In a very similar vein is Bryan Caplan's book "the Case Against Education."<p>In an interview[1] he lays out his argument, roughly, as:<p>> Right. So, the first story is called human capital, and just says that people with more education earn more money because they have been trained effectively for the jobs they are going to do. So, school--you go to school, and it gives you more skills; you make more money. Nice simple story.<p>> The main story that I am pushing in the book is called signaling. This says that, yes, going to school does cause your earnings to go up; but, the reason isn't so much that you are learning useful skills as that you are getting certified. You are getting a stamp on your forehead saying, 'Great; hey, premium worker. Hire this person.'<p>> And then, the last story is called ability bias. This one just says that it's just coincidental that people who have more education make more money; and rather, what's going on is it's the kind of thing that wealthy people--the people who are going to be wealthy--rather do.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-education/" rel="nofollow">https://www.econtalk.org/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-ed...</a>
Well of course it is. How are you supposed to learn about how to integrate into society without, you know...learning about it?<p>I wish people would be more specific - it's not that education in of itself is bad, it's that the way it is currently implemented in this specific society has these specific flaws. I strongly dislike when a discussion disparages an entire concept when it's really just our implementation of that concept that is flawed. It rules out potential solutions simply because they are associated with ones that failed, when the differences between them could result in success.<p>Not saying that's what's in the video - I get the impression that they are in fact talking about specifically the implementation and not ripping on education itself, but I've seen and heard stuff like this used as the foundation not only of attacks on being educated but also on anything else where some implementations of an ideal failed and so the ideal and all possible solutions stemming from that ideal are dismissed as unworkable. And it bothers me a bit how that approach is popular among many sides of many arguments that I have seen. I would in fact suggest that it is in fact a marker of a failed education - using an example of a failed implementation to argue that the concept itself is inherently flawed is itself an example of a failure in critical thinking.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the problem is always scale. The modern system of American education really was born out of idealism, in fact the same ideals that the comments here are using to attack it. It doesn't even matter what you start with. When you scale, you end up with <i>mass</i> education, i.e. a system tasked with the job of actively taking care of almost every American child for 40 hours a week, whether they want it or not. There is no way to have that without the inevitable accompanying problems.
I just found that this OP and the other two HN articles I've stumbled on today are somehow related at a deeper level - they're all talking about the creativity and intelligence in general.<p>The Lesson to Unlearn - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729619" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729619</a><p>Brain tunes itself to criticality, maximizing information processing - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729211" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21729211</a><p>I don't think all individuals should become a 100% creative/original person. That would make the society very unstable. So we need some (actually, a lot of) obedient people that makes the society keep going, in this regard that I think the current education is useful. On the other hand, there's always a rebel no matter how hard we try to cast people into a form. The question is that the society needs a good mixture of creative and boring people and I don't know how we can achieve that. My theory right now is the society is somehow auto-adjusting itself - like the brain auto-adjusting itself in the above article - to have its "critical" state, i.e. having the right mixture of people: not too boring but not too revolutionary. Of course, the society is much bigger and more complex than a single brain, so its adjustment is slow and inefficient. But it's interesting how it's still functioning while its education system is so broken.
Garbage.<p>You can look at countries without high levels or any education in existence today. They are far more Indoctrinated. They are far less free thinking.<p>Even in a strict religious school I would say every year of education makes a person less indoctrinated. The things you have to learn like science outweigh that years negatives whatever that maybe.<p>Could you improve the education system.... yes... we all know that. But are not sure how.<p>The idea about Japan not being scientific is however very interesting for 1989. The meme they are technologically advanced isn't really correct, it's almost a racist mythology.
I’d highly recommend Sceptical Essays(1928) by Bertrand Russell to anybody interested in the topic: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/144355.Sceptical_Essays" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/144355.Sceptical_Essays</a>
Over time, I've come to realise that the most important gift we can give our children is formal training in critical thinking. I think STEM and such can wait.<p>The ability to question narratives put forth by the industry, the government, media, political parties etc. is important not only to realise the truth at an abstract level, but also has practical implications on things such as successful investment strategies.
I believe the most important thing we can teach kids is the ability to discern influences, at all time. Some are positive, and obviously some are negative. Everything exert an influence on us and it is crucial to be aware of it.<p>People should be able to see the world with their own eyes, instead of with the eyes of culture or other socially transmitted concepts.
It most certainly is!<p>If you listen to kids they will tell you their take on the environment, consumption, worthy causes, etc. I’m quite sure they’re not thinking about these things themselves.<p>So yeah, teachers indoctrinate students with their biases. Some kids seek out their own information as they grow up, many don’t question it.<p>So we end up in places where nuclear power was bad, for example, or banning straws (when there are much bigger issues with plastics) and detrimental things like everyone is special and unique and the future is yours to conquer (and of course this leads to disappointment when due to outsourcing and shipping jobs overseas they end up working at dead end minimum wage jobs).
