This is a deeply anti-intellectual message.
He’s telling people that school is irrelevant. He starts off with history, and actually makes a good point: that history is often taught poorly, with a narrow focus. That’s a complaint about the quality of the teaching, and I think it’s good to encourage students to demand better of their instructors.
But then it gets weird. He starts complaining about the subjects themselves: no one needs to know any math beyond addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and how does he know? Because he’s a satirist on television who doesn’t understand logarithms, and he’s just fine.
Ugh.
OK, granted, you don’t need to understand mathematics to make fun of mathematics on TV, and in fact, it probably helps to be ignorant if you want to do that. But lots of professions do use mathematics beyond the basics of arithmetic. You want to go into science or engineering? Better know algebra, calculus, logarithms, trig, and it’s undercutting education to say otherwise.
And let’s say your passion is history or literature (we need those disciplines, too!): you’re a better person with a deeper understanding of how the world works if you know a little bit more math than the minimal, just as the science types are better people for knowing literature and art and history.
Don’t get me started on his treatment of biology. All you’ll remember is the smell of the preservatives soaking the frogs you dissect? You know nothing, John Oliver.
It’s not something to be proud of, either.
I thought that was very uncharacteristic of the show. It’s something I’d expect from Sarah Palin, not Oliver.
So much bullshit in such a short video. I suppose it was expected that John Oliver would at some point do something disappointing.
I am also very surprised. It is a piling on of the media message that our education system is very poor. But it is not. Simply stated the poor score badly on international exams but the affluent are at the top of the world. (There are many studies of many international tests that disaggregate the data to show that US school districts with <25% poverty score at the top of the industrialized countries, even Finland with 5% poverty.)
A well rounded education leads to an informed constituency. This includes history, science, mathematics and art. (Language studies are necessary for every thing els so it is a given.) For him to do a show like this is a very big disappointment.
Can’t watch it right now, but I’ll do so later. It wouldn’t be that uncharacteristic for him, in my estimation, to make fun of education to a point, only to go back to remind people of its value. Sounds like it’s quite awful, though? I could see him doing a bit on how little of that stuff he needs for his own work… only to veer into some self-depreciating humour about how he’s not exactly being a rocket surgeon, a neuro-engineer or whatever. But – to the people who already watched it – that is not where he’s going with this, is he?
aarrrrgggghhhh
agreed. I watched that video to try to catch PZ missing some obvious satire or subtle attack on ‘Texas rewriting history books (ie. coverups)’. Could not find any of Oliver’s clevery sarcasm lurking in that vid.
I too was massively disappointed in my idol, putting out such a piece of claptrap; embodying all the complaints many hi-schoolers express between classes.
Saganite,
No, it’s not. As PZ wrote, first he criticizes what is(n’t) taught in history class, but then in mocking other classes he loses all nuance and just mocks them as useless.
For example, he jokes that math is useless and of all they teach you you actually only need addition, substraction, multiplication and division. Chemistry is going to be disappointing because they don’t teach you how to make meth. English class is “just” essay writing, so the only thing you can do wrong is forgetting who dies at the end of which book and proceedes listing some deaths at the end of various books (insert more jokes about the death of American dream).
He’s usually much better at nuanced criticism, so this just falls flat.
I wrote,
That must be the point!!! he was caricaturing the usual attitude twixt edumacation like I am befuddling my spelling in this piece of nuthin. He’s makin fun of himself by attacking edumacation in the most obviously backhanded method. He’s trying to enthuse their rebellious nature by enfiring the “I’ll show him how not bad education really is, to show how wrong he is, give me that math book I tore up last spring…”
But Oliver can do better than this. thumbs down, to Oliver.
Journalists of all people should have basic statistics at the very least.
see, re @8, we’re doin it (re @7). Expounding on all the errors in that piece. Easy for Oliver to sit back and cluck, “yes, yes, yes, what I was sayin without words”
That fateful moment when you realize a show’s writers might have just begun to run out of ideas.
Gotta admit the smell of formaldehyde is my most vivid memory of high school biology. That and trying to decap a chameleon with tools inadequate to the task.
John Oliver has always had a reactionary vein of humor, aimed at right-wingers. It’s just been mostly confined to foreign affairs. He almost never misses a chance to mock designated enemies of the US. He will even reverse himself. In the first season, he had an excellent piece on the Indian elections, highlighting the sinister career of Narendra Modi. Not a word since. Modi is just as sinister but now he is a supporter of the US government, just like John Oliver.
No heroes, right?
That was the worst Last week Tonight piece I have ever seen. It is so utterly uncharacteristic of Oliver, and yet if there is some subtle jab at under funding of education, the corruption of the system by the religious right or other proponents of revisionist history, anti-scientific ‘teach the controversy’ nonsense, or other forms of bastardisation of education then I can’t see it.
I am afraid this is an ‘F’ grade for Mr Oliver. Do better, we know you can.
10: Because one 21-minute segment is off, you think they are running out of ideas?
It’s just one segment, out of many.
I’ve heard many sketch-comedy artists (such as Key & Peele) state that some sketches just aren’t going to be winners, but that doesn’t mean you’re a failure. That’s just the way it is.
One bad sketch doesn’t mean much. One bad sketch is far from a pattern.
Sili @ 13;
Yup – no gods, no masters, no heroes…
… and also no role models and it seems precious few consistently decent high profile human beings.
And people wonder why I am so cynical.
Still, this is a relatively rare misstep from Oliver. He hasn’t gone completely off the wingnut deep end.
At least, not yet.
marilove,
Agreed.
Let’s just hope it doesn’t turn into a pattern.
Who knows, maybe there will be enough (constructive) criticism of the clip that encourages Oliver to make a longer and more thought out segment on education?
yeah, I see this as a “slap in the face” reminder that “no one is perfect”. That no matter how *stellar* I think Oliver’s humurous takes on world affairs can be, he can still “lay an egg”, producing a piece of cr@p. This is one of those turds.
Chris61:
That explains a lot.
Gregory @ 16: He hasn’t even gone off the wingnut shallow end. Or even dipped his tones in the water. This has nothing to do with wingnut anything. I doubt he *actually* thinks school is worthless — his mother was a schoolteacher, actually. And, he has a college degree.
More than likely, he was just trying to make a joke by commenting on the sorry state of affairs that public education is nowadays, especially in the US — and he’d be right — but it fell flat. It happens.
