Zcorp wrote:Yakk wrote:If school should teach people how to sit in boring and slow classes (for them) and be taught nothing in the subject area (that they don't already know) and have to make that productive, why shouldn't it also teach that being left behind results in you being passed over? What makes one more valid than the other, other than one is a supporting rhetorical device, and the other isn't, for your argument?
There is a lot to do in a classroom if you feel you have mastered the material.
Yes, there is lots to do if the teacher is not willing or able to teach you the subject covered by the classroom.
There is of course teaching other students. You could be working on material for other classes, asking your teacher to get you material to learn more on the subject,
This last one might be covered under "gifted education", where you do work and are evaluated for work that is outside of the standard curriculum.
doing the research yourself to learn more in the subject in class time, create a project where you apply that knowledge to demonstrate your mastery of the material and show to other students how this knowledge is practical.
If you are sitting there in a classroom bored, you either have a shitty teacher or take your learning into your own hands. While it sucks to have a shitty teacher that is true for everyone, but expecting the system to give you significant resources (a teacher and a classroom) is no where close to just.
What if there are 30 students in a school board that are bored by the speed at which regular classrooms move? Because that is what most Gifted education programs that are more than a token "here is some extra work" kind of material act like. A full classroom of students that push forward faster.
Same resources -- a classroom with a teacher, with a modest amount of pupils per teacher. Different constraints, because the students are able to advance through the material faster, and consume harder material.
Not only do you want those things but we have no evidence that staying in that classroom hurts the development nor performance of these individuals asking for extra resources, and significant evidence suggesting it hurts the development of other individuals even if we disregard the lower amount of resources they will get.
My theory is that you put "eliminate privilege" as your primary goal prior to the justifications, and not (as your rhetoric claims) as a derived claim.
Then sir, you would be incorrect.
Then where does your certainty come from? Ignorance? Faith? Revealed knowledge?
The fact is that the educational pedagogy has fluctuated wildly over the last century. Each time, people have put forward that their method is the one true scientific method, and that the last folk where misguided. Why should whatever pedagogy you have chosen be the right one, and be so right that everyone else is certainly wrong?
I'm not saying that you are definitely wrong -- I'm just saying that your faith in your own beliefs sure undermines any faith I have that you are reasonable. People who are certain they are right are not the kind of people to trust with something as important as education.
Your welcome to read through the rest of this thread.
Why are you talking about my welcome? You're welcome to talk about your welcome, but you're not welcome to talk about my welcome, thank you very much.
Unless you mean "you are welcome to read through the rest of this thread", in which case, no thank you. I already have, and your insinuation that I have not seems to be nothing more than flame bait. And your grammar skillz are the sucks.
My goal is much less about eliminating privilege and very much about creating an environment that creates the most success for the most people.
What about an environment that, for each student, creates the most success, within the bounds of fair resource allocation?
Then students who, for whatever reason, "deserve" more resources, get access to them. (In particular, educating people with disabilities)
And given the degree to which you express certainty in the domain of a social science (and hence, a really really hard science -- nothing easy like physics), there is strong reason to doubt that the evidence is nearly strong enough to back that level of certainty.
I've have not once ever made the claim that physics is easy, nor have a made the claim that social science is a harder science except in the regard of isolating variables. I have made claim that social sciences are harder to apply in practice (for a large variety of reasons, but this has nothing to do with the acquisition of knowledge. Take your red herrings elsewhere please.
Social sciences are ridiculously harder to generate facts for. The number of variables you have to control for an isolate in even a simple psychology experiment is beyond what the LHC has to deal with, because human beings are ridiculously complex things compared to fundamental particles, even fundamental particles being smashed together at near light speed.
Say "I don't know, but studies suggest" is reasonable in the social sciences. Saying "X is true", where X is anything but a tautology or a statement hedged by a ridiculous number of qualifications, is a demonstration of colossal arrogance and a sign of ignorance or deception.
Ie, the research on the "Matthew effect" -- the closest you could come to proving it as being absolutely true would require controlled studies where you teach some children to read at a young age, and teach other students a variety of other skills. The variety of other skills would produce a myriad control groups (to deal with the attention problem -- ie, the attention given to the child being taught to read confounding the experiment). The children would have to be randomly assigned to a control group, and not told what the study was about, and you'd have to somehow prevent the possibility of children dropping out of the study.
The above constraints are simply ridiculous.
Instead, you have observational studies (or at best rare natural experiments), from which you derive correlations and you decide on causation based on hopefully reasonable "just so" stories. Hopefully you get effect sizes larger than the drop out rate of participation (in case the drop outs are far from random). What comes out is a strong suggestion.
Another name for the Matthew effect might be a "virtuous cycle", where students who successfully master material at one level end up with a boost when learning material at the next level. Then, instead of aiming at relative performance (which the Matthew effect concentrates on, as derived from the sociology model), it concentrates on the internal benefits of mastery. Which would suggest a mastery based education model, where people aren't advanced until they have mastered the previous cycle, instead of a social promotion system, where even abysmal learning performance is ignored, and the student is moved onto the next level of subject material with no support to learn the old material.
Under that argument, we'd throw out the grade system and social promotion completely.
Now, the effect of this would be a Matthew's effect of advancement of students through the education system. Those that start out with a head start would always stay ahead: so if your primary goal was equality, such a system would be bad. In a sense, it is an individually streamed system. It would also be a really poor babysitting system, as you'd need to mix both 10 year old fast learners and 18 year old slower learners in either the same classroom, or being taught the same material (or at least, so I'd suspect).
No...that there is student tracking at all is a inequality in school resources.
Sorry, what? If each student receives near to the same resources, there might be inequality in outcomes, but not in resources.
An inequality that has little to no impact on improving student performance (for the gifted) and significant impact on decreasing other students performance.
And once again, what about the MIT/Community college calculus argument. I've asked you it once. And then twice. And now a third time.
How is splitting engineering students taking calculus at MIT and business students at community college not similar to "tracking"?You could do that, you would also then have a very different goal that a good social program should have. If are not trying to allocate resources to create the most success in the most people, but instead trying to allocate a huge amount of resources on a few specific individuals to try and achieve maximal progress in fields of study that would be a very different goal. You would be right in like with Milton Friedman and how he thinks we our economic policies should behave. Although I'd argue that the social unrest created by this inequality will likely lead to great conflict that will very likely threaten the progress made by those few to increase knowledge and human well-being.
But you said your first goal wasn't equality, yet here you are saying that "good social programs" are evaluated by the degree they create equality?
Puzzling.
