Democracy and Education

What Hacker News says

1. tcjDec 2019
   For anyone who enjoyed this, a lot of these ideas were really well discussed a few years back in Neil Postman's "Teaching as a Subversive Activity" (1969) and John Dewey's "Democracy & Education" (1916). As you can see these books are over 50 years old. These ideas aren't new, which goes to say how long we've known this and what little have we done.

   The real question Graham poses here is: what is the point of schooling? At the moment, it teaches and conditions people to "hack tests" as Graham puts it. So people continue to do that throughout their lives.

   It also conditions people to think there is a "correct" answer to problems. Which in the open-ended nature of the real questions we have to grapple with in life is a complete lie. A teacher will rarely say: "It depends."

   What passes for "education" today is really just "training" and very far removed from real learning. People only learn about things that interest them. And you learn by asking questions, which most of the time will lead to further questions to which you will only ever find tentative, temporary answers. Not that different from how scientists treat their "solutions" to big questions as tentative.

   What can we do to change that? Change schools. It's the one place where we have kids kept for 15 years by mandate! It's the biggest lever we have to change perceptions and attitudes. Remove tests and grading. Learning will free up when that happens. It's remarkable what happens when at the beginning of the year the teacher gives everyone an A. Let go of the idea that permeates American society that everything needs to be measured. Some things do, but things like intelligence can't and shouldn't.

   I know the immediate response is that this is unpractical. And to that I ask why? Because we need a way to control? Control what? What district is "performing" better? When was a score on a math test a true measure of human potentiality?

   We need to go back to core questions as to what is the point of schools and what is worth teaching and learning in today's world. The world has changed immensely, but our "curriculums" are the same. The only difference is we use tablets and Microsoft Word to hand in assignments.

   I agree with Graham's conclusion. When we liberate ourselves from these useless idealogical metaphors we will free people and society up to stop hacking tests and start living.

   Show morethread
2. jveldMar 2016
   The tendency to characterize educational institutions as 'factories' for producing intellectual laborers (or knowledge workers, to use a synonomous but less harsh sounding term) is deeply unsettling to me. Although this piece mainly presents the author's arguments for bootcamp-contra-university in terms of her positive cultural experiences, these aren't presented on the strength of their own merits. The argument is (as usual), that the author's favored approach would increase the efficiency of the technology for transforming unskilled laborers into skilled laborers. Although this might seem like a hair splitting point, I think that this view of education causes larger problems than irritating continental-philosophy-reading, freeBSD-loving overall curmudgeons like yours truly.

   Education in America was never intended to produce laborers. In fact, the "liberality" of those arts which form a traditional university curriculum doesn't refer to their tendency to attract war protesters, communists, or critical theorists: these "liberal" arts are the arts of free men (free as in speech, not beer, yada yada), who would need a deep understanding of history and culture to prepare them for participation in political life. Historically, this freedom was enjoyed only by clerics and aristocrats. The hope of democratic societies is to extend political agency to ever broadening sectors of society, and to base political agency upon merit, rather than social caste. Universal education, it was argued, would produce the citizens that a large democracy would need, which would compensate for the fact that receiving such an education reduces one's available time for labor. One might recall that summer vacations were conceived to alleviate the imposition that schooling represented on a families ability to avail themselves of the labor of their offspring [1].

   Now would be a reasonable time to point out to me that political agency and economic welfare aren't exactly cleanly seperable goals, and that I'm still actually just splitting hairs, and that jobs are important by golly! Point taken. But here's the punchline: I would argue that out confusion about the purpose of higher education has caused us as a society to waste a huge amount of effort 'fixing' universities to accomodate the needs of industry, rather than investing in new strategies - I think that a concerted effort to create an apprenticeship system for training IT workers (and probably other kinds of workers too) would better suit the needs of businesses, as well as the tastes of more restless students, at a vastly reduced expense. Freed from the pressure to teach industry-ready but highly transient skills, universities could be preserved as places to learn deep, ready for students who have a knack for academic work, or have become interested in the theoretical aspects of their practical work. As it stands, the standoff between vocational and traditional perspectives is undermining our ability to teach both theory and praxis.

