fuck this year seriously

"Let's change the public education system in the US, increasing teacher wages, decreasing tuition costs and student debt so every child has equal opportunity regardless of parental wealth. We might need a tax increase somewhere, but it will pay off massively in the long run"

"Nah I rather just help people by posting a black JPEG to Insta"

@bittersweet "Yeah, I mean, we can't end up with an educated population. Imagine what they could do if they were able to think for themselves?!"

What was that sentence again? "I love the poorly educated"?
Hmmm, makes sense.

@sudocode Laughed way too hard on this one. Now I have to clean up all this coffee.

@sudocode Ha! Didn't think about this one. That's great!

@Jilano Critical thinking? in Murica?

ok then - Go ahead and educate them.

Reminder: most AntiVax are "educated". COVID-19 took care of that problem.

@magicMirror There's a big difference between learning something and thinking you did. Besides, I'd bet most of those people are just staying in their own bubble/echo chamber on social media and not reading actual factual sources (not talking about "alternative truths" as there is not such thing).

> it will pay off massively in the long run"

Kinda..

They 'experimented' doing that here for a while, by a while, I mean about 80 years. :-)

The end result..

10% end up educated and useful productive members of society. (Assuming they aren't killed by the other 90% before they get old enough to do anything useful..)

The other 90%, the money was wasted on them.

Still, I guess its better than the 10% who made it, not having made it under the previous system.

But there is a lot of room for improvement, mainly figuring out who the 90% is you shouldn't try to educate !

@Nanos Low entry cost to education and great public schools has worked here in the Netherlands (I say has, because there's a big push to make education less accessible).

But on average, we tend to score in the top 10 of countries with low income gaps, and come in at 6 (after all 5 Scandinavian states) in the ranking of social mobility — meaning: It doesn't matter where you came from, your success is determined by merit, ambition and effort.

Yes, there is some waste, our implementation is far from perfect. There are people who "studied" for 10 years and partied more than they learned. There are people who are left behind in education because of austerity measures here as well.

But the United States is fucking 27th. 26 countries are better at the American Dream than the USA.

I do consider myself a capitalist, even close to libertarianism at times.

I just draw the line at education. Everyone deserves an equal start. After that... survival of the fittest, bitches.

@bittersweet

------------

meaning: It doesn't matter where you came from, your success is determined by merit, ambition and effort.

------------

There are more variables at play there. :-)

A big one is genetics.

We aren't blessed with Netherland folk here, instead we have a pool of stupid people, who even after 80 years of the expensive education thrown at them, only 10% end up with qualifications.

The others are, well, a rabble.

The 10% appear to be random mutations, since the population in the area is very inbred and rarely brings in any new blood to the area.

@Nanos

Luck also plays a big role in success as well.

Though its pretty hard to take advantage if you don't have those other things as well !

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...

I hear that places like Facebook can improve your luck..

Related link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

> There are people who are left behind in

> education because of austerity measures

> here as well.

I'm reminded of places I've lived where people with potential was left untrained, and even today, such places are unemployment hotspots in some cases rising to 70% !

I've never been able to find out why funding was denied in those areas, other than one person telling me that their educational establishment was told by another not to do certain courses, or what little funding they had, would all be removed..

What shenanigans was going on behind the scenes I wonder..

@Jilano Hence the missing "critical thinking" skill.
These days people choose thier facts to fit thier exisiting bias - education requires you to throw away your bias...

@Nanos

Luck and genetics play a role.

But intelligence and knowledge are like physical strength -- some people's genes prevent them from becoming athletic gods (academical geniuses), but training can still elevate all who participate.

It's not necessarily about throwing expensive education at people -- it's about developing and improving a very solid broad base level of affordable public education.

If the quality gap between the cheapest and most expensive education is huge, you end up with very little social mobility -- and eventually a class war where those with an unfair chance at education will revolt.

I come from a poor-as-fuck family, whose parents both died when I was 12. Only because we have a reasonable public education system interwoven with a good support system of psychologists and coaches, did I manage to climb up to a 6 figure income... So I gladly pay my 52% income tax, as long as it flows back to improving quality of public education.

@bittersweet

> training can still elevate all who participate.

