Is the most likely explanation not because smart people, on average, tend to be more useful to society, and thus societies with a 'pro-smart' norm will tend to be more successful than that value their Einsteins and Flemings as little as everyone else?
I want to address Scott's "Utopian society" where kids over 6 can choose what they want to do and the level of rigor they want in their classes, or if they want to attend classes at all. I think this would be tantamount to child abuse--like opening a credit card in your kid's name and buying them a nice TV to watch, only for them to grow up and realize that they have a ruined credit score.
Kids are smart in some ways, but very dumb in others. They are bad at long term planning because they don't have the real world experience to know what the consequences of their actions will be. Also, if it's unethical for parents to make such schooling decisions for their kids, surely it's not fair for the kids to make decisions for the adults they will become. The person I am in my 20s has so little in common with my 7 year old self that we may as well be an entirely different person with shared memories.
The choices you make as a kid and the things you learn have an outsize impact on your entire adult life. 7 year old me HATED social niceties, hated brushing my hair, dressing nice, didn't understand why I couldn't wear stained clothes and live in a pigsty. And I hated my parents for making me conform to these arbitrary social standards. 7 year old me would not have chosen the rigorous class schedule. But I took it anyway.
Parents' job isn't to make their KID happy. It's to maximize total happiness/goodness (whatever you want to call it) over the course of their lifetime. Often, this involves making them miserable as children so they can be functional as adults. I'm glad my parents forced me to conform to (some) arbitrary social norms, because now I can have a normal social life and a well paying public facing job that wouldn't have happened if those habits (studying, being polite, being social, being neat) hadn't been inculcated in me so many years ago.
I guess I have less respect for kids' desires than Scott. I don't care if the kid doesn't want to greet adults with "good morning"; it's a social convention he'll need and he's going to learn to do it. I don't care if he isn't bothered by his room being a pigsty, because instilling norms of cleanliness will make him happier over the course of his life. I'm more of a libertarian when it comes to certain aspects of parenting (e.g. I think kids should have much more freedom of movement, freedom to read/watch what they want, than is currently socially acceptable), but I believe with strict enforcement of certain rules and behaviors along with plentiful unstructured free time.
Not every desire needs to be indulged as a pure expression of 'self'. SELF is changeable and should be changed, somewhat, for everyone's mutual benefit. Allowing young children too much freedom isn't being kind to them, it's screwing over the adults they'll become for temporary enjoyment.
For each kid for whom forcing them to clean their room (and eat what I'm serving or don't eat, and no video games, and harsh limits on "screen time", and similar "it's good for you / you'll thank me later" types of things) instilled norms of cleanliness (or whatever), how many are there like me, in whom it instilled:
- a lifelong feeling of spite about authority
- depression and anxiety
- a desire to escape (and a lack of desire to visit home as an adult)
And my room isn't any cleaner now than it was then. Some things can't be fixed by force.
yeah. i really like alfie kohn's books, particularly "Punished By Rewards" and "Unconditional Parenting" which make a very persuasive case for radically permissive child rearing. but even so, it's hard to know how well his ideals work in practice; parenting is hardly an a priori endeavor.
Also worth noting that as early as middle school I was capable of thinking "I don't like doing X, but I know my parents have my best interests at heart and know lots of things, and they want me to do X, so if I do X I'll probably be better off"
Kids are not universally dumb. I can only speak for myself, but I think people would be surprised by the extent to which kids can just learn to trust their parents judgement (and that the kids that don't usually just end up rebelling until they learn by experience anyway)
Where I do think there's room here is for parents as commitment-enforcers. So while I think a parent probably shouldn't force a kid to go to do something they *always* hate over the course of years, I think if a kid agrees in the abstract that something is good for them, it's totally reasonable for the parent to force them in the moment to follow through. So like, if a kid says they want to play soccer, and the parent has them promise to stick with it for the season, its reasonable for the parent to enforce that commitment. I think you can easily extend that to schooling and many other things.
But also, this is all pretty complicated and it's hard to know for sure. Also imo really only applies starting around 6th or 7th grade. To stick with just a simple heuristic, I think there's a difference between "I hate this" and "I don't wanna", and parents/society should try to differentiate the two even if it's hard.
That follow-up study to the marshmallow test comes to mind-- the one that asserts that the original test didn't measure for the kids' willpower, but for the kids' trust in authority.
if a student is able to understand that they're being forced into an uncomfortable situation for their own good, it's probably because they have enough trust in their parents to assume that things will work out in their favor in the long term-- and that sorts out all of the kids whose parents don't deserve that sort of trust. You'd assume that kids with bad home lives-- even ones that don't register on the scale of abuse-- will pretty consistently have problems understanding that it's in their own interest to defer to authority.
And I was capable of thinking "I don't like doing X. The school claims it's in a good cause, but they've told me untruths before. I wonder how I can manipulate them into letting me do Y instead?"
FWIW, my successes at that age were limited - I can only really count 2, and they may have had some seriously unwanted side effects, though the claim was made that some changes made after this were unrelated. OTOH, the possible side effects turned out fairly well for me, so not too bad overall. And I'd already learned the meta lesson - authorities generally don't respond to reason, and rarely care what subalterns want, so the effective way to get it is to manipulate them.
By the time I was in high school, I was actively experimenting with techniques I'd read about for manipulating people, such as getting the teacher to move to one side or other of the room by only acting attentive when/if they moved in that direction. (Didn't work too well; I'd have had to get other classmates involved to be really successful; assuming of course that it was a workable technique.) OTOH, I'd mastered basics like - if I create disruption/consume lots of their time every time they stop me from reading a random novel in class, or reading ahead in the text book, or doing the homework assigned in the prior class - and do it in a supposedly unexceptionable way (blurting out answers, asking questions, etc.) they'll opt for peace and quiet and let me do my thing, provided I'm quiet about it.
Feeling resentful about being forced to do things is normal. Your result isn't some negative reaction against over-authoritarian schools, but rather natural instincts asserting themselves against control. At least some kids internalize social and obedience norms.
I noted elsewhere here, but in my experience I *wasn't* resentful because I learned by experience to trust my parents when they forced me to do things. I experienced that they were usually right when they made me do something, and I could see for myself that following their rules made me better off. It starts with small things, like "you can't stay up late you have school tomorrow", and the first time you ignore the rule you feel shitty at school and think "huh maybe they're right".
I wonder if enforcing truly arbitrary rules doesn't just make kids not trust their parents when they are given rules to follow.
I think there's a lot of disagreement about what is an "arbitrary" rule. Mindal above obviously thinks that "norms of cleanliness" are important and not arbitrary. But I'm 35, and so far god has not struck me down for my room being a mess. All that happened when I left home was that my room kept being a mess, but I no longer had to waste energy arguing about what a mess it was.
This is confounded in my case by the fact that I was living with undiagnosed ADHD throughout my childhood, and arguably/apparently was not really capable of learning "norms of cleanliness" by example in this way.
But beware, anybody who would argue that this makes my case inapplicable. Are you sure you would know if your kid had a "real problem" rather than just being "lazy"? Would they trust you enough to tell you? If they did, would you listen? (I did, and they didn't.)
(In fairness to my parents and for the sake of accuracy, I should say for the record that I am conflating and generalizing here -- I am condensing a whole childhood of fights over control as though it was all about the single example of "room cleaning", since that was given above. In fact that _specific_ fight subsided long before college because my parents gave up on trying to enforce it, and were reduced to making occasional snide remarks.
Also in fairness I should say it was really mostly one parent.)
So I guess you could describe if as a heuristic that balances between 1 and 2, how much suffering and how immediate/strong is the sense that doing the thing they were forced to do was valuable
That doesn't have to be a rule qua rule, though - IMO, you don't have to be forced to follow genuinely good rules. I mean, my parents did in fact tell me "don't do this, you'll regret it," every so often, I pretty reliably listened (when they put it that strongly), and when I didn't the "enforcement" was natural consequences ("OK, I cannot actually go to the event I wanted to go to and get my homework done. I guess I should've done it earlier the way you suggested. Mom, will you give <friend> my apologies?") (I mean, I could also have not done the homework, but it was a class I'd picked, I wanted to be there, so nope, not doing that.) Or, as you cite, feeling awful if you stay up too late. That said, I don't actually regret the one time I stayed up all night - I wanted to know how functional I was if I did that, and it's been useful after the fact to know what that feels like and what I can/can't expect myself to be able to do. (For one thing, it helped me avoid all-nighters in college, because I knew I was burning the entire next day if I pulled one.)
I don't know. I just feel that being able to make my own decisions and learn from them was generally a very useful experience, and served me well when I moved out.
On the one hand, in this case was the rule necessary?
Couldn't your parents have simply let you go to bed when you want?
You experiment with a late night, don't like being tired at school, so decide yourself to go to bed early.
On the other hand, perhaps the purpose of such "I told you so" rules serves to prove the wisdom of the parent's other rules, such as look both ways before you cross the road, where letting kids experiment for themselves doesn't have such great outcomes.
Forcing kids to do things is inviting power struggles, but surely we can gradually let small and then older children experience the consequences of their own choices and learn from the experience? A kid who turns up his nose at dinner won't starve if he has to skip dinner, but he might learn that the cost isn't worth it and either broaden his palate or learn to contribute a bit to the cooking process so it can cater more to his tastes. Kids can learn to budget money if they're required to stick to an allowance and learn the consequences of running out. We can still feed, clothe, and house them, but they may miss a luxury. It's not alway a choice between Eden and prison.
There might be a good heuristic here. If your kid doesn't clean their room, the worst thing that happens is that _your_ desire (not theirs, obviously) for a clean room is not satisfied. But if your kid doesn't brush their teeth, especially once their permanent teeth come in, they could suffer serious and irreversible health consequences of that.
Of course, if your actual desire is to teach them the value of cleanliness, and you think that forcing them to clean their room will do that, then you could imagine that failure to do so will cause them the serious damage of "being a slob". That seems a little more metaphysical and harder to nail down concrete consequences of, though. And unlike rotten teeth, it's something they could choose to reverse later in life, if that's important to them. So the argument seems weak.
Though it might also be said that your significant others encountered friction because of their inability to tolerate mess.
A mismatch is a potential problem in either direction, and the further one is an outlier the more likely the mismatch. But both Felix Unger and Oscar Madison (is there a comparable reference for people younger than GenX or so?) are likely to run into that. Is inculcating stringent cleaning standards or broad ranges of tolerance and adaptability to different standards in a child (assuming the latter is possible) more likely to lead to adult happiness?
(Or maybe I'm just self-justifying being an unreformed slob, despite my dad's best efforts otherwise. :-))
But how many kids, at least at middle school, don't believe that not brushing their teeth will give them cavities, or don't believe cavities are bad?
It's akrasia that makes kids not want to brush their teeth, which is different from not wanting to clean your room because you just legitimately don't care that much if your room is clean.
I suspect if you were strongly unwilling to obey your parents and clean your room when they told you too, then it wasn't really them asking to clean your room which made you spite authority. You always spited authority. It is part of who you are, and that is totally ok. Honestly, it is a pretty common trait with apparent age correlates.
I have similar concerns to @mindal, though the room tidying was perhaps a bad exampe.
Some thoughts/questions:
I think we should give kids as much freedom as possible, and try to guide them towards better decisions through education and example whenever possible rather than simply laying down the law.
Where possible, let kids make "bad choices" and learn through experience.
But many kids would choose to eat pizza and icecream everyday and eschew all vegetables, despite the best efforts of reasoning and persuasion of their guardians.
Is it tyranny to restrict junk food and enforce 5 fruit and veg a day?
If the answer is no, then till what age? There are plenty of adults that are "not great at long term planning" either. There will be plenty of 40 year olds that regret the actions of their 20 year old selves.
In the preceding paragraphs you could easily replace "kids" with "people" in a debate about paternalism vs libertarianism.
How different are kids from adults? How much better or worse are certain "mistakes" to make earlier or later in life?
I fully agree the school system needs a drastic overhaul. I wasn't traumatised but I did find it extremely dull and largely a waste of time.
Fewer hours, more freedom seem like no brainers. Zero hours and total freedom probably not. Where exactly that line should be drawn is a very complicated question. Letting a 6 year old decide sounds less advisable then letting them microwave a burrito.
One question for those that were traumatised, how much of that was due to "the system", as opposed to "the other inmates"?
I can't help but think of Lord of the Flies when I think of kids left to complete freedom...
Though of course in the former all were trapped together, whereas in Scott's system Piggy could simply choose to go somewhere else?
Could it be that one of the most traumatising aspects of child prisons is the forced mixing? Is this a feature or a bug? Would Scott's system result in kids naturally segregating themselves? If so, how and what would be the effects?
This feels like exactly the sort of thing described a couple posts down in terms of "if we put all the high-IQ people in a room they'll all agree about things peculiar to them and no one else".
Almost no one below 2-3 SDs above average IQ reads this blog. We are extreme outliers in any sense of the word, and a general education system isn't (and shouldn't be) designed for us. Maybe we shouldn't HAVE a general education system, but for as long as we're trying to, I don't know of any way to not have the 145 IQ kid bored while the 95 IQ kid is still trying to learn.
(I wonder if racism here is the result of the same forces. If you're white and 150 IQ and you judge white people by your 150 IQ friends but judge black people by the 80 IQ guy behind the counter at McDonald's who is the only one you regularly see because your community is like 99% white+asian+jewish, you're going to perceive a much larger and much more insurmountable gap. This is true even if the 150 IQ black people have their own club - but they benefit from a much wider view of white culture because it's all around them. This is a dumb bias and one I'd hope people here would be aware of, but the "school was bad for me and therefore is bad for everyone" stories seem to confirm it's at least a little operative.)
Has anyone said "school is bad for me therefore it must be bad for everyone"? I said the opposite and most of the other commenters here seem to be saying the opposite too.
> Has anyone said "school is bad for me therefore it must be bad for everyone"? I said the opposite
That's the vibe I got from the "why are we still going over this for a fourth time I'm so bored" (i.e., "why are we going over this more times than my 145-IQ brain requires"), "why can't I fidget or move around" (i.e. "why can't I do small stimuli that are important to me as someone on the spectrum"), etc.
I took him to mean that what was working for the students who needed more time and repetition wasn't working for him, but for some reason we insist that all students be given exactly the same schooling.
I also got the impression that both your opinion and (consequently?) the general consensus here was "school is terrible for everyone (but maybe we don't have to burn the ALL down, or at least not quite tomorrow)". (To quote you specifically, "Konstantin is too nice to put it this way, but think of school as a moderately abusive environment.") If you were trying to communicate the message "school was terrible for me but I was an exception", this is evidence of at least two readers who did not hear it that way.
To be fair, mostly what I think I'm hearing is "school was bad for me and lots of other people, which is enough grounds to reform it" -- which is not the same as "school was bad for everyone".
What does it mean for the environment to be "moderately abusive" then? This sounds like an attempt at an objective assessment of the environment itself, would it still be moderately abusive if it only had the people who seem to like it present?
In other words: is exercise moderately abusive? Exercise sucks: you're hot, sweaty, and out of breath during, tired and sore after, and you're literally running on a treadmill going nowhere (cardio) or emulating Sysyphus by lifting a rock over and over again (strength). Also, it often happens at ungodly hours of the morning (my local gym has classes at 5am, I shudder to think about when the instructor gets up). Also, it causes injuries. Nonetheless, many people seem to enjoy it more or less as it happens, and many others seem to think that it's a sufficiently good idea to do it despite it not being enjoyable.
I think that a crucial factor is to what extent you are free to choose an alternative.
There is a great difference in the extent to which people like or hate exercise, so if you would force everyone (who reasonably can) to exercise, then I think that is also abusive to a certain extent. Some people won't mind being forced, because they enjoy it, while others will mind very much.
Perhaps 'abusive' is not really the right word for it, but neither is 'lack of freedom.' It's really a combination of not having a choice and the environment being very unpleasant/damaging for some.
Honestly, the whole “school is literally prison” section came off as extremely typical-mindy.
On the flip side, did anyone say, “literally nobody can have a really bad experience at school”? Because that’s how you came off with the “to prove they exist” line introducing the comments here.
I believe there are clearly students who need something like current public school, some for whom its not necessarily the greatest but it’s okay, and those for whom it is literal psychological torture. The way you’ve framed all of this makes it seem like you think the latter group is the majority - I think most of the pushback you are getting is from people who suspect it is much less common. Even less common than that is the sort of 6 year old that would actually thrive in your utopia, even though I don’t doubt that 6 year old Scott Alexander (and gbdub frankly) would have done pretty well there.
And to be clear I get that you are mostly asking to allow for choice - on that I 100% agree! I think we just judge differently the percentage of students who are served very badly, in the way you experienced it, by the current system.
The problem is, in my personal estimate the parents who would choose to opt out their not very bright offspring because school is too bothersome (or any other silly reason) would far outweigh those with sons or daughters genuinely frustrated by the current system.
As a teacher, I get to know plenty of people who seem to think that my assessment of their spawn's inability to grasp basic math (mostly for lack of trying) is an attempt to mess with them. Some even told to my face that they believe the stuff inconsequential to real life, which supports the notion that they'd get rid of my services if able.
With little to no formal education to rely upon, the children of these people would experience more difficulties to find jobs than now, which would cause problems to society.
I think numbers matter here, so I have tried find some numbers:
- A vast majority of younger children (under 12) is really happy with school. In a large and representative German study for children of age 6-12,
80% of them chose the statement "I like going to school" or "I like very much going to school".
In an open field "What could be done better at your school", the second most frequent answer was "nothing". (The top answer was "the playground" if you are curious.)
- High school students are a lot less happy with school. If asked for emotions they feel during school, they report more negative than positive emotions. The most frequent answers are stressed, happy, tired, and bored.
- Still, it seems that this does not mean that high school students find school like hell. I have looked into a few other studies, and my impression is that most high school students find school overall ok. By far the largest study is the 2015 OECD PISA study, which asked 15-year old students for their well-being. On a life-satisfaction scale (not specifically on school), OECD students report 7.3 on a scale from 0 to 10. They also asked school specific questions, and they do find that students agree with statements like "I am often nervous before a test". But that doesn't seem to turn school into hell for most students.
- Among adolescents, there IS definitely a minority of students (depends on how you count, I would say between 5% and 20%) who are really unhappy with school. In the PISA study, this is very strongly associated with bullying. (This was a focus of the study, so it might be a spotlight effect, but it seems that other researchers agree that bullying is at least the most obvious culprit.)
So my personal interpretation is: Students up to the age of 12 totally love school. When puberty hits, they get annoyed. (But I am not sure how much this tells about schools. Perhaps it tells more about puberty. 18-year old students seem to be less annoyed with school than 15-year old.) But overall, even in puberty, it seems ok. Except that yes, school starts too early!
However, this is only for the majority. I totally believe that for some students, school is hell. This is a minority, perhaps 5%, and perhaps another 15% where it's not literally hell, but not ok either. It seems that Scott and some other commenters belong to this minority. Even inside this group, Scott might be an exceptional case because hell is usually the others (bullying students and teachers), not the boring lessons and the lack of freedom to build a dog-driven carriage.
So to me the implications are that schools are rather ok. At the same time, being in hell is very bad, and we should do something about it. But this is exactly what happens: the most important (perhaps only most obvious) problem is bullying, and schools and people put a lot more effort into this problem than 10 years ago. For people like Scott who fall through the cracks, the solution should be "for exceptional cases, find/allow good exceptional solutions" rather than "tear down the system".
I found school somewhat excruciating in the earlier years, then gradually exciting in spots when I was old enough for challenging "tracked" classes, and downright enjoyable once I got into a good university. At all times these were reasonably clean, safe places with practically no violence and fairly sane teachers, including some inspiring ones.
Just wanted to chime in here, having missed the chance to comment on the last post. Scott's wail came across as "school was torture for me and everyone who sees it as torture should be allowed to escape."
So first, Scott's definition of torture is he can't go to the bathroom or fart when he wants to, which is amazingly overstated. As were all the comments he approved of where people bragged about how school taught them to subvert authority by giving them the answers they wanted instead of "the truth" (sorry, wasn't this a rationalist community?).
As WTF mentions, this is a bunch of bright kids whining about ridiculously trivial problems and it was utterly boggling to see Scott raise this as a relevant issue after Freddie's excellent book. And I speak as someone who was not just bright and bored but actually bullied badly for a couple years. I didn't like school much, either. I just have the ability to separate good policy from my own trivial problems.
Also, Scott completely misses the real responsibility, which others have touched on. If Scott was bored and unhappy, he should have talked to his parents. That's who is responsible for Scott's unhappiness.
As for not being able to go to the bathroom with permission as "abusive"--picture my eyes rolling hard--students have considerably more ability to go to the bathroom than teachers do. They get breaks between every class, usually some kind of brief breakfast break and then a lunch break. Teachers often can't take those time because they are working with students. They can't leave the kids alone (high school teachers have more freedom than ES in this regard, but not much.).
There are plenty of jobs where you can't go to the bathroom until you have a break. Including some pretty highly paid jobs. Scott might want to imagine a world where he did whatever he wanted and then got low grades and wasn't allowed to test and show his ability because hey, diversity, and realize there's a lot of ways his life could be worse.
Honestly, as I've said on the previous blog, if you're a bright kid who thought normal school was miserable torture, get over yourself. It's you, not school. You are a snowflake. No one cares. And it's not something that is universal to bright kids. I know tons of insanely smart kids who get real joy in doing their work, even if they know the answer, and I wish more teachers would push them for more. I also know real bright kids who think school is bullshit, and I understand and tell them in *my* class to give me a counter offer that uses their brains and allows me to assess their abilities and in other classes to learn to play the game for purposes of college and employment. If you want to fix *that* game, well, hunker down until the current anti-test phase is over, because bright kids in the near future have grades or nothing.
American schools aren't broken. They do a much better job than most people think. To the extent they don't work, excluding kids from school by their choice as a matter of public policy is a really bad idea.
You've commented before on how smart kids need to get over themselves, and I think you reacted to that (which has been said here before) instead of what was said this time. Scott, and the comments he highlights, aren't so much about "school sucks if you're smart" but "school sucks for lots and lots of people." One of Freddie's big points is that trying to get someone to learn algebra who is never going to learn algebra is one of the ways it particularly sucks for kids on the low end.
I agree with almost every bit of what Freddie says. I disagree with his prescriptions, but his diagnosis is spot on.
I understand Scott thinks he is saying school sucks for lots and lots of people, but first, he's simply wrong. And the list of things he details as "abuse" are simply absurd.
To tie these together, lots and lots of kids who don't ever learn algebra don't think school sucks. They aren't beaten down by it. Scott and Freddie are talking about two different things. It's one thing to say "it's wrong to expect below average intelligence kids to learn things beyond their ability" and quite another to say "putting people in school to learn things is torture because they can't pee when they want to (etc).".
I am saying that Scott is projecting. There is a clear profile of bright kids who were bored by school and as adults feel much wronged by it. There are other profiles of kids who didn't fit into school as well. They aren't "lots and lots".
Short of bullying (where moving a kid makes sense), I'm largely unsympathetic to these claims, most particularly because the vast majority of the people complaining did just fine in things academic. Therefore, their suffering wasn't related to school or learning. They are just people who don't like a particular experience. That's on their parents, not school.
Schooling is mandatory, so their suffering is definitely related to school.
Parents often don't have any other options other than their local public school, so even if a kid is miserable and tells their parents how awful their schooling experience is...what exactly are parents supposed to do? Homeschooling and unschooling are imperfect options that most families cannot make work.
School is the primary problem here, not parenting. Scott's point that schooling should be shorter, more efficient and less restrictive is the big takeaway.
Yes, there are lots of jobs that require giving up certain freedoms... and if adults were required to do those jobs without getting paid, that would be bad.
>Almost no one below 2-3 SDs above average IQ reads this blog.
You would have to be totally delusional to believe this. Either that, or you're unfamiliar with the standard deviations of IQ. 2 SD above average is 130. 3 is 145. Having nearly everyone on this site above 2 SD would mean that the readers of this blog have a average intelligence much greater than the average PhD recipient, much greater than every profession that has been quantified by IQ. It would be a community comprised of exclusively the top eighth of doctors, lawyers, scientists, and professors. You would have to be blinded by your own self importance to believe this is the case. This blog certainly attracts good discussion, but exclusively the top 2% of intelligence? Get real.
Of course, there's the SSC survey, which took IQ results. We have reason to be skeptical of the information. Firstly, self reported IQ is always dubious. Secondly, only about a quarter of the people surveyed answered the question. This probably skews it towards higher IQ. Those who answered either got their answer from a sketchy online test, or were noticeably smart enough to be given a physical test in the first place. Even still, about a third of the responses came from people below 130 IQ. Given the nature of the data, it seems fair to assume that half of the readers of this blog are above 2SD and half are below. That's still very high, and it reflects very highly on this community. We still ought to be honest about our collective intelligence.
This. Kids thrive - from the earliest age - on structure. They are cause-and-effect learning engines that need predictable, reliable emotional and social environments. Later on, as adolescents, they develop autonomy by pushing back against the structure and developing an independent sense of self. We all have strong, ingrained memories of our adolescence and the misery/confusion/weirdness of that transition. Some people never leave that emotional adolescent state of rebellion behind and go on to become libertarians (I kid! Mostly...) But the strength of those memories and experiences cloud how important boring routine, discipline, and ritual were in our childhood. It is the scaffolding on which the self is built
> Kids thrive - from the earliest age - on structure
I would be interested to dig into this more, and I'm curious if there is a more formal expression of what this means / any research on this topic, or if it's mostly just a folk saying.
I always figured it was one of those things that parents say to make themselves (and each other) feel better. But, as the rest of the thread talks a lot about, that's probably typical-minding on my part. I'm sure it's true that every kid does best with _some_ level of structure (obviously "drop the kid in the woods to fend for themselves" is not a suitable environment), and some are presumably happier with more structure than others.
But the euphemism of "structure" here to mean "rules" always sat weirdly with me. "Breakfast is at 10 AM every day" is a structure! "If you don't eat what I cook, you don't eat" is ... not the same kind of structure. I could believe that, in some cases, carefully applied, for some kids, it could give them a broadened palate. It could also give them an eating disorder.
I have memories of my adolescence, yeah - of growing into a peer in an environment in which I had been a child. Mostly, it involved volunteering for things, and people going "oh yeah, she's growing up, she can do that now. Sure, why not?" And moving into accepting me into adult social circles. It was very pleasant.
I don't actually disagree about needing predictable, reliable emotional environments, or *possibly* social depending on what you mean. But you can achieve that without a lot of coercion; I had supportive, reliable parents who would tell me when they thought I was wrong, and listen if I told them I thought they were, and that worked great. No rebellion, we still get on great.
> Kids thrive - from the earliest age - on structure. They are cause-and-effect learning engines that need predictable, reliable emotional and social environments.
I just don't know about thriving on structure. Certainly most of us need some, especially in extreme youth. But public schools turn out 18-year-olds, and by that age they ought to have been in an environment that produces people who've gradually learned to take responsibility for a lot of the consequences of their own actions. How often have we seen public school kids flounder at a good university because suddenly neither Mommy nor teacher was there to hold their hands and make them keep up with the curriculum? By that age they ought to have learned their own motivation for controlling impulses and deferring gratification. They ought to have begun discovering which maximal efforts are fulfilling enough to be worth it. They won't get that in a stultifying and mediocre warehouse. A school that's not always preparing kids for increased freedom and responsibility is as much a failure as parents who commit the same error.
Universities have certainly been complaining about the lack of independence in modern students. Yet schools existed in the past, so it's not schools in themselves that caused this change (although schools did change).
I think both schools and parents changed, in exactly the way calculated to result in this change. But there has always been a spectrum of kids allowed to develop independent responsibility and kids whose parents did everything for them rather than teach them (or just let them learn) the difference between what happens when they take responsibility and exert themselves and what happens if they don't.
I think a lot of kids realize that schools don't provide any kind of consistent, understandable structure. It's mostly an arbitrary exercise of authority instead.
Candidly, parents are underrepresented in the rationalist community. I think this leads to some non pragmatic rabbit holes. Kids can be real selfish assholes which is why most adults put childrearing and teaching on a societal pedestal (maybe not this community). You can’t say that in polite society but every parent knows it. Childless rationalists sorta have this perception of their youthful selves that’s saint like and doesn’t jive with my lived experience around children at all. Like, at all.
As another parent, I fully endorse this opinion. Having a kid has shattered many illusions about what kind of parenting would have been best for me, and I now constantly apologize to my parents.
Whereas for me the experience was the opposite. The experience of bringing up children fit reasonably well with both my views of the subject and my parents' practice.
I don't much know what advice rationalists give, and although I might self-describe as a rationalist I don't consider myself really a part of the community so labeled. It's along the general lines of Scott's views, although perhaps less extreme. I believe parents are entitled to set conditions for their children where the children's behavior imposes costs on the parents, and for the children's benefit conditional on maximizing the amount of freedom for the child consistent with it. For instance, our kids did not have to eat what we were having, but the alternative was to have something else reasonably nutritious that didn't require additional effort by us. Our son ate a lot fruit yogurt. We had no restrictions on how much time they could spend online (once we got to the point where everyone had his own computer) or what they could do on the computer, or what books they could read.
The more general point was that we had to be willing to offer reasons for anything we told them to do, and be willing to change our mind if they provided good counter-arguments. We had, in other words, to treat them as rational humans, not as pets. That made the transition from child to housemate as they grew older pretty much seamless.
Same for me. I am laid back, was raised by laid back parents and am raising my children (currently 11 and 14) in a pretty laid back free range way.
I will also say that the schools that they go to are way better than the ones I went to (except the kids get less recess than I would like). Bullying and violence is far less.
Maybe this is because they both go to magnet schools that offer a ton of electives so other than the 3 R's they can kind of choose what they want to learn.
Also the family I was reared in. I sometimes worry that my model of the world has been distorted by growing up in a bubble where it was taken for granted that everyone was both rational and reasonable.
I'm a teacher in middle school (grades 6-9 to be precise) and a parent of two - a son age 8 and a daughter age 5. I view my parenting as compatible with rationalism - that is, my philosophy on parenting springs from the same personality traits that incline me towards reading this blog.
"Kids can be real selfish assholes" - children are born with pro-social instincts (see e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-moral-life-of-babies/). If you don't actively participate in overwriting these instincts with the need to conform to society by accepting/tolerating the things in society that are broken and unfair, kids are rarely if ever as selfish as adults are. What kids are is honest about their own needs (a trait which society tries to beat out of them) and sometimes unaware of the needs of others (which they can learn). On the other hand adults who have learned to meet their needs through social manipulation rather than direct communication, and who are incurious or callous about the needs of others, are many many orders of magnitude more selfish than any kid I've ever met.
To put it in terms of covid: my son has expressed the wish that covid would go away. He has said things like "I wish there were no bats" (I explained to him why it wasn't bats' fault). He has not said things like "I don't care if Grandma dies, I just want to go see my friends". On the other hand, many adults (see the Great Barrington Declaration, among others) say precisely that - that we should be unwilling to make personal sacrifices to protect the vulnerable, or that the vulnerable/elderly should be willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the economy.
Having children has not changed my perception that my "youthful self" was innocent and should not have been subjected to the types of abuse I was subjected to. In many cases it has made me much more furious at my parents and other caregivers as I have realized how trivially easy it is to treat a child like a human being and protect them from those who would do them harm, which in turn makes me wonder why I was not given that kind of treatment and protection.
In particular, with respect to the object question - school is supposed to provide students with learning and with socialization, which are both intrinsically fun and valuable for humans in general. If a particular child is suffering so much from school that they view it as a "prison" and not an opportunity to learn and socialize, that school is doing something deeply, deeply wrong to that child. There definitely needs to be a way out for those kids - I'm somewhat agnostic on the best way for society to provide that way out, and not at all opposed to imperfect solutions, so I think things like charter schools, home/unschooling, voucher systems/school choice, etc. are all reasonable stabs at improving the system for the kids who are very poorly served by it.
Children are born with a remarkably broad variety of natures. Some are quite pro-social, and others aren't. The size of innate differences in children's personalities and needs has probably been my number one surprise as a parent, and I suspect it invalidates any one-size-fits-all parenting/schooling advice.
I suspect we may be using the term "pro-social" in different ways?
Consider the list Paul Bloom mentioned in that article I linked to - "An understanding that helping is morally good, and that harming, hindering, or otherwise thwarting the goals of another person is morally bad. A rudimentary sense of justice—an understanding that good guys should be rewarded and bad guys should be punished. An initial sense of fairness—in particular, that there should be an equal division of resources."
Would you agree that these are universal traits of children, or at least reasonably close to universal? I have seen some of the studies backing Bloom's claim and I found them plausible and in line with my personal experiences.
I can't distinguish between them not understanding that "harming, hindering, or otherwise thwarting the goals of someone else is morally bad" and them not caring about that moral injunction. But one or the other is reasonably common in toddlers.
Take an example: My five year old will take a tablet that he and my 3 year old are watching a show on, and turn so the 3 year old has a hard time watching for no apparent reason except to 'hoard the good thing.' I don't think he's even aware he's being a jerk, but it's impossible to know for sure. He's either unaware of the moral valence of his actions, or completely doesn't care about that moral valence. Either way, it's anti-social.
Yes, some 'pro-social' behavior must be developed, or even sometimes explicitly taught. And for the example you provided, it'd probably be easy enough to teach your five year old by giving him a 'taste of his own medicine'.
'Theory of mind' isn't innate, or, rather, it isn't fully 'online and operational' right away, but develops (and at different rates for different children, or not at all for a small proportion) in early childhood, and pretty universally AFAIK.
" On the other hand, many adults (see the Great Barrington Declaration, among others) say precisely that - that we should be unwilling to make personal sacrifices to protect the vulnerable, or that the vulnerable/elderly should be willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the economy."
I think that is a wildly inaccurate picture of the argument made in the declaration.
"Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice."
Is that what you mean by "for the sake of the economy"?
"The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals. "
Is that what you mean by "the vulnerable/elderly should be willing to sacrifice themselves"?
Would you like to either defend your description of the declaration or retract it and apologize? If you haven't read it, here it is:
I will admit that the first part of my statement (we should be unwilling to make personal sacrifices to protect the vulnerable) was primarily referring to the Great Barrington Declaration, while the second part of my statement ("the vulnerable/elderly should be willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the economy") was primarily referring to the "others" - for example, Dan Patrick's comments about the elderly sacrificing themselves.
However, I do believe that the GBD is simply Patrick's idea - let the old and vulnerable make all the sacrifices - repackaged and "sanewashed" in a way that gives people who don't care about the costs of an uncontrolled pandemic deniability when they propose that we just get on with our lives regardless of the cost.
I believe that if the GBD authors were genuinely concerned with the welfare of the overall public, they'd have a serious proposal for actually solving the problems they've identified. For example:
"Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health"
Where's the evidence that this is because of lockdown policies and not because people are afraid to go to a doctor during a pandemic? Because I've been under some form of lockdown in my country of residence since November but I have been able to access medical care for myself and my children and go to outdoor spaces including public parks. Doctors here have also been making more house calls, and just last week we had a doctor come to do a blood screening for my whole family. Now, if there's a lockdown policy that is actually discouraging people from going outside during the day to take a walk or get some fresh air, or banning people from seeking medical services, that policy needs to be adjusted. But for the most part, lockdowns have caught up to the general guidance that outdoor recreation in small groups is fine, and medical facilities can remain open; the GBD is mischaracterizing lockdown policy in general in a big way here and I'd call the argument that people are missing cancer screenings or childhood vaccinations because of lockdowns an outright lie given the evidence that in fact what's happening is that without lockdowns, regular people are afraid to go to hospitals, and during uncontrolled outbreaks, medical professionals have been diverted from routine care to provide care to covid patients.
Once you realize that the GBD is being, at best, deeply misleading about the causes of the problems it identifies, it's very clear that the solutions they propose are not only wildly off-base, but actively counterproductive. Like this:
"Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume."
University lecture halls = superspreader events. School sporting events = superspreader events. Restaurants = superspreader events. Art, music, sport, and other cultural activities = superspreader events.
But that's the point, right? The more the virus spreads, the faster we'll achieve herd immunity. Never mind the fact that achieving herd immunity through exposure would kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people in the US alone. Never mind that they thought they'd achieved herd immunity in Manaus and then the hospitals ran out of oxygen for the ventilators (although to be fair the GBD authors didn't know that would happen when they wrote the GBD - but they should have accounted for the possibility, since experts were saying, even then, that it might not be possible to achieve herd immunity through natural infection at all). But put all that aside, because here's the point: do you think that, if we had taken the accelerationist path in October and started actively encouraging people to go to superspreader events whenever they could to get the virus on behalf of the vulnerable, we would have seen the level of cancer screenings return to normal by now?
There is simply no logical path by which encouraging uncontrolled spread of coronavirus through the population makes *people who think they might be at risk for cancer* and *who act conscientiously to mitigate that risk* more likely to leave their houses and go to a medical facility which is overrun with covid patients. Same for parents who want their kids to be healthy - as a parent, I'd certainly keep my kids home during an unmitigated covid wave and delay a childhood vaccination by a couple of months rather than expose them, myself, and their grandmother (who lives with us) to the risk of covid transmission.
The people who wrote this thing are supposed to be scientists, so it confuses me that they could have missed the very obvious fact that there is no path from Point A to Point B located anywhere in the GBD.
If encouraging people to go out and get covid as fast as possible isn't really for the benefit of cancer screening patients and unvaccinated kids, then what is it for? If the authors are misleading us about the goal of their proposals, we have to make some kind of educated guess about what it is they really want.
Given that the GBD was sponsored by a libertarian think-tank, I'm going to guess it is motivated by an ideological opposition to anything governments do and a commitment to free market principles. So again, I stand by the implication that the GBD is asking us to sacrifice the vulnerable for the economy, although I admit that this is a reasoned inference rather than something the GBD authors have openly admitted to.
"Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals."
What they're proposing here is very simple: lockdowns for the sick, elderly, and other vulnerable people. Segregate the millions of Americans with risk factors due to age or health problems from their younger and healthier friends and family members. And note that instead of limited lockdowns for everyone which are targeted to flatten the curve until a safe reopening can occur, we're talking about unlimited lockdowns for the most vulnerable that can't end until vaccines arrive (which, when this was written, was quite a ways off). Instead of "everyone stays home for a few weeks until community spread drops" it's "everyone goes out now (in October), but grandpa stays locked in his house until June." In other words, healthier people should be unwilling to make personal sacrifices to protect less healthy people, and it instead is the sick and elderly who will have to make the sacrifices to allow us to resume "[a]rts, music, sport and other cultural activities". So upon reflection, I do indeed believe I have characterized the intention of the GBD quite accurately.
Also, the idea that public health professionals have some effective way to protect people living in multigenerational households that they're just not using now for some reason but would be able to deploy during an uncontrolled outbreak seems a bit suspicious. Where is this "comprehensive and detailed list of measures," I wonder, and why don't the authors of the GBD produce it now in order to relieve our growing suspicion that this document is a dangerous and callous piece of propaganda rather than a serious scientific public policy proposal? Why don't they tell us how, exactly, they think we are going to stop a 16-year-old from coming home from school with covid and infecting grandpa?
Again, there is a complete lack of any logical pathway from the proposals in the GBD to the problems it claims to want to solve. There are no steps that take us from "let healthy people get sick" to "we've protected the vulnerable and restored life to normal." The most charitable assessment of this document is that it is motivated reasoning taken to an alarming extreme, and that some people simply didn't notice that this is advocating for a situation in which our sick and elderly people make all the sacrifices and take on all the burden. But I am cynical enough to believe that its authors knew exactly what effects these policies would have if implemented and chose to advocate for them anyway, despite their obvious danger and despite their obvious ineffectiveness.
I would have liked to see someone really try a "let's protect the elderly" path, which would have involved things like paying to delivery groceries to every single person over 60, and establishing two layers of protection around nursing homes.
The fact that you disagree with them about the optimal policy is not an excuse for wildly misrepresenting their position. "I suspect they really believe X even though they say Y because I don't believe Y is workable" is not an excuse for saying "They believe X," which is what you were doing.
The logical pathway is quite simple, whether or not you agree with it. If you protect the vulnerable and let everyone else live their lives normally you eliminate most of the cost of precautions and most of the damage of the disease. Either that gets you to and past herd immunity and the frequency of the disease gets low enough so the vulnerable can come out or it doesn't, you eventually get a vaccine, you vaccinate the vulnerable and they can then come out. That may not convince you, but it is a perfectly coherent policy.
"If you protect the vulnerable and let everyone else live their lives normally" = "If the vulnerable make all the sacrifices," which is what I said they said.
The misrepresentation is obscuring what "protect the vulnerable" looks like in practice. It's not grocery delivery - it's months and months of deep and constant isolation.
"Where's the evidence that this is because of lockdown policies and not because people are afraid to go to a doctor during a pandemic? "
I think part of the problem is reactions to lockdown policies are not uniform but instead spread over a distribution on both sides of risk tolerance. When the government wants to prevent large social gathering they ban outdoor dining, not because outdoor dining carries risk but because it sends a signal that the lockdown is more serious. For people at the other side of the spectrum even in the partial opening of the summer, the government is sending signals that you should stay home unless absolutely necessary (and then you think how necessary is my physical or dental checkup etc). While I don't agree with the GBD I think that the authors would see it as a Pareto optimal change compared to current policy as our current policy as in the current policy everyone suffers from isolation and the associated consequences but they would claim that we should design a policy in which we limit those who need to isolate to those who are at risk. I don't think the GBD is actually the right policy but the failure to consider any changes to the current lockdown policy for almost a year shows a real lack of imagination and prioritization from liberals (probably because many of the leaders are less conscientious and violating the lockdowns anyway).
"the failure to consider any changes to the current lockdown policy for almost a year shows a real lack of imagination and prioritization from liberals"
Where I live we had an initial very strong lockdown last March - April, then lockdown was phased out, then over the summer officials encouraged people to go and do travel/tourism/dining (with reasonable health restrictions/inspections in place for accommodations, transport, and restaurants), and then in response to an overwhelming second wave lockdowns were put back in November and are currently being phased out again.
I haven't been following any US jurisdiction particularly closely but I would be surprised to hear of a place where there have been no policy changes for a year. Correct me if I'm wrong though.
"I think part of the problem is reactions to lockdown policies are not uniform but instead spread over a distribution on both sides of risk tolerance."
Agreed, but it's going to be very hard to tease apart "I'm afraid to get a cancer screening because there's a lockdown" from "I'm afraid to get a cancer screening because the news is showing the national guard set up field hospitals and makeshift morgues to deal with all the covid cases the medical system doesn't have capacity for" - so the analysis has to balance whatever signaling effect lockdowns have against the signaling effect death rates would have absent lockdowns, and probably there's going to be some overlap, for example when lockdowns are imposed as a response to overflowing hospitals.
This has been my experience too, and I don't think the kids I know are any worse than average. Delayed gratification and tolerance are learned traits. (I mean tolerance as in "accepting things you don't like", not "racism")
I don't think the under-representation of parents is that bad. I think it's mostly due to a lot of us being relatively young (where we live) to have had kids, when the 'community' first coalesced.
Yes, kids can be real selfish assholes! I believe that schools are mostly daycare but I appreciate that that's very valuable to almost everyone (including myself).
I didn't like school overall and it's probably mostly because of the naked hypocrisy suffused everywhere, even in the comparatively very good (public) schools I attended. They threw up all kinds of ridiculous obstacles to me _learning_! It's a weird kind of pedestal on which 'we' have installed 'teaching' (I'd say 'schooling') – maybe the pedestal is too high for any kind of criticism to have much of any actual effect on how well schools live up to the ideals in which we wrap them up in our social religion.
It doesn't need to be a complete dichotomy, although Scott presents it as one. The parents can set certain expectations but allow the kids to figure out how they want to fulfill those constraints. There are also plenty of things that parents and school force kids to do at 5 that they could easily start doing later when they better understand the utility.
Fully agreed. Given how much I respect Scott's thinking, it was honestly kind of jarring to hear him offer a vision that seemed so obviously bad. I'm fully on board with reforms that promote diversity of experiences for students, including some with lots more freedom for students. But seven-year-olds doing literally anything they want, short of crime... that's a dozen bridges too far. I guess maybe he's assuming children behave radically differently in a society built ground-up with this freedom, but I think in any world the average kid would drown in all that freedom.
I also found it jarring, but I think Scott is more expressing a "would that it could be otherwise" than a "this would totally work and kids would be fine, society is stupid". He seemed pretty clear at the end of the post that he doesn't think reforms are actually workable. I think Scott is angry that we have to throw kids like him to Moloch to prevent the world where many children learn nothing, and spend their time tying firecrackers to cats' tails and playing on railway tracks. Which seems reasonable - it sounds like school really sucked for him. I'd be fantasising about burning it all to the ground as well.
There's some good evidence that 'un-schooling' – "seven-year-olds doing literally anything they want, short of crime" – actually works pretty well for at least _some_ kids.
There's some sensible adjustments that communities can make to make it a lot more 'reasonable' too – tho it would be difficult to imagine doing them on the scale of a major metro area.
It seems to me that when children reject social niceties like cleanliness, they're often entirely in the right.
I'd argue that people generally do things like comb their hair and clean their homes because either:
• They genuinely enjoy doing so for the sake of personal expression or aesthetics- something that children sometimes discover an interest in as they grow older, or:
• They feel that they have to engage in costly social signaling to compete for the positional good of status- a hugely wasteful collective action problem that children often immediately recognize the injustice of, only to later accept once they've given up on resisting it and turn to sour grapes justifications for emotional comfort.
When everyone eventually defects in a collective action problem, teaching a child to defect early can benefit that specific child in a zero-sum sort of way, but teaching every child to defect as a general policy doesn't actually help anyone.
Ideally, we'd live in a society where people who enjoy putting effort into things like personal style could do so, while those who are less interested could appear as slovenly and uncouth as they liked without social penalty. Collectively agreeing not to teach children to do otherwise meaningless things to compete for social status might not bring us all the way to that point, but it would be a step in the right direction.
On the other hand, you can hugely increase your social and sexual opportunties by engaging in the bare minimum of said signaling. This is basically a lifehack, and the child should at the very least understand that it's available and will make their life easier.
It's so easy, generally (tho I could be very wrong about this!) to 'fix' these problems later that it seems to cruel to require _everyone_ to meet them without understanding their benefits.
Even with a strict, consistent, and insistent demand for cleanliness, kids are still generally much less clean or put-together than adults. We're obviously grading on a curve anyways.
The whole branch of comments about the supposed futility of cleaning strikes me as coming from a bizarro world: isn't it a matter of, you know, hygiene?
There's this weird association between cleaning in the sanitary sense and cleaning in the putting items in order sense, which... don't really overlap that much, and children are usually assigned to #2. There's nothing hygienic about combing or not combing your hair.
"I can't find [precious/necessary] thing, find it for me!"
Some people can manage messiness. Some people's ADHD is so bad that they easily get in a cycle of letting things get messy and then can't manage it and are paralyzed to get out. The only escape is stopping things from getting messy in the first place.
Since English is my second language, I'm under the impression that the verb "to clean" implies at least some level of dirt removal, which a cursory Google search seems to support.
But even if I'm wrong and it can be intended as merely having to do with bringing order into chaos, well, since I'm messy AND asthmatic I can attest that there's a deep correlation between the ability to remove dirt and the state of disorder of a room.
I didn't understand why my parents seemed to spend so much time cleaning, but 1) it wasn't that much, and 2) if you get on the wrong side of the hill things will start going to crap real fast.
It's not saving time to wait until a disaster to do work.
I'm – personally – with you on staying on the 'right side of the hill'.
But I've had immense difficulty getting _adults_ to agree to that too! Given that, it just doesn't seem right to insist that _children_ get with a program 'too difficult' for a lot of adults.
It really didn't hit me until I became a parent myself.
When visiting my parents (before covid), I did some random household chore for them, out of their eyes, just because it needed done and I was right there. The next day they were wondering WTF, which of us did it, are we doing senile? It was fun to watch for a while but I confessed to it.
Do you not believe that people clean their homes to avoid a build-up of dirt, mold, insect infestations and other hazardous-to-life things? Because that's the main reason that comes to mind when I think of cleaning, and that I believe motivate most people in the first place. Signaling would be an important secondary motivation, but only so far as you're signaling that you and your dwelling are not in fact infested with critters and are safe to interact with.
I tend to be a slob, but I gradually learned from my husband some of the pleasures that come from at least moderate cleanliness. I'll never be truly neat, but the house is less cluttered now and it's usually easier to find things. I grew up in a house that was oppressively clean; these things can go overboard.
I tend to be a slob too! I'm trying harder to be cleaner, and am perhaps one of those people who needs to be pressured to clean sometimes. But I agree some people may go overboard with it, it doesn't always need to be top priority.
As the other reply already implied, the optimal amount of 'dirt' isn't literally zero.
But I'm in total agreement about being clean enough to avoid insect infestations! But that's still something to be sold to a large number of adults too.
It is! Perhaps it's because I grew up in the tropics, where even the smallest amount of food or dirt can lead to a lot more risk. Living in Canada now seems very different.
That's a good point. I've live in enough places of sufficiently diverse 'insect infestation risk', that I tend to personally err on the 'salt the earth' side (i.e. prevent any amount of food or dirt or anything edible or usable by pests).
But some people seem to just be lucky and escape The Horde however messy they are. (And some people are completely unfazed even cohabitating with several Hordes!)
It is very hard to attribute causes to the things that have changed about you since you were seven. My impression from the little I've seen of the research is that, so long as a child has a generally supportive environment, parenting style has relatively little effect on what they will be like as an adult. You certainly would have learned which behavior is considered socially acceptable (within whichever culture you were immersed in) on your own, and you might have acquired an appreciation for it on your own as well.
You're arguing that you have the skills/traits/habits you do because you were forced to practice them as a kid. But the having the skills after being forced to practice them doesn't really prove anything except that being force to practice them does not prohibit you from acquiring them. I would find your view much more compelling if there were examples of people who were otherwise just like you, but who were not forced to practice such things and who did not acquire them by the time they were adults.
>But the having the skills after being forced to practice them doesn't really prove anything except that being force to practice them does not prohibit you from acquiring them.
For the life of me, I can't see how someone might acquire the skill of doing math or programming without practicing doing math or programming, or how the inverse might be true, forced or not.
First of all, I was talking about skills like "being polite", not doing math or programming. Second, I have sufficient programming and math skill to make money doing them, and almost of none of that skill came from people forcing me to practice. It came from me choosing to practice.
Why would you think that school is the only reason for people to learn basic math? Given that the only basic math most people can even reliably perform is exactly those they use frequently, e.g. when handling monetary amounts, it seems pretty unlikely that not forcing children to practice those skills would do much to prevent them from later acquiring them.
There's even some evidence that you can effectively 'backload' a lot of math instruction, e.g. wait to even start teaching it until students are teenagers. That points to the amount, and timing of, the practice that is mandated as being mostly wasteful (for most students).
Do you think all of this social training will endure and really change their adult behavior for the better? I have strong doubts, mainly from introspection (I was bad at most of your examples, got (slighty) better with age, but not from my parent efforts when I was young (which I resisted a lot, sometimes to a level that embarrass my adult-self ;-) ) and also from observing childhood friends that are still friends. Global trend: people do not fundamentally change, but they tends to become more polite and slower to rev-up to anger with age
Now all of those nice social child behavior sure makes parent life easier (my step-child is more sociable than I was....and I am happy for it :-) ). I suspect this is the main reason why parents insist on it. Don't you? Be honest ;-p
Agree. I don't think most kids and teens don't have the curiosity and discipline to learn on their own like Scott imagines. If given a choice most will watch TV, play video games, smoke pot and watch porn all day (speaking from personal experience). They need to external shove and discipline to grow into a better version of themselves in the future. I think school and religion can both serve this purpose for the average person and make them happier in the long run. I attended the University of Chicago for undergrad and absolutely hated the humanities and sociology classes I was forced to take (I was a science major); but looking back I am very grateful for this experience because it made me into a more well rounded, intellectually curious person which I never would have forced myself to do on my own.
But the choices aren't limited to passively watching them learn it on their own or passively watching them fail to do so. We can set things up so that kids have incentives to learn and do things, both carrot and stick, even if we take care not to make the disincentives too dangerous when they're still too young to know better. It works the same way with adults later. Sometimes our culture seems to default to a notion of basically child-proofing all habitats, for both old and young.
You should take a look at Escola da Ponte. Sadly most content is in portuguese, and I'm not extremely knowledgeable of it. I read some reports and it seems to work well, and the kids have a lot of autonomy and it's quite self oriented.
I was better at long term planning than my parents, who are actually quite good at it. My self isn't changeable. Just because you were an irresponsible kid with no consistent desires doesn't mean we all were.
There already are these sort of community centers - libraries. They host classes and other sort of educational events.
I hope that with the recent bump in online education due to covid, more computational and automated approaches to education will emerge. There's no longer a need to limit one good teacher to teaching a class of 20-30 students, when they could teach the entire nation. And since the students have different aptitudes to explanation - some prefer more visual metaphors, some like analytic explanations - it creates a sort of market for explanations, for educational videos. Imagine a library of educational videos like youtube, where educators (like 3blue1brown) or educational teams (like CrashCourse) could host their videos to sell to schools. The schools distribute videos to their students and test them later to assess their knowledge. Ideally I envision automated education as something like "all students receive shortest possible explanation A -> 75% pass the test and move on, 25% fail and get a different explanation B, take test again -> 20% pass the test and move on, 5% get help from a teacher". This way strong students can quickly move at their own pace, students with unusual requirements for explanation get a chance to find an educator that works for them (telling material as a sockpuppet theatre for example), and failing students get full attention of the teachers without disrupting the flow of the lessons.
“There's no longer a need to limit one good teacher to teaching a class of 20-30 students, when they could teach the entire nation.”
This applies to lecturing, and I think it’s great that I can access a basically infinite free library of lectures both for my own edification and to send to my students. (CrashCourse already *is* assigned reading in many cases, and is basically designed for that purpose.) And assessment of multiple-choice tests can be (and is) done at scale.
Unfortunately (or fortunately for guild, I guess) most of the rest is more difficult to do at scale. The loop students do work —> teacher diagnoses how they’re conceiving the material or carrying out the skill (including productive discussions!) —> teacher provides targeted guidance is more labor-intensive. And this is where good teachers spend most of their time.
That said, in an Infinite Pandemic World I think you’re right that you could have a lot more specialization to individual needs when students aren’t grouped by physical geography. Long-term I think it’s clear the demand is for a return to meatspace schools, but maybe we could incorporate more hybrid elements to take advantage of the potential gains that you outline here.
The ability of one person to teach an unlimited number has existed ever since the invention of the printing press. The puzzle is why we continue to teach via mass lectures, with too many students for any significant interaction, centuries later.
Anecdotal, but when I was in college my friend and I had basically opposite learning styles. He would skip many classes, but read the textbook and learn everything that way. He found lectures mostly pointless. I, on the other hand, can't get myself to read even the best written textbook for more than 5 minutes at a time and often find myself not remembering what I read because my mind was wandering. However, I can sit and listen to a lecture and grasp the material well and just use the textbook to occasionally look up examples or clear up areas of confusion. I wouldn't call myself a particularly social person, but having a real person in front of me provides motivation to pay attention that I have a very hard time summoning on my own with a book.
Does it help if the book is written in a way designed to show the personality of the author, let you feel there is a human being on the other side of the page? GKC, for example.
I can't say for sure because I don't recall if I've ever read a textbook like that. I imagine I'd find it a bit easier to get through, although it is still lacking the modicum of social pressure that live instruction provides and that I find I often need for motivation.
I may be a bit unusual in that I find it difficult to get through dry material, but also tend to (probably overly) distrust non-fiction that seems too interesting or follows what seems like "fiction-logic". As a result, I read very little non-fiction beyond blog-post length.
During my time in college, I found many textbooks overly dry and felt like many of them dragged things out, a problem that only got worse after I went blind and found myself listening to a monotone, computer voice reading them more slowly than my eye could when it worked(Note: went blind in my right eye in infancy, my left eye in my mid-20s), and that's not getting into, when I could get hold of the textbook digitally, it was usually as a PDF(a format I wasn't fond of when I could see and have come to hate since going blind) or had to be accessed through a website that was a total pain in the anatomy to use with a screen reader and had the kind of obtrusive DRM that makes you want to pirate a copy just so you don't feel like you have a virtual bad cop with a itchy trigger finger waiting for the flimsiest excuse.
And I say this as someone who occasionally read print encyclopedias for fun and still pulls the occasional all nighter on Wikipedia(though to the World Book's credit, it keeps things brief enough that if you decide to just read through, it never stays on one subject long enough to get boring, and Wikipedia is one of the most screen reader friendly websites in existence).
That said, I found the 90-minute morning lectures from highschool tedious and the 2-hour lectures from the afternoon(I attended a Highschool that let out after lunch on Fridays, so Monday-Thursday had longer afternoon classes to make up the difference) inteolerable, and when I got to college, I found the 50-minute lectures for classes that met thrice weekly much more reasonable and the 75-minute lectures tedious, but still an improvement over highschool. I also like that, in college, I could have free periods or even days off instead of being forced to have a full-day, every day... and I couldn't even enjoy the afternoons off on Fridays in Highschool due to attending a semi-boarding school where most of the students lived in Dorems from Sunday night to Friday morning and spent most of Friday afternoon and Sunday evening on a bus(my weekly commute was five hours each way).
Though, even a 50-minute lecture can be tedious with a boring lecturer, but even the best teachers I've ever had struggled to make a 2-hour class not seem overly long.
And while I'll gladly listen to an interesting YouTuber for hours on end, I generally find that's easier when individual videos are in the 5-15 minute range than when they're an hour or two.
Never did like taking online classes in college though, and only ever did it for courses with no face-to-face sections. A canned lecture I can listen too whenever can be just as good, if not better than a live one heard in a lecture hall, I find there's value in having to be in a certain place at a certain time, that listening to canned lectures or doing assigned reading is too easy to procrastinate on without that structure, and if you're actually lucky enough to have a teacher for the course, class time isn't just lecturing, but includes actual discussion and hands-on demonstrations you don't get with canned lectures. And hey, even if you just have a boring lecturer and get more out of reading the textbook, I often found it was usually easier to focus on reading the textbook in class than trying to do so during free time.
Still, I wish college had given me more opportunities to pursue interesting coourses outside of those required for my degree without fear of over committing or worrying about something interesting I'm not very good at pulling my GPA down. I love arts and crafts and took art class to fill out my schedule every year of highschool even though for three of my four years I was basically the only college-bound student sharing a class with the multiple special needs or primary students(In addition to being semi-boarding, my HS was a combined k-12 school and a school for the blind and visually impaired, so technically, even as the brightest in my year and being dual-enrolled at a local IB school, I suppose I qualified as special needs myself) and was doing independant projects while the teachers did smaller, more supervised crafts with my younger/less intellectual classmates, in college, the only art classes I had the opportunity to take before I ran out of humanities requirements where Art Appreciation, Music Appreciation, and Theatre Appreciation.
I'm the same way. I only skipped class one single time in college, which my friends thought was an insane level of dedication, but I spent wayyyyy less time studying than they did. I like listening to a real person talk, asking questions in real time, and taking my own notes. It helps me retain information. Reading textbooks or lecture slides without attending the class is torture. Clearly for some people it's the opposite,
I think some of the meritocracy objections might be that the higher salaries seem to be disproportionately aligned with the trait "smart" -- as opposed to the trait "kind" or the trait "has good hand-eye coordination" or the trait "has a lot of endurance" (all of which, incidentally, I would want in the "best" surgeon). That is, that "smart" is being treated as a near-universal proxy for "arete", even though most professions require other traits as well.
I'm not even sure it has to do with salaries as much as the perception, as you put it, that smart=arete. Income and IQ are correlated, but the differences aren't all that stark--the difference between an IQ of 130 and 100 produces a difference in annual income of $12k per year, which is significant, but wouldn't even put you in a different social class. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11711-smarter-people-are-no-better-off/ There are lots of smart people who end up teachers making $40k a year and lots of less smart people who work in skilled trades and make a great living.
As other folks have said, it feels like the issue is a combination of 1) people rightly being mad about income inequality and attributing it to meritocracy and 2) people being mad that so much of their own self-worth derives from how good or bad their grades were.
Yeah, honestly, the skills that are most important in the OR aren't really selected for by the funnel that leads to medical school. Surgeons tend to just be the people with the temperament (and hand-eye coordination/proprioception) best suited to surgical training, selected from a population pre-filtered based on standard "smart" traits and the associated metrics.
You could imagine a society where the filter order was reversed - where surgeons were first filtered based on mechanical skills, or risk-taking / temperament, and then subsequently were divvied up into fields depending on how essential traditional "smart" traits were for a chosen field (there's probably a joke about orthopedic surgeons here). To me, that's the strongest part of FdB's argument - that "smart" traits are the gatekeepers to high status jobs, even if those high status jobs really don't require much in the way of "smart" in their day-to-day practice.
I feel there's an assumption that early-21st-century medicine is more advanced than it actually is. In practice, I think part of the reason that we want smart educated surgeons, is because no one really knows for certain what a surgeon will find when they start cutting someone open, and it's important that the surgeon be able to make accurate split-second decisions about how to proceed. (Which is also why confidence is selected for.)
