[gregdaniels421]

> Who the heck is reading The Republic word for word in their dorm in between all the other classes and activities and the other stuff assigned by the same Prof

I think this comment says more about you than actual students who care. I did all the readings, even the extra ones. So did all the people in my study group for the class. Maybe select for more studious friends.

[popalchemist]

It's not an isolated incident, he is describing an increasingly common attitude which is utilitarian/"realist" at best and a grotesque materialist corruption of the liberal arts education ideal at worst. Education is generally no longer seen as an end in and of itself, but as a means to more money; insofar as one accepts that view, learning the material is aside the point; getting the grade that gets you the paper that gets you the job that gets you the money is the point, for them.

[majormajor]

> getting the grade that gets you the paper that gets you the job that gets you the money is the point, for them.

If there's a revolution in work due to AI the first jobs to fall are going to be the ones that don't require any originality or critical thinking. Any number of paper-pushing middleman jobs.

These have already been tightly squeezed by automation - see the rise of the bachelors-having-barista trope who can't find a job despite their degree.

Question is, how long would it take for the idea that if you don't train yourself to put some creative effort in, the machine is gonna replace you to propagate through the world enough to change how high-schoolers and college students behave? Whether that means pushing them into tangible hands-on fields, or into more original-creation as the robots replace manual labor too...

Or if we get some sort of UBI first instead? Or Skynet?

[jruohonen]

> getting the grade that gets you the paper that gets you the job that gets you the money is the point, for them.

But then there still is a lever, I suppose, including for reading.

[runarberg]

I‘m not super versed in sociology of education but I was always under the impression that over assigning was a real problem in undergraduate and collage setting (even in high school to an extent I heard last).

My post-modern mind went straight to thinking this was the system working as desired. We over-assign to weed out students of from lower classes such that they are more stressed and less likely to graduate, therefor maintaining a status quo of higher classes being more educated and more deserving of the fruits of the labor of the less educated working classes.

[sublinear]

Lower socioeconomic status students are getting most of their stress from elsewhere. Compromising the syllabus doesn't work. All these debates have been tried before.

[runarberg]

Classism has a way to go for the overkill. I don‘t think the post-modern interpretation is 100% correct... I think this is more complex and nuanced, but your rebuttal is not very good.

Higher classes have both the time and the space to read everything on the list. They also have the training to know where to pay attention, and what they can skim through. If you over-assign you do weed out more students, and the students you do weed out are biased against the working classes.

When I took my BSc in psychology at the University of Iceland in 2011, some of my teachers admitted to this practice (but not the purpose). They told us that the reading list was too long for any one person and that we just had to go through the abstracts and find out which papers to read carefully and which to skim over.

[sublinear]

Yes, but why does someone need to be of a different socioeconomic class to have prioritization skills? I'm just saying they have the extra burden of consequences for prioritizing school.

I think it's a realistic skill to need in the real world regardless. What's stopping someone wealthy from developing a toxic relationship or addiction? You can say that's trashy, and I'd agree, but that only proves my point that "class" is not that significant.