I want to argue your point about being able to waste a portion of our human resources. The idea that we can waste human potentially is totally opposed to the reason for having a democracy. — Athena

That's never stopped any civilization.

Our wars are about defending democratic principles and everyone's human dignity. — Athena

Sure, you can buy that...

Teachers would be ecstatic if students were eager to learn. — Athena

All children are eager to learn. It takes some effort to turn them off learning. All children, like all dogs, want to be "good", valued and appreciated. It takes some effort to convince them that they are bad, unworthy, stupid and useless. Still, we manage.

That's never stopped any civilization. — Vera Mont

What? :gasp: How about the civilizations that came to an end? War leads to war and if the cause of war is not resolved, civilizations fall.

Sure, you can buy that... — Vera Mont

Absolutely. Only when leaders can convince the masses they are fighting for a good cause, will the masses be mobilized for war. That does not mean the leaders are telling the truth about the war. Public schools were used to mobilize the US for WWI and WWII. I have the books to validate that and I am willing to quote from them. :nerd: And don't forget the pin up girls and patriotic posters that sold the war.

It is best when the leaders like Billy Grayham can convince the people that God wants us to send our sons and daughters into a war. Grayham and Eisenhower mobilized the US against Russia, those godless communist people and changed our pledge of allegiance to say "One nation under God" and now we have the White Nationalists to deal with. As our culture wars are demanding our attention, I am wondering if the fall of other civilizations looked like this when they came to their end? Nations that live with a story of the coming last days might bring the end on themselves.

PS I forgot the children in school. Have you visited inner city schools? I attended schools that became the subject of news reports about teachers suffering battle fatigue. I should say this was not the children's fault but poverty is cruel.

What? :gasp: How about the civilizations that came to an end? War leads to war and if the cause of war is not resolved, civilizations fall. — Athena

Yup. That's a great way to waste the bottom tier of their population.

Absolutely. Only when leaders can convince the masses they are fighting for a good cause, will the masses be mobilized for war. That does not mean the leaders are telling the truth about the war. — Athena

So? How does that promote or protect democracy?

PS I forgot the children in school. Have you visited inner city schools? I attended schools that became the subject of news reports about teachers suffering battle fatigue. I should say this was not the children's fault but poverty is cruel. — Athena

No shit!

formal education versus autodidact learning: the absence of studied criticism in the latter — jgill

This is quite true. Self-directed learning can turn out very lopsided, just owing to the lack of direction and resistance from other students or teachers. I was not a very reflective student in college, and I wasn't a very reflective student out of college, either. I became a much better 'scholar' after I retired.

The big mistake in my state college experience was my plan to teach English. I just wasn't cut out to be a high school teacher, and was blind to this fact. I don't regret majoring in English; maybe a BA majoring in social science (or sociology/psychology) would have made more sense. I ended up in social service work, where Chaucer and Keats were not all that helpful.

State colleges and Universities are still a pretty good deal. In the 1960s state support of higher education was still strong, and tuition and housing were very affordable.

In the 1980's the tension in Australia was always education understood as a blunt tool to get you a job - well paid or otherwise. Education at some point ditched history and context and became obsessed with vocational outcomes rather than wisdom or preparation for an adult civic life.

I genuinely am not 100% sure what the point of the education system is or how I would live without school, however I believe that I would further my pursuit of what I find to be real knowledge and life experience and spend my time intentionally with those I love and working towards a greater goal. — pursuitofknowlege

I suspect the vast number of doctors, lawyers, accountants, computer programmers, financial analysts, upper level managers, insurance underwriters, engineers, educators (including philosophy professors) rely upon what they learned in school in their day to day lives. Of course school is not all you need, but it is an important component.

There are also the trades, and maybe you grew up around and learned on your own, but there are plenty of plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, HVAC repair people and the like that also learned their trade through formal education.

Of course there are values to education beyond the pragmatic, which is the argument for liberal arts education. There are those (like me, for example) who believe it enriches lives in less tangible ways, arguing that we do not require a metric to prove such education has value.

The proof though is in the pudding. Take a look around you at those who decided to forego a formal education and see where they have landed. The stats don't paint a pretty picture for the high school dropout.

There is a particularly foolish trend in rejecting higher education that says the cost of the degrees are not worth the payoff, computing the value of the education against the debt you will be left with, especially those degrees that do not provide directly translatable skills. That is not a good argument against higher education. That is a good argument for why we need to reconsider how education is paid for. Because higher education is a high demand item because it can directly impact your social class, people are willing to take out massive loans for it and the government is willing to provide the money for it. That has resulted in the universities raising their fees to see how much loan money they can extract, and the costs have spiraled out of control, leaving students with debt they cannot ever hope to repay.

My advice would be to find an affordable education. It's well worth it. Like it or not, those who subscribe to the theory that formal education is a waste of time will not be the ones making the important decisions where you live.