This is a super minor thing, and I do not think there is any reason whatsoever to think this is going to turn into some sort of pattern, so I’m not really putting in any effort “hoping” that it won’t.
The Daily Show had and The Colbert Report both MULTIPLE miss-steps every season, some really pretty large (much, much worse than this John Oliver miss-step). To pretend they didn’t is unreasonable and unrealistic.
I think John Oliver’s show is going to be okay. I doubt we’re going to see him turn into Bill O”Reilly any time soon!
Are you quite sure this isn’t gentle sarcasm? It sounds that way to me, but I may be listening for it. The main point I take from that clip is that the vast majority of people in the states, and frankly elsewhere also live their whole lives without knowing any more math than the four operations.
It’s a mockery of the idea that you can reduce education to the bare minimum of ‘necessary’ information to get you through your exams, which is exactly the way most schools present it.
What he’s telling kids is that this is all you need to know to escape the US education system, and that’s kind of the joke, surely? Swearing for humorous effect at the start of the piece kind of highlights the fact that it’s not actually aimed at a minor audience, doesn’t it?
The one true purpose of school is to take an animal that evolved to run the plains of Africa, and just fucking break it like a wild horse. Discipline, that the main purpose.
@19 Caine
It does. But not the things you think it does.
Ian: Yeah, I think that was the intent. I don’t know if it came across quite as intended, though… which happens.
You’re all taking this way to seriously. It’s a simple jokey bit not on the actual show. Don’t even analyse it except from a comedy point of view. It’s like a silly pirate’s letter to warm up a crowd, not a 20 minute routine about 100% pear cider.
The real reason is to correctly spell curmudgeonly.
Or maybe argue persuasively for the ranking of these in a hierarchy: Oliver, Stuart, Maher, Colbert, Carlin …
re 21:
so, this is just a Britisher throwing out some blather as just a joke that is just being missed by everyone listening to it? umm, sounds familiar to a recent controv…(guess)
sorry to try to derail. I struggle with similar thought: that Oliver’s piece was a form of sarcasm that was so subtle, and was flying over my head no matter how hard I try to catch it.
I just fall back on. “Not funny this time. try harder next time, Sir JohnOliver you’ve given us so much better before.”, while gently leading him off the stage without yanking him.
Marc: This isn’t JUST a comedy show, though. John Oliver clearly has a point of view and clearly intends to make political points through satire. There is a reason, for example, that he spends 21 minutes on ONE topic.
I have no memories of the frogstench, though I have heard of it. Fishstench too. I’m pretty sure my science classes at GCSE level were limited to physics and chemistry, and I wisely avoided biology for A-levels… not because I think it’s beneath me, but because it’s absolutely, nightmare-inducingly horrifying. Seeing the inside of my forefinger when I sensibly tried to hack it off with a broken teacup that I somehow believed still needed washing was enough exploration into anatomy for me.
Anyway, I’m mostly going to hope that this was him dutifully reading a script, rather than this being something he genuinely believes. At least he didn’t bring out that “those who can, do” nonsense, right?
What was the political point of the save our geckos? Of #notmychristian? It’s a comedy show too. Not everything on LWT is about stadiums and quarries.
Yep, and quite a lot of people end up in debt they cannot pay back despite of earining enough money because they are unable to to some calculations that surpass the “four operations”.
Or if they’re lucky they’re just unable to figure out how much wallpaper and paint they need.
Or upscale and downscale a recipe.
Or adequately judge the risks and benefits of something because they have no clue about probability…
Or statistics for that matter
Since we have calculators now, I don’t know how much people need to master the four basic operations. The canonical examples of “balancing a checkbook” and “making change” scarcely exist anymore; they’ve been automated out of existence.
I’d much rather people mastered reading a graph, understood functions, rates, trends and proportions, and understood correlation vs. causation, understood median vs. mean (and when each is appropriate) than that they were a whiz at arithmetic. These concepts are pretty fundamental to decision making, including political decision making. And much maligned middle school and high school algebra is where they are taught.
As my father (who’s a retired math teacher) is fond to say: without maths, you’d all still be butt naked in trees eating leaves.
I read the clip the way Ian did @21. It could be my wishful thinking but I heard self-deprecation in the comments about math and biology rather than dismissal. Still, he ought to know that saying “math is useless” is a very poor joke.
First off, this is clearly not actually aimed to children, so this is not a “kids, school is just useless” message. I took it as making fun, through exageration, of the idea that some of the things taught in school are not necessarily useful, while recognising that this is in fact true to an extent. Nevertheless, there is value in learning those things during your school years even if you’ll forget the details later on, obviously.
The fact that it is an online only segment, just 4 minutes long, and pretty absurd, to me says that this is just a joke, taken to an extreme for comedic effect, as they usually do. This is certainly not one of those things John disguises as a joke because he really wants you to seriously think about it.
Stevenjohnson2 @ 12
How often is he suppose to segments about Narendra Modi? This sounds like conspiracy theory logic to me.
latveriandiplomat
head->desk
This is why education should be left to educators and not self-styled experts on the internet and tv.
Children need basic arithmetics to get a sense of numbers, amounts, scale. They need to develop their brains. This is like saying that since we have cars we don’t need to teach them how to walk anymore.
@#37, Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
Well, strictly speaking, latveriandiplomat has a point. All the math you need if you want to go out and get a job and earn enough to (theoretically) feed and house yourself is addition, subtraction, and multiplication. (Strictly speaking, you don’t even need division, although it makes some parts of the process simpler.) You can be a checkout clerk at a retail or fast-food establishment and use nothing more than those three operators to do your job and keep your personal finances in reasonable order. You don’t even need to understand them, these days, because the register (or a desk calculator) will do the actual work for you.
And as long as your ambitions are limited to being a checkout clerk, you will never even be forced to realize that there is anything more out there. Nor do you need to know much of anything — a checkout clerk can do a perfectly adequate job without knowing any science, or history, or literature, or anything — you don’t even need to be literate, in some cases.
As for John Oliver, yes, this was a very stupid segment. Oliver and his writers had damn well better hope the schools are still teaching higher math — without the engineering which goes into manufacturing to produce the TVs, cameras, and broadcast infrastructure, they’d just be a bunch of village idiots somewhere, making half-witted sarcastic comments to audiences which were occasionally as large as 5 people at a time.
