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'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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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."
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
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?
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).
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?
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
<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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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").
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...'
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
Are you not? Why?
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."
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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?
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.
What they want to buy is the credential, not necessarily the education itself. :/
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.
>(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
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.
[Rosane Rosana-Dan voice] Never mind....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
*applause*
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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?
> 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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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").