I think it might be broader than just credentialism, insofar as practical approximations of meritocracy end up optimizing not merit but an easier-to-measure proxy. I think a similar mechanic is at work when software developers get promoted into management positions because they're good at writing code -- it's easier to estimate someone's coding ability than their managerial skills, and it's probably not completely uncorrelated with being a good manager insofar as e.g. conscientiousness is a part of both jobs, and so it ends up being used.
An avenue Freddie didn't explore, but I'm interested in: let's consider intelligence a natural resource. Does our current system deprive us of some of the benefits of that resource, by allocating it toward useless academic pursuits?
I noted in the thread that once we get a good polygenic risk score for IQ and other such in-demand traits, we can start taxing people with the potential to get high-paying jobs. They'll have the option of wasting their lives proving Hilbert's unsolved mathematical problems rather than helping a hedge fund get slightly higher returns, but damn it they'll have to pay for that luxury.
I certainly think that part of academia is subsidized intellectual masturbation, although those are often also the fields where 140+ IQ seems most rare.
Counterpoint, I also feel like part of academia is real intellectual output for cheap, since you can get brilliant people for a fraction of the salary they could command in industry. Because they love having a job where they can pursue the most interesting problems out there, surrounded by people who are also doing this.
The contrast between what our postdocs make in university departments and what they could get if they ran off to Google is staggering. And yet most people in my PhD cohort want to go on into the university departments!
Does the reduced salary make up for the lesser impact on society and the state of the art? Because Google has made some amazing innovations and at least as important, they've actually put it in practice.
An immense amount of academic output is so poorly done that the replication rate of that field is below 50%, which means that it is worse than a coin toss. Parts are purely ideological and seem intended to cover up the facts. Does any of that actually produce positive value to society, even if it was done for free?
I can see your point for fields like material science and physics, but overall, the state of science seems quite poor.
I'm basically only talking about math and hard science here. My colleagues are all physicists.
As for the fields with below 50% replication rate, do they actually have lots of people that could've excelled doing deep learning at Google instead? My impression is that Google is currently happy to hire people with abstract math degrees as developers, even if their studies are not applicable to the subject at all. People with sociology degrees, less so.
I think this says something about what they consider promising signals.
I would prefer doing science reforms that would chance the incentives away from p-hacking (and the like), biased publication, only doing original research, etc; to increase the value they provide.
Basically, increase their value. Then you can even pay them more and still come out ahead :)
Another variation on this question (I apologize ahead of time if this starts a eugenics debate): are we allocating natural intelligence optimally? Maybe there's little marginal utility to IQ past 130, and society would be better off if smart people interbred with average people more often, and we had more people with IQs of 110-120. Or maybe the opposite is the case and we'd be better off with more algebraic geometers.
The Internet says that one man produces enough sperm in two weeks to impregnate every fertile woman on the planet. I don't know if that's true, but I do know that there's enough smart sperm to go around. No rationing needed.
> There are studies finding extreme negative effects from having disruptive kids in your class; I'm a little skeptical of this kind of research, but being stuck with unmanageable classmates is definitely no fun. I haven't seen the research, but it wouldn't surprise me if having lots of overachievers in your class was helpful - good role models, inspiration, whatever (see also this comment for some brief discussion of this). So if all the smart kids go to charters and all the dull kids stay in public, the smart kids will do better and the dull kids will do worse. How should we think about this?
That paragraph equivocates sort of strangely between "disruptive" kids and "dull" kids.
Scott's writing here takes it as given that these "disruptive" kids are going to be in classrooms and are going to be disruptive, so they're going to inflict negative externalities on _someone_, and the question is just who gets stuck with them. I thought the obvious answer was that we should put the disruptive kids somewhere that they don't inflict negative externalities on people -- either in a very strict classroom with harsh punishments, or in a daycare classroom where the school will still watch your kids but it's given up on teaching them.
For "dull" kids, I'd like to believe that they'd benefit from being in a class with other "dull" kids, so that the teacher can teach at a slow pace that will work for all of them.
This is a really good point (the difference between "disruptive" and merely academically behind) that I hadn't noticed when reading the post, thanks.
As a "gifted" kid, I loved helping other kids who were further behind but wanted to learn. As a high school freshman, I was in a math class with juniors and seniors (due to transferring into a public system from a private school with more aggressive tracking), and sometimes I helped them with classwork, and I think everybody really gained by this? And I enjoyed it, and it seemed like they did too. At a later point I also did tutoring outside school hours, some of it for pay.
Of course, not everybody who's academically advanced is also good at teaching, or enjoys it. But I seem to recall reading that there's evidence that mixed-ability groups benefit students because they can teach each other, rather than relying exclusively on the teachers. I don't feel like I have thought much about whether or how it benefits the more advanced kids, but I know it's commonly said that the best way to really learn something is to teach it (and I think it's true.)
That said, I was (in this case) in the position of helping kids who were studying the same material, but took longer to get to it and were having a bit more trouble with it -- not kids who were further behind than that.
"I thought the obvious answer was that we should put the disruptive kids somewhere that they don't inflict negative externalities on people -- either in a very strict classroom with harsh punishments, or in a daycare classroom where the school will still watch your kids but it's given up on teaching them."
The trouble is when those kids age out of school. What happens next? They're not "educated" and they're not motivated to do anything - we're talking about the disruptive, not the "bored and would benefit from being in an advanced class" or "would prefer to be doing a practical subject", we're talking about "doesn't want to be here, doesn't want to do anything, has no ambitions beyond hanging around with their mates, playing games, and doing weed/minor recreational drugs/drinking".
They're not employable, they're not interested in bettering themselves, and eventually they do become society's problem by ending up in jail.
*Some* kids who do drop out *do* benefit from programmes like this one https://www.education.ie/en/Learners/Information/Youthreach. They are the ones who perhaps have psychological/learning difficulties and need more support, are from homes where they are not getting support, or just need a different direction to steer themselves. Their parents want to help them, they want to get on.
But there is the hard core remnant of "don't want to do anything" and those are the ones ending up in petty crime or lifetime social welfare dependency, and what do you do with those? That's the enduring problem.
There are two or three (at least) BIG HUGE MAJOR problems that occur to me.
(1) What is education/what are schools for?
We seem to have decided the answer to that is "Turning out workers", particularly in the shiny new STEM fields where all the jobs are. Secondarily to that, we've also decided that schools are where you park the kids so parents can go to work and the kids are not wandering the streets getting into trouble. Any school that has an identifiable uniform, yes you *will* get people phoning the headmaster to complain "I saw a bunch of your students hanging around on the streets at lunchtime!" even if the kids are not doing anything or are just being ordinarily rowdy of the usual nature - not breaking windows etc. It happened at the school where I worked. This encourages schools to keep the kids corralled in, since members of the public whinging about "why aren't the kids in school?" and maybe going to the local media to whinge publicly are going to get your school a bad name. And a bad name is enough excuse to hang the dog.
"Turning out STEM workers who can all get shiny jobs in the shiny Dublin-based multinationals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Docks" is, of course, going to leave some children behind in the dust. This leads on to the second problem.
But first, a personal anecdote! I have an Arts Nephew and a Science Nephew. Neither one is demonstrably more smart than the other, though if you gave the maths-based type of IQ test to my Arts Nephew he'd probably do worse on it (like myself Arts Nephew struggles with numbers etc.)
I have to apologise in advance here, Arts Nephew also wants to go into journalism and has completed his degree in English and is doing various gigs for student newpaper, etc. Funnily enough, he also does a lot of graphic design work even though he has no formal training in that. Talent will out!
Science Nephew is still completing his undergraduate degree in Galway and by all accounts is doing really well. Now, when he goes looking for a job, he'll probably get something in the shiny new STEM fields. By the metric of what education/schooling is supposed to achieve, he is VALUABLE in a way Arts Nephew is not.
Phooey, say I, my darling nephews are both equally valuable. But society's judgement is that Arts Nephew would be better off if he had tried going into STEM and if he couldn't hack it there, then an honest cleaning toilets would be better. I have no disagreement that working as a janitor is an honest, valuable to society job, but the idea is that Science Nephew who may get a job working in a cubicle for the Silicon Docks lot is better, in some real sense, than Arts Nephew doing a gig for the Dublin Literary Festival. Maybe so, maybe not. But you can't shove Arts Nephew into the round hole of STEM, so what are you going to do with him?
(2) Our education system is a "one size fits all" solution, grappling and often failing with "how do you make sure everyone is getting a basic and comparable education" and "how do you deal with issues of inequality relating to socio-economic class, race (now becoming a genuine question in Ireland), and intellectual ability as well as physical/mental disabilities?"
Mainstreaming is the preferred solution to make sure the rising tide lifts all boats. This is a "yes, but" solution. (Okay, need to break off here as I'm cooking the mid-day meal and I need to attend to the kitchen, I will be back to complete this in a bit).
The "yes" part is because when streaming by ability/technical schools/special schools were where children were divided off, to be blunt, they acted as dumping grounds. Plonk them in there and forget about them.
The stigma over technical as contrasted with academic education existed in my day, a threat often used by parents for bad grades was "you'll have to go to the technical school instead". I don't think that stigma has faded and indeed, with the push from governments themselves to get everyone going to college (because 'studies prove having a degree means higher earnings over your lifetime' and because white-collar/knowledge economy jobs are where the last bastion of full-time, permanent, pensionable employment resides) I think it has only increased. Sure, a plumber may make good money as an independent tradesman, but parents want Johnny to be a doctor, not a plumber. Even where Johnny's father is a plumber, having a doctor in the family is a big boost to social standing. Though it often is that where Johnny's (or Susie's! this works for girls too!) dad is an electrician or plumber or other tradesman, they're happy for Johnny or Susie to follow in the family footsteps.
So mainstreaming theoretically avoids all this - nobody is singled out as "destined for the scrapheap" from the age of six/eleven/fifteen on. Again, personal anecdote: in my day, dyslexia was not a thing many people, even schools, were familiar with. If you were not doing well in class, this was because you were stupid and you had to live with that label from then on. So the investment in Special Needs Assistants, child psychology services, and things like "hey if the kid literally cannot read the text they can't learn the stuff" realisations are a boon and a godsend.
Here comes the "but".
But when you're trying to do a "one size fits all" curriculum and classroom, you will have a few very bright kids bored to tears and a few slower kids struggling even with the normed-to-the-average material. That's not even considering the physically and mentally additional needs kids, the kids with psychological issues, the kids with shitty home lives issues, and the small but persistent percentage of bad seeds.
Squaring that circle so the bright kids get enriched classes, the slower kids (who may just be bad at one particular subject but okay on others) get extra support, and the rest of the kids with needs get their appropriate levels of support costs money and political will. Nobody wants to raise taxes and the public don't want their taxes raised. So money is always, always, always an issue.
The problem of the bad seeds, who will do nothing even with all the support in the world, is another one. These are the kids who will deliberately disrupt classes, bully others, don't want to be in school but also don't want to be in any kind of training and, let's be frank, *are* headed down the school-to-prison pipeline. Law says everyone is entitled to an education, so they get passed around from school to school - if you ever eventually do get permitted to expel them - like a hot potato and end up in the worst-disadvantaged schools which *have* to take them. A student body selected for trouble-makers is going to be a lot of problems. I'll spare you the rant about bleeding-hearts because long-time readers have heard it all before from me.
Not that great, for a lot of reasons, and here is where I re-iterated that SCHOOLS ARE NOT HOMES AND SHOULD NOT BE REQUIRED TO BE HOMES.
If schools have to run breakfast clubs because the kids will not be fed otherwise, then that is not a problem for the schools and is not the purview of education. If parents have to be in at work at eight in the morning and will not be able to collect the kids until six or seven at night, that is not a reason for schools to provide babysitting/childminding services.
But the expectations and demands have stretched so that schools and teachers are increasingly being expected to teach children and provide children with what parents should be teaching and providing for them (how to be a good citizen, how to manage life such as cooking, paying bills, tax, etc.) That does not leave much time for the rest of it when it comes to teaching.
Things like Common Core and so on are attempts at standardisation so that you can measure outcomes and make judgements of success or failure. You need to be able to tell if a kid in a school in Alabama is getting the same basic education as a kid in a school in the Bronx. Or if a kid from school A in Alabama is getting the same education as a kid in school B in Alabama. Are the exam results comparable? Does school A hand out As and Bs like snuff at a wake and does school B mark hard so that a C there is the equivalent of an A from the first school?
The problems with such an approach, you all know, not least the "payment by results means teaching to the test and grinding for passing the arbitrary markers, not actual teaching".
Once again, personal experience. Despite what I said about mainstreaming, in practice there is a local hierarchy. The four secondary (high) schools in my town are definitely ranked from highest to lowest. The school where I worked (for a while) was *not* the one a neighbour's child attended where they got a golf scholarship to an American college and then internships for an American Congressman and an American Senator.
It did have a vocational rather than purely academic bent, and ran three versions of the Leaving Certificate:
(1) Established or Standard Leaving Certificate - this is the pure academic level one for most schools, the exam that gives you points for entry to college courses
(2) Leaving Certificate Vocational Programme - an intermediate level one which adds in practical modules as well as the academic test subjects. "Ireland's Leaving Certificate Vocational Programme (LCVP) is a Leaving Certificate with a strong vocational aspect.
The programme consists of Leaving Certificate subjects, together with three compulsory link modules on enterprise education, preparation for work and work experience. Students must take at least 5 Leaving Certificate subjects, one of which must be Irish and a continental language or vocational language module." This will also give you points for college entry.
(3) Leaving Certificate Applied - the lowest level and least academic. It would be unfair to say it's for no-hopers, someone who is strongly oriented towards practical subjects could do well in this and enter on an apprenticeship (one year one of our students got an apprenticeship to the ESB, the national electricity generation and supply semi-state organisation. You don't just walk into one of those and our principal was as pleased as a dog with two tails. But yeah, it can also be "where you park the kids until they're legally old enough to leave and you don't want them to drop out early".
"The Leaving Certificate Applied is a distinct, self-contained two-year Leaving Certificate programme aimed at preparing students for adult and working life.
The programme sets out to recognise the talents of all students and to provide opportunities for developing personal responsibility, self-esteem and self-knowledge. The programme focuses on the talents of each student and helps students apply what they learn to the real world."
We had a fair supply of kids with problems: broken homes, psychological difficulties, learning difficulties, etc. This is because of the sorting effect - the better students go to the other schools, the ones remaining go to ours.
So yes: liaising with social workers, Breakfast Club, Behaviour Support Classroom (a room where you supervise the kids who have been kicked out of the ordinary classroom for troublemaking until they cool off), Home School Community Liaison scheme (to support parents and get parents involved. Some parents are willing but have low literacy, left school early themselves, or have trouble home lives. They want their kids to do better, stay in school, get educated. This is to help them), other supports.
And yet there are still those who fall through the cracks.
For those who do drop out early, there is a final programme: "The Youthreach programme provides two years integrated education, training and work experience for unemployed early school leavers without any qualifications or vocational training who are between 15 and 20 years of age."
This is the final sorting of the sheep and the goats. The kids who couldn't hack it in school and who have problems severe enough to need a lot of support end up here. Some of them do well, they get the help and individual support they needed, and they go on to something - steered to job training, mental health services, something. Some few still fall out even with all the help because of some weakness or problem too great to overcome.
It's been very strange how the jobs I have gone into have enabled me to track one such person: from struggling in school, to dropping out, to falling out of that programme by (it's an old-fashioned phrase but the only one that fits) ending up in bad company and picking up a drug habit, to becoming a single mother on welfare (repeating the pattern of her own mother) and applying for social housing, to getting into a row at a house party (drink and drugs involved of course), stabbing another woman in the stomach, and ending up with a jail sentence.
What is the educational system to do there? What is the role of the school in such a life?
The final ones are the bad seeds. Not necessarily stupid, some can be very clever. These are the ones who don't care and don't want to care. These are the ones who learn the rules so they can game the system when engaging with social services for the rest of their lives, if they don't end up in prison.
And at the end of all this, I don't have any solution. It's one thing to identify (for example) the dangers of AI and set up various foundations, research facilities, and projects to investigate and solve that problem. You're starting clear and fresh on a green-field site.
The school system is not like that. As I said, we're all travelling in a vehicle and tinkering with the engine, unbolting parts and bolting on others, throwing bits away, trying new fuels - and then we wonder why it broke down half-way there and we never got to our destination.
Throwing more money at the problem isn't the solution, even though money is desperately needed. The problem of the school system is a problem of society as a whole and will only be "solved" if we can all somehow agree on "what is the purpose of education? what best supports a range of abilities? is crying 'racism' any damn good at all? do we need to dismantle our economic system so we are not treating adults and children as cogs in the machine?" and what to do about it all.
I mention racism because the American context is plainly very much different from the Irish one, and trendy nonsense such as declaring white privilege (which is a label rapidly acquiring the implications of "white supremacy" as well) is when parents read to their kids so that is why black pupils don't do as well as white pupils so we must do away with things like "tests" and "there is a right and a wrong answer to a maths problem" in order that All Shall Have Prizes is NOT the solution. Ireland is still majority white so the disparate outcomes can't be explained by neat "systemic racism" mantras.
"Squaring that circle so the bright kids get enriched classes, the slower kids (who may just be bad at one particular subject but okay on others) get extra support, and the rest of the kids with needs get their appropriate levels of support costs money and political will. "
Political will, maybe. But I'm not sure it has to cost much money, as long as the individual school has hundreds rather than tens of students. Having five classrooms, of which one is for the students good at math, three for the average, and one for the really hopeless, takes the same number of rooms and teachers as five classrooms all teaching the same thing to a random mix of students. Letting the one student to whom the high end class is still too low sit in the school library reading a book on math or something else that interests him costs nothing, assuming the school has a library and a librarian.
I'd mildly demur in that for the really bright students you are going to need teachers on top of the subject. It's easier to get teachers who can teach the three average classes. And ditto for the less able students, teaching kids who may have learning disabilities or may not be able to get one particular subject needs some extra strategies than simply teaching the maths. Again, it's easier to get a teacher who can teach the majority of average students, just let the bad students sit there and behave, and ignore the bright student.
And of course, there is always the pressure from parents who don't want to believe Johnny or Susie is bad at this subject, no, it's the mean teacher who is picking on them and has it in for them. Sometimes there *is* a mean teacher picking on the kid. Sometimes not. We seem to be putting our eggs in the basket of "anyone and everyone can be brought up to a certain level, just apply some Grit (copyright Duckworth) and Engaged Teachers and a sprinkle of Diversity Inclusiveness Tolerance" and that is just not so.
"Disruptive" very often equates to "has untreated learning difficulties or mental health issues." So locking them away seems bad. But they would benefit from teachers who are trained to help their specific issues. Often doing this effectively is going to require much smaller class sizes, which comes back to money
Negative externalities afflicted by disruptive students is, I think, the most insidious harm that has resulted in the US from the reification of education and of the worldview expressed in the statement (not the law) of "no child left behind".
Some kids are just bad eggs. That's not say they couldn't eventually become good eggs. But while they're rotten, they really stink up the joint. The New York Times narrative is that taking bad eggs out of the standard class disproportionately affects minorities and is therefore discriminatory and evil. But some of those other thirty kids in the class are also underprivileged, and they aren't benefitting from the bad egg's presence, either.
Will the bad egg do worse while suspended or in a class of other bad eggs? Probably! If you're the parent of that pungent ovoid, who is, of course, just misunderstood, and just needs to be treated with patience and understanding, and is medically certified as needing six warnings before being disciplined, you will object! You will fight for his *right* to be in the same class as everyone else. With persistence, you will win.
This doesn't just apply to bad eggs, but to kind-spirited special needs kids whose parents want them to have the "authentic high school experience", even though the kid might be functioning at a first grade level. Parents, backed by medical documentation and well-intentioned laws, can insist that their child be allowed to "participate" in the regular class, and be praised and graded as though they had some idea of what the course is about. The result is a kind of "education theater" that forces regular classrooms to also act as make-a-wish fulfillment centers.
It's not like I have anything against those kids. In a perfect world, they and their parents should get their wishes. But in our world, the externalities are real and substantial.
Until we find a way to reconcile the needs of the many with the needs of the few -- to reject the idea that my child has a right to be in the class with your child, even if my child brings your child down -- it's going to be very difficult to bring the waterline very far above "not always terrible."
The trends seem to be against this. A lot of school reform activism, especially in major cities, seems to be about my right to put my kid next to your kid, even if we don't describe it in those terms. I would say that I don't want my kid to face barriers to being in the good school. What I might not say -- and might not even realize -- is that most of what makes that school "good" in the statistics is the kids who already go there.
This comment really rings true. The amount of paperwork and parent meetings that go into accommodating special needs students requires a considerable amount of extra time from teachers and presents additional challenges when planning classes. Some students' individual plans require that you create practically entirely separate syllabi and assignments for them in addition to maintaining near-constant contact with the parents. When you have 150-200 students and maybe 1/3 of those students are on an accommodations plan of some kind, the extras add up. It would be much easier to just tell the parents that their students "aren't a good fit for the ideals of X Charter or Y private school or [even sometimes] public magnet Z" and send them back to the neighborhood public school.
It's also true that all it takes is a small number of determined disruptive students (sometimes those armed with accommodations that make it extremely hard to discipline them) to wreck a whole class. I could normally use all the tricks of the trade to handle 2-3 disruptive students at a time, but some classes had 6 or 7 "known troublemakers" who were just too much for one teacher to consistently handle alongside 25-30 other students. The days in which those most-disruptive students were suspended were by far the most pleasant and productive for everyone in the class, especially the vast majority of students who actually wanted to be there and learn.
This latter point, I think, is far too often ignored in the education debates as beast@tanagra points out. It's incredibly unfair to the vast majority of students--of all ability levels!--who get subjected to foolishness by a small handful. And while I'm sure it definitely makes a difference for test scores (as Scott--who I regret pigeonholing as someone without classroom experience without doing due diligence!--points out in his post), it also has an enormous effect on the level of stress for students and teachers and the relative attractiveness of specific teaching jobs. When education reformers lament that the best teachers don't want to go to the worst schools and try to spin this as some kind of nefarious plot, a large part of it is just not wanting to deal with constant disruptions of all kinds that you don't have much power to stop as a teacher, especially when you're being evaluated on maintaining control of the classroom by admins who barely ever taught themselves (though that's a different fun topic of discussion).
Something between “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” and the perfectly efficient transistor would indeed be nice. Specifically, a system that gives exactly the additional incentive necessary to ensure people commit to higher-value professions, and no more. Or rather, that finds an equilibrium point at which the marginal cost of increasing the pay for a profession is not worth the marginal utility of increasing the chance that someone will choose to do it.
However, it’s important to note that today’s economy (and capitalism generally) is not only very far from that ideal case, but very far from the transistor, as well. The amount of money that flows to each individual corresponds to their power to demand that money. Merit is one type of power, which allows for some small demands. Vast existing wealth is a much greater power, which allows for much greater demands.
People without skills or existing wealth have almost no power, and thus are forced to accept minimum wage jobs which can’t even feed their families. Those who lack citizenship have even less, and can’t even command that. Of course, even poor and unskilled workers have power when working in concert to withhold labor, which is the point of union organizing. It corrects some of the power differential between owners and workers, getting closer to a truly efficient exchange.
Anyway, when we look at the drastically unequal wealth distribution, it’s hard to argue that it was created out of efficiency rather than these power differentials. So much of the time, in working to increase the power of workers and decrease the power of the very rich, we don’t even need to fight in the name of fairness. Even an actually efficient transistor would be an improvement.
Like I said, we could tax people who COULD have high-paying jobs, even if they don't actually take them, thus not having a marginal tax rate disincentivize them from taking it.
I don't think progressive marginal tax rates are the issue here. And taxing people based on their genetics or test scores, as you seem to be implying, sounds trivially easy to corrupt and/or creates super perverse incentives.
What are the "super perverse incentives" of taxing people by their genes? They can't change their genes, so there's nothing they can do to avoid taxes, and thus no deadweight loss.
I'm not a billionaire, so maybe I'm maximally boring, because "if you didn't defraud anyone or break any laws when you made your fortune, you 'deserve' it" appeals a lot to me.
It's not so much that I think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos "deserve" a gazillion dollars, and that a surgeon deserves much much less than a gazillion, but still a lot of dollars.
Rather, every time I buy something from Amazon, I implicitly decide Jeff Bezos deserves the tiny fraction of his gazillion dollars that's coming *from me*. I'm not judging the sum total, only my individual contribution. And since I don't want someone else telling me whether I can buy from Amazon, I extend the same courtesy to others.
If enough people choose the same way I do, it adds up, and if it happens to add up to a gazillion, then so be it (standard caveats about people being free from coercion apply).
Suppose I swear my everlasting fealty to you. I do so freely and in a sober mind, sincerely believing that your judgment is better than my own, indeed is so even in cases where I think there’s an exception to this.
Like other voluntary agreements, this is Pareto-improving at the margin: you get a vassal, I get what I consider to be better judgment than my native one - and (other than you, presumably) who is to say I am wrong?
One person does this and they’re weirdos, indeed marginally higher utility-weirdos so more power to them. It wouldn’t even be enforceable! Enough people start doing this it becomes quite enforceable.
Now I think the case for giving a dollar working this way is not as trivially easy as swearing fealty. (Indeed I think people should largely be able to enforceable give each other dollars, within limits, while there shouldn’t be an enforceable oaths of fealty, period.) If dollars could only be spent on personal consumption I would share the intuition that income inequality just doesn’t matter in se (though we could still support some redistribution to address absolute consumption deficits.) But the fact that dollars do lead to power basically forms the republican argument against accumulated economic inequality.
Bezos purchased a major paper with spare change, he runs countless warehouses where the “burrito test” is unpassed, and so on. This is where the Wilt Chamberlain argument, I believe, fails, even if there are some lucky individuals (like Chamberlain himself, I suppose) whose relatively innocuous enjoyment of obscene wealth doesn’t arouse such concern.
I think we're on similar pages here, but I'm trying to separate a moral judgement about how much money someone has from how they spend it. And I'm not really that worried about how Bezos (or other fantastically rich people) are spending their money. I hear mixed things about Amazon warehouses -- they certainly make some people miserable, others seem OK with them, and I haven't done enough research to have a well informed opinion of my own. I don't think owning the Washington Post confers that much power because legacy media is bleeding credibility. I blocked WaPo from my Google News feed after they doxed some random woman for what she wore to a random Halloween party some time back.
But maybe I'm just horribly, irresponsibly misinformed.
Incidentally, this is another reason to have some skepticism of "meritocracy in the good sense" of the most important positions being assigned to the most naturally capable people. Some important positions have negative value and produce more negative value the more competent the person is. A basically stupid and lazy person is oftentimes the least bad person you can have occupying a super-powerful position, and every criterion which a society uses for what it actually wants in a position (other than sheer luck) will serve as a criterion for ambition and cunning as well.
(Even Donald Trump, I believe, the obvious case of a stupid, lazy person who can do a lot of damage put in a high position, did significantly less damage than an equally cruel and unscrupulous but smart and ambitious person would have done.)
Obviously abolishing kings (or turning them into ceremonial monarchs, people who get gigantic houses for free to smile and wave and appear in tabloids or whatever) is better than just hoping that kings happen to be stupid and lazy. And there are many many cases where you do want capable people running things, to some approximation! (I am mildly in favor of sortition for legislatures, much less in favor of sortition for who should be hospital administrators, say.) But I also think that this is a cost of meritocracy, moreover a generalized one, since most powerful positions carry an element of it.
How do we know that Trump is actually stupid and lazy? (This is an honest question -- what evidence do we have of his levels of industriousness and/or of his IQ?)
Even if we discount that every Republican President has been derided by the US press as stupid since Ford, and lazy since Bush Jr, Trump had people from inside his own camps saying that he was easily distracted and unconcerned with nuance.
Yes, the world is just filled with stupid and lazy billionaires. I write device drivers for a mostly-obscure operating system. My manager doesn't care one whit about the root cause analysis of a priority inversion issue, but is Very concerned about whether or not my ship date is in jeopardy. Is he "a technical idiot" (no, he's not) or is his day concerned with different, equally complex, problems than is mine?
The laziness has been widely reported. For instance, here:
"One of the most closely guarded and worst-kept secrets of Donald Trump’s presidency is his extraordinary laziness. Despite efforts to project a manly ardor, the current leader of the free world spends most of his free time tweeting, calling friends, and watching Fox News. Of his 745 days in office, Trump has spent 222 days unwinding at Trump-branded properties and 168 days golfing. According to the testimony of numerous West Wing staffers, he struggles to focus in meetings, largely ignores intelligence briefings, and tunes out policy minutiae. Once, according to former White House aide Cliff Sims, Trump literally got up and wandered away while Paul Ryan was in the Oval Office attempting to explain the Republican health-care bill. While Ryan was still talking, Trump walked down the hall to his private dining room and turned on the TV."
This is why I never understood the left-wing complaint that Trump spent all of his time playing golf instead of presiding. If you're a Democrat who disagrees with Trump on everything, isn't Golfer-In-Chief Trump the optimal scenario barring a road to Damascus moment?
I feel you may be proving too much here, in that your argument for dollars behaving similarly to oaths feels like it ought to apply to trust as well. Trust, especially the trust of many people, also confers power, so why isn't it problematic that many more people trust Dr. Fauci about vaccines than the guy on the street corner with a sign?
It could be that this effect only matters at a certain level of inequality which wealth reaches but trust doesn't. But there is a lot of variance among people in terms of how many people are willing to listen to them, from those whose opinions never leave their immediate social group to celebrities whose words are read by millions. Using reach as an easier-to-measure proxy for trust, the most-followed Twitter accounts have on the order of 100 million followers, or six orders of magnitude more than Dunbar's Number.
Six orders of magnitude is, in fact, smaller than the wealth gap, but still seems large enough that these sorts of concerns might apply. And in some sense they do: there are wisdom-of-crowd type arguments to be made for the value of spreading trust among the populace instead of concentrating it. Information cascades and herding among pollsters are at least potentially related to a mis-allocation of trust.
Perhaps it's correct to bite the bullet and worry about trust inequality in the same manner as about wealth inequality. But I feel that, even after consideration of the downsides, many fewer people would find it reasonable to worry about the variance in how many people will listen to someone than the variance in how much money someone has, so I don't think this is the whole argument.
I think the correct answer is to bite the bullet and worry about the epistemic and political consequences of trust inequality, for precisely the reasons you mention.
Of course, you can't tax trust, or stop enforcing it. Off the top of my head I don't have any great solutions other than "uhh subsidize local newspapers or something??? change advertising/privacy law such that twitter is no longer profitable??? personally pay more attention to low-status weirdos???" (other issues beyond trust inequality are involved, but I feel *very* confident that twitter is indeed doing major epistemic harm.) but thinking about a problem naturally comes before coming to a tryable solution/mitigator to it.
The problem here is not any individual contribution or whether Bezos deserves it. Its also not a matter of moral or where he got his money from.
The Problem is, that someone with so much money has a real lot of economical and political power. Everyone who cares about liberty, civil rights and fair treatment for everyone should be able to see that this is a great risk. Everything could be fine, but this is just gambling. Like if you have a good king or dictator and everything is fine, or you have a bad one everything goes to hell. This is the main point in having democracy: divide the political power to a degree, that it doesn't matter if there are a few bad or crazy guys in between. So in political terms we figured it quite well, but in the economical sphere many people are blind on this eye.
So let's give all the gratitude for building a successful company al all the gratitude about your easy online shopping to Bezos, but does this have to give him so much power? I think we really need mechanisms in society that take care that no single group or person can get too much power, including economic power.
What about: nobody can have more than say 200 times the average wealth, the rest is taxed. Of cause we could pick a different number, it just have to give enough room for people getting rich (for what ever could be the benefits of having rich people in a society) but it has to give a limit before this gets dangerous because of too much power.
I know a lot of people worry that the ultra-rich have undue political power, but I don't actually see a lot of evidence of this in our current system. I'm not denying that money can buy political influence -- it definitely does -- but it seems to mostly be used in service of fairly specific regulatory capture, not to set up some Russian-style oligarchy, or to push some sweeping ideological agenda on an unwilling populace.
I think this is because democracy still works pretty well in the US, recent turmoil not withstanding, and lots of things other than money also confer power.
But I'll readily admit that my own ideological biases may blind me to the abuses you are worried about, so I'd appreciate it if you could provide some concrete examples to suggest that there is a systemic problem in the US context.
Almost as soon as I wrote this I thought to myself "How quick you are to forget about the financial crisis".
I'll admit that Wall Street challenges my view. Bailouts going as far back as the 1980s represent more than just "run-of-the-mill" regulatory capture, and I think it's probable that campaign donations and exorbitant speaking fees play a role. But groupthink is also important -- a lot of people throughout government seem to have really drunk the Wall Street kool-aid (which, admittedly, goes down a lot easier with a bag full of money).
I'm still not sure I see this generalizing to other very lucrative industries, though. It makes me think the money, while not unimportant, isn't decisive.
Also also, I could give you the common response that there would be less money in politics if political power wasn't worth so much damn money. You might respond that even if we start with a minimalist government, rich people will help politicians grow their power so that the rich people can use it to benefit themselves. But I'm not convinced this works without a bootleggers and Baptists dynamic. Corruptible politicians and powerful private interests also need sincere but naive do-gooders to provide cover for their schemes. Call it the devil's threesome of the progressive state.
"The Problem is, that someone with so much money has a real lot of economical and political power."
I think that's a feature, not a bug. It means that there are a bunch of people out there, with very different views, each of whom has enough resources so that he can try to push projects, political, economic, or scientific, that appeal to them. We are better off in a world with both the Koch Brothers and Soros than with neither. Musk gives us electric cars sooner than we would have gotten them, may give us global satellite internet, might even get to Mars.
I get your point. But couldn't this feature get improved a lot, if we had 1000 more people with 10 Millions each that could support different things (and have to team up for the very big issues) instead of one Bezos where it is pure luck if he is the person to do good, evil or just waist resources?
But you could also ask the people in a referendum, witch projects should be financed each year with the billions taxed in. I think this way more real problems would be solved and even if not, it was democratic.
1. It isn't pure luck. The ability to make a fortune is some evidence of competence, hence makes it more likely that, whatever he does, he will do well.
2. Democracy is a means, not an end. A much superior form of "government," when practical, is competitive dictatorship, the way we run restaurants and hotels. I have no vote on what is on the menu, an absolute vote on which restaurant I go to.
Or in other words, to me, "even if not, it was democratic" sounds like "even if sacrificing a virgin didn't bring rain, it was still what the gods commanded."
And I think if you try to imagine your referendum system in the real world, including the mechanism for solving whichever problems won the popularity contest, it is pretty obvious that it would work very badly. That, after all, is how we solved the drug problem. And the alcohol problem.
"I agree with jmk's critique - I briefly tried funner, more freeform lessons, failed, and then did more or less the same thing as everyone else."
This might be surprising, but I disagree with this critique. I've tried lots of 'freeform' teaching ideas and they've all gone over really well. I really think there is free value just lying around that teachers miss because they assume students will try to take advantage of them. This was at the college level but even for college students, professors mostly assume that students are looking to screw you over. This has never been my experience and when I give students more freedom, they have consistently used it to become more engaged, not to skip class or throw paper towels.
"The purely financial issues seem solvable; if the cost of public education is X, give kids who want charter schools a voucher for 0.75X, and donate the extra 0.25X to the public school system. The charter school will be fine with less money, and every kid who leaves for charter schools will make the public schools better instead of worse."
I don't think money is ever the bottleneck. I would rather go to a hole in the wall with a few very bright students and teachers than a top-of-the-line building full of overpaid psychopaths and dull peers.
There are multiple powerful filtering effects at play by the time you get to a college seminar room from your average urban public school 8th or 9th grade classroom. I have also taught at the collegiate level and there I've been able to do wonderful things with freeform classes, creative projects, and student-directed learning. Trying similar things at the secondary level just did not work, except in classes that had considerable selection effects (i.e. AP classes).
For what it's worth, I am a freewheeling high school teacher in a Title I school who never does anything because everyone else does unless it strikes me as a good idea. I teach mid-tier, not honors, kids in middle maths (A2, Trig, Precalc) and get kids who count on their fingers.
Teaching is a performance art, not a learned skill, although skills are involved. It's most akin to acting. However, it also has a cognitive aspect, particularly in terms of developing your own lessons. Not "smart" = "smarter lessons" but "smart" = "better able to assess group ability and build lessons that will work for the room." (In Japan, you'd have to do some interesting work to get kids willing to step out and explore, like putting down breadcrumbs.)
You know, I think you're right that teaching is vaudeville. I never made that connection but I have a background in theatre, maybe that's why I have more success with alternative approaches than others do.
Maybe I'm a naive idiot, but I feel like there is totally a common ground between you, Freddie, charter schools, kids, parents, Bryan Caplan and generalized school reformers that would give all of you mostly what you want, particularly in the "better total outcomes for kids" category. And I don't think it's that hard to imagine it, particularly since we have so many other examples in society of systems in different areas that overcome the issues (and the incentives that lead to them) that most of you all agree are bad and should be fixed.
Probably. I think my situation (guy with a blog) incentivizes me to focus on disagreements, philosophical principles, and what we would do in utopia. If Freddie, Bryan, me, Eva Mowskowitz, and Diane Ravitch were ever stuck in a room together and charged with fixing education, I feel like we could probably come up with an okay compromise solution.
I agree! So then, not to be a nagging killjoy, because these are fascinating philosophical discussions, but from an... "Effective Altruistic-Reform" perspective, shouldn't we spend a little more time trying to make that room a real room in the [insert state name here] capitol building? There are lots of smart people here and in education across the country who have really good ideas about this stuff, and then in parallel: school boards, administrators, mayors, governors who (seem to) have no idea any of those people exist, much less that they've said anything useful. Isn't that weird? I don't like the Ivory Tower metaphor all that much, but maybe in this case the Ivory tower should send a wee expeditionary force to (peacefully and via the democratic process) occupy the mayor/governor's mansion of a city or state and actually deploy some of these good ideas?
Man, Bryan Caplan's book is a big lie. Everything in it is dishonest. Any author who writes about ending public school without mentioning race is profoundly deceptive. (This is kind of a problem with deBoer's recommendations, too, but at least he's being honest about the real issue.)
And yes, I would consider there is zero common ground between all those. Most parents like public schools. Most parents object to charters. The parents who want charters want private school for free because they can't afford private. Generalized school reformers have just spent 16 years getting everything they wanted. Result: public rebellion, completely rollback of all their gains, and they're in total disarray.
" If Freddie, Bryan, me, Eva Mowskowitz, and Diane Ravitch were ever stuck in a room together and charged with fixing education, I feel like we could probably come up with an okay compromise solution."
No, you would not. Bryan is a fraud and a dilettante. Eva is a horrible person and to the extent she achieves anything it's first by selecting for compliant parents and then booting out any kids who won't be able to score well enough to meet their bragging rights. Diane Ravitch is a useless ideologue. And you haven't shown much understanding of what's required to teach kids.
Start by accepting that American schools are working for the vast majority of kids. Add in that we need to stop defining "low test scores" as "failure". Stop treating the right to attend school as an absolute and create boundaries for both ability and behavior. Tell the feds or states to address those outside the boundaries.
That might be a starting point. But no, not you and Freddie (who I agree with on a lot) and Diane, much less the horrorshows of Caplan and Moskowitz.
"Most parents like public schools. Most parents object to charters."
You're going to back that up with data, right? And also give a reason why the kids and parents (even if we grant they are in the minority) who don't like their *specific* public school they are forced to attend, or who do like their *specific* charter school they chose to attend, are wrong and should have their choices/preferences ignored, and shouldn't be listened to if they have ideas about improving them?
Strangely, a lot of the brief recommendations you make, when you take a break from labelling people as morally bankrupt, are relatively similar to things that some of those morally bankrupt people also advocate.
"And also give a reason why the kids and parents (even if we grant they are in the minority) who don't like their *specific* public school they are forced to attend, or who do like their *specific* charter school they chose to attend, are wrong and should have their choices/preferences ignored, and shouldn't be listened to if they have ideas about improving them?"
Pretty sure I said no such thing. As for ignoring their choices or preferences, that's for their parents to decide. My own view is if you want private school pay for it.
I checked the link, and under school choice it says for general public 44% support charters, and 37% opposed, for parents it says 49% support, 32% oppose with 19% neither support or oppose. That doesn't seem like "most parents object to charters".
re: "Pretty sure I said no such thing" - fair enough. If you aren't advocating for shutting down charters, and you don't want to prevent people from trying to improve their public schools, then I retract it.
Also, I have to thank you for those poll stats, the part where they asked people the exact same question, but mentioned that Trump supported/opposed it, and measured the different reactions - was very interesting!
Arggh, my mistake in the earlier post. I meant public support. Obviously, as I wouldn't have linked in something denying my point! Sorry. Total brain fritz on my part.
Parents do show mild support for charters as a proposition. But the only ones who actively seek it are those who don't like their peer group and can't affford private, as I said. Which is obvious. If you look where charters are strong, it's in either inner cities or suburban areas with a high poverty population. It's also why charters are radically opposed in many areas by the same parents who probably said they support charters philosophically.
As for the poll, that's kind of linked to my earlier point: it's kind of shocking how few people will talk about charters without knowing what data is out there. I bet you thought there was more public support for charters before that poll.
"If you aren't advocating for shutting down charters, and you don't want to prevent people from trying to improve their public schools, then I retract it."
Oh, I advocate for shutting down charters. They're a waste of money. It's private school on the public dime and I oppose it. I don't care if people don't like their specific schools. They can move or pay for private. Or homeschool.
I don't even know what "stop trying people to improve their public schools" means. But people have the right to ask for change, and they do.
" I bet you thought there was more public support for charters before that poll."
I thought it was about 50/50, but the poll numbers I care about are "what do parents think about their specific public or charter school."
"Oh, I advocate for shutting down charters. They're a waste of money. It's private school on the public dime and I oppose it. I don't care if people don't like their specific schools. They can move or pay for private. Or homeschool."
Yeah, but that was precisely my assertion: that you are denying those people that choice. As you state above, a large chunk of people who use charters are in inner cities - I live in Cleveland, for example. A lot of the parents who choose charter schools around here don't have the resources to pay for private school (or even the taxes to support the public schools) and their public schools are so horrific (and their children treated so terribly) that I cannot in good conscience shut them down, and I don't think anyone else could look them in the eye and do it either, regardless of selection bias or gaming the lotteries.
Despite what everyone thinks, parents aren't schools' customers. The taxpayers are.
"A lot of the parents who choose charter schools around here don't have the resources to pay for private school (or even the taxes to support the public schools) and their public schools are so horrific (and their children treated so terribly) that I cannot in good conscience shut them down, and I don't think anyone else could look them in the eye and do it either, regardless of selection bias or gaming the lotteries."
I am absolutely certain that's untrue that the students are treated terribly as a general rule, unless you can demonstrate a lot of lawsuits. And then, hey! lawsuits. They'll be fixed. Otherwise, eh. But if parents think their kids are treated terribly, then they can pay for private. As for schools that are simply low achieving and have lots of students who don't care--which can lead to a dearth of functioning teachers--I'm sympathetic, but again, the solution until something comes along to fix those public schools is to move or pay for private. The solution is not to give those parents private school for free.
Responding to jmk789's comment, I'll point out that my high school didn't have bathroom passes and pretty much freely let people go whenever and the hallways did not devolve into total anarchy and chaos (although some students did occasionally cut classes). I see the general point, but there's quite a lot of freedom you can in fact give students without it getting out of hand (assuming you do it regularly - if it's a one-time thing there's a much higher risk of exploitation).
I don't think jmk789 was talking about high school with that example. He seemed to be referring to elementary school age kids. Having a hall/bathroom pass for high schoolers is probably not needed. Having one for nine year old kids seems a lot more reasonable.
Do these quotes sound like high schoolers to you?
> The moment the bell rings to begin class, the hands start to go up. Student A: “Mr. Alexander, I gotta go, BAD.” Student B: “Mr. A, I need to go to the bathroom.” Student C: “Can I please go to the bathroom please I really need to go it’s so bad”.
Um. Yes. They do. In fact, I have a rule in my classroom. If I'm lecturing, and you raise your hand and keep it up while I'm talking, and I call on you, and you ask to go to the bathroom, you won't be going to the bathroom for the entire class. So don't' raise your hand while I'm talking. And if you ask during work time, I better have seen you working or you won't go.
I don't use bathroom passes, and used to allow several students to go rather than one at a time. Our school put a stop to it, no doubt for the same reason other schools put a stop to it, which is fires and other forms of vandalism were happening, so they wanted to reduce the number of students out and about.
>In a completely utopian society I was building from the ground up, I would want a law that no child over (let’s say) 6 can be involuntarily confined anywhere, any more than any adult can. If a child wants to stay at home, they can stay at home. If they want to wander the streets, they can wander the streets.
This strikes me as the opinion of someone who's never parented a 6 year old before. Which isn't entirely unreasonable, as I had lots of highly unrealistic ideas about what parenting would be like until I had children.
This isn't to say that I don't think we impose too many restrictions on our children (I think most would be quite safe walking about on their own), but giving young children adult levels of freedom is asking for a lot of problems.
It is kind of a problem today. During the times when "we wandered around on our own from morning till night and nothing happened", often it was (a) because we lived in the country and there wasn't the same possibility of danger as living in the middle of a large city (b) there was informal supervision by neighbours and any passing adult who saw you.
I wouldn't mind a gang of six year olds playing in the street outside their homes. I'd be a little bit worried about a six year old wandering around the town on their own - at the very least, kids that age are the ones who run right out in front of cars.
I have never parented a six year old before. I do (sort of, it's complicated) live with a four-year-old. I don't think she's an especially reasonable person, but I think if we told her it was important to ask our permission before going anywhere, she would.
In fact - I'm not actually sure it's illegal for kids to leave their house without their parents' permission now? It all just seems to work on the honor system? I assume it would continue to work on the honor system in my utopia?
I don't know if it's illegal, but I think a parent would receive support from law enforcement if their child kept leaving home against their wishes.
The difficulties I was thinking of were related to more mundane activities. As a personal example, my 7yo's bedtime used to be 830-900, but after we noticed that he was regularly waking us up at 11 or later complaining about nightmares or an inability to sleep, we experimented with moving bedtime up to the draconian time to 7pm. It's almost completely eliminated all issues he was having getting to sleep and quite improved the quality of sleep that he gets.
This is something that has to be imposed upon him. Left to his own devices he'd watch TV or play outside until he collapsed from exhaustion at midnight. He needed an adult's perspective and intervention to get better sleep at night.
We also do stuff like confining all children to quarters for two hours a day (for naptime and to maintain the sanity of the parents), force our children to go to therapist/doctor's appointments even if they really don't want to, etc. All of which would appear to be "involuntary confinement" (though perhaps you had something more specific in mind when you wrote that sentence).
At the end of the day, I think that if parents are going to be held responsible for the safety and welfare of a child, they need to be allowed to impose restrictions on that child's behavior, if for no other reason than it can make their lives more convenient.
I imagine your proposal was more aimed at parents who force their kids to attend a school they hate, or play a sport they're not interested in, or go to a summer camp with people they don't like. I am completely on board with that sentiment; I think the most important job a parent has is caring for the emotional safety of their children. Parents need to be aggressive in removing their children from situations where the child is miserable, and seek out situations where the child can flourish.
That can be a difficult and exhausting task, especially if it means something like "take the child out of public school and start homeschooling them" and not all parents are going to have the same ability to meet those needs. But it's very, very important that we try as best we can.
No. The most important job a parent has is caring for the *physical* safety of their children. Physical safety is more important than emotional safety.
As to the summer camp: I get the feeling people have completely unrealistic expectations of what parents are capable of. Suppose the kid needs supervision during the summer vacation so his parents can work and, you know, feed the family and pay the bills. The only summer camp that's available has a bunch of kids the child doesn't like. Within those constraints, *of course* you send the kid to the summer camp.
On the flip side, my five year old has almost no inclination toward compliance at ALL. If I ask him to do something outside of 'stuff he's been heavily trained to obey on', he will completely ignore me much of the time. My three year old is far more compliant than he is.
Extrapolating from one (or a small number of similar children) is a parallel fallacy to the typical mind fallacy IMO. The diversity in child personality at 2 years of age seems enormous, and especially on compliance/agreeableness people seem to often underestimate that range.
Oh definitely, the variation in children is huge! Ultimately I think that is an argument in favor for what Scott is advocating: no more one size fits all solutions, allow kids and parents to make choices that are tailored to their individual needs.
It is absolutely illegal for kids to leave their house without parental permission, particularly if the kids are below a certain age. The parents are the ones charged.
If the four year old you sort of parent left the house while you were the only adult in the house, writing a blog post, and a cop found her, you'd have a whole bunch of hard questions to answer.
Under a certain age, if a child is spotted roaming the streets unaccompanied, the police will be called, the child will be picked up and returned home, and the parents will receive a visit from social services. Maybe not every time but this happened to a family my wife knows a few years ago. The child in question was nine.
Definitely shows that something has gone badly wrong with society. As long as a child was behaving themselves (i.e. not committing vandalism or causing trouble), walking the streets unaccompanied was entirely legal in the 1950s. Parental authorization was needed, of course.
What can we do as a practical matter to help young people escape institutionalized education?
One way we can help in a limited but practical way is to make more students aware of their ability to take a GED/High-School-Equivalency exam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Educational_Development) as a substitute for a high school diploma.
When I was a junior in high school, I somehow stumbled on information about this, passed the test, and without a second thought dropped out of high school to take charge of my own education in a microwave-burrito-friendly community college and then university. If more high school students were aware of this option, and that it's a fine option to take, the miserable ones among them could free themselves from it more quickly.
Any young students in your circle complaining about their lot in life? You'd be doing them a favor to make sure they're aware of this option.
Never. I went from the GED to my local community college to do all of the prereqs I needed to grease the chute for my application into the local university, which had (maybe still has) a sort of big-sister-school relationship with the community college. Once I had my BS, nobody in the job world ever expressed any interest in whether I had a high school diploma or not.
Side note: taking as many prereqs as I could at the community college was also much cheaper. And the quality of those classes was better than their equivalent 100/200-level classes at university (taught by community college profs in small classrooms, not harried grad students in university auditoriums).
I think there is an important debate to have about how to make community college better for everyone. Right now it does incredible work getting a small portion of students into college, and generally helps with class mobility with associate degrees (in some fields). And for committed students who aim to use it as a steppingstone to a 4-year degree, it is a financial and educational lifeline. But an enormous number of students who start CC don not complete the 2 years, and many accrue small debt for it. It is always an afterthought in the college funding debate, but really should be close to the center. All the wailing about Ivy League schools really obscures the college experience of the vast majority of Americans,
This is the cheat code to getting an incredibly cheap college education from pretty well thought of schools. Both the flagship public universities in my state have programs where they guarantee acceptance if you finish an associates degree at one of the state's community colleges with a 3.0 or better. A big part of the cost of college is room and board which you can save on by living with parents and tuition is much cheaper at CC.
And many places have programs where you can start taking local community college classes while in HS or as you did essentially finish HS early and start CC.
Funny how much of this discussion comes down to whether people like school or not.
I never liked it, and know a lot of people in the same boat. Then again, I know people that say it was the best part of their lives, many of whom weren't particularly popular or well liked.
But on the margins, I've little doubt it's better than the alternative. I have close family that teach in disadvantaged areas. There's a sizeable portion of the student body that are just happy to be somewhere where they aren't sexually abused.
Your theory for how we should reform education in a utopian society seems exactly that - utopian. I doubt that without monetary or legal incentives, most adults would get an education or do productive labor with their free time as opposed to wasting it away. But kids, people who neurologically have not developed the part of their brain responsible for long term self control? No fucking way. If we gave kids the choice of where to spend their time, at least 80% of them would just fuck off and play video games or sports or something. Not only would this lead to them not getting an education, but even if you believe school is useless educationally, it helps kids to internalize norms of self-control and obedience that are necessary for successfully functioning as an adult. I predict that your utopia would collapse within a generation.
How did people learn self-control and obedience before the development of the Prussian education system c. 1763, I wonder? Must have just been a bunch of savages who spent all day playing sticks and balls, I suppose.
Mostly they did hard labor in farm fields, where discipline was of the corporal variety and if you didn’t learn the lessons you starved to death. When you weren’t doing that you played at spears and arrows for the local strongman and either learned the rules or faced death by sharp object.
They didn't. Getting people to show up on time or sober and stay that way was *incredibly* difficult for early modern employers to do, even with significant amounts of coercion. It would be difficult to sustain a modern standard of living with these pre-cucked work habits, but on the other hand, I have to admire our ancestors for having more self-respect than most people today.
There's a lot of good history on this, but for literary satisfaction Thompson's "History of the English Working Class" is probably still the best place to start.
I would argue this was a big part of why slavery became so popular in the New World, because it created as system where even greater amounts (and more horrific methods) of coercion were considered acceptable.
Slavery was really inefficient at extracting labor from people. They did studies at the time where they compared the output of paid labor to slavery and there was a huge gap in productivity.
As other commenters have said, there were much lower levels of obedience/discipline of the kind being discussed here (and less demand for it). Reading through US history, the change produced by widespread public education is notable.
I'm confused why everybody thinks that schools were invented in Prussia in 1763.
Eton, for instance, was founded in 1440. Winchester was founded in 1382. The oldest extant school in Britain is the King's School in Canterbury which was founded in 597. I know next to nothing about the early centuries of those schools' histories, but I should imagine they had discipline there.
Scrap the focus on "kids": as both the former "bright" child and the present teacher, I can safely assume that the strict majority of *teenagers* would do next to nothing to learn stuff in Scott's ideal system.
Sure, it'd have been a blast for me, and maybe it'd even have helped me academically, but for most people I know this "utopian system" would have been an unmitigated disaster.
We have some evidence on that. Sudbury Valley School has been running on an unschooling model for quite a long time, and I don't think there is any evidence that most of the kids never learn anything. The only thing we made our kids learn was the multiplication tables, and they somehow managed to get pretty well educated.
Most kids like learning things. The trick is to let them learn things they want to learn instead of trying to force them to learn things they don't want to learn.
But families who enroll their kids in Sudbury Valley pay $10k/year for it (cheap for a private school, but still) and have to get them to Framingham. If it didn't seem to be going well, you'd presumably pull them out.
I add to what Julia already said that people getting their children into Sudbury schools are obviously invested in their education, and presumably primed them to like learning (I know plenty of families doing the very opposite).
Again, something of the sort would have been great for me, but most of my peers just had not the same curiosity or drive: let them be the majority in a similar place and I doubt the results will be as good. In these posts charter schools' success has been suggested being mostly the result of sample selection, I can't see how such a niche enterprise as democratic education could not be riddled with self-selection.
Plus, I'd say that there's plenty to be learnt that a kid just might not want to learn (say, math for many people or freaking number-of-days-in-a-specific-month for, me, I never bothered but I really should).
My kids like to learn, and often seem to enjoy learning from school as well as their own selected areas. That said, they are easily distracted and given a choice will spend far too much time watching TV and playing video games.
For my kids, who again, genuinely enjoy learning, I feel like this plan would require a significant reduction in the availability of entertainment/distractions.
I had the same thought. The review got me wondering is there any way to quantify improvements in social cohesion or solving coordination problems?
It’s often pointed out that schools were designed to create good, compliant industrial labor. But I think most people a century ago put equal or greater emphasis on schools creating *citizens*. The schools weren’t daycare; they were supposed to hammer all these grimy, illiterate immigrant kids into productive Americans who could get along. And at least for my family, it worked pretty well.
Before NYC made my grandparents go to school, kids in their tenement spent all day sewing buttons onto cards. NYC neighborhoods were fiefdoms of kinship networks and organized crime. I think this is the default if you don’t pry kids away from their families for a few hours per day and show them they’re part of another, bigger context. If you don’t give kids an alternate meritocracy to work with, it’s kinship networks and mafias all the way down.
School has been serving that function for 100 years. In the meantime, the country has been getting progressively more complex, diverse, and urbanized. Is it possible that we’re communicating and coordinating better than we possibly could have without compulsory schooling?
How much of the progress we made in the past 100 years has been because of the communal experience of school? Did we gain anything as a culture for all reading some of the same books and learning the same math? We harp on the failures of traditional school for women and minorities, but how much advancement for those groups is due to the exposure and opportunity school offers? School might be fundamentally traumatic on some level, but so is life. And to me it’s clear that building and preserving social cohesion and solving coordination problems actually demand considerable capacity for self-abnegation. If we’ve all been learning this in school and even subconsciously applying it, then the game we’ve been playing is not really about individual achievement.
I agree. I see the argument about letting kids do as they please as a complete abandonment of social cohesion in favor of the unfettered exploration of the self. This is already a huge problem in our society that leaves people lonely, anxious, and incapable of even imagining the potential for collective action. I really don't think that doing away with any kind of structured learning and socialization for kids is going to help. If nothing else school teaches kids that sometimes you need to do things that you don't find fun or useful, or cooperate with people you don't like, in order to get by in this world. In a libertarian utopia perhaps nobody would ever have to do anything they don't want to do but in actual reality people need to learn to temporarily put aside the self without throwing a tantrum or declaring themselves the victims of an abusive authoritarian system, whether that's for the purposes of social cohesion or group problem solving or just forcing yourself to complete the kinds of arbitrary tasks that are an inevitable part of being an adult human. Anybody who thinks they're oh so smart for refusing to do homework because they see it as pointless busywork is really missing an important lesson about putting up with the kinds of annoying shit that are going to be ever-present in adult life. Good luck telling your boss you refuse to finish that task because it's pointless, or telling your spouse you're not going to help them with something because it's pointless and you're too smart to bother. I actually loved DeBoer's book for the record, and I'm very critical of the idea of meritocracy, I just really don't have much patience for these arguments that boil down to "I was just too smart/wily/practical/self-directed/anti-authoritarian for school so therefore it's totally useless/abusive/cruel/counterproductive and I would have turned out better without it." Uh, really? If you were never once required to complete a lengthy task that you found boring and pointless, or cooperate with authority and peers in a group setting that has to enforce some level behavioral norms in order to function, or deal with people you find dull or objectionable or downright awful, would you really have the same life you have today?
As someone much smarter than me once said, "Life is suffering."
"If nothing else school teaches kids that sometimes you need to do things that you don't find fun or useful, or cooperate with people you don't like, in order to get by in this world."
So does more or less anything you want to do that involves cooperating with other people, of which you encounter a very large number without school inventing additional, and to you arbitrary, ones.
Your general argument seems to be "life in the real world requires doing X, Y, and Z. So we will lock kids away from the real world in an artificial environment we have created where we make them do things that will teach them about doing X, Y, and Z." Isn't a simpler solution to let them out into the real world where they will themselves discover the need and learn from it?
Your general argument seems to be "life in the real world requires doing X, Y, and Z. So we will lock kids away from the real world in an artificial environment we have created where we make them do things that will teach them about doing X, Y, and Z."
I’d say yes. The X, Y and Z of the modern world is considerably more complex than it was in most human societies of the past, much less whatever Homo sapiens evolved to handle. You’re operating at a global scale across language and cultural barriers. We also demand and actually achieve a level of personal freedom that’s probably unprecedented while doing this. It’s not like learning by doing, or most other aspects of life, involved any kind of personal choice for most of history.
School as we know it wasn’t imposed by some alien civilization; it was a natural response to reaching a certain scale, technology or diversity and having whatever came before break down. The world where we have to cooperate with others *in the specific way we do now* in turn grew out of having a supply of people trained to cooperate in a safe, low-stakes environment when they were six.
You can’t take a bunch of humans in a state of nature and expect them to achieve anything too complex. They’re not going to “figure it out”; the default for most of history was civilization remaining virtually unchanged for hundreds or even thousands of years. And that’s with a low population. I’m not sure in today’s world removing compulsory school for the majority wouldn’t lead to some kind of disaster, or at least a massive setback. We ought to appreciate that the world we’ve built on top of the modern education system probably facilitated a lot of advancement and an unprecedented level of autonomy as well.
You seem to have not noticed the second part of my post. Kids need to learn to navigate the modern world. The best way to do that is by doing things in the modern world, not by doing things in an artificial world designed to mimic the modern world.
I'm not sure, incidentally, that the amount of knowledge needed to function in the modern world is larger than in the past. It's different, of course. But in some ways we have it much easier. My guess is that either riding a bike or driving a car requires less skill than riding a horse, not more, and being employed in a firm may well require less skill than peasant farming. Cooking in a kitchen over a stove is easier than cooking over a fire.
David, I notice a theme in your posts, which is that you make incredibly reasonable points that do not apply to a large portion of society. Your family is weird. Your parenting methods are weird. Great weird! But really far outside normal, I think.
You say stuff like "cooperating with other people, of which you encounter a very large number without school..." And I think you're probably misunderstanding the state of the world. There are many layers to this, including socioeconomic class, culture, innate intelligence, family values, and probably the simple passage of time. The life of an under-parented child is quite different today than it was in your youth, your kids' youth, or mine for that matter. "Learn to navigate the modern world" sometimes stops at microwaving a literal or metaphorical burrito. Encountering people outside school and learning to cook are more unusual things than you make them out to be.
I think we as a society can and should aim to provide a higher floor, which is where I agree with Freddie. I do also however agree with you & Scott that we can and should do better than the current system in terms of squashing the innate desire to learn.
I did notice the second part of your post. Seeing your follow up, it's clear we have different ideas about what "the modern world" means and what things we do today are "difficult" vs "easy".
