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Current Affairs

PREVIEW: What is Education For?

Current Affairs

Current Affairs

Comedy, Government, News, Culture, Politics

4.4645 Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2020

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Nathan, Pete and Sparky discuss the book Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, and education more broadly. Should there be a curriculum? Should twelve-year-olds be allowed to drop out? Is it possible to have a radically democratic school? Is there such a thing as "intelligence"? What is "education" anyway? We answer all these questions and more. Full episode here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/42516771 This is a preview of an episode available in full to our $5 Patreon subscribers. To listen to the whole episode, as well as lots of other brilliant bonus episodes, please consider becoming one of our subscribers at www.patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Transcript

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0:00.0

my vision for education from, you know, from any level to any other level would basically just be

0:05.1

completely open institutions with a lot of resources and with a lot of people working there

0:12.5

who just love learning and know a lot about a lot. And, you know, basically like an open period

0:19.9

for kids, right? We're like kind of like we have now. You know, you're, basically like an open period for kids, right?

0:21.1

We're like kind of like we have now.

0:23.1

You know, you're not responsible for anything.

0:25.4

You're not responsible for like paying for your own whatever.

0:28.9

You don't have to do X, Y, or Z where you can, like the expectations that you'll spend

0:33.6

your time in these institutions.

0:34.5

You don't have to.

0:35.5

You can spend your time in the forest looking for mushrooms or something. You can spend your time learning to sail, although

0:39.5

there will be resources in these institutions to help you do that. But it's not just kids, right?

0:44.2

Anybody can kind of go. Let me ask you a specific though, which is, if it turns out that kids

0:49.7

tend to really like looking for mushrooms, and they like playing with computers and they like,

0:55.6

you know, they become very creative. But none of them learns any history, right? None of them

1:01.8

knows anything about the politics of the country, because it turns out that that's not very

1:06.3

interesting. A lot of them, a giant percentage of them, don't know basic facts about, like, the scientific world.

1:14.6

And then they go into the world in a democracy, right, where they have to make decisions that depend on knowledge of those things, right?

1:22.2

They literally decide whether wars happen in a, right, if they're in a democracy.

1:29.0

And they've spent their whole life looking for mushrooms. So I don't think that it works

1:33.1

like that, though. I mean, like go find an example, right? Like there are many, you know,

1:37.8

it's skewed, right? Because these are people who are kind of in the public consciousness,

...

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