Editorial RPG Codex Editorial: Darth Roxor on the State of RPG Writing

[laclongquan]

The classical sitcom was structured so that one could watch any of its episodes in any order and have no problem understanding what was going on. Thus, producers reasoned, they would avoid alienating more casual viewers and maximize ratings. Sometime around the 2000s, for reasons which I won't go into here, that began to change. Continuity and the resulting increased complexity in storytelling and worldbuilding became acceptable, even valuable as a source of potential licensing opportunities.

Melodrama is the easiest and cheapest thing possible to write, that is the whole reason they do it. Comedy, scifi etc. all require a strong concept for each episode, that's why those things are always shit today. Rest of article can just be skipped.

Comedy is goddamn hard to write especially if you want some substance in it. Scifi require some sort of logic thinking. Fantasy require some imaginations.

In the end, Melodrama is just the easiest.

 

[Pentagon]

Standards have first been lowered in elementary schools, on the basis that holding back students a year could lead to dropping out, arrested development, social exclusion, losing friends, etc. Everyone succeeds and graduates, even if they fail. That could be argued for, but they also stopped separating better students from weaker ones in different classes, on the same grounds, so weaker students no longer get the attention they deserve (and the stronger ones are neglected too, never to live up to their potential).

Anecdotal, but I was not a quality student in elementary school. But in high school and college, I became more studious and after graduation I was able to land a position with a top company in my engineering field.

If I had been sorted towards lower-tier classes in elementary school, would I have enjoyed the same success? Possibly not. People grow at different rates, and I question the value in labelling them too early.

 

[Fairfax]

Well, someone agrees with Roxor.
https://twitter.com/ChrisAvellone/status/825906177867337728

 

[Darth Roxor]

Senpai noticed me.

Now I can retire in peace.

 

[Ismaul]

Anecdotal, but I was not a quality student in elementary school. But in high school and college, I became more studious and after graduation I was able to land a position with a top company in my engineering field.

If I had been sorted towards lower-tier classes in elementary school, would I have enjoyed the same success? Possibly not. People grow at different rates, and I question the value in labelling them too early.

That's a valid concern. You don't want kids to be labelled as bright or stupid from the start, which will have a social impact, influence their future opportunities, and make them develop a negative or overconfident view of themselves. But the problem is, how are you going to help those who are a bit behind, who are progressing slower than others, if you don't first identify them? And how do you cultivate excellence, if your best kids are so bored with their studies because the teaching is not challenging them enough?

Right now what is happening is that everyone is going at the speed of mentally challenged kids. Look ma, no labels, everyone's the same! That's a really bad answer to the problem. The way to do it right is not obvious or easy, I'll grant you that. Might be that the future of learning is a mix of some group/social learning and some alone time with a personalized computer tutor, self-tailoring to each kid's skills and interests.


As a counterpoint, I'll offer an anecdote of my own. I was in an alternative elementary school during the first years, and it had faster math progression but slower language learning. At some point it became too costly for my parents, so I got switched to regular public school for 3rd grade. If I hadn't been identified as a kid with those weaknesses and strengths, they wouldn't have organized for me to leave during math courses to improve my language skills with a tutor. I got lucky, two years later the reform hit, and this kind of thing was no longer done. (I even managed to get second place in the regional writing competition the same year lol).

 

[ilitarist]

Hard to believe that's really what happens in American schools, this lowest denominator thing.

Other systems are bad too. Good marks and especially praise can make a kid an outcast in a class, as well as give him a false feeling of superiority without effort which is later crashed when they come to real problems. Bad marks make kids give up or realise marks do not matter.

Anyway you can't talk about global education problems in context of videogame writing. Every medium had always had a rather low general quality. Tolstoy had worse education as his fellow countless novelists who wrote cheap adventure or romance novels, and he was actually a military man in his youth. The question about bloatness percieved as a great thing is much more valid. I'm surprised Morrowind got a free pass here. Maybe for the same reason as Betrayer at Krondor cause it can be seen as sort of bookish/mythical stylization? But it's horrible with its tourist guide text and rare occasions when characters have a personality are bad too.

