The Primary Goal of Education SHOULD NOT be to make children into “productive, useful members of society”

Because children do not exist primarily to produce profit or to be used to produce capital.

The primary goal of education should be self improvement, social awareness, and the curation of democratically competent and socially responsible citizens.  

You should leave school able to function as a citizen and community member, not just as a worker and employee. 

But that was never the intent.

Our current model of education was invented by the Prussians because their citizens were too independent to make good soldiers.

The Prussian model was so successful at instilling obedience in students that EVERY western country adopted it so they would have a strong and effective military.

Public education has never been about empowerment. The current system is doing exactly what was intended.

True, but some of the western countries, particularly the Scandinavian ones, seem to be doing away with this system

I could be wrong, though. I hear about Finland’s great educational system all the time, but I’ve also heard they are very nationalistic. And of course, I am no expert on Scandinavian countries nor have I lived in one.

Education reform has been taking place, but damn it has been taking a really long time.

Finland! 

I have some Finnish friends here, so maybe they can elaborate on and/or correct what I say next...

Yes, their public education is remarkably effective. 100% literacy rate (really!) plus free university for anyone who wants it. Finnish classrooms are more exploratory than adversarial, and children are encouraged to learn instead of memorizing facts.

They offset the free education with compulsory military service (everyone serves between 165 and 347 days, depending on rank + interest) but conscientious objectors may choose public service instead. Norway does something similar, IIRC.

It’s a good system and seems to work well.

But.

The entire population of Finland is about 5 million people. 

There are only 7 million Finns in existence total. So it’s far, far easier to implement such programs there than in (say) the United States. The entire population of Finland would live comfortably in the NYC area, with room left over for all of Norway’s citizens too.

And any nationalism exhibited by Finland is probably well warranted by sharing an 800 mile border with Russia... who recently “annexed” Crimea (population 2 million). So it’s perfectly understandable why Finland feels justified in keeping 2 million soldiers + reservists on hand for defense.

But back to education, and specifically how intentionally fascist the western/Prussian model is...

My original point was that the existing system works exactly the way the folks in power want it to work. 

The failures in our system are intentional... since poorly educated people do not ask questions, have little career choice, and ultimately end up serving the state by either (a) becoming soldiers or (b) becoming imprisoned slave labor. After all, it is legal to pay inmates pennies per hour -- or nothing at all -- to perform work for the state... and the practice is growing. Jails are now profit centers in many cities & counties.

And look at how our education system infantilizes people! 

It’s become the norm that people graduate university with a degree... but don’t know “how to adult”. For 12 years they were told to sit down, shut up, form up in lines, obtain permission to pee. Then an additional ~4 years of jumping through hoops set up by a FOR PROFIT system designed to squeeze every dime out of students. 

40 years ago a college graduate could buy a house AND a car... now, many of them live with their parents.

I would love to see honest reform, but I just don’t see it happening. Reform of the magnitude required would look more like revolution... 

I think one reason why quality education is not valued by the corporatist state is because a mass populace of well-informed individuals, innovators, free-thinkers and the like would threaten the current heavily controlled level of innovation, ingenuity, and progress, and thereby also threaten their customer base. I think state schools are such shit because not only are brainwashed people easier to govern, but because it better serves the corporate arm of the state to allow only a select few access the resources necessary to create, and invent, and improve the world. 

So, aside from the fact that “free,” government-controlled schools remove incentive from the market to build competing private schools, there is added incentive given to those with the most concentrated wealth to not invest in education. The government is doing their job for them in providing bottom-of-the-barrel instruction. 

They don’t want education. They never did.

North American public education is based on Prussian obedience training, developed because Prussia wanted a more subservient army.

And we’re not talking “loosely modelled” here... they literally brought Prussians and Prussian-trained implementers here to build our educational system from scratch.

Corporations Snatch Education Data

Parents can fight this stuff but it's too late... way too late.

Even if strict privacy laws are enacted corporations will (cue Jeff Goldblum) find a way. That's what they do. Circumventing unpleasant laws is bred into their corporate DNA.

In this political climate, anyway.

