Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Loughla | Hacker News Reader

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As someone inside the higher education machine and who is married to a long-time teacher, that's false; there is no conspiracy to keep kids dumb in schools.

The problem is that we're tasked with coming up with a universal system of education for an unbelievably varied skill set presented by students. So, we shoot for the middle (or just slightly below the middle when parents complain that it's too hard). Combine that with apathy and burn-out among the aging workforce in education, and you get the full picture.

There's no conspiracy, just an averaging out of student abilities and bitter, resigned teachers who are tired of being told how to do their jobs by politicians and loud-mouths in the media.

Whether or not critical thinking skills are being fostered in our current system in all classrooms, that's another question. But, there is no conspiracy.

As a side note; working in programming and engineering doesn't magically imbue a person with more or better critical thinking skills than English literature or art history.

I feel for you. It seems that for each design decision, school systems are set up to be easy to administer. Slots students and teachers into classes and classes into periods and rotate them around.

But:

who are tired of being told how to do their jobs by politicians and loud-mouths in the media

If you are getting paid by the public, the public is going to have lots of opinions on your job performance. Everyone has to answer to someone, whether its bosses or customers or constituents, and no one is given a guarantee that these people will only judge you based on the "correct" things.

Agreed.

People have a really bad problem of analyzing what's wrong with schools. Part of the reason why is that we always want to think in terms of us-versus-them. It's very difficult to keep in your head a system where intelligent people are all acting in good faith, yet the results are so poor. Much easier to buy into some kind of slogan.

Public education is a service, and like with any service, the people writing the check have certain expectations. With education, it's very simple: secondary education should provide the student with the ability to have a productive job and/or move on to higher education.

But there are a ton of confounding variables. Student populations are not the same. Facilities differ. We all know the spiel. This stuff is difficult! Good teachers require the ability to creatively match teaching style to students.

With difficult creative jobs, we know what works: as few rules as possible, clear acceptance criteria, and diverse people working in small groups with creative tension. This isn't a mystery.

Instead we've created overly-complex monstrosities of administration, consultants as far as the eye can see, an institutional, assembly-line metaphor for work, and stringent rules slathered on top. Then we add in teacher's unions and school boards. Finally, some smart ass came up with the idea "Just what are we doing, anyway? We need a test!"

I agree with the smart ass. We need a test. In fact, as a taxpayer without acceptance criteria I'm not paying for it. But tacking a test on top of the heaping pile of dog shit we currently have as an education system will not make it work. It'll just point out how bad it is. That's fine with me, but be prepared for a lot of fake "X raises questions" articles like this one as the establishment twists itself into pretzels trying to deny that it's the structure of the system itself that is at fault, not the tests.

So it's a tough situation. There are no good or bad guys, and that just makes it worse.

> People have a really bad problem of analyzing what's wrong with schools. Part of the reason why is that we always want to think in terms of us-versus-them.

That's actually, IMO, not even close to the biggest problem. The main problem with analyzing what is wrong with the schools is that no one can agree to shared definition of the mission of the schools that admits to an easy objective measurement, and, that this is complicated by lots of people selling proposed metricsbased on their beliefs about what those metrics will be which will justify the policy prescriptions they already prefer, which are often based on prefered outcomes that are different than what the outcomes are advertised as proxies for measuring (and often based on concealed ideological or financial interest of the people selling them.)

Meh, not so much.

Look at it this way: schools are political systems. Therefore, they exist and will continue to exist entirely based on the perceived value the voters are getting.

I seriously doubt voters sit down debating complicated metrics. Whatever the criteria that causes voters to vote one way or another is, you can be assured it is a simple one.

Sure, the nerdy, pointy-hat discussion is way down in the weeds, but that's not how political systems operate -- unless you're just trying to blow smoke up people's asses, in which case you can line up a dozen experts for and against anything you want. It's back to clanning and politics. This ain't engineering.

You're right. That should have read: "who are tired of being told new and exciting ways to do their jobs by new> politicians and loud-mouths in the media, but that really only amount to what we did five years ago."

Really, though, it's less that we're told what and how to do it, and more that the what and how is generally 5-10 years behind current research and practice.

For example, current practice under common core standards is what was being taught in the late 90's and early 2000's in teacher preparation programs. We knew it worked then, but that movement didn't have the political willpower/firepower of NCLB.

I never called it a conspiracy. Those were not my words.

People in power prefer constituents that produce wealth while being easy to control. That's just a fact of logistics. Encouraging education and arts that benefit critical thinking does not produce those results.

Encouraging education that relies on rote memorization does produce those results. So the people in power naturally choose the solution that best fits their own self interests. No conspiracy required.

That is why No Child Left behind was enacted. That's why the changes in Common Core (at least for mathematics) would make any mathematician lose their shit.

The evolutionary nature of a system does not require groups 'conspiring' in order to vote collectively on beneficial traits. It happens naturally.

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