Do schools make you poor?

[Shamou]

Originally Posted by Lychee

The link above is about a Sai Baba who says he is an incarnation of the first Sai Baba.

Well... that's good enough for me... I don't trust cloning or reincarnation since I last saw a live Elvis TV show two years ago...

.

[jaydeschizo]

Uplift, have you ever ingaged in this scientific research you seem to distrust so much?

I won't say I trust all scientific research, I know how done (seeing as I do it myself), but to descredit someone like Newton is silly. Newton was correct in what he did, was it later discovered that he was't right about everything? Yes!

That doesn't discredit him though, nothing wrong with Newtonian Physics, nearly everything around you can be accurately (not perfectly) modelled by it.

Oh, and people should really learn the difference between laws and theories. Gravity: law, quite certain it will keep doing what it's doing.
Quantum mechanics: theory, it seems to be working but where not quite sure if it will keep on working if we do it differently.

Science is all about degrees of certainty and assumptions, just like all human observations. However, most "scientific" human observations are redone multiple times by other people all over the world to get a higher degree of certainty whether or not it's really true.

I like a peer tested piece of knowledge!

Hmm, I'm rambling again.

[Uplift]

Originally Posted by jaydeschizo

Uplift, have you ever ingaged in this scientific research you seem to distrust so much?

Yeh, I had to reluctantly study the whole scientific process in depth to get my Degree in Indigenous Studies. I got on the Dean's Honour Roll, and in the top ten percent of all Australian University Students, and got admitted to some prestigious National Honour Society. All by correspondence too.

The scientific issue is a major factor in the horrendous oblitheration of many Indigenous Cultures, as it was deemed superior, and brutally forced upon them, as it is to this day, even though they had and have their own successful and preferred world view. I studied it from both the Indigenous and western perspectives. I must say though, because I have always been interested in health and fitness, and have long witnessed and investigated the ludicrous, company funded, predetermined, result seeking scientific studies, which also innundate every mode of science, I am unashamedly biased.

So unless you have 'studied' Indigenous Cultures, I guess you will have to take my word for it, suffer in silence, and accept me as a 'PEER'. (Or dickhead... whichever you prefer)

[Keith]

Uplift, you seem to have a misunderstanding as to how science works.

The basis of science is this:
(1) You speculate that something might be true
(2) You work out an experiment to provide evidence that your idea is probably right.
(3) If the experiment is successful, you work from the assumption that your idea is right until/unless someone comes up with an experiment that proves your idea wrong.

Failure of an experiment doesn't mean that science failed - experiments failing is part of the scientific method : it's how science works out what isn't true. Similarly, failure of a particular theory doesn't mean that science has failed - it means that science is working as it's supposed to. Science is about trial and error - some error is both expected and necessary.

Michelson/Morley is referred to as "'the most successful failed experiment" because the experiment didn't do what it was expected to do - and because that failure gave scientists the necessary information to refine the accuracy of their theory.

Originally Posted by Namaste

I do not see how the Western school system, the scientific world view or the unfortunate Morley and Michelson have anything to do with the amount of school shootings in America. Education systems and regard for scientific thinking are very similar in the US and Australia yet people (and children!) don't get shot here nearly as often (methinks, possibly) because guns are much harder to get a hold of. If wicked science is the cause of this misfortune, why doesn't it affect Aussies in the same way?

Nah. Like Michael Moore pointed out in "Bowling for Columbine", Canada has as many guns per capita as the US and a ton less shootings. Access to guns is certainly an enabler, but it's not the cause. Moore speculated that the 'culture of fear' in the US was the ultimate cause.

To actually be on-topic for a moment ():
I believe that yes, financial skills would be a valuable thing for skills to teach. I also believe that, even more valuable than teaching knowledge, would be providing kids with the emotional and developmental skills they need to take control of their own life. Like JiriNovotny pointed out, the current implementation of schools focuses on passive receiving of information at the expense of self-motivated and independent thinking. That does not produce the best possible citizens - or lives.

[Shamou]

Originally Posted by Keith

Uplift, you seem to have a misunderstanding as to how science works.

The basis of science is this:
(1) You speculate that something might be true
(2) You work out an experiment to provide evidence that your idea is probably right.
(3) If the experiment is successful, you work from the assumption that your idea is right until/unless someone comes up with an experiment that proves your idea wrong.

(Steps of the Scientific Method)

1. statement of the problem,

2. hypotheses as to the cause of the problem,

3. experiments designed to test each hypothesis,

4. predicted results of the experiments,

5. observed results of the experiments and
conclusions from the results of the experiments.

