Teach them to read, do chores, be responsible, and cooperate with one another. Buy them books. You can't do a worse job than your local school district. It isn't possible. You are literate, for one.
Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons is a great book and will leave your kids at an independent reading level.
Back in the 1960-80s there was a couple who advocated for what they called 'unschooling', which was rooted in kids learning to be productive members of their home and community. Basic learning was important, but the structured 'school' environment was de-emphasized and productivity and practical learning was the focus.
This idea you have was one thing they thought was important. Tell your kids how much it costs to run your household. Show them the bills! Explain why you wanted the lights out when no one was in a room based on your electricity bills and tell them about kilowatt hours. Talk about what else could be done with money saved if you didn't waste it leaving lights on, water running, the door open, etc. Then go over the bills the next month and talk about the differences based on weather, family needs, changes you made from last month. "Yes, the water bill is higher, Timmy, but why do you think that is? Well done....we have a garden this month and have to water it regularly. When we get food from it, that will cut down on the grocery bill. Let's look at that bill now and remember in two months how much we spent." They also promoted the idea of kids having a checkbook and helping pay the bills with an allowance and a budget.
Your ideas are very sound. Make sure you teach about interest, debt, unintended consequences, opportunity costs, and trade-offs. And I would use cash. Kids like concrete things and the jingle of coins in their little pockets and purses. Money on a card is theoretical. Cash is real. A kid understands four quarters getting whittled down to two but will not appreciate, in the same visceral way, $1 going to .50 on a card.
This is the way I was raised, I was surprised when I got to adulthood and learned that it's not the default in the US. I got my first bank account when I was five, and some kind of allowance, and from that point on my parents were only buying me non-necessities at Christmas and my birthday.
I remember when I was seven demanding that I get pocket money (which was something I had read about in children's books) for the jobs I was doing around the house, so my mother gave me a shilling a week.
Then we went decimal currency, and that was now 5p in new money. When I was twelve, there was a Batman/Superman annual in the local shop I wanted to buy. It cost 40p. It took me eight weeks of saving up every penny I had to buy it. I still remember counting the individual pennies every week to see how close to my goal I was! 😁
Is this not how it is done? Getting pocket money from your parents for doing jobs around the house, if you're not doing small jobs outside like maybe a paper round or cutting the grass for the neighbours and such?
Do American parents just give money to their kids? Granted, I'm a long time since childhood and don't know what modern Irish practice is, but just "here's as much money as you want" doesn't seem like something that goes on even now.
Family and friends do give money for birthdays and special occasions, and that's supposed to go into some kind of savings so you're teaching them the value of money and budgeting:
That raises the question of whether we really need a common culture at all, and if yes, does it matter what the culture is - is Hamlet better than Spider-Man?
That great American novel, “Up the Down Staircase” (Bel Kaufman, 1964) offers possible answers:
(A teacher asks:)
“Why do we study ‘The Myths’ and ‘The Odyssey?’”
(Student response 1:) Because everybody in high school at one time or another read it and now we have to read it because it’s our turn.
(Student response 2:) Because we want to talk like cultured people. At a party how would you like it if someone mentioned a Greek God and you didn’t know him. You would be embarrased (sic).
(Student response 3:) The Trojan horse was used as a spy of today. Gods were used as dictators and Penelpe (sic) still walks the streets of modern society.
"That raises the question of whether we really need a common culture at all, and if yes, does it matter what the culture is - is Hamlet better than Spider-Man?"
It depends what lessons are taken away from Spiderman. "With great power comes great responsibility" is a good one, but maybe the lesson learned is not the one you want learned.
SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE
There's a great backstory for the villain in the recent Hanuman movie, where the guy wants to be a superhero since childhood. How he sets about that, however... later on, as adults, he reveals to his friend and helper that since Batman's parents were dead, his parents should be dead too, so he sets that up by killing them in a fire as a child:
I think we don't want aspiring superheroes to learn the lesson that "Many of these supers are orphans, so I need to be an orphan, and if my parents are still alive, I need to remedy that" 😁
"Culture is also transmitted by TV, social media, etc."
And a bloody awful job it often does of it, too. If you're expecting your upcoming generations to acquire by osmosis basic facts about history, science, the world, and so forth from popular culture, then you'll be vastly disappointed. They'll learn the popular myths of the day around what is the Right Side Of History, Correct View To Have. That may not be the same as what really happened/is in existence.
I've complained about historical ignorance on here often enough, so I won't flog the dead horse all over again this time. But it does very strongly depend on what we mean by culture, and what kind of culture we want to transmit. A society that learns all its "facts" from social media is a society that can be easily controlled by whoever shapes that media. "1984" is about that, as well as other things.
Not to mention all the value-neutral "facts" that TV and movies get very wrong, that would harm you or others around you if you ever tried to depend on them in real-life situations. For example:
- you do *not* need to wait until someone has been missing for 24 hours to file a missing persons report if you have good reason to believe that something is wrong, and waiting that long can significantly decrease the chance of them being found intact and unharmed
- breaking a beer bottle over someone's head does not harmlessly knock them out; in fact there's a decent chance that if you do so, you'll end up arrested and charged with murder, because glass is harder than skull
- dragging someone out of a crashed car to save them from the inevitable explosion risks compounding existing injuries for no reason. Unless the car is actually on fire, the chance of it exploding is approximately 0%, and injured passengers are best left inside until trained EMTs can get them free safely
- wild animals of any kind are *not* cuddly and affectionate. Hollywood's representation of bears and deer are among the worst offenders: both are quite capable of, and willing to, kill people who they see as provoking them.
- police officers have no legal obligation whatsoever to respond truthfully to "are you a cop?"
- falling from a high distance and landing in water, even deep water, is only *slightly* less rough on your body than landing on concrete, and is significantly harder for rescuers to drag your broken body out of
- releasing wild animals raised in captivity into the wild is a good way to get them killed, and carries a surprising level of risk for the people doing the release as well
The standard pushback to #1 is that people didn't have an urgent need to read before, that education emerged around the same time as literacy but hasn't necessarily caused all of it because these days people would be motivated to learn to read anyway
The standard counter-pushback to this pushback is that the "urgent need to read" didn't spring up fully formed. The amount of stuff to read and the literacy rate increased one another in a virtuous cycle, and that cycle could easily start spinning the other way if pivot-to-video gets its way.
> for most of history the population was illiterate.
This is not nearly as true as pop history would have you believe. Reading and writing are so incredibly useful that people throughout the world have invented and reinvented it over and over. The common myth that medieval people specifically were a bunch of illiterate peasants is more a matter of shifting definitions than of objective fact. They would very regularly read and write in the common tongue, (English for the English peasants, French for French peasants, and so on,) but were largely ignorant of *literature,* which was in Latin and was therefore inaccessible to many of them. Thus they were not "literate" but still could, and did, read and write.
> Universal education has changed all that.
The biggest factor in changing all of that was the Reformation. Teaching people that the Bible was not the sole province of priests and bishops, but that everyone should read and understand it for themselves, meant that everyone needed to understand reading at a deeper level than was common among the peasantry. Community schooling arose largely out of that; government-imposed "universal education" came centuries later, *after* reaching the point that universal literacy could largely be taken for granted.
In 1875-76, 16 percent of men in England and Wales, and 22 percent of women, could not write their name on the marriage register. In Ireland the figures were worse, over 30 percent of men and 36 percent of women. In Scotland in 1872-3, things were a bit better, only about 10 percent of men and 20 percent of women could not write their names.
Given that that was the last generation before compulsory education, it does mean that universal literacy could not be taken for granted when the government imposed universal education.
The figures for the 1840s were much worse. Nearly half of all women, and one third of all men could not write their names on the marriage register in England and Wales in the 1841-1845 period. As the source I linked above notes, there was a great increase in the number of children sent to school during this period.
Dickens' All the Year Round had sales of about 300 000 when something really good was being published in it. The Daily Telegraph had sales of around 250 000 when Sala was particularly entertaining. These were things that "everybody" read in Victorian England. Since people tended to share printed matter, I would expect there were maybe two million people who read for entertainment - So less than 10 percent of the population.
If I'm being pedantic, I haven't read a book in so long that I would need to take a seriously long time to think over when the last time was. Shifting to audiobooks has been wonderful, but even that has largely been for entertainment and not for an educational or professional purposes. These days, I would rather hunt for the references to the specific knowledge that I need and move on to using it.
I also read and write text daily as part of my job in healthcare, where we make or amend legal documents hundreds of times each day. I also write as a hobby (at several Substacks, as the subjects are all very different from each other).
This is all to say that how often we might read a book (rather than using one for reference) is not an ironclad metric to check literacy with, speaking generally.
- AFAIK, the people arguing against school are all still in favor of children learning to read and write.
- Basic literacy is self-sustaining at this point. If every school disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn't have much effect on the literacy rate. Texting, internet usage, signs, etc. are part of our culture. Every parent knows how to read and write.
The parents are two people who can teach you to read. They aren't the only people. There are also your grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends. You just need one person in your life who doesn't want you to be severely handicapped. This isn't run-of-the-mill bad parenting in our culture. It's a severe case. Could you even use a smartphone without basic literacy?
For illiterate parents to be unable to teach their children to read, you need two illiterate people to marry, in a country where over 99% of youths are literate (by the basic definition of literacy).
>Could you even use a smartphone without basic literacy?
My Indian coworker told me that his grandma is illiterate but still knows how to use the smartphone to set up a video call with her grandkids. All she needed was someone to tell her what icons to tap.
There's also various text-to-speech programs used by blind people, which could also be used by illiterates.
And the high amount of writing in our society is a function of high literacy rates. If we stopped teaching reading and writing literacy might not disappear overnight, but it could very easily just slip and keep slipping while more and more pictures get used to compensate. A smartphone in that society might have all-icon modes and default to audio options.
Which is rather annoying when you try to talk about how the Republic became the Empire and draw analogues to our current situation and the other guy says "Wait. Rome was a Republic?"
If the conclusion of the article is "formal education doesn't seem to matter all that much", then the assumption "university students have higher average performance than gen pop" is not justified (and arguably, is contradicts the conclusion). You need independent evidence that this is true to use that claim as evidence that "formal education doesn't seem to matter all that much".
I'm pretty sure the imputed causation here isn't "college makes these people know more things", but rather "college students are disproportionately selected from people who did well in pre-college school and who retain more from it."
No, because more intelligent people are more likely to do higher education (even if this difference between students and non-students has drastically reduced lately). These more intelligent people also tend to either remember more or be more interested in trivia and tend to answer better on these types of questions because they often put themselves in situations where the information is available.
This study suggests the average IQ of college students is pretty average and attributes it to the increasing the prevelance of "higher" education driving the average down. The data the evidences that college students are smarter than average is 70+ years old. https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293/PR2199.000694.v1
The sample population was mostly students taking introductory psychology courses at Kent State University. There should be some way to compare 2012 KSU psych students to the average, somehow?
I don't want to sound like an intellectual snob, but... are the nation's best and brightest really going to the univerity that auto-completes with "massacre"?
Probably not, but more than half of american adults have no college degrees at all, and only small minority goes to the top schools. So there's a good chance that KSU students are at least above average?
FWIW, as an undergrad, before I selected my major, I took several psychology classes. And I happened to know all the facts questioned. (Including that Paul Revere got caught by the British before he got outside of Boston, and the message was carried by William Dawes, a physician making his rounds. I don't know whether he carried it on purpose, or just liked to gossip.
No, Revere got to Lexington, and he was on his way to Concord when he, Dawes and third fellow, Samuel Prescott, were intercepted by the British. Revere was captured, Dawes was thrown from his horse (but he doesn't seem to have been captured), but Prescott escaped to reach Concord. Revere's warning gave Capt. John Parker, the leader of the Lexington militia (who happens to be my ancestor), time to rally the local militia on Lexington Green. The British hadn't made their expected appearance by 3am, and at some point during the wee hours of the morning, Parker and his men retreated to the local tavern to "refresh" themselves. In later deposition Parker admitted that he had begun to think it was all a false alarm, when a fellow from an outlying farm came riding into town to tell them the British were approaching. Parker reassembled his men on the Lexington Green. Since Revere, Dawes, and Prescott had left for Concord hours earlier, Parker assumed that Concord had been warned in time to hide their powder and cannon — so he ordered his men to let the British pass. But things got out of hand as they often do when people are armed and tense, and shots were fired. The rest is history, as they say.
I don't know any of this. What I know is that Paul Revere saw either one or two lights hanging in a tower somewhere, and thus he knew the British were coming either by land or sea, and then he rode around to all the towns saying "The British are coming!"
This is, of course, because I never studied any American history in school (my school would have mentioned the American Revolution only in the context of why the British were looking for a new place to send convicts in the 1780s) so I've picked it up entirely through cultural osmosis.
If we looked at the gaps between *my* knowledge of US history, and the knowledge of another reasonably smart person who actually did high school level history in the US, we might have a better idea of the value of formal education over cultural osmosis.
Maybe not authoritative, and somewhat dated (need to exclude the writing score), but good enough for me. Psych is indeed below average, at 992, but not THAT far below average. Which rings true. In my experience, it's not a notorious dumb kid major, but certainly doesn't have a reputation as a smart kid major either.
KSU mean SAT of 1140 puts them in the 67th percentile of SAT takers and approximately the 83rd percentile of the overall population if we assume almost everyone who didn’t take the SAT would have scored worse than that.
just as an interesting tidbit, i recently learned that the portrayal in the popular imagination of what happened at kent state was pretty distorted even from the most damning possible interpretation of the actual events
what actually happened involved a lot less "girl putting flower into gun barrel and then being shot" and a lot more "large protest throwing rocks at national guard who begin to retreat, then panic and start to route, then get cornered and panic even more, then fire warning shots over the rock-throwing-protesters heads in order to scare them off, which causes innocent uninvolved students hundreds of feet away to get hit and die"
considering how different this is from, say, the watchmen portrayal, I felt pretty betrayed when I learned what had actually happened. any civilian in the same position, taking exactly the same actions, wouldn't even be blamed. Obviously the national guard should be held to a much higher standard, and indeed they behaved both cowardly and atrociously, but I really do wish the narrative everyone ended up believing better resembled the truth
Helen Andrews has made this part of her beat. Perhaps out of frustration over the uses to which the revisions, or re-imaginings, are being made - to foment violence and disorder:
I would have thought it clear that what "Watchmen" portrayed was, well, a cartoon. (One of the protesters had in fact put a flower in the barrel of the gun - the day before.) "Warning shots" is a funny description, however; this was live ammunition, shot haphazardly, partly into the crowd - two of the students killed were protesters and two were not. They were all about 100m from the National Guard - not point-blank range, as shown in "Watchmen", but also not lost bullets from warning shots. These were large-caliber bullets that ripped large holes through the victims. I rather doubt that "any civilian in the same position, taking exactly the same actions, wouldn't even be blamed", unless you mean "by people in certain parts of Texas", perhaps.
I guess you have a fair point, I basically think 'they pulled a rittenhouse except they missed and shot innocents instead of the actual threatening rioters" is accurate and it's not like rittenhouse didn't get blamed
err, except that they're nat guard and we are supposed to hold such to a much higher standard
bu also i have a hard time not seeing the sort of spectre of communist revolution sentiment stuff in the proteste's actions, the throwing rocks at people who are aiming guns at you thing really confuses me and the "they can't kill us all" banner from those out of towners really rub me the wrong way. Considering it seems like this is probably an unpopular opinion, maybe I am not the right person to try to actually model this situation.
It seems reasonable that they perform better than the average person _at the same age_. It's not at all clear they perform better than the average person in general - they've had so much less life experience and opportunities to absorb facts than older people.
From what I remember, first year psych students get experimented on - they participate in at least one experiment as part of the course.
This is where psychology graduate students get a lot of their subjects from when they do a thesis/dissertation. Which is one point against a lot of psych papers - they're not random sampling, they're getting the cheapest subjects possible to study.
When I went to university psych was also considered a "science" for breadth purposes, and was considered a relatively easy way to fulfill that requirement.
So I would expect first year psych students to have some very odd responses.
Seems like since university students are mostly straight out of school, they should retain the most information from school, so demonstrating that they don't know anything demonstrates effectively that they didn't retain anything from school. So although 40-year-olds will know more, that doesn't bear on the effectiveness of school. Actually, you might think that if people go to school for 20 years and fail general knowledge tests but then work for 20 years and are able to pass them, it's an even stronger case that school doesn't do anything.
Yes. But they should at least know more than people the same age who did _poorly_ in school, assuming school does anything? And even if school really does nothing, it seems likely that most people who do well in school would also do more reading or or other intellectual activity than people who did poorly in school (note the "most" part).
If the average person's performance is the same or better than that of a university student at the sort of basic knowledge one would tend to learn in school, then that would be a pretty strong piece of evidence against school being useful at imparting information on students.
If I remember correctly, in 1984 Britain was part of Oceania with the US? Oceania was sort of geographical stand-in for "the West", Euroasia for the USSSR and Eastasia for China?
Yeah, also not entirely sure I remember Julia being suggested as a double-agent explicitly against Winston all along, although it's plausible I'm just missing some clue. I do remember the one guy Winston was seeking out to join the rebel group ending up as his torturer, though, so clearly some element of "the world at large is against Winston's efforts to rebel"
That last guy is called O'Brien. I also don't remember Julia betraying Winston. What I do remember is that Winston was very suspicious of her, while being immediately trusting of O'Brien. I always saw a great irony in that.
My recollection is that near the end, O'Brien tells Winston that Julia cracked in interrogation almost instantly, but that's not the same as being a state agent.
What's funny is that at one point in the book, Julia admits that she didn't realize Oceania's enemy has changed repeatedly in her life time. I think the reader is meant to glean from that that she is still partially brainwashed, but reading this post, maybe she just doesn't remember!
What I wondered in that book is why Eurasia and Eastasia never ganged up against Oceania. It always managed to be at peace with one, which was some astute statesmanship by Oceania.
Yeah, in the spirit of the challenge I hadn't revisited the book for the initial comment, but took a read over the last part and my impression is that O'Brien was lying about that part. The ending where he meets Julia again suggested to me that her room 101 treatment was some kind of lobotomy - which would seem to imply that she was psychologically more stubborn than Winston, not less so (although maybe on matters that weren't related to Winston himself? But seems thematically appropriate for O'Brien to manipulate reality to his whims on Julia as well)
And yeah, that's a good point. Honestly my impression given the book-within-the-book is that none of the three countries are actually aligned at any given time, they're all functionally identical superstates jockeying for position without any real expectations of substantive wins, but Oceania just has a vested interest in keeping the full populace on tilt about who the real enemy is.
Apparently I was smart enough to remember details of a book I read in high school but too dumb to consider that maybe the totalitarian-state interrogator guy was lying.
To be fair, that part is where he's all "I like you, Winston, we're kinda the same except you're a bit nuts, so I'll let you ask questions"
So I think you're meant to take him at least slightly at face value as being more genuine there - but I guess the point is also that even when full Party acolytes aren't trying to lie, they're able to not actually tell the truth
I don’t think he lies at all in that entire sequence. He’s not intended as a realistic character; he’s our view into how the totalitarian state functions.
I assumed at the time that the countries really are rivals because in the real world we have the West, the Soviet block, and China, and it was obviously referring to that.
This was my conclusion as well. The "1%" had determined that the status quo could only be maintained by a calculated ongoing war that sacrificed a number of the masses each year in the pursuit of stability while playing at war.
IIRC it's explicitly mentioned as an instance of doublethink, the powers simultaneously realize that perpetual war is beneficial to all and also are trying to conquer each other; and this isn't quite the same as the war being entirely for show, on some level they were in fact trying to win.
My recollection from high school class discussion is that none of the countries have a real vested interest in winning the war. They just need to be at war to stimulate the economy, manipulate the population, and justify a constant state of emergency.
I think it's more about controlling the economy rather than stimulating it. Post-war Britain was in "the Age of Austerity" - the economy was limping along, rationing was still in force, and the UK was trying to survive via USA loans and paying off its debts.
"One of the key challenges facing the UK in 1945 was the economic position of the country.
The national debt had risen from £760 million to £3500 million. Britain had spent close to £7 billion, or a quarter of the national wealth, on the war effort.
The UK was spending £2000 million a year abroad, while earning only £350 million in return. Loans from the USA were vital if the UK economy was to recover.
One in three houses had been destroyed by bombing whilst factories and shops had also been destroyed in large numbers.
Britain suffered 264,433 military and 60,595 civilian deaths during the war. Many others were physically and mentally scarred by the war and unable to resume normal life.
177 merchant ships and two-thirds of the Navy had been sunk, so food supplies were still a problem. Rationing remained in place for another 10 years. Income tax remained high to help the Government pay for the reconstruction.
This period saw the end of the British Empire. Its standing in the world had declined as it became impossible to contend with the economic might of the USA.
Wartime rationing had to be continued due to shortages of food and raw materials. This period in UK history is often called the Age of
Austerity."
People will put up with shortages and planned economy if it's to support "the War", so there always has to be a war for the government to tell the populace "this is why you need to tighten your belts".
Yeah I recall a bit saying that Eurasia could easily annex Airstrip 1 (Britain), but chose not to, as the countries had tacitly agreed to restrict their war to a defined grey zone.
I think they specifically were not stimulating the economy, nor seeking any of the usual technological advances from wa; rather war was used to deflect the attention of the people away from the Party, in all the three countries. And give a perpetual cover for why there was never enough to eat, etc. Only occasionally on the periphery did they ever have a little burst of hot war, so Goldstein’s (O’Brien’s) book said.
Also fair - I guess I was thinking more about the specificity of the scar on the head for room 101 + the whole "she was rigid and awkward like a dead body" thing, which made me think of brain damage. It would also seem to fit with Julia's character being defined by a sort of rebellion and individualism, so her greatest fear could conceivably be forcibly losing that
But then, Winston's greatest fear wasn't being fat and ugly and he's described that way late in the book too. So 🤷♂️
Also, Room 101 is the place where they break you by exposing you to your greatest fears. Unless Julia's greatest fear was being lobotomised (which I suppose is possible), she probably wasn't given a lobotomy there (although I suppose she might have got one in some other part of the Ministry).
>What's funny is that at one point in the book, Julia admits that she didn't realize Oceania's enemy has changed repeatedly in her life time. I think the reader is meant to glean from that that she is still partially brainwashed, but reading this post, maybe she just doesn't remember!
Julia believes that the war isn't actually happening, which is actually plausible since the rocket barrages are suspiciously timed to intensify during Hate Week. The general takeaway is that Winston sees through the first layer of the deception (that Big Brother is good, when he's not) but is easily caught by the next layer (the Brotherhood is good, when in fact it's apparently merely an ongoing honeypot), whereas Julia rejects more of it - she also achieves more, as she at least mostly got to enjoy her life while Winston was stressed out for years and accomplished nothing thereby.
I love this take. Winston Smith is totally a doomscroller who makes himself miserable. It's no wonder he's so easy for many of us to identify with.
It is also appropriate that I, named after a tormented Dostoyevsky character, looked down on Julia whereas you Magic Mushroom figured out she was the wiser one.
That’s insightful. The same basically red-blooded attitude toward life that makes Julia indifferent to the Party, makes her indifferent to the Brotherhood.
I see Winston as having just enough of the aspirational intellectual in him to represent those the Party most likes to “win”.
>What I wondered in that book is why Eurasia and Eastasia never ganged up against Oceania. It always managed to be at peace with one, which was some astute statesmanship by Oceania.
We don't know if they have. We don't really even know if they exist, we can't be sure of anything that the Ingsoc regime says about the rest of the world.
If the war isn't completely fake, it's plausible that Oceania is the weakest of the three, with the other two permanently at war with each other and Oceania strategically switching sides to maintain the balance of power and contain whichever one is stronger at the moment.
A chapter of Goldstein’s book says that Oceania is protected by the ocean, Eurasia by the steppes, and Eastasia by its large population, and yet each country could carve out bits of the others yet chooses not to.
>What I wondered in that book is why Eurasia and Eastasia never ganged up against Oceania.
Because War is Peace.
Winston finds Goldstein's writings at some point, and they explain the "wars" are all proxy battles about dumping excess resources to maintain control of the population, not about actually gaining territory. If they conquer each other they won't have an easy way to create hardships.
The book is quite explicit about the fact that Julia's rebellion is somewhat superficial. She's not really rebelling against the philosophy of the party, she just wants to have some casual sex and some fun.
Canonically the reason why Eurasia and Eastasia never united to defeat Oceania was that the war was intended solely to use up excess production:
"The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of
DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by
the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the
machine without raising the general standard of living"
The war also gives citizens a reason to give up power to the Inner Party (or its counterparts).
The lack of effort to make significant gains is also explained. The war never involved that states actually invading each other. They only ever fought in colonies in a massive disputed area containing parts of Africa and Asia:
"War prisoners apart, the average
citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or
Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he
were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are
creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about
them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the
fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might
evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia,
or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must
never be crossed by anything except bombs."
In other words, Oceania and the others only fight these wars to oppress its own citizens. The incoherent strategy is explained in a banned book that the protagonist is given as a trap, so maybe the explanation isn't accurate.
Julia seemed to understand as Winston did not, that it was meaningless. Certainly to her. She was not the least interested in the doings of the Party, where to Winston it was a puzzle he worked on by degrees over many years.
Julia definitely wasn’t a double agent. There’s a whole scene at the end of the book where Winston and Julia reconnect (it’s a horrifying reunion, but it happens) and it’s clear that she underwent the same torture and brainwashing that Winston did.
No it isn't. She still has all her teeth and appears to be pregnant. And we only saw her being taken away, but didn't see anything else that happened to her in between.
The Party was onto Winston from the start. Why wouldn't they also have used a honeytrap if they used everything else against him, too? Julia only started coming onto him -- by literally giving him a note that said "I love you" -- after he started writing his illegal journal, which was literally sold to him by a Party informant.
Orwell wasn't just some guy, neither. He was a former police officer. Meaning he knew how LEOs actually think, and how to run reliable operations against a desired target. You mean to tell me he wrote a book about a guy who, upon triggering his police-state's alarm, was immediately pursued sexually by an attractive woman half his age, whom we only see from said poor sap's PoV, and that there was never supposed to be any implication she was a spy the whole time?
The only reason more people don't pick up on it, beyond it being extremely depressing, is that most of us read the book when we're too young to be able to appreciate subtle touches like this.
O’Brien makes it clear that they interrogated her and she betrayed him: “a textbook case.” When Winston sees her she has a visible scar. For that matter she has no reason to describe her treatment to Winston like she does if it didn’t really happen. Orwell drops too many details suggesting she was tortured for that not to be the case; if it’s not what he was going for, he’s not a competent storyteller.
So the Party lacked access to scar makeup? And the ability to train their agents to lie continuously and come up with plausible cover stories? Or, assuming it wasn't scar makeup, she couldn't have gotten it some other way given her dangerous line of work?
Not that I'll go as far as to say it's open-and-shut Julia was a spy. The whole point is that you never find out anything for sure. But the idea that she absolutely WASN'T is preposterous.
Of course from the perspective of reality it's feasible that she's a spy. But from the perspective of fictional construction, it's not feasible, imo. A huge amount of the book's impact is that O'Brien is honest with Winston during his interrogation. O'Brien is a nearly superhuman figure: he knows what Winston is thinking before he says it, he even knows Winston's dreams ("the place where there is no darkness"). He spends a tremendous amount of time expounding on the theory of the totalitarian state in a way that has little or no value as psychological torture, but serves to inform the reader of Orwell's ideas on the subject, and being a vehicle for those ideas is a huge part of what the book is about. He also admits to earlier deceptions, like writing Goldstein's book. If O'Brien lied about Julia betraying Winston, all as a way of further manipulating him, then everything else he says in the interrogation could be a lie in service of breaking Winston. That would make him a better interrogation agent, but a worse expounder of Orwell's ideas. Orwell wasn't just trying to recreate Darkness at Noon, to show how people could be manipulated; like Winston, he understood HOW, but with this book he wanted to understand WHY. If O'Brien's interrogation testimony isn't truthful, then those chapters are a tremendous waste of time.
Furthermore, while you elsewhere said people don't consider that Julia might be a spy because it's depressing, I'd argue that it's actually more crushing the other way: that Julia was a sincerely physical, intuitive, sensual being (the complement to Winston's rationality and contemplation) who was sincerely broken and made to hate freedom just as Winston was. For her to be a super-spy would not add anything to our understanding of the Party's power; we already know from the figure of Mr. Charrington that they have those. For her to be a sincerely loving person beaten by the Party just like Winston was, even though her gifts are different from Winston's and seemingly more resilient, shows that there's no escape either through the mind or through the heart. That to me is much more in line with what 1984 is trying to tell us about totalitarianism.
The fact is that any character in the book *could* be a member of the Thought Police, but I don't see any evidence in the book that Julia *was* one, and I see plenty of thematic reasons why that would make it a worse book.
I agree; the whole thing about Winston and Julia is their mutual belief that “they can’t change our thoughts (about each other).” That theme is much less compelling if one-sided. The breaking of personal bonds was so much in the air then. It’s sort of the main point of intersection between 1984 and Brave New World.
I agree with Tom, below - though I'd argue that you can't trust O'Brien's version of anything, I think it's pretty clear in the reunion scene that she went through the same thing Winston did. She even states clearly that the same pressure that broke Winston broke her as well - that once she fully understood that she was willing to sacrifice Winston to save herself that there wasn't anything else to hold on to.
There just isn't any reason to think that she was a spy or a plant (or pregnant - all Winston notes is that her body had changed, that it was "thicker". I think it's all just demonstrating that she had all the passion burned out of her, and that they're alien to each other now). Every other spy was gleefully shown to Winston (and the reader). She never says anything in that final conversation that suggests she was anything other than a fellow victim.
If she revealed she was in on it, there'd have been no value in Winston giving her up to O'Brien in Room 101, and hence they'd lose out on achieving their objective of getting Winston to not merely submit, but to love his oppression.
It's been years since I read the book, but I don't think that's at all right. Winston meets Julia after Winston had been in room 101 and Winston's treatment had progressed to the point that Winston released from the Ministry of Love. I don't think Julia revealing to Winston that Julia had been a plant all along would undermine the effects of what happened in room 101. To the contrary, it would further undermine any remnants of Winston's love for Julia.
The bigger point is the one already argued in more depth by Tom Hitchner: This is a work of fiction, so if Julia were lying in that scene, the author would find a way to let us know.
Julia represented a sort of instinctive, unthinking, natural-as-breathing-and-sex opposition to the Party, as against Winston’s painful intellectual awakening, which was less robust perhaps although Julia too was said to have betrayed Winston as he did her: “Do it to Julia!”
Well julia tells winston shes had several previous affairs with the same basic contours and julia approaches him. So either for some reason she only got caught with winston, or she is an agent of the state. (Of course they are all agents of the state really)
> this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania.
From Part 2 Chapter 9:
> The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three super-states are in some places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. *** Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. *** Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
There is, by the way, a fan theory/interpretation of the story that every single thing Winston didn't see with his own eyes in the storyline in fake, there is no Oceania or Eastasia or Eurasia, it is Britian (or even London alone) that has descended into a North-Korea-like totalitarianism that invented an entire world history and geopolitics to its liking. The rockets that keep falling on London are launched by this very totalitarianism at their own territory. The world outside could be anything, possibly our own world, possibly a cold-war-like world, possibly a radically different world than the one described in 1984, or perhaps a severely watered-down version of what the party has exaggerated and spiced up.
That theory is intriguing and consistent with part of the spirit of the novel as a piece of art (the use of unreliable narrator), but I think it runs contrary to the spirit of the message (being, double-think as an all-pervasive force that literally everybody, even the most powerful, are absorbed by).
The Inner Party being so macchiavelian as to literally invent the war seems less doublethink-y than some high ranking officer investing every waking minute in a great plan to retake Kinshasa for the glory of Oceania while at the same knowing it does not really matter and Eurasians will re-retake it soon after
I need to jump in here on this entire discussion. I just spent the week in a cabin and found a copy of animal farm and 1984 and chose to reread them both. I just finished yesterday morning!
The amazing thing is that all the discussion on this thread is of various people’s memory of a book which they read decades ago, and most of the comments are extremely accurate. Thus the readers of this blog do remember what they read years ago, primarily in High School.
Does this refute the idea that we don’t learn in school? Or does it show that only some people learn, namely the same people attracted to substacks like this one?
I have always been skeptical, personally, about the idea that people don’t learn much in school. I learned a lot, and didn’t really try very hard (though I was valedictorian). On the other hand I am also extremely well acquainted with a lot of people who both know very little (they would totally flunk the test at the start of this post) and they show zero interest in learning anything of this nature.
> Does this refute the idea that we don’t learn in school? Or does it show that only some people learn, namely the same people attracted to substacks like this one?
Not precisely either of those, but closer to the latter. More like, "everyone learns and retains *things that are important to them or of interest to them,* and there's a strong overlap between people who are going to be interested in trivia and literature, and people who would be attracted to a site like this."
I'm not sure it aligns with my experience. The things I can definitively put my finger on as "being learned in school" and NOT by osmosis are... almost by definition... things I have no inherent interest in (if I did have, I would have read more widely on it outside of school and couldn't therfore be sure it wasn't absorbed/kept by osmosis).
Oxbow Lakes and a lot of Geography spring to mind, as I remember a lot of that stuff (the water cycle etc etc) and have definitely never pursued that knowledge outside of school..... MacBeth/Classic lit more generally also springs to mind... German/French vocab and grammar ... I can be sure in all these cases anything I do know I learned at school, and have had either zero or minimal cultural reinforcement of in poart because of my lack of interest.
Auschwitz was not a concentration camp. It is a city where it was located. The whole city was not a camp. Oświęcim (Auschwitz in German....) is much more than that. I live in Oświęcim and it makes me feel sick when people assume my home, my city, is only a giant living museum to the horrors inflicted in the past
Full text of the question is "During the Holocaust, Jews and many others were sent to concentration camps, death camps, and ghettos. Can you name any concentration camps, death camps, or ghettos you have heard of?" and 44% mentioned Auschwitz in their response.
> it makes me feel sick when people assume my home, my city, is only a giant living museum to the horrors inflicted in the past
Ooh, you're not gonna like hearing that a lot of people view the entirety of continental Europe that way, as a huge graveyard of horrors... But in Auschwitz's case, the entire current population is less than a thirtieth of the number of people who were killed there, so it's somewhat more justified.
An ironic consequence of the Western Eurocentric education is that people associate violence, inequality, and exploitation with America and/or Europe. You read about the Bantu Expansion and the Dungan Revolt and you realize it's the same stuff everywhere.
I recently saw a black YouTuber or Tik...Tokker?– mention something about "solidarity with my Arab brothers who suffered under the white slavers and oppressors alongside us", and I actually involuntarily chuckled out loud upon hearing it — it's just so incredibly through-the-looking-glass to the actual history involved that it's not even depressing any more.
I wanted to leave a comment along the lines of: "Yes, my friend: the Arab corsairs fought valiantly to curtail the rapacious British slavers, as the foul Limeys sought new eunuchs to guard their harems and seized thousands of women along the shores of Cir–... wait, waaaait a second!—"
...but it's hopeless so I didn't bother, heh. 🤷♂️
I like to watch World Friends, which is a talk show on youtube featuring a rotating cast of people who work as models in Korea. (Technically, some of them aren't models. Mostly they're models.) The gimmick is that they're all from different countries and comparisons are drawn between relevant cultures and/or languages. Sometimes this works better than others.
There was one episode in which everyone was asked to rate their geographical knowledge and then posed a series of really easy geographical questions.
One question that everybody aced was "where is Egypt?"
There were only two guests who didn't immediately point to Egypt. They were the two American blacks, and neither of them had any idea where Egypt might be.
This probably goes some way toward explaining the persistence of the Black Cleopatra myth.
There's a difference between YOUR horror and the horror happening because it was convenient. There are cities with over 50% of population being Jewish before the war. Many cities were like 30%. Oświęcim is just located in very good location transport-wise, that's why there are like 7 big amusement parks in 10 miles radius. But it's not our horror compared to cities which lost half of their people, now trying to go on like normal. It's not Będzin, now a city like any other, which was over 90% Jewish (now there's about 10k Jews in a whole of Poland). It's the ground, the earth. But we, from Oświęcim, lost only a small part of our people.
Also Europe is no more living horror museum than China but no one views it that way.
Let's see what all I can name just off the top of my head:
WW1 & 2
Winter War
Thirty Years' War
War of the Roses
The Troubles
Napoleon
French Revolution
Muslim conquest of Spain and Portugal leading to Reconquista
Various genocides in the Balkans
Various other factional wars in Britain between some combination of Protestants, Catholics, Irish, Scotts, and English
Seem to recall the Basque people having been pretty heavily oppressed, don't recall if it's something that would be called genocide.
And this isn't counting all the various empires, of which I seem to recall English, Portuguese (dunno how influential that was on the continent), Spanish, French, Austria-Hungarian, Dutch, Swedish, Roman, Macedonian...
But this is also pretty heavily biased by what I learned in... well, some of this I learned in school, but now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure most of it was cultural osmosis. Regardless, there's a bias in what I've been exposed to. My list for East Asia would be about half that big? Middle East should properly count as Asia, but the numbers there will be biased because the US has been at war there for most of my life at this point. My knowledge of African history is comparatively tiny.
Edit: Oh, and if we count Russia and Ukraine as Europe, we can add the Holodomor. And, y'know, the current war going on there.
I'm a bit suss on the methodology of the test, I'd like to see the list of 'marked as wrong' answers sorted by frequency before assuming that the college students actually didn't understand these questions. For example Dachau and Ravensbruck are perfectly good answers to the question here --- and on the who did the US declare independence from, I'm not convinced that UK, England and Britain were all scored as correct.
I don't think that's right - the survey asked both "What was Auschwitz?" (Question 6) and "Can you name any concentration camps, death camps, or ghettos?" (Question 21)
In response to Question 6 in the 2018 US Survey, about 44% of millennials answered that Auschwitz was a death camp or concentration camp. (Edited to add: or "forced labor camp" - I was reading the table a little incorrectly.)
Given that Scott linked the 2020 US survey, I assumed that the question being referenced was Question 5 there, which did have 44% give Auschwitz among in their list, especially since the summary page mentions the stat together with the results for other camps given in that question. Not completely sure.
Thank you! That explains the terrible results-- that's a recall question, not a recognition question! Of course you'll get abysmal results if you ask for recall. Recognition matters more.
I think one thing average people are confused about is where the concentration camps were located, and where the Jews and others sent to them, originated.
ETA: and for reasons I don't know (Cold War, not yet having access to records?) what little we were taught in school about WW2 made little mention of the east and its unfathomable suffering, to the point that when I read more about it much later on, I was genuinely shocked to discover what happened in Belarus, for example.
If you're American, it's probably at least partially because we were pretty uninvolved in eastern front. If we weren't involved, it clearly wasn't important, and we were too busy with the western front and the Pacific theater to worry about such minor things as Stalingrad.
One thing that this highlights but was not mentioned is that we know for a fact there is a large difference between memory recall and memory recognition. The full text requires someone to search their brain, and generate a foreign-sounding name with only a sentence or so of context. And the stated statistics only mentions a single one. This is clearly flawed for our desired use of the statistic.
A better statistic would be what percentage were able to identify at least one actual concentration camp, death camp, or ghetto?
On top of that, I'm pointing out that setting *recall* as a threshold for education being useful is unfair. There's merit to recognition as well! Like, if someone starts talking about Auschwitz then you might still be able to functionally engage in the conversation upon recognition alone. If you had never heard of Auschwitz outside of cultural osmosis, by contrast, you probably never developed enough of a mental context to be able to do so in a meaningful way.
That does sound very tough. It makes sense that people connect those negative dots so strongly, but it's unfortunate that it negatively impacts the perception of the entire city so many years later. I'm sure there are many tourists/visitors. But I guess few would choose Ausschwitz as their residence due to the cities history alone.
There's been an interesting language shift in that even 20 years ago, most certainly 30+ years ago, both the camp and the town were, in Polish and in Poland, called by the same (Polish) name, Oświęcim. I've noticed an almost total shift (at least in mainstream media, idk about colloquial use) towards calling the camp by its German name now (while the town obviously remains with the Polish one). Initially I thought it was to improve clarity to foreigners who'd not know the Polish name, but now I think that it's likely a way to separate the contemporary reality of the town from the horror of the history (which is becoming possible three generations on, allowing for the still lingering population level trauma entrenched in the society and culture).
I wish they could change that stupid German name. "Au" means "ow", and "schwitz" is the erikativ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs of "sweat", and combined it's a dreadful trivialization of the horrors that happened there. It's some caricature of a joke, like the cynical pseudo-funny slogans they put on their KZ gates, like "work makes free" and "to each his own", which really makes me sick.
I see you have a German nickname, so perhaps you are used to applause from compatriots when spreading such absurdities. But -witz or -vitz is a perfectly ordinary Slavic suffix, as anyone would know who 1) has heard about Poland 2) can name a couple of places in East Germany 3) can name a few Americans of Jewish origin.
Could you please be more polite? I know it's not the correct etymology. But I can well imagine SS guards laughing about this hilarious joke, because they don't care about etymology.
And I don't know how you imagine Germans talking about the holocaust. I have never received applause for this, because I have never told anyone about it.
It's perfect location when it comes to transport. It's near two highways intersection, very good access to the train network, close to the big cities.... it's not a coincidence many kids from here got to very good schools in Katowice/Kraków.... but it's much cheaper.... so very easy to commute anywhere you need to
Yeah, that's the typical distinction between death camps and the other forced labor camps (aka concentration camps, I'm unsure of formally that term is meant to be inclusive of the death camps or only refer to the latter). Iirc, huge numbers of people died in the latter - they had life expectancy of < 1 year, because they rapidly worked people to death. But the death camps are those with the gas chambers etc.
* I'm almost certainly wrong on the details. A quick wiki search will surely give a better answer.
You think I don't know that? But it's still a city. So simplifying that Auschwitz= concentration camp only is inaccurate. It was better stated in a full questionnaire given to the participants in the test.
But saying 'they don't know Auschwitz was a concentration camp" is perfectly accurate.
If x is the name of two things, in category a and category b, it's perfectly fine to say 'x is an a' or 'x is a b'. See, for example: 'Mississipi is a state'.
Given that you are from Poland, this may be a translation issue- but there is really nothing to complain about here.
No, I don't think so. I fully sympathize with the residents of Oświęcim who would like their town to be associated with probably anything else in world history.
For what it's worth, though, I have never heard anyone blame (or praise, in some unfortunate cases) the town itself for the crimes committed near it. I believe that people of all political persuasions are well able to discern between "Auschwitz the Nazi occupied town and concentration camp" and "Oświęcim the Polish town with history outside of WW2", even if they have no clue at all of Oświęcim.
What I'm trying to get at is that for the overwhelming majority of people in the world who know the name "Auschwitz" at all, it is synonymous with the concentration and extermination camp, and most might not even realize that it's the (German) name of an actual town that merely had the misfortune of being used as its location and namesake. Using "Auschwitz" as a synonym for the camp is neither fully wrong nor very if at all harmful to Oświęcim.
The brute fact of the matter is, Auschwitz will be associated with the Holocaust proportionally to what else Oświęcim contributed to world history. For the past 80 years, this has leaned heavily towards to the former. Quite frankly, I would also not want the that proportion to shift away from the Holocaust because it faded out of the collective memory: The value of that memory as a warning to future generations can hardly be overstated. If you agree, perhaps you can also find it in you to accept the role Auschwitz (as opposed to Oświęcim) has to play.
The UNESCO- certified camp complex museum will always be here, for future generations. It's huuuuge but it won't be redeveloped. There are thousands of death places never marked or mentioned, but this specific one will stay. But that's all we can guarantee you get: the museum, not the city. Honestly most people living here benefit from the tourism sector, many operate b&b etc. But it's more like Hiroshima: there's an important history and a lesson for future generations, no one denies that, but it's also... a city. You know: universities, schools, corner shops, hair salons, shoe shops... You get swamped with election ads right before any voting.... We get to be a city. Anyone wanting to remember for their short visit gets a museum.
Also I do think that if we owe anyone anything, it's to the Jewish community. So if everyone wants to front us some money to build at last a proper synagogue (we have a small cramped room right now...) in Oświęcim, or even just some idk Jewish prayer room, they're welcome to it. So many Jews ask about it and it feels sad every time I tell them that that's all we've got.
These are all reasonable concerns, together with your other reply, but I have to ask: By what mechanism do you expect daily life in your city to improve in real ways if people just "remember" that Oświęcim is more than the former Auschwitz concentration camp? You already said that your city materially benefits from the Auschwitz tourism.
Picking up on the synagogue example, do you ask for direct (or increased, if they already exist) contributions from e.g. the UN/UNESCO/Israel to your city's budget so you can build that proper synagogue, and do you believe this was more likely to happen if people mentally separated Auschwitz and Oświęcim?
Did you know that there remains an active US navy base at Pearl Harbor today? I didn't, until I went to visit the Pearl Harbor tourist attraction one time, and the GPS took me to the base instead, and I got escorted back out by armed gate guards muttering about stupid tourists.
I feel bad that your city has to bear that association, but what are you objecting to? The post says, "44% know Auschwitz was the site of a concentration camp." Is that not accurate?
If it said "44% know that Shakespeare was a playwright", would you object that Shakespeare is not only the playwright because there are a handful of other unrelated famous people with the same surname?
I think this might be a difference in US/Polish usage. When I type "Auschwitz" into English Wikipedia, I get the page for the concentration camp, with a blurb at the top saying ""Auschwitz" redirects here. For the city, see Oświęcim. For other uses, see Auschwitz (disambiguation)"
Well! I have been educated, and I will help you right this wrong. From now on, I will not only call it by its proper name, but too shall add your quote there so the reader may learn as I have:
"One of the worst of all the death-camps, where tens of thousands died, was 'Oświęcim' (note: actually, it is much more than that!)."
No problem. Some may say I am a hero, but I prefer to simply call myself a super-ally. 🙂
Unfortunately, the way language works is that bad connotations do not get removed from words. This is the cause of things like the 'treadmill of the euphemisms', where people refer to a thing indirectly, but the indirect usage becomes just as bad as the original meaning, and then needs another euphemism, and repeats. It's also a natural part of language that people refer to things by their location, such as 'DC' referring to the US government rather than the District of Columbia
Fighting this is almost impossible; the most effective course of action is to find a new name for the town and point all the Auschwitz signs at the camp. Or just always refer to the town as Oświęcim and the camp as Auschwitz.
We would never rename it, there's too much camps all over Poland and it would not be worth it. Also we do refer to Oświęcim as Oświęcim and to the camp as Auschwitz, because these are their official names in the registeries. I don't expect laypeople to know the difference, just wanted to highlight it under an article with bigger reach that could gain traction.
Now hold on... if you *do* want to focus on the deaths, and — although *you yourself* readily interpreted a reference to "Auschwitz" as referring to "[your] city" of Oświęcim — you *do* see the two names as having different connotations and uses...
...then it almost seems like there's no point complaining about someone using "Auschwitz" to talk about the deaths there in the first place. 🤨
Hm, I see that the German name is in fact just a Germanicization of the Polish name. It looks pretty naturally German to me, except that I barely know anything about German and could be easily fooled.
So - how well can "Auschwitz" pass for a German place name? Is it better than "Strasbourg" pretending to be French?
It's German because it's Silesian. Everything Silesian is a little German. Large part of the population was german-speaking. Lots of German names, to this day. Auschwitz is not a new word, that's how it was called in German throughout the years.
I can't get over 69% of respondents not knowing Moscow is the capital of Russia. Imagine what other information has to be lacking to not know that. You can't know about WW2 or the cold War. It's not even one of those countries that has a trick capital like Australia or Brazil.
I'd be surprised if more than a percent of them know who either Molotov or Ribbentrop were. A much more likely mechanism seems to me that Nazis=evil, commies=evil, clearly natural allies.
A non-aggression pact is not even sort of the same thing as agreeing to collaborate. The Soviet Union and the Nazis both did heinous things, but it's important to get the history right - they did those things *separately.*
Russia was invading Poland from the East as Germany was invading from the West; that's "separately" in only the narrowly geographic sense. If you count Germany and Japan as collaborating in 1942, it's hard to see how you deny Germany and Russia collaborating in 1939.
They WERE alligned with the Nazis. They literally started the war together with a secret protocol and the invasion of a baker's half-dozen countries each:
"The participants were recruited from introductory psychology courses at Kent State University, as well as from introduction to psychology and introduction to research methods courses at Colorado State University"
I's not much use to them. Incidentally, they did ask about the capital of Australia, and 1.5% of participants responded correctly.
And I cannot get over that so many people believe that cops shoot unarmed black men regularly--a stat which concerns me more than a lack of knowledge of national capitals. It seems people struggle with a lot of facts; why worry about the pedantic ones (can you spell the capital of Burkina Faso without cheating?) when other mistakes have so much more influence on our society?
Understandable, since that's definitely optimizing for heat rather than light, and he brought it up clumsily... but I can /sort of/ see a connection: perhaps the thinking was that this is a similar sort of innumeracy to that which was mentioned in the post? Like, 'the same people who only know "Big Brother" from TV also only "know" the prevalence of "cop violence" from TV'?
*edit:* ...okay, so it's a stretch & that's not how he framed it, really; so I'll concede the warning is probably deserved.
Not... not that anyone asked if I thought it was, come to think of it—
"Major warning, 50% - super not necessary to turn this one into a culture war thread."
Let me try to rephrase Zaruw's claim in a less polarizing manner: It is also amazing how many false claims people on the internet believe when a few minutes of Googling would provide the data for them to realize that they are wrong.
*MY* sadly cynical belief is that most people don't CARE if they are factually right or wrong. As long as the narrative backs their beliefs then they are content. The correctness of the actual position is pretty far down on the list of what is important. Which is why they don't even bother to check.
Given this, why would we be surprised if lots of people didn't know the capital of Russia? It just doesn't matter to them.
It just feels impossible to NOT know this even if you don't care.
Like, it doesn't matter to me that there is a famous TV personality called Kim Kardashian, or that there is a Golf player named Tiger Woods. But it would have been impossible to not learn these things at some point.
My comment is not meant to be polarizing. Like you, I feel people don't care about being factually right or wrong, and stating the "wrong" stat will somehow turn you into a "culture warrior". Can one have an opinion about the violence in Myanmar without knowing the capital? (Which is no longer Yangon.) I think so. Should I listen to someone who willfully mis-uses policing stats (regardless of intent or political leanings)? I think not.
As someone who has lived in many countries and travelled to many more, I think too many people overestimate their understanding of other nations. The OP said, "I can't get over 69% of respondents not knowing Moscow is the capital of Russia." How much SHOULD the average person know about Russia in terms of basic facts? GDP? Population? Military size?
US race relations is a culture war topic where at least some large groups of people are working hard to obscure some facts and emphasize others, they succeed at some of this.
Moscow isn't a pedantic topic, as Thomas said "It's not even one of those countries that has a trick capital like Australia or Brazil."
I always interpret this as people exaggerating a stat for emphasis, similar to how you might say something heavy "weighs a ton". If someone says that 3,000 unarmed Black men are shot annually I just ignore the number and assume they mean "The number of unarmed Black men is unacceptably high" similar to if they said an obviously false number like a "zillion".
Is that helpful, though? On a topic closer to home for me, what to make of crimes committed against Asian Americans, and specifically those after Trump said "China Virus." There was nothing there to exaggerate for emphasis; it was pure misuse of stats to push the kind of "culture war" narrative I'm now being accused of making. My car mechanic not knowing the capital of Russia is much less of a concern to me than people in positions of power not understanding (or, worse, misusing) stats to push policies that misrepresent or even harm my community.
Helpful for what? You seem to believe that it was helpful for accomplishing their goal of implementing certain policies, but simply dislike those policies.
I'm agnostic about whether Trump's rhetoric led to discrimination (including crime) against Asian-Americans. What reasons do you have for rejecting that hypothesis? In other words, how do you know that there's nothing there to exaggerate? I don't think there's enough information to conclude either way which is why it's a "culture war" topic.
Well the original strain was at one time referred to in the literature as "Wuhan-Hu-1" and naming viruses after origin location is very common (norovirus, zika, dengue fever, ebola, Spanish flu*, lassa virus, hantavirus, Lyme disease, etc.). Trump calling it a "China virus" was a mere generalization and perhaps a rhetorical poke at the Chinese state without any racial connotation.
Meanwhile, those who pretended to be shocked by Trump on this issue were often supportive of the sort of policies that prevented Asians from being admitted to certain ivy league schools, with Harvard's justification something to the effect that Asians have "terrible personalities", or whatever. Compared to the absird idea that maybe Trump was dog whistling to his base that Asian skulls should be bashed in, the anti-asian bias in college admissions created tangible harms.
None of that really answers my question of why you're sure that the rhetoric didn't lead to increased discrimination. I don't think the etymology of Lyme disease is relevant. I was expecting you to say why the commonly cited data that indicates increased discrimination is flawed (I think it is) and give an alternative that you think is more accurate.
Instead, you pivoted to talking about the hypocrisy of some vague group of people. If you're not willing to respond to good-faith questions, we probably don't have much to talk about.
Russia has somewhat of a trick capital. If someone answered St. Petersburg, I could see the mix up since it was the capital for 200 years. If you answered anything else besides those two, I have no respect for you
This one really made me wonder how valid the survey is. It's really, really, really hard for me to believe that, if I went onto a US college campus and asked a random person what the capital of Russia was, the chance of them not knowing the answer is higher than 2/3.
If I lived in the US, I think I would geniunely try to test this on the nearest university campus, it seems insane to me.
I'll try this tomorrow, albeit not thoroughly nor systematically, and see what the responses are — I have also had trouble believing some of these (I think I knew most, if not all, of those examples by the time I was like 10 years old; I had no friends, no video games, and no TV, though, just as many books as I wanted — so I developed weirdly, heh).
Really interested in the results! Also, the way they framed the questions to the students made it very clear that guessing was better than not answering, so that at least some of the correct respondents just guessed the first/only city they could think of in Russia etc.
With regards to knowing it at 10 years old, I thought something similar: I taught at a secondary school for a while, and I think that over half of all 8th-graders would have known this. I am from Germany, where students are tracked into different schools, and this was the lower academic tier.
I attended the higher academic tier, and I am almost certain that north of 80% of my classmates in 8th grade would have known this. And with Russia being so significant, I don't think that gap can be ascribed to geographical/cultural proximity.
Just really stunned by this result, and interested in hearing what yours are going to be.
So a teacher I know tested this question in an 8th and a 10th grade classroom at a lower academic tier school in Germany. 15/17 and 14/15 got it right, respectively.
Makes me side eye the result from the survey even more. I know that Americans tend to be bad at geography, but so bad that their college students get beaten by 8th graders from the bottom half of the academic distribution in Germany?
I suspect that "Americans are bad at geography" is also greatly exaggerated.
Incidentally, I remember one time I met someone from Europe who was visiting the US who thought that Florida bordered Mexico. And this was a *college student* who *specifically traveled to the US*, so you'd expect them to be highly selected.
If an American visiting Germany thought that Bavaria bordered Poland, I wouldn't take that as evidence of them being bad at geography. People generally aren't expected to know the internal geography of foreign countries.
> People generally aren't expected to know the internal geography of foreign countries.
Only Americans are expected to know everything and mocked otherwise, for some reason. I suspect it's because Europeans haven't realized that they aren't the center of the world anymore yet.
Also, the proper analogy is not US -> Germany, but US -> Europe. This would be a bit like something thinking that Italy borders Turkey.
That makes me curious - are Americans good at *American* geography?
To be fair, as a European, I couldn't name the 50 American states, and definitely not their capitals... it makes perfect sense that things geographically distant from you feel irrelevant.
I wonder what would be the neutral form of test. Something like: name some countries or states along with their capitals, you get 1 point for each correct answer? Then give me a histogram how many people got how many points, and also the list of frequently correct answers and their frequencies.
Hey now I'm pretty damn good at American geography. I don't remember the capital of Australia off the top of my head. I do know 50 state capitals and broad strokes of regional geography across a landmass larger than Europe
When a Brazilian professor said most of her students wouldn't know where exactly Ukraine is and an European colleague of mine was surprised, the former was like "how many of *your* students would know where exactly Bolivia is?"
My West Coast US experience has been that any town I know the name of is probably not actually the capital of whatever state it's in. Seattle's not the capital of Washington, Portland's not the capital of Oregon, San Francisco or Los Angeles aren't the capital of California.
In approximately 1/3 of states, the capital city is also the largest city. This isn't the case on the West Coast, but I'm sure you're at least somewhat familiar with Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Boston, Honolulu, and so on...
I always assume that Boulder, Augusta, and Springfield are the capitals of Colorado, Georgia, and Massachusetts, partly because of the heuristic that the largest city often isn't the capital, and partly because two of those are the names of capitals of other states. (And Boulder has the university, like many other capitals smaller than the biggest city - Madison, Austin, Lansing, Columbus, etc.)
The one I find even harder to believe, and which I would like someone to test, is that less than 1% knows that Hannibal is from Carthage.
How is it remotely possible that the founder of Taoism is much better known than what city the Romans were fighting against in the Punic Wars among student in the US, a Western country?
I assume that more students at the average US university have a grandparent who engages in Taoist practice than have any at-home discussions of Roman military history.
I see your point, but I still find it incredible that 99% doesn't know about Carthage.
I was under the impression that America, as a civilization, sees itself as part of the West, and therefore sees Greece and Rome as the past of its own civilization, and that Rome having fought Carthage was common knowledge.
I wouldn't say "99% don't know about Carthage". I suspect that if you ask people "have you ever heard of Carthage?", a non-trivial number would say "isn't that something to do with Rome?" If you ask them, "Which of the following fought two major wars with Rome? The Hittites, Carthage, the Ottomans, Cappadocia", the fraction over 25% that got it right would be even higher.
It's often hard to dredge up information that you haven't thought about recently, without a bit of prompting - but once you got them going, some of the people that didn't seem to know initially might even be able to come up with the elephants crossing the Alps thing.
So yes, this sort of thing is "common knowledge" in a sense, like Chester A Arthur being a president, or Denali being the tallest peak in North America. But the fact that it's almost never mentioned in contemporary culture (much less than basic aspects of Greek or Norse mythology) means that it doesn't come to mind very easily for most people.
Cultural osmosis explains this one pretty handily. Asian Mysticism saw a pretty strong cultural interest from at least the Bruce Lee era up through now throughout the US. Whether exposure by pop TV and movies, "clever" book titles ("The Tao of X" sort of titles) or having friends or acquaintances that are on their second or third spiritual conversion, or Chinese takeout fortune cookies everyone has probably heard about Taoism and Confucianism (and probably others like Buddhism).
If people have heard about those things and then someone asks them about "what Chinese religion was founded by Lao Tse", even if they don't know the answer for sure, if they're only picking from the 2-5 asian religions they've picked up through osmosis (and even more if maybe they've heard the "Confucius says ..." jokes enough to not pick Confucianism), it seems reasonable to get to 4% of people giving the correct answer.
I don't know about Americans, but I'm Canadian and I don't have any idea who Hannibal is; and while I think I've heard of Carthage, I wouldn't have known what or where it is without reading the comments. I've heard of the Punic Wars, but I don't know anything about them. (I think, if asked, I'd assume they had something to do with Rome, but that would be a guess based on the word "Punic" feeling like a Latin or Latinized adjective.) I am very confident that I never learned about any of these things in school. So to me it seems bizarre to be shocked that hardly anyone knows that Hannibal is from Carthage; but maybe American school curriculum really is that different.
How old are you? When did you go to school? What history did they teach you? Was the history of Rome not taught?
I'm not from North America. One of these days I need to ask Americans on this site what they learn in school. I used to assume that history of western civilization is taught in the same way in the schools of all western countries. I may have been wrong.
I know about both of these things and didn't know that Moscow was the capital of Russia. I mean, it's likely I was told that Moscow is the capital of Russia at some point in the course of being told about WW2 and/or the Cold War, but it's not a very salient fact about either of those things nor strongly connected to any of the more salient facts, so I forgot it.
While I see your point, I'm not sure it's quite as powerful as you think. From what I vaguely recall of high school and honestly even college courses, most of the stuff about WW2 focused on the US campaigns and Nazi atrocities. Well, and US atrocities, if you count the nuclear bombs. For every reference to Operation Barbarossa, I can probably point to like 10 about D-Day. Even having known about Operation Barbarossa, I more associate it with Leningrad and Stalingrad than with Moscow. Which, looking at your link, I find that Stalingrad was actually after the failure of Barbarossa; whether I will remember that in a year is another question.
The most salient reason to know Moscow is the capital of Russia is that lots of news stories use Moscow as a synecdoche for Russia or the Russian government (and before that the Soviet one), likewise other countries' capitals.
Prior to reading this article I didn't *know* the capital of Russia was Moscow. If someone asked me to *guess* the capital of Russia, Moscow would have been my first guess, but it could easily be a "trick capital" country, and I haven't spent enough time memorizing capitals to be sure.
If I think about news articles I've read about Russia, I'm pretty sure they reference the Kremlin and Putin being in Moscow, but that would only bring me up to an 80% or 90% confidence rate - still not enough to say I *know* Moscow is the capital. Thinking about WW2 or the Cold War doesn't help much, because I can't think of any big events from those wars that specifically involve the capital of Russia. WW2 was fought in a lot of different parts of Russia (I don't specifically remember a "battle of Moscow" or something similar), and the major event I remember from the Cold War is tearing down the Berlin Wall, which is obviously in Berlin, which I do remember is in Germany.
Realistically, the number of people who'd not answer because of quibbles about what counts as knowledge would be very small compared to the number of people who'd not answer because they really don't know. There may be a couple of percent of literal geeks who thought "Moscow probably is but I don't *know*" but you're not going to get to 69 percent that way.
<i>There may be a couple of percent of literal geeks who thought "Moscow probably is but I don't *know*" but you're not going to get to 69 percent that way.</i>
"Well, according to Plato we can only truly have knowledge about the Forms, therefore it's definitionally impossible to know a fact about the physical world like 'Moscow is the capital of Russia'."
The Nazis never quite reached Moscow, though they did get close before being turned back. The most famous battles are Stalingrad and Kursk, not Moscow.
Unlike Napoleon, who actually captured and occupied Moscow for all the good that did him.
It's very easy to not make connections between historical events that you learned in isolation. E.g. most Americans have probably heard of Napoleon and the War of 1812 but won't realize they happened at the same time.
If you're accustomed to US capitals being basically random, you might reasonably guess it's Stalingrad or something, while knowing Moscow is the most populous.
I really want to know how the questions were phrased (I expect higher accuracy from "what country is Moscow the capital of?" than from "what is the capital of Russia?", and more accuracy still from certain multiple-choice versions).
If you follow the link, you find the study with all questions in a table.
It’s important to note that the students were also strongly encouraged to guess an answer if they weren’t sure, which makes the 31% figure even crazier.
It occurs to me that I grew up during the Cold War, and hearing news from Washington and Moscow was a regular and important occurrence. I was surrounded by Cold War spy movies and thriller books and so forth. But someone born in the 1990s might see Russia as "just another country".
Moscow was not always the capital of Russia ... just saying. Also: If someone thought Sidney is the capital of Australia: Zero chance that person knows anything worthwhile about down-under? Or if you did not know the capital of Brazil or South Africa or Switzerland or India or Myanmar or Vietnam or the Netherlands - or mix up those Baltic republics and their capitals all the time - you won't know anything about them, really? ... How many Europeans vs. Americans know the capital of California?!?
My personal experience with this particular question seems to back up Scott's hypothesis.
I know that Moscow is the capital of Russia, but I know it because there were KGB agents in some books I read as a kid and I had a friend from Moscow. And people mentioned it a lot when the olympics were in Russia.
Nowhere would I have connected my knowledge of Moscow to having learned about it in school, and I can't say with confidence that I ever did. (Like, I'm sure I did, but I don't remember it at all.)
> Imagine what other information has to be lacking to not know that. You can't know about WW2 or the cold War.
I don't think that's necessarily true. You can learn about WW2 just fine but forget certain facts about it or facts learned in connection with it, especially facts that aren't actually important to the bigger picture, like "Moscow is the capital of Russia". I know Moscow is the capital of Russia, but if you had asked me to whether I learned that in school I would have said "I don't think so". I'm pretty sure we had a geography unit in school, but I don't recall ever being taught the capitals of any countries other than my own.
It seems strange not to compare the results of schooling with the alternatives, presumably homeschooling or unschooling. It does not seem at all obvious to me that they would be a better solution!
Hmmm I'm not sure, did anyone argue that introducing civil rights law was bad itself, rather than that it was supposedly misused later-on? Genuine question, I havent followed the conversation strictly.
Thomas Sowell has made that point, noting that over the approximately 100 years from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, black Americans made slow, steady progress towards equality, but after 1964 that progress was sharply curtailed and in many cases even reversed. Aside from the collateral damage caused by the CRA's scope creep, Sowell makes a pretty strong case in _Black Rednecks and White Liberals_ that it has failed at its own stated goals.
I've seen occasional accounts from black people that the education was better in segregated schools because there were teachers who both thought the students could learn and were serious about teaching them. I've never heard anything about how common this was.
In any case, there was a claim that integrating the schools meant that black students were more like to get white teachers who didn't expect them to do well, whether trying to be kind about it or just being prejudiced.
The big advantage of formally segregated schools is that it reduces in-school bullying and makes the standard-deviation gap easier to account for. It has the disadvantage of screwing over the higher-IQ black students, especially were they to transfer to a white school, to which their prior education would have left them badly underqualified for their grade level. This is part of what happened with MLK, and hence why he relied on plagiarism to get his degrees.
The solution to this isn't to re-introduce racial segregation, but cognitive segregation. It's just most of the populous, especially the elites, reject this, because they don't like how it doesn't achieve balanced racial presence at every level of schooling.
This does not prove that it was CRA stopping narrowing the gaps, maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe causality was backwards: because gaps stopped narrowing, activists wished to extend scope of CRA
It's not a matter of talk. The CRA objectively DID weaken freedom of association. Quite substantially. That was the whole point of its creation. To force companies and organizations to hire and provide services to people they didn't want to.
Whether that was a regretable necessity, a strong positive good, or an ultimately unjustifiable wrong turn for our society is a separate matter. But also of vastly less relevance than the question of whether we should still be using methods meant for crusing Jim Crow sixty years after its defeat, in a country that even with our recent souring of race relations is still close to a historic low in the personal racism of the populous. Especially given both our failure to close the gaps and our vastly better knowledge of the importance of human heredity.
That "race relations [are] still close to a historic low in... personal racism,' is essentially true for every day since the end of Jim Crow. I am not sure that I disagree with you (that the time may well have come), but this does not seem like a compelling argument.
Hanania and some others argue that the only way to prevent such misuse would have been to not introduce the laws in the first place, and the way to prevent further misuse is to repeal them. Hanania and many other libertarians also argue that private entities shouldn't be banned from discriminating anyway, private individuals or companies should be free to decide whom they associate or do business with however they wish.
Should we really staying the course on our horrendous violations of civil liberties for the sake of goals anybody who knows anything serious about genetics, evo-psych, and anything remotely reliable from the social sciences, could tell you we're never gonna achieve? Especially given that we've objectively made tremendous advancements in racial harmony since the act's original implementation? And the cost of kneecapping what were originally the building blocks of a free society -- freedoms of speech, conscience, commerce, and association -- are hardly insubstantial.
Not that most libs actually care about such things anymore, as achieving equality of outcome is still clearly the chief desire of almost everybody really imporant in the leftoid bloc. But that still doesn't make it any less damaging for society. Especially given that, with the project to this point being a failure, the logical next step for them is to support the further curtailment of any of our rights which impede their goals.
"But if we get rid of civil rights laws, how *else* are we supposed to establish that freedom of association doesn't apply to mean people?"
You aren't. That's the whole point.
As it happens, allowing free-market competition to operate would *also* be the most effective way to combat unjust discrimination, but it would still be the right thing to do regardless.
It seems like the unjust discrimination of Jim Crow lasted for around 70 years under a free market system with no sign of abating, and then vanished pretty quickly when that law was passed.
Nope. Jim Crow laws existed precisely because the free market was proving too effective in disincentivizing discrimination, which is why they weren't called "Jim Crow freely-made decisions by private individuals".
Jim Crow was not solely enforced by law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 targeted private businesses engaging in discrimination; the case challenging it, going all the way to the Supreme Court, was Heart of Atlanta Motel. There was no law forcing Woolworth to segregate its lunch counter. The whole reason for the Green Book was to tell Black travelers which businesses would serve them and which weren’t, which should demonstrate both that it was legal for businesses to serve them and that integrated businesses were marginalized; they did not dominate or even compete on par with segregated businesses (since if they did no book would have been necessary).
You're right in that Jim Crow was not solely a matter of law. Many in the South who supported it even did so when they knew the system was against their own economic interest. Putting an end to it probably did require government intervention.
The question is whether the interventions that were used were: (a) ultimately the right sort of interventions, either morally or practically; and (b) are still appropriate for 2024 America as opposed to 1964 America, especially given how much our knowledge of the importance of hereditarianism has advanced.
The cost to degrading freedoms of conscience, speech, and association for the sake of pursuing higher levels of racial equality has not been small. It's been at least as substantial to us as the War on Drugs, with an equally dubious record of success. It sure doesn't deserve the level of sacrosanctity it still enjoys.
Taxes cant be enforced entirely by law, that doesnt suggest taxation is a free market activity
> (since if they did no book would have been necessary).
Thats an unreasonable standard, if yelp tells me which businesses are racially owned(they did for a bit) does that suggest theres been no decrease in racism?
Slave societys had to draft the lower classes into slave patrols; no system of governance would make racism disappear the second it passed. You need to be making a very complicated argument about rate of change not just point out any amount of racism existed.
On the contrary, Jim Crow was very much on the way out. The simple facts that 1) the 1964 act got enough support to pass in the first place, and 2) it was received with so much popular support across the country, demonstrate that pretty clearly. Jim wasn't dead yet, but he was definitely on his last legs, and it was no great accomplishment for the federal government to swoop in and steal credit for the kill.
That the 1964 law passed Congress isn’t evidence at all that Jim Crow was on its way out, because Jim Crow was a combination of state laws and private action; none of it was federal law. How many congressmen and senators from Southern states do you think voted for the CRA? In the fifties and sixties, who do you think won more Southern governorships: integrationists, or hardcore segregationists? (Look up when Lester Maddox got elected governor—even I was stunned by this.)
What would work as evidence that Jim Crow was on its last legs would be a move away from segregation laws and the politicians who supported them, and a decline in segregated businesses and a corresponding increase in integrated ones. I’m not aware of either of those things happening prior to 1964; are you?
That depends on what you mean by "cancel culture". Having a culture that's able to cancel people is good in principle, but whether the use of that ability is good in practice depends on who's doing it and for what purpose.
There's no such thing as a system that prevents all mistakes, regardless of whether you have a free market or not. But the incentives to correct errors are generally stronger under a free market than otherwise.
Very valid, we're lacking a control here (even in the theoretical argumentation). I suppose the cultural osmosis perspective was supposed to be the main alternative, but of course people generally encounter school *and* culture, so it's tough to see how to separate those two without considering e.g. unschooled children. A significant difference between those approaches would be unschooling = (basically) noone gets educated, schooling = (basically) everyone gets educated, homeschooling = privileged people get educated (perhaps at a higher level and certainly with higher individual focus).
As an anecdata - I'm a homeschooled kid, and due to this I missed on a lot of standard cultural osmosis as well. Instead, most of my early osmotic knowledge was influenced on the kind of thing my parents were interested in, which means that up until high school I behaved like a mini-gen-X, up to favourite media and speech patterns. I had little to no idea about things like Marvel heroes or fashion trends.
It's not necessarily bad to replace one osmosis with the other, and I don't regret this particular feature of my childhood environment. But I sure feel like I'm lucky I have educated parents, from whom I was able to acquire a fair share of useful background knowledge.
This is an excellent argument. It's very clear with immigrant children too: school is a key factor in acculturation for people who DON'T come with the mainstream cultural equipment.
I was never home schooled, but still only picked up some standard "osmotic" knowledge from school because of a certain weirdness of my family environment (no TV at home, not religious in a 95% religious country etc etc).
> most of my early osmotic knowledge was influenced on the kind of thing my parents were interested in, which means that up until high school I behaved like a mini-gen-X, up to favourite media and speech patterns. I had little to no idea about things like Marvel heroes
Marvel heroes are a big cultural presence in gen-X. My dad had a huge collection of Daredevil comics.
Different country. Where I am from, gen X childhood still mostly fell on the years behind the Iron curtain, so being into superheroes is more associated with younger folks.
I had some, mostly through hobby clubs / group lessons (I attended painting and chess and a few others). However, this was still much less contact with peers than an average kid of my age would have.
The method of schooling (compulsory, home, un-) and what cultural environment you will be exposed to during/after schooling are probably related. If anything, I would expect that culture to reinforce the effects of the experienced schooling method, not average it out or even counteract it. Either way, you would indeeed have to look at the different kinds of schooling and what kinds of culture these people are exposed to later in life.
But we don't establish that they would start out learning the same, or that, having not learned something in early life, they would pick it up as well later on.
I don't want to say the poll statistics cited in the post are necessarily well done and representative, but if they are, it sounds like the benefit of schooling for knowledge and skills is close to zero for most people.
Other people have raised points about what the numbers may and may not show. What I'm saying is simply that even if these results are taken to be bad, they may or may not be as bad as results that we would see from the absence of education.
Yeah, I'm just saying if the post can show that there is no benefit of schooling for knowledge and skills, then it's not possible for the alternatives to be meaningfully worse.
Or to put it another way, this post would first have to find and include some more positive results of schooling before doing a comparison to alternatives. Because even if it found that only 3% of homeschooled kids were proficient in numeracy (compared to the 10% mentioned in the post), it wouldn't make me think, "well, I guess traditional schooling isn't so bad by comparison". It would make me think that both were a waste for the vast majority of people. And the small difference is likely correlation, not causation (homeschooling is commonly done for religious reasons).
(Hypotheticals aside, I liked my schooling overall and felt I got value from it.)
Who is looking after and schooling the kids? Does “cheaper” include the income lost when going from both parents being employed to only one having a career, or are we just assuming here?
One thing worth analyzing is how much that second income actually helps in the end.
This is something my mom likes to point out when she does classes on personal finance for local groups. When you don't have one person at home, that piles on a lot of additional expenses. You need a second car, with all the ongoing expenses that entails. (Maybe not so much in the age of remote work, but still...) You need to pay extra for childcare. You get home and feel too tired to prepare meals, so you order in or eat out more often. And so on, and so forth. Add up all of these extra expenses and compare them to the smaller of the two incomes, and... it doesn't look like such a good idea anymore.
Obviously this is going to vary hugely by job, country, region, age of kids etc, but when I was a teen and my three siblings were coming up to that age, my mum went back to work so that we could afford for us all to go to a private high school (the local senior school having been tried and rejected, FWIW). So for us it did in fact make financial sense at that point in time.
I assume one alternative considered is to wrap up schooling and start working earlier. So, instead of 12 years of general education, 4–5 years of university, and starting to work at 22 to 24 or later, have, say, 6 years of general education, 5 years of vocational education, and start working at 17.
Does anybody remember the comment, years back, from someone home- or un-schooled who said that apart from some embarrassing knowledge gaps ("What? Dinosaurs aren't mythical?") they didn't really miss a lot of important things and caught up fast?
The post starts mentioning the - famous in this circles - book by Prof. Bryan Caplan: "The case against education". So, if one is indeed curious about more data than a relatively short post can provide, there is a place to turn to. Studies that do try to answer your question found not much - if any - worse results. Maybe we should wonder what the alternatives might cost (esp. day-care for kids without teachers), schools are about 10k per year per student.
"Education has always had the status of a sacred institution right across the political spectrum. When Tony Blair came up with his “Education, Education, Education” pitch in the 1997 UK general election it seemed like just unassailable common sense. So what to make then of broadsides from radical deschooling intellectuals (see below) questioning the very basis of our whole education system. Broadsides like these: “Schools fail to teach what they pretend to teach. Most of their inmates spend years failing to learn things like Mathematics, Science and French”[1] ....and: “An illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is a result of teaching.”[2]...." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/teach-your-children-well
Yes Curiosity is the thing (even if it can sometimes kill the cat). If you could somehow manufacture a Curiosity and Scepticism pill, there would be no need for schooling.
It gets even worse after high school. A friend of mine once noted the curious phenomenon (this was before student loan forgiveness became a hot political issue) that a college education was the one thing that many people are perfectly content to pay for and not get.
Sorry; I should have been more clear. What he was referring to was kids who don't take schooling seriously and waste all their time partying, and never even get the credential because of it.
This, in the end, is where I think Scott and much of the crowd here is missing the forest for the trees.
Schooling is probably not very helpful for people that are very smart because ultimately schools need to educate the not-very-smart crowd.
Yes your friends might learn about the Orwellian worlds from their parents/friends. But is the poor kid in rural Alabama likely to hear that from their friends?
School does quite a lot for the poor kid from rural Alabama! The ability to learn a) how to cooperate and coordinate with others, b) how to read deeply and think critically, c) how to do research, and d) that there *are* free resources such as the Alabama Virtual Library (available to anyone with an Alabama IP address) goes a long way!
As a side note, Alabama has the LEAST doctors per capita of anywhere in the United States. Public school is a starting point where you can start learning about how to improve your environment and maybe fill the gaps in health care yourself.
And if you're from one of the many communities in rural Alabama that doesn't have a sewer system, there is a very compelling reason to get educated enough to go earn big money, or at bare minimum, leave.
***
I'm with you in that vocational options are fantastic and credentialism is real, but public school *before* that point does quite a lot, even in spite of students' tendencies to zone out.
(a) Can be learnt better in other ways (e.g., by working in a job), whilst most people will never use (b), (c) and (d) after leaving school, if they even use it during school.
- perhaps it's not about averages but extremes: sure, most people won't learn anything. Some will learn how to create mRNA vaccines.
- perhaps it's about knowing what you don't know, and knowing where to look things up. I don't recall much about the Peloponnesian war, but I remember it happened; and I know what to Google to find more information about it.
>>it's not about averages but extremes: sure, most people won't learn anything. Some will learn how to create mRNA vaccines.
I agree wholeheartedly with this. And at the other end, while some higher IQ middle class kids might learn to read fluently by the age of 7 anyway, a large proportion of the rest would simply not at all.
Weird, seems to me that school is most useful for the left tail and if anything detrimental to the brightest kids. The brightest kids learn to read before school starts and would probably be reading biochem in their spare time if people weren't forcing them to spend all their time making collages representing what fractions mean to them (yes I am bitter)
Is it? I remember loads of experimental kits for all kinds of MINT subjects in my childhood. I myself got a kit for basic electrical engineering. It explained all kinds of basics from wires, resistors, capacitors, up to transistors. The final assembly was a very basic transistor radio.
I don't remember clearly, but I must have been between 8-10. I had no one accompanying me on my learning there, so I didn't get most of the transistor stuff. But at least a lot of basics were understood and retained. Another meta skill learnt was just the kind of agency and wonder in that - the final radio was awesome. Using the water tap (connected to long plumbing in the house) as an antenna (as was recommended in the manual), I received and listened to AFM english-speaking radio (from the US forces in Germany) in brilliantly clear quality. This happened completely outside the school environment.
Now thinking about it, I wish I kept getting these kinds of kits as presents for more subjects, and more complex ones later on. Instead, I got a computer, which was kind of a kit experience as well at that time (so not too bad of a replacement for the kits).
So I disagree. Biochem experiments can be as simple as growing a yeast bread and maybe identifying the gas the bacteria produce through some chemical method.
Similarly, if Caplan had his way, and education were subsidised to a much lower degree, then the people who would be disproportionately affected would be those whose families cannot pay for education out of their own pocket. Caplan’s response to this is that his recommendation would benefit the poorest the most, since they are the ones who are most harmed by credentialism; this is true on average, yes, but what about the geniuses who could have become professors, and were never given the chance? I don’t know that it always makes sense to base policy only on averages
We have stabdardized testing to identify geniuses who live in poverty. Or at least we would if we didn't deem the results from said tests to be racist, and so ban their use for practical purposes at almost every opportunity.
If standardized tests are banned in US schools, I think that will come as a big surprise to actual students in US schools, who end up taking standardized tests pretty often.
I was referring to this, but it's also hardly like we put standardized tests to useful purposes in our schools. They're used to measure school performance, not student performance, which is honestly worse than if they were not used at all. It's just punishing and rewarding schools for their racial and economic demographics, and further entrences the woke narrative by conceding to its points by forcing its believers to live up to them in the real world. Which they never can, because their beliefs are wrong.
I don't see a straight line between reducing schooling (a policy change) and reducing credentialism (an economic/cultural change). If anything, it would probably create a bigger credential gap.
Oh and one more thing - you're probably thinking of bright kids in a supportive environment... How will a child learn to read before school if their parents don't give them books?
It's a great motte! I'd be happy if school proponents argued that completely removing schooling then we'd have way more illiteracy and the current system is better than that. I'd even agree.
But a decade of schooling after teaching kids to read where there will be basically no proven value is a hell of bailey to defend.
It's not just reading. What about algebra? Sure, super bright and motivated kids might read up themselves. But there's still value in exposing some bright but less motivated students to these concepts.
Empirically that's useless. In fact, I believe it's even actually harmful as it will push kids that could like it later have an aversion to it.
Anecdote: I hated statistics at school. Thought I was terrible at it and incapable of doing it. By luck I started working with it, now I'm great and love it. School was _harmful_ in my life.
The same happened with Spanish. I could have easily have learnt it, but school drilled a hatred of the language on me that only these days I realised it would actually be good to learn. But now I'm older and don't have the time / patience
It's not useless. As long as there are kids from underprivileged backgrounds, who manage to do well at school, go to a good uni, and get a job they like, school is defensible, unless you can sketch a practical alternative route they could have taken.
What *about* it? I can think of exactly one time when I've used it outside of a school setting — it was quite memorable for how rare it was! — and that was to solve an explicitly algebra-based puzzle in an escape room.
Geometry and trig, I use from time to time in my work as a software developer. Algebra? Never. If my experience in the real world has taught me anything on the subject, it's that the whiny kids who asked "when am I ever going to use this?" were actually right!
Plenty of people do though. My point was, you can't expect kids to learn this at home; and if you want to give everyone a chance to do their dream job, school is possibly a good way of doing this. Not necessarily the best! But I don't think Chaplan addresses this.
I of course don't know what kind of software you develop, but algebra is the kind of thing that, if you're going any tech work at all, you might use implicitly without thinking of it as "doing algebra". If you've ever figured out "where is the breakeven point in this tradeoff", you're probably solving for X somehow.
You are not representative. If the great remote learning pandemic experiment taught us anything it is that most students (even college students in major classes learning stuff that presumably interests them and is career relevant) can’t really learn without structure and hand holding. Autodidacts are the exception, and rarer than lizard men.
Goodness, that's a great point. All this has really been disproven quite conclusively in the last four years. People had measurable learning loss effects when not in school.
Getting your kids school to close on you when you haven't made allowances for it is a much different beast than choosing not to school your kid on your own agenda.
I'm not arguing for or against universal schooling here, simply making the point that the pandemic really isn't a good natural experiment to argue one way or the other.
Even for working class children, spending 3 years out of school when it's the societally natural thing, or spending 3 years out of school with no idea when it'll end would obviously yield vastly different outcomes.
It's very different to be told "schools will be closed until further notice" and it ends up being 3 years, and being told outright "schools will be closed for 3 years".
It's also different to have schools close on you when the entire society revolves around schools instead of having a more liberal schooling model.
The pandemic really isn't a good natural experiment in this matter.
Eliminate school and the typical student (family) will not start pursuing optimized independent learning. Probably what they will do will be even less optimized than what we got in the pandemic. Some will, but they will be a rounding error.
This is the conclusion I don't disagree with; but a lot of pandemic education was 'sit at your computer and follow along with the teacher trying to keep the class on task while she does her normal lesson over zoom.'
Seems optimized for creating distractions and not something we can draw a lot of conclusions on.
Wait, you're a professor, right? I'm thinking of k-12 education at the time. Perhaps university courses were done differently.
The obvious response to that is to create classes and schools for gifted kids, where they can socialize and learn a curriculum optimized to their abilities, rather than waiting for the dumb kids to finish collages.
NYC used to have schools like this, I don't know if they still do (there are obvious political headwinds), but any big city should be able to while drawing from the pool of smart kids all across the city.
However, there may also be something to be said for required exposure to the other 99% of the human race that has different interests and priorities.
The headwinds are there for a reason, and I expect that to be a major political division in the future. Kids who excel in school make the schools a better place for all students. Recognizing this, some people want to make schools for only excellent students, so that they will benefit significantly from being around each other. Other people, recognizing the same thing, want to distribute these students around less functional students in order to help bring them up. These are contradictory goals, obviously, and the plan that's best for the desired students is worst for every other student.
From a policy perspective I don't know which plan would be better overall, but there are both significant benefits and significant drawbacks to both.
If you have this problem, you just have too few tracks. The kids who benefitted from the top kids being there would do even better in a class of their own.
Saying as someone who stonewalled those learning-incapable stupid ones (i.e. my entire primary-school save for one person, and it was probably an above-median class in a large white city outside US); and entered a kind of feedback loop with a professor, locking out (for multiple weeks) my actually good university group save at most for two other students who could keep up but not always participate much.
Oh, and at some point I had reasonably strong groupmates at university sneak into a definitely-weak group — because that's where it was feasible to get the basics of that specific subject at a low pace. Not the same subject as the one I hijacked.
So yeah, half-measures are insufficient, sort all the students so that noone believes to be stuck in a class with learning-incapable idiots.
>The kids who benefitted from the top kids being there would do even better in a class of their own.
To my knowledge what research there is on this says the opposite. Having the smart kids in class seems to raise the expectations and results for the struggling students
Does the measured case includes leaving the do-not-care kids in? Because sure, reducing the share of those who care does no good to what happens in the class (from the point of view of those who do care)
You are correct that a lot of the issue is the do-not-care kids. By diluting them with the care-a-lot kids, that makes things better for the kids in the middle and often the kids at the bottom. And I don't think it's primarily about academics, but instead about environment. An environment dominated by smart kids who try hard is going to calmer and more conducive to learning. An environment dominated by the kids that don't care is going to be disruptive, loud, and bad for learning. This is partly just not being disrupted by those individual students, and partly a peer-pressure effect with disruptive kids conforming to the local norm.
Middle kids are going to do much better on average around higher achievers because the achievers set better norms. Throwing a single high-achieving kid into a disruptive class is just going to disrupt that student, though.
There's definitely a thought in education to not put kids on tracks at all, so that the disruptive kids get spread around among the less-disruptive and don't all bring each other down. This likely benefits them at the expense of those that would have been in an even less-disruptive environment. They don't at all frame it this way, of course, but instead talk about how much better the lower performers learn around the higher performers.
To be fair, there are also some students who imitate the furniture during classes, being perfectly non-disruptive but usually not learning much either.
It all does get disruptive when a teacher attempts not to leave them behind, of course.
As for low-performers in the high-performer-dense environment, are they learning better, or do they have a better choice of whose work to copy to get passing grades? I was a curious kid so I did once try to find out what it takes to not let a specific classmate copy during a test… it was a bit of an effort.
One problem is that there is still stealth tracking because wealthy parents will go to great lengths to put their children into the "best" schools, either through private school or buying houses in expensive districts. It's the genius from poor families that lose out when there's no explicit tracking.
I've seen you and other folks say things like this before, and it's just so, so far afield from my experience. School provided a structure for me to learn to apply my intellect and a way to gain self esteem from excelling in topics like math and science.
I think it really comes down to "Some implementations of school are good, and others are bad," and trying to draw narrow conclusions about school in general is destined to fail.
Think of it like a medication or treatment with wildly different outcomes for one measure of efficacy (learning) but relatively consistently positive outcomes for another outcome measure (caring for children while their parents are at work). It's still on net useful and improves learning outcomes specifically for some group of the population even if the aggregate learning outcome measures are ambiguous.
I learned to read before school started and probably stuff like times tables as well. But my parents are very much not math/science people, and so most of my math/science knowledge comes from school. Even the fact that I liked those subjects was discovered at school!
Also, once I got past Algebra 1 or so, my parents weren’t able to help me much with math homework. But they were helping me with, say, Latin homework much longer than that.
I think school is most useful for the average kid, as it should be. Average kids are the most common type of kids and strangely, despite this, they’re the ones who often get ignored in discussions like this about education.
I could read before I started school (somewhat over the age of four, which was the official school starting age in my time, no preschool or kindergarten) and I'm not particularly smart so I'm rather amused by the guy bragging that he taught his two year old to read (but don't everybody try this, only some special parents and kids can do it!). I don't even remember learning to read, so I think that means I was learning around two as well.
Yeah, maybe some bright kids would be reading biochemistry in their spare time - or maybe not. I was reading Charlotte Bronte at age nine (and mostly frustrated at the large chunks of dialogue in untranslated French when I had no access to any kind of dictionary to translate this or means of learning French) but I *definitely* needed the practice on fractions because I was, and remain, absolutely useless at anything to do with maths.
Some kids will do biochemistry in their free time. Some kids will do music and the arts. Some kids will just hang around on street corners.
Deiseach, the claim that you aren't particularly smart is absurd on its face. You have to surely be top percentile on a bunch of axes. If nothing else, I was raised Catholic and your understanding of theology and church history is deeper than anyone I've ever met, including our bishop.
I agree with your general point, but I can't in good conscience let you rest it on such a dubious foundation :p
No, honestly, I really am average to stupid (depending on what the day is and what the topic). I think I'm in the range 100-105 IQ, getting up to 110 on a good day. I've never done any proper test, but that feels about right.
I'm good with words, but that's no more credit to me than a bird being good at flying; my paternal family is wordcels all the way even though we're not particularly well-off or middle-class; in general, upper working class to lower middle class, with the newer generations doing better 😁
Maths is definitely where I fall down, I have no innate or instinctive "getting" of it at all and I'm stuck on a very basic level.
What I am good at, due to a combination of said paternal genes which also probably have a strong dollop of autism spectrum/neurosis/anxiety/social awkwardness and avoidance in the mix, is getting fixated on a particular subject and then acquiring enough broad (but shallow) knowledge on it to be able to pass as much better-informed than I am in reality (typical Gemini there!)
Thank you for the kind words, though, and I'm pleased to see that my compulsory school attendance is still paying off dividends in teaching me how to pass for normie in general interactions!
I'm with Godshatter. The thing we call "intelligence" has a lot of components, and "IQ" and "g" are crude averages that smooth over the texture in the data in order to provide a single number. I'll trust you that your math skills are bad - I'm horrible at statistics, myself - but you clearly have high ability in other areas, stuff I can only describe as "intellectual agility" and "pattern-matching ability". (If you average out at 105 but have 90 for math, what does that say about the other parts? Oh, wait, that's math...)
Assuming their parents know what biochem is and expose them to it. Not all smart kids are that lucky.
School at least provides an overview of the context of what fields of human knowledge exists. It sucks to get hooked on an area of knowledge and then have to learn it as slowly as teh bottom 20% can keep up, but I think it's a bit of hubris to assume every smart kid would have gotten hooked on those ares of knowledge in the first place without being exposed to them in school.
I disagree, there were a bunch of interesting and/or foundational topics that I became aware of and learned only because of school. Otherwise, I would have spent that time learning more minutiae about StarCraft and Magic: the Gathering.
The only kids for whom school is really unnecessary are those who are both smart and high in agency. IME agency does not automatically arise from curiosity, which is somewhat of a blind spot for people who are naturally highly agentic.
I went to a public elementary school, was bored out of my mind and hated it. In 6th grade I started going to a private gifted school, which used better teaching methods and was a lot more challenging but still had a lot of structure. Going to that school was very good for me. Not despite of the structure but because of it. 12 year old me would have been playing a bunch of video games, hanging out with friends, and reading fiction if I wasn't in school. There are definitely some bright kids who are super curious and would read biochem in their free time, but there are many, many bright kids who need their curiosity guided and need to be exposed to different fields in school.
> 12 year old me would have been playing a bunch of video games, hanging out with friends, and reading fiction if I wasn't in school.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I know video games get a bad rap a lot of the time, but they're *directly* responsible for me landing a successful, lucrative career as a software developer. If young me hadn't run across the concept of programming and thought "wow, I could build my own video games with this!" I would probably never have ended up discovering I have a knack for it and gotten the opportunity to make a living doing something I enjoy.
I dunno, I know a lot of smart-but-lazy kids who would have happily spent their whole youth doing nothing in particular if they hadn't had the discipline of being forced to listen to classes and do exams.
Also I think it's very easy to get a very superficial understanding of something like biochemistry from reading books, but understanding it properly takes discipline, you really have to sit down and study a whole lot of individually uninteresting facts. Some smart kids might get there on their own.
Success is often more about social skills than whether you read at two, and so is school. School is as much about soft skills as it is how well you do on multiple choice questions. Unlike academic skills, these are not taught directly in school, but through exposure.
My autistic kid is home educated and learned to read at two. My NT daughter is the opposite; she struggled to read but got there eventually, and benefits from school, yes, in terms of socialisation. Many NT kids do.
Of the two I think my daughter will ultimately be more successful though she lags behind academically compared to the ASD one, because I don't know that the autistic one will ever be able to have a job at all due to social deficits.
There are some people for whom academic skills propel them through life, and I think we're disproportionately represented on this blog. But I would say the bulk of people are getting by on social skills instead.
I think this is true of the far right tail of intelligence and motivation, but not typically true for kids one standard deviation above the mean in both.
I read your review and had a question that I thought would be better to post here. You said “there is no doubt that some countries have education systems that work better than that of the US; instead of drastically reducing the provision of education in America, why not emulate the education system of others?” It’s been a few years, did you ever happen to find a better education system than the US? There are certainly many countries that have less wasteful spending on education, but in terms of increasing productivity, I think the case against education applies well to all of them.
When you compare Asian, White, Hispanic, and African Americans test scores to the test scores of the region of origin, Americans perform either better or with no statistically significant difference from their region of origin. I would love to improve the test scores of all students but especially minorities, but looking at other countries, no one has seemed to find a solution to do it. In higher education, we even more clearly top all the lists for education. So I am genuinely asking since I have been try to find one myself, were you able to find a country with a better education system?
I was going by things like PISA - Singapore, Japan, Switzerland, etc all do well. Remarkably, the US does better on reading than any other English-speaking country except Canada though.
PISA was what I was basing it on to. Our Asian and White test scores are already at parity with those countries . So essentially the only problem we have left to solve with education is how to raise Hispanic and African American test scores to the level of Whites, which has been one of the top priorities for education researchers and I have yet to find a country that solved it. I keep hoping we’ll find a solution, but since we haven’t, I’m sympathetic to Bryan’s argument that we should cut funding.
>- perhaps it's not about averages but extremes: sure, most people won't learn anything. Some will learn how to create mRNA vaccines.
Or it's about specialization: Most people are not qualified to do 50% of the job positions on the market, why should every kid excel in every subject at school?
If every kid remembers about a third of what they learned in school, but everyone remembers a different third based on their interests and future careers, that sounds like pretty normal specialization of labor and cognitive/cultural diversity.
Exactly, I don't even understand the original argument, because... how do these "cultural" facts get into the "culture", so that then the unwashed masses can get them via "cultural osmosis"??
Surely, Shakespeare wouldn't have survived if there was no schooling! Because even if a few wise men did study him, if they then created a cultural artifact, eg a movie based on him, no-one would watch it! Cause they wouldn't even know who he is!
So this cultural context is so heavily shaped by school (and the guys who do give a shit about what they learn) that I don't even know what the alternative would look like. Probably a lot closer to Idiocracy, than it already looks like...
> Surely, Shakespeare wouldn't have survived if there was no schooling! Because even if a few wise men did study him, if they then created a cultural artifact, eg a movie based on him, no-one would watch it! Cause they wouldn't even know who he is!
What makes you think that got transmitted through school and study? Shakespeare was an entertainer; the default hypothesis here is that his work survived due to its enduring popularity as entertainment.
At the time, yes, but in recent decades Shakespeare does seem to be mostly sustained by school. I would guess the number of kids who get exposed to Shakespeare in school is 10-100X those who see a movie or organically read a play. And without future writers and audience goers being exposed to it in school, there would be far less people to write or see the next movie, so awareness would rapidly die down.
School doesn't seem to be doing a particularly good job of it recently.
Are you old enough to remember _Boy Meets World,_ a popular TV show from the 90s? When Cory, talking to Mr. Feeney, used Romeo and Juliet as an example of a classic love story worth emulating, it was a punchline. "Ha ha, look how dumb Cory is, that he doesn't know what happened to them in the end!"
Fast forward one short decade, and Taylor Swift's "Love Story" makes the same mistake... but plays it completely straight. (She also, in the same song, displays total ignorance of The Scarlet Letter.) And, if the song's popularity was anything to go by, almost no one noticed!
<i>- perhaps it's not about averages but extremes: sure, most people won't learn anything. Some will learn how to create mRNA vaccines.</i>
Wouldn't the obvious answer just be to test kids at a certain age (11, or 14, or whatever), and only continue educating those who score above a certain threshold? That way we could still educate our super-geniuses, without forcing future binmen to waste time trying to understand literary criticism.
How about just letting them decide whether to continue studying, and what subjects to study? I expect the kid who'll invent mRNA vaccines will choose to continue studying biology and chemistry, while the kid who'll be a binman won't.
Exactly. I recently found myself having to use something that I last studied in college, and while I didn't remember any of the details, I did remember that it exists and could easily look it up and use it.
I remember the rats, too; and I'm reasonably certain I haven't encountered any mention of it since reading 1984 about 20 years ago. Possibly it's an emotional connection thing; I don't personally have a horror of rats, but I do have a horror of something else and it kind of imprinted the scene on my mind.
Daring to criticise (politely criticise) Hanania's "Shakespeare is Fake" essay made Hanania very angry. So angry that I got banned....and not just banned but - and I quote - "for 100years!"
I don't want to be around people who see a pile on and decide to join in. Given that the thrust of his argument is correct, it sounds like there was no need for your comment.
I have never in my long life ever joined any kind of "pile on" about anything. And you haven't seen my comment so you have no basis on which to judge its merit. On the contrary your own comments here are a kind of "pile on" type thing....merely gratuitous insults for which you should be ashamed.
There's no such thing as an n=1 pile on. Look, you're upset with a single person criticising you, i.e. me. How do you think Hanania felt with 50 people criticising him? Then you come along and add your criticism. If you can't see the inappropriateness of that, or the meanness of it, you truly need to do some self-reflection. It's the context in which you gave the criticism. And to top it off, *he was right*, so your criticism couldn't have been all that good.
I'm not "upset" and you weren't "criticising"....I would been fine about it if you had been. What you have been doing does not deserve to be called criticism. (In order to do that you would have to have had sight of my comment on Hanania's 'stack). You were being gratuitously insulting pure and simple. It would appear that you simply have no conception of the difference between criticism and insult. You seem to have the notion that criticism is inherently "inappropriate" and "mean". Enough of your nonsense.
Was he right? I'm not convinced. I'm only about 10% into reading about the mess, but so far, he's taking it as a given that Shakespeare is only one of let's say millions of writers, and it's probable that someone better came along.
But that ignores that Shakespeare, at the time, would have had to go through many massive filters to finally get to the point of writing what was written.
I believe the journey, when it is hard and full of obstacles, transforms you in a way that will show through in your work. The journey was difficult for Shakespeare, and has become so easy for subsequent writers, it's unsurprising the more modern stuff is generally "meh."
I'll keep reading. Maybe this (and other?) points are addressed in Hanania's essay.
Aside: I notice that when I type in "Shakespeare is Fake" on Google, it does not give any auto-complete option of Hanania, and the actual result for it is somewhere halfway down the page. Predictable behaviour from the search engine that gave up on being a search engine and decided to be a cultural definer instead.
This is utterly ridiculous. His critical comment, which you have no knowledge of the content or tone of, is automatically inappropriate, mean and bannable, no matter what it actually said, because many other people left critical comments?
What if he was the first to leave a critical comment? What if his criticism was different from others, and especially valuable? Oh wait, you've already decided it can't be valuable, because Hanania is perfectly correct about everything he says in the post and therefore anyone criticising it should be banned,
Do you not see how this would apply to any criticism of any blog post which received anything but unanimous acclaim? The implied principle is completely unworkable and unjust, and seems especially bizarre coming from someone who is presumably right-leaning politically.
Nonsense. Criticism is valid quite independantly of the existence of other similar criticism. There could be 1 million negative comments; it wouldn't make the addition of another one any less valid a comment.
If you read a comment section before you comment (as you always should) and you find many or most comments being critical or negative of the piece to which they're attached, your decision to also post a critical comment is absolutely joining a pile on. One of the reasons cancel culture got to be a real part of society is that it doesn't intuitively feel like a pile on for the commenters, it just feels like you're throwing a stone that probably missed, but it feels very very real and very serious to the recipient of all these atomized "criticisms."
Oh dear...another one peddling graceless presumptiveness. How could you possibly know where my critical comment came on the thread....it could been the first for all you know? I had barely even heard of this 'pile on' notion till today and it is certainly not something I would ever indulge in because I am not a groupthink type of person....but judging by your peevish, ill judged comment here I suspect it is something that you probably do on a regular basis.
Then let him preemptively ban me, too, since I would also have "piled on" about "SBF is right, Shakespeare is dumb and over-rated".
Though I know Hanania likes to do clickbait rage, so what his real opinion might be, I have no idea - and don't care. Shakespeare introduced me to the beauty and musicality of language when I was 15, and whatever some "so smart I got myself arrested for fraud" guy and his hangers-on may think is of no persuasive value to me.
Hanania is a stupid person and he says stupid things. Apparently some people here think you can just say "against fideism!" and that somehow makes Hanania worth addressing. But unlike legitimate "against fideism!", there is nothing insightful or interesting to be learned from Hanania's stupid things.
He's right though that SBF's point was valid. The prior on Shakespeare being born when he was is low, under some simple but reasonable models, for some reasonable reference classes. (Although describing it as "pretty damning" is an overstatement.)
There were a lot of bad arguments in the comment section like, "what are the odds that the greatest writer's surname would start with the letter S?". The prior on that is low, and it's valid to say it's low. It's 1 in 26 under a very simplistic model that doesn't take letter frequency in names into account.
"Names that starts with S" might be a reasonable reference class if you hypothesizing that people with S names are more likely to become famous writers. But it's obviously not a reasonable reference class for a debate on whether we give undue reverence to past writers.
A low prior doesn't mean Shakespeare isn't the greatest writer. It just means that if he's the greatest, either it's a genuine coincidence, or you need an explanation on why a person in the past was more likely to be the greatest.
To be clear, I'm not defending any of Hanania's statements on Shakespeare other than that specific statistical argument. I'm also not claiming there aren't better models or reference classes the would give a higher prior. Just that the chosen one is reasonable.
He's not correct, SBF's argument (and his) is stupid. They construe the meaning of "greatest writer" in such a literal, autistic manner as to make it incoherent. "Writership" is not an objective, culturally independent quality. Even within a single culture, writers do not face off against each other in contests to determine which writer is the better among them. When people say "Shakespeare is the greatest English writer," they're clearly *not* saying that if you put him and Jonathan Franzen in a pit, only Shakespeare would come out of it alive, (unscathed, wearing Franzen's blood-spattered glasses). Even in contests where relative skill is understood to be objectively measurable, "who is the greatest of all time?" is understood to be distinct from the question "who would win a tournament if it were held today?" For instance, many people call Muhammed Ali "The Greatest" but also believe that he would have fallen to Tyson in a hypothetical fight held during their respective primes.
Given all this, making an argument that Shakespeare is "unlikely" to be the greatest writer because the *prior* of his being so is low given the English-speaking population at the place at time of his birth, is irritating and facile. It's on the same level as publishing a detailed statistical argument to prove to your coworker that the "World's Greatest Dad" mug his wife got him is highly unlikely to be descriptively accurate.
1. You haven't argued against the soundness of the argument. You seem to be saying that their argument is correct, but they're fighting a strawman, since no one thinks Shakespeare is literally the greatest in any meaningful or measurable way.
2. The exact definition of "greatest writer" doesn't matter for the argument. Even with a weird definition, like "the greatest writer was the person who wrote the most vowels in their lifetime", the argument still holds. It's a very general argument. It only requires a definition where people after 1616 could be the greatest writer and that it's reasonable enough to use a simple model where each educated English-speaking person has an equal chance of being that person.
3. It's weird people get so angry about this. Not you in particular, but the entire comment section on Hanania's blog. I can't imagine there'd be a similar reaction if he had claimed this about any other writer.
> It's on the same level as publishing a detailed statistical argument to prove to your coworker that the "World's Greatest Dad" mug his wife got him is highly unlikely to be descriptively accurate.
Your coworker would probably say, "look, you're right, I'm not actually the greatest dad in the world, and you're clearly autistic".
People understand that "World's Greatest Dad" mugs are just a cute, lighthearted compliment, and anyone who takes it literally is deluded and narcissistic (with the exception of one dad somewhere, I guess). I don't think you intend to imply that anyone who thinks Shakespeare is literally the greatest writer is crazy.
There are many people who really do think Shakespeare is the greatest English writer, which makes it fair game for Hanania to debate the point.
1. Daycare. With extended family destroyed, both parents at work, and child labor useless/illegal they need to be stashed somewhere.
2. Domestication. School attempts to instill conformity with how modern civilization works.
And in a distant third is the signalling value so beloved by contrarians, where all of us collectively pretend that school at all fulfills its nominal purpose.
