-By-Default-Stability sentiments represented here in one way or another. I'm surprised, where's the hyper autodidact It's-A-Racket-Teach-Yourself viewpoint?

Just recently I've begun hearing the Over-Generalized-Liberal-Arts-Educations-Are-Destroying-Minds-And-Society-Needs-To-Return-To-Atelier-Style-Specialized-Trade/Skilled Craft-Apprenticeships thing too.

[Broco]

[CubaLibre]

[Broco]

Funny job choice, since judges are tightly bound by statutes, precedent, and directives from superior courts, and have precious little autonomy to do what they think is right. I find it hard to understand how you think you'd thrive in that environment.

Lately in the news there was an activist district judge who was always making off-the-wall decisions which were reversed by superior courts, and had sections in his opinions entitled "Recommendations to the Executive Branch" and "Recommendations to Congress". He quit being a judge after only a couple of years and went to academia.

It seems to me that if, like him, you would like to be highly autonomous in your work and influence policy, becoming a law professor would be much more comfortable for you. Sure you would probably be ignored and not actually influence policy, but you'd at least be putting your preferred arguments out there.

[CubaLibre]

Part and parcel of my whole worldview is "act locally." If I can help actual, specific people that come before my bench, so much the better. If I really wanted to influence federal policy I would just become a politician. I have other like-minded people working that end.

Also, judges - even at the district level - have far more discretion than laypeople commonly believe. This isn't a constructionist vs. activist argument or whatever, this is deeply ingrained in even conservative judicial culture. A truly brilliant judge has the room to alter jurisprudence for years to come. Think Holmes or Cardozo or the Warren court, or even Posner at the circuit level.
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[Broco]

[CubaLibre]

You assume here that I am an idealistic student and have never been a corporate drone.
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[Adilegian]

Just a quick note here while I'm catching up on the thread. CubaLibre, you might enjoy some of Wendell Berry's essays, particularly Sex, Economy, Community, and Freedom.
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[GalaxyHead]

[Capt. Caveman]

Hey internisus, what's the name of the typesetter you work for? I live in NJ and I'm looking for a similar gig. I very nearly submitted an application to proofread for http://www.writersrelief.com/index.asp but decided not to because they look sort of...not too legit. Also, what do you think are the odds of me being hired for a company like the one you're working for if I'm in the middle of college and haven't earned a degree in anything yet?

[Kappuru]

[GalaxyHead]

Apparently I read 1254 words per minute with a 84% reading comprehension. Which doesn't surprise me, as I skim too much. I usually slow down when I have to absorb crucial information, but I have mastered the art of skimming articles and finding important information for my classes. Professors all want the same sort of information anyway.
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“We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,” - Harry Schoell, Cyclone Power Technologies Inc, in response to erroneous reports about a robot under development.

[Adilegian]

My WPM: 354
Comprehension rate: 64%

The test was interesting, and I wonder how the fact that the text self-consciously treated speed-reading affects performance.

It's not universally reliable, I think, because it gauges speed reading in terms of a particular kind of knowledge that doesn't exactly flatter my talents. Had it been about abstractions, and had it featured an argument of some sort, then I expect my performance would have improved.

In fact, I got the comprehension questions that focused upon numbers wrong, whereas I got the later questions (which focused upon the article's argument for which speed-reading program works best) right. So! I expect I do much better with abstractions -- that is, writing that less emphasizes discrete quantification and statistics.
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[CubaLibre]

Personally I found that I got the number questions correct because the numbers stick out to you in a text. I recall their physical shape rather than the concepts they represent; that is to say, I didn't remember "50%" as "half" but rather as the way the numbers 5 and 0 appear on the printed page.

I have a very visual memory in that sense... when a professor asks me to identify such and such an argument in a case, for instance, I'll remember that it was in this column on this side of the page in this paragraph, based on shape.
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[internisus]

[Capt. Caveman]

sounds pretty intense!

[internisus]

Yeah, it is. I'm kind of depressed about it because the slow pace and missing this deadline are canceling out my earlier feeling that I was doing alright and making decent money for the month. But it really is interesting--I think I'll actually buy this book at some point. It goes into detail about the history and relationship between all these different theories of how people learn to read, an incredibly complex process that involves parsing, decoding, meaning-making, etc. The theory stuff alone is just so interesting.

As an aside, maybe some here will be interested: in the past half-year, I've worked on at least four education books with contributed chapters by experts in education, psychology, economics, psychometrics, statistics, etc. Over and over, I've read different cases from different corners that all come down to: No Child Left Behind is a horrible, horrible thing because it wants to pretend that education is simple when it's really incredibly complex. In the area of reading comprehension, just for one, NCLB has brought us back to before the 1970s.