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I did all coursework at A level and it applies exactly the same there btw, you just can't do previous tests as much, but it's still absolutely about getting you to produce the document that meets the examination criteria. This became somewhat harder at university when I did an arts subject which renders the examination criteria extremely subjective but again, same principle, the examiner wants to see something and your objective is to provide the thing that meets their expectations. You don't really have to understand what you're doing, you just have to be able to produce the thing at the end by whatever means you have available. Pretty good training for work, I guess.
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Sep 27, 2019 23:24
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gently caress, back when I was a stripper I was in East London and it was just after the recession really started kicking in with the Coalition so this article really drew up some stuff for me. It was getting bad then, I can't imagine how poo poo the industry must be now for dancers  I just came
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Sep 27, 2019 23:25
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OwlFancier posted:I did all coursework at A level and it applies exactly the same there btw, you just can't do previous tests as much, but it's still absolutely about getting you to produce the document that meets the examination criteria. there is a significiant difference in the educational value of testing critical thinking, and then the value of testing sheer memory. yeah you gotta stick to style and form, but it is actually pushing you to read and engage with material and coming up with your own viewpoint.
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Sep 27, 2019 23:27
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I dunno what coursework is to you but when I did it it was literally just a long form essay test you can do at home without a time limit. Like write 20k words about X question over the course of X weeks, rather than 250 words about it in X minutes.
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Sep 27, 2019 23:28
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Corbs is gonna announce the policy in IDS's constituency as well 
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Sep 27, 2019 23:28
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OwlFancier posted:I dunno what coursework is to you but when I did it it was literally just a long form essay test you can do at home without a time limit. it has a lot more freedom and is significantly less about just vomiting up information you can set your own questions, select your own sources, and take your own angle. yeah, it is an essay ultimately, but the content of it and what it teaches you is an actual skill, rather than memorising exact quotes.
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Sep 27, 2019 23:29
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*shrug* when I did it it was just write a load of poo poo, look on wikipedia for some sources to back up your argument, clickthrough a couple of times so it's less obvious you went straight to wikipedia, put them at the end, then pad it out to hit the word count. Aside from the subjects where it was demonstrating you had taken in the technical skills imparted over the course, which I guess is a sort of understanding, but it's basically just vocational regurgitation. At A level it wasn't even that, cos all the coursework was based directly on the lessons, so aside from demonstrating practical skills (hello doing titrations while colourblind) it really is just vomiting up the stuff you were supposed to have learned earlier. I mean I appreciated not doing all the tests in the middle of summer when I was choking to death on my own snot but that was genuinely the only difference to me.
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Sep 27, 2019 23:34
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im sorry you were what sounds like a lazy student owlfancier, because it seems like you cheated yourself out of a lot of learning
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Sep 27, 2019 23:35
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Oh I learned quite a lot at uni, just not actually in the university, my best performance was something I already knew how to do more or less but spent the time I wasn't at the university building practicing. The whole point of the university degree really was just getting some bit of paper that said yes I am big brained and can do this thing I already know how to do.
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Sep 27, 2019 23:38
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Another Person posted:it has a lot more freedom and is significantly less about just vomiting up information 'Freedom' is being used in a very... American way here. You are free to choose topics and approaches within certain parameters and then be told if those are correct or not. Is school in 2019 better than school in 1989? Yeah probably a bit. Is it good? No, not really. This is the same discussion that always happens in left wing circles: reformism versus revolution. In our socialist utopia we will need whole new ways of relating to the economy, to the government and to each other and radically rethinking the meaning of school and education will be necessary. And while it's not exactly on the agenda for Monday it's useful to think about, so I don't really get why people are reacting so strongly against these ideas. Everyone itt seems to be all about remaking the economy from the bottom up, but we're okay with A-levels continuing as long as you can choose your coursework?
