The Structure of Public School

Who has the better vision?

  • Pavlovianmodel146
  • Loren646
0 voters

Loren646 v. Pavlovianmodel146

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Unless I am mistaken, there is a formatting problem in Pav’s conclusion. While the two debaters have very different voices and I can identify who is speaking, given the nested nature of internet communication it does create some confusion, especially with regards to ‘new’ vs. ‘old’ information.

I fixed it, please re-read.

I am sure Carleas can attest to the quotes being the only thing I edited. I have had the same problem twice now.

I wasn’t expecting your position, Pav. Like Wonderer, I thought it would be two idealized systems that you each would defend, and that they’d be rooted in learning, not in practical considerations. The last thing you expect in a philosophy debate is a practical consideration. I’d like to see a rematch concerning the whole school system, and not just high school, and where people are actually presenting their own system rather than endorsing a specific system that already exists.

Loren, I think you let Pav get the best of you by attacking his position more than you tauted your own. I think your proposal could compare pretty well, but you spent all your time tearing down Pav’s and the criteria that he was using. Basically, the positive aspects of Pav’s system seemed to be that they were already your system: almost no math or science if you don’t want them, and plenty of real-world knowledge.

I disagree with both of you about foreign language, though. I’ve taken foreign languages all my life, and I think I’ve gotten a lot out of them just for how mentally broadening they are. In addition, there are a ton of opportunities that knowledge of a foreign language affords you, and that’s going to increase as the world continues to globalize. If you get by on english, the reason will be that someone else has learned a foreign language.

I consider it a social sciences debate as opposed to a philosophy debate.

I’m game for a re-match if the other parties concerned are. Although, I have not seen Loren646 recently.

I would like for there to be a team re-match, perhaps after the ILP vs. ILO Debates are over.

Loren 646 + Wonderer

vs.

Carleas + PavlovianModel146

EDIT: Carleas, one other thing that I would like to add here is that the goal of the debate was to tout our own ideal visions for the public school system and curriculum. In this case, after researching information on a few of the local High Schools, it just so happened that one system already in existence almost identically matched my ideal vision for curriculum.

I didn’t mean to imply that your argument was a bad one. At first I was a little upset, and threw myself a little tantrum over being surprised, but the argument that high schools should teach what gets kids into college was well made, and sort of pushed the onus onto colleges to decide what is best in terms of education. I still think Loren’s position, better explained, could have given your position a run for its money (it wasn’t mutually exclusive with teaching to college requirements).

Loren, one thing I forgot to mention in my last post: I don’t think that most of the money that colleges make comes from tuition. As I understand it, tuition covers operating cost; the real profit comes from alumni donors (and the investment of donor money). Colleges therefore have more incentive to produce successful professionals than to tool their admissions criteria to admit as many people as possible. So, in theory they design admissions criteria based on predictors of college, and therefore professional, success. Emphasis on “in theory”.

I didn’t read that implication into it. I just thought that your position was that I deviated greatly from the general topic by using an already established model, where I countered by saying that the already established model is my model.

At any rate, I figured a team debate would be a cool idea here. Both yourself and Wonderer seem to find the same general flaws with both the way myself and Loren646 undertook this debate. Wonderer has Loren646 as the winner, you have me as the winner, so I thought it would be an interesting debate.

Yeah, what I did was pretty filthy and I washed my hands afterward.

ARGUMENT: We need to teach kids what will get them into colleges, therefore the college entry requirements are what are dictating the existence of advanced level classes and not the High Schools themselves.

COUNTER: The college entry requirements are ridiculous and do not relate in any way to an education dictated by real-world application and usage, therefore, the college entry requirements (as well as what is taught in colleges) needs to change.

REBUTTAL: We are here to discuss what is a good High School curriculum and why. What the colleges should or should not do is irrelevant to the topic.

Anyway, it was a good logic trap, but kind of dirty.

No, it was a bad logical trap, and went against you in my judgement. I mentioned it in my post.

I did notice what you said there. My counter to that is that college entry requirements are relevant only to the extent that High Schools must offer courses that get the students into college, which is why High School courses (ideally) are indexed to same. However, debating the actual changing of the college entrance requirements, or debating the opinion that colleges should change their standards is irrelevant in so much that the High School entrance requirements should still be indexed to whatever college entrance requirements become.

It is just my opinion that when a specific topic is debated, an, “All other things remaining equal,” sort of assumption should be made. Suggesting that college entrance requirements should be changed acts in direct opposition to this method of debate.

Could someone point me to the part of the debate where Loren shows expanded knowledge to be harmful?

I don’t think she said it was harmful, just unnecessary.

Yeah, her/his argument was more a cost benefit analysis, that says that if the knowledge isn’t useful, we should be teaching things that are useful with that time.

I don’t think anything could be useful than having an electorate educated in science. Haven’t the kerfuffles over evolution, abortion, and stem cell research shown this? Uneducated people getting uppity over things they don’t understand can cause major problems.

Damn, I should have used that.

…but first, I would have had to thought of it.

Meh, we all get nervous when under the gun.

Thank you. Although, I didn’t mean exclusively for the debate, that point also would have greatly benefitted me in the initial discussion had by Loren646 and myself.

This is such an interesting debate, and one which I shall wade in on the clumsy flippers of my deductions.
I shall venture that when we learn mathematics, or science - or anything appearing devoid of vocational benefit - it is not the facts themselves that we absorb, rather it is the capacity to configure and operate our mind according to a stringent set of conditionals; a motile, transposable framework of thought-process, as opposed to a mountain of vocationally useless data.
I’ll naively call upon the data/information/knowledge/wisdom hierachy as a framework which is loosely related to an educational curriculum; imagine the assimilation of data into information, then into knowledge, then into wisdom - while the stimuli (data) contained within that process are under scrutiny in this discussion, the process which engages a child’s mind to perform that process is of paramount importance when engaged in pragmatic - vocational or not - social reality.

The ability to ‘digest’ information is a higher priority than the information itself. Mathematics, sciences &c., may seem useless vocationally, but the proving/disproving of a given “theorem” (used loosely and intended more socially than mathematically), and to theoretically comprehend - before the act - the consequence of an action, is limitlessly portable, whatever the context. The subtle delivery of these conclusions is an art in itself: decorum.

As a director of research who barely graduated high-school and worked from the age of 16 (quite some time ago), I’ve found the basic frameworks of scientific investigation learnt when I was a schoolboy of endless use - and that’s one recallable conscious example. When I mentor engineers, my goal is not to feed them information, rather to try to stimulate the internal processes which compute that information and transduce it into a recallable form of knowledge. Invariably that involves the use of philosophical logic and the same application of rigorous definitions - which are, in essence, lacking ‘substance’ in the same fashion as ‘knowing how to do calculus’ lacks a tangible payoff.
This slightly pointless contribution to an excellent debate can be trivialised with: teach a man to fish, &c.