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On November 01 2013 23:16 Djzapz wrote:Show nested quote +On November 01 2013 16:13 sam!zdat wrote:On November 01 2013 11:42 Djzapz wrote:On November 01 2013 11:16 sam!zdat wrote:
all you need to teach someone is books and time Books are great but they're limited. They have to be published, bought, shipped, they have to be with you physically. Some are dated, not so relevant... Pdfs, online articles, peer reviewed papers, can be on my computer in the hours after they were published. Surely books can't be dismissed, they're of extreme importance - but to say that they're all we need does leave out a ridiculous amount of knowledge. fetishism of novelty very little you can learn from papers published hours ago that you can't learn from reading plato and arguing about it You're trolling or very misguided. Philosophy has its utilities but we can't just sit with Plato an expect to all of the conclusions that humanity has come to through WORK. Not everything comes through pure intellectual work, sometimes you need to go outside and do stuff. Maybe if you're only looking at modern philosophy but it's clear that you're very narrow-minded. How can plato enlighten me about the social benefits and the implementation of active transportation measures? That's the subject I'm working on. Not everything is practical. Not everything is part of your philosophy major. There are practical things in life. There are political events that unfold and are difficult to understand. Plato doesn't help with those. Plato doesn't help very much with the issue of sexism either  I think it's peculiar that a person who seems to have a background in philosophy would actively limit himself intellectually to that extent just because of an irrational love for physical media.
you don't teach "active transportation measures" in school. that's advanced student stuff. not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about general education in which, yes, I think technology in the classroom is worse than useless, no I'm not trolling. I went to a school which was very proud of its advanced, modern classrooms and my education suffered for it.
i don't know why you think my claim is "we should all just be plato scholastics and nothing else."
edit: basically the problem is that technology encourages speeding up when what we all need to do is slow down
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On November 02 2013 01:53 sam!zdat wrote:Show nested quote +On November 01 2013 23:16 Djzapz wrote:On November 01 2013 16:13 sam!zdat wrote:On November 01 2013 11:42 Djzapz wrote:On November 01 2013 11:16 sam!zdat wrote:
all you need to teach someone is books and time Books are great but they're limited. They have to be published, bought, shipped, they have to be with you physically. Some are dated, not so relevant... Pdfs, online articles, peer reviewed papers, can be on my computer in the hours after they were published. Surely books can't be dismissed, they're of extreme importance - but to say that they're all we need does leave out a ridiculous amount of knowledge. fetishism of novelty very little you can learn from papers published hours ago that you can't learn from reading plato and arguing about it You're trolling or very misguided. Philosophy has its utilities but we can't just sit with Plato an expect to all of the conclusions that humanity has come to through WORK. Not everything comes through pure intellectual work, sometimes you need to go outside and do stuff. Maybe if you're only looking at modern philosophy but it's clear that you're very narrow-minded. How can plato enlighten me about the social benefits and the implementation of active transportation measures? That's the subject I'm working on. Not everything is practical. Not everything is part of your philosophy major. There are practical things in life. There are political events that unfold and are difficult to understand. Plato doesn't help with those. Plato doesn't help very much with the issue of sexism either I think it's peculiar that a person who seems to have a background in philosophy would actively limit himself intellectually to that extent just because of an irrational love for physical media. you don't teach "active transportation measures" in school. that's advanced student stuff. not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about general education in which, yes, I think technology in the classroom is worse than useless, no I'm not trolling. I went to a school which was very proud of its advanced, modern classrooms and my education suffered for it. i don't know why you think my claim is "we should all just be plato scholastics and nothing else." edit: basically the problem is that technology encourages speeding up when what we all need to do is slow down
Well, that's fair. I'll admit that I got confused when you spoke of having arguments about Plato. Arguments about his writings can't possibly yield much in a general education setting. Maybe in a controlled environment.
Anyway I think technology is mostly useful for higher education, but I can agree that in many cases it's not good for children.