   It's also led to the illusion that the quality of an education can be more or less straightforwardly quantified using crude economic heuristics. Maybe nobody actually believes that this is a good way to evaluate education, but the demand for such quanititative measures nevertheless persists -- to the great detriment of students and faculty. Since no individual element of a University experience can be easily correlated with these "measurements" of educational excellence, the approach by business-oriented administrators seems to be something like "let's see how much we can cut without making people too angry [2]." Of course, neither the constant cutting of less 'profitable' programs, nor the withering wages of the underclass of adjuncts has stopped the university administrations from availing themselves of the near-infinite price elasticity afforded them by the finincial aid system -- after all, it is all about the bottom line, isn't it?

   [1] Everything about this paragraph is pretty drastically oversimplified. For a fuller exposition of these ideas as they were expressed in the relevant historical period, check out John Dewey's Democracy and Education, published in 1916.

   [2] I don't mean to imply that University administrators are moustache-twiddling evil capitalists out to suck the education system dry. It's just that, faced with the task of administering a complex system with difficult-to-measure outputs, people who are trained in business and generally encouraged to view their task in business terms seem to settle into this approach.

   Show morethread
3. saraid216Mar 2015
   1) You copied the wrong definition for cooperative.

   It's "a farm, business, or other organization that is owned and run jointly by its members, who share the profits or benefits."

   2) The article mentions John Dewey, but doesn't really get into who he is. I strongly recommend reading his book, "Democracy and Education".

   As a taste:

   "A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity."

   http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=DewDemo....

   Show morethread
4. saraid216Jul 2013
   Okay, let's do this.

   Democracy isn't about accountability or critical publics, though I'll concede the third point about tools for discussion, which we don't have enough of, and which are of fairly pitiful quality in this day and age. (That's going to be a contentious claim, isn't it? Damn. I'll footnote my complaint as [1] then.) Accountability and critical publics are, I agree, necessary but they're nowhere near sufficient.

   I do not think that it is working particularly well in any country. No country I know of has a population dedicated towards an increased participation in their own governance. At best, they ask a class of well-to-do persons to handle their governance on their behalf.

   But I also think a well-done democracy is actually an ideal worth pursuing. It is not enough to imagine democracy as the least tyrannical, most tolerant state of government: it must be something positively defined to be recognized as an ambition. For that, I turn to a book published in 1916, John Dewey's Democracy and Education.

   "A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity." [2]

   To me, a well-done democracy is one in which the overwhelming majority of the population (for those who want a number, let's call it 70 to 80 percent) are actively participant in their governance. One possible way to measure active participation is the drafting of legislation. (Voting is passive participation; a head count, to paraphrase Einstein [3], requires only a spine. It does not require a large brain.) Sure, this requires free flow of information, critical thinking, and tools for discussion, but you begin to recognize that having gcc, gdb, and a decent CS education is not sufficient to write an operating system from scratch: you have to actually put code to computer. For me, such a goal necessitates a reconstructed educational system. Perhaps I am wrong about that, but if I thought that, I wouldn't be trying to come up with one. :)

   But wait, there's more. It isn't sufficient to have heavy participation. It has to be maintained. Such sustained participation isn't possible if some particular subset or coalition gains an upper hand: and yet that is exactly how any kind of legislation can ever be passed. What's needed here is ways to guarantee that underdog groups always have their voices acknowledged, heard, engaged with, and accounted for. An effort should be made to keep them from losing every vote; such an effort, I expect, will inevitably lead to a fracturing of any underdog group whose interests actually non-beneficial. That's an unproven guess, but it is my expectation. You can read more about this particular issue in the place my thinking on it was inspired from, Danielle Allen's Talking to Strangers [4].

