I'd like to add that "DEI" is, in this administrative environment, often reduced to a collection of terms searched for and flagged without regard for context. Such that "diversity" might be flagged in a grant application that has nothing to do with racial or ethnic diversity.
USDA is doing the same thing with ag funding, though I don't think the same level of chaos is appearing because there are still at the moment competent people below the true-believer management. But not for long, as soon as they complete their return to Kansas City, inevitably losing DERP holdouts (exactly as happened during the last Trump admin).
They seem like entirely different things to me, in the sense that I wouldn’t expect a writer, or a baker, or a chef to have typical ethical behaviors as a group.
Shouldn't you? Bakers and chefs aren't just "interested in nerdy stuff like chemical reactions," they make food for people. Writers have ethical obligations, both individually and as a group?
I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
The cultural perception of nerds being relentlessly bullied for the crime of having imaginations/GPAs/acne, I think, presented a culturally sympathetic view to the extent that the latent bro-ism caught some off guard, like we'd expect them to emerge from sweet gentle Stranger-Things style basement nerds to adulthoods as, say, Randall Munroe or something
>> I don’t know why you’d think “being interested in nerdy stuff like computers” would somehow translate into virtuous behavior.
> The cultural perception of nerds being relentlessly bullied for the crime of having imaginations/GPAs/acne, I think, presented a culturally sympathetic view to the extent that the latent bro-ism caught some off guard, like we'd expect them to emerge from sweet gentle Stranger-Things style basement nerds to adulthoods as, say, Randall Munroe or something
To emphasize that point, I think the assumption was that being bullied and ostracized would lead nerds to have greater empathy and be nice people, because they experienced how bad it is when people aren't nice.
But I think the reality, obvious in hindsight, is that was a totally unreasonable assumption. IIRC, the experience of abuse can actually create future abusers. With geeks/nerds, I think a fairly common outcome as been a combination of arrogance with a kind of social ineptness/unawareness that is not nice.
Yeah, exactly, "man hands on inhumanity to man" and all that. I have to admit I was a little surprised when I saw it firsthand, myself, so it's not like I was any less naive about it.
I'm definitely on the "it's the devices" train, but reading instruction in school in the US after high school really breaks students into an absolute exhaustion with the practice. Not to mention they're still reading the stuff I read in the '80s. Certainly some exceptions but I do not think secondary instruction has the right take on this.
Few people have a clue about what education is actually for. How can you possibly educate students well if you don't know the destination? And how can you know the destination if you don't know what it means to be human? To be human entails a destination that is definitive for the species.
Overwhelmingly, education today is a shaped by the logic of consumerism. Consumerism begins with a false anthropology, that of the hedonistic homo economicus.
1. Schools send a strong message, whether explicitly or implicitly, that education is about "getting a job". It's about being able to secure a career. At the very least, it is sold primarily as a ticket out of poverty and a means of moving up the social ladder. In a competitive, hyperindividualistic, and consumerist society, status is measured by consumption, so education is a means to increase your power to consume.
2. How many times have we heard teachers say "knowledge is power"? That's a Baconian turn of phrase that represents a turn in scientific history where understanding and knowledge are subordinated to technical power and control. Understanding nature is here dethroned to make way for dominating nature. "Know-how" for us is more important that knowing the "what" and the "why".
3. The coverage of topics and how they're addressed is often jumbled and incoherent. There is some ordering, sure, but it is usually superficial and sloppy. Its practice is like that of some mysterious and obsolete ritual. Many pedagogues are simply bad.
4. Understanding is not rewarded as much as producing supposedly measurable results. In schools, the ultimate result is the grade. The grading system is inherently competitive and designed to rank people first and foremost in a technocratic fashion under the pretense of objectivity. This has "management science" written all over it.
5. Education fads and attempts to artificially infuse technology into education is motivated by profit and abetted by ignorance. Indeed, education in general is big business. Forget tablets and computers. It suffices to note the rapacious practices of the textbook industry, made worse by the fact that these textbooks are almost invariably terrible from a pedagogical standpoint.
Given the soullessness and mechanical nature of modern education, why should we be surprised by what we observe? (I'm not proposing some kind of squishy curriculum. Much of the "reform" of the last few decades that has received just derision is just as misguided, or even worse.) Just as we can talk about factory farming, we may talk about factory education. Students are numbers. But education occurs through relationships. This must begin with parents, but parents are too busy making ends meet or chasing the next promotion. When families were large, older siblings would pick up the slack.
The primary purpose of education is intellectual and moral freedom. Not hyperindividualist freedom, which is about the satisfaction of appetite and the ability to do whatever you happen to feel like doing. The classical view of freedom, which is the ability to do what is objectively good and the ability to be more fully human. Since human beings are essentially intellectual beings and moral beings, it follows that our greatest and most essential expression of freedom is found in the intellectual and the moral.
Why wouldn't the political coalition of teachers not be a "real" teacher-related reason? It is not illegal, at this point in time, for teachers to oppose AI for political reasons.
As others note, there are a lot of reasons for teachers to refuse or hate AI, though in my experience most don't know shit about it and just want students to stop using it as an expedient. I, for instance, take a look at the tiny Dell cubes that have barely powered our Windows workstations and hilariously bedraggled Prometheus units and anticipate "well, we can't even afford to update these pieces of shit, so I suppose as a 'Microsoft shop' we'll be on a upgrade path to CoPilot-enabled cloud computing or some bullshit like that, then it'll really be all over" so my primary concerns are infrastructural. But god yeah the AI writing I get, jesus. These kids think they're driving around in the AI equivalent of Lambos, but free tier CoPilot is a used 2017 Chevy Cruze.
>You could argue peer review has become a mechanism to encourage incrementalism. That it doesn’t reward big leaps. And the public isn’t getting ROI on science funding compared to 50 years ago.
USDA is doing the same thing with ag funding, though I don't think the same level of chaos is appearing because there are still at the moment competent people below the true-believer management. But not for long, as soon as they complete their return to Kansas City, inevitably losing DERP holdouts (exactly as happened during the last Trump admin).
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