I also do not agree with some of the "purple prose" attacks. Not that examples where good but the arguments used to condemn them could be used to destroy Shakespear or any other poet. And the rotting bell thing is kinda good, I think.

 

[Telengard]

Organizing students into a class-based structure based on individual statistical merit is a theory that actually doesn't go back that far. The real old-school type of learning is where everyone listens to the lecture, then later you get tested, and if you keep failing the test, then you get drop-kicked out the door for good. The old-school school system wasn't about learning for learning's sake; it was basic prep for modern work, and scholarly work if you continued on. The fairly recent concept of having mandatory schooling broke that idea, though. Can't drop kick kids out the door if they're required by law to be there. (Special note: There's still a lot of people alive in the US who quit school in Elementary School, by the way.) Not only that, though, a lot of those old-school schools allowed individual teachers to tailor their own curriculum, within certain guidelines of course. Successful programs would then receive national acclaim. But then came statistics-based student modelling. And once this New Wave statistics-based education system was implemented, most of these old-school teachers from the 30s and 40s quit in protest (that would be in the late 70s, in case you want context).

Splitting students into classes of regular, remedial, and advanced, with the split being based on learning ability, that was organized around a new theoretical model. The basic idea being that now education was going to be based around quantifiable numbers, and thus students would be definitively taught as they individually needed (well, as they individually needed within three basic class groups, not actually individually needed). So, definitively no longer would such things a teacher's favoritism be involved in what a student was taught. The question arose early, though, about what age to split students into this class-based system and how to determine which student would go where. And the IQ test seemed to be a godsend in that regard, to be implemented as early as kids were considered emotionally ready.

But, here's the thing - statistically, this new system didn't pan out. Yes indeed, the system that was going to change education to be based on statistics rather than teacher evaluations, that system failed at statistics. While certain individuals prospered under the new system, mandatory education is about mass-production, not individual success. So it is the success or failure of the masses, not the individual, that mattered. And while some individuals did prosper, the masses failed. Which is a statistical failure.

One of the key things that broke the New Wave was the problem of implementation. Whereas before there was one teacher teaching a subject at a given hour, now you needed three - one for each classification of students. So, one remedial class, one advanced class, and one regular class. Now then, a lot of the schools of the time weren't that large, so they didn't have enough teachers to cover that concept - schools with one or two teachers at a given grade were common. So, in order to implement this new system that required more teachers, such schools would do things like bring in temps. After all, it was usually only math and reading that were split like this, so you didn't exactly need a new full-time teacher at each grade...

And so, how did they organize that - well, the remedial class would get the temp teacher, and the advanced class would get the best of the two regular teachers. Thus, those who theoretically needed the most help got the least, and those who needed the least got the best. (And if the schools didn't organize like that, oh how the parents would complain - your excelling child being given a crappy temp teacher! The horror.) But that's all an interesting aside.

The real meat of the issue came in what statistically occurred as a result of the system. So, as happened, and for various reasons, a lot of those "advanced" classes actually proceeded slower than the regular classes did, and thus the advanced students ended up learning less than their regular student counterparts. Meantime, the remedial class was essentially often considered an exile class, thus even though a student was supposed to be able to work their way out of remedial by putting in effort, in practice most remedial teachers essentially wrote their students off, did minimal effort at improvement and concentrated on the basics, and in due time recommended to the parents of each student that their kid should go to a technical school, often recommending that they even quit high school and head there early. Because after all, their kid was dumb, so high school was a waste of time for them. Which idea I am, personally, grateful for.

Because while other high schoolers were baby-sitting and working at fast food restaurants, my first job was tutoring such students. My gig was to get them through high school, instead of being sent to the technical school. And I didn't just do that, I got a high percentage of them into college.

Now, think about what that means from a parent's perspective. Say you have an a kid in Advanced class, but now that he's in high school, he is testing out as having less knowledge than regular students. Or say you have a remedial student that the school system has written off and told you to your face was dumb and should quit school, but along comes a high school student who gets your kid to college instead. A high school student does what all the remedial teachers did not. -Yes, parents got a bit miffed, and weren't exactly quiet about it. And the icing on the cake was when the IQ testing part fell flat on its face, proving itself to be a much less accurate predictor of a student's future high school grades than was their current elementary school grades. (Oh, how I laughed the day the study results came out and the story hit the papers.)

