
"Student as nigger" - Essay on problems with schools and teaching (1969) - jodrellblank
http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030301studentasnigger.html
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ghshephard
"Occasionally, a class is unbelievably faithful to the traditional seating
plan. They sit mournfully facing an empty altar and they sprain their necks
trying to see me and the other students. I curse and mutter but they hold
firm. It's almost as though they're saying:, "Screw you, you bastard, you're
going to have to tell us to move." And I swear to myself I won't."

Oddly enough I couldn't help but think about Jacob on Lost when I read that
paragraph.

In general, I agree with the themes, but, you know what, I'm really happy
someone taught me that a mole is 6.02 _10^23, and that G is 6.67_ 10^-11. I
appreciate being able to write a complete sentence, and feel sorry for those
who can't communicate in written format.

So, if that makes me a slave to the system, so be it. What the author fails to
appreciate, is that perhaps some of us will have a happier life being lead
through a system, not everyone is going to be an entrepreneurial learner. We
certainly do lose some freedom, and to some degree propagate a system of
enslavement - but it serves some of us fairly well.

I realize the author is writing on a higher plane, but it's also interesting
how some of his thoughts compare to PG's: "It would be well if we stopped
lying to ourselves about what compulsory schooling does for our children. It
temporarily imprisons them; it standardizes them; it intimidates them. If
that's what we want, we should admit it."

I thought it was a good read, but maybe that's because I'm listening to
Eminem's "I'm not Afraid" on repeat. :-)

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hugh3
Well, I was going to comment on the attention-whoringly inflammatory title,
but I note it was written in 1969 when the word you-know-what was several
orders of magnitude less inflammatory than it is now, so I hope we can move
past that.

The main problem with the rest of the article is that it's so exaggerated that
it's hardly worth engaging with.

~~~
epochwolf
I have to agree. He lost me at the part where we should let people decide if
they should learn to read.

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randomwalker
The link goes to a different essay from the book. The actual titular essay is
here: <http://ry4an.org/readings/short/student/>

~~~
hugh3
Ah, that makes sense; at least the title now has some relation to the content.

The content still doesn't make a helluva lot of sense though:

 _Students, like black people, have immense unused power. They could,
theoretically, insist on participating in their own education. They could make
academic freedom bilateral. They could teach their teachers to thrive on love
and admiration, rather than fear and respect, and to lay down their weapons.
Students could discover community. And they could learn to dance by dancing on
the IBM cards. They could make coloring books out of the catalogs and they
could put the grading system in a museum._

The words "misplaced idealism" spring to mind. So do the words "Drugs are
bad".

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endtime
The only discernible point of this essay is that you shouldn't travel back in
time to 1969 and enroll at Cal State LA.

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voidfiles
I have been in actual class, in the last 3 years, where this text was used as
the opening reading. It was a course on pedagogy. The teacher was using it as
a lightning rod, a discussion piece. The teacher used it, I think, to quickly
sort the class in to the types of people she had in her classroom.

To be blunt, I love this essay. And, there seem to be few of you engaging in
the ideas. Yes, its easy to look at it and say utopia, never going to happen.
And, yet, it's easy to say well if this was the case, no one would learn
anything, but come on, dig in.

I think the point is, and it's one that paul graham him self has made in his
book, Hackers and Painters, is that students are trying to learn real things,
but in most cases they are just sitting there being talked at. Not in all
cases, but most cases.

I don't think he is trying to say that things like chemistry, and physics
aren't important, but he is making the point that giving people a choice is
more important.

Before I make my passionate case for the way I like to learn, its important to
state that I realize that there are as many ways to learn as there are colors.
We can probably sort people in to a small number of effective buckets, but
diversity is the name of the game.

I don't practice anything passionately that was taught to me in school.
Programming, cooking, writing. They tried to teach me writing, but they tried
in an English teacher way, and I don't write, or think like an English
teacher.

The things I choice to care about, and I chose to get better at, I do best.

And, I can hear you already, you liberal education people, yelling, "but if
you don't force people to learn lots of things, they won't ever do it by
themselves.", bull shit, of course there are going to be people who refuse to
learn anything, but come on, life is a bell curve, most people would probably
choose to learn, a moderate amount of things ,in moderation, and that is fine.

The damage we are doing, as argued by the essay, is that by forcing everyone
to learn the same things, determined by people other then the people learning,
is that we are probably turning many, otherwise eager to learn people, off of
learning for ever, because they are forced to learn things they don't care
about, and a lot of things they really don't care about.

So, come on, lets engage on the subject matter.

Hackers, and Painters
[http://books.google.com/books?id=B4dk0tYPrckC&printsec=f...](http://books.google.com/books?id=B4dk0tYPrckC&printsec=frontcover&dq=hackers+and+painters&source=bl&ots=PQ2eZ7Gh9Y&sig=-I-rwxUPDB2NawTfRTqmX8K3Y_s&hl=en&ei=JZPnS5KlD4TMsQOq2fX-
CA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false)

