And there it is. The problem with America is that we’re not ethnically homogeneous enough.
Shoo, you.
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Okay, now I know you’re not interested in arguing in good faith, because this is fundamentally disconnected from the reality of any teaching curriculum I’ve ever been exposed to either as a student or as the son of a primary school teacher.
Have fun on your family compound.
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Fair enough. I can think of a few non-political terms to describe an independent thinker who thinks that a state lottery (AKA “the fool’s tax”) is a sensible way to fully fund a public K-12 education system or who’s arrogant enough to think his individual efforts can come close to replicating the outcomes of a collaborative educational effort, but I’ll refrain from using them here. The idea that one can solve one of the many problems in a public K-12 system primarily by starving it of funds is just as foolish as throwing money at a problem and calling it a day – that kind of thinking is a bad habit of the mind, which leads to things like Citizens United or declaring oneself a Libertarian (not that I’m accusing you of being that kind of dope).
I’m sure you don’t think you are, but a lot of people use terms without having the educational background to understand that they are derogatory. Taylor’s early portrayal of workers as cogs was quickly discarded as offensive and disrespectful by his heirs in the scientific management movement.
I don’t believe that Switzerland is an ethnically homogenous society, mainly because it isn’t. That’s the sort of fact you pick up from good teachers in good, well-funded schools.
Since it’s become clear that you’re not aware of certain basic economic, historical, business management, paedagogical, and now geographical concepts needed to carry the discussion here forward I don’t think it will be productive to continue it.
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Given that Europe isn’t nearly as “ethnically homogenous” as most people imagine, it’s a bullshit argument.
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That’s an old problem for the elite. You can find Woodrow Wilson referencing the bifurcation of education in his time where one class of people get the “liberal” education (Greek classics, debate, etc) for technocrats and other such experts and the rest get rote rehearsal that makes them effective workers/soldiers. This is inherent to capitalism and which is why the elite fear an educated populous. Now the cat is out of the bag thanks to the Internet. It’s why they want to control all the avenues of that as well. If only James Burke could live a bit longer maybe he’d get see that “balanced anarchy” he talked about in one of his TV series.
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Seems like dude was basically being real honest: aside from the threat of any of the existing colonial powers, the US also had to “protect” itself from the hundreds of thousands of people it was enslaving. Militias and “local control” dealt with uppity brown people quite a bit more than they ever faced Spanish, French or English incursions.
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The kindergarten where my kid would go if I put her in our public school system not only gives 1hr long “SAT” tests to the kids but keeps them in from recess if they are not doing well enough and they study for it.
Nah, the person in question was just a gun nut who went right to a bigot’s explanation instead of Switzerland’s strict gun control laws.
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The “Stanford Achievement Test” has been a fixture of schools for 100 years, though mostly it isn’t mandatory anymore (and has been supplanted in many districts by other assessments). The ones given at the elementary level are untimed, and mainly used for assessing programs and schools, not the kids themselves.
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David Attenborough voice: Here we see the rarely-witnessed Libertarian circle-jerk. Researchers have been working for decades to unravel the complex and intertwined fallacies woven by these remarkable creatures, but always find air or feces in the center.
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Last time we had free State Universities in California we got Silicon Valley.
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The value of having an educated public has been codified in US law since the passage of the Morrill Acts in the 19th century; notably, this was to
promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life
(In particular, not just “applied” degrees.)
While we were the first to recognize the importance to society of opening higher education to everyone, in the last 25 years much of Europe has caught up or surpassed us in the fraction of the population with tertiary degrees, and frankly it shows in the quality of their public discourse compared to ours.
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That might be it’s intended use but when you have teachers keeping kids in from recess to prepare for the test then that entire premiss falls apart.
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Anecdotally I’ve noticed that the more similar people feel they are to one another the worse they are willing to behave. And certainly lack of diversity can lead to blind spots.
Of course whether people feel they are different from one another is a learned thing. Where I live an English and a Scottish person would be awfully “similar” but there are plenty of people who would stab me in the throat with a thistle for saying that in the UK.
Which makes me wonder how a person could measure “ethnic homogeneity”. If you get your DNA done by ancestry-dot-com then you’ll find out what percentage of your ancestors come Iberia, but presumably your Portugese great great grandmother would be as offended to be called Spanish as my Scottish grandmother would have been to be called English. I once heard a professor joke that in eastern Europe someone will be racist against you because you pronounce the letter ‘e’ differently than they do (and I once had a co-worker from Montenegro who seemed to subtly look down on other co-workers from Romania as stupid).
Hell, growing up Canada people used to make fun of the intelligence of people from Newfoundland. I’ve got to wonder if that started in Labrador.
So if you do think that “ethnic homogeneity” has an impact on “how people react to one another” I’d be interested to hear what you think ethnic homogeneity is and how you think it impacts people’s reactions, for better or for worse.
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Understatement:
Also, I’d be very interested to know exactly which US school district is officially prepping 5 year olds for the SAT as part of their curriculum (and then punishing them if they don’t perform satisfactorily.)
Not saying it’s 100% impossible, it just seems highly improbable.
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I’m not going to defend the way politicians have decided to use these test results, or how school administrators (not teachers!) have decided to respond to that use. I just wanted to point out that these SATs are neither anything new nor related to the college entrance exams. I took these exams back when JFK was president, and I think I turned out alright.
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Are the scantron standardized tests what the hullabaloo here is all about?
If so, then I doubly call bullshit;
Though annoying, they are nothing like the SAT or ACT, except the format of filling in the little bubbles labeled A, B, C, D and E.
They’re supposed to be an assessment of how each school’s student body is doing compared to rest of the schools in each state. (Like yourself, I make no claim about how the info gathered is actually used. That’s another kettle of fish, entirely.)
I remember having to take them once a year in elementary school, but never as young as kindergarten. I also don’t recall ever studying for them, or being kept from recess for not doing well. If that’s what is actually happening in someone’s school district, the parents need to file official complaints.
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Although such tests aren’t administered before elementary school, things like that do happen. Malcolm Harris, author of a book on Millenials and one himself, describes a school that:
tells parents that they’re canceling the annual kindergarten show because, as Harris puts it, “These kids could not spare two days off from their regularly scheduled work […] The implication is that the very children themselves aren’t good enough without some serious improvements.”
Harris (a left-winger) makes it clear that those who drive situations like this are politicians and school administators who’ve bought into the idea current amongst conservatives (and apparently at least one self-educated “independent thinker”) that education should be primarily about preparing young people to compete in a tight labour market.
There are concerns based in reality here, but they have nothing to do with librul unionised teachers robbing preschoolers of their childhoods by forcing them to take college entrance exams. They have everything to do with 35 years of agenda-setting by conservatives and Libertarians.
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That was my main point of contention with such a dubious claim.
Anecdotal “evidence” is not the the same thing as verifiable facts.
Like I’d said, it’s not a complete impossibility, but neither is it legal ‘official school policy’ or “the norm” for most publicly funded primary schools in the US. My own mom would have raised bloody hell if our district tried to pull that crap, and so would have most of her peers.
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Well, your mother sounds like the kind of person who 1. got her information on such matters from places other than crank Libertarian Web sites and 2. didn’t respond to a reality-based situation by doing an “I’m taking my ball and going home” ragequit but instead tried to remedy it like an adult who wants to participate in society.
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