If we just consider elementary and secondary school, the idea is not to prepare students for a career or even a job. It's to prepare them for a life in the society and open the possibility of more specalized learning. Had I been left to my own devices, I'd have taken only English, French, art and history. The school system insisted that I acquire basic numeracy and at least a glance into the sciences - both of which have stood me in good stead through working and private life. Some of my classmates would barely be able to read if they were not forced to - and the poor schools do release illiterate graduates - let alone become acquainted with world of literature or have an inkling of the past events which determined our present.

A comprehensive education, even if it's quite shallow, must necessarily be formal and structured: knowledge has to be built up from fundamentals. I can't be grabbed willy-nilly out of random websites.
That said, decently stocked public libraries a great boon to learning.

Not sure how you can say it is hardly a problem. We fail to agree over the fundamental building blocks of civilization itself, forget the flat Earth or vaccine debates - they are symptoms of a bigger issue, aren't they? In increasingly diverse and polarized societies, if there is no shared mainstream narrative, chaos or internecine tribalism would seem to be a consequence. Is it any wonder that some people are calling for a return to religion or Christian values as a kind of nostalgia project, harking back to a perceived golden era?

Ha, no I didn't mean the denial of these things is hardly a problem. I meant that it isn't a problem to teach well justified positions just because some people disagree. Citizens shouldn't all get an equal vote on what an appropriate chemistry, carpentry, or biology curriculum might be; let's leave that to the chemists, carpenters, and biologists.

Well, I guess we could equally say that nothing needs to be a thorny issue, whether it be health care or fire arms policy. But it is.

Right, here I was thinking of how ethics tends to get approached in the upper grade levels. Rather than focus on areas where their might be broad consensus, like the Aristotlean vice-incontinence-continence-virtue distinction, the psychology/neuroscience of habit formation, the theory of virtue as a mean between extremes, virtue as a route to self-determination, etc. we seem to instead jump to focusing on the most ideologically contentious and complex issues (at least here in the US).

Identity politics, the individual versus society, etc. are all important. They shouldn't be the ground floor. Where ethics is actually taught, curricula try to build up an analytical and theoretical tool kit before approaching these issues. Having "race and the West" tacked on to history class as an aside is probably not the best way to go about this, especially when a sort of emotivist nihilism is already the cultural norm.



That post wasn't supposed to be "how do we get ethical behavior." It was a list of what I think are generally uncontentious notions about some of the ways in which we can promote ethical behavior.

:up:

Most adults I know agree that they have forgotten the majority of what they learnt in school — pursuitofknowlege

This because they have mostly forgotten what it was they did and didn't learn in school. But if you go into it, they may admit to having learned to read and write, to behave in a group appropriately, to deal with money and weights and measures, and make simple calculations, the rules and some technique of various sports and games, the fundamentals of law and how to treat others, and no doubt a host of other stuff that I myself have forgotten I learned there, but still use all the time.

My point is education for democracy is essential to having a democracy and that does not come from reading the Bible. The US made a huge mistake when it replaced its "domestic" education with education for technology and left moral training to the Church.

I kind of agree, but how would you teach 'the good' in a world where there is no agreement on what the good is or if it is anything more than perspectival. Education would seem to be lot easier in a culture where pluralism and diversity don't exist. — Tom Storm

The goal should not be "to teach the good". :scream: Becoming aware of morals and being ethical or virtuous, is about learning logic and principles, and therefore having good moral judgment.

HOW TO THINK NOT WHAT TO THINK!!!! Liberty is having the individual ability and authority to define the good. If being gay is good for me it is good that is my right. No one has the right to oppose what is right for me, unless somehow what I am doing harms someone. The good is defending liberty and justice for all.

↪Athena In the 1980's the tension in Australia was always education understood as a blunt tool to get you a job - well paid or otherwise. Education at some point ditched history and context and became obsessed with vocational outcomes rather than wisdom or preparation for an adult civic life. — Tom Storm

I love discussing things with people who have a different point of view because of living in a different country. How can what is true of US education, also be true for Australia? 1980 is a long distance from 1958 and I am saying the change, of which you speak, began in 1958 with the National Defense Education Act. That change has manifested in all advanced countries for economic reasons. The change is tied to Capitalism and international banking.

Small third world countries with strong conservative forces that kept them in the past, are trying to do in 5 years what modern countries have done in over 100 years because today money is everything! A nation can not assure its citizens the good life through food abundance, education, medical care, opportunity, etc., without money. In the US it was national defense issues that brought about replacing domestic education with education for technology, but as soon as the new technology began changing our world, everyone had to rush to prepare its citizens for a New World.

We would do well to have a better understanding of how technology and therefore education for technology are changing the power of governments and countries and individuals. Several books have been written on the subject. The subject can be very depressing or very inspiring if we wonder about the New Age as a time of high tech., peace and the end of tyranny.

Conservatives step back and give the visionaries room to take action.