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A persons education isn't just about learning facts. It's also about learning approaches to thinking and problem solving.

A crude example would be these days people are less reliant on memorising information as they were 30 years ago because search engines enable the individual to find answers quickly. So you adapt your approach to a particular subject to learn how to search for answers instead of how to memorize those answers.

As an aside, since we are heading at pace to a future where our memory is augmented by the internet; if for the internet offline for whatever reason humanity could be thrown into the dark ages again with vasts sums of knowledge lost.



Then standardized tests came along and all kids learn is how to pass these same tests.

US education is an atrocity.


That's bullshit. Standardization can be done very effectively. If the tests are different enough year by year.

That said College Board is a very big risk factor, because its process and scoring is opaque.

US education is problematic because (inner city) children are not thaught the value of education. When parents are crazy, it's hard to teach the kids.


As Busta Rhymes put it:

    "When even role models tell us we're born to be felons
    We're never gettin' into Harvard or Carnegie Mellon
    And we gon' end up either robbin' somebody or killin'
    It's not fair that's all they can tell us
    That's why you hustle hella hard, never celebrate a holiday
    That'll be the day I coulda finally hit the lottery
    I refuse to ever lose or throw my shot away
    Or chalk it up as just another one that got away."
Is the problem 'children not being taught the value of education,' or that they /are/ taught that they're on a school-to-prison pipeline, without a lot of hope for much else?


I have no intimate knowledge of role models of every child, but how the fuck kids in the hood end up with a racist dumbass as one is nonsense. Those are not role models, those are the good old enemies of progress, the ethnophobes, the good evangelicals, or the good mothers who won't let their precious Percys play with Marquis.

It's not their fault that they are trapped, but the fact is still that. They incorrectly under value long term goals like staying out of jail (the overused example of making quick bucks by selling drugs), just like almost all people, they just pay for it much more, since they happen to be poor.


The real problem with US education is that there's an "inner city" phenomenon at all. In every other country in the world "inner city" children are just children.

Standardization itself isn't the problem per-se, it's that schools get put in the uncomfortable position of having to hit certain metrics or they lose funding. What they do to maintain funding is eject under-performing kids so they don't drag down their average.

This is what happens when you have metrics that encourage the wrong outcome and turn the entire education system into a game that has a meta.


Agreed. And of course it's very hard to go to school when your family has no money. Or you don't even have a family. And of course it's hard to keep families together, when people can't find jobs, because silly X-while-black convictions, a-and of course it's even harder to keep people on track in school when they are just a literal fuck up away from dropping out because they don't have access to birth control (nor proper education about reproduction).




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