SaintlyBloody

On 5/8/2022 at 5:44 AM, Etat said:

Food for thought to be sure!!  Speaking only from my own perspective, it appears to me the national curriculum that was introduced in Australia several years ago has lead to a couple of trivial outcomes including a general decline in academic achievement and a loss of choice for parents of school kids. 

 

But who cares about that though right??  The positives are that it has lead to an abundance of government employed bureaucrats and administrators, an exceptional amount of reporting requirements from teachers, a booming mental health industry for over-examined stressed out kids, and has opened the door to government (read lobbyist) contrived social "education" initiatives.

 

What's not to love about Australia's national curriculum???

So very sorry for this super late response. And yes, that's why I think developed/high trust societies are better off with more decentralization (depending on other factors), if they can make it work. Usually, they can make it work, and the sole reason it is easier to backfire against societies with low trust/development is that the corruption makes it difficult to enact, and it leads to fragmentation, inner strife, and implosion. I have a feeling that it's not so simple, but instrumentally, developed societies perhaps have larger burden of innovating to maintain their edge, while developing countries can simply emulate (cheaper) to catch up. In my own country, the only sectors that perform well are those run by the federal government, and all province run programmes suffer. Education is a concurrent subject, managed by both, and here too, there is a heaven and earth difference. Lip service was paid for maintaining the cultural and linguistic distinctiveness of the provinces when education was given to the jurisdiction of states, but what it has actually done is deprive students of good quality instruction and testing. Inept officials just say 'federal bogeyman bad' and keep sticking on to their power, no matter however inept they are. They also stupidly almost completely extinguished English from their curriculum, and these students have extreme difficulty absorbing complex thoughts in English or expressing their own complex thoughts in that language when they get to the University - and let's face it, the academic world is a world run in English right now. My point is, the principles of justice and equity often don't work in fragmented societies, and can potentially do a hell lot of harm, if one is not pragmatic.

For nations with weak educational infrastructure, 'subjectivity' becomes a euphemism for nepotism, abuse of power (yes, educators are extremely powerful and students disempowered), politicization, corruption, and arbitrariness. Standardized testing, done right, can at least offer some degree of fairness and meritocracy. It also gives a lot more information about the examinee than is generally assumed. In both cases, anonymization and other ancillary measures are actually providing the fairness, but it is still far easier to do with standardized than not. On the other hand, too much standardization can become a trap leading down to the suppression of difference, ingenuity, even worse politicization, and the deterioration of cultural capital. In other words, it depends on the person who is using either method, in which cases, with what intentions, and via which techniques.

In general, I believe high trust, developed societies should take a mainly decentralized approach balanced with some standardization, and low trust/developing societies should take a mainly standardized approach with some exceptions (because even developing societies have islands of excellence), with the goal being eventual decentralization - but I could be wrong. A lot also depends on the importance education receives in the budget, the cultural traditions of the society concerned, etc.

dross

doleful 

Degenerative

Despicable

Disastrous

Deprecable

Dishevelled

Dilapidated 

Destitute

Depressing 

Sorry

Pitiable

Deplorable

Regrettable 

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