

48 of 48 - compay
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/06/opinion/06herbert.html

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ryanwaggoner
I love this story. Very inspiring and it gives me hope that perhaps the
education system in this country can still be fixed through innovation, hard
work, and the investment of people who care more about results and making a
difference than they care about how much they care (or how much they appear to
care, but I digress).

I feel like most of the people on this site who think that the university
system is obsolete and who think that college is overrated don't understand
how privileged their perspective is. If you grew up middle class and came from
a family where most people went to college, or even just a family where going
to college wasn't looked down upon, then yeah, there are a lot of other paths
that could work out just as well for you, from traveling to starting a company
to self-learning to joining the military. Whatever. But severely
underprivileged kids don't skip college because of their other options and
because they think it's not the best way to learn. They skip it because the
idea of college is foreign to the point of being laughable. Because bettering
oneself hasn't been taught. Because education isn't valued. Sadly, for some
people in these subcultures, higher education is not only ignored, but viewed
with suspicion or even scorn.

The entire trajectory of these kids lives will be changed forever because they
earned the right to go to college. The mere fact that the education system in
this country enables that means that we're still doing something right.

~~~
johnnybgoode
I can't speak for everyone here who criticizes the credential-based university
system, but you have actually touched on one of the reasons I do that.
Credentialism creates _artificial, unnecessary_ barriers that hurt the poor
even more than it hurts the middle class.

You are looking at a story about a few of the "lucky" ones and declaring the
system a success. What the story doesn't mention is the incredible damage
credentialism causes in the first place.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Interesting...can you expound on this? Specifically on the "credentials"
portion...are you talking about the granting of degrees, the barriers to entry
to starting a university, or the barriers to attend university?

~~~
johnnybgoode
All of the above, combined with the legal privileges conferred on holders of
credentials, which necessarily result in legal barriers for those without
credentials.

Not to mention the credentialism (a focus on credentials rather than actual
ability) that is encouraged throughout society, which adds more obstacles even
where legal barriers don't exist.

While this hurts everyone, the poor are especially affected because it's more
difficult for them to obtain credentials. Offering more and more state
assistance to try to help them obtain credentials is akin to holding someone's
head underwater and providing some dirty air once in a while.

~~~
endtime
>Not to mention the credentialism (a focus on credentials rather than actual
ability)

Well, the idea is that credentials are a measure of actual ability. A company
looking for new hires can't give everyone a month-long trial to see what their
ability is firsthand, so credentials like GPA and degree serve as a heuristic.
It's not a perfect system, and in some respects you could even call it
broken...but until someone comes up with a better way for companies to work
out who to interview, it's necessary. Personally, I think it would be better
to fix the problems than to remove the system entirely.

~~~
Alex3917
"A company looking for new hires can't give everyone a month-long trial to see
what their ability is firsthand, so credentials like GPA and degree serve as a
heuristic."

This is just corporate propaganda. GPA has no correlation with work
performance, it's only used because it's a legal way to keep minorities out of
the workforce.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_GPA has no correlation with work performance._

I'd like to see some reliable studies to back up this statement. I don't see
how this could be true when adjusted for variations in programs and schools.
If I'm hiring twenty programmers from the same school who graduated from the
same program at the same time, you're telling me that if I hire 10 people who
barely graduated with a 2.0 GPA and ten people who busted their ass and
graduated with a 4.0 GPA, the first group won't outperform the latter? Why
would that be true?

