Celtics Hospital is Back, Baby: Finally: Jaylen Brown Has Thoughts on Education - Celtics Hospital Jaylen Brown back!

In other Brown news, Jaylen chose Cal-Berkeley over Calipari in large part because he valued the academic tradition there. He didn't have much to say about where his career began, but he has definitely taken advantage of the academic connections he has given to playing for Boston:

    Oakes explains how defining and publicly separating students by their apparent intellectual abilities generates damaging and unfair consequences. While Brown was reviewing terms such as social stratification (the system of categorizing people based on socioeconomic factors) and curricular monitoring (the practice of grouping students according to their perceived ability), he could not help but cry.

Celtics Hospital Jaylen Brown back

    He realized that learning high school concepts that didn't apply to the real world was no coincidence. He realized that memorizing facts and figures for the sole purpose of regurgitation was not how they all treated information. These circumstances were by design.

    Oakes introduced Brown to how schools structure inequality.

    "I experienced a lot of the things I was talking about, and I had no idea," Brown said. "I consider myself a smart guy, but once you learn that someone's been cheating on you all your life, it's kind of awful to realize. That made me a little emotional."

Boston.com

This is an interesting topic, and since it's a slow news day, I'm going to talk a little about Oakes' notion of "structured inequality."

I saw a teacher talk once about how he moved from a high school in a socially stable neighborhood to a low school in a poor neighborhood. From year to year, the scores of their standardized exams plummeted.

His opinion was, "I did not go from being a good teacher to a bad teacher overnight."

Oakes is absolutely right about structured inequality: A central component of public education since its beginnings in early modern Europe is the notion of guided outcomes. Yes, some systems (for example in Scotland and Germany) were more meritocratic than others (in Britain and France), but recognizing higher ability among lower class students has always been a coincidence, and educational opportunities have always been stratified.

There was never a golden age from which the present system has fallen. The system has always been about strengthening the established order of things.

Have you ever stopped to ask why they were taught italics? Did you know that there are other ways to do both multiplication and division?

You were taught italics because it is the fastest way to write by hand. You were taught tabular multiplication and "long division" because they are the most compact methods for performing hand calculations.

They were taught these things to qualify for a career as an employee.

With no particular characteristics that made you stand out from the crowd, your teachers were preparing you, most of them without even knowing they were, for a career that is right for your social position.

You've probably seen mocking basic common math education, and honestly, it deserves a significant enough amount of mockery, but not for whatever reason you may think.

You may think you were taught arithmetic, but unless you can explain why you start from the left when you make a long division, or why you "bring" numbers to columns adjacent to multiplication, you didn't learn anything about arithmetic. You just learned some rules and how to apply them. You learned what you needed to know for a middle class job. Neither more nor less.

The common core is an attempt to teach mathematics instead of teaching rules. However, the entire primary and secondary education systems have, from the very beginning, been on the rules of teaching. This approach to rules is inherent in the system, and those rules are ultimately about fostering an orderly society. And an orderly society is a stratified society.

But there is more to it. I was a substitute teacher for a couple of years. I did not take much homework because I discovered that teachers generally did not leave adequate materials for subs.

However, one experience left a lasting impression on me. I was in high school in a poorer section of Sioux Falls. The school day started with a fifteen minute class where we turned off all the lights and watched a movie.

You did not need to be a Rhodesian scholar to understand that this session was intended to calm down these children and prepare them for more or less homework.