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

[Ben Goertzel]

The main problem with the US school system is that most US parents are
anti-intellectual --- they don't encourage their kids to learn
intellectual things, and don't encourage the teachers to encourage
their kids to learn such things....  This problem is indeed more
rampant in some ethic groups than others, but for sure no ethnic group
has a monopoly on it...

The school system has adapted itself to uncreative, anti-intellectual
parents and their spawn, to an excessive degree....  So that even when
it's presented with parents and kids who do favor and encourage
intellect and learning, in many cases the system is incapable to adapt
to this situation....

I can see that the Montgomery County school system genuinely tries
really hard to provide a high quality education -- and it does succeed
to a reasonable degree ... kids coming out of the advanced tracks in
high school know a lot of stuff ... e.g. in math they do calculus,
linear algebra, statistics, basic differential equations, bla bla bla,
which is more than they did in high school in the US back in my day...
 However, they seem to draw the line at offering advanced content,
they have no idea how to really foster creativity.  Every now and then
they give open-ended assignments -- say, letting the students choose
their own paper topics for National History Day papers or some such
... but the scope is still pretty restricted, and such occasions where
freedom of choice is permitted are fairly rare.

My middle child spends most of his nonschool waking hours studying and
doing animation, which is his particular passion -- learning to use
various software, writing scripts, drawing on his graphics tablet,
etc. -- and the amount of enthusiasm he has for this sooooo vastly
exceeds his joy in what he does in school, it's ridiculous.  If I were
home schooling him now, I would teach him more serious computer
programming in an animation context; I would encourage him to write
more polished scripts for his animations (thus improving his writing,
which is pretty good already); I would teach him how algebra is used
to calculate various quantities for computer graphics, which would
interest him more in math, which he hates....  It's amazing how much
more kids enjoy learning things when presented in the context of
something they are passionate about.  But the school system just does
not work this way at all -- information is presented impersonally and
homogeneously, so as to make it seem as uninteresting as possible ;-)
....  As it is I try to show him how various subjects of study tie in
with his passion, but given how many hours school takes, he wants to
spend most of his free time actually making animations rather than
doing extra study of other topics...

[BTW, his work is still childish, but creative nonetheless.  If you
want a sample check out RoboTurtle II, which is about an evil AI that
I create.  Search Goertzel, or roboturtle, on Google Video ;-) ]

Does the Singularity obsolete the need to improve education?  Sure, in
a grand sense....  But looking more deeply, the reason the Singularity
hasn't occurred already is because our society actively discourages
creativity and learning to such an extent -- which is the same
essential reason our school system is not better than it is....  As
usual, a problem that looks like an institutional problem ultimately
boils down to a problem of the idiocy and patheticness of individual
and cultural human nature...

-- Ben G

On 11/4/06, Al Brooks <kerry_prez at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Yes, and it could be America is too large for the
> problem to be solved, it can only perhaps be lessened.
> What I wonder is: can it be one reason student
> performance is overall pretty low is because teachers
> and administrators not only inflate grades but also
> don't want to flunk ethnic students? One hesitates to
> write this, however if too many ethnics washed out of
> the system it would not only look extremely bad, but
> also the students, families, and activists would
> deeply resent all the flunking and seek revenge.
> Let's be frank-- America is a complicated, overheated
> ethnic stew-pot, and such undoubtedly affects the
> school system.
>
>
>
> > The US public education system is highly erratic.
> > There is very
> > little centralization....  So, some public school
> > systems are great,
> > some are miserable, most are OK.
> >
>
>
>
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