Input Junkie

The security problem is that it's possible to kill people by overriding the autonomic monitoring which would normally dump people out of VR if they're excessively stressed.

The solution is to have hardware that can't be affected by anything online to dump people out of VR if they're too stressed.

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chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com

OK, me. Public (state) school until age 11. Private (ie English Public) school 11-18 (albeit on a government scholarship). Brother - state schools all the way. So I think I've seen both sides.

Why private schools tend to do better academically:

The kids tend to come from homes with better educated parents and/or more respect for education. This translates into more parental support for the school.
Smaller classes typically, though often other facilities are no better or worse than a decent state school.
Fewer disruptive elements. Private schools much readier to discipline (and you know what that meant in my day!) and expel problem pupils. This has two huge advatages. It makes for a better learning environment and it attracts staff who are interested in taching their subject rather than spending all their time dealing with behavioural problems.
Higher expectations. This applies to 'elite' state schools too where they exist. If the expectation is that anyone who isn't thick as a plank will go to a top university it tends to come out that way. Studying with other bright motivated kids under teachers with high standards raises one's game. If being just better than mediocre makes one a star, just better than mediocre tends to be where one sticks.
More freedom wrt to syllabus. If the government dumbs down 'A' levels to moron point you can teach to the IB for example.

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madfilkentist

One of the most important values of private schools is diversity (in the real, not the PC, sense). Different schools can use different techniques and teach different viewpoints. Even if some of them are bad, not everybody will be subjected to the same mistakes in lockstep.

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halimede.livejournal.com

In the Netherlands our public schools are very diverse. I went to a public Montessori school, f'rex. And if I recall correctly, private schools are equally bound by the national curriculum, at least.

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sartorias.livejournal.com

The problem with discussing private schools is that there are so many different types, including of course the fundamentalist ones that wish to control not just the learning but the thinking of the students, and so a great part of whose day is spent on lectures built around certain portions of the Bible.

That said, most private schools outside of religious institutions (and these days there are many, many Catholic schools, at least out here, that will also fit this venue) who want to offer enriched academics in a safe environment. And a lot of them will be flexible as they can to include a diversity of children. Not the posh ones dealing only with the rich, of course. But the ones focused on academics. And yes, one can try new methods of teaching if others don't work, and there's less chance of the stone stupid administration (most of whom have never been in a classroom except to inpsect) handing down godawful teaching methods because of some political decision, as has been troubling the public schools--again, at least out here--for the past thirty years.

The horror now? "teaching to the test."

There's no more room for journalism, analytical thinking, writing essays--just worksheets designed to teach to the SAT tests.

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my RL experience with private schools vs public - which includes knowing people who taught in a whole bunch of schools - across the country, hasn't been anything like "academic excellence" or even any kind of investment in science, AT ALL. I didn't get anything like serious science teaching until public high school, where I received a vastly superior education to the friends who went to the pricey Catholic HS in town. The parish schools, the nuns' fancy independent private school, all of them equally sucked when it came to the sciences, the arts, even to reading and language arts. Except for the extremely unique private academies like Pinkerton or St. Paul's, the idea that there's this renaissance thing going on with them is not borne out by any of the empirics. I routinely followed the news and knew more about any science field, be it bio, aerospace, or forensic archeology, in grade & middle school, than *any* of my teachers, with one year's exception. And from what I've seen of friends' kids's work, this is still largely true, with exceptions coming from individual teachers, not the administrations. The public schools have far more systematic, if fiercely-fought-over, dedication to both science and the arts these days.

And that story - talk about your crippled, hide-bound imagination! The only thing girls would do to enhance themselves in VR would be to give themselves bigger boobs, while only boys would want to make themselves seem stronger? Please. Like Karen Healy at Girls Read Comics says: "I am a geek. I have rehearsed world domination monologues while shaving my legs. I have finely tuned plans for what I will do if I fall into a vat of radioactive waste and emerge with superstrength. And I am just as entitled to my self-indulgent adolescent power fantasies as any male comic book nerd. [...] For lo: I am trying to save the world. See you guys later; I've got a massively powerful cultural paradigm to crush beneath my booted heel."

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I should have phrased my question better--neither public nor private schools are monolithic, and what I meant to get at was finding whatever does work at various private schools.

There's a lot I didn't like about that story, and the bit you refer to is only one piece of it. Aside from being offensive, it's stupid. If students have to look the way they do in real life (presumably including clothes), then girls who want padding will use real life padding. More generally, I saw the tone of that passage as "Isn't it cute to see the adults controllng teenagers' foolishness?".

I'll be writing up my opinions of all the Hugo nominees after the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society meeting this Friday. I'll only be getting about 7 minutes on the Hugo nominees panel, and I have quite a bit more to say than that.

