You accidentally hit on the solution: bring back the cane! As Machiavelli once wrote, “If you can’t be respected, it is better to be feared than loved.”
You accidentally hit on the solution: bring back the cane! As Machiavelli once wrote, “If you can’t be respected, it is better to be feared than loved.”[/quote]
Don’t be daft!
Buttercup: I’m serious in a way. If the government is actually going to compel children to go to a kind of one-size-fits-all school (rather than either making it non-compulsory or completely overhauling the system so it attends to individual needs), then it actually needs to stop playing around and back it up with genuine force.
I agree that everything is put onto teachers to ‘engage’ children. In the past, it was more like: ‘Don’t go then. Not our problem. You can work in the mines.’ Now, western societies are responsible for any uneducated kids in terms of welfare payments.
‘The government’ isn’t teachers, though. I certainly wouldn’t have a teacher raise a hand to my kid, or would I raise a hand to another person’s kid, basically because I wouldn’t love or particularly care about the kids in my class enough to want to ‘discipline’ them to that extent. I simply don’t really care how kids behave, beyond classroom management, which is not rocket science, within the contexts I’ve experienced anyway.
And how can you ensure the whack with the ruler wouldn’t be because the teacher was in a bad mood and simply disliked the kid? Citizens can’t do that in the ‘real world’.
I don’t know what the ‘solution’ is, obviously (I’m not making policy, here), but you may have hit on something with ‘fear’. Clearly some tit of a teacher with a stick is about as scary as … once you’re older than 10, but there need to be social consequences for being a lazy, violent, malevolent little shit. There certainly were when I was one. 
Buttercup: I don’t really have the solutions either, especially since I think the genie is now out of the bottle, so to speak.
I was merely saying (which I think you agree with to a certain extent) that the education systems in countries such as Britain, the U.S. or Australia seem to have been overthrown but haven’t been replaced with anything better, or at least more functional. Obviously, whatever they’re doing in Finland seems to be the best way of doing things (at least for now), but the ability to turn the British education system into the Finnish education system rests more on turning Britain into Finland than anything else, which is obviously a tall order even if people actually want that.
Given the choice then between say the Taiwanese or British, in terms of a preferable model, it’s a real Clayton’s choice. Obviously, I have real issues with how education is conducted in Taiwan, and yet at the end of the day, I think that the Taiwanese model probably functions better. If it weren’t for the woeful fertility rates and general issues to do with family-unfriendliness in the workplace, I might even be pushed to say that Taiwanese society as a whole is in better shape than British.
I think it’s part of a broader malaise in English-speaking countries. Everyone demands his right to be a dickhead (including me, though I’m actually far more restrained in real life than on here), but no one chooses not to exercise it out of some sense of duty to others, or even because he realises it’s in his long term interests not to contribute to the tragedy of the commons (although, as a countervailing force, if he’s the only one who does exercise restraint, it’s actually against his own interests to do so).
I think our education systems, and actually our societies at large, in many English-speaking countries are actually failing. They’re not entirely failed yet, but they’re rapidly getting there, and as I mentioned at the start, I largely believe the genie is out of the bottle now and it can’t be put back in (at least not without some fairly severe crises).
The strange part is that there have been some recent studies showing that African American women have been dramatically outperforming African American men. Seem to recall one study quoted something like close to twice as many black women than black men are now completing advance degrees. On the other hand, in the U.S. girls in general evidently have been out performing the boys in recent years.
Why “On the other hand”? Isn’t the situation between the sexes the same with African American people as it is with the US population as a whole? Girls do better, in general, at academic subjects than boys.
boys are set up to be losers. All women who get married marry losers anyway don’t they. All boyfriends are losers too are they not?
It is because the brains of girls are quite different than boys. First the first 6 months after conception, they are the same. Then as the boy’s brain develops in the womb, it is given a critical testosterone boost.
This totally influences the behavour differences between girls and boys during their formative years in school. Girls respect authority more, are more empathetic, and generally function better in structured school environments. Boys generally are more abstract thinkers, challenge authority, and are more aggressive. In structured school environments, the system, I would argue, favours the girls much more than it favours the boys.
