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Comment by PicassoCTs | Hacker News Reader

Those curiculums developed by sould-dead gremiums in consensus on the minimum knowledge you goto have are a blight on western civilization. Instead of giving students the ability to discover a topic, or built something they are interested in themselves and then give them a understanding and fascination with the discoverers who have gone before them. Instead they kill the subject..

I must confess, it gives my dry old heart some joy, to see the anti-education masses coming from this, voting and storming the fortresses that produced the paywall around education, that only money with tutors could or accidental intrinsic motivation could overcome and burn & salt those outposts of classists academia.

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Yes, definitely, destroying education as we know it without any plans for what the next thing is will definitely work.

Developed countries really need a come to Jesus moment, because the disdain for everything that made them great places is unbelievable. People will understand, after great suffering, that destroying stuff is much easier than building it.

We're in the destroying phase right now. Unless you live in China - I hear they're mostly doing well. Or middle of nowhere Africa, where there's nothing to destroy because there's nothing there.

But systems can rot from within too, or just decay naturally, and don't need to be destroyed. What if the core ideas that built our current civilization were ideas of the past, that we don't have any more, and we don't know what to do when The Machine Stops? Doesn't have to be a literal machine - it's a good metaphor for how democracy fell apart.

The do as well as the USSR did. Meaning "excellent" till the last day!

I can't parse this comment, but yes, in some respects, we're in a similar stage now to the USSR's final stage.

> People will understand, after great suffering, that destroying stuff is much easier than building it.

"It is easier to destroy than to create" doesn't tell you when something should be torn down.

You can have a house that provided shelter for your family for generations, but if it's water damaged, the floors are rotting and it's full of toxic mold, the person who shows up with a bulldozer isn't necessarily wrong.

Forgetting that it was the anti-education forces that created the curriculums. The war on public education goes back a long time; teachers lost the freedom to teach decades ago. and it has been the same forces behind it all along.

Ok... what would you do differently? Keep in mind you have to educate millions of students across an enormous spectrum of abilities, socioeconomic backgrounds, and interests.

No you don't. There is a narrow range of abilities at each level if students are properly held back when they haven't mastered the material.

Their interests are built by what they are taught. "Socioeconomic background" is a tautology. Their backgrounds are irrelevant.

I would build a "intrinsic motivation" first curriculum, where knowledge is handed as powertools to a already existing passion and the self-thought "expansion" of knowledge is the most important gift to be made.

If the child is fascinated by video games- i would help it make video games, the curriculum be damned. All knowledge holes can be filled later, but the passion to wanting to know, can never be restored unless the want for knowledge remains intact.

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