Using your own experience to discuss public education is likely no longer valid as many things have changed in schools since then.
My oldest son is in elementary school right now. However, I do not want to discuss my son’s experience on my blog.
@Liam
Eris and Makemake are not planets, only dwarf planets.
This is still subject to some debate.
jldsays:
why is it illegal to switch to an alternative currency in most countries?
Because that would make it difficult for the state to collect taxes, IMHO the main real reason. 😉
whsays:
FYI: Using your own experience to discuss public education is likely no longer valid as many things have changed in schools since then.
You seem to be talking without experience of the current state of elementary or secondary education. Go spend time in a elementary/secondary classroom and see what’s actually going on.
Liam Heathersays:
Eris and Makemake are not planets, only dwarf planets. But I’m sure you wanted to give your readership the opportunity to learn about the categorization of orbiting bodies 😉
I think the notion of norm gives a good perspective on your thoughts and on the biases you are speaking of. More specifically, there are differences between laws and prescriptive norms, and while we surely need the first, it is not that obvious for the latter.
School is a lot about norms and regular measures of the distance between an individual and the norm. As school becomes mandatory, the institution crafts a mass society of citizens.
Back when I was a student, I spent far too much time in student politics, dealing with people who constantly challenged established ideas and had many radical new ideas of their own. The most important lesson I learnt was that being a nonconformist has nothing to do with being smarter or understanding things better than the rest. It just means that you have difficulties in adapting to live in a complex society, where things are usually not the way you would want them to be.
99% of the time, those radical new ideas are not really worth anything, and challenging the established order is just based on some fundamental misunderstanding. To make things worse, there is no reliable way to distinguish the remaining 1%. Unless you are ready to take significant risks, it is just better to be a conformist and enjoy the only life you have.
For some of us, however, conformism is not really possible. Nonconformism is our problem, and we just have to learn to live with it. Back in student politics, I knew many who learned, and many who did not. Those who learned often became quite succesful in whatever they chose to do, as they had learned to be critical of themselves and question their own ideas.
The way you describe public schools (of Canada?) resembles what we had in Finland when my parents went to school. Since then, things have got much better – because of those succesful nonconformists – and even the average conformist teacher is supposed encourage a bit of nonconformism in kids.
Wherever you go, you can usually find succesful nonconformists behind the established order.
@wh
Using your own experience to discuss public education is likely no longer valid as many things have changed in schools since then.
My oldest son is in elementary school right now. However, I do not want to discuss my son’s experience on my blog.
@Liam
Eris and Makemake are not planets, only dwarf planets.
This is still subject to some debate.
Because that would make it difficult for the state to collect taxes, IMHO the main real reason. 😉
FYI: Using your own experience to discuss public education is likely no longer valid as many things have changed in schools since then.
You seem to be talking without experience of the current state of elementary or secondary education. Go spend time in a elementary/secondary classroom and see what’s actually going on.
Eris and Makemake are not planets, only dwarf planets. But I’m sure you wanted to give your readership the opportunity to learn about the categorization of orbiting bodies 😉
I think the notion of norm gives a good perspective on your thoughts and on the biases you are speaking of. More specifically, there are differences between laws and prescriptive norms, and while we surely need the first, it is not that obvious for the latter.
School is a lot about norms and regular measures of the distance between an individual and the norm. As school becomes mandatory, the institution crafts a mass society of citizens.
I see there is an article about norms on Wikipedia with a large bibliography : https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Norm_%28sociology%29
Back when I was a student, I spent far too much time in student politics, dealing with people who constantly challenged established ideas and had many radical new ideas of their own. The most important lesson I learnt was that being a nonconformist has nothing to do with being smarter or understanding things better than the rest. It just means that you have difficulties in adapting to live in a complex society, where things are usually not the way you would want them to be.
99% of the time, those radical new ideas are not really worth anything, and challenging the established order is just based on some fundamental misunderstanding. To make things worse, there is no reliable way to distinguish the remaining 1%. Unless you are ready to take significant risks, it is just better to be a conformist and enjoy the only life you have.
For some of us, however, conformism is not really possible. Nonconformism is our problem, and we just have to learn to live with it. Back in student politics, I knew many who learned, and many who did not. Those who learned often became quite succesful in whatever they chose to do, as they had learned to be critical of themselves and question their own ideas.
The way you describe public schools (of Canada?) resembles what we had in Finland when my parents went to school. Since then, things have got much better – because of those succesful nonconformists – and even the average conformist teacher is supposed encourage a bit of nonconformism in kids.
Wherever you go, you can usually find succesful nonconformists behind the established order.