However, I’ve always believed these structured early school environments and the whole public school system in general reward mediocrity. Most talented people hated high school. I sure did. I loved the social side and the sports (I was a bit of a jock), but was it intellectually stimulating? Double fuck no. The best and brightest can’t wait to get out to move onto bigger and better things. I learned more from my parents and role models outside of school than inside school. Anytime I hear people keep going on about their high school years, I think to myself privately they probably haven’t achieved too much since. And to me, it’s often mediocrities that decide to become teachers in that system. The pay’s ok, it provides two months vacation, and it values union seniority versus performance.
In my opinion, if African Americans don’t achieve in the mediocre environs of High School, it’s because they are either exceptionally high achieving (bored) or they don’t work hard enough or have the proper mentors/family support. Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan mentioned these in his 1965 report and was attacked from the left wing of the Dems. Basically he said divorce, abandonment and out-of-wedlock births increased in the numbers of female-headed households and the high rates of poverty, low educational outcomes, and inflated rates of abuse that are associated with them.
Saying that their minds are different and that they don’t like to be stared at is really objectionable IMHO. What about great African Americans such as Alan Keyes or Clarence Thomas? 
I wish I was as smart and as erudite as they are. People are people, and I truly think poverty doesn’t just penalize blacks but large amounts of whites, Latinos, and other demographics as well. However, even in conditions of poverty, if families stay together, value education, and give their kids proper values, there will be upward mobility. Unfortunately, I think the African American community is often too ready to blame their failures on others/past historical grievances. Yes, slavery was awful, but it really shouldn’t be used in the 21st Century to rationalize the lack of advancement. Change has to come from within and some pretty intense navel gazing. Unfortuntely, it is a lot easier to blame others. Give them any special preference based on their collective lack of progress means penalizing the accomplishments of individuals that were able to climb up the social ladder. You’re cheapening their accomplishments. Thomas said as much after graduating from Yale Law School when people during the recruitment process viewed him as an affirmative action graduate rather than a brilliant scholar that he is/was.
I totally agree with this, though I think the right structured environments are good for boys. I went to a single sex school and I think that generally worked well. Maybe it’s simplistic to say this, but it worked because we had teachers who could be complete and uncompromising hard arses with us when we stepped out of line. There’s no way a teacher could have done half the stuff that happened to us in a mixed environment. For one thing, we had teachers who were not afraid to use corporal punishment at all.
Again, I agree. High school was still often boring as shit for me and I hated all the lining up and bureaucratic bullshit at my school. That said, I think it was the lesser of two evils. The whole reason my parents pulled me out of the government system was because they could see that I was going to end up going completely off the rails. So, whilst my school often drove me insane (and I couldn’t wait to get out), it probably kept me in check. Also, I think most of my teachers in my last year of school, with the exception perhaps of my English teacher (who was away with the pixies), were pretty solid guys who knew their shit and didn’t have time to screw around. There was just an expectation that we were there to be pushed by our teachers, by our peers and by ourselves.
Largely, I’d agree with you, but I think it’s slightly different in some cases (including my own). I went into teaching for a whole lot of inter-linked reasons. The first was unashamedly so I could actually have a job. It was partly because I studied things (such as philosophy) that don’t readily lend themselves to direct career paths (other than some fields of consulting or financial analysis – things I had no desire to go into back then, but would actually be interested in now), and partly because I absolutely abhor the narrow focus of most “careers” (including teaching, ironically, which has become such an exercise in painting by numbers that it simply doesn’t allow for any interesting tangents and I get bored, so I can completely relate to some my students in that respect) that I’ve never had any interest in a career. I wanted something that would allow me to have a whole life outside of work, and I actually think this is both necessary and healthy. It’s not just the time on the job I’m talking about, it’s about the quality of the time on the job. As I’ve said, that narrow focus on really mundane things wears me down incredibly quickly. It wore me down in all of the jobs I had before I became a teacher. I need intellectual stimulation to keep me intellectually energetic outside of work and I need to be intellectually energetic outside of work to keep me intellectually stimulated at work. I really think this point is lost in how bureaucratic and narrowly focussed school is even for the teachers these days (or at least the teachers I really admired were the ones who were interested in lots of different things and who would go off on interesting tangents, but I knew even then that they struggled with the narrow focus of the curriculum). Ironically, the bureaucracy, the paperwork and the dullness of both the curriculum and colleagues has often meant teaching has been incredibly draining for me. Interestingly, I wouldn’t put discipline issues in this category because I have worked in schools where discipline was handled well (and there was support from above), and so it isn’t something in and of itself that wears me down. In some ways, I actually greatly prefer teaching rowdy boys to more compliant students.
