It is widely known that every corporate developer has endless time for his work. Mundane aspects like costs of development should have no impact on our code, the pureness of which is a goal in itself.
> It's called "Vernichtungslager" / "Concentration Camps", their whole purpose is the legal killing of undesirables, you're really venting your anger at the wrong agency here. They're just doing the job they were hired for.
Something tells me there will be no meeting 50 years after the torture in US secret prisons -- especially none with any insight into the wrongness of it.
There's quite a functional overlap between many uses of jQuery and what React does.
Ignoring animations and ajax, the core functionality of jQuery orients itself to the concept of progressive enhancement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_enhancement), you have a basic functionality of a page in HTML and you enhance that with scripts for better user experience. Hence most of jQuery methods follow the operations required for progressive enhancement: finding DOM stuff and changing it, registering events etc.
This is what in the end conflicts with the design of React. React is (again ignoring server-side-js prerendering) an all-or-nothing approach. The whole dynamic part of the DOM is constructed out of the virtual DOM. There is no no need to find DOM elements, because the React way would just relink your component to the real DOM result of its previous rendering or you find DOM elements of child components via React refs. To follow React design, you only change the real DOM directly if you need to step outside of React to e.g. integrate another library. The normal modus operandi is to just render new new virtual DOM based on your props / state.
You can do some meaningful things with combination of React and jQuery, e.g. just use jQuery's focusin/focusout to make up for the lack of bubbling focus support in React. Mostly though you shouldn't need to -- by design.
It's not really a bug for the same reasons that jQuery implements focus/blur independently from focusin/focusout. focus events just don't bubble out natively so you have to make your synthetic event system do that if you want / need it. jQuery implements it as a separate pair of events, React chose not to / only deviates from DOM behavior in very few instances (onchange). Using jQuery was just easier for my use case which seemed too exotic to claim any kind of general relevance.
I think it's deluded to expect any country to come even close to what the US is doing except maybe China. The budgets of all are not anywhere high enough to pull such a thing off. The US has moved on a dark and lonely path after 9/11.. Not only in espionage, but also in remote killings, illegal imprisonment and torture. To say others do just the same seems deluded.
Europe outsources a good deal of their defense and intelligence to the US, and for good reason, why spend money on redundant systems when the West is working together.
I can agree with your point that nobody quite reaches the scale of the US.
I mean, I am not suggesting Uganda has huge data warehousing and analysis compounds or anything absurd like that.
But I do suggest that every country is doing what they are capable. And countries like Japan, China, UK, Israel, Germany, Russia etc. are capable of quite a lot.
So it would kind of be more meaningful to not compare to the national average but to private schools targeting the same socio-economic situations, but with a traditional curriculum.
Again the point is not to show that Sudbury Valley is better, but rather just that the complete lack of curriculum is clearly not producing horrible results.
Children who have been raised to value learning will, in all likelihood, value learning. This is not a surprise!
I would also be curious to see the breakdown of what fields those students go into.
Some people are capable of self-learning in certain fields where as others are not. A great example of this is math, we all have heard stories (or know the person, or are the person!) of someone who can learn math on their own straight from a text book. Then there are others who learn best from an interactive discussion about math with a teacher. And then there are those who learn best about math from a discussion within a peer group!
If you look at our current teaching system, it tries to target all three learning styles to varying degrees.
Hearing stories about some wonder-kid in 7th grade who taught himself everything up to calculus in a single summer by reading on his own doesn't really help the discussion around setting national educational policy, because that kid is, to say the least, an outlier.
Writing is similar. Having an instructor guide students in areas to learn can be very valuable. Left to their own devices and being told to just write poems for a few hours a day for some length of time, I am betting most students wouldn't stumble upon haiku(s?) on their own!
>because that kid is, to say the least, an outlier. //
One of the major problems as I see it is that pretty much all kids are outliers in some way but en masse education tends to ignore this and force uniformity to a great extent (much greater than necessary IMO).
Please, can you give more insight about the school, instead of this short info "No curriculum - 80% went to college". What happens to 20%, are they completely uneducated because they didn't want to learn? Do they past some official mandatory tests? How exactly do they learn, who teaches them? You mentioned no classes if not requested, maybe 90% of knowledge gaining happens on that requested classes? How often do students get expulsion? What happens if some student don't want to do anything or don't even show up in school?
I'll do my best to write more posts getting in to the specifics, but my observation so far is that none of the extreme possibilities happen. There are problems. There are expulsions. Not many, but they do happen. The students don't magically learn everything on their own, but they do seem to develop in to competent, thoughtful, curious adults on their own...
Thanks for interesting blog posts. Answers to those questions help to understand what's good or bad about that system. Or any educational system. It's interesting, do they develop into curiosity, or they had it from the beginning.
There's no silver bullet in education, it's very complex thing. And to disregard traditional system on any ground could be too hasty. I've attended two schools. Both traditional system, but second one (last 2 years of education) had good reputation and to get there you had to pass exams (not very hard though). 100% of my class got into college (not US). And much less people from my first school did. The main difference was all the students in my class got in that school specifically because they wanted to go to higher education (also good teachers :).
I think the main problem is that these days we tend to look at this as a purely quantitative matter, when it's largely a quality matter.
We largely abandoned the enlightenment ideas of a humanist education. One whose purposes it isn't to drill people into fulfilling norms, but that enables them to live fulfilled lives where they can express themselves and grow into the kind of educated citizen being able to judge on political matters beyond who you'd like to drink a beer with more.
