Vassenor wrote:Forsher wrote:
The question is more inviting people to engage in denialism rather than "it was a good thing", the scales are as you say.
I suspect the kind of discussion this was meant to generate was more along the lines of "identify and assess two contrasting positions in the historiography of indigenous Americans post-Columbus".
At Level 3 in NZ, there's a history standard that's called "Demonstrate understanding of different perspectives of people in an historical event of significance to New Zealanders". An example of what that might mean in practice is to be found in document 3.4A here:
That task includes things that you might otherwise ask as "to what extent do you believe the My Lai massacre was justified?". It's just phrased very differently.
Just read the article... what the actual fuck. The question is, I believe, a necessary skill, it just needs rephrasing. However, that's assuming it's introduced very differently and is definitely not the case if you append it at the end of:
That last paragraph beggars belief.
Nah, you should be paid according to the greater of how much other people don't want the job or the difficulty it requires. That is to say, people should be compensated for their time as individuals.
There really is, frankly, little value added by vacuuming an office or standing around on the street exposed to the weather, but no-one really wants work like this, so it should be necessary to pay people rather a lot to get them to do it.
This is, obviously, how the economy is meant to work* but, equally obviously, this is also not how the economy actually works.**
*I mean, yes, there's negotiation with the employer which creates a downward pressure on wages.
**Because people need jobs so badly, the negotiation with the employer is more a dictation, which means people readily end up working for wages that don't compensate them for their time but which is, instead, the greatest amount of money they're able to obtain for their time. This is why "market power" is one of the key violations of "perfect competition" present in "actual markets" (probably rivalled only by externalities).
When I did History for GCSE and A-Level we were always taught to say that any opinion we were asked to discuss was understandable even if we personally disagreed with it and to write both about why someone might hold that opinion and disagree with it.
Not just history too. I did A-Level English Language, and part of that included the eternal debate of Skinner vs Chomsky on language acquisition, with all the best essays being the ones where we piously discuss why it's somewhere in the middle.
But the thing is... it's not even close. I've gone and looked into the books and videos of Chomsky on the subject since school. He absolutely, viscerally, murders the behaviouralist argument in incredible eloquence again and again in a way that makes it really hard to even see where the compromise comes from. That duh, some basics like what specific language babies learn comes from the environment, but that going beyond that is dead-end research.
And I'm not entirely okay with that it took a continuing interest afterwards to learn these details.