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not diploma mills exactly, since you don't get a diploma for 8th grade, but all about telling parents their kids were getting the best possible education, without actually measuring it other than standardized test scores. They were *very* hidebound and uninterested in flexibility, and suggestions that we could do more interesting things, by concerned parents, tended to be very poorly received. I used to get in trouble all the time for reading ahead of my grade level at the library and my sibs have similar stories. The labs were full of old useless junk, the videos years out of date, and the textbooks too. The teachers were extremely poorly paid - this is typical of private schools, which aren't unionized - even if they weren't nuns, and so tended not to be the best and brightest, either. --And yet, if you read the promotional materials put out by the schools we went to, you'd think they were [are] the most nurturing, creative, vibrant places in the city, instead of puppy mills where bullying and rigidity rules the day and you learn only what you teach yourself.

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demonspawnmom.livejournal.com

Private schools are PROHIBITIVELY expensive for those of us who make just a wee too much to qualify for squalorships. The competition is pretty cutthroat to get into the really good private schools as well - my kids have enough problems without THAT sort of pressure applied to them!

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Which sort of pressure? I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm just not sure what you mean.

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demonspawnmom.livejournal.com

I am going to assume that you don't have kids ... the pressure I'm talking about is qualifying for scholarships if the finances can't cover the costs (through academics, music, whatever). Kids are under enough pressure from parents, peers and themselves - leave well enough alone!

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You're right--I don't have kids.

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If you read actual studies on voucher schools -- private schools that accept public school vouchers so that poor students can have "choice" -- what you'll find is a Dickensian nightmare.

Except for the very top schools which do not pretend to teach anybody but the upper classes, private schools don't do a better job. Again and again, when the schools are actually studied for performance, they don't do better.

And as for innovation -- they don't do that, either. They teach the way they've always taught, on the whole.

The main "advantage" to private schools is that they don't have to follow labor law, anti=discrimination laws, health and safety codes, or provide an education, if they don't want to. This leaves them free to decide whether to hire teachers who have anysort of education or credentials and payt them subnormal wages, house their classes in any sort of building, refuse to admit children they don't want for any reason, and not teach subjects that they don't like. They're also free to impose religious and political ideology if they want to.

There are some very good private schools. But there are also many, many terrible private schools, and nobody likes to look at them. People point to the elite schools and say that's what private schools are and they ignore the authoritarian anti-evolution schools, the tough-love discipline schools, and the utter fake schools, all of which do exist.

If you walk into the private schools in my town -- and I have -- they look exactly like the public schools, except they are missing mandated facilities like playgrounds and laboratory rooms. Including class size, which can be worse than the public schools, because there are legal caps on the size of public school classes.

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How about Sudbury Valley? They're definitely innovative, sound as though they might be quite good, and have tuition of $5880/year for the first child from a family and a sliding scale for the rest.

This is more than a lot of people can afford, but it's also within reach for a lot of people who aren't extremely rich.

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Reading nthe description of the school under "About us," I'm not impressed that it is an innovative school -- there have been schools that say those things about themselves for more than a hundred years. There's nothing new about the program.

Not relevant here, but I'm also unimpressed by the school's philosophy. It's a decent preschool approach, but there comes a point when children need to learn more than they can discover on their own.

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not just schools, but software, hotels, anything. I've worked in the media for too many years, *and* I've seen the flyers put out by the schools I and my sibs went to, and compare/contrast to our own experience...

I'm also reminded of all the thousands of student council candidates I've seen get up and say "I'm going to be totally different from everyone else!"

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It's not a brand-new innovaton, but it's certainly something that hasn't been used by the vast majority of schools.

The idea isn't that students have to discover everything on their own, it's that they initiate all their own learning.

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It's not a brand-new innovaton, but it's certainly something that hasn't been used by the vast majority of schools.

The question was whether the school was an example of innovation. It turns out it's not an example of innovation, it's an example of clinging to a discredited philosophy of education.

The idea isn't that students have to discover everything on their own, it's that they initiate all their own learning.

And how do they initiate what they haven't heard of? How on earth are they going to learn the vast amount of stuff they need, if they have to start everything? The modern world requires that people know things that instinct and child's play will never lead them to.

Either the website lies, and the teachers actually do introduce a curriculum, or the students come out of there with big holes in their knowledge and skills. Or both.

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Here's the faq: http://www.sudval.org/01_abou_09.html

The kids are in a lively-minded community, which helps. If the descripton is accurate, they aren't afraid of learning and can pick up academic subjects quickly if they see a reason to.

Conventional schooling is apt to produce people who believe that learning is difficult or impossible for them.

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Right, they can pick up subjects if they see a reason to -- which can only happen if they ever see the subjects at all.

Conventional schooling is apt to produce people who believe that learning is difficult or impossible for them.

You know that obnoxious usenet response, "Cite?" It's tailor-made for statements like this. What does "apt" mean in this context anyway? Do you know the beliefs of a representative section of the school-educated population with respect to their own learning? How do you know this? Can you show me any evidence one way or another about this?

There are problems with public education, but I hate to see people say unhelpful things about things which are not even related to the problems.

Useful learning frequently is difficult, and frequently takes a concerted, diligent effort on the part of the learner. I don't see why this is a problem. People will do it when it's worth it to them. That doesn't mean that the only way it can be worth it to them is if they think of it all on their own.