>>transmit cultural knowledge, give most people an ability to function in society - have we forgotten that most societies were illiterate pre universal schooling - and to filter out the brightest for the elites.<<
I'd add "provide overview, testing ground and foundational basis of the areas of potential pursuit/excellence to the ones who WILL pursue specific paths".
I'm completely failing to understand why the idea that "we teach biology to everyone not in order that everyone knows forever how chloroplasts work, but so the ones who WILL want/need to know it later get a chance to".
I'm wondering if this isn't because people engaged in this conversation mostly come from the backgrounds in which having an institution that performs this task via universal compulsory exposure is not necessary or even advantageous and don't realise how many people would NOT became even vaguely aware of DNA, chloroplasts, Moscow, electrons, North Atlantic Gyre etc etc etc otherwise/through cultural osmosis -- and if they do, it'd be much later than some of their peers.
And I'm not even talking about "underclass" kids, or kids of very uneducated working class parents. I've been consistently amazed about stuff teenage children of perfectly functional, middle class parents with some form of post secondary education didn't know (from meeting my children's peers) until they were exposed to it at school. Never mind the ones from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. [I live in a non-urban area of the UK]
The arrow of causality is backwards. Usually societies start developing and then spend some of that money on universal education. The best known example is 19th C Britain which was an industrial and creativity powerhouse but half the kids were in the workforce, not schools.
There are also plenty of examples of countries especially communist and Middle Eastern that have widespread education and are not rich.
Isn't that just because high-IQ countries have both better PISA scores and higher economic output? Or is there some reason to posit a direct causal relationship?
For 19th century Britain, see Sherlock Holmes' view on public education, which pretty clearly is the author interjecting his view and optimism around it:
"It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high, and allow you to look down upon the houses like this."
I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself.
"Look at those big, isolated clumps of building rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-colored sea."
"The board-schools."
"Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future. — “The Naval Treaty”
This is getting kids out of the workforce and into education, so that they might do better in life. We're now contemplating sending them back to the workforce since we claim they learn nothing in school. That may well be, but I also think a bunch of the average 12-15 year olds looking (or not looking) for work isn't going to work that great either; we've done away with the heavy manufacturing industries which needed a lot of manual labour, and so we're instead going to put them all into service industry jobs (and having had experience of how, say, a fast-food restaurant operated on a bank holiday when everyone there was pretty much a teenager, I'm not optimistic on that).
Basically agreed. In the comment section thus far, I think that "cultural knowledge" has been a bit underemphasized. A lot of day-to-day communication goes beyond just language and really needs shared cultural references. I mildly disagree with Scott's downplaying of a "ratchet" effect for cultural references.
This doesn't require that everyone _value_ particular works, e.g. "1984", and the choice of _which_ works is, in a sense, arbitrary (just as the vocabulary of a language is, in a sense, arbitrary). But it is important that many cultural references be _shared_.
> This kind of argument is pretty easy to dispute. Uneducated societies are never rich, transitioning from peasant to educated explains a lot of the economic growth in the modern era.
The direction of causality is not at all clear there. Education could have followed economic growth.
> have we forgotten that most societies were illiterate pre universal schooling
Literacy is very important, agreed. Schooling served a purpose at the time to make an illiterate populace literate, agreed. Is that an argument that schooling still serves that important purpose, when the widely accepted cultural knowledge is that literacy is important, and most kids are already literate when entering school?
The first two points would point to just replacing schools with daycare centers or something. There is something of the kind in Germany where kids stay longer until their parents can pick them up, where they do their homework, get a meal, play with others etc.. It would certainly cost a lot less than schools do.
"Daycare" where kids just play all day works fine for very young kids, but once you've got a big group of 8 year olds or 12 year olds, you need to work hard to keep them busy or else they'll start organising their own trouble. And if you're warehousing kids all day, you might as well try to teach them something.
Most kids would legit enjoy work, or apprenticing, far more than study. You get PAID for work, and acquire skills that are actually useful and monetizable.
The choice of what to do should be left to the individual kids, and suggestions can and should be offered to them relative to their developmental and their general-intelligence levels. But the notion that the current "warehousing" system is any sort of positive good for the child is a profoundly cruel and stupid belief. Anyone who feels it deserves to be offered free shin kicks by any number of our countless bored, tortured youths who populate our pedagogic institutions.
I also agree that some students should be allowed or even encouraged to leave school earlier in order to apprentice for a job. The money that would be spent schooling them can be used to subsidize their on the job learning and would likely be far more beneficial for them.
Lots of kids check out sometime from middle school through high school, learn almost nothing, and then really drop out the moment they are allowed. Many go on to productive work the moment they are allowed, making money and being less bored, while also learning skills useful to their career.
I think the problem there is that the people in charge of that decision consider it demeaning to work in, say, an oil field instead of moving further into education. Oil field workers are not consulted on that question, but educators with advanced degrees are.
> Most kids would legit enjoy work, or apprenticing, far more than study. You get PAID for work, and acquire skills that are actually useful and monetizable.
Now there's an idea, pay kids to study and turn in assignments and other kinds of work. You can earn a salary doing and learning trades, or academic subjects, or a bunch of other monetizable skills.
Not entirely unreasonable, but the problem with tying it to performance is that you'd incentivise cheating more than ever, right as we've entered an era where it's easier to cheat on your assignments than ever.
The point of academic assignments, or any sort of training assignment, for those with the capability to do them, should be training the students to do something intellectually useful that's both achievable for them eventually but currently out of their reach enough to provide a reasonable challenge. This has been heavily deprioritized ever since we decided to start holding schools responsible for test scores, and we should be taking steps to get away from this.
A better idea would be by giving students money directly and just teaching them how to use it as a part of their schooling. Some would use it better than others, sure. But learning how to handle money is probably the most useful skill you can learn in modern society outside basic literacy and numeracy, yet most of us either don't learn it in school at all, or only learn a small part of it.
Are you sure it would cost less? I was shocked to see the list of supplies students are expected to bring at the beginning of a school year to their elementary school in the US. The items include facial tissues, paper towels, pencils (24-36, depending on your grade), paper, and other things one would think would be provided.
Where does the money go, then, if not to teacher's salaries? Would daycare cost less than the famously low salaries of teachers?
Well you could drastically cut the latter and nothing of value would be lost. To paraphrase Jefferson, schools are administrated best which are administrated least.
If there were no subjects, you wouldn't need people who know each subject at your school, which should cut down significantly on the number of people involved. You also wouldn't have to pay for credentials that you don't need, though that affects different states differently. Some states already hire non-certified teachers regularly (these are often states with the lowest pay, not coincidentally).
If you were optimizing for cheapest operation, I think it would look more like summer camp than a modern public school. Camp counselors tend to be very young and are paid practically nothing. For year-round service, I bet you could have staff at $10-15/hour ($20-30,000/year) equivalents instead of teachers salaries which has a national average *starting* wage at $42,000 and an average over $60k.
As an aside, teachers wages are very close to median wages for the nation as a whole. The lowest average salary is in Mississippi, but almost exactly matches the state's own average salary for all sectors (since it's a poor state). The next lowest are South Dakota and West Virginia, with similar stories.
Some people seem to think teachers should be making more than the communities they serve, but I don't think that's a reasonable argument. There are 3.2 million public school teachers in the US - it's an entirely normal career and paying normal wages doesn't seem out of whack.
I think John Taylor Gatto has a point that a lot of the purpose of school is sorting children into those who have more more of a chance to succeed and those who don't, while real capacity is more evenly distributed.
I think school teaches children to mostly believe that if they didn't learn something in school, they can't learn it at all. The culture is getting better about adult learning, but I don't think effects of school have gone away.
Look at what people seem to really want to learn on their own-- crafts and martial arts. (This is a very rough estimate on my part.) It's precisely things that weren't school subjects.
Part of the problem with school is that it gives academic status to things that children mostly don't want to do-- it ignores motivation, while people are more likely to want to learn things they're interested in.
Well, the proliferation of credentialism is also an important factor here I'd guess. If you can't gainfully employ informally acquired skills, that has to put quite a damper on motivation to learn anything other than amusing fluff.
I know what you are saying, but I don't think that is really relevant. We are talking about school level learning here. If you were a terrible student in school but fall in science later in life, no one asks you to provide a certificate showing you have a high-school proficiency in chemistry. This is more of an issue for post university level skills.
I'm pretty doubtful that there was a substantial cohort of children eager to learn chemistry or Latin of their own accord in any era, so school is probably not to blame.
>no one asks you to provide a certificate showing you have a high-school proficiency in chemistry
They do ask for a university degree though, which you are unlikely to have.
Agreed. But that isn't the conversation we are having right now. ACX is pointing out that kids don't know the facts that they should be learning in _school_, and then asks the question, "What is school for then?".
If this post was about students making it through a computer science degree and not knowing what a HashMap was (which I could 100% believe) we could have a whole different discussion about how universities just exist to provide credentials, not learning. But I think right now we are just talking about school education.
The school-university pipeline is pretty well established though, so it's hard to disentangle those things. Even if school is worthless, and you can learn chemistry at any age, if you don't do it on the right timeline then acquiring the right credentials is much harder. Compsci-related subjects are (were?) somewhat an exception to it, where "learning to code" by yourself actually is a realistic path to a career.
> Part of the problem with school is that it gives academic status to things that children mostly don't want to do-- it ignores motivation, while people are more likely to want to learn things they're interested in.
To be fair, if we let kids just do whatever they were interested in, we'd end up with a society heavily overpopulated by ballerinas and princesses, astronauts and firefighters.
This is a terrible argument. We spend most of their time in school teaching them how to write, work mathematical problems, and memorize historical facts, and they're just as unlikely to be writers, mathematicians or historians.
Are you sure? Just speaking for myself here, but I'd have never become a software developer if I hadn't been exposed to computers, and the concept that they work based on a bunch of simple instructions that people write out, in elementary school.
Honestly, I would be okay with all of these (apart from princess, which is impossible for more than, what 20 people people in each generation?). Having an overpopulation of astronauts would be a massive boon for society in my opinion, they are pretty smart people, they would figure out a way to contribute even if they all couldn't make it into NASA or ESA or CNSA.
But I suspect many just want to be YouTuber, actor or athlete, who I see as adding less value to society, but perhaps I am being overly judgemental.
That all said, if a child of mine wanted to be any of those things, I would encourage them to pursue it. I don't see it as the role of schools to dissuade children from their dreams. As they age, they will naturally start to understand the world and how they can contribute to it. There is no need for schools to say "we only need a few firefighters, so its probably better to consider chartered accountancy Sally!"
Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with Gatto. The Northwest Ordinance set up "public schools" for 3 "Grades" -- to instill reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic in those who needed and to identify those (few) who could go further.
I think a lot of schooling is socialization. It would be interesting if there were a survey in which home-schooled kids were compared to kids school in traditional classrooms, following an identical curriculum.
My brother homeschooled his kids, and I've always wondered how their experience was differed, socially, than ours.
My gut instinct tells me we should just feed students' interests. I've found that to be the case in encouraging literacy in adult men. Most of what we consider important 'facts' simply aren't that important. But if one has an interest in Tesla, or welding, say, providing them with appropriate, attractive materials is a good place to start. Your ultimate goal might be critical thinking or precalculus, but giving them the tools to investigate what interests them helps them learn how to learn what they want to know. What we might consider important they can pick up later, at their own leisure.
I can't help but hope that people who practice and support critical thinking will someday again staff 'Human Resources and Workforce Development' [Personnel] offices, replacing the current crowd of Identitarian Drones.
Sadly they're mostly illegal nowadays, but any HR official who doesn't think standardized tests are the best way to judge prospective candidates is no better than an MD who thinks the best way to treat a fever is by bloodletting.
Arizona has good government because people going into civil service are generally hired on their qualifications. But it has lousy politics because there are scant qualifications for running for elective office. We end up with Joe Arapaio and professional teleprompter-reader and election-denier Kari Lake. I'll take a civil servant over them any day. At least the dog catcher has a clean driving record. We should start screening would-be political candidates to at least find out if they know which planet they're on.
3. Ideological indoctrination. Early universal schooling advocates were really open about it being a major goal and current universal schooling advocates are pretty transparent and proud about them subjecting pupils to ideological indoctrination.
That also basically goes under "domestication", at least when society more-or-less agrees on the "correct" ideology. When the "culture war" flares up, school of course becomes a battleground, like everything else.
And giving students a sense of what kinds of ideas and subjects even exist. No 8 year old will be aware of the huge range of subjects it is possible to be interested in without some exposure. No parents, no matter how educated themselves, know that much. Now, if we were somehow able to optimize for this, and then encourage (or just *allow*) study of students' actual interests as they emerge, school might be worth the costs to children.
> 2. Domestication. School attempts to instill conformity with how modern civilization works.
I'm not sure why school is better at this than being at home with guardians. It's probably worse for most kids, actually, probably better for kids with abusive guardians, and unclear with guardians that are neglectful.
School teaches you to be on time, take orders from superiors, endure boring tasks, handle peers, all things that kids generally don't have to deal with at home. They're not exactly enjoyable, but necessary for most jobs.
I've been thinking about this, and one puzzle is: assume that fact/skill learning really doesn't work. We know that education was valued historically in many diverse cultures for thousands of years, and universal, accessible education has been an ethical priority in the West for at least several hundred years. Why? What function, other than teaching skills, did it serve to make it so important?
Guess 1): "Historically, before access to libraries, education was _the_ best place to learn facts." But that's prob not true, most skills were gained through apprenticeships.
Guess 2): "Education is about signaling, and everyone wants to signal good things, and socially minded people also want to make sure that this signaling mechanism is available to people from wider backgrounds."
I'm curious if anyone has other thoughts, especially people familiar with historic education traditions, e.g. in Hebrew or Chinese cultures.
Traditional Chinese education is primarily a system for creating and selecting bureaucrats to serve the state, not a system for transmitting knowledge. My understanding of Chinese history is that this is commonly accepted since the keju exam system got established.
Jewish education is based on the Torah and Talmud, and *man* do they learn their Torah and Talmud. I think this is because 1, they talk about nothing else for several years, and 2, it's integrated so closely with their daily life (ie you might be wondering whether it's okay to carry a certain object on a Saturday, and have to dredge through your memory to figure out what Talmud discussion is relevant) that they never forget it.
I think there might be something similar going on with classical education - a lot of it was about teaching Latin and the classics, and most of these people would then go on to read a lot of Latin and use classical metaphors for everything.
On the other hand, I also know a weird amount of classics (not nearly as much as an ancient person, but enough that I could tell you various facts about Hannibal) and I'm not sure why. Maybe classics are just inherently interesting.
> and most of these people would then go on to read a lot of Latin and use classical metaphors for everything
You wrote a post once complaining that it was weird that people were starting to make real-world political arguments by drawing on metaphors from Harry Potter.
I believe I made the point at the time that the reason they were doing that was that they could rely on everybody else having read the same books. That's the point of acculturation. It's no different when the books that everybody has read are the Talmud, or a medieval canon of classical works. The society is formed by everybody reading the same thing.
"Reading, Riting, Rithmetic" are in fact useful and most people can learn them in school. While you havent reached that, expanding education is good. More can also be useful, just not everything to everyone. A lot of past education was more like job-specific training today.
Except that the current push in school is not for more literacy and numeracy. It's for other things that frankly are luxury beliefs.
We spend far more than we need to on basic education. it's very poorly allocated by people who for several generations now have a vested interest in it being poorly allocated.
I would put more emphasis on the signalling race, but otherwise agreed. The question was why people thought it was useful. That those reasons dont apply at current margins is the point.
> We know that education was valued historically in many diverse cultures for thousands of years, and universal, accessible education has been an ethical priority in the West for at least several hundred years. Why? What function, other than teaching skills, did it serve to make it so important?
Well, in the first place, teaching skills wasn't a function of education at all. That's what apprenticeships are for.
(And note that in a traditional society, those who belong to the educated classes are most likely 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘴𝘬𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘴. It would be more common that possessing a useful skill got you summarily ejected from polite society - it would be actively disqualifying - than that you'd be expected to have one.)
The function it served was acculturation, enabling people who might not have ever previously met to recognize that they belonged to the same social class, held the same values and viewpoints, and could cooperate with each other.
Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World, by Patricia Crone, has a decent amount of treatment of education; I liked the book a lot.
I'd quibble about the definition of "useful skill", but we both probably agree. "Trades" aren't a fit occupation for a gentleman, and I've heard that this is at the root of the British distinction between "solicitor" (tradesman) and "barrister" (gentleman expert).
And other than that, yeah, I think you've put it more clearly than I did.
<i>We know that education was valued historically in many diverse cultures for thousands of years,</i>
At least in the West, schooling often focused on teaching you the skills you'd need to learn things yourself, rather than trying to impart a large variety of facts per se. E.g., most scholarship was in Latin, so schools made sure their students were fluent in Latin. They also had a big focus on logic and rhetoric, so people could follow arguments and sort the valid from the invalid. General knowledge facts about history, natural philosophy, and the like, were mostly taught incidentally, as and when they came up.
<i>and universal, accessible education has been an ethical priority in the West for at least several hundred years. Why?</i>
Probably typical-minding. People who think about ethics, education, society, and the like, are going to be more intellectually-minded than the average person, so it'll be easy for them to overestimate how much the average person values intellectual education (as opposed to practical education, like apprenticeships).
<i>I'm curious if anyone has other thoughts, especially people familiar with historic education traditions, e.g. in Hebrew or Chinese cultures.</i>
In China, education was supposed to inculcate a good moral character (which it was also supposed to do in the West, of course, although China probably took this aspect further). You were expected to know the Confucian Classics by heart so that you always knew the correct course of action in any given situation.
I think it's a combination of the two. Certainly there were facts, and logic, and understandings of how the world worked. And there's also the part where it's about *how* to think and *how* to learn, not only through formal instruction, but also simply by observing and imitating one's teachers and peers.
And there's the part that, when you learn the same things as the current elite, you learn how to move among them. That's both an invaluable life skill, and also the meat that underlies signaling. You move out of whatever petty tradition your family had, and move into the tradition of the lords of the earth, a tradition which stretches back for centuries. You learn that they aren't superhuman, or mysterious gurus, that it's all just people like you, but each different in their own way. (Of course, depending on your actual position, you might not want to explicitly point this out.)
As time went on, and societies got more complex, there were more and more layers added. A month or two ago, some of the comments had a discussion about liberal arts universities vs. vocational schools. These are two different models of education, but in America they've sort of met in the middle, with things like the land-grant universities. Now there's layers and layers, and status is still tied to the layers, even though the actual facts being taught may not differ much.
But apart from "signalling", the main difference is the people you're around. Are you learning the habits of the very best, from the very best, alongside the future leaders of the world who will know your name? Or are you getting a pale imitation, a dried husk that goes through the motions without knowing what it's doing? And yet, a smart and driven person can take a dead tradition and breathe life into it, or do it all on their own. Teachers at "bad" schools can still carry and instill the spark, when they find students who want to learn. And students at "good" schools can have involuted themselves into test-taking machines, or can buy into the "signalling" critique and ignore the treasure at their fingertips. The world is a lot more fluid than it used to be.
“If school teaches you some fact, then either you’ll never encounter it again after school, in which case you’ll quickly forget it). Or you will encounter it again after school, in which case school was unnecessary; you would have learned it anyway.”
I feel like there’s an unconsidered option here, where learning makes you more likely to encounter learning again (because being more educated you’re more likely to be in circumstances In which you encounter it, such as reading) and perhaps also more likely to recognize it as learning and as worth knowing. In particular, one could hypothesize that the habits of learning being imprinted early makes it easier to make students inclined to be receptive to learn, and re-learn, in the future.
There are two questionable premises in that passage:
1. Encountering a fact outside of school is SUFFICIENT for remembering it later on. I think this depends a lot on the fact and how important it's perceived to be - school has some priorities, culture has others. Perhaps if I encountered a fact about Jupiter outside of school, I wouldn't care in that moment to remember it.
2. Not encountering a fact outside of school later on is SUFFICIENT for (probably) forgetting it. I think that depends on how I would encounter it. But surely it depends on how relevant the fact is to my life or thinking. Say I never encounter a fact about the process of mummification again - if I find the topic fascinating, I might look things up for my own curiosity, or use it in my creative writing, or just fantasize about how this aspect might have affected the thinking of the people at the time (did the pharaohs think about what they would look like if anyone ever discovered them)? It seems to me like facts OVERALL do have an exponential decay, but SPECIFIC facts (per person) needn't have.
I interpreted "encounter" to mean unplanned/unintended. Seeing something on the news about a topic, say. But if you insist on defining it otherwise, I have provided two other examples of how the process could work without encountering a fact in any way.
The thing missing seems to be some theory of what makes things *interesting*. Perhaps being taught the intricacies of some topic engenders an appreciation that things can be interesting, and how to recognise the things you will find interesting.
Yes. That, and also just *recognizing* things. Let's say that Scott encounters three things that remind him of 1984 within a week/month/whatever: some politician is called Orwellian, he sees a meme about Big Brother and another meme about 1984 not being a manual.
But to someone who hasn't learned the connection first, those are three totally independent things! Even if people encounter each of these three topics 100 times, I don't think that they would recognize that they have anything to do with each other.
Learning a topic works by building a dense web of facts and connections between them. If you are not reminded of any of them, you forget the whole bunch. But if it's dense enough, then each of the aspects reinforces the whole rest. If you know enough about a topic, you'll see it appearing over and over again in your life.
That's a good point. It's sort of like how listening to a foreign language you don't understand won't help you, but if you do understand it, it reinforces your memory.
This resonates with something that I've long thought was a goal in the kind of education I do. I try to give people an exposure to many different things, 90% of which they will forget and never pay attention to again, but hopefully some small fraction of which they will find interesting enough to seek out more about. I also hope that they'll have a better foundation for encountering some of these things again at some future point - and perhaps that being primed with one thing they learned about will help them remember the relevance of other things they encountered just before or after it.
I think there's a key method here, which is that when you learn something new, if you're excited about it, you'll see its patterns reflected in everything around you, which will help you remember it, especially if you have people to talk about it with.
It's ... kinda like watching a serial TV show, one episode per week, getting into it, talking about it with friends, making jokes, coining memes, speculating, indulging in fanfic, etc. Versus bingeing the whole thing in a weekend, writing a review, and then forgetting it completely.
Curious if you have thoughts on Egan. (Author of the book that won last year’s review contest). My (limited) understanding is that Egan education is about trying to make learning emotionally salient. In the 1984 example- I don’t think I’ve read or encountered anything that went into the rats scene. Yet, I’m pretty sure I’ll forget Orwell’s name before I forget that.
I’m preparing to teach Egan’s method as a homeschooling parent, and after reading essentially everything Brandon Hendrickson has written on Substack, I don’t think Egan’s methods implemented broadly would lead to significantly different test scores or economic productivity. I am fairly confident it would make students much happier why they are in school, and think there is a small chance that it could make people long term more creative and curious. So a net benefit to the status quo, but drastically cutting all government funding to high school and college are still better ideas imo. Wait to cut K-8 until after we see whether this had a positive or negative impact.
Schools exists so that a) we can work in various modern white-collar jobs and b) we can select who should work in various jobs.
A lot of modern (especially white-collar) jobs require incredible depth of knowledge or skills in one very narrow aspect. But, it is very difficult to know in advance what your career path would be. For the longest time I wanted to be a doctor at least in part because my parents were doctors. But now I'm a philosopher. At least part of this was because a lot of schooling taught me something about myself: I was better at solving abstract problems than remembering facts. I also learned that I enjoyed philosophy more than biology. So, a lot of schooling involves building up a broad body of knowledge, not so that you will remember all of that. Instead, it is so that you know enough about everything so that when you become an adult, you have some inkling of where your interests and aptitudes are and further you know enough to transition to a more specialized avenue of study that would be useful for your work. Of course there are tradeoffs so you might want to start streaming the less academically inclined kids towards more "practical" kinds of knowledge at an earlier stage if you identify them early.
I think you're right, though it doesn't quite "rescue" school, because while this might be an intended side-effect, it's rarely brought up as the reason for schooling. "Go to school, learn about various sciences and stuff and decide what you like" isn't what people say to their children (maybe aside from Soviet children books).
If the goal is just to familiarize children with various fields, why marks, why tests, and the whole stress associated with them? Well, they do have their uses - a mark lets you know the teacher thinks you understand what you were trying to learn, so you can track your progress in a numeric way. But unfortunately, marks doesn't work that way for most people, I think. Instead, they become the goal (of going to school). A boring, stressful goal. Which, admittedly, kind of prepares children for adult life where stressful, boring and utterly meaningless jobs await them eagerly.
In the end, I think school is many things - broadening of view, socialization, "domestication", daycare, even a place to really learn some skills - for some people, at least, if not for all. But it's all a confusing jumble of conflicting goals, never well-suited for anyone in particular, but kind of allowing the majority to muddle through.
Excluding the big ones like the SAT, tests and grades are more for the administrator's benefit than for the students. It's one of the only ways they can confirm that teachers are teaching what they're paid to teach. And school isn't special in this regard, any industry with such a huge number of (mostly unsupervised) producers is going to have a big problem with standardization.
Do teachers spend more time preparing and grading tests than doctors spend filling out insurance forms, or bureaucrats spend writing memos?
Without marks and tests, people don't study the stuff even once.
It's a lot like playing a game - you have to put some artificial goals in so that you get the real goal. We know that the real reason to play Twister is to have fun, not to put left hand on green or whatever. But you're not going to have fun unless you and everyone else try to put left hand on green.
There are plenty of games where you don't have any kind of score, though. In fact, I avoided scored games as a plague when I was a child, because to have a score is to have a possibility of losing, and I could never stand that. And I study things all the time without any kinds of tests even as an adult - as long as they of interest me. This, I think, is much more true of children, especially in highly entertaining subjects like chemistry (explosions!) or physics (lightning!) or basic computer science (you can make your own game!). At least until marks and test beat all curiosity out of you and you become afraid of new themes, because you might fail and get a bad mark.
Admittedly, I'm not sure how to study utterly uninteresting subjects like writing, or (classical) literature without marks (at least I found them utterly boring, so, given choice, I'd probably avoid them in school, especially literature), and different types of minds react differently to marks. But my main thesis is that marks and tests system as it is is not particularly conductive to the goal of letting children taste every subject and decide what they like the most, and in fact could be a big hindrance to it. Also, no matter how many times teachers and parents repeat the phrase "knowledge is more important than marks", I don't think there is a single child out there who ever believed that lie: marks are the most important thing at school, because getting bad ones means all kinds of punishment, while failing to understand stuff and then getting passing marks by cheating (or, if we're being charitable, by cramming before the test) at least avoids punishments.
That being said, personally I'm not sure how to reform school without, or with different score system, and I freely admit it. I have high hopes for cybernetic augmentation of brain and AI teachers a la The Diamond Age, because I'm that kind of tech-optimist.
I think one of the things that schools are pretty darn good at is teaching you that cheating is counter-productive. I don't think I have ever met someone that has told me that they learnt that cheating is the way to succeed at school, and at my school it was hammered into us that it is better to fail honestly than succeed dishonestly, a lesson that I have carried through my life as have all of my peers (I think).
That said, when it came to sports, we were definitely taught to play to the referee, not to the rules. If the ref doesn't see it, you are not cheating was definitely a core belief, as well as "Always play to the second whistle", in other words, keep playing even if you know you violated a law (like a knock-on), make it the referees job to enforce the rules, don't self referee even if you know you made a mistake. One may consider this to be unethical or outside the spirit of the game or sportsmanship, but honestly I consider myself to have benefitted from these two different perspectives on honesty.
I would 100% agree about cramming though. Many people I have talked to over the years have worn the ability to study the night before and forget everything the next day as a badge of honour. But to be fair, I can't see anything necessarily wrong about this. I can't say that these students were poorly served by learning that this is a way to achieve the goal set for them.
Maybe it's something Western. In Russia, there is a culture of cheating in both school and university, and I heard the same about Chinese students. Jut yesterday I saw a "life hack" type of post at a social media site which advised first year students to become friends with older ones, because you can always get completed coursework from them, which is usually passed down through generations of students, and so is usually well-checked for errors. And I know it works, because I saw it work. Not everyone just copies the work symbol-for-symbol, of course, many just use it to check themselves, but if you don't have time, because you wasted it on something else, or don't care about this particular subject much? Then it's OK.
Personally, I almost never cheated (twice I copied other people work, because my own attempts to do it failed, and I ran out of time, but I told the teacher I did it, and I took time to understand what I was copying in details, and so was able to answer any questions about it), but I certainly let people copy my work. And I know I was in minority on this.
In fact, I think many here in Russia would cynically argue that the main thing school teaches you is to cheat, lie, hide your opinion and bow to authority. That was not my experience, not entirely, but some parts ring somewhat true (the main exhibit usually are Russia literature essays we had to write on every book assigned to us; you could never express your true opinion in those essays (because a teenagers opinion on "War and Peace" is usually "it's boring shit about stuff that has zero relevance to my life and anything I care about"), but parrot your teacher and approved literary critics).
In Slovakia, I guess it depends on specific university, maybe also on specific teacher. I have seen exams where cheating was practically encouraged (imagine the teacher saying "I need to leave this room for a few minutes, please do not cheat" and leaving the students alone in the room for 15 minutes; the same thing also happens during the following exams).
I suspect one of the differences might be that we were almost never graded on a curve. So if you knew the right answers, there was no reason not to help your friends. (By the way, I consider grading on a curve to be an evil system, because although it prevents cheating, it also disincentivizes people from helping each other in non-cheating ways, such as learning together.)
There are plenty of games without score (Twister, for example!) but they all involve giving you some sort of concrete goal you aim towards, even though that goal is not itself why you play the game. Teaching could be structured with goals other than tests and marks. But it’s helpful to have something, which isn’t actually valuable outside of school, but is treated as valuable within school, the same way we have with games.
I disagree that all games involve concrete goal. Or, rather, there are a lot of activities that are maybe not games, but are game-like (I think I remember heavy discussion about this in gamedev community, related to sandbox games).
We ran around with my friends, pretending to shoot stick pistols at imaginary enemies without any defined goal. I guess you can say we had shifting, improvised "goals", like when someone shouted "there are fascists behind that tree, let's shoot them!", but it seems to me like stretching definition of goal a bit too far. Likewise, I'm did not had any externally defined goals when I was tinkering with lego pieces or other construction sets. Some self-imposed goals, sure, like "Today I want to build some transformers out of lego because I just watched a cartoon and want to re-create it on my table".
When you put it like that, that seems right. I wouldn't want to count "playing with stick guns" or "playing with legos" as a "game", though they do count as "play" - but I think of more sandbox-like things like Grand Theft Auto or Europa Universalis and see that there's definitely a continuum with border cases, no matter how you try to draw the definition. But as the things are more game-like, they give you more metrics that you can treat as goals to a greater or lesser degree. There's also weird cases where people play games without adopting the goals the creator gives - speedrunners are a really interesting type of case.
A lot of my thinking here is inspired by Thi Nguyen's work in Games: Agency as Art.
> "Go to school, learn about various sciences and stuff and decide what you like" isn't what people say to their children (maybe aside from Soviet children books).
Genuinely confused as to what is the alternative - that's definitely how I thought of school/the attitude my parents tried to instill! (Well, of course there were hurdles to cross, especially the major one of getting into college, but they were just gateways to more advanced topics among which to discover an intellectual calling.)
I would guess the most common alternative is "go to school and study, or I'll whap you black and blue", or at least this is the vibe I'm getting from my upper floor neighbours (whoever decided that modern apartment buildings would be fine without sound insulation should be forever tortured by screaming people and karaoke).
Well, for the less dysfunctional families, the alternative is "go to school to get good work when you're adult" without ever specifying how exactly will school help you - it just magically should make you a doctor, a lawyer, a businessman, or at least a programmer (these days).
Though both variants are kind of guesses, as my own parents never had to talk to me much about "why" of school, since I hit on my obsession with computers at a very young age, and it seemed kind of obvious that I should study mathematics, especially since I mostly liked that subject. Why I should study anything BUT mathematics and related fields, and especially literature, which took up more school hours than all subjects I was actually interested in, was another question, the answer to which ("because you should know culture") was never satisfying.
I suppose the questions "why do I have to go to school [today]?" (when you're young) and "what should I try to accomplish at school?" (when you're old enough to care about that) have different answers. I was focusing on the latter, but sure, there were also implied disciplinary and future-ruining consequences for refusing to go to school from kindergarten.
> "Go to school, learn about various sciences and stuff and decide what you like" isn't what people say to their children (maybe aside from Soviet children books).
That's exactly what I tell my kids. But they are in elementary school now; when they get older, I will probably be like "okay, you need to make the decision now" and then "you need to get the diploma -- if you end up hating the subject, you can still change your career later, but you probably won't get another opportunity to get the diploma".
> why marks, why tests, and the whole stress associated with them?
Why indeed. I would prefer a hypothetical school that has no tests, or even better only the kind where they tell you the result, but they don't put it on a permanent record. In my opinion, kids should have the opportunity to redo the tests as many times as they wish. If you understand something now, why should it matter that you were supposed to understand it a few months ago? The important thing is that you finally do understand it. If you fail to get the driving license, you are allowed to try again; why wouldn't the same apply to everything?
Isn't there also an option where it's about teaching you a lot of things so that you can decide which of those things you want to reinforce? Each individual might only reinforce a small subset, which is why the general knowledge quiz finds such low levels, but perhaps a very high proportion of individuals find *something* from school interesting and choose to live lives that reinforce that something, and if that were true, you could justify education on that basis.
I don't think most people deliberately reinforce anything - certainly I've never met anyone who has flashcards with Orwell's name on it that they read once a year.
Maybe you mean something less formal, like you decide to become a literature professor as a career or something, or decide you love reading and get it as a hobby. I think it would be very surprising if 12+ years of school as it currently exists was optimal and efficient for getting you to figure out what career/hobby to have.
Well I'm not really trying to argue for optimality, but off the top of my head, I'm not sure what would be a better approach than giving a minimal grounding for appreciation in lots of different topics, which is pretty close to what school is.
You might have very different ideas on how far from optimal school is for that purpose.
Including homework, I spent maybe 19,000 hours in k-12. One percent of that would be 190 hours. How much could you do with a 190 hour program that was specifically designed to find what the student was interested in?
How many topics and fields does our current k-12 system even expose us to? How often do students leave high school knowing what they want to specialize in? It seems to me that possibly the majority of students entering university either don't know what career they want, or are mistaken about what they want and later switch fields.
If your high school was like mine, it never gave you an opportunity to discover an interest in most possible careers. I never learned at school if I might enjoy carpentry (we had no shop class), computer programming, plumbing, cooking, food blogging, working in HR, being a park ranger, psychology, marketing, finance, hospital administration, nurse, etc. We mostly had to discover that in university or outside of school.
High school let me know if I generally liked math, hard sciences, writing, literature, history, creating art (but we had very few hours of this), and maybe a couple other things. It also incidentally shows you what a teaching career entails.
If we're considering only how effective school is at helping students discover what they want to do with their career and not other benefits, then literature, history and to some extent art are a bit of a trap. Far more students discover they like these topics than can actually get careers in it. Especially so if you enjoy the topic itself but don't enjoy teaching. The topics students get to sample in high school are very different than the topics they're likely to get a career in.
Math, science and writing are prerequisites for a lot of jobs, so that's a point in favor of schools helping discover interests. But I think most of what school is doing isn't helping you discover you like math so much as it's training you in math. That's great if you're going into a career that requires math. For everyone else, it's ~7 years of training in a field they didn't use (I'm counting the math up to grade 5 as universally useful). And knowing you enjoy high school math is still a far step from knowing which math-requiring career you actually want, or if one of the many non-math careers you never tried might be better for you.
So I wouldn't be surprised if it were possible to expose students to much, much more potential interests in just 1% of the time that they currently spend in school.
Optimality and efficiency is quite a high bar to set, given that in your post, you were trying to find any reason to keep schools around, no? Quote: "Can we rescue some kind of value for school?"
Not just that you decide what hobby/career to have after 12 years of school, but that you decide that after 1-4 years and then preferentially learn those subjects for the remainder.
20% of people knowing various facts that everyone should have learned in school is consistent with everyone picking which 20% of school they care about early on and then learning a ton of that stuff over the rest of their school career.
These are hardly impressive facts to be knowing. If we're still as bad as we were in '99, and we're probably worse, most of our populous is as knowledgable about literature and history as an innumerate is about algebra.
Is that actually true, or is Scott preferentially picking things from a long list that feel to him like everyone should know that, and since we're in the same tiny subculture as him we feel the same way about them?
Were there 10 more things on that list of questions that we wouldn't know, and the non-STEM folks would think we must be complete idiots because of it?
Knowing that Jupiter is the largest planet, that George Orwell wrote 1984, and that the Himalayas are the world's largest mountain range are hardly serious nerd facts. They're extremely general, easy, and non-technical bits of trivia.
And we don't know more because we're "STEM folks". We know more because we have much higher general intelligence than the average American. There's nothing on average we'd be less likely to know than the average American, including football and Taylor Swift trivia.
Besides, ou shouldn't need to be a genius to know these things, nor facts generally. These people still know who Toto is, as do we. I'm sure they can learn Jupiter is the largest planet.
Interesting theoretical case. An empirical case might look at the changes likely introduced by required education, as is the case in Germany? Or seeing how things improved for groups over the next few years, that were allowed to enter school (or proper school) at a distinct point that, like girls or maybe blacks? Do those results differ compared to the theoretical argumentation here?
Very important omission here: This post argues against/questions education, full stop (at the school level). But as far as I can tell, the reference class is only US pupils. Perhaps the education system in the US is (generally) broken? I'm from Germany, and I can tell you with certainty that there's a widespread stereotype of US Americans being extremely uneducated as a whole. I suspect it might be similar in other Western countries. So it might make sense to look at another population - how many Germans (or whoever) know the facts listed above / the ones adapted to be relevant to their country or teaching curriculum? This still wouldn't counteract the cultural osmosis perspective, because perhaps the osmosis in other places might be better, or maybe it interacts more effectively with the education system there. But it would certainly point to a US-specific weakness if true. Wrote this before looking anything up FYI.
My actual impression is our schools are better or effectively the same, but Germans are more likely to casually discuss or read about high brow topics, not marvel movies or football. This supports Scott’s thesis, school cannot make Americans educated, they need repetition as adults and that’s something other countries do better. But my opinion on Germans is based solely on a small sample that Visited to the US and that already means that they are probably more educated than the average German.
That's possibly a sort of illusion: Europeans tend to encounter American tourists , American s.have a way of not knowing much about what goes on outside America, which really shows up when they are abroad. But it's a very specific deficit.
I think they kind of treat a vacation somewhere else as a sort of theme park. The people they encounter are playing the part of people talking funny and doing odd things, but it's not what they do when they go home at night.
It's not just American tourists though.
I've heard some odd stories about German tourists thinking "Oh, a beach in the wild American West! Of course it's a nude beach..." and being rudely surprised when they're informed it isn't.
US whites score better than all European countries in PISA (ditto for blacks/Asians/LatAms and black/Asian/LatAm countries), so the US educational system seems to be working pretty well.
Just to take one subject, history: School mainly taught me to accept unquestioningly what my teacher and my textbooks told me. I wrote various reports for history class. I put endnotes and bibliographies in these reports, because the teacher required it, but I didn’t see any point to those things. It was not until several years post-high-school that it sunk in for me that there could be debate about historical facts, and that you should support your argument with sources, preferably primary sources. (This was thanks to my participation in the Academy of Saint Gabriel, a group loosely connected to the Society for Creative Anachronism.)
(This comment probably makes me sound stupid, so let me just say that all my teachers considered me a good student.)
Hm - part of me sympathizes with this. But at other times I felt like my teachers were engaged in some kind of cargo cult of Being A Critical Thinker so hard that they never taught any object level information, and also that it never stuck because they never wanted to expose us to any real controversies we could take a side on. They just taught us really artificial rubrics for Thinking Critically About Things that I assume no real historian has ever used, then made us use them artificially in essays.
I think it's a tough question what age teachers should start introducing anything other than object level facts (eg you should probably just memorize your ABCs without learning that there was controversy for a while over whether J should be included), and also whether a mass-production school environment can ever be any good at teaching that. I think part of this is fear of kids getting the questions wrong -> don't present them with any real controversies - what do you do if some kid decides to make a case for the South being right during the Civil War? Give them an A if the essay is well-structured and they cite sources that support their points? Give them an F because even if they superficially do a good job, they must have missed the better sources that real historians would use to conclude this isn't true? But if you try to avoid this, you end up with fake cargo-cult controversies that nobody cares about.
Yours is the correct position, but good luck trying to push it through in the modern Anglosphere's pedagogic system. "White men are evil" is their religion.
We probably shouldn't even be using a grading system in schools at all. It's a system which begs to be abused, and regularly is.
There's a lot of disagreement about whether morality is "just opinion". I know that our school system likes to teach it as though anything related to values is "opinion" rather than fact, but there's a lot of confused ideas that go into that definition.
I doubt that there's anybody in the world entirely not-confused about these questions. Plenty of people think that they are though, which is what counts!
I read a book on classical education a while ago and, naturally, it didn't all stick with me, but I recall that they suggested, and you can still kind of see reflected in our school set up, a three tier approach to covering the same content. Primary education, grammar stage, is about facts. Then a repeat of the subjects in the middle school "logic stage" where reasoning is focused on. Then the rhetoric stage, which is more about challenging or justifying in the same fields and such.
I think the real thing, is that anything complex becomes subjective. And you simply cannot allow anything to be subjective as a teacher, as society forbids it.
Perhaps there was a golden age (I doubt it) in the past where great teachers could be independent and decide with impunity how good an argument for one side or the other was. But today, if there is even the slightest ability for parents to object, they will swoop in and insist that little Susie get's an A+ for her work, and how can you deny her when she worked so hard, blah blah.
So teachers are forced over and over again to water down the curriculum and take out any subjectivity or nuance until all that is left is "What date did..." or "Name the 5 reasons in the text book for..."
This of course is why in theory teachers should get tenure, to take off the pressure of having to bend to the whims of parents, but that brings in a whole bunch of other problems we don't have time to get into now.
> that brings in a whole bunch of other problems we don't have time to get into now.
Most of which can be summed up in the word "accountability."
When I was in high school, one week the school paper published an article claiming that research showed that a surprisingly high percentage of people who live on farms engage in bestiality with the livestock. And you have to understand, this was in a rural, agrarian community, and the headline of the article, which I won't repeat here, made it clear that the writer knew exactly what he was doing, deliberately throwing this rhetorical hand grenade into a crowd of his fellow students.
Naturally, the students and their parents did not take kindly to this. The student who wrote the article got in trouble... but the teacher who ran the paper did not. Sure, she was removed from the paper and reassigned to teaching other classes, but that was the most that they were able to do, *because she had tenure.* I had her class the next year, and found her quite possibly the most unpleasant teacher I'd ever been saddled with. (On her own merits; I was unaware that this was the teacher who'd let that article get published until a classmate brought it up several months into the year.)
Exactly. How can you give teachers an environment where they won't be pressured by teachers and faculty, but can still be held accountable for gross misconduct? I don't know, and this is why basically teachers have to simply be cogs in a machine, unless they are part of a particularly exclusive organisation.
I think that a big problem is a conflict of interests -- teachers are responsible for *teaching* the kids, but also for *grading* the kids. It is good when the teachers are accountable to parents for how they teach, but not when the parents can pressure them to give better grades.
As it is now, when parents complain about how you teach their kids, at least 9 times out of 10 the actual problem is that you gave their kids bad grades. If you give everyone an A, the complaints about teaching disappear instantly, even if you keep teaching exactly the same way. Which suggests that the parents didn't have a problem with teaching in the first place. They were just unhappy about the grades, but couldn't complain directly, because the obvious answer to "why did my Johnny get an F?" is "because he got all the answers on the test wrong". So they need to change their complaint into "why do you teach my Johnny in a way that doesn't work for him?" or something like that. When Johnny gets an A despite not knowing anything, suddenly your teaching methods become acceptable.
The way to fix this would be to have one person teach the kids, and a different person to grade them. Then the parents would have to choose which person they actually want to complain about, so the debate would become more honest.
True, but then we end up in the current system of standardised tests, and everyone complains that teachers "teach to the test", but then of course they do, that is how teachers and regulators evaluate them, on test results, and we all end up in the same place. And even if we had a person grading nuanced answers rather than a standardised test, parents will still complain that the one teacher didn't teach their child to pass the other teachers mean marking.
I do wonder how much of it is simply "the lack of choice". I think in general parents don't get to choose their kids teachers, so all you can do is complain. But of course, if you could choose, then everyone would just choose the teacher who got the highest marks last time. But obviously not everyone can have that teacher, so how do you allocate, seeing as parents don't pay? There simply are no easy answers.
'what do you do if some kid decides to make a case for the South being right during the Civil War? Give them an A if the essay is well-structured and they cite sources that support their points?'
That sounds like an 'ought' question, so I'm not sure by what metric an answer could be considered incorrect here. What would you do, other than grade kids on how well they tie in what happened with what they personally would have wanted to happen?
One thing I noted is that Americans I interact with on the Internet are likely to go "didn't they teach you at school?" on history-facts that I would consider very niche, the names and dates of kings or battles or pre-modern states, say. And here my thought always is "these are useless history-facts that should not be taught in the first place": in my opinion history teaching in schools should be more about broad-strokes culture history, thought history, and above all the historical method, than about events, modulo some events considered vital to understanding of the modern world (like the World Wars) or to put those other things into a proper context.
I don't quite remember the contents of the compulsory first through ninth grade history classes here in Finland, but in high school the emphasis was definitely on the historical method, exams featuring questions requiring the student to analyze the included historical documents, and the other questions being essays of form of "why/how" rather than a list of facts, and I wholeheartedly endorse this style of history teaching. Although I do suspect you couldn't teach first-graders this way: it probably takes a certain degree of intellectual maturity and couldn't be taught much earlier than high school anyway, just like math classes seem to track what students of the given age are disposed to learning (no algebra until they're teens, etc).
That being said, I don't expect most of the students to remember the historical method any better than the size of electrons relative to atoms, but kings and generals history is thoroughly useless for an average person as a practical skill, for understanding their place in the world, or anything else but a matter of curiosity or grounding background for more serious study (but in these latter cases the person would have learned these things outside School anyway). And I say that as someone who e.g. remembers that the Roman Consuls of year 481 were Spurius Furius (and someone of the Fabii).
In the UK it was definitely focused on critically analysing sources and their reliability and biases from high school onwards.
But even before that we talked about fact vs opinion and differing viewpoints. E.g. writing a short piece about the pros of the Roman conquest of Britian and another about the cons.
I had the opposite experience with history class at school -- they spent so much time focusing on "how historians actually work" that they never taught us all that much actual history (outside a few tiny areas where we focused obsessively).
>I’m betting it’s the latter - for example, I’ve forgotten the names of some of my college professors, even though I would have seen them almost daily for a year.
That's not how the spaced repetition curve works. It only works if the repetitions are actually spaced, which leads to a counterintuitive phenomenon: if you had seen the names of your professors FEWER times (but in an optimally spaced out manner), you would remember them BETTER. In real life, random encounters of facts are basically never even close to optimally spaced, so no wonder we forget everything we are taught.
> The "Forget to Learn" theory suggests that our brains store memories with two strengths: storage strength, which remains steady, and retrieval strength, which fades over time. Interestingly, when retrieval strength drops, learning increases when we access the memory again. This idea, called desirable difficulty, is a key reason why spaced repetition works so well.
The implication would be that recalling your professors' names before much forgetting had occurred didn't adjust those memories' forgetting curve all that much. I hadn't heard about this either until I read that link.
I learned about this technique from Pimsleur language tapes, but I can't find anything online that corroborates struggle to recall being an important part of the process. But that's definitely how it's implemented: whether with flashcards or language tapes, the technique is that you try to recall before being reminded.
"Our rule 5 states that the longer the gap you leave between repetitions, the stronger will be the effect on the memory trace’s durability. This is shown in the graph below, developed as a result of research carried out by SuperMemo"
This matches my experience somewhat, and also makes intuitive sense to me because learning is strongest when recall is most difficult. Nevertheless, as far as I can tell, no academic research corroborates this (the term to google for is "expanding interval") because no(?) studies test on repetition intervals longer than 1 or 2 days.
Have you ever had to type a password or entry code daily for a long time, then you came back from a trip and had a lot of trouble getting it right? I sure have, and it seems to be common. The memory that was getting reinforced daily tends to fade over longer periods unless it also gets reinforced at a longer period.
There was a paper on memorizing long-term passwords or keys by spaced repetition (for some purpose like crypto cold storage), but I, uh, don't recall more.
The toy model would be that if you recall the fact daily, then you are strengthening your short-term memory of the fact, without any strengthening of the act of long-term recall. Whereas if you let your short-term memory fade and then recall it again, you are strengthening your long-term recall of the fact.
I understand the question to be about which one causes the biggest effect in reality (including it's real amount in the air) rather than which is the most potent.
After some research: fair enough, it contributes most to the greenhouse effect, but since it's not really being added by human activity, it's not causing global warming (i.e. a RISE in temperature over time).
Human activity does add water vapour to the atmosphere. You ever see the billowing clouds of gas emanating from a coal fired power plant? That's not carbon dioxide, it's steam.
Granted there's a natural water cycle that turns water vapour into precipitation, but there's also a natural carbon cycle that turns carbon dioxide into vegetation.
Water is usually discounted in greenhouse gas discussions, and I would like to give a +1 to your comments.
Probably humans can do very little to change the greenhouse effects of water, so everyone concentrates on what they think humans CAN change: CO2 and methane.
This doesn't contradict your source - the amount of water vapor can increase over time even if our direct emission of it is not relevant. It does however imply that we shouldn't worry about how much vapor we put into the atmosphere.
Btw, according to that source, the gas coming from a coal plant is an even mix of CO2 and water: "the exhaust coming from a coal power plant—the classic example of a climate-warming greenhouse gas emission—contains almost as much water vapor as CO2.2 It’s why that exhaust forms a visible cloud." Perhaps you meant just that last part?
The natural carbon cycle surely has other differences to the water cycle that makes those two hard to compare, no? The time aspect, for instance (see the article).
Do I understand correctly that you're doubting that human activity is the central cause of climate change? Or that our CO2 production is its main driver?
Jumping into the middle of the deciduous tree argument...
Each of the following is true:
1. Water vapor (& throw in clouds) causes the largest portion of the greenhouse effect on present-day Earth. Carbon monoxide is #2, methane is #3.
2. Per molecule, the order is reversed, so in that sense methane is the most potent of the three.
3. The increase of temperature over the past century (global warming) was caused largely by increased in carbon dioxide, with methane #2.
4. The relative importance of the gases contributing to the change in greenhouse effect strength over the past century are carbon dioxide and water vapor, in a rough tie. Methane is third.
5. Because most of the water vapor increase has been caused by rising temperatures, it is a positive feedback on global warming rather than a root cause.
6. At different times and timescales in Earth's history, carbon dioxide has been primarily a feedback and primarily a cause. Right now it's a cause.
All of which is to say that the wording differences are subtle but scientifically meaningful, and in this instance the stayed correct answer was correct.
It’s possible Scott’s synopsis of the question was wrong, but if the question wasn’t which anthropogenic forcing contributes the most, I still would have confidently answered water vapor.
Are you saying you think that’s incorrect, because the context was obviously anthropogenic forcing?
I'm taking "global warming" to mean the recent (50-200 yr) rise in temperatures and "cause" to be the mechanism that caused temperatures to rise. In the recent warming, water vapor is mostly an amplifier rather than a cause, but one can find less natural readings of "cause" that would put increasing water vapor on a par with increasing carbon dioxide.
Your reference to a possibly incorrect synopsis prompted me to follow the link. It turns out the survey was 11 years ago. Given the politicization of climate change even then, I might expect 50% of respondents to viscerally refuse to answer "carbon dioxide"! But the question was even vaguer than that, and water vapor wasn't one of the options.
<em>What gas do most scientists believe causes atmospheric temperatures to rise?
58% Carbon dioxide
10% Hydrogen
8% Helium
7% Radon
16% Don't know</em>
There's a lot to unpack here!
The question doesn't ask for the most important gas. It could be (mis)interpreted as "What's the only gas that causes temperatures to rise?" or "Which of the four gases listed can cause temperatures to rise?"
The possible answers don't include water vapor, so our whole discussion here is beside the point. Hydrogen and helium could easily ensnare a respondent who's not paying close attention, because they both cause balloons to rise in the atmosphere, and "rise" is the question word that's carrying the most weight (no pun intended). And radon could actually snare a scientifically literate respondent, who reasons "Radon is radioactive, and when the radon atom decays, it releases energy, part of which ends up as internal energy (i.e., heat). So radon definitely causes temperatures to rise, no matter what the other three do." Knowledge of the basics of radioactivity requires less complex physical understanding than knowledge of the basics of atmospheric radiative transfer.
> I'm taking "global warming" to mean the recent (50-200 yr) rise in temperatures
Out of curiosity, what's your take on recent research suggesting that "the recent (50-200 yr) rise in temperatures" is significantly less than has been reported, due to the data deriving disproportionately from measurements made in cities, which are heat islands, and thus that we aren't seeing global warming so much as *local* warming in the places where most people live?
I interpreted Scott's summary "know which gas causes most global warming" as being the question "which gas is responsible for the largest radiative forcing on Earth's atmosphere". Maybe I'm biased, because I had several questions that were phrased almost precisely like this in physics exams 30 years ago and water vapor was definitely the right answer.
But given that you looked up the actual question, yeah:
A) Anthropogenic forcing or not is largely irrelevant
B) And of course you're right that water vapor wasn't an option
Well they _could_ be noting that without the Sun fusing hydrogen into helium, the Earth would be rather chilly. ( No, I don't really think anyone answered "hydrogen" for that reason... ) :-)
But it isn't the direct cause of global warming. Water cycle is more-or-less in equilibrium by itself holding the concentration of other gases constant, so it makes sense to attribute causality elsewhere.
I had the exact same thought so I clicked the link to the question. Pew worded it as what has do scientists believe is causing the Earths temperature to rise. I still don’t like that wording, but it at least lets me know what Pew wants me to think the answer is
Yeah. I was aghast at that one. Actual climate scientists will confidently say water vapor.
Reminds me of helping my daughter with her English homework. Half of the “is this a complete sentence” questions were garbage, and my daughter was very upset with the gods.
This sort of thing occurred to me when looking over the list. A lot of the questions had either "advanced right" answers like saying Eric Blair wrote 1984, or "advanced wrong" answers like saying that Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford wrote Romeo and Juliet. Either these definitely shows more engagement with the context of the facts than a simple "I don't know" or an ordinary wrong answer.
Likewise, the Copernicus question. If you know anything about the contemporary astronomical debates beyond the level of popcultural osmosis, you'll know that Copernicus did not "discover" that the sun is the center of the solar system; at best he made a lucky guess. His solar model was awful, so much so that it set the acceptance of the possibility of heliocentrism by the scientific community back by at least a century.
I would have known about Copernicus (and yes, saying he discovered that the earth orbits the sun is a poor way to describe what he did) but if you held my feet to the fire I couldn't have told you a particular date, so if you asked me "quick! In 1543 who?" I'd probably have guessed "Galileo?" since he's the guy everyone knows in regards to "controversy over does the sun go round the earth or the earth goes round the sun".
Very few people can remember dates, but for those of us who do, they are immensely helpful in keeping historical narratives straight in our heads since the basic rule of causality is that effects can't possibly happen before their causes.
I was going to bring this up if no one else did. Scott paraphrased the question in a way that totally changed what it meant. The gas that causes by far the most global warming is water vapor. On a per molecule basis, it is by far sulfur hexafluoride.
The survey question asks which gas is believed to cause rising temperatures, which is much more clearly CO2.
Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is often used to cool electrical transformers and can be released into the atmosphere when they degrade. So yes, there is a non-trivial amount! However, the first video result on google is of a science entertainer huffing SF6 to give himself a deep Darth Vader voice, so it's clearly not too dangerous for humans.
And atmospheric scientists used to intentionally release sulfur hexafluoride into the atmosphere if they wanted to track the motion of air because it was so inert and so easy to detect. Oops.
Thermodynamically, it "should" be. SF6 + 4H2O -> H2SO4 + 6HF is highly favored. It turns out that this reaction is so slow that sulfur hexafluoride can be treated as practically nontoxic, while essentially all similar compounds (e.g. tungsten, platinum, and uranium hexafluorides) are very reactive, corrosive, and toxic.
Many Thanks! I _think_ that it is thought that the fluorines are packed so tightly around the relatively small sulfur that it is hard for other reactants to get close enough (aka "steric hindrance").
I don‘t have a clear theoretical counter-argument here, but as someone working in the field of demography, I am highly skeptical of the Case Against Education. The empirical evidence seems overwhelming that, whether people remember specific things or not, education changes human behavior significantly, resulting in changes in the economy and society. A part of this (I‘ve seen numbers on the order of 50%) can be argued to be a selection effect. But much of it cannot be, no matter how many people have tried to make that case.
That said, the biggest transformations happen with literacy and then the widespread provision of basic tertiary education. I‘m sure there is plenty of room for fluff in the education industry (eg probably too many PhDs, do all these fields really need masters, is children‘s time in high school being well-spent, etc)?
Yep. I think the strongest case for education is on 1) changing a society as a whole from "illiterate & uneducated" to "literate & educated" and 2) teaching easily verifiable skills/facts.
At least in my experience, almost nobody is in practice advocating to abolish school entirely, it's mostly about reducing or changing its scope. But even there, as someone who often advocates for schools to be changed into an explicit skills-focused education, I often get a surprising amount of pushback.
Every time I get into an discussion on how bad the knowledge of many people is on cultural topics, despite the topic being taught in school, nobody wants to accept the possibility that school just might not be a very good place to teach it. No, they always conclude that "we need to improve teaching", usually in some nebulous way that just-so-happens to fit with their preconceptions.
On the other hand, when I point out how ridiculous it is that not only is our tax system unnecessarily overcomplicated, we aren't even taught in school how it works, it's somehow beyond the scope of school.
People imo really are ideologically quite married to the idea of school as a place of idealised, cultured learning, despite the evidence that it's not actually very good at it.
The MPs and probability paper is posted a lot but the point remains important, most people even those making important decisions don't have basic skills and knowledge needed to make those decisions.
Retention of facts and skills from school varies greatly from country to country. Whatever theory of education you have needs to explain that. The US has unusually poor outcomes given its wealth and the resources it spends. It's probably easier to make a Case Against the US Education System, than a Case Against Education in general.
In my opinion, school has three different goals with three different profiles for how much you should retain, neatly corresponding to primary, secondary and tertiary education.
In primary education, very basic knowledge and skills that every single person should know are imparted, and the goal should be as close to 100% retention as possible. Maybe you're rusty with long division now, but you should at least know what division is.
In secondary education, the goal should be to present as much of the breadth of human endeavor as is possible for a young mind to experience, so that the student can choose what to specialize in. Retention is not important here. A teenager should get the chance to learn some history, write some code, read and write poetry, do some science in a lab, play serious sports, sing and act, bend their brain with advanced math, etc. so they can make an informed choice what to do in college. But you aren't expected to retain all of that. It's a tasting buffet.
Tertiary education should be more goal-driven than previous stages. Retention should depend on what goals exactly the student has for choosing a particular course.
I don't believe in the concept of education where the teacher pours facts and skills into children's minds, and we measure success by how much stays in. That's not what it's for. Maybe that's true for the most basic skills taught in primary school, but past that point education is meant to serve the student's life goals. Sometimes that means presenting a lot of information that is meant to be only tasted rather than swallowed so the student can choose what's best. And sometimes that means presenting a lot of information that the student is meant to only pick a small amount from that is directly relevant to them. As long as their life goals are being served, that's still success. This is not a skull-filling contest.
"At 521, U.S. whites outscored all countries founded by whites (light blue bars) except Estonia. American whites edged Japan and South Korea by one point, which isn’t shabby."
"U.S. Hispanics at 470 outscored all Latin American countries, with Chile scoring highest at 438."
Some notes/amendments that I would make. I largely agree with you.
1) The end goal of education should not be getting a diploma from a college. Setting aside the nonsense requirements that credentialism has led to, the broadest swath of what Western society needs to thrive as a cohesive group (as in, Capital S "Society") is labor and specialization. College only provides some avenues toward specialization. Trade schools can teach someone about plumbing, engines, electricity, etc. And, there are possibilities beyond that.
2) An enduring artifact of the No Child Left Behind approach to education is an emphasis on "pour[ing] facts and skills into children's minds". That is where I think the *modern* emphasis on rote and memorization comes from.
I am hopeful that we're turning away from that approach, but it has been quite some time since I've been in school and can't speak to it personally.
As someone who graduated high school before No Child Left Behind, there was plenty of "rote and memorization" in the Before Times as well. (It may well have gotten worse since then, but it was not by any means a new thing created by NCLB.)
This is great, but I think that the American system tends to emphasize university as still being a time to experience many different subjects - with some experience of actually *doing* several subjects rather than just *learning* about them - with specialization waiting until post-graduation. It does seem to me to be a strength: even though European undergrads come into grad school with more depth in their field, American students catch up on that, and tend to have more interdisciplinary connections.
1. Public schooling aims to bring everyone up to speed. Presumably, rich folks would still educate their children (as has been done for centuries at least), be it via private schools or homeschooling. But poor people won't have the luxury to let their children read Shakespeare when they can do chores instead. And middle class might be in between. So perhaps schools provide a basic (maybe very basic) level of education to everyone. Perhaps those stats you cite would be even lower without public school?
2. Maybe lots of people forget lots of facts. But perhaps schools give them the opportunity to find the subjects they're interested in pursuing, by giving them a broad view? Surely people who intend to study mathematics after school will have significantly greater number literacy compared to prospective English Literature students, and the other way around with being able to interpret poems or writing essays or sth. In the stats you cite, we might see that math people are bad at lit facts whereas lit people are bad at computations. For the two groups individually, however, it might have been worth learning one of those skills/knowledge, even if the other turned out to be completely useless later on. (Nb: I don't think thats true. Even if you don't remember a lot about a subjects "must know" facts, it can instill a curiosity. Perhaps I don't care about US history, but thanks to my history lessons, I notice how fascinating I find mideaval Europe. Even if I read every book on the subject, I still might not be able to name 3 US presidents. That doesn't necessarily mean that school is the best or a good way of sparking that curiosity. Just that even if I don't remember anything that gets asked in a survey, a given subject needn't have been fully wasteful for me.?
"According to tests, fewer than 10% of Americans retain PIIAC-defined “basic numeracy skills”, even though in theory you need to know algebra to graduate from most public schools."
I think you're misreading/misrepresenting this link. It says that 70% of Americans have "basic or above" numeracy skills.
Japan and Finland - two countries with completely different, but positively rated, education systems have 19% of the population with level 4/5 numeracy proficiency, while Italy and Spain have 5% and 4% respectively.
I think this just suggests that "it seems most people forget almost all of what they learn in school, whether we’re talking about facts or skills." is untrue. I know "people mostly retain a reasonable level of numeracy and literacy (depending on the quality of the education system), but forget isolated facts, unused foreign languages, and more advanced numeracy" doesn't sound as snappy, but this is probably the more accurate take from the data.
Can you really attribute retention of basic numeracy and literacy to school when it's something most people need to use daily throught their lives?
I.e. most people read something regularly - chats, social media, news websites, product descrption, maybe some work related materials, etc. Likewise they still need to use basic arithmetic everytime they want to buy something, and so on.
With literacy, it's hard to determine at the margins. Most Westerners live in a very literate culture, which is self-sustaining, even in the absence of education; but the same paper I referenced notes that 23/22% of Japanese and Finnish people score Level 4/5 on the PIIAC literacy test (mainly about understanding complex texts), compared to 3% of Italians. This seems huge to me, and seems better explained by differing quality of education than through different daily use of language.
If you live in a lower-education region, say in West Africa, without a written lingua franca or ubiquitous written language, it's even more extreme. In this context, whether people develop and retain even basic literacy is totally dependent on the quality of schooling.
With numeracy, it's very easy for people in most modern societies to be mostly innumerate. If you don't pick up the skills/habits at a young age, the maths you use when buying stuff, or sorting out your budget/spending just degrades into vague heuristics. Again, do Japanese/Finnish people use moderately advanced maths 7x more often than Italian/Spanish people because of some distinctive cultural factors? Or is it a better explanation that one education system allows people to retain this information and skills more effectively than the other?
Seems really obvious to me that quality of education is super important at the margins here.
My prior for Finn/Italian differences would be something like: 35% of the effect is because of different education levels (twice as many Finns as Italians pursue higher education), 30% of the effect is from better remembering/integrating the things people have learned in school through education quality, 30% would be improvements in general intelligence through education quality (education remains the most robust way of raising adult IQ scores (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6088505/). Maybe 5% from developmental or genetic characteristics?
Japan's scores could be connected to innate factors, but anyone familiar with East Asian education systems will understand the chasm between the educational experience of a European and a Japanese person. So I'd estimate that it's mostly an effect of education styles/intensity there as well.
I got the second highest grade for math ("long math", ie. the more advanced option from Finnish high school's two math lines) from Finnish high school graduation exams, and have certainly forgotten almost everything that I don't need in daily life.
Perhaps, but you would presumably perform better than your Italian counterpart if these skills were re-tested.
More advanced courses generally: a) teach you new things that you'll forgot soon after graduating if you don't reinforce them; and b) reinforce things that you'd been learning for the last 5 years. We probably neglect b), because it's not the stated purpose of the course, but it's probably where most of the value lies for those who don't pursue something similar.
For example, if you learned calculus, you might have forgotten almost everything at the actual calculus level, but learning calculus reinforced the basic components you have to use in a calculus course: arithmetic, algebra, geometry etc. Someone who didn't learn calculus, or learned it less effectively, would be much more likely to forget these basic components.
I guess that this is the same with a lot of your education - you think it's sad that you've forgotten so much of what you were explicitly taught in your later education, but you don't appreciate all the countless ways in which you're superior to the Italians ;)
Amusingly, that report contains a lot of stacked bar graphs. The sample task for level 4/5 numeracy proficiency was picking out information from a stacked bar graph. The report shows that only 9% of Americans have level 4/5 proficiency using... a stacked bar graph.
So if 91% of Americans misread or misunderstood that statistic, I feel like maybe the report authors should have seen that coming.
>This model makes it hard for school to be useful. If school teaches you some fact, then either you’ll never encounter it again after school, in which case you’ll quickly forget it). Or you will encounter it again after school, in which case school was unnecessary; you would have learned it anyway.
>Can we rescue some kind of value for school?
Isn't "culture" the obvious next step here? Facts that you will encounter after school may only be there because school made them cultural touchstones to begin with.
If you learn about the great hero Lei Feng in school, and then later you do something great, one of your classmates might say "wow, you did that just like Lei Feng!". And then when you go home to your parents who were also thought about Lei Feng when they were in school, and they tell you to eat your greens so that you can be strong like Lei Feng. Thus Lei Feng gets repeated and you remember him. He is repeated because everyone knows about him, and everyone knows about him because he is repeated, and school is foundational to this cascade. Since school keeps teaching about Lei Feng, then Lei Feng becomes a cultural touchstone that everyone can relate to and use, and since he is used (outside school) people remember him even more.
But then you move to the US and your kids learn about Spiderman in school and they don't listen when you tell them about eating greens like Lei Feng, so you have to tell them to eat greens to be strong like Spiderman instead. And though Lei Feng and Spiderman fills the same function with regards to greens-eating, there's a big difference between them in other aspects, and "society" may have an interest in making Lei Feng a cultural touchstone instead of Spiderman (or vice versa).
I worry that the knowledge people retain from these cultural tidbits is shallow. I read 1984, but like Scott, I don't remember much of it, and the cultural bits that are reinforced are basically "totalitarian police state = bad" and "thought police or excessive government surveillance = bad". And that's really all you need to know about Orwell to sound educated and throw the adjective "Orwellian" around in casual conversation. And if the person you're speaking with isn't into literature, that's likely all they know about Orwell as well.
A more striking example of shallow cultural knowledge is Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken. The common cultural use is roughly the opposite of the actual message of the poem. I think that misconception happened because people mostly only remember the last two lines of the poem ("I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.").
School also helped popularize some falsehoods that become common knowledge. The myth that when Columbus lived people thought the Earth was flat was spread in part by school textbooks. The war of 1812 is another amusing one: American students and Canadian students are both taught their own side won.
Sure, peoples knowledge is shallow per Scotts original post. But I still think it matters if people have shallow knowledge of Lei Feng or if they have shallow knowledge of Spiderman (or neither or both). The small percentage of people with deep knowledge of Lei Feng will be proportional to the size of the larger mass of people with shallow knowledge. Fundamentally there is a thing that's culture and it does matter: there's a difference between US culture and Igbo culture and Han culture and it affects how people behave in pretty strong ways. The issue with my argument IMO is that it's hard to know to which degree school can shape culture efficiently (it doesn't look that efficient to me), and to which degree the effects of shaping the culture can be known beforehand (it looks very hard for someone to know that teaching people about Lei Feng actually will make them behave the desired way).
Lei Feng was just a random example. I don't think totalitarian propaganda should be taught in schools (is anyone surprised?). Generally I agree with the Scott/Caplan/libertarian vibe: privatize schools and let the parents decide. I assume ~90% parents will pick schools that teaches reasonable, traditional cultural norms, and that this would be enough to uphold healthy cultural norms in society at large (at least better than any alternative).
Right, so you're using Lei Feng as a Chinese equivalent of Spiderman, not pointing to any particular difference between them.
Back to your first post, you're saying that if school isn't good at teaching facts or skills, maybe its value is shaping culture?
I agree with your own critique of your argument. I also agree that the education system can and does try to instill good values.
I'd point out that if the benefit of public school is that it helps the government shape values and culture, then it comes with the corresponding downside: that it helps the government shape values and culture.
"The Road Not Taken" isn't a good choice for your point. Not that I can see, at any rate.
Take the poem for what it *is*, as in how people commonly understand it, a beautiful way to express individualism. That is a value that we (or I, to withdraw an assumption about your nationality) as Americans want to express and to mold into each generation. It's a valid way to interpret a work of art, as it's a quite common interpretation.
However, take the poem for what it *was*, a shitpost where one friend ribs another for his worry over making decisions. That is also a value that Americans generally want to instill in others, that we can encourage, assuage, and strengthen those we care about through comedy. It's a valid interpretation using the same source material to get to something positive that we affirmatively want to see grow within our culture. Those aren't the same values, but they're both things that the Capital W "We" would want to propagate.
The prior interpretation isn't shallow. Even if we say that it is shallow, that expresses a value that we want. We get something from it whether we are ignorant of Edward Thomas or understand who he was in relation to Frost. That would say to me that schooling isn't needed, which is a point I disagree with.
I wouldn't call the first interpretation an interpretation of the poem. It's an interpretation of the last two lines, ignoring the rest of the poem. There is no less travelled path. The poem states they're the same.
Maybe on its own, those two lines are a beautiful and profound adage about individualism. I've not claiming any particular message or philosophical outlook is shallow. I'm saying it's shallow knowledge of the poem. It stems from only knowing or only remembering the last two lines of the poem.
As with 1984, the version you of the work that you learn from osmosis of popular culture without actually reading the work itself is just a few small tidbits, that may not even be congruent with message of the work.
The speaker establishes the scene, two paths in the woods. It's comedic -- "I could not travel both and be one traveler" -- while setting up that a decision must be made. They consider the decision at length.
"And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,"
This says to me that both paths are pretty much the same, except one is a slightly less trodden down. What makes them end up equal is the speaker's passing down that path. It's not just the last two lines of the poem.
Additionally, the speaker wants the less trodden soil, as it has "the better claim".
"And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!"
First!
"Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back."
The decision was going to be final. You cannot un-walk a path that you have taken.
"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
This can be both or either of telling others that choosing the way that had been taken by fewer people was the choice that made the speaker who they are, pointing toward the individualism interpretation, or taking the piss by using the sigh to subvert that individualist angle. "Just take a path, Thomas. It's grass."
I happen to like both interpretations. The idea that someone would write a poem to sass the crap out of their friend is a good one and I wish we saw it more now. The modern equivalent would be creating a meme, but I like the idea of using a poem to do it.
The two paths are equally travelled. It says this again in the next two lines. The speaker is vacillating between the choices. Like, "ooh, that way looks nice. But that other way looks nice and grassy and not travelled much. Hmm, but the first way also looks about equally not travelled."
Apart from the literal meaning of the words, we know this is what the author intended from your own story about the author and his friend.
Even if we accept your meaning, it doesn't mesh with the individualist, "take your own path" sentiment. It's not "to boldly explore where no one has gone before". Doing what is "slightly less trodden down" is rather anti-inspiring. It's like deciding whether to eat an apple or an orange based on which one is slightly less popular.
Small decisions like that, or indecisions in Thomas' case, are a part of what makes us who we are. We make decisions every day that we could have chosen differently on and gotten a similar enough result to be satisfied.
Further, it's not all-caps INDIVIDUALISM. Note that I have never used the word "rugged" in combination with it like you might find in speeches and corporate advertising, because this isn't a choice that generates a grand effect all on its own. It's not an image of rugged individualism, just something that sets us apart.
These small choices, like wearing black t-shirts with jeans, wearing a choker and earrings, having an opinion on Burger King's/Hungry Jack's fries, are small tokens that speak to who we are. The sum total of these make us unique, and that is a key facet of individualism.
Less "Oh, Pioneers" and more "I'm a winter, give me the purple one".
1984 is more like The Road Not Taken than many people realize; its meaning is very different from the meaning that pop culture has adopted for it.
If you ask the average "man on the street" what the message of 1984 is, they'd probably give you some version of "a warning about the evils of communism." And this is completely wrong. George Orwell was a Communist true-believer himself. He's on record as saying that "The war and the revolution are inseparable," meaning that by the end of World War II, England would inevitably have undergone a communist revolution.
He was a proud advocate of an idealized system he dreamed up, which he called English Socialism, believing that it would combine the best aspects of existing English culture and Marx's philosophies and avoid the pitfalls, and he published his ideas on what needed to be done to reach that blessed state.
1984 was a story of how this could all go wrong: when the Revolution finally arrived, The People made all the wrong choices, did the things he warned against doing, and ended up with something they *called* English Socialism but which was actually Stalinism, literally in all but name. This is not a story about the need to avoid communism; it's a story about the urgent necessity, when it inevitably arrives, of getting it right.
Of course, the war was *not* inseparable from the revolution, a communist England never happened, and all that context fell apart. As the USSR expanded, Stalinism became indistinguishable from communism itself in the minds of the general public, and the most vivid imagery of the story was transformed into a powerful warning against letting your country get taken over by communists. Which, I suppose, makes this book one of the starkest examples we have of "death of the author."
> These results are scattered across many polls, which makes them vulnerable to publication bias; I can’t find a good unified general knowledge survey of the whole population.
As so often in social science, you want the General Social Survey! It's run every other year with many of the same questions, so little concern about publication bias. I suspect it's where some of these reported results are from (it has the electrons/atoms question). But it also has other fun questions in the "Science Knowledge and Attitudes" module, like 'are lasers caused by focusing sound waves'.
- Very few people actually teach themselves how to read. Like, I've heard of reading clicking together for people who are read to as children but it seems to be pretty rare. Unschooled people in 3rd world countries coexist with text their whole lives and never put it together. As far as I can tell, >99% of people learn how to read the same way my kids do, by having a teacher tell them lots of rules and give drills etc. The homeschoolers I know also actively teach their young kids reading. They don't just plop them in a room with books and expect any learning to happen.
- Basic reading might fit into the "up to 4th grade" framework, but peoples' reading keeps improving after 4th grade. At some point you might just expect it to take off without school: they read more and more complex things and it iteratively improves. That might be fine for the smart, self-motivated types, but the people who forgot that Moscow is the capital of Russia wouldn't be spending 5th grade - later reading, they would be spending it watching TikTok or whatever. In addition to needing basic reading to function in day to day life, there really is a correlation between reading ability and general employability in white colour work, so teaching people how to read matters.
- Do the smart, self-motived people not need post-4th grade school? Even if they don't need to be forced to read, they retain a much higher percentage of the random stuff they are taught and benefit that way. The math is a good example: most people don't use anything beyond arithmetic but some people use a huge amount of math in their work and so it's good that they learn it somewhere.
So the weaker students benefit by being forced to read a lot, the stronger ones by actually learning stuff they retain.
> So the weaker students benefit by being forced to read a lot
Do they benefit, if they come out of it hating reading?
How many of the young people today who love reading can trace it back to being forced to read in school, vs. the number who can trace it back to Harry Potter? I'll bet you anything that the Harry Potter crowd is deeply in the majority here.
> Very few people actually teach themselves how to read
Indeed, that claim follows from the excellent Sold a Story podcast, tracing the history of the disaster that was (is?) "let's take phonics out of schools". A select few teach themselves to read; the majority need to be taught it in a slow, often frustrating way.
Since you mention it, I remember reading about how many kids (even at like 13) have to be taught how to use words like "although" in sentences. Even that they don't pick up on their own.
All else aside, I think its odd that the "place to warehouse children while their parents are away" function of schooling is always a side note in these education posts. This is basically the most important social institution underpinning the modern economy. Dual-income households need childcare and would like their children to be doing something positive or at least neutral during this time. Teaching them maths or history or whatever is appealing because they have the chance for their children to be part of the 20% that learn something for life and become more knowledgable.
Until the alternatives to traditional schooling provide a comparable amount of childcare, I don't think it will be possible for all or most people to use them. I've seen some people propose paying parents to homeschool, but homeschooling will just never have the economies of scale to justify taking one parent out of the labour pool (with tax money). I think schools can be reformed, but I don't think they're getting replaced under any realistic scenerio.
I don't think that necessarily contradicts with anything in my comment. The original motivation to implement widespread schooling is not necessarily the reason we're stuck with it now. The way I see it:
World with single-income households and limited schooling = fine
World with single-income households and widespread schooling = fine
World with dual-income households and limited schooling = nobody to do childcare
World with dual-income households and widespread schooling = fine
We shouldn't be "warehousing" children anywhere. It's one of the worst things we do in modern society, made all the more awful by how said warehousing fails the children even on its own terms.
Who says they have to either spend time with you or be in a warehouse? It's not my fault your a selfish asshole. Nor that we live in a demented, safetyist hellhole society.
This person doesn't have kids. The idea that not wanting to be surrounded by your children 24/7 makes you a selfish asshole is hilarious to me.
But if I can try to interpret what they seem to be implying, it is that kids should be able to wander around unsupervised at their own will. I suppose that this would kind of work like the idyllic Tom Sawyer view we have of the past where during summer vacations parents would throw their children out of the house to run around the neighbourhood and not expect to see them until dark, but all year round.
I can't see how this would work in reality, it doesn't have an precedent in history that I am aware of, but it is an intriguing notion.
It's not "not wanting to be surrounded by your children 24/7" that makes someone an asshole. It's seeing the warehousing of their children as a positive good that makes someone an asshole.
If you just want someone to take your kids off your hands, THERE ARE BETTER WAYS TO SEE THEM TAKEN OFF YOUR HANDS THAN DUMPING THEM INTO A PUBLIC SCHOOL. LIKE ALMOST ALL OF THEM. BECAUSE SCHOOL SUCKS.
I grew up with an approximation of the Tom Sawyer version. We lived in suburbs in small southern towns. The dads worked, the moms were housewives, and all the neighbors with kids knew each other and, if they were not actually friends, acted friendly and chatted with each other because that's what you needed to do to get your kid into the informal neighborhood "daycare" system: All the kids in the group could go into most other kids' houses to use the bathroom or get some water. Some moms even provided snacks and let the group play inside the house for a while. But mostly we played outside. Each of us had certain landmarks that were the boundaries beyond which we couldn't go -- smaller kids had nearer landmarks. By the time I was 10 mine was about half a mile from the house in the direction that led to a mostly undeveloped area of scrub forest. We all knew that as it neared suppertime we had to be closer to the house so we could hear our parents call.
I think it was quite good for me. In school, I was the weird smart kid.
At home I was just one of the neighborhood gang. I highly recommend that parents try to build some approximation of the setup I had -- maybe something like neighboring summer homes or Air B&B's for a month in the country every summer.
There are calls to relax child employment laws. Indeed, children going to school and having all the other trappings that come with what we think of as childhood are a very recent development; historically, they were a valuable part of the labour force and would learn whatever skills were necessary for their, mostly meager and brief by modern standards, lives, while being productive.
It is only when expecting better than this for one’s children became the norm that the problem of where they could be stashed arose.
Sounds interesting, but with one important caveat: "copy this small, extremely successful thing and scale it up to massive scale" virtually never ends up working successfully.
I'm generally as fanatically anti-school as Scott. But I do think there are some hard to articulate mathematical intuitions, quantifying and analysing, probabilities stuff, what things are multiplicative vs additive etc., that got drilled in at six form(uk version of high school), and that I'd only give a 50% chance I would have picked up on my own.
Another thing, I did take coding classes at uni and a couple of years after graduating didn't even know what a float was. Then watching some Youtube tutorials I learnt about 10x more stuff in about half the time.
There are two ways of stimulating learning: 1) "Artificial" - some kind of spaced repetition, rote learning or consistent practice to learn something isolated and without immediate use or relevance; 2) "Natural" Connecting things to real-life, narratives, or other interesting ideas; making it the kind of thing you retain more effortlessly.
Modern Western education usually doesn't have the stamina/commitment for 1) to be effective, because you need to be very consistent, ensure attention, and dedicate a lot of time for this. So when we do this, most students don't retain the skills they learn, hence these disappointing results. But 2) can work more effectively, by connecting these isolated facts to a broader cultural milieu (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind).
East Asian education focuses a lot on 1), but they have the stamina to go through with it. This means that most East-Asian educated 35 year olds you meet will still be able to do all the maths equations you'd forgotten by your 18th birthday, but they may be more likely to lack the "connecting tissue" between knowledge areas, and often seem kind of ignorant about some basic facts about the world.
1) Reading and especially more so writing are REALLY GOOD candidates for the usefulness of universal schooling. I'd say 4 years is a bit optimistic -- many people don't achieve even moderate proficiency in reading until later, probably around 12-14. Writing ditto, but possibly more so (in my observation, many kids who learn to read on some basic level before going to school, don't learn to write as early).
2) Same with basic life-useful arithmetic though you could argue that this gets outsourced to technology more and more so is becoming less essential.
3) As to other more academic subject areas I always had this idea that the purpose of schooling is less to give *everyone* a lasting knowledge for life, but to provide everyone with a kind of taster of various key areas, so they can choose if and what they might pursue further, either professionally or even in a more dilettante/hobby way.
So people forgetting content after a few months or a year will be kinda (implicitly) expected and natural, though we could assume that things repeated a lot --- the kind of content that will be FURTHER reinforced by the repetition and the general culture osmosis -- will stick more but the rest will just leave a sort of vague faint veil like residue.
4) And for the people who do decide to pursue a subject further, school will provide some sort of basis for that so university doesn't have to start with telling them what cells and DNA are, or whatever the basic foundation knowledge of a given subject is.
5) Finally, in addition to providing childcare (aka warehousing children), school also teaches mainstream social values and behaviours, ie is an instrument for broadly understood socialisation and reinforcing certain level of conformity -- whether that's a good thing or not is highly arguable but it's definitely one of its functions (appearance of universal, free basic schooling roughly coinciding with industrial revolution which needed punctual workers able to consistently focus on repetitive tasks to set schedules is probably not coincidental).
> appearance of universal, free basic schooling roughly coinciding with industrial revolution which needed punctual workers able to consistently focus on repetitive tasks
Yes. Pre industrial agricultural labourers did not need to start at a very specific time on the dot, for example. They were operating more according to "where the sun is in the sky, roughly" than the factory whistle announcing the start of a specific shift, and the rhythm of the team work was more likely to be "negotiated" within the group than set externally by, for example, the speed of the conveyor belt.
The range of permitted movements was also likely larger in most agricultural labour: there's a stronger parallel between standing mostly still (or moving in very prescribed limited way) at your allocated conveyor belt position and sitting still at the school desk than between the latter and picking sheaves of wheat following a reaper or ploughing a field.
And the tasks, while also often repetitive and often as or more backbreaking as factory labour, made more sense in themselves, being less broken up into tiny chunks.
I'm not saying agricultural labourers (or, idk, for example galley rowing slaves working to the drum set rhythm) had it better than factory workers by any means. I'm saying that the growth of industrialisation required a development of a different set of time management and self organisation skills that previously had only been required of, idk, monks in particularly strict rule orders.
I am not sure I agree. Factory work for both adults and children became common long before education became mandatory, so it doesn't seem like we can say that education was required for factory work. Rather, it seems to me that factory work was required for education.
Note: I am not an expert on this period in history, some of what I say may be incorrect, my knowledge of this primarily from surface reading of Pop-sci books.
Prior to the industrial revolution, children would accompany their parents during their jobs from the age they were able walk. So a 4 year old boy would be expected to follow his father around the field. Perhaps not to actually work, but at least to be monitored by him.
When the industrial revolution happened, this effectively continued, and children accompanied their parents to the factories. However, within about 50 years it became pretty clear that factories were not places for children, and legislation was quickly passed which outlawed this.
So now we had a conundrum. Parents in factories, children not allowed, what to do? Within another few decades, education became mandatory for all children and the final piece of the puzzle was solved.
So I think it somewhat unlikely that education was necessary for effective work in a factory. I think such skills could probably be far more effectively learnt should children just have attended factories from age 6 than attending school. Rather schools kept them safe until they were a bit more mature and ready to participate in this more complex and dangerous kind of work, rather than trying to maximise the efficiency of the child->factory worker process.
The Industrial Revolution predates universal free basic schooling. Governments were not setting up schools for the benefit of employers. Rather, if you look at the Puritans' Old Deceiver law (which didn't make education free, just mandatory), it was explicitly about religion. Government was insisting on schooling for reasons of ideological inculcation. This is also why the KKK was against Catholic & German Lutheran schools, insisting on mandatory public education.
School doesn't resemble an optimally efficient institution for letting students try different subjects to discover what they like and are good at. It doesn't resemble an optimal.institution for permanent instilling a narrowly defined core, either. Maybe it's a compromise.
It resembles an institution designed over centuries by many people, largely well intentioned, trying to optimise for various things that they might not have even been fully aware of. Same as most other institutions, really
I agree with your points about the tendency to forget facts but I think there's another way of thinking about education that is more significant.
When you *really* learn something, it's not the facts that are most significant; it's how all the facts hang together. My favourite analogy is about 'growing the tree' rather than 'collecting the leaves'. If you grow the tree of knowledge on a subject, the leaves of data come along for the ride. Your example of 1984 illustrates that you remember lots of facts — but that's because the story was significant. The same applies to the story of American Democracy — and the story of African Kingdoms.
The way that American education is designed, there's an overall desire to bring everyone up to the same level. But what if that's not possible? What if some folks are unable to grow the tree of knowledge and schools have to instead throw facts at their students for long enough to pass their exams? I believe that the folks on the left of the bell curve gain little from this while the folks on the right are held back because they are not taught to grow trees until they get to their Master's and beyond. The result is mediocrity.
I was lucky enough to go to school in the UK when they still separated students by the grade they got in an "11+" exam. The top students went to a grammar school where they were prepared for university. The rest went to a "secondary modern" where they were prepared for a more technical career. My brother has had a very successful career as a carpenter and my nephew was a bank manager at 21. I think it was better for everyone.
One more thought: I am currently doing a degree with the Open University. In the UK 85% scores you a distinction while 40% scores you a bare pass (don't mock — the assignments are graded far more severely than similar assignments in the USA).
I'd say that about 60% of the students seem to have no inclination to learn anything or to get a good grade. You see people in the forums saying things like (paraphrase) "I have an average of 42% in my last three assignments — does it matter if I skip the last one". They give the impression that they are only there because their mum said so and they have no interest in the materials. Meanwhile, others are getting distinctions in every assignment and spend every evening chatting about the Acropolis or whether the Gettier problem is real.
I'd say they have no business being there and would be better off in a different system. It's a waste of money and three years and it slows everything down for the students who care.
It would be interesting to see a system where tertiary education was tiered. In a way, we have community colleges here in the US that kinda sorta do this, but I don't think that's super useful.
I'd like to see a system with a 1-year degree, let's call it a neophyte degree, that is just non-basic courses like Comparative Religion, Art History, Intro to Psych, Optics, etc. with no eye toward English or Math classes.
If you seek an N.A. or N.S. or something and decide this whole college business isn't for you, that's only a year or one semester lost and you can still try it again later. You might not realize it at the time, but even putting two years and the associated education debt on the table is asking a lot.
There's another aspect of higher education that I want to see amended, the cultural norm that college is for a specific age group. I was absolutely not ready for college when I went. Now that I'm older, I know what I want and I desperately want to get in there.
In years past, the vast majority of folks in the UK went to a technical college or did an apprenticeship. I think that's better than a bachelor's degree in an academic subject for most people.
Look up the French system, tiered from terminal professionally oriented high-school-level diploma via two/three year university-attached fast-track-to-work-market programs considered as such via 3+2 programs to MSc and then there are engineering degrees which I would call 2+3…
Re: 40% being a bare pass, yes, that's how school worked for me. I was highly surprised to find the American system of grading was vastly different. See "The Simpsons" episode where Bart gets an F, even after trying his best. Over here, an F would be 10-25%, in the show Bart got 59% which would easily have been a passing mark and even a low C.
That has led me to think that part of what is wrong with the education *system* in America is this grinding after grades; there were people saying on a different thread that they never read any of the set books and relied on Spark/Cliff Notes type aids to get through school. So I think that it's easy for a student to avoid reading the actual book or play and instead just get the "this is the canned answer" from notes, serve that up, and get the requisite grade. Grind away like that throughout school, it's easy to come out the other end remembering nothing after you no longer have to regurgitate it for tests.
We in America have a tendency, in our schools, and I think it's gotten worse over time, of not wanting to give tests that are "too hard". There's a discomfort with having any space between "good enough" and "perfect". I don't know where this comes from, but the ultimate result is high schools that give straight 'A's to everyone. The SATs keep getting their high end compressed, and the number of people getting the maximum score goes up and up.
Whereas I have vivid memories of a college physics course where I think literally nobody got more than 55%, and most of us were more like 35%.
In defense of low-to-middling students, of which I was one, I think this is an overly harsh opinion.
I may not have discussed the Acropolois or the Gettier problem, but I found the 3 years I spent on my bachelors to be very much worthwhile for a number of reasons.
Firstly, as you point out you do need to work pretty hard even to get 40% on your modules. So you learn pretty quickly how to work hard, and that points aren't given away for free, you need to earn them, which you don't necessarily learn in school, where I basically had not figured out how to learn whatsoever, but still made it through with average marks.
Secondly, you are surrounded with interesting and inspiring people. Over the course of 3 years, they will rub off on you. You can learn a lot about the kind of person you want to be and what you are looking for from life by being around other motivated students.
Thirdly, you get to mature. I think you are setting a very high bar for 18 year olds. Sure, some people will have already figured out what they want to do by the age of 18, but I certainly hadn't and University was a great place for me to do that. I think being in University becase "mum said so", is actually not a terrible reason for someone who is basically still a child. And sure, you may not have much interest in the topic to begin with, but doing builds motivation, not the other way around. Sometimes it takes a good few years to build a passion for your subject, it did for me anyway, I only really knuckled down in my 3rd year when I had a really cool thesis project I really wanted to put all my energy into.
Finally, I don't think other students are "slowed down" by there being slower students. As you pointed out, each student can set their own targets. Many decide that they want to graduate with distinctions, do summer placements, do student exchanges abroad, read outside of the curriculum, join debating societies. All of these options are still available to them. If they are particularly gifted, they can even take additional modules not required for their degrees, or try to do a masters in 3 years rather than 4 and start post-grad work early.
At school level I can somewhat agree, you are all in one class, your only real way of learning is by listening to the teacher, so having disruptive or lower level students who need to get all the attention from the teacher can limit the higher ability students. But this simply is not the way that universities work, where only a small amount of learning is in lectures, and professors do not slow down for slower students. They have decided what they will cover in that lecture, and if the slower students can't keep up, they will need to figure that out in their own time.
So yeah, have a bit of sympathy for us slower students, we are still trying to figure life out.
I wonder if it wouldn't be better to give more options to students who haven't yet made up their minds and allow them to spend those years maturing somewhere where they aren't accumulating a vast debt. The university will still be there when they are able to make decisions for themselves and decide whether they want to spend three or four years studying something they don't care about.
Ah. I probably should have pointed out that I went to university in Britain. I did take on a bit of debt during my time in university, but hardly enough to worry about. Money well spent in my opinion.
I'm also in Britain. I did an apprenticeship in the Royal Navy at sixteen and went to the Falklands. It gave me a good start in life.
I'm doing a degree with the Open University (OU) in my autumn years and one of the things that does annoy me is that the tutors **do** dumb down the tutorials and its hard to engage them in anything beyond the basic info needed to pass.
Another complaint particular to the Open University is that there are no entrance requirements (it's right there in the name). It was always intended for mature students coming back to education later in life but, with the expectation that everyone go to university, there are now a lot of eighteen-year-olds who could not get into a brick university. The average age on entry has dropped over the last decade or so from 34 to 24. I think a lot of those younger students are there because their mum said so.
Maybe students at a brick university get to hang out with inspiring and motivated students but that doesn't seem to be the case at the OU. And good for you for getting motivated and knuckling down but I don't think that's the norm.
I think there's not much difference in terms of motivation between the cultural osmosis questions (puck, Popeye, Toto) and the school questions.
You learn the answer to cultural osmosis questions because you want to have something to talk about with other people. They are a social lubricant, and not knowing them (when "everybody" else does) would negatively affect you social life and your status. You are motivated to learn them, and remember them, because you are a social animal.
But it's (mostly) the same with the school questions. School is a social community within the broader society of which it's a part. Learning more gets you better grades, and getting better grades means raising your social status within the student body. Additionally, school learning and good grades open the road to better status later in life.
"I’m betting it’s the latter - for example, I’ve forgotten the names of some of my college professors, even though I would have seen them almost daily for a year." => I would hazard a guess that Scott doesn't get together with his former classmates very often. Because if he did, I would expect those former college professors would be the subject of many conversations in that social circle, and hence he would remember their names through repetition.
I'd say that there are 2 more aspects going for the School and remembering stuff.
1st is how important does a person regard certain knowledge. I know people who say how unimportant basic calculations in chemistry are (calculating molar concentrations for making a solution) and how they will forget them either way (despite needing to use them at least once a year so far). And they do forget how to do that. While I am treating any knowledge like that as very important and try to remember. Unlike names of teachers. Though I do indeed don't remember everything I wish I remembered and regard as important.
2nd is school allows for people to experience and try different disciplines that they might not have tried otherwise. It broadens the perspectives. A kid who never though they could be a Mathematician will find out they like Math (if a teacher is good) and go for that career. I know that I went for education initially in History and Archaeology and then in Computational Biology because I had teachers of History and Biology that I enjoyed in high school.
If a student tries a subject, finds out that they are terrible at it and hate it, they are not then excused from that subject and switched to something else. School just doesn't in practice resemble what it would be if we modeled it as being for that purpose.
This is a potentially fair criticism, depending on our goals with education. But it certainly isn't a criticism of education itself, only of a particular method.
My grandfather, born in the early 1900s, last entered a classroom when he left third grade to work on the farm. But he read a newspaper, managed his farm's finances, and in general could handle life better than many Ivy League 20-somethings. He was not at all unusual for his generation.
Barack Obama talked about how his grandmother, a HS graduate, wrote better than his law students because she had read far more. I would be curious (in a way Scott doesn’t seem to be) whether the knowledge retention figures have gotten worse in recent years.
Education teaches skills. Just not the skills you are expecting it to teach.
You say we remember how to read and write and do simple addition because we learnt it in school and use it everyday. But why do we use it everyday. Sure because it comes up in life and stuff. But also because we use it in school. Like if you taught school up to 4th grade and then kids got jobs at age 9 they would remember how to read and write because they use it in their jobs. But if at age 9 kids just played basketball all day till they turned 22. Then maybe by then they would forget basic addition and reading. School reinforces the basic skills learnt earlier.
Also: School makes recall easier. The more advanced skills that you forget are easier to relearn if you need to then if you hadn't learnt them at all.
Also: More advances skills need to be taught otherwise no one would have them. Like some kids go on to learn calculus. They manage that by learning it before they forget the algebra they learnt. But if no one is taught algebra then no one could learn calculus. Then no one could do high level math and science. We could say "only teach algebra to kids who want to do science" But kids are bad at knowing what they will want to do. You could say "only teach algebra to kids with a high IQ" But even people without high IQs might decide to do something where they need to know algebra.
We could probably start schooling at 13 if we wanted to and have students catch up on everything we would otherwise have taught them in the first few months.
Before that, the far more important part is teaching kids to sit still and pretend to listen and work, an invaluable talent in later life, and to have somewhere to pack them off to during the day while the parents work.
> Okay, so that maybe justifies up to fourth grade. Are there any examples from later schooling that could work like this?
I think a lot of people take longer than fourth grade to acquire complete literacy. I also am dubious that you're going to learn things like "the difference between hour and our" outside of a school environment (or some other intentional-learning environment, like having ChatGPT proofread your writing). Sure, maybe you'll get the occasional correction from a friend, but mostly people are going to just not care that you're making yourself look like an idiot as you misspell every third word, and either not read, not hire you, or do their best to work through your trash writing.
That's a good point. I also feel like people with good numerical literacy (myself included) vastly overestimate the skills of pupils. Here in Germany, kids learn about linear and quadratic functions in 7th grade, and how a function graph, a table of values, and an equation are all different representations of a function. Or remember how many pupils in your class struggled with fractions (I definitely did)? I don't think that's because children are super dumb - those same pupils really picked up the pace during A-levels. You don't spend the rest of school thinking about polynomials of ever-higher degrees - at some point, you get how they work. But getting to a point where you get stuff and can actually work it takes a scarily long time.
Small specific comment regarding why remembering your professors for many days in a year wasn’t enough for long term: My understanding of spaced repetition theory is that the larger the gap before interrupting the forgetting curve, the stronger you reinforced the memory (assuming you could actually recall it and didn’t leave it for too late).
So if this is true then in order to remember something a year from now, you need to have actively recalled *after having the appropriate non-trivial gap*.
This makes intuitive sense to me, if you never have to recall a piece of information over a long period of time, then it makes sense for your brain to not ‘file it under long term storage’ regardless of frequency.
I think schooling serves a dual purpose. One component of it is to teach children basic skills that they need to function in our modern technological society; as Scott points out, schools are doing rather poorly at this, but still better than nothing. But another component is to expose kids to a variety of subjects, in hope that the really smart ones will find something that interests them. Just as a person would probably never learn to read unless he is deliberately taught to do so, he might never learn to program a computer or solve equations or stage controlled experiments, or even write novels. Or maybe he would (through cultural osmosis), but with a lower probability. The problem is that our economy is no longer agrarian, like it was in the past. It's no longer driven by strong backs and gumption; it's driven by those 0.5% (or whatever) of kids who are willing and able to continue learning all of their lives, and increasing that percentage even a little is worth the effort.
For the man who wrote "Beware of the man of one study", Scott sure has a tendency to believe single, counter-intuitive studies when it suits the point he's making.
I'm sorry, I simply don't believe it. I don't believe that only 31% of students (even Kent State psychology students) knew that Moscow was the capital of Russia (while 81% knew the name of Dorothy's dog). Moscow is well into cultural osmosis territory, it's in hundreds of movies you've seen, it's in every second newspaper you pick up. It's not one of those "trick" capitals like Wellington or Ottawa that gets overshadowed by more prominent cities in its own country. I simply don't believe it.
Anyway, my general counterargument would be: if you think the unwashed masses are ignorant now, wait 'til you see how ignorant they'd be if they'd never been to school.
Perhaps the sample, specifically, might lack frequent exposure through entertainment media. They're still being exposed to that particular class of fact whenever a nation's capital city or a prominent government building is used to reference that nation.
"It remains to be seen how Washington will respond to Moscow's statement," would be an example sentence I just cooked up.
We've been referencing Moscow across Americana and in other spheres of American life both in the thousand years we've lived post-2020 and in the times before then.
Scott is writing a paid blog. The aim may not necessarily be to espouse a position he fervently believes, so much as to write a compelling post about a thing he found curious and spark plentiful interesting debate in the comments. Contrarian / unintuitive positions are much better at achieving this.
At least for STEM, I think the lottery ticket hypothesis is important here. For reference, the lottery ticket hypothesis is roughly, If you train a neural network with a million neurons to recognize cats, then you can strip away all but 10,000 neurons after training and still get high performance. However, we don't know of a trainng method to start with just the neded 10,000 neurons.
Similarly, as a society we need a couple hundred thousand people good enough at math and engineering to build LRASMs and AWACs etc, and bridges and power plants I guess. Right now we are getting those thousands of people out of the education system by attempting to teach math to millions, which seems wasteful but we don't actually know that it is- I suspect if we needed 150,000 engineers so we only started teaching third grade math to 150,000 people, we'd rapidly start losing wars.
→ Most people are just sort of dumb and aren't really able to learn *anything* very good, except (sort of) for things that are constantly repeated and have some sort of socio-emotional valence (since, for them, "fitting in, and being the kind of person that everyone says is the kind of person everyone wants to be, and emoting appropriately to whatever it is that aforesaid kind of person conspicuously emotes about" collectively constitute >90% of "important things" & all mental activity in general).
→ You and I and the regular ACXian remember these things, on the other hand, because we are just better at remembering things, because our brains work gooder. This is why we also know almost as many stupid facts, such as "the Big Brother show is in the reality TV genre", as the normie — *despite* spending most of our time solving deep universal mysteries and stuff instead.
And furthermore,
hm had another point to make here but it's slipping my mind, hold on
Here’s Scott’s argument: (1) learning is about remembering. (2) it you don’t remember, you didn’t learn. (3) if you didn’t learn, then schooling was a waste of time. I disagree with premise (1). A lot of learning is acquiring meta knowledge. For example, I haven’t done calculus since I was a freshman in college, approximately right after Newton and Leibniz invented it. I don’t remember how to solve differential equations. But what I do remember is that calculus is a thing, I know some things it could be used for, and I know that there are people who are good at it and know how to work it. All of that is pretty valuable to have.
Schooling also gives self-knowledge: about what I am good at, what I lack innate talent for, what I enjoy. How is someone supposed to know in advance of making some real guided effort that they are good at foreign languages or bad at programming? A lot of schooling is this process of self-discovery.
I think we should take a long, hard look at what math is taught - I work in IT, and I don't think I've ever had to use even High School math. I *have* had to read up on math for statistics, because that's something with more common real-world applications.
Also, it's time to stop pretending that we won't always have a calculator with us.
Sure, but it means that learning algorithmic solving for division and so on isn't really productive, because that's what you *do* have a calculator for.
I am curious about what would happen if statistics were taught earlier in the math sequence. It is, of course, important. My impression is, for the average human, "independent samples of a random variable" is a _very_ counterintuitive concept. Just getting people to accept "No, if a fair coin comes up heads three times, that does _not_ mean that it is now more likely to come up tails." is hard.
That just makes it more important to learn - false and strongly believed intuitions are really bad to have, and while not knowing calculus rarely hurts you, misunderstanding probabilities is likely to.
That's a good summary of the argument, thanks. Clearly many commenters also disagree with premise 3 (school as daycare, school as exploration/discovery of subjects - this part you allude to in your last paragraph). If learning can differ from recalling facts, then premise 2 also needs more justification.
My understanding of Scott's argument was not that learning is about remembering, but rather that remembering key facts is a symptom of a broader understanding of the subject. This symptom is sensitive (i.e. if you understand a subject then you're quite likely to remember key facts about it) but not necessarily specific (i.e. it's definitely possible to memorize a few key facts about a subject, either deliberately or through cultural osmosis, without knowing anything about the rest of the subject).
I don’t think that’s an improvement, though. Take his example of studying Spanish. I also took two years of Spanish in high school and retain next to nothing. I remember key facts about the language: that it is a Romance language, that people in Spain, Mexico, and South America speak it, that it is a widely-spoken language in the US, that great writers like Borges, Garcia Marquez, and Cervantes wrote in it, etc. I don’t think I have a broad understanding of the Spanish language, although I do possess valuable meta knowledge about it.
That depends on how it is taught though. There was nearly no focus on history or literature at all in any of the languages I learned (except my primary language and one secondary language that I started to learn in very special circumstances). Especially if you only learn a language for two years it seems quite weird to me to learn such details completely unrelated to actually speaking or understanding the language. Of course the result is that in my country most people have neither any meta knowledge about the languages they learned in school nor any capacity to speak or understand it...
Two points that may or may not be helpful for the pro-schooling case:
1. You get out of it what you put into it. My 14 year old is eager to learn and self-motivated to some extent but the structure of school gives her expert guidance on topics, pacing, etc and she tries to maximize the impact of this. While I could help her (especially with Lit and STEM) I'm too busy working to do it to the degree that she finds she needs it.
2. While school may not do well at its *stated* purpose of educating past elementary school it does *great* at its cannot-be-spoken-aloud purposes of keeping the kids occupied while the adults are economically productive, and teaching children to fit themselves into the *structure* of a modern organized group (I think back to your review on the old blog of Little Soldiers). This function is maybe a little less creepy-sounding if we tie it to executive functioning.
I'm not sure that is a pro-school argument, but we've tried un-schooling and home schooling and private school and now... one of our kids is in a lottery school and the other is in straight up public school (although that is warped by us living in a relatively affluent area).
