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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

"Because of the reliance on the corporation, we set out to design an educational system in its mirror image. The linear journey from first to twelfth grade, then bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees systematized learning in a way that turned people into interchangeable parts and valued mobility."

This is false. This progression predated the corporation.

The present educational system has been influenced by the desire to produce employees, but that's not where its structure originated. The structure is medieval.

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well, I suppose its not incorrect to say the roots are medieval, but it is most accurate to lay the foundation of our educational system with the prussian school.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

The progression existed, but it was for the elite. Most people didn't spend so many years in school when they were going to work on a farm or join a trade where they would be apprentice. The idea that everyone should go through 12 years of compulsory age-based schooling and then ideally through college and into an office is fairly recent.

Different bits of it were at different times. In Europe middle class kids started going to schools in the late medieval period. Whereas college was for the rich roughly till WWII.

In fact, it's recent enough that my great grandfather (who was born in 1908) never went to high school. His formal education ended in the 8th grade, and that was plenty good enough for him.

Yeah, I'm sick of seeing that idea being passed about without sources. I think most of the people talking about it haven't even heard of John Taylor Gatto, which is where it came from.

But, do you have sources?

I read a lot about the history of education for "The Age of the Essay." There are links to some in the notes.

http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory-Sch...

For anyone that hasn't read JTG, this is his most well known work and I highly recommend it (and his others). Surprised that no one had mentioned it yet as it's highly relevant to the issue at hand.

A fundamental change due to industry: before modern education, it was the teacher's fault if the student didn't learn. You don't tell the local nobleman that his son and heir did a C- job. Today, we see education as an opportunity for students to demonstrate how hard they've worked, usually as part of the job-qualification process. Actual learning is still important, but secondary. (Will this be on the test?)

Democratic credentialism is probably better than elitist humanism, but in a niche-and-network economy education has to be applicable and customizable. If it won't fit in a few blog posts, today's internet has a hard time teaching it.

-nb-- Education's medieval structure died in the late 1800s when the ancient religious universities (Oxfords, Harvards) swapped it for the PhD model. Some of them were still pushing the geocentric universe at the time.

The PhD developed to meet the research staffing needs of the German chemical industry.

>Some of them were still pushing the geocentric universe at the time.

OT: Have you heard of Relativity? What's wrong with choosing an arbitrary reference point to be local.

"Some of them had refused to accept a heliocentric solar system before until that time."

Are you saying that's unclear? I still find it hard to believe, so I can't tell.

What's wrong with choosing an arbitrary reference point to be local.

Choosing a non-inertial reference frame would be the problem.

Relative velocities (including temporal velocity...) are essentially arbitrary, but acceleration is not; and the accelerating forces experienced by objects in the solar system are overwhelmingly dominated by the sun.

Yes a non-IFoR is a problem but then then pretty much every point we'd want to choose is accelerating relative to us. I'd dispute that for the majority of people the sun's gravity is the dominating force - seems Earth's gravity is pretty dominant to me.

But I think I must have had my trolling hat on for this one, sorry.

Perhaps the most accurate way to put it is that the same broad systemic forces that produced the corporation also produced the current educational system.

And the same broad systemic forces that is forcing us away from the corporate model, is also forcing, gradually, our educational system to change.

And as always, those of us living at the margins, feel the impending changes most keenly. I have a lot of friends who still feel quite comfortable within the current educational system.

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