Traditions emerge for a reason. Society is impossible without them. Traditions provide lenses, rules, norms, and expectations that help make sense of the world, harmonize competing aims and interests, provide stability, and enable long-term planning. But tradition can be tyrannical. Traditions can oppress, restrict, stagnate, and destroy individuals and society. So where’s the line? When does tradition become tyranny?
Tag: education
Arbitrary Wagon Wheel Education
Have you ever asked yourself why children are compelled to attend some kind of school – including home education – for exactly 180 days per year, and study particular state-mandated subjects, and blah blah blah?
Words Poorly Used #102 — AI
Putin and Musk are holding forth on the future of AI. They, and most the rest of us, act like AI is a stage play that is evolving toward a tightly plotted ending. Observations: AI is in the Stone Age. We’ve been wrestling with the mouse for over 3 decades. That is glacial change.
Incentives or Imposed Instruction?
On the one hand, you believe it’s not from the benevolence of the butcher that we get our meat, but by his regard to his self-interest in a market context. On the other hand, you believe that children have no regard for their self-interest and do not respond to market incentives so must be forced and directed to do what’s good for them and by extension society.
How My Daughter Reminded Me What Self-Directed Education Really Means
On the walk home from the park, I told my kids about this new idea for a dedicated time allotment for various “subjects.” I suggested that maybe it was something we could try and wanted to know what they thought about the idea. My 10-year-old daughter’s answer was priceless. “Mom, no, I don’t think so. That sounds sort of ‘schooly’, don’t you think?”
Intrinsic Motivation vs. Extrinsic Motivation
Maybe this isn’t a problem for you. Maybe you are perfectly willing to reward your child for good behavior until they move out, but for the rest of us, we want our children to want to be kind, to want to share, to want to help out around the house, to want to learn.
Legislation Can’t Fix Imperfect Information
Perhaps someone discovers that she’s paid less for approximately the same job that another performs elsewhere, though both may have approximately the same skills, experience, and ambition. This doesn’t mean the employer had any malicious intent, rather that the employer and employee made a voluntary agreement based on their information and what the company could offer.
Simple Assumptions with Massive Results
Great leaps in understanding human behavior when economists asked, “What if we assumed individuals in the market were rationally self-interested actors?”
The Learner Precedes the Teacher
The learner comes first. Their desire to learn a fact or method or subject is – must be – the first mover in order for genuine education to occur. If that desire prompts them to seek formal or informal teachers, the teaching is valuable. If teaching is imposed on unwilling learners, it’s the opposite of valuable. It does violence to education.
The Myth of ‘Good Government’
The history of the US is not that of good government gone bad, but of bad government remaining bad. Yes, it’s improved a bit in some areas even as it has worsened in others, but when it comes to its central evils—plundering, kidnapping, caging, and killing people—it continues to follow the pattern of cruel oppression which has always defined it.