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Sep 27, 2019 23:41
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Carborundum posted:'Freedom' is being used in a very... American way here. You are free to choose topics and approaches within certain parameters and then be told if those are correct or not. im not arguing against reforming education in a radical fashion, im arguing that it isn't just strapping kids down to chairs and forcing them to parrot in a lot of subjects right now, and also arguing that the abolition of the school like has been raised here is a terrible idea. im arguing about what was and what is, im not really talking about what will be unless that the will be is kicking kids out of school at age 10, in which case I will happily oppose. im happy to leave the will be to someone who knows more than anyone in this thread seems to, because we seem to lack an idea of how to really fix it past the most general notions. the idea of being given the freedom to choose approaches and topics is to encourage kids to start challenging poo poo. you keep looking at the looming test and then forget about what it has actually taught you on the way to the dumb, lovely test. you do learn things.
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Sep 27, 2019 23:47
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I'd strongly suggest that the testing approach whether coursework or examination based absolutely encourages you to forget, or even to simply not learn, the thing you are supposed to be learning. All those approaches encourage you to simply learn how to pass the course, which I think is invariably easier and more encouraged than actually learning the thing you're supposed to learn. Schooling is fundamentally unequipped to teach you actual skills or information by examination, any such motivation to learn you have to bring yourself, in which case, what is the school structure for? The testing approach by any means works directly against the notion of actually engaging with the material as you would something you want to learn, again the experience is very much like commodification, it gets in the way of integrating knowledge and skills into yourself holistically. Like, yes, I'm a lazy academic, I don't like academia, the reason I'm a lazy academic that doesn't like academia is because 100% of my experience with it has been as a glorified parroting exercise because that is the nature of qualfiication and testing focused schooling. It cannot be anything but that in the structure we have today. You can try and find ways to attempt to distract from that but that's what it is. And it carries on wholly into adulthood, that's what training is at work, too. It isn't for you, the qualifications aren't for you, they're ways for capital to assign numerical value to you, to turn you into the sum of your qualifications. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Sep 28, 2019 |
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Sep 27, 2019 23:50
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Rarity posted:Corbs is gonna announce the policy in IDS's constituency as well 
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Sep 27, 2019 23:51
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I know teachers now and I'd be a bit wary of entering a discussion with them where I criticised the current education system on the strength of my memories of being a child in it then versus their experience of it now for fear of looking like an uninformed idiot.
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Sep 27, 2019 23:52
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OwlFancier posted:any such motivation to learn you have to bring yourself, in which case, what is the school structure for? To trick and beat you into doing that.
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Sep 27, 2019 23:53
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Rarity posted:Corbs is gonna announce the policy in IDS's constituency as well Oh my god stop. I can only get so hard.
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Sep 27, 2019 23:53
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Point of ordehhhh Mr Iain Duncan Smith Mr Speaker Jeremy Corbyn is coming to my constituency and being mean
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Sep 28, 2019 00:07
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this comes off as a thousand words on how very smart you are i didn't get much from school either, but i reckon a big ol fraction of kids do well out of having access to professional support. i also reckon a big ol fraction of kids do well out of having short-term goals stand in for long-away payoffs. plausibly you can design an entirely synthetic system of pieces of paper such that getting extra pieces of paper correlates with later insight into the nature of the world and contributions to society. you could even design it so that you can cheaply and reliably distribute it to ten million children a year! with such a system of mass-production you can't hope to suit every kid, but you would have to be spectacularly self-centred to look at the past two hundred years of experience in compulsory education across a wide range of societies, capitalist and not, and claim that just because it wasn't designed for you it's all a big mistake
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Sep 28, 2019 00:07
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coffeetable posted:gj writing ten thousand words on how very smart you are If you believe that qualifications = insight and contribution to society then I have a bridge to sell you from oxford.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:09
