As someone homeschooled in a fairly conservative Christian environment I have known dozens of others such as myself, and I can say with confidence that you would have been the exception rather than the rule. It honestly baffles me to wonder where all these horror stories of bad parents and miserable kids come from, because growing up I knew almost no one who was deeply at odds with their parents, and now as a (mostly) adult, this remains true. For more info about my experience, you can see below by searching my name
There are two words spelled “desert”, one of which is pronounced like “dessert”. Your “just deserts” are what you “deserve” (which may or may not involve dessert, depending on whether you ate all of your vegetables)
Though etymologically the two words pronounced "dessert" are the same. The reason sweet dishes at the end of a meal are called that way isn't that no people live in them.
The same root of 'serve' with a different prefix: one is de-sert and the other is dis-sert, both filtered through French (apparently a desert is what you deserve but a dessert is a "disservice", i.e. what you have when the food service is removed).
Actually, desert (as in what you deserve) and dessert (as in the thing that you eat after all of the courses have been cleared from the table) link up etymologically in the French "deservir" which denoted descent. The former word dates back to the late Latin servir while the latter shows up in mid 16th century France. Even today, both can still be sweet!
Desert is off on its own although it was spelled "desart" in the 18th century, which we should maybe return to using so as to lessen an already crowded field?
(Note: I had to delete my original post because I misspelled the final desert as dessert!)
marxbro1917, you are to be congratulated on your willingness to struggle through dense texts, a skill that does have real value. But personally, I find that's much easier to do when the subject of the text really interests me, as I presume it does in your case with Marx. But when a dense text does not hold inherent interest for the struggling reader, the likeliest outcome is not enlightenment but sleep.
I kinda feel the materialist view of history would mesh fairly well with some aspects of rationalist thought, especially some of the game theoretical ones, so I've always wanted this too.
It's not that weird, because the respecting-enemies thing was said to be specific to Freddie, not Scott. And it's entirely possible to judge DeBoer's writing on education on its own grounds without having to read Marx first. DeBoer may be writing from a Marxist perspective, but he didn't write his book just for students of Marx.
If people aren't familiar with Freddie they may be surprised he actually favors equality of results rather than (the more popular among the American political center) equality of opportunity. That makes Freddie's Marxist relevant, although if he'd been an anarcho-syndicalist that could have served the same purpose of illustrating his distance from the political center.
He's explaining to bourgeois Americans what Freddie's positions are in categories they would understand. And "equality of results" sounds an awful lot like "to each according to his needs".
There is both geographical and generational variation here, I think. My experience in England is that bourgeois opposition to swearing is rare among those born after perhaps 1960, but that some working class communities - especially in places that had a strong Methodist presence - preserve it. I've got far more black looks for swearing in a pub in a Northumbrian mining town than I ever have in bougie old Oxfordshire.
You could improve your average by writing about other parts of your life and opinions. For example, how was your school experience? Has it affected your opinions about politics or anything else?
I don't know whether this is a direct answer, but you seem to assume that there are rules for social engagement, and if you don't break the rules (rules that you seem to have chosen according to your preferences), then you don't have to listen to any criticism of what you're doing.
Unfortunately, I'm not very interested in Marx, and you write about getting Marx right a *lot*. I don't see any way for you to make that more interesting to me, and probably not to other people.
Once upon a time I lived a large part of my online life on the site metafilter. The mods there referred to behavior such as yours as "axe-grinding". It was a ban-worthy offense because axe-grindy people are exhausting to deal with -- they tend to suck up all of the oxygen in the room, meaning they distract from the main event. They verge on being spammers.
Here in this thread you've used the presence of the word "Marx" in the body of the post to tenuously connect it back your favorite topic of how that one time Scott said this one thing about Marxism and he was wrong and let's continue to talk about it forever.
I get it -- you want a direct response and you're willing to be persistent about it. There are more constructive ways to go about this though. Why don't you write a post about this of your own that lays out your whole case in detail and then link to it and ask for responses in the next open thread?
Ehh, insistent cluelessness doesn't seem ban-worthy and if I were Scott I wouldn't want to set such a precedent. Personally I'm learning to get a certain amount of entertainment out of marxbro1917's predictable comments, kind of like watching reality TV or something. It helps to remember that as a matter of intellectual charity I can't take his stuff seriously-- he's practically a straw man for Marxism.
> For example, can you show that anything I've said about Marxism is a 'straw man' as compared to what Marx said?
Honestly I've read a lot of your comments, and have learned nearly nothing about Marxism from them. If you could take the time to explain your interpretation of Marxism, rather than merely throwing around accusations that others are interpreting it wrong, you wouldn't be getting so much flak.
I am increasingly liking the idea of volume limits -- X comments per person per unit time. (Per post or across all of them, I'm not sure it matters much.)
I happen to be a fan of token-bucket systems, so perhaps something like: you get one comment-token when a post goes live, and another one for each hour that passes after that. You can accumulate up to, say, 6. (And obviously spending a token lets you make a comment.)
You could also do something like HN based on nesting depth. Perhaps quadratic: a top-level comment can only be replied after 1 minute, a second-level comment after 4 minutes, a third-level comment after 9 minutes...
But really, I think 11 comments in 3 hours, of which about 9 are essentially (and predictably) offtopic, is worth just banning and moving on.
One of the things I like about blogging's erosion of the writer vs commenter is that commenters can easily start their own blogs. I would recommend you do that so niche discussions can move there.
What you’re describing is you coming in, starting flame wars, and eventually wearing out your conversation partners through sheer insistence alone. You make isolated demands for rigor around anything even remotely having to do with Marx. If the discussion has nothing to do with Marx, you somehow manage to bring Marx into it anyway.
Rationalists write a large volume of *interesting* text. You haven’t hit that bar, not even close. Your writing is one-note and not at all illuminating. The most common thing you do is just demand that people go back to primary sources and read Marx directly, which is not a reasonable demand of anyone’s time. You do this as if to cast shame on the people that haven’t read it, and as a method of invalidating any criticism related to communism and Marxism that isn’t perfectly aligned with Marx’s original writings.
You have the capacity to be much better. You can describe Marx’s ideas in your own words, much like Scott did here for this book. You can describe how this relates to the topic at hand, rather than just admonishing Scott for not reading Marx for the umpteenth time. You can make people *interested* in Marx by talking about what you personally got from the primary sources.
So far, you haven’t been doing that. You’ve been filling up comment section after comment section with admonitions, goading people into arguing with you, and nitpicking people until their frustration gets the best of them. You can do better.
I fully expect you now want to reply to this with a dismissal, or a rebuttal, or a nitpick of some sort where you say “technically, I didn’t do this” or “can you prove where I did this”, at which point I will give up because going through your comment history to win an argument with you is not worth my time. My point is not to win this argument with you. My point is to express what it feels like to read your comments, and to impress on you that if what you want is to actually discuss Marx’s ideas, then you’re doing it badly and making people hate both you and Marx.
In other words: you’re treating discussion like a competition.
It feels like you’re commenting to “win” and to make yourself feel smart e.g.:
“Nerds like myself often highly value reading difficult, dense texts like Marx. I find it interesting and enlightening that Scott Alexander apparently does not value this.”
Instead of using it to actually come to a shared understanding with other people.
Treating every conversation like an adversarial competition is arguably a bullying tactic, and so you shouldn’t be surprised that it makes people want to not deal with you anymore.
I don't think banning is necessary as long as people who don't want to read a comment thread can just collapse it. Unfortunately Substack doesn't seem to support that yet.
I would oppose volume limits. This is already my eighth comment on this post and I don't think I'm being in any way excessive. There are a lot of different subtopics branching off the main post. I also wrote 21 comments on the coronavirus open thread, and I'd invite critique on any of them but so far they all seem to have passed without bothering anyone.
I suspect there are a lot of people who are making a large number of comments per post but you aren't noticing the volume because they aren't drawing your attention.
Marxbro is by far the most interesting commenter on ACX and it's not even a competition. He's the only one who brings actual intellectual diversity in the usual tedium of milequetoast liberalism peppered with the occasional mask-slipping posts about IQ and race. If he were banned my respect for Scott would be considerably lower.
People who use the phrase 'mask-slipping' are invariably uncharitable wokescolds. If the prevailing view here is indeed 'milquetoast liberalism', then what exactly is the mask supposed to be concealing? Or if, as the phrase implies, they're secretly fash, then you should be applauding the intellectual diversity of a site that brings together Marxists with crypto-fascists.
No, I agree - and kudos for the Mask reference, by the way; I enjoyed it - but I think the accusation of 'mask-slipping is made in bad faith here. It's suggesting that anyone who subscribes to, or even entertains, the Idea That Must Not Be Named is likely far-right or concealing some unsavoury political view.
One of the great virtues of this blog, and the rationalist blogosphere more generally, is the ability to discuss issues like that one with intellectual candour without worrying that a) you're just giving succour to someone who is a genuine racist or b) that the people you're talking to will accuse you of racism for doing so.
'One of the great virtues of this blog, and the rationalist blogosphere more generally, is the ability to discuss issues like that one with intellectual candour without worrying that a) you're just giving succour to someone who is a genuine racist or b) that the people you're talking to will accuse you of racism for doing so.'
A) would only be true if the community didn't contain any racists? What's the reason for thinking that?
You really find someone telling someone that what they've said about Marx's view is wrong over and over again, without elaborating on what Marx's views actually are "interesting"?
If Marxbro had pointed out some relevant things Marx said about education, his posts on this thread would be interesting. Otherwise they amount to no more than relentless complaints that Scott is unfairly dismissive of the works of Marx. Which may well be true, but once would be enough to point it out.
Hey, why not do this corrective work in a manner which does not disrupt the comment threads as much. You have to agree that bringing up mistakes from old posts are often a bit of-topic, and could be better explained fully also to people who have not read your comments on earlier posts. Maybe you could make a post somewhere called “litany of Scott’s anti-marxist mistakes”, and post a link to this in every blogpost - with a note for every new sin you have added to the doc from the post. It could then be legible to people who would not know what you are talking about when you mention “gestalt impression”, without being as noisy.
If the list was well written and made some good points I personally would be very interested in seeing Scott answer it in depth; even though I feel he is mostly justified in not responding to each (sometimes a bit nitpicky - I mean citations for a joke post, really?) comment you make.
I would have loved to see you comment what Marx said about education, or what you think a Marxist approach to the topic would be, in relation to the blogpost - but I have not seen it because of focus on earlier mistakes.
People! Stop interacting with this guy. Each time he claims Scott mischaracterized Marx and demands “primary sources” to support Scott’s characterization. Each time commentators provide primary sources (including myself) showing Scott’s interpretation of Marx was reasonable. He never responds and never cites primary sources himself. He gives no indication of having read anything by Marx or having anything other than a superficial knowledge of Marx.
You have never responded to the many people citing Marx’s words to you and don’t appear to be familiar with his work. Scott’s characterization would be uncontroversial to almost anyone familiar with Marx’s work.
Even the <i>phrase</i> "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".
Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "guy who missed some HTML cursive or whatever"
When I had my son apply to a charter high school founded by teachers at his middle school, I was told that admission was by lottery only, but the parents had to show up in person to find out if their child was picked at random.
When I showed up to find out if my son's name was on the list, the person holding the list was his old middle school math teacher. I nervously asked if he'd been picked in the lottery? His teacher said, without looking at the list: "Of course he did." I asked if he could check the list just to make sure. The charter school teacher said: "Don't worry about it. He's in."
I'm no expert, but I was under the impression that the hoops to get into charter schools were mostly regulatory and likely in place to "defend" public school systems and teachers (not nominally but effectively).
Not really. We already know that All Good Things are Correlated. IQ is correlated with everything positive. Bigger support networks, better mental health, more involved parenting, fewer divorces, better home environments, lower lead intake, lower trauma incidence, etc. And all that stuff is in turn correlated with all the rest of that stuff.
This isn't evidence that IQ is heritable (let alone genetic); it's evidence that the tangled ball of all-positive-characteristics is heritable. Which absolutely noone argues with. The disagreements are about which part of the giant-ball-of-goodness is driving the heritability (wealth? IQ? Social contacts? Concientiousness? Agreeableness/Pro-social instincts?) and whether that driver is genetic.
This is trivially false. The heritability of behavior is extremely controversial amongst the political left (except sexuality, despite the fact that the heritability of sexual orientation is lower than most other aspects of behavior).
>The disagreements are about which part of the giant-ball-of-goodness is driving the heritability (wealth? IQ? Social contacts? Concientiousness? Agreeableness/Pro-social instincts?) and whether that driver is genetic.
We have heritability studies for IQ specifically, and its very high. You're acting like its some great mystery - it's not. Twin and sibling studies demonstrate that the impact of shared environment explains almost none of the concordance in IQ between identical twins.
My impression came mostly from this podcast, which described basically trying to filter based on parents' dedication. (Which presumably correlates with parents' ability to supervise kids doing homework and other stuff that helps with academics.) https://www.econtalk.org/robert-pondiscio-on-how-the-other-half-learns/
An example was appointments for the child to be fitted for a uniform as a requirement for entering the lottery.
By the way, I used to be a true believer in the social science theory that the amount of money spent by a school per pupil has no influence on anything. However, seeing what a very well-run private school administration can do with a whole lot of money to spend has made me more skeptical.
I attended a charter school all 4 years quite recently. Admissions was entirely by lottery, open to everyone in the district. I can tell you that even in freshman year, the student body was not even remotely close to representative of normal kids; it was basically an entire school of the kids who would normally be in gifted / accelerated programs. And by graduation, it was even more refined to super talented & smart people, because the students who left to go back to their local normal schools were mostly from the rear of the pack.
I think that I got a lot better of an education there than I would have at my local school, and I would attribute more of that to the quality of my classmates than to the teachers or curriculum , though both of which were also better.
Do you have a good sense of why it started out so heavily selected? Was it just that smarter kids were more interested in going there, or did they have some kind of filter mechanism?
Are we opposed to using votes to mean "this is correct" on ACX? I'm not sure if I should indicate that this conforms to my own research on the topic by posting a small comment or clicking the heart button.
So you have to have a certain amount of investment in order to figure out what's a "good" school to get into and how to apply to it. You also have to be willing to invest a certain amount of ongoing effort into your kid's school -- a charter school will usually not be as convenient as sending your kid to the literally closest public school. Your kid may not actually want to go to the charter school, if their friends from a lower school level/the neighbors are going to the close-by public school, so you have to override them.
None of these are gigantic burdens, but you put them together and you get a pretty strong effect where the kids who go to the district's best charter schools are the ones whose parents are conscientious and invested in education.
The experience described above about attending charter schools only noted that the initial class was not representative of the overall school population. It did not, however, know if it was representative of the losing lottery applicants.
At the charter school where I had my son apply, they had a lot of hoops to jump through to winnow down to the more education-oriented parents: e.g., applications had to be dropped off in person and you had to come in person to find out if your child had been chosen.
Also, the more education-oriented parents were aware that this charter high school was being started by the best teachers at the middle school. The more apathetic parents likely didn't agree that these were the best teachers or didn't know or didn't care.
It's at least partially selecting for people who have more free time. If someone is a single parent working two full time jobs to pay rent, they probably don't have the time and definitely don't have the energy to do those type of things. Perhaps that's not the average case, but certainly the people who have the most money to start with are going to be the people who have the most ability to get their kids through those processes.
There's also a self-perpetuating character to this. Once the school has a reputation for being a "school for smart kids," parents whose kids might qualify just don't bother to apply because they think that they won't be accepted.
A lot of charter school advocates also underestimate the importance of logistics. If you have two full-time working parents in inflexible jobs, sending a kid across town to a charter school is often not feasible. Getting a kid to an inconveniently located school requires resources.
There is obvious bias in who applies, but that’s why they study charter lotteries that are oversubscribed and compare the winners to the losers. The winners do better.
If the comment above is accurate, a precondition for being a winner is that your parents attend the drawing in person. That's a nonrandom sample, and probably also implies that other nonrandom interventions are happening both before and during the lottery.
And to complete the thought: the losers go back to public school, and their classmates will be kids whose parents didn't participate in the lottery. Thus, in general, a performance difference between charter and non-charter can potentially be explained by differences in the composition of classmates rather than differences in the schools themselves. (man, science is hard.)
You know, to be perfectly honest, I do sometimes wonder to what extent the students themselves help or hinder a learning environment. The focus is always on the teachers but to be honest I found in high school especially a huuuuuge amount of time was taken up by those completely unmotivated and also this had the more pernicious and hidden effect of limiting the kind of activities and teaching strategies that the teacher could do in the first place (a cool activity but one that requires effort isn’t possible if there’s too much apathy)
Judith Rich Harris' emphasis on the impact of peer culture is sadly neglected, for the most part, in education debates. She points out that children adopt the language of their peers rather than their parents, whether or not their friends smoke is a better predictor of smoking then parents smoking, etc. Peer culture is immensely important in learning.
This is neglected? Seems to me like it drives trillions of dollars of economic activity - that concern is exactly what "good school districts" mean in practice.
De facto, yes, but the public policy debate rarely discusses the importance of peers and peer culture. If peer attitudes and behaviors were regarded as more important for student outcomes than, say, curriculum, teacher training and credentials, expenditures, etc. then we'd be having a very different public conversation on educational policy and its relationship to outcomes. Poor parents who can't afford "good school districts" might be even more aggressive than they currently are on behalf of school choice.
The late Ed Lazear had a fascinating simple model of classroom interruptions and ability that fits the stylized facts about class size and achievement and a few others.
That was interesting just for the idea on the title page, that one reason it's hard to find correlations between class size and success is that the size of class consistent with good learning depends on the level of discipline among the students.
There are others, such as refusal to backfill. Everything can be gamed. It is in the best interest of charter schools to manipulate the lotteries, very much including their financial best interest. And in many cases they are more or less operating on the honor system. To not assume fraud would be profoundly foolish.
The deeper question is this: if the charter advantage is as powerful as proponents claim, why would the schools that we know cheated have cheated at all? Why would they have felt the need, if the magic charter school dust was all it took?
Because of choice. You are forced to go to public schools, so all the school administrators need to do to keep their jobs is to show good numbers and they're good. In wealthy areas, the parents have a much more vested interest, but otherwise, your customers—students and parents who can't move to wealthy areas—are always forced to go back. Therefore, there isn't as much incentive to perform as great as charter schools where there is the threat of closure.
That's not actually an answer to the question Freddie asked.
The actual answer is that the incentive for charter schools to cheat exists regardless of whether they really are better, at least within the range that seems plausible. Even if they really do give better outcomes than normal public schools on the margin, gaming the system to make the difference look bigger can only help them.
Yes, pretty obviously this. For example, someone might write a book saying "shut down all charter schools because, while they do get better results, this is all just an illusion". So it's nice if the gap is big enough to make that person look wrong, even if you have to cheat a little.
More generally, you might both believe in your secret sauce and be a little uncertain of how soon - if ever - it will be able to deliver results. So you cheat.
Even if you have magic teaching dust it doesn't follow that it works uniformly or that you wouldn't still prefer more enthusiastic kids and parents over kids with behavioral issues and bad parents.
The real question is how much gain happens because in a group of motivated students, the social prestige revolves more around academic success. That is, how much do the outcomes show that it's beneficial for high-performers to get clumped together so that they can focus on learning rather than socialization. What if spreading the high and low- performance/study discipline students into a homogenous distribution might hinder the former without changing much for the latter?
I think "focus on learning rather than socialization" is an understatement of the problem as it manifests in a lot of schools. In the schools which are pulling down the average of our national scores, it's often the case that few students feel like it's socially acceptable among their peers to care about learning at all.
It's not either/or. Many cheaters in gaming and sports were excellent players who wanted an extra boost. Even if charter school magic is real, selection effects are presumably just as or even more powerful. As long as oversight is lax, why report 10% higher test scores when you can report 25% higher test scores?
I'm much more of a capitalist than you are, but even I think there's a good reason for governments to do truth-in-advertising regulations. I agree that fraud here is bad, but I think there's vastly more reasonable fixes than banning charters.
By definition, they select for people who are not satisfied with the public schools and have enough initiative to make an effort. That is a pretty significant filter, by itself. But I wouldn't call it cheating or "rigging" their results.
This essay went an interesting direction in the end. I guess I see a few types of concerns:
1) Signalling: How do we make sure the right competency signals exist in a post-school world. If I'm a high-IQ sociopath, then I will (presumably) fail school but may pass IQ tests.
2) How will we ensure basic competencies? I don't think the current model does a great job, but I get the feeling that many home-schooled children are products of self-selection.
3) How do we wish to warehouse children until they're adults?
I get the impression that the US likely does a terrible job at all of this relative to other nations. However, I am still interested in the sorts of responses.
(Also that tie-in with intelligence & worth is an interesting one, and one that is really hard to unpack in a good way. I get the feeling that IQ differences matter less after certain thresholds relative to personality dimensions. )
1. You’re going to want participation in group activities for that one. Chess club, softball league, or whatever.
2. GED or SAT tests.
3. We don’t. Instead we just let them run around outside all day every day if that’s what they’re into, or let them sit inside and read or play computer games, or let them get part time jobs for spending money, or whatever. Basically their lives will be like summer vacation all year long.
I just realized I was thinking in terms of my childhood in small town Americana, and that it might be somewhat more necessary to warehouse your children if you live in a place like San Francisco, where people feel obligated to maintain up to date maps of human sidewalk feces.
First, I won't accept that without evidence. Second, preemptive incarceration is not an acceptable crime prevention tool in any other context, and I don't think it should be acceptable for children either.
I suspect you are broadly correct. Children are not adults.
Or to put it another way: when my high-IQ wife was young and let roam free without supervision, she & her friends played with explosives.(no joke!)
I mean, no matter where we start on this. Society has already come to the conclusion children are not to be trusted alone. So some sort of warehousing makes sense, even if the current school system isn't appropriate.
Children were able to be raised for thousands of years without anything like "warehouses". Typically the slightly older children would look after the slightly younger ones. "It takes a village" was the expression taken up by Hillary Clinton, but that doesn't imply it takes a warehouse.
They were also more fungible thousands of years ago too. Did you not notice in the Book of Job that it was considered adequate for God to replace Job's dead children with a new set of living children?
Child warehouses are a modern necessity in the same sense as accounting, tax systems, or the internet. I'm a bit tongue in cheek, but not wildly so. We can talk about a more Montessori-based childcare system, or a million other things, but risk-tolerance has gone down over the last thousand years, and this drives a lot about child care & management. Most of the rest of the system has also adapted to remove this as a reasonable possibility.
I think risk-tolerance is inconsistent. Parents will subject their children to certain risks on their own, and schools may acceptably subject them to certain risks, while other ones will get them sued.
For thousands of years, children only needed to be illiterate hunter gatherers And they wil form gangs and hunt by instinct. Its just that in in the context of a modern society, a hunting gang is a criminal gang.
I played with lots of explosives and fire as a kid, despite being "smart" in the formal-education and IQ senses. I turned out fine. Kids are a lot more resilient and less abjectly stupid than we give them credit for. I am of the opinion that kids need a chance to play with dangerous stuff and subvert authority in porwntially harmful ways -whether it's building a rickety clubhouse out of scrap wood or riding around dirt roads on the roof of a joyride van. It teaches them self-reliance, the natural consequences of their actions, and the extent of their power over the world.
I wouldn't be surprised if you did turn out fine, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the death rate, or rate at which children are maimed would be higher under those circumstances. It gets really hard doing that utilitarian calculus where "Johnny loses a foot", and most heuristics would tell us that Johnny losing a foot outweighs most non-quantifiable outcomes.
Well, I set our garage on fire when I was only four, before schooling was an issue. I put it out with the garden hose before it did more than char a bit of the wood.
I can think of half a dozen friends who played with explosives, and I remember no stories of injuries in a high school with 800 students per class level. My father played with explosives throughout his high school and college years.
I remember coming home after hearing the kid in front of me say you should smoosh the matchheads in a pipe bomb tightly to make sure you have a good bang. He had street cred from a bandaged hand and a bandaged eye after a couple weeks off from school.
And my parents were sharing academic gossip. Someone had wanted to give a lecture to my school about anorexia risks to the prettiest, most popular girls. Principal said no, given the results of a previous year's lecture about the risks to the boldest young fellows from making homemade fireworks and even pipe bombs.
Hong Kong used to have no anorexia. Then Hong Kong media did a series about the risk to the prettiest, most popular girls from anorexia. Since then Hong Kong has anorexia. 'Crazy Like Us', Ethan Watters.
You raise an interesting question-- it used to be pretty common for kids (smart kids?) to play with explosives, but I haven't seen mention anywhere of injuries or deaths resulting from that. Does it just not get mentioned because it would interfere with light-hearted stories about playing with explosives, or were injuries actually very rare?
I actually know quite a few tales of incidents when kids played with explosives. It still happens a lot every year in Germany, not only among kids, at the end of the year, because of our obsession with personal fireworks on new years eve.
I've personally produced quite some impressive fireworks several decades ago when I was younger. Some left overs served me well end of 2020, because selling fireworks was forbidden due to the Corona crisis. But I was more into flames then explosions, so my mishaps didn't turn into a catastrophe back then.
I suspect injuries are somewhat rare, but I also have heard about stories where somebody is maimed from an explosive. In that social circle, I believe there was one maiming??? But I'd have to consult my wife, as it isn't my story, and I may be mixing up her life with somebody else's childhood explosive-maiming story.
1) If you want to signal your capabilities, then in a system where public funding is gone, you can buy whatever products to complete that demonstrate it - and you will only do what is actually profitable for you to do.
"If I'm a high-IQ sociopath, then I will (presumably) fail school but may pass IQ tests."
I failed at school but do well on standardized tests. I believe I would be more accurately described as a 'high-IQ neurotic.' I better indication of high-IQ sociopathy is achievement of an MBA or appointment as CEO.
Hi J'myle, in context the comment is just to rebut the idea that IQ and pass rates in education measure similar things.
In the case of sociopathy, the idea is that a sociopath can do well on a cognitive test, but may lack conscientiousness and/or executive function sufficient to succeed in formal education.
An MBA or CEO appointment really doesn't do much to separate things out, as non-psychopaths have attained both statuses, and attaining a status isn't a good sign that one oughtn't attain a status.
In any case, there are multiple reasons why a person can have high IQ and fail schooling. Many of them will relate to things like conscientiousness and/or executive function.
Working hard is a talent, same as looks or smarts. If it turned out that educational outcomes were more correlated with executive function than IQ, I don't think DeBoer would be any happier.
I understand his objection to be with any kind of false equivalency between traits and worth. If we traded the cult of smarts for the cult of hard graft, it wouldn't be a better world for DeBoer (as far as I understand Scott's explanation of what Scott thinks DeBoer thinks, anyway...)
I find it hard to believe that actions, like consistent work / working hard (however you would like to define it), could be considered as inherent as genotype or phenotype. Environment certainly has an impact on ones ability to 'work hard'.
Yeah I completely agree environment likely as a huge impact on the choices one makes, such as whether to work hard or goof off.
It's not clear to me why it would matter to our judgement of someone's intrinsic worth whether their traits are the product of genes or of circumstance, though.
Imagine it's the night before a big exam, and both Alice, Bob and Claire get a message from their friends asking them to come out for a drink.
Alice is genetically high scrupulosity and is prone to worrying, so she turns down the offer in favour of some last minute studying and a good night's sleep. She does well on the exam.
Bob has ADHD and finds it hard to follow through on things. He finds procrastination pretty tempting and wants to say yes. However, he came from a stable and understanding family who have instilled values around the importance of education and of working hard to get ahead. He turns down the offer and does well on the exam.
Claire has no particular natural traits that make her a sticker or a quitter. She tends to make time for the things she cares about, but her parents have never really seen the point of education and have never supported her schooling. Her mother often tells her that having kids is the end of freedom, and to have fun while she's young. Claire decides that she'd rather die unqualified and happy than a lonely and boring A student, so she goes out and parties until 3am. She flunks the exam and ends up in a miserable and unfulfilling job.
Alice, Bob and Claire are equally smart. Alice and Bob have advantages to their ability to work hard and meet commitments - Alice has genetically influenced personality traits, and Bob has the advantage of a good work ethic instilled at home. Claire has none of these things and as a result isn't much of a hard worker.
I'm with Scott that the Alices and Bobs of this world make better lawyers and doctors than Claire would. If I were interviewing for a job I'd want to hire them instead of Claire. But it doesn't seem to me that Claire 'deserves' to live in a small house, struggle to feed her kids, and work a boring job to make ends meet - even though from one perspective it looks like she 'wasted' her intelligence, she was never set up for success. It still feels like Alice and Bob are lucky in their personalities, and Claire is unlucky, just as if they were smarter than her.
DeBoer presumably thinks the solution here is a Marxist revolution and a complete decoupling of occupation from wealth. I'd disagree - I think incenticising achievement is the best way to get it, and I'm willing to accept wealth inequity to get a more functional society. However, I do think society has a duty of care to people like Claire and that progressive taxation and a social net is a good way to balance out some of Alice and Bob's good fortune at being high functioning people to offset Claire's bad luck at being a washout.
Do we have to assume that Claire is also incapable of learning that there's a connection between conscientiousness and getting more material goods or a more interesting job, if she finds that those are important to her?
Thanks for this comment. That's certainly one way to end up with a Claire - either she might not acknowledge that others work harder, or she might attribute their success to being more naturally talented.
Alternatively she might just be very akrasic - "I know I need to study and every time this happens I promise myself I'll try harder, but in the moment I always have a ready excuse that lets me off the hook". You could model this as a lack of willpower, unusually sharp future discounting, lack of reflective self-awareness - but in any case there's definitely a kind of person who is bad at doing things they know they need to do. (I suppose I said Claire is generally OK at sticking with things she really cares about, so perhaps we should call this new archetype 'Dave').
People like Claire and Dave seem to exist, one way or another, and it's hard to imagine there's something other than nature and nurture that makes them behave the way they do.
I do not believe this is true. I have not worked particularly hard in my life. As a result, I am paid about half as much as my equally talented peers that graduated from the same law school. Meanwhile I still keep in touch with people from my high school that were untalented, but hard workers. I make approximately twice as much as them. This situation does not seem unique. No matter how hard they work, they can never do the job I have. Meanwhile, when I am at my job, I take breaks to read articles like this and post comments like this.
I think there are likely thresholds where hard-work takes precedence over IQ, and IQ takes precedence over hard work. If you're high-IQ enough, then diligence (or other factors) likely explains outcomes more. However, until you're there, IQ is generally very important, if not more important.
I could be wrong though & would be happy to hear from others. If I had to guess, this threshold situation is partially a result of how our signalling systems work. Or to put it another way: once you're all smart enough to pass the bar exam, the bigger question is who does more "stuff".
Yes, both are important and not always in equal measures. Musk is a billionaire because he is both a genius and a workaholic. If he was 10% less genius but 10% more workaholic, or vice versa, hard to say.
When I was reading the book, I found the term "meritocracy" to be one of the worst issues. I think the problem with it is ultimately that people-like-Scott and people-like-DeBoer use it in different ways. Scott defines "meritocracy is when people who are good at a thing do that thing - teachers should be people who are good at teaching, construction workers should be people who are good at construction work, surgeons should be people who are good at surgery, and so on." Fairly obviously good, and that's how even all communist countries have worked. DeBoer defines it more like "meritocracy is when people who are good at things have a good life while people who are bad at things have a bad life." This seems bad, given the assumption that everyone should have a good life and you can't really improve on how good you are at different skills.
Notably, you can achieve the first "meritocracy" while avoiding the second "meritocracy"! Perhaps it's not possible given human psychology, but at least theoretically you could have people assigned to jobs that they are good at while still letting everyone have the same lifestyle. I suspect that's what DeBoer wants, but his conflation of terminology helps no one.
We really really just need to get rid of "meritocracy" and its cognates and replace them with "selecting/screening for ability" or similar and then debate the tradeoffs and uses of that. I usually dislike language policing, but this term replacement would be an unalloyed good: it not only makes thought and expression clearer but deprives opponents of ability-based selection of a rhetorical weapon they can use to unfairly smear supporters of such selection as elitists.
To be specific: saying "ability-based selection" instead of "meritocracy" makes it clear that the point of selection, screening, sorting, whatever you want to call it is *not* to set the worthier above the less-worthy. Rather it is to put the more-able-in-some-dimension in an organizational/institutional environment that lets them make the most productive use of that dimension of their ability. Any rational set of social institutions, be it libertarian or socialist or social-democratic or whatever, should want to do this. And if we can agree on that then we can get onto harder and more useful questions, like how to tradeoff the inevitable biases and unfairnesses of real-world selection processes against the utility of even imperfect sorting by ability.
I've watched some Star Trek, but not all that much. Do we ever get to see the lives of people who don't have prestigious jobs like, starship officer, to see how the demanding-but-unglamourous jobs get done?
Honestly, the closest I see is DS9, however, that has a lot of capitalist intermixings as seen with the role Quark plays in the entire system. Quark literally represents their economy. The only unglamorous character I believe I've seen is Rom, and... yeah... he isn't a particularly helpful example.
Rom eventually enlists in the Bajoran Militia and becomes a Maintenance Engineer FC because he’s an engineering genius. He has one of the most beautiful character arcs in DS9.
Honestly the whole thing is very poorly thought-out in Trek, and the latest episodes of Discovery have seen a bit of subversion of it.
However...
Picard's brother was a winemaker. He was presented in TNG as living more or less exactly the life that a winemaker in France would have been living in the mid-20th century. He was critical of Picard for seeking prestige in space rather than living up to his family's expectations of winemaking. The two had a fist fight. Later, his character was revealed to have died in a fire.
Sisko's father was a restauranteur. He made jambalaya in New Orleans. He too was presented in more or less the way a modern New Orleans restaurant owner would have been presented.
So the idea seems to be that regular 20th/21st century occupations still exist on Earth, but people do them out of habit or personal interest in wine/jambalaya/etc. more than out of the necessity to earn a living.
It's never explained why the Picards can own a vineyard and a chateau or what the criteria are to be allowed to operate a cajun restaurant in a dense city, absent the ability to actually sell anything that you make. The series Picard critiques this implicitly when a black woman character who lives in a trailer and has a drug problem essentially accuses Picard of white privilege because he gets to live in a big chateau with his Romulan servants and his antique furniture and she's stuck in a trailer growing space marijuana for her vape stick. Needless to say, the fan base was... let's say, divided... on this particular critique and the way in which it was made.
But the emerging consensus in canon seems to be that the "postcapitalist utopia" is more propaganda than anything else and structural equalities still exist despite Picard's protestations in TNG that they had moved beyond materialism. DS9 did a good job of interrogating Trek's utopianism and Picard and Disco are cranking that interrogation up to 11, with mixed effects.
I think the actual answer is: Gene Roddenbery died without working out the details and his successors in charge of the franchise don't believe in it and therefore subvert it.
Hah, you say that as if working out the details to a postscarcity utopia is some trivial matter that Gene could have handled if he'd been given a couple more years on this Earth.
I read recently that Gene objected to the plot of "Measure of a Man" because he felt that his utopia wouldn't have lawyers. He thought they wouldn't be needed, because crime would have been eradicated by simply brainwashing anyone who might do crimes into not doing crimes.
It seems to me a lot like Gene defined "utopia" as "a place where things I don't like don't exist" as opposed to some coherent viable system. That's not really a critique - I love Trek, obviously - but its social commentary was more about allegory and less about detailed worldbuilding of space communism.
Hmm, no, I think Gene didn't work out the details at all, and just assumed them and expected everyone else to share his assumptions.
But, while he was alive, you had the option of just asking him what his assumptions were and then writing to them. Once he was dead, you either had to find someone else with the same assumptions or actually work out a coherent system.
They did neither, they just decided it wouldn't work and write Trek as being decidedly a potemkin utopia.
Haven't you ever, even temporarily longed for a simple, low-stress job where the chance of failure is low, or where failure wouldn't have catastrophic consequences for anyone who depended on you? There's a place in the world for people who gravitate toward both prestigious and unprestigious jobs.
I agree that the two senses of meritocracy get unnecessarily conflated.
The first sense of meritocracy is the idea of filling positions with the people who would be the best at the job. This is an amazing piece of social technology, and certainly not the norm in human societies throughout history; the norm is to fill positions through nepotism and back-scratching. Societies and institutions which manage to get their shit together for long enough to practice _some_ form of meritocracy will vastly outperform their peers, at least until they revert to the mean and go back to the old nepotism-and-back-scratching methods.
The second sense of meritocracy is the idea that greater rewards should accrue to the people in the more competitive positions, the ones that require a greater degree of merit. A surgeon gets paid more than a flower salesman. It is at least possible to imagine the first kind of meritocracy without the first -- surgeon positions are highly selective and flower salesman positions aren't, but the surgeon doesn't make any more money than the flower salesman -- but in this society who would want to be a surgeon rather than a flower salesman?
People who like saving lives? People who don't like flowers? Certainly some people become surgeons because of the money but I hardly think all of them do.
I agree, some people would still become surgeons, but the overall quality of surgeons would be lower.
On the upside, the quality of flower salesmen would be higher! Or rather, since flower salesman is a relatively pleasant job, flower salesmen would be selected through nepotism and back-scratching.
Who would do the unpleasant _and_ low-status jobs? No idea.
I suspect that socially necessary unpleasant jobs would very rapidly become prestigious or respected. If we imagine a world, for example, where there has been an abolition of work-based income - for whatever government-policy related reason - then very quickly, our houses would get filled with excess garbage. Our streets would start to overflow with it. And, sooner, rather than later, we would be very thankful to whoever ultimately took the garbage away.
Jobs that are more opaque about their effects - sewage workers who clean out the tunnels, say, and are out of sight out of mind - would probably take a bit longer, but I think ultimately people would be very thankful to whoever it was that made their toilets flush again. We don't have any difficulty considering a medical researcher to be prestigious despite us interacting with their work in only the most peripheral way, after all.
Medical schools are selective, and retain a somewhat medieval guild mentality. Dalits in India who have unpleasant work reserved to them aren't prestigious. My guess is that if we couldn't incentivize necessary but disliked work with money, we'd sentence prisoners to do it (and then start coming up with reasons why more people need to be imprisoned).
In a world where the government has abolished work-based income, I suspect that the next thing that would happen is that someone would come up with a loophole that allows work-based income. I'm envisioning garbagemen who will pick up your garbage, but only in exchange for a blowjob.
> I suspect that socially necessary unpleasant jobs would very rapidly become prestigious or respected.
No, you would get immense corruption where people have to secretly pay (or otherwise compensate) their doctors to get good treatment. We see this in every country where doctors get very low pay.
A useful comparison would be countries where doctors aren't paid as much as the US. E.g. in most western european countries surgeons earn a respectable wage around the level of teachers and other professionals, but not the much higher levels in the US, and they have no shortage of doctors.
If anything you might get more doctors if everyone who wanted to be one could become one without the massive costs of college then medical school.
This is not true according to salary explorer. For example in Germany Average physician salary is ~100K€ and average teacher salary is ~34K€. This is about a multiple of three. In the United States the average teacher salary is $75,000 a year and the average physician salary is $240,000 a year which is slightly higher than a multiple of three. Even a cardiothoracic surgeon only makes a multiple of about 4.5 $343K/yr) while in Germany a CT surgeon averages 183K€/yr (5.2X)
Rewarding people for doing jobs well is one way of sorting people into the jobs they are good at, possibly the only decentralized way that works. But someone who accepted DeBoer's arguments could propose solving that problem with an IQ tax. IQ correlates with lots of positive outcomes in life — that was part of the point of _The Bell Curve_. So if you have a good way of measuring it, one that can't be gamed by people who want to conceal their high IQ, you can tax high IQ people, subsidize low IQ people, and so redistribute the positive outcomes.
The US military sort of follows this model. Everyone who is the same rank gets paid the same, but before enlistment we take an aptitude test to see what we would be good at. An E-3 infantryman ("flower salesman") gets paid the same as an E-3 cryptologic linguist ("surgeon"). Certain jobs suck more than others; imagine being an E-3 cop in the Air Force and your job is to stand in front of a jet for 12 hours. As opposed to an E-3 honor guard member who gets to do drill and ceremony for diplomats at fancy military banquets/possibly the US president (and maybe even meet the president).
Even if it were possible to funnel competent people to the most value-adding jobs, pay them the same as everyone else, and avoid any significant incentive effects, would that even be desirable? Just consider, if Carl is a cashier and Sam is a surgeon, won't Sam have higher status? Maybe we could rewrite status norms to make cashiers as prestigious as surgeons? But, logically, if every job has equal prestige, then none have any. Status-seeking and status-games are innate to human psychology. If people see Sam as high-status, they'll smile at him more often, laugh at his jokes more easily, and listen to his opinions more readily. He'll likely have better mating prospects and a more intact family. There'd still be hierarchy, just motivated by status over profit, providing social rewards, instead of material. Wouldn't DeBoer still find that world deeply unsatisfying?
> Notably, you can achieve the first "meritocracy" while avoiding the second "meritocracy"! Perhaps it's not possible given human psychology, but at least theoretically you could have people assigned to jobs that they are good at while still letting everyone have the same lifestyle.
You don't even have to do that. It's possible to have a baseline below which no one falls (e.g. UBI), so that nobody has a "bad" life, and yet still have a world where surgeons get paid more than flower salesmen.
I think we can divide jobs in two different dimensions; one is the utility they generate for other people, the other is the utility they generate for the person doing the job.
Generally, we pay people according much more to the first than the second - you'd expect that a job that a lot of people enjoy doing to be paid less than one that employees hate, but that's not generally true.
I suspect that if we had a system where people do not have to work on point of starvation (either the US welfare system where you can't claim unemployment indefinitely, or the UK one where you lose your unemployment if you turn down a job offer or leave your job voluntarily), then most jobs wouldn't be much affected, but the unpleasant and badly paid would have to pay a lot more. I bet that jobs like "office toilet cleaner" would get big raises.
Until people redefine "bad" life to include one in which anyone has to confront the horror of inequality, as in, a world in which anyone else has something he can't have. How often do we hear people claim to prefer a society with lower average wealth, and even lower wealth for the least wealthy, as long as it's more "equal"?
"Notably, you can achieve the first 'meritocracy' while avoiding the second 'meritocracy'! Perhaps it's not possible given human psychology...."
Then it's not possible, and you can't achieve it. As a theoretical possibility, this is only worth talking about if you're an SF writer or possibly a eugenicist. Otherwise, discussions of what the hypothetical New Soviet Man or whatever could do if unbound from pesky human psychology get into "Do you want mountains of skulls? Because this is how you get mountains of skulls" territory.
You can't do this with real humans because, A: real humans respond to incentives, and while "if you do this especially productive thing we'll reward you in ways that make your life better than those of the people who are less productive" isn't the *only* incentive that matters it is sometimes the one that matters most. And because B: even if you disallow or equalize the tangible objectives like material wealth, people will still pursue intangible objectives like status and power. And because C: in order to get some especially productive stuff done, you have to give them control over resources that they can with a bit of cleverness use to make their lives better than those of the people who were only tasked with keeping the floor clean.
If we pretend that this isn't so, that we're building a utopia for the New Socialist Man and that New Socialist Men will evolve to thrive in this environment, then we can see what happens by looking to the Soviet Union. An awful lot of what could have been valuable productive effort gets diverted to status and power games and things like getting tight with the functionary who decides who gets what apartment. An awful lot of what should be valuable productive resources get inefficiently diverted to lifestyle improvement for corrupt bureaucrats where it would have been more efficient to just let an honest businessman take some of the profits and buy the nice things he wants. And while the Soviet Union could sometimes incentivize materially productive people to achieve great things, this was weighted towards high-profile, high-status things like space rockets and hydrogen bombs and not so much things like making the heat and plumbing work and ensuring that your society's logistics could keep the shops filled with goods.
I think DeBoer's problem is not with smarter people becoming surgeons or whatever, it's with smarter people getting rich. You could perfectly well have a system in which everyone gets exactly the same salary but the top jobs still go to the smartest people. Or how about a world in which the highest salary is twice the lowest salary? I would say that the question of different material rewards is completely separate from the question of whether the best candidate gets the job. I think Scott confuses the issue by refusing to make this distinction; Scott assumes that smart people will only be surgeons if they get paid more for it. But that does not follow.
I think to some extent, the problem is that if you incorporate the meritocracy arguments about why the sorting exists, His case becomes: "merit if unearned, but we still need a capitalistic sorting mechanism, however we can alleviate inequality via fiscal transfers to poor people to flatten the income curve". Which is to say, indistinguishable from social democracy on policy itself, save that the justification (people start with unequal opportunities so it's only moral to flatten income inequality vs people start with unequal capabilities ...) is very marginally different.
I think there is a synthesis of that position with the Bryan Caplan position that exists. Which is to say, clearly explaining that if ensuring equality through education isn't as important, it could be optimized for sorting purposes, making labour signals clearer and stronger.
I was mostly being tongue in cheek, I just don't think I've ever seen you explicitly call yourself a libertarian, and have had the impression that that's not a label you'd seek out.
Also, thank you for alerting me to the Burrito Test, that's both useful and concise. I'm right there with you on the schools as prisons analogy, the schedule alone thoroughly sabotaged my own middle and high school experience, and I feel like I still have a certain reflexive contrarianism and skepticism of authority due to years of arbitrary and capricious school rules and policies.
To be fair, though, at what age would you want to give a group of children unfettered and unsupervised access to a microwave oven? Ninety percent of five-year-olds will blow up the microwave by accident, and five percent of fifteen-year-olds will blow up the microwave on purpose.
Overall I'm skeptical of the opinions on child-rearing from people (like Scott) who have been children but never had children. Once you've been on both sides of the table, then things that used to seem like arbitrary and capricious rules imposed by uncaring authority figures instead start to seem like tricky and desperate line-ball decisions made under circumstances of constant near-disaster.
I don't think an actual, literal burrito should be required for the spirit of the test, though. Schools have lunch periods. My mom and dad were allowed to walk home every day and have a homemade lunch, or stay in the cafeteria and buy lunch. In contrast, my middle school lunch period was 22 minutes long, of which I spent at least 5 and sometimes 10 in the line to buy lunch. And aside from that, while my elementary school had a designated snack time each morning, anything outside of that, or any period in middle school, we weren't generally allowed to eat anything or to drink anything other than water. This included time between classes.
(Aside: My middle school was also figure eight shaped, the school designated and enforced one way hallways and staircases to control traffic, time between periods was only 3 minutes, and teachers were *not* required to dismiss class right when the bell rang. As a result, in at least one instance I was frequently unable to make it on time from a classroom right next to the stairs, to another classroom on the other floor right next to those same stairs).
Slight exception: in high school after freshman year I asked for, and received, permission to *not* take a lunch period so I could take an extra class, and each year I was able to find a teacher willing to let me eat lunch in their classroom provided I did so quietly, but I don't think they would have extended that permission to other students broadly. Also, the one time I had a study hall period, I wasn't allowed to eat during it, even though it was held in the cafeteria.
For what it is worth, I have both been a child and had children. The two children of my present marriage were both home unschooled, and we are happy with the results. Part of the reason we did it that way was that both my memory, of a very good private school, and my wife's, of a reasonably good suburban public school, were mostly of being bored. We thought we could do better for our children.
When our son was very little we did make sure that the sharp knives were high enough so he couldn't reach them, since he regarded them as toy swords. I don't think there were any arbitrary or capricious rules, and we were always willing to consider arguments from the kids against such rules as we had.
Hi, Professor Friedman. I’ve seen you discuss the benefits of families making decisions by reasons rather than arbitrary dictates by those who happen to be in authority (the parents), both in the context of your childhood and of your parenting. I see merit in that view, but what happens when the parent and the child are unable to agree on the most prudent course of action? Did your parents (and did you as a parent of minor children) ultimately resolve differences by dictate where reason failed to produce agreement? Did you handle such situations in some other way? Or did you never experience situations where parents and child were unable to reach agreement through argument? I admire your work.
"Ninety percent of five-year-olds will blow up the microwave by accident, and five percent of fifteen-year-olds will blow up the microwave on purpose."
Says who? Do you in fact have any children? All my children have unfettered access to the microwave as soon as they are physically capable of using it and forever more after that. Never had one issue.
I like the Burrito Test but it seems disingenuous to apply it to a place where you go home at the end of the day instead of staying full time. By that logic you could say an amusement park is an institution.
Going home at the end of the day doesn't seem like the right test. In that case even jail wouldn't be an institution if you were only incarcerated for a few hours.
The better way to look at it might be that you are allowed to microwave a burrito if you're allowed to leave at will and go somewhere else to microwave a burrito.
For what it's worth (I've never been to a Montessori school), Montessori claimed that children can be meticulous and responsible if they're taught how. Anyone have experience?
No. Any word with the prefix "neo" is a hold over from the 80's when we thought that the Japanese had already overtaken us and that we better copy them to stay cool. Also it feels like most people use neoliberal as an insult.
I think liberaltarian was one of those fusion words that people were trying to make happen during the Bush administration that never really ended up happening.
There's a ton to examine here and it's very late and I should be in bed so a few quick reactions off the top of my head.
"Second, lower the legal dropout age to 12, so students who aren't getting anything from school don't have to keep banging their heads against it, and so schools don't have to cook the books to pretend they're meeting standards."
We had that. My parents left school early (around ages 12-14) and this was partly because the schools *were* terrible but also partly because they had to start earning money to help their families. All their lives they felt the lack of education and it did hold them back. So sure, you can have kids leaving formal education at the age of 12 - but then what? Unless we bring back child labour which may not be a solution we want, they'll be hanging around at home or, more likely, hanging around street corners.
"But they'll have the opportunities to learn at home by accessing the Internet, libraries, and following their own interests with supportive and engaged parents!"
"If they could get $12,000 - $30,000 to stay home and help teach their kid, how many working mothers (or fathers!) might decide they didn't have to take that second job in order to make ends meet?"
Yeah, about that. Skipping ahead to the "let parents teach kids at home", we're getting a great example of how this is working during the various lockdowns in countries all over the world. And the consensus seems to be "my God, when is the government going to re-open the schools because we can't manage having the kids at home all the time?" Part of that is not able to homeschool, running out of energy/enthusiasm, needing to work from home, needing to go to work as usual, etc. It is not generally a new flourishing of "why do we need schools anyway?" Old-fashioned "mom is a full-time homemaker who stays at home and looks after the kids" is not the rule anymore, in part because of the necessity for two incomes nowadays, in part because of the whole "an adult needs to go out and interact with other adults" and "your value is determined by having a Real Proper Job and child-minding is not that, unless you're doing it outside the home and being paid a wage for it".
Thirdly, the morning and after-school caretaking. You'll need somebody to do that - be it childcare workers, teachers, whomever. And if they're at work from 6-9 a.m. mornings and 4-8 p.m. evenings looking after your kids, they can't be at home looking after their own kids. Which will result either in people not having children because they're too busy working (hey, didn't we talk about this being a problem?) or a case of 'the cobbler's children have no shoes' because their parents (okay, I mean mothers here, because childminding is a majority female job) are working minding other people's kids.
"The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development."
Yes, that's horrible. It's also due to the rise in parents suing schools over little Johnny falling in the playground, insurance premiums going UP UP UP because parents are suing schools, teachers not wanting to be sued for personal liability because little Johnny fell in the playground when they were supervising breaktime, etc. Solve that problem first and we can go back to the old days where unless a limb was severed, nothing was thought of the usual knocks and bumps and bruises.
"YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO."
Yes, this is where the rest of us go "so, what the heck is a 'hall pass' anyway?" and when we get the explanation, we go "what the hell is wrong with you, America?" The first thing my father taught me before I started school was the phrase "an bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas" which means "may I have permission to go to the toilet?", where if you need to go you raise your hand, utter this magic phrase, and get told "all right but hurry up". We don't have hall passes, bathroom passes, or the likes.
(The only time this didn't work was when I was seven, for no reason I suddenly felt unwell, asked to go, was told to wait for a few minutes until it would be break time, and then I threw up all over my desk. I *think* I may have told the teacher "I told you I was going to be sick". But that's the only time I've ever experienced being refused).
"It's also due to the rise in parents suing schools"
Is that actually true? I have never heard of a parent suing schools (here in the UK) and the courts here have a habit of excessively siding with schools (recently the Supreme Court decided schools could fine parents for child absences on the basis of a law that requires "regular attendance" at school).
I understood all this stuff as an attitude that drives a general ratcheting of behaviours that are in-theory risk averse but are in-practice nonsense.
One of my kids' schools had no doors on the toilet cubicles, because doors could be dangerous if misused. Parents were not allowed on-site at all and had to stand on the pavement because of the fear of on-site child abuse.
To use the monkey bars are another kids' school, they have to pass a monkey bar "driving test" to show they can safely use the monkey bars. My son one day was spotted going the non-prescribed direction on the monkey bars (I assure you they're symmetrical) and had his confiscated, banning him from the monkey bars.
This shouldn't be confused with over-protective instincts. One day my son screwed something up. So they decided to punish him by not feeding him. He was 5. We only found out when we picked him up. (We had words and they never did that again.)
"so, what the heck is a 'hall pass' anyway?"
One of my friends in London told me her daughter's school had a rule that children can only go to the toilet at break times. One lesson her 5 year old daughter forgot to go at break time, and was told she had to wait until the next break, and some time later wet herself.
All the teachers involved seemed like lovely people that decided to be teachers because they love kids... that somehow adopted these horrible ideas working in these places.
Asymmetric risk. If I let a five-year-old wander the school alone, the worst thing that happens is she gets abducted and I'm to blame. If I don't let a five-year-old wander the school alone, the worst thing happens is that she wets herself and I'm not to blame.
Hm, I don't think this example works because there are so many safeguards against abduction in the school, that if one of them failed it would be that safeguard (the teacher who failed to lock the door, or failed to screen someone) who would be blamed, not the one who allowed someone to go to the toilet.
But yeah, this sort of thing.
I don't know of a name for this, but there's this failure-mode in humans, I think, wherein under-stress they become panicky and intolerant of perceived uncertainty even when it is counter-productive.
And if enough people are like this enough of the time in an institution then maybe being more relaxed and sensible about things you start feeling like you're being reckless or complacent. Upward-spiral-style.
"Is that actually true? I have never heard of a parent suing schools (here in the UK) " Yes, unfortunately in the US, the dark hand of the lawsuit lawyers is everywhere, governing much public policy. Legal fees is a large line item in the budgets of most school districts.
I think most of what Scott's focusing on is allowing choices. There may be a lot of parents who hate homeschooling and just want the schools to be open again, but there's also some who may find it better, especially considering some of the horrors he talked about (though, like you, I never had the hall pass thing).
My impression (with no data backing this up) is that while there are a lot of people who don't like the distance learning thing, there are some who find it much better. Of course, this isn't the same as homeschooling, but you get some of the same benefits. I know one family who, when a parent had to travel to a different state for a job, just moved the whole family there for a month. Making homeschooling a more affordable option would make stuff like that much easier.
> Thirdly, the morning and after-school caretaking. You'll need somebody to do that
Of course, but one worker can take care of many kids, leaving the rest of the parents free. Ideally, they'd be the ones most able to spare the time, or at least compensated fairly for it, though I guess in practice we all know how that can turn out. At the very least, I don't think it'd be worse than any other job with evening hours.
"Yeah, about that. Skipping ahead to the "let parents teach kids at home", we're getting a great example of how this is working during the various lockdowns in countries all over the world. And the consensus seems to be "my God, when is the government going to re-open the schools because we can't manage having the kids at home all the time?""
From everything I've seen, the stress is trying to manage that WHILE also working. If the extra $12k-30k means one parent no longer has to work, that becomes a lot more manageable (though obviously still a lot of work, speaking as someone who was homeschooled by a SAHM).
I'm just not super interested in hearing anyone's opinions on 'parenting' , or the optimal approach to child rearing, etc., who isn't a parent, in the same way that I'm indifferent to anyone offering advice on how to react in a fire fight that's never been in a combat zone.
I'd also like to meet these legions of parents who are making $6-$15hr who would love to be able to discuss the nuances of Aristotle with their kids if they could just pry themselves away from work for 40 hrs a week.
For all the people who I know that would consider 'home school an option' if everything broke right, $30k a year- or less- is not moving the needle. And I was a roofer for 14 years, so it's not like I'm just making a guess here.
Homeschooling no longer means the parent has to teach the kid. The parent becomes a "project manager" that makes sure their kid takes the right classes, does homework, passes the tests, troubleshoots their access/wifi if needed and sets up outdoor extracurriculars and playdates with other kids. k12.com takes care of the curriculum.
Right. And I'm for that, actually ( I home schooled my son for 7th grade), so it's not the notion of home school that I'm opposed to. It's the idea of financially incentivizing parents to do it that I think is a bad idea.
Just because you are worried about cases where parents take advantage of the system to either:
A. Pocket the money without educating their children
or
B. Use it to keep their children at home and abuse them
or C. something else?
Because when I see those objections I think "man, good thing our education system never pockets money without educating children or results in child abuse!"
I'm being a bit facetious here, but I do wonder if you are falling for some status quo bias. But since you haven't stated your argument yet I may just be responding to a strawman, in which case, I apologize in advance :)
Basically, my problem with it comes down to the fact that the calculations made for this kind of thing always identify the average cost, but not the marginal cost, for educating a kid. So, yes-- if the school's budget is $10m, and they have 500 kids, then I guess you can say it's 'costing' $20k a year per kid. But a lot of that $10m goes to fixed costs, so that kind of accounting is deceptive.
If another kid enters the school, bringing the total to 501 kids, it isn't costing $20k to educate her. The marginal cost is probably a couple thousand dollars, at best. So giving someone $20k to keep their kid out of the school is a wild overpayment, because that doesn't reflect anything close to what it would actually cost to keep that one kid in school for the next year.
The point isn't that they'd 'discuss the nuances of Aristotle' at home. The point is that discussing the nuances of Aristotle is completely useless for most kids and they'd be better off just doing what actually interests them or playing around.
I can't speak to elementary school, but in high school when I taught, hall passes were a thing because some students would cut class and wander the halls, sometimes disrupting other classes, etc. A hall pass was needed to allow administrators know who was out of class for a legitimate reason, and who was not.
Also, I think people are overstating the significance of a hall pass. In most cases, a hall pass is simply a written permission slip. So, in practice, most teachers' practice was exactly what you experienced: "Can I go to the bathroom?" "Yes, but please hurry, and write a pass for me to sign."
I don't know how broadly true this is, geographically or temporally.
I was in high school in the early 2000s on Long Island, and over the course of that time my school went from most teachers just handing out an eraser or piece of wood with "hall pass" written on it to the school mandating that every student in the halls during classes getting detention, even if the bell just rang and they're across the hall from the room they're supposed to be in, unless they have a hall pass written on specific paper and filled out with the date, time, reason for being in the hall, and teacher's signature. Also, all but two of the school bathrooms (out of I think eight) were locked throughout the day, so when you did get a pass, you'd be gone at least twice as long, and teachers weren't supposed to give out more than one bathroom pass at a time. Also also, we were required to wear our student IDs on a lanyard at all times, even during class sitting at our desks, and yes, school staff working as hall monitors did occasionally look into a classroom from the hall and interrupt classes to give detentions to students who took their IDs off.
I can recall attempts to implement something similar, because 1) shockingly, some students use bathroom passes not to go to the bathroom, but to engage in tomfoolery of varying degrees of severity (I recall one student who asked for a bathroom pass on the first day of class; I told him, "I will never give you a pass all year, because last year I saw you roaming the halls every day); 2) many problems on campus, especially serious problems such as violence, are caused by nonstudents who come on campus; hence, the ID policy. The interrupting class thing strikes me as very, very much not the norm.
Did he pass? I also recall being a long term sub, and there was one kid ("Johnny Smith") who was constantly disrupting class, every day, for weeks. Then, one day, another kid shows up and says, "Hi, I'm Johnny Smith." It turns out that the original kid knew that the real Johnny Smith was going to be out indefinitely, so he figured it would be fun to cut class and pretend to be him
Yeah, IIRC I don't think the interrupting class thing lasted more than a semester or two, it was probably more part of the suddenly-implementing-poorly-thought-out-policies overreaches.
I find it odd that you, of all people, are skeptical of the idea of people learning things outside of the school system. If most of your education, as demonstrated in conversations on SSC, comes from your schooling, Ireland must have a very impressive educational system.
I'm not sceptical of people learning outside the system, I'm sceptical of them getting the chance. The notion of "pay the parents the $12,000 a year so one can stay home and teach the kids" is a nice one, but how it would work out in practice is a different matter. Some people will have the ability, desire and interest to make it work. Many people won't, or will not be able to juggle responsibilities enough to make it work. I think a lot of kids would be told "oh just look something up online" or would be let run feral - as long as they're out of the house and out from under the adult's feet, who cares?
I think school also provides a structure and a range of subjects - there's constant arguing over the curriculum and dropping 'useless' subjects, but it does give everyone a chance to have a taste and see if they do have a talent for languages or maths or music or art or science. Again, plenty of kids will be totally uninterested in how they're presented, or only want to learn one or two particular subjects, but that's life.
We've got a system and it's not ideal by any means, but poking and prodding at it in bits and pieces is rather like dismantling a car while you're travelling in it. You have no right to be surprised if you don't get to your destination after you've unbolted the engine and it fell out five miles back.
The main, big question is "what do we want from school? what is the purpose of education?" and everybody has a different answer. And it's still mainly potential employers who want good employees. Maybe the emphasis has changed from "we want people who will stand for hours on assembly lines doing repetitive manual work" to "we want critical thinking and STEM skills" but the end result of that is still "so they can fit in to a job being productive and making money for our business", not "for the general sake of having a body of citizens who can think critically".
Until we sort that out, we are still going to be loading school with more and more unattainable functions - of not alone educating kids so they can all be coders and get good-paying jobs, but of being Good Citizens and childminding them and feeding them and the other tasks that are the purview of the parents and the family.
I agree with Freddie that no, school is not a magic wand where you can just cram in more "education" and make sure that 100% of the class all graduate with dazzling test scores and go on to middle-class white collar professional jobs even if Dad was a laid off coal miner or Mom was an inner city single parent. No matter how much money you throw at it, or fancy new types of schools, or fancy new paedogogic theories, or social justice activism where you teach anti-racist mathematics instead of the old-fashioned kind about getting the correct solution - https://www.todos-math.org/statements - that is not going to change this fact.
(Actually, being thick as two short planks when it comes to maths, I would flourish like the green bay tree under an anti-racist maths and addressing social and emotional needs in maths classrooms structure during my schooling, but I still wouldn't learn any maths).
So what do we put in place? Having worked, as I've mentioned, in clerical support on an early school leavers' programme, I can tell you from first hand experience that letting kids leave at 15 is not going to result in every single one going on to learn for themselves or get a job or be productive. The most vulnerable need a heck of lot of support (often psychological). The little potential criminals prefer to smoke weed, do petty crime, and be pains in the arse of every person who has to deal with them.
"Ireland must have a very impressive educational system."
Ah, I went to school to the nuns - the Mercy Order, the same ones that ran the Mid-western hospital Scott worked at (I still remember the photo he shared of the interior and me going "I recognise that, that's the Mercy Cross!" https://www.mercyworld.org/newsroom/the-mercy-cross-281/). You'll have to ask our host for the benefits or not associated with that 😁
You'll have to ask our host his opinions on the benefits or not
You're a lot more interesting and engaging when you talk about your personal experiences than when you wriggle on and around the IQ of black people, and I was pleasantly surprised by this sincere turn at the end. FYI, Intelligence isn't a real journal - they've been known to publish absolute trash papers, and for all its 'predominance' in the field of 'intelligence research' its impact factor is < 3 which is a joke. Generally speaking, the entire field of 'intelligence research' is a joke and you shouldn't listen to their 'specialists' (listen to geneticists instead).
Wait, hang on a second. You're acting like DeBoer is trying to make school more mandatory. But it sounds like he's just trying to make it more available.
Did he also propose banning homeschooling or something? Is the universal childcare supposed to be mandatory?
Or would your anti-school response be equally applicable to any non-abolitionist educational position, with this rant just landing on DeBoer because you happened to be reading his book?
Maybe I'm just having a hard time understanding because I liked school and was treated well there, but this doesn't really feel like a rational response.
(Also, you are really underselling how bad child labour is.)
Yeah, I read the book and a lot of DeBoer's points seem to be "allow kids to not go to school at all, but also allow them to go to school if they want to, and somewhat encourage it because education is good and homeschooling takes up parent time," which seems entirely reasonable and not at all what Scott is arguing about.
There's a thin line between mandatory and available for school, given that parents decide whether or not to send their children there, and given social expectations/rat races. I don't think people *wanted* to be competing to get their kids into the best preschools, but here we are.
I am mostly concerned about eliminating charter schools, which I think are a useful escape route.
Isn't that "thin line" a fully general argument against the availability of anything good for children?
Take for example private tutors. They do some good. If we increased access to tutors, then the rat race might make it socially required. In fact, that specific rat race has already occurred in South Korea.
So there are cases in life where escape routes only available to some (and encompassing all decision makers and influencers) allow a addressable problem to go unaddressed.
I guess this isn't HIS argument against charter schools (which I am assuming means schools you have to pay to go to).
Or as Gabriel says, they can make a problem worse by creating a rat race (I think this is what is going on with mortgages in the UK and house prices for the past few years).
My personal answer to this is that I am happy for my friends who can afford to send their kids to private schools, where their kids are generally much happier and get a better time. My kids and I will continue to muddle through the state-school-system, which seems so systematically horrible it is baffling to me.
All the state-schools in this area follow the "cloud chart" system. They have a massive blue area on the wall, with a cloud in the middle, and going in one direction you have progressively worse weather (rain, storms, lightning, volcanos) and in the other direction you have the opposite. Everyone has a little picture with their name on a moveable label. They all start the day on the cloud. Then for each act of good or bad behaviour they are moved up or down this ranking. Part of the idea is the public celebration or humiliation as reward and deterrent. It really messes up the kids and everyone I've met who wasn't trained as a teacher in the state-sector thinks it's an offensively bad idea (but I say this wondering if I'll get an interesting response here) -- but the state-school-teachers all buy it.
"I guess this isn't HIS argument against charter schools (which I am assuming means schools you have to pay to go to)."
You are assuming incorrectly. Charter schools are more analogous to Academies - publicly funded, but outside the control of the local education authorities, with greater freedom to decide how to go about their business. America does also have private schools, but they're not the subject of this discussion.
Thanks! Also sounds similar to "free schools" in the UK (where free refers to freedom from the local authority, rather than cost-free, but they /are/ cost-free).
Yes, absolutely; I think I'm right in saying that Free Schools are a subset of Academies rather than an entirely distinct category, but I'm not au fait enough with the nuances (on either side of the Pond) to say whether they're more or less similar to US Charters than other types of Academy.
not to be cnn philosophical but an escape route from what/who? if society bases decisions on something else are you “helping” any child by avoiding it? maybe but at what point is the decision the childs not the parents?
I think the issue with charter schools is a collective action one. They may provide an escape for some students, but at the cost of making the situation for the remaining students worse, by reducing the incentive to change by removing the most politically influential parents. (Same applies to private schools). So if you care about maximising total outcomes you should tradeoff the worse experience for the small number who can escape now for making the system better for everyone.
Or to put it another way, if the rich had to send their kids to the same schools as the poor, they'd probably be better. (This is also an issue with the local property tax model of school funding in a lot of the US)
This sounds like holding rich kids hostage until someone figures out a way to deal with poor kids, though no one has a clue what can be done to improve education for the members of a group many of whose families, for whatever reason, send kids to school who can't readily learn and/or can't avoid disrupting the learning process for everyone around them. And we would lose the advantage that giving at least some people an exit option always confers: the monopoly, deprived of its captive audience, is required to innovate until it improves its performance somehow.
I made a different top-level comment about this but deleted it when I found yours.
Freddie definitely wants people to be able to drop out at 12, so he doesn't want people to be required to go to schools.
"If they exist, parents will send them there" seems like a different problem to fix. Once school is not *required*, it gives the students bargaining power with their parents. Obviously some parents would never care what their kids say, but overall I don't think we should be running society for what the worst parents do. (And if we run them as if we're just trying to worry about "what the worst parents do" we would *definitely* require kids to be in schools away from them.)
> It is weird for a libertarian to have to insist to a socialist that equality can sometimes be an end in itself, but I am prepared to insist on this.
IMO, the concept you're looking for is better termed "orthogonality" rather than "equality". It's not about making things equal, but rather about making sure that in all cases only what's relevant is considered -- or, as Eliezer would say, hugging the query.
Would like you to know that as soon as you started ranting about how terrible Child Prison is, I started pumping my fists in the air and going "yessssssssssssssss!" out loud, earning me stares from my housemates.
Don't know if that's ever happened to me before, reading a blog piece.
"This is a compelling argument. But it accidentally proves too much. If white supremacists wanted to make a rule that only white people could hold high-paying positions, on what grounds (besides symbolic ones) could DeBoer oppose them? After all, there would still be the same level of hierarchy (high-paying vs. low-paying positions), whether or not access to the high-paying positions were gated by race. It seems like rejecting segregation of this sort requires some consideration of social mobility as an absolute good."
Disagree, I think you are wrong.
He is rejecting the idea that more social mobility -> better outcomes.
This is not the same as thinking less social mobility -> better or equal outcomes.
I read that quote as meaning that social mobility is fine as it is.
He's specifically saying: "Why should we as leftists want more social mobility...."
Also "only white people holding high paying positions" would be increased social mobility, since currently not only white people hold high-paying positions.
DeBoer would argue that for this, a bunch of whites need to get up first, whilst a bunch of non-whites need to get kicked down.
Therefore this scheme is social mobility. Also not helpful to any goals of DeBoer, so at best irrelevant.
But this wouldn't be conservative either, since it would be unjustified by their standards as well. Such a shuffle would have nothing to do with a pecuniary reward incentive for the most capable to maximize their potential for the benefit of society.
DeBoer disagrees with this conservative position as a case for social mobility.
But he probably would agree with the implied conservative position, that kicking the capable down and arbitrarily pushing the less capable up, is not a great benefit to society.
Also in DeBoer world with its raised floor and lowered ceiling, social mobility itself must mean much less since there's less space to be mobile in.
Everyone has a job and has food to eat and is safe. There is little pressure to excel or push yourself hard to compete with your peers. You wait ten years for your car and it's a Trabant. If you're well connected and a doctor, you get your car faster and it's a Wartburg!
[That's the GDR experience incredibly simplified and I'm not saying that he wants the scarcity. Just pointing to an example of how that would look/feel like.]
"He is rejecting the idea that more social mobility -> better outcomes. This is not the same as thinking less social mobility -> better or equal outcomes."
I'm a bit confused - isn't this claiming that we're exactly at the one spot where we've maximized the ability of social mobility to improve outcomes. Why would we expect ourselves to be there?
I read DeBoer as more saying "trying to change the social hierarchy by replacing one rich person with one otherwise-identical poor person is useless, and having a hierarchy at all is bad" while you're arguing against the much weaker position "the current social hierarchy is the best hierarchy there can be," which DeBoer certainly doesn't believe.
He doesn't share your assumption that social mobility matters that much, to begin with.
Like, assume social mobility could span from 0 to 1 and everything above 0.3 is good.
Everything above 0.7 is bad. But anything between 0.3 and 0.7 is more or less the same.
Just avoid the extremes and social mobility isn't an issue worth looking into more.
So the question goes the other way:
Why would you expect that there is a sharply defined maximum and that moving there is straight-forward and worth the cost?
Mind you, I definitely have no opinion on this. I just think that's what he means. Or a more plausible interpretation than yours at least. He could have written that, but he probably didn't expect to need to address a white-supremacist thought experiment. That might be the Spanish inquisition among possible objections :)
I can also only go by that quote and not by having read the whole book. So I might just be misinformed.
deBoer is actually much clearer about this than the review acknowledges.
The third paragraph in the quoted passage goes on to say:
"This is not to suggest that we will ever achieve true equality in all aspects in our society, as any variation between individuals will inevitably result in inequality. Rather the point is that equality of certain essential outcomes related to material security and political representation is a realizable and noble goal."
*equality of certain essential outcomes related to material security and political representation*, i.e. not stoner surgeons or a homogenous society that denies or suppresses differences in ability.
He seems to be saying that social mobility is exactly equal in aggregate:
> Mobility, after all, says nothing about the underlying overall conditions of people within the system, only their movement within it. From that standpoint the question is still zero sum.
He seems to be saying that in any system with a hierarchy, it doesn't matter how people move around because the hierarchy still exists. Scott's example shows that some hierarchies are better than others, i.e. ours is better (I think you'll agree?) than one that is rigidly segregated by race.
Yes, the current hierarchy is better than a rigidly race-segregated one.
But DeBoer is not forced to disagree with that statement if he followed his prior logic of a cliff, like Scott implied.
And yes, he focusses on social mobility being a zero sum status competition and rejects the conservative view of it being a virtue discovery mechanism as...... well he doesn't say it's false, he says it's the conservative view.
But he's not completely against a hierarchy.
What he wants is the "winners not being able to lording [their privelege] over the rest of us". There can be a hierarchy without losers having to feel bad about being at the bottom. If being at the bottom is very pleasant.
Lowering the ceiling is necessary to raise the floor.
But he doesn't need this to happen without anyone losing their relative position in the ranking. Everything just gets compressed.
So social mobility can stay the same, increase or decrease now..... it matters even less than before. Being kicked down is no longer a pitiable state of affairs and being raised up is no longer all that enviable.
Honestly, I can only hope I'm getting this right. This is an alien mindset to me and I'm trying my best here.
But I don't see the world in terms of fairness, resentment, status, deserts, moral rights or competition.
I think there's some sort of "typical mind" analogue that occurs whenever people talk about their experiences in school. "I had an awful time in grade school" becomes "Grade schools are prisons" instead of "I went to shitty schools/school district" or even "I'm not the typical student schools were meant to deal with."
I don't say this because I think public schools are great or that there's anything uniquely attractive about the way we do public schooling now. I'm just not sure that dramatic changes would be beneficial to [all, most, X percentile] students, and I think there's a fair chance it could be harmful.
I think Scott is mostly advocated for allowing choices and experimentation. Don't forcibly change everyone's school hours to 9-3, but try it for some and see what happens. If it turns out that this causes all the students to fail or something, then it was a failure and you can get rid of it.
Certainly people have different experiences in school, but I don't think it's a coincidence that hating high school is a common trope, at least in the US. And even if it is a small minority, having more choices would only help those suffering.
IMO the most relevant feature of a prison is that you can't leave by choice. This is basically true of all schools for children, even ones the children like to be at, because of truancy laws.
When school is ok, this is fine; when school is bad, it complicates matters horribly.
I think school, like prison, is mostly defined by the other inmates (and to a lesser degree the guards). Like, if the other inmates are nice and have similar interests and the guards don’t abuse you and the worst thing is the crappy food... well, not getting to leave would suck but otherwise that doesn’t sound too bad.
I think I am a person whose brain works in a pretty similar way to Scott’s, was bullied in middle school, and who supports school choice, charters, vouchers, the lot - but yeah this all felt kind of over the top. School (public ones for most of it!) was a major net positive in my life.
I second this. School was at times traumatizing, but overall it was a HUGE net positive for me. Being forced to stick to a schedule, observe rules and interact with different people I never would have met otherwise was good for me. Structure was good for me; most of the “arbitrary” rules I chafed against now strike me as largely pro-social, even the hall passes for the bathroom.
Above all, school was *my* domain, a place where I could develop an identity away from my parents. I think if my parents had tried to homeschool or unschool me, I would be dead.
I’m hearing a lot of “let the child choose” in this thread. What can a kid really choose, and how wisely? All decisions are directed by your parents at some fundamental level. I picked the violin, but it was because of my parents that I was in a music store and not a church youth group or a tennis camp. Except that school gave me a space to truly develop my own identity and expose me to different adults, not to mention peers.
I wasn’t the happiest kid, but I was “good at formal education” and mostly loved it. At home I’m not sure I ever felt I was good at anything meaningful despite my parents’ best efforts. I’m keenly aware that even if I’m an OK parent, I may be totally blind to the kinds of shortcomings that might make my kid a basket case.
My parents were actually great, but only because I also had school. And I only had school because it was a mandate. If Mom and Dad had defaulted to educating me themselves and governed 100% of my life growing up, I doubt I would have survived it.
It’s a small sample size, but one of the few homeschooled kids I know now works for an organization trying to curb abuses among homeschooling families. She and her husband were both homeschooled and turned out fine, but not every parent trying this is remotely mentally or emotionally equipped for it. She has collected enough horror stories that she believes homeschooling needs more oversight and the kids advocacy.
Could be true- I certainly know people who had that situation.
The anecdote about the kid locking themselves in the bathroom because school is awful and the parents screaming at them...I feel like there’s a lot more going on there. My worst times in school were never just about school. The problem with some kids might not be “school is soul-throttling child prison” so much as “Maybe there are stressors that nothing can fix,” e.g. a disturbed sibling.
Or it might be that even if these parents have choices and are empowered to make them, this would be how they handled things. This also assumes the kid even *tells* the adults anything.
My parents helped me weather the negative parts of school, and school helped me deal with the intolerable aspects of my home life. Remove either of those and I think I’d have turned out a wreck.
Majascule, I might know a young Rationalist who would probably like to connect with your friend and her husband. Homeschooled in an abusive home, no one to turn to for help as all other adults were part of the same cult as the parents. This young person and I have talked quite a bit about what we could do to help children in similar situations, but I don't have much expertise in this area.
See article for links to sources: "Suppose there was a cabal of evil geniuses who decided to force teens into labor camps where 56% were disengaged, 75% had negative feelings, 17% had to be put on psychiatric medications to survive, suicides had increased 300% since the founding of the labor camp system, and there was an annual 20% increase in suicides each fall when they were forced back into the camps. If this was an Apple factory in China, there would be international protests and boycotts. When it was discovered they were actually doing this to children, the company would collapse." https://flowidealism.medium.com/schooling-in-the-u-s-26063004b984
I had the same reaction. I had a pretty good experience in (private, religious) school so I notice that I can't entirely relate to where Scott's coming from. And I've heard anecdotes of students with tough situations at home feeling like school is a refuge from that. Those are exactly the kinds of students the "meritocracy" model of school is supposed to be helping the most, too, which makes me reluctant to endorse banning / reducing school as a solution.
I am extremely biased (one parent is a teacher, and both of my roommates are as well), but yeah that part rubbed me the wrong way. I wonder if Scott might be being exposed to the worst cases as a psychiatrist and reacting in much the same way as one of my friends, who is a social worker and so refused to put her children in daycare--when you spend all day investigating child abuse at daycares, it's hard to remember that daycare is generally just as safe as home.
My mom gets weekly emails from parents demanding *more* homework, and she has to gently suggesting that they allow their elementary-aged children some unstructured time to play. In my town, there has been constant fighting between a faction that wants school to start later and a faction that wants school to start earlier so parents don't have to arrange before-school care for their children. School might be full of bullies, but many of the children my rooommates teach are bullied by parents/siblings and view school as a safe haven where they can let their guard down and get a warm meal (often, the only one they get, period). There are not perfect solutions, and the idea that most people would do better with a choose-your-own-adventure school structure strikes me as naively privileged.
It's not that school can't be better, but school serves lots of children just fine (full disclosure: I was one of those little snots who adored it). I think some more choice is a need so more children can be served by it, but I think the culprit for why a lot of that doesn't happen is more to do with government and, yes, educational reformers, than it is to do with public schools themselves. One of the quickest ways to alleviate the "school prison" problem is to hire more teachers and reduce class sizes--teachers don't have to be as strict when they're not trying to manage 30 children--and I've yet to know a teacher who wasn't a huge supporter of such measures. But it's expensive, so it never happens. Hiring anti-racism experts or whatever the fashion of the day is is far cheaper.
Bill Gates spent a lot of money studying smaller class sizes. There turned out to be no educational benefits, but at least he learned a lesson about his hoped for reform (which Greg Cochran could have told him for free), while other people never learn the same for theirs.
Does "no educational benefits" simply mean that it didn't raise scores? Or that it did nothing to improve the quality of life of children who are forced to undergo this education? I suspect there are lots of worthwhile interventions that would do one but not the other.
Quality of life meaning - go home from ‘school’ delightedly worn out from being outside; drop the IQ bullshitery, and know that, yes there ARE different kinds of intelligence and desire and expose kids to those entire ranges -
- cooking (ya think that’s useless / optional / elitist? Mise en place is the foundation for organization in other areas; learning how to make a meal from a handful of scrappy things = an economic lesson that likewise carries over into everything else)
- f*ck alegbra; lemonade stand math and percentages and supply purchasing and how to sell websites to clients or whatever. And if you want to learn algebra for pleasure as some do, then do.
- strategic and tactical thinking and interaction; community knitting / integration
- teaching by example to get off the hedonic treadmill which most of school implicitly supports
- epistemology - in a less gated vocabulary - could and should be the basis of schooling from day one of schooling at 4 years old. Or whenever.
I dropped out of HS in 1978 - in Coney Island / Brighton Beach during the Odessa era wherein what seemed like the entire cohort of Russian emigrants came there, flooded the school systems, and they knew more math and science than the entire faculty, and their insights were astounding. Nature or nurture? (esp as those kids were mostly prevented from going to school in Odessa). It don’t matter, nature or nurture - it was awesome to be with those kids and learn what they knew - and how they thought.
My 18 year old kid was 1/2 homeschooled and like me, started working full time as a teenager; “work” = play and pleasure for him, as it did for me (mostly) (now, entirely; and i, a low IQ person, am a super high achiever in “business” and other conventional markers of success).
School, yes, worse than prisons
There are some great teachers, yes. But mostly - meh; and the weight of the institution is too much. The story of teachers in Finland is far better than in the US.
Feed those kids.
Get their parents out of their McJobs.
Let’s stop using college as a marker of success. College has been devalued; like so many other formerly successful venues, it’s been flipped and engineered into a way to extract cash from the people they’ve fear marketed to. End the tax free status. End the amateur athletic competition fiction money producing treadmills which spit out broken student athletes when they break. What IS a marker of ‘success’? having the ability to stand on ones own 2 feet, and help others do the same. Very little of that is taught or learned in current schools. It COULD be though; with all the above supports [funding parents and families out of poverty; showing not telling community building skills; learning practical joyful things in a wide range; real math; real literature and history, whatever that means; ethics by example & etc]
Yeah, I think Gates was focused on measuring educational outcomes rather than "quality of life". Voucher proponents who don't see gains on the former often point to the fact that families seem to greatly prefer their chosen schools as evidence those are better on intangibles.
My vague recollection is that Bill Gates funded the fad in the 2000s for "small learning communities," which are more like "schools within schools" rather than small classes per se. Then about 12 years ago he announced he'd wasted his money and that small learning communities didn't improve education. So the small learning communities fad dried up when he took his money and moved on to Common Core. (I gather that fad is mostly over now too.)
Why could Greg Cochran have told him this? I don't think this is a natural consequence of eg much of intelligence being genetic - there *are* interventions that increase test scores, they're just hard to scale.
I recall that Greg's take on "The Case Against Education" is that we COULD do better, but we WON'T because all the popular ideas in education are wrong.
Which hard to scale interventions are you referring to?
For myself, Scott unashamedly referring to mandatory schools as "child prisons" was pretty much triggering - it reminded me of what it was like to be incarcerated in a school - where almost nothing was formally taught that I didn't already know - in part on the excuse that this imprisonment would magically instill social skills.
I learned a lot, particularly when I encountered concepts like <i>habeas corpus</i> (didn't apply to children, any more than it applied e.g. to black people in the time of slavery) etc. etc. Or all those statements about liberty school teachers claimed our culture believed in, even though none of them applied to me at the time (or to any other child).
More importantly, I learned how to get bullies in trouble with the powers that be, how to figure out what answer was wanted and give that, rather than blurting out the truth, and how to manipulate authorities into doing what I wanted. Very useful skills, though I'd rather not have had to learn them by experimenting on the guards (teachers), trustees (prefects), and fellow prisoners (students).
And I had so much better an experience than the one my government chose to inflict on those who'd committed the crime of being <em>native Canadian children</em>, rather than children of more favored demographics ("races" to an American).
And then there were the unfortunate children who wound up in the care of social services. They were probably better off than the native children, but not always, and not by much.
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As I write this, I'm still "triggered" - i.e. angry in retrospect, and more consciously cynical, mistrusting etc. than has been normal for me in adulthood.
I don't know about "typical mind". But even if every day of your mandatory school attendance was consistently wonderful, I'm reasonably sure that wasn't true for many of your classmates, and some of them were likely outright miserable. All a bad school does is raise the overall level of misery; a good school (whatever that is) doesn't prevent it.
Only one of the four K12 schools I attended counted as especially bad. The final one had something like a 97% college attendance rate - and little brats throwing chewing gum at me/into my long hair from behind, regularly. (Things improved a lot when I beat up one young man very very publicly. But that was the year <i>after</i> the chewing gum problem.)
I've no idea whether changes in what we force on children would be better or worse overall. But when triggered, I frankly don't care - if the choice is between people like me spending 7 hours a day in what we experience as prison, or something equally bad happening to people like you (e.g. because of some rule that individual differences must be ignored), then I'd prefer you and yours to be the victims, not me and mine - even if there happen to be more like you. (I'm on the autistic spectrum, which is quite likely the root cause of my bad experiences even in "good" schools. And don't get me started on some of what's done to autistic children, with the ostensible goal of "curing" them.)
But let me reiterate again - it doesn't take a "bad" school to make some of its unwilling attendees miserable; it only takes a school that's unsuitable <em>for them</em>.
> I learned a lot, particularly when I encountered concepts like <i>habeas corpus</i> (didn't apply to children, any more than it applied e.g. to black people in the time of slavery) etc. etc. Or all those statements about liberty school teachers claimed our culture believed in, even though none of them applied to me at the time (or to any other child).
When I was in middle school, a bunch of kids signed a petition to get rid of a teacher they didn't like, and they all got detention. Still galls me 25 years later, and I wasn't even involved.
I guess that the lesson is to not use honest tactics.
I remember coming into the classroom where a hated teacher had taught the hour before, finding the floor and tables littered with wads of paper, showing the fun the kids had had, at the expense of the teacher. If I remember correctly, that teacher's head was also smashed through a glass window.
He was let go, in favor of retaining another teacher who was supposed to be a temp.
---
Once we had someone studying to be a teacher try to give a lesson to my class, which was infamous for having a group of difficult kids. Seeing a puppy be ripped to shreds by a pack of lions would have been a kinder sight.
All fair points, but I think "I'm not the typical student schools were meant to deal with" covers your situation.
And using that as justification to advocate for caring less about test scores, diversifying the types of grade schools available to the public through heavier use of charters, and allowing people to pick and choose more between these options rather than having to stick with the school they've been assigned to is perfectly reasonable! But I don't think that's where most people get from "School is prison". And like other bad slogans, it can backfire and turn people off of your otherwise-reasonable reform agenda.
True enough, and I probably wouldn't have said what Scott said, because of the reactions I've gotten to comments like this - and because the whole experience is now decades in the past.
Also, to be honest, because I learned the lessons of those school days, which included saying what I don't mean in order to get the effects I want, or avoid effects I don't want. (It's called "social skills" when higher status people or people you like do it, and "sociopathy" or "manipulation" when lower status people do it.)
Fortunately, fixing the schools is not a cause of mine. And more importantly, I have no children, and thus feel no duty to protect any particular individuals from their mandated "education".
But as long as those who set the rules impose a Procrustean bed on everyone, metaphorical limbs will be lopped off, and survivors will be both crippled and angry.
Scott was spot-on with both my experience in school and our kids experiences. School is a special sort of Hell I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies, where I was routinely bullied from age five until age 16 when I graduated a year early after being bored out of my mind in every class that wasn't Calculus.
If you remember your school any differently, I suspect you're either forgetting a lot of nastiness or where among the privileged on top of the social heap.
The rest of us despised it and couldn't wait to put it all behind us.
I've been really confused for the last year to hear about kids who were depressed because they couldn't go back to school. Did they use to get depressed over the summer holiday every year?
For what it's worth, I went to what was probably the best school in Illinois (the University of Chicago Laboratory School), a school designed largely to deal with bright faculty kids. I was bored most of the time. I don't remember restroom passes, but I am pretty sure you had to get permission from the teacher to leave class to go to the restroom.
Indeed. I had great schooling at 610.ru, and most my peers had good schooling, too - but that's not a judgment about all schools as selection effects dominate. Not all schools are good, not all schools are bad, but schools are not _inherently_ prisons that are bad for you.
Incidentally, that bit about whether the 1% or the 20% are the class enemies is usually a debate between Occupy/DSA types (who say the 1% is the enemy) and the left-neoliberal Brookings institution types (who say the 20% is the enemy, despite being from the 20% themselves). I think the classic statement of the 20% view is from Richard Reeves: https://www.brookings.edu/book/dream-hoarders/
There are some left-socialist types who also agree that the 20% are the enemy, but they do seem to be rarer (especially when the question of free college comes up).
I associate the school of thought targeting the top 20% rather than the top 1% with cultural conservatism. It's a way of defining the evil elite that's ruining society with liberal educated people in general rather than capitalists. For a microcosm of what the debate looks like see this Jacobin piece tearing into David Brooks for promoting that attitude: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/david-brooks-inequality-family-conservatives-rich-poor
One thing that might be confusing the issue is characterizing the 1% and 20%. You say:
> the 1% are the Buffetts and Bezoses of the world; the 20% are the "managerial" class of well-off urban professionals, bureaucrats, creative types, and other mandarins.
But that's far from the case. Wiki[1] tells me there are ~600 American billionaires, which is 0.0005% of American households. This random link[2] uses survey data to estimate .03% centi-millionaires and 1% deca-millionaries. A related post[3] pegs the 1% at 500k household income, which jives with a number I'd seen somewhere from the IRS.
$10M net worth or $500K income is squarely in the realm of (married) doctors, corporate lawyers, tech employees, etc. if they "keep their head down and work hard." Even some bureaucrats, I'm sure, cold make it.
If you don't inherit your place in the 1%, you could theoretically get there as an employee/practice owner in the right industries. Getting to the .03% OTOH basically requires massive equity gains, crime, or a prodigious career in finance. The same site[4] pegs the 80th percentile income at $140k, which requires good paying jobs to get into, but not you-have-to-go-to-Harvard level jobs.
The difference in viewpoints I think is whether you're concerned about who gets the ticket-to-1% jobs vs. whether your concern is about "I don't like the 0.3% being so powerful and so far out of reach"
(You can of course also worry about how to get more households to $140k income, regardless of what percentile that is, but that's at the other end of the spectrum)
Personally, I'm an upper-middle-class warrior who vacillates between thinking that the bottom 20% are the enemy and thinking that the bottom 80% are the enemy.
And to put that in perspective: yeah, $330k/year is a ton but if you're sole earner and want to buy a home in San Francisco it barely qualifies you for a mortgage.
Right, but "San Francisco" (really meaning "the nicer parts of the Bay Area") is pretty much designed to be a playground for the one percent, with some sketchy parts of town for the people who are going to serve coffee and mop floors for the one percent. Wasn't always the case, but a couple of generations ago the STEM-oriented subset of the 1% looked to San Francisco, said "this is going to be our place", and made it so. If you're not part of that 1%, or willing to dodge homeless people for the opportunity to sell coffee to that 1%, San Francisco may not be the city for you even if they can't pass laws explicitly barring you from living there.
Thought experiment: let’s imagine a scientific discipline. On an important question, there are two school of thoughts: A and B. In terms of ideological and institutional pressure, career incentives, respectability, media coverage, it’s much more advantageous to be a supporter of A. However, even if supporters of B tends to be very quiet, and not discuss their positions in public very much, they still represent the majority opinion in the field, at least in questionnaires preserving anonymity. Assuming no other knowledge of the question, which position has more chances to reflect reality, A or B?
Imagine two disciplines, A and B. An important question covers both. The community of A thinks the answer to the question is X, the community of B thinks the answer to the question is Y. However, B as a field is notorious for its low rigor, replication issues, methodological flaws, and attempts at foraying from B to A have resulted in disaster and being laughed out of the room by A specialists. A as a field, on the other hand, is booming and attracting the top talent across all stripes of potential graduate students. Assuming no other knowledge of the question, which position has more chances to reflect reality, X or Y?
I could think of another thought experiment. Country A used to be the undisputed superpower. Country A used to act as if it believed X but now the official ideology is Y and every social institution is increasingly being rearranged on the basis of Y. Country B used to be very poor and weak but is now overtaking A in more and more scientific and economic fields. Country B continues to act as a country where everyone believes X is correct and nobody thinks the matter is worth discussing.
Interesting! The question is whether country B is going to overtake country A thanks in part to the no-doubt glorious application of the Y principle to its own population? I guess we'll just have to wait, huh. This makes me think of another thought experiment, where a prolific commentator from discipline B keeps saying that the evidence from discipline A will vindicate him Any Day Now. Assuming no knowledge of the question, how long must we wait before his predictions are finally dismissed?
In this obviously completely hypothetical thought experiment, there would be a very strong social stigma against looking at the underlying data. You would be denounced on Twitter and if a little bit famous, the NYT would write hit piece on you.
That depends on how much knowledge we're willing to smuggle in through here:
> In terms of ideological and institutional pressure, career incentives, respectability, media coverage, it’s much more advantageous to be a supporter of A.
If we were to suppose that A is socially preferred over B for no good reason, then B is more likely to be true.
However, the very fact that the above institutional-pressure situation has arisen actually gives us some indication that A is more likely to be true. In the majority of cases, a stern and inflexible academic consensus is more likely to arise for true statements than for false statements. So the vast majority of cases which fit the situation you described are cases where B is some crackpot theory like "Earth is hollow" or "Aliens built the pyramids".
Now, this should not be taken as an argument against any particular B, certainly not the one that you're thinking of right now. But I don't think that it can be taken as an argument in favour of it either.
« However, the very fact that the above institutional-pressure situation has arisen actually gives us some indication that A is more likely to be true. » What would be the mechanisms through which institutional pressure would select for truth? I am not saying that such mechanisms don’t exist, but there are many disciplines where it doesn’t seem to work really well: e.g. US « nutrition science » for the last 50 years, Education science, Criminology (and obviously Soviet agronomy and social science).
The mechanism would be that scientific institutions are largely filled with scientists who are honestly interested in finding out things that are true.
It's easy to come up with examples where institutions are wrong, but the vast majority of times they are right. How many protons in a carbon atom? What is the composition of Earth's lower mantle? How do mitochondria work? Did Aliens build the goddamn pyramids? You can open up most textbooks on most subjects and find that almost everything in them is true and sensible.
One thing I kept thinking when I read this book: what if we took the "the only way schools 'succeed' is by filtering out low-performing students" idea as a suggestion rather than a condemnation? Would that improve things for both high- and low- performing students?
There are things in the book that suggest it might!
First, de Boer explicitly praises "weed out" classes in medicine and engineering as a mercy. They don't string students along and force them to learn material they can't ever hope to master.
Second, de Boer recommends letting 12 year olds drop out, because forcing thing to do something they're not good at is bad.