It's not necessarily that you need more net knowledge and skill as an individual to navigate the modern world; forest-dwelling hunter gatherers have encyclopedic knowledge of their environment and how to use its resources. But I think hunter gatherers, like most people throughout history, still have less complexity to manage because with very few exceptions *they know everyone around them*, and almost everyone they meet is an expert in the same things they are. This dramatically reduces certain kinds of mental and social labor. It probably makes living in the rainforest possible at all. There is almost nothing for you to do but survive and transmit the knowledge that let you do it to the next generation.
But since industrialization and the resultant dramatic upshot in urbanization, a majority of people encounter a sea of strangers every time they leave the house, each of whom might present a new set of unknown challenges. Your desk job may not require more total knowledge than peasant farming, but you will need to coordinate with lots of different people, many of whom you barely know if at all, and about things of which you know virtually nothing.
These people may come from different cultures and many may not be operating in their native language. Together you are trying to perform one function out of thousands toward the goal of building or maintaining something that might be so vast no single person could possibly understand it even at the most basic level. This is fairly new stuff for human beings in general.
You are also in a position to mess things up for large numbers of people you've never met for reasons that might be inscrutable to you. If you're a bad hunter-gatherer or a bad farmer, you hurt yourself, your family or at most your village. The modern world involves far more thinking at scale and putting trust in people and processes that might be totally alien to you. And I think doing that requires, or is at least facilitated by, formal schooling.
You can't put a kid on the floor of a Boeing factory who doesn't have a certain foundation of knowledge and skill. He has to be able to read, write, do a certain level of math, follow instructions and, above all, understand his own role. He has to trust instructions given to him by authorities with expertise that might be completely beyond him. He has to do his job with the understanding that if he deviates, he may cause serious problems for large numbers of people he has never met, and possibly even cause a plane crash. At the same time, you want him to be smart and educated enough to spot a fault in the process. I personally would much rather have my airplanes built by someone who spent years building knowledge and developing their judgement in the low-stakes environment of school before getting into aeronautics.
If you expect a kid to just drop into "the real world" and learn these things as they go, your civilization probably does not build airplanes, or microchips, or global logistics, or anything very complex at all. I think we have been able to get as complex as we have because of the innovation of compulsory school. I doubt we'd be having this conversation on the internet if 100 years worth of assorted random people didn't pass through formal education and provide the workforce required to make this computer and all the networks it exploits.
If you make it the job of people in complex organizations who build complex things to also provide the basics for anyone who wants to participate, you create a massive burden on those systems. Maybe you still build airplanes, but if your workforce requires the equivalent of a decade of training before it can do any meaningful work, I doubt it. In any case, your lunch will probably get eaten by somebody drawing their workforce from something like a school.
Specifically what children would do is follow the lead of the children slightly older than them, and so on, until you get to the discontinuities that happen with teens (who want nothing at all to do with those younger than them) and adults (who are busy with their duties in the working world). So you would have two groups, one doing whatever 12-13 year-olds thought was the best thing to be doing, and one doing whatever 17 year-olds thought was best. If we want to cut to the chase we could probably just ask them now what that would be.
>I think this is one reason institutions are so bad: they’re a one-size-fits-all solution to how you’re going to spend your day, and that size will be right for some people and wrong for others.
This sort of contrasts with the idea that "it's not what you're doing but who you're doing it with." In my experience, school was miserable in k-6 when we were all in general ed classrooms but in 7-12th grade once we were segregated into AP/Honors I overall enjoyed school. I wonder if you'd have enjoyed school if you were around mostly other high achieving students and the "moron shouting weird taunts" was always in some other classroom? So is it the structure or the other inmates that causes school to be like prisons?
I also think if you start letting parents pick schools, soon most of the segregation will be along lines that won't have long-term benefits to the kids or society. If you let parents pick schools, for most parents, the most important thing will be picking schools with the same religious/political ideology they have (don't believe in evolution, there's a charter school for you!). This clearly erodes educational quality but more importantly will ultimately loosen ties that bind communities together, erode citizenship, and increase partisanship. Instead, I'd rather have one public school big enough that it can segregate via IQ/Academic Achievement. Having the smartest athiest, catholic, muslim, protestant, mormon, democrat, republican,and libertarian student all in the same classroom is much better than having each of them off in their own charter school.
I know I have strong bias for preferring my own experience but to me this was ideal. We had around 75 kids in the top 10% all attending the same classes together. But importantly, there were kids of different races, religions, class, and politics all mingled together. We'd constantly have fierce debates as we'd have everything from marxist to environmental anarchist, to free market capitalist kids arguing with each other. But in the end of the day, because we spent 8 hours a day for 4+ years with each other, we were mostly friends (the moron shouting weird taunts isn't in AP/Honors classes). And that's a huge Civic benefit to traditional schooling.
> This sort of contrasts with the idea that "it's not what you're doing but who you're doing it with." In my experience, school was miserable in k-6 when we were all in general ed classrooms but in 7-12th grade once we were segregated into AP/Honors I overall enjoyed school.
I think you're onto something with this. My experience was similar: school was sort of boring and dreadful to me. But then I went to a summer program where I met a bunch of gifted/talented kids in the region, and even after I returned to my normal everything changed.
It wasn't that my school was different - it wasn't. But my outlook had shifted - I suddenly had a bunch of like-minded friends I could communicate with outside of school, and that made my whole experience much better.
I’m one of those people who liked school and hadn’t noted that I was tracked into gifted classes at six. In public school. I’m not sure I’ve met anyone tracked earlier than I was, and I’m sure that was key.
My support for public schooling is certainly informed by my own positive experiences off bring tracked into the gifted program at large schools starting in 1st grade. The way my district did things I was still in a normal classroom most of the time, but the gifted program allowed me to make those connections with other "smart" kids, which made everything else so much more tolerable.
"I wonder if you'd have enjoyed school if you were around mostly other high achieving students and the "moron shouting weird taunts" was always in some other classroom?"
I was in such a school, and was still bored most of the time.
Yes. What Scott describes is much worse than I experienced.
I remember one bully — who later became a friend of mine. One case of a physics teacher who insisted he was right and I was wrong, and was unwilling to respond to a straightforward proof of the contrary. But also a liberal social studies teacher who was perfectly happy to have me argue with his views, up to the point of showing that the (college level) textbook we were using was blatantly dishonest.
On the whole, the teachers were reasonably good and the social interaction not oppressive, although I was pretty much an outsider to it. But spending all that time sitting in class being bored when I could have been reading interesting books or having interesting arguments with my friends was still sufficiently bad so that I wanted something better for my children.
> In my experience, school was miserable in k-6 when we were all in general ed classrooms but in 7-12th grade once we were segregated into AP/Honors I overall enjoyed school.
My high school experience was miserable in 9th and 10th grades, and wonderful in 11th and 12th grades, exactly for this reason.
I think a lot of what people complain about regarding "meritocracy"/"jobs for smarter people pay better than jobs for less smart people, and the smarter people deserve the extra pay because of merit" is what you called credentialism back on SSC, and what I recall in Listen, Liberal being (very) briefly referred to as "valedictocracy". Rule by people of a specific educational background, who think they deserve to be there specifically because of that specific educational background. That smart people in some meaningful sense "should" rule over dumb people, as Oligopsony talked about. I think this fundamentally elides one of the fundamental purposes of democracy, which is referenced quite clearly in Federalist Paper No. 10:
>Those who hold, and those who are without property, have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a monied interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government.
It may very well be that high IQ people are "more important" to a good society than low IQ people - it also might very well be that creditors are "more important" to a good society than debtors. It is nonetheless fairly obvious to anybody with half a brain that letting creditors write all the laws will immediately result in the debtors getting absolutely screwed (and vice versa). One might (fairly) point out IQ isn't quite like creditor/debtor relations: a smart person has no particular class position. However, education is the actual metric we are actually using for all this, not literal IQ - there's a reason we roughly go after people for intentional deception in our education system, but nobody cares if you claim your IQ is 169 or 69 - and that sure as hell represents a defined class position.
An economist would say that creditors & debtors make mutually beneficial deals. Restricting creditors from offering certain deals will harm the debtors who would have benefited from them. Wiping away debt will help someone who's already in debt, but harm someone who can't borrow due to the risk of the debt being wiped out.
If that is indeed what economists say, then they are idiots. Creditors let run rampant would bring back debt slavery; debtors let run rampant would get all their debts removed. You can tell because this is exactly what both sides do: creditors attempt to create predatory loans that definitely don't benefit the victim (e.g. Mariner Finance's scheme where they send desperate people a quick check of $1200, throw in another $800 later, then wind up within a year suing them for over $3000 - hardly mutually beneficial, in my view), and there's currently a major movement in the USA to get a rather significant chunk of debt forgiven (admittedly, by the state paying it off).
It's also the view of the recipient, in this case, who said "It would have been cheaper for me to go out and borrow money from the mob."
What does it even matter if the loan is "mutually beneficial" in whatever annoying economist sense you mean? If you are being chased by an axe murderer, I live in a well-fortified bunker and am the only person around for miles, and I offer to let you hide in my bunker and/or to shoot the axe murderer, but if and only if you agree to become my slave for perpetuity, well that might very well be "mutually beneficial" for you, but there's a good reason no modern government will honor it.
If it's cheaper to borrow money from the mob, that indicates the mob is providing a service the above-ground economy is neglecting (or it's because they don't pay taxes).
It matters if it's mutually beneficial, because if that is the case then banning it makes people worse off rather than better. And the problem with permitting contracts extorted at gunpoint is that it incentivizes people to go around attacking people who don't want to be attacked, and then there's deadweight loss of those people trying to avoid said attacks rather than any consumer surplus. Whereas offering someone a loan is not an attack that people avoid, but instead something they seek out (even if they have to go to the mob).
There is a lot of space for something to be mutually beneficial. For example, here are two hypothetical cases:
Case A: A company gives this fellow a loan at 33% interest rate per annum. He proceeds to pay it over the course of the next year or two. Both parties benefit - the man gets the money he needs, and the company gets a rather serious return on its investment.
Case B: A company gives this fellow a loan that is supposedly at 33% interest per annum. Instead, however, within a year he is being dragged into court for 150% the value of the original loan (by various tricky fees snuck in the contract, including paying for their attorney despite being unable to afford one himself), despite having made several payments. The man got the money he needed, and the company gets an even bigger return on its investment.
In both case A and case B, the deal is """mutually beneficial""", but in case B the benefit is rather less mutual. It's fairly obvious that the creditor, in this case, would prefer case B - after all, that's exactly what they've done!
I'm not sure FdB would agree with me, but I regard myself as critical of meritocracy, yet I'm not really opposed either to:
"(1) "high-status jobs like 'surgeon' go to the most qualified applicant" or (2) "jobs for smarter people pay better than jobs for less smart people, and the smarter people deserve the extra pay because of merit"
I certainly think jobs should go to the most qualified applicant, at least in most cases. I don't think smarter people "deserve" extra pay, but until we can work out post scarcity utopia communism, I'm happy to pay them extra as a way of achieving adequate incentives etc.
So what do I mean when I say that I'm opposed to meritocracy? Well I take it that there's a cluster of positions and ideologies. The ideas in this cluster don't strictly entail each other, but they tend to go as a bloc. When I say "I dislike meritocracy" what I'm really saying is I dislike this bloc of ideas. Roughly, this bloc consists in:
A) Our absolute number one priority should be achieving equality of opportunity. This takes precedence over trying to ensure a comfortable life for those at the bottom.
B) People who fail simply didn't try hard enough. If they really wanted it they'd succeed.
C) The winners of the social competition , in virtue of being the winners, are well placed to govern us. They have smart ideas which mean they'll govern well.
D) It is possible to have a society with a strong degree of equality of opportunity without reducing differences in outcomes (c.f. the Gatsby curve for why this is wrong).
E) The answer to all social woes is education, education, education.
F) People who have managed to get a degree- or especially a postgraduate degree- deserve special respect in terms of their political views, moral credentials etc.
Michael Sandel discusses these ideas in his book "The Tyranny of Merit". I discuss Sandel's book here:
Defined as such, yes, I agree, but the converse requires acknowledging that some sizable fraction of people will never understand algebra and they reason they do not command high salaries is because they contribute scant economic value.
As we grow more data-driven, there's going to an increasing demand for Smart. Smart alone is not enough, but Smart is becoming more valuable, and Smart combined with other key attributes is really, really valuable.
Your post and the poster above suggesting we are using credentials in place of Smart, essentially allowing the elite write their own rules, really rings true.
On the other hand, from personal experience, I work with a really diverse workforce in terms of intelligence and economic status, and the lower IQ types are just...they aren't the breakthrough drivers. They obviously contribute a lot of value or else we wouldn't pay them, but they aren't worth what the Smart Kids are worth. The Smart Kids saved me millions of dollars last year. The Low IQ types let dozens of important functions lapse because they just didn't want to work, and the results deteriorated, and now we have to rebuild half our controls from scratch.
This doesn't mean they should be poor or we should deny them healthcare or we should let them sign NINJA loans...but, Good Lord, can we at least be honest about the intellectual capabilities of the majority of the American Population?
To follow up on the charter school lottery discussion, San Francisco's school choice offers an interesting datapoint. All the SF public schools are open to any resident and assignment is determined by lottery. Families from areas of town with historically low test scores get higher priority, so most very poor families can effectively chose any school in the district.
This program is currently in the process of being reworked, because the schools are still segregated. Highly sought-after schools have trouble recruiting poor black students. Some schools near low-income housing have special programs like Spanish or Mandarin, which are very popular with middle- and upper-class white and Asian families, but most of the black families chose the less competitive English programs at the same schools.
Choice alone is not sufficient. Developing programs that are more attractive to black families is key. And providing more support for students who don't have resources at home could help boost students' achievement.
"Highly sought-after schools have trouble recruiting poor black students."
This sounds like poor people/blacks don't want to go to the highly-sought after schools, rather than the schools having some subtle filter to exclude them. Do you think this is right? If so, why do you think the poor people/blacks are less interested?
Yes, I think that is right. In my experience, the schools and families would love to have more integration.
I think that some of it is simply cultural: white yuppies love the idea of their kids speaking multiple languages and I just don't know how popular that is among black families. I think another part of it is inertia: if none of your friends and neighbors have kids in the language or other special programs, you probably will be less excited about those. Thirdly, many families with resources are willing to drive across town everyday to have their kids in the "best" schools, while it seems like poor black families tend to send their kids to one of the closest schools. Finally, I think there is at least a perception that the special programs, especially the language immersion programs, require additional tutoring and other after-school help, which costs money.
(There is also the reverse problem, that white and Asian families are VERY reluctant to send their kids to majority-minority schools. Many people simply assume that programs that are mostly black and Hispanic are "bad" schools. In my experience, the students and teachers in those majority-minority classrooms can be excellent.)
As far as I know, the district has tried little or not at all to tackle these issues. Instead, they are restricting the number of schools each family can chose from, trying to engineer integration. I am cautiously optimistic of the new plan, but fear that the District is hamstrung by the fact that rich families can either (a) move to neighborhoods that increase their chance of getting the school they want or (b) attend private schools instead.
Without wanting to understate the seriousness of some kids valuing school as a refuge from their home life... that still doesn't say a lot about school:
The entire IQ/intelligence debate just makes me want to unplug the entire Internet. Almost everyone would agree that the cognitive, emotional, and psychogical substrate laid down during the prenatal period and infancy is determined by factors outside of your control, and that devastating genetic or environmental insults can completely alter the course of one's life.
But a small subset of the Internet has a set of psychological and ideological commitments that requires them to collapse this reasonable consensus into de facto genetic determinism, and no study is too small, no effect size too trivial, no heuristic or metric so flawed, that it won't get aggregated into multi-paragraph manifestos on the futility of social programs and the superiority of the genetic elite.
On the contrary, it's very interesting to see HBDers/hereditarianists galaxy brain themselves into thinking prenatal effects or epigenetics aren't real!
Ha! Like that guy said, epigenetics is much more boring than mild transgenerational effects (not to say those don't exist) and much more fundamental to understanding the *genetics* behind, well, whatever people say when they say stuff is "genetic". You'll learn more by studying epigenomic data than computing whatever correlations for whatever behavioral traits with a hundred confounders on the same British population, but I guess genetic mechanisms are just a liberal codeword for genetic denialism (as per that twitter dude).
The 'additive genetic effects' crowd can be funny too, for instance they publish papers that disprove the existence or effect of epistasis, much to the surprise of people who had been studying it for decades.
There is an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed once you start talking about reforming education at the high school level: sports.
From an academic perspective, dropping the Freshman-Sophomore-Junior-Senior paradigm wouldn't be a huge deal. You could group kids by different ages, let them move up based on aptitude rather than time served, knock yourself out.
But whatever system you discover that works best for learning will have a very, very hard time usurping the status quo, because of sports. There's a big overlap between parents who are heavily invested in their kids' academic success and those invested in their athletic success. So while it may be best to send junior to some hippie-dippy school where he can be self-actualized by studying his key interests of chemistry, bowling, music, and cooking, if that means he never gets a chance to play for his hometown football team, there are a lot of parents who will keep him at City High.
And really, shouldn't we want City High's football team to be a source of pride for the local community? Doesn't that help create social capital, particularly in the more rural parts of the country that desperately need it?
And if you're a hometown hero, are you going to want to take an apprenticeship at age 18, or are you going to want to keep playing ball with your buddies? And are we so sure the latter isn't a better pathway to happiness in the long-term?
Ideally the US would have more of a European-style system where sports clubs aren't tied to any one particular school. But we don't have that system, and to get there we'd have to tear down a lot of Chesterton fences.
My understanding is that this is also a main barrier to later high school start times - schools want to have daylight hours in the afternoon for sports practice.
As a high school teacher I believe that the issues brougth up by Scott and you others are valid. I have reasonably high hopes that they will be solved or at least go away. The three ways of getting to grips with the situation that I consider most likely is the following:
1. AGI or something reasonably close. One way or the other, the problem goes away.
2. Drastically longer lifespans permitting drastically larger investments in childrens upbringing. Some homeschooling families are pretty close to this situation right now but it is very far from something that can replace schools in general due to the considerations in the comments making up this post. I´m sceptical towards that a general rise in incomes would produce drastically more of this without changes since the salaries of teachers also rises.
3. Human genetical engineering, especially regarding intelligence. Maybe some molochian rat race would keep the misery alive and kicking but at least some part of the problem seems to be driven by our tries to handle the effects of the large individual differences. I belive that it probably will be easier to avoid low intellingence than to achieve high intelligence and that would compress the range and thereby ease some of the pressures.
My hopes for some kind of purely societal solution is really low. I went into teaching with my eyes open to this problem and 20 years of training, practise and reading have gotten my hopes down. No consideration rised in these two posts is new to me but several are unusually well articulated.
I don´t know if it makes a real difference for anyone other than myself and my conscience but at least most of my pupils seem to answer well toward openness about how school works and why it sucks. Just knowing how deeply unnatural the classroom setting and therefore the demands that follow from it are seem somewhat helpful to some (maybe half of them?).
If there was one single thing I would want us teachers to discuss it would be filtering on differences. If we (or the system) have tried something for long enough and someone persists in withering that should be considered a good reason to do things that otherwise are ruled out for system preserving reasons.
I am one of the people who enjoyed school and wrote a comment pushing back on the idea that schools are so abusive. Reflecting futher, I think I did this because I was feeling defensive -- I liked school, and I felt that Scott's "burn down the schools" attitude would lead to something I liked being taken away (from, say, an imaginary version of me that's growing up now, or from my hypothetical future kids). I'd guess other commenters were coming from the same place, too.
On one hand, this is kinda dumb. Scott's proposal isn't actually to burn down the schools, it's to have more school choice. If the resulting choices aren't as good, then I won't have to pick them. No one's proposing to take anything away from my hypothetical kids.
But on the other hand, I still think it's worth flagging this defensiveness -- and its origin in a disagreement on how bad schools are and for whom -- for a few reasons.
First, there's both an object-level issue here (what sorts of changes will improve schools?) and a meta-level issue (what sort of system should we set up for finding and implementing these changes?). People like Scott who think that schools are a terrible hellscape and people like me who personally enjoyed school can agree on the meta-level issue (more experimentation and school choice) regardless of our disagreement. But ironing out factual disagreements about how many kids feel severely abused in school could help make more rapid progress on the object-level issue of which changes schools should preferentially experiment with.
Second, there's a meta-meta-level question about how much we should be willing to risk destroying the current system in order to pursue marginal improvements. Some people think that more charter schools will result in massive disruptions to the current education ecosystem. If you think that the status quo is a hellscape that needs to be burned down, that might seem like a worthwhile risk to take. If you think that the status quo is basically good, then you might be more nervous about opening the door to school reforms.
Finally, I think this discussion could be lubricated by making it common knowledge that some people feel defensive about how good/bad their school was. Consider this sentence from above:
> The potential solutions are things like offering more sizes (more diverse types of schools), having the sizes stretch (free-range schools where you can work yourself into the right niche for you) or having people not spend 30,000 hours of the most vulnerable period of their life in an institution.
I was nodding along in total agreement for the first two-thirds of this sentence. But then I got to the last third, the 30,000-hours-in-an-institution part, and started feeling mad. And since I was feeling mad, I figured that I must actually disagree with Scott and started looking for reasons to disagree. But ultimately, there weren't any: I actually agree that people should have the option of not spending so much time in school; I just felt defensive about the framing of it and started reflexively looking for counterarguments. I think this is mirror to the way Scott was upset by DeBoer's line about getting kids out of empty homes, setting off an angry rant despite them agreeing on object-level things like letting kids leave school early. Stuff like this makes you feel like you disagree, even when you actually agree.
Err I guess I don't mean to imply that you necessarily did something wrong. I'm sure there's a delicate balance between upsetting people and saying anything at all. Certainly it would be awkward to hedge every sentence about your awful time in school with "But also lots of people had a great time in school and their lived experience is valuable as well" or whatever.
I just wanted to "call out" this dynamic as a whole, because it might being creating resistance to your ideas out of an emotional response to the tone rather than the substance.
Oddly enough, on reflection I would say that I enjoyed school _and_ feel like it was still definitely abusive in some ways? I'm lucky in that I was in general able to attend schools, and classes, where lots of actual learning happened, and I love learning. There was a lot of "meritocracy" involved in that -- first in private school, then in a public school that had significant academic tracking, so I was mostly in class with other strong students (and a separate "continuation school" sub-campus where they put the really problematic kids -- see https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/eo/ce/ .) Judging from the few classes I had that were _not_ academically tracked (e.g. health class), I would have been pretty miserable without tracking. In those classes, not much was learned, and behavior was worse. (I have the impression that anti-charter-school people tend to also be anti-tracking, which is scary to me.)
And there were still aspects of even my excellent school experience that were clearly abusive, most notably physical education (at both the private and public schools I attended.) As far as I can tell, the requirements for being a PE teacher are "really likes yelling at kids; always wanted to be a drill sergeant but couldn't cut it." It seems very standard for PE teachers to completely ignore students' differing ability levels, and punish students who are unable to do the assigned work by yelling at them for being lazy, and giving them more of it. (This may well be just as true of academic subjects, and I only avoided it by always being at the top of the ability curve, instead of the bottom!)
The enduring damage that PE class did to my mental health (and to some degree my physical health as a result -- a multi-decade aversion to exercise is not healthy!) honestly seems like getting off lightly, compared to some of the stories here.
The thing that makes the whole package abusive, IMO, is not so much that it sucks -- it's that, when it sucks, you're stuck with it. Whatever anybody wants to do to you -- be they staff, or for the most part other students -- they're going to do it, and you're going to take it. That's not a healthy environment, and it's not a healthy thing to teach children, EVEN IF mostly nothing bad happens in practice, but especially when it does.
(I now feel the need to clarify that I don't think exercise classes for kids are inherently abusive. So for a more specific example: I have a personal trainer now, as an adult. I had kind of a "lightbulb moment" the first time this happened: I was in the middle of an exercise, and I was struggling with it, and my form was starting to suffer, and he said something like: "you look like you're having trouble, why don't you stop there." Of course, I'm an adult, and I'm paying him, and he can't force me to exercise against my will. But it was still kind of startling. I can't EVER remember a PE teacher saying anything like that. If your form is bad, it's because you're lazy, which is solved through more exercise.)
+1 to "probably would have been miserable without tracking" and also to "PE teachers tend to have astonishingly similar personality types"
On the topic of PE, I think that PE class is super-valuable not so much for getting kids physically active, but for actually teaching them things that they'd never learn without it. Things like:
- how to throw a football/baseball/frisbee
- how to do a cartwheel
- some basic stretches
- what it feels like to run a mile
It really seems like if no one taught me some of these things when I was a kid in PE, I still wouldn't know some of them. So I guess I think that PE is actually one of the more educational classes you take in elementary/middle school.
I don't know the reason, but I don't think I learned much if any of that in school. My athletic progress consisted of ping-pong, done with my father in our basement, judo, done outside of school, archery, done in the summer, and, much later, SCA sword and shield fighting, the first athletic activity that I turned out to actually be good at.
My guess on what was happening is that the other kids did baseball and such for fun on their own time, so were naturally much better at it than I was. SCA combat was new for all of us — this was when when the Midwest branch was just getting started — and it turned out that I was physically strong and fast, things I had not realized in the context of PE.
I completely agree about tracking; I was very happy when my senior year came around and I was in enough special honors programs that I didn't actually have to set foot on campus at all. (Although it led to recurring mild nightmares about discovering that I couldn't graduate because of something I needed to do in "homeroom", and I had forgotten where that was because I never bothered to go.)
PE classes did help with things like first aid, hunter safety (i.e., how to handle a gun and how not to shoot your friends), and learning that I could train to run a 7-minute mile if I just ran a bit every day for a few months. But I'd have traded all of that for not getting beaten up as much. I suspect that anyone who feels differently simply hasn't been punched enough.
"(I have the impression that anti-charter-school people tend to also be anti-tracking, which is scary to me.)"
FWIW I'm pro tracking and anti charter (at least most of the charter models I've looked at). I've tried to separate these opinions from my very positive experiences as a heavily tracked public school kid, but no doubt that creates some bias.
"Student A takes off in the direction of the bathroom, but then decides to run up and down the hallways as fast as possible. Student B is off to visit her friend in in-school suspension and waves into the windows of other classrooms along the way, disrupting numerous other classes. Student C goes to the bathroom, but then decides that the paper towel dispensers seem like they’d be fun to tear off the wall and comes back to the classroom armed with plenty of wet crumpled paper towels to throw at other students. Students D and E, now that it’s clear Teacher Scott isn’t going to stop them, decide to ignore the amazing, engaging lesson Teacher Scott is trying to pitch to them and have wandered out of the classroom and are now engaging in some kind of inappropriate conduct in the stairwell."
Yes, that is absolutely what happens. There are also the kids that straggle in ten minutes late, the kids who go "Miss/Sir, I forgot my book, I need to go to my locker" and so forth. We have those two. The thing is, if you tell those students A, B and C they can't go to the bathroom, they are not going to sit quietly and learn. They will find some other way of being disruptive.
Possibly the difference is that American schools are so much larger and have so many more pupils. And of course you have the whole school shootings thing. So very strict harsh discipline is needed. But I went to school when you could be beaten with a stick by the teacher and we *still* didn't have anything like "bathroom passes":
"Research has found that 84% of second level schools use corporal punishment as a form of discipline. The most common method of corporal punishment used is the leather strap. Other methods include the cane, ruler, furniture legs, and tree branches."
I liked school. I wasn't bullied, but I didn't get the things out of it that are claimed to be benefits (socialisation, being a good 'team player' and so on). I drifted along happily in my own little world.
I'm fascinated that most (all?) of you seem to think that homework is of no benefit. Yeah, there's the problem of having to write English essays that the teacher obviously hasn't read, but by the same token it (a) enabled me to practice my handwriting (b) go over what I had learned in class so I could be sure that I understood it (c) learn and study what hadn't been gone over in class ("I want you all to read chapters 5-10"). Depending on the age level, three hours a night may be excessive, but no homework at all seems also the other extreme.
"Now I am asking the Seanad, in asking it to pass this motion, to put a stop to this at least in the case of little girls. Let us see if we cannot at least abolish all physical punishment for girls in our schools. This is 1956. The regulations were altered in 1946. Let the 1956 modification have as its aim to do away with the beating of our girls in our schools altogether. I should like to quote the views of a woman teacher, an enlightened educationist, in a most compelling article on discipline in schools, published in the Church of Ireland Gazette on February 17th, 1956, by Kathleen Heard, whom I do not know, but with whose ideas I find myself very much in sympathy.
She says: "A teacher must respect her pupils"—which seems to me to be a point that is often forgotten—"must respect them——"
"and show them that she does respect them. She must not first demand respect from them at the point of the bayonet, or with that attitude. When pupils see that she is worthy of respect they will give it.
"Obedience and good (?) discipline achieved by many rules and punishments will not, generally, last when schooldays are over, and I firmly believe that any corporal punishment, however mildly or reluctantly administered, is an evil thing. It is degrading to pupil and teacher. The weaker child will obey through fear and the ‘diehard' will always give trouble if forced to outward submission. He will take it out of those weaker than himself, and is all set to be a ‘juvenile delinquent' when he leaves.
"The ‘bend-over' type of discipline, canes, leather strap, rulers and the human fist, are all weapons of war. The race conquered by such means is naturally resentful. It is not a fair fight. The children are not armed."
We got the ruler and báta, the boys who went to the Christian Brothers got the strap, but I don't remember anyone getting "the human fist" although some teachers would throw the blackboard duster at you.
I was paddled in a US public school (60k population city in NC) as 9th grader in 1989. As far as I know corporal punishment kept on happening well past that time. It may still be legal but rare IDK. It was very common while I was in school.
It was, so far as I know, non-existent, not even thought of, in the private school I graduated from in 1961. But that was a private school run by the University of Chicago, so may not have been the norm even for private schools then.
Someone corners Evan one day, nowhere near school, and says "you were disrespectful in class" and pummels him. "Now shape up or next time will be worse."
Someone will want to say this is immoral. And maybe it is. But would it *work*?
Work in what sense? Work in the narrow sense of "Evan no longer misbehaves where his abusers can see?" Possibly, especially if the authorities are turning a blind eye and he has no choice but to obey or get beaten. Work in the sense of improving Evan's character, educational performance, or later life outcomes? I doubt it.
In fact, I would expect it to have the opposite effect, if Evan learns that it's acceptable to beat up people who are disrespectful to you (and that the authorities turn a blind eye to that sort of thing).
By the time we are in high school, I think we are long past "oh, the only reason Evan harasses other kids is because he *learned violence is the answer*."
People avoid pain. It's why, as described in Scott's essay, people would go to great lengths to avoid going to school where the bullies are.
I don't so much care that Evan becomes a better person. I do care that Evan stops bullying *other* kids and fucking up learning time for everyone.
"You were disrespectful" is pretty damn different from "You were bullying other kids," so maybe you should have said that you were specifically intending this as a way to deal with violent bullies rather than a backdoor way to implement corporal punishment.
But even then, if all you care about is keeping the bully from disrupting class and you don't care about his outcomes, then just expel him. Or suspend him. You know, the punishments that are specifically about removing a troublesome student from the school.
Also, the whole concept seems self-contradictory. I don't think "beat up Evan illegally when nobody is looking, thus demonstrating that the rules don't matter unless you can enforce them with the threat of violence" is going to make people *more* respectful of authority.
The English public school system, late 19th and early 20th century, had prefects, older boys with authority over younger boys. That may, in practice, have been an institutionalized version of what you describe.
> The thing is, if you tell those students A, B and C they can't go to the bathroom, they are not going to sit quietly and learn. They will find some other way of being disruptive.
I think some kids are always good and some kids are always bad, but most of us were somewhere in the middle depending on context and opportunity. At school there were plenty of hours when I sat and worked quietly, but then again there were also hours when I joined the rest of the class in tormenting some poor substitute teacher to see if we could get her to cry. Kids will act up, or not, depending on context and opportunity.
Regarding the selection effect discussion, it seems clear that charter schools do select for parents, and I would argue this is a good thing. An involved parent at a bad school can't really make an impact, but a school composed of involved parents can develop a culture of valuing learning and academic achievement. A situation where the average school is pretty bad but at least we can say everyone is treated equally is far from optimal. I think this is one of those situations where it's ok to sacrifice complete equality and let parents associate based on their priorities. The parents who want a good education for their kids can go find one, and the ones who don't care or don't have the and energy will get whatever is doable.
> Let him stand up for his kind of people, and I’ll stand up for mine, and hopefully we can figure out some kind of system that serves everybody.
You cannot, because there are at least two different distinct categories of students.
One category is like Scott: extremely intelligent and conscientious. If you stick a child like that in a nice community center with an unlimited library, his sparkling mind will expand into the study of science, math, history, music, and anything else, much faster than any teacher could keep up.
Another category is like me: average kids. If you stick someone like me in the same community center next to Scott, I'd alternate my time between running around doing nothing (or causing trouble), and reading science fiction all day. I know this, because that's what happened to me. Kids like me need *guided* instruction, with teachers who can patiently explain the material, and who can enforce student participation. Enforcement is sometimes ugly, but without it, some kids will never develop practical problem-solving skills -- the skills that simply come naturally to genius children.
Arguably, there's a third category of kids: those with mental (and/or physical) problems; and obviously they require custom-tailored solutions. However, I think maybe their existence is already implied in Scott's article and DeBoer's book, I'm not sure.
Sadly, one obvious solution to this problem is gating/warehousing/whatever you call it: separating the three categories of children, then applying different solutions to each. But this will probably never happen; at least, not officially, and not in America.
Bugmaster, I'm curious what your reaction is to Hiker's post just above about vocational school and someone else below speaking about GED then community college then whatever beyond. In other words, an education motivated by and focused around the pragmatic need to be able to live independently and earn a living at some point.
Did you dislike school but feel like it's the only system that would lead you to success and so whatever unhappiness it may have caused you was necessary to your desired outcome? Or did you like it just fine?
The utopian in me would like to believe that the "average" kids who would read science fiction all day would eventually with the right supports come around to a path that would lead them to be able to live on their own and pay the rent.
I am an extreme skeptic of the necessity of coercion in raising a human being, or that the instances when coercion are necessary are so fewer than we currently see such that we can't conceive of what the lower limit of it can be. (I'm not speaking about what it takes to run an orderly institution, more speaking about the individual)
Or there are people like me: smart kids with no self-discipline. If left to my own devices I'd have run around like a lunatic or talked to my friends all day. If required to apply myself to learning I'd learn nearly as readily and enthusiastically as someone like Scott. The difference is that I was not a self-directed kid with any level of discipline or judgment. I needed that structure from adults in order to learn anything. That's not the same thing as not being bright! Plenty of bright kids need help learning to sit still and apply themselves, but maybe those people are underrepresented on here and on the internet in general because they tend to be less introverted. The people who comment here are by and large very different from the average adult and were likely different from the average kid as well (even the average smart kid).
You are correct that this is a very non-random group of people, although I still observe a fair number who liked school. But my impression of "smart kids with no self-discipline" is that they can still get interested in things and put lots of time and energy into them, even teaching themselves some self-discipline in the process. The function of the educational system — in our context of home unschooling, mainly the parents — is to wave lots of interesting things in front of them and, when they bite on one of them, help and encourage them to pursue it.
I wonder how much of your view comes from observing bright kids who were persuaded by the school system that "self-discipline" meant doing boring things of no interest to them, hence that any time they still had to themselves should be spent playing video games.
Shenkin's memory of vocational schools is one thing that's really missing here. I went to a fairly bad (by educational, rather than ethical standards) high school that educated about two thousand students at a time. A lot of those kids had a bad attitude and didn't respond well to the seemingly-abstract demands of the education system. This is something that I think can happen both to students above average intelligence and ones slightly below average. I ended up graduating with a C average and not proceeding to college, which was probably the result of diagnosed and untreated ADHD (one thing that I think psychiatrists may be prone to overlooking is the different calculus that the parents of an ADHD patient might have to work through if one or both parents has a history of amphetamine abuse, and perhaps their greatest fear is their kid going down the same path. I don't think this was talked through very well by my child psychiatrist)
Late into my high school education I was referred to a partner program with a local community college that allowed high school students meeting some base requirements to attend vocational classes. There were classes in nursing, auto mechanics, welding, and computer networking (which is what I went for), among others. What surprised me was that a really good number of the kids attending these programs were the ones that I'd known as problem-students. Some aspect of this, in my opinion, was that auto mechanics and welding were compatible with an especially toxic masculinity common to rural america. Another, more important aspect, is that kids who've previously shown little interest in education might come around if there's a clear-cut path to skill attainment that will give them a career. The scale of this program was so small that I doubt it could have had much real impact on even the local scale, but it's easy to speculate that many of the students hit worst by the education system as it stands-- those with overly concrete expectations for education, little desire or ability to proceed through college, parents who have less enthusiasm for education, and other social risk factors-- would be the first to benefit from a vocational alt-education system.
I'd also like to hit on the philosophies of education that you described (especially the contrasting ones between Thiel and Rawls): whether you believe in education as prioritizing maximal attainment by any student, or as raising the floor for attainment by all students, the current education system has the same gaps, and in many cases the answers are so obvious that we can't assume that they aren't known to the system.
Education in mathematics at and above grade 6 is one especially egregious example: most students will have at least an anecdotal memory of being given test questions and having to memorize certain aspects of the material in order to pass the test. Most readers of this blog probably did above average-- I did well enough to buoy my grades despite tanking the homework assignments in every class. But this is a fairly awful way to teach mathematics, and everyone knows it. It is, however, a fairly good way to test for a specific form of forced memorization that can stand in as a proxy for a single aspect of IQ. I'd wager that if you took a good math test (ie, one that asks students to look at a few formulae and figure out how to apply those formulae to specific problems) and instead forced the students to memorize half of it before test day, that you could probably use those test results as a vague analog for IQ.
English classes' vocabulary tests, history classes' memorization requirements of dates and names, and countless other easy examples would suggest that American education does this constantly. It's as if the way that classes test for things isn't optimizing for their stated role (determining whether a student learned what the class was teaching them) but for another strange, implicit role of sorting students by IQ. You could probably conceptualize this as IQ 'covering' for failures in the design of the test, but I think there's more to it. I'd guess that schools are aware of their role in sorting societal winners from losers, in determining who gets the good jobs and the accolades. And they measure for innate ability so that the highest-IQ students are the ones who make it through.
This is well said: "kids who've previously shown little interest in education might come around if there's a clear-cut path to skill attainment that will give them a career."
This to me is a central issue, that school is a process built almost entirely on external motivation. For some extroverted kids or kids with unstable homes (I was one of those kids), school has compensatory benefits in terms of social life or stable reward systems.
But for an introverted kid who wants to find a path to economic security, the psychological cost of school all day every day is incredibly high and a maddeningly indirect route to the skills needed for almost any job.
We know that there's almost no amount of external motivation that can match the glory of internal motivation. It seems to me we could be doing so much better at helping kids find and listen to their internal motivation and building on it as earlier as possible. Instead, schools tend to beat internal motivation out of a child and replace it with this much paler substitute.
It's been a long time since we had a Chesterton quote, so here's one on education (or if you prefer, the trade of teaching).
We've been generally saying that schools are much more for the benefit of parents than of children, and here's G.K. describing a schoolmaster at his own school of St Paul's:
"It is time that something should be said about the masters, and especially the High Master. Immensely important as we thought ourselves in comparison with those remote but respectable enemies, after all they did have something to do with the school. The most eccentric and entertaining of them, Mr. Elam, has already been sketched in brilliant black and white by the pen of Mr. Compton Mackenzie. I have forgotten whether Mr. Mackenzie mentioned what always struck me as the most disturbing eccentricity of that eccentric; the open derision with which he spoke of his own profession and position, of those who shared it with him and even of those who were set over him in its exercise. He would explain the difference between satire and the bitterness of the risus sardonicus by the helpful parable, "If I were walking along the street and fell down in the mud, I should laugh a sardonic laugh. But if I were to see the High Master of this school fall down in the mud, I should laugh a sarcastic laugh." I chiefly mention his name here for another reason; because he once vented his scorn for what he called "the trade of an usher" in the form of a rhetorical question addressed to a boy: "Why are boys sent to school, Robinson?" Robinson, with downcast eyes and an air of offensive virtue, replied faintly, "To learn, sir." "No, boy, no," said the old gentleman wagging his head. "It was because one day at breakfast Mr. Robinson said to Mrs. Robinson, 'My dear, we must do something about that boy. He's a nuisance to me and he's a nuisance to you and he's a perfect plague to the servants.'" Then, with an indescribable extreme of grinding and grating contempt: "'So we'll Pay Some Man. . . .'"
And something a little lighter since we're toiling in the heavy mud of this entire topic:
"Frederick Walker, Head Master of Manchester and afterwards High Master of St. Paul's School, was, as most people know by this time, a very remarkable man. He was the sort of man who may live in anecdotes, like Dr. Johnson; indeed in some respects he was not unlike Dr. Johnson. He was like him in the startling volume of his voice, in his heavy face and figure, and in a certain tendency to explode at what did not seem to be exactly the appropriate moment; he would talk with perfect good humour and rationality and rend the roof over what seemed a trifle. In essential matters, however, his hard-hitting was generally quite right; and had even about it a homely and popular character, that somehow smacked of the north country. It is he of whom the famous tale is told that, when a fastidious lady wrote to ask him what was the social standing of the boys at his school, he replied, "Madam, so long as your son behaves himself and the fees are paid, no questions will be asked about his social standing."
I wasn't confused about why Scott didn't like grade school. He did a fine job of explaining why in the previous post. I was confused why Scott thought that his problems were representative of most students. Or if not most, then at least enough to where that group's feelings about school should be dominant in discussions of reform.
I expect that as a child, Scott was an outlier among students. I expect that's true of many folks who read and post here. I'm not surprised that lots of folks felt that school didn't do a good job for them. But that's because ya'll are outliers! School didn't do well with you because it wasn't designed for you. Before you tare down the system and replace it with something that better suits you, you should spend more time considering folks in the fatter part of the distribution. (Unless you're a Thielist, I suppose.)
Last thing: Scott dismisses Konstantin's point far too easily. If you're predicating your argument on the fact that school made you miserable, how can you dismiss the argument that the alternative to school would make other people miserable? (Educated by Tara Westover seems relevant to this discussion.) Scott is able to dismiss this because he thinks "School is prison" and is therefore punishment for everyone but the truly miserable, but here again is my confusion. "School feels like prison for me [and other outliers like me who read my blog]" isn't the same as showing that for most people. So really the argument boils down to whether one set of outliers should be forced to feel miserable so that another set of outliers (along a different axis) will have a space to not feel miserable.
"School is prison" has two meanings. One is "it's very unpleasant". The other is "it's an institution you're forced to be in, and if you try to escape, people will catch you and bring you back". I think the second one is pretty hard to argue with, however you feel about the first, and that should be a warning sign.
I agree I am an atypical student. But everyone is atypical in their own way. I know people who hated school because they were too smart and that made it boring. I know other people who hated school because they were too dumb and that made it humiliating and impossible. I know people who hated school because they were introverts and it was hard to be crammed together with 30 classmates, and people who hated school because they were extroverts and it was painful to have to keep quiet all day when your friends were sitting right there next to you.
Overall I think I'm making the same argument as in my review of My Brother Ron ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/31/book-review-my-brother-ron/ ), which talks about confining schizophrenics to institutions. Some of them will like it there, others won't. If you let people choose freely, some of the ones who would be better off inside will be dumb/misinformed and still choose to stay out anyway. I still think we should err on the side of freedom and choice.
And I remain fine with the "freedom and choice" side (though, as I noted above, I think you dismiss the downsides too easily). My issue is that "School is prison" doesn't connote "it's very unpleasant", it connotes, "you will be raped, tortured, and abused by the worst people society has on offer and also those authority figures responsible for your health and safety."
But maybe I have too negative an impression of prison. Perhaps we can agree on "School is Club Fed"?
I'm curious about this : is being beaten up such a common school experience ?
I have *never* been beaten up, despite being a scrawny nerd (no glasses though). And I can only remember one kid that has been (though this is less reliable).
I've only got a sample size of one, but it loomed rather large in my formative experiences. It might be one of those things like outrunning the bear, where it's not so much how much a "scrawny nerd" one happens to be objectively as relatively. That is, maybe only the very bottom targets in any group get selected? I certainly didn't get the impression that there was anyone else in my class getting beat up as much as me. Dunno if that explains your situation, though. Maybe you were just around nicer people? :-)
We could also call schools "compulsory, affordable childcare institutions" or "mandatory acculturation for routine jobs."
Part of what strikes me as unfixably broken about schools is that the childcare need so overrode the learning need that a lot of it feels like window-dressing to justify keeping kids somewhere safe during the once-conventional work week. This went along with a co-equal need to groom children to be ready to work 40-hour plus work weeks and to follow orders. These two needs -- childcare and worker acculturation -- create perverse incentives across the whole system.
It creates an AP science teacher who says they're teaching conscientiousness through the medium of chemistry, an AP calculus teacher who says they're teaching self-esteem through the medium of math, and various humanities/social studies teachers getting their fifteen year-old students to write resumes for jobs that haven't yet been worked. Teachers work really really hard, but their jobs also get forced through this system of perverse incentives.
I loved school because it was better than home and because it so rewarded my people-pleasing doggedness. But even for me, I would have done so much better as a grown person later to have had other choices earlier. Both of my children, who had stability at home in a way I didn't, found school to be painfully boring and agonizing. The extroverted one found the compensatory social rewards to be adequate; the introverted one didn't and so was mostly homeschooled. Lucky that we could do that and unfortunate it's an option available to so few people.
My version of the minimally viable reform that would be most possible, is to legalize child labor. This also demands the removal of truancy as a crime, at least to the extent that children can find and do work safely.
If all goes as planned from there, some corporation or the like will offer slightly better conditions than the schools, and children will flock there, and the schools will realize that they must adapt to survive, and will become themselves, slightly better, and the corporation will realize their new billion dollar cash pump is in danger if they don't make it just a little better, and the spiral continues.
Standard model of competition working.
I find that the people most pushing for this are race realist leftists, who think that forcing calculus on blacks then sending them to jail when they fail to measure up, is the very essence of systemic racism. This isn't exactly my political position, but if shutting down the school to prison pipeline is the best excuse to shut down the schools, I'm happy to side with it.
Charter schools are probably net positive, but only slightly, and won't spiral, because they're still competing for parents, not children, and, the current system is already optimized in large part, for the convenience and self esteem of parents. The well being of children is left out of the equation.
As for the rest, I'm firmly in the [school as torture] camp, and have little patience or forgiveness for those who excuse it with "torturing people is fun" and "it makes us money".
I expect that, while children still live with their parents, their decision of where to go to school or work would be influenced to a great degree by their parents even if they were legally allowed to choose for themselves (which would be very difficult to pass into law anyway). Child labor as a competitor to school chosen by the children would probably be somewhat better than charter schools at incentivizing schools to be good for children, but its effect would probably still be limited.
One of the popular arguments made against child labor back in the day, was to bash their version of welfare queens, mothers who would force their children into jobs and take all the profit for themselves. I find this was mostly (though not entirely) fiction, but, ideally we should put in more protections to ensure that children receive their own wages than existed then.
Most children will basically do what their parents tell them to, even if this makes them miserable. They'll commit suicide before saying they're unhappy. I do expect this. But, some children will look for options, and if they find them, they'll take them. Ideally, once a few children who were on track for a long and exciting career in crime grow up into well adjusted adults, parents will take notice, and will encourage their own at risk children to consider work as an alternative to school. Over time, the definition of at risk should expand, and work as education should be normalized.
I'm confident that, with enough cycles, a corporation can find a better way to educate children where they're happier, more productive, and get more prestigious jobs in the future, where work will cease to be just for the "low class" "at risk" types, and become something sought after by the elites, and then we can eliminate the schools entirely. Until then, even in the best case, there will be a subset who are miserable, but quietly make good grades and no one notices. In that sense, I would love to move faster and be more radical, but it isn't going to happen. Even my minimum viable solution probably won't happen, but I don't think anything less will even have a positive impact.
So, I guess, the question is, how is this different from charter schools?
The first is that it simply removes preconceptions. Charter schools are all focused on the task of (passing X test). If the test itself is flawed (it is) then the results, no matter how optimized, will also be flawed. That is, the public schools already do what they do pretty well. It's just that what they're doing is spiteful and evil, not that they're doing it poorly.
The next is that corporations can advertise to children. If a child is offered less work for higher wages, it's harder to convince him not to take it.
Similarly, corporations have a specific product they have to provide. That is, they can fire workers or hire them, but they can't just tell them to work and then refuse to pay their wages. Charter schools can't promise good grades.
Also, I find that almost all children are employable. Even animals can do work and make a living wage, there's no reason any but the exceptionally dis-functionally insane shouldn't be able to. The same can't be said of schooling. Charter schools inevitably run into the issue that many children simply cannot be educated.
As above, the charter school approach mostly focuses on lifting hyper-educable students into more schooling, and ignores ineducable students who either quietly fail in misery or turn to a life in crime as the only alternative. I think this is backwards.
Finally, we've tried charter schools. They don't work. Not that maybe they aren't slightly better, but they aren't going geometric. I at least, cannot take them seriously as a threat to the school system. So, more broadly, if we're going to eliminate schooling, we need to put predators in the water, and hope they succeed. If the predators aren't multiplying and reducing the prey population, we need to try a new predator.
One extra note- I don't trust people's memories very much. Rather than asking adults if they enjoyed school, we should ask children if they enjoy school. I'm sure there's some fraction who honestly do enjoy school, and come out the other side as productive happy adults with awesome jobs and so on and so on, but broadly, I think school is always awful, and some people just don't have good emotional memory, and when we do poll children they do say, in overwhelming majority, that school is awful.
So, not to pick on you particularly, because it's been suggested in several places, but what in the world is making people forget that child labor was, in fact, the pre-existing solution? And that it was so horrible we outlawed it, and we still sneer at the then proprietors as cartoon villains?
I mean, really. We seen that movie. No one wants to see it again. (Almost no one, I guess.)
Also, remember that America is WEIRD. Child labor is much more common and well accepted than you characterize it as. So, the alternative question, is why don't territories with child labor radically outperform the rest of the world? My first answer is that they do, we're just measuring things in a WEIRD way, that's designed to elevate WEIRD results. Even saying that, it remains that on some metrics, we are vastly outperforming them, so again, why? My next answer is that while they're obviously correct on this one issue, that doesn't mean they aren't making other errors capable of massively depleting their GDP or such. A lot of politics can be summarized as- adopt policy A of country X, but not B from X, and you'll get all the good things in X but none of the bad. I do think people underestimate the idea of "just adopt everything about X and we'll be at least at X's level", but that does carry the drawback that it becomes impossible to learn from nations that aren't vastly and obviously superior.
Okay, so, with that said, first, propaganda. That is, the education system is absolutely critical to the entire justification of the modern elite class' existence. Eliminate education and you eliminate degrees. You eliminate expertise. The modern priesthood draws its mystical powers from education, and their success in the education system. They are, at the least, not the most capable people in the country, when judged by an outside rubric. Eliminating education doesn't eliminate hierarchy, or even the existence of modernist priests, but it does change who is on the very top of the hierarchy. In short, once a vetting process has been established for how much mystical power a given person has, it's very hard to change it, because the ruling mystics are absolutely opposed to it being changed.
The second two issues are much more direct. Workers don't want to compete with children, and teachers and etc. want their free money pump. Also, remember that education is also a massive subsidy to corporations that would otherwise have to train workers themselves. It doesn't matter if education is half, a fifth or a tenth as effective as the alternative, at the wonderful price of free, corporations will always line up in favour of it.
If we go look at the debate at the time, first, parental rights create a lot of problems, and people were opposed to parents profiting off of child abuse. Even in the modern day, any attempt to scale back the school system is met with accusations of child abuse. With that said, I don't see particularly high rates of child abuse in states like Texas or Alaska where no questions asked home schooling is legal. Thus, I mostly classify this as a phantom menace. It's actually legal in Texas for parents to make their children do farm work eight hours a day and say that's their version of education. (It's also legal to let them do whatever they please and say that's their version of education.) It's true that most people are so mindless that you can prevent some abuse through pure obscurity, but I think giving more rights to children will clearly not result in that much abuse, given that parents have available to them plenty of states with laws such that abuse is almost entirely safe and legal. It should also be noted, that opponents of child labour would always and inevitably pick out the very worst work places, with the very worst parents, and among that, the children with the very worst luck. The image created by opponents of child labor, was simply not realistic in the sense of being normal. It was entirely on the outer fringe, and as the winners of the debate, that characterization is still with us today.
As stated, a lot of the child labor argument was about falling wages and job loss. Workers wanted more monopoly rights. Furthermore, once a few states caved, corporations operating in those states found competing with corporations in states with larger labour pools difficult, and thus joined in to call for universal abolition of child labour. Immigrant labour was also something people disliked competing against (as they still do today) and many immigrants were younger and had more children, so child labour laws was another way to target them.
It's hard to prove that you're better off going to work on a dock hauling boxes than learning calculus and then going to college. I'd think it much easier to convince someone that a child is better off hauling boxes than being locked in jail. Of course, I'm all for just legalizing truancy on its own, but doing so without removing child labour laws is practically demanding they turn to crime, and the reputation of child dropouts won't improve, and parents will continue misleading innocent children who don't know better into the education system.
So. 1) I appreciate the work you put into answering this. It's not surprising that you're not convincing to me, but I do want you to know that I see and acknowledge your effort.
That said, 2) My eight year old just got on her morning meeting for school. I can hear her outside my door. If such a dystopian policy ever came to be, I would, 100%, leave the country. Even if, like other immigrants, I had to go from being well off to being poor, I would consider it worthwhile to get my family out of a country that took away the schools and tried to give my kids back to the places that built machines that could only be serviced by small children. I think most of my class (middle to upper middle knowledge workers with kids) would do likewise. And despite what you say about the educated class, I think that sparking a desertion en masse would be a disaster.
And 3) As for the working class, well, they're the ones with the guns, and without the wherewithal to leave. They're also, for the most part, entirely separate from this entire conversation. They come from towns like the one I came from, where there are three elementary schools, a middle, and a high. And everyone goes to school together. If you showed up and told them you were shutting down their schools, they would fight you.
Which leads me to 4) do you have kids? Are you around kids? I know there are a lot of fringe views on ASX, but this really seems like something that can only have been written by someone for whom kids are theoretical.
1: My policies rely on the implicit assumption that education is a fraud and doesn't increase productivity (actually, that it decreases productivity). This is something I'm totally confident is true, but is also an entirely different conversation. I'm not saying that education is bad (except in as far as I just did). I'm saying that, given that education is bad, here's the most realistic way to end it.
Note that I'm not saying work is good either. Some work is productive, thus worth doing at the moment, but should still be slowly phased out of existence as we implement better ways to be productive. Some work is counterproductive, and we need to shut that down asap. In the end, child labour, alongside labour in general, is just a stepping stone between here and utopia.
2: I think your concept of what child labour is, is off, largely due to said propaganda images. It's actually much more reasonable to have children out in the field watching sheep or at a computer writing code than demand they work in some sort of nest of overactive Rude Goldberg machines.
As for a mass desertion by the educated class, I think that unrealistic. Most people who do well in the current system will still be rated highly in the new system. Furthermore, in so far as people rated highly by the current system and low in the new system are driven out, people from other countries that are rated poorly by the current system but highly in the new system will come flocking in. Realistically, once the policy is adopted in America, the rest of the world will follow suit, so no one would flee the country and vice versa.
3: I'm not shutting down their schools!
My policy steps are, again-
Legalize truancy. Almost everyone affected by this change are extremely low class individuals who are on the edge of becoming hardened criminals, and putting them in jail makes a future of crime and incarceration a near certainty. The immediate effect is a slight reduction in the criminalization of minors, resulting in lower overall crime rates.
Legalize child labour. This gets the truant students off the streets, further reducing crime, while also producing free profits. Wages in general will fall and some tiny minority of parents will take their children out of school and pressure them into working for the parent's profit.
Produce careers. Note that at this point, no further action (or inaction) from government is necessary. Corporations take children that would have, under the current system, become hardened criminals, and give them high status jobs, leading to stable families and high life outcome ratings.
Phase out schools. Parents with children who aren't doing well in the education system turn to work places with superior track records. Every cycle, the bottom 1% of students give up and find work, because education fundamentally requires the bottom percentiles to fail. The number of students shrink. As work becomes normalized, and school ceases to be normal, the process accelerates. Eventually people decide generally that education is stupid, and stop doing it.
4: In my experience, my ideas work perfectly. Of course, in my experience, children are all about as neurotypical as I am, so... using your own family as a sample group is generally a bad idea?
Broadly, I observe that families that maintain an 1800s culture are happier and healthier than the sickly and miserable conditions common in the present day.
A lot of people seem to be coming at the school debate with the sort of implicit assumption that schooling done well means taking a pupil from one point in the hegemony, and delivering them to another place on the hegemony, some number of rungs up. Given the research suggesting that the majority of things determining where one ends up are genetically determined and that a good amount of the rest are determined by family and community rather than teacher and school, it would be easy to write off the value of school - it doesn't work!
But education could also mean that each person, within that hegemony, can be more effective. The paperwork could be done faster, the beer brewed more tasty, the new inventions more brilliant and the new companies better at changing the world. And surely this is true? A person in the middle of the hegemony now can process more accounts than can a person in the middle of the hegemony fifty years ago, but that hasn't helped today's accountants somehow become higher up.
That view of education suggests that a huge amount of the ways we measure school (how much further education do they do on to, what are their lifetime earnings...) are measuring entirely the wrong thing, and that's probably cause for concern!
"Answer that’s paternalist itself (though not necessarily collectively so, since it can achieve mass support): more mandatory meetings. Compulsory voting, conscription into militias (give everyone guns and the training to use them), compulsory Quaker meetings, compulsory PTA meetings, compulsory unionization of all workplaces (and if the union votes to set dues at zero and not go on strike ever, okay, at least that’s what they chose.) Anything that increases capacity while getting each other to talk to each other about their interests."
Apparently (according to the summary at https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-winnowing-of-american-democracy-few.html ) this sort of direct democracy was how most local governments and community organizations were run for much of American history. This doesn't necessarily seem paternalistic in itself: that article justifies it in terms of giving people more direct control over how they were governed. Historically, this method of making decisions was beneficial in that it reduced the extent to which elites could make decisions that benefitted them but not the people they ruled, and it may have reduced the frequency of misguided top-down attempts at progress of the sort that James Scott criticizes in _Seeing Like a State_ ; it was harmful in that the citizens in general were less competent at making decisions that required Scott's epistémē and more likely to be led to make bad decisions by emotion (the article notes that lynchings were a result of partly leaving law enforcement up to the community rather than letting specially trained and somewhat legally accountable professionals do it).
For a discussion of alternate classroom discipline, I suggest Duncan Sabien's discussion with Spencer Greenberg regarding Duncan's experience as a teacher.
His rule for bathroom use for instance was that if you need to go to the bathroom, you write your name on the "used the bathroom" sheet, go to the bathroom and then stay in class 5(?) extra minutes after the recess bell rings. No questions asked, no moralizing, no permission required. Did not lead to total chaos.
Scott, what happened to "every single part of my brain is telling me that high school was lovely"? (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/10/book-review-house-of-god/) . Did you realize your younger self had been telling you the truth all along? What's the story here!
(Sorry about possibly having posted this twice. My browser is acting funny right now.)
Partly elementary/middle school were worse than high school, partly I still have a desire to excuse my high school but I'm going off of my younger self's memories rather than my gestalt impression.
Scott, re medical residency, do you think that all of those hours are necessary? I've always been skeptical that in order to produce a competent doctor, the U.S. system needs to be as elite and demanding as it is. O-chem required as a undergrad, and intense residency hours being two things that always made me suspicious. Is there really sooo much to know that it couldn't be done in 40 hours. And why is this still a thing given the research about how many patients are harmed by overworked and tired docs?
I managed to skip organic chemistry, so no argument there.
Residency as it currently exists is the balance of a few factors. First, ACGME demands lots of rotations per residency, including some really dumb ones, which means if it takes eg 8,000 hours to train a doctor, you've got to find time for 8,000 hours of actual training plus the 4,000 hours of useless stuff they make you do on the side. Second, due to some combination of ACGME policies and the unavoidable economics of medicine, residencies are really expensive, and the hospital makes a tiny amount of that money back by getting lots of work out of residents. Third, lots of wards need 24-7 coverage and studies show that the more times you transfer patients the more mistakes slip in, so it's tempting to give people really long shifts. Probably other things too.
Very interesting post; that clarified some things. I guess I'm still left wondering whether doctors are being taught too much. Most of the people I know, and my own experience, attest that they learned so much in the book learnin' phase of their education that they never used on the job. Whats the practical difference between a hot shot psychiatrist and median psychiatrist? Would the median patient even notice? My uncle is a doc and has always said that ~95% of his visits are very uninteresting and easy to manage, and are not very demanding in terms of intellectual horsepower.
I suppose I'm still kind of bitter that I couldn't get into med school because I couldnt crush o-chem and the MCAT. My feeling was always, "Okay, I'm not super smart, but aren't I smart <i>enough</i>?" (not claiming I deserved a spot of course) Is there any cross-country data that could prove this? Is it as hard to get into medical school in Moldova and Kazakhstan as it is in the U.S.? If not, would your median U.S. doc totally smoke your median doc from Moldova or Kazachstan?
