On 10/07/2016 05:37 PM, Nick Thompson wrote: > One the one hand, I believe that intentional education by any neighborhood is > probably better than education that as seen as inflicted the families of the > neighborhood, if only because of the placebo effect. On the other hand, all > the effort by parents of one school to serve the kids in their school, makes > the schools uneven in just the way that we cannot tolerate, and is > destructive of the higher order community. Does that make me a hierarchical > communitarian. Geez. Some of the best outcomes are produced when the > entire meta-community pulls together, but unfortunately that seems to require > a war.
At a monthly extra-curricular activity at the local college, a discussion came up about which students were (and were not) likely to attend such a thing. (In this meeting, we discussed this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.08225) I tried to goad the professors and students (who obviously believe in the power of formal education) into discussing categories of students, e.g. those who will simply complete the program but be fairly lackluster vs. those who attack the domain with zest. 8^) I failed. Everyone remained polite. Of course, I do this precisely because I'm _not_ a fan of formal education. In any case, as a result, I began to think about the degradation of our society's overall decency through the advent and stabilization of social media like Twitter. Such has given the disenfrachised a louder bullhorn to blast their opinions and positions. In some cases, that's good. But for the most part, it's given voice to things like radicalization, "alt-right", "men's rights", the psychological diagnosis of us trolls from a distance, etc. But in the context of Nick's frame, perhaps such disruption is an example of breaking out of a local optimum, going through a less optimal state, in order to arrive at a higher (though still local) optimum elsewhere in the space? I admit I've had (probably stolen) this same thought about MOOCs. Do we have to suffer a period of sub-standard education in order to come out the other side onto a super-standard? -- ∃glenE ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