Third, de Boer suggests that making sure top-performing students succeed is a really good thing:
> In fact, the notion that there is a strong connection between education and economic growth has recently been convincingly argued to be largely a statistical mirage. The data shows that what really matters is the academic performance of the top 5 percent of students.
If that's true, shouldn't we be doing everything we can to identify the top 5 percent of students, remove all barriers to their success, and gear schooling toward them instead of the kids that don't want to be in school?
Countries with vocational education programs can track kids into those earlier in life if that’s where their aptitude is. It’s still sorting so it’s still subject to unfairness, but the kids can graduate with a skill they can actually use (as opposed to remaining in an academic track and not mastering much of it.) But this depends on having a manufacturing sector. Denmark did this, may still do it. So it made sense to lots of people at some point.
Germany has been running a large scale experiment on this of sorts. The results are ... nothing to brag about.
In short, there a (depending on the state) mostly two or three tiers of schools with the general idea that innate ability determines your path through this. The main consequences are that signalling is ridiculous importance now that up to fifty percent of students get educated in the highest tier of school, the Gymnasium. University admittance is also mostly tied to having completed school at a Gymnasium. Furthermore the multi-tier system as practiced in Germany is a large driver of educational inequality, which depends on social background much more than in otherwise comparable countries.
To be fair, "nothing to brag about" is about as high praise I've ever heard a German give their country's performance in anything (except making bread and windows.)
More seriously, while there are surely improvements that could be made, the relevant counterfactual is "How would German students fare if Germany had single track system like the US?" My impression is that the Haupt- and Realschule paths are useful and productive alternatives that yield overall better results with less frustration for all involved, despite the selection process being less than perfect.
> the relevant counterfactual is "How would German students fare if Germany had single track system like the US?"
YES, exactly. A lot of discussion of "tracking" seems to miss this.
Some resistance to tracking seems to be driven by the notion that it's setting some kids up for failure. Possibly one way to ameliorate that is to have lots of opportunities for "track jumping."
My (poor, rural, not-very-rigorous) school actually did a good job at this. e.g., if you were on the medium track in math, you could jump up to the high track by taking Geometry and Pre-Calculus at the same time.
I've noticed a lot of scandals involving thesis plagiarism by German politicians, including the president of the European Commission. Presumably, this is only because journalists bother to check their thesis and plagiarism is widespread among those that never have a journalist look into their past (almost everyone in society).
This suggests that there is a lot of opportunity to game the system by those who know the rules (which correlates strongly with being from a higher class).
> what if we took the "the only way schools 'succeed' is by filtering out low-performing students" idea as a suggestion rather than a condemnation?
The major issue I see is that there currently is a dogmatic insistence in Western society on individualism and inclusion, even for those that would benefit from substantial paternalism and being in a community with similar people. The result is that there are fairly high demands on people to be able to function in society, which then results in the insistence that everyone is taught the skills necessary. This in turn makes it very hard to preserve hands-on education where people learn by doing, without this being subverted into classroom education where people have to learn more abstract skills by listening and reading.
An example of the dogma is that they've been closing communal housing for mental patients in my country, based on 'inclusiveness,' claiming that this lets these people be part of normal society. In reality, these people seem to become far more lonely on average, as they have a very hard time finding common ground with 'normal' people or participating in activities on the same level. I've heard several complaints that people's only real human contact is the social worker. This probably represents an immense problem, because people with that issue probably have a very hard time getting heard. The number of incidents and jailings of mental patients has also greatly increased as a result. I see this as a huge failure, but those in charge seem totally unwilling to consider the idea that these reforms were harmful to many.
Similarly, they've closed communal elderly homes, so only the elderly with very poor health can still benefit from communal living in nursing homes. This seems to greatly increase loneliness and those people getting in trouble.
I only see benefits in offering less-capable people the choice for communal living, so even those with very low abilities can have a decent quality of life. Most mental health patients and those with very low-IQ that would benefit from this probably can't earn a living, but communal programs like tending a garden together or doing other manual labor is extremely healthy and satisfying for most of them. And it would probably be enable more people to earn a living, because many people with mental issues and low IQ can carry only a limited figurative load. The less load they need to carry to care for themselves, the more they can use for work.
Don't we already do this in a way, by leaving most serious education to universities, which have merit-based admissions systems, at least partly, and for a little while longer? We just waste a lot of students' time before we get to that part.
Tracking is a good idea, but you need to actually have a plan for the less-academically-inclined students otherwise you're just tracking them into a bin.
Germany, Austria and other Middle European countries do a good job of sorting out the students who would benefit from university educations and those who would be better suited for manual trades but where they really succeed is in making sure that manual tradesmen have dignity. People aren't as inclined to scoff at a Meisterbrief there as we routinely do at a trade school diploma here. Even when we pay them well, which isn't a given, American blue collar workers are treated as obsolete losers.
Plausibly that income differences are not due to differences in *parental* income (that is, parental SES goes little to explain differences in childhood outcomes - parental IQ does much more).
This was one of the better SSCs I've ever read, and synthesizes so many of my thoughts that I don't have to write my own thoughts down, I can just link this. Well done.
"I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it" any improvement made within the capitalist framework strengthens capitalism. Every Marxist I read seems very open and up front about this. They take it as axiomatic that the only way to make things better is to first make them so much worse that the whole system collapses, then something something revolution something something utopia. Someday I will understand why otherwise intelligent and wise people (i.e. smarter than me) advocate this position, and then I will understand everything there is to understand about people.
The other thing in play is time constraints-- if your kid is in a bad school for ten years, this is serious damage to your kid, even if ten years of work would make the schools better in general.
Apparently the only Marxists I come across are accelerationists? As an only somewhat left-of-center liberal in the Midwest, I don't meet them IRL and my internet diet must just lean that way.
@marxbro1917 "Reading" would be an overstatement, "stumbled across" comes closer to reality. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams who are definitely accelerationists. Slavoj Žižek. Eric Hobsbawm. Freddie DeBoer, who for several years lived probably within a 45 minute drive of my house while working on his doctorate at Purdue.
But my assessment in my original comment I think comes primarily from two things. First, coming across some accelerationist arguments and (apparently mistakenly) assuming they were typical. Again, I live in a place where the only Marxists I meet IRL are the stereotypical callow hipster college students, and I'm not a Marxist myself or particularly interested in Marxism, so my political vision doesn't pick out the nuances in the shades of Red that someone with an internet handle of "marxbro1917" probably cares deeply about.
Secondly though, I just can't square arguments I see people making (whether or not they identify as accelerationist or even Marxist at all) any other way. The negative reaction to billionaire philanthropy for instance seems patently absurd to me but would make perfect sense in a worldview where no matter what good it does it props up the existing corrupt capitalist system where people are allowed to be billionaires at all.
The negative reaction to billionaire philanthropy is to the bit where they decide how it is spent - because of the concern that this just reinforces billionaire control over society. If you think that "billionaires have too much power" is a bigger problem than "charities don't have enough money", then it makes perfect sense and doesn't require an accelerationist argument.
If billionaires want to give their money away, then they should actually give it away, not transfer it to a foundation where they decide how it is spent.
Ok, re: billionaire power vs. charitable needs, I get that and that the conclusion follows logically from the premise, I just have trouble seeing how anyone could look at the world we live in and possibly think that. I mean, sure, there are probably some billionaires really do have outsized influence, but they're the exception rather than the rule. Availability heuristic maybe? Do the people making that argument worry about the nth scion of the Walton/Rockefeller/Mellon/Vanderbuilt/whatever clan having too much power? Or are they really just talking about e.g. George Soros/the Koch brothers/Bezuckerbergos?
Sure a billion dollars is a large amount of money <i>to a single individual</i>, but it's a blip on the federal budget, much less society as a whole. It does not seem to me that billionaires have too much power. People do make such arguments and when you refute their individual points they get this look and say "well it's bad anyways". And <i>that's ok</i>. I'm not saying that everything we believe has to be backed by a logically consistent worldview. I just can't help but think it comes from an underlying <i>moral</i> judgement about whether it's ok for someone to have a billion dollars in the first place. Doubly so because while I disagree for complicated reasons it nevertheless seems a defensible position: a billion dollars an incomprehensible amount of money to an individual person and there are plenty of starving people in the world. I have a lot of sympathy for that argument and it makes more sense to me that the other one is an adhoc appendage to it rather than moon gibberish.
And on that note it seems conversely obvious to me that charities do not have enough money. It seems equally obvious that there are some worthy charities that languish for e.g. lack of optics where marginal spending (in absolute terms) matters crucially. Things that ultimately matter but both the private market and public institutions have failed to provide for reasons good or bad. Vaccines and bed nets in Africa. The Bronx Freedom Fund. Whatever. There's always more needs than resources.
I suspect it's the usual "the people who are most extreme get heard more because they're controversial" thing happening in social media. I'm not sure that there's a good solution to it though.
That's accelerationism, but there's also an argument I call the hostage-taking argument. That is, if you require the rich and powerful to subject their own children to the hellscape of public schools, they'll be incentivized to make them better. It's not very convincing either, for several reasons. One is that even 20%ers and 1%ers can't actually reform the system that easily. Heck, even 0.01%ers probably can't. The system has some serious inertia. Much easier just to come up with a new way of letting their own children escape. Another is that a good one-size-fits-all system probably just isn't possible (and anything but that effectively allows the rich people an escape). And of course a third is it's morally repugnant to hold people's children hostage.
If they are rich enough, they'll send their children to private schools. If you ban private schools, they'll send their children to private schools in another country. If you ban them and their children from leaving the country, then you're an authoritarian state.
This is definitely a debate within Marxism and leftism in general: should you make incremental improvements now at the cost of potentially delaying the inevitable wholesale improvements you really want?
There are also non-communist Marxists. For example, you can appreciate and agree with Marx's critiques of capitalism but think the best solution we can get to in practice is some sort of countervailing force within capitalism that mitigates the harm it does. I think it's reasonable to be a Marxist social democrat or a Marxist Rhine capitalist. You can be a Marxist labor union activist even though the concept of a "labor union" would be redundant/meaningless in a society in which the workers owned the means of production. Marxism is much broader than just communism - there's a whole method of analysis which can be applied to economics, politics, and other fields as well - and its strategies are not limited to this extreme accelerationist worldview.
Not just within leftism. It was also an argument within libertarianism. Rothbard condemned libertarian efforts to reduce government regulation of the economy as being an "efficiency agent for the state." If only things got bad enough ...
"This is a compelling argument. But it accidentally proves too much. If white supremacists wanted to make a rule that only white people could hold high-paying positions, on what grounds (besides symbolic ones) could DeBoer oppose them?"
I don't think this is as important to Freddie's model because in his model, the material difference between the bottom and top rungs is colossally less wide than it is now. No, narrower even than that. It seems in that model not a very important thing to argue over who sits on which rung because they are so close together and, importantly, people can gain more by doing things they want to do than fighting for a higher rung (thus coming around closer to an almost libertarian description, but then utopian visions do have a tendency to converge).
I agree that imagining a world in which that was so is nigh impossible but it does explain why he wouldn't care much about designing a system that was resistant to being captured by any particular group.
The idea that homework doesn't promote learning seems counter to the very basic observation that practicing something makes one better at that thing. Or that kids who were never taught math could, with a small amount of time focused on it, end up at the same place as kids with years of math classes - same thing. If kids had been practicing math for 10 years, how could they *not* be better than those who'd done it for 6 months or whatever?
The obvious counter to this is that the classes or the homework don't actually make the kids "practice" and that's why it doesn't work. In which case it seems obvious how to make the classes or the homework better, no?
If you want to get better at, say, chess, you practice more chess. If you want to get better at a second language, you practice reading and conversing in that language. If you want to get better at shooting a basketball, you go shoot basketballs. These points seems incontrovertible to me. So what am i missing regarding homework or math classes?
I am also skeptical of the idea that one year of maths education can be as effective as six years, it seems like it might be a "Beware the man of one study" situation.
On the other hand, I will say that the vast majority of "maths homework" that I did throughout my K-12 career was of basically zero value once I got to university and saw what _real_ mathematics was about; it was endless hours of diminishing returns getting ever-so-slightly better at applying a mechanical solution to some very limited class of problem in arithmetic/algebra/trigonometry/calculus. As an adult with a career that is far more mathematical than most, I'm sure I can't possibly do mental arithmetic as fast as ten-year-old me, nor do integration-by-parts as well as seventeen-year-old me, because those skills which I spent so many hours developing I lost because they were useless.
I bet a lot of the explanation for catching up in math is just that there's very little math done in K-7 (and for good reason, many children don't develop good abstract reasoning skills until their teens). The K-7 curriculum, AFAIK, is just arithmetic and a bit of pre-algebra. It's a lot of drills, but not much knowledge being acquired.
I don't think you'd see the same result if you skipped math through 10th grade and then tried to catch up in 11th grade.
I suspect what's going on is that there's simply a limit to how many hours a day are productive for learning. There's plenty of time already available in a typical K-12 school day to fill your brain up.
I imagine there's a lot of nuance and confounding effects in these studies (e.g. teachers who don't assign homework probably are using class time more efficiently), but ultimately there's always going to be massively diminishing returns after ~6 hours/day.
My experience doing homework at a reasonably-good-but-not-excellent high school was that most homework failed to either force me to repeat tasks that were worth practicing or re-learn concept that were worth learning. This was in stark contrast to my experience excellent undergrad where most homework either forced me to practice things worth practicing or go back and re-learn material to fill gaps in my understanding.
The exception to this rule was paper writing where any amount of practice improved my writing ability.
Practice doesn't make you better. Practice with feedback and adjustment makes you better.
This is potentially confusing because most things that are fun, are fun because they have a natural feedback process built into them. Getting the feedback is a reinforcement mechanism - it's what makes the fun thing fun. "when I do A correctly, then B happens, and I like B" is a great way to teach you how to do A. At some level, that's why chess, conversation, and basketball are fun, when done correctly. You play your game and you immediately see whether you are capturing pieces or being captured, and whether you eventually win or lose. You make your comment and you get a response. You shoot your shot and you see if the ball goes in. The feedback is a natural, built-in reward system. It teaches you. That's why we learn so well from games.
Much homework, however, is not like this. It's not intrinsically motivating because it doesn't come with immediate, natural, obvious feedback. Solving an algebra problem is like this: If I give you 2x-10=3, solve for x, and you write "x=5" on your paper, then you have received no feedback, no satisfaction, and no indication that your solution method was wrong. Maybe if you're lucky the teacher marks this homework a day or two later and you say "ah; x was actually 6.5... how about that?" - but you haven't learned anything. Now do 50 of these per night. And of course if you have an answer key the incentive is for you to just copy answers from it.
What students really need is guided practice, not just repetition.
I have a little data on this. Our kids went to a Sudbury model (unschooling) school for some years before we shifted to home unschooling. A class only happened if students asked for it. One year some students wanted to learn math. In the course of the year, a group of students of mixed ages went from zero to the early stages of algebra.
I never did much homework until I hit higher math and physics; then it became very valuable to have blocks of uninterrupted time alone when I could master problem-solving.
The burrito test is new to me. I do remember from middle+high school a small number of teachers who, being unwilling to follow the rules dictated from on high (or, in one or two cases, perhaps unfamiliar with the notion of "rules"), ran classrooms that passed this test, and adjacent tests I could concoct. This was in a school that shortened the inter-class period from 8 mins to 5 mins to make sure people didn't linger in the hallway, and also took the doors off of the bathrooms for "security".
My interpretation of this is as a strong argument in favor of heterogeneity --- and therefore also in favor of charter schools.
It's usually taken as a given that students are unable to judge their teachers --- how should a *kid* know if (s)he's learning? --- but given that students aren't really learning so much anyway, perhaps allowing students to chose teachers wouldn't be a terrible idea. Is there any good reason not to adopt a policy of "horrifically unpopular elementary school teachers will be put on probation"?
A good reason I can think is that most kids would prefer a teacher who lets them prat around and do no work. If you genuinely believe that no learning happens, then it makes sense to pay teachers to be glorified child entertainers (and you could require fewer credentials and pay them much less).
At a slight tangent, the system Adam Smith supported for universities was one in which professors were paid directly by the students. So if nobody wanted to take your classes you didn't get any income, unless you were one of the minority who also had a fellowship as part of your income. I'm not certain, but I think that in the 18th century boys went to university considerably younger than now. Smith writes: "No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given."
I found myself surprised at the strength of your preference against schools at first, but from the sounds of the descriptions you give, schools really are much much more awful where you live than they ever were for me. I guess I had a sort of impression of American schools from pop culture but I assumed that it was... I don't know, exaggerated for dramatic effect? It's jarring to imagine that they might really have been like that!
Like everything else, it depends. I went to New York City public schools. Some, like mine, were totally fine. Others were clearly hellholes. It depended on the neighborhood and whether it was a magnet school (like a charter, but for a specific area like tech or performing arts). My high school was unremarkable except that it was huge - 4300 kids. It was nothing like the movies, neither gritty teen dramas nor “High School Musical”. I kept waiting for all the stereotypical exciting high school shenanigans to happen, but mostly it was pretty uneventful.
I'm not the best person to make this case, but my impression of the argument against the idea of endorsing charter schools as ways to help at least some kids goes like this:
We have lots of publicly provided goods in society - national defense, mass transit, food inspection, schools, roads, etc. Some of it can be opted out in various ways (mass transit and schools), some less so (national defense). Much of the political dynamic over the last 40 years has involved the conservative view that if you tear down / open up these systems, everyone can choose what they want and will be better off. The liberal response is that approach is a way to dismantle the aspects of society that help the least fortunate, so no. The conservative rejoinder is that public schools are a lost cause, and we should save who we can.
The liberal objections to charter schools is that they represent a deliberate effort to dismantle the common project of public schooling by peeling off exactly the children with parents with the most power and resources, and consigning everyone else to an even worse life because the charter schools drain both money and common political will from the effort to improve them. It is like saying the roads are bad and filled with potholes, so we're going to build a tollways next to it so at least people who can afford to pay will have safe travel. Now if you think that even fixing the roads is a bad idea (i.e. schools are prisons), then exiting to a different path is great, but I don't think that's how most people see it. Liberals think the point is to fix the damn roads, and if only poor people use the roads, they will never be fixed.
The real question is, what are the realistic politics? If you keep charter schools out and force people to attend the public schools, will they improve? If people who can't afford private school and have to use the local public school have to either live with a bad school, or participate in the PTA, run for school board, pay attention to and vote for school levies, will that do the trick? I doubt that has actually worked, and I think liberals have a lot of arguments that conservatives have deliberately starved public education of funds for many ulterior reasons, but I think that is the core issue.
On the other hand, if you fundamentally believe that public primary education is helplessly broken, then this argument misses the point. But a lot of people think that school is a net positive, even for kids, and want it to be as good as it can for as many people as possible.
All of this may be obvious to everyone else, but I find the basic assumptions behind these arguments useful to lay out, at least for my own understanding.
Out of curiosity, has anything like that ever been tried in the developed world? A town or region in an industrialized country with a fully privatized educational system? I am not aware of it, and it might be interesting to see it play out.
There's another part of this too. The conservative view tends to see the family as the core unit involved, whereas the liberals see the child as the key participant. (Different from other left-right debates for some reason.) The liberal side says that a child with neglectful parents should have just as much opportunity for a good education. Since children can't be expected to navigate an open marketplace, society assumes the obligation of providing that. I'm not sure if I have ever heard a conservative response to that - if equality of opportunity is indeed the goal, how to you provide equal opportunity for children regardless of parental attention, capability, or even presence?
England got compulsory public schooling gradually over the course of the 19th century. Early in the century it was a private system. E.G. West, _Education and the Industrial Revolution_ discusses it. He does not find any evidence that literacy increased faster after public schooling went in, but the available data isn't very good.
“ The liberal objections to charter schools is that they represent a deliberate effort to dismantle the common project of public schooling by peeling off exactly the children with parents with the most power and resources, and consigning everyone else to an even worse life because the charter schools drain both money and common political will from the effort to improve them.”
The issue I have with this logic is that, bluntly, it forces students and parents who give a shit to accept significantly worse outcomes in order to force students and parents who don’t give a shit to be marginally better.
The best experiences I had in high school were in “honors” classes, AP courses, and community college classes, with students self selected for innate intelligence yes, but also a healthy dose of student and parent give-a-shit (there were plenty of smart slackers coasting through the standard curriculum).
The worst were in the state mandated classes that everyone had to take, where I was mixed in with disruptive assholes and stoners who were just counting time until they could drop out with parents who were perfectly fine with their kids getting knocked up at 17 and spending their lives doing menial jobs in the town they were born in.
Incidentally, this didn’t map all that closely to wealth - there were plenty of relatively well off among the slacker set, and plenty of tryhards with single Tiger moms. And it wasn’t necessarily the teachers - my least favorite class had one of my favorite teachers who I genuinely felt bad for (he was a newer teacher, and by union seniority rules got shafted with the shit classes).
If students are going to not give a shit, if parents are going to abdicate their responsibilities, why must the conscientious families sacrifice their time and effort trying to marginally improve the education of people who genuinely don’t want it? I don’t go all in on “school is a prison” like Scott, but when I do trend that way it’s because of this Harrison Bergeron race to the bottom stuff.
You're conflating the argument A/ charter schools will create a two-tiered system wherein high quality schooling is generally available to only higher socio-economic status children, with an argument B/ effective schooling that acknowledges and accommodates differences in interest and aptitude is not possible in a universal public education system. Arg B is plainly false, there are counterexamples in many EU countries at least.
Your experiences are aligned with one of deBoer's core arguments in his book, i.e. the current US education system is fundamental flawed due to being predicated on a single "success" path culminating in a college degree. As you've seen, this ignores reality, imposes impossible expectations on educators, and harms students.
The solution is to reform the public education system to provide suitable paths for those that aren't academically inclined, not to extract the college track into a separate system for the affluent and leave everyone else in an underfunded rump that works for no one.
The trick is standardized testing, score based and ranked report cards, free education, and a homogenized school system. Shuffle kids into schools with standardized testing, and allow good public schools to compete for students and students to compete for schools.
Allocating kids to schools by testing means either moving kids every year or two or else late developers get stuck in the wrong school. Neither of those are good solutions.
The far better solution is bigger schools, big enough that you can separate the students within the school. Also much more variety of classes and let the kids - at least at high school and probably at middle/junior high level too - pick specific classes with a wide variety of tracks.
There should be a basic skills requirement to graduate - the ability to read and write sufficiently well to be able to fill in an official form, the ability to understand enough arithmetic to keep track of your finances as an adult, enough civics to have a general idea that you can vote and what you can vote for, etc.
But English or Mathematics or Government beyond that should be voluntary, the same as everything else. If you want to do trig or calc or study To Kill a Mockingbird or Shakespeare, or do a class in the internal workings of the US Senate, or study mediaeval Chinese history or start learning a language, or learn IPA (one of the rare skills that I think far more people would find useful than actually have learned it, and not an especially hard one to learn), or whatever, then go ahead, there's a class for that.
You can't do this in rural areas, because the travel distances required to have a school this big are too great to be practical (this is why universities, which have exactly this structure, are always residential institutions in rural areas, but there are commuter schools in higher-density areas).
Unfortunately in practice, attempts to do this within the public school system have come under attack as themselves contributing to systemic racism. E.g. the current push in New York and San Francisco to assign seats at highly competitive public schools by lottery rather than standardized test, since the latter has resulted in a student body heavily biased toward Asian and to a somewhat lesser extent white students.
this is rather obviously overblown and extremely unfair to the students in such schools, and such complaints bely racist attitudes towards Asians in the American body politic.
I am cautiously in favor of European style tracking, and definitely of deemphasizing “college as the one true path of success”. But I don’t think that is realistically achievable in the United States, at least not any time soon, due to racial equity concerns.
In the meantime I am extremely sympathetic to a right of exit for families who want something different than what the local one-size-fits-all public school might be offering, and I support things like vouchers and charters that can offer options regardless of SES. Why should they be forced to waste their child’s whole educational career fighting a Quixotic battle against a broken system that refuses to do its job?
Especially when often the biggest problem is often disinterested, disruptive, abusive students - why should I sacrifice the education of my own kids to benefit kids who were offered free education on a silver platter and instead of sitting down to eat it chose to flip the table over?
It's not clear whether you're saying it should be, but "parent give-a-shit", while obviously preferable, should not be a prerequisite for a child to have access to quality education commensurate with their interest and aptitude. This is entirely achievable–certainly for any OECD country–and there are strong arguments for why from "maximize human potential and flourishing" to "maximize our national economic productivity and competitiveness".
Ideally it would not be, although I don’t think you can eliminate the positive benefit of parental involvement and interest in education (nor should you try, ans when you do, that’s when I start getting the Harrison Bergeron vibes).
My objection is to the argument “good students and good parents should be forced to stay in a failing school system so that the parents will lobby for reform”. That’s unfairly allocating the burden of creating a good system on a small segment of the most willing to be involved parents. Instead the burden ought to fall on the employees of the school system itself - but in practice these are often the very people the involved parents must spend the most time fighting to get a decent education for their kids!
Give a shit is doing a ton of work here, and a lot of it is un-merited. In my neighborhood, there is a neighborhood school. It's fine. There is also, about three miles off, a magnet for gifted kids. A lot of the neighborhood kids my kids went to preschool with go there. (For the record, my kids could too, we just don't send them there.)
The kids from the magnet boast about how their school has one of the best reading scores in the state. My local public doesn't. But, my local public has kids with fifteen different native languages. There are multiple kids only a year or two out of refugee camps. All of these kids have to take the reading test after a year here. And my school is educating them all. Not some, not just the ones who know the system well enough to jump through hoops, but all of them.
And I don't think it's really fair to say that their parents don't give a shit. Getting from Somalia (or wherever) to America is hard, and has been much harder recently. I think that shows give-a-shit-ness. But I doubt they've had much of a chance to explore the local charter and magnet school ecosystem. They're busy. They're in a new country, learning yet another new language, figuring out how to get work and live here, navigating emigration. Give a shit is a really entitled way of referring to the leisure and system mastery to work the bureaucracy. I think it's really functioning as a proxy for white collar and middle class.
And for the record, all of those kids are at least bi-lingual, many of them are multi-lingual. I think the assumption that they're dumber than my kids is a mistake (except inasmuch as my kids are the smartest in the region), or that going to school with them is dragging my kids down, even if they are missing out on one of the best reading schools in the state.
"Give a shit is a really entitled way of referring to the leisure and system mastery to work the bureaucracy."
That's not what I think of when I think of giving a shit. I think of parents that keep on their kids to do their homework, show up on time, and be polite and respectful. Immigrant kids can have their own issues, but if their parents give a shit they'll catch up on language issues/navigating the system within a couple years.
Most of your post is about immigrant kids, and while that creates particular issues at particular schools, I don't think it's the main driver of public schools underperforming or the phenomenon Gbdub is referring to.
Scott even discussed that example above! And I tried pointing to that to counter Education Realist's claims about skimming, although I can't find the particular post now. He thinks the charters there will inevitably unionize and then they'll lose their cost advantage.
"I think liberals have a lot of arguments that conservatives have deliberately starved public education of funds for many ulterior reasons" is not credible empirically. Per pupil expenditure has gone up 3x since 1970 and the U.S. has the second highest per pupil expenditure in the world, after oil-rich Norway,
The "starved public education of funds" is false propaganda. There is also a literature showing that, at best, there is a weak correlation between spending and outcomes. Culture is a far more important variable. Utah has the lowest per pupil K12 spending in the US yet the highest rates of social mobility of any state. Converting to Mormonism would almost certainly do more for improving educational outcomes than would an additional 3x increase in spending.
I keep hearing this, but it never makes sense to me - no job I've worked has ever required me to limit bathroom breaks to a specific time. And half my college classes started with some variation of "I don't have a bathroom policy. You're not in elementary school, if you need to leave my class then just leave quietly."
Is this a holdover from the old days when students would go straight to the factory after high school?
Yes. You're a college grad. Most people are not, and were not.
School prepares the median student for the world, which is why they should allocate classes and schools based on grades and stratify the student body to enable optimized education methods for each stratum. Students are all different, and require different things from school. The American education system's failure to stratify its student body is a major issue with it.
There has been a fair bit of publicity recently about Amazon not allowing (or implicitly not allowing) its workers to even go on bathroom breaks, with some workers having to pee in bottles to meet their quotas. I'm not familiar with other factory positions, but I'd assume that having fixed bathroom breaks is at least common, if not ubiquitous.
It’s because jobs you have had are selected for conscientiousness. It’s assumed (usually correctly) that you will plan your biological and personal needs such that you don’t need to peace out in the middle of a critical meeting or a rush of customers (and if you do, you have a damn good reason).
But children do need to be taught some measure of self control, and that’s entirely beside the children who are actual assholes that will abuse any inch of privilege they are given.
I freely admit to being the little punk who was the reason bathroom hall passes exist.
Because some people seem confused by this apparently American institution, the hall pass was just a block of wood or something you carried to the bathroom show you had permission to walk the halls. Also, there were only two in each class, which limited how many kids were out at one time. It also incentivized you to return promptly, lest another kid become figuratively or even literally pissed at having to wait.
At six or seven years old, I was bored often enough that I routinely abused my bathroom privileges, staying out until someone tracked me down loitering in the stairwell or breaking into supply closets. It really did have to be drummed into me that I was scaring my teacher, annoying my classmates and making a general nuisance of myself.
Someone might argue that maybe the school needed less structure or a more engaging curriculum. Maybe, but I think I personally needed to learn a little about the impacts of my actions on others.
I’m sorry for spoiling bathroom breaks for everybody else.
In my previous call center job, they assigned each of us a schedule of two 15 minute breaks, and one 1 hour meal break. All the rest of the time we had to be ready to receive calls.
It was a pain, but I can understand the logic behind it. The more people on the phone, the less callers have to wait on hold, and the shorter the call que.
I think that bureaucratic processes more often arise from ordinary bureaucratic incentives, rather than some grand scheme to turn your child into a 19th century Prussian factory worker.
Bathroom passes exist because at some point they didn't exist, and children left the classroom willy-nilly and went to smoke behind the bike shed. Or maybe they went down the street to McDonalds and got run over by a car.
Then the teachers got in trouble, so they came up with the most obvious possible solution to the problem of "how can we prevent children from randomly vanishing during class while still letting them use the bathroom?" Lo and behold, the bathroom pass was born.
In terms of Freddie, his primary genius his ability to understand that people can’t do more than they are capable of. His chief flaw is his inability to understand that people can easily do less than they are capable of. And people doing less than they are capable of is why the Soviet Union didn’t work so well.
Once we have GWAS scores for IQ, ability to work hard, etc we can lay a head tax on people based on it so the more gifted must get high-paying jobs just to have the same after-tax income of the less gifted. We can already tax the tall: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/tax-the-tall.html
I'm pretty confused in the section about mobility. You use the example of white supremacists who say only whites should hold high-status positions, and say that it doesn't seem possible to object to this without saying that mobility is inherently good...and then you go on to make 3 objections, NONE of which appear to me to imply that mobility is inherently good.
Your second objection is that it's better if high-status positions are distributed widely (as opposed to being clumped in social-network space), and your third is that equality is inherently better than inequality. But I don't see any inherent reason you couldn't have a mostly-flat hierarchy with wildly-distributed success and still have low mobility.
Your first objection is meritocracy. Perhaps you can't have meritocracy without mobility (if only because merit is not static), but the reverse doesn't seem true--you can have mobility without having meritocracy. So this still doesn't seem like it implied mobility is *inherently* good, or that more mobility is necessarily better than less mobility.
Sounds like overall you're saying "all improvements are necessarily changes", but that hardly implies that maximizing changes is a good strategy.
Maximizing change would require repeatedly reversing the hierarchy. I don't think Scott wants that kind of maximized "mobility". Permitted, but not required.
> Maximizing change would require repeatedly reversing the hierarchy.
This is far from obvious. Repeatedly reversing the hierarchy will have very little effect on people in the middle, which is where you expect most people to be.
Before we can say what maximizing change requires, we need to specify how we measure the amount of change that has happened.
I think the issue is that Freddie’s argument against mobility is basically “it still produces a hierarchy, and hierarchy is bad!”. Scott’s objection is basically, “clearly not all hierarchies are created equal, otherwise you have no basis to prefer a meritocratic hierarchy to a white supremacist partriarchal hierarchy”.
He's not saying you can't object to the white only elite without saying mobility is bad, but that DeBoer's argument against mobility also applies even in this hypothetical. He then goes on to explain how he would defend mobility, even considering DeBoer's argument that it's a zero sum game. Part of that reasoning is that mobility is necessary for meritocracy.
"Third Law. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families." which you link to in the sentence that says "All show that differences in intelligence and many other traits are mostly due to genes, not shared environment."
Those don't seem to say the same thing at all. What did you mean here?
The following sentences qualify it, "But at least here and now, most outcomes depend more on genes than on educational quality", but the original seems like it disagrees with what you're quoting. Maybe you meant it as a pointer to the broader literature which does support the version you said?
His argument about race and IQ is not necessarily contradictory; it could be the case that there are genetic differences between individuals that explain differences in IQ, but also that every ethnic group has the same distribution of those genetic differences as every other ethnic group. (I don’t know how plausible this is genetically, or if there are any studies suggesting it’s true, but it’s at least an internally consistent theory.)
I don't think it's even selective rigor. That'd be the case if he were convinced by the evidence in one case but not the other. However, for both cases he handles the disagreement on the moral dimension, while having opposite opinions for the two cases.
In the individual differences case, DeBoer states that inequality exists, other people respond with "well, but wouldn't that be a morally monstrous world?", and he responds by saying they're confused about where people's moral value comes from.
In the racial differences case, DeBoer states that it would be morally monstrous if such differences existed. But the same moral argument applies--even if races were to differ in intelligence, we could believe that they still have equal moral value.
There's the empirical question and the normative one. Empirically he could be correct that there are environmental factors affecting racial groups differently and this suffices to explain group differences. But normatively, it's hard to say there's a bigger moral issue with genetic differences between groups rather than within groups. Freddie argues hard that the within group differences in smarts are morally irrelevant and don't make people of lesser value, but wouldn't make the same argument for between group differences.
Completely implausible. If a bunch of smart people meet up and decide to settle a distant continent, you get a group that's smarter.
Unless nature selects for groups having a constant(magic number?) intelligence level(why would it select across human groups, and not across species?), it's likely groups will have different average intelligence even just due to random selection events; throw in environmental selection, and it becomes even more likely.
Yes, schools are mostly "child prisons". But isn't this a good way to prepare children to later be able to handle their four-decade plus sentence in the far harsher adult prison of soul-crushing nine-to-five workplace drudgery?
I greatly prefer work to school. That could reflect having a relatively good job, but it's also because employers need to get employees to choose to work for them and schools just rely on families living nearby (which can affect the decisions of parents, but doesn't directly depend on the kids).
"But isn't this a good way to prepare children to later be able to handle their four-decade plus sentence in the far harsher adult prison of soul-crushing nine-to-five workplace drudgery?"
The real argument for schools was always very simple - ensure inoculation in certain social ideas. That's why there's so much opposition to home schooling. Parents may teach children some retrograde ideas
Amusingly enough, Lyman Stone suggests that the rise of public education is the primary cause of increased athiesm in current society, with some pretty compelling arguments actually. It's buried in this report somewhere, but the case includes the fact that in Indonesia (I think?), the government ended up promoting a policy that increased attendance at Islamic secondary schools, and showing a causal increase in religiosity amongst that group.
“A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare.”
Justice H. Walter Croskey, in the opinion holding that California parents do not have the right to home school their children. Later reversed.
>I don't know if this is what DeBoer is dismissing as the conservative perspective, but it just seems uncontroversially true to me.
No, DeBoer's view of the conservative argument is that people respond to incentives, i.e. the supply side instead of the demand side.
In your view, the customer wants the best person for the job, and is willing to pay for different jobs depending on their importance. So the smartest laborer becomes a doctor (where customers care a lot about the difference), the second smartest laborer a mechanic (where customers care about the difference, but less), the third smartest laborer a janitor (where customers still care about quality, but even less).
In the conservative's view, not only are laborers picking between jobs (if being a mechanic is less stressful and more fun than being a doctor, why wouldn't the smartest person want to be a mechanic instead of a doctor?), they're also able to change their own abilities (someone who is smart who can either be a consultant for free or become a doctor by studying very hard will only study very hard if it's better to be a doctor than a consultant).
This only goes so far, tho--it might explain the difference between doctors and consultants, but not the difference between doctors and janitors. DeBoer is focusing on the latter gap, I think, and noting the conservative is exaggerating their theory's ability to explain it.
Scott’s discussion about the odd inconsistency in DeBoer’s views on the implications of IQ and superiority reminds me of the reaction I had when I heard a discussion on that issue between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein. Klein was expressing the same concern as DeBoer - that to say that there were genetically based differences in IQs in different populations was to suggest that some groups are intrinsically superior to others. And I just had no earthly idea what he was talking about. I mean, if you ask Ezra Klein “Is a person with a high IQ intrinsically superior to a person with a low IQ?,” the odds that he’ll say yes are approximately zero point nothing percent. Of course Klein knows that IQ does not convey superiority in any morally significant sense! But this would seem to imply he both believes “High IQ individuals are not superior to low IQ individuals” (agreed!) and “High IQ groups are superior to low IQ groups” (disagreed!). This tension seems easy to resolve - just acknowledge that IQ does not affect comparative moral worth at he individual or group level.
Also, Scott, your description of school-as-hell was deeply resonate with me. I can say without exaggeration that my time in the public school system was more miserable to me, and left me with deeper scars and issues, than my time in Iraq.
The statement “there’s more in group variation than variation between groups” is true, and also something Murray has pointed out over and over again, and he’s bent over backwards to make it clear that variation between groups tells you nothing about individual group members. So, it’s nice to see you agreeing with him on those points.
They don't JUST have "some gene for dark skin". There are multiple correlated alleles, which is why someone having a de novo mutation in one won't cause the algorithm to put them in the wrong cluster. As for whether it's "meaningful", these aren't just junk DNA markers (although those are of course quite useful in tracing ancestry). Genes protecting against malaria, sleeping sickness and other tropical diseases are more common in... the tropics. The whole reason we find differences in skin color is because different environments (with different amounts of sunlight, along with food that may or not substitute for vitamin D from the sun) had different selective pressures. Words like "Kenyans, Nigerians, and Zimbabweans" refer to modern states and nationalities, which is correlated with ancestry but population geneticists would take about the groups within those countries and often fall on both sides of borders dating back to colonization. A larger number of clusters will get you those distinctions. Are they "meaningful"? There's always going to be a subjective aspect, but one rule of thumb is not to needlessly throw away information, which after all might correlated with other things of interest.
Except that the people who talk about the reason for different average outcomes by groups are making an implicit assumption about the distribution of IQ and other relevant characteristics — that it is the same for all groups, hence any differences in average outcome by group must be due to discrimination.
“Klein's point wasn't about whether it's strictly logical to say this or that. It was that group-level IQ differences are never discussed except as a just-so story to justify the fact that black people are worse off than white people.”
Klein may very well believe this, and he may also have said it elsewhere, but that just wasn’t what he said in the discussion I was citing. Also, it’s simply false to say that “group-level IQ differences are *never* discussed except as a just-so story to justify the fact that black people are worse off than white people.” I’m sure there are people who do this, but to claim that is literally the only time and context anyone ever discusses the topic just isn’t true. I don’t want to get too into the weeds on this because Scott was clear he didn’t want the comments to swerve into a discussion of The Bell Curve per se, but Scott does point out (to his discomfort) that the conclusions Murray reached in the book were in line with the expert consensus at the time, and that consensus has actually grown stronger over time as more research has been done (3 to 1 in favor of Murray’s basic thesis of a mix of genetic and environmental factors initially, becoming 4 to 1 in favor at present). Lots of discussion exists on about this topic, and only a tiny fraction of it even vaguely resembles what you describe to be its singular purpose and manifestation.
And even if your claim was true about how the topic is discussed, it still wouldn’t justify the response that it usually invokes. DeBoer points out that people are worried about the implications of IQ, genetics, and success, and that people are attempting to alleviate those worries with the Noble Lie that genetics has no influence on IQ or intelligence, or that IQ is irrelevant, etc. DeBoer correctly argues that we shouldn’t do this - instead, we should alleviate this worry not with a Noble Lie, but the Noble Truth, which is that IQ is morally irrelevant and has no bearing on people’s equality or moral worth. In the same way, if Klein (or others) are worried about the implications of possible group level genetic differences and how people might draw illegitimate conclusions from them (a reasonable worry!), the response isn’t the Noble Lie that no such differences exist. The proper response is the Noble Truth that any such differences which might exist are irrelevant, and that our commitment to the moral and political equality of all people doesn’t depend on every person or group having identical genetic endowments in all areas.
The Flynn Effect wasn’t surprising to Murray. After all, he’s the one who coined the term - in The Bell Curve, of all places. I’ve always been puzzled why people seem to think that the Flynn Effect is somehow incompatible with the argument in The Bell Curve, when the Flynn Effect itself is described there in detail and is integral to the argument of the book. (The actual argument in the book, not the constantly misrepresented version usually espoused by people who haven’t read it.)
I don’t know enough anthropologists to know if your description of their methodology is accurate, but if that is, it speaks poorly of them. For any factor X, if X is genetically influenced, the odds that the genetic factors influencing X will be tuned to exactly the same average and variance in every population on earth simultaneously is just staggeringly unlikely. And it’s not as though genetics is something that we “need to fall back on” if we are unable to find sufficient social factors to explain away all variance. It’s just one factor among many that influences things. Anthropologists citing their own inability to control for every possible confounding social variable as a justification for assuming at the outset that genetics is irrelevant is a classic argument from ignorance fallacy.
I’m not sure how one can reach that conclusion without actually knowing the contributions of genetics. The statement “social factors are wide ranging, and have huge impacts” can very well be true, but it just doesn’t follow from this that therefore genetic factors must be small or nonexistent or not worth looking into. That’s a non sequitur. For all it shows, both factors could be huge, or one could be larger but the other still relevant and worth knowing. Or not. But there is no way to determine either the relative or absolute size of the influence of two different things by studying only one of them and declining to study the other.
And he should make sure to ask a mix of the Marsh Arabs (the ones who escaped the genocide), the Kurds, and the families of the ones that were lowered feet first into wood chippers by the Hussein government.
I think the issue is less "I believe this to be true so that would lead to a bad conclusion" than "a lot of society believes this to be true (at least implicitly) so saying it would be used to justify bad actions." You can believe that people shouldn't believe a thing while acting on the knowledge that they do
Hi Scott, new subscriber here - thank you for this post, it was very interesting reading. I agree with much of what you say, but during the passages where you discuss your general view on the interaction between intellectual talent and social environment, I kept asking, "what about Michael Oher?"
If I understand you correctly, your belief is that social environment has relatively little effect on intellectual talent, and that the best we can do is find the kids with talent and give them as much of an opportunity as we can to thrive, while ensuring that the rest live comfortable, fulfilling lives in whatever adult role their relatively low-talent capacities permit.
I ask about Michael Oher because I'm not sure how his experience fits into your theory. Oher was the subject of a non-fiction book by Michael Lewis called The Blind Side (extraordinary book, very well-written, pretend the appallingly bad film adaptation doesn't exist). If you haven't read it, I really hope you do, because I'd love to read your review.
It's superficially about football, but for our purposes it's the story of a black teenager from one of the worst ghettos in America at the time: Hurt Village in Memphis, TN. Michael Oher was by consensus regarded as clinically stupid, and his total disaster of an academic career was believed to be in the expected range of results for someone of his tested intellectual capabilities. Around the age of 16, he was adopted by a very wealthy white family; over the course of two years, his IQ score went up two standard deviations, and his grades went up sufficiently (from straight Fs) that he became eligible for a college athletic scholarship.
The full story is incredibly fascinating (and heartwarming), but it's really hard for me to know of it and accept your contention that there's not much environment can do to affect intellectual potential. Or perhaps better put, it's hard for me to accept that the current academic estimations we have of the intellectual potential contained in America's impoverished communities is remotely accurate.
I would love to hear your thoughts, either now or after you've had a chance to read the book in question.
P.S. This is not necessarily incompatible with the thesis that there's only so much that school alone can do to unlock the intellectual potential of its pupils. Season 4 of The Wire makes the case eloquently (via art, of course, not science) that the life problems experienced by low-income students are often so profound that school is only a small piece of the solution, akin to getting a hospital bed - there's about a dozen other very important steps that need to occur to heal somebody apart from just giving them the bed.
That's not a function of poverty, that's a function of culture. You can have a health culture, even if everybody is poor. Hell, by current standards, the people who founded this country were dirt-poor. They didn't even have electricity! Yet they were capable of complex thought.
> his grades went up sufficiently (from straight Fs) that he became eligible for a college athletic scholarship.
This is a narrow comment about this point, and not the rest of your post. There's a pretty substantial section of *The Blind Side* that describes gaming the school system to turn Oher's failing grades into passing grades. Lewis makes it pretty clear that there wasn't a whole lot of learning going on in those cases.
That said, I don't doubt that Oher was able to do better in school (and learn more) once he was consistently fed and clothed!
It's true the Tuohy's gamed the system with the "Great Mormon Grade Grab", but recall that those were to replace old F's with new A's - Oher still had to pass classroom tests during his senior year administered by the school, without his tutor present, just like any other kid, and according to Lewis, his private tutor and his teachers were all drilling him pretty hard.
I'm not suggesting he became a genius, but there was clearly a day-and-night improvement in his academic performance, and a significant amount of it required Oher to actually improve.
1. How to optimize outcomes for IQ 70-85 is not well understood. (Look at Blasi’s research on interventions for borderline intellectual function. That is progress but they’re just getting started.) My understanding is that that range correlates with negative environment having a stronger influence than it does in the higher and lower ranges.
I call it the Sammy Hagar problem. I love that guy, fantastic singer and successful businessman. High IQ he is not - the interviews are strange. But he is valued for his other contributions and those contributions are significant (yes, I enjoy Van Halen.) How to nurture and support people with alternative skill sets to make profound contributions?
2. The “smart” that there may be a “cult of” - I think it’s the 95-115s idolizing the 125+. Some have the idea that if they had a little more of the magic x, they’d be 130s, and that would make their lives better. I think it doesn’t work that way at all.
3. Meritocracy never operates in isolation. Institutions run to establish and perpetuate power of 115s, plus distributing emotional abuse and sometimes physical and additional typed, the kids who rise to the top in that are not necessarily the most meritorious. Some of it turns on how much PTSD someone has, how well they concentrate and trust groups. It selects for 115s with less trauma.
4. Agreed about learning math too young - some kids get abstraction very young and some don’t get it until much later - developmentally. Abusing those that don’t is miserable and a waste of time.
5. If US schools didn’t funnel the less -traumatized 115s to the upper middle class, those folks would get mad.
I didn't know who Sammy Hagar was, so I looked him up... and his Wikipedia article says that in high school he "excelled academically"! Maybe you want to call it something else.
Thanks. Maybe I should. There’s a similarity between his communication in those old interviews, and the one person I know who has an 83 IQ, and I’ve been trying to make a map of what’s different in the one-standard-deviation below normal IQ. Maybe he is not the right example after all. Or maybe they share something else, or maybe Wikipedia is wrong in some way. Thanks for letting me know.
One of the biggest problems with the standard school system is the implied assumption that every child is the same, since why else do they expect everyone to learn the same subjects at the same pace? In reality people have different abilities and interests. Schools would look very different if they recognized this fact. Taking math as an example, some students should skip all advanced math and just learn the fundamental math that they never learned well, while other students could complete elementary school match in 4th grade and then choose specific areas to focus on.
Schools talk constantly about this fact. There’s a policy disagreement about the degree to which you should group classes by ability (and if so, how to differentiate instruction so that each student is challenged at the right level,) but not that different students should receive different instruction.
You can't even gate admission by test score in American high schools.
There needs to be stratification by standardized testing, and a de-emphasis of extracurriculars, which rich people can game excessively.
There's only so much help super-well-paid tutors can provide, although a much more comfortable learning environment and parental inculcation does help the better-off as well. But the child in an exam hall is isolated from such support, while the child in an extracurricular is not.
If a child could reasonably travel to more than one high school, then those high schools should be merged into a bigger high school that can provide more internal stratification by aptitude and interest. There is no reason for New York City to have more than 10 or so high schools.
There are 1.1 million students in the New York City public school system - if roughly 1/3 are in high school, you’re talking about high schools with populations pushing 40k or more, i.e. substantially bigger than the undergraduate populations at all but the largest public universities. That seems unnecessarily huge.
This assumes that there are only economies of scale and not diseconomies of scale in schooling, which strikes me as unlikely. From 1946 to 1974, the number of school districts in the U.S. fell about six fold and the number of students roughly doubled, producing an increase of more than an order of magnitude in the number of students per school district. It's a long time since I looked at the data, but I believe educational outcomes were declining over that period. For more on the complicated issue of why, see:
And American schools lack report cards with numerical grades and class/year rankings (e.g. 51st out of 211 students in say, Mathematics), which are necessary to implement stratification in a transparent manner.
Yet all states have graduation requirements that include math, science, social studies, and language arts. If we were serious about allowing for personalization, we would not mandate that students must either choose a highly stigmatized status as a high school dropout OR take classes that they may loathe and/or be bad at. A partial "solution" is to offer some high school courses that are a joke (e.g. many business math courses, "rocks for jocks" geology courses, etc.) but which allow students to "earn" the required credits to graduate.
DeBoer suggests exactly that in his book (specifically talking about an easy but useful stats course as an alternative to algebra, but it could be extended) and I agree it's a good idea.
There is a genre of recent new stories to the effect that kids are starting to lose their mind doing school over Zoom at home. It’s possible this is just inaccurate. But it seems like most kids don’t feel like school is soul crushing and get positive benefits from socialization with other kids (even if some of those experiences are themselves not fun or even emotionally hurtful). I say this as a gay kid who was a nerd and didn’t play sports and wasn’t very popular along any dimension.
The usual argument I've heard for homeschooling is that homeschooled kids *do* have socialization, just not through school. There's activities like sports, or groups of other home schooled kids. The problem with zoom classes now is that no one's seeing anyone else, and there's no real socialization options at all.
Seconding this. I was homeschooled, and usually had a group activity at least every other day. 4-H, book club, church events, homeschool group, and so on.
My own daughter is almost 2 now, and other than church (which isn't adhering very carefully to government orders) it's pretty hard to find other families to socialize with at present. She hasn't seen anyone outside the family in almost a month. This isn't normal, and isn't sustainable -- but not because of a lack of school.
I agree with this, although implicit in the assumption is a family unit that is willing and able to facilitate that. The modern two working parent household, particularly for poorer families, doesn’t really support that. I would posit that kids have better extracurricular outlets through school in these cases. Obviously these arrangements are interdependent but it’s hand waving to suggest if we change school then kids will just find edifying activities elsewhere.
I discuss this in a chapter of a book I'm working on, based largely on comments I got on my blog about home schooling. I turns out that, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics, as of 2016 only 55% of home schooled children came from two parent families where only one worked, with 11% from one parent families. The chapter is mostly about unschooling, but covers home schooling as well:
Isolation is definitely bad for kids, but the precise model of 'school' that we currently have is far from the only possible model for kids to socialize.
Across the pond they have the word "swotty" for "studious". So perhaps it should have been called "The Cult of Swot". I learned that word from an interview with the screenwriter Nicole Taylor, who said she became a lawyer (something she wound up hating) because that's what students who were swotty but not into math/science did.
One other comment - Scott notes a few times how DeBoer seems to conflate “we can’t be absolutely certain of X” with “we can completely dismiss X.” He seems to make a similar flavored mistake when he says:
“For conservatives, at least, there's a hope that a high level of social mobility provides incentives for each person to maximize their talents and, in doing so, both reap pecuniary rewards and provide benefits to society. This makes sense if you presume, as conservatives do, that people excel only in the pursuit of self-interest.”
But, this is a straw man. Conservatives (or at least every single one I’ve talked with and read) do not believe “that people excel ONLY in the pursuit of self-interest,” nor do the general personal and social benefits DeBoer highlights depend on the assumption that self interest is the sole possible motivation for people to excel. All it requires to work is the belief that self interest is at least part of the reason, for at least part of the population. So, the argument doesn’t require that people are ONLY motivated by self interest.
I feel like we're ignoring the fact that schools have been shut down in some places for around a year, and so we've kind of stumbled into a weird natural experiment to test the hypothesis that getting rid of all schools and replacing them with nothing would be an improvement.
The consensus across the political spectrum seems to be that keeping schools closed is super bad and harmful to children. The only debate seems to be whether keeping schools closed is the lesser of two evils or not.
I'll admit I haven't dug into this any more than just reading newspaper articles about it. Do we know if there's any real evidence behind the idea that closing schools down for the pandemic is harming children, or is it just an assumption that everybody is making?
There's definitely evidence that this specific closing has been bad for students, but it's not exactly typical of what proponents advocate for. For example, kids can't get together physically; parents are stuck at home in a crowded space with their kids; and the education system wasn't prepared for this scenario.
Bad in what ways? I expect test scores are going down (at least in the places where standards haven't been relaxed) since for all Scott's pessimism, school doesn't teach literally nothing and school via Zoom is worse at what teaching school does manage, but are we seeing kids being more unhappy/traumatized/all the other things getting them out of child prison was supposed to resolve (and if we are, are we controlling for the fact that a lot of that's probably due to lockdowns)?
I've definitely heard reports, both anecdotal and of data, that kids are more unhappy, although I haven't seen research data myself. I'm not sure how you really could control for it being due to lockdowns.
My roommate has been getting lots of texts/calls from his students begging to know when they can come back to school. He teaches a very low income cohort, and for a lot of them school is (a) their only reliable source of food, (b) their only chance at maybe getting a shot out of poverty, (c) their only escape from cruel parents/siblings, (d) one of the activities keeping them away from drugs, gangs, etc.
I'm not sure how you disaggregate "the pandemic sucks" from everything else, and it's admittedly a non-representative sample.
"and if we are, are we controlling for the fact that a lot of that's probably due to lockdowns"
Yeah, if public school is like unto a prison, you shouldn't expect to see an improvement by sending the kids off to smaller prisons. And normal pre-Covid homeschooling was not generally meant or understood to be kids spending literally all their time at home being parentally tutored in algebra and Aristotle and whatnot. I think there's strong overlap in support for home-schooling and support for free-range childhood, along with a range of structured social activities outside the home. All of which have been verboten for most of the past year, so nothing about this is going to work well.
Anecdotally, dear God yes. Not universally, but multiple kids of my acquaintance who had moderate anxiety/social issues that had been well addressed by their schools and parents and who were well integrated into their schools and peer groups have had flat out terrible years, to the point of their parents quitting jobs to manage or homeschool them. These families are very eager for schools re-opening next year.
"The consensus across the political spectrum seems to be that keeping schools closed is super bad and harmful to children." — is that the consensus? Because the consensus I seem to be seeing is that keeping schools closed forces parents to manage their kids 24/7...which many parents are unprepared for. I haven't seen much indication that the kids are learning less (and my sister is an anecdote to the contrary).
Perhaps I should have said "the vast majority of articles I have read from both left leaning and right leaning news organizations seem to indicate that keeping schools closed is super bad and harmful to children." I apologize for the imprecision.
Is the problem with eg. algebra that it can't be taught *at all*, or that it can't be taught *in the time provided*?
That is, would a fixed curriculum be achievable to more if students were given personalized training at the pace they are capable of learning the material? If so, how would it be practical to achieve this?
I wish I could find an essay I read a few years ago from some Computer Science professor about how some people just can't learn how to program. He identified various concepts that proved to be insurmountable hurdles to a significant portion of his students every year. I think the hardest concept was recursion, the middle concept was loops, and the easiest concept was variable assignment.
Anecdotally, there's a decently large subset of students who forget pretty basic things like how to deal with fractions and the order of operations every time it's taught, almost instantly. Maybe they could do the algebra slowly, with open notes. And mostly they can, and eventually are allowed to graduate. But why? What's gained by this?
When I was a math TA for intro to college algebra (years ago), there were some students taking it multiple times. It seemed that the ones who struggled the most had not mastered fractions, and part of the reason for that was they had not mastered multiplication. Factors and multiples require some ability to do some mental math, thinking about multiplication, and if it isn’t already mastered it’s grim. Solving algebraic equations is all about multiplying and dividing, and polynomial factoring is nearly impossible without multiplication skills. I think math classes need to be split up into levels (like the Success for All reading curriculum out of Johns Hopkins) with a very high bar to move up. Teaching kids to memorize and teaching them to retain information is really important for the kids who don’t just remember naturally. Some kids master the material with more time, some need simplified curriculum.
I agree with this 100% and it drives me crazy how memorization and practice has gone out of fashion. I really like the analogy from the book "Make It Stick": "Memorizing facts is like stocking a construction site with the supplies to put up a house." Obviously memorization *alone* isn't enough to learn any useful math, but today we tell kids to build a house without giving them any wood.
I've done quite a bit of math tutoring across all levels. I love math and think it's a valuable life skill, and I wish everyone could enjoy it as I do. But, my impression is that there's a significant minority of people who simply lack the abstraction ability needed for success in algebra. What I've found very interesting (and very frustrating as a tutor) is that a lot of times, the students will understand and correctly answer an equivalent problem when phrased in terms of something concrete, like money. But once you write the symbols down on paper, the connection is gone, and they need to fall back to memorized rules which they quickly forget and will never be able to generalize. For example, a lot of kids can make change correctly, but still fail their arithmetic tests.
Although with enough practice they might get to a point where they can pass the class, it's such a stretch for them--and such a blow to self-esteem--that I wonder if it's the best use of schools' time.
Well, sometimes it seems to help, sometimes not. In the successful cases, they're able to take their understanding of money and apply it to the math, and--with practice--eventually do away with the translation step. For other students, the translation step seems just as mysterious to them as the math, and the translation process is difficult for them. Also it runs into problems when you get into later curriculum that doesn't translate easily to money.
"This not only does away with "desert", but also with reified Society deciding who should prosper."
I appreciate this part as a Leftist, because I do find that we can sometimes come off as conspiracy theorist-y when we imply that someone consciously chose to make certain outcomes rather than mindless markets doing so. Pointing this out is helpful messaging advice.
However, as a society we HAVE chosen NOT to intervene (much) in the markets that make surgeons much more highly paid than, say, teachers. The idea of artificially raising the floor and lowering the ceiling of incomes mentioned later on is something the government could do, and I'd argue that choosing NOT to is also a choice (I haven't been a reader long but I know you're a fellow EA, which I assume means you also believe the utilitarian axiom that choosing not to act is as meaningful as acting).
I'm with you on DeBeor not using "meritocracy" correctly here, but I think he's referring to the widespread practice rather than the theory of putting of barriers to entry so that someone off the street isn't doing your surgery, the way many of my fellow Leftists use "capitalism" and you use "communism".
Yeah, the fact that Molochian incentives exist doesn't mean that there aren't genuinely bad people who genuinely want to attack efforts to fix the problems they create purely out of their own greed.
You're still conceding too much: All of our economic institutions, including laws regarding property ownership, are political choices. And these laws are actively enforced, not passively. We have made a decision to use purposefully the law to maintain substantial economic inequality.
There is nothing passive about allowing significant wealth disparities via commanding higher income on the labor market. "Markets" don't create or enforce ownership. Other countries have chosen to compress their income distributions using taxation and transfers. We have done so less. It's political policy choices all the way down.
The negotiation of higher salaries by the more capable tends to be a relatively natural process, where people demand more money based on factors like skill, experience, replaceability, etc. These salaries are lowered by redistribution and such. Lower salaries tend be increased by policy relative to a state with no interventions, like minimum wage laws and redistribution.
Of course you can always force salaries together more (although at a cost), but the more you try to diverge from the natural situation, the more problems you tend to get. That is why communism failed, because they tried to diverge too far from human nature, resulting in people evading the rules (corruption) and not engaging in the positive behavior (working hard & being innovative) that communism assumed people would not have to be rewarded for.
I think that one of the main failure modes of more extreme leftism is to not recognize this and treat policy choices as fully arbitrary, so there is no difference in downsides between a high and low level of redistribution.
Of course, you may be willing to pay a fairly disproportionate price to get a certain level of equality, but that price should be recognized and weighed as part of making the decision and of convincing others to support it.
"People own whatever they can command on the labor market" is no more natural than "people own whatever they can command via welfare law". I do not accept labeling the first as "natural" and then describing the second as "divergence" from this natural state.
At no point in human (or even pre-human) history was ownership defined strictly by what you could produce in by your skills in isolation. We are "naturally" social creatures, not atomistically individualist ones.
I think of progressive taxation as an attempt to intervene in the market mechanisms that determine the relative pay of surgeons vs. teachers. I support progressive taxation, and would support it more if more of the money went to good causes like giving it to the poor.
A more complete answer here would involve how we are unfairly privileging surgeons' pay through medical licensing issues which keep them artificially scarce, and unfairly privileging teachers' pay much less, and that this is responsible for a big part of the discrepancy.
In addition to the issue of relative pay between teachers and surgeons is the relative pay among teachers themselves. Which could be a potential mechanism for incentivizing quality teachers, but in practice this is suppressed by union rules that treat seniority as the only differentiator between teachers.
For a different comment I looked up the average salary difference between physicians and teachers in Germany, I then did the same for France and Sweden. They are almost identical in terms of multiple as the United States varying between 3 and 4.5 for physicians and surgeons respectively. Interestingly Germany pays its CT surgeons a multiple of 5.2 which is significantly higher than the US multiple of 4.5.
Whether or not they tax some of that difference back is a different argument.
A fundamental problem when talking about "deserts" is that, despite person A not necessarily deserving their property, it does not follow that person B thus deserves it.
This is a matter of differing definitions of meritocracy, not incorrect usage.
SA is attempting to refute deBoer's argument by…
1/ Arguing as if it were a matter of who gets "more money" and "should prosper" as if the alternatives were "less money" and "should only get by". The actual alternatives are consignment to poverty, debt peonage, and/or incarceration by a world-historically affluent society.
2/ narrowing the definition of meritocracy to the unobjectionable "vested with responsibility", ducking the entirely valid definition that deBoer is clearly using, "vested with economic goods and/or political power" and more specifically, the American brand of meritocracy which says that not only do the meritorious deserve economic and social success, but *also* that the meritless deserve nothing and misfortune is prima facie evidence of an absence of merit.
deBoer writes (in the book, not the 9 year old article SA quoted):
"To recognize that our abilities lie outside of our control would be to strike the hardest possible blow against meritocracy. For it is that belief in the universal availability of success that underpins our entire system; it is the logic that convinces us that our suffering is fair."
I’m going to put a TL;DR here at the top. You have picked two professions where the salaries are either directly set by the government or constrained within a narrow band buy said government and have claimed that this is the government NOT interfering with the free market. This is not correct. Fuller explanation below.
Physicians and teacher incomes are the absolute worst metric of “free market meritocracy”. Your statement that “we have chosen not to intervene much in the markets . . .” Is not even a little true. Teachers salaries are directly set by the state and physicians are paid under a system that sets prices based on the Relative Value Unit in which a government arranged panel of physicians assign a value to every type of physician interaction and procedure (the E&M and CPT code). The dollar value of an RVU is defined by CMS (Medicare) every year (currently ~$37/RVU) and therefore the price that Medicare will pay for any physician interaction is defined by a fixed (RVU number X RVU value). It is illegal for a physician to charge a Medicare patient more than that fixed dollar value set by the government. As 60% of the healthcare dollar is directly spent by the federal government in either Medicare or Medicaid payments and private insurance negotiations usually start as a percentage of the Medicare allowable even private practice physicians incomes exist within a narrow band set by governmental management. This leads to completely ridiculous outcomes such as the best surgeon in the United States gets paid exactly the same for a complex operation as the worst surgeon in the United States for the same operation.
For salaried physicians government meddling is even more direct. Physician salaries are governed within a band called “fair market value“ in order to theoretically prevent hospitals from paying physicians for referrals. This fair market value is set in opaque ways by looking at average salaries. While the government has avoided defining these fair market values there have been multiple federal lawsuits that have sued hospitals for going above them.
In short, asserting that teachers and physician incomes are set in some sort of laissez-faire capitalist world is ridiculous.
DeBoer says he wants not social mobility but "a higher floor for material conditions" and "a necessarily lower ceiling".
Then you object that "After all, there would still be the same level of hierarchy".
Huh? This section is muddled. He says he's in favor of not having as much hierarchy, then you give three examples of how hierarchies can be better or worse, and end up with the non-sequitur "It is weird for a liberal/libertarian to have to insist to a socialist that equality can sometimes be an end in itself" after he argued for equality and you argued against it.
"Seriously, he talks about how much he hates believe in genetic group-level IQ differences about thirty times per page" - should that be "belief" or "believers"?
Re. the last part about schools as prisons and alternative ways to teach children, I’d encourage looking into the Sudbury Valley School and Peter Gray’s writing, specifically Free to Learn. Could make a good book review!
Also while lots of educational journalists do good stuff, Matt Barnum from Chalkbeat is a reporter who people interested in education should get used to following.
One of the arguments for school that you haven't addressed is giving children an alternative environment to abusive parents (or just an alternative environment in general - there is arguably something to the idea that children should have a secondary environment where they learn things from people other than their parents). I agree with you about how schools are terrible (especially American schools, I think? my high school in Israel had only about 50% of the bad stuff you mention), but I'm not convinced "abolish schools" is a better solution for most kids than "make schools less bad".
Note that that is also an argument for letting children work for pay. Being a paid employee provides a child more power relative to his parents than going to school, since it gives him the option of leaving home if home is bad enough and if the state won't insist on dragging him back.
This is potentially useful, but I don't think it would work as well. The idea behind school giving a useful non-abusive environment is that even severely abusive parents will probably send kids to school (because it's the norm and maybe also because they want to get rid of them).
If kids have the option to work for pay - well, this works pretty well if they're aware of it and know how to find it. But most kids probably don't have those skills, and their abusive parents might either stop them or force them into especially miserable jobs and then take their money. It's much harder to make this work compared to a standardized school format if the parents are powerful hostile figures with power over their kids.
You seem to be assuming that kids are slaves. A six year old is quite unlikely to find a job and work at it, but a fourteen or fifteen year old could. Unless the government forces him to obey his parents, he has the option of being free and supporting himself — not very well, unless he is extraordinarily talented, but better than living with abusive parents. Forbidding him to work puts him at the parents' mercy, unless some other adults are willing to support him.
I think the British model where most people do high school until they're 16 and then people who want to keep doing school go on to A-levels for two more years is the beginning of a good structure. I like the idea of the "dropout" age being lowered, but I think the ideal would be to add in more diplomas. They don't even have to be separate buildings like in the UK, but allowing students to get an 8th grade diploma or a 10th grade diploma or a High School Diploma™️ (after 12th grade) would associate a milestone achievement with each of these steps, and maybe help destigmatize/normalize "dropping out" after any one of them.
I also very much agree with section III. about school being child prison. I often argue that so many problems with school boil down to the fact that school is not consensual, for parents or for the children attending. I'm positively interested in experiments that pay students for going to high school (and eliminating homework entirely). I'm also generally a fan of UBIs, and your question of what parents would do if they personally were receiving ~15k per child per year is definitely food for thought.
Has anyone read In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School
by Jal Mehta & Sarah Fine? I started it but haven't finished, but it discusses Success Academy (I believe) as well as schools with no-excuses policies and everything in between.
I'm generally disinclined from homeschooling-as-a-society-wide-solution for socialization reasons, since if you start putting kids together in clusters to do socialization you've basically recreated school but community-by-community, and I'm not enough of a socialist to think that's the best solution. I hope to be in a position to give my kids the option to be homeschooled for some or all of middle school, and I like to call myself a "middle school abolitionist" in general because I think there are far better things we could do with that time than anything we would recognize as a school.
Oh, that's very interesting, I didn't know that. I imagine them becoming "functional" is due in no small part to their social organization? That is, most people who drop out at 8th grade wouldn't have the support network needed to keep taking care of them until they're old enough to live independently (unless parents were fine leaving them home alone all day, and the kids were independent enough to want that in the first place).
I think a lot of Amish, practically all of the women and all of the men who are farmers, are themselves working at home, so the kids are being home schooled in running a household or a farm. I don't know how it works where the father is doing something other than farming, but my guess is that, if it's running a small business, the kids are apprenticing in that.
We have some non-Amish friends who have a family business. The kids went through the normal school system, but my impression is that they also spent a noticeable amount of time helping out in the business. At this point it looks as though one of the sons is gradually replacing is father in running it. An interestingly different family pattern from the one we are familiar with, where the child may end up in the parent's field (true of me, my wife, and one of her three siblings) but not in the parent's firm.
There are some Amish who are employees of non-Amish in construction and other activities, and I don't know what their kids do after leaving school.
I actually had a pretty nice time in high school. It wasn't a particularly good high school either. Maybe I am representative of a certain "kind of person who does well in the system we have now;" and maybe that kind of person is more rare than I currently imagine it to be.
1. I LOVED this post! "SSC Does a Graduation Speech" has burned itself into my brain and I suspect the criticism of school from this one will as well.
2. Some thoughts on pro public school extremism:
I think some people are fiercely pro public school *because* they see school as prisons, and see non-public schools (particularly private and parochial schools; they're not usually explicitly thinking about charter schools and if they do, they assume they're like private and religious schools) as having even more prison-like elements than public school. Specifically, they have all the elements mentioned above AND are more likely to be sex-segregated or require uniforms (and, in the case of parochial schools, threaten the students with Hell).
I am sympathetic to this position, though ultimately I come down on your side--it's worth letting some parents send their kids to more oppressive environments than the default if we also get the chance to get some kids in *less* oppressive environments. But I can see how someone who's more concerned with putting a floor on badness than raising the ceiling on goodness might oppose private/parochial/charter schools.
Speaking for myself, I went to public school and did consider it child prison--*and* I was grateful that at least I wasn't one of my friends who went to Catholic school, where the bullying was worse and the dress code more expensive, more boring-looking, and less comfortable, or one of the evangelical Christian homeschool kids I read about online, who had no friends other than their parents who beat them, taught them creationism, and made them act as third parents to their many younger siblings.
I admit this is probably not the reason *most* public school defenders feel relatively positive about the public school system or more critical of other kinds of schools, but I do think there are some who hold this position and don't say it because "school is child prison" is one of those things you're not supposed to Notice in many circles.
"I think some people are fiercely pro public school *because* they see school as prisons, and see non-public schools (particularly private and parochial schools; they're not usually explicitly thinking about charter schools and if they do, they assume they're like private and religious schools) as having even more prison-like elements than public school."
The most common argument I've heard against charter schools is from people who believe that letting children with parents who are somewhat interested in their children's well being leave a school may be slightly good for those children, but is morally outweighed by the neighborhood public school becoming much more like a prison, now that there aren't any interested parents left to advocate for anything better. Possibly then setting off a downward spiral of the interested teachers also leaving, and the "school" becoming a literal prison full of barbed wire and knives.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to that argument. Not that the other children shouldn't be allowed to leave -- but that perhaps we should think harder about how to make things less bad for the children who are left behind. Not having a default at all, and every school becoming a charter school is one possible solution, though I'm not sure how transportation would work.
For the problems, it would be worth looking into the UK system from 1948 until the mid-1970s (it was phased out in different areas at different times).
There was a high-stakes test taken at the end of elementary school (the "11+", taken by classes of mostly eleven-year olds). It was pass/fail and norm-marked (ie the number of passes is determined in advance and those with the highest scores pass; the actual score is not revealed, just a pass or a fail). Those who passed (10-20% depending on the area) went to a "grammar school", which was an academic school aiming at university entry (this was in an era when less than 10% went to university). Those who failed went to a "secondary modern school" which were meant to be vocational schools but were in practice usually disastrous - largely because the sort of people who politicians listen to didn't let their kids end up there; tutoring for 10 and 11 year olds to get them to pass the 11+ was very popular.
Every time anyone proposes charter schools or whatever in the UK, they're accused of wanting to turn the rest of the schools back into secondary moderns.
"or one of the evangelical Christian homeschool kids I read about online, who had no friends other than their parents who beat them, taught them creationism, and made them act as third parents to their many younger siblings."
How sure are you that what you describe is actually a common result of home schooling rather than a rare extreme emphasized by people who are against it? Here is some possibly relevant data, from a chapter of a book I am writing that looks at unschooling and home schooling:
Much hostility to home schooling comes from the belief that home-schoolers are mostly uneducated Christian fundamentalists trying to keep their children ignorant of evolution and sex education. That does not fit the NCES survey data. As of 2015-16, only 16% of home schooling parents gave “a desire to provide religious instruction” as the most important reason for home schooling, just below the 17% who chose “a dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools.” The most common reason, 34%, was “a concern about the environment of other schools, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure.” So far as the educational background of home-schooling parents, 30% had a bachelor’s degree, an additional 15% a graduate or professional school degree. For parents whose children attend a school, public or private, the figures were nearly identical: 27% with a bachelor’s degree, 17% with a graduate or professional school degree.
Oh, I don't think most homeschoolers are like that at all! The bloggers I followed who were abused made it clear that the problem was the ideology, not the homeschooling. I followed other bloggers who described a liberal hippie style of homeschooling that sounded much better than the school I went to (mostly from the parent's perspective, in those cases). It was just an example in my mind of how it could have been much worse, that makes me grateful to have gone to public school.
One key point is that however bad school is, some home environments are worse. Some parents abuse or neglect their children, some foist adult responsibilities onto kids too young to handle them, some simply don't have the knowledge or tools to teach their children anything at all. There is value in having a place where kids are treated well, and we should make sure that all children that need such a place can go there, regardless of their parents. However, families should be able to opt out if they can show they are providing a better environment than a traditional school.
Also, regarding "tourist teachers" my impression is that teaching is a set of skills that need to be developed through training and experience. While a certain level of intelligence is needed, I don't think an unrelated Ivy League diploma means that you would be good at it. Give a genius an auto repair manual, and he'll still be worse at fixing your car than an average mechanic.
"Also, regarding "tourist teachers" my impression is that teaching is a set of skills that need to be developed through training and experience."
My understanding is that this varies a lot by subject (IQ will do more for you if you're teaching physics than phonics), and energy level. Especially energy level. Back when I was following KIPP schools, my main impression was that it was all very well for a high energy 20 something, but no one could give birth and raise an infant in that environment, which is a major test of sustainability for most teachers.
At the calculus level there probably is a legitimate issue that anyone who's smart and conscientious enough to understand the material in depth well and figure out how to communicate it is both smart and an excellent communicator, and has a lot of job options, so it's hard to keep them as a teacher.
One good rule is that any teacher should be educated in the subject to at least one level higher than what they are teaching, so that they can answer the inevitable questions that go one level of abstraction deeper than the actual class topic.
But for higher level math and science classes (in particular) that's an education that does give them a lot of options.
"However, families should be able to opt out if they can show they are providing a better environment than a traditional school."
Show to whom, how defined? In practice I would expect any such test to be controlled by the public school bureaucracy allied with the teachers' unions, both groups with an obvious incentive to try to keep kids in the public schools.
This is a beautiful post, and in writing it I think it's extremely likely that you prevented at least thousands of hours of child-torture, and as a survivor of School I am profoundly grateful for that. Thank you, Scott.
Could you explain how your surgeon example in defense of a meritocracy extends to, say, a profession that does not have to do with life and death? Like, an account manager, for instance. Does the idea that "people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen", apply here? Or does our economic system also have inefficient pockets that reward certain people--more likely college educated folks who rise up in the meritocracy--for ultimately inconsequential work... What do we do with that?
There are definitely inefficiencies in the system. Sometimes it's hard to accurately assess someone's ability, and sometimes it's hard to assess the quality of output. So, people have to rely on imperfect proxies for ability/quality, and you'll get inefficiencies wherever that happens. For example, charisma and college degrees are often going to be factors in the hiring process, even when they aren't a direct factor in job performance.
Someone might reasonably believe that without self-interest providing some share of motivation to excel, society will be much poorer, or even in some sense fail, without believing that all people get all their motivation to excel exclusively from self-interest.
I can't tell if Freddie is purporting to believe that conservatives believe the maximalist claim ("all motivation to excel in all people is exclusively from self-interest"), or if he's just using mildly snotty language to represent the more modest claim ("a sufficient amount of motivation to excel comes from self-interest that it is essential for a functioning society").
As a high school teacher who independently reached many of Scott's conclusions about education years ago, here's how I think about my role, how I sleep at night, and what the pandemic year has revealed.
• I am daycare. 15-year-olds don't need a babysitter, but their parents are also not interested in having them sit at home all day getting into trouble*. Ok, fine. Perhaps my class can be a not-terrible place to spend an hour.
• *Some students do, in fact, prefer to be in school. More than I would have thought. (I now know this because I work for a chain of charter schools that has been ideologically committed -- for better and worse -- to staying open the whole year, while also allowing students to be online if their families chose. I've informally surveyed the ones who attend in person; they often had some input in the choice. Some of this in-person preference arises from a loathing for online learning, but much of it is a hunger for structure and socialization.)
• If I'm not having fun, I hate my job and know I'm probably making my class a sucky place to spend an hour. So I prioritize my lessons to keep myself stimulated. This usually involves goading students into a challenge, a discussion, or a project with me.
• I know they'll forget almost everything I formally teach, so there's little point in judging them harshly for forgetting it five minutes from now rather than five minutes after the test. So... I don't give many tests when I have a choice, and it's difficult to fail my class on test performance alone.
• Homework? Gross. I won't say it never happens, but it's not my norm. At all.
• I'm usually the smartest (IQ) person in the classroom, and even when I'm not, I'm by far the least naïve and most clever (education, street-smarts, rationality, etc.). The most important thing I have to offer teens is a peek inside my head, so I try to create situations where we look at problems together and they get excited to see how I approach those problems. (This may or may not have much overlap with the official curriculum, but with a little lawyering a teacher can justify almost anything.)
• Left to their own devices, most students would prefer to be playing games, watching YouTube videos, or getting into weird discussions. So I take some inspiration from these. Where is there potential for play in my content? What makes a YouTube personality engaging? What off-ramps for weird discussions exist that will also make these teens wiser?
• Savvy and wisdom tend to linger long after content is forgotten -- as do fond memories of an unusually enjoyable class. I consider the latter a terminal good.
Are you the same tangrabeast on lesswrong who uses anki in your classroom ? I’m currently writing my undergrad thesis on spaced repetition in foreign language classrooms, and I cited that LW post in a research paper I wrote on the subject last year. I agree with many of your conclusions above, and I’d love to hear more about your spaced repetition experiment (if it’s still ongoing) or any post-mortem reflections you may have.
Yes, that's me. SRS still has a place in my class; we used it today, in fact. But its role is much diminished since the heyday of my experiments with it, for reasons that I was already hinting at in my year two report. I had an in-progress report on year three I can try to dig up, but I think I had shelved it because my inner Paul Graham was telling me that it was bloated and self-important.
Is LessWrong still a good place to post an update on that? I haven't checked in there much in the past few years, and my impressions were of reduced activity.
Yes, I'd be very interested to read the progress report. I've only been using LW for the last few months, but it gets a steady stream of posts every day.
Heiner Rindermann, the author of the 2020 study you linked, seems to a be a racist due to these choice selections. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Heiner_Rindermann If I'm wrong or if they're taken out of context, let me know.
I am not familiar with that person in the slightest, but, RationalWiki is one of the least reliable sources I know of. I would be very skeptical of any research there.
So did he or did he not say those things? You can't just cast doubt on something without bringing in some sort of source as to why. I brought in RationalWiki due to the quotes it had of things he said that would make his research biased and of dubious quality. Bring in something that disproves the things Heiner Rindermann said.
I do not trust them to adequately report the context around those quotes, and, more importantly, pick quotes that actually are representative of Heiner’s work. I would wager the quotes themselves are actually things he has said though!
Is there any context where saying skull size and skin color being correlated with intelligence anything other than phrenology and racism? If so, please provide a reasonable context that could exist for those comments made during a conference held in secret on the grounds of the University College London without the knowledge or approval of University College London themselves. I hope you realize that while there could be a reasonable context, you'll have to stretch so far as to find one that you're becoming unreasonable.
"Is there any context where saying skull size and skin color being correlated with intelligence anything other than phrenology and racism?"
Is it racism if it's true, as I think both of those claims are, assuming "intelligence" means measured IQ? Try googling on [head size IQ]. Here is one of the things I found:
The article you linked discusses how larger brains, due to greater folding, are correlated with intelligence and not how skull size is correlated with it. Brains being bigger due to greater folding certainly correlates with intelligence but the size of your skull is different from intelligence as an elephant's skull is far bigger than a human's but an elephant is far dumber than a human. Remember these keywords, "cranial capacity (meaning skull size not brain size, literally volume of the skull)" and "skin color". If you want to back up his statements, find evidence supporting that skull size is what's correlated with intelligence and that skin color is correlated with intelligence when corrected for confounding factors such as SES.
Looking at their quotes, it depends on your definition of "racist." It sounds as though he believes that average IQ is different in different populations and that part of the reason is genetic. He is pretty clearly hostile to immigration of people from the Middle East to Germany, for both genetic and cultural reasons.
I wouldn't call him a racist if his factual beliefs are true, or even if they are some mix of true and reasonable errors, but some people would.
The anti-schools rant hits hard in many respects, but it seems confused about who demands education and the answer is: parents.
There was a time not very long ago when Scott's dream of far shorter school was a reality. I'm too lazy to look up the stats, but not many kids were going to high school until well into the 20th century. Why did this change? What happened? The answer is: parents wanted to send their kids to high school.
You wouldn't know it from Scott's post, but while schooling is compulsory (and it only is in a sense) education is at the end of the day demand-driven industry. Everyone wants it, even if they shouldn't.
>not many kids were going to high school until well into the 20th century. Why did this change? What happened?
My answer is: society got wealthier, and chose to spend that wealth on extended youth.
I think a lot of our current politically charged issues are a result of this happening again, and us not acknowledging it. Calls for more college are a reflection of this; campuses policing behavior more aggressively is a result of this; etc.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing - I was glad to not have adult responsibilities as a teenager! But I don't think the process by which adolescence has been extended is well understood, and is going to continue to cause problems.
Part of this is meritocracy, a tension that Scott hasn't really engaged with in his own framework. Parents demand what's best for their kids. Society got more meritocratic. Jobs required more knowledge. Few parents are willing to take a look at their kid and say from the outset "no knowledge job for you." So they demand schooling for their kids.
If you turn back the clock to the 17th or 18th century you get Scott's dream: a bit of schooling, but no one really gives a shit, it's all sort of a joke, parents teach kids what they want their kids to learn. The secret sauce? A very different way of connecting people with work.
Check out David Labaree's writing, particularly "Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling."
Basically - education does seem to have a small (but non-zero) effect on intelligence, and that this effect sticks. It feels like that's reason enough to not allow kids to drop out at the age of 12.
Hi Scott - possibly? I think I had a grand total of maybe 20 or so comments on SSC across many years, and I’ve not blogged in a while. I haven’t attended any SSC meet ups or blogged about rationality though - if there’s another Federico you are thinking of.
That depends on whether the kids who drop out at the age of 12 are ones whose intelligence would be improved by more formal education. Essentially all Amish do it — and then get home schooled in running a farm or a household, which they seem to end up doing well.
Iirc - that study didn’t attempt to quantify whether education is more effective at boosting IQ on some subgroups rather than others. Do you know of any studies that try to look at this in a quantitative way with a credible design? I know the Gibbons quote of course :)
Scott, what kind of nightmarish high school did you go to?
This is not a joke: if you’re willing, I really would like to read an article or something about what kind of experiences, personal or otherwise, led to these kinds of intensely negative gut reactions against school.
Because you make me worried. I went to school in Canada where things felt pretty sane to me. I can identify some similarities (homework felt very excessive to me and I struggled a lot with that) and some differences (my high school started at 9 AM and we even had one day a week where we only started at 10), but it doesn’t feel like the magnitude of differences I’ve heard of so far is enough to call one “okay” and the other “child prison”.
Is it just differences in individual reaction? There were still students that struggled in my school, sure, and arguably I was one of the ones that did better with the environment, but is it enough to explain the difference?
This is important because:
1. I live in California now, and I might end up having kids here at some point. They’d be subject to the American education system, and if it’s really that bad I might consider moving back to Canada when they get to schooling age.
2. I’ve always been kind of interested in education and teaching, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up gravitating back to it sometime down the road. If I do, I want to make sure I do a good job of it.
3. You’re not the only American writer I respect who has completely lambasted the US education system to the point of choosing homeschooling for his kids (or future kids). Shamus Young, a videogame blogger, wrote an entire online “autoblography” that was ostensibly about his childhood but ended up being mostly about his trials and tribulations in the US education system of the late 70s-80s, ultimately published as a book titled “How I Learned”. I felt it was because of a mix of failures on the school’s part plus a personality that chafed hard against those failures, but between you and him it’s enough to make me wonder whether it’s a problem that generalizes, and if so, how far. (A few bad schools? All American schools? All schools in general?)
i went to highly regarded public schools in california. they were pretty good. my best guess is that many other, not as highly regarded suburban public schools in california are about as good in terms of not-torturing, and also that the differences in academic outcomes are mostly due to selection effects.
I think Scott's (and my) characterization of school as a "child prison" comes fundamentally from the root fact that school is a non consensual institution. I had a wonderful time in high school, but I did not choose to be there, and as Scott mentions, high schools almost unequivocally fail the Burrito Test. I think the quality of education in the US varies super wildly district-to-district, and that's one of its major flaws (an accusation I don't make lightly).
TL;DR I would characterize school as a "prison" philosophically as long as it was a non consensual institution, no matter how cushy or nice that institution was.
When you're a child, everything is a non-consensual situation. You're stuck doing what your parents tell you. Going to school might not have been my choice, but it was sure as hell what my parents chose for me. It's also what I'm choosing for my children.
If I _did_ have a choice, between going to school every day to hang out with my friends versus staying at home alone and being taught everything by my mother, I definitely would have chosen school despite its many imperfections.
If you have good/reasonable parents, then not *everything* is non-consensual. And your parents didn't really consent to sending you to school either, assuming they didn't have the time or funds to homeschool you (as most parents don't), because it's required by law. I also would've chosen to be in school, but I think more discussion of school which takes into account that people don't really choose to be there (though they may get to choose which school) can help iron out many of the issues.
Why do you assume that home schooling means being home alone? Judging at least by comments on my blog by multiple home schooling people, that's not the norm. It would be even less the norm if the schooling system was not absorbing much of the time of all the other kids you would like to interact with, but there is still the option of interacting with other home schooled kids or with other kids on the weekend.
I’m starting to get the inkling that at very least my high school was much less prison-like than those of other people here. For the Burrito test: I vaguely remember my high school having a microwave in the cafeteria, which students could use on their lunch breaks. (Hard to remember for sure because I generally just brought cold lunches and sat with my friends in the hallways.) And students usually had a ~1hr free period during the day where they could leave the school. (I would sometimes use it to duck out to the library.)
The point in different districts is actually very relevant. IIRC, in Canada schools with worse outcomes get better support and funding, because they know it’s generally harder to teach underachieving/struggling students. My (rough) understanding is that in the US, it’s the opposite, they “incentivize” schools to teach better by tying funding to standardized test scores, which likely just exacerbates the differences.
(But don’t quote me on either of those, I haven’t verified those and I might be wrong.)
That's definitely possible; I went to two high schools.
At the public school, we were not allowed to leave the cafeteria during lunch without asking permission (except for seniors going to the senior lounge.) During study halls we were generally allowed to leave the classroom when we wanted. I would say it definitely fails the Burrito Test unless students are in a free period. In college, you could theoretically leave class at any moment (without asking, and in classes without attendance policies, without penalty) to microwave a burrito, but the same was not true of my high school (and as I said in another comment, my high school had generally high student-teacher trust.)
My private (international) school allowed us to go wherever we wanted during lunch, and we had 10-15 minutes between each class (only 4 a day) where we could go whenever we wanted. I would say this school passes the Burrito Test.
I've heard that schools in Europe are better about this, and the schools in the US are generally more prison-like than schools elsewhere.
See if you can sit in on some classes in some different districts at different ages. What is bad and how bad it is will vary by school. I think like much of US society school is often a popularity contest. I have late-elementary age kids and in all the schools they’ve been in (we’ve moved) they have never had to correct and return a math page that had mistakes. Some teachers would accept corrections but it was never required. Learning to mastery was not a thing. There is also some startling bullying. Your Canadian school sounds lovely.
There seems to be something about public institutions in the US that makes them function substantially worse than institutions in other first-world countries (speaking as an Australian who has lived in the US for many years). I don't really understand why it is, but it's a weird degenerative disease (a relative of cost disease, perhaps, although we have cost disease in Australia too) that makes every single function of government seem to function a whole lot worse.
It's why getting through airport security in the US takes an hour instead of five minutes. It's why going through Immigration at a US airport takes an hour (my record is two hours) instead of five to ten minutes. And it's why any kind of transaction involving the Department of Motor Vehicles is some kind of all-day odyssey instead of a ten-minute transaction. What's more, at every step you'll find that not only are the processes inefficient, the employees who serve you are rude and downright aggressive.
While I've dealt with US immigration, airport security and DMVs, I've never dealt with their public schools, but if I try to imagine what a school would look like if it were run by DMV employees then I can easily see how it would be closer to torture than to my own (boring, generally okay) high school experiences in Australia.
I agree with the general theme, though the details vary wildly across the country. My experience with the DMV has routinely been fine at several different locations. Even when I had to transfer my license from another country (Canada), it took less than 30 minutes at a busy urban facility.
I think Scott’s missing a fundamental tension here between his libertarian-ish desire for more student freedoms and the realities of the need for order within schools, including at the much-lauded charters that Scott wants other schools to emulate.
First, the kinds of charter schools that often get all the press about their “success” tend to be extremely militarized and have all kinds of strict rules governing student behavior. If you dislike regular public schools for being rigid, may I introduce you to the creepiness that is the “Teach Like a Champion” toolkit (and similar systems of its ilk) that’s become the Bible for all kinds of charter school chains as well as a number of public school systems? See here for a sample, including a student berated for insufficient eyes on the speaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC0ltKOwF_A
While perhaps a few special charters (and even some--gasp--public schools!) might have more of this Montessori-esque system that Scott seems to want in education, the reality is that most of these successful charter schools are extremely controlled and disciplinarily harsh environments. Plus, the students who can’t fit into this environment get filtered out back to their neighborhood public schools or don’t even apply to the charter in the first place (hence the DeBoer critique).
Second, the “bathroom pass” complaint is an excellent illustration of a similar kind of tension between order and liberty that seems to be quite common online, especially from people who were well-behaved students and found such tyranny to be unconscionable (I felt much the same way as a student). Let’s walk through what would happen in practice though if libertarian idealist Scott became a teacher.
Teacher Scott has just entered the classroom of 35+ students for his first day at a typical urban public school. The moment the bell rings to begin class, the hands start to go up. Student A: “Mr. Alexander, I gotta go, BAD.” Student B: “Mr. A, I need to go to the bathroom.” Student C: “Can I please go to the bathroom please I really need to go it’s so bad”. Teacher Scott, being a nice guy who’s committed to his libertarian ideals in education, tells all the students they’re welcome to go to the bathroom and that he will never dare to stop them from fulfilling such a basic requirement of nature.
Student A takes off in the direction of the bathroom, but then decides to run up and down the hallways as fast as possible. Student B is off to visit her friend in in-school suspension and waves into the windows of other classrooms along the way, disrupting numerous other classes. Student C goes to the bathroom, but then decides that the paper towel dispensers seem like they’d be fun to tear off the wall and comes back to the classroom armed with plenty of wet crumpled paper towels to throw at other students. Students D and E, now that it’s clear Teacher Scott isn’t going to stop them, decide to ignore the amazing, engaging lesson Teacher Scott is trying to pitch to them and have wandered out of the classroom and are now engaging in some kind of inappropriate conduct in the stairwell.
Now perhaps Teacher Scott is proud of the fact that he’s just unleashed anarchy against the evil prison-like environs of public education in the first five minutes of his time in the classroom, but he’s also not going to be Teacher Scott for much longer. Even the hated teacher’s unions would likely not support a rookie teacher who made life worse for everyone else in the school. This is why, in fact, both the evil public schools and the beloved charters likely share similarly strict bathroom rules as well as other rules governing student behavior that seem absolutely maddening to the well-behaved students, but are in fact there for a reason. One might call them Chesterton's Bathroom Passes. At the $40k a year elite private school though, I’m sure you can get up whenever you like and go to the bathroom.
Scott is making a lot of idealistic assumptions here and I’d respectfully encourage him to spend some time volunteering in or at least visiting local public and charter schools in his neighborhood to see just how much his ideals would match up to reality.
I used to teach in public schools, so I understand and acknowledge these dynamics.
I'm not claiming there's a way to keep the apparatus of school completely intact while getting rid of all the oppressive parts, I'm suggesting we try to find alternatives to that apparatus.
But if we can't even think of a way to rid ourselves of bathroom passes, the most archetypal and oft-repeated example of scholastic oppression, what progress can we really make against the "oppressive parts" in general? Most of the "oppressive parts" seem to come as a consequence of the fact that unsupervised children are frequently a danger to themselves or others. I don't want my children oppressed by a bunch of petty minor government employees, but I also don't want them wandering unsupervised, so there's an unavoidable tension there.
(For the record, at my non-US school we didn't have a thing called a "bathroom pass" at all, but you still had to get your teacher's permission to leave the room to go to the bathroom.)
I think American kids are not taught cooperation as a social good in the same way kids in other countries are. So there is a high level of poking and whispering and general disobedience. Rigid charter schools shut that down. Public schools are generally less effective at that, so they’re always between gears. Teachers must use their personality to impose and that rankles some kids (maybe like Scott was.) I think the successful charters with kids from disadvantaged backgrounds acknowledge up front that kids are coming from struggle, but they say, in here we do it differently, and rather than using their personality to impose rules, the rules are a given and the personality can be load-bearing for cultivating mutual respect and achievement.
I’m not against rules, but they manifest in a variety of ways and some of it is destructive.
A youth soccer team with a wishy-washy coach may turn on itself, I’ve seen that happen, and then with a more experienced and tougher coach it started to resolve. Hope that makes sense.
What about a privileges-based system, like is also used in prisons? Then kids get the right to go to the bathroom when they want by default and problem kids have to ask.
This can be resolved with an IT solution. A fairly basic system uses a pass to enter and exit the room, so this makes it easier for the teacher than the current situation.
It can also be sold to schools as a safety measure, to reduce the risk of school shootings, violent parents, etc.
Then the problem kids beat up the non-problem kids and they ask the teacher to take the privilege away so they stop being beaten up.
Find a way to address school bullying first, and then we can look at the rest of the problems, because until you do, everything will be shaped around the bullies.