I'm suspicious of this one, because this answer is wrong - the correct answer is "Eric Arthur Blair" (George Orwell was his pen-name). If the survey-makers themselves didn't know that, they'd undercount by marking the most-informed people - the ones who know the author's real name - as "wrong". Still, probably only 1% or less who actually know that little bit of trivia.
I don't think the fact that "George Orwell" is a pen name means it's wrong. It's like if I showed you a picture of Dwayne Johnson and asked you who it was and you said "The Rock".
I think there's a bit of a difference between a nickname and an outright false name. There are ways to phrase the question that wouldn't have "George Orwell" being wrong, but "who wrote" is pretty unambiguous IMO; the person who physically created the manuscript is Eric Arthur Blair, not the nonexistent Orwell.
Regardless of this, however, the overall point is that if one *only* accepts "George Orwell" as correct, one will undercount due to people giving the more-correct answers of "Eric Blair" or "Eric Arthur Blair", and I'd need more-direct access to the survey results to confirm that this didn't happen.
By convention, the person wrote the book as the pen name, so the (primary) correct answer to the question is the pen name. I don’t actually remember George Eliot’s actual name.
I mean a name is just a way to refer to someone, right, and George Orwell pretty unambiguously refers to a single individual. It's not his given name by birth but by that logic does it mean that, say, a trans person can only ever be credited for their work under their deadname? Or that Muhammad Ali doesn't exist, only Cassius Clay does? A chosen name is still a name, and a pen name is specifically chosen by an author so that the book will be attributed to that pen name.
In any case, on a practical level I highly doubt that there is any significant proportion of people who answered "Eric Blair" that the results would be drastically different if you took that into account.
It's not like he went around calling himself George Orwell in everyday life; there's a difference between changing one's name overall (I'd say Lenin and Stalin did this, for non-trans examples; Mao's last wife is more complicated) and assuming a false one for some purpose.
If I've taken anything useful or interesting from this, it's that the actual name of the author who wrote the most abominable book I've ever attempted to read isn't Ayn Rand.
Airstrip One was part of Oceania, not Eurasia. The ideology of Oceania was Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism). Oceania also contained what was the United States.
This reads more like a theoretical case against a particular form of education (rote fact retention) than against education per se. Ex: A few years ago a young person asked the stereotypical, "When will I ever use this?" regarding some basic math they were learning, and I explained that I use them frequently in my normal daily life. It's unlikely I was explicitly taught to use these as tools for solving "problems" in daily life, but if that were done it seems likely to foster an environment that would trigger recollection/utilization.
Thanks. And can we just defend the question "When will I ever use this in real life?". I think this is a perfectly valid question from a student, yet in general we treat it as disruptive and defiance of authority to be stamped out.
Obviously I suspect it is often asked as code for "This is boring and I don't feel like learning it", but the question itself is pretty sensible.
This reads more like a theoretical case against a particular form of education (rote fact retention) than against education per se. Ex: A few years ago a young person asked the stereotypical, "When will I ever use this?" regarding some basic math they were learning, and I explained that I use them frequently in my normal daily life. It's unlikely I was explicitly taught to use these as tools for solving "problems" in daily life, but if that were done it seems likely to foster an environment that would trigger recollection/utilization.
Can the case for education be that children find out what is there to get interested in. As in, somebody's fascinated by electrons so they pick up STEM, but forget what is Shakespeare and Moscow and someone else finds out she likes literature, so she forgets about electrons and planets. They both benefited from school and there was no way of knowing what they will eventually like, they had to engage with the topic at some depth.
This bears no relationship to reality. The smart kids who get really into shit like electrons tend to be the kinds of kids who get really into everything. That's the whole point of the g factor.
G factor is a population statistic. Knowing about electrons is a strong indicator of knowing about Shakespeare, sure, but it doesn't follow that smart kids don't have disinterests - that attempts to prove way too much. In fact every smart person I know has at least one big knowledge gap that they admit they're bad at or never interested them.
By analogy, athletic fitness is a thing but it doesn't follow that every kid with an athletic proficiency will be an athletic generalist - we can meaningfully talk about kids finding sports that they love and are passionate about. Plenty of people love swimming but hate cross country.
Yes, you're right, the smart kids who could answer questions about one topic probably could as well in any other topic.
But the value of schools in "interest discovery" could still be true. The most optimistic case I can make is something like: Students get presented a range of topics that are important and most likely to trigger interest, all in the appropriate difficulty for their age as evidenced by centuries of education science. If they spend their time on their own, they would be limited to their parents' knowledge, social media and video games and they may not get exposed to topics like digestive tract of ruminants, romantic era literature and smell of ammonia.
Even video games can be legitimately valuable. There's plenty of research on the cognitive and therapeutic benefits of Tetris, for example. My mom used to always nag teenaged-me about spending too much time on games and that it would never do me any good. Haven't heard that one anymore ever since I explained to her how I solved a real-world coding problem with a technique I picked up in Starcraft event scripting.
You should think of how much time you spent on Starcraft and what you could've learned during that time instead.
I think video games are absolute scourge on children and a big value of school is in keeping children out of them (for some hours of the day). I think it's preferable to be bored to tears than getting empty dopamine hits from video games. It's too easy to kill boredom these days and school may be the last place that can provide it.
In other posts of his, Scott has specifically underlined that boredom is a big part of why he dislikes schooling so much. As someone with ADD, I stand by this specific point: boredom is not a utility like water and electricity that we must ensure everyone has access to.
I would add that a pair of core values to having school/a formal education/child warehousing are 1) peer socialization and 2) opportunities to discover.
To quote Scott Galloway, "Anyone who tells you to follow your passion is already rich." Discovering things that you enjoy is a key aspect to enjoying life. Discovering things that you are good at gives you a chance to contribute to society when you're older and make money doing them.
The ‘warehouse’ term is Scott’s. I think you owe Chris an apology. Unless you understood that and rain such venom on all parents seeking a baby sitter, in which case I think you should be banned.
I'm not offended by the term. It's the thing itself I find offensive, especially those who find it a positive good rather than a regrettable necessity, as they'd still be wrong in the latter case, but at least wouldn't also be justifying the infliction of years of pointless torture on innocent children.
Also, babysitters don't give you homework. Nor do they refuse to let you go to the bathroom without asking for permission first.
Only in a situation where two-income households are the norm, which was never the case until the stagflation of the 1970s made single-income households untenable for a vast swath of the populace. It's one of the bitter ironies of history: almost immediately after various social movements won the right for women who wished to work outside the home to do so, catastrophic economic events forced most of the women who *didn't* wish to into the workforce anyway.
This is true! If there's an open set of hands available at home, we don't need no stinkin' out-of-house childcare.
One of my best and dearest friends decided to become a stay at home mom A) because childcare costs were sucking up the vast majority of her earnings and B) her daughter kept getting sick there anyway and had to stay home (and still pay for days her daughter wasn't there). She's fortunate to have the husband she does. He makes enough that they can make it fine on the single income. (As an aside, I adore the guy partly because of just how good they are to each other.)
True, but I would say this may not be the norm. One of my friend's wife's whole salary went on the childcare, it would have been more cost effective for her to just keep the kids at home, but she decided she would rather do meaningful work with adults 8 hours a day than do childcare, and I can't blame her.
And my brother in law loves his children to death, but he is very eager to return to work after caring for them over the last 3 years.
What I am saying is that being a full-time carer is a passion for some, but for many they have other goals in life they want to pursue. Even if they had all the money in the world, they would still want to pursue professional career.
But I do agree that it is sad that some who would love nothing other than caring full-time are denied this possibility by financial realities.
Mostly agreed. My one quibble is that I think there's more parents, especially of young children, that would rather be at home with them than earning an income. Maybe it's too anecdata, but that's about a quarter to a third of the coworkers I've had in healthcare, and definitely a majority for those who had/have young kids still.
I find your phrasing "meaningful work with adults 8 hours a day than do childcare" incredibly dismissive and rude towards stay at home parents. Investing in raising one's children is one of the most meaningful and rewarding activities in existence. Furthermore it can be extremely high impact. For example, the history of geniuses shows that a significant portion of geniuses were raised to be geniuses by their parents.
Genuine question, is that really true that it was never the case that both parents would work prior to the 1970s? I know the post-war boom created a massive amount of wealth such that many households could thrive on a single income, but were there really that many households were only the father worked in the 1870s?
First, there are no absolutes here. It's not that it was "never the case," but it certainly wasn't common at all.
That being said, the key words here are "outside the home." In pre-industrial times, it was common for father, mother, and children to all work together, contributing their labor jointly to the family farm or business. The industrial revolution saw a massive change in worker dynamics; this is where the "employer with many employees" model we know today first became common.
For various legal and cultural reasons, it was difficult for women to get a job with an employer before the early 20th century. WWI and especially WWII shifted this a little, out of sheer necessity, with a lot of men off at war, women stepped in to fill in the gaps back at home, but this was always understood to be a temporary measure, that "went back to normal" once the soldiers came home.
Up until the 1960s, the types of employment women could legally find was highly restricted. That got changed through social and political pressure as part of the wider societal turmoil that was the hallmark of the 60s, and women finally had the freedom to find employment on equal grounds to men.
...for a few short years. Then the 1970s happened, and that hard-won "freedom" metamorphosed into just a new type of chain.
The reason I ask, is that from my perspective, as tough as things may have been for people in the 1970s, I still feel like life was easier than in the 1870s, or the 1820s or the 1600s or the 1300s. So I feel like it would be odd if only one parent had to work in the 1600s and the other could just solely child-rear, but like I say, I genuinely have no idea what family structures were like back then.
But if I am understanding your point correctly, it was prior to the industrial revolution mothers might have to work hard to make ends meet, but they would work at home, so that significantly changed the burden of child-rearing (and I suspect that also they would know their neighbours much better back then before the wide-spread redistribution of labour of their lifetime, so perhaps that helped?).
But then after the Industrial Revolution, suddenly a single parent could sustain a family, and this continued until eventually the bubble started to deflate in the 1970s, but by that point it was established that the only way to earn money was outside of the house, requiring something to be done about the kids?
For most of human history, "women's work" tracked pretty closely with "work that can be done while keeping half an eye on the kids playing in the next room", or even "while nursing". And that's an awful lot of very important work. Among other things, for most of recorded history, we'd all have been going about naked if not for most women spending a big chunk of their time spinning, weaving, knitting, and watching the kids.
This doesn't really begin to change until the industrial revolution, in part because all of the machine-driven spinning wheels and looms. But even then, there's still a good deal of work that needs to be done and can be done at home while watching the kids, so specialization with one wage-earning spouse and one homemaker (and/or home businesswoman) still made sense.
I feel like the biggest thing this model leaves out is curiosity? We learn more robustly when we're more engaged with the thing we're learning, because we make connections, and allow the experience to change us. A fact that you've really learned is as densely connected with other facts in your brain that if you forgot it, you could re-derive it (or approximately it. I might forget what year the Treaty of Tripoli was signed, but I'll remember it was during the first Adams presidency.)
Curiosity is hard to model, but you can use self-directedness as a proxy. You were playing Civ voluntarily (and presumably reading the Civilopedia, or whatever, voluntarily). It's funny we're all thinking about thinking about the Roman Empire, because that was one of the first examples I've seen of this idea, in Holt's How Children Fail. He describes a kid caught secretly reading a science textbook when he was supposed to be learning about the Roman Empire, and speculates/asserts that voluntarily learning science is higher-quality learning than sullenly sitting through a lecture on history. I think this is probably right, although maybe worth testing. I mean, curiosity is presumably an adaptive emotion, meaning it must naturally promote learning, even though your eyes are always taking in a fixed-bandwidth constant amount of data.
I suggest that things might work somewhat like this:
1. The main point of any given person's education is for them to learn a lot about some fairly narrow domain. (Some people never need to and/or never do, and for them maybe their time in schools is wasted, but we can't necessarily tell in advance which people those are.)
2. You can't dive straight into learning the high-level things. They're complicated and difficult, they build on lower-level things, they're hard to motivate without other things for context.
3. So before learning the narrow high-level things you end up wanting to know, you need to spend some time learning somewhat broader things at a somewhat lower level.
4. But you can't dive straight into those from scratch either; you need to prepare by learning (again) somewhat broader things at a somewhat lower level.
5. Recurse through several levels until reaching things you _can_ learn from scratch.
6. It turns out that there are enough levels of this that if you want to have people learning difficult things at age 20, you need to start building the scaffolding much earlier, and because you don't know where anyone will end up you need to start very broad.
7. When you do this, the things you learn at each level are encountered repeatedly-enough during that level, so you retain them for the next level. At that level your education narrows, and you start forgetting much of what you learner in the previous levels, but _not_ the bits that are relevant to what you're still studying.
8. By the time you're, say, 20, you've narrowed a lot, you may well have forgotten most of what you learned at the earlier levels, but _parts_ of the earlier stuff were necessary to get you where you are now, with expertise in Ancient Hittite or category theory or organic synthesis or whatever.
9. If you'd known in advance exactly where you'd end up, you could have skipped most of the stuff in the earlier levels. But you didn't. (At least, most people don't.)
This model seems to be consistent with (1) most people forgetting most of what they learn in school, and (2) school still having value.
(But it only works in so far as it's true that most people emerge from the education system having learned something relatively high-level and narrow that they couldn't have jumped straight into without years of gradually-narrowing-and-rising preparation, and that's actually useful for their later life. I don't know how true that actually is. It's certainly true for me, and I suspect for many ACX readers, but that's not exactly the population median.)
I was composing a comment, but now I don't have to because this one is an excellent summary of what I was trying to say. Working backwards from "successful engineering career" inevitably brings one to the elementary school as a starting point.
Glad to hear it. I was surprised that no one else had made the same point already (though many people had made the kinda-adjacent point that broad education is a way for people to _find out_ what they're interested in and want to learn more about).
I like it as a theory, but I just don't think it's true that most people need to know a lot of detail about the kind of subject that they teach you about in school. The number of people who end up using expertise about "Ancient Hittite or category theory or organic synthesis" professionally, is, I'd guess, a lot less than 1% of the population.
I think school's overpowered for the job it's actually used for.
(Which is a good thing! The luxury of having these overpowered institutions is what you win by being a rich nation. But it does look like a luxury to me, and any attempt to explain it as a necessity runs into problems.)
The problem though is similar to that of advertising: "everyone" knows 80% of ad budgets are wasted, nobody knows how to tell which 20% will work in advance. Education broadly ratchets up the knowledge, which parts end up being useful in the end is impossible to say beforehand.
Oh, no argument here, I'm going one level deeper though - the signaling spending suffers the same problem, it's hard to know which signals will be effective.
What the heck is this website? That was an informative and optimistic article, but the site's main page looks like an abandoned blog that offers me a meatloaf recipe then warns me not to commit computer fraud.
I know this specific article, and consider it one of the most valuable works on the subject of targeted advertising, the sort of stuff that should be considered "required reading" to anyone considering deploying targeted advertising. But I'm not familiar with the broader website or any shenanigans the author(s) may have thrown around on it.
I'm sure you're right about things at the obscurity-level of Ancient Hittite / category theory / organic synthesis (though there are a _lot_ of such things and they surely add up; I wouldn't be that surprised if they add up to more than 1%, but surely not more than 5%).
But something similar applies to less exotic things. Consider, e.g., being a doctor, or a schoolteacher (though obviously there's something a bit unsatisfactory about defending the value of school education by saying "it's useful for making schoolteachers"!), or a mechanical engineer.
It's still surely true that for many people this sort of process isn't very relevant. If you're working in retail sales, for instance, then while there absolutely are professional skills you will want to develop they don't have much to do with anything you'll have learned in school. But, as I said, "we can't necessarily tell in advance which people those are".
"Why would most students forget things that schools teach many times?
Why would they remember it when it’s learned through cultural osmosis (eg Popeye, “yo quiero Taco Bell”)?"
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When I see this question my mind just screams "Kieran Eagan was right!" Our brains are wired for cultural osmosis, so we should teach in a way that replicates cultural osmosis.
100% and then the kids who do poorly in school are permanently damaged by the experience, yet school isn’t even necessary. We need to abolish this system. It’s harmful to many.
I’m not sure, maybe smaller group learning environments more focused on learning how to learn and basic skills, and only done until the child has mastered the basics, followed by aristocratic tutoring, as envisioned by Erik Hoel, or apprenticed trade work depending on student’s aptitude, interests, and natural talents.
Also, for those bound for university, send them sooner, like at 16 and skip the gen ed unless it matches their talents.
No reason fine art painters should be unable to graduate high school because they can’t pass algebra two, which is the current system.
Likewise, making engineers pass Spanish is nonsense.
Let’s stop pretending that everyone needs to succeed at analyzing english literature or solving physics equations to be successful adults.
I totally agree on your "send them to University at 16" comment.
Here in the UK you finish school at 16, and you then have the opportunity to go to "College", a 2 year course prior to uni. In college you get to pick the 4 topics you want to study. I picked Math, Further Math, Physics and Computing.
I was so happy to drop all the wasted time I spent on languages and History and Geography, and there are many students who I am sure were so happy top drop all the time they wasted on Math and Science when all they wanted to do was more French.
I think 16 is definitely old enough to decide what you want to start specialising into, even if you aren't sure about a degree yet. I think this would be a good system worldwide.
These arguments and studies are interesting, but both Caplan and Scott don't do nearly enough addressing the empirical and historical evidence that no country has attained even middle income status / basic functionality by contemporary standards without universal schooling.
I will freely admit I don't know how schooling works to achieve that, and think a weak form of the argument (e.g. stop mandatory schooling at 14/15) is plausible, but the absolute lack of exceptions to the rule (other than maybe some petrostates) needs a very strong explanation.
I see this as somewhat analogous to diet; I don't know why eating lots of heavily processed food is bad for you, but in practice that sure seems to be the case, and nutrient-level arguments don't strike me as persuasive versus societal level impacts.
Which countries lack universal education? Are there things they have in common other than their lack of universal education which might distinguish them from, say, the UK before education was universal there?
Sure, I don't dispute it. We don't have any counter examples the other way, though, of countries that industrialised or modernised *without* near universal education.
The UK is an interesting case as even before truly universal schooling came into play in the 1870s a large proportion of the population (estimates vary, but it's over 25%) were already in either private schools or church schools.
Are you maybe confusing cause and effect? Countries that become prosperous, or even *start* to become prosperous, suddenly have resources to toss at things like universal education — perhaps for sensible reasons, or perhaps for things like signaling, or reducing the pool of workers.
That’s analogous to what we’ve seen recently: when a country gets *really* prosperous it decides everybody should go to college, perhaps for no better reason.
It's certainly possible, but the universality of it requires every otherwise functional country to be identically irrational; not impossible, but demanding a very good explanation.
I’ll grant that, but it’s not like each country becomes prosperous in a vacuum. If the first couple of industrializing countries go that way, you could imagine copycats, especially if it’s tempting to think it’s related to their success.
And don’t assume the true motive is irrational just because the stated one seems to be.
People tend to remember that which is important to them and forget that which is not. That a lot of people remember what I consider basic BS seems tragic to me, but when I'm in a conversation and have no idea when the NFL draft is and who's probably going to go in the first round, that's tragic to the person to whom I'm speaking.
How about ‘you forget a lot, but not the subset of things that really interest you or prove useful for your eventual line of work, and in fifth grade we don’t know what you will be interested in or good at so we show you a little of everything.’ As time goes on you can specialize (and different countries start specializing at different times).
Would be great if it was actually done like that. Right now it's more that you are shown some things a lot, some things a bit and some things not at all. And when you have the choice to specialize you mostly know to too little to make any sensible decisions and it ends up being random.
Prior to reading this article I didn't *know* the capital of Russia was Moscow. If someone asked me to *guess* the capital of Russia, Moscow would have been my first guess, but it could easily be a "trick capital" country, and I haven't spent enough time memorizing capitals to be sure.
If I think about news articles I've read about Russia, I'm pretty sure they reference the Kremlin and Putin being in Moscow, but that would only bring me up to an 80% or 90% confidence rate - still not enough to say I *know* Moscow is the capital. Thinking about WW2 or the Cold War doesn't help much, because I can't think of any big events from those wars that specifically involve the capital of Russia. WW2 was fought in a lot of different parts of Russia (I don't specifically remember a "battle of Moscow" or something similar), and the major event I remember from the Cold War is tearing down the Berlin Wall, which is obviously in Berlin, which I do remember is in Germany.
Fun fact, in 1987 a West German named Mathias Rust flew a Cessna from Finland and landed it in Moscow. This was a huge embarrassment to the Soviet authorities at the time, as they supposedly had a huge and advanced air defense network to ward off NATO bombers. For years afterwards, Muscovites would jokingly call Red Square Terminal 3 (referring to the nearby airport which had only 2 terminals).
There was no Battle of Moscow in WW2 because the German advance stalled just short of the city.
Now hopefully you can remember with certainty that Moscow is the capital.
I hadn't considered that, news articles will frequently use either or both of a nation's capital and their most important government building(s) as stand ins when referencing that nation. There's little reminders for certain facts buried everywhere.
By coincidence, I ran across a video which includes research on nautilus' memories. Their memories aren't as good as other cephalopods', but they do only remember for a little while. Give them more time after they've forgotten, and the memory comes back, but with less certainty.
I think you're underestimating the possibility that most school is useless for most people, but most people find at least one part useful (and we don't know which in advance)
I also forgot basically all of Spanish. I remember very little from my History classes. But I learned a ton in English class, things I built upon and still use and still remember. Same with Math. I forgot literally all of chemistry, but I remember most of the Physics I learned. I can't remember what happens in Pride and Prejudice beyond a few basics, but I remember Jane Eyre in great detail.
If everyone retains one subject out of ten, then any individual factoid would only have 10% retention, but still school would be useful to everyone
Maybe we should just see learning ultimately forgettable facts and algorithms as the vehicle for inculcating good habits of thinking, communicating and behaving (individually and within groups).
And that schooling should correspondingly shift the emphasis to the latter. I have no idea what’s being taught in elementary schools these days along these lines but I know that during my stint as a kid I really didn’t learn that much about how to sceptically assess information or how to solidly communicate and manage conflict with others for example.
Other than repetition, a difference between the intellectually curious and the incurious is that the incurious hear a fact of little immediate relevance to their lives and couldn't possibly care less. It really is in one ear or out the other. A curious person hears a fact, or an assertion, and actually reacts to it, thinks about it. Maybe it spurs further questions or answers a question he had already wondered about. It just bounces around inside his head more, and the result is that more is retained.
I think to the incurious, their time in school, even in front of an interesting and engaging teacher, is like time spent waiting at the DMV. It's just one solid blur. How well do you remember the form you had to fill out to renew your driver's license the time before last? That's how well they remember the test on the three branches of government. It was something they had to complete once, then never think about again.
But in many cases I can still picture myself in the classrooms and the books where I first heard about this or that fact or concept.
You are either very unique, due to having some form of photographic memory, universal talent or extreme luck that school subjects interested you this universally - or you are just deluding yourself. Are you really curious about every single random topic you hear about? The details of the sport of curling? The names of every single crater on each of Jupiters moons? The powerpoint presentation of how my 89 year old grandpa spent his summer vacation? I can guarantee you every human on earth that I've ever met would fall into your incurious category, and that the actual percentage of population in that category would be over 99,9%.
I don't think I intended to make any claim so strong. I think everyone's curiosity varies from subject to subject. Though I don't remember school ever trying to teach me to memorize the names of craters. The knowledge is much more fundamental than that, so I don't think it's so odd for someone to be curious about most of it, if they have a general curiosity about how the world works, where we came from and where we're going.
I also think that anyone who so much as reads a single post of Scott's from beginning to end probably has an intellectual curiosity at least 2 SDs above the mean. I might be +3; perhaps Scott himself is +4.
Maybe it's unusual to visualize where I was sitting in classrooms when I learned about something interesting for the first time, I don't know, though I wouldn't suppose I have a photographic memory. And I'm sure most of those memories are distorted in some way.
Sorry, your initial claim did indeed seem very strong to me. This comment of yours seems much more reasonable. I just wanted to make the point that no one is interested in *everything*, but yes, some people are generally far more curious than others and there is strong correlation with IQ there from what I've anecdotally heard. But it's not black and white and rather a spectrum. (I personally always had very little curiosity about how most things work in detail - I was mostly just interested in the most fundamental aspects of our reality aka philosophy, but very much into that. Fighting with the details while the fundamentals were so questionable was always of limited appeal to me, although I am certainly happy others have a different view.)
> This model makes it hard for school to be useful. If school teaches you some fact, then either you’ll never encounter it again after school, in which case you’ll quickly forget it). Or you will encounter it again after school, in which case school was unnecessary; you would have learned it anyway.
Theoretically, what could redeem formal education is that many important things are not learned through cultural osmosis. Particularly for more complex higher-ed-type things, too many people are speaking confidently and bamboozling the general public. An expert class of teacher could theoretically help students distinguish truth.
To give a few examples from higher ed & psych research methods in particular: knowing that lots of studies don’t replicate, knowing that many things that have been demonstrated in animals don’t translate to humans, knowing that correlation isn’t causation, knowing how to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention (and therefore, whether to adopt that intervention into one’s life), knowing that a depressed patient is as likely to abandon taking an SSRI as they are a placebo (for most SSRIs - from the Cipriani paper), knowing that statistical significance ≠ practical significance. These things do make it into the milieu for ACX readers, but definitely not the general public.
Making education useful definitely requires repetition & building upon concepts. But I also think you allude to another important explanation earlier, that school feels like impersonal rote memorization.
If society can select teachers (or curriculum developers) who know how to A) identify what is important and B) convey why it is important, learning should happen. But one reason this doesn’t happen is class size: A teacher can’t speak to the unique interests of 20+ students (much less 250 in a large lecture hall) - without tons of money for low student/teacher rations, or without a one-room-schoolhouse style education where older kids teach younger kids. If you can't speak to a students personal interests, it's hard to convey why something is important.
Another explanation grades (The Case Against Grades by Alfie Kohn is very interesting). Teachers have a dual role of A) teaching and B) recommending students for college/jobs. As long as students know that their teachers affect their future’s, they’re going to try to learn the thing the teachers want them to learn, rather than engage with material in a personally meaningful way (e.g., learning the plot points and character names of 1984, rather than searching for possible parallels with current society). If students aren’t expected to maximize the memorability of testable facts for the day of an exam, they could theoretically use this newfound free time to explore class content in a personally meaningful way (albeit, if and only if someone adequately inspires them to do so).
Everyone knows that one, often to the point of being detrimental. It's become a meme, where people who don't understand the meaning behind it simply use it as a glib excuse to dismiss evidence presented in favor of something they don't want to believe.
The truth is, in the vast majority of cases, correlation *very much does* imply the existence of a causation; it's just not necessarily the first causal chain that came to your mind when you noticed the correlation. (Also tragically under-comprehended, and thus abused, is the inverse: a lack of correlation absolutely does imply a lack of causation.)
Who said the point of school was to educate everyone? Giving everyone adequate exposure to facts and ideas means the 17% of people who care enough about Jupiter to learn the first thing about it get the chance to go to college armed with the same basic facts that allow them to collaborate with each other and discover more facts about Jupiter.
If only 17% of people know as basic-ass a fact as "Jupiter is the largest planet", the institution responsible for inculcating knowledge of basic facts is so thoroughly failing at its job as to question whether said institution serves any useful purpose at all. As far as planet-facts go, that's the equivalent of not knowing 'W' is a letter of the alphabet.
When you learn and then forget, does it become easier to relearn? Maybe the point is to create the appropriate brain structures for understanding those facts even if the facts are lost later? I don't think the argument about math skills disproves this since understanding how to do math still requires some knowledge, it's not a purely skill based exercise.
My (positive side) theory about school is that the purpose is to introduce students to a wide range of potential knowledge that they may use in their adult life. Some of this is obviously good - learning to read, multiplication - but most of it is contingently good - algebra if you go into a math field but not for most people, or Spanish if you keep learning it, but most people don't.
So what's the point of the majority of learning? To see if you like it and want to pursue it later. If you never get exposed to any part of it, it's much much harder to get into it later. Someone who never had a science class in middle or high school is going to have a much harder time in college science classes or a science field. Since most people don't go on to science in college or a science field, this will result in waste for most people. It's very difficult to determine who needs which classes, especially at the "developing interest" stage of learning. Most classes end up being wasteful here, even if we have no way to determine that ahead of time for most students.
My (negative side) theory about school is that the primary purpose is enculturation with a side of babysitting. We invented the modern school approach in order to make kids better at fitting into the general culture. This comes out in weird things, like elementary anecdotes and stories shared by teachers that my kids learn being the same ones I learned at a different school in a completely different area. Things like Johnnie Appleseed and Paul Bunyan on the more obvious side, but there are more niche things as well.
There's also the straight up cynical theory that it's the government being busybodies making sure people aren't raising their kids "wrong" and forcing them into a legible system for government leaders to review.
I think there is a small fraction of the actual purpose of schools that falls in the cynical side, say 5%, and a tension between the other two theories where some people want school to be about expanding horizons and some people want to make sure kids fit in to society. Depending on the day and the school in question, I feel that either might be on either side of a 60/40 or 70/30 split.
These may well both be present, but it is worth bearing in mind that they have strikingly different criteria for success.
Exposing students to a wide range of subjects so that they have a chance of encountering whichever one they are best at or most interested in succeeds if the student find their niche, even if they forget all the rest of the range.
Enculturation gives people _shared_ cultural references, whether Johnnie Appleseed or "1984", and helps them communication - but _only_ if a large fraction of them _retain_ the references. I think of these as somewhat like additions to vocabulary.
What does it mean to "retain" the references here? Scott's examples included things that exist in the culture and can be picked up through cultural osmosis. Memes propagate through the culture just fine, despite only a small minority understanding them fully. Bits and pieces seem to be enough for people to get the gist of it and join the culture. Johnnie Appleseed probably has a much more thorough story than I remember, but what sticks is an appreciation for creating something and making the world a better place. 1984, even with the most basic cultural meme version, is about being wary of authoritarian governments trying to control the population against their will. Are there additional details to both that make a much bigger lesson? Probably, but it's enough for shared culture to know where the reference comes from and the general direction of it. It's like the meme of Fry from Futurama squinting. Even people who never saw the show or don't know which episode that's from can join in on the reference. My guess is you know exactly which meme I'm talking about despite my limited description, and it brought to your mind the type of words that might go along with it.
Many Thanks! Partially agreed. I think that there is some additional context sometimes provided by looking at a cultural reference in a class. As one commenter mentioned, "1984", "Orwellian", and "big brother", acquired by cultural osmosis look disconnected. There is some value in connecting them.
Orthogonal to that, as other commenters have pointed out, (writing from the usa), we have a fairly large number of immigrants, and also a fairly large number of somewhat disconnected subcultures. Cultural osmosis can sometimes use a helping hand, somewhat analogous to ESL courses. As with vocabulary, it is tricky to pick what to teach. Probably the optimum is to pick cultural references which are right on the edge of being taught by osmosis, neither so prevalent that the students already know them anyway nor so obscure that the students will rarely encounter a repetition apart from class.
Re Fry - actually, I Googled that meme. Yes, I've seen it before, though I now know more of its context... One of the other limitations of cultural osmosis is that there are intergenerational differences in cultural references - though I _don't_ suggest formal education as a solution to those!
I'm not sure this is an argument against education so much as an argument against "renaissance men", the idea that an educated citizenry should have a broad knowledge of many fields. If knowledge inherently falls out of our heads within a few years if it's not reinforced by our environment, school still serves a number of purposes:
#1 Warehousing kids.
Straight up, if you want women to be able to work, you need to warehouse kids somewhere. This sounds bad but the benefit is women can have jobs and kids, which naively puts it's value at 50% of GDP and a more serious evaluation would still probably have it as a double digit percentage of GDP.
#2 Sorting kids by IQ/merit.
Schools do this, or try to, everyone knows this, every parent freaks out about it, and everyone tries to game it. It's also really important; you care how capable your surgeon or your lawyer are.
#3 Rapid exposure to lots of different fields
Sure, you may not remember anything from high school biology (I don't) but I remember I was pretty good at it but didn't really like it. Figuring out what career a kid should have is a tough optimization problem: how smart are you, what do you like, and how much will it pay. One things schools do is expose you to lots of different fields you might be interested in and give you challenges to see how good you are at them.
So 'lil Bobby loves history and he's good at it but it doesn't pay, he loves debate club and lawyers get paid well but he's bad at it, and he's kinda meh on chemistry but physical sciences pay well and he's really good at it. What career should Bobby pursue? I dunno, that's up to Bobby, but now he knows what he's good at and what he likes. As an adult, Bobby might keep reading history as a hobby, work as a chemical engineer, and forget everything about debate but the important thing isn't how much he remembers, the core thing is making as informed a decision as possible in his teens about his future career, which is actually a huge deal.
I'm not saying this is what school was designed for, I'm saying these seem to be the obvious benefits of the evolved system we have now.
The questions in the '99 Gallup survey are hardly broad knowledge. They were basic facts. The equivalent in their fields of knowing one's ABCs and 1-2-3s.
I'm surprised Scott didn't mention the source for spaced memorization : I'm pretty sure this is taken directly from the Vehaarav Na program, a program designed to allow Orthodox Jews to eventually finish the Talmud once a year. Scott, am I right?
Question: Even at age 77, I remember a lot of what I learned in public school. I was a smart kid, though not at all diligent as a student. Does my relatively good memory reflect something peculiar about my brain, or is it mainly that I rehearsed what I learned more than I realize?
I would guess you've rehearsed more than you realize. I doubt there are any facts or discreet pieces of information you learned in school that you 1) haven't practiced since and 2) could accurately recall right now.
Practice here can be subtle things, like Scott talking about the Roman Empire. Interestingly, Hannibal coming from Carthage (and the Carthaginian Wars) is part of what comes to mind when I think of the Roman Empire, so that particular factoid gets "re-upped" for me periodically. Other facts, like the daily diet of a person in Gaul, though clearly related to the Roman Empire and something that I have heard about before, is no longer in my head. I can't tell you what it is, but I do have a vaguely related memory about learning those facts.
I assume you're correct, but it raises the question of what "rehearse" actually means, and the answer is probably complicated. I'm fuzzy on plane geometry, but I'd say I've got most of math through high school down pretty cold, and I suspect it's more related to the fact that I had an easy time learning math, than that I continued to use it (though indeed in someways I have continued to do so).
If you actually want to test how effective education, is we could run an experiment. Take a whole cohort of children of all ages and don't give them education for an entire year. Maybe give them a placebo version we call education, like poorly optimized online lessons most of them don't show up for. Then watch their test scores over the next few years and see if this lowered their knowledge and skills.
We actually did this during COVID, for a year, and the results are quite strong. People who lost a year of education have far lower skills and knowledge levels by any test we can do, even 3 years later. This is robust across many fields of study, and seems to be true of children of all ages from elementary school through high school. I think we can definitely say now that the education makes a difference.
I don’t know if that shows what you want it to. There are too many other variables that changed besides not going to school like lack of social contact and stress about Covid. Also maybe the kids did worse on tests now but in a few years the scores will approach the same number as pre-Covid kids.
You are of course right that there are other variables. At this post though we are ending the third full year back to school. Students who missed 4th grade are finishing 7th grade right now: students who missed 9th grade are finishing 12th grade now. This is clearly not an effect that vanishes in a year or two, like many other effects seem to.
In the mid 1900s kids who were kept out of formal schooling until age ten were found to catch up with their peers within months. This means that, for those kids, the first five years of public education would have been a waste of their time and the public's money.
I think there was a lot more (or less, if you will) going on during the coof than just kids missing "education". And I know, from people who had kids in state schools during the lockdowns, that they were stunned at how little was done during the day, how low the bar was, and how banal the content.
Kids who's parents chose to keep them home in the 90's were probably in very different home environments one way or the other than the median student, which makes comparing outcomes very iffy. This was a much more representative sample of students (and a much larger one) since it was almost everyone across the board.
I agree that very little was done effectively in terms of online education during lockdowns. I think online education can probably work for some fraction of students but getting a bunch of normal classroom teachers who have never taught online and telling them to do a lecture on zoom the kids are supposed to watch live is not the way to do that. A lot less was done than in a regular school day, I think.
I agree with you on that. I think the bigger question is whether anything we learn in school sticks around in further adult life. I think Scott's post would agree that if someone studied history in high school and history in college, then went on to become a history professor, that they still know what they learned in high school (or at least much more than most people). His contention is that for the people who didn't reinforce the knowledge, it goes away quickly and thoroughly.
Your point reinforces his, actually, by showing that even a one year separation causes massive and lasting drops in knowledge held. It doesn't really clarify the main question, though, which is how much of that learning is retained later or even used productively for society or the individual holding it.
Maybe, we'll have to check again in 5 years, but it certainly doesn't look like this is something that vanishes in 10 months or whatever; it looks more like the "education builds a scaffold that improves your ability to learn more later" idea is a bigger deal than he's giving it credit for
Yeah, it seems weird to me to say that school is useless at the same time everybody is bitching about the severe damage suffered from kids getting a worse version of one whole year of school. We can come up with just-so explanations for these two things to go together but they really, strongly, contraindicate. Even in Scott's own anti-education cases, I never see "school versus control," just "school versus school in the Kingdom of Heaven where all the teachers are knowledgeable and patient, all the students are attentive and bright, and all curricula focus on teaching useful things in the most optimal way to preserve knowledge."
Is that really a contradiction, though? How exactly does "look at how much basic knowledge kids end up losing in just one year away from school" contradict the thesis "schools are terrible at getting kids to learn and retain knowledge"?
If you want to know if schools are good IRL, you have to compare them to the alternatives. If schools are terrible at getting kids to learn and retain knowledge, that should be compared to some actually-existing alternative to school. Like, I'm sure that direct lossless permanent downloads of information into the brain are better than schooling, but that information doesn't help much since those don't actually exist.
> If you want to know if schools are good IRL, you have to compare them to the alternatives.
No, that's how you determine if it's the best possible policy. To simply know if something is good, you look at it in isolation and compare it against *nothing.*
Do schools produce better knowledge retention than no education at all? Yes, to some degree. This was never in doubt. Do schools also cause harm to kids, that they would not experience with no school? Yes, this is also indisputable. Does the good outweigh the bad? And to what degree? Now there's where you have room for debate.
> To simply know if something is good, you look at it in isolation and compare it against *nothing.*
Right. Schooling is amazing compared to nothing, that's why everybody is complaining that the Covid-19 years not only caused academic failure and put everybody on the back foot educationally, but also turned children into feral animals who can't behave in classes.
> that's why everybody is complaining that the Covid-19 years ... turned children into feral animals who can't behave in classes.
You're the first person I've ever heard make this claim. (Particularly given that complaints about this issue were already pretty widespread before 2020!) The typical claim is that this was due to a breakdown in 1) expectations and 2) the ability of teachers and schools to discipline misbehaving students.
> This is a pretty god-of-the-gaps-ish hypothesis, and counterbalanced by all the kids who said school made them hate learning, or made them unable to learn in a non-fake/rote way, or that they can’t read books now because they’re too traumatized from years of being forced to read books that they hate.
Having school-aged kids of my own, I believe the default state of most humans is to do as little learning as possible unless it's directly relevant to some immediate need. Unfortunately my children rarely have an immediate need of understanding great literature or the fall of the Roman empire. Instead it's usually Minecraft related.
While I don't doubt there are people out there that were traumatized by being forced to read books, I would guess that a majority of those wouldn't have gone on to become prolific readers anyway.
I do think there's some merit to the scaffolding idea. I don't remember any details of the Krebs cycle, but I do have this idea implanted in my mind that animals extract energy from food and release CO2. It's possible I would have learned that through cultural osmosis, but it would only be part of culture because a critical mass of people learned it in school.
I keep seeing this term "critical mass" and related terms, and it has me thinking about writing something along the lines of "Education is intellectual health in a similar vein to vaccination is for physical health."
I don't know where to start with that idea, yet.
A quick edit to add: Please don't take this comment as criticism. You just happened to be the one I was reading when that thought finally formed fully for me. Say that three times fast, lol.
Interesting perspective! While I agree school can be better at teaching skills than facts, there's more to consider. Maybe schools could focus on building curiosity and information literacy to help navigate the firehose of information we face after graduation.
I'm entirely on board with the overall case, based solely on my personal experience of 90% of high school being an unpleasant waste of time. I certainly don't recall many of the subjects, and not having to write another essay about some dumb thing still remains the biggest benefit of being an adult, 25 years later. Post-high-school-syndrome?
HOWEVER, I think the evidence is Under-specific - All of the studies I've seen mix together so many different kinds of people. It's completely coherent to think that anything beyond primary school is a waste for a median person or groups of people while other types benefit enormously through university. It's also somewhat likely that the types of people who benefit all the way through university are a tiny fraction of the population, so that if you average the effects out it shows that school was a waste of time. When making decisions in my own life, I don't care if something is a waste of time for a p50 citizen, I want to know how it might affect someone in my (or my children's) circumstances. Are there any studies on the p99 group? (But also, I find "intellectuals" completely alien and just want to grill and develop computer systems, so there are certainly more variables at play)
Regardless, I feel like there is a strong practical and moral case to stop legally compelling kids to attend these institutions. The folks who thrive in school end up running the show and think it's compassionate and caring to force everyone into a one-size-fits-all that values school above trades or just having other preferences & priorities.
I was surprised when at a lunch for elementary school children's parents each participant described an elementary school teacher that had a big influence on them. I expected some discussion of learning some subject matter. But I was the only one who didn't talk about a teacher that made them feel good about themselves and gave them confidence.
Second, and perhaps more important, although I have no doubt that students forget 90% of what they are taught, it seems very unlikely that it is the same 90 percent for every student. In part that is because individuals have different interests and different career paths. And, it is impossible for teachers to know what each student's career path will be. Nor do students necessarily know themselves. Hence, we give every student a broad education on everything. And in doing so, we give them a valuable gift: Opportunity. A student who has been exposed to a wide range of subjects has more choices than one who hasn't. Eg: When I was in college, I took a wildlife ecology class which was very interesting, and I considered majoring in it. But I had not taken Chem in high school, which were considered prerequisites for the college Chem class that was required for the major.
So, students forgetting 90% of what they are taught is the inevitable result of the very sound policy of exposing students to as many academic areas as possible.
Using one example of a skill (numeracy) is not enough. Maybe our brains are especially resistant to numeracy but not other skills? I retain many skills that I learned in school after fourth grade. 1. Reading Talmud, legal writing, debate, a few languages etc.
I think the point of school isn't to just assemble a collection of facts, but to teach people how to learn/navigate uncertainty. You want a basic scaffolding of facts so you don't need to rederive the world from scratch, but, more than that, you want a lot of open-ended projects that require you to apply/stretch the tools you have to build something you can evaluate the soundness of.
At younger ages, I think there should be a lot of physical building, where the feedback loop of reality is tighter. In college, I benefited a lot from being part of a philosophical debating society (no judges, no prizes, you only argue for what you actually think), and it changed how I did my reading in all my actual classes.
I wasn't just reading to retain information, I was always curious about how a novel, a history, a bit of computer science might fit into a long running argument I was having about how to live. I asked more of the facts I was exposed to.
I’ve retained many skills that I learned in school after fourth grade: Talmud, legal writing, essays, research, languages. Maybe the buman/Western brain is especially bad at learning/retaining numeracy but not other skills?
What level of correct answers would be normative here? The underlying rule I have for reading survey research is that you always have to question your implicit assumptions about what the outcomes should be.
Do we have examples of low-education-penetration societies where people got comparable questions correct more of the time? Maybe it is the case that education works reasonably well and these polls results are a 90th percentile outcome in context.
I think your Roman empire survey question doesn't reflect what you meant it to. When the survey was live, there was a massive cultural meme going on, spurred by a tiktok thing, trying to prove that men think about the Roman empire all the time and women don't. I remember the women in my office asking all the men if they thought about the Roman empire at least once a day. (Including many who don't have tiktok). So when I saw your survey question I assumed you were trying to look into that phenomenon. I think a lot of people who don't think about the Roman empire normally, may have been thinking and talking about it more than usual at that time.
> 4% know what Chinese religion was founded by Lao Tse (Taoism)
Considering that Laozi's mother stayed pregnant until he was finally born at the age of eighty, some might question the premise here.
Taoism is the indigenous religion of China; there is no reason to believe it was founded by anyone. Most traditional practices have no specific originator. All traditional practice bundles have no single originator.
Good point. Education is about taking a purported fact - Lao Tse founded Taoism - and using it as a basis for goiing deeper and creating more connections - what is a religion? Is Taoism a religion? Does Taoism have a body of works that was "founded"? Are religions founded or do they evolve in some other manner?
And does anyone doubt that Lao Tse would have cared if you knew his name? If you understand Taoism it is that memorizing facts is not supremely important.
> Are religions founded or do they evolve in some other manner?
These options are not exclusive of one another.
> And does anyone doubt that Lao Tse would have cared if you knew his name?
Laozi 老子 is not a name; his name is recorded as 李耳.
If you poll American students on the adjusted question "which Chinese religion was founded by Li Er?", you might get a much lower hit rate.
Though, it's not clear to me why. 4% is already unrealistically low, given the form of the question. The major religion of China is Buddhism. It was not founded by a Chinese person.
Taoism is second.
And that's it. If you really want to reach, you could argue for Islam or Taiping Christianity as being "Chinese religions", but really the question "name a Chinese religion" should produce responses that are more than 4% "Taoism", and, just as with Buddhism, Western students are going to recognize that Islam wasn't founded by anyone Chinese.
There is a sense in which this is true and good, a sense in which it is true and bad, and a sense in which it isn't true.
True and good: We expect school, especially early grades, to teach kids to behave in a particular set of ways that become almost instinctive--stuff like lining up, sitting quietly in class, obeying adult authorities, etc. That kind of indoctrination is broadly positive. The whole framework of school is one in which math, science, grammar, history, geography, spelling, and all that stuff is important to learn, and you should care about them--to some extent, school is trying to indoctrinate kids in that mental framework.
True and bad: In general, teachers, school administrators, and educational bureaucracies trying to get kids to believe their partisan or controversial ideas seems like a bad thing. But which things are "indoctrination" and which are just passing on of shared civic values is part of the argument--if everyone said the Pledge of Allegiance every day and memorized the Gettysburg Address 50 years ago, and now everyone recites some creed involving tolerance and diversity every day and memorize the I Have a Dream speech, it's not like indoctrination has *decreased* exactly, it just changed direction a bit. Similarly if everyone used to read Last of the Mohicas and now they read The Color Purple, there's some indoctrination there in the choice of what to read, but not obviously more now than then.
Not true: Most actual class time is spent trying to teach academic subjects that aren't really indoctrination except in the very broadest sense of "math, history, grammar, and science are important to learn." Even the more controversial stuff like sex ed is mostly focused on imparting some factual information it would be handy for teenagers to have, like "this really fun thing you're doing might have a surprising consequence nine months from now."
Scott's argument is basically that schools aren't doing all that well at that last bit--they get kids for nine months * 12 years, and it sounds like a lot of them probably can't tell you what decade the civil war took place in, multiply fractions, or say whether the moon is bigger or smaller than the sun. One way to interpret that is that the real purpose of school is something else (signaling, credentialing, indoctrination, patronage jobs, free babysitting, etc.). Another is that schools are mostly not very good at what they're trying to do--perhaps because they should work differently somehow, perhaps because getting normies to remember that stuff a decade after school is genuinely hard.
You're not taking either priming or relearning into account. Priming involves both the activation of a concept and the suppression of false positives--a process that's been proposed as representing "g." What these quizzes are asking is to remember facts unrelated to the daily lives of most people taking them. If the areas in which those facts lie suddenly become much more relevant, in a day or two scores will increase quite a bit. Correct identification and activation of metaphors, similes and analogies are examples of this.
Which is why relearning is am argument for education. You can't remember Spanish. I can't remember the names of the cranial nerves. I do remember the mnemonic I used though. If it begins to matter again, how quickly could I reliably relearn them? Pretty much the same with you and Spanish.
You're also not taking into account that a lot of cultural exposure happens at school, and that depriving students of that exposure deprives them off opportunities to soak things up from that context. Granted, not everything they learn there is either accurate or useful, but I'd argue it's still much more reliably beneficial them tik tok.
Last, generalization learning is a real thing. It's hard to demonstrate, but we can occasionally and we know it's there. My Master's thesis related to generalization learning in medical students (learning about one diagnosis taught them things about other conditions, even in other areas, eg cardiac arrest, pulmonary embolus and gastroesophageal reflux. Granted the related contexts are proximal, but that's the easiest way to demonstrate generalization. Lots of more interesting case studies in Arthur Koestler's book on creativity that he uses to illustrate his concept of biassociation.
You're not taking either priming or relearning into account. Priming involves both the activation of a concept and the suppression of false positives--a process that's been proposed as representing "g." What these quizzes are asking is to remember facts unrelated to the daily lives of most people taking them. If the areas in which those facts lie suddenly become much more relevant, in a day or two scores will increase quite a bit. Correct identification and activation of metaphors, similes and analogies are examples of this.
Which is why relearning is am argument for education. You can't remember Spanish. I can't remember the names of the cranial nerves. I do remember the mnemonic I used though. If it begins to matter again, how quickly could I reliably relearn them? Pretty much the same with you and Spanish.
You're also not taking into account that a lot of cultural exposure happens at school, and that depriving students of that exposure deprives them off opportunities to soak things up from that context. Granted, not everything they learn there is either accurate or useful, but I'd argue it's still much more reliably beneficial them tik tok.
Last, generalization learning is a real thing. It's hard to demonstrate, but we can occasionally and we know it's there. My Master's thesis related to generalization learning in medical students (learning about one diagnosis taught them things about other conditions, even in other areas, eg cardiac arrest, pulmonary embolus and gastroesophageal reflux. Granted the related contexts are proximal, but that's the easiest way to demonstrate generalization. Lots of more interesting case studies in Arthur Koestler's book on creativity that he uses to illustrate his concept of biassociation.
"So either people didn’t get 7 optimally-spaced repetitions of the Himalayas in school, or this very optimistic website is wrong and seven repetitions don’t suffice to remember information “for life”. I’m betting it’s the latter - for example, I’ve forgotten the names of some of my college professors, even though I would have seen them almost daily for a year."
Bizarre note: sometimes frequent repetition makes you forget facts more quickly. In college any serious music student is unlocking the combination lock on their instrument locker 2-4 times per day. I've seen a serious student forget it over their 1 1/2 week spring break. It's like the brain factors in the frequency of repetition into the speed of forgetting: a fact recalled every 6 hours can be safely forgotten after a week; a fact recalled every 6 months should be held for 10 years.
>Remember, these are university students, so the average person’s performance is worse.
I'm going to be awefuly unoriginal and doubt how strong that prior is. For some aspects of culture, I kinda expect it to be false:
-afaik, American college student are more foreign than the general population. Them not knowing a character of American literature would not be surprising, even Moby Dick.
-some datum may be well known in a minor subpopulation, which isn't college student. I bet a number of military history nerds who will never set foot on a campus know all about Hannibal.
-others may be well known amongst college students from 50 years ago, but curriculum moved since.
I would be shocked if college students weren't better on average at answering questions about academic subjects learned in K-12 than non-college-students.
"Otherwise - aside from being a place to warehouse children while their parents are away - I’m not sure how you rescue the usefulness of most schooling."
How about it being a place for children to get to know, cooperate with and solve conflict with other children from their communities, and from different backgrounds, culturally and economically, thus creating a foundation of empathy with their perceived nation? Many children socialize with people from similar backgrounds, economically and culturally, outside of school. They're with people of similar culture and socioeconomic status before they come to school and after school. Once they graduate, they're likely to find jobs where their colleagues are from similar socio-economic backgrounds.
In Denmark this nationwide empathy-building function is stated as one of the key functions of the school.
Yes, it's supposed to function as the great equalizer by giving children an opportunity to reach into higher education and better jobs.
Yes, it's supposed to be the foundation for us to continue our economic strategy as an "Information Economy".
But it's also supposed to function as the one place where children exist in a sort of pure, naive state of mind, seeing themselves as equal with all the other kids. We all know it's not true later in life. We're all but equal. But as children we're blind to it. And in this blindness, we build this empathy that's hard to teach directly, or later on. I think it's remarkably succesful at that. And that's why it's such a threat to our country that private schools are rising in popularity. There's a lot of debate about it these days. Denmark is a remarkably homogenous country, and our welfare model arguably can only work when a country is remarkably homogenous - or when the participants (tax payers) perceive it as homogenous; sufficiently homogenous to feel sympathy with the variety of citizens, of which their classrooms configurate as their reference point. The classroom as a microcosm of society.
"Fewer than 50% (i.e. worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms." That's... not good. You don't have to know electrons are three orders of magnitude smaller than protons or neutrons, you just have to know they're part of the atom, and that the part is smaller than the whole. Ouch.
When we interviewed science teachers we would always ask them the triple point of water. Every now and again you would get one who knew the answer, but mostly you'd get blank stares.
The average American income is between $32,000-$39,000. I don’t think the quality of life for these people would markedly improve if they knew atoms were bigger than electrons. This is difficult knowledge to practically apply. People who have jobs that depend on this knowledge are in the very small minority. I can say unequivocally that I have never benefited from knowing this fact in my line of work, and have only found it useful in attempting to understand something recreationally or to maintain status with people who measure other people’s worth by such strange standards. One could reasonably argue that it is more important to know how to fix a flat, or hang a door, or mend clothes. I imagine many here don’t know these things. And for some reason, schools don’t teach them. What makes this ignorance less shameful?
The median is, yeah; mean's around $60K. But sure, not a lotta physicists in the population, relatively speaking. I'd say the populations that would find flat-fixing and door-hanging (!) and clothes-mending useful are also minorities, flat-fixing probably being the biggest of the three... I think distinguishing between the general population and the college freshman class might be useful here: if you're going to college and you don't know electrons are smaller than atoms you should be ashamed of yourself, or at least embarrassed.
what if you're going to school in a humanities field? There's certainly aspects of science where there's a direct bearing on something like history or anthropology but I wouldn't consider the structure of the atom to be one of them
I did know the three parts of an atom, but I don't think I ever used the knowledge, even the couple more sciencey courses I had to take for my degree
This is true, but it's true because of how we as a society chose to design high school education. And I think someone who came from an educational structure (hypothetical or real, I don't know how universally this stuff is taught) where chemistry was an elective and not a basic part of science teaching would still do fine with the coursework.
Math is more important, or at least arithmetic is, and I think there's real value in understanding statistics and geometry. On the other hand, I completely failed to grasp pre-calculus, received a gift D-, and never needed it again in my life.
(come to think of it, statistics was a university requirement, and pre-calc a high school one... I think society might benefit overall from flipping the two, although perhaps I'm overly generalizing from my own life experience.
Definitely think stats is very useful and should be taught more broadly, however.)
Since you expressed (!) that I would think more people might need to know how to hang doors than know the relative size of an electron, I’ll try to explain myself.
There are a lot of doors (billions in fact). You probably used one recently. You might even have a few. They were all hung. This was accomplished by millions of people all over the globe who knew how and support themselves in this manner. In addition to these professionals, when average people move large objects into/out of their home, they sometimes need to remove the door. I’ve done this. Most adults I know have done this. These doors need to be rehung. Rich people pay someone to do all this moving and hanging for them but most people aren’t rich.
When it comes to knowing whether an electron is smaller than an atom, I would argue that for most people it won’t prove nearly as useful as knowing how to hang a door. It’s even been that way for me. For a few people, electron knowledge is absolutely essential to incredibly important wonderful work, but this fact doesn’t require that more people know the size of an electron than know how to hang a door.
If you personally don’t know how to hang doors it’s not a problem because you can rest assured a lot of other people do know and have extracted the value of that knowledge for you. Likewise, if you don’t know the size of an electron it’s not a problem because you can rest assured that a relatively few other people do know and have extracted the value of that knowledge for you.
As a shamefully forgetful, largely ignorant person myself, I would just respectfully request that learned people—whether door hangers or electron buffs—consider forgiving less learned people for forgetting/not knowing things that they personally might not really need to know.
I think false is the answer I would select. If you're conceptualizing the electron as a point particle (or equivalently, if you know its precise position), then it has no "size". The size of an atom is the size of its electron cloud, and in the case of helium, this is equal to the "sizes" of the individual electrons. Electrons in a plasma, or conduction electrons in a metal, are arguably much "bigger" than atoms.
Electrons and atoms have no clearly defined size. The best you can do is characterise how spread out their wave function is at the moment, but that's going to depend on how much energy they have. I have a PhD in theoretical physics, and I might have gotten this question 'wrong' because I would have no idea what they meant.
I had approximately the same understanding, and recognized that the question was ambiguous. But one of the things education ought to be good for is giving you a functional understanding of how other people think. Even as a hardcore STEM nerd who understands how fuzzy an electron wave function can be, it was clear to me that whoever wrote that question probably thought it was unambiguous and to anyone who isn't a STEM nerd, being several orders of magnitude less massive than an atom would make electrons unambiguously "smaller".
Now that we've established that education is just daycare, let's discuss why.
Over 30 years ago a group of parents decided to start a public school in my area. I thought they were mad. I already knew that public school admin were a bunch of power-hungry sociopaths and were not going to cede an iota of power, money, or control over their fiefdom to any unwashed parent. But the main guy, whose brain child this endeavor was, was an extrovert. And a very smart man. And a believer in the natural goodness and reasonableness of mankind. So he wheedled his way into the good graces of a few, and then got the power of a republican legislator on the education committee at his state capitol to pull a very powerful funding equation string, and we got our school. It's way more complicated than that but you had to be there.
After that came many huge jobs but the most difficult one was hiring teachers. After many years of being on the committee that weeded through over a thousand+ applications over the years, my conclusion is that the 'problem' of education cannot be fixed given the current system. Teachers are not capable of being educated.
Our application process was clearly detailed on our website. About 7/8 of teachers (even the good ones) would not send us all the documents we required to process their application without being prompted multiple times in most cases. (1)They couldn't follow simple instructions that mattered for their career.
Once they got an interview, we found that (2) most of the people who made it through our very rigorous application process had not even bothered to look over the website and see what our school was about.
Our interviews were usually about two hours long. During them we asked a wide variety of questions, many of which were pertinent to the subject matter the teacher was going to teach (some esoteric but most basic). (3) Very few teachers whose applications were good enough for us to waste 120 + minutes of our time arranging an interview for understood their basic subject matter.
Regarding the esoteric questions (4) we found that very few applicants (of any age) who had a semi-basic understanding of their content area had any kind of nuanced understanding.
Some of our interview questions were designed to see if this person, this *teacher*, was a person of intellectual curiosity. (5) Very seldom. VERY seldom.
Some of our questions were designed to see how a person would react in a situation where the school was actually run by a board of parents who hired and fired them. Were they amenable to correction and to shifting how they did things if we were displeased? (6) Many were honest. They said no. They were the professionals (even though some of them were right out of school with zero experience outside of 'student teaching').
We asked them their leisure reading habits. (7) Many did not read and the ones that did read often read frivolous, non-intellectual material.
We asked them to list the last ten books they had read and (8) there were many oprah book club fans, but most could not complete a list of ten books they had remembered reading that weren't 'educationist' garbage.
We asked them their hobbies, their passions, their beliefs about education, their motivations, and the purpose of educating a child. (9) A few were passionate about some hobby, most of their beliefs were the current marxist educrat garbage they had been taught in school and never questioned for a second, and their motivations were sometimes that it was an easy job to know more than a kid did, but often it was that a relative was a teacher, or they had had a good teacher once. It was almost never that the knowledge they had was important, interesting, essential, and needed to be passed on to the next generation. This was usually because they had almost no actual knowledge, so that is understandable.
Generally speaking, people who go into education are some of the most ignorant, lazy, easily propagandized, and sometimes lying strata of the population. Even some of the good ones go south once they are in a group. I used to joke that when you passed through the portals of a public school (even a parent-run one like ours) it pithed your prefrontal cortex.
Anyway, as I told people who would mistakenly admire me for homeschooling my kids in the early years, "I am not a patient person but you can't do a worse job than your neighborhood school. It's impossible because you love your kids. Even if your kids are just beating each other up in the backyard, they are still better off at home."
The American public school system is worse than daycare. It is evil. It crushes the life and creativity and natural intelligence out of children. It places them in the hands of ignoramuses, fools, and demons. It cannot be reformed and it MUST be abolished.
Sounds like you were trying to start a school that catered to right-wing ways of thinking. So it is no surprise your applicants were not curious about knowledge. They are used to being spoonfed dogma. Public schools in districts that offer good salaries and good working conditions are full of very smart teachers. When you slash salaries and don't back them up with good discipline the good teachers leave and you are left with the "ignoramuses". You may be fine homeschooling your kids, but those same ignoramuses you cite have kids too. I suppose in a world without public education we would be fine letting those kids be taught by ignoramuses in their homes?
The point of public schools is to keep trying. It's all we got. We are one country and if you bvelieve in it find a way to cultivate better teachers. Pay them more or offer better working conditions. Of course, that won't happen over night. If you want curious, creative kids then you would be a fan of the Schools of Education and the progressives that pack them. They have been yelling about needing to teach creativity for over a century and the Republican mindset has always been their foil. So careful what you ask for. I guarantee that if you abolish public schools you will get a bunch of christian madrasas that teach dogma and rote memorization.
I've had intelligent friends who went through 'schools of education'. They said it was a dead bore, and mostly how to do the paperwork and being graded on adherence to the propaganda du jour. Zero creativity. Zero.
We have a pay scale that rewards teachers based on merit, not how many years they warmed the desk. It's been proven that more pay does not get you better teachers. Some inner cities pay over $20k per student. You could get private tutors for kids at that price but no - the insect overlords of education would not like that. Kids stuck in cities might actually learn and thrive if you did that.
Working conditions are based on the expectations of the school. We have excellent working conditions.
Abolishing public schools would at least raze the administrative bloat and force people to rethink what the hell each county is doing with all these millions and millions of dollars. Each community would get to decide how that played out instead of having a national curriculum that is rooted in the changing idiocy of the national educrats and the constantly moving target of testing, lies, damned lies, and educational outcome statistics.
Working conditions in many schools is bad because they draw on student populations full of broken homes and poverty. They have a mandate to ensure all students have a chance to learn. Private schools get out of that mandate and hence, can achieve better working conditions. It's a luxary public schools cannot afford.
I went through an ed school and even taught in one. I agree with you on your assessment. They place too much emphasis on things other than content, however, looking at the national conversation about schooling from the right and the left, lack on emphasis on content seems to be a bipartisan trend. The left doesn't want centralized content control and the right wants to ram conservative dogma down the students' throats. I wouldn't mind more centralized control of curriculum, but after seeing what the idiots in Texas and Florida insist we should learn I no longer believe this. It's sad, but the right has bought into the post-modern alternative facts mantra. Unlike the left though, they are not self-reflecxive enough to understand this, well, at least the average conservative. The leaders of the right understand and expolit this because they have ulterior culture-war reasons to get poeople to doubt content. That way they can keep us mad while they slash taxes for the wealthy and keep the oligarchs firmly in control.
Flyover, there is a de facto national curriculum. One decade it was drug education and new math. All over the country. These things always end up popping up *all over the country*. There is always a cause du jour that the educrats want shoved down kids's throats. It's much easier than teaching science or math. Very few school boards resist whatever is being forced fed them either from the feds or from the union - but it all comes from national sources - the lack-of-taste makers of education, if you will.
The mandate of private schools is whatever the school's purpose is but you are right. They are exempt from a lot of the absolute stupidity and waste of time rubbish that the local schools do to dumb things down so that the average kid doesn't accidentally learn something and rise above the rabble.
In my school district the teachers are now sitting down in circles and allowing the kids to bully the weirdos and the social outcasts. Parents are suing the district for a variety of shocking abuses of power.
We don't run a private school. We run a public charter school. We are publicly funded and the school district skims off about 20% of our money just because they can. We run on less and we do more. Granted, the bar is low. We have to follow most of the state rules and have a few things we don't have to follow, just like some of the district's special schools they themselves set up to compete with us.
The public schools could actually teach content if they knew any, or if they wanted to. It has very little to do with some kind of political bifurcation. But in my experience over the past 30+ years of working in education reform, the left wants and has lobbied for centralized "content" control and the right has lobbied for the freedom of individual districts to decide for themselves.
My guess is that even the commies in town probably want their kids to be able to do math and read. However, the schools aren't currently set up for that. Good kids do well because of parental support at home. In turn the school district talks about all their SAT scores and acts like it is all the school's accomplishment. (The district I am in rolls our charter SAT scores into their overall scores because it raises their average.) But if you want to ask them about illiteracy, lowering graduation requirements, drop out rate, violence in the hallways, etc - well, it's all those damn parents's fault!!!!
I have several family members and friends who were/are teachers, and I think the universal message I've heard from all of them was that the education degree requirements were mostly useless, and that grad programs in education existed entirely to justify raises for teachers.
My mother was a teacher. This is absolutely true. That's one reason why we have so many 'teachers' with masters and phds and yet we still have intellectually empty and degrading curriculums.
"christian madrasas that teach dogma and rote memorization"
Oh no! Not - ROTE MEMORISATION! The horror, the horror!
Imagine making kids learn their times tables and lists of words out of spelling books, why it would be back to the Dark Ages!
And even worse - Christians! Why, allowing them to operate their own schools might mean that ... they end up pretty much the same as the public school system?
"The majority of studies in this category conducted quantitative analyses of largescale student outcome data to draw conclusions about any sector effects that exist for students attending urban Catholic schools (Berends & Waddington, 2018; Chen & Pong, 2014; Fleming et al., 2018; Freeman & Berends, 2016; Hallinan & Kubitschek, 2010, 2012; Hallinan et al., 2009; Lee et al., 2017; Morgan & Todd, 2009; Reardon et al., 2009). Though, as mentioned in the introduction, previous research had long suggested urban Catholic secondary schools produced both a “common school effect” and “Catholic school advantage” (e.g., Altonji et al, 2005; Bryk et al., 1993; Grogger & Neal, 2000; Neal, 1997), these 10 studies of more recent student outcome data presented a more complex, less consistent portrait of urban Catholic elementary and secondary schools.
For example, in their comparisons of data from middle school students in the Chicago School Study and the Chicago Catholic School Study (longitudinal data sets of Chicago middle school students), Hallinan and Kubitschek (2012) ultimately found no significant differences in reading or math achievement when comparing Catholic and public student performance. Similarly, using data from the federal Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999 (ECLS-K), a nationally representative sample of kindergarten students, Reardon et al. (2009) found no observable differences in reading scores among public and Catholic elementary school students regardless of race and/or urbanicity and strong evidence suggesting that Catholic schools were less successful at generating high math outcomes than public schools. Hallinan and Kubitschek (2010) did find in another comparison of Chicago School Study and Chicago Catholic School Study data that urban Catholic schools were still associated with smaller student achievement gaps between racial and socioeconomic status student groups. However, the evidence across studies reviewed in this paper suggested a Catholic school advantage related to student achievement at the elementary level appears to be minimal, non-existent, or inconclusive.
Evidence across studies reviewed in this paper did still point to the existence of a Catholic school advantage in relation to post-secondary outcomes. Drawing on data from nine different freshman cohorts at one of the largest public universities in the U.S., Fleming et al. (2018) found that students across a wide range of demographics who attended urban Catholic high schools had higher college grade-point averages and were more likely to complete college. Similarly, in their analysis of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), a longitudinal, nationally representative data set initiated in the fall of 2001, Freeman and Berends (2016) found that students who attend any Catholic high school (including urban Catholic high schools) were more likely to continue onto college than students who did not attend Catholic high schools."
Forcibly close down these madrasas now! Signed, a victim survivor of being educated between the ages of 4-17 by nuns, without whom I would have learned nothing! Those who went before us warned us:
No no no, you're missing the loaded psychological implications of the term here. A madrasa is an Islamic school where people are indoctrinated and taught jihadist ideology mixed in with what we would consider the "actual education." The point of a term like that is to insinuate that Christian schools would be no different, and distract you from the fact that Christian tradition has nothing even remotely resembling jihadist ideology. (And anyone who says "but, but, but, the Crusades!!!!" has no idea what the Crusades really were or why they happened, and really ought to study the relevant history before making a fool of themselves.)
I’m looking for the upvote button, can’t find it,. I can only say I just learned more about the current state of the USA from your comment then I have from the 97% of ‘reputable’ news, plus alt-ish blogs and websites.
You’ve just smashed my comfortable illusion of intelligent, competent teachers being held down only by politically appointed administrations. it was a nice illusion while it lasted
Though not religious myself, I consider teaching to be an almost religious level calling. Which is why I use 'single quotes' around the word 'teacher' a lot. Most of these people are hacks looking for 3-4 months a year off. I have it on the best authority that this is true. Other teachers assured me this was the case.
I am happy to admit that there are some with good intentions but lacking a real calling. I feel for those people. Some of them are very sweet, but they are often very ignorant and have almost no intellectual curiosity that would make them the kind of person who could grow into a calling. After three years, these people get tenure and it doesn't matter that they ask the smartest kid in the room to teach the new math methodology because they don't understand it themselves (true story). They can't be fired and they get pretty entitled pretty quickly.
Most teachers are members of teacher's unions which, combined, makes the largest union in the world. They do not think independently but are a herd, or maybe borg would be the better metaphor. I speak in generalities, you understand. I am very good friends with some teachers. I have been related to some teachers. I have taught independently myself. In a way, what you are saying is actually true. We hire a lot of those intelligent, competent teachers who were being held down by politically motivated administrators. It's just that they are a very tiny percentage of teachers. A very tiny percentage.
I will admit that I was not educated in the USA, but in RSA and the UK, but I think you got extremely unlucky. I went to pretty average schools, and all my teachers were pretty average upper middle class people.
Were they intellectual titans? No. But all the teachers I had were smart, engaged, well read and passionate about what they do. I can only speak for the two countries I was educated in, but I don't think the US is that different to them, and I think you greatly miscategorise the kind of people who apply to be teachers.
I don't think it is asking too much for a person who says on their resume that they are passionate about English literature to know who Milton is, or to be able to name a few metaphysical poets. Or to expect them to name a few of Shakespeare's history plays. Or for an economics teacher to discuss the difference between the Austrian and the Keynesian school. Or for a science teacher to know the triple point of water. Or for a math teacher to explain the difference between mathematics and arithmetic.
I have read and evaluated well over 1200 resumes (I stopped keeping track of the number of resumes I've read about 18 years ago) sent in from all over the country. I have participated in scores and scores of interviews. You can have no idea how much I wish you were right, Mallory James.
Sadly, this is not a phenomenon exclusive to education. I've participated in job interviews for my own profession, (software developer,) and I typically ask very basic questions, things so universal that you'd expect any developer to have picked up in their first year of college, or in their first six months on the job.
For example, "you have a large list of Person objects. Each person has a unique name. You want to be able to efficiently look up people by name. How would you do it?" It's a bit depressing how few candidates are able to answer with some version of "use a hash table," considering just how ubiquitous this scenario is in software development.
Agreed, that is disappointing, this is the minimum I would expect from my teachers. But then again, I think most of the teachers I had would be able to answer such questions (although I did once have a science teacher who when I said that we didn't actually touch things, its just that our electrons repelled each other when we got very close and that's why we didn't fall through things, they said "No, its because atoms are connected together like a net", so you know, they weren't all particularly bright)
Given that I would say that this is a pretty low bar, and this was a private school where I presume no particular certification or degree was mandated, why do you think you had so few talented applicants? I presume you could have hired anyone from the US labour pool, why do you think so few qualified people applied?
I would point out that if this was over 30 years ago, putting the details up on your website may have been counter-productive. Only a tiny number of geeks knew how to use the web or even had access in 1994 (it had only been released in 1993 as you will recall), so you probably very much limited your applicant pool that way.
Well, we did take out ads in magazines that went to education reform-minded people, as well. At that time our local district had their jobs posted online, as did most other schools in the area. I live in the mountain west. It is pretty high tech here, but the school/time-frame I was talking about re the application process was the second school we started and it was in the late 1990s. We had to start a second school because the district accomplished a coup against the parent board in charge and went into the building and stole our books and materials and installed their puppet. When you have millions of dollars and years of experience, but do a shit job of educating kids, it is super embarrassing when "non-professionals' are able to do a much better job and have almost immediately better outcomes with less money and fewer resources in the course of a few years.
Why is the talent pool so low in talent.....there is an American saying, snarky but often fair, that those who can, do. And those who can't, teach. So a great musician will go into some kind of professional music-ing, but a mediocre one will go into music education. This is not completely fair because some people really do have a talent for teaching young people and are very valuable because of that.
There is another saying that there are three reasons people go into teaching: June, July, and August. These are the three summer months during which most teachers are not working. So, you get a full time job, but (what with summer, Christmas break, Easter break, "in service days", etc, etc, etc) you only actually work about 8 of the 12 months.
We ask every interviewee why they want to teach at our school and/or why they went into this field. You get a lot of different answers. I'd say about 1/3 of the time you get someone who found out they had a gift for teaching and really wanted to pass that on to young people. A lot of the time it is 'my mom was a teacher', 'everyone in my family is a teacher', 'I really admire this or that teacher I had', 'I was told I would make a good teacher', 'I was the best in my class at X subject', 'I love kids', 'I love math and wanted to pass that love on', etc.
We always grill applicants on subject matter. A lot of the people who love math can't tell us the things we need to know to be convinced that they are a master of their subject. This is because education schools, as I think I said before, spend a lot of class hours on propaganda (and pop psychology) and *very* little on making sure students are prepared in a subject area.
Often, the system is insanely incoherent. In fact, what is called a middle school certification meant (in the past - don't know if this has been reformed but I doubt it has) that you were certified to teach any subject offered in grades 6-9. I had a brother in law who was a coach and had to teach physics. For which, I assure you, he was thoroughly unprepared. To say that he was only ever one day ahead of his students would probably be putting a shine on the situation.
Another reason inadequate people go into it is job security. The system of tenure is a huge problem in American education. In my state, if a person teaches one day into their fourth year of teaching, they have automatic job security. Three years and one day in the classroom and you can never be fired. No matter how incompetent you prove to be.
Another big factor is that kids spend 13 years in public schools. They hardly ever interact with the real world. Generally speaking, the only working adults they see doing their job are teachers and they see that day in and day out for years and years and years. They often think, as I certainly did when in school, "How hard can this be? These people just need to know a little more than I do. I could do that."
And finally, I'll say that another problem is the barrier to entry. There is very little other than the obligatory lame ED degree from some college or university and a few weeks of student teaching. I know there are some tests to get certain certifications, but I also know that the bar on those is low. I had a friend who was a social worker and went to take the math test for state certification (she had to do this in order to work in schools). There she talked to a young woman who was a teacher and was taking the test for the third time. My friend wasn't great at math but found the test easy and all her SW compatriots had no trouble passing it.
I could go on and on but it is demoralizing and I doubt you want more. Smart, motivated people in the US most often go into real jobs with real responsibilities and real risks. We sometimes hire them when they retire or get laid off. We do what we can to not hire people who are traditionally trained teachers. Why? Because it is almost always a mistake. They often prove to be entitled, troublemaking, lazy, uncommitted parasites. The exception (and there are some) proves the rule.
I do have loads more questions (why did you need to offer tenure at a private school? Why was barrier to entry a problem, couldn't you have mandated a Master's degree or PHD in a related subject like schools require in Finland?), but I have already taken up loads of your time, so thanks for what you have offered so far. Thanks for trying to make a difference.
I suppose what I have got out of this is how sad it is that US culture disincentivizes any with talent from trying to teach. As you point out, it seems there is a self fulfilling prophecy in the US that means people will assume that if you teach it must be because you can't do anything else. Well, hardly surprising that no one talented applies in such a situation if that is what the population writ large will think of them, including their students.
I guess the one positive I take out of this, is that I suppose I am a bit more impressed by the job the government manage to do to keep education standards relatively high (or at least higher than most countries here in Europe), considering all the obstacles you encountered with sourcing talent. But then I suppose a syllabus mostly teaches itself.
On the topic of barrier to entry, I totally agree. I definitely think it should be harder to become a teacher than most other jobs. Perhaps on the order of a Doctor (well, let's not go crazy, but definitely more than 5 years of advanced study). I hope we get to see some improvements in this area in future.
Just a few clarifications: 1 - we absolutely do not offer tenure at our school (and would not if we could) and it is not a private school. It is a public charter school. All can attend but we have a wait list with over 1000 students on it right now, so it is tough to get a spot.
2 - we mandate expertise in the content area in which you are applying to teach. A Latin teacher has to have advanced knowledge of Latin and to read regularly in that language. A classical history teacher has to have some Latin or Greek and a fairly thorough knowledge of classical history. An engineering teacher has to have worked in the field before applying. Etc.
3 - I think the self-fulfilling prophecy is of recent date. When I was a kid people did not think teachers were ignorant, probably because they weren't so much so as they are now. If anything people think entirely too well of teachers, largely because they don't realize what is going on in the classroom and they have no idea how ignorant so many of them are. As the founder of our school says, "There will always be angry parents because there will always be parents of 4th graders. At 4th grade people start to realize that their sweet little child can not read, has little math skill, and waning interest in acquiring knowledge."
I have an application (I saved a copy of it because it was so remarkable) from a very sincere, sweet man who wanted to teach at our school. In his statement of educational philosophy (we won't accept an application without one), he could hardly write a sentence without a grammar or punctuation mistake. It is one of the few applications that actually broke my heart. This man had been failed by teachers for every one of the 17 years of his life that he had been in primary and secondary school, and college. It still makes me sick to think about it. IIRC, he was working on a masters. I still think about this poor man.
4 - a huge part of the problem is how vast this country is. Each state makes its own rules, putatively. But the reality is that an enormous, nationwide union controls the Ed schools, the school boards, the licensing boards, and most of the politicians. That union leans very, very far left, and gets further left every year. But there are plenty of people making a lot of money off of it.
One should also consider that a primary goal of education (up to high school at least) is what I would call 'patriotism'. Literature, history, and geography classes are often primarily meant to justify the current state of affairs, to the point where most education programs have 'literature' and 'foreign literature'. Geographic notionism is mostly focused on national creeks and mountain ranges rather than world capitals. History is mostly your country's history, with a pinch of manifest destiny (try to ask any history buff outside the US who Paul Revere was, I'm confident you won't ever get to 44% positive response rate).
I was under the impression (3rd hand or so!) that in the USA, 'woke' was mostly inculcating something close to _anti_patriotism. Does anyone have first hand information?
That's pretty accurate. In this and various other aspects, wokeness has been systematically degrading and corrupting education for several decades now.
In order to discover what sort of things you like and are good at, you have to have some idea of what sort of things there are.
School gets kids to do a large variety of things to see what sticks, then focus in on what they are good at as they get older.
Without such a mechanism, most people will be stuck doing the sorts of things their parents or neighbours do, never knowing if there are possibilities out there that might work better for them that they actually can explore rather than just hear vague stories of, as has been the case for most of human history.
No it doesn't. It gets kids to do a small variety of the same things. Usually poorly. So poorly as to where it's impossible to make use of such talents upon graduation, as they're competing with millions of others with the same underdeveloped skills, and little means of distinguishing their own abilities of such beyond wasting more of their time and money on more school, all of which is only valuable relative to their sheepskin.
I think a universal voucher system, with the option to use the resources for homeschooling, would probably be the best option of the plausible ones we have now. Mostly because it would offer the most possible means for experimentation with various lesrning methods and cirricula that could actually be useful.
Our current system is monumentally awful and wasteful. Nothing less than industrial-scale child abuse. I sincerely regret the time of my life I wasted on it, as well ever thinking it was a good idea to do such.
I think you are asking about the wrong kinds of facts. The fact that Copernicus discovered that the Earth moved around the sun is less important than the fact that people used to believe that the sun travelled around the Earth, and it was only with keen scientific observation and thought that someone figured out the reality and shared the correct model with with world. A better "fact" to test for would be something like: Did humans always believe that the Earth went around the sun?
Isn't this the scaffolding that remains, and people can look up the details if these need to?
This is definitely the Scott position I wrestle most mightly with, because I don't agree, but I'm really really struggling to find good counterarguments.
Perhaps today I'll start from this direction: First imagine that you have a kid warehouse. Now what are you going to put in it?
This is to say, I think lots of people find kid warehousing valuable for lots of reasons. Now can you think of ways to organise the days of these kids that are obviously better?
It seems to me that more sporty/vocational ways have been tried, and weren't disasters, but weren't obviously better. There have also been minimal-rules sorts of institutions, and they haven't been disasters, but also haven't been obviously better.
Teaching people good ideas and lots of civics and hoping some of it sticks might just be the best they can manage?
This is pretty weak justification for a coercive national project, but it might be enough.
This is a Scott position I have a lot of sympathy with, because I disliked school as a child (by which I mean, it was a major source of unhappiness for me). When I complained about it, I was told that it was good for me and important and would help me socially. I find it validating as an adult to reflect that actually school wasn't good at doing what it was supposed to be doing, and that it wasn't really designed with my interests in mind, but with the interest of keeping my parents at work.
I'm sorry you experienced that. Now that I'm a parent and a teacher, my observation is that the parents around me do not do things in their childrens' best interest with any regularity. They act selfishly and out of a desire to conform 99% of the time.
One of the reasons I'm very pro-school is because schools are at least set up with institutional rules that try to make them function for the benefit of the children, and after a century or so of eliminating corporal punishment and sexual abuse from most of them, I think we've reached a position where schools are probably on average better places for kids to be than their own homes.
I don't know that this is right, and I certainly recognise that lots of people don't agree with it. And because school has to aim for the median kid, there must necessarily be lots of children who don't end up fitting well into the system. I... don't have any good ideas for what to do about them.
I can kind of see both sides of this. I imagine my experience with school was like a lot of the ACX commentariat. I did really well academically, my parents were invested in my welfare, but school was mostly a drag and a waste of time. There were clearly other kids who should not have been in school, either because they were more capable on their own or they were not capable of benefitting from education at all.
My mother was a special education teacher for most of her career in a very rural, poor and drug infested area. She would ask kids about their parents, and a common response would be "mommy doesn't care, daddy is in jail for meth." For these kids, school was probably the one place they were regularly fed, and people paid attention to them, and they weren't beaten or sexually abused by mommy's latest boyfriend. Mandatory schooling is probably the only way people like these kids have any sort of a chance at a healthy or productive development.
I think any sort of solution to schooling needs to square the individual needs of each student with what the system is trying to do for them. Not that this is an easy or practical thing to do.
I think this is the real divide. Bryan Caplan's kids are going to do just fine whether they go to their local school or not; he and his wife are going to make sure they can read, write, and don't just hang around aimlessly and idly.
The bright, self-directed, and self-disciplined kids will also do okay, even if they feel they would be a lot happier and better off never having to go to school.
It's the kids in the deprived areas for whom school is the stable environment that makes sure they get something to eat (breakfast and lunch clubs), are looked after in some degree, have somewhere to go that isn't hanging around aimlessly and idly and getting enticed by criminal gangs to join up:
They are the ones who will suffer without school, or something to replace it. Cheerfully chirping that they can just go online! and manage their own pace and level of study! ignores the problems there.
The school system, like democracy, is the worst thing out there - except for all the other things.
The local widget factory will keep the low-prospect kids occupied, provide them structure and opportunity to socialise, help them reach self-sufficiency and escape abusive situations at home, and teach them valuable life lessons while doing productive work.
Sure, some potential geniuses might not get the opportunity to advance, and some people who might have done well given some other choice of career might fall through the cracks, but IQ tests and genetic profiling should catch most of them, and the sacrifice of the rest is one we are apparently willing to make for the greater good in our new school-free utopia.
Problem is, we've off-shored and out-sourced all the widget factories. What remains is either you need a high level of technical skills, or you can get a job in service industries.
And if you've ever tried training in kids to do useful work, for example on work experience during transition year from the local schools, you'll realise how long it takes and how little you can actually give them to do. Even building sites won't find much for 12 year olds, so that's why age of apprenticeship is 16.
And leaving school at an early age does leave them, even the non-academically inclined, with gaps in their education that they won't make up or pick up in later life (not without outside support). Legal school leaving age will be set at what - 15? Okay, that might be manageable. But my father left school at 12, and when I was 13 I had to explain how compound interest worked to him, because he had stopped paying back a loan on the assumption that he had it all paid off, and couldn't understand why the bank were sending him letters demanding more payments to finish it off. Because I had learned all about compound interest in maths class in school, I was telling my father - a man who had been working all his life, who wasn't stupid, who was able to do so many things - why he was wrong about thinking he had paid off the loan.
"School-free" will not be utopia. The ones who are truly hopeless will probably drop into crime (see the recent news story about criminal gangs targeting kids as young as seven in my own country), the ones with any ability will need some kind of apprenticeship programmes and training/education programmes, at which point we're practically doing school all over again. Few if any businesses engage in on-the-job training, even apprenticeships mix on the job training with learning in vocational or training services.
You could survey the kids. What do they like better? Being in school, or being at home?
Everyone I remember who went to school with me didn't like it. I'm not sure whether a single one of the ca. 100 kids in my grade wanted to be there. Everyone was happy when the holidays started. Everyone was sad when they were over. Everyone dreaded class starting at the beginning of the day. Almost everyone was terminally bored by the lessons.
I think I probably had an unusually blessed home life. But even adjusting for myself being atypical, I have a hard time seeing the median kid I knew back then being sufficiently abused at home to prefer school.
If you warehoused the kids and told them they could bring cell phones and just do what they wanted, like a more supervised recess that last the entire school duration, I think almost everyone would have been far less miserable.
Yeah... I'm afraid I don't have sufficient respect for children's opinions to care about that. I don't think kids know what they like, or are capable of making decisions that make them happier. They need us to do that for them. For example, not liking school/work is normal. Looking forward to home time/clocking off time is normal. Enjoying leisure and anticipating enjoyment doesn't mean to me that non-leisure activities should not be done.
If you just left kids up to their own devices - pun intended - I think you would end up with a lot of kids who never achieve functional literacy and numeracy (despite the large quantities of words and numbers on phones). Lots of them would just be catatonic for hours on end, and I don't think that's good. And lots of them would go around hitting and bullying each other.
I'd be very much willing to rethink the balance of school vs. leisure; or to change the way they do school. But I think doing nothing or leaving the kids to veg out would not bring about desirable outcomes.
I want to suggest that most of the value of school is really social and behavioral. We send young people off to a place they get to learn to interact with other young people and learn norms of behavior.
The whole education stuff could be done much better but it's ultimately largely secondary. It's just necessary to justify the large expense of the day care and socialization aspects to parents and voters.
If you want people to learn norms of behaviour, the seemingly-obvious choice would be to get them to associate with people who are already socialised, i.e., adults, not to drop them in a room with loads of other unsocialised people and hope they figure it out.
William Golding's book was not a story about children, but a metaphor about humanity. And it is fiction. In reality, this is not how children behave when isolated from society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways
I agree with most of what you wrote, and it is most astute, but you understated a very important reason for comprehensive child schooling:
Very many parents can teach their children nothing at all, they are are either completly uneducated, have no didactic skills, have no time to teach their children, or look on any education as a waste of time.
These kids will form a part of tomorrows society, we need them to understand things so that they can participate, undertake useful work, and use their knowledge to evluate social events and communicate their thought-out opinions to others, and to vote for the best of the bad crew we call politicians.
Pre-registering my answers for the first 4 questions at the beginning of the post:
1. Repetition is very important, but you actually learn one module then move on to the next. This is briefly covered again next year, but not much more. There isn’t quite enough repetition to make things stick long-term. Many of us have experienced this firsthand in the real world, e.g., a job. In my first corporate job, I had to ask the same questions over and over again to learn how to solve basically the same problem, just slightly shifted. This continued for months, and then finally, it sticked. For the average person to become truly proficient at something, they have to keep repeating it ad nauseam. School feels like you’re doing exactly that, but if you take a closer look, you’re not. At least not with the same rigor as you would in an actual job.
2. The reason information sticks when learned through general osmosis is because our minds are preconditioned to remember information we have reason to believe is critical. For example, how to pump gas and use a gas station. The very first time you are old enough to consciously perceive your parents talking about going to the gas station, we perceive that as being a very important thing because our parents are telling us about it, and it seems rational to be something we will do when we get a car one day. The point is that the cultural osmosis happens as one part of an apparatus containing us, our relatives, our friends, and our community, and so on. “Okay son, let’s go to the gas station” -> “I will get a car someday” -> “We always drive and need gas” -> “This is something we continue to do all the time,” and so on. Things that are cultural keep reoccurring and have enormous amounts of repetition. School just doesn’t carry the same weight as the zeitgeist does.
3. Children are smart enough to know that what they are actually incentivized to do is cram information the day before to pass, not to remember it. Once the test has passed, the information will not come up for quite some time until the next test, which they will just cram for again. This is classic game theory about incentives and agents. There’s no reason to think that it would play out any other way.
4. This is answered by the previous 3 points. The mind is a funny thing, and humans are so adaptive that they have a precognitive understanding of what is likely to be important and what is not. We put so much time into studying things our unconscious mind already declared moot. The effort was wasted from the beginning.
One thing that might get obscured by listing a bunch of facts and asking how many people know them, is the extent to which different people learn different facts.
For instance, you might come up with a list of 5 facts that you'd expect learn in school, and discover that 20% of Americans know each of them, and that kind of look like only 20% of students learn anything in school.
But it could also be that every person remembers 1 fact, in which case every person did really learn *something* in school.
And if the 20% of things they each learned were the things that are really interesting and enriching to their personality, or the things that will be particularly relevant to their career and endeavors, then maybe that's actually evidence of the system working pretty well?
We all know that human labor is hugely specialized these days; someone who knew how to perform 20% of all jobs in the market (from janitor to construction worker to systems analyst to heart surgeon) would be a miraculous savant. Why do we expect school kids to each retain *everything*, instead of specializing in the same ways?
Of course, the argument then is that even if the 20% each person learns is good and important, they're still wasting 80% of their time. But skipping over the debate about 'intangibles' and background knowledge, it's also just the case that you don't know which things each child is going to care about or need later in life when they enter grade school, so you need to expose them to everything to let them develop and discover what they care about.
*Maybe* you could divert them into more specialized courses of study than we do now when they hit highschool, but frankly even if we proved that someone's interests at teh end of middle school perfectly predicted their interests in college, I still wouldn't trust the bureaucracy (or their parents) to make that determination for them.
> But it could also be that every person remembers 1 fact, in which case every person did really learn *something* in school.
I don't think anyone is literally, pedantically claiming that people learn *nothing at all;* but rather that the amount of learning is so low that it's not worth the extreme expense in time, money, and opportunity costs.
There are two factors that I think meaningfully change the calculus on society’s return to education that are not covered here or in Caplan’s book. My hunch is that these make the expected value positive for universal K-12 but not for universal post-secondary:
1) Childcare: as we saw during the school shutdowns during COVID, if kids aren’t in school it massively impacts parental productivity. Without free public schools, I’d expect we would return to a world where many more families would only have one working parent. I’d guess it would also decrease birth-rates. Maybe some people think this would be a better world, but it would certainly reduce the tax base. In a non-agrarian society, my guess is that having a bunch of 12-18yos roaming around not in school would cause lots of problems. And while child abuse unfortunately does happen in school settings, schools work really hard to prevent it and catch it; if you tried to put all these kids into the workplace without robust oversight I think we’d see a lot more abuse. So then, if you allow that the government should run childcare, you might as well try to do something useful with that time, and $13k/child/year is a lot cheaper than my family pays for our 2yo to attend preschool. I think the current curriculum is wildly unoptimized, but I think the childcare function of K12 schools makes them more economically valuable than just the returns to the student.
2) “Fat tails”: the fact that most kids find most of their classes useless and boring doesn’t automatically mean that the expected value per student is not positive. I took a computer science course in high school and it changed the course of my life and career, but that same course was probably boring and useless for most of the other people in the class. Looking back, it’s easy to say that I should have taken that course and the other students shouldn’t have, but I don’t think you could have predicted who would have their life changed by a course a priori. My uncle took French in high school, went to Paris for a semester in college, met a woman there and lived in France for most of his adult life. French was probably a waste of time for nearly every other student in his class, but for my uncle it was a big deal! The story of Steve Jobs learning about calligraphy is about as “economically useless” of a course as you could get, but it turns out he put that to use in designing the Apple computer - as he says, "you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward." On a broader societal scale, if the requirement that all students take biology in high school increased the odds by 5% that we would have an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 widely available within 18 months of the virus appearing, that might very well justify keeping the requirement, even if 99.9% of students find it useless.
To add, one thing that school could do is function as a place where osmosis can take place. It's not unlikely that students learn at ton from each other.
>Otherwise - aside from being a place to warehouse children while their parents are away - I’m not sure how you rescue the usefulness of most schooling.
socialization, for starters
also you love to see libertarians spend decades cutting funding for schools and trying to undermine them with privatization and then use these poor results as an excuse to cut schools further. the US's poor results are an anomaly, not a fact of nature
As a libertarian, this post made me laugh. At the idea of libertarians actually getting their preferred policy outcome, in something as pervasive as public schooling no less. I struggle to think of a political philosophy that has had less impact on American policy than libertarianism.
I suggest you search for the old SSC post Considerations on Cost Disease. It has a nice graph at the very beginning where the cost of public schooling (adjusted for inflation) has soared since 1970, yet test scores have remained flat.
i'm sorry, i think there might be some confusion. when i say "libertarians have gotten their preferred policy outcomes on public education," what i mean is they (or their allies) have successfully managed to block comprehensive federal education funding and reform. i understand that it's still not legal to marry 15 year olds.
I'm going to explicitly call this out as BS, since Scott himself wrote a post detailing how public k-12 education funding has increased 250% (after inflation) over the last 50 years. That is in no way compatible with "blocked" funding.
I still laugh at your conclusion that libertarians can manage to block federal legislation.
Also, you can legally marry 15 year olds in the noted libertarian states of... Hawaii? and Kansas? Wait, that doesn't seem right...
It's true that government primary schools are not funded much by the federal government, and never have been. But if you're under the impression that libertarians (or their supposed allies) have been blocking increases in school funding overall, you could not possibly be more mistaken.
Speaking as a rocket scientist, the success rate of institutions building rocket engines is only weakly correlated with their financing. I believe the same is true of education, but that's not my field.
> the success rate of institutions building rocket engines is only weakly correlated with their financing.
I'd believe that, if you added the caveat "after overcoming a significant barrier to entry." Because if you don't have enough financing to build and launch a rocket in the first place, that's a pretty powerful correlation!
You can go deep or you can go wide, but there isn't time to go both deep and wide.
As a society we have chosen to go wide for much of our education (history especially). This means we also go shallow. And this means that people forget almost all they were taught.
Maybe you do a year of US history in high school. When do you cover this again? "Never" is a good guess.
Aaannd ... most of the facts are, as Scott suggests, abstract. Falstaff is a character in the Henry IV plays. A student can remember that for a test in a few weeks. But Falstaff isn't "real" in the same way that, say, Luke Skywalker was for a generation. You'll need to *WATCH* (not read) a good performance of the play. Then come back in a few years and watch another one ... or excerpts or something. Then tie young Hal in with the actual historical Henry V ... and Owen Gendower and a war for Welsh independence. This can be done. But it takes more than a few hours once or twice in high school.
It *IS* possible to make history less abstract, more "real" and have more depth, but the tradeoff is that lots of history will simply not get covered. *I* am okay with this because I'd rather that the "right" 10% be (mostly) remembered even if the cost is mostly ignoring 90%. The way we teach history we cover a lot more with the tacit understanding that the kids will remember barely any of it.
The same basic point holds for literature, though the details are different.
The same holds for science (especially Newtonian physics). Wide or deep but not both.
And in ALL cases most of the students will only "learn" what they are forced to learn because THEY DON'T CARE.
I always thought that "you can only go deep or go wide but you can't do both" was an expression of intellectual laziness, but I've now come to believe that it's an expression of our lack of general curiosity. Sure humans are curious, but most humans only make the effort to focus their curiosity on things that will benefit or please them. Very few humans enjoy pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake.
But I was corrupted by Heinlein at an early age. I still believe in his thesis that superior humans are generalists. A person should be able to solve differential equations and keep the line running as short-order to cook (I'm paraphrasing him). And, after reading Beyond This Horizon in sixth grade, I wanted to grow up to be an encyclopedic synthesist — a person who analyzes the sum total of human knowledge looking for ways that different silos of knowledge can work together to exploit untapped potential. Unfortunately, our culture rewards people who master silos of knowledge. But should there be a call for an encyclopedic synthesist I'm ready to get to work!
So in your view, if one person has a bad idea that invalidates all the other ideas that that person may offer?
In his novel, Time Enough for Love, a strong incest theme runs through work, but the novel takes place in a setting where gamete selection and genetic manipulation can prevent any birth defects due to inbreeding. Of course, he raised the disturbing question of whether sex with one's clone was masturbation. Heinlein also makes references in many of his novels to underage sexuality — which modern readers find uncomfortable. But he grew up in an America where the age of consent was twelve or thirteen across wide swaths of the country.
"I always thought that 'you can only go deep or go wide but you can't do both' was an expression of intellectual laziness, but I've now come to believe that it's an expression of our lack of general curiosity."
A typical US academic year (for K-12) runs about 180 days. If we assume one hour classes then this gives us 180 hours of instruction per class per year. You lose some time to class overhead (e.g. taking role call) and you lose some time to non-instructional activities such as giving tests.
US History is generally taught as one year in high school.
So ... you have 180 hours, minus some overhead, to teach ALL the relevant bits of US history. How can you avoid the "wide or deep" tradeoff? Yes, in High School you can (maybe) assume another 180 hours of homework but you still wind up with about one hour of time (class or study) per year [starting in 1620 we get 1620+360 = 1980]. Not all years of US history are equal, but you will get two days of class + homework time to cover the US civil war. Unless you take time away from something else ... such as the events LEADING UP to the US Civil War. Or reconstruction. Or a thread on technology in the US. Or ...
And HALF the kids have an IQ of around 100 or less. Most have an IQ below 120. It will take them A LOT longer to learn something than one would expect if one doesn't have any experience actually trying to teach non-super-bright kids.
And most of them don't care about US history. They may be curious about something else, but not necessarily US history. Or whatever topic "we" want them to care about. I imagine a lot of folks on this board would be less than enthusiastic about being forced to learn a lot about sports. Imagine that some of these kids care about sports but not history. Or Dungeons and Dragons or chess but not literature.
Then ... we don't repeat the US History for a number of years and a lot of the knowledge fades because it just isn't relevant.
Play this game with European history and world history and Chinese history. And then with literature. And math -- it can take an *amazingly* long time for average kids to reliably learn to multiply mixed numbers; hard to believe until you see it for real. And then the sciences.
Count the number of hours available K-12 (keeping in mind that you probably shouldn't be assigning hours and hours of homework per night to 4th graders). Realize that a lot of these topics take 3x - 10x as long to learn as you think they should.
I should have clarified my remarks. Off-topically, I was making the observation that even smart adult humans are not very curious. But I'm not sure whether it's modern pedagogy that stifles young humans' general curiosity or whether general curiosity is not a natural part of our behavioral repertoire.
OTOH, a graduate of the eighth grade in 1895 may have had a better general education than most college grads today.
This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas (link below — plus a link to a 1912 eighth-grade final to show that Salina KS was not an outlier in the educational attainments possible for fourteen-year-olds).
8th Grade Final Exam:
Salina , KS - 1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7-10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $.20 per inch?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865?
Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.
Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of N.A.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.
So, those are great questions, could I see the results the median students gave?
I am not saying that it isn't true that "a graduate of the eighth grade in 1895 may have had a better general education than most college grads today." but what I am saying is that the only evidence I have ever read is that we are getting steadily smarter over time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
You'd need to check the old records to see how many students graduated from 8th Grade. That would be an interesting project if you have the time to undertake it.
But smartness is mostly worthless if you (a) grow up in a society where the prevailing pedagogy and the surrounding culture are incapable of transmitting knowledge to the young, and (b) where the natural state of humans across all IQ ranges is to be unmotivated to learn. Very few people are Abraham Lincolns who, with only 12 months of formal schooling, can pass the Bar let alone become President. I for one find this group's IQ fetish to be tiresome. IMHO, IQ is more bullshit than science. And to quote the late Stephen Hawking...
>When asked in a 2004 interview with The New York Times what his IQ is, Hawking gave a curt reply: "I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers."
I am not going to undertake that research as a project. You were the one offering a list of questions without answers as evidence that people were smarter on average in the past. It is up to YOU to provide evidence for your hypothesis.
I don't know what you mean that smartness is worthless if you grow up in a society where the culture is incapable of transmitting knowledge to the young or the natural state is to be unmotivated to learn. I think even when these two things are true, it is still better to be smart than not, and it is certainly not worthless.
While you didn't state it explicitly, I am going to assume you are implying that our current western culture is incapable of transmitting knowledge to the young and the natural state of humans is to be unmotivated to learn.
On the first point, I think this is patently false. We have continued to advance our knowledge in all sciences decade after decade for the past several centuries. There is no way you can say we aren't passing knowledge to the young effectively. It is patently untrue.
As to the natural state of humans being unmotivated to learn, I guess my question would be "relative to what?". Relative to the past? Relative to other mammals? Relative to some platonic ideal of curiosity? I think it would be awesome if we were on average more interested in learning, but that will always be true, so it isn't really an argument you can win.
As to "this group's IQ fetish", I really don't know what you mean nor how SH's comment is relevant. I agree with him that people who boast about their IQ are losers, and I am not surprised he has no idea what his IQ is, I don't think 99% of people know what their IQs are, but how is that relevant to the conversation we are having?
IQ is a very messy and difficult measure of intelligence, but it is the best we have. If you have another measure you prefer, I am more than happy to use that.
But the point of the Flynn effect research, is that across the world, in complete unrelated departments, we have shown that when the exact same questions are asked over the period of time, humans have consistently been giving better and better answers. We are on average slowly getting more intelligent over time, and it is too fast to be genetic, so it must be down to the way we pass on knowledge and learning across the generations.
Lincoln was kicked in the head by a horse when he was young and probably suffered some sort of brain damage. If he didn't keep his mind active he would stare off into space and lose track of time for hours on end. So he made a conscious effort to always have his mind engaged. Not exactly a typical neurological example.
I should have clarified my remarks. Off-topically, I was making the observation that even smart adult humans are not very curious. But I'm not sure whether it's modern pedagogy that stifles young humans' general curiosity or whether general curiosity is not a natural part of our behavioral repertoire.
OTOH, a graduate of the eighth grade in 1895 may have had a better general education than most college grads today.
This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas (link below — plus a link to a 1912 eighth-grade final to show that Salina KS was not an outlier in the educational attainments possible for fourteen-year-olds).
8th Grade Final Exam:
Salina , KS - 1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7-10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $.20 per inch?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865?
Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.
Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of N.A.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.
I often fall back on Horace Mann's idea that we need a public education so that we can all be on the same page so-to-speak as Americans (or whatever country they live). Our recent cultural bifurcation shows how prescient Mann was. We now live in siloed worlds where people are living by different narratives and those narratives color the facts that they believe in. We may all pick up many of the same facts, but they mean very different things depending on how you acquire your knowledge.
School helps us to build a common narrative with common meanings for the facts we are required to learn. The point of having a common curriculum is not that each fact in it is necessary, but it is necessary that we all share a common set of facts and interpretations. We then use those common facts/interpretations to process the new events and facts that come our way in our daily political discussions. They help immigrants integrate into our culture as well. When Mann was helping build our public school system he was well away that many Americans were immigrants and came from different religious and cultural backgrounds. Our country was new and he realized that if it were to survive we needed something to bind us all together.
Critics jump in and say that this project is a way to force non-White kids into a white supremacy way of thinking, and at times they would be right. But education also has a built-in notion that beliefs can and should change when exposed to reasoning. Thus, part of what is important about education is equipping us with the tools needed for reviewing old facts and ways of integrating new facts in our shared body of knowledge. It's a dynamic process.
Of course we forget many facts. It's profoundly ignorant to use that as an excuse to not learn facts or to not require students to learn things. They are going to learn facts either way and they will forget those facts as well. But each fact that is learned will help build their overall point of view on the world. Wouldn't it be better to try to steer kids toward a more well-built viewpoint than to just let them ping-pong around the internet of facts? Shouldn't we be advocating for sober reviews of what those facts should be instead of becoming nihilists and saying,"we can't agree on anything so nothing should be taught!"?
Likewise, falling for the old, "they will just forget the facts so why teach them" trope is tiring. It leads to nihilism about education at best and at worst, leaves us susceptible to charlatans and scammers who are politically motivated to steer kids toward points of view that are politically biased. The proper space is in school where political biases can be uncovered and discussed in a public forum. It would be bad if schools taught that facts and naaratives were absolute and demanded assent without critical thinking, but thankfully, with all the flaws of the progressive left they have traditionally taught that critical thinking is a value worth cultivating.
We shouldn't give in to cranks on the left and the right who are peddling post-modern notions of the lack of absolute truths and narratives. Likewise, we should be weary of those same folks who claim that their truths and narratives are the correct ones. Instead, we need to keep coming together in our schools to hash out what good knowledge is, knowing that yes, we will forget most of the facts, but that we will cultivate a way of thinking, a way of coming together to figure out how to move forward.
And this is not just about a shared American identity. Engineers and doctors need to cultivate the same methods of buildding and processing knowledge as that is how science advances. Through learning and doing science we cultivate the proper tools for discovering knowledge. So even if you forget what a mole is you still understand the imporatnace of founding knowledge on experiemnets and reason. Does anyone who pays attention to our internet swamps believe kids, left to their own devices would develop the tools necessary to participate in good, less biased science?