   And lastly, there needs to be a kind of standard, a set of shared values that can undergird the very notion of a democracy. Why is it ideal that everyone has a voice? The core behind it is an egalitarianism: the bedrock belief that no one is intrinsically worth more than another. This egalitarianism has often been expressed as an equality of outcome (proportionate representation), or an equality of opportunity (non-discrimination), or an equality of process (everyone jumps through the same hoops). I favor Amartya Sen's equality of autonomy [5] which leads into the capabilities approach that he developed alongside Martha Nussbaum [6]. I like the capabilities approach because it avoids many of the pitfalls that previous arguments have run into: you can't stymie its analysis by moving macroscopically to statistical claims or microscopically to anecdote: its equally applicable to both cases. It's on bases like this that rule of law can be built.

   It's important, I feel, to aspire towards democracy rather than resign ourselves to it. Such resignation makes room for a willingness to trade in democratic powers for short-term gratuity, such as the ever popular "liberty for security" but also things like "education for solvency" or "inclusiveness for comfort". Even if we misstep or are embattled, we do need to believe that there's a worthwhile goal to shoot for. Otherwise it's a constant battle of attrition for rights until there are none left, because we can't positively assert them on their own merits.

   [1] Our communication tools have not been developed with community or collaboration in mind. This is particularly notable with Engelbart's passing, but it's always worth noting how very exceptional it is every time a decent "social" space like Github or Discourse comes out. Our tooling has focused almost exclusively on one-to-one communication, rarely even bothering to consider how three or more people could interact. This might be simple laziness, but what it really says to me is how inconsequential the notion of existing in a community is for us as a society: there's no itch to be scratched by good tools for discussion. The itch isn't there. And for those few who have it and scratch it, there appears to be no market.

   [2] http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=DewDemo....

   [3] The original quote is, "He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him a spinal cord would suffice."

   [4a] http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/014665in.html

   [4b] http://www.amazon.com/Talking-Strangers-Anxieties-Citizenshi...

   [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_of_autonomy

   [6a] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach

   [6b] http://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/ethics/nussbaum.htm

   [6c] http://crookedtimber.org/2011/08/29/martha-nussbaums-creatin...

   [6d] http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Capabilities-Human-Developmen...

   Show morethread
5. graycatFeb 2021
   Broadly one problem with education in advanced, industrialized countries is the ratio of number of teachers to number of children.

   E.g., if waste enough time on YouTube, can find some videos of, say, cooking in some 2nd and 3rd world countries. So, yesterday I found a video of cooking in Madagascar. Yup, for the kids, it was very different from the US!!!!

   Basically the kids were right in with the parents, fathers doing whatever work, especially fishing, and mothers doing whatever, especially cooking. So, the ratio of number of parents to number of children was MUCH higher than in US public schools. The kids were just running around, playing with each other, no doubt learning roles and skills from the adults. The kids just had little opportunity to form cliques, in-groups, a hierarchy, do social climbing, bullying, etc. In particular, the kids were MUCH better supervised than in US public schools. Maybe among the adults there was a Big Man on the Beach but not among the kids.

   Is this education? Well, yes!! There is the old, famous John Dewey Democracy and Education where with a definition that education is the passing down from the older generation to the younger one. What gets passed down is all of it, good and bad, true or false, written or not, scientific or not, etc.

   Then some educational theorists decided to separate the kids from their parents, have schools with MUCH lower ratio of number of adults to number of children, have the kids do 3Rs, read some often silly literature (fiction), learn some questionable history, learn some propaganda civics, and learn some technical subjects that are supposed to make them good apprentice workers or some such. Whatever the learning is, that low ratio remains important and, in particular, brings the opportunity for bullying, social climbing, in-groups, status hierarchies, queen bee, pretty, cheerleader girls, big man on campus athlete boys, football Homecoming King and Queen, etc.

   Then there is the darned problem of SEX: Bluntly, at least in the US, the girls are ready to be good as wives and mothers years before the boys are ready to be good as husbands and fathers. So, in grades 7-9, lots of the girls are the prettiest human females ever get and attractive to any man that can still stand but look at boys their own age as silly children. The boys have to put up with the high quality social distancing from the girls their own age until they get to the 9+th grades and notice that girls 1-3 years younger WILL pay attention to them. Similar thing happens in college: The freshmen women are gorgeous, but the ones looking for their MRS degree will be looking at the senior men, not the junior, sophomores, or freshmen.

