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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/06/opinion/06herbert.html

by compay • 17 years ago

35 44 17 years ago

pj3• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

pj3• 17 years ago

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.

gizmo3• 17 years ago

Yes, children lie and cheat. But children that are not loved/given affection probably won't even learn to talk, and become emotionally damaged. There has been an interesting study on the effect on absence of affection on monkeys. It didn't turn out pretty.

Kids who are loved are cruel, they lie and they cheat. Children that are not loved are simply even worse.

sho3• 17 years ago

"Children come into this world innocent."

I really wish people would not use words like "innocent" in this context. Exactly what do you mean by your statement? Do you mean they are not guilty of a crime? What crime, the crime of being adult? Or free from moral wrong? A few minutes watching a young boy pulling wings off flies will disabuse you of this misconception.

I just can't stand this nonsense about children being these pure little angels who can do no wrong. A blank slate, yes, perhaps. Words like "innocent" are just plain inapplicable and say more about the speaker than they do the kids.

gizmo3• 17 years ago

They are free of moral wrong, like a lion who tears a zebra apart. Or like a shark who attacks a surfer.

Actions that are morally wrong to us are not morally wrong for those who lack morals. And if you can do no wrong you certainly can't be guilty. Therefore, innocent seems an apt label.

ryanwaggoner4• 17 years ago

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.

johnnybgoode11• 17 years ago

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.

ryanwaggoner4• 17 years ago

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?

grandalf• 17 years ago

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.

gizmo3• 17 years ago

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.

johnnybgoode11• 17 years ago

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.

endtime7• 17 years ago

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.

johnnybgoode11• 17 years ago

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

screwperman• 17 years ago

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

jsz0• 17 years ago

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.

Alex39173• 17 years ago

"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...

jwvgoethe• 17 years ago

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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