Well said. But in regards to your final remarks most of my HS science education was about facts rather than the theory of science. I don't ever remember receiving any education in the *theory of science* or the *scientific method* in HS or college. Luckily my dad was working on his PhD in the history of scientific thinking before he died, and he tutored me. Most of the researchers I knew in grad school gave little thought to the concept of falsifiability, and they went out of their way to disprove the null hypothesis (to create publishable results). Proving the null hypothesis was the kiss of death for one's career. ;-)
> Otherwise - aside from being a place to warehouse children while their parents are away - I’m not sure how you rescue the usefulness of most schooling.
Add what they learn to a spaced repetition app (like Anki, lots of parts are FOSS), test pure memory of facts all along school, like testing 3 month later what you learned before. The issue seems to be that to learn something you have to make it dense to go deep, but to remember alongside other things it you have to make it sparse, dilute it. If you spend one month learning how to solve integral, then you're prescribed to solve a few integrals a week later, with a small test, then a month later, then 2 month later, etc. Call them "memory test" and put in them stuff you're supposed to hit in the forgetting curve right about now, taking the bottom 10% of the forgetting curve to lower chance people can't keep up at all.
Let's not underestimate the importance of warehousing children.
Free socialized child care, as I understand it, is associated with and probably as a significant casual relationship with the massive gains in economic productivity seen in developed countries in the 20th century. It allows both parents to pursue more fulfilling and much more productive roles---unless they happen to be the small but significant portion of humans who really, sincerely, deeply like children.
And those people, and this is almost the best part of public schools, can all become teachers and earn well deserved paychecks for the highly valuable work they enjoy.
I think philosophically I'm on board with Scott's overall thesis of schools generally sucking, but am more looking for ways to make them suck less then eliminate them.
Most parents are probably about as good at taking care of kids as their teachers, or generally in the same ballpark, but don't want to do it *all day*, and I don't think that for children up to fifteen or so, schools as they exist in, say, liberal Bellvue, Washington, or conservative Colorado Springs, Colorado, or Tex-Mex Chula Vista, California, are more than incrementally suboptimal.
Though of course let's improve them on the margins, and get people out of them and into independent roles in society at little earlier than whatever the graduation age is for an MFA.
My dream solution is to start a tradition where once a year all the 14 year olds are left in the woods for six weeks and at the end the survivors are given a driver's license and bottle of the beverage of their choice. But that's not a goal I consider achievable, so how about shaving a full year off high school and bachelor's degree timelines?
And if we're really feeling crispy, let's have a compromise between the school choice and the union's where you have a wide selection of charters offering a variety of learning environment for their children but not massive pay differentials for their staff?
Ideally accompanied by, say, three quarters where all the students in a state have to go to a unified school for town, then metropolitan region, then state, and do some stuff focused less on academics and more on getting to know their fellow citizens?
Small correction: the question about electrons vs atoms allowed "Don't know" as an answer, and 25% of people chose it. So 47% correct is not actually worse than chance in this instance.
I always thought that the point of education (beyond the social/warehousing/non-learning benefits) was as a sampling table for various subjects they wouldn't otherwise be exposed to. Sure, learning literature probably doesn't impact most lives, but for some folks it'll be completely life-changing. The same is true of higher math, sciences, music, etc.
If that's the case, and I have no proof to back this up but I'm sure it is, then we should be doing school much differently. Colleges should care less about overall GPA and more about recommendations and high marks in a single subject. Schools should actively encourage students to specialize and give wide-ranging choices starting very early on. Of course, a lot of countries that do education well already do this.
In a past life, I was a teacher (chemistry/physics/programming at a private high school). One of the big things that drove me out of teaching was the ever-increasing push from all sides to remove object-level, fact-based education. "They can just google it" or "we need to teach them how to think" were the slogans; "inquiry-based education" was the buzzword. The idea was to get the kids to come up with experiments and projects and "discover" the principles of the subject with the teacher acting as a "guide on the side, not sage on the stage" (as the phrase went).
It fails. Miserably. Especially miserably for kids who *don't already have a strong underlying foundation in the subject* and who aren't intrinsically motivated.
Similarly, teaching "reading skills" just fails without having learned the underlying meaning of the thing you're reading. How you read a scientific paper is very different than how you read a piece of fiction--other than core-level decoding (which should be taught by like 1st grade, but isn't often taught at all), it's *all* context-dependent and requires a foundation of core knowledge.
On the other hand, there were lots of kids who did learn a lot. So teaching wasn't valueless. Whether or not they can spout memorized bits on a spot test years later is...fairly irrelevant (so these studies don't actually mean much IMO). But I taught them several times and many of them could use the foundational skills they'd been taught in year 1 to reason in year 3.
Basically, I'm strongly negatively biased against *current US educational practices* across the board. The US educational system (from pre-K all the way through graduate education) is rotten and needs to be entirely burned down and replaced root and branch. But I'm *not* negatively biased against *education on general principles*.
Teachers should do what they have (or should have) expertise in doing--imparting core foundational knowledge and skills in specific subject areas, focusing on the very broad ones. And this should be tracked at least to a substantial degree--no moving on in math until you have mastered the earlier stuff. Etc. In early grades, where kids are most open (in my personal experience) to being sponges, feed them information and core reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. They (usually) *crave* facts. So feed them facts. In later grades, once they have this core foundation, build connections between facts. Start working on pattern recognition. And yes, identify those people who really do have the drive and desire and aptitude to go further and help them go further, but let those who *don't* find some solid stopping point for their formal schooling. Could be as early as 8th grade, if they've mastered the basics and want to move into some other form of job or life training.
And utterly kill the idea that you need a college degree to do most jobs.
I have a child in first grade and another in pre-k, and observing their school experience so far makes me skeptical of this articles thesis. My kids will not sit still and let us teach them things at home, but for some reason, they go to school, do what the teacher tells them, and come home knowing new things. I agree that they won’t retain most of this knowledge for very long, but I don’t think that matters. Here’s an example why.
My son learned to read in kindergarten. If he wasn’t in school he wouldn’t be reading yet. Last week we went to a public garden, they gave him a map, and he had a blast reading the map and running around finding everything. (This sort of thing happens everywhere we go. The zoo, museums, Disney world, etc.) Would he have had fun at the garden if he couldn’t read the map? Ya, Probably. Did being able to read help his appreciation of what he was seeing? Yes. Will this experience make him a better person when he grows up? I think so. That’s the benefit of learning things at a young age. They get more chances to enjoy these kinds of experiences and, I hope, this leads to better outcomes when they grow up.
I also, however, expect diminishing returns as they get to higher grades. Learning to read and do basic math changed my world in big ways. Reading “The Red Pony” and struggling to understand what a binomial theorem is changed my world in little ways, or not at all. But at least at a young age (and as someone who hated school all the way through college, I can’t believe I’m saying this) I think school is great!
As a matter of personal anecdote, these arguments against education have never resonated with me. I quite liked school, was good at it, and believe that I derived a lot of value from it. I recognize that this isn't everyone's experience, but I don't think it is so unique either.
Mainly, I think the emphasis on facts misses most of the benefit of school. The post acknowledges that facts are only a part of school, but I think this still gives them too much credit. In my experience, fact memorization was a small and relatively unimportant part of school, and the one part I disliked. I think the more important learning took place at a more abstract level of concepts and context for pattern recognition. From English, I didn't take away a memorization of the plot of 1984, but rather an improved capability to learn from text and communicate clearly. From math, I didn't take away the formula for the quadratic equation, but rather a fluency with manipulating numbers. From science, I didn't take away the steps of the Krebs cycle, but rather a comprehension of the world as a stack of natural phenomena which can be investigated and understood, and the often subtle differences between productive and unproductive methods of investigation.
Plenty of the things I learned from school were taught poorly or highly indirectly, and I could have certainly learned much of them through free exploration outside of school (and did also learn many other things that way), but without school, I believe I would have many more gaps. For example, I was always very interested in science and without school I would have still learned about plenty of scientific concepts on an intuitive level. But I doubt that I would have nearly as deep of an understanding of science on a mathematical level without school because some important areas of math (particularly differential equations and multivariate calculus) just don't interest me that much and I would not have pursued them very far without school.
I always enjoyed learning, too. But I think we're in the minority. I guess the question is how much education does a person need to function in our society.
We see all sorts of examples of ignorant people who can function perfectly well in twenty-first-century society. People who believe the Earth was created in 4004 BCE lead productive lives in our society. For most Americans, Paul Revere's ride does not influence whether they can earn a paycheck. And Romeo and Juliet? Wasn't that a TV series or something?
We take for granted that reading is an important skill to have. But a commonly quoted factoid is that 50% of Americans can't read a book at an eighth-grade level. While it's clear that illiteracy is highest in the poor, obviously 50% of America isn't unemployed. Are we setting our reading standards too high?
In fact, I wonder if technology isn't making it easier for people to function while being ignorant. My spelling skills have deteriorated with spell-checkers. I just have to be aware that my spell-checker isn't substituting the wrong word. My math skills have deteriorated with calculators.
Back in the Eighties there was a big push to teach kids financial skills. "They need to be able to balance a checkbook!" was the refrain. Checkbooks are fading into history, and I can check my balance any time as long as I have a smartphone and within range of cell tower.
Technology definitely makes it easier to function without proper grammar and literacy. One of my children has trouble writing things. She has Siri transcribe everything, and I think she might be able to function as well as an adult as I do (I find it difficult to read maps, and consider myself lucky to be born in this decade). As far the 80s push to teach financial skills--that is one we definitely need back, even if only as the first of 7 repetitions. I remember learning then that credit card companies couldn't charge more than 23% compounded interest because that would be usury. Clearly, there are a lot of policy makers who never learned that in the first place.
I have learned a fair number of poems, included a handful in languages other than my native English. I think it takes me more than seven repetitions to master them; perhaps a dozen or a score is sufficient. I don't necessarily know the exact typography, but I know the words and can recite them.
I'm going to assume they're rhymed poems that you've memorized, though. I can still recite most of Coleridge's Kublai Khan having memorized it 40 years ago, but I was never able to fully memorized W.S. Merwin's The Sound of Light, even though it's a much shorter and (to my mind) a more exquisite poem. I suspect that's because it isn't rhymed.
Many of them, probably most, but certainly not all. I have been able to memorize some blank verse, and even some verse with recurring metrical patterns but varying line lengths, such as Robinson Jeffers' "Be Angry at the Sun."
But my point is more that even with the mnemonic aid of traditional verse forms, it seems to take me more than seven repetitions to become word perfect.
I don't remember how many repetitions it took me to memorize Kublai Khan, but I worked at it over and over and over. Between fifty and a hundred repetitions? What surprised me is that most of it still intact in my memory after forty-plus years.
Country singer Travis Tritt was told that his song "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" would never be successful because it has no rhyming scheme. It hit #2 on the US charts and #1 in Canada, and remains one of his most memorable works. I could still recite the whole thing by heart to this day.
Yes, I have the same problem. I do have a few bits of unrhymed, unrhythmed free verse in my head, but far less of it than rhymed stuff. And for the free verse I can't remember where the line breaks are, even though they're part of the poem's structure. I don't think modern poets sufficiently appreciatee what they are giving up when they throw away rhyme and meter, or opted for such subtle or convoluted versions of then that they do not function as a memory aid.
I'd have to question the "smarter people know more stuff" thesis. I worked with some very smart people during my thirty-plus years in tech, but other than their narrowly focused knowledge, most of them were shockingly ignorant about things outside their specialties and their hobbies. But most of the smart people I've known have very little natural curiosity either. But they seem to function quite well in their general ignorance.
So the real question is -- why did the researchers think those specific questions were something most people would know? Why did the researchers know them?
I've had this feeling several times with my non-engineering friends. "What do you mean you don't remember which is the hypotenuse of a triangle?" Smart, nerdy friends, too -- just not math people.
This sounds very much like all learning and skill acquisition to me. Babies learn all sounds initially, then prune everything down to the ones that only matter for the language their family speaks. Children are taught fundamental facts, and then based on the field they go into they build on the ones that they need to continue in that field and forget all the rest.
Why do we expect people to remember any random fact they learned years ago and didn't need?
So what should that say about the utility of education?
1) The "civic responsibility" element of educated voters is only relevant if voters actually remain engaged in civic life beyond voting once a year.
2) Everything else is trying to provide a broad enough base of knowledge that people are prepared to go different directions in their career.
If I were sure I wanted to be a mechanic, and I had a natural talent for being a mechanic, I should study cars from 6th grade on instead of history or literature, and I would be a greater mechanic than what our current system produces. The same logic applies to other fields. I often wonder how our current system could ever compete with the old systems of apprenticing at 12, or always going into your dad's field.
The fact that the current system *is* so effective at economic output would seem to indicate that the important element is the matching of talent/interest with career. Therefore, the benefit of our system of education is giving young people *flexibility* in what careers they are prepared to pursue in more detail, rather than in their continuing to have a broad base of knowledge for its own sake. The potential historian, engineer, businessman, or doctor will all have been exposed to and learned the basics they need to continue the field of study they should be in, even if they didn't know that was what they wanted to do at the start of high school. The fact that the doctor can't remember algebra and the engineer has no idea what a simile is doesn't really matter.
A while back, somehow some of us got onto discussion of facts we had to memorize. I had to memorize all 50 states. But a generation earlier, they included capitals, too. I remember reading "A Wrinkle In Time" and sympathizing with Meg that it was pointless to memorize "the principal imports and exports of Nicaragua". (And yet that phrase stuck in my mind, decades later.)
I'm a teacher so take this with a grain of salt, I might be a bit defensive. Some more arguments for education:
A part of the forgetting curve is that having learned something before means you can relearn it faster. If I randomly ask a high school graduate to solve 3x+7=25 maybe they can't solve it, but there's a good chance they could relearn it quickly if it becomes relevant, much more quickly than if they'd never learned it before. Here I think you can conceptualize school as "keeping your options open". If you just never learn algebra at all it will take you a really long time to learn it if you ever need to go down a path that requires algebra. We could debate how often algebra is really necessary but there are real costs to just never learning something and having to start from scratch if it becomes important.
One thing I hear a lot of people say is that we want students to be lifelong learners. To me, that's about whether students feel successful learning stuff. I recently taught my 7th grade students how to tell what shape cross-section you get when you slice different 3-d shapes. I bet a lot of people would be surprised how hard that skill is for some students. But with a bunch of practice kids get really good at it. I feel confident that almost none of my students will ever need to know what shape you get when you slice a square pyramid perpendicular to its base. Still, kids feel accomplished when they get good at it. The experience of looking at something and thinking "whoa this is hard" and then working on it and getting better and eventually feeling confident and crushing it is empowering for kids. It teaches them that they have the power to learn hard things. If school does its job well (we often fail at this!) kids have lots of these experiences over their schooling, and it teaches them that they can learn hard things.
My guess is that the typical ACX reader really underestimates the extent to which they have learned this disposition toward learning. Learning this, and learning it for a bunch of different disciplines, is something that sticks even after everything else has been forgotten.
Final thought: while the 7 repetitions thing doesn't guarantee you learn something forever it does make a big difference. Most teachers and schools today don't have a very good understanding of spaced repetition and people would remember way more with more thoughtful spaced practice in school.
I'm not going to read 570 comments, and nobody will ever read this one. Nonetheless we soldier on.
I ctrl-fed "eugenics", "sterilize", and "euthanasia" and got no hits, so for posterity let me say that education is supremely valuable. It gives us something to blame so that we don't have to start wondering if we need so many people.
I mean, there’s tons of folks wondering why we even bother to try to teach anything to people who don’t care about any of it and will never use it in their unwashed life making glue in the Gluetown glue factory until they die or whatever. Like, way way more than one might expect in a place where people like to talk about ways to relieve suffering and improve the human condition, and how IQ determines life outcomes.
The gluetown glue factories were all shuttered decades ago, and we care about educating the agricultural workers' children because we're trying to teach them English.
No, what I meant is that education is an ideologically-motivated sacrifice, and doesn't need to justify itself with results. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it's just a thing. Our system couldn't keep up appearances if it admitted some hard things.
Education primarily exists for enculturation (in the good sense) and indoctrination (in the bad sense) simultaneously. Both teach you how to behave in society. People who go to school mostly don't learn actual things, but they do learn how they are generally expected to behave.
Well, they certainly used to, up until they stopped enforcing basic standards of discipline in schools. I was lucky to get through it before that happened, and you probably were too. Today's kids, though? Not so much.
I stopped rising to say the Pledge of Allegiance my Junior year (mostly because I was an atheist, and the "under god" phrase rubbed me the wrong way. It caused some raised eyebrows among the staff and administration, but I got *endless* shit from my peers for being an unpatriotic commie.
Also, as someone who had a very brief career as a junior high school science teacher, I would say the biggest impediment to discipline in my classes were the parents of my students. I tried to use a modified Socratic method rather than just lecturing. Of course, I'd call on them when they were passing notes and whispering, to bring their attention back to the class. A bunch of my students (including the daughter of the Chair of the BoE) complained that I was calling on them too much (they felt I was humiliating them by putting them on the spot in front of their friends). They complained to the parents, and the parents complained to the administration, and I was told not to call on those students. Amazing.
Actually, we really only learn things because we’re interested in them, they matter to us. School should not be about learning facts, but about learning how to teach yourself. It’s about paying attention, as Simone Weil once said.
If the vast majority of people don’t know facts, it’s because those facts mean nothing to them.
Small correction- as a native of Airstrip One, I am proud to be upholding the glorious virtues of Oceania against the treacherous Eurasians/Eastasians (delete as appropriate)
I've been fighting about this with my sons for 20 years, so I've had plenty to time to rehearse the arguments. All claims that school teaches nothing and so doesn't matter founder on the fact that introducing mass, mandatary schooling for children has *profound* impacts on any society, starting with a collapse in the birth rate. So far as we can tell, modern schooling is inextricably linked to everything else about modern society. Why, I couldn't say, but I think the impacts speak for themselves.
> All claims that school teaches nothing and so doesn't matter founder on the fact that introducing mass, mandatary schooling for children has *profound* impacts on any society
Is that a fact, or is it simply post hoc ergo propter hoc? Do we have any control group, of societies that were on the same path as the nations that did introduce mandatory education, which chose not to do so?
Well, that all depends on how you define "modernized." According to Wikipedia, "The movement for compulsory public education (in other words, prohibiting private schools and requiring all children to attend public schools) in the United States began in the early 1920s." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_public_education_in_the_United_States )
By the 1920s, we already had telephones and fax machines, air conditioners, the Model T Ford, and the flight of the Wright Brothers, just to name a few examples off the top of my head. Computers did not yet exist, but IBM did. Einstein's Theory of Relativity was old hat at this point, and both the New York Times and the New York Stock Exchange were long-established institutions.
Mandatory schooling did not establish modernization; it grew out of it.
A different Wikipedia article says that Massachusetts had compulsory primary schooling in 1642, and that Horace Mann imported the Prussian model of schooling when he became the state's secretary of education in 1837. Those were earlier stages of modernization. I think Massachusetts has to count as part of American history; its model of schooling came into use nationwide by the era you refer to.
Note that the phrase "mandatory school" is not synonymous with "compulsory public education." Indeed, the United States doesn't have compulsory public education; Oregon passed a law imposing it in the 1920s (pushed by the Ku Klux Klan as an anti-Catholic measure), but the Supreme Court invalidated in not long after, ruling that the child is not merely a creature of the state. So by that definition we are not "modernized" and never were modernized on a national scale.
I'm unclear why you're so dismissive of school justification 3? Your dismissal strikes me as similar to someone saying "what's the point of all that rationalism nonsense, they're not even really trying to be better at knowing things, just better at knowing when they know things!" Which is obviously a gross mischaracterization.
To be clear I think US schools as implemented are mostly babysitting for >50% of students, but "building a framework for how to learn and how to reason" strikes me intuitively as a much stronger theoretical argument for school than any particular collection of facts it might impart.
My theory on school is that most of the huge quality of life gains that you see associated with a transition to public schooling come almost entirely from teaching basic literacy and numeracy. Going from "can't read" to "can read" is a gigantically impactful skill acquisition that opens up near-limitless opportunities for an individual.
As far as usefulness of school in the present day, I think most of the usefulness of schools for kids is those two basic things, plus a social outlet and exposure to new things (like music, drama, sports, etc). Everything else is just window dressing.
For parents of course, the primary value is childcare (plus teaching kids those basic skills so you don't have to).
edit: To be clear, my statements apply only to elementary (pre-HS) education. Once you hit the high school level I think there can be some arguments made about the value of beginning to specialize in specific topics (thinking about say, Calculus). And of course at the university level, the value is the extreme specialist education.
One of the social effects of schooling, though, is immersing kids who don't fit in in a pool of other kids who harass or bully them. That includes bright kids (I was one), but also slow kids, gender atypical kids, kids with unusual ethnic backgrounds, neuroatypical kids (that might have included me, but I've never been formally diagnosed), kids who are just funny looking, and a lot of other categories.
I want to say though, that at least for the high quality public school that my kids are attending, the exposure to different varieties of people has been a universally positive experience (through the 4th grade). My kids are different (for ~reasons~) and they haven't experienced anything close to bullying. The school has done a fantastic job of making everyone feel welcomed and included.
I'm certain that not every school will have this approach, but it is possible to mix a wide variety of kids together and not have them form hateful cliques. Besides, they're going to have to mix with the rest of the world at some point, might as well start early.
My comment about the social benefit was more that public schooling is the cheapest and most convenient way to have your kid spend their day around same age peers. My kids, at least, so far seem to enjoy that aspect of schooling the most.
I'm sure there are such. On the other hand, I went to a small elementary school in a minuscule town that was evolving from rural to suburban. I was years ahead of my classmates intellectually, I didn't understand social behavior, and I was the goat. And I don't think any of my teachers had a clue what to do with me. It didn't teach me to mix with the rest of the world; it taught me to despise most of humanity, in a way it took me a long time to recover from. And I've talked with other people who went through the same thing.
Of course that was a long time ago, back in the middle of the last century. But I'm not sure that your better experience is typical of how things are now. Neither of us is reasoning from a statistical sample.
"but it is possible to mix a wide variety of kids together and not have them form hateful cliques"
It doesn't matter if this is *possible*; it matters if it is *done*. Maybe you have a special school that does this, or maybe your kids are different in a way that puts them in one of the non-hateful cliques, but your experience is not universal and I don't think it is even normal.
Because what's the incentive for the school administrators? What do they gain from suppressing hateful clique formation, that's worth the effort? We don't even pretend that's one of the metrics we actually evaluate schools on.
I think for our district the incentive is to maintain their reputation as one of the best schools in the state.
Regardless though, I want to clarify that I'm not attempting to defend the entire premise of schooling; just yesterday some friends and I were joking about how little we remember from various high school classes. I'm instead trying to provide some perspective on why I have enrolled my children in a public school, and the benefits I see them getting from it.
If I had to make a policy decision, I think it would be to fund a lot more "alternative" style school experiences. We had an even better experience at a Montessori school that was *extremely* invested in creating a welcoming, playful environment for all the kids, but that was too expensive for us to consider enrolling all four of children there.
I'm guessing your district's reputation as one of the best schools in the state, depends far more on test scores and college admissions than it does the social skills or happiness of the students. So long as *most* of the nerds aren't bullied to the point of dropping out before they go off to MIT, mission accomplished.
For test scores the school wants all the students to care about studies somewhat, though. And for the getting the nerds, it helps to have a reputation of succesfully preventing the aggressive confrontations (this is relatively cheap when you only have the students who are there — among other things — also to study). And you want some concentrations of nerds, yeah.
The trick is once the nerds bubble up in their small clique, it doesn't matter as much if they are mocked by the others, as long as it happens from a safe (for the nerds) distance.
I get giddy reading your posts about school. I think you take it too far, but I enjoy that. Some kids in high school wore Marilyn Manson shirts to show the establishment what they thought about them. If this blog was around back then, I would have made an ACX one with some juicy quotes,. They probably would have made me turn it inside out, though. Whatever.
Here's an alternative & better method to teach people boring stuff that they need to remember: Spelling is one of those things, so long as one writes fairly often in a context where spellcheck isn't available. I taught myhomeschooled kid to spell. I did not bother to teach her spelling til she was 10. It seemed to me that it would be easier to learn when she was older and more able to tolerate tedium. And I lucked into a spelling book that used an extremely effective method of getting those spellings to stick: Each chapter was a list of about 50 words . She read through them, then I took back the book and read them off to her as she wrote them down. We kept going until she had gotten 5 wrong. Then, to strengthen her memory of those words, she did 3 things with each: Write it 5 times. Write a sentence using it. And write the word in large letters then turn it into a picture by decorating each letter. The next day we went on to the next part of the list, but included the 5 missed from yesterday in the list. Usually she got them right, but if she missed one of them they were one of the 5 that she did extra practice on at the end of that session.
At the end of every chapter we did a test of all the words she'd missed, with other random words from the chapter mixed in, and followed the same routine for learning any that were missed. (Usually she did not miss many, though. ). There were also some mega-reviews every so often of, say, the last 3 chapters, same learning routine for any missed. Using this system for about half an hour 5 days a week, we got far beyond her grade level, and nearly to the end of the book, where the words were long and weird. She's now an adult, and a good speller.
There is a name for this system of drilling things into memory, but I have forgotten it. I'm pretty confident that this targeted repetition works better than spaced repetition. It certainly worked well for us, and I recommend it for anyone homeschooling who wants to teach things like spelling or the times tables.. There's probably software that uses this system too.
Pretty sure I would have gotten all the college student questionnaire questions right if I were paying attention.
>"7% know who discovered, in 1543, that the Earth orbits the sun"
Not sure I would endorse this framing as true, though. He theorized and hypothesized it, sure, but his theory wasn't all the great, and I don't think I can say humanity *knew* this until significantly later. Maybe not until Kepler.
Kepler gave a correct model of the solar system, but no good explanation for it. Newton's Universal Gravitation gave a good explanation for why Kepler's model behaved the way it did. But there were still unanswered physical questions in the form of "if the earth orbits the sun, we would expect to see X, and we do not see X, therefore the earth must be standing still."
In every case, the answer turned out to be "X is indeed happening, we just lack the precision necessary to detect it with our current instruments." IIRC the last such question was not resolved until the early 20th century.
"<1% know what city the general Hannibal was from (Carthage)"
I'm not surprised that students haven't learned much about Carthage, but I'm kind of surprised so few university students have played games from the Civilization series! (Hannibal is one of the leaders you can play as, and your starting city with him is, of course, Carthage.)
People who have not gone through school know how to learn, and people who have do not. That's why all the kids I grew up with were able to figure out how to use computers, while very few of the adults were able to.
What schedule would you suggest to review a topic for your lifetime? I'm hypothesizing a system where you don't grade yourself, you just review the material at fixed intervals.
If you have trouble remembering names, you should try to use the literal names more often in conversations. Call people by their names once in a while (not just "hey, you") and refer to people by their names in conversations (say "professor Smith was sick today" instead of "my algebra teacher was sick today")
If you try to remember the names of your college professors now, I bet the ones whose names you do remember are the ones whose names you used often in conversation.
You used the "Mount Everest is in the Himalayas" example several times, but I don't think school ever attempted to teach me this and I'm not sure why you'd expect it to.
I learned from numerous sources (some in school, some not) that Mt. Everest is the highest mountain peak on earth (often described as "tallest mountain" but apparently if you measure base-to-peak then there are taller ones).
I learned from cultural osmosis that the Himalayas are a big cold snowy mountain range in Asia. (I think I first learned this from the Duck Tales video game.)
I didn't know that Mt. Everest is in the Himalayas before reading this post. If you had forced me to guess Everest's location, I guess I might have said Himalayas just because I think that's literally the only (non-fictional) mountain range outside the US that I can name. But if you'd asked me in a conversation I'd have said "I don't know".
Now that you've told me that the world's most famous mountain is located in the world's most famous mountain range, I think I will probably remember that, which increases my confidence that I was actually never taught this (rather than having forgotten it).
> I think that's literally the only (non-fictional) mountain range outside the US that I can name.
Not the Andes (essentially what they call the Rocky Mountains in South America; the mountain range doesn't *exactly* go all the way down uninterrupted, but it's pretty close) or the Swiss Alps? Both are pretty famous.
How are you at crosswords and scrabble and similar games? I'm *horrible*, because I can't seem to call up words like that. My meat neural net doesn't do that sort of retrieval, I suppose.
I wouldn't say I've played them enough to have a good gauge of my ability at them.
I'd say I'm bad at anagrams, though. And not sure how related this is, but I've also noticed I have trouble getting phonetics-based jokes when they're written down; for example, Order of the Stick has a prequel book called "On the Origin of PCs", and I read that title many times before I realized it was a joke.
I don't know why you wouldn't expect school to teach you where Mount Everest is.
You don't have to cut very deep into geography before you start mentioning the biggest mountain ranges in the world. And if you mention the Himalayas you'll probably mention the most interesting fact about it -- it has the highest mountain in the world.
The Himalayas also come up as an example whenever you teach plate tectonics.
I work in the medical field. I value my lecture-based education and am terrified by any "gaps" that might exist. Not because I remember all the details, but because in many cases I remember that there was "something to worry about in this area" and "nothing obviously worrisome in this area; OK to proceed." AKA I might remember that some drugs for organ x affect calcium, but don't recall any connection between drugs for organ y and calcium. So when I prescribe drugs that affect organ x I might look up the med I'm going to prescribe, look up the patient's calcium/kidney function, and review his med list to make sure things are OK. For organ y I do not. I tend to be very cautious; I've memorized so many of these interactions but I often still look them up to refresh myself and be sure.
Bottom line, the education helps me know what I don't know. If I had never gotten the lecture on organ y, then I would not know what I did not know. That would lead to hours and hours of lost time per month neurotically looking up med interactions just in case there was a danger of which I was unaware.
Of course there *are* things I don't know I don't know, and that's why every profession and life in general is a continual learning process, but at least the book learning provided a starting point.
Firstly, I think pretty much every example here is of information that I would describe as "optional". I think the vast majority of people can get through their lives without knowing what organ produces insulin or who Paul Revere was. I don't consider this kind of information to be essential for all members of our society. They are all really cool things to know, but I work with plenty of extremely intelligent people who would get many of the facts on that list wrong. So I don't consider people's inability to answer them to be particularly concerning.
But secondly, I would also somewhat question the validity of mapping whether someone correctly answers these questions to whether people know this information. From their methodology, it appears participants were presented with questions (all in capitals for some reason?) in a random order and asked to answer them.
This is a great format for a quiz show, but in general I would say a bad way to assess someone's knowledge. I suspect that if rather than asking "Which mountain range is Everest part of" you were to ask that exact same person "What are the himalayas", they would quite quickly say "That's where Everest is right? In Asia I think". I think goes double for "What is Moscow" or "Who was Copernicus", where I think you would get much higher success rates if the phrasing of the question if it were reversed.
So I think it is a bit reductionist to look at people's ability to answer trivial pursuit question and infer from that how well they know these facts. Human's aren't computers. Humans do not answer random, contextless questions very well, that is not how our brains are wired (literally).
I am obviously speculating here, but I suspect if you were to ask a whole bunch of questions about the solar system, you would get far more people remembering that Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system, than when the question is asked between questions about zebras and hockey pucks.
I'm a STEM-brained engineer turned programmer, and it's precisely because I don't think school is about learning "facts" that I'm planning on sending my kids to an extremely crunchy progressive (pre-/)school that focuses on social and emotional development and lots of outdoor playtime.
I can help my kids learn the textbook stuff, but I can't replicate the environment of 20+ kids exploring the woods together or negotiating playground swing access or doing group art projects etc.
There's a good practical answer to this in D. T. Willingham's book "Why don't students like school?".
Willingham is a cognitive psychologist, and he starts off his introduction by promising his book will only cover ideas that are both widely replicated in research, and have a large effect size (his words are "an enormous amount of evidence, not just a few studies"). He also spends half a chapter arguing against Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences and other fads - can you tell that I like this book?
Chapter 3 is titled Why Do Students Remember Everything That's on Television and Forget Everything I say? (The "I" here is the intended audience, teachers.) His answer is, Memory is the Residue of Thought - you need to get students to think about a topic (ideally with spaced repetition - the forgetting curve appears in the book too). That means, for example, not doing a unit on volcanoes where you set an assignment to design a fake newspaper article about the effects of an eruption, because then your students will be thinking a lot about newspapers (what will it be called? how many columns? what price? what kind of jokey advertisements at the top?) as opposed to thinking about volcanoes.
Better still, get students to think about the meanings of things, not just bare facts, when you teach them. The name and date when Romeo and Juliet was written are facts; connecting them to a web of meanings and connections is learning. Willingham suggests to teach facts as part of stories (with characters, conflict, causality, and complications), because the human mind seems to have a special mode for absorbing stories well.
Willingham is not, however, a "progressive" educator or a proponent of Discovery Learning or anything in that direction. He spends all of Chapter 2 arguing why facts matter and people do need to learn them, and Chapter 5 to argue that a certain amount of "drilling" is necessary. We just have to do it in an interesting and appealing way.
Of course, another answer - that complements Willingham more than it contradicts him, although it comes from a very different viewpoint - won the last ACX book review contest, based on the work of Kieran Egan who has a lot to argue against education as currently practiced, but with practical suggestions how to do it better.
Egan's idea of History also helps with learning in a different way - his idea is that maybe in elementary school you "do" a lot of world cultures, but at a superficial enough level that the little ones can follow, then in middle school you "do" them again but in more depth, and then later on you look at some examples from them again in even more depth. So you do hear the fact that there are pyramids in Egypt, for example, many times over in different years in your schooling without it becoming groundhog day.
And people who don't know about Hannibal clearly don't think about Rome often enough, but the really cool people think about the Roman Republic once a week, not the Empire. SPQR for the win!
I think about education and schooling more in terms of learning skills rather than facts. You learn to do math problems, read, write, and assimilate various facts and turn them into essays or multiple choice answers or whatever. The facts themselves are sometimes important but often beside the point. Almost no one actually needs to know that Ramses was a pharaoh in Egypt, when his rule was, or which wars he fought.
So I do think the learning to learn framing has some value, although it's very unfortunate that we learn these skills on topics that are so meaningless and boring to the average kid. While I cringe at kids wanting to be YouTubers or TikTokers, a class built around that would probably teach the average kid much more useful skills than a normal class. Things like developing interesting content, organizing your thoughts, planning marketing, how to position yourself for your audience, and so on.
I think the main benefit of school per se is that it forces your average kid to put more effort into learning things than they would otherwise. Some kids are pretty self-motivated and would do better learning on their own, but I would bet the majority would rather relax and watch videos than pour a lot of effort into self-organized projects. So school, while again often quite boring, does get them to learn more than they would on their own. Of course, then they forget it, but at least they learned to learn to some degree. And practiced general skills like reading, writing, and using arbitrary facts.
I’m like 99% confident I would have answered all the questions you listed in the intro correctly, or at least would have been very embarrassed when you told me the correct answer and recognized that I should have known it.
Oddly I can’t really say which of those facts I really “learned” through a formal class, although I think many of them were covered in classes I took (that is, I would have been taught the facts if I didn’t know them already)
> only 66% of Americans age 18-29 knew that the US won independence from Britain (as opposed to some other country).
> 31% know the capital of Russia (Moscow)
Bullshit.
On any statistics exercise that gives these kinds of results, the default assumption should always be "the researchers messed up somewhere, probably on purpose".
A lot of it is down to incentives. Surveys pay very small incentives so people can’t be bothered to think too much. Accuracy goes through the roof when you tell people you will pay them more if they get the answers right.
I think this shows that these facts are not top of mind, but I bet if you showed them a list of options most people would get it right. The author is basing their whole argument on how available these facts are to people, but culture is not a general knowledge quiz and it is sub-conscious / half-known knowledge that forms the basis for most of our decisions
How much do you have to think to come up with the capital of Russia? Like, it’s harder to NOT think of Moscow than to think of it for most people, I would think.
As someone who regularly polls the public, your average person is very domestic in focus, rarely engages with the news, and rarely leaves the country. Foreign capitals are not coming up regularly in their conversation - so they are really switching gear to think about it. It's really crazy to think about - but so many people just don't think about stuff that people living a more intellectual lifestyle take for granted.
I tend to agree. I mentioned it in a reply further down, too:
A teacher I know in Germany posed the Russia-question in his 8th and his 10th grade classrooms today, and in each of them, only one or two students got it wrong. Germany has a school system that sepearates students into higher and lower academic tracks, and this was in a lower tier school
I understand that Americans aren’t great at geography, but I have a hard time believing that their college students get beaten by German 8th graders, most of whom won’t go to college ever.
There’s definitely some “simple true-false questions don’t actually reveal what people really know” going on here. Perhaps people really get dumber when put on the spot. Test anxiety.
Acculturation is something that I sometimes hear smart people suggest as an underrated purpose of schooling.
1) I think there was something in "The Elephant in the Brain" about it being difficult for the British in India to employ the locals because they were incorrigibly unreliable. IIRC the idea was that you can't keep your assembly lines running unless you have a workforce that has is used to scheduled bathroom breaks and long hours of sitting still.
2) A friend of mine said that the homeschooled kids he knows have a much higher rate of turning out *weird*. He didn't go into detail, but I think he meant to imply that they were weird in a problematic way, making them less hireable or dateable (at least by him).
And sure, culture fit is a big deal when hiring employees (although people often understate this). However, I don't think school is an effective way to help with this, and even if it were, it seems like the costs to the students are stupidly high.
If compulsory schooling were ended in the US, I think there would be more children growing up in cult compounds where their families teach them that the government is run by reptilians or that the rapture is imminent or whatever, never to be challenged by normal people. That would be too bad for those kids, and maybe also dangerous, but ultimately probably worth it.
A question for Scott and for the commenters against education: when you were ten, what did you do in your free time? Did you read widely, about Paul Revere and times tables and the Roman Empire and how to speak Spanish? Or did you, like me, spend most of your free time watching TV and playing flash games on the computer, only encountering truly novel ideas on an occasional trip to the library or movie theater? Even among the bright and school-hating crowd here I highly doubt that a majority are self-directed enough to succeed without compulsory education.
Yes, actually. I read, had flash cards, activity books, history records, maps—you name it. I was an 80’s kid so I guess you just got screwed by being later on the de-evolutionary timeline.
I was an 80s kid, too, but I fucked around like you. My name is Chad but I spelled it Chab because I thought it didn’t matter which way the round part of a d pointed. School cured me of this and I still spell my name correctly to this very day.
On the other hand I also remember my first grade teacher showing us a slide show of his dog and his white ‘67 Corvette Sting Ray convertible, which concluded with a field trip to faculty parking where he showed us the actual Corvette. He even let me touch it.
Don’t get me wrong I watched the hell out of cartoons and I would spend hours on the computer (Apple 2e) console (Atari; my friends had NES) or telephone (rotary) but there was just less interesting stuff to be distracted by and hanging with your friends was the primary thing to do. We were bored a lot! Riding bikes, aimlessly, for hours. (The lyrics on Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs hit hard!) Anyway, I was likely more nerdy than my counterparts but not at all alone in being well read, or having the experiences I described above.
My first kid (b. 1998) played the Sims, EverQuest and Skyrim. She was never bored. Now she desperately tries to be less attached to her phone, to go to bed on time, to not get wound up in online drama, to not be anxious and depressed. But she can’t remember life before constant distraction. To a Gen-Xer like me, I see a generation of people stuck in a mental hamster wheel.
My second kid (b. 2016) is coming up in a world that already recognizes the 2000’s and 2010’s were fuuuuucked uuuup. Nowadays, the threat of technology on positive child rearing is nigh undeniable, but try to keep it out of their hands—Go on try! Best we can figure is some tablet chitty-chat-game time as a reward. But now when my kid says, “I’m bored,” I say, “Good.” I am not looking forward to the last 5 years of childhood, but I definitely feel better prepared.
10, huh? That was before I realized that being smart would do anything for me aside from get me beat up. I spent a lot of time in escapist fantasy of one sort or another. I didn't get self-directed until college, when life started opening up.
I'm against education and dropped out in early middle school. I spent most of my childhood watching TV and playing Flash games. I never actively read books, so my knowledge comes from osmosis and going down rabbit holes when I find interesting topics.
10? Hard work on the farm, struggling to live up to impossible standards that, I imagined, would finally be good enough to satisfy Dad and not get beat up for getting things wrong.
I read, a lot. Mostly fantasy and sci-fi, but there were always a lot of books around and there was an entire set of Childcraft encyclopedias in my room to paw through. I remember carefully reading the Guide to Parents and checking off my developmental milestones. I tried to teach myself Japanese and Latin, and my mom got me books to help, but I needed actual classes to get anywhere with them. I learned a lot of Latin roots but never had it in me to sit down and grind the case system.
I did spend time playing video games and fooling around on the internet, but most of my childhood was in the 90s so internet was an occasional thing and all the consoles belonged to my brother, who got them secondhand. Lots of Atari. I occasionally watched television, but it was not a household where the TV was always on - the TV was on only when there was a specific thing to watch, and off afterwards. I was aware from a young age that constantly watching TV was Not For Us.
Now I wish I'd had even less internet and computers as a kid. It was all wasted time and yes, I probably still wouldn't have taught myself Latin, but I wouldn't be so addicted now.
The most important stuff I ever learned was in high school. It was a media studies class based on the work of Marshall McLuhan and focused on interpreting the why and how of media. Because of this specifically I have been immune from just about every moral panic or propaganda attack. I dropped television cold in the mid 90’s, only recently coming back to Netflix may e 10 years ago. It absolutely formed a crucial part of my personality that I believe has set me closer to truth and fortified my resistance to bullshit. I would never have discovered this in my own.
The issue is that experience was unbelievably rare compared to the experiences of my cohort and even more so the kids coming up after me—it’s simply not taught.
Could the problem be that the real problem with schools is they teach the wrong stuff the wrong way and the only learning that happens is through luck? If so, how does this differ from any other knowledge based institution—apprenticeships, scouts, higher ed, etc. there are few good and special teachers because good and special people are rare everywhere.
It's funny - about half the people in my family, including me, recall going on an extended media boycott in our late teens and early twenties. For some it was a deliberate stand against complacency, as with you. For myself, I just found it hard to stay engaged for the duration of a feature film. I did fine in uni so it wasn't a general attention span issue.
Media literacy is one of those subjects that's taught very unevenly from one district to another. But it hasn't gone away - in the US communication studies degrees are just as common as education or visual arts degrees. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_322.10.asp
Yeah, fair point on Media Studies—I’m sure it’s fairly widespread, but my guess is that instead of a hand-crafted curriculum by a super engaged and very cool teacher, most kids are getting MacMillan or Pearson—the “big 2” of text book publishing.
I did a Sociology text book review for the local High School and there were very limited options and some, like National Geographic, were simply too expensive regardless of their content. The books were atrocious and just as <current year> as you could hope to find. I’ve taught MacMillan books and hated it.
For me, this is an even stronger critique of education than Scott’s. Not only is it mostly useless, but it custom designed to annihilate creativity in the students and faculty. So now, even accidentally learning something important becomes impossible.
The real benefit of school is the unyielding brutality of other people and learning to recognize kindred spirits.
Maybe the forgetting curve is down around 1% after a few decades, but they teach a lot more than 100 things at school. The forgetting curve is consistent with a world where it’s important that everyone knows *something*, though it doesn’t matter what.
I admit this is a bit hand-waving, but there is something about school teaching you “how to learn” as the most important skill, with most actual facts being of quite secondary importance. I’d say besides basic arithmetic and reading comprehension, most of the specifics of what i learned in grade school does not get used in my work. But the ways with which I learned how to learn, are still used for my continuing education now.
Can you give some examples? I don't think any of how I learn as an adult comes from skills I acquired as a child. In particular, as an adult I've become much, much better at asking lots of questions when I don't understand something. This has vastly accelerated how quickly I pick up new material in a wide variety of domains.
This was *not* I skill I had as a youth, mostly because everything in school came so easily to me and I didn't need to ask very many questions to understand it.
My sister has lived (as a non-expat) in Hungary for a bit over a decade. She speaks less than an hour of English (mostly calls to the US) per day. When she visits the US, she causes multiple daily chuckles by forgetting “basic” English vocab words.
A lot of debate and confusion in this thread can be resolved by the reminder that "education" and "schooling" aren't even close to being synonyms. A person can easily spend years in school while receiving mere hours of education, and I know from reading the other comments that I'm not the only person whose most profound education has had nothing to do with classrooms or teachers. "Against Schooling" would have been a way better title for Caplan's book.
Anyway, for all the talk of child warehousing (horrifying) and acculturation, people are forgetting one of the main actual historical functions of primary school, namely the function college serves now: granting a credential that provides prospective employers evidence of a borderline work ethic and very basic competence at various tasks.
That isn't necessarily the case anymore*. There are entire swathes of the country where presenting a high school diploma doesn't tell a prospective employer whether a person can read, write, or do basic arithmetic.
*When a school district is bragging about record high graduation rates, *during peak covid*, and makes zero reference to performance, you should be suspicious.
What surprised me most was the claim that more people know what organ produces insulin than know that the capital of Russia is Moscow. That casts doubt on the entire collection of percentages.
It’s a lot easier to learn something a second time around though, I often have to dig up stuff I forgot from my math education and it’s much easier to come up to speed now than I remember it being to learn in the first place. This doesn’t help impress people at parties since only the stuff on the tip of your tongue counts but it makes a difference in the real world.
What makes school bad isn't that it does nothing, it's that they can tell that it did something for some people including themselves (even if typical-mind fallacy + placebo effect means most people don't get the same benefit they did).
Quoting Eliezer Yudkowsky's Preface to the Sequences:
> In modern society so little is taught of the skills of rational belief and decision-making, so little of the mathematics and sciences underlying them . . . that it turns out that just reading through a massive brain-dump full of problems in philosophy and science can, yes, be surprisingly good for you. Walking through all of that, from a dozen different angles, can sometimes convey a glimpse of the central rhythm.
The problem with education is that they don't try to optimize the process at all. There are millions of redundant angles with the gems mixed in and unidentified. With some things like literature, it doesn't even occur to them to optimize.
> The problem with education is that they don't try to optimize the process at all.
This. So much money and time spent on education, and yet so little optimization.
It's like a form of signaling, but different than the one typically discussed. By spending lot of money and time we signal that we collectively care about the next generation having a lot of knowledge. But if we actually cared, we would do it differently.
For example, no one expects kids to remember literally everything from the school. Yet we are horrified if they don't know the basic things. Great! So now we know that not all knowledge is equal, and that remembering some parts is more important than remembering the other parts. Okay, so... why don't we make a small textbook containing only the *most important basic information* (such as: "atoms are bigger than electrons", "the capital of Russia is Moscow") and give this book to all students, to keep forever at home, and maybe review once a year for the rest of their lives?
It would be an interesting challenge to make this book of "basic knowledge". The important part is to resist the temptation to put there too many things. The longer you make the book, and the smaller font you use, the less likely will people be to actually read it. (You can make a longer version for nerds, of course.)
So much of our extant paradigm is directly descended from medieval scribes, who had no science or optimization and thus just conformed to the role of reading as much good stuff as possible (because people who conformed to that role visibly did better than people who didn't).
One of the things that schools try to teach is how to reason about facts. It is not possible to reason about facts if you don't know a bunch facts. Therefore, schools have to teach some facts.
“Atoms are bigger than electrons” is not important basic information. If you ask someone whether an atom is bigger than an electron, and they reply “an atom is bigger than an electron because atoms contain electrons,” that indicates that they have some understanding of atoms. If they reply “no,” that’s a pretty clear indication that they lack a basic understanding of atoms. That’s why a “no” answer is somewhat concerning.
But not everybody needs to be able to reason about atoms. Indeed, to have a deep understanding of atoms you need to have a deep understanding of quantum theory, which excludes most people. I think it’s true that some facts are more useful than others, but I don’t think that means there is a good way to determine what is “important basic information” and what is not. The world is constantly changing, so even if you could determine the most important for adults to know today, the list will be out of date by the time your students graduate. It’s easier to rank skills; for example literacy is very important and will likely remain so.
Unfortunately, even theoretical knowledge sometimes has an impact on everyday life. In my opinion, people who believe in homeopathy also fail at understanding atomic theory. And the belief in homeopathy will at best cost you some money, at worst it may cost you your health.
> The world is constantly changing, so even if you could determine the most important for adults to know today, the list will be out of date by the time your students graduate.
There should be some simple way for adults to refresh/update their knowledge regularly. I imagine that some hypothetical enlightened country could e.g. choose 200 most important topics, make a 30 minute video for each of them, and then show those videos on a TV, one topic a week, in a 4 year cycle. With occasional remake of some video, or replacing some topic with a different one. (TV rather than internet so that people are synchronized and can talk to their neighbors about the same topic. But of course the video archive would also be available for everyone.)
For those who haven't seen it, here is the preface to "1066 and All That" by W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman:
COMPULSORY PREFACE
(*This Means You*)
Histories have previously been written with the object of exalting their authors. The object of this History is to console the reader. *No other history does this.*
History is not what you thought. *It is what you can remember.* All other history defeats itself.
This is the only Memorable History of England, because all the History that you can remember is in this book, which is the result of years of research in golf-clubs, gun-rooms, green-rooms, etc.
For instance, two out of the four Dates originally included were eliminated at the last moment, a research done at the Eton and Harrow match having revealed that they are *not memorable.*
The Editors will be glad of further assistance towards the elimination, in future editions, of any similarly un-historical matter which, despite their vigilance, may have crept into the text.
They take this opportunity of acknowledging their inestimable debt to the mass of educated men and women of their race whose historical intuitions and opinions this work enshrines.
Also, to the Great British People without whose self-sacrificing determination to become top Nation there would have been no (memorable) history.
History is now at an end (see p. 123); this History is therefore final.
I have occassionally, in my crazier and grumpier moments, fanticized about passing a law that would require all science fiction to be hard science fiction. That desire was born of a recognition that most people absorb their understanding of the natural world not from study or even what they "learned" in school, but rather from random snippits picked up over the years like flotsam on the seashore. If we forced all their media to adhere to a strict, factual depiction of the nature of reality (or at least our best current understanding of it) we might actually creat a populace with a modicum of scientific understanding.
Your cultural osmosis point makes me wonder if I'm not actually that crazy.
I think about job fit. If there's school for less time or no school, kids would presumably start working from a younger age and through inertia some would stick in those industries. If school forces them to choose later once they've been exposed to more types of work, maybe they choose industries in which they have a better fit. Across a whole population, this seems important.
I know lots of 15 yo kids who would love to ditch school to work instead and only very few (~5%) are doing something they enjoy.
School doesn’t need to have any “purpose.” It just needs to be the best available way in 2024 of using one million adults to organize the lives of thirty million kids while twenty nine million parents work jobs or keep house. If some of the kids get something out of it, that’s a bonus.
In other words, the case against education is not a case against schools.
That you and most of your generation (seem to) remember few of the facts you were taught at school is not a good argument for abolishing schools. Here are my reasons:
• When I was at school in the 1950s, I was lazy, bored, rebellious and terrified in just about equal measure, but I Iearnt stuff, a great deal of which has stayed with me all my life, hooking up productively with what I learnt later. I learnt about Omsk, Tomsk and Yakutsk; the Kuroshio Current, prevailing winds, the world’s major rivers and mountain ranges, and the connection between those four things; the square on the hypotenuse; the main tributaries of the Murray (Mitta Mitta, Ovens, Gouldburn, Campaspe, Loddon); Latin roots; grammar; the main exports of every country in the British Commonwealth and some others besides; Vasco da Gama and Magellan; analysis and parsing; Magna Carta; Mazeppa’s Ride; Lord Shaftesbury; The Inchcape Rock; Houtman’s Abrolhos …. We learnt it all singsong, by heart, the way kids learn playground chants, and most of the time it was no hardship at all. I've lost bits and pieces along the way, but again and again I recognise something because it is related to something I learnt all those years ago.
• Could it be that you and most of your generation don’t remember much from your school days because you weren’t actually taught? For some time, most educationists have subscribed to the constructivist belief that kids learn best when they “construct their own knowledge”. In other words, kids should be able to pick up school subjects the way they learn to speak their native tongue. There are two problems here: 1) Constructivism began life as a DEscription of how people learn but has been turned into a PREscription of how teachers should teach; 2) no distinction is made between knowledge that is biologically primary (e.g. speaking your native tongue) and knowledge that is biologically secondary (e.g. reading and writing). The first can be learnt by social osmosis; the second, generally speaking, cannot. Biological primary vs secondary knowledge: Informing Cognitive Load Theory | InnerDrive
• Much of what you do retain has been consigned to schema buried in long-term memory, where its elements are not readily available to explicit recall. But they underpin a great deal of your present knowledge and the schema itself can be brought to mind and made use of when considering other information. The implications of schemas | Filling the pail (wordpress.com) For example, being literate means you have at some stage learnt to decode the alphabetic system, though you don’t have to recapitulate that laborious process every time you pick up a book.
• People have been transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next since the larynx descended. The knowledge hard won by one generation need no longer die with them. This is important because: “Knowledge is what we think with. It is an interaction between the environment and long-term memory, mediated by working memory, that determines what we pay attention to.” Dr Greg Ashman.pdf (education.gov.au) Say we do away with schools, what then? We will leave kids to learn by cultural osmosis, they will be educated by social media, literacy will once again become the preserve of a privileged few, and the gap between the privileged and disadvantaged will become entrenched.
Seems like there's a model where, in addition to needing to remember facts, you need to build on one knowledge base to learn another; you allude to this a bit yourself. It may be that teaching algebra to small children will be useless for 90% of them, but that there is a class of attainment (e.g. getting an engineering degree) that can't be achieved if you don't start learning about algebra relatively early.
Basically, it seems like there might be a spherical cow model of school in which it presents a large number of opportunities to (most) students, but only a small fraction of any given cohort takes any given opportunity and actually 'goes through the door' to pursue professional opportunities in that direction.
Like, I can imagine a toy workforce composed of 20% doctors, 20% engineers, 20% artists, 20% scientists, and 20% lawyers; under strong assumptions of 'forgetting', 80% of the population would forget about the three branches of government, and a *different* 80% would forget about Claude Monet, and so on. But their time in school nonetheless enabled each 20% to discover their future career and to lay the foundation of their current expertise.
One thing you can say about American schools is that they are impressively Romeo and Juliet-oriented.
Personally, I think the language in Romeo and Juliet is too hard for high school students. Shakespeare, as Stoppard's movie implies, was suddenly discovering he was a genius and thus showed off inordinately in Rome and Juliet. I would instead recommend Julius Caesar, which Shakespeare wrote in a pared back dignified English version of Latin, as an introduction to Shakespeare, at least for boys.
I suspect the data will pile up that during covid school closures, while kids from the upper half of society (the laptop class) did okay (not good but not horrible) from taking classes online over Zoom, that not going to an organized place and being talked at by middle class grown-ups was bad for the lower half of the social spectrum.
They wrote several articles on the same theme including a meta-analysis, and Dylan William has done some YouTube videos (watchable). Central holding is roughly "it doesn’t matter where you go to school, it matters what teacher you get" in particular it matters what questions teachers are asking kids to assess their prior learning and to assess whether they've understood the lesson - leading to such gimmicks as individual white-boards, exit tickets and so on. Obviously B&W were mainly interested in education outcomes, but it seems like it must have some relevance for long term retention too. If a teacher is actually having a real dialogue with pupils about what they know, then tailoring a lesson to a pupils ZPD, then making sure they have actually learned, then tailoring the next lesson to the next step etc. that has a much better chance of sticking for life than a teacher who just wants to Get Through The Lesson - a strong temptation for anyone.
Scott and others, I have a great test you can do with mates at a pub or whatever: give them a blank piece of paper and ask them to draw a world map.
When I was a student at St Andrews (a uni which has recently topped Oxford and Cambridge in various UK uni rankings), I got some of the following results:
- a clear sea between the USA and Canada (she had walked over a bridge once separating the two countries)
- one medical student had Africa north of Russia (she said she got the highest mark in geography at her school)
- almost everyone deleted places like Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia
- literally no-one knew that South America is significantly to the right of North America, not straight below it
but
my all time favourite was a modern history student. She drew the island of GB, to its left the island of Ireland. Below the island of Ireland was the island of Wales (???).... and to their left, the island of Poland.
She had been studying WWII, and somehow thought Hitler's invasion of Poland involved sailing around the UK.
I remember the Roman Empire question from the survey. I don't remember, now, but some random thing had come up in the prior 24 hours that made me think about it. So I answered yes. I realize that's part of Scott's point. The "random things" (whatever it was) might not have been that random.
There had been a meme going around a few weeks before the survey to the effect that men would think about the Roman Empire about once a day and wasn't that hilarious.
> Fewer than 50% (ie worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms.
Trolling the questioners?
Asking people this kind of questions probably makes you look like an insufferable nerd who wouldn’t stand a chance in the ancestral environment, and they treat you like one.
I think this is the best way to ensure you’ll learn things from school and keep them long-term: to be an insufferable nerd who wouldn’t stand a chance in the ancestral environment, so you’ll stay isolated from pop culture, leaving school as the only cultural environment able to influence you by osmosis.
I love how you identify the power of culture as a continued education force of sorts.
Two items I feel you missed (maybe willingly, but IMO worth noting):
- I wouldn’t underestimate the effect of trolling in these surveys
- Education’s role as a giver of frameworks is far more important than as a giver of facts. The value we gain from it IMO is learning how to understand and contextualise facts, and derive action from them, not memorising them. The fact that we use the latter to (maybe even unintentionally) teach the former is my biggest gripe with the system.
All of this theoretical case is fine (seriously - I don't have strong feelings myself one way or the other), but I assume you realize there is a huge literature in the economics of education robustly showing that each additional year of schooling leads to about 10% higher lifetime earnings (e.g. here is one recent paper by Harry Patrinos, one of the big names in the field: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJM-03-2021-0184/full/html). I don't know if the kids are learning facts, or thought processes, or socialization, or it's changing their aspirations, or something else entirely, but they are absolutely benefitting from going to school. And yes economists are well aware of selection bias and have written dozens of papers involving quasi-experimental designs and other ways to try to tease out causality here.
What's the alternative to schooling? Is there a big population that broke the law and quit school at age 8? How do you explain Sudbury schools where kids do just fine without any traditional schooling (kids do what they want)?
Yes there is in fact a big population of 8-year-olds who aren't in school around the world (I've done a lot of work in rural sub-Saharan Africa, although mostly on health not education), and it was even larger 50-100 years ago. Over time and space there has been huge variation in both mandatory schooling laws and in enforcement of those laws (including not just by age, but also by gender and by religion / ethnicity / language). These variations are what allow researchers to estimate the causal impact of an additional year of school.
As far as Sudbury schools, as Tom points out there is surely a large endogenous selection effect there. Of course some kids do better with minimal or unstructured schooling; my focus is on the average effect, and that seemed to be Scott's focus / claim as well.
If you click my link above (helpfully provided in order to answer these sorts of questions), you'll quickly see that their 10% estimate is based on 142 countries from 1970-2014 via 853 separate datasets (covering a wide range of ages). No extrapolation required.
That seems not very useful then? How relevant could the figure be to any particular situation? Is the figure consistent across all their datasets? That would be surprising.
First of all, if you want to know whether the figure is consistent just read the article (and/or other relevant papers from the literature)! It's publicly available. I'm not an expert on this - in fact please do us all a favor, read up on the topic since you're interested, and summarize here. My sense is that of course it's not exactly 10% for all ages / regions / time periods, but that in fact it's more consistent than one might imagine. However maybe that's wrong.
Second of all, you seem to have missed the point of this discussion, which was not to provide concrete advice to policymakers in every particular situation but rather to debate the overall role of schooling. Scott concluded his post with "I’m not sure how you rescue the usefulness of most schooling" so I was pointing to evidence for the usefulness of *most* schooling. Clearly for that purpose we should look at large datasets covering average effects in a broad range of situations; otherwise if I provided evidence only that 8-year-olds in Africa benefit from schooling -- although actually I think that would be pretty compelling, given the poor quality of schools there -- someone could correctly reply that I hadn't responded to his overall point or shown that schooling is generally useful. Why would you expect evidence about his question to also directly answer some other only vaguely related (albeit reasonable) question that you seem to have?
Thought about this for a while and realized that this could just be a case of unrelated correlates to a primary cause. One hypothesis would be, “Children with higher levels of intelligence and conscientious will stay in school longer and will also earn more over their lifetime.” This in and of itself does not imply that it’s the schooling that causes the higher lifetime earnings.
Hi Scott - you're thinking like an economist, which is great (imho). However it turns out that economists also think like economists, and they understand very well exactly the dynamic you're suggesting (which is indeed a thing that happens), and they control for that in their analyses. Trust me (or read the papers!) this has been debated at length and in detail for decades, and everyone involved comprehends the distinction between correlation and causation.
It's not my area of research but for instance consider a project that builds a bunch of new local schools around a country. Previously all kids were supposed to travel if need be to finish primary school, but some of them didn't. Now that the new schools exist, local kids are going to school for an extra year or two on average, and in fact the marginal impact is *not* on the most intelligent / conscientious kids (who were already traveling). 20-30 years later we can measure the resulting impact on earnings. Similar idea for a law raising mandatory schooling from (say) age 12 to 15, where the 'best' kids were already staying in school as you say, and the change (hence also the downstream income effect) is from the mediocre kids.
In any case from a policy perspective at some level we don't really care who it effects or how or why: we just want to know whether a policy that forces [more] kids to go to school [for longer] improves average outcomes. The answer is very clear: yes, it does.
I listened to a podcast a few years ago that used that general knowledge survey as the basis for a quiz of the hosts. I'm surprised that they haven't done the survey again.
Asking for the answer, the confidence of that answer being correct, and an estimate of how many other people would get the question correct was something I hadn't seen before, but I don't read those types of papers often, so maybe that's the normal methodology.
What if 90% of the population is too dumb to remember much from school, but significant benefits accrue to the other 10%? And productivity follows a power law where the top 10% are probably responsible for at least half of all the productivity, so if for whatever reasons we can’t just school the 10%, it is better to school everybody than to school nobody.
I feel like most of the stuff I know was not learned in school or even at university but on my own. However, many of my colleagues don't think so. They think school and university taught them quite a bit. I should probably press them on that and see whether it's actually true or whether they just think it's true.
However, I have one concern with this post: most of the evidence there sounds more like evidence towards "Education is not perfect", rather than "Education doesn't help at all". To me, the evidence in the post, sounds similar to claiming that: we cannot cure all cancer (or some other diseases), many _actually healthy_ people recover on their own, and people die eventually anyway, so "why even trying?". It would be nice to found out some kind-off randomized control trials, to see how much education improves our lives. Maybe we have any sadden improvements in the schools in some regions, so we can see whether people there become actually richer/happier/strong/...?
Basically I'd like to see if without education increases amount of people who can "name the capital of Russia", or it doesn't help at all.
Even if school is abysmal for learning, you need something to keep children busy (especially in 2 income households). What’s the alternate social structure that allows children to socialize with children of the same age, make friends, and keep their minds occupied? Not everyone can or wants to homeschool.
Apart from that, there might also be a class based explanation to schooling. Me and Amy entire peer group, (people who graduated from good colleges, got technical jobs etc) seem to remember a lot of what I learnt in school. I seem to remember the structure of Benzene, which I swear the last time I studied was in high school (since I went into Computer Science later), I think that is true for a lot of my friends too, we generally remember a lot of what we were taught in school. So there could be an explanation, that for a certain group of people, (maybe < 1-2%) schooling is great to teach them about facts, ways to think etc, but this is not true for most of society which doesn’t seem to learnt anything useful at school and might be better furnished by alternate social structures.
Out of mutual curiosity, I read the whole list to my wife. She knew all of them except Hannibal. We're both a little appalled that college freshmen often don't know most of those; they don't strike us as esoteric.
> The remaining pro-school argument would be that even if they forget every specific thing, they retain some kind of scaffolding that makes it easier for them to learn and understand new things in the future; i.e. they keep some sort of overall concept of learning.
This is extremely suspicious in my opinion, because the "ability to learn and understand new things" sounds very much like "intelligence", so this basically says that even if kids forget everything they have learned at school, at least they will retain the intelligence they were born with. That's great, but what was the point of the school then?
Generally, once we admit that instead of "school makes kids intelligent" the direction of causality is "intelligent kids are more successful at school", schools start to seem much less impressive, and most arguments in their favor start to sound confused.
That doesn't mean that there are no good arguments for schools; gjm provides a great list in this tread. Schools are good for teaching things where complexity builds on top of complexity, and maybe you would never be motivated to walk the entire path alone. (If you open the Wikipedia page on Russia, you will find that its capital is Moscow. If you open the Wikipedia page on quantum something, you probably won't understand what it is talking about.) Schools are good for kids whose parents suck at explaining things.
It's just that crediting schools for making students intelligent is like crediting basketball clubs for making their members tall.
You recognize that some subjects require or at least strongly benefit from building on previous levels. There are also students that benefit more than others building up in any subject, and also students who benefit from a lot of hand-holding in the learning process (and lots of overlap in those groups). A genuinely intelligent child will gain less from those things than most of their peers, while a genuinely unintelligent child may not gain much in any case from structured classroom learning (as opposed to experiential).
For those in the middle, some level of handholding is better than independent and some level of building on previous lessons will be better than jumping up to the higher level. Schools recognize this to some extent, which is why gifted programs exist and why special ed exists. Gifted programs don't always do much to change the dynamic, though special ed is pretty regimented and I think does what it's supposed to do - once you recognize that many students in that category aren't going to achieve high levels no matter what approach is used.
Well... I'm pretty sure I got my initial knowledge of Roman history courtesy of Rosemary Sutcliff, so I'm gonna call that a strike against "you need to know a certain amount about Roman history before you can enjoy books, movies, podcasts, etc on Roman history."
(More generally, I think we can disqualify any theory that says "you can't enjoy learning about X for the first time" for almost any X where further learning would be enjoyable, but that is on observational grounds.)
Thinking back to college I can't remember most of my professors' names either; most of what I remember from classes is what I have thought about since, though not all. I have pages of handwritten notes in Japanese and Farsi that I just flat cannot read anymore, although when I tried, about a decade post-college, to get a Romance language I'd since dropped back to "can visit the place and talk to people" I was able to do so a lot faster than I could pick up an entirely new language; that could just be that Romance is easy, but I suspect I'd also retained enough basic rules ("Oh right, this is the one with all the ãos"/"oh right, normal Romance grammar"/"oh right, that one weird exception to normal Romance grammar") from my brief class to mean I only really needed vocab and practice - and I expect if I wanted to go back to trying to learn Japanese, I would have a not bad time up to the limits of Japanese 101 As Taught At <my university> and then things would get dramatically harder.
So maybe relearning is easier than initial learning? This still strikes me as an insufficient justification for the modern school system though. (And all those were classes I chose voluntarily, and have made a minimal effort to keep up over the years, so that's another potential confounding factor.)
Reading through the thread, I've been convinced by the "highly valuable warehouse for kids" argument. But it occurs to me that if we accept that school's MAIN value is warehousing kids, then maybe we should really ask what's the best way to make use of these kids time and development and growth while they're at the warehouse?
My impression is most schools are almost entirely "book learning" of one form or another. Which is to say read textbooks, memorize key facts, pass tests based on memorizing those facts, rinse and repeat. This probably has some value, especially for basic science and the three Rs. But beyond the this, maybe we should ask questions like "would kids benefit more from a history class, or more gym class?" and "would kids benefit more from a geography class, or a class in home economics or home repair?"
When I look at myself and my fellow millenials, I'm less concerned about how knowledgeable we are about the capitals of foreign countries than I am about how knowledgeable we are at changing a flat tire or building a book-shelf. We also have severe amounts of obesity in the west right now, so maybe more priority should be put on kids getting lots of healthy physical activity while at school?
I write the above not because I'm very physically fit and great at changing tires and wish more people were the same - quite the contrary, these are a couple of my biggest shortcomings.
Even if we agree that warehousing kids for 5 days a week is ideal, that still leaves serious questions of how best to go about warehousing them. We can keep the term "school" regardless of what it does, but maybe we should focus a bit less on book-learning and a bit more on physical fitness and practical life skills? I think that's a reasonable question to ask given what Scott shared about how much book-learning in school is forgotten.
Good additions. All of them are useful practical knowledge for just about anybody to know.
Maybe at one time a lot of kids picked up a lot of these practical life skills just through outdoor weekend activities or spending time with family/friends, but I suspect that most kids these days spend the vast majority of their spare time online and/or playing video games.
"In order to settle a bet, I asked ACX survey respondents whether they had thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours. About 45% had done so."
The big green bat rotates inside out in four-dimensional space, its wings stretching and turning into thick stone walls all around you. It would be pitch dark if the watery sun were not dripping through pores in the ceiling.
“Amor universal”, claims a pitaya-flavored voice as a thorn pierces the dungeon floor and your foot, laming you.
“No se preocupe, señor:”, taunts the stoned bat, “antes se coge al mentiroso que al cojo”.
Thousands, myriads of thorns close in on you. Blinking, you make out a carnation and a rose. The flowers are doors and they read, respectively, “SALIDA” and “MUERTE”.
“Se lo advertí:”, the bat goes on triumphantly, “nunca hallará la alegría trascendente si no SALE DEL COCHE. Así, pues, entre el clavel y la rosa, Vuestra Majestad _escoja_”.
Perhaps we could make a stronger case for education for old people. Many people die because no one ever told them what the signs of a stroke, blood clot, or heart attack are, or what to do if they have one. Old age brings many health problems that people need to be educated about just to recognize that they have a problem.
(I would say that the basics of financial investment should also be taught at some point, except that all our financial investors are wrong about how to invest for retirement. Any rational analysis shows that today's financial investors are extremely averse to the risk of running out of money because of a stock market crash, and dismiss the risk of running out of money due to being invested in safe, low-return investments. This is, oddly, just the opposite of what I think consensus on human risk-aversion bias would predict, which would be that the low-probability event of a stock market crash would be under-counted. There's a similar problem in medical care, in which risk aversion is much stronger for low-probability terrible outcomes from treatment than for high-probability terrible outcomes from non-treatement)
1) While everyone (in a knowledge job) has forgotten ~90% of what they've been taught, they remember the 10% that's relevant to their job
2) We don't know which job 6th graders are going to end up in at the end of the day.
So we end up teaching a broad raft of things, most of which ends up being completely unnecessary, because we just don't know who's going to do what (and also they're going to be there for 8 hours every day and you'll get burnt out learning math for 8 hours straight). This broadness tapers down as you get further along your track towards being useful to society, narrowing to specific high school classes, then a college major, and then particular on-the-job training or more narrowly defined graduate level stuff.
I also really really doubt that we would end up with the same volume of people having necessary knowledge skills if we relied on a more self taught approach. For example, I'm extraordinarily lazy when I'm not forced to do stuff. Never in a million years would I have learned differential equations or programming without a class structure (and even then it was a close run thing).
Traditional schooling increases the number of lazy people that end up with useful skills, while the self-starters aren't really held back that much.
This blog keeps going down in its death spiral. Why does Scott Alexander no longer recognize a case of conflict theory? He had even read Moldbug and many others who have made the same point, but not mentioning conflict theory explocitly. Is that Scott still alive? I would dpubt it if you had not shared the baby phoyos. Perhaps.. Are you tired of having to blog and write dumb stuff because of that? Are you experoencing memory loss like depicted here? Are you getting paid or coerced to write dumbly? In any case, conflict theory an unusually simply-the-only-right-answer, and Scott Alexander should not miss that. Sorry.
I feel like there's a lot of trauma-reenacting going on in this thread. Most of the people arguing that school is bad seem to have personally had a bad time at school. Where are the people saying "Well personally I had a great time at school, but objectively it was useless"?
Personally I think I had a pretty average, middle-of-the-bell-curve school experience compared to my peers; not the best but not the worst. Being a 12-16 year old boy can be pretty awkward regardless, and I certainly wouldn't say it was the best days of my life (university was far better, and being a young adult with a job was better still) but I had some good times.
It wasn't perfect, and it could have been better... if the school itself had been better, or if some of my own decisions had been better. But it was certainly far better than I'd have gone sitting at home all day.
"my suspicion is that if school magically disappeared, unless the rest of society were very dramatically altered at the same time, it would be almost immediately recreated in some other form by necessity"
Oh, yeah. Let's say we do away with compulsory schooling and it's left up to parents how they educate their kids; send them to the schools, homeschool them, turn them loose in the field to graze...
The parents who are smart enough and educated enough to homeschool or unschool the kids will have some dependence on "one at least of the parents can be free to oversee the kids". So maybe what happens is that not everyone is up for teaching little Sophonisba or Mahershalalhashbaz advanced maths, and the darlings are *so* brainy, you know, they need the intellectual challenge! Well, we parents could get together and hire a young grad student to do an hour a day for five days a week of maths teaching for the small group of our little budding blossoms.
Well, hey, you're re-invented schooling in one form. Or even if it is private tuition, the grind school model. Or what C.S. Lewis obtained at the age of 16, when he was sent to a private tutor:
"At Bookham I was met by my new teacher--"Kirk" or "Knock" or the Great Knock as my father, my brother, and I all called him.
…A few minutes later we were walking away from the station.
"You are now," said Kirk, "proceeding along the principal artery between Great and Little Bookham."
I stole a glance at him. Was this geographical exordium a heavy joke? Or was he trying to conceal his emotions? His face, however, showed only an inflexible gravity. I began to "make conversation" in the deplorable manner which I had acquired at those evening parties and indeed found increasingly necessary to use with my father. I said I was surprised at the "scenery" of Surrey; it was much "wilder" than I had expected.
"Stop!" shouted Kirk with a suddenness that made me jump. "What do you mean by wildness and what grounds had you for not expecting it?"
I replied I don't know what, still "making conversation". As answer after answer was torn to shreds it at last dawned upon me that he really wanted to know. He was not making conversation, nor joking, nor snubbing me; he wanted to know. I was stung into attempting a real answer. A few passes sufficed to show that I had no clear and distinct idea corresponding to the word "wildness", and that, in so far as I had any idea at all, "wildness" was a singularly inept word. "Do you not see, then," concluded the Great Knock, "that your remark was meaningless?" I prepared to sulk a little, assuming that the subject would now be dropped. Never was I more mistaken in my life. Having analysed my terms, Kirk was proceeding to deal with my proposition as a whole. On what had I based (but he pronounced it baized) my expectations about the Flora and Geology of Surrey? Was it maps, or photographs, or books? I could produce none. It had, heaven help me, never occurred to me that what I called my thoughts needed to be "baized" on anything. Kirk once more drew a conclusion--without the slightest sign of emotion, but equally without the slightest concession to what I thought good manners: "Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?"
By this time our acquaintance had lasted about three and a half minutes; but the tone set by this first conversation was preserved without a single break during all the years I spent at Bookham.
…If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity, that man was Kirk. Born a little later, he would have been a Logical Positivist. The idea that human beings should exercise their vocal organs for any purpose except that of communicating or discovering truth was to him preposterous. The most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation. I soon came to know the differing values of his three openings. The loud cry of "Stop!" was flung in to arrest a torrent of verbiage which could not be endured a moment longer; not because it fretted his patience (he never thought of that) but because it was wasting time, darkening counsel. The hastier and quieter "Excuse!" (i.e. "Excuse me") ushered in a correction or distinction merely parenthetical and betokened that, thus set right, your remark might still, without absurdity, be allowed to reach completion. The most encouraging of all was, "I hear you." This meant that your remark was significant and only required refutation; it had risen to the dignity of error. Refutation (when we got so far) always followed the same lines. Had I read this? Had I studied that? Had I any statistical evidence? Had I any evidence in my own experience? And so to the almost inevitable conclusion, "Do you not see then that you had no right, etc."
Some boys would not have liked it; to me it was red beef and strong beer. I had taken it for granted that my leisure hours at Bookham would be passed in "grown-up conversation". And that, as you know already, I had no taste for. In my experience it meant conversation about politics, money, deaths, and digestion. I assumed that a taste for it, as for eating mustard or reading newspapers, would develop in me when I grew older (so far, all three expectations have been disappointed). …I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you. Even in Mathematics, whatever could be done by mere reasoning (as in simple geometry) I did with delight; but the moment calculation came in I was helpless. I grasped the principles but my answers were always wrong. Yet though I could never have been a scientist, I had scientific as well as imaginative impulses, and I loved ratiocination. Kirk excited and satisfied one side of me. Here was talk that was really about something. Here was a man who thought not about you but about what you said. No doubt I snorted and bridled a little at some of my tossings; but, taking it all in all, I loved the treatment. After being knocked down sufficiently often I began to know a few guards and blows, and to put on intellectual muscle. In the end, unless I flatter myself, I became a not contemptible sparring partner. It was a great day when the man who had so long been engaged in exposing my vagueness at last cautioned me against the dangers of excessive subtlety."
Having quoted from "Surprised by Joy" by Lewis, I have to add in some more memories of his and his brother's education, given that we're talking about "School! What is it good for? (Absolutely nothing)":
"I have now to tell you how Wyvern made me a prig. When I went there, nothing was further from my mind than the idea that my private taste for fairly good books, for Wagner, for mythology, gave me any sort of superiority to those who read nothing but magazines and listened to nothing but the (then fashionable) Rag-time. The claim might seem unbelievable if I did not add that I had been protected from this sort of conceit by downright ignorance. Mr. Ian Hay somewhere draws a picture of the reading minority at a Public School in his day as boys who talked about "G. B. S. and G. K. C." in the same spirit in which other boys secretly smoked; both sets were inspired by the same craving for forbidden fruit and the same desire to be grown-up. And I suppose boys such as he describes might come from Chelsea or Oxford or Cambridge homes where they heard things about contemporary literature. But my position was wholly different. I was, for example, a great reader of Shaw about the time I went to Wyvern, but I had never dreamed that reading Shaw was anything to be proud of. Shaw was an author on my father's shelves like any other author. I began reading him because his Dramatic Opinions contained a good deal about Wagner and Wagner's very name was then a lure to me. Thence I went on to read most of the other Shaws we had. But how his reputation stood in the literary world I neither knew nor cared; I didn't know there was "a literary world". My father told me Shaw was "a mountebank" but that there were some laughs in John Bull's Other Island. It was the same with all my other reading; no one (thank God) had ever admired or encouraged it. (William Morris, for some unfathomable reason, my father always referred to as "that whistlepainter".) I might be--no doubt I was--conceited at Chartres for being good at my Latin; this was something recognised as meritorious. But "Eng. Lit." was blessedly absent from the official syllabus, so I was saved from any possibility of conceit about it. Never in my life had I read a work of fiction, poetry, or criticism in my own language except because, after trying the first few pages, I liked the taste of it. I could not help knowing that most other people, boys and grown-ups alike, did not care for the books I read. A very few tastes I could share with my father, a few more with my brother; apart from that, there was no point of contact, and this I accepted as a sort of natural law. If I reflected on it at all, it would have given me, I think, a slight feeling, not of superiority, but of inferiority. The latest popular novel was so obviously a more adult, a more normal, a more sophisticated taste than any of mine. A certain shame or bashfulness attached itself to whatever one deeply and privately enjoyed. I went to the Coll far more disposed to excuse my literary tastes than to plume myself on them.
But this innocence did not last. It was, from the first, a little shaken by all that I soon began to learn from my form-master about the glories of literature. I was at last made free of the dangerous secret that others had, like me, found there "enormous bliss" and been maddened by beauty. Among the other New Bugs of my year, too, I met a pair of boys who came from the Dragon School at Oxford (where Naomi Mitchison in her 'teens had just produced her first play) and from them also I got the dim impression that there was a world I had never dreamed of, a world in which poetry, say, was a thing public and accepted, just as Games and Gallantry were accepted at Wyvern; nay, a world in which a taste for such things was almost meritorious. I felt as Siegfried felt when it first dawned on him that he was not Mime's son. What had been "my" taste was apparently "our" taste (if only I could ever meet the "we" to whom that "our" belonged). And if "our" taste, then--by a perilous transition--perhaps "good" taste or "the right taste". For that transition involves a kind of Fall. The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost. Even then, however, it is not necessary to take the further downward step of despising the "philistines" who do not share it. Unfortunately I took it. Hitherto, though increasingly miserable at Wyvern, I had been half ashamed of my own misery, still ready (if I were only allowed) to admire the Olympians, still a little overawed, cowed rather than resentful. I had, you see, no standing place against the Wyvernian ethos, no side for which I could play against it; it was a bare "I" against what seemed simply the world. But the moment that "I" became, however vaguely, a we--and Wyvern not the world but a world--the whole thing changed. It was now possible, at least in thought, to retaliate. I can remember what may well have been the precise moment of this transition. A prefect called Blugg or Glubb or some such name stood opposite me, belching in my face, giving me some order. The belching was not intended as an insult. You can't "insult" a fag any more than an animal. If Bulb had thought of my reactions at all, he would have expected me to find his eructations funny. What pushed me over the edge into pure priggery was his face--the puffy bloated cheeks, the thick, moist, sagging lower lip, the yokel blend of drowsiness and cunning. "The lout!" I thought. "The clod! The dull, crass clown! For all his powers and privileges, I would not be he." I had become a Prig, a High-Brow."
"My brother's reports had grown worse and worse; and the tutor to whom he had now been sent confirmed them to the extent of saying that he seemed to have learned almost nothing at school. Nor was that all. Sentences savagely underlined in my father's copy of The Lanchester Tradition reveal his thoughts. They are passages about a certain glazed insolence, an elaborate, heartless flippancy, which the reforming Headmaster in that story encountered in the Bloods of the school he wished to reform. That was how my father envisaged my brother at this period: flippant, languid, emptied of the intellectual interests which had appeared in his earlier boyhood, immovable, indifferent to all real values, and urgent in his demand for a motor-bicycle.
It was, of course, to turn us into public-school boys that my father had originally sent us to Wyvern; the finished product appalled him. It is a familiar tragi-comedy and you can study it in Lockhart; Scott laboured hard to make his son a hussar, but when the actual hussar was presented to him, Scott sometimes forgot the illusion of being an aristocrat and became once more a respectable Edinburgh lawyer with strong views about Puppyism. So in our family. Mispronunciation was one of my father's favourite rhetorical weapons. He now always sounded the first syllable of Wyvern wrongly. I can still hear him growl, "Wyvernian affectation." In proportion as my brother's tone became languid and urbanely weary, so my father's voice became more richly and energetically Irish, and all manner of strange music from his boyhood in Cork and Dublin forced its way up through the more recent Belfastian crust.
...Yet out of this "unpleasantness" (a favourite word of my father's) there sprang what I still reckon, by merely natural standards, the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me. The tutor (in Surrey) to whom my brother had been sent was one of my father's oldest friends. He had been headmaster of Lurgan when my father was a boy there. In a surprisingly short time he so re-built and extended the ruins of my brother's education that he not only passed into Sandhurst but was placed among those very few candidates at the top of the list who received prize cadetships. I do not think my father ever did justice to my brother's achievement; it came at a time when the gulf between them was too wide, and when they were friends again it had become ancient history. But he saw very clearly what it proved about the exceptional powers of his teacher. At the same time, he was almost as sick as I of the very name of Wyvern. And I never ceased, by letter and by word of mouth, to beg that I might be taken away. All these factors urged him to the decision which he now made. Might it not after all be best to give me my desire? to have done with school for good and send me also to Surrey to read for the University with Mr. Kirkpatrick? He did not form this plan without much doubt and hesitation. He did his best to put all the risks before me: the dangers of solitude, the sudden change from the life and bustle of a great school (which change I might not like so much as I anticipated), the possibly deadening effect of living with only an old man and his old wife for company. Should I really be happy with no companions of my own age? I tried to look very grave at these questions. But it was all imposture. My heart laughed. Happy without other boys? Happy without toothache, without chilblains, happy without pebbles in my shoes? And so the arrangement was made. If it had had nothing else to recommend it, the mere thought, "Never, never, never, shall I have to play games again," was enough to transport me. If you want to know how I felt, imagine your own feelings on waking one morning to find that income tax or unrequited love had somehow vanished from the world.
I should be sorry if I were understood to think, or if I encouraged any reader in thinking, that this invincible dislike of doing things with a bat or a ball were other than a misfortune. Not, indeed, that I allow to games any of the moral and almost mystical virtue which schoolmasters claim for them; they seem to me to lead to ambition, jealousy, and embittered partisan feeling, quite as often as to anything else. Yet not to like them is a misfortune, because it cuts you off from companionship with many excellent people who can be approached in no other way. A misfortune, not a vice; for it is involuntary. I had tried to like games and failed. That impulse had been left out of my make-up; I was to games, as the proverb has it, like an ass to the harp."
"I have said that he was almost wholly logical; but not quite. He had been a Presbyterian and was now an Atheist. He spent Sunday, as he spent most of his time on week-days, working in his garden. But one curious trait from his Presbyterian youth survived. He always, on Sundays, gardened in a different, and slightly more respectable, suit. An Ulster Scot may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his week-day clothes on the Sabbath.
Having said that he was an Atheist, I hasten to add that he was a "Rationalist" of the old, high and dry nineteenth-century type. For Atheism has come down in the world since those days, and mixed itself with politics and learned to dabble in dirt. The anonymous donor who now sends me anti-God magazines hopes, no doubt, to hurt the Christian in me; he really hurts the ex-Atheist. I am ashamed that my old mates and (which matters much more) Kirk's old mates should have sunk to what they are now. It was different then; even McCabe wrote like a man. At the time when I knew him, the fuel of Kirk's Atheism was chiefly of the anthropological and pessimistic kind. He was great on The Golden Bough and Schopenhauer."
> Where are the people saying "Well personally I had a great time at school, but objectively it was useless"?
I generally liked school and I'm not sure most of it was useful.
I still use math a bit. I use basic math in everyday tasks. I use more advanced math like algebra, trig, linear algebra and some calculus a little bit as a programmer. It's not the bulk of my work, but it comes up here and there. I appreciate learning math in school in particular because it's something I probably wouldn't have learned on my own initiative.
But I seem to be in a very small minority of people who have used calculus outside of school. And for much of what we learned, even stuff I strongly feel everyone should know, it's hard to argue that the knowledge actually helps them in life. Does it really matter if someone doesn't know that dinosaurs existed? The impact would be the same as not knowing what unicorns are: you'll miss out on some cultural references. You might not appreciate Jurassic Park as much. You might have an embarrassing conversation with a friend who assumes you know that dinosaurs existed. But the same could be said about unicorns and we don't teach them in school.
I'd say the same about most of what we learned. The main use of most of it is simply that other people also know the same facts and can reference them. You can write a song that references that the Earth revolves around the sun and people will understand. Education is supposed to be more than that. You can gain shared cultural knowledge by watching a Harry Potter movie or listening to the latest celebrity gossip. The facts we learn in school are supposed to be more useful than that.
Learning how to read and write, and learning basic math are useful for most people. But what about the rest of school?
The thing about school is that just because it’s taught doesn’t mean that a student learns it. Not even just the bad students but it’s really not that hard to get decent grades while doing the bare minimum. Of course that doesn’t look good for schools but that’s less about the concept than the execution. This is probably why homeschoolers do better, because the parent is making sure you actually learn the facts instead of just this broad based test that can be meta gamed.
Another thing that we don’t really learn by rote. It’s very difficult and will easily be forgotten. But we also don’t really learn by concepts either. Those ideas just seem too abstract and the student won’t pick it up. We learn through context, which is why people learn more Roman history through memes than through school. Not only are they funny but the little picture makes it more “real” than just reading words. That’s why history classes should just historically accurate, but still engaging, tv shows that tell a coherent story. It’s not as dense as a textbook but students will pick up more and then when they do read a textbook, it will feel more alive. There are ways to do education better. We’re not really trying anything that could be effective.
Teach them to read, do chores, be responsible, and cooperate with one another. Buy them books. You can't do a worse job than your local school district. It isn't possible. You are literate, for one.
Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons is a great book and will leave your kids at an independent reading level.
Do not sacrifice your children to Baal.
Back in the 1960-80s there was a couple who advocated for what they called 'unschooling', which was rooted in kids learning to be productive members of their home and community. Basic learning was important, but the structured 'school' environment was de-emphasized and productivity and practical learning was the focus.
This idea you have was one thing they thought was important. Tell your kids how much it costs to run your household. Show them the bills! Explain why you wanted the lights out when no one was in a room based on your electricity bills and tell them about kilowatt hours. Talk about what else could be done with money saved if you didn't waste it leaving lights on, water running, the door open, etc. Then go over the bills the next month and talk about the differences based on weather, family needs, changes you made from last month. "Yes, the water bill is higher, Timmy, but why do you think that is? Well done....we have a garden this month and have to water it regularly. When we get food from it, that will cut down on the grocery bill. Let's look at that bill now and remember in two months how much we spent." They also promoted the idea of kids having a checkbook and helping pay the bills with an allowance and a budget.
Your ideas are very sound. Make sure you teach about interest, debt, unintended consequences, opportunity costs, and trade-offs. And I would use cash. Kids like concrete things and the jingle of coins in their little pockets and purses. Money on a card is theoretical. Cash is real. A kid understands four quarters getting whittled down to two but will not appreciate, in the same visceral way, $1 going to .50 on a card.
This is the way I was raised, I was surprised when I got to adulthood and learned that it's not the default in the US. I got my first bank account when I was five, and some kind of allowance, and from that point on my parents were only buying me non-necessities at Christmas and my birthday.
I remember when I was seven demanding that I get pocket money (which was something I had read about in children's books) for the jobs I was doing around the house, so my mother gave me a shilling a week.
Then we went decimal currency, and that was now 5p in new money. When I was twelve, there was a Batman/Superman annual in the local shop I wanted to buy. It cost 40p. It took me eight weeks of saving up every penny I had to buy it. I still remember counting the individual pennies every week to see how close to my goal I was! 😁
"an allowance for chores"
Is this not how it is done? Getting pocket money from your parents for doing jobs around the house, if you're not doing small jobs outside like maybe a paper round or cutting the grass for the neighbours and such?
Do American parents just give money to their kids? Granted, I'm a long time since childhood and don't know what modern Irish practice is, but just "here's as much money as you want" doesn't seem like something that goes on even now.
Family and friends do give money for birthdays and special occasions, and that's supposed to go into some kind of savings so you're teaching them the value of money and budgeting:
https://www.raisin.ie/savings/childrens-savings-accounts/
> Do American parents just give money to their kids?
Some do, some don't. Depends on the family.
As Scott said, we don’t need schools for #2. Culture is also transmitted by TV, social media, etc.
That raises the question of whether we really need a common culture at all, and if yes, does it matter what the culture is - is Hamlet better than Spider-Man?
That great American novel, “Up the Down Staircase” (Bel Kaufman, 1964) offers possible answers:
(A teacher asks:)
“Why do we study ‘The Myths’ and ‘The Odyssey?’”
(Student response 1:) Because everybody in high school at one time or another read it and now we have to read it because it’s our turn.
(Student response 2:) Because we want to talk like cultured people. At a party how would you like it if someone mentioned a Greek God and you didn’t know him. You would be embarrased (sic).
(Student response 3:) The Trojan horse was used as a spy of today. Gods were used as dictators and Penelpe (sic) still walks the streets of modern society.
"That raises the question of whether we really need a common culture at all, and if yes, does it matter what the culture is - is Hamlet better than Spider-Man?"
It depends what lessons are taken away from Spiderman. "With great power comes great responsibility" is a good one, but maybe the lesson learned is not the one you want learned.
SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE
There's a great backstory for the villain in the recent Hanuman movie, where the guy wants to be a superhero since childhood. How he sets about that, however... later on, as adults, he reveals to his friend and helper that since Batman's parents were dead, his parents should be dead too, so he sets that up by killing them in a fire as a child:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanu-Man
I think we don't want aspiring superheroes to learn the lesson that "Many of these supers are orphans, so I need to be an orphan, and if my parents are still alive, I need to remedy that" 😁
I always wondered, what are the lessons that Hamlet is supposed to teach? Being an indecisive wimp is bad?
"Culture is also transmitted by TV, social media, etc."
And a bloody awful job it often does of it, too. If you're expecting your upcoming generations to acquire by osmosis basic facts about history, science, the world, and so forth from popular culture, then you'll be vastly disappointed. They'll learn the popular myths of the day around what is the Right Side Of History, Correct View To Have. That may not be the same as what really happened/is in existence.
I've complained about historical ignorance on here often enough, so I won't flog the dead horse all over again this time. But it does very strongly depend on what we mean by culture, and what kind of culture we want to transmit. A society that learns all its "facts" from social media is a society that can be easily controlled by whoever shapes that media. "1984" is about that, as well as other things.
Not to mention all the value-neutral "facts" that TV and movies get very wrong, that would harm you or others around you if you ever tried to depend on them in real-life situations. For example:
- you do *not* need to wait until someone has been missing for 24 hours to file a missing persons report if you have good reason to believe that something is wrong, and waiting that long can significantly decrease the chance of them being found intact and unharmed
- breaking a beer bottle over someone's head does not harmlessly knock them out; in fact there's a decent chance that if you do so, you'll end up arrested and charged with murder, because glass is harder than skull
- dragging someone out of a crashed car to save them from the inevitable explosion risks compounding existing injuries for no reason. Unless the car is actually on fire, the chance of it exploding is approximately 0%, and injured passengers are best left inside until trained EMTs can get them free safely
- wild animals of any kind are *not* cuddly and affectionate. Hollywood's representation of bears and deer are among the worst offenders: both are quite capable of, and willing to, kill people who they see as provoking them.
- police officers have no legal obligation whatsoever to respond truthfully to "are you a cop?"
- falling from a high distance and landing in water, even deep water, is only *slightly* less rough on your body than landing on concrete, and is significantly harder for rescuers to drag your broken body out of
- releasing wild animals raised in captivity into the wild is a good way to get them killed, and carries a surprising level of risk for the people doing the release as well
That "are you a cop" bit was referenced just this week in Scott's review of The Others Within Us.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-within-us
Where? I just ran a text search for "cop" and "police" and got no results.
The link is buried in the question mark at the end of "Luckily, demons apparently have to tell the truth about this?"
The standard pushback to #1 is that people didn't have an urgent need to read before, that education emerged around the same time as literacy but hasn't necessarily caused all of it because these days people would be motivated to learn to read anyway
The standard counter-pushback to this pushback is that the "urgent need to read" didn't spring up fully formed. The amount of stuff to read and the literacy rate increased one another in a virtuous cycle, and that cycle could easily start spinning the other way if pivot-to-video gets its way.
Indeed, there's got to be some circularity to this
I do feel like it weakens the argument for the continued usefulness of mandatory education though
> for most of history the population was illiterate.
This is not nearly as true as pop history would have you believe. Reading and writing are so incredibly useful that people throughout the world have invented and reinvented it over and over. The common myth that medieval people specifically were a bunch of illiterate peasants is more a matter of shifting definitions than of objective fact. They would very regularly read and write in the common tongue, (English for the English peasants, French for French peasants, and so on,) but were largely ignorant of *literature,* which was in Latin and was therefore inaccessible to many of them. Thus they were not "literate" but still could, and did, read and write.
> Universal education has changed all that.
The biggest factor in changing all of that was the Reformation. Teaching people that the Bible was not the sole province of priests and bishops, but that everyone should read and understand it for themselves, meant that everyone needed to understand reading at a deeper level than was common among the peasantry. Community schooling arose largely out of that; government-imposed "universal education" came centuries later, *after* reaching the point that universal literacy could largely be taken for granted.
I think you are overselling the amount of literacy before compulsory education.
see:https://books.google.ca/books?id=b6YwAQAAMAAJ&pg=PT18#v=onepage&q&f=false
In 1875-76, 16 percent of men in England and Wales, and 22 percent of women, could not write their name on the marriage register. In Ireland the figures were worse, over 30 percent of men and 36 percent of women. In Scotland in 1872-3, things were a bit better, only about 10 percent of men and 20 percent of women could not write their names.
In every case, a small minority, nowhere near 50%, let alone a state of "all the peasants were illiterate."
Meanwhile, today under compulsory education, almost half of Americans did not read a single book last year. ( https://nathanbransford.com/blog/2024/01/46-of-americans-didnt-read-a-book-in-2023-this-week-in-books ) Does that strike you as better conditions than your 1870s Brits?
Given that that was the last generation before compulsory education, it does mean that universal literacy could not be taken for granted when the government imposed universal education.
The figures for the 1840s were much worse. Nearly half of all women, and one third of all men could not write their names on the marriage register in England and Wales in the 1841-1845 period. As the source I linked above notes, there was a great increase in the number of children sent to school during this period.
You didn't answer my question.
Dickens' All the Year Round had sales of about 300 000 when something really good was being published in it. The Daily Telegraph had sales of around 250 000 when Sala was particularly entertaining. These were things that "everybody" read in Victorian England. Since people tended to share printed matter, I would expect there were maybe two million people who read for entertainment - So less than 10 percent of the population.
If I'm being pedantic, I haven't read a book in so long that I would need to take a seriously long time to think over when the last time was. Shifting to audiobooks has been wonderful, but even that has largely been for entertainment and not for an educational or professional purposes. These days, I would rather hunt for the references to the specific knowledge that I need and move on to using it.
I also read and write text daily as part of my job in healthcare, where we make or amend legal documents hundreds of times each day. I also write as a hobby (at several Substacks, as the subjects are all very different from each other).
This is all to say that how often we might read a book (rather than using one for reference) is not an ironclad metric to check literacy with, speaking generally.
For 1)
- AFAIK, the people arguing against school are all still in favor of children learning to read and write.
- Basic literacy is self-sustaining at this point. If every school disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn't have much effect on the literacy rate. Texting, internet usage, signs, etc. are part of our culture. Every parent knows how to read and write.
I think your view is more naive.
The parents are two people who can teach you to read. They aren't the only people. There are also your grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends. You just need one person in your life who doesn't want you to be severely handicapped. This isn't run-of-the-mill bad parenting in our culture. It's a severe case. Could you even use a smartphone without basic literacy?
For illiterate parents to be unable to teach their children to read, you need two illiterate people to marry, in a country where over 99% of youths are literate (by the basic definition of literacy).
> Yes, because people can read.
Hence the phrase "self-sustaining".
>Could you even use a smartphone without basic literacy?
My Indian coworker told me that his grandma is illiterate but still knows how to use the smartphone to set up a video call with her grandkids. All she needed was someone to tell her what icons to tap.
There's also various text-to-speech programs used by blind people, which could also be used by illiterates.
And the high amount of writing in our society is a function of high literacy rates. If we stopped teaching reading and writing literacy might not disappear overnight, but it could very easily just slip and keep slipping while more and more pictures get used to compensate. A smartphone in that society might have all-icon modes and default to audio options.
Which is rather annoying when you try to talk about how the Republic became the Empire and draw analogues to our current situation and the other guy says "Wait. Rome was a Republic?"
I joke, but only halfway.
Most people know that Rome was an empire, but probably most of the events they can think of from Roman history occurred during the republic.
The Roman Republic was an empire, under most modern definitions of the word.
I'd think that anyone who played the Civ games enough would have heard of Sullla.
*rimshot*
*crickets*
Julius Caeser is probably the best known thing about Rome. I think most people don't even realize that the republic and empire were different periods.
> Remember, these are university students, so the average person’s performance is worse.
Are you sure about that?
Are you not? Why?
well, those scores seem quite low and I wasnt very impressed with education in general
If the conclusion of the article is "formal education doesn't seem to matter all that much", then the assumption "university students have higher average performance than gen pop" is not justified (and arguably, is contradicts the conclusion). You need independent evidence that this is true to use that claim as evidence that "formal education doesn't seem to matter all that much".
I'm pretty sure the imputed causation here isn't "college makes these people know more things", but rather "college students are disproportionately selected from people who did well in pre-college school and who retain more from it."
No, because more intelligent people are more likely to do higher education (even if this difference between students and non-students has drastically reduced lately). These more intelligent people also tend to either remember more or be more interested in trivia and tend to answer better on these types of questions because they often put themselves in situations where the information is available.
This study suggests the average IQ of college students is pretty average and attributes it to the increasing the prevelance of "higher" education driving the average down. The data the evidences that college students are smarter than average is 70+ years old. https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293/PR2199.000694.v1
Huh... That's a really interesting find. Thank you! Looks like I have some updating to do.
The sample population was mostly students taking introductory psychology courses at Kent State University. There should be some way to compare 2012 KSU psych students to the average, somehow?
I don't want to sound like an intellectual snob, but... are the nation's best and brightest really going to the univerity that auto-completes with "massacre"?
Probably not, but more than half of american adults have no college degrees at all, and only small minority goes to the top schools. So there's a good chance that KSU students are at least above average?
Psychology students, though?
FWIW, as an undergrad, before I selected my major, I took several psychology classes. And I happened to know all the facts questioned. (Including that Paul Revere got caught by the British before he got outside of Boston, and the message was carried by William Dawes, a physician making his rounds. I don't know whether he carried it on purpose, or just liked to gossip.
No, Revere got to Lexington, and he was on his way to Concord when he, Dawes and third fellow, Samuel Prescott, were intercepted by the British. Revere was captured, Dawes was thrown from his horse (but he doesn't seem to have been captured), but Prescott escaped to reach Concord. Revere's warning gave Capt. John Parker, the leader of the Lexington militia (who happens to be my ancestor), time to rally the local militia on Lexington Green. The British hadn't made their expected appearance by 3am, and at some point during the wee hours of the morning, Parker and his men retreated to the local tavern to "refresh" themselves. In later deposition Parker admitted that he had begun to think it was all a false alarm, when a fellow from an outlying farm came riding into town to tell them the British were approaching. Parker reassembled his men on the Lexington Green. Since Revere, Dawes, and Prescott had left for Concord hours earlier, Parker assumed that Concord had been warned in time to hide their powder and cannon — so he ordered his men to let the British pass. But things got out of hand as they often do when people are armed and tense, and shots were fired. The rest is history, as they say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Revere_Capture_Site
I don't know any of this. What I know is that Paul Revere saw either one or two lights hanging in a tower somewhere, and thus he knew the British were coming either by land or sea, and then he rode around to all the towns saying "The British are coming!"
This is, of course, because I never studied any American history in school (my school would have mentioned the American Revolution only in the context of why the British were looking for a new place to send convicts in the 1780s) so I've picked it up entirely through cultural osmosis.
If we looked at the gaps between *my* knowledge of US history, and the knowledge of another reasonably smart person who actually did high school level history in the US, we might have a better idea of the value of formal education over cultural osmosis.
Looked it up:
Average SAT score at Kent State: 1140
Average nationally: 1028
I think roughly 50% of Americans take either the SAT or ACT, and there's heavy negative selection among those who don't.
Found an article with average by *intended* major: (https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-average-sat-score-for-every-college-major-2014-10)
Maybe not authoritative, and somewhat dated (need to exclude the writing score), but good enough for me. Psych is indeed below average, at 992, but not THAT far below average. Which rings true. In my experience, it's not a notorious dumb kid major, but certainly doesn't have a reputation as a smart kid major either.
KSU mean SAT of 1140 puts them in the 67th percentile of SAT takers and approximately the 83rd percentile of the overall population if we assume almost everyone who didn’t take the SAT would have scored worse than that.
no, but it's also not a bad school. based on it's academic rankings it's a great example of an average college.
just as an interesting tidbit, i recently learned that the portrayal in the popular imagination of what happened at kent state was pretty distorted even from the most damning possible interpretation of the actual events
where the "popular imagination" portrayal looks something like the intro to the movie Watchmen here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/krqpj3sfkjl0ggzl9yw1f/chrome_iNJm1RQXEe.mp4?rlkey=chwjw7seyye7h5a1faiindaas&st=kq6q3z7m&dl=0
what actually happened involved a lot less "girl putting flower into gun barrel and then being shot" and a lot more "large protest throwing rocks at national guard who begin to retreat, then panic and start to route, then get cornered and panic even more, then fire warning shots over the rock-throwing-protesters heads in order to scare them off, which causes innocent uninvolved students hundreds of feet away to get hit and die"
considering how different this is from, say, the watchmen portrayal, I felt pretty betrayed when I learned what had actually happened. any civilian in the same position, taking exactly the same actions, wouldn't even be blamed. Obviously the national guard should be held to a much higher standard, and indeed they behaved both cowardly and atrociously, but I really do wish the narrative everyone ended up believing better resembled the truth
Most of history seems to be like this when you look at it.
Helen Andrews has made this part of her beat. Perhaps out of frustration over the uses to which the revisions, or re-imaginings, are being made - to foment violence and disorder:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-fake-history-gets-made/
I would have thought it clear that what "Watchmen" portrayed was, well, a cartoon. (One of the protesters had in fact put a flower in the barrel of the gun - the day before.) "Warning shots" is a funny description, however; this was live ammunition, shot haphazardly, partly into the crowd - two of the students killed were protesters and two were not. They were all about 100m from the National Guard - not point-blank range, as shown in "Watchmen", but also not lost bullets from warning shots. These were large-caliber bullets that ripped large holes through the victims. I rather doubt that "any civilian in the same position, taking exactly the same actions, wouldn't even be blamed", unless you mean "by people in certain parts of Texas", perhaps.
I guess you have a fair point, I basically think 'they pulled a rittenhouse except they missed and shot innocents instead of the actual threatening rioters" is accurate and it's not like rittenhouse didn't get blamed
err, except that they're nat guard and we are supposed to hold such to a much higher standard
bu also i have a hard time not seeing the sort of spectre of communist revolution sentiment stuff in the proteste's actions, the throwing rocks at people who are aiming guns at you thing really confuses me and the "they can't kill us all" banner from those out of towners really rub me the wrong way. Considering it seems like this is probably an unpopular opinion, maybe I am not the right person to try to actually model this situation.
Funny, I had the opposite experience. When I read the details on Wikipedia, it was a lot *worse* than I expected.