My high school didn't have bathroom passes; we had to sign out of and back into classrooms when leaving, but by 11th or 12th grade we were generally not required to ask to go to the bathroom. There were absolutely issues with students vaping/smoking weed in the bathrooms, but I don't think the absence of bathroom passes was the primary culprit here. My high school had a generally high degree of student-teacher trust, and I think that was one of its best attributes. Unfortunately such a thing is hard to emulate, but I personally believe teachers and administrators (as the very literal "adults in the room") have a responsibility to be first-movers in this scenario, incrementally allowing students more freedom and in turn expecting more of them.
Seems like the issue here is that the kids can get away with being barbarians. Student C, in particular, should get a fairly significant punishment for their behaviour. If you do things like that, then they stop doing the really disruptive stuff, at minimum, and the issue will get much less salient.
I suspect the root cause there is that schools have no effective way to punish students. What's the worst they can do - tell you that you don't have to come to school for a while? Ohnoes. I'm not in favour of corporal punishment, but you wouldn't expect much of this behaviour at a school that could enact such direct discipline for misdeeds. The trick is to find a punishment that's equally effective, but less barbaric(or seen as less barbaric by a majority of the voting public, at a minimum).
1. Those "studies" that Scott cites re IQ and genetics are fcking _surveys_ of _psychologists_. At the least, where are the fcking geneticists? The studies have near-zero credibility there for the points Scott wants to establish, and his use of them for that really diminished my respect for him. They're fcking popularity contests! It's the kind of rhetorical stunt I'd expect from a college sophomore.
2. $15K to $30K is not going to be enough in most major urban areas for most people to stay home. That's just past to future minimum wage ($7.5 to $15/hour) if you have one kid. Not to mention the other stuff kids get at school. So that's going to be a nice spliff for folks who want to home-school their multiple kids, but beyond that, meh.
3. Charter schools are little better or worse than regular public schools, based on our experience with both, and my work starting a charter school.
My understanding is that the main difference between charter & non-charter schools is not academic outcomes, but price, with charters being cheaper. Education Realist argues this is because Special Education sucks up so much of the budget and charters avoid those students.
At the winter and spring programs for my local public elementary, there is usually a number by the special ed kids, nearly half of whom have an adult attending them. It certainly looks like an expensive program, and those kids aren't going to charter schools.
Given the cognitive psychologists are the ones studying intelligence explicitly why wouldn't a survey of them give a good sense of the consensus of the science of intelligence?
1. This is about the intersection of intelligence and genetics. Psychologists are no more informed about genetics than anyone else, on average.
2. It's asking their opinion. It's a survey, not a study. I'm mildly interested in their opinion, but it carries little weight, because no one is asked to provide any analysis supporting their opinions. Psychologists are as biased as anyone else. IMHO, that's a big reason why there was a difference in opinions between politically led and politically right psychologists in the survey.
1. Are there any studies with geneticists around? You say "at the very least," so do you mean there are people other than geneticists and psychologists that should be surveyed? What do you mean by popularity contests?
2. The average household has around two kids. And Scott's proposal isn't to force anyone to teach for minimum wage. If a family thinks it's not worth it, then they can send their kids to school as they do now. But this will help families on the margin, if they want to homeschool their kids.
1. It's not my responsibility to find those studies, but without them, its irresponsible to make claims about the intersection of intelligence and genetics. I'm saying that you need to work with psychologists and psychologists, and I'm saying a survey is wildly insufficient.
2. Fair point; I thought Scott was talking about large, systemic changes. Many things make a difference at the margin; this is one of them, sure, if they want to homeschool their kids. My hunch is that is a small group of people, but it will make a difference to them, sure.
I don't think it makes sense to say that intelligence is not related to moral value. I value mice more than flies. I value dogs more than mice. I value dolphins more than dogs and I value smart humans more than dull humans. I am a utilitarian consequentialist and I believe that the innate value of an entity comes from its capacity to experience. Smarter people can have deeper thoughts, understand more connections, hold more ideas on their head at a time etc. And thus their experiences are richer and more valuable than that of a dull person in the exact same way that a dull person's experiences are richer and more valuable than that of a lower animal.
It might be convenient and agreeable to assert that all people have equal worth but I do not see how it is logical
I share a similar philosophical view that one ought to place value on entities in proportion to their capacity for conscious experience, but I'm not sure that the relevant differences in moral weight are all that high from human to human (outside of extreme cases - I agree that the experiences of a permanently comatose person are probably not of equal weight to a person with higher brain function).
As evidence, consider times when you yourself have been at reduced intelligence! The effects of alcohol, weed, sleep deprivation, and a number of other relatively ordinary experiences can curtail your intelligence by a fair bit. My internal experience in such states doesn’t seem to me to be particularly less vivid or important - I think I put about as much value on the wellbeing of my drunk self as I do on my sober self, even if the former would do worse on an IQ test.
I agree that someone with more intelligence, all else equal, probably has access to a greater variety of experience - a person who struggled with algebra is probably not going to jump for joy upon discovering an elegant mathematical proof - but I don’t find this all that compelling given how few people actually bother to explore the vast range of experiences available to them. Do you know anyone who can credibly lament that they've already exhausted the variety of subjective experiences available to their current brain? I don't.
Also, the argument suggests that we should disvalue people with low physical fitness, because they can’t experience the joy of climbing a mountain. (For that matter, we should disvalue agoraphobics and people who spend their whole lives in Nebraska.) It seems like this argument proves too much, or at least that it implies a whole lot of things and it’s not clear that “intelligence” is the relevant axis to focus on.
I actually thinking drunkenness is a perfect example to illustrate my point. People often drink with the intention of dulling down the experience to make it more manageable. This implies that suffering experienced whilst drunk has a significantly lower negative valence than if experienced sober.
> Also, the argument suggests that we should disvalue people with low physical fitness, because they can’t experience the joy of climbing a mountain
It's not about variety. It's about depth and dimension. A smart and a dull person can climb the same mountain and the smart person's experience will be richer; their perceptions will be more finely resolved, their actions more precisely calculated.
You can't possibly know that. What if it were the other way around? What if the dumb person's experience of mountain climbing were richer, because less intelligent people tend to live in the moment, while more intelligent people are constantly distracted by thoughts of something else?
It does seem to me that this is a complicated attempt to smuggle self-interest back into your utiliarian consequentialism, by aiming "the greatest good for the greatest number, with of course a higher weighting factor for smart people like me".
Do you value more-intelligent mice more than you value less-intelligent mice, though? I don't, because the difference between a smart and dumb mouse is small enough to be meaningless to me. If God existed, He would no doubt feel the same way about the smartest and dumbest humans.
How do I assign moral value to people? Privately, I value myself at infinity, my family at near-infinity, my friends and close associates highly, my acquaintances quite lowly, and everyone else at zero. But publically, I value everyone equally, because this is a polite social fiction that we all respect due to the fact that everyone has approximately equal ability to clonk someone else over the head with a rock.
> Do you value more-intelligent mice more than you value less-intelligent mice, though? I don't, because the difference between a smart and dumb mouse is small enough to be dmeaningless to me.
The difference between a smart and dumb mouse is also small to me but I suspect this says more about my lack of experience with mice than it does anything else. I do however have plenty of experience dealing with people of all different levels of intelligence and the differences are astounding
If I say "yes" then I wind up obliged to start donating to those mosquito net charities, don't I?
Realistically if we're talking a stranger who is dying in front of me and I'm the only one who can save him, then yes, I'll pay the five bucks. For an unknown stranger dying in a foreign country that isn't specifically my responsibility I, like most people, won't, because once I've committed to that I'm obliged to become an effective altruist.
Almost nobody is ever in a position to save a life for $5. The actual cost per life saved for "those mosquito net charities" is $3000. So no, you're not committing to much of anything, practically speaking, by assigning a very low, but non-zero value to a stranger's life.
Zero is a very scary value to assign to the lives of strangers. It suggests that if you could have prevented the more than 20,000 child deaths due to fire in 2017 for $1, you would not do it. It suggests that if you have a choice between getting a free month on your Netflix subscription and increasing the standard of living for everyone in Africa by 20%, you'd take the free Netflix.
I think that one of the reasons people avoid confronting the question "how much is a stranger's life worth to me?" is because they think that if they assign any value other than zero, they'll be obligated to do things they don't want to do. But that's not the case (and it *certainly* isn't the case that you're obligated to become an effective altruist), if nothing else because there not many opportunities to save lives for very small costs.
> Zero is a very scary value to assign to the lives of strangers. It suggests that if you could have prevented the more than 20,000 child deaths due to fire in 2017 for $1, you would not do it.
I want to say that this pattern-matches to me on the idea that "atheists must be immoral because morality comes from God", where a different kind of person has trouble seeing how anyone would do good without divine rules/intervention/retribution... while the atheist just builds their coherent value system—which can be just as charitable—on a different rock altogether.
(In this case, I would point out that just because the reason isn't *related to the strangers' individual value,* there can still be reason to do such a thing—the cynic in me points out there are at least the opinions of the people they do put value on, but other reasons could surely be found.)
I guess I'm trying to use "value" in a fairly general way (as, for example, part of what people are talking about with revealed preferences), and I tried to couch it with the phrasing "this suggests that", rather than "this implies that".
Personally, I think someone is probably making an error by assigning zero value to strangers, either for the reasons I was getting at with the $1 vs 20k strangers or because the notion of assigning moral value to people is mistaken to begin with. But Melvin volunteered the moral values they assign to other people, so I'm trying to engage on those grounds.
I think it is a mistake to think that people who have cognitive abilities that help them do well at school and in the job market have experiences that are morally more valuable than others. Moreover, I think it is really, really bad to assume that this is the case and make moral judgements based on it. Most people throughout history who thought they had a good basis for rating some people as less morally valuable than others were not just wrong, but were making some of the most horrifying moral errors that humanity ever committed.
> believe that the innate value of an entity comes from its capacity to experience. Smarter people can have deeper thoughts, understand more connections, hold more ideas on their head at a time etc. And thus their experiences are richer and more valuable than that of a dull person in the exact same way that a dull person's experiences are richer and more valuable than that of a lower animal.
I think the mistake here is conflating two different notions of intelligence. There is no particular reason to believe that the difference between someone who scores 90 IQ vs 100 IQ is of the same type as the difference between a cow and a dolphin.
Given humans with the same amount of healthy brain tissue can score very differently on IQ tests it would be weird if this was the case. Or that our system for measuring "intelligence" for a set of tasks wildly different from the ancestral environment would happen to map on to the biological trait that differs between species
And instead of arguing with Marxists about who gets paid how much, let's just stop tying moral worth to money. End the Cult of Rich. (The old USSR did in some measure achieve this, but I don't care for its methods, or for that matter its overall results.)
None with histories of success, no. What I had in mind was a Citizens' Basic Income or something very like it, but the real change must be to hearts, not bank accounts. Yet it is a waste of breath simply to tell people, "You should not feel that way about poor people."
Besides, however high my moral worth may be, I can't pay my electricity bill with it.
I think there have been a fair number of societies where perceived moral worth, or at least status, which is closely related, was not tied to money, although money might be one factor. In 19th century England, "he made it in trade" was a negative. A poor Church of England minister had more status than a richer tradesman. In traditional Jewish or Islamic societies, a religious scholar had more status than a richer businessman.
The same is true in sizable parts of our society. A Nobel prize winner has more status but probably less money than the author of a widely used introductory textbook in his field. A very successful bridge player or chess player has more status in his community than a less successful and richer one.
IQ by itself gives little status in our society. Being a member of Mensa isn't worth very much — less than being a Harvard graduate.
Are you really steelmanning the socialist case here? Yes, it is good for society to have the most competent person for a job perform that job - and in that sense of "meritocracy" presumably everyone is a meritocrat.
In the functional capitalist system you describe the people who are more competent will be assigned more money and status and live more comfortable lives. This incentivizes people to contribute as much value as they can, which is good for society.
Since people have different levels of talent, the result, however, is an uneven distribution of goods like status and money. On the face of it, that seems unfair. So we end up with a tension between incentivizing people to provide value and having a fair distribution of "goods". We can try to resolve that tension in different ways:
1. We can deny that the unequal distribution is unfair and keep the current system.
2. We can stop rewarding more competent people with status and money, sacrificing the incentivization mechanisms.
3. We can do something in between, like using redistributive taxation to reduce the resulting inequality while keeping some incentivization.
A common way to defend 1 is to claim that if you are productive you *deserve* both monetary rewards and high status. And vice versa, if you are incompetent you deserve little or no money and low status. Even though this isn't the technical definition of "meritocracy" the idea is somewhat associated, so presumably that's what DeBoer is opposed to.
And this view has trouble with IQ realism. Normally the view is combined with ideas like that success comes from hard work and using free will to make good choices. But if success is rather determined by an inherited IQ level that you are not responsible for, then it's hard to defend an uneven distribution of goods as fair and just.
Since the solution 2 plausibly leads to a worse society it isn't very tempting. Instead, a social democratic-ish mixed economy version of 3 becomes more tempting: retain a free market monetary and status incentives for productivity but use progressive taxation to redistribute a fair amount of the goods.
However, if competency is largely determined by IQ, or other factors people have no control over, then it seems unfair that the high IQ people will end up with lots of money and status.
Fairness is not the sole criteria. A society that resembles a meritocracy will be richer, safer, and cleaner than one that does not. It may be less fair, but some things are more important than fairness.
Right, it is also possible to sacrifice either fairness or efficiency, if one turns out to be more important and there is no way to get both.
Note however, that if a society is perceived to be unfair that leads to secondary problems too, like lower social trust.
Of course, a moderate socialist would argue that you can get enough of both meritocratic efficiency and fairness through the combination of a capitalist economy and progressive redistributive taxation.
At a tangent, one problem with the whole "fairness" argument is that if you take it seriously — everything you are is due to things you were not responsible for, whether genetics, environment, or luck — the conclusion is not that everyone deserves the same outcome but that nobody deserves anything. That leads you to ignore issues of fairness and instead try to maximize whatever you think is important — utlitarianism or some alternative with a different maximand.
> A common way to defend 1 is to claim that if you are productive you *deserve* both monetary rewards and high status.
A better way to defend 1 would be that you've earned whatever people freely give you, and since there's no problem with the individual exchanges (paying someone to perform a surgery), there's no problem with the resulting distribution. Since people tend to prefer better surgeons to worse ones, monetary rewards will tend to flow to higher-IQ people, but they're being paid by each person who judges their price to be worth it, not rewarded for their IQ.
Compare to e.g. basketball, where height, an unchosen trait, is a prerequisite for professional success. Is it fair that short people are unlikely to make much money there? I think it is - viewers want to see a certain level of play, and so they ultimately pay to see it. But the successful players aren't being rewarded for their height, but for providing a good experience, which is a choice.
I don't think "inputs" like IQ or effort are relevant to desert. Suppose one guy slaves away studying/practicing, sacrifices a lot of personal life for his dream job, and is only able to perform adequately because he works really hard. The other guy is so naturally talented that he can do the job as a hobby with minimal practice. Which one is more deserving? The one the customer chooses.
I am suspicious of this reasoning because it seems like when the masses throw money, you get weird results.
We are in an age where people will buy a stock based on a misspelling of a word in an Elon Musk tweet, or a cryptocurrency because celebrities promote it.
Also, it has always been a little weird to me how little problem most people have with lottery tickets. Isn't this creating inequality for the undeserving on purpose? But we don't see activists trying to ban lotteries.
I don't think we've figured out how to properly deal with summing small inputs from large numbers of people. Utilitarianism seems to have problems with this too, with paradoxes about the worth of making millions of people every-so-slightly better off.
I don't have a good alternative, and it's been a long time since I more-or-less accepted that people get rich for unfair reasons and I'll just have to deal with it. But it seems like a there is a mystery here, and something being the sum of a lot of voluntary transactions doesn't resolve the mystery for me.
Distribution of money or distribution of traits relevant for jobs like NBA player? Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain example started with people having equal amounts of money, and it subsequently becoming very unequal even though each step didn't violate any notion of fairness.
Distribution of anything. The point isnt that inequalities can't arise in an otherwise just system, it is that the starting state of the system must be included. We can't say that the current distribution is just because we know that it started from an unequal distribution.
I think there are some people who would object to inequalities even in Nozick's thought experiment. If the real objection is not to the ex-post inequalities but to prior injustices, then logically it should seem that our responses should be tailored to those prior injustices rather than the present.
We can't go back in time and solve prior injustices. There is a consequentialist argument or redistribution in the present, which is that transfers increase overall utility. There is a deontological argument against that, which is that everyone owns their money justly, so that taxation is theft. But including the initial state removes that objection and leaves the consequentualist argument.
"A common way to defend 1 is to claim that if you are productive you *deserve* both monetary rewards and high status."
I don't think that correctly represents the argument. It's that if you are productive you are entitled to monetary rewards, which is not the same thing. It ultimately comes from the intuition that an individual is entitled to what he produces. That's an easy and persuasive intuition in a context where production is clearly linked to individuals. Imagine that there is lots of empty land out there and anyone who wants can go out, clear some of it, plant crops, etc. There is still inequality — some people are better farmers than others or luckier — but there is a strong intuition that each person is entitled to what he produces, whether or not he deserves it. Applying the intuition to a complicated and interdependent society is harder, but I think it can still be done.
>"I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on..."
tl;dr of course any two racial groups could differ genetically in either direction, and we would have no real way to tell, given the eminent plausibility of environmental/socialization differences that are even larger—and can't be controlled for by adoption studies, since e.g. people's perception of your skin colour doesn't change when you're adopted. (Don't look at experts on IQ only, look at experts on quantitative genetics, or at least people who are genuinely literate in it [Murray isn't*]. Those are the prerequisite concepts, e.g. understanding what heritability means.)
It's not that races couldn't possibly differ genetically for IQ-affecting genes. It's that there's no reason at all to assume any particular genetic difference in any particular direction (unless by misunderstanding heritability)—yet Murray and friends keep speculating that black people specifically have lower-IQ genes than white people specifically.
"...Let's first be clear about the conclusion itself. In a recent article on 'The Real Bell Curve,' Charles Murray grumbles about critics, such as Stephen Jay Gould, who read the book as saying that racial differences in IQ are mostly genetic. Murray answers by quoting from the book:
If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanations have won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate (311).
In this passage, Herrnstein and Murray are 'resolutely agnostic' about whether bad environment or genetic endowment is more responsible for the lower IQs of Blacks. But they indicate no agnosticism at all about whether *part of the IQ difference* between Blacks and Whites is genetic; and given their way of thinking about the matter, this means that they are not at all agnostic about *some* Black genetic inferiority...
...Notice... that [Murray's] statement of alternatives blots out a crucial possibility: that Blacks are much worse off than Whites environmentally and better off genetically. Allowing this option, we get a different set of alternatives: genetically, Blacks are worse off - or better off - or equal to Whites. I don't say that it is likely that blacks are better off genetically than whites, but it is possible, and—a very important point—what you consider possible affects what you think is an extremist position...
...If you accept The Bell Curve's way of putting the options, then the idea that environmental differences between blacks and whites are big enough to account for 15 IQ points looks like extremism. But given the actual alternatives—that blacks are genetically on a par with whites, or worse off, or better off—zero genetic difference doesn't seem extremist at all."
+ Scott seems like he would be interested in hearing a lucid explanation of the criticisms of Murray and why his opinion isn't a reasonable middle-ground, so "we can move on."
"It's that there's no reason at all to assume any particular genetic difference in any particular direction"
That's too strong. We do, after all, have a theoretical basis for predicting some genetic differences.
The obvious case is not race but sex. We are as-if-optimized for reproductive success. So we should expect differences in the distribution of heritable traits where the traits have different payoffs for male and female reproductive strategies. The obvious example is that the payoff to a male from a taste for promiscuity is higher than the payoff to a female, and that prediction seems to fit at least casual observation. There are less obvious predictions as well. One can imagine similar arguments for racial groups whose ancestors spent a long time in different environments, although the only obvious ones are things such as skin color and genetic defenses against malaria.
I agree that for sexes, plausible predictions can be made that, though far from certain (cf. seahorses and hyenas), are more likely in one direction than the other
tangent, for interest! [on parental investment theory; in general not specifically for humans]:
>"The obvious example is that the payoff to a male from a taste for promiscuity is higher than the payoff to a female..."
Interestingly, insofar as that's been thought relevant to parental care evolution (when will a male desert to mate again vs. help raise its offspring? when will a female?), it turns out to be complicated by the "Fisher condition"* familiar from sex ratio theory, that every mating must have one male and one female—so to properly model males' and females' gains from desertion, you have to keep track of where the future mates would come from (even Maynard Smith accidentally left that out of one of his 1977 models**)
The Fisher condition complicates the theory itself, not just the technical details of the models, because at the 1:1 sex ratio, the average male and average female should expect exactly the same amount of future reproduction—so how can it benefit males more than females to desert? An answer is that it can if there's already sexual selection, because then *mated* males, who are the ones facing the decision whether to desert, are a *non-random subset* of males, with higher-than-average expectation of future reproduction [Queller 1997, https://www.jstor.org/stable/50761; Kokko and Jennions 2003, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169534703000090]
(Parental care is also thought to be easily influenced by mode of reproduction; e.g. since in fish, vs. mammals, eggs are laid before males fertilize them, females have the first opportunity to desert and leave the males to guard the nest [Dawkins and Carlisle 1976, https://www.nature.com/articles/262131a0])
**How to properly apply which Fisher condition (on reproductive output? on mating rate?) to which sex ratios (adult? at maturity? operational?) has tripped up lots of researchers. An amusing summary [Fromhage and Jennions 2016, https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12517]: "There is a long history of modellers struggling with the Fisher condition. For example, model 2 of Maynard Smith failed to specify where the mating opportunities of deserting males came from, creating the impression they appeared from thin air... This problem went unnoticed for many years, until Webb et al. and Wade and Shuster proposed solutions... the latter of which turned out to be flawed itself. Kokko and Jennions subsequently drew on Queller and made the Fisher condition the focal point of their model for the evolution of parental care but, as we have described here, they too inadvertently misapplied the Fisher condition. We trust that our current model is now Fisher consistent, although the literature on this topic is hardly a recommendation for uncritical acceptance of such assurances." [Jennions and Fromhage 2017, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2016.0312] has a useful table for which quantities have which Fisher conditions for which sex ratios
I actually use the Fisher condition in a price theory textbook to demonstrate that the economic approach isn't limited to humans, it applies to genes too — the analysis parallels the explanation of why all checkout lines in a supermarket are about the same length.
As a small child spending a year in Cambridge, I met Fisher. I don't remember the occasion, but by my parents' account I was very impressed. He not only knew more than I did about dinosaurs, an enthusiasm at the time, he knew more than I did about comic books.
The Senior Common Room took two copies of the Times, for the crossword puzzle. It was a contest — Fisher against everyone else.
It's an odd moment to write an encomium to learning at home & talk about how horrible school is, when a whole lot of parents (not all, but a whole lot) are finding their kids miserable because they're stuck at home. And it's not the zoom school, at least in all the cases I know of; it's the lack of social contact. I've seen lots of news stories saying "I can't believe I want to go to school" type-things. So whatever you do, don't make homeschooling the default. (I admit it would be better out of a pandemic, since those homeschooling kids tend to get together.) If you want non-prison schools, then advocate for those. Or free-range schools where the kids go and design their own activities & do whatever they want. But some sort of place to be with other kids (and for a lot of kids, some sort of structure to the day) is really necessary.
This is an interesting time to be looking at the education system, since so many children have been locked up at home instead of at school for nearly a year now, and enough miss it to suggest some utility outside the bare minimum of learning basic skills that can be done on a computer.
Outside of absolute basics in reading, writing, and arithmetic, I would prefer that a lot more focus was placed on student experience in general, and it seems like a major flaw that Freddie's thoughts on charter schools don't give more weight to student happiness regardless of test scores.
I was homeschooled until about 16, when I studied pretty much whatever I wanted at community college. It was a good experience, with lots of youth group and clubs and 4-H, all very relaxed.
Now I'm an elementary art teacher, and mostly get to see the good side of that system. Every week of so the children get to paint or poke at pieces of wool or build something out of clay and dip it in glaze and see how it melts into glass. This is quite popular. Children stop in the hallway to tell me that art is their favorite subject. Even the kids who won't ever be great at realism or technique seem to have a decent time trying different things out. I think music class is also fairly popular (except that this year they aren't allowed to sing).
Waldorf schools, are quite arty and imaginative, and they seem like a good idea, though after interviewing at one I've realized that it's much too much work to be a teacher at one.
I can't tell from this review if Freddie has much of an opinion on the sorts of things young people who aren't academically gifted should be encouraged to do more of instead. School doesn't have to be the place for trying to figure that out, but since the infrastructure is already in place, it could be for many young people.
Some high schools have excellent and popular culinary arts programs. Sous chef or baker isn't a dead end position the way fast food worker mostly is. Some high schools have good cosmetology programs, and 18 year olds graduate with certificates allowing them to get salon jobs immediately. It can be hard to find good shop teachers since mechanics don't need to put up with all the BS entailed in getting certified as a teacher, but a good welding or automotive repair or any other respectable blue collar program is super useful. I'm not sure if there are many high schools with programs in innovative agriculture -- permaculture, regenerative agriculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, etc -- but there could be, and probably are some already. To extent that these programs are well targeted, they mostly don't have a big problem with students and their teachers agreeing on when to go to the bathroom. Some high schools seem to have nearly transitioned into community college, with specializations, choices, and large campuses. Other schools allow duel enrollment with the local college, which can also be very positive.
Majority hispanic schools especially seem to do a reasonably decent job of communicating that working in a kitchen or salon or building or repairing physical things *isn't necessarily a bad life, or a failure.* Freddie seems to think so as well, but that message seems to get a bit lost in the abstractions, and in the fact that he's an academic himself, and very embroiled in the kinds of academic concerns that he admits aren't important or universal enough to stress in education. But maybe he's like Levin and does whatever the city equivalent of wielding a scythe is.
"Certainly it is hard to deny that public school does anything other than crush learning - I have too many bad memories of teachers yelling at me for reading in school, or for peeking ahead in the textbook, to doubt that."
Scott's school sounds surprisingly restrictive. Especially the parts about getting yelled at for reading ahead. What was that about? In my experience teachers get rather put out when students blast through an assignment super fast and then expect to be entertained or given something else to do, but that's just a management issue. Even if they can come up with a new activity instantly, explaining it might derail the rest of the class.
I went to a magnet high school which boasted a record of 0 disciplinary suspensions of students per year.
Come senior year when I was arrested at school for drug posession, I discovered how they managed to pull that off: Send the student back to their normal, geographically-zoned high school, or a K-12 for bad kids if you committed a crime, for the rest of the year, but allow them back right in time for graduation.
It's effectively a suspension (from the school's perspective) but without the accompanying statistic.
Great post. My top 10 to be sure. I just want to add a few things that might not be obvious to most people. First, even very small IQ differences can lead to drastically different pay scales. Take the NBA for example. The top 3 ranked basketball players may be only 10% or even 5% better than the next 3 ranked basketball play but still make many multiples more. Even when the "merit" difference is small, the "pay" or "status" difference can still be huge - especially in our global economy. It is more exponential than linear. This speaks to how hard this "cult of merit" would be to tamp down, even if we tried....which I don't think we should.
Second, if you really think about it, if his premise is really true, and you wanted to really improve society and those suffering under the "cult of meritocracy", Bryan Caplans book is a better path than Deboers utopian suggestions.
Scott it's simple if you don't want to have Marxbro popping up just stop taking cheap shots at Marx without having read him. I get that people can't be bothered to read books these days and would rather listen to podcasts or something but that's not an excuse for speaking your opinion while uninformed. Even Peterson's reputation crashed and burned when he admitted to not having read Marx prior to his debate about Marxism.
I hear that the Manifesto is considered to be pretty crappy compared to the standards of other works by Marx ? (One reason being that it's a propaganda piece.)
For instance, that quip about 'it has been a failure every time it's been tried'. We can wax endlessly about the successes and failures of the USSR (which was no paradise but did industrialize the entire country in a handful of years, alphabetize its population, *won the goddamn WW2* and the space race as well), or debate about whether China truly is communist and so on, but that little quip in itself is tired and clichéd and brushes away a definitely complex historical topic for the sake of a gratuitous jab. This is below your caliber as a new 'public figure'.
In Western Europe we had quite a few communists/socialists in power during its long history, and they were not associated with scary Soviet tanks and rounds of purges, but things like universal healthcare, labor protections, unemployment benefits, and weeks and weeks of paid leave. I know SSC/ACX has quite the readership in ex-USSR countries and I understand they turned into hardcore libertarians due to having been traumatized by Russian domination but I don't have that trauma and my cliché of communism is that it brought me things that are cool and good, actually. Of course if you are American and *not* from an ex-USSR country you have even less of an excuse for spouting tired clichés.
In any case, negative and dismissive clichés are the epitome of uncharitability and I don't see that same hostility towards people who constantly bring up race-and-IQ stuff. Which is all the more ironic since eugenics *has* been tried (and failed).
Also note that the USSR failed to provide free universal healthcare, because their doctors routinely demanded 'gifts.' So people without enough money couldn't afford healthcare.
There was also a huge shortage of doctors, resulting in them being unable to provide high levels of care.
Both of these were presumably caused by underpaying doctors.
My understanding is that western Europe had Social Democrats competing with Christian Democrats, but the Communist Party was marginalized by the former basically everywhere outside of Italy. Where are you from, specifically?
Some social democratic parties had Marxist roots or Marxist factions. I.e.: The German SDP were officially Marxist at their foundation and during Weimar when they were in goverment. Weimar of course failed, but it was nothing like the USSR. They did eventually abandon Marxism around 1960, but even before that they were staunch supporters of liberal democracy. Soviet aligned communists were participants in the French popular front government of the 1930s. Wiki is not entirely clear on this and does not cite sources but Guy Mollett who was French PM in the 1950s seems to have started out as an anti-Soviet Marxist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Mollet#Early_political_career One of the absolutely key figures in the development of European social democracy is Eduard Bernstein who seems to have been heavily influenced by Marx although also to have disagreed with him on important stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Bernstein
We can wax endlessly about the successes and failures of the Fascist Italy (which was no paradise, but significantly increased literacy and made the trains ran on time), or debate wether Germany truly was National Socialist and so on, but this little Goodwin's-law comment in itself is tired and clichéd and brushes away a definitely complex historical topic for the sake of a gratuitous jab.
The detractors of fascism don't reject fascism because it "failed", they're usually the ones that make it fail (because the facist countries declare war on them). The "train ran on time" thing is a myth, btw.
I suppose we could look at the "Spanish miracle" for an example of fascism peacefully losing out to a superior alternative. Franco wasn't really an ideological falangist, but he let them have a lot of important positions because they were his allies. When he decided the economy wasn't working very well he started removing them and replacing them with members of Opus Dei, which worked out much better.
I think if you compare Soviet economic progress with Japan, or Taiwan, or South Korea, it looks pretty bad. They all started out poor, they all of much less in natural resources per capita, and all of them are now much richer and more developed than Russia. And none of them had a famine along the way that killed several million people. You might find it interesting to read _The Russians_ for a picture of the Soviet Union in its later stages, a third world country with a first world capital and military.
>How might the personified Chinese education system respond?
>What if it said “I don’t know what you 老外 are doing in America, but I’m not crushing anybody. I’m just telling kids to sit here drawing 1,000 raindrops in a row without moving or protesting. If after that you decide you don’t want to found the next Uber, that’s on you. But if you do decide to found the next Uber, I will have taught you the most important skill: discipline. Learning how to sit still and obey others is the necessary prerequisite to learning how to sit still and obey yourself.”
>If it was really mean, it might go further. “I notice most of you Americans suck at this skill. I notice you’re always whining about how you don’t have enough discipline to pursue your interests. Some of you are writers who spend years fantasizing about the novel you’re going to publish, but can never quite bring yourself to put pen to paper. Others want to learn another language, but reject real work in favor of phone apps that promise to ‘gamify’ staying at a 101 level for the rest of your life. You don’t need to feel bad about having no self-control; after all, nobody taught you any. If you’d gone to 宋庆龄幼儿园, you would have spent your formative years learning to sit still and focus, having your natural impulse to slack off squeezed out of you. Then you could have pushed through and written your novel, or learned 官話, or if you wanted to start Uber you could start Uber. At the very least you’d be doing something other than lying in bed browsing Reddit posts about how adulting is hard.”
What bothers me about school is its immense costs and half-hearted vague benefits. Boot camps are brutal but make you a good soldier; meditation retreats are brutal but make you a good monk. If people were acting off some theory that discipline and self-abnegation made you a stronger person, and they had really good proof of that theory, then...I would still wonder if you could just make kids sit totally motionless in meditation for an hour a day, then give them the rest of the day off. If not, then I would support whatever system gave the maximum amount of discipline with the least amount of brutality. I doubt modern school is anywhere around this level.
I agree with your stance in this article (and in this comment). I don't agree with your stance back in Jan 2020, where you notably failed to compare drawing 1,000 raindrops to prisons or to child labor. I feel like in the 2020 article, you forgot to mention the immense costs, and focused mostly on the half-hearted benefits.
(My Chinese friend who went to school in both China and the west assures me the Chinese system is more traumatizing.)
And I've been told (sorry, I have no reference for this) that Chinese kids in America have among the highest suicide rates. The person who told me this is a psychiatrist, not much given to making things up. I suspect (for that reason only) that she knew what she was talking about. She attributed to (my words) oppression by tiger moms. Of course, some might attribute it instead to oppression of Asians by white elites. Ya pays yer money and takes yer cherce...
The benefits of school are only vague for the smart children of educated parents. For others the alternative is leaving kids to fend for themselves while their parents nod off on a vicodin binge. Every modern society has schools. Who else is going to teach that with hard work anyone can succeed? In school we come to understand through grades and constant feedback that some people have more merit than others, and we get what we deserve in our meritocratic society. Eliminate school and indoctrination, and other ideas will come fill the vacuum.
In my, entirely anecdotal, experience of having taught and worked in China the notional discipline benefits don't seem to transfer. I met a lot of kids who had spent their teen years in insane 12 hour days of formal education. And got out of it and struggled in colleges that didn;t force them to work in the same way, and at jobs, and tended to be deeply unhappy from the trauma of their teen years.
If we're discussing radical ideas for fixing education, I've got one for y'all.
Setting aside all the resource and logistical problems of actually educating people, I think there's a structural problem with education. I can testify that I love learning, but that the foremost learning pipeline in the world was as much a misery for me as Scott writes that it is. I think a lot of that misery comes from the pileup of three facts: (1) most people don't care about everything, (2) learning things you don't care about is really hard, but (3) we want people to be robust so we want everyone to learn a broad base and that usually includes a bunch of things each student doesn't care about. We want people to be able to fix their house and possibly build Saturn V, so we teach them Algebra and then Calculus, but most people don't inherently love and care about Algebra and especially not Calculus. So we solve that problem in the obvious way; we hold their nose to the grindstone until they figure out how to pretend they care. By contrast, once you find something you love, you will learn everything there is to know about it. Most people go green around the gills when you ask them to do statistics ... unless it's for sports or board games, where suddenly they're a savant.
I think we need to restructure education around that determined love.
At a certain point, maybe at the end of middle school, students would cycle through a bunch of high-tempo focused activities, each a FIRST Robotics Competition style sprint. They put on a play, they spend a few weeks learning baseball, the works. You do one topic after another until you know what each student enjoys enough to be self-motivated in. From there, they first go deep in their chosen specialties, and then they're introduced to how it fits in to the bigger picture. Oh, you love Artificial Intelligence? Well AI dates back to some of the foundational work of computing. Why was anything worrying about computing things? Well, we needed a faster way to print artillery tables and crack codes. Why? Well we were at war; there was this bad man with a funny mustache in a place called Europe, you see...
Does this totally get rid of rote memorization? Probably not. But if we can reduce the slog, I think we'll find school a lot more fun and effective. I know I treasured my time in FIRST Robotics and resented my - objectively excellent - high school for every moment it stole away from robot time.
There are a lot of reasonable complaints about this idea. Doesn't it require way more teachers? How does it work in poor or remote areas that can't hire all those specialized teachers? Are there some things everyone needs to learn but nobody likes learning about? What if one year everyone chooses baseball and nobody chooses robotics? I have no answers to any of those questions; I called the idea radical and I meant it. I bet there are more iterations to go before the model is fit for human consumption.
But it's not like the current system works either.
I work in an expensive, but not selective private school where all the parents are educated and successful. Still a large number of kids don't really care that much....about anything. It is not that they haven't been allowed to discover their passion. Their passion is a nice comfortable couch, some bon bons, and entertainment. It really isn't surprising. If all humans were motivated, ambitious, curious, we would have killed ourselves off during the hunter gatherer times.
David, that's very interesting! Definitely a lot of similarities, including that when I said board games I really meant D&D but thought it was unnecessarily specific. If they're an example to go by, I should have trusted my gut. I loved their line about throwing books at the students and seeing what sticks.
I think what I was imagining still has more of a formal place and structure to it than unschooling or homeschooling; I don't want to do away with schools, I just want them to be less painful for the advantages they do provide. I'm imagining it more like a single roof under which a whole bunch of guilds live. Each guilds is internally united by a shared love, but they also feel an obligation to eventually show the students how their narrow love is part of the greater whole. I'd say the ideal version of this ends up with many departments, but one coffee shop that all the students converge on after class to swap war stories.
This is long-winded and I suppose I should have my own blog if I want to vent. But I don't have one, so thanks to Scott's generosity, here I am. So, perhaps with apologies,...
... there's a contradiction in DeBoer (at least in Scott's description of his book) that I think more could be made of. (Or if Scott did, I missed it.)
To DeBoar (and me, too), on the one hand, academic achievement isn't intrinsically for everyone, yet it's the only one we encourage, and students who aren't well suited for academic excellence should be allowed to leave school early and pursue directions that better suit their talents, or at least their interests. And on the other hand, DeBoer says that charter schools cheat because they cherry-pick academically talented students and kick out the rest. That really isn't all that different from what he otherwise thinks should be done. That is the contradiction.
We have regressed in providing a range of public schools that cater to multiple tastes and aspirations. When I was growing up in NYC in the '50s & '60s, more such paths were provided. Bronx Science, Stuyvesant and Brooklyn tech educated the technical elite. (I'm not afraid of that term.) The HS of Music and Art trained talented musicians and artists, at least in the "classical" arts and music; but it's worth noting that these days, even places like Juilliard have strong jazz programs and more than a whiff of hip-hop and even country music in the air. We had a HS of Printing Trades, a HS of maritime trades (which was located on a ship moored at a pier, and I envied the kids who went there). There was a HS of Performing Arts for aspiring actors and a HS of Fashion Trades. Except for the "elite"schools, these were called "vocational schools." And in "ordinary" high schools, there were two kinds of degrees: a "general" degree and an "academic degree", which was intended for the small (compared to now) number of students who expected go on to college. The "general" degree fed a large demand for accountants, clerks, retail employees, firemen, policemen, bus drivers, subway workers, etc. Some of the above jobs are gone, but not all of them. And the office buildings whose corner offices house the 20% (or 10%, anyway) employ large number of plumbers, electrical workers, building engineers, maintenance workers, security guards; and tend to hire outside carpenters and decorators for renovations and outside janitorial agencies for cleanup. In the buildings where I spent most of my career, the folks who provided these services in the buildings where I worked were really good at what they did. Those who did have college degrees probably didn't need them for their jobs but may have appreciated their ability to have gone. Those who did not probably did not suffer for their lack. I respected them all; or at least, if there were those whom I respected less, it wasn't because they had less education than I did. And quite a few were very smart, college degrees or not.
Cherry-picking students makes sense. Birds of a feather should be allowed to flock together and the flock should be catered to and nurtured. Musicians are going to do better around other musicians, actors around other actors, athletes among other athletes. It is as ridiculous to take a genuinely talented young athlete whose heart is in soccer, hocky, basketball or baseball and make him take algebra (unless he wants to take it), just as it would be ridiculous to send me to a program specializing in any of those sports.
Finally, problem kids: retarded, or disturbed, or blind, or deaf, were taken out of the regular classrooms and put into special programs. Kids who always acted out and kept others from learning were put into the "600" schools (like, say, PS 612). There is a residue of that still left, but for the most part, "mainstreaming" has taken over, that this to me is a terrible idea. To me, this past diversity of educational paths was humane and generous. My elementary school in the Bronx had a little garden plot fenced off from the recess area. It was very pretty. I once asked a teacher what that was for. It turned out to be a place where the retarded kids could learn to plant flowers and maybe vegetables and get some joy of satisfaction in their lives instead of bitter tears of failure. At the age of say, 9, when I learned this, I thought it very sweet.
Thus, a lot of what DeBoer advocates used to be in place. It's true that the job market has changed, and it is also true that all of a sudden in 1957 we threw huge amounts of money into scientific and technical programs in order to "beat the Russians." I actually owe my ability to get through college and grad school with very little debt due my good fortune in being talented (or at least interested) in such things, but somehow it became the thing that now "everybody" should be learning. Not!
Finally, and separately, just speaking personally, I do agree that not everyone is intellectually gifted, and for the record, I am skeptical of the notion that intellectual ability is genetically linked to race. It can be independent of race while still being genetic at the individual level, as Scott points out. But I also don't think that everyone is artistically gifted, or athletically gifted, or has that "Momma, I wanna sing" impetus. And lots of people are not terribly gifted or even interested in any particular thing. It seems to me that public education should still provide pathways to cater to a broad variety of tastes and hopes.
Streaming is a hard question, I think. There are obviously times when it's warranted. But there are also times when it proves a very bad idea, and I don't know how to tell which are which.
I went to a high school program for the "gifted". I have mixed feelings about it. I liked it, learned a fair bit, and was very well-prepared for university. But it was kind of a weird social environment, full of people with an unhealthy desire for good grades. Maybe I would've gotten an even better education in a healthier atmosphere elsewhere. Or maybe I would've gotten a worse education in a worse environment. I really don't know.
And of course there's always the fear of children being essentially thrown into the trash, sent to miserable programs for the doomed. Streaming can easily make for self-fulfilling prophecies.
Interesting, I went to a gifted high school and we had the opposite problem. Everyone was fairly smart, but the school work wasn't especially challenging (it's still just high school) so everyone became lazy. Competitively lazy. The only kids who worked hard were the Asian kids, everyone else competed on how little work they could do while still getting acceptable grades.
Something has changed, though, in the ~20 years since I went there: the selective schools in my city have become primarily Asian. Because Asians are that much smarter? No, because the selection exam for the schools is at least somewhat gameable. It turns out that if you spend your free time from ages 4-11 in cram schools getting drilled on the sorts of questions that show up on IQ tests, you can significantly boost your score on IQ tests (who knew?) so a cram school industry has developed in my city, teaching kids to be able to pass the selective schools exams.
So the selective schools these days are filled with a combination of a few truly brilliant kids plus a large number of somewhat intelligent kids whose parents have sent them to cram school from the age of four specifically to pass that entrance exam. It's a sad example of Goodhart's Law in action.
I went to Bronx Science, class of 1963. Back then we were all Jews. Now it's all Asians. (For clarity, "all" is of course an exaggeration in both ways.) I don't recall any of my friends studying or preparing in any way for the entrance exam. I figured, if I get in I guess I'll go; if not, I'll go somewhere else. (Where's my "shrug" emoji?) I don't recall kids competing for grades, but one useful lesson I learned is that there are real geniuses out there. I got to rub shoulders with some of them, but realized pretty quickly that I'm not one. That was a life lesson worth learning.
When I taught an evening class in Chemistry at Columbia, I was warned that these kids will be grade-grubbers and they'll walk all over you if you're not careful. That turned out not to be true, either. These were kids who who had gone to college but after some years in the workforce decided maybe they'd like to go to med school, so had to pick up some entrance requirements. They were mature and dedicated, and I was as proud of the students who tried but discovered it just was not for them as for those who shone.
I don't think that studying is the same as gaming, though. And the city does (or at least used to) provide test preparation for the special high schools at least for lower-income students, but that was not until after I had come and gone.
The need to learn how to discipline yourself and achieve a goal is is a terribly valuable skill to have, and I'd rather be in favor of encouraging and enabling more kids to have that experience. Again, in the broader context of Scott's blog, this is applicable to all pursuits, not just purely academic ones. As a personal confession, it's something I suck at. But I still did OK, and as a 73-year old retiree, it's something I'm still working on, in the spirit of "dream the impossible dream".
Is it unfair that kids who love to play basketball find programs where they can get better and will devote large amounts of quality time trying to get better at it? Is it unfair that these kids excel in that sport? It it unfair that they use their skills and their hard work and the training that they've gotten to get in to a college with a good basketball program? I don't think so. That's not gaming the system. That's learning how to work hard in order to get the most out of your talents and interest. I'm for learning to excel in the things you love to do, unless those things are illegal or directly harmful to others.
As a caveat, I think it's nuts that great X players (where X can equal "basketball" or several other sports) have to go to college to maximize their chances of getting onto a pro team. That makes sense for some people, but I don't see why it should be required for all, and of course many athletes benefit from the broader college/university experience. Baseball still seems to recruit mostly out of high school, which makes more sense to me.
The issue is not "gaming the system", to my mind. The issue is that the current weltanschauung so highly regards purely intellectual (and especially scientific and technological) success.
I think the issue is that school used to be for sorting kids into career paths and preparing them for those careers and then at some point someone decided they were for equalizing social inequalities and of course a system that tracks janitors one way and rocket scientists another way is meeting goal a but not goal b. And then of course the pandemic hit and we've all realized that actually, school is just a place to put kids during business hours so both parents in a household can work full time jobs, and so it doesn't really matter that various social factions have widely divergent views of what you should do with the kids once they are there - it's just 'out of sight, out of mind' for most people.
If I'm getting surgery, I want the best surgical team I can get. I want the surgeon, anesthesiologist, nurses, janitor who sterilizes the operating theater, and all the support staff I don't know about to be excellent at their respective jobs.
But, once I'm off the table and I've paid, I don't actually care how the team divides up the money. It's all quite symmetrical from my perspective: if *any* of them had failed I'd be dead.
But most likely the surgeon and anesthesiologist will receive the lion's share of the money. And also have a disproportionate voice in decisions the team has to make together (e.g. will we schedule an operation on Yom Kippur?). This happens for reasons that mostly boil down to "the surgeon is harder to replace than the janitor".
This seems kind of unfair, though it's a load-bearing unfairness that's tricky to replace. And in less collaborative environments, it seems a lot fairer, though DeBoer might disagree.
I'd have agreed with Scott's take on this if he had used almost any other kind of doctor for his example. Surgery may be more about good hands than a good head. And Hippocrates said that doctors should have nothing to do with them. Surgery, recall, comes out of barbering, not medicine.
I don't think that entirely makes sense. The team isn't a single entity - if I'm getting a surgery, I want the best possible surgeon, one of the best possible anesthesiologist, but would be happy with only a fairly good janitor or other support staff. I would be willing to pay much more for a good surgeon, whose every tiny movement may make a difference to my life during the surgery, than for support staff.
Freddie is a mensch, but one concern I have with his vision of socialism is that it’s almost exclusively moralistic. The smart people who run society (unlike Scott, I don’t see him as contesting that they would do so) will graciously look after their dumber brethren, because it’s the tight thing to do.
I think Freddie is right that this is morally right, but I’m much less sanguine that 1) morality alone can persuade here or that 2) even well-motivated managerial authority will not be practically malevolent.
What you need is counter-power, which means a mix of organization and indeed intelligence for self-government and pressing for collective rights. You can be an IQ realist and agree that even say IQ 80 people have this, organized rightly, but I feel like the *gist* of much IQ realism is that no, people who perform poorly on these tests must be ruled by others, and that’s why IQ realism leaves a bad taste in most leftists’ mouths. Certainly that’s the takeaway I get from the Bell Curve, even once you take away the spicy race stuff.
Oh, hey, Oligopsony! Long time no see. I think you're quite right on both points.
Equality of power is more important than equality of opportunity or outcome. And I have no clue how to achieve it.
And IQ realism often segues into a weird uni-dimensional view of merit, worth, and fitness for power. Scott defines meritocracy as "the person best at the job should get the job" and is bothered by Freddie describing it as "the person of the highest quality should get the job" but Freddie's definition describes the real-world system at least as well. And IQ realists often seem disturbingly keen on the kind of meritocracy Freddie rails against.
...come to think of it, that'd be a great subject for a Scott-style post. The eternal battle between meritocracy1 vs meritocracy2.
The hard thing about "the person best at the job should get the job" is that to some extent, it has to be "the person <i>seen as</i> best for the job should get the job".
Good question! I would like to give this a more thorough answer after some thought, but here are some things that can increase the power of people who don’t pay close attention to politics, hated school, and are in menial jobs, which regardless of what you think about IQ is a significant portion of the population.
1) Circular answer: more unions, more civil society in general, more democracy (where we accept that “are you better off than you were four years ago?” produces better incentives for state managers than any alternative method.) Deprofessionalize activism. This isn’t entirely circular; people can talk to each other about how much work sucks and try to unionize right now, and they’ve done it in the past when the state was even more hostile and information even less available (though tbf civil society was stronger) and even when they fail it will build capacity.
2) Answer that’s paternalist itself (though not necessarily collectively so, since it can achieve mass support): more mandatory meetings. Compulsory voting, conscription into militias (give everyone guns and the training to use them), compulsory Quaker meetings, compulsory PTA meetings, compulsory unionization of all workplaces (and if the union votes to set dues at zero and not go on strike ever, okay, at least that’s what they chose.) Anything that increases capacity while getting each other to talk to each other about their interests.
3) The dodge answer: less lead in gasoline, more schooling again, more whatever you think causes Flynn effects.
4) Less meritocracy, even in your sense. If we segregate people by capacity then we’ll find people with a lot of capacity having more interests in common with each other, and poor communities with fewer leaders in their midst. I think the case for this is stronger the more you think IQ/capacity/whatever you want to call it is highly heritable.
5) Meta answer: I think Taleb is right that IQ doesn’t predict as much as is popularly assumed if you take out clinical populations and look at non-narrowly nerdy problems. IQ may gate understanding of quantum physics or Hegel or whatever the fuck but just be a lot less predictive of things like navigating collective social situations, finding friends, object-level moral reasoning, refusing to stand down for a good cause, and so on, which is most politics that matters. I believe that people that others would down on as dull, that I myself would at least instinctually look down on as dull, are capable of insight and creativity that surprises arrogant nerds like me and most of the other commenters here, especially when it comes to practical, non-nerd shit.
Also, having a more riot-friendly culture, like France. This is one of those things where public discussion has become stupid (a stupid discussion held largely by technically-high-IQ people, mind) because of the effervescent amnesia of the news cycle, with people’s views on this just being a function of who held a riot last, but the important thing is the long-term incentives, not the particular effect of this or that riot, which indeed are often pointlessly counterproductive even when they are for The Right Side, etc.
I think sometimes about this less meritocracy point. If you look at the industrial revolution, you find that working class movements tend to rely heavily on leaders who, when you look at them, probably had a skillset that in some frictionless capitalist meritocracy would have taken them out of the baseline labor pool. We don't have a frictionless capitalist meritocracy now by any means, but I do think a lot of the sort of people who were in the working class intellectual/leader role 200 years ago do things like get a decent paying sales job based on charisma, or a college scholarship, or start a risky business, etc. Organizing and leading a social movement is hard, and if you have the chops for it someone will often pay you middle class money or better to use them.
This doesn't operate with perfect efficiency - there are lots of people with relevant leadership skills who don't for one reason or another get to use them in their job, and they're still crucial to workplace organizing. And there are (dwindling) niches like up-from-the-ranks labor leader where you can try to take someone who has the skills and the solidarity and put them in a sustainable organizational structure. But if you extend the idea of meritocracy beyond IQ to include selection for the other social or organizational skills that are valuable to both a workplace and a social movement it seems clear that the more efficient the meritocracy the more the bottom rungs of society are going to be denuded of the people whose talents most naturally lend themselves to fighting for the collective interests of those rungs.
"while spending "as much as $3000 to $4000 less per child per year than their public school counterparts"
I can't speak for Success specifically, but in general:
Funny thing about NYC charter schools is that they are co-located with district schools. At no cost to the charter.
Isn't it amazing that when two schools in the same building get close to the same funding per student, but one has to maintain everything and the other gets a free ride, the free-ride one can spend more on actual students?
And they very much don't share resources. Stories abound of each charter kid having new laptops while district kids *in the same physical school* have to share one old desktop between 3 kids.
> Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true. But I guess The Cult Of Successful At Formal Education sounds less snappy, so whatever.
Not a real problem; people talk about excessive credentialism all the time. "The Cult of Credentials" sounds snappier than "The Cult of Smart" does.
> I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment).
If you don't like being slammed for not being willing to talk about your actual thoughts, some explanation of why you think this situation is "crazy" might be warranted. As described, you looked at some old surveys of expert opinion and found broad agreement. And then you looked at some very recent surveys of expert opinion and found even more agreement. And this is "crazy"? Whatever Freddie DeBoer is doing, you appear to be doing it too.
Schools as prisons is a pretty old trope. People have been trying to revolutionise them into blissful places of natural joy since at least the nineteenth century but all such experiments have failed. The tension is between two aspects of schools you don't like - the fact of bullying and the inability to microwave burritos. It turns out that if you give kids lots of freedom, one thing some of the do with it is bully other kids. One reason many parents like charters - or their UK equivalents - is because behaviour is better and so things like bullying are reduced. How do charters achieve this? More rules, more consistently enforced. If you visited a school like Michaela Community School in London and told the kids there that they were in child prison because of all the rules they had to follow, they would think you had lost the plot.
I'd argue there's an important distinction between rules (as a set of specific behavioral instructions, procedures, and prohibitions which provide structure and safety) and an atmosphere of restrictiveness.
Consider the old joke: "In England, everything is permitted except what is forbidden. In Germany, everything is forbidden except what is permitted. In France, everything is allowed, even what is prohibited. In the USSR, everything is prohibited, even what is permitted."
I think you can create a school environment where the default assumption is that something is permitted unless there's a specific rule against it, but it takes a certain mindset among teachers and administrators. It's all too easy to default to vague offenses like "defiance" or "disorderly behavior" as a mechanism for enforcing arbitrary rules that create a restrictive atmosphere.
True, but many successful charters avoid this by making expectations extremely explicit. Nobody then gets disciplined for vague crimes and it is also educative (because in many situations, kids don’t know the norms the teachers are applying). However, kids still are not able to microwave burritos or flip pancakes or whatever.
Yes, I agree with you on charters (and other private schools) being better at least in part because of better behavior. Although I think in practice some of that is better rule teaching/enforcement and some of it is selection. And I agree that reasonable rule enforcement won't feel restrictive.
I think what I'm saying is that rule enforcement alone isn't enough to determine whether an environment feels restrictive (so I disagree with the burrito test). Some schools with lots of rules will be restrictive and others will be safe and structured. But I think probably in practice there are more restrictive ones than safe/structured ones since I think institutions over time tend to slide towards authoritarianism and accumulation of restrictions.
I was imprisoned in a Montessori school from preschool through sixth grade. And while I can't directly compare to public schools, I think it was just bad in different ways. The worst part was that with no formal reward/punishment system (i.e. grades, detention) the only motivator was guilt. Maybe they weren't trying to, but the teachers instilled a feeling of constant guilt (mostly about getting distracted and not finishing assignments fast enough) that still haunts me.
I'm told some Montessori schools are better than the one I went to. Actually, I'm told the one I went to has improved a lot--it's bigger and much more professional. But I'm still skeptical of the whole concept.
Maria Montessori's best product was primary, ages 3-6. Lower elementary, 6-9, still works pretty well. Upper elementary, 9-12, works much less well and if the school doesn't solve it you get the situation you describe. One particular weakness of upper elementary in the standard model is that while young children are perfectly happy working silently, as they get older kids want to talk a lot more. If a Montessori program doesn't shift to take advantage of this talkiness, and some do, then you get the guilt thing going on. Montessori was also better at younger ages when concrete is more important than abstract.
There are great Montessori programs all the way through grade 12, but a LOT more work needs to be done by individual schools and programs to make it work from upper elementary onward. Primary and lower elementary are pretty successful turnkey programs.
> First, universal childcare and pre-K; he freely admits that this will not affect kids' academic abilities one whit, but thinks they're the right thing to do in order to relieve struggling children and families. Second, lower the legal dropout age to 12, so students who aren't getting anything from school don't have to keep banging their heads against it, and so schools don't have to cook the books to pretend they're meeting standards. Third, lower standards for graduation, so that children who realistically aren't smart enough to learn algebra (it's algebra in particular surprisingly often!) can still get through. Fourth, burn all charter schools (he doesn't actually say "burn", but you can tell he fantasizes about it). And fifth, make it so that you no longer need a college degree to succeed in the job market.
You know, other than 4, which is some Harrison Bergeron-level horror, the rest are eminently sensible. Most of it even used to be the norm, barely half a century ago.
I liked where you went at the end there, great essay. I’ve been meaning to get to this one, and some other related ones (The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel)
> DeBoer recalls hearing an immigrant mother proudly describe her older kid's achievements in math, science, etc, "and then her younger son ran by, and she said, offhand, 'This one, he is maybe not so smart.'"
That reminded me of what Banerjee and Duflo mention in Poor Economics: Poor people in third world tend to do this. Sometimes it's even worded even more roughly ("that one is an idiot"). The authors analyze it differently though. As a coping measure when all that parents can afford is to send just one child to the school. They just write the other kids off as stupid and you don't have to deal with the moral problem.
What is the moral problem? *Are* the other kids stupid?
In a park in San Francisco I once heard a guy confiding to his friend that the guy's son kept doing so well in school. And this worried him because he had always performed poorly in school, so the accolades this boy was raking in had him worried that he was a cuckold.
I instinctively objected to this, but that's just because I don't like the thought of punishing someone for being smart, and I have no other dogs in the fight. I don't know that guy.
But his argument, however much I might dislike it, is perfectly valid.
I guess you mean why do the parents believe they can send only one child to school. The book suggests it is because they think that school has no value unless the kid finishes the high school and gets a nice government job. Therefore, given the cost of keeping the kid in the school for so long, they choose to do it for one child and let other children drop out as soon as possible.
A number of rationalists have written essays about the atrocities of school, accompanied with truly horrifying stories of e.g. being yelled at by teachers for reading ahead. After reading these essays, I always end up feeling ... confused.
I went through 13 years of public school and enjoyed all of them. Obviously that's N = 1, so I tried asking around to see what my friends thought of their school, expecting to get a more balanced split between decent experiences and horror stories like those here. On the contrary, basically everyone I know also had a decent experience in school; they're invariably shocked and horrified by stories like these. This has just left me more confused.
Obviously there are strong selection effects here: neither "people I know" nor "famous rationalist bloggers" are very representative samples. But I still feel like there's something more to be explained. Some guesses:
1) People remember the good parts of school more readily than the bad parts. I think this is partly true: the first things I remember from high school are times spent socializing with friends; meanwhile my constant feeling of sleep-deprivation, sometimes from sleeping less than 30 hours in a week, is like the eighth thing I remember.
2) Horrifying things about school seem normal from the inside. This must also be part of it: homework seems annoying but fine, until you really think about how much of your life you've wasted doing it. Same goes for the generalized busywork that fills much of high school.
3) School might be getting better; rationalists bloggers are a little older than my friends, so their memories of school are more negative. This is possible, especially if bullying is getting less common.
Even taking these things into account, I *still* feel like there's more to be explained. The stories rationalist bloggers tell about school, and the negative feelings they report they had towards school while still students, are just so different from anything I've found among people I know. Perhaps there's some reason that rationalists are more likely to have had horrible schoolings?
The rationalists are likely to have taken the schools at their word about what you're supposed to be doing in school.
People will tell you that the purpose of school is for you to learn things. But then if you do a good job, they yell at you.
We know you know the answers, so stop providing them when the teacher asks for them.
You're undermining the teacher's authority by knowing the material.
Stop asking questions in class; the other students can't follow you. No, you're not supposed to be interested in the class. No, the class isn't supposed to cover material you're not already familiar with.
Yes, you got the highest score on the midterm. Yes, we're giving you a bad grade because you don't do the homework. No, the score on the midterm is not a better indication of whether you learned the material than your homework completion rate is. No, it also isn't better than "class participation".
It's not fair that you got a low score in class participation after we told you to stop asking or answering questions in class? Sure it is. Go away and think about it on your own time.
The people who remember school fondly, and the people who think school is a fine system that does a fine job, are those who never believed the claim that school was about learning things.
Eh, I'm not so sure. For example, no one I know has been yelled at by a teacher for reading ahead in the textbook, or anything like that. Part of my confusion is: do teachers actually do that all the time?
> no one I know has been yelled at by a teacher for reading ahead in the textbook, or anything like that.
This could be because no one you know has ever had a teacher who would do this. Or it could be because no one you know has ever revealed in class that they read ahead in the textbook.
Teachers aren't restricted to yelling at you for reading ahead. They'll also yell at you for reading the assigned reading, if you use that knowledge to point out when they start contradicting the textbook.
In my American public school, my teachers praised me for reading ahead in the textbook or in the assigned reading. So it's definitely not a universal with public schools.
I attended American public schools and actively tried to learn things there, and (aside from the tests vs. homework thing) none of this happened to me as far as I can remember. I expect that the extent to which this is true varies significantly between schools (and also between class levels: many of my high school classes were for gifted/advanced students).
To be clear, with the exception of first grade, I attended fancy private schools. I'm not commenting on the public school system. I'm commenting on the school system.
> The rationalists are likely to have taken the schools at their word about what you're supposed to be doing in school.
Very true for me. But I'd associate that tendency with the autistic spectrum primarily - and then suspect that somewhat more autistics, proportionately, hang out in rationalist and rationalist-adjacent spaces.
IIRC in one blog post DeBoer mentions having been popular at school. I'm not saying Scott or Zvi or whoever necessarily *wasn't*, but part of me wonders if rationalists were just nerds?
I'm increasingly curious what a typical school experience was too. Seems like friend groups might converge on or be indirectly sorted for this
For what it's worth, most (but not all) of the people I've asked about this were also quite nerdy. Many of them guess that bullying nerds used to be common, but isn't so common anymore.
But I feel this can't explain everything -- only some of the school horror stories are about bullying!
Let's analyze by splitting that last question into separate causal chains:
1. Does having a horrible school experience make someone more likely to become a rationalist?
2. Does having some kind of predisposition towards rationalism make someone more likely to have a horrible school experience?
3. Does currently being a rationalist make someone more likely to reflect back on school in a negative light?
1. Does having a horrible school experience make someone more likely to become a rationalist? Perhaps. One could imagine this might cause a child to grow up distrustful of authority and institutions, which could produce a questioning mindset that interrogates that which others take for granted. One could also imagine being socially marginalized due to bad school experiences and finding rationalism to be a community which accepts people who were socially marginalized in school.
2. Does having some kind of predisposition towards rationalism make someone more likely to have a horrible school experience? The specific horror stories I've read here seem to suggest that high intelligence/"giftedness" accounts for some of the problems with schooling - teachers aren't necessarily trained to deal with gifted students and many of us have similar issues with teachers who interpret our intelligence as impertinence or insubordination. "Nerdiness" or "geekiness" - let's gloss that as a tendency to focus strongly on esoteric topics out of interest or curiosity - may cause bad experiences at school and also predispose one towards rationalism. Difficulty with social skills, including interpreting social cues, may also lead to bad experiences, and also to rationalist tendencies/modes of thought.
3. Does currently being a rationalist make someone more likely to reflect back on school in a negative light? I think this is possible but perhaps not likely. Generally my reflections are more colored by emotional valance then by a rational objection to e.g. teaching methodology which I discovered through rationalism. If anything, reading blogs like Scott's has made me more forgiving of imperfect human systems and their perverse unintended consequences.
I may have missed something. If I had to guess I'd say 2 is the strongest effect - this is mostly a matter of rationalists mostly having been gifted, and gifted students mostly having had a terrible time in school. But that could be my own interpretive bias.
> People remember the good parts of school more readily than the bad parts. I think this is partly true: the first things I remember from high school are times spent socializing with friends
I think that you have to realize that it makes a huge difference to what extent people had friends and enjoyed socializing (or even...could socialize well).
If most of your school day is boring as hell, interspersed by occasional terror, that is a far different experience than often enjoying yourself, interspersed by occasional terror.
First, there is a fair bit of gratuitous hoop-jumping in school, which bothers some people much more than others (you say "homework seems annoying but fine," so I'm guessing you're in the "others"; so am I). It is somewhat difficult to argue *for* the hoops (Scott tried once, when reviewing Chinese education), which leaves people like you and me who had a generally positive experience in school without a platform to argue.
Second, bringing out the full potential of every student is at best an aspirational goal for schools, and certainly not their first priority (even insofar as the goal of school is education, I think it's closer to "maximize the 10th percentile of the amount learned by the students" i.e. there's much more focus on the less-successful students in each class), so the smart-but-annoying students really can be a nuisance. (When the teacher tells Michael Watts "We know you know the answers, so stop providing them when the teacher asks for them.", the teacher actually does have a point.) I don't necessarily expect the rationalist community to hit more than its fair share of teachers who can't handle smart-but-annoying students, but I do expect it to be disproportionately smart-but-annoying. (In my case, I was very much smart-but-annoying, but my schools handled it well enough; however, in a couple of cases that meant "send me out into the hallway with a textbook and let me study the material on my own." This was preferable than having me stay in the classroom with everyone else, but it's not the ideal way to handle gifted students either.)
Finally, this is a sizeable community, and I'm not sure that a discussion on whether we should BURN ALL SCHOOLS DOWN brings out the central examples of how rationalists were treated in school.
> (When the teacher tells Michael Watts "We know you know the answers, so stop providing them when the teacher asks for them.", the teacher actually does have a point.)
This directive tends to be delivered by the school administration, not by the teacher.
Years ago I read the book dedicated to the analysis of the "Head Start" program in Chicago. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name to reference, but the book argued that child's success in school correlated a lot with the fact whether their parents cared about their education, supported that it was important, asked about their day at school etc. Kids who didn't have this support system at home lost all advantage they've initially got by participating in the "Head Start" by third grade.
I don't have a lot of studies to research this further, but my anecdotal evidence indeed shows that poor Asian immigrants and Jewish refugees from USSR managed to raise the kids that went off to get PhDs despite the poverty because kids' education was the family's priority. (But we could also suggest that only the smartest immigrants made it to the US and kids just inherited their IQ.)
However, in our parenting community it seems to be a "common knowledge" that the primary difference between well-performing and low-performing schools is who students' parents are. And parents who care more about their children's education tend to send those kids to charter schools, therefore performing the selection so that the school itself doesn't really need to. These parents will more likely help their kids with homework than blame them for spending time with books instead of fixing dinner. Obviously, rich parents will also have more resources to volunteer, hire tutors and donate to add resources to their school, so this effect is multiplied when the school is located in an affluent community. But selection for motivated parents might skew the results a lot too, and I was surprised to see this was not brought up in the book or the review as a factor to consider.
Iowa recently passed a "school choice" bill which increases the number of charter schools, and allows for a ~$5,200 voucher for families to spend on private schools. These vouchers would go to bottom 5% ranked school students according to standardized test scores (I think). This has turned into a pretty partisan battle of those for/against, of parental choice versus the fear of removing funding from public schools that are already struggling, and umbrage at public taxes funding private schools. Have you ever heard of similar systems?
Harrison Bergeron is nothing like what DeBoer is advocating. Harrison Bergeron is when people are assigned to jobs randomly and everyone's natural abilities are forced to be nothing. DeBoer advocates for a world where people don't become homeless (or even stuck in a poor house) because they're not smart.
A UBI would ensure that people don’t become homeless for not being smart. If that were DeBoer’s primary goal, it would be a 1 pager on UBI, not a 277-page book on the horrors of meritocracy. The book’s listing specifically summarizes: “This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes.” And then advocates for a bunch of policies that diminish individual mobility based on performance and promotes the government using force to enforce things he’d like to see happen, like abolishing charter schools, which he views in opposition to equality of outcome.
Harrison Bergeron is about optimizing for total equality of outcome at the expense of individual achievement and political freedom, which is at the *very least* in the general direction of what BeBoer is advocating for. Using drastic, non-consensual measures to manifest equality of outcomes for highly dissimilarly-situated people, including measures that minimize social mobility and success for exceptional people is the link between DeBoer and Bergeron. Harrison Bergeron’s society uses hyperbolic, literal “handicapping” penalties for gifted people but that doesn’t mean that less literal, ostensibly-equalizing proposals by DeBoer aren’t exactly the kind of thing Vonnegut’s allegory was pointing to: equality and non-competition being more important than individuality and choice.
Do you believe that there’s nothing short of putting a literal weight around a person’s neck that justifies comparison to Harrison Bergeron? If not, what would DeBoer have had to advocate for such that you’d agree it warranted comparison?
"if we ever figure out how to teach kids things,..."
We... do?
Spacing, interleaving, testing (NOT high stakes, but to utilise the 'testing effect' to *learn*), elaboration of context, (POSSIBLY progressive summarization), deliberate practice, teaching others, and the thing that inspired Bloom's two sigma 'problem' - personal one-on-one teaching (produced the backbone of the Oxbridgite aristocracy of the British Empire, and Dawkins, and a bunch of others!).
For spacing and spaced repetition, which I consider fundamental and a foundation to build on, here are some links that are easier/more immediately actionable, perhaps, or gentler than gwern's excellent and comprehensive overview (in sequence):
And the anecdotal reports all pointing to this being a thing, plus the *massive* clustering of breakthroughs in 'circles' and 'lineages' if you look at advisor-advisee relationships in the academy of Ph.D.s; did you know that academically lineally, Newton is a descendant of Galileo? Many such cases! (Nearly all of them, actually; most modern math originates in just a few, pretty tight, lineage clusters. Check it out on the Mathematics Genealogy Project if you find it incredible.)
All these are interventions that can be systematized, broken down into chunks that school teachers can easily use them, and made the new 'standard of pedagogy' if we want. We don't, and there's also no 'we', so *shrug* *gestures expansively*... well, *this*, I guess.
All this is IQ mediated, obv, so ability tracking (maybe using adaptive testing, like the GRE, but as an indicative of someone's readiness instead of a test of almost IQ) so that classes happen and concepts are introduced at *just* the right moment for them to hit the sweet spot of difficulty resulting in a 'flow' state for the student to the extent possible. (Ref the flow research by Mihaly C...)
Decouple content from age, break stuff up into chunks you can progress through, gamify it (not demeaningly!), and make learning *not* fixed hours (so instead of dropping out, you progress at the rate at which *your* brain develops, and start working part time at 16/18, BUT that doesn't mean your education has stopped, it just means you do it for far fewer hours but many more years), make vocational education and apprenticeships a thing, and the problem is just fucking solved, for current standards of problem and solved. Still kinda rapey, but at least far less unenjoyable. Not gonna happen unless we build the infra for it, but hey, a man can imagine, right?
Because Dawkins is a more recent and relatable figure for everyone here - more proximate - both in terms of content, and lineage! Also, he doesn't feel as distant, and he's not covered in ancient-sauce. So it hits.
But also because he's a bit of demo case for tutorial learning. He contributed a chapter to the book I linked, and his own tutor went on to found an entire field and win a Nobel. The experience of the tutorial was also very, very impressive. More in the chapter he contributed about it in the book, if you're interested.
I can say with some certainty that childhood spent playing Civilization 2 is not necessarily a good thing. I spent all my time doing suboptimal-but-cool things in the Fantastic Worlds expansion which seems to be reflected in how the rest of my life turned out.
I think the most important thing in the whole education quality debate is that children have a stable home and the parents are invested in the best education possible. I am guessing that this is the primary sorting mechanism to the extent that occurs in charter schools.
The difficult thing is effective schooling for children that don’t have those advantages. Whatever we do I think it is highly immoral to try to level down the child that has loving parents to the outcome of the child that does not have parents that love them. That is the enormous moral hazard that Freddie seems willing to accept.
Parents have the savvy and bandwidth to navigate the local education ecosystem seeking out the good charters or magnets and jumping through the hoops they create =/= parents love their kids.
DeBoer seems to accept as default that school is at least acceptable as an experience while Scott's "School is child prison" seems pretty clearly to differ.
Does anyone know where a typical fourth grader or whoever falls on the love - hate spectrum about school?
This disagreement reminds me of arguments I've heard about sortition:
Q: Do the political mechanisms we use to select leaders work better or worse than choosing randomly?
Typical answer: Random leaders are obviously worse! The current system, for all its flaws, selects for the most universally likeable, respected, smart people who are nearest to the center of a kaleidoscopic venn diagram of voters preferences. Finding people (and beliefs) that even sorta represent millions of people is actually a very hard problem and if you put a plumber a banker and a teacher in a room they'd have a hard time converging on policy too.
Sortitioners: Maybe in theory, but a politician also needs the support of other political figures and their party and maybe ExxonGoldMart to pay for the campaign helicopter. The competition between these guys is so intense that the people who stay in the game long enough to acquire power are chameleons good at pretending to be whoever you want them to be, or those who don't have any values that limit scummy but politically useful maneuvers. We're running an evolutionary algorithm that selects for shittiness.
In the politics case, the groups don't seem to necessarily disagree on preferred policy in a given world. The difference is they're looking at the world and seeing different things?
So it makes sense to me to ask: Are we doing better or worse than nothing (in comparing public schools now to unschooling)?
This to me seems to miss the point of democracy: However bad a current leader is, they can be removed from office bloodlessly. Historically, lots of lives were lost in zero-sum competitions on who rules.
> "racial income gaps are not due to differences in income/poverty"
probably a typo
> "The 1% are the Buffetts and Bezoses of the world"
Pet peeve: The 1% (of the USA) are households with incomes over $300k or so. They are successful doctors and lawyers (in certain subfields), successful small business owners, senior management at medium-sized business, and the like, especially when they are dual-income couples. By definition, they are 1 out of 100 households. Billionaires are more like 0.0002%, and "people who are legitimately jockeying for wealthiest in the world" are rarer still.
One of the arguments in favor of economic mobility I haven't seen mentioned yet is that even if some jobs are objectively more desirable than others, there's a lot of variation between jobs and a lot of variation between people which means that being able to choose jobs lets people improve their own utility and results in an non-zero sum game.
This of course doesn't fully excuse a high mobility/low equity society but it's still better for outdoorsy types to be able to choose to be loggers while unathletic introverts work data entry, even if both of those jobs are less desirable than being a banker who makes six figures.
A caveat is that economic mobility doesn't exactly capture this dynamic but a society with with strict caste based assignment of jobs is almost certainly going to be less economically mobile than free market society, even one with low economic mobility.
School is a way to get children away from their parents. Of course children hate it. Parents can't function without it, though.
And dealing with pointless regimen, bullying, and busiwork are essential skills for a modern human. Education is about more than intelligence in whatever way "IQ" supposedly measures, which by the way is a whole can of worms that I suspect, if I opened here, it would attract some unpleasantness.
I'd love to know more about your opinions on Montessori. We seriously committed to it, moved across town for it and our son attended it from age 3 to 11. In hindsight, the best one-line description of our feelings about Montessori was, "It is an over-reaction to the problems of public education.". I've forgotten who said this, but it seems perfect.
Freddie's book argues many of the same things I did in 2000 in a five essay series called "How to Help the Left Side of the Bell Curve:"
"Stifling discussion of intelligence differences allows the IQ upper class to quietly push its interests at the expense of the rest of society. Denouncing Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray proclaims your faith in empirical egalitarianism. Then you can ignore the irksome demands of moral egalitarianism. ... Our political discourse is dominated not by a concern for the needs of the American people as a whole, but by the self-interest and unexamined assumptions of the verbally facile."
Outstanding rant on the child prison. I agree--I send my kids to Montessori school! I would check out the work of Prof Angeline Lillard at UVa, who has done actual honest-to-god RFTs on Montessori charters and they show a real step-up. You can also download a PDF of the first chapter of her book, which includes a great history of how child-prison was conceived in the 19th century as a direct analogue of the factory.
"The kid will still have to spend ten hours of his day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"!"
And I'm betting that, on their breaks, the child laborers will be allowed to microwave a fucking burrito without asking fucking permission (facilities permitting).
My biggest issue with DeBoer's principle argument is that it's based on this thesis of "if everyone has a different natural intelligence then not everyone can go to college/get post-secondary education/can have a non-Labor centered career". There's literally zero sensible reason to think this is true. He uses algebra as an example of a thing some people just can't do, but is that actually true? Look at a different example: reading. Everyone has a different innate ability to read, but despite of that basically every single person that can either see or feel can learn to read (and basically everyone in America CAN read). He at no point establishes what the level of intelligence needed to get post-secondary education is and at no point establishes what the distribution of human intelligence is, both of which are needed for his primary anti-meritocracy argument to make any sense at all. I mean if you need an IQ of 110 to be a good doctor or lawyer or researcher then ya those fields are essentially off-limits to some 75% of people, but what if you only need an 80? Then more than 75% of people CAN do it. What that cutoff is super matters here, and without it the book is just a kind of defeatist speculation.
This doesn't even touch the fact that "intelligence" is not a singular trait but instead a series of different "intelligences" for a variety of subjects and fields. The chances that the cutoff for what we'd view as a "good" career are so high for every field or that someone is low enough intelligence in every field for there to be any more than a really small number of people who are destined at birth to be cashiers seems insanely unlikely.
> Approximately 32 million adults in the United States can’t read, according to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that 50 percent of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at an eighth-grade level.
It would be nice if Scott could review some Adam Tooze. It's not quite up his alley, but Tooze (bleeding Marxist though he may be) has a lot of interesting things to say on the economics of the Second World War, the interwar period, and the recent global financial crisis.
It may also help with how ACX frames history and economic policy in general.
I much enjoyed this; though largely because it confirmed my priors. Several years ago the parents of about half of our youngest son's 4th grade class were summoned for a meeting with the teacher at our private school. There the teacher and principal informed us that sadly our kids regularly failed to obey. While the others sat quietly while the teacher spoke ours were often fidgeting and getting up and wondering about looking in this box or on that shelf. They recommended Ritalin for all of them. It would, they assured us, make everyone much calmer and more amenable to schooling.
We've homeschooled ever since. Save mindless TV watching we've encouraged their interests. One is good at math (we finished algebra II before he was 13) and the other found R and GitHub and is curiously interested in modeling, investing and Civilization V. Best of all they're happy.
Great review, Scott. I'm especially delighted that you have so forcefully expressed something I felt intensely as a child: that school had its occasional good moments, but mostly it was about depriving me of my freedom.
I also continue to be enraged and baffled about why we insist on ignoring the innate sleep cycles of kids in setting school hours. The result for me was 12 years of misery; yes, first grade through high school, ending only when I got to college and could pick my own hours.
Your clear distinction of intelligence and success at formal education is crucial. It’s something I’ve long felt without always articulating explicitly. Some teachers get this in the form of “everyone learns differently,” yet despite the fact that this observation has been around long enough to become a cliche, school systems rarely take it into account.
I going to have to think some more about DeBoer's critique of meritocracy. I found your surgery example counter argument convincing, but there's a fairness angle to DeBoer's idea with a sneaky appeal, even if we probably can't realize such a utopian state of affairs short of the post-scarcity society posited in Banks's Culture series.
We set school hours for the benefit of parents, who generally have to be at work by 9:00 at the latest. Particularly now that we cannot assume that one parent is a stay-at-home mother and no longer consider it acceptable to leave children unattended for more than five minutes, the kids have to be at school (or at least on a school bus) well before the parents have to start their own morning commutes.
As I understand it, school hours are also set for the convenience of school administrators.
It's more acceptable to have teenagers standing outside before dawn, and expensive to have an extra set of school buses. So the teenagers have very early classes.
Right - even though, if you're struggling with the logistics of getting all the kids to school before their parents have to go off to work, the teenagers are an *asset* that you can use to mind the younger kids for a bit and see that they get off to school on time. But we can't use them for that, because we sent them off to school first. And because we somehow lost the ability to trust teenagers with the care of small children.
The school hour thing is changing, with many high schools going to a 9am start time. Locally, there's a well-regarded charter resisting this, but since that's coming from a charter it's probably a sign of its rigor and the dedication of those parents.
As for the teenager thing, I can assure you that having teenagers watch your kids is a tradition that is very much alive.
This book sounds extremely similar to Michael Sandel's The Tyranny of Merit. Sandel also sees a meritocracy as conferring some moral value on those who participate which he finds unfair because of genetic differences (among others), which then results in a gated class relying on universities to keep out the unwashed masses. He neatly side-steps the whole matter of IQ though and as such doesn't feel the need to tie himself into knots explaining whether or not group-level IQ differences exist or are allowed to.
I had a hard time wrapping my head around this view too, since every time Sandel introduced morality into meritocracy, I couldn't help but think that it didn't belong there and wasn't relevant to the concept of a meritocracy. In the end I have somewhat settled on the suspicion that, consciously or not, the argument rests on a certain ambiguity with regards to words like 'merit', 'desert' and 'value'. I personally agree more with the way Scott framed the issue when he was removing 'desert' from the argument.
There's a lot more to the whole meritocracy concept than either your gloss of de Boer's understanding (that Society straightforwardly hands rewards to people who do well in school because they are Better) or your own explanation (that people individually allocate rewards based straightforwardly on competence, resulting in rewards for intelligence).
One of the first authors to use the term, Michael Young, used it to describe a system in which political power accrued to those with perceived merit. The mechanism for this is simple and plausible: merit -> financial rewards -> political influence. Perhaps this is not a bad system on its face, but then you have to consider how its outputs (financial rewards and political influence) impact its inputs (merit - or more accurately, perception of merit). In other words, if I can pay for my kids to get credentials, and many/most people determine merit based on credentials, then what you have is a cycle in which credentials -> financial rewards -> political influence -> credentials. This cycle is obviously easily corruptible and will be rife with nepotism, cronyism, fraud, etc.
Alternatively, perhaps perception of merit comes not from credentials but from identity - given a choice between two surgeons, maybe I pick the white man because he just seems more competent, somehow, in a way I can't quite put my finger on. Maybe I pick the American because she speaks English at a native fluency, but the Indian immigrant surgeon is actually a better surgeon. Perhaps a little girl's perception of her *own* merit is influenced by stereotypes such as the idea that girls are bad at math, and so she never becomes a surgeon because she was too intimidated to take an organic chemistry class or a statistics class as a prerequisite. Maybe I pick the Jewish lawyer because he just seems more... lawyerly. Maybe I pick the programmer with a better "cultural fit" because he laughed at my Star Trek joke during the job interview, but the programmer who grew up in a different cultural milieu would be better at the actual job. Etc.
de Boer surely has this conceptual framework in mind when he writes something like "no matter the criteria and regardless of the accuracy of the system contrived to measure it" - and I expect he also expects his readers, at least on the left, to be familiar with it as well. I think he's wrong to gloss over the implementation problems in "meritocracy" because that is where the whole concept starts to fall apart a bit. That's where you get a lot of the structural/cyclical inequalities from - especially once those with "merit" create their own standards for what counts as "merit" and their biases (perhaps inadvertently) influence those standards.
There's another problem where the merit->financial rewards formulation is somehow reversed in people's minds such that they come to believe that the possession of financial resources and political influence is an *indicator* of merit. In other words, if money accrues to the best surgeons, then when you see a rich surgeon, you assume he is very good at his job. I don't think I need to point out the flaws in this thinking, but I do need to point out that it is just ridiculously widespread and completely pervades almost every public discussion about the distribution of power and wealth in society. In particular, this reverse formulation (which many authors call the "myth of meritocracy") lets people argue things like "taxing wealth is equivalent to punishing success" - the implication is that wealth comes about *only* or perhaps *primarily* as a consequence of merit, and not, e.g. inheritance, rent-seeking, luck, or fraudulent/exploitative practices. Obviously the question of how much of wealth is actually due to merit, and how much due to corruption/luck/etc., is important for determining how much socialism and how much unfettered capitalism we should have in a society. de Boer takes the extreme position and says "even merit is actually luck" but I think in order to understand this extreme position you need to acknowledge the context of what it is extreme in comparison to - the conceptual framework that de Boer is in dialogue with when he says he rejects meritocracy. He's not so much rejecting your conception of meritocracy (the idea of rewarding merit) as he is rejecting the framework in which it would be fair to have a ruling class whose membership was based on criteria like "being really good at surgery" if those criteria were applied fairly and objectively, rather than corruptly and subjectively.
Tied up in this "myth of meritocracy" idea is the related argument that reducing financial rewards for merit will somehow discourage people from being meritorious - that is, if you don't make the best surgeons rich, they'll decide (perhaps subconsciously) there's no point in being good at surgery anymore. I may not be doing this argument justice, but thinkers like Rawls have argued relatively convincingly that some level of inequality is necessary to incentivize merit, otherwise (my example, not Rawls') future surgeons will just sit around all day watching TikTok rather than studying hard to get into the best medical schools. I think there's something to this, but of course the question becomes one of tradeoffs - how much inequality are we willing to tolerate in order to motivate people to excel - and implementation - how vulnerable is the incentive/signaling system to corruption. Which brings me back to why I think deBoer should address the particular historical implementation problems of meritocracy rather than attacking the concept. But again, for a leftist audience, maybe he doesn't have to.
But to backtrack a bit and defend deBoer's thesis: even if meritocracy did only produce a system where good surgeons got more money, and this system did not become corrupt or lead to situations like a system of licensing which excludes perfectly good doctors trained in other countries during a time when there is a shortage of licensed doctors, and the system did not lead to the situation where going to an elite college increases your odds of gaining political power and influence - it would still be the case that people at this point in time seem to respect a good surgeon more than they respect a good plumber, that parents will want their children to become surgeons rather than plumbers, etc., and since sanitation arguably saves many more lives than surgery (at least in part because surgery without running water would be dangerous) there is an argument to be made that society needs plumbers at least as much as it needs surgeons and so there is no reason in principle why we should respect surgeons more than plumbers. So this sort of brings us back around to the "cult of smart" - if you think, as I do, that the reason surgery is a higher-status occupation than plumbing is because it's implicitly more intellectual and our society codes intellectual work as higher-status by default. And I agree with de Boer that this might not be very fair - giving smarter people more money might be a necessary measure to get them to do things like endure four years of residency, but do we also need to give them more status, and more respect, and more political power, and generally assume that they are more worthy as human beings? Probably not. And we need to acknowledge that a relatively wealthy kid will have an easier time at things like residency because they'll have a better support network, better nutrition, etc. etc. etc. and so, perhaps, although we can call the output "merit" (i.e. if you're actually a good surgeon, you have merit) perhaps we need to be careful about calling the input "merit" (i.e. did you get to be a good surgeon because you are Better or because you had genetic/environmental advantages - or, rather, to the extent that they amount to the same thing, do we want to describe those advantages as "merit" or "privilege"?).
The gist of what you're saying is that in reality the 'merit' bit in meritocracy is sometimes not a always competence; that it's corrupted by rent-seekers who use money and influence to get their kids into the clubs. That due to information asymmetry or bigotry etc people use poor heuristics to assess people's competence. But none of these points are actual arguments against meritocracy - at least not the definition we care about. It's just saying that sometimes our institutions aren't very good at producing meritocratic outcomes.
Right, I think I made it clear that I'm not opposed to selecting surgeons based on actual surgical competence, but in case I hadn't: I'm not opposed to that at all. In fact I have personally chosen surgeons based on my understanding of their surgical competence and paid a premium for the choice.
But if I had to gloss the "gist" of what I'm saying it would be "the definition of 'meritocracy' is so expansive that it's not reasonable to evaluate de Boer's position using only 'the definition we care about' - we need to thoroughly understand what de Boer knows about meritocracy, including what he thinks other people think it means, in order to make sense of what he is saying".
It looks like there are at least four definitions of meritocracy floating around:
Meritocracy a): hey, wouldn't it be great if we could pick our surgeon based on his surgical skills rather than just going with the guy whose cousin is in the Royal College of Surgeons?
Meritocracy b): we need to make some policy about surgery - say, a licensing scheme to decide who can perform it. We should definitely ask the Royal College of Surgeons to help us with this, even though five minutes ago we couldn't trust them to give us an objective recommendation about which surgeon we should hire. Anyway they have the ear of the king so they're going to get to decide who becomes a surgeon.
Meritocracy c): surgeons get to live in big houses and eat at fancy restaurants; plumbers have to live in small houses and eat at McDonald's.
Meritocracy d): your plane is going down and you have one parachute. Of course you give it to the surgeon and let the plumber die. That's not even a hard choice.
There are a lot of steps from a) to d). a) is the definition Scott wants to stick to. b) is the one the term 'meritocracy' was invented to criticize. c) is the one leftists usually worry about. d) is the one de Boer is bringing up and arguing against.
But because of the historical structure of discourse from a) through to d), it doesn't make sense to set a) in opposition to an argument against d). de Boer is arguing against d) as a way to show that leftist arguments against c) are unprincipled. Bringing a) into that internecine debate detracts from our understanding of it, and also makes people think that leftists are unreasonable crazies who don't believe a).
This may be an incidence where just tabooing the word "meritocracy" would fix the entire thing, or at least make clear who was agreeing and disagreeing with whom.
>we need to make some policy about surgery - say, a licensing scheme to decide who can perform it. We should definitely ask the Royal College of Surgeons to help us with this, even though five minutes ago we couldn't trust them to give us an objective recommendation about which surgeon we should hire.
"Can you pass a test that was designed by the Royal College of Surgeons to check if you should be a member?" is still less abusable than "Can you convince the head of the Royal College to recommend you?" even if the head of the Royal College tries to come up with a test that his cousin will pass.
For instance, the test will still filter out all the bad surgeons who *aren't* friends with someone important - a pool of 99 certified surgeons and 1 cheating cousin is better than a pool with 100 people who may or may not have studied medicine at all. It can also remove other types of biases - even if the head of the college really hates someone and refuses to recommend them, they can still point to their test scores to get hired as a surgeon.
If you throw out objective measures of aptitude, you're stuck with subjective measures, and those are way, way easier to corrupt. The stock example would be companies that hire for "cultural fit," and then conclude that [insert minority here] doesn't fit the company culture. At least with a test, the head of the Royal College has to *pretend* he's picking the best surgeon and give a reason why they're the best, instead of just blatantly picking his friends and family.
The point of example b) was that when you give experts the political influence to make policy, part of that influence can be used to influence who becomes an expert.
Now, if they do happen to come up with an objective test, they've chosen a less-corruptible way to use their political influence, and I would applaud that. But historically that hasn't always been the case, and you can find or imagine scenarios where an organization of credentialed experts exercises their gatekeeping ability to do something like exclude minorities or drive artificial scarcity to prop up their own wages or prestige. Milton Friedman has famously accused the AMA of doing this, for example.
This type of thing may also lead to entrenchment and enforcement of a particular worldview. Suppose some controversial new surgical procedure is devised and the Royal College of Surgeons doesn't like it. They make it harder to gather evidence about the new procedure by saying that anyone who performs it gets their license revoked. Then when some non-RCS surgeons do the procedure, the test results are rejected because the procedure wasn't done by licensed surgeons. Or maybe the Democratic College of Surgeons in the country next door approves the procedure but the RCS won't accept safety data from the DCS because the procedures were performed in a different country (kind of like the situation with the FDA and vaccines).
Maybe it makes sense to pay RCS surgeons more - but does it make sense to let them make policy? That's the question we're asking when we use "meritocracy" to refer to a system in which financial rewards AND political influence are given to people based on competence at a particular task. I think the answer is "to an extent" - but I think external mechanisms need to be in place to notice and fend off attempts to corrupt the credentialing and policymaking processes.
Thank you for mentioning Rawls. I was thinking of him while reading Scott's essay, and you saved me from saying "But what about Rawls and the second principle of justice and stuff?"
Can you think of any defense for his assumption that, faced with being randomly allocated to some role in a society, you will always decide as if you were certain to end up as the worst off person? That's what the argument requires.
The veil of ignorance was proposed by Harsanyi well before Rawls, and he followed out its logic to the obvious implication, which is maximizing average Von Neumann utility. Rawls didn't like the conclusion so waved his hands and came up with the difference principle.
The veil of ignorance is sort of nonsensical, because it assumes that people's biases solely consist of explicit knowledge that could potentially be done away with, leaving an ideologically neutral person behind to make a decision like "how much women's rights should society have"?
My classic example of this is gay rights. Ask a liberal "what rights would you want society to afford to gay people, if you might be inserted into society as a gay person" and the liberal will say "I'd want to make sure gay people had protection from discrimination in housing and employment, and the right to legally recognized marriage." Ask a Christian fundamentalist the same question and they'd say "I'd want to make sure gay people could be cured of their gayness so I could get treatment and then go on to live a normal life." Obviously these worldviews are incompatible because of more than just a disagreement about allocation of scarce resources. And I think this is where most meaningful disagreements in society come from.
The minimum wage argument isn't "we should have a $10 minimum wage" vs. "we should have a $20 minimum wage." If that was the case we could just negotiate the number to $15 and everyone would be a little bit happy. Rather, it's "we should have a $15 minimum wage" vs. "minimum wage earners just need to get better jobs" and arguments about moral hazards and the ethical implications of second-order effects of labor market distortions. None of this is negotiable in the way Rawls wants to negotiate it.
That makes sense for your gay example. But the main argument against the minimum wage is that the harm it does to low-skill workers who it prices out of the labor market is greater than the benefit to slightly less low-skilled workers who get a raise. The Rawlsian argument implies that you should not have a minimum wage, because the people it hurts are on average worse off than the people it helps. On the Harsanyi version, the result is less clear. Straightforward economic arguments suggest that a minimum wage is inferior to a costless subsidy of the poor, but that may not be an option. Whether it is superior to doing nothing depends on the relevant elasticities (are you knocking ten people off the ladder to higher wages and giving one person a raise or the other way around) and the shape of the relevant utility functions. Either way, the veil of ignorance is relevant.
Yeah, I'm disappointed by Scott, as we had already pointed out in the comments a similar criticism of his too narrow definition of meritocracy the last (?) time this discussion came up.
Notably, Young is only a starting point : as a reminder, 'aristocracy' literally means "rule of the best". So going back to Aristotle might be interesting.
This kind of 'coincidence' in terms should make one wary about the future evolution of a meritocracy. In fact there are indications that 'meritocracy' might already be devolving into hereditary aristocracy, now that the exceptional post-WW2 conditions have dissipated :
Also, it might be interesting to look at how the USA (and similar countries) went from a republic where only white(-ish) men "of talent and virtue" had the right to vote to a much more democratic system.
That's a great article - I remember reading it when it came out, and it clearly influenced my thinking in the comments I've made here on the topic. Thanks for reminding me about it.
I agree with your "school is prison" hypothesis, but I think you're missing the obvious, it's prison because some kids need a prison...kids are stupid, and violent, and by the time they reach 12 large and agile enough to murder someone with ease.
Schools seem at least in part design to handle this aggression. More select schools handle this by never selecting the very aggressive children. But some schools will always have to be prisons. But maybe I'm missing something? Historically this wasn't the case, but historically 100% schooling wasn't the case, and moving to 100% schooling seems to always come with moving to a prison system of schooling.
I read Scott's warning: "I try to review books in an unbiased way, without letting myself succumb to fits of emotion. So be warned: I'm going to fail with this one."
