Good long read. Discussion of class in America. I mostly agree with the author so probably won’t sit well here
One thing that bothers me about the modern state of education in America is how regimented it is. As someone who succeeded under the old regime it is increasingly clear that I would have been left behind in today's landscape. I was a flunkie, I barely graduated from public school (let's call it "social promotion"), then used community college and a lower tier public university to force my way into the "creative class". I'm not sure that that pathway is still open. They have kids doing homework in kidergarten now, and the big state schools that used to require a 3.0 to get in now turn away students with all A's. We've always been a country with second chances, but the rise of the hyper-regimented education tract makes that less available. On the one hand I don't want to raise my kids in a hyper-regimented way, but on the other hand, I don't want to be careless and set them up for failure in the modern world. It's a mess we've created.
My kid goes to fifth grade a public school. Her school is for gifted children and it is different from the public school she was in before her present school. They have almost no homework and by that I mean she has homework a few times a year. They will point you to studies that seem to show most kids get very little benefit from homework at this age. They do large projects that integrate several different academic disciplines into one project most the time. They go to math class in accordance to their ability, not their age. They work to improve behavior problems not just punish. It's so totally different from my school experience. I think it might be part of the way education should change in the future. They receive the same amount of money per child as every other schools in the district but they sacrifice some of the programs found at other schools to make the thing work. An objection to this kind of thing is that these are super smart kids who mostly have parents that have fostered their kids interests and have books around and know how to conduct themselves in a classroom. There is a sliver of truth to this but I'm gonna tell ya, smart kids are wicked fucked up. Lots of ADHD, spectrum behavior, delusions of grandeur, smart fucking moths and cleaver enough to cause real trouble. I think it takes more skill to guide these classes than many others. There are schools in the district where 80% of the kids will experience houslessness. over the course of the school year. I don't think harshing on a kid who is semi homeless and facing food insecurity over not getting his math homework done will often increase his engagement in school. I don't think harsh punishment for behavior that is a natural outgrowth of such a kids life is probably helpful either. I think my kids school might be part of a model for a better education system. Making school a more positive experience could make a big difference in my kids lives. I'm kinda wandering all over the place with this but I'll end with this little thing. One of the toughest grade schools in out district is about ten blocks from my shop. Oregon's biggest housing projects feeds into that school. A teacher I know got a grant to bring a dog trained to work with victims of trauma into the classroom. He said it changed everything in his classroom. Voices lowered, kids were calmer, he had more instructional time and less time spent trying to get kids attention. Before the dog they had a huge attendance problem but after the dog truancy dropped something like 80% and stayed that way for the rest of the year. I'm not saying that every classroom needs a trauma dog but I think it does show that there are different things we could try that aren't obvious and that aren't 3 hours of homework for second grader.
But is it your fault, b_b? Do you feel guilty about it? Standardized testing has always been about punishing minorities. The SAT was invented to keep Jews out of Harvard, which was just an implementation of how the Han Chinese kept their minorities down for two thousand years. We didn't create this mess, we inherited it. But that doesn't mean you can't feel guilty about it and decide that no, the problem isn't the hyperwealthy, it's those nasty people who make fun of lolbrooks on Twitter.
I don't feel guilty; I feel conflicted. Big difference. I'd like to think that I can teach my kids to just be good people and pursue that which interests them intellectually and the rest will fall into place. But I'm just unsure that that's a viable path anymore. That's entirely due to our continual obsession with "fixing" education. As a teenager I worked all the hours at a restaurant that my boss would let me work, which put me over the legal limit almost every week. That's a type of education, but it's not the type of education that counts for anything that will get you into college, but it's proved invaluable to me personally. I don't want my kids doing 3 hours of homework a night or whatever. I want them out learning how to be humans. But the competitive landscape of education today may make that infeasible. And maybe that's fine. Times change. But it sure doesn't seem like young people are any happier these days.