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On November 02 2013 01:53 sam!zdat wrote:Show nested quote +On November 01 2013 23:16 Djzapz wrote:On November 01 2013 16:13 sam!zdat wrote:On November 01 2013 11:42 Djzapz wrote:On November 01 2013 11:16 sam!zdat wrote:
all you need to teach someone is books and time Books are great but they're limited. They have to be published, bought, shipped, they have to be with you physically. Some are dated, not so relevant... Pdfs, online articles, peer reviewed papers, can be on my computer in the hours after they were published. Surely books can't be dismissed, they're of extreme importance - but to say that they're all we need does leave out a ridiculous amount of knowledge. fetishism of novelty very little you can learn from papers published hours ago that you can't learn from reading plato and arguing about it You're trolling or very misguided. Philosophy has its utilities but we can't just sit with Plato an expect to all of the conclusions that humanity has come to through WORK. Not everything comes through pure intellectual work, sometimes you need to go outside and do stuff. Maybe if you're only looking at modern philosophy but it's clear that you're very narrow-minded. How can plato enlighten me about the social benefits and the implementation of active transportation measures? That's the subject I'm working on. Not everything is practical. Not everything is part of your philosophy major. There are practical things in life. There are political events that unfold and are difficult to understand. Plato doesn't help with those. Plato doesn't help very much with the issue of sexism either I think it's peculiar that a person who seems to have a background in philosophy would actively limit himself intellectually to that extent just because of an irrational love for physical media. you don't teach "active transportation measures" in school. that's advanced student stuff. not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about general education in which, yes, I think technology in the classroom is worse than useless, no I'm not trolling. I went to a school which was very proud of its advanced, modern classrooms and my education suffered for it. i don't know why you think my claim is "we should all just be plato scholastics and nothing else." edit: basically the problem is that technology encourages speeding up when what we all need to do is slow down
what do you mean "speeding up"?
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On November 02 2013 02:47 Djzapz wrote:
Arguments about his writings can't possibly yield much in a general education setting. Maybe in a controlled environment.
could not disagree more. I think the one of the most valuable things one could ever do in school would be to have a bunch of 8th graders work through the entire text of The Republic, out loud.
On November 02 2013 02:48 Roe wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2013 01:53 sam!zdat wrote:On November 01 2013 23:16 Djzapz wrote:On November 01 2013 16:13 sam!zdat wrote:On November 01 2013 11:42 Djzapz wrote:On November 01 2013 11:16 sam!zdat wrote:
all you need to teach someone is books and time Books are great but they're limited. They have to be published, bought, shipped, they have to be with you physically. Some are dated, not so relevant... Pdfs, online articles, peer reviewed papers, can be on my computer in the hours after they were published. Surely books can't be dismissed, they're of extreme importance - but to say that they're all we need does leave out a ridiculous amount of knowledge. fetishism of novelty very little you can learn from papers published hours ago that you can't learn from reading plato and arguing about it You're trolling or very misguided. Philosophy has its utilities but we can't just sit with Plato an expect to all of the conclusions that humanity has come to through WORK. Not everything comes through pure intellectual work, sometimes you need to go outside and do stuff. Maybe if you're only looking at modern philosophy but it's clear that you're very narrow-minded. How can plato enlighten me about the social benefits and the implementation of active transportation measures? That's the subject I'm working on. Not everything is practical. Not everything is part of your philosophy major. There are practical things in life. There are political events that unfold and are difficult to understand. Plato doesn't help with those. Plato doesn't help very much with the issue of sexism either I think it's peculiar that a person who seems to have a background in philosophy would actively limit himself intellectually to that extent just because of an irrational love for physical media. you don't teach "active transportation measures" in school. that's advanced student stuff. not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about general education in which, yes, I think technology in the classroom is worse than useless, no I'm not trolling. I went to a school which was very proud of its advanced, modern classrooms and my education suffered for it. i don't know why you think my claim is "we should all just be plato scholastics and nothing else." edit: basically the problem is that technology encourages speeding up when what we all need to do is slow down what do you mean "speeding up"?
going faster
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On November 02 2013 02:58 sam!zdat wrote:
could not disagree more. I think the one of the most valuable things one could ever do in school would be to have a bunch of 8th graders work through the entire text of The Republic, out loud.
