It seems to be a common thing for people who didn't get a decent education in maths and science to decry the teaching of maths and science.
I think children should get a proper education formally and practically on how to balance and how to meet the political (in the sense that these are needs that are solved at the societal / collective level) needs of a group of people. It doesn't have to be a large group; along the lines of the entire school or talking about the needs of a district or city would do. I think that such education would go a long way to help people understand what is important in governance, and be more resistant to political ideology that is harmful to these things.
> Any rigid structure of governance that is focused on anything else will eventually fail.
I don't think we are contradicting each other. The need to feel free and have flexibility in certain aspects of governance is a political need that needs to be balanced. An education in governance should address this aspect so that citizens are more tuned-in to abuses of office and institutions that infringe on freedoms that most citizens have not chosen to yield to the government.
Even though we were not contradicting each other, I do not completely agree with this.
> In a government, the primary need is that the people feel free, feel like they're not being ordered around by a dictator, that they can have fun or do what they want or set their own rules.
I think you recognize that this freedom here is quite qualified. The freedom to do what we want or set our own rules certainly need to be qualified at least around to the extent that they do not cause negative consequences to other people. Where the exact boundaries are are always shifting depending on the specific circumstances and population, and this is why various needs need to be balanced by government; i.e. the extent of this freedom is being balanced by other societal needs.
Hence I would say that prima facie, a primary objective is a balance of freedom and well-being of the citizenry, with neither need superior over the other.
On the other hand,
> [the freedom to] set their own rules
may sometimes be done most efficiently and reliably through governmental institutions, using government institutions to conduct certain self-funded voluntary programs.
There are plenty of governments who have never felt that to be a primary, secondary, or even tertiary need. 'Plenty' here refers to an overwhelming majority of governments, through an overwhelming majority of recorded history.
> Any rigid structure of governance that is focused on anything else will eventually fail.
Are you basing this on the brief, half-century window of human history where liberal democracies governed something between a quarter, and a third of the world's population?
When I look at human history, it seems to be that despotism is the norm, and liberal democracy is a quirky, novel fad, that may fizzle out, just like acid-washed jeans, and pet rocks did.
Teaching children how to organize to solve their own problems would be antithetical to the incentives of any normal school’s administration. Children who can self-organize to oppose them are a threat. If people wanted children to learn how to organize, be capable and be self-efficacious democratic schools like Summerhill or Sudbury would be vastly more popular. They don’t. They want childcare that teaches children to sit down, shut up and do as they’re told.
They certainly don’t teach that. Kids who can’t sit down and shut up are given free reign to disrupt everyone else.
A power not exercised is still relevant insofar as it can be.
I would make a simple criteria: if you are a net taxpayer, you get to vote. If you are a net loss to the government, you don't get to vote.
If people have control over their circumstances, then they will be able to arrange their life in such a way that they can enable their voting power and vote responsibly.
This could be accomplished by taking a voluntary test based on free reading materials, or by earning a grade on free classes made available online and in community colleges and perhaps high schools.
Your grade then decides how much your vote counts. Your vote impact score might scale your vote linearly (0 to 1), or it could decide how much to augment a baseline of, let's say, 1.0, where the max augment is to add another 1.0 for a max of 2.0.
I'm sure there are lots of ways this might be done. The main point is to encourage voters to be better informed and more fair. Another goal would be to counteract mass media manipulators who spew disinformation and manipulate the underinformed.
Until we can somehow accomplish (especially) the latter, America will sink ever deeper into a political system governed by anger and stupidity.
Political theory is useless at school. At best children would be totally lost in the plethora of ideologies without proper understanding of why people invented them. At worst they would be indoctrinated with the ideology, chosen by the government (usually the case).
What we really need to teach children is decision making and responsibility taking. School is to obsessed with learning the facts omitting scepticism and problem solving whatsoever. Kids are being taught recipes, not how to act when you don't know the right one.
Too many people don't know they have a vote.