I peer down the paragraph and see Scott descend into a capitalized fit over bathroom passes lmao
"He could have written a chapter about race that reinforced this message."
I get the impression you think this is a contradiction? I understood what you represented to be something like someone arguing that the monarchy is illigitimate and terrible and dumb, and then arguing that -- I dunno -- the Jordanian royal family are not living up to their responsibilities as monarchs. There's no contradiction here: I'm saying the whole system is dumb, but I'm saying that this is compounded in this case by the fact that the system is not living up to its own success-modes (for what they are) by the Jordanian royal family not caring about their subjects as they should.
So he's saying that valuing people based on their intelligence is bad. But highlights the special case of race to say that there is more going on in this case which makes it even worse?
"white supremacy touches on so many aspects of American life that it's irresponsible to believe we have adequately controlled for it"
I don't know if this is true for this issue. I feel I can't explore it without causing explosions. But there are similar-sounding things I believe that mean I'd rather not just dismiss this.
"Then he goes on to, at great length, denounce as loathsome and villainous anyone who might suspect these gaps of being genetic."
So... is there any chance that -- for him --this is similar to the case where one feels very uncomfortable when somebody starts a rant about how many of such-and-such-a-race are in the media or banking? Ideally I'd like to meet this and every other comment with an open mind and take it for what it is -- but I really struggle in this case because the probability is so high that it is not a coincidence this this a malicious trope (whether or not the person saying it is oblivious or not)?
"Some people wrote me to complain that I handled this in a cowardly way"
"But that's kind of cowardly too"
I'm literally only replying to this because I remember a post a while back where you posted all these nasty comments people had written about you over the years, and I felt sad for you taking this stuff to heart.
So in-case it helps purge your heart of this sentiment: /not/ holding an opinion is not cowardly -- not /wanting/ to hold an opinion is not cowardly -- being cognizant and sensitive around an issue is not cowardly -- people aren't entitled to your pleas for leave to just leave an issue alone or not feel like investing time in it. I didn't read your bell curve comment and think cowardly: I thought it was a sensible clarification with wisely chosen words that defended your declared distance from this issue. It was a great example of how an unaligned person can respond to an allegation they're aligned one with, without it somehow turning into being defacto opposite aligned.
Out of interest, how does banning work on this platform? I don't recall ever logging in or creating an account. I was wondering about this because I was never sure how much banning was core to keeping the comments interesting on SSC, or how much it was that triggering things in these essays seem to generally follow 1000 calming things? Do you understand?
Is it IP based? The IP this site sees I share with a LOT of people.
1. His school criticism doesn’t make sense in context — Freddie suggests more pre-K and after school programs and Scott responds with GOING TO CLASS IS PRISON. I get he has an axe to grind but not sure why he did it here. I loved after school daycare as a good social setting that was more fun than either class or home. If not all schools have them I think that sucks.
2. Scott is speaking from a statistically rare position as the kid who wanted to learn on his own instead of being in class. The vast majority of kids aren’t that intellectually curious naturally, and of the ones that are, many (like myself) aren’t motivated enough to learn without authority saying we have to. Scott’s dream society would work very well for him and imo drastically underserve almost everyone else.
3. That said I agree there are many ways to make school less terrible (like bathroom freedom, looser requirements when a kid is just bad at something, more life advice classes) that we should pursue, probably through charters since they’re easier to experiment with.
2. Sure, most people aren't that intellectually curious but as I understand it Scott was mostly pointing out that kids who indeed are that curious, get chastised.
He got chastised. My curious kids gets encouraged, and so did I. I think teachers by and large like the smart kids. Whatever happened to Scott (and some of the other commenters) is sad, but I really doubt it's typical. I (and especially my wife) are plugged into social and social media groups with lots of parents. The world described here isn't one I recognize.
John Holt (an early education reformer) pointed out that before school, children learn a lot like walking and talking), but school damages their curiosity and initiative.
The instinct to learn basics for living, like walking, talking, socializing, finding tasty food, seem pretty different from Scott’s instinct to open an unassigned textbook chapter and absorb its trivia.
Where I live, my kids love after-school day care. The state school day-care teachers are young and fun and get the kids doing loads of activities. But much of this depends on the age of those day-care teachers. My eldest son, went to a different school that had old ladies as day-care teachers who just sat there and talked while the kids played with wooden blocks day in, day out. I wonder whether (like the UK's Marks and Spencers and some airlines) those young and fun day-care teachers will become the jaded old ladies and and change the institution back to boring because you can't replace them back with young and fun because that's ageist. Maybe more schools should employ former students as day-care teacher for fixed-term-only contracts and as great way to offer part-time work experience once you've left school.
Where I live, most children go to after-school care and a very high percentage of mothers work full-time jobs.
I also wonder how much American children are damaged by the US' litigious culture in that any possible fun/adventurous activities for children are disallowed because the risk of getting sued.
Also is bullying still such a big thing as it was in the 70s, 80s and maybe 90s? From what I've online (Reddit, etc.) children are much nicer these days and the stereotypical movie bully just doesn't really exist. I may be wrong. I guess kids will always be cruel.
"Society obsessively denies that IQ can possibly matter."
You say "society" but you only mention a narrow set of progressive critics. But look at pop culture! The innate genius is an extremely common and positive character type, the basis of some of the most successful TV shows ever. And of course many elite institutions are still gated by tests that weigh heavily on intelligence, even as some on the left are trying to change this.
I think Mensa loses respect for being ostentatious. IQ, like wealth, is highly valued, but classy people are subtle about it.
I had a horrible experience with schooling and agree there are things wrong with it.
That said, if you spend half your waking hours in a place, and have anxiety dreams, there's a baseline likelihood that your anxiety dreams will be set in that place. I wouldn't rate the prevalence of anxiety dreams about school as strong evidence of anything.
Also, I used to have anxiety dreams about the entrance hall to my apartment despite nothing even remotely bad ever having happened there.
I am really intrigued by what you make of Proust's saying (rough translation of the first sentence of his essay "Contre Saint-Beuve"): "Everyday i attach a lesser price to intelligence".
Or Tolstoys:
"I know that most men—not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever, and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic problems—can very seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as to oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty—conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives."
I haven't read De Boer's book yet, but if his whole point includes an issue with the business of defining smarts by the certified smarts (which is a good business model, but comes with a price) he would seem to have a point.
I agree with Scott wholeheartedly about school. I did a phd in a physical science, and this process is notorious for being terrible in all kinds of ways. All of those things that are said about it are correct. Even still, if I had to choose between doing the phd over again and doing elementary school over again, I would choose the phd easily.
I laugh at the indignation over schools closed because of covid. People are talking like the kids are somehow being harmed by this, as if school actually taught people something rather than just wasting their time and abusing them. People say that school gets kids away from abusive parents, but I bet for each kid that is abused at home, there's at least one other kid who is abused at school.
I do think that a big part of what people are pissed about is that they have to work and thus can't look after their kids. School solved this problem, and now that they're closed it's come back. I'll grant that this is an issue, but maybe society shouldn't be structured in such a way that parent's don't have the time to care for their own children. Just a thought.
I know I'm ranting here. and it's late and I should go to bed, but I did have to get in my school is worse than useless rant when I read this article.
Kids themselves are definitely part of the group that is indignant about schools being closed. Not all kids like school, but a large group of kids prefer school to being at home.
"everyone gains by having more competent people in top positions, whether it's a surgeon who can operate more safely, an economist who can more effectively prevent recessions, or a scientist who can discover more new cures for diseases. Social mobility allows people to be sorted into the positions they are most competent for, and increases the general competence level of society."
I think that there is a hidden assumption here that "top" positions are more important than "non-top" positions. There is a robust argument for square-peg-in-square-hole allocation for jobs and other positions (ie putting people in "the positions they are most competent for", as you put it). But that only works if you assume the absence of a general factor of intelligence (ie people who are good at one thing are no more likely to be good at another than anyone else) and the fundamental thesis of both the book and this review is that there is a general factor of intelligence.
If there is a general factor of intelligence then the people with more of it will be better at almost any job they do. This means that jobs that concentrate lots of those people will be done well; jobs that don't, will not be done well (to the extent that those jobs require intelligence). Obviously it's true that you want a better surgeon than a worse surgeon, but at the level of societal allocation, to the degree that general intelligence matters (and no-one argues that there isn't some specialisation of aptitude), having that better surgeon means that you have a worse person doing whatever that better surgeon isn't doing because they became a surgeon.
The not-so-hidden assumption is that some jobs are more important than others and that we can safely allocate higher intelligence people to those important jobs and lower intelligence people to other, less important jobs.
The really hidden assumption is that the allocation system we currently have for doing so (pay) is actually usefully correlated with the more important jobs. I think that is something that Freddie De Boer, being a Marxist, assumes is not true without consideration, and that Scott Alexander, being a liberal/capitalist, assumes is true without consideration.
I think it's a question that needs to be answered. Both the question of whether the market does a good job of evaluating the relative value of jobs and the even deeper challenge of whether there is any mechanism that is capable of evaluating that.
It is obviously the case that having a more intelligent person working at McDonald's means that customers get their orders screwed up less often. They may be able to innovate better flow mechanisms that result in people being served faster. That is a benefit. I think it's not as big a benefit as having a better surgeon, but I wouldn't know where to start at proving it, especially proving it to someone who doesn't accept financial valuations as having any moral significance.
I think a lot of the questions you're raising are basically covered in economics. You write down a model of people's preferences (e.g. how much they value waiting for burgers vs not dying in heart surgery), resources (e.g. how good you are at serving burgers vs heart surgery), and how people can trade, and then prove things about it.
Under some reasonable-but-not-perfect assumptions about free trade capitalist systems, you'll usually converge on a Pareto efficient equilibrium. That's likely where "the allocation system we currently have for doing so (pay) is actually usefully correlated with the more important jobs" is coming from.
I appreciate the review, and share many of your criticisms. In particular, the rant about schools at the end was--is soothing an odd word to use to describe an angry rant about school being prison-like? Perhaps, but it was soothing nonetheless. As a kid, I kicked perpetually against everything I found facing me in the school system, and when deBoer finished his book describing his paradise of everyone attending public schools with no alternatives, forever, I was almost ready to take up arms against the vision.
I've provided my own take on the book before, but it fits here nicely, so I'll repeat it once more:
Before The Cult of Smart was released, I was writing rapturous praises of it, with language like "he is by a long shot the single clearest thinker in the education discussion." I have been anticipating the book from the first moment I heard of it, eagerly ordered it well in advance of its release, and stayed up until I should have been waking up to finish it the first day I got it. My copy is littered with emphatically felt marginal notes and highlighting.
With all that buildup, it's almost inevitable, perhaps, for there to be some sort of letdown. But did it have to be quite so dramatic?
The core disappointment, I think, came in reading his book after listening to him talk about it. He frontloads all the most cogent, valuable points into the podcast, then fills the rest with self-conscious reassertions of his progressive values and, in what was surely the low point of the book, a seven-page boilerplate argument for Medicare for All that could have been lifted straight out of Bernie 2020 campaign material. I came for his insights on education, and left feeling like he never quite dove into it as far and as concretely as I had hoped, while spending altogether too much energy on routine ideological arguments that have already seen a thousand thousand repetitions.
It is an intensely political book, and a book that wants to be two things at once. On the one hand, you read a leftist pleading with others on his team to internalize the weight of realizing the insistent, inconvenient fact of varying academic talent. On the other, you read an evangelist, eager to convert others to his team. This might prove beneficial in the end, because the same shibboleths and diversions that so frustrated me may successfully serve his goal of making his critical message about varying aptitudes palatable to those who share his politics and dislike my own, something much more important than my own enjoyment of the book. It put a damper on things, though. It is a work I can wrestle productively with, but not one I can endorse.
In the end, deBoer does indeed shatter a myth, though at least for me not the myth he was aiming to shatter. No, the one he consigns to oblivion is the myth that a part of me always yearns to believe: that if you could just show somebody the right data, if you could just build enough of a shared understanding, you would arrive inexorably at the same conclusions. The shared understanding is there. To his credit, I never feel as if I am occupying a different world to him when he presents his factual case. He is thorough and honest. It's this that really lays the values gap bare. He shares point after point that I nod eagerly along to, all building up to what I would describe as the book's true thesis:
If we all came together and acknowledged the innate, intractable gaps that exist in people's academic potential, everyone could finally agree that Marxists have been correct about everything this whole time.
This is not an uncommon thesis to find in this genre. He shares that distinction with Charles Murray in The Bell Curve and Bryan Caplan in The Case Against Education ("If we all came together and acknowledged the innate, intractable gaps that exist in people's academic potential, everyone could finally agree that libertarians have been correct about everything this whole time"). It is frustrating nonetheless, and leaves the book a shadow of what it could have been.
[Content warning: rambling thoughts; I have not yet read the comments]
I do not agree with a crucial piece of the argument and, as far as I can tell, Scott endorses the argument at least implicitly.
I do not think society at large values intelligence above all else. At the very most Scott and DeBoer do. As far as I can tell, the only thing that distinguishes intellectual endeavours from others is that the curve of reward vs achievement is much less tail heavy.
Let me try to clarify what I mean by that a bit.
If you look at a graph representing average income of football players by the percentile they land in, I expect the graph to look roughly even till it explodes at the tail end, skyrocketing to millions of $.
What would the equivalent graph look like for accountants? I expect it to be on average higher (ie. that the average accountant earns more than the average football player), except with the blow up on the tail being much much smaller.
That is my intuition about this anyhow.
That does not mean that society values intelligence higher than other qualities. In fact, I'd argue the opposite — collectively humanity values great football players much much much more than great scientists (even though the latter arguably contribute more to the well-being of humanity). Heck, we even value extremely good looking people (or charismatic people) than smart people considering how much the top actors earn, and how much attention and undue credence is given to various celebrities (note: we == humanity at large, you personally might have different values). Unless there are some magical schools of acting that bestow the ability to sway crowds to their alumni, all these qualities are equally arbitrary as skill at manipulating algebraic terms.
Likewise, people focusing on sending their offspring to best possible schools is not inconsistent with that model — if my child is not extremely gifted at kicking balls, I expect his prospects to be better if he *doesn't* become a footballer, since I doubt any ball kicking school will push him to the tail end of the relevant distribution. However, if the school makes him slightly better at accountancy career, that is a straight up boon (and it is irrelevant whether the improvement is from being a better accountant, or being able to signal quality from graduating the "best" accountancy school around).
My prior on "society values intelligence above all else" is quite low. Nothing in the article so far has convinced me otherwise.
Let us not be naïve. The die has recently been cast. Brazil's future is America's future. If the self-coup fails, then the world might have a new birth of freedom, but, if it succeeds, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Therefore, send not to know for whom Brazilians are fighting. They are fighting for us.
I think it has become clear that Brazilians' aspirations have been betrayed and that the new Administration, instead of living up to its electoral promises of honesty and economic liberalization, is hard at work consolidating its power, protecting corrupt heavyweights, intervening in the economy, supporting monarchist agitators an antagonizing the free press. We can now see the bitter fruits of Trump's support for Brazil's regime. Make no mistake. As Nixon once said, as Brazil goes, so does Latin America https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/21/archives/brazil-will-press-kissinger-on-trade.html
My point is, as President Nixon once remarked, as Brasil goes, so goes Latin America. if we do not intervene soon, we will lose Brazil, at which point we will have lost Latin America to China.
Have you considered that maybe you are suffering from a bad case of typical mind fallacy in your opinion on schools ? I don't think the average child experience is as bad as you make it happen, and I don't think the average child would do as well as you without school.
Just to give an opposite data point: I loved my school time from the beginning to the end (not saying there were no bad or boring moments but overall highly positive), and I am very confident that I would be less intelligent, less scientifically inclined and less socialised if I had been homeschooled.
As a well socialized 4.0 college student with a high interest in science and numerous artistic talents that was homeschooled and even 'unschooled', I don't think you should be so confident unless you're just sure your parents would have sucked at it. Granted, my mom had an MBA before she started homeschooling us, but the people I know who were homeschooled all have multiple skills and test scores WELL above average. I think one homeschool group I briefly interacted with had average ACT scores above thirty, and they only met once a week for a small annual fee and volunteering requirements.
Saying "school is a prison for children" is like saying "police is legalized murder". Technically, this is true, but only in the same way as "Dorothy kills the first person she meets, then assembles a gang to kill again". It's not the whole truth.
Not every parent is a qualified surgeon, which is why parents must sometimes place their children's very lives in the hands of medical professionals. Similarly, not every parent is a competent teacher, nor is every child capable of productive self-study. Khan Academy videos are great, but they're no substitute for guided instruction, especially for children who are not geniuses. This is why parents must sometimes place their children's education in the hands of qualified professionals. And yes, it would be nice if every parent could afford a couple personal tutors for their child, but, well, most cannot.
As it happens, public schools in the US are pretty bad; similarly, policemen sometimes kill innocent people for no reason (or, arguably, for race-motivated reasons, which is even worse). But that's not a good reason to abolish the police altogether, because the negative consequences will overwhelm the positives. The same applies to schools.
I think the police analogy doesn't hold. Police officers don't spend most of their time in violent encounters. Whereas schoolchildren do spend a lot of time in a confined place being forbidden to leave.
A better analogy would be "like saying 'being a soldier in an active warzone is legalized murder'", to which I'd say, "yes, it is a bit similar".
I'd love to read a post on schooling (decoupled from a book review) if it doesn't exist yet. I went to kind-of-charter-school (I think, I'm outside U.S and it doesn't look to be 1:1 equivalent) which was religious and suffered from most of the same issues as public ones here.
Also, what is bathroom pass? Google doesn't really seem helpful.
It's a pass that a kid carries when they go to the bathroom. If they get stopped by another adult in the hallway (a teacher, administrator, security guard) they show the pass to prove they aren't cutting class and have the teacher's permission to be outside the classroom.
The bit about school as school prison really rings true to me; I remember substituting at the elite private school of my area and just immediately being disgusted by the environment and especially the quiet servility. It instantly made me never want to be a teacher ever again
I think 16 and 17 year olds are the new women; they have a whole wide range right violations predicated on exaggerated notions of their biochemistry making them stupider (notions that if applied to adult disabled or even the old would be considered extremely offensive). It's a similar situation with younger children, but also different because the younger you go the more true claims about you being too stupid to make decisions on your own
The tricky and uncomfortable yet very fascinating question when it comes to children's rights id contract law and sexual consent. My gut reaction is allow much more contract law but keep sexual consent with an adult laws at 17 or 18.
Yet I look at austria sexual consent laws or even the old NL consent laws (15) and I have to admit 15 or 16 doesn't seem wildly immoral to me either.
Japan sexual consent laws seen much to low and very strange that it's not talked about.
Some societies don't value intelligence as moral worth much and seem as a result to be more open to using IQ in the educational system, netherlands and germany comes to mind.
They have the least bad education systems imho, and NL had the happiest children.
Concerning your confusion on meritocracy criticism. A useful distinction here might be between desert and entitlement. Someone who wins the lottery is entitled to their millions but we'd hardly say they deserved it or if I over-pay someone to do something, say 100k to dig a small hole, then they're likewise entitled to it but hardly deserve it. As you note, it may be best (for reasons of liberty or maximising utility) to arrange society with a system like capitalism whereby people will tend to choose to reward others based on their productivity (though this is not ofc guaranteed) even if that productivity isn't deserved or even if sometimes people do so for wholly subjective reasons unrelated to productivity. You say this system is what meritocracy is.
A lot of criticisms of capitalism or even just a given society on "meritocratic" grounds says people who do making money or advance in society don't deserve it. The most obvious meritocratic stance is "equality of opportunity" whereby you say that, while in the final distribution person A is more productive than person B, this is only because A was given unfair advantages in education, opportunities etc. compared with B. This is normally seen as the argument for meritocracy and a lot of societal criticism and reform is based on this idea - that they don't merit or deserve the income or productivity they've attained. But if we take your model of meritocracy, there can't be any objection re. A or B.
Now, I agree your approach is correct but I think the term meritocracy is usually seen to relate to this (thick) sense of equality of opportunity (as opposed to say a weak one of just letting anyone apply for a given opportunity) and many people and much politics is spent questioning the idea of who deserves to have become productive, not that we should chose productive people per se.
1. Amen, amen to the idea that meritocracy (that is, benefits accruing to the intelligent and capable) is just a thing that emerges from situations in which people have the freedom to choose. It’s efficient!
2. Trying to prevent meritocracy leads to bad, weird outcomes, especially for the poor whom DeBoer wants to help. A Venezuelan acquaintance (émigré, lawyer, from a rich family) was telling me about how Chavez tried to widen opportunity by creating his own chain of professional schools. These took in poor students and churned out doctors and lawyers after three-week-long courses. These people were not capable lawyers or doctors, obviously, but various other Bolivarian social programs swallowed them up and deployed them around the country to serve the pueblo. Whom did this scheme harm? The poor, who couldn’t afford to avoid the fake doctors.
3. This article (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/magazine/white-fragility-robin-diangelo.html) quoted some anti-racist trainers who also want to undermine meritocracy. One of them talks about how law firms should try to hire compassionate people. But then, “Ron Ferguson, a Black economist, faculty member at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative, is a political liberal who gets impatient with such thinking about conventional standards and qualifications. ‘The cost,’ he told me in January, ‘is underemphasizing excellence and performance and the need to develop competitive prowess.’”
4. Tangential and just conjecture, but: I sometimes wonder if meritocracy (benefits accruing to the capable, unimpeded by human constraints like sexism) itself isn’t responsible for the (maybe illusory?) decline in the quality of American education. In the Bad Old Days, it was much harder for women to become surgeons and rocket scientists, or whatever. Now it isn’t as hard. The very smart women who would have been stuck being teachers or nurses in 1950 are now likelier to be surgeons and rocket scientists.
5. Another spicy-but-unverifiable claim: meritocracy probably feels more unjust now that we mate assortatively. It looks more like inherited, class-based benefit, which it probably partially is, but it’s also because smart men marry smart women now, and they have smart children.
I've often heard the anecdotal argument that prior to the 70s, many more very smart women went into teaching. I'd also say that having met thousands of public school teachers, the older generation did include many smart women who increased the average intelligence of teachers. As they have retired, I expect average teacher intelligence may well have declined.
I mean, I think the great debate about intelligence determining your value as a human being might be a short lived thing regardless purely because of AI. Strength used to determine your value as a human being too, but then we automated all the STR jobs.
Silicon Valley is automating all the INT jobs right now, and when that's done in a decade or two we might be having giant arguments about how CHA or WIS determines your value as a human being.
This review feels half-finished. Like, you got so worked up about the charter schools and compulsory education thing you didn't have the energy to properly discuss the more core idea of the book. Which is - after we have done exhausted every possible educational intervention and the dust has settled, there will still be winners and losers - based on innate ability.
Is it psychologically realistic to completely decouple the sense of one's worth from intelligence/educational achievement? What would the society look like in this scenario? Can we significantly diminish the rewards to talent without completely destroying the incentives that compel people to do socially useful work?
I hope you can spend more time on those questions in another post.
"Universal school": orphanages for everyone! I think it's a leftover from High Modernism.
About a hundred years ago, any look at trends in the organization of society would find what I call the disassembly of the home. Before the Industrial Revolution, people mostly worked at home (be that a farm or a workshop attached to the house), mostly gave birth at home, mostly received medical care at home, cooked and ate at home, etc. In cities, artisans sold their wares from the streetfront room, too.
The Industrial Revolution separated these functions, creating specialized factories, hospitals, shopping venues, etc. because this enabled stunning gains in efficiency. Extrapolate this, to scry what the far-off future of the mid-20th century may hold, and the obvious prediction is that more and more functions will leave the "home" until it's literally a dormitory. To the extent children are not a good fit for a dormitory-for-adults, or one happened to pick an ontology where childcare is a separate function, the logical consequence is that all children are to be raised in what are basically orphanages.
As a matter of cognition, this is the sin of mentally setting variances to zero. Sure, if all people (or all "normal" people, there being discrete internally-homogeneous categories of variously "broken"/"insane" people) were in fact identical, something of this sort might even work. To be very charitable, the effort to approximate such a state of affairs was a resounding success in the physical industries. The huge expenditure on standards organizations, metrology, quality control, mechanization, etc. did in fact make parts exchangeable! Professional education and certification is but a pale shadow, comparatively, and at a time before individual genetic variance was understood (instead society was just shaking off a religion which very much taught that people are spiritually exchangeable, "soul" and "free will" and all), it was a reasonable mistake to assume that society could be reorganized on similar principles.
"It’s very hard to track changes in people’s basic beliefs about psychology. I was flabbergasted to learn that until Dr. Benjamin Spock’s landmark 1940s book on child care, parents were told not to hug, kiss, or show affection to babies, because that would coddle them and make them weak, pampered adults. Before that, parents interacted with their kids much less, and it was assumed that siblings and nannies and friends would raise them, or they would raise themselves."
I realize I'm risking a ban by commenting on that section, but I'm not gonna say anything about race and IQ.
However, you were begging for evidence to change your mind? What? How is that good practice? Unless you do that in both directions, on all occasions, you're going to end up with biased conclusions!
There is always evidence for both sides of a controversy! You can't decide which conclusion you want to arrive at a priori, then specifically seek out evidence that supports it!
He's very obviously just playing a mind game here, imo. This is as close as he can possibly come to admitting he believes in group IQ differences without serving himself up on a platter for crucifixion. It's actually very clever because it sets up a weird paradox for anyone who might try to hold him accountable, in that 'guy who is AFRAID the FACTS are racist' is not easily confronted as 'man exposes his ignorant racism' without incurring huge cognitive dissonance both on the scientific and moral front.
The weird thing about this comments is that I can't tell if you are a cynical believer in race/IQ whose point is 'Scott's always secretly agreed with us' or a cynical leftist or liberal whose point is 'Scott's always been secretly fash'.
I will say that as a good Bayesian, Scott doesn't actually have to think of it in terms of believe/ not believe, as opposed to assigning a credence to how likely he thinks it is to be true. I think you are right to get the vibe that the credence is north of 50% though.
I never assumed he was anything less than terminally open-minded. I don't frequent these circles enough to really be familiar with the lingo but I understand the point. As for my ideological bent, I really was just thinking in terms of psychology. Maybe I'm super autistic or something but I genuinely don't have an axe to grind most of the time. People are simply interesting to model. Perhaps I'm a great Bayesian, but I wouldn't know.
Because he's only human, and when confronted with facts that undermine our deeply held values, accepting those facts can be almost 'psychologically painful' ?
I like to think of it in terms of power. What one believes they are capable of heavily determines what they can accomplish. And also what they are *allowed* to accomplish by the system (resources/laws/etc.) In the current educational system both are being actively repressed. What, how, where, when children learn is decided mostly by politicians and administrators. Children have no say. Parents have little. Teachers have a small amount of power. Administrators have more but are still heavily constrained. So what are we all learning? That our voices don't matter, what we want isn't important, from a very very early age. We learn the opposite of democracy from a very young age and then are surprised when our "democratic" society has turned into a corporate oligarchy. There have been many many experiments in small democratic schools, where children have a voice in what they learn and how. Where if a child isn't happy and engaged by school it is considered a failure. But these haven't been widely adopted. Why? I agree with Freddie deBoer that there is a cult of "smart" or a cult of intelligence that is a little bit sociopathic that can optimize success in our current competitive culture and economy. Everyone wants their children to succeed. Success in our world, in our economy, is correlated with success in a public school system that rewards a very specific type of intelligence, compliance to status quo, deference to power and the systems that support that power. So it's rational for parents, educators, and politicians to think that trying to enforce more compliance will lead to more success. That's not the kind of world I want to live in though, and I would love to see little community based schools, where students, parents, educators are empowered by the system to search out their talents and interests and recognize they can have a say in shaping the world around them and our collective future.
Just as a meta-comment, trusting Scott's personal experience in school to generalize isn't a great idea. Clearly he wasn't your average student. Just because there was too much structure for him (or only read at certain times) doesn't mean that's bad for everyone.
I'm curious how widespread is the extremely negative sentiment towards the concept of schools in this review? Also, is it just an American thing or do people in other parts of the world feel the same about school?
Personally, my preferences couldn't be further away from Scott's. My childhood and teenage years would be miserable without school, and the thought of being home-schooled instead is a horrifying one.
Mostly it was the amount and variety of social interactions in school that made the experience positive - certainly I would have had much fewer peer interactions if I were home-schooled.
Could tell you from my experience that eastern european schooling might as well be called child supermax. I'd eyeball it at a third of students no matter where in the world you go, and I honestly don't see a reason to avoid accommodating that group.
Reporting in from Europe - Scott is correct. Homework is soul-crushing (if you even bother doing it and don't just copy your friend's answers), every time we have break all the kids are forced outside whether it's -30 degrees centigrade or not, bullying is "solved" by putting the victims in trouble, and everything fun is forbidden. The one good thing is that at least we didn't have bathroom passes.
I find the take bizarre and alien, and I think it's notable that most (not all) of the commenters agreeing with it seem to be childless adults. Not a lot of parents are chiming in to agree, which I think is because it's such a different vision from what we see.
I mostly agree with the "school is prison for kids", I certainly felt this way when I was a student, even if I had zero difficulty in school.
It was more than 30 years ago and in Europe, so not sure how comparable my school experience is with current US situation, but clearly, being under the authority of non-parent adults (professors, or worse, teaching assistants (I struggle with finding an english word, in french it's educators (pions in slang), apparenlty it does not exists in the US educational system. If you don't know what it is, lucky you, prison gards are the exact equivalent) was something i didn't like and restrospectively really made the experience prison-like. I'm still quite allergic to it ( no sympathy at all for police for example, or bosses playing the hierarchy-card).
I agree that the main (very non-PC) purpose of school is keeping children out of the streets (and the parents available for the work force - either working, or demanding (the best way to keep the wages down - employers looooove a high unemployment))...
But, apart from the formal education (I also think it's overrated, but there I would not trust my judgement, as I never struggled even a little on learning, I was clearly not the target), there are 2 things that were not mentioned and that could not be reproduced by homeschooling:
Its a socialization place, with many children able to interract with "minimal" (compared to parent presence) adult interference. I had no huge need for that, because at the time there was enough kids in my neighborhood and we were free to do our stuff outside as long as we were back for dinner. This was the norm then, but it is not anymore (at least in an urban context). Children-on-their-own can leads to problems (bullying,..) but, remembering my childhood, I think those problems are hugely blown out and it's on average a huge positive, something that I would like my childs to experience. School is often the only place where it can (more or less) happen, especially with the trend for smaller families and urbanisation. Certainly not as good as kids playing in the woods, but better than alone with mom and a playstation...
And, less funny and more controversial: as debilitating it felt at the time to do my school (prison) time, maybe it prepared me to adult life because it's close to most work environments (which are also prison-like). Would I have been able to endure it as I do now without the school training? Not sure. Now ideally, neither school-prisons nor job-prisons would exists...but if you go this way you are discussing Marxism or a society of one-person entrepreneurs aka anarchy...i.e. utopies with a high track-record of sucking badly when implemented.
One thing that you missed that may explain the difference between your and Freddie's positions on hierarchy is assortive mating:
If we grant for the sake of argument that intelligence is about 50% heritable (about half of the variance is explained by genetics) and that intelligence is very useful for leadership, a hierarchy which strongly sorts for intelligence will leave the lower rungs of the hierarchy with fewer and worse 'natural leaders' to organize it. If the 'bourgeoisie' is on average more intelligent than the 'proletariat' but mostly marry one another with little consideration of intelligence, then sheer numbers will mean that the proles still have a large number of diamonds-in-the-rough who can form a revolutionary vanguard. If, instead, the 'bourgeoisie' admitted smart proles and kicked out their own failsons, with a strong preference for more intelligent spouses, that process would quickly remove most of the potential prole organizers from the running.
I'm not a socialist, so this may be a crude strawman, but I'm given to understand that the UK saw something similar in the Labor party. In the beginning, Labor MPs were unusually intelligent but largely uneducated coal miners and factory workers. Today, they're slightly-less-wealthy Oxbridge graduates than their Tory counterparts and have similar biases / class-interests.
The last section made me genuinely emotional, because I'm so often the one making this exact same argument and I've never heard anyone else outside of my personal sphere say it out loud. I've been an educator for 15 years, and I can tell you without hesitation that public school is prison for children. Thank you.
I'm afraid I feel like the the "prevent people from being able to escape the current educational helltopia" angle is strategic crab-bucketing, strangely enough akin to the accelerationist notion of crashing capitalism - by making the current system untenable to the absolute maximum number of people, it may speed up change by raising the number of voices raised in discontent, without asking how much damage might be done before the critical tipping point is reached or even whether the outcome is going to be the one predicted.
If this even needs to be voiced, I see that sort of reasoning as yet another instance of the morally abhorrent "the ends justify the means" shtick that every kind of political fanaticism tends to exude. And it can't even work in a world without restrictions on freedom of movement and immigration.
Re “The Part About There Being A Cult Of Smart” section, it seems to me you should mention the element of “Work Ethic”. Society dislikes ‘easy’ success of high IQ people given it is (at least partially) genetic, while celebrates exceptional academic/business achievements as these are often perceived to be large part hard work/perseverance and smaller part IQ.
America's racial groups score pretty well when compared to their global counterparts: e.g. Whites' 499 in Math was better than half of Europe including Austria, Sweden, France, and the UK, but worse than twelve other EU countries and all East Asians. Hispanics' 446 was better than any LatAm country except Chile (447), and Blacks' 419 was close to Trinidad (425), the only black country in the rankings.
I think one of the things missed here is how teaching and learning in school has shifted from the way Scott writes about it, to a version more applicable to the modern world (I recognize this is not true of all school systems).
Sure, schools still have kids write essays on "To Kill A Mockingbird", but more often than not, teachers, particularly younger teachers who grew up online, are gearing their classes more towards experiential learning and developing critical thinking. You aren't being forced to memorize dates in history class, you're being taught to synthesize information and develop coherent arguments. We should be encouraging more of this. Anyone, regardless of intelligence, benefits from this type of educational experience.
In the Fall of 1999, I began attending high school. The preceding spring saw 2 teens shoot up their school resulting in a massacre in the town of Littleton, Colorado. Naturally, an overreaction took place at so-called institutions of higher learning around the country.
When I arrived at the high school for the first time, I noticed that we were ordered to enter the school, segregated by sex at two separate entrances. The school had a large study body, well over 3,000 students, so this was not exactly an easy process. We all lined at the entrance designed for male students, waiting to see what was greeting us once we got inside. Well, turns out, we were welcomed on our first day with a Security Wand that was waved up and down around us by a school police officer who appeared as though he was past retirement age but still wanted some income. We also had to place our backpacks through an x-ray detector and we had a to walk through a metal detector. Nothing like a medium security prison setup to kick off your high school experience.
Worse yet, there were real fears for many of us with what happened at Columbine. Yet, there was nothing, that I can recall, in any form of a psychological reassurance. No, "if you are feeling depressed, or down, etc.", nothing. Their entire reaction was the make the school more and more like a prison. Hell, I went to a low security prison once that had less mechanisms in place for weapons detection.
The size of the school made the situation incredibly demoralizing. In Winters, we'd be forced to stand in lines, single files that could stretch on for at least a quarter mile, if not more. Distinctly remember being pelted with frozen precipitation just so I could have the privilege of entering my public high school.
We also were issued IDs that had to be worn at all times. If we did not have our IDs, we were issued a written warning. After a certain number of warnings, of which I do not recall the amount, it resulted in an automatic suspension. Including the security checkpoint that started the day, there were several checkpoints where we must have ID to scan in order to gain entry. If you did not have your ID card, you would not be allowed to get lunch.
Eventually the rule of wearing the ID seemed to go away but we always had to scan in when entering school, and entering the lunchroom. That lasted my entire four years.
I like a lot of things about this post, but I disagree on one point: meritocracy.
My message is (1) meritocracy does not mean what you think it means and (2) on some level you, and a lot of other well meaning people, have been tricked into defending the motte of a motte-and-bailey argument.
About the meaning of the word: it literally translates to "rule of the deserving", so you could suspect it is about power and it is about human deserts. Now, etymology is not the same as meaning. Maybe we should ask the guy who invented the word, by writing a dystopian book about it in 1958? That would be this guy: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
To summarize, "the meritocracy" was meant to describe two things: (a) an upper class selected based on some measure of ability. The selection was described to be such that mediocre children of the upper class could be helped to make it, but it would expel embarrassingly incompetent people as well as draft any exceptional people into the upper class. This would guarantee the security of the rulers from a lower class lacking capable leaders. (b) an ideology similar to social darwinism, positing that the upper class were "the deserving", so anything they got was by definition deserved, and the lower class "the undeserving", so any of their demands or needs could be dismissed as whining or prevarication. Young was particularly worried that by labeling the lower class as undeserving they would be stripped away of dignity, beyond any material loss from the wealth-grabbing by a "morally righteous" ruling class. (in short: "a boot stomping on low-IQ people's face, forever)
Coming to the motte-and-bailey. The idea that the haves deserve everything they have, and possibly more, and that the have-nots should be happy with anything they receive because they don't deserve more (if they did, they would have gotten it) is very much alive. It is seldom stated as such but it is the unspoken assumption in much political and social commentary. The main approach for promoting this idea is by playing on the confusion between meritocracy as giving responsibility positions to the most capable, and possibly rewarding them for the extra effort (as you define it) and meritocracy as a justification for boundless inequality (the original meaning, still very much in use).
Both Young and DeBoer seem to go further and think that "it was better when it was worse" and that we should abandon the battle for social mobility, as well as give up selecting the most capable for positions of responsibility, as the price to stop the rise of a smug, self-righteous upper class. I very much disagree with them on this. But we should recognize that there is a problem, and be very careful when discussing "meritocracy", because not everyone means the same thing by the word. If possible, push back against rhetoric based on dividing "deserving" from "undeserving". At the very least, when people like DeBoer write against meritocracy, stop saying that they did not understand the concept. They did.
Do you have any empirical evidence to back up the claim that most children find school anything like as torturous as you're making out? That passage seemed to rely quite heavily on personal experience, which doesn't seem the right way to go about this. (My own experience is that I generally preferred not being at school to being there as a kid, but I never hated it, but then again, British schools rarely assign 3 hours of homework!)
DeBoer's description of mobility in the hierarchy feels unnecessarily zero-sum. A person can create value in a way that changes the proportions of different categories in the hierarchy by i.e. creating a new business sector or paying their employees more. You can bring people up with you without pushing other people down.
Also, there's another aspect that needs to be considered before the current education system can be replaced - child abuse in the home. I heard from someone who was homeschooled that her parents locked away her birth certificate, wouldn't allow her to get a job or a driver's license or go to college, subjected her to physical and sexual abuse, and there was no societal system in place to monitor her well-being. So, yes, school is horrific and terrible for many students, but homeschooling isn't necessarily always better and there needs to be at least some contact between kids and adults who aren't in their parent's social circle.
One of the better models I've seen is my friends who were homeschooled up until high school, and then attended public school mostly to take advanced subjects. A more scalable solution might give the option of trade school or high school at that point.
Thank you for this lovely review. But rather than being a thorn in DeBoer's side, I think the trickiness of the issue of racial differences in intelligence may highlight a necessary nuance missed in your defence of meritocracy.
Firstly, balancing the views of experts as you briefly link to is likely less valuable than it might be otherwise due to the controversy of the topic. We don't even need to consider the 'object' of the question (which you have wisely forbidden), because we can instead establish that we will never be able to confidently determine whether race correlates with intelligence independently of environment. Genetics and environment are massively interacting parameters (e.g. there is no school where a black child has exactly the same experience as a white child). You can't factor out the environment from the equation and see what differences are left to be attributed to genetics because environment isn't just a confounding parameter but the very mechanism through which genes for intelligence might be expressed. One environment may cause one gene to cause intelligence, while a different, possibly currently non-existant, environment may cause that same gene to reduce intelligence. This is without even having to descend into the endless discussion of bias in how we measure and define intelligence. So our topic here is less a discussion on which facts are true and more on reasoning and ethics.
Your defence of meritocracy used the example of a surgeon. But I think we can distinguish the *utility* of meritocracy with its inherent *virtue* (there's maybe some kind of irony here as the book's argument concerns the conflation of intelligence with virtue). We choose the intelligent person to be the surgeon because we want good surgical results and we assume that an intelligent person is more likely to get those good results (a debatable assumption perhaps but let's ride with it). This demonstrates a social utility of a meritocracy of intelligence, but it says little about its virtue, i.e. we can now see it as a necessary evil. I think this is an important distinction because the virtue of meritocracy is often presumed as self-evident across the political spectrum, and the book argues persuasively against this.
Now we wouldn't need the intelligence metric for the surgeon if we had an oracle who could predict how good their results will be. If we had such an oracle, and it told us a certain unintelligent person was going to give us the best results in the operating theatre, then I suspect nearly everyone would go with that person. Therefore, the necessity is that intelligence provides an indicator for outcome.
Intelligence, imperfect as it may be as an indicator of outcome, is a property of the individual. I assume measures of intelligence involve some aggregation of a number of tests. Now let's consider measures of intelligence of a racial group, which, even if we could be completely confident of its validity (which we can't), would give us a very slight prior for measuring an individual's intelligence. The group's intelligence is at best a weak indicator of the individual's intelligence - which we can already measure far more accurately - which then was a vague indicator of their likely results. So there is next to no utility in such a group-based meritocracy.
Now onto the position of virtue: the main argument I hear on meritocracy's virtue (i.e. not societal utility) is that it let's us all have hope in the persuit of our dreams, regardless of how likely they are in practice. In the case of a meritocracy of individual intelligence this is true precisely because we struggle to really measure it. Even if everyone tells you you're a loser, there is still the plausible scenario where you work hard and one day succeed, i.e. you were smarter than anyone realised. Ultimately, this provides at least a sense of agency. But with meritocracies based on groups where we cannot choose whether or not to belong (e.g. race), we lose this possible virtue because we don't have agency over the group. (You could argue that the group itself has the power to rise collectively - this is beyond the scope of my point here.)
So what? Ultimately, the question of whether there is differences in intelligence between races is not only impossible to answer conclusively, but it is irrelevant to the discussion of meritocracy because it fails to offer any of the proposed value and virtue that meritocracy is purported to provide.
This is the best reply. The persuasive argument in favor of meritocracy is not moral, but utilitarian.
I think it would be possible to obtain a relatively confident answer about differences in intelligence between 'races' (or more precisely, groups with different ancestry), but I think if this result pointed in the 'racist' direction, most 'experts' would just demand to put the burden of proof higher.
I hope Scott comes back to answer this. I have 2 kids under 2, plan on sending them both to public school, with a fallback of private school, with a fallback of homeschooling. I expect them to succeed well in public school, but reading this makes me push myself harder for financial independence and plenty of cash so I could afford private schooling/quitting my career. In my head, homeschooling is a minimum of 10 years without working, then part-time until they are 18.
I'm not Scott, but we home unschooled two kids. My wife did more of it than I did, so I put the question to her. Her answer was that time doing it was no more than two hours a day, much of it spent doing things she enjoyed, but that she had to be "on call" 24/7, except when I was there dealing with the kids. My memory is that it took considerably less of my time than that. She was a full time housewife and mother at that point, having quit her job as an oil geologist before we had our first child.
I should add that our kids were only being home unschooled from about 10 and 13. Earlier than that they were being unschooled in a very small and unconventional school on the Sudbury model. We, especially my wife, put some time into that as well, of course, and our kids spent a good deal less time there than they would have in a conventional school, but it did make the process easier for us.
Over the past year I've learned a lot about the full-time RVing community (which I plan to join within the next year, and which is much larger than I realized, close to 1 million people in the US, though I think most of those are not really nomadic and mostly stay in one place, and tends to skew towards older people compared to the general population).
I mention this because this community (necessarily) has a much broader Overton window about how to school kids, and takes much more advantage of the possibilities modern technology offers for doing so. Every discussion I've seen about this, usually framed as advice for families thinking of becoming full-timers, talks about being honest with yourself as a parent about what you're capable of, and looking honestly and comprehensively at how your child learns. They list out many different styles of "roadschooling" and what kinds of families they work best for, and how to make effective uses of all the resources available. This community also has developed ways to "domicile" (aka establish legal residence) in almost any state, helping deal with local laws making this difficult for many others. Check out https://www.fulltimefamilies.com/roadschooling-how-to-homeschool-while-rving/ for an example of what I'm talking about. Youtube vlogs show many examples of this, including families where both parents work and each kid is schooled in a different way optimized for their learning style and well-being.
This is where I mention that I sent my kid to the Sudbury Valley School, a 50-year-old democratic, student-governed community of 150, aged 4 to 18. The kids do whatever they want all day, within the confines of laws written by the student-run legislature and enforced by the student-run judiciary. The graduates turn out fine. I present the school as an extreme of school reform.
Gonna write a few bits in response to the various responses I got. Apologies in advance for any incoherence (because it's not like I'm deeply thinking this through right this minute).
First, I am very thankful I have no kids so they're not going through what, even in 1916, Padraig Pearse was calling The Murder Machine (though this was political in the cause of Irish independence, not as a paedogogical solution):
The English once proposed in their Dublin Parliament a measure for the castration of all Irish priests who refused to quit Ireland. The proposal was so filthy than although it duly passed the House and was transmitted to England with the warm recommendation at the Viceroy, it was not eventually adopted. But the English have actually carried out an even filthier thing. They have planned and established an education system which more wickedly does violence to the elemental human rights of Irish children than would an edict for the general castration of Irish males. The system has aimed at the substitution for men and women of mere Things. It has not been an entire success. There are still a great many thousand men and women in Ireland. But a great many thousand of what, by way of courtesy, we call men and women, are simply Things. Men and women. however depraved, have kindly human allegiances. But these Things have no allegiance. Like other Things, they are for sale.
Our common parlance has become impressed with the conception of education as some sort of manufacturing process. Our children are the ‘raw material’; we desiderate for their education ‘modern methods’ which must be efficient but cheap; we send them to Clongowes to be ‘finished’; when finished they are ‘turned out’; specialists ‘grind’ them for the English Civil Service and the so-called liberal professions; in each of our great colleges there is a department known as the ‘scrap-heap’, though officially called the Fourth Preparatory—the limbo to which the debris ejected by the machine is relegated. The stuff there is either too hard or too soft to be moulded to the pattern required by the Civil Service Commissioners or the Incorporated Law Society.
In our adoption of the standpoint here indicated there is involved a primary blunder as to the nature and functions of education. For education has not to do with the manufacture of things, but with fostering the growth of things. And the conditions we should strive to bring about in our education system are not the conditions favourable to the rapid and cheap manufacture of ready-mades, but the conditions favourable to the growth of living organisms—the liberty and the light and the gladness of a ploughed field under the spring sunshine.
In particular I would urge that the Irish school system of the future should give freedom—freedom to the individual school, freedom to the individual teacher, freedom as far as may be to the individual pupil. Without freedom there can be no right growth; and education is properly the fostering of the right growth of a personality. Our school system must bring, too, some gallant inspiration. And with the inspiration it must bring a certain hardening. One scarcely knows whether modern sentimentalism or modern utilitarianism is the more sure sign of modern decadence. I would boldly preach the antique faith that fighting is the only noble thing, and that he only is at peace with God who is at war with the powers of evil.
In a true education system, religion, patriotism, literature, art and science would be brought in such a way into the daily lives of boys and girls as to affect their character and conduct. We may assume that religion is a vital thing in Irish schools, but I know that the other things, speaking broadly, do not exist. There are no ideas there, no love of beauty, no love of books, no love of knowledge, no heroic inspiration. And there is no room for such things either on the earth or in the heavens, for the earth is cumbered and the heavens are darkened by the monstrous bulk of the programme. Most of the educators detest the programme. They are like the adherents of a dead creed who continue to mumble formulas and to make obeisance before an idol which they have found out to be a spurious divinity."
Second, I am very grateful for the education I have received, of whatever degree, and even more grateful that I was let alone to roam through the bookshelves and pull out dusty volumes. I may have over-dosed on the 19th century but I was able to find things out for myself.
Thirdly, there are so many constraints on education today. Mostly I am going to kick up about the recommendations which Scott rightly says should only be a worst case scenario about turning schools into baby-sitting services.
WHAT ARE SCHOOLS FOR? (This is where I go "in my day..."). They used to be for education, no matter how rote or brutal that was (as a side-note, it was pretty brutal in my late parents' day - that would be 30s and 40s when they were attending primary school and literally getting beaten, to the point where when my mother had us kids she was determined that no way were we going to go to the same local school, even if conditions had drastically changed thirty years later).
Now, however, they are surrogate homes. SCHOOLS SHOULD NOT BE FEEDING KIDS BREAKFAST. That is not the function of a school! And if the home situation is so bad that the parents cannot afford to feed their children, or have no idea of how to feed them, or are so actively neglectful that they will not feed them, that SHOULD be for a completely different service to handle, be that social workers or a whole new body set up to box a week's worth of healthy meals and deliver it to at-risk households plus instructions on how to cook them. Why are schools feeding children, open early in the morning so the kids can be dropped off when the parents have to be at work, providing after-school services so the kids can be minded while the parents are still at work, and so on?
You're asking teachers not alone to teach, but to be parents, nurses, child-minders, and rear your children for you. Is it any wonder schools are failing at what they are supposed to do, namely turn out people able to read, write, and do basic arithmetic at a functional level?
"Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development."
They're being asked to function as "child prisons" so that two-income working parents can get out to start work at 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. and still drop the kid off to school and not have them at home for the two hours between the parents leaving for work and the kid needing to turn up for school. Since the decline of "one parent who stays at home as full-time home-maker who can walk the kids to school at 8:30 a.m. in time for 9 a.m. start", if you want to change this, you don't have to change schools - you have to change the whole economic engine of society so schools DON'T have to be open at 7:30 a.m. and stay open until 5, 6 or 7 p.m. to child-mind for working parents.
But it's a lot easier to blame schools than change society on a fundamental level.
There's also the problem of "what about if your school isn't in walking/cycling distance", which is a different matter. School didn't start until 8:45 a.m. for me but I had to be on the school bus at 7:30 a.m. since it had a long, looping route to collect all us country kids, meaning between the ages of 12 and 15 I spend an hour and a quarter on the bus travelling to school in the morning every school day.
Okay, so we're turning our school into child-raising second homes. Who is going to do the child-minding? First, if you're asking teachers to stay late in the evening or come in early in the morning to supervise, even on a rota, you are going to have to stump up extra money to pay them. If you want to avoid using teachers but hire on childcare providers or "an adult to sit there and make sure the kids at least pretend to study", then you need to persuade the relevant authority to pay money to hire them on. Remember what Scott said about penny-pinching? If you haven't the budget to buy heating oil, where the heck are you going to get money to hire more staff? So you'll end up using volunteers, which results (generally) in twenty people saying they're interested, ten people showing up, and five people who will actually do it.
There are legally-required ratios for how many children a staff member can supervise:
"Breakdown of Required Ratios
The ratios below relate to full time (5+ hours per day) and Part time (3.5 hours – 5 hours per day) services:
0 – 1 year of age
1 adult : 3 children
1 – 2 years of age
1 adult : 5 children
2 – 3 years of age
1 adult : 6 children
3 – 6 years of age
1 adult : 8 children
The ratios below relate to Sessional Services (up to 3.5 hours per day):
0 – 1 year of age
1 adult : 3 children
1 – 2.5 years of age
1 adult : 5 children
2.5 – 6 years of age
1 adult : 11 children"
Naturally enough, the younger the children, the fewer a staff member can supervise.
Second half of the above, because SubStack instructed me to write a shorter comment before posting 😀
Oh, and speaking of money. The childcare service I work for gets most of its funding from fees. There are, at present, five different schemes to subsidise low-income parents to obtain childcare besides the universal free preschool programme (all of which are going to be replaced by a single scheme and about feckin' time say I). You can imagine the fun it is working out which kid fits under which scheme and applying for that on a government website (such fun that I religiously avoid doing it and let the other victims handle it). Details here: https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/education/pre_school_education_and_childcare/your_childcare_options.html#l11e49
This will be the new simplified method for parents who may not be that literate or computer-savvy to deal with:
There are also parents who have to pay full whack. But anyway, having introduced a method whereby parents can now pay the balance of their subsidised fee by credit card (because it was a nightmare dealing with cash-handling), there's another little surprise in store for us. Never mind that often parents are running a balance in the red (I get landed with "reconcile the spreadsheet of what fees *should* have been paid with the receipt books for what fees *were* paid" at the end of the year which is an annual 'pull my hair out' time), what with the Covid-19 happy fun times the bank handling these sprang a surprise on us.
Imagine that Mrs Murphy pays €10 a day for little Johnny to attend. She pays (daily or weekly) by credit card. We should get €50 in fees, right? Oh no. The poor banks, you see, are afraid they will lose revenue due to the shut-down in custom for most businesses not doing the same volume of trade. So to protect themselves and keep the normal level of revenue on transactions, they take a nibble from each processed fee.
So Mrs Murphy pays €10. The bank takes its nibble and credits our account with €9.85. Say we have 100 transactions a week (and we have a much greater volume), that's €15 less in fees for us.
Multiply that by term time, so €15 x 48 weeks = €720 less in the year. That's €720 less to pay for heating oil, or any other cost. You see now why heartless school districts in America may be instructing teachers not to turn on the heating until the thermometer hits a certain point?
I don't know what the solution is. There isn't an easy solution. The economy is going more and more towards "decent jobs = knowledge jobs" and to get that you need an education, and you need to be able to provide the piece of paper. Maybe the piece of paper is meaningless, but what is dead certain is that if you *don't* have that piece of paper, your options are gravely limited and getting worse every year. The days of "leave school at 15, get a job sweeping the floor in the local box factory, work your way up" are dying if not already dead.
Insurance costs and the fear of liabilities: it may indeed be true that there are not many cases of parents suing schools. However, it only takes one such case for the *fear* of potential cases to take hold. This is the contractual obligation for insurance we have to have as a service provider:
"1. Public Liability insurance with a limit of indemnity of €6,500,000 (€6.5 million) for any one claim or series of claims arising out of a single occurrence, with an indemnity to the Executive arising from the provision of the Services, which insurance will also cover claims arising from the activities of any sub-contractor engaged by the Provider."
Our premium this year was €8,000, an increase of €500 on last year despite no claims or changes to conditions because "to hell with you, that's why". Public indemnity insurance is getting more and more expensive so that, for instance, playgrounds are closing down because they can't get covered. There's the fear of "that one big case" so insurance companies are turning the screws which in turn means schools, etc. start saying "no running, you need to have a certificate to climb on the bars, etc." because if little Johnny takes a tumble and Mrs Murphy makes a claim then next year's premium will be nose-bleed high and the slack in the budget isn't there to cover it.
I was initially suspicious that early start times were solely to support two income households. Googling suggests that even as far back as the late 60s, almost half of all households had both spouses working.
I don't know when the push for earlier start times happened; I'm childless and was homeschooled. But if it happened too recently, I'm not sure that the rise in two income households is to blame, because that has been stable since the 90s (that surprised me).
Its possible that single parent households are driving it as well, those have been rising slowly but steadily since the 60s.
While I understand your annoyance with the bank fees issue, this has nothing to do with education. You could charge the parents more to cover the processing fees. You could find a bank that sucks less. You can not expect the banks to not take advantage of the fact that you consider cash-handling to be a nightmare : from their point of view they're providing a useful service to you and expect to be paid for it ! (I suppose that refusing credit cards and only take debit cards or other ways of directly wiring electronic money is not an option ?)
To what extent does IQ really affect high-level skill-acquisition?
I generally take the connection between the two with a huge grain of salt, largely because of the degree of perfection to which even people with low IQs master their native language. They can reliably master tens of thousands of vocabulary words, with perfect accent and near immediate recall, often with no explicit instruction. The grammatical/semantic content of these words is often quite complex -- what is "love?" and what in the world is a "subjunctive mood?" -- yet even a below-average native speaker can produce these more consistently/more effectively than the vast majority (presumably-high IQ) polyglots can manage any second language. This is really something!
Looks like it. Seems then is very possible to acquire high-level (cognitive) skills with lower-than-average IQ. If this is the case, maybe the problem with education is in the differences in nurture rather than those in nature after all [except perhaps in the extremely low-IQ cases]. I wonder if this also calls into the value of IQ-measured intelligence, since the really valuable aspects of "intelligence" are what it can do -- e.g. develop complex cognitive skills.
I guess that one issue with measuring purely cognitive skills with IQ is that you can hardly make a test that is only measuring cognitive skills.
And you need more than cognitive skills to be successful in a society, including the very specific form of society that is the WW1 US military which IQ is (trying to) test the fitness for.
I was homeschooled for 8 years and then sent to an unusually competent public highschool so I could learn more advanced materials that my mom wasn't prepared to teach like physics and calculus. The whole situation was pretty good. The public school seemed to waste a lot of time, but was not really abusive, though I don't doubt that many others are.
Anyway, I was lucky because I lived in a family that could afford to live on a single income after my mom quit her teaching job to homeschool me and my brothers. But I always wondered, if she didn't really quit being a teacher, why did she quit being paid? If we had gone to a public school, the government would have paid a certain amount of money (from our taxes) to have us educated. Instead, they just pocketed it and we paid for it ourselves via my mom's free labor.
What if homeschooling parents were paid the same amount of money as schools to educate their kids? The number one issue is potential abuse. This is a substantial amount of money and would incentivize people to have families of 12 children and "homeschool" them regardless of their own competency. So there would need to be controls in place to prevent abuse. There already are licensed homeschool evaluators that you're required to see once a year and demonstrate all of the things you did to make sure you're getting a proper education. I have no idea how reliable this is, how easy it would be for someone to find a lazy evaluator and fake enough accomplishments to get through each year. But if that's not very different from public schools doing the same thing.
However, if they are educated properly this could be positive in a similar manner to UBI, in that it would enable a single parent to care for their children properly without starving.
However, this leads to another potential issue in the distortion of freedom on the children. If a family has three children, then perhaps a parent could get $36,000 per year to stay at home and homeschool them. If they could get a job elsewhere for $30,000, then this is worth it. A single parent could perhaps make a living this way and do a much better job of raising the kids than by working fast food or something. But if one of the kids wants to go to public school, the family's income drops to $24,000. If two want to go to public school maybe the parent decides homeschooling is inefficient and forces the third to go as well so they can get a job. Or more likely, the parent forces the kids to stay at homeschool so they can keep the money.
I'm pretty sure these and similar issues are a large part of why this isn't being done already. But probably a larger part is a general lack of respect for homeschooling, despite it having the potential to be much better than public school if done right. Even giving a smaller amount of money, like $3-6k per child, would help families who want to make the transition from two incomes to one in order to homeschool, while preventing abuse because it's still a loss compared to a job and not enough to live off of alone.
Why not make the grants opt-in, have a limited number of grants available, and make the licensing for grants more stringent than the current homeschool licensing? I think the added friction might deter many of those who were just in it to abuse the system.
FWIW given that public school is the alternative, I don't think concern for the freedom of the children is a consideration here. The cynical part of me thinks it's just that the current system makes for better workers haha.
"What if homeschooling parents were paid the same amount of money as schools to educate their kids? The number one issue is potential abuse."
Oh hell yeah. There are people who look upon their kids solely as income-generation machines and don't care about them in any way, shape or form. I can think of a few examples of people who would gladly sign up for the "home-schooling allowance" and if the kid even learned the alphabet it'd be a miracle.
Why not just tie continuation of the grant to proctored scores on standardized tests? If you really wanted to, you could make it so they'd have to match or beat the avg for the public schools in their state.
"There already are licensed homeschool evaluators that you're required to see once a year and demonstrate all of the things you did to make sure you're getting a proper education."
Where? It isn't true in California, where we home unschooled our two children.
I am a father of a 14 year old in Berlin (Germany), my son is studying in a bilingual Gymnasium (high school). I wanted to say I'm with you on your conclusions about school. I think that one simple fix one could make is to reduce the number of things one has to study (French, Italian, German, English, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Math, Ethics, Sport, History, Geography, Music; I'm probably missing some subjects). One other fix that would have exponential impact would be if teachers were ruthlessly selected for actually being able to teach.
Ok let's tune down the Child labor analogy antill someone does a surface check on what are the actual historical and/or contemporary child labor conditions we're comparing school to. My intuition is that child labor is probably much worse then the average school, and I'm not saying this as a defence of schools.
I'm putting here a preliminary google search for the interested:
This is not really related to Scott's post, alas, but I'm noticing a lot of posters named "Thrks", "Thrmm" and similar bottish names, replying solely to agree with Marxbro. It seems like it out to be obvious that this is "the trolling", and should get "the banned".
I strongly disagree. This blog has always had a dearth of quality left-wing commenters, and especially communists/Marxists/etc. I wouldn't count Marxbro as one of those, but banning Marxbro and his defenders would send all the wrong signals.
To be clear, I'm a neoliberal (I mean I call myself a left-libertarian but most people would call me a neoliberal, I think) and find Marxbro incredibly annoying. I just like having a healthy diversity of viewpoints, and having a good population of far-left commenters is an important part of that.
I think public schools are terrible and really badly thought out. I have two kids in school now (8th and 12th grade). Yes, all of the prison trappings are there, and so much worse than when I was in school (a terrible school in rural Texas) because of all the safety lockdown measures due to school shootings. My kids’ school is, based on the usual measures like statewide testing percentage that go to college, a little above average. Why is it terrible? Bullying, especially of LGBT kids. Teachers who routinely talk about their political opinions in class when it is irrelevant to the material. Superficial support for kids with diabilities like ADHD. And, more systemically, a curriculum that was designed 50 years ago when we were fighting the Cold War and thought we needed to produce as many engineers as possible. I know smart people, like readers of this blog, find this nearly impossible to grasp, but the math and science we are “teaching” them is almost completely pointless. Scott mentioned algebra specifically, and that is right. The tiny fraction of students who go on to CS, math, and engineering need it. Literally no one else will ever use it, much less trig or calculus. But we ram it down the throats of the miserable anyway. Who doesn’t know by 9th grade what their mathematical aptitude is? Make it optional. What informed citizens need so much more is some knowledge of statistics and probability for use in practical situations.
I’m dubious about charter schools out of charity. That is, if charter schools are so great, then they are low-hanging fruit we’re not picking because (1) we’re too dumb, or (2) the entrenched powers are so venal that they are stopping it. Here’s a more charitable take, and a high prior for me: any relative success of charter schools is due to them gaming the system. I’m all for reform of the public schools, but there’s some Chesterton’s Fence reasons against the “burn it down!” response.
Off-topic: sometimes when I'm signing in here to SubStack, it gives me the instructions in French. Is it because my IP address is in Europe that it assumes I am a sophisticate? 😁
In the USA social status is mostly determined by how much money you make. And wages are to a large extent determined by the supply of and demand for labor. Maybe more intelligent people do a better job at restricting their supply?
While I am very sympathetic to the description of school as an oppressive institution, the solution to deregulate completely ignores that family is also an oppressive institution. Especially in the US, parental authority goes far beyond the authority of prison guards.
It seems less utopian to imagine a good school system than imagining billions of parents simultaneously choosing to be good without any coordination.
I have a weirdly bifurcated family, and so my experience touches both sides of the class divide that DeBoer identifies in his book and Scott responds to in this piece.
My Mom was a white-collar professional who kept the books for a mid-sized construction company (she has since retired.) My Dad (also retired) was a blue-collar technician and jack-of-all-trades. Dad is a high school dropout who reads at a third grade level. He's dyslexic, and back in the 50s no one knew how to deal with that.
I graduated from an elite institution (Harvey Mudd College), work as an engineer, and read obsessively on all kinds of intellectual topics. My kid brother, ten years my junior, had no desire to go to college. He was* great with his hands and got a job working in a trade. He was an apprentice generator technician. He had no desire to engage intellectually, and was much more comfortable hammering metal in a forge.
This is all a prelude to me talking about how badly our society serves kids like my brother: There are a whole lot of people who are more comfortable turning a wrench than engaging with Sartre, but our school system and the society around it denigrates those people. "Oh, you can't get into college, what's wrong with you?" NO! Our society needs people who can turn wrenches. That's important! But more than that, as both Scott and DeBoer identify our innate worth as humans is not tied to our intellect.
I would like to see a system that leaned more toward apprenticeships for teenagers who find school to be stultifying. They have learned to read and do basic math, and further school is a waste for them. (And, as Scott notes, a prison.) My kid brother would have been far better served by apprenticing at a mechanic's shop at 14 instead of doing 4 more years of school before he went off to learn to be a diesel mechanic. Why did we waste his time?
But more, I think about how our elites denigrate blue collar employment, and how poisonous that is. And that's part of the Cult of Smart that DeBoer correctly identifies, though like Scott I am opposed to his socialist methods.
*This is the part where I note that he was killed in a car wreck the day after Thanksgiving, 2006, at age 22, and so I have no idea how he'd have turned out 15 years later. That's why all of this is written in the past tense.
This is probably old hat, but can I make the obvious point here that if all outcomes are equalized because it's the Right Thing to do based on our equal moral value as humans, the potential downside is that no one then really has an incentive to spend years and years doing the unfun training it takes to become the talented surgeon we'll need at some point to do our complicated, dangerous surgeries, and so rather than raising Freddie's living standards floor for the poor and downtrodden, we're likely to lower it for everybody, because there'll be less productivity overall and thus less stuff to go around?
Some years back I was at an event for alumni of the very elite private school I went to. My conclusion from listening to the school officials boast of everything they did was that they believed in "The Devil finds work for idle hands" theory of education. If you only keep the kids sufficiently busy, they won't have time to do drugs or get pregnant.
No, you don’t want to homeschool your children. You will insist that your WIFE give up her career to stay home and teach your children and do all the other shit work you think men are too good for.
Also, nice job sneaking in that ‘see how smart I always have been?’ Bit at the end about how teachers mistreated you for reading in class or peeking ahead in the textbook.
It sounds as though DeBoer's implicit model is that stuff just appears and must then be distributed, and distribution ought to be on the basis of what people deserve. Since nobody deserves anything, all relevant characteristics being reducible to genetics or environment or luck, none of which the individual is responsible for, everyone should get the same outcome.
There are two problems with that. One is that we usually think of desert in terms of the actual person, not the imaginary disembodied soul who became that person. If that person is kind and generous and productive, he deserves more than the person with the opposite characteristics, even though neither of the imaginary pre-conception souls deserved to become those people.
The other is that stuff doesn't appear, it is produced, and there is a pretty strong moral intuition saying not that I deserve to get what I produce but that I am entitled to it, hence that the question is now how the pool of goodies is to be handed out but under what circumstances and for what reasons one person is entitled to get goodies a different person produced without that person's consent. The idea of someone producing something is less intuitive in a large and interdependent society, but it is still possible to make sense of it.
I'm curious as to how DeBoer would respond to an example, I think from Nozick, of the distinction between desert and entitlement. You and I agree to bet a dollar on the flip of a coin. You win. You don't deserve the dollar, because you didn't deserve to have the coin land heads. But you are entitled to the dollar.
> it is produced, and there is a pretty strong moral intuition saying not that I deserve to get what I produce but that I am entitled to it, hence that the question is now how the pool of goodies is to be handed out but under what circumstances and for what reasons one person is entitled to get goodies a different person produced without that person's consent
Minor typo notice: "We did so out of the conviction that this suppot of children and their parents was a fundamental right..." says "suppot" instead of "support". (Not sure if typo in transcription or in the original text)
The problem with the whole public vs charter vs home school debate is that everybody talks in terms of a totally deficient model of how schools function that ignores the major problem that actually matters.
School is not an individual environment, it is a social one. By participating in a school, a child changes that school, often in quite complex ways. Why then, does everybody treat schools as some kind of unchanging system that you can opt in or out of? Send your child to school A and they will achieve X, send your child to school B and they will achieve Y.
This is so obviously not how school works that I can't begin to understand why people persist with it. The experience of a child at school is generally dominated not by their teacher, or by their median peer, or by the "learning system" they are supposedly interfacing with. It is dominated by the presence or absence of the bottom 5-10% of their peers who are simultaneously stupid, behaviorally disruptive in the classroom, and social bullies who make everybody's lives miserable. The presence of these kids at the school is a net harm to everybody else there in a non-trivial way. It feels like this should be desperately obvious to anybody who has ever been to school, even been a parent of a child at school, or ever been an administrator of a school.
Historically, these children would frequently have simply been excluded from the school system entirely with the expectation that they would end up in prison soon after reaching adulthood. This makes equity metrics look bad, so the political left do what they always do: come up with an ideological model that bares little resemblance to reality and shout down anybody who questions it. Interestingly, the libertarian side of the political right also doesn't like to question the notion that schooling is anything more than the result of individual decisions made in a designed system, instead of collective, social decisions made on who should be excluded. The result is that achieving success as a school in modern society typically involves optimizing along an axis that nobody seems to think even exists. This typically involves a lot of implicit and explicit lying.
The notion that charter schools are not selective is laughable. They don't even have to be particularly selective, they just have to select against the bottom 10%. This is trivially easy: those kids generally don't have parents who are fighting to send them to charter school. Homeschooling does this even better, for obvious reasons. In the last year, I transferred my daughters from a public elementary school to a private Catholic school. There is little difference in the curriculum and the teachers appear to be just as much a mixed bag. Standards do not appear to be much higher. The main difference in both achievement and happiness comes from what they DON'T have to deal with from their peers.
The result of this is that kids with a high externality get concentrated in the public school system. Because public schools have to optimize for equity these days, and these kids are horrific for equity metrics, a disproportionate fraction of the schools' resources are expended on dealing with them. Hence, charter schools are both cheaper and give better results for the non-disruptive kids who inhabit them.
Nobody is brave enough to discuss non-integrated models of education. This is a problem, because non-integrated systems are likely more efficient overall, but with higher inequality. This means that you can trivially show improvements simply by creating a system that naturally leads to non-integration.
Scott's concluding rant reminded of Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society," in which he argues against the institutional approach and in favor of something more personalists. Pre-charter schools, but still insightful.
I do think there is a "Cult of Intelligence" as well as a "Cult of Being Successful at Formal Education". Yes, there are definitely people that push back against the idea of IQ and Mensa - but I think that may say more about a rejection of people who publicly and vocally *self-label* as "intelligent".
And, yes, there is the movement that's seeking to broaden the definition of intelligence (IMO, to the point of making the term meaningless: a child who is good at sports is now "kinesthetically intelligent") - but I think that's specifically a minority position pushing back against the majority cultural trend that has a much more 'traditional' view of "intelligence", and has a high value on it.
Maybe I'm misreading, but it felt like that paragraph stood in opposition to both the Parable of the Talents post and much of the preceding material in this post - it seemed odd, after so much discussion from Scott on how people wrongly conflate intelligence and intrinsic value, to then turn around and say there isn't *actually* a cult of intelligence, by citing the unpopularity of Mensa and IQ.
Yeah, nobody likes show-offs, whether they are showing off their intelligence, or athletic skills. I'll notice though that there seems to be no equivalent to Mensa for athletic skills, the closest thing that comes to mind is bodybuilding, but even there, there's also an aesthetic aspect (and more importantly, maybe no hard cutoff for joining ?)
Two of my sons agreed with Scott that school is child prison; in fact one said he would rather go to prison. So I let them leave school and have tried to educate them at home. The result is that they never leave the house and are pretty much terrified of people, especially groups of people they don't know. I watched one shrink in horror from a crowd of people that had spilled from a busy bar onto the sidewalk. He could not bring himself to go near them.
So they may have learned just as much academic stuff at home, but they have completely lost touch with the world outside our home, and at the moment this looks to me like a slowly unfolding disaster. They have no future plans, no notion of anything they would like to do with their lives, minimal connection to other people their age. They refuse to consider college, because it involves leaving home to be with other people.
I am thinking that there may be something to forcing your children to do the expected, socially "normal" think if the alternative is complete withdrawal from society.
This was not my experience at all as someone homeschooled. Ctrl 'F' Shaeor and see my reply just below. But I'd also ask how old your children are and if you're planning to engage them in any clubs or if they have gotten the chance to play outside much. I'm not sure what to tell you except that, from my perspective as one of five kids successfully homeschooled and having known dozens of others, this sounds very wrong and more like a stereotype of what people fear homeschooling is like, rather than the reality.
They are now 18 and 20. They can go outside whenever they want, which is seldom; I used to push them to go outside but gave up long ago. They were never in any clubs etc. because they absolutely refused to go.
I moved about a decade ago and was not very active in clubs either for about the last ten years of my education (I just never really liked the area and never made friends). Most of my oldest friends are online then, especially because one of our central members is handicapped. I do not go outside an inordinate amount, but I am moving to the beach to live with my brother and get a job and work out, etc., so I am actively trying to change this (I am 21).
I'll be honest, as much as I love homeschooling, anything can be ruined with the wrong psychology, and it has been a very deep and conscious decision these last few years that I wanted to get away from technology and live a more embodied life (RE: I have had health troubles). But I don't think I would have realized this at all if it weren't for the fact that my parents homeschooled us in the first place from a moral (and also fun-loving!) foundation. My convictions about the evils of internet porn (and to an extent, reactionary disposition in general) have played no small part in this realization. So, I think family culture matters in this respect, to which end I cannot comment on your two sons.
All I know is that I am happy and measurably more achieved than a lot of people, and I have my parents to thank for that, to a great extent, as well as my religious outlook, which has been common to other successful homeschoolers I've known.
That may not be to do with schooling as such, they may have antisocial personality problems. I was a resolute non-joiner of everything anyone tried to push me into (including the Girl Guides) and yes, if I hadn't had to attend school I would never have gone outside the door.
I'm still of that mindset. I can't blame school for making me like this or for failing to socialise me to the same level as 'normal' people, it's mostly to do with mental whatever and familial genetics (for example, I haven't suffered during lockdown as "staying at home, never mingling with other people, not going places" is my normal life). So I may be giving you the stupidly obvious advice, but have they gone to a doctor or seen anyone about this?
I was homeschooled, Scott, and in my teen years, I had a number of major surgeries that meant I had to leave all structured learning activities. Throughout my entire childhood, I had maybe one or two semesters of proper school that included standardized tests, algebra, science, logic, etc, within a private classically oriented church-school. I basically ended up 'unschooling' as we called it, which consisted of writing a lot for fun and reading things I felt like reading. I did not touch math for years. During those periods when my learning WAS more structured it never consisted of more than a handful of workbook pages that I did BY MY SELF and that I always could finish before lunch, while getting up at 9 am.
Then I went to college and I got a perfect 4.0 up to calculus one until finally dropping out because I found it oppressive. School is NOT for education, it is for rearing up good worker drones, and it is based on the militarist Prussian model for exactly that purpose. I am better adjusted than any of my friends who went to public school - I have written five novels, and I am a talented visual artist, among other things. This model has worked for me and my five other siblings, many of which are now part-time daytraders on track to be independently wealthy, regardless of any degrees they do or do not possess.
It is known for a fact that members of my family have tested IQs in the stratosphere, but two of those members are adopted, one with learning disabilities, and it is clear to me that they are reaching their potential as well, with little effect coming from their lack of formal education. Again, their schooling is finished with about a maximum of three hour's work, oftentimes less, and for some long periods when we are moving or busy, none at all.
I am open to all questions. Yes, we did have involvement with various groups at one point or another, but these were actually just fun. One time we made a smoke bomb out of peanut butter. Another time we inflated pig blatters and played with them. In hindsight, my father should have been extremely jealous of how my mother spent her time, lol
Scott, your default seems to be describing humans as machines (the competent surgeon vs the crummy one) -- so you tend to view systems from your self-protective perspective (wanting a competent surgeon to operate on you). This is evidence perhaps that you're less agnostic than you might think about what constitutes human worth, as your first impulse seems to be that it can be measured in utility. I don't think you really believe that; I suspect you might just have a sort of intellectual mannerism that is causing you to look at the problem sort of inside-out.
Marx incorrectly believed mobility was impossible within capitalism. And since capitalism was also supposedly incapable of ever elevating, or even recognizing, human worth among the proletariat, the whole concept of human worth had to be thrown out the window, at least for a while. The question of whether someone might make a better surgeon than a farmer was a luxury when, what, 80% of the people were effectively enslaved. Many mistakes were made, but it seems to me the lasting central thrust of Marxism should have been the part that demands we reimagine (and reject) meritocracy, not to make would-be surgeons farmers, but so that we look at human worth from the point of view of humans rather than producers and consumers.
Put another way: With a less hyperbolic framing we can still strive for systems that ensure all surgeons are qualified, without getting panicky that if you give up your method of valuing people you'll surely wind up dead from a botched surgery. There are far more interesting ways of valuing life than from a consumer's point of view!
I read The Cult of Smart a few months back and agree with Scott's take.
What amazed me the most about the book is that Freddie attributes workers' incomes to their IQs, and not any skills they acquired in school. So learning to code doesn't increase your income any, it's just a way to pass the time until you graduate and go into the high-paying programming job your high IQ entitles you to.
So Freddie, a man who's spent his entire life in the education system as student to PhD level and teacher in both elementary and university, doesn't think education actually teaches useful skills.
Maybe I missed someone discussing this here, but, in my experience with the American school system, it's the poor working class kids that get treated particularly badly in public schools - even in quite decent school districts. I haven't seen any research on this, so all my evidence is purely anecdotal. But from all I know it does seem to me that the system treats like garbage exactly those kids who need to be at school.
None of my anecdotal examples were bad kids. None of them were troublemakers, and all of them were in some advanced classes. Most or all of them had some concentration issues, but I find that unsurprising, given how badly they were taught. Yet they all were continually yelled at, had lengthy notes written to parents, had parents called to school during the exact times of the day when those parents could least afford it, had their parents yelled at. In some cases, teachers pressured the parents to get their kids medicated for ADHD to improve their school performance; in at least one, the parent accepted, due to not knowing better. It's hard to tell how much damage is being done by indiscriminate medicating of kids guilty of nothing but being themselves.
From what I've seen, I suspect that it's mostly about their parents being obviously working class and not being able to communicate in what's perceived as the educated manner. I don't have actual data, but I wouldn't be surprised if just about all of the public school system is guilty of class discrimination - perhaps because the teachers are unqualified and insecure, and it's the working class kids and families that they can harass without much pushback.
So if I'm right, and we have a system that, among other things, discriminates by class against the very people who need it to work, it doesn't seem like it has an excuse to exist in this form.
I really appreciate the last section of this review. I think Self-Directed Education holds the answer for many families, and provides a vision of education that is decidedly not child-prison. https://self-directed.org
"I don't think totally unstructured learning is optimal for kids" may be in reference to things like SDE or Unschooling - if so, that line reflects a common misunderstanding. Kids/families/centers practicing SDE don't have "no structure" - they just get to choose/create structure for themselves, and change it if it's not working or helping them achieve whatever their goals may be.
I volunteer with ASDE and am working to create an alternative-to-school in Portland, OR. It drives me crazy to think what we'd be able to do with the level of funding that's available to public schools, or even half that much. Vouchers could possibly help, but in all likelihood the conditions for an organization to be eligible for the vouchers would require you to re-implement most of the same broken systems of conventional public schools. This is the same issue with present-day Charters - most actually-innovative approaches to raising capable young people are not allowed.
There are a lot of replies, and while I will probably read most of them it will be a few days, so I want to respond here right away. This image of yours of school as child prison is incredibly bizarre. I can only think that you have a very particular, very biased window into schooling and kids. My kids like school. Most of the parents I know have kids who like school. I can't think of any families I know where I've heard that the kids perked up or got more cheerful as school went virtual. I can think of three I know personally where it went badly enough that a parent stopped working to homeschool. In none of those cases are the parents planning on continuing to to so once school re-opens. Both they (and their kids!) miss school and look forward to its return.
I'm sorry, like, really sorry, for whatever happened to you in school. It was clearly traumatic and scarring. But you're generalizing from that experience to a world that just doesn't look anything like that. Universal pre-k and afterschool until five or six would be a great boon to most parents who work for a living. (In fact, it's what's on offer in my city, and probably a lot of major metros.) I'm not sure exactly what your idea is, but it sounds to me like you basically want everyone who has kids to have a parent in the home. That would be delightful, but I don't know how to get there from here. In the meantime, free school and activities are awfully nice. As it is, the wife and I are behind on the annual ritual of stitching together a series of camps, day camps and vacations to occupy and entertain the kids between the end of May and the middle of August. It's a giant pain in the a**, and it's expensive. I'm just as happy not to have to do it the rest of the year.
Being "smart" got me a cushy job which I currently do from home, a nice home with lots of space and pleasant things... maybe one needs to be "smart" to do my job, but failing to be "smart" should not mean living in substandard housing or on the streets, failing to be "smart" should not mean constant drudgery (unless you want it to, I guess). Every human deserves adequate housing and food. Leaving of course the problem that we need the rubbish collected and toilets cleaned...
FWIW, I had a miserable time in school. Junior High was the worst for me. I spent most of my time reading science fiction books. To the point where 1) a social studies teacher frisked me on the way into class and confiscated my book for the duration, 2) a science teacher grabbed my book and whacked me on the arm with it, and 3) a music theory teacher set me off to one side so I could read without being "distracted with by her teaching". I think that was sarcasm.
Parents who want better, and have the time, and the awareness of the bureaucracy, and possibly the contacts with the school system . . .
To a first approximation, the well-off (or at least better off) white-collar parents.
As someone homeschooled in a fairly conservative Christian environment I have known dozens of others such as myself, and I can say with confidence that you would have been the exception rather than the rule. It honestly baffles me to wonder where all these horror stories of bad parents and miserable kids come from, because growing up I knew almost no one who was deeply at odds with their parents, and now as a (mostly) adult, this remains true. For more info about my experience, you can see below by searching my name
I think Scott used "I turned out okay!" facetiously.
The Montessori school where my kids go has had fire alarms set off from young children making toast.
Only if one believes that dessert is the only possible basis for deciding tax rates.
As a professional teacher, if I had to say what I think the job of a teacher is, it's "be Harry Nyquist".
There are two words spelled “desert”, one of which is pronounced like “dessert”. Your “just deserts” are what you “deserve” (which may or may not involve dessert, depending on whether you ate all of your vegetables)
Oops. You're right. --I guess I got my just deserts. WIll delete.
Though etymologically the two words pronounced "dessert" are the same. The reason sweet dishes at the end of a meal are called that way isn't that no people live in them.
The same root of 'serve' with a different prefix: one is de-sert and the other is dis-sert, both filtered through French (apparently a desert is what you deserve but a dessert is a "disservice", i.e. what you have when the food service is removed).
Oh, I just assumed that dessert (in the food sense) was called that because it's something you should deserve (as a calque of Latin "merenda")
Amateur pedantic here!
Actually, desert (as in what you deserve) and dessert (as in the thing that you eat after all of the courses have been cleared from the table) link up etymologically in the French "deservir" which denoted descent. The former word dates back to the late Latin servir while the latter shows up in mid 16th century France. Even today, both can still be sweet!
Desert is off on its own although it was spelled "desart" in the 18th century, which we should maybe return to using so as to lessen an already crowded field?
(Note: I had to delete my original post because I misspelled the final desert as dessert!)
marxbro1917, you are to be congratulated on your willingness to struggle through dense texts, a skill that does have real value. But personally, I find that's much easier to do when the subject of the text really interests me, as I presume it does in your case with Marx. But when a dense text does not hold inherent interest for the struggling reader, the likeliest outcome is not enlightenment but sleep.
I kinda feel the materialist view of history would mesh fairly well with some aspects of rationalist thought, especially some of the game theoretical ones, so I've always wanted this too.
I for one eagerly await Scott's review of Das Kapital. Hell, the Civil War in France or the Eighteenth Brumaire will do
It's not that weird, because the respecting-enemies thing was said to be specific to Freddie, not Scott. And it's entirely possible to judge DeBoer's writing on education on its own grounds without having to read Marx first. DeBoer may be writing from a Marxist perspective, but he didn't write his book just for students of Marx.
If people aren't familiar with Freddie they may be surprised he actually favors equality of results rather than (the more popular among the American political center) equality of opportunity. That makes Freddie's Marxist relevant, although if he'd been an anarcho-syndicalist that could have served the same purpose of illustrating his distance from the political center.
He's explaining to bourgeois Americans what Freddie's positions are in categories they would understand. And "equality of results" sounds an awful lot like "to each according to his needs".
Dude, it's a joke. A funny description of Freddie as an inversion of a quote, and then a reference to it later in the text.
Scott, please. We're begging you. We know you've found the ban button by now because you've banned a couple of other people.
There is both geographical and generational variation here, I think. My experience in England is that bourgeois opposition to swearing is rare among those born after perhaps 1960, but that some working class communities - especially in places that had a strong Methodist presence - preserve it. I've got far more black looks for swearing in a pub in a Northumbrian mining town than I ever have in bougie old Oxfordshire.
Because you're boring. Or at least that's why I'm skimming discussions where you show up.
Well, at least that's an interesting question.
You could improve your average by writing about other parts of your life and opinions. For example, how was your school experience? Has it affected your opinions about politics or anything else?
I don't know whether this is a direct answer, but you seem to assume that there are rules for social engagement, and if you don't break the rules (rules that you seem to have chosen according to your preferences), then you don't have to listen to any criticism of what you're doing.
Unfortunately, I'm not very interested in Marx, and you write about getting Marx right a *lot*. I don't see any way for you to make that more interesting to me, and probably not to other people.
He's one of the last priests of a dead religion. As Nietzsche said, even though God is dead, his gruesome shadow lives on.
Once upon a time I lived a large part of my online life on the site metafilter. The mods there referred to behavior such as yours as "axe-grinding". It was a ban-worthy offense because axe-grindy people are exhausting to deal with -- they tend to suck up all of the oxygen in the room, meaning they distract from the main event. They verge on being spammers.
Here in this thread you've used the presence of the word "Marx" in the body of the post to tenuously connect it back your favorite topic of how that one time Scott said this one thing about Marxism and he was wrong and let's continue to talk about it forever.
I get it -- you want a direct response and you're willing to be persistent about it. There are more constructive ways to go about this though. Why don't you write a post about this of your own that lays out your whole case in detail and then link to it and ask for responses in the next open thread?
Also, a suggestion if you do this: you will want to address exactly "Why this is important".
Ehh, insistent cluelessness doesn't seem ban-worthy and if I were Scott I wouldn't want to set such a precedent. Personally I'm learning to get a certain amount of entertainment out of marxbro1917's predictable comments, kind of like watching reality TV or something. It helps to remember that as a matter of intellectual charity I can't take his stuff seriously-- he's practically a straw man for Marxism.
Totally sincere question, but I'm having a hard time reading tone here:
> This seems like a very mean and uncharitable thing to say about someone as genuine and scholarly as myself.
Is this sarcasm?
> For example, can you show that anything I've said about Marxism is a 'straw man' as compared to what Marx said?
Honestly I've read a lot of your comments, and have learned nearly nothing about Marxism from them. If you could take the time to explain your interpretation of Marxism, rather than merely throwing around accusations that others are interpreting it wrong, you wouldn't be getting so much flak.
I am increasingly liking the idea of volume limits -- X comments per person per unit time. (Per post or across all of them, I'm not sure it matters much.)
I happen to be a fan of token-bucket systems, so perhaps something like: you get one comment-token when a post goes live, and another one for each hour that passes after that. You can accumulate up to, say, 6. (And obviously spending a token lets you make a comment.)
You could also do something like HN based on nesting depth. Perhaps quadratic: a top-level comment can only be replied after 1 minute, a second-level comment after 4 minutes, a third-level comment after 9 minutes...
But really, I think 11 comments in 3 hours, of which about 9 are essentially (and predictably) offtopic, is worth just banning and moving on.
One of the things I like about blogging's erosion of the writer vs commenter is that commenters can easily start their own blogs. I would recommend you do that so niche discussions can move there.
What you’re describing is you coming in, starting flame wars, and eventually wearing out your conversation partners through sheer insistence alone. You make isolated demands for rigor around anything even remotely having to do with Marx. If the discussion has nothing to do with Marx, you somehow manage to bring Marx into it anyway.
Rationalists write a large volume of *interesting* text. You haven’t hit that bar, not even close. Your writing is one-note and not at all illuminating. The most common thing you do is just demand that people go back to primary sources and read Marx directly, which is not a reasonable demand of anyone’s time. You do this as if to cast shame on the people that haven’t read it, and as a method of invalidating any criticism related to communism and Marxism that isn’t perfectly aligned with Marx’s original writings.
You have the capacity to be much better. You can describe Marx’s ideas in your own words, much like Scott did here for this book. You can describe how this relates to the topic at hand, rather than just admonishing Scott for not reading Marx for the umpteenth time. You can make people *interested* in Marx by talking about what you personally got from the primary sources.
So far, you haven’t been doing that. You’ve been filling up comment section after comment section with admonitions, goading people into arguing with you, and nitpicking people until their frustration gets the best of them. You can do better.
I fully expect you now want to reply to this with a dismissal, or a rebuttal, or a nitpick of some sort where you say “technically, I didn’t do this” or “can you prove where I did this”, at which point I will give up because going through your comment history to win an argument with you is not worth my time. My point is not to win this argument with you. My point is to express what it feels like to read your comments, and to impress on you that if what you want is to actually discuss Marx’s ideas, then you’re doing it badly and making people hate both you and Marx.
In other words: you’re treating discussion like a competition.
It feels like you’re commenting to “win” and to make yourself feel smart e.g.:
“Nerds like myself often highly value reading difficult, dense texts like Marx. I find it interesting and enlightening that Scott Alexander apparently does not value this.”
Instead of using it to actually come to a shared understanding with other people.
Treating every conversation like an adversarial competition is arguably a bullying tactic, and so you shouldn’t be surprised that it makes people want to not deal with you anymore.
I don't think banning is necessary as long as people who don't want to read a comment thread can just collapse it. Unfortunately Substack doesn't seem to support that yet.
It does: click the vertical line to the left of a set of comments to collapse them.
Thanks!
I would oppose volume limits. This is already my eighth comment on this post and I don't think I'm being in any way excessive. There are a lot of different subtopics branching off the main post. I also wrote 21 comments on the coronavirus open thread, and I'd invite critique on any of them but so far they all seem to have passed without bothering anyone.
I suspect there are a lot of people who are making a large number of comments per post but you aren't noticing the volume because they aren't drawing your attention.
Marxbro is by far the most interesting commenter on ACX and it's not even a competition. He's the only one who brings actual intellectual diversity in the usual tedium of milequetoast liberalism peppered with the occasional mask-slipping posts about IQ and race. If he were banned my respect for Scott would be considerably lower.
People who use the phrase 'mask-slipping' are invariably uncharitable wokescolds. If the prevailing view here is indeed 'milquetoast liberalism', then what exactly is the mask supposed to be concealing? Or if, as the phrase implies, they're secretly fash, then you should be applauding the intellectual diversity of a site that brings together Marxists with crypto-fascists.
No, I agree - and kudos for the Mask reference, by the way; I enjoyed it - but I think the accusation of 'mask-slipping is made in bad faith here. It's suggesting that anyone who subscribes to, or even entertains, the Idea That Must Not Be Named is likely far-right or concealing some unsavoury political view.
One of the great virtues of this blog, and the rationalist blogosphere more generally, is the ability to discuss issues like that one with intellectual candour without worrying that a) you're just giving succour to someone who is a genuine racist or b) that the people you're talking to will accuse you of racism for doing so.
'One of the great virtues of this blog, and the rationalist blogosphere more generally, is the ability to discuss issues like that one with intellectual candour without worrying that a) you're just giving succour to someone who is a genuine racist or b) that the people you're talking to will accuse you of racism for doing so.'
A) would only be true if the community didn't contain any racists? What's the reason for thinking that?
You really find someone telling someone that what they've said about Marx's view is wrong over and over again, without elaborating on what Marx's views actually are "interesting"?
Okay, I somewhat take that back, I haven't read every corner of the thread. But you have *also* done a lot of what I said.
If Marxbro had pointed out some relevant things Marx said about education, his posts on this thread would be interesting. Otherwise they amount to no more than relentless complaints that Scott is unfairly dismissive of the works of Marx. Which may well be true, but once would be enough to point it out.
Hey, why not do this corrective work in a manner which does not disrupt the comment threads as much. You have to agree that bringing up mistakes from old posts are often a bit of-topic, and could be better explained fully also to people who have not read your comments on earlier posts. Maybe you could make a post somewhere called “litany of Scott’s anti-marxist mistakes”, and post a link to this in every blogpost - with a note for every new sin you have added to the doc from the post. It could then be legible to people who would not know what you are talking about when you mention “gestalt impression”, without being as noisy.
If the list was well written and made some good points I personally would be very interested in seeing Scott answer it in depth; even though I feel he is mostly justified in not responding to each (sometimes a bit nitpicky - I mean citations for a joke post, really?) comment you make.
I would have loved to see you comment what Marx said about education, or what you think a Marxist approach to the topic would be, in relation to the blogpost - but I have not seen it because of focus on earlier mistakes.
People! Stop interacting with this guy. Each time he claims Scott mischaracterized Marx and demands “primary sources” to support Scott’s characterization. Each time commentators provide primary sources (including myself) showing Scott’s interpretation of Marx was reasonable. He never responds and never cites primary sources himself. He gives no indication of having read anything by Marx or having anything other than a superficial knowledge of Marx.
You have never responded to the many people citing Marx’s words to you and don’t appear to be familiar with his work. Scott’s characterization would be uncontroversial to almost anyone familiar with Marx’s work.
I think we have a coordination problem.
He did cite a primary source at least one time.
Even the <i>phrase</i> "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".
You missed some HTML cursive or whatever.
Thanks, fixed.
Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "guy who missed some HTML cursive or whatever"
😂
Charter schools admissions is by lottery
. There is no entrance test. There is no selection. Read or listen to Thomas Sowell on charter schools.
This is true in principle but not always in practice. See eg https://www.edweek.org/leadership/charter-schools-more-likely-to-ignore-special-education-applicants-study-finds/2018/12 . My guess is DeBoer thinks they do a lot of this kind of shady thing. But I agree I should correct the article to mention that this is hard and would have to be done subtly if at all.
When I had my son apply to a charter high school founded by teachers at his middle school, I was told that admission was by lottery only, but the parents had to show up in person to find out if their child was picked at random.
When I showed up to find out if my son's name was on the list, the person holding the list was his old middle school math teacher. I nervously asked if he'd been picked in the lottery? His teacher said, without looking at the list: "Of course he did." I asked if he could check the list just to make sure. The charter school teacher said: "Don't worry about it. He's in."
I'm no expert, but I was under the impression that the hoops to get into charter schools were mostly regulatory and likely in place to "defend" public school systems and teachers (not nominally but effectively).
That seems like another point in favour of the 'intelligence is genetic' hypothesis!
Not really. We already know that All Good Things are Correlated. IQ is correlated with everything positive. Bigger support networks, better mental health, more involved parenting, fewer divorces, better home environments, lower lead intake, lower trauma incidence, etc. And all that stuff is in turn correlated with all the rest of that stuff.
