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Social Promotion in Public School

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  1. #1
    spoonitnow's Avatar
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    US Players Allowed Social Promotion in Public School

    Social promotion is the policy that you are moved along to the next grade in public schools even if you fail your classes. There are two main justifications for this policy:

    1. The schools do not have the resources that would be required to actually teach the abundance of kids that would be held back in the grades if they didn't allow them to progress to the next grade.
    2. It's not fair to shame the kids who fail their classes by holding them back a year.

    Here's an interesting piece of history on the subject that I didn't know about until now. The bold is especially interesting:

    With the proliferation of graded schools in the middle of the 19th century, retention became a common practice, as were mid-term promotions. In fact, a century ago, approximately half of all American students were retained at least once before the age of 13.

    Social promotion began to spread in the 1930s along with concerns about the psychosocial effects of retention. This trend reversed in the 1980s, as concern about slipping academic standards rose.
    Personally, I'm of the belief that people in power want to weaken those who aren't in power to be able to control them and profit from them. Social promotion (along with a number of education policies in the United States) seems to do a great job of that.

    Thoughts on social promotion specifically or the education system in the United States being designed to make people easier to control?
  2. #2
    Galapogos's Avatar
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    I've never understood that logic. If you allow a kid forward if they failed the previous grade it only gets harder for them to pass that next grade. Then they pass it anyway and move on to a another grade that's even harder than the last one then they fail that too. If that goes on long enough you end up with a Youtube commenter by the time they're done high school.


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  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by spoonitnow View Post
    Personally, I'm of the belief that people in power want to weaken those who aren't in power to be able to control them and profit from them. Social promotion (along with a number of education policies in the United States) seems to do a great job of that.
    Be quiet, drink your beer, watch football on your big screen tv and keep making those monthly credit card payments on said tv, like the rest of us!
    Some days it feels like I've been standing forever, waiting for the bank teller to return so I can cash in all these Sklansky Bucks.
  4. #4
    rong's Avatar
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    Someone has to collect the garbage, and justify the jobs of all those policemen.
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  5. #5
    This is a problem because our society is built on the welfare program of public education. If people are not passed because of performance, they have little option because being a functional member of society requires passing. It's a catch-22.

    Retention is something that works in a private system, because then "the education system" wouldn't be the foundation of the society and wouldn't create the innumerable moral hazards like the one we're talking about right now.



    Quote Originally Posted by spoonitnow View Post
    1. The schools do not have the resources that would be required to actually teach the abundance of kids that would be held back in the grades if they didn't allow them to progress to the next grade.
    They say it but it isn't true. All this is is extracting the role of parents in the lives of their children, and paying lots of tax revenues for a teeny-tiny hypothetical benefit in teachers being able to spend a little more time with students on their own. If we're using the classroom paradigm (which truthfully is mostly an archaic system that doesn't change due to subsidization), then we should move in the opposite direction where we have huge classes and parents are expected to make sure the students are taking notes and learning the material. If a teacher can present to 10, he can also present to a 100. If people think this wouldn't work because young students suck at taking notes or paying attention, then we're fools if we think they're learning the material any other way in the first place.

    2. It's not fair to shame the kids who fail their classes by holding them back a year.
    It isn't, and everybody should be passed from every class they merely choose to take. Welfare is not a privilege, but an entitlement. If we live in a society that says we can't get anywhere in life without degrees, we are entitled to those degrees. Herein lies one of the consequences of state funding.

    Here's an interesting piece of history on the subject that I didn't know about until now. The bold is especially interesting:
    Dollars to donuts, this retention happened in private systems without much funding or competition from public.



    Personally, I'm of the belief that people in power want to weaken those who aren't in power to be able to control them and profit from them. Social promotion (along with a number of education policies in the United States) seems to do a great job of that.
    I disagree. I think almost everybody is trying to do the right thing, but trying your best still leads to dysfunction when the system is innately dysfunctional. We are stuck in an archaic view of education and the state, where we believe it is good to virtually mandate scholasticism for all. No amount of brain power or good intentions can fix this. Only deleting the system and letting a functional one arise can fix it.
  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by rong View Post
    Someone has to collect the garbage, and justify the jobs of all those policemen.
    There are an assload of well-paying employment opportunities that don't require a lick of the education somebody gets in any grade of school, and we look down upon them because we all have it stuck in our heads that we wanna be like the aristocrats of old, who created the concept and institution of education for themselves because they had nothing better to do than read the classics, pontificate upon history and philosophy, etc

