Comment on Are We Living in a Golden Age of Stupidity? - Slashdot

tehn00bi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

• TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  the individual matters more than the education. i know several st johns graduates whose personality is yes-men. i have a liberal arts education and 95% of my peers at uni thought it was stupid and just wanted job skills.

  a Socratic education only works if you already inclined towards skeptical inquiry. you can’t educate people into skepticism, it’s really an emotional disposition. normal people do not want to think anyone than they want to run marathons. only a small percentage of people are inclined to such activities.

  i taught philosophy for 3 years, about 500 students. maybe a dozen of them actually learned anything… the other 490 were just there for a requirement/grade/elective and did absolutely did not give a fuck other than thinking quoting Plato make them sound smart and win arguments, or help them further entrench themselves in their delusional conspiracy mindset. had about 50% of my students actively argued for exploiting slaves for business profits, because all that mattered was their own wealth.

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  • giraffes@kbin.earth ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    a Socratic education only works if you already inclined towards skeptical inquiry

    Or if you just accost people in the streets like Socrates :b

    I work at a top university and can confirm that the overwhelming majority of students are concerned primarily about jobs. It doesn't matter how good the school is; this is an effect of industrialization and more importantly education being reduced to a means for economic development and productivity. In my experience, it is ironically worse at the "better" schools where acceptance is highly competitive. If I'm being honest, a good community college is the sweet spot: teachers invested in teaching and students with the leisure and/or low risk/investment in just learning things for the heck of it.

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  • tehn00bi@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Nice, thanks for sharing your experience.

    I’ve only known a few go through St John’s and they are all very intelligent, yet partially disconnected from modern life, sort of like the Amish.

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