The Vicar
Yes, as long as you always just spend exactly the money you earn and never either need to take out a loan or invest money in a retirement fonds or something like that.
I read all the available comments before watching the clip, because John Oliver’s segments are usually about 20 minutes. From PZ’s post, and most of the comments, I was expecting a long anti-intellectual tirade with a few jokes thrown in. Then at #25, Dreaming of.. mentioned that it was only 4 minutes — so I went back and watched it.
Lighten up, people! It’s a joke. John may have contributed to it, but it is obviously mainly the work of his writing team. Do you believe that a group of people who make their living by writing essays with obscure and not-so-obscure cultural references really think that the time they spent in school learning to write essays was wasted?
And come on, John and the team know perfectly well that high school American History class won’t discuss Harding’s peccadilloes any more than they’ll play for you the audio recording of LBJ talking to his tailor about how much extra room he needs in his pants. You’ll have to watch cable news (Rachel Maddow) for that.
Before I watched it, I was getting all riled up and ready to comment about how Oliver and company should know better, seeing as how we have an entire political party dedicated to not understanding world history.. and then I watched him make a joke about seeing colonialists as either thrilling adventurers or genocidal lunatics. And only learning enough about Asia and Africa to recognize their general shapes.
As far as I can see, the only mis-step in that piece was not including an interpretive coda; and that really was a mis-step, since in our current culture you can expect to see serious pundits and serious politicians making serious points about solving the world’s problems through proud and deliberate ignorance. Poe’s law feeds on itself and its effect grows exponentially (and I’m sure John Oliver has a pretty good idea of what that means, both culturally and mathematically).
Scientismist,
Yes, I think most if not all of us in this thread managed to grasp that. What we’re saying is that it was a shit joke.
I’m with Scientismist @#40 – it’s a joke piece; IMO you guys are taking it way too seriously. His delivery might have been off, but do you really think Oliver would support the changes in education that he talks about in this piece?
Okay. My take:
He’s making fun of how badly school is taught and how in the end you will not learn anything. History: You will not learn anything about Africa and Asia, Biology: All you’ll remember is how formaldehyde smells, Chemistry: you won’t learn anything and you’ll be disappointed ’cause you wanted to learn how to cook meth. English: you’ll simply bullshit your way through.
But his humor/analysis sort of fails in the Math area. Here it isn’t that the schools fail to teach math but that you, the student, are going to fail to learn what the schools *do* try to teach you. All you are going to learn is that math has funny sounding words and you won’t understand any of it because everybody hates math. But now it’s *you* failing math and not the schools failing you.
Or in other words, in the other subjects the joke is the schools are bullshitting you because they are incompetent. In math it the schools are bullshitting you because math *is* bullshit. Not the same at all. And also not funny.
Faulty analysis.
But I’m hypersensitive as I was a math major.
Beatrice — I thought it was a pretty good joke. A very pointed joke. And the point is sharp and dangerous.
I see why Oliver prefers the long format. Pointed jokes need some room to swing around without stabbing unintended targets.
(PS – Dreaming of.. was at 35, not 25.)
41 Beatrice
It’s pretty clear many people, including PZ, are judging this on the message instead of, or in addition to, judging it on humour.
You do realize “It’s a Joke” is not actually a magic spell that banishes all criticism if you draw the pentagram correctly and remember to circle it in the correct direction while reciting it, right?
You don’t have to master them but you have to know how to do them. If a situation comes up where 5 is added to 7 and the result is 23 you really do need to realize that something must be wrong because 5 + 7 really ought to be more than 10 and less than 15.
The same argument can be made about spelling and spell checkers but one really does need to know that incomprehensible dreck is incomprehensible. And dreck is unpleasant to read and thus ineffective in communicating.
Marc Abian,
I’m going to rephrase my comment because saying that it was a shit joke admittedly isn’t clear:
The joke is not particularly funny. It has its bits, but altogether it falls flat.
what he is saying is way too true for the majority of students In the real world here in the U S A that, if you are lucky, is what you will learn including the math part otherwise no one would have ever signed up for mortgages with payments they could never hope to keep paying or get into so much debt with credit cards. How much math understanding would it have taken to see the danger of buying all the securitized debt that was the root of the latest economic collapse.
The checkout clerk is increasingly being automated as is the stocker everything is scanned you don’t even have to make change anymore. What kind of education does it take to fill and move boxes at Amazon? It is the same in more technical fields punch in some keys and a computer will do the “hard part” might even do the entire operation.
What is missing in education is training in the ability to think and think in all subjects it is mostly learning for the test and getting the diploma.
From my perspective one of John Oliver’s main subjects is always mindless unthinking complacency. To “get along” in this time it seems that is what you need but if that is not…………….
uncle frogy
Giliell @39:
Or, put another way, as long as you’re willing to be completely at the mercy of people who understand math better than you do. One of the points of education is (or ought to be) to equip the student with enough knowledge and critical reasoning ability to avoid being taken advantage of.
Thinking more about it. This is what bugs me about the skit:
We have two basic methods of sarcasm:
1) Pointing out people are stupid and can’t understand complicated concepts. or
2) Pointing out complicated concepts are complicated and we should just ignore them cause they must be bullshit.
In a sarcastic barb you can use one or the other but you really shouldn’t use both because these two points are incompatible. All of this skit is basically point 1. BS your way through english by just memorizing who dies– you’ll get away with it cause the schools don’t care; fuck it, you’ll never learn anything about Africa or Asia cause the schools don’t care; etc. But when it comes to math he’s switching over completely to point 2: “logarithm” what a stupid sounding word, I don’t know what it is and I don’t *want* to know what it is; and you can’t make me know what it is– nyah- nyah.
As others have pointed out, you need to have an error detector. The calculator will quite happily and correctly add 17 + 23 or 172 + 3 or, my own common mistake, 17 + 32. Having a sense the correct answer will be around 40, it’s easy to realize one mistake, and for the other, the reported answer is off by enough (c.25%) to be suspicious and double-check. And notice I have to also have a sense of what might be a mistake, which again, isn’t going to come from the calculator.
