Hacker News Reader

Comment by nathanaldensr | Hacker News Reader

We should add ethics and philosophy to that. It's far past time for grade school to stop being about "teach the sheep the bare minimum to turn them into dumb, compliant factory workers."

View on HN

Funny how being a dumb compliant factor worker has a better chance at making a living than someone with a philosophy degree.

Or you can double major computer science and philosophy like I did

One of those will help career wise and the other aids in that. A good pair

A guess. I would guess chances are that someone with a philosophy degree has more options to begin with, and would more likely go lateral into some white collar office job than become destitute.

True, will they directly use a degree in philosophy though? The path to a white collar job is much shorter with other degrees.

I don't think it does; there are no factory jobs. These days for a good career you need a more nuanced understanding of the world.

But.. there are. I’m not saying working in a factory is a glorious, all-fulfilling career but it’s work. The best thing the American educational system could do is teach trades rather than leave young adults in tens of thousands to hundred thousands in debt to begin their adult life. Having a “nuanced” understanding of the world will do little to change that.

Whose ethics and whose philosophy? Can we teach the Bible? The Quran? Confucius?

That's a good question. Perhaps a smattering of some kind? I think even if it's not a specific set of ethics, even merely teaching that the concept exists is a start.

Certainly all of those three are terrible choices if your goal is to produce a less compliant populace that is healthily critical of authority.

Why would a less compliant population be healthy? It seems like the opposite is true.

To clarify: that was an adverb to 'critical of authority'. In the sense I meant it, it means a population that is prepared to challenge authority but does so based on reason and good information.

Covering a variety of ethical frameworks is generally a good strategy to teach ethics

That's way too ambitious.

If it's anything like any PHIL 100 course, it'll just be an endless cycle of Cultural Relativism --> Act Utilitarianism --> Hitler --> Rule Utilitarianism --> Cultural Relativism..., ad infinitum

I quite enjoyed being warned against reading Nietzsche at Harvard.

Philosophy is the penultimate science, but as a pedagogic discipline it’s practically hopeless nowadays.

Yeah, do it!

There is a lot of good scholarship on those topics, and a lot of good resources that are accessible to people who have not yet learned scholarships which is also ideal.

Just drop the part where you say "can we teach the bible [etc]", because that makes it sound like you're referring to teaching the practice of a religion which has nothing to do with teaching ethics or philosophy.

All three, plus samples from other world traditions. Personally I think Marcus Aurelius, The Bhagavad Gita, and Homer would be excellent resources for high school kids.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com