Third world doctors often end up working as first world nurses, but this might be more about first world doctors not wanting competition than about third world doctor competence?
An issue is: Do we need to spend 13 years making an 18 year old? With 39 months off spread throughout? It seems glacial. Our Education System really needs to be refocused on identifying aptitudes (which includes smarts, but also talent, enjoyment...) and building on and adding to skill sets. There should be much more independent play and certified learning up front, with daycare provided for working parents. Intense modules of learning interspersed with projects as they get older. Then classroom study and hands on before separating into vocational, collegial or uncommitted.
FdB wants to change the world so that we can find places in it for the people he will not let us change (in any intrusive way). I would rather change the system slightly, add a Works Corps and have them change the country and the world.
Let’s work backwards. I propose an adjunct to the Army Corps of Engineers, the America Works Corps. You could think of it as Society in Motion. When fully operational there would be EMTs, Practicing Nurses, Hi Voltage Line Techs, Internet Specialists, Heavy Machinery Operators, Carpenters, Electricians.... FEMA could call in a full battalion to Puerto Rico after a hurricane. Five battalions could be dropped in Indonesia after a tsunami.
The reason for it being under the auspices of the Corps? Socialization, standardization and deployment as a resource. The first year would be Boot Camp and Basic Ed. From there aptitudes would sort and further classes, exercises and field work would begin. It would be a 3-4 year commitment. It would all depend on chosen field.
Individuals could re-up. They could sign up for 2-3 year postings to overseas projects. Or, having gained their professional licenses / credentials, they could get a GI Loan, move to the place of their choice and start rebuilding America.
The gold standard studies on job training tell us that the only ones that move the needle are apprenticeship related. Why? Because the individual wants to do that type of work, the company has that type of job and a training site is set up to put the two together. This idea does just that but on a national scale that doesn’t flood any one market.
Now that we seen what the Black Box connects to, the question becomes what do we do with the Box? Well, we certainly move towards a more Germanic system of identifying those whose aptitudes and personalities want to move towards the Corps than college.
I also think that there is a huge issue that has been completely ignored: terraforming. Schools need to be involved from soil management to hydroponics to seedlings to aqua-culture to..... If the Sahel needs a 8,000 km green barrier, then the High Plains could use a bit of tending in the next 20 years as we manage the Missouri and Mississippi basins.
The education experts keep ‘fixing’ their factory. They keep giving their customers an experience they don’t enjoy, they keep turning out too many products of low value and they keep demanding more more money for their efforts.
> The best I can do is: on the one hand there's the utilitarian perspective,
> which is summed up well enough by "from each according to their ability,
> to each according to their need".
Scott. The word "utilitarian" is a couple of centuries old; you don't get to redefine it now. That's a quote from Marx, who is NOT a utilitarian. The utilitarian perspective is traditionally summed up as the Benthamite formula "the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people" (although that's both imprecise and insufficiently general).
Scott Alexander often seems to play fast and loose with "jokes" when it comes to misrepresentation of political thought. One does wonder what exactly is supposed to be funny there.
We should probably also avoid "hints", as "hints" are not specific enough - what is needed is a full investigation of the similarities of utilitarian and Marxist thought. If you're only "hinting" at something then you're not expressing yourself fully.
The sarcasm isn't helping your case. I'm advocating for straight-forward, clear communication here. Mashing together two different schools of philosophical thought with no explanation or reasoning is not an example of good communication.
I think the utilitarian course actually is to take from everyone as much as they can give, and use it to help the people who need it most. I agree that I used a Marx quote to refer to a Bentham theory, but can you explain why you don't think it's appropriate?
Can you explain how it _is_ appropriate, with reference to Marxist thought?
Alternately, can you find quotes from Bentham or JS Mill (or any other utilitarian) that approaches Marx's quotation there?
I think the fairly standard common-sense position here is that the Marxists and the Utilitarians are two different schools of thought, and it is not useful to mix them up. If you're making some sort of point that they're the same, or similar enough, then I think that's a case for you to make in detail, not simply assume is a given.
[Socialist utilitarian raising his hand] Marx doesn't "own" the idea of taking from abilities and distributing based on needs. It's good idea even you aren't a Marxist. Scott is giving you a huge fig leaf here!!Take it!!
It’s not approximate because utilitarianism is entirely result-oriented, whereas the quote you used is process-oriented. Utilitarian ideals are for whatever works best for everyone. The quote you used assumes that result from a system that agrees with it.
There's no way to explain this in the number of characters I'm allowed. This is just an overview; you'll have to email me to get my reasons. I'll see if I can fit in some examples of point 2 in a reply to my reply.
1. The obvious problem with quoting Marx to define utilitarianism is that it connotes much more than it says literally, accidentally creating a motte-and-bailey fallacy. You want (I'm guessing) only to claim that the quote is a usable definition of utilitarianism (the motte), regardless of who wrote it. But because Marx wrote it, using it will suggest to readers that Marxism is similar to or compatible with utilitarianism (the bailey).
2. The less-obvious problem is that it's wrong (as a definition of utilitarianism). You were probably thinking something like, "If everyone produces as much as they're able to, and everyone gets everything they… need? … that's distributing utility to everyone, which sounds like the greatest good to the most people." But it isn't. The differences in the language are subtle; their consequences are not. See examples below.
3. The even-less-obvious problem is that utilitarianism is part of one large, self-consistent bundle of metaphysical assumptions that all mutually support each other (empirical philosophy); while Marx's formulation is part of a second self-consistent bundle of metaphysical assumptions that all mutually imply each other (rational philosophy), and each of which directly contradicts one belief in the first bundle. So equating utilitarianism with Marx's idea of justice is just a few inferences away from adding the claim "A if and only if not A" to a theorem prover, meaning it can be invoked to make every inference end in contradiction (or, equivalently, may be used to prove anything).
4. Marx attacked utilitarianism as being egoistic, selfish, and interested only in "usefulness" or hedonistic pleasure. All of these attacks stem from Marx's Platonist metaphysics, as he made clear in his writings to everyone except himself. For instance, he wrote that "every particular social activity as a species-activity merely represents the species, i.e., an attribute of my own nature, and in which every person is the representative of every other" (Karl Marx, 'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law,' in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works, Vol. Ill (New York: International Publishers 1975) p. 119; cited in Brenkert 1981, "Marx's Critique of Utilitarianism", p. 200). This shows that Marx saw individuals as having no significance in themselves, but only being significant as representatives of a common human nature. Any deviation of individuals from that essential (Platonic) nature would be error to be eliminated, rather than legitimate differences to be respected. (This comes from Hegel and Plato.) Even the bizarre mistake of thinking utilitarianism was "hedonistic" is quite common among Platonists, who just can't conceive of pursuing individual happiness and pleasure as anything other than sinful degeneracy, and when asked to imagine someone pursuing happiness, always imagine somebody having profligate sex and overindulging in wine, rather than somebody falling in love, or making friends.
Points 2-4 come down mostly to these Platonist beliefs of Marx's:
1. That what matters is Platonic Forms--in this case the human species--not mere earthly individuals. Therefore,
a. Satisfying the desires of individuals is generally bad rather than good, as people pursuing egoistic wants are not pursuing the historical progress of the species.
b. Any differences between individuals is proof of social corruption; in an ideal world, everyone would be the same.
b. Conflicts between individuals of the same social class are signs of corruption, to be solved by purging the evil people rather than by "compromise", whatever that means.
2. That measurement, numeric quantification, and optimization are useless to the philosopher, who deals only in universal, eternal, absolute truths.
3. That market prices are blasphemy, because they claim that the value of a type of good can vary with circumstances, or with how it was made, or how many middlemen handled it. Values are by definition absolute and eternal. [I'm not aware that Marx said anything like this explicitly, but this is how Platonists think, and many things in Marx are explained by supposing he believed it.)
Marx: From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.
- "From each… to each...": Marx was writing about distributing goods of some sort, whether physical or abstract. But the phrasing implies that this isn't a collection of voluntary transactions, each between two individuals. Rather, there's an unnamed redistributor to whom all these goods are given, who then redistributes them based on His assessment of everyone's needs. There's no room for individual choice in this scenario. Marxists believe that individual differences should be eliminated, not honored. Marxist "justice" means everybody is the same, does similar work, and gets the same stuff.
There's a common assumption among philosophers that utilitarianism is also collectivist, with utility computed using a single utility function which is assumed to apply to all people. I don't know where this stupid assumption came from; Bentham and John Stuart Mill were both staunch individualists uniquely aware that different people wanted different things.
Utilitarianism allows different people to have different utility functions. In practice, this requires that all exchanges of goods are made by the free choices of both parties, because there's no other way to know what basket of goods makes any given individual most happy. This is just one reason why utilitarianism goes hand-in-hand with individual liberty and a free market.
- "according to his ability": Nothing about his preferences. No one gets to choose their job; if they did, Marxist society would have a whole lot of poets, and no garbage collectors. (Marx overlooks this problem because he sees the division of labor as Original Sin, and vaguely imagines that under communism, everybody does all the jobs, or rotates through all the jobs, or only does fun jobs like making handcrafted goods or writing poems.) No one gets to decide how long and hard they must work. I presently choose to work very little, make very little money, spend very little money, and have a lot of free time. I'm not allowed to do that under Marxism. Whereas utilitarianism recognizes that free time has high utility to me, and so counts that free time in my utility.
- "according to his needs": Again, nothing about preferences; nothing even about good. . But note especially the word "needs". Marxists mean that literally. Marxists after Marx--Adorno and Horkheimer, for example--regularly froth at the mouth ranting against "consumerism" and "consumer culture", which turns out to mean "people getting what they want" and "people liking things I don't like". (Note, for instance, that nothing except their specificity distinguishes Adorno's mad rants against jazz from his mad rants against consumer-culture in general).
Well, guess what? You don't need Beethoven symphonies, or novels, or air conditioning, or a dog, or comfortable shoes, or food that tastes good. In fact, addiction to nice things is what make the bourgeoisie disgusting and weak.
In China, "need" even extended to children as products. Until recently, the Party decided how many children everyone needed--or rather, how many children China needed. They could order women not to have children, and presumably if the population were low, they could order woman to have children. They also saw women's bodies as social capital in Sparta, in Plato's Republic, and in Rousseau's Emile.
I don't remember whether Marx said anything against consumption himself [1], but at least since modernism, Marxist culture has preached that getting what you want is spiritually bad for you. They don't use the word "spirit", but other than the vocabulary, Marxist rants against consumerism could be mistaken for medieval sermons against greed. That's why Marxists think it's good, not bad, that Marxist production and distribution doesn't allow individuals to get what they want.
This Marxist asceticism, limiting people to fulfilling only their basic physical needs [2], is the opposite of utilitarianism, which is all about letting the most people get the most they can of what they want.
It's easy for us today to just assume that Marx thought, as utilitarians do, that more happiness is better and more pain is worse. But that wasn't the majority view at the time, and it wasn't Marx's view. He saw the pursuit of private happiness as sinful (though he didn't use that word). When Jefferson wrote that all men have the right to pursue happiness, that was (literally) revolutionary, not so much because he called it a "right" as because he implied that happiness on Earth was inherently good. Plato would have disagreed, as would a lot of Romans, Tertullian, a lot of Saints from Francis to Mother Theresa, and the Puritans who settled Boston. Platonists see the physical world as a distraction from the transcendent one, and the enjoyment of physical pleasure as "decadence". In Marxism, it's even worse: they inherited the disdain for hedonism from Plato, Rousseau, and Hegel; but jettisoned the part where we finally reach the transcendent Paradise. All we get at the end of the road is True Communism, which is at its best everyone getting what they need.
- There's another problem with using the word "needs": To implement Marx's policy, "needs" must be a Boolean predicate, so that every human desire either is, or is not, a need. This isn't a problem for utilitarianism, which doesn't merely list "needs", but measures the intensity of happiness produced in each person by each good. People who want one type of good a lot get a lot of that type of good; people who want it just a little, get just a few.
- Marx's formulation of justice assumes there are never any trade-offs or conflicts of interest! What happens if we need electricity, but we also need to stop climate change? What happens if we need police to restrain violent people in confusing and cognitively-overloading situations, but we need them not to kill any innocent bystanders? What happens in the trolley problem? Which needs get met in literally any contentious social issue ever? Marx has nothing to say. His followers simply assume that conflict of interest between proletarians with correct class consciousness is impossible, and so every case of conflict is due to one of the agents being a class enemy. "Compromise" is an incomprehensible word to them; they probably map it to "tactical delay".
Utilitarianism, by contrast, deals with many of these issues easily. Are the police killing too many innocent citizens? Give them stricter rules, or defund the police, and then count how many innocent citizens are killed by police or by criminals, before and after the policy change. Fiddle with the rules until the number goes up if you change them in either direction. Should we build more nuclear power plants to stop climate change? Compare the expected social cost of the nuclear power plants, the social cost of unchecked climate change, the social cost of supplying all that energy from renewable resources, and the social cost of just not using that electricity. Choose the option with the greatest expected utility.
I wrote: "Which needs get met in literally any contentious social issue ever? Marx has nothing to say." This was unfair. I see things that way only because I have the luxury of living in a liberal democracy, where we don't have social institutions that are just naked social structures of power and oppression, like in the feudal societies Marx was fond of, or in the paranoid delusions of Marcuse and his offspring.
I'm sympathetic to FdB's critique of the part of meritocracy where smart=good. I've been trying to work on giving up that alief, now that I'm more intellectually convinced the belief is incorrect and pernicious. I grew up thinking "stupid" was such a bad word (and thing to be) that you could never call anyone it—it would be shattering. So it takes some deliberate practice to unlearn that.
Here's what's been helpful to me:
- I read about saints who were intellectually slow (e.g. Bl Solanus Casey, who remained a porter, not a priest, for this reason)
- I work on remembering that I'm very smart now, but I won't be when I'm old (probably) and I'm not going to become less a person then. I'm going to be the same person, called to different work (including the witness of being dependent on others without being ashamed of my dependency)
- Having a baby helps! My one-year-old is so clearly a person and takes joy in the world without being able to do the things I pride myself most on. I expect her to grow up and become more like me, but there's a lot that is good about her as she is, I don't feel as frightened about if she didn't mature in the way I expect.
I'm curious if anyone else here has actively cultivated this shift?
Yes! Though I wouldn't have articulated it that beautifully.
I was praised and validated a great deal for my smarts growing up, and smarts as an attribute was praised and validated above all in my family. Mom talked about kindness and doing good, so some of that stuck. But both my parents were raised in a very shame-o-centric way and that default to shame and criticism buried a lot of the kindness.
It took some really tough things happening to me in my late 20s through 40s to see how limited smart is up against other qualities (kindness, compassion, patience, steadiness, wisdom) in navigating a life. Somewhere in there I grasped how the focus on smarts in my childhood had led me to use it as a crutch and defense mechanism and how that prevented me from growing up in other ways I needed to in order to have a satisfying life. Overintellectualization is a hell of a drug.
I really like being smart. Or more, I really like being curious and able to get really excited about learning new things. But also, I'm in my late 50s now and my memory isn't what it used to be and my drive to precision isn't what it used to be. I think those changes would be terrifying to me now if I hadn't shifted my center of gravity a couple of decades earlier. As it is, I'm enjoying the commensurate decline in neuroticism and don't mind the world looking a little more impressionist to me.
"the focus on smarts in my childhood had led me to use it as a crutch and defense mechanism and how that prevented me from growing up in other ways I needed to in order to have a satisfying life. Overintellectualization is a hell of a drug."
Stop taking about me >.>
Falling in love with someone whose brain works very differently from my own was a transformative experience for me. Before I always found the phrase "smart in your own way" to be grossly patronizing. Now I'm regularly in awe of the capabilities of someone with multiple "learning disabilities" (quotes used because they're only disabling in modern educational context) and a thoroughly average IQ. I'm still glad I'm smart in MY way, but I'm also sometimes kinda jealous.
re: "charter schools get 0.75x and public schools get to keep the 0.25x extra" it's important to seperate marginal vs average costs. If the average cost of educating a kid is $20k and 5 leave for a charter school then you're down 5*0.75*20k=75k ie a full teachers salary, so have to fire a teacher and redistribute 20 kids amoung the rest. All the fixed & nongifted population's costs of buildings, busses, special Ed, etc don't decrease. Assume classes are 25 kids, then the marginal cost per kid is only $3k*, not enough for a 2nd school. This is per a Massachusetts ex-principle.
There could be more cost savings if you have charter schools share buildings, increasing beurocratic inertia against; starting a charter school is easier than convincing an existing school to turn over part of the student body and physical building.
*multiply by 4/3 if each teacher only teaches for 3 of the 4 periods in each day.
My experience is that school was at it's worst between around 10-15 years of age, and many of my friends and acquaintances agree. I think the community center idea would work especially well for kids of this age, give them relative freedom to develop while still maintaining a safe space, especially for issues relating to puberty.
"The purely financial issues seem solvable; if the cost of public education is X, give kids who want charter schools a voucher for 0.75X, and donate the extra 0.25X to the public school system. The charter school will be fine with less money, and every kid who leaves for charter schools will make the public schools better instead of worse."
Would the benefit of the additional funding actually outweigh the loss of the student? Peer groups certainly have a positive impact on students' performance, and I'm not convinced its one that could be offset by throwing money at the problem.
"saving the really abused kids is an important goal, and school accomplishes it": One negative utilitarian argument for compulsory students I hear a lot is just that - school is a better place than the worst homes, and importantly, the worst parents would not send their kids to school if it wasn't compulsory and enforced by threat of fines, CPS intervention etc. So unless we find some way to reliably determine who is a terrible parent / what is a terrible household, we need to force everyone into school (or at least have high standards for opting out) to protect the worst-off children.
(A related argument is that making everyone go to the same child prison forestalls the development of isolated bubbles of society where "dangerous things can grow" - that's both a staple of Islamophobe rhetoric and the official rationale for compulsory schooling in Germany - specifically, to prevent Nazi enclaves from forming out of sight.)
Personally l find compulsory child prison to be a disproportionate response to the problems it's meant to solve, and would prefer directly screening for bad parents; but I realize that seems icky and most people would prefer just putting all kids into child prison to doing the hard work of figuring out what we want to expect from parents as a society.
I had a bit of an epiphany related to an ethnic group discriminated against in my region of the world - that I haven't known anyone in that group and neither had my friends, because they avoid compulsory schooling like plague. Hence they're easy to dehumanize and form negative stereotypes about - no positive experiences to anchor versus an occasional negative one.
People living alongside each other, but not contacting is a recipe for strife, ethnic or otherwise. Mixing people up in schools bridges that divide somewhat.
Agreed - though I've seen that same argument applied to compulsory military service, and in both cases I think it identifies a positive side effect but is not sufficient to justify the specific thing. Like, if we want social cohesion, let's talk about how we can best achieve social cohesion - a search that I'm pretty sure would lead us somewhere else than to the institutions we happen to have now.
Justifying school by pointing to its unintended side effects (which it is not optimized or optimizing for) is a classic trap. Let's not fall for it.
My first thought related to childrearing is to send said child is to some weird Montessori thing because it is surely better than the regular school I've been to. In my country it's often said that "childhood/high school/whatever is the best years of your life". To me that feels very alien - adulthood is the best years of your life, because you have control over your environment and the way you spend your time, can minimize contact with people who drive you up the wall and/or want to harm you, can surround yourself with people you actually like etc.
I think school has messed me up in a lot of ways, in particular by introducing a very unhealthy divide between work (motivated externally) and play (which I do because I want to) - which magnifies my natural tendency to procrastinate even on personal projects. Once I decide I want to finish them they go into the "work" category which I will then avoid as much as possible. The complete inability of most people to do self-directed work seems caused by the way we approach schooling.
However, what if it's the other way around? I can only tell by observing adults, myself included, who can get absolutely miserable when unemployed and otherwise unforced to put themselves in motion. If humans are naturally lazy (or energy-conserving) yet inaction makes them unhappy and depressed, forcing people to attend a bullshit job / bullshit education is a net good. In a similar way, many introverts I know would probably have no social skills whatsoever without compulsory schooling, they'd just hole up in their houses and gradually lose the ability to talk. Hell, _this happened to me_ in a few periods in my life. When I was writing a thesis and otherwise not leaving the house at all, despite my normally outgoing personality I recall being anxious about even going to a grocery store.
It's possible that the forcing part needs to stay. Perhaps we can, at least, let the children choose the activities and social contexts they're forced into, by greatly extending the definition of "school" that satisfies the mandatory requirement? Apprenticeships, community centers, all kinds of voluntary classes? Just let the children sort themselves into groups they feel good in, doing something useful and prosocial?
Most of your position on this seems to come down to you much you hated or enjoyed your school life and then reasoning backwards from there. I'm kinda in the middle.
There was a period (maybe 6th to 7th grade) where I would have 100% agreed with Scott that schools are prisons. Bullying at that point was a daily occurrence. Some of my friends were even worse off than me, and I already felt horrible most days.
At some point the bullying just stopped. I don't know if the bullies changed or I changed. Maybe others were still being bullied just as bad and I was just not noticing it? I mainly enjoyed the rest of my school time after that. Maybe Stockholm syndrome.
I might be the only person in the world but I enjoyed most of the novels I had to read and interpret for school. Some authors I discovered through school I still like today.
At the end of my school life I was even pretty friendly with one guy who I remembered as being the worst bully because the two of us were the only two libertarians at school. I eventually stopped being a libertarian, he is an academic economist today. Make of that what you will.
Currently, schooling is the equivalent of having both arranged marriage and banning divorce. The equivalent of the common argument in favor is then that marriage is so beneficial for most, that the fact some people become really unhappy in marriage, or actually get beaten by their partner, is not a reason to make exceptions.
Note that divorce is a major reason for poverty among women and children & staying single makes people poorer, lonelier, etc. And many people in certain nations seem quite happy with their arranged marriage.
Yet arguing for the combination of arranged marriage and banning divorce would make the NYT describe you as an evil neo-reactionary misogynist, especially because it would disallow a minority of women who get abused, to leave their abuser. Yet we know that many kids get horrible abused in schools, but then the mainstream is fine with forcing these kids to stay in that abusive environment and their only solution is anti-bullying programs, even though they seem fairly ineffective. Imagine suggesting that the only allowed solution for abused women is to go to couples therapy and to argue that if therapy doesn't stop the abuse, the women have to stay with their partner.
I think Joshua's comment is very plausible. In the town where I grew up, the path of least resistance went to a fairly bad (at the time—I hear a new head came in and turned things around) secondary school. The motivated parents got their kids into schools the next town over or the local (private) Public school or the Catholic school. I can see that causing a vicious cycle of brain drain on the not-so-good school. I've heard similar things from people who grew up in the few parts of the UK where the Grammar School system remains. (OTOH the Germans, Dutch and Austrians seem okay with their Realschulen and selective Gymnasiums and what have you)
There is another take that is missing from all of this. Many people object to meritocracy not because they object to meritocracy on principle (of course jobs should be worked by those most qualified to perform them!).
However, they argue that the current system does not correctly identify who has this merit. This is because social investment is a person is cumulative, and most people can learn to do most things. Lots of people will make perfectly qualified surgeons if you just assume that's what they're going to be from an early age (and divert social resources to training them).
This allows for a sort of inter-generational transfer of wealth under the guise of meritocracy, which I believe some have termed 'opportunity hoarding.' It's probably less bad than other forms of hereditary privilige, since it requires work to maintain and you can still lose if if you're not able to learn or perform well enough even with these advantages. But it's still bad that some kids, who might turn out to be brilliant scientist, dont ever get the chance because they got low-grade lead poisoning, went to a bad school, were socially punished for studying outside of gender norms, etc etc.
So I think probably one of the major and most compelling arguments against meritocracy is that it attributes differences in capability to innate qualities, rather than environmental ones. This is not to say that innate ability doesn't play a factor: it's a multiplies, and perhaps has larger effects at the tails. But for most people and most jobs, these aren't the dominant effects. The main concern, then is that meritocracy is a useful excuse for continuing to ignore inherent structural inequalities in opportunity.
Plus, this sort of thing can happen without there being any conscious discrimination at all. Look up why many professional hockey players are born between January and March, and few are born between October and December.
I think the other part of this critique is that it is *worse* than purely hereditary privilege, since it not only results in unequal results, but also in the notion that the privileged are privileged because they *deserve* it, and thus don't have a sense of nobelese oblige, and lack humility. (and those not privileged are not only not privileged, but live with the sense that it's because we're unworthy).
I think that Americans have far too much hope and fear about charter schools.
I live in The Netherlands where there are very many charter schools and have been for a long time. There is no real evidence that this has caused inequality or has had an impact on the quality of schools. The Dutch PISA results have historically been much better than average for the EU, but the same is true for Finland, which has only public schools. So if you can do much better than average by having almost no private or charter schools and by having way more charter schools than average, the percentage doesn't seem to matter.
So it seems to me that charter schools are largely a distraction and don't result in the kind of significant changes that many Americans hope or fear will happen.
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For those who want to know some Dutch school system history:
The French who occupied my country from 1795-1813 made a law that forced all schools to be public. They were still religious, but based on a very liberal and generic Christianity. The result was a century-long conflict that is know as the 'school struggle.' The first part of the struggle involved the right to start schools for a specific denomination.
After a new constitution was introduced and a fight over the interpretation of that constitution, denominational schools were allowed in 1857, although they didn't get equal funding. The second part of the struggle was a fight to get equal funding. This was resolved in 1917 after a compromise between conservatives and liberals (which also resulted in universal suffrage).
Since then, you can start a Dutch charter school with full funding, if you can make a good case that you will attract enough students and can provide a quality education. The government is then obligated to provide the school building and pay the same amount per student that public schools get. A side effect of this law initially intended to enable denominational schools, it that it is also relatively easy to start schools with a different pedagogic approach, like Montessori, Dalton, Jenaplan or Waldorf.
That sounds like something in between charter schools and a voucher system. I don't think there is any state in the U.S. where any group that can make such a case gets to start a charter school with full government funding. It sounds as though your charter schools can be religious, which I don't think is true in the U.S.
They are often officially religious, although with the secularization of society, most are merely nominally so. The one I went to had one or two teachers that started the day with prayer, a tiny minority and they clearly were the last holdouts. Other than that, there was not much sign that they were religious.
These schools are still liked by many secular people, because the nominally religious schools tend to be better, probably largely due to selection effects, which seem to be unintentional (many depend on 'voluntary' contributions by parents to do spend on nice things that the government won't pay for, which they like so much that the contributions are not made all that voluntary; Muslims are put off by nominally Christian schools and the general self-reinforcing effect where more capable parents pick the better schools, which then have better kids, which makes the school better, etc).
We do have a bible belt where there are more orthodox schools, who seem to object to the usual stuff (gay sex being OK, Darwinism, casual/sexy clothing, etc).
>I feel bad for giving such emotionally loaded examples - saving the really abused kids is an important goal, and school accomplishes it.
Does it? How? Isn't school usually during work hours, when parents aren't home? Even if a parent is not at work during school hours, can't a kid just go anywhere else? To a friend, or just join other kids on the street? And if a kid is locked at home, social services definitely should have already taken them.
As far as I can tell, schools have three effects on abused kids:
1) It marks them with bad grades, giving abusive parents motivation and excuse to abuse their kids more. (Also, I suspect, a lot of otherwise nice parents misguidedly think they HAVE to abuse kids with less-than-perfect grades and if they don't, they are BAD PARENTS who DON'T CARE ABOUT THEIR CHILDREN'S FUTURE)
2) It takes their day time they could have used to mentally recharge and prepare for parent's return.
3) It gives them homework, preventing them from escaping abuse in the evening, and additionally enraging abusive parents.
Sending everyone to school to help abused kids is not like forcing women to marry moderately abusive men because they might marry someone worse. It's like forcing women to marry an additional abusive man who comes when their real husband is at work because women can't vote, too dumb to know what's good for them and honestly just fuck them, it's not like they count as people anyway.
Unless I'm missing something huge (would like to know what if so!), it was the most wrong individual sentence you ever wrote on your blog, and I have read everything!
Of cause schools can't save every single case, but I think you are making too world way too simple. It sounds a bit like you have a special case in mind. The effects you name of cause can happen, but why do you think it always plays out this way? And you also miss a lot of other effects.
First of all the many signs of the very worst abuses can be seen by a teacher who than calls the police.
Secondly the kid gets to know other adults and children and hat a chance to learn that the way their parents are is not the normal way humans behave.
There is even a real chance to get some friend and have fun.
The most positive effects do probably not come from the way schools work, but from the mere fact that the kids are taken out of the environment controlled by their parents and get in touch with normal society. Abusive persons often are very good in covering up whats going on and a key part of that is to isolate the victim socially.
But even your points can as well act out the opposite:
1) in comparison and competition with the classmates they can find where they are good in, or at least see that they are not that miserable piece of scrap their parents perhaps make them believe.
2) most people can better recharge when they are distracted from the problem and for a while forget about it. So sitting at home in fear of doing a mistake and waiting in anxiety is worse. And not all parents work.
3) Homework can also serve as a very good excuse to escape.
Hm. I think I see why you disagree, and yet you didn't say anything I don't know. I'll state my case precisely: Scott seems to think that school, even if it harms some (most) kids, manages to help the most abused children. It's an important job and one of the reasons not to dismantle the school system. I disagree: I think school harms children who experience abuse at home, and possibly harms them more than the average child. That's on average, not in every case! Surely there are examples of good teachers noticing abuse and helping in many ways. Still the system is not worth it.
Here I am comparing school to a system that existed for hundreds of years and still exist in many places today: children spend a lot of time outside, in groups, doing whatever. Some adults who have time watch out for them. Kids are often invited to each other's houses. That's it, hardly seems utopian or unrealistic. Back to points:
1) Yes, teachers can spot abuse. Who is more likely to spot abuse per unit of time: a teacher who has to lecture a class of 25-35 kids at a time, making sure not to deviate from a strict curriculum? Or a grandparent, talking to their granddaughter's friend over dinner? If the latter, school prevents uncovering abuse instead of helping it.
2) Same: When is a kid more likely to learn that the way her parents are treating her is not normal: listening for the n-th time about supply and demand curves? Or hanging out with friends?
3) A chance to get friends and have fun! In school! What? It's forbidden to talk and do anything enjoyable during class. In my school teachers used to make friends sit as far as possible from each other to prevent this very thing you say school can help with. And everything kids do during recess they can do outside school too, except they don't have a fifteen(five)-minute limit on any social interaction.
4) School does take children from abusive homes temporarily (again, only when most parents are at work and can't abuse their children anyway), but without school, what do you think children would do with that time? Sit alone in dark closets, careful not to interact with society now that school is not forcing them? No, children would socialize more and parents who never let their kids play with other kids would be immediately suspicious.
5) School sucks at creating good competitions. It felt bad hearing from teachers that our group was the worst in school, and it felt bad when a teacher singled me out and screamed at other children "Why can't you be like Ivan?!". I felt good winning city-wide competitions, but I and another girl I knew took virtually every first place in our age group, and we were not the ones abused - abused kids didn't win anything. You know what felt better that all that? Playing with my friends after school. I was probably the most successful student of my age in my town and I got the most self-esteem when I was making my friends laugh. School just can't create an atmosphere of healthy competition like children themselves can. Very few kids (by design!) can find any joy in success at school, most are hurt in their self-esteem.
6) Try saying to an actual student that Algebra is better rest than *anything* the student himself can come up with and watch the reaction. Again, some (very few) students have a favorite subject or two they can relax in. Mostly school hates relaxation and increases anxiety (there were studies confirming it!).
7) Homework can not serve as an excuse to escape. My own parents, who are way nicer than most, never accepted an excuse "I'm busy with homework" to not give me grief about something if they wanted to. Parents who actually beat their children are even less likely to.
In general, school is an enormous burden placed on kids. Some kids (like me) have a lot of slack in their lives and can deal with it. Children with horrible families have way less slack in terms of free time, ability, self-esteem, mental energy and more, and so the burden almost certainly harms them disproportionately.
It depends on how you define school. I didn't want to defend schools the way they work right now, and judging from many comments here your schoola in the US could very well be worse than what we have here in Europe.
I was starting at Scotts 'child prison' so I was thinking about an institution were all children have to spend a relevant amount of time together with other children that are not only from the same 'bubble' of society. The imported part is, that there are no excuses allowed so there is no chance for parents to isolate their children.
So my point is, that there should be some kind of school and of cause it should be implemented in the way it helps the most.
Why do you assume that the culture kids will be taught in your institution will be superior to the culture their parents would choose for them? There seems an implicit assumption in discussions of this sort, often attacks on home schooling, that any parent who doesn't approve of the cultural lessons his kid will learn in the local school is an ignorant fundamentalist. Also that people other than parents are more competent to decide how children should be brought up than their parents are.
Consider, for example, hard working religious parents in the black inner city who want their kids to turn out like them rather than like the average of the local high school.
I do not think nor did i say that the culture at school would be superior. But i also don't think that any school can 'overwrite' the culture that is lived and tough by the parents, so it doesn't matter much if one of them is 'superior'.
It is about seeing there is a choice and having a fair chance to compare. Parents can plant a seed, and advertise for what they think is best, but in the end every human has to choose for them self. Parents trying too hard to influence the outcome often cause the opposite.
If the culture of the parents is too constraining (often with the best in mind, but overly protective) seeing other cultures can be liberating. On the other hand, if children have a loving family living by honest values, this will stick. Perhaps it takes some experiences, but than they can value their culture at home much better.
Parents can plant a seed, and advertise for what they think is best, but in the end every human has to choose for them self. Parents trying too hard to influence the outcome often cause the opposite.
There is even more about this. Imagine someone growing up only in the best culture were everyone is nice and honest and true. Then this young adult gets out in the world and has never (practically) learned how to identify a liar, trickster or bully. This can turn out to become a much harder lesson than it had been in the schoolyard where you can get the support of your parents, hopefully teachers and the opponent is also just a kid. Therefore there has to be a place were kids can play and experiment with their power, skills and relations It does not have to be comfortable, but there should be some kind of independent supervision that takes care that it does not get real dangerous. This safety net is the main point that makes an organized place (you can call it institution) much better than just randomly playing outside.
Of cause the current schools will often not achieve this. But i think it is better to fix the schools instead of burning down the schools or leave there all kids whose parents do not have the resources (this is not only about money) to organize something better privately.
I don't know if you are familiar with _The Nurture Assumption_. The author argues that, for most kids, it's the peer group, typically in school, not the family, that is the main factor determining adult personality.
Having read a number of the comments and the assumptions contained therein in the original post and this one, I kind of feel compelled to weigh in. As this is my first comment here: hi all and thank you Scott for the amazing work you do.
DISCLAIMER: The content in this post is purely anecdotal/experience based. If that doesn't interest you, skip over it I promise you you won't miss anything.
So I went to a Montessori School. I'll try to outline as briefly as possible the framework this entails: Students were giving a lot of freedom from the very beginning (talking about 6 year olds here) and the focus was on empowering them to make their own choices. In short, I think it worked and proves that, at least in some cases, you can let kids decide what they want to do and what and how they want to learn and end up with kids consciously deciding to learn things.
About half of the time spend in school, you would be literally free to do whatever you wanted. You were obliged to spend it in the classroom (although you could take bathroom breaks whenever you wanted) but that's it. If you wanted to do math, you could go to your teacher and ask for some math problems, if you felt like reading a book, that was fine. A friend of mine and I decided we wanted to draw a comic set in the world our favourite video game and we did that and nothing but that for multiple weeks. Nobody had a problem with it. Students were free to wander around the classroom, sit on a different table or on the ground, even rearrange tables if they wanted to engage in some form of group project. I don't remember there being anything remotely describable as anarchy.
There were no grades. From time to time, you would get tested in this subject or that and afterwards your teacher would tell you how you did and how you could improve. At the end of each term, you would receive a written assessment of your learning progress from your teacher, about half a page for each subject and also stuff like general behaviour. Furthermore, you yourself would write an assesment of how you viewed your efforts and your progress (again, starting from grade 1). I remember that being really hard but these are now cherished documents of a younger me's view on themselves.
Ages 6 - 9 and 9 - 12 would be educated together in one classroom. As students mostly chose what they wanted to spend their time on, that worked surprisingly well. If you had trouble with a certain task the idea was that you would first go to another, usually older student and ask them about it and only if that didn't solve your issue you would ask the teacher. I remember that being mostly enjoyable and I found explaining things to younger students was a great way to test your own understanding of a matter.
There was no fixed curriculum either. If you took longer than other kids to learn to write, you were encouraged to keep working on it but nothing else happened. If you wanted to repeat a certain exercise for the 10th time, you were free to do so. If you felt you got it after the first time, you could get a harder one or move on to a different topic. There were learning goals sorted by year but how and when exactly you achieved them was entirely up to you.
There were no homeworks. Occasionally you would be asked to do presentations or group projects (of which you could usually choose the specific topic yourself out of a broad range) and these could require you to go to the library to get some material or something of the likes. You could take care of those during the freely assignable school times or at home.
So where did that leave the kids? I decided to leave that school at the age of 12, which to this day I consider one of the greatest mistakes of my live but it gave me the opportunity to observe how I and other kids from that school would fare when tested the regular way. Pretty much all of them seemed to do just fine, with very few being true all-As kind of students but with nobody really struggling too much. Neither me nor the many people I talked to, including those that switched at a much later age, found any noticeable deficit in curriculum and most went on to finish high school with good-to-very-good grades.
Of course I am aware that such a school would heavily select parents for certain traits. While, as it was a public school, it wasn't a selection by wealth (I was raised by a single mom and money was definitely an issue) I would expect parents who really cared about their childs education to be more likely to choose such a school. Which definitely would bias the results of my anecdotal observation.
However, even if we assume that most of the kids on that school would have finished high school with good grades regardless of which elementary school (which honestly I doubt) they did, there is still one crucial difference: Me and most people that I talked to (I'd guess n~100) who attended this or a similar kind of school enjoyed it. Very much. At the end of the holidays I was actually getting a bit impatient to get back to school, to start learning again. And nobody, not a single one experienced it as the living hell that I find so much writing about here and elsewhere.
So why am I writing this? It seems from my observation that you can achieve, at the very least, similar results of regular modes of education with MUCH more freedom and MUCH less suffering on the side of the children. The model is certainly not perfect (and, as always, implemented even less perfectly) but it goes against the conventional wisdom and assumptions about childrens behaviour in so many ways with results so far from what I have heard people express that I think it is worthwhile to at least know it exists. That it is possible to do things differently and to at least not necessarily have it descend into the sort of prisoner-experiment-survival-fight that a lot of people seem to be envisioning.
How about the social relationships within the school? Were there children that had trouble making friends because everyone was involved in their own thing?
It all sounds like a sink-or-swim environment where you can have the time of your life if you have initiative and drive, but mostly waste your time if you do not. Were there children that struggled with the lack of structure?
On the social framework I want to say it wasn't paradise: some kids were more popular than others and there were still school yard fights and the likes. But honestly, if anything there were more opportunities to make friends than anywhere else: after all, you were allowed to get up during school hours and just walk up to another student and talk to them. I think the vast majority of kids likes to do stuff with other kids more than doing it alone, so being involved in your own thing doesn't seem like too much of an issue. At any rate, I have not talked to anyone who felt completely alone and much less bullied.
I'd kind of say the same about getting used to the lack of structure. Some did it better with it than others but I don't recall anyone being completely lost. After all, if you didn't know what to do you could always ask your teacher to give you some tasks (or, if it seemed you were really falling behind in some area, the teacher might tell you themselves they thought it was a good idea if you would work more on this or that). It's not that there was no structure, just that the structure forced on anyone who would rather do something else.
Sounds very attractive. What country was this in? How common were such schools?
"I don't remember there being anything remotely describable as anarchy."
Relative to the usual model, what you are describing is anarchy — individuals deciding what to do for themselves rather than being told what to do by someone else. What it isn't is chaos.
They essentially described how a pretty standard Montessori elementary school runs. They're not all over the place, but common enough. Sadly, most people are only familiar with Montessori day cares stopping at age 5, which tend to not be run as well/as sophisticated.
We started a K-8 charter school with a similar model (gpacharter.org) a decade or so ago which is still going strong. One of the most difficult parts was finding/training teachers. Most teaching college graduates just don't get it.
"Most teaching college graduates just don't get it."
Could this be a symptom of 'the cult of smart'? Not the book (i didn't read it), but what it seems to talk about: that theoretical skills and knowledge is valued very high and every else like personal development, working and thinking independently, learning by experience, cooperating and so on, get almost forgotten meanwhile.
My wife is a secondary Montessori teacher who taught at a Montessori HS. There are some really neat things you can do when you get the Montessori method into the hands of older kids.
For example, the kids were supposed to run a shop (for learning about economics and stuff). They got together and decided they wanted to run a pizza parlor. The kids had to do some research on how to build the pizza oven, made the rounds and got materials donated, built it, and figured out the pizza recipes on their own (with some guidance from the teachers). Then they sold pizzas they made and used the money to go on 'intercessions' - basically long-distance field trips to go help clean up after natural disasters, or learn history from first-hand sightseeing.
The hardest part about it was that the HS was a public school. The school district didn't like that one of their schools didn't have the same cookie-cutter vision as the rest of the district so they had to constantly fight against a dozen initiatives coming down from on high. Every state and local politician would want to layer on a new 'solution' to fix schools, which meant teachers like my wife had to spend another hour after school going through the motions for a program that had no idea what her classroom was dealing with, but promised magical results. Nobody ever ended the old failed programs, of course.
Fast forward: we moved to a state with a strong charter school program and my wife moved into a new secondary Montessori program. The biggest difference with the charter? It stripped away the layers of bureaucracy. Finally freed of the politicians from both sides of the aisle trying to 'fix' education, she could focus on the actual problem of educating the children. I still think Montessori is good for some kids and not necessarily for all (as with any educational approach, kids aren't one-size-fits-all), but I do like the emphasis on the kids becoming independent learners. Still, maybe the biggest thing we can do is stop trying to 'fix' schools, and instead empower them to fix themselves.
The thing I found interesting about this discussion, and the unpleasantness of last weekend, was how it highlighted the degrees to which various parties index on agreeableness.
By agreeableness, I don't necessarily mean personal pleasantness or nastiness, though I suspect they are somewhat correlated. But how much people value agreeing with the right people or disagreeing with the wrong people.
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I think the current mainstream internet culture is characterized by a strong emphasis on agreeableness. I think Matthew Yglesias summed it up well in his post last weekend:
"But everyone also believes that sexism and misogyny are significant problems in the world, and that the people struggling against those problems are worthy of admiration and praise. So to leap into a conversation about sexism and misogyny yelling “WELL ACTUALLY GIOLLA AND KAJONIUS FIND THAT SEX DIFFERENCES IN PERSONALITY ARE LARGER IN COUNTRIES WITH MORE GENDER EQUALITY” would be considered a rude and undermining thing to do"
Again, this should not be confused with personal pleasantness -- this agreeableness can manifest itself in some ugly ways like Twitter mobs. But there is a sense that if people are fighting on the side of the angels; defined as against racism, sexism, homo/transphobia or Trump, then it's best to nod along and ignore any inconvenient facts, lest it provide ammunition to the other side. In fact, they are unlikely to follow paths of research that may lead to inconvenient facts.
Critics would call this careerism and groupthink. It may be a response to the media industry being driven by social media. More charitable people would consider it an understandable response to a president who was a blowhard and stoked resentment. Regardless, it's there.
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Scott indexes a little lower on agreeableness (though again, seems to be more personally pleasant). He will not stop digging for truth, even if it might lead to a conclusion that puts him at odds with people supporting a cause he may believe in. He'll listen to and allow in his forum voices that might be shunned elsewhere.
I'm glad there's people like him doing it. But I confess it's not for everyone. I wouldn't even go down the road of researching racial differences in IQ. I'm still not convinced it's prudent to even take up that question, given the light/heat ratio such a discussion will produce. But I'm glad someone is doing it. It can lead us to taking a possible pandemic seriously before we might have otherwise.
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On the other end of the spectrum we have Frederik de Boer. As Scott noted at the beginning of the review, he's someone who doesn't seem to agree with anybody.
It seems that for de Boer, not only does he not care about being in agreement with the right people, he cares very much about *not* being in agreement with the wrong kind of people.
So, if his research leads him to conclusions that are uncomfortably close to Charles Murray, he writes a several page rant about how loathsome he thinks Murray's ideas are, and anyone who might agree with them.
Acknowledging how cruel schools can be to some people might land him in alignment with people like Christian home-schoolers and proponents of more traditional families, and we can't have that! So it's back to the standard prescriptions of universal pre-K and after-school programs so kids can be supervised while parents are at work where we belong!
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I agree (ahem) with Yglesias that we have swung too far to the agreeable side of the spectrum. I'm not sure Scott's at the optimal point, but I'm glad there are people pulling us in that direction. And I think that as Trump shrinks in our rear view mirror, and we realize that our pandemic response could have benefitted from some unorthodox thinking, we'll move in that direction.
> I think there's a weak straw-mannish version of (2) which is something like "because I'm smart, I naturally should get more money than dumb people, to reward me for being an inherently better person". I think the stronger version is something like "very few people can be surgeons, lots of people can be fast food workers, if someone is smart enough to do either one we want to incentivize them to become a surgeon, so surgeons should be paid more." If you take out a lot of steps, it looks like "smart -> pay more", but it's not quite as moralistic as the straw man.
I mentioned this no reddit, but I'll mention it here too: you don't need to have smart people paid more to incentivize them to be doctors. Pay them more for being doctors, pay them less (i.e. via taxes) for being smart.
I won't say taxing IQ isn't controversial, but we also shouldn't pretend there is no alternative to smart people being richer than dumb people. Society currently assigns economic spoils at birth via IQ, and society could very easily undo this without destroying the incentives of smart people to pursue important/hard jobs. We choose not to.
And to add: once you've heard the idea of modifying people's taxes by IQ, you're no longer "reasonable capitalist caring about incentives vs reasonable communist caring about the poor". You now need to pick between (1) a policy that reduces inequality without reducing production or (2) enshrining the legitimacy of income that was won by cosmic lottery.
Unsurprisingly almost everyone I've talked to about this has gone for 2.
I think the idea is to institute this tax after we have found most of the genetic determinants of IQ. So the only way of avoiding it for yourself is to bribe or somehow follow the people testing your genes.
There could still be some long run elasticity, with high IQ people having fewer children due to being poorer, low IQ people more, assuming that children are a normal good.
How would this not still reduce smart people's incentive to work? They could certainly work fewer hours and do lower quality work. It's not just about allocating them into the right professions. It's also more important to society how much smart people work relative to how much others work.
I would add on to Pete Shenkin's comment regarding vocational schools. The public HS I attended from 87-90 wasn't a dedicated vocational school but it still had vocational/shop classes that included wood-working, drafting, home-ec, and auto shop. It at least provided alternatives and creative outlets to learning that the required classes could leave one wanting. I think the push towards STEM in the 90s caused these programs to be cut, then subsequently, art & music classes as being worthless for creating a society of engineers and doctors. As a student back then I bridged the gap between enjoying doing moment-diagrams in my statics classes and doing woodworking projects. Learning opportunities that my parents couldn't provide and ultimately led me away from wanting to be an engineer and veer into architecture.
The learning environment over the last 20 yrs for middle and HS kids has been this relentless drive towards STEM learning (with the whip-hand held by tech telling everyone that the only way to save American kids from a life of wrenching pipes or welding steel is to teach them code) and the media, parents and politicians lapping that up.
Believe me, I enjoyed math, statics and chemistry until I got into a University Engineering school and loathed every minute of my classes. Only once I started taking creative electives did I realize differential equations, learning Fortran, and plodding through thermodynamics did I realize my talents lay adjacent to engineering via architecture. I'm also fortunate/unfortunate enough to be self-didactic enough to want to learn a lot of things without becoming an expert in everything.
This segues into the meritocracy side of the equation. Not every surgeon is smart. Not every engineer is smart. Not every architect or lawyer is smart. But these professions have managed to gatekeep the flow of folks into their respective fields to also keep social respect, accolades and pay higher. It's always fun listening to my very smart brother-in-law who is finishing his medical fellowship talk about the dumb doctors who he has to learn under and who are well-paid despite the fact. I can say the same for many formula-smart engineers who are not common-sense bright. I also know a few tradespeople who never went to college but are smart and make good money.
I think the last 25 years of our collective shift towards STEM learning as the be-all-end-all of education by forcing a certain-type of meritocratic learning and social stratification has been a big disservice to society in general. It wrongly assumes that STEM will lift all boats (tech certainly thinks so) but it just furthers stratification and marginalizes the type of Renaissance learning that leads to more well-rounded individuals.
Maybe a return to trade/vocational classes to primary learning environments would allow us to see a shift in making learning enjoyable for everyone and not as either a prison-sentence for 18yrs or simply the means to earning a future high 6-figure income.
> The purely financial issues seem solvable; if the cost of public education is X, give kids who want charter schools a voucher for 0.75X, and donate the extra 0.25X to the public school system. The charter school will be fine with less money, and every kid who leaves for charter schools will make the public schools better instead of worse.
I'm not sure I follow. This increases the per capita funding for the public school system, but still decreases its funding total. There are per capita costs for school (textbooks, materials), and there are non-per capita costs (like teachers). I'm not entirely sure that a class of 30 with 30.25X funding is better than a class of 31 with 31X funding.
To extend the difference a little, a class of 20 with 22.5X funding vs a class of 30 with 30X funding is still something I wouldn't be sure about. If the class of 30 spent 21X on a teacher, and 9X on materials (.3X per person), then a class of 20 would have 16.5X on a teacher, assuming the same material costs. I know lower class size helps, but surely a teacher paid a little over 25% more would too, so I still don't know which wins out, or if the winner is consistent with varying numbers.
It *might* be true that there are economies of scale, but it also *might* be false. People who want everyone in one basket they manage like to say "economy of scale" as if it answers everything, but scale brings both benefits and problems.
Right, but that was my point. I don't know which way it falls, so it seems difficult to claim that Scotts proposal here constitutes a solution. It might, but it might not, and you need more argument to resolve that.
"and there are non-per capita costs (like teachers). "
???
Why do you think the number of teachers required doesn't scale with the number of students? Do you think a school with a thousand students has the same number of teachers as one with five hundred?
Because you can scale class size. A school with a thousand students probably has more teachers than one with five hundred, but not necessarily twice as many. It could just have bigger class sizes. Therefore, teachers are not per capita.
A school with 500 students can have larger classes too. Presumably both schools try to set class size at what they think is the best value. Why do you expect the larger school to have bigger classes?
I expect rough correlation between teachers and students, but not necessarily linear correlation. That is, most of the time, I'd expect more students to equate to more teachers, but not always, and rarely perfectly.
For example, my toy example in my first comment had a class of 30, where 1 extra student does or doesn't go to a charter school. If that student choses not to go to a charter school, the public school is not going to hire .03 extra teachers for that year, they're just going to have that teacher teach a class of 31. I suppose it's possible, but I'd be surprised if the teacher even gets paid 3% extra.
The second toy example might fall apart on this. That is, if enough students decided not to go to charter school that class sizes increased by 50%, there probably would be more teachers hired. On the other hand, this might not be how it works either. Imagine a small school that has one teacher for each of the 3 R's: reading, writing, and arithmetic. If they get 50% more students, they can't just hire 1.5 more teachers, and even if they hire 1 or 2 more teachers, which subject(s) get(s) left out? This is a silly toy example, but because teachers are a discrete resource, there will be parts on the curve where stuff like this happens to a lesser or greater degree. In fact, I think any school with X teachers for each required class would run into this problem with any percent increase that isn't a multiple of 1/X.
Very aside comment, I ordered a copy of "The Bell Curve" yesterday. I know of two people who claim to have read it... so I'll be the third. I liked "Coming Apart" by Murray, which I think was described as an update of the Bell Curve without the forbidden topic. I mostly feel that Charles should be given some credit for pointing out the effect of genetics, intelligence and selection. Rather than being demonized for sharing an uncomfortable truth.
In the interest of adding data to the competing anecdotes of whether kids hate school: The Georgia Department of Education surveys students on school climate annually and requires public schools to administer the results to at least 75% of students in grades 3-12.
372K students in grades 3-5 responded to the statement, “I like school”: 35% Always; 26% Often; 34% Sometimes; 5% Never.
690K students in grades 6-12 responded to the statement, “I like school”: 16% Strongly Agree; 56% Somewhat Agree; 16% Somewhat Disagree; 13% Strongly Disagree.
The elementary survey is 15 questions long, but the middle/high survey is over 100 questions long. However, “I like school” is the first question for either survey, so I’m reasonably confident in its validity.
Another relevant question: 372K students in grades 3-5 responded to the statement, “How often in the past couple of months have kids picked on you by threatening you?”: 70% Never; 15% Once or twice; 8% A few times; 4% Many times; 2% Every day.
The results for “How often in the past couple of months have kids picked on you by hitting or kicking you?” are pretty similar.
In the bottom part of that post, I briefly describe analysis that shows the 6-12 grade question, “I feel my school has high standards for achievement” has the strongest relationship to student growth (schools that see the most improvement in test scores tend to have high standards). And the most predictive question for elementary schools is the threats question.
The point of meritocracy isn't to move everyone into the upper class, it's just to create a maximally productive society. Assume that education has the ability to create a surgeon who, without education, would have been a general laborer (this may or may not be true).
In a "meritocratic" capitalist society, that's good for the surgeon - she gets more money. It's also good for people who need surgery - if she's a good surgeon, they get better surgery, if she's a bad surgeon, she provides an alternative that decreases surgery costs society-wide. Note that this doesn't have anything to do with what the surgeon "deserves" as Scott points out. It's just people making choices that help them. There aren't as many surgeons as general laborers.
But, and here's the part I feel like people miss, it's *also* good for general laborers. With people removed from the general labor pool, the cost of general labor goes up. So when people say "education is the silver bullet that solves poverty" it doesn't necessarily mean "education will turn all factory workers into programmers." It means "education, done well, will place our citizens more optimally in a way that fills empty programming jobs *and* makes factory workers more valuable by alleviating the glut."
You can ask whether education actually does this - maybe it gates high-skilled jobs more than it fills them by forcing all high-skilled workers to be credentialed. But I get very annoyed with people who talk about "meritocracy" being unfair (it is), without asking, "okay, but even if it is unfair, is it better for everyone?" If I'm going to lose in every possible world, even if it's completely out of my control, please do not waste your breath arguing about how unfair it is that some people have to lose. Please instead just let me lose in a world where losing has a good consolation prize.
One thing missing from the ideal schooling system you describe is civics education. Schools teach subjects that make each individual student no better (or not much better) off, but benefit society as a whole. Broadly I think this includes some math, a fair amount of history, a fair amount of science, and a bit of actual civics. Few students would choose to study these topics, but we're all better off when more students understand these things.
Imagine if no one got the lesson on the balance of power between the federal government branches. We might have one branch ceding lawmaking power to the other two. Or if everyone skipped the lessons on trends versus data points in statistics, a bunch of people would be fooled by arguments like "winter is cold still, therefore climate change isn't real". In reality, just imagine how much worse it could be.
I think you are vastly overestimating how successful schools are in teaching. I doubt many people, a decade after graduating from high school, remember anything at all about trends versus data points. If you watch the discussion of covid infection rates, you may notice that most people don't see the difference between level and rate of change. They explain the sharp drop starting in early January as due to the fact that people were no longer partying because the holiday is over, without realizing that that implies a change in the rate of change of infection rates, not a change in the level. It's only if the rate of change goes negative that the level starts to go down.
Similarly for most other issues. And that's aside from case where what the schools teach isn't true. My elder son's school taught about AIDS as if it were a normal venereal disease, not one spread mostly by anal intercourse and, secondarily, blood transfusions and needle sharing. What schools teach about politically relevant issues such as the causes of the Great Depression depends on the political views of the teachers and school boards, not on the evidence.
These are good points. But I think we should consider the alternative here. In the Ideal School System, would people have more or less statistical training. At least most of us know medians and averages, if nothing else. Furthermore, while some schools teach incorrect or misleading things, in general they teach correct information. Their mathematics and science might be dull sometimes (personally I'm in the School was Pretty Decent camp), but they're correct. History might not be your preferred selection or versions of events, but if kids chose their classes like in the ISS, a much larger group of people hasn't studied the American Revolution or Nazi Germany (Godwin points!).
I agree with @Erwin below. Even very basic elements of schooling confer collective benefits on society. Maybe the ISS accomplishes some of these, maybe more kids choose to take courses and do so more willingly than I expect, but I think these benefits would be net decreased in a system as described.
In the ideal school system, someone would tell the kids that _How to Lie With Statistics_ is a really fun book, some of the kids would believe that, read it, and tell other kids that it was true. More generally, a school system would work better if, like unschooling, it had a strong incentive to offer kids things they wanted to read, material they wanted to learn. That's less likely to happen in a context where the kid has almost no power over what he is being taught.
You go in an very important direction, but kind of stop half way, by sticking to the intellectual education. I think the most important thing people learn at school are things that we usually don't even think about. There they see how different people are out there in the society they once will live in and learn some kind of strategies to deal with them.
That doesn't require school, just some context where they are interacting with other people. Some such contexts would have a narrower range of people than school, some a wider. The people I got to know in the SCA or SSC are much more diverse than the people I went to school with.
Basically i agree, it can look much different and better than today's schools.
But it has to mandatory, with no chance for parents to isolate their children until they are adults. And this is almost Scotts definition of a 'child prison' as a institution where every is forced into by law.
You assume that the only alternative to parental tyranny is state tyranny. In almost all contexts of a modern society, parents don't have the option of isolating their children until they are adults, because the children are interacting with other children, watching television, reading books, ... . You seem to be imagining a closed compound of cultists, which is a pretty rare pattern outside paranoid imaginations.
If you want to phrase it like this, yes I assume the only way to break though parental tyranny are strict rules of society. The state is just the current form the society organizes on a bigger scale.
It was a specific man i know that convinced me about the importance of this. He was quite supportive of homeschooling to keep out the evil state tyranny from his family He was also very good in leaving a positive impression with people he who met him first and hiding how tyrannic his ideas of family were. From this example i know, that none of us would recognize someone like this if we don't know them very well. But trying to recognize tyrannic parents would produce a lot of false positives and do more harm than good. Modern media can help for sure, but things like books and friends from the neighborhood can be banned too easily. So the only way I see, is to ensure enough social contacts.
I welcome alternative ideas to ensure save social contacts that the parents can effectively ban. And please also think of people living in dangerous neighborhoods or remotely in the countryside, so it is not suspicious if the kids don't just play outside or don't meet any other kids there.
How is anyone taking this article seriously? Such fundamental misconceptions about 1. how to create better learning environments and 2. economic value provided by specialized labor.
1. How to create a better learning envrionment:
Instead of pointing at the good schools (the ones with the best results) and saying, "How come all of their parents care about their education? How dare they all sit in class well behaved! We need to break that up so that those 'special' kids are evenly dispersed." How about you take the principles that are established in those schools and imitate them. What principles are those? The very ones you complain are selected for in those schools: mainly 1. ability of the child to act civilized in a classroom setting and 2. parents who care about their education.
2. Economic value:
The people who get paid more in society don't get paid more because we value intelligence more that stupidity, or however you want to label that spectrum. They get compensated more because of scarcity. There are less people who can build good software than can mow a lawn. I can agree with you all the day about gatekeeping problems, especially in well established industries like medicine. But there are only certain people who can do certain things. This alone doesn't make them receive higher payment. It is that fact which leads their labor to be competed over. The fact that multiple employers will seek them out is where their salary is determined.
I mean these are so fundamental and your article laughs in the faces of these tenants. I understand how education and gatekeeping are tied into both of these, but I think your article doesn't deal w/ that properly.
How is anyone taking this article seriously? Such fundamental misconceptions about 1. how to create better learning environments and 2. economic value provided by specialized labor.
1. How to create a better learning envrionment:
Instead of pointing at the good schools (the ones with the best results) and saying, "How come all of their parents care about their education? How dare they all sit in class well behaved! We need to break that up so that those 'special' kids are evenly dispersed." How about you take the principles that are established in those schools and imitate them. What principles are those? The very ones you complain are selected for in those schools: mainly 1. ability of the child to act civilized in a classroom setting and 2. parents who care about their education.
2. Economic value:
The people who get paid more in society don't get paid more because we value intelligence more that stupidity, or however you want to label that spectrum. They get compensated more because of scarcity. There are less people who can build good software than can mow a lawn. I can agree with you all the day about gatekeeping problems, especially in well established industries like medicine. But there are only certain people who can do certain things. This alone doesn't make them receive higher payment. It is that fact which leads their labor to be competed over. The fact that multiple employers will seek them out is where their salary is determined.
I mean these are so fundamental and your article laughs in the faces of these tenants. I understand how education and gatekeeping are tied into both of these, but I think your article doesn't deal w/ that properly.
Re: "cherry picking parents" - maybe it explains away the overperformance of some charters, but *is it a bad thing*? Parents in deprived neighborhoods often face schools with significant discipline problems that interfere with learning. Parents who want better for their kids should have the option to get their kids out of these situations.
>DeBoer argued that charter schools succeed through selection effects: they only take the best students. Several commenters pointed out this was illegal.
Is this written with USA in mind? How does it work and why is it illegal? In Russia, many schools for children only take those who perform best on some kind of test.
The US does have some magnet schools that may accept students based on test scores. But the charter schools discussed here are not supposed to be able to deny students.
