"The opposite of poverty is justice"

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Campitor
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by Campitor »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Fri Jun 23, 2017 1:28 pm
Unfortunately, there is no other place to send these kids. Meanwhile, there are some very poor, very bright kids in these classrooms who are just wasting their time, and falling further and further behind their peers in more affluent districts.
And this is what's most sad - no one wants to say it or do something about it. We all get it. Yet when it comes to these incorrigible kids, in action no better than evil trolls with parents equally culpable, society thinks they can automagically reform them by putting them in with regular students and a competent teacher. I truly sympathize with public school teachers - they have been given a sow's ear for a system and are expected to make silk purses. Good teachers with good students will yield amazing results. Good teachers with good student with Pelican Bay inmate level kids sprinkled in - extremely bad results.

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fiby41
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by fiby41 »

As long as we are on the topic of spearating the performers and non-performers, so to speak in a school setting...
The school I went to, we were sorted on the basis of last year's marks into a list. The topper was put in to division A, 2nd highest in to B, 3rd to C, 4th into D, 5th into A and so on.
In some other schools, first n students were sorted into division A, second n students into B and so on where n was the class strength. First I found this appalling, but now I think it must've been a blessing in disguise for my friends in those schools. It's a meritocracy and more akin to the outside world than what I had.

enigmaT120
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by enigmaT120 »

fiby41, was that in the United States?

Riggerjack
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by Riggerjack »

@7w5

WWW.APA.org/monitor/2013/03/smarter.aspx

Read the article, then ask yourself if you really believe that Americans are 30 IQ points smarter, or if IQ tests for a certain way of thinking. A way that has gotten much more prevalent since education and tech are now so common in our lives. Then ask if other ways of thinking are less valuable, now that they are less common.

If we were to run a gym the way we run education, it would be to put kids thru 12 years of dexterity and flexibility training. After a hundred years, we could show definitive improvements in both flexibility and dexterity.

But none of this reflects gains or losses in strength and endurance. My belief is that mental strength and endurance have their value, even when they don't show on a dexterity test...

7Wannabe5
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Re: "The opposite of poverty is justice"

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Riggerjack: Even though I am somebody who still experiences direct benefit from being able to score well on mental "dexterity" tests, I don't disagree with your assertion regarding strength and/or endurance. For instance, I think humans lost a good deal of abilities during the transition from the oral tradition to the age of literacy. Young children are still sometimes taught facts or ideas in association with music, but that method is quickly phased out. I was watching an episode of Star Trek recently in which Captain Kirk was challenged to recall the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, and the only reason I was able to recite it was due to early repeated exposure to Scholastic Rock public service interludes during 1970s Saturday morning cartoon programming.

Nature vs. nurture is rather a puzzle in this realm. When I was a student at a university that was highly biased towards SAT scores in admissions, I once had a conversation with a large group of my peers in which we discovered that the majority of us had learned to read before entering kindergarten, and one of our parents had taught us by making use of the Beginner Books series by Random House, featuring the works of Dr. Seuss. IOW, something like 90% correlation between being read "Hop on Pop" when you were 3 and having the privilege of competing in Organic Chem 16 years later.

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