.

[Uplift]

You've both neglected funding and the peer review process which is the ultimate decider of which experiments are 'successfull' and accepted. For instance, NASA and all it's proofs, can be defunct in the time it takes to stamp a document. To believe otherwise is incredibly niave.

[Keith]

Originally Posted by Uplift

You've both neglected funding and the peer review process which is the ultimate decider of which experiments are 'successfull' and accepted.

Peer review was part of my step #3.

Originally Posted by Uplift

For instance, NASA and all it's proofs, can be defunct in the time it takes to stamp a document. To believe otherwise is incredibly naive.

Can you please elaborate on this?

Shamou,
Your steps 1-5 basically equate to my step 1-2. I included step 3 since disprovability and taking the results of previous experiments as a baseline are also an important part of science.

[Uplift]

Think... if the space race ends, which it has been in danger of doing, NASA's funding dries up. Science's history, acceptance, and success has ways been subject to those in power and funding, and it's usefulness to those in power, or to those funding the experiments. Just as governments appoint ministers who serve their purpose, and shape the education systems to serve their purpose, which in turn produce the scientists to serve their purpose, they thus exert control over the supposedly 'unbiased' scientific process. Scientists have to pass government approved exams and get payed too.

[Keith]

Originally Posted by Uplift

Think... if the space race ends, which it has been in danger of doing, NASA's funding dries up.

Sure. But that doesn't cancel out the results of all the scientific experiments they conducted.

Originally Posted by Uplift

Science's history, acceptance, and success has ways been subject to those in power and funding, and it's usefulness to those in power, or to those funding the experiments.

Of course. That's why so much time, money and manpower goes into cosmetics research rather than cancer research. People with power will always have significant control over a society's focus but that's not particularly to science. When it's right, it tends to find its way out, too - Gallileo may have been killed for his argument that the Earth moves around the sun, but the evidence supported him and now everyone knows it.

Sadly, information, be it scientific knowledge or common sense is susceptable to spin, misinterpretation and censorship.

You seem to believe that common sense is opposed to science, but they work in tandem. Common sense is what you have experienced and what you know to be true. Science is a way of bringing what you suspect to be true into your experience so you can test it and move it into the 'known to be true' category if appropriate.

[palimpsest]

Scientific research eventually being proved incorrect -- that means it works, it's supposed to change and grow. But, when you involve people who are too arrogant to explore anything outside of their bias (calling themselves scientists,) forcing it onto the world-- and other people ready to lap up any "scientific fact" because it saves them from having to think, then we have a problem... but that's more of a social failing than that of the philosophy.

Pulling this back on topic, I've changed schools six times -- and, hmm... I think it depends on the school and the people running it. I've been through mounds of rote-learning and suffered through Lord-of-the-Flies social tangles that the very people I'd turn to for guidance and mediating authority acted oblivious to -- even joined in on (that will eventually be a funny story, I keep telling myself.) Thankfully I've also been to one school that taught me critical thinking, social graces by example and reinforcement, and with teachers who'd take it as a personal insult rather than a favor if I didn't do my work (as it should be, I belatedly realized.) Unfortunately, that last school was the most expensive and it did literally make us poor.

I think a lot also depends on the student -- where even the teachers hated me, I've had classmates say it held the fondest memories of their life. In the place I loved, we still had hooky-players and druggies or just average students complaining about teachers I idolized and the quality of facilities I never knew a high school could have -- if you just don't find fulfillment in an environment incompatible to you, you don't, you know.

I don't think there's a cut-and-dry improvement formula that will work for every unique individual -- I loathed this one health class that had a study of the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People conducted with a passion usually reserved for the study of the Qu'ran, so please please let's keep the self-help SELF-help until we figure out the difference between "education" and "brainwashing"! I've experienced individual class schedules as able to allow for individual pacing, the pursuit of individual interests (you can choose the subjects you want to fill the quota,) and the break down cliquishness -- but a classmate said she'd find it isolating (different classmates for every class,) a teacher said it would encourage truancy, and I've been confused by the mid-semester timetable change and missed a couple of classes that one year but that may just be because I was unused to it.

On the other hand, I should probably note that I'm currently a 19-year-old home-schooling 10th grader. There was some psychological kerfuffle...

[Uplift]

Kieth here's an example of what I object to, in regard to the scientific community, and with regard to science being manipulated by those in power, which I never said, and don't believe, is a unique situation in our western culture.