This isn't evidence that IQ is heritable (let alone genetic); it's evidence that the tangled ball of all-positive-characteristics is heritable. Which absolutely noone argues with. The disagreements are about which part of the giant-ball-of-goodness is driving the heritability (wealth? IQ? Social contacts? Concientiousness? Agreeableness/Pro-social instincts?) and whether that driver is genetic.
Hence the use of adoption and twin studies, which is how we know a significant part of sexual orientation is genetic.
>Which absolutely noone argues with.
This is trivially false. The heritability of behavior is extremely controversial amongst the political left (except sexuality, despite the fact that the heritability of sexual orientation is lower than most other aspects of behavior).
>The disagreements are about which part of the giant-ball-of-goodness is driving the heritability (wealth? IQ? Social contacts? Concientiousness? Agreeableness/Pro-social instincts?) and whether that driver is genetic.
We have heritability studies for IQ specifically, and its very high. You're acting like its some great mystery - it's not. Twin and sibling studies demonstrate that the impact of shared environment explains almost none of the concordance in IQ between identical twins.
My impression came mostly from this podcast, which described basically trying to filter based on parents' dedication. (Which presumably correlates with parents' ability to supervise kids doing homework and other stuff that helps with academics.) https://www.econtalk.org/robert-pondiscio-on-how-the-other-half-learns/
An example was appointments for the child to be fitted for a uniform as a requirement for entering the lottery.
How did you and your son find the school experience?
He wound up getting a scholarship offer to an expensive private school, which turned out to be a good experience.
By the way, I used to be a true believer in the social science theory that the amount of money spent by a school per pupil has no influence on anything. However, seeing what a very well-run private school administration can do with a whole lot of money to spend has made me more skeptical.
I attended a charter school all 4 years quite recently. Admissions was entirely by lottery, open to everyone in the district. I can tell you that even in freshman year, the student body was not even remotely close to representative of normal kids; it was basically an entire school of the kids who would normally be in gifted / accelerated programs. And by graduation, it was even more refined to super talented & smart people, because the students who left to go back to their local normal schools were mostly from the rear of the pack.
I think that I got a lot better of an education there than I would have at my local school, and I would attribute more of that to the quality of my classmates than to the teachers or curriculum , though both of which were also better.
Do you have a good sense of why it started out so heavily selected? Was it just that smarter kids were more interested in going there, or did they have some kind of filter mechanism?
Whose parents were involved enough, interested enough in education, valued education enough. Simple as that, I think.
Are we opposed to using votes to mean "this is correct" on ACX? I'm not sure if I should indicate that this conforms to my own research on the topic by posting a small comment or clicking the heart button.
We are opposed to using votes at all. Scott mentioned them as one of the default Substack features he wants to get rid of.
in what ways? im not discounting your experience but this doesnt really help overcome my priors
So you have to have a certain amount of investment in order to figure out what's a "good" school to get into and how to apply to it. You also have to be willing to invest a certain amount of ongoing effort into your kid's school -- a charter school will usually not be as convenient as sending your kid to the literally closest public school. Your kid may not actually want to go to the charter school, if their friends from a lower school level/the neighbors are going to the close-by public school, so you have to override them.
None of these are gigantic burdens, but you put them together and you get a pretty strong effect where the kids who go to the district's best charter schools are the ones whose parents are conscientious and invested in education.
The experience described above about attending charter schools only noted that the initial class was not representative of the overall school population. It did not, however, know if it was representative of the losing lottery applicants.
At the charter school where I had my son apply, they had a lot of hoops to jump through to winnow down to the more education-oriented parents: e.g., applications had to be dropped off in person and you had to come in person to find out if your child had been chosen.
Also, the more education-oriented parents were aware that this charter high school was being started by the best teachers at the middle school. The more apathetic parents likely didn't agree that these were the best teachers or didn't know or didn't care.
It's at least partially selecting for people who have more free time. If someone is a single parent working two full time jobs to pay rent, they probably don't have the time and definitely don't have the energy to do those type of things. Perhaps that's not the average case, but certainly the people who have the most money to start with are going to be the people who have the most ability to get their kids through those processes.
There's also a self-perpetuating character to this. Once the school has a reputation for being a "school for smart kids," parents whose kids might qualify just don't bother to apply because they think that they won't be accepted.
A lot of charter school advocates also underestimate the importance of logistics. If you have two full-time working parents in inflexible jobs, sending a kid across town to a charter school is often not feasible. Getting a kid to an inconveniently located school requires resources.
There is obvious bias in who applies, but that’s why they study charter lotteries that are oversubscribed and compare the winners to the losers. The winners do better.
If the comment above is accurate, a precondition for being a winner is that your parents attend the drawing in person. That's a nonrandom sample, and probably also implies that other nonrandom interventions are happening both before and during the lottery.
Different schools have different processes. I think the ones studied are genuine lotteries.
And to complete the thought: the losers go back to public school, and their classmates will be kids whose parents didn't participate in the lottery. Thus, in general, a performance difference between charter and non-charter can potentially be explained by differences in the composition of classmates rather than differences in the schools themselves. (man, science is hard.)
You know, to be perfectly honest, I do sometimes wonder to what extent the students themselves help or hinder a learning environment. The focus is always on the teachers but to be honest I found in high school especially a huuuuuge amount of time was taken up by those completely unmotivated and also this had the more pernicious and hidden effect of limiting the kind of activities and teaching strategies that the teacher could do in the first place (a cool activity but one that requires effort isn’t possible if there’s too much apathy)
Judith Rich Harris' emphasis on the impact of peer culture is sadly neglected, for the most part, in education debates. She points out that children adopt the language of their peers rather than their parents, whether or not their friends smoke is a better predictor of smoking then parents smoking, etc. Peer culture is immensely important in learning.
This is neglected? Seems to me like it drives trillions of dollars of economic activity - that concern is exactly what "good school districts" mean in practice.
De facto, yes, but the public policy debate rarely discusses the importance of peers and peer culture. If peer attitudes and behaviors were regarded as more important for student outcomes than, say, curriculum, teacher training and credentials, expenditures, etc. then we'd be having a very different public conversation on educational policy and its relationship to outcomes. Poor parents who can't afford "good school districts" might be even more aggressive than they currently are on behalf of school choice.
The late Ed Lazear had a fascinating simple model of classroom interruptions and ability that fits the stylized facts about class size and achievement and a few others.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2696418?seq=1
That was interesting just for the idea on the title page, that one reason it's hard to find correlations between class size and success is that the size of class consistent with good learning depends on the level of discipline among the students.
There are, in fact, many ways that lotteries can be gamed. Here's a taste: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-charters-admissions/special-report-class-struggle-how-charter-schools-get-students-they-want-idUSBRE91E0HF20130215
There are others, such as refusal to backfill. Everything can be gamed. It is in the best interest of charter schools to manipulate the lotteries, very much including their financial best interest. And in many cases they are more or less operating on the honor system. To not assume fraud would be profoundly foolish.
The deeper question is this: if the charter advantage is as powerful as proponents claim, why would the schools that we know cheated have cheated at all? Why would they have felt the need, if the magic charter school dust was all it took?
Because of choice. You are forced to go to public schools, so all the school administrators need to do to keep their jobs is to show good numbers and they're good. In wealthy areas, the parents have a much more vested interest, but otherwise, your customers—students and parents who can't move to wealthy areas—are always forced to go back. Therefore, there isn't as much incentive to perform as great as charter schools where there is the threat of closure.
That's not actually an answer to the question Freddie asked.
The actual answer is that the incentive for charter schools to cheat exists regardless of whether they really are better, at least within the range that seems plausible. Even if they really do give better outcomes than normal public schools on the margin, gaming the system to make the difference look bigger can only help them.
Yes, pretty obviously this. For example, someone might write a book saying "shut down all charter schools because, while they do get better results, this is all just an illusion". So it's nice if the gap is big enough to make that person look wrong, even if you have to cheat a little.
More generally, you might both believe in your secret sauce and be a little uncertain of how soon - if ever - it will be able to deliver results. So you cheat.
Even if you have magic teaching dust it doesn't follow that it works uniformly or that you wouldn't still prefer more enthusiastic kids and parents over kids with behavioral issues and bad parents.
The real question is how much gain happens because in a group of motivated students, the social prestige revolves more around academic success. That is, how much do the outcomes show that it's beneficial for high-performers to get clumped together so that they can focus on learning rather than socialization. What if spreading the high and low- performance/study discipline students into a homogenous distribution might hinder the former without changing much for the latter?
I think "focus on learning rather than socialization" is an understatement of the problem as it manifests in a lot of schools. In the schools which are pulling down the average of our national scores, it's often the case that few students feel like it's socially acceptable among their peers to care about learning at all.
It's not either/or. Many cheaters in gaming and sports were excellent players who wanted an extra boost. Even if charter school magic is real, selection effects are presumably just as or even more powerful. As long as oversight is lax, why report 10% higher test scores when you can report 25% higher test scores?
I'm much more of a capitalist than you are, but even I think there's a good reason for governments to do truth-in-advertising regulations. I agree that fraud here is bad, but I think there's vastly more reasonable fixes than banning charters.
By definition, they select for people who are not satisfied with the public schools and have enough initiative to make an effort. That is a pretty significant filter, by itself. But I wouldn't call it cheating or "rigging" their results.
There's a lot of cheating and rigged results in public schools already, come charters go charters.
Scott - I am so glad you are back. Thank you.
This essay went an interesting direction in the end. I guess I see a few types of concerns:
1) Signalling: How do we make sure the right competency signals exist in a post-school world. If I'm a high-IQ sociopath, then I will (presumably) fail school but may pass IQ tests.
2) How will we ensure basic competencies? I don't think the current model does a great job, but I get the feeling that many home-schooled children are products of self-selection.
3) How do we wish to warehouse children until they're adults?
I get the impression that the US likely does a terrible job at all of this relative to other nations. However, I am still interested in the sorts of responses.
(Also that tie-in with intelligence & worth is an interesting one, and one that is really hard to unpack in a good way. I get the feeling that IQ differences matter less after certain thresholds relative to personality dimensions. )
1. You’re going to want participation in group activities for that one. Chess club, softball league, or whatever.
2. GED or SAT tests.
3. We don’t. Instead we just let them run around outside all day every day if that’s what they’re into, or let them sit inside and read or play computer games, or let them get part time jobs for spending money, or whatever. Basically their lives will be like summer vacation all year long.
I just realized I was thinking in terms of my childhood in small town Americana, and that it might be somewhat more necessary to warehouse your children if you live in a place like San Francisco, where people feel obligated to maintain up to date maps of human sidewalk feces.
Are you aware what low IQ trends tend to when left to run around outside all day? They form gangs and commit crime.
*teens not trends
First, I won't accept that without evidence. Second, preemptive incarceration is not an acceptable crime prevention tool in any other context, and I don't think it should be acceptable for children either.
I suspect you are broadly correct. Children are not adults.
Or to put it another way: when my high-IQ wife was young and let roam free without supervision, she & her friends played with explosives.(no joke!)
I mean, no matter where we start on this. Society has already come to the conclusion children are not to be trusted alone. So some sort of warehousing makes sense, even if the current school system isn't appropriate.
Young as in elementary school age.
Children were able to be raised for thousands of years without anything like "warehouses". Typically the slightly older children would look after the slightly younger ones. "It takes a village" was the expression taken up by Hillary Clinton, but that doesn't imply it takes a warehouse.
They were also more fungible thousands of years ago too. Did you not notice in the Book of Job that it was considered adequate for God to replace Job's dead children with a new set of living children?
Child warehouses are a modern necessity in the same sense as accounting, tax systems, or the internet. I'm a bit tongue in cheek, but not wildly so. We can talk about a more Montessori-based childcare system, or a million other things, but risk-tolerance has gone down over the last thousand years, and this drives a lot about child care & management. Most of the rest of the system has also adapted to remove this as a reasonable possibility.
I think risk-tolerance is inconsistent. Parents will subject their children to certain risks on their own, and schools may acceptably subject them to certain risks, while other ones will get them sued.
"over the last thousand years" is way missing the mark. 50 years ago children played outside unsupervised all day long in the Summer, no problem.
For thousands of years, children only needed to be illiterate hunter gatherers And they wil form gangs and hunt by instinct. Its just that in in the context of a modern society, a hunting gang is a criminal gang.
It still takes skills to be a hunter-gatherer, and there was a lot of knowledge in low-tech agricultural societies.
I played with lots of explosives and fire as a kid, despite being "smart" in the formal-education and IQ senses. I turned out fine. Kids are a lot more resilient and less abjectly stupid than we give them credit for. I am of the opinion that kids need a chance to play with dangerous stuff and subvert authority in porwntially harmful ways -whether it's building a rickety clubhouse out of scrap wood or riding around dirt roads on the roof of a joyride van. It teaches them self-reliance, the natural consequences of their actions, and the extent of their power over the world.
Sounds like survivor bias.
I wouldn't be surprised if you did turn out fine, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the death rate, or rate at which children are maimed would be higher under those circumstances. It gets really hard doing that utilitarian calculus where "Johnny loses a foot", and most heuristics would tell us that Johnny losing a foot outweighs most non-quantifiable outcomes.
There's a joke among unschooling parents that sooner or later most unschooled kids will set something on fire in the backyard.
Well, I set our garage on fire when I was only four, before schooling was an issue. I put it out with the garden hose before it did more than char a bit of the wood.
I can think of half a dozen friends who played with explosives, and I remember no stories of injuries in a high school with 800 students per class level. My father played with explosives throughout his high school and college years.
I remember coming home after hearing the kid in front of me say you should smoosh the matchheads in a pipe bomb tightly to make sure you have a good bang. He had street cred from a bandaged hand and a bandaged eye after a couple weeks off from school.
And my parents were sharing academic gossip. Someone had wanted to give a lecture to my school about anorexia risks to the prettiest, most popular girls. Principal said no, given the results of a previous year's lecture about the risks to the boldest young fellows from making homemade fireworks and even pipe bombs.
Hong Kong used to have no anorexia. Then Hong Kong media did a series about the risk to the prettiest, most popular girls from anorexia. Since then Hong Kong has anorexia. 'Crazy Like Us', Ethan Watters.
You raise an interesting question-- it used to be pretty common for kids (smart kids?) to play with explosives, but I haven't seen mention anywhere of injuries or deaths resulting from that. Does it just not get mentioned because it would interfere with light-hearted stories about playing with explosives, or were injuries actually very rare?
I actually know quite a few tales of incidents when kids played with explosives. It still happens a lot every year in Germany, not only among kids, at the end of the year, because of our obsession with personal fireworks on new years eve.
I've personally produced quite some impressive fireworks several decades ago when I was younger. Some left overs served me well end of 2020, because selling fireworks was forbidden due to the Corona crisis. But I was more into flames then explosions, so my mishaps didn't turn into a catastrophe back then.
I suspect injuries are somewhat rare, but I also have heard about stories where somebody is maimed from an explosive. In that social circle, I believe there was one maiming??? But I'd have to consult my wife, as it isn't my story, and I may be mixing up her life with somebody else's childhood explosive-maiming story.
Low IQ teens with limited alternative options to generate income form gangs. And even the low IQ part might be inaccurate or irrelevant.
1) If you want to signal your capabilities, then in a system where public funding is gone, you can buy whatever products to complete that demonstrate it - and you will only do what is actually profitable for you to do.
You would need to rely on a Udacity or Coursera like system, and these would rely on buyers.
Probably not MOOCs as the pass rate is generally low.
Non-sense - in the absence of public school, you’d just go to private school. That’s the product which you’re buying.
Ah, my apologies. I was originally writing about the radical critique of schools, not like a voucher system.
I don't think school does a good idea of protecting us from high-IQ sociopaths.
"If I'm a high-IQ sociopath, then I will (presumably) fail school but may pass IQ tests."
I failed at school but do well on standardized tests. I believe I would be more accurately described as a 'high-IQ neurotic.' I better indication of high-IQ sociopathy is achievement of an MBA or appointment as CEO.
Hi J'myle, in context the comment is just to rebut the idea that IQ and pass rates in education measure similar things.
In the case of sociopathy, the idea is that a sociopath can do well on a cognitive test, but may lack conscientiousness and/or executive function sufficient to succeed in formal education.
An MBA or CEO appointment really doesn't do much to separate things out, as non-psychopaths have attained both statuses, and attaining a status isn't a good sign that one oughtn't attain a status.
In any case, there are multiple reasons why a person can have high IQ and fail schooling. Many of them will relate to things like conscientiousness and/or executive function.
DeBoer has never heard the saying "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard"
What is hard work to a workaholic?
I get paid well because I love to sit down and solve a complex software puzzle. It’s not work to me at all. I’d do it and have done it for free.
Working hard is a talent, same as looks or smarts. If it turned out that educational outcomes were more correlated with executive function than IQ, I don't think DeBoer would be any happier.
I understand his objection to be with any kind of false equivalency between traits and worth. If we traded the cult of smarts for the cult of hard graft, it wouldn't be a better world for DeBoer (as far as I understand Scott's explanation of what Scott thinks DeBoer thinks, anyway...)
I find it hard to believe that actions, like consistent work / working hard (however you would like to define it), could be considered as inherent as genotype or phenotype. Environment certainly has an impact on ones ability to 'work hard'.
Yeah I completely agree environment likely as a huge impact on the choices one makes, such as whether to work hard or goof off.
It's not clear to me why it would matter to our judgement of someone's intrinsic worth whether their traits are the product of genes or of circumstance, though.
Imagine it's the night before a big exam, and both Alice, Bob and Claire get a message from their friends asking them to come out for a drink.
Alice is genetically high scrupulosity and is prone to worrying, so she turns down the offer in favour of some last minute studying and a good night's sleep. She does well on the exam.
Bob has ADHD and finds it hard to follow through on things. He finds procrastination pretty tempting and wants to say yes. However, he came from a stable and understanding family who have instilled values around the importance of education and of working hard to get ahead. He turns down the offer and does well on the exam.
Claire has no particular natural traits that make her a sticker or a quitter. She tends to make time for the things she cares about, but her parents have never really seen the point of education and have never supported her schooling. Her mother often tells her that having kids is the end of freedom, and to have fun while she's young. Claire decides that she'd rather die unqualified and happy than a lonely and boring A student, so she goes out and parties until 3am. She flunks the exam and ends up in a miserable and unfulfilling job.
Alice, Bob and Claire are equally smart. Alice and Bob have advantages to their ability to work hard and meet commitments - Alice has genetically influenced personality traits, and Bob has the advantage of a good work ethic instilled at home. Claire has none of these things and as a result isn't much of a hard worker.
I'm with Scott that the Alices and Bobs of this world make better lawyers and doctors than Claire would. If I were interviewing for a job I'd want to hire them instead of Claire. But it doesn't seem to me that Claire 'deserves' to live in a small house, struggle to feed her kids, and work a boring job to make ends meet - even though from one perspective it looks like she 'wasted' her intelligence, she was never set up for success. It still feels like Alice and Bob are lucky in their personalities, and Claire is unlucky, just as if they were smarter than her.
DeBoer presumably thinks the solution here is a Marxist revolution and a complete decoupling of occupation from wealth. I'd disagree - I think incenticising achievement is the best way to get it, and I'm willing to accept wealth inequity to get a more functional society. However, I do think society has a duty of care to people like Claire and that progressive taxation and a social net is a good way to balance out some of Alice and Bob's good fortune at being high functioning people to offset Claire's bad luck at being a washout.
Do we have to assume that Claire is also incapable of learning that there's a connection between conscientiousness and getting more material goods or a more interesting job, if she finds that those are important to her?
Thanks for this comment. That's certainly one way to end up with a Claire - either she might not acknowledge that others work harder, or she might attribute their success to being more naturally talented.
Alternatively she might just be very akrasic - "I know I need to study and every time this happens I promise myself I'll try harder, but in the moment I always have a ready excuse that lets me off the hook". You could model this as a lack of willpower, unusually sharp future discounting, lack of reflective self-awareness - but in any case there's definitely a kind of person who is bad at doing things they know they need to do. (I suppose I said Claire is generally OK at sticking with things she really cares about, so perhaps we should call this new archetype 'Dave').
People like Claire and Dave seem to exist, one way or another, and it's hard to imagine there's something other than nature and nurture that makes them behave the way they do.
I do not believe this is true. I have not worked particularly hard in my life. As a result, I am paid about half as much as my equally talented peers that graduated from the same law school. Meanwhile I still keep in touch with people from my high school that were untalented, but hard workers. I make approximately twice as much as them. This situation does not seem unique. No matter how hard they work, they can never do the job I have. Meanwhile, when I am at my job, I take breaks to read articles like this and post comments like this.
I think there are likely thresholds where hard-work takes precedence over IQ, and IQ takes precedence over hard work. If you're high-IQ enough, then diligence (or other factors) likely explains outcomes more. However, until you're there, IQ is generally very important, if not more important.
I could be wrong though & would be happy to hear from others. If I had to guess, this threshold situation is partially a result of how our signalling systems work. Or to put it another way: once you're all smart enough to pass the bar exam, the bigger question is who does more "stuff".
Yes, both are important and not always in equal measures. Musk is a billionaire because he is both a genius and a workaholic. If he was 10% less genius but 10% more workaholic, or vice versa, hard to say.
When I was reading the book, I found the term "meritocracy" to be one of the worst issues. I think the problem with it is ultimately that people-like-Scott and people-like-DeBoer use it in different ways. Scott defines "meritocracy is when people who are good at a thing do that thing - teachers should be people who are good at teaching, construction workers should be people who are good at construction work, surgeons should be people who are good at surgery, and so on." Fairly obviously good, and that's how even all communist countries have worked. DeBoer defines it more like "meritocracy is when people who are good at things have a good life while people who are bad at things have a bad life." This seems bad, given the assumption that everyone should have a good life and you can't really improve on how good you are at different skills.
Notably, you can achieve the first "meritocracy" while avoiding the second "meritocracy"! Perhaps it's not possible given human psychology, but at least theoretically you could have people assigned to jobs that they are good at while still letting everyone have the same lifestyle. I suspect that's what DeBoer wants, but his conflation of terminology helps no one.
We really really just need to get rid of "meritocracy" and its cognates and replace them with "selecting/screening for ability" or similar and then debate the tradeoffs and uses of that. I usually dislike language policing, but this term replacement would be an unalloyed good: it not only makes thought and expression clearer but deprives opponents of ability-based selection of a rhetorical weapon they can use to unfairly smear supporters of such selection as elitists.
To be specific: saying "ability-based selection" instead of "meritocracy" makes it clear that the point of selection, screening, sorting, whatever you want to call it is *not* to set the worthier above the less-worthy. Rather it is to put the more-able-in-some-dimension in an organizational/institutional environment that lets them make the most productive use of that dimension of their ability. Any rational set of social institutions, be it libertarian or socialist or social-democratic or whatever, should want to do this. And if we can agree on that then we can get onto harder and more useful questions, like how to tradeoff the inevitable biases and unfairnesses of real-world selection processes against the utility of even imperfect sorting by ability.
Sounds like tabooing words https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your-words
That possibility sounds like the Star Trek economy of people working demanding jobs due to prestige: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/star-trek-as-fantasy.html
I've watched some Star Trek, but not all that much. Do we ever get to see the lives of people who don't have prestigious jobs like, starship officer, to see how the demanding-but-unglamourous jobs get done?
I've watched even less than you.
Honestly, the closest I see is DS9, however, that has a lot of capitalist intermixings as seen with the role Quark plays in the entire system. Quark literally represents their economy. The only unglamorous character I believe I've seen is Rom, and... yeah... he isn't a particularly helpful example.
Rom eventually enlists in the Bajoran Militia and becomes a Maintenance Engineer FC because he’s an engineering genius. He has one of the most beautiful character arcs in DS9.
I hate Rom's character, but you can suffice to say that Rom isn't a good starting point for any model of economics.
Honestly the whole thing is very poorly thought-out in Trek, and the latest episodes of Discovery have seen a bit of subversion of it.
However...
Picard's brother was a winemaker. He was presented in TNG as living more or less exactly the life that a winemaker in France would have been living in the mid-20th century. He was critical of Picard for seeking prestige in space rather than living up to his family's expectations of winemaking. The two had a fist fight. Later, his character was revealed to have died in a fire.
Sisko's father was a restauranteur. He made jambalaya in New Orleans. He too was presented in more or less the way a modern New Orleans restaurant owner would have been presented.
So the idea seems to be that regular 20th/21st century occupations still exist on Earth, but people do them out of habit or personal interest in wine/jambalaya/etc. more than out of the necessity to earn a living.
It's never explained why the Picards can own a vineyard and a chateau or what the criteria are to be allowed to operate a cajun restaurant in a dense city, absent the ability to actually sell anything that you make. The series Picard critiques this implicitly when a black woman character who lives in a trailer and has a drug problem essentially accuses Picard of white privilege because he gets to live in a big chateau with his Romulan servants and his antique furniture and she's stuck in a trailer growing space marijuana for her vape stick. Needless to say, the fan base was... let's say, divided... on this particular critique and the way in which it was made.
But the emerging consensus in canon seems to be that the "postcapitalist utopia" is more propaganda than anything else and structural equalities still exist despite Picard's protestations in TNG that they had moved beyond materialism. DS9 did a good job of interrogating Trek's utopianism and Picard and Disco are cranking that interrogation up to 11, with mixed effects.
I think the actual answer is: Gene Roddenbery died without working out the details and his successors in charge of the franchise don't believe in it and therefore subvert it.
Hah, you say that as if working out the details to a postscarcity utopia is some trivial matter that Gene could have handled if he'd been given a couple more years on this Earth.
I read recently that Gene objected to the plot of "Measure of a Man" because he felt that his utopia wouldn't have lawyers. He thought they wouldn't be needed, because crime would have been eradicated by simply brainwashing anyone who might do crimes into not doing crimes.
It seems to me a lot like Gene defined "utopia" as "a place where things I don't like don't exist" as opposed to some coherent viable system. That's not really a critique - I love Trek, obviously - but its social commentary was more about allegory and less about detailed worldbuilding of space communism.
Hmm, no, I think Gene didn't work out the details at all, and just assumed them and expected everyone else to share his assumptions.
But, while he was alive, you had the option of just asking him what his assumptions were and then writing to them. Once he was dead, you either had to find someone else with the same assumptions or actually work out a coherent system.
They did neither, they just decided it wouldn't work and write Trek as being decidedly a potemkin utopia.
Haven't you ever, even temporarily longed for a simple, low-stress job where the chance of failure is low, or where failure wouldn't have catastrophic consequences for anyone who depended on you? There's a place in the world for people who gravitate toward both prestigious and unprestigious jobs.
I agree that the two senses of meritocracy get unnecessarily conflated.
The first sense of meritocracy is the idea of filling positions with the people who would be the best at the job. This is an amazing piece of social technology, and certainly not the norm in human societies throughout history; the norm is to fill positions through nepotism and back-scratching. Societies and institutions which manage to get their shit together for long enough to practice _some_ form of meritocracy will vastly outperform their peers, at least until they revert to the mean and go back to the old nepotism-and-back-scratching methods.
The second sense of meritocracy is the idea that greater rewards should accrue to the people in the more competitive positions, the ones that require a greater degree of merit. A surgeon gets paid more than a flower salesman. It is at least possible to imagine the first kind of meritocracy without the first -- surgeon positions are highly selective and flower salesman positions aren't, but the surgeon doesn't make any more money than the flower salesman -- but in this society who would want to be a surgeon rather than a flower salesman?
People who like saving lives? People who don't like flowers? Certainly some people become surgeons because of the money but I hardly think all of them do.
I agree, some people would still become surgeons, but the overall quality of surgeons would be lower.
On the upside, the quality of flower salesmen would be higher! Or rather, since flower salesman is a relatively pleasant job, flower salesmen would be selected through nepotism and back-scratching.
Who would do the unpleasant _and_ low-status jobs? No idea.
I suspect that socially necessary unpleasant jobs would very rapidly become prestigious or respected. If we imagine a world, for example, where there has been an abolition of work-based income - for whatever government-policy related reason - then very quickly, our houses would get filled with excess garbage. Our streets would start to overflow with it. And, sooner, rather than later, we would be very thankful to whoever ultimately took the garbage away.
Jobs that are more opaque about their effects - sewage workers who clean out the tunnels, say, and are out of sight out of mind - would probably take a bit longer, but I think ultimately people would be very thankful to whoever it was that made their toilets flush again. We don't have any difficulty considering a medical researcher to be prestigious despite us interacting with their work in only the most peripheral way, after all.
Medical schools are selective, and retain a somewhat medieval guild mentality. Dalits in India who have unpleasant work reserved to them aren't prestigious. My guess is that if we couldn't incentivize necessary but disliked work with money, we'd sentence prisoners to do it (and then start coming up with reasons why more people need to be imprisoned).
I wonder if there are any historical examples of this we could perhaps profit from learning about. Hmmmm......
In a world where the government has abolished work-based income, I suspect that the next thing that would happen is that someone would come up with a loophole that allows work-based income. I'm envisioning garbagemen who will pick up your garbage, but only in exchange for a blowjob.
A more realistic outcome is for workers to compensate themselves, by performing less work. It's the one lever they still control.
A similar experiment has already been run. It gave rise to the saying “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. “
> I suspect that socially necessary unpleasant jobs would very rapidly become prestigious or respected.
No, you would get immense corruption where people have to secretly pay (or otherwise compensate) their doctors to get good treatment. We see this in every country where doctors get very low pay.
I've always suspected that certain pink-ghetto jobs got done really well 50-70 years ago because even high-IQ women were stuck in them.
A useful comparison would be countries where doctors aren't paid as much as the US. E.g. in most western european countries surgeons earn a respectable wage around the level of teachers and other professionals, but not the much higher levels in the US, and they have no shortage of doctors.
If anything you might get more doctors if everyone who wanted to be one could become one without the massive costs of college then medical school.
This is not true according to salary explorer. For example in Germany Average physician salary is ~100K€ and average teacher salary is ~34K€. This is about a multiple of three. In the United States the average teacher salary is $75,000 a year and the average physician salary is $240,000 a year which is slightly higher than a multiple of three. Even a cardiothoracic surgeon only makes a multiple of about 4.5 $343K/yr) while in Germany a CT surgeon averages 183K€/yr (5.2X)
Rewarding people for doing jobs well is one way of sorting people into the jobs they are good at, possibly the only decentralized way that works. But someone who accepted DeBoer's arguments could propose solving that problem with an IQ tax. IQ correlates with lots of positive outcomes in life — that was part of the point of _The Bell Curve_. So if you have a good way of measuring it, one that can't be gamed by people who want to conceal their high IQ, you can tax high IQ people, subsidize low IQ people, and so redistribute the positive outcomes.
The US military sort of follows this model. Everyone who is the same rank gets paid the same, but before enlistment we take an aptitude test to see what we would be good at. An E-3 infantryman ("flower salesman") gets paid the same as an E-3 cryptologic linguist ("surgeon"). Certain jobs suck more than others; imagine being an E-3 cop in the Air Force and your job is to stand in front of a jet for 12 hours. As opposed to an E-3 honor guard member who gets to do drill and ceremony for diplomats at fancy military banquets/possibly the US president (and maybe even meet the president).
Even if it were possible to funnel competent people to the most value-adding jobs, pay them the same as everyone else, and avoid any significant incentive effects, would that even be desirable? Just consider, if Carl is a cashier and Sam is a surgeon, won't Sam have higher status? Maybe we could rewrite status norms to make cashiers as prestigious as surgeons? But, logically, if every job has equal prestige, then none have any. Status-seeking and status-games are innate to human psychology. If people see Sam as high-status, they'll smile at him more often, laugh at his jokes more easily, and listen to his opinions more readily. He'll likely have better mating prospects and a more intact family. There'd still be hierarchy, just motivated by status over profit, providing social rewards, instead of material. Wouldn't DeBoer still find that world deeply unsatisfying?
Yep. Marxist utopias work for naked mole rats, bees, and ants and that’s it.
> Notably, you can achieve the first "meritocracy" while avoiding the second "meritocracy"! Perhaps it's not possible given human psychology, but at least theoretically you could have people assigned to jobs that they are good at while still letting everyone have the same lifestyle.
You don't even have to do that. It's possible to have a baseline below which no one falls (e.g. UBI), so that nobody has a "bad" life, and yet still have a world where surgeons get paid more than flower salesmen.
I think we can divide jobs in two different dimensions; one is the utility they generate for other people, the other is the utility they generate for the person doing the job.
Generally, we pay people according much more to the first than the second - you'd expect that a job that a lot of people enjoy doing to be paid less than one that employees hate, but that's not generally true.
I suspect that if we had a system where people do not have to work on point of starvation (either the US welfare system where you can't claim unemployment indefinitely, or the UK one where you lose your unemployment if you turn down a job offer or leave your job voluntarily), then most jobs wouldn't be much affected, but the unpleasant and badly paid would have to pay a lot more. I bet that jobs like "office toilet cleaner" would get big raises.
Until people redefine "bad" life to include one in which anyone has to confront the horror of inequality, as in, a world in which anyone else has something he can't have. How often do we hear people claim to prefer a society with lower average wealth, and even lower wealth for the least wealthy, as long as it's more "equal"?
"Notably, you can achieve the first 'meritocracy' while avoiding the second 'meritocracy'! Perhaps it's not possible given human psychology...."
Then it's not possible, and you can't achieve it. As a theoretical possibility, this is only worth talking about if you're an SF writer or possibly a eugenicist. Otherwise, discussions of what the hypothetical New Soviet Man or whatever could do if unbound from pesky human psychology get into "Do you want mountains of skulls? Because this is how you get mountains of skulls" territory.
You can't do this with real humans because, A: real humans respond to incentives, and while "if you do this especially productive thing we'll reward you in ways that make your life better than those of the people who are less productive" isn't the *only* incentive that matters it is sometimes the one that matters most. And because B: even if you disallow or equalize the tangible objectives like material wealth, people will still pursue intangible objectives like status and power. And because C: in order to get some especially productive stuff done, you have to give them control over resources that they can with a bit of cleverness use to make their lives better than those of the people who were only tasked with keeping the floor clean.
If we pretend that this isn't so, that we're building a utopia for the New Socialist Man and that New Socialist Men will evolve to thrive in this environment, then we can see what happens by looking to the Soviet Union. An awful lot of what could have been valuable productive effort gets diverted to status and power games and things like getting tight with the functionary who decides who gets what apartment. An awful lot of what should be valuable productive resources get inefficiently diverted to lifestyle improvement for corrupt bureaucrats where it would have been more efficient to just let an honest businessman take some of the profits and buy the nice things he wants. And while the Soviet Union could sometimes incentivize materially productive people to achieve great things, this was weighted towards high-profile, high-status things like space rockets and hydrogen bombs and not so much things like making the heat and plumbing work and ensuring that your society's logistics could keep the shops filled with goods.
I think DeBoer's problem is not with smarter people becoming surgeons or whatever, it's with smarter people getting rich. You could perfectly well have a system in which everyone gets exactly the same salary but the top jobs still go to the smartest people. Or how about a world in which the highest salary is twice the lowest salary? I would say that the question of different material rewards is completely separate from the question of whether the best candidate gets the job. I think Scott confuses the issue by refusing to make this distinction; Scott assumes that smart people will only be surgeons if they get paid more for it. But that does not follow.
Exactly. I know this is going to be buried but the book “Head, Hand, Heart.“ Has a much better take on this exact issue than Freddie’s
I think to some extent, the problem is that if you incorporate the meritocracy arguments about why the sorting exists, His case becomes: "merit if unearned, but we still need a capitalistic sorting mechanism, however we can alleviate inequality via fiscal transfers to poor people to flatten the income curve". Which is to say, indistinguishable from social democracy on policy itself, save that the justification (people start with unequal opportunities so it's only moral to flatten income inequality vs people start with unequal capabilities ...) is very marginally different.
I think there is a synthesis of that position with the Bryan Caplan position that exists. Which is to say, clearly explaining that if ensuring equality through education isn't as important, it could be optimized for sorting purposes, making labour signals clearer and stronger.
Did Scott just come out as a libertarian?
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-like-left-libertarianism-ist-manifesto/
I was mostly being tongue in cheek, I just don't think I've ever seen you explicitly call yourself a libertarian, and have had the impression that that's not a label you'd seek out.
Also, thank you for alerting me to the Burrito Test, that's both useful and concise. I'm right there with you on the schools as prisons analogy, the schedule alone thoroughly sabotaged my own middle and high school experience, and I feel like I still have a certain reflexive contrarianism and skepticism of authority due to years of arbitrary and capricious school rules and policies.
To be fair, though, at what age would you want to give a group of children unfettered and unsupervised access to a microwave oven? Ninety percent of five-year-olds will blow up the microwave by accident, and five percent of fifteen-year-olds will blow up the microwave on purpose.
Overall I'm skeptical of the opinions on child-rearing from people (like Scott) who have been children but never had children. Once you've been on both sides of the table, then things that used to seem like arbitrary and capricious rules imposed by uncaring authority figures instead start to seem like tricky and desperate line-ball decisions made under circumstances of constant near-disaster.
I don't think an actual, literal burrito should be required for the spirit of the test, though. Schools have lunch periods. My mom and dad were allowed to walk home every day and have a homemade lunch, or stay in the cafeteria and buy lunch. In contrast, my middle school lunch period was 22 minutes long, of which I spent at least 5 and sometimes 10 in the line to buy lunch. And aside from that, while my elementary school had a designated snack time each morning, anything outside of that, or any period in middle school, we weren't generally allowed to eat anything or to drink anything other than water. This included time between classes.
(Aside: My middle school was also figure eight shaped, the school designated and enforced one way hallways and staircases to control traffic, time between periods was only 3 minutes, and teachers were *not* required to dismiss class right when the bell rang. As a result, in at least one instance I was frequently unable to make it on time from a classroom right next to the stairs, to another classroom on the other floor right next to those same stairs).
Slight exception: in high school after freshman year I asked for, and received, permission to *not* take a lunch period so I could take an extra class, and each year I was able to find a teacher willing to let me eat lunch in their classroom provided I did so quietly, but I don't think they would have extended that permission to other students broadly. Also, the one time I had a study hall period, I wasn't allowed to eat during it, even though it was held in the cafeteria.
For what it is worth, I have both been a child and had children. The two children of my present marriage were both home unschooled, and we are happy with the results. Part of the reason we did it that way was that both my memory, of a very good private school, and my wife's, of a reasonably good suburban public school, were mostly of being bored. We thought we could do better for our children.
When our son was very little we did make sure that the sharp knives were high enough so he couldn't reach them, since he regarded them as toy swords. I don't think there were any arbitrary or capricious rules, and we were always willing to consider arguments from the kids against such rules as we had.
Hi, Professor Friedman. I’ve seen you discuss the benefits of families making decisions by reasons rather than arbitrary dictates by those who happen to be in authority (the parents), both in the context of your childhood and of your parenting. I see merit in that view, but what happens when the parent and the child are unable to agree on the most prudent course of action? Did your parents (and did you as a parent of minor children) ultimately resolve differences by dictate where reason failed to produce agreement? Did you handle such situations in some other way? Or did you never experience situations where parents and child were unable to reach agreement through argument? I admire your work.
"Ninety percent of five-year-olds will blow up the microwave by accident, and five percent of fifteen-year-olds will blow up the microwave on purpose."
Says who? Do you in fact have any children? All my children have unfettered access to the microwave as soon as they are physically capable of using it and forever more after that. Never had one issue.
I like the Burrito Test but it seems disingenuous to apply it to a place where you go home at the end of the day instead of staying full time. By that logic you could say an amusement park is an institution.
Going home at the end of the day doesn't seem like the right test. In that case even jail wouldn't be an institution if you were only incarcerated for a few hours.
The better way to look at it might be that you are allowed to microwave a burrito if you're allowed to leave at will and go somewhere else to microwave a burrito.
For what it's worth (I've never been to a Montessori school), Montessori claimed that children can be meticulous and responsible if they're taught how. Anyone have experience?
I think you replied to the wrong comment.
You now nowadays all the cool left libertarians call themselves neoliberals! You've got to get with the times.
No. Any word with the prefix "neo" is a hold over from the 80's when we thought that the Japanese had already overtaken us and that we better copy them to stay cool. Also it feels like most people use neoliberal as an insult.
Scott, aren't you best described as a liberaltarian?
I think liberaltarian was one of those fusion words that people were trying to make happen during the Bush administration that never really ended up happening.
Ordoliberalism might be the right word for this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism
There's a ton to examine here and it's very late and I should be in bed so a few quick reactions off the top of my head.
"Second, lower the legal dropout age to 12, so students who aren't getting anything from school don't have to keep banging their heads against it, and so schools don't have to cook the books to pretend they're meeting standards."
We had that. My parents left school early (around ages 12-14) and this was partly because the schools *were* terrible but also partly because they had to start earning money to help their families. All their lives they felt the lack of education and it did hold them back. So sure, you can have kids leaving formal education at the age of 12 - but then what? Unless we bring back child labour which may not be a solution we want, they'll be hanging around at home or, more likely, hanging around street corners.
"But they'll have the opportunities to learn at home by accessing the Internet, libraries, and following their own interests with supportive and engaged parents!"
"If they could get $12,000 - $30,000 to stay home and help teach their kid, how many working mothers (or fathers!) might decide they didn't have to take that second job in order to make ends meet?"
Yeah, about that. Skipping ahead to the "let parents teach kids at home", we're getting a great example of how this is working during the various lockdowns in countries all over the world. And the consensus seems to be "my God, when is the government going to re-open the schools because we can't manage having the kids at home all the time?" Part of that is not able to homeschool, running out of energy/enthusiasm, needing to work from home, needing to go to work as usual, etc. It is not generally a new flourishing of "why do we need schools anyway?" Old-fashioned "mom is a full-time homemaker who stays at home and looks after the kids" is not the rule anymore, in part because of the necessity for two incomes nowadays, in part because of the whole "an adult needs to go out and interact with other adults" and "your value is determined by having a Real Proper Job and child-minding is not that, unless you're doing it outside the home and being paid a wage for it".
Thirdly, the morning and after-school caretaking. You'll need somebody to do that - be it childcare workers, teachers, whomever. And if they're at work from 6-9 a.m. mornings and 4-8 p.m. evenings looking after your kids, they can't be at home looking after their own kids. Which will result either in people not having children because they're too busy working (hey, didn't we talk about this being a problem?) or a case of 'the cobbler's children have no shoes' because their parents (okay, I mean mothers here, because childminding is a majority female job) are working minding other people's kids.
"The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development."
Yes, that's horrible. It's also due to the rise in parents suing schools over little Johnny falling in the playground, insurance premiums going UP UP UP because parents are suing schools, teachers not wanting to be sued for personal liability because little Johnny fell in the playground when they were supervising breaktime, etc. Solve that problem first and we can go back to the old days where unless a limb was severed, nothing was thought of the usual knocks and bumps and bruises.
"YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO."
Yes, this is where the rest of us go "so, what the heck is a 'hall pass' anyway?" and when we get the explanation, we go "what the hell is wrong with you, America?" The first thing my father taught me before I started school was the phrase "an bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas" which means "may I have permission to go to the toilet?", where if you need to go you raise your hand, utter this magic phrase, and get told "all right but hurry up". We don't have hall passes, bathroom passes, or the likes.
(The only time this didn't work was when I was seven, for no reason I suddenly felt unwell, asked to go, was told to wait for a few minutes until it would be break time, and then I threw up all over my desk. I *think* I may have told the teacher "I told you I was going to be sick". But that's the only time I've ever experienced being refused).
"It's also due to the rise in parents suing schools"
Is that actually true? I have never heard of a parent suing schools (here in the UK) and the courts here have a habit of excessively siding with schools (recently the Supreme Court decided schools could fine parents for child absences on the basis of a law that requires "regular attendance" at school).
I understood all this stuff as an attitude that drives a general ratcheting of behaviours that are in-theory risk averse but are in-practice nonsense.
One of my kids' schools had no doors on the toilet cubicles, because doors could be dangerous if misused. Parents were not allowed on-site at all and had to stand on the pavement because of the fear of on-site child abuse.
To use the monkey bars are another kids' school, they have to pass a monkey bar "driving test" to show they can safely use the monkey bars. My son one day was spotted going the non-prescribed direction on the monkey bars (I assure you they're symmetrical) and had his confiscated, banning him from the monkey bars.
This shouldn't be confused with over-protective instincts. One day my son screwed something up. So they decided to punish him by not feeding him. He was 5. We only found out when we picked him up. (We had words and they never did that again.)
"so, what the heck is a 'hall pass' anyway?"
One of my friends in London told me her daughter's school had a rule that children can only go to the toilet at break times. One lesson her 5 year old daughter forgot to go at break time, and was told she had to wait until the next break, and some time later wet herself.
All the teachers involved seemed like lovely people that decided to be teachers because they love kids... that somehow adopted these horrible ideas working in these places.
Asymmetric risk. If I let a five-year-old wander the school alone, the worst thing that happens is she gets abducted and I'm to blame. If I don't let a five-year-old wander the school alone, the worst thing happens is that she wets herself and I'm not to blame.
Hm, I don't think this example works because there are so many safeguards against abduction in the school, that if one of them failed it would be that safeguard (the teacher who failed to lock the door, or failed to screen someone) who would be blamed, not the one who allowed someone to go to the toilet.
But yeah, this sort of thing.
I don't know of a name for this, but there's this failure-mode in humans, I think, wherein under-stress they become panicky and intolerant of perceived uncertainty even when it is counter-productive.
And if enough people are like this enough of the time in an institution then maybe being more relaxed and sensible about things you start feeling like you're being reckless or complacent. Upward-spiral-style.
"Is that actually true? I have never heard of a parent suing schools (here in the UK) " Yes, unfortunately in the US, the dark hand of the lawsuit lawyers is everywhere, governing much public policy. Legal fees is a large line item in the budgets of most school districts.
I don't know that very many parents sue schools, but it only takes a few lawsuits to make schools frightened.
I think most of what Scott's focusing on is allowing choices. There may be a lot of parents who hate homeschooling and just want the schools to be open again, but there's also some who may find it better, especially considering some of the horrors he talked about (though, like you, I never had the hall pass thing).
My impression (with no data backing this up) is that while there are a lot of people who don't like the distance learning thing, there are some who find it much better. Of course, this isn't the same as homeschooling, but you get some of the same benefits. I know one family who, when a parent had to travel to a different state for a job, just moved the whole family there for a month. Making homeschooling a more affordable option would make stuff like that much easier.
> Thirdly, the morning and after-school caretaking. You'll need somebody to do that
Of course, but one worker can take care of many kids, leaving the rest of the parents free. Ideally, they'd be the ones most able to spare the time, or at least compensated fairly for it, though I guess in practice we all know how that can turn out. At the very least, I don't think it'd be worse than any other job with evening hours.
"Yeah, about that. Skipping ahead to the "let parents teach kids at home", we're getting a great example of how this is working during the various lockdowns in countries all over the world. And the consensus seems to be "my God, when is the government going to re-open the schools because we can't manage having the kids at home all the time?""
From everything I've seen, the stress is trying to manage that WHILE also working. If the extra $12k-30k means one parent no longer has to work, that becomes a lot more manageable (though obviously still a lot of work, speaking as someone who was homeschooled by a SAHM).
Honestly having children at home all day is pretty draining even if you are a SAHM and don't need to work.
I'm just not super interested in hearing anyone's opinions on 'parenting' , or the optimal approach to child rearing, etc., who isn't a parent, in the same way that I'm indifferent to anyone offering advice on how to react in a fire fight that's never been in a combat zone.
If that's addressed at me I'm a parent.
I'd also like to meet these legions of parents who are making $6-$15hr who would love to be able to discuss the nuances of Aristotle with their kids if they could just pry themselves away from work for 40 hrs a week.
For all the people who I know that would consider 'home school an option' if everything broke right, $30k a year- or less- is not moving the needle. And I was a roofer for 14 years, so it's not like I'm just making a guess here.
Homeschooling no longer means the parent has to teach the kid. The parent becomes a "project manager" that makes sure their kid takes the right classes, does homework, passes the tests, troubleshoots their access/wifi if needed and sets up outdoor extracurriculars and playdates with other kids. k12.com takes care of the curriculum.
Right. And I'm for that, actually ( I home schooled my son for 7th grade), so it's not the notion of home school that I'm opposed to. It's the idea of financially incentivizing parents to do it that I think is a bad idea.
Just because you are worried about cases where parents take advantage of the system to either:
A. Pocket the money without educating their children
or
B. Use it to keep their children at home and abuse them
or C. something else?
Because when I see those objections I think "man, good thing our education system never pockets money without educating children or results in child abuse!"
I'm being a bit facetious here, but I do wonder if you are falling for some status quo bias. But since you haven't stated your argument yet I may just be responding to a strawman, in which case, I apologize in advance :)
Hi A-H,
Basically, my problem with it comes down to the fact that the calculations made for this kind of thing always identify the average cost, but not the marginal cost, for educating a kid. So, yes-- if the school's budget is $10m, and they have 500 kids, then I guess you can say it's 'costing' $20k a year per kid. But a lot of that $10m goes to fixed costs, so that kind of accounting is deceptive.
If another kid enters the school, bringing the total to 501 kids, it isn't costing $20k to educate her. The marginal cost is probably a couple thousand dollars, at best. So giving someone $20k to keep their kid out of the school is a wild overpayment, because that doesn't reflect anything close to what it would actually cost to keep that one kid in school for the next year.
The point isn't that they'd 'discuss the nuances of Aristotle' at home. The point is that discussing the nuances of Aristotle is completely useless for most kids and they'd be better off just doing what actually interests them or playing around.
I can't speak to elementary school, but in high school when I taught, hall passes were a thing because some students would cut class and wander the halls, sometimes disrupting other classes, etc. A hall pass was needed to allow administrators know who was out of class for a legitimate reason, and who was not.
Also, I think people are overstating the significance of a hall pass. In most cases, a hall pass is simply a written permission slip. So, in practice, most teachers' practice was exactly what you experienced: "Can I go to the bathroom?" "Yes, but please hurry, and write a pass for me to sign."
I don't know how broadly true this is, geographically or temporally.
I was in high school in the early 2000s on Long Island, and over the course of that time my school went from most teachers just handing out an eraser or piece of wood with "hall pass" written on it to the school mandating that every student in the halls during classes getting detention, even if the bell just rang and they're across the hall from the room they're supposed to be in, unless they have a hall pass written on specific paper and filled out with the date, time, reason for being in the hall, and teacher's signature. Also, all but two of the school bathrooms (out of I think eight) were locked throughout the day, so when you did get a pass, you'd be gone at least twice as long, and teachers weren't supposed to give out more than one bathroom pass at a time. Also also, we were required to wear our student IDs on a lanyard at all times, even during class sitting at our desks, and yes, school staff working as hall monitors did occasionally look into a classroom from the hall and interrupt classes to give detentions to students who took their IDs off.
I can recall attempts to implement something similar, because 1) shockingly, some students use bathroom passes not to go to the bathroom, but to engage in tomfoolery of varying degrees of severity (I recall one student who asked for a bathroom pass on the first day of class; I told him, "I will never give you a pass all year, because last year I saw you roaming the halls every day); 2) many problems on campus, especially serious problems such as violence, are caused by nonstudents who come on campus; hence, the ID policy. The interrupting class thing strikes me as very, very much not the norm.
I now remember the Mark Harmon movie "Summer School" where a kid asks for a bathroom pass on the first day and isn't seen again until the final exam.
Did he pass? I also recall being a long term sub, and there was one kid ("Johnny Smith") who was constantly disrupting class, every day, for weeks. Then, one day, another kid shows up and says, "Hi, I'm Johnny Smith." It turns out that the original kid knew that the real Johnny Smith was going to be out indefinitely, so he figured it would be fun to cut class and pretend to be him
Yeah, IIRC I don't think the interrupting class thing lasted more than a semester or two, it was probably more part of the suddenly-implementing-poorly-thought-out-policies overreaches.
I find it odd that you, of all people, are skeptical of the idea of people learning things outside of the school system. If most of your education, as demonstrated in conversations on SSC, comes from your schooling, Ireland must have a very impressive educational system.
I'm not sceptical of people learning outside the system, I'm sceptical of them getting the chance. The notion of "pay the parents the $12,000 a year so one can stay home and teach the kids" is a nice one, but how it would work out in practice is a different matter. Some people will have the ability, desire and interest to make it work. Many people won't, or will not be able to juggle responsibilities enough to make it work. I think a lot of kids would be told "oh just look something up online" or would be let run feral - as long as they're out of the house and out from under the adult's feet, who cares?
I think school also provides a structure and a range of subjects - there's constant arguing over the curriculum and dropping 'useless' subjects, but it does give everyone a chance to have a taste and see if they do have a talent for languages or maths or music or art or science. Again, plenty of kids will be totally uninterested in how they're presented, or only want to learn one or two particular subjects, but that's life.
We've got a system and it's not ideal by any means, but poking and prodding at it in bits and pieces is rather like dismantling a car while you're travelling in it. You have no right to be surprised if you don't get to your destination after you've unbolted the engine and it fell out five miles back.
The main, big question is "what do we want from school? what is the purpose of education?" and everybody has a different answer. And it's still mainly potential employers who want good employees. Maybe the emphasis has changed from "we want people who will stand for hours on assembly lines doing repetitive manual work" to "we want critical thinking and STEM skills" but the end result of that is still "so they can fit in to a job being productive and making money for our business", not "for the general sake of having a body of citizens who can think critically".
Until we sort that out, we are still going to be loading school with more and more unattainable functions - of not alone educating kids so they can all be coders and get good-paying jobs, but of being Good Citizens and childminding them and feeding them and the other tasks that are the purview of the parents and the family.
I agree with Freddie that no, school is not a magic wand where you can just cram in more "education" and make sure that 100% of the class all graduate with dazzling test scores and go on to middle-class white collar professional jobs even if Dad was a laid off coal miner or Mom was an inner city single parent. No matter how much money you throw at it, or fancy new types of schools, or fancy new paedogogic theories, or social justice activism where you teach anti-racist mathematics instead of the old-fashioned kind about getting the correct solution - https://www.todos-math.org/statements - that is not going to change this fact.
(Actually, being thick as two short planks when it comes to maths, I would flourish like the green bay tree under an anti-racist maths and addressing social and emotional needs in maths classrooms structure during my schooling, but I still wouldn't learn any maths).
So what do we put in place? Having worked, as I've mentioned, in clerical support on an early school leavers' programme, I can tell you from first hand experience that letting kids leave at 15 is not going to result in every single one going on to learn for themselves or get a job or be productive. The most vulnerable need a heck of lot of support (often psychological). The little potential criminals prefer to smoke weed, do petty crime, and be pains in the arse of every person who has to deal with them.
"Ireland must have a very impressive educational system."
Ah, I went to school to the nuns - the Mercy Order, the same ones that ran the Mid-western hospital Scott worked at (I still remember the photo he shared of the interior and me going "I recognise that, that's the Mercy Cross!" https://www.mercyworld.org/newsroom/the-mercy-cross-281/). You'll have to ask our host for the benefits or not associated with that 😁
You'll have to ask our host his opinions on the benefits or not
Scott,
I appreciate this review a lot.
All your ALL-CAPS yelling especially is appreciated.
I've been a teacher, outside the systems, for basically my whole 30 year career ... and I've home/un-schooled my 5 kids.
Burn it all down and replace it with nothing would be better than the Child-prison complex we have now.
I hope you eventually bite the bullet, and finish your path on this.
And thanks for this. your vituperation was especially appreciated.
You're a lot more interesting and engaging when you talk about your personal experiences than when you wriggle on and around the IQ of black people, and I was pleasantly surprised by this sincere turn at the end. FYI, Intelligence isn't a real journal - they've been known to publish absolute trash papers, and for all its 'predominance' in the field of 'intelligence research' its impact factor is < 3 which is a joke. Generally speaking, the entire field of 'intelligence research' is a joke and you shouldn't listen to their 'specialists' (listen to geneticists instead).
Wait, hang on a second. You're acting like DeBoer is trying to make school more mandatory. But it sounds like he's just trying to make it more available.
Did he also propose banning homeschooling or something? Is the universal childcare supposed to be mandatory?
Or would your anti-school response be equally applicable to any non-abolitionist educational position, with this rant just landing on DeBoer because you happened to be reading his book?
Maybe I'm just having a hard time understanding because I liked school and was treated well there, but this doesn't really feel like a rational response.
(Also, you are really underselling how bad child labour is.)
Yeah, I read the book and a lot of DeBoer's points seem to be "allow kids to not go to school at all, but also allow them to go to school if they want to, and somewhat encourage it because education is good and homeschooling takes up parent time," which seems entirely reasonable and not at all what Scott is arguing about.
Or is this first and foremost inspired by his opposition to charters?
There's a thin line between mandatory and available for school, given that parents decide whether or not to send their children there, and given social expectations/rat races. I don't think people *wanted* to be competing to get their kids into the best preschools, but here we are.
I am mostly concerned about eliminating charter schools, which I think are a useful escape route.
Isn't that "thin line" a fully general argument against the availability of anything good for children?
Take for example private tutors. They do some good. If we increased access to tutors, then the rat race might make it socially required. In fact, that specific rat race has already occurred in South Korea.
We could tax positional goods, like education.
So there are cases in life where escape routes only available to some (and encompassing all decision makers and influencers) allow a addressable problem to go unaddressed.
I guess this isn't HIS argument against charter schools (which I am assuming means schools you have to pay to go to).
Or as Gabriel says, they can make a problem worse by creating a rat race (I think this is what is going on with mortgages in the UK and house prices for the past few years).
My personal answer to this is that I am happy for my friends who can afford to send their kids to private schools, where their kids are generally much happier and get a better time. My kids and I will continue to muddle through the state-school-system, which seems so systematically horrible it is baffling to me.
All the state-schools in this area follow the "cloud chart" system. They have a massive blue area on the wall, with a cloud in the middle, and going in one direction you have progressively worse weather (rain, storms, lightning, volcanos) and in the other direction you have the opposite. Everyone has a little picture with their name on a moveable label. They all start the day on the cloud. Then for each act of good or bad behaviour they are moved up or down this ranking. Part of the idea is the public celebration or humiliation as reward and deterrent. It really messes up the kids and everyone I've met who wasn't trained as a teacher in the state-sector thinks it's an offensively bad idea (but I say this wondering if I'll get an interesting response here) -- but the state-school-teachers all buy it.
"I guess this isn't HIS argument against charter schools (which I am assuming means schools you have to pay to go to)."
You are assuming incorrectly. Charter schools are more analogous to Academies - publicly funded, but outside the control of the local education authorities, with greater freedom to decide how to go about their business. America does also have private schools, but they're not the subject of this discussion.
Thanks! Also sounds similar to "free schools" in the UK (where free refers to freedom from the local authority, rather than cost-free, but they /are/ cost-free).
Yes, absolutely; I think I'm right in saying that Free Schools are a subset of Academies rather than an entirely distinct category, but I'm not au fait enough with the nuances (on either side of the Pond) to say whether they're more or less similar to US Charters than other types of Academy.
not to be cnn philosophical but an escape route from what/who? if society bases decisions on something else are you “helping” any child by avoiding it? maybe but at what point is the decision the childs not the parents?
I think the issue with charter schools is a collective action one. They may provide an escape for some students, but at the cost of making the situation for the remaining students worse, by reducing the incentive to change by removing the most politically influential parents. (Same applies to private schools). So if you care about maximising total outcomes you should tradeoff the worse experience for the small number who can escape now for making the system better for everyone.
Or to put it another way, if the rich had to send their kids to the same schools as the poor, they'd probably be better. (This is also an issue with the local property tax model of school funding in a lot of the US)
This sounds like holding rich kids hostage until someone figures out a way to deal with poor kids, though no one has a clue what can be done to improve education for the members of a group many of whose families, for whatever reason, send kids to school who can't readily learn and/or can't avoid disrupting the learning process for everyone around them. And we would lose the advantage that giving at least some people an exit option always confers: the monopoly, deprived of its captive audience, is required to innovate until it improves its performance somehow.
I made a different top-level comment about this but deleted it when I found yours.
Freddie definitely wants people to be able to drop out at 12, so he doesn't want people to be required to go to schools.
"If they exist, parents will send them there" seems like a different problem to fix. Once school is not *required*, it gives the students bargaining power with their parents. Obviously some parents would never care what their kids say, but overall I don't think we should be running society for what the worst parents do. (And if we run them as if we're just trying to worry about "what the worst parents do" we would *definitely* require kids to be in schools away from them.)
> It is weird for a libertarian to have to insist to a socialist that equality can sometimes be an end in itself, but I am prepared to insist on this.
IMO, the concept you're looking for is better termed "orthogonality" rather than "equality". It's not about making things equal, but rather about making sure that in all cases only what's relevant is considered -- or, as Eliezer would say, hugging the query.
Do you think it is different from 'egalitarian'?
Would like you to know that as soon as you started ranting about how terrible Child Prison is, I started pumping my fists in the air and going "yessssssssssssssss!" out loud, earning me stares from my housemates.
Don't know if that's ever happened to me before, reading a blog piece.
You must be new to Scott's writing then. :)
Been reading for about four years now. I just really, REALLY hate public schools.
"This is a compelling argument. But it accidentally proves too much. If white supremacists wanted to make a rule that only white people could hold high-paying positions, on what grounds (besides symbolic ones) could DeBoer oppose them? After all, there would still be the same level of hierarchy (high-paying vs. low-paying positions), whether or not access to the high-paying positions were gated by race. It seems like rejecting segregation of this sort requires some consideration of social mobility as an absolute good."
Disagree, I think you are wrong.
He is rejecting the idea that more social mobility -> better outcomes.
This is not the same as thinking less social mobility -> better or equal outcomes.
I read that quote as meaning that social mobility is fine as it is.
He's specifically saying: "Why should we as leftists want more social mobility...."
Also "only white people holding high paying positions" would be increased social mobility, since currently not only white people hold high-paying positions.
DeBoer would argue that for this, a bunch of whites need to get up first, whilst a bunch of non-whites need to get kicked down.
Therefore this scheme is social mobility. Also not helpful to any goals of DeBoer, so at best irrelevant.
But this wouldn't be conservative either, since it would be unjustified by their standards as well. Such a shuffle would have nothing to do with a pecuniary reward incentive for the most capable to maximize their potential for the benefit of society.
DeBoer disagrees with this conservative position as a case for social mobility.
But he probably would agree with the implied conservative position, that kicking the capable down and arbitrarily pushing the less capable up, is not a great benefit to society.
Also in DeBoer world with its raised floor and lowered ceiling, social mobility itself must mean much less since there's less space to be mobile in.
Everyone has a job and has food to eat and is safe. There is little pressure to excel or push yourself hard to compete with your peers. You wait ten years for your car and it's a Trabant. If you're well connected and a doctor, you get your car faster and it's a Wartburg!
[That's the GDR experience incredibly simplified and I'm not saying that he wants the scarcity. Just pointing to an example of how that would look/feel like.]
"He is rejecting the idea that more social mobility -> better outcomes. This is not the same as thinking less social mobility -> better or equal outcomes."
I'm a bit confused - isn't this claiming that we're exactly at the one spot where we've maximized the ability of social mobility to improve outcomes. Why would we expect ourselves to be there?
I read DeBoer as more saying "trying to change the social hierarchy by replacing one rich person with one otherwise-identical poor person is useless, and having a hierarchy at all is bad" while you're arguing against the much weaker position "the current social hierarchy is the best hierarchy there can be," which DeBoer certainly doesn't believe.
He doesn't share your assumption that social mobility matters that much, to begin with.
Like, assume social mobility could span from 0 to 1 and everything above 0.3 is good.
Everything above 0.7 is bad. But anything between 0.3 and 0.7 is more or less the same.
Just avoid the extremes and social mobility isn't an issue worth looking into more.
So the question goes the other way:
Why would you expect that there is a sharply defined maximum and that moving there is straight-forward and worth the cost?
Mind you, I definitely have no opinion on this. I just think that's what he means. Or a more plausible interpretation than yours at least. He could have written that, but he probably didn't expect to need to address a white-supremacist thought experiment. That might be the Spanish inquisition among possible objections :)
I can also only go by that quote and not by having read the whole book. So I might just be misinformed.
deBoer is actually much clearer about this than the review acknowledges.
The third paragraph in the quoted passage goes on to say:
"This is not to suggest that we will ever achieve true equality in all aspects in our society, as any variation between individuals will inevitably result in inequality. Rather the point is that equality of certain essential outcomes related to material security and political representation is a realizable and noble goal."
*equality of certain essential outcomes related to material security and political representation*, i.e. not stoner surgeons or a homogenous society that denies or suppresses differences in ability.
He seems to be saying that social mobility is exactly equal in aggregate:
> Mobility, after all, says nothing about the underlying overall conditions of people within the system, only their movement within it. From that standpoint the question is still zero sum.
He seems to be saying that in any system with a hierarchy, it doesn't matter how people move around because the hierarchy still exists. Scott's example shows that some hierarchies are better than others, i.e. ours is better (I think you'll agree?) than one that is rigidly segregated by race.
Yes, the current hierarchy is better than a rigidly race-segregated one.
But DeBoer is not forced to disagree with that statement if he followed his prior logic of a cliff, like Scott implied.
And yes, he focusses on social mobility being a zero sum status competition and rejects the conservative view of it being a virtue discovery mechanism as...... well he doesn't say it's false, he says it's the conservative view.
But he's not completely against a hierarchy.
What he wants is the "winners not being able to lording [their privelege] over the rest of us". There can be a hierarchy without losers having to feel bad about being at the bottom. If being at the bottom is very pleasant.
Lowering the ceiling is necessary to raise the floor.
But he doesn't need this to happen without anyone losing their relative position in the ranking. Everything just gets compressed.
So social mobility can stay the same, increase or decrease now..... it matters even less than before. Being kicked down is no longer a pitiable state of affairs and being raised up is no longer all that enviable.
Honestly, I can only hope I'm getting this right. This is an alien mindset to me and I'm trying my best here.
But I don't see the world in terms of fairness, resentment, status, deserts, moral rights or competition.
I think there's some sort of "typical mind" analogue that occurs whenever people talk about their experiences in school. "I had an awful time in grade school" becomes "Grade schools are prisons" instead of "I went to shitty schools/school district" or even "I'm not the typical student schools were meant to deal with."
I don't say this because I think public schools are great or that there's anything uniquely attractive about the way we do public schooling now. I'm just not sure that dramatic changes would be beneficial to [all, most, X percentile] students, and I think there's a fair chance it could be harmful.
I think Scott is mostly advocated for allowing choices and experimentation. Don't forcibly change everyone's school hours to 9-3, but try it for some and see what happens. If it turns out that this causes all the students to fail or something, then it was a failure and you can get rid of it.
Certainly people have different experiences in school, but I don't think it's a coincidence that hating high school is a common trope, at least in the US. And even if it is a small minority, having more choices would only help those suffering.
IMO the most relevant feature of a prison is that you can't leave by choice. This is basically true of all schools for children, even ones the children like to be at, because of truancy laws.
When school is ok, this is fine; when school is bad, it complicates matters horribly.
I think school, like prison, is mostly defined by the other inmates (and to a lesser degree the guards). Like, if the other inmates are nice and have similar interests and the guards don’t abuse you and the worst thing is the crappy food... well, not getting to leave would suck but otherwise that doesn’t sound too bad.
The mandatory nature of school makes it less like this, though, as the bullies and disruptive kids are often bored kids who don't want to be there.
I think I am a person whose brain works in a pretty similar way to Scott’s, was bullied in middle school, and who supports school choice, charters, vouchers, the lot - but yeah this all felt kind of over the top. School (public ones for most of it!) was a major net positive in my life.
I second this. School was at times traumatizing, but overall it was a HUGE net positive for me. Being forced to stick to a schedule, observe rules and interact with different people I never would have met otherwise was good for me. Structure was good for me; most of the “arbitrary” rules I chafed against now strike me as largely pro-social, even the hall passes for the bathroom.
Above all, school was *my* domain, a place where I could develop an identity away from my parents. I think if my parents had tried to homeschool or unschool me, I would be dead.
I’m hearing a lot of “let the child choose” in this thread. What can a kid really choose, and how wisely? All decisions are directed by your parents at some fundamental level. I picked the violin, but it was because of my parents that I was in a music store and not a church youth group or a tennis camp. Except that school gave me a space to truly develop my own identity and expose me to different adults, not to mention peers.
I wasn’t the happiest kid, but I was “good at formal education” and mostly loved it. At home I’m not sure I ever felt I was good at anything meaningful despite my parents’ best efforts. I’m keenly aware that even if I’m an OK parent, I may be totally blind to the kinds of shortcomings that might make my kid a basket case.
My parents were actually great, but only because I also had school. And I only had school because it was a mandate. If Mom and Dad had defaulted to educating me themselves and governed 100% of my life growing up, I doubt I would have survived it.
One general problem with home schooling is that if children have abusive parents, it can be much worse for them than school.
It’s a small sample size, but one of the few homeschooled kids I know now works for an organization trying to curb abuses among homeschooling families. She and her husband were both homeschooled and turned out fine, but not every parent trying this is remotely mentally or emotionally equipped for it. She has collected enough horror stories that she believes homeschooling needs more oversight and the kids advocacy.
I should have said abusive home-- sometimes the problem is one or more siblings, not the parents.
Could be true- I certainly know people who had that situation.
The anecdote about the kid locking themselves in the bathroom because school is awful and the parents screaming at them...I feel like there’s a lot more going on there. My worst times in school were never just about school. The problem with some kids might not be “school is soul-throttling child prison” so much as “Maybe there are stressors that nothing can fix,” e.g. a disturbed sibling.
Or it might be that even if these parents have choices and are empowered to make them, this would be how they handled things. This also assumes the kid even *tells* the adults anything.
My parents helped me weather the negative parts of school, and school helped me deal with the intolerable aspects of my home life. Remove either of those and I think I’d have turned out a wreck.
Majascule, I might know a young Rationalist who would probably like to connect with your friend and her husband. Homeschooled in an abusive home, no one to turn to for help as all other adults were part of the same cult as the parents. This young person and I have talked quite a bit about what we could do to help children in similar situations, but I don't have much expertise in this area.
See article for links to sources: "Suppose there was a cabal of evil geniuses who decided to force teens into labor camps where 56% were disengaged, 75% had negative feelings, 17% had to be put on psychiatric medications to survive, suicides had increased 300% since the founding of the labor camp system, and there was an annual 20% increase in suicides each fall when they were forced back into the camps. If this was an Apple factory in China, there would be international protests and boycotts. When it was discovered they were actually doing this to children, the company would collapse." https://flowidealism.medium.com/schooling-in-the-u-s-26063004b984
I had the same reaction. I had a pretty good experience in (private, religious) school so I notice that I can't entirely relate to where Scott's coming from. And I've heard anecdotes of students with tough situations at home feeling like school is a refuge from that. Those are exactly the kinds of students the "meritocracy" model of school is supposed to be helping the most, too, which makes me reluctant to endorse banning / reducing school as a solution.
I am extremely biased (one parent is a teacher, and both of my roommates are as well), but yeah that part rubbed me the wrong way. I wonder if Scott might be being exposed to the worst cases as a psychiatrist and reacting in much the same way as one of my friends, who is a social worker and so refused to put her children in daycare--when you spend all day investigating child abuse at daycares, it's hard to remember that daycare is generally just as safe as home.
My mom gets weekly emails from parents demanding *more* homework, and she has to gently suggesting that they allow their elementary-aged children some unstructured time to play. In my town, there has been constant fighting between a faction that wants school to start later and a faction that wants school to start earlier so parents don't have to arrange before-school care for their children. School might be full of bullies, but many of the children my rooommates teach are bullied by parents/siblings and view school as a safe haven where they can let their guard down and get a warm meal (often, the only one they get, period). There are not perfect solutions, and the idea that most people would do better with a choose-your-own-adventure school structure strikes me as naively privileged.
It's not that school can't be better, but school serves lots of children just fine (full disclosure: I was one of those little snots who adored it). I think some more choice is a need so more children can be served by it, but I think the culprit for why a lot of that doesn't happen is more to do with government and, yes, educational reformers, than it is to do with public schools themselves. One of the quickest ways to alleviate the "school prison" problem is to hire more teachers and reduce class sizes--teachers don't have to be as strict when they're not trying to manage 30 children--and I've yet to know a teacher who wasn't a huge supporter of such measures. But it's expensive, so it never happens. Hiring anti-racism experts or whatever the fashion of the day is is far cheaper.
Bill Gates spent a lot of money studying smaller class sizes. There turned out to be no educational benefits, but at least he learned a lesson about his hoped for reform (which Greg Cochran could have told him for free), while other people never learn the same for theirs.
Does "no educational benefits" simply mean that it didn't raise scores? Or that it did nothing to improve the quality of life of children who are forced to undergo this education? I suspect there are lots of worthwhile interventions that would do one but not the other.
Quality of life meaning - go home from ‘school’ delightedly worn out from being outside; drop the IQ bullshitery, and know that, yes there ARE different kinds of intelligence and desire and expose kids to those entire ranges -
- making things by hand
- coding
- climbing
- building things
- running
- reading - and also
- HEARING stories [fiction & nonfiction] read aloud
- cooking (ya think that’s useless / optional / elitist? Mise en place is the foundation for organization in other areas; learning how to make a meal from a handful of scrappy things = an economic lesson that likewise carries over into everything else)
- f*ck alegbra; lemonade stand math and percentages and supply purchasing and how to sell websites to clients or whatever. And if you want to learn algebra for pleasure as some do, then do.
- strategic and tactical thinking and interaction; community knitting / integration
- teaching by example to get off the hedonic treadmill which most of school implicitly supports
- epistemology - in a less gated vocabulary - could and should be the basis of schooling from day one of schooling at 4 years old. Or whenever.
I dropped out of HS in 1978 - in Coney Island / Brighton Beach during the Odessa era wherein what seemed like the entire cohort of Russian emigrants came there, flooded the school systems, and they knew more math and science than the entire faculty, and their insights were astounding. Nature or nurture? (esp as those kids were mostly prevented from going to school in Odessa). It don’t matter, nature or nurture - it was awesome to be with those kids and learn what they knew - and how they thought.
My 18 year old kid was 1/2 homeschooled and like me, started working full time as a teenager; “work” = play and pleasure for him, as it did for me (mostly) (now, entirely; and i, a low IQ person, am a super high achiever in “business” and other conventional markers of success).
School, yes, worse than prisons
There are some great teachers, yes. But mostly - meh; and the weight of the institution is too much. The story of teachers in Finland is far better than in the US.
Feed those kids.
Get their parents out of their McJobs.
Let’s stop using college as a marker of success. College has been devalued; like so many other formerly successful venues, it’s been flipped and engineered into a way to extract cash from the people they’ve fear marketed to. End the tax free status. End the amateur athletic competition fiction money producing treadmills which spit out broken student athletes when they break. What IS a marker of ‘success’? having the ability to stand on ones own 2 feet, and help others do the same. Very little of that is taught or learned in current schools. It COULD be though; with all the above supports [funding parents and families out of poverty; showing not telling community building skills; learning practical joyful things in a wide range; real math; real literature and history, whatever that means; ethics by example & etc]
Yeah, I think Gates was focused on measuring educational outcomes rather than "quality of life". Voucher proponents who don't see gains on the former often point to the fact that families seem to greatly prefer their chosen schools as evidence those are better on intangibles.
My vague recollection is that Bill Gates funded the fad in the 2000s for "small learning communities," which are more like "schools within schools" rather than small classes per se. Then about 12 years ago he announced he'd wasted his money and that small learning communities didn't improve education. So the small learning communities fad dried up when he took his money and moved on to Common Core. (I gather that fad is mostly over now too.)
Why could Greg Cochran have told him this? I don't think this is a natural consequence of eg much of intelligence being genetic - there *are* interventions that increase test scores, they're just hard to scale.
I recall that Greg's take on "The Case Against Education" is that we COULD do better, but we WON'T because all the popular ideas in education are wrong.
Which hard to scale interventions are you referring to?
For myself, Scott unashamedly referring to mandatory schools as "child prisons" was pretty much triggering - it reminded me of what it was like to be incarcerated in a school - where almost nothing was formally taught that I didn't already know - in part on the excuse that this imprisonment would magically instill social skills.
I learned a lot, particularly when I encountered concepts like <i>habeas corpus</i> (didn't apply to children, any more than it applied e.g. to black people in the time of slavery) etc. etc. Or all those statements about liberty school teachers claimed our culture believed in, even though none of them applied to me at the time (or to any other child).
More importantly, I learned how to get bullies in trouble with the powers that be, how to figure out what answer was wanted and give that, rather than blurting out the truth, and how to manipulate authorities into doing what I wanted. Very useful skills, though I'd rather not have had to learn them by experimenting on the guards (teachers), trustees (prefects), and fellow prisoners (students).
And I had so much better an experience than the one my government chose to inflict on those who'd committed the crime of being <em>native Canadian children</em>, rather than children of more favored demographics ("races" to an American).
And then there were the unfortunate children who wound up in the care of social services. They were probably better off than the native children, but not always, and not by much.
-
As I write this, I'm still "triggered" - i.e. angry in retrospect, and more consciously cynical, mistrusting etc. than has been normal for me in adulthood.
I don't know about "typical mind". But even if every day of your mandatory school attendance was consistently wonderful, I'm reasonably sure that wasn't true for many of your classmates, and some of them were likely outright miserable. All a bad school does is raise the overall level of misery; a good school (whatever that is) doesn't prevent it.
Only one of the four K12 schools I attended counted as especially bad. The final one had something like a 97% college attendance rate - and little brats throwing chewing gum at me/into my long hair from behind, regularly. (Things improved a lot when I beat up one young man very very publicly. But that was the year <i>after</i> the chewing gum problem.)
I've no idea whether changes in what we force on children would be better or worse overall. But when triggered, I frankly don't care - if the choice is between people like me spending 7 hours a day in what we experience as prison, or something equally bad happening to people like you (e.g. because of some rule that individual differences must be ignored), then I'd prefer you and yours to be the victims, not me and mine - even if there happen to be more like you. (I'm on the autistic spectrum, which is quite likely the root cause of my bad experiences even in "good" schools. And don't get me started on some of what's done to autistic children, with the ostensible goal of "curing" them.)
But let me reiterate again - it doesn't take a "bad" school to make some of its unwilling attendees miserable; it only takes a school that's unsuitable <em>for them</em>.
> I learned a lot, particularly when I encountered concepts like <i>habeas corpus</i> (didn't apply to children, any more than it applied e.g. to black people in the time of slavery) etc. etc. Or all those statements about liberty school teachers claimed our culture believed in, even though none of them applied to me at the time (or to any other child).
Literally my experience...
When I was in middle school, a bunch of kids signed a petition to get rid of a teacher they didn't like, and they all got detention. Still galls me 25 years later, and I wasn't even involved.
I guess that the lesson is to not use honest tactics.
I remember coming into the classroom where a hated teacher had taught the hour before, finding the floor and tables littered with wads of paper, showing the fun the kids had had, at the expense of the teacher. If I remember correctly, that teacher's head was also smashed through a glass window.
He was let go, in favor of retaining another teacher who was supposed to be a temp.
---
Once we had someone studying to be a teacher try to give a lesson to my class, which was infamous for having a group of difficult kids. Seeing a puppy be ripped to shreds by a pack of lions would have been a kinder sight.
All fair points, but I think "I'm not the typical student schools were meant to deal with" covers your situation.
And using that as justification to advocate for caring less about test scores, diversifying the types of grade schools available to the public through heavier use of charters, and allowing people to pick and choose more between these options rather than having to stick with the school they've been assigned to is perfectly reasonable! But I don't think that's where most people get from "School is prison". And like other bad slogans, it can backfire and turn people off of your otherwise-reasonable reform agenda.
True enough, and I probably wouldn't have said what Scott said, because of the reactions I've gotten to comments like this - and because the whole experience is now decades in the past.
Also, to be honest, because I learned the lessons of those school days, which included saying what I don't mean in order to get the effects I want, or avoid effects I don't want. (It's called "social skills" when higher status people or people you like do it, and "sociopathy" or "manipulation" when lower status people do it.)
Fortunately, fixing the schools is not a cause of mine. And more importantly, I have no children, and thus feel no duty to protect any particular individuals from their mandated "education".
But as long as those who set the rules impose a Procrustean bed on everyone, metaphorical limbs will be lopped off, and survivors will be both crippled and angry.
Scott was spot-on with both my experience in school and our kids experiences. School is a special sort of Hell I wouldn't wish on my worst enemies, where I was routinely bullied from age five until age 16 when I graduated a year early after being bored out of my mind in every class that wasn't Calculus.
If you remember your school any differently, I suspect you're either forgetting a lot of nastiness or where among the privileged on top of the social heap.
The rest of us despised it and couldn't wait to put it all behind us.
I've been really confused for the last year to hear about kids who were depressed because they couldn't go back to school. Did they use to get depressed over the summer holiday every year?
For what it's worth, I went to what was probably the best school in Illinois (the University of Chicago Laboratory School), a school designed largely to deal with bright faculty kids. I was bored most of the time. I don't remember restroom passes, but I am pretty sure you had to get permission from the teacher to leave class to go to the restroom.
Indeed. I had great schooling at 610.ru, and most my peers had good schooling, too - but that's not a judgment about all schools as selection effects dominate. Not all schools are good, not all schools are bad, but schools are not _inherently_ prisons that are bad for you.
Incidentally, that bit about whether the 1% or the 20% are the class enemies is usually a debate between Occupy/DSA types (who say the 1% is the enemy) and the left-neoliberal Brookings institution types (who say the 20% is the enemy, despite being from the 20% themselves). I think the classic statement of the 20% view is from Richard Reeves: https://www.brookings.edu/book/dream-hoarders/
There are some left-socialist types who also agree that the 20% are the enemy, but they do seem to be rarer (especially when the question of free college comes up).
Really? I always thought of left-neoliberal types as the 20%ers who anti-20%ers were worried about. I'll have to look into your link.
I associate the school of thought targeting the top 20% rather than the top 1% with cultural conservatism. It's a way of defining the evil elite that's ruining society with liberal educated people in general rather than capitalists. For a microcosm of what the debate looks like see this Jacobin piece tearing into David Brooks for promoting that attitude: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/04/david-brooks-inequality-family-conservatives-rich-poor
Thanks, I had fallen for this (BTW, what % of population goes to Ivy League and similar?).
I wonder how did a Marxist fall for that ?!?
One thing that might be confusing the issue is characterizing the 1% and 20%. You say:
> the 1% are the Buffetts and Bezoses of the world; the 20% are the "managerial" class of well-off urban professionals, bureaucrats, creative types, and other mandarins.
But that's far from the case. Wiki[1] tells me there are ~600 American billionaires, which is 0.0005% of American households. This random link[2] uses survey data to estimate .03% centi-millionaires and 1% deca-millionaries. A related post[3] pegs the 1% at 500k household income, which jives with a number I'd seen somewhere from the IRS.
$10M net worth or $500K income is squarely in the realm of (married) doctors, corporate lawyers, tech employees, etc. if they "keep their head down and work hard." Even some bureaucrats, I'm sure, cold make it.
If you don't inherit your place in the 1%, you could theoretically get there as an employee/practice owner in the right industries. Getting to the .03% OTOH basically requires massive equity gains, crime, or a prodigious career in finance. The same site[4] pegs the 80th percentile income at $140k, which requires good paying jobs to get into, but not you-have-to-go-to-Harvard level jobs.
The difference in viewpoints I think is whether you're concerned about who gets the ticket-to-1% jobs vs. whether your concern is about "I don't like the 0.3% being so powerful and so far out of reach"
(You can of course also worry about how to get more households to $140k income, regardless of what percentile that is, but that's at the other end of the spectrum)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth
[2]: https://dqydj.com/how-many-millionaires-decamillionaires-america/
[3]: https://dqydj.com/top-one-percent-united-states/
[4]: https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/
Personally, I'm an upper-middle-class warrior who vacillates between thinking that the bottom 20% are the enemy and thinking that the bottom 80% are the enemy.
They both are, but then so are the top 20/80%.
It's also kind annoying to see the top 1% conflated with the ultra-rich billionaire types.
For reference, because I wondered: If we go by income, cutoff for top 20% is $80k/year and for top 1% it's $330k/year.
https://fourpillarfreedom.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/incomePercentiles2.jpg
And to put that in perspective: yeah, $330k/year is a ton but if you're sole earner and want to buy a home in San Francisco it barely qualifies you for a mortgage.
https://abc7news.com/realestate/report-you-need-to-earn-$309k-to-afford-a-home-in-sf/5692115/
Oops, only after posting that did I find the per-household (not per-individual) version of the first chart.
https://fourpillarfreedom.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/incomePercentiles4.jpg
Not to worry, anyone in the top... 3% is probably good to settle in SF.
San Francisco is pretty small. You can get substantially more house in, say, the far wilds of Daly City.
You can settle in a city without buying a house there.
Right, but "San Francisco" (really meaning "the nicer parts of the Bay Area") is pretty much designed to be a playground for the one percent, with some sketchy parts of town for the people who are going to serve coffee and mop floors for the one percent. Wasn't always the case, but a couple of generations ago the STEM-oriented subset of the 1% looked to San Francisco, said "this is going to be our place", and made it so. If you're not part of that 1%, or willing to dodge homeless people for the opportunity to sell coffee to that 1%, San Francisco may not be the city for you even if they can't pass laws explicitly barring you from living there.
Thought experiment: let’s imagine a scientific discipline. On an important question, there are two school of thoughts: A and B. In terms of ideological and institutional pressure, career incentives, respectability, media coverage, it’s much more advantageous to be a supporter of A. However, even if supporters of B tends to be very quiet, and not discuss their positions in public very much, they still represent the majority opinion in the field, at least in questionnaires preserving anonymity. Assuming no other knowledge of the question, which position has more chances to reflect reality, A or B?
Imagine two disciplines, A and B. An important question covers both. The community of A thinks the answer to the question is X, the community of B thinks the answer to the question is Y. However, B as a field is notorious for its low rigor, replication issues, methodological flaws, and attempts at foraying from B to A have resulted in disaster and being laughed out of the room by A specialists. A as a field, on the other hand, is booming and attracting the top talent across all stripes of potential graduate students. Assuming no other knowledge of the question, which position has more chances to reflect reality, X or Y?
I could think of another thought experiment. Country A used to be the undisputed superpower. Country A used to act as if it believed X but now the official ideology is Y and every social institution is increasingly being rearranged on the basis of Y. Country B used to be very poor and weak but is now overtaking A in more and more scientific and economic fields. Country B continues to act as a country where everyone believes X is correct and nobody thinks the matter is worth discussing.
Interesting! The question is whether country B is going to overtake country A thanks in part to the no-doubt glorious application of the Y principle to its own population? I guess we'll just have to wait, huh. This makes me think of another thought experiment, where a prolific commentator from discipline B keeps saying that the evidence from discipline A will vindicate him Any Day Now. Assuming no knowledge of the question, how long must we wait before his predictions are finally dismissed?
I feel like there's an interesting backstory to this thread that I'm missing.
I'm assuming that it's referring obliquely to HBD (race and IQ). And presumably the US and China.
Of course not, I'm obviously referring to the purported harm of eating too much meat; unless that was global warming?
I don't see how it works for the U.S. and China. What is X? What is the doctrine that the U.S. used to believe and China did and does?
Presumably A is the United Kingdom, X is classical liberalism, Y is socialism? B is the U.S. The time period is the 20th century.
I think in such a situation, I would feel obliged to look at the data and make up my own mind.
In this obviously completely hypothetical thought experiment, there would be a very strong social stigma against looking at the underlying data. You would be denounced on Twitter and if a little bit famous, the NYT would write hit piece on you.
That depends on how much knowledge we're willing to smuggle in through here:
> In terms of ideological and institutional pressure, career incentives, respectability, media coverage, it’s much more advantageous to be a supporter of A.
If we were to suppose that A is socially preferred over B for no good reason, then B is more likely to be true.
However, the very fact that the above institutional-pressure situation has arisen actually gives us some indication that A is more likely to be true. In the majority of cases, a stern and inflexible academic consensus is more likely to arise for true statements than for false statements. So the vast majority of cases which fit the situation you described are cases where B is some crackpot theory like "Earth is hollow" or "Aliens built the pyramids".
Now, this should not be taken as an argument against any particular B, certainly not the one that you're thinking of right now. But I don't think that it can be taken as an argument in favour of it either.
« However, the very fact that the above institutional-pressure situation has arisen actually gives us some indication that A is more likely to be true. » What would be the mechanisms through which institutional pressure would select for truth? I am not saying that such mechanisms don’t exist, but there are many disciplines where it doesn’t seem to work really well: e.g. US « nutrition science » for the last 50 years, Education science, Criminology (and obviously Soviet agronomy and social science).
The mechanism would be that scientific institutions are largely filled with scientists who are honestly interested in finding out things that are true.
It's easy to come up with examples where institutions are wrong, but the vast majority of times they are right. How many protons in a carbon atom? What is the composition of Earth's lower mantle? How do mitochondria work? Did Aliens build the goddamn pyramids? You can open up most textbooks on most subjects and find that almost everything in them is true and sensible.
One thing I kept thinking when I read this book: what if we took the "the only way schools 'succeed' is by filtering out low-performing students" idea as a suggestion rather than a condemnation? Would that improve things for both high- and low- performing students?
There are things in the book that suggest it might!
First, de Boer explicitly praises "weed out" classes in medicine and engineering as a mercy. They don't string students along and force them to learn material they can't ever hope to master.
Second, de Boer recommends letting 12 year olds drop out, because forcing thing to do something they're not good at is bad.
Third, de Boer suggests that making sure top-performing students succeed is a really good thing:
> In fact, the notion that there is a strong connection between education and economic growth has recently been convincingly argued to be largely a statistical mirage. The data shows that what really matters is the academic performance of the top 5 percent of students.
If that's true, shouldn't we be doing everything we can to identify the top 5 percent of students, remove all barriers to their success, and gear schooling toward them instead of the kids that don't want to be in school?
Countries with vocational education programs can track kids into those earlier in life if that’s where their aptitude is. It’s still sorting so it’s still subject to unfairness, but the kids can graduate with a skill they can actually use (as opposed to remaining in an academic track and not mastering much of it.) But this depends on having a manufacturing sector. Denmark did this, may still do it. So it made sense to lots of people at some point.
Robin Hanson makes basically that argument (based on some research showing actual benefits to the remaining students) here: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/01/helpful-inequality.html
Germany has been running a large scale experiment on this of sorts. The results are ... nothing to brag about.
In short, there a (depending on the state) mostly two or three tiers of schools with the general idea that innate ability determines your path through this. The main consequences are that signalling is ridiculous importance now that up to fifty percent of students get educated in the highest tier of school, the Gymnasium. University admittance is also mostly tied to having completed school at a Gymnasium. Furthermore the multi-tier system as practiced in Germany is a large driver of educational inequality, which depends on social background much more than in otherwise comparable countries.
To be fair, "nothing to brag about" is about as high praise I've ever heard a German give their country's performance in anything (except making bread and windows.)
More seriously, while there are surely improvements that could be made, the relevant counterfactual is "How would German students fare if Germany had single track system like the US?" My impression is that the Haupt- and Realschule paths are useful and productive alternatives that yield overall better results with less frustration for all involved, despite the selection process being less than perfect.
> the relevant counterfactual is "How would German students fare if Germany had single track system like the US?"
YES, exactly. A lot of discussion of "tracking" seems to miss this.
Some resistance to tracking seems to be driven by the notion that it's setting some kids up for failure. Possibly one way to ameliorate that is to have lots of opportunities for "track jumping."
My (poor, rural, not-very-rigorous) school actually did a good job at this. e.g., if you were on the medium track in math, you could jump up to the high track by taking Geometry and Pre-Calculus at the same time.
I've noticed a lot of scandals involving thesis plagiarism by German politicians, including the president of the European Commission. Presumably, this is only because journalists bother to check their thesis and plagiarism is widespread among those that never have a journalist look into their past (almost everyone in society).
This suggests that there is a lot of opportunity to game the system by those who know the rules (which correlates strongly with being from a higher class).
> what if we took the "the only way schools 'succeed' is by filtering out low-performing students" idea as a suggestion rather than a condemnation?
The major issue I see is that there currently is a dogmatic insistence in Western society on individualism and inclusion, even for those that would benefit from substantial paternalism and being in a community with similar people. The result is that there are fairly high demands on people to be able to function in society, which then results in the insistence that everyone is taught the skills necessary. This in turn makes it very hard to preserve hands-on education where people learn by doing, without this being subverted into classroom education where people have to learn more abstract skills by listening and reading.
An example of the dogma is that they've been closing communal housing for mental patients in my country, based on 'inclusiveness,' claiming that this lets these people be part of normal society. In reality, these people seem to become far more lonely on average, as they have a very hard time finding common ground with 'normal' people or participating in activities on the same level. I've heard several complaints that people's only real human contact is the social worker. This probably represents an immense problem, because people with that issue probably have a very hard time getting heard. The number of incidents and jailings of mental patients has also greatly increased as a result. I see this as a huge failure, but those in charge seem totally unwilling to consider the idea that these reforms were harmful to many.
Similarly, they've closed communal elderly homes, so only the elderly with very poor health can still benefit from communal living in nursing homes. This seems to greatly increase loneliness and those people getting in trouble.
I only see benefits in offering less-capable people the choice for communal living, so even those with very low abilities can have a decent quality of life. Most mental health patients and those with very low-IQ that would benefit from this probably can't earn a living, but communal programs like tending a garden together or doing other manual labor is extremely healthy and satisfying for most of them. And it would probably be enable more people to earn a living, because many people with mental issues and low IQ can carry only a limited figurative load. The less load they need to carry to care for themselves, the more they can use for work.
Don't we already do this in a way, by leaving most serious education to universities, which have merit-based admissions systems, at least partly, and for a little while longer? We just waste a lot of students' time before we get to that part.
Tracking is a good idea, but you need to actually have a plan for the less-academically-inclined students otherwise you're just tracking them into a bin.
Germany, Austria and other Middle European countries do a good job of sorting out the students who would benefit from university educations and those who would be better suited for manual trades but where they really succeed is in making sure that manual tradesmen have dignity. People aren't as inclined to scoff at a Meisterbrief there as we routinely do at a trade school diploma here. Even when we pay them well, which isn't a given, American blue collar workers are treated as obsolete losers.
Yet the push from nearly all liberal school systems is to completely eliminate so-called "gifted" programs in the name of egalitarianism.
In the phrase "income gaps are not due to differences in income", I'm pretty sure you mean IQ gaps.
If that is not what you meant, I'm gonna need a little more explanation here.
Plausibly that income differences are not due to differences in *parental* income (that is, parental SES goes little to explain differences in childhood outcomes - parental IQ does much more).
But the typo hypothesis makes more sense.
Can anyone cite the "ample evidence that homework does not help learning?"
It's consistent with the more extreme versions of educational nihilism.
This was one of the better SSCs I've ever read, and synthesizes so many of my thoughts that I don't have to write my own thoughts down, I can just link this. Well done.
