Generally. Education is wasted on most people and not necessary for others
Yeah, who cares about the goims. They dont need to be educated, hu?
Honestly, with people like you, I cant see how the US would ever recover from this economic downturn. With 10% educated and the rest idiots, you wont be able to do shit.
It is my experience that the people who can benefit most from education manage to get one.
Freeman Dyson. Thomas Edison.
And my mate works to educate the very worst students. I heap praise on her daily for that.
I was saying nothing about what should be done. Merely how things actually work.
BTW my work for the last 3 years has been nothing but educating myself and then educating any one else interested.
My experience is that for the most part you can't educate the uninterested. And it is a waste to try. Even so you have to try in order to find out where to put the most effort.
In addition: really efficient research is at the 50% waste level. I'm not calling for an end to research.
BTW I'm humbled every day by how little I know and how much I can't do.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Josh Cryer wrote:
I am insulted by the "Tea Party folks" because they're ignorant, hateful, evil people. Period. When I grew up I was taught to keep politics out of work, and to be good to others. As I have aged I have found that this mindset is an exception, not a rule.
Then I take you have never been to a Tea Party. I have, and here's what I saw: http://www.flickr.com/photos/38193998@N ... 179759852/
That guy in the leather jacket, that's Art. I work with him. He came Over from Poland. If you want to hear colorful language about The One, talk to Art. He'll use words like socialist and criminal. But then he grew up in Communist, Soviet controlled, Poland. So what does he know? He's ignorant, hateful and evil, wanting liberty and to keep his property. Or maybe he just appreciates what we have and thinks it's important that we don't let people like Obama, Pelosi and Reid wreck it.
I was mostly making a jab, since "secessionists" tend to wave around the American flag (and sometimes the confederate flag) and like to claim that they're patroits while secretly wishing to become seperate from America.
Ever hear about: "I love my country but hate my government"?
A common refrain in America for several hundred years.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
KitemanSA wrote:I am not sure you read his intent correctly.
I sure read his intend correctly, but you might have missread mine.
I said, "Dont need" as in "dont have to". I did not say "must not".
"Dont need to " is very clearly what he means when says:
Msimon wrote: not necessary for others
Earlier, Skipjack wrote: Yeah, who cares about the goims. They dont need to be educated, hu?
Perhaps I did miss-read yours. But your introduction of the Yiddish insult "goim" made me think you were suggesting that he (MS) was suggesting that said folks were cattle and couldn't learn. Sorry if I took your implied insult out of context.
Skipjack wrote:
KitemanSA wrote: most public high school students would be better off if those who didn't want to be there, weren't there.
Probably, but then maybe it would just be better to be tough with certain elements at school and in general life, that disrespect the law...
Won't argue there. When criminals do it, you remove them from society. When "students" do it, perhaps they should be removed from school.
Skipjack wrote:
KitemanSA wrote:If kids were actually required to work during the summer, I suspect they would be glad to be in school, and apply themselves more.
Here in Austria it is still common for high school students to work in summer. I did. My parents insisted on it "to solidify my character". It did not hurt me, but it did not make me appreciate school more either
That said, I do not disagree with you here. The biggest problem is that those kids that suck and missbehave at school dont really work in summer either. Unless you count selling drugs and being in a gang as work.
Actually, I was talking in this case about most all students, not just highschool. And I think I said required, not expected. A couple summers out in the fields during their pre-teens might make kids a LOT more appreciative of school.
TDPerk, sorry, you're right, I misstated the classroom size. I do hope that you don't think I intentionally attempted to mislead people on such easily acquired information. I read an article a little while about some LA classrooms going to 40.
I should not have implied that it was a sole determinant in any case, as some countries (Asian) with larger classroom sizes have similar educational levels. It was more of a jab at our institutional system because I know for a fact that in poorer areas smaller classroom sizes result in more educated individuals.
I consider it a cultural thing because in poor ghettos you are surrounded by more negative influences, which are I believe more likely to corrupt your learning experience outside of the school. Consistent research has shown in these poor areas classroom sizes of less than 20 result in more children getting through school and even more of them going to college.
So rather than continuing a self-perpetuating cycle of ignorance these areas need more attention.
Also, the whole "age and gender appropriate behavior" thing is again a cultural thing. Asian schooling is extremely strict, yet Japanese and Korean grades are above par. My nephew is being looked at by the people at his public school for ADD drugs, since he fidgets around at his desk throughout the school day. I had this same problem when I was a kid, and my parents insisted to the teacher that she give me harder material to learn. I was doing third grade math in the first grade by the time I went on to the next school.
I have no idea what you mean by "rightward drift" because it's likely you are just picking an arbitrary definition that fits what you consider "rightward." So I can't really respond to it. If it means what I think it means then I see no evidence that the nation is moving "to the right."
As far as understanding about education being like work, it's mainly because I think that most people who go through the education system and have a very workerist mentality were trained just as well as military guys who wind up believing patriotic nonsense and going and getting themselves killed for pointless causes. Pledge of Allegiance (written by a socialist) and all. The propaganda I see in the public school systems is not very good at all.