 _It's only used because it's a legal way to keep minorities out of the
workforce._

Bullshit. Corporations don't give two shits if there are minorities working
for them, as long as they're making them money. This sounds like a viewpoint
that drove whatever study came to the conclusion in the first part of your
sentence, if there even was such a study.

~~~
Alex3917
"I'd like to see some reliable studies to back up this statement."

<http://searchyc.com/alex3917+gpa>

(Some of these comments may be part of threads with other relevant info.)

------
gizmo
I'd love to see a "five years later" kind of study on these kids.

Are these kids going to do better than other kids who made it into college
from relatively harsh backgrounds?

Are these kids going to keep their good work ethic when the teachers in
college don't care about them?

I wonder if getting into college has become the goal for the students like it
has for the teacher/principal at their high school. If I had to guess: I
expect the results to be quite polarized: some kids will drop out and
accomplish little, others will keep their work ethic and do well.

------
pj
Children come into this world innocent. They don't know what to admire or even
what inspiration is. If our society valued education and encouraged reading
books and learning and building the mind, then that's what children would do.

More than anything, children want to be loved, accepted, and encouraged.
They'll do anything you ask if you love them for doing it. They don't know
anything else.

~~~
kurtosis
Hey no offense but I'm guessing that you haven't spent very much time
interacting with children that aren't your own. In my experience children lie
and dissemble and deceive before they learn to talk. Think about all of the
crying and malingering they do to manipulate adults into giving them food or
anything else that they happen to want. Think about the vicious
competitiveness of every sibling rivalry. They do want to be loved, accepted,
and encouraged as you say, but they are perfectly capable of figuring out
their own ways of getting these things - and are often willing to bend the
rules if they are not disciplined.

~~~
pj
I can't disagree with you more. I have spent time around other parents'
children. Many of the kids are better behaved than their parents. Many of them
are dismayed that the world treats them poorly because of their parents' bad
behavior.

Lying is a natural. It is a gift that humans and few other species share.
Every child that matures into a capable adult learns how to lie. They
experiment with lying. They test their ability to lie. Children who don't
learn to lie are emotionally and intellectually stunted.

It is effective parenting that instills in the child the knowledge that lying
is only _so_ effective. It gets you some distance, but when the lie is
discovered you crash. People distrust you. They won't help you when you need
it. Honesty has value as well.

If parents give in to the lies, because they lack the courage to punish them,
the child pays the price later in life. If parents don't teach their children
that lies and dishonesty have negative consequences, and if lies are
continually rewarded, then that's what the child is going to learn best.

Parents who reward lies are doing their children a great disservice as well as
the world who has to tolerate them as they grow up.

~~~
sho
_"Many of the kids are better behaved than their parents."_

Huh? Do you have any hard data to back up this bizarre proposition? Certainly
everything I've ever experienced speaks rather forcefully against it. The
bullying in schools, the ostracism of anyone different, the teasing. This is
not learned behaviour, it is the default state, to be overcome by education
and socialisation, not to be encouraged or preserved.

Methinks you are confusing the reality of children with what you wish or
imagine children are. There is a reason "acting like a child" is not a
compliment.

~~~
johnnybgoode
_The bullying in schools, the ostracism of anyone different, the teasing. This
is not learned behaviour, it is the default state, to be overcome by education
and socialisation_

I think the problems you mention are largely _caused_ by today's school
environments, not cured by them.

~~~
endtime
This strikes me as a lofty-sounding statement that may not actually mean very
much. I'd love to hear you elaborate and contradict me.

I think the US public school system is deeply flawed, but one of the few
things I don't blame it for is the cruelty of children. Kids are just cruel.

~~~
pj
there was a video on the news the other day that some kids with cell phones
had recorded of this one kid beating the crap out of another kid and it was
the kid getting beat up who was punished by the school.

~~~
endtime
Okay, that's a fair point. There are some very stupid policies concerning
fights - I've seen my younger brother be penalized for defending himself as
well. But it is silly to say that schools cause the fights in the first place,
and/or that kids, left to their own devices, would be civil to one another.

------
johnnybgoode
I understand why some people love these kinds of stories. At first glance, it
looks like a great story. But when I think about it, I see more senseless
credentialism. To oversimplify, I see a large class of people being
unnecessarily held down, with everyone cheering when a select few are
permitted to rise back up.

~~~
endtime
Your class warfare attitude doesn't seem justified. No one is holding people
down, and no one is "allowing" these students to rise up. The story is that
someone who wants to help people started a good school, and it's working. It's
bizarre to try and cast this as a classist struggle.

