@lpwaterhouse@ioc.exchange @baldur I was thinking exactly this. With all the discourse around 'cheating' (also prior to ChatGPT), remarkably few people ever seem to ask what's driving cheating in the first place, and whether that might hint at a deeper problem with how education is treated...
If you require people to go through 'education' that they have no reason or motivation to go through, it's really not surprising that they look for the shortest path to meeting that requirement. What might education look like if it were a voluntary, student-governed experience instead? Would there be any reason left for people to cheat?
It would look like libraries.
We should replace school with libraries.
CC: @lpwaterhouse@ioc.exchange @baldur@toot.cafe
@cy @lpwaterhouse@ioc.exchange @baldur I think it's going to depend on how you define 'libraries' - philosophically, I agree that that's probably what it would look like.
But most libraries today do not have on-call expert instructors for a wide range of topics that can assist you with the thing you're trying to learn! And that would probably be needed to be a good alternative to schools.
But if people don't have all their time and energy stolen by those plotting against their education, then they'll educate themselves just fine. And yes that does mean people refusing to study Trigonometry, until they have a reason to actually use it, but I think that's worth the resilience and resistance to tyranny people gain, once we're not training our children to bow before oppression.
CC: @lpwaterhouse@ioc.exchange @baldur@toot.cafe
@joepie91 @lpwaterhouse So, at least outside the US people in academia have been talking for a while about this change in student's attitudes towards higher education, the shift towards a "I'm buying a piece of paper that employers demand, education is an optional extra" attitude
I haven't followed US higher education discourse closely but in the UK and Iceland teachers have been worrying about this for quite a long while. First heard talk about this around 2002 when I first taught at uni level