US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3363

People seem to speak highly of South Korea and Finland's education programs, are they also of the opinion that students learn better in heterogenous classes where students are on different levels and teachers have to teach to the different levels?

Most American math curricula are very broad and allow a decent amount of autonomy for the teacher in terms of figuring out how the content should be best learned and the skills best developed in one's classroom.

On November 08 2021 07:46 Liquid`Drone wrote:


I'm not too familiar with South Korea, other than that I've seen time tables indicating south korean children spend several more hours in school than western children do, as well as anecdotal (to the point where I consider it truth, though) stories of the south korean work ethic. Can't comment on that one - hopefully one of our korean posters can chime in here.

Regarding Finland, while their school system is in many ways regarded as a big success story (as mentioned, they've performed very well at the PISA tests - the programme for international student assessment. (The winner the past years has been China, but I read some fairly strong but also credible allegations of them being selective in who they test)), it has been subject to some critique, too, and their strengths relate more to the academic performance, and less to the elements of school that are harder to quantify and assess. But - my understanding is that their success formula is more related to having highly educated teachers teaching the youngest children, and spending more resources on the children that fall behind at an early age. This, to my understanding, largely consists of removing the children who are struggling the most from the classroom to give those children more private tutoring/tutoring in small groups - which means that the remaining students can indeed 'learn at a higher level'. (If we have any Finns, feel free to correct or add to this.)

Like I said though (and as you summarized earlier) - I'm not entirely negative towards merit-based distribution of students. BUT, I do think heterogenous classes come with their strengths and advantages, too. Growing up in Norway, there was 0 option for any separation based on ability, and myself, I thought this sucked, because I was probably 4-5 years ahead of my classmates in math, and it bored the hell out of me. While math was my strongest subject in elementary, I gave it 0 effort, and by the time I entered high school, I had actually fallen behind and developed many knowledge gaps, resulting in it becoming my worst subject. I think there's a direct relation between this happening, and me asking my teacher if I could have more advanced learning material only to get an angry no as a response, when I was 8 years old.

(My older brother went to the same school, had a different teacher (he's two years older, our parents taught both of us math at the same time), his teacher said yes to the same request, and he ended up pursuing a career in programming. Me as an 8 year old was 2 years better than him as an 8 year old, me as an 18 year old was 5 years worse.)

But - (my impression) is that Norway fares exceptionally well in various, less quantifiable metrics, like equity, sense of togetherness and community. That I, coming from reasonably wealthy and highly educated parents spent my first 6 years in the same classroom as children from all sorts of less fortunate backgrounds (and even more fortunate ones, too) has also helped me develop important life skills. Me not thinking of myself as better than others because I am better than them at school is a societal good. Much like how I can connect my failing math skills to my teacher refusing to separate based on ability, I can connect my sense of togetherness with the high school dropouts with the same elementary school experience. (While I'm skeptical towards attributing too much importance to anecdotes, my aforementioned brother is definitely more of an elitist than I am. ) It's also very possible that my teacher's response was partially a consequence of me being an incredibly arrogant child, and that she assumed (probably correctly) that I would have ended up bragging to my classmates about being on a higher level than them. I actually love her dearly and think she was a fantastic teacher.

A quick summary of my opinion on merit-based separation of students is: The Finnish way of spending more resources on children who fall behind early is pretty much just good. There's some legitimate concern that children who get more 'specialized education' can end up being a bit socially ostracized, but I don't think this is a necessary consequence, and either way, that is actually preferable to them not properly learning how to read.

'AP'-classes are very good for the students that attend them - but there's a question of resource-distribution. With limited budgets and being forced to prioritize between one of the two, I do believe it is more important to bring the 'worst' performers up to an acceptable level, than to give the top performers all the tools required to reach their full potential. It's fair to disagree here - but again, this imo is a political question, one of whether you want society to be / believe that society is best built from the bottom or from the top.

Furthermore, there are differences based on age groups and subjects. The older you get, the more positive I am towards these. (And even in Norway, high school math is tiered.) But I do think it's important - for the 'fabric of society' - that children attend school, and different classes with all types of different children, and that they learn to cooperate with children with all types of different abilities.

All this said, the idea of closing such classes due to lacking ethnic diversity seems like an entirely flawed way of looking at or dealing with the problem.

On November 08 2021 13:54 Falling wrote:

Ok, I was wondering about this. Because in my own practice, I have a fair amount of liberty due to classroom autonomy. However, it's fairly easy to tell what time it is based on how curriculum changes combined with the direction of professional development. This is what makes the topic rather tricky- even if there is a concerted push to bring in CRT, one can actually fall back on- well it's up to individual teacher implementation. True. However, it doesn't change that there is a push- and as more teachers come on board, yeah, you will actually have it in the classroom. But at the same time, other teachers can keep doing their thing. So it ends up being a formless target that is difficult to argue against.