My observations of preschoolers is that they are learning the rules of the universe. That means very hands on discovery of the practical side of how things work coupled with a vivid imagination and creativity. That sounds like STEAM to me.
When schools teach social and political subjects to young children they tend to simplify the subject to the point of not being true. Kids are not ready for nuance.
Well, leadership, but less leading via thought leadership and more via listening, arbitrating, and brokering compromises between conflicting wants and needs.
Guess who teaches our kids?
My sarcasm detector may be off so if it was, please forgive me.
Why must it continue to be that way?
It's possible we must expect and accept that children from broken, impoverished, or abusive homes will just be, well, screwed in comparison to their better off peers.
Can't we instead look for a better way?
- Improve the funding and education of our public schools (particularly by the decoupling of property taxes being the primary source of school funding).
- Take a hard look at our current minimum wage and find a way to make it easier for hard working people to make ends meet, allowing them more time to nurture and teach their children.
Giving up on hard luck children is by extension giving up on our societies future. To me at least, thats simply untenable.
I don't think mediocre is unacceptable. But, I do think the country's achievement systems do. And yes, we should look for better systems.
I don't think funding will improve the education system much, unfortunately. Probably we would be better off spending that money reducing the number of single parent families. (Somehow...)
On the other side, we all would benefit from good quality education for everybody. I mean proper benefit for whole mankind for generations, golden age and whatnot.
Currently, in many places which prefer predatory mindset (looking at you too, US), its everybody for themselves, fuck the rest, the higher I am above everybody else the better I am off. Well, not really if you actually want to live in society. Otherwise you end up walled in your luxury home like in South Africa, with private security, but afraid to go out after dark, carrying guns everywhere, high crime rate etc.
I agree that we all benefit from a high quality education for the children.
I think you're describing 'Bellum omnium contra omnes'. And yes, we seem to be heading in that direction in much of the world.
In case, we would seek to have a macro-scale program delivering exceptional results to all of our current participants.
Your last sentence isn't reasonable. We would test the performance of participants in your proposed program, and a bell curve would immediately arise.
Depends what you mean by wiser. It really seems we absolutely don't have the same definition.
> Your last sentence isn't reasonable. We would test the performance of participants in your proposed program, and a bell curve would immediately arise.
So what? Nowhere did I say it would deliver equally exceptional results to all the participants.
Just that it's goal would be to deliver exceptional results to all current participants, compared to the means of the rest of the world and all of human history.
How does your inevitable bell curve contradict or invalidate any of it? How does having internal variations invalidate any of it?
It is worth noting that a world where children from broken, impoverished (etc.) homes are not disadvantaged is a world where one cannot advantage one's own kids.
There is of course a strong argument for significant societal investment in keeping children from broken homes from raising broken homes of their own.
Please don't take this as an argument against taking steps to improve education and opportunity[2], only that anything approaching true flatness would represent a massive disruption of social order and motivation.
[1] Literal.
[2] I agree with most of your suggestions; educated persons are valuable.
This is such an uncreative, broken, zero-sum, awful line of reasoning. One can shift up both the bottom and top rungs of a scale simultaneously, so that there would still be advantaged kids despite there being fewer children from broken/impoverished homes.
In fact, such a thing has been done but not necessarily for morally good reasons either. This uplift is exactly what was seen when schools were desegregated in the South and the bottom (black schools) were uplifted: the emergence of private expensive religious schools that were effectively white-only, raising the uppermost advantaged bar as well.
But I don't think there are easy fixes, because there's also intergenerational social mobility - working class parents going without luxuries to send their children to a better school etc. It's very tough to give poor-but-ambitious families means to improve their lot over a long time without already-wealthy families monopolizing those opportunities.
See recent US and UK politics for examples. Although perhaps like attracts like, so if there's enough dysfunction around at all levels you get a politics of brokenness with dysfunctional broken leaders appealing to broken supporters.
But, that doesn't mean we can't move the bar for all students upward. We can look for ways to ensure the average student learns more, or has more tangible skills, or whatever else we want.
The rising tide floats all boats, yada yada yada.