Jccarlton, I work in construction. Ask any of the engineers here how the construction workers have talked on their projects. The only thing is that when the boss comes around (he's a Christian involved in many local things), everyone plays nice. We are completely seperate from the breaucracy and no females work with us. It takes a certain type of individual to 'fit' within this group, which is why you get fired if you are a 'complainer.' I learned this very early on, when one skinny guy who complained all the time about various stuff was called out by my coworkers as being "unsafe."
The pay is very good though, so I simply do not complain, and I overlook situations where individuals are being treated unfairly in my job, because that's life. I suppose you could say I am complaining here, but it is not really complaining so much relating my personal experience with a certain political type.
I have experiences with liberals that I am happy to share, too. Don't get me started on primitive yuppie types. I could go on for days about them.
Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is.
Jccarlton, I work in construction. Ask any of the engineers here how the construction workers have talked on their projects.
About like sailors I recon.
In the Navy if every third word is a curse word things are fine. Every second word - trouble. The sailors stop cursing - big trouble.
If the job situation is not to your liking - become an engineer. Or an engineering assistant. Less cursing and the quarters are often heated or air conditioned as required.
My dad never talked "sailor talk" at home. Towards the end of his life he regressed and talked like a sailor all the time. His ship was AOG-27.
He was a Chief. Damage Control. And his regular duty was oil king. He was in the battle of Okinawa during the Kamikaze attacks. The language must have been pretty blue during those times.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Josh Cryer wrote:Open source *is* progressive. Anti-patents *are* progressive. What you seem to be doing is confusing the term "progressive." The Democrats are not progressives, they are simply another arm of the capitalist machine. The biggest give-aways (as in raw money given away, not tax reductions) in our history have been by both the "conservatives" and the "liberals."
Open source and anti patents are fantasies of people who haven't yet understood that what they create has real value. Once that happens open source and loss of control goes away real fast.
I disagree here, because I think the issue is misunderstood.
E.g. open-source makes a lot of sense for big HW manufactures like IBM - they simply need an OS to run on their HW. It also makes sense for ones like Google. And it even makes a sense for companies producing software applications.
IMO it is because software is just a tool and sometimes it is much cheaper to share the code - if nothing else, somebody else will notice and sometimes even fix your bugs.
But your introduction of the Yiddish insult "goim" made me think you were suggesting that he (MS) was suggesting that said folks were cattle and couldn't learn.
No, but that educating them is a waste and not necessary anyway, or maybe even unbeneficial.
Uneducated people can be easily missguided and the next Hitler is already waiting in line to make use of that. So the more education you can press into someonem, whether he likes it, or not, the better for society as a whole.
But your introduction of the Yiddish insult "goim" made me think you were suggesting that he (MS) was suggesting that said folks were cattle and couldn't learn.
No, but that educating them is a waste and not necessary anyway, or maybe even unbeneficial.
Uneducated people can be easily missguided and the next Hitler is already waiting in line to make use of that. So the more education you can press into someonem, whether he likes it, or not, the better for society as a whole.
Education takes a LOT better when people are interested.
I hated writing in school. A D for me was average and Cs were a good grade. Then around '76 I decided I wanted to write a technical article and it just came out flowed. I had always liked reading. So I had a lot of templates to work with. I've been writing ever since (as the need and desire arose) and I even manage to make a few bob off it.
Trouble is our schools operate by formula rather than teaching a subject when a person is interested in learning it.
The internet will change all that. In 20 years schools will be going the way of dinosaur media.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
MSimon wrote:My experience is that for the most part you can't educate the uninterested. And it is a waste to try. Even so you have to try in order to find out where to put the most effort.
That relates to my personal experience. During my undergrad I was more interested in socialising than study and just managed to scape through. Now having worked for a living, in my distance-ed postgrad studies I have the deligence to push into subjects until I find the interesting parts which has earnt me some HD grades. I find Paul Graham's article Why Nerds are Unpopular quite insightful about the high school system. Its long, so in summry it describes why most kids are more interested in poularity than learning. Here are a few extracts for you to determine if the rest of it is worth reading:
And as for the schools, they were just holding pens. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time. At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were.... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)
Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. [Kids] weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies. Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. [...] What happened? We're up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don't start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30. Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them. If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many schools practically do stop there. The stated purpose of schools is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most schools do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't really take it seriously-- not even the smart kids. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.
We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American schools. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.
Skipjack wrote:Yeah, who cares about the goims. They dont need to be educated, hu?
Honestly, with people like you, I cant see how the US would ever recover from this economic downturn. With 10% educated and the rest idiots, you wont be able to do shit.
Skipjack wrote:No, but that educating them is a waste and not necessary anyway, or maybe even unbeneficial.
Uneducated people can be easily missguided and the next Hitler is already waiting in line to make use of that. So the more education you can press into someonem, whether he likes it, or not, the better for society as a whole.
We are dumb and easily suseptable to a guy like Hitler?!? Sorry, that is your history, not ours. Thanks for the lecture though.