The US formalism and legal system around public education specifically calls out its purpose for creating nationally aligned citizenship.<p>For example a few years ago Colorado proposed to educate High Schoolers using a textbook that highlights morally questionable aspects of American history from the perspective of "The Left" (Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States"), it was rejected by the courts on the grounds it would not accomplish the required purpose of creating nationally aligned citizens, crucially NOT because it wasn't a good textbook for teaching history.
Nice video! I'd like to know when and where Chomsky made these remarks. In fact, I'd like to watch the entire presentation.
Strange that the captions are often incorrect -- did Chomsky review and approve them?
I think we can't really expect the opposite to happen. There's not an educational system out there that would actively try to delegitimize itself or the power structures it exists in.<p>That being said, Chomsky's works -- especially, Understanding Power and Manufacturing Consent -- are extremely helpful to understanding our current world. Even if the examples are out-dated, you can see the same things play out today as they did in the 80's. I would recommend them even if you don't align personally with his politics.
It is intended to be, but in reality it’s just a system that trains students to pass tests. For the most part, such system leaves students highly skeptical towards everything - which is a good thing.
I don’t agree with this. Because of the education I received at K-12 and undergrad studies, I was able to get a job. Without that I would not have been able to support my family. Also the K-12 educational systems across the world have lifted several billions out of poverty. Without educational system most people would be mired in ignorance and believing in myths.
There are endless debates about curriculum and yet there is one lessen that is never up for debate, and it is thought throughout every day and in every lessen: Sit down, be quiet, do as you're told.<p>I wonder what a society would look like, where each of us had not been exposed to over a decade of this in our most impressionable years.
It's quite eye opening to learn about the origins of the modern education system. The how and the why of the modern school system. Especially the people who brought the public school system from europe to america. They certainly weren't interested in creating a population of critical thinkers. It's why public "education" is supported by such disparate countries like america to nazi germany to the soviet union to communist china. One thing all countries and politicians and elites love is public "education".
Also school plants into children some biases that later used by authorities for divide-and-conquer.<p>E.g. the school told me that I belong to some ethnicity and that there are other ethnicities I should know about. As a child I couldn't care less. Why would they tell me this if ethnicity doesn't even matter for future job?<p>Another example is socio-economic system classification: capitalist vs socialist vs fascist vs monarchy etc. Why does it have to be so clean-cut categories? Like if you're not in one camp then you have to be in another. Just another divisive tool.<p>So they do want to create the work force but they also want to prevent any sort of revolt and thus plant psychological leverages in peoples' heads. It is a science of social engineering that they don't teach in schools.
What a coincidence, I posted this just yesterday at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730116" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21730116</a> :<p>My post reads:<p>In my view schools/universities are institutions for mass indoctrination. Noam Chomsky has said something along similar lines. I borrowed the words from him.<p>A bunch of my other observations:<p><a href="https://realminority.wordpress.com/observations-of-the-world" rel="nofollow">https://realminority.wordpress.com/observations-of-the-world</a>
People should go to school to learn, not to be indoctrinated. They should learn critical thinking to for their own ideas and opinions based on facts and logic.
Chomsky's talk titled "Corporate Attack on Education" held at St. Philip's Church, Harlem on March 16, 2012: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbMP-cy1INA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbMP-cy1INA</a><p>> I think the university should tolerate a large diversity of opinion, which it does not. I think there is a severe failure - the failure is one of honesty, in my opinion. That is, I don't believe that scholarship within the university attempts to come to grips with the real structure of the society. I think it is under such narrow ideological controls that it avoids any concern or investigation of central issues in our society.<p>-- Noam Chomsky, interview in Business Today (May, 1973) <a href="https://chomsky.info/197305__/" rel="nofollow">https://chomsky.info/197305__/</a>
It never ceases to amaze me how this pseudo-intellectual hack is taken seriously at all. But I suppose it must be by people who have not really been exposed to any serious thinking before.<p>Leaving aside how unoriginal and trite the things he is saying actually are (I imagine it's what Trump would sound like if he had a wider vocabulary), just consider his smear of Bloom and his book. It's amazing. Here's a very serious book that tries to address the problems he just presented, and all he's got is something worse than a straw man. Suggesting that the classics have a place in the curriculum is 'a couple of smart guys deciding what the great thoughts are' and paramount to imposing authority and trashing everything else. He even manages to sandwich it into 'turning the schools into marine corps'. I think only two conclusions are possible - either he had not read the book in question, or he is willfully lying about it (and not very convincingly).