I mentioned school indoctrination

If you read the short thread and its replies – especially from teachers – you have another piece of evidence to what I asserted regarding education just being one of many products produced jointly through schools. Just to clarify, “indoctrination” is not necessarily bad or good itself, but is bad or good depending on what is being preached. The real question here is not what, but by whom. The party that is both most interested in the healthy attitudes of the child, is in the best position to judge a child’s needs, and is through the natural order the first…

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Schools and COVID

As the new school year approaches, there are lots of concerns over Coronavirus spreading through schools. While the virus isn’t dangerous to children, it is potentially dangerous to those they might be in contact with, such as grandparents and other relatives with high-risk profiles. This has caused lots of scrambling. How can we continue the current school arrangement when schools are and always have been a giant pathological petri dish? If we abandon the current paradigm of grouping children by age in small boxes, how will they get “socialized”? How will our children learn without school? This pulls the mask…

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Problems with separation of church and state

This is some practical observation. Separation of church and state really means freedom from blasphemy laws. This is why the restrictions on laws respecting religion or prohibiting it are withing the first amendment to the United States constitution, rather separate from it. It’s fundamentally about speech. The problems (or perhaps flaws) arise when the power and scope of the state grows, especially if the religious make-up of the culture has a high degree of diversity. When this happens the state will become atheistic or agnostic over time, as we can see in most western countries today. Why does this happen?…

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Grades – Important Measure, or a Tool of Oppression?

Once again, we have a great tweet as an entry-point into a deeper, more important discussion: Grading students – is it necessary and appropriate, or a piece of convention that ought to be reconsidered? Before we even bother digging into any perspectives, let’s challenge the initial response. It turns out the story that Jesse is responding to was the result of a writer being duped, and the email was faked. Buzzfeed issued the appropriate correction at the TOP of the story. That’s actually a responsible correction, so good on them. Why did this gain such traction? I think its because…

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