By the way, I read the FAQ. It had nothing concrete in it.

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sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com

Except for the very top schools which do not pretend to teach anybody but the upper classes, private schools don't do a better job.

The big exception to this would be Catholic parochial schools. No, they aren't all better than all public schools, but they average better.

(Yes, I'm a Catholic. No, I didn't go to parochial school.)

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On what basis do you say that Catholic schools average better than public schools? The figures I've seen varied widely, with a tendency to being worse in significant areas, when you look at all of the schools, and don't just cherry-pick the parishes you like.

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They sucked. I learned nothing there whatsoever - my parents taught me to read before I started school, I was resented by the teachers for it and myself bitterly resented "See Spot" (and used to get in trouble for reading above my age level on a regular basis, books like "The Mowgli Stories" and LOTR and "20,000 leagues"); we did *no science* at all except rote memorization of things which often turned out to be significantly out of date or misleading, at best; and what math I learned I also learned at home, or taught myself after with idiosyncratic geometric methods, because my teachers did nothing but rote memorization of "tricks". My parents wasted a whole lot of their money, to no purpose, sending me to parish schools.

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sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com

Oddly enough, I had exactly the same issues with ahead-of-class reading in public schools (this was in suburban NY and especially rural CT). Science was also pretty primitive until I got into high school -- in my NY grade school, "science class" generally consisted of watching films from Bell Labs and such. Reddy Killowat, Hemo The Magnificent, all that stuff.

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orangemike.livejournal.com

It was set up with a combination of snob appeal (Episcopalian affiliation) and tacit racism. My daddy thought it would have higher standards than the crappy Southern public schools. He was right, but I was scorned and ignored as a tacky non-rich kid (scholarship boy) with questionable ideas about the glories of segregation.

Milwaukee has one of the nation's biggest voucher school programs, and they are a gold mine for every scamster and snake-oil salesman in town. They are also a great source of funds for those seeking to indoctrinate children in Catholicism, Islam, or fundamentalist Lutheranism with my tax dollars.

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Milwaukee is the place where the most thorough study of voucher programs has gone on. What's interesting is that the first of these studies was produced several years ago, and the program stays in place, despite the actual abuse of children in these schools. And the same rhetoric is used all around the country to promote voucher programs, pointing to Milwaukee as a success story for vouchers.

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orangemike.livejournal.com

Tell me about it!

Some of these schools are run by good conmen and swindlers, the kind who have their victims convinced that the snake oil is curing their lumbago and the mean old FDA is keeping them from the medicine they need. (Let us now praise Dr. Frances O. Kelsey: blessed is she among bureaucrats!) Anybody who has studied white-collar crime knows that the classic cons leave the mark convinced that the swindler is the hero, and the cops are the bad guys: Ponzi had his suckers convinced that the government conspired to close his beneficial operation down on the bankers' orders.

Many parents want their children indoctrinated in the teachings of a particular sect or ideology, and are delighted to have it paid for by taxpayer dollars. (For those not aware of this, voucher schools in Milwaukee are protected from regulation and inspection by the state's Department of Public Instruction; and do not have to administer the mandatory statewide testing to which public schools are subjected.)

Full disclosure: I'm proud to say, my daughter is a Milwaukee Public School student; and I once worked for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

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bradhicks.livejournal.com

8 years of public school followed by 4 years of private school, and the difference has almost nothing to do with pedagogy or doctrine or technique. The difference has to do with peer pressure.

In the (public) Hazelwood School District, education was something you had to grudgingly sit through. The only really important thing was inter-school athletics, either playing or showing up to root for them. As a result, anybody who put more effort into studying than was necessary to get a high C or low B average was seen as vaguely weird, at best, and a threat to the school's athletes (by raising the grading curve to the point where the athletes were risking academic probation). I'm not talking about the kids' opinions, here, although more than half of them shared those opinions. I'm talking about the pretty nearly 100% consistent attitude of the parents, and of maybe 10% of the teachers and staff.

The private high school I attended, Faith Christian Academy, was priced on a sliding scale; I think my parents were spending about $1,000 per child per year to send Beth and I there, well within the price range of a union electrician with a stay-at-home wife. Even back in the 1970s before anybody had heard of vouchers, Faith had a certain number of tuition-waived slots available per year, funded by two or three local churches. But the difference in attitude was like night and day. By the end of my first week there, other kids were asking me why I didn't put in enough effort to get the grades I obviously could, if I was getting Cs with no effort. Even the biggest slacker on the basketball team was studying hard enough that he went on to get a summa-cum-laude college degree on the habits he had when he was at Faith.

And without exception that I saw in four years there, they had virtually all gotten those attitudes by growing up in families where putting effort into your grades and into learning things was expected, and the few who didn't went along with that culture due to massive peer pressure.

No government program can, or ever will, change the parents' attitudes towards education. If I were running for office and was asked what I was going to do to "improve the schools," I would look the questioner right in the eye and say, "Nothing. The schools are fine. We'll stop graduating morons when you stop sending them to us."

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