In addition to needing a job, in line with being able to do other things outside of work, given that I’d been working to save and travel, travelling and spending all of my money, and then going back to Australia to start the process all over again, I worked out that I needed the kind of job that I could do anywhere in the world, which made teaching an obvious choice. Again, I think being able to work and live overseas ultimately brings something extra to someone’s teaching as it gives them more life experience. I think not enough teachers have much real life experience. I don’t think a twenty-two year old mathematics teacher can bring anywhere near as much to the job as a guy who first worked as an engineer for fifteen years. Likewise, how can a social studies teacher really talk much about foreign lands and people if he’s never actually been in the midst of them*. However, such people going into (or more precisely, remaining in) teaching is extremely rare because the incentives – be they pay or intellectual stimulation – are all screwed up. So yes, teaching largely does attract the mediocre, or at least retains the mediocre.
*Tangentally to the paragraph above (and I’ve basically been writing this entire post as a public pm to you), there’s this clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdEGJb5W5ks.
There’s a lot I disagree with Mark Steyn about elsewhere, but I really relate to that clip, especially the bit from 3:48 onwards where he talks about his teachers being both incredibly well-versed in the canon of Western thought yet also having all sorts of experience with obscure cultures and languages. He hits the nail right on the head in that clip where he basically says that so many people have no knowledge of either their own culture or another, yet go on with all of this wishy-washy multicultural shit.
[quote]In my opinion, if African Americans don’t achieve in the mediocre environs of High School, it’s because they are either exceptionally high achieving (bored) or they don’t work hard enough or have the proper mentors/family support. Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan mentioned these in his 1965 report and was attacked from the left wing of the Dems. Basically he said divorce, abandonment and out-of-wedlock births increased in the numbers of female-headed households and the high rates of poverty, low educational outcomes, and inflated rates of abuse that are associated with them.
Saying that their minds are different and that they don’t like to be stared at is really objectionable IMHO. What about great African Americans such as Alan Keyes or Clarence Thomas? I wish I was as smart and as erudite as they are. People are people, and I truly think poverty doesn’t just penalize blacks but large amounts of whites, Latinos, and other demographics as well. However, even in conditions of poverty, if families stay together, value education, and give their kids proper values, there will be upward mobility. Unfortunately, I think the African American community is often too ready to blame their failures on others/past historical grievances. Yes, slavery was awful, but it really shouldn’t be used in the 21st Century to rationalize the lack of advancement. Change has to come from within and some pretty intense navel gazing. Unfortuntely, it is a lot easier to blame others. Give them any special preference based on their collective lack of progress means penalizing the accomplishments of individuals that were able to climb up the social ladder. You’re cheapening their accomplishments. Thomas said as much after graduating from Yale Law School when people during the recruitment process viewed him as an affirmative action graduate rather than a brilliant scholar that he is/was.[/quote]
Again, one hundred percent with you on all of these things. Doesn’t it seem obvious that the reason Asian kids arrive in the West from countries that were shattered by war, corrupt governments, and so on, dirt poor with families that speak little English and have few transferable skills, yet end up becoming doctors, accountants and other professionals in one generation is because the families stay together, work their arses off (and imparts that ethic to the children) and highly value education? That was certainly the case with the Vietnamese guys I went to school with.