And so, the system sputtered to a halt as its central tenets fell apart. The budget crunch of the 90s scrubbed out any last remnants of an already failed system, since who can afford three teachers doing the job of one when budgets are being slashed?

PS: the every child is a special snowflake thing is actually pretty old. It's the kind of thing a teacher says to the parents of a student who isn't doing very well, you know in order to mollify them. If you heard what teachers really say about your kids behind closed doors, you'd probably never send your little snot-nosed bastards to school again.

 

[Baptiste Bourdon]

Hi, I realize I'm getting in the way of a big conversation, sorry about that. I just wanted to make a modest reaction about the example of midichlorians used in the Editorial, I didn't know where else to put it :

"On the other hand, in The Phantom Menace the whole “power of the force” is reduced to the concentration of midichlorians in a body. Was this explanation necessary? Did the universe get better through this exposition?"

ok it didn't get far better (for the universe), but yes this explanation was necessary. Plus I might add : midichlorians aren't the origin of the "power of the force", there is no "reducing", they're merely a marker, a consequence of being connected with the Force. Why was it necessary ? Mainly because the prequel trilogy had to make a huge difference with the original on all levels, including the fact the prequels show a universe far more technological and technical. We see Jedi swordfighting and Force-using at its prime, the mystical aspect having been mostly replaced by technicity and knowledge, because that's what happens when a society's science is dominant : the more you know, the less you assume/believe. And maybe that's part of why the Republic falls. So, having a definition about midichlorians being a scientific way of measuring one's connection with the Force isn't only a writing device to confirm Anakin's 'force power', it's also one of the many markers of the universe's NECESSARY contrast between the original and the prequels. One is technologic, the other is mystic.

 

[MrBuzzKill]

Man, some of these posts really lack the hooks necessary to keep me reading past the first sentence.
By the way, can we get a TL;DR rating?

 

[Shadenuat]

The practical part of the article is decent, the anti librul academia part is over the top and takes too long, although it does have a point burried beneath there about pragmatism in writing.
I think editing, committee writing and overextension are the main problems. Undertale was mentioned in the article, and I think it's an interesting example - made by one person, it's a "smart" "tumblr" indie gaym, but it is a totally, 100% coherent in it's smartumblrindie gaymeness.
Overextension can be battled with experience from pnp gaming. The moment you see player party look at your amazing quest/city/map full of lore and characters and leet story and then suddenly turn around and deciding to explore completely different direction thus wasting all your work and making you come up with new shit on the fly, you learn to respect player choice more than your own ego. You learn to avoid pulling all your resources into one direction and realise it is always better to use your writing ability to add more options and choice for the player.

I don't know how editing goes in big projects like PoE, but from my own experience with smaller projects (running multiple DMs and parties), it really helps when there is a tyranny of one, or at least sith Rule of Two. Aka all writing goes through 1-2 people who have an agreement how game should feel like.

In the end, text is an unstrument, mechanics even, for roleplaying. It should go into main strategic development goals: bringing more options for the player and expanding on main characters and story; not far beyond into the land where dragons dwell.

P.S. I couldn't help to feel that the part about wacky writing begs for Lewis Carroll and American McGee Alice reference

 

[Black Angel]

P.S. I couldn't help to feel that the part about wacky writing begs for Lewis Carroll and American McGee Alice reference

Oh wait, wrong reference

I'm still wondering why the Infernal Train became a 40k meme. Some said it's because it's a cathedral on rails, but it doesn't even reminds me of 40k's battleship.

 

[Shadenuat]

I'm still wondering why the Infernal Train became a 40k meme. Some said it's because it's a cathedral on rails, but it doesn't even reminds me of 40k's battleship.

Because there was a demonic train in one of the books about 40k. I think one about ultramarines.

 

[Fenix]

I also specifically attacked the idea that all this only happened in 20 years. I specifically said these problems go back a long way.

Yeah, and you said it out of thin air, that's why I called it bullshit.

