The dumbing down theory

[Justinian2]

Is education optimal?

Their research raises a few red flags. On the one hand: Is it any surprise that a public school system forced to "teach to the test" churns out students who are averse (or flat-out unable) to thinking analytically, learn on their own, or write a research paper? On the other: Does the number of pages read + the number of pages written = an accurate assessment of academic progress?

The complete article is at this link: http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/life/does-going-to-college-make-you-smarter-or-poorer-2445161/

Unfortunately, we can't actually see the people that are making posts on the internet. For all we know, some of them are pre high school students or Alzheimer patients.

What is certain is that the majority either do not have sufficient analytical skills or prefer a verbal stoning to analytical debate.

Politicians have similar characteristics. Is the political dialogue, dumbed down to appeal to ten year olds, part of the problem? Are people emulating politicians? Are politicians teaching bad habits to citizens?

Or is the blame to be shouldered by the educators?

The dumbing down theory is popular. Google shows more than a million pages discussing this theory. Amazon offers books on it. A lot of people believe in this theory.

http://www.erichufschmid.net/Dumb-down/Dumbed-down-Part-1.html

 

[drkitten]

Is education optimal?

Of course not. Among other things, optimal education would be almost exclusively one-on-one, because that way you can make best use of the individual experiences and knowledge of the individual student. That's the basis for the tutorial system at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, but it's cost-prohibitive to deploy on a larger system; even at Oxbridge, it exists only because the government provides much larger educational subsidies to those universities than to former polys, and because most of the colleges have uberhuge endowments that can support this tremendously expensive teaching style.

The article you cite is looking at the wrong things, though. College doesn't make you smarter or poorer; if you're lucky, it will help make you better educated (which is not the same as smarter). Most people, however, want a college degree because it will make them more employable, and in particular, more employable at "better" jobs. (I'd much rather work as an accountant than as a plumber, since I don't really fancy spending my days being drenched in untreated, freezing-cold sewage.)

So it has little to do with politicians and a lot more to do with "offer the customers what they want." Criticizing universities for offering watered-down curricula is like criticizing an ice cream shop for serving high sugar, high fat food.

 

[Justinian2]

Of course not. Among other things, optimal education would be almost exclusively one-on-one, because that way you can make best use of the individual experiences and knowledge of the individual student. That's the basis for the tutorial system at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, but it's cost-prohibitive to deploy on a larger system; even at Oxbridge, it exists only because the government provides much larger educational subsidies to those universities than to former polys, and because most of the colleges have uberhuge endowments that can support this tremendously expensive teaching style.

The article you cite is looking at the wrong things, though. College doesn't make you smarter or poorer; if you're lucky, it will help make you better educated (which is not the same as smarter). Most people, however, want a college degree because it will make them more employable, and in particular, more employable at "better" jobs. (I'd much rather work as an accountant than as a plumber, since I don't really fancy spending my days being drenched in untreated, freezing-cold sewage.)

So it has little to do with politicians and a lot more to do with "offer the customers what they want." Criticizing universities for offering watered-down curricula is like criticizing an ice cream shop for serving high sugar, high fat food.

I do agree that there are a few times when one on one is best. I'm not sure that the best education is ALWAYS one on one. Home schooling gives a great education when the mother is a good teacher. However, the student, her child, doesn't get to interact with other children as much.

There are two reasons that immediately come to mind for not liking the present school systems. The first is that it puts too much emphasis on 'being right' about facts given by the text book and professor. The second reason is that the system doesn't teach a person that a memorized fact isn't always the most important thing. I think students are made too competative and should sometimes realize that good human interaction is sometimes more important than a mere grade.

 

[WildCat]

Uh, it was actually the dumbing down of coursework and social promotions and such that preceded standardized tests. Standardized tests allow for comparisons between schools so that schools that give you an "A" for spellling your name right 60% of the time don't outrank schools which have actual academic standards.

 

[drkitten]

I do agree that there are a few times when one on one is best. I'm not sure that the best education is ALWAYS one on one. Home schooling gives a great education when the mother is a good teacher. However, the student, her child, doesn't get to interact with other children as much.

Why should interaction be taught at school?

