Re: [Gnu-arch-users] OT: trained dependency

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 15:43, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> >>>>> "Zenaan" == Zenaan Harkness <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> Zenaan, do you have anything of your own to say?  If not, aren't you
> as guilty of deferring to authority as any of the well-schooled are?
> Those are rhetorical questions---I know you do have something to say,
> and I doubt you swallow everything Ilich or the other guy says without
> thinking, and so does everybody else on g.a.u.  But look at your last
> few posts.  OK, now tell me how you know that all those kids you worry
> about aren't freethinkers cloaked in appropriate quotes, just like
> you?  Then tell me how to get a computer to compute that?

Stephen, you called into question what I was saying. So I decided a few
links and quotes would be in order, to "defend" my own point of view. If
you have not been able to fathom my point of view, then perhaps I need
to learn to express myself better.

> The problem is not figuring out what's wrong.  We all know what the
> results are, and we all agree they're despicable.  But what Ilich and
> his ilk are doing is identical except for political slant to what the
> Bible-thumpers and right-wingers, not to mention the American
> Federation of Teachers, do.  There is no detectable science there,
> simply identification of bad results, and then a jump crossing
> light-years to "identification" of "causes".

Based on my own experience of school, which I started after a year and
two thirds of home schooling (which I started at the age of 7), here are
some things I believe:
 - school does not teach the way I learn
 - school is not conducive to forming original thought
 - school is not conducive to self confidence
 - schooling is not designed to teach:
   - independant, analytical thinking
   - conversation/ the socratic method
   - how to handle relationships with peers (friendship or otherwise)

And I believe that any of a number of alternative school systems, such
as:
 - home schooling
 - steiner schools
 - no schooling (or rather, self-education/ apprecticing)
 - apprenticeships

are significantly better than the compulsory system we have.

> Here's a story to make you puke.  At my alma mater I once spent some
> time drinking coffee with a very depressed Indian prince (who also
> happened to be an Assistant Professor of Economics at Stanford).  He
> had just got out of a PhD defense of an ed school student, who had
> done a small survey, so small that he had fewer data points than
> variables.  So he made up (by interpolation) a bunch of extra data
> points and ran his statistics.  OK, fail him, and tell him "do it
> right, next time"?  Nope; the chairman of the committee told my
> professor that by education research standards that "technical point"
> was too fine to be relevant to the pass/fail decision, and "anyway, we
> do that all the time; small data sets are an inherent problem in our
> research."
> 
> Sure, you can point to that as further evidence of how bad the current
> situation is; but that's as far as you can go, except to say "Down
> With Everything; back to the Rousseauvian[1] State of Nature and let's
> see if something good happens this time"!  These are the people who
> are generating the data on cause and effect---some of it's surely
> good, but how the hell can somebody without PhDs in stats, soc, _and_
> ed know?

If you read Gatto, you will likely be convinced that these "non
education" systems are designed to be exactly that. It took in the order
of 100 years to institute, but it was by design.

I'm not going to say more than that, because without writing a bloody
thesis with stats, detailed history and the like, you'll just trash it.
So go read Gatto if it actually interests you. He does scatter (perhaps
he'll write a book specifically on it next time) nuggets of "how to
actually educate effectively" throughout his books. But you have to go
digging.

...
> Simply nuking all the public schools, or merely abolishing
> mandatory schooling, will not have the desired effect.

Well, _that_ convinces me then don't it.

> Me?  I keep a 2x4 by the blackboard, and on Friday whack any student
> who has not publically contradicted me at least once that week.  In
> graduate courses I require that the contradiction be "plausible".  ;-)

Ahah! So you're defending your livelihood perhaps. Not in the slightest?
Well who's to really say.

> But I'm, uh, a rare bird.  That takes a lot of emotional effort, and

I'm sure it is, and I'm sure you do. But I put it to you that you are
severely handicapped by the system; and that the system is designed with
the specific intent to handicap people like you, and reward those who
"submit" in a docile way to the system. Really, if you haven't read
Gatto, I believe you will find him distinctly insightful.

> it takes up time in class that could be used more profitably by
> lecturing ... if the students were accustomed enough to thinking, that
> is.  :-(

Not accustomed to thinking, _by design_. By specific intent and
persistence sustained over a century. Sure, shoot these statements down,
as I can't copy in 100s of pages to convince you. More inflammatory
comments or not, I can't do in email what Gatto does in 400 pages (in
just one of his currently four books).

> But most professors measure "achievement" by the quantity of
> received wisdom that the students can spit back on the tests.
> 
> Note that in any of the top 50 graduate departments in any field, or
> in most undergrad honors programs, there's no reason _not_ to measure
> things that way.

Except that pop quizzes, monthly exams and published results (resulting
in humiliation for most in the bell curve) have specific purposes which
are not related to education. I don't care whether you believe it or
not, I happen to agree with Gatto.

>   So it's a tough call where to "get out of the
> students' way" and just measure results, and where you have to get
> into the trenches and teach your ass off.

You are already a product of the last century of systematization. You
don't (speak at least) get past your assumption that results must be
measured, and presumably that results actually measure intelligence.

You can't be blamed as such, but try to see that these assumptions are
exactly that, assumptions, that might in fact be false, that might in
fact be designed to have effects that we clearly see today, but are so
pervasive that we don't see.

> [2]  Yes, that's right.  According to a study mentioned by the
> Economist a couple of years ago, Vietnamese-Americans and immigrants
> had the highest scholastic achievement scores in the US, beating out
> the perennial favorites Chinese-American and Jewish-American kids by a
> statistically significant margin.

This does not surprise me. Based on my recent reading, I would expect it
to be so.

> HTH

A valiant effort perhaps.