You're thinking about it totally wrong. 'sokay. The whole system has lied to you your whole life and it's like finding out there's no Santa. American education as you know it was a capital-S Socialist play. Big dumb strikes? Haymarket bombings? All a part of the resources of the few belonging to the many. American education same-same. As we all know, however, socialism is the devil and must be defeated at all costs, even if you have to twist yourself into a knot defending Somalia so that Saint Rand will smile on you from the hypercapitalist afterlife. So we have to pretend that school schedules aren't arranged after the harvest and standardized testing isn't about crushing minorities and child nutrition didn't used to belong to the Department of Defense. No, no - opportunity belongs to the bold, not the landed. Of COURSE kindergarteners are getting homework! That way there's something to grade, so we can look at their performance and run their teachers through an algorithm that we can use to punish them if they look at us sideways. Those same butt-hurt conservatives talking about "bobos" don't have to deal with any of this of course 'cuz they put their kids in private schools or defiantly home-school them because of liberty or freedom or some shit. But they can for sure point out at how educational performance is dropping, just look at the graphs. Clearly the system has failed and it's undoubtedly because of those elites since Obama invented Common Core. We aren't obsessed with "fixing" education we're obsessed better performance without paying for it. Point on the graph where technology upgrades come from. Then tell me how this all comes down to the "bobos." I got a job after school at a toy store when I was in 4th grade. Totally illegal; boss still deducted FICA. There was not a time after the age of 10 in which I was not working double-digit hours a week out of the house. That's not what this is about, though: My kid goes to an IB nonprofit. Critical Race Theory? she haz it. I'm spending a grand a month for the express purpose of giving her a leg up on her peers, who are being warehoused for free so that they learn how to be warehoused as adults. Can I fix the educational system? Not from here I can't. But I also can't pretend that this is the fault of a kid on the wharf saying "inductive reasoning" instead of these choads. lolbrooks' whole thing is "they can't be elites if they have poor taste" which is about as Thurston Howell III a mentality as I can come up with.I want them out learning how to be humans.
Yeah, sure, totally agree, but this is where the conservatives have been very successful at making education a wedge for the left. At least here in Michigan (which I assume is the standard play everywhere) the GOP have found very willing collaborators in the inner city in their mission to destroy the public school system. Left and Right come together and use the abject shittiness that is the Detroit school system to say, "public schools don't work." And the left is so gullible and guileless that they just go along for fear of being labeled racists for saying, "Maybe what works in Detroit isn't what's going to work literally everywhere else." So they fuck up everybody in an attempt to seem not racist and all the while the GOP is laughing their way to a privatized system, since fuck it, I don't care how bad the schools suck even in this rich white suburb, because I wouldn't dream of sending my kid there...I just want my voucher so fuck you even more.We aren't obsessed with "fixing" education we're obsessed better performance without paying for it.
LOL you're talking to someone who literally helped mix Waiting for Superman. That said, NONE of this lands at the feet of people who went to college.And the left is so gullible and guileless that they just go along for fear of being labeled racists for saying, "Maybe what works in Detroit isn't what's going to work literally everywhere else."
THE GUY IN THE BOAT, DAVID David Brooks' whole schtick is "but I like rich people, therefore they can't be evil" and since he's been on NPR the average wish-I-went-to-Woodstock yuppie has been able to go "but look I have a diversity of ideas I listen to NPR's pet conservative!" There are a few unassailable, anthropological truths that lolbrooks is just whiffing right over: -Urbanization is a 200-year trend. It reflects the network effects of industrialization and mechanization. lolbrooks can blame it on people who make fun of his sandwich but - the "supermanager" class is a post-war American construct whose roots lie in the Marshall Plan. - The richer you are the more Republican you are. So lolbrooks can want that college professor clearing $90k a year to be the true elite? But Charles Koch earns more than a billion a month. And that's not gonna change no matter how many times lolbrooks says "bobo."So who’s of a higher social class? The guy in the boat, or the kid with the fancy words?
Ok I’ll bite. Yes lolbrooks guy doesn’t exactly have a great reputation. Urbanization isn’t a new trend and super managers have been breeding for a while. But class stratification between red and blue is real imo. These days Red folks and Blue folks seem to have stratified pretty hard and red folks of all classes think that they are under attack. That perception allows rich red folks to consolidate power and not spend as much effort keeping poorer red folks down. They can then use that consolidated force to strike down blue values in a somewhat coordinated fashion.
I believe you mean "identity politics." 'cuz when I talk to the reddest of red people I know, I have a much easier time getting 'em to agree with socialism than supply side economics. Republicans have been populist since Barry Goldwater. They've been getting votes through dog whistles and wedge issues. That doesn't make it a red vs. blue problem, it makes it a vote-your-hatred problem. Pinning the world's problems on intellectuals has been the populist play since Julius Caesar or before and "yes, yes, the problem is the people who look down on my lifestyle choices" is hardly groundbreaking political analysis.But class stratification between red and blue is real imo.
Along with class sorting, geographic sorting is a gigantic problem, in my opinion, because it means we don't have a two-party system in most places. We have two separate one party systems in most of the country. So instead of competing to to the middle, we're competing to the extremes, since in one part control you always have to out compete the other guy on purity and loyalty. Denunciations await for non-conformers. You see that hugely in the Trump controlled red areas, but increasingly among the woke set, too. For all the flak that people throw about a two party system, in theory it's supposed to be a moderating influence. by contrast, one party systems are always self-reinforcing in the worst way. I'm not sure how you roll back that trend. My hope was that Trump would make the GOP implode, the democrats would take over everything and then split in two to rebuild the middle. Clearly that was a pipe dream.