site banner
parrhesia  1yr ago (sotonye.substack.com)   2657 thread views

Most Education is Wasteful and Immoral

sotonye.substack.com

SS: I make a case for drastically cutting back on education. I argue that education doesn’t achieve its desired goals. The material is irrelevant and students forget much of the material. Most information taught in schools is quickly accessible with a smartphone. Education might be warranted if it boosted cognitive ability but it appears to be increasing IQ scores rather than actual ability to think.

8
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

In particular in the area of information technology we don't bother remembering anything, we develop technologies like wikipedia.org and stackoverflow.com so that relevant information is easily available and retrievable by anyone. No education needed.

Are you saying that Wikipedia does away with the need to memorise information in the area of information technology or of memorising information in general? If the latter I strongly disagree.

Wikipedia is an instance of MediaWiki, but there's many types of wikis. They were created precisely for people to write and avoid memorizing.

So you can disagree, but they were created, people use them, and they work.

They're brilliant resources I won't disagree. But I don't think Wikipedia is good enough to do away with the need to memorise historical facts to the point where someone relying solely on it won't be severely limited.

If someone is misrepresenting history to you, you won't become aware that something is wrong in the first place unless you've got a stock of historical knowledge already built up in your mind (Wikipedia is a decent way to do this, but we're back to memorising information here).

Now you can double check everything you hear on Wikipedia, but even that labour intensive act can't help you find analogous information which won't be considered relevant enough to be included in the same Wikipedia page, but which may be very relevant to the discussion at hand.

But I don't think Wikipedia is good enough to do away with the need to memorise historical facts to the point where someone relying solely on it won't be severely limited.

This is a false dilemma. You can use Wikipedia to avoid memorizing certain facts, like the year WWII started, and other stuff you happen to remember.

There's many historical fact that I do remember, but I remember because I keep talking about them, and I keep looking them up. I'm not memorizing them, I just happen to remember them.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats