{"id":909,"date":"2011-03-08T21:40:30","date_gmt":"2011-03-09T01:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=909"},"modified":"2011-03-08T21:48:31","modified_gmt":"2011-03-09T01:48:31","slug":"does-race-to-nowhere-go-anywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=909","title":{"rendered":"Does &#8220;Race to Nowhere&#8221; go anywhere?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just saw a little news segment for a new documentary on education problems called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.racetonowhere.com\/home\">Race to Nowhere<\/a>.  So I checked out its website.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" width=\"560\" height=\"349\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/pYwjgfcq_iY?rel=0\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I can&#8217;t comment on the film itself, because I haven&#8217;t seen it.  And, to be totally honest, it doesn&#8217;t look entirely worth seeing; I&#8217;m not sure I&#8217;d learn much from it.  From the promotional videos on the website, and what I just saw about it on the news, its main message seems to be: &#8220;Look, we&#8217;ve got a pretty serious and undeniable problem here.  Students are suffering needlessly.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Um, yeah.  Great observation.  Is this really surprising news?<\/p>\n<p>Well, it&#8217;s a <em>step<\/em>, at least.  You can&#8217;t address the problem if you don&#8217;t see the problem, and apparently a lot of people don&#8217;t.  And the problem <em>isn&#8217;t<\/em> that students aren&#8217;t achieving enough, aren&#8217;t doing well enough on their tests, aren&#8217;t doing better at math than the Asians.  The problem is that they&#8217;re suffering needlessly.  Right?<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a step, but it&#8217;s still not the holy grail of the problem with schools.  The main problem is, as <a href=\"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=895\">I&#8217;ve stated before<\/a>, the <em>memorization of the material itself is useless<\/em>.  Until parents, educators, and students realize this, the problem will remain.  You can put a band-aid on the wound by collectively lowering academic standards to create less stress, but the wound&#8217;s not going to heal until you have concrete answers for what your goals are with education (and not just the vague &#8220;I want to get into a good college so I can get a good job so I can be happy&#8221;).  That is, you have to know why you are learning specific material.  You can&#8217;t be taking a course simply for the credit.  If you do that, the actual content is meaningless.  That it can be horribly stressful is just a side effect.  It&#8217;s like doing a documentary on how uncomfortable hospital outfits are instead of looking at the disease.<\/p>\n<p>So&#8230; yes, school causes lots of stress, boo-hoo, it&#8217;s so hard.  Get to the point.  Take that final step of logic.<\/p>\n<p>From what I can see from <em>Race to Nowhere<\/em>, it doesn&#8217;t get to the point.  It might not necessarily be wrong or bad, but it looks incomplete.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just saw a little news segment for a new documentary on education problems called Race to Nowhere. So I checked out its website. I can&#8217;t comment on the film itself, because I haven&#8217;t seen it. And, to be totally honest, it doesn&#8217;t look entirely worth seeing; I&#8217;m not sure [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[53],"tags":[380,78],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-eF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}