   Heck, when I was in college, I lived at home and dated a girl about 200 yards from my house. She was 4 years younger! So, right, as I was a sophomore in college, she was a sophomore in high school. Mother Nature and Darwin were happy. But the difference was still not large enough: When I was a first year grad student, she was a college freshman looking ONLY for her MRS degree, and we broke up, she quickly got married and "punched out" two boys, all before I got married.

   Gee, when Lady Di was 15 she decided that she would marry Prince Charles, about 15 years older. She did! Lady Di was drop dead gorgeous, and Charles didn't have a chance!

   Later I got a second lesson: I had a late model high end Camaro and a good job and for the job wanted to do some library research. So, I drove to my old college and hoped that I would be able to use the library. As I drove up, parked, and started to walk, I got a really good "come hither" look from a coed about 50 yards away. I never got any such looks when I was a student there! And all that coed knew about me was that I had a late model sports car, looked older, out of college, and didn't look like any of the students she had already seen.

   So, in Madagascar, I guess the boys of 15 or so either (a) the US age differences apply and they chase girls 2-4 years younger (with parents not far away) or (b) the US differences do not apply and they chase girls close to their own age. And for (b) maybe there is little reason for the US differences to apply, that is, a boy of 15 may have long since learned the work of the men, fishing, boating, net making, boat building and repairing, collecting shellfish by swimming to the bottom, etc. and, thus, be qualified as a husband.

   I would ask (1) what the heck are the goals of US public education and (2) does the current system have even 10% of the bang for the buck possible for the goals?

   Show morethread
6. graycatNov 2014
   Warning: <rant>

   Controversial opinions. Long road with sharp curves ahead. Author spent too much time in school, as both a student and a professor. YMMV.

   My guess is that the article deliberately omitted the main point: As good as the teacher was and as good as the performance of her students was, the evidence from the testing of that teacher on her 4th grade students on 4th grade work was that that teacher added relatively little to what her students already had when they entered her class. Or, in a sense, with the way their teacher evaluation system works, the good teachers of her students were in K and grades 1, 2, 3 so that by the start of grade 4 the 4th grade students were already doing really well at grade 4 work and, with the way the measurement of amount added by that 4th grade teacher was done, that teacher was seen to have added relatively little. So, adding relatively little, she was evaluated as not doing well.

   Added? Why the emphasis on added? Well, suppose you are teaching 4th grade, your students come into your class struggling with 1st grade work (it can happen), you work hard, and in the one year get your students good at 1st grade work, 2nd grade work, and 3rd grade work, whew, three years of work in one year, but, still don't have the students good at 4th grade work. So, such a teacher, taught three years of work in one year, should, still, be rated very effective. So, likely such situations are the source of the interest in measuring what was added.

   Now measuring the added amount is likely, in some cases, tricky both for both testing and statistically. And, likely the severity and rigidity of the system kept the 4th grade teacher from moving her 4th grade students on to 5th and 6th grade work and, instead, kept them grinding away at just the 4th grade work they already knew so well that the teacher had little to add. And if she had moved her students ahead to 5th and 6th grade work, then the test, of just 4th grade work, would not show that progress and the teacher again would be measured as not adding much.

   So, net, for a 4th grade teacher, a really good 3rd grade teacher is a tough act to follow!

   It's sad to see such stress and struggle with K-12 teaching. We are so wound up with the goal of "no child left behind" and, to this end, coming up with systems to beat up on teachers that don't get us to that goal, that we have really poor systems of evaluation and, with high irony, fail at some basic academic tasks and have far too many false alarms. Bummer.

   Or, if you can't do statistics well, then don't do statistics at all. We're better off with no statistics than with bad statistics. Have I seen some really bad, we're talking brain dead, statistics in K-12 education, up close, and personal? Yup!