I used to think that, until I lived in an area with incredibly stupid people.

And the world is filling up with yet more stupid people, as we run out of not stupid people !

No matter what education those folk was given, it didn't elevate them at all.

Think of it like trying to train animals, some genetic lines of animals are easier to train than others, and some, are just impossible !

Part of the reason in some places we have a lot of so called educated people, who have qualifications, but only because they have dumbed down the exams so much, that anyone could pass.

I'm reminded of a course I went on, where 3 of us had the ability, and 27 other folk didn't..

Not to worry thought, since the 27 copied from one of us, so they could all pass !

This is perhaps why nothing works today..

And no one knows how to fix things !

@cafebabe

No, people was supplied with housing, generous government handouts, good local facilities, which they continuously trashed..

You might say it was all part of a huge experiment to try and show that throwing money at people would really help them.

It helped some of them, but most, it did not.

As such, I'm keen to see the right sort of folk from any group, get the kind of help that would help them, which in turn would help make everyone's lives better in the grand scheme of things.

Blanket solutions tend to be very wasteful of resources I notice.

@bittersweet

> I just draw the line at education.

> Everyone deserves an equal start.

Pondering about that, I think you are right.

Question springs up though, at what point do you stop education ?

I mean, you can't educate everyone up to the age of 75..

And education for everyone up to the age of 3 is probably not enough..

So, where do you draw the line ?

I notice the Amish do the line at about 14 years old isn't it ?

This makes me also think of Universal Basic Income..

@cafebabe

> do you have any source for me to dig ?

Sadly not without giving my location away. :--(

I can also draw upon animal experiments, where it is more clearly noticeable the effects of breeding and environment have with each other.

Eg. You can have a bunch of stupid animals and they are incapable of learning, compared to another bunch.

You do get stubborn animals who aren't stupid, and could learn, but don't want to. :-)

Those tend to be more noticeable by their use of physical violence to try to get their own way.

I guess the same could be said for humans. :-)

This discussion has helped me make another step in problem solving the issue of group cooperation.

I was noticing that a lot of successful people become that way because they start off being successful on their own.

Only then folk are more willing to be cooperative and help them become more successful.

Or jump on the bandwagon..

This also appears to apply in relationships..

Eg. Don't try to establish a cooperative relationship, because the other person will leave at some point, perhaps because you have finished whatever project you are both working on.

Better to focus on your own efforts, as if the other person doesn't exist !

I wonder if the same applies in open source projects ?

Do those only get established well once one person has done a lot of work and got something working ?

Or do folk really all join together and build something from scratch ?

@Nanos Regarding age and education... Should be mandatory till 16.

College should be non-mandatory, but cheap and accessible for all ages.

College should also be flexible, easy to combine with other activities.

In the Netherlands there are now plans to eliminate yearly tuition and split bachelors into smaller bits which would cost €40 each — allowing you to work as a freelance developer, using your income to pay for a part-time CS bachelor instead of building up debt for example.

@bittersweet

That sounds all very sensible.

Would we also have different tiers of schooling ?

Eg. the trouble making folk who can't or don't want to learn can be put in one school, whilst everyone else goes to another ?

As its really hard to learn when kids are trying to kill you in class !

@Nanos

Ideally most education content would be distributed digitally at variable speed, think: KhanAcademy, or Udemy (if it was curated for quality and purpose).

Rush through stuff you find easy, spend more time on what you find tough to grasp.

Schools would exist as coaching institutes. They hire didactic experts which sit down with students to plan & review progress, psychologists and career guides to motivate people and keep them on track, field specialists to assist when they're stuck.

I went to a Yenaplan school for a while, and one of my favorite parts was that you had to coach kids a few years younger than you, and were coached by students a few years older. That concept could be modernized, automated.

By paying less attention to the content and more to coaching towards autodidactism, I think the boundary between good and problematic students wouldn't be so harsh either: Fuckups would land in front of a shrink much faster to get them back on track again.

@bittersweet

Makes me think of MMORPG's and Kinships. :-)

May i remind you about 🔫 being changed to prevent shootings?
That really did something, didn't it? 😐

Fuck.

Why not both?

@sudocode I lol’d hard to this.