I am disappointed with the treatment of lotteries. There are several issues that people are failing to distinguish.
Freddie DeBoer asks why are they cheating "if the charter advantage is as powerful as proponents claim"? Different people make different claims! Some of them are exaggerated and some are probably correct. Yes, barriers to entering the lottery improve the charter's test scores, but they controlled in a randomized controlled trial. It is very important to only consider the results of RCT. In the book he cites the same Reuters article and claims that it undermines RCT. This is confused. Also, he mentions drop outs / backfill as another form of selection. This should be corrected by intention-to-treat analysis. I haven't checked how extensively this is used, but Scott pointed it out in the study he cited.
Maybe the drawing of the lotteries is rigged, and not just entrance to the lotteries. Steve Sailer is the only person I have heard clearly suggest this. Sometimes people imply it, but muddled insinuation does not produce clear thought. In particular, DeBoer said at SSC that the papers take the lotteries "on faith," which sounds like this, but again he cited the Reuters article and is probably just confused. This lead me to actually look at some charter RCTs and they don't take it on faith. They check that the selected and rejected groups were indistinguishable on all the metrics they could measure, in particular prior test scores. I looked at 4 studies, looking at multiple schools each, and only one found a school with rigged lottery, which of course they excluded from their analysis. Maybe lotteries are rigged in the normal case where a school is not subject to a study, but for the factual question of whether charter schools do something, that is irrelevant to RCT. One of the studies noted that the Boston charters have a centralized lottery, which I'd think would be more secure than letting the individual schools draw their own lotteries.
Alexander H suggests that the selective students made his education better. Maybe charters are just streaming, but that doesn't mean they don't work. Is streaming a positive-sum change or a zero-sum change? Do smart students help arbitrary classmates, or do they more help other smart students? Disruptive students are probably a zero-sum game of hot potato, though. But people are already playing this game; are charter schools making it worse?
"Why would they have felt the need, if the magic charter school dust was all it took?"
This is like expressing incredulity that Lance Armstrong is a fast bicyclist because he cheated. 'If he's so fast, why'd he have to cheat.' Because he wanted to win, and the surest way to win is to both be really good and also cheat.
What no one cares to admit is that while Lance Armstrong did PED's, pretty much EVERY competitive cyclist at that level does, but Lance committed the Unpardonable Sin of breaking Greg LeMonde's Tour de France consecutive wins record. He therefore was hung out to dry. This is a scarcely hidden inconvenient truth in the pro cycling world. See also the NFL, and probably the top levels of any other professional sport.
"The community centers offer a wide variety of classes aimed at a wide variety of learning styles to make that happen."
I was surprised to see this -- it's not something I'm especially knowledgeable about, but I was under the impression that "learning styles" had been widely discredited -- am I mistaken on that? eg from a 2017 literature review (https://bit.ly/2M6xDSR), "more methodologically sound studies have tended to refute the hypothesis and...a substantial divide continues to exist, with learning styles instruction enjoying broad acceptance in practice, but the majority of research evidence suggesting that it has no benefit to student learning, deepening questions about its validity."
> There are studies finding extreme negative effects from having disruptive kids in your class; I'm a little skeptical of this kind of research
I went to a "good" school district and was a "good" student, in that I have a nearly eidetic memory and enjoyed learning most things. In eighth or ninth grade, I had a social studies class with a "disruptive" boy who quickly figured out that the teacher was *extremely* timid. He effectively ran the classroom all semester, running around, yelling over the teacher's feeble attempts to teach anything, inciting other kids to join him in bullying the teacher or performatively goofing off. This continued such that I have no memory of doing anything in that class or even what we were supposed to be doing - maybe we were supposed to be getting some geography? I really don't know. But I am pretty sure that one disruptive kid invalidated an entire course.
I had a great high school chemistry teacher but he got fed up dealing with a different chem class (the disruptive students) and quit and so we had substitute teachers for the rest of the year and I definitely learned less after he left.
Italian universities usually work somewhat similarly to your utopian education system.
For most curricula and courses attendance is not mandatory. Students have multiple opportunities in an year to take a final exam worth the whole grade, they can retake exams if they fail or they are not satisfied with their grade, and delaying exams even by more than an year is not particularly punished or frowned upon. Often there is a syllabus listing multiple adequate sources for individual study and students can look for the one that most suits them.
Single professors can deviate from this model and try to enforce more standardized classwork, for instance by making the final exam significantly harder than whatever other grading option they offer to students attending the lectures and following week by week. Those who do are usually almost universally disliked, and the amount of misery they produce becomes only more jarring by the close comparisons to their more relaxed colleagues
Of course we are talking about institutions that educate adults, albeit usually young and not financially independent, which in many ways makes things simpler.
Also usually the more "professionalizing" a curricula is, the stricter the organization becomes, for instance medical students and engineers often get much less liberties than say students of pure mathematics or literature or philosophy.
In general I think this flexibility is very effective in both making the whole experience less miserable and in retaining students that would otherwise dropout or underperform.
Early in my university degree I had an important loss in my family and I was not able to study effectively for some months, and failded or got bad grades in multiple exams. In the end I graduated with honors in the normal three years, whilst in another system I may have been kicked out.
I think there are two main reasons people object to meritocracy, which aren't quite the ones mentioned:
1) No-one's bothered about how surgeons are chosen, and only a handful of hand-wringers care about "how we, as a society, decide who we value and who we don't." People care about how the current ruling-class is chosen. Historically, the US was ruled by a lively mix of robber barons, small-town lawyers, charlatans, silver-spoon dynasts, slaveowners, militia generals and religious zealots. Now it's ruled by copy-pasted Princeton grads.
This has massive policy implications, as seen by the fact that it nearly lost the Cold War until a senile B-movie actor surrounded by a clique of blanco refugees, religious zealots, oil barons, a spy with Nazi connections and his wife's favourite astrologer took over. All this was only skin deep, because the broader ruling class weren't replaced, and civil servants, lawyers judges, NGO-ites, journalists, academics and bankers are all varying degrees of the same copy-paste. Even modern Republican politicians are mostly Princeton grads LARPing as cowboys (hence Trump). Surgeons are a terrible example, as they're the least relevant to the direction the US takes. They'd always be chosen on ability in the same way athletes are, it's the ruling/administrative class who wouldn't.
"Picking the best people and putting them in charge" is the point of all political systems, as opposed to the definition of any of them, and it's difficult to see how swapping "credentialism" for [actual ability determination system] would would change the way the US is run.
2) In any meritocracy, there has to be a way to assess merit that is quickly legible to whomever's making hiring/promotion decisions, there will always be tests, and people will try to game them. These could be improved a bit in a way which wouldn't immediately degenerate (e.g. standardised, open-admission tests at the degree level), but the trade-off greater gains for those with test-taking skills (as opposed to actual ability at the occupation) vs. class bias in university selection. Sarcastically straw-manning your position as "Real meritocracy hasn't been tried yet" is rebuttable, but I'm not convinced meritocracy wouldn't degenerate into credentialism fairly quickly.
I agree that surgeons are a bad example (I was going to post similar) but I think a lot of meritocracy critique comes from powerful people trying to find ways to maintain their power (e.g. attacks on magnet/exam schools). I support increasing lotteries as a way to correct for bias but given a choice between selecting people based on a test and selecting people based on their parents I'd choose the test.
With regard to point 2 I think this is the real problem with meritocracy. Many successful organizations have a good method of determining merit but that these organizations are fragile and hard to scale (typically relying on good bosses hiring good subordinates in a self perpetuating hierarchy). This becomes even more difficult when the job is not the job (e.g. politics)
Also, Marxists don't like it because anyone who's still a Marxist is presumably angry at the ruling class we have now (most of the old-growth Marxists in Europe/North America made peace with the system and merged into the current ruling class).
Late to this convo, as always, and also as always I find the conversations irritating but appreciate those who discuss this as policy for all rather than assuming everyone's a bright but anti-social kid who hated school.
I know Michael Pershan posts here and he's very good. His writing focuses more on teaching and research, while I focus on teaching and policy. In any event, if you are interested in reading about policy and teaching in Title I schools with a diverse community, you may want to ignore my politics and try my blog: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/
Specific topics mentioned here that you might want to read about: disruptive kids, vocational education, the worth of teaching advanced topics to lower IQ kids, the value of education, my experience as a bright kid who was bored, Brian Caplan's book, Robert Pondiscio's book, the history of education reform in Bush/Obama years.
General comments:
1. It is impossible to overstate the damage risked by a disruptive kid in a classroom, even when the teacher can handle it. (as I can)
2. Vocational education is very expensive, and there was never a halcyon period when we did it better than today.
3. Any discussion of education that doesn't discuss the disparate impact of the policy is really not worth discussing. Education policy in the US is *all* about race and disparate impact.
4. Most people are woefully ignorant of how the costs are distributed. For example, Scott starts by proposing that parents be given "the cost" of educating their child, then says as a counter well, give them 75% of "the cost". But "the cost" of educating children includes the cost of educating sped and ELL kids. Little is done on cost of educating the kids who show up at the border and are plopped in a public high school (I taught those classes for three years), but they get twice as many English classes and then electives and also stay in school an extra year.
And "on average", special ed kids cost twice as much as non-sped, but even that masks the tremendous expense of severely handicapped kids. Even severely handicapped kids who can learn. I taught a wonderful, fantastic kid in a wheelchair who had to have a full-time aide to help him go to the bathroom, order food, eat. That aide easily cost at *least* $50k/year. And this was a kid who could be unattended, who could participate in class, and is now in college. Blind kids need full time aides in the classroom (who have to whisper information to their students while the teachers talk, not that this isn't disruptive). Again, these are kids who can benefit.
Now let's try the severely mentally disabled and autistic kids, who are violent and who often need their diapers changed. These classes have one teacher and 5-7 aides for maybe 10-12 kids. These kids on average cost close to $100K/year. (there's a reason why schools aren't totally averse to paying private school tuition for severely disabled kids whose parents argue for it. It's irritating, but often cheaper.)
Then there are all the services that schools have to provide: psychologists. Reading and sight specialists. ELL specialist to test the kids every year.
So if the average cost per child is $16K or $12K, or even $20k, you can dream on if you think a normal kid costs that much, or that you'd get that much. It will depend a great deal on the costs of your particular district, and they will have all sorts of laws on their side justifying all your costs.
Figure an average NYC kid costs a lot, as most of them qualify for special services. Maybe 8K. Average suburban kid? Maybe 4-5K. Teacher salaries are higher in certain states, of course, but as someone observes, teachers don't scale.
So it's more likely that Scott's idea to give parents the cost of educating their child will be negotiated down to maybe 50% or less, and that's of a much, much smaller number.
There's a lot of people commenting here that are just....wow. But I always forget how many are making really good points because, well, they're just so polite. And I know some of you read my blog already.
But education's important, and I really feel the aggravation keenly when I see a bunch of highly educated people be in the aggregate so utterly clueless about the issues in US Ed.
You mention that the restrictions on bodily freedom got easier to bear as an adult. But isn't it possible that a large point of school is just that? To get you to adjust to letting go of bodily freedoms for a duration of time and become ok with it?
The same about intense boredom. I think the virtues of being able to tolerate boredom are not enough appreciated. The jobs society needs to get done are most often NOT tasks that are enjoyable. But they need to be done and often the wage premium is for learning to do a good job of things that you don't enjoy. Or oftentimes you don't think you enjoy but get past a certain threshold and they don't seem as bad.
In that sense learning to get past the frustrations of boredom seems a good skillset for success.
But it's one learned better when it is success at something you want to do, not a task someone else has set you. Consider, for example, grinding in an RPG, which quite a lot of people do voluntarily. Or learning the sort of athletic skill where you feel incompetent and frustrated in the early months.
In all of this, I did not find a link to studies showing that the average charter school or homeschooled kid is on actually happier than the average student of a regular high-schools. Some of the comments just seemed to me like the situation described could be mostly independent of school, and be caused by e.g. puberty. It may also be interesting to see whether class size affects happiness. As far as I know, it does not affect standard school results, once you control for background variables.
To respond to deboer’s comment, they would cheat even if their education system worked (1) as a hedge because they didn’t know in advance it would, (2) to make it work even better
Bathroom passes and defund the police: I was struck that the same utopian argument exists in both places - “if it weren’t for the system we wouldn’t need the enforcement”. And there’s the same Chesterton’s fence trade off: are we sure we really want to dismantle this system and roll the dice that the next thing won’t be way worse, vs if we keep trying to iterate on the current system there’s every incentive for dead Enders to do the bear minimum and keep dead-ending, and the only way to escape the rut is to tear down and rebuild. I was also struck by my instincts that it’s very dangerous to tear down the existing system when it comes to police, but that I’m more open minded when it comes to schools. Then I interrogated that apparent contradiction, looking for a model that would encompass a few axes and tell me whether I’m wrong and both flavors of utopian experiment are bad ideas, or if there’s a solution space that situates “tear down the rebuild school” but not “tear down and rebuild law enforcement.”
If we assume there’s an inflection point where some systems are better torn down and other systems iterated, it’s probably a matter of costs and benefits. How likely is it that the existing system is above the 50% margin of what we’d get if we rolled the dice and started over? How big is the upside if we succeed? How big is the catastrophe if we fail.
On its face it seems like defunding or dismantling the police scores medium on the first axis, high on the second, and high on the third. Which makes me need another axis, or at least a caveat to the first, which is “in the same game theory universe, how likely is it we could make something better even if we were well intentioned?” Call it “the wire principle”.
Given the above, the risks of dismantling the police would seem to exceed the benefits, especially when we can work granularly: dismantling and replacing some of the worst, for instance.
Schooling might score differently. The risks are certainly lower, as long as we allow home schooling and charters. If we eliminated public schools the burden while we were figuring out something better would almost certainly fall on the poor, and I’m not as convinced as Scott that school is not doing anything for them.
Harrison Bergeron is a much misunderstood story. It's a parody/satire of anti-egalitarian writers like Ayn Rand, making fun of the "if not for the oppressive System that we think wants this ridiculous caricature of equality, we'd be godlke supermen" attitude. The point is not "strawman equality is bad", it's "they really think they're superheroes trying to stop us from implementing this strawman version of equality they've created in their heads."
(And remember the ending: after bounding through the air like a superhero and declaring himself king, Harrison Bergeron gets literally brought down to earth in the most extreme way possible: being killed by a shotgun, a weapon that almost anyone can use.)
I read somewhere that Kurt Vonnegut thought Diane Glampers was the hero. Not sure if it's true, but it *is* true that the story was written long before the concept of affirmative action or quotas, so it's certainly not satirizing anything to do with civil rights.
Someone on Data Secrets Lox tracked down the Vonnegut quote, and I don't think that's the correct interpretation:
"I can't be sure, but there is a possibility that my story "Harrison Bergeron" is about the envy and self-pity I felt in an over-achievers' high school in Indianapolis quite a while ago now. Some people never tame those emotions. John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald and Mark David Chapman come to mind. "Handicapper Generals," if you like."
That implies that the inspiration for the story was his remembering emotions in high school that would have put him on Glampers' side, but not that he as the author of the story is on that side. Not unless you assume that he approves of Booth, Oswald and Chapman.
> We act as if there is some other sense of "deserve" beyond these three, where everyone in the First World "deserves" a middle-class lifestyle, and maybe a few very likeable hard-working people like surgeons and inventors "deserve" just a little extra. I share this intuition. But I don't have a good sense for what kind of definition of the word "deserve" lands us there
What about circles of concern? We start from the computer point of view: Assume that you are an incredibly strong transistor with lots of money, but your significant other isn't. Do they deserve an equal share of your money? No, according to the model, but it would make them (and thus you) unhappy if they got just the standard rate for childcare and housework and so they get the money. Same thing with children, parents, friends, employees etc. The people that you want to do well are in your circle of concern and you will spend money to make them happy. In the context of a whole society this becomes trickle-down economics which due to the limited number of people any person cares about works badly if only few people are rich but pretty decently if a fair share of the population has money to spare.
(Also, everyone cares a little bit about the people they meet in the streets (altruistically or you wish them economic success so you might benefit), so social security makes sense. You could maybe shoehorn this into utilitarianism by arguing that people always view themselves as part of a group and so would be happier in a disease-ridden African village than on the disease-ridden streets of San Francisco.)
"This is also the kind of thing I hear from people in psychiatric institutions. Some people say it saved their life and helped them begin the work of self-transformation, other people say it was abusive and traumatizing. People will have both sets of comments about the same institutions, same doctors, same nurses."
Or the same people can say both that it was terrible and useful. Being locked in a box with a bunch of scary conspecifics and scared for your life isn't fun, but it's also closer than most of modern life to the sort of problem for which evolution baked our brains. That can be pretty helpful for some sorts of people - in particular, those clever enough to actually solve the problem and get all the happy juices associated with that.
As a parent, the idea of enshrining in law the same freedoms for kids than adult have is... pure insanity.
The point of parenting children is they do not have the experience to make good choices. They avoid pain (like we all do) but cannot appreciate that pain avoided now is more pain in the future, or that things that hurt can turn out to be great things.
It is the job of a successful parent to balance freedom and joy and exploration of the world as the child wants it with discipline, effort, discomfort, and tolerating negative in exchange for positive. There is no easy answer, and attempting to parent has failure modes on both sides - too little push to do the hard, and too much regimentation and force. It still needs to be done.
Responding to the section: "If a child wants to stay at home, they can stay at home. If they want to wander the streets, they can wander the streets..." Hahahahaha! Oh wait, you're serious, let me laugh even harder! *humor intended.*
It is a common failure of extremely gifted people to imagine that other people are just like them, i.e., possessing the curiosity, drive, independence, and personal discipline to maximize their potential from a young age. Most people are not like that, and most children are *especially* not like that. I think that Scott would learn something from being a parent. I have two very bright, very capable daughters, and we encourage them to pursue their own interests, but giving them total freedom would be an unmitigated disaster.
The vast majority of children, given total freedom to do whatever they wanted to with their time, would choose to stay home and watch TV or play video games all day. Given a choice of food, they would choose pizza and mac & cheese. I remember a news story a while back about a girl whose parents did let her do whatever she wanted, so she stayed home in front of the TV, and was morbidly obese at the age of 14. The parents were charged with criminal negligence and child abuse. This is basic biology: the portions of the brain that govern self-discipline and long-term planning are among the last to mature, and do not function properly until adulthood. Expecting 8-year olds to make decisions based on their future job prospects is laughable; many of my classmates in *college* couldn't do that effectively.
I share many of Scott's frustrations with "school as an institution", and elementary school in particular seemed like an enormous waste of time. The problem is that if you have a class of 30 kids, all of whom must learn the same lesson, then the teacher must teach to the lowest common denominator. The solution, however, is not to give kids total freedom, but to use a customized curriculum based on interests and ability. When I got to middle school, life for me improved enormously, because I was able to take a number of gifted classes. The rule in the gifted math class was that I could choose a textbook, and work through it at my own rate. However, the book had to be math, and I had to turn in a certain amount of work each week, and take occasional tests on whatever subject I had chosen to learn.
My daughters go to a public school where each class is divided by ability into small groups of 4-5 students, which learn different things at different rates. IMHO, it works reasonably well, but it is enormously labor intensive. The small groups are led by parent volunteers, so you so need 1 teacher and 5 parents for a class of 24 kids. Needless to say, the district is in Silicon Valley, where you have a surplus of highly-educated, high-paid, single-earner families, so that there are enough parent volunteers. (Charter-school-like selection-bias-for-parents applies here, too.) It would not work in a poor inner-city district.
The sad truth of the matter is that we are expecting public schools to take over much of the responsibility of child-rearing, because both parents are off working, sometimes multiple jobs, for low pay. The schools behave as institutions because they do not have the manpower (womanpower? personpower?) to do that properly.
Unfortunately, parenting is hard. You can't outsource it to the schools, nor can you outsource it (as Scott suggests) to the kids themselves.
> The utilitarian's definition [...] even a burger flipper making $15,000 a year doesn't “deserve” it
> the utilitarian perspective, which is [...] "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need"
What the hell, Scott? As author of the Consequentialism FAQ, you should know better than to confuse utilitarianism with communism.
My opinion as a negative utilitarian is that everybody by default "deserves" $15,000 a year or so. Because why not? It doesn't hurt to say so. If you don't "deserve" something then you might feel guilty for having it (a feeling with negative utility), but not guilty enough to give it all away, and as you've discussed yourself, extreme generosity doesn't scale as well as, say, the Giving What We Can Pledge does, so we both favor the latter, do we not? Aside from which, incentive structures yada yada.
Harry Nyquist is often credited with the sampling theorem (independently explored by Kotel'nikov in 1933 and Shannon in 1948 and perhaps some other people, Wikipedia story on it is instructive; Nyquist had proven a specific subcase). But yes, generally having a place to bounce ideas off each other is good. And I'd argue that elite schools are essentially that, that they are providing non-trivial benefits because they get both best students and best teachers in ("peer effects", superadditivity, whatever you want to call that).
Is the most likely explanation not because smart people, on average, tend to be more useful to society, and thus societies with a 'pro-smart' norm will tend to be more successful than that value their Einsteins and Flemings as little as everyone else?
i'd say another highlight was skluug's comment, "i liked high school"
Self-promotion will get you everywhere.
I want to address Scott's "Utopian society" where kids over 6 can choose what they want to do and the level of rigor they want in their classes, or if they want to attend classes at all. I think this would be tantamount to child abuse--like opening a credit card in your kid's name and buying them a nice TV to watch, only for them to grow up and realize that they have a ruined credit score.
Kids are smart in some ways, but very dumb in others. They are bad at long term planning because they don't have the real world experience to know what the consequences of their actions will be. Also, if it's unethical for parents to make such schooling decisions for their kids, surely it's not fair for the kids to make decisions for the adults they will become. The person I am in my 20s has so little in common with my 7 year old self that we may as well be an entirely different person with shared memories.
The choices you make as a kid and the things you learn have an outsize impact on your entire adult life. 7 year old me HATED social niceties, hated brushing my hair, dressing nice, didn't understand why I couldn't wear stained clothes and live in a pigsty. And I hated my parents for making me conform to these arbitrary social standards. 7 year old me would not have chosen the rigorous class schedule. But I took it anyway.
Parents' job isn't to make their KID happy. It's to maximize total happiness/goodness (whatever you want to call it) over the course of their lifetime. Often, this involves making them miserable as children so they can be functional as adults. I'm glad my parents forced me to conform to (some) arbitrary social norms, because now I can have a normal social life and a well paying public facing job that wouldn't have happened if those habits (studying, being polite, being social, being neat) hadn't been inculcated in me so many years ago.
I guess I have less respect for kids' desires than Scott. I don't care if the kid doesn't want to greet adults with "good morning"; it's a social convention he'll need and he's going to learn to do it. I don't care if he isn't bothered by his room being a pigsty, because instilling norms of cleanliness will make him happier over the course of his life. I'm more of a libertarian when it comes to certain aspects of parenting (e.g. I think kids should have much more freedom of movement, freedom to read/watch what they want, than is currently socially acceptable), but I believe with strict enforcement of certain rules and behaviors along with plentiful unstructured free time.
Not every desire needs to be indulged as a pure expression of 'self'. SELF is changeable and should be changed, somewhat, for everyone's mutual benefit. Allowing young children too much freedom isn't being kind to them, it's screwing over the adults they'll become for temporary enjoyment.
"instilling norms of cleanliness"
For each kid for whom forcing them to clean their room (and eat what I'm serving or don't eat, and no video games, and harsh limits on "screen time", and similar "it's good for you / you'll thank me later" types of things) instilled norms of cleanliness (or whatever), how many are there like me, in whom it instilled:
- a lifelong feeling of spite about authority
- depression and anxiety
- a desire to escape (and a lack of desire to visit home as an adult)
And my room isn't any cleaner now than it was then. Some things can't be fixed by force.
yeah. i really like alfie kohn's books, particularly "Punished By Rewards" and "Unconditional Parenting" which make a very persuasive case for radically permissive child rearing. but even so, it's hard to know how well his ideals work in practice; parenting is hardly an a priori endeavor.
Here's an anarchist opponent of our education system on Alfie Kohn: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2010/11/in_defense_of_s.html
Also worth noting that as early as middle school I was capable of thinking "I don't like doing X, but I know my parents have my best interests at heart and know lots of things, and they want me to do X, so if I do X I'll probably be better off"
Kids are not universally dumb. I can only speak for myself, but I think people would be surprised by the extent to which kids can just learn to trust their parents judgement (and that the kids that don't usually just end up rebelling until they learn by experience anyway)
Where I do think there's room here is for parents as commitment-enforcers. So while I think a parent probably shouldn't force a kid to go to do something they *always* hate over the course of years, I think if a kid agrees in the abstract that something is good for them, it's totally reasonable for the parent to force them in the moment to follow through. So like, if a kid says they want to play soccer, and the parent has them promise to stick with it for the season, its reasonable for the parent to enforce that commitment. I think you can easily extend that to schooling and many other things.
But also, this is all pretty complicated and it's hard to know for sure. Also imo really only applies starting around 6th or 7th grade. To stick with just a simple heuristic, I think there's a difference between "I hate this" and "I don't wanna", and parents/society should try to differentiate the two even if it's hard.
That follow-up study to the marshmallow test comes to mind-- the one that asserts that the original test didn't measure for the kids' willpower, but for the kids' trust in authority.
if a student is able to understand that they're being forced into an uncomfortable situation for their own good, it's probably because they have enough trust in their parents to assume that things will work out in their favor in the long term-- and that sorts out all of the kids whose parents don't deserve that sort of trust. You'd assume that kids with bad home lives-- even ones that don't register on the scale of abuse-- will pretty consistently have problems understanding that it's in their own interest to defer to authority.
I'm glad you had the maturity to figure that out as a middle-schooler, but my middle-schooler still pitches a fit at things obviously good for him.
Totally just my own experience, and I know parenting and the experience of childhood is about as far from universal as anything can be.
And I was capable of thinking "I don't like doing X. The school claims it's in a good cause, but they've told me untruths before. I wonder how I can manipulate them into letting me do Y instead?"
FWIW, my successes at that age were limited - I can only really count 2, and they may have had some seriously unwanted side effects, though the claim was made that some changes made after this were unrelated. OTOH, the possible side effects turned out fairly well for me, so not too bad overall. And I'd already learned the meta lesson - authorities generally don't respond to reason, and rarely care what subalterns want, so the effective way to get it is to manipulate them.
By the time I was in high school, I was actively experimenting with techniques I'd read about for manipulating people, such as getting the teacher to move to one side or other of the room by only acting attentive when/if they moved in that direction. (Didn't work too well; I'd have had to get other classmates involved to be really successful; assuming of course that it was a workable technique.) OTOH, I'd mastered basics like - if I create disruption/consume lots of their time every time they stop me from reading a random novel in class, or reading ahead in the text book, or doing the homework assigned in the prior class - and do it in a supposedly unexceptionable way (blurting out answers, asking questions, etc.) they'll opt for peace and quiet and let me do my thing, provided I'm quiet about it.
Feeling resentful about being forced to do things is normal. Your result isn't some negative reaction against over-authoritarian schools, but rather natural instincts asserting themselves against control. At least some kids internalize social and obedience norms.
I noted elsewhere here, but in my experience I *wasn't* resentful because I learned by experience to trust my parents when they forced me to do things. I experienced that they were usually right when they made me do something, and I could see for myself that following their rules made me better off. It starts with small things, like "you can't stay up late you have school tomorrow", and the first time you ignore the rule you feel shitty at school and think "huh maybe they're right".
I wonder if enforcing truly arbitrary rules doesn't just make kids not trust their parents when they are given rules to follow.
I think there's a lot of disagreement about what is an "arbitrary" rule. Mindal above obviously thinks that "norms of cleanliness" are important and not arbitrary. But I'm 35, and so far god has not struck me down for my room being a mess. All that happened when I left home was that my room kept being a mess, but I no longer had to waste energy arguing about what a mess it was.
This is confounded in my case by the fact that I was living with undiagnosed ADHD throughout my childhood, and arguably/apparently was not really capable of learning "norms of cleanliness" by example in this way.
But beware, anybody who would argue that this makes my case inapplicable. Are you sure you would know if your kid had a "real problem" rather than just being "lazy"? Would they trust you enough to tell you? If they did, would you listen? (I did, and they didn't.)
(In fairness to my parents and for the sake of accuracy, I should say for the record that I am conflating and generalizing here -- I am condensing a whole childhood of fights over control as though it was all about the single example of "room cleaning", since that was given above. In fact that _specific_ fight subsided long before college because my parents gave up on trying to enforce it, and were reduced to making occasional snide remarks.
Also in fairness I should say it was really mostly one parent.)
In my framing I think the answer would be if the thing the kid is being forced to do is something that
1) they will *in hindsight* not mind having been forced to do within the next year or so
2) where does the dislike fall between mild annoyance that is soon forgotten, and real suffering that is long remembered
So I guess you could describe if as a heuristic that balances between 1 and 2, how much suffering and how immediate/strong is the sense that doing the thing they were forced to do was valuable
That doesn't have to be a rule qua rule, though - IMO, you don't have to be forced to follow genuinely good rules. I mean, my parents did in fact tell me "don't do this, you'll regret it," every so often, I pretty reliably listened (when they put it that strongly), and when I didn't the "enforcement" was natural consequences ("OK, I cannot actually go to the event I wanted to go to and get my homework done. I guess I should've done it earlier the way you suggested. Mom, will you give <friend> my apologies?") (I mean, I could also have not done the homework, but it was a class I'd picked, I wanted to be there, so nope, not doing that.) Or, as you cite, feeling awful if you stay up too late. That said, I don't actually regret the one time I stayed up all night - I wanted to know how functional I was if I did that, and it's been useful after the fact to know what that feels like and what I can/can't expect myself to be able to do. (For one thing, it helped me avoid all-nighters in college, because I knew I was burning the entire next day if I pulled one.)
I don't know. I just feel that being able to make my own decisions and learn from them was generally a very useful experience, and served me well when I moved out.
Also, occasionally one's parents are *wrong*.
I have two conflicting thoughts on this.
On the one hand, in this case was the rule necessary?
Couldn't your parents have simply let you go to bed when you want?
You experiment with a late night, don't like being tired at school, so decide yourself to go to bed early.
On the other hand, perhaps the purpose of such "I told you so" rules serves to prove the wisdom of the parent's other rules, such as look both ways before you cross the road, where letting kids experiment for themselves doesn't have such great outcomes.
Forcing kids to do things is inviting power struggles, but surely we can gradually let small and then older children experience the consequences of their own choices and learn from the experience? A kid who turns up his nose at dinner won't starve if he has to skip dinner, but he might learn that the cost isn't worth it and either broaden his palate or learn to contribute a bit to the cooking process so it can cater more to his tastes. Kids can learn to budget money if they're required to stick to an allowance and learn the consequences of running out. We can still feed, clothe, and house them, but they may miss a luxury. It's not alway a choice between Eden and prison.
My room is also still very messy (at least it is the day before the house cleaner comes), but I have to say I'm glad they made me brush my teeth.
There might be a good heuristic here. If your kid doesn't clean their room, the worst thing that happens is that _your_ desire (not theirs, obviously) for a clean room is not satisfied. But if your kid doesn't brush their teeth, especially once their permanent teeth come in, they could suffer serious and irreversible health consequences of that.
Of course, if your actual desire is to teach them the value of cleanliness, and you think that forcing them to clean their room will do that, then you could imagine that failure to do so will cause them the serious damage of "being a slob". That seems a little more metaphysical and harder to nail down concrete consequences of, though. And unlike rotten teeth, it's something they could choose to reverse later in life, if that's important to them. So the argument seems weak.
I'm not sure it's such a bad argument? I've encountered friction in otherwise relaxed romantic relationships because of my messiness.
Though it might also be said that your significant others encountered friction because of their inability to tolerate mess.
A mismatch is a potential problem in either direction, and the further one is an outlier the more likely the mismatch. But both Felix Unger and Oscar Madison (is there a comparable reference for people younger than GenX or so?) are likely to run into that. Is inculcating stringent cleaning standards or broad ranges of tolerance and adaptability to different standards in a child (assuming the latter is possible) more likely to lead to adult happiness?
(Or maybe I'm just self-justifying being an unreformed slob, despite my dad's best efforts otherwise. :-))
I am considerably older than GenX and have no idea who either Felix Unger or Oscar Madison was.
But how many kids, at least at middle school, don't believe that not brushing their teeth will give them cavities, or don't believe cavities are bad?
It's akrasia that makes kids not want to brush their teeth, which is different from not wanting to clean your room because you just legitimately don't care that much if your room is clean.
> - a lifelong feeling of spite about authority
I suspect if you were strongly unwilling to obey your parents and clean your room when they told you too, then it wasn't really them asking to clean your room which made you spite authority. You always spited authority. It is part of who you are, and that is totally ok. Honestly, it is a pretty common trait with apparent age correlates.
I would have guessed it being a trait coming more from nurture than nature?
I have similar concerns to @mindal, though the room tidying was perhaps a bad exampe.
Some thoughts/questions:
I think we should give kids as much freedom as possible, and try to guide them towards better decisions through education and example whenever possible rather than simply laying down the law.
Where possible, let kids make "bad choices" and learn through experience.
But many kids would choose to eat pizza and icecream everyday and eschew all vegetables, despite the best efforts of reasoning and persuasion of their guardians.
Is it tyranny to restrict junk food and enforce 5 fruit and veg a day?
If the answer is no, then till what age? There are plenty of adults that are "not great at long term planning" either. There will be plenty of 40 year olds that regret the actions of their 20 year old selves.
In the preceding paragraphs you could easily replace "kids" with "people" in a debate about paternalism vs libertarianism.
How different are kids from adults? How much better or worse are certain "mistakes" to make earlier or later in life?
I fully agree the school system needs a drastic overhaul. I wasn't traumatised but I did find it extremely dull and largely a waste of time.
Fewer hours, more freedom seem like no brainers. Zero hours and total freedom probably not. Where exactly that line should be drawn is a very complicated question. Letting a 6 year old decide sounds less advisable then letting them microwave a burrito.
One question for those that were traumatised, how much of that was due to "the system", as opposed to "the other inmates"?
I can't help but think of Lord of the Flies when I think of kids left to complete freedom...
Though of course in the former all were trapped together, whereas in Scott's system Piggy could simply choose to go somewhere else?
Could it be that one of the most traumatising aspects of child prisons is the forced mixing? Is this a feature or a bug? Would Scott's system result in kids naturally segregating themselves? If so, how and what would be the effects?
This feels like exactly the sort of thing described a couple posts down in terms of "if we put all the high-IQ people in a room they'll all agree about things peculiar to them and no one else".
Almost no one below 2-3 SDs above average IQ reads this blog. We are extreme outliers in any sense of the word, and a general education system isn't (and shouldn't be) designed for us. Maybe we shouldn't HAVE a general education system, but for as long as we're trying to, I don't know of any way to not have the 145 IQ kid bored while the 95 IQ kid is still trying to learn.
(I wonder if racism here is the result of the same forces. If you're white and 150 IQ and you judge white people by your 150 IQ friends but judge black people by the 80 IQ guy behind the counter at McDonald's who is the only one you regularly see because your community is like 99% white+asian+jewish, you're going to perceive a much larger and much more insurmountable gap. This is true even if the 150 IQ black people have their own club - but they benefit from a much wider view of white culture because it's all around them. This is a dumb bias and one I'd hope people here would be aware of, but the "school was bad for me and therefore is bad for everyone" stories seem to confirm it's at least a little operative.)
Has anyone said "school is bad for me therefore it must be bad for everyone"? I said the opposite and most of the other commenters here seem to be saying the opposite too.
> Has anyone said "school is bad for me therefore it must be bad for everyone"? I said the opposite
That's the vibe I got from the "why are we still going over this for a fourth time I'm so bored" (i.e., "why are we going over this more times than my 145-IQ brain requires"), "why can't I fidget or move around" (i.e. "why can't I do small stimuli that are important to me as someone on the spectrum"), etc.
I took him to mean that what was working for the students who needed more time and repetition wasn't working for him, but for some reason we insist that all students be given exactly the same schooling.
I also got the impression that both your opinion and (consequently?) the general consensus here was "school is terrible for everyone (but maybe we don't have to burn the ALL down, or at least not quite tomorrow)". (To quote you specifically, "Konstantin is too nice to put it this way, but think of school as a moderately abusive environment.") If you were trying to communicate the message "school was terrible for me but I was an exception", this is evidence of at least two readers who did not hear it that way.
To be fair, mostly what I think I'm hearing is "school was bad for me and lots of other people, which is enough grounds to reform it" -- which is not the same as "school was bad for everyone".
That people like school doesn't mean that it's not moderately abusive.
A lot of people seem to like moderately abusive environments.
What does it mean for the environment to be "moderately abusive" then? This sounds like an attempt at an objective assessment of the environment itself, would it still be moderately abusive if it only had the people who seem to like it present?
In other words: is exercise moderately abusive? Exercise sucks: you're hot, sweaty, and out of breath during, tired and sore after, and you're literally running on a treadmill going nowhere (cardio) or emulating Sysyphus by lifting a rock over and over again (strength). Also, it often happens at ungodly hours of the morning (my local gym has classes at 5am, I shudder to think about when the instructor gets up). Also, it causes injuries. Nonetheless, many people seem to enjoy it more or less as it happens, and many others seem to think that it's a sufficiently good idea to do it despite it not being enjoyable.
I think that a crucial factor is to what extent you are free to choose an alternative.
There is a great difference in the extent to which people like or hate exercise, so if you would force everyone (who reasonably can) to exercise, then I think that is also abusive to a certain extent. Some people won't mind being forced, because they enjoy it, while others will mind very much.
Perhaps 'abusive' is not really the right word for it, but neither is 'lack of freedom.' It's really a combination of not having a choice and the environment being very unpleasant/damaging for some.
Honestly, the whole “school is literally prison” section came off as extremely typical-mindy.
On the flip side, did anyone say, “literally nobody can have a really bad experience at school”? Because that’s how you came off with the “to prove they exist” line introducing the comments here.
I believe there are clearly students who need something like current public school, some for whom its not necessarily the greatest but it’s okay, and those for whom it is literal psychological torture. The way you’ve framed all of this makes it seem like you think the latter group is the majority - I think most of the pushback you are getting is from people who suspect it is much less common. Even less common than that is the sort of 6 year old that would actually thrive in your utopia, even though I don’t doubt that 6 year old Scott Alexander (and gbdub frankly) would have done pretty well there.
And to be clear I get that you are mostly asking to allow for choice - on that I 100% agree! I think we just judge differently the percentage of students who are served very badly, in the way you experienced it, by the current system.
The problem is, in my personal estimate the parents who would choose to opt out their not very bright offspring because school is too bothersome (or any other silly reason) would far outweigh those with sons or daughters genuinely frustrated by the current system.
As a teacher, I get to know plenty of people who seem to think that my assessment of their spawn's inability to grasp basic math (mostly for lack of trying) is an attempt to mess with them. Some even told to my face that they believe the stuff inconsequential to real life, which supports the notion that they'd get rid of my services if able.
With little to no formal education to rely upon, the children of these people would experience more difficulties to find jobs than now, which would cause problems to society.
I think numbers matter here, so I have tried find some numbers:
- A vast majority of younger children (under 12) is really happy with school. In a large and representative German study for children of age 6-12,
80% of them chose the statement "I like going to school" or "I like very much going to school".
In an open field "What could be done better at your school", the second most frequent answer was "nothing". (The top answer was "the playground" if you are curious.)
https://www.kika.de/schule-leben/index.html
- High school students are a lot less happy with school. If asked for emotions they feel during school, they report more negative than positive emotions. The most frequent answers are stressed, happy, tired, and bored.
https://news.yale.edu/2020/01/30/national-survey-students-feelings-about-high-school-are-mostly-negative
- Still, it seems that this does not mean that high school students find school like hell. I have looked into a few other studies, and my impression is that most high school students find school overall ok. By far the largest study is the 2015 OECD PISA study, which asked 15-year old students for their well-being. On a life-satisfaction scale (not specifically on school), OECD students report 7.3 on a scale from 0 to 10. They also asked school specific questions, and they do find that students agree with statements like "I am often nervous before a test". But that doesn't seem to turn school into hell for most students.
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/PISA-2015-Results-Students-Well-being-Volume-III-Overview.pdf
- Among adolescents, there IS definitely a minority of students (depends on how you count, I would say between 5% and 20%) who are really unhappy with school. In the PISA study, this is very strongly associated with bullying. (This was a focus of the study, so it might be a spotlight effect, but it seems that other researchers agree that bullying is at least the most obvious culprit.)
So my personal interpretation is: Students up to the age of 12 totally love school. When puberty hits, they get annoyed. (But I am not sure how much this tells about schools. Perhaps it tells more about puberty. 18-year old students seem to be less annoyed with school than 15-year old.) But overall, even in puberty, it seems ok. Except that yes, school starts too early!
However, this is only for the majority. I totally believe that for some students, school is hell. This is a minority, perhaps 5%, and perhaps another 15% where it's not literally hell, but not ok either. It seems that Scott and some other commenters belong to this minority. Even inside this group, Scott might be an exceptional case because hell is usually the others (bullying students and teachers), not the boring lessons and the lack of freedom to build a dog-driven carriage.
So to me the implications are that schools are rather ok. At the same time, being in hell is very bad, and we should do something about it. But this is exactly what happens: the most important (perhaps only most obvious) problem is bullying, and schools and people put a lot more effort into this problem than 10 years ago. For people like Scott who fall through the cracks, the solution should be "for exceptional cases, find/allow good exceptional solutions" rather than "tear down the system".
I found school somewhat excruciating in the earlier years, then gradually exciting in spots when I was old enough for challenging "tracked" classes, and downright enjoyable once I got into a good university. At all times these were reasonably clean, safe places with practically no violence and fairly sane teachers, including some inspiring ones.
Just wanted to chime in here, having missed the chance to comment on the last post. Scott's wail came across as "school was torture for me and everyone who sees it as torture should be allowed to escape."
So first, Scott's definition of torture is he can't go to the bathroom or fart when he wants to, which is amazingly overstated. As were all the comments he approved of where people bragged about how school taught them to subvert authority by giving them the answers they wanted instead of "the truth" (sorry, wasn't this a rationalist community?).
As WTF mentions, this is a bunch of bright kids whining about ridiculously trivial problems and it was utterly boggling to see Scott raise this as a relevant issue after Freddie's excellent book. And I speak as someone who was not just bright and bored but actually bullied badly for a couple years. I didn't like school much, either. I just have the ability to separate good policy from my own trivial problems.
Also, Scott completely misses the real responsibility, which others have touched on. If Scott was bored and unhappy, he should have talked to his parents. That's who is responsible for Scott's unhappiness.
As for not being able to go to the bathroom with permission as "abusive"--picture my eyes rolling hard--students have considerably more ability to go to the bathroom than teachers do. They get breaks between every class, usually some kind of brief breakfast break and then a lunch break. Teachers often can't take those time because they are working with students. They can't leave the kids alone (high school teachers have more freedom than ES in this regard, but not much.).
There are plenty of jobs where you can't go to the bathroom until you have a break. Including some pretty highly paid jobs. Scott might want to imagine a world where he did whatever he wanted and then got low grades and wasn't allowed to test and show his ability because hey, diversity, and realize there's a lot of ways his life could be worse.
Honestly, as I've said on the previous blog, if you're a bright kid who thought normal school was miserable torture, get over yourself. It's you, not school. You are a snowflake. No one cares. And it's not something that is universal to bright kids. I know tons of insanely smart kids who get real joy in doing their work, even if they know the answer, and I wish more teachers would push them for more. I also know real bright kids who think school is bullshit, and I understand and tell them in *my* class to give me a counter offer that uses their brains and allows me to assess their abilities and in other classes to learn to play the game for purposes of college and employment. If you want to fix *that* game, well, hunker down until the current anti-test phase is over, because bright kids in the near future have grades or nothing.
American schools aren't broken. They do a much better job than most people think. To the extent they don't work, excluding kids from school by their choice as a matter of public policy is a really bad idea.
I'm glad you found the new blog.
You've commented before on how smart kids need to get over themselves, and I think you reacted to that (which has been said here before) instead of what was said this time. Scott, and the comments he highlights, aren't so much about "school sucks if you're smart" but "school sucks for lots and lots of people." One of Freddie's big points is that trying to get someone to learn algebra who is never going to learn algebra is one of the ways it particularly sucks for kids on the low end.
I agree with almost every bit of what Freddie says. I disagree with his prescriptions, but his diagnosis is spot on.
I understand Scott thinks he is saying school sucks for lots and lots of people, but first, he's simply wrong. And the list of things he details as "abuse" are simply absurd.
To tie these together, lots and lots of kids who don't ever learn algebra don't think school sucks. They aren't beaten down by it. Scott and Freddie are talking about two different things. It's one thing to say "it's wrong to expect below average intelligence kids to learn things beyond their ability" and quite another to say "putting people in school to learn things is torture because they can't pee when they want to (etc).".
Ooops, hit enter too soon.
I am saying that Scott is projecting. There is a clear profile of bright kids who were bored by school and as adults feel much wronged by it. There are other profiles of kids who didn't fit into school as well. They aren't "lots and lots".
Short of bullying (where moving a kid makes sense), I'm largely unsympathetic to these claims, most particularly because the vast majority of the people complaining did just fine in things academic. Therefore, their suffering wasn't related to school or learning. They are just people who don't like a particular experience. That's on their parents, not school.
Schooling is mandatory, so their suffering is definitely related to school.
Parents often don't have any other options other than their local public school, so even if a kid is miserable and tells their parents how awful their schooling experience is...what exactly are parents supposed to do? Homeschooling and unschooling are imperfect options that most families cannot make work.
School is the primary problem here, not parenting. Scott's point that schooling should be shorter, more efficient and less restrictive is the big takeaway.
Yes, there are lots of jobs that require giving up certain freedoms... and if adults were required to do those jobs without getting paid, that would be bad.
>Almost no one below 2-3 SDs above average IQ reads this blog.
You would have to be totally delusional to believe this. Either that, or you're unfamiliar with the standard deviations of IQ. 2 SD above average is 130. 3 is 145. Having nearly everyone on this site above 2 SD would mean that the readers of this blog have a average intelligence much greater than the average PhD recipient, much greater than every profession that has been quantified by IQ. It would be a community comprised of exclusively the top eighth of doctors, lawyers, scientists, and professors. You would have to be blinded by your own self importance to believe this is the case. This blog certainly attracts good discussion, but exclusively the top 2% of intelligence? Get real.
Of course, there's the SSC survey, which took IQ results. We have reason to be skeptical of the information. Firstly, self reported IQ is always dubious. Secondly, only about a quarter of the people surveyed answered the question. This probably skews it towards higher IQ. Those who answered either got their answer from a sketchy online test, or were noticeably smart enough to be given a physical test in the first place. Even still, about a third of the responses came from people below 130 IQ. Given the nature of the data, it seems fair to assume that half of the readers of this blog are above 2SD and half are below. That's still very high, and it reflects very highly on this community. We still ought to be honest about our collective intelligence.
This. Kids thrive - from the earliest age - on structure. They are cause-and-effect learning engines that need predictable, reliable emotional and social environments. Later on, as adolescents, they develop autonomy by pushing back against the structure and developing an independent sense of self. We all have strong, ingrained memories of our adolescence and the misery/confusion/weirdness of that transition. Some people never leave that emotional adolescent state of rebellion behind and go on to become libertarians (I kid! Mostly...) But the strength of those memories and experiences cloud how important boring routine, discipline, and ritual were in our childhood. It is the scaffolding on which the self is built
> Kids thrive - from the earliest age - on structure
I would be interested to dig into this more, and I'm curious if there is a more formal expression of what this means / any research on this topic, or if it's mostly just a folk saying.
I always figured it was one of those things that parents say to make themselves (and each other) feel better. But, as the rest of the thread talks a lot about, that's probably typical-minding on my part. I'm sure it's true that every kid does best with _some_ level of structure (obviously "drop the kid in the woods to fend for themselves" is not a suitable environment), and some are presumably happier with more structure than others.
But the euphemism of "structure" here to mean "rules" always sat weirdly with me. "Breakfast is at 10 AM every day" is a structure! "If you don't eat what I cook, you don't eat" is ... not the same kind of structure. I could believe that, in some cases, carefully applied, for some kids, it could give them a broadened palate. It could also give them an eating disorder.
Wrong.
I have memories of my adolescence, yeah - of growing into a peer in an environment in which I had been a child. Mostly, it involved volunteering for things, and people going "oh yeah, she's growing up, she can do that now. Sure, why not?" And moving into accepting me into adult social circles. It was very pleasant.
I don't actually disagree about needing predictable, reliable emotional environments, or *possibly* social depending on what you mean. But you can achieve that without a lot of coercion; I had supportive, reliable parents who would tell me when they thought I was wrong, and listen if I told them I thought they were, and that worked great. No rebellion, we still get on great.
Oh, and I'm a libertarian.
> Kids thrive - from the earliest age - on structure. They are cause-and-effect learning engines that need predictable, reliable emotional and social environments.
But do schools produce such an environment?
I just don't know about thriving on structure. Certainly most of us need some, especially in extreme youth. But public schools turn out 18-year-olds, and by that age they ought to have been in an environment that produces people who've gradually learned to take responsibility for a lot of the consequences of their own actions. How often have we seen public school kids flounder at a good university because suddenly neither Mommy nor teacher was there to hold their hands and make them keep up with the curriculum? By that age they ought to have learned their own motivation for controlling impulses and deferring gratification. They ought to have begun discovering which maximal efforts are fulfilling enough to be worth it. They won't get that in a stultifying and mediocre warehouse. A school that's not always preparing kids for increased freedom and responsibility is as much a failure as parents who commit the same error.
Universities have certainly been complaining about the lack of independence in modern students. Yet schools existed in the past, so it's not schools in themselves that caused this change (although schools did change).
I think both schools and parents changed, in exactly the way calculated to result in this change. But there has always been a spectrum of kids allowed to develop independent responsibility and kids whose parents did everything for them rather than teach them (or just let them learn) the difference between what happens when they take responsibility and exert themselves and what happens if they don't.
I think a lot of kids realize that schools don't provide any kind of consistent, understandable structure. It's mostly an arbitrary exercise of authority instead.
Candidly, parents are underrepresented in the rationalist community. I think this leads to some non pragmatic rabbit holes. Kids can be real selfish assholes which is why most adults put childrearing and teaching on a societal pedestal (maybe not this community). You can’t say that in polite society but every parent knows it. Childless rationalists sorta have this perception of their youthful selves that’s saint like and doesn’t jive with my lived experience around children at all. Like, at all.
Our community is working on closing our children gap as fast as it can, don't worry.
Attaboy
As another parent, I fully endorse this opinion. Having a kid has shattered many illusions about what kind of parenting would have been best for me, and I now constantly apologize to my parents.
Whereas for me the experience was the opposite. The experience of bringing up children fit reasonably well with both my views of the subject and my parents' practice.
Do you find it fits well with the advice you see rationalists give?
I don't much know what advice rationalists give, and although I might self-describe as a rationalist I don't consider myself really a part of the community so labeled. It's along the general lines of Scott's views, although perhaps less extreme. I believe parents are entitled to set conditions for their children where the children's behavior imposes costs on the parents, and for the children's benefit conditional on maximizing the amount of freedom for the child consistent with it. For instance, our kids did not have to eat what we were having, but the alternative was to have something else reasonably nutritious that didn't require additional effort by us. Our son ate a lot fruit yogurt. We had no restrictions on how much time they could spend online (once we got to the point where everyone had his own computer) or what they could do on the computer, or what books they could read.
The more general point was that we had to be willing to offer reasons for anything we told them to do, and be willing to change our mind if they provided good counter-arguments. We had, in other words, to treat them as rational humans, not as pets. That made the transition from child to housemate as they grew older pretty much seamless.
Same for me. I am laid back, was raised by laid back parents and am raising my children (currently 11 and 14) in a pretty laid back free range way.
I will also say that the schools that they go to are way better than the ones I went to (except the kids get less recess than I would like). Bullying and violence is far less.
Maybe this is because they both go to magnet schools that offer a ton of electives so other than the 3 R's they can kind of choose what they want to learn.
You should realize that even in this weird group of people, you have an unusually competent family.
Also the family I was reared in. I sometimes worry that my model of the world has been distorted by growing up in a bubble where it was taken for granted that everyone was both rational and reasonable.
You *sometimes* worry about it? Man...
I'm a teacher in middle school (grades 6-9 to be precise) and a parent of two - a son age 8 and a daughter age 5. I view my parenting as compatible with rationalism - that is, my philosophy on parenting springs from the same personality traits that incline me towards reading this blog.
"Kids can be real selfish assholes" - children are born with pro-social instincts (see e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-moral-life-of-babies/). If you don't actively participate in overwriting these instincts with the need to conform to society by accepting/tolerating the things in society that are broken and unfair, kids are rarely if ever as selfish as adults are. What kids are is honest about their own needs (a trait which society tries to beat out of them) and sometimes unaware of the needs of others (which they can learn). On the other hand adults who have learned to meet their needs through social manipulation rather than direct communication, and who are incurious or callous about the needs of others, are many many orders of magnitude more selfish than any kid I've ever met.
To put it in terms of covid: my son has expressed the wish that covid would go away. He has said things like "I wish there were no bats" (I explained to him why it wasn't bats' fault). He has not said things like "I don't care if Grandma dies, I just want to go see my friends". On the other hand, many adults (see the Great Barrington Declaration, among others) say precisely that - that we should be unwilling to make personal sacrifices to protect the vulnerable, or that the vulnerable/elderly should be willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the economy.
Having children has not changed my perception that my "youthful self" was innocent and should not have been subjected to the types of abuse I was subjected to. In many cases it has made me much more furious at my parents and other caregivers as I have realized how trivially easy it is to treat a child like a human being and protect them from those who would do them harm, which in turn makes me wonder why I was not given that kind of treatment and protection.
In particular, with respect to the object question - school is supposed to provide students with learning and with socialization, which are both intrinsically fun and valuable for humans in general. If a particular child is suffering so much from school that they view it as a "prison" and not an opportunity to learn and socialize, that school is doing something deeply, deeply wrong to that child. There definitely needs to be a way out for those kids - I'm somewhat agnostic on the best way for society to provide that way out, and not at all opposed to imperfect solutions, so I think things like charter schools, home/unschooling, voucher systems/school choice, etc. are all reasonable stabs at improving the system for the kids who are very poorly served by it.
> children are born with pro-social instincts
Children are born with a remarkably broad variety of natures. Some are quite pro-social, and others aren't. The size of innate differences in children's personalities and needs has probably been my number one surprise as a parent, and I suspect it invalidates any one-size-fits-all parenting/schooling advice.
I suspect we may be using the term "pro-social" in different ways?
Consider the list Paul Bloom mentioned in that article I linked to - "An understanding that helping is morally good, and that harming, hindering, or otherwise thwarting the goals of another person is morally bad. A rudimentary sense of justice—an understanding that good guys should be rewarded and bad guys should be punished. An initial sense of fairness—in particular, that there should be an equal division of resources."
Would you agree that these are universal traits of children, or at least reasonably close to universal? I have seen some of the studies backing Bloom's claim and I found them plausible and in line with my personal experiences.
I can't distinguish between them not understanding that "harming, hindering, or otherwise thwarting the goals of someone else is morally bad" and them not caring about that moral injunction. But one or the other is reasonably common in toddlers.
Take an example: My five year old will take a tablet that he and my 3 year old are watching a show on, and turn so the 3 year old has a hard time watching for no apparent reason except to 'hoard the good thing.' I don't think he's even aware he's being a jerk, but it's impossible to know for sure. He's either unaware of the moral valence of his actions, or completely doesn't care about that moral valence. Either way, it's anti-social.
Yes, some 'pro-social' behavior must be developed, or even sometimes explicitly taught. And for the example you provided, it'd probably be easy enough to teach your five year old by giving him a 'taste of his own medicine'.
'Theory of mind' isn't innate, or, rather, it isn't fully 'online and operational' right away, but develops (and at different rates for different children, or not at all for a small proportion) in early childhood, and pretty universally AFAIK.
I worry about adults who never grow out of the infantile notion that fairness equals equal division of resources.
Fortunately, even kids have an intuitive grasp of merit and desert.
You write:
" On the other hand, many adults (see the Great Barrington Declaration, among others) say precisely that - that we should be unwilling to make personal sacrifices to protect the vulnerable, or that the vulnerable/elderly should be willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the economy."
I think that is a wildly inaccurate picture of the argument made in the declaration.
"Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice."
Is that what you mean by "for the sake of the economy"?
"The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.
Adopting measures to protect the vulnerable should be the central aim of public health responses to COVID-19. By way of example, nursing homes should use staff with acquired immunity and perform frequent testing of other staff and all visitors. Staff rotation should be minimized. Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals. "
Is that what you mean by "the vulnerable/elderly should be willing to sacrifice themselves"?
Would you like to either defend your description of the declaration or retract it and apologize? If you haven't read it, here it is:
https://gbdeclaration.org/
I will admit that the first part of my statement (we should be unwilling to make personal sacrifices to protect the vulnerable) was primarily referring to the Great Barrington Declaration, while the second part of my statement ("the vulnerable/elderly should be willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the economy") was primarily referring to the "others" - for example, Dan Patrick's comments about the elderly sacrificing themselves.
However, I do believe that the GBD is simply Patrick's idea - let the old and vulnerable make all the sacrifices - repackaged and "sanewashed" in a way that gives people who don't care about the costs of an uncontrolled pandemic deniability when they propose that we just get on with our lives regardless of the cost.
I believe that if the GBD authors were genuinely concerned with the welfare of the overall public, they'd have a serious proposal for actually solving the problems they've identified. For example:
"Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health"
Where's the evidence that this is because of lockdown policies and not because people are afraid to go to a doctor during a pandemic? Because I've been under some form of lockdown in my country of residence since November but I have been able to access medical care for myself and my children and go to outdoor spaces including public parks. Doctors here have also been making more house calls, and just last week we had a doctor come to do a blood screening for my whole family. Now, if there's a lockdown policy that is actually discouraging people from going outside during the day to take a walk or get some fresh air, or banning people from seeking medical services, that policy needs to be adjusted. But for the most part, lockdowns have caught up to the general guidance that outdoor recreation in small groups is fine, and medical facilities can remain open; the GBD is mischaracterizing lockdown policy in general in a big way here and I'd call the argument that people are missing cancer screenings or childhood vaccinations because of lockdowns an outright lie given the evidence that in fact what's happening is that without lockdowns, regular people are afraid to go to hospitals, and during uncontrolled outbreaks, medical professionals have been diverted from routine care to provide care to covid patients.
Once you realize that the GBD is being, at best, deeply misleading about the causes of the problems it identifies, it's very clear that the solutions they propose are not only wildly off-base, but actively counterproductive. Like this:
"Schools and universities should be open for in-person teaching. Extracurricular activities, such as sports, should be resumed. Young low-risk adults should work normally, rather than from home. Restaurants and other businesses should open. Arts, music, sport and other cultural activities should resume."
University lecture halls = superspreader events. School sporting events = superspreader events. Restaurants = superspreader events. Art, music, sport, and other cultural activities = superspreader events.
But that's the point, right? The more the virus spreads, the faster we'll achieve herd immunity. Never mind the fact that achieving herd immunity through exposure would kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people in the US alone. Never mind that they thought they'd achieved herd immunity in Manaus and then the hospitals ran out of oxygen for the ventilators (although to be fair the GBD authors didn't know that would happen when they wrote the GBD - but they should have accounted for the possibility, since experts were saying, even then, that it might not be possible to achieve herd immunity through natural infection at all). But put all that aside, because here's the point: do you think that, if we had taken the accelerationist path in October and started actively encouraging people to go to superspreader events whenever they could to get the virus on behalf of the vulnerable, we would have seen the level of cancer screenings return to normal by now?
There is simply no logical path by which encouraging uncontrolled spread of coronavirus through the population makes *people who think they might be at risk for cancer* and *who act conscientiously to mitigate that risk* more likely to leave their houses and go to a medical facility which is overrun with covid patients. Same for parents who want their kids to be healthy - as a parent, I'd certainly keep my kids home during an unmitigated covid wave and delay a childhood vaccination by a couple of months rather than expose them, myself, and their grandmother (who lives with us) to the risk of covid transmission.
The people who wrote this thing are supposed to be scientists, so it confuses me that they could have missed the very obvious fact that there is no path from Point A to Point B located anywhere in the GBD.
If encouraging people to go out and get covid as fast as possible isn't really for the benefit of cancer screening patients and unvaccinated kids, then what is it for? If the authors are misleading us about the goal of their proposals, we have to make some kind of educated guess about what it is they really want.
Given that the GBD was sponsored by a libertarian think-tank, I'm going to guess it is motivated by an ideological opposition to anything governments do and a commitment to free market principles. So again, I stand by the implication that the GBD is asking us to sacrifice the vulnerable for the economy, although I admit that this is a reasoned inference rather than something the GBD authors have openly admitted to.
"Retired people living at home should have groceries and other essentials delivered to their home. When possible, they should meet family members outside rather than inside. A comprehensive and detailed list of measures, including approaches to multi-generational households, can be implemented, and is well within the scope and capability of public health professionals."