The joke in Ohio about it is "can't read, can't write, Kent State" and you say it real fast so "can't" sounds just like "Kent."
Can't read, Can't write, Kent State - haha just kidding there's great liquid crystal research there, never heard of the massacre until I visited.
You never heard the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young song? (Kids these days!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCS-g3HwXdc
It seems reasonable that they perform better than the average person _at the same age_. It's not at all clear they perform better than the average person in general - they've had so much less life experience and opportunities to absorb facts than older people.
From what I remember, first year psych students get experimented on - they participate in at least one experiment as part of the course.
This is where psychology graduate students get a lot of their subjects from when they do a thesis/dissertation. Which is one point against a lot of psych papers - they're not random sampling, they're getting the cheapest subjects possible to study.
When I went to university psych was also considered a "science" for breadth purposes, and was considered a relatively easy way to fulfill that requirement.
So I would expect first year psych students to have some very odd responses.
Old joke: "All psychology is based on experiments with white male rats and white male psychology students."
And yes, psychology students are famously the _worst_ test subjects for psychology studies. Availability bias to use them.
Aren't most psychology students female?
I did say it was an old joke.
Seems like since university students are mostly straight out of school, they should retain the most information from school, so demonstrating that they don't know anything demonstrates effectively that they didn't retain anything from school. So although 40-year-olds will know more, that doesn't bear on the effectiveness of school. Actually, you might think that if people go to school for 20 years and fail general knowledge tests but then work for 20 years and are able to pass them, it's an even stronger case that school doesn't do anything.
Yes. But they should at least know more than people the same age who did _poorly_ in school, assuming school does anything? And even if school really does nothing, it seems likely that most people who do well in school would also do more reading or or other intellectual activity than people who did poorly in school (note the "most" part).
If the average person's performance is the same or better than that of a university student at the sort of basic knowledge one would tend to learn in school, then that would be a pretty strong piece of evidence against school being useful at imparting information on students.
If I remember correctly, in 1984 Britain was part of Oceania with the US? Oceania was sort of geographical stand-in for "the West", Euroasia for the USSSR and Eastasia for China?
This is correct.
Yeah, also not entirely sure I remember Julia being suggested as a double-agent explicitly against Winston all along, although it's plausible I'm just missing some clue. I do remember the one guy Winston was seeking out to join the rebel group ending up as his torturer, though, so clearly some element of "the world at large is against Winston's efforts to rebel"
That last guy is called O'Brien. I also don't remember Julia betraying Winston. What I do remember is that Winston was very suspicious of her, while being immediately trusting of O'Brien. I always saw a great irony in that.
My recollection is that near the end, O'Brien tells Winston that Julia cracked in interrogation almost instantly, but that's not the same as being a state agent.
What's funny is that at one point in the book, Julia admits that she didn't realize Oceania's enemy has changed repeatedly in her life time. I think the reader is meant to glean from that that she is still partially brainwashed, but reading this post, maybe she just doesn't remember!
What I wondered in that book is why Eurasia and Eastasia never ganged up against Oceania. It always managed to be at peace with one, which was some astute statesmanship by Oceania.
Yeah, in the spirit of the challenge I hadn't revisited the book for the initial comment, but took a read over the last part and my impression is that O'Brien was lying about that part. The ending where he meets Julia again suggested to me that her room 101 treatment was some kind of lobotomy - which would seem to imply that she was psychologically more stubborn than Winston, not less so (although maybe on matters that weren't related to Winston himself? But seems thematically appropriate for O'Brien to manipulate reality to his whims on Julia as well)
And yeah, that's a good point. Honestly my impression given the book-within-the-book is that none of the three countries are actually aligned at any given time, they're all functionally identical superstates jockeying for position without any real expectations of substantive wins, but Oceania just has a vested interest in keeping the full populace on tilt about who the real enemy is.
Apparently I was smart enough to remember details of a book I read in high school but too dumb to consider that maybe the totalitarian-state interrogator guy was lying.
To be fair, that part is where he's all "I like you, Winston, we're kinda the same except you're a bit nuts, so I'll let you ask questions"
So I think you're meant to take him at least slightly at face value as being more genuine there - but I guess the point is also that even when full Party acolytes aren't trying to lie, they're able to not actually tell the truth
I don’t think he lies at all in that entire sequence. He’s not intended as a realistic character; he’s our view into how the totalitarian state functions.
I assumed at the time that the countries really are rivals because in the real world we have the West, the Soviet block, and China, and it was obviously referring to that.
I think I'd always assumed that the three states aren't rivals in any sense, the Party runs them all.
This was my conclusion as well. The "1%" had determined that the status quo could only be maintained by a calculated ongoing war that sacrificed a number of the masses each year in the pursuit of stability while playing at war.
I'm sure they were run by the same kind of party, but they could still be rivals. The Soviets and China were both Communist, but split pretty quickly.
The book insinuates that they're run by different "Parties", but that in all that really matters they're mostly the same.
IIRC it's explicitly mentioned as an instance of doublethink, the powers simultaneously realize that perpetual war is beneficial to all and also are trying to conquer each other; and this isn't quite the same as the war being entirely for show, on some level they were in fact trying to win.
China was not actually a third rival in 1948. A bit like Bonfire of the Vanities preceding the Tawana Brawley case.
My recollection from high school class discussion is that none of the countries have a real vested interest in winning the war. They just need to be at war to stimulate the economy, manipulate the population, and justify a constant state of emergency.
They need to be at war, but not to win. This justifies sacrifices on the part of the proles and the Outer Party, and *keeps the Inner Party in power*.
Stimulate the economy? That's the broken windows fallacy. It's another lie to keep the population in line.
Orwell did seem to believe there was a problem of overproduction that needed to be dealt with.
I think it's more about controlling the economy rather than stimulating it. Post-war Britain was in "the Age of Austerity" - the economy was limping along, rationing was still in force, and the UK was trying to survive via USA loans and paying off its debts.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zgmf2nb/revision/1
"One of the key challenges facing the UK in 1945 was the economic position of the country.
The national debt had risen from £760 million to £3500 million. Britain had spent close to £7 billion, or a quarter of the national wealth, on the war effort.
The UK was spending £2000 million a year abroad, while earning only £350 million in return. Loans from the USA were vital if the UK economy was to recover.
One in three houses had been destroyed by bombing whilst factories and shops had also been destroyed in large numbers.
Britain suffered 264,433 military and 60,595 civilian deaths during the war. Many others were physically and mentally scarred by the war and unable to resume normal life.
177 merchant ships and two-thirds of the Navy had been sunk, so food supplies were still a problem. Rationing remained in place for another 10 years. Income tax remained high to help the Government pay for the reconstruction.
This period saw the end of the British Empire. Its standing in the world had declined as it became impossible to contend with the economic might of the USA.
Wartime rationing had to be continued due to shortages of food and raw materials. This period in UK history is often called the Age of
Austerity."
People will put up with shortages and planned economy if it's to support "the War", so there always has to be a war for the government to tell the populace "this is why you need to tighten your belts".
Yeah I recall a bit saying that Eurasia could easily annex Airstrip 1 (Britain), but chose not to, as the countries had tacitly agreed to restrict their war to a defined grey zone.
I think they specifically were not stimulating the economy, nor seeking any of the usual technological advances from wa; rather war was used to deflect the attention of the people away from the Party, in all the three countries. And give a perpetual cover for why there was never enough to eat, etc. Only occasionally on the periphery did they ever have a little burst of hot war, so Goldstein’s (O’Brien’s) book said.
The only evidence of a lobotomy is a scar on her head. Torture is a much more parsimonious explanation.
Also fair - I guess I was thinking more about the specificity of the scar on the head for room 101 + the whole "she was rigid and awkward like a dead body" thing, which made me think of brain damage. It would also seem to fit with Julia's character being defined by a sort of rebellion and individualism, so her greatest fear could conceivably be forcibly losing that
But then, Winston's greatest fear wasn't being fat and ugly and he's described that way late in the book too. So 🤷♂️
Also, Room 101 is the place where they break you by exposing you to your greatest fears. Unless Julia's greatest fear was being lobotomised (which I suppose is possible), she probably wasn't given a lobotomy there (although I suppose she might have got one in some other part of the Ministry).
>What's funny is that at one point in the book, Julia admits that she didn't realize Oceania's enemy has changed repeatedly in her life time. I think the reader is meant to glean from that that she is still partially brainwashed, but reading this post, maybe she just doesn't remember!
Julia believes that the war isn't actually happening, which is actually plausible since the rocket barrages are suspiciously timed to intensify during Hate Week. The general takeaway is that Winston sees through the first layer of the deception (that Big Brother is good, when he's not) but is easily caught by the next layer (the Brotherhood is good, when in fact it's apparently merely an ongoing honeypot), whereas Julia rejects more of it - she also achieves more, as she at least mostly got to enjoy her life while Winston was stressed out for years and accomplished nothing thereby.
I love this take. Winston Smith is totally a doomscroller who makes himself miserable. It's no wonder he's so easy for many of us to identify with.
It is also appropriate that I, named after a tormented Dostoyevsky character, looked down on Julia whereas you Magic Mushroom figured out she was the wiser one.
That’s insightful. The same basically red-blooded attitude toward life that makes Julia indifferent to the Party, makes her indifferent to the Brotherhood.
I see Winston as having just enough of the aspirational intellectual in him to represent those the Party most likes to “win”.
>What I wondered in that book is why Eurasia and Eastasia never ganged up against Oceania. It always managed to be at peace with one, which was some astute statesmanship by Oceania.
We don't know if they have. We don't really even know if they exist, we can't be sure of anything that the Ingsoc regime says about the rest of the world.
Hypothetically, it's too tempting for one of them to defect, so there can't be a stable alliance.
If the war isn't completely fake, it's plausible that Oceania is the weakest of the three, with the other two permanently at war with each other and Oceania strategically switching sides to maintain the balance of power and contain whichever one is stronger at the moment.
A chapter of Goldstein’s book says that Oceania is protected by the ocean, Eurasia by the steppes, and Eastasia by its large population, and yet each country could carve out bits of the others yet chooses not to.
>What I wondered in that book is why Eurasia and Eastasia never ganged up against Oceania.
Because War is Peace.
Winston finds Goldstein's writings at some point, and they explain the "wars" are all proxy battles about dumping excess resources to maintain control of the population, not about actually gaining territory. If they conquer each other they won't have an easy way to create hardships.
The book is quite explicit about the fact that Julia's rebellion is somewhat superficial. She's not really rebelling against the philosophy of the party, she just wants to have some casual sex and some fun.
Canonically the reason why Eurasia and Eastasia never united to defeat Oceania was that the war was intended solely to use up excess production:
"The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of
DOUBLETHINK, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by
the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the
machine without raising the general standard of living"
The war also gives citizens a reason to give up power to the Inner Party (or its counterparts).
The lack of effort to make significant gains is also explained. The war never involved that states actually invading each other. They only ever fought in colonies in a massive disputed area containing parts of Africa and Asia:
"War prisoners apart, the average
citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or
Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he
were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are
creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about
them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the
fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might
evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia,
or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must
never be crossed by anything except bombs."
In other words, Oceania and the others only fight these wars to oppress its own citizens. The incoherent strategy is explained in a banned book that the protagonist is given as a trap, so maybe the explanation isn't accurate.
Julia seemed to understand as Winston did not, that it was meaningless. Certainly to her. She was not the least interested in the doings of the Party, where to Winston it was a puzzle he worked on by degrees over many years.
Julia definitely wasn’t a double agent. There’s a whole scene at the end of the book where Winston and Julia reconnect (it’s a horrifying reunion, but it happens) and it’s clear that she underwent the same torture and brainwashing that Winston did.
No it isn't. She still has all her teeth and appears to be pregnant. And we only saw her being taken away, but didn't see anything else that happened to her in between.
The Party was onto Winston from the start. Why wouldn't they also have used a honeytrap if they used everything else against him, too? Julia only started coming onto him -- by literally giving him a note that said "I love you" -- after he started writing his illegal journal, which was literally sold to him by a Party informant.
Orwell wasn't just some guy, neither. He was a former police officer. Meaning he knew how LEOs actually think, and how to run reliable operations against a desired target. You mean to tell me he wrote a book about a guy who, upon triggering his police-state's alarm, was immediately pursued sexually by an attractive woman half his age, whom we only see from said poor sap's PoV, and that there was never supposed to be any implication she was a spy the whole time?
The only reason more people don't pick up on it, beyond it being extremely depressing, is that most of us read the book when we're too young to be able to appreciate subtle touches like this.
O’Brien makes it clear that they interrogated her and she betrayed him: “a textbook case.” When Winston sees her she has a visible scar. For that matter she has no reason to describe her treatment to Winston like she does if it didn’t really happen. Orwell drops too many details suggesting she was tortured for that not to be the case; if it’s not what he was going for, he’s not a competent storyteller.
So the Party lacked access to scar makeup? And the ability to train their agents to lie continuously and come up with plausible cover stories? Or, assuming it wasn't scar makeup, she couldn't have gotten it some other way given her dangerous line of work?
Not that I'll go as far as to say it's open-and-shut Julia was a spy. The whole point is that you never find out anything for sure. But the idea that she absolutely WASN'T is preposterous.
Of course from the perspective of reality it's feasible that she's a spy. But from the perspective of fictional construction, it's not feasible, imo. A huge amount of the book's impact is that O'Brien is honest with Winston during his interrogation. O'Brien is a nearly superhuman figure: he knows what Winston is thinking before he says it, he even knows Winston's dreams ("the place where there is no darkness"). He spends a tremendous amount of time expounding on the theory of the totalitarian state in a way that has little or no value as psychological torture, but serves to inform the reader of Orwell's ideas on the subject, and being a vehicle for those ideas is a huge part of what the book is about. He also admits to earlier deceptions, like writing Goldstein's book. If O'Brien lied about Julia betraying Winston, all as a way of further manipulating him, then everything else he says in the interrogation could be a lie in service of breaking Winston. That would make him a better interrogation agent, but a worse expounder of Orwell's ideas. Orwell wasn't just trying to recreate Darkness at Noon, to show how people could be manipulated; like Winston, he understood HOW, but with this book he wanted to understand WHY. If O'Brien's interrogation testimony isn't truthful, then those chapters are a tremendous waste of time.
Furthermore, while you elsewhere said people don't consider that Julia might be a spy because it's depressing, I'd argue that it's actually more crushing the other way: that Julia was a sincerely physical, intuitive, sensual being (the complement to Winston's rationality and contemplation) who was sincerely broken and made to hate freedom just as Winston was. For her to be a super-spy would not add anything to our understanding of the Party's power; we already know from the figure of Mr. Charrington that they have those. For her to be a sincerely loving person beaten by the Party just like Winston was, even though her gifts are different from Winston's and seemingly more resilient, shows that there's no escape either through the mind or through the heart. That to me is much more in line with what 1984 is trying to tell us about totalitarianism.
The fact is that any character in the book *could* be a member of the Thought Police, but I don't see any evidence in the book that Julia *was* one, and I see plenty of thematic reasons why that would make it a worse book.
I agree; the whole thing about Winston and Julia is their mutual belief that “they can’t change our thoughts (about each other).” That theme is much less compelling if one-sided. The breaking of personal bonds was so much in the air then. It’s sort of the main point of intersection between 1984 and Brave New World.
I agree with Tom, below - though I'd argue that you can't trust O'Brien's version of anything, I think it's pretty clear in the reunion scene that she went through the same thing Winston did. She even states clearly that the same pressure that broke Winston broke her as well - that once she fully understood that she was willing to sacrifice Winston to save herself that there wasn't anything else to hold on to.
There just isn't any reason to think that she was a spy or a plant (or pregnant - all Winston notes is that her body had changed, that it was "thicker". I think it's all just demonstrating that she had all the passion burned out of her, and that they're alien to each other now). Every other spy was gleefully shown to Winston (and the reader). She never says anything in that final conversation that suggests she was anything other than a fellow victim.
If she revealed she was in on it, there'd have been no value in Winston giving her up to O'Brien in Room 101, and hence they'd lose out on achieving their objective of getting Winston to not merely submit, but to love his oppression.
It's been years since I read the book, but I don't think that's at all right. Winston meets Julia after Winston had been in room 101 and Winston's treatment had progressed to the point that Winston released from the Ministry of Love. I don't think Julia revealing to Winston that Julia had been a plant all along would undermine the effects of what happened in room 101. To the contrary, it would further undermine any remnants of Winston's love for Julia.
The bigger point is the one already argued in more depth by Tom Hitchner: This is a work of fiction, so if Julia were lying in that scene, the author would find a way to let us know.
Julia represented a sort of instinctive, unthinking, natural-as-breathing-and-sex opposition to the Party, as against Winston’s painful intellectual awakening, which was less robust perhaps although Julia too was said to have betrayed Winston as he did her: “Do it to Julia!”
Well julia tells winston shes had several previous affairs with the same basic contours and julia approaches him. So either for some reason she only got caught with winston, or she is an agent of the state. (Of course they are all agents of the state really)
Yes.
From 1984 [1], Part 1 Chapter 1:
> this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania.
From Part 2 Chapter 9:
> The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three super-states are in some places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait. *** Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa. *** Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
There is, by the way, a fan theory/interpretation of the story that every single thing Winston didn't see with his own eyes in the storyline in fake, there is no Oceania or Eastasia or Eurasia, it is Britian (or even London alone) that has descended into a North-Korea-like totalitarianism that invented an entire world history and geopolitics to its liking. The rockets that keep falling on London are launched by this very totalitarianism at their own territory. The world outside could be anything, possibly our own world, possibly a cold-war-like world, possibly a radically different world than the one described in 1984, or perhaps a severely watered-down version of what the party has exaggerated and spiced up.
[1] https://www.george-orwell.org/1984/
That theory is intriguing and consistent with part of the spirit of the novel as a piece of art (the use of unreliable narrator), but I think it runs contrary to the spirit of the message (being, double-think as an all-pervasive force that literally everybody, even the most powerful, are absorbed by).
The Inner Party being so macchiavelian as to literally invent the war seems less doublethink-y than some high ranking officer investing every waking minute in a great plan to retake Kinshasa for the glory of Oceania while at the same knowing it does not really matter and Eurasians will re-retake it soon after
I always figured the geopolitics in the books were a lie, and the UK was basically North Korea on the North Sea.
I need to jump in here on this entire discussion. I just spent the week in a cabin and found a copy of animal farm and 1984 and chose to reread them both. I just finished yesterday morning!
The amazing thing is that all the discussion on this thread is of various people’s memory of a book which they read decades ago, and most of the comments are extremely accurate. Thus the readers of this blog do remember what they read years ago, primarily in High School.
Does this refute the idea that we don’t learn in school? Or does it show that only some people learn, namely the same people attracted to substacks like this one?
I have always been skeptical, personally, about the idea that people don’t learn much in school. I learned a lot, and didn’t really try very hard (though I was valedictorian). On the other hand I am also extremely well acquainted with a lot of people who both know very little (they would totally flunk the test at the start of this post) and they show zero interest in learning anything of this nature.
Thoughts?
> Does this refute the idea that we don’t learn in school? Or does it show that only some people learn, namely the same people attracted to substacks like this one?
Not precisely either of those, but closer to the latter. More like, "everyone learns and retains *things that are important to them or of interest to them,* and there's a strong overlap between people who are going to be interested in trivia and literature, and people who would be attracted to a site like this."
This seems reasonable. Do others agree?
I'm not sure it aligns with my experience. The things I can definitively put my finger on as "being learned in school" and NOT by osmosis are... almost by definition... things I have no inherent interest in (if I did have, I would have read more widely on it outside of school and couldn't therfore be sure it wasn't absorbed/kept by osmosis).
Oxbow Lakes and a lot of Geography spring to mind, as I remember a lot of that stuff (the water cycle etc etc) and have definitely never pursued that knowledge outside of school..... MacBeth/Classic lit more generally also springs to mind... German/French vocab and grammar ... I can be sure in all these cases anything I do know I learned at school, and have had either zero or minimal cultural reinforcement of in poart because of my lack of interest.
Auschwitz was not a concentration camp. It is a city where it was located. The whole city was not a camp. Oświęcim (Auschwitz in German....) is much more than that. I live in Oświęcim and it makes me feel sick when people assume my home, my city, is only a giant living museum to the horrors inflicted in the past
Full text of the question is "During the Holocaust, Jews and many others were sent to concentration camps, death camps, and ghettos. Can you name any concentration camps, death camps, or ghettos you have heard of?" and 44% mentioned Auschwitz in their response.
> it makes me feel sick when people assume my home, my city, is only a giant living museum to the horrors inflicted in the past
Ooh, you're not gonna like hearing that a lot of people view the entirety of continental Europe that way, as a huge graveyard of horrors... But in Auschwitz's case, the entire current population is less than a thirtieth of the number of people who were killed there, so it's somewhat more justified.
I responded below - the survey asked both "What was Auschwitz" and "Can you name any..."
An ironic consequence of the Western Eurocentric education is that people associate violence, inequality, and exploitation with America and/or Europe. You read about the Bantu Expansion and the Dungan Revolt and you realize it's the same stuff everywhere.
I recently saw a black YouTuber or Tik...Tokker?– mention something about "solidarity with my Arab brothers who suffered under the white slavers and oppressors alongside us", and I actually involuntarily chuckled out loud upon hearing it — it's just so incredibly through-the-looking-glass to the actual history involved that it's not even depressing any more.
I wanted to leave a comment along the lines of: "Yes, my friend: the Arab corsairs fought valiantly to curtail the rapacious British slavers, as the foul Limeys sought new eunuchs to guard their harems and seized thousands of women along the shores of Cir–... wait, waaaait a second!—"
...but it's hopeless so I didn't bother, heh. 🤷♂️
I like to watch World Friends, which is a talk show on youtube featuring a rotating cast of people who work as models in Korea. (Technically, some of them aren't models. Mostly they're models.) The gimmick is that they're all from different countries and comparisons are drawn between relevant cultures and/or languages. Sometimes this works better than others.
There was one episode in which everyone was asked to rate their geographical knowledge and then posed a series of really easy geographical questions.
One question that everybody aced was "where is Egypt?"
There were only two guests who didn't immediately point to Egypt. They were the two American blacks, and neither of them had any idea where Egypt might be.
This probably goes some way toward explaining the persistence of the Black Cleopatra myth.
There's a difference between YOUR horror and the horror happening because it was convenient. There are cities with over 50% of population being Jewish before the war. Many cities were like 30%. Oświęcim is just located in very good location transport-wise, that's why there are like 7 big amusement parks in 10 miles radius. But it's not our horror compared to cities which lost half of their people, now trying to go on like normal. It's not Będzin, now a city like any other, which was over 90% Jewish (now there's about 10k Jews in a whole of Poland). It's the ground, the earth. But we, from Oświęcim, lost only a small part of our people.
Also Europe is no more living horror museum than China but no one views it that way.
That is exactly how China is seen by an enormous number of people, especially Americans.
My take on it is essentially Abraham Erskine's: So many people forget that the first country that the Chinese Communist Party invaded was their own.
If you like Chinese horror, boy have I got a story for you: https://endtransplantabuse.org/bodies-at-an-exhibition/
"Ooh, you're not gonna like hearing that a lot of people view the entirety of continental Europe that way, as a huge graveyard of horrors..."
I wonder who you're thinking of. I would say a moderate number of Jews (which still adds up to a fair number of people), but anyone else?
anyone who's heard of the thirty years war; many non-europeans living in ex-colonies (include some Americans)
Let's see what all I can name just off the top of my head:
WW1 & 2
Winter War
Thirty Years' War
War of the Roses
The Troubles
Napoleon
French Revolution
Muslim conquest of Spain and Portugal leading to Reconquista
Various genocides in the Balkans
Various other factional wars in Britain between some combination of Protestants, Catholics, Irish, Scotts, and English
Seem to recall the Basque people having been pretty heavily oppressed, don't recall if it's something that would be called genocide.
And this isn't counting all the various empires, of which I seem to recall English, Portuguese (dunno how influential that was on the continent), Spanish, French, Austria-Hungarian, Dutch, Swedish, Roman, Macedonian...
But this is also pretty heavily biased by what I learned in... well, some of this I learned in school, but now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure most of it was cultural osmosis. Regardless, there's a bias in what I've been exposed to. My list for East Asia would be about half that big? Middle East should properly count as Asia, but the numbers there will be biased because the US has been at war there for most of my life at this point. My knowledge of African history is comparatively tiny.
Edit: Oh, and if we count Russia and Ukraine as Europe, we can add the Holodomor. And, y'know, the current war going on there.
Yup! Are the Hundred-years war and the Franco-Prussian war additions to the list, or are they other names for wars you have already listed?
Yeah, when I think of history, it is mostly the history of slaughter...
( With occasional bits of the history of science and technology thrown in for relief. )
I'm a bit suss on the methodology of the test, I'd like to see the list of 'marked as wrong' answers sorted by frequency before assuming that the college students actually didn't understand these questions. For example Dachau and Ravensbruck are perfectly good answers to the question here --- and on the who did the US declare independence from, I'm not convinced that UK, England and Britain were all scored as correct.
> For example Dachau and Ravensbruck are perfectly good answers to the question here
Respondents could give multiple answers. 6% mentioned Dachau among their answers, 36% didn't name anything, 12% named incorrect answers.
I don't think that's right - the survey asked both "What was Auschwitz?" (Question 6) and "Can you name any concentration camps, death camps, or ghettos?" (Question 21)
In response to Question 6 in the 2018 US Survey, about 44% of millennials answered that Auschwitz was a death camp or concentration camp. (Edited to add: or "forced labor camp" - I was reading the table a little incorrectly.)
https://www.claimscon.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Holocaust-Knowledge-and-Awareness-Study-%E2%80%93-Topline-Results-1-1.pdf
Given that Scott linked the 2020 US survey, I assumed that the question being referenced was Question 5 there, which did have 44% give Auschwitz among in their list, especially since the summary page mentions the stat together with the results for other camps given in that question. Not completely sure.
Thank you! That explains the terrible results-- that's a recall question, not a recognition question! Of course you'll get abysmal results if you ask for recall. Recognition matters more.
I think one thing average people are confused about is where the concentration camps were located, and where the Jews and others sent to them, originated.
ETA: and for reasons I don't know (Cold War, not yet having access to records?) what little we were taught in school about WW2 made little mention of the east and its unfathomable suffering, to the point that when I read more about it much later on, I was genuinely shocked to discover what happened in Belarus, for example.
If you're American, it's probably at least partially because we were pretty uninvolved in eastern front. If we weren't involved, it clearly wasn't important, and we were too busy with the western front and the Pacific theater to worry about such minor things as Stalingrad.
I wasn’t alive during the war.
Neither was I. I'm saying our history books tend to only care about the parts we were involved in.
One thing that this highlights but was not mentioned is that we know for a fact there is a large difference between memory recall and memory recognition. The full text requires someone to search their brain, and generate a foreign-sounding name with only a sentence or so of context. And the stated statistics only mentions a single one. This is clearly flawed for our desired use of the statistic.
A better statistic would be what percentage were able to identify at least one actual concentration camp, death camp, or ghetto?
On top of that, I'm pointing out that setting *recall* as a threshold for education being useful is unfair. There's merit to recognition as well! Like, if someone starts talking about Auschwitz then you might still be able to functionally engage in the conversation upon recognition alone. If you had never heard of Auschwitz outside of cultural osmosis, by contrast, you probably never developed enough of a mental context to be able to do so in a meaningful way.
That does sound very tough. It makes sense that people connect those negative dots so strongly, but it's unfortunate that it negatively impacts the perception of the entire city so many years later. I'm sure there are many tourists/visitors. But I guess few would choose Ausschwitz as their residence due to the cities history alone.
There's been an interesting language shift in that even 20 years ago, most certainly 30+ years ago, both the camp and the town were, in Polish and in Poland, called by the same (Polish) name, Oświęcim. I've noticed an almost total shift (at least in mainstream media, idk about colloquial use) towards calling the camp by its German name now (while the town obviously remains with the Polish one). Initially I thought it was to improve clarity to foreigners who'd not know the Polish name, but now I think that it's likely a way to separate the contemporary reality of the town from the horror of the history (which is becoming possible three generations on, allowing for the still lingering population level trauma entrenched in the society and culture).
I wish they could change that stupid German name. "Au" means "ow", and "schwitz" is the erikativ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs of "sweat", and combined it's a dreadful trivialization of the horrors that happened there. It's some caricature of a joke, like the cynical pseudo-funny slogans they put on their KZ gates, like "work makes free" and "to each his own", which really makes me sick.
This is nonsense.
I see you have a German nickname, so perhaps you are used to applause from compatriots when spreading such absurdities. But -witz or -vitz is a perfectly ordinary Slavic suffix, as anyone would know who 1) has heard about Poland 2) can name a couple of places in East Germany 3) can name a few Americans of Jewish origin.
Could you please be more polite? I know it's not the correct etymology. But I can well imagine SS guards laughing about this hilarious joke, because they don't care about etymology.
And I don't know how you imagine Germans talking about the holocaust. I have never received applause for this, because I have never told anyone about it.
It's perfect location when it comes to transport. It's near two highways intersection, very good access to the train network, close to the big cities.... it's not a coincidence many kids from here got to very good schools in Katowice/Kraków.... but it's much cheaper.... so very easy to commute anywhere you need to
"It's perfect location when it comes to transport." That's why the Nazis put the concentration camp there, incidentally.
Yes. Everyone who's been knows that.
What was the name of the camp? Wasn’t it Auschwitz-Birkenau?
Auschwitz-Birkenau was a part of the larger "KZ Auschwitz" complex. It is infamously known for being the largest extermination camp in Nazi Germany.
Auschwitz was a concentration camp, Birkenau was a death camp.
A "death camp," with gas chambers? Were people killed there, or were they just sent there when they were dying?
Yeah, that's the typical distinction between death camps and the other forced labor camps (aka concentration camps, I'm unsure of formally that term is meant to be inclusive of the death camps or only refer to the latter). Iirc, huge numbers of people died in the latter - they had life expectancy of < 1 year, because they rapidly worked people to death. But the death camps are those with the gas chambers etc.
* I'm almost certainly wrong on the details. A quick wiki search will surely give a better answer.
As unfortunate as it must be for any resident "KZ Auschwitz" was indeed the official name of that concentration camp.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/KZ_Auschwitz
You think I don't know that? But it's still a city. So simplifying that Auschwitz= concentration camp only is inaccurate. It was better stated in a full questionnaire given to the participants in the test.
But saying 'they don't know Auschwitz was a concentration camp" is perfectly accurate.
If x is the name of two things, in category a and category b, it's perfectly fine to say 'x is an a' or 'x is a b'. See, for example: 'Mississipi is a state'.
Given that you are from Poland, this may be a translation issue- but there is really nothing to complain about here.
No, I don't think so. I fully sympathize with the residents of Oświęcim who would like their town to be associated with probably anything else in world history.
For what it's worth, though, I have never heard anyone blame (or praise, in some unfortunate cases) the town itself for the crimes committed near it. I believe that people of all political persuasions are well able to discern between "Auschwitz the Nazi occupied town and concentration camp" and "Oświęcim the Polish town with history outside of WW2", even if they have no clue at all of Oświęcim.
What I'm trying to get at is that for the overwhelming majority of people in the world who know the name "Auschwitz" at all, it is synonymous with the concentration and extermination camp, and most might not even realize that it's the (German) name of an actual town that merely had the misfortune of being used as its location and namesake. Using "Auschwitz" as a synonym for the camp is neither fully wrong nor very if at all harmful to Oświęcim.
The brute fact of the matter is, Auschwitz will be associated with the Holocaust proportionally to what else Oświęcim contributed to world history. For the past 80 years, this has leaned heavily towards to the former. Quite frankly, I would also not want the that proportion to shift away from the Holocaust because it faded out of the collective memory: The value of that memory as a warning to future generations can hardly be overstated. If you agree, perhaps you can also find it in you to accept the role Auschwitz (as opposed to Oświęcim) has to play.
The UNESCO- certified camp complex museum will always be here, for future generations. It's huuuuge but it won't be redeveloped. There are thousands of death places never marked or mentioned, but this specific one will stay. But that's all we can guarantee you get: the museum, not the city. Honestly most people living here benefit from the tourism sector, many operate b&b etc. But it's more like Hiroshima: there's an important history and a lesson for future generations, no one denies that, but it's also... a city. You know: universities, schools, corner shops, hair salons, shoe shops... You get swamped with election ads right before any voting.... We get to be a city. Anyone wanting to remember for their short visit gets a museum.
Also I do think that if we owe anyone anything, it's to the Jewish community. So if everyone wants to front us some money to build at last a proper synagogue (we have a small cramped room right now...) in Oświęcim, or even just some idk Jewish prayer room, they're welcome to it. So many Jews ask about it and it feels sad every time I tell them that that's all we've got.
These are all reasonable concerns, together with your other reply, but I have to ask: By what mechanism do you expect daily life in your city to improve in real ways if people just "remember" that Oświęcim is more than the former Auschwitz concentration camp? You already said that your city materially benefits from the Auschwitz tourism.
Picking up on the synagogue example, do you ask for direct (or increased, if they already exist) contributions from e.g. the UN/UNESCO/Israel to your city's budget so you can build that proper synagogue, and do you believe this was more likely to happen if people mentally separated Auschwitz and Oświęcim?
I don’t see any implication that Auschwitz was only a concentration camp, any more than “Pearl Harbor” is only an attack.
Did you know that there remains an active US navy base at Pearl Harbor today? I didn't, until I went to visit the Pearl Harbor tourist attraction one time, and the GPS took me to the base instead, and I got escorted back out by armed gate guards muttering about stupid tourists.
I hear Guantánamo Bay has some lovely beaches!
I feel bad that your city has to bear that association, but what are you objecting to? The post says, "44% know Auschwitz was the site of a concentration camp." Is that not accurate?
If it said "44% know that Shakespeare was a playwright", would you object that Shakespeare is not only the playwright because there are a handful of other unrelated famous people with the same surname?
I think this might be a difference in US/Polish usage. When I type "Auschwitz" into English Wikipedia, I get the page for the concentration camp, with a blurb at the top saying ""Auschwitz" redirects here. For the city, see Oświęcim. For other uses, see Auschwitz (disambiguation)"
Well! I have been educated, and I will help you right this wrong. From now on, I will not only call it by its proper name, but too shall add your quote there so the reader may learn as I have:
"One of the worst of all the death-camps, where tens of thousands died, was 'Oświęcim' (note: actually, it is much more than that!)."
No problem. Some may say I am a hero, but I prefer to simply call myself a super-ally. 🙂
1. It was not Oświęcim camp. It was at most a camp in Oświęcim.
2.Also Auschwitz was a concentration camp, Birkenau was a death camp.
3. It was Nazi-administered and forcibly germanized (like all the city names for example), on all the documents you have Auschwitz never Oświęcim.
4. Also you are downplaying deaths.
So not any kind of ally here
Unfortunately, the way language works is that bad connotations do not get removed from words. This is the cause of things like the 'treadmill of the euphemisms', where people refer to a thing indirectly, but the indirect usage becomes just as bad as the original meaning, and then needs another euphemism, and repeats. It's also a natural part of language that people refer to things by their location, such as 'DC' referring to the US government rather than the District of Columbia
Fighting this is almost impossible; the most effective course of action is to find a new name for the town and point all the Auschwitz signs at the camp. Or just always refer to the town as Oświęcim and the camp as Auschwitz.
We would never rename it, there's too much camps all over Poland and it would not be worth it. Also we do refer to Oświęcim as Oświęcim and to the camp as Auschwitz, because these are their official names in the registeries. I don't expect laypeople to know the difference, just wanted to highlight it under an article with bigger reach that could gain traction.
For most of my life (I'm 70), "concentration camp" was the usual term for death camp.
This may not have been optimal, but it's the history of language we've got.
Yes, wasn't there a conversation about this, maybe in last year's book reviews?
Now hold on... if you *do* want to focus on the deaths, and — although *you yourself* readily interpreted a reference to "Auschwitz" as referring to "[your] city" of Oświęcim — you *do* see the two names as having different connotations and uses...
...then it almost seems like there's no point complaining about someone using "Auschwitz" to talk about the deaths there in the first place. 🤨
> Oświęcim (Auschwitz in German....)
Hm, I see that the German name is in fact just a Germanicization of the Polish name. It looks pretty naturally German to me, except that I barely know anything about German and could be easily fooled.
So - how well can "Auschwitz" pass for a German place name? Is it better than "Strasbourg" pretending to be French?
It's German because it's Silesian. Everything Silesian is a little German. Large part of the population was german-speaking. Lots of German names, to this day. Auschwitz is not a new word, that's how it was called in German throughout the years.
Yes, I used to live in Dachau, and it was similar there. When tourists stopped to ask directions, it was obvious what they were looking for.
The Dachau hospital closed their maternity ward, because so few people wanted that town name as their child's birth place.
I can't get over 69% of respondents not knowing Moscow is the capital of Russia. Imagine what other information has to be lacking to not know that. You can't know about WW2 or the cold War. It's not even one of those countries that has a trick capital like Australia or Brazil.
>You can't know about WW2
Most Americans think that USSR was allied with Nazis AFAIK.
For two years it sort of was, so can't blame them.
I'd be surprised if more than a percent of them know who either Molotov or Ribbentrop were. A much more likely mechanism seems to me that Nazis=evil, commies=evil, clearly natural allies.
Wasn't Molotov some kind of bartender?
🔥
He could really get you hammered.
I think he's better known for his spicy cocktails. They can get you really fired up, that's how hot they are.
Sickle burn.
Here is a piece of education:
The Molotov Cocktail was invented by FInnish soldiers fighting invading Soviet tanks with little real anti tank weaponry.
I don't know who either of those people are, but I still know what Molotov-Ribbentrop is.
They were the Foreign Ministers (well, Molotov was called People's Commissioner still, but it was effectively the same).
A non-aggression pact is not even sort of the same thing as agreeing to collaborate. The Soviet Union and the Nazis both did heinous things, but it's important to get the history right - they did those things *separately.*
Russia was invading Poland from the East as Germany was invading from the West; that's "separately" in only the narrowly geographic sense. If you count Germany and Japan as collaborating in 1942, it's hard to see how you deny Germany and Russia collaborating in 1939.
They agreed to a detailed plan for partitioning Eastern Europe.
See "Secret Protocol" section here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact
It was, in the beginning of the war.
They WERE alligned with the Nazis. They literally started the war together with a secret protocol and the invasion of a baker's half-dozen countries each:
https://www.kyleorton.com/p/socialism-could-never-have-a-human
Yes me too. But then the only one of the pop culture questions I knew the answer to was the puck one so there's that.
"The participants were recruited from introductory psychology courses at Kent State University, as well as from introduction to psychology and introduction to research methods courses at Colorado State University"
I's not much use to them. Incidentally, they did ask about the capital of Australia, and 1.5% of participants responded correctly.
And I cannot get over that so many people believe that cops shoot unarmed black men regularly--a stat which concerns me more than a lack of knowledge of national capitals. It seems people struggle with a lot of facts; why worry about the pedantic ones (can you spell the capital of Burkina Faso without cheating?) when other mistakes have so much more influence on our society?
Major warning, 50% - super not necessary to turn this one into a culture war thread.
Understandable, since that's definitely optimizing for heat rather than light, and he brought it up clumsily... but I can /sort of/ see a connection: perhaps the thinking was that this is a similar sort of innumeracy to that which was mentioned in the post? Like, 'the same people who only know "Big Brother" from TV also only "know" the prevalence of "cop violence" from TV'?
*edit:* ...okay, so it's a stretch & that's not how he framed it, really; so I'll concede the warning is probably deserved.
Not... not that anyone asked if I thought it was, come to think of it—
"Major warning, 50% - super not necessary to turn this one into a culture war thread."
Let me try to rephrase Zaruw's claim in a less polarizing manner: It is also amazing how many false claims people on the internet believe when a few minutes of Googling would provide the data for them to realize that they are wrong.
*MY* sadly cynical belief is that most people don't CARE if they are factually right or wrong. As long as the narrative backs their beliefs then they are content. The correctness of the actual position is pretty far down on the list of what is important. Which is why they don't even bother to check.
Given this, why would we be surprised if lots of people didn't know the capital of Russia? It just doesn't matter to them.
It just feels impossible to NOT know this even if you don't care.
Like, it doesn't matter to me that there is a famous TV personality called Kim Kardashian, or that there is a Golf player named Tiger Woods. But it would have been impossible to not learn these things at some point.
My comment is not meant to be polarizing. Like you, I feel people don't care about being factually right or wrong, and stating the "wrong" stat will somehow turn you into a "culture warrior". Can one have an opinion about the violence in Myanmar without knowing the capital? (Which is no longer Yangon.) I think so. Should I listen to someone who willfully mis-uses policing stats (regardless of intent or political leanings)? I think not.
As someone who has lived in many countries and travelled to many more, I think too many people overestimate their understanding of other nations. The OP said, "I can't get over 69% of respondents not knowing Moscow is the capital of Russia." How much SHOULD the average person know about Russia in terms of basic facts? GDP? Population? Military size?
Oh come on, you can't just write a post about how education is useless and college students are clueless and not expect discussion like this.
US race relations is a culture war topic where at least some large groups of people are working hard to obscure some facts and emphasize others, they succeed at some of this.
Moscow isn't a pedantic topic, as Thomas said "It's not even one of those countries that has a trick capital like Australia or Brazil."
I always interpret this as people exaggerating a stat for emphasis, similar to how you might say something heavy "weighs a ton". If someone says that 3,000 unarmed Black men are shot annually I just ignore the number and assume they mean "The number of unarmed Black men is unacceptably high" similar to if they said an obviously false number like a "zillion".
Is that helpful, though? On a topic closer to home for me, what to make of crimes committed against Asian Americans, and specifically those after Trump said "China Virus." There was nothing there to exaggerate for emphasis; it was pure misuse of stats to push the kind of "culture war" narrative I'm now being accused of making. My car mechanic not knowing the capital of Russia is much less of a concern to me than people in positions of power not understanding (or, worse, misusing) stats to push policies that misrepresent or even harm my community.
Helpful for what? You seem to believe that it was helpful for accomplishing their goal of implementing certain policies, but simply dislike those policies.
I'm agnostic about whether Trump's rhetoric led to discrimination (including crime) against Asian-Americans. What reasons do you have for rejecting that hypothesis? In other words, how do you know that there's nothing there to exaggerate? I don't think there's enough information to conclude either way which is why it's a "culture war" topic.
Well the original strain was at one time referred to in the literature as "Wuhan-Hu-1" and naming viruses after origin location is very common (norovirus, zika, dengue fever, ebola, Spanish flu*, lassa virus, hantavirus, Lyme disease, etc.). Trump calling it a "China virus" was a mere generalization and perhaps a rhetorical poke at the Chinese state without any racial connotation.
Meanwhile, those who pretended to be shocked by Trump on this issue were often supportive of the sort of policies that prevented Asians from being admitted to certain ivy league schools, with Harvard's justification something to the effect that Asians have "terrible personalities", or whatever. Compared to the absird idea that maybe Trump was dog whistling to his base that Asian skulls should be bashed in, the anti-asian bias in college admissions created tangible harms.
None of that really answers my question of why you're sure that the rhetoric didn't lead to increased discrimination. I don't think the etymology of Lyme disease is relevant. I was expecting you to say why the commonly cited data that indicates increased discrimination is flawed (I think it is) and give an alternative that you think is more accurate.
Instead, you pivoted to talking about the hypocrisy of some vague group of people. If you're not willing to respond to good-faith questions, we probably don't have much to talk about.
Russia has somewhat of a trick capital. If someone answered St. Petersburg, I could see the mix up since it was the capital for 200 years. If you answered anything else besides those two, I have no respect for you
Novgorod?
Turkey is much worse in that regard.
This one really made me wonder how valid the survey is. It's really, really, really hard for me to believe that, if I went onto a US college campus and asked a random person what the capital of Russia was, the chance of them not knowing the answer is higher than 2/3.
If I lived in the US, I think I would geniunely try to test this on the nearest university campus, it seems insane to me.
I'll try this tomorrow, albeit not thoroughly nor systematically, and see what the responses are — I have also had trouble believing some of these (I think I knew most, if not all, of those examples by the time I was like 10 years old; I had no friends, no video games, and no TV, though, just as many books as I wanted — so I developed weirdly, heh).
Really interested in the results! Also, the way they framed the questions to the students made it very clear that guessing was better than not answering, so that at least some of the correct respondents just guessed the first/only city they could think of in Russia etc.
With regards to knowing it at 10 years old, I thought something similar: I taught at a secondary school for a while, and I think that over half of all 8th-graders would have known this. I am from Germany, where students are tracked into different schools, and this was the lower academic tier.
I attended the higher academic tier, and I am almost certain that north of 80% of my classmates in 8th grade would have known this. And with Russia being so significant, I don't think that gap can be ascribed to geographical/cultural proximity.
Just really stunned by this result, and interested in hearing what yours are going to be.
So a teacher I know tested this question in an 8th and a 10th grade classroom at a lower academic tier school in Germany. 15/17 and 14/15 got it right, respectively.
Makes me side eye the result from the survey even more. I know that Americans tend to be bad at geography, but so bad that their college students get beaten by 8th graders from the bottom half of the academic distribution in Germany?
Thats really difficult to wrap my mind around.
I suspect that "Americans are bad at geography" is also greatly exaggerated.
Incidentally, I remember one time I met someone from Europe who was visiting the US who thought that Florida bordered Mexico. And this was a *college student* who *specifically traveled to the US*, so you'd expect them to be highly selected.
If an American visiting Germany thought that Bavaria bordered Poland, I wouldn't take that as evidence of them being bad at geography. People generally aren't expected to know the internal geography of foreign countries.
> People generally aren't expected to know the internal geography of foreign countries.
Only Americans are expected to know everything and mocked otherwise, for some reason. I suspect it's because Europeans haven't realized that they aren't the center of the world anymore yet.
Also, the proper analogy is not US -> Germany, but US -> Europe. This would be a bit like something thinking that Italy borders Turkey.
maybe as a non-American (are you European?) you underestimate how bad Americans are at geography. Most Americans have not been abroad.
That makes me curious - are Americans good at *American* geography?
To be fair, as a European, I couldn't name the 50 American states, and definitely not their capitals... it makes perfect sense that things geographically distant from you feel irrelevant.
I wonder what would be the neutral form of test. Something like: name some countries or states along with their capitals, you get 1 point for each correct answer? Then give me a histogram how many people got how many points, and also the list of frequently correct answers and their frequencies.
Hey now I'm pretty damn good at American geography. I don't remember the capital of Australia off the top of my head. I do know 50 state capitals and broad strokes of regional geography across a landmass larger than Europe
When a Brazilian professor said most of her students wouldn't know where exactly Ukraine is and an European colleague of mine was surprised, the former was like "how many of *your* students would know where exactly Bolivia is?"
My West Coast US experience has been that any town I know the name of is probably not actually the capital of whatever state it's in. Seattle's not the capital of Washington, Portland's not the capital of Oregon, San Francisco or Los Angeles aren't the capital of California.
In approximately 1/3 of states, the capital city is also the largest city. This isn't the case on the West Coast, but I'm sure you're at least somewhat familiar with Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta, Salt Lake City, Boston, Honolulu, and so on...
I always assume that Boulder, Augusta, and Springfield are the capitals of Colorado, Georgia, and Massachusetts, partly because of the heuristic that the largest city often isn't the capital, and partly because two of those are the names of capitals of other states. (And Boulder has the university, like many other capitals smaller than the biggest city - Madison, Austin, Lansing, Columbus, etc.)
But, as they say, "One out of three ain't good."
It's not like Albany or Madison are such famous metropolises either
The one I find even harder to believe, and which I would like someone to test, is that less than 1% knows that Hannibal is from Carthage.
How is it remotely possible that the founder of Taoism is much better known than what city the Romans were fighting against in the Punic Wars among student in the US, a Western country?
I assume that more students at the average US university have a grandparent who engages in Taoist practice than have any at-home discussions of Roman military history.
I see your point, but I still find it incredible that 99% doesn't know about Carthage.
I was under the impression that America, as a civilization, sees itself as part of the West, and therefore sees Greece and Rome as the past of its own civilization, and that Rome having fought Carthage was common knowledge.
I wouldn't say "99% don't know about Carthage". I suspect that if you ask people "have you ever heard of Carthage?", a non-trivial number would say "isn't that something to do with Rome?" If you ask them, "Which of the following fought two major wars with Rome? The Hittites, Carthage, the Ottomans, Cappadocia", the fraction over 25% that got it right would be even higher.
It's often hard to dredge up information that you haven't thought about recently, without a bit of prompting - but once you got them going, some of the people that didn't seem to know initially might even be able to come up with the elephants crossing the Alps thing.
So yes, this sort of thing is "common knowledge" in a sense, like Chester A Arthur being a president, or Denali being the tallest peak in North America. But the fact that it's almost never mentioned in contemporary culture (much less than basic aspects of Greek or Norse mythology) means that it doesn't come to mind very easily for most people.
It tripped me up because I forgot Carthage was a city-state. "What city in Carthage is Hannibal from?"
Cultural osmosis explains this one pretty handily. Asian Mysticism saw a pretty strong cultural interest from at least the Bruce Lee era up through now throughout the US. Whether exposure by pop TV and movies, "clever" book titles ("The Tao of X" sort of titles) or having friends or acquaintances that are on their second or third spiritual conversion, or Chinese takeout fortune cookies everyone has probably heard about Taoism and Confucianism (and probably others like Buddhism).
If people have heard about those things and then someone asks them about "what Chinese religion was founded by Lao Tse", even if they don't know the answer for sure, if they're only picking from the 2-5 asian religions they've picked up through osmosis (and even more if maybe they've heard the "Confucius says ..." jokes enough to not pick Confucianism), it seems reasonable to get to 4% of people giving the correct answer.
Oh, now I get it.
I had misread the question as "who was the founder of Taoism?"
If the question was instead "what religion was started by Lao Tse", it's much easier.
I don't know about Americans, but I'm Canadian and I don't have any idea who Hannibal is; and while I think I've heard of Carthage, I wouldn't have known what or where it is without reading the comments. I've heard of the Punic Wars, but I don't know anything about them. (I think, if asked, I'd assume they had something to do with Rome, but that would be a guess based on the word "Punic" feeling like a Latin or Latinized adjective.) I am very confident that I never learned about any of these things in school. So to me it seems bizarre to be shocked that hardly anyone knows that Hannibal is from Carthage; but maybe American school curriculum really is that different.
How old are you? When did you go to school? What history did they teach you? Was the history of Rome not taught?
I'm not from North America. One of these days I need to ask Americans on this site what they learn in school. I used to assume that history of western civilization is taught in the same way in the schools of all western countries. I may have been wrong.
> You can't know about WW2 or the cold War.
I know about both of these things and didn't know that Moscow was the capital of Russia. I mean, it's likely I was told that Moscow is the capital of Russia at some point in the course of being told about WW2 and/or the Cold War, but it's not a very salient fact about either of those things nor strongly connected to any of the more salient facts, so I forgot it.
" ...it's not a very salient fact about either of those things nor strongly connected to any of the more salient facts..."
Respectfully, I disagree.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-was-operation-barbarossa#:~:text=On%20the%2022nd%20of%20June,the%20Luftwaffe%20ruled%20the%20skies.
While I see your point, I'm not sure it's quite as powerful as you think. From what I vaguely recall of high school and honestly even college courses, most of the stuff about WW2 focused on the US campaigns and Nazi atrocities. Well, and US atrocities, if you count the nuclear bombs. For every reference to Operation Barbarossa, I can probably point to like 10 about D-Day. Even having known about Operation Barbarossa, I more associate it with Leningrad and Stalingrad than with Moscow. Which, looking at your link, I find that Stalingrad was actually after the failure of Barbarossa; whether I will remember that in a year is another question.
That link does nothing to prove your point.
Where was Hannibal from?
Lithuania, of course! 😉
The Los Angeles underground?
Hannibal is a town in Missouri, obviously.
The most salient reason to know Moscow is the capital of Russia is that lots of news stories use Moscow as a synecdoche for Russia or the Russian government (and before that the Soviet one), likewise other countries' capitals.
Prior to reading this article I didn't *know* the capital of Russia was Moscow. If someone asked me to *guess* the capital of Russia, Moscow would have been my first guess, but it could easily be a "trick capital" country, and I haven't spent enough time memorizing capitals to be sure.
If I think about news articles I've read about Russia, I'm pretty sure they reference the Kremlin and Putin being in Moscow, but that would only bring me up to an 80% or 90% confidence rate - still not enough to say I *know* Moscow is the capital. Thinking about WW2 or the Cold War doesn't help much, because I can't think of any big events from those wars that specifically involve the capital of Russia. WW2 was fought in a lot of different parts of Russia (I don't specifically remember a "battle of Moscow" or something similar), and the major event I remember from the Cold War is tearing down the Berlin Wall, which is obviously in Berlin, which I do remember is in Germany.
Realistically, the number of people who'd not answer because of quibbles about what counts as knowledge would be very small compared to the number of people who'd not answer because they really don't know. There may be a couple of percent of literal geeks who thought "Moscow probably is but I don't *know*" but you're not going to get to 69 percent that way.
<i>There may be a couple of percent of literal geeks who thought "Moscow probably is but I don't *know*" but you're not going to get to 69 percent that way.</i>
"Well, according to Plato we can only truly have knowledge about the Forms, therefore it's definitionally impossible to know a fact about the physical world like 'Moscow is the capital of Russia'."
The Nazis never quite reached Moscow, though they did get close before being turned back. The most famous battles are Stalingrad and Kursk, not Moscow.
Unlike Napoleon, who actually captured and occupied Moscow for all the good that did him.
I don't see how you got to not knowing about WW2 or the Cold War. The basic facts of those conflicts don't depend on Moscow's being the capital.
They likely don't know about the wars in any great detail, but that's hardly surprising.
Putting things that happened in a timeline correctly might also be something a lot of people fail at.
I assume most people will get WWI and WWII correctly placed, but their relation to the American Civil War or the Great Depression? Maybe not so much.
It's very easy to not make connections between historical events that you learned in isolation. E.g. most Americans have probably heard of Napoleon and the War of 1812 but won't realize they happened at the same time.
If you're accustomed to US capitals being basically random, you might reasonably guess it's Stalingrad or something, while knowing Moscow is the most populous.
I really want to know how the questions were phrased (I expect higher accuracy from "what country is Moscow the capital of?" than from "what is the capital of Russia?", and more accuracy still from certain multiple-choice versions).
If you follow the link, you find the study with all questions in a table.
It’s important to note that the students were also strongly encouraged to guess an answer if they weren’t sure, which makes the 31% figure even crazier.
And you can't have listened to any news that used "Moscow says" just like they use "Washington says". Or at least, never put it together.
That is the strangest part for me. Capitals are used all the time as metonymy for the governments of the main world powers.
It occurs to me that I grew up during the Cold War, and hearing news from Washington and Moscow was a regular and important occurrence. I was surrounded by Cold War spy movies and thriller books and so forth. But someone born in the 1990s might see Russia as "just another country".
Just learned this is metonymy and not synecdoche - so thanks!
of course, Synecdoche is a town in New York
Also the only starship capable of rescuing Princess Ryan from the evil Dar Yamaguchi!
Moscow was not always the capital of Russia ... just saying. Also: If someone thought Sidney is the capital of Australia: Zero chance that person knows anything worthwhile about down-under? Or if you did not know the capital of Brazil or South Africa or Switzerland or India or Myanmar or Vietnam or the Netherlands - or mix up those Baltic republics and their capitals all the time - you won't know anything about them, really? ... How many Europeans vs. Americans know the capital of California?!?
My personal experience with this particular question seems to back up Scott's hypothesis.
I know that Moscow is the capital of Russia, but I know it because there were KGB agents in some books I read as a kid and I had a friend from Moscow. And people mentioned it a lot when the olympics were in Russia.
Nowhere would I have connected my knowledge of Moscow to having learned about it in school, and I can't say with confidence that I ever did. (Like, I'm sure I did, but I don't remember it at all.)
> Imagine what other information has to be lacking to not know that. You can't know about WW2 or the cold War.
I don't think that's necessarily true. You can learn about WW2 just fine but forget certain facts about it or facts learned in connection with it, especially facts that aren't actually important to the bigger picture, like "Moscow is the capital of Russia". I know Moscow is the capital of Russia, but if you had asked me to whether I learned that in school I would have said "I don't think so". I'm pretty sure we had a geography unit in school, but I don't recall ever being taught the capitals of any countries other than my own.
It seems strange not to compare the results of schooling with the alternatives, presumably homeschooling or unschooling. It does not seem at all obvious to me that they would be a better solution!
“How about the alternatives?” was a question I also had when the big discussion around here was civil rights law.
Hmmm I'm not sure, did anyone argue that introducing civil rights law was bad itself, rather than that it was supposedly misused later-on? Genuine question, I havent followed the conversation strictly.
Thomas Sowell has made that point, noting that over the approximately 100 years from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, black Americans made slow, steady progress towards equality, but after 1964 that progress was sharply curtailed and in many cases even reversed. Aside from the collateral damage caused by the CRA's scope creep, Sowell makes a pretty strong case in _Black Rednecks and White Liberals_ that it has failed at its own stated goals.
I've seen occasional accounts from black people that the education was better in segregated schools because there were teachers who both thought the students could learn and were serious about teaching them. I've never heard anything about how common this was.
In any case, there was a claim that integrating the schools meant that black students were more like to get white teachers who didn't expect them to do well, whether trying to be kind about it or just being prejudiced.
I'd be skeptical of this.
The big advantage of formally segregated schools is that it reduces in-school bullying and makes the standard-deviation gap easier to account for. It has the disadvantage of screwing over the higher-IQ black students, especially were they to transfer to a white school, to which their prior education would have left them badly underqualified for their grade level. This is part of what happened with MLK, and hence why he relied on plagiarism to get his degrees.
The solution to this isn't to re-introduce racial segregation, but cognitive segregation. It's just most of the populous, especially the elites, reject this, because they don't like how it doesn't achieve balanced racial presence at every level of schooling.
I remember hearing it on NPR, a few years ago.
This does not prove that it was CRA stopping narrowing the gaps, maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe causality was backwards: because gaps stopped narrowing, activists wished to extend scope of CRA
Also, I think the timing was wrong. Progress only stopped in the 80s, and there are plenty of other explanations available for that.
Some people did, yes. I just replied to one of them on this subthread.
> did anyone argue that introducing civil rights law was bad itself, rather than that it was supposedly misused later-on?
idk about here, but I very much see it elsewhere
moderate libertains(reason.com) talk about it weakening freedom of association
rightwing substack seems to think that activist judges made the cooperates invent dei
etc.
It's not a matter of talk. The CRA objectively DID weaken freedom of association. Quite substantially. That was the whole point of its creation. To force companies and organizations to hire and provide services to people they didn't want to.
Whether that was a regretable necessity, a strong positive good, or an ultimately unjustifiable wrong turn for our society is a separate matter. But also of vastly less relevance than the question of whether we should still be using methods meant for crusing Jim Crow sixty years after its defeat, in a country that even with our recent souring of race relations is still close to a historic low in the personal racism of the populous. Especially given both our failure to close the gaps and our vastly better knowledge of the importance of human heredity.
That "race relations [are] still close to a historic low in... personal racism,' is essentially true for every day since the end of Jim Crow. I am not sure that I disagree with you (that the time may well have come), but this does not seem like a compelling argument.
Why not?
Hanania and some others argue that the only way to prevent such misuse would have been to not introduce the laws in the first place, and the way to prevent further misuse is to repeal them. Hanania and many other libertarians also argue that private entities shouldn't be banned from discriminating anyway, private individuals or companies should be free to decide whom they associate or do business with however they wish.
Should we really staying the course on our horrendous violations of civil liberties for the sake of goals anybody who knows anything serious about genetics, evo-psych, and anything remotely reliable from the social sciences, could tell you we're never gonna achieve? Especially given that we've objectively made tremendous advancements in racial harmony since the act's original implementation? And the cost of kneecapping what were originally the building blocks of a free society -- freedoms of speech, conscience, commerce, and association -- are hardly insubstantial.
Not that most libs actually care about such things anymore, as achieving equality of outcome is still clearly the chief desire of almost everybody really imporant in the leftoid bloc. But that still doesn't make it any less damaging for society. Especially given that, with the project to this point being a failure, the logical next step for them is to support the further curtailment of any of our rights which impede their goals.
You're debating the wrong person.
"But if we get rid of civil rights laws, how *else* are we supposed to establish that freedom of association doesn't apply to mean people?"
You aren't. That's the whole point.
As it happens, allowing free-market competition to operate would *also* be the most effective way to combat unjust discrimination, but it would still be the right thing to do regardless.
It seems like the unjust discrimination of Jim Crow lasted for around 70 years under a free market system with no sign of abating, and then vanished pretty quickly when that law was passed.
Nope. Jim Crow laws existed precisely because the free market was proving too effective in disincentivizing discrimination, which is why they weren't called "Jim Crow freely-made decisions by private individuals".
Jim Crow was not solely enforced by law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 targeted private businesses engaging in discrimination; the case challenging it, going all the way to the Supreme Court, was Heart of Atlanta Motel. There was no law forcing Woolworth to segregate its lunch counter. The whole reason for the Green Book was to tell Black travelers which businesses would serve them and which weren’t, which should demonstrate both that it was legal for businesses to serve them and that integrated businesses were marginalized; they did not dominate or even compete on par with segregated businesses (since if they did no book would have been necessary).
You're right in that Jim Crow was not solely a matter of law. Many in the South who supported it even did so when they knew the system was against their own economic interest. Putting an end to it probably did require government intervention.
The question is whether the interventions that were used were: (a) ultimately the right sort of interventions, either morally or practically; and (b) are still appropriate for 2024 America as opposed to 1964 America, especially given how much our knowledge of the importance of hereditarianism has advanced.
The cost to degrading freedoms of conscience, speech, and association for the sake of pursuing higher levels of racial equality has not been small. It's been at least as substantial to us as the War on Drugs, with an equally dubious record of success. It sure doesn't deserve the level of sacrosanctity it still enjoys.
> Jim Crow was not solely enforced by law.
Taxes cant be enforced entirely by law, that doesnt suggest taxation is a free market activity
> (since if they did no book would have been necessary).
Thats an unreasonable standard, if yelp tells me which businesses are racially owned(they did for a bit) does that suggest theres been no decrease in racism?
Slave societys had to draft the lower classes into slave patrols; no system of governance would make racism disappear the second it passed. You need to be making a very complicated argument about rate of change not just point out any amount of racism existed.
On the contrary, Jim Crow was very much on the way out. The simple facts that 1) the 1964 act got enough support to pass in the first place, and 2) it was received with so much popular support across the country, demonstrate that pretty clearly. Jim wasn't dead yet, but he was definitely on his last legs, and it was no great accomplishment for the federal government to swoop in and steal credit for the kill.
That the 1964 law passed Congress isn’t evidence at all that Jim Crow was on its way out, because Jim Crow was a combination of state laws and private action; none of it was federal law. How many congressmen and senators from Southern states do you think voted for the CRA? In the fifties and sixties, who do you think won more Southern governorships: integrationists, or hardcore segregationists? (Look up when Lester Maddox got elected governor—even I was stunned by this.)
What would work as evidence that Jim Crow was on its last legs would be a move away from segregation laws and the politicians who supported them, and a decline in segregated businesses and a corresponding increase in integrated ones. I’m not aware of either of those things happening prior to 1964; are you?
I take it you're a fan of cancel culture?
The problem with freedom of association and freedom of speech is that they can never been taken to 100% due to the "who cancels the cancelers?" issue.
That depends on what you mean by "cancel culture". Having a culture that's able to cancel people is good in principle, but whether the use of that ability is good in practice depends on who's doing it and for what purpose.
It sounds like you don't trust the free market to sort it out after all then.
There's no such thing as a system that prevents all mistakes, regardless of whether you have a free market or not. But the incentives to correct errors are generally stronger under a free market than otherwise.
Very valid, we're lacking a control here (even in the theoretical argumentation). I suppose the cultural osmosis perspective was supposed to be the main alternative, but of course people generally encounter school *and* culture, so it's tough to see how to separate those two without considering e.g. unschooled children. A significant difference between those approaches would be unschooling = (basically) noone gets educated, schooling = (basically) everyone gets educated, homeschooling = privileged people get educated (perhaps at a higher level and certainly with higher individual focus).
As an anecdata - I'm a homeschooled kid, and due to this I missed on a lot of standard cultural osmosis as well. Instead, most of my early osmotic knowledge was influenced on the kind of thing my parents were interested in, which means that up until high school I behaved like a mini-gen-X, up to favourite media and speech patterns. I had little to no idea about things like Marvel heroes or fashion trends.
It's not necessarily bad to replace one osmosis with the other, and I don't regret this particular feature of my childhood environment. But I sure feel like I'm lucky I have educated parents, from whom I was able to acquire a fair share of useful background knowledge.
This is an excellent argument. It's very clear with immigrant children too: school is a key factor in acculturation for people who DON'T come with the mainstream cultural equipment.
I was never home schooled, but still only picked up some standard "osmotic" knowledge from school because of a certain weirdness of my family environment (no TV at home, not religious in a 95% religious country etc etc).
> most of my early osmotic knowledge was influenced on the kind of thing my parents were interested in, which means that up until high school I behaved like a mini-gen-X, up to favourite media and speech patterns. I had little to no idea about things like Marvel heroes
Marvel heroes are a big cultural presence in gen-X. My dad had a huge collection of Daredevil comics.
Different country. Where I am from, gen X childhood still mostly fell on the years behind the Iron curtain, so being into superheroes is more associated with younger folks.
Just curious, did you have much exposure to kids your own age outside of school? Like after-school activities, camp, neighbours, friends, etc.
I had some, mostly through hobby clubs / group lessons (I attended painting and chess and a few others). However, this was still much less contact with peers than an average kid of my age would have.
The method of schooling (compulsory, home, un-) and what cultural environment you will be exposed to during/after schooling are probably related. If anything, I would expect that culture to reinforce the effects of the experienced schooling method, not average it out or even counteract it. Either way, you would indeeed have to look at the different kinds of schooling and what kinds of culture these people are exposed to later in life.
"Better" how? It seems very likely to me that they would be cheaper at the very least, and plausibly more pleasant for the kids.
Better in terms of learning and retaining information, since that’s how the post is evaluating formal schooling.
Getting similar outcomes for much lower cost would still be considered better by most people's standards.
Of course, but would we get similar outcomes? That's the point in dispute.
The article argues that all three would probably do the same, because of the forgetting curve.
But we don't establish that they would start out learning the same, or that, having not learned something in early life, they would pick it up as well later on.
I don't want to say the poll statistics cited in the post are necessarily well done and representative, but if they are, it sounds like the benefit of schooling for knowledge and skills is close to zero for most people.
Other people have raised points about what the numbers may and may not show. What I'm saying is simply that even if these results are taken to be bad, they may or may not be as bad as results that we would see from the absence of education.
Yeah, I'm just saying if the post can show that there is no benefit of schooling for knowledge and skills, then it's not possible for the alternatives to be meaningfully worse.
Or to put it another way, this post would first have to find and include some more positive results of schooling before doing a comparison to alternatives. Because even if it found that only 3% of homeschooled kids were proficient in numeracy (compared to the 10% mentioned in the post), it wouldn't make me think, "well, I guess traditional schooling isn't so bad by comparison". It would make me think that both were a waste for the vast majority of people. And the small difference is likely correlation, not causation (homeschooling is commonly done for religious reasons).
(Hypotheticals aside, I liked my schooling overall and felt I got value from it.)
What if the number turned out to be 0? Given that the poll numbers are nonzero, it's always possible to be worse.
Who is looking after and schooling the kids? Does “cheaper” include the income lost when going from both parents being employed to only one having a career, or are we just assuming here?
One thing worth analyzing is how much that second income actually helps in the end.
This is something my mom likes to point out when she does classes on personal finance for local groups. When you don't have one person at home, that piles on a lot of additional expenses. You need a second car, with all the ongoing expenses that entails. (Maybe not so much in the age of remote work, but still...) You need to pay extra for childcare. You get home and feel too tired to prepare meals, so you order in or eat out more often. And so on, and so forth. Add up all of these extra expenses and compare them to the smaller of the two incomes, and... it doesn't look like such a good idea anymore.
Obviously this is going to vary hugely by job, country, region, age of kids etc, but when I was a teen and my three siblings were coming up to that age, my mum went back to work so that we could afford for us all to go to a private high school (the local senior school having been tried and rejected, FWIW). So for us it did in fact make financial sense at that point in time.
I assume one alternative considered is to wrap up schooling and start working earlier. So, instead of 12 years of general education, 4–5 years of university, and starting to work at 22 to 24 or later, have, say, 6 years of general education, 5 years of vocational education, and start working at 17.
Does anybody remember the comment, years back, from someone home- or un-schooled who said that apart from some embarrassing knowledge gaps ("What? Dinosaurs aren't mythical?") they didn't really miss a lot of important things and caught up fast?
The post starts mentioning the - famous in this circles - book by Prof. Bryan Caplan: "The case against education". So, if one is indeed curious about more data than a relatively short post can provide, there is a place to turn to. Studies that do try to answer your question found not much - if any - worse results. Maybe we should wonder what the alternatives might cost (esp. day-care for kids without teachers), schools are about 10k per year per student.
"Education has always had the status of a sacred institution right across the political spectrum. When Tony Blair came up with his “Education, Education, Education” pitch in the 1997 UK general election it seemed like just unassailable common sense. So what to make then of broadsides from radical deschooling intellectuals (see below) questioning the very basis of our whole education system. Broadsides like these: “Schools fail to teach what they pretend to teach. Most of their inmates spend years failing to learn things like Mathematics, Science and French”[1] ....and: “An illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is a result of teaching.”[2]...." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/teach-your-children-well
Among my (very smart) friends, I would say that most of what they know (they know a lot) was learnt despite school, not because of it.
Yes Curiosity is the thing (even if it can sometimes kill the cat). If you could somehow manufacture a Curiosity and Scepticism pill, there would be no need for schooling.
This matches my priors based on extensive experience being around very smart people.
It gets even worse after high school. A friend of mine once noted the curious phenomenon (this was before student loan forgiveness became a hot political issue) that a college education was the one thing that many people are perfectly content to pay for and not get.
What they want to buy is the credential, not necessarily the education itself. :/
Sorry; I should have been more clear. What he was referring to was kids who don't take schooling seriously and waste all their time partying, and never even get the credential because of it.
>(very smart)
This, in the end, is where I think Scott and much of the crowd here is missing the forest for the trees.
Schooling is probably not very helpful for people that are very smart because ultimately schools need to educate the not-very-smart crowd.
Yes your friends might learn about the Orwellian worlds from their parents/friends. But is the poor kid in rural Alabama likely to hear that from their friends?
School does quite a lot for the poor kid from rural Alabama! The ability to learn a) how to cooperate and coordinate with others, b) how to read deeply and think critically, c) how to do research, and d) that there *are* free resources such as the Alabama Virtual Library (available to anyone with an Alabama IP address) goes a long way!
As a side note, Alabama has the LEAST doctors per capita of anywhere in the United States. Public school is a starting point where you can start learning about how to improve your environment and maybe fill the gaps in health care yourself.
And if you're from one of the many communities in rural Alabama that doesn't have a sewer system, there is a very compelling reason to get educated enough to go earn big money, or at bare minimum, leave.
***
I'm with you in that vocational options are fantastic and credentialism is real, but public school *before* that point does quite a lot, even in spite of students' tendencies to zone out.
(a) Can be learnt better in other ways (e.g., by working in a job), whilst most people will never use (b), (c) and (d) after leaving school, if they even use it during school.
I've written a review of Caplan's book here: https://logos.substack.com/p/against-education-473ac28f47bf
Some counterpoints he misses:
- perhaps it's not about averages but extremes: sure, most people won't learn anything. Some will learn how to create mRNA vaccines.
- perhaps it's about knowing what you don't know, and knowing where to look things up. I don't recall much about the Peloponnesian war, but I remember it happened; and I know what to Google to find more information about it.
I think this is more or less Tyler Cowen's take: School gives you context.
He says it transforms men from beasts https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/02/why_education_i.html
I think of it as mental furniture.
>>it's not about averages but extremes: sure, most people won't learn anything. Some will learn how to create mRNA vaccines.
I agree wholeheartedly with this. And at the other end, while some higher IQ middle class kids might learn to read fluently by the age of 7 anyway, a large proportion of the rest would simply not at all.
Weird, seems to me that school is most useful for the left tail and if anything detrimental to the brightest kids. The brightest kids learn to read before school starts and would probably be reading biochem in their spare time if people weren't forcing them to spend all their time making collages representing what fractions mean to them (yes I am bitter)
Yes but Bryan's argument extends to university, no?
You don't need to be in university to read biochem
Hard (and expensive!) to do experiments in your room!
Are you trying to say that attending university is cheap?
No but anyone *can* attend uni, either through scholarships or loans. Try getting a loan to install a lab in your garage...
Is it? I remember loads of experimental kits for all kinds of MINT subjects in my childhood. I myself got a kit for basic electrical engineering. It explained all kinds of basics from wires, resistors, capacitors, up to transistors. The final assembly was a very basic transistor radio.
I don't remember clearly, but I must have been between 8-10. I had no one accompanying me on my learning there, so I didn't get most of the transistor stuff. But at least a lot of basics were understood and retained. Another meta skill learnt was just the kind of agency and wonder in that - the final radio was awesome. Using the water tap (connected to long plumbing in the house) as an antenna (as was recommended in the manual), I received and listened to AFM english-speaking radio (from the US forces in Germany) in brilliantly clear quality. This happened completely outside the school environment.
Now thinking about it, I wish I kept getting these kinds of kits as presents for more subjects, and more complex ones later on. Instead, I got a computer, which was kind of a kit experience as well at that time (so not too bad of a replacement for the kits).
So I disagree. Biochem experiments can be as simple as growing a yeast bread and maybe identifying the gas the bacteria produce through some chemical method.
Oscilloscopes aren't cheap...
Bryan's arguement explicitly doesn't really apply to people who enjoy their time learning whether in school or at university.
How would you know you enjoy school and uni, if you don't get the chance to go?
The same ways customers make that decision for any other expensive product or service before they buy?
Education ain't special here.
Also re left tails,
Similarly, if Caplan had his way, and education were subsidised to a much lower degree, then the people who would be disproportionately affected would be those whose families cannot pay for education out of their own pocket. Caplan’s response to this is that his recommendation would benefit the poorest the most, since they are the ones who are most harmed by credentialism; this is true on average, yes, but what about the geniuses who could have become professors, and were never given the chance? I don’t know that it always makes sense to base policy only on averages
We have stabdardized testing to identify geniuses who live in poverty. Or at least we would if we didn't deem the results from said tests to be racist, and so ban their use for practical purposes at almost every opportunity.
If standardized tests are banned in US schools, I think that will come as a big surprise to actual students in US schools, who end up taking standardized tests pretty often.
I believe he's referring to employment screening, where testing is all but entirely illegal despite the obvious benefits.
[Rosane Rosana-Dan voice] Never mind....
I was referring to this, but it's also hardly like we put standardized tests to useful purposes in our schools. They're used to measure school performance, not student performance, which is honestly worse than if they were not used at all. It's just punishing and rewarding schools for their racial and economic demographics, and further entrences the woke narrative by conceding to its points by forcing its believers to live up to them in the real world. Which they never can, because their beliefs are wrong.
I don't see a straight line between reducing schooling (a policy change) and reducing credentialism (an economic/cultural change). If anything, it would probably create a bigger credential gap.
Oh and one more thing - you're probably thinking of bright kids in a supportive environment... How will a child learn to read before school if their parents don't give them books?
Learning to read is the motte.
It's a great motte! I'd be happy if school proponents argued that completely removing schooling then we'd have way more illiteracy and the current system is better than that. I'd even agree.
But a decade of schooling after teaching kids to read where there will be basically no proven value is a hell of bailey to defend.
It's not just reading. What about algebra? Sure, super bright and motivated kids might read up themselves. But there's still value in exposing some bright but less motivated students to these concepts.
Empirically that's useless. In fact, I believe it's even actually harmful as it will push kids that could like it later have an aversion to it.
Anecdote: I hated statistics at school. Thought I was terrible at it and incapable of doing it. By luck I started working with it, now I'm great and love it. School was _harmful_ in my life.
The same happened with Spanish. I could have easily have learnt it, but school drilled a hatred of the language on me that only these days I realised it would actually be good to learn. But now I'm older and don't have the time / patience
It's not useless. As long as there are kids from underprivileged backgrounds, who manage to do well at school, go to a good uni, and get a job they like, school is defensible, unless you can sketch a practical alternative route they could have taken.
> What about algebra?
What *about* it? I can think of exactly one time when I've used it outside of a school setting — it was quite memorable for how rare it was! — and that was to solve an explicitly algebra-based puzzle in an escape room.
Geometry and trig, I use from time to time in my work as a software developer. Algebra? Never. If my experience in the real world has taught me anything on the subject, it's that the whiny kids who asked "when am I ever going to use this?" were actually right!
You don't use algebra skills as a software developer?
Surely there is a spillover from one discipline to another? Both use abstract symbols in a logical and systematic manner in order to solve problems.
Plenty of people do though. My point was, you can't expect kids to learn this at home; and if you want to give everyone a chance to do their dream job, school is possibly a good way of doing this. Not necessarily the best! But I don't think Chaplan addresses this.
I of course don't know what kind of software you develop, but algebra is the kind of thing that, if you're going any tech work at all, you might use implicitly without thinking of it as "doing algebra". If you've ever figured out "where is the breakeven point in this tradeoff", you're probably solving for X somehow.
How? Are you all UI all the time? I can't avoid algebra.
You are not representative. If the great remote learning pandemic experiment taught us anything it is that most students (even college students in major classes learning stuff that presumably interests them and is career relevant) can’t really learn without structure and hand holding. Autodidacts are the exception, and rarer than lizard men.
Goodness, that's a great point. All this has really been disproven quite conclusively in the last four years. People had measurable learning loss effects when not in school.
Not really.
Getting your kids school to close on you when you haven't made allowances for it is a much different beast than choosing not to school your kid on your own agenda.
"Choosing" is one thing. The problem is that people in the working classes largely don't / wouldn't have that choice.
I'm not arguing for or against universal schooling here, simply making the point that the pandemic really isn't a good natural experiment to argue one way or the other.
Even for working class children, spending 3 years out of school when it's the societally natural thing, or spending 3 years out of school with no idea when it'll end would obviously yield vastly different outcomes.
> Getting your kids school to close on you when you haven't made allowances
This logic holds if we were talking about 3 months, not 3 years. In that timeline a pivot is clearly possible.
I don't think this logic holds.
It's very different to be told "schools will be closed until further notice" and it ends up being 3 years, and being told outright "schools will be closed for 3 years".
It's also different to have schools close on you when the entire society revolves around schools instead of having a more liberal schooling model.
The pandemic really isn't a good natural experiment in this matter.
If it's knowledge that we know they were going to lose anyway, why would we be upset that they lose it a little faster this way?
I don't disagree with the conclusion, but what I saw of remote learning was pretty far from any sort of optimized independent learning.
Eliminate school and the typical student (family) will not start pursuing optimized independent learning. Probably what they will do will be even less optimized than what we got in the pandemic. Some will, but they will be a rounding error.
This is the conclusion I don't disagree with; but a lot of pandemic education was 'sit at your computer and follow along with the teacher trying to keep the class on task while she does her normal lesson over zoom.'
Seems optimized for creating distractions and not something we can draw a lot of conclusions on.
Wait, you're a professor, right? I'm thinking of k-12 education at the time. Perhaps university courses were done differently.
The obvious response to that is to create classes and schools for gifted kids, where they can socialize and learn a curriculum optimized to their abilities, rather than waiting for the dumb kids to finish collages.
NYC used to have schools like this, I don't know if they still do (there are obvious political headwinds), but any big city should be able to while drawing from the pool of smart kids all across the city.
However, there may also be something to be said for required exposure to the other 99% of the human race that has different interests and priorities.
The headwinds are there for a reason, and I expect that to be a major political division in the future. Kids who excel in school make the schools a better place for all students. Recognizing this, some people want to make schools for only excellent students, so that they will benefit significantly from being around each other. Other people, recognizing the same thing, want to distribute these students around less functional students in order to help bring them up. These are contradictory goals, obviously, and the plan that's best for the desired students is worst for every other student.
From a policy perspective I don't know which plan would be better overall, but there are both significant benefits and significant drawbacks to both.
If you have this problem, you just have too few tracks. The kids who benefitted from the top kids being there would do even better in a class of their own.
Saying as someone who stonewalled those learning-incapable stupid ones (i.e. my entire primary-school save for one person, and it was probably an above-median class in a large white city outside US); and entered a kind of feedback loop with a professor, locking out (for multiple weeks) my actually good university group save at most for two other students who could keep up but not always participate much.
Oh, and at some point I had reasonably strong groupmates at university sneak into a definitely-weak group — because that's where it was feasible to get the basics of that specific subject at a low pace. Not the same subject as the one I hijacked.
So yeah, half-measures are insufficient, sort all the students so that noone believes to be stuck in a class with learning-incapable idiots.
>The kids who benefitted from the top kids being there would do even better in a class of their own.
To my knowledge what research there is on this says the opposite. Having the smart kids in class seems to raise the expectations and results for the struggling students
Does the measured case includes leaving the do-not-care kids in? Because sure, reducing the share of those who care does no good to what happens in the class (from the point of view of those who do care)
You are correct that a lot of the issue is the do-not-care kids. By diluting them with the care-a-lot kids, that makes things better for the kids in the middle and often the kids at the bottom. And I don't think it's primarily about academics, but instead about environment. An environment dominated by smart kids who try hard is going to calmer and more conducive to learning. An environment dominated by the kids that don't care is going to be disruptive, loud, and bad for learning. This is partly just not being disrupted by those individual students, and partly a peer-pressure effect with disruptive kids conforming to the local norm.
Middle kids are going to do much better on average around higher achievers because the achievers set better norms. Throwing a single high-achieving kid into a disruptive class is just going to disrupt that student, though.
There's definitely a thought in education to not put kids on tracks at all, so that the disruptive kids get spread around among the less-disruptive and don't all bring each other down. This likely benefits them at the expense of those that would have been in an even less-disruptive environment. They don't at all frame it this way, of course, but instead talk about how much better the lower performers learn around the higher performers.
To be fair, there are also some students who imitate the furniture during classes, being perfectly non-disruptive but usually not learning much either.
It all does get disruptive when a teacher attempts not to leave them behind, of course.
As for low-performers in the high-performer-dense environment, are they learning better, or do they have a better choice of whose work to copy to get passing grades? I was a curious kid so I did once try to find out what it takes to not let a specific classmate copy during a test… it was a bit of an effort.
One problem is that there is still stealth tracking because wealthy parents will go to great lengths to put their children into the "best" schools, either through private school or buying houses in expensive districts. It's the genius from poor families that lose out when there's no explicit tracking.
I've seen you and other folks say things like this before, and it's just so, so far afield from my experience. School provided a structure for me to learn to apply my intellect and a way to gain self esteem from excelling in topics like math and science.
I think it really comes down to "Some implementations of school are good, and others are bad," and trying to draw narrow conclusions about school in general is destined to fail.
Think of it like a medication or treatment with wildly different outcomes for one measure of efficacy (learning) but relatively consistently positive outcomes for another outcome measure (caring for children while their parents are at work). It's still on net useful and improves learning outcomes specifically for some group of the population even if the aggregate learning outcome measures are ambiguous.
I think the problem is that the audience of this blog greatly selects for "smart autodidacts who suffer in a typical school environment".
I learned to read before school started and probably stuff like times tables as well. But my parents are very much not math/science people, and so most of my math/science knowledge comes from school. Even the fact that I liked those subjects was discovered at school!
Also, once I got past Algebra 1 or so, my parents weren’t able to help me much with math homework. But they were helping me with, say, Latin homework much longer than that.
Streaming is a thing ...just not so.much in the US.
I think school is most useful for the average kid, as it should be. Average kids are the most common type of kids and strangely, despite this, they’re the ones who often get ignored in discussions like this about education.
I could read before I started school (somewhat over the age of four, which was the official school starting age in my time, no preschool or kindergarten) and I'm not particularly smart so I'm rather amused by the guy bragging that he taught his two year old to read (but don't everybody try this, only some special parents and kids can do it!). I don't even remember learning to read, so I think that means I was learning around two as well.
Yeah, maybe some bright kids would be reading biochemistry in their spare time - or maybe not. I was reading Charlotte Bronte at age nine (and mostly frustrated at the large chunks of dialogue in untranslated French when I had no access to any kind of dictionary to translate this or means of learning French) but I *definitely* needed the practice on fractions because I was, and remain, absolutely useless at anything to do with maths.
Some kids will do biochemistry in their free time. Some kids will do music and the arts. Some kids will just hang around on street corners.
Deiseach, the claim that you aren't particularly smart is absurd on its face. You have to surely be top percentile on a bunch of axes. If nothing else, I was raised Catholic and your understanding of theology and church history is deeper than anyone I've ever met, including our bishop.
I agree with your general point, but I can't in good conscience let you rest it on such a dubious foundation :p
No, honestly, I really am average to stupid (depending on what the day is and what the topic). I think I'm in the range 100-105 IQ, getting up to 110 on a good day. I've never done any proper test, but that feels about right.
I'm good with words, but that's no more credit to me than a bird being good at flying; my paternal family is wordcels all the way even though we're not particularly well-off or middle-class; in general, upper working class to lower middle class, with the newer generations doing better 😁
Maths is definitely where I fall down, I have no innate or instinctive "getting" of it at all and I'm stuck on a very basic level.
What I am good at, due to a combination of said paternal genes which also probably have a strong dollop of autism spectrum/neurosis/anxiety/social awkwardness and avoidance in the mix, is getting fixated on a particular subject and then acquiring enough broad (but shallow) knowledge on it to be able to pass as much better-informed than I am in reality (typical Gemini there!)
Thank you for the kind words, though, and I'm pleased to see that my compulsory school attendance is still paying off dividends in teaching me how to pass for normie in general interactions!
I'm with Godshatter. The thing we call "intelligence" has a lot of components, and "IQ" and "g" are crude averages that smooth over the texture in the data in order to provide a single number. I'll trust you that your math skills are bad - I'm horrible at statistics, myself - but you clearly have high ability in other areas, stuff I can only describe as "intellectual agility" and "pattern-matching ability". (If you average out at 105 but have 90 for math, what does that say about the other parts? Oh, wait, that's math...)
I am not sure if this is true. I used to believe that this was the case but now I am beginning to think that IQ is how easy it is to program system 2.
Assuming their parents know what biochem is and expose them to it. Not all smart kids are that lucky.
School at least provides an overview of the context of what fields of human knowledge exists. It sucks to get hooked on an area of knowledge and then have to learn it as slowly as teh bottom 20% can keep up, but I think it's a bit of hubris to assume every smart kid would have gotten hooked on those ares of knowledge in the first place without being exposed to them in school.
I disagree, there were a bunch of interesting and/or foundational topics that I became aware of and learned only because of school. Otherwise, I would have spent that time learning more minutiae about StarCraft and Magic: the Gathering.
The only kids for whom school is really unnecessary are those who are both smart and high in agency. IME agency does not automatically arise from curiosity, which is somewhat of a blind spot for people who are naturally highly agentic.
I went to a public elementary school, was bored out of my mind and hated it. In 6th grade I started going to a private gifted school, which used better teaching methods and was a lot more challenging but still had a lot of structure. Going to that school was very good for me. Not despite of the structure but because of it. 12 year old me would have been playing a bunch of video games, hanging out with friends, and reading fiction if I wasn't in school. There are definitely some bright kids who are super curious and would read biochem in their free time, but there are many, many bright kids who need their curiosity guided and need to be exposed to different fields in school.
> 12 year old me would have been playing a bunch of video games, hanging out with friends, and reading fiction if I wasn't in school.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I know video games get a bad rap a lot of the time, but they're *directly* responsible for me landing a successful, lucrative career as a software developer. If young me hadn't run across the concept of programming and thought "wow, I could build my own video games with this!" I would probably never have ended up discovering I have a knack for it and gotten the opportunity to make a living doing something I enjoy.
I dunno, I know a lot of smart-but-lazy kids who would have happily spent their whole youth doing nothing in particular if they hadn't had the discipline of being forced to listen to classes and do exams.
Also I think it's very easy to get a very superficial understanding of something like biochemistry from reading books, but understanding it properly takes discipline, you really have to sit down and study a whole lot of individually uninteresting facts. Some smart kids might get there on their own.
Success is often more about social skills than whether you read at two, and so is school. School is as much about soft skills as it is how well you do on multiple choice questions. Unlike academic skills, these are not taught directly in school, but through exposure.
My autistic kid is home educated and learned to read at two. My NT daughter is the opposite; she struggled to read but got there eventually, and benefits from school, yes, in terms of socialisation. Many NT kids do.
Of the two I think my daughter will ultimately be more successful though she lags behind academically compared to the ASD one, because I don't know that the autistic one will ever be able to have a job at all due to social deficits.
There are some people for whom academic skills propel them through life, and I think we're disproportionately represented on this blog. But I would say the bulk of people are getting by on social skills instead.
I think this is true of the far right tail of intelligence and motivation, but not typically true for kids one standard deviation above the mean in both.
I read your review and had a question that I thought would be better to post here. You said “there is no doubt that some countries have education systems that work better than that of the US; instead of drastically reducing the provision of education in America, why not emulate the education system of others?” It’s been a few years, did you ever happen to find a better education system than the US? There are certainly many countries that have less wasteful spending on education, but in terms of increasing productivity, I think the case against education applies well to all of them.
When you compare Asian, White, Hispanic, and African Americans test scores to the test scores of the region of origin, Americans perform either better or with no statistically significant difference from their region of origin. I would love to improve the test scores of all students but especially minorities, but looking at other countries, no one has seemed to find a solution to do it. In higher education, we even more clearly top all the lists for education. So I am genuinely asking since I have been try to find one myself, were you able to find a country with a better education system?
I was going by things like PISA - Singapore, Japan, Switzerland, etc all do well. Remarkably, the US does better on reading than any other English-speaking country except Canada though.
Singapore is an English speaking country.
"Singapore is an English speaking country, lah!"
Can!
PISA was what I was basing it on to. Our Asian and White test scores are already at parity with those countries . So essentially the only problem we have left to solve with education is how to raise Hispanic and African American test scores to the level of Whites, which has been one of the top priorities for education researchers and I have yet to find a country that solved it. I keep hoping we’ll find a solution, but since we haven’t, I’m sympathetic to Bryan’s argument that we should cut funding.
>- perhaps it's not about averages but extremes: sure, most people won't learn anything. Some will learn how to create mRNA vaccines.
Or it's about specialization: Most people are not qualified to do 50% of the job positions on the market, why should every kid excel in every subject at school?
If every kid remembers about a third of what they learned in school, but everyone remembers a different third based on their interests and future careers, that sounds like pretty normal specialization of labor and cognitive/cultural diversity.
Exactly, I don't even understand the original argument, because... how do these "cultural" facts get into the "culture", so that then the unwashed masses can get them via "cultural osmosis"??
Surely, Shakespeare wouldn't have survived if there was no schooling! Because even if a few wise men did study him, if they then created a cultural artifact, eg a movie based on him, no-one would watch it! Cause they wouldn't even know who he is!
So this cultural context is so heavily shaped by school (and the guys who do give a shit about what they learn) that I don't even know what the alternative would look like. Probably a lot closer to Idiocracy, than it already looks like...
> Surely, Shakespeare wouldn't have survived if there was no schooling! Because even if a few wise men did study him, if they then created a cultural artifact, eg a movie based on him, no-one would watch it! Cause they wouldn't even know who he is!
What makes you think that got transmitted through school and study? Shakespeare was an entertainer; the default hypothesis here is that his work survived due to its enduring popularity as entertainment.
At the time, yes, but in recent decades Shakespeare does seem to be mostly sustained by school. I would guess the number of kids who get exposed to Shakespeare in school is 10-100X those who see a movie or organically read a play. And without future writers and audience goers being exposed to it in school, there would be far less people to write or see the next movie, so awareness would rapidly die down.
School doesn't seem to be doing a particularly good job of it recently.
Are you old enough to remember _Boy Meets World,_ a popular TV show from the 90s? When Cory, talking to Mr. Feeney, used Romeo and Juliet as an example of a classic love story worth emulating, it was a punchline. "Ha ha, look how dumb Cory is, that he doesn't know what happened to them in the end!"
Fast forward one short decade, and Taylor Swift's "Love Story" makes the same mistake... but plays it completely straight. (She also, in the same song, displays total ignorance of The Scarlet Letter.) And, if the song's popularity was anything to go by, almost no one noticed!
> At the time, yes, but in recent decades Shakespeare does seem to be mostly sustained by school.
Sadly, yes, a lot of his best humor and wordplay and dick jokes have become obscure because of language shifts. :-(
<i>- perhaps it's not about averages but extremes: sure, most people won't learn anything. Some will learn how to create mRNA vaccines.</i>
Wouldn't the obvious answer just be to test kids at a certain age (11, or 14, or whatever), and only continue educating those who score above a certain threshold? That way we could still educate our super-geniuses, without forcing future binmen to waste time trying to understand literary criticism.
How about just letting them decide whether to continue studying, and what subjects to study? I expect the kid who'll invent mRNA vaccines will choose to continue studying biology and chemistry, while the kid who'll be a binman won't.
Exactly. I recently found myself having to use something that I last studied in college, and while I didn't remember any of the details, I did remember that it exists and could easily look it up and use it.
I remember the rats, too; and I'm reasonably certain I haven't encountered any mention of it since reading 1984 about 20 years ago. Possibly it's an emotional connection thing; I don't personally have a horror of rats, but I do have a horror of something else and it kind of imprinted the scene on my mind.
Did you watch Game of Thrones? That featured one repetition...
Nope.
Daring to criticise (politely criticise) Hanania's "Shakespeare is Fake" essay made Hanania very angry. So angry that I got banned....and not just banned but - and I quote - "for 100years!"
To be fair, he is right, and the comment section looks like a total pile on. I'd ban you too.
If we're talking about being "fair" how would you even know, given that my comment is not on that comment section?
I don't want to be around people who see a pile on and decide to join in. Given that the thrust of his argument is correct, it sounds like there was no need for your comment.
I have never in my long life ever joined any kind of "pile on" about anything. And you haven't seen my comment so you have no basis on which to judge its merit. On the contrary your own comments here are a kind of "pile on" type thing....merely gratuitous insults for which you should be ashamed.
There's no such thing as an n=1 pile on. Look, you're upset with a single person criticising you, i.e. me. How do you think Hanania felt with 50 people criticising him? Then you come along and add your criticism. If you can't see the inappropriateness of that, or the meanness of it, you truly need to do some self-reflection. It's the context in which you gave the criticism. And to top it off, *he was right*, so your criticism couldn't have been all that good.
If Hanania can't tolerate 50 people criticizing him, then why does he write such blog posts?
I'm not "upset" and you weren't "criticising"....I would been fine about it if you had been. What you have been doing does not deserve to be called criticism. (In order to do that you would have to have had sight of my comment on Hanania's 'stack). You were being gratuitously insulting pure and simple. It would appear that you simply have no conception of the difference between criticism and insult. You seem to have the notion that criticism is inherently "inappropriate" and "mean". Enough of your nonsense.
Was he right? I'm not convinced. I'm only about 10% into reading about the mess, but so far, he's taking it as a given that Shakespeare is only one of let's say millions of writers, and it's probable that someone better came along.
But that ignores that Shakespeare, at the time, would have had to go through many massive filters to finally get to the point of writing what was written.
I believe the journey, when it is hard and full of obstacles, transforms you in a way that will show through in your work. The journey was difficult for Shakespeare, and has become so easy for subsequent writers, it's unsurprising the more modern stuff is generally "meh."
I'll keep reading. Maybe this (and other?) points are addressed in Hanania's essay.
Aside: I notice that when I type in "Shakespeare is Fake" on Google, it does not give any auto-complete option of Hanania, and the actual result for it is somewhere halfway down the page. Predictable behaviour from the search engine that gave up on being a search engine and decided to be a cultural definer instead.
This is utterly ridiculous. His critical comment, which you have no knowledge of the content or tone of, is automatically inappropriate, mean and bannable, no matter what it actually said, because many other people left critical comments?
What if he was the first to leave a critical comment? What if his criticism was different from others, and especially valuable? Oh wait, you've already decided it can't be valuable, because Hanania is perfectly correct about everything he says in the post and therefore anyone criticising it should be banned,
Do you not see how this would apply to any criticism of any blog post which received anything but unanimous acclaim? The implied principle is completely unworkable and unjust, and seems especially bizarre coming from someone who is presumably right-leaning politically.
Nonsense. Criticism is valid quite independantly of the existence of other similar criticism. There could be 1 million negative comments; it wouldn't make the addition of another one any less valid a comment.
I have also never joined a pile on!
If you read a comment section before you comment (as you always should) and you find many or most comments being critical or negative of the piece to which they're attached, your decision to also post a critical comment is absolutely joining a pile on. One of the reasons cancel culture got to be a real part of society is that it doesn't intuitively feel like a pile on for the commenters, it just feels like you're throwing a stone that probably missed, but it feels very very real and very serious to the recipient of all these atomized "criticisms."
Oh dear...another one peddling graceless presumptiveness. How could you possibly know where my critical comment came on the thread....it could been the first for all you know? I had barely even heard of this 'pile on' notion till today and it is certainly not something I would ever indulge in because I am not a groupthink type of person....but judging by your peevish, ill judged comment here I suspect it is something that you probably do on a regular basis.
What? Didn't you know that we must construct additional pile-ons?
*applause*
Then let him preemptively ban me, too, since I would also have "piled on" about "SBF is right, Shakespeare is dumb and over-rated".
Though I know Hanania likes to do clickbait rage, so what his real opinion might be, I have no idea - and don't care. Shakespeare introduced me to the beauty and musicality of language when I was 15, and whatever some "so smart I got myself arrested for fraud" guy and his hangers-on may think is of no persuasive value to me.
Hanania is a stupid person and he says stupid things. Apparently some people here think you can just say "against fideism!" and that somehow makes Hanania worth addressing. But unlike legitimate "against fideism!", there is nothing insightful or interesting to be learned from Hanania's stupid things.
He's right though that SBF's point was valid. The prior on Shakespeare being born when he was is low, under some simple but reasonable models, for some reasonable reference classes. (Although describing it as "pretty damning" is an overstatement.)
There were a lot of bad arguments in the comment section like, "what are the odds that the greatest writer's surname would start with the letter S?". The prior on that is low, and it's valid to say it's low. It's 1 in 26 under a very simplistic model that doesn't take letter frequency in names into account.
"Names that starts with S" might be a reasonable reference class if you hypothesizing that people with S names are more likely to become famous writers. But it's obviously not a reasonable reference class for a debate on whether we give undue reverence to past writers.
A low prior doesn't mean Shakespeare isn't the greatest writer. It just means that if he's the greatest, either it's a genuine coincidence, or you need an explanation on why a person in the past was more likely to be the greatest.
To be clear, I'm not defending any of Hanania's statements on Shakespeare other than that specific statistical argument. I'm also not claiming there aren't better models or reference classes the would give a higher prior. Just that the chosen one is reasonable.
He's not correct, SBF's argument (and his) is stupid. They construe the meaning of "greatest writer" in such a literal, autistic manner as to make it incoherent. "Writership" is not an objective, culturally independent quality. Even within a single culture, writers do not face off against each other in contests to determine which writer is the better among them. When people say "Shakespeare is the greatest English writer," they're clearly *not* saying that if you put him and Jonathan Franzen in a pit, only Shakespeare would come out of it alive, (unscathed, wearing Franzen's blood-spattered glasses). Even in contests where relative skill is understood to be objectively measurable, "who is the greatest of all time?" is understood to be distinct from the question "who would win a tournament if it were held today?" For instance, many people call Muhammed Ali "The Greatest" but also believe that he would have fallen to Tyson in a hypothetical fight held during their respective primes.
Given all this, making an argument that Shakespeare is "unlikely" to be the greatest writer because the *prior* of his being so is low given the English-speaking population at the place at time of his birth, is irritating and facile. It's on the same level as publishing a detailed statistical argument to prove to your coworker that the "World's Greatest Dad" mug his wife got him is highly unlikely to be descriptively accurate.
1. You haven't argued against the soundness of the argument. You seem to be saying that their argument is correct, but they're fighting a strawman, since no one thinks Shakespeare is literally the greatest in any meaningful or measurable way.
2. The exact definition of "greatest writer" doesn't matter for the argument. Even with a weird definition, like "the greatest writer was the person who wrote the most vowels in their lifetime", the argument still holds. It's a very general argument. It only requires a definition where people after 1616 could be the greatest writer and that it's reasonable enough to use a simple model where each educated English-speaking person has an equal chance of being that person.
3. It's weird people get so angry about this. Not you in particular, but the entire comment section on Hanania's blog. I can't imagine there'd be a similar reaction if he had claimed this about any other writer.
> It's on the same level as publishing a detailed statistical argument to prove to your coworker that the "World's Greatest Dad" mug his wife got him is highly unlikely to be descriptively accurate.
Your coworker would probably say, "look, you're right, I'm not actually the greatest dad in the world, and you're clearly autistic".
People understand that "World's Greatest Dad" mugs are just a cute, lighthearted compliment, and anyone who takes it literally is deluded and narcissistic (with the exception of one dad somewhere, I guess). I don't think you intend to imply that anyone who thinks Shakespeare is literally the greatest writer is crazy.
There are many people who really do think Shakespeare is the greatest English writer, which makes it fair game for Hanania to debate the point.
>Can we rescue some kind of value for school?
Yes. The main purposes of school are:
1. Daycare. With extended family destroyed, both parents at work, and child labor useless/illegal they need to be stashed somewhere.
2. Domestication. School attempts to instill conformity with how modern civilization works.
And in a distant third is the signalling value so beloved by contrarians, where all of us collectively pretend that school at all fulfills its nominal purpose.
Sure, that is what I meant by "domestication".
I think this is the best so far succinct summary:
>>transmit cultural knowledge, give most people an ability to function in society - have we forgotten that most societies were illiterate pre universal schooling - and to filter out the brightest for the elites.<<
I'd add "provide overview, testing ground and foundational basis of the areas of potential pursuit/excellence to the ones who WILL pursue specific paths".
I'm completely failing to understand why the idea that "we teach biology to everyone not in order that everyone knows forever how chloroplasts work, but so the ones who WILL want/need to know it later get a chance to".
I'm wondering if this isn't because people engaged in this conversation mostly come from the backgrounds in which having an institution that performs this task via universal compulsory exposure is not necessary or even advantageous and don't realise how many people would NOT became even vaguely aware of DNA, chloroplasts, Moscow, electrons, North Atlantic Gyre etc etc etc otherwise/through cultural osmosis -- and if they do, it'd be much later than some of their peers.
And I'm not even talking about "underclass" kids, or kids of very uneducated working class parents. I've been consistently amazed about stuff teenage children of perfectly functional, middle class parents with some form of post secondary education didn't know (from meeting my children's peers) until they were exposed to it at school. Never mind the ones from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. [I live in a non-urban area of the UK]
Caplan has blogged about Macro-Mincer regressions on whether a society getting more educated causes it to get richer.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/05/schooling_incom.html
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/10/international_e.html
Would you like to guess what he found?
The arrow of causality is backwards. Usually societies start developing and then spend some of that money on universal education. The best known example is 19th C Britain which was an industrial and creativity powerhouse but half the kids were in the workforce, not schools.
There are also plenty of examples of countries especially communist and Middle Eastern that have widespread education and are not rich.
Isn't that just because high-IQ countries have both better PISA scores and higher economic output? Or is there some reason to posit a direct causal relationship?
For 19th century Britain, see Sherlock Holmes' view on public education, which pretty clearly is the author interjecting his view and optimism around it:
"It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high, and allow you to look down upon the houses like this."
I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself.
"Look at those big, isolated clumps of building rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-colored sea."
"The board-schools."
"Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future. — “The Naval Treaty”
This is getting kids out of the workforce and into education, so that they might do better in life. We're now contemplating sending them back to the workforce since we claim they learn nothing in school. That may well be, but I also think a bunch of the average 12-15 year olds looking (or not looking) for work isn't going to work that great either; we've done away with the heavy manufacturing industries which needed a lot of manual labour, and so we're instead going to put them all into service industry jobs (and having had experience of how, say, a fast-food restaurant operated on a bank holiday when everyone there was pretty much a teenager, I'm not optimistic on that).
> we've done away with the heavy manufacturing industries which needed a lot of manual labour
...Because exploiting cheap labor overseas is more efficient. There's no reason we can't have cheap labor domestically as well.
This fails the "why shouldn't I kill you" test though; our whole society is oriented around avoiding that.
Basically agreed. In the comment section thus far, I think that "cultural knowledge" has been a bit underemphasized. A lot of day-to-day communication goes beyond just language and really needs shared cultural references. I mildly disagree with Scott's downplaying of a "ratchet" effect for cultural references.
This doesn't require that everyone _value_ particular works, e.g. "1984", and the choice of _which_ works is, in a sense, arbitrary (just as the vocabulary of a language is, in a sense, arbitrary). But it is important that many cultural references be _shared_.
> This kind of argument is pretty easy to dispute. Uneducated societies are never rich, transitioning from peasant to educated explains a lot of the economic growth in the modern era.
The direction of causality is not at all clear there. Education could have followed economic growth.