"I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it" any improvement made within the capitalist framework strengthens capitalism. Every Marxist I read seems very open and up front about this. They take it as axiomatic that the only way to make things better is to first make them so much worse that the whole system collapses, then something something revolution something something utopia. Someday I will understand why otherwise intelligent and wise people (i.e. smarter than me) advocate this position, and then I will understand everything there is to understand about people.
The other thing in play is time constraints-- if your kid is in a bad school for ten years, this is serious damage to your kid, even if ten years of work would make the schools better in general.
People who advocate this are often called accelerationists, and it's definitely not popular in most leftist spaces.
Apparently the only Marxists I come across are accelerationists? As an only somewhat left-of-center liberal in the Midwest, I don't meet them IRL and my internet diet must just lean that way.
@marxbro1917 "Reading" would be an overstatement, "stumbled across" comes closer to reality. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams who are definitely accelerationists. Slavoj Žižek. Eric Hobsbawm. Freddie DeBoer, who for several years lived probably within a 45 minute drive of my house while working on his doctorate at Purdue.
But my assessment in my original comment I think comes primarily from two things. First, coming across some accelerationist arguments and (apparently mistakenly) assuming they were typical. Again, I live in a place where the only Marxists I meet IRL are the stereotypical callow hipster college students, and I'm not a Marxist myself or particularly interested in Marxism, so my political vision doesn't pick out the nuances in the shades of Red that someone with an internet handle of "marxbro1917" probably cares deeply about.
Secondly though, I just can't square arguments I see people making (whether or not they identify as accelerationist or even Marxist at all) any other way. The negative reaction to billionaire philanthropy for instance seems patently absurd to me but would make perfect sense in a worldview where no matter what good it does it props up the existing corrupt capitalist system where people are allowed to be billionaires at all.
The negative reaction to billionaire philanthropy is to the bit where they decide how it is spent - because of the concern that this just reinforces billionaire control over society. If you think that "billionaires have too much power" is a bigger problem than "charities don't have enough money", then it makes perfect sense and doesn't require an accelerationist argument.
If billionaires want to give their money away, then they should actually give it away, not transfer it to a foundation where they decide how it is spent.
I don't understand what you mean by "actually give it away."
If they give it away, it is always their choice whom to give it to. If you don't want them to have that choice, you have to tax away the money.
Or do you mean voluntarily giving it to the state to then distribute based on democratic decision making?
Ok, re: billionaire power vs. charitable needs, I get that and that the conclusion follows logically from the premise, I just have trouble seeing how anyone could look at the world we live in and possibly think that. I mean, sure, there are probably some billionaires really do have outsized influence, but they're the exception rather than the rule. Availability heuristic maybe? Do the people making that argument worry about the nth scion of the Walton/Rockefeller/Mellon/Vanderbuilt/whatever clan having too much power? Or are they really just talking about e.g. George Soros/the Koch brothers/Bezuckerbergos?
Sure a billion dollars is a large amount of money <i>to a single individual</i>, but it's a blip on the federal budget, much less society as a whole. It does not seem to me that billionaires have too much power. People do make such arguments and when you refute their individual points they get this look and say "well it's bad anyways". And <i>that's ok</i>. I'm not saying that everything we believe has to be backed by a logically consistent worldview. I just can't help but think it comes from an underlying <i>moral</i> judgement about whether it's ok for someone to have a billion dollars in the first place. Doubly so because while I disagree for complicated reasons it nevertheless seems a defensible position: a billion dollars an incomprehensible amount of money to an individual person and there are plenty of starving people in the world. I have a lot of sympathy for that argument and it makes more sense to me that the other one is an adhoc appendage to it rather than moon gibberish.
And on that note it seems conversely obvious to me that charities do not have enough money. It seems equally obvious that there are some worthy charities that languish for e.g. lack of optics where marginal spending (in absolute terms) matters crucially. Things that ultimately matter but both the private market and public institutions have failed to provide for reasons good or bad. Vaccines and bed nets in Africa. The Bronx Freedom Fund. Whatever. There's always more needs than resources.
I suspect it's the usual "the people who are most extreme get heard more because they're controversial" thing happening in social media. I'm not sure that there's a good solution to it though.
That's accelerationism, but there's also an argument I call the hostage-taking argument. That is, if you require the rich and powerful to subject their own children to the hellscape of public schools, they'll be incentivized to make them better. It's not very convincing either, for several reasons. One is that even 20%ers and 1%ers can't actually reform the system that easily. Heck, even 0.01%ers probably can't. The system has some serious inertia. Much easier just to come up with a new way of letting their own children escape. Another is that a good one-size-fits-all system probably just isn't possible (and anything but that effectively allows the rich people an escape). And of course a third is it's morally repugnant to hold people's children hostage.
If they are rich enough, they'll send their children to private schools. If you ban private schools, they'll send their children to private schools in another country. If you ban them and their children from leaving the country, then you're an authoritarian state.
You also start to see sortition by school district. It already exists, but it would grow substantially if that was the only option.
This is definitely a debate within Marxism and leftism in general: should you make incremental improvements now at the cost of potentially delaying the inevitable wholesale improvements you really want?
There are also non-communist Marxists. For example, you can appreciate and agree with Marx's critiques of capitalism but think the best solution we can get to in practice is some sort of countervailing force within capitalism that mitigates the harm it does. I think it's reasonable to be a Marxist social democrat or a Marxist Rhine capitalist. You can be a Marxist labor union activist even though the concept of a "labor union" would be redundant/meaningless in a society in which the workers owned the means of production. Marxism is much broader than just communism - there's a whole method of analysis which can be applied to economics, politics, and other fields as well - and its strategies are not limited to this extreme accelerationist worldview.
Not just within leftism. It was also an argument within libertarianism. Rothbard condemned libertarian efforts to reduce government regulation of the economy as being an "efficiency agent for the state." If only things got bad enough ...
"This is a compelling argument. But it accidentally proves too much. If white supremacists wanted to make a rule that only white people could hold high-paying positions, on what grounds (besides symbolic ones) could DeBoer oppose them?"
I don't think this is as important to Freddie's model because in his model, the material difference between the bottom and top rungs is colossally less wide than it is now. No, narrower even than that. It seems in that model not a very important thing to argue over who sits on which rung because they are so close together and, importantly, people can gain more by doing things they want to do than fighting for a higher rung (thus coming around closer to an almost libertarian description, but then utopian visions do have a tendency to converge).
I agree that imagining a world in which that was so is nigh impossible but it does explain why he wouldn't care much about designing a system that was resistant to being captured by any particular group.
The idea that homework doesn't promote learning seems counter to the very basic observation that practicing something makes one better at that thing. Or that kids who were never taught math could, with a small amount of time focused on it, end up at the same place as kids with years of math classes - same thing. If kids had been practicing math for 10 years, how could they *not* be better than those who'd done it for 6 months or whatever?
The obvious counter to this is that the classes or the homework don't actually make the kids "practice" and that's why it doesn't work. In which case it seems obvious how to make the classes or the homework better, no?
If you want to get better at, say, chess, you practice more chess. If you want to get better at a second language, you practice reading and conversing in that language. If you want to get better at shooting a basketball, you go shoot basketballs. These points seems incontrovertible to me. So what am i missing regarding homework or math classes?
The value isn’t in knowing x. It’s the proven ability to learn X in Y time that’s valuable.
I am also skeptical of the idea that one year of maths education can be as effective as six years, it seems like it might be a "Beware the man of one study" situation.
On the other hand, I will say that the vast majority of "maths homework" that I did throughout my K-12 career was of basically zero value once I got to university and saw what _real_ mathematics was about; it was endless hours of diminishing returns getting ever-so-slightly better at applying a mechanical solution to some very limited class of problem in arithmetic/algebra/trigonometry/calculus. As an adult with a career that is far more mathematical than most, I'm sure I can't possibly do mental arithmetic as fast as ten-year-old me, nor do integration-by-parts as well as seventeen-year-old me, because those skills which I spent so many hours developing I lost because they were useless.
I bet a lot of the explanation for catching up in math is just that there's very little math done in K-7 (and for good reason, many children don't develop good abstract reasoning skills until their teens). The K-7 curriculum, AFAIK, is just arithmetic and a bit of pre-algebra. It's a lot of drills, but not much knowledge being acquired.
I don't think you'd see the same result if you skipped math through 10th grade and then tried to catch up in 11th grade.
I suspect what's going on is that there's simply a limit to how many hours a day are productive for learning. There's plenty of time already available in a typical K-12 school day to fill your brain up.
I imagine there's a lot of nuance and confounding effects in these studies (e.g. teachers who don't assign homework probably are using class time more efficiently), but ultimately there's always going to be massively diminishing returns after ~6 hours/day.
https://www.cardcow.com/841838/mr-osborne-may-excused-my-brain-full-gary-larson-far-side/
My experience doing homework at a reasonably-good-but-not-excellent high school was that most homework failed to either force me to repeat tasks that were worth practicing or re-learn concept that were worth learning. This was in stark contrast to my experience excellent undergrad where most homework either forced me to practice things worth practicing or go back and re-learn material to fill gaps in my understanding.
The exception to this rule was paper writing where any amount of practice improved my writing ability.
Practice doesn't make you better. Practice with feedback and adjustment makes you better.
This is potentially confusing because most things that are fun, are fun because they have a natural feedback process built into them. Getting the feedback is a reinforcement mechanism - it's what makes the fun thing fun. "when I do A correctly, then B happens, and I like B" is a great way to teach you how to do A. At some level, that's why chess, conversation, and basketball are fun, when done correctly. You play your game and you immediately see whether you are capturing pieces or being captured, and whether you eventually win or lose. You make your comment and you get a response. You shoot your shot and you see if the ball goes in. The feedback is a natural, built-in reward system. It teaches you. That's why we learn so well from games.
Much homework, however, is not like this. It's not intrinsically motivating because it doesn't come with immediate, natural, obvious feedback. Solving an algebra problem is like this: If I give you 2x-10=3, solve for x, and you write "x=5" on your paper, then you have received no feedback, no satisfaction, and no indication that your solution method was wrong. Maybe if you're lucky the teacher marks this homework a day or two later and you say "ah; x was actually 6.5... how about that?" - but you haven't learned anything. Now do 50 of these per night. And of course if you have an answer key the incentive is for you to just copy answers from it.
What students really need is guided practice, not just repetition.
I have a little data on this. Our kids went to a Sudbury model (unschooling) school for some years before we shifted to home unschooling. A class only happened if students asked for it. One year some students wanted to learn math. In the course of the year, a group of students of mixed ages went from zero to the early stages of algebra.
I never did much homework until I hit higher math and physics; then it became very valuable to have blocks of uninterrupted time alone when I could master problem-solving.
The burrito test is new to me. I do remember from middle+high school a small number of teachers who, being unwilling to follow the rules dictated from on high (or, in one or two cases, perhaps unfamiliar with the notion of "rules"), ran classrooms that passed this test, and adjacent tests I could concoct. This was in a school that shortened the inter-class period from 8 mins to 5 mins to make sure people didn't linger in the hallway, and also took the doors off of the bathrooms for "security".
My interpretation of this is as a strong argument in favor of heterogeneity --- and therefore also in favor of charter schools.
It's usually taken as a given that students are unable to judge their teachers --- how should a *kid* know if (s)he's learning? --- but given that students aren't really learning so much anyway, perhaps allowing students to chose teachers wouldn't be a terrible idea. Is there any good reason not to adopt a policy of "horrifically unpopular elementary school teachers will be put on probation"?
A good reason I can think is that most kids would prefer a teacher who lets them prat around and do no work. If you genuinely believe that no learning happens, then it makes sense to pay teachers to be glorified child entertainers (and you could require fewer credentials and pay them much less).
At a slight tangent, the system Adam Smith supported for universities was one in which professors were paid directly by the students. So if nobody wanted to take your classes you didn't get any income, unless you were one of the minority who also had a fellowship as part of your income. I'm not certain, but I think that in the 18th century boys went to university considerably younger than now. Smith writes: "No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as is well known wherever any such lectures are given."
Wasn't that the system in France in the middle ages?
I found myself surprised at the strength of your preference against schools at first, but from the sounds of the descriptions you give, schools really are much much more awful where you live than they ever were for me. I guess I had a sort of impression of American schools from pop culture but I assumed that it was... I don't know, exaggerated for dramatic effect? It's jarring to imagine that they might really have been like that!
They... aren’t. Or at least they aren’t universally like that.
American higher education is popular among people in other countries. Primary education is another story/
Like everything else, it depends. I went to New York City public schools. Some, like mine, were totally fine. Others were clearly hellholes. It depended on the neighborhood and whether it was a magnet school (like a charter, but for a specific area like tech or performing arts). My high school was unremarkable except that it was huge - 4300 kids. It was nothing like the movies, neither gritty teen dramas nor “High School Musical”. I kept waiting for all the stereotypical exciting high school shenanigans to happen, but mostly it was pretty uneventful.
I'm not the best person to make this case, but my impression of the argument against the idea of endorsing charter schools as ways to help at least some kids goes like this:
We have lots of publicly provided goods in society - national defense, mass transit, food inspection, schools, roads, etc. Some of it can be opted out in various ways (mass transit and schools), some less so (national defense). Much of the political dynamic over the last 40 years has involved the conservative view that if you tear down / open up these systems, everyone can choose what they want and will be better off. The liberal response is that approach is a way to dismantle the aspects of society that help the least fortunate, so no. The conservative rejoinder is that public schools are a lost cause, and we should save who we can.
The liberal objections to charter schools is that they represent a deliberate effort to dismantle the common project of public schooling by peeling off exactly the children with parents with the most power and resources, and consigning everyone else to an even worse life because the charter schools drain both money and common political will from the effort to improve them. It is like saying the roads are bad and filled with potholes, so we're going to build a tollways next to it so at least people who can afford to pay will have safe travel. Now if you think that even fixing the roads is a bad idea (i.e. schools are prisons), then exiting to a different path is great, but I don't think that's how most people see it. Liberals think the point is to fix the damn roads, and if only poor people use the roads, they will never be fixed.
The real question is, what are the realistic politics? If you keep charter schools out and force people to attend the public schools, will they improve? If people who can't afford private school and have to use the local public school have to either live with a bad school, or participate in the PTA, run for school board, pay attention to and vote for school levies, will that do the trick? I doubt that has actually worked, and I think liberals have a lot of arguments that conservatives have deliberately starved public education of funds for many ulterior reasons, but I think that is the core issue.
On the other hand, if you fundamentally believe that public primary education is helplessly broken, then this argument misses the point. But a lot of people think that school is a net positive, even for kids, and want it to be as good as it can for as many people as possible.
All of this may be obvious to everyone else, but I find the basic assumptions behind these arguments useful to lay out, at least for my own understanding.
If you give the poor money, then they can use toll roads or save the money for something they prefer and avoid congesting the roads.
Out of curiosity, has anything like that ever been tried in the developed world? A town or region in an industrialized country with a fully privatized educational system? I am not aware of it, and it might be interesting to see it play out.
There's another part of this too. The conservative view tends to see the family as the core unit involved, whereas the liberals see the child as the key participant. (Different from other left-right debates for some reason.) The liberal side says that a child with neglectful parents should have just as much opportunity for a good education. Since children can't be expected to navigate an open marketplace, society assumes the obligation of providing that. I'm not sure if I have ever heard a conservative response to that - if equality of opportunity is indeed the goal, how to you provide equal opportunity for children regardless of parental attention, capability, or even presence?
It wasn't industrialized, but the Puritans made education mandatory for children, but didn't publicly provide it.
England got compulsory public schooling gradually over the course of the 19th century. Early in the century it was a private system. E.G. West, _Education and the Industrial Revolution_ discusses it. He does not find any evidence that literacy increased faster after public schooling went in, but the available data isn't very good.
"If you keep charter schools out and force people to attend the public schools, will they improve?"
No, they won't. The crab mentality will kick in and the good/high IQ students will be dragged down.
https://quillette.com/2019/02/10/public-educations-dirty-secret/
“ The liberal objections to charter schools is that they represent a deliberate effort to dismantle the common project of public schooling by peeling off exactly the children with parents with the most power and resources, and consigning everyone else to an even worse life because the charter schools drain both money and common political will from the effort to improve them.”
The issue I have with this logic is that, bluntly, it forces students and parents who give a shit to accept significantly worse outcomes in order to force students and parents who don’t give a shit to be marginally better.
The best experiences I had in high school were in “honors” classes, AP courses, and community college classes, with students self selected for innate intelligence yes, but also a healthy dose of student and parent give-a-shit (there were plenty of smart slackers coasting through the standard curriculum).
The worst were in the state mandated classes that everyone had to take, where I was mixed in with disruptive assholes and stoners who were just counting time until they could drop out with parents who were perfectly fine with their kids getting knocked up at 17 and spending their lives doing menial jobs in the town they were born in.
Incidentally, this didn’t map all that closely to wealth - there were plenty of relatively well off among the slacker set, and plenty of tryhards with single Tiger moms. And it wasn’t necessarily the teachers - my least favorite class had one of my favorite teachers who I genuinely felt bad for (he was a newer teacher, and by union seniority rules got shafted with the shit classes).
If students are going to not give a shit, if parents are going to abdicate their responsibilities, why must the conscientious families sacrifice their time and effort trying to marginally improve the education of people who genuinely don’t want it? I don’t go all in on “school is a prison” like Scott, but when I do trend that way it’s because of this Harrison Bergeron race to the bottom stuff.
You're conflating the argument A/ charter schools will create a two-tiered system wherein high quality schooling is generally available to only higher socio-economic status children, with an argument B/ effective schooling that acknowledges and accommodates differences in interest and aptitude is not possible in a universal public education system. Arg B is plainly false, there are counterexamples in many EU countries at least.
Your experiences are aligned with one of deBoer's core arguments in his book, i.e. the current US education system is fundamental flawed due to being predicated on a single "success" path culminating in a college degree. As you've seen, this ignores reality, imposes impossible expectations on educators, and harms students.
The solution is to reform the public education system to provide suitable paths for those that aren't academically inclined, not to extract the college track into a separate system for the affluent and leave everyone else in an underfunded rump that works for no one.
The trick is standardized testing, score based and ranked report cards, free education, and a homogenized school system. Shuffle kids into schools with standardized testing, and allow good public schools to compete for students and students to compete for schools.
There's only so much a parent can do to help his or her kid in an exam hall.
Allocating kids to schools by testing means either moving kids every year or two or else late developers get stuck in the wrong school. Neither of those are good solutions.
The far better solution is bigger schools, big enough that you can separate the students within the school. Also much more variety of classes and let the kids - at least at high school and probably at middle/junior high level too - pick specific classes with a wide variety of tracks.
There should be a basic skills requirement to graduate - the ability to read and write sufficiently well to be able to fill in an official form, the ability to understand enough arithmetic to keep track of your finances as an adult, enough civics to have a general idea that you can vote and what you can vote for, etc.
But English or Mathematics or Government beyond that should be voluntary, the same as everything else. If you want to do trig or calc or study To Kill a Mockingbird or Shakespeare, or do a class in the internal workings of the US Senate, or study mediaeval Chinese history or start learning a language, or learn IPA (one of the rare skills that I think far more people would find useful than actually have learned it, and not an especially hard one to learn), or whatever, then go ahead, there's a class for that.
You can't do this in rural areas, because the travel distances required to have a school this big are too great to be practical (this is why universities, which have exactly this structure, are always residential institutions in rural areas, but there are commuter schools in higher-density areas).
Unfortunately in practice, attempts to do this within the public school system have come under attack as themselves contributing to systemic racism. E.g. the current push in New York and San Francisco to assign seats at highly competitive public schools by lottery rather than standardized test, since the latter has resulted in a student body heavily biased toward Asian and to a somewhat lesser extent white students.
this is rather obviously overblown and extremely unfair to the students in such schools, and such complaints bely racist attitudes towards Asians in the American body politic.
I am cautiously in favor of European style tracking, and definitely of deemphasizing “college as the one true path of success”. But I don’t think that is realistically achievable in the United States, at least not any time soon, due to racial equity concerns.
In the meantime I am extremely sympathetic to a right of exit for families who want something different than what the local one-size-fits-all public school might be offering, and I support things like vouchers and charters that can offer options regardless of SES. Why should they be forced to waste their child’s whole educational career fighting a Quixotic battle against a broken system that refuses to do its job?
Especially when often the biggest problem is often disinterested, disruptive, abusive students - why should I sacrifice the education of my own kids to benefit kids who were offered free education on a silver platter and instead of sitting down to eat it chose to flip the table over?
It's not clear whether you're saying it should be, but "parent give-a-shit", while obviously preferable, should not be a prerequisite for a child to have access to quality education commensurate with their interest and aptitude. This is entirely achievable–certainly for any OECD country–and there are strong arguments for why from "maximize human potential and flourishing" to "maximize our national economic productivity and competitiveness".
Ideally it would not be, although I don’t think you can eliminate the positive benefit of parental involvement and interest in education (nor should you try, ans when you do, that’s when I start getting the Harrison Bergeron vibes).
My objection is to the argument “good students and good parents should be forced to stay in a failing school system so that the parents will lobby for reform”. That’s unfairly allocating the burden of creating a good system on a small segment of the most willing to be involved parents. Instead the burden ought to fall on the employees of the school system itself - but in practice these are often the very people the involved parents must spend the most time fighting to get a decent education for their kids!
Give a shit is doing a ton of work here, and a lot of it is un-merited. In my neighborhood, there is a neighborhood school. It's fine. There is also, about three miles off, a magnet for gifted kids. A lot of the neighborhood kids my kids went to preschool with go there. (For the record, my kids could too, we just don't send them there.)
The kids from the magnet boast about how their school has one of the best reading scores in the state. My local public doesn't. But, my local public has kids with fifteen different native languages. There are multiple kids only a year or two out of refugee camps. All of these kids have to take the reading test after a year here. And my school is educating them all. Not some, not just the ones who know the system well enough to jump through hoops, but all of them.
And I don't think it's really fair to say that their parents don't give a shit. Getting from Somalia (or wherever) to America is hard, and has been much harder recently. I think that shows give-a-shit-ness. But I doubt they've had much of a chance to explore the local charter and magnet school ecosystem. They're busy. They're in a new country, learning yet another new language, figuring out how to get work and live here, navigating emigration. Give a shit is a really entitled way of referring to the leisure and system mastery to work the bureaucracy. I think it's really functioning as a proxy for white collar and middle class.
And for the record, all of those kids are at least bi-lingual, many of them are multi-lingual. I think the assumption that they're dumber than my kids is a mistake (except inasmuch as my kids are the smartest in the region), or that going to school with them is dragging my kids down, even if they are missing out on one of the best reading schools in the state.
"Give a shit is a really entitled way of referring to the leisure and system mastery to work the bureaucracy."
That's not what I think of when I think of giving a shit. I think of parents that keep on their kids to do their homework, show up on time, and be polite and respectful. Immigrant kids can have their own issues, but if their parents give a shit they'll catch up on language issues/navigating the system within a couple years.
Most of your post is about immigrant kids, and while that creates particular issues at particular schools, I don't think it's the main driver of public schools underperforming or the phenomenon Gbdub is referring to.
It really isn't just about peeling of the best students. In New Orleans they went
to 100% charter schools and all students are better off. Competition is simply better than a monopoly.
Scott even discussed that example above! And I tried pointing to that to counter Education Realist's claims about skimming, although I can't find the particular post now. He thinks the charters there will inevitably unionize and then they'll lose their cost advantage.
"I think liberals have a lot of arguments that conservatives have deliberately starved public education of funds for many ulterior reasons" is not credible empirically. Per pupil expenditure has gone up 3x since 1970 and the U.S. has the second highest per pupil expenditure in the world, after oil-rich Norway,
https://www.insider.com/how-much-countries-around-the-world-spend-on-education-2019-8
The "starved public education of funds" is false propaganda. There is also a literature showing that, at best, there is a weak correlation between spending and outcomes. Culture is a far more important variable. Utah has the lowest per pupil K12 spending in the US yet the highest rates of social mobility of any state. Converting to Mormonism would almost certainly do more for improving educational outcomes than would an additional 3x increase in spending.
There is a need to train children to obey authority and adhere to factory-like schedules. Bathroom passes are part of the socialization process.
I keep hearing this, but it never makes sense to me - no job I've worked has ever required me to limit bathroom breaks to a specific time. And half my college classes started with some variation of "I don't have a bathroom policy. You're not in elementary school, if you need to leave my class then just leave quietly."
Is this a holdover from the old days when students would go straight to the factory after high school?
Yes. You're a college grad. Most people are not, and were not.
School prepares the median student for the world, which is why they should allocate classes and schools based on grades and stratify the student body to enable optimized education methods for each stratum. Students are all different, and require different things from school. The American education system's failure to stratify its student body is a major issue with it.
There has been a fair bit of publicity recently about Amazon not allowing (or implicitly not allowing) its workers to even go on bathroom breaks, with some workers having to pee in bottles to meet their quotas. I'm not familiar with other factory positions, but I'd assume that having fixed bathroom breaks is at least common, if not ubiquitous.
It’s because jobs you have had are selected for conscientiousness. It’s assumed (usually correctly) that you will plan your biological and personal needs such that you don’t need to peace out in the middle of a critical meeting or a rush of customers (and if you do, you have a damn good reason).
But children do need to be taught some measure of self control, and that’s entirely beside the children who are actual assholes that will abuse any inch of privilege they are given.
I freely admit to being the little punk who was the reason bathroom hall passes exist.
Because some people seem confused by this apparently American institution, the hall pass was just a block of wood or something you carried to the bathroom show you had permission to walk the halls. Also, there were only two in each class, which limited how many kids were out at one time. It also incentivized you to return promptly, lest another kid become figuratively or even literally pissed at having to wait.
At six or seven years old, I was bored often enough that I routinely abused my bathroom privileges, staying out until someone tracked me down loitering in the stairwell or breaking into supply closets. It really did have to be drummed into me that I was scaring my teacher, annoying my classmates and making a general nuisance of myself.
Someone might argue that maybe the school needed less structure or a more engaging curriculum. Maybe, but I think I personally needed to learn a little about the impacts of my actions on others.
I’m sorry for spoiling bathroom breaks for everybody else.
In my previous call center job, they assigned each of us a schedule of two 15 minute breaks, and one 1 hour meal break. All the rest of the time we had to be ready to receive calls.
It was a pain, but I can understand the logic behind it. The more people on the phone, the less callers have to wait on hold, and the shorter the call que.
I think that bureaucratic processes more often arise from ordinary bureaucratic incentives, rather than some grand scheme to turn your child into a 19th century Prussian factory worker.
Bathroom passes exist because at some point they didn't exist, and children left the classroom willy-nilly and went to smoke behind the bike shed. Or maybe they went down the street to McDonalds and got run over by a car.
Then the teachers got in trouble, so they came up with the most obvious possible solution to the problem of "how can we prevent children from randomly vanishing during class while still letting them use the bathroom?" Lo and behold, the bathroom pass was born.
In terms of Freddie, his primary genius his ability to understand that people can’t do more than they are capable of. His chief flaw is his inability to understand that people can easily do less than they are capable of. And people doing less than they are capable of is why the Soviet Union didn’t work so well.
Once we have GWAS scores for IQ, ability to work hard, etc we can lay a head tax on people based on it so the more gifted must get high-paying jobs just to have the same after-tax income of the less gifted. We can already tax the tall: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/12/tax-the-tall.html
I'm pretty confused in the section about mobility. You use the example of white supremacists who say only whites should hold high-status positions, and say that it doesn't seem possible to object to this without saying that mobility is inherently good...and then you go on to make 3 objections, NONE of which appear to me to imply that mobility is inherently good.
Your second objection is that it's better if high-status positions are distributed widely (as opposed to being clumped in social-network space), and your third is that equality is inherently better than inequality. But I don't see any inherent reason you couldn't have a mostly-flat hierarchy with wildly-distributed success and still have low mobility.
Your first objection is meritocracy. Perhaps you can't have meritocracy without mobility (if only because merit is not static), but the reverse doesn't seem true--you can have mobility without having meritocracy. So this still doesn't seem like it implied mobility is *inherently* good, or that more mobility is necessarily better than less mobility.
Sounds like overall you're saying "all improvements are necessarily changes", but that hardly implies that maximizing changes is a good strategy.
Maximizing change would require repeatedly reversing the hierarchy. I don't think Scott wants that kind of maximized "mobility". Permitted, but not required.
> Maximizing change would require repeatedly reversing the hierarchy.
This is far from obvious. Repeatedly reversing the hierarchy will have very little effect on people in the middle, which is where you expect most people to be.
Before we can say what maximizing change requires, we need to specify how we measure the amount of change that has happened.
Good point, maximizing change might require something like rot13.
I think the issue is that Freddie’s argument against mobility is basically “it still produces a hierarchy, and hierarchy is bad!”. Scott’s objection is basically, “clearly not all hierarchies are created equal, otherwise you have no basis to prefer a meritocratic hierarchy to a white supremacist partriarchal hierarchy”.
He's not saying you can't object to the white only elite without saying mobility is bad, but that DeBoer's argument against mobility also applies even in this hypothetical. He then goes on to explain how he would defend mobility, even considering DeBoer's argument that it's a zero sum game. Part of that reasoning is that mobility is necessary for meritocracy.
In the Turkheimer paper you link, he says:
"Third Law. A substantial portion of the variation in complex human behavioral traits is not accounted for by the effects of genes or families." which you link to in the sentence that says "All show that differences in intelligence and many other traits are mostly due to genes, not shared environment."
Those don't seem to say the same thing at all. What did you mean here?
The following sentences qualify it, "But at least here and now, most outcomes depend more on genes than on educational quality", but the original seems like it disagrees with what you're quoting. Maybe you meant it as a pointer to the broader literature which does support the version you said?
Thanks, I've changed the link to an article on Plomin.
His argument about race and IQ is not necessarily contradictory; it could be the case that there are genetic differences between individuals that explain differences in IQ, but also that every ethnic group has the same distribution of those genetic differences as every other ethnic group. (I don’t know how plausible this is genetically, or if there are any studies suggesting it’s true, but it’s at least an internally consistent theory.)
The point is selective rigor. Of course one could be true but not the other, but the two theoried should be held to the same standard of evidence.
I don't think it's even selective rigor. That'd be the case if he were convinced by the evidence in one case but not the other. However, for both cases he handles the disagreement on the moral dimension, while having opposite opinions for the two cases.
In the individual differences case, DeBoer states that inequality exists, other people respond with "well, but wouldn't that be a morally monstrous world?", and he responds by saying they're confused about where people's moral value comes from.
In the racial differences case, DeBoer states that it would be morally monstrous if such differences existed. But the same moral argument applies--even if races were to differ in intelligence, we could believe that they still have equal moral value.
There's the empirical question and the normative one. Empirically he could be correct that there are environmental factors affecting racial groups differently and this suffices to explain group differences. But normatively, it's hard to say there's a bigger moral issue with genetic differences between groups rather than within groups. Freddie argues hard that the within group differences in smarts are morally irrelevant and don't make people of lesser value, but wouldn't make the same argument for between group differences.
Scott did say he'd ban this topic.
Completely implausible. If a bunch of smart people meet up and decide to settle a distant continent, you get a group that's smarter.
Unless nature selects for groups having a constant(magic number?) intelligence level(why would it select across human groups, and not across species?), it's likely groups will have different average intelligence even just due to random selection events; throw in environmental selection, and it becomes even more likely.
Yes, schools are mostly "child prisons". But isn't this a good way to prepare children to later be able to handle their four-decade plus sentence in the far harsher adult prison of soul-crushing nine-to-five workplace drudgery?
I greatly prefer work to school. That could reflect having a relatively good job, but it's also because employers need to get employees to choose to work for them and schools just rely on families living nearby (which can affect the decisions of parents, but doesn't directly depend on the kids).
"But isn't this a good way to prepare children to later be able to handle their four-decade plus sentence in the far harsher adult prison of soul-crushing nine-to-five workplace drudgery?"
No.
Because younger children are more cooperative than older ones, if this was true, child labor laws would not exist.
The real argument for schools was always very simple - ensure inoculation in certain social ideas. That's why there's so much opposition to home schooling. Parents may teach children some retrograde ideas
https://arizonalawreview.org/homeschooling-parent-rights-absolutism-vs-child-rights-to-education-protection/
https://harvardmagazine.com/2020/05/right-now-risks-homeschooling
Living in complex societies with tens of millions of people is not "natural." People need to be trained how to do it.
To perform training, there is a need to establish the end goal of thereof.
There are different ways to adopt to society. We have self-appointed group of people who are defining the parameters of the training.
Amusingly enough, Lyman Stone suggests that the rise of public education is the primary cause of increased athiesm in current society, with some pretty compelling arguments actually. It's buried in this report somewhere, but the case includes the fact that in Indonesia (I think?), the government ended up promoting a policy that increased attendance at Islamic secondary schools, and showing a causal increase in religiosity amongst that group.
https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/promise-and-peril-the-history-of-american-religiosity-and-its-recent-decline/
“A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare.”
Justice H. Walter Croskey, in the opinion holding that California parents do not have the right to home school their children. Later reversed.
>I don't know if this is what DeBoer is dismissing as the conservative perspective, but it just seems uncontroversially true to me.
No, DeBoer's view of the conservative argument is that people respond to incentives, i.e. the supply side instead of the demand side.
In your view, the customer wants the best person for the job, and is willing to pay for different jobs depending on their importance. So the smartest laborer becomes a doctor (where customers care a lot about the difference), the second smartest laborer a mechanic (where customers care about the difference, but less), the third smartest laborer a janitor (where customers still care about quality, but even less).
In the conservative's view, not only are laborers picking between jobs (if being a mechanic is less stressful and more fun than being a doctor, why wouldn't the smartest person want to be a mechanic instead of a doctor?), they're also able to change their own abilities (someone who is smart who can either be a consultant for free or become a doctor by studying very hard will only study very hard if it's better to be a doctor than a consultant).
This only goes so far, tho--it might explain the difference between doctors and consultants, but not the difference between doctors and janitors. DeBoer is focusing on the latter gap, I think, and noting the conservative is exaggerating their theory's ability to explain it.
Scott’s discussion about the odd inconsistency in DeBoer’s views on the implications of IQ and superiority reminds me of the reaction I had when I heard a discussion on that issue between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein. Klein was expressing the same concern as DeBoer - that to say that there were genetically based differences in IQs in different populations was to suggest that some groups are intrinsically superior to others. And I just had no earthly idea what he was talking about. I mean, if you ask Ezra Klein “Is a person with a high IQ intrinsically superior to a person with a low IQ?,” the odds that he’ll say yes are approximately zero point nothing percent. Of course Klein knows that IQ does not convey superiority in any morally significant sense! But this would seem to imply he both believes “High IQ individuals are not superior to low IQ individuals” (agreed!) and “High IQ groups are superior to low IQ groups” (disagreed!). This tension seems easy to resolve - just acknowledge that IQ does not affect comparative moral worth at he individual or group level.
Also, Scott, your description of school-as-hell was deeply resonate with me. I can say without exaggeration that my time in the public school system was more miserable to me, and left me with deeper scars and issues, than my time in Iraq.
Ethnic groups vary internally in SES, so it's rare that "a whole ethnic group is poor".
Ethnicity is different from race, but self-identified race actually does map quite well onto where a clustering algorithm would place your DNA.
https://med.stanford.edu/content/dam/sm/tanglab/documents/GeneticStructureSelfIdentifiedRaceEthnicityAndConfoundingInCase-ControlAssociationStudies.pdf
Currently genetics has a hard time distinguishing between French & Germans though, even though we would consider them to be quite distinct ethnically.
The statement “there’s more in group variation than variation between groups” is true, and also something Murray has pointed out over and over again, and he’s bent over backwards to make it clear that variation between groups tells you nothing about individual group members. So, it’s nice to see you agreeing with him on those points.
Everything you say here about clustering and within-group/between-group variation was addressed by Scott in one of his SSC posts: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/12/does-race-exist-does-culture/
They don't JUST have "some gene for dark skin". There are multiple correlated alleles, which is why someone having a de novo mutation in one won't cause the algorithm to put them in the wrong cluster. As for whether it's "meaningful", these aren't just junk DNA markers (although those are of course quite useful in tracing ancestry). Genes protecting against malaria, sleeping sickness and other tropical diseases are more common in... the tropics. The whole reason we find differences in skin color is because different environments (with different amounts of sunlight, along with food that may or not substitute for vitamin D from the sun) had different selective pressures. Words like "Kenyans, Nigerians, and Zimbabweans" refer to modern states and nationalities, which is correlated with ancestry but population geneticists would take about the groups within those countries and often fall on both sides of borders dating back to colonization. A larger number of clusters will get you those distinctions. Are they "meaningful"? There's always going to be a subjective aspect, but one rule of thumb is not to needlessly throw away information, which after all might correlated with other things of interest.
Except that the people who talk about the reason for different average outcomes by groups are making an implicit assumption about the distribution of IQ and other relevant characteristics — that it is the same for all groups, hence any differences in average outcome by group must be due to discrimination.
“Klein's point wasn't about whether it's strictly logical to say this or that. It was that group-level IQ differences are never discussed except as a just-so story to justify the fact that black people are worse off than white people.”
Klein may very well believe this, and he may also have said it elsewhere, but that just wasn’t what he said in the discussion I was citing. Also, it’s simply false to say that “group-level IQ differences are *never* discussed except as a just-so story to justify the fact that black people are worse off than white people.” I’m sure there are people who do this, but to claim that is literally the only time and context anyone ever discusses the topic just isn’t true. I don’t want to get too into the weeds on this because Scott was clear he didn’t want the comments to swerve into a discussion of The Bell Curve per se, but Scott does point out (to his discomfort) that the conclusions Murray reached in the book were in line with the expert consensus at the time, and that consensus has actually grown stronger over time as more research has been done (3 to 1 in favor of Murray’s basic thesis of a mix of genetic and environmental factors initially, becoming 4 to 1 in favor at present). Lots of discussion exists on about this topic, and only a tiny fraction of it even vaguely resembles what you describe to be its singular purpose and manifestation.
And even if your claim was true about how the topic is discussed, it still wouldn’t justify the response that it usually invokes. DeBoer points out that people are worried about the implications of IQ, genetics, and success, and that people are attempting to alleviate those worries with the Noble Lie that genetics has no influence on IQ or intelligence, or that IQ is irrelevant, etc. DeBoer correctly argues that we shouldn’t do this - instead, we should alleviate this worry not with a Noble Lie, but the Noble Truth, which is that IQ is morally irrelevant and has no bearing on people’s equality or moral worth. In the same way, if Klein (or others) are worried about the implications of possible group level genetic differences and how people might draw illegitimate conclusions from them (a reasonable worry!), the response isn’t the Noble Lie that no such differences exist. The proper response is the Noble Truth that any such differences which might exist are irrelevant, and that our commitment to the moral and political equality of all people doesn’t depend on every person or group having identical genetic endowments in all areas.
The Flynn Effect wasn’t surprising to Murray. After all, he’s the one who coined the term - in The Bell Curve, of all places. I’ve always been puzzled why people seem to think that the Flynn Effect is somehow incompatible with the argument in The Bell Curve, when the Flynn Effect itself is described there in detail and is integral to the argument of the book. (The actual argument in the book, not the constantly misrepresented version usually espoused by people who haven’t read it.)
I don’t know enough anthropologists to know if your description of their methodology is accurate, but if that is, it speaks poorly of them. For any factor X, if X is genetically influenced, the odds that the genetic factors influencing X will be tuned to exactly the same average and variance in every population on earth simultaneously is just staggeringly unlikely. And it’s not as though genetics is something that we “need to fall back on” if we are unable to find sufficient social factors to explain away all variance. It’s just one factor among many that influences things. Anthropologists citing their own inability to control for every possible confounding social variable as a justification for assuming at the outset that genetics is irrelevant is a classic argument from ignorance fallacy.
I’m not sure how one can reach that conclusion without actually knowing the contributions of genetics. The statement “social factors are wide ranging, and have huge impacts” can very well be true, but it just doesn’t follow from this that therefore genetic factors must be small or nonexistent or not worth looking into. That’s a non sequitur. For all it shows, both factors could be huge, or one could be larger but the other still relevant and worth knowing. Or not. But there is no way to determine either the relative or absolute size of the influence of two different things by studying only one of them and declining to study the other.
Why don’t you go over there and ask them if you’re so curious? I’ll reimburse you for your ticket.
And he should make sure to ask a mix of the Marsh Arabs (the ones who escaped the genocide), the Kurds, and the families of the ones that were lowered feet first into wood chippers by the Hussein government.
Man, I laughed pretty hard when I read this - I never thought to compare the two.
I would certainly do school again before going back downrange but I hear what you’re saying. I’m sorry school sucked so much for you.
I think the issue is less "I believe this to be true so that would lead to a bad conclusion" than "a lot of society believes this to be true (at least implicitly) so saying it would be used to justify bad actions." You can believe that people shouldn't believe a thing while acting on the knowledge that they do
Hi Scott, new subscriber here - thank you for this post, it was very interesting reading. I agree with much of what you say, but during the passages where you discuss your general view on the interaction between intellectual talent and social environment, I kept asking, "what about Michael Oher?"
If I understand you correctly, your belief is that social environment has relatively little effect on intellectual talent, and that the best we can do is find the kids with talent and give them as much of an opportunity as we can to thrive, while ensuring that the rest live comfortable, fulfilling lives in whatever adult role their relatively low-talent capacities permit.
I ask about Michael Oher because I'm not sure how his experience fits into your theory. Oher was the subject of a non-fiction book by Michael Lewis called The Blind Side (extraordinary book, very well-written, pretend the appallingly bad film adaptation doesn't exist). If you haven't read it, I really hope you do, because I'd love to read your review.
It's superficially about football, but for our purposes it's the story of a black teenager from one of the worst ghettos in America at the time: Hurt Village in Memphis, TN. Michael Oher was by consensus regarded as clinically stupid, and his total disaster of an academic career was believed to be in the expected range of results for someone of his tested intellectual capabilities. Around the age of 16, he was adopted by a very wealthy white family; over the course of two years, his IQ score went up two standard deviations, and his grades went up sufficiently (from straight Fs) that he became eligible for a college athletic scholarship.
The full story is incredibly fascinating (and heartwarming), but it's really hard for me to know of it and accept your contention that there's not much environment can do to affect intellectual potential. Or perhaps better put, it's hard for me to accept that the current academic estimations we have of the intellectual potential contained in America's impoverished communities is remotely accurate.
I would love to hear your thoughts, either now or after you've had a chance to read the book in question.
P.S. This is not necessarily incompatible with the thesis that there's only so much that school alone can do to unlock the intellectual potential of its pupils. Season 4 of The Wire makes the case eloquently (via art, of course, not science) that the life problems experienced by low-income students are often so profound that school is only a small piece of the solution, akin to getting a hospital bed - there's about a dozen other very important steps that need to occur to heal somebody apart from just giving them the bed.
I believe James Heckman has written on the "non-cognitive skills" which play into #2.
That's not a function of poverty, that's a function of culture. You can have a health culture, even if everybody is poor. Hell, by current standards, the people who founded this country were dirt-poor. They didn't even have electricity! Yet they were capable of complex thought.
> his grades went up sufficiently (from straight Fs) that he became eligible for a college athletic scholarship.
This is a narrow comment about this point, and not the rest of your post. There's a pretty substantial section of *The Blind Side* that describes gaming the school system to turn Oher's failing grades into passing grades. Lewis makes it pretty clear that there wasn't a whole lot of learning going on in those cases.
That said, I don't doubt that Oher was able to do better in school (and learn more) once he was consistently fed and clothed!
It's true the Tuohy's gamed the system with the "Great Mormon Grade Grab", but recall that those were to replace old F's with new A's - Oher still had to pass classroom tests during his senior year administered by the school, without his tutor present, just like any other kid, and according to Lewis, his private tutor and his teachers were all drilling him pretty hard.
I'm not suggesting he became a genius, but there was clearly a day-and-night improvement in his academic performance, and a significant amount of it required Oher to actually improve.
I haven't read the book, and something like that doesn't surprise me at all, but surely having private tutors isn't a fair comparison?
1. How to optimize outcomes for IQ 70-85 is not well understood. (Look at Blasi’s research on interventions for borderline intellectual function. That is progress but they’re just getting started.) My understanding is that that range correlates with negative environment having a stronger influence than it does in the higher and lower ranges.
I call it the Sammy Hagar problem. I love that guy, fantastic singer and successful businessman. High IQ he is not - the interviews are strange. But he is valued for his other contributions and those contributions are significant (yes, I enjoy Van Halen.) How to nurture and support people with alternative skill sets to make profound contributions?
2. The “smart” that there may be a “cult of” - I think it’s the 95-115s idolizing the 125+. Some have the idea that if they had a little more of the magic x, they’d be 130s, and that would make their lives better. I think it doesn’t work that way at all.
3. Meritocracy never operates in isolation. Institutions run to establish and perpetuate power of 115s, plus distributing emotional abuse and sometimes physical and additional typed, the kids who rise to the top in that are not necessarily the most meritorious. Some of it turns on how much PTSD someone has, how well they concentrate and trust groups. It selects for 115s with less trauma.
4. Agreed about learning math too young - some kids get abstraction very young and some don’t get it until much later - developmentally. Abusing those that don’t is miserable and a waste of time.
5. If US schools didn’t funnel the less -traumatized 115s to the upper middle class, those folks would get mad.
I don't like any post-Roth Van Halen albums but I am weirdly moved by the idea of making the world's Sammy Hagars thrive. Great comment.
I didn't know who Sammy Hagar was, so I looked him up... and his Wikipedia article says that in high school he "excelled academically"! Maybe you want to call it something else.
Thanks. Maybe I should. There’s a similarity between his communication in those old interviews, and the one person I know who has an 83 IQ, and I’ve been trying to make a map of what’s different in the one-standard-deviation below normal IQ. Maybe he is not the right example after all. Or maybe they share something else, or maybe Wikipedia is wrong in some way. Thanks for letting me know.
One of the biggest problems with the standard school system is the implied assumption that every child is the same, since why else do they expect everyone to learn the same subjects at the same pace? In reality people have different abilities and interests. Schools would look very different if they recognized this fact. Taking math as an example, some students should skip all advanced math and just learn the fundamental math that they never learned well, while other students could complete elementary school match in 4th grade and then choose specific areas to focus on.
Schools talk constantly about this fact. There’s a policy disagreement about the degree to which you should group classes by ability (and if so, how to differentiate instruction so that each student is challenged at the right level,) but not that different students should receive different instruction.
You can't even gate admission by test score in American high schools.
There needs to be stratification by standardized testing, and a de-emphasis of extracurriculars, which rich people can game excessively.
There's only so much help super-well-paid tutors can provide, although a much more comfortable learning environment and parental inculcation does help the better-off as well. But the child in an exam hall is isolated from such support, while the child in an extracurricular is not.
If a child could reasonably travel to more than one high school, then those high schools should be merged into a bigger high school that can provide more internal stratification by aptitude and interest. There is no reason for New York City to have more than 10 or so high schools.
There are 1.1 million students in the New York City public school system - if roughly 1/3 are in high school, you’re talking about high schools with populations pushing 40k or more, i.e. substantially bigger than the undergraduate populations at all but the largest public universities. That seems unnecessarily huge.
This assumes that there are only economies of scale and not diseconomies of scale in schooling, which strikes me as unlikely. From 1946 to 1974, the number of school districts in the U.S. fell about six fold and the number of students roughly doubled, producing an increase of more than an order of magnitude in the number of students per school district. It's a long time since I looked at the data, but I believe educational outcomes were declining over that period. For more on the complicated issue of why, see:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Peltzman_Comment/Peltzman_Comment.html, where I suggest some reasons to expect diseconomies of scale.
And American schools lack report cards with numerical grades and class/year rankings (e.g. 51st out of 211 students in say, Mathematics), which are necessary to implement stratification in a transparent manner.
Yet all states have graduation requirements that include math, science, social studies, and language arts. If we were serious about allowing for personalization, we would not mandate that students must either choose a highly stigmatized status as a high school dropout OR take classes that they may loathe and/or be bad at. A partial "solution" is to offer some high school courses that are a joke (e.g. many business math courses, "rocks for jocks" geology courses, etc.) but which allow students to "earn" the required credits to graduate.
DeBoer suggests exactly that in his book (specifically talking about an easy but useful stats course as an alternative to algebra, but it could be extended) and I agree it's a good idea.
There is a genre of recent new stories to the effect that kids are starting to lose their mind doing school over Zoom at home. It’s possible this is just inaccurate. But it seems like most kids don’t feel like school is soul crushing and get positive benefits from socialization with other kids (even if some of those experiences are themselves not fun or even emotionally hurtful). I say this as a gay kid who was a nerd and didn’t play sports and wasn’t very popular along any dimension.
The usual argument I've heard for homeschooling is that homeschooled kids *do* have socialization, just not through school. There's activities like sports, or groups of other home schooled kids. The problem with zoom classes now is that no one's seeing anyone else, and there's no real socialization options at all.
Seconding this. I was homeschooled, and usually had a group activity at least every other day. 4-H, book club, church events, homeschool group, and so on.
My own daughter is almost 2 now, and other than church (which isn't adhering very carefully to government orders) it's pretty hard to find other families to socialize with at present. She hasn't seen anyone outside the family in almost a month. This isn't normal, and isn't sustainable -- but not because of a lack of school.
I agree with this, although implicit in the assumption is a family unit that is willing and able to facilitate that. The modern two working parent household, particularly for poorer families, doesn’t really support that. I would posit that kids have better extracurricular outlets through school in these cases. Obviously these arrangements are interdependent but it’s hand waving to suggest if we change school then kids will just find edifying activities elsewhere.
I discuss this in a chapter of a book I'm working on, based largely on comments I got on my blog about home schooling. I turns out that, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics, as of 2016 only 55% of home schooled children came from two parent families where only one worked, with 11% from one parent families. The chapter is mostly about unschooling, but covers home schooling as well:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Education/Unschooling.pdf
Isolation is definitely bad for kids, but the precise model of 'school' that we currently have is far from the only possible model for kids to socialize.
Across the pond they have the word "swotty" for "studious". So perhaps it should have been called "The Cult of Swot". I learned that word from an interview with the screenwriter Nicole Taylor, who said she became a lawyer (something she wound up hating) because that's what students who were swotty but not into math/science did.
One other comment - Scott notes a few times how DeBoer seems to conflate “we can’t be absolutely certain of X” with “we can completely dismiss X.” He seems to make a similar flavored mistake when he says:
“For conservatives, at least, there's a hope that a high level of social mobility provides incentives for each person to maximize their talents and, in doing so, both reap pecuniary rewards and provide benefits to society. This makes sense if you presume, as conservatives do, that people excel only in the pursuit of self-interest.”
But, this is a straw man. Conservatives (or at least every single one I’ve talked with and read) do not believe “that people excel ONLY in the pursuit of self-interest,” nor do the general personal and social benefits DeBoer highlights depend on the assumption that self interest is the sole possible motivation for people to excel. All it requires to work is the belief that self interest is at least part of the reason, for at least part of the population. So, the argument doesn’t require that people are ONLY motivated by self interest.
I feel like we're ignoring the fact that schools have been shut down in some places for around a year, and so we've kind of stumbled into a weird natural experiment to test the hypothesis that getting rid of all schools and replacing them with nothing would be an improvement.
The consensus across the political spectrum seems to be that keeping schools closed is super bad and harmful to children. The only debate seems to be whether keeping schools closed is the lesser of two evils or not.
I'll admit I haven't dug into this any more than just reading newspaper articles about it. Do we know if there's any real evidence behind the idea that closing schools down for the pandemic is harming children, or is it just an assumption that everybody is making?
There's definitely evidence that this specific closing has been bad for students, but it's not exactly typical of what proponents advocate for. For example, kids can't get together physically; parents are stuck at home in a crowded space with their kids; and the education system wasn't prepared for this scenario.
Those are good points, thank you.
Bad in what ways? I expect test scores are going down (at least in the places where standards haven't been relaxed) since for all Scott's pessimism, school doesn't teach literally nothing and school via Zoom is worse at what teaching school does manage, but are we seeing kids being more unhappy/traumatized/all the other things getting them out of child prison was supposed to resolve (and if we are, are we controlling for the fact that a lot of that's probably due to lockdowns)?
I've definitely heard reports, both anecdotal and of data, that kids are more unhappy, although I haven't seen research data myself. I'm not sure how you really could control for it being due to lockdowns.
One way would be to look at the effect of lockdowns on kids who were already being home schooled.
I truly hope that someone does a good study on this. I think it will be really illuminating.
My roommate has been getting lots of texts/calls from his students begging to know when they can come back to school. He teaches a very low income cohort, and for a lot of them school is (a) their only reliable source of food, (b) their only chance at maybe getting a shot out of poverty, (c) their only escape from cruel parents/siblings, (d) one of the activities keeping them away from drugs, gangs, etc.
I'm not sure how you disaggregate "the pandemic sucks" from everything else, and it's admittedly a non-representative sample.
"and if we are, are we controlling for the fact that a lot of that's probably due to lockdowns"
Yeah, if public school is like unto a prison, you shouldn't expect to see an improvement by sending the kids off to smaller prisons. And normal pre-Covid homeschooling was not generally meant or understood to be kids spending literally all their time at home being parentally tutored in algebra and Aristotle and whatnot. I think there's strong overlap in support for home-schooling and support for free-range childhood, along with a range of structured social activities outside the home. All of which have been verboten for most of the past year, so nothing about this is going to work well.
Anecdotally, dear God yes. Not universally, but multiple kids of my acquaintance who had moderate anxiety/social issues that had been well addressed by their schools and parents and who were well integrated into their schools and peer groups have had flat out terrible years, to the point of their parents quitting jobs to manage or homeschool them. These families are very eager for schools re-opening next year.
"The consensus across the political spectrum seems to be that keeping schools closed is super bad and harmful to children." — is that the consensus? Because the consensus I seem to be seeing is that keeping schools closed forces parents to manage their kids 24/7...which many parents are unprepared for. I haven't seen much indication that the kids are learning less (and my sister is an anecdote to the contrary).
...and then I look up Slow Boring for a completely different comment, and discover that MattY is a Man of One Study showing that people are OK with the school closings: https://twitter.com/pollreport/status/1362156634735173635?s=21
Perhaps I should have said "the vast majority of articles I have read from both left leaning and right leaning news organizations seem to indicate that keeping schools closed is super bad and harmful to children." I apologize for the imprecision.
Related question I would love to see answered:
Is the problem with eg. algebra that it can't be taught *at all*, or that it can't be taught *in the time provided*?
That is, would a fixed curriculum be achievable to more if students were given personalized training at the pace they are capable of learning the material? If so, how would it be practical to achieve this?
I wish I could find an essay I read a few years ago from some Computer Science professor about how some people just can't learn how to program. He identified various concepts that proved to be insurmountable hurdles to a significant portion of his students every year. I think the hardest concept was recursion, the middle concept was loops, and the easiest concept was variable assignment.
Here you go!
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=887892586020755938&hl=en&as_sdt=0,26
See also:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M4RM7548nzXjMicvr/checking-for-the-programming-gear
Thank you! I've been looking for this for some time now!
Do note the failed replication attempts:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/M4RM7548nzXjMicvr/checking-for-the-programming-gear?commentId=ooMwcDZxsvt56cm4h
The author has publicly retracted this paper after a series of failed replications, see here: http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hump_retraction.pdf
Anecdotally, there's a decently large subset of students who forget pretty basic things like how to deal with fractions and the order of operations every time it's taught, almost instantly. Maybe they could do the algebra slowly, with open notes. And mostly they can, and eventually are allowed to graduate. But why? What's gained by this?
When I was a math TA for intro to college algebra (years ago), there were some students taking it multiple times. It seemed that the ones who struggled the most had not mastered fractions, and part of the reason for that was they had not mastered multiplication. Factors and multiples require some ability to do some mental math, thinking about multiplication, and if it isn’t already mastered it’s grim. Solving algebraic equations is all about multiplying and dividing, and polynomial factoring is nearly impossible without multiplication skills. I think math classes need to be split up into levels (like the Success for All reading curriculum out of Johns Hopkins) with a very high bar to move up. Teaching kids to memorize and teaching them to retain information is really important for the kids who don’t just remember naturally. Some kids master the material with more time, some need simplified curriculum.
I agree with this 100% and it drives me crazy how memorization and practice has gone out of fashion. I really like the analogy from the book "Make It Stick": "Memorizing facts is like stocking a construction site with the supplies to put up a house." Obviously memorization *alone* isn't enough to learn any useful math, but today we tell kids to build a house without giving them any wood.
I've done quite a bit of math tutoring across all levels. I love math and think it's a valuable life skill, and I wish everyone could enjoy it as I do. But, my impression is that there's a significant minority of people who simply lack the abstraction ability needed for success in algebra. What I've found very interesting (and very frustrating as a tutor) is that a lot of times, the students will understand and correctly answer an equivalent problem when phrased in terms of something concrete, like money. But once you write the symbols down on paper, the connection is gone, and they need to fall back to memorized rules which they quickly forget and will never be able to generalize. For example, a lot of kids can make change correctly, but still fail their arithmetic tests.
Although with enough practice they might get to a point where they can pass the class, it's such a stretch for them--and such a blow to self-esteem--that I wonder if it's the best use of schools' time.
Can they learn to translate the problem into money?
Well, sometimes it seems to help, sometimes not. In the successful cases, they're able to take their understanding of money and apply it to the math, and--with practice--eventually do away with the translation step. For other students, the translation step seems just as mysterious to them as the math, and the translation process is difficult for them. Also it runs into problems when you get into later curriculum that doesn't translate easily to money.
"This not only does away with "desert", but also with reified Society deciding who should prosper."
I appreciate this part as a Leftist, because I do find that we can sometimes come off as conspiracy theorist-y when we imply that someone consciously chose to make certain outcomes rather than mindless markets doing so. Pointing this out is helpful messaging advice.
However, as a society we HAVE chosen NOT to intervene (much) in the markets that make surgeons much more highly paid than, say, teachers. The idea of artificially raising the floor and lowering the ceiling of incomes mentioned later on is something the government could do, and I'd argue that choosing NOT to is also a choice (I haven't been a reader long but I know you're a fellow EA, which I assume means you also believe the utilitarian axiom that choosing not to act is as meaningful as acting).
I'm with you on DeBeor not using "meritocracy" correctly here, but I think he's referring to the widespread practice rather than the theory of putting of barriers to entry so that someone off the street isn't doing your surgery, the way many of my fellow Leftists use "capitalism" and you use "communism".
Yeah, the fact that Molochian incentives exist doesn't mean that there aren't genuinely bad people who genuinely want to attack efforts to fix the problems they create purely out of their own greed.
You're still conceding too much: All of our economic institutions, including laws regarding property ownership, are political choices. And these laws are actively enforced, not passively. We have made a decision to use purposefully the law to maintain substantial economic inequality.
There is nothing passive about allowing significant wealth disparities via commanding higher income on the labor market. "Markets" don't create or enforce ownership. Other countries have chosen to compress their income distributions using taxation and transfers. We have done so less. It's political policy choices all the way down.
The negotiation of higher salaries by the more capable tends to be a relatively natural process, where people demand more money based on factors like skill, experience, replaceability, etc. These salaries are lowered by redistribution and such. Lower salaries tend be increased by policy relative to a state with no interventions, like minimum wage laws and redistribution.
Of course you can always force salaries together more (although at a cost), but the more you try to diverge from the natural situation, the more problems you tend to get. That is why communism failed, because they tried to diverge too far from human nature, resulting in people evading the rules (corruption) and not engaging in the positive behavior (working hard & being innovative) that communism assumed people would not have to be rewarded for.
I think that one of the main failure modes of more extreme leftism is to not recognize this and treat policy choices as fully arbitrary, so there is no difference in downsides between a high and low level of redistribution.
Of course, you may be willing to pay a fairly disproportionate price to get a certain level of equality, but that price should be recognized and weighed as part of making the decision and of convincing others to support it.
"People own whatever they can command on the labor market" is no more natural than "people own whatever they can command via welfare law". I do not accept labeling the first as "natural" and then describing the second as "divergence" from this natural state.
At no point in human (or even pre-human) history was ownership defined strictly by what you could produce in by your skills in isolation. We are "naturally" social creatures, not atomistically individualist ones.
It's just a fancy name for price-fixing, a/k/a erasing price signals, and we know exactly what happens to supply and demand when we do that.
I think of progressive taxation as an attempt to intervene in the market mechanisms that determine the relative pay of surgeons vs. teachers. I support progressive taxation, and would support it more if more of the money went to good causes like giving it to the poor.
A more complete answer here would involve how we are unfairly privileging surgeons' pay through medical licensing issues which keep them artificially scarce, and unfairly privileging teachers' pay much less, and that this is responsible for a big part of the discrepancy.
In addition to the issue of relative pay between teachers and surgeons is the relative pay among teachers themselves. Which could be a potential mechanism for incentivizing quality teachers, but in practice this is suppressed by union rules that treat seniority as the only differentiator between teachers.
Thank you! I have a bunch of fun pointing out that doctors effectively have a cartel. It's fun to watch the reactions and the eye-twitching.
Aren't there like, a dozen other reasons why doctors are paid more than teachers, in addition to medical licensing?
When all you have is a hammer...
For a different comment I looked up the average salary difference between physicians and teachers in Germany, I then did the same for France and Sweden. They are almost identical in terms of multiple as the United States varying between 3 and 4.5 for physicians and surgeons respectively. Interestingly Germany pays its CT surgeons a multiple of 5.2 which is significantly higher than the US multiple of 4.5.
Whether or not they tax some of that difference back is a different argument.
A fundamental problem when talking about "deserts" is that, despite person A not necessarily deserving their property, it does not follow that person B thus deserves it.
Yes yes yes.
This is a matter of differing definitions of meritocracy, not incorrect usage.
SA is attempting to refute deBoer's argument by…
1/ Arguing as if it were a matter of who gets "more money" and "should prosper" as if the alternatives were "less money" and "should only get by". The actual alternatives are consignment to poverty, debt peonage, and/or incarceration by a world-historically affluent society.
2/ narrowing the definition of meritocracy to the unobjectionable "vested with responsibility", ducking the entirely valid definition that deBoer is clearly using, "vested with economic goods and/or political power" and more specifically, the American brand of meritocracy which says that not only do the meritorious deserve economic and social success, but *also* that the meritless deserve nothing and misfortune is prima facie evidence of an absence of merit.
deBoer writes (in the book, not the 9 year old article SA quoted):
"To recognize that our abilities lie outside of our control would be to strike the hardest possible blow against meritocracy. For it is that belief in the universal availability of success that underpins our entire system; it is the logic that convinces us that our suffering is fair."
I’m going to put a TL;DR here at the top. You have picked two professions where the salaries are either directly set by the government or constrained within a narrow band buy said government and have claimed that this is the government NOT interfering with the free market. This is not correct. Fuller explanation below.
Physicians and teacher incomes are the absolute worst metric of “free market meritocracy”. Your statement that “we have chosen not to intervene much in the markets . . .” Is not even a little true. Teachers salaries are directly set by the state and physicians are paid under a system that sets prices based on the Relative Value Unit in which a government arranged panel of physicians assign a value to every type of physician interaction and procedure (the E&M and CPT code). The dollar value of an RVU is defined by CMS (Medicare) every year (currently ~$37/RVU) and therefore the price that Medicare will pay for any physician interaction is defined by a fixed (RVU number X RVU value). It is illegal for a physician to charge a Medicare patient more than that fixed dollar value set by the government. As 60% of the healthcare dollar is directly spent by the federal government in either Medicare or Medicaid payments and private insurance negotiations usually start as a percentage of the Medicare allowable even private practice physicians incomes exist within a narrow band set by governmental management. This leads to completely ridiculous outcomes such as the best surgeon in the United States gets paid exactly the same for a complex operation as the worst surgeon in the United States for the same operation.
For salaried physicians government meddling is even more direct. Physician salaries are governed within a band called “fair market value“ in order to theoretically prevent hospitals from paying physicians for referrals. This fair market value is set in opaque ways by looking at average salaries. While the government has avoided defining these fair market values there have been multiple federal lawsuits that have sued hospitals for going above them.
In short, asserting that teachers and physician incomes are set in some sort of laissez-faire capitalist world is ridiculous.
You're going to get in trouble for the child labor bit.
Also, the pro social effects of things like free school lunch and free childcare from school were kind of glossed over.
Also, desert is wrong in this. A desert is a place without water... a dessert is the thing you get because you deserve it.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/get-your-just-deserts
Nope. A dessert is a thing you eat after dinner. You don't add an extra "s" when you derive "desert" from "deserve".
The fact that "desert" is pronounced like "dessert", and not "desert" is just one of those (many) weird quirks of English spelling and etymology.
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/just-deserts.html
Just desserts increases the likelihood of diabetes.
DeBoer says he wants not social mobility but "a higher floor for material conditions" and "a necessarily lower ceiling".
Then you object that "After all, there would still be the same level of hierarchy".
Huh? This section is muddled. He says he's in favor of not having as much hierarchy, then you give three examples of how hierarchies can be better or worse, and end up with the non-sequitur "It is weird for a liberal/libertarian to have to insist to a socialist that equality can sometimes be an end in itself" after he argued for equality and you argued against it.
"Seriously, he talks about how much he hates believe in genetic group-level IQ differences about thirty times per page" - should that be "belief" or "believers"?
Re. the last part about schools as prisons and alternative ways to teach children, I’d encourage looking into the Sudbury Valley School and Peter Gray’s writing, specifically Free to Learn. Could make a good book review!
Re Success Academy, anyone who is interested in this (or having an opinion on this) should read charter and choice advocate Robert Pondiscio's book. I excerpted it in a blog post here: http://notepad.michaelpershan.com/some-interesting-things-i-learned-from-robert-pondiscios-book-about-success-academy/
Also while lots of educational journalists do good stuff, Matt Barnum from Chalkbeat is a reporter who people interested in education should get used to following.
One of the arguments for school that you haven't addressed is giving children an alternative environment to abusive parents (or just an alternative environment in general - there is arguably something to the idea that children should have a secondary environment where they learn things from people other than their parents). I agree with you about how schools are terrible (especially American schools, I think? my high school in Israel had only about 50% of the bad stuff you mention), but I'm not convinced "abolish schools" is a better solution for most kids than "make schools less bad".
Note that that is also an argument for letting children work for pay. Being a paid employee provides a child more power relative to his parents than going to school, since it gives him the option of leaving home if home is bad enough and if the state won't insist on dragging him back.
This is potentially useful, but I don't think it would work as well. The idea behind school giving a useful non-abusive environment is that even severely abusive parents will probably send kids to school (because it's the norm and maybe also because they want to get rid of them).
If kids have the option to work for pay - well, this works pretty well if they're aware of it and know how to find it. But most kids probably don't have those skills, and their abusive parents might either stop them or force them into especially miserable jobs and then take their money. It's much harder to make this work compared to a standardized school format if the parents are powerful hostile figures with power over their kids.
You seem to be assuming that kids are slaves. A six year old is quite unlikely to find a job and work at it, but a fourteen or fifteen year old could. Unless the government forces him to obey his parents, he has the option of being free and supporting himself — not very well, unless he is extraordinarily talented, but better than living with abusive parents. Forbidding him to work puts him at the parents' mercy, unless some other adults are willing to support him.
Some people think that only mules can pull carts.
Several thoughts...
I think the British model where most people do high school until they're 16 and then people who want to keep doing school go on to A-levels for two more years is the beginning of a good structure. I like the idea of the "dropout" age being lowered, but I think the ideal would be to add in more diplomas. They don't even have to be separate buildings like in the UK, but allowing students to get an 8th grade diploma or a 10th grade diploma or a High School Diploma™️ (after 12th grade) would associate a milestone achievement with each of these steps, and maybe help destigmatize/normalize "dropping out" after any one of them.
I also very much agree with section III. about school being child prison. I often argue that so many problems with school boil down to the fact that school is not consensual, for parents or for the children attending. I'm positively interested in experiments that pay students for going to high school (and eliminating homework entirely). I'm also generally a fan of UBIs, and your question of what parents would do if they personally were receiving ~15k per child per year is definitely food for thought.
Has anyone read In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School
by Jal Mehta & Sarah Fine? I started it but haven't finished, but it discusses Success Academy (I believe) as well as schools with no-excuses policies and everything in between.
I'm generally disinclined from homeschooling-as-a-society-wide-solution for socialization reasons, since if you start putting kids together in clusters to do socialization you've basically recreated school but community-by-community, and I'm not enough of a socialist to think that's the best solution. I hope to be in a position to give my kids the option to be homeschooled for some or all of middle school, and I like to call myself a "middle school abolitionist" in general because I think there are far better things we could do with that time than anything we would recognize as a school.
One point nobody has mentioned is that Amish routinely leave school after 8th grade and seem to end up as functional people.
Oh, that's very interesting, I didn't know that. I imagine them becoming "functional" is due in no small part to their social organization? That is, most people who drop out at 8th grade wouldn't have the support network needed to keep taking care of them until they're old enough to live independently (unless parents were fine leaving them home alone all day, and the kids were independent enough to want that in the first place).
I think a lot of Amish, practically all of the women and all of the men who are farmers, are themselves working at home, so the kids are being home schooled in running a household or a farm. I don't know how it works where the father is doing something other than farming, but my guess is that, if it's running a small business, the kids are apprenticing in that.
We have some non-Amish friends who have a family business. The kids went through the normal school system, but my impression is that they also spent a noticeable amount of time helping out in the business. At this point it looks as though one of the sons is gradually replacing is father in running it. An interestingly different family pattern from the one we are familiar with, where the child may end up in the parent's field (true of me, my wife, and one of her three siblings) but not in the parent's firm.
There are some Amish who are employees of non-Amish in construction and other activities, and I don't know what their kids do after leaving school.
I actually had a pretty nice time in high school. It wasn't a particularly good high school either. Maybe I am representative of a certain "kind of person who does well in the system we have now;" and maybe that kind of person is more rare than I currently imagine it to be.
1. I LOVED this post! "SSC Does a Graduation Speech" has burned itself into my brain and I suspect the criticism of school from this one will as well.
2. Some thoughts on pro public school extremism:
I think some people are fiercely pro public school *because* they see school as prisons, and see non-public schools (particularly private and parochial schools; they're not usually explicitly thinking about charter schools and if they do, they assume they're like private and religious schools) as having even more prison-like elements than public school. Specifically, they have all the elements mentioned above AND are more likely to be sex-segregated or require uniforms (and, in the case of parochial schools, threaten the students with Hell).
I am sympathetic to this position, though ultimately I come down on your side--it's worth letting some parents send their kids to more oppressive environments than the default if we also get the chance to get some kids in *less* oppressive environments. But I can see how someone who's more concerned with putting a floor on badness than raising the ceiling on goodness might oppose private/parochial/charter schools.
Speaking for myself, I went to public school and did consider it child prison--*and* I was grateful that at least I wasn't one of my friends who went to Catholic school, where the bullying was worse and the dress code more expensive, more boring-looking, and less comfortable, or one of the evangelical Christian homeschool kids I read about online, who had no friends other than their parents who beat them, taught them creationism, and made them act as third parents to their many younger siblings.
I admit this is probably not the reason *most* public school defenders feel relatively positive about the public school system or more critical of other kinds of schools, but I do think there are some who hold this position and don't say it because "school is child prison" is one of those things you're not supposed to Notice in many circles.
"I think some people are fiercely pro public school *because* they see school as prisons, and see non-public schools (particularly private and parochial schools; they're not usually explicitly thinking about charter schools and if they do, they assume they're like private and religious schools) as having even more prison-like elements than public school."
The most common argument I've heard against charter schools is from people who believe that letting children with parents who are somewhat interested in their children's well being leave a school may be slightly good for those children, but is morally outweighed by the neighborhood public school becoming much more like a prison, now that there aren't any interested parents left to advocate for anything better. Possibly then setting off a downward spiral of the interested teachers also leaving, and the "school" becoming a literal prison full of barbed wire and knives.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to that argument. Not that the other children shouldn't be allowed to leave -- but that perhaps we should think harder about how to make things less bad for the children who are left behind. Not having a default at all, and every school becoming a charter school is one possible solution, though I'm not sure how transportation would work.
For the problems, it would be worth looking into the UK system from 1948 until the mid-1970s (it was phased out in different areas at different times).
There was a high-stakes test taken at the end of elementary school (the "11+", taken by classes of mostly eleven-year olds). It was pass/fail and norm-marked (ie the number of passes is determined in advance and those with the highest scores pass; the actual score is not revealed, just a pass or a fail). Those who passed (10-20% depending on the area) went to a "grammar school", which was an academic school aiming at university entry (this was in an era when less than 10% went to university). Those who failed went to a "secondary modern school" which were meant to be vocational schools but were in practice usually disastrous - largely because the sort of people who politicians listen to didn't let their kids end up there; tutoring for 10 and 11 year olds to get them to pass the 11+ was very popular.
Every time anyone proposes charter schools or whatever in the UK, they're accused of wanting to turn the rest of the schools back into secondary moderns.
"or one of the evangelical Christian homeschool kids I read about online, who had no friends other than their parents who beat them, taught them creationism, and made them act as third parents to their many younger siblings."
How sure are you that what you describe is actually a common result of home schooling rather than a rare extreme emphasized by people who are against it? Here is some possibly relevant data, from a chapter of a book I am writing that looks at unschooling and home schooling:
Much hostility to home schooling comes from the belief that home-schoolers are mostly uneducated Christian fundamentalists trying to keep their children ignorant of evolution and sex education. That does not fit the NCES survey data. As of 2015-16, only 16% of home schooling parents gave “a desire to provide religious instruction” as the most important reason for home schooling, just below the 17% who chose “a dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools.” The most common reason, 34%, was “a concern about the environment of other schools, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure.” So far as the educational background of home-schooling parents, 30% had a bachelor’s degree, an additional 15% a graduate or professional school degree. For parents whose children attend a school, public or private, the figures were nearly identical: 27% with a bachelor’s degree, 17% with a graduate or professional school degree.
Oh, I don't think most homeschoolers are like that at all! The bloggers I followed who were abused made it clear that the problem was the ideology, not the homeschooling. I followed other bloggers who described a liberal hippie style of homeschooling that sounded much better than the school I went to (mostly from the parent's perspective, in those cases). It was just an example in my mind of how it could have been much worse, that makes me grateful to have gone to public school.
One key point is that however bad school is, some home environments are worse. Some parents abuse or neglect their children, some foist adult responsibilities onto kids too young to handle them, some simply don't have the knowledge or tools to teach their children anything at all. There is value in having a place where kids are treated well, and we should make sure that all children that need such a place can go there, regardless of their parents. However, families should be able to opt out if they can show they are providing a better environment than a traditional school.
Also, regarding "tourist teachers" my impression is that teaching is a set of skills that need to be developed through training and experience. While a certain level of intelligence is needed, I don't think an unrelated Ivy League diploma means that you would be good at it. Give a genius an auto repair manual, and he'll still be worse at fixing your car than an average mechanic.
"Also, regarding "tourist teachers" my impression is that teaching is a set of skills that need to be developed through training and experience."
My understanding is that this varies a lot by subject (IQ will do more for you if you're teaching physics than phonics), and energy level. Especially energy level. Back when I was following KIPP schools, my main impression was that it was all very well for a high energy 20 something, but no one could give birth and raise an infant in that environment, which is a major test of sustainability for most teachers.
At the calculus level there probably is a legitimate issue that anyone who's smart and conscientious enough to understand the material in depth well and figure out how to communicate it is both smart and an excellent communicator, and has a lot of job options, so it's hard to keep them as a teacher.
One good rule is that any teacher should be educated in the subject to at least one level higher than what they are teaching, so that they can answer the inevitable questions that go one level of abstraction deeper than the actual class topic.
But for higher level math and science classes (in particular) that's an education that does give them a lot of options.
"However, families should be able to opt out if they can show they are providing a better environment than a traditional school."
Show to whom, how defined? In practice I would expect any such test to be controlled by the public school bureaucracy allied with the teachers' unions, both groups with an obvious incentive to try to keep kids in the public schools.
This is a beautiful post, and in writing it I think it's extremely likely that you prevented at least thousands of hours of child-torture, and as a survivor of School I am profoundly grateful for that. Thank you, Scott.
Could you explain how your surgeon example in defense of a meritocracy extends to, say, a profession that does not have to do with life and death? Like, an account manager, for instance. Does the idea that "people prefer to have jobs done well rather than poorly, and use their financial and social clout to make this happen", apply here? Or does our economic system also have inefficient pockets that reward certain people--more likely college educated folks who rise up in the meritocracy--for ultimately inconsequential work... What do we do with that?
There are definitely inefficiencies in the system. Sometimes it's hard to accurately assess someone's ability, and sometimes it's hard to assess the quality of output. So, people have to rely on imperfect proxies for ability/quality, and you'll get inefficiencies wherever that happens. For example, charisma and college degrees are often going to be factors in the hiring process, even when they aren't a direct factor in job performance.
DeBoer asserts "This makes sense if you presume, as conservatives do, that people excel only in the pursuit of self-interest."
This makes sense if you presume, as DeBoer does, that conservatives presume that people excel only in the pursuit of self-interest.
Someone might reasonably believe that without self-interest providing some share of motivation to excel, society will be much poorer, or even in some sense fail, without believing that all people get all their motivation to excel exclusively from self-interest.
I can't tell if Freddie is purporting to believe that conservatives believe the maximalist claim ("all motivation to excel in all people is exclusively from self-interest"), or if he's just using mildly snotty language to represent the more modest claim ("a sufficient amount of motivation to excel comes from self-interest that it is essential for a functioning society").
The relevant SSC post is https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/28/financial-incentives-are-weaker-than-social-incentives-but-very-important-anyway/
As a high school teacher who independently reached many of Scott's conclusions about education years ago, here's how I think about my role, how I sleep at night, and what the pandemic year has revealed.
• I am daycare. 15-year-olds don't need a babysitter, but their parents are also not interested in having them sit at home all day getting into trouble*. Ok, fine. Perhaps my class can be a not-terrible place to spend an hour.
• *Some students do, in fact, prefer to be in school. More than I would have thought. (I now know this because I work for a chain of charter schools that has been ideologically committed -- for better and worse -- to staying open the whole year, while also allowing students to be online if their families chose. I've informally surveyed the ones who attend in person; they often had some input in the choice. Some of this in-person preference arises from a loathing for online learning, but much of it is a hunger for structure and socialization.)
• If I'm not having fun, I hate my job and know I'm probably making my class a sucky place to spend an hour. So I prioritize my lessons to keep myself stimulated. This usually involves goading students into a challenge, a discussion, or a project with me.
• I know they'll forget almost everything I formally teach, so there's little point in judging them harshly for forgetting it five minutes from now rather than five minutes after the test. So... I don't give many tests when I have a choice, and it's difficult to fail my class on test performance alone.
• Homework? Gross. I won't say it never happens, but it's not my norm. At all.
• I'm usually the smartest (IQ) person in the classroom, and even when I'm not, I'm by far the least naïve and most clever (education, street-smarts, rationality, etc.). The most important thing I have to offer teens is a peek inside my head, so I try to create situations where we look at problems together and they get excited to see how I approach those problems. (This may or may not have much overlap with the official curriculum, but with a little lawyering a teacher can justify almost anything.)
• Left to their own devices, most students would prefer to be playing games, watching YouTube videos, or getting into weird discussions. So I take some inspiration from these. Where is there potential for play in my content? What makes a YouTube personality engaging? What off-ramps for weird discussions exist that will also make these teens wiser?
• Savvy and wisdom tend to linger long after content is forgotten -- as do fond memories of an unusually enjoyable class. I consider the latter a terminal good.
You sound like an excellent teacher. I hope my kids have the chance to be taught by someone so thoughtful about their craft.
Are you the same tangrabeast on lesswrong who uses anki in your classroom ? I’m currently writing my undergrad thesis on spaced repetition in foreign language classrooms, and I cited that LW post in a research paper I wrote on the subject last year. I agree with many of your conclusions above, and I’d love to hear more about your spaced repetition experiment (if it’s still ongoing) or any post-mortem reflections you may have.
Yes, that's me. SRS still has a place in my class; we used it today, in fact. But its role is much diminished since the heyday of my experiments with it, for reasons that I was already hinting at in my year two report. I had an in-progress report on year three I can try to dig up, but I think I had shelved it because my inner Paul Graham was telling me that it was bloated and self-important.
Is LessWrong still a good place to post an update on that? I haven't checked in there much in the past few years, and my impressions were of reduced activity.
It's considerably livelier now than it was a few years ago. I'd definitely enjoy reading a follow-up.
Yes, I'd be very interested to read the progress report. I've only been using LW for the last few months, but it gets a steady stream of posts every day.
I have posted my follow-up at LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F6ZTtBXn2cFLmWPdM/seven-years-of-spaced-repetition-software-in-the-classroom-1
Heiner Rindermann, the author of the 2020 study you linked, seems to a be a racist due to these choice selections. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Heiner_Rindermann If I'm wrong or if they're taken out of context, let me know.
I am not familiar with that person in the slightest, but, RationalWiki is one of the least reliable sources I know of. I would be very skeptical of any research there.
So did he or did he not say those things? You can't just cast doubt on something without bringing in some sort of source as to why. I brought in RationalWiki due to the quotes it had of things he said that would make his research biased and of dubious quality. Bring in something that disproves the things Heiner Rindermann said.
I do not trust them to adequately report the context around those quotes, and, more importantly, pick quotes that actually are representative of Heiner’s work. I would wager the quotes themselves are actually things he has said though!
Is there any context where saying skull size and skin color being correlated with intelligence anything other than phrenology and racism? If so, please provide a reasonable context that could exist for those comments made during a conference held in secret on the grounds of the University College London without the knowledge or approval of University College London themselves. I hope you realize that while there could be a reasonable context, you'll have to stretch so far as to find one that you're becoming unreasonable.
"Is there any context where saying skull size and skin color being correlated with intelligence anything other than phrenology and racism?"
Is it racism if it's true, as I think both of those claims are, assuming "intelligence" means measured IQ? Try googling on [head size IQ]. Here is one of the things I found:
https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/actually-people-with-larger-heads-really-do-tend-to-be-smarter-but-not-for-reason-you-might-think.html
Phrenology was a theory about detailed relations between head shape and a variety of characteristics, not head size and intelligence.
The article you linked discusses how larger brains, due to greater folding, are correlated with intelligence and not how skull size is correlated with it. Brains being bigger due to greater folding certainly correlates with intelligence but the size of your skull is different from intelligence as an elephant's skull is far bigger than a human's but an elephant is far dumber than a human. Remember these keywords, "cranial capacity (meaning skull size not brain size, literally volume of the skull)" and "skin color". If you want to back up his statements, find evidence supporting that skull size is what's correlated with intelligence and that skin color is correlated with intelligence when corrected for confounding factors such as SES.
Looking at their quotes, it depends on your definition of "racist." It sounds as though he believes that average IQ is different in different populations and that part of the reason is genetic. He is pretty clearly hostile to immigration of people from the Middle East to Germany, for both genetic and cultural reasons.
I wouldn't call him a racist if his factual beliefs are true, or even if they are some mix of true and reasonable errors, but some people would.
The anti-schools rant hits hard in many respects, but it seems confused about who demands education and the answer is: parents.
There was a time not very long ago when Scott's dream of far shorter school was a reality. I'm too lazy to look up the stats, but not many kids were going to high school until well into the 20th century. Why did this change? What happened? The answer is: parents wanted to send their kids to high school.
You wouldn't know it from Scott's post, but while schooling is compulsory (and it only is in a sense) education is at the end of the day demand-driven industry. Everyone wants it, even if they shouldn't.
>not many kids were going to high school until well into the 20th century. Why did this change? What happened?
My answer is: society got wealthier, and chose to spend that wealth on extended youth.
I think a lot of our current politically charged issues are a result of this happening again, and us not acknowledging it. Calls for more college are a reflection of this; campuses policing behavior more aggressively is a result of this; etc.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing - I was glad to not have adult responsibilities as a teenager! But I don't think the process by which adolescence has been extended is well understood, and is going to continue to cause problems.
Part of this is meritocracy, a tension that Scott hasn't really engaged with in his own framework. Parents demand what's best for their kids. Society got more meritocratic. Jobs required more knowledge. Few parents are willing to take a look at their kid and say from the outset "no knowledge job for you." So they demand schooling for their kids.
If you turn back the clock to the 17th or 18th century you get Scott's dream: a bit of schooling, but no one really gives a shit, it's all sort of a joke, parents teach kids what they want their kids to learn. The secret sauce? A very different way of connecting people with work.
Check out David Labaree's writing, particularly "Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling."
i liked high school
I didn't read Freddie's book (I've bought it but haven't gotten around to it yet) - but - does he discuss this research from Stuart Ritchie? https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/how-much-does-education-improve-intelligence-a-metaanalysis(5e92b4d8-7b10-4d30-b2e5-6dfef494fa46).html
Basically - education does seem to have a small (but non-zero) effect on intelligence, and that this effect sticks. It feels like that's reason enough to not allow kids to drop out at the age of 12.
Are you the Federico who used to comment on SSC five-ish years ago and have your own blog?
Hi Scott - possibly? I think I had a grand total of maybe 20 or so comments on SSC across many years, and I’ve not blogged in a while. I haven’t attended any SSC meet ups or blogged about rationality though - if there’s another Federico you are thinking of.
That depends on whether the kids who drop out at the age of 12 are ones whose intelligence would be improved by more formal education. Essentially all Amish do it — and then get home schooled in running a farm or a household, which they seem to end up doing well.
Iirc - that study didn’t attempt to quantify whether education is more effective at boosting IQ on some subgroups rather than others. Do you know of any studies that try to look at this in a quantitative way with a credible design? I know the Gibbons quote of course :)
I don't know of such studies, but I would expect it would be more effective for some people than for others.
Scott, what kind of nightmarish high school did you go to?
This is not a joke: if you’re willing, I really would like to read an article or something about what kind of experiences, personal or otherwise, led to these kinds of intensely negative gut reactions against school.
Because you make me worried. I went to school in Canada where things felt pretty sane to me. I can identify some similarities (homework felt very excessive to me and I struggled a lot with that) and some differences (my high school started at 9 AM and we even had one day a week where we only started at 10), but it doesn’t feel like the magnitude of differences I’ve heard of so far is enough to call one “okay” and the other “child prison”.
Is it just differences in individual reaction? There were still students that struggled in my school, sure, and arguably I was one of the ones that did better with the environment, but is it enough to explain the difference?
This is important because:
1. I live in California now, and I might end up having kids here at some point. They’d be subject to the American education system, and if it’s really that bad I might consider moving back to Canada when they get to schooling age.
2. I’ve always been kind of interested in education and teaching, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I ended up gravitating back to it sometime down the road. If I do, I want to make sure I do a good job of it.
3. You’re not the only American writer I respect who has completely lambasted the US education system to the point of choosing homeschooling for his kids (or future kids). Shamus Young, a videogame blogger, wrote an entire online “autoblography” that was ostensibly about his childhood but ended up being mostly about his trials and tribulations in the US education system of the late 70s-80s, ultimately published as a book titled “How I Learned”. I felt it was because of a mix of failures on the school’s part plus a personality that chafed hard against those failures, but between you and him it’s enough to make me wonder whether it’s a problem that generalizes, and if so, how far. (A few bad schools? All American schools? All schools in general?)
i went to highly regarded public schools in california. they were pretty good. my best guess is that many other, not as highly regarded suburban public schools in california are about as good in terms of not-torturing, and also that the differences in academic outcomes are mostly due to selection effects.
I think Scott's (and my) characterization of school as a "child prison" comes fundamentally from the root fact that school is a non consensual institution. I had a wonderful time in high school, but I did not choose to be there, and as Scott mentions, high schools almost unequivocally fail the Burrito Test. I think the quality of education in the US varies super wildly district-to-district, and that's one of its major flaws (an accusation I don't make lightly).
TL;DR I would characterize school as a "prison" philosophically as long as it was a non consensual institution, no matter how cushy or nice that institution was.
When you're a child, everything is a non-consensual situation. You're stuck doing what your parents tell you. Going to school might not have been my choice, but it was sure as hell what my parents chose for me. It's also what I'm choosing for my children.
If I _did_ have a choice, between going to school every day to hang out with my friends versus staying at home alone and being taught everything by my mother, I definitely would have chosen school despite its many imperfections.
If you have good/reasonable parents, then not *everything* is non-consensual. And your parents didn't really consent to sending you to school either, assuming they didn't have the time or funds to homeschool you (as most parents don't), because it's required by law. I also would've chosen to be in school, but I think more discussion of school which takes into account that people don't really choose to be there (though they may get to choose which school) can help iron out many of the issues.
Why do you assume that home schooling means being home alone? Judging at least by comments on my blog by multiple home schooling people, that's not the norm. It would be even less the norm if the schooling system was not absorbing much of the time of all the other kids you would like to interact with, but there is still the option of interacting with other home schooled kids or with other kids on the weekend.
The relevant blog post, with comments:
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=19727420&postID=6466664425205975255
I’m starting to get the inkling that at very least my high school was much less prison-like than those of other people here. For the Burrito test: I vaguely remember my high school having a microwave in the cafeteria, which students could use on their lunch breaks. (Hard to remember for sure because I generally just brought cold lunches and sat with my friends in the hallways.) And students usually had a ~1hr free period during the day where they could leave the school. (I would sometimes use it to duck out to the library.)
The point in different districts is actually very relevant. IIRC, in Canada schools with worse outcomes get better support and funding, because they know it’s generally harder to teach underachieving/struggling students. My (rough) understanding is that in the US, it’s the opposite, they “incentivize” schools to teach better by tying funding to standardized test scores, which likely just exacerbates the differences.
(But don’t quote me on either of those, I haven’t verified those and I might be wrong.)
That's definitely possible; I went to two high schools.
At the public school, we were not allowed to leave the cafeteria during lunch without asking permission (except for seniors going to the senior lounge.) During study halls we were generally allowed to leave the classroom when we wanted. I would say it definitely fails the Burrito Test unless students are in a free period. In college, you could theoretically leave class at any moment (without asking, and in classes without attendance policies, without penalty) to microwave a burrito, but the same was not true of my high school (and as I said in another comment, my high school had generally high student-teacher trust.)
My private (international) school allowed us to go wherever we wanted during lunch, and we had 10-15 minutes between each class (only 4 a day) where we could go whenever we wanted. I would say this school passes the Burrito Test.
I've heard that schools in Europe are better about this, and the schools in the US are generally more prison-like than schools elsewhere.
See if you can sit in on some classes in some different districts at different ages. What is bad and how bad it is will vary by school. I think like much of US society school is often a popularity contest. I have late-elementary age kids and in all the schools they’ve been in (we’ve moved) they have never had to correct and return a math page that had mistakes. Some teachers would accept corrections but it was never required. Learning to mastery was not a thing. There is also some startling bullying. Your Canadian school sounds lovely.
There seems to be something about public institutions in the US that makes them function substantially worse than institutions in other first-world countries (speaking as an Australian who has lived in the US for many years). I don't really understand why it is, but it's a weird degenerative disease (a relative of cost disease, perhaps, although we have cost disease in Australia too) that makes every single function of government seem to function a whole lot worse.
It's why getting through airport security in the US takes an hour instead of five minutes. It's why going through Immigration at a US airport takes an hour (my record is two hours) instead of five to ten minutes. And it's why any kind of transaction involving the Department of Motor Vehicles is some kind of all-day odyssey instead of a ten-minute transaction. What's more, at every step you'll find that not only are the processes inefficient, the employees who serve you are rude and downright aggressive.
While I've dealt with US immigration, airport security and DMVs, I've never dealt with their public schools, but if I try to imagine what a school would look like if it were run by DMV employees then I can easily see how it would be closer to torture than to my own (boring, generally okay) high school experiences in Australia.
I agree with the general theme, though the details vary wildly across the country. My experience with the DMV has routinely been fine at several different locations. Even when I had to transfer my license from another country (Canada), it took less than 30 minutes at a busy urban facility.
I think Scott’s missing a fundamental tension here between his libertarian-ish desire for more student freedoms and the realities of the need for order within schools, including at the much-lauded charters that Scott wants other schools to emulate.
First, the kinds of charter schools that often get all the press about their “success” tend to be extremely militarized and have all kinds of strict rules governing student behavior. If you dislike regular public schools for being rigid, may I introduce you to the creepiness that is the “Teach Like a Champion” toolkit (and similar systems of its ilk) that’s become the Bible for all kinds of charter school chains as well as a number of public school systems? See here for a sample, including a student berated for insufficient eyes on the speaker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC0ltKOwF_A
While perhaps a few special charters (and even some--gasp--public schools!) might have more of this Montessori-esque system that Scott seems to want in education, the reality is that most of these successful charter schools are extremely controlled and disciplinarily harsh environments. Plus, the students who can’t fit into this environment get filtered out back to their neighborhood public schools or don’t even apply to the charter in the first place (hence the DeBoer critique).
Second, the “bathroom pass” complaint is an excellent illustration of a similar kind of tension between order and liberty that seems to be quite common online, especially from people who were well-behaved students and found such tyranny to be unconscionable (I felt much the same way as a student). Let’s walk through what would happen in practice though if libertarian idealist Scott became a teacher.
Teacher Scott has just entered the classroom of 35+ students for his first day at a typical urban public school. The moment the bell rings to begin class, the hands start to go up. Student A: “Mr. Alexander, I gotta go, BAD.” Student B: “Mr. A, I need to go to the bathroom.” Student C: “Can I please go to the bathroom please I really need to go it’s so bad”. Teacher Scott, being a nice guy who’s committed to his libertarian ideals in education, tells all the students they’re welcome to go to the bathroom and that he will never dare to stop them from fulfilling such a basic requirement of nature.
Student A takes off in the direction of the bathroom, but then decides to run up and down the hallways as fast as possible. Student B is off to visit her friend in in-school suspension and waves into the windows of other classrooms along the way, disrupting numerous other classes. Student C goes to the bathroom, but then decides that the paper towel dispensers seem like they’d be fun to tear off the wall and comes back to the classroom armed with plenty of wet crumpled paper towels to throw at other students. Students D and E, now that it’s clear Teacher Scott isn’t going to stop them, decide to ignore the amazing, engaging lesson Teacher Scott is trying to pitch to them and have wandered out of the classroom and are now engaging in some kind of inappropriate conduct in the stairwell.
Now perhaps Teacher Scott is proud of the fact that he’s just unleashed anarchy against the evil prison-like environs of public education in the first five minutes of his time in the classroom, but he’s also not going to be Teacher Scott for much longer. Even the hated teacher’s unions would likely not support a rookie teacher who made life worse for everyone else in the school. This is why, in fact, both the evil public schools and the beloved charters likely share similarly strict bathroom rules as well as other rules governing student behavior that seem absolutely maddening to the well-behaved students, but are in fact there for a reason. One might call them Chesterton's Bathroom Passes. At the $40k a year elite private school though, I’m sure you can get up whenever you like and go to the bathroom.
Scott is making a lot of idealistic assumptions here and I’d respectfully encourage him to spend some time volunteering in or at least visiting local public and charter schools in his neighborhood to see just how much his ideals would match up to reality.