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Ok y'all I have to ask. How the hell do schools work in the UK? I've been here a while but of course I'm not a child and don't have kids, so I haven't really figured out, like, primary school and poo poo. Let me first tell you how all this works back in Finland: Ages 6-15: elementary school, 9 years (6 years of "lower school" and 3 years of "upper school") Ages 15-18: grammar school, 3 years (or "high school" or whatever the gently caress this is in English) Ages 18+: university, or "college" or "polytechnic" or whatever, or nothing Alternative path: Ages 15-18: vocational school, 3 years - qualifies you to be a plumber, or carpenter, or chef, or electrician, or car mechanic, or whatever Ages 18+: "college" i.e. more practical university-like thing; or actual university, if you did both grammar & vocational which some people do (grammar is required, or at least like 95% required, for university) Alternative path: Different vocational school, you can learn like basic accounting or whatever and become a bank teller or something like that, or you can study basic computer IT stuff, and all kinds of things Note on terminology: a "university" is a place where you can get a PhD in whatever it is you're studying. A "polytechnic" or "college" is a place where you either study things for which PhDs don't exist (e.g. nursing) or you can get a PhD in it (e.g. computer science) but have to go to an "actual" university for your PhD, not the college. Make sense? Alright, now that that's all clear, I shall next describe the UK system, my understanding of which is obviously complete and correct. Ages 4-5 to 12: primary school, or academy, or comprehensive, 7-9 years or so Ages 12 to 15: college or prep school or high school or academy or grammar school. At the end of this, you do your GCSEs. These are optional but mandatory Ages 15 to 18: high school or college or prep school or "sixth form" (???) or grammar school or vocational school or I don't loving know. At the end of this, you do A-levels, except if you don't want to Ages 16 to 99: college (e.g. Trinity College) or college (e.g. random car mechanic study school) or polytechnic (same as the previous one) or university (see Trinity College) or a different kind of college or a different kind of polytechnic; or an academy In addition to GCSEs and A-levels, there's also O-levels and probably other levels too. In colleges and universities, which both describe 78 different kinds of institution, you can get associate's degrees, standard "higher academic" degrees, or A-levels or S-levels, and also other kinds of things. Did I get that mostly correct? I might have missed a few synonyms for various types of school but different.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:10
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coffeetable posted:plausibly you can design an entirely synthetic system of pieces of paper such that getting extra pieces of paper correlates with later insight into the nature of the world and contributions to society. Is someone working on this system now, or are we just hypothesising here?
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Sep 28, 2019 00:12
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jaete posted:school nonsense Dunno, all irrelevant. After brexit its a bow and arrow and food crates dropped by somewhat motivated Scandinavians. Thats all the school you'll get.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:12
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School sux and is mostly an extended prison service with a daycare twist because socialists won't let us use kids as cheap labour anymore.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:13
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Another Person posted:im not arguing against reforming education in a radical fashion, im arguing that it isn't just strapping kids down to chairs and forcing them to parrot in a lot of subjects right now, and also arguing that the abolition of the school like has been raised here is a terrible idea. im arguing about what was and what is, im not really talking about what will be unless that the will be is kicking kids out of school at age 10, in which case I will happily oppose. im happy to leave the will be to someone who knows more than anyone in this thread seems to, because we seem to lack an idea of how to really fix it past the most general notions. Kids aren't strapped to chairs and forced to parrot anything, but when I get them after their A-levels or even after their uni degrees, the education system certainly hasn't made them well rounded individuals with integrated world-views. It's made them pretty good at passing tests and working within arbitrarily defined boundaries and deadlines. They learn how to operate within the educational system, in precisely the way that old Brazilian guy talks about in that book from 60 years ago. Just the teachers are nicer about it now. My experience of the British education is all on the maths, physics, engineering side and I can tell you for a fact that the vast majority of students have literally no idea what it would mean to formulate a problem for themselves. What they do know and understand very well is the importance of passing tests and how choices they make at 15 and 18 affect their life and career prospects. And that is a lovely outcome and a lovely environment for real 'education'. And as for alternatives, I suppose the most widespread alternative you can find in Britain is the Steiner school, which I am no expert in and I'm sure is not perfect but seems to address some of these issues.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:15
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jaete posted:Ok y'all I have to ask. How the hell do schools work in the UK? age 4-5: nursery. untested. age 5-11: primary school. tested with SATs (not the US SAT test) age 11-16: seconary school. tested with GCSEs. age 16-18: an optional stage which can branch, seeing you either go into sixth form if your school offers it, or college if you prefer some freedom/it isn't offered. tested with A-Levels. university undergraduate degree is typically 18-21 on a full time basis, but anyone can study at university at any age if they can get in. a masters course is typically one year on a full time basis, 2 on a part time. a PhD is 4 years on a full time basis, 8 on a part time basis. you do not get a degree in UK college, but you can gain qualifications for either more education, or technical training. e; o-levels are the previous iteration of a testing system, replaced by a-levels e2: and there are private or religious versions of the first three stages alongside the state run versions.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:15