But there's a lot of Motte and Bailey when it comes to CRT. It's a very particular way of dealing with racism (motte), but if pushed against the specifics, one retreats to 'so you oppose ridding society of racism?' (bailey). As though there was no other way to deal with racism. So there's a lot of 'not-CRT' running around- but I think James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian does some great breakdowns of what look for- the 'praxis'. And their explanations are also minus the hysterical parents that perhaps not the most coherent and therefore easy to dismiss... but do get the CNN/ MSNBC crowd all worked up.

On November 08 2021 15:45 BlackJack wrote:


Yes, I agree completely. A couple interviews from TV come to mind when talking about the murkiness of this "not-CRT" in schools issue. One is Condaleeza Rice on the View. After she expresses why she disagrees with what is happening in schools Whoopi Goldberg says something like "There is no way to hide the fact that white people used to own black people." Then another host chimes in "People want to hide history." Another TV segment is Malcolm Nance on Real Time with Bill Maher when during a discussion on CRT he basically accused the other panelist of denying the history of the Scalp Act and the Chinese Exclusion Act and saying that "You think my great-great grandfather finding in the Civil War is bullshit."

The problem with the discourse isn't just from people like that guy at the Virginia rally that said CRT was the biggest issue to him and then couldn't define it. It seems that even some defenders of CRT can't really define it either and end up conflating it with just teaching history or that being against it is akin to denying that slavery existed or denying that violence against Native Americans existed.

On November 08 2021 20:24 WombaT wrote:

A lot of people do want to hide history though, it’s a pretty common theme the world over. Our fellow Brits on the mainland have an appalling understanding of Ireland, not coincidental when especially under Conservative stewardship the curriculum gets tweaked to take out most of that pesky bad stuff the British and the Empire did.

In the crudest sense I’d happily trade more balanced and less jingoistic history curriculums for maths and whatnot all being untouched.

The wider CRT framework is rather broad yes, given that it’s a lens through which to analyse things rather than a set of prescriptions. Discussion of the wider particulars is, IMO the kind of discourse had in a thread like this with pretty educated adults in a variety of fields (and me), or humanities undergrads.

Perhaps I’m underselling the youth, but as a whole framework it’s reasonably complicated and needs some background interest in various things. I can’t imagine more than 2/3 even in my high school politics class way back being able to really engage with that topic outside or just getting it verbatim from the teacher, which kind of defeats the point.

Individual components being integrated elsewhere either in lessons or in structural educational policy yeah, I could see that working fine. I’d be interested to hear from our educators what and how they’d do in approaching implementation.

In a wider sense I can to a degree understand frustrations from many angles. I’ve plenty of experience myself dealing with people who, perhaps have good intentions but have a completely warped and myopic understanding of concepts like privilege and race and sex, esp. intersectionality. The ‘you have to defer you’re a white dude’ types that absolutely do exist out there.

On the flip side there is a whole outrage machine that exists to retweet silly things or some really obscure academic’s paper and it really ends up with people having a skewed perception on quite how prevalent and influential certain ideas are.

I think Falling’s characterisation of many defences using a Motte and Bailey approach is also pretty apt. I assume the data isn’t out there to actually qualify results with aims, if it is there I have yet to come across it, so it probably is quite difficult to justify that way. Are the fundamental ideas sound and is it the optimal framework to go about it? Possibly yes

If it’s implemented badly at an educational level I think it could be net detrimental, but this does very much depend on particulars. There’s a wider society out there after all, if the wider culture and education clash and education doesn’t feed into modifying the wider culture you could have a lot of dissonance there, to take one thing.

On November 08 2021 21:13 Jockmcplop wrote:


Off topic, but I was never taught a single thing about modern Ireland and the troubles in my entire time at school. My education on Ireland stopped at how Ireland was occasionally relevant to English kings.

On November 08 2021 23:11 Silvanel wrote:
Funnily enough, I seem to recall that Northern Ireland independence was discussed in our "Knowledge about society" class in middle school. I think it wasn't mandated by the program, though, it was chosen by our teacher.

On November 09 2021 00:42 WombaT wrote:

We’re independent? Why did nobody tell me!?

Interesting info though, not being a prick for a second. It seems that well, almost every other place I’m hearing discussed has considerably more room for teacher autonomy in pursuing particular topics. Whereas in what parts of Britain I know about there’s a curriculum with topics and the variance is perhaps how a teacher approaches a topic. With the possible exception of Scotland who I do believe do things rather differently in education so may not be locked in to particular topics.

On November 09 2021 04:49 KwarK wrote:
My assumption is that if a home rule Ireland had decided it wanted to become a republic the way a great many former colonies did Britain would not have intervened militarily because the whole point of home rule was to get Britain out of Ireland. Ireland basically convinced Britain that the relationship wasn’t working out and that they would be better as friends. If after the breakup Ireland completely ghosted Britain there would probably have been some hard feelings but no will to force Ireland to get back together with them.