[extropy-chat] it's all understandable, except

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Nov 04, 2006 at 06:59:08PM -0500, Ben Goertzel wrote:

> Homeschooling worked well for my kids for a few years...

I believe you readily. Unfortunately, you're not representative,
as far as I can tell (which is admittedly, not much).
 
> But while it lasted, it was pretty good.  The kids learned more, and
> had more fun, and most critically their spirit of creativity and
> independent exploration was encouraged rather than discouraged...

I understand most public schools in USia are in a really bad shape.
There's no problem with public education e.g. in Finland, though,
so it doesn't seem an intrinsic issue. Even the best system can't shine
if it's not being managed right. We need to figure out how to
manage things right. Actually, we already know, it's just that
that knowledge hasn't percolated into the right political motorics cortex,
or that rotten site is cheerfully ignoring that information because it
has to deal with really important things (like, which pork barrel
to open up next). So if the system is failing, it should not
penalize homeschoolers who're providing good care (as periodically
measured with unbiased benchmarks). If the benchmarks are good,
they will weed out the wingnuts, because they can't deliver
a rounded, high quality education -- not because of their wingnut
biases. 
 
> during my childhood, and I thought it sucked at the time.  It is
> survivable of course ... but why should this sort of ordeal be
> necessary?

It shouldn't, absolutely. Good education isn't that hard, but
in practice it's crippled by anorexic budgets and systemic idiocy (as
about anything in the current downfall of democracies, which 
actually used to work for a surprisingly long while).

It would be so ironic if demographics and education would shoot
down our chance for Singularity within the narrow launch horizon.
If we mess it up real good this time, our grandchildren might not have
an opportunity for another shot. 

That sucks so much, it is our duty to get this done right.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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