What they're proposing here is very simple: lockdowns for the sick, elderly, and other vulnerable people. Segregate the millions of Americans with risk factors due to age or health problems from their younger and healthier friends and family members. And note that instead of limited lockdowns for everyone which are targeted to flatten the curve until a safe reopening can occur, we're talking about unlimited lockdowns for the most vulnerable that can't end until vaccines arrive (which, when this was written, was quite a ways off). Instead of "everyone stays home for a few weeks until community spread drops" it's "everyone goes out now (in October), but grandpa stays locked in his house until June." In other words, healthier people should be unwilling to make personal sacrifices to protect less healthy people, and it instead is the sick and elderly who will have to make the sacrifices to allow us to resume "[a]rts, music, sport and other cultural activities". So upon reflection, I do indeed believe I have characterized the intention of the GBD quite accurately.
Also, the idea that public health professionals have some effective way to protect people living in multigenerational households that they're just not using now for some reason but would be able to deploy during an uncontrolled outbreak seems a bit suspicious. Where is this "comprehensive and detailed list of measures," I wonder, and why don't the authors of the GBD produce it now in order to relieve our growing suspicion that this document is a dangerous and callous piece of propaganda rather than a serious scientific public policy proposal? Why don't they tell us how, exactly, they think we are going to stop a 16-year-old from coming home from school with covid and infecting grandpa?
Again, there is a complete lack of any logical pathway from the proposals in the GBD to the problems it claims to want to solve. There are no steps that take us from "let healthy people get sick" to "we've protected the vulnerable and restored life to normal." The most charitable assessment of this document is that it is motivated reasoning taken to an alarming extreme, and that some people simply didn't notice that this is advocating for a situation in which our sick and elderly people make all the sacrifices and take on all the burden. But I am cynical enough to believe that its authors knew exactly what effects these policies would have if implemented and chose to advocate for them anyway, despite their obvious danger and despite their obvious ineffectiveness.
I would have liked to see someone really try a "let's protect the elderly" path, which would have involved things like paying to delivery groceries to every single person over 60, and establishing two layers of protection around nursing homes.
That was essentially what the Great Barrington Declaration proposed.
To clarify - do you mean "let's protect the elderly" or "let's only protect the elderly and no one else"?
The fact that you disagree with them about the optimal policy is not an excuse for wildly misrepresenting their position. "I suspect they really believe X even though they say Y because I don't believe Y is workable" is not an excuse for saying "They believe X," which is what you were doing.
The logical pathway is quite simple, whether or not you agree with it. If you protect the vulnerable and let everyone else live their lives normally you eliminate most of the cost of precautions and most of the damage of the disease. Either that gets you to and past herd immunity and the frequency of the disease gets low enough so the vulnerable can come out or it doesn't, you eventually get a vaccine, you vaccinate the vulnerable and they can then come out. That may not convince you, but it is a perfectly coherent policy.
"If you protect the vulnerable and let everyone else live their lives normally" = "If the vulnerable make all the sacrifices," which is what I said they said.
The misrepresentation is obscuring what "protect the vulnerable" looks like in practice. It's not grocery delivery - it's months and months of deep and constant isolation.
"Where's the evidence that this is because of lockdown policies and not because people are afraid to go to a doctor during a pandemic? "
I think part of the problem is reactions to lockdown policies are not uniform but instead spread over a distribution on both sides of risk tolerance. When the government wants to prevent large social gathering they ban outdoor dining, not because outdoor dining carries risk but because it sends a signal that the lockdown is more serious. For people at the other side of the spectrum even in the partial opening of the summer, the government is sending signals that you should stay home unless absolutely necessary (and then you think how necessary is my physical or dental checkup etc). While I don't agree with the GBD I think that the authors would see it as a Pareto optimal change compared to current policy as our current policy as in the current policy everyone suffers from isolation and the associated consequences but they would claim that we should design a policy in which we limit those who need to isolate to those who are at risk. I don't think the GBD is actually the right policy but the failure to consider any changes to the current lockdown policy for almost a year shows a real lack of imagination and prioritization from liberals (probably because many of the leaders are less conscientious and violating the lockdowns anyway).
"the failure to consider any changes to the current lockdown policy for almost a year shows a real lack of imagination and prioritization from liberals"
Where I live we had an initial very strong lockdown last March - April, then lockdown was phased out, then over the summer officials encouraged people to go and do travel/tourism/dining (with reasonable health restrictions/inspections in place for accommodations, transport, and restaurants), and then in response to an overwhelming second wave lockdowns were put back in November and are currently being phased out again.
I haven't been following any US jurisdiction particularly closely but I would be surprised to hear of a place where there have been no policy changes for a year. Correct me if I'm wrong though.
"I think part of the problem is reactions to lockdown policies are not uniform but instead spread over a distribution on both sides of risk tolerance."
Agreed, but it's going to be very hard to tease apart "I'm afraid to get a cancer screening because there's a lockdown" from "I'm afraid to get a cancer screening because the news is showing the national guard set up field hospitals and makeshift morgues to deal with all the covid cases the medical system doesn't have capacity for" - so the analysis has to balance whatever signaling effect lockdowns have against the signaling effect death rates would have absent lockdowns, and probably there's going to be some overlap, for example when lockdowns are imposed as a response to overflowing hospitals.
This has been my experience too, and I don't think the kids I know are any worse than average. Delayed gratification and tolerance are learned traits. (I mean tolerance as in "accepting things you don't like", not "racism")
I don't think the under-representation of parents is that bad. I think it's mostly due to a lot of us being relatively young (where we live) to have had kids, when the 'community' first coalesced.
Yes, kids can be real selfish assholes! I believe that schools are mostly daycare but I appreciate that that's very valuable to almost everyone (including myself).
I didn't like school overall and it's probably mostly because of the naked hypocrisy suffused everywhere, even in the comparatively very good (public) schools I attended. They threw up all kinds of ridiculous obstacles to me _learning_! It's a weird kind of pedestal on which 'we' have installed 'teaching' (I'd say 'schooling') – maybe the pedestal is too high for any kind of criticism to have much of any actual effect on how well schools live up to the ideals in which we wrap them up in our social religion.
It doesn't need to be a complete dichotomy, although Scott presents it as one. The parents can set certain expectations but allow the kids to figure out how they want to fulfill those constraints. There are also plenty of things that parents and school force kids to do at 5 that they could easily start doing later when they better understand the utility.
Fully agreed. Given how much I respect Scott's thinking, it was honestly kind of jarring to hear him offer a vision that seemed so obviously bad. I'm fully on board with reforms that promote diversity of experiences for students, including some with lots more freedom for students. But seven-year-olds doing literally anything they want, short of crime... that's a dozen bridges too far. I guess maybe he's assuming children behave radically differently in a society built ground-up with this freedom, but I think in any world the average kid would drown in all that freedom.
I also found it jarring, but I think Scott is more expressing a "would that it could be otherwise" than a "this would totally work and kids would be fine, society is stupid". He seemed pretty clear at the end of the post that he doesn't think reforms are actually workable. I think Scott is angry that we have to throw kids like him to Moloch to prevent the world where many children learn nothing, and spend their time tying firecrackers to cats' tails and playing on railway tracks. Which seems reasonable - it sounds like school really sucked for him. I'd be fantasising about burning it all to the ground as well.
There's some good evidence that 'un-schooling' – "seven-year-olds doing literally anything they want, short of crime" – actually works pretty well for at least _some_ kids.
There's some sensible adjustments that communities can make to make it a lot more 'reasonable' too – tho it would be difficult to imagine doing them on the scale of a major metro area.
It seems to me that when children reject social niceties like cleanliness, they're often entirely in the right.
I'd argue that people generally do things like comb their hair and clean their homes because either:
• They genuinely enjoy doing so for the sake of personal expression or aesthetics- something that children sometimes discover an interest in as they grow older, or:
• They feel that they have to engage in costly social signaling to compete for the positional good of status- a hugely wasteful collective action problem that children often immediately recognize the injustice of, only to later accept once they've given up on resisting it and turn to sour grapes justifications for emotional comfort.
When everyone eventually defects in a collective action problem, teaching a child to defect early can benefit that specific child in a zero-sum sort of way, but teaching every child to defect as a general policy doesn't actually help anyone.
Ideally, we'd live in a society where people who enjoy putting effort into things like personal style could do so, while those who are less interested could appear as slovenly and uncouth as they liked without social penalty. Collectively agreeing not to teach children to do otherwise meaningless things to compete for social status might not bring us all the way to that point, but it would be a step in the right direction.
On the other hand, you can hugely increase your social and sexual opportunties by engaging in the bare minimum of said signaling. This is basically a lifehack, and the child should at the very least understand that it's available and will make their life easier.
It's so easy, generally (tho I could be very wrong about this!) to 'fix' these problems later that it seems to cruel to require _everyone_ to meet them without understanding their benefits.
Even with a strict, consistent, and insistent demand for cleanliness, kids are still generally much less clean or put-together than adults. We're obviously grading on a curve anyways.
The whole branch of comments about the supposed futility of cleaning strikes me as coming from a bizarro world: isn't it a matter of, you know, hygiene?
There's this weird association between cleaning in the sanitary sense and cleaning in the putting items in order sense, which... don't really overlap that much, and children are usually assigned to #2. There's nothing hygienic about combing or not combing your hair.
"What's the point in cleaning my room?"
15 minutes later:
"I can't find [precious/necessary] thing, find it for me!"
Some people can manage messiness. Some people's ADHD is so bad that they easily get in a cycle of letting things get messy and then can't manage it and are paralyzed to get out. The only escape is stopping things from getting messy in the first place.
some people's adhd is so bad that they find the obligation to clean their room to someone else's standards horrifically burdensome.
(but that's not to say it's obvious which of these two things is a greater concern--it's varied and nuanced!)
When someone cannot find shoes, we know what side of the hill we are on.
Since English is my second language, I'm under the impression that the verb "to clean" implies at least some level of dirt removal, which a cursory Google search seems to support.
But even if I'm wrong and it can be intended as merely having to do with bringing order into chaos, well, since I'm messy AND asthmatic I can attest that there's a deep correlation between the ability to remove dirt and the state of disorder of a room.
I insist on my kids cleaning up because if they don't, we get ants all over the house.
I didn't understand why my parents seemed to spend so much time cleaning, but 1) it wasn't that much, and 2) if you get on the wrong side of the hill things will start going to crap real fast.
It's not saving time to wait until a disaster to do work.
I'm – personally – with you on staying on the 'right side of the hill'.
But I've had immense difficulty getting _adults_ to agree to that too! Given that, it just doesn't seem right to insist that _children_ get with a program 'too difficult' for a lot of adults.
It really didn't hit me until I became a parent myself.
When visiting my parents (before covid), I did some random household chore for them, out of their eyes, just because it needed done and I was right there. The next day they were wondering WTF, which of us did it, are we doing senile? It was fun to watch for a while but I confessed to it.
Do you not believe that people clean their homes to avoid a build-up of dirt, mold, insect infestations and other hazardous-to-life things? Because that's the main reason that comes to mind when I think of cleaning, and that I believe motivate most people in the first place. Signaling would be an important secondary motivation, but only so far as you're signaling that you and your dwelling are not in fact infested with critters and are safe to interact with.
I tend to be a slob, but I gradually learned from my husband some of the pleasures that come from at least moderate cleanliness. I'll never be truly neat, but the house is less cluttered now and it's usually easier to find things. I grew up in a house that was oppressively clean; these things can go overboard.
I tend to be a slob too! I'm trying harder to be cleaner, and am perhaps one of those people who needs to be pressured to clean sometimes. But I agree some people may go overboard with it, it doesn't always need to be top priority.
As the other reply already implied, the optimal amount of 'dirt' isn't literally zero.
But I'm in total agreement about being clean enough to avoid insect infestations! But that's still something to be sold to a large number of adults too.
It is! Perhaps it's because I grew up in the tropics, where even the smallest amount of food or dirt can lead to a lot more risk. Living in Canada now seems very different.
That's a good point. I've live in enough places of sufficiently diverse 'insect infestation risk', that I tend to personally err on the 'salt the earth' side (i.e. prevent any amount of food or dirt or anything edible or usable by pests).
But some people seem to just be lucky and escape The Horde however messy they are. (And some people are completely unfazed even cohabitating with several Hordes!)
It is very hard to attribute causes to the things that have changed about you since you were seven. My impression from the little I've seen of the research is that, so long as a child has a generally supportive environment, parenting style has relatively little effect on what they will be like as an adult. You certainly would have learned which behavior is considered socially acceptable (within whichever culture you were immersed in) on your own, and you might have acquired an appreciation for it on your own as well.
You're arguing that you have the skills/traits/habits you do because you were forced to practice them as a kid. But the having the skills after being forced to practice them doesn't really prove anything except that being force to practice them does not prohibit you from acquiring them. I would find your view much more compelling if there were examples of people who were otherwise just like you, but who were not forced to practice such things and who did not acquire them by the time they were adults.
>But the having the skills after being forced to practice them doesn't really prove anything except that being force to practice them does not prohibit you from acquiring them.
For the life of me, I can't see how someone might acquire the skill of doing math or programming without practicing doing math or programming, or how the inverse might be true, forced or not.
First of all, I was talking about skills like "being polite", not doing math or programming. Second, I have sufficient programming and math skill to make money doing them, and almost of none of that skill came from people forcing me to practice. It came from me choosing to practice.
Why would you think that school is the only reason for people to learn basic math? Given that the only basic math most people can even reliably perform is exactly those they use frequently, e.g. when handling monetary amounts, it seems pretty unlikely that not forcing children to practice those skills would do much to prevent them from later acquiring them.
There's even some evidence that you can effectively 'backload' a lot of math instruction, e.g. wait to even start teaching it until students are teenagers. That points to the amount, and timing of, the practice that is mandated as being mostly wasteful (for most students).
Do you think all of this social training will endure and really change their adult behavior for the better? I have strong doubts, mainly from introspection (I was bad at most of your examples, got (slighty) better with age, but not from my parent efforts when I was young (which I resisted a lot, sometimes to a level that embarrass my adult-self ;-) ) and also from observing childhood friends that are still friends. Global trend: people do not fundamentally change, but they tends to become more polite and slower to rev-up to anger with age
Now all of those nice social child behavior sure makes parent life easier (my step-child is more sociable than I was....and I am happy for it :-) ). I suspect this is the main reason why parents insist on it. Don't you? Be honest ;-p
Agree. I don't think most kids and teens don't have the curiosity and discipline to learn on their own like Scott imagines. If given a choice most will watch TV, play video games, smoke pot and watch porn all day (speaking from personal experience). They need to external shove and discipline to grow into a better version of themselves in the future. I think school and religion can both serve this purpose for the average person and make them happier in the long run. I attended the University of Chicago for undergrad and absolutely hated the humanities and sociology classes I was forced to take (I was a science major); but looking back I am very grateful for this experience because it made me into a more well rounded, intellectually curious person which I never would have forced myself to do on my own.
But the choices aren't limited to passively watching them learn it on their own or passively watching them fail to do so. We can set things up so that kids have incentives to learn and do things, both carrot and stick, even if we take care not to make the disincentives too dangerous when they're still too young to know better. It works the same way with adults later. Sometimes our culture seems to default to a notion of basically child-proofing all habitats, for both old and young.
You should take a look at Escola da Ponte. Sadly most content is in portuguese, and I'm not extremely knowledgeable of it. I read some reports and it seems to work well, and the kids have a lot of autonomy and it's quite self oriented.
I was better at long term planning than my parents, who are actually quite good at it. My self isn't changeable. Just because you were an irresponsible kid with no consistent desires doesn't mean we all were.
There already are these sort of community centers - libraries. They host classes and other sort of educational events.
I hope that with the recent bump in online education due to covid, more computational and automated approaches to education will emerge. There's no longer a need to limit one good teacher to teaching a class of 20-30 students, when they could teach the entire nation. And since the students have different aptitudes to explanation - some prefer more visual metaphors, some like analytic explanations - it creates a sort of market for explanations, for educational videos. Imagine a library of educational videos like youtube, where educators (like 3blue1brown) or educational teams (like CrashCourse) could host their videos to sell to schools. The schools distribute videos to their students and test them later to assess their knowledge. Ideally I envision automated education as something like "all students receive shortest possible explanation A -> 75% pass the test and move on, 25% fail and get a different explanation B, take test again -> 20% pass the test and move on, 5% get help from a teacher". This way strong students can quickly move at their own pace, students with unusual requirements for explanation get a chance to find an educator that works for them (telling material as a sockpuppet theatre for example), and failing students get full attention of the teachers without disrupting the flow of the lessons.
“There's no longer a need to limit one good teacher to teaching a class of 20-30 students, when they could teach the entire nation.”
This applies to lecturing, and I think it’s great that I can access a basically infinite free library of lectures both for my own edification and to send to my students. (CrashCourse already *is* assigned reading in many cases, and is basically designed for that purpose.) And assessment of multiple-choice tests can be (and is) done at scale.
Unfortunately (or fortunately for guild, I guess) most of the rest is more difficult to do at scale. The loop students do work —> teacher diagnoses how they’re conceiving the material or carrying out the skill (including productive discussions!) —> teacher provides targeted guidance is more labor-intensive. And this is where good teachers spend most of their time.
That said, in an Infinite Pandemic World I think you’re right that you could have a lot more specialization to individual needs when students aren’t grouped by physical geography. Long-term I think it’s clear the demand is for a return to meatspace schools, but maybe we could incorporate more hybrid elements to take advantage of the potential gains that you outline here.
The ability of one person to teach an unlimited number has existed ever since the invention of the printing press. The puzzle is why we continue to teach via mass lectures, with too many students for any significant interaction, centuries later.
Anecdotal, but when I was in college my friend and I had basically opposite learning styles. He would skip many classes, but read the textbook and learn everything that way. He found lectures mostly pointless. I, on the other hand, can't get myself to read even the best written textbook for more than 5 minutes at a time and often find myself not remembering what I read because my mind was wandering. However, I can sit and listen to a lecture and grasp the material well and just use the textbook to occasionally look up examples or clear up areas of confusion. I wouldn't call myself a particularly social person, but having a real person in front of me provides motivation to pay attention that I have a very hard time summoning on my own with a book.
Does it help if the book is written in a way designed to show the personality of the author, let you feel there is a human being on the other side of the page? GKC, for example.
I can't say for sure because I don't recall if I've ever read a textbook like that. I imagine I'd find it a bit easier to get through, although it is still lacking the modicum of social pressure that live instruction provides and that I find I often need for motivation.
I may be a bit unusual in that I find it difficult to get through dry material, but also tend to (probably overly) distrust non-fiction that seems too interesting or follows what seems like "fiction-logic". As a result, I read very little non-fiction beyond blog-post length.
Try my _Hidden Order_.
During my time in college, I found many textbooks overly dry and felt like many of them dragged things out, a problem that only got worse after I went blind and found myself listening to a monotone, computer voice reading them more slowly than my eye could when it worked(Note: went blind in my right eye in infancy, my left eye in my mid-20s), and that's not getting into, when I could get hold of the textbook digitally, it was usually as a PDF(a format I wasn't fond of when I could see and have come to hate since going blind) or had to be accessed through a website that was a total pain in the anatomy to use with a screen reader and had the kind of obtrusive DRM that makes you want to pirate a copy just so you don't feel like you have a virtual bad cop with a itchy trigger finger waiting for the flimsiest excuse.
And I say this as someone who occasionally read print encyclopedias for fun and still pulls the occasional all nighter on Wikipedia(though to the World Book's credit, it keeps things brief enough that if you decide to just read through, it never stays on one subject long enough to get boring, and Wikipedia is one of the most screen reader friendly websites in existence).
That said, I found the 90-minute morning lectures from highschool tedious and the 2-hour lectures from the afternoon(I attended a Highschool that let out after lunch on Fridays, so Monday-Thursday had longer afternoon classes to make up the difference) inteolerable, and when I got to college, I found the 50-minute lectures for classes that met thrice weekly much more reasonable and the 75-minute lectures tedious, but still an improvement over highschool. I also like that, in college, I could have free periods or even days off instead of being forced to have a full-day, every day... and I couldn't even enjoy the afternoons off on Fridays in Highschool due to attending a semi-boarding school where most of the students lived in Dorems from Sunday night to Friday morning and spent most of Friday afternoon and Sunday evening on a bus(my weekly commute was five hours each way).
Though, even a 50-minute lecture can be tedious with a boring lecturer, but even the best teachers I've ever had struggled to make a 2-hour class not seem overly long.
And while I'll gladly listen to an interesting YouTuber for hours on end, I generally find that's easier when individual videos are in the 5-15 minute range than when they're an hour or two.
Never did like taking online classes in college though, and only ever did it for courses with no face-to-face sections. A canned lecture I can listen too whenever can be just as good, if not better than a live one heard in a lecture hall, I find there's value in having to be in a certain place at a certain time, that listening to canned lectures or doing assigned reading is too easy to procrastinate on without that structure, and if you're actually lucky enough to have a teacher for the course, class time isn't just lecturing, but includes actual discussion and hands-on demonstrations you don't get with canned lectures. And hey, even if you just have a boring lecturer and get more out of reading the textbook, I often found it was usually easier to focus on reading the textbook in class than trying to do so during free time.
Still, I wish college had given me more opportunities to pursue interesting coourses outside of those required for my degree without fear of over committing or worrying about something interesting I'm not very good at pulling my GPA down. I love arts and crafts and took art class to fill out my schedule every year of highschool even though for three of my four years I was basically the only college-bound student sharing a class with the multiple special needs or primary students(In addition to being semi-boarding, my HS was a combined k-12 school and a school for the blind and visually impaired, so technically, even as the brightest in my year and being dual-enrolled at a local IB school, I suppose I qualified as special needs myself) and was doing independant projects while the teachers did smaller, more supervised crafts with my younger/less intellectual classmates, in college, the only art classes I had the opportunity to take before I ran out of humanities requirements where Art Appreciation, Music Appreciation, and Theatre Appreciation.
I'm the same way. I only skipped class one single time in college, which my friends thought was an insane level of dedication, but I spent wayyyyy less time studying than they did. I like listening to a real person talk, asking questions in real time, and taking my own notes. It helps me retain information. Reading textbooks or lecture slides without attending the class is torture. Clearly for some people it's the opposite,
I think some of the meritocracy objections might be that the higher salaries seem to be disproportionately aligned with the trait "smart" -- as opposed to the trait "kind" or the trait "has good hand-eye coordination" or the trait "has a lot of endurance" (all of which, incidentally, I would want in the "best" surgeon). That is, that "smart" is being treated as a near-universal proxy for "arete", even though most professions require other traits as well.
I'm not even sure it has to do with salaries as much as the perception, as you put it, that smart=arete. Income and IQ are correlated, but the differences aren't all that stark--the difference between an IQ of 130 and 100 produces a difference in annual income of $12k per year, which is significant, but wouldn't even put you in a different social class. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11711-smarter-people-are-no-better-off/ There are lots of smart people who end up teachers making $40k a year and lots of less smart people who work in skilled trades and make a great living.
As other folks have said, it feels like the issue is a combination of 1) people rightly being mad about income inequality and attributing it to meritocracy and 2) people being mad that so much of their own self-worth derives from how good or bad their grades were.
Yeah, honestly, the skills that are most important in the OR aren't really selected for by the funnel that leads to medical school. Surgeons tend to just be the people with the temperament (and hand-eye coordination/proprioception) best suited to surgical training, selected from a population pre-filtered based on standard "smart" traits and the associated metrics.
You could imagine a society where the filter order was reversed - where surgeons were first filtered based on mechanical skills, or risk-taking / temperament, and then subsequently were divvied up into fields depending on how essential traditional "smart" traits were for a chosen field (there's probably a joke about orthopedic surgeons here). To me, that's the strongest part of FdB's argument - that "smart" traits are the gatekeepers to high status jobs, even if those high status jobs really don't require much in the way of "smart" in their day-to-day practice.
I feel there's an assumption that early-21st-century medicine is more advanced than it actually is. In practice, I think part of the reason that we want smart educated surgeons, is because no one really knows for certain what a surgeon will find when they start cutting someone open, and it's important that the surgeon be able to make accurate split-second decisions about how to proceed. (Which is also why confidence is selected for.)
I agree with this, but I think the culprit here is credentialism, not meritocracy.
I think it might be broader than just credentialism, insofar as practical approximations of meritocracy end up optimizing not merit but an easier-to-measure proxy. I think a similar mechanic is at work when software developers get promoted into management positions because they're good at writing code -- it's easier to estimate someone's coding ability than their managerial skills, and it's probably not completely uncorrelated with being a good manager insofar as e.g. conscientiousness is a part of both jobs, and so it ends up being used.
Yes, this is well put. We don't work as hard to value or incentivize "kind" in the places it could have the biggest impact.
An avenue Freddie didn't explore, but I'm interested in: let's consider intelligence a natural resource. Does our current system deprive us of some of the benefits of that resource, by allocating it toward useless academic pursuits?
For example: Tyler Cowen's post today (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/02/my-history-of-manual-labor.html) prompted me to question: what if there were a bunch of 140+ IQ people running grocery store produce sections?
A friend of mine happens to (a) be a 140+ IQ genius, (b) run a produce section. And her produce section is *great*.
I noted in the thread that once we get a good polygenic risk score for IQ and other such in-demand traits, we can start taxing people with the potential to get high-paying jobs. They'll have the option of wasting their lives proving Hilbert's unsolved mathematical problems rather than helping a hedge fund get slightly higher returns, but damn it they'll have to pay for that luxury.
I certainly think that part of academia is subsidized intellectual masturbation, although those are often also the fields where 140+ IQ seems most rare.
Counterpoint, I also feel like part of academia is real intellectual output for cheap, since you can get brilliant people for a fraction of the salary they could command in industry. Because they love having a job where they can pursue the most interesting problems out there, surrounded by people who are also doing this.
The contrast between what our postdocs make in university departments and what they could get if they ran off to Google is staggering. And yet most people in my PhD cohort want to go on into the university departments!
Does the reduced salary make up for the lesser impact on society and the state of the art? Because Google has made some amazing innovations and at least as important, they've actually put it in practice.
An immense amount of academic output is so poorly done that the replication rate of that field is below 50%, which means that it is worse than a coin toss. Parts are purely ideological and seem intended to cover up the facts. Does any of that actually produce positive value to society, even if it was done for free?
I can see your point for fields like material science and physics, but overall, the state of science seems quite poor.
I'm basically only talking about math and hard science here. My colleagues are all physicists.
As for the fields with below 50% replication rate, do they actually have lots of people that could've excelled doing deep learning at Google instead? My impression is that Google is currently happy to hire people with abstract math degrees as developers, even if their studies are not applicable to the subject at all. People with sociology degrees, less so.
I think this says something about what they consider promising signals.
I would prefer doing science reforms that would chance the incentives away from p-hacking (and the like), biased publication, only doing original research, etc; to increase the value they provide.
Basically, increase their value. Then you can even pay them more and still come out ahead :)
Another variation on this question (I apologize ahead of time if this starts a eugenics debate): are we allocating natural intelligence optimally? Maybe there's little marginal utility to IQ past 130, and society would be better off if smart people interbred with average people more often, and we had more people with IQs of 110-120. Or maybe the opposite is the case and we'd be better off with more algebraic geometers.
But would the marriages last??
The Internet says that one man produces enough sperm in two weeks to impregnate every fertile woman on the planet. I don't know if that's true, but I do know that there's enough smart sperm to go around. No rationing needed.
I was surprised to see this quote:
> There are studies finding extreme negative effects from having disruptive kids in your class; I'm a little skeptical of this kind of research, but being stuck with unmanageable classmates is definitely no fun. I haven't seen the research, but it wouldn't surprise me if having lots of overachievers in your class was helpful - good role models, inspiration, whatever (see also this comment for some brief discussion of this). So if all the smart kids go to charters and all the dull kids stay in public, the smart kids will do better and the dull kids will do worse. How should we think about this?
That paragraph equivocates sort of strangely between "disruptive" kids and "dull" kids.
Scott's writing here takes it as given that these "disruptive" kids are going to be in classrooms and are going to be disruptive, so they're going to inflict negative externalities on _someone_, and the question is just who gets stuck with them. I thought the obvious answer was that we should put the disruptive kids somewhere that they don't inflict negative externalities on people -- either in a very strict classroom with harsh punishments, or in a daycare classroom where the school will still watch your kids but it's given up on teaching them.
For "dull" kids, I'd like to believe that they'd benefit from being in a class with other "dull" kids, so that the teacher can teach at a slow pace that will work for all of them.
This is a really good point (the difference between "disruptive" and merely academically behind) that I hadn't noticed when reading the post, thanks.
As a "gifted" kid, I loved helping other kids who were further behind but wanted to learn. As a high school freshman, I was in a math class with juniors and seniors (due to transferring into a public system from a private school with more aggressive tracking), and sometimes I helped them with classwork, and I think everybody really gained by this? And I enjoyed it, and it seemed like they did too. At a later point I also did tutoring outside school hours, some of it for pay.
Of course, not everybody who's academically advanced is also good at teaching, or enjoys it. But I seem to recall reading that there's evidence that mixed-ability groups benefit students because they can teach each other, rather than relying exclusively on the teachers. I don't feel like I have thought much about whether or how it benefits the more advanced kids, but I know it's commonly said that the best way to really learn something is to teach it (and I think it's true.)
That said, I was (in this case) in the position of helping kids who were studying the same material, but took longer to get to it and were having a bit more trouble with it -- not kids who were further behind than that.
"I thought the obvious answer was that we should put the disruptive kids somewhere that they don't inflict negative externalities on people -- either in a very strict classroom with harsh punishments, or in a daycare classroom where the school will still watch your kids but it's given up on teaching them."
The trouble is when those kids age out of school. What happens next? They're not "educated" and they're not motivated to do anything - we're talking about the disruptive, not the "bored and would benefit from being in an advanced class" or "would prefer to be doing a practical subject", we're talking about "doesn't want to be here, doesn't want to do anything, has no ambitions beyond hanging around with their mates, playing games, and doing weed/minor recreational drugs/drinking".
They're not employable, they're not interested in bettering themselves, and eventually they do become society's problem by ending up in jail.
*Some* kids who do drop out *do* benefit from programmes like this one https://www.education.ie/en/Learners/Information/Youthreach. They are the ones who perhaps have psychological/learning difficulties and need more support, are from homes where they are not getting support, or just need a different direction to steer themselves. Their parents want to help them, they want to get on.
But there is the hard core remnant of "don't want to do anything" and those are the ones ending up in petty crime or lifetime social welfare dependency, and what do you do with those? That's the enduring problem.
What *does* solve this problem?
Warfare and hanging bandits.
That is the €8.9 billion question, and if anyone is curious to see the breakdown of where the money goes in the Irish education system, here you go: https://www.education.ie/en/Publications/Corporate-Reports/Financial-Reports/Financial-Reports-List/main-features-of-budget-2021-education.pdf
There are two or three (at least) BIG HUGE MAJOR problems that occur to me.
(1) What is education/what are schools for?
We seem to have decided the answer to that is "Turning out workers", particularly in the shiny new STEM fields where all the jobs are. Secondarily to that, we've also decided that schools are where you park the kids so parents can go to work and the kids are not wandering the streets getting into trouble. Any school that has an identifiable uniform, yes you *will* get people phoning the headmaster to complain "I saw a bunch of your students hanging around on the streets at lunchtime!" even if the kids are not doing anything or are just being ordinarily rowdy of the usual nature - not breaking windows etc. It happened at the school where I worked. This encourages schools to keep the kids corralled in, since members of the public whinging about "why aren't the kids in school?" and maybe going to the local media to whinge publicly are going to get your school a bad name. And a bad name is enough excuse to hang the dog.
"Turning out STEM workers who can all get shiny jobs in the shiny Dublin-based multinationals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Docks" is, of course, going to leave some children behind in the dust. This leads on to the second problem.
But first, a personal anecdote! I have an Arts Nephew and a Science Nephew. Neither one is demonstrably more smart than the other, though if you gave the maths-based type of IQ test to my Arts Nephew he'd probably do worse on it (like myself Arts Nephew struggles with numbers etc.)
I have to apologise in advance here, Arts Nephew also wants to go into journalism and has completed his degree in English and is doing various gigs for student newpaper, etc. Funnily enough, he also does a lot of graphic design work even though he has no formal training in that. Talent will out!
Science Nephew is still completing his undergraduate degree in Galway and by all accounts is doing really well. Now, when he goes looking for a job, he'll probably get something in the shiny new STEM fields. By the metric of what education/schooling is supposed to achieve, he is VALUABLE in a way Arts Nephew is not.
Phooey, say I, my darling nephews are both equally valuable. But society's judgement is that Arts Nephew would be better off if he had tried going into STEM and if he couldn't hack it there, then an honest cleaning toilets would be better. I have no disagreement that working as a janitor is an honest, valuable to society job, but the idea is that Science Nephew who may get a job working in a cubicle for the Silicon Docks lot is better, in some real sense, than Arts Nephew doing a gig for the Dublin Literary Festival. Maybe so, maybe not. But you can't shove Arts Nephew into the round hole of STEM, so what are you going to do with him?
(2) Our education system is a "one size fits all" solution, grappling and often failing with "how do you make sure everyone is getting a basic and comparable education" and "how do you deal with issues of inequality relating to socio-economic class, race (now becoming a genuine question in Ireland), and intellectual ability as well as physical/mental disabilities?"
Mainstreaming is the preferred solution to make sure the rising tide lifts all boats. This is a "yes, but" solution. (Okay, need to break off here as I'm cooking the mid-day meal and I need to attend to the kitchen, I will be back to complete this in a bit).
Okay, back again.
The "yes" part is because when streaming by ability/technical schools/special schools were where children were divided off, to be blunt, they acted as dumping grounds. Plonk them in there and forget about them.
The stigma over technical as contrasted with academic education existed in my day, a threat often used by parents for bad grades was "you'll have to go to the technical school instead". I don't think that stigma has faded and indeed, with the push from governments themselves to get everyone going to college (because 'studies prove having a degree means higher earnings over your lifetime' and because white-collar/knowledge economy jobs are where the last bastion of full-time, permanent, pensionable employment resides) I think it has only increased. Sure, a plumber may make good money as an independent tradesman, but parents want Johnny to be a doctor, not a plumber. Even where Johnny's father is a plumber, having a doctor in the family is a big boost to social standing. Though it often is that where Johnny's (or Susie's! this works for girls too!) dad is an electrician or plumber or other tradesman, they're happy for Johnny or Susie to follow in the family footsteps.
So mainstreaming theoretically avoids all this - nobody is singled out as "destined for the scrapheap" from the age of six/eleven/fifteen on. Again, personal anecdote: in my day, dyslexia was not a thing many people, even schools, were familiar with. If you were not doing well in class, this was because you were stupid and you had to live with that label from then on. So the investment in Special Needs Assistants, child psychology services, and things like "hey if the kid literally cannot read the text they can't learn the stuff" realisations are a boon and a godsend.
Here comes the "but".
But when you're trying to do a "one size fits all" curriculum and classroom, you will have a few very bright kids bored to tears and a few slower kids struggling even with the normed-to-the-average material. That's not even considering the physically and mentally additional needs kids, the kids with psychological issues, the kids with shitty home lives issues, and the small but persistent percentage of bad seeds.
Squaring that circle so the bright kids get enriched classes, the slower kids (who may just be bad at one particular subject but okay on others) get extra support, and the rest of the kids with needs get their appropriate levels of support costs money and political will. Nobody wants to raise taxes and the public don't want their taxes raised. So money is always, always, always an issue.
The problem of the bad seeds, who will do nothing even with all the support in the world, is another one. These are the kids who will deliberately disrupt classes, bully others, don't want to be in school but also don't want to be in any kind of training and, let's be frank, *are* headed down the school-to-prison pipeline. Law says everyone is entitled to an education, so they get passed around from school to school - if you ever eventually do get permitted to expel them - like a hot potato and end up in the worst-disadvantaged schools which *have* to take them. A student body selected for trouble-makers is going to be a lot of problems. I'll spare you the rant about bleeding-hearts because long-time readers have heard it all before from me.
(3) So what is it like at the bottom of the pile?
Not that great, for a lot of reasons, and here is where I re-iterated that SCHOOLS ARE NOT HOMES AND SHOULD NOT BE REQUIRED TO BE HOMES.
If schools have to run breakfast clubs because the kids will not be fed otherwise, then that is not a problem for the schools and is not the purview of education. If parents have to be in at work at eight in the morning and will not be able to collect the kids until six or seven at night, that is not a reason for schools to provide babysitting/childminding services.
But the expectations and demands have stretched so that schools and teachers are increasingly being expected to teach children and provide children with what parents should be teaching and providing for them (how to be a good citizen, how to manage life such as cooking, paying bills, tax, etc.) That does not leave much time for the rest of it when it comes to teaching.
Things like Common Core and so on are attempts at standardisation so that you can measure outcomes and make judgements of success or failure. You need to be able to tell if a kid in a school in Alabama is getting the same basic education as a kid in a school in the Bronx. Or if a kid from school A in Alabama is getting the same education as a kid in school B in Alabama. Are the exam results comparable? Does school A hand out As and Bs like snuff at a wake and does school B mark hard so that a C there is the equivalent of an A from the first school?
The problems with such an approach, you all know, not least the "payment by results means teaching to the test and grinding for passing the arbitrary markers, not actual teaching".
Once again, personal experience. Despite what I said about mainstreaming, in practice there is a local hierarchy. The four secondary (high) schools in my town are definitely ranked from highest to lowest. The school where I worked (for a while) was *not* the one a neighbour's child attended where they got a golf scholarship to an American college and then internships for an American Congressman and an American Senator.
You can read up links here on Disadvantaged Areas and DEIS which is what the school I worked for fell under. https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/education/the_irish_education_system/measures_to_address_educational_disadvantage.html#l736dc
It did have a vocational rather than purely academic bent, and ran three versions of the Leaving Certificate:
(1) Established or Standard Leaving Certificate - this is the pure academic level one for most schools, the exam that gives you points for entry to college courses
(2) Leaving Certificate Vocational Programme - an intermediate level one which adds in practical modules as well as the academic test subjects. "Ireland's Leaving Certificate Vocational Programme (LCVP) is a Leaving Certificate with a strong vocational aspect.
The programme consists of Leaving Certificate subjects, together with three compulsory link modules on enterprise education, preparation for work and work experience. Students must take at least 5 Leaving Certificate subjects, one of which must be Irish and a continental language or vocational language module." This will also give you points for college entry.
(3) Leaving Certificate Applied - the lowest level and least academic. It would be unfair to say it's for no-hopers, someone who is strongly oriented towards practical subjects could do well in this and enter on an apprenticeship (one year one of our students got an apprenticeship to the ESB, the national electricity generation and supply semi-state organisation. You don't just walk into one of those and our principal was as pleased as a dog with two tails. But yeah, it can also be "where you park the kids until they're legally old enough to leave and you don't want them to drop out early".
"The Leaving Certificate Applied is a distinct, self-contained two-year Leaving Certificate programme aimed at preparing students for adult and working life.
The programme sets out to recognise the talents of all students and to provide opportunities for developing personal responsibility, self-esteem and self-knowledge. The programme focuses on the talents of each student and helps students apply what they learn to the real world."
We had a fair supply of kids with problems: broken homes, psychological difficulties, learning difficulties, etc. This is because of the sorting effect - the better students go to the other schools, the ones remaining go to ours.
So yes: liaising with social workers, Breakfast Club, Behaviour Support Classroom (a room where you supervise the kids who have been kicked out of the ordinary classroom for troublemaking until they cool off), Home School Community Liaison scheme (to support parents and get parents involved. Some parents are willing but have low literacy, left school early themselves, or have trouble home lives. They want their kids to do better, stay in school, get educated. This is to help them), other supports.
And yet there are still those who fall through the cracks.
For those who do drop out early, there is a final programme: "The Youthreach programme provides two years integrated education, training and work experience for unemployed early school leavers without any qualifications or vocational training who are between 15 and 20 years of age."
This is the final sorting of the sheep and the goats. The kids who couldn't hack it in school and who have problems severe enough to need a lot of support end up here. Some of them do well, they get the help and individual support they needed, and they go on to something - steered to job training, mental health services, something. Some few still fall out even with all the help because of some weakness or problem too great to overcome.
It's been very strange how the jobs I have gone into have enabled me to track one such person: from struggling in school, to dropping out, to falling out of that programme by (it's an old-fashioned phrase but the only one that fits) ending up in bad company and picking up a drug habit, to becoming a single mother on welfare (repeating the pattern of her own mother) and applying for social housing, to getting into a row at a house party (drink and drugs involved of course), stabbing another woman in the stomach, and ending up with a jail sentence.
What is the educational system to do there? What is the role of the school in such a life?
The final ones are the bad seeds. Not necessarily stupid, some can be very clever. These are the ones who don't care and don't want to care. These are the ones who learn the rules so they can game the system when engaging with social services for the rest of their lives, if they don't end up in prison.
And at the end of all this, I don't have any solution. It's one thing to identify (for example) the dangers of AI and set up various foundations, research facilities, and projects to investigate and solve that problem. You're starting clear and fresh on a green-field site.
The school system is not like that. As I said, we're all travelling in a vehicle and tinkering with the engine, unbolting parts and bolting on others, throwing bits away, trying new fuels - and then we wonder why it broke down half-way there and we never got to our destination.
Throwing more money at the problem isn't the solution, even though money is desperately needed. The problem of the school system is a problem of society as a whole and will only be "solved" if we can all somehow agree on "what is the purpose of education? what best supports a range of abilities? is crying 'racism' any damn good at all? do we need to dismantle our economic system so we are not treating adults and children as cogs in the machine?" and what to do about it all.
I mention racism because the American context is plainly very much different from the Irish one, and trendy nonsense such as declaring white privilege (which is a label rapidly acquiring the implications of "white supremacy" as well) is when parents read to their kids so that is why black pupils don't do as well as white pupils so we must do away with things like "tests" and "there is a right and a wrong answer to a maths problem" in order that All Shall Have Prizes is NOT the solution. Ireland is still majority white so the disparate outcomes can't be explained by neat "systemic racism" mantras.
"Squaring that circle so the bright kids get enriched classes, the slower kids (who may just be bad at one particular subject but okay on others) get extra support, and the rest of the kids with needs get their appropriate levels of support costs money and political will. "
Political will, maybe. But I'm not sure it has to cost much money, as long as the individual school has hundreds rather than tens of students. Having five classrooms, of which one is for the students good at math, three for the average, and one for the really hopeless, takes the same number of rooms and teachers as five classrooms all teaching the same thing to a random mix of students. Letting the one student to whom the high end class is still too low sit in the school library reading a book on math or something else that interests him costs nothing, assuming the school has a library and a librarian.
I'd mildly demur in that for the really bright students you are going to need teachers on top of the subject. It's easier to get teachers who can teach the three average classes. And ditto for the less able students, teaching kids who may have learning disabilities or may not be able to get one particular subject needs some extra strategies than simply teaching the maths. Again, it's easier to get a teacher who can teach the majority of average students, just let the bad students sit there and behave, and ignore the bright student.
And of course, there is always the pressure from parents who don't want to believe Johnny or Susie is bad at this subject, no, it's the mean teacher who is picking on them and has it in for them. Sometimes there *is* a mean teacher picking on the kid. Sometimes not. We seem to be putting our eggs in the basket of "anyone and everyone can be brought up to a certain level, just apply some Grit (copyright Duckworth) and Engaged Teachers and a sprinkle of Diversity Inclusiveness Tolerance" and that is just not so.
"Disruptive" very often equates to "has untreated learning difficulties or mental health issues." So locking them away seems bad. But they would benefit from teachers who are trained to help their specific issues. Often doing this effectively is going to require much smaller class sizes, which comes back to money
Negative externalities afflicted by disruptive students is, I think, the most insidious harm that has resulted in the US from the reification of education and of the worldview expressed in the statement (not the law) of "no child left behind".
Some kids are just bad eggs. That's not say they couldn't eventually become good eggs. But while they're rotten, they really stink up the joint. The New York Times narrative is that taking bad eggs out of the standard class disproportionately affects minorities and is therefore discriminatory and evil. But some of those other thirty kids in the class are also underprivileged, and they aren't benefitting from the bad egg's presence, either.
Will the bad egg do worse while suspended or in a class of other bad eggs? Probably! If you're the parent of that pungent ovoid, who is, of course, just misunderstood, and just needs to be treated with patience and understanding, and is medically certified as needing six warnings before being disciplined, you will object! You will fight for his *right* to be in the same class as everyone else. With persistence, you will win.
This doesn't just apply to bad eggs, but to kind-spirited special needs kids whose parents want them to have the "authentic high school experience", even though the kid might be functioning at a first grade level. Parents, backed by medical documentation and well-intentioned laws, can insist that their child be allowed to "participate" in the regular class, and be praised and graded as though they had some idea of what the course is about. The result is a kind of "education theater" that forces regular classrooms to also act as make-a-wish fulfillment centers.
It's not like I have anything against those kids. In a perfect world, they and their parents should get their wishes. But in our world, the externalities are real and substantial.
Until we find a way to reconcile the needs of the many with the needs of the few -- to reject the idea that my child has a right to be in the class with your child, even if my child brings your child down -- it's going to be very difficult to bring the waterline very far above "not always terrible."
The trends seem to be against this. A lot of school reform activism, especially in major cities, seems to be about my right to put my kid next to your kid, even if we don't describe it in those terms. I would say that I don't want my kid to face barriers to being in the good school. What I might not say -- and might not even realize -- is that most of what makes that school "good" in the statistics is the kids who already go there.
This comment really rings true. The amount of paperwork and parent meetings that go into accommodating special needs students requires a considerable amount of extra time from teachers and presents additional challenges when planning classes. Some students' individual plans require that you create practically entirely separate syllabi and assignments for them in addition to maintaining near-constant contact with the parents. When you have 150-200 students and maybe 1/3 of those students are on an accommodations plan of some kind, the extras add up. It would be much easier to just tell the parents that their students "aren't a good fit for the ideals of X Charter or Y private school or [even sometimes] public magnet Z" and send them back to the neighborhood public school.
It's also true that all it takes is a small number of determined disruptive students (sometimes those armed with accommodations that make it extremely hard to discipline them) to wreck a whole class. I could normally use all the tricks of the trade to handle 2-3 disruptive students at a time, but some classes had 6 or 7 "known troublemakers" who were just too much for one teacher to consistently handle alongside 25-30 other students. The days in which those most-disruptive students were suspended were by far the most pleasant and productive for everyone in the class, especially the vast majority of students who actually wanted to be there and learn.
This latter point, I think, is far too often ignored in the education debates as beast@tanagra points out. It's incredibly unfair to the vast majority of students--of all ability levels!--who get subjected to foolishness by a small handful. And while I'm sure it definitely makes a difference for test scores (as Scott--who I regret pigeonholing as someone without classroom experience without doing due diligence!--points out in his post), it also has an enormous effect on the level of stress for students and teachers and the relative attractiveness of specific teaching jobs. When education reformers lament that the best teachers don't want to go to the worst schools and try to spin this as some kind of nefarious plot, a large part of it is just not wanting to deal with constant disruptions of all kinds that you don't have much power to stop as a teacher, especially when you're being evaluated on maintaining control of the classroom by admins who barely ever taught themselves (though that's a different fun topic of discussion).
Something between “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” and the perfectly efficient transistor would indeed be nice. Specifically, a system that gives exactly the additional incentive necessary to ensure people commit to higher-value professions, and no more. Or rather, that finds an equilibrium point at which the marginal cost of increasing the pay for a profession is not worth the marginal utility of increasing the chance that someone will choose to do it.
However, it’s important to note that today’s economy (and capitalism generally) is not only very far from that ideal case, but very far from the transistor, as well. The amount of money that flows to each individual corresponds to their power to demand that money. Merit is one type of power, which allows for some small demands. Vast existing wealth is a much greater power, which allows for much greater demands.
People without skills or existing wealth have almost no power, and thus are forced to accept minimum wage jobs which can’t even feed their families. Those who lack citizenship have even less, and can’t even command that. Of course, even poor and unskilled workers have power when working in concert to withhold labor, which is the point of union organizing. It corrects some of the power differential between owners and workers, getting closer to a truly efficient exchange.
Anyway, when we look at the drastically unequal wealth distribution, it’s hard to argue that it was created out of efficiency rather than these power differentials. So much of the time, in working to increase the power of workers and decrease the power of the very rich, we don’t even need to fight in the name of fairness. Even an actually efficient transistor would be an improvement.
Like I said, we could tax people who COULD have high-paying jobs, even if they don't actually take them, thus not having a marginal tax rate disincentivize them from taking it.
I don't think progressive marginal tax rates are the issue here. And taxing people based on their genetics or test scores, as you seem to be implying, sounds trivially easy to corrupt and/or creates super perverse incentives.
What are the "super perverse incentives" of taxing people by their genes? They can't change their genes, so there's nothing they can do to avoid taxes, and thus no deadweight loss.
This is how child support works.
I'm loving the microwave burrito euphemism.
Me too. My favorite part. I hope it gets Honorable mention in other conversations. Can the president microwave a burrito without asking?
if SSC meetups are ever a thing again, i'm showing up holding a frozen burrito
I think I got that off social justice Tumblr, but I'd assumed it was common knowledge by now. Guess not!
I feel like I'm missing something. I tried looking it up and I got a Simpsons joke.
I'm not a billionaire, so maybe I'm maximally boring, because "if you didn't defraud anyone or break any laws when you made your fortune, you 'deserve' it" appeals a lot to me.
It's not so much that I think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos "deserve" a gazillion dollars, and that a surgeon deserves much much less than a gazillion, but still a lot of dollars.
Rather, every time I buy something from Amazon, I implicitly decide Jeff Bezos deserves the tiny fraction of his gazillion dollars that's coming *from me*. I'm not judging the sum total, only my individual contribution. And since I don't want someone else telling me whether I can buy from Amazon, I extend the same courtesy to others.
If enough people choose the same way I do, it adds up, and if it happens to add up to a gazillion, then so be it (standard caveats about people being free from coercion apply).
Suppose I swear my everlasting fealty to you. I do so freely and in a sober mind, sincerely believing that your judgment is better than my own, indeed is so even in cases where I think there’s an exception to this.
Like other voluntary agreements, this is Pareto-improving at the margin: you get a vassal, I get what I consider to be better judgment than my native one - and (other than you, presumably) who is to say I am wrong?
One person does this and they’re weirdos, indeed marginally higher utility-weirdos so more power to them. It wouldn’t even be enforceable! Enough people start doing this it becomes quite enforceable.
Now I think the case for giving a dollar working this way is not as trivially easy as swearing fealty. (Indeed I think people should largely be able to enforceable give each other dollars, within limits, while there shouldn’t be an enforceable oaths of fealty, period.) If dollars could only be spent on personal consumption I would share the intuition that income inequality just doesn’t matter in se (though we could still support some redistribution to address absolute consumption deficits.) But the fact that dollars do lead to power basically forms the republican argument against accumulated economic inequality.
Bezos purchased a major paper with spare change, he runs countless warehouses where the “burrito test” is unpassed, and so on. This is where the Wilt Chamberlain argument, I believe, fails, even if there are some lucky individuals (like Chamberlain himself, I suppose) whose relatively innocuous enjoyment of obscene wealth doesn’t arouse such concern.
I think we're on similar pages here, but I'm trying to separate a moral judgement about how much money someone has from how they spend it. And I'm not really that worried about how Bezos (or other fantastically rich people) are spending their money. I hear mixed things about Amazon warehouses -- they certainly make some people miserable, others seem OK with them, and I haven't done enough research to have a well informed opinion of my own. I don't think owning the Washington Post confers that much power because legacy media is bleeding credibility. I blocked WaPo from my Google News feed after they doxed some random woman for what she wore to a random Halloween party some time back.
But maybe I'm just horribly, irresponsibly misinformed.
Incidentally, this is another reason to have some skepticism of "meritocracy in the good sense" of the most important positions being assigned to the most naturally capable people. Some important positions have negative value and produce more negative value the more competent the person is. A basically stupid and lazy person is oftentimes the least bad person you can have occupying a super-powerful position, and every criterion which a society uses for what it actually wants in a position (other than sheer luck) will serve as a criterion for ambition and cunning as well.
(Even Donald Trump, I believe, the obvious case of a stupid, lazy person who can do a lot of damage put in a high position, did significantly less damage than an equally cruel and unscrupulous but smart and ambitious person would have done.)
Obviously abolishing kings (or turning them into ceremonial monarchs, people who get gigantic houses for free to smile and wave and appear in tabloids or whatever) is better than just hoping that kings happen to be stupid and lazy. And there are many many cases where you do want capable people running things, to some approximation! (I am mildly in favor of sortition for legislatures, much less in favor of sortition for who should be hospital administrators, say.) But I also think that this is a cost of meritocracy, moreover a generalized one, since most powerful positions carry an element of it.
How do we know that Trump is actually stupid and lazy? (This is an honest question -- what evidence do we have of his levels of industriousness and/or of his IQ?)
Even if we discount that every Republican President has been derided by the US press as stupid since Ford, and lazy since Bush Jr, Trump had people from inside his own camps saying that he was easily distracted and unconcerned with nuance.
Yes, the world is just filled with stupid and lazy billionaires. I write device drivers for a mostly-obscure operating system. My manager doesn't care one whit about the root cause analysis of a priority inversion issue, but is Very concerned about whether or not my ship date is in jeopardy. Is he "a technical idiot" (no, he's not) or is his day concerned with different, equally complex, problems than is mine?
The laziness has been widely reported. For instance, here:
"One of the most closely guarded and worst-kept secrets of Donald Trump’s presidency is his extraordinary laziness. Despite efforts to project a manly ardor, the current leader of the free world spends most of his free time tweeting, calling friends, and watching Fox News. Of his 745 days in office, Trump has spent 222 days unwinding at Trump-branded properties and 168 days golfing. According to the testimony of numerous West Wing staffers, he struggles to focus in meetings, largely ignores intelligence briefings, and tunes out policy minutiae. Once, according to former White House aide Cliff Sims, Trump literally got up and wandered away while Paul Ryan was in the Oval Office attempting to explain the Republican health-care bill. While Ryan was still talking, Trump walked down the hall to his private dining room and turned on the TV."
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/the-worst-kept-secret-of-trumps-presidency
I'm less certain whether he's actually unintelligent or just clinically devoid of intellectual curiousity, but the outcome is much the same.
Sounds like he was stuck in an institution, too.
This is why I never understood the left-wing complaint that Trump spent all of his time playing golf instead of presiding. If you're a Democrat who disagrees with Trump on everything, isn't Golfer-In-Chief Trump the optimal scenario barring a road to Damascus moment?
I feel you may be proving too much here, in that your argument for dollars behaving similarly to oaths feels like it ought to apply to trust as well. Trust, especially the trust of many people, also confers power, so why isn't it problematic that many more people trust Dr. Fauci about vaccines than the guy on the street corner with a sign?
It could be that this effect only matters at a certain level of inequality which wealth reaches but trust doesn't. But there is a lot of variance among people in terms of how many people are willing to listen to them, from those whose opinions never leave their immediate social group to celebrities whose words are read by millions. Using reach as an easier-to-measure proxy for trust, the most-followed Twitter accounts have on the order of 100 million followers, or six orders of magnitude more than Dunbar's Number.
Six orders of magnitude is, in fact, smaller than the wealth gap, but still seems large enough that these sorts of concerns might apply. And in some sense they do: there are wisdom-of-crowd type arguments to be made for the value of spreading trust among the populace instead of concentrating it. Information cascades and herding among pollsters are at least potentially related to a mis-allocation of trust.
Perhaps it's correct to bite the bullet and worry about trust inequality in the same manner as about wealth inequality. But I feel that, even after consideration of the downsides, many fewer people would find it reasonable to worry about the variance in how many people will listen to someone than the variance in how much money someone has, so I don't think this is the whole argument.
I think the correct answer is to bite the bullet and worry about the epistemic and political consequences of trust inequality, for precisely the reasons you mention.
Of course, you can't tax trust, or stop enforcing it. Off the top of my head I don't have any great solutions other than "uhh subsidize local newspapers or something??? change advertising/privacy law such that twitter is no longer profitable??? personally pay more attention to low-status weirdos???" (other issues beyond trust inequality are involved, but I feel *very* confident that twitter is indeed doing major epistemic harm.) but thinking about a problem naturally comes before coming to a tryable solution/mitigator to it.
I am suspicious of summation having good results. See: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart#comment-1292674
I am suspicious of summation having good results. See: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart#comment-1292674
The problem here is not any individual contribution or whether Bezos deserves it. Its also not a matter of moral or where he got his money from.
The Problem is, that someone with so much money has a real lot of economical and political power. Everyone who cares about liberty, civil rights and fair treatment for everyone should be able to see that this is a great risk. Everything could be fine, but this is just gambling. Like if you have a good king or dictator and everything is fine, or you have a bad one everything goes to hell. This is the main point in having democracy: divide the political power to a degree, that it doesn't matter if there are a few bad or crazy guys in between. So in political terms we figured it quite well, but in the economical sphere many people are blind on this eye.
So let's give all the gratitude for building a successful company al all the gratitude about your easy online shopping to Bezos, but does this have to give him so much power? I think we really need mechanisms in society that take care that no single group or person can get too much power, including economic power.
What about: nobody can have more than say 200 times the average wealth, the rest is taxed. Of cause we could pick a different number, it just have to give enough room for people getting rich (for what ever could be the benefits of having rich people in a society) but it has to give a limit before this gets dangerous because of too much power.
I know a lot of people worry that the ultra-rich have undue political power, but I don't actually see a lot of evidence of this in our current system. I'm not denying that money can buy political influence -- it definitely does -- but it seems to mostly be used in service of fairly specific regulatory capture, not to set up some Russian-style oligarchy, or to push some sweeping ideological agenda on an unwilling populace.
I think this is because democracy still works pretty well in the US, recent turmoil not withstanding, and lots of things other than money also confer power.
But I'll readily admit that my own ideological biases may blind me to the abuses you are worried about, so I'd appreciate it if you could provide some concrete examples to suggest that there is a systemic problem in the US context.
Almost as soon as I wrote this I thought to myself "How quick you are to forget about the financial crisis".
I'll admit that Wall Street challenges my view. Bailouts going as far back as the 1980s represent more than just "run-of-the-mill" regulatory capture, and I think it's probable that campaign donations and exorbitant speaking fees play a role. But groupthink is also important -- a lot of people throughout government seem to have really drunk the Wall Street kool-aid (which, admittedly, goes down a lot easier with a bag full of money).
I'm still not sure I see this generalizing to other very lucrative industries, though. It makes me think the money, while not unimportant, isn't decisive.
Also also, I could give you the common response that there would be less money in politics if political power wasn't worth so much damn money. You might respond that even if we start with a minimalist government, rich people will help politicians grow their power so that the rich people can use it to benefit themselves. But I'm not convinced this works without a bootleggers and Baptists dynamic. Corruptible politicians and powerful private interests also need sincere but naive do-gooders to provide cover for their schemes. Call it the devil's threesome of the progressive state.
"The Problem is, that someone with so much money has a real lot of economical and political power."
I think that's a feature, not a bug. It means that there are a bunch of people out there, with very different views, each of whom has enough resources so that he can try to push projects, political, economic, or scientific, that appeal to them. We are better off in a world with both the Koch Brothers and Soros than with neither. Musk gives us electric cars sooner than we would have gotten them, may give us global satellite internet, might even get to Mars.
I get your point. But couldn't this feature get improved a lot, if we had 1000 more people with 10 Millions each that could support different things (and have to team up for the very big issues) instead of one Bezos where it is pure luck if he is the person to do good, evil or just waist resources?
But you could also ask the people in a referendum, witch projects should be financed each year with the billions taxed in. I think this way more real problems would be solved and even if not, it was democratic.
1. It isn't pure luck. The ability to make a fortune is some evidence of competence, hence makes it more likely that, whatever he does, he will do well.
2. Democracy is a means, not an end. A much superior form of "government," when practical, is competitive dictatorship, the way we run restaurants and hotels. I have no vote on what is on the menu, an absolute vote on which restaurant I go to.
Or in other words, to me, "even if not, it was democratic" sounds like "even if sacrificing a virgin didn't bring rain, it was still what the gods commanded."
And I think if you try to imagine your referendum system in the real world, including the mechanism for solving whichever problems won the popularity contest, it is pretty obvious that it would work very badly. That, after all, is how we solved the drug problem. And the alcohol problem.
"I agree with jmk's critique - I briefly tried funner, more freeform lessons, failed, and then did more or less the same thing as everyone else."
This might be surprising, but I disagree with this critique. I've tried lots of 'freeform' teaching ideas and they've all gone over really well. I really think there is free value just lying around that teachers miss because they assume students will try to take advantage of them. This was at the college level but even for college students, professors mostly assume that students are looking to screw you over. This has never been my experience and when I give students more freedom, they have consistently used it to become more engaged, not to skip class or throw paper towels.
"The purely financial issues seem solvable; if the cost of public education is X, give kids who want charter schools a voucher for 0.75X, and donate the extra 0.25X to the public school system. The charter school will be fine with less money, and every kid who leaves for charter schools will make the public schools better instead of worse."
I don't think money is ever the bottleneck. I would rather go to a hole in the wall with a few very bright students and teachers than a top-of-the-line building full of overpaid psychopaths and dull peers.
Early childhood education and collegiate education are radically different, basically apples to oranges.
How about high school?
There are multiple powerful filtering effects at play by the time you get to a college seminar room from your average urban public school 8th or 9th grade classroom. I have also taught at the collegiate level and there I've been able to do wonderful things with freeform classes, creative projects, and student-directed learning. Trying similar things at the secondary level just did not work, except in classes that had considerable selection effects (i.e. AP classes).