I believe that you believe that to be elegant but IMO that'd be completely useless.
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On November 02 2013 02:58 sam!zdat wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2013 02:47 Djzapz wrote:
Arguments about his writings can't possibly yield much in a general education setting. Maybe in a controlled environment.
could not disagree more. I think the one of the most valuable things one could ever do in school would be to have a bunch of 8th graders work through the entire text of The Republic, out loud. Show nested quote +On November 02 2013 02:48 Roe wrote:On November 02 2013 01:53 sam!zdat wrote:On November 01 2013 23:16 Djzapz wrote:On November 01 2013 16:13 sam!zdat wrote:On November 01 2013 11:42 Djzapz wrote:On November 01 2013 11:16 sam!zdat wrote:
all you need to teach someone is books and time Books are great but they're limited. They have to be published, bought, shipped, they have to be with you physically. Some are dated, not so relevant... Pdfs, online articles, peer reviewed papers, can be on my computer in the hours after they were published. Surely books can't be dismissed, they're of extreme importance - but to say that they're all we need does leave out a ridiculous amount of knowledge. fetishism of novelty very little you can learn from papers published hours ago that you can't learn from reading plato and arguing about it You're trolling or very misguided. Philosophy has its utilities but we can't just sit with Plato an expect to all of the conclusions that humanity has come to through WORK. Not everything comes through pure intellectual work, sometimes you need to go outside and do stuff. Maybe if you're only looking at modern philosophy but it's clear that you're very narrow-minded. How can plato enlighten me about the social benefits and the implementation of active transportation measures? That's the subject I'm working on. Not everything is practical. Not everything is part of your philosophy major. There are practical things in life. There are political events that unfold and are difficult to understand. Plato doesn't help with those. Plato doesn't help very much with the issue of sexism either I think it's peculiar that a person who seems to have a background in philosophy would actively limit himself intellectually to that extent just because of an irrational love for physical media. you don't teach "active transportation measures" in school. that's advanced student stuff. not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about general education in which, yes, I think technology in the classroom is worse than useless, no I'm not trolling. I went to a school which was very proud of its advanced, modern classrooms and my education suffered for it. i don't know why you think my claim is "we should all just be plato scholastics and nothing else." edit: basically the problem is that technology encourages speeding up when what we all need to do is slow down what do you mean "speeding up"? going faster
what's going faster
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lol let's cut the bullshit, by "speeding up" he means that technology allows students to "use" information before they've actually grasped it or filed it away in their minds in any meaningful way. In very much the same way that Micronesia earlier described, stuff like wikipedia, while being incredibly useful, provides students with a means of appearing like they understand, when in reality, they are merely copying and pasting (or, egads, paraphrasing).
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On November 02 2013 03:02 Djzapz wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2013 02:58 sam!zdat wrote:
could not disagree more. I think the one of the most valuable things one could ever do in school would be to have a bunch of 8th graders work through the entire text of The Republic, out loud. I believe that you believe that to be elegant but IMO that'd be completely useless.
what do you mean, "elegant"?
I think the point of education is teaching people to think
I've seen a student's entire way of thinking transformed by an encounter with that text. A student who had been completely failed by mainstream education, which was training her to be a drone
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On November 02 2013 03:23 sam!zdat wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2013 03:02 Djzapz wrote:On November 02 2013 02:58 sam!zdat wrote:
could not disagree more. I think the one of the most valuable things one could ever do in school would be to have a bunch of 8th graders work through the entire text of The Republic, out loud. I believe that you believe that to be elegant but IMO that'd be completely useless. what do you mean, "elegant"? I think the point of education is teaching people to think I've seen a student's entire way of thinking transformed by an encounter with that text. A student who had been completely failed by mainstream education, which was training her to be a drone
I think you're completely insane if you think that the average 13-14 year old kid is able to derive much from The Republic. Some of them, sure. I know that when I was 13-14, it wouldn't have been good for me, and many of my classmates weren't quite at that level either.
