No, I don't have all the possibilities. I can own movies in physical form, but I can't own the movies I want to own. And it can be even worse. Here I can watch Disney/Pixar movies wonderfully dubbed into local language in cinemas with my grandchildren, but even Disney+ subscription doesn't have these audio tracks.
They were. I was there in edu conferences, training sessions and other events years ago and could observe all this massive FUD which appeared – "smartphones are the future", "all communication will be in social media in the future", "books will not matter", "privacy will not matter", "if we ban smartphones, we will handicap our children" etc. People didn't know better and there was genuine fear in education. Or actually, it's still very much there.
This is a huge factor, and heavily influenced by the purveyors of the technologies involved. A factor I hadn't realized that is implicated in this transition is the shift from the Teacher-led classroom to the device-led classroom. The teacher is no longer seen as the expert, the interpreter, the model figure of the subject when the laptop or tablet is the delivery tool. Students learn that the teacher is a facilitator, likely not up to date on the latest changes to the app interface, and not an authority on the subject.
Device-delivery instead of teacher-delivery puts the student first, even when the student knows nothing, and has zero impulse control.
So instead of modelling a productive and enriching data accessing environment, we're actually just tearing down the walls of the school and asking teachers to babysit the mayhem.
Most of public schools over the world struggle with much more basic problems than methods or programs. The most important thing IMHO is a stable environment. You can use the very best methods and programs, but if teachers change frequently, like it become more and more a norm in public schools, all these don't matter much really.
Somehow most of my circle of friends are public school teachers. Sure, there are teachers who forgot their "why" and only still do it for the (not very impressive) paycheck and eventual pension. But most teachers really, REALLY care about seeing kids succeed. The problems they talk about frequently are:
1. Lack of support from parents. Many parents treat school as free daycare and are not invested at all in their kids. They don't care of their kid gets good grades, they don't care if they get bad grades. They don't come to parent-teacher conferences. When their kid gets in trouble, they either insist that their kid didn't do anything wrong. Or literally tell the school, "hey, after that morning bell rings, he's your problem, don't hassle me about it."
2. Lack of funding. Need I say more.
3. Lack of authority. If a kid is being constantly disruptive, the teachers are told they just have to deal with it. They can't eject a kid from the classroom for ANY reason except when physical harm is imminent. My son's class had several students who were pretty much allowed to be on their chromebooks all day every day because the alternative was constant verbal abuse toward the their classmates and teacher. My son thought this was deeply unfair. He wasn't wrong.
4. Many school systems have a kind of twisted version of "no child left behind." All the kids who have special educational, emotional, or behavioral needs get plopped into regular classrooms with regular teachers. This is bad for basically everyone. The kids with special needs aren't getting the specialized teaching they require. If they are disruptive (and they often are when they aren't getting what they need), the whole class falls behind in learning because the teacher has to spend 1/2 their time dealing with 1/30th of the class.
Or even more basic, if the parents don't have the time or temperament to properly participate in parenting, then the teachers or the school aren't really going to matter either.
i believe some countries have a different experience. in a report about participating on online classes from home during covid in germany it was observed that kids with worse conditions at home were disadvantaged the most, which leads to the reverse conclusion that for these kids going to school did matter.
I think that anecdote leads to the same conclusion, no? Children with worse parents have worse outcomes?
All the kids with engaged parents who participated in online classes from home probably did just fine.
I'm not saying going to school doesn't matter, I'm saying that what kind of school you go to is going to matter a lot less if your parents can't do a good job. Or put another way, what kind of parents you have is the dominant influence in your educational outcome.
This matters because when thinking about what kind of policies are needed to influence educational outcomes, they may not need to directly have to do with school.
not quite. your claim was that with a bad situation at home, school does not make a difference. while i understand the opposite. the worse the situation at home, the more of a difference school makes for them.
i see it like this:
good home + good school = good outcome
good home + no school = good outcome
bad home + good school = ok outcome
bad home + no school = bad outcome
so for a good home school does not matter. for a bad home it does. (i am ignoring bad schools, they probably make things worse in either case)
It's much more complicated than that. For example in my experience a school per se doesn't matter much for many kids from problematic homes. What matters is that they get a time away from home. COVID lockdowns killed exactly that – they didn't have to be away from home and it was very bad for their mental health.
Then there is a growing number of parents who are actively working against the school, undermine the child's trust against school and teachers etc. Most of the time a school can't do anything with these and outcome is always bad.
Then there is a growing number of children who don't do well in school no matter what. They can have a good home and good school, but because of some neurodiversity for example do very bad anyway.
I also don't agree that good home alone is enough for good outcome. It really depends from many things.
In short – education, outcome from school and home etc are hyperindividual and there is no hard rules.
It really just depends. There might short/small runs which are easily automated, and there might be a large scale production which are not and need hand assembly. The very same product might see both during production – fully automated robots and hand assembly etc.
Unfortunately it's not that simple any more. There are already very fundamental issues on which we are already very polarized, online or not. One of these is safety for example – far too many people are ready to give up any freedoms in the name of security. Ideas for EU chatcontrol, camera networks etc don't come from some bureaucrats, there is a very broad social demand for this.
Voters in democracies are usually not people who deeply understand issues. We outsource that to politicians, but politicians have a second agenda, serving the people who paid their campaign.