I also said that the humanities has been in trouble basically since its very institutionalisation.

Lol, and now the time has come?
You post is a one short story in fanatasy ganre, where you making assumption that humans have TWO HEADS! but they are just invisible, but now the time has come and all bad things that happened explained by this!
LOOK! HE HAS TWO HEAD!
Kind of stories like in Ancient Greece.

Spoiler

But utopias in general, not just ideal communism, are destined to fail.

Agree.

They are conceived based on preferences and ideas of one single individual. In order to work, you need to kill, mutilate or throw in jail everyone who disagrees with you.

It's all doesn't matter because all other political regimes do exactly the same - they build state on ideas of one man and they need to use violnce for that, and the only reason you think you see the difference is because said Communism was forced to build state from scratch in just years, maybe ten years surrounded by hostile states, while all big similiar periods of state induced violence for other, conditional "democratic" regimes were all in the past.

Utopias are unimaginative and provincial because no single individual can possibly plan and anticipate every single service, need and human preference.

The point in utopia that failed is not in service, need and human preference at all.

Society is a gigantic entity filled with different individuals and needs.

Yes, but don't tell me that every needs is fulfilled in so called democratic state.
In fact, these needs are thightly controlled by various institutions, controlled and changed to be lowest need - flesh needs, which was already formulated in Ancient Rome - bread and circuses.
One of the reason that accelerated fail of Communistic state was that people there were educated in a way to rise man up, and all its needs and desires. While state aimed to control every person, in the same time state tried to grow a New Man, Man of th Future. That was a contradiction that determined an existence of social stratum that can be roughly called as intellectuals.
In US and other democratic countries it is a comparatively small group, while in USSR it was half of population of Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (what called now as Russia), (not talking about asian republics which falls quickly after ndependence acquisition in feodalism).

I actually think I wrote an excessive explanation which mostly will hurt discussion but I had to try.

Let them figure it out by themselves what they want. The result will be better.

It is a disastrously naive approach to think, that man with real power will let crowd to figure out what that crowd want.
They will control, canalize, mold and reshape all "wants" and "needs" and in digital era it is possible as never before, when you could escape into the free land, not controlled by the king.
Today nowhere to run.

The failures of communism have nothing to do with egoism. The problem is the need to control every aspect of the lives of individuals to ensure that the order is being respected. This ensues the corruption and incompetence associated with the bureaucracy created to ensure this control, the lack of incentives to create wealth (why should I work If I will not be properly compensated for this), etc. Utopias of control are based on the delusion that you can improve people’s lives by taking their liberty, which reveals lack of basic understanding of how wealth and prosperity are created in the first place.

You see, the only reason I comment it is I don't want you to be blind and in a deadend, I don't want you and other to spend years in fruitless search for truth when you turned wrong way in that labirinth. I just want to share the experience to protect from wrong turn that lead to deadend.

Communistic state failed because people stopped believing in communistic idea first and foremost.
But I talk not about all people, because ordinary people were the last who stopped believing in it, I talk about communistic elites, those who was in power.
They gradually ceased to understand, why they have to manage and take care of people, and in the same time all that they manage not theirs. but belonge to people.
It is hard to outline period when it starts, but that doesn't really matter.
So in last 20-30 years before 91, they have less and less motivations to actually manage state, and it is when corruption and criminal begun to flourish, for example widely known "cotton case", where The Republic of Uzbekistan, main supplier of cotton, fabricated reports that they collected 3 tons of cotton while in reality there was 0.5 ton.
That happened because top persons of the country put pressure on the leadership of the Republic of Uzbekistan to collect more and more cotton, without any agreecultural and economical rationale, while it was just impossible.
But nobody from the first persons of the country was interested in what was possible and what wasn't, they actually wasn't interest in managing, all they needed was indicators.
And thus economics failed more and more over time.
And what happened in 91 was in fact a counter-revolution, when corrupted - in many senses - elites desided that a people are superfluous part, they decided that they would not only manage, but also to own factories, enterprises and all movable and immovable property for their own profit.

