Felis cheshiri

Testing

one, one. Felis cheshiri (talk) 01:42, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Education.

Not "idiots", children. You seemed to me to be discussing the education of children, not higher education.

It is a natural and expected characteristic of childhood that the child does not properly plan for their entire life. To ignore this fact in favor of some idealistic notion that they should would be foolish and not at all logical.

To pick an extreme example, virtually all adults are thankful for the ability to read, and thankful that they learned it when it was still easy to do so, but many children are not interested at all. If reading teachers were "optional assistants called in to do a job when and only when wanted", society would suffer, the children would suffer when they were adults, and they would likely be extremely irritated that the teacher did not properly do his or her job.

It is extremely foolish to expect children to act as rational agents. Any theory on education that depends on it is likewise foolish. That's all I was trying to say. APL (talk) 01:17, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

So, why's that foolish? Do you think rationality is absolute, i.e. all adults are perfectly rational, or that it's open-ended, i.e. gaining rationality is an ongoing process? I think the latter (and that rationality increases in society over time, just like technology and other knowledge). Given this, all humans are rational agents. My argument is not based on an expectation that children will plan properly, but an expectation that adults to some extent won't, and that the difference is only a matter of degree. For consistency, I'm forced to conclude that it's the same type of injustice to force a child to read as it is for me to force you to to program in Python, or learn to do Fourier transforms. These are things which are generally thought to be great, and widely useful. That doesn't give me the right to interfere with your plans and force you into contact with those subjects, even if I could demonstrate that you are probably less rational than I am.

There is another part to the argument, which is that you can't force learning; but that would be a side-track, so let's leave it for now. I don't know how to do Fourier transforms, please don't make me try. Felis cheshiri (talk) 03:20, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I envisage teachers, or parents at least, providing regular suggestions about what it is that the child needs to learn. In fact I think they have a duty to. "If you don't learn to read soon you'll have a really shitty time in future and regret it a lot, like this person did, see..." sort of thing. I should perhaps have mentioned that part before. This isn't because the child has a special status that an adult can't have, but because the child is a dependent. A similar situation might be if you (the parent) were looking after, say, a very ignorant alcoholic. Felis cheshiri (talk) 03:26, 24 December 2009 (UTC)