Some Indigenous People describe creation as such. If you clear and smooth off a large patch of sand at the beach, then walk on it, sit on it, blow on it, pour water on it, etc, a landscape complete with all of the physical features we observe on earth emerges. So those people feel that beings invisible to our senses do exactly that, and live happily and successfully, according to that view. They don't have a need to disprove it, dismantle it and evolve it, as they are certain of it, and it works. When asked how they obtained this information they are ridiculed when they explain that they communicate with the spirit world. Despite considerable success (in the case of Indigenous Australians at least 40,000years, and embarrassingly, more like 100,000years) western science views that scenario as ridiculous, primitive, naive or childlike, and asserts that it has proven it's world view of creation. The western world view which is seen as advanced, evolving and superior, is then forceably imposed on others, and is seen as educating and saving the 'poor unfortunates'. Western science then begins to enforce it's latest theory, replacing all of it's others, that have collapsed, (as will no doubt this one, unless it's an exception), which requires us to swallow a theory much less believable, and no more provable than the one it ridicules.

'Yeh that ye all may listeneth! A magic, mighty cloud sprang forth one day, and even though we often get tomorrows weather wrong, we who understandeth all things, mightily looked back through all the ages, and know that the day of the great cloud was exactly 13.7 billion years ago...on a lovely Sunday morn. And the great mystery cloud just decided to explode creating all we see today.

'Excuse me sir, where did the great cloud come from? Sir...'
'Shutup and don't ask stupid questions, it doesnt matter ye uneducated fools.'

'Excuse me sir, how big is the space the great mysteriously, scientifically appearing cloud created, and when will it end? Sir...'
'That's enough of your stupidity, if you don't obey and hail the science of the cloud, you'll be ridiculed and flogged!

And whilst it seems, and is idiotic, that is exactly the treatment dished out by the western world to Indigenous Cultures. So argue and debate science's virtues all you like. If you want another convert, just an explanation of the source of the cloud will do, along with some respect for the people subjicated along science's merry way.

[infinitethoughts]

coollikeme

All knowledge is inside you.

The infrastructure you live in.......does not want you to learn this.
If it keeps you believing you have to go outside yourself, it stays alive.

[infinitethoughts]

Example.

A person wants to gain financial knowledge.
A person wants to know how to become financially independent.

You are vast......extremely vast.
Therefore, you already are financially independent.

[medaille]

This is in reply to the topic and not the argument that dominated it.

Here's a page from John Taylor Gattos book, "The Underground History of American Education" which is available free online at:
Table of Contents - John Taylor Gatto

This page is located at:
Occasional Letter Number One - John Taylor Gatto

Occasional Letter Number One

Between 1896 and 1920, a small group of industrialists and financiers, together with their private charitable foundations, subsidized university chairs, university researchers, and school administrators, spent more money on forced schooling than the government itself did. Carnegie and Rockefeller, as late as 1915, were spending more themselves. In this laissez-faire fashion a system of modern schooling was constructed without public participation. The motives for this are undoubtedly mixed, but it will be useful for you to hear a few excerpts from the first mission statement of Rockefeller’s General Education Board as they occur in a document called Occasional Letter Number One (1906):

In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple...we will organize children...and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

This mission statement will reward multiple rereadings.

[medaille]

Our modern day school system is an institution designed as a tool of the elite as a method of furthering their control over the population. The idea that more school leads to success is only logical within the corporate capitalist structure we live in today.

Let's look at the TV show, Are you smarter then a fifth grader? The concept of that show tells you all you need to know. The vast majority of what is taught in school is unnecessary for everyday living for low income jobs and high income jobs alike.

School instead is designed to produce conformity in the population, separate people into easily managed castes, and to ensure that people always look outside themselves for their motivation.

The basis of economics is that we have a free market in which there are lots of small suppliers and lots of small demanders, so that monopolies don't corrupt the efficiency of the market. It would only be logical to assume that we would have a vested interest in producing entrepeneurs. That is not the case. We produce people who are "ready" to go into the job market which could also be read as the proletariot or those who don't own the means of production.

Higher education certainly has its values, but it won't be the primary force in people in being successful at fulfilling their life purpose. More specifically, it is designed to hinder people in their attempts at fulfilling their life purposes, because people shouldn't be doing whatever their heart wants, they should be working at their job.

[Uplift]

That excerpt from the mission statement is a classic. Not quite 'Captain America', or Harrison Ford hurling 'baddies' out of jumbo jets is it? Time to change.