> have we forgotten that most societies were illiterate pre universal schooling
Literacy is very important, agreed. Schooling served a purpose at the time to make an illiterate populace literate, agreed. Is that an argument that schooling still serves that important purpose, when the widely accepted cultural knowledge is that literacy is important, and most kids are already literate when entering school?
The first two points would point to just replacing schools with daycare centers or something. There is something of the kind in Germany where kids stay longer until their parents can pick them up, where they do their homework, get a meal, play with others etc.. It would certainly cost a lot less than schools do.
"Daycare" where kids just play all day works fine for very young kids, but once you've got a big group of 8 year olds or 12 year olds, you need to work hard to keep them busy or else they'll start organising their own trouble. And if you're warehousing kids all day, you might as well try to teach them something.
Or give them jobs. Maybe that's what Vo-Tech is supposed to be.
Most kids would legit enjoy work, or apprenticing, far more than study. You get PAID for work, and acquire skills that are actually useful and monetizable.
The choice of what to do should be left to the individual kids, and suggestions can and should be offered to them relative to their developmental and their general-intelligence levels. But the notion that the current "warehousing" system is any sort of positive good for the child is a profoundly cruel and stupid belief. Anyone who feels it deserves to be offered free shin kicks by any number of our countless bored, tortured youths who populate our pedagogic institutions.
I also agree that some students should be allowed or even encouraged to leave school earlier in order to apprentice for a job. The money that would be spent schooling them can be used to subsidize their on the job learning and would likely be far more beneficial for them.
Lots of kids check out sometime from middle school through high school, learn almost nothing, and then really drop out the moment they are allowed. Many go on to productive work the moment they are allowed, making money and being less bored, while also learning skills useful to their career.
I think the problem there is that the people in charge of that decision consider it demeaning to work in, say, an oil field instead of moving further into education. Oil field workers are not consulted on that question, but educators with advanced degrees are.
> Most kids would legit enjoy work, or apprenticing, far more than study. You get PAID for work, and acquire skills that are actually useful and monetizable.
Now there's an idea, pay kids to study and turn in assignments and other kinds of work. You can earn a salary doing and learning trades, or academic subjects, or a bunch of other monetizable skills.
Not entirely unreasonable, but the problem with tying it to performance is that you'd incentivise cheating more than ever, right as we've entered an era where it's easier to cheat on your assignments than ever.
The point of academic assignments, or any sort of training assignment, for those with the capability to do them, should be training the students to do something intellectually useful that's both achievable for them eventually but currently out of their reach enough to provide a reasonable challenge. This has been heavily deprioritized ever since we decided to start holding schools responsible for test scores, and we should be taking steps to get away from this.
A better idea would be by giving students money directly and just teaching them how to use it as a part of their schooling. Some would use it better than others, sure. But learning how to handle money is probably the most useful skill you can learn in modern society outside basic literacy and numeracy, yet most of us either don't learn it in school at all, or only learn a small part of it.
Are you sure it would cost less? I was shocked to see the list of supplies students are expected to bring at the beginning of a school year to their elementary school in the US. The items include facial tissues, paper towels, pencils (24-36, depending on your grade), paper, and other things one would think would be provided.
Where does the money go, then, if not to teacher's salaries? Would daycare cost less than the famously low salaries of teachers?
At a minimum, there's building maintenance and administration.
And that is different for daycare buildings than for schools?
Well you could drastically cut the latter and nothing of value would be lost. To paraphrase Jefferson, schools are administrated best which are administrated least.
Those are all things kids would also be using at home, so I don't see the relevance.
They are all things kids would be using at the library, too, yet they aren't asked to bring them to the library.
People do bring them to the library. What library will give you free pens and paper on request?
If there were no subjects, you wouldn't need people who know each subject at your school, which should cut down significantly on the number of people involved. You also wouldn't have to pay for credentials that you don't need, though that affects different states differently. Some states already hire non-certified teachers regularly (these are often states with the lowest pay, not coincidentally).
If you were optimizing for cheapest operation, I think it would look more like summer camp than a modern public school. Camp counselors tend to be very young and are paid practically nothing. For year-round service, I bet you could have staff at $10-15/hour ($20-30,000/year) equivalents instead of teachers salaries which has a national average *starting* wage at $42,000 and an average over $60k.
As an aside, teachers wages are very close to median wages for the nation as a whole. The lowest average salary is in Mississippi, but almost exactly matches the state's own average salary for all sectors (since it's a poor state). The next lowest are South Dakota and West Virginia, with similar stories.
Some people seem to think teachers should be making more than the communities they serve, but I don't think that's a reasonable argument. There are 3.2 million public school teachers in the US - it's an entirely normal career and paying normal wages doesn't seem out of whack.
I think John Taylor Gatto has a point that a lot of the purpose of school is sorting children into those who have more more of a chance to succeed and those who don't, while real capacity is more evenly distributed.
I think school teaches children to mostly believe that if they didn't learn something in school, they can't learn it at all. The culture is getting better about adult learning, but I don't think effects of school have gone away.
Look at what people seem to really want to learn on their own-- crafts and martial arts. (This is a very rough estimate on my part.) It's precisely things that weren't school subjects.
Part of the problem with school is that it gives academic status to things that children mostly don't want to do-- it ignores motivation, while people are more likely to want to learn things they're interested in.
Well, the proliferation of credentialism is also an important factor here I'd guess. If you can't gainfully employ informally acquired skills, that has to put quite a damper on motivation to learn anything other than amusing fluff.
I know what you are saying, but I don't think that is really relevant. We are talking about school level learning here. If you were a terrible student in school but fall in science later in life, no one asks you to provide a certificate showing you have a high-school proficiency in chemistry. This is more of an issue for post university level skills.
I'm pretty doubtful that there was a substantial cohort of children eager to learn chemistry or Latin of their own accord in any era, so school is probably not to blame.
>no one asks you to provide a certificate showing you have a high-school proficiency in chemistry
They do ask for a university degree though, which you are unlikely to have.
Agreed. But that isn't the conversation we are having right now. ACX is pointing out that kids don't know the facts that they should be learning in _school_, and then asks the question, "What is school for then?".
If this post was about students making it through a computer science degree and not knowing what a HashMap was (which I could 100% believe) we could have a whole different discussion about how universities just exist to provide credentials, not learning. But I think right now we are just talking about school education.
The school-university pipeline is pretty well established though, so it's hard to disentangle those things. Even if school is worthless, and you can learn chemistry at any age, if you don't do it on the right timeline then acquiring the right credentials is much harder. Compsci-related subjects are (were?) somewhat an exception to it, where "learning to code" by yourself actually is a realistic path to a career.
People also study languages on their own.
> Part of the problem with school is that it gives academic status to things that children mostly don't want to do-- it ignores motivation, while people are more likely to want to learn things they're interested in.
To be fair, if we let kids just do whatever they were interested in, we'd end up with a society heavily overpopulated by ballerinas and princesses, astronauts and firefighters.
This is a terrible argument. We spend most of their time in school teaching them how to write, work mathematical problems, and memorize historical facts, and they're just as unlikely to be writers, mathematicians or historians.
Are you sure? Just speaking for myself here, but I'd have never become a software developer if I hadn't been exposed to computers, and the concept that they work based on a bunch of simple instructions that people write out, in elementary school.
Because American homes are notorious for not having computers relative to schools?
In the 80s and early 90s?
Honestly, I would be okay with all of these (apart from princess, which is impossible for more than, what 20 people people in each generation?). Having an overpopulation of astronauts would be a massive boon for society in my opinion, they are pretty smart people, they would figure out a way to contribute even if they all couldn't make it into NASA or ESA or CNSA.
But I suspect many just want to be YouTuber, actor or athlete, who I see as adding less value to society, but perhaps I am being overly judgemental.
That all said, if a child of mine wanted to be any of those things, I would encourage them to pursue it. I don't see it as the role of schools to dissuade children from their dreams. As they age, they will naturally start to understand the world and how they can contribute to it. There is no need for schools to say "we only need a few firefighters, so its probably better to consider chartered accountancy Sally!"
Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with Gatto. The Northwest Ordinance set up "public schools" for 3 "Grades" -- to instill reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic in those who needed and to identify those (few) who could go further.
I think a lot of schooling is socialization. It would be interesting if there were a survey in which home-schooled kids were compared to kids school in traditional classrooms, following an identical curriculum.
My brother homeschooled his kids, and I've always wondered how their experience was differed, socially, than ours.
My gut instinct tells me we should just feed students' interests. I've found that to be the case in encouraging literacy in adult men. Most of what we consider important 'facts' simply aren't that important. But if one has an interest in Tesla, or welding, say, providing them with appropriate, attractive materials is a good place to start. Your ultimate goal might be critical thinking or precalculus, but giving them the tools to investigate what interests them helps them learn how to learn what they want to know. What we might consider important they can pick up later, at their own leisure.
I can't help but hope that people who practice and support critical thinking will someday again staff 'Human Resources and Workforce Development' [Personnel] offices, replacing the current crowd of Identitarian Drones.
Sadly they're mostly illegal nowadays, but any HR official who doesn't think standardized tests are the best way to judge prospective candidates is no better than an MD who thinks the best way to treat a fever is by bloodletting.
Arizona has good government because people going into civil service are generally hired on their qualifications. But it has lousy politics because there are scant qualifications for running for elective office. We end up with Joe Arapaio and professional teleprompter-reader and election-denier Kari Lake. I'll take a civil servant over them any day. At least the dog catcher has a clean driving record. We should start screening would-be political candidates to at least find out if they know which planet they're on.
3. Ideological indoctrination. Early universal schooling advocates were really open about it being a major goal and current universal schooling advocates are pretty transparent and proud about them subjecting pupils to ideological indoctrination.
That also basically goes under "domestication", at least when society more-or-less agrees on the "correct" ideology. When the "culture war" flares up, school of course becomes a battleground, like everything else.
And giving students a sense of what kinds of ideas and subjects even exist. No 8 year old will be aware of the huge range of subjects it is possible to be interested in without some exposure. No parents, no matter how educated themselves, know that much. Now, if we were somehow able to optimize for this, and then encourage (or just *allow*) study of students' actual interests as they emerge, school might be worth the costs to children.
> 2. Domestication. School attempts to instill conformity with how modern civilization works.
I'm not sure why school is better at this than being at home with guardians. It's probably worse for most kids, actually, probably better for kids with abusive guardians, and unclear with guardians that are neglectful.
School teaches you to be on time, take orders from superiors, endure boring tasks, handle peers, all things that kids generally don't have to deal with at home. They're not exactly enjoyable, but necessary for most jobs.
I've been thinking about this, and one puzzle is: assume that fact/skill learning really doesn't work. We know that education was valued historically in many diverse cultures for thousands of years, and universal, accessible education has been an ethical priority in the West for at least several hundred years. Why? What function, other than teaching skills, did it serve to make it so important?
Guess 1): "Historically, before access to libraries, education was _the_ best place to learn facts." But that's prob not true, most skills were gained through apprenticeships.
Guess 2): "Education is about signaling, and everyone wants to signal good things, and socially minded people also want to make sure that this signaling mechanism is available to people from wider backgrounds."
I'm curious if anyone has other thoughts, especially people familiar with historic education traditions, e.g. in Hebrew or Chinese cultures.
Re Guess 1: You switch up facts and skills, no? Perhaps skills were best learned at apprenticeships, AND facts best learned at schools?
Traditional Chinese education is primarily a system for creating and selecting bureaucrats to serve the state, not a system for transmitting knowledge. My understanding of Chinese history is that this is commonly accepted since the keju exam system got established.
Jewish education is based on the Torah and Talmud, and *man* do they learn their Torah and Talmud. I think this is because 1, they talk about nothing else for several years, and 2, it's integrated so closely with their daily life (ie you might be wondering whether it's okay to carry a certain object on a Saturday, and have to dredge through your memory to figure out what Talmud discussion is relevant) that they never forget it.
I think there might be something similar going on with classical education - a lot of it was about teaching Latin and the classics, and most of these people would then go on to read a lot of Latin and use classical metaphors for everything.
On the other hand, I also know a weird amount of classics (not nearly as much as an ancient person, but enough that I could tell you various facts about Hannibal) and I'm not sure why. Maybe classics are just inherently interesting.
Isn't the program you mention to retain information directly based on Vehaarev Na, designed to remember the Talmud?
Memorization is a sorely underutilized tool in modern pedagogy. Especially as far as those with low-g are concerned.
> and most of these people would then go on to read a lot of Latin and use classical metaphors for everything
You wrote a post once complaining that it was weird that people were starting to make real-world political arguments by drawing on metaphors from Harry Potter.
I believe I made the point at the time that the reason they were doing that was that they could rely on everybody else having read the same books. That's the point of acculturation. It's no different when the books that everybody has read are the Talmud, or a medieval canon of classical works. The society is formed by everybody reading the same thing.
>The society is formed by everybody reading the same thing.
Agreed. _Common_ cultural references are valuable.
I remember almost as much about 1984 as you do - and I haven't read it. You may be very right about this.
Robin Hanson has the theory that school is for submitting to authority. https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/school-is-to-submithtml
"Reading, Riting, Rithmetic" are in fact useful and most people can learn them in school. While you havent reached that, expanding education is good. More can also be useful, just not everything to everyone. A lot of past education was more like job-specific training today.
Except that the current push in school is not for more literacy and numeracy. It's for other things that frankly are luxury beliefs.
We spend far more than we need to on basic education. it's very poorly allocated by people who for several generations now have a vested interest in it being poorly allocated.
I would put more emphasis on the signalling race, but otherwise agreed. The question was why people thought it was useful. That those reasons dont apply at current margins is the point.
> We know that education was valued historically in many diverse cultures for thousands of years, and universal, accessible education has been an ethical priority in the West for at least several hundred years. Why? What function, other than teaching skills, did it serve to make it so important?
Well, in the first place, teaching skills wasn't a function of education at all. That's what apprenticeships are for.
(And note that in a traditional society, those who belong to the educated classes are most likely 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘴𝘬𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘴. It would be more common that possessing a useful skill got you summarily ejected from polite society - it would be actively disqualifying - than that you'd be expected to have one.)
The function it served was acculturation, enabling people who might not have ever previously met to recognize that they belonged to the same social class, held the same values and viewpoints, and could cooperate with each other.
Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World, by Patricia Crone, has a decent amount of treatment of education; I liked the book a lot.
I'd quibble about the definition of "useful skill", but we both probably agree. "Trades" aren't a fit occupation for a gentleman, and I've heard that this is at the root of the British distinction between "solicitor" (tradesman) and "barrister" (gentleman expert).
And other than that, yeah, I think you've put it more clearly than I did.
<i>We know that education was valued historically in many diverse cultures for thousands of years,</i>
At least in the West, schooling often focused on teaching you the skills you'd need to learn things yourself, rather than trying to impart a large variety of facts per se. E.g., most scholarship was in Latin, so schools made sure their students were fluent in Latin. They also had a big focus on logic and rhetoric, so people could follow arguments and sort the valid from the invalid. General knowledge facts about history, natural philosophy, and the like, were mostly taught incidentally, as and when they came up.
<i>and universal, accessible education has been an ethical priority in the West for at least several hundred years. Why?</i>
Probably typical-minding. People who think about ethics, education, society, and the like, are going to be more intellectually-minded than the average person, so it'll be easy for them to overestimate how much the average person values intellectual education (as opposed to practical education, like apprenticeships).
<i>I'm curious if anyone has other thoughts, especially people familiar with historic education traditions, e.g. in Hebrew or Chinese cultures.</i>
In China, education was supposed to inculcate a good moral character (which it was also supposed to do in the West, of course, although China probably took this aspect further). You were expected to know the Confucian Classics by heart so that you always knew the correct course of action in any given situation.
I think it's a combination of the two. Certainly there were facts, and logic, and understandings of how the world worked. And there's also the part where it's about *how* to think and *how* to learn, not only through formal instruction, but also simply by observing and imitating one's teachers and peers.
And there's the part that, when you learn the same things as the current elite, you learn how to move among them. That's both an invaluable life skill, and also the meat that underlies signaling. You move out of whatever petty tradition your family had, and move into the tradition of the lords of the earth, a tradition which stretches back for centuries. You learn that they aren't superhuman, or mysterious gurus, that it's all just people like you, but each different in their own way. (Of course, depending on your actual position, you might not want to explicitly point this out.)
As time went on, and societies got more complex, there were more and more layers added. A month or two ago, some of the comments had a discussion about liberal arts universities vs. vocational schools. These are two different models of education, but in America they've sort of met in the middle, with things like the land-grant universities. Now there's layers and layers, and status is still tied to the layers, even though the actual facts being taught may not differ much.
But apart from "signalling", the main difference is the people you're around. Are you learning the habits of the very best, from the very best, alongside the future leaders of the world who will know your name? Or are you getting a pale imitation, a dried husk that goes through the motions without knowing what it's doing? And yet, a smart and driven person can take a dead tradition and breathe life into it, or do it all on their own. Teachers at "bad" schools can still carry and instill the spark, when they find students who want to learn. And students at "good" schools can have involuted themselves into test-taking machines, or can buy into the "signalling" critique and ignore the treasure at their fingertips. The world is a lot more fluid than it used to be.
This is all fairly Anglocentric, though. The French have another story, and I don't even know about the Germans, let alone anyone else.
Germans basically invented the modern school. "Prussian education system" article on the wiki has a pretty good overview.
“If school teaches you some fact, then either you’ll never encounter it again after school, in which case you’ll quickly forget it). Or you will encounter it again after school, in which case school was unnecessary; you would have learned it anyway.”
I feel like there’s an unconsidered option here, where learning makes you more likely to encounter learning again (because being more educated you’re more likely to be in circumstances In which you encounter it, such as reading) and perhaps also more likely to recognize it as learning and as worth knowing. In particular, one could hypothesize that the habits of learning being imprinted early makes it easier to make students inclined to be receptive to learn, and re-learn, in the future.
There are two questionable premises in that passage:
1. Encountering a fact outside of school is SUFFICIENT for remembering it later on. I think this depends a lot on the fact and how important it's perceived to be - school has some priorities, culture has others. Perhaps if I encountered a fact about Jupiter outside of school, I wouldn't care in that moment to remember it.
2. Not encountering a fact outside of school later on is SUFFICIENT for (probably) forgetting it. I think that depends on how I would encounter it. But surely it depends on how relevant the fact is to my life or thinking. Say I never encounter a fact about the process of mummification again - if I find the topic fascinating, I might look things up for my own curiosity, or use it in my creative writing, or just fantasize about how this aspect might have affected the thinking of the people at the time (did the pharaohs think about what they would look like if anyone ever discovered them)? It seems to me like facts OVERALL do have an exponential decay, but SPECIFIC facts (per person) needn't have.
> Say I never encounter a fact about the process of mummification again - if I find the topic fascinating, I might look things up for my own curiosity
That would be an example of encountering facts about the topic.
I interpreted "encounter" to mean unplanned/unintended. Seeing something on the news about a topic, say. But if you insist on defining it otherwise, I have provided two other examples of how the process could work without encountering a fact in any way.
The thing missing seems to be some theory of what makes things *interesting*. Perhaps being taught the intricacies of some topic engenders an appreciation that things can be interesting, and how to recognise the things you will find interesting.
Yes. That, and also just *recognizing* things. Let's say that Scott encounters three things that remind him of 1984 within a week/month/whatever: some politician is called Orwellian, he sees a meme about Big Brother and another meme about 1984 not being a manual.
But to someone who hasn't learned the connection first, those are three totally independent things! Even if people encounter each of these three topics 100 times, I don't think that they would recognize that they have anything to do with each other.
Learning a topic works by building a dense web of facts and connections between them. If you are not reminded of any of them, you forget the whole bunch. But if it's dense enough, then each of the aspects reinforces the whole rest. If you know enough about a topic, you'll see it appearing over and over again in your life.
That's a good point. It's sort of like how listening to a foreign language you don't understand won't help you, but if you do understand it, it reinforces your memory.
This resonates with something that I've long thought was a goal in the kind of education I do. I try to give people an exposure to many different things, 90% of which they will forget and never pay attention to again, but hopefully some small fraction of which they will find interesting enough to seek out more about. I also hope that they'll have a better foundation for encountering some of these things again at some future point - and perhaps that being primed with one thing they learned about will help them remember the relevance of other things they encountered just before or after it.
I think there's a key method here, which is that when you learn something new, if you're excited about it, you'll see its patterns reflected in everything around you, which will help you remember it, especially if you have people to talk about it with.
It's ... kinda like watching a serial TV show, one episode per week, getting into it, talking about it with friends, making jokes, coining memes, speculating, indulging in fanfic, etc. Versus bingeing the whole thing in a weekend, writing a review, and then forgetting it completely.
Curious if you have thoughts on Egan. (Author of the book that won last year’s review contest). My (limited) understanding is that Egan education is about trying to make learning emotionally salient. In the 1984 example- I don’t think I’ve read or encountered anything that went into the rats scene. Yet, I’m pretty sure I’ll forget Orwell’s name before I forget that.
I’m preparing to teach Egan’s method as a homeschooling parent, and after reading essentially everything Brandon Hendrickson has written on Substack, I don’t think Egan’s methods implemented broadly would lead to significantly different test scores or economic productivity. I am fairly confident it would make students much happier why they are in school, and think there is a small chance that it could make people long term more creative and curious. So a net benefit to the status quo, but drastically cutting all government funding to high school and college are still better ideas imo. Wait to cut K-8 until after we see whether this had a positive or negative impact.
Meanwhile, while I remember a rough outline from the single rime I've read 1984 some 20 years ago, I don't remember any rats at all.
Schools exists so that a) we can work in various modern white-collar jobs and b) we can select who should work in various jobs.
A lot of modern (especially white-collar) jobs require incredible depth of knowledge or skills in one very narrow aspect. But, it is very difficult to know in advance what your career path would be. For the longest time I wanted to be a doctor at least in part because my parents were doctors. But now I'm a philosopher. At least part of this was because a lot of schooling taught me something about myself: I was better at solving abstract problems than remembering facts. I also learned that I enjoyed philosophy more than biology. So, a lot of schooling involves building up a broad body of knowledge, not so that you will remember all of that. Instead, it is so that you know enough about everything so that when you become an adult, you have some inkling of where your interests and aptitudes are and further you know enough to transition to a more specialized avenue of study that would be useful for your work. Of course there are tradeoffs so you might want to start streaming the less academically inclined kids towards more "practical" kinds of knowledge at an earlier stage if you identify them early.
I think you're right, though it doesn't quite "rescue" school, because while this might be an intended side-effect, it's rarely brought up as the reason for schooling. "Go to school, learn about various sciences and stuff and decide what you like" isn't what people say to their children (maybe aside from Soviet children books).
If the goal is just to familiarize children with various fields, why marks, why tests, and the whole stress associated with them? Well, they do have their uses - a mark lets you know the teacher thinks you understand what you were trying to learn, so you can track your progress in a numeric way. But unfortunately, marks doesn't work that way for most people, I think. Instead, they become the goal (of going to school). A boring, stressful goal. Which, admittedly, kind of prepares children for adult life where stressful, boring and utterly meaningless jobs await them eagerly.
In the end, I think school is many things - broadening of view, socialization, "domestication", daycare, even a place to really learn some skills - for some people, at least, if not for all. But it's all a confusing jumble of conflicting goals, never well-suited for anyone in particular, but kind of allowing the majority to muddle through.
Excluding the big ones like the SAT, tests and grades are more for the administrator's benefit than for the students. It's one of the only ways they can confirm that teachers are teaching what they're paid to teach. And school isn't special in this regard, any industry with such a huge number of (mostly unsupervised) producers is going to have a big problem with standardization.
Do teachers spend more time preparing and grading tests than doctors spend filling out insurance forms, or bureaucrats spend writing memos?
Without marks and tests, people don't study the stuff even once.
It's a lot like playing a game - you have to put some artificial goals in so that you get the real goal. We know that the real reason to play Twister is to have fun, not to put left hand on green or whatever. But you're not going to have fun unless you and everyone else try to put left hand on green.
There are plenty of games where you don't have any kind of score, though. In fact, I avoided scored games as a plague when I was a child, because to have a score is to have a possibility of losing, and I could never stand that. And I study things all the time without any kinds of tests even as an adult - as long as they of interest me. This, I think, is much more true of children, especially in highly entertaining subjects like chemistry (explosions!) or physics (lightning!) or basic computer science (you can make your own game!). At least until marks and test beat all curiosity out of you and you become afraid of new themes, because you might fail and get a bad mark.
Admittedly, I'm not sure how to study utterly uninteresting subjects like writing, or (classical) literature without marks (at least I found them utterly boring, so, given choice, I'd probably avoid them in school, especially literature), and different types of minds react differently to marks. But my main thesis is that marks and tests system as it is is not particularly conductive to the goal of letting children taste every subject and decide what they like the most, and in fact could be a big hindrance to it. Also, no matter how many times teachers and parents repeat the phrase "knowledge is more important than marks", I don't think there is a single child out there who ever believed that lie: marks are the most important thing at school, because getting bad ones means all kinds of punishment, while failing to understand stuff and then getting passing marks by cheating (or, if we're being charitable, by cramming before the test) at least avoids punishments.
That being said, personally I'm not sure how to reform school without, or with different score system, and I freely admit it. I have high hopes for cybernetic augmentation of brain and AI teachers a la The Diamond Age, because I'm that kind of tech-optimist.
I think one of the things that schools are pretty darn good at is teaching you that cheating is counter-productive. I don't think I have ever met someone that has told me that they learnt that cheating is the way to succeed at school, and at my school it was hammered into us that it is better to fail honestly than succeed dishonestly, a lesson that I have carried through my life as have all of my peers (I think).
That said, when it came to sports, we were definitely taught to play to the referee, not to the rules. If the ref doesn't see it, you are not cheating was definitely a core belief, as well as "Always play to the second whistle", in other words, keep playing even if you know you violated a law (like a knock-on), make it the referees job to enforce the rules, don't self referee even if you know you made a mistake. One may consider this to be unethical or outside the spirit of the game or sportsmanship, but honestly I consider myself to have benefitted from these two different perspectives on honesty.
I would 100% agree about cramming though. Many people I have talked to over the years have worn the ability to study the night before and forget everything the next day as a badge of honour. But to be fair, I can't see anything necessarily wrong about this. I can't say that these students were poorly served by learning that this is a way to achieve the goal set for them.
> I don't think I have ever met someone that has told me that they learnt that cheating is the way to succeed at school
Ever consider the possibility that this is because the ones who talk about it get caught and end up not succeeding?
I mean, by the time we are talking at the pub it is a bit late to sabotage their school careers.
Maybe it's something Western. In Russia, there is a culture of cheating in both school and university, and I heard the same about Chinese students. Jut yesterday I saw a "life hack" type of post at a social media site which advised first year students to become friends with older ones, because you can always get completed coursework from them, which is usually passed down through generations of students, and so is usually well-checked for errors. And I know it works, because I saw it work. Not everyone just copies the work symbol-for-symbol, of course, many just use it to check themselves, but if you don't have time, because you wasted it on something else, or don't care about this particular subject much? Then it's OK.
Personally, I almost never cheated (twice I copied other people work, because my own attempts to do it failed, and I ran out of time, but I told the teacher I did it, and I took time to understand what I was copying in details, and so was able to answer any questions about it), but I certainly let people copy my work. And I know I was in minority on this.
In fact, I think many here in Russia would cynically argue that the main thing school teaches you is to cheat, lie, hide your opinion and bow to authority. That was not my experience, not entirely, but some parts ring somewhat true (the main exhibit usually are Russia literature essays we had to write on every book assigned to us; you could never express your true opinion in those essays (because a teenagers opinion on "War and Peace" is usually "it's boring shit about stuff that has zero relevance to my life and anything I care about"), but parrot your teacher and approved literary critics).
That is interesting, thanks for that perspective.
Cheating totally can work. But it works best, when you kind of know the topic, only need some prompt for starter.
In Slovakia, I guess it depends on specific university, maybe also on specific teacher. I have seen exams where cheating was practically encouraged (imagine the teacher saying "I need to leave this room for a few minutes, please do not cheat" and leaving the students alone in the room for 15 minutes; the same thing also happens during the following exams).
I suspect one of the differences might be that we were almost never graded on a curve. So if you knew the right answers, there was no reason not to help your friends. (By the way, I consider grading on a curve to be an evil system, because although it prevents cheating, it also disincentivizes people from helping each other in non-cheating ways, such as learning together.)
There are plenty of games without score (Twister, for example!) but they all involve giving you some sort of concrete goal you aim towards, even though that goal is not itself why you play the game. Teaching could be structured with goals other than tests and marks. But it’s helpful to have something, which isn’t actually valuable outside of school, but is treated as valuable within school, the same way we have with games.
I disagree that all games involve concrete goal. Or, rather, there are a lot of activities that are maybe not games, but are game-like (I think I remember heavy discussion about this in gamedev community, related to sandbox games).
We ran around with my friends, pretending to shoot stick pistols at imaginary enemies without any defined goal. I guess you can say we had shifting, improvised "goals", like when someone shouted "there are fascists behind that tree, let's shoot them!", but it seems to me like stretching definition of goal a bit too far. Likewise, I'm did not had any externally defined goals when I was tinkering with lego pieces or other construction sets. Some self-imposed goals, sure, like "Today I want to build some transformers out of lego because I just watched a cartoon and want to re-create it on my table".
When you put it like that, that seems right. I wouldn't want to count "playing with stick guns" or "playing with legos" as a "game", though they do count as "play" - but I think of more sandbox-like things like Grand Theft Auto or Europa Universalis and see that there's definitely a continuum with border cases, no matter how you try to draw the definition. But as the things are more game-like, they give you more metrics that you can treat as goals to a greater or lesser degree. There's also weird cases where people play games without adopting the goals the creator gives - speedrunners are a really interesting type of case.
A lot of my thinking here is inspired by Thi Nguyen's work in Games: Agency as Art.
https://academic.oup.com/book/32137
A review: https://archive.philosophersmag.com/games-agency-as-art-a-review/
> "Go to school, learn about various sciences and stuff and decide what you like" isn't what people say to their children (maybe aside from Soviet children books).
Genuinely confused as to what is the alternative - that's definitely how I thought of school/the attitude my parents tried to instill! (Well, of course there were hurdles to cross, especially the major one of getting into college, but they were just gateways to more advanced topics among which to discover an intellectual calling.)
I would guess the most common alternative is "go to school and study, or I'll whap you black and blue", or at least this is the vibe I'm getting from my upper floor neighbours (whoever decided that modern apartment buildings would be fine without sound insulation should be forever tortured by screaming people and karaoke).
Well, for the less dysfunctional families, the alternative is "go to school to get good work when you're adult" without ever specifying how exactly will school help you - it just magically should make you a doctor, a lawyer, a businessman, or at least a programmer (these days).
Though both variants are kind of guesses, as my own parents never had to talk to me much about "why" of school, since I hit on my obsession with computers at a very young age, and it seemed kind of obvious that I should study mathematics, especially since I mostly liked that subject. Why I should study anything BUT mathematics and related fields, and especially literature, which took up more school hours than all subjects I was actually interested in, was another question, the answer to which ("because you should know culture") was never satisfying.
I suppose the questions "why do I have to go to school [today]?" (when you're young) and "what should I try to accomplish at school?" (when you're old enough to care about that) have different answers. I was focusing on the latter, but sure, there were also implied disciplinary and future-ruining consequences for refusing to go to school from kindergarten.
> "Go to school, learn about various sciences and stuff and decide what you like" isn't what people say to their children (maybe aside from Soviet children books).
That's exactly what I tell my kids. But they are in elementary school now; when they get older, I will probably be like "okay, you need to make the decision now" and then "you need to get the diploma -- if you end up hating the subject, you can still change your career later, but you probably won't get another opportunity to get the diploma".
> why marks, why tests, and the whole stress associated with them?
Why indeed. I would prefer a hypothetical school that has no tests, or even better only the kind where they tell you the result, but they don't put it on a permanent record. In my opinion, kids should have the opportunity to redo the tests as many times as they wish. If you understand something now, why should it matter that you were supposed to understand it a few months ago? The important thing is that you finally do understand it. If you fail to get the driving license, you are allowed to try again; why wouldn't the same apply to everything?
Isn't there also an option where it's about teaching you a lot of things so that you can decide which of those things you want to reinforce? Each individual might only reinforce a small subset, which is why the general knowledge quiz finds such low levels, but perhaps a very high proportion of individuals find *something* from school interesting and choose to live lives that reinforce that something, and if that were true, you could justify education on that basis.
I don't think most people deliberately reinforce anything - certainly I've never met anyone who has flashcards with Orwell's name on it that they read once a year.
Maybe you mean something less formal, like you decide to become a literature professor as a career or something, or decide you love reading and get it as a hobby. I think it would be very surprising if 12+ years of school as it currently exists was optimal and efficient for getting you to figure out what career/hobby to have.
Well I'm not really trying to argue for optimality, but off the top of my head, I'm not sure what would be a better approach than giving a minimal grounding for appreciation in lots of different topics, which is pretty close to what school is.
You might have very different ideas on how far from optimal school is for that purpose.
Including homework, I spent maybe 19,000 hours in k-12. One percent of that would be 190 hours. How much could you do with a 190 hour program that was specifically designed to find what the student was interested in?
How many topics and fields does our current k-12 system even expose us to? How often do students leave high school knowing what they want to specialize in? It seems to me that possibly the majority of students entering university either don't know what career they want, or are mistaken about what they want and later switch fields.
If your high school was like mine, it never gave you an opportunity to discover an interest in most possible careers. I never learned at school if I might enjoy carpentry (we had no shop class), computer programming, plumbing, cooking, food blogging, working in HR, being a park ranger, psychology, marketing, finance, hospital administration, nurse, etc. We mostly had to discover that in university or outside of school.
High school let me know if I generally liked math, hard sciences, writing, literature, history, creating art (but we had very few hours of this), and maybe a couple other things. It also incidentally shows you what a teaching career entails.
If we're considering only how effective school is at helping students discover what they want to do with their career and not other benefits, then literature, history and to some extent art are a bit of a trap. Far more students discover they like these topics than can actually get careers in it. Especially so if you enjoy the topic itself but don't enjoy teaching. The topics students get to sample in high school are very different than the topics they're likely to get a career in.
Math, science and writing are prerequisites for a lot of jobs, so that's a point in favor of schools helping discover interests. But I think most of what school is doing isn't helping you discover you like math so much as it's training you in math. That's great if you're going into a career that requires math. For everyone else, it's ~7 years of training in a field they didn't use (I'm counting the math up to grade 5 as universally useful). And knowing you enjoy high school math is still a far step from knowing which math-requiring career you actually want, or if one of the many non-math careers you never tried might be better for you.
So I wouldn't be surprised if it were possible to expose students to much, much more potential interests in just 1% of the time that they currently spend in school.
Optimality and efficiency is quite a high bar to set, given that in your post, you were trying to find any reason to keep schools around, no? Quote: "Can we rescue some kind of value for school?"
Not just that you decide what hobby/career to have after 12 years of school, but that you decide that after 1-4 years and then preferentially learn those subjects for the remainder.
20% of people knowing various facts that everyone should have learned in school is consistent with everyone picking which 20% of school they care about early on and then learning a ton of that stuff over the rest of their school career.
These are hardly impressive facts to be knowing. If we're still as bad as we were in '99, and we're probably worse, most of our populous is as knowledgable about literature and history as an innumerate is about algebra.
Is that actually true, or is Scott preferentially picking things from a long list that feel to him like everyone should know that, and since we're in the same tiny subculture as him we feel the same way about them?
Were there 10 more things on that list of questions that we wouldn't know, and the non-STEM folks would think we must be complete idiots because of it?
Knowing that Jupiter is the largest planet, that George Orwell wrote 1984, and that the Himalayas are the world's largest mountain range are hardly serious nerd facts. They're extremely general, easy, and non-technical bits of trivia.
And we don't know more because we're "STEM folks". We know more because we have much higher general intelligence than the average American. There's nothing on average we'd be less likely to know than the average American, including football and Taylor Swift trivia.
Besides, ou shouldn't need to be a genius to know these things, nor facts generally. These people still know who Toto is, as do we. I'm sure they can learn Jupiter is the largest planet.
Interesting theoretical case. An empirical case might look at the changes likely introduced by required education, as is the case in Germany? Or seeing how things improved for groups over the next few years, that were allowed to enter school (or proper school) at a distinct point that, like girls or maybe blacks? Do those results differ compared to the theoretical argumentation here?
Very important omission here: This post argues against/questions education, full stop (at the school level). But as far as I can tell, the reference class is only US pupils. Perhaps the education system in the US is (generally) broken? I'm from Germany, and I can tell you with certainty that there's a widespread stereotype of US Americans being extremely uneducated as a whole. I suspect it might be similar in other Western countries. So it might make sense to look at another population - how many Germans (or whoever) know the facts listed above / the ones adapted to be relevant to their country or teaching curriculum? This still wouldn't counteract the cultural osmosis perspective, because perhaps the osmosis in other places might be better, or maybe it interacts more effectively with the education system there. But it would certainly point to a US-specific weakness if true. Wrote this before looking anything up FYI.
The only apples to apples comparison we have of US students and German students is that US students score 1468 and German students score 1447 on the PISA. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country
My actual impression is our schools are better or effectively the same, but Germans are more likely to casually discuss or read about high brow topics, not marvel movies or football. This supports Scott’s thesis, school cannot make Americans educated, they need repetition as adults and that’s something other countries do better. But my opinion on Germans is based solely on a small sample that Visited to the US and that already means that they are probably more educated than the average German.
prole germans love soccer, video games and such. I'm pretty sure the sample you met was extremely biased.
That's possibly a sort of illusion: Europeans tend to encounter American tourists , American s.have a way of not knowing much about what goes on outside America, which really shows up when they are abroad. But it's a very specific deficit.
I think they kind of treat a vacation somewhere else as a sort of theme park. The people they encounter are playing the part of people talking funny and doing odd things, but it's not what they do when they go home at night.
It's not just American tourists though.
I've heard some odd stories about German tourists thinking "Oh, a beach in the wild American West! Of course it's a nude beach..." and being rudely surprised when they're informed it isn't.
I always feel for Europeans, having to do those accents all the time. Must be exhausting!
US whites score better than all European countries in PISA (ditto for blacks/Asians/LatAms and black/Asian/LatAm countries), so the US educational system seems to be working pretty well.
+1 for following up the "I am not debating Bryan Caplan" post with a weak-tea criticism of Bryan Caplan's recent work.
This isn't a criticism of Caplan; if anything it's agreeing with him.
Agreement is the weakest form of criticism.
Just to take one subject, history: School mainly taught me to accept unquestioningly what my teacher and my textbooks told me. I wrote various reports for history class. I put endnotes and bibliographies in these reports, because the teacher required it, but I didn’t see any point to those things. It was not until several years post-high-school that it sunk in for me that there could be debate about historical facts, and that you should support your argument with sources, preferably primary sources. (This was thanks to my participation in the Academy of Saint Gabriel, a group loosely connected to the Society for Creative Anachronism.)
(This comment probably makes me sound stupid, so let me just say that all my teachers considered me a good student.)
Hm - part of me sympathizes with this. But at other times I felt like my teachers were engaged in some kind of cargo cult of Being A Critical Thinker so hard that they never taught any object level information, and also that it never stuck because they never wanted to expose us to any real controversies we could take a side on. They just taught us really artificial rubrics for Thinking Critically About Things that I assume no real historian has ever used, then made us use them artificially in essays.
I think it's a tough question what age teachers should start introducing anything other than object level facts (eg you should probably just memorize your ABCs without learning that there was controversy for a while over whether J should be included), and also whether a mass-production school environment can ever be any good at teaching that. I think part of this is fear of kids getting the questions wrong -> don't present them with any real controversies - what do you do if some kid decides to make a case for the South being right during the Civil War? Give them an A if the essay is well-structured and they cite sources that support their points? Give them an F because even if they superficially do a good job, they must have missed the better sources that real historians would use to conclude this isn't true? But if you try to avoid this, you end up with fake cargo-cult controversies that nobody cares about.
Is that even a question of truth or falsehood? It's true that they were the LOSING side, but whether they were "right" is just opinion.
Yours is the correct position, but good luck trying to push it through in the modern Anglosphere's pedagogic system. "White men are evil" is their religion.
We probably shouldn't even be using a grading system in schools at all. It's a system which begs to be abused, and regularly is.
There's a lot of disagreement about whether morality is "just opinion". I know that our school system likes to teach it as though anything related to values is "opinion" rather than fact, but there's a lot of confused ideas that go into that definition.
I doubt that there's anybody in the world entirely not-confused about these questions. Plenty of people think that they are though, which is what counts!
Very much agree with Cargo Cult thinking.
It's hard to avoid this with any field where there's a lot of people though. And there are a lot of teachers out there.
I read a book on classical education a while ago and, naturally, it didn't all stick with me, but I recall that they suggested, and you can still kind of see reflected in our school set up, a three tier approach to covering the same content. Primary education, grammar stage, is about facts. Then a repeat of the subjects in the middle school "logic stage" where reasoning is focused on. Then the rhetoric stage, which is more about challenging or justifying in the same fields and such.
I kind of agree.
I think the real thing, is that anything complex becomes subjective. And you simply cannot allow anything to be subjective as a teacher, as society forbids it.
Perhaps there was a golden age (I doubt it) in the past where great teachers could be independent and decide with impunity how good an argument for one side or the other was. But today, if there is even the slightest ability for parents to object, they will swoop in and insist that little Susie get's an A+ for her work, and how can you deny her when she worked so hard, blah blah.
So teachers are forced over and over again to water down the curriculum and take out any subjectivity or nuance until all that is left is "What date did..." or "Name the 5 reasons in the text book for..."
This of course is why in theory teachers should get tenure, to take off the pressure of having to bend to the whims of parents, but that brings in a whole bunch of other problems we don't have time to get into now.
> that brings in a whole bunch of other problems we don't have time to get into now.
Most of which can be summed up in the word "accountability."
When I was in high school, one week the school paper published an article claiming that research showed that a surprisingly high percentage of people who live on farms engage in bestiality with the livestock. And you have to understand, this was in a rural, agrarian community, and the headline of the article, which I won't repeat here, made it clear that the writer knew exactly what he was doing, deliberately throwing this rhetorical hand grenade into a crowd of his fellow students.
Naturally, the students and their parents did not take kindly to this. The student who wrote the article got in trouble... but the teacher who ran the paper did not. Sure, she was removed from the paper and reassigned to teaching other classes, but that was the most that they were able to do, *because she had tenure.* I had her class the next year, and found her quite possibly the most unpleasant teacher I'd ever been saddled with. (On her own merits; I was unaware that this was the teacher who'd let that article get published until a classmate brought it up several months into the year.)
Exactly. How can you give teachers an environment where they won't be pressured by teachers and faculty, but can still be held accountable for gross misconduct? I don't know, and this is why basically teachers have to simply be cogs in a machine, unless they are part of a particularly exclusive organisation.
I think that a big problem is a conflict of interests -- teachers are responsible for *teaching* the kids, but also for *grading* the kids. It is good when the teachers are accountable to parents for how they teach, but not when the parents can pressure them to give better grades.
As it is now, when parents complain about how you teach their kids, at least 9 times out of 10 the actual problem is that you gave their kids bad grades. If you give everyone an A, the complaints about teaching disappear instantly, even if you keep teaching exactly the same way. Which suggests that the parents didn't have a problem with teaching in the first place. They were just unhappy about the grades, but couldn't complain directly, because the obvious answer to "why did my Johnny get an F?" is "because he got all the answers on the test wrong". So they need to change their complaint into "why do you teach my Johnny in a way that doesn't work for him?" or something like that. When Johnny gets an A despite not knowing anything, suddenly your teaching methods become acceptable.
The way to fix this would be to have one person teach the kids, and a different person to grade them. Then the parents would have to choose which person they actually want to complain about, so the debate would become more honest.
True, but then we end up in the current system of standardised tests, and everyone complains that teachers "teach to the test", but then of course they do, that is how teachers and regulators evaluate them, on test results, and we all end up in the same place. And even if we had a person grading nuanced answers rather than a standardised test, parents will still complain that the one teacher didn't teach their child to pass the other teachers mean marking.
I do wonder how much of it is simply "the lack of choice". I think in general parents don't get to choose their kids teachers, so all you can do is complain. But of course, if you could choose, then everyone would just choose the teacher who got the highest marks last time. But obviously not everyone can have that teacher, so how do you allocate, seeing as parents don't pay? There simply are no easy answers.
'what do you do if some kid decides to make a case for the South being right during the Civil War? Give them an A if the essay is well-structured and they cite sources that support their points?'
That sounds like an 'ought' question, so I'm not sure by what metric an answer could be considered incorrect here. What would you do, other than grade kids on how well they tie in what happened with what they personally would have wanted to happen?
One thing I noted is that Americans I interact with on the Internet are likely to go "didn't they teach you at school?" on history-facts that I would consider very niche, the names and dates of kings or battles or pre-modern states, say. And here my thought always is "these are useless history-facts that should not be taught in the first place": in my opinion history teaching in schools should be more about broad-strokes culture history, thought history, and above all the historical method, than about events, modulo some events considered vital to understanding of the modern world (like the World Wars) or to put those other things into a proper context.
I don't quite remember the contents of the compulsory first through ninth grade history classes here in Finland, but in high school the emphasis was definitely on the historical method, exams featuring questions requiring the student to analyze the included historical documents, and the other questions being essays of form of "why/how" rather than a list of facts, and I wholeheartedly endorse this style of history teaching. Although I do suspect you couldn't teach first-graders this way: it probably takes a certain degree of intellectual maturity and couldn't be taught much earlier than high school anyway, just like math classes seem to track what students of the given age are disposed to learning (no algebra until they're teens, etc).
That being said, I don't expect most of the students to remember the historical method any better than the size of electrons relative to atoms, but kings and generals history is thoroughly useless for an average person as a practical skill, for understanding their place in the world, or anything else but a matter of curiosity or grounding background for more serious study (but in these latter cases the person would have learned these things outside School anyway). And I say that as someone who e.g. remembers that the Roman Consuls of year 481 were Spurius Furius (and someone of the Fabii).
Did something of note happen in the year 481?
Not as I recall, Spurius Furius is just such a fun name I happened to memorize it.
Yeah, straight out of Asterix! :D
If you know a little bit about English history, and want a laugh, check out the book "1066 and All That". I'm going to post an excerpt below.
In the UK it was definitely focused on critically analysing sources and their reliability and biases from high school onwards.
But even before that we talked about fact vs opinion and differing viewpoints. E.g. writing a short piece about the pros of the Roman conquest of Britian and another about the cons.
I had the opposite experience with history class at school -- they spent so much time focusing on "how historians actually work" that they never taught us all that much actual history (outside a few tiny areas where we focused obsessively).
>I’m betting it’s the latter - for example, I’ve forgotten the names of some of my college professors, even though I would have seen them almost daily for a year.
That's not how the spaced repetition curve works. It only works if the repetitions are actually spaced, which leads to a counterintuitive phenomenon: if you had seen the names of your professors FEWER times (but in an optimally spaced out manner), you would remember them BETTER. In real life, random encounters of facts are basically never even close to optimally spaced, so no wonder we forget everything we are taught.
I've never heard this before. Do you have any links? Why would it be true?
It's mentioned in the very link you put in the caption of the spaced repetition curve pic:
https://traverse.link/spaced-repetition/the-optimal-spaced-repetition-schedule
Quote from that:
> The "Forget to Learn" theory suggests that our brains store memories with two strengths: storage strength, which remains steady, and retrieval strength, which fades over time. Interestingly, when retrieval strength drops, learning increases when we access the memory again. This idea, called desirable difficulty, is a key reason why spaced repetition works so well.
The implication would be that recalling your professors' names before much forgetting had occurred didn't adjust those memories' forgetting curve all that much. I hadn't heard about this either until I read that link.
I learned about this technique from Pimsleur language tapes, but I can't find anything online that corroborates struggle to recall being an important part of the process. But that's definitely how it's implemented: whether with flashcards or language tapes, the technique is that you try to recall before being reminded.
"Our rule 5 states that the longer the gap you leave between repetitions, the stronger will be the effect on the memory trace’s durability. This is shown in the graph below, developed as a result of research carried out by SuperMemo"
https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/spaced-repetition-in-learning
This matches my experience somewhat, and also makes intuitive sense to me because learning is strongest when recall is most difficult. Nevertheless, as far as I can tell, no academic research corroborates this (the term to google for is "expanding interval") because no(?) studies test on repetition intervals longer than 1 or 2 days.
Have you ever had to type a password or entry code daily for a long time, then you came back from a trip and had a lot of trouble getting it right? I sure have, and it seems to be common. The memory that was getting reinforced daily tends to fade over longer periods unless it also gets reinforced at a longer period.
There was a paper on memorizing long-term passwords or keys by spaced repetition (for some purpose like crypto cold storage), but I, uh, don't recall more.
> Have you ever had to type a password or entry code daily for a long time, then you came back from a trip and had a lot of trouble getting it right?
Yes. Thankfully, I had it stored in my browser's password locker on a different computer, or I'd have had some real trouble getting in.
The toy model would be that if you recall the fact daily, then you are strengthening your short-term memory of the fact, without any strengthening of the act of long-term recall. Whereas if you let your short-term memory fade and then recall it again, you are strengthening your long-term recall of the fact.
This would be my intuitive understanding of spaced repetition.
If that were actually true, language learners would actively avoid immersion and just do SRS exclusively.
Kieran Egan’s book Educated Mind is an excellent antidote to this problem
> 58% know which gas causes most global warming (carbon dioxide).
To be honest this one isn't trivial, if the answer was methane I would not too be surprised either.
Both answers are actually wrong. The most dominant greenhouse gas is water vapour, and it isn't close.
I understand the question to be about which one causes the biggest effect in reality (including it's real amount in the air) rather than which is the most potent.
Then the answer is water vapour.
After some research: fair enough, it contributes most to the greenhouse effect, but since it's not really being added by human activity, it's not causing global warming (i.e. a RISE in temperature over time).
Human activity does add water vapour to the atmosphere. You ever see the billowing clouds of gas emanating from a coal fired power plant? That's not carbon dioxide, it's steam.
Granted there's a natural water cycle that turns water vapour into precipitation, but there's also a natural carbon cycle that turns carbon dioxide into vegetation.
I accept that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have been increasing over time, but so have atmospheric concentrations of water vapour: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022JD036728
Water is usually discounted in greenhouse gas discussions, and I would like to give a +1 to your comments.
Probably humans can do very little to change the greenhouse effects of water, so everyone concentrates on what they think humans CAN change: CO2 and methane.
My statement was not based on my own perception but on my quick search (sorry for not providing source directly):
[couldn't find the original source I stumbled upon, here's the next best thing]
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/climate-change/steamy-relationships-how-atmospheric-water-vapor-amplifies-earths-greenhouse-effect/
Here's a source explaining the atmospheric interactions and why we don't have to worry about our emissions of water vapor in plain language:
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-do-we-blame-climate-change-carbon-dioxide-when-water-vapor-much-more-common-greenhouse
This doesn't contradict your source - the amount of water vapor can increase over time even if our direct emission of it is not relevant. It does however imply that we shouldn't worry about how much vapor we put into the atmosphere.
Btw, according to that source, the gas coming from a coal plant is an even mix of CO2 and water: "the exhaust coming from a coal power plant—the classic example of a climate-warming greenhouse gas emission—contains almost as much water vapor as CO2.2 It’s why that exhaust forms a visible cloud." Perhaps you meant just that last part?
The natural carbon cycle surely has other differences to the water cycle that makes those two hard to compare, no? The time aspect, for instance (see the article).
Do I understand correctly that you're doubting that human activity is the central cause of climate change? Or that our CO2 production is its main driver?
Jumping into the middle of the deciduous tree argument...
Each of the following is true:
1. Water vapor (& throw in clouds) causes the largest portion of the greenhouse effect on present-day Earth. Carbon monoxide is #2, methane is #3.
2. Per molecule, the order is reversed, so in that sense methane is the most potent of the three.
3. The increase of temperature over the past century (global warming) was caused largely by increased in carbon dioxide, with methane #2.
4. The relative importance of the gases contributing to the change in greenhouse effect strength over the past century are carbon dioxide and water vapor, in a rough tie. Methane is third.
5. Because most of the water vapor increase has been caused by rising temperatures, it is a positive feedback on global warming rather than a root cause.
6. At different times and timescales in Earth's history, carbon dioxide has been primarily a feedback and primarily a cause. Right now it's a cause.
All of which is to say that the wording differences are subtle but scientifically meaningful, and in this instance the stayed correct answer was correct.
2.
Thanks for the nice explanation
It’s possible Scott’s synopsis of the question was wrong, but if the question wasn’t which anthropogenic forcing contributes the most, I still would have confidently answered water vapor.
Are you saying you think that’s incorrect, because the context was obviously anthropogenic forcing?
I'm taking "global warming" to mean the recent (50-200 yr) rise in temperatures and "cause" to be the mechanism that caused temperatures to rise. In the recent warming, water vapor is mostly an amplifier rather than a cause, but one can find less natural readings of "cause" that would put increasing water vapor on a par with increasing carbon dioxide.
Your reference to a possibly incorrect synopsis prompted me to follow the link. It turns out the survey was 11 years ago. Given the politicization of climate change even then, I might expect 50% of respondents to viscerally refuse to answer "carbon dioxide"! But the question was even vaguer than that, and water vapor wasn't one of the options.
<em>What gas do most scientists believe causes atmospheric temperatures to rise?
58% Carbon dioxide
10% Hydrogen
8% Helium
7% Radon
16% Don't know</em>
There's a lot to unpack here!
The question doesn't ask for the most important gas. It could be (mis)interpreted as "What's the only gas that causes temperatures to rise?" or "Which of the four gases listed can cause temperatures to rise?"
The possible answers don't include water vapor, so our whole discussion here is beside the point. Hydrogen and helium could easily ensnare a respondent who's not paying close attention, because they both cause balloons to rise in the atmosphere, and "rise" is the question word that's carrying the most weight (no pun intended). And radon could actually snare a scientifically literate respondent, who reasons "Radon is radioactive, and when the radon atom decays, it releases energy, part of which ends up as internal energy (i.e., heat). So radon definitely causes temperatures to rise, no matter what the other three do." Knowledge of the basics of radioactivity requires less complex physical understanding than knowledge of the basics of atmospheric radiative transfer.
> I'm taking "global warming" to mean the recent (50-200 yr) rise in temperatures
Out of curiosity, what's your take on recent research suggesting that "the recent (50-200 yr) rise in temperatures" is significantly less than has been reported, due to the data deriving disproportionately from measurements made in cities, which are heat islands, and thus that we aren't seeing global warming so much as *local* warming in the places where most people live?
Thanks for looking up the question!
I interpreted Scott's summary "know which gas causes most global warming" as being the question "which gas is responsible for the largest radiative forcing on Earth's atmosphere". Maybe I'm biased, because I had several questions that were phrased almost precisely like this in physics exams 30 years ago and water vapor was definitely the right answer.
But given that you looked up the actual question, yeah:
A) Anthropogenic forcing or not is largely irrelevant
B) And of course you're right that water vapor wasn't an option
<mild snark>
>10% Hydrogen
Well they _could_ be noting that without the Sun fusing hydrogen into helium, the Earth would be rather chilly. ( No, I don't really think anyone answered "hydrogen" for that reason... ) :-)
</mild snark>
But it isn't the direct cause of global warming. Water cycle is more-or-less in equilibrium by itself holding the concentration of other gases constant, so it makes sense to attribute causality elsewhere.
Water cycle is not in equilibrium. The atmospheric concentration of water vapour is trending upwards.
I had the exact same thought so I clicked the link to the question. Pew worded it as what has do scientists believe is causing the Earths temperature to rise. I still don’t like that wording, but it at least lets me know what Pew wants me to think the answer is
The question could be reasonably interpreted as what causes the increase.
Yeah. I was aghast at that one. Actual climate scientists will confidently say water vapor.
Reminds me of helping my daughter with her English homework. Half of the “is this a complete sentence” questions were garbage, and my daughter was very upset with the gods.
This is the problem with discussing third party descriptions of poll questions.
The actual question (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-against-education/comment/57125317) makes it obvious what the answer is (hint: it's not radon).
Many Thanks! I was trying to decide whether to bring that up...
I think I've heard definitions of "gas" such that ones below their boiling points (e.g. water vapor at room temperature and pressure) wouldn't count.
This sort of thing occurred to me when looking over the list. A lot of the questions had either "advanced right" answers like saying Eric Blair wrote 1984, or "advanced wrong" answers like saying that Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford wrote Romeo and Juliet. Either these definitely shows more engagement with the context of the facts than a simple "I don't know" or an ordinary wrong answer.
Likewise, the Copernicus question. If you know anything about the contemporary astronomical debates beyond the level of popcultural osmosis, you'll know that Copernicus did not "discover" that the sun is the center of the solar system; at best he made a lucky guess. His solar model was awful, so much so that it set the acceptance of the possibility of heliocentrism by the scientific community back by at least a century.
I would have known about Copernicus (and yes, saying he discovered that the earth orbits the sun is a poor way to describe what he did) but if you held my feet to the fire I couldn't have told you a particular date, so if you asked me "quick! In 1543 who?" I'd probably have guessed "Galileo?" since he's the guy everyone knows in regards to "controversy over does the sun go round the earth or the earth goes round the sun".
Very few people can remember dates, but for those of us who do, they are immensely helpful in keeping historical narratives straight in our heads since the basic rule of causality is that effects can't possibly happen before their causes.
I was going to bring this up if no one else did. Scott paraphrased the question in a way that totally changed what it meant. The gas that causes by far the most global warming is water vapor. On a per molecule basis, it is by far sulfur hexafluoride.
The survey question asks which gas is believed to cause rising temperatures, which is much more clearly CO2.
> On a per molecule basis, it is by far sulfur hexafluoride.
Not a chemist, but the very name sounds mildly horrifying. Is there any non-trivial level of it actually in our atmosphere?
Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6) is often used to cool electrical transformers and can be released into the atmosphere when they degrade. So yes, there is a non-trivial amount! However, the first video result on google is of a science entertainer huffing SF6 to give himself a deep Darth Vader voice, so it's clearly not too dangerous for humans.
Oh, the deep voice gas. I've seen videos like that. I didn't remember that was the name of it though.
And atmospheric scientists used to intentionally release sulfur hexafluoride into the atmosphere if they wanted to track the motion of air because it was so inert and so easy to detect. Oops.
>the very name sounds mildly horrifying
Thermodynamically, it "should" be. SF6 + 4H2O -> H2SO4 + 6HF is highly favored. It turns out that this reaction is so slow that sulfur hexafluoride can be treated as practically nontoxic, while essentially all similar compounds (e.g. tungsten, platinum, and uranium hexafluorides) are very reactive, corrosive, and toxic.
Does anyone know why this one is so nonreactive?
Many Thanks! I _think_ that it is thought that the fluorines are packed so tightly around the relatively small sulfur that it is hard for other reactants to get close enough (aka "steric hindrance").
I don‘t have a clear theoretical counter-argument here, but as someone working in the field of demography, I am highly skeptical of the Case Against Education. The empirical evidence seems overwhelming that, whether people remember specific things or not, education changes human behavior significantly, resulting in changes in the economy and society. A part of this (I‘ve seen numbers on the order of 50%) can be argued to be a selection effect. But much of it cannot be, no matter how many people have tried to make that case.
That said, the biggest transformations happen with literacy and then the widespread provision of basic tertiary education. I‘m sure there is plenty of room for fluff in the education industry (eg probably too many PhDs, do all these fields really need masters, is children‘s time in high school being well-spent, etc)?
What empirical evidence are you referring to?
Yep. I think the strongest case for education is on 1) changing a society as a whole from "illiterate & uneducated" to "literate & educated" and 2) teaching easily verifiable skills/facts.
At least in my experience, almost nobody is in practice advocating to abolish school entirely, it's mostly about reducing or changing its scope. But even there, as someone who often advocates for schools to be changed into an explicit skills-focused education, I often get a surprising amount of pushback.
Every time I get into an discussion on how bad the knowledge of many people is on cultural topics, despite the topic being taught in school, nobody wants to accept the possibility that school just might not be a very good place to teach it. No, they always conclude that "we need to improve teaching", usually in some nebulous way that just-so-happens to fit with their preconceptions.
On the other hand, when I point out how ridiculous it is that not only is our tax system unnecessarily overcomplicated, we aren't even taught in school how it works, it's somehow beyond the scope of school.
People imo really are ideologically quite married to the idea of school as a place of idealised, cultured learning, despite the evidence that it's not actually very good at it.
The MPs and probability paper is posted a lot but the point remains important, most people even those making important decisions don't have basic skills and knowledge needed to make those decisions.
Retention of facts and skills from school varies greatly from country to country. Whatever theory of education you have needs to explain that. The US has unusually poor outcomes given its wealth and the resources it spends. It's probably easier to make a Case Against the US Education System, than a Case Against Education in general.
In my opinion, school has three different goals with three different profiles for how much you should retain, neatly corresponding to primary, secondary and tertiary education.
In primary education, very basic knowledge and skills that every single person should know are imparted, and the goal should be as close to 100% retention as possible. Maybe you're rusty with long division now, but you should at least know what division is.
In secondary education, the goal should be to present as much of the breadth of human endeavor as is possible for a young mind to experience, so that the student can choose what to specialize in. Retention is not important here. A teenager should get the chance to learn some history, write some code, read and write poetry, do some science in a lab, play serious sports, sing and act, bend their brain with advanced math, etc. so they can make an informed choice what to do in college. But you aren't expected to retain all of that. It's a tasting buffet.
Tertiary education should be more goal-driven than previous stages. Retention should depend on what goals exactly the student has for choosing a particular course.
I don't believe in the concept of education where the teacher pours facts and skills into children's minds, and we measure success by how much stays in. That's not what it's for. Maybe that's true for the most basic skills taught in primary school, but past that point education is meant to serve the student's life goals. Sometimes that means presenting a lot of information that is meant to be only tasted rather than swallowed so the student can choose what's best. And sometimes that means presenting a lot of information that the student is meant to only pick a small amount from that is directly relevant to them. As long as their life goals are being served, that's still success. This is not a skull-filling contest.
According to international comparisons the US schooling system actually does quite well: https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-new-2018-pisa-school-test-scores-usa-usa/
"At 521, U.S. whites outscored all countries founded by whites (light blue bars) except Estonia. American whites edged Japan and South Korea by one point, which isn’t shabby."
"U.S. Hispanics at 470 outscored all Latin American countries, with Chile scoring highest at 438."
Some notes/amendments that I would make. I largely agree with you.
1) The end goal of education should not be getting a diploma from a college. Setting aside the nonsense requirements that credentialism has led to, the broadest swath of what Western society needs to thrive as a cohesive group (as in, Capital S "Society") is labor and specialization. College only provides some avenues toward specialization. Trade schools can teach someone about plumbing, engines, electricity, etc. And, there are possibilities beyond that.
2) An enduring artifact of the No Child Left Behind approach to education is an emphasis on "pour[ing] facts and skills into children's minds". That is where I think the *modern* emphasis on rote and memorization comes from.
I am hopeful that we're turning away from that approach, but it has been quite some time since I've been in school and can't speak to it personally.
As someone who graduated high school before No Child Left Behind, there was plenty of "rote and memorization" in the Before Times as well. (It may well have gotten worse since then, but it was not by any means a new thing created by NCLB.)
My education straddles the dividing line. You are definitely right.
I like this comment best.
This is great, but I think that the American system tends to emphasize university as still being a time to experience many different subjects - with some experience of actually *doing* several subjects rather than just *learning* about them - with specialization waiting until post-graduation. It does seem to me to be a strength: even though European undergrads come into grad school with more depth in their field, American students catch up on that, and tend to have more interdisciplinary connections.
Here are a few objections that come to mind:
1. Public schooling aims to bring everyone up to speed. Presumably, rich folks would still educate their children (as has been done for centuries at least), be it via private schools or homeschooling. But poor people won't have the luxury to let their children read Shakespeare when they can do chores instead. And middle class might be in between. So perhaps schools provide a basic (maybe very basic) level of education to everyone. Perhaps those stats you cite would be even lower without public school?
2. Maybe lots of people forget lots of facts. But perhaps schools give them the opportunity to find the subjects they're interested in pursuing, by giving them a broad view? Surely people who intend to study mathematics after school will have significantly greater number literacy compared to prospective English Literature students, and the other way around with being able to interpret poems or writing essays or sth. In the stats you cite, we might see that math people are bad at lit facts whereas lit people are bad at computations. For the two groups individually, however, it might have been worth learning one of those skills/knowledge, even if the other turned out to be completely useless later on. (Nb: I don't think thats true. Even if you don't remember a lot about a subjects "must know" facts, it can instill a curiosity. Perhaps I don't care about US history, but thanks to my history lessons, I notice how fascinating I find mideaval Europe. Even if I read every book on the subject, I still might not be able to name 3 US presidents. That doesn't necessarily mean that school is the best or a good way of sparking that curiosity. Just that even if I don't remember anything that gets asked in a survey, a given subject needn't have been fully wasteful for me.?
"According to tests, fewer than 10% of Americans retain PIIAC-defined “basic numeracy skills”, even though in theory you need to know algebra to graduate from most public schools."
I think you're misreading/misrepresenting this link. It says that 70% of Americans have "basic or above" numeracy skills.
The data is from an interesting report: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014008.pdf
Japan and Finland - two countries with completely different, but positively rated, education systems have 19% of the population with level 4/5 numeracy proficiency, while Italy and Spain have 5% and 4% respectively.
I think this just suggests that "it seems most people forget almost all of what they learn in school, whether we’re talking about facts or skills." is untrue. I know "people mostly retain a reasonable level of numeracy and literacy (depending on the quality of the education system), but forget isolated facts, unused foreign languages, and more advanced numeracy" doesn't sound as snappy, but this is probably the more accurate take from the data.
Can you really attribute retention of basic numeracy and literacy to school when it's something most people need to use daily throught their lives?
I.e. most people read something regularly - chats, social media, news websites, product descrption, maybe some work related materials, etc. Likewise they still need to use basic arithmetic everytime they want to buy something, and so on.
With literacy, it's hard to determine at the margins. Most Westerners live in a very literate culture, which is self-sustaining, even in the absence of education; but the same paper I referenced notes that 23/22% of Japanese and Finnish people score Level 4/5 on the PIIAC literacy test (mainly about understanding complex texts), compared to 3% of Italians. This seems huge to me, and seems better explained by differing quality of education than through different daily use of language.
If you live in a lower-education region, say in West Africa, without a written lingua franca or ubiquitous written language, it's even more extreme. In this context, whether people develop and retain even basic literacy is totally dependent on the quality of schooling.
With numeracy, it's very easy for people in most modern societies to be mostly innumerate. If you don't pick up the skills/habits at a young age, the maths you use when buying stuff, or sorting out your budget/spending just degrades into vague heuristics. Again, do Japanese/Finnish people use moderately advanced maths 7x more often than Italian/Spanish people because of some distinctive cultural factors? Or is it a better explanation that one education system allows people to retain this information and skills more effectively than the other?
Seems really obvious to me that quality of education is super important at the margins here.
Italians also have a lower average IQ compared to Finns or Japanese, which likely explains most of the difference.
My prior for Finn/Italian differences would be something like: 35% of the effect is because of different education levels (twice as many Finns as Italians pursue higher education), 30% of the effect is from better remembering/integrating the things people have learned in school through education quality, 30% would be improvements in general intelligence through education quality (education remains the most robust way of raising adult IQ scores (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6088505/). Maybe 5% from developmental or genetic characteristics?
As Finns seem to have had lower IQ scores than Italy as late as the 1980s, I'd doubt any strong innate differences there. (https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/Average-IQ-values-in-various-European-countries-Buj-1981.pdf)
Japan's scores could be connected to innate factors, but anyone familiar with East Asian education systems will understand the chasm between the educational experience of a European and a Japanese person. So I'd estimate that it's mostly an effect of education styles/intensity there as well.
Thanks, you're right, I've edited the post.
I got the second highest grade for math ("long math", ie. the more advanced option from Finnish high school's two math lines) from Finnish high school graduation exams, and have certainly forgotten almost everything that I don't need in daily life.
Perhaps, but you would presumably perform better than your Italian counterpart if these skills were re-tested.
More advanced courses generally: a) teach you new things that you'll forgot soon after graduating if you don't reinforce them; and b) reinforce things that you'd been learning for the last 5 years. We probably neglect b), because it's not the stated purpose of the course, but it's probably where most of the value lies for those who don't pursue something similar.
For example, if you learned calculus, you might have forgotten almost everything at the actual calculus level, but learning calculus reinforced the basic components you have to use in a calculus course: arithmetic, algebra, geometry etc. Someone who didn't learn calculus, or learned it less effectively, would be much more likely to forget these basic components.
I guess that this is the same with a lot of your education - you think it's sad that you've forgotten so much of what you were explicitly taught in your later education, but you don't appreciate all the countless ways in which you're superior to the Italians ;)
Amusingly, that report contains a lot of stacked bar graphs. The sample task for level 4/5 numeracy proficiency was picking out information from a stacked bar graph. The report shows that only 9% of Americans have level 4/5 proficiency using... a stacked bar graph.
So if 91% of Americans misread or misunderstood that statistic, I feel like maybe the report authors should have seen that coming.
>This model makes it hard for school to be useful. If school teaches you some fact, then either you’ll never encounter it again after school, in which case you’ll quickly forget it). Or you will encounter it again after school, in which case school was unnecessary; you would have learned it anyway.
>Can we rescue some kind of value for school?
Isn't "culture" the obvious next step here? Facts that you will encounter after school may only be there because school made them cultural touchstones to begin with.
If you learn about the great hero Lei Feng in school, and then later you do something great, one of your classmates might say "wow, you did that just like Lei Feng!". And then when you go home to your parents who were also thought about Lei Feng when they were in school, and they tell you to eat your greens so that you can be strong like Lei Feng. Thus Lei Feng gets repeated and you remember him. He is repeated because everyone knows about him, and everyone knows about him because he is repeated, and school is foundational to this cascade. Since school keeps teaching about Lei Feng, then Lei Feng becomes a cultural touchstone that everyone can relate to and use, and since he is used (outside school) people remember him even more.
But then you move to the US and your kids learn about Spiderman in school and they don't listen when you tell them about eating greens like Lei Feng, so you have to tell them to eat greens to be strong like Spiderman instead. And though Lei Feng and Spiderman fills the same function with regards to greens-eating, there's a big difference between them in other aspects, and "society" may have an interest in making Lei Feng a cultural touchstone instead of Spiderman (or vice versa).
I worry that the knowledge people retain from these cultural tidbits is shallow. I read 1984, but like Scott, I don't remember much of it, and the cultural bits that are reinforced are basically "totalitarian police state = bad" and "thought police or excessive government surveillance = bad". And that's really all you need to know about Orwell to sound educated and throw the adjective "Orwellian" around in casual conversation. And if the person you're speaking with isn't into literature, that's likely all they know about Orwell as well.
A more striking example of shallow cultural knowledge is Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken. The common cultural use is roughly the opposite of the actual message of the poem. I think that misconception happened because people mostly only remember the last two lines of the poem ("I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.").
School also helped popularize some falsehoods that become common knowledge. The myth that when Columbus lived people thought the Earth was flat was spread in part by school textbooks. The war of 1812 is another amusing one: American students and Canadian students are both taught their own side won.
Sure, peoples knowledge is shallow per Scotts original post. But I still think it matters if people have shallow knowledge of Lei Feng or if they have shallow knowledge of Spiderman (or neither or both). The small percentage of people with deep knowledge of Lei Feng will be proportional to the size of the larger mass of people with shallow knowledge. Fundamentally there is a thing that's culture and it does matter: there's a difference between US culture and Igbo culture and Han culture and it affects how people behave in pretty strong ways. The issue with my argument IMO is that it's hard to know to which degree school can shape culture efficiently (it doesn't look that efficient to me), and to which degree the effects of shaping the culture can be known beforehand (it looks very hard for someone to know that teaching people about Lei Feng actually will make them behave the desired way).
To clear something up, do you think it's a good thing or a bad thing that people learn about Lei Feng? And why?
Lei Feng was just a random example. I don't think totalitarian propaganda should be taught in schools (is anyone surprised?). Generally I agree with the Scott/Caplan/libertarian vibe: privatize schools and let the parents decide. I assume ~90% parents will pick schools that teaches reasonable, traditional cultural norms, and that this would be enough to uphold healthy cultural norms in society at large (at least better than any alternative).
Right, so you're using Lei Feng as a Chinese equivalent of Spiderman, not pointing to any particular difference between them.
Back to your first post, you're saying that if school isn't good at teaching facts or skills, maybe its value is shaping culture?
I agree with your own critique of your argument. I also agree that the education system can and does try to instill good values.
I'd point out that if the benefit of public school is that it helps the government shape values and culture, then it comes with the corresponding downside: that it helps the government shape values and culture.
I completely agree with your post.
Just to clarify: My original point was a response to Scotts argument:
>Or you will encounter it again after school, in which case school was unnecessary; you would have learned it anyway.
My response is that the reason why you encounter something again after school is that school teaches it to everyone.
"The Road Not Taken" isn't a good choice for your point. Not that I can see, at any rate.
Take the poem for what it *is*, as in how people commonly understand it, a beautiful way to express individualism. That is a value that we (or I, to withdraw an assumption about your nationality) as Americans want to express and to mold into each generation. It's a valid way to interpret a work of art, as it's a quite common interpretation.
However, take the poem for what it *was*, a shitpost where one friend ribs another for his worry over making decisions. That is also a value that Americans generally want to instill in others, that we can encourage, assuage, and strengthen those we care about through comedy. It's a valid interpretation using the same source material to get to something positive that we affirmatively want to see grow within our culture. Those aren't the same values, but they're both things that the Capital W "We" would want to propagate.
The prior interpretation isn't shallow. Even if we say that it is shallow, that expresses a value that we want. We get something from it whether we are ignorant of Edward Thomas or understand who he was in relation to Frost. That would say to me that schooling isn't needed, which is a point I disagree with.
It's not really my example. It's the most commonly given example of a popularly misunderstood poem that I'm aware of. For example: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misread-poem-in-america/
I wouldn't call the first interpretation an interpretation of the poem. It's an interpretation of the last two lines, ignoring the rest of the poem. There is no less travelled path. The poem states they're the same.
Maybe on its own, those two lines are a beautiful and profound adage about individualism. I've not claiming any particular message or philosophical outlook is shallow. I'm saying it's shallow knowledge of the poem. It stems from only knowing or only remembering the last two lines of the poem.
As with 1984, the version you of the work that you learn from osmosis of popular culture without actually reading the work itself is just a few small tidbits, that may not even be congruent with message of the work.
"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood"
The speaker establishes the scene, two paths in the woods. It's comedic -- "I could not travel both and be one traveler" -- while setting up that a decision must be made. They consider the decision at length.
"And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,"
This says to me that both paths are pretty much the same, except one is a slightly less trodden down. What makes them end up equal is the speaker's passing down that path. It's not just the last two lines of the poem.
Additionally, the speaker wants the less trodden soil, as it has "the better claim".
"And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!"
First!
"Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back."
The decision was going to be final. You cannot un-walk a path that you have taken.
"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
This can be both or either of telling others that choosing the way that had been taken by fewer people was the choice that made the speaker who they are, pointing toward the individualism interpretation, or taking the piss by using the sigh to subvert that individualist angle. "Just take a path, Thomas. It's grass."
I happen to like both interpretations. The idea that someone would write a poem to sass the crap out of their friend is a good one and I wish we saw it more now. The modern equivalent would be creating a meme, but I like the idea of using a poem to do it.
"Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same"
The two paths are equally travelled. It says this again in the next two lines. The speaker is vacillating between the choices. Like, "ooh, that way looks nice. But that other way looks nice and grassy and not travelled much. Hmm, but the first way also looks about equally not travelled."
Apart from the literal meaning of the words, we know this is what the author intended from your own story about the author and his friend.
Even if we accept your meaning, it doesn't mesh with the individualist, "take your own path" sentiment. It's not "to boldly explore where no one has gone before". Doing what is "slightly less trodden down" is rather anti-inspiring. It's like deciding whether to eat an apple or an orange based on which one is slightly less popular.
> "Just take a path, Thomas. It's grass."
Yeah, I like that too.
Small decisions like that, or indecisions in Thomas' case, are a part of what makes us who we are. We make decisions every day that we could have chosen differently on and gotten a similar enough result to be satisfied.
Further, it's not all-caps INDIVIDUALISM. Note that I have never used the word "rugged" in combination with it like you might find in speeches and corporate advertising, because this isn't a choice that generates a grand effect all on its own. It's not an image of rugged individualism, just something that sets us apart.
These small choices, like wearing black t-shirts with jeans, wearing a choker and earrings, having an opinion on Burger King's/Hungry Jack's fries, are small tokens that speak to who we are. The sum total of these make us unique, and that is a key facet of individualism.
Less "Oh, Pioneers" and more "I'm a winter, give me the purple one".
This is fun, I'm enjoying this. Thanks.
1984 is more like The Road Not Taken than many people realize; its meaning is very different from the meaning that pop culture has adopted for it.
If you ask the average "man on the street" what the message of 1984 is, they'd probably give you some version of "a warning about the evils of communism." And this is completely wrong. George Orwell was a Communist true-believer himself. He's on record as saying that "The war and the revolution are inseparable," meaning that by the end of World War II, England would inevitably have undergone a communist revolution.
He was a proud advocate of an idealized system he dreamed up, which he called English Socialism, believing that it would combine the best aspects of existing English culture and Marx's philosophies and avoid the pitfalls, and he published his ideas on what needed to be done to reach that blessed state.
1984 was a story of how this could all go wrong: when the Revolution finally arrived, The People made all the wrong choices, did the things he warned against doing, and ended up with something they *called* English Socialism but which was actually Stalinism, literally in all but name. This is not a story about the need to avoid communism; it's a story about the urgent necessity, when it inevitably arrives, of getting it right.
Of course, the war was *not* inseparable from the revolution, a communist England never happened, and all that context fell apart. As the USSR expanded, Stalinism became indistinguishable from communism itself in the minds of the general public, and the most vivid imagery of the story was transformed into a powerful warning against letting your country get taken over by communists. Which, I suppose, makes this book one of the starkest examples we have of "death of the author."
Thanks for the context. I hadn't known and it's quite amusing.
> These results are scattered across many polls, which makes them vulnerable to publication bias; I can’t find a good unified general knowledge survey of the whole population.
As so often in social science, you want the General Social Survey! It's run every other year with many of the same questions, so little concern about publication bias. I suspect it's where some of these reported results are from (it has the electrons/atoms question). But it also has other fun questions in the "Science Knowledge and Attitudes" module, like 'are lasers caused by focusing sound waves'.
The interface is a bit wonky, but if you filter by module -> Science Knowledge and Attitudes, you can find a bunch of questions here. https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/vfilter
You can also download the data here: https://gss.norc.org/Get-The-Data
They have lots of demographic variables and stuff, so could be a good resource for you (or other readers!) to mess around with.
Okay, steelmanning education:
- Very few people actually teach themselves how to read. Like, I've heard of reading clicking together for people who are read to as children but it seems to be pretty rare. Unschooled people in 3rd world countries coexist with text their whole lives and never put it together. As far as I can tell, >99% of people learn how to read the same way my kids do, by having a teacher tell them lots of rules and give drills etc. The homeschoolers I know also actively teach their young kids reading. They don't just plop them in a room with books and expect any learning to happen.
- Basic reading might fit into the "up to 4th grade" framework, but peoples' reading keeps improving after 4th grade. At some point you might just expect it to take off without school: they read more and more complex things and it iteratively improves. That might be fine for the smart, self-motivated types, but the people who forgot that Moscow is the capital of Russia wouldn't be spending 5th grade - later reading, they would be spending it watching TikTok or whatever. In addition to needing basic reading to function in day to day life, there really is a correlation between reading ability and general employability in white colour work, so teaching people how to read matters.
- Do the smart, self-motived people not need post-4th grade school? Even if they don't need to be forced to read, they retain a much higher percentage of the random stuff they are taught and benefit that way. The math is a good example: most people don't use anything beyond arithmetic but some people use a huge amount of math in their work and so it's good that they learn it somewhere.
So the weaker students benefit by being forced to read a lot, the stronger ones by actually learning stuff they retain.
> So the weaker students benefit by being forced to read a lot
Do they benefit, if they come out of it hating reading?
How many of the young people today who love reading can trace it back to being forced to read in school, vs. the number who can trace it back to Harry Potter? I'll bet you anything that the Harry Potter crowd is deeply in the majority here.
> Very few people actually teach themselves how to read
Indeed, that claim follows from the excellent Sold a Story podcast, tracing the history of the disaster that was (is?) "let's take phonics out of schools". A select few teach themselves to read; the majority need to be taught it in a slow, often frustrating way.
Since you mention it, I remember reading about how many kids (even at like 13) have to be taught how to use words like "although" in sentences. Even that they don't pick up on their own.
All else aside, I think its odd that the "place to warehouse children while their parents are away" function of schooling is always a side note in these education posts. This is basically the most important social institution underpinning the modern economy. Dual-income households need childcare and would like their children to be doing something positive or at least neutral during this time. Teaching them maths or history or whatever is appealing because they have the chance for their children to be part of the 20% that learn something for life and become more knowledgable.
Until the alternatives to traditional schooling provide a comparable amount of childcare, I don't think it will be possible for all or most people to use them. I've seen some people propose paying parents to homeschool, but homeschooling will just never have the economies of scale to justify taking one parent out of the labour pool (with tax money). I think schools can be reformed, but I don't think they're getting replaced under any realistic scenerio.
I agree it's a major purpose wrongly treated as a sidenote, but education became practically universal before dual incomes were that common.
I don't think that necessarily contradicts with anything in my comment. The original motivation to implement widespread schooling is not necessarily the reason we're stuck with it now. The way I see it:
World with single-income households and limited schooling = fine
World with single-income households and widespread schooling = fine
World with dual-income households and limited schooling = nobody to do childcare
World with dual-income households and widespread schooling = fine
Housewives in that era were still working hard.
I agree, this is perhaps the most important aspect and it gets treated like an, "Oh, yeah, that's on the list, too."
We shouldn't be "warehousing" children anywhere. It's one of the worst things we do in modern society, made all the more awful by how said warehousing fails the children even on its own terms.
Do you have kids? I love warehousing mine, and they love being warehoused. Kids and parents simply don't want to spend all their time together.
Who says they have to either spend time with you or be in a warehouse? It's not my fault your a selfish asshole. Nor that we live in a demented, safetyist hellhole society.
This person doesn't have kids. The idea that not wanting to be surrounded by your children 24/7 makes you a selfish asshole is hilarious to me.
But if I can try to interpret what they seem to be implying, it is that kids should be able to wander around unsupervised at their own will. I suppose that this would kind of work like the idyllic Tom Sawyer view we have of the past where during summer vacations parents would throw their children out of the house to run around the neighbourhood and not expect to see them until dark, but all year round.
I can't see how this would work in reality, it doesn't have an precedent in history that I am aware of, but it is an intriguing notion.
It's not "not wanting to be surrounded by your children 24/7" that makes someone an asshole. It's seeing the warehousing of their children as a positive good that makes someone an asshole.
If you just want someone to take your kids off your hands, THERE ARE BETTER WAYS TO SEE THEM TAKEN OFF YOUR HANDS THAN DUMPING THEM INTO A PUBLIC SCHOOL. LIKE ALMOST ALL OF THEM. BECAUSE SCHOOL SUCKS.
I grew up with an approximation of the Tom Sawyer version. We lived in suburbs in small southern towns. The dads worked, the moms were housewives, and all the neighbors with kids knew each other and, if they were not actually friends, acted friendly and chatted with each other because that's what you needed to do to get your kid into the informal neighborhood "daycare" system: All the kids in the group could go into most other kids' houses to use the bathroom or get some water. Some moms even provided snacks and let the group play inside the house for a while. But mostly we played outside. Each of us had certain landmarks that were the boundaries beyond which we couldn't go -- smaller kids had nearer landmarks. By the time I was 10 mine was about half a mile from the house in the direction that led to a mostly undeveloped area of scrub forest. We all knew that as it neared suppertime we had to be closer to the house so we could hear our parents call.
I think it was quite good for me. In school, I was the weird smart kid.
At home I was just one of the neighborhood gang. I highly recommend that parents try to build some approximation of the setup I had -- maybe something like neighboring summer homes or Air B&B's for a month in the country every summer.
There are calls to relax child employment laws. Indeed, children going to school and having all the other trappings that come with what we think of as childhood are a very recent development; historically, they were a valuable part of the labour force and would learn whatever skills were necessary for their, mostly meager and brief by modern standards, lives, while being productive.
It is only when expecting better than this for one’s children became the norm that the problem of where they could be stashed arose.
Scrap schools! The children yearn for the mines!
how you rescue the usefulness of most schooling? Copy Alpha School, a small school with no teachers, in which a High Schooler built a $3M Mountain bike track business https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsUwcO61irw&t=5s , another one made a documentary about Cancer as a food borne illness https://www.cancerfoodborneillness.com/ , another teen writes a prominent Alternative Education newsletter and is going to Stamford https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPUt5eADH1U
Sounds interesting, but with one important caveat: "copy this small, extremely successful thing and scale it up to massive scale" virtually never ends up working successfully.
I'm generally as fanatically anti-school as Scott. But I do think there are some hard to articulate mathematical intuitions, quantifying and analysing, probabilities stuff, what things are multiplicative vs additive etc., that got drilled in at six form(uk version of high school), and that I'd only give a 50% chance I would have picked up on my own.
Another thing, I did take coding classes at uni and a couple of years after graduating didn't even know what a float was. Then watching some Youtube tutorials I learnt about 10x more stuff in about half the time.
My overall hot-take here is:
There are two ways of stimulating learning: 1) "Artificial" - some kind of spaced repetition, rote learning or consistent practice to learn something isolated and without immediate use or relevance; 2) "Natural" Connecting things to real-life, narratives, or other interesting ideas; making it the kind of thing you retain more effortlessly.
Modern Western education usually doesn't have the stamina/commitment for 1) to be effective, because you need to be very consistent, ensure attention, and dedicate a lot of time for this. So when we do this, most students don't retain the skills they learn, hence these disappointing results. But 2) can work more effectively, by connecting these isolated facts to a broader cultural milieu (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-educated-mind).
East Asian education focuses a lot on 1), but they have the stamina to go through with it. This means that most East-Asian educated 35 year olds you meet will still be able to do all the maths equations you'd forgotten by your 18th birthday, but they may be more likely to lack the "connecting tissue" between knowledge areas, and often seem kind of ignorant about some basic facts about the world.
1) Reading and especially more so writing are REALLY GOOD candidates for the usefulness of universal schooling. I'd say 4 years is a bit optimistic -- many people don't achieve even moderate proficiency in reading until later, probably around 12-14. Writing ditto, but possibly more so (in my observation, many kids who learn to read on some basic level before going to school, don't learn to write as early).
2) Same with basic life-useful arithmetic though you could argue that this gets outsourced to technology more and more so is becoming less essential.
3) As to other more academic subject areas I always had this idea that the purpose of schooling is less to give *everyone* a lasting knowledge for life, but to provide everyone with a kind of taster of various key areas, so they can choose if and what they might pursue further, either professionally or even in a more dilettante/hobby way.
So people forgetting content after a few months or a year will be kinda (implicitly) expected and natural, though we could assume that things repeated a lot --- the kind of content that will be FURTHER reinforced by the repetition and the general culture osmosis -- will stick more but the rest will just leave a sort of vague faint veil like residue.
4) And for the people who do decide to pursue a subject further, school will provide some sort of basis for that so university doesn't have to start with telling them what cells and DNA are, or whatever the basic foundation knowledge of a given subject is.
5) Finally, in addition to providing childcare (aka warehousing children), school also teaches mainstream social values and behaviours, ie is an instrument for broadly understood socialisation and reinforcing certain level of conformity -- whether that's a good thing or not is highly arguable but it's definitely one of its functions (appearance of universal, free basic schooling roughly coinciding with industrial revolution which needed punctual workers able to consistently focus on repetitive tasks to set schedules is probably not coincidental).
Thank you for that, I'm getting persuaded here to change my thinking about universal schooling introduction.
> appearance of universal, free basic schooling roughly coinciding with industrial revolution which needed punctual workers able to consistently focus on repetitive tasks
Unlike pre-industrial agricultural labourers?
Yes. Pre industrial agricultural labourers did not need to start at a very specific time on the dot, for example. They were operating more according to "where the sun is in the sky, roughly" than the factory whistle announcing the start of a specific shift, and the rhythm of the team work was more likely to be "negotiated" within the group than set externally by, for example, the speed of the conveyor belt.
The range of permitted movements was also likely larger in most agricultural labour: there's a stronger parallel between standing mostly still (or moving in very prescribed limited way) at your allocated conveyor belt position and sitting still at the school desk than between the latter and picking sheaves of wheat following a reaper or ploughing a field.
And the tasks, while also often repetitive and often as or more backbreaking as factory labour, made more sense in themselves, being less broken up into tiny chunks.
I'm not saying agricultural labourers (or, idk, for example galley rowing slaves working to the drum set rhythm) had it better than factory workers by any means. I'm saying that the growth of industrialisation required a development of a different set of time management and self organisation skills that previously had only been required of, idk, monks in particularly strict rule orders.
I am not sure I agree. Factory work for both adults and children became common long before education became mandatory, so it doesn't seem like we can say that education was required for factory work. Rather, it seems to me that factory work was required for education.
Note: I am not an expert on this period in history, some of what I say may be incorrect, my knowledge of this primarily from surface reading of Pop-sci books.
Prior to the industrial revolution, children would accompany their parents during their jobs from the age they were able walk. So a 4 year old boy would be expected to follow his father around the field. Perhaps not to actually work, but at least to be monitored by him.
When the industrial revolution happened, this effectively continued, and children accompanied their parents to the factories. However, within about 50 years it became pretty clear that factories were not places for children, and legislation was quickly passed which outlawed this.
So now we had a conundrum. Parents in factories, children not allowed, what to do? Within another few decades, education became mandatory for all children and the final piece of the puzzle was solved.
So I think it somewhat unlikely that education was necessary for effective work in a factory. I think such skills could probably be far more effectively learnt should children just have attended factories from age 6 than attending school. Rather schools kept them safe until they were a bit more mature and ready to participate in this more complex and dangerous kind of work, rather than trying to maximise the efficiency of the child->factory worker process.
School doesn't resemble an institution for letting students try different subjects to discover what they like and are good at. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-against-education/comment/57089633
The Industrial Revolution predates universal free basic schooling. Governments were not setting up schools for the benefit of employers. Rather, if you look at the Puritans' Old Deceiver law (which didn't make education free, just mandatory), it was explicitly about religion. Government was insisting on schooling for reasons of ideological inculcation. This is also why the KKK was against Catholic & German Lutheran schools, insisting on mandatory public education.
School doesn't resemble an optimally efficient institution for letting students try different subjects to discover what they like and are good at. It doesn't resemble an optimal.institution for permanent instilling a narrowly defined core, either. Maybe it's a compromise.
What does it mostly resemble? A warehouse for young people.
It resembles an institution designed over centuries by many people, largely well intentioned, trying to optimise for various things that they might not have even been fully aware of. Same as most other institutions, really
What a boring and entirely correct answer. :-)
I agree with your points about the tendency to forget facts but I think there's another way of thinking about education that is more significant.
When you *really* learn something, it's not the facts that are most significant; it's how all the facts hang together. My favourite analogy is about 'growing the tree' rather than 'collecting the leaves'. If you grow the tree of knowledge on a subject, the leaves of data come along for the ride. Your example of 1984 illustrates that you remember lots of facts — but that's because the story was significant. The same applies to the story of American Democracy — and the story of African Kingdoms.
The way that American education is designed, there's an overall desire to bring everyone up to the same level. But what if that's not possible? What if some folks are unable to grow the tree of knowledge and schools have to instead throw facts at their students for long enough to pass their exams? I believe that the folks on the left of the bell curve gain little from this while the folks on the right are held back because they are not taught to grow trees until they get to their Master's and beyond. The result is mediocrity.
Charles Murray is very good on this in Real Education: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/3205941
His message is based on four simple truths:
— Ability varies
— Half of the children are below average.
— Too many people are going to college.
— America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted.
I wrote a review here:
https://www.raggedclown.com/2009/03/23/what-is-education-for/
I was lucky enough to go to school in the UK when they still separated students by the grade they got in an "11+" exam. The top students went to a grammar school where they were prepared for university. The rest went to a "secondary modern" where they were prepared for a more technical career. My brother has had a very successful career as a carpenter and my nephew was a bank manager at 21. I think it was better for everyone.
One more thought: I am currently doing a degree with the Open University. In the UK 85% scores you a distinction while 40% scores you a bare pass (don't mock — the assignments are graded far more severely than similar assignments in the USA).
I'd say that about 60% of the students seem to have no inclination to learn anything or to get a good grade. You see people in the forums saying things like (paraphrase) "I have an average of 42% in my last three assignments — does it matter if I skip the last one". They give the impression that they are only there because their mum said so and they have no interest in the materials. Meanwhile, others are getting distinctions in every assignment and spend every evening chatting about the Acropolis or whether the Gettier problem is real.
I'd say they have no business being there and would be better off in a different system. It's a waste of money and three years and it slows everything down for the students who care.
It would be interesting to see a system where tertiary education was tiered. In a way, we have community colleges here in the US that kinda sorta do this, but I don't think that's super useful.
I'd like to see a system with a 1-year degree, let's call it a neophyte degree, that is just non-basic courses like Comparative Religion, Art History, Intro to Psych, Optics, etc. with no eye toward English or Math classes.
If you seek an N.A. or N.S. or something and decide this whole college business isn't for you, that's only a year or one semester lost and you can still try it again later. You might not realize it at the time, but even putting two years and the associated education debt on the table is asking a lot.
There's another aspect of higher education that I want to see amended, the cultural norm that college is for a specific age group. I was absolutely not ready for college when I went. Now that I'm older, I know what I want and I desperately want to get in there.
In years past, the vast majority of folks in the UK went to a technical college or did an apprenticeship. I think that's better than a bachelor's degree in an academic subject for most people.
Agreed.
Look up the French system, tiered from terminal professionally oriented high-school-level diploma via two/three year university-attached fast-track-to-work-market programs considered as such via 3+2 programs to MSc and then there are engineering degrees which I would call 2+3…
Re: 40% being a bare pass, yes, that's how school worked for me. I was highly surprised to find the American system of grading was vastly different. See "The Simpsons" episode where Bart gets an F, even after trying his best. Over here, an F would be 10-25%, in the show Bart got 59% which would easily have been a passing mark and even a low C.
That has led me to think that part of what is wrong with the education *system* in America is this grinding after grades; there were people saying on a different thread that they never read any of the set books and relied on Spark/Cliff Notes type aids to get through school. So I think that it's easy for a student to avoid reading the actual book or play and instead just get the "this is the canned answer" from notes, serve that up, and get the requisite grade. Grind away like that throughout school, it's easy to come out the other end remembering nothing after you no longer have to regurgitate it for tests.
We in America have a tendency, in our schools, and I think it's gotten worse over time, of not wanting to give tests that are "too hard". There's a discomfort with having any space between "good enough" and "perfect". I don't know where this comes from, but the ultimate result is high schools that give straight 'A's to everyone. The SATs keep getting their high end compressed, and the number of people getting the maximum score goes up and up.
Whereas I have vivid memories of a college physics course where I think literally nobody got more than 55%, and most of us were more like 35%.
I didn't know what the Gettier problem is until I looked it up just now. But I suppose I still might not know what it is.
Haha! Good one!
In defense of low-to-middling students, of which I was one, I think this is an overly harsh opinion.
I may not have discussed the Acropolois or the Gettier problem, but I found the 3 years I spent on my bachelors to be very much worthwhile for a number of reasons.
Firstly, as you point out you do need to work pretty hard even to get 40% on your modules. So you learn pretty quickly how to work hard, and that points aren't given away for free, you need to earn them, which you don't necessarily learn in school, where I basically had not figured out how to learn whatsoever, but still made it through with average marks.
Secondly, you are surrounded with interesting and inspiring people. Over the course of 3 years, they will rub off on you. You can learn a lot about the kind of person you want to be and what you are looking for from life by being around other motivated students.
Thirdly, you get to mature. I think you are setting a very high bar for 18 year olds. Sure, some people will have already figured out what they want to do by the age of 18, but I certainly hadn't and University was a great place for me to do that. I think being in University becase "mum said so", is actually not a terrible reason for someone who is basically still a child. And sure, you may not have much interest in the topic to begin with, but doing builds motivation, not the other way around. Sometimes it takes a good few years to build a passion for your subject, it did for me anyway, I only really knuckled down in my 3rd year when I had a really cool thesis project I really wanted to put all my energy into.
Finally, I don't think other students are "slowed down" by there being slower students. As you pointed out, each student can set their own targets. Many decide that they want to graduate with distinctions, do summer placements, do student exchanges abroad, read outside of the curriculum, join debating societies. All of these options are still available to them. If they are particularly gifted, they can even take additional modules not required for their degrees, or try to do a masters in 3 years rather than 4 and start post-grad work early.
At school level I can somewhat agree, you are all in one class, your only real way of learning is by listening to the teacher, so having disruptive or lower level students who need to get all the attention from the teacher can limit the higher ability students. But this simply is not the way that universities work, where only a small amount of learning is in lectures, and professors do not slow down for slower students. They have decided what they will cover in that lecture, and if the slower students can't keep up, they will need to figure that out in their own time.
So yeah, have a bit of sympathy for us slower students, we are still trying to figure life out.
I wonder if it wouldn't be better to give more options to students who haven't yet made up their minds and allow them to spend those years maturing somewhere where they aren't accumulating a vast debt. The university will still be there when they are able to make decisions for themselves and decide whether they want to spend three or four years studying something they don't care about.
Ah. I probably should have pointed out that I went to university in Britain. I did take on a bit of debt during my time in university, but hardly enough to worry about. Money well spent in my opinion.
I'm also in Britain. I did an apprenticeship in the Royal Navy at sixteen and went to the Falklands. It gave me a good start in life.
I'm doing a degree with the Open University (OU) in my autumn years and one of the things that does annoy me is that the tutors **do** dumb down the tutorials and its hard to engage them in anything beyond the basic info needed to pass.
Another complaint particular to the Open University is that there are no entrance requirements (it's right there in the name). It was always intended for mature students coming back to education later in life but, with the expectation that everyone go to university, there are now a lot of eighteen-year-olds who could not get into a brick university. The average age on entry has dropped over the last decade or so from 34 to 24. I think a lot of those younger students are there because their mum said so.
Maybe students at a brick university get to hang out with inspiring and motivated students but that doesn't seem to be the case at the OU. And good for you for getting motivated and knuckling down but I don't think that's the norm.
Ah, pity to hear that, I can definitely see how you are frustrated that unmotivated students are sucking away your professors' time.
Good luck with the degree!
I think there's not much difference in terms of motivation between the cultural osmosis questions (puck, Popeye, Toto) and the school questions.
You learn the answer to cultural osmosis questions because you want to have something to talk about with other people. They are a social lubricant, and not knowing them (when "everybody" else does) would negatively affect you social life and your status. You are motivated to learn them, and remember them, because you are a social animal.
But it's (mostly) the same with the school questions. School is a social community within the broader society of which it's a part. Learning more gets you better grades, and getting better grades means raising your social status within the student body. Additionally, school learning and good grades open the road to better status later in life.
"I’m betting it’s the latter - for example, I’ve forgotten the names of some of my college professors, even though I would have seen them almost daily for a year." => I would hazard a guess that Scott doesn't get together with his former classmates very often. Because if he did, I would expect those former college professors would be the subject of many conversations in that social circle, and hence he would remember their names through repetition.
I'd say that there are 2 more aspects going for the School and remembering stuff.
1st is how important does a person regard certain knowledge. I know people who say how unimportant basic calculations in chemistry are (calculating molar concentrations for making a solution) and how they will forget them either way (despite needing to use them at least once a year so far). And they do forget how to do that. While I am treating any knowledge like that as very important and try to remember. Unlike names of teachers. Though I do indeed don't remember everything I wish I remembered and regard as important.
2nd is school allows for people to experience and try different disciplines that they might not have tried otherwise. It broadens the perspectives. A kid who never though they could be a Mathematician will find out they like Math (if a teacher is good) and go for that career. I know that I went for education initially in History and Archaeology and then in Computational Biology because I had teachers of History and Biology that I enjoyed in high school.
If a student tries a subject, finds out that they are terrible at it and hate it, they are not then excused from that subject and switched to something else. School just doesn't in practice resemble what it would be if we modeled it as being for that purpose.
This is a potentially fair criticism, depending on our goals with education. But it certainly isn't a criticism of education itself, only of a particular method.
It should clue you in to what school isn't actually about:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/politics-isnt-ahtml
My grandfather, born in the early 1900s, last entered a classroom when he left third grade to work on the farm. But he read a newspaper, managed his farm's finances, and in general could handle life better than many Ivy League 20-somethings. He was not at all unusual for his generation.
Barack Obama talked about how his grandmother, a HS graduate, wrote better than his law students because she had read far more. I would be curious (in a way Scott doesn’t seem to be) whether the knowledge retention figures have gotten worse in recent years.
Education teaches skills. Just not the skills you are expecting it to teach.
You say we remember how to read and write and do simple addition because we learnt it in school and use it everyday. But why do we use it everyday. Sure because it comes up in life and stuff. But also because we use it in school. Like if you taught school up to 4th grade and then kids got jobs at age 9 they would remember how to read and write because they use it in their jobs. But if at age 9 kids just played basketball all day till they turned 22. Then maybe by then they would forget basic addition and reading. School reinforces the basic skills learnt earlier.
Also: School makes recall easier. The more advanced skills that you forget are easier to relearn if you need to then if you hadn't learnt them at all.
Also: More advances skills need to be taught otherwise no one would have them. Like some kids go on to learn calculus. They manage that by learning it before they forget the algebra they learnt. But if no one is taught algebra then no one could learn calculus. Then no one could do high level math and science. We could say "only teach algebra to kids who want to do science" But kids are bad at knowing what they will want to do. You could say "only teach algebra to kids with a high IQ" But even people without high IQs might decide to do something where they need to know algebra.
We could probably start schooling at 13 if we wanted to and have students catch up on everything we would otherwise have taught them in the first few months.
Before that, the far more important part is teaching kids to sit still and pretend to listen and work, an invaluable talent in later life, and to have somewhere to pack them off to during the day while the parents work.
> Okay, so that maybe justifies up to fourth grade. Are there any examples from later schooling that could work like this?
I think a lot of people take longer than fourth grade to acquire complete literacy. I also am dubious that you're going to learn things like "the difference between hour and our" outside of a school environment (or some other intentional-learning environment, like having ChatGPT proofread your writing). Sure, maybe you'll get the occasional correction from a friend, but mostly people are going to just not care that you're making yourself look like an idiot as you misspell every third word, and either not read, not hire you, or do their best to work through your trash writing.
That's a good point. I also feel like people with good numerical literacy (myself included) vastly overestimate the skills of pupils. Here in Germany, kids learn about linear and quadratic functions in 7th grade, and how a function graph, a table of values, and an equation are all different representations of a function. Or remember how many pupils in your class struggled with fractions (I definitely did)? I don't think that's because children are super dumb - those same pupils really picked up the pace during A-levels. You don't spend the rest of school thinking about polynomials of ever-higher degrees - at some point, you get how they work. But getting to a point where you get stuff and can actually work it takes a scarily long time.
Small specific comment regarding why remembering your professors for many days in a year wasn’t enough for long term: My understanding of spaced repetition theory is that the larger the gap before interrupting the forgetting curve, the stronger you reinforced the memory (assuming you could actually recall it and didn’t leave it for too late).
So if this is true then in order to remember something a year from now, you need to have actively recalled *after having the appropriate non-trivial gap*.
This makes intuitive sense to me, if you never have to recall a piece of information over a long period of time, then it makes sense for your brain to not ‘file it under long term storage’ regardless of frequency.
This seems a lot like James Flynn's theory of intellectual feedback loops being the cause of differences in mental abilities between groups
I think schooling serves a dual purpose. One component of it is to teach children basic skills that they need to function in our modern technological society; as Scott points out, schools are doing rather poorly at this, but still better than nothing. But another component is to expose kids to a variety of subjects, in hope that the really smart ones will find something that interests them. Just as a person would probably never learn to read unless he is deliberately taught to do so, he might never learn to program a computer or solve equations or stage controlled experiments, or even write novels. Or maybe he would (through cultural osmosis), but with a lower probability. The problem is that our economy is no longer agrarian, like it was in the past. It's no longer driven by strong backs and gumption; it's driven by those 0.5% (or whatever) of kids who are willing and able to continue learning all of their lives, and increasing that percentage even a little is worth the effort.
For the man who wrote "Beware of the man of one study", Scott sure has a tendency to believe single, counter-intuitive studies when it suits the point he's making.
I'm sorry, I simply don't believe it. I don't believe that only 31% of students (even Kent State psychology students) knew that Moscow was the capital of Russia (while 81% knew the name of Dorothy's dog). Moscow is well into cultural osmosis territory, it's in hundreds of movies you've seen, it's in every second newspaper you pick up. It's not one of those "trick" capitals like Wellington or Ottawa that gets overshadowed by more prominent cities in its own country. I simply don't believe it.
Anyway, my general counterargument would be: if you think the unwashed masses are ignorant now, wait 'til you see how ignorant they'd be if they'd never been to school.
Keep in mind this study was before the Russia-Ukraine conflict started, maybe not in the news very much.