VoucherCloud surveyed 2,392 people ages 18 or older and, according to the L.A. Times, “were given both tech and non-tech terms and were asked to choose from three possible definitions.”

The results? An embarrassing amount of Americans think HTML is a disease you can catch from another human being–which says a lot about the state of both sex and computer education in the U.S.

Hmm... VoucherCloud. That's a weird name for a research organization, isn't it? Sounds more like a coupon website.

Oh wait it is. And worse, they have a reputation for pulling attention whore media stunts.

So suddenly this survey's looking a bit off. But I'd be curious to see the results of a real study, one that wasn't conducted by email, where all the respondents weren't grandparents answering spam from their favorite couponing website.

Sigh.

FACE-O-GUESS® — THE PROCESS

Here’s my page of notes for my ‘Guess Who’-alike game board; below it, the final product. Drawing the faces, I made some artistic choices of course, but for the most part the faces you see contain the same data as the big, messy graph that came first.

I had no idea what each character would look like until I’d finished drawing them. I just copied the information over from the graph. It was fun and interesting to generate faces like this; to be taken by surprise by my own drawings, as if I was watching someone else draw. And then seeing which characters come out on top in this stripped-down, bare-essentials genetic lottery.

Your original, traditional Guess Who characteristics follow a 5:19 pattern: out of the 24 characters, five will share a particular feature that deviates from the (arbitrary) norm. This includes baldness, rosy cheeks etc. but also BEING A WOMAN, which results in classic Guess Who having only five female characters, problematic not only because women are bizarrely underrepresented but also because of the implication that masculinity is normal while femininity is deviant. And on top of that it reinforces the idea of gender as binary (male or female as the only options).

It might seem weird (not on Tumblr though probably) to think so seriously about fucking ‘Guess Who’, but these aren’t made-up issues; this is real-life stuff that I think about. I’m teaching 16-year-olds in Japan; I expect they’re receiving enough day-to-day reinforcement of conservative ideas of gender without needing any extra from me.

Anyway — I broke the 5:19 rule with my game board; I was gonna look up exactly how ‘Guess Who’ worked but I didn’t have the time and then decided it didn’t matter anyway. I may have been wrong! As you can see from my messy blue grid, I split characteristics by different ratios and did my best to spread them out as evenly and ‘randomly’ (not randomly) as possible, though this involved some fudging here and there because I am hopeless at maths and have no clue about statistics. I don’t even know if statistics enters into it. The point is: I don’t know how much, if at all, discarding the 5:19 ratio for each characteristic affects the way the game plays. (So far, with my students, it seems to be working okay though.) I just like the idea of some characteristics being rarer than others, like in life. And I like the idea that some questions will have a different risk/reward ratio to others.

Regarding gender, I decided it would be nice (as well as easy for me) to make gender a non-question. Before starting to draw, I gave each column on the grid a unisex name. It was very interesting, as I drew, to see which random collection of characteristics seemed female to me, which male, and which ambiguous. What would I have to add to or remove from a particular face to make it seem more decidedly male or female? If it was something as simple as long eyelashes, does that mean it’s eyelashes that determine our gender? I would love to tease my students with questions like these, if only I spoke the language properly.

Anyway, the end result is a version of ‘Guess Who’ where you can’t ask “Is your character male?” because there’s no clear yes-or-no answer.

I also eliminated baldness as a factor for reasons that made sense at the time but now that I think about it more, I could have easily made it work. I can only apologise for my egregious pate-ism.

Have you noticed yet there are no characters with hair both light and wavy? See, I’m no good with numbers. I was looking forward to drawing light and wavy hair but never mind.

The main reason I made my own ‘Guess Who’ board was not in fact my noble and endless quest for social justice but because I wanted to play it with my students and the only scans of ‘Guess Who’ cards I could find on the internet were low-res shit. And even if I could get good scans, they wouldn’t copy well I reckon. These Japanese schools have riso duplicators whose copies are less sharp than a digital photocopier’s; plus anyway you’re losing a lot of information in a black-and-white copy: hair and eye colour, the rosy cheeks, etc.

