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

[Adrian Tymes]

On Jan 20, 2014 2:50 PM, "Kelly Anderson" <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 10:41 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>> I hope Common Core is a step in the right direction.
>
> I rather doubt it will be. First, It means there will be ONE way to
educate children instead of 50. That means whatever we get wrong will be
wrong for EVERYONE.

There is that danger, but famously, quite a few of those 50 - primarily
those around north Texas - have been getting it very wrong.

> Since Bill Gates' foundation is behind Common Core, we can assume
everyone going through it will likely be good at using computers. Who will
fix cars or weld pipes or become doctors or do other REAL things if
everyone is good at computers?

Computers can help with all of those.  It's become like reading and
writing: useful for practically all fields.

> Second, the federal government rarely gets anything right, so why should
we expect it of them this time?

True, but not an argument that CC is in fact another failure.  The feds
sometimes get it right, or at least righter than the states.

> It may be a minor point, but it's not constitutional.

Actually it is constitutional...insofar as any power the US Constitution
regulates is involved.  Common educational standards enable interstate
commerce: if the blokes in the next state over can't understand your basic
technology, they'll not buy it, nor will you likely hire them to use it.

But is Congress passing a law here?  No.  Is it illegal to teach non-CC?
No.  You might not get funding from the feds if you do not, but nothing in
the US Constitution requires the feds to fund any particular educational
model; it just says they may promote this sort of thing (so long as, for
example, they maintain separation of church and state - and no, not just
any worldview can be called "church" in that sense).

> I think EVERY school should teach things their own way and compete in an
open marketplace for students.

What then happens to the poorly served students, at the worst schools, who
grow up dumb?  They become a burden the rest of us must support for the
rest of their lives.  If you try to externalize and thus ignore this cost,
your analysis fails for incompleteness.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20140120/f7d66fab/attachment.html>