For what it's worth, I am a freewheeling high school teacher in a Title I school who never does anything because everyone else does unless it strikes me as a good idea. I teach mid-tier, not honors, kids in middle maths (A2, Trig, Precalc) and get kids who count on their fingers.
Teaching is a performance art, not a learned skill, although skills are involved. It's most akin to acting. However, it also has a cognitive aspect, particularly in terms of developing your own lessons. Not "smart" = "smarter lessons" but "smart" = "better able to assess group ability and build lessons that will work for the room." (In Japan, you'd have to do some interesting work to get kids willing to step out and explore, like putting down breadcrumbs.)
You know, I think you're right that teaching is vaudeville. I never made that connection but I have a background in theatre, maybe that's why I have more success with alternative approaches than others do.
Years ago, I read a little book with the wonderful punning title, "You're a Teacher, Now Act Like It." That was indeed the thesis.
Maybe I'm a naive idiot, but I feel like there is totally a common ground between you, Freddie, charter schools, kids, parents, Bryan Caplan and generalized school reformers that would give all of you mostly what you want, particularly in the "better total outcomes for kids" category. And I don't think it's that hard to imagine it, particularly since we have so many other examples in society of systems in different areas that overcome the issues (and the incentives that lead to them) that most of you all agree are bad and should be fixed.
Probably. I think my situation (guy with a blog) incentivizes me to focus on disagreements, philosophical principles, and what we would do in utopia. If Freddie, Bryan, me, Eva Mowskowitz, and Diane Ravitch were ever stuck in a room together and charged with fixing education, I feel like we could probably come up with an okay compromise solution.
I agree! So then, not to be a nagging killjoy, because these are fascinating philosophical discussions, but from an... "Effective Altruistic-Reform" perspective, shouldn't we spend a little more time trying to make that room a real room in the [insert state name here] capitol building? There are lots of smart people here and in education across the country who have really good ideas about this stuff, and then in parallel: school boards, administrators, mayors, governors who (seem to) have no idea any of those people exist, much less that they've said anything useful. Isn't that weird? I don't like the Ivory Tower metaphor all that much, but maybe in this case the Ivory tower should send a wee expeditionary force to (peacefully and via the democratic process) occupy the mayor/governor's mansion of a city or state and actually deploy some of these good ideas?
Man, Bryan Caplan's book is a big lie. Everything in it is dishonest. Any author who writes about ending public school without mentioning race is profoundly deceptive. (This is kind of a problem with deBoer's recommendations, too, but at least he's being honest about the real issue.)
And yes, I would consider there is zero common ground between all those. Most parents like public schools. Most parents object to charters. The parents who want charters want private school for free because they can't afford private. Generalized school reformers have just spent 16 years getting everything they wanted. Result: public rebellion, completely rollback of all their gains, and they're in total disarray.
" If Freddie, Bryan, me, Eva Mowskowitz, and Diane Ravitch were ever stuck in a room together and charged with fixing education, I feel like we could probably come up with an okay compromise solution."
No, you would not. Bryan is a fraud and a dilettante. Eva is a horrible person and to the extent she achieves anything it's first by selecting for compliant parents and then booting out any kids who won't be able to score well enough to meet their bragging rights. Diane Ravitch is a useless ideologue. And you haven't shown much understanding of what's required to teach kids.
Start by accepting that American schools are working for the vast majority of kids. Add in that we need to stop defining "low test scores" as "failure". Stop treating the right to attend school as an absolute and create boundaries for both ability and behavior. Tell the feds or states to address those outside the boundaries.
That might be a starting point. But no, not you and Freddie (who I agree with on a lot) and Diane, much less the horrorshows of Caplan and Moskowitz.
"Most parents like public schools. Most parents object to charters."
You're going to back that up with data, right? And also give a reason why the kids and parents (even if we grant they are in the minority) who don't like their *specific* public school they are forced to attend, or who do like their *specific* charter school they chose to attend, are wrong and should have their choices/preferences ignored, and shouldn't be listened to if they have ideas about improving them?
Strangely, a lot of the brief recommendations you make, when you take a break from labelling people as morally bankrupt, are relatively similar to things that some of those morally bankrupt people also advocate.
"You're going to back that up with data, right? "
Sure. Ednext does polls every year.
https://www.educationnext.org/2020-ednext-poll-interactive/
Look under school choice.
"And also give a reason why the kids and parents (even if we grant they are in the minority) who don't like their *specific* public school they are forced to attend, or who do like their *specific* charter school they chose to attend, are wrong and should have their choices/preferences ignored, and shouldn't be listened to if they have ideas about improving them?"
Pretty sure I said no such thing. As for ignoring their choices or preferences, that's for their parents to decide. My own view is if you want private school pay for it.
I checked the link, and under school choice it says for general public 44% support charters, and 37% opposed, for parents it says 49% support, 32% oppose with 19% neither support or oppose. That doesn't seem like "most parents object to charters".
re: "Pretty sure I said no such thing" - fair enough. If you aren't advocating for shutting down charters, and you don't want to prevent people from trying to improve their public schools, then I retract it.
Also, I have to thank you for those poll stats, the part where they asked people the exact same question, but mentioned that Trump supported/opposed it, and measured the different reactions - was very interesting!
I clicked "reply" on the wrong post--my response is above.
Arggh, my mistake in the earlier post. I meant public support. Obviously, as I wouldn't have linked in something denying my point! Sorry. Total brain fritz on my part.
Parents do show mild support for charters as a proposition. But the only ones who actively seek it are those who don't like their peer group and can't affford private, as I said. Which is obvious. If you look where charters are strong, it's in either inner cities or suburban areas with a high poverty population. It's also why charters are radically opposed in many areas by the same parents who probably said they support charters philosophically.
As for the poll, that's kind of linked to my earlier point: it's kind of shocking how few people will talk about charters without knowing what data is out there. I bet you thought there was more public support for charters before that poll.
"If you aren't advocating for shutting down charters, and you don't want to prevent people from trying to improve their public schools, then I retract it."
Oh, I advocate for shutting down charters. They're a waste of money. It's private school on the public dime and I oppose it. I don't care if people don't like their specific schools. They can move or pay for private. Or homeschool.
I don't even know what "stop trying people to improve their public schools" means. But people have the right to ask for change, and they do.
" I bet you thought there was more public support for charters before that poll."
I thought it was about 50/50, but the poll numbers I care about are "what do parents think about their specific public or charter school."
"Oh, I advocate for shutting down charters. They're a waste of money. It's private school on the public dime and I oppose it. I don't care if people don't like their specific schools. They can move or pay for private. Or homeschool."
Yeah, but that was precisely my assertion: that you are denying those people that choice. As you state above, a large chunk of people who use charters are in inner cities - I live in Cleveland, for example. A lot of the parents who choose charter schools around here don't have the resources to pay for private school (or even the taxes to support the public schools) and their public schools are so horrific (and their children treated so terribly) that I cannot in good conscience shut them down, and I don't think anyone else could look them in the eye and do it either, regardless of selection bias or gaming the lotteries.
Despite what everyone thinks, parents aren't schools' customers. The taxpayers are.
"A lot of the parents who choose charter schools around here don't have the resources to pay for private school (or even the taxes to support the public schools) and their public schools are so horrific (and their children treated so terribly) that I cannot in good conscience shut them down, and I don't think anyone else could look them in the eye and do it either, regardless of selection bias or gaming the lotteries."
I am absolutely certain that's untrue that the students are treated terribly as a general rule, unless you can demonstrate a lot of lawsuits. And then, hey! lawsuits. They'll be fixed. Otherwise, eh. But if parents think their kids are treated terribly, then they can pay for private. As for schools that are simply low achieving and have lots of students who don't care--which can lead to a dearth of functioning teachers--I'm sympathetic, but again, the solution until something comes along to fix those public schools is to move or pay for private. The solution is not to give those parents private school for free.
Not saying that the research on disruptive kids is definitely correct. But to anyone that's been through it, it's definitely the prior.
Responding to jmk789's comment, I'll point out that my high school didn't have bathroom passes and pretty much freely let people go whenever and the hallways did not devolve into total anarchy and chaos (although some students did occasionally cut classes). I see the general point, but there's quite a lot of freedom you can in fact give students without it getting out of hand (assuming you do it regularly - if it's a one-time thing there's a much higher risk of exploitation).
I don't think jmk789 was talking about high school with that example. He seemed to be referring to elementary school age kids. Having a hall/bathroom pass for high schoolers is probably not needed. Having one for nine year old kids seems a lot more reasonable.
Do these quotes sound like high schoolers to you?
> The moment the bell rings to begin class, the hands start to go up. Student A: “Mr. Alexander, I gotta go, BAD.” Student B: “Mr. A, I need to go to the bathroom.” Student C: “Can I please go to the bathroom please I really need to go it’s so bad”.
Um. Yes. They do. In fact, I have a rule in my classroom. If I'm lecturing, and you raise your hand and keep it up while I'm talking, and I call on you, and you ask to go to the bathroom, you won't be going to the bathroom for the entire class. So don't' raise your hand while I'm talking. And if you ask during work time, I better have seen you working or you won't go.
I don't use bathroom passes, and used to allow several students to go rather than one at a time. Our school put a stop to it, no doubt for the same reason other schools put a stop to it, which is fires and other forms of vandalism were happening, so they wanted to reduce the number of students out and about.
>In a completely utopian society I was building from the ground up, I would want a law that no child over (let’s say) 6 can be involuntarily confined anywhere, any more than any adult can. If a child wants to stay at home, they can stay at home. If they want to wander the streets, they can wander the streets.
This strikes me as the opinion of someone who's never parented a 6 year old before. Which isn't entirely unreasonable, as I had lots of highly unrealistic ideas about what parenting would be like until I had children.
This isn't to say that I don't think we impose too many restrictions on our children (I think most would be quite safe walking about on their own), but giving young children adult levels of freedom is asking for a lot of problems.
It is kind of a problem today. During the times when "we wandered around on our own from morning till night and nothing happened", often it was (a) because we lived in the country and there wasn't the same possibility of danger as living in the middle of a large city (b) there was informal supervision by neighbours and any passing adult who saw you.
I wouldn't mind a gang of six year olds playing in the street outside their homes. I'd be a little bit worried about a six year old wandering around the town on their own - at the very least, kids that age are the ones who run right out in front of cars.
I have never parented a six year old before. I do (sort of, it's complicated) live with a four-year-old. I don't think she's an especially reasonable person, but I think if we told her it was important to ask our permission before going anywhere, she would.
In fact - I'm not actually sure it's illegal for kids to leave their house without their parents' permission now? It all just seems to work on the honor system? I assume it would continue to work on the honor system in my utopia?
I don't know if it's illegal, but I think a parent would receive support from law enforcement if their child kept leaving home against their wishes.
The difficulties I was thinking of were related to more mundane activities. As a personal example, my 7yo's bedtime used to be 830-900, but after we noticed that he was regularly waking us up at 11 or later complaining about nightmares or an inability to sleep, we experimented with moving bedtime up to the draconian time to 7pm. It's almost completely eliminated all issues he was having getting to sleep and quite improved the quality of sleep that he gets.
This is something that has to be imposed upon him. Left to his own devices he'd watch TV or play outside until he collapsed from exhaustion at midnight. He needed an adult's perspective and intervention to get better sleep at night.
We also do stuff like confining all children to quarters for two hours a day (for naptime and to maintain the sanity of the parents), force our children to go to therapist/doctor's appointments even if they really don't want to, etc. All of which would appear to be "involuntary confinement" (though perhaps you had something more specific in mind when you wrote that sentence).
At the end of the day, I think that if parents are going to be held responsible for the safety and welfare of a child, they need to be allowed to impose restrictions on that child's behavior, if for no other reason than it can make their lives more convenient.
I imagine your proposal was more aimed at parents who force their kids to attend a school they hate, or play a sport they're not interested in, or go to a summer camp with people they don't like. I am completely on board with that sentiment; I think the most important job a parent has is caring for the emotional safety of their children. Parents need to be aggressive in removing their children from situations where the child is miserable, and seek out situations where the child can flourish.
That can be a difficult and exhausting task, especially if it means something like "take the child out of public school and start homeschooling them" and not all parents are going to have the same ability to meet those needs. But it's very, very important that we try as best we can.
No. The most important job a parent has is caring for the *physical* safety of their children. Physical safety is more important than emotional safety.
As to the summer camp: I get the feeling people have completely unrealistic expectations of what parents are capable of. Suppose the kid needs supervision during the summer vacation so his parents can work and, you know, feed the family and pay the bills. The only summer camp that's available has a bunch of kids the child doesn't like. Within those constraints, *of course* you send the kid to the summer camp.
On the flip side, my five year old has almost no inclination toward compliance at ALL. If I ask him to do something outside of 'stuff he's been heavily trained to obey on', he will completely ignore me much of the time. My three year old is far more compliant than he is.
Extrapolating from one (or a small number of similar children) is a parallel fallacy to the typical mind fallacy IMO. The diversity in child personality at 2 years of age seems enormous, and especially on compliance/agreeableness people seem to often underestimate that range.
Oh definitely, the variation in children is huge! Ultimately I think that is an argument in favor for what Scott is advocating: no more one size fits all solutions, allow kids and parents to make choices that are tailored to their individual needs.
It is absolutely illegal for kids to leave their house without parental permission, particularly if the kids are below a certain age. The parents are the ones charged.
If the four year old you sort of parent left the house while you were the only adult in the house, writing a blog post, and a cop found her, you'd have a whole bunch of hard questions to answer.
Under a certain age, if a child is spotted roaming the streets unaccompanied, the police will be called, the child will be picked up and returned home, and the parents will receive a visit from social services. Maybe not every time but this happened to a family my wife knows a few years ago. The child in question was nine.
Definitely shows that something has gone badly wrong with society. As long as a child was behaving themselves (i.e. not committing vandalism or causing trouble), walking the streets unaccompanied was entirely legal in the 1950s. Parental authorization was needed, of course.
What can we do as a practical matter to help young people escape institutionalized education?
One way we can help in a limited but practical way is to make more students aware of their ability to take a GED/High-School-Equivalency exam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Educational_Development) as a substitute for a high school diploma.
When I was a junior in high school, I somehow stumbled on information about this, passed the test, and without a second thought dropped out of high school to take charge of my own education in a microwave-burrito-friendly community college and then university. If more high school students were aware of this option, and that it's a fine option to take, the miserable ones among them could free themselves from it more quickly.
Any young students in your circle complaining about their lot in life? You'd be doing them a favor to make sure they're aware of this option.
Do you ever feel like you faced discrimination from colleges, jobs, etc for having a GED instead of a normal high school degree?
Never. I went from the GED to my local community college to do all of the prereqs I needed to grease the chute for my application into the local university, which had (maybe still has) a sort of big-sister-school relationship with the community college. Once I had my BS, nobody in the job world ever expressed any interest in whether I had a high school diploma or not.
Side note: taking as many prereqs as I could at the community college was also much cheaper. And the quality of those classes was better than their equivalent 100/200-level classes at university (taught by community college profs in small classrooms, not harried grad students in university auditoriums).
I think there is an important debate to have about how to make community college better for everyone. Right now it does incredible work getting a small portion of students into college, and generally helps with class mobility with associate degrees (in some fields). And for committed students who aim to use it as a steppingstone to a 4-year degree, it is a financial and educational lifeline. But an enormous number of students who start CC don not complete the 2 years, and many accrue small debt for it. It is always an afterthought in the college funding debate, but really should be close to the center. All the wailing about Ivy League schools really obscures the college experience of the vast majority of Americans,
This is the cheat code to getting an incredibly cheap college education from pretty well thought of schools. Both the flagship public universities in my state have programs where they guarantee acceptance if you finish an associates degree at one of the state's community colleges with a 3.0 or better. A big part of the cost of college is room and board which you can save on by living with parents and tuition is much cheaper at CC.
And many places have programs where you can start taking local community college classes while in HS or as you did essentially finish HS early and start CC.
Funny how much of this discussion comes down to whether people like school or not.
I never liked it, and know a lot of people in the same boat. Then again, I know people that say it was the best part of their lives, many of whom weren't particularly popular or well liked.
But on the margins, I've little doubt it's better than the alternative. I have close family that teach in disadvantaged areas. There's a sizeable portion of the student body that are just happy to be somewhere where they aren't sexually abused.
Your theory for how we should reform education in a utopian society seems exactly that - utopian. I doubt that without monetary or legal incentives, most adults would get an education or do productive labor with their free time as opposed to wasting it away. But kids, people who neurologically have not developed the part of their brain responsible for long term self control? No fucking way. If we gave kids the choice of where to spend their time, at least 80% of them would just fuck off and play video games or sports or something. Not only would this lead to them not getting an education, but even if you believe school is useless educationally, it helps kids to internalize norms of self-control and obedience that are necessary for successfully functioning as an adult. I predict that your utopia would collapse within a generation.
How did people learn self-control and obedience before the development of the Prussian education system c. 1763, I wonder? Must have just been a bunch of savages who spent all day playing sticks and balls, I suppose.
Mostly they did hard labor in farm fields, where discipline was of the corporal variety and if you didn’t learn the lessons you starved to death. When you weren’t doing that you played at spears and arrows for the local strongman and either learned the rules or faced death by sharp object.
They didn't. Getting people to show up on time or sober and stay that way was *incredibly* difficult for early modern employers to do, even with significant amounts of coercion. It would be difficult to sustain a modern standard of living with these pre-cucked work habits, but on the other hand, I have to admire our ancestors for having more self-respect than most people today.
There's a lot of good history on this, but for literary satisfaction Thompson's "History of the English Working Class" is probably still the best place to start.
I would argue this was a big part of why slavery became so popular in the New World, because it created as system where even greater amounts (and more horrific methods) of coercion were considered acceptable.
Slavery was really inefficient at extracting labor from people. They did studies at the time where they compared the output of paid labor to slavery and there was a huge gap in productivity.
As other commenters have said, there were much lower levels of obedience/discipline of the kind being discussed here (and less demand for it). Reading through US history, the change produced by widespread public education is notable.
"How did people learn self-control and obedience before the development of the Prussian education system c. 1763, I wonder?"
Your parents beat it into you.
I'm confused why everybody thinks that schools were invented in Prussia in 1763.
Eton, for instance, was founded in 1440. Winchester was founded in 1382. The oldest extant school in Britain is the King's School in Canterbury which was founded in 597. I know next to nothing about the early centuries of those schools' histories, but I should imagine they had discipline there.
Scrap the focus on "kids": as both the former "bright" child and the present teacher, I can safely assume that the strict majority of *teenagers* would do next to nothing to learn stuff in Scott's ideal system.
Sure, it'd have been a blast for me, and maybe it'd even have helped me academically, but for most people I know this "utopian system" would have been an unmitigated disaster.
We have some evidence on that. Sudbury Valley School has been running on an unschooling model for quite a long time, and I don't think there is any evidence that most of the kids never learn anything. The only thing we made our kids learn was the multiplication tables, and they somehow managed to get pretty well educated.
Most kids like learning things. The trick is to let them learn things they want to learn instead of trying to force them to learn things they don't want to learn.
But families who enroll their kids in Sudbury Valley pay $10k/year for it (cheap for a private school, but still) and have to get them to Framingham. If it didn't seem to be going well, you'd presumably pull them out.
I add to what Julia already said that people getting their children into Sudbury schools are obviously invested in their education, and presumably primed them to like learning (I know plenty of families doing the very opposite).
Again, something of the sort would have been great for me, but most of my peers just had not the same curiosity or drive: let them be the majority in a similar place and I doubt the results will be as good. In these posts charter schools' success has been suggested being mostly the result of sample selection, I can't see how such a niche enterprise as democratic education could not be riddled with self-selection.
Plus, I'd say that there's plenty to be learnt that a kid just might not want to learn (say, math for many people or freaking number-of-days-in-a-specific-month for, me, I never bothered but I really should).
My kids like to learn, and often seem to enjoy learning from school as well as their own selected areas. That said, they are easily distracted and given a choice will spend far too much time watching TV and playing video games.
For my kids, who again, genuinely enjoy learning, I feel like this plan would require a significant reduction in the availability of entertainment/distractions.
I had the same thought. The review got me wondering is there any way to quantify improvements in social cohesion or solving coordination problems?
It’s often pointed out that schools were designed to create good, compliant industrial labor. But I think most people a century ago put equal or greater emphasis on schools creating *citizens*. The schools weren’t daycare; they were supposed to hammer all these grimy, illiterate immigrant kids into productive Americans who could get along. And at least for my family, it worked pretty well.
Before NYC made my grandparents go to school, kids in their tenement spent all day sewing buttons onto cards. NYC neighborhoods were fiefdoms of kinship networks and organized crime. I think this is the default if you don’t pry kids away from their families for a few hours per day and show them they’re part of another, bigger context. If you don’t give kids an alternate meritocracy to work with, it’s kinship networks and mafias all the way down.
School has been serving that function for 100 years. In the meantime, the country has been getting progressively more complex, diverse, and urbanized. Is it possible that we’re communicating and coordinating better than we possibly could have without compulsory schooling?
How much of the progress we made in the past 100 years has been because of the communal experience of school? Did we gain anything as a culture for all reading some of the same books and learning the same math? We harp on the failures of traditional school for women and minorities, but how much advancement for those groups is due to the exposure and opportunity school offers? School might be fundamentally traumatic on some level, but so is life. And to me it’s clear that building and preserving social cohesion and solving coordination problems actually demand considerable capacity for self-abnegation. If we’ve all been learning this in school and even subconsciously applying it, then the game we’ve been playing is not really about individual achievement.
I agree. I see the argument about letting kids do as they please as a complete abandonment of social cohesion in favor of the unfettered exploration of the self. This is already a huge problem in our society that leaves people lonely, anxious, and incapable of even imagining the potential for collective action. I really don't think that doing away with any kind of structured learning and socialization for kids is going to help. If nothing else school teaches kids that sometimes you need to do things that you don't find fun or useful, or cooperate with people you don't like, in order to get by in this world. In a libertarian utopia perhaps nobody would ever have to do anything they don't want to do but in actual reality people need to learn to temporarily put aside the self without throwing a tantrum or declaring themselves the victims of an abusive authoritarian system, whether that's for the purposes of social cohesion or group problem solving or just forcing yourself to complete the kinds of arbitrary tasks that are an inevitable part of being an adult human. Anybody who thinks they're oh so smart for refusing to do homework because they see it as pointless busywork is really missing an important lesson about putting up with the kinds of annoying shit that are going to be ever-present in adult life. Good luck telling your boss you refuse to finish that task because it's pointless, or telling your spouse you're not going to help them with something because it's pointless and you're too smart to bother. I actually loved DeBoer's book for the record, and I'm very critical of the idea of meritocracy, I just really don't have much patience for these arguments that boil down to "I was just too smart/wily/practical/self-directed/anti-authoritarian for school so therefore it's totally useless/abusive/cruel/counterproductive and I would have turned out better without it." Uh, really? If you were never once required to complete a lengthy task that you found boring and pointless, or cooperate with authority and peers in a group setting that has to enforce some level behavioral norms in order to function, or deal with people you find dull or objectionable or downright awful, would you really have the same life you have today?
As someone much smarter than me once said, "Life is suffering."
"If nothing else school teaches kids that sometimes you need to do things that you don't find fun or useful, or cooperate with people you don't like, in order to get by in this world."
So does more or less anything you want to do that involves cooperating with other people, of which you encounter a very large number without school inventing additional, and to you arbitrary, ones.
Your general argument seems to be "life in the real world requires doing X, Y, and Z. So we will lock kids away from the real world in an artificial environment we have created where we make them do things that will teach them about doing X, Y, and Z." Isn't a simpler solution to let them out into the real world where they will themselves discover the need and learn from it?
Your general argument seems to be "life in the real world requires doing X, Y, and Z. So we will lock kids away from the real world in an artificial environment we have created where we make them do things that will teach them about doing X, Y, and Z."
I’d say yes. The X, Y and Z of the modern world is considerably more complex than it was in most human societies of the past, much less whatever Homo sapiens evolved to handle. You’re operating at a global scale across language and cultural barriers. We also demand and actually achieve a level of personal freedom that’s probably unprecedented while doing this. It’s not like learning by doing, or most other aspects of life, involved any kind of personal choice for most of history.
School as we know it wasn’t imposed by some alien civilization; it was a natural response to reaching a certain scale, technology or diversity and having whatever came before break down. The world where we have to cooperate with others *in the specific way we do now* in turn grew out of having a supply of people trained to cooperate in a safe, low-stakes environment when they were six.
You can’t take a bunch of humans in a state of nature and expect them to achieve anything too complex. They’re not going to “figure it out”; the default for most of history was civilization remaining virtually unchanged for hundreds or even thousands of years. And that’s with a low population. I’m not sure in today’s world removing compulsory school for the majority wouldn’t lead to some kind of disaster, or at least a massive setback. We ought to appreciate that the world we’ve built on top of the modern education system probably facilitated a lot of advancement and an unprecedented level of autonomy as well.
You seem to have not noticed the second part of my post. Kids need to learn to navigate the modern world. The best way to do that is by doing things in the modern world, not by doing things in an artificial world designed to mimic the modern world.
I'm not sure, incidentally, that the amount of knowledge needed to function in the modern world is larger than in the past. It's different, of course. But in some ways we have it much easier. My guess is that either riding a bike or driving a car requires less skill than riding a horse, not more, and being employed in a firm may well require less skill than peasant farming. Cooking in a kitchen over a stove is easier than cooking over a fire.
David, I notice a theme in your posts, which is that you make incredibly reasonable points that do not apply to a large portion of society. Your family is weird. Your parenting methods are weird. Great weird! But really far outside normal, I think.
You say stuff like "cooperating with other people, of which you encounter a very large number without school..." And I think you're probably misunderstanding the state of the world. There are many layers to this, including socioeconomic class, culture, innate intelligence, family values, and probably the simple passage of time. The life of an under-parented child is quite different today than it was in your youth, your kids' youth, or mine for that matter. "Learn to navigate the modern world" sometimes stops at microwaving a literal or metaphorical burrito. Encountering people outside school and learning to cook are more unusual things than you make them out to be.
I think we as a society can and should aim to provide a higher floor, which is where I agree with Freddie. I do also however agree with you & Scott that we can and should do better than the current system in terms of squashing the innate desire to learn.
I did notice the second part of your post. Seeing your follow up, it's clear we have different ideas about what "the modern world" means and what things we do today are "difficult" vs "easy".
It's not necessarily that you need more net knowledge and skill as an individual to navigate the modern world; forest-dwelling hunter gatherers have encyclopedic knowledge of their environment and how to use its resources. But I think hunter gatherers, like most people throughout history, still have less complexity to manage because with very few exceptions *they know everyone around them*, and almost everyone they meet is an expert in the same things they are. This dramatically reduces certain kinds of mental and social labor. It probably makes living in the rainforest possible at all. There is almost nothing for you to do but survive and transmit the knowledge that let you do it to the next generation.
But since industrialization and the resultant dramatic upshot in urbanization, a majority of people encounter a sea of strangers every time they leave the house, each of whom might present a new set of unknown challenges. Your desk job may not require more total knowledge than peasant farming, but you will need to coordinate with lots of different people, many of whom you barely know if at all, and about things of which you know virtually nothing.
These people may come from different cultures and many may not be operating in their native language. Together you are trying to perform one function out of thousands toward the goal of building or maintaining something that might be so vast no single person could possibly understand it even at the most basic level. This is fairly new stuff for human beings in general.
You are also in a position to mess things up for large numbers of people you've never met for reasons that might be inscrutable to you. If you're a bad hunter-gatherer or a bad farmer, you hurt yourself, your family or at most your village. The modern world involves far more thinking at scale and putting trust in people and processes that might be totally alien to you. And I think doing that requires, or is at least facilitated by, formal schooling.
You can't put a kid on the floor of a Boeing factory who doesn't have a certain foundation of knowledge and skill. He has to be able to read, write, do a certain level of math, follow instructions and, above all, understand his own role. He has to trust instructions given to him by authorities with expertise that might be completely beyond him. He has to do his job with the understanding that if he deviates, he may cause serious problems for large numbers of people he has never met, and possibly even cause a plane crash. At the same time, you want him to be smart and educated enough to spot a fault in the process. I personally would much rather have my airplanes built by someone who spent years building knowledge and developing their judgement in the low-stakes environment of school before getting into aeronautics.
If you expect a kid to just drop into "the real world" and learn these things as they go, your civilization probably does not build airplanes, or microchips, or global logistics, or anything very complex at all. I think we have been able to get as complex as we have because of the innovation of compulsory school. I doubt we'd be having this conversation on the internet if 100 years worth of assorted random people didn't pass through formal education and provide the workforce required to make this computer and all the networks it exploits.
If you make it the job of people in complex organizations who build complex things to also provide the basics for anyone who wants to participate, you create a massive burden on those systems. Maybe you still build airplanes, but if your workforce requires the equivalent of a decade of training before it can do any meaningful work, I doubt it. In any case, your lunch will probably get eaten by somebody drawing their workforce from something like a school.
Specifically what children would do is follow the lead of the children slightly older than them, and so on, until you get to the discontinuities that happen with teens (who want nothing at all to do with those younger than them) and adults (who are busy with their duties in the working world). So you would have two groups, one doing whatever 12-13 year-olds thought was the best thing to be doing, and one doing whatever 17 year-olds thought was best. If we want to cut to the chase we could probably just ask them now what that would be.
>I think this is one reason institutions are so bad: they’re a one-size-fits-all solution to how you’re going to spend your day, and that size will be right for some people and wrong for others.
This sort of contrasts with the idea that "it's not what you're doing but who you're doing it with." In my experience, school was miserable in k-6 when we were all in general ed classrooms but in 7-12th grade once we were segregated into AP/Honors I overall enjoyed school. I wonder if you'd have enjoyed school if you were around mostly other high achieving students and the "moron shouting weird taunts" was always in some other classroom? So is it the structure or the other inmates that causes school to be like prisons?
I also think if you start letting parents pick schools, soon most of the segregation will be along lines that won't have long-term benefits to the kids or society. If you let parents pick schools, for most parents, the most important thing will be picking schools with the same religious/political ideology they have (don't believe in evolution, there's a charter school for you!). This clearly erodes educational quality but more importantly will ultimately loosen ties that bind communities together, erode citizenship, and increase partisanship. Instead, I'd rather have one public school big enough that it can segregate via IQ/Academic Achievement. Having the smartest athiest, catholic, muslim, protestant, mormon, democrat, republican,and libertarian student all in the same classroom is much better than having each of them off in their own charter school.
I know I have strong bias for preferring my own experience but to me this was ideal. We had around 75 kids in the top 10% all attending the same classes together. But importantly, there were kids of different races, religions, class, and politics all mingled together. We'd constantly have fierce debates as we'd have everything from marxist to environmental anarchist, to free market capitalist kids arguing with each other. But in the end of the day, because we spent 8 hours a day for 4+ years with each other, we were mostly friends (the moron shouting weird taunts isn't in AP/Honors classes). And that's a huge Civic benefit to traditional schooling.
> This sort of contrasts with the idea that "it's not what you're doing but who you're doing it with." In my experience, school was miserable in k-6 when we were all in general ed classrooms but in 7-12th grade once we were segregated into AP/Honors I overall enjoyed school.
I think you're onto something with this. My experience was similar: school was sort of boring and dreadful to me. But then I went to a summer program where I met a bunch of gifted/talented kids in the region, and even after I returned to my normal everything changed.
It wasn't that my school was different - it wasn't. But my outlook had shifted - I suddenly had a bunch of like-minded friends I could communicate with outside of school, and that made my whole experience much better.
I’m one of those people who liked school and hadn’t noted that I was tracked into gifted classes at six. In public school. I’m not sure I’ve met anyone tracked earlier than I was, and I’m sure that was key.
My support for public schooling is certainly informed by my own positive experiences off bring tracked into the gifted program at large schools starting in 1st grade. The way my district did things I was still in a normal classroom most of the time, but the gifted program allowed me to make those connections with other "smart" kids, which made everything else so much more tolerable.
"I wonder if you'd have enjoyed school if you were around mostly other high achieving students and the "moron shouting weird taunts" was always in some other classroom?"
I was in such a school, and was still bored most of the time.
Bored most of the time is a huge improvement over Scott's 'emotional fits of capital letters' though.
Yes. What Scott describes is much worse than I experienced.
I remember one bully — who later became a friend of mine. One case of a physics teacher who insisted he was right and I was wrong, and was unwilling to respond to a straightforward proof of the contrary. But also a liberal social studies teacher who was perfectly happy to have me argue with his views, up to the point of showing that the (college level) textbook we were using was blatantly dishonest.
On the whole, the teachers were reasonably good and the social interaction not oppressive, although I was pretty much an outsider to it. But spending all that time sitting in class being bored when I could have been reading interesting books or having interesting arguments with my friends was still sufficiently bad so that I wanted something better for my children.
> In my experience, school was miserable in k-6 when we were all in general ed classrooms but in 7-12th grade once we were segregated into AP/Honors I overall enjoyed school.
My high school experience was miserable in 9th and 10th grades, and wonderful in 11th and 12th grades, exactly for this reason.
I think a lot of what people complain about regarding "meritocracy"/"jobs for smarter people pay better than jobs for less smart people, and the smarter people deserve the extra pay because of merit" is what you called credentialism back on SSC, and what I recall in Listen, Liberal being (very) briefly referred to as "valedictocracy". Rule by people of a specific educational background, who think they deserve to be there specifically because of that specific educational background. That smart people in some meaningful sense "should" rule over dumb people, as Oligopsony talked about. I think this fundamentally elides one of the fundamental purposes of democracy, which is referenced quite clearly in Federalist Paper No. 10:
>Those who hold, and those who are without property, have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a monied interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government.
It may very well be that high IQ people are "more important" to a good society than low IQ people - it also might very well be that creditors are "more important" to a good society than debtors. It is nonetheless fairly obvious to anybody with half a brain that letting creditors write all the laws will immediately result in the debtors getting absolutely screwed (and vice versa). One might (fairly) point out IQ isn't quite like creditor/debtor relations: a smart person has no particular class position. However, education is the actual metric we are actually using for all this, not literal IQ - there's a reason we roughly go after people for intentional deception in our education system, but nobody cares if you claim your IQ is 169 or 69 - and that sure as hell represents a defined class position.
An economist would say that creditors & debtors make mutually beneficial deals. Restricting creditors from offering certain deals will harm the debtors who would have benefited from them. Wiping away debt will help someone who's already in debt, but harm someone who can't borrow due to the risk of the debt being wiped out.
If that is indeed what economists say, then they are idiots. Creditors let run rampant would bring back debt slavery; debtors let run rampant would get all their debts removed. You can tell because this is exactly what both sides do: creditors attempt to create predatory loans that definitely don't benefit the victim (e.g. Mariner Finance's scheme where they send desperate people a quick check of $1200, throw in another $800 later, then wind up within a year suing them for over $3000 - hardly mutually beneficial, in my view), and there's currently a major movement in the USA to get a rather significant chunk of debt forgiven (admittedly, by the state paying it off).
How is your view definitive of whether the loan was mutually beneficial?
It's also the view of the recipient, in this case, who said "It would have been cheaper for me to go out and borrow money from the mob."
What does it even matter if the loan is "mutually beneficial" in whatever annoying economist sense you mean? If you are being chased by an axe murderer, I live in a well-fortified bunker and am the only person around for miles, and I offer to let you hide in my bunker and/or to shoot the axe murderer, but if and only if you agree to become my slave for perpetuity, well that might very well be "mutually beneficial" for you, but there's a good reason no modern government will honor it.
If it's cheaper to borrow money from the mob, that indicates the mob is providing a service the above-ground economy is neglecting (or it's because they don't pay taxes).
It matters if it's mutually beneficial, because if that is the case then banning it makes people worse off rather than better. And the problem with permitting contracts extorted at gunpoint is that it incentivizes people to go around attacking people who don't want to be attacked, and then there's deadweight loss of those people trying to avoid said attacks rather than any consumer surplus. Whereas offering someone a loan is not an attack that people avoid, but instead something they seek out (even if they have to go to the mob).
There is a lot of space for something to be mutually beneficial. For example, here are two hypothetical cases:
Case A: A company gives this fellow a loan at 33% interest rate per annum. He proceeds to pay it over the course of the next year or two. Both parties benefit - the man gets the money he needs, and the company gets a rather serious return on its investment.
Case B: A company gives this fellow a loan that is supposedly at 33% interest per annum. Instead, however, within a year he is being dragged into court for 150% the value of the original loan (by various tricky fees snuck in the contract, including paying for their attorney despite being unable to afford one himself), despite having made several payments. The man got the money he needed, and the company gets an even bigger return on its investment.
In both case A and case B, the deal is """mutually beneficial""", but in case B the benefit is rather less mutual. It's fairly obvious that the creditor, in this case, would prefer case B - after all, that's exactly what they've done!
I'm not sure FdB would agree with me, but I regard myself as critical of meritocracy, yet I'm not really opposed either to:
"(1) "high-status jobs like 'surgeon' go to the most qualified applicant" or (2) "jobs for smarter people pay better than jobs for less smart people, and the smarter people deserve the extra pay because of merit"
I certainly think jobs should go to the most qualified applicant, at least in most cases. I don't think smarter people "deserve" extra pay, but until we can work out post scarcity utopia communism, I'm happy to pay them extra as a way of achieving adequate incentives etc.
So what do I mean when I say that I'm opposed to meritocracy? Well I take it that there's a cluster of positions and ideologies. The ideas in this cluster don't strictly entail each other, but they tend to go as a bloc. When I say "I dislike meritocracy" what I'm really saying is I dislike this bloc of ideas. Roughly, this bloc consists in:
A) Our absolute number one priority should be achieving equality of opportunity. This takes precedence over trying to ensure a comfortable life for those at the bottom.
B) People who fail simply didn't try hard enough. If they really wanted it they'd succeed.
C) The winners of the social competition , in virtue of being the winners, are well placed to govern us. They have smart ideas which mean they'll govern well.
D) It is possible to have a society with a strong degree of equality of opportunity without reducing differences in outcomes (c.f. the Gatsby curve for why this is wrong).
E) The answer to all social woes is education, education, education.
F) People who have managed to get a degree- or especially a postgraduate degree- deserve special respect in terms of their political views, moral credentials etc.
Michael Sandel discusses these ideas in his book "The Tyranny of Merit". I discuss Sandel's book here:
https://deponysum.com/2021/01/26/reflections-occasioned-by-reading-michael-sandels-the-tyranny-of-merit-part-1/
and here:
https://deponysum.com/2021/02/01/reflections-occasioned-by-reading-michael-sandels-the-tyranny-of-merit-part-2/
Happy to explicate further if anyone has any questions.
Defined as such, yes, I agree, but the converse requires acknowledging that some sizable fraction of people will never understand algebra and they reason they do not command high salaries is because they contribute scant economic value.
As we grow more data-driven, there's going to an increasing demand for Smart. Smart alone is not enough, but Smart is becoming more valuable, and Smart combined with other key attributes is really, really valuable.
Your post and the poster above suggesting we are using credentials in place of Smart, essentially allowing the elite write their own rules, really rings true.
On the other hand, from personal experience, I work with a really diverse workforce in terms of intelligence and economic status, and the lower IQ types are just...they aren't the breakthrough drivers. They obviously contribute a lot of value or else we wouldn't pay them, but they aren't worth what the Smart Kids are worth. The Smart Kids saved me millions of dollars last year. The Low IQ types let dozens of important functions lapse because they just didn't want to work, and the results deteriorated, and now we have to rebuild half our controls from scratch.
This doesn't mean they should be poor or we should deny them healthcare or we should let them sign NINJA loans...but, Good Lord, can we at least be honest about the intellectual capabilities of the majority of the American Population?
To follow up on the charter school lottery discussion, San Francisco's school choice offers an interesting datapoint. All the SF public schools are open to any resident and assignment is determined by lottery. Families from areas of town with historically low test scores get higher priority, so most very poor families can effectively chose any school in the district.
This program is currently in the process of being reworked, because the schools are still segregated. Highly sought-after schools have trouble recruiting poor black students. Some schools near low-income housing have special programs like Spanish or Mandarin, which are very popular with middle- and upper-class white and Asian families, but most of the black families chose the less competitive English programs at the same schools.
Choice alone is not sufficient. Developing programs that are more attractive to black families is key. And providing more support for students who don't have resources at home could help boost students' achievement.
"Highly sought-after schools have trouble recruiting poor black students."
This sounds like poor people/blacks don't want to go to the highly-sought after schools, rather than the schools having some subtle filter to exclude them. Do you think this is right? If so, why do you think the poor people/blacks are less interested?
Yes, I think that is right. In my experience, the schools and families would love to have more integration.
I think that some of it is simply cultural: white yuppies love the idea of their kids speaking multiple languages and I just don't know how popular that is among black families. I think another part of it is inertia: if none of your friends and neighbors have kids in the language or other special programs, you probably will be less excited about those. Thirdly, many families with resources are willing to drive across town everyday to have their kids in the "best" schools, while it seems like poor black families tend to send their kids to one of the closest schools. Finally, I think there is at least a perception that the special programs, especially the language immersion programs, require additional tutoring and other after-school help, which costs money.
(There is also the reverse problem, that white and Asian families are VERY reluctant to send their kids to majority-minority schools. Many people simply assume that programs that are mostly black and Hispanic are "bad" schools. In my experience, the students and teachers in those majority-minority classrooms can be excellent.)
As far as I know, the district has tried little or not at all to tackle these issues. Instead, they are restricting the number of schools each family can chose from, trying to engineer integration. I am cautiously optimistic of the new plan, but fear that the District is hamstrung by the fact that rich families can either (a) move to neighborhoods that increase their chance of getting the school they want or (b) attend private schools instead.
Isn't this why busing failed?
And I think that a major reason is culture. Parents and kids want to be around people with a similar culture.
Without wanting to understate the seriousness of some kids valuing school as a refuge from their home life... that still doesn't say a lot about school:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/18/wanted-man-quits-lockdown-at-home-for-peace-and-quiet-in-prison
The entire IQ/intelligence debate just makes me want to unplug the entire Internet. Almost everyone would agree that the cognitive, emotional, and psychogical substrate laid down during the prenatal period and infancy is determined by factors outside of your control, and that devastating genetic or environmental insults can completely alter the course of one's life.
But a small subset of the Internet has a set of psychological and ideological commitments that requires them to collapse this reasonable consensus into de facto genetic determinism, and no study is too small, no effect size too trivial, no heuristic or metric so flawed, that it won't get aggregated into multi-paragraph manifestos on the futility of social programs and the superiority of the genetic elite.
On the contrary, it's very interesting to see HBDers/hereditarianists galaxy brain themselves into thinking prenatal effects or epigenetics aren't real!
Is this a reference to https://twitter.com/dr_appie/status/1357064652769943553 ?
Ha! Like that guy said, epigenetics is much more boring than mild transgenerational effects (not to say those don't exist) and much more fundamental to understanding the *genetics* behind, well, whatever people say when they say stuff is "genetic". You'll learn more by studying epigenomic data than computing whatever correlations for whatever behavioral traits with a hundred confounders on the same British population, but I guess genetic mechanisms are just a liberal codeword for genetic denialism (as per that twitter dude).
The 'additive genetic effects' crowd can be funny too, for instance they publish papers that disprove the existence or effect of epistasis, much to the surprise of people who had been studying it for decades.
There is an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed once you start talking about reforming education at the high school level: sports.
From an academic perspective, dropping the Freshman-Sophomore-Junior-Senior paradigm wouldn't be a huge deal. You could group kids by different ages, let them move up based on aptitude rather than time served, knock yourself out.
But whatever system you discover that works best for learning will have a very, very hard time usurping the status quo, because of sports. There's a big overlap between parents who are heavily invested in their kids' academic success and those invested in their athletic success. So while it may be best to send junior to some hippie-dippy school where he can be self-actualized by studying his key interests of chemistry, bowling, music, and cooking, if that means he never gets a chance to play for his hometown football team, there are a lot of parents who will keep him at City High.
And really, shouldn't we want City High's football team to be a source of pride for the local community? Doesn't that help create social capital, particularly in the more rural parts of the country that desperately need it?
And if you're a hometown hero, are you going to want to take an apprenticeship at age 18, or are you going to want to keep playing ball with your buddies? And are we so sure the latter isn't a better pathway to happiness in the long-term?
Ideally the US would have more of a European-style system where sports clubs aren't tied to any one particular school. But we don't have that system, and to get there we'd have to tear down a lot of Chesterton fences.
My understanding is that this is also a main barrier to later high school start times - schools want to have daylight hours in the afternoon for sports practice.
As a high school teacher I believe that the issues brougth up by Scott and you others are valid. I have reasonably high hopes that they will be solved or at least go away. The three ways of getting to grips with the situation that I consider most likely is the following:
1. AGI or something reasonably close. One way or the other, the problem goes away.
2. Drastically longer lifespans permitting drastically larger investments in childrens upbringing. Some homeschooling families are pretty close to this situation right now but it is very far from something that can replace schools in general due to the considerations in the comments making up this post. I´m sceptical towards that a general rise in incomes would produce drastically more of this without changes since the salaries of teachers also rises.
3. Human genetical engineering, especially regarding intelligence. Maybe some molochian rat race would keep the misery alive and kicking but at least some part of the problem seems to be driven by our tries to handle the effects of the large individual differences. I belive that it probably will be easier to avoid low intellingence than to achieve high intelligence and that would compress the range and thereby ease some of the pressures.
My hopes for some kind of purely societal solution is really low. I went into teaching with my eyes open to this problem and 20 years of training, practise and reading have gotten my hopes down. No consideration rised in these two posts is new to me but several are unusually well articulated.
I don´t know if it makes a real difference for anyone other than myself and my conscience but at least most of my pupils seem to answer well toward openness about how school works and why it sucks. Just knowing how deeply unnatural the classroom setting and therefore the demands that follow from it are seem somewhat helpful to some (maybe half of them?).
If there was one single thing I would want us teachers to discuss it would be filtering on differences. If we (or the system) have tried something for long enough and someone persists in withering that should be considered a good reason to do things that otherwise are ruled out for system preserving reasons.
I am one of the people who enjoyed school and wrote a comment pushing back on the idea that schools are so abusive. Reflecting futher, I think I did this because I was feeling defensive -- I liked school, and I felt that Scott's "burn down the schools" attitude would lead to something I liked being taken away (from, say, an imaginary version of me that's growing up now, or from my hypothetical future kids). I'd guess other commenters were coming from the same place, too.
On one hand, this is kinda dumb. Scott's proposal isn't actually to burn down the schools, it's to have more school choice. If the resulting choices aren't as good, then I won't have to pick them. No one's proposing to take anything away from my hypothetical kids.
But on the other hand, I still think it's worth flagging this defensiveness -- and its origin in a disagreement on how bad schools are and for whom -- for a few reasons.
First, there's both an object-level issue here (what sorts of changes will improve schools?) and a meta-level issue (what sort of system should we set up for finding and implementing these changes?). People like Scott who think that schools are a terrible hellscape and people like me who personally enjoyed school can agree on the meta-level issue (more experimentation and school choice) regardless of our disagreement. But ironing out factual disagreements about how many kids feel severely abused in school could help make more rapid progress on the object-level issue of which changes schools should preferentially experiment with.
Second, there's a meta-meta-level question about how much we should be willing to risk destroying the current system in order to pursue marginal improvements. Some people think that more charter schools will result in massive disruptions to the current education ecosystem. If you think that the status quo is a hellscape that needs to be burned down, that might seem like a worthwhile risk to take. If you think that the status quo is basically good, then you might be more nervous about opening the door to school reforms.
Finally, I think this discussion could be lubricated by making it common knowledge that some people feel defensive about how good/bad their school was. Consider this sentence from above:
> The potential solutions are things like offering more sizes (more diverse types of schools), having the sizes stretch (free-range schools where you can work yourself into the right niche for you) or having people not spend 30,000 hours of the most vulnerable period of their life in an institution.
I was nodding along in total agreement for the first two-thirds of this sentence. But then I got to the last third, the 30,000-hours-in-an-institution part, and started feeling mad. And since I was feeling mad, I figured that I must actually disagree with Scott and started looking for reasons to disagree. But ultimately, there weren't any: I actually agree that people should have the option of not spending so much time in school; I just felt defensive about the framing of it and started reflexively looking for counterarguments. I think this is mirror to the way Scott was upset by DeBoer's line about getting kids out of empty homes, setting off an angry rant despite them agreeing on object-level things like letting kids leave school early. Stuff like this makes you feel like you disagree, even when you actually agree.
Good discourse.
Yeah, sorry, I'm kind of being a jerk here.
Err I guess I don't mean to imply that you necessarily did something wrong. I'm sure there's a delicate balance between upsetting people and saying anything at all. Certainly it would be awkward to hedge every sentence about your awful time in school with "But also lots of people had a great time in school and their lived experience is valuable as well" or whatever.
I just wanted to "call out" this dynamic as a whole, because it might being creating resistance to your ideas out of an emotional response to the tone rather than the substance.
Oddly enough, on reflection I would say that I enjoyed school _and_ feel like it was still definitely abusive in some ways? I'm lucky in that I was in general able to attend schools, and classes, where lots of actual learning happened, and I love learning. There was a lot of "meritocracy" involved in that -- first in private school, then in a public school that had significant academic tracking, so I was mostly in class with other strong students (and a separate "continuation school" sub-campus where they put the really problematic kids -- see https://www.cde.ca.gov/sp/eo/ce/ .) Judging from the few classes I had that were _not_ academically tracked (e.g. health class), I would have been pretty miserable without tracking. In those classes, not much was learned, and behavior was worse. (I have the impression that anti-charter-school people tend to also be anti-tracking, which is scary to me.)
And there were still aspects of even my excellent school experience that were clearly abusive, most notably physical education (at both the private and public schools I attended.) As far as I can tell, the requirements for being a PE teacher are "really likes yelling at kids; always wanted to be a drill sergeant but couldn't cut it." It seems very standard for PE teachers to completely ignore students' differing ability levels, and punish students who are unable to do the assigned work by yelling at them for being lazy, and giving them more of it. (This may well be just as true of academic subjects, and I only avoided it by always being at the top of the ability curve, instead of the bottom!)
The enduring damage that PE class did to my mental health (and to some degree my physical health as a result -- a multi-decade aversion to exercise is not healthy!) honestly seems like getting off lightly, compared to some of the stories here.
The thing that makes the whole package abusive, IMO, is not so much that it sucks -- it's that, when it sucks, you're stuck with it. Whatever anybody wants to do to you -- be they staff, or for the most part other students -- they're going to do it, and you're going to take it. That's not a healthy environment, and it's not a healthy thing to teach children, EVEN IF mostly nothing bad happens in practice, but especially when it does.
(I now feel the need to clarify that I don't think exercise classes for kids are inherently abusive. So for a more specific example: I have a personal trainer now, as an adult. I had kind of a "lightbulb moment" the first time this happened: I was in the middle of an exercise, and I was struggling with it, and my form was starting to suffer, and he said something like: "you look like you're having trouble, why don't you stop there." Of course, I'm an adult, and I'm paying him, and he can't force me to exercise against my will. But it was still kind of startling. I can't EVER remember a PE teacher saying anything like that. If your form is bad, it's because you're lazy, which is solved through more exercise.)
+1 to "probably would have been miserable without tracking" and also to "PE teachers tend to have astonishingly similar personality types"
On the topic of PE, I think that PE class is super-valuable not so much for getting kids physically active, but for actually teaching them things that they'd never learn without it. Things like:
- how to throw a football/baseball/frisbee
- how to do a cartwheel
- some basic stretches
- what it feels like to run a mile
It really seems like if no one taught me some of these things when I was a kid in PE, I still wouldn't know some of them. So I guess I think that PE is actually one of the more educational classes you take in elementary/middle school.
I don't know the reason, but I don't think I learned much if any of that in school. My athletic progress consisted of ping-pong, done with my father in our basement, judo, done outside of school, archery, done in the summer, and, much later, SCA sword and shield fighting, the first athletic activity that I turned out to actually be good at.
My guess on what was happening is that the other kids did baseball and such for fun on their own time, so were naturally much better at it than I was. SCA combat was new for all of us — this was when when the Midwest branch was just getting started — and it turned out that I was physically strong and fast, things I had not realized in the context of PE.
I completely agree about tracking; I was very happy when my senior year came around and I was in enough special honors programs that I didn't actually have to set foot on campus at all. (Although it led to recurring mild nightmares about discovering that I couldn't graduate because of something I needed to do in "homeroom", and I had forgotten where that was because I never bothered to go.)
PE classes did help with things like first aid, hunter safety (i.e., how to handle a gun and how not to shoot your friends), and learning that I could train to run a 7-minute mile if I just ran a bit every day for a few months. But I'd have traded all of that for not getting beaten up as much. I suspect that anyone who feels differently simply hasn't been punched enough.
"(I have the impression that anti-charter-school people tend to also be anti-tracking, which is scary to me.)"
FWIW I'm pro tracking and anti charter (at least most of the charter models I've looked at). I've tried to separate these opinions from my very positive experiences as a heavily tracked public school kid, but no doubt that creates some bias.
"Student A takes off in the direction of the bathroom, but then decides to run up and down the hallways as fast as possible. Student B is off to visit her friend in in-school suspension and waves into the windows of other classrooms along the way, disrupting numerous other classes. Student C goes to the bathroom, but then decides that the paper towel dispensers seem like they’d be fun to tear off the wall and comes back to the classroom armed with plenty of wet crumpled paper towels to throw at other students. Students D and E, now that it’s clear Teacher Scott isn’t going to stop them, decide to ignore the amazing, engaging lesson Teacher Scott is trying to pitch to them and have wandered out of the classroom and are now engaging in some kind of inappropriate conduct in the stairwell."
Yes, that is absolutely what happens. There are also the kids that straggle in ten minutes late, the kids who go "Miss/Sir, I forgot my book, I need to go to my locker" and so forth. We have those two. The thing is, if you tell those students A, B and C they can't go to the bathroom, they are not going to sit quietly and learn. They will find some other way of being disruptive.
Possibly the difference is that American schools are so much larger and have so many more pupils. And of course you have the whole school shootings thing. So very strict harsh discipline is needed. But I went to school when you could be beaten with a stick by the teacher and we *still* didn't have anything like "bathroom passes":
https://www.rte.ie/archives/2014/0825/639285-call-for-banning-of-corporal-punishment-in-schools/
"Research has found that 84% of second level schools use corporal punishment as a form of discipline. The most common method of corporal punishment used is the leather strap. Other methods include the cane, ruler, furniture legs, and tree branches."
I liked school. I wasn't bullied, but I didn't get the things out of it that are claimed to be benefits (socialisation, being a good 'team player' and so on). I drifted along happily in my own little world.
I'm fascinated that most (all?) of you seem to think that homework is of no benefit. Yeah, there's the problem of having to write English essays that the teacher obviously hasn't read, but by the same token it (a) enabled me to practice my handwriting (b) go over what I had learned in class so I could be sure that I understood it (c) learn and study what hadn't been gone over in class ("I want you all to read chapters 5-10"). Depending on the age level, three hours a night may be excessive, but no homework at all seems also the other extreme.
From a debate on abolishing corporal punishment in Irish schools (it wasn't formally abolished until 1982): https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/1956-04-19/6/
"Now I am asking the Seanad, in asking it to pass this motion, to put a stop to this at least in the case of little girls. Let us see if we cannot at least abolish all physical punishment for girls in our schools. This is 1956. The regulations were altered in 1946. Let the 1956 modification have as its aim to do away with the beating of our girls in our schools altogether. I should like to quote the views of a woman teacher, an enlightened educationist, in a most compelling article on discipline in schools, published in the Church of Ireland Gazette on February 17th, 1956, by Kathleen Heard, whom I do not know, but with whose ideas I find myself very much in sympathy.
She says: "A teacher must respect her pupils"—which seems to me to be a point that is often forgotten—"must respect them——"
"and show them that she does respect them. She must not first demand respect from them at the point of the bayonet, or with that attitude. When pupils see that she is worthy of respect they will give it.
"Obedience and good (?) discipline achieved by many rules and punishments will not, generally, last when schooldays are over, and I firmly believe that any corporal punishment, however mildly or reluctantly administered, is an evil thing. It is degrading to pupil and teacher. The weaker child will obey through fear and the ‘diehard' will always give trouble if forced to outward submission. He will take it out of those weaker than himself, and is all set to be a ‘juvenile delinquent' when he leaves.
"The ‘bend-over' type of discipline, canes, leather strap, rulers and the human fist, are all weapons of war. The race conquered by such means is naturally resentful. It is not a fair fight. The children are not armed."
We got the ruler and báta, the boys who went to the Christian Brothers got the strap, but I don't remember anyone getting "the human fist" although some teachers would throw the blackboard duster at you.
I was paddled in a US public school (60k population city in NC) as 9th grader in 1989. As far as I know corporal punishment kept on happening well past that time. It may still be legal but rare IDK. It was very common while I was in school.
It was, so far as I know, non-existent, not even thought of, in the private school I graduated from in 1961. But that was a private school run by the University of Chicago, so may not have been the norm even for private schools then.
What if it were to be done off the books?
Someone corners Evan one day, nowhere near school, and says "you were disrespectful in class" and pummels him. "Now shape up or next time will be worse."
Someone will want to say this is immoral. And maybe it is. But would it *work*?
Work in what sense? Work in the narrow sense of "Evan no longer misbehaves where his abusers can see?" Possibly, especially if the authorities are turning a blind eye and he has no choice but to obey or get beaten. Work in the sense of improving Evan's character, educational performance, or later life outcomes? I doubt it.
In fact, I would expect it to have the opposite effect, if Evan learns that it's acceptable to beat up people who are disrespectful to you (and that the authorities turn a blind eye to that sort of thing).
By the time we are in high school, I think we are long past "oh, the only reason Evan harasses other kids is because he *learned violence is the answer*."
People avoid pain. It's why, as described in Scott's essay, people would go to great lengths to avoid going to school where the bullies are.
I don't so much care that Evan becomes a better person. I do care that Evan stops bullying *other* kids and fucking up learning time for everyone.
"You were disrespectful" is pretty damn different from "You were bullying other kids," so maybe you should have said that you were specifically intending this as a way to deal with violent bullies rather than a backdoor way to implement corporal punishment.
But even then, if all you care about is keeping the bully from disrupting class and you don't care about his outcomes, then just expel him. Or suspend him. You know, the punishments that are specifically about removing a troublesome student from the school.
Also, the whole concept seems self-contradictory. I don't think "beat up Evan illegally when nobody is looking, thus demonstrating that the rules don't matter unless you can enforce them with the threat of violence" is going to make people *more* respectful of authority.
I don't care how Evan *feels*. I care about the bad behavior that interferes with other students to stop.
Kicking Evan out of school is not a punishment for Evan. It is a reward for Evan.
The English public school system, late 19th and early 20th century, had prefects, older boys with authority over younger boys. That may, in practice, have been an institutionalized version of what you describe.
> The thing is, if you tell those students A, B and C they can't go to the bathroom, they are not going to sit quietly and learn. They will find some other way of being disruptive.
I think some kids are always good and some kids are always bad, but most of us were somewhere in the middle depending on context and opportunity. At school there were plenty of hours when I sat and worked quietly, but then again there were also hours when I joined the rest of the class in tormenting some poor substitute teacher to see if we could get her to cry. Kids will act up, or not, depending on context and opportunity.
Regarding the selection effect discussion, it seems clear that charter schools do select for parents, and I would argue this is a good thing. An involved parent at a bad school can't really make an impact, but a school composed of involved parents can develop a culture of valuing learning and academic achievement. A situation where the average school is pretty bad but at least we can say everyone is treated equally is far from optimal. I think this is one of those situations where it's ok to sacrifice complete equality and let parents associate based on their priorities. The parents who want a good education for their kids can go find one, and the ones who don't care or don't have the and energy will get whatever is doable.
> Let him stand up for his kind of people, and I’ll stand up for mine, and hopefully we can figure out some kind of system that serves everybody.
You cannot, because there are at least two different distinct categories of students.
One category is like Scott: extremely intelligent and conscientious. If you stick a child like that in a nice community center with an unlimited library, his sparkling mind will expand into the study of science, math, history, music, and anything else, much faster than any teacher could keep up.
Another category is like me: average kids. If you stick someone like me in the same community center next to Scott, I'd alternate my time between running around doing nothing (or causing trouble), and reading science fiction all day. I know this, because that's what happened to me. Kids like me need *guided* instruction, with teachers who can patiently explain the material, and who can enforce student participation. Enforcement is sometimes ugly, but without it, some kids will never develop practical problem-solving skills -- the skills that simply come naturally to genius children.
Arguably, there's a third category of kids: those with mental (and/or physical) problems; and obviously they require custom-tailored solutions. However, I think maybe their existence is already implied in Scott's article and DeBoer's book, I'm not sure.
Sadly, one obvious solution to this problem is gating/warehousing/whatever you call it: separating the three categories of children, then applying different solutions to each. But this will probably never happen; at least, not officially, and not in America.
Bugmaster, I'm curious what your reaction is to Hiker's post just above about vocational school and someone else below speaking about GED then community college then whatever beyond. In other words, an education motivated by and focused around the pragmatic need to be able to live independently and earn a living at some point.