I wonder if there's a percentage of people who think "The Kremlin" is Russia's capital?
I'm trying to think back to the Call of Duty games and whether they use the name of Russia's capital specifically. I don't remember at this point.
Even so, there's Call of Duty, Red Dawn, innumerable pre-COVID cultural references to Moscow in America.
Keep in mind the sample is (mostly feminine) psychology students. Male-dominated subjects would be more likely to know action-packed stuff like that.
Perhaps the sample, specifically, might lack frequent exposure through entertainment media. They're still being exposed to that particular class of fact whenever a nation's capital city or a prominent government building is used to reference that nation.
"It remains to be seen how Washington will respond to Moscow's statement," would be an example sentence I just cooked up.
We've been referencing Moscow across Americana and in other spheres of American life both in the thousand years we've lived post-2020 and in the times before then.
As much as young women love foreign policy news there's no sexy identity politics angle to pre-2014 Russian diplomacy.
Scott is writing a paid blog. The aim may not necessarily be to espouse a position he fervently believes, so much as to write a compelling post about a thing he found curious and spark plentiful interesting debate in the comments. Contrarian / unintuitive positions are much better at achieving this.
That said, he also wrote this warning against (meta-)contrarians all the way back in 2010, so I doubt he's intentionally leaning into contrarianism: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9kcTNWopvXFncXgPy/intellectual-hipsters-and-meta-contrarianism
At least for STEM, I think the lottery ticket hypothesis is important here. For reference, the lottery ticket hypothesis is roughly, If you train a neural network with a million neurons to recognize cats, then you can strip away all but 10,000 neurons after training and still get high performance. However, we don't know of a trainng method to start with just the neded 10,000 neurons.
Similarly, as a society we need a couple hundred thousand people good enough at math and engineering to build LRASMs and AWACs etc, and bridges and power plants I guess. Right now we are getting those thousands of people out of the education system by attempting to teach math to millions, which seems wasteful but we don't actually know that it is- I suspect if we needed 150,000 engineers so we only started teaching third grade math to 150,000 people, we'd rapidly start losing wars.
Alternative theory:
→ Most people are just sort of dumb and aren't really able to learn *anything* very good, except (sort of) for things that are constantly repeated and have some sort of socio-emotional valence (since, for them, "fitting in, and being the kind of person that everyone says is the kind of person everyone wants to be, and emoting appropriately to whatever it is that aforesaid kind of person conspicuously emotes about" collectively constitute >90% of "important things" & all mental activity in general).
→ You and I and the regular ACXian remember these things, on the other hand, because we are just better at remembering things, because our brains work gooder. This is why we also know almost as many stupid facts, such as "the Big Brother show is in the reality TV genre", as the normie — *despite* spending most of our time solving deep universal mysteries and stuff instead.
And furthermore,
hm had another point to make here but it's slipping my mind, hold on
Here’s Scott’s argument: (1) learning is about remembering. (2) it you don’t remember, you didn’t learn. (3) if you didn’t learn, then schooling was a waste of time. I disagree with premise (1). A lot of learning is acquiring meta knowledge. For example, I haven’t done calculus since I was a freshman in college, approximately right after Newton and Leibniz invented it. I don’t remember how to solve differential equations. But what I do remember is that calculus is a thing, I know some things it could be used for, and I know that there are people who are good at it and know how to work it. All of that is pretty valuable to have.
Schooling also gives self-knowledge: about what I am good at, what I lack innate talent for, what I enjoy. How is someone supposed to know in advance of making some real guided effort that they are good at foreign languages or bad at programming? A lot of schooling is this process of self-discovery.
I think we should take a long, hard look at what math is taught - I work in IT, and I don't think I've ever had to use even High School math. I *have* had to read up on math for statistics, because that's something with more common real-world applications.
Also, it's time to stop pretending that we won't always have a calculator with us.
Sure, but it means that learning algorithmic solving for division and so on isn't really productive, because that's what you *do* have a calculator for.
I agree. I have long thought probability/statistics should be a routine part of the HS curriculum.
It was when I were a lad.
I am curious about what would happen if statistics were taught earlier in the math sequence. It is, of course, important. My impression is, for the average human, "independent samples of a random variable" is a _very_ counterintuitive concept. Just getting people to accept "No, if a fair coin comes up heads three times, that does _not_ mean that it is now more likely to come up tails." is hard.
True! Many Thanks!
That just makes it more important to learn - false and strongly believed intuitions are really bad to have, and while not knowing calculus rarely hurts you, misunderstanding probabilities is likely to.
Many Thanks! That's reasonable. I am morbidly curious about how hard it is to dislodge the Monte Carlo fallacy from a typical person's intuition...
Agreed.
Doesn't directly contradict your point, just adds nuance -- it's useful in many many to be able to do quick mental math, quicker than you can use calculators: https://diff.substack.com/p/is-mental-math-part-of-the-current
That's a good summary of the argument, thanks. Clearly many commenters also disagree with premise 3 (school as daycare, school as exploration/discovery of subjects - this part you allude to in your last paragraph). If learning can differ from recalling facts, then premise 2 also needs more justification.
My understanding of Scott's argument was not that learning is about remembering, but rather that remembering key facts is a symptom of a broader understanding of the subject. This symptom is sensitive (i.e. if you understand a subject then you're quite likely to remember key facts about it) but not necessarily specific (i.e. it's definitely possible to memorize a few key facts about a subject, either deliberately or through cultural osmosis, without knowing anything about the rest of the subject).
I don’t think that’s an improvement, though. Take his example of studying Spanish. I also took two years of Spanish in high school and retain next to nothing. I remember key facts about the language: that it is a Romance language, that people in Spain, Mexico, and South America speak it, that it is a widely-spoken language in the US, that great writers like Borges, Garcia Marquez, and Cervantes wrote in it, etc. I don’t think I have a broad understanding of the Spanish language, although I do possess valuable meta knowledge about it.
That depends on how it is taught though. There was nearly no focus on history or literature at all in any of the languages I learned (except my primary language and one secondary language that I started to learn in very special circumstances). Especially if you only learn a language for two years it seems quite weird to me to learn such details completely unrelated to actually speaking or understanding the language. Of course the result is that in my country most people have neither any meta knowledge about the languages they learned in school nor any capacity to speak or understand it...
Two points that may or may not be helpful for the pro-schooling case:
1. You get out of it what you put into it. My 14 year old is eager to learn and self-motivated to some extent but the structure of school gives her expert guidance on topics, pacing, etc and she tries to maximize the impact of this. While I could help her (especially with Lit and STEM) I'm too busy working to do it to the degree that she finds she needs it.
2. While school may not do well at its *stated* purpose of educating past elementary school it does *great* at its cannot-be-spoken-aloud purposes of keeping the kids occupied while the adults are economically productive, and teaching children to fit themselves into the *structure* of a modern organized group (I think back to your review on the old blog of Little Soldiers). This function is maybe a little less creepy-sounding if we tie it to executive functioning.
I'm not sure that is a pro-school argument, but we've tried un-schooling and home schooling and private school and now... one of our kids is in a lottery school and the other is in straight up public school (although that is warped by us living in a relatively affluent area).
>19% know who wrote 1984 (George Orwell)
I'm suspicious of this one, because this answer is wrong - the correct answer is "Eric Arthur Blair" (George Orwell was his pen-name). If the survey-makers themselves didn't know that, they'd undercount by marking the most-informed people - the ones who know the author's real name - as "wrong". Still, probably only 1% or less who actually know that little bit of trivia.
I don't think the fact that "George Orwell" is a pen name means it's wrong. It's like if I showed you a picture of Dwayne Johnson and asked you who it was and you said "The Rock".
I think there's a bit of a difference between a nickname and an outright false name. There are ways to phrase the question that wouldn't have "George Orwell" being wrong, but "who wrote" is pretty unambiguous IMO; the person who physically created the manuscript is Eric Arthur Blair, not the nonexistent Orwell.
Regardless of this, however, the overall point is that if one *only* accepts "George Orwell" as correct, one will undercount due to people giving the more-correct answers of "Eric Blair" or "Eric Arthur Blair", and I'd need more-direct access to the survey results to confirm that this didn't happen.
By convention, the person wrote the book as the pen name, so the (primary) correct answer to the question is the pen name. I don’t actually remember George Eliot’s actual name.
I mean a name is just a way to refer to someone, right, and George Orwell pretty unambiguously refers to a single individual. It's not his given name by birth but by that logic does it mean that, say, a trans person can only ever be credited for their work under their deadname? Or that Muhammad Ali doesn't exist, only Cassius Clay does? A chosen name is still a name, and a pen name is specifically chosen by an author so that the book will be attributed to that pen name.
In any case, on a practical level I highly doubt that there is any significant proportion of people who answered "Eric Blair" that the results would be drastically different if you took that into account.
It's not like he went around calling himself George Orwell in everyday life; there's a difference between changing one's name overall (I'd say Lenin and Stalin did this, for non-trans examples; Mao's last wife is more complicated) and assuming a false one for some purpose.
And yeah, I did note that it's probably <1%.
I think this argument is getting a bit pedantic so let's just agree to disagree. At the end of the day, this is the real answer to who wrote 1984:
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fuhm59pqpbbq81.jpg
Ever see a movie featuring Norma Jean Mortenson?
TIL: Plato didn't write The Republic.
If I've taken anything useful or interesting from this, it's that the actual name of the author who wrote the most abominable book I've ever attempted to read isn't Ayn Rand.
Airstrip One was part of Oceania, not Eurasia. The ideology of Oceania was Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism). Oceania also contained what was the United States.
This reads more like a theoretical case against a particular form of education (rote fact retention) than against education per se. Ex: A few years ago a young person asked the stereotypical, "When will I ever use this?" regarding some basic math they were learning, and I explained that I use them frequently in my normal daily life. It's unlikely I was explicitly taught to use these as tools for solving "problems" in daily life, but if that were done it seems likely to foster an environment that would trigger recollection/utilization.
Thanks. And can we just defend the question "When will I ever use this in real life?". I think this is a perfectly valid question from a student, yet in general we treat it as disruptive and defiance of authority to be stamped out.
Obviously I suspect it is often asked as code for "This is boring and I don't feel like learning it", but the question itself is pretty sensible.
This reads more like a theoretical case against a particular form of education (rote fact retention) than against education per se. Ex: A few years ago a young person asked the stereotypical, "When will I ever use this?" regarding some basic math they were learning, and I explained that I use them frequently in my normal daily life. It's unlikely I was explicitly taught to use these as tools for solving "problems" in daily life, but if that were done it seems likely to foster an environment that would trigger recollection/utilization.
Some people enjoy going to school. So that's a good justification for them.
However, not a good justification for forced schooling.
Can the case for education be that children find out what is there to get interested in. As in, somebody's fascinated by electrons so they pick up STEM, but forget what is Shakespeare and Moscow and someone else finds out she likes literature, so she forgets about electrons and planets. They both benefited from school and there was no way of knowing what they will eventually like, they had to engage with the topic at some depth.
This bears no relationship to reality. The smart kids who get really into shit like electrons tend to be the kinds of kids who get really into everything. That's the whole point of the g factor.
G factor is a population statistic. Knowing about electrons is a strong indicator of knowing about Shakespeare, sure, but it doesn't follow that smart kids don't have disinterests - that attempts to prove way too much. In fact every smart person I know has at least one big knowledge gap that they admit they're bad at or never interested them.
By analogy, athletic fitness is a thing but it doesn't follow that every kid with an athletic proficiency will be an athletic generalist - we can meaningfully talk about kids finding sports that they love and are passionate about. Plenty of people love swimming but hate cross country.
Yes, you're right, the smart kids who could answer questions about one topic probably could as well in any other topic.
But the value of schools in "interest discovery" could still be true. The most optimistic case I can make is something like: Students get presented a range of topics that are important and most likely to trigger interest, all in the appropriate difficulty for their age as evidenced by centuries of education science. If they spend their time on their own, they would be limited to their parents' knowledge, social media and video games and they may not get exposed to topics like digestive tract of ruminants, romantic era literature and smell of ammonia.
Even video games can be legitimately valuable. There's plenty of research on the cognitive and therapeutic benefits of Tetris, for example. My mom used to always nag teenaged-me about spending too much time on games and that it would never do me any good. Haven't heard that one anymore ever since I explained to her how I solved a real-world coding problem with a technique I picked up in Starcraft event scripting.
You can find plenty of anecdotal examples of kids teaching themselves multiplication and division thanks to Minecraft. I know one!
You should think of how much time you spent on Starcraft and what you could've learned during that time instead.
I think video games are absolute scourge on children and a big value of school is in keeping children out of them (for some hours of the day). I think it's preferable to be bored to tears than getting empty dopamine hits from video games. It's too easy to kill boredom these days and school may be the last place that can provide it.
In other posts of his, Scott has specifically underlined that boredom is a big part of why he dislikes schooling so much. As someone with ADD, I stand by this specific point: boredom is not a utility like water and electricity that we must ensure everyone has access to.
Warehousing children is a value all on its own.
I would add that a pair of core values to having school/a formal education/child warehousing are 1) peer socialization and 2) opportunities to discover.
To quote Scott Galloway, "Anyone who tells you to follow your passion is already rich." Discovering things that you enjoy is a key aspect to enjoying life. Discovering things that you are good at gives you a chance to contribute to society when you're older and make money doing them.
The ‘warehouse’ term is Scott’s. I think you owe Chris an apology. Unless you understood that and rain such venom on all parents seeking a baby sitter, in which case I think you should be banned.
I'm not offended by the term. It's the thing itself I find offensive, especially those who find it a positive good rather than a regrettable necessity, as they'd still be wrong in the latter case, but at least wouldn't also be justifying the infliction of years of pointless torture on innocent children.
Also, babysitters don't give you homework. Nor do they refuse to let you go to the bathroom without asking for permission first.
User banned for this comment.
> Warehousing children is a value all on its own.
Only in a situation where two-income households are the norm, which was never the case until the stagflation of the 1970s made single-income households untenable for a vast swath of the populace. It's one of the bitter ironies of history: almost immediately after various social movements won the right for women who wished to work outside the home to do so, catastrophic economic events forced most of the women who *didn't* wish to into the workforce anyway.
This is true! If there's an open set of hands available at home, we don't need no stinkin' out-of-house childcare.
One of my best and dearest friends decided to become a stay at home mom A) because childcare costs were sucking up the vast majority of her earnings and B) her daughter kept getting sick there anyway and had to stay home (and still pay for days her daughter wasn't there). She's fortunate to have the husband she does. He makes enough that they can make it fine on the single income. (As an aside, I adore the guy partly because of just how good they are to each other.)
True, but I would say this may not be the norm. One of my friend's wife's whole salary went on the childcare, it would have been more cost effective for her to just keep the kids at home, but she decided she would rather do meaningful work with adults 8 hours a day than do childcare, and I can't blame her.
And my brother in law loves his children to death, but he is very eager to return to work after caring for them over the last 3 years.
What I am saying is that being a full-time carer is a passion for some, but for many they have other goals in life they want to pursue. Even if they had all the money in the world, they would still want to pursue professional career.
But I do agree that it is sad that some who would love nothing other than caring full-time are denied this possibility by financial realities.
Mostly agreed. My one quibble is that I think there's more parents, especially of young children, that would rather be at home with them than earning an income. Maybe it's too anecdata, but that's about a quarter to a third of the coworkers I've had in healthcare, and definitely a majority for those who had/have young kids still.
Agreed
I find your phrasing "meaningful work with adults 8 hours a day than do childcare" incredibly dismissive and rude towards stay at home parents. Investing in raising one's children is one of the most meaningful and rewarding activities in existence. Furthermore it can be extremely high impact. For example, the history of geniuses shows that a significant portion of geniuses were raised to be geniuses by their parents.
Genuine question, is that really true that it was never the case that both parents would work prior to the 1970s? I know the post-war boom created a massive amount of wealth such that many households could thrive on a single income, but were there really that many households were only the father worked in the 1870s?
First, there are no absolutes here. It's not that it was "never the case," but it certainly wasn't common at all.
That being said, the key words here are "outside the home." In pre-industrial times, it was common for father, mother, and children to all work together, contributing their labor jointly to the family farm or business. The industrial revolution saw a massive change in worker dynamics; this is where the "employer with many employees" model we know today first became common.
For various legal and cultural reasons, it was difficult for women to get a job with an employer before the early 20th century. WWI and especially WWII shifted this a little, out of sheer necessity, with a lot of men off at war, women stepped in to fill in the gaps back at home, but this was always understood to be a temporary measure, that "went back to normal" once the soldiers came home.
Up until the 1960s, the types of employment women could legally find was highly restricted. That got changed through social and political pressure as part of the wider societal turmoil that was the hallmark of the 60s, and women finally had the freedom to find employment on equal grounds to men.
...for a few short years. Then the 1970s happened, and that hard-won "freedom" metamorphosed into just a new type of chain.
Yeah, I see what you mean.
The reason I ask, is that from my perspective, as tough as things may have been for people in the 1970s, I still feel like life was easier than in the 1870s, or the 1820s or the 1600s or the 1300s. So I feel like it would be odd if only one parent had to work in the 1600s and the other could just solely child-rear, but like I say, I genuinely have no idea what family structures were like back then.
But if I am understanding your point correctly, it was prior to the industrial revolution mothers might have to work hard to make ends meet, but they would work at home, so that significantly changed the burden of child-rearing (and I suspect that also they would know their neighbours much better back then before the wide-spread redistribution of labour of their lifetime, so perhaps that helped?).
But then after the Industrial Revolution, suddenly a single parent could sustain a family, and this continued until eventually the bubble started to deflate in the 1970s, but by that point it was established that the only way to earn money was outside of the house, requiring something to be done about the kids?
Basically, yes.
For most of human history, "women's work" tracked pretty closely with "work that can be done while keeping half an eye on the kids playing in the next room", or even "while nursing". And that's an awful lot of very important work. Among other things, for most of recorded history, we'd all have been going about naked if not for most women spending a big chunk of their time spinning, weaving, knitting, and watching the kids.
This doesn't really begin to change until the industrial revolution, in part because all of the machine-driven spinning wheels and looms. But even then, there's still a good deal of work that needs to be done and can be done at home while watching the kids, so specialization with one wage-earning spouse and one homemaker (and/or home businesswoman) still made sense.
And still does make sense, in a great many cases.
I feel like the biggest thing this model leaves out is curiosity? We learn more robustly when we're more engaged with the thing we're learning, because we make connections, and allow the experience to change us. A fact that you've really learned is as densely connected with other facts in your brain that if you forgot it, you could re-derive it (or approximately it. I might forget what year the Treaty of Tripoli was signed, but I'll remember it was during the first Adams presidency.)
Curiosity is hard to model, but you can use self-directedness as a proxy. You were playing Civ voluntarily (and presumably reading the Civilopedia, or whatever, voluntarily). It's funny we're all thinking about thinking about the Roman Empire, because that was one of the first examples I've seen of this idea, in Holt's How Children Fail. He describes a kid caught secretly reading a science textbook when he was supposed to be learning about the Roman Empire, and speculates/asserts that voluntarily learning science is higher-quality learning than sullenly sitting through a lecture on history. I think this is probably right, although maybe worth testing. I mean, curiosity is presumably an adaptive emotion, meaning it must naturally promote learning, even though your eyes are always taking in a fixed-bandwidth constant amount of data.
I suggest that things might work somewhat like this:
1. The main point of any given person's education is for them to learn a lot about some fairly narrow domain. (Some people never need to and/or never do, and for them maybe their time in schools is wasted, but we can't necessarily tell in advance which people those are.)
2. You can't dive straight into learning the high-level things. They're complicated and difficult, they build on lower-level things, they're hard to motivate without other things for context.
3. So before learning the narrow high-level things you end up wanting to know, you need to spend some time learning somewhat broader things at a somewhat lower level.
4. But you can't dive straight into those from scratch either; you need to prepare by learning (again) somewhat broader things at a somewhat lower level.
5. Recurse through several levels until reaching things you _can_ learn from scratch.
6. It turns out that there are enough levels of this that if you want to have people learning difficult things at age 20, you need to start building the scaffolding much earlier, and because you don't know where anyone will end up you need to start very broad.
7. When you do this, the things you learn at each level are encountered repeatedly-enough during that level, so you retain them for the next level. At that level your education narrows, and you start forgetting much of what you learner in the previous levels, but _not_ the bits that are relevant to what you're still studying.
8. By the time you're, say, 20, you've narrowed a lot, you may well have forgotten most of what you learned at the earlier levels, but _parts_ of the earlier stuff were necessary to get you where you are now, with expertise in Ancient Hittite or category theory or organic synthesis or whatever.
9. If you'd known in advance exactly where you'd end up, you could have skipped most of the stuff in the earlier levels. But you didn't. (At least, most people don't.)
This model seems to be consistent with (1) most people forgetting most of what they learn in school, and (2) school still having value.
(But it only works in so far as it's true that most people emerge from the education system having learned something relatively high-level and narrow that they couldn't have jumped straight into without years of gradually-narrowing-and-rising preparation, and that's actually useful for their later life. I don't know how true that actually is. It's certainly true for me, and I suspect for many ACX readers, but that's not exactly the population median.)
I was composing a comment, but now I don't have to because this one is an excellent summary of what I was trying to say. Working backwards from "successful engineering career" inevitably brings one to the elementary school as a starting point.
Glad to hear it. I was surprised that no one else had made the same point already (though many people had made the kinda-adjacent point that broad education is a way for people to _find out_ what they're interested in and want to learn more about).
I like it as a theory, but I just don't think it's true that most people need to know a lot of detail about the kind of subject that they teach you about in school. The number of people who end up using expertise about "Ancient Hittite or category theory or organic synthesis" professionally, is, I'd guess, a lot less than 1% of the population.
I think school's overpowered for the job it's actually used for.
(Which is a good thing! The luxury of having these overpowered institutions is what you win by being a rich nation. But it does look like a luxury to me, and any attempt to explain it as a necessity runs into problems.)
The problem though is similar to that of advertising: "everyone" knows 80% of ad budgets are wasted, nobody knows how to tell which 20% will work in advance. Education broadly ratchets up the knowledge, which parts end up being useful in the end is impossible to say beforehand.
In advertising, at least, the "waste" isn't wasted at all; it's what makes it worthwhile at all as a psychological signal of value. ( https://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/ )
Oh, no argument here, I'm going one level deeper though - the signaling spending suffers the same problem, it's hard to know which signals will be effective.
What the heck is this website? That was an informative and optimistic article, but the site's main page looks like an abandoned blog that offers me a meatloaf recipe then warns me not to commit computer fraud.
Couldn't tell you, sorry.
I know this specific article, and consider it one of the most valuable works on the subject of targeted advertising, the sort of stuff that should be considered "required reading" to anyone considering deploying targeted advertising. But I'm not familiar with the broader website or any shenanigans the author(s) may have thrown around on it.
That's great, thanks for the link!
I'm sure you're right about things at the obscurity-level of Ancient Hittite / category theory / organic synthesis (though there are a _lot_ of such things and they surely add up; I wouldn't be that surprised if they add up to more than 1%, but surely not more than 5%).
But something similar applies to less exotic things. Consider, e.g., being a doctor, or a schoolteacher (though obviously there's something a bit unsatisfactory about defending the value of school education by saying "it's useful for making schoolteachers"!), or a mechanical engineer.
It's still surely true that for many people this sort of process isn't very relevant. If you're working in retail sales, for instance, then while there absolutely are professional skills you will want to develop they don't have much to do with anything you'll have learned in school. But, as I said, "we can't necessarily tell in advance which people those are".
"Why would most students forget things that schools teach many times?
Why would they remember it when it’s learned through cultural osmosis (eg Popeye, “yo quiero Taco Bell”)?"
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When I see this question my mind just screams "Kieran Eagan was right!" Our brains are wired for cultural osmosis, so we should teach in a way that replicates cultural osmosis.
100% and then the kids who do poorly in school are permanently damaged by the experience, yet school isn’t even necessary. We need to abolish this system. It’s harmful to many.
Abolish it in favor of what? What are the pros and cons of the alternatives?
I’m not sure, maybe smaller group learning environments more focused on learning how to learn and basic skills, and only done until the child has mastered the basics, followed by aristocratic tutoring, as envisioned by Erik Hoel, or apprenticed trade work depending on student’s aptitude, interests, and natural talents.
Also, for those bound for university, send them sooner, like at 16 and skip the gen ed unless it matches their talents.
No reason fine art painters should be unable to graduate high school because they can’t pass algebra two, which is the current system.
Likewise, making engineers pass Spanish is nonsense.
Let’s stop pretending that everyone needs to succeed at analyzing english literature or solving physics equations to be successful adults.
I totally agree on your "send them to University at 16" comment.
Here in the UK you finish school at 16, and you then have the opportunity to go to "College", a 2 year course prior to uni. In college you get to pick the 4 topics you want to study. I picked Math, Further Math, Physics and Computing.
I was so happy to drop all the wasted time I spent on languages and History and Geography, and there are many students who I am sure were so happy top drop all the time they wasted on Math and Science when all they wanted to do was more French.
I think 16 is definitely old enough to decide what you want to start specialising into, even if you aren't sure about a degree yet. I think this would be a good system worldwide.
These arguments and studies are interesting, but both Caplan and Scott don't do nearly enough addressing the empirical and historical evidence that no country has attained even middle income status / basic functionality by contemporary standards without universal schooling.
I will freely admit I don't know how schooling works to achieve that, and think a weak form of the argument (e.g. stop mandatory schooling at 14/15) is plausible, but the absolute lack of exceptions to the rule (other than maybe some petrostates) needs a very strong explanation.
I see this as somewhat analogous to diet; I don't know why eating lots of heavily processed food is bad for you, but in practice that sure seems to be the case, and nutrient-level arguments don't strike me as persuasive versus societal level impacts.
Which countries lack universal education? Are there things they have in common other than their lack of universal education which might distinguish them from, say, the UK before education was universal there?
Sure, I don't dispute it. We don't have any counter examples the other way, though, of countries that industrialised or modernised *without* near universal education.
The UK is an interesting case as even before truly universal schooling came into play in the 1870s a large proportion of the population (estimates vary, but it's over 25%) were already in either private schools or church schools.
Are you maybe confusing cause and effect? Countries that become prosperous, or even *start* to become prosperous, suddenly have resources to toss at things like universal education — perhaps for sensible reasons, or perhaps for things like signaling, or reducing the pool of workers.
That’s analogous to what we’ve seen recently: when a country gets *really* prosperous it decides everybody should go to college, perhaps for no better reason.
It's certainly possible, but the universality of it requires every otherwise functional country to be identically irrational; not impossible, but demanding a very good explanation.
I’ll grant that, but it’s not like each country becomes prosperous in a vacuum. If the first couple of industrializing countries go that way, you could imagine copycats, especially if it’s tempting to think it’s related to their success.
And don’t assume the true motive is irrational just because the stated one seems to be.
People tend to remember that which is important to them and forget that which is not. That a lot of people remember what I consider basic BS seems tragic to me, but when I'm in a conversation and have no idea when the NFL draft is and who's probably going to go in the first round, that's tragic to the person to whom I'm speaking.
How about ‘you forget a lot, but not the subset of things that really interest you or prove useful for your eventual line of work, and in fifth grade we don’t know what you will be interested in or good at so we show you a little of everything.’ As time goes on you can specialize (and different countries start specializing at different times).
I suppose, if you want your child to go to the LSE. ;-)
Would be great if it was actually done like that. Right now it's more that you are shown some things a lot, some things a bit and some things not at all. And when you have the choice to specialize you mostly know to too little to make any sensible decisions and it ends up being random.
Prior to reading this article I didn't *know* the capital of Russia was Moscow. If someone asked me to *guess* the capital of Russia, Moscow would have been my first guess, but it could easily be a "trick capital" country, and I haven't spent enough time memorizing capitals to be sure.
If I think about news articles I've read about Russia, I'm pretty sure they reference the Kremlin and Putin being in Moscow, but that would only bring me up to an 80% or 90% confidence rate - still not enough to say I *know* Moscow is the capital. Thinking about WW2 or the Cold War doesn't help much, because I can't think of any big events from those wars that specifically involve the capital of Russia. WW2 was fought in a lot of different parts of Russia (I don't specifically remember a "battle of Moscow" or something similar), and the major event I remember from the Cold War is tearing down the Berlin Wall, which is obviously in Berlin, which I do remember is in Germany.
Fun fact, in 1987 a West German named Mathias Rust flew a Cessna from Finland and landed it in Moscow. This was a huge embarrassment to the Soviet authorities at the time, as they supposedly had a huge and advanced air defense network to ward off NATO bombers. For years afterwards, Muscovites would jokingly call Red Square Terminal 3 (referring to the nearby airport which had only 2 terminals).
There was no Battle of Moscow in WW2 because the German advance stalled just short of the city.
Now hopefully you can remember with certainty that Moscow is the capital.
I hadn't considered that, news articles will frequently use either or both of a nation's capital and their most important government building(s) as stand ins when referencing that nation. There's little reminders for certain facts buried everywhere.
By coincidence, I ran across a video which includes research on nautilus' memories. Their memories aren't as good as other cephalopods', but they do only remember for a little while. Give them more time after they've forgotten, and the memory comes back, but with less certainty.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c4bBUDi8_Y
I think the purpose of schools is to prepare students to work in large organizations.
I think you're underestimating the possibility that most school is useless for most people, but most people find at least one part useful (and we don't know which in advance)
I also forgot basically all of Spanish. I remember very little from my History classes. But I learned a ton in English class, things I built upon and still use and still remember. Same with Math. I forgot literally all of chemistry, but I remember most of the Physics I learned. I can't remember what happens in Pride and Prejudice beyond a few basics, but I remember Jane Eyre in great detail.
If everyone retains one subject out of ten, then any individual factoid would only have 10% retention, but still school would be useful to everyone
Maybe we should just see learning ultimately forgettable facts and algorithms as the vehicle for inculcating good habits of thinking, communicating and behaving (individually and within groups).
And that schooling should correspondingly shift the emphasis to the latter. I have no idea what’s being taught in elementary schools these days along these lines but I know that during my stint as a kid I really didn’t learn that much about how to sceptically assess information or how to solidly communicate and manage conflict with others for example.
Other than repetition, a difference between the intellectually curious and the incurious is that the incurious hear a fact of little immediate relevance to their lives and couldn't possibly care less. It really is in one ear or out the other. A curious person hears a fact, or an assertion, and actually reacts to it, thinks about it. Maybe it spurs further questions or answers a question he had already wondered about. It just bounces around inside his head more, and the result is that more is retained.
I think to the incurious, their time in school, even in front of an interesting and engaging teacher, is like time spent waiting at the DMV. It's just one solid blur. How well do you remember the form you had to fill out to renew your driver's license the time before last? That's how well they remember the test on the three branches of government. It was something they had to complete once, then never think about again.
But in many cases I can still picture myself in the classrooms and the books where I first heard about this or that fact or concept.
You are either very unique, due to having some form of photographic memory, universal talent or extreme luck that school subjects interested you this universally - or you are just deluding yourself. Are you really curious about every single random topic you hear about? The details of the sport of curling? The names of every single crater on each of Jupiters moons? The powerpoint presentation of how my 89 year old grandpa spent his summer vacation? I can guarantee you every human on earth that I've ever met would fall into your incurious category, and that the actual percentage of population in that category would be over 99,9%.
I don't think I intended to make any claim so strong. I think everyone's curiosity varies from subject to subject. Though I don't remember school ever trying to teach me to memorize the names of craters. The knowledge is much more fundamental than that, so I don't think it's so odd for someone to be curious about most of it, if they have a general curiosity about how the world works, where we came from and where we're going.
I also think that anyone who so much as reads a single post of Scott's from beginning to end probably has an intellectual curiosity at least 2 SDs above the mean. I might be +3; perhaps Scott himself is +4.
Maybe it's unusual to visualize where I was sitting in classrooms when I learned about something interesting for the first time, I don't know, though I wouldn't suppose I have a photographic memory. And I'm sure most of those memories are distorted in some way.
Sorry, your initial claim did indeed seem very strong to me. This comment of yours seems much more reasonable. I just wanted to make the point that no one is interested in *everything*, but yes, some people are generally far more curious than others and there is strong correlation with IQ there from what I've anecdotally heard. But it's not black and white and rather a spectrum. (I personally always had very little curiosity about how most things work in detail - I was mostly just interested in the most fundamental aspects of our reality aka philosophy, but very much into that. Fighting with the details while the fundamentals were so questionable was always of limited appeal to me, although I am certainly happy others have a different view.)
Typo report:
> This model makes it hard for school to be useful. If school teaches you some fact, then either you’ll never encounter it again after school, in which case you’ll quickly forget it). Or you will encounter it again after school, in which case school was unnecessary; you would have learned it anyway.
You have an orphaned close-parenthesis in there.
Theoretically, what could redeem formal education is that many important things are not learned through cultural osmosis. Particularly for more complex higher-ed-type things, too many people are speaking confidently and bamboozling the general public. An expert class of teacher could theoretically help students distinguish truth.
To give a few examples from higher ed & psych research methods in particular: knowing that lots of studies don’t replicate, knowing that many things that have been demonstrated in animals don’t translate to humans, knowing that correlation isn’t causation, knowing how to evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention (and therefore, whether to adopt that intervention into one’s life), knowing that a depressed patient is as likely to abandon taking an SSRI as they are a placebo (for most SSRIs - from the Cipriani paper), knowing that statistical significance ≠ practical significance. These things do make it into the milieu for ACX readers, but definitely not the general public.
Making education useful definitely requires repetition & building upon concepts. But I also think you allude to another important explanation earlier, that school feels like impersonal rote memorization.
If society can select teachers (or curriculum developers) who know how to A) identify what is important and B) convey why it is important, learning should happen. But one reason this doesn’t happen is class size: A teacher can’t speak to the unique interests of 20+ students (much less 250 in a large lecture hall) - without tons of money for low student/teacher rations, or without a one-room-schoolhouse style education where older kids teach younger kids. If you can't speak to a students personal interests, it's hard to convey why something is important.
Another explanation grades (The Case Against Grades by Alfie Kohn is very interesting). Teachers have a dual role of A) teaching and B) recommending students for college/jobs. As long as students know that their teachers affect their future’s, they’re going to try to learn the thing the teachers want them to learn, rather than engage with material in a personally meaningful way (e.g., learning the plot points and character names of 1984, rather than searching for possible parallels with current society). If students aren’t expected to maximize the memorability of testable facts for the day of an exam, they could theoretically use this newfound free time to explore class content in a personally meaningful way (albeit, if and only if someone adequately inspires them to do so).
> knowing that correlation isn’t causation
Everyone knows that one, often to the point of being detrimental. It's become a meme, where people who don't understand the meaning behind it simply use it as a glib excuse to dismiss evidence presented in favor of something they don't want to believe.
The truth is, in the vast majority of cases, correlation *very much does* imply the existence of a causation; it's just not necessarily the first causal chain that came to your mind when you noticed the correlation. (Also tragically under-comprehended, and thus abused, is the inverse: a lack of correlation absolutely does imply a lack of causation.)
Who said the point of school was to educate everyone? Giving everyone adequate exposure to facts and ideas means the 17% of people who care enough about Jupiter to learn the first thing about it get the chance to go to college armed with the same basic facts that allow them to collaborate with each other and discover more facts about Jupiter.
If only 17% of people know as basic-ass a fact as "Jupiter is the largest planet", the institution responsible for inculcating knowledge of basic facts is so thoroughly failing at its job as to question whether said institution serves any useful purpose at all. As far as planet-facts go, that's the equivalent of not knowing 'W' is a letter of the alphabet.
When you learn and then forget, does it become easier to relearn? Maybe the point is to create the appropriate brain structures for understanding those facts even if the facts are lost later? I don't think the argument about math skills disproves this since understanding how to do math still requires some knowledge, it's not a purely skill based exercise.
My (positive side) theory about school is that the purpose is to introduce students to a wide range of potential knowledge that they may use in their adult life. Some of this is obviously good - learning to read, multiplication - but most of it is contingently good - algebra if you go into a math field but not for most people, or Spanish if you keep learning it, but most people don't.
So what's the point of the majority of learning? To see if you like it and want to pursue it later. If you never get exposed to any part of it, it's much much harder to get into it later. Someone who never had a science class in middle or high school is going to have a much harder time in college science classes or a science field. Since most people don't go on to science in college or a science field, this will result in waste for most people. It's very difficult to determine who needs which classes, especially at the "developing interest" stage of learning. Most classes end up being wasteful here, even if we have no way to determine that ahead of time for most students.
My (negative side) theory about school is that the primary purpose is enculturation with a side of babysitting. We invented the modern school approach in order to make kids better at fitting into the general culture. This comes out in weird things, like elementary anecdotes and stories shared by teachers that my kids learn being the same ones I learned at a different school in a completely different area. Things like Johnnie Appleseed and Paul Bunyan on the more obvious side, but there are more niche things as well.
There's also the straight up cynical theory that it's the government being busybodies making sure people aren't raising their kids "wrong" and forcing them into a legible system for government leaders to review.
I think there is a small fraction of the actual purpose of schools that falls in the cynical side, say 5%, and a tension between the other two theories where some people want school to be about expanding horizons and some people want to make sure kids fit in to society. Depending on the day and the school in question, I feel that either might be on either side of a 60/40 or 70/30 split.
Re "wide range" exposure and "enculturation":
These may well both be present, but it is worth bearing in mind that they have strikingly different criteria for success.
Exposing students to a wide range of subjects so that they have a chance of encountering whichever one they are best at or most interested in succeeds if the student find their niche, even if they forget all the rest of the range.
Enculturation gives people _shared_ cultural references, whether Johnnie Appleseed or "1984", and helps them communication - but _only_ if a large fraction of them _retain_ the references. I think of these as somewhat like additions to vocabulary.
What does it mean to "retain" the references here? Scott's examples included things that exist in the culture and can be picked up through cultural osmosis. Memes propagate through the culture just fine, despite only a small minority understanding them fully. Bits and pieces seem to be enough for people to get the gist of it and join the culture. Johnnie Appleseed probably has a much more thorough story than I remember, but what sticks is an appreciation for creating something and making the world a better place. 1984, even with the most basic cultural meme version, is about being wary of authoritarian governments trying to control the population against their will. Are there additional details to both that make a much bigger lesson? Probably, but it's enough for shared culture to know where the reference comes from and the general direction of it. It's like the meme of Fry from Futurama squinting. Even people who never saw the show or don't know which episode that's from can join in on the reference. My guess is you know exactly which meme I'm talking about despite my limited description, and it brought to your mind the type of words that might go along with it.
Many Thanks! Partially agreed. I think that there is some additional context sometimes provided by looking at a cultural reference in a class. As one commenter mentioned, "1984", "Orwellian", and "big brother", acquired by cultural osmosis look disconnected. There is some value in connecting them.
Orthogonal to that, as other commenters have pointed out, (writing from the usa), we have a fairly large number of immigrants, and also a fairly large number of somewhat disconnected subcultures. Cultural osmosis can sometimes use a helping hand, somewhat analogous to ESL courses. As with vocabulary, it is tricky to pick what to teach. Probably the optimum is to pick cultural references which are right on the edge of being taught by osmosis, neither so prevalent that the students already know them anyway nor so obscure that the students will rarely encounter a repetition apart from class.
Re Fry - actually, I Googled that meme. Yes, I've seen it before, though I now know more of its context... One of the other limitations of cultural osmosis is that there are intergenerational differences in cultural references - though I _don't_ suggest formal education as a solution to those!
I'm not sure this is an argument against education so much as an argument against "renaissance men", the idea that an educated citizenry should have a broad knowledge of many fields. If knowledge inherently falls out of our heads within a few years if it's not reinforced by our environment, school still serves a number of purposes:
#1 Warehousing kids.
Straight up, if you want women to be able to work, you need to warehouse kids somewhere. This sounds bad but the benefit is women can have jobs and kids, which naively puts it's value at 50% of GDP and a more serious evaluation would still probably have it as a double digit percentage of GDP.
#2 Sorting kids by IQ/merit.
Schools do this, or try to, everyone knows this, every parent freaks out about it, and everyone tries to game it. It's also really important; you care how capable your surgeon or your lawyer are.
#3 Rapid exposure to lots of different fields
Sure, you may not remember anything from high school biology (I don't) but I remember I was pretty good at it but didn't really like it. Figuring out what career a kid should have is a tough optimization problem: how smart are you, what do you like, and how much will it pay. One things schools do is expose you to lots of different fields you might be interested in and give you challenges to see how good you are at them.
So 'lil Bobby loves history and he's good at it but it doesn't pay, he loves debate club and lawyers get paid well but he's bad at it, and he's kinda meh on chemistry but physical sciences pay well and he's really good at it. What career should Bobby pursue? I dunno, that's up to Bobby, but now he knows what he's good at and what he likes. As an adult, Bobby might keep reading history as a hobby, work as a chemical engineer, and forget everything about debate but the important thing isn't how much he remembers, the core thing is making as informed a decision as possible in his teens about his future career, which is actually a huge deal.
I'm not saying this is what school was designed for, I'm saying these seem to be the obvious benefits of the evolved system we have now.
The questions in the '99 Gallup survey are hardly broad knowledge. They were basic facts. The equivalent in their fields of knowing one's ABCs and 1-2-3s.
I'm surprised Scott didn't mention the source for spaced memorization : I'm pretty sure this is taken directly from the Vehaarav Na program, a program designed to allow Orthodox Jews to eventually finish the Talmud once a year. Scott, am I right?
Really interesting points.
Question: Even at age 77, I remember a lot of what I learned in public school. I was a smart kid, though not at all diligent as a student. Does my relatively good memory reflect something peculiar about my brain, or is it mainly that I rehearsed what I learned more than I realize?
I would guess you've rehearsed more than you realize. I doubt there are any facts or discreet pieces of information you learned in school that you 1) haven't practiced since and 2) could accurately recall right now.
Practice here can be subtle things, like Scott talking about the Roman Empire. Interestingly, Hannibal coming from Carthage (and the Carthaginian Wars) is part of what comes to mind when I think of the Roman Empire, so that particular factoid gets "re-upped" for me periodically. Other facts, like the daily diet of a person in Gaul, though clearly related to the Roman Empire and something that I have heard about before, is no longer in my head. I can't tell you what it is, but I do have a vaguely related memory about learning those facts.
I assume you're correct, but it raises the question of what "rehearse" actually means, and the answer is probably complicated. I'm fuzzy on plane geometry, but I'd say I've got most of math through high school down pretty cold, and I suspect it's more related to the fact that I had an easy time learning math, than that I continued to use it (though indeed in someways I have continued to do so).
If you actually want to test how effective education, is we could run an experiment. Take a whole cohort of children of all ages and don't give them education for an entire year. Maybe give them a placebo version we call education, like poorly optimized online lessons most of them don't show up for. Then watch their test scores over the next few years and see if this lowered their knowledge and skills.
We actually did this during COVID, for a year, and the results are quite strong. People who lost a year of education have far lower skills and knowledge levels by any test we can do, even 3 years later. This is robust across many fields of study, and seems to be true of children of all ages from elementary school through high school. I think we can definitely say now that the education makes a difference.
I don’t know if that shows what you want it to. There are too many other variables that changed besides not going to school like lack of social contact and stress about Covid. Also maybe the kids did worse on tests now but in a few years the scores will approach the same number as pre-Covid kids.
You are of course right that there are other variables. At this post though we are ending the third full year back to school. Students who missed 4th grade are finishing 7th grade right now: students who missed 9th grade are finishing 12th grade now. This is clearly not an effect that vanishes in a year or two, like many other effects seem to.
In the mid 1900s kids who were kept out of formal schooling until age ten were found to catch up with their peers within months. This means that, for those kids, the first five years of public education would have been a waste of their time and the public's money.
I think there was a lot more (or less, if you will) going on during the coof than just kids missing "education". And I know, from people who had kids in state schools during the lockdowns, that they were stunned at how little was done during the day, how low the bar was, and how banal the content.
Kids who's parents chose to keep them home in the 90's were probably in very different home environments one way or the other than the median student, which makes comparing outcomes very iffy. This was a much more representative sample of students (and a much larger one) since it was almost everyone across the board.
I agree that very little was done effectively in terms of online education during lockdowns. I think online education can probably work for some fraction of students but getting a bunch of normal classroom teachers who have never taught online and telling them to do a lecture on zoom the kids are supposed to watch live is not the way to do that. A lot less was done than in a regular school day, I think.
I agree with you on that. I think the bigger question is whether anything we learn in school sticks around in further adult life. I think Scott's post would agree that if someone studied history in high school and history in college, then went on to become a history professor, that they still know what they learned in high school (or at least much more than most people). His contention is that for the people who didn't reinforce the knowledge, it goes away quickly and thoroughly.
Your point reinforces his, actually, by showing that even a one year separation causes massive and lasting drops in knowledge held. It doesn't really clarify the main question, though, which is how much of that learning is retained later or even used productively for society or the individual holding it.
Maybe, we'll have to check again in 5 years, but it certainly doesn't look like this is something that vanishes in 10 months or whatever; it looks more like the "education builds a scaffold that improves your ability to learn more later" idea is a bigger deal than he's giving it credit for
Yeah, it seems weird to me to say that school is useless at the same time everybody is bitching about the severe damage suffered from kids getting a worse version of one whole year of school. We can come up with just-so explanations for these two things to go together but they really, strongly, contraindicate. Even in Scott's own anti-education cases, I never see "school versus control," just "school versus school in the Kingdom of Heaven where all the teachers are knowledgeable and patient, all the students are attentive and bright, and all curricula focus on teaching useful things in the most optimal way to preserve knowledge."
Is that really a contradiction, though? How exactly does "look at how much basic knowledge kids end up losing in just one year away from school" contradict the thesis "schools are terrible at getting kids to learn and retain knowledge"?
If you want to know if schools are good IRL, you have to compare them to the alternatives. If schools are terrible at getting kids to learn and retain knowledge, that should be compared to some actually-existing alternative to school. Like, I'm sure that direct lossless permanent downloads of information into the brain are better than schooling, but that information doesn't help much since those don't actually exist.
> If you want to know if schools are good IRL, you have to compare them to the alternatives.
No, that's how you determine if it's the best possible policy. To simply know if something is good, you look at it in isolation and compare it against *nothing.*
Do schools produce better knowledge retention than no education at all? Yes, to some degree. This was never in doubt. Do schools also cause harm to kids, that they would not experience with no school? Yes, this is also indisputable. Does the good outweigh the bad? And to what degree? Now there's where you have room for debate.
> To simply know if something is good, you look at it in isolation and compare it against *nothing.*
Right. Schooling is amazing compared to nothing, that's why everybody is complaining that the Covid-19 years not only caused academic failure and put everybody on the back foot educationally, but also turned children into feral animals who can't behave in classes.
> that's why everybody is complaining that the Covid-19 years ... turned children into feral animals who can't behave in classes.
You're the first person I've ever heard make this claim. (Particularly given that complaints about this issue were already pretty widespread before 2020!) The typical claim is that this was due to a breakdown in 1) expectations and 2) the ability of teachers and schools to discipline misbehaving students.
> This is a pretty god-of-the-gaps-ish hypothesis, and counterbalanced by all the kids who said school made them hate learning, or made them unable to learn in a non-fake/rote way, or that they can’t read books now because they’re too traumatized from years of being forced to read books that they hate.
Having school-aged kids of my own, I believe the default state of most humans is to do as little learning as possible unless it's directly relevant to some immediate need. Unfortunately my children rarely have an immediate need of understanding great literature or the fall of the Roman empire. Instead it's usually Minecraft related.
While I don't doubt there are people out there that were traumatized by being forced to read books, I would guess that a majority of those wouldn't have gone on to become prolific readers anyway.
I do think there's some merit to the scaffolding idea. I don't remember any details of the Krebs cycle, but I do have this idea implanted in my mind that animals extract energy from food and release CO2. It's possible I would have learned that through cultural osmosis, but it would only be part of culture because a critical mass of people learned it in school.
I keep seeing this term "critical mass" and related terms, and it has me thinking about writing something along the lines of "Education is intellectual health in a similar vein to vaccination is for physical health."
I don't know where to start with that idea, yet.
A quick edit to add: Please don't take this comment as criticism. You just happened to be the one I was reading when that thought finally formed fully for me. Say that three times fast, lol.
>traumatized by being forced to read books
I don't think I'm unique in finding that reading for English class sucked all the joy out of reading, even if the underlying book was a good one
there's something very, very wrong with how we teach literature
Why is this presented an argument against schools? It seems like an argument against learning stuff.
Interesting perspective! While I agree school can be better at teaching skills than facts, there's more to consider. Maybe schools could focus on building curiosity and information literacy to help navigate the firehose of information we face after graduation.
Schools don't teach skills or facts. We wouldn't have so many functionally illiterate people in this country if it could even teach reading.
I'm entirely on board with the overall case, based solely on my personal experience of 90% of high school being an unpleasant waste of time. I certainly don't recall many of the subjects, and not having to write another essay about some dumb thing still remains the biggest benefit of being an adult, 25 years later. Post-high-school-syndrome?
HOWEVER, I think the evidence is Under-specific - All of the studies I've seen mix together so many different kinds of people. It's completely coherent to think that anything beyond primary school is a waste for a median person or groups of people while other types benefit enormously through university. It's also somewhat likely that the types of people who benefit all the way through university are a tiny fraction of the population, so that if you average the effects out it shows that school was a waste of time. When making decisions in my own life, I don't care if something is a waste of time for a p50 citizen, I want to know how it might affect someone in my (or my children's) circumstances. Are there any studies on the p99 group? (But also, I find "intellectuals" completely alien and just want to grill and develop computer systems, so there are certainly more variables at play)
Regardless, I feel like there is a strong practical and moral case to stop legally compelling kids to attend these institutions. The folks who thrive in school end up running the show and think it's compassionate and caring to force everyone into a one-size-fits-all that values school above trades or just having other preferences & priorities.
I was surprised when at a lunch for elementary school children's parents each participant described an elementary school teacher that had a big influence on them. I expected some discussion of learning some subject matter. But I was the only one who didn't talk about a teacher that made them feel good about themselves and gave them confidence.
There are a couple of major flaws in this analysis.
First, defining the goal of education as simply instilling facts is rather silly. To use California as an example, the state's social studies standards indeed have a content component. But, they also have a separate skills component. https://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/hssanalysisskills.asp Ditto the Common Core https://www.thecorestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RH/11-12/
Second, and perhaps more important, although I have no doubt that students forget 90% of what they are taught, it seems very unlikely that it is the same 90 percent for every student. In part that is because individuals have different interests and different career paths. And, it is impossible for teachers to know what each student's career path will be. Nor do students necessarily know themselves. Hence, we give every student a broad education on everything. And in doing so, we give them a valuable gift: Opportunity. A student who has been exposed to a wide range of subjects has more choices than one who hasn't. Eg: When I was in college, I took a wildlife ecology class which was very interesting, and I considered majoring in it. But I had not taken Chem in high school, which were considered prerequisites for the college Chem class that was required for the major.
So, students forgetting 90% of what they are taught is the inevitable result of the very sound policy of exposing students to as many academic areas as possible.
The only one I missed was the one about the Holocaust ...
The only thing I remember with absolute certainty from my high school years is that everyone from Comoros is gay.
Using one example of a skill (numeracy) is not enough. Maybe our brains are especially resistant to numeracy but not other skills? I retain many skills that I learned in school after fourth grade. 1. Reading Talmud, legal writing, debate, a few languages etc.
I think the point of school isn't to just assemble a collection of facts, but to teach people how to learn/navigate uncertainty. You want a basic scaffolding of facts so you don't need to rederive the world from scratch, but, more than that, you want a lot of open-ended projects that require you to apply/stretch the tools you have to build something you can evaluate the soundness of.
At younger ages, I think there should be a lot of physical building, where the feedback loop of reality is tighter. In college, I benefited a lot from being part of a philosophical debating society (no judges, no prizes, you only argue for what you actually think), and it changed how I did my reading in all my actual classes.
I wasn't just reading to retain information, I was always curious about how a novel, a history, a bit of computer science might fit into a long running argument I was having about how to live. I asked more of the facts I was exposed to.
I’ve retained many skills that I learned in school after fourth grade: Talmud, legal writing, essays, research, languages. Maybe the buman/Western brain is especially bad at learning/retaining numeracy but not other skills?
What level of correct answers would be normative here? The underlying rule I have for reading survey research is that you always have to question your implicit assumptions about what the outcomes should be.
Do we have examples of low-education-penetration societies where people got comparable questions correct more of the time? Maybe it is the case that education works reasonably well and these polls results are a 90th percentile outcome in context.
I think your Roman empire survey question doesn't reflect what you meant it to. When the survey was live, there was a massive cultural meme going on, spurred by a tiktok thing, trying to prove that men think about the Roman empire all the time and women don't. I remember the women in my office asking all the men if they thought about the Roman empire at least once a day. (Including many who don't have tiktok). So when I saw your survey question I assumed you were trying to look into that phenomenon. I think a lot of people who don't think about the Roman empire normally, may have been thinking and talking about it more than usual at that time.
> 4% know what Chinese religion was founded by Lao Tse (Taoism)
Considering that Laozi's mother stayed pregnant until he was finally born at the age of eighty, some might question the premise here.
Taoism is the indigenous religion of China; there is no reason to believe it was founded by anyone. Most traditional practices have no specific originator. All traditional practice bundles have no single originator.
Good point. Education is about taking a purported fact - Lao Tse founded Taoism - and using it as a basis for goiing deeper and creating more connections - what is a religion? Is Taoism a religion? Does Taoism have a body of works that was "founded"? Are religions founded or do they evolve in some other manner?
And does anyone doubt that Lao Tse would have cared if you knew his name? If you understand Taoism it is that memorizing facts is not supremely important.
> Are religions founded or do they evolve in some other manner?
These options are not exclusive of one another.
> And does anyone doubt that Lao Tse would have cared if you knew his name?
Laozi 老子 is not a name; his name is recorded as 李耳.
If you poll American students on the adjusted question "which Chinese religion was founded by Li Er?", you might get a much lower hit rate.
Though, it's not clear to me why. 4% is already unrealistically low, given the form of the question. The major religion of China is Buddhism. It was not founded by a Chinese person.
Taoism is second.
And that's it. If you really want to reach, you could argue for Islam or Taiping Christianity as being "Chinese religions", but really the question "name a Chinese religion" should produce responses that are more than 4% "Taoism", and, just as with Buddhism, Western students are going to recognize that Islam wasn't founded by anyone Chinese.
Indoctrination is a more-important purpose of schooling than the imparting of knowledge.
There is a sense in which this is true and good, a sense in which it is true and bad, and a sense in which it isn't true.
True and good: We expect school, especially early grades, to teach kids to behave in a particular set of ways that become almost instinctive--stuff like lining up, sitting quietly in class, obeying adult authorities, etc. That kind of indoctrination is broadly positive. The whole framework of school is one in which math, science, grammar, history, geography, spelling, and all that stuff is important to learn, and you should care about them--to some extent, school is trying to indoctrinate kids in that mental framework.
True and bad: In general, teachers, school administrators, and educational bureaucracies trying to get kids to believe their partisan or controversial ideas seems like a bad thing. But which things are "indoctrination" and which are just passing on of shared civic values is part of the argument--if everyone said the Pledge of Allegiance every day and memorized the Gettysburg Address 50 years ago, and now everyone recites some creed involving tolerance and diversity every day and memorize the I Have a Dream speech, it's not like indoctrination has *decreased* exactly, it just changed direction a bit. Similarly if everyone used to read Last of the Mohicas and now they read The Color Purple, there's some indoctrination there in the choice of what to read, but not obviously more now than then.
Not true: Most actual class time is spent trying to teach academic subjects that aren't really indoctrination except in the very broadest sense of "math, history, grammar, and science are important to learn." Even the more controversial stuff like sex ed is mostly focused on imparting some factual information it would be handy for teenagers to have, like "this really fun thing you're doing might have a surprising consequence nine months from now."
Scott's argument is basically that schools aren't doing all that well at that last bit--they get kids for nine months * 12 years, and it sounds like a lot of them probably can't tell you what decade the civil war took place in, multiply fractions, or say whether the moon is bigger or smaller than the sun. One way to interpret that is that the real purpose of school is something else (signaling, credentialing, indoctrination, patronage jobs, free babysitting, etc.). Another is that schools are mostly not very good at what they're trying to do--perhaps because they should work differently somehow, perhaps because getting normies to remember that stuff a decade after school is genuinely hard.
An excellent expansion of my remark, None of the Above.
You're not taking either priming or relearning into account. Priming involves both the activation of a concept and the suppression of false positives--a process that's been proposed as representing "g." What these quizzes are asking is to remember facts unrelated to the daily lives of most people taking them. If the areas in which those facts lie suddenly become much more relevant, in a day or two scores will increase quite a bit. Correct identification and activation of metaphors, similes and analogies are examples of this.
Which is why relearning is am argument for education. You can't remember Spanish. I can't remember the names of the cranial nerves. I do remember the mnemonic I used though. If it begins to matter again, how quickly could I reliably relearn them? Pretty much the same with you and Spanish.
You're also not taking into account that a lot of cultural exposure happens at school, and that depriving students of that exposure deprives them off opportunities to soak things up from that context. Granted, not everything they learn there is either accurate or useful, but I'd argue it's still much more reliably beneficial them tik tok.
Last, generalization learning is a real thing. It's hard to demonstrate, but we can occasionally and we know it's there. My Master's thesis related to generalization learning in medical students (learning about one diagnosis taught them things about other conditions, even in other areas, eg cardiac arrest, pulmonary embolus and gastroesophageal reflux. Granted the related contexts are proximal, but that's the easiest way to demonstrate generalization. Lots of more interesting case studies in Arthur Koestler's book on creativity that he uses to illustrate his concept of biassociation.
You're not taking either priming or relearning into account. Priming involves both the activation of a concept and the suppression of false positives--a process that's been proposed as representing "g." What these quizzes are asking is to remember facts unrelated to the daily lives of most people taking them. If the areas in which those facts lie suddenly become much more relevant, in a day or two scores will increase quite a bit. Correct identification and activation of metaphors, similes and analogies are examples of this.
Which is why relearning is am argument for education. You can't remember Spanish. I can't remember the names of the cranial nerves. I do remember the mnemonic I used though. If it begins to matter again, how quickly could I reliably relearn them? Pretty much the same with you and Spanish.
You're also not taking into account that a lot of cultural exposure happens at school, and that depriving students of that exposure deprives them off opportunities to soak things up from that context. Granted, not everything they learn there is either accurate or useful, but I'd argue it's still much more reliably beneficial them tik tok.
Last, generalization learning is a real thing. It's hard to demonstrate, but we can occasionally and we know it's there. My Master's thesis related to generalization learning in medical students (learning about one diagnosis taught them things about other conditions, even in other areas, eg cardiac arrest, pulmonary embolus and gastroesophageal reflux. Granted the related contexts are proximal, but that's the easiest way to demonstrate generalization. Lots of more interesting case studies in Arthur Koestler's book on creativity that he uses to illustrate his concept of biassociation.
"So either people didn’t get 7 optimally-spaced repetitions of the Himalayas in school, or this very optimistic website is wrong and seven repetitions don’t suffice to remember information “for life”. I’m betting it’s the latter - for example, I’ve forgotten the names of some of my college professors, even though I would have seen them almost daily for a year."
Bizarre note: sometimes frequent repetition makes you forget facts more quickly. In college any serious music student is unlocking the combination lock on their instrument locker 2-4 times per day. I've seen a serious student forget it over their 1 1/2 week spring break. It's like the brain factors in the frequency of repetition into the speed of forgetting: a fact recalled every 6 hours can be safely forgotten after a week; a fact recalled every 6 months should be held for 10 years.
>Remember, these are university students, so the average person’s performance is worse.
I'm going to be awefuly unoriginal and doubt how strong that prior is. For some aspects of culture, I kinda expect it to be false:
-afaik, American college student are more foreign than the general population. Them not knowing a character of American literature would not be surprising, even Moby Dick.
-some datum may be well known in a minor subpopulation, which isn't college student. I bet a number of military history nerds who will never set foot on a campus know all about Hannibal.
-others may be well known amongst college students from 50 years ago, but curriculum moved since.
I would be shocked if college students weren't better on average at answering questions about academic subjects learned in K-12 than non-college-students.
"Otherwise - aside from being a place to warehouse children while their parents are away - I’m not sure how you rescue the usefulness of most schooling."
How about it being a place for children to get to know, cooperate with and solve conflict with other children from their communities, and from different backgrounds, culturally and economically, thus creating a foundation of empathy with their perceived nation? Many children socialize with people from similar backgrounds, economically and culturally, outside of school. They're with people of similar culture and socioeconomic status before they come to school and after school. Once they graduate, they're likely to find jobs where their colleagues are from similar socio-economic backgrounds.
In Denmark this nationwide empathy-building function is stated as one of the key functions of the school.
Yes, it's supposed to function as the great equalizer by giving children an opportunity to reach into higher education and better jobs.
Yes, it's supposed to be the foundation for us to continue our economic strategy as an "Information Economy".
But it's also supposed to function as the one place where children exist in a sort of pure, naive state of mind, seeing themselves as equal with all the other kids. We all know it's not true later in life. We're all but equal. But as children we're blind to it. And in this blindness, we build this empathy that's hard to teach directly, or later on. I think it's remarkably succesful at that. And that's why it's such a threat to our country that private schools are rising in popularity. There's a lot of debate about it these days. Denmark is a remarkably homogenous country, and our welfare model arguably can only work when a country is remarkably homogenous - or when the participants (tax payers) perceive it as homogenous; sufficiently homogenous to feel sympathy with the variety of citizens, of which their classrooms configurate as their reference point. The classroom as a microcosm of society.
"Fewer than 50% (i.e. worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms." That's... not good. You don't have to know electrons are three orders of magnitude smaller than protons or neutrons, you just have to know they're part of the atom, and that the part is smaller than the whole. Ouch.
When we interviewed science teachers we would always ask them the triple point of water. Every now and again you would get one who knew the answer, but mostly you'd get blank stares.
Sublime. ;-)
XD
Were you asking for the general concept, or the numerical temperature and pressure? I could certainly understand not knowing the latter on the spot.
General concept.
The average American income is between $32,000-$39,000. I don’t think the quality of life for these people would markedly improve if they knew atoms were bigger than electrons. This is difficult knowledge to practically apply. People who have jobs that depend on this knowledge are in the very small minority. I can say unequivocally that I have never benefited from knowing this fact in my line of work, and have only found it useful in attempting to understand something recreationally or to maintain status with people who measure other people’s worth by such strange standards. One could reasonably argue that it is more important to know how to fix a flat, or hang a door, or mend clothes. I imagine many here don’t know these things. And for some reason, schools don’t teach them. What makes this ignorance less shameful?
The median is, yeah; mean's around $60K. But sure, not a lotta physicists in the population, relatively speaking. I'd say the populations that would find flat-fixing and door-hanging (!) and clothes-mending useful are also minorities, flat-fixing probably being the biggest of the three... I think distinguishing between the general population and the college freshman class might be useful here: if you're going to college and you don't know electrons are smaller than atoms you should be ashamed of yourself, or at least embarrassed.
what if you're going to school in a humanities field? There's certainly aspects of science where there's a direct bearing on something like history or anthropology but I wouldn't consider the structure of the atom to be one of them
I did know the three parts of an atom, but I don't think I ever used the knowledge, even the couple more sciencey courses I had to take for my degree
If you're going to *college* then you should have a basic grounding in math, science and humanities, right?
This is true, but it's true because of how we as a society chose to design high school education. And I think someone who came from an educational structure (hypothetical or real, I don't know how universally this stuff is taught) where chemistry was an elective and not a basic part of science teaching would still do fine with the coursework.
Math is more important, or at least arithmetic is, and I think there's real value in understanding statistics and geometry. On the other hand, I completely failed to grasp pre-calculus, received a gift D-, and never needed it again in my life.
(come to think of it, statistics was a university requirement, and pre-calc a high school one... I think society might benefit overall from flipping the two, although perhaps I'm overly generalizing from my own life experience.
Definitely think stats is very useful and should be taught more broadly, however.)
What's basic? Adding fractions? Trigonometry? Differential equations? Measure theory?
Arithmetic. Yes. Maybe. No. No.
Since you expressed (!) that I would think more people might need to know how to hang doors than know the relative size of an electron, I’ll try to explain myself.
There are a lot of doors (billions in fact). You probably used one recently. You might even have a few. They were all hung. This was accomplished by millions of people all over the globe who knew how and support themselves in this manner. In addition to these professionals, when average people move large objects into/out of their home, they sometimes need to remove the door. I’ve done this. Most adults I know have done this. These doors need to be rehung. Rich people pay someone to do all this moving and hanging for them but most people aren’t rich.
When it comes to knowing whether an electron is smaller than an atom, I would argue that for most people it won’t prove nearly as useful as knowing how to hang a door. It’s even been that way for me. For a few people, electron knowledge is absolutely essential to incredibly important wonderful work, but this fact doesn’t require that more people know the size of an electron than know how to hang a door.
If you personally don’t know how to hang doors it’s not a problem because you can rest assured a lot of other people do know and have extracted the value of that knowledge for you. Likewise, if you don’t know the size of an electron it’s not a problem because you can rest assured that a relatively few other people do know and have extracted the value of that knowledge for you.
As a shamefully forgetful, largely ignorant person myself, I would just respectfully request that learned people—whether door hangers or electron buffs—consider forgiving less learned people for forgetting/not knowing things that they personally might not really need to know.
I think false is the answer I would select. If you're conceptualizing the electron as a point particle (or equivalently, if you know its precise position), then it has no "size". The size of an atom is the size of its electron cloud, and in the case of helium, this is equal to the "sizes" of the individual electrons. Electrons in a plasma, or conduction electrons in a metal, are arguably much "bigger" than atoms.
I rather think electron microscopes would not be a thing if this were strictly true.
Electrons and atoms have no clearly defined size. The best you can do is characterise how spread out their wave function is at the moment, but that's going to depend on how much energy they have. I have a PhD in theoretical physics, and I might have gotten this question 'wrong' because I would have no idea what they meant.
I think this is a terrible question.
Why wouldn't you surmise mass?
I had approximately the same understanding, and recognized that the question was ambiguous. But one of the things education ought to be good for is giving you a functional understanding of how other people think. Even as a hardcore STEM nerd who understands how fuzzy an electron wave function can be, it was clear to me that whoever wrote that question probably thought it was unambiguous and to anyone who isn't a STEM nerd, being several orders of magnitude less massive than an atom would make electrons unambiguously "smaller".
Now that we've established that education is just daycare, let's discuss why.
Over 30 years ago a group of parents decided to start a public school in my area. I thought they were mad. I already knew that public school admin were a bunch of power-hungry sociopaths and were not going to cede an iota of power, money, or control over their fiefdom to any unwashed parent. But the main guy, whose brain child this endeavor was, was an extrovert. And a very smart man. And a believer in the natural goodness and reasonableness of mankind. So he wheedled his way into the good graces of a few, and then got the power of a republican legislator on the education committee at his state capitol to pull a very powerful funding equation string, and we got our school. It's way more complicated than that but you had to be there.
After that came many huge jobs but the most difficult one was hiring teachers. After many years of being on the committee that weeded through over a thousand+ applications over the years, my conclusion is that the 'problem' of education cannot be fixed given the current system. Teachers are not capable of being educated.
Our application process was clearly detailed on our website. About 7/8 of teachers (even the good ones) would not send us all the documents we required to process their application without being prompted multiple times in most cases. (1)They couldn't follow simple instructions that mattered for their career.
Once they got an interview, we found that (2) most of the people who made it through our very rigorous application process had not even bothered to look over the website and see what our school was about.
Our interviews were usually about two hours long. During them we asked a wide variety of questions, many of which were pertinent to the subject matter the teacher was going to teach (some esoteric but most basic). (3) Very few teachers whose applications were good enough for us to waste 120 + minutes of our time arranging an interview for understood their basic subject matter.
Regarding the esoteric questions (4) we found that very few applicants (of any age) who had a semi-basic understanding of their content area had any kind of nuanced understanding.
Some of our interview questions were designed to see if this person, this *teacher*, was a person of intellectual curiosity. (5) Very seldom. VERY seldom.
Some of our questions were designed to see how a person would react in a situation where the school was actually run by a board of parents who hired and fired them. Were they amenable to correction and to shifting how they did things if we were displeased? (6) Many were honest. They said no. They were the professionals (even though some of them were right out of school with zero experience outside of 'student teaching').
We asked them their leisure reading habits. (7) Many did not read and the ones that did read often read frivolous, non-intellectual material.
We asked them to list the last ten books they had read and (8) there were many oprah book club fans, but most could not complete a list of ten books they had remembered reading that weren't 'educationist' garbage.
We asked them their hobbies, their passions, their beliefs about education, their motivations, and the purpose of educating a child. (9) A few were passionate about some hobby, most of their beliefs were the current marxist educrat garbage they had been taught in school and never questioned for a second, and their motivations were sometimes that it was an easy job to know more than a kid did, but often it was that a relative was a teacher, or they had had a good teacher once. It was almost never that the knowledge they had was important, interesting, essential, and needed to be passed on to the next generation. This was usually because they had almost no actual knowledge, so that is understandable.
Generally speaking, people who go into education are some of the most ignorant, lazy, easily propagandized, and sometimes lying strata of the population. Even some of the good ones go south once they are in a group. I used to joke that when you passed through the portals of a public school (even a parent-run one like ours) it pithed your prefrontal cortex.
Anyway, as I told people who would mistakenly admire me for homeschooling my kids in the early years, "I am not a patient person but you can't do a worse job than your neighborhood school. It's impossible because you love your kids. Even if your kids are just beating each other up in the backyard, they are still better off at home."
The American public school system is worse than daycare. It is evil. It crushes the life and creativity and natural intelligence out of children. It places them in the hands of ignoramuses, fools, and demons. It cannot be reformed and it MUST be abolished.
I think it’s okay.
Sounds like you were trying to start a school that catered to right-wing ways of thinking. So it is no surprise your applicants were not curious about knowledge. They are used to being spoonfed dogma. Public schools in districts that offer good salaries and good working conditions are full of very smart teachers. When you slash salaries and don't back them up with good discipline the good teachers leave and you are left with the "ignoramuses". You may be fine homeschooling your kids, but those same ignoramuses you cite have kids too. I suppose in a world without public education we would be fine letting those kids be taught by ignoramuses in their homes?
The point of public schools is to keep trying. It's all we got. We are one country and if you bvelieve in it find a way to cultivate better teachers. Pay them more or offer better working conditions. Of course, that won't happen over night. If you want curious, creative kids then you would be a fan of the Schools of Education and the progressives that pack them. They have been yelling about needing to teach creativity for over a century and the Republican mindset has always been their foil. So careful what you ask for. I guarantee that if you abolish public schools you will get a bunch of christian madrasas that teach dogma and rote memorization.
I've had intelligent friends who went through 'schools of education'. They said it was a dead bore, and mostly how to do the paperwork and being graded on adherence to the propaganda du jour. Zero creativity. Zero.
We have a pay scale that rewards teachers based on merit, not how many years they warmed the desk. It's been proven that more pay does not get you better teachers. Some inner cities pay over $20k per student. You could get private tutors for kids at that price but no - the insect overlords of education would not like that. Kids stuck in cities might actually learn and thrive if you did that.
Working conditions are based on the expectations of the school. We have excellent working conditions.
Abolishing public schools would at least raze the administrative bloat and force people to rethink what the hell each county is doing with all these millions and millions of dollars. Each community would get to decide how that played out instead of having a national curriculum that is rooted in the changing idiocy of the national educrats and the constantly moving target of testing, lies, damned lies, and educational outcome statistics.
There is no national curriculum. Never has been.
Working conditions in many schools is bad because they draw on student populations full of broken homes and poverty. They have a mandate to ensure all students have a chance to learn. Private schools get out of that mandate and hence, can achieve better working conditions. It's a luxary public schools cannot afford.
I went through an ed school and even taught in one. I agree with you on your assessment. They place too much emphasis on things other than content, however, looking at the national conversation about schooling from the right and the left, lack on emphasis on content seems to be a bipartisan trend. The left doesn't want centralized content control and the right wants to ram conservative dogma down the students' throats. I wouldn't mind more centralized control of curriculum, but after seeing what the idiots in Texas and Florida insist we should learn I no longer believe this. It's sad, but the right has bought into the post-modern alternative facts mantra. Unlike the left though, they are not self-reflecxive enough to understand this, well, at least the average conservative. The leaders of the right understand and expolit this because they have ulterior culture-war reasons to get poeople to doubt content. That way they can keep us mad while they slash taxes for the wealthy and keep the oligarchs firmly in control.
Flyover, there is a de facto national curriculum. One decade it was drug education and new math. All over the country. These things always end up popping up *all over the country*. There is always a cause du jour that the educrats want shoved down kids's throats. It's much easier than teaching science or math. Very few school boards resist whatever is being forced fed them either from the feds or from the union - but it all comes from national sources - the lack-of-taste makers of education, if you will.
The mandate of private schools is whatever the school's purpose is but you are right. They are exempt from a lot of the absolute stupidity and waste of time rubbish that the local schools do to dumb things down so that the average kid doesn't accidentally learn something and rise above the rabble.
In my school district the teachers are now sitting down in circles and allowing the kids to bully the weirdos and the social outcasts. Parents are suing the district for a variety of shocking abuses of power.
We don't run a private school. We run a public charter school. We are publicly funded and the school district skims off about 20% of our money just because they can. We run on less and we do more. Granted, the bar is low. We have to follow most of the state rules and have a few things we don't have to follow, just like some of the district's special schools they themselves set up to compete with us.
The public schools could actually teach content if they knew any, or if they wanted to. It has very little to do with some kind of political bifurcation. But in my experience over the past 30+ years of working in education reform, the left wants and has lobbied for centralized "content" control and the right has lobbied for the freedom of individual districts to decide for themselves.
My guess is that even the commies in town probably want their kids to be able to do math and read. However, the schools aren't currently set up for that. Good kids do well because of parental support at home. In turn the school district talks about all their SAT scores and acts like it is all the school's accomplishment. (The district I am in rolls our charter SAT scores into their overall scores because it raises their average.) But if you want to ask them about illiteracy, lowering graduation requirements, drop out rate, violence in the hallways, etc - well, it's all those damn parents's fault!!!!
This has been going on since the 70s.
A lot of my professional development as a teacher has involved unlearning the stuff I was taught in teacher training.
I have several family members and friends who were/are teachers, and I think the universal message I've heard from all of them was that the education degree requirements were mostly useless, and that grad programs in education existed entirely to justify raises for teachers.
My mother was a teacher. This is absolutely true. That's one reason why we have so many 'teachers' with masters and phds and yet we still have intellectually empty and degrading curriculums.
"christian madrasas that teach dogma and rote memorization"
Oh no! Not - ROTE MEMORISATION! The horror, the horror!
Imagine making kids learn their times tables and lists of words out of spelling books, why it would be back to the Dark Ages!
And even worse - Christians! Why, allowing them to operate their own schools might mean that ... they end up pretty much the same as the public school system?
https://www.bc.edu/content/dam/bc1/schools/lsoe/faculty%20&%20research/research-projects/Miller2021_Article_ExaminingTheLegacyOfUrbanCatho.pdf
"The majority of studies in this category conducted quantitative analyses of largescale student outcome data to draw conclusions about any sector effects that exist for students attending urban Catholic schools (Berends & Waddington, 2018; Chen & Pong, 2014; Fleming et al., 2018; Freeman & Berends, 2016; Hallinan & Kubitschek, 2010, 2012; Hallinan et al., 2009; Lee et al., 2017; Morgan & Todd, 2009; Reardon et al., 2009). Though, as mentioned in the introduction, previous research had long suggested urban Catholic secondary schools produced both a “common school effect” and “Catholic school advantage” (e.g., Altonji et al, 2005; Bryk et al., 1993; Grogger & Neal, 2000; Neal, 1997), these 10 studies of more recent student outcome data presented a more complex, less consistent portrait of urban Catholic elementary and secondary schools.
For example, in their comparisons of data from middle school students in the Chicago School Study and the Chicago Catholic School Study (longitudinal data sets of Chicago middle school students), Hallinan and Kubitschek (2012) ultimately found no significant differences in reading or math achievement when comparing Catholic and public student performance. Similarly, using data from the federal Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999 (ECLS-K), a nationally representative sample of kindergarten students, Reardon et al. (2009) found no observable differences in reading scores among public and Catholic elementary school students regardless of race and/or urbanicity and strong evidence suggesting that Catholic schools were less successful at generating high math outcomes than public schools. Hallinan and Kubitschek (2010) did find in another comparison of Chicago School Study and Chicago Catholic School Study data that urban Catholic schools were still associated with smaller student achievement gaps between racial and socioeconomic status student groups. However, the evidence across studies reviewed in this paper suggested a Catholic school advantage related to student achievement at the elementary level appears to be minimal, non-existent, or inconclusive.
Evidence across studies reviewed in this paper did still point to the existence of a Catholic school advantage in relation to post-secondary outcomes. Drawing on data from nine different freshman cohorts at one of the largest public universities in the U.S., Fleming et al. (2018) found that students across a wide range of demographics who attended urban Catholic high schools had higher college grade-point averages and were more likely to complete college. Similarly, in their analysis of the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), a longitudinal, nationally representative data set initiated in the fall of 2001, Freeman and Berends (2016) found that students who attend any Catholic high school (including urban Catholic high schools) were more likely to continue onto college than students who did not attend Catholic high schools."
Forcibly close down these madrasas now! Signed, a victim survivor of being educated between the ages of 4-17 by nuns, without whom I would have learned nothing! Those who went before us warned us:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GNCMJJXXQAEcp6G.jpg
No no no, you're missing the loaded psychological implications of the term here. A madrasa is an Islamic school where people are indoctrinated and taught jihadist ideology mixed in with what we would consider the "actual education." The point of a term like that is to insinuate that Christian schools would be no different, and distract you from the fact that Christian tradition has nothing even remotely resembling jihadist ideology. (And anyone who says "but, but, but, the Crusades!!!!" has no idea what the Crusades really were or why they happened, and really ought to study the relevant history before making a fool of themselves.)
I’m looking for the upvote button, can’t find it,. I can only say I just learned more about the current state of the USA from your comment then I have from the 97% of ‘reputable’ news, plus alt-ish blogs and websites.
You’ve just smashed my comfortable illusion of intelligent, competent teachers being held down only by politically appointed administrations. it was a nice illusion while it lasted
In reply to MLHVM
Though not religious myself, I consider teaching to be an almost religious level calling. Which is why I use 'single quotes' around the word 'teacher' a lot. Most of these people are hacks looking for 3-4 months a year off. I have it on the best authority that this is true. Other teachers assured me this was the case.
I am happy to admit that there are some with good intentions but lacking a real calling. I feel for those people. Some of them are very sweet, but they are often very ignorant and have almost no intellectual curiosity that would make them the kind of person who could grow into a calling. After three years, these people get tenure and it doesn't matter that they ask the smartest kid in the room to teach the new math methodology because they don't understand it themselves (true story). They can't be fired and they get pretty entitled pretty quickly.
Most teachers are members of teacher's unions which, combined, makes the largest union in the world. They do not think independently but are a herd, or maybe borg would be the better metaphor. I speak in generalities, you understand. I am very good friends with some teachers. I have been related to some teachers. I have taught independently myself. In a way, what you are saying is actually true. We hire a lot of those intelligent, competent teachers who were being held down by politically motivated administrators. It's just that they are a very tiny percentage of teachers. A very tiny percentage.
I will admit that I was not educated in the USA, but in RSA and the UK, but I think you got extremely unlucky. I went to pretty average schools, and all my teachers were pretty average upper middle class people.
Were they intellectual titans? No. But all the teachers I had were smart, engaged, well read and passionate about what they do. I can only speak for the two countries I was educated in, but I don't think the US is that different to them, and I think you greatly miscategorise the kind of people who apply to be teachers.
I don't think it is asking too much for a person who says on their resume that they are passionate about English literature to know who Milton is, or to be able to name a few metaphysical poets. Or to expect them to name a few of Shakespeare's history plays. Or for an economics teacher to discuss the difference between the Austrian and the Keynesian school. Or for a science teacher to know the triple point of water. Or for a math teacher to explain the difference between mathematics and arithmetic.
I have read and evaluated well over 1200 resumes (I stopped keeping track of the number of resumes I've read about 18 years ago) sent in from all over the country. I have participated in scores and scores of interviews. You can have no idea how much I wish you were right, Mallory James.
Sadly, this is not a phenomenon exclusive to education. I've participated in job interviews for my own profession, (software developer,) and I typically ask very basic questions, things so universal that you'd expect any developer to have picked up in their first year of college, or in their first six months on the job.
For example, "you have a large list of Person objects. Each person has a unique name. You want to be able to efficiently look up people by name. How would you do it?" It's a bit depressing how few candidates are able to answer with some version of "use a hash table," considering just how ubiquitous this scenario is in software development.
Agreed, that is disappointing, this is the minimum I would expect from my teachers. But then again, I think most of the teachers I had would be able to answer such questions (although I did once have a science teacher who when I said that we didn't actually touch things, its just that our electrons repelled each other when we got very close and that's why we didn't fall through things, they said "No, its because atoms are connected together like a net", so you know, they weren't all particularly bright)
Given that I would say that this is a pretty low bar, and this was a private school where I presume no particular certification or degree was mandated, why do you think you had so few talented applicants? I presume you could have hired anyone from the US labour pool, why do you think so few qualified people applied?
I would point out that if this was over 30 years ago, putting the details up on your website may have been counter-productive. Only a tiny number of geeks knew how to use the web or even had access in 1994 (it had only been released in 1993 as you will recall), so you probably very much limited your applicant pool that way.
This is going to be a long answer, Mallory James.
Well, we did take out ads in magazines that went to education reform-minded people, as well. At that time our local district had their jobs posted online, as did most other schools in the area. I live in the mountain west. It is pretty high tech here, but the school/time-frame I was talking about re the application process was the second school we started and it was in the late 1990s. We had to start a second school because the district accomplished a coup against the parent board in charge and went into the building and stole our books and materials and installed their puppet. When you have millions of dollars and years of experience, but do a shit job of educating kids, it is super embarrassing when "non-professionals' are able to do a much better job and have almost immediately better outcomes with less money and fewer resources in the course of a few years.
Why is the talent pool so low in talent.....there is an American saying, snarky but often fair, that those who can, do. And those who can't, teach. So a great musician will go into some kind of professional music-ing, but a mediocre one will go into music education. This is not completely fair because some people really do have a talent for teaching young people and are very valuable because of that.
There is another saying that there are three reasons people go into teaching: June, July, and August. These are the three summer months during which most teachers are not working. So, you get a full time job, but (what with summer, Christmas break, Easter break, "in service days", etc, etc, etc) you only actually work about 8 of the 12 months.
We ask every interviewee why they want to teach at our school and/or why they went into this field. You get a lot of different answers. I'd say about 1/3 of the time you get someone who found out they had a gift for teaching and really wanted to pass that on to young people. A lot of the time it is 'my mom was a teacher', 'everyone in my family is a teacher', 'I really admire this or that teacher I had', 'I was told I would make a good teacher', 'I was the best in my class at X subject', 'I love kids', 'I love math and wanted to pass that love on', etc.
We always grill applicants on subject matter. A lot of the people who love math can't tell us the things we need to know to be convinced that they are a master of their subject. This is because education schools, as I think I said before, spend a lot of class hours on propaganda (and pop psychology) and *very* little on making sure students are prepared in a subject area.
Often, the system is insanely incoherent. In fact, what is called a middle school certification meant (in the past - don't know if this has been reformed but I doubt it has) that you were certified to teach any subject offered in grades 6-9. I had a brother in law who was a coach and had to teach physics. For which, I assure you, he was thoroughly unprepared. To say that he was only ever one day ahead of his students would probably be putting a shine on the situation.
Another reason inadequate people go into it is job security. The system of tenure is a huge problem in American education. In my state, if a person teaches one day into their fourth year of teaching, they have automatic job security. Three years and one day in the classroom and you can never be fired. No matter how incompetent you prove to be.
Another big factor is that kids spend 13 years in public schools. They hardly ever interact with the real world. Generally speaking, the only working adults they see doing their job are teachers and they see that day in and day out for years and years and years. They often think, as I certainly did when in school, "How hard can this be? These people just need to know a little more than I do. I could do that."
And finally, I'll say that another problem is the barrier to entry. There is very little other than the obligatory lame ED degree from some college or university and a few weeks of student teaching. I know there are some tests to get certain certifications, but I also know that the bar on those is low. I had a friend who was a social worker and went to take the math test for state certification (she had to do this in order to work in schools). There she talked to a young woman who was a teacher and was taking the test for the third time. My friend wasn't great at math but found the test easy and all her SW compatriots had no trouble passing it.
I could go on and on but it is demoralizing and I doubt you want more. Smart, motivated people in the US most often go into real jobs with real responsibilities and real risks. We sometimes hire them when they retire or get laid off. We do what we can to not hire people who are traditionally trained teachers. Why? Because it is almost always a mistake. They often prove to be entitled, troublemaking, lazy, uncommitted parasites. The exception (and there are some) proves the rule.
Nope, I think that is a pretty good answer.
I do have loads more questions (why did you need to offer tenure at a private school? Why was barrier to entry a problem, couldn't you have mandated a Master's degree or PHD in a related subject like schools require in Finland?), but I have already taken up loads of your time, so thanks for what you have offered so far. Thanks for trying to make a difference.
I suppose what I have got out of this is how sad it is that US culture disincentivizes any with talent from trying to teach. As you point out, it seems there is a self fulfilling prophecy in the US that means people will assume that if you teach it must be because you can't do anything else. Well, hardly surprising that no one talented applies in such a situation if that is what the population writ large will think of them, including their students.
I guess the one positive I take out of this, is that I suppose I am a bit more impressed by the job the government manage to do to keep education standards relatively high (or at least higher than most countries here in Europe), considering all the obstacles you encountered with sourcing talent. But then I suppose a syllabus mostly teaches itself.
On the topic of barrier to entry, I totally agree. I definitely think it should be harder to become a teacher than most other jobs. Perhaps on the order of a Doctor (well, let's not go crazy, but definitely more than 5 years of advanced study). I hope we get to see some improvements in this area in future.
Just a few clarifications: 1 - we absolutely do not offer tenure at our school (and would not if we could) and it is not a private school. It is a public charter school. All can attend but we have a wait list with over 1000 students on it right now, so it is tough to get a spot.
2 - we mandate expertise in the content area in which you are applying to teach. A Latin teacher has to have advanced knowledge of Latin and to read regularly in that language. A classical history teacher has to have some Latin or Greek and a fairly thorough knowledge of classical history. An engineering teacher has to have worked in the field before applying. Etc.
3 - I think the self-fulfilling prophecy is of recent date. When I was a kid people did not think teachers were ignorant, probably because they weren't so much so as they are now. If anything people think entirely too well of teachers, largely because they don't realize what is going on in the classroom and they have no idea how ignorant so many of them are. As the founder of our school says, "There will always be angry parents because there will always be parents of 4th graders. At 4th grade people start to realize that their sweet little child can not read, has little math skill, and waning interest in acquiring knowledge."
I have an application (I saved a copy of it because it was so remarkable) from a very sincere, sweet man who wanted to teach at our school. In his statement of educational philosophy (we won't accept an application without one), he could hardly write a sentence without a grammar or punctuation mistake. It is one of the few applications that actually broke my heart. This man had been failed by teachers for every one of the 17 years of his life that he had been in primary and secondary school, and college. It still makes me sick to think about it. IIRC, he was working on a masters. I still think about this poor man.
4 - a huge part of the problem is how vast this country is. Each state makes its own rules, putatively. But the reality is that an enormous, nationwide union controls the Ed schools, the school boards, the licensing boards, and most of the politicians. That union leans very, very far left, and gets further left every year. But there are plenty of people making a lot of money off of it.
One should also consider that a primary goal of education (up to high school at least) is what I would call 'patriotism'. Literature, history, and geography classes are often primarily meant to justify the current state of affairs, to the point where most education programs have 'literature' and 'foreign literature'. Geographic notionism is mostly focused on national creeks and mountain ranges rather than world capitals. History is mostly your country's history, with a pinch of manifest destiny (try to ask any history buff outside the US who Paul Revere was, I'm confident you won't ever get to 44% positive response rate).
I was under the impression (3rd hand or so!) that in the USA, 'woke' was mostly inculcating something close to _anti_patriotism. Does anyone have first hand information?
That's pretty accurate. In this and various other aspects, wokeness has been systematically degrading and corrupting education for several decades now.
Many Thanks!
In order to discover what sort of things you like and are good at, you have to have some idea of what sort of things there are.
School gets kids to do a large variety of things to see what sticks, then focus in on what they are good at as they get older.
Without such a mechanism, most people will be stuck doing the sorts of things their parents or neighbours do, never knowing if there are possibilities out there that might work better for them that they actually can explore rather than just hear vague stories of, as has been the case for most of human history.
No it doesn't. It gets kids to do a small variety of the same things. Usually poorly. So poorly as to where it's impossible to make use of such talents upon graduation, as they're competing with millions of others with the same underdeveloped skills, and little means of distinguishing their own abilities of such beyond wasting more of their time and money on more school, all of which is only valuable relative to their sheepskin.
Depends on the school.
Are you arguing against school, or for better school?
I think a universal voucher system, with the option to use the resources for homeschooling, would probably be the best option of the plausible ones we have now. Mostly because it would offer the most possible means for experimentation with various lesrning methods and cirricula that could actually be useful.
Our current system is monumentally awful and wasteful. Nothing less than industrial-scale child abuse. I sincerely regret the time of my life I wasted on it, as well ever thinking it was a good idea to do such.
I think you are asking about the wrong kinds of facts. The fact that Copernicus discovered that the Earth moved around the sun is less important than the fact that people used to believe that the sun travelled around the Earth, and it was only with keen scientific observation and thought that someone figured out the reality and shared the correct model with with world. A better "fact" to test for would be something like: Did humans always believe that the Earth went around the sun?
Isn't this the scaffolding that remains, and people can look up the details if these need to?
This is definitely the Scott position I wrestle most mightly with, because I don't agree, but I'm really really struggling to find good counterarguments.
Perhaps today I'll start from this direction: First imagine that you have a kid warehouse. Now what are you going to put in it?
This is to say, I think lots of people find kid warehousing valuable for lots of reasons. Now can you think of ways to organise the days of these kids that are obviously better?
It seems to me that more sporty/vocational ways have been tried, and weren't disasters, but weren't obviously better. There have also been minimal-rules sorts of institutions, and they haven't been disasters, but also haven't been obviously better.
Teaching people good ideas and lots of civics and hoping some of it sticks might just be the best they can manage?
This is pretty weak justification for a coercive national project, but it might be enough.
This is a Scott position I have a lot of sympathy with, because I disliked school as a child (by which I mean, it was a major source of unhappiness for me). When I complained about it, I was told that it was good for me and important and would help me socially. I find it validating as an adult to reflect that actually school wasn't good at doing what it was supposed to be doing, and that it wasn't really designed with my interests in mind, but with the interest of keeping my parents at work.
I'm sorry you experienced that. Now that I'm a parent and a teacher, my observation is that the parents around me do not do things in their childrens' best interest with any regularity. They act selfishly and out of a desire to conform 99% of the time.
One of the reasons I'm very pro-school is because schools are at least set up with institutional rules that try to make them function for the benefit of the children, and after a century or so of eliminating corporal punishment and sexual abuse from most of them, I think we've reached a position where schools are probably on average better places for kids to be than their own homes.
I don't know that this is right, and I certainly recognise that lots of people don't agree with it. And because school has to aim for the median kid, there must necessarily be lots of children who don't end up fitting well into the system. I... don't have any good ideas for what to do about them.
I can kind of see both sides of this. I imagine my experience with school was like a lot of the ACX commentariat. I did really well academically, my parents were invested in my welfare, but school was mostly a drag and a waste of time. There were clearly other kids who should not have been in school, either because they were more capable on their own or they were not capable of benefitting from education at all.
My mother was a special education teacher for most of her career in a very rural, poor and drug infested area. She would ask kids about their parents, and a common response would be "mommy doesn't care, daddy is in jail for meth." For these kids, school was probably the one place they were regularly fed, and people paid attention to them, and they weren't beaten or sexually abused by mommy's latest boyfriend. Mandatory schooling is probably the only way people like these kids have any sort of a chance at a healthy or productive development.
I think any sort of solution to schooling needs to square the individual needs of each student with what the system is trying to do for them. Not that this is an easy or practical thing to do.
I think this is the real divide. Bryan Caplan's kids are going to do just fine whether they go to their local school or not; he and his wife are going to make sure they can read, write, and don't just hang around aimlessly and idly.
The bright, self-directed, and self-disciplined kids will also do okay, even if they feel they would be a lot happier and better off never having to go to school.
It's the kids in the deprived areas for whom school is the stable environment that makes sure they get something to eat (breakfast and lunch clubs), are looked after in some degree, have somewhere to go that isn't hanging around aimlessly and idly and getting enticed by criminal gangs to join up:
https://www.thejournal.ie/young-children-targeted-by-gangs-to-engage-in-crime-6388491-May2024/
They are the ones who will suffer without school, or something to replace it. Cheerfully chirping that they can just go online! and manage their own pace and level of study! ignores the problems there.
The school system, like democracy, is the worst thing out there - except for all the other things.
The local widget factory will keep the low-prospect kids occupied, provide them structure and opportunity to socialise, help them reach self-sufficiency and escape abusive situations at home, and teach them valuable life lessons while doing productive work.
Sure, some potential geniuses might not get the opportunity to advance, and some people who might have done well given some other choice of career might fall through the cracks, but IQ tests and genetic profiling should catch most of them, and the sacrifice of the rest is one we are apparently willing to make for the greater good in our new school-free utopia.
Problem is, we've off-shored and out-sourced all the widget factories. What remains is either you need a high level of technical skills, or you can get a job in service industries.
And if you've ever tried training in kids to do useful work, for example on work experience during transition year from the local schools, you'll realise how long it takes and how little you can actually give them to do. Even building sites won't find much for 12 year olds, so that's why age of apprenticeship is 16.
And leaving school at an early age does leave them, even the non-academically inclined, with gaps in their education that they won't make up or pick up in later life (not without outside support). Legal school leaving age will be set at what - 15? Okay, that might be manageable. But my father left school at 12, and when I was 13 I had to explain how compound interest worked to him, because he had stopped paying back a loan on the assumption that he had it all paid off, and couldn't understand why the bank were sending him letters demanding more payments to finish it off. Because I had learned all about compound interest in maths class in school, I was telling my father - a man who had been working all his life, who wasn't stupid, who was able to do so many things - why he was wrong about thinking he had paid off the loan.
"School-free" will not be utopia. The ones who are truly hopeless will probably drop into crime (see the recent news story about criminal gangs targeting kids as young as seven in my own country), the ones with any ability will need some kind of apprenticeship programmes and training/education programmes, at which point we're practically doing school all over again. Few if any businesses engage in on-the-job training, even apprenticeships mix on the job training with learning in vocational or training services.
You could survey the kids. What do they like better? Being in school, or being at home?
Everyone I remember who went to school with me didn't like it. I'm not sure whether a single one of the ca. 100 kids in my grade wanted to be there. Everyone was happy when the holidays started. Everyone was sad when they were over. Everyone dreaded class starting at the beginning of the day. Almost everyone was terminally bored by the lessons.
I think I probably had an unusually blessed home life. But even adjusting for myself being atypical, I have a hard time seeing the median kid I knew back then being sufficiently abused at home to prefer school.
If you warehoused the kids and told them they could bring cell phones and just do what they wanted, like a more supervised recess that last the entire school duration, I think almost everyone would have been far less miserable.
(this was in Germany)
Yeah... I'm afraid I don't have sufficient respect for children's opinions to care about that. I don't think kids know what they like, or are capable of making decisions that make them happier. They need us to do that for them. For example, not liking school/work is normal. Looking forward to home time/clocking off time is normal. Enjoying leisure and anticipating enjoyment doesn't mean to me that non-leisure activities should not be done.
If you just left kids up to their own devices - pun intended - I think you would end up with a lot of kids who never achieve functional literacy and numeracy (despite the large quantities of words and numbers on phones). Lots of them would just be catatonic for hours on end, and I don't think that's good. And lots of them would go around hitting and bullying each other.
I'd be very much willing to rethink the balance of school vs. leisure; or to change the way they do school. But I think doing nothing or leaving the kids to veg out would not bring about desirable outcomes.
I want to suggest that most of the value of school is really social and behavioral. We send young people off to a place they get to learn to interact with other young people and learn norms of behavior.
The whole education stuff could be done much better but it's ultimately largely secondary. It's just necessary to justify the large expense of the day care and socialization aspects to parents and voters.
If you want people to learn norms of behaviour, the seemingly-obvious choice would be to get them to associate with people who are already socialised, i.e., adults, not to drop them in a room with loads of other unsocialised people and hope they figure it out.
William Goldring had some insights on how that turns out, in its purest form...
William Golding's book was not a story about children, but a metaphor about humanity. And it is fiction. In reality, this is not how children behave when isolated from society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongan_castaways
I agree with most of what you wrote, and it is most astute, but you understated a very important reason for comprehensive child schooling:
Very many parents can teach their children nothing at all, they are are either completly uneducated, have no didactic skills, have no time to teach their children, or look on any education as a waste of time.
These kids will form a part of tomorrows society, we need them to understand things so that they can participate, undertake useful work, and use their knowledge to evluate social events and communicate their thought-out opinions to others, and to vote for the best of the bad crew we call politicians.
Who were those guys Kafkaesque and Orwellian anyway?
Joist wrote Ulysses and Girder wrote Faust
Courtesy of a joke I heard years ago, here's one version of it:
Paddy goes for a job on a building site. ‘I’ll give you a test,’ says the foreman.
‘What’s the difference between a joist and a girder?''
‘C’mon now, that’s too easy,’ says Paddy.
‘The difference is that Joyce wrote Ulysses and Goethe wrote Faust...'
Pre-registering my answers for the first 4 questions at the beginning of the post:
1. Repetition is very important, but you actually learn one module then move on to the next. This is briefly covered again next year, but not much more. There isn’t quite enough repetition to make things stick long-term. Many of us have experienced this firsthand in the real world, e.g., a job. In my first corporate job, I had to ask the same questions over and over again to learn how to solve basically the same problem, just slightly shifted. This continued for months, and then finally, it sticked. For the average person to become truly proficient at something, they have to keep repeating it ad nauseam. School feels like you’re doing exactly that, but if you take a closer look, you’re not. At least not with the same rigor as you would in an actual job.
2. The reason information sticks when learned through general osmosis is because our minds are preconditioned to remember information we have reason to believe is critical. For example, how to pump gas and use a gas station. The very first time you are old enough to consciously perceive your parents talking about going to the gas station, we perceive that as being a very important thing because our parents are telling us about it, and it seems rational to be something we will do when we get a car one day. The point is that the cultural osmosis happens as one part of an apparatus containing us, our relatives, our friends, and our community, and so on. “Okay son, let’s go to the gas station” -> “I will get a car someday” -> “We always drive and need gas” -> “This is something we continue to do all the time,” and so on. Things that are cultural keep reoccurring and have enormous amounts of repetition. School just doesn’t carry the same weight as the zeitgeist does.
3. Children are smart enough to know that what they are actually incentivized to do is cram information the day before to pass, not to remember it. Once the test has passed, the information will not come up for quite some time until the next test, which they will just cram for again. This is classic game theory about incentives and agents. There’s no reason to think that it would play out any other way.
4. This is answered by the previous 3 points. The mind is a funny thing, and humans are so adaptive that they have a precognitive understanding of what is likely to be important and what is not. We put so much time into studying things our unconscious mind already declared moot. The effort was wasted from the beginning.
One thing that might get obscured by listing a bunch of facts and asking how many people know them, is the extent to which different people learn different facts.
For instance, you might come up with a list of 5 facts that you'd expect learn in school, and discover that 20% of Americans know each of them, and that kind of look like only 20% of students learn anything in school.
But it could also be that every person remembers 1 fact, in which case every person did really learn *something* in school.
And if the 20% of things they each learned were the things that are really interesting and enriching to their personality, or the things that will be particularly relevant to their career and endeavors, then maybe that's actually evidence of the system working pretty well?
We all know that human labor is hugely specialized these days; someone who knew how to perform 20% of all jobs in the market (from janitor to construction worker to systems analyst to heart surgeon) would be a miraculous savant. Why do we expect school kids to each retain *everything*, instead of specializing in the same ways?
Of course, the argument then is that even if the 20% each person learns is good and important, they're still wasting 80% of their time. But skipping over the debate about 'intangibles' and background knowledge, it's also just the case that you don't know which things each child is going to care about or need later in life when they enter grade school, so you need to expose them to everything to let them develop and discover what they care about.
*Maybe* you could divert them into more specialized courses of study than we do now when they hit highschool, but frankly even if we proved that someone's interests at teh end of middle school perfectly predicted their interests in college, I still wouldn't trust the bureaucracy (or their parents) to make that determination for them.
> But it could also be that every person remembers 1 fact, in which case every person did really learn *something* in school.
I don't think anyone is literally, pedantically claiming that people learn *nothing at all;* but rather that the amount of learning is so low that it's not worth the extreme expense in time, money, and opportunity costs.
See the rest of my comment for a discussion of that specific point...
There are two factors that I think meaningfully change the calculus on society’s return to education that are not covered here or in Caplan’s book. My hunch is that these make the expected value positive for universal K-12 but not for universal post-secondary:
1) Childcare: as we saw during the school shutdowns during COVID, if kids aren’t in school it massively impacts parental productivity. Without free public schools, I’d expect we would return to a world where many more families would only have one working parent. I’d guess it would also decrease birth-rates. Maybe some people think this would be a better world, but it would certainly reduce the tax base. In a non-agrarian society, my guess is that having a bunch of 12-18yos roaming around not in school would cause lots of problems. And while child abuse unfortunately does happen in school settings, schools work really hard to prevent it and catch it; if you tried to put all these kids into the workplace without robust oversight I think we’d see a lot more abuse. So then, if you allow that the government should run childcare, you might as well try to do something useful with that time, and $13k/child/year is a lot cheaper than my family pays for our 2yo to attend preschool. I think the current curriculum is wildly unoptimized, but I think the childcare function of K12 schools makes them more economically valuable than just the returns to the student.
2) “Fat tails”: the fact that most kids find most of their classes useless and boring doesn’t automatically mean that the expected value per student is not positive. I took a computer science course in high school and it changed the course of my life and career, but that same course was probably boring and useless for most of the other people in the class. Looking back, it’s easy to say that I should have taken that course and the other students shouldn’t have, but I don’t think you could have predicted who would have their life changed by a course a priori. My uncle took French in high school, went to Paris for a semester in college, met a woman there and lived in France for most of his adult life. French was probably a waste of time for nearly every other student in his class, but for my uncle it was a big deal! The story of Steve Jobs learning about calligraphy is about as “economically useless” of a course as you could get, but it turns out he put that to use in designing the Apple computer - as he says, "you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward." On a broader societal scale, if the requirement that all students take biology in high school increased the odds by 5% that we would have an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 widely available within 18 months of the virus appearing, that might very well justify keeping the requirement, even if 99.9% of students find it useless.
To add, one thing that school could do is function as a place where osmosis can take place. It's not unlikely that students learn at ton from each other.
>Otherwise - aside from being a place to warehouse children while their parents are away - I’m not sure how you rescue the usefulness of most schooling.
socialization, for starters
also you love to see libertarians spend decades cutting funding for schools and trying to undermine them with privatization and then use these poor results as an excuse to cut schools further. the US's poor results are an anomaly, not a fact of nature
As a libertarian, this post made me laugh. At the idea of libertarians actually getting their preferred policy outcome, in something as pervasive as public schooling no less. I struggle to think of a political philosophy that has had less impact on American policy than libertarianism.
I suggest you search for the old SSC post Considerations on Cost Disease. It has a nice graph at the very beginning where the cost of public schooling (adjusted for inflation) has soared since 1970, yet test scores have remained flat.
i'm sorry, i think there might be some confusion. when i say "libertarians have gotten their preferred policy outcomes on public education," what i mean is they (or their allies) have successfully managed to block comprehensive federal education funding and reform. i understand that it's still not legal to marry 15 year olds.
I'm going to explicitly call this out as BS, since Scott himself wrote a post detailing how public k-12 education funding has increased 250% (after inflation) over the last 50 years. That is in no way compatible with "blocked" funding.
I still laugh at your conclusion that libertarians can manage to block federal legislation.
Also, you can legally marry 15 year olds in the noted libertarian states of... Hawaii? and Kansas? Wait, that doesn't seem right...
>makes a joke about libertarians being pedophiles
>libertarian immediately responds with intricate knowledge of state age of consent laws
>mfw
It's called Google. (Or Bing, or DuckDuckGo, or Yandex, or ChatGPT...)
It's true that government primary schools are not funded much by the federal government, and never have been. But if you're under the impression that libertarians (or their supposed allies) have been blocking increases in school funding overall, you could not possibly be more mistaken.
You don’t seem to realize that school funding is almost entirely divorced from school success in the US.
sure man. that makes a bunch of sense. this is also true for rocket engines or home repairs
Speaking as a rocket scientist, the success rate of institutions building rocket engines is only weakly correlated with their financing. I believe the same is true of education, but that's not my field.
> the success rate of institutions building rocket engines is only weakly correlated with their financing.
I'd believe that, if you added the caveat "after overcoming a significant barrier to entry." Because if you don't have enough financing to build and launch a rocket in the first place, that's a pretty powerful correlation!
