this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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chapotraphouse
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What actually is the focus on memorising for? Like even my English lit exams i had to memorise the quotes i was going to use for an essag question i didn't know yet.
How does this serve capitalism?
to grind you down for a life time of "because i said so"s at work.
I think it's probably because recall is often a demonstration of proficiency - think how consuming/reading language is easier than producing/writing it. Not the only sign of proficiency, but one of them.
On the other hand, we benefit more from current technology by being proficient with references, and proficiency over an entire field is now inefficient and/or unattainable. Even in languages - native languages at that - most of us only become proficient at producing contemporary styles, whereas it often takes specialists to decypher old texts with appropriate linguistic and historical context. But now chatbots can fill in for the specialist by acting as a more widely available and in-depth reference, I guess.
systems don't have to be good they have to be good enough
our education system basically produces as many people as we need taught to the standard we need. It isn't better because it doesn't have to be and institutions have inertia
Related to liberal philosophy and psychology, I think, the whole "rational actors" perspective of the human being. That we are machines that take some input and spit out an output in reliable and accurate ways. The ones who don't are ignored as part of humanity to maintain the definition.
Another way to look at education is that it is a factory line to output workers to exploit for labor. The defects are discarded, and the ones who make it out are the ones who somehow take any input and reliably accurate and exploitable output (labor)
Which is why graduates of most fields have no experience and function on cultivated instincts like memorization. Only when a worker works with their actual hands, so to speak, do they learn real knowledge of their labor. This is how education used to be, an apprenticeship sort of model, which you still see in certain trades and fields like the medical field.
Memorization predates capitalism. So I'd look for reasons in pre-capital societies
a large portion of my education was "shut up and do what you're bloody well told"
to such an extent that part of me does despite my knowing better resent people who won't
that would slow it down quite a bit though. Are you sure you aren't just more interested in history and philosophy than maths. Because I did get taught historical context along with my maths and science lessons and found it hopelessly boring.
Maths would do better to be taught as the creative subject it is. I had a really fun maths teacher who taught us how once you understand how an equation works you can apply it to solve a variety of problems in interesting ways.
I think the way schools teach obedience is less in the subjects themselves but the constructed social atmosphere. The calling people sir, the being grouped into classes and forced to stand in lines, we had one PE teacher that would make us do punishments from WW1 for backtalking (there's some historical context for you!) the fact it was a collective punishment also didn't help
Would you say that you'd extrapolate that sort of thinking to lots of other things in life?
yeah I think that would be fair to say. why do you ask
I guess that explains your past opposition of me proposing and imposing a proposed bilingual policy....
Sorry for before...
I agree that letting kids chose what to study is a good thing but I think that's more for older kids for a number of reasons.
1 - they need some experience with the subject to know if they like it and it would be a shame if they gave up on maths or history entirely because of a bad impression at the very beginning stage when if they got to know the subject better they might love it
2 - young children if left to their own devices probably won't do the early childhood work they need to. Children mature as they age and I would argue it's abusive to give them responsibility for their decisions before they are old enough to make them properly
3 - society and the children themselves do need them to have a baseline level of knowledge in various subjects.
Sure, but different students approach maths in different ways. Some prefer applied math with clear, preferably cool, use cases. You want to teach those the rocket equation and orbital mechanics first.
Other's want everyday or civil applications. Or historical context of how the problems were developed.
Still others want pure math and proofs and the really abstract stuff and how it fits into modern bleeding edge math.
And still others are reading Russell and Whitehead at age 13 and should have math taught from a philosophy perspective.
yeah but there are limited resources per student (although we grossly underprioritise education children are our future)
I'm not an expert on this stuff though I'm just basing my thinking on my own school experience
As I understand it we imported it from China because it was a system that allowed education at greater scale than Europes previous system of having a conversation with the examiner. It lets lots of people sit the same exam at once
to say capitalism strives for greater efficiency is false it strives for greater scale
Now we stick with it because we've been doing it 200 years and people are used to it
It’s much easier to make and grade an exam that’s based on memorisation than on understanding. Such exams are also less prone to biased grading.