'No Left Turn in Education'

[mahagonny]

Just joined.

'Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence they are creating artificial stupidity.'  - Sowell

About time.

[mamselle]

Sorry, that doesn't square with my experience.

I have taught in 9 elementary schools as a substitute for a couple of years and observed, par contraire, that the kids were alert, aware of electronic devices as tools but not crutches, and quite capable of working with them, not trying to get them to do the work for them.

My middle-school music theory kids can download a music transcription app, use to to write their own 16-bar melodic compositions, and they're currently applying the centuries-old Common Practice Period rules about counterpoint, accompaniment, and figured bass arrangements to create the LH bass/accompaniments to them (well, one kid is writing a fugue, but it's the same idea). We use the play-back part of the app to share them in class.

Since I've worked pretty hard to stay current with the electronic tools used in other aspects of my work (I can do a mean PowerPoint on Egyptian architecture history, wanna see it?) and I know folks who do a lot more than that (we now have a way to read the palimsests of scraped-off parchments thanks to imagaic coding by a group of art historians and computer technicians working together) and who use their mad skillz for the good (you should see the use of microscopy to analyze the fire damage to wooden pillars and prepare the repairs for Notre Dame--including, since August, the organ--now underway).

So, interesting turns of phrase, but not very rooted in anything other than an imagined, dystopian reality.

M.

[mahagonny]

Sorry, forgot the link. Here it is.

https://noleftturn.us

[polly_mer]

Do you know anything about technology or history?  It gets old to be told foolish things because people who don't know want to be alarmist about things that aren't happening.

If you want to be alarmed, then think about the widening gap between activities that must be done by a handful of highly educated people and the automated tasks that mean more and more people fall below the bar of being able to do anything productive other than unskilled caretaking.

[mahagonny]

Apropos of this, Megyn Kelly explaining about how American media does not understand a good half of the voters and doesn't desire to. And how unity is not coming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdWw_yGbvBs

[Parasaurolophus]

This is moronic and piss-poorly informed.

I've clicked around the website, and for people so concerned about "critical thinking", precious little of it is on display. The quality of argumentation is atrocious, straw men are rife, and the 'founding' open letter is a textbook case of poor writing, poor argumentation, and a poor grasp of the issues. It's confused and all over the place (e.g. they claim to be concerned about K-12, but shade into the university an awful lot). This is what you get when your intellectual bright lights are Ben Shapiro and his ilk.

Seriously. Have a look at the 'News' section to see where they're getting their shit from.

The point of the website and 'organization' is to enrich whoever's in charge of the project by capitalizing on various moral panics among the right which have been given a certain prominence thanks to shit media coverage for the last twenty (thirty? more?) years (but especially the last five or so). Nothing more. Same shit, different day.

[mahagonny]

Yikes...OK...a strong reaction. I like those. Keeps it interesting.

Well, there is going to be a vigorous reaction against the currency of people referring to such things as a Holocaust inflicted on black Americans by whites, saying republican is the party of renewed and reinvigorated racism and other baseless stupidity, Trump or no Trump. If these aren't the people to do it, who should do it and how is what I wonder? Because it's coming, whether CNN knows or not.

[kaysixteen]

Sowell has written a lot of very good stuff over the years, but he is an ideologue, a secular libertarian conservative.   He blames teachers for bad education outcomes, when this is usually not the case, at least not to anything resembling the majority level.   Our k12 ed system, really two or three systems (depending on whether one wants to divide private schools and public schools in elite suburbs, the other system being the sh*tty public schools in urban and rural America) is woefully inadequate, but there are many reasons for this, most of which have little if anything to do with teachers trying to indoctrinate students in the Gospel according to Marx.   But cherry-picking an occasional outrageous example (often without bothering to fact-check such 'examples'), is an easy way of avoiding having to take responsibility (as a conservative) for your role in fostering and maintaining the bad system, and keeping the poor kids (and increasingly also middle class ones) stuck in those sh*tty, shameful schools.