~~~
johnnybgoode
Again, it has to do with credentialism. I'm not making a typical class warfare
argument.

~~~
endtime
>To oversimplify, I see a large class of people being unnecessarily held down,
with everyone cheering when a select few are permitted to rise back up.

That kind of sounds like a typical class warfare argument to me...

~~~
johnnybgoode
I can see why, but the details matter.

------
jwvgoethe
Repeatedly I see articles of this theme and the comments insisting that
"education is broken." Well I would like to advance the argument that
education in the United States at the present is better than any place else in
the world and better than it has ever been. But with one caveat, and that is
that children, like people, differ in their abilities and not everyone will or
can become a great mathematician or engineer or writer. However, for the ones
who are have talent, our educational system, at the secondary and post-
secondary level is unique in its ability to nurture budding genius.

American education still has a emphasis on liberal education which practically
only exists in the anglo world and most strongly in the US. For all the
antagonism towards the general curriculum requirements here on HN, which IMHO
is a strain of philistinism, our mental life, and the strength of our
democracy depends on citizens well aware of the world around them and capable
of critical argument. While some are innately born with this ability, a
liberal education is the way to ensure it in those who are not.

Beyond this, for our most promising scientific minds are very well served by
our educational system. Generally attending a strong public or good private
secondary school, they will be recognized early in their ability and
encouraged to supplement their mathematical and scientific coursework at a
local institution of higher learning. During summers, they will work in the
lab of a prominent university professor and get early exposure to research.
This will continue in university as they become further familiar with the
state of the art as an undergraduate and are better prepared for graduate
school than someone without these benefits so early, say in India or China
where the state of research is not so strong.

Do some talented individuals fall by the wayside? Yes, but not as many as
imagined. The only real criticism of american education is that it leaves
those who may not want or be capable of a high status creative profession
underserved. But this is a uniquely american calculation in the interests of
equity and idealism. We accept some measure of inefficiency here in our
educational system to maintain coherence with our national mythos that all men
are created equal, an ambiguous but politically useful statement. Otherwise we
could follow a german model and single out the talented children from the rest
around the age of 10 and send them to different schools. But I can't really
imagine this working in the United States.

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jsz0
The quickest way to fix the education system in this country is to basically
pay kids to learn. The promise of future rewards simply isn't tangible enough
for a lot of kids today -- especially ones who don't see any future for
themselves. What if quarterly report cards were a way for students to earn
some money? Not much... maybe only a few hundred dollars at maximum (As in all
courses for example) Give the teachers incentives based on the same metrics.

I'm skeptical of the idea that, with enough money,, we can coddle kids into
learning by revising how the information is taught or otherwise candy coating
the material to be more accessible. It's a bad life lesson. Sometimes learning
things is hard. Sometimes you have to work at it. Sometimes you need to learn
a subject inside out to understand it and that is difficult. If you manage to
find someway to make a particular subject easy to learn it only works to a
certain degree because kids may be conditioned to believe that all information
they need to learn in life will be presented in such a carefully engineered
and optimized way. That is simply not reality. The reality of most people's
lives is you work for your own best interest and are rewarded for it in a
tangible way. Duplicating that model in public schools in some form would be a
step in the right direction.

~~~
Alex3917
"The quickest way to fix the education system in this country is to basically
pay kids to learn."

No, it's not.

[http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-
Pra...](http://www.amazon.com/Punished-Rewards-Trouble-Incentive-
Praise/dp/0618001816)

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grandalf
Hmm. Would Herbert have lauded the school if it had been a voucher funded
private school? As far as I know, Herbert strenuously opposes school vouchers.

------
screwperman
To see the equivalent of this initiative on steriods, take a look at Bihar's
Super 30: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMSYGLbIUxc>

