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.
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.