> There is a lot of evidence that the educational establishment is full of idiots.
The world is full of people who are not smart and don't want to feel inferior. No conspiracy needed, we've collectively decided it's best to dumb down to a common denominator to make everyone feel included. That's what you're seeing here. To a degree this is part of a good society but it also removes incentives to escape mediocrity.
This is a fantastic comment because of how right you think you are, how utterly wrong you are in reality, and the context being the assertion that people don’t like to feel stupid. Thank you so much for this.
In the metaphorical galaxy brain comic of this situation, “GATE programs fell out of fashion because of tall poppy syndrome” is the first or AT BEST the third frame.
It’s the line of thinking held by the ‘uninformed self-described smart guy’ contingent, that knows nothing about education, yet think that they can intuit their way through it. It’s unrealistic, naive, and utterly condescending. It’s no surprise that I see it so much in tech people.
I was pretty skeptical, which is why I asked for examples, but I’m not particularly up on this subject, so I was hoping you could explain why he’s wrong.
You can't cover it all in a summer, you can only think you've covered it all in a summer. In reality, you have only a cursory overview of most topics so you fail when you go to college.
I've seen this firsthand. Kids who think they're gifted and talented, and coast with B's through high school. Then college Calculus hits and they realize they don't actually know math or how to reason about it - they only know the surface level of the pieces and how to apply them in a test.
How is that relevant to what’s happening here? No one’s teaching three-cueing as a way to dumb anything down or enforce mediocrity - the people teaching it genuinely believe it’s the best approach to teaching reading; that it’s how good (not mediocre!) readers learn to read.
The world is full of people who are not smart and don't want to feel inferior. No conspiracy needed, we've collectively decided it's best to dumb down to a common denominator to make everyone feel included. That's what you're seeing here. To a degree this is part of a good society but it also removes incentives to escape mediocrity.