That was a nice story though.
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I think we expect too little from our students and so they coast along without ever being challenged. the Republic is not hard, there is no philosophical context needed to follow it because it develops all its ideas in the text itself. Make them try to understand it and they will rise to the challenge. the main problem with our educational system today is that school is simply too easy
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United States24637 Posts
On November 02 2013 04:07 sam!zdat wrote:
I think we expect too little from our students and so they coast along without ever being challenged. the Republic is not hard, there is no philosophical context needed to follow it because it develops all its ideas in the text itself. Make them try to understand it and they will rise to the challenge. the main problem with our educational system today is that school is simply too easy
How have you arrived at that conclusion? Sure, many people on this website might feel this way, based on their own experiences, and those of their friends, but that is not a fair representative sample of a whole country, or group of countries.
Personally, most of the students I was teaching couldn't keep up with the standards... it was essentially too hard for them. Making the course harder for 99% of them would not have helped (and would have probably been very helpful for 1% of them). Of course there were ways to make them stronger students so that when they got to my class they could handle it being harder, but there was no 'main problem' for them that their prior schooling was simply too easy.
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On November 02 2013 04:11 micronesia wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2013 04:07 sam!zdat wrote:
I think we expect too little from our students and so they coast along without ever being challenged. the Republic is not hard, there is no philosophical context needed to follow it because it develops all its ideas in the text itself. Make them try to understand it and they will rise to the challenge. the main problem with our educational system today is that school is simply too easy How have you arrived at that conclusion? Sure, many people on this website might feel this way, based on their own experiences, and those of their friends, but that is not a fair representative sample of a whole country, or group of countries. Personally, most of the students I was teaching couldn't keep up with the standards... it was essentially too hard for them. Making the course harder for 99% of them would not have helped (and would have probably been very helpful for 1% of them). Of course there were ways to make them stronger students so that when they got to my class they could handle it being harder, but there was no 'main problem' for them that their prior schooling was simply too easy.
I think this has less to do with overt difficulty and more to do with the troublesome relationship between standards based education and actual learning.
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United States24637 Posts
On November 02 2013 04:12 farvacola wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2013 04:11 micronesia wrote:On November 02 2013 04:07 sam!zdat wrote:
I think we expect too little from our students and so they coast along without ever being challenged. the Republic is not hard, there is no philosophical context needed to follow it because it develops all its ideas in the text itself. Make them try to understand it and they will rise to the challenge. the main problem with our educational system today is that school is simply too easy How have you arrived at that conclusion? Sure, many people on this website might feel this way, based on their own experiences, and those of their friends, but that is not a fair representative sample of a whole country, or group of countries. Personally, most of the students I was teaching couldn't keep up with the standards... it was essentially too hard for them. Making the course harder for 99% of them would not have helped (and would have probably been very helpful for 1% of them). Of course there were ways to make them stronger students so that when they got to my class they could handle it being harder, but there was no 'main problem' for them that their prior schooling was simply too easy. I think this has less to do with overt difficulty and more to do with the troublesome relationship between standards based education and actual learning.
Well yea, that opens up a whole new can of worms. I should clarify that in my example, I was using the word 'standard' very generally and not to refer to any particular or imposed "standards." I was just referring to the level of expectation/difficulty of the course.
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i think there's a vicious cycle of the easiness and superficiality of education leading to student apathy and boredom leading to further easiness and superficiality.
standardized assessments further vitiates the quality of education (this leads us back to Lyotard)
I think school should be very hard, but also that it should be okay to fail
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On November 02 2013 04:44 sam!zdat wrote:
i think there's a vicious cycle of the easiness and superficiality of education leading to student apathy and boredom leading to further easiness and superficiality.
standardized assessments further vitiates the quality of education (this leads us back to Lyotard)
I think school should be very hard, but also that it should be okay to fail
It's not quite that simple. If you make school really hard, the kids who can deal with it are advantaged, the kids who can't do it don't learn anything instead of learning something like they would if it were easier.
