A lazy blog post about education…

…inspired by an online interaction with a fitness influencer to whom I sent all this.

Below is the epilogue to a textbook on theories of human development by William Crain. My only

Contact with him, was that he and I took a piss next to each other in the bathrooms at City College when I was going for a second BA there.

here’s my commentary:

During the Cold War, in the wake of the Russian’s launching of Sputnik in 1957, it became a cultural assumption that Americans were behind the times on science (even though WE were the ones who invented the atom bomb first).  The American public education system is designed for and run by a pluralistic society in which many different cultures coexist side-by-side—(I’ve never been to Russia so I can’t say for absolute certain, but,)—in Russia, this is not the case.  I suspect their technological advances were the result of what happens when sufficiently smart people encounter the stubbornness of a stagnant culture. When everyone is from the same culture it’s a lot easier to pluck the smart kid out of the class, and put him with the gifted kids. When failure for something important means you face a firing squad, things have a way of working themselves out.

Anyways, the reason (of relevance to the issue) I sent her this article, aside from the fact that it’s what inspired my thinking in my comment, is that it’s a pretty comprehensive laundry list of things that went wrong with education over the last 70 years.  It’s the kind of resistance you’ll run into when trying to design curricula for public or otherwise accredited schools.

If you wanna skip the reading the real points are:

• The time spent in the gym is time you’re taking away from kids to play and be imaginative. And social. Etc.

• Nothing special there, every ambitious teacher has to fight over resources,  time with the kids, staff, supplies, rooms, etc. (I’m not a teacher, I just live with one).

• The point though is that the way to win is by showing how what you’re offering solves more of the problems posed by those various tradeoffs than it creates. (The kids lack motor development and imaginative play, they morph into 18 year olds with green hair and a concept of a “worm self”. Gym provides motor development and fosters a sense that one’s body is a temple.)

Trigger warning.

If you do read the article, there’s a section on “equity”.

I don’t know which side of the culture war you’re on,

the “radical progress” side,

the “progress has gone too far” side,

or the neutral “it’s all so complicated” like me.

But, to preempt any impulse to disengage with the material cause you hear that, it’s important to know that this was written in 2012, and The college where he teaches is in Harlem, where for YEARS it was just incontestable that black schools were underfunded.