And do you use a calculator to check your change? Or the bill in a restaurant? Verify the amount the ATM spat out? And numerous other mundane tasks…
A sense of what might be correct, and what is implausible or impossible, is a BIG help when reading newspaper articles. Reporters, for some reason, seem to be remarkably innumerate (there are many exceptions, but innumeracy, or at least boneheaded errors, seems to be the rule). Then there are the misleading statements of politicians, lawyers, and lobbyists, who presume the innumeracy of the audience (who are oftentimes each other!).
Calculators and the like are incredibly useful tools. But they are just that — tools — and like any other tool, can be misused, lost, broken, unavailable, inappropriate / inconvenient, and do require some knowledge / training to use.
let me add John Oliver is a bomb thrower
the reaction on a blog frequented by a lot of people in education including the Chief poster is understandable
uncle frogy
Oh. It’s a joke piece.
So those bits where he mocked gun nuts were actually pro-gun, presented satirically?
I’m never going to be able to watch John Oliver again.
woozy
I once aided in a 9th grade maths class. To make this clear, in the horribly stratified German system, this was their last year at school. They were doing percentages. I frequently came about kids doing something like 10% of 200€ = 200€ and they didn’t notice that this could not be true.
unclefroggy
Nope, what he’s saying is that you don’t need that shit anyway because he gets along fine.
+++
Also, NO, English (and respective languages) are NOT “bullshitting your way through because you know who dies at the end”. I’m a language teacher. Even though I’m a foreign language teacher which means that my main task is to teach that language, verbs and tenses and vocabulary, I also know it’s so much more.
Giliell,
Adding to your comment about English:
If Oliver had restricted himself to only that part after saying that English classes are “just” essays, I think it could have been fine mockery of how English classes in US are presumably badly taught, only expecting from students to remember some facts about novels instead of delving any deeper or teaching anything else. But he did keep that part about how English classes are just writing essays as if that by itself had no value. As you say, there’s vocabulary, there’s grammar… there’s teaching children how to organize their thoughts and share them in a meaningful way with readers/listerners.
What’s weird is Oliver is the son of two teachers and had quite a thorough educational upbringing. Obviously he has no idea about the U.S. Education system or growing up in it (which is why he can sometimes sound a little disingenuous when reading cultural jokes written by his writing staff and not his own experience). Yes it was a joke but it was clearly a misfire.
I also consider it to be a poor joke. In fact I don’t find Last Week Tonight funny anyway. I just agree the fuck out of it. But it wasn’t criticised for being a poor joke in the OP. It was criticised for advancing an anti-intellectual opinion.
But this isn’t an opinion piece, with jokes. It’s just a joke. It doesn’t have a genuine opinion to criticise. You may as well say lettuce can’t talk, or knock on doors, and why does it want to be let in to a house in the first place…
And just because this particular clip is a joke piece with no message to it, doesn’t mean he has no messages in other pieces.
It looks like irony to me. It seems as though he’s mocking the stereotypical bits of the various subjects and the stereotypical reactions to them. But I don’t think it was as well-written as usual.
Not that it matters, but Oliver probably didn’t dissect a frog at school. It wasn’t something we did in the UK back then, as a rule. My primary school class dissected bulls eyes once, but this doesn’t seem to be normal and nobody else my age believes me. I had to pick up the eyes from the butcher’s shop, which was just next door to the school. The butcher gave them to me wrapped in a single sheet of newspaper, which was all kinds of gruesome by the time I got them to school. And we dissected hearts a few years later in secondary school. No frogs, though. Nobody I know of that kind of age did frogs.
I don’t think John Oliver is being true to himself here, let alone pissing us off.
Oliver obviously takes pleasure in learning. You can see that in his epic takedown of the sports stadium scam.
It really does seem a bit odd to get too worked up about this.
You have to remember you’re also viewing this as someone who has discussed the kind of silly anti-school messages you see from libertarian youtubers… the writers of this piece may not have been thinking of that. I don’y think that anyone with a university degree who is also claiming that anything in math aside from basic arithmetic is useless is really meant to be taken seriously.
They make an episode every week, and when they’re not on the air, they put out a video that is vaguely topical. They probably thought of “back to school” as a theme, had the idea about the plot summaries for American literature, and then had to structure a piece so they’d have a context for that. I seriously doubt there’s much more to it than that.
I *really* don’t think it’s that difficult to separate what’s meant to be a joke, and what isn’t. In every piece with a serious point, Oliver has moments where he stops overtly joking, and speaks in a more sincere manner. He did not do that *at all* in this bit.
Jeebus, peoples. As Krusty the Clown says, “When you look at me like that it’s a JOKE! ” That is, Oliver’s a comedian, folks, not a scientist or pedagog (like many of you). I say we let him go, this time, and go outside and play in the fresh air until it gets dark and Ken Ham starts yelling about all our science “contaminated” kids. http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/creationist-ken-ham-science-has-contaminated-kids-into-believing-in-evolution-and-lgbt-rights/
At some level, isn’t a comedians job to make us feel uncomfortable? Sadly, I know many people who are exactly as he describes: people who feel that the things they never learned are unnecessary for anyone to learn. And if something was forgotten, learning it was simply a waste in the first place.
It seems silly to infer so much into what is a short video written simply because the show isn’t airing until September the 13th. I mean, last week he did a 3 minute bit dedicated entirely to the fact that nothing is more fun than lying confidentally about history.
There’s marked difference between his insightful satirical pieces that go into depth and his quick videos. This one seems like it’s more in line with his ‘correspondent’ character from the Daily Show – It just doesn’t work as well because he doesn’t have Stewart as his straight man.
So, yeah, it’s not as funny. But I doubt he intended it to be taken as seriously as anyone here is, and I doubt anyone is going to suddenly change their opinion about math/chemistry/biology/english based on this. No, he shouldn’t be promoting anti-intellectual ideas, but I think this is just a short clip that didn’t quite work as well as it could have. Every comedian can have a bad day because they want to make a Breaking Bad joke.
@62 J Hart
No, Oliver isn’t a comedian, he’s a *satirist*, and the function of satire is to use humor to make a political point. It’s not a mistake to analyze that point and discuss it, and it’s nowhere near as tedious as trying to stop the whole discussion with “it’s a joke, and jokes can never mean anything!” just because it makes you uncomfortable to criticize a celebrity you like.
@65 zibble – You realize he can be both? If he says ‘A man walks into a bar – ouch’ that doesn’t mean it has weighted political import because he’s a satirist. He often uses the top of his show during his weekly recap to make silly jokes and puns mixed in a bit of satire. Some of his recap items are just jokes.
