I am a mid-tier expert in software engineering. it's not nearly as fraught and fucked up a field as child education afaict. it actually does try new good ideas with some regularity. the reasons it sometimes doesn't are due to misaligned incentives and honest stupidity.
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Replying to @danlistensto @selentelechia
hmm what constraints do you think bind for childhood ed that don't for software?
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Replying to @eigenrobot @selentelechia
150 years of cultural indoctrination in support of supplying wage worker labor and conscription fodder for the military industrial complex disintegration of extended families via atomization and institutional overreach bureaucratic authoritarianism
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Replying to @danlistensto @selentelechia
hm do you think schools were less abusive 150 years ago? or that there was less child abuse 150 years ago? especially of disabled/etc kids? I mean--I totally agree that this situation is awful and schools are awful but I'm not sure it's a problem that's ever been solved
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Replying to @eigenrobot @selentelechia
i have limited knowledge of what schools were like before the Prussian model was widely adopted. my impression (which might be wrong) is that they were smaller, tended to be mixed age groups, and there was less schooling done in general.
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my impression of what the lives of developmentally-different people was like in the past is that it sucked ass in a bazillion ways but they might have had access to more care provided directly by immediate and extended family. less atomization in the past.
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otoh there was possibly considerably more abuse inflicted on them by their own families. in particular rates of alcoholism in the 19th century were really startling and i'm sure that got taken out on the kids a lot, especially the weird/frustrating/difficult/needy kids.
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That hasn't changed. So it remains, what to do about those kids? School can't deal with them, home can't either. Institutions for troubled youth? We have funding and manpower for that? And those are going to look like the schools, anyway.
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rates of alcoholism are much lower, but yeah, most families are ill-equipped to deal with children (in general). perfectly "normal" children have challenging episodes too though. there's nothing special about needing to deal with kids being challenging. this is typical.
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Replying to @danlistensto @ChrisExpTheNews and
my opinion is that our society is much too atomized and much too dominated by institutions (which have largely rotted and become corrupt and ineffectual). if I was brewing up a solution from scratch it would involve training parents to be better parents.
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heh that should work about as well as mandatory ethics training and if parents don't show up what will you do? take away their kids?
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no, there would be no penalty at all. it wouldn't be mandatory. it would be provided as a public service. why does this seem bad to you? child care is a skill and it can be learned.
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I'm skeptical that the people who would need to show up would show up, and that the teachers would competently impart skills to most parents, and that the curriculum would be a net positive even if conveyed also these institutions probably still exist in the form of Church
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