I used to teach in public schools, so I understand and acknowledge these dynamics.
I'm not claiming there's a way to keep the apparatus of school completely intact while getting rid of all the oppressive parts, I'm suggesting we try to find alternatives to that apparatus.
But if we can't even think of a way to rid ourselves of bathroom passes, the most archetypal and oft-repeated example of scholastic oppression, what progress can we really make against the "oppressive parts" in general? Most of the "oppressive parts" seem to come as a consequence of the fact that unsupervised children are frequently a danger to themselves or others. I don't want my children oppressed by a bunch of petty minor government employees, but I also don't want them wandering unsupervised, so there's an unavoidable tension there.
(For the record, at my non-US school we didn't have a thing called a "bathroom pass" at all, but you still had to get your teacher's permission to leave the room to go to the bathroom.)
The obvious answer is supervised burrito-capable microwaves.
I think American kids are not taught cooperation as a social good in the same way kids in other countries are. So there is a high level of poking and whispering and general disobedience. Rigid charter schools shut that down. Public schools are generally less effective at that, so they’re always between gears. Teachers must use their personality to impose and that rankles some kids (maybe like Scott was.) I think the successful charters with kids from disadvantaged backgrounds acknowledge up front that kids are coming from struggle, but they say, in here we do it differently, and rather than using their personality to impose rules, the rules are a given and the personality can be load-bearing for cultivating mutual respect and achievement.
I’m not against rules, but they manifest in a variety of ways and some of it is destructive.
A youth soccer team with a wishy-washy coach may turn on itself, I’ve seen that happen, and then with a more experienced and tougher coach it started to resolve. Hope that makes sense.
What about a privileges-based system, like is also used in prisons? Then kids get the right to go to the bathroom when they want by default and problem kids have to ask.
This can be resolved with an IT solution. A fairly basic system uses a pass to enter and exit the room, so this makes it easier for the teacher than the current situation.
It can also be sold to schools as a safety measure, to reduce the risk of school shootings, violent parents, etc.
Then the problem kids beat up the non-problem kids and they ask the teacher to take the privilege away so they stop being beaten up.
Find a way to address school bullying first, and then we can look at the rest of the problems, because until you do, everything will be shaped around the bullies.
My high school didn't have bathroom passes; we had to sign out of and back into classrooms when leaving, but by 11th or 12th grade we were generally not required to ask to go to the bathroom. There were absolutely issues with students vaping/smoking weed in the bathrooms, but I don't think the absence of bathroom passes was the primary culprit here. My high school had a generally high degree of student-teacher trust, and I think that was one of its best attributes. Unfortunately such a thing is hard to emulate, but I personally believe teachers and administrators (as the very literal "adults in the room") have a responsibility to be first-movers in this scenario, incrementally allowing students more freedom and in turn expecting more of them.
Seems like the issue here is that the kids can get away with being barbarians. Student C, in particular, should get a fairly significant punishment for their behaviour. If you do things like that, then they stop doing the really disruptive stuff, at minimum, and the issue will get much less salient.
I suspect the root cause there is that schools have no effective way to punish students. What's the worst they can do - tell you that you don't have to come to school for a while? Ohnoes. I'm not in favour of corporal punishment, but you wouldn't expect much of this behaviour at a school that could enact such direct discipline for misdeeds. The trick is to find a punishment that's equally effective, but less barbaric(or seen as less barbaric by a majority of the voting public, at a minimum).
Couple of thoughts:
1. Those "studies" that Scott cites re IQ and genetics are fcking _surveys_ of _psychologists_. At the least, where are the fcking geneticists? The studies have near-zero credibility there for the points Scott wants to establish, and his use of them for that really diminished my respect for him. They're fcking popularity contests! It's the kind of rhetorical stunt I'd expect from a college sophomore.
2. $15K to $30K is not going to be enough in most major urban areas for most people to stay home. That's just past to future minimum wage ($7.5 to $15/hour) if you have one kid. Not to mention the other stuff kids get at school. So that's going to be a nice spliff for folks who want to home-school their multiple kids, but beyond that, meh.
3. Charter schools are little better or worse than regular public schools, based on our experience with both, and my work starting a charter school.
My understanding is that the main difference between charter & non-charter schools is not academic outcomes, but price, with charters being cheaper. Education Realist argues this is because Special Education sucks up so much of the budget and charters avoid those students.
At the winter and spring programs for my local public elementary, there is usually a number by the special ed kids, nearly half of whom have an adult attending them. It certainly looks like an expensive program, and those kids aren't going to charter schools.
Given the cognitive psychologists are the ones studying intelligence explicitly why wouldn't a survey of them give a good sense of the consensus of the science of intelligence?
1. This is about the intersection of intelligence and genetics. Psychologists are no more informed about genetics than anyone else, on average.
2. It's asking their opinion. It's a survey, not a study. I'm mildly interested in their opinion, but it carries little weight, because no one is asked to provide any analysis supporting their opinions. Psychologists are as biased as anyone else. IMHO, that's a big reason why there was a difference in opinions between politically led and politically right psychologists in the survey.
1. Are there any studies with geneticists around? You say "at the very least," so do you mean there are people other than geneticists and psychologists that should be surveyed? What do you mean by popularity contests?
2. The average household has around two kids. And Scott's proposal isn't to force anyone to teach for minimum wage. If a family thinks it's not worth it, then they can send their kids to school as they do now. But this will help families on the margin, if they want to homeschool their kids.
1. It's not my responsibility to find those studies, but without them, its irresponsible to make claims about the intersection of intelligence and genetics. I'm saying that you need to work with psychologists and psychologists, and I'm saying a survey is wildly insufficient.
2. Fair point; I thought Scott was talking about large, systemic changes. Many things make a difference at the margin; this is one of them, sure, if they want to homeschool their kids. My hunch is that is a small group of people, but it will make a difference to them, sure.
I don't think it makes sense to say that intelligence is not related to moral value. I value mice more than flies. I value dogs more than mice. I value dolphins more than dogs and I value smart humans more than dull humans. I am a utilitarian consequentialist and I believe that the innate value of an entity comes from its capacity to experience. Smarter people can have deeper thoughts, understand more connections, hold more ideas on their head at a time etc. And thus their experiences are richer and more valuable than that of a dull person in the exact same way that a dull person's experiences are richer and more valuable than that of a lower animal.
It might be convenient and agreeable to assert that all people have equal worth but I do not see how it is logical
I share a similar philosophical view that one ought to place value on entities in proportion to their capacity for conscious experience, but I'm not sure that the relevant differences in moral weight are all that high from human to human (outside of extreme cases - I agree that the experiences of a permanently comatose person are probably not of equal weight to a person with higher brain function).
As evidence, consider times when you yourself have been at reduced intelligence! The effects of alcohol, weed, sleep deprivation, and a number of other relatively ordinary experiences can curtail your intelligence by a fair bit. My internal experience in such states doesn’t seem to me to be particularly less vivid or important - I think I put about as much value on the wellbeing of my drunk self as I do on my sober self, even if the former would do worse on an IQ test.
I agree that someone with more intelligence, all else equal, probably has access to a greater variety of experience - a person who struggled with algebra is probably not going to jump for joy upon discovering an elegant mathematical proof - but I don’t find this all that compelling given how few people actually bother to explore the vast range of experiences available to them. Do you know anyone who can credibly lament that they've already exhausted the variety of subjective experiences available to their current brain? I don't.
Also, the argument suggests that we should disvalue people with low physical fitness, because they can’t experience the joy of climbing a mountain. (For that matter, we should disvalue agoraphobics and people who spend their whole lives in Nebraska.) It seems like this argument proves too much, or at least that it implies a whole lot of things and it’s not clear that “intelligence” is the relevant axis to focus on.
I actually thinking drunkenness is a perfect example to illustrate my point. People often drink with the intention of dulling down the experience to make it more manageable. This implies that suffering experienced whilst drunk has a significantly lower negative valence than if experienced sober.
> Also, the argument suggests that we should disvalue people with low physical fitness, because they can’t experience the joy of climbing a mountain
It's not about variety. It's about depth and dimension. A smart and a dull person can climb the same mountain and the smart person's experience will be richer; their perceptions will be more finely resolved, their actions more precisely calculated.
You can't possibly know that. What if it were the other way around? What if the dumb person's experience of mountain climbing were richer, because less intelligent people tend to live in the moment, while more intelligent people are constantly distracted by thoughts of something else?
It does seem to me that this is a complicated attempt to smuggle self-interest back into your utiliarian consequentialism, by aiming "the greatest good for the greatest number, with of course a higher weighting factor for smart people like me".
Do you value more-intelligent mice more than you value less-intelligent mice, though? I don't, because the difference between a smart and dumb mouse is small enough to be meaningless to me. If God existed, He would no doubt feel the same way about the smartest and dumbest humans.
How do I assign moral value to people? Privately, I value myself at infinity, my family at near-infinity, my friends and close associates highly, my acquaintances quite lowly, and everyone else at zero. But publically, I value everyone equally, because this is a polite social fiction that we all respect due to the fact that everyone has approximately equal ability to clonk someone else over the head with a rock.
> Do you value more-intelligent mice more than you value less-intelligent mice, though? I don't, because the difference between a smart and dumb mouse is small enough to be dmeaningless to me.
The difference between a smart and dumb mouse is also small to me but I suspect this says more about my lack of experience with mice than it does anything else. I do however have plenty of experience dealing with people of all different levels of intelligence and the differences are astounding
I have enough experience with dogs to say that there are big intelligence differences there as well.
> everyone else at zero
You wouldn't be willing to pay $5 to save a stranger's life?
If I say "yes" then I wind up obliged to start donating to those mosquito net charities, don't I?
Realistically if we're talking a stranger who is dying in front of me and I'm the only one who can save him, then yes, I'll pay the five bucks. For an unknown stranger dying in a foreign country that isn't specifically my responsibility I, like most people, won't, because once I've committed to that I'm obliged to become an effective altruist.
Almost nobody is ever in a position to save a life for $5. The actual cost per life saved for "those mosquito net charities" is $3000. So no, you're not committing to much of anything, practically speaking, by assigning a very low, but non-zero value to a stranger's life.
Zero is a very scary value to assign to the lives of strangers. It suggests that if you could have prevented the more than 20,000 child deaths due to fire in 2017 for $1, you would not do it. It suggests that if you have a choice between getting a free month on your Netflix subscription and increasing the standard of living for everyone in Africa by 20%, you'd take the free Netflix.
I think that one of the reasons people avoid confronting the question "how much is a stranger's life worth to me?" is because they think that if they assign any value other than zero, they'll be obligated to do things they don't want to do. But that's not the case (and it *certainly* isn't the case that you're obligated to become an effective altruist), if nothing else because there not many opportunities to save lives for very small costs.
> Zero is a very scary value to assign to the lives of strangers. It suggests that if you could have prevented the more than 20,000 child deaths due to fire in 2017 for $1, you would not do it.
I want to say that this pattern-matches to me on the idea that "atheists must be immoral because morality comes from God", where a different kind of person has trouble seeing how anyone would do good without divine rules/intervention/retribution... while the atheist just builds their coherent value system—which can be just as charitable—on a different rock altogether.
(In this case, I would point out that just because the reason isn't *related to the strangers' individual value,* there can still be reason to do such a thing—the cynic in me points out there are at least the opinions of the people they do put value on, but other reasons could surely be found.)
That's fair.
I guess I'm trying to use "value" in a fairly general way (as, for example, part of what people are talking about with revealed preferences), and I tried to couch it with the phrasing "this suggests that", rather than "this implies that".
Personally, I think someone is probably making an error by assigning zero value to strangers, either for the reasons I was getting at with the $1 vs 20k strangers or because the notion of assigning moral value to people is mistaken to begin with. But Melvin volunteered the moral values they assign to other people, so I'm trying to engage on those grounds.
I think it is a mistake to think that people who have cognitive abilities that help them do well at school and in the job market have experiences that are morally more valuable than others. Moreover, I think it is really, really bad to assume that this is the case and make moral judgements based on it. Most people throughout history who thought they had a good basis for rating some people as less morally valuable than others were not just wrong, but were making some of the most horrifying moral errors that humanity ever committed.
What about people who have a great appreciation for music? (Or food, or football, or sex.) An equivalent argument would seem to apply.
> believe that the innate value of an entity comes from its capacity to experience. Smarter people can have deeper thoughts, understand more connections, hold more ideas on their head at a time etc. And thus their experiences are richer and more valuable than that of a dull person in the exact same way that a dull person's experiences are richer and more valuable than that of a lower animal.
I think the mistake here is conflating two different notions of intelligence. There is no particular reason to believe that the difference between someone who scores 90 IQ vs 100 IQ is of the same type as the difference between a cow and a dolphin.
Given humans with the same amount of healthy brain tissue can score very differently on IQ tests it would be weird if this was the case. Or that our system for measuring "intelligence" for a set of tasks wildly different from the ancestral environment would happen to map on to the biological trait that differs between species
And instead of arguing with Marxists about who gets paid how much, let's just stop tying moral worth to money. End the Cult of Rich. (The old USSR did in some measure achieve this, but I don't care for its methods, or for that matter its overall results.)
Are there any preferable methods you would point to?
None with histories of success, no. What I had in mind was a Citizens' Basic Income or something very like it, but the real change must be to hearts, not bank accounts. Yet it is a waste of breath simply to tell people, "You should not feel that way about poor people."
Besides, however high my moral worth may be, I can't pay my electricity bill with it.
I think there have been a fair number of societies where perceived moral worth, or at least status, which is closely related, was not tied to money, although money might be one factor. In 19th century England, "he made it in trade" was a negative. A poor Church of England minister had more status than a richer tradesman. In traditional Jewish or Islamic societies, a religious scholar had more status than a richer businessman.
The same is true in sizable parts of our society. A Nobel prize winner has more status but probably less money than the author of a widely used introductory textbook in his field. A very successful bridge player or chess player has more status in his community than a less successful and richer one.
IQ by itself gives little status in our society. Being a member of Mensa isn't worth very much — less than being a Harvard graduate.
Re meritocracy and jobs:
Are you really steelmanning the socialist case here? Yes, it is good for society to have the most competent person for a job perform that job - and in that sense of "meritocracy" presumably everyone is a meritocrat.
In the functional capitalist system you describe the people who are more competent will be assigned more money and status and live more comfortable lives. This incentivizes people to contribute as much value as they can, which is good for society.
Since people have different levels of talent, the result, however, is an uneven distribution of goods like status and money. On the face of it, that seems unfair. So we end up with a tension between incentivizing people to provide value and having a fair distribution of "goods". We can try to resolve that tension in different ways:
1. We can deny that the unequal distribution is unfair and keep the current system.
2. We can stop rewarding more competent people with status and money, sacrificing the incentivization mechanisms.
3. We can do something in between, like using redistributive taxation to reduce the resulting inequality while keeping some incentivization.
A common way to defend 1 is to claim that if you are productive you *deserve* both monetary rewards and high status. And vice versa, if you are incompetent you deserve little or no money and low status. Even though this isn't the technical definition of "meritocracy" the idea is somewhat associated, so presumably that's what DeBoer is opposed to.
And this view has trouble with IQ realism. Normally the view is combined with ideas like that success comes from hard work and using free will to make good choices. But if success is rather determined by an inherited IQ level that you are not responsible for, then it's hard to defend an uneven distribution of goods as fair and just.
Since the solution 2 plausibly leads to a worse society it isn't very tempting. Instead, a social democratic-ish mixed economy version of 3 becomes more tempting: retain a free market monetary and status incentives for productivity but use progressive taxation to redistribute a fair amount of the goods.
However, if competency is largely determined by IQ, or other factors people have no control over, then it seems unfair that the high IQ people will end up with lots of money and status.
Fairness is not the sole criteria. A society that resembles a meritocracy will be richer, safer, and cleaner than one that does not. It may be less fair, but some things are more important than fairness.
Right, it is also possible to sacrifice either fairness or efficiency, if one turns out to be more important and there is no way to get both.
Note however, that if a society is perceived to be unfair that leads to secondary problems too, like lower social trust.
Of course, a moderate socialist would argue that you can get enough of both meritocratic efficiency and fairness through the combination of a capitalist economy and progressive redistributive taxation.
At a tangent, one problem with the whole "fairness" argument is that if you take it seriously — everything you are is due to things you were not responsible for, whether genetics, environment, or luck — the conclusion is not that everyone deserves the same outcome but that nobody deserves anything. That leads you to ignore issues of fairness and instead try to maximize whatever you think is important — utlitarianism or some alternative with a different maximand.
In many ways this is about the perception of fairness, the goal being social peace. (However this breaks down if people start to starve.)
> A common way to defend 1 is to claim that if you are productive you *deserve* both monetary rewards and high status.
A better way to defend 1 would be that you've earned whatever people freely give you, and since there's no problem with the individual exchanges (paying someone to perform a surgery), there's no problem with the resulting distribution. Since people tend to prefer better surgeons to worse ones, monetary rewards will tend to flow to higher-IQ people, but they're being paid by each person who judges their price to be worth it, not rewarded for their IQ.
Compare to e.g. basketball, where height, an unchosen trait, is a prerequisite for professional success. Is it fair that short people are unlikely to make much money there? I think it is - viewers want to see a certain level of play, and so they ultimately pay to see it. But the successful players aren't being rewarded for their height, but for providing a good experience, which is a choice.
I don't think "inputs" like IQ or effort are relevant to desert. Suppose one guy slaves away studying/practicing, sacrifices a lot of personal life for his dream job, and is only able to perform adequately because he works really hard. The other guy is so naturally talented that he can do the job as a hobby with minimal practice. Which one is more deserving? The one the customer chooses.
That's Robert Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain example.
I am suspicious of this reasoning because it seems like when the masses throw money, you get weird results.
We are in an age where people will buy a stock based on a misspelling of a word in an Elon Musk tweet, or a cryptocurrency because celebrities promote it.
Also, it has always been a little weird to me how little problem most people have with lottery tickets. Isn't this creating inequality for the undeserving on purpose? But we don't see activists trying to ban lotteries.
I don't think we've figured out how to properly deal with summing small inputs from large numbers of people. Utilitarianism seems to have problems with this too, with paradoxes about the worth of making millions of people every-so-slightly better off.
I don't have a good alternative, and it's been a long time since I more-or-less accepted that people get rich for unfair reasons and I'll just have to deal with it. But it seems like a there is a mystery here, and something being the sum of a lot of voluntary transactions doesn't resolve the mystery for me.
If there is a problem with the initial distribution, there is a problem wth the final distribution.
Distribution of money or distribution of traits relevant for jobs like NBA player? Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain example started with people having equal amounts of money, and it subsequently becoming very unequal even though each step didn't violate any notion of fairness.
Distribution of anything. The point isnt that inequalities can't arise in an otherwise just system, it is that the starting state of the system must be included. We can't say that the current distribution is just because we know that it started from an unequal distribution.
I think there are some people who would object to inequalities even in Nozick's thought experiment. If the real objection is not to the ex-post inequalities but to prior injustices, then logically it should seem that our responses should be tailored to those prior injustices rather than the present.
We can't go back in time and solve prior injustices. There is a consequentialist argument or redistribution in the present, which is that transfers increase overall utility. There is a deontological argument against that, which is that everyone owns their money justly, so that taxation is theft. But including the initial state removes that objection and leaves the consequentualist argument.
"A common way to defend 1 is to claim that if you are productive you *deserve* both monetary rewards and high status."
I don't think that correctly represents the argument. It's that if you are productive you are entitled to monetary rewards, which is not the same thing. It ultimately comes from the intuition that an individual is entitled to what he produces. That's an easy and persuasive intuition in a context where production is clearly linked to individuals. Imagine that there is lots of empty land out there and anyone who wants can go out, clear some of it, plant crops, etc. There is still inequality — some people are better farmers than others or luckier — but there is a strong intuition that each person is entitled to what he produces, whether or not he deserves it. Applying the intuition to a complicated and interdependent society is harder, but I think it can still be done.
>"I can't find any expert surveys giving the expected result that they all agree this is dumb and definitely 100% environment and we can move on..."
tl;dr of course any two racial groups could differ genetically in either direction, and we would have no real way to tell, given the eminent plausibility of environmental/socialization differences that are even larger—and can't be controlled for by adoption studies, since e.g. people's perception of your skin colour doesn't change when you're adopted. (Don't look at experts on IQ only, look at experts on quantitative genetics, or at least people who are genuinely literate in it [Murray isn't*]. Those are the prerequisite concepts, e.g. understanding what heritability means.)
It's not that races couldn't possibly differ genetically for IQ-affecting genes. It's that there's no reason at all to assume any particular genetic difference in any particular direction (unless by misunderstanding heritability)—yet Murray and friends keep speculating that black people specifically have lower-IQ genes than white people specifically.
[https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/block/papers/Heritability.html]:
"...Let's first be clear about the conclusion itself. In a recent article on 'The Real Bell Curve,' Charles Murray grumbles about critics, such as Stephen Jay Gould, who read the book as saying that racial differences in IQ are mostly genetic. Murray answers by quoting from the book:
If the reader is now convinced that either the genetic or environmental explanations have won out to the exclusion of the other, we have not done a sufficiently good job of presenting one side or the other. It seems highly likely to us that both genes and environment have something to do with racial differences. What might the mix be? We are resolutely agnostic on that issue; as far as we can determine, the evidence does not yet justify an estimate (311).
In this passage, Herrnstein and Murray are 'resolutely agnostic' about whether bad environment or genetic endowment is more responsible for the lower IQs of Blacks. But they indicate no agnosticism at all about whether *part of the IQ difference* between Blacks and Whites is genetic; and given their way of thinking about the matter, this means that they are not at all agnostic about *some* Black genetic inferiority...
...Notice... that [Murray's] statement of alternatives blots out a crucial possibility: that Blacks are much worse off than Whites environmentally and better off genetically. Allowing this option, we get a different set of alternatives: genetically, Blacks are worse off - or better off - or equal to Whites. I don't say that it is likely that blacks are better off genetically than whites, but it is possible, and—a very important point—what you consider possible affects what you think is an extremist position...
...If you accept The Bell Curve's way of putting the options, then the idea that environmental differences between blacks and whites are big enough to account for 15 IQ points looks like extremism. But given the actual alternatives—that blacks are genetically on a par with whites, or worse off, or better off—zero genetic difference doesn't seem extremist at all."
[my attempt to intuitively explain what heritability is: https://www.quora.com/What-is-heritability/answer/David-Bahry]
*see also his more recent misunderstanding of polygenic scores in WSJ [https://www.facebook.com/david.bahry/posts/10156548007575286]
I think you missed the note that doing this will get you banned?
Must have. What note are you talking about?
+ Scott seems like he would be interested in hearing a lucid explanation of the criticisms of Murray and why his opinion isn't a reasonable middle-ground, so "we can move on."
Ah. Yes, I did miss it.
It seems a couple of my other comments were deleted, but this one wasn't, so I suppose that means it was deemed sufficiently meta-level
"It's that there's no reason at all to assume any particular genetic difference in any particular direction"
That's too strong. We do, after all, have a theoretical basis for predicting some genetic differences.
The obvious case is not race but sex. We are as-if-optimized for reproductive success. So we should expect differences in the distribution of heritable traits where the traits have different payoffs for male and female reproductive strategies. The obvious example is that the payoff to a male from a taste for promiscuity is higher than the payoff to a female, and that prediction seems to fit at least casual observation. There are less obvious predictions as well. One can imagine similar arguments for racial groups whose ancestors spent a long time in different environments, although the only obvious ones are things such as skin color and genetic defenses against malaria.
My statement was about racial groups;
I agree that for sexes, plausible predictions can be made that, though far from certain (cf. seahorses and hyenas), are more likely in one direction than the other
(and agree re: malaria and skin colour)
tangent, for interest! [on parental investment theory; in general not specifically for humans]:
>"The obvious example is that the payoff to a male from a taste for promiscuity is higher than the payoff to a female..."
Interestingly, insofar as that's been thought relevant to parental care evolution (when will a male desert to mate again vs. help raise its offspring? when will a female?), it turns out to be complicated by the "Fisher condition"* familiar from sex ratio theory, that every mating must have one male and one female—so to properly model males' and females' gains from desertion, you have to keep track of where the future mates would come from (even Maynard Smith accidentally left that out of one of his 1977 models**)
The Fisher condition complicates the theory itself, not just the technical details of the models, because at the 1:1 sex ratio, the average male and average female should expect exactly the same amount of future reproduction—so how can it benefit males more than females to desert? An answer is that it can if there's already sexual selection, because then *mated* males, who are the ones facing the decision whether to desert, are a *non-random subset* of males, with higher-than-average expectation of future reproduction [Queller 1997, https://www.jstor.org/stable/50761; Kokko and Jennions 2003, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0169534703000090]
(Parental care is also thought to be easily influenced by mode of reproduction; e.g. since in fish, vs. mammals, eggs are laid before males fertilize them, females have the first opportunity to desert and leave the males to guard the nest [Dawkins and Carlisle 1976, https://www.nature.com/articles/262131a0])
*Actually Carl Düsing gave the 1:1 sex ratio argument first, in 1884 [Edwards 1998, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/286141]
**How to properly apply which Fisher condition (on reproductive output? on mating rate?) to which sex ratios (adult? at maturity? operational?) has tripped up lots of researchers. An amusing summary [Fromhage and Jennions 2016, https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms12517]: "There is a long history of modellers struggling with the Fisher condition. For example, model 2 of Maynard Smith failed to specify where the mating opportunities of deserting males came from, creating the impression they appeared from thin air... This problem went unnoticed for many years, until Webb et al. and Wade and Shuster proposed solutions... the latter of which turned out to be flawed itself. Kokko and Jennions subsequently drew on Queller and made the Fisher condition the focal point of their model for the evolution of parental care but, as we have described here, they too inadvertently misapplied the Fisher condition. We trust that our current model is now Fisher consistent, although the literature on this topic is hardly a recommendation for uncritical acceptance of such assurances." [Jennions and Fromhage 2017, https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2016.0312] has a useful table for which quantities have which Fisher conditions for which sex ratios
(oh and multiple matings can reduces the fitness benefit of paternal care, by reducing paternity certainty)
I actually use the Fisher condition in a price theory textbook to demonstrate that the economic approach isn't limited to humans, it applies to genes too — the analysis parallels the explanation of why all checkout lines in a supermarket are about the same length.
As a small child spending a year in Cambridge, I met Fisher. I don't remember the occasion, but by my parents' account I was very impressed. He not only knew more than I did about dinosaurs, an enthusiasm at the time, he knew more than I did about comic books.
The Senior Common Room took two copies of the Times, for the crossword puzzle. It was a contest — Fisher against everyone else.
It's an odd moment to write an encomium to learning at home & talk about how horrible school is, when a whole lot of parents (not all, but a whole lot) are finding their kids miserable because they're stuck at home. And it's not the zoom school, at least in all the cases I know of; it's the lack of social contact. I've seen lots of news stories saying "I can't believe I want to go to school" type-things. So whatever you do, don't make homeschooling the default. (I admit it would be better out of a pandemic, since those homeschooling kids tend to get together.) If you want non-prison schools, then advocate for those. Or free-range schools where the kids go and design their own activities & do whatever they want. But some sort of place to be with other kids (and for a lot of kids, some sort of structure to the day) is really necessary.
I went to public school, but most people I know who were home schooled had plenty of social time with other kids.
Kids are missing socializing for the same reason I am—there's a pandemic and I'm not allowed to socialize outside my household.
This is an interesting time to be looking at the education system, since so many children have been locked up at home instead of at school for nearly a year now, and enough miss it to suggest some utility outside the bare minimum of learning basic skills that can be done on a computer.
Outside of absolute basics in reading, writing, and arithmetic, I would prefer that a lot more focus was placed on student experience in general, and it seems like a major flaw that Freddie's thoughts on charter schools don't give more weight to student happiness regardless of test scores.
I was homeschooled until about 16, when I studied pretty much whatever I wanted at community college. It was a good experience, with lots of youth group and clubs and 4-H, all very relaxed.
Now I'm an elementary art teacher, and mostly get to see the good side of that system. Every week of so the children get to paint or poke at pieces of wool or build something out of clay and dip it in glaze and see how it melts into glass. This is quite popular. Children stop in the hallway to tell me that art is their favorite subject. Even the kids who won't ever be great at realism or technique seem to have a decent time trying different things out. I think music class is also fairly popular (except that this year they aren't allowed to sing).
Waldorf schools, are quite arty and imaginative, and they seem like a good idea, though after interviewing at one I've realized that it's much too much work to be a teacher at one.
I can't tell from this review if Freddie has much of an opinion on the sorts of things young people who aren't academically gifted should be encouraged to do more of instead. School doesn't have to be the place for trying to figure that out, but since the infrastructure is already in place, it could be for many young people.
Some high schools have excellent and popular culinary arts programs. Sous chef or baker isn't a dead end position the way fast food worker mostly is. Some high schools have good cosmetology programs, and 18 year olds graduate with certificates allowing them to get salon jobs immediately. It can be hard to find good shop teachers since mechanics don't need to put up with all the BS entailed in getting certified as a teacher, but a good welding or automotive repair or any other respectable blue collar program is super useful. I'm not sure if there are many high schools with programs in innovative agriculture -- permaculture, regenerative agriculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, etc -- but there could be, and probably are some already. To extent that these programs are well targeted, they mostly don't have a big problem with students and their teachers agreeing on when to go to the bathroom. Some high schools seem to have nearly transitioned into community college, with specializations, choices, and large campuses. Other schools allow duel enrollment with the local college, which can also be very positive.
Majority hispanic schools especially seem to do a reasonably decent job of communicating that working in a kitchen or salon or building or repairing physical things *isn't necessarily a bad life, or a failure.* Freddie seems to think so as well, but that message seems to get a bit lost in the abstractions, and in the fact that he's an academic himself, and very embroiled in the kinds of academic concerns that he admits aren't important or universal enough to stress in education. But maybe he's like Levin and does whatever the city equivalent of wielding a scythe is.
"Certainly it is hard to deny that public school does anything other than crush learning - I have too many bad memories of teachers yelling at me for reading in school, or for peeking ahead in the textbook, to doubt that."
Scott's school sounds surprisingly restrictive. Especially the parts about getting yelled at for reading ahead. What was that about? In my experience teachers get rather put out when students blast through an assignment super fast and then expect to be entertained or given something else to do, but that's just a management issue. Even if they can come up with a new activity instantly, explaining it might derail the rest of the class.
Thanks! I enjoy your articles.
I went to a magnet high school which boasted a record of 0 disciplinary suspensions of students per year.
Come senior year when I was arrested at school for drug posession, I discovered how they managed to pull that off: Send the student back to their normal, geographically-zoned high school, or a K-12 for bad kids if you committed a crime, for the rest of the year, but allow them back right in time for graduation.
It's effectively a suspension (from the school's perspective) but without the accompanying statistic.
Scott: I think the first "income" in this quote is meant to be "IQ":
"studies have shown that racial income gaps are not due to differences in income/poverty, "
Great post. My top 10 to be sure. I just want to add a few things that might not be obvious to most people. First, even very small IQ differences can lead to drastically different pay scales. Take the NBA for example. The top 3 ranked basketball players may be only 10% or even 5% better than the next 3 ranked basketball play but still make many multiples more. Even when the "merit" difference is small, the "pay" or "status" difference can still be huge - especially in our global economy. It is more exponential than linear. This speaks to how hard this "cult of merit" would be to tamp down, even if we tried....which I don't think we should.
Second, if you really think about it, if his premise is really true, and you wanted to really improve society and those suffering under the "cult of meritocracy", Bryan Caplans book is a better path than Deboers utopian suggestions.
Scott it's simple if you don't want to have Marxbro popping up just stop taking cheap shots at Marx without having read him. I get that people can't be bothered to read books these days and would rather listen to podcasts or something but that's not an excuse for speaking your opinion while uninformed. Even Peterson's reputation crashed and burned when he admitted to not having read Marx prior to his debate about Marxism.
I've read one book by Marx and one volume of commentary. What part of this post do you think was a cheap shot?
I hear that the Manifesto is considered to be pretty crappy compared to the standards of other works by Marx ? (One reason being that it's a propaganda piece.)
For instance, that quip about 'it has been a failure every time it's been tried'. We can wax endlessly about the successes and failures of the USSR (which was no paradise but did industrialize the entire country in a handful of years, alphabetize its population, *won the goddamn WW2* and the space race as well), or debate about whether China truly is communist and so on, but that little quip in itself is tired and clichéd and brushes away a definitely complex historical topic for the sake of a gratuitous jab. This is below your caliber as a new 'public figure'.
Cliches often exist for a reason.
I don't think Rationalists have been around long enough or been notable enough to have accumulated comparable cliches.
In Western Europe we had quite a few communists/socialists in power during its long history, and they were not associated with scary Soviet tanks and rounds of purges, but things like universal healthcare, labor protections, unemployment benefits, and weeks and weeks of paid leave. I know SSC/ACX has quite the readership in ex-USSR countries and I understand they turned into hardcore libertarians due to having been traumatized by Russian domination but I don't have that trauma and my cliché of communism is that it brought me things that are cool and good, actually. Of course if you are American and *not* from an ex-USSR country you have even less of an excuse for spouting tired clichés.
In any case, negative and dismissive clichés are the epitome of uncharitability and I don't see that same hostility towards people who constantly bring up race-and-IQ stuff. Which is all the more ironic since eugenics *has* been tried (and failed).
> but things like universal healthcare, labor protections, unemployment benefits, and weeks and weeks of paid leave.
None of that makes for a Marxist society. You are defending social-democracy, which people tend to distinguish from Marxism, for good reason.
Also note that the USSR failed to provide free universal healthcare, because their doctors routinely demanded 'gifts.' So people without enough money couldn't afford healthcare.
There was also a huge shortage of doctors, resulting in them being unable to provide high levels of care.
Both of these were presumably caused by underpaying doctors.
My understanding is that western Europe had Social Democrats competing with Christian Democrats, but the Communist Party was marginalized by the former basically everywhere outside of Italy. Where are you from, specifically?
Some social democratic parties had Marxist roots or Marxist factions. I.e.: The German SDP were officially Marxist at their foundation and during Weimar when they were in goverment. Weimar of course failed, but it was nothing like the USSR. They did eventually abandon Marxism around 1960, but even before that they were staunch supporters of liberal democracy. Soviet aligned communists were participants in the French popular front government of the 1930s. Wiki is not entirely clear on this and does not cite sources but Guy Mollett who was French PM in the 1950s seems to have started out as an anti-Soviet Marxist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Mollet#Early_political_career One of the absolutely key figures in the development of European social democracy is Eduard Bernstein who seems to have been heavily influenced by Marx although also to have disagreed with him on important stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Bernstein
Communists had an outsized influence in the drafting of the postwar laws in France due to the outsized role they played in the Résistance.
When was eugenics tried and failed?
Could you give some specific examples of the communists/socialists in power in Europe that you're referencing?
We can wax endlessly about the successes and failures of the Fascist Italy (which was no paradise, but significantly increased literacy and made the trains ran on time), or debate wether Germany truly was National Socialist and so on, but this little Goodwin's-law comment in itself is tired and clichéd and brushes away a definitely complex historical topic for the sake of a gratuitous jab.
The detractors of fascism don't reject fascism because it "failed", they're usually the ones that make it fail (because the facist countries declare war on them). The "train ran on time" thing is a myth, btw.
I suppose we could look at the "Spanish miracle" for an example of fascism peacefully losing out to a superior alternative. Franco wasn't really an ideological falangist, but he let them have a lot of important positions because they were his allies. When he decided the economy wasn't working very well he started removing them and replacing them with members of Opus Dei, which worked out much better.
I think if you compare Soviet economic progress with Japan, or Taiwan, or South Korea, it looks pretty bad. They all started out poor, they all of much less in natural resources per capita, and all of them are now much richer and more developed than Russia. And none of them had a famine along the way that killed several million people. You might find it interesting to read _The Russians_ for a picture of the Soviet Union in its later stages, a third world country with a first world capital and military.
Are you a marxbro sockpuppet?
The end was unexpected coming from Scott, who is the same author who wrote this:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-little-soldiers/
to quote:
>How might the personified Chinese education system respond?
>What if it said “I don’t know what you 老外 are doing in America, but I’m not crushing anybody. I’m just telling kids to sit here drawing 1,000 raindrops in a row without moving or protesting. If after that you decide you don’t want to found the next Uber, that’s on you. But if you do decide to found the next Uber, I will have taught you the most important skill: discipline. Learning how to sit still and obey others is the necessary prerequisite to learning how to sit still and obey yourself.”
>If it was really mean, it might go further. “I notice most of you Americans suck at this skill. I notice you’re always whining about how you don’t have enough discipline to pursue your interests. Some of you are writers who spend years fantasizing about the novel you’re going to publish, but can never quite bring yourself to put pen to paper. Others want to learn another language, but reject real work in favor of phone apps that promise to ‘gamify’ staying at a 101 level for the rest of your life. You don’t need to feel bad about having no self-control; after all, nobody taught you any. If you’d gone to 宋庆龄幼儿园, you would have spent your formative years learning to sit still and focus, having your natural impulse to slack off squeezed out of you. Then you could have pushed through and written your novel, or learned 官話, or if you wanted to start Uber you could start Uber. At the very least you’d be doing something other than lying in bed browsing Reddit posts about how adulting is hard.”
What bothers me about school is its immense costs and half-hearted vague benefits. Boot camps are brutal but make you a good soldier; meditation retreats are brutal but make you a good monk. If people were acting off some theory that discipline and self-abnegation made you a stronger person, and they had really good proof of that theory, then...I would still wonder if you could just make kids sit totally motionless in meditation for an hour a day, then give them the rest of the day off. If not, then I would support whatever system gave the maximum amount of discipline with the least amount of brutality. I doubt modern school is anywhere around this level.
I agree with your stance in this article (and in this comment). I don't agree with your stance back in Jan 2020, where you notably failed to compare drawing 1,000 raindrops to prisons or to child labor. I feel like in the 2020 article, you forgot to mention the immense costs, and focused mostly on the half-hearted benefits.
(My Chinese friend who went to school in both China and the west assures me the Chinese system is more traumatizing.)
And I've been told (sorry, I have no reference for this) that Chinese kids in America have among the highest suicide rates. The person who told me this is a psychiatrist, not much given to making things up. I suspect (for that reason only) that she knew what she was talking about. She attributed to (my words) oppression by tiger moms. Of course, some might attribute it instead to oppression of Asians by white elites. Ya pays yer money and takes yer cherce...
The benefits of school are only vague for the smart children of educated parents. For others the alternative is leaving kids to fend for themselves while their parents nod off on a vicodin binge. Every modern society has schools. Who else is going to teach that with hard work anyone can succeed? In school we come to understand through grades and constant feedback that some people have more merit than others, and we get what we deserve in our meritocratic society. Eliminate school and indoctrination, and other ideas will come fill the vacuum.
In my, entirely anecdotal, experience of having taught and worked in China the notional discipline benefits don't seem to transfer. I met a lot of kids who had spent their teen years in insane 12 hour days of formal education. And got out of it and struggled in colleges that didn;t force them to work in the same way, and at jobs, and tended to be deeply unhappy from the trauma of their teen years.
If we're discussing radical ideas for fixing education, I've got one for y'all.
Setting aside all the resource and logistical problems of actually educating people, I think there's a structural problem with education. I can testify that I love learning, but that the foremost learning pipeline in the world was as much a misery for me as Scott writes that it is. I think a lot of that misery comes from the pileup of three facts: (1) most people don't care about everything, (2) learning things you don't care about is really hard, but (3) we want people to be robust so we want everyone to learn a broad base and that usually includes a bunch of things each student doesn't care about. We want people to be able to fix their house and possibly build Saturn V, so we teach them Algebra and then Calculus, but most people don't inherently love and care about Algebra and especially not Calculus. So we solve that problem in the obvious way; we hold their nose to the grindstone until they figure out how to pretend they care. By contrast, once you find something you love, you will learn everything there is to know about it. Most people go green around the gills when you ask them to do statistics ... unless it's for sports or board games, where suddenly they're a savant.
I think we need to restructure education around that determined love.
At a certain point, maybe at the end of middle school, students would cycle through a bunch of high-tempo focused activities, each a FIRST Robotics Competition style sprint. They put on a play, they spend a few weeks learning baseball, the works. You do one topic after another until you know what each student enjoys enough to be self-motivated in. From there, they first go deep in their chosen specialties, and then they're introduced to how it fits in to the bigger picture. Oh, you love Artificial Intelligence? Well AI dates back to some of the foundational work of computing. Why was anything worrying about computing things? Well, we needed a faster way to print artillery tables and crack codes. Why? Well we were at war; there was this bad man with a funny mustache in a place called Europe, you see...
Does this totally get rid of rote memorization? Probably not. But if we can reduce the slog, I think we'll find school a lot more fun and effective. I know I treasured my time in FIRST Robotics and resented my - objectively excellent - high school for every moment it stole away from robot time.
There are a lot of reasonable complaints about this idea. Doesn't it require way more teachers? How does it work in poor or remote areas that can't hire all those specialized teachers? Are there some things everyone needs to learn but nobody likes learning about? What if one year everyone chooses baseball and nobody chooses robotics? I have no answers to any of those questions; I called the idea radical and I meant it. I bet there are more iterations to go before the model is fit for human consumption.
But it's not like the current system works either.
I work in an expensive, but not selective private school where all the parents are educated and successful. Still a large number of kids don't really care that much....about anything. It is not that they haven't been allowed to discover their passion. Their passion is a nice comfortable couch, some bon bons, and entertainment. It really isn't surprising. If all humans were motivated, ambitious, curious, we would have killed ourselves off during the hunter gatherer times.
You are describing what happens with unschooling.
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Ideas%20I/Education/Unschooling.pdf
David, that's very interesting! Definitely a lot of similarities, including that when I said board games I really meant D&D but thought it was unnecessarily specific. If they're an example to go by, I should have trusted my gut. I loved their line about throwing books at the students and seeing what sticks.
I think what I was imagining still has more of a formal place and structure to it than unschooling or homeschooling; I don't want to do away with schools, I just want them to be less painful for the advantages they do provide. I'm imagining it more like a single roof under which a whole bunch of guilds live. Each guilds is internally united by a shared love, but they also feel an obligation to eventually show the students how their narrow love is part of the greater whole. I'd say the ideal version of this ends up with many departments, but one coffee shop that all the students converge on after class to swap war stories.
This is long-winded and I suppose I should have my own blog if I want to vent. But I don't have one, so thanks to Scott's generosity, here I am. So, perhaps with apologies,...
... there's a contradiction in DeBoer (at least in Scott's description of his book) that I think more could be made of. (Or if Scott did, I missed it.)
To DeBoar (and me, too), on the one hand, academic achievement isn't intrinsically for everyone, yet it's the only one we encourage, and students who aren't well suited for academic excellence should be allowed to leave school early and pursue directions that better suit their talents, or at least their interests. And on the other hand, DeBoer says that charter schools cheat because they cherry-pick academically talented students and kick out the rest. That really isn't all that different from what he otherwise thinks should be done. That is the contradiction.
We have regressed in providing a range of public schools that cater to multiple tastes and aspirations. When I was growing up in NYC in the '50s & '60s, more such paths were provided. Bronx Science, Stuyvesant and Brooklyn tech educated the technical elite. (I'm not afraid of that term.) The HS of Music and Art trained talented musicians and artists, at least in the "classical" arts and music; but it's worth noting that these days, even places like Juilliard have strong jazz programs and more than a whiff of hip-hop and even country music in the air. We had a HS of Printing Trades, a HS of maritime trades (which was located on a ship moored at a pier, and I envied the kids who went there). There was a HS of Performing Arts for aspiring actors and a HS of Fashion Trades. Except for the "elite"schools, these were called "vocational schools." And in "ordinary" high schools, there were two kinds of degrees: a "general" degree and an "academic degree", which was intended for the small (compared to now) number of students who expected go on to college. The "general" degree fed a large demand for accountants, clerks, retail employees, firemen, policemen, bus drivers, subway workers, etc. Some of the above jobs are gone, but not all of them. And the office buildings whose corner offices house the 20% (or 10%, anyway) employ large number of plumbers, electrical workers, building engineers, maintenance workers, security guards; and tend to hire outside carpenters and decorators for renovations and outside janitorial agencies for cleanup. In the buildings where I spent most of my career, the folks who provided these services in the buildings where I worked were really good at what they did. Those who did have college degrees probably didn't need them for their jobs but may have appreciated their ability to have gone. Those who did not probably did not suffer for their lack. I respected them all; or at least, if there were those whom I respected less, it wasn't because they had less education than I did. And quite a few were very smart, college degrees or not.
Cherry-picking students makes sense. Birds of a feather should be allowed to flock together and the flock should be catered to and nurtured. Musicians are going to do better around other musicians, actors around other actors, athletes among other athletes. It is as ridiculous to take a genuinely talented young athlete whose heart is in soccer, hocky, basketball or baseball and make him take algebra (unless he wants to take it), just as it would be ridiculous to send me to a program specializing in any of those sports.
Finally, problem kids: retarded, or disturbed, or blind, or deaf, were taken out of the regular classrooms and put into special programs. Kids who always acted out and kept others from learning were put into the "600" schools (like, say, PS 612). There is a residue of that still left, but for the most part, "mainstreaming" has taken over, that this to me is a terrible idea. To me, this past diversity of educational paths was humane and generous. My elementary school in the Bronx had a little garden plot fenced off from the recess area. It was very pretty. I once asked a teacher what that was for. It turned out to be a place where the retarded kids could learn to plant flowers and maybe vegetables and get some joy of satisfaction in their lives instead of bitter tears of failure. At the age of say, 9, when I learned this, I thought it very sweet.
Thus, a lot of what DeBoer advocates used to be in place. It's true that the job market has changed, and it is also true that all of a sudden in 1957 we threw huge amounts of money into scientific and technical programs in order to "beat the Russians." I actually owe my ability to get through college and grad school with very little debt due my good fortune in being talented (or at least interested) in such things, but somehow it became the thing that now "everybody" should be learning. Not!
Finally, and separately, just speaking personally, I do agree that not everyone is intellectually gifted, and for the record, I am skeptical of the notion that intellectual ability is genetically linked to race. It can be independent of race while still being genetic at the individual level, as Scott points out. But I also don't think that everyone is artistically gifted, or athletically gifted, or has that "Momma, I wanna sing" impetus. And lots of people are not terribly gifted or even interested in any particular thing. It seems to me that public education should still provide pathways to cater to a broad variety of tastes and hopes.
Streaming is a hard question, I think. There are obviously times when it's warranted. But there are also times when it proves a very bad idea, and I don't know how to tell which are which.
I went to a high school program for the "gifted". I have mixed feelings about it. I liked it, learned a fair bit, and was very well-prepared for university. But it was kind of a weird social environment, full of people with an unhealthy desire for good grades. Maybe I would've gotten an even better education in a healthier atmosphere elsewhere. Or maybe I would've gotten a worse education in a worse environment. I really don't know.
And of course there's always the fear of children being essentially thrown into the trash, sent to miserable programs for the doomed. Streaming can easily make for self-fulfilling prophecies.
Interesting, I went to a gifted high school and we had the opposite problem. Everyone was fairly smart, but the school work wasn't especially challenging (it's still just high school) so everyone became lazy. Competitively lazy. The only kids who worked hard were the Asian kids, everyone else competed on how little work they could do while still getting acceptable grades.
Something has changed, though, in the ~20 years since I went there: the selective schools in my city have become primarily Asian. Because Asians are that much smarter? No, because the selection exam for the schools is at least somewhat gameable. It turns out that if you spend your free time from ages 4-11 in cram schools getting drilled on the sorts of questions that show up on IQ tests, you can significantly boost your score on IQ tests (who knew?) so a cram school industry has developed in my city, teaching kids to be able to pass the selective schools exams.
So the selective schools these days are filled with a combination of a few truly brilliant kids plus a large number of somewhat intelligent kids whose parents have sent them to cram school from the age of four specifically to pass that entrance exam. It's a sad example of Goodhart's Law in action.
It might be worth noting that my high school was extremely Asian. Many of the Asian students embraced the stereotypes, half jokingly and half not.
I never got the impression that the Asians were any less talented than the white kids, though.
I went to Bronx Science, class of 1963. Back then we were all Jews. Now it's all Asians. (For clarity, "all" is of course an exaggeration in both ways.) I don't recall any of my friends studying or preparing in any way for the entrance exam. I figured, if I get in I guess I'll go; if not, I'll go somewhere else. (Where's my "shrug" emoji?) I don't recall kids competing for grades, but one useful lesson I learned is that there are real geniuses out there. I got to rub shoulders with some of them, but realized pretty quickly that I'm not one. That was a life lesson worth learning.
When I taught an evening class in Chemistry at Columbia, I was warned that these kids will be grade-grubbers and they'll walk all over you if you're not careful. That turned out not to be true, either. These were kids who who had gone to college but after some years in the workforce decided maybe they'd like to go to med school, so had to pick up some entrance requirements. They were mature and dedicated, and I was as proud of the students who tried but discovered it just was not for them as for those who shone.
I don't think that studying is the same as gaming, though. And the city does (or at least used to) provide test preparation for the special high schools at least for lower-income students, but that was not until after I had come and gone.
The need to learn how to discipline yourself and achieve a goal is is a terribly valuable skill to have, and I'd rather be in favor of encouraging and enabling more kids to have that experience. Again, in the broader context of Scott's blog, this is applicable to all pursuits, not just purely academic ones. As a personal confession, it's something I suck at. But I still did OK, and as a 73-year old retiree, it's something I'm still working on, in the spirit of "dream the impossible dream".
Is it unfair that kids who love to play basketball find programs where they can get better and will devote large amounts of quality time trying to get better at it? Is it unfair that these kids excel in that sport? It it unfair that they use their skills and their hard work and the training that they've gotten to get in to a college with a good basketball program? I don't think so. That's not gaming the system. That's learning how to work hard in order to get the most out of your talents and interest. I'm for learning to excel in the things you love to do, unless those things are illegal or directly harmful to others.
As a caveat, I think it's nuts that great X players (where X can equal "basketball" or several other sports) have to go to college to maximize their chances of getting onto a pro team. That makes sense for some people, but I don't see why it should be required for all, and of course many athletes benefit from the broader college/university experience. Baseball still seems to recruit mostly out of high school, which makes more sense to me.
The issue is not "gaming the system", to my mind. The issue is that the current weltanschauung so highly regards purely intellectual (and especially scientific and technological) success.
I think the issue is that school used to be for sorting kids into career paths and preparing them for those careers and then at some point someone decided they were for equalizing social inequalities and of course a system that tracks janitors one way and rocket scientists another way is meeting goal a but not goal b. And then of course the pandemic hit and we've all realized that actually, school is just a place to put kids during business hours so both parents in a household can work full time jobs, and so it doesn't really matter that various social factions have widely divergent views of what you should do with the kids once they are there - it's just 'out of sight, out of mind' for most people.
There's more to the meritocracy thing...
If I'm getting surgery, I want the best surgical team I can get. I want the surgeon, anesthesiologist, nurses, janitor who sterilizes the operating theater, and all the support staff I don't know about to be excellent at their respective jobs.
But, once I'm off the table and I've paid, I don't actually care how the team divides up the money. It's all quite symmetrical from my perspective: if *any* of them had failed I'd be dead.
But most likely the surgeon and anesthesiologist will receive the lion's share of the money. And also have a disproportionate voice in decisions the team has to make together (e.g. will we schedule an operation on Yom Kippur?). This happens for reasons that mostly boil down to "the surgeon is harder to replace than the janitor".
This seems kind of unfair, though it's a load-bearing unfairness that's tricky to replace. And in less collaborative environments, it seems a lot fairer, though DeBoer might disagree.
I'd have agreed with Scott's take on this if he had used almost any other kind of doctor for his example. Surgery may be more about good hands than a good head. And Hippocrates said that doctors should have nothing to do with them. Surgery, recall, comes out of barbering, not medicine.
Isn't surgery just high-end butchery?
I don't think that entirely makes sense. The team isn't a single entity - if I'm getting a surgery, I want the best possible surgeon, one of the best possible anesthesiologist, but would be happy with only a fairly good janitor or other support staff. I would be willing to pay much more for a good surgeon, whose every tiny movement may make a difference to my life during the surgery, than for support staff.
and if two women are allowed to talk about the microwaved burrito, we call it a "Bechdel Burrito Test"
Only if the burrito isn't a man.
In which case it's a burrita.
Unless the burrito was purchased from a fast-food truck located at the gate of a petrochemical plant. Then it's a "Bechtel burrito test."
Freddie is a mensch, but one concern I have with his vision of socialism is that it’s almost exclusively moralistic. The smart people who run society (unlike Scott, I don’t see him as contesting that they would do so) will graciously look after their dumber brethren, because it’s the tight thing to do.
I think Freddie is right that this is morally right, but I’m much less sanguine that 1) morality alone can persuade here or that 2) even well-motivated managerial authority will not be practically malevolent.
What you need is counter-power, which means a mix of organization and indeed intelligence for self-government and pressing for collective rights. You can be an IQ realist and agree that even say IQ 80 people have this, organized rightly, but I feel like the *gist* of much IQ realism is that no, people who perform poorly on these tests must be ruled by others, and that’s why IQ realism leaves a bad taste in most leftists’ mouths. Certainly that’s the takeaway I get from the Bell Curve, even once you take away the spicy race stuff.
Oh, hey, Oligopsony! Long time no see. I think you're quite right on both points.
Equality of power is more important than equality of opportunity or outcome. And I have no clue how to achieve it.
And IQ realism often segues into a weird uni-dimensional view of merit, worth, and fitness for power. Scott defines meritocracy as "the person best at the job should get the job" and is bothered by Freddie describing it as "the person of the highest quality should get the job" but Freddie's definition describes the real-world system at least as well. And IQ realists often seem disturbingly keen on the kind of meritocracy Freddie rails against.
...come to think of it, that'd be a great subject for a Scott-style post. The eternal battle between meritocracy1 vs meritocracy2.
The hard thing about "the person best at the job should get the job" is that to some extent, it has to be "the person <i>seen as</i> best for the job should get the job".
Can you say more about how you would expect IQ 80 people to organize and get (their fair share of) power?
Good question! I would like to give this a more thorough answer after some thought, but here are some things that can increase the power of people who don’t pay close attention to politics, hated school, and are in menial jobs, which regardless of what you think about IQ is a significant portion of the population.
1) Circular answer: more unions, more civil society in general, more democracy (where we accept that “are you better off than you were four years ago?” produces better incentives for state managers than any alternative method.) Deprofessionalize activism. This isn’t entirely circular; people can talk to each other about how much work sucks and try to unionize right now, and they’ve done it in the past when the state was even more hostile and information even less available (though tbf civil society was stronger) and even when they fail it will build capacity.
2) Answer that’s paternalist itself (though not necessarily collectively so, since it can achieve mass support): more mandatory meetings. Compulsory voting, conscription into militias (give everyone guns and the training to use them), compulsory Quaker meetings, compulsory PTA meetings, compulsory unionization of all workplaces (and if the union votes to set dues at zero and not go on strike ever, okay, at least that’s what they chose.) Anything that increases capacity while getting each other to talk to each other about their interests.
3) The dodge answer: less lead in gasoline, more schooling again, more whatever you think causes Flynn effects.
4) Less meritocracy, even in your sense. If we segregate people by capacity then we’ll find people with a lot of capacity having more interests in common with each other, and poor communities with fewer leaders in their midst. I think the case for this is stronger the more you think IQ/capacity/whatever you want to call it is highly heritable.
5) Meta answer: I think Taleb is right that IQ doesn’t predict as much as is popularly assumed if you take out clinical populations and look at non-narrowly nerdy problems. IQ may gate understanding of quantum physics or Hegel or whatever the fuck but just be a lot less predictive of things like navigating collective social situations, finding friends, object-level moral reasoning, refusing to stand down for a good cause, and so on, which is most politics that matters. I believe that people that others would down on as dull, that I myself would at least instinctually look down on as dull, are capable of insight and creativity that surprises arrogant nerds like me and most of the other commenters here, especially when it comes to practical, non-nerd shit.
Also, having a more riot-friendly culture, like France. This is one of those things where public discussion has become stupid (a stupid discussion held largely by technically-high-IQ people, mind) because of the effervescent amnesia of the news cycle, with people’s views on this just being a function of who held a riot last, but the important thing is the long-term incentives, not the particular effect of this or that riot, which indeed are often pointlessly counterproductive even when they are for The Right Side, etc.
France has higher inequality than the Scandinavian countries and The Netherlands, that do not have a riot culture.
I think sometimes about this less meritocracy point. If you look at the industrial revolution, you find that working class movements tend to rely heavily on leaders who, when you look at them, probably had a skillset that in some frictionless capitalist meritocracy would have taken them out of the baseline labor pool. We don't have a frictionless capitalist meritocracy now by any means, but I do think a lot of the sort of people who were in the working class intellectual/leader role 200 years ago do things like get a decent paying sales job based on charisma, or a college scholarship, or start a risky business, etc. Organizing and leading a social movement is hard, and if you have the chops for it someone will often pay you middle class money or better to use them.
This doesn't operate with perfect efficiency - there are lots of people with relevant leadership skills who don't for one reason or another get to use them in their job, and they're still crucial to workplace organizing. And there are (dwindling) niches like up-from-the-ranks labor leader where you can try to take someone who has the skills and the solidarity and put them in a sustainable organizational structure. But if you extend the idea of meritocracy beyond IQ to include selection for the other social or organizational skills that are valuable to both a workplace and a social movement it seems clear that the more efficient the meritocracy the more the bottom rungs of society are going to be denuded of the people whose talents most naturally lend themselves to fighting for the collective interests of those rungs.
Yeah, see also the issue of brain drain across countries.
"while spending "as much as $3000 to $4000 less per child per year than their public school counterparts"
I can't speak for Success specifically, but in general:
Funny thing about NYC charter schools is that they are co-located with district schools. At no cost to the charter.
Isn't it amazing that when two schools in the same building get close to the same funding per student, but one has to maintain everything and the other gets a free ride, the free-ride one can spend more on actual students?
And they very much don't share resources. Stories abound of each charter kid having new laptops while district kids *in the same physical school* have to share one old desktop between 3 kids.
> Still, I worry that the title - The Cult Of Smart - might lead people to think there is a cult surrounding intelligence, when exactly the opposite is true. But I guess The Cult Of Successful At Formal Education sounds less snappy, so whatever.
Not a real problem; people talk about excessive credentialism all the time. "The Cult of Credentials" sounds snappier than "The Cult of Smart" does.
> I would usually defer to expert consensus, but all the studies I can find which try to assess expert consensus seem crazy. A while ago, I freaked out upon finding a study that seemed to show most expert scientists in the field agreed with Murray's thesis in 1987 - about three times as many said the gap was due to a combination of genetics and environment as said it was just environment. Then I freaked out again when I found another study (here is the most recent version, from 2020) showing basically the same thing (about four times as many say it’s a combination of genetics and environment compared to just environment).
If you don't like being slammed for not being willing to talk about your actual thoughts, some explanation of why you think this situation is "crazy" might be warranted. As described, you looked at some old surveys of expert opinion and found broad agreement. And then you looked at some very recent surveys of expert opinion and found even more agreement. And this is "crazy"? Whatever Freddie DeBoer is doing, you appear to be doing it too.
Schools as prisons is a pretty old trope. People have been trying to revolutionise them into blissful places of natural joy since at least the nineteenth century but all such experiments have failed. The tension is between two aspects of schools you don't like - the fact of bullying and the inability to microwave burritos. It turns out that if you give kids lots of freedom, one thing some of the do with it is bully other kids. One reason many parents like charters - or their UK equivalents - is because behaviour is better and so things like bullying are reduced. How do charters achieve this? More rules, more consistently enforced. If you visited a school like Michaela Community School in London and told the kids there that they were in child prison because of all the rules they had to follow, they would think you had lost the plot.
I'd argue there's an important distinction between rules (as a set of specific behavioral instructions, procedures, and prohibitions which provide structure and safety) and an atmosphere of restrictiveness.
Consider the old joke: "In England, everything is permitted except what is forbidden. In Germany, everything is forbidden except what is permitted. In France, everything is allowed, even what is prohibited. In the USSR, everything is prohibited, even what is permitted."
I think you can create a school environment where the default assumption is that something is permitted unless there's a specific rule against it, but it takes a certain mindset among teachers and administrators. It's all too easy to default to vague offenses like "defiance" or "disorderly behavior" as a mechanism for enforcing arbitrary rules that create a restrictive atmosphere.
True, but many successful charters avoid this by making expectations extremely explicit. Nobody then gets disciplined for vague crimes and it is also educative (because in many situations, kids don’t know the norms the teachers are applying). However, kids still are not able to microwave burritos or flip pancakes or whatever.
Yes, I agree with you on charters (and other private schools) being better at least in part because of better behavior. Although I think in practice some of that is better rule teaching/enforcement and some of it is selection. And I agree that reasonable rule enforcement won't feel restrictive.
I think what I'm saying is that rule enforcement alone isn't enough to determine whether an environment feels restrictive (so I disagree with the burrito test). Some schools with lots of rules will be restrictive and others will be safe and structured. But I think probably in practice there are more restrictive ones than safe/structured ones since I think institutions over time tend to slide towards authoritarianism and accumulation of restrictions.
I was imprisoned in a Montessori school from preschool through sixth grade. And while I can't directly compare to public schools, I think it was just bad in different ways. The worst part was that with no formal reward/punishment system (i.e. grades, detention) the only motivator was guilt. Maybe they weren't trying to, but the teachers instilled a feeling of constant guilt (mostly about getting distracted and not finishing assignments fast enough) that still haunts me.
I'm told some Montessori schools are better than the one I went to. Actually, I'm told the one I went to has improved a lot--it's bigger and much more professional. But I'm still skeptical of the whole concept.
Maria Montessori's best product was primary, ages 3-6. Lower elementary, 6-9, still works pretty well. Upper elementary, 9-12, works much less well and if the school doesn't solve it you get the situation you describe. One particular weakness of upper elementary in the standard model is that while young children are perfectly happy working silently, as they get older kids want to talk a lot more. If a Montessori program doesn't shift to take advantage of this talkiness, and some do, then you get the guilt thing going on. Montessori was also better at younger ages when concrete is more important than abstract.
There are great Montessori programs all the way through grade 12, but a LOT more work needs to be done by individual schools and programs to make it work from upper elementary onward. Primary and lower elementary are pretty successful turnkey programs.
> First, universal childcare and pre-K; he freely admits that this will not affect kids' academic abilities one whit, but thinks they're the right thing to do in order to relieve struggling children and families. Second, lower the legal dropout age to 12, so students who aren't getting anything from school don't have to keep banging their heads against it, and so schools don't have to cook the books to pretend they're meeting standards. Third, lower standards for graduation, so that children who realistically aren't smart enough to learn algebra (it's algebra in particular surprisingly often!) can still get through. Fourth, burn all charter schools (he doesn't actually say "burn", but you can tell he fantasizes about it). And fifth, make it so that you no longer need a college degree to succeed in the job market.
You know, other than 4, which is some Harrison Bergeron-level horror, the rest are eminently sensible. Most of it even used to be the norm, barely half a century ago.
I liked where you went at the end there, great essay. I’ve been meaning to get to this one, and some other related ones (The Tyranny of Merit by Michael Sandel)
> children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to *12 PM to 9 AM* than the average adult's 10 - 7.
I believe this should be "12AM to 9AM"
> DeBoer recalls hearing an immigrant mother proudly describe her older kid's achievements in math, science, etc, "and then her younger son ran by, and she said, offhand, 'This one, he is maybe not so smart.'"
That reminded me of what Banerjee and Duflo mention in Poor Economics: Poor people in third world tend to do this. Sometimes it's even worded even more roughly ("that one is an idiot"). The authors analyze it differently though. As a coping measure when all that parents can afford is to send just one child to the school. They just write the other kids off as stupid and you don't have to deal with the moral problem.
What is the moral problem? *Are* the other kids stupid?
In a park in San Francisco I once heard a guy confiding to his friend that the guy's son kept doing so well in school. And this worried him because he had always performed poorly in school, so the accolades this boy was raking in had him worried that he was a cuckold.
I instinctively objected to this, but that's just because I don't like the thought of punishing someone for being smart, and I have no other dogs in the fight. I don't know that guy.
But his argument, however much I might dislike it, is perfectly valid.
No, they are not stupid. The parent just can afford to send them to school.
Why do you believe this?
I guess you mean why do the parents believe they can send only one child to school. The book suggests it is because they think that school has no value unless the kid finishes the high school and gets a nice government job. Therefore, given the cost of keeping the kid in the school for so long, they choose to do it for one child and let other children drop out as soon as possible.
No, when I asked "why do you believe this", I was referring to your belief, not someone else's belief.
Why do you believe that, when the parents say that one of their children is stupid, they are wrong about that?
Because the intelligence of siblings are highly correlated.
A number of rationalists have written essays about the atrocities of school, accompanied with truly horrifying stories of e.g. being yelled at by teachers for reading ahead. After reading these essays, I always end up feeling ... confused.
I went through 13 years of public school and enjoyed all of them. Obviously that's N = 1, so I tried asking around to see what my friends thought of their school, expecting to get a more balanced split between decent experiences and horror stories like those here. On the contrary, basically everyone I know also had a decent experience in school; they're invariably shocked and horrified by stories like these. This has just left me more confused.
Obviously there are strong selection effects here: neither "people I know" nor "famous rationalist bloggers" are very representative samples. But I still feel like there's something more to be explained. Some guesses:
1) People remember the good parts of school more readily than the bad parts. I think this is partly true: the first things I remember from high school are times spent socializing with friends; meanwhile my constant feeling of sleep-deprivation, sometimes from sleeping less than 30 hours in a week, is like the eighth thing I remember.
2) Horrifying things about school seem normal from the inside. This must also be part of it: homework seems annoying but fine, until you really think about how much of your life you've wasted doing it. Same goes for the generalized busywork that fills much of high school.
3) School might be getting better; rationalists bloggers are a little older than my friends, so their memories of school are more negative. This is possible, especially if bullying is getting less common.
Even taking these things into account, I *still* feel like there's more to be explained. The stories rationalist bloggers tell about school, and the negative feelings they report they had towards school while still students, are just so different from anything I've found among people I know. Perhaps there's some reason that rationalists are more likely to have had horrible schoolings?
Overall, I'm still confused.
The rationalists are likely to have taken the schools at their word about what you're supposed to be doing in school.
People will tell you that the purpose of school is for you to learn things. But then if you do a good job, they yell at you.
We know you know the answers, so stop providing them when the teacher asks for them.
You're undermining the teacher's authority by knowing the material.
Stop asking questions in class; the other students can't follow you. No, you're not supposed to be interested in the class. No, the class isn't supposed to cover material you're not already familiar with.
Yes, you got the highest score on the midterm. Yes, we're giving you a bad grade because you don't do the homework. No, the score on the midterm is not a better indication of whether you learned the material than your homework completion rate is. No, it also isn't better than "class participation".
It's not fair that you got a low score in class participation after we told you to stop asking or answering questions in class? Sure it is. Go away and think about it on your own time.
The people who remember school fondly, and the people who think school is a fine system that does a fine job, are those who never believed the claim that school was about learning things.
Eh, I'm not so sure. For example, no one I know has been yelled at by a teacher for reading ahead in the textbook, or anything like that. Part of my confusion is: do teachers actually do that all the time?
> no one I know has been yelled at by a teacher for reading ahead in the textbook, or anything like that.
This could be because no one you know has ever had a teacher who would do this. Or it could be because no one you know has ever revealed in class that they read ahead in the textbook.
Teachers aren't restricted to yelling at you for reading ahead. They'll also yell at you for reading the assigned reading, if you use that knowledge to point out when they start contradicting the textbook.
In my American public school, my teachers praised me for reading ahead in the textbook or in the assigned reading. So it's definitely not a universal with public schools.
I attended American public schools and actively tried to learn things there, and (aside from the tests vs. homework thing) none of this happened to me as far as I can remember. I expect that the extent to which this is true varies significantly between schools (and also between class levels: many of my high school classes were for gifted/advanced students).
To be clear, with the exception of first grade, I attended fancy private schools. I'm not commenting on the public school system. I'm commenting on the school system.
> The rationalists are likely to have taken the schools at their word about what you're supposed to be doing in school.
Very true for me. But I'd associate that tendency with the autistic spectrum primarily - and then suspect that somewhat more autistics, proportionately, hang out in rationalist and rationalist-adjacent spaces.
IIRC in one blog post DeBoer mentions having been popular at school. I'm not saying Scott or Zvi or whoever necessarily *wasn't*, but part of me wonders if rationalists were just nerds?
I'm increasingly curious what a typical school experience was too. Seems like friend groups might converge on or be indirectly sorted for this
For what it's worth, most (but not all) of the people I've asked about this were also quite nerdy. Many of them guess that bullying nerds used to be common, but isn't so common anymore.
But I feel this can't explain everything -- only some of the school horror stories are about bullying!
Let's analyze by splitting that last question into separate causal chains:
1. Does having a horrible school experience make someone more likely to become a rationalist?
2. Does having some kind of predisposition towards rationalism make someone more likely to have a horrible school experience?
3. Does currently being a rationalist make someone more likely to reflect back on school in a negative light?
1. Does having a horrible school experience make someone more likely to become a rationalist? Perhaps. One could imagine this might cause a child to grow up distrustful of authority and institutions, which could produce a questioning mindset that interrogates that which others take for granted. One could also imagine being socially marginalized due to bad school experiences and finding rationalism to be a community which accepts people who were socially marginalized in school.
2. Does having some kind of predisposition towards rationalism make someone more likely to have a horrible school experience? The specific horror stories I've read here seem to suggest that high intelligence/"giftedness" accounts for some of the problems with schooling - teachers aren't necessarily trained to deal with gifted students and many of us have similar issues with teachers who interpret our intelligence as impertinence or insubordination. "Nerdiness" or "geekiness" - let's gloss that as a tendency to focus strongly on esoteric topics out of interest or curiosity - may cause bad experiences at school and also predispose one towards rationalism. Difficulty with social skills, including interpreting social cues, may also lead to bad experiences, and also to rationalist tendencies/modes of thought.
3. Does currently being a rationalist make someone more likely to reflect back on school in a negative light? I think this is possible but perhaps not likely. Generally my reflections are more colored by emotional valance then by a rational objection to e.g. teaching methodology which I discovered through rationalism. If anything, reading blogs like Scott's has made me more forgiving of imperfect human systems and their perverse unintended consequences.
I may have missed something. If I had to guess I'd say 2 is the strongest effect - this is mostly a matter of rationalists mostly having been gifted, and gifted students mostly having had a terrible time in school. But that could be my own interpretive bias.
> People remember the good parts of school more readily than the bad parts. I think this is partly true: the first things I remember from high school are times spent socializing with friends
I think that you have to realize that it makes a huge difference to what extent people had friends and enjoyed socializing (or even...could socialize well).
If most of your school day is boring as hell, interspersed by occasional terror, that is a far different experience than often enjoying yourself, interspersed by occasional terror.
I think there are several things going on here.
First, there is a fair bit of gratuitous hoop-jumping in school, which bothers some people much more than others (you say "homework seems annoying but fine," so I'm guessing you're in the "others"; so am I). It is somewhat difficult to argue *for* the hoops (Scott tried once, when reviewing Chinese education), which leaves people like you and me who had a generally positive experience in school without a platform to argue.
Second, bringing out the full potential of every student is at best an aspirational goal for schools, and certainly not their first priority (even insofar as the goal of school is education, I think it's closer to "maximize the 10th percentile of the amount learned by the students" i.e. there's much more focus on the less-successful students in each class), so the smart-but-annoying students really can be a nuisance. (When the teacher tells Michael Watts "We know you know the answers, so stop providing them when the teacher asks for them.", the teacher actually does have a point.) I don't necessarily expect the rationalist community to hit more than its fair share of teachers who can't handle smart-but-annoying students, but I do expect it to be disproportionately smart-but-annoying. (In my case, I was very much smart-but-annoying, but my schools handled it well enough; however, in a couple of cases that meant "send me out into the hallway with a textbook and let me study the material on my own." This was preferable than having me stay in the classroom with everyone else, but it's not the ideal way to handle gifted students either.)
Finally, this is a sizeable community, and I'm not sure that a discussion on whether we should BURN ALL SCHOOLS DOWN brings out the central examples of how rationalists were treated in school.
> (When the teacher tells Michael Watts "We know you know the answers, so stop providing them when the teacher asks for them.", the teacher actually does have a point.)
This directive tends to be delivered by the school administration, not by the teacher.
Years ago I read the book dedicated to the analysis of the "Head Start" program in Chicago. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name to reference, but the book argued that child's success in school correlated a lot with the fact whether their parents cared about their education, supported that it was important, asked about their day at school etc. Kids who didn't have this support system at home lost all advantage they've initially got by participating in the "Head Start" by third grade.
I don't have a lot of studies to research this further, but my anecdotal evidence indeed shows that poor Asian immigrants and Jewish refugees from USSR managed to raise the kids that went off to get PhDs despite the poverty because kids' education was the family's priority. (But we could also suggest that only the smartest immigrants made it to the US and kids just inherited their IQ.)
However, in our parenting community it seems to be a "common knowledge" that the primary difference between well-performing and low-performing schools is who students' parents are. And parents who care more about their children's education tend to send those kids to charter schools, therefore performing the selection so that the school itself doesn't really need to. These parents will more likely help their kids with homework than blame them for spending time with books instead of fixing dinner. Obviously, rich parents will also have more resources to volunteer, hire tutors and donate to add resources to their school, so this effect is multiplied when the school is located in an affluent community. But selection for motivated parents might skew the results a lot too, and I was surprised to see this was not brought up in the book or the review as a factor to consider.
Iowa recently passed a "school choice" bill which increases the number of charter schools, and allows for a ~$5,200 voucher for families to spend on private schools. These vouchers would go to bottom 5% ranked school students according to standardized test scores (I think). This has turned into a pretty partisan battle of those for/against, of parental choice versus the fear of removing funding from public schools that are already struggling, and umbrage at public taxes funding private schools. Have you ever heard of similar systems?
The amount of self-control it must have taken for Scott to not just write “BOOOOO HARRISON BERGERON” and copy-paste it 3000 times is admirable.
Harrison Bergeron is nothing like what DeBoer is advocating. Harrison Bergeron is when people are assigned to jobs randomly and everyone's natural abilities are forced to be nothing. DeBoer advocates for a world where people don't become homeless (or even stuck in a poor house) because they're not smart.
A UBI would ensure that people don’t become homeless for not being smart. If that were DeBoer’s primary goal, it would be a 1 pager on UBI, not a 277-page book on the horrors of meritocracy. The book’s listing specifically summarizes: “This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes.” And then advocates for a bunch of policies that diminish individual mobility based on performance and promotes the government using force to enforce things he’d like to see happen, like abolishing charter schools, which he views in opposition to equality of outcome.
Harrison Bergeron is about optimizing for total equality of outcome at the expense of individual achievement and political freedom, which is at the *very least* in the general direction of what BeBoer is advocating for. Using drastic, non-consensual measures to manifest equality of outcomes for highly dissimilarly-situated people, including measures that minimize social mobility and success for exceptional people is the link between DeBoer and Bergeron. Harrison Bergeron’s society uses hyperbolic, literal “handicapping” penalties for gifted people but that doesn’t mean that less literal, ostensibly-equalizing proposals by DeBoer aren’t exactly the kind of thing Vonnegut’s allegory was pointing to: equality and non-competition being more important than individuality and choice.
Do you believe that there’s nothing short of putting a literal weight around a person’s neck that justifies comparison to Harrison Bergeron? If not, what would DeBoer have had to advocate for such that you’d agree it warranted comparison?
"if we ever figure out how to teach kids things,..."
We... do?
Spacing, interleaving, testing (NOT high stakes, but to utilise the 'testing effect' to *learn*), elaboration of context, (POSSIBLY progressive summarization), deliberate practice, teaching others, and the thing that inspired Bloom's two sigma 'problem' - personal one-on-one teaching (produced the backbone of the Oxbridgite aristocracy of the British Empire, and Dawkins, and a bunch of others!).
Links:
(Start here) An interview where Romeo explained a core of these methods, plus how to put them into practice for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRkUcbQ639o
For spacing and spaced repetition, which I consider fundamental and a foundation to build on, here are some links that are easier/more immediately actionable, perhaps, or gentler than gwern's excellent and comprehensive overview (in sequence):
https://ncase.me/remember/
http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/
A self-consistent and self-implementing, easy to read and implement book about some of these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/113856172X
Another one, somewhat more memory oriented: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0190214473
One on deliberate practice: https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise/dp/0544947223/
Teaching others - don't have anything that comes to mind on this, sorry!
Bloom's two sigma/massive effect of one-on-one/personal teaching: just the Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
Plus all the highly suggestive accounts that this goes *all the way to the top, and possibly beyond*:
https://www.amazon.com/Oxford-Tutorial-Thanks-Taught-Think/dp/1099191343/
And the anecdotal reports all pointing to this being a thing, plus the *massive* clustering of breakthroughs in 'circles' and 'lineages' if you look at advisor-advisee relationships in the academy of Ph.D.s; did you know that academically lineally, Newton is a descendant of Galileo? Many such cases! (Nearly all of them, actually; most modern math originates in just a few, pretty tight, lineage clusters. Check it out on the Mathematics Genealogy Project if you find it incredible.)
Empirically, this works, too, in 'increasing the level' *wherever you start, even the high end*: http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebra.html (cribbed from gwern's write-up on SR).
All these are interventions that can be systematized, broken down into chunks that school teachers can easily use them, and made the new 'standard of pedagogy' if we want. We don't, and there's also no 'we', so *shrug* *gestures expansively*... well, *this*, I guess.
All this is IQ mediated, obv, so ability tracking (maybe using adaptive testing, like the GRE, but as an indicative of someone's readiness instead of a test of almost IQ) so that classes happen and concepts are introduced at *just* the right moment for them to hit the sweet spot of difficulty resulting in a 'flow' state for the student to the extent possible. (Ref the flow research by Mihaly C...)
Decouple content from age, break stuff up into chunks you can progress through, gamify it (not demeaningly!), and make learning *not* fixed hours (so instead of dropping out, you progress at the rate at which *your* brain develops, and start working part time at 16/18, BUT that doesn't mean your education has stopped, it just means you do it for far fewer hours but many more years), make vocational education and apprenticeships a thing, and the problem is just fucking solved, for current standards of problem and solved. Still kinda rapey, but at least far less unenjoyable. Not gonna happen unless we build the infra for it, but hey, a man can imagine, right?
Lol why does Dawkins deserve special mention for the benefit of Oxbridge-style 1-on-1 tutoring, rather than, say, Darwin himself?
Because Dawkins is a more recent and relatable figure for everyone here - more proximate - both in terms of content, and lineage! Also, he doesn't feel as distant, and he's not covered in ancient-sauce. So it hits.
But also because he's a bit of demo case for tutorial learning. He contributed a chapter to the book I linked, and his own tutor went on to found an entire field and win a Nobel. The experience of the tutorial was also very, very impressive. More in the chapter he contributed about it in the book, if you're interested.
I can say with some certainty that childhood spent playing Civilization 2 is not necessarily a good thing. I spent all my time doing suboptimal-but-cool things in the Fantastic Worlds expansion which seems to be reflected in how the rest of my life turned out.
Did we all somehow play Civ 2?
Somehow? It was a great game!
Somehow.
I've played Alpha Centauri, you insensitive clod !
I think the most important thing in the whole education quality debate is that children have a stable home and the parents are invested in the best education possible. I am guessing that this is the primary sorting mechanism to the extent that occurs in charter schools.
The difficult thing is effective schooling for children that don’t have those advantages. Whatever we do I think it is highly immoral to try to level down the child that has loving parents to the outcome of the child that does not have parents that love them. That is the enormous moral hazard that Freddie seems willing to accept.
Scott correctly points this out.
Parents have the savvy and bandwidth to navigate the local education ecosystem seeking out the good charters or magnets and jumping through the hoops they create =/= parents love their kids.
User name checks out though, so that's nice.
DeBoer seems to accept as default that school is at least acceptable as an experience while Scott's "School is child prison" seems pretty clearly to differ.
Does anyone know where a typical fourth grader or whoever falls on the love - hate spectrum about school?
This disagreement reminds me of arguments I've heard about sortition:
Q: Do the political mechanisms we use to select leaders work better or worse than choosing randomly?
Typical answer: Random leaders are obviously worse! The current system, for all its flaws, selects for the most universally likeable, respected, smart people who are nearest to the center of a kaleidoscopic venn diagram of voters preferences. Finding people (and beliefs) that even sorta represent millions of people is actually a very hard problem and if you put a plumber a banker and a teacher in a room they'd have a hard time converging on policy too.
Sortitioners: Maybe in theory, but a politician also needs the support of other political figures and their party and maybe ExxonGoldMart to pay for the campaign helicopter. The competition between these guys is so intense that the people who stay in the game long enough to acquire power are chameleons good at pretending to be whoever you want them to be, or those who don't have any values that limit scummy but politically useful maneuvers. We're running an evolutionary algorithm that selects for shittiness.
In the politics case, the groups don't seem to necessarily disagree on preferred policy in a given world. The difference is they're looking at the world and seeing different things?
So it makes sense to me to ask: Are we doing better or worse than nothing (in comparing public schools now to unschooling)?
This to me seems to miss the point of democracy: However bad a current leader is, they can be removed from office bloodlessly. Historically, lots of lives were lost in zero-sum competitions on who rules.
> "racial income gaps are not due to differences in income/poverty"
probably a typo
> "The 1% are the Buffetts and Bezoses of the world"
Pet peeve: The 1% (of the USA) are households with incomes over $300k or so. They are successful doctors and lawyers (in certain subfields), successful small business owners, senior management at medium-sized business, and the like, especially when they are dual-income couples. By definition, they are 1 out of 100 households. Billionaires are more like 0.0002%, and "people who are legitimately jockeying for wealthiest in the world" are rarer still.
However, everyone does this conflation.
Wouldn't it be "The Cult of Formal Educational Success"? :/
One of the arguments in favor of economic mobility I haven't seen mentioned yet is that even if some jobs are objectively more desirable than others, there's a lot of variation between jobs and a lot of variation between people which means that being able to choose jobs lets people improve their own utility and results in an non-zero sum game.
This of course doesn't fully excuse a high mobility/low equity society but it's still better for outdoorsy types to be able to choose to be loggers while unathletic introverts work data entry, even if both of those jobs are less desirable than being a banker who makes six figures.
A caveat is that economic mobility doesn't exactly capture this dynamic but a society with with strict caste based assignment of jobs is almost certainly going to be less economically mobile than free market society, even one with low economic mobility.
School is a way to get children away from their parents. Of course children hate it. Parents can't function without it, though.
And dealing with pointless regimen, bullying, and busiwork are essential skills for a modern human. Education is about more than intelligence in whatever way "IQ" supposedly measures, which by the way is a whole can of worms that I suspect, if I opened here, it would attract some unpleasantness.
I'd love to know more about your opinions on Montessori. We seriously committed to it, moved across town for it and our son attended it from age 3 to 11. In hindsight, the best one-line description of our feelings about Montessori was, "It is an over-reaction to the problems of public education.". I've forgotten who said this, but it seems perfect.
Of course, that implies Montessori cannot be public. And that is incorrect. At least one charter school has tried it out.
Freddie's book argues many of the same things I did in 2000 in a five essay series called "How to Help the Left Side of the Bell Curve:"
"Stifling discussion of intelligence differences allows the IQ upper class to quietly push its interests at the expense of the rest of society. Denouncing Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray proclaims your faith in empirical egalitarianism. Then you can ignore the irksome demands of moral egalitarianism. ... Our political discourse is dominated not by a concern for the needs of the American people as a whole, but by the self-interest and unexamined assumptions of the verbally facile."
https://web.archive.org/web/20050309223730/http://www.isteve.com/How_to_Help_the_Left_Half_of_the_Bell_Curve.htm
Outstanding rant on the child prison. I agree--I send my kids to Montessori school! I would check out the work of Prof Angeline Lillard at UVa, who has done actual honest-to-god RFTs on Montessori charters and they show a real step-up. You can also download a PDF of the first chapter of her book, which includes a great history of how child-prison was conceived in the 19th century as a direct analogue of the factory.
"The kid will still have to spend ten hours of his day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"!"
And I'm betting that, on their breaks, the child laborers will be allowed to microwave a fucking burrito without asking fucking permission (facilities permitting).
My biggest issue with DeBoer's principle argument is that it's based on this thesis of "if everyone has a different natural intelligence then not everyone can go to college/get post-secondary education/can have a non-Labor centered career". There's literally zero sensible reason to think this is true. He uses algebra as an example of a thing some people just can't do, but is that actually true? Look at a different example: reading. Everyone has a different innate ability to read, but despite of that basically every single person that can either see or feel can learn to read (and basically everyone in America CAN read). He at no point establishes what the level of intelligence needed to get post-secondary education is and at no point establishes what the distribution of human intelligence is, both of which are needed for his primary anti-meritocracy argument to make any sense at all. I mean if you need an IQ of 110 to be a good doctor or lawyer or researcher then ya those fields are essentially off-limits to some 75% of people, but what if you only need an 80? Then more than 75% of people CAN do it. What that cutoff is super matters here, and without it the book is just a kind of defeatist speculation.
This doesn't even touch the fact that "intelligence" is not a singular trait but instead a series of different "intelligences" for a variety of subjects and fields. The chances that the cutoff for what we'd view as a "good" career are so high for every field or that someone is low enough intelligence in every field for there to be any more than a really small number of people who are destined at birth to be cashiers seems insanely unlikely.
> and basically everyone in America CAN read
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/11/01/hiding-in-plain-sight-the-adult-literacy-crisis/?noredirect=on
> Approximately 32 million adults in the United States can’t read, according to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that 50 percent of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at an eighth-grade level.
It would be nice if Scott could review some Adam Tooze. It's not quite up his alley, but Tooze (bleeding Marxist though he may be) has a lot of interesting things to say on the economics of the Second World War, the interwar period, and the recent global financial crisis.
It may also help with how ACX frames history and economic policy in general.
Henry Kissinger has excellent stuff too.
I much enjoyed this; though largely because it confirmed my priors. Several years ago the parents of about half of our youngest son's 4th grade class were summoned for a meeting with the teacher at our private school. There the teacher and principal informed us that sadly our kids regularly failed to obey. While the others sat quietly while the teacher spoke ours were often fidgeting and getting up and wondering about looking in this box or on that shelf. They recommended Ritalin for all of them. It would, they assured us, make everyone much calmer and more amenable to schooling.
We've homeschooled ever since. Save mindless TV watching we've encouraged their interests. One is good at math (we finished algebra II before he was 13) and the other found R and GitHub and is curiously interested in modeling, investing and Civilization V. Best of all they're happy.
Great review, Scott. I'm especially delighted that you have so forcefully expressed something I felt intensely as a child: that school had its occasional good moments, but mostly it was about depriving me of my freedom.
I also continue to be enraged and baffled about why we insist on ignoring the innate sleep cycles of kids in setting school hours. The result for me was 12 years of misery; yes, first grade through high school, ending only when I got to college and could pick my own hours.
Your clear distinction of intelligence and success at formal education is crucial. It’s something I’ve long felt without always articulating explicitly. Some teachers get this in the form of “everyone learns differently,” yet despite the fact that this observation has been around long enough to become a cliche, school systems rarely take it into account.
I going to have to think some more about DeBoer's critique of meritocracy. I found your surgery example counter argument convincing, but there's a fairness angle to DeBoer's idea with a sneaky appeal, even if we probably can't realize such a utopian state of affairs short of the post-scarcity society posited in Banks's Culture series.
We set school hours for the benefit of parents, who generally have to be at work by 9:00 at the latest. Particularly now that we cannot assume that one parent is a stay-at-home mother and no longer consider it acceptable to leave children unattended for more than five minutes, the kids have to be at school (or at least on a school bus) well before the parents have to start their own morning commutes.
As I understand it, school hours are also set for the convenience of school administrators.
It's more acceptable to have teenagers standing outside before dawn, and expensive to have an extra set of school buses. So the teenagers have very early classes.
Right - even though, if you're struggling with the logistics of getting all the kids to school before their parents have to go off to work, the teenagers are an *asset* that you can use to mind the younger kids for a bit and see that they get off to school on time. But we can't use them for that, because we sent them off to school first. And because we somehow lost the ability to trust teenagers with the care of small children.
The school hour thing is changing, with many high schools going to a 9am start time. Locally, there's a well-regarded charter resisting this, but since that's coming from a charter it's probably a sign of its rigor and the dedication of those parents.
As for the teenager thing, I can assure you that having teenagers watch your kids is a tradition that is very much alive.
I'm glad to hear that schools are going to a more reasonable start for teenagers. I wouldn't be surprised if it should be even later.
It's taken a long time to make some progress on this.
This book sounds extremely similar to Michael Sandel's The Tyranny of Merit. Sandel also sees a meritocracy as conferring some moral value on those who participate which he finds unfair because of genetic differences (among others), which then results in a gated class relying on universities to keep out the unwashed masses. He neatly side-steps the whole matter of IQ though and as such doesn't feel the need to tie himself into knots explaining whether or not group-level IQ differences exist or are allowed to.
I had a hard time wrapping my head around this view too, since every time Sandel introduced morality into meritocracy, I couldn't help but think that it didn't belong there and wasn't relevant to the concept of a meritocracy. In the end I have somewhat settled on the suspicion that, consciously or not, the argument rests on a certain ambiguity with regards to words like 'merit', 'desert' and 'value'. I personally agree more with the way Scott framed the issue when he was removing 'desert' from the argument.
There's a lot more to the whole meritocracy concept than either your gloss of de Boer's understanding (that Society straightforwardly hands rewards to people who do well in school because they are Better) or your own explanation (that people individually allocate rewards based straightforwardly on competence, resulting in rewards for intelligence).
One of the first authors to use the term, Michael Young, used it to describe a system in which political power accrued to those with perceived merit. The mechanism for this is simple and plausible: merit -> financial rewards -> political influence. Perhaps this is not a bad system on its face, but then you have to consider how its outputs (financial rewards and political influence) impact its inputs (merit - or more accurately, perception of merit). In other words, if I can pay for my kids to get credentials, and many/most people determine merit based on credentials, then what you have is a cycle in which credentials -> financial rewards -> political influence -> credentials. This cycle is obviously easily corruptible and will be rife with nepotism, cronyism, fraud, etc.
Alternatively, perhaps perception of merit comes not from credentials but from identity - given a choice between two surgeons, maybe I pick the white man because he just seems more competent, somehow, in a way I can't quite put my finger on. Maybe I pick the American because she speaks English at a native fluency, but the Indian immigrant surgeon is actually a better surgeon. Perhaps a little girl's perception of her *own* merit is influenced by stereotypes such as the idea that girls are bad at math, and so she never becomes a surgeon because she was too intimidated to take an organic chemistry class or a statistics class as a prerequisite. Maybe I pick the Jewish lawyer because he just seems more... lawyerly. Maybe I pick the programmer with a better "cultural fit" because he laughed at my Star Trek joke during the job interview, but the programmer who grew up in a different cultural milieu would be better at the actual job. Etc.
de Boer surely has this conceptual framework in mind when he writes something like "no matter the criteria and regardless of the accuracy of the system contrived to measure it" - and I expect he also expects his readers, at least on the left, to be familiar with it as well. I think he's wrong to gloss over the implementation problems in "meritocracy" because that is where the whole concept starts to fall apart a bit. That's where you get a lot of the structural/cyclical inequalities from - especially once those with "merit" create their own standards for what counts as "merit" and their biases (perhaps inadvertently) influence those standards.
There's another problem where the merit->financial rewards formulation is somehow reversed in people's minds such that they come to believe that the possession of financial resources and political influence is an *indicator* of merit. In other words, if money accrues to the best surgeons, then when you see a rich surgeon, you assume he is very good at his job. I don't think I need to point out the flaws in this thinking, but I do need to point out that it is just ridiculously widespread and completely pervades almost every public discussion about the distribution of power and wealth in society. In particular, this reverse formulation (which many authors call the "myth of meritocracy") lets people argue things like "taxing wealth is equivalent to punishing success" - the implication is that wealth comes about *only* or perhaps *primarily* as a consequence of merit, and not, e.g. inheritance, rent-seeking, luck, or fraudulent/exploitative practices. Obviously the question of how much of wealth is actually due to merit, and how much due to corruption/luck/etc., is important for determining how much socialism and how much unfettered capitalism we should have in a society. de Boer takes the extreme position and says "even merit is actually luck" but I think in order to understand this extreme position you need to acknowledge the context of what it is extreme in comparison to - the conceptual framework that de Boer is in dialogue with when he says he rejects meritocracy. He's not so much rejecting your conception of meritocracy (the idea of rewarding merit) as he is rejecting the framework in which it would be fair to have a ruling class whose membership was based on criteria like "being really good at surgery" if those criteria were applied fairly and objectively, rather than corruptly and subjectively.
Tied up in this "myth of meritocracy" idea is the related argument that reducing financial rewards for merit will somehow discourage people from being meritorious - that is, if you don't make the best surgeons rich, they'll decide (perhaps subconsciously) there's no point in being good at surgery anymore. I may not be doing this argument justice, but thinkers like Rawls have argued relatively convincingly that some level of inequality is necessary to incentivize merit, otherwise (my example, not Rawls') future surgeons will just sit around all day watching TikTok rather than studying hard to get into the best medical schools. I think there's something to this, but of course the question becomes one of tradeoffs - how much inequality are we willing to tolerate in order to motivate people to excel - and implementation - how vulnerable is the incentive/signaling system to corruption. Which brings me back to why I think deBoer should address the particular historical implementation problems of meritocracy rather than attacking the concept. But again, for a leftist audience, maybe he doesn't have to.
But to backtrack a bit and defend deBoer's thesis: even if meritocracy did only produce a system where good surgeons got more money, and this system did not become corrupt or lead to situations like a system of licensing which excludes perfectly good doctors trained in other countries during a time when there is a shortage of licensed doctors, and the system did not lead to the situation where going to an elite college increases your odds of gaining political power and influence - it would still be the case that people at this point in time seem to respect a good surgeon more than they respect a good plumber, that parents will want their children to become surgeons rather than plumbers, etc., and since sanitation arguably saves many more lives than surgery (at least in part because surgery without running water would be dangerous) there is an argument to be made that society needs plumbers at least as much as it needs surgeons and so there is no reason in principle why we should respect surgeons more than plumbers. So this sort of brings us back around to the "cult of smart" - if you think, as I do, that the reason surgery is a higher-status occupation than plumbing is because it's implicitly more intellectual and our society codes intellectual work as higher-status by default. And I agree with de Boer that this might not be very fair - giving smarter people more money might be a necessary measure to get them to do things like endure four years of residency, but do we also need to give them more status, and more respect, and more political power, and generally assume that they are more worthy as human beings? Probably not. And we need to acknowledge that a relatively wealthy kid will have an easier time at things like residency because they'll have a better support network, better nutrition, etc. etc. etc. and so, perhaps, although we can call the output "merit" (i.e. if you're actually a good surgeon, you have merit) perhaps we need to be careful about calling the input "merit" (i.e. did you get to be a good surgeon because you are Better or because you had genetic/environmental advantages - or, rather, to the extent that they amount to the same thing, do we want to describe those advantages as "merit" or "privilege"?).