This whole anti-intellectual “when am I actually going to use this?” position pisses the fuck out of me. For starters, school has no fucking way of knowing what your life is going to be like after you graduate. That’s why it’s good to get as wide an education as possible, so you have the greatest number of options. Try to imagine the number of people who got into science or mathematical fields because they did it in school and thought “hey, I like this!” Anyone think it’d really be better if potential math geniuses only get exposed to math after choosing to go to college for it?
And that’s buying into the bullshit idea that the only purpose of school is to train you to be a worker. Classes like history, biology, geography, and math are essential for a functioning, educated democracy. Math especially; you can’t just reduce math to “oh, when am I going to use the Pythagorean theorum?” Math is about training your mind to look at the world in a rational, objective way, and this has broad value, especially when it comes to politics. I can’t stress enough how frustrated it makes me that people are too lazy to understand the difference between “the average woman is 10% weaker than the average man” and “no woman could ever be as strong as a man”.
Yes, kids should be learning that stuff better, but that’s not only the school’s fault. Our kids are growing up in a society that dismisses the whole point of the school system. Of course kids don’t care enough to pay attention and educate themselves when even John Oliver is saying “what’s the point of logarithms?”
Sometimes comedy has a deeper meaning, sometimes it does not. Sometimes people are satirising, sometimes they’re showing just footage of penguins falling over with funny sound effects. This isn’t a hard concept.
I’d wager that Oliver has never tried to build a piece of furniture (and no, I don’t mean assembling something from Ikea). If he had, he would have more appreciation for geometry and trigonometry.
OTOH, I do feel that a lot of what I was taught in math classes seemed to be aimed more at preparing me for more math classes that for the world off-campus. I was taught almost nothing about statistics, which I have filled in a bit since then on my own, but I still feel that I am not well equipped to understand what polls are really saying, for example. I would have much preferred to learn statistics instead of all that time I was forced to spend trying to factor polynomials. To this day, I have no idea what practical value that has.
Marc Abian @58:
No, every joke has a point of view, that’s what makes them funny (or sometimes not). I don’t think John Oliver is anti-intellectual, but this joke was, because it only works as a joke if you accept the point of view that (1) schools fail to teach things that are useful (the bit about history and geography), and (2) what schools do teach isn’t useful (the bit about math and biology). If you’re not working from that common understanding, then there’s no real joke content left other than “Hey check out this funny thing about this president’s penis, and also, remember how much formalin stinks? Yeah, this guy remembers.”
The problem is, there’s something to (1), in that the American education system can be justly criticized for failing to teach important information, particularly about the rest of the world. But (2) is a commonly-held trope that lots of people buy into, that interferes with teachers’ ability to effectively communicate material to some students, provides ammunition to people who want to cut education funding, and encourages people to regard education as effete and ineffectual. John Oliver’s bit mixes these two, implicitly linking them as ideas.
At the end of the day, this bit isn’t a huge deal. But it’s totally fair game to criticize the anti-intellectual worldview it tacitly represents, and to criticize John Oliver (and his writers) for relying on it as a hacky source of humor in their otherwise thoughtful, intelligent show.
Well, I apologize, because my poorly written first sentence so alarmed people that they couldn’t be bothered to read my whole post. So let’s try this, here’s the 2nd part first:
I think if you interpret “whiz at arithmetic” as I intended (see below), this should be an unobjectionable statement. These are appropriate secondary school skills, and I’m arguing that they have broad applicability, that they are not just useful for students who are not going into STEM, and even useful for non-college bound students. And they are beyond the four basic operations, so there I am earnestly disagreeing with John Oliver in a specific and substantial way.
Now the second part
What I was not saying here:
– Students don’t need to know how to perform the basic operations.
– Students don’t need to develop number sense.
– You shouldn’t need arithmetic skills to graduate high school, or in life.
What I meant by “mastery” was the kind of flawless execution you need to do pen and paper bookkeeping skills efficiently. Arithmetic skills to that level are not a measure of number sense, or brain power, or good preparation for higher math. They are purely the product of dreary practice on rote procedures, over and over again.
And no, I am not strawmanning here, there are math education “reformers” who insist that students must demonstrate this level of competence before moving on to higher math. Do a little reading on “The Math Wars” to see this type of thinking in action.
Arithmetic skills to that level used to be valuable; they are absolutely not anymore. I stand by that.
If you need to understand what loan terms are best, understanding the compound interest formula is crucial. Refusing to use a calculator and working out the computation on paper is not just a waste of time; it’s error prone enough to be a bad idea.
Finding an error in a lengthy computation in a professional context requires number sense, yes, but it’s not going to be found by doing long division on paper. It’s going to found by thinking through the steps, looking for unexpected intermediate results (it’s OK to use a calculator for this part; everyone does) or even double checking for data entry errors. Even if you could, given a few weeks or months, work through the problem yourself, flawlessly, with your awesome arithmetic skills, that would not be the right approach to getting a trustworthy result.
When I grade math exams, I take as little off as possible for simple mistakes like “forgot to carry a one”. I’m much more interested in “is the problem set up correctly” and “were the rules of algebra followed” in solving the equation. Do you really think that is Is the wrong emphasis for a high school level exam? Do you really think “Drill, baby, drill” is the only way to really understand mathematical concepts?
Any way, sorry for the confusion. I hope this is a little more palatable and more importantly, thought-provoking.
The points made by the jokes in the segment:
1. Americans are not taught enough about Asia and Africa.
2. Math beyond basic functions learned by 4th grade is not needed.
3. There is no real point made regarding Chemistry or Biology aside from being dismissive.
4. English is mostly learning about stories in certain books.
5. The Death of the American Dream.
Meta-point: School is pointless.
1 is good, 2 might technically be true but it ignores the sciences (see also: 3), and limiting what one learns from English to simply the plots of the stories read is pretty reductive, even for the sake of comedy.