One of the things that a lot of educational theorists have been complaining about for decades is the idea that school is a place to correct parental failings; anything we want children to do should become part of the school curriculum. If parents don't make sure that their children spend active time playing sports, then we need to add gym facilities and make time during the day for play. If parents don't provide appropriate medical care for their children, we need to have a nurse on-staff. If parents don't provide proper breakfasts for the children, we need to put a waffle iron in the kitchen.

... and if parents don't provide opportunities for socialization, then obviously we need to group all the students together in a single room and make everyone learn to wait their turn while the teacher helps each student one at a time.

 

[iknownothing]

churns out students who are averse to (or flat-out unincapable of) to thinking analytically, learning on their own, or writeing a research paper?

Sorry, that sentence bugged me.

 

[sadhatter]

Why should interaction be taught at school?

One of the things that a lot of educational theorists have been complaining about for decades is the idea that school is a place to correct parental failings; anything we want children to do should become part of the school curriculum. If parents don't make sure that their children spend active time playing sports, then we need to add gym facilities and make time during the day for play. If parents don't provide appropriate medical care for their children, we need to have a nurse on-staff. If parents don't provide proper breakfasts for the children, we need to put a waffle iron in the kitchen.

... and if parents don't provide opportunities for socialization, then obviously we need to group all the students together in a single room and make everyone learn to wait their turn while the teacher helps each student one at a time.

Yeah , strip away social interaction, sports, and make sure that if a kid gets hurt it is a pain in the butt to get them to someone who can help. That will make kids want to go to school and learn more.

I hated sports in school ( and in adulthood.), but at the very least it was a break from the monotony of the daily life in school. And if i enjoyed that time ( if not the activity itself) i am sure those who enjoy running around , sweating and getting hurt are getting quite a bit out of it.

To try and say by making school less pleasant , varied, and let's face it, fun, you will get better results is just silly. In my later high school years i tended to be contracted out to set up plays to help kids get into certain issues. To this day i will still get the odd teenager asking me if i " was that guy who did the play about Volatile organic compounds . " the fact they remember this speaks volumes for making learning interesting. Putting kids in a russian gulag devoted to nothing other than education does nothing other than teaching them to learn enough to shut up the teachers and their parents.

 

[WildCat]

Yeah , strip away social interaction, sports, and make sure that if a kid gets hurt it is a pain in the butt to get them to someone who can help.

School nurses are allowed to help? When I was in grade school back in the 1970s the nurses couldn't even give you an aspirin for a headache, the nurse's office was where you went to await mom or dad picking you up after blowing chunks all over the classroom. Which the janitor would cover with some sort of pink stuff that smelled worse than the vomit...

 

[sadhatter]

School nurses are allowed to help? When I was in grade school back in the 1970s the nurses couldn't even give you an aspirin for a headache, the nurse's office was where you went to await mom or dad picking you up after blowing chunks all over the classroom. Which the janitor would cover with some sort of pink stuff that smelled worse than the vomit...

Schools must have been different in the 70's, or in chicago, where i was, in my public and high school days, the school nurse would bind large wounds till one got to the hospital, keep teeth that had been knocked out in a liquid that would hopefully preserve them as long as possible, keep kids from aggravating a broken bone, do lice checks, administer shots, and generally anything that could be done before getting to a hospital and that was within the scope of practice for their profession.

 

[Justinian2]

Why should interaction be taught at school?

One of the things that a lot of educational theorists have been complaining about for decades is the idea that school is a place to correct parental failings; anything we want children to do should become part of the school curriculum. If parents don't make sure that their children spend active time playing sports, then we need to add gym facilities and make time during the day for play. If parents don't provide appropriate medical care for their children, we need to have a nurse on-staff. If parents don't provide proper breakfasts for the children, we need to put a waffle iron in the kitchen.

... and if parents don't provide opportunities for socialization, then obviously we need to group all the students together in a single room and make everyone learn to wait their turn while the teacher helps each student one at a time.

A year at an expensive post graduate school changed one of my children from being a liberal leaning conservative to being a conservative.

An arrest on false charges turned him back into a liberal leaning conservative.

What I'm saying is that schools and society are very influential in molding our children.

The following is one idea that I've had that has actually been adopted by one teacher. My argument was: "How do people know how to vote if they don't have any goals in mind for the society that they want? Get the children to design their own Utopia and discuss it in class. Knowing what they want in a government and where that government should go, should precede the selection of any candidate." The Californian teacher did incorporate that idea into her curriculum.