The gist of what you're saying is that in reality the 'merit' bit in meritocracy is sometimes not a always competence; that it's corrupted by rent-seekers who use money and influence to get their kids into the clubs. That due to information asymmetry or bigotry etc people use poor heuristics to assess people's competence. But none of these points are actual arguments against meritocracy - at least not the definition we care about. It's just saying that sometimes our institutions aren't very good at producing meritocratic outcomes.
...sometimes not always about** competence - sorry not sure what happened there.
Right, I think I made it clear that I'm not opposed to selecting surgeons based on actual surgical competence, but in case I hadn't: I'm not opposed to that at all. In fact I have personally chosen surgeons based on my understanding of their surgical competence and paid a premium for the choice.
But if I had to gloss the "gist" of what I'm saying it would be "the definition of 'meritocracy' is so expansive that it's not reasonable to evaluate de Boer's position using only 'the definition we care about' - we need to thoroughly understand what de Boer knows about meritocracy, including what he thinks other people think it means, in order to make sense of what he is saying".
This might be more clear:
It looks like there are at least four definitions of meritocracy floating around:
Meritocracy a): hey, wouldn't it be great if we could pick our surgeon based on his surgical skills rather than just going with the guy whose cousin is in the Royal College of Surgeons?
Meritocracy b): we need to make some policy about surgery - say, a licensing scheme to decide who can perform it. We should definitely ask the Royal College of Surgeons to help us with this, even though five minutes ago we couldn't trust them to give us an objective recommendation about which surgeon we should hire. Anyway they have the ear of the king so they're going to get to decide who becomes a surgeon.
Meritocracy c): surgeons get to live in big houses and eat at fancy restaurants; plumbers have to live in small houses and eat at McDonald's.
Meritocracy d): your plane is going down and you have one parachute. Of course you give it to the surgeon and let the plumber die. That's not even a hard choice.
There are a lot of steps from a) to d). a) is the definition Scott wants to stick to. b) is the one the term 'meritocracy' was invented to criticize. c) is the one leftists usually worry about. d) is the one de Boer is bringing up and arguing against.
But because of the historical structure of discourse from a) through to d), it doesn't make sense to set a) in opposition to an argument against d). de Boer is arguing against d) as a way to show that leftist arguments against c) are unprincipled. Bringing a) into that internecine debate detracts from our understanding of it, and also makes people think that leftists are unreasonable crazies who don't believe a).
This may be an incidence where just tabooing the word "meritocracy" would fix the entire thing, or at least make clear who was agreeing and disagreeing with whom.
>we need to make some policy about surgery - say, a licensing scheme to decide who can perform it. We should definitely ask the Royal College of Surgeons to help us with this, even though five minutes ago we couldn't trust them to give us an objective recommendation about which surgeon we should hire.
"Can you pass a test that was designed by the Royal College of Surgeons to check if you should be a member?" is still less abusable than "Can you convince the head of the Royal College to recommend you?" even if the head of the Royal College tries to come up with a test that his cousin will pass.
For instance, the test will still filter out all the bad surgeons who *aren't* friends with someone important - a pool of 99 certified surgeons and 1 cheating cousin is better than a pool with 100 people who may or may not have studied medicine at all. It can also remove other types of biases - even if the head of the college really hates someone and refuses to recommend them, they can still point to their test scores to get hired as a surgeon.
If you throw out objective measures of aptitude, you're stuck with subjective measures, and those are way, way easier to corrupt. The stock example would be companies that hire for "cultural fit," and then conclude that [insert minority here] doesn't fit the company culture. At least with a test, the head of the Royal College has to *pretend* he's picking the best surgeon and give a reason why they're the best, instead of just blatantly picking his friends and family.
Yes, I agree with all of that.
The point of example b) was that when you give experts the political influence to make policy, part of that influence can be used to influence who becomes an expert.
Now, if they do happen to come up with an objective test, they've chosen a less-corruptible way to use their political influence, and I would applaud that. But historically that hasn't always been the case, and you can find or imagine scenarios where an organization of credentialed experts exercises their gatekeeping ability to do something like exclude minorities or drive artificial scarcity to prop up their own wages or prestige. Milton Friedman has famously accused the AMA of doing this, for example.
This type of thing may also lead to entrenchment and enforcement of a particular worldview. Suppose some controversial new surgical procedure is devised and the Royal College of Surgeons doesn't like it. They make it harder to gather evidence about the new procedure by saying that anyone who performs it gets their license revoked. Then when some non-RCS surgeons do the procedure, the test results are rejected because the procedure wasn't done by licensed surgeons. Or maybe the Democratic College of Surgeons in the country next door approves the procedure but the RCS won't accept safety data from the DCS because the procedures were performed in a different country (kind of like the situation with the FDA and vaccines).
Maybe it makes sense to pay RCS surgeons more - but does it make sense to let them make policy? That's the question we're asking when we use "meritocracy" to refer to a system in which financial rewards AND political influence are given to people based on competence at a particular task. I think the answer is "to an extent" - but I think external mechanisms need to be in place to notice and fend off attempts to corrupt the credentialing and policymaking processes.
Thank you for mentioning Rawls. I was thinking of him while reading Scott's essay, and you saved me from saying "But what about Rawls and the second principle of justice and stuff?"
Can you think of any defense for his assumption that, faced with being randomly allocated to some role in a society, you will always decide as if you were certain to end up as the worst off person? That's what the argument requires.
The veil of ignorance was proposed by Harsanyi well before Rawls, and he followed out its logic to the obvious implication, which is maximizing average Von Neumann utility. Rawls didn't like the conclusion so waved his hands and came up with the difference principle.
The veil of ignorance is sort of nonsensical, because it assumes that people's biases solely consist of explicit knowledge that could potentially be done away with, leaving an ideologically neutral person behind to make a decision like "how much women's rights should society have"?
My classic example of this is gay rights. Ask a liberal "what rights would you want society to afford to gay people, if you might be inserted into society as a gay person" and the liberal will say "I'd want to make sure gay people had protection from discrimination in housing and employment, and the right to legally recognized marriage." Ask a Christian fundamentalist the same question and they'd say "I'd want to make sure gay people could be cured of their gayness so I could get treatment and then go on to live a normal life." Obviously these worldviews are incompatible because of more than just a disagreement about allocation of scarce resources. And I think this is where most meaningful disagreements in society come from.
The minimum wage argument isn't "we should have a $10 minimum wage" vs. "we should have a $20 minimum wage." If that was the case we could just negotiate the number to $15 and everyone would be a little bit happy. Rather, it's "we should have a $15 minimum wage" vs. "minimum wage earners just need to get better jobs" and arguments about moral hazards and the ethical implications of second-order effects of labor market distortions. None of this is negotiable in the way Rawls wants to negotiate it.
That makes sense for your gay example. But the main argument against the minimum wage is that the harm it does to low-skill workers who it prices out of the labor market is greater than the benefit to slightly less low-skilled workers who get a raise. The Rawlsian argument implies that you should not have a minimum wage, because the people it hurts are on average worse off than the people it helps. On the Harsanyi version, the result is less clear. Straightforward economic arguments suggest that a minimum wage is inferior to a costless subsidy of the poor, but that may not be an option. Whether it is superior to doing nothing depends on the relevant elasticities (are you knocking ten people off the ladder to higher wages and giving one person a raise or the other way around) and the shape of the relevant utility functions. Either way, the veil of ignorance is relevant.
Yeah, I'm disappointed by Scott, as we had already pointed out in the comments a similar criticism of his too narrow definition of meritocracy the last (?) time this discussion came up.
Notably, Young is only a starting point : as a reminder, 'aristocracy' literally means "rule of the best". So going back to Aristotle might be interesting.
This kind of 'coincidence' in terms should make one wary about the future evolution of a meritocracy. In fact there are indications that 'meritocracy' might already be devolving into hereditary aristocracy, now that the exceptional post-WW2 conditions have dissipated :
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
Also, it might be interesting to look at how the USA (and similar countries) went from a republic where only white(-ish) men "of talent and virtue" had the right to vote to a much more democratic system.
That's a great article - I remember reading it when it came out, and it clearly influenced my thinking in the comments I've made here on the topic. Thanks for reminding me about it.
I agree with your "school is prison" hypothesis, but I think you're missing the obvious, it's prison because some kids need a prison...kids are stupid, and violent, and by the time they reach 12 large and agile enough to murder someone with ease.
Schools seem at least in part design to handle this aggression. More select schools handle this by never selecting the very aggressive children. But some schools will always have to be prisons. But maybe I'm missing something? Historically this wasn't the case, but historically 100% schooling wasn't the case, and moving to 100% schooling seems to always come with moving to a prison system of schooling.
I read Scott's warning: "I try to review books in an unbiased way, without letting myself succumb to fits of emotion. So be warned: I'm going to fail with this one."
I peer down the paragraph and see Scott descend into a capitalized fit over bathroom passes lmao
"He could have written a chapter about race that reinforced this message."
I get the impression you think this is a contradiction? I understood what you represented to be something like someone arguing that the monarchy is illigitimate and terrible and dumb, and then arguing that -- I dunno -- the Jordanian royal family are not living up to their responsibilities as monarchs. There's no contradiction here: I'm saying the whole system is dumb, but I'm saying that this is compounded in this case by the fact that the system is not living up to its own success-modes (for what they are) by the Jordanian royal family not caring about their subjects as they should.
So he's saying that valuing people based on their intelligence is bad. But highlights the special case of race to say that there is more going on in this case which makes it even worse?
"white supremacy touches on so many aspects of American life that it's irresponsible to believe we have adequately controlled for it"
I don't know if this is true for this issue. I feel I can't explore it without causing explosions. But there are similar-sounding things I believe that mean I'd rather not just dismiss this.
"Then he goes on to, at great length, denounce as loathsome and villainous anyone who might suspect these gaps of being genetic."
So... is there any chance that -- for him --this is similar to the case where one feels very uncomfortable when somebody starts a rant about how many of such-and-such-a-race are in the media or banking? Ideally I'd like to meet this and every other comment with an open mind and take it for what it is -- but I really struggle in this case because the probability is so high that it is not a coincidence this this a malicious trope (whether or not the person saying it is oblivious or not)?
"Some people wrote me to complain that I handled this in a cowardly way"
"But that's kind of cowardly too"
I'm literally only replying to this because I remember a post a while back where you posted all these nasty comments people had written about you over the years, and I felt sad for you taking this stuff to heart.
So in-case it helps purge your heart of this sentiment: /not/ holding an opinion is not cowardly -- not /wanting/ to hold an opinion is not cowardly -- being cognizant and sensitive around an issue is not cowardly -- people aren't entitled to your pleas for leave to just leave an issue alone or not feel like investing time in it. I didn't read your bell curve comment and think cowardly: I thought it was a sensible clarification with wisely chosen words that defended your declared distance from this issue. It was a great example of how an unaligned person can respond to an allegation they're aligned one with, without it somehow turning into being defacto opposite aligned.
"I will ban anyone"
Out of interest, how does banning work on this platform? I don't recall ever logging in or creating an account. I was wondering about this because I was never sure how much banning was core to keeping the comments interesting on SSC, or how much it was that triggering things in these essays seem to generally follow 1000 calming things? Do you understand?
Is it IP based? The IP this site sees I share with a LOT of people.
We all registered at substack, so I think we'd have our accounts blocked.
Oh wait. Yes, I remember subscribing for emails. I didn't realise this was related to me picking a name and a picture. Sorry. I need more sleep.
You guys are getting pictures??
I get to disagree with Scott for once!
1. His school criticism doesn’t make sense in context — Freddie suggests more pre-K and after school programs and Scott responds with GOING TO CLASS IS PRISON. I get he has an axe to grind but not sure why he did it here. I loved after school daycare as a good social setting that was more fun than either class or home. If not all schools have them I think that sucks.
2. Scott is speaking from a statistically rare position as the kid who wanted to learn on his own instead of being in class. The vast majority of kids aren’t that intellectually curious naturally, and of the ones that are, many (like myself) aren’t motivated enough to learn without authority saying we have to. Scott’s dream society would work very well for him and imo drastically underserve almost everyone else.
3. That said I agree there are many ways to make school less terrible (like bathroom freedom, looser requirements when a kid is just bad at something, more life advice classes) that we should pursue, probably through charters since they’re easier to experiment with.
2. Sure, most people aren't that intellectually curious but as I understand it Scott was mostly pointing out that kids who indeed are that curious, get chastised.
For sure, it’s worth not torturing advanced kids too, but this doesn’t really engage with “fixing the education system” for more than a select few
He got chastised. My curious kids gets encouraged, and so did I. I think teachers by and large like the smart kids. Whatever happened to Scott (and some of the other commenters) is sad, but I really doubt it's typical. I (and especially my wife) are plugged into social and social media groups with lots of parents. The world described here isn't one I recognize.
John Holt (an early education reformer) pointed out that before school, children learn a lot like walking and talking), but school damages their curiosity and initiative.
The instinct to learn basics for living, like walking, talking, socializing, finding tasty food, seem pretty different from Scott’s instinct to open an unassigned textbook chapter and absorb its trivia.
Where I live, my kids love after-school day care. The state school day-care teachers are young and fun and get the kids doing loads of activities. But much of this depends on the age of those day-care teachers. My eldest son, went to a different school that had old ladies as day-care teachers who just sat there and talked while the kids played with wooden blocks day in, day out. I wonder whether (like the UK's Marks and Spencers and some airlines) those young and fun day-care teachers will become the jaded old ladies and and change the institution back to boring because you can't replace them back with young and fun because that's ageist. Maybe more schools should employ former students as day-care teacher for fixed-term-only contracts and as great way to offer part-time work experience once you've left school.
Where I live, most children go to after-school care and a very high percentage of mothers work full-time jobs.
I also wonder how much American children are damaged by the US' litigious culture in that any possible fun/adventurous activities for children are disallowed because the risk of getting sued.
Also is bullying still such a big thing as it was in the 70s, 80s and maybe 90s? From what I've online (Reddit, etc.) children are much nicer these days and the stereotypical movie bully just doesn't really exist. I may be wrong. I guess kids will always be cruel.
"Society obsessively denies that IQ can possibly matter."
You say "society" but you only mention a narrow set of progressive critics. But look at pop culture! The innate genius is an extremely common and positive character type, the basis of some of the most successful TV shows ever. And of course many elite institutions are still gated by tests that weigh heavily on intelligence, even as some on the left are trying to change this.
I think Mensa loses respect for being ostentatious. IQ, like wealth, is highly valued, but classy people are subtle about it.
Just as clue, I believe that the prevalence of anxiety dreams about school are a strong indicator that there's something wrong with school.
I had a horrible experience with schooling and agree there are things wrong with it.
That said, if you spend half your waking hours in a place, and have anxiety dreams, there's a baseline likelihood that your anxiety dreams will be set in that place. I wouldn't rate the prevalence of anxiety dreams about school as strong evidence of anything.
Also, I used to have anxiety dreams about the entrance hall to my apartment despite nothing even remotely bad ever having happened there.
It would be interesting to see whether anxiety dreams about other childhood experiences are common.
Not a childhood experience, but I don't think people have that level of anxiety dreams about work.
I am really intrigued by what you make of Proust's saying (rough translation of the first sentence of his essay "Contre Saint-Beuve"): "Everyday i attach a lesser price to intelligence".
Or Tolstoys:
"I know that most men—not only those considered clever, but even those who are very clever, and capable of understanding most difficult scientific, mathematical, or philosophic problems—can very seldom discern even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as to oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions they have formed, perhaps with much difficulty—conclusions of which they are proud, which they have taught to others, and on which they have built their lives."
I haven't read De Boer's book yet, but if his whole point includes an issue with the business of defining smarts by the certified smarts (which is a good business model, but comes with a price) he would seem to have a point.
https://posttenuretourettes.wordpress.com/2021/02/18/radical-candor-from-scott-alexander/
I agree with Scott wholeheartedly about school. I did a phd in a physical science, and this process is notorious for being terrible in all kinds of ways. All of those things that are said about it are correct. Even still, if I had to choose between doing the phd over again and doing elementary school over again, I would choose the phd easily.
I laugh at the indignation over schools closed because of covid. People are talking like the kids are somehow being harmed by this, as if school actually taught people something rather than just wasting their time and abusing them. People say that school gets kids away from abusive parents, but I bet for each kid that is abused at home, there's at least one other kid who is abused at school.
I do think that a big part of what people are pissed about is that they have to work and thus can't look after their kids. School solved this problem, and now that they're closed it's come back. I'll grant that this is an issue, but maybe society shouldn't be structured in such a way that parent's don't have the time to care for their own children. Just a thought.
I know I'm ranting here. and it's late and I should go to bed, but I did have to get in my school is worse than useless rant when I read this article.
Kids themselves are definitely part of the group that is indignant about schools being closed. Not all kids like school, but a large group of kids prefer school to being at home.
"everyone gains by having more competent people in top positions, whether it's a surgeon who can operate more safely, an economist who can more effectively prevent recessions, or a scientist who can discover more new cures for diseases. Social mobility allows people to be sorted into the positions they are most competent for, and increases the general competence level of society."
I think that there is a hidden assumption here that "top" positions are more important than "non-top" positions. There is a robust argument for square-peg-in-square-hole allocation for jobs and other positions (ie putting people in "the positions they are most competent for", as you put it). But that only works if you assume the absence of a general factor of intelligence (ie people who are good at one thing are no more likely to be good at another than anyone else) and the fundamental thesis of both the book and this review is that there is a general factor of intelligence.
If there is a general factor of intelligence then the people with more of it will be better at almost any job they do. This means that jobs that concentrate lots of those people will be done well; jobs that don't, will not be done well (to the extent that those jobs require intelligence). Obviously it's true that you want a better surgeon than a worse surgeon, but at the level of societal allocation, to the degree that general intelligence matters (and no-one argues that there isn't some specialisation of aptitude), having that better surgeon means that you have a worse person doing whatever that better surgeon isn't doing because they became a surgeon.
The not-so-hidden assumption is that some jobs are more important than others and that we can safely allocate higher intelligence people to those important jobs and lower intelligence people to other, less important jobs.
The really hidden assumption is that the allocation system we currently have for doing so (pay) is actually usefully correlated with the more important jobs. I think that is something that Freddie De Boer, being a Marxist, assumes is not true without consideration, and that Scott Alexander, being a liberal/capitalist, assumes is true without consideration.
I think it's a question that needs to be answered. Both the question of whether the market does a good job of evaluating the relative value of jobs and the even deeper challenge of whether there is any mechanism that is capable of evaluating that.
It is obviously the case that having a more intelligent person working at McDonald's means that customers get their orders screwed up less often. They may be able to innovate better flow mechanisms that result in people being served faster. That is a benefit. I think it's not as big a benefit as having a better surgeon, but I wouldn't know where to start at proving it, especially proving it to someone who doesn't accept financial valuations as having any moral significance.
I think a lot of the questions you're raising are basically covered in economics. You write down a model of people's preferences (e.g. how much they value waiting for burgers vs not dying in heart surgery), resources (e.g. how good you are at serving burgers vs heart surgery), and how people can trade, and then prove things about it.
Under some reasonable-but-not-perfect assumptions about free trade capitalist systems, you'll usually converge on a Pareto efficient equilibrium. That's likely where "the allocation system we currently have for doing so (pay) is actually usefully correlated with the more important jobs" is coming from.
I appreciate the review, and share many of your criticisms. In particular, the rant about schools at the end was--is soothing an odd word to use to describe an angry rant about school being prison-like? Perhaps, but it was soothing nonetheless. As a kid, I kicked perpetually against everything I found facing me in the school system, and when deBoer finished his book describing his paradise of everyone attending public schools with no alternatives, forever, I was almost ready to take up arms against the vision.
I've provided my own take on the book before, but it fits here nicely, so I'll repeat it once more:
Before The Cult of Smart was released, I was writing rapturous praises of it, with language like "he is by a long shot the single clearest thinker in the education discussion." I have been anticipating the book from the first moment I heard of it, eagerly ordered it well in advance of its release, and stayed up until I should have been waking up to finish it the first day I got it. My copy is littered with emphatically felt marginal notes and highlighting.
With all that buildup, it's almost inevitable, perhaps, for there to be some sort of letdown. But did it have to be quite so dramatic?
The core disappointment, I think, came in reading his book after listening to him talk about it. He frontloads all the most cogent, valuable points into the podcast, then fills the rest with self-conscious reassertions of his progressive values and, in what was surely the low point of the book, a seven-page boilerplate argument for Medicare for All that could have been lifted straight out of Bernie 2020 campaign material. I came for his insights on education, and left feeling like he never quite dove into it as far and as concretely as I had hoped, while spending altogether too much energy on routine ideological arguments that have already seen a thousand thousand repetitions.
It is an intensely political book, and a book that wants to be two things at once. On the one hand, you read a leftist pleading with others on his team to internalize the weight of realizing the insistent, inconvenient fact of varying academic talent. On the other, you read an evangelist, eager to convert others to his team. This might prove beneficial in the end, because the same shibboleths and diversions that so frustrated me may successfully serve his goal of making his critical message about varying aptitudes palatable to those who share his politics and dislike my own, something much more important than my own enjoyment of the book. It put a damper on things, though. It is a work I can wrestle productively with, but not one I can endorse.
In the end, deBoer does indeed shatter a myth, though at least for me not the myth he was aiming to shatter. No, the one he consigns to oblivion is the myth that a part of me always yearns to believe: that if you could just show somebody the right data, if you could just build enough of a shared understanding, you would arrive inexorably at the same conclusions. The shared understanding is there. To his credit, I never feel as if I am occupying a different world to him when he presents his factual case. He is thorough and honest. It's this that really lays the values gap bare. He shares point after point that I nod eagerly along to, all building up to what I would describe as the book's true thesis:
If we all came together and acknowledged the innate, intractable gaps that exist in people's academic potential, everyone could finally agree that Marxists have been correct about everything this whole time.
This is not an uncommon thesis to find in this genre. He shares that distinction with Charles Murray in The Bell Curve and Bryan Caplan in The Case Against Education ("If we all came together and acknowledged the innate, intractable gaps that exist in people's academic potential, everyone could finally agree that libertarians have been correct about everything this whole time"). It is frustrating nonetheless, and leaves the book a shadow of what it could have been.
[Content warning: rambling thoughts; I have not yet read the comments]
I do not agree with a crucial piece of the argument and, as far as I can tell, Scott endorses the argument at least implicitly.
I do not think society at large values intelligence above all else. At the very most Scott and DeBoer do. As far as I can tell, the only thing that distinguishes intellectual endeavours from others is that the curve of reward vs achievement is much less tail heavy.
Let me try to clarify what I mean by that a bit.
If you look at a graph representing average income of football players by the percentile they land in, I expect the graph to look roughly even till it explodes at the tail end, skyrocketing to millions of $.
What would the equivalent graph look like for accountants? I expect it to be on average higher (ie. that the average accountant earns more than the average football player), except with the blow up on the tail being much much smaller.
That is my intuition about this anyhow.
That does not mean that society values intelligence higher than other qualities. In fact, I'd argue the opposite — collectively humanity values great football players much much much more than great scientists (even though the latter arguably contribute more to the well-being of humanity). Heck, we even value extremely good looking people (or charismatic people) than smart people considering how much the top actors earn, and how much attention and undue credence is given to various celebrities (note: we == humanity at large, you personally might have different values). Unless there are some magical schools of acting that bestow the ability to sway crowds to their alumni, all these qualities are equally arbitrary as skill at manipulating algebraic terms.
Likewise, people focusing on sending their offspring to best possible schools is not inconsistent with that model — if my child is not extremely gifted at kicking balls, I expect his prospects to be better if he *doesn't* become a footballer, since I doubt any ball kicking school will push him to the tail end of the relevant distribution. However, if the school makes him slightly better at accountancy career, that is a straight up boon (and it is irrelevant whether the improvement is from being a better accountant, or being able to signal quality from graduating the "best" accountancy school around).
My prior on "society values intelligence above all else" is quite low. Nothing in the article so far has convinced me otherwise.
Let us not be naïve. The die has recently been cast. Brazil's future is America's future. If the self-coup fails, then the world might have a new birth of freedom, but, if it succeeds, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Therefore, send not to know for whom Brazilians are fighting. They are fighting for us.
Forgive my ignorance, but what is happening in Brazil ?
(Besides Bolsonaro having been elected a while ago.)
I think it has become clear that Brazilians' aspirations have been betrayed and that the new Administration, instead of living up to its electoral promises of honesty and economic liberalization, is hard at work consolidating its power, protecting corrupt heavyweights, intervening in the economy, supporting monarchist agitators an antagonizing the free press. We can now see the bitter fruits of Trump's support for Brazil's regime. Make no mistake. As Nixon once said, as Brazil goes, so does Latin America https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/21/archives/brazil-will-press-kissinger-on-trade.html
I am utterly *shocked* this is happening, *nobody* could have foreseen this ! /s
My point is, as President Nixon once remarked, as Brasil goes, so goes Latin America. if we do not intervene soon, we will lose Brazil, at which point we will have lost Latin America to China.
Who is the "we" ? I would expect South America to be pretty fed up with 'interventions' from USA…
Have you considered that maybe you are suffering from a bad case of typical mind fallacy in your opinion on schools ? I don't think the average child experience is as bad as you make it happen, and I don't think the average child would do as well as you without school.
Just to give an opposite data point: I loved my school time from the beginning to the end (not saying there were no bad or boring moments but overall highly positive), and I am very confident that I would be less intelligent, less scientifically inclined and less socialised if I had been homeschooled.
As a well socialized 4.0 college student with a high interest in science and numerous artistic talents that was homeschooled and even 'unschooled', I don't think you should be so confident unless you're just sure your parents would have sucked at it. Granted, my mom had an MBA before she started homeschooling us, but the people I know who were homeschooled all have multiple skills and test scores WELL above average. I think one homeschool group I briefly interacted with had average ACT scores above thirty, and they only met once a week for a small annual fee and volunteering requirements.
Saying "school is a prison for children" is like saying "police is legalized murder". Technically, this is true, but only in the same way as "Dorothy kills the first person she meets, then assembles a gang to kill again". It's not the whole truth.
Not every parent is a qualified surgeon, which is why parents must sometimes place their children's very lives in the hands of medical professionals. Similarly, not every parent is a competent teacher, nor is every child capable of productive self-study. Khan Academy videos are great, but they're no substitute for guided instruction, especially for children who are not geniuses. This is why parents must sometimes place their children's education in the hands of qualified professionals. And yes, it would be nice if every parent could afford a couple personal tutors for their child, but, well, most cannot.
As it happens, public schools in the US are pretty bad; similarly, policemen sometimes kill innocent people for no reason (or, arguably, for race-motivated reasons, which is even worse). But that's not a good reason to abolish the police altogether, because the negative consequences will overwhelm the positives. The same applies to schools.
I think the police analogy doesn't hold. Police officers don't spend most of their time in violent encounters. Whereas schoolchildren do spend a lot of time in a confined place being forbidden to leave.
A better analogy would be "like saying 'being a soldier in an active warzone is legalized murder'", to which I'd say, "yes, it is a bit similar".
I'd love to read a post on schooling (decoupled from a book review) if it doesn't exist yet. I went to kind-of-charter-school (I think, I'm outside U.S and it doesn't look to be 1:1 equivalent) which was religious and suffered from most of the same issues as public ones here.
Also, what is bathroom pass? Google doesn't really seem helpful.
It's a pass that a kid carries when they go to the bathroom. If they get stopped by another adult in the hallway (a teacher, administrator, security guard) they show the pass to prove they aren't cutting class and have the teacher's permission to be outside the classroom.
The bit about school as school prison really rings true to me; I remember substituting at the elite private school of my area and just immediately being disgusted by the environment and especially the quiet servility. It instantly made me never want to be a teacher ever again
I think 16 and 17 year olds are the new women; they have a whole wide range right violations predicated on exaggerated notions of their biochemistry making them stupider (notions that if applied to adult disabled or even the old would be considered extremely offensive). It's a similar situation with younger children, but also different because the younger you go the more true claims about you being too stupid to make decisions on your own
The tricky and uncomfortable yet very fascinating question when it comes to children's rights id contract law and sexual consent. My gut reaction is allow much more contract law but keep sexual consent with an adult laws at 17 or 18.
Yet I look at austria sexual consent laws or even the old NL consent laws (15) and I have to admit 15 or 16 doesn't seem wildly immoral to me either.
Japan sexual consent laws seen much to low and very strange that it's not talked about.
Some societies don't value intelligence as moral worth much and seem as a result to be more open to using IQ in the educational system, netherlands and germany comes to mind.
They have the least bad education systems imho, and NL had the happiest children.
Concerning your confusion on meritocracy criticism. A useful distinction here might be between desert and entitlement. Someone who wins the lottery is entitled to their millions but we'd hardly say they deserved it or if I over-pay someone to do something, say 100k to dig a small hole, then they're likewise entitled to it but hardly deserve it. As you note, it may be best (for reasons of liberty or maximising utility) to arrange society with a system like capitalism whereby people will tend to choose to reward others based on their productivity (though this is not ofc guaranteed) even if that productivity isn't deserved or even if sometimes people do so for wholly subjective reasons unrelated to productivity. You say this system is what meritocracy is.
A lot of criticisms of capitalism or even just a given society on "meritocratic" grounds says people who do making money or advance in society don't deserve it. The most obvious meritocratic stance is "equality of opportunity" whereby you say that, while in the final distribution person A is more productive than person B, this is only because A was given unfair advantages in education, opportunities etc. compared with B. This is normally seen as the argument for meritocracy and a lot of societal criticism and reform is based on this idea - that they don't merit or deserve the income or productivity they've attained. But if we take your model of meritocracy, there can't be any objection re. A or B.
Now, I agree your approach is correct but I think the term meritocracy is usually seen to relate to this (thick) sense of equality of opportunity (as opposed to say a weak one of just letting anyone apply for a given opportunity) and many people and much politics is spent questioning the idea of who deserves to have become productive, not that we should chose productive people per se.
A mishmash of thoughts in response:
1. Amen, amen to the idea that meritocracy (that is, benefits accruing to the intelligent and capable) is just a thing that emerges from situations in which people have the freedom to choose. It’s efficient!
2. Trying to prevent meritocracy leads to bad, weird outcomes, especially for the poor whom DeBoer wants to help. A Venezuelan acquaintance (émigré, lawyer, from a rich family) was telling me about how Chavez tried to widen opportunity by creating his own chain of professional schools. These took in poor students and churned out doctors and lawyers after three-week-long courses. These people were not capable lawyers or doctors, obviously, but various other Bolivarian social programs swallowed them up and deployed them around the country to serve the pueblo. Whom did this scheme harm? The poor, who couldn’t afford to avoid the fake doctors.
3. This article (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/magazine/white-fragility-robin-diangelo.html) quoted some anti-racist trainers who also want to undermine meritocracy. One of them talks about how law firms should try to hire compassionate people. But then, “Ron Ferguson, a Black economist, faculty member at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of Harvard’s Achievement Gap Initiative, is a political liberal who gets impatient with such thinking about conventional standards and qualifications. ‘The cost,’ he told me in January, ‘is underemphasizing excellence and performance and the need to develop competitive prowess.’”
4. Tangential and just conjecture, but: I sometimes wonder if meritocracy (benefits accruing to the capable, unimpeded by human constraints like sexism) itself isn’t responsible for the (maybe illusory?) decline in the quality of American education. In the Bad Old Days, it was much harder for women to become surgeons and rocket scientists, or whatever. Now it isn’t as hard. The very smart women who would have been stuck being teachers or nurses in 1950 are now likelier to be surgeons and rocket scientists.
5. Another spicy-but-unverifiable claim: meritocracy probably feels more unjust now that we mate assortatively. It looks more like inherited, class-based benefit, which it probably partially is, but it’s also because smart men marry smart women now, and they have smart children.
re #4 I suspect similar things.
I've often heard the anecdotal argument that prior to the 70s, many more very smart women went into teaching. I'd also say that having met thousands of public school teachers, the older generation did include many smart women who increased the average intelligence of teachers. As they have retired, I expect average teacher intelligence may well have declined.
I mean, I think the great debate about intelligence determining your value as a human being might be a short lived thing regardless purely because of AI. Strength used to determine your value as a human being too, but then we automated all the STR jobs.
Silicon Valley is automating all the INT jobs right now, and when that's done in a decade or two we might be having giant arguments about how CHA or WIS determines your value as a human being.
This review feels half-finished. Like, you got so worked up about the charter schools and compulsory education thing you didn't have the energy to properly discuss the more core idea of the book. Which is - after we have done exhausted every possible educational intervention and the dust has settled, there will still be winners and losers - based on innate ability.
Is it psychologically realistic to completely decouple the sense of one's worth from intelligence/educational achievement? What would the society look like in this scenario? Can we significantly diminish the rewards to talent without completely destroying the incentives that compel people to do socially useful work?
I hope you can spend more time on those questions in another post.
"Universal school": orphanages for everyone! I think it's a leftover from High Modernism.
About a hundred years ago, any look at trends in the organization of society would find what I call the disassembly of the home. Before the Industrial Revolution, people mostly worked at home (be that a farm or a workshop attached to the house), mostly gave birth at home, mostly received medical care at home, cooked and ate at home, etc. In cities, artisans sold their wares from the streetfront room, too.
The Industrial Revolution separated these functions, creating specialized factories, hospitals, shopping venues, etc. because this enabled stunning gains in efficiency. Extrapolate this, to scry what the far-off future of the mid-20th century may hold, and the obvious prediction is that more and more functions will leave the "home" until it's literally a dormitory. To the extent children are not a good fit for a dormitory-for-adults, or one happened to pick an ontology where childcare is a separate function, the logical consequence is that all children are to be raised in what are basically orphanages.
As a matter of cognition, this is the sin of mentally setting variances to zero. Sure, if all people (or all "normal" people, there being discrete internally-homogeneous categories of variously "broken"/"insane" people) were in fact identical, something of this sort might even work. To be very charitable, the effort to approximate such a state of affairs was a resounding success in the physical industries. The huge expenditure on standards organizations, metrology, quality control, mechanization, etc. did in fact make parts exchangeable! Professional education and certification is but a pale shadow, comparatively, and at a time before individual genetic variance was understood (instead society was just shaking off a religion which very much taught that people are spiritually exchangeable, "soul" and "free will" and all), it was a reasonable mistake to assume that society could be reorganized on similar principles.
Oh, and from https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/16/cbt-in-the-water-supply/ :
"It’s very hard to track changes in people’s basic beliefs about psychology. I was flabbergasted to learn that until Dr. Benjamin Spock’s landmark 1940s book on child care, parents were told not to hug, kiss, or show affection to babies, because that would coddle them and make them weak, pampered adults. Before that, parents interacted with their kids much less, and it was assumed that siblings and nannies and friends would raise them, or they would raise themselves."
This reinforces my belief that leftist tend to be very good at discovering and describing problems, but tend to be bad at finding effective solutions.
I realize I'm risking a ban by commenting on that section, but I'm not gonna say anything about race and IQ.
However, you were begging for evidence to change your mind? What? How is that good practice? Unless you do that in both directions, on all occasions, you're going to end up with biased conclusions!
There is always evidence for both sides of a controversy! You can't decide which conclusion you want to arrive at a priori, then specifically seek out evidence that supports it!
He's very obviously just playing a mind game here, imo. This is as close as he can possibly come to admitting he believes in group IQ differences without serving himself up on a platter for crucifixion. It's actually very clever because it sets up a weird paradox for anyone who might try to hold him accountable, in that 'guy who is AFRAID the FACTS are racist' is not easily confronted as 'man exposes his ignorant racism' without incurring huge cognitive dissonance both on the scientific and moral front.
The weird thing about this comments is that I can't tell if you are a cynical believer in race/IQ whose point is 'Scott's always secretly agreed with us' or a cynical leftist or liberal whose point is 'Scott's always been secretly fash'.
I will say that as a good Bayesian, Scott doesn't actually have to think of it in terms of believe/ not believe, as opposed to assigning a credence to how likely he thinks it is to be true. I think you are right to get the vibe that the credence is north of 50% though.
I never assumed he was anything less than terminally open-minded. I don't frequent these circles enough to really be familiar with the lingo but I understand the point. As for my ideological bent, I really was just thinking in terms of psychology. Maybe I'm super autistic or something but I genuinely don't have an axe to grind most of the time. People are simply interesting to model. Perhaps I'm a great Bayesian, but I wouldn't know.
Can you explain the difference between 'assigning a credence to how likely he thinks it is to be true' and 'believing more or less strongly' ?
Because he's only human, and when confronted with facts that undermine our deeply held values, accepting those facts can be almost 'psychologically painful' ?
I like to think of it in terms of power. What one believes they are capable of heavily determines what they can accomplish. And also what they are *allowed* to accomplish by the system (resources/laws/etc.) In the current educational system both are being actively repressed. What, how, where, when children learn is decided mostly by politicians and administrators. Children have no say. Parents have little. Teachers have a small amount of power. Administrators have more but are still heavily constrained. So what are we all learning? That our voices don't matter, what we want isn't important, from a very very early age. We learn the opposite of democracy from a very young age and then are surprised when our "democratic" society has turned into a corporate oligarchy. There have been many many experiments in small democratic schools, where children have a voice in what they learn and how. Where if a child isn't happy and engaged by school it is considered a failure. But these haven't been widely adopted. Why? I agree with Freddie deBoer that there is a cult of "smart" or a cult of intelligence that is a little bit sociopathic that can optimize success in our current competitive culture and economy. Everyone wants their children to succeed. Success in our world, in our economy, is correlated with success in a public school system that rewards a very specific type of intelligence, compliance to status quo, deference to power and the systems that support that power. So it's rational for parents, educators, and politicians to think that trying to enforce more compliance will lead to more success. That's not the kind of world I want to live in though, and I would love to see little community based schools, where students, parents, educators are empowered by the system to search out their talents and interests and recognize they can have a say in shaping the world around them and our collective future.
>even back in the 50s and 60s when we were kicking Soviet ass and landing men on the moon
Welll....if anything the inverse is true and it was the Soviets kicking American ass - https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1735086-america-fuck-yeah
Just as a meta-comment, trusting Scott's personal experience in school to generalize isn't a great idea. Clearly he wasn't your average student. Just because there was too much structure for him (or only read at certain times) doesn't mean that's bad for everyone.
> School is child prison
I'm curious how widespread is the extremely negative sentiment towards the concept of schools in this review? Also, is it just an American thing or do people in other parts of the world feel the same about school?
Personally, my preferences couldn't be further away from Scott's. My childhood and teenage years would be miserable without school, and the thought of being home-schooled instead is a horrifying one.
Mostly it was the amount and variety of social interactions in school that made the experience positive - certainly I would have had much fewer peer interactions if I were home-schooled.
Could tell you from my experience that eastern european schooling might as well be called child supermax. I'd eyeball it at a third of students no matter where in the world you go, and I honestly don't see a reason to avoid accommodating that group.
Reporting in from Europe - Scott is correct. Homework is soul-crushing (if you even bother doing it and don't just copy your friend's answers), every time we have break all the kids are forced outside whether it's -30 degrees centigrade or not, bullying is "solved" by putting the victims in trouble, and everything fun is forbidden. The one good thing is that at least we didn't have bathroom passes.
I find the take bizarre and alien, and I think it's notable that most (not all) of the commenters agreeing with it seem to be childless adults. Not a lot of parents are chiming in to agree, which I think is because it's such a different vision from what we see.
I mostly agree with the "school is prison for kids", I certainly felt this way when I was a student, even if I had zero difficulty in school.
It was more than 30 years ago and in Europe, so not sure how comparable my school experience is with current US situation, but clearly, being under the authority of non-parent adults (professors, or worse, teaching assistants (I struggle with finding an english word, in french it's educators (pions in slang), apparenlty it does not exists in the US educational system. If you don't know what it is, lucky you, prison gards are the exact equivalent) was something i didn't like and restrospectively really made the experience prison-like. I'm still quite allergic to it ( no sympathy at all for police for example, or bosses playing the hierarchy-card).
I agree that the main (very non-PC) purpose of school is keeping children out of the streets (and the parents available for the work force - either working, or demanding (the best way to keep the wages down - employers looooove a high unemployment))...
But, apart from the formal education (I also think it's overrated, but there I would not trust my judgement, as I never struggled even a little on learning, I was clearly not the target), there are 2 things that were not mentioned and that could not be reproduced by homeschooling:
Its a socialization place, with many children able to interract with "minimal" (compared to parent presence) adult interference. I had no huge need for that, because at the time there was enough kids in my neighborhood and we were free to do our stuff outside as long as we were back for dinner. This was the norm then, but it is not anymore (at least in an urban context). Children-on-their-own can leads to problems (bullying,..) but, remembering my childhood, I think those problems are hugely blown out and it's on average a huge positive, something that I would like my childs to experience. School is often the only place where it can (more or less) happen, especially with the trend for smaller families and urbanisation. Certainly not as good as kids playing in the woods, but better than alone with mom and a playstation...
And, less funny and more controversial: as debilitating it felt at the time to do my school (prison) time, maybe it prepared me to adult life because it's close to most work environments (which are also prison-like). Would I have been able to endure it as I do now without the school training? Not sure. Now ideally, neither school-prisons nor job-prisons would exists...but if you go this way you are discussing Marxism or a society of one-person entrepreneurs aka anarchy...i.e. utopies with a high track-record of sucking badly when implemented.
One thing that you missed that may explain the difference between your and Freddie's positions on hierarchy is assortive mating:
If we grant for the sake of argument that intelligence is about 50% heritable (about half of the variance is explained by genetics) and that intelligence is very useful for leadership, a hierarchy which strongly sorts for intelligence will leave the lower rungs of the hierarchy with fewer and worse 'natural leaders' to organize it. If the 'bourgeoisie' is on average more intelligent than the 'proletariat' but mostly marry one another with little consideration of intelligence, then sheer numbers will mean that the proles still have a large number of diamonds-in-the-rough who can form a revolutionary vanguard. If, instead, the 'bourgeoisie' admitted smart proles and kicked out their own failsons, with a strong preference for more intelligent spouses, that process would quickly remove most of the potential prole organizers from the running.
I'm not a socialist, so this may be a crude strawman, but I'm given to understand that the UK saw something similar in the Labor party. In the beginning, Labor MPs were unusually intelligent but largely uneducated coal miners and factory workers. Today, they're slightly-less-wealthy Oxbridge graduates than their Tory counterparts and have similar biases / class-interests.
The last section made me genuinely emotional, because I'm so often the one making this exact same argument and I've never heard anyone else outside of my personal sphere say it out loud. I've been an educator for 15 years, and I can tell you without hesitation that public school is prison for children. Thank you.
Are you a Jew?
I think you know it's almost time.
Pick a good female. Commit to her permanently. Start making babies. Untold knowledge awaits you.
I'm afraid I feel like the the "prevent people from being able to escape the current educational helltopia" angle is strategic crab-bucketing, strangely enough akin to the accelerationist notion of crashing capitalism - by making the current system untenable to the absolute maximum number of people, it may speed up change by raising the number of voices raised in discontent, without asking how much damage might be done before the critical tipping point is reached or even whether the outcome is going to be the one predicted.
If this even needs to be voiced, I see that sort of reasoning as yet another instance of the morally abhorrent "the ends justify the means" shtick that every kind of political fanaticism tends to exude. And it can't even work in a world without restrictions on freedom of movement and immigration.
Re “The Part About There Being A Cult Of Smart” section, it seems to me you should mention the element of “Work Ethic”. Society dislikes ‘easy’ success of high IQ people given it is (at least partially) genetic, while celebrates exceptional academic/business achievements as these are often perceived to be large part hard work/perseverance and smaller part IQ.
Re: PISA results and "how a country which does so poorly can land a man on the moon".
Average PISA scores vary widely by race: https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/pisa2015/pisa2015highlights_5e.asp
America's racial groups score pretty well when compared to their global counterparts: e.g. Whites' 499 in Math was better than half of Europe including Austria, Sweden, France, and the UK, but worse than twelve other EU countries and all East Asians. Hispanics' 446 was better than any LatAm country except Chile (447), and Blacks' 419 was close to Trinidad (425), the only black country in the rankings.
I think one of the things missed here is how teaching and learning in school has shifted from the way Scott writes about it, to a version more applicable to the modern world (I recognize this is not true of all school systems).
Sure, schools still have kids write essays on "To Kill A Mockingbird", but more often than not, teachers, particularly younger teachers who grew up online, are gearing their classes more towards experiential learning and developing critical thinking. You aren't being forced to memorize dates in history class, you're being taught to synthesize information and develop coherent arguments. We should be encouraging more of this. Anyone, regardless of intelligence, benefits from this type of educational experience.
Re: Schools as quasi-prisons.
In the Fall of 1999, I began attending high school. The preceding spring saw 2 teens shoot up their school resulting in a massacre in the town of Littleton, Colorado. Naturally, an overreaction took place at so-called institutions of higher learning around the country.
When I arrived at the high school for the first time, I noticed that we were ordered to enter the school, segregated by sex at two separate entrances. The school had a large study body, well over 3,000 students, so this was not exactly an easy process. We all lined at the entrance designed for male students, waiting to see what was greeting us once we got inside. Well, turns out, we were welcomed on our first day with a Security Wand that was waved up and down around us by a school police officer who appeared as though he was past retirement age but still wanted some income. We also had to place our backpacks through an x-ray detector and we had a to walk through a metal detector. Nothing like a medium security prison setup to kick off your high school experience.
Worse yet, there were real fears for many of us with what happened at Columbine. Yet, there was nothing, that I can recall, in any form of a psychological reassurance. No, "if you are feeling depressed, or down, etc.", nothing. Their entire reaction was the make the school more and more like a prison. Hell, I went to a low security prison once that had less mechanisms in place for weapons detection.
The size of the school made the situation incredibly demoralizing. In Winters, we'd be forced to stand in lines, single files that could stretch on for at least a quarter mile, if not more. Distinctly remember being pelted with frozen precipitation just so I could have the privilege of entering my public high school.
We also were issued IDs that had to be worn at all times. If we did not have our IDs, we were issued a written warning. After a certain number of warnings, of which I do not recall the amount, it resulted in an automatic suspension. Including the security checkpoint that started the day, there were several checkpoints where we must have ID to scan in order to gain entry. If you did not have your ID card, you would not be allowed to get lunch.
Eventually the rule of wearing the ID seemed to go away but we always had to scan in when entering school, and entering the lunchroom. That lasted my entire four years.
I like a lot of things about this post, but I disagree on one point: meritocracy.
My message is (1) meritocracy does not mean what you think it means and (2) on some level you, and a lot of other well meaning people, have been tricked into defending the motte of a motte-and-bailey argument.
About the meaning of the word: it literally translates to "rule of the deserving", so you could suspect it is about power and it is about human deserts. Now, etymology is not the same as meaning. Maybe we should ask the guy who invented the word, by writing a dystopian book about it in 1958? That would be this guy: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
To summarize, "the meritocracy" was meant to describe two things: (a) an upper class selected based on some measure of ability. The selection was described to be such that mediocre children of the upper class could be helped to make it, but it would expel embarrassingly incompetent people as well as draft any exceptional people into the upper class. This would guarantee the security of the rulers from a lower class lacking capable leaders. (b) an ideology similar to social darwinism, positing that the upper class were "the deserving", so anything they got was by definition deserved, and the lower class "the undeserving", so any of their demands or needs could be dismissed as whining or prevarication. Young was particularly worried that by labeling the lower class as undeserving they would be stripped away of dignity, beyond any material loss from the wealth-grabbing by a "morally righteous" ruling class. (in short: "a boot stomping on low-IQ people's face, forever)
Coming to the motte-and-bailey. The idea that the haves deserve everything they have, and possibly more, and that the have-nots should be happy with anything they receive because they don't deserve more (if they did, they would have gotten it) is very much alive. It is seldom stated as such but it is the unspoken assumption in much political and social commentary. The main approach for promoting this idea is by playing on the confusion between meritocracy as giving responsibility positions to the most capable, and possibly rewarding them for the extra effort (as you define it) and meritocracy as a justification for boundless inequality (the original meaning, still very much in use).
Both Young and DeBoer seem to go further and think that "it was better when it was worse" and that we should abandon the battle for social mobility, as well as give up selecting the most capable for positions of responsibility, as the price to stop the rise of a smug, self-righteous upper class. I very much disagree with them on this. But we should recognize that there is a problem, and be very careful when discussing "meritocracy", because not everyone means the same thing by the word. If possible, push back against rhetoric based on dividing "deserving" from "undeserving". At the very least, when people like DeBoer write against meritocracy, stop saying that they did not understand the concept. They did.
PS: I know you wrote posts specifically about meritocracy in the past. Unfortunately, I discovered SSC only after you closed the blog.
Do you have any empirical evidence to back up the claim that most children find school anything like as torturous as you're making out? That passage seemed to rely quite heavily on personal experience, which doesn't seem the right way to go about this. (My own experience is that I generally preferred not being at school to being there as a kid, but I never hated it, but then again, British schools rarely assign 3 hours of homework!)
DeBoer's description of mobility in the hierarchy feels unnecessarily zero-sum. A person can create value in a way that changes the proportions of different categories in the hierarchy by i.e. creating a new business sector or paying their employees more. You can bring people up with you without pushing other people down.
Also, there's another aspect that needs to be considered before the current education system can be replaced - child abuse in the home. I heard from someone who was homeschooled that her parents locked away her birth certificate, wouldn't allow her to get a job or a driver's license or go to college, subjected her to physical and sexual abuse, and there was no societal system in place to monitor her well-being. So, yes, school is horrific and terrible for many students, but homeschooling isn't necessarily always better and there needs to be at least some contact between kids and adults who aren't in their parent's social circle.
One of the better models I've seen is my friends who were homeschooled up until high school, and then attended public school mostly to take advanced subjects. A more scalable solution might give the option of trade school or high school at that point.
Thank you for this lovely review. But rather than being a thorn in DeBoer's side, I think the trickiness of the issue of racial differences in intelligence may highlight a necessary nuance missed in your defence of meritocracy.
Firstly, balancing the views of experts as you briefly link to is likely less valuable than it might be otherwise due to the controversy of the topic. We don't even need to consider the 'object' of the question (which you have wisely forbidden), because we can instead establish that we will never be able to confidently determine whether race correlates with intelligence independently of environment. Genetics and environment are massively interacting parameters (e.g. there is no school where a black child has exactly the same experience as a white child). You can't factor out the environment from the equation and see what differences are left to be attributed to genetics because environment isn't just a confounding parameter but the very mechanism through which genes for intelligence might be expressed. One environment may cause one gene to cause intelligence, while a different, possibly currently non-existant, environment may cause that same gene to reduce intelligence. This is without even having to descend into the endless discussion of bias in how we measure and define intelligence. So our topic here is less a discussion on which facts are true and more on reasoning and ethics.
Your defence of meritocracy used the example of a surgeon. But I think we can distinguish the *utility* of meritocracy with its inherent *virtue* (there's maybe some kind of irony here as the book's argument concerns the conflation of intelligence with virtue). We choose the intelligent person to be the surgeon because we want good surgical results and we assume that an intelligent person is more likely to get those good results (a debatable assumption perhaps but let's ride with it). This demonstrates a social utility of a meritocracy of intelligence, but it says little about its virtue, i.e. we can now see it as a necessary evil. I think this is an important distinction because the virtue of meritocracy is often presumed as self-evident across the political spectrum, and the book argues persuasively against this.
Now we wouldn't need the intelligence metric for the surgeon if we had an oracle who could predict how good their results will be. If we had such an oracle, and it told us a certain unintelligent person was going to give us the best results in the operating theatre, then I suspect nearly everyone would go with that person. Therefore, the necessity is that intelligence provides an indicator for outcome.
Intelligence, imperfect as it may be as an indicator of outcome, is a property of the individual. I assume measures of intelligence involve some aggregation of a number of tests. Now let's consider measures of intelligence of a racial group, which, even if we could be completely confident of its validity (which we can't), would give us a very slight prior for measuring an individual's intelligence. The group's intelligence is at best a weak indicator of the individual's intelligence - which we can already measure far more accurately - which then was a vague indicator of their likely results. So there is next to no utility in such a group-based meritocracy.
Now onto the position of virtue: the main argument I hear on meritocracy's virtue (i.e. not societal utility) is that it let's us all have hope in the persuit of our dreams, regardless of how likely they are in practice. In the case of a meritocracy of individual intelligence this is true precisely because we struggle to really measure it. Even if everyone tells you you're a loser, there is still the plausible scenario where you work hard and one day succeed, i.e. you were smarter than anyone realised. Ultimately, this provides at least a sense of agency. But with meritocracies based on groups where we cannot choose whether or not to belong (e.g. race), we lose this possible virtue because we don't have agency over the group. (You could argue that the group itself has the power to rise collectively - this is beyond the scope of my point here.)
So what? Ultimately, the question of whether there is differences in intelligence between races is not only impossible to answer conclusively, but it is irrelevant to the discussion of meritocracy because it fails to offer any of the proposed value and virtue that meritocracy is purported to provide.
This is the best reply. The persuasive argument in favor of meritocracy is not moral, but utilitarian.
I think it would be possible to obtain a relatively confident answer about differences in intelligence between 'races' (or more precisely, groups with different ancestry), but I think if this result pointed in the 'racist' direction, most 'experts' would just demand to put the burden of proof higher.
Scott, what exactly is your estimate of how much of your time raising a home schooled kid would take?
I hope Scott comes back to answer this. I have 2 kids under 2, plan on sending them both to public school, with a fallback of private school, with a fallback of homeschooling. I expect them to succeed well in public school, but reading this makes me push myself harder for financial independence and plenty of cash so I could afford private schooling/quitting my career. In my head, homeschooling is a minimum of 10 years without working, then part-time until they are 18.
I'm not Scott, but we home unschooled two kids. My wife did more of it than I did, so I put the question to her. Her answer was that time doing it was no more than two hours a day, much of it spent doing things she enjoyed, but that she had to be "on call" 24/7, except when I was there dealing with the kids. My memory is that it took considerably less of my time than that. She was a full time housewife and mother at that point, having quit her job as an oil geologist before we had our first child.
I should add that our kids were only being home unschooled from about 10 and 13. Earlier than that they were being unschooled in a very small and unconventional school on the Sudbury model. We, especially my wife, put some time into that as well, of course, and our kids spent a good deal less time there than they would have in a conventional school, but it did make the process easier for us.
Over the past year I've learned a lot about the full-time RVing community (which I plan to join within the next year, and which is much larger than I realized, close to 1 million people in the US, though I think most of those are not really nomadic and mostly stay in one place, and tends to skew towards older people compared to the general population).
I mention this because this community (necessarily) has a much broader Overton window about how to school kids, and takes much more advantage of the possibilities modern technology offers for doing so. Every discussion I've seen about this, usually framed as advice for families thinking of becoming full-timers, talks about being honest with yourself as a parent about what you're capable of, and looking honestly and comprehensively at how your child learns. They list out many different styles of "roadschooling" and what kinds of families they work best for, and how to make effective uses of all the resources available. This community also has developed ways to "domicile" (aka establish legal residence) in almost any state, helping deal with local laws making this difficult for many others. Check out https://www.fulltimefamilies.com/roadschooling-how-to-homeschool-while-rving/ for an example of what I'm talking about. Youtube vlogs show many examples of this, including families where both parents work and each kid is schooled in a different way optimized for their learning style and well-being.
> he cites a study showing that individualized tutoring has an effect size of 0.4.
What does this mean?
I'm still wondering the same!
This is where I mention that I sent my kid to the Sudbury Valley School, a 50-year-old democratic, student-governed community of 150, aged 4 to 18. The kids do whatever they want all day, within the confines of laws written by the student-run legislature and enforced by the student-run judiciary. The graduates turn out fine. I present the school as an extreme of school reform.
Gonna write a few bits in response to the various responses I got. Apologies in advance for any incoherence (because it's not like I'm deeply thinking this through right this minute).
First, I am very thankful I have no kids so they're not going through what, even in 1916, Padraig Pearse was calling The Murder Machine (though this was political in the cause of Irish independence, not as a paedogogical solution):
https://www.cym.ie/documents/themurdermachine.pdf
The English once proposed in their Dublin Parliament a measure for the castration of all Irish priests who refused to quit Ireland. The proposal was so filthy than although it duly passed the House and was transmitted to England with the warm recommendation at the Viceroy, it was not eventually adopted. But the English have actually carried out an even filthier thing. They have planned and established an education system which more wickedly does violence to the elemental human rights of Irish children than would an edict for the general castration of Irish males. The system has aimed at the substitution for men and women of mere Things. It has not been an entire success. There are still a great many thousand men and women in Ireland. But a great many thousand of what, by way of courtesy, we call men and women, are simply Things. Men and women. however depraved, have kindly human allegiances. But these Things have no allegiance. Like other Things, they are for sale.
Our common parlance has become impressed with the conception of education as some sort of manufacturing process. Our children are the ‘raw material’; we desiderate for their education ‘modern methods’ which must be efficient but cheap; we send them to Clongowes to be ‘finished’; when finished they are ‘turned out’; specialists ‘grind’ them for the English Civil Service and the so-called liberal professions; in each of our great colleges there is a department known as the ‘scrap-heap’, though officially called the Fourth Preparatory—the limbo to which the debris ejected by the machine is relegated. The stuff there is either too hard or too soft to be moulded to the pattern required by the Civil Service Commissioners or the Incorporated Law Society.
In our adoption of the standpoint here indicated there is involved a primary blunder as to the nature and functions of education. For education has not to do with the manufacture of things, but with fostering the growth of things. And the conditions we should strive to bring about in our education system are not the conditions favourable to the rapid and cheap manufacture of ready-mades, but the conditions favourable to the growth of living organisms—the liberty and the light and the gladness of a ploughed field under the spring sunshine.
In particular I would urge that the Irish school system of the future should give freedom—freedom to the individual school, freedom to the individual teacher, freedom as far as may be to the individual pupil. Without freedom there can be no right growth; and education is properly the fostering of the right growth of a personality. Our school system must bring, too, some gallant inspiration. And with the inspiration it must bring a certain hardening. One scarcely knows whether modern sentimentalism or modern utilitarianism is the more sure sign of modern decadence. I would boldly preach the antique faith that fighting is the only noble thing, and that he only is at peace with God who is at war with the powers of evil.
In a true education system, religion, patriotism, literature, art and science would be brought in such a way into the daily lives of boys and girls as to affect their character and conduct. We may assume that religion is a vital thing in Irish schools, but I know that the other things, speaking broadly, do not exist. There are no ideas there, no love of beauty, no love of books, no love of knowledge, no heroic inspiration. And there is no room for such things either on the earth or in the heavens, for the earth is cumbered and the heavens are darkened by the monstrous bulk of the programme. Most of the educators detest the programme. They are like the adherents of a dead creed who continue to mumble formulas and to make obeisance before an idol which they have found out to be a spurious divinity."
Second, I am very grateful for the education I have received, of whatever degree, and even more grateful that I was let alone to roam through the bookshelves and pull out dusty volumes. I may have over-dosed on the 19th century but I was able to find things out for myself.
Thirdly, there are so many constraints on education today. Mostly I am going to kick up about the recommendations which Scott rightly says should only be a worst case scenario about turning schools into baby-sitting services.
WHAT ARE SCHOOLS FOR? (This is where I go "in my day..."). They used to be for education, no matter how rote or brutal that was (as a side-note, it was pretty brutal in my late parents' day - that would be 30s and 40s when they were attending primary school and literally getting beaten, to the point where when my mother had us kids she was determined that no way were we going to go to the same local school, even if conditions had drastically changed thirty years later).
Now, however, they are surrogate homes. SCHOOLS SHOULD NOT BE FEEDING KIDS BREAKFAST. That is not the function of a school! And if the home situation is so bad that the parents cannot afford to feed their children, or have no idea of how to feed them, or are so actively neglectful that they will not feed them, that SHOULD be for a completely different service to handle, be that social workers or a whole new body set up to box a week's worth of healthy meals and deliver it to at-risk households plus instructions on how to cook them. Why are schools feeding children, open early in the morning so the kids can be dropped off when the parents have to be at work, providing after-school services so the kids can be minded while the parents are still at work, and so on?
You're asking teachers not alone to teach, but to be parents, nurses, child-minders, and rear your children for you. Is it any wonder schools are failing at what they are supposed to do, namely turn out people able to read, write, and do basic arithmetic at a functional level?
"Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development."
They're being asked to function as "child prisons" so that two-income working parents can get out to start work at 8 a.m. or 9 a.m. and still drop the kid off to school and not have them at home for the two hours between the parents leaving for work and the kid needing to turn up for school. Since the decline of "one parent who stays at home as full-time home-maker who can walk the kids to school at 8:30 a.m. in time for 9 a.m. start", if you want to change this, you don't have to change schools - you have to change the whole economic engine of society so schools DON'T have to be open at 7:30 a.m. and stay open until 5, 6 or 7 p.m. to child-mind for working parents.
But it's a lot easier to blame schools than change society on a fundamental level.
There's also the problem of "what about if your school isn't in walking/cycling distance", which is a different matter. School didn't start until 8:45 a.m. for me but I had to be on the school bus at 7:30 a.m. since it had a long, looping route to collect all us country kids, meaning between the ages of 12 and 15 I spend an hour and a quarter on the bus travelling to school in the morning every school day.
Okay, so we're turning our school into child-raising second homes. Who is going to do the child-minding? First, if you're asking teachers to stay late in the evening or come in early in the morning to supervise, even on a rota, you are going to have to stump up extra money to pay them. If you want to avoid using teachers but hire on childcare providers or "an adult to sit there and make sure the kids at least pretend to study", then you need to persuade the relevant authority to pay money to hire them on. Remember what Scott said about penny-pinching? If you haven't the budget to buy heating oil, where the heck are you going to get money to hire more staff? So you'll end up using volunteers, which results (generally) in twenty people saying they're interested, ten people showing up, and five people who will actually do it.
There are legally-required ratios for how many children a staff member can supervise:
"Breakdown of Required Ratios
The ratios below relate to full time (5+ hours per day) and Part time (3.5 hours – 5 hours per day) services:
0 – 1 year of age
1 adult : 3 children
1 – 2 years of age
1 adult : 5 children
2 – 3 years of age
1 adult : 6 children
3 – 6 years of age
1 adult : 8 children
The ratios below relate to Sessional Services (up to 3.5 hours per day):
0 – 1 year of age
1 adult : 3 children
1 – 2.5 years of age
1 adult : 5 children
2.5 – 6 years of age
1 adult : 11 children"
Naturally enough, the younger the children, the fewer a staff member can supervise.
Second half of the above, because SubStack instructed me to write a shorter comment before posting 😀
Oh, and speaking of money. The childcare service I work for gets most of its funding from fees. There are, at present, five different schemes to subsidise low-income parents to obtain childcare besides the universal free preschool programme (all of which are going to be replaced by a single scheme and about feckin' time say I). You can imagine the fun it is working out which kid fits under which scheme and applying for that on a government website (such fun that I religiously avoid doing it and let the other victims handle it). Details here: https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/education/pre_school_education_and_childcare/your_childcare_options.html#l11e49
This will be the new simplified method for parents who may not be that literate or computer-savvy to deal with:
https://www.ncs.gov.ie/en/types-of-subsidy/
There are also parents who have to pay full whack. But anyway, having introduced a method whereby parents can now pay the balance of their subsidised fee by credit card (because it was a nightmare dealing with cash-handling), there's another little surprise in store for us. Never mind that often parents are running a balance in the red (I get landed with "reconcile the spreadsheet of what fees *should* have been paid with the receipt books for what fees *were* paid" at the end of the year which is an annual 'pull my hair out' time), what with the Covid-19 happy fun times the bank handling these sprang a surprise on us.
Imagine that Mrs Murphy pays €10 a day for little Johnny to attend. She pays (daily or weekly) by credit card. We should get €50 in fees, right? Oh no. The poor banks, you see, are afraid they will lose revenue due to the shut-down in custom for most businesses not doing the same volume of trade. So to protect themselves and keep the normal level of revenue on transactions, they take a nibble from each processed fee.
So Mrs Murphy pays €10. The bank takes its nibble and credits our account with €9.85. Say we have 100 transactions a week (and we have a much greater volume), that's €15 less in fees for us.
Multiply that by term time, so €15 x 48 weeks = €720 less in the year. That's €720 less to pay for heating oil, or any other cost. You see now why heartless school districts in America may be instructing teachers not to turn on the heating until the thermometer hits a certain point?
I don't know what the solution is. There isn't an easy solution. The economy is going more and more towards "decent jobs = knowledge jobs" and to get that you need an education, and you need to be able to provide the piece of paper. Maybe the piece of paper is meaningless, but what is dead certain is that if you *don't* have that piece of paper, your options are gravely limited and getting worse every year. The days of "leave school at 15, get a job sweeping the floor in the local box factory, work your way up" are dying if not already dead.
Insurance costs and the fear of liabilities: it may indeed be true that there are not many cases of parents suing schools. However, it only takes one such case for the *fear* of potential cases to take hold. This is the contractual obligation for insurance we have to have as a service provider:
"1. Public Liability insurance with a limit of indemnity of €6,500,000 (€6.5 million) for any one claim or series of claims arising out of a single occurrence, with an indemnity to the Executive arising from the provision of the Services, which insurance will also cover claims arising from the activities of any sub-contractor engaged by the Provider."
Our premium this year was €8,000, an increase of €500 on last year despite no claims or changes to conditions because "to hell with you, that's why". Public indemnity insurance is getting more and more expensive so that, for instance, playgrounds are closing down because they can't get covered. There's the fear of "that one big case" so insurance companies are turning the screws which in turn means schools, etc. start saying "no running, you need to have a certificate to climb on the bars, etc." because if little Johnny takes a tumble and Mrs Murphy makes a claim then next year's premium will be nose-bleed high and the slack in the budget isn't there to cover it.
This is a news article from 22 years ago and things haven't become any more relaxed since: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/education/a-law-lesson-for-teachers-1.175880
It brings me joy to read your comments again.
I was initially suspicious that early start times were solely to support two income households. Googling suggests that even as far back as the late 60s, almost half of all households had both spouses working.
http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/the-fallacy-of-cheap-home-prices-dual-income-trap-home-prices-over-valued-by-25-percent/
The graph below suggests it was a very rapid climb though.
https://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2012-2/
I couldn't find a graph for school start times throughout the decades. But this link says school used to start between 8:30 and 9.
https://schoolstarttime.org/early-school-start-times/#:~:text=As%20late%20as%20the%201950's,earlier%20for%20secondary%20school%20students.
The CDC says school starts at 8 these days.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2015/p0806-school-sleep.html
I don't know when the push for earlier start times happened; I'm childless and was homeschooled. But if it happened too recently, I'm not sure that the rise in two income households is to blame, because that has been stable since the 90s (that surprised me).
Its possible that single parent households are driving it as well, those have been rising slowly but steadily since the 60s.
While I understand your annoyance with the bank fees issue, this has nothing to do with education. You could charge the parents more to cover the processing fees. You could find a bank that sucks less. You can not expect the banks to not take advantage of the fact that you consider cash-handling to be a nightmare : from their point of view they're providing a useful service to you and expect to be paid for it ! (I suppose that refusing credit cards and only take debit cards or other ways of directly wiring electronic money is not an option ?)
See also : "human resources".
----
One issue seems to be the conflation between education as teaching and education as child-rearing.
To what extent does IQ really affect high-level skill-acquisition?
I generally take the connection between the two with a huge grain of salt, largely because of the degree of perfection to which even people with low IQs master their native language. They can reliably master tens of thousands of vocabulary words, with perfect accent and near immediate recall, often with no explicit instruction. The grammatical/semantic content of these words is often quite complex -- what is "love?" and what in the world is a "subjunctive mood?" -- yet even a below-average native speaker can produce these more consistently/more effectively than the vast majority (presumably-high IQ) polyglots can manage any second language. This is really something!
Likewise (e.g.), the study of Go masters I linked below shows that they have on average LOWER IQ than the normal population (93 vs 100). The N is admittedly low here, but if we're just trying to prove the possibility of acquiring high-level skills with lower-than-average IQ, this is sufficient. http://jtoomim.org/brain-training/White%20matter%20neuroplastic%20changes%20in%20long-term%20trained%20players%20of%20the%20game%20of%20baduk.pdf
What's the thought here?
IQ measures a somewhat different form of intelligence that is required for success at Go ?
Looks like it. Seems then is very possible to acquire high-level (cognitive) skills with lower-than-average IQ. If this is the case, maybe the problem with education is in the differences in nurture rather than those in nature after all [except perhaps in the extremely low-IQ cases]. I wonder if this also calls into the value of IQ-measured intelligence, since the really valuable aspects of "intelligence" are what it can do -- e.g. develop complex cognitive skills.
I guess that one issue with measuring purely cognitive skills with IQ is that you can hardly make a test that is only measuring cognitive skills.
And you need more than cognitive skills to be successful in a society, including the very specific form of society that is the WW1 US military which IQ is (trying to) test the fitness for.
I was homeschooled for 8 years and then sent to an unusually competent public highschool so I could learn more advanced materials that my mom wasn't prepared to teach like physics and calculus. The whole situation was pretty good. The public school seemed to waste a lot of time, but was not really abusive, though I don't doubt that many others are.
Anyway, I was lucky because I lived in a family that could afford to live on a single income after my mom quit her teaching job to homeschool me and my brothers. But I always wondered, if she didn't really quit being a teacher, why did she quit being paid? If we had gone to a public school, the government would have paid a certain amount of money (from our taxes) to have us educated. Instead, they just pocketed it and we paid for it ourselves via my mom's free labor.
What if homeschooling parents were paid the same amount of money as schools to educate their kids? The number one issue is potential abuse. This is a substantial amount of money and would incentivize people to have families of 12 children and "homeschool" them regardless of their own competency. So there would need to be controls in place to prevent abuse. There already are licensed homeschool evaluators that you're required to see once a year and demonstrate all of the things you did to make sure you're getting a proper education. I have no idea how reliable this is, how easy it would be for someone to find a lazy evaluator and fake enough accomplishments to get through each year. But if that's not very different from public schools doing the same thing.
However, if they are educated properly this could be positive in a similar manner to UBI, in that it would enable a single parent to care for their children properly without starving.
However, this leads to another potential issue in the distortion of freedom on the children. If a family has three children, then perhaps a parent could get $36,000 per year to stay at home and homeschool them. If they could get a job elsewhere for $30,000, then this is worth it. A single parent could perhaps make a living this way and do a much better job of raising the kids than by working fast food or something. But if one of the kids wants to go to public school, the family's income drops to $24,000. If two want to go to public school maybe the parent decides homeschooling is inefficient and forces the third to go as well so they can get a job. Or more likely, the parent forces the kids to stay at homeschool so they can keep the money.
I'm pretty sure these and similar issues are a large part of why this isn't being done already. But probably a larger part is a general lack of respect for homeschooling, despite it having the potential to be much better than public school if done right. Even giving a smaller amount of money, like $3-6k per child, would help families who want to make the transition from two incomes to one in order to homeschool, while preventing abuse because it's still a loss compared to a job and not enough to live off of alone.
Why not make the grants opt-in, have a limited number of grants available, and make the licensing for grants more stringent than the current homeschool licensing? I think the added friction might deter many of those who were just in it to abuse the system.
FWIW given that public school is the alternative, I don't think concern for the freedom of the children is a consideration here. The cynical part of me thinks it's just that the current system makes for better workers haha.
"What if homeschooling parents were paid the same amount of money as schools to educate their kids? The number one issue is potential abuse."
Oh hell yeah. There are people who look upon their kids solely as income-generation machines and don't care about them in any way, shape or form. I can think of a few examples of people who would gladly sign up for the "home-schooling allowance" and if the kid even learned the alphabet it'd be a miracle.
Why not just tie continuation of the grant to proctored scores on standardized tests? If you really wanted to, you could make it so they'd have to match or beat the avg for the public schools in their state.
Oh would you look at that, this exists on the state level in 4 states. https://www.1040.com/blog/2019/10/8/education-tax-credits-tax-deductions-and-homeschooling/
Looks like Louisiana is the best, with a potential $5k tax credit for a K-12 student. Minnesota is the next best at a max of $2.5k.
I did not know that. Hopefully it becomes more widespread, but I have low hopes for that.
There is a foundation called EdChoice that exists to encourage the idea of education vouchers.
"There already are licensed homeschool evaluators that you're required to see once a year and demonstrate all of the things you did to make sure you're getting a proper education."
Where? It isn't true in California, where we home unschooled our two children.
I am a father of a 14 year old in Berlin (Germany), my son is studying in a bilingual Gymnasium (high school). I wanted to say I'm with you on your conclusions about school. I think that one simple fix one could make is to reduce the number of things one has to study (French, Italian, German, English, Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Math, Ethics, Sport, History, Geography, Music; I'm probably missing some subjects). One other fix that would have exponential impact would be if teachers were ruthlessly selected for actually being able to teach.
One vicious circle is how teachers have been steadily losing social prestige during the last decades...
Ok let's tune down the Child labor analogy antill someone does a surface check on what are the actual historical and/or contemporary child labor conditions we're comparing school to. My intuition is that child labor is probably much worse then the average school, and I'm not saying this as a defence of schools.
I'm putting here a preliminary google search for the interested:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2017&q=child+labor+conditions&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5
And this one might be relevant for the discussion, titled "child labor: myth, theory and fact":
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24357670
This is not really related to Scott's post, alas, but I'm noticing a lot of posters named "Thrks", "Thrmm" and similar bottish names, replying solely to agree with Marxbro. It seems like it out to be obvious that this is "the trolling", and should get "the banned".
lol I'm not a communist, I'm just some rando who can't be bothered with creating a proper account
I strongly disagree. This blog has always had a dearth of quality left-wing commenters, and especially communists/Marxists/etc. I wouldn't count Marxbro as one of those, but banning Marxbro and his defenders would send all the wrong signals.
To be clear, I'm a neoliberal (I mean I call myself a left-libertarian but most people would call me a neoliberal, I think) and find Marxbro incredibly annoying. I just like having a healthy diversity of viewpoints, and having a good population of far-left commenters is an important part of that.
I think public schools are terrible and really badly thought out. I have two kids in school now (8th and 12th grade). Yes, all of the prison trappings are there, and so much worse than when I was in school (a terrible school in rural Texas) because of all the safety lockdown measures due to school shootings. My kids’ school is, based on the usual measures like statewide testing percentage that go to college, a little above average. Why is it terrible? Bullying, especially of LGBT kids. Teachers who routinely talk about their political opinions in class when it is irrelevant to the material. Superficial support for kids with diabilities like ADHD. And, more systemically, a curriculum that was designed 50 years ago when we were fighting the Cold War and thought we needed to produce as many engineers as possible. I know smart people, like readers of this blog, find this nearly impossible to grasp, but the math and science we are “teaching” them is almost completely pointless. Scott mentioned algebra specifically, and that is right. The tiny fraction of students who go on to CS, math, and engineering need it. Literally no one else will ever use it, much less trig or calculus. But we ram it down the throats of the miserable anyway. Who doesn’t know by 9th grade what their mathematical aptitude is? Make it optional. What informed citizens need so much more is some knowledge of statistics and probability for use in practical situations.
I’m dubious about charter schools out of charity. That is, if charter schools are so great, then they are low-hanging fruit we’re not picking because (1) we’re too dumb, or (2) the entrenched powers are so venal that they are stopping it. Here’s a more charitable take, and a high prior for me: any relative success of charter schools is due to them gaming the system. I’m all for reform of the public schools, but there’s some Chesterton’s Fence reasons against the “burn it down!” response.
Off-topic: sometimes when I'm signing in here to SubStack, it gives me the instructions in French. Is it because my IP address is in Europe that it assumes I am a sophisticate? 😁
In the USA social status is mostly determined by how much money you make. And wages are to a large extent determined by the supply of and demand for labor. Maybe more intelligent people do a better job at restricting their supply?
While I am very sympathetic to the description of school as an oppressive institution, the solution to deregulate completely ignores that family is also an oppressive institution. Especially in the US, parental authority goes far beyond the authority of prison guards.
It seems less utopian to imagine a good school system than imagining billions of parents simultaneously choosing to be good without any coordination.
I have a weirdly bifurcated family, and so my experience touches both sides of the class divide that DeBoer identifies in his book and Scott responds to in this piece.
My Mom was a white-collar professional who kept the books for a mid-sized construction company (she has since retired.) My Dad (also retired) was a blue-collar technician and jack-of-all-trades. Dad is a high school dropout who reads at a third grade level. He's dyslexic, and back in the 50s no one knew how to deal with that.
I graduated from an elite institution (Harvey Mudd College), work as an engineer, and read obsessively on all kinds of intellectual topics. My kid brother, ten years my junior, had no desire to go to college. He was* great with his hands and got a job working in a trade. He was an apprentice generator technician. He had no desire to engage intellectually, and was much more comfortable hammering metal in a forge.
This is all a prelude to me talking about how badly our society serves kids like my brother: There are a whole lot of people who are more comfortable turning a wrench than engaging with Sartre, but our school system and the society around it denigrates those people. "Oh, you can't get into college, what's wrong with you?" NO! Our society needs people who can turn wrenches. That's important! But more than that, as both Scott and DeBoer identify our innate worth as humans is not tied to our intellect.
I would like to see a system that leaned more toward apprenticeships for teenagers who find school to be stultifying. They have learned to read and do basic math, and further school is a waste for them. (And, as Scott notes, a prison.) My kid brother would have been far better served by apprenticing at a mechanic's shop at 14 instead of doing 4 more years of school before he went off to learn to be a diesel mechanic. Why did we waste his time?
But more, I think about how our elites denigrate blue collar employment, and how poisonous that is. And that's part of the Cult of Smart that DeBoer correctly identifies, though like Scott I am opposed to his socialist methods.
*This is the part where I note that he was killed in a car wreck the day after Thanksgiving, 2006, at age 22, and so I have no idea how he'd have turned out 15 years later. That's why all of this is written in the past tense.
This is probably old hat, but can I make the obvious point here that if all outcomes are equalized because it's the Right Thing to do based on our equal moral value as humans, the potential downside is that no one then really has an incentive to spend years and years doing the unfun training it takes to become the talented surgeon we'll need at some point to do our complicated, dangerous surgeries, and so rather than raising Freddie's living standards floor for the poor and downtrodden, we're likely to lower it for everybody, because there'll be less productivity overall and thus less stuff to go around?
On your point about homework ...
Some years back I was at an event for alumni of the very elite private school I went to. My conclusion from listening to the school officials boast of everything they did was that they believed in "The Devil finds work for idle hands" theory of education. If you only keep the kids sufficiently busy, they won't have time to do drugs or get pregnant.
No, you don’t want to homeschool your children. You will insist that your WIFE give up her career to stay home and teach your children and do all the other shit work you think men are too good for.
Also, nice job sneaking in that ‘see how smart I always have been?’ Bit at the end about how teachers mistreated you for reading in class or peeking ahead in the textbook.
Karen indeed.
It sounds as though DeBoer's implicit model is that stuff just appears and must then be distributed, and distribution ought to be on the basis of what people deserve. Since nobody deserves anything, all relevant characteristics being reducible to genetics or environment or luck, none of which the individual is responsible for, everyone should get the same outcome.
There are two problems with that. One is that we usually think of desert in terms of the actual person, not the imaginary disembodied soul who became that person. If that person is kind and generous and productive, he deserves more than the person with the opposite characteristics, even though neither of the imaginary pre-conception souls deserved to become those people.
The other is that stuff doesn't appear, it is produced, and there is a pretty strong moral intuition saying not that I deserve to get what I produce but that I am entitled to it, hence that the question is now how the pool of goodies is to be handed out but under what circumstances and for what reasons one person is entitled to get goodies a different person produced without that person's consent. The idea of someone producing something is less intuitive in a large and interdependent society, but it is still possible to make sense of it.
I'm curious as to how DeBoer would respond to an example, I think from Nozick, of the distinction between desert and entitlement. You and I agree to bet a dollar on the flip of a coin. You win. You don't deserve the dollar, because you didn't deserve to have the coin land heads. But you are entitled to the dollar.
> it is produced, and there is a pretty strong moral intuition saying not that I deserve to get what I produce but that I am entitled to it, hence that the question is now how the pool of goodies is to be handed out but under what circumstances and for what reasons one person is entitled to get goodies a different person produced without that person's consent
Accidental Marxism
Not accidental. Marx's view of exploitation is based on the same moral intuition, just combined with poor economics.
Minor typo notice: "We did so out of the conviction that this suppot of children and their parents was a fundamental right..." says "suppot" instead of "support". (Not sure if typo in transcription or in the original text)
The problem with the whole public vs charter vs home school debate is that everybody talks in terms of a totally deficient model of how schools function that ignores the major problem that actually matters.
School is not an individual environment, it is a social one. By participating in a school, a child changes that school, often in quite complex ways. Why then, does everybody treat schools as some kind of unchanging system that you can opt in or out of? Send your child to school A and they will achieve X, send your child to school B and they will achieve Y.
This is so obviously not how school works that I can't begin to understand why people persist with it. The experience of a child at school is generally dominated not by their teacher, or by their median peer, or by the "learning system" they are supposedly interfacing with. It is dominated by the presence or absence of the bottom 5-10% of their peers who are simultaneously stupid, behaviorally disruptive in the classroom, and social bullies who make everybody's lives miserable. The presence of these kids at the school is a net harm to everybody else there in a non-trivial way. It feels like this should be desperately obvious to anybody who has ever been to school, even been a parent of a child at school, or ever been an administrator of a school.
Historically, these children would frequently have simply been excluded from the school system entirely with the expectation that they would end up in prison soon after reaching adulthood. This makes equity metrics look bad, so the political left do what they always do: come up with an ideological model that bares little resemblance to reality and shout down anybody who questions it. Interestingly, the libertarian side of the political right also doesn't like to question the notion that schooling is anything more than the result of individual decisions made in a designed system, instead of collective, social decisions made on who should be excluded. The result is that achieving success as a school in modern society typically involves optimizing along an axis that nobody seems to think even exists. This typically involves a lot of implicit and explicit lying.
The notion that charter schools are not selective is laughable. They don't even have to be particularly selective, they just have to select against the bottom 10%. This is trivially easy: those kids generally don't have parents who are fighting to send them to charter school. Homeschooling does this even better, for obvious reasons. In the last year, I transferred my daughters from a public elementary school to a private Catholic school. There is little difference in the curriculum and the teachers appear to be just as much a mixed bag. Standards do not appear to be much higher. The main difference in both achievement and happiness comes from what they DON'T have to deal with from their peers.
The result of this is that kids with a high externality get concentrated in the public school system. Because public schools have to optimize for equity these days, and these kids are horrific for equity metrics, a disproportionate fraction of the schools' resources are expended on dealing with them. Hence, charter schools are both cheaper and give better results for the non-disruptive kids who inhabit them.
Nobody is brave enough to discuss non-integrated models of education. This is a problem, because non-integrated systems are likely more efficient overall, but with higher inequality. This means that you can trivially show improvements simply by creating a system that naturally leads to non-integration.
Excellent post--this sums it up.
"12PM to 9AM" suggests that kids should be awake for 3 hours of the day. Now, as a dad of 4, I'm not against this...
Scott's concluding rant reminded of Ivan Illich's "Deschooling Society," in which he argues against the institutional approach and in favor of something more personalists. Pre-charter schools, but still insightful.
I do think there is a "Cult of Intelligence" as well as a "Cult of Being Successful at Formal Education". Yes, there are definitely people that push back against the idea of IQ and Mensa - but I think that may say more about a rejection of people who publicly and vocally *self-label* as "intelligent".
And, yes, there is the movement that's seeking to broaden the definition of intelligence (IMO, to the point of making the term meaningless: a child who is good at sports is now "kinesthetically intelligent") - but I think that's specifically a minority position pushing back against the majority cultural trend that has a much more 'traditional' view of "intelligence", and has a high value on it.
Maybe I'm misreading, but it felt like that paragraph stood in opposition to both the Parable of the Talents post and much of the preceding material in this post - it seemed odd, after so much discussion from Scott on how people wrongly conflate intelligence and intrinsic value, to then turn around and say there isn't *actually* a cult of intelligence, by citing the unpopularity of Mensa and IQ.
Agree completely about "Cult of Intelligence"; what people hate is know-it-alls, not smart people.
Yeah, nobody likes show-offs, whether they are showing off their intelligence, or athletic skills. I'll notice though that there seems to be no equivalent to Mensa for athletic skills, the closest thing that comes to mind is bodybuilding, but even there, there's also an aesthetic aspect (and more importantly, maybe no hard cutoff for joining ?)
Two of my sons agreed with Scott that school is child prison; in fact one said he would rather go to prison. So I let them leave school and have tried to educate them at home. The result is that they never leave the house and are pretty much terrified of people, especially groups of people they don't know. I watched one shrink in horror from a crowd of people that had spilled from a busy bar onto the sidewalk. He could not bring himself to go near them.
So they may have learned just as much academic stuff at home, but they have completely lost touch with the world outside our home, and at the moment this looks to me like a slowly unfolding disaster. They have no future plans, no notion of anything they would like to do with their lives, minimal connection to other people their age. They refuse to consider college, because it involves leaving home to be with other people.
I am thinking that there may be something to forcing your children to do the expected, socially "normal" think if the alternative is complete withdrawal from society.
This was not my experience at all as someone homeschooled. Ctrl 'F' Shaeor and see my reply just below. But I'd also ask how old your children are and if you're planning to engage them in any clubs or if they have gotten the chance to play outside much. I'm not sure what to tell you except that, from my perspective as one of five kids successfully homeschooled and having known dozens of others, this sounds very wrong and more like a stereotype of what people fear homeschooling is like, rather than the reality.
They are now 18 and 20. They can go outside whenever they want, which is seldom; I used to push them to go outside but gave up long ago. They were never in any clubs etc. because they absolutely refused to go.
I moved about a decade ago and was not very active in clubs either for about the last ten years of my education (I just never really liked the area and never made friends). Most of my oldest friends are online then, especially because one of our central members is handicapped. I do not go outside an inordinate amount, but I am moving to the beach to live with my brother and get a job and work out, etc., so I am actively trying to change this (I am 21).
I'll be honest, as much as I love homeschooling, anything can be ruined with the wrong psychology, and it has been a very deep and conscious decision these last few years that I wanted to get away from technology and live a more embodied life (RE: I have had health troubles). But I don't think I would have realized this at all if it weren't for the fact that my parents homeschooled us in the first place from a moral (and also fun-loving!) foundation. My convictions about the evils of internet porn (and to an extent, reactionary disposition in general) have played no small part in this realization. So, I think family culture matters in this respect, to which end I cannot comment on your two sons.
All I know is that I am happy and measurably more achieved than a lot of people, and I have my parents to thank for that, to a great extent, as well as my religious outlook, which has been common to other successful homeschoolers I've known.
That may not be to do with schooling as such, they may have antisocial personality problems. I was a resolute non-joiner of everything anyone tried to push me into (including the Girl Guides) and yes, if I hadn't had to attend school I would never have gone outside the door.
I'm still of that mindset. I can't blame school for making me like this or for failing to socialise me to the same level as 'normal' people, it's mostly to do with mental whatever and familial genetics (for example, I haven't suffered during lockdown as "staying at home, never mingling with other people, not going places" is my normal life). So I may be giving you the stupidly obvious advice, but have they gone to a doctor or seen anyone about this?
I was homeschooled, Scott, and in my teen years, I had a number of major surgeries that meant I had to leave all structured learning activities. Throughout my entire childhood, I had maybe one or two semesters of proper school that included standardized tests, algebra, science, logic, etc, within a private classically oriented church-school. I basically ended up 'unschooling' as we called it, which consisted of writing a lot for fun and reading things I felt like reading. I did not touch math for years. During those periods when my learning WAS more structured it never consisted of more than a handful of workbook pages that I did BY MY SELF and that I always could finish before lunch, while getting up at 9 am.
Then I went to college and I got a perfect 4.0 up to calculus one until finally dropping out because I found it oppressive. School is NOT for education, it is for rearing up good worker drones, and it is based on the militarist Prussian model for exactly that purpose. I am better adjusted than any of my friends who went to public school - I have written five novels, and I am a talented visual artist, among other things. This model has worked for me and my five other siblings, many of which are now part-time daytraders on track to be independently wealthy, regardless of any degrees they do or do not possess.
It is known for a fact that members of my family have tested IQs in the stratosphere, but two of those members are adopted, one with learning disabilities, and it is clear to me that they are reaching their potential as well, with little effect coming from their lack of formal education. Again, their schooling is finished with about a maximum of three hour's work, oftentimes less, and for some long periods when we are moving or busy, none at all.
I am open to all questions. Yes, we did have involvement with various groups at one point or another, but these were actually just fun. One time we made a smoke bomb out of peanut butter. Another time we inflated pig blatters and played with them. In hindsight, my father should have been extremely jealous of how my mother spent her time, lol
Scott, your default seems to be describing humans as machines (the competent surgeon vs the crummy one) -- so you tend to view systems from your self-protective perspective (wanting a competent surgeon to operate on you). This is evidence perhaps that you're less agnostic than you might think about what constitutes human worth, as your first impulse seems to be that it can be measured in utility. I don't think you really believe that; I suspect you might just have a sort of intellectual mannerism that is causing you to look at the problem sort of inside-out.
Marx incorrectly believed mobility was impossible within capitalism. And since capitalism was also supposedly incapable of ever elevating, or even recognizing, human worth among the proletariat, the whole concept of human worth had to be thrown out the window, at least for a while. The question of whether someone might make a better surgeon than a farmer was a luxury when, what, 80% of the people were effectively enslaved. Many mistakes were made, but it seems to me the lasting central thrust of Marxism should have been the part that demands we reimagine (and reject) meritocracy, not to make would-be surgeons farmers, but so that we look at human worth from the point of view of humans rather than producers and consumers.
Put another way: With a less hyperbolic framing we can still strive for systems that ensure all surgeons are qualified, without getting panicky that if you give up your method of valuing people you'll surely wind up dead from a botched surgery. There are far more interesting ways of valuing life than from a consumer's point of view!
I read The Cult of Smart a few months back and agree with Scott's take.
What amazed me the most about the book is that Freddie attributes workers' incomes to their IQs, and not any skills they acquired in school. So learning to code doesn't increase your income any, it's just a way to pass the time until you graduate and go into the high-paying programming job your high IQ entitles you to.
So Freddie, a man who's spent his entire life in the education system as student to PhD level and teacher in both elementary and university, doesn't think education actually teaches useful skills.
To be fair, his PhD is in English.
And now he makes a living as a writer... Presumably there is some relation.
Maybe I missed someone discussing this here, but, in my experience with the American school system, it's the poor working class kids that get treated particularly badly in public schools - even in quite decent school districts. I haven't seen any research on this, so all my evidence is purely anecdotal. But from all I know it does seem to me that the system treats like garbage exactly those kids who need to be at school.
None of my anecdotal examples were bad kids. None of them were troublemakers, and all of them were in some advanced classes. Most or all of them had some concentration issues, but I find that unsurprising, given how badly they were taught. Yet they all were continually yelled at, had lengthy notes written to parents, had parents called to school during the exact times of the day when those parents could least afford it, had their parents yelled at. In some cases, teachers pressured the parents to get their kids medicated for ADHD to improve their school performance; in at least one, the parent accepted, due to not knowing better. It's hard to tell how much damage is being done by indiscriminate medicating of kids guilty of nothing but being themselves.
From what I've seen, I suspect that it's mostly about their parents being obviously working class and not being able to communicate in what's perceived as the educated manner. I don't have actual data, but I wouldn't be surprised if just about all of the public school system is guilty of class discrimination - perhaps because the teachers are unqualified and insecure, and it's the working class kids and families that they can harass without much pushback.
So if I'm right, and we have a system that, among other things, discriminates by class against the very people who need it to work, it doesn't seem like it has an excuse to exist in this form.
I really appreciate the last section of this review. I think Self-Directed Education holds the answer for many families, and provides a vision of education that is decidedly not child-prison. https://self-directed.org
"I don't think totally unstructured learning is optimal for kids" may be in reference to things like SDE or Unschooling - if so, that line reflects a common misunderstanding. Kids/families/centers practicing SDE don't have "no structure" - they just get to choose/create structure for themselves, and change it if it's not working or helping them achieve whatever their goals may be.
I volunteer with ASDE and am working to create an alternative-to-school in Portland, OR. It drives me crazy to think what we'd be able to do with the level of funding that's available to public schools, or even half that much. Vouchers could possibly help, but in all likelihood the conditions for an organization to be eligible for the vouchers would require you to re-implement most of the same broken systems of conventional public schools. This is the same issue with present-day Charters - most actually-innovative approaches to raising capable young people are not allowed.
There are a lot of replies, and while I will probably read most of them it will be a few days, so I want to respond here right away. This image of yours of school as child prison is incredibly bizarre. I can only think that you have a very particular, very biased window into schooling and kids. My kids like school. Most of the parents I know have kids who like school. I can't think of any families I know where I've heard that the kids perked up or got more cheerful as school went virtual. I can think of three I know personally where it went badly enough that a parent stopped working to homeschool. In none of those cases are the parents planning on continuing to to so once school re-opens. Both they (and their kids!) miss school and look forward to its return.
I'm sorry, like, really sorry, for whatever happened to you in school. It was clearly traumatic and scarring. But you're generalizing from that experience to a world that just doesn't look anything like that. Universal pre-k and afterschool until five or six would be a great boon to most parents who work for a living. (In fact, it's what's on offer in my city, and probably a lot of major metros.) I'm not sure exactly what your idea is, but it sounds to me like you basically want everyone who has kids to have a parent in the home. That would be delightful, but I don't know how to get there from here. In the meantime, free school and activities are awfully nice. As it is, the wife and I are behind on the annual ritual of stitching together a series of camps, day camps and vacations to occupy and entertain the kids between the end of May and the middle of August. It's a giant pain in the a**, and it's expensive. I'm just as happy not to have to do it the rest of the year.
Being "smart" got me a cushy job which I currently do from home, a nice home with lots of space and pleasant things... maybe one needs to be "smart" to do my job, but failing to be "smart" should not mean living in substandard housing or on the streets, failing to be "smart" should not mean constant drudgery (unless you want it to, I guess). Every human deserves adequate housing and food. Leaving of course the problem that we need the rubbish collected and toilets cleaned...
FWIW, I had a miserable time in school. Junior High was the worst for me. I spent most of my time reading science fiction books. To the point where 1) a social studies teacher frisked me on the way into class and confiscated my book for the duration, 2) a science teacher grabbed my book and whacked me on the arm with it, and 3) a music theory teacher set me off to one side so I could read without being "distracted with by her teaching". I think that was sarcasm.