Yes, it is comedy. Satire even. But it is anti-intellectual. You can’t argue that it was intentionally pointless: it was silly, it was comedic, it was not as focused or driven as a usual segment on the show, but it was clearly meant to be in the same vein as other Serious Satire on his show. He aimed to have a sarcastic little piece on Back To School, mocking school. And he did so. And he did so in a sloppy manner that shows disdain for everything outside of history class and maybe a little begrudging respect for English (hence the effort in providing literature spoilers). Perhaps it is a tad overdramatic to view it as a tipping point, to take this rushed four minute piece on one broad subject and think significantly less of Oliver for it. But the anti-intellectualism is there, and “just a joke”, as always, is a bullshit excuse.
I think some are mistaking the subject of “going back to school” with “education” and reacting with education is good and important when clearly the trend in education policy is passing some test or other, testing to make sure we weed out the bad (union?) teachers and reducing funding all kind of anti intellectual seems to me
uncle frogy
@72
I agree, but think it’s VERY overdramatic to see it as a tipping point. Last Week Tonight does not attract massive number because it’s on a premium cable channel with no commercials. Little online sketches like these remind people when the show is coming back on the air.
Yeah, I agree, it was hit and miss not because he was mixing satire with jokes but because his jokes seemed to be in the same vein as his correspondent ‘character’ on the Daily Show, only he lacked a straight man to complete the double act. It didn’t work, but I really think we can give him a pass for a couple jokes that might have worked in a different context (It IS true that the smell of dissected animals sticks with you, that’s amusing, and the idea of a Cliff’s Notes for ‘Who Dies’ is pretty funny)
We’re talking about a man whose parents were both teachers. So while we can say this was mildly disappointing, let’s not condemn him (or his writers) who have delivered 50 episodes of great content because of a four minute promotional online video that missed the mark.
I think that the lesson to be learned from all this is that sometimes culture gets in the way of humour.
This sketch was very English. I can only assume from the comments on this page that it doesn’t translate very well. I think he’s doing the classic self-effacing English thing here, playing around as someone who writes off education and playing the clown as a joke on himself. He doesn’t really think that kids shouldn’t study maths, it’s just funny to act like he does. It’s farcical in a knowing kind of way, trying to bring the audience along as part of the farce.
The clue is in the wink that lies behind the critical analysis of literature at the end (which I, as a lit. grad actually found pretty hysterical).
My God some of the fusty ‘how can he possibly say this about the shining beacon of truth that is education, dagnabit?!’ comments on this here webpage are nearly as funny as Oliver is…
Has anyone actually his video from last week? He could be trolling us:
I thought it was a pretty scathing send-up of how US school curricula are.
We don’t teach anything about Africa or Asia.
We teach them all of the old hoary standards of literature – my kid has already read The Great Gatsby for AP English this year, and my other kid read Of Mice and Men last year.
We don’t tell them what math is good for, beyond a vague “it’s good for you to expand how you think”.
We don’t connect frog dissection to anything other than “this is what the inside of an animal looks like”.
It’s gotten so bad that my kids themselves complain about how they’re being taught to the Common Core and state tests, and don’t get to do anything beyond those narrow parameters.
I don’t think it was quite satire, though – it was almost a throw hands up “I give up, it does all suck here, so why bother?” kind of thing.
I thought it was funny. Because, yep, that’s basically what I remember from high school.
Anything I learned about Asia or Africa was done on home study or in college. The same for anything truly interesting for American or European history. We weren’t exactly learning from Howard Zinn in high school.
I remember slightly more from math than addition subtraction multiplication and division. Since I took algebra, geometry, and calculus, I remember: Order of operation, how to find the length of the hypotenuse, and how to find a derivative of an equation. I also remember that I hate math with a passion, proofs are torture devices invented by an evil dark god, and I will never produce a graph as nice as the one the graphing calculator comes up with. Some people will end up being engineers and statisticians and need to memorize these formulas. Some of us could have stood to have had less calculus and more “this is how you figure out how to pick a retirement plan”.
Science? I surely do remember how frogs smell. You know what I don’t remember? The Krebs cycle. And the only thing I remember from chemistry is balancing equations was created by the same dark god that invented proofs.
Atwood and Butler were too feminist and too science fiction to learn in high school. Let’s read about what some dead white guys had to say. It is so much better and mind-expanding when literally the only female character in the entire story doesn’t get a name- that definitely has universal qualities.
I was not a slacker student- I studied, I took the test, I graduated with honors. I also did not stay someone who worked in retail and fast food, but way to be extremely classest people. The fact of the matter is, most of us don’t need to know that much math, science, and history and those who specialize in those fields learn everything we were taught in high school is basically wrong anyway.
Alan Alansan:
Are you joking yourself, because this is inconsistent with John Oliver’s usual comedic style and there is very little indication that it is supposed to all be simply a joke at his own expense. At least not exclusively.
And this rather unique reading of the comment thread is a nice and succinct reason take your comedic interpretations seriously. (Perhaps that is the joke. It is also not funny. Try harder.)
Is this a bad segment? Yes, I think so. It doesn’t work, it comes across as antiintellectual and only a few parts are actually funny. It’s a rare misstep for Olivier.
But the comments here are just silly. Comments from people who have obviously not watched the video jumping on board. People saying things like it’s the beginning of the end and how he’s out of ideas. The whole “no more heroes” meme, which you’d think would stop being brought up after awhile because it really only applies when someone you thought perfect screws up. Eventually shouldn’t we know that nobody is perfect?
And the people defending the but are just as bad. It’s a bad bit. It’s not his first piece to fall flat and it won’t be his last. I’m happy to see it called out, that’s the only way a show gets better. But leaping to the conclusion that the show is out of ideas is silly. We will see when the show is actually back from hiatus. As many of the more reasonable comments here have noted, its uncharastic and probably just a misstep.
I really love people getting upset about people criticising a segment, telling folks they are silly for caring.
If it’s silly to criticise a TV host for making a really unthinking anti-school video that echoes right-wing talking points (ask any teacher about how often they have to deal with that bullshit and how it makes their lives harder), how much more silly is it to go to the internet and chastize nobodies making comments on a blog?
Have you considered that youm ay be the ones overreactingbe cause people are criticising your hero?
Admittedly I’m not USAian, so I dare say a lot of it isn’t going to ring true for me, but it sounded to me an awful lot like “You won’t need to learn anything, because you are not going to amount to anything because “Death of the American Dream”.
So someone is having a bleak hiatus.
@Giliell, 39
Don’t forget needing (I may be misusing this word here…) to check whether the 1.75 litre bottles or packs of 6 330ml cans of soda are cheaper!