In a sense of statebuilding, or systemic weakness of USSR it was that when period if ideological indoctrination ends, elites lost all and every motivation to actually manage the state.
While so called democratic states, which are actually capitalistic states have huge advantage in this, no matter how ugly they are in rest - they are ALWAYS over-motivated to struggle with competitors, and to defend state's interests, because state's interests and their interests are the same.
Thus they are super stable in their elites and management.
China has avoided this trap and look at them.

Utopias of control are based on the delusion that you can improve people’s lives by taking their liberty, which reveals lack of basic understanding of how wealth and prosperity are created in the first place.

Communistic utopia was quite naive about control - they controlled "physical indicators" - where person can move and travel, which book that person has access to, and so on.
Democratic anti-utopia on the other hand control people's thinking, desires and needs, while they don't care about rest, except maybe money leash - credits, and other forms of leash.
But such things as economical slavery only possible because people keep thinking it is fair, just order of things, which again lead us to people who think they have liberty, freedom etc, and those who controlled all their thinking.
As for "how wealth and prosperity are created in the first place" - look history books about colonialism, e.g. Opium Wars between Britain and China, that's a brightest example of it.

 

[Israfael]

Because there was a demonic train in one of the books about 40k. I think one about ultramarines.

It's been actually 3 or 4 books, spanning different novel series (stopped reading wh40k novels for some reason recently, no time for anything but KKKodex

 

[Ismaul]

Telengard
Many great points man!

(tl;dr) So you're saying that the separation of students in classes based on learning ability failed for those main reasons:

1. It required more teachers in small schools where they didn't have enough students to fill 2-3 classes instead of 1.
2. Splitting kids based on IQ tests didn't work because it didn't really measure actual learning ability (which I guess also includes more factors like socio-economical status).
3. Parents always wanted their kids in the best class.
4. Budget cuts in the '90 were the final nail in the coffin.

Maybe you're right. Might I ask which is the country where this happened?

The cuts in the '90s were effectively the end for that system in Canada too. Schools where I went had a way to tackle the lack of teachers issue though: they mixed two different grades together for the best students, so you'd have a class of grades 3-4, one of 5-6, but only for the best students, that could adapt, and also help the others in the lower grade. Weaker students had a full class of their own. It worked for me, don't know for others.

I'm also surprised the "better" classes didn't actually perform better than weaker ones. Are you familiar with Rosenthal and Jacobson's research on the Self-fulfilling prophecy phenomenon (or Pygmalion effect)? Published in '68, it showed that teachers expected their students to succeed according to their class, so they unconsciously treated them differently, and the students acted accordingly, realizing those expectations. And that is not counting the fact that weaker students got the worse teachers... I might have expected that this kind of biais would also be a factor in shutting down the separation of students system, but I don't know.

Damn man, designing a good education system is hard, even when you don't have politicians actively trying to bring it down, like nowadays.

 

[uaciaut]

Good read.

As someone who has never player Darklands though - how exactly does the game manage to translate the lives, feast days and miracles of 100 patron saints into the gameplay?

 

[Lurker King]

Damn man, designing a good education system is hard, even when you don't have politicians actively trying to bring it down, like nowadays.

It’s only hard because you take for granted the illuminist concept of universal education without considering the preferences and dispositions of actual people. Let’s make this clear once and for all: most people hate books and have no other interests besides cheap entertainment, food and sex. The “problem” of education only appears when you take all these people and shove them in classes and say, “Hey, guess what? Now, you have to learn 2000 years of knowledge* to learn in X years”. I think that most people should be obligated to learn very basic things such as reading, writing, basic arithmetic, notions of geography, legal duties and rights, etc. Anything more than that should be optional. That way high school would stop being prisons were fathers imprison their kids while they are working.

But even if most people wouldn’t be wasting teachers' time by being forced to learn a bunch of stuff they don’t want, there is still another problem in the meagre diet of classes that are offered. If you are a natural singer, dancer, gardener or artisan you are fucked because most school curriculums won’t support your vocation. This represents a huge loss for society, which instead of developing or channeling these talents, it’s forcing these people to be something that they don’t want. That’s also one of the reasons why students are uninterested.

