Gindil said:
First, we would have to change our education paradigm:
Second, there's plenty of ways to change education for the betterment of society. The problem is all of the money that goes into it, and how we have politicians messing it up. That's a rant for another time. My view, based on how our educational system is lacking is to adapt our students to different standards, similar to Montessori. We lose a lot of divergent thinking, and the public system spits out people for factory jobs.
There's more ways, it's just incredibly difficult to get anything new into the system that allows a smarter population in general.
I... must vehemently disagree with both the video and your post, which is basically an extension of the video.
I mean, the video seemed pretty good, and I was waiting for the big reveal at the end, only for that reveal to be the belief that kids think much less creatively the further they advance in the school system. It was carefully worded to imply this, when the only comparison was kids between kindergarten and 2nd grade, I think, it's been a bit since I saw the video. But we have a biological explanation for that, which is the loss of about 2/3rds of synapses in brain neurons between the ages of 4 and 6. In fact, very young children are the most creative people on the planet. It has nothing to do with a repressive education system, merely biology. And I can say that in my high school, I was doing a lot of creative work and not only encouraged, but required to connect multiple points that had seemingly little connection, and to create a convincing message about the connection. For instance, I had a geopolitics teacher that asked his freshmen world history students to compare the Mongols to Al-Qaeda, to teach them about terrorism as a military strategy; never mind the crazy papers he asked us to write. A geology teacher asked me to use prospect theory to figure out mining investment riskiness. Most English classes do this all the damned time.
No, the problem with education in America is not just the overall lack of funding, but where that money is going. I don't know which idiot decided it was a good idea to fund public schooling based on the taxes collected of the area that the school covers. It creates good public schools in high wealth areas, where the wealthy can afford private schooling, and creates bad public schools in poor areas, which rely on public education to get their youth out of said area and move on to better things in life. That story of the woman in Ohio who defrauded a neighbouring school district (which was a very wealthy area, btw) by sending her kids to the school there illegally (she lived in a neighbouring district, one of the poorest in Ohio and known to have a much worse school)? That's common across America. It's one of the saddest realities we face. Thankfully, I went to an inner city school that received a lot of extra funding from the city and preferential treatment, while admitting kids from across the entire city (of course, they had to be tested in 8th grade to be allowed admission). But this isn't everywhere, and in areas where the infrastructure is relatively poorer, and which relies on taxes collected from a small, economically poor area, the schools suck. There is no advancement there. The only advancement is in areas of high economic growth, areas which need this public advancement less.
So in a way, it's about preparing most people for the factory (or in this case, office) workforce, but it's more because the places that can even prepare people for the top positions are unavailable for most people geographically.