The very concept of manufactured consent seems very much projection on Chomsky's part. Very much, 'they don't agree with me but I know what their real interests are so I can speak for them better than they can for themselves' crap to turn the masses into sock puppets to win arguments.
> The very concept of manufactured consent seems very much projection on Chomsky's part
Per Chomsky, the co-authored work is more Herman's than his, and anyhow the phrase and concept is from Walter Lipmann, 66 years before Herman and Chomsky's work with the title inspired by it (and 51 years before their first book on the topic.)
But, no, neither the idea that deliberate propaganda is a major source of political beliefs or the particular manner and mechanisms by which the US media is involved in delivering that propaganda is "projection".
> Very much, 'they don't agree with me but I know what their real interests are so I can speak for them better than they can for themselves' crap
Manufacturing Consent doesn't pretend to be an exploration of what the “real interests” of the public are; it can't be misleading "projection" at doing that, because it doesn't do it at all.
It's possible you've missed the entire 20th Century and 21st Century thus far, so an exhaustive list of examples would be impractical, but perhaps take a moment to ponder just a couple:
- "yellow cake uranium"
- "a land without people for a people without a land"
The demand comes from people who value their children’s perceived safety over the ability of some internet perv to get at porn or for terrorists to plan atrocities.
And no, they don’t want to hear about the importance of freedom to communicate being more important boy. I’m just gonna move this road we go do you wanna go out that way okay, because they believe that their communication will never cross these lines, so it’s irrelevant.
“But what if the government turns bad and uses this against you” carries far less weight, in a large part due to its theoretical nature, than “we need to stop this bad thing now”.
Heck, a lot of the governments likely aren’t thinking beyond “we need to stop this bad thing now so people vote for us” either. The immediate leap from governments wanting any form of oversight to “this is all part of the wider plan to subjugate humanity” that often comes up on this site is amusing but ultimately unhelpful and comes across as conspiratorial. Not because it’s wrong exactly, but because it posits a plan where it’s not very clear there is one. It’s just well intentioned people making well intentioned but poor choices as we stumble our way into mediocrity.
Are you a parent? Have you ever seen a kid growing up? 90%+ of kids wouldn't care at all about any work or learning without social pressure from parents, teachers and peers. That's the whole point of schools – to create a social pressure to put all this knowledge into heads of kids in hope that some of this would be useful for them. And to do it through all these awfully messy years we call childhood and adolescence.
I don't know where you grow up but in most of the developed world kids mock kids for putting effort into study; peers provide social pressure against learning, not towards it.
That depends on peer quality. And it's why so much of education outcomes depends on peer quality.
It's also why there's a considerable opposition to tracking.
If you evaluate academic ability, inevitably, the students who want to learn things are going to be closer to the top, and the ones who don't want to learn things are going to be closer to the bottom.
Now, group students up by ability aggressively: the "top end classes" are going to devour the school program - while the "bottom end classes" would devolve into a pandemonium.
Naturally, the parents of the bottom end students would want there to be zero tracking, so that the average "peer quality" pulls their children up, and the parents of the top end students want there to be the most aggressive tracking possible, so that the average "peer quality" doesn't drag their children down.
A big part of what the rich parents pay for when they send their kids into those expensive private schools is access to better "peer quality". "If a kid's parents are rich" isn't a perfect proxy for "if the kid wants to be learning things", but it outperforms the average. And if a private school is actually willing to expel the most disruptive students, then it's going to tip the scales even further.
Yeah, but that's not the point I was trying to make. My main point was that traditional thinking is that schools need to fight AI or students won't learn. But I think we'd be better off working with AI instead, customizing education according to each student's interests and needs, providing immediate feedback, etc. And I expect school buildings themselves will still be used, if that wasn't clear. I'm not pitching a "school from home" campaign, not after 2020 forced one on us.
Of course teachers still have a role in maintaining discipline, motivation, and things that computers can't do, as well as validating that the AI systems are behaving correctly for the things they can.
The biggest thing I don't like about that approach is it's yet another bump in screen time, which, eh, if I think hard enough on that aspect, it maybe makes me hate the whole idea, so.
It doesn't work for many reasons. For example it's completely normal for a young people to do things only because they are forced to. It doesn't matter how you customize it, how immediate your feedback is etc. I know that I'd used AI to do a lot of school work without learning anything because why not? Fortunately I hadn't any chance for that in seventies. And who/what determines each student's interests and needs? And is it even OK to align for these? I can very confidently say that if my school would align to my specific interests and needs back then, I'd be dead by now. I wouldn't have knowledge and experience to survive changing times.
My professor at uni said that people who have learned to search for information before the internet came along are the best at searching for information on the internet. My personal experience agrees and I'm very glad I'm one of such people.
I've seen gambling destroying more lives than alcohol in my lifetime. And I live in the area which is rather on top of the world by alcohol consumption per capita.
When I was in school (in seventies), all boys at least tried to learn how to use and take care of all sharp tools and machines with one up to wood and metal lathe. When I was in school now as a teacher, scissors were the only somewhat sharp things kids were allowed to use. Risk tolerance is so low in our society nowadays, sense of responsibility of children is nonexistent etc.
A semester of machine shop taught me an immense amount, and based on my experience with a lot of techies, 95% more about how the world (and tools) work than 95% of the population.
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