So I decided it would be better to make my own board, with clear, bold, black-and-white art, tailored to cheap reproduction. This is exactly the sort of thing cartoonists are for. And I realised I could restrict the facial features and other characteristics according to the vocabulary my students already know or could learn quickly; plus I could encourage them to practice useful vocab and sentence patterns I’d been teaching them anyway: ‘surprised’, ‘seems’, etc. Plus I could do fun shit like cat ears and three eyes!

"Tailored to reproduction" is a paradoxical phrase, isn’t it? But it really does sum up a lot of what cartooning is about.

Anyway — I think that’s everything I had to say about this project, but ask ‘em if you got ‘em.

Oh and feel free to doodle any of these characters if the mood should strike you. I’d love to see what other people make of these weirdos.

When artistry meets education. This is so badass it hurts. 

Think education is an automatic cure for low wages? It’s not that simple.

This Economic Policy Institute chart busts the stereotype that low-wage workers are all uneducated. SHARE and sign our petition to raise the wage: http://wefb.it/3AoVrw http://ift.tt/KQUmNA

The part that makes me sad about this is that some women (myself included) were hacking at age 13 but then stopped, because they didn’t have the role models or educational resources available to encourage them to continue. I did find programming on my own but I didn’t even realize that what I was doing was called “programming” or that it was a viable career path I could take.

I’m not interested in joining the “Is Paul Graham sexist and is the technology industry misogynistic and is Silicon Valley terrible overall?” conversation in this context but I hope Paul Graham does stop and think about what can be done to get (and keep) 13-year-old girls interested in a career in programming. He’s so smart and visionary and powerful in the industry that he could make a real difference.

God knows we need more female programmers. Hell, we need more female everything -- inequality is rampant. The patriarchy wants girls playing with dolls instead of tools & software.

However. The part I bolded up there bugs the shit out of me:

"...if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13….What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum..."

First off, we can't all be founders and visionaries. The people we label that are usually tortured genius types who can't stop themselves from doing what they do. It's not something you can teach, no matter how early you start.

Secondly, WE CAN'T ALL BE FOUNDERS AND VISIONARIES. Those people are important but they'd be nothing without armies of smart, technical, savvy people to back them up and actually do shit.

Imagine a sim where all the employees at Apple were Steve Jobs. Now imagine the blood, the pathos, the hostage negotiation team being called in before lunchtime. Yeah.

The way we idolize "great people" is a sickness and needs to stop. There is nothing wrong with having a skill and using it in boring day-to-day work because that shit is important. Society would grind to a halt if (say) trash collection ceased tomorrow. 

Finally, the idea that in order to effect change we must 'change the school curriculum or something' is flawed. YES, schools and formal education are important, but they are not THE means of encouraging development in youth.

Aside from playing into the oppressive notion that individuals must cede power to institutions, it fosters the idea that we are nothing without formal education. When actually, the best & brightest (that we so idolize) often dropped out of school.

I realize I just hijacked a rant about girls not being afforded the same chances as boys in order to rant about education instead, but this is important. It drives everything. We can't effectively rebalance things with the institutions & thought patterns we have now.

'We Are Creating Walmarts of Education'

University degree is the new high school diploma. Only, you go into debt for the degree. 

The process of gutting 'socialist' programs like free public education is nearly complete and nobody even noticed. 

"A public school is supposed to have art. We had none. A public school is supposed to have a library. We didn’t." —John Owens "Not Public School As We Remember It"

These aren't schools. They're training for minimum-wage labor.

soulbrotherv2:

Harvard University Announcement: No tuition and no student loans

Boost

This is brilliant and wonderful!

But this should be normal, not surprising. It's self-serving altruism: everyone benefits, including Harvard. Aside from some nice press, Harvard's classes will have more hard-working students that want to be there, who really REALLY earned it... rather than one-percenter offspring whose mommies & daddies pick the most exclusive/expensive place on the list.

Every school that can afford it should waive tuition & expenses for a number of qualifying families. The fact we're excited and a bit stunned over this news tells us how bad things have gotten.

Wii's new controller looks awesome!