[ExI] common core educations standards, was: RE: far future

[Kelly Anderson]

On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 12:37 PM, Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Jan 21, 2014 10:49 AM, "Kelly Anderson" <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Put another way, just imagine how incredible the results would be if we
> spent as much extra on the top 5% of students as we now spend on the bottom
> 5% of students. What if Special Education were bi-polar? What would that
> look like?
>
> Speaking as one of those top 5% who got Special Education because he stuck
> out from the crowd...
>
> Look up "gifted children".  This is far from a new concept, and arguably
> what you are asking for is already the case.  It is no panacea - and does
> not result in all or even many of those top 5% being placed in charge or
> even given much post-education support.
>
I was offered a gifted placement, but it would have involved my parents
driving me 12 miles to school every day because my school didn't have a
program. The special education kids didn't have to do that. So perhaps this
is just a personal rough spot with me.

> More generally, though, your comments point toward all but abandoning the
> bottom 95%.  Having most people labor for the exclusive benefit of the top
> few has been tried, repeatedly, under many many many names, and it never
> works well.  ("Slavery", "communism", and "feudalism" are some of the best
> known forms.)
>
I don't want to abandon them. I want to give them the best education we
can. I just don't want to stop the truly gifted to do it, which is what
common core and no child's behind left alone do, IMHO.

> The main recurring problem is selecting the top few: those who are first
> in get to decide the incentives for deciding the next top few, and very few
> of them (a few, but small enough that they mostly get overridden by their
> peers) have the benefit of society as their goal in this.  The result
> quickly deviates from the founders' ideals, assuming those founders were
> competent to implement them in the first place (they often aren't, so the
> subsequent deviation just makes a bad situation worse).
>
It worked well for several thousand years in China. People were picked to
be the top of government based on passing exams. Since this is the longest
lasting civilization since Egypt, I would hardly call it a failure.

> If we must have an underclass then let it be subsentient AIs.  Let all
> people be promoted to the upper class.  And that means more than just
> material wealth: let them live as long, rich, and full lives as they
> desire.  Should we some day develop sentient AIs, be they uploads or
> birthed purely from computation, let them be "people" too, for this and all
> other important purposes.
>
I don't want AI to creep into this particular conversation. We could start
a new thread though.

-Kelly
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