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!)
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?
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.
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!)
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.
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?