I guess a lot of what I wrote is country-specific, and I was thinking about Slovakia where employers do not care about the specific college, they only care about whether you have one or not. Not sure why, but that’s how it works.
And pretty much anyone can get to some college, so the only obstacles are either being somehow insane, or coming from so poor family that even if the college is free, you simply cannot afford a few more years of not having income. So “having college education” is a proxy for “not being poor or insane”, which of course is a horrible classism. Somehow citizens of the country that regularly has a majority of communists in the parliament don’t mind this at all.
So the current situation here is that the elementary and high schools don’t matter at all—because unless you are very poor or insane, you will get to some college, and for most people it doesn’t matter which one—so the usual complaints about schools are along the lines of “too much homework” or “too difficult lessons”. On the other hand, people notice that young people with university education are somehow much less impressive than they used to be a decade or two ago. But almost no one can connect the dots. So the politicians here do some Brownian-motion “reforms” of education, which for example means that one year they remove some part of math education, the next year they put it back, yet another year they shift some math from one grade to another. Each time saying to media how this reform will fix the problems with education.
Sorry, it’s a stupid country with stupid voters, and I am getting more and more disappointed every year.
Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s not Slovaks, it’s humans.
Imagine someone of average intelligence. Now consider that fully one half of the country’s population is below median intelligence, that is, stupider than someone you imagined...
That’s where cultural habits make a big difference. In some places the stupid people follow relatively good heuristics, in some places they follow relatively bad ones.
Culture is important, yes, but that usual argument is that it’s institutions which matter. The most prominent advocate of this approach is probably Daron Acemoglu, see e.g. this or his book.
From your description of Slovakian politics it seems like the actors are little coordinated. Maybe there room for a liquid democracy based political party?
I guess a lot of what I wrote is country-specific, and I was thinking about Slovakia where employers do not care about the specific college, they only care about whether you have one or not. Not sure why, but that’s how it works.
And pretty much anyone can get to some college, so the only obstacles are either being somehow insane, or coming from so poor family that even if the college is free, you simply cannot afford a few more years of not having income. So “having college education” is a proxy for “not being poor or insane”, which of course is a horrible classism. Somehow citizens of the country that regularly has a majority of communists in the parliament don’t mind this at all.
So the current situation here is that the elementary and high schools don’t matter at all—because unless you are very poor or insane, you will get to some college, and for most people it doesn’t matter which one—so the usual complaints about schools are along the lines of “too much homework” or “too difficult lessons”. On the other hand, people notice that young people with university education are somehow much less impressive than they used to be a decade or two ago. But almost no one can connect the dots. So the politicians here do some Brownian-motion “reforms” of education, which for example means that one year they remove some part of math education, the next year they put it back, yet another year they shift some math from one grade to another. Each time saying to media how this reform will fix the problems with education.
Sorry, it’s a stupid country with stupid voters, and I am getting more and more disappointed every year.
Sorry to disappoint you, but it’s not Slovaks, it’s humans.
Imagine someone of average intelligence. Now consider that fully one half of the country’s population is below median intelligence, that is, stupider than someone you imagined...
That’s where cultural habits make a big difference. In some places the stupid people follow relatively good heuristics, in some places they follow relatively bad ones.
Culture is important, yes, but that usual argument is that it’s institutions which matter. The most prominent advocate of this approach is probably Daron Acemoglu, see e.g. this or his book.
From your description of Slovakian politics it seems like the actors are little coordinated. Maybe there room for a liquid democracy based political party?