Reality often doesn't make sense. The worst schools get the most funding, and have for decades.
If you're going to make lazy swipes, you could at least try to make them intelligent lazy swipes.
You can go deep or you can go wide, but there isn't time to go both deep and wide.
As a society we have chosen to go wide for much of our education (history especially). This means we also go shallow. And this means that people forget almost all they were taught.
Maybe you do a year of US history in high school. When do you cover this again? "Never" is a good guess.
Aaannd ... most of the facts are, as Scott suggests, abstract. Falstaff is a character in the Henry IV plays. A student can remember that for a test in a few weeks. But Falstaff isn't "real" in the same way that, say, Luke Skywalker was for a generation. You'll need to *WATCH* (not read) a good performance of the play. Then come back in a few years and watch another one ... or excerpts or something. Then tie young Hal in with the actual historical Henry V ... and Owen Gendower and a war for Welsh independence. This can be done. But it takes more than a few hours once or twice in high school.
It *IS* possible to make history less abstract, more "real" and have more depth, but the tradeoff is that lots of history will simply not get covered. *I* am okay with this because I'd rather that the "right" 10% be (mostly) remembered even if the cost is mostly ignoring 90%. The way we teach history we cover a lot more with the tacit understanding that the kids will remember barely any of it.
The same basic point holds for literature, though the details are different.
The same holds for science (especially Newtonian physics). Wide or deep but not both.
And in ALL cases most of the students will only "learn" what they are forced to learn because THEY DON'T CARE.
I always thought that "you can only go deep or go wide but you can't do both" was an expression of intellectual laziness, but I've now come to believe that it's an expression of our lack of general curiosity. Sure humans are curious, but most humans only make the effort to focus their curiosity on things that will benefit or please them. Very few humans enjoy pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake.
But I was corrupted by Heinlein at an early age. I still believe in his thesis that superior humans are generalists. A person should be able to solve differential equations and keep the line running as short-order to cook (I'm paraphrasing him). And, after reading Beyond This Horizon in sixth grade, I wanted to grow up to be an encyclopedic synthesist — a person who analyzes the sum total of human knowledge looking for ways that different silos of knowledge can work together to exploit untapped potential. Unfortunately, our culture rewards people who master silos of knowledge. But should there be a call for an encyclopedic synthesist I'm ready to get to work!
Heinlein also believed we ought to create an idealized future world where incest loses its stigma, so...
So in your view, if one person has a bad idea that invalidates all the other ideas that that person may offer?
In his novel, Time Enough for Love, a strong incest theme runs through work, but the novel takes place in a setting where gamete selection and genetic manipulation can prevent any birth defects due to inbreeding. Of course, he raised the disturbing question of whether sex with one's clone was masturbation. Heinlein also makes references in many of his novels to underage sexuality — which modern readers find uncomfortable. But he grew up in an America where the age of consent was twelve or thirteen across wide swaths of the country.
You thought this point was relevant, so...
"I always thought that 'you can only go deep or go wide but you can't do both' was an expression of intellectual laziness, but I've now come to believe that it's an expression of our lack of general curiosity."
A typical US academic year (for K-12) runs about 180 days. If we assume one hour classes then this gives us 180 hours of instruction per class per year. You lose some time to class overhead (e.g. taking role call) and you lose some time to non-instructional activities such as giving tests.
US History is generally taught as one year in high school.
So ... you have 180 hours, minus some overhead, to teach ALL the relevant bits of US history. How can you avoid the "wide or deep" tradeoff? Yes, in High School you can (maybe) assume another 180 hours of homework but you still wind up with about one hour of time (class or study) per year [starting in 1620 we get 1620+360 = 1980]. Not all years of US history are equal, but you will get two days of class + homework time to cover the US civil war. Unless you take time away from something else ... such as the events LEADING UP to the US Civil War. Or reconstruction. Or a thread on technology in the US. Or ...
And HALF the kids have an IQ of around 100 or less. Most have an IQ below 120. It will take them A LOT longer to learn something than one would expect if one doesn't have any experience actually trying to teach non-super-bright kids.
And most of them don't care about US history. They may be curious about something else, but not necessarily US history. Or whatever topic "we" want them to care about. I imagine a lot of folks on this board would be less than enthusiastic about being forced to learn a lot about sports. Imagine that some of these kids care about sports but not history. Or Dungeons and Dragons or chess but not literature.
Then ... we don't repeat the US History for a number of years and a lot of the knowledge fades because it just isn't relevant.
Play this game with European history and world history and Chinese history. And then with literature. And math -- it can take an *amazingly* long time for average kids to reliably learn to multiply mixed numbers; hard to believe until you see it for real. And then the sciences.
Count the number of hours available K-12 (keeping in mind that you probably shouldn't be assigning hours and hours of homework per night to 4th graders). Realize that a lot of these topics take 3x - 10x as long to learn as you think they should.
It isn't just a lack of general curiosity.
I should have clarified my remarks. Off-topically, I was making the observation that even smart adult humans are not very curious. But I'm not sure whether it's modern pedagogy that stifles young humans' general curiosity or whether general curiosity is not a natural part of our behavioral repertoire.
OTOH, a graduate of the eighth grade in 1895 may have had a better general education than most college grads today.
This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas (link below — plus a link to a 1912 eighth-grade final to show that Salina KS was not an outlier in the educational attainments possible for fourteen-year-olds).
8th Grade Final Exam:
Salina , KS - 1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7-10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $.20 per inch?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865?
Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.
Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of N.A.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.
https://newrepublic.com/article/79470/1895-8th-grade-final-exam-i-couldnt-pass-it-could-you
https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html
So, those are great questions, could I see the results the median students gave?
I am not saying that it isn't true that "a graduate of the eighth grade in 1895 may have had a better general education than most college grads today." but what I am saying is that the only evidence I have ever read is that we are getting steadily smarter over time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
You'd need to check the old records to see how many students graduated from 8th Grade. That would be an interesting project if you have the time to undertake it.
But smartness is mostly worthless if you (a) grow up in a society where the prevailing pedagogy and the surrounding culture are incapable of transmitting knowledge to the young, and (b) where the natural state of humans across all IQ ranges is to be unmotivated to learn. Very few people are Abraham Lincolns who, with only 12 months of formal schooling, can pass the Bar let alone become President. I for one find this group's IQ fetish to be tiresome. IMHO, IQ is more bullshit than science. And to quote the late Stephen Hawking...
>When asked in a 2004 interview with The New York Times what his IQ is, Hawking gave a curt reply: "I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers."
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/your-iq-isnt-160-no-ones-is
I am not going to undertake that research as a project. You were the one offering a list of questions without answers as evidence that people were smarter on average in the past. It is up to YOU to provide evidence for your hypothesis.
I don't know what you mean that smartness is worthless if you grow up in a society where the culture is incapable of transmitting knowledge to the young or the natural state is to be unmotivated to learn. I think even when these two things are true, it is still better to be smart than not, and it is certainly not worthless.
While you didn't state it explicitly, I am going to assume you are implying that our current western culture is incapable of transmitting knowledge to the young and the natural state of humans is to be unmotivated to learn.
On the first point, I think this is patently false. We have continued to advance our knowledge in all sciences decade after decade for the past several centuries. There is no way you can say we aren't passing knowledge to the young effectively. It is patently untrue.
As to the natural state of humans being unmotivated to learn, I guess my question would be "relative to what?". Relative to the past? Relative to other mammals? Relative to some platonic ideal of curiosity? I think it would be awesome if we were on average more interested in learning, but that will always be true, so it isn't really an argument you can win.
As to "this group's IQ fetish", I really don't know what you mean nor how SH's comment is relevant. I agree with him that people who boast about their IQ are losers, and I am not surprised he has no idea what his IQ is, I don't think 99% of people know what their IQs are, but how is that relevant to the conversation we are having?
IQ is a very messy and difficult measure of intelligence, but it is the best we have. If you have another measure you prefer, I am more than happy to use that.
But the point of the Flynn effect research, is that across the world, in complete unrelated departments, we have shown that when the exact same questions are asked over the period of time, humans have consistently been giving better and better answers. We are on average slowly getting more intelligent over time, and it is too fast to be genetic, so it must be down to the way we pass on knowledge and learning across the generations.
Lincoln was kicked in the head by a horse when he was young and probably suffered some sort of brain damage. If he didn't keep his mind active he would stare off into space and lose track of time for hours on end. So he made a conscious effort to always have his mind engaged. Not exactly a typical neurological example.
I should have clarified my remarks. Off-topically, I was making the observation that even smart adult humans are not very curious. But I'm not sure whether it's modern pedagogy that stifles young humans' general curiosity or whether general curiosity is not a natural part of our behavioral repertoire.
OTOH, a graduate of the eighth grade in 1895 may have had a better general education than most college grads today.
This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas (link below — plus a link to a 1912 eighth-grade final to show that Salina KS was not an outlier in the educational attainments possible for fourteen-year-olds).
8th Grade Final Exam:
Salina , KS - 1895
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7-10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu, deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $.20 per inch?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, and 1865?
Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u'.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e'. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.
Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of N.A.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.
https://newrepublic.com/article/79470/1895-8th-grade-final-exam-i-couldnt-pass-it-could-you
https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html
This seems to have been posted twice for some reason. I'm not going to delete this one in case it somehow deletes the other. :-)
I often fall back on Horace Mann's idea that we need a public education so that we can all be on the same page so-to-speak as Americans (or whatever country they live). Our recent cultural bifurcation shows how prescient Mann was. We now live in siloed worlds where people are living by different narratives and those narratives color the facts that they believe in. We may all pick up many of the same facts, but they mean very different things depending on how you acquire your knowledge.
School helps us to build a common narrative with common meanings for the facts we are required to learn. The point of having a common curriculum is not that each fact in it is necessary, but it is necessary that we all share a common set of facts and interpretations. We then use those common facts/interpretations to process the new events and facts that come our way in our daily political discussions. They help immigrants integrate into our culture as well. When Mann was helping build our public school system he was well away that many Americans were immigrants and came from different religious and cultural backgrounds. Our country was new and he realized that if it were to survive we needed something to bind us all together.
Critics jump in and say that this project is a way to force non-White kids into a white supremacy way of thinking, and at times they would be right. But education also has a built-in notion that beliefs can and should change when exposed to reasoning. Thus, part of what is important about education is equipping us with the tools needed for reviewing old facts and ways of integrating new facts in our shared body of knowledge. It's a dynamic process.
Of course we forget many facts. It's profoundly ignorant to use that as an excuse to not learn facts or to not require students to learn things. They are going to learn facts either way and they will forget those facts as well. But each fact that is learned will help build their overall point of view on the world. Wouldn't it be better to try to steer kids toward a more well-built viewpoint than to just let them ping-pong around the internet of facts? Shouldn't we be advocating for sober reviews of what those facts should be instead of becoming nihilists and saying,"we can't agree on anything so nothing should be taught!"?
Likewise, falling for the old, "they will just forget the facts so why teach them" trope is tiring. It leads to nihilism about education at best and at worst, leaves us susceptible to charlatans and scammers who are politically motivated to steer kids toward points of view that are politically biased. The proper space is in school where political biases can be uncovered and discussed in a public forum. It would be bad if schools taught that facts and naaratives were absolute and demanded assent without critical thinking, but thankfully, with all the flaws of the progressive left they have traditionally taught that critical thinking is a value worth cultivating.
We shouldn't give in to cranks on the left and the right who are peddling post-modern notions of the lack of absolute truths and narratives. Likewise, we should be weary of those same folks who claim that their truths and narratives are the correct ones. Instead, we need to keep coming together in our schools to hash out what good knowledge is, knowing that yes, we will forget most of the facts, but that we will cultivate a way of thinking, a way of coming together to figure out how to move forward.
And this is not just about a shared American identity. Engineers and doctors need to cultivate the same methods of buildding and processing knowledge as that is how science advances. Through learning and doing science we cultivate the proper tools for discovering knowledge. So even if you forget what a mole is you still understand the imporatnace of founding knowledge on experiemnets and reason. Does anyone who pays attention to our internet swamps believe kids, left to their own devices would develop the tools necessary to participate in good, less biased science?
Well said. But in regards to your final remarks most of my HS science education was about facts rather than the theory of science. I don't ever remember receiving any education in the *theory of science* or the *scientific method* in HS or college. Luckily my dad was working on his PhD in the history of scientific thinking before he died, and he tutored me. Most of the researchers I knew in grad school gave little thought to the concept of falsifiability, and they went out of their way to disprove the null hypothesis (to create publishable results). Proving the null hypothesis was the kiss of death for one's career. ;-)
1984? I read 1984 once. They put Wilson in a room. A rubber room. A rubber room with rats. And rats make Wilson crazy.
> Otherwise - aside from being a place to warehouse children while their parents are away - I’m not sure how you rescue the usefulness of most schooling.
Add what they learn to a spaced repetition app (like Anki, lots of parts are FOSS), test pure memory of facts all along school, like testing 3 month later what you learned before. The issue seems to be that to learn something you have to make it dense to go deep, but to remember alongside other things it you have to make it sparse, dilute it. If you spend one month learning how to solve integral, then you're prescribed to solve a few integrals a week later, with a small test, then a month later, then 2 month later, etc. Call them "memory test" and put in them stuff you're supposed to hit in the forgetting curve right about now, taking the bottom 10% of the forgetting curve to lower chance people can't keep up at all.
Let's not underestimate the importance of warehousing children.
Free socialized child care, as I understand it, is associated with and probably as a significant casual relationship with the massive gains in economic productivity seen in developed countries in the 20th century. It allows both parents to pursue more fulfilling and much more productive roles---unless they happen to be the small but significant portion of humans who really, sincerely, deeply like children.
And those people, and this is almost the best part of public schools, can all become teachers and earn well deserved paychecks for the highly valuable work they enjoy.
I think philosophically I'm on board with Scott's overall thesis of schools generally sucking, but am more looking for ways to make them suck less then eliminate them.
Most parents are probably about as good at taking care of kids as their teachers, or generally in the same ballpark, but don't want to do it *all day*, and I don't think that for children up to fifteen or so, schools as they exist in, say, liberal Bellvue, Washington, or conservative Colorado Springs, Colorado, or Tex-Mex Chula Vista, California, are more than incrementally suboptimal.
Though of course let's improve them on the margins, and get people out of them and into independent roles in society at little earlier than whatever the graduation age is for an MFA.
My dream solution is to start a tradition where once a year all the 14 year olds are left in the woods for six weeks and at the end the survivors are given a driver's license and bottle of the beverage of their choice. But that's not a goal I consider achievable, so how about shaving a full year off high school and bachelor's degree timelines?
And if we're really feeling crispy, let's have a compromise between the school choice and the union's where you have a wide selection of charters offering a variety of learning environment for their children but not massive pay differentials for their staff?
Ideally accompanied by, say, three quarters where all the students in a state have to go to a unified school for town, then metropolitan region, then state, and do some stuff focused less on academics and more on getting to know their fellow citizens?
Small correction: the question about electrons vs atoms allowed "Don't know" as an answer, and 25% of people chose it. So 47% correct is not actually worse than chance in this instance.
I always thought that the point of education (beyond the social/warehousing/non-learning benefits) was as a sampling table for various subjects they wouldn't otherwise be exposed to. Sure, learning literature probably doesn't impact most lives, but for some folks it'll be completely life-changing. The same is true of higher math, sciences, music, etc.
If that's the case, and I have no proof to back this up but I'm sure it is, then we should be doing school much differently. Colleges should care less about overall GPA and more about recommendations and high marks in a single subject. Schools should actively encourage students to specialize and give wide-ranging choices starting very early on. Of course, a lot of countries that do education well already do this.
In a past life, I was a teacher (chemistry/physics/programming at a private high school). One of the big things that drove me out of teaching was the ever-increasing push from all sides to remove object-level, fact-based education. "They can just google it" or "we need to teach them how to think" were the slogans; "inquiry-based education" was the buzzword. The idea was to get the kids to come up with experiments and projects and "discover" the principles of the subject with the teacher acting as a "guide on the side, not sage on the stage" (as the phrase went).
It fails. Miserably. Especially miserably for kids who *don't already have a strong underlying foundation in the subject* and who aren't intrinsically motivated.
Similarly, teaching "reading skills" just fails without having learned the underlying meaning of the thing you're reading. How you read a scientific paper is very different than how you read a piece of fiction--other than core-level decoding (which should be taught by like 1st grade, but isn't often taught at all), it's *all* context-dependent and requires a foundation of core knowledge.
On the other hand, there were lots of kids who did learn a lot. So teaching wasn't valueless. Whether or not they can spout memorized bits on a spot test years later is...fairly irrelevant (so these studies don't actually mean much IMO). But I taught them several times and many of them could use the foundational skills they'd been taught in year 1 to reason in year 3.
Basically, I'm strongly negatively biased against *current US educational practices* across the board. The US educational system (from pre-K all the way through graduate education) is rotten and needs to be entirely burned down and replaced root and branch. But I'm *not* negatively biased against *education on general principles*.
Teachers should do what they have (or should have) expertise in doing--imparting core foundational knowledge and skills in specific subject areas, focusing on the very broad ones. And this should be tracked at least to a substantial degree--no moving on in math until you have mastered the earlier stuff. Etc. In early grades, where kids are most open (in my personal experience) to being sponges, feed them information and core reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. They (usually) *crave* facts. So feed them facts. In later grades, once they have this core foundation, build connections between facts. Start working on pattern recognition. And yes, identify those people who really do have the drive and desire and aptitude to go further and help them go further, but let those who *don't* find some solid stopping point for their formal schooling. Could be as early as 8th grade, if they've mastered the basics and want to move into some other form of job or life training.
And utterly kill the idea that you need a college degree to do most jobs.
I have a child in first grade and another in pre-k, and observing their school experience so far makes me skeptical of this articles thesis. My kids will not sit still and let us teach them things at home, but for some reason, they go to school, do what the teacher tells them, and come home knowing new things. I agree that they won’t retain most of this knowledge for very long, but I don’t think that matters. Here’s an example why.
My son learned to read in kindergarten. If he wasn’t in school he wouldn’t be reading yet. Last week we went to a public garden, they gave him a map, and he had a blast reading the map and running around finding everything. (This sort of thing happens everywhere we go. The zoo, museums, Disney world, etc.) Would he have had fun at the garden if he couldn’t read the map? Ya, Probably. Did being able to read help his appreciation of what he was seeing? Yes. Will this experience make him a better person when he grows up? I think so. That’s the benefit of learning things at a young age. They get more chances to enjoy these kinds of experiences and, I hope, this leads to better outcomes when they grow up.
I also, however, expect diminishing returns as they get to higher grades. Learning to read and do basic math changed my world in big ways. Reading “The Red Pony” and struggling to understand what a binomial theorem is changed my world in little ways, or not at all. But at least at a young age (and as someone who hated school all the way through college, I can’t believe I’m saying this) I think school is great!
The post discusses such things that are typically learnt up to 4th grade.
As a matter of personal anecdote, these arguments against education have never resonated with me. I quite liked school, was good at it, and believe that I derived a lot of value from it. I recognize that this isn't everyone's experience, but I don't think it is so unique either.
Mainly, I think the emphasis on facts misses most of the benefit of school. The post acknowledges that facts are only a part of school, but I think this still gives them too much credit. In my experience, fact memorization was a small and relatively unimportant part of school, and the one part I disliked. I think the more important learning took place at a more abstract level of concepts and context for pattern recognition. From English, I didn't take away a memorization of the plot of 1984, but rather an improved capability to learn from text and communicate clearly. From math, I didn't take away the formula for the quadratic equation, but rather a fluency with manipulating numbers. From science, I didn't take away the steps of the Krebs cycle, but rather a comprehension of the world as a stack of natural phenomena which can be investigated and understood, and the often subtle differences between productive and unproductive methods of investigation.
Plenty of the things I learned from school were taught poorly or highly indirectly, and I could have certainly learned much of them through free exploration outside of school (and did also learn many other things that way), but without school, I believe I would have many more gaps. For example, I was always very interested in science and without school I would have still learned about plenty of scientific concepts on an intuitive level. But I doubt that I would have nearly as deep of an understanding of science on a mathematical level without school because some important areas of math (particularly differential equations and multivariate calculus) just don't interest me that much and I would not have pursued them very far without school.
I always enjoyed learning, too. But I think we're in the minority. I guess the question is how much education does a person need to function in our society.
We see all sorts of examples of ignorant people who can function perfectly well in twenty-first-century society. People who believe the Earth was created in 4004 BCE lead productive lives in our society. For most Americans, Paul Revere's ride does not influence whether they can earn a paycheck. And Romeo and Juliet? Wasn't that a TV series or something?
We take for granted that reading is an important skill to have. But a commonly quoted factoid is that 50% of Americans can't read a book at an eighth-grade level. While it's clear that illiteracy is highest in the poor, obviously 50% of America isn't unemployed. Are we setting our reading standards too high?
In fact, I wonder if technology isn't making it easier for people to function while being ignorant. My spelling skills have deteriorated with spell-checkers. I just have to be aware that my spell-checker isn't substituting the wrong word. My math skills have deteriorated with calculators.
Back in the Eighties there was a big push to teach kids financial skills. "They need to be able to balance a checkbook!" was the refrain. Checkbooks are fading into history, and I can check my balance any time as long as I have a smartphone and within range of cell tower.
Technology definitely makes it easier to function without proper grammar and literacy. One of my children has trouble writing things. She has Siri transcribe everything, and I think she might be able to function as well as an adult as I do (I find it difficult to read maps, and consider myself lucky to be born in this decade). As far the 80s push to teach financial skills--that is one we definitely need back, even if only as the first of 7 repetitions. I remember learning then that credit card companies couldn't charge more than 23% compounded interest because that would be usury. Clearly, there are a lot of policy makers who never learned that in the first place.
I have learned a fair number of poems, included a handful in languages other than my native English. I think it takes me more than seven repetitions to master them; perhaps a dozen or a score is sufficient. I don't necessarily know the exact typography, but I know the words and can recite them.
I'm going to assume they're rhymed poems that you've memorized, though. I can still recite most of Coleridge's Kublai Khan having memorized it 40 years ago, but I was never able to fully memorized W.S. Merwin's The Sound of Light, even though it's a much shorter and (to my mind) a more exquisite poem. I suspect that's because it isn't rhymed.
Many of them, probably most, but certainly not all. I have been able to memorize some blank verse, and even some verse with recurring metrical patterns but varying line lengths, such as Robinson Jeffers' "Be Angry at the Sun."
But my point is more that even with the mnemonic aid of traditional verse forms, it seems to take me more than seven repetitions to become word perfect.
I don't remember how many repetitions it took me to memorize Kublai Khan, but I worked at it over and over and over. Between fifty and a hundred repetitions? What surprised me is that most of it still intact in my memory after forty-plus years.
Country singer Travis Tritt was told that his song "I'm Gonna Be Somebody" would never be successful because it has no rhyming scheme. It hit #2 on the US charts and #1 in Canada, and remains one of his most memorable works. I could still recite the whole thing by heart to this day.
Well I think if you learn the words to a tune, the tune functions as a mnemonic device that does the work that a rhyme would have done.
Good point.
Yes, I have the same problem. I do have a few bits of unrhymed, unrhythmed free verse in my head, but far less of it than rhymed stuff. And for the free verse I can't remember where the line breaks are, even though they're part of the poem's structure. I don't think modern poets sufficiently appreciatee what they are giving up when they throw away rhyme and meter, or opted for such subtle or convoluted versions of then that they do not function as a memory aid.
I know a bunch of it too. Here for the pleasure of contemplating it is the beginning (as I remember it -- there may be mistakes.)
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
Where Aleph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
The measureless caverns and sunless sea give me a shiver every time.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
Then I forget a bunch of lines. But the finale may have been what made me want to pursue mysticism...
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
"His flashing eyes, his floating hair" gave me goosebumps.
Here's the end of Melville's "The Berg"
Hard berg, methought
So cold, so vast
With mortal damp self-overcast
Exhaling still they dankish breath
Adrift dissolving, bound for death,
Though lumpish thou, a lumbering one
A lumbering lubbard loitering slow
Impingers rue thee and go down
Sounding thy precipice below
Nor stir the slimy slug that sprawls
Along thy dead indifference of walls.
I didn't know Melville wrote poetry! That's rather good!
Hey I just described Xanadu to GPT4 without using its name, and asked it for a poem about this place. Falls a bit short of Coleridge:
Beneath a dome of glass, the woodlands sleep,
Secure in arms of clear, unyielding sweep.
A stream meanders, whispers secrets low,
Through dappled light where wild forget-me-nots grow.
Invitations sent on wings of dove,
To friends held dear, as close as stars above.
"Come join me in this sanctuary rare,
Where nature's heart is shielded from despair."
Within this glass, the world is still and pure,
Each leaf and stone a story, ancient and sure.
The air is crisp, a testament to peace,
Where time’s soft passage holds a gentle lease.
A community within a verdant sphere,
Together safe, with those they hold most dear.
In harmony, they thrive away from harm,
Embraced by woodland's evergreen charm.
>In harmony, they thrive away from harm,
Embraced by woodland's evergreen charm.
To which they mayst add:
Bark and pine needles don't abrade their bliss
For harmlessly harmony lubricates the kiss.
Ummm. Thank you for playing, GPT4. ;-)
I'd have to question the "smarter people know more stuff" thesis. I worked with some very smart people during my thirty-plus years in tech, but other than their narrowly focused knowledge, most of them were shockingly ignorant about things outside their specialties and their hobbies. But most of the smart people I've known have very little natural curiosity either. But they seem to function quite well in their general ignorance.
So the real question is -- why did the researchers think those specific questions were something most people would know? Why did the researchers know them?
I've had this feeling several times with my non-engineering friends. "What do you mean you don't remember which is the hypotenuse of a triangle?" Smart, nerdy friends, too -- just not math people.
This sounds very much like all learning and skill acquisition to me. Babies learn all sounds initially, then prune everything down to the ones that only matter for the language their family speaks. Children are taught fundamental facts, and then based on the field they go into they build on the ones that they need to continue in that field and forget all the rest.
Why do we expect people to remember any random fact they learned years ago and didn't need?
So what should that say about the utility of education?
1) The "civic responsibility" element of educated voters is only relevant if voters actually remain engaged in civic life beyond voting once a year.
2) Everything else is trying to provide a broad enough base of knowledge that people are prepared to go different directions in their career.
If I were sure I wanted to be a mechanic, and I had a natural talent for being a mechanic, I should study cars from 6th grade on instead of history or literature, and I would be a greater mechanic than what our current system produces. The same logic applies to other fields. I often wonder how our current system could ever compete with the old systems of apprenticing at 12, or always going into your dad's field.
The fact that the current system *is* so effective at economic output would seem to indicate that the important element is the matching of talent/interest with career. Therefore, the benefit of our system of education is giving young people *flexibility* in what careers they are prepared to pursue in more detail, rather than in their continuing to have a broad base of knowledge for its own sake. The potential historian, engineer, businessman, or doctor will all have been exposed to and learned the basics they need to continue the field of study they should be in, even if they didn't know that was what they wanted to do at the start of high school. The fact that the doctor can't remember algebra and the engineer has no idea what a simile is doesn't really matter.
A while back, somehow some of us got onto discussion of facts we had to memorize. I had to memorize all 50 states. But a generation earlier, they included capitals, too. I remember reading "A Wrinkle In Time" and sympathizing with Meg that it was pointless to memorize "the principal imports and exports of Nicaragua". (And yet that phrase stuck in my mind, decades later.)
I'm a teacher so take this with a grain of salt, I might be a bit defensive. Some more arguments for education:
A part of the forgetting curve is that having learned something before means you can relearn it faster. If I randomly ask a high school graduate to solve 3x+7=25 maybe they can't solve it, but there's a good chance they could relearn it quickly if it becomes relevant, much more quickly than if they'd never learned it before. Here I think you can conceptualize school as "keeping your options open". If you just never learn algebra at all it will take you a really long time to learn it if you ever need to go down a path that requires algebra. We could debate how often algebra is really necessary but there are real costs to just never learning something and having to start from scratch if it becomes important.
One thing I hear a lot of people say is that we want students to be lifelong learners. To me, that's about whether students feel successful learning stuff. I recently taught my 7th grade students how to tell what shape cross-section you get when you slice different 3-d shapes. I bet a lot of people would be surprised how hard that skill is for some students. But with a bunch of practice kids get really good at it. I feel confident that almost none of my students will ever need to know what shape you get when you slice a square pyramid perpendicular to its base. Still, kids feel accomplished when they get good at it. The experience of looking at something and thinking "whoa this is hard" and then working on it and getting better and eventually feeling confident and crushing it is empowering for kids. It teaches them that they have the power to learn hard things. If school does its job well (we often fail at this!) kids have lots of these experiences over their schooling, and it teaches them that they can learn hard things.
My guess is that the typical ACX reader really underestimates the extent to which they have learned this disposition toward learning. Learning this, and learning it for a bunch of different disciplines, is something that sticks even after everything else has been forgotten.
Final thought: while the 7 repetitions thing doesn't guarantee you learn something forever it does make a big difference. Most teachers and schools today don't have a very good understanding of spaced repetition and people would remember way more with more thoughtful spaced practice in school.
Hear hear
Excellent! Thanks!
I'm not going to read 570 comments, and nobody will ever read this one. Nonetheless we soldier on.
I ctrl-fed "eugenics", "sterilize", and "euthanasia" and got no hits, so for posterity let me say that education is supremely valuable. It gives us something to blame so that we don't have to start wondering if we need so many people.
>nobody will ever read this one
Occasionally someone will :-)
I mean, there’s tons of folks wondering why we even bother to try to teach anything to people who don’t care about any of it and will never use it in their unwashed life making glue in the Gluetown glue factory until they die or whatever. Like, way way more than one might expect in a place where people like to talk about ways to relieve suffering and improve the human condition, and how IQ determines life outcomes.
The gluetown glue factories were all shuttered decades ago, and we care about educating the agricultural workers' children because we're trying to teach them English.
No, what I meant is that education is an ideologically-motivated sacrifice, and doesn't need to justify itself with results. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, it's just a thing. Our system couldn't keep up appearances if it admitted some hard things.
"There’s been renewed debate around Bryan Caplan’s The Case Against Education recently"
What is this referring to?
Education primarily exists for enculturation (in the good sense) and indoctrination (in the bad sense) simultaneously. Both teach you how to behave in society. People who go to school mostly don't learn actual things, but they do learn how they are generally expected to behave.
Well, they certainly used to, up until they stopped enforcing basic standards of discipline in schools. I was lucky to get through it before that happened, and you probably were too. Today's kids, though? Not so much.
I was homeschooled! So, I got some good (different) enculturation but also missed out on some socialization, good and bad socialization.
I stopped rising to say the Pledge of Allegiance my Junior year (mostly because I was an atheist, and the "under god" phrase rubbed me the wrong way. It caused some raised eyebrows among the staff and administration, but I got *endless* shit from my peers for being an unpatriotic commie.
Also, as someone who had a very brief career as a junior high school science teacher, I would say the biggest impediment to discipline in my classes were the parents of my students. I tried to use a modified Socratic method rather than just lecturing. Of course, I'd call on them when they were passing notes and whispering, to bring their attention back to the class. A bunch of my students (including the daughter of the Chair of the BoE) complained that I was calling on them too much (they felt I was humiliating them by putting them on the spot in front of their friends). They complained to the parents, and the parents complained to the administration, and I was told not to call on those students. Amazing.
Actually, we really only learn things because we’re interested in them, they matter to us. School should not be about learning facts, but about learning how to teach yourself. It’s about paying attention, as Simone Weil once said.
If the vast majority of people don’t know facts, it’s because those facts mean nothing to them.
Small correction- as a native of Airstrip One, I am proud to be upholding the glorious virtues of Oceania against the treacherous Eurasians/Eastasians (delete as appropriate)
I've been fighting about this with my sons for 20 years, so I've had plenty to time to rehearse the arguments. All claims that school teaches nothing and so doesn't matter founder on the fact that introducing mass, mandatary schooling for children has *profound* impacts on any society, starting with a collapse in the birth rate. So far as we can tell, modern schooling is inextricably linked to everything else about modern society. Why, I couldn't say, but I think the impacts speak for themselves.
> All claims that school teaches nothing and so doesn't matter founder on the fact that introducing mass, mandatary schooling for children has *profound* impacts on any society
Is that a fact, or is it simply post hoc ergo propter hoc? Do we have any control group, of societies that were on the same path as the nations that did introduce mandatory education, which chose not to do so?
No, because there are no examples of societies that have modernized without mandatory schooling.
Well, that all depends on how you define "modernized." According to Wikipedia, "The movement for compulsory public education (in other words, prohibiting private schools and requiring all children to attend public schools) in the United States began in the early 1920s." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_public_education_in_the_United_States )
By the 1920s, we already had telephones and fax machines, air conditioners, the Model T Ford, and the flight of the Wright Brothers, just to name a few examples off the top of my head. Computers did not yet exist, but IBM did. Einstein's Theory of Relativity was old hat at this point, and both the New York Times and the New York Stock Exchange were long-established institutions.
Mandatory schooling did not establish modernization; it grew out of it.
A different Wikipedia article says that Massachusetts had compulsory primary schooling in 1642, and that Horace Mann imported the Prussian model of schooling when he became the state's secretary of education in 1837. Those were earlier stages of modernization. I think Massachusetts has to count as part of American history; its model of schooling came into use nationwide by the era you refer to.
Note that the phrase "mandatory school" is not synonymous with "compulsory public education." Indeed, the United States doesn't have compulsory public education; Oregon passed a law imposing it in the 1920s (pushed by the Ku Klux Klan as an anti-Catholic measure), but the Supreme Court invalidated in not long after, ruling that the child is not merely a creature of the state. So by that definition we are not "modernized" and never were modernized on a national scale.
I'm unclear why you're so dismissive of school justification 3? Your dismissal strikes me as similar to someone saying "what's the point of all that rationalism nonsense, they're not even really trying to be better at knowing things, just better at knowing when they know things!" Which is obviously a gross mischaracterization.
To be clear I think US schools as implemented are mostly babysitting for >50% of students, but "building a framework for how to learn and how to reason" strikes me intuitively as a much stronger theoretical argument for school than any particular collection of facts it might impart.
My theory on school is that most of the huge quality of life gains that you see associated with a transition to public schooling come almost entirely from teaching basic literacy and numeracy. Going from "can't read" to "can read" is a gigantically impactful skill acquisition that opens up near-limitless opportunities for an individual.
As far as usefulness of school in the present day, I think most of the usefulness of schools for kids is those two basic things, plus a social outlet and exposure to new things (like music, drama, sports, etc). Everything else is just window dressing.
For parents of course, the primary value is childcare (plus teaching kids those basic skills so you don't have to).
edit: To be clear, my statements apply only to elementary (pre-HS) education. Once you hit the high school level I think there can be some arguments made about the value of beginning to specialize in specific topics (thinking about say, Calculus). And of course at the university level, the value is the extreme specialist education.
One of the social effects of schooling, though, is immersing kids who don't fit in in a pool of other kids who harass or bully them. That includes bright kids (I was one), but also slow kids, gender atypical kids, kids with unusual ethnic backgrounds, neuroatypical kids (that might have included me, but I've never been formally diagnosed), kids who are just funny looking, and a lot of other categories.
Sure, there's pros and cons to everything.
I want to say though, that at least for the high quality public school that my kids are attending, the exposure to different varieties of people has been a universally positive experience (through the 4th grade). My kids are different (for ~reasons~) and they haven't experienced anything close to bullying. The school has done a fantastic job of making everyone feel welcomed and included.
I'm certain that not every school will have this approach, but it is possible to mix a wide variety of kids together and not have them form hateful cliques. Besides, they're going to have to mix with the rest of the world at some point, might as well start early.
My comment about the social benefit was more that public schooling is the cheapest and most convenient way to have your kid spend their day around same age peers. My kids, at least, so far seem to enjoy that aspect of schooling the most.
I'm sure there are such. On the other hand, I went to a small elementary school in a minuscule town that was evolving from rural to suburban. I was years ahead of my classmates intellectually, I didn't understand social behavior, and I was the goat. And I don't think any of my teachers had a clue what to do with me. It didn't teach me to mix with the rest of the world; it taught me to despise most of humanity, in a way it took me a long time to recover from. And I've talked with other people who went through the same thing.
Of course that was a long time ago, back in the middle of the last century. But I'm not sure that your better experience is typical of how things are now. Neither of us is reasoning from a statistical sample.
"but it is possible to mix a wide variety of kids together and not have them form hateful cliques"
It doesn't matter if this is *possible*; it matters if it is *done*. Maybe you have a special school that does this, or maybe your kids are different in a way that puts them in one of the non-hateful cliques, but your experience is not universal and I don't think it is even normal.
Because what's the incentive for the school administrators? What do they gain from suppressing hateful clique formation, that's worth the effort? We don't even pretend that's one of the metrics we actually evaluate schools on.
I think for our district the incentive is to maintain their reputation as one of the best schools in the state.
Regardless though, I want to clarify that I'm not attempting to defend the entire premise of schooling; just yesterday some friends and I were joking about how little we remember from various high school classes. I'm instead trying to provide some perspective on why I have enrolled my children in a public school, and the benefits I see them getting from it.
If I had to make a policy decision, I think it would be to fund a lot more "alternative" style school experiences. We had an even better experience at a Montessori school that was *extremely* invested in creating a welcoming, playful environment for all the kids, but that was too expensive for us to consider enrolling all four of children there.
I'm guessing your district's reputation as one of the best schools in the state, depends far more on test scores and college admissions than it does the social skills or happiness of the students. So long as *most* of the nerds aren't bullied to the point of dropping out before they go off to MIT, mission accomplished.
For test scores the school wants all the students to care about studies somewhat, though. And for the getting the nerds, it helps to have a reputation of succesfully preventing the aggressive confrontations (this is relatively cheap when you only have the students who are there — among other things — also to study). And you want some concentrations of nerds, yeah.
The trick is once the nerds bubble up in their small clique, it doesn't matter as much if they are mocked by the others, as long as it happens from a safe (for the nerds) distance.
I get giddy reading your posts about school. I think you take it too far, but I enjoy that. Some kids in high school wore Marilyn Manson shirts to show the establishment what they thought about them. If this blog was around back then, I would have made an ACX one with some juicy quotes,. They probably would have made me turn it inside out, though. Whatever.
Here's an alternative & better method to teach people boring stuff that they need to remember: Spelling is one of those things, so long as one writes fairly often in a context where spellcheck isn't available. I taught myhomeschooled kid to spell. I did not bother to teach her spelling til she was 10. It seemed to me that it would be easier to learn when she was older and more able to tolerate tedium. And I lucked into a spelling book that used an extremely effective method of getting those spellings to stick: Each chapter was a list of about 50 words . She read through them, then I took back the book and read them off to her as she wrote them down. We kept going until she had gotten 5 wrong. Then, to strengthen her memory of those words, she did 3 things with each: Write it 5 times. Write a sentence using it. And write the word in large letters then turn it into a picture by decorating each letter. The next day we went on to the next part of the list, but included the 5 missed from yesterday in the list. Usually she got them right, but if she missed one of them they were one of the 5 that she did extra practice on at the end of that session.
At the end of every chapter we did a test of all the words she'd missed, with other random words from the chapter mixed in, and followed the same routine for learning any that were missed. (Usually she did not miss many, though. ). There were also some mega-reviews every so often of, say, the last 3 chapters, same learning routine for any missed. Using this system for about half an hour 5 days a week, we got far beyond her grade level, and nearly to the end of the book, where the words were long and weird. She's now an adult, and a good speller.
There is a name for this system of drilling things into memory, but I have forgotten it. I'm pretty confident that this targeted repetition works better than spaced repetition. It certainly worked well for us, and I recommend it for anyone homeschooling who wants to teach things like spelling or the times tables.. There's probably software that uses this system too.
This sounds similar to, though not identical with, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system
(ChatGPT was actually useful here - not that I trust it by itself... https://chatgpt.com/share/dbc4122e-6fe5-40fa-b4ec-ab8f6686ee2e )
Pretty sure I would have gotten all the college student questionnaire questions right if I were paying attention.
>"7% know who discovered, in 1543, that the Earth orbits the sun"
Not sure I would endorse this framing as true, though. He theorized and hypothesized it, sure, but his theory wasn't all the great, and I don't think I can say humanity *knew* this until significantly later. Maybe not until Kepler.
It all depends on your standard of proof.
Kepler gave a correct model of the solar system, but no good explanation for it. Newton's Universal Gravitation gave a good explanation for why Kepler's model behaved the way it did. But there were still unanswered physical questions in the form of "if the earth orbits the sun, we would expect to see X, and we do not see X, therefore the earth must be standing still."
In every case, the answer turned out to be "X is indeed happening, we just lack the precision necessary to detect it with our current instruments." IIRC the last such question was not resolved until the early 20th century.
Very true, good point.
Although if I really wanted to be nitpicky I could argue that he published in 1543 but made the discovery years to decades earlier.
"<1% know what city the general Hannibal was from (Carthage)"
I'm not surprised that students haven't learned much about Carthage, but I'm kind of surprised so few university students have played games from the Civilization series! (Hannibal is one of the leaders you can play as, and your starting city with him is, of course, Carthage.)
People who have not gone through school know how to learn, and people who have do not. That's why all the kids I grew up with were able to figure out how to use computers, while very few of the adults were able to.
What schedule would you suggest to review a topic for your lifetime? I'm hypothesizing a system where you don't grade yourself, you just review the material at fixed intervals.
If you have trouble remembering names, you should try to use the literal names more often in conversations. Call people by their names once in a while (not just "hey, you") and refer to people by their names in conversations (say "professor Smith was sick today" instead of "my algebra teacher was sick today")
If you try to remember the names of your college professors now, I bet the ones whose names you do remember are the ones whose names you used often in conversation.
School does exactly two useful things:
1) It teaches the least stupid elements of the lumpenproletariat how to read
2) Daycare
Learning is recollection
You used the "Mount Everest is in the Himalayas" example several times, but I don't think school ever attempted to teach me this and I'm not sure why you'd expect it to.
I learned from numerous sources (some in school, some not) that Mt. Everest is the highest mountain peak on earth (often described as "tallest mountain" but apparently if you measure base-to-peak then there are taller ones).
I learned from cultural osmosis that the Himalayas are a big cold snowy mountain range in Asia. (I think I first learned this from the Duck Tales video game.)
I didn't know that Mt. Everest is in the Himalayas before reading this post. If you had forced me to guess Everest's location, I guess I might have said Himalayas just because I think that's literally the only (non-fictional) mountain range outside the US that I can name. But if you'd asked me in a conversation I'd have said "I don't know".
Now that you've told me that the world's most famous mountain is located in the world's most famous mountain range, I think I will probably remember that, which increases my confidence that I was actually never taught this (rather than having forgotten it).
> I think that's literally the only (non-fictional) mountain range outside the US that I can name.
Not the Andes (essentially what they call the Rocky Mountains in South America; the mountain range doesn't *exactly* go all the way down uninterrupted, but it's pretty close) or the Swiss Alps? Both are pretty famous.
Well, I recognize both those names now that you've mentioned them.
How are you at crosswords and scrabble and similar games? I'm *horrible*, because I can't seem to call up words like that. My meat neural net doesn't do that sort of retrieval, I suppose.
I wouldn't say I've played them enough to have a good gauge of my ability at them.
I'd say I'm bad at anagrams, though. And not sure how related this is, but I've also noticed I have trouble getting phonetics-based jokes when they're written down; for example, Order of the Stick has a prequel book called "On the Origin of PCs", and I read that title many times before I realized it was a joke.
I don't know why you wouldn't expect school to teach you where Mount Everest is.
You don't have to cut very deep into geography before you start mentioning the biggest mountain ranges in the world. And if you mention the Himalayas you'll probably mention the most interesting fact about it -- it has the highest mountain in the world.
The Himalayas also come up as an example whenever you teach plate tectonics.
I work in the medical field. I value my lecture-based education and am terrified by any "gaps" that might exist. Not because I remember all the details, but because in many cases I remember that there was "something to worry about in this area" and "nothing obviously worrisome in this area; OK to proceed." AKA I might remember that some drugs for organ x affect calcium, but don't recall any connection between drugs for organ y and calcium. So when I prescribe drugs that affect organ x I might look up the med I'm going to prescribe, look up the patient's calcium/kidney function, and review his med list to make sure things are OK. For organ y I do not. I tend to be very cautious; I've memorized so many of these interactions but I often still look them up to refresh myself and be sure.
Bottom line, the education helps me know what I don't know. If I had never gotten the lecture on organ y, then I would not know what I did not know. That would lead to hours and hours of lost time per month neurotically looking up med interactions just in case there was a danger of which I was unaware.
Of course there *are* things I don't know I don't know, and that's why every profession and life in general is a continual learning process, but at least the book learning provided a starting point.
Firstly, I think pretty much every example here is of information that I would describe as "optional". I think the vast majority of people can get through their lives without knowing what organ produces insulin or who Paul Revere was. I don't consider this kind of information to be essential for all members of our society. They are all really cool things to know, but I work with plenty of extremely intelligent people who would get many of the facts on that list wrong. So I don't consider people's inability to answer them to be particularly concerning.
But secondly, I would also somewhat question the validity of mapping whether someone correctly answers these questions to whether people know this information. From their methodology, it appears participants were presented with questions (all in capitals for some reason?) in a random order and asked to answer them.
This is a great format for a quiz show, but in general I would say a bad way to assess someone's knowledge. I suspect that if rather than asking "Which mountain range is Everest part of" you were to ask that exact same person "What are the himalayas", they would quite quickly say "That's where Everest is right? In Asia I think". I think goes double for "What is Moscow" or "Who was Copernicus", where I think you would get much higher success rates if the phrasing of the question if it were reversed.
So I think it is a bit reductionist to look at people's ability to answer trivial pursuit question and infer from that how well they know these facts. Human's aren't computers. Humans do not answer random, contextless questions very well, that is not how our brains are wired (literally).
I am obviously speculating here, but I suspect if you were to ask a whole bunch of questions about the solar system, you would get far more people remembering that Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system, than when the question is asked between questions about zebras and hockey pucks.
I'm a STEM-brained engineer turned programmer, and it's precisely because I don't think school is about learning "facts" that I'm planning on sending my kids to an extremely crunchy progressive (pre-/)school that focuses on social and emotional development and lots of outdoor playtime.
I can help my kids learn the textbook stuff, but I can't replicate the environment of 20+ kids exploring the woods together or negotiating playground swing access or doing group art projects etc.
There's a good practical answer to this in D. T. Willingham's book "Why don't students like school?".
Willingham is a cognitive psychologist, and he starts off his introduction by promising his book will only cover ideas that are both widely replicated in research, and have a large effect size (his words are "an enormous amount of evidence, not just a few studies"). He also spends half a chapter arguing against Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences and other fads - can you tell that I like this book?
Chapter 3 is titled Why Do Students Remember Everything That's on Television and Forget Everything I say? (The "I" here is the intended audience, teachers.) His answer is, Memory is the Residue of Thought - you need to get students to think about a topic (ideally with spaced repetition - the forgetting curve appears in the book too). That means, for example, not doing a unit on volcanoes where you set an assignment to design a fake newspaper article about the effects of an eruption, because then your students will be thinking a lot about newspapers (what will it be called? how many columns? what price? what kind of jokey advertisements at the top?) as opposed to thinking about volcanoes.
Better still, get students to think about the meanings of things, not just bare facts, when you teach them. The name and date when Romeo and Juliet was written are facts; connecting them to a web of meanings and connections is learning. Willingham suggests to teach facts as part of stories (with characters, conflict, causality, and complications), because the human mind seems to have a special mode for absorbing stories well.
Willingham is not, however, a "progressive" educator or a proponent of Discovery Learning or anything in that direction. He spends all of Chapter 2 arguing why facts matter and people do need to learn them, and Chapter 5 to argue that a certain amount of "drilling" is necessary. We just have to do it in an interesting and appealing way.
Of course, another answer - that complements Willingham more than it contradicts him, although it comes from a very different viewpoint - won the last ACX book review contest, based on the work of Kieran Egan who has a lot to argue against education as currently practiced, but with practical suggestions how to do it better.
Egan's idea of History also helps with learning in a different way - his idea is that maybe in elementary school you "do" a lot of world cultures, but at a superficial enough level that the little ones can follow, then in middle school you "do" them again but in more depth, and then later on you look at some examples from them again in even more depth. So you do hear the fact that there are pyramids in Egypt, for example, many times over in different years in your schooling without it becoming groundhog day.
And people who don't know about Hannibal clearly don't think about Rome often enough, but the really cool people think about the Roman Republic once a week, not the Empire. SPQR for the win!
I think about education and schooling more in terms of learning skills rather than facts. You learn to do math problems, read, write, and assimilate various facts and turn them into essays or multiple choice answers or whatever. The facts themselves are sometimes important but often beside the point. Almost no one actually needs to know that Ramses was a pharaoh in Egypt, when his rule was, or which wars he fought.
So I do think the learning to learn framing has some value, although it's very unfortunate that we learn these skills on topics that are so meaningless and boring to the average kid. While I cringe at kids wanting to be YouTubers or TikTokers, a class built around that would probably teach the average kid much more useful skills than a normal class. Things like developing interesting content, organizing your thoughts, planning marketing, how to position yourself for your audience, and so on.
I think the main benefit of school per se is that it forces your average kid to put more effort into learning things than they would otherwise. Some kids are pretty self-motivated and would do better learning on their own, but I would bet the majority would rather relax and watch videos than pour a lot of effort into self-organized projects. So school, while again often quite boring, does get them to learn more than they would on their own. Of course, then they forget it, but at least they learned to learn to some degree. And practiced general skills like reading, writing, and using arbitrary facts.
I’m like 99% confident I would have answered all the questions you listed in the intro correctly, or at least would have been very embarrassed when you told me the correct answer and recognized that I should have known it.
Oddly I can’t really say which of those facts I really “learned” through a formal class, although I think many of them were covered in classes I took (that is, I would have been taught the facts if I didn’t know them already)
> Fewer than 50% (ie worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms.
Electrons have a larger de Broglie wavelength, but a smaller mass.
> 44% know who rode on horseback in 1775 to warn that the British were coming (Paul Revere)
Paul Revere, William Dawes, and Samuel Prescott. But someone made a famous poem that only mentioned one of them.
> only 66% of Americans age 18-29 knew that the US won independence from Britain (as opposed to some other country).
> 31% know the capital of Russia (Moscow)
Bullshit.
On any statistics exercise that gives these kinds of results, the default assumption should always be "the researchers messed up somewhere, probably on purpose".
A lot of it is down to incentives. Surveys pay very small incentives so people can’t be bothered to think too much. Accuracy goes through the roof when you tell people you will pay them more if they get the answers right.
I think this shows that these facts are not top of mind, but I bet if you showed them a list of options most people would get it right. The author is basing their whole argument on how available these facts are to people, but culture is not a general knowledge quiz and it is sub-conscious / half-known knowledge that forms the basis for most of our decisions
How much do you have to think to come up with the capital of Russia? Like, it’s harder to NOT think of Moscow than to think of it for most people, I would think.
As someone who regularly polls the public, your average person is very domestic in focus, rarely engages with the news, and rarely leaves the country. Foreign capitals are not coming up regularly in their conversation - so they are really switching gear to think about it. It's really crazy to think about - but so many people just don't think about stuff that people living a more intellectual lifestyle take for granted.
I tend to agree. I mentioned it in a reply further down, too:
A teacher I know in Germany posed the Russia-question in his 8th and his 10th grade classrooms today, and in each of them, only one or two students got it wrong. Germany has a school system that sepearates students into higher and lower academic tracks, and this was in a lower tier school
I understand that Americans aren’t great at geography, but I have a hard time believing that their college students get beaten by German 8th graders, most of whom won’t go to college ever.
There’s definitely some “simple true-false questions don’t actually reveal what people really know” going on here. Perhaps people really get dumber when put on the spot. Test anxiety.
How important is it to get it right?
Is the survey taker in front of you writing down your answers, or is it a phone call, or is it an internet anonymous survey?
Do you get money or something for each correct answer?
Is there any feedback for correct/incorrect answers?
Acculturation is something that I sometimes hear smart people suggest as an underrated purpose of schooling.
1) I think there was something in "The Elephant in the Brain" about it being difficult for the British in India to employ the locals because they were incorrigibly unreliable. IIRC the idea was that you can't keep your assembly lines running unless you have a workforce that has is used to scheduled bathroom breaks and long hours of sitting still.
2) A friend of mine said that the homeschooled kids he knows have a much higher rate of turning out *weird*. He didn't go into detail, but I think he meant to imply that they were weird in a problematic way, making them less hireable or dateable (at least by him).
And sure, culture fit is a big deal when hiring employees (although people often understate this). However, I don't think school is an effective way to help with this, and even if it were, it seems like the costs to the students are stupidly high.
If compulsory schooling were ended in the US, I think there would be more children growing up in cult compounds where their families teach them that the government is run by reptilians or that the rapture is imminent or whatever, never to be challenged by normal people. That would be too bad for those kids, and maybe also dangerous, but ultimately probably worth it.
A question for Scott and for the commenters against education: when you were ten, what did you do in your free time? Did you read widely, about Paul Revere and times tables and the Roman Empire and how to speak Spanish? Or did you, like me, spend most of your free time watching TV and playing flash games on the computer, only encountering truly novel ideas on an occasional trip to the library or movie theater? Even among the bright and school-hating crowd here I highly doubt that a majority are self-directed enough to succeed without compulsory education.
Yes, actually. I read, had flash cards, activity books, history records, maps—you name it. I was an 80’s kid so I guess you just got screwed by being later on the de-evolutionary timeline.
I mean this sincerely - that is great for you. Do you feel like others your age were the same? I wouldn't guess this trait varies much by generation.
I was an 80s kid, too, but I fucked around like you. My name is Chad but I spelled it Chab because I thought it didn’t matter which way the round part of a d pointed. School cured me of this and I still spell my name correctly to this very day.
On the other hand I also remember my first grade teacher showing us a slide show of his dog and his white ‘67 Corvette Sting Ray convertible, which concluded with a field trip to faculty parking where he showed us the actual Corvette. He even let me touch it.
Don’t get me wrong I watched the hell out of cartoons and I would spend hours on the computer (Apple 2e) console (Atari; my friends had NES) or telephone (rotary) but there was just less interesting stuff to be distracted by and hanging with your friends was the primary thing to do. We were bored a lot! Riding bikes, aimlessly, for hours. (The lyrics on Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs hit hard!) Anyway, I was likely more nerdy than my counterparts but not at all alone in being well read, or having the experiences I described above.
My first kid (b. 1998) played the Sims, EverQuest and Skyrim. She was never bored. Now she desperately tries to be less attached to her phone, to go to bed on time, to not get wound up in online drama, to not be anxious and depressed. But she can’t remember life before constant distraction. To a Gen-Xer like me, I see a generation of people stuck in a mental hamster wheel.
My second kid (b. 2016) is coming up in a world that already recognizes the 2000’s and 2010’s were fuuuuucked uuuup. Nowadays, the threat of technology on positive child rearing is nigh undeniable, but try to keep it out of their hands—Go on try! Best we can figure is some tablet chitty-chat-game time as a reward. But now when my kid says, “I’m bored,” I say, “Good.” I am not looking forward to the last 5 years of childhood, but I definitely feel better prepared.
10, huh? That was before I realized that being smart would do anything for me aside from get me beat up. I spent a lot of time in escapist fantasy of one sort or another. I didn't get self-directed until college, when life started opening up.
I'm against education and dropped out in early middle school. I spent most of my childhood watching TV and playing Flash games. I never actively read books, so my knowledge comes from osmosis and going down rabbit holes when I find interesting topics.
10? Hard work on the farm, struggling to live up to impossible standards that, I imagined, would finally be good enough to satisfy Dad and not get beat up for getting things wrong.
Free time? What's that?
I read, a lot. Mostly fantasy and sci-fi, but there were always a lot of books around and there was an entire set of Childcraft encyclopedias in my room to paw through. I remember carefully reading the Guide to Parents and checking off my developmental milestones. I tried to teach myself Japanese and Latin, and my mom got me books to help, but I needed actual classes to get anywhere with them. I learned a lot of Latin roots but never had it in me to sit down and grind the case system.
I did spend time playing video games and fooling around on the internet, but most of my childhood was in the 90s so internet was an occasional thing and all the consoles belonged to my brother, who got them secondhand. Lots of Atari. I occasionally watched television, but it was not a household where the TV was always on - the TV was on only when there was a specific thing to watch, and off afterwards. I was aware from a young age that constantly watching TV was Not For Us.
Now I wish I'd had even less internet and computers as a kid. It was all wasted time and yes, I probably still wouldn't have taught myself Latin, but I wouldn't be so addicted now.
This will get buried, by here goes…
The most important stuff I ever learned was in high school. It was a media studies class based on the work of Marshall McLuhan and focused on interpreting the why and how of media. Because of this specifically I have been immune from just about every moral panic or propaganda attack. I dropped television cold in the mid 90’s, only recently coming back to Netflix may e 10 years ago. It absolutely formed a crucial part of my personality that I believe has set me closer to truth and fortified my resistance to bullshit. I would never have discovered this in my own.
The issue is that experience was unbelievably rare compared to the experiences of my cohort and even more so the kids coming up after me—it’s simply not taught.
Could the problem be that the real problem with schools is they teach the wrong stuff the wrong way and the only learning that happens is through luck? If so, how does this differ from any other knowledge based institution—apprenticeships, scouts, higher ed, etc. there are few good and special teachers because good and special people are rare everywhere.
Much love to Mr. Gaydos! NCHS ‘93!!!
It's funny - about half the people in my family, including me, recall going on an extended media boycott in our late teens and early twenties. For some it was a deliberate stand against complacency, as with you. For myself, I just found it hard to stay engaged for the duration of a feature film. I did fine in uni so it wasn't a general attention span issue.
Media literacy is one of those subjects that's taught very unevenly from one district to another. But it hasn't gone away - in the US communication studies degrees are just as common as education or visual arts degrees. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_322.10.asp
Yeah, fair point on Media Studies—I’m sure it’s fairly widespread, but my guess is that instead of a hand-crafted curriculum by a super engaged and very cool teacher, most kids are getting MacMillan or Pearson—the “big 2” of text book publishing.
I did a Sociology text book review for the local High School and there were very limited options and some, like National Geographic, were simply too expensive regardless of their content. The books were atrocious and just as <current year> as you could hope to find. I’ve taught MacMillan books and hated it.
For me, this is an even stronger critique of education than Scott’s. Not only is it mostly useless, but it custom designed to annihilate creativity in the students and faculty. So now, even accidentally learning something important becomes impossible.
The real benefit of school is the unyielding brutality of other people and learning to recognize kindred spirits.
Maybe the forgetting curve is down around 1% after a few decades, but they teach a lot more than 100 things at school. The forgetting curve is consistent with a world where it’s important that everyone knows *something*, though it doesn’t matter what.
I admit this is a bit hand-waving, but there is something about school teaching you “how to learn” as the most important skill, with most actual facts being of quite secondary importance. I’d say besides basic arithmetic and reading comprehension, most of the specifics of what i learned in grade school does not get used in my work. But the ways with which I learned how to learn, are still used for my continuing education now.
Can you give some examples? I don't think any of how I learn as an adult comes from skills I acquired as a child. In particular, as an adult I've become much, much better at asking lots of questions when I don't understand something. This has vastly accelerated how quickly I pick up new material in a wide variety of domains.
This was *not* I skill I had as a youth, mostly because everything in school came so easily to me and I didn't need to ask very many questions to understand it.
Here’s one more anecdote to offer.
My sister has lived (as a non-expat) in Hungary for a bit over a decade. She speaks less than an hour of English (mostly calls to the US) per day. When she visits the US, she causes multiple daily chuckles by forgetting “basic” English vocab words.
A lot of debate and confusion in this thread can be resolved by the reminder that "education" and "schooling" aren't even close to being synonyms. A person can easily spend years in school while receiving mere hours of education, and I know from reading the other comments that I'm not the only person whose most profound education has had nothing to do with classrooms or teachers. "Against Schooling" would have been a way better title for Caplan's book.
Anyway, for all the talk of child warehousing (horrifying) and acculturation, people are forgetting one of the main actual historical functions of primary school, namely the function college serves now: granting a credential that provides prospective employers evidence of a borderline work ethic and very basic competence at various tasks.
That isn't necessarily the case anymore*. There are entire swathes of the country where presenting a high school diploma doesn't tell a prospective employer whether a person can read, write, or do basic arithmetic.
*When a school district is bragging about record high graduation rates, *during peak covid*, and makes zero reference to performance, you should be suspicious.
https://www.cps.edu/press-releases/chicago-public-schools-announce-record-high-graduation-rate-record-low-dropout-rate/
What surprised me most was the claim that more people know what organ produces insulin than know that the capital of Russia is Moscow. That casts doubt on the entire collection of percentages.
Diabetes.
That was my first thought. But only 3% of people age 18-44 have diabetes. Probably more like 1% for university student age.
No love for Weird Al Yankovic's Pancreas Song?
"Iiiiiinsulin! Gluuuuucagon! Coming from the Islets of Langerhans!
Can't you see, I love my pancreas,
Golly gee I love my pancreas!"
It's a real toe-tapper and packed with true facts about the pancreas. Always puts a smile on my face.
It’s a lot easier to learn something a second time around though, I often have to dig up stuff I forgot from my math education and it’s much easier to come up to speed now than I remember it being to learn in the first place. This doesn’t help impress people at parties since only the stuff on the tip of your tongue counts but it makes a difference in the real world.
What makes school bad isn't that it does nothing, it's that they can tell that it did something for some people including themselves (even if typical-mind fallacy + placebo effect means most people don't get the same benefit they did).
Quoting Eliezer Yudkowsky's Preface to the Sequences:
> In modern society so little is taught of the skills of rational belief and decision-making, so little of the mathematics and sciences underlying them . . . that it turns out that just reading through a massive brain-dump full of problems in philosophy and science can, yes, be surprisingly good for you. Walking through all of that, from a dozen different angles, can sometimes convey a glimpse of the central rhythm.
The problem with education is that they don't try to optimize the process at all. There are millions of redundant angles with the gems mixed in and unidentified. With some things like literature, it doesn't even occur to them to optimize.
> The problem with education is that they don't try to optimize the process at all.
This. So much money and time spent on education, and yet so little optimization.
It's like a form of signaling, but different than the one typically discussed. By spending lot of money and time we signal that we collectively care about the next generation having a lot of knowledge. But if we actually cared, we would do it differently.
For example, no one expects kids to remember literally everything from the school. Yet we are horrified if they don't know the basic things. Great! So now we know that not all knowledge is equal, and that remembering some parts is more important than remembering the other parts. Okay, so... why don't we make a small textbook containing only the *most important basic information* (such as: "atoms are bigger than electrons", "the capital of Russia is Moscow") and give this book to all students, to keep forever at home, and maybe review once a year for the rest of their lives?
It would be an interesting challenge to make this book of "basic knowledge". The important part is to resist the temptation to put there too many things. The longer you make the book, and the smaller font you use, the less likely will people be to actually read it. (You can make a longer version for nerds, of course.)
So much of our extant paradigm is directly descended from medieval scribes, who had no science or optimization and thus just conformed to the role of reading as much good stuff as possible (because people who conformed to that role visibly did better than people who didn't).
One of the things that schools try to teach is how to reason about facts. It is not possible to reason about facts if you don't know a bunch facts. Therefore, schools have to teach some facts.
“Atoms are bigger than electrons” is not important basic information. If you ask someone whether an atom is bigger than an electron, and they reply “an atom is bigger than an electron because atoms contain electrons,” that indicates that they have some understanding of atoms. If they reply “no,” that’s a pretty clear indication that they lack a basic understanding of atoms. That’s why a “no” answer is somewhat concerning.
But not everybody needs to be able to reason about atoms. Indeed, to have a deep understanding of atoms you need to have a deep understanding of quantum theory, which excludes most people. I think it’s true that some facts are more useful than others, but I don’t think that means there is a good way to determine what is “important basic information” and what is not. The world is constantly changing, so even if you could determine the most important for adults to know today, the list will be out of date by the time your students graduate. It’s easier to rank skills; for example literacy is very important and will likely remain so.
Unfortunately, even theoretical knowledge sometimes has an impact on everyday life. In my opinion, people who believe in homeopathy also fail at understanding atomic theory. And the belief in homeopathy will at best cost you some money, at worst it may cost you your health.
> The world is constantly changing, so even if you could determine the most important for adults to know today, the list will be out of date by the time your students graduate.
There should be some simple way for adults to refresh/update their knowledge regularly. I imagine that some hypothetical enlightened country could e.g. choose 200 most important topics, make a 30 minute video for each of them, and then show those videos on a TV, one topic a week, in a 4 year cycle. With occasional remake of some video, or replacing some topic with a different one. (TV rather than internet so that people are synchronized and can talk to their neighbors about the same topic. But of course the video archive would also be available for everyone.)
I would be curious to see the revealed preferences of the people who claim school is useless, but have kids. Do you in fact send your kids to school?
For those who haven't seen it, here is the preface to "1066 and All That" by W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman:
COMPULSORY PREFACE
(*This Means You*)
Histories have previously been written with the object of exalting their authors. The object of this History is to console the reader. *No other history does this.*
History is not what you thought. *It is what you can remember.* All other history defeats itself.
This is the only Memorable History of England, because all the History that you can remember is in this book, which is the result of years of research in golf-clubs, gun-rooms, green-rooms, etc.
For instance, two out of the four Dates originally included were eliminated at the last moment, a research done at the Eton and Harrow match having revealed that they are *not memorable.*
The Editors will be glad of further assistance towards the elimination, in future editions, of any similarly un-historical matter which, despite their vigilance, may have crept into the text.
They take this opportunity of acknowledging their inestimable debt to the mass of educated men and women of their race whose historical intuitions and opinions this work enshrines.
Also, to the Great British People without whose self-sacrificing determination to become top Nation there would have been no (memorable) history.
History is now at an end (see p. 123); this History is therefore final.
W. C. S.
R. J. Y
I have occassionally, in my crazier and grumpier moments, fanticized about passing a law that would require all science fiction to be hard science fiction. That desire was born of a recognition that most people absorb their understanding of the natural world not from study or even what they "learned" in school, but rather from random snippits picked up over the years like flotsam on the seashore. If we forced all their media to adhere to a strict, factual depiction of the nature of reality (or at least our best current understanding of it) we might actually creat a populace with a modicum of scientific understanding.
Your cultural osmosis point makes me wonder if I'm not actually that crazy.
I think about job fit. If there's school for less time or no school, kids would presumably start working from a younger age and through inertia some would stick in those industries. If school forces them to choose later once they've been exposed to more types of work, maybe they choose industries in which they have a better fit. Across a whole population, this seems important.
I know lots of 15 yo kids who would love to ditch school to work instead and only very few (~5%) are doing something they enjoy.
School doesn’t need to have any “purpose.” It just needs to be the best available way in 2024 of using one million adults to organize the lives of thirty million kids while twenty nine million parents work jobs or keep house. If some of the kids get something out of it, that’s a bonus.
In other words, the case against education is not a case against schools.
That you and most of your generation (seem to) remember few of the facts you were taught at school is not a good argument for abolishing schools. Here are my reasons:
• When I was at school in the 1950s, I was lazy, bored, rebellious and terrified in just about equal measure, but I Iearnt stuff, a great deal of which has stayed with me all my life, hooking up productively with what I learnt later. I learnt about Omsk, Tomsk and Yakutsk; the Kuroshio Current, prevailing winds, the world’s major rivers and mountain ranges, and the connection between those four things; the square on the hypotenuse; the main tributaries of the Murray (Mitta Mitta, Ovens, Gouldburn, Campaspe, Loddon); Latin roots; grammar; the main exports of every country in the British Commonwealth and some others besides; Vasco da Gama and Magellan; analysis and parsing; Magna Carta; Mazeppa’s Ride; Lord Shaftesbury; The Inchcape Rock; Houtman’s Abrolhos …. We learnt it all singsong, by heart, the way kids learn playground chants, and most of the time it was no hardship at all. I've lost bits and pieces along the way, but again and again I recognise something because it is related to something I learnt all those years ago.
• Could it be that you and most of your generation don’t remember much from your school days because you weren’t actually taught? For some time, most educationists have subscribed to the constructivist belief that kids learn best when they “construct their own knowledge”. In other words, kids should be able to pick up school subjects the way they learn to speak their native tongue. There are two problems here: 1) Constructivism began life as a DEscription of how people learn but has been turned into a PREscription of how teachers should teach; 2) no distinction is made between knowledge that is biologically primary (e.g. speaking your native tongue) and knowledge that is biologically secondary (e.g. reading and writing). The first can be learnt by social osmosis; the second, generally speaking, cannot. Biological primary vs secondary knowledge: Informing Cognitive Load Theory | InnerDrive
• Much of what you do retain has been consigned to schema buried in long-term memory, where its elements are not readily available to explicit recall. But they underpin a great deal of your present knowledge and the schema itself can be brought to mind and made use of when considering other information. The implications of schemas | Filling the pail (wordpress.com) For example, being literate means you have at some stage learnt to decode the alphabetic system, though you don’t have to recapitulate that laborious process every time you pick up a book.
• People have been transmitting knowledge from one generation to the next since the larynx descended. The knowledge hard won by one generation need no longer die with them. This is important because: “Knowledge is what we think with. It is an interaction between the environment and long-term memory, mediated by working memory, that determines what we pay attention to.” Dr Greg Ashman.pdf (education.gov.au) Say we do away with schools, what then? We will leave kids to learn by cultural osmosis, they will be educated by social media, literacy will once again become the preserve of a privileged few, and the gap between the privileged and disadvantaged will become entrenched.
Seems like there's a model where, in addition to needing to remember facts, you need to build on one knowledge base to learn another; you allude to this a bit yourself. It may be that teaching algebra to small children will be useless for 90% of them, but that there is a class of attainment (e.g. getting an engineering degree) that can't be achieved if you don't start learning about algebra relatively early.
Basically, it seems like there might be a spherical cow model of school in which it presents a large number of opportunities to (most) students, but only a small fraction of any given cohort takes any given opportunity and actually 'goes through the door' to pursue professional opportunities in that direction.
Like, I can imagine a toy workforce composed of 20% doctors, 20% engineers, 20% artists, 20% scientists, and 20% lawyers; under strong assumptions of 'forgetting', 80% of the population would forget about the three branches of government, and a *different* 80% would forget about Claude Monet, and so on. But their time in school nonetheless enabled each 20% to discover their future career and to lay the foundation of their current expertise.
One thing you can say about American schools is that they are impressively Romeo and Juliet-oriented.
Personally, I think the language in Romeo and Juliet is too hard for high school students. Shakespeare, as Stoppard's movie implies, was suddenly discovering he was a genius and thus showed off inordinately in Rome and Juliet. I would instead recommend Julius Caesar, which Shakespeare wrote in a pared back dignified English version of Latin, as an introduction to Shakespeare, at least for boys.
I suspect the data will pile up that during covid school closures, while kids from the upper half of society (the laptop class) did okay (not good but not horrible) from taking classes online over Zoom, that not going to an organized place and being talked at by middle class grown-ups was bad for the lower half of the social spectrum.
I did a teacher training programme in the UK 10 years ago. The core text on our reading list was Black & William, Inside the Black Box - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/44836144_Inside_the_Black_Box_Raising_Standards_Through_Classroom_Assessment
They wrote several articles on the same theme including a meta-analysis, and Dylan William has done some YouTube videos (watchable). Central holding is roughly "it doesn’t matter where you go to school, it matters what teacher you get" in particular it matters what questions teachers are asking kids to assess their prior learning and to assess whether they've understood the lesson - leading to such gimmicks as individual white-boards, exit tickets and so on. Obviously B&W were mainly interested in education outcomes, but it seems like it must have some relevance for long term retention too. If a teacher is actually having a real dialogue with pupils about what they know, then tailoring a lesson to a pupils ZPD, then making sure they have actually learned, then tailoring the next lesson to the next step etc. that has a much better chance of sticking for life than a teacher who just wants to Get Through The Lesson - a strong temptation for anyone.
> Fewer than 50% (ie worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms.
Let me check...
https://github.com/electron/electron
https://github.com/atom/atom
Electron is about 15MB as a ZIP file, Atom is about 13MB as a ZIP file. Electron is bigger.
Scott and others, I have a great test you can do with mates at a pub or whatever: give them a blank piece of paper and ask them to draw a world map.
When I was a student at St Andrews (a uni which has recently topped Oxford and Cambridge in various UK uni rankings), I got some of the following results:
- a clear sea between the USA and Canada (she had walked over a bridge once separating the two countries)
- one medical student had Africa north of Russia (she said she got the highest mark in geography at her school)
- almost everyone deleted places like Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia
- literally no-one knew that South America is significantly to the right of North America, not straight below it
but
my all time favourite was a modern history student. She drew the island of GB, to its left the island of Ireland. Below the island of Ireland was the island of Wales (???).... and to their left, the island of Poland.
She had been studying WWII, and somehow thought Hitler's invasion of Poland involved sailing around the UK.
If this is what top-uni students think....
I remember the Roman Empire question from the survey. I don't remember, now, but some random thing had come up in the prior 24 hours that made me think about it. So I answered yes. I realize that's part of Scott's point. The "random things" (whatever it was) might not have been that random.
There had been a meme going around a few weeks before the survey to the effect that men would think about the Roman Empire about once a day and wasn't that hilarious.
> Fewer than 50% (ie worse than chance) can correctly answer a true-false question about whether electrons are bigger than atoms.
Trolling the questioners?
Asking people this kind of questions probably makes you look like an insufferable nerd who wouldn’t stand a chance in the ancestral environment, and they treat you like one.
I think this is the best way to ensure you’ll learn things from school and keep them long-term: to be an insufferable nerd who wouldn’t stand a chance in the ancestral environment, so you’ll stay isolated from pop culture, leaving school as the only cultural environment able to influence you by osmosis.
I love how you identify the power of culture as a continued education force of sorts.
Two items I feel you missed (maybe willingly, but IMO worth noting):
- I wouldn’t underestimate the effect of trolling in these surveys
- Education’s role as a giver of frameworks is far more important than as a giver of facts. The value we gain from it IMO is learning how to understand and contextualise facts, and derive action from them, not memorising them. The fact that we use the latter to (maybe even unintentionally) teach the former is my biggest gripe with the system.
All of this theoretical case is fine (seriously - I don't have strong feelings myself one way or the other), but I assume you realize there is a huge literature in the economics of education robustly showing that each additional year of schooling leads to about 10% higher lifetime earnings (e.g. here is one recent paper by Harry Patrinos, one of the big names in the field: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJM-03-2021-0184/full/html). I don't know if the kids are learning facts, or thought processes, or socialization, or it's changing their aspirations, or something else entirely, but they are absolutely benefitting from going to school. And yes economists are well aware of selection bias and have written dozens of papers involving quasi-experimental designs and other ways to try to tease out causality here.
This seems like a pretty glaring omission from Caplan’s argument (and Scott’s review of it).
What's the alternative to schooling? Is there a big population that broke the law and quit school at age 8? How do you explain Sudbury schools where kids do just fine without any traditional schooling (kids do what they want)?
I would think Sudbury schools would be subject to a pretty heavy selection effect.
They are- selection for students who failed in public schools...
Yes there is in fact a big population of 8-year-olds who aren't in school around the world (I've done a lot of work in rural sub-Saharan Africa, although mostly on health not education), and it was even larger 50-100 years ago. Over time and space there has been huge variation in both mandatory schooling laws and in enforcement of those laws (including not just by age, but also by gender and by religion / ethnicity / language). These variations are what allow researchers to estimate the causal impact of an additional year of school.
As far as Sudbury schools, as Tom points out there is surely a large endogenous selection effect there. Of course some kids do better with minimal or unstructured schooling; my focus is on the average effect, and that seemed to be Scott's focus / claim as well.
Are 8-year olds in sub-Saharan Africa the people who were used to generate that 10% number? What are we extrapolating from with that figure exactly?
If you click my link above (helpfully provided in order to answer these sorts of questions), you'll quickly see that their 10% estimate is based on 142 countries from 1970-2014 via 853 separate datasets (covering a wide range of ages). No extrapolation required.
That seems not very useful then? How relevant could the figure be to any particular situation? Is the figure consistent across all their datasets? That would be surprising.
First of all, if you want to know whether the figure is consistent just read the article (and/or other relevant papers from the literature)! It's publicly available. I'm not an expert on this - in fact please do us all a favor, read up on the topic since you're interested, and summarize here. My sense is that of course it's not exactly 10% for all ages / regions / time periods, but that in fact it's more consistent than one might imagine. However maybe that's wrong.
Second of all, you seem to have missed the point of this discussion, which was not to provide concrete advice to policymakers in every particular situation but rather to debate the overall role of schooling. Scott concluded his post with "I’m not sure how you rescue the usefulness of most schooling" so I was pointing to evidence for the usefulness of *most* schooling. Clearly for that purpose we should look at large datasets covering average effects in a broad range of situations; otherwise if I provided evidence only that 8-year-olds in Africa benefit from schooling -- although actually I think that would be pretty compelling, given the poor quality of schools there -- someone could correctly reply that I hadn't responded to his overall point or shown that schooling is generally useful. Why would you expect evidence about his question to also directly answer some other only vaguely related (albeit reasonable) question that you seem to have?
Thought about this for a while and realized that this could just be a case of unrelated correlates to a primary cause. One hypothesis would be, “Children with higher levels of intelligence and conscientious will stay in school longer and will also earn more over their lifetime.” This in and of itself does not imply that it’s the schooling that causes the higher lifetime earnings.
Hi Scott - you're thinking like an economist, which is great (imho). However it turns out that economists also think like economists, and they understand very well exactly the dynamic you're suggesting (which is indeed a thing that happens), and they control for that in their analyses. Trust me (or read the papers!) this has been debated at length and in detail for decades, and everyone involved comprehends the distinction between correlation and causation.
It's not my area of research but for instance consider a project that builds a bunch of new local schools around a country. Previously all kids were supposed to travel if need be to finish primary school, but some of them didn't. Now that the new schools exist, local kids are going to school for an extra year or two on average, and in fact the marginal impact is *not* on the most intelligent / conscientious kids (who were already traveling). 20-30 years later we can measure the resulting impact on earnings. Similar idea for a law raising mandatory schooling from (say) age 12 to 15, where the 'best' kids were already staying in school as you say, and the change (hence also the downstream income effect) is from the mediocre kids.
In any case from a policy perspective at some level we don't really care who it effects or how or why: we just want to know whether a policy that forces [more] kids to go to school [for longer] improves average outcomes. The answer is very clear: yes, it does.
I listened to a podcast a few years ago that used that general knowledge survey as the basis for a quiz of the hosts. I'm surprised that they haven't done the survey again.
Asking for the answer, the confidence of that answer being correct, and an estimate of how many other people would get the question correct was something I hadn't seen before, but I don't read those types of papers often, so maybe that's the normal methodology.
What if 90% of the population is too dumb to remember much from school, but significant benefits accrue to the other 10%? And productivity follows a power law where the top 10% are probably responsible for at least half of all the productivity, so if for whatever reasons we can’t just school the 10%, it is better to school everybody than to school nobody.
I remember a lot more about 1984 than that just from listening to the Simon prebble audiobook a few times (most recently 5 years ago)
I feel like most of the stuff I know was not learned in school or even at university but on my own. However, many of my colleagues don't think so. They think school and university taught them quite a bit. I should probably press them on that and see whether it's actually true or whether they just think it's true.
However, I have one concern with this post: most of the evidence there sounds more like evidence towards "Education is not perfect", rather than "Education doesn't help at all". To me, the evidence in the post, sounds similar to claiming that: we cannot cure all cancer (or some other diseases), many _actually healthy_ people recover on their own, and people die eventually anyway, so "why even trying?". It would be nice to found out some kind-off randomized control trials, to see how much education improves our lives. Maybe we have any sadden improvements in the schools in some regions, so we can see whether people there become actually richer/happier/strong/...?
Basically I'd like to see if without education increases amount of people who can "name the capital of Russia", or it doesn't help at all.
Even if school is abysmal for learning, you need something to keep children busy (especially in 2 income households). What’s the alternate social structure that allows children to socialize with children of the same age, make friends, and keep their minds occupied? Not everyone can or wants to homeschool.
Apart from that, there might also be a class based explanation to schooling. Me and Amy entire peer group, (people who graduated from good colleges, got technical jobs etc) seem to remember a lot of what I learnt in school. I seem to remember the structure of Benzene, which I swear the last time I studied was in high school (since I went into Computer Science later), I think that is true for a lot of my friends too, we generally remember a lot of what we were taught in school. So there could be an explanation, that for a certain group of people, (maybe < 1-2%) schooling is great to teach them about facts, ways to think etc, but this is not true for most of society which doesn’t seem to learnt anything useful at school and might be better furnished by alternate social structures.
Out of mutual curiosity, I read the whole list to my wife. She knew all of them except Hannibal. We're both a little appalled that college freshmen often don't know most of those; they don't strike us as esoteric.
> The remaining pro-school argument would be that even if they forget every specific thing, they retain some kind of scaffolding that makes it easier for them to learn and understand new things in the future; i.e. they keep some sort of overall concept of learning.
This is extremely suspicious in my opinion, because the "ability to learn and understand new things" sounds very much like "intelligence", so this basically says that even if kids forget everything they have learned at school, at least they will retain the intelligence they were born with. That's great, but what was the point of the school then?
Generally, once we admit that instead of "school makes kids intelligent" the direction of causality is "intelligent kids are more successful at school", schools start to seem much less impressive, and most arguments in their favor start to sound confused.
That doesn't mean that there are no good arguments for schools; gjm provides a great list in this tread. Schools are good for teaching things where complexity builds on top of complexity, and maybe you would never be motivated to walk the entire path alone. (If you open the Wikipedia page on Russia, you will find that its capital is Moscow. If you open the Wikipedia page on quantum something, you probably won't understand what it is talking about.) Schools are good for kids whose parents suck at explaining things.
It's just that crediting schools for making students intelligent is like crediting basketball clubs for making their members tall.
You recognize that some subjects require or at least strongly benefit from building on previous levels. There are also students that benefit more than others building up in any subject, and also students who benefit from a lot of hand-holding in the learning process (and lots of overlap in those groups). A genuinely intelligent child will gain less from those things than most of their peers, while a genuinely unintelligent child may not gain much in any case from structured classroom learning (as opposed to experiential).
For those in the middle, some level of handholding is better than independent and some level of building on previous lessons will be better than jumping up to the higher level. Schools recognize this to some extent, which is why gifted programs exist and why special ed exists. Gifted programs don't always do much to change the dynamic, though special ed is pretty regimented and I think does what it's supposed to do - once you recognize that many students in that category aren't going to achieve high levels no matter what approach is used.
Well... I'm pretty sure I got my initial knowledge of Roman history courtesy of Rosemary Sutcliff, so I'm gonna call that a strike against "you need to know a certain amount about Roman history before you can enjoy books, movies, podcasts, etc on Roman history."
(More generally, I think we can disqualify any theory that says "you can't enjoy learning about X for the first time" for almost any X where further learning would be enjoyable, but that is on observational grounds.)
Thinking back to college I can't remember most of my professors' names either; most of what I remember from classes is what I have thought about since, though not all. I have pages of handwritten notes in Japanese and Farsi that I just flat cannot read anymore, although when I tried, about a decade post-college, to get a Romance language I'd since dropped back to "can visit the place and talk to people" I was able to do so a lot faster than I could pick up an entirely new language; that could just be that Romance is easy, but I suspect I'd also retained enough basic rules ("Oh right, this is the one with all the ãos"/"oh right, normal Romance grammar"/"oh right, that one weird exception to normal Romance grammar") from my brief class to mean I only really needed vocab and practice - and I expect if I wanted to go back to trying to learn Japanese, I would have a not bad time up to the limits of Japanese 101 As Taught At <my university> and then things would get dramatically harder.
So maybe relearning is easier than initial learning? This still strikes me as an insufficient justification for the modern school system though. (And all those were classes I chose voluntarily, and have made a minimal effort to keep up over the years, so that's another potential confounding factor.)
Reading through the thread, I've been convinced by the "highly valuable warehouse for kids" argument. But it occurs to me that if we accept that school's MAIN value is warehousing kids, then maybe we should really ask what's the best way to make use of these kids time and development and growth while they're at the warehouse?
My impression is most schools are almost entirely "book learning" of one form or another. Which is to say read textbooks, memorize key facts, pass tests based on memorizing those facts, rinse and repeat. This probably has some value, especially for basic science and the three Rs. But beyond the this, maybe we should ask questions like "would kids benefit more from a history class, or more gym class?" and "would kids benefit more from a geography class, or a class in home economics or home repair?"
When I look at myself and my fellow millenials, I'm less concerned about how knowledgeable we are about the capitals of foreign countries than I am about how knowledgeable we are at changing a flat tire or building a book-shelf. We also have severe amounts of obesity in the west right now, so maybe more priority should be put on kids getting lots of healthy physical activity while at school?
I write the above not because I'm very physically fit and great at changing tires and wish more people were the same - quite the contrary, these are a couple of my biggest shortcomings.
Even if we agree that warehousing kids for 5 days a week is ideal, that still leaves serious questions of how best to go about warehousing them. We can keep the term "school" regardless of what it does, but maybe we should focus a bit less on book-learning and a bit more on physical fitness and practical life skills? I think that's a reasonable question to ask given what Scott shared about how much book-learning in school is forgotten.
Good additions. All of them are useful practical knowledge for just about anybody to know.
Maybe at one time a lot of kids picked up a lot of these practical life skills just through outdoor weekend activities or spending time with family/friends, but I suspect that most kids these days spend the vast majority of their spare time online and/or playing video games.
"In order to settle a bet, I asked ACX survey respondents whether they had thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours. About 45% had done so."
Did you win the bet?
> I cannot speak Spanish today to save my life
The big green bat rotates inside out in four-dimensional space, its wings stretching and turning into thick stone walls all around you. It would be pitch dark if the watery sun were not dripping through pores in the ceiling.
“Amor universal”, claims a pitaya-flavored voice as a thorn pierces the dungeon floor and your foot, laming you.
“No se preocupe, señor:”, taunts the stoned bat, “antes se coge al mentiroso que al cojo”.
Thousands, myriads of thorns close in on you. Blinking, you make out a carnation and a rose. The flowers are doors and they read, respectively, “SALIDA” and “MUERTE”.
“Se lo advertí:”, the bat goes on triumphantly, “nunca hallará la alegría trascendente si no SALE DEL COCHE. Así, pues, entre el clavel y la rosa, Vuestra Majestad _escoja_”.
Perhaps we could make a stronger case for education for old people. Many people die because no one ever told them what the signs of a stroke, blood clot, or heart attack are, or what to do if they have one. Old age brings many health problems that people need to be educated about just to recognize that they have a problem.
(I would say that the basics of financial investment should also be taught at some point, except that all our financial investors are wrong about how to invest for retirement. Any rational analysis shows that today's financial investors are extremely averse to the risk of running out of money because of a stock market crash, and dismiss the risk of running out of money due to being invested in safe, low-return investments. This is, oddly, just the opposite of what I think consensus on human risk-aversion bias would predict, which would be that the low-probability event of a stock market crash would be under-counted. There's a similar problem in medical care, in which risk aversion is much stronger for low-probability terrible outcomes from treatment than for high-probability terrible outcomes from non-treatement)
think some huge things you're missing here are:
1) While everyone (in a knowledge job) has forgotten ~90% of what they've been taught, they remember the 10% that's relevant to their job
2) We don't know which job 6th graders are going to end up in at the end of the day.
So we end up teaching a broad raft of things, most of which ends up being completely unnecessary, because we just don't know who's going to do what (and also they're going to be there for 8 hours every day and you'll get burnt out learning math for 8 hours straight). This broadness tapers down as you get further along your track towards being useful to society, narrowing to specific high school classes, then a college major, and then particular on-the-job training or more narrowly defined graduate level stuff.
I also really really doubt that we would end up with the same volume of people having necessary knowledge skills if we relied on a more self taught approach. For example, I'm extraordinarily lazy when I'm not forced to do stuff. Never in a million years would I have learned differential equations or programming without a class structure (and even then it was a close run thing).
Traditional schooling increases the number of lazy people that end up with useful skills, while the self-starters aren't really held back that much.
Amazing how far down I can scroll without seeing anybody ask what to me is the most obvious question:
Scott, you're a new dad. You live in one of the most homeschool-friendly states in the country. Do you plan to send your own children to school?
Seconded! Yes, Scott, your readers would like to know, if you're comfortable sharing.
This blog keeps going down in its death spiral. Why does Scott Alexander no longer recognize a case of conflict theory? He had even read Moldbug and many others who have made the same point, but not mentioning conflict theory explocitly. Is that Scott still alive? I would dpubt it if you had not shared the baby phoyos. Perhaps.. Are you tired of having to blog and write dumb stuff because of that? Are you experoencing memory loss like depicted here? Are you getting paid or coerced to write dumbly? In any case, conflict theory an unusually simply-the-only-right-answer, and Scott Alexander should not miss that. Sorry.
I suspect that somebody who's written an entire FAQ about why he disagrees with Moldbug has probably read Moldbug.
Sturgeon’s Law
I feel like there's a lot of trauma-reenacting going on in this thread. Most of the people arguing that school is bad seem to have personally had a bad time at school. Where are the people saying "Well personally I had a great time at school, but objectively it was useless"?
Personally I think I had a pretty average, middle-of-the-bell-curve school experience compared to my peers; not the best but not the worst. Being a 12-16 year old boy can be pretty awkward regardless, and I certainly wouldn't say it was the best days of my life (university was far better, and being a young adult with a job was better still) but I had some good times.
It wasn't perfect, and it could have been better... if the school itself had been better, or if some of my own decisions had been better. But it was certainly far better than I'd have gone sitting at home all day.
"my suspicion is that if school magically disappeared, unless the rest of society were very dramatically altered at the same time, it would be almost immediately recreated in some other form by necessity"
Oh, yeah. Let's say we do away with compulsory schooling and it's left up to parents how they educate their kids; send them to the schools, homeschool them, turn them loose in the field to graze...
The parents who are smart enough and educated enough to homeschool or unschool the kids will have some dependence on "one at least of the parents can be free to oversee the kids". So maybe what happens is that not everyone is up for teaching little Sophonisba or Mahershalalhashbaz advanced maths, and the darlings are *so* brainy, you know, they need the intellectual challenge! Well, we parents could get together and hire a young grad student to do an hour a day for five days a week of maths teaching for the small group of our little budding blossoms.
Well, hey, you're re-invented schooling in one form. Or even if it is private tuition, the grind school model. Or what C.S. Lewis obtained at the age of 16, when he was sent to a private tutor:
"At Bookham I was met by my new teacher--"Kirk" or "Knock" or the Great Knock as my father, my brother, and I all called him.
…A few minutes later we were walking away from the station.
"You are now," said Kirk, "proceeding along the principal artery between Great and Little Bookham."
I stole a glance at him. Was this geographical exordium a heavy joke? Or was he trying to conceal his emotions? His face, however, showed only an inflexible gravity. I began to "make conversation" in the deplorable manner which I had acquired at those evening parties and indeed found increasingly necessary to use with my father. I said I was surprised at the "scenery" of Surrey; it was much "wilder" than I had expected.
"Stop!" shouted Kirk with a suddenness that made me jump. "What do you mean by wildness and what grounds had you for not expecting it?"
I replied I don't know what, still "making conversation". As answer after answer was torn to shreds it at last dawned upon me that he really wanted to know. He was not making conversation, nor joking, nor snubbing me; he wanted to know. I was stung into attempting a real answer. A few passes sufficed to show that I had no clear and distinct idea corresponding to the word "wildness", and that, in so far as I had any idea at all, "wildness" was a singularly inept word. "Do you not see, then," concluded the Great Knock, "that your remark was meaningless?" I prepared to sulk a little, assuming that the subject would now be dropped. Never was I more mistaken in my life. Having analysed my terms, Kirk was proceeding to deal with my proposition as a whole. On what had I based (but he pronounced it baized) my expectations about the Flora and Geology of Surrey? Was it maps, or photographs, or books? I could produce none. It had, heaven help me, never occurred to me that what I called my thoughts needed to be "baized" on anything. Kirk once more drew a conclusion--without the slightest sign of emotion, but equally without the slightest concession to what I thought good manners: "Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?"
By this time our acquaintance had lasted about three and a half minutes; but the tone set by this first conversation was preserved without a single break during all the years I spent at Bookham.
…If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity, that man was Kirk. Born a little later, he would have been a Logical Positivist. The idea that human beings should exercise their vocal organs for any purpose except that of communicating or discovering truth was to him preposterous. The most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation. I soon came to know the differing values of his three openings. The loud cry of "Stop!" was flung in to arrest a torrent of verbiage which could not be endured a moment longer; not because it fretted his patience (he never thought of that) but because it was wasting time, darkening counsel. The hastier and quieter "Excuse!" (i.e. "Excuse me") ushered in a correction or distinction merely parenthetical and betokened that, thus set right, your remark might still, without absurdity, be allowed to reach completion. The most encouraging of all was, "I hear you." This meant that your remark was significant and only required refutation; it had risen to the dignity of error. Refutation (when we got so far) always followed the same lines. Had I read this? Had I studied that? Had I any statistical evidence? Had I any evidence in my own experience? And so to the almost inevitable conclusion, "Do you not see then that you had no right, etc."
Some boys would not have liked it; to me it was red beef and strong beer. I had taken it for granted that my leisure hours at Bookham would be passed in "grown-up conversation". And that, as you know already, I had no taste for. In my experience it meant conversation about politics, money, deaths, and digestion. I assumed that a taste for it, as for eating mustard or reading newspapers, would develop in me when I grew older (so far, all three expectations have been disappointed). …I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you. Even in Mathematics, whatever could be done by mere reasoning (as in simple geometry) I did with delight; but the moment calculation came in I was helpless. I grasped the principles but my answers were always wrong. Yet though I could never have been a scientist, I had scientific as well as imaginative impulses, and I loved ratiocination. Kirk excited and satisfied one side of me. Here was talk that was really about something. Here was a man who thought not about you but about what you said. No doubt I snorted and bridled a little at some of my tossings; but, taking it all in all, I loved the treatment. After being knocked down sufficiently often I began to know a few guards and blows, and to put on intellectual muscle. In the end, unless I flatter myself, I became a not contemptible sparring partner. It was a great day when the man who had so long been engaged in exposing my vagueness at last cautioned me against the dangers of excessive subtlety."
Having quoted from "Surprised by Joy" by Lewis, I have to add in some more memories of his and his brother's education, given that we're talking about "School! What is it good for? (Absolutely nothing)":
https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lewiscs-surprisedbyjoy/lewiscs-surprisedbyjoy-01-h.html
"I have now to tell you how Wyvern made me a prig. When I went there, nothing was further from my mind than the idea that my private taste for fairly good books, for Wagner, for mythology, gave me any sort of superiority to those who read nothing but magazines and listened to nothing but the (then fashionable) Rag-time. The claim might seem unbelievable if I did not add that I had been protected from this sort of conceit by downright ignorance. Mr. Ian Hay somewhere draws a picture of the reading minority at a Public School in his day as boys who talked about "G. B. S. and G. K. C." in the same spirit in which other boys secretly smoked; both sets were inspired by the same craving for forbidden fruit and the same desire to be grown-up. And I suppose boys such as he describes might come from Chelsea or Oxford or Cambridge homes where they heard things about contemporary literature. But my position was wholly different. I was, for example, a great reader of Shaw about the time I went to Wyvern, but I had never dreamed that reading Shaw was anything to be proud of. Shaw was an author on my father's shelves like any other author. I began reading him because his Dramatic Opinions contained a good deal about Wagner and Wagner's very name was then a lure to me. Thence I went on to read most of the other Shaws we had. But how his reputation stood in the literary world I neither knew nor cared; I didn't know there was "a literary world". My father told me Shaw was "a mountebank" but that there were some laughs in John Bull's Other Island. It was the same with all my other reading; no one (thank God) had ever admired or encouraged it. (William Morris, for some unfathomable reason, my father always referred to as "that whistlepainter".) I might be--no doubt I was--conceited at Chartres for being good at my Latin; this was something recognised as meritorious. But "Eng. Lit." was blessedly absent from the official syllabus, so I was saved from any possibility of conceit about it. Never in my life had I read a work of fiction, poetry, or criticism in my own language except because, after trying the first few pages, I liked the taste of it. I could not help knowing that most other people, boys and grown-ups alike, did not care for the books I read. A very few tastes I could share with my father, a few more with my brother; apart from that, there was no point of contact, and this I accepted as a sort of natural law. If I reflected on it at all, it would have given me, I think, a slight feeling, not of superiority, but of inferiority. The latest popular novel was so obviously a more adult, a more normal, a more sophisticated taste than any of mine. A certain shame or bashfulness attached itself to whatever one deeply and privately enjoyed. I went to the Coll far more disposed to excuse my literary tastes than to plume myself on them.
But this innocence did not last. It was, from the first, a little shaken by all that I soon began to learn from my form-master about the glories of literature. I was at last made free of the dangerous secret that others had, like me, found there "enormous bliss" and been maddened by beauty. Among the other New Bugs of my year, too, I met a pair of boys who came from the Dragon School at Oxford (where Naomi Mitchison in her 'teens had just produced her first play) and from them also I got the dim impression that there was a world I had never dreamed of, a world in which poetry, say, was a thing public and accepted, just as Games and Gallantry were accepted at Wyvern; nay, a world in which a taste for such things was almost meritorious. I felt as Siegfried felt when it first dawned on him that he was not Mime's son. What had been "my" taste was apparently "our" taste (if only I could ever meet the "we" to whom that "our" belonged). And if "our" taste, then--by a perilous transition--perhaps "good" taste or "the right taste". For that transition involves a kind of Fall. The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost. Even then, however, it is not necessary to take the further downward step of despising the "philistines" who do not share it. Unfortunately I took it. Hitherto, though increasingly miserable at Wyvern, I had been half ashamed of my own misery, still ready (if I were only allowed) to admire the Olympians, still a little overawed, cowed rather than resentful. I had, you see, no standing place against the Wyvernian ethos, no side for which I could play against it; it was a bare "I" against what seemed simply the world. But the moment that "I" became, however vaguely, a we--and Wyvern not the world but a world--the whole thing changed. It was now possible, at least in thought, to retaliate. I can remember what may well have been the precise moment of this transition. A prefect called Blugg or Glubb or some such name stood opposite me, belching in my face, giving me some order. The belching was not intended as an insult. You can't "insult" a fag any more than an animal. If Bulb had thought of my reactions at all, he would have expected me to find his eructations funny. What pushed me over the edge into pure priggery was his face--the puffy bloated cheeks, the thick, moist, sagging lower lip, the yokel blend of drowsiness and cunning. "The lout!" I thought. "The clod! The dull, crass clown! For all his powers and privileges, I would not be he." I had become a Prig, a High-Brow."
"My brother's reports had grown worse and worse; and the tutor to whom he had now been sent confirmed them to the extent of saying that he seemed to have learned almost nothing at school. Nor was that all. Sentences savagely underlined in my father's copy of The Lanchester Tradition reveal his thoughts. They are passages about a certain glazed insolence, an elaborate, heartless flippancy, which the reforming Headmaster in that story encountered in the Bloods of the school he wished to reform. That was how my father envisaged my brother at this period: flippant, languid, emptied of the intellectual interests which had appeared in his earlier boyhood, immovable, indifferent to all real values, and urgent in his demand for a motor-bicycle.
It was, of course, to turn us into public-school boys that my father had originally sent us to Wyvern; the finished product appalled him. It is a familiar tragi-comedy and you can study it in Lockhart; Scott laboured hard to make his son a hussar, but when the actual hussar was presented to him, Scott sometimes forgot the illusion of being an aristocrat and became once more a respectable Edinburgh lawyer with strong views about Puppyism. So in our family. Mispronunciation was one of my father's favourite rhetorical weapons. He now always sounded the first syllable of Wyvern wrongly. I can still hear him growl, "Wyvernian affectation." In proportion as my brother's tone became languid and urbanely weary, so my father's voice became more richly and energetically Irish, and all manner of strange music from his boyhood in Cork and Dublin forced its way up through the more recent Belfastian crust.
...Yet out of this "unpleasantness" (a favourite word of my father's) there sprang what I still reckon, by merely natural standards, the most fortunate thing that ever happened to me. The tutor (in Surrey) to whom my brother had been sent was one of my father's oldest friends. He had been headmaster of Lurgan when my father was a boy there. In a surprisingly short time he so re-built and extended the ruins of my brother's education that he not only passed into Sandhurst but was placed among those very few candidates at the top of the list who received prize cadetships. I do not think my father ever did justice to my brother's achievement; it came at a time when the gulf between them was too wide, and when they were friends again it had become ancient history. But he saw very clearly what it proved about the exceptional powers of his teacher. At the same time, he was almost as sick as I of the very name of Wyvern. And I never ceased, by letter and by word of mouth, to beg that I might be taken away. All these factors urged him to the decision which he now made. Might it not after all be best to give me my desire? to have done with school for good and send me also to Surrey to read for the University with Mr. Kirkpatrick? He did not form this plan without much doubt and hesitation. He did his best to put all the risks before me: the dangers of solitude, the sudden change from the life and bustle of a great school (which change I might not like so much as I anticipated), the possibly deadening effect of living with only an old man and his old wife for company. Should I really be happy with no companions of my own age? I tried to look very grave at these questions. But it was all imposture. My heart laughed. Happy without other boys? Happy without toothache, without chilblains, happy without pebbles in my shoes? And so the arrangement was made. If it had had nothing else to recommend it, the mere thought, "Never, never, never, shall I have to play games again," was enough to transport me. If you want to know how I felt, imagine your own feelings on waking one morning to find that income tax or unrequited love had somehow vanished from the world.
I should be sorry if I were understood to think, or if I encouraged any reader in thinking, that this invincible dislike of doing things with a bat or a ball were other than a misfortune. Not, indeed, that I allow to games any of the moral and almost mystical virtue which schoolmasters claim for them; they seem to me to lead to ambition, jealousy, and embittered partisan feeling, quite as often as to anything else. Yet not to like them is a misfortune, because it cuts you off from companionship with many excellent people who can be approached in no other way. A misfortune, not a vice; for it is involuntary. I had tried to like games and failed. That impulse had been left out of my make-up; I was to games, as the proverb has it, like an ass to the harp."
On his tutor:
"I have said that he was almost wholly logical; but not quite. He had been a Presbyterian and was now an Atheist. He spent Sunday, as he spent most of his time on week-days, working in his garden. But one curious trait from his Presbyterian youth survived. He always, on Sundays, gardened in a different, and slightly more respectable, suit. An Ulster Scot may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his week-day clothes on the Sabbath.
Having said that he was an Atheist, I hasten to add that he was a "Rationalist" of the old, high and dry nineteenth-century type. For Atheism has come down in the world since those days, and mixed itself with politics and learned to dabble in dirt. The anonymous donor who now sends me anti-God magazines hopes, no doubt, to hurt the Christian in me; he really hurts the ex-Atheist. I am ashamed that my old mates and (which matters much more) Kirk's old mates should have sunk to what they are now. It was different then; even McCabe wrote like a man. At the time when I knew him, the fuel of Kirk's Atheism was chiefly of the anthropological and pessimistic kind. He was great on The Golden Bough and Schopenhauer."
Not every bad experience is “trauma”.
Thank you! That is a severely overused and abused word these days!
> Where are the people saying "Well personally I had a great time at school, but objectively it was useless"?
I generally liked school and I'm not sure most of it was useful.
I still use math a bit. I use basic math in everyday tasks. I use more advanced math like algebra, trig, linear algebra and some calculus a little bit as a programmer. It's not the bulk of my work, but it comes up here and there. I appreciate learning math in school in particular because it's something I probably wouldn't have learned on my own initiative.
But I seem to be in a very small minority of people who have used calculus outside of school. And for much of what we learned, even stuff I strongly feel everyone should know, it's hard to argue that the knowledge actually helps them in life. Does it really matter if someone doesn't know that dinosaurs existed? The impact would be the same as not knowing what unicorns are: you'll miss out on some cultural references. You might not appreciate Jurassic Park as much. You might have an embarrassing conversation with a friend who assumes you know that dinosaurs existed. But the same could be said about unicorns and we don't teach them in school.
I'd say the same about most of what we learned. The main use of most of it is simply that other people also know the same facts and can reference them. You can write a song that references that the Earth revolves around the sun and people will understand. Education is supposed to be more than that. You can gain shared cultural knowledge by watching a Harry Potter movie or listening to the latest celebrity gossip. The facts we learn in school are supposed to be more useful than that.
Learning how to read and write, and learning basic math are useful for most people. But what about the rest of school?
The thing about school is that just because it’s taught doesn’t mean that a student learns it. Not even just the bad students but it’s really not that hard to get decent grades while doing the bare minimum. Of course that doesn’t look good for schools but that’s less about the concept than the execution. This is probably why homeschoolers do better, because the parent is making sure you actually learn the facts instead of just this broad based test that can be meta gamed.
Another thing that we don’t really learn by rote. It’s very difficult and will easily be forgotten. But we also don’t really learn by concepts either. Those ideas just seem too abstract and the student won’t pick it up. We learn through context, which is why people learn more Roman history through memes than through school. Not only are they funny but the little picture makes it more “real” than just reading words. That’s why history classes should just historically accurate, but still engaging, tv shows that tell a coherent story. It’s not as dense as a textbook but students will pick up more and then when they do read a textbook, it will feel more alive. There are ways to do education better. We’re not really trying anything that could be effective.