    It is my opinion that being a plumber is a way better job than most of the jobs people with bachelors degrees have. It pays super well and it's not that hard. It's just looked down upon by society so nobody wants to do it, and uncountable sums of taxes are wasted on unsuccessfully Renaissance-Man-ifying everybody who eventually becomes as plumber
  7. #7
    spoonitnow's Avatar
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    There's a really good Mike Rowe TED talk that is on ^^ that topic, and I can't get the website to load right now. Could someone find it and post it?
  8. #8
    spoonitnow's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by wufwugy View Post
    I disagree. I think almost everybody is trying to do the right thing, but trying your best still leads to dysfunction when the system is innately dysfunctional. We are stuck in an archaic view of education and the state, where we believe it is good to virtually mandate scholasticism for all. No amount of brain power or good intentions can fix this. Only deleting the system and letting a functional one arise can fix it.
    I may have lacked some clarity. I think that the control aspect of the situation is largely people in power trying to do the right thing, so I agree with you on the bold as well.

    Have you seen the documentary "Century of Self?" It was made in digestible ~60-minute parts. It's the most accessible thing I can think of that could illustrate what I mean with my stance on this.

    Also, I disagree with the underlined portion as a necessary part of my position. My reasoning is that I think the system does exactly what it was designed to do (which is not to educate people in any meaningful way).
  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by Galapogos View Post
    I've never understood that logic. If you allow a kid forward if they failed the previous grade it only gets harder for them to pass that next grade. Then they pass it anyway and move on to a another grade that's even harder than the last one then they fail that too. If that goes on long enough you end up with a Youtube commenter by the time they're done high school.
    The irony is that the public system, by natural structure, benefits the most well-off and hurts the least well-off. This is because it's both an entitlement yet not entirely treated like an entitlement. What this means is that the exclusionary principles of private education (which are good) are subsidized, which makes that entitlement of exclusive club membership more accessible to those who perform better and thus need the subsidy less

    Because the entire system functions like this, we see huge and weird employment problems like employers only hiring people with bachelors degrees. The state props up the exclusionary principle, which props up the handful of people who can achieve exclusionary status, and makes everybody else worse off

    People bitch about how shitty the job market is and few realize that the primary culprit is state subsidized education. In fact, we have it so backwards that we think the solution to the shitty job market is more subsidization, but that will do nothing for us other than prop up the most capable among us and punish everybody else
  10. #10
    Renton's Avatar
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    Same old something for nothing. People who support this sort of policy think that scarce resources can emerge from nowhere, in most cases the resource is money (for example the idea that the welfare state somehow results in a better economy), but in this example the resource is knowledge. Public education is why we're still operating on a K-12 model after all these decades. Maybe it's possible to teach someone to become a person in less than 13 years? Nope? Not gonna look into that? Okay...
  11. #11
    spoonitnow's Avatar
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    I was talking about this earlier with someone else and thought it didn't deserve its own post, but I wanted to share it here.

    Back between about 2002 and 2005, I ran a chess club that ended up attracting a lot of kids. At the time, our schools were K-8 for elementary school and 9-12 for high school. With the eight elementary schools, I was able to go around and regularly make appearances to coach and talk with the kids and stuff like that usually at least once a month at each school while their clubs were active. This allowed me to recruit for a weekly chess club that went one night a week in this restaurant.

    At its peak for about 9 months straight, we were regularly getting between 60-80 kids per night. We broke up the kids into three main groups loosely based on age, but the more skilled kids from the younger groups often came to play with the older kids out of necessity for their growth. Things kept growing as we had kids coming from adjacent counties, and we had parents who would stay to eat and hang out with the kids, and kids who acted up were asked not to come back if they couldn't behave, so things never didn't get out of hand.

    I moved across the state in 2005, and I gave control of the chess club over to some school officials since that seemed like the logical thing to do. Their stupid policies and need to turn everything into a clusterfuck meant that the club was lucky to get 10 players to come only a few months later.

    They moved the club to a local elementary school gym (less than a half-mile away). I later found out that all of the kids' parents were required to sign permission slips and pay some kind of insurance fee for the school activity? Lots of other bad policies were put into place, it stopped being fun for the kids, and it stopped being something the parents were willing to get behind.

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