* That’s assuming teachers are actually teaching their respective disciplines, which is no true in 9 out of 10 cases. A math teacher, for instance, should educate students to proof conjectures, instead of instructing them to memorize a bunch of operations with formulas they don’t understand. It’s ridiculous. I think the same thing could be said by the other areas. Any way you look at it, it becomes clear that how education should be it is incompatible with how most people are. And that's fine. Most people shouldn't be forced into books. The problem is when we assume they should. That's the main problem.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Good read.

As someone who has never player Darklands though - how exactly does the game manage to translate the lives, feast days and miracles of 100 patron saints into the gameplay?

Lives give you hints regarding the situations, in which you can pray for the saint's assistance.

Feast days act as modifiers to how much faith ("mana") you have to spend to successfully pray the gay away for a miracle. The closer to the feast day, the less you have to spend.

Miracles do miraculous stuff like increase your damage or turn the hearts of wicked men.

 

[uaciaut]

Good read.

As someone who has never player Darklands though - how exactly does the game manage to translate the lives, feast days and miracles of 100 patron saints into the gameplay?

Lives give you hints regarding the situations, in which you can pray for the saint's assistance.

Feast days act as modifiers to how much faith ("mana") you have to spend to successfully pray the gay away for a miracle. The closer to the feast day, the less you have to spend.

Miracles do miraculous stuff like increase your damage or turn the hearts of wicked men.

Cute mechanic.

Like Prime Junta said i'm fine with some lore dumping - i did read some of the books from BG2 from example since i had never played any Forgotten Realms PnP previously and wasn't really familiar with the world/setting and i read a bit of World of Darkness lore outside the game after playing VtmB since i enjoyed the world. I also think it's pretty much impossible to connect every piece of lore you stumble across to some gameplay mechanic, but yeah nowadays games throw shitty info at you for the sake of it.

 

[Ismaul]

It’s only hard because you take for granted the illuminist concept of universal education without considering the preferences and dispositions of actual people. Let’s make this clear once and for all: most people hate books and have no other interests besides cheap entertainment, food and sex.

Thing is, though, can you trust kids to make the choice of how much they want to learn, instead of just choosing the easy way? Do they have the hindsight to chose well?

I agree that schools function like prisons, they're obedience teaching machines. And kids hate that, naturally. But I believe that it's not because kids don't want to learn, it's the delivery system that sucks and is constraining, which then makes them suffer through education instead of enjoying it / developing themselves. The idea would be to change that delivery system, instead of abandoning the idea of giving kids a solid education. School curriculums being too uniform is a problem, and ultimately you'd want something where education / what is learned is at least partly driven by each student's own motivations / interests, as long as they all cover the bases.

Maybe we're saying the same thing basically. You need to teach a solid base to everyone, and let them explore for the rest, but not without a certain framework, guidance to help them and hold them accountable for their progress. That is not an obvious system to design. Rigidity is easy, flexibility requires good conditions to exist.

Also, another issue is, if you don't want kids to develop a minimum of critical thinking, then we'd better not be ruled under a democratic system. It's already pretty bad right now, which is why we vote every 4 years on something only marginally important as the face of the system. So we'd need to shift to some form of aristocracy / meritocracy political system, where better educated individuals rule. That's a big shift. You couldn't even have the masses vote for it, "b-but muh democracy".

 

[Lurker King]

I think that everyone should be forced to learn some basic things in order to be citizens, but other than that, they should choose what they want to learn, if they choose anything at all. Contemporary mandatory education, and the social expectations around it, are a huge hypocrisy that only makes people miserable. Do you think that we should lock kids inside classrooms for 15 years until they are mature enough to know what they want? Don’t you think that we should offer different interests and let them choose what they feel attracted to, instead of decide on their behalf because they don’t know? First, most of the ham-fisted content they are forced to absorb will be lost as time passes. So let’s force them into what a group of people decided is best for them won’t improve them, if that’s what you are thinking. Education is not like a bitter pill that you should be forced to swallow. The purpose shouldn’t be to force everyone to be intellectuals of high culture, but to develop their interests, whether they are artistic, scientific or more pragmatic. Once you start thinking these lines you can allow kids to change disciplines if they changed minds. Isn’t that how things work in the adult world? You choose a discipline or course. If you decide that you don’t like, you move to something else. Second, we shouldn’t underestimate peoples’ interests and vocations. By the end of elementary school and the beginning of high school, students already have a notion of what areas they want, if they want any.