From there, you have a few solutions for the kids who have failed. Either you make them take it all over again, but then you're doing a damn fine job ensuring that they're wasting their time. You can also put them through an easier curriculum, but they're not complete morons, and they'll understand that they're in stupid school and they got demoted to stupid. This just makes an already-existing vicious circle even worse. Kids who have trouble stop giving a fuck because the school system is ill adapted to them, and eventually they drop out.
The kids who don't perform as well should not be failed. The kids who show more potential in school should be put in AP classes and should be pushed toward excellence. Making more kids fail classes is ridiculous because the point of school at a young age is not failing or passing. It's not about grades, it's not about advantaging the smarter kids, it's about bringing out the kids potential. Even the ones who don't perform so well in school, they should be taught classes which are on their level so that they can at least get something out of it.
That's not to say they should never fail. Sometimes, pushing a kid through school before he's ready for it is the worst thing we can do. But imposing high standards on kids who can't achieve those standards demoralizes them and in the end they're less ready for life than they would have been if they had just been taught a bit more slowly.
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Im sure a lot of students would be very happy with failing if there were no consequences.
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On November 02 2013 05:06 Djzapz wrote:
The kids who show more potential in school should be put in AP classes and should be pushed toward excellence.
the AP program should be abolished
On November 02 2013 05:06 Djzapz wrote:
they should be taught classes which are on their level so that they can at least get something out of it.
On November 02 2013 05:06 Djzapz wrote:
they'll understand that they're in stupid school and they got demoted to stupid. .
what's the difference
On November 02 2013 05:06 Djzapz wrote:
Kids who have trouble stop giving a fuck because the school system is ill adapted to them, and eventually they drop out.
this is already the state of affairs
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United States24637 Posts
On November 02 2013 05:17 sam!zdat wrote:Show nested quote +On November 02 2013 05:06 Djzapz wrote:
The kids who show more potential in school should be put in AP classes and should be pushed toward excellence. the AP program should be abolished Can you explain your reasoning for this, and what it should be replaced with, if anything?
I do get the fact that having a 'regular' and an 'advanced' class is essentially no different than having a 'regular' and a 'slow' class.
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my objection is the test, and also the farcical notion that these credits are equivalent to college-level work
I liked my honors classes until they became AP classes. then I stopped liking them because they were a standardized curriculum based around a standardized test and it was just education-factory stuff.
there can be advanced classes, but they should be simply that: advanced classes. Not AP
On November 02 2013 05:23 micronesia wrote:
I do get the fact that having a 'regular' and an 'advanced' class is essentially no different than having a 'regular' and a 'slow' class.
it's just more american everyone-gets-a-trophy euphemism. kids in "regular" classes know they are in "stupid" classes, just like anyone who buys a "medium" drink when the choices are "medium" "large" and "huge" knows that they are buying a "small" drink.
adults in the educational system like to think that kids don't know about the euphemistic bullshit that pervades the entire system, but that's just a fantasy. kids aren't stupid
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On November 02 2013 05:57 sam!zdat wrote:
my objection is the test, and also the farcical notion that these credits are equivalent to college-level work
I liked my honors classes until they became AP classes. then I stopped liking them because they were a standardized curriculum based around a standardized test and it was just education-factory stuff.
there can be advanced classes, but they should be simply that: advanced classes. Not AP
I don't care what they're called. Kids who perform better should take advanced classes and kids who have trouble should have classes that are better adapted to them. School should not be "hard" for kids who can't handle that.
it's just more american everyone-gets-a-trophy euphemism. kids in "regular" classes know they are in "stupid" classes, just like anyone who buys a "medium" drink when the choices are "medium" "large" and "huge" knows that they are buying a "small" drink.
You only think like that because you're one of those people who spend too much time talking about grades and that shit. Trophies don't matter. You want kids to learn, so try to adjust their education for them, that's all. Don't make them jump through hoops just to see which ones can do it and which ones will fall face-first. There's nothing pedagogical about making school too hard for some people.
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EPT
