Posted by Gaishan 12 hours ago
It would be interesting to know what was the “right” answer to this in 1912.
An indian-australian's semi-recent take on modern "educayshun":
Wikipedia for images:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Stuyvesant
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Raleigh
Sketch one balding clean shaven face and sketch another one with pointy triangular beard?
10% of high school aged people attended a high school?
90% of students enrolled in high school never bothered to attend or "worked from home"?
Wouldn't that make them factory workers rather than students though?
According to the top comment, only about 10% of students attended high school at the time.
Were, say, 95% of all students in primary school with another 5% in university or night school courses?Some of the questions are look line bonus questions. I wouldn't have been able to place Serbia on a map in 8th grade (Montenegro didn't exist anymore/yet), but I remember a friend failing a 9th grade test where he was expected to name 30 African countries and either place them on a map or name their capital cities. The test was stupid but not that much outside expectations.
It was mostly B-grade learning: learn the rules, apply the rules or research, reformulate, present etc. Critical thinking would begin in or just before highschool.
Deep knowledge wasn't required.
My response to that would be "for real critical thinking, you need memorization as a starting point. You can't think critically about the politics of the Middle East until you can point to Israel and Gaza on a map!"
Who's right? Are memorization and critical thinking complements, or substitutes?
This might have different answers in different fields. Like in maths, can you learn more advanced maths without a deep intuitive familiarity with numbers, the kind you get from being able to do arithmetic in your head? What about history? Can you get by without dates?
Not true IMHO. You can map it to a some sort of neighbouring countries graph and a few other facts.
So the opposite of irrelevant. You need 10 minutes before you can start to think about the question that was likely a premise for a larger argument.
"To be a surgeon, knowing surgery techniques from memory is irrelevant. When called upon to do surgery, I can simply leave, attend medical school, then come back and do the surgery. What's really important is knowing where the medical school is located."
The claim was "you need memorization as a starting point". And that's the part I disagree with. Ability - it's irrelevant. Speed of doing it in specific cases - relevant.
The mathematics is simple. The rest of it is stuff that is simple to Google. There’s a little bit of interpretation, but none of this is about problem solving or any kind of serious analysis.
Perhaps I am out of the loop, but are kids allowed to Google stuff during tests nowadays? In my days we were not allowed to bring any books or notes to a test, and up until the last two years of high school no calculators either.
All this besides the obvious that Google wasn't available back then. I guess many schools didn't even have a comprehensive library, let alone enough copies of a particular book to have many kids borrow them at the same time.
Funnily enough we're always carrying a calculator and (access to) Google in our pockets. Not that I share his view, I do think knowing facts and figures is necessary.
So memorisation was necessity.
Have you ever seen anyone under the age of 30 try to "google" something? It's bizarre and disturbing. I've seen it for myself, but on r/teachers they have horror stories. To hear them tell it, most kids fail not by cheating, but by being unable to google anything with which to cheat. Even if we dial it down to balance the exaggeration...
Inability to search with more than one keyword. Inability to decide which words are unimportant in a sentence to leave them out of the search terms. Inability to add extra words to give the search engine enough context (funny story about a high school chemistry teacher telling them "reaction" doesn't work for that unless they also include "chemistry" or "chemical"). And on and on and on.
School is about teaching your brain how to retain information in general, so you can retain what you need to use.
They would lack any info about world wars, decolonization, computers, space race, internet, climate change, just to pick some topics taught today.
The people who built all those things and won two world wars were educated with this curriculum. They took us from horse and buggy to space travel, clearly they were doing something right with education.
More broadly, home schooling seems to be more effective in 19th century America. Edison likely never took any test and definitely never attended a college that depended on it. He was home-schooled because his hearing was so bad.
School mainly serves as day care and social programming: obey authority, believe what we tell you, remember what will appear on the test. Some people get more out of it than others.
If you've got a system that can reliably take a citizen earning $40,000/year and turn them into a citizen earning $140,000/year, governments from all over the world will beat down a path to your door. Over a 40 year career that's an extra $4 million in taxable income.
Well that question didn’t age well…