Now, regarding democracy, the truth is that our education, even when is put to best use, doesn’t make people knowledgeable enough to make informed political decisions. Most voters don’t know basic facts about the candidates involved, their constituency, etc. There is research about this. 99,9% of voters are ignorant, because being informed enough is too fucking hard and you have no social incentive to learn these things. You have just one vote. So forcing people into classes for 15 years to memorize things they will probably forget won’t make any difference at all to democracy. People will still vote for whatever crazy reason they have in their heads. The only difference is that both students and teachers will have enormous emotional suffering for being in a insanely coercive, expensive and useless prison that is compulsory education. I also think that democracy sucks for so many reasons and should be replaced by epistocracy, which also sucks, but less – if you interested in this discussion, read Jason Brennan’s book “Against Democracy”.

 

[Ismaul]

Lurker King
Hmm, did you read my previous post? 'Cause we agree on most things.
The only thing is I wouldn't leave kids just choose what they want to learn and let them be on their own, they need guidance and help. They need stimulation and models to follow. Most of all, they need feedback on their work. School could become that.

Also, you can't teach all the basics in elementary school, you have to account for the brain's development, which means some basic things have to be taught later.

 

[Fairfax]

 

[Lurker King]

Lurker King
Hmm, did you read my previous post? 'Cause we agree on most things.
The only thing is I wouldn't leave kids just choose what they want to learn and let them be on their own, they need guidance and help. They need stimulation and models to follow. Most of all, they need feedback on their work. School could become that.

Also, you can't teach all the basics in elementary school, you have to account for the brain's development, which means some basic things have to be taught later.

I read your previous post. I was using the opportunity to criticize the traditional point of view. I disagree with you with the part about democracy, even if we both agree that it sucks. It doesn’t really change the political outcome, with good or bad education.

 

[Fenix]

It's classic paranoid projection. They only went into shit like that in the first place because they have an axe to grind, and so to them anyone who disagrees is ebul nazi blah blah. But the ones they accuse this of are not the ones staging protests and using 'activism' to attack everyone but themselves.

Isn't it the same as spreading paranoia in times of McCarthyism? When "remember everyone can be a Red, if he disagree with government he IS Red" something like that.

That could be argued for, but they also stopped separating better students from weaker ones in different classes, on the same grounds, so weaker students no longer get the attention they deserve (and the stronger ones are neglected too, never to live up to their potential).

School that is in 50 meters from my house, after some time past 91 year considered to practice this separation, I abandon it when such changes begin.
Better ones were supposed to learn from 8 am till 2 pm, weaker ones from that point till to 8 pm.
I even know a teacher, he being offered a work in that school at some point, but he refused, because in his understanding it was not pedagogical approach.
I'm not sure but in Russia exist division by specialization - some class, and even schools specializing on mathematics, physics, music etc.

Anyway you can't talk about global education problems in context of videogame writing.

I find your post interesting, but this is the part I disagree with.
You actually can, and most important he didn't pull all it out of thin air, but that's subject of dispute of course.

And once this New Wave statistics-based education system was implemented, most of these old-school teachers from the 30s and 40s quit in protest (that would be in the late 70s, in case you want context).

Do you know by any chance, when test system was implemented in US? I mean that checkbox test system when all you need is pen to put a checkmarks.

A high school student does what all the remedial teachers did not. -Yes, parents got a bit miffed, and weren't exactly quiet about it. And the icing on the cake was when the IQ testing part fell flat on its face, proving itself to be a much less accurate predictor of a student's future high school grades than was their current elementary school grades. (Oh, how I laughed the day the study results came out and the story hit the papers.)

I wonder if it could affect or be connected with the advent of films where "someone gather a bunch of looser to X and win"?

If you heard what teachers really say about your kids behind closed doors, you'd probably never send your little snot-nosed bastards to school again.

http://oneseries.tv/en/watch-online/new-girl/season_1/episode_14 18:00-18:25