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by makeitdouble 834 days ago
The premise here is that education's primary purpose is expanding knowledge. I think it's so naive of a take it could be on purpose ?

> One mother told me it permanently damaged her relationship with her son because it forced her to be an enforcer rather than a mom.

This is by design, or at least an accepted byproduct. Having parents rolled in and being on the same page as the school is part of the process. This might not be explicited, the school might not even be thinking about it a lot, but it's a no downside proposition for the school, and parents will be more willing to pay, volunteer their tine, not make waves etc. if they're acting as an extension of school at home.

When your kids doesn't do homework it's you, the parent that gets summoned.

The basic purpose of schooling is to preprare a kid for society, and what society wants is not just bright kids, but citizen pushing themselves and following the common line. When they'll be adults they'll have deadline and meaningless overtime instead of homeworks. As pointed in the article, behaviors can reinforced, and that's what homeworks do.

4 comments

The purpose of school could be to teach children to fill in forms without complaint until they die. In fact given our work or die structure today that’s generally a pretty useful skill. Of course, not everyone has to fill in forms to survive. There are a lot of professions that form filling isn’t mandatory and is a useless skill.

In fact, the absolute best jobs are for people who lead the form fillers in one way or another, either by creating the new ways of doing things or by setting direction. An awful lot of the best leaders I know, whether thought or organizational, have a learning disability and did very poorly in early education with its emphasis on drilling the skill of form filling without question. It wasn’t until college when they were finally asked to understand and explain their understanding did they do well.

But most people aren’t that type of person, and public education at minimum is industrialized education. It is absolutely imperative we build a machine that industrialized the production of form fillers, after all - it’s not like AI won’t be filling those forms out in a few years!

You’re just testing whether or not kids have a stable home situation with parents who give a damn. Homework is classist busy work
There are much cheaper ways to teach kids to conform or obey.

If that's really the goal. You should be upset at the trillions of dollars wasted.

I think it's a complex problem, even on the "let's rule them all" side of the coin. I don't want to spend my Goldwin points right away, but looking at the past it takes a decent amount of resources to real push it to something efficient.

Also parents do love their kids. It takes a lot to actually have them side with the higher entity and align their behavior, and I think the current system strikes the balance by giving the kid a fighting chance to succeed, and have parents agree to let their kids be out for most of the day and follow school's rules even after (for funsies: there's schools in Japan where kids have to wear the uniform even outside school, even on short vacations. They quite literally belong to the school during the school year.)

PS: Many teachers really want their students to succeed, and many will do what they can to not have them eaten by the system. I'd wager it could one reason for burn out for some of them.

Attendance, grades and disciplinary action all already fill that role more than enough. And school does not have a single "purpose" any more than it is a single form or history. It's not like some guy named Thomas School sat down one day and wrote a master plan.