My point is that people haven't been taught the tools necessary to contribute to society.

 

[gumboot]

Personally I think this is a direct consequence of western society placing an unrealistic value on tertiary education. Once upon a time, it wasn't seen as a necessary step in education except for specific academic-orientated subjects and things such as lawyering, doctoring, engineering, and so forth.

The overwhelming majority who didn't go to university weren't seen as inferior in any way.

Then something shifted. I don't know how it happened, or why, but over time the view became that tertiary education was vitally important, and soon it was accepted as a matter of course that you had to go. Suddenly a whole vast population of students left high school and went straight into university, not because they wanted to or because their chosen field or work required it, but because it was expected of everyone.

These people, who didn't belong at university and didn't really want to be there, needed subjects to interest them, so you get a change in the sort of courses made available. One tertiary institute here now offers, I've noticed, a THREE YEAR full degree course for the job of... wait for it...

Flight Attendant

WTF?

Now these people come out with worthless degrees and can't find work because they haven't picked up useful employable skills they traditionally would have acquired from leaving school and going into an apprenticeship system.

Meanwhile the influx of students has devalued a degree severely so that those who really did need to do tertiary study find their hard effort and careful study was basically a waste of time.

And all the while there's no one going out of school any more and taking up a trade because if you haven't been to university you're some sort of social pariah retard. Some polytechs offer courses in these technical trades but formal education was never the best place to learn that sort of skill and as such they're coming out with worthless pieces of paper because they don't really know what they're doing. As a result the traditional work for those non-university types is suffering a severe manpower shortage; plumbers, electricians, builders, and so forth.

New Zealand, as example, has only about one thousand master plumbers serving a population of four million! And most of those plumbers are either very close to or actually over retirement age. (A couple of years back my parents had to get a plumber in to do a gas fitting. He was over 70 and working on Christmas Eve (had a full day's work booked) and told my parents he wanted to retire, but his work were so desperate to retain him due to lack of replacement that they basically just increased his fee until he couldn't say no).

 

[drkitten]

Personally I think this is a direct consequence of western society placing an unrealistic value on tertiary education. Once upon a time, it wasn't seen as a necessary step in education except for specific academic-orientated subjects and things such as lawyering, doctoring, engineering, and so forth.

The overwhelming majority who didn't go to university weren't seen as inferior in any way.

Then something shifted. I don't know how it happened, or why, but over time the view became that tertiary education was vitally important, and soon it was accepted as a matter of course that you had to go. Suddenly a whole vast population of students left high school and went straight into university, not because they wanted to or because their chosen field or work required it, but because it was expected of everyone.

People had unrealistic expectations of what they wanted to do for a career, or what they wanted their children to do for a career. My grandfather worked on a fishing boat until he got a "better" job working in a fish cannery, up to his elbows in fish guts and sharp cutting blades. He quite reasonably wanted my father to be able to spend his declining years in possession of all of his fingers.....

Vietnam helped, too, at least in the States. Sputnik money made it very easy and cheap to go to school, and you were more likely to make it to your declining years at all if you didn't go to to the hamburger factory. But once the boomers got out of college, they discovered there weren't enough jobs that actually demanded college education.

And the employers discovered that college-educated workers were competing for (white collar) jobs that ordinarily would have hired high school graduates, so they raised their standards. The result is that now you need a college degree to compete with the pool of applicants, and everyone knows it, so everyone tried to go on to college.

We're both overstating it, actually. The percentage of people (in the States) with high school degrees is close to 100%, but the percentage of people with college degrees is still only about 30%. (And that's true even if you only look at 25-29 year olds.) Most people still have traditional (high school) education and traditional employment. But those aren't the ones you read about in these muckracking articles.

New Zealand, as example, has only about one thousand master plumbers serving a population of four million! And most of those plumbers are either very close to or actually over retirement age.

Yes. But do you really want to be a plumber? Do you really want to be drenched to the waist in other people's feces on Christmas Eve? There's a reason that even master plumbers want their children to go to college.....

 

[WildCat]

Then something shifted. I don't know how it happened, or why, but over time the view became that tertiary education was vitally important, and soon it was accepted as a matter of course that you had to go. Suddenly a whole vast population of students left high school and went straight into university, not because they wanted to or because their chosen field or work required it, but because it was expected of everyone.

