I have been trying to consider other perspectives for 3 decades, but I still can’t see how forcing kids to sit in a desk hours a day isn’t a form of torture.
At the very least call it socialization instead of education, don’t gaslight kids into thinking classrooms are primarily about learning. They are primarily about creating order.
Agreed. I once wrote an article based on a TED talk - do schools kill creativity - and touch on a lot of this stuff. People (young or old) weren't designed to be put in that environment, and if you act out, you're 'naughty'… nope just normal!
School fucked me up so bad I don’t even know how to talk about it in a way that people can understand. As soon as I got out of school and tried to self study, I realized that I was far more capable than I had ever thought.
There are few things I learned that were important but I can’t think of any that I couldn’t have learned in a self-study environment with an empathetic tutor there to answer questions and help me decided on assignments that would be optimized for my own strengths and weaknesses.
Whose TED was it
If our course work is based on 1 textbook, we don't need 4 months 2master the knowledge in that textbook. We can read the textbook over a weekend, then spend a few weeks covering material in class.
Education is vital. School? Not so much.
Well, classrooms SHOULD be about learning. Some schools are better than others. I would only say that as poorly as public schools are doing now, i think having no public schools would probably be worse. At least in most cases.
I don’t see how classrooms are practical places for learning unless it’s all guided study where each student is doing their own thing and the teacher is there to help them stay on track and answer questions. Lectures are so completely outdated, even if they are interactive. If I find a tutorial series on YouTube I can watch it at 2x speed, screenshot or make a video recording of any part I want to review and skip anything that is redundant to me.
A tutorial and a recorded lecture are basically the same. The benefit of live is being able to ask questions/have a discussion. Theoretically, it shouldn't matter whether it is live in a classroom or online but data shows otherwise.
During COVID, when classrooms turned into Zoom meetings, students did worse on average. Could be other factors involved of course and different people learn better in different ways.
I hated school a lot... Didn't suffer much per sé but I was one of the kids that was ahead of the rest and was held back every year because the teachers didn't know what to do with us. Then I got bored. I lost a lot of my skills for learning because I didn't use them, everything was too easy.
When I finished first, they just made me write numbers on a notebook until the class was over.
I was similar except I wasn’t good at memorizing facts. Give me a problem to solve and I’d be one of the first to solve it, plus I could find all the connections that even teachers missed.
Finally when I started self studying I realized I could learn 2-3x faster than the class was teaching the material. I noticed all kinds of contradictions with what teachers and parents said but when I pointed them out they’d change the topic or get angry at me.
One of the handful of true stories from my novel (which is 95% fiction) is when the boy (me) was told that “we live in a free country” I immediately decided to walk out of the classroom and go to the bathroom without raising my hand. I got in a lot of trouble for that. The teacher lectured me about how “we need rules to prevent chaos” and I said “ok, so we live in a KIND OF MAYBE free country”
It's been said (in less words) that Thomas Edison-- 1 of the most famous inventors of the last 200 years-- would have been a juvenile delinquent in today's education systems. Today's educational systems would have dumbed him down to idiocy
I believe that we're born with high intelligence; how else was Alexander the Great able to conquer the "known" world by 21?
It's only over time in socialized settings that it is decreased enough so that the children are made controllable.