But really, you don’t have to go so far as loans and investments to see the value of a decent mental grasp of the mathematical basics – just go grocery shopping and try to decide which of the multiple sizes of a single product gives you the most [thing] for your [currency unit]. And ok, you probably don’t need the kind of mastery of those basics that latveriandiplomat’s talking about for that, but you definitely need a robust grasp of them.
It just occurred to me that this probably says a lot about me. Awks.
Here in the UK, alcohol always has “£X per litre” in small print on that little label attached to the shelf at supermarkets.
Why they can’t do this for all foodstuffs is beyond me.
[OT]
Thumper,
That’s a practice here in most (bigger) shops for all products. Even for things like toilet paper you have price per roll.
I think it might even be written in some regulation, but I’m sure that I’ve seen stores that don’t have prices that detailed so I’d have to check before making any claims.
My landlord used to say that history is the most useless subject of all, because people don’t learn from history anyway.
added to my #86
All foodstuffs and househols products like toiletries and cleaning stuff, not all things sold.
Obviously, each person is going to have a different perspective, but i honestly think this was just another example of John mocking a phenomenon by impersonating it. Something he has done plenty of times. He is laughing at the adult that actually thinks that the most memorable thing from biology class was preservative fluid or doesn’t know a fucking thing about Africa, by pretending to be that adult. It’s not really supporting or defending it, it’s using it for comedy. And i think the fact that there is a grain of truth in it just makes it funnier, as does the fact that it’s pretty tragic how a lot of people are actually like that.
It’s not his best, for sure, but it’s another example on a long list of very similar pretend skits. When he is pretending to be a 15 year old suburban girl dispatching cruelty, we don’t actually think he really does think the opinions he is impersonating are his own…
J Hart
You do realise that Krusty said this after he said something offensive which was definitely not a joke, right? So that your analogy is the exact opposite of the point you are trying to make?
Sorry guys, but this is just irony. That and trading on the observed misapprehensions of the American public and a heavyweight jab at the real anti-intellectualism within your society. You seem to have missed the point that he is a brit and observing with an outsiders cynical eye. On this side of the pond, these would be seen as run of the mill, lets take a poke at teachers, the public, memories of school days and anything else that has a funny side, jokes / gags / wit. Laugh, it makes the angst, the pain and anxiety lift a bit.
Mr Oliver,
you DO know what a logarithm is. You use it every time you say “that’s 1 with [that many] zeroes after it”.
(Surely he must have said it at least once, all journalists do).
[OT]
Rhetorical question:
Why do some people from “over the pond” so often assume they are the only non-US person commenting here?
Beatrice:
British exceptionalism. ;)
http://on.cc.com/1PwKq6P
I thought this John Oliver segment was merely over the top satire that exemplified the problems with education. I remember asking my 7th grade Geography teacher “when will I ever use this stuff?” and his response was anger and to do what I was told. Or when I was in med school, I had to memorize glycolysis, Kreb’s Cycle and the electron transport chain only to regurgitate that knowledge for the final exam. As a practicing physician, I have yet to discuss the finer points of Acetyl COA synthesis with any of my patients. So why learn it? On Youtube I saw a teacher take great pains to insure that her med students thoroughly understood and enjoyed learning about biochemical pathways eg. she put glycolysis to song via substituting the lyrics of Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me”. I have no doubt that all those future clinicians won’t recite glycolysis to patients but will never forget it. And they will always be thankful that they learnt it.
PZ, I think John was taking a justifiable poke at modern education. What is the purpose of learning knowledge if the goal is to forget it later? Why should the kid who will eventually become a professor of Medieval Literature learn the vector forces acting on a block situated on an incline plane? Or why should the professor of Particle Physics at CERN have to have learned the proper theme of Macbeth in the 11th grade as forcibly dictated by his English teacher? Indeed everyone should learn all these things for all knowledge is truly important. But it takes a thoughtful and caring teacher (like Robin Williams aka Mr. Keating of the Dead Poet’s Society) to give you the answer at to why learn any of it. The purpose of learning knowledge is to “learn knowledge for it’s own sake” even if you will never use it. Whether it’s dissecting frogs in 9th grade Biology, learning trig or understanding past participles, it’s all good. And very few teachers have the skill of bringing out the joy of learning and the joy of thinking/problem solving among kids. That’s what I came away with from John Oliver’s segment.
Now I’ve go it.
When they’re 5 years old, we should figure out which information exactly a child is going to need in their life and only teach them that, nothing else*.
No more of this developing the mind, waking their interest, giving them some general knowledge bullshit. After all, when do you need to know about African countries and their capitols? If you’re invited to “Who wants to be a millionaire” you can look that up beforehand.
*1. I’m wondering, how do I know which word they will need and a how to shelter the rest of the students who won’t need that particular word from the terrible knowledge of a term they cannot immediately turn into money in their bright capitalist future.
Giliell @ 97:
:Snort: Oh, why teach anything, just go with Learning Bad! As for a good grounding in math, if you don’t have one, don’t ever try to make a quilt. Or much of anything else.
Giliell,
Oh, that si just silly. Of course you can’t tell in advance what children will need. That’s why you form them into what you want them to be from the beginning.
Future mathematicians room 1, hair dressers room 2, cooks room 3…. so no one learns anything useless and they all have nice bright futures in front of them. Someone unahppy with what was chosen for them? Hah. Collateral damage. Isn’t it worth it so that people wouldn’t have to learn too much?
Joking aside, I don’t think I have ever heard anyone outside of some Scandinavian countries who wasn’t uhnappy with parts or most of their country’s school system. We could all do better. ANd I agree that sometimes curriculum just tries to push millions of facts on children, with little context or explanation. But being against variable , well-rounded education because “a physicist doesn’t need to be well informed on literature”? That horrifies me. It’s anti-intellectualism at it’s worst.
A rant about education and I write it’s instead of its… that’s so embarrassing.
And so was the G.O.A.T devised…
@31 Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
Which of these examples are really examples of the four operations being insufficient rather than people being too lazy to bother trying the four operations? The four operations get you really really far if you actually bother using them. However thinking is hard work, so people avoid doing it most of the time.
@83 Athywren – Frustration Familiarity Panda
I hope this was satire.
@6 Beatrice
Thanks for the confirmation. I got to watch it myself now.