   Net, I wouldn't trust the Statistics and Evaluation Branch of the New York State Department of Education to get 2 + 2 = 4 correct. Why? I've seen just way too much fumbling with statistics. Or, bluntly, effective application of statistics to important real situations is mostly quite far beyond the abilities of ordinary organizations -- it's just too hard for them; they just can't get it right; they make messes and do harm.

   Here's one way to slow down nearly any application of statistics: Go to some statistics texts, get the assumptions, and then demand that the assumptions be justified. One assumption? Sure, independence -- that assumption is so powerful that, in anything much closer to daily reality than quantum mechanics or dice rolling, it is essentially impossible to justify.

   Looks like the goal of "no child left behind" has generated a massive bozo explosion.

   My dad was a fantastic educator, and his description of the ideal in education was a student sitting at one end of a log and a good teacher sitting at the other end. Try to characterize this educational environment with statistics? As they say in New York, f'get about it.

   But, really, no worries, mate: There is a safety valve -- the main source of education anyway, the home. E.g., I had a friend who went to a NYC school where most of the students knew only two words, and they could say those two with a wide variety of variations. The abbreviation of those two words was just "MF". That's all they knew. Not very articulate, but, then, usually they did get their meaning across, but, then, their meaning was not very advanced, either.

   My friend? In the third grade, he was sick at home for a week with the flu, and his mother was shocked to discover that he didn't know how to read. So, in that week, she taught him. Then he knew how to read. In school? Maybe he also learned different ways to say MF.

   Education? He did quite well: Got PBK at SUNY, Ph.D. at Courant, and was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. His education was (1) in K-12 or (2) at home? Three guesses, the first two don't count! Or, four years, K-3, the schools couldn't teach him to read, and his mother did it in a week.

   Yes, maybe by grade 12 he knew the binomial theorem, and maybe his mother didn't teach him that at home, but, really, still, his education, the real key to his education, was at home.

   My dad told me about a basic book on education, Dewey, Democracy and Education. So, since I was spending so much time in school, I wanted to know why and read the book. At one point Dewey defined education -- passing down from one generation to the next, where he was quite clear that what gets passed is both the good and the bad, not just all good. Well, net, most of that passing down happens at home, and there's next to nothing K-12 can do about it.

   Actually, a lot of people understand this basic fact and, thus, want education to start at birth, that is, have the government provide the basic home parenting in, shall we say, at risk situations. I believe you will find that our current President is in favor of this! In other words, he sees the at risk situations as so hopeless that for a solution it is necessary to replace the home itself. Maybe he's correct.

   Sorry 'bout K-12: I trust that it really can do babysitting, that is, keep the kids off the streets and, thus, mostly out of crime and drugs, keep the sixth and seventh grade girls from getting pregnant, etc. For much more, well, in some of the at risk situations, tough to have much more; or watch the PBS

   http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/education-of-michell...

   with "The Education of Michelle Rhee". She tried. She was good. She tried hard, really hard. In the end, she accomplished basically zip, zilch, zero and nichts, nil, nada. The teachers themselves commonly believed that the goals were just hopeless. Or, she was unable to make the K-12 schools make up for poor homes. Sorry 'bout that. But didn't we know that already?

   Well, maybe George Bush believed that education happened in K-12 and that, thus, we could solve the problem of poor education by a program like No Child Left Behind in K-12. Well, W also believed that "The Iraqis are perfectly capable of governing themselves", i.e., have the country stay together, as one country, a democracy, and not split apart into Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, and Others, with fighting, torture, atrocities, civil war, little problems like those. So, just help the Iraqis write a constitution, hold elections, and all will come together singing "Why Can't We Be Friends?". Where did W get that really strong funny stuff he'd been smoking?

   Bush 41 was smart enough to stay the heck out of Baghdad. Bush 43 was not. Maybe W was not the brightest bulb on the tree. "No child left behind"? I understand: W, if your father had only had that goal in mind!

   "More educational statistics, Ma!". Then, for the poor performers, "off with their heads!*. Might not make the situation much worse!

   YMMV.

   </rant>

   Show morethread