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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30019 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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There's a place where kids undergo strenuous training from a young age. It's South Korea, and it's universally considered a terrible place to grow up, most of all by South Koreans themselves. Thanks but no thanks, let's let kids actually have a childhood.

We already train kids for 8 hours every weekday plus homework, beginning at a young age. I’m saying that that this training should simply be more specialized, not that it needs to be more strenuous. In fact, if you make it more specialized, we could probably get away with making it less stressful.

Korean education is a complete mess. If I'm reading wikipedia right, their big life-changing exam (for which they rearrange public transport routes and ground flights during the English listening) is almost entirely multiple-choice:

All questions are multiple-choice, except for the 9 questions in the Mathematics section, which are short answer.

Imagine trying to answer a literature question in multiple-choice format. It's ironic, they care so much about education that the inevitable 500K kids demanding remarking means they can't even test literary/rhetorical skills at all in their national exams.

It's OK, AI will surely fix this.

At some point, AI tutors will so massively surpass human teachers that the whole educational edifice will collapse in a heap. There will be nothing they can do, it will simply be too shameful to pretend they're serving any purpose.

It'll be interesting to see how things go in East Asia, where they're super into respecting teachers and tutors. There's a prestige they have there that won't be easily broken, no matter how pointless their work is.

That's nuts. Even the dreaded Eight Leg Essay of the Ming dynasty required some creativity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-legged_essay

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