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Carborundum posted:Kids aren't strapped to chairs Lol my little brother got strapped to a table at a local rural primary school cos they didnt know wtf! Works for Deloitte now.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:17
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University was hellish for me because there was both no way in which to excel, I had no reason to really try hard and it became stupidly obvious very early on that I loved telling stories more than I loved research. I wish, more than anything, that I could have gone back and told my younger self to do things differently. So much needs to be done better.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:18
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jaete posted:Ok y'all I have to ask. How the hell do schools work in the UK? You have primary school, secondary school, college, and university. Primary school is basically childcare and basic skills like reading and writing, they used to do tests at the end but I dunno if they still do, probably cos morons love tests, they're not worth anything other than for getting into "good" secondary schools. Secondary school is where you go to do your basic compulsory education, you're expected to leave it at age 16-ish with GCSEs in all the core subjects (english, science maths etc) at at least C grade, or you've failed at life and can go die in a hole cos basically all jobs require that and you also need GCSE's to get into college. College is sometimes attached to the secondary school as 6th form, that's where you do A levels for two years which are the babby optional education, most people probably do them to get into a university. University is where you do your degree or masters or doctorate or whatever. There's some vocational options at each level but they're complicated and I dunno much about them. But basically each layer finishes with tests that then determine whether you can get into the layer above, when you get to the university layer you get to take out £30k worth of loans and hand it to the university in exchange for a bit of paper that won't get you anywhere because everyone has one now lol. I think that handout is what they call the "contribution to society" OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Sep 28, 2019 |
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Sep 28, 2019 00:19
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Carborundum posted:Kids aren't strapped to chairs and forced to parrot anything, but when I get them after their A-levels or even after their uni degrees, the education system certainly hasn't made them well rounded individuals with integrated world-views. It's made them pretty good at passing tests and working within arbitrarily defined boundaries and deadlines. They learn how to operate within the educational system, in precisely the way that old Brazilian guy talks about in that book from 60 years ago. Just the teachers are nicer about it now. yeah, i said what feels like a million words ago that maths is always going to be tested under this type of system, this can be extended to engineering or physics pretty easily. i am honestly at a loss on how you reform stem subjects in a way which better engages students with the content of the course, because teaching kids to teach themselves how to teach is an exceedingly difficult ask, which is what asking kids to develop their own problems demands. education is an extremely difficult thing to just 'reform', but what sounds more like abolition of education is far more dangerous than the lovely capitalist version we have now, because it runs the risk of knowingly leaving kids on their own long before they have developed any sort of critical capability.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:23
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5-11 : primary school / first school (different names for the same thing 12-16: secondary school / high school (see above). GCSEs at the end 16-18: generally referred to as 6th form. This may be a continuation of a high school.or a separate college. A-levels, or AS levels (an AS is like half an A-level, so you can study a broader range of subjects) 18-20: university, undergraduate degree. You can remain at university to do a master's degree, PhD, or any number of graduate courses Alternatives are to split off after GCSEs to do more vocational courses. BTEC, NVQ and the like. Schools and 6th form colleges offer these, but tend to be more into academia. Technical colleges are like 6th form colleges for vocational education. Apprenticeships also fit into this, but where depends on the type of job. O-Levels were the exams at 16 that got replaced by GCSEs. Academies usually package together primary and secondary, and will often be run by an academy trust, a governing body that runs multiple schools.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:25
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Also scottish schools are a bit different just to confuse you. the GCSEs and A levels are called something different and the grades work slightly differently, they used to be Standard Grades and Highers but I believe that's changed now. You don't go to a separate college or whatever to do the last year of high school, this confused me when watching the england-set highly realistic teenager person documentary "skins" as a youngun. colleges in scotland are just places you go to do sub-degree level and vocational qualifications and the like, I don't know if that's also the case in england I don't know what your system is. Also your standard university degree is four years instead of three which i think is cool. also the government pays for it if you live here like a normal sensible country.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:27
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OwlFancier posted:You have primary school, secondary school, college, and university. Ahh. So college always means... something like "high school"? Or rather, I mean, if something's called "college", all I have to know is what year it was founded, so I can differentiate between e.g. Eton College or Trinity College, which are not colleges, they're just called that because they're old, and actual "modern" colleges which are just high schools? Are A levels always required for university?