Gotta agree. It starts out like it’s criticizing bad school education (with the example of biased history lessons), but then it goes in a really weird direction.
If this was supposed to be self-depreciating humour, then he struck completely the wrong tone. He didn’t make it sound like he was silly for not learning any of this stuff, but that the topics themselves were stupid and useless.
Boo, John, boo.
@erik333, 102
A less than serious example, but no. See, shops tend to set prices in ways that make it difficult to tell which of a selection of the same product at different sizes is actually the best value just by looking. As Thumper mentioned at 85, many products include a price per litre or 100g or whatever on their tag, but that’s worked out using the retail price, which doesn’t account for offer prices, and things are often on offer. So, while it may be quite clear from looking at the shelf that, on a regular day and at the regular prices that are almost never relevant, one product is clearly better value, that can be completely reversed. Obviously, in the case of choosing between cans or bottles of soda, that’s only going to be a matter of pennies, but some things cost more than soda, and spending more per unit on them can end up making a very large difference over time if you’re not actually able to check the numbers properly, which can be especially hard if you don’t have a particularly good grasp of multiplication and division when comparing fiddly quantities.
…In case you’re just hoping it was satire because of how petty it is to worry about small variations in prices, consider that some of us have had to live on student loans for several years in a row, while in the middle of a recession that made part time work particularly scarce, and old habits die hard. (Besides, why waste money on inflated prices for food and toiletries when I could be wasting that money much more pleasurably on games or films?)
erik333
Depends on where you draw the line. And generally most people don’t count figuring out percentages and interest rates to be applied division and multiplication just like trigonometry is usually not counted a just addition, substraction etc.
There’s actually a reason why the EU mandated that stores need to give you a baseline price per 100g/ml/units (including offers and special packs), because it was a favourite trick of manufacturers and retailers to give you an offer that looked good but was actually more expensive than the regular pack
+++
The reason why Oliver’s segment fails is because he chose to mix reasonable complaints with bullshit complaints. He could have done it the way he did his sex ed segment. He could have started with the history lesson and made similar complaints about other subjects, like maths often fails to teach what it is good for and how you apply it, and how English is too much dead white dudes and often fails to include material that’s relevant to the students. But he didn’t and went on bullshitting
Giliell @ 105:
I wish that was the case in the States, it would make it much easier to figure out how much you’re actually spending. I hate to hear the howling that would go up here if such a mandate was proposed.
Giliell,
re: prices
Ah, so that is regulated, as I suspected. Thank you for the confirmation.
@104 Athywren – Frustration Familiarity Panda
It seemed to me you were implying the problem wasn’t solvable using the four operations mentioned.
@105 Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
Sure, but that reason wasn’t that the four operations weren’t sufficient for the task but that most people aren’t good at doing it without tools.
@105 Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk-
I agree trigonometry is handy – some of it might be useful while being nontrivial to derive on your own. At the very least you need to know what type of problems are easily solvable and how/where to look for the answers.
erik333,
To be fair, I don’t think that was the reason either. It’s not user friendly to make it more difficult for people to compare prices and it’s a way for stores to basically scam people with “discounts” that aren’t there.
So the reason was consumer protection, where whether people can to basic math is irrelevant.
That was a joke … right? Right? After all, it cannot possibly be the case that telling an offensively misogynist joke is merely a “pratfall” that does not mean you are a terrible scientist, whereas telling a childish series of jokes to children means that you are an unwatchable satirist/commentator. I mean, that would be absurd, wouldn’t it?
Lighten up, everyone!
We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.
Sorry, I was watching The Wall earlier today and I got that song stuck in my head.
The “price per 100g” type information is mandatory in Australia now too. It used to drive me nuts trying to compare two pack sizes that were not simple multiples like they used to be, such as 0.5 litre and 1 litre. Now its more likely to be 475ml and 1.25 litre, just to confound those who didn’t carry calculators. The number of ripoffs in packaging are now plain to see, albeit in small print on the shelf labels.
Giliell @ 105:
But he wasn’t complaining about what is taught. He was sardonically pointing out that, yes, summer’s over, and school’s beginning, and that sucks and is tedious (at least that’s what everyone always says), and we all have to do it for what seems like the millionth time. That’s nothing really to do with how math and physics need to be taught better, or how English is made tedious by hundred year old classics.
Of course, sure, it’s a trite segment that’s been done before (I can’t count how many times I’ve heard, “I’m never going to need this”). But… it’s like that saying about analyzing jokes: “Analyzing jokes is like dissecting a frog: no one cares, and the frog dies”.
Oliver’s quip, that he’s a well-paid adult who doesn’t need to know about logarithms, is a testament to another sad fact: almost every person whose job is essential to getting John Oliver on air is more mathematically savant than he is, and yet is paid less than John Oliver. And that is true of all prestigious professions in the media and show business.
Even if he’s merely jesting, he doesn’t seem to be bothered by the fact, or even noticing it. No, he boasts that he’s made it to a well-paid job, on the shoulders of all those who actually paid attention in school.
Why does a technological society like ours have such an outrageously skewed assessment of talents?
Eh, I understand the viewpoint that it’s anti-intellectual. Having read the criticism, I think it’s fair to call it a misstep. Albeit one I still found amusing (things that merit criticism can still be amusing).
I can’t fully understand how this 4 minute piece, from someone that produces *a lot* of thoughtful and interesting content would upset someone to the point of declaring they’ll never watch John Oliver again. But people are free to choose what they watch and what they criticize and to express their feelings.
As for me, I can’t wait to watch John Oliver’s next show.
He’s not ACTUALLY making fun of the subjects, he knows they are important (he’s gone on about America’s low test scores IN math before), it’s more of an ironic “I’m hip with the kids and I’ll say a bunch of stuff that will make teachers hate me” thing. The joke is, kids already think math will be “useless” and he’s sharing the secret truth “oh it is”.
Is it? No, not really, but in a manner of speaking, Oliver’s right for the vast majority of people. Yes, science and technology, but that’s not most people. I know you’re a Proffy, but most people work at a cash register or a phone or a conveyor belt or a mop bucket. That’s basically life for the vast majority of people, and for that vast majority, Oliver is completely right, they will NEVER need a logarithm. Ever. They will die in their bed never having understood higher level math, and think their lives were not lacking for it.
I… I don’t really know what a logarithm is myself…
latveriandiplomat