Because eventually a high school diploma couldn't even guarantee you could write your own name correctly, let alone write a coherent sentence or do basic math. At least a college degree means you can do those things.

 

[WildCat]

We're both overstating it, actually. The percentage of people (in the States) with high school degrees is close to 100%,

I bet it's much closer to 75% than 100%.

If you went to a big-city public school more like 50%.

 

[Modified]

Yes. But do you really want to be a plumber? Do you really want to be drenched to the waist in other people's feces on Christmas Eve?

The plumber's assistant usually does the dirty work.

 

[WildCat]

The plumber's assistant usually does the dirty work.

Better yet, the plumber just lets other contractors use his license and he collects money without doing any work at all.

 

[gumboot]

Yes. But do you really want to be a plumber? Do you really want to be drenched to the waist in other people's feces on Christmas Eve? There's a reason that even master plumbers want their children to go to college.....

The only time I've ever seen a plumber even remotely "drenched to the waist in other people's feces" is in lame American comedies.

Plumbers here get paid better than doctors, and most of what they're doing is clean and relatively straight forward. Same for electricians.

I'd rather be debt free and replacing the washer on someone's tap for $100 an hour than making someone's hamburger for $10 an hour so I can pay off my $20,000 loan for my worthless degree.

 

[Modified]

Plumbers here get paid better than doctors, and most of what they're doing is clean and relatively straight forward. Same for electricians.

Around here, AC work pays better than both, and is probably easier than both.

 

[tsig]

People had unrealistic expectations of what they wanted to do for a career, or what they wanted their children to do for a career. My grandfather worked on a fishing boat until he got a "better" job working in a fish cannery, up to his elbows in fish guts and sharp cutting blades. He quite reasonably wanted my father to be able to spend his declining years in possession of all of his fingers.....

Vietnam helped, too, at least in the States. Sputnik money made it very easy and cheap to go to school, and you were more likely to make it to your declining years at all if you didn't go to to the hamburger factory. But once the boomers got out of college, they discovered there weren't enough jobs that actually demanded college education.

And the employers discovered that college-educated workers were competing for (white collar) jobs that ordinarily would have hired high school graduates, so they raised their standards. The result is that now you need a college degree to compete with the pool of applicants, and everyone knows it, so everyone tried to go on to college.

We're both overstating it, actually. The percentage of people (in the States) with high school degrees is close to 100%, but the percentage of people with college degrees is still only about 30%. (And that's true even if you only look at 25-29 year olds.) Most people still have traditional (high school) education and traditional employment. But those aren't the ones you read about in these muckracking articles.



Yes. But do you really want to be a plumber? Do you really want to be drenched to the waist in other people's feces on Christmas Eve? There's a reason that even master plumbers want their children to go to college.....

That's what apprentices are for.

ETA: curse you modified

 

[bobc]

http://www.erichufschmid.net/Dumb-down/Dumbed-down-Part-1.html

Hmm, website says this

Schools are not "dumbing us down"

The dumbing down phenomenon is an illusion. Most parents have an exaggerated view of their children. Almost every parent considers his children to be much more intelligent, good looking, and talented than they really are.

When children do lousy in school, some parents refuse to believe it is because their children are actually dumb. Instead, they look for an excuse, and the most popular excuse today is that the school and television transformed their children into idiots through a magic and mysterious dumbing down process.

People who believe that the school or television made their children stupid are simply showing an inability to be realistic about their children.

which kinda goes against the "dumbing down theory". So it's not question of dumbing down, but dumbness.

Then it says this

A few decades earlier they fooled the world into thinking astronauts landed on the moon. They also bombard us with Holocaust propaganda, and they have convinced tens of millions of people that there are creatures from other planets flying around the earth in spaceships

Did I read that wrong? Or are they saying the moon landings were a hoax? I'm now wondering if this site is an example of the dumbness that they are proclaiming.

ETA: reading further, this web page says

The Zionist movement is the most significant movement of the human race.

It is the largest, most diabolical, and most destructive.

The Zionists are using the media to trick us into fighting their wars, giving them pity, and funding their movement.

They are also trying to get control of our schools in order to manipulate our children.

Okay... so it's an anti-semitic website. Not the greatest place to go to for information.