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Sep 28, 2019 00:27
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Angepain posted:Also scottish schools are a bit different just to confuse you. the GCSEs and A levels are called something different and the grades work slightly differently, they used to be Standard Grades and Highers but I believe that's changed now. You don't go to a separate college or whatever to do the last year of high school, this confused me when watching the england-set highly realistic teenager person documentary "skins" as a youngun. colleges in scotland are just places you go to do sub-degree level and vocational qualifications and the like, I don't know if that's also the case in england I don't know what your system is. you don't always go to a different school in england or wales too. it really does depend on the school and the area. also, your standard university degrees that are 4 years are typically bachelor-master sandwich courses, where you receive a masters degree at the end, iirc. i remember looking into it years ago now.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:29
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Also, most of everything that was said only applies to English and Welsh schools, Scottish system has its differences.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:29
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jaete posted:Ahh. So college always means... something like "high school"? Yeah "college" is the bit between school and university, but some of the really old universities are called colleges. Cos a lot of the modern universities were what used to be called "polytechnics" which were (I think) trade schools, basically? There's a lot of weird snobbery about that among people who give a poo poo about it. Some colleges are actually separate from schools, they literally only teach A levels or similar level courses, for about two years. A levels or an equivalent are basically always required unless you can work out a deal or something. There's a shitload of qualifications you can get in the UK, BTECs, NVQs, all sorts of poo poo, and there's a points system or something too? gently caress if I know how it works. But you basically need to show you have a certain caliber of academia brain before you can go into the big brain buildings.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:31
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Aye its shite in unique ways
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Sep 28, 2019 00:31
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jaete posted:Ahh. So college always means... something like "high school"? a-levels are not always required for university, they are just the most frequently asked requirement because most people going to uni are going straight from a previous schooling system you can get into them using work experience, an interest, career development, etc. this is how most older students get in, people 40 and above going into higher education for whatever reason. it is just usually most people go in based on grades received previously, and most of the unis lie out of their asses on what their standards for admission are. a lot of the russells and above demand A*AA grades, but happily offer and accept to students that get like ABB, or BBB. they use it as a method to try and scare off kids who might not even consider A*AA as a possibility and its hosed.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:32
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jaete posted:Ahh. So college always means... something like "high school"? College can mean: high school, 6th form college, technical college, or part of a collegiate university. The word doesn't tell you much by itself. A collegiate university (like Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and some others I don't know about) split students off into separate colleges which tend to have their own slightly different culture. Depending on the university, some amount of teaching takes place in the college and the rest on a central campus
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Sep 28, 2019 00:34
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You can blag your way into uni yeah, I did. But that's another one of those middle class things where if you look and sound right you get a lot more leeway. On paper they demand qualifications, or advertise demanding qualifications, basically, and that's your foot in the door to being able to blag your way in.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:34
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Another Person posted:also, your standard university degrees that are 4 years are typically bachelor-master sandwich courses, where you receive a masters degree at the end, iirc. i remember looking into it years ago now. Not in Scotland, we just get an extra year for larking about in. 4 years for a shiny BSc.
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Sep 28, 2019 00:36
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