Did you dislike school but feel like it's the only system that would lead you to success and so whatever unhappiness it may have caused you was necessary to your desired outcome? Or did you like it just fine?
The utopian in me would like to believe that the "average" kids who would read science fiction all day would eventually with the right supports come around to a path that would lead them to be able to live on their own and pay the rent.
I am an extreme skeptic of the necessity of coercion in raising a human being, or that the instances when coercion are necessary are so fewer than we currently see such that we can't conceive of what the lower limit of it can be. (I'm not speaking about what it takes to run an orderly institution, more speaking about the individual)
Or there are people like me: smart kids with no self-discipline. If left to my own devices I'd have run around like a lunatic or talked to my friends all day. If required to apply myself to learning I'd learn nearly as readily and enthusiastically as someone like Scott. The difference is that I was not a self-directed kid with any level of discipline or judgment. I needed that structure from adults in order to learn anything. That's not the same thing as not being bright! Plenty of bright kids need help learning to sit still and apply themselves, but maybe those people are underrepresented on here and on the internet in general because they tend to be less introverted. The people who comment here are by and large very different from the average adult and were likely different from the average kid as well (even the average smart kid).
You are correct that this is a very non-random group of people, although I still observe a fair number who liked school. But my impression of "smart kids with no self-discipline" is that they can still get interested in things and put lots of time and energy into them, even teaching themselves some self-discipline in the process. The function of the educational system — in our context of home unschooling, mainly the parents — is to wave lots of interesting things in front of them and, when they bite on one of them, help and encourage them to pursue it.
I wonder how much of your view comes from observing bright kids who were persuaded by the school system that "self-discipline" meant doing boring things of no interest to them, hence that any time they still had to themselves should be spent playing video games.
Shenkin's memory of vocational schools is one thing that's really missing here. I went to a fairly bad (by educational, rather than ethical standards) high school that educated about two thousand students at a time. A lot of those kids had a bad attitude and didn't respond well to the seemingly-abstract demands of the education system. This is something that I think can happen both to students above average intelligence and ones slightly below average. I ended up graduating with a C average and not proceeding to college, which was probably the result of diagnosed and untreated ADHD (one thing that I think psychiatrists may be prone to overlooking is the different calculus that the parents of an ADHD patient might have to work through if one or both parents has a history of amphetamine abuse, and perhaps their greatest fear is their kid going down the same path. I don't think this was talked through very well by my child psychiatrist)
Late into my high school education I was referred to a partner program with a local community college that allowed high school students meeting some base requirements to attend vocational classes. There were classes in nursing, auto mechanics, welding, and computer networking (which is what I went for), among others. What surprised me was that a really good number of the kids attending these programs were the ones that I'd known as problem-students. Some aspect of this, in my opinion, was that auto mechanics and welding were compatible with an especially toxic masculinity common to rural america. Another, more important aspect, is that kids who've previously shown little interest in education might come around if there's a clear-cut path to skill attainment that will give them a career. The scale of this program was so small that I doubt it could have had much real impact on even the local scale, but it's easy to speculate that many of the students hit worst by the education system as it stands-- those with overly concrete expectations for education, little desire or ability to proceed through college, parents who have less enthusiasm for education, and other social risk factors-- would be the first to benefit from a vocational alt-education system.
I'd also like to hit on the philosophies of education that you described (especially the contrasting ones between Thiel and Rawls): whether you believe in education as prioritizing maximal attainment by any student, or as raising the floor for attainment by all students, the current education system has the same gaps, and in many cases the answers are so obvious that we can't assume that they aren't known to the system.
Education in mathematics at and above grade 6 is one especially egregious example: most students will have at least an anecdotal memory of being given test questions and having to memorize certain aspects of the material in order to pass the test. Most readers of this blog probably did above average-- I did well enough to buoy my grades despite tanking the homework assignments in every class. But this is a fairly awful way to teach mathematics, and everyone knows it. It is, however, a fairly good way to test for a specific form of forced memorization that can stand in as a proxy for a single aspect of IQ. I'd wager that if you took a good math test (ie, one that asks students to look at a few formulae and figure out how to apply those formulae to specific problems) and instead forced the students to memorize half of it before test day, that you could probably use those test results as a vague analog for IQ.
English classes' vocabulary tests, history classes' memorization requirements of dates and names, and countless other easy examples would suggest that American education does this constantly. It's as if the way that classes test for things isn't optimizing for their stated role (determining whether a student learned what the class was teaching them) but for another strange, implicit role of sorting students by IQ. You could probably conceptualize this as IQ 'covering' for failures in the design of the test, but I think there's more to it. I'd guess that schools are aware of their role in sorting societal winners from losers, in determining who gets the good jobs and the accolades. And they measure for innate ability so that the highest-IQ students are the ones who make it through.
This is well said: "kids who've previously shown little interest in education might come around if there's a clear-cut path to skill attainment that will give them a career."
This to me is a central issue, that school is a process built almost entirely on external motivation. For some extroverted kids or kids with unstable homes (I was one of those kids), school has compensatory benefits in terms of social life or stable reward systems.
But for an introverted kid who wants to find a path to economic security, the psychological cost of school all day every day is incredibly high and a maddeningly indirect route to the skills needed for almost any job.
We know that there's almost no amount of external motivation that can match the glory of internal motivation. It seems to me we could be doing so much better at helping kids find and listen to their internal motivation and building on it as earlier as possible. Instead, schools tend to beat internal motivation out of a child and replace it with this much paler substitute.
It's been a long time since we had a Chesterton quote, so here's one on education (or if you prefer, the trade of teaching).
We've been generally saying that schools are much more for the benefit of parents than of children, and here's G.K. describing a schoolmaster at his own school of St Paul's:
"It is time that something should be said about the masters, and especially the High Master. Immensely important as we thought ourselves in comparison with those remote but respectable enemies, after all they did have something to do with the school. The most eccentric and entertaining of them, Mr. Elam, has already been sketched in brilliant black and white by the pen of Mr. Compton Mackenzie. I have forgotten whether Mr. Mackenzie mentioned what always struck me as the most disturbing eccentricity of that eccentric; the open derision with which he spoke of his own profession and position, of those who shared it with him and even of those who were set over him in its exercise. He would explain the difference between satire and the bitterness of the risus sardonicus by the helpful parable, "If I were walking along the street and fell down in the mud, I should laugh a sardonic laugh. But if I were to see the High Master of this school fall down in the mud, I should laugh a sarcastic laugh." I chiefly mention his name here for another reason; because he once vented his scorn for what he called "the trade of an usher" in the form of a rhetorical question addressed to a boy: "Why are boys sent to school, Robinson?" Robinson, with downcast eyes and an air of offensive virtue, replied faintly, "To learn, sir." "No, boy, no," said the old gentleman wagging his head. "It was because one day at breakfast Mr. Robinson said to Mrs. Robinson, 'My dear, we must do something about that boy. He's a nuisance to me and he's a nuisance to you and he's a perfect plague to the servants.'" Then, with an indescribable extreme of grinding and grating contempt: "'So we'll Pay Some Man. . . .'"
And something a little lighter since we're toiling in the heavy mud of this entire topic:
"Frederick Walker, Head Master of Manchester and afterwards High Master of St. Paul's School, was, as most people know by this time, a very remarkable man. He was the sort of man who may live in anecdotes, like Dr. Johnson; indeed in some respects he was not unlike Dr. Johnson. He was like him in the startling volume of his voice, in his heavy face and figure, and in a certain tendency to explode at what did not seem to be exactly the appropriate moment; he would talk with perfect good humour and rationality and rend the roof over what seemed a trifle. In essential matters, however, his hard-hitting was generally quite right; and had even about it a homely and popular character, that somehow smacked of the north country. It is he of whom the famous tale is told that, when a fastidious lady wrote to ask him what was the social standing of the boys at his school, he replied, "Madam, so long as your son behaves himself and the fees are paid, no questions will be asked about his social standing."
I wasn't confused about why Scott didn't like grade school. He did a fine job of explaining why in the previous post. I was confused why Scott thought that his problems were representative of most students. Or if not most, then at least enough to where that group's feelings about school should be dominant in discussions of reform.
I expect that as a child, Scott was an outlier among students. I expect that's true of many folks who read and post here. I'm not surprised that lots of folks felt that school didn't do a good job for them. But that's because ya'll are outliers! School didn't do well with you because it wasn't designed for you. Before you tare down the system and replace it with something that better suits you, you should spend more time considering folks in the fatter part of the distribution. (Unless you're a Thielist, I suppose.)
Last thing: Scott dismisses Konstantin's point far too easily. If you're predicating your argument on the fact that school made you miserable, how can you dismiss the argument that the alternative to school would make other people miserable? (Educated by Tara Westover seems relevant to this discussion.) Scott is able to dismiss this because he thinks "School is prison" and is therefore punishment for everyone but the truly miserable, but here again is my confusion. "School feels like prison for me [and other outliers like me who read my blog]" isn't the same as showing that for most people. So really the argument boils down to whether one set of outliers should be forced to feel miserable so that another set of outliers (along a different axis) will have a space to not feel miserable.
"School is prison" has two meanings. One is "it's very unpleasant". The other is "it's an institution you're forced to be in, and if you try to escape, people will catch you and bring you back". I think the second one is pretty hard to argue with, however you feel about the first, and that should be a warning sign.
I agree I am an atypical student. But everyone is atypical in their own way. I know people who hated school because they were too smart and that made it boring. I know other people who hated school because they were too dumb and that made it humiliating and impossible. I know people who hated school because they were introverts and it was hard to be crammed together with 30 classmates, and people who hated school because they were extroverts and it was painful to have to keep quiet all day when your friends were sitting right there next to you.
Overall I think I'm making the same argument as in my review of My Brother Ron ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/31/book-review-my-brother-ron/ ), which talks about confining schizophrenics to institutions. Some of them will like it there, others won't. If you let people choose freely, some of the ones who would be better off inside will be dumb/misinformed and still choose to stay out anyway. I still think we should err on the side of freedom and choice.
And I remain fine with the "freedom and choice" side (though, as I noted above, I think you dismiss the downsides too easily). My issue is that "School is prison" doesn't connote "it's very unpleasant", it connotes, "you will be raped, tortured, and abused by the worst people society has on offer and also those authority figures responsible for your health and safety."
But maybe I have too negative an impression of prison. Perhaps we can agree on "School is Club Fed"?
Out of curiosity, how often were you beaten up at school?
I'm curious about this : is being beaten up such a common school experience ?
I have *never* been beaten up, despite being a scrawny nerd (no glasses though). And I can only remember one kid that has been (though this is less reliable).
I've only got a sample size of one, but it loomed rather large in my formative experiences. It might be one of those things like outrunning the bear, where it's not so much how much a "scrawny nerd" one happens to be objectively as relatively. That is, maybe only the very bottom targets in any group get selected? I certainly didn't get the impression that there was anyone else in my class getting beat up as much as me. Dunno if that explains your situation, though. Maybe you were just around nicer people? :-)
Maybe. Most of the school *I* would have been the one "at the bottom".
We could also call schools "compulsory, affordable childcare institutions" or "mandatory acculturation for routine jobs."
Part of what strikes me as unfixably broken about schools is that the childcare need so overrode the learning need that a lot of it feels like window-dressing to justify keeping kids somewhere safe during the once-conventional work week. This went along with a co-equal need to groom children to be ready to work 40-hour plus work weeks and to follow orders. These two needs -- childcare and worker acculturation -- create perverse incentives across the whole system.
It creates an AP science teacher who says they're teaching conscientiousness through the medium of chemistry, an AP calculus teacher who says they're teaching self-esteem through the medium of math, and various humanities/social studies teachers getting their fifteen year-old students to write resumes for jobs that haven't yet been worked. Teachers work really really hard, but their jobs also get forced through this system of perverse incentives.
I loved school because it was better than home and because it so rewarded my people-pleasing doggedness. But even for me, I would have done so much better as a grown person later to have had other choices earlier. Both of my children, who had stability at home in a way I didn't, found school to be painfully boring and agonizing. The extroverted one found the compensatory social rewards to be adequate; the introverted one didn't and so was mostly homeschooled. Lucky that we could do that and unfortunate it's an option available to so few people.
My version of the minimally viable reform that would be most possible, is to legalize child labor. This also demands the removal of truancy as a crime, at least to the extent that children can find and do work safely.
If all goes as planned from there, some corporation or the like will offer slightly better conditions than the schools, and children will flock there, and the schools will realize that they must adapt to survive, and will become themselves, slightly better, and the corporation will realize their new billion dollar cash pump is in danger if they don't make it just a little better, and the spiral continues.
Standard model of competition working.
I find that the people most pushing for this are race realist leftists, who think that forcing calculus on blacks then sending them to jail when they fail to measure up, is the very essence of systemic racism. This isn't exactly my political position, but if shutting down the school to prison pipeline is the best excuse to shut down the schools, I'm happy to side with it.
Charter schools are probably net positive, but only slightly, and won't spiral, because they're still competing for parents, not children, and, the current system is already optimized in large part, for the convenience and self esteem of parents. The well being of children is left out of the equation.
As for the rest, I'm firmly in the [school as torture] camp, and have little patience or forgiveness for those who excuse it with "torturing people is fun" and "it makes us money".
I expect that, while children still live with their parents, their decision of where to go to school or work would be influenced to a great degree by their parents even if they were legally allowed to choose for themselves (which would be very difficult to pass into law anyway). Child labor as a competitor to school chosen by the children would probably be somewhat better than charter schools at incentivizing schools to be good for children, but its effect would probably still be limited.
One of the popular arguments made against child labor back in the day, was to bash their version of welfare queens, mothers who would force their children into jobs and take all the profit for themselves. I find this was mostly (though not entirely) fiction, but, ideally we should put in more protections to ensure that children receive their own wages than existed then.
Most children will basically do what their parents tell them to, even if this makes them miserable. They'll commit suicide before saying they're unhappy. I do expect this. But, some children will look for options, and if they find them, they'll take them. Ideally, once a few children who were on track for a long and exciting career in crime grow up into well adjusted adults, parents will take notice, and will encourage their own at risk children to consider work as an alternative to school. Over time, the definition of at risk should expand, and work as education should be normalized.
I'm confident that, with enough cycles, a corporation can find a better way to educate children where they're happier, more productive, and get more prestigious jobs in the future, where work will cease to be just for the "low class" "at risk" types, and become something sought after by the elites, and then we can eliminate the schools entirely. Until then, even in the best case, there will be a subset who are miserable, but quietly make good grades and no one notices. In that sense, I would love to move faster and be more radical, but it isn't going to happen. Even my minimum viable solution probably won't happen, but I don't think anything less will even have a positive impact.
So, I guess, the question is, how is this different from charter schools?
The first is that it simply removes preconceptions. Charter schools are all focused on the task of (passing X test). If the test itself is flawed (it is) then the results, no matter how optimized, will also be flawed. That is, the public schools already do what they do pretty well. It's just that what they're doing is spiteful and evil, not that they're doing it poorly.
The next is that corporations can advertise to children. If a child is offered less work for higher wages, it's harder to convince him not to take it.
Similarly, corporations have a specific product they have to provide. That is, they can fire workers or hire them, but they can't just tell them to work and then refuse to pay their wages. Charter schools can't promise good grades.
Also, I find that almost all children are employable. Even animals can do work and make a living wage, there's no reason any but the exceptionally dis-functionally insane shouldn't be able to. The same can't be said of schooling. Charter schools inevitably run into the issue that many children simply cannot be educated.
As above, the charter school approach mostly focuses on lifting hyper-educable students into more schooling, and ignores ineducable students who either quietly fail in misery or turn to a life in crime as the only alternative. I think this is backwards.
Finally, we've tried charter schools. They don't work. Not that maybe they aren't slightly better, but they aren't going geometric. I at least, cannot take them seriously as a threat to the school system. So, more broadly, if we're going to eliminate schooling, we need to put predators in the water, and hope they succeed. If the predators aren't multiplying and reducing the prey population, we need to try a new predator.
One extra note- I don't trust people's memories very much. Rather than asking adults if they enjoyed school, we should ask children if they enjoy school. I'm sure there's some fraction who honestly do enjoy school, and come out the other side as productive happy adults with awesome jobs and so on and so on, but broadly, I think school is always awful, and some people just don't have good emotional memory, and when we do poll children they do say, in overwhelming majority, that school is awful.
So, not to pick on you particularly, because it's been suggested in several places, but what in the world is making people forget that child labor was, in fact, the pre-existing solution? And that it was so horrible we outlawed it, and we still sneer at the then proprietors as cartoon villains?
I mean, really. We seen that movie. No one wants to see it again. (Almost no one, I guess.)
Propaganda. Jobs. Money.
Also, remember that America is WEIRD. Child labor is much more common and well accepted than you characterize it as. So, the alternative question, is why don't territories with child labor radically outperform the rest of the world? My first answer is that they do, we're just measuring things in a WEIRD way, that's designed to elevate WEIRD results. Even saying that, it remains that on some metrics, we are vastly outperforming them, so again, why? My next answer is that while they're obviously correct on this one issue, that doesn't mean they aren't making other errors capable of massively depleting their GDP or such. A lot of politics can be summarized as- adopt policy A of country X, but not B from X, and you'll get all the good things in X but none of the bad. I do think people underestimate the idea of "just adopt everything about X and we'll be at least at X's level", but that does carry the drawback that it becomes impossible to learn from nations that aren't vastly and obviously superior.
Okay, so, with that said, first, propaganda. That is, the education system is absolutely critical to the entire justification of the modern elite class' existence. Eliminate education and you eliminate degrees. You eliminate expertise. The modern priesthood draws its mystical powers from education, and their success in the education system. They are, at the least, not the most capable people in the country, when judged by an outside rubric. Eliminating education doesn't eliminate hierarchy, or even the existence of modernist priests, but it does change who is on the very top of the hierarchy. In short, once a vetting process has been established for how much mystical power a given person has, it's very hard to change it, because the ruling mystics are absolutely opposed to it being changed.
The second two issues are much more direct. Workers don't want to compete with children, and teachers and etc. want their free money pump. Also, remember that education is also a massive subsidy to corporations that would otherwise have to train workers themselves. It doesn't matter if education is half, a fifth or a tenth as effective as the alternative, at the wonderful price of free, corporations will always line up in favour of it.
If we go look at the debate at the time, first, parental rights create a lot of problems, and people were opposed to parents profiting off of child abuse. Even in the modern day, any attempt to scale back the school system is met with accusations of child abuse. With that said, I don't see particularly high rates of child abuse in states like Texas or Alaska where no questions asked home schooling is legal. Thus, I mostly classify this as a phantom menace. It's actually legal in Texas for parents to make their children do farm work eight hours a day and say that's their version of education. (It's also legal to let them do whatever they please and say that's their version of education.) It's true that most people are so mindless that you can prevent some abuse through pure obscurity, but I think giving more rights to children will clearly not result in that much abuse, given that parents have available to them plenty of states with laws such that abuse is almost entirely safe and legal. It should also be noted, that opponents of child labour would always and inevitably pick out the very worst work places, with the very worst parents, and among that, the children with the very worst luck. The image created by opponents of child labor, was simply not realistic in the sense of being normal. It was entirely on the outer fringe, and as the winners of the debate, that characterization is still with us today.
As stated, a lot of the child labor argument was about falling wages and job loss. Workers wanted more monopoly rights. Furthermore, once a few states caved, corporations operating in those states found competing with corporations in states with larger labour pools difficult, and thus joined in to call for universal abolition of child labour. Immigrant labour was also something people disliked competing against (as they still do today) and many immigrants were younger and had more children, so child labour laws was another way to target them.
It's hard to prove that you're better off going to work on a dock hauling boxes than learning calculus and then going to college. I'd think it much easier to convince someone that a child is better off hauling boxes than being locked in jail. Of course, I'm all for just legalizing truancy on its own, but doing so without removing child labour laws is practically demanding they turn to crime, and the reputation of child dropouts won't improve, and parents will continue misleading innocent children who don't know better into the education system.
So. 1) I appreciate the work you put into answering this. It's not surprising that you're not convincing to me, but I do want you to know that I see and acknowledge your effort.
That said, 2) My eight year old just got on her morning meeting for school. I can hear her outside my door. If such a dystopian policy ever came to be, I would, 100%, leave the country. Even if, like other immigrants, I had to go from being well off to being poor, I would consider it worthwhile to get my family out of a country that took away the schools and tried to give my kids back to the places that built machines that could only be serviced by small children. I think most of my class (middle to upper middle knowledge workers with kids) would do likewise. And despite what you say about the educated class, I think that sparking a desertion en masse would be a disaster.
And 3) As for the working class, well, they're the ones with the guns, and without the wherewithal to leave. They're also, for the most part, entirely separate from this entire conversation. They come from towns like the one I came from, where there are three elementary schools, a middle, and a high. And everyone goes to school together. If you showed up and told them you were shutting down their schools, they would fight you.
Which leads me to 4) do you have kids? Are you around kids? I know there are a lot of fringe views on ASX, but this really seems like something that can only have been written by someone for whom kids are theoretical.
1: My policies rely on the implicit assumption that education is a fraud and doesn't increase productivity (actually, that it decreases productivity). This is something I'm totally confident is true, but is also an entirely different conversation. I'm not saying that education is bad (except in as far as I just did). I'm saying that, given that education is bad, here's the most realistic way to end it.
Note that I'm not saying work is good either. Some work is productive, thus worth doing at the moment, but should still be slowly phased out of existence as we implement better ways to be productive. Some work is counterproductive, and we need to shut that down asap. In the end, child labour, alongside labour in general, is just a stepping stone between here and utopia.
2: I think your concept of what child labour is, is off, largely due to said propaganda images. It's actually much more reasonable to have children out in the field watching sheep or at a computer writing code than demand they work in some sort of nest of overactive Rude Goldberg machines.
As for a mass desertion by the educated class, I think that unrealistic. Most people who do well in the current system will still be rated highly in the new system. Furthermore, in so far as people rated highly by the current system and low in the new system are driven out, people from other countries that are rated poorly by the current system but highly in the new system will come flocking in. Realistically, once the policy is adopted in America, the rest of the world will follow suit, so no one would flee the country and vice versa.
3: I'm not shutting down their schools!
My policy steps are, again-
Legalize truancy. Almost everyone affected by this change are extremely low class individuals who are on the edge of becoming hardened criminals, and putting them in jail makes a future of crime and incarceration a near certainty. The immediate effect is a slight reduction in the criminalization of minors, resulting in lower overall crime rates.
Legalize child labour. This gets the truant students off the streets, further reducing crime, while also producing free profits. Wages in general will fall and some tiny minority of parents will take their children out of school and pressure them into working for the parent's profit.
Produce careers. Note that at this point, no further action (or inaction) from government is necessary. Corporations take children that would have, under the current system, become hardened criminals, and give them high status jobs, leading to stable families and high life outcome ratings.
Phase out schools. Parents with children who aren't doing well in the education system turn to work places with superior track records. Every cycle, the bottom 1% of students give up and find work, because education fundamentally requires the bottom percentiles to fail. The number of students shrink. As work becomes normalized, and school ceases to be normal, the process accelerates. Eventually people decide generally that education is stupid, and stop doing it.
4: In my experience, my ideas work perfectly. Of course, in my experience, children are all about as neurotypical as I am, so... using your own family as a sample group is generally a bad idea?
Broadly, I observe that families that maintain an 1800s culture are happier and healthier than the sickly and miserable conditions common in the present day.
A lot of people seem to be coming at the school debate with the sort of implicit assumption that schooling done well means taking a pupil from one point in the hegemony, and delivering them to another place on the hegemony, some number of rungs up. Given the research suggesting that the majority of things determining where one ends up are genetically determined and that a good amount of the rest are determined by family and community rather than teacher and school, it would be easy to write off the value of school - it doesn't work!
But education could also mean that each person, within that hegemony, can be more effective. The paperwork could be done faster, the beer brewed more tasty, the new inventions more brilliant and the new companies better at changing the world. And surely this is true? A person in the middle of the hegemony now can process more accounts than can a person in the middle of the hegemony fifty years ago, but that hasn't helped today's accountants somehow become higher up.
That view of education suggests that a huge amount of the ways we measure school (how much further education do they do on to, what are their lifetime earnings...) are measuring entirely the wrong thing, and that's probably cause for concern!
"Answer that’s paternalist itself (though not necessarily collectively so, since it can achieve mass support): more mandatory meetings. Compulsory voting, conscription into militias (give everyone guns and the training to use them), compulsory Quaker meetings, compulsory PTA meetings, compulsory unionization of all workplaces (and if the union votes to set dues at zero and not go on strike ever, okay, at least that’s what they chose.) Anything that increases capacity while getting each other to talk to each other about their interests."
Apparently (according to the summary at https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-winnowing-of-american-democracy-few.html ) this sort of direct democracy was how most local governments and community organizations were run for much of American history. This doesn't necessarily seem paternalistic in itself: that article justifies it in terms of giving people more direct control over how they were governed. Historically, this method of making decisions was beneficial in that it reduced the extent to which elites could make decisions that benefitted them but not the people they ruled, and it may have reduced the frequency of misguided top-down attempts at progress of the sort that James Scott criticizes in _Seeing Like a State_ ; it was harmful in that the citizens in general were less competent at making decisions that required Scott's epistémē and more likely to be led to make bad decisions by emotion (the article notes that lynchings were a result of partly leaving law enforcement up to the community rather than letting specially trained and somewhat legally accountable professionals do it).
For a discussion of alternate classroom discipline, I suggest Duncan Sabien's discussion with Spencer Greenberg regarding Duncan's experience as a teacher.
His rule for bathroom use for instance was that if you need to go to the bathroom, you write your name on the "used the bathroom" sheet, go to the bathroom and then stay in class 5(?) extra minutes after the recess bell rings. No questions asked, no moralizing, no permission required. Did not lead to total chaos.
https://clearerthinkingpodcast.com/?ep=021
Scott, what happened to "every single part of my brain is telling me that high school was lovely"? (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/10/book-review-house-of-god/) . Did you realize your younger self had been telling you the truth all along? What's the story here!
(Sorry about possibly having posted this twice. My browser is acting funny right now.)
Partly elementary/middle school were worse than high school, partly I still have a desire to excuse my high school but I'm going off of my younger self's memories rather than my gestalt impression.
Scott, re medical residency, do you think that all of those hours are necessary? I've always been skeptical that in order to produce a competent doctor, the U.S. system needs to be as elite and demanding as it is. O-chem required as a undergrad, and intense residency hours being two things that always made me suspicious. Is there really sooo much to know that it couldn't be done in 40 hours. And why is this still a thing given the research about how many patients are harmed by overworked and tired docs?
I managed to skip organic chemistry, so no argument there.
Residency as it currently exists is the balance of a few factors. First, ACGME demands lots of rotations per residency, including some really dumb ones, which means if it takes eg 8,000 hours to train a doctor, you've got to find time for 8,000 hours of actual training plus the 4,000 hours of useless stuff they make you do on the side. Second, due to some combination of ACGME policies and the unavoidable economics of medicine, residencies are really expensive, and the hospital makes a tiny amount of that money back by getting lots of work out of residents. Third, lots of wards need 24-7 coverage and studies show that the more times you transfer patients the more mistakes slip in, so it's tempting to give people really long shifts. Probably other things too.
See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/13/why-do-test-scores-plateau/
Very interesting post; that clarified some things. I guess I'm still left wondering whether doctors are being taught too much. Most of the people I know, and my own experience, attest that they learned so much in the book learnin' phase of their education that they never used on the job. Whats the practical difference between a hot shot psychiatrist and median psychiatrist? Would the median patient even notice? My uncle is a doc and has always said that ~95% of his visits are very uninteresting and easy to manage, and are not very demanding in terms of intellectual horsepower.
I suppose I'm still kind of bitter that I couldn't get into med school because I couldnt crush o-chem and the MCAT. My feeling was always, "Okay, I'm not super smart, but aren't I smart <i>enough</i>?" (not claiming I deserved a spot of course) Is there any cross-country data that could prove this? Is it as hard to get into medical school in Moldova and Kazakhstan as it is in the U.S.? If not, would your median U.S. doc totally smoke your median doc from Moldova or Kazachstan?
Third world doctors often end up working as first world nurses, but this might be more about first world doctors not wanting competition than about third world doctor competence?
An issue is: Do we need to spend 13 years making an 18 year old? With 39 months off spread throughout? It seems glacial. Our Education System really needs to be refocused on identifying aptitudes (which includes smarts, but also talent, enjoyment...) and building on and adding to skill sets. There should be much more independent play and certified learning up front, with daycare provided for working parents. Intense modules of learning interspersed with projects as they get older. Then classroom study and hands on before separating into vocational, collegial or uncommitted.
FdB wants to change the world so that we can find places in it for the people he will not let us change (in any intrusive way). I would rather change the system slightly, add a Works Corps and have them change the country and the world.
Let’s work backwards. I propose an adjunct to the Army Corps of Engineers, the America Works Corps. You could think of it as Society in Motion. When fully operational there would be EMTs, Practicing Nurses, Hi Voltage Line Techs, Internet Specialists, Heavy Machinery Operators, Carpenters, Electricians.... FEMA could call in a full battalion to Puerto Rico after a hurricane. Five battalions could be dropped in Indonesia after a tsunami.
The reason for it being under the auspices of the Corps? Socialization, standardization and deployment as a resource. The first year would be Boot Camp and Basic Ed. From there aptitudes would sort and further classes, exercises and field work would begin. It would be a 3-4 year commitment. It would all depend on chosen field.
Individuals could re-up. They could sign up for 2-3 year postings to overseas projects. Or, having gained their professional licenses / credentials, they could get a GI Loan, move to the place of their choice and start rebuilding America.
The gold standard studies on job training tell us that the only ones that move the needle are apprenticeship related. Why? Because the individual wants to do that type of work, the company has that type of job and a training site is set up to put the two together. This idea does just that but on a national scale that doesn’t flood any one market.
Now that we seen what the Black Box connects to, the question becomes what do we do with the Box? Well, we certainly move towards a more Germanic system of identifying those whose aptitudes and personalities want to move towards the Corps than college.
I also think that there is a huge issue that has been completely ignored: terraforming. Schools need to be involved from soil management to hydroponics to seedlings to aqua-culture to..... If the Sahel needs a 8,000 km green barrier, then the High Plains could use a bit of tending in the next 20 years as we manage the Missouri and Mississippi basins.
The education experts keep ‘fixing’ their factory. They keep giving their customers an experience they don’t enjoy, they keep turning out too many products of low value and they keep demanding more more money for their efforts.
Yes. Bring back the WPA and CCC. I would buy this t-shirt.
Scott wrote:
> The best I can do is: on the one hand there's the utilitarian perspective,
> which is summed up well enough by "from each according to their ability,
> to each according to their need".
Scott. The word "utilitarian" is a couple of centuries old; you don't get to redefine it now. That's a quote from Marx, who is NOT a utilitarian. The utilitarian perspective is traditionally summed up as the Benthamite formula "the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people" (although that's both imprecise and insufficiently general).
I think that was either a joke, or a hint that they're maybe not so different.
Scott Alexander often seems to play fast and loose with "jokes" when it comes to misrepresentation of political thought. One does wonder what exactly is supposed to be funny there.
We should probably also avoid "hints", as "hints" are not specific enough - what is needed is a full investigation of the similarities of utilitarian and Marxist thought. If you're only "hinting" at something then you're not expressing yourself fully.
I am shocked that someone with as deft a touch as you would argue against subtlety
The point of Rationalist writings should be to make your point as clearly as possible. Not to "hint" at a "subtlety" through "jokes".
Certainly no rational person could find any benefit from a subtle joke
The sarcasm isn't helping your case. I'm advocating for straight-forward, clear communication here. Mashing together two different schools of philosophical thought with no explanation or reasoning is not an example of good communication.
I think the utilitarian course actually is to take from everyone as much as they can give, and use it to help the people who need it most. I agree that I used a Marx quote to refer to a Bentham theory, but can you explain why you don't think it's appropriate?
Can you explain how it _is_ appropriate, with reference to Marxist thought?
Alternately, can you find quotes from Bentham or JS Mill (or any other utilitarian) that approaches Marx's quotation there?
I think the fairly standard common-sense position here is that the Marxists and the Utilitarians are two different schools of thought, and it is not useful to mix them up. If you're making some sort of point that they're the same, or similar enough, then I think that's a case for you to make in detail, not simply assume is a given.
[Socialist utilitarian raising his hand] Marx doesn't "own" the idea of taking from abilities and distributing based on needs. It's good idea even you aren't a Marxist. Scott is giving you a huge fig leaf here!!Take it!!
A huge fig leaf? A huge thing intended to conceal a difficulty or embarrassment?
Dude, Marx is riffing on St. Luke there. It's not an original idea.
It’s not approximate because utilitarianism is entirely result-oriented, whereas the quote you used is process-oriented. Utilitarian ideals are for whatever works best for everyone. The quote you used assumes that result from a system that agrees with it.
Sorry. Autocorrect switched “appropriate” with “approximate”. My bad.
"Result-oriented" and "process-oriented" are not categories within Marxist thought and I'm not sure why you are separating them out like that.
Perhaps it's a Utilitarian thing?
There's no way to explain this in the number of characters I'm allowed. This is just an overview; you'll have to email me to get my reasons. I'll see if I can fit in some examples of point 2 in a reply to my reply.
1. The obvious problem with quoting Marx to define utilitarianism is that it connotes much more than it says literally, accidentally creating a motte-and-bailey fallacy. You want (I'm guessing) only to claim that the quote is a usable definition of utilitarianism (the motte), regardless of who wrote it. But because Marx wrote it, using it will suggest to readers that Marxism is similar to or compatible with utilitarianism (the bailey).
2. The less-obvious problem is that it's wrong (as a definition of utilitarianism). You were probably thinking something like, "If everyone produces as much as they're able to, and everyone gets everything they… need? … that's distributing utility to everyone, which sounds like the greatest good to the most people." But it isn't. The differences in the language are subtle; their consequences are not. See examples below.
3. The even-less-obvious problem is that utilitarianism is part of one large, self-consistent bundle of metaphysical assumptions that all mutually support each other (empirical philosophy); while Marx's formulation is part of a second self-consistent bundle of metaphysical assumptions that all mutually imply each other (rational philosophy), and each of which directly contradicts one belief in the first bundle. So equating utilitarianism with Marx's idea of justice is just a few inferences away from adding the claim "A if and only if not A" to a theorem prover, meaning it can be invoked to make every inference end in contradiction (or, equivalently, may be used to prove anything).
4. Marx attacked utilitarianism as being egoistic, selfish, and interested only in "usefulness" or hedonistic pleasure. All of these attacks stem from Marx's Platonist metaphysics, as he made clear in his writings to everyone except himself. For instance, he wrote that "every particular social activity as a species-activity merely represents the species, i.e., an attribute of my own nature, and in which every person is the representative of every other" (Karl Marx, 'Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law,' in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Collected Works, Vol. Ill (New York: International Publishers 1975) p. 119; cited in Brenkert 1981, "Marx's Critique of Utilitarianism", p. 200). This shows that Marx saw individuals as having no significance in themselves, but only being significant as representatives of a common human nature. Any deviation of individuals from that essential (Platonic) nature would be error to be eliminated, rather than legitimate differences to be respected. (This comes from Hegel and Plato.) Even the bizarre mistake of thinking utilitarianism was "hedonistic" is quite common among Platonists, who just can't conceive of pursuing individual happiness and pleasure as anything other than sinful degeneracy, and when asked to imagine someone pursuing happiness, always imagine somebody having profligate sex and overindulging in wine, rather than somebody falling in love, or making friends.
Points 2-4 come down mostly to these Platonist beliefs of Marx's:
1. That what matters is Platonic Forms--in this case the human species--not mere earthly individuals. Therefore,
a. Satisfying the desires of individuals is generally bad rather than good, as people pursuing egoistic wants are not pursuing the historical progress of the species.
b. Any differences between individuals is proof of social corruption; in an ideal world, everyone would be the same.
b. Conflicts between individuals of the same social class are signs of corruption, to be solved by purging the evil people rather than by "compromise", whatever that means.
2. That measurement, numeric quantification, and optimization are useless to the philosopher, who deals only in universal, eternal, absolute truths.
3. That market prices are blasphemy, because they claim that the value of a type of good can vary with circumstances, or with how it was made, or how many middlemen handled it. Values are by definition absolute and eternal. [I'm not aware that Marx said anything like this explicitly, but this is how Platonists think, and many things in Marx are explained by supposing he believed it.)
Re. problem 2, let's look at the quotation:
Marx: From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs.
- "From each… to each...": Marx was writing about distributing goods of some sort, whether physical or abstract. But the phrasing implies that this isn't a collection of voluntary transactions, each between two individuals. Rather, there's an unnamed redistributor to whom all these goods are given, who then redistributes them based on His assessment of everyone's needs. There's no room for individual choice in this scenario. Marxists believe that individual differences should be eliminated, not honored. Marxist "justice" means everybody is the same, does similar work, and gets the same stuff.
There's a common assumption among philosophers that utilitarianism is also collectivist, with utility computed using a single utility function which is assumed to apply to all people. I don't know where this stupid assumption came from; Bentham and John Stuart Mill were both staunch individualists uniquely aware that different people wanted different things.
Utilitarianism allows different people to have different utility functions. In practice, this requires that all exchanges of goods are made by the free choices of both parties, because there's no other way to know what basket of goods makes any given individual most happy. This is just one reason why utilitarianism goes hand-in-hand with individual liberty and a free market.
- "according to his ability": Nothing about his preferences. No one gets to choose their job; if they did, Marxist society would have a whole lot of poets, and no garbage collectors. (Marx overlooks this problem because he sees the division of labor as Original Sin, and vaguely imagines that under communism, everybody does all the jobs, or rotates through all the jobs, or only does fun jobs like making handcrafted goods or writing poems.) No one gets to decide how long and hard they must work. I presently choose to work very little, make very little money, spend very little money, and have a lot of free time. I'm not allowed to do that under Marxism. Whereas utilitarianism recognizes that free time has high utility to me, and so counts that free time in my utility.
- "according to his needs": Again, nothing about preferences; nothing even about good. . But note especially the word "needs". Marxists mean that literally. Marxists after Marx--Adorno and Horkheimer, for example--regularly froth at the mouth ranting against "consumerism" and "consumer culture", which turns out to mean "people getting what they want" and "people liking things I don't like". (Note, for instance, that nothing except their specificity distinguishes Adorno's mad rants against jazz from his mad rants against consumer-culture in general).
Well, guess what? You don't need Beethoven symphonies, or novels, or air conditioning, or a dog, or comfortable shoes, or food that tastes good. In fact, addiction to nice things is what make the bourgeoisie disgusting and weak.
In China, "need" even extended to children as products. Until recently, the Party decided how many children everyone needed--or rather, how many children China needed. They could order women not to have children, and presumably if the population were low, they could order woman to have children. They also saw women's bodies as social capital in Sparta, in Plato's Republic, and in Rousseau's Emile.
I don't remember whether Marx said anything against consumption himself [1], but at least since modernism, Marxist culture has preached that getting what you want is spiritually bad for you. They don't use the word "spirit", but other than the vocabulary, Marxist rants against consumerism could be mistaken for medieval sermons against greed. That's why Marxists think it's good, not bad, that Marxist production and distribution doesn't allow individuals to get what they want.
This Marxist asceticism, limiting people to fulfilling only their basic physical needs [2], is the opposite of utilitarianism, which is all about letting the most people get the most they can of what they want.
It's easy for us today to just assume that Marx thought, as utilitarians do, that more happiness is better and more pain is worse. But that wasn't the majority view at the time, and it wasn't Marx's view. He saw the pursuit of private happiness as sinful (though he didn't use that word). When Jefferson wrote that all men have the right to pursue happiness, that was (literally) revolutionary, not so much because he called it a "right" as because he implied that happiness on Earth was inherently good. Plato would have disagreed, as would a lot of Romans, Tertullian, a lot of Saints from Francis to Mother Theresa, and the Puritans who settled Boston. Platonists see the physical world as a distraction from the transcendent one, and the enjoyment of physical pleasure as "decadence". In Marxism, it's even worse: they inherited the disdain for hedonism from Plato, Rousseau, and Hegel; but jettisoned the part where we finally reach the transcendent Paradise. All we get at the end of the road is True Communism, which is at its best everyone getting what they need.
- There's another problem with using the word "needs": To implement Marx's policy, "needs" must be a Boolean predicate, so that every human desire either is, or is not, a need. This isn't a problem for utilitarianism, which doesn't merely list "needs", but measures the intensity of happiness produced in each person by each good. People who want one type of good a lot get a lot of that type of good; people who want it just a little, get just a few.
- Marx's formulation of justice assumes there are never any trade-offs or conflicts of interest! What happens if we need electricity, but we also need to stop climate change? What happens if we need police to restrain violent people in confusing and cognitively-overloading situations, but we need them not to kill any innocent bystanders? What happens in the trolley problem? Which needs get met in literally any contentious social issue ever? Marx has nothing to say. His followers simply assume that conflict of interest between proletarians with correct class consciousness is impossible, and so every case of conflict is due to one of the agents being a class enemy. "Compromise" is an incomprehensible word to them; they probably map it to "tactical delay".
Utilitarianism, by contrast, deals with many of these issues easily. Are the police killing too many innocent citizens? Give them stricter rules, or defund the police, and then count how many innocent citizens are killed by police or by criminals, before and after the policy change. Fiddle with the rules until the number goes up if you change them in either direction. Should we build more nuclear power plants to stop climate change? Compare the expected social cost of the nuclear power plants, the social cost of unchecked climate change, the social cost of supplying all that energy from renewable resources, and the social cost of just not using that electricity. Choose the option with the greatest expected utility.
I wrote: "Which needs get met in literally any contentious social issue ever? Marx has nothing to say." This was unfair. I see things that way only because I have the luxury of living in a liberal democracy, where we don't have social institutions that are just naked social structures of power and oppression, like in the feudal societies Marx was fond of, or in the paranoid delusions of Marcuse and his offspring.
I'm sympathetic to FdB's critique of the part of meritocracy where smart=good. I've been trying to work on giving up that alief, now that I'm more intellectually convinced the belief is incorrect and pernicious. I grew up thinking "stupid" was such a bad word (and thing to be) that you could never call anyone it—it would be shattering. So it takes some deliberate practice to unlearn that.
Here's what's been helpful to me:
- I read about saints who were intellectually slow (e.g. Bl Solanus Casey, who remained a porter, not a priest, for this reason)
- Since becoming Catholic, I meet a lot more people with serious physical and mental disabilities, and I get to know them as people, not as deficiencies. This is a huge part of the Bruderhof's culture, too: https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/parenting/special-needs-children/the-teacher-who-never-spoke
- I work on remembering that I'm very smart now, but I won't be when I'm old (probably) and I'm not going to become less a person then. I'm going to be the same person, called to different work (including the witness of being dependent on others without being ashamed of my dependency)
- Having a baby helps! My one-year-old is so clearly a person and takes joy in the world without being able to do the things I pride myself most on. I expect her to grow up and become more like me, but there's a lot that is good about her as she is, I don't feel as frightened about if she didn't mature in the way I expect.
I'm curious if anyone else here has actively cultivated this shift?
Long time no see, welcome back here!
Yes! Though I wouldn't have articulated it that beautifully.
I was praised and validated a great deal for my smarts growing up, and smarts as an attribute was praised and validated above all in my family. Mom talked about kindness and doing good, so some of that stuck. But both my parents were raised in a very shame-o-centric way and that default to shame and criticism buried a lot of the kindness.
It took some really tough things happening to me in my late 20s through 40s to see how limited smart is up against other qualities (kindness, compassion, patience, steadiness, wisdom) in navigating a life. Somewhere in there I grasped how the focus on smarts in my childhood had led me to use it as a crutch and defense mechanism and how that prevented me from growing up in other ways I needed to in order to have a satisfying life. Overintellectualization is a hell of a drug.
I really like being smart. Or more, I really like being curious and able to get really excited about learning new things. But also, I'm in my late 50s now and my memory isn't what it used to be and my drive to precision isn't what it used to be. I think those changes would be terrifying to me now if I hadn't shifted my center of gravity a couple of decades earlier. As it is, I'm enjoying the commensurate decline in neuroticism and don't mind the world looking a little more impressionist to me.
(Do people still read Drama of the Gifted Child?)
"the focus on smarts in my childhood had led me to use it as a crutch and defense mechanism and how that prevented me from growing up in other ways I needed to in order to have a satisfying life. Overintellectualization is a hell of a drug."
Stop taking about me >.>
Falling in love with someone whose brain works very differently from my own was a transformative experience for me. Before I always found the phrase "smart in your own way" to be grossly patronizing. Now I'm regularly in awe of the capabilities of someone with multiple "learning disabilities" (quotes used because they're only disabling in modern educational context) and a thoroughly average IQ. I'm still glad I'm smart in MY way, but I'm also sometimes kinda jealous.
I'm really impressed by this. I think I aspire toward it, but I'm kind of stuck on being patronizing vs. genuinely accepting and valuing.
Yes, and it's made it easier to adjust after a medical treatment reduced my intelligence.
re: "charter schools get 0.75x and public schools get to keep the 0.25x extra" it's important to seperate marginal vs average costs. If the average cost of educating a kid is $20k and 5 leave for a charter school then you're down 5*0.75*20k=75k ie a full teachers salary, so have to fire a teacher and redistribute 20 kids amoung the rest. All the fixed & nongifted population's costs of buildings, busses, special Ed, etc don't decrease. Assume classes are 25 kids, then the marginal cost per kid is only $3k*, not enough for a 2nd school. This is per a Massachusetts ex-principle.
There could be more cost savings if you have charter schools share buildings, increasing beurocratic inertia against; starting a charter school is easier than convincing an existing school to turn over part of the student body and physical building.
*multiply by 4/3 if each teacher only teaches for 3 of the 4 periods in each day.
At risk of being a nuisance, my first name's got one "L" and three "P"s.
And yes, this is my real surname.
Fixed, sorry.
Thanks.
My experience is that school was at it's worst between around 10-15 years of age, and many of my friends and acquaintances agree. I think the community center idea would work especially well for kids of this age, give them relative freedom to develop while still maintaining a safe space, especially for issues relating to puberty.
freedom at six?? um... you've read lord of the flies, right?
Lord of the Flies was fiction, not anthropology. And the kids were substantially over six.
yeah. unless i misread Scott, the freedom *starts* at six, not ends.
also...
"The undoubted littluns, those aged about six, led a quite
distinct, and at the same time intense, life of their own"
"The purely financial issues seem solvable; if the cost of public education is X, give kids who want charter schools a voucher for 0.75X, and donate the extra 0.25X to the public school system. The charter school will be fine with less money, and every kid who leaves for charter schools will make the public schools better instead of worse."
Would the benefit of the additional funding actually outweigh the loss of the student? Peer groups certainly have a positive impact on students' performance, and I'm not convinced its one that could be offset by throwing money at the problem.
Someone else's imagining of a school in line with what you're describing: https://www.montessoricosmos.org/blog/2021/2/18/the-montessori-unschool-a-manifesto-part-1?fbclid=IwAR3rtK6IbqBe6B8bg0mHavr-OEi6qtdayROKqneK38gLQCK5VqGX9DVw1Zw
"saving the really abused kids is an important goal, and school accomplishes it": One negative utilitarian argument for compulsory students I hear a lot is just that - school is a better place than the worst homes, and importantly, the worst parents would not send their kids to school if it wasn't compulsory and enforced by threat of fines, CPS intervention etc. So unless we find some way to reliably determine who is a terrible parent / what is a terrible household, we need to force everyone into school (or at least have high standards for opting out) to protect the worst-off children.
(A related argument is that making everyone go to the same child prison forestalls the development of isolated bubbles of society where "dangerous things can grow" - that's both a staple of Islamophobe rhetoric and the official rationale for compulsory schooling in Germany - specifically, to prevent Nazi enclaves from forming out of sight.)
Personally l find compulsory child prison to be a disproportionate response to the problems it's meant to solve, and would prefer directly screening for bad parents; but I realize that seems icky and most people would prefer just putting all kids into child prison to doing the hard work of figuring out what we want to expect from parents as a society.
I had a bit of an epiphany related to an ethnic group discriminated against in my region of the world - that I haven't known anyone in that group and neither had my friends, because they avoid compulsory schooling like plague. Hence they're easy to dehumanize and form negative stereotypes about - no positive experiences to anchor versus an occasional negative one.
People living alongside each other, but not contacting is a recipe for strife, ethnic or otherwise. Mixing people up in schools bridges that divide somewhat.
Agreed - though I've seen that same argument applied to compulsory military service, and in both cases I think it identifies a positive side effect but is not sufficient to justify the specific thing. Like, if we want social cohesion, let's talk about how we can best achieve social cohesion - a search that I'm pretty sure would lead us somewhere else than to the institutions we happen to have now.
Justifying school by pointing to its unintended side effects (which it is not optimized or optimizing for) is a classic trap. Let's not fall for it.
I feel very conflicted about this.
My first thought related to childrearing is to send said child is to some weird Montessori thing because it is surely better than the regular school I've been to. In my country it's often said that "childhood/high school/whatever is the best years of your life". To me that feels very alien - adulthood is the best years of your life, because you have control over your environment and the way you spend your time, can minimize contact with people who drive you up the wall and/or want to harm you, can surround yourself with people you actually like etc.
I think school has messed me up in a lot of ways, in particular by introducing a very unhealthy divide between work (motivated externally) and play (which I do because I want to) - which magnifies my natural tendency to procrastinate even on personal projects. Once I decide I want to finish them they go into the "work" category which I will then avoid as much as possible. The complete inability of most people to do self-directed work seems caused by the way we approach schooling.
However, what if it's the other way around? I can only tell by observing adults, myself included, who can get absolutely miserable when unemployed and otherwise unforced to put themselves in motion. If humans are naturally lazy (or energy-conserving) yet inaction makes them unhappy and depressed, forcing people to attend a bullshit job / bullshit education is a net good. In a similar way, many introverts I know would probably have no social skills whatsoever without compulsory schooling, they'd just hole up in their houses and gradually lose the ability to talk. Hell, _this happened to me_ in a few periods in my life. When I was writing a thesis and otherwise not leaving the house at all, despite my normally outgoing personality I recall being anxious about even going to a grocery store.
It's possible that the forcing part needs to stay. Perhaps we can, at least, let the children choose the activities and social contexts they're forced into, by greatly extending the definition of "school" that satisfies the mandatory requirement? Apprenticeships, community centers, all kinds of voluntary classes? Just let the children sort themselves into groups they feel good in, doing something useful and prosocial?
Most of your position on this seems to come down to you much you hated or enjoyed your school life and then reasoning backwards from there. I'm kinda in the middle.
There was a period (maybe 6th to 7th grade) where I would have 100% agreed with Scott that schools are prisons. Bullying at that point was a daily occurrence. Some of my friends were even worse off than me, and I already felt horrible most days.
At some point the bullying just stopped. I don't know if the bullies changed or I changed. Maybe others were still being bullied just as bad and I was just not noticing it? I mainly enjoyed the rest of my school time after that. Maybe Stockholm syndrome.
I might be the only person in the world but I enjoyed most of the novels I had to read and interpret for school. Some authors I discovered through school I still like today.
At the end of my school life I was even pretty friendly with one guy who I remembered as being the worst bully because the two of us were the only two libertarians at school. I eventually stopped being a libertarian, he is an academic economist today. Make of that what you will.
Currently, schooling is the equivalent of having both arranged marriage and banning divorce. The equivalent of the common argument in favor is then that marriage is so beneficial for most, that the fact some people become really unhappy in marriage, or actually get beaten by their partner, is not a reason to make exceptions.
Note that divorce is a major reason for poverty among women and children & staying single makes people poorer, lonelier, etc. And many people in certain nations seem quite happy with their arranged marriage.
Yet arguing for the combination of arranged marriage and banning divorce would make the NYT describe you as an evil neo-reactionary misogynist, especially because it would disallow a minority of women who get abused, to leave their abuser. Yet we know that many kids get horrible abused in schools, but then the mainstream is fine with forcing these kids to stay in that abusive environment and their only solution is anti-bullying programs, even though they seem fairly ineffective. Imagine suggesting that the only allowed solution for abused women is to go to couples therapy and to argue that if therapy doesn't stop the abuse, the women have to stay with their partner.
I think Joshua's comment is very plausible. In the town where I grew up, the path of least resistance went to a fairly bad (at the time—I hear a new head came in and turned things around) secondary school. The motivated parents got their kids into schools the next town over or the local (private) Public school or the Catholic school. I can see that causing a vicious cycle of brain drain on the not-so-good school. I've heard similar things from people who grew up in the few parts of the UK where the Grammar School system remains. (OTOH the Germans, Dutch and Austrians seem okay with their Realschulen and selective Gymnasiums and what have you)
There is another take that is missing from all of this. Many people object to meritocracy not because they object to meritocracy on principle (of course jobs should be worked by those most qualified to perform them!).
However, they argue that the current system does not correctly identify who has this merit. This is because social investment is a person is cumulative, and most people can learn to do most things. Lots of people will make perfectly qualified surgeons if you just assume that's what they're going to be from an early age (and divert social resources to training them).
This allows for a sort of inter-generational transfer of wealth under the guise of meritocracy, which I believe some have termed 'opportunity hoarding.' It's probably less bad than other forms of hereditary privilige, since it requires work to maintain and you can still lose if if you're not able to learn or perform well enough even with these advantages. But it's still bad that some kids, who might turn out to be brilliant scientist, dont ever get the chance because they got low-grade lead poisoning, went to a bad school, were socially punished for studying outside of gender norms, etc etc.
So I think probably one of the major and most compelling arguments against meritocracy is that it attributes differences in capability to innate qualities, rather than environmental ones. This is not to say that innate ability doesn't play a factor: it's a multiplies, and perhaps has larger effects at the tails. But for most people and most jobs, these aren't the dominant effects. The main concern, then is that meritocracy is a useful excuse for continuing to ignore inherent structural inequalities in opportunity.
Plus, this sort of thing can happen without there being any conscious discrimination at all. Look up why many professional hockey players are born between January and March, and few are born between October and December.
I think the other part of this critique is that it is *worse* than purely hereditary privilege, since it not only results in unequal results, but also in the notion that the privileged are privileged because they *deserve* it, and thus don't have a sense of nobelese oblige, and lack humility. (and those not privileged are not only not privileged, but live with the sense that it's because we're unworthy).
I think that Americans have far too much hope and fear about charter schools.
I live in The Netherlands where there are very many charter schools and have been for a long time. There is no real evidence that this has caused inequality or has had an impact on the quality of schools. The Dutch PISA results have historically been much better than average for the EU, but the same is true for Finland, which has only public schools. So if you can do much better than average by having almost no private or charter schools and by having way more charter schools than average, the percentage doesn't seem to matter.
So it seems to me that charter schools are largely a distraction and don't result in the kind of significant changes that many Americans hope or fear will happen.
---
For those who want to know some Dutch school system history:
The French who occupied my country from 1795-1813 made a law that forced all schools to be public. They were still religious, but based on a very liberal and generic Christianity. The result was a century-long conflict that is know as the 'school struggle.' The first part of the struggle involved the right to start schools for a specific denomination.
After a new constitution was introduced and a fight over the interpretation of that constitution, denominational schools were allowed in 1857, although they didn't get equal funding. The second part of the struggle was a fight to get equal funding. This was resolved in 1917 after a compromise between conservatives and liberals (which also resulted in universal suffrage).
Since then, you can start a Dutch charter school with full funding, if you can make a good case that you will attract enough students and can provide a quality education. The government is then obligated to provide the school building and pay the same amount per student that public schools get. A side effect of this law initially intended to enable denominational schools, it that it is also relatively easy to start schools with a different pedagogic approach, like Montessori, Dalton, Jenaplan or Waldorf.
That sounds like something in between charter schools and a voucher system. I don't think there is any state in the U.S. where any group that can make such a case gets to start a charter school with full government funding. It sounds as though your charter schools can be religious, which I don't think is true in the U.S.
They are often officially religious, although with the secularization of society, most are merely nominally so. The one I went to had one or two teachers that started the day with prayer, a tiny minority and they clearly were the last holdouts. Other than that, there was not much sign that they were religious.
These schools are still liked by many secular people, because the nominally religious schools tend to be better, probably largely due to selection effects, which seem to be unintentional (many depend on 'voluntary' contributions by parents to do spend on nice things that the government won't pay for, which they like so much that the contributions are not made all that voluntary; Muslims are put off by nominally Christian schools and the general self-reinforcing effect where more capable parents pick the better schools, which then have better kids, which makes the school better, etc).
We do have a bible belt where there are more orthodox schools, who seem to object to the usual stuff (gay sex being OK, Darwinism, casual/sexy clothing, etc).
>I feel bad for giving such emotionally loaded examples - saving the really abused kids is an important goal, and school accomplishes it.
Does it? How? Isn't school usually during work hours, when parents aren't home? Even if a parent is not at work during school hours, can't a kid just go anywhere else? To a friend, or just join other kids on the street? And if a kid is locked at home, social services definitely should have already taken them.
As far as I can tell, schools have three effects on abused kids:
1) It marks them with bad grades, giving abusive parents motivation and excuse to abuse their kids more. (Also, I suspect, a lot of otherwise nice parents misguidedly think they HAVE to abuse kids with less-than-perfect grades and if they don't, they are BAD PARENTS who DON'T CARE ABOUT THEIR CHILDREN'S FUTURE)
2) It takes their day time they could have used to mentally recharge and prepare for parent's return.
3) It gives them homework, preventing them from escaping abuse in the evening, and additionally enraging abusive parents.
Sending everyone to school to help abused kids is not like forcing women to marry moderately abusive men because they might marry someone worse. It's like forcing women to marry an additional abusive man who comes when their real husband is at work because women can't vote, too dumb to know what's good for them and honestly just fuck them, it's not like they count as people anyway.
Unless I'm missing something huge (would like to know what if so!), it was the most wrong individual sentence you ever wrote on your blog, and I have read everything!
Of cause schools can't save every single case, but I think you are making too world way too simple. It sounds a bit like you have a special case in mind. The effects you name of cause can happen, but why do you think it always plays out this way? And you also miss a lot of other effects.
First of all the many signs of the very worst abuses can be seen by a teacher who than calls the police.
Secondly the kid gets to know other adults and children and hat a chance to learn that the way their parents are is not the normal way humans behave.
There is even a real chance to get some friend and have fun.
The most positive effects do probably not come from the way schools work, but from the mere fact that the kids are taken out of the environment controlled by their parents and get in touch with normal society. Abusive persons often are very good in covering up whats going on and a key part of that is to isolate the victim socially.
But even your points can as well act out the opposite:
1) in comparison and competition with the classmates they can find where they are good in, or at least see that they are not that miserable piece of scrap their parents perhaps make them believe.
2) most people can better recharge when they are distracted from the problem and for a while forget about it. So sitting at home in fear of doing a mistake and waiting in anxiety is worse. And not all parents work.
3) Homework can also serve as a very good excuse to escape.
Hm. I think I see why you disagree, and yet you didn't say anything I don't know. I'll state my case precisely: Scott seems to think that school, even if it harms some (most) kids, manages to help the most abused children. It's an important job and one of the reasons not to dismantle the school system. I disagree: I think school harms children who experience abuse at home, and possibly harms them more than the average child. That's on average, not in every case! Surely there are examples of good teachers noticing abuse and helping in many ways. Still the system is not worth it.
Here I am comparing school to a system that existed for hundreds of years and still exist in many places today: children spend a lot of time outside, in groups, doing whatever. Some adults who have time watch out for them. Kids are often invited to each other's houses. That's it, hardly seems utopian or unrealistic. Back to points:
1) Yes, teachers can spot abuse. Who is more likely to spot abuse per unit of time: a teacher who has to lecture a class of 25-35 kids at a time, making sure not to deviate from a strict curriculum? Or a grandparent, talking to their granddaughter's friend over dinner? If the latter, school prevents uncovering abuse instead of helping it.
2) Same: When is a kid more likely to learn that the way her parents are treating her is not normal: listening for the n-th time about supply and demand curves? Or hanging out with friends?
3) A chance to get friends and have fun! In school! What? It's forbidden to talk and do anything enjoyable during class. In my school teachers used to make friends sit as far as possible from each other to prevent this very thing you say school can help with. And everything kids do during recess they can do outside school too, except they don't have a fifteen(five)-minute limit on any social interaction.
4) School does take children from abusive homes temporarily (again, only when most parents are at work and can't abuse their children anyway), but without school, what do you think children would do with that time? Sit alone in dark closets, careful not to interact with society now that school is not forcing them? No, children would socialize more and parents who never let their kids play with other kids would be immediately suspicious.
5) School sucks at creating good competitions. It felt bad hearing from teachers that our group was the worst in school, and it felt bad when a teacher singled me out and screamed at other children "Why can't you be like Ivan?!". I felt good winning city-wide competitions, but I and another girl I knew took virtually every first place in our age group, and we were not the ones abused - abused kids didn't win anything. You know what felt better that all that? Playing with my friends after school. I was probably the most successful student of my age in my town and I got the most self-esteem when I was making my friends laugh. School just can't create an atmosphere of healthy competition like children themselves can. Very few kids (by design!) can find any joy in success at school, most are hurt in their self-esteem.
6) Try saying to an actual student that Algebra is better rest than *anything* the student himself can come up with and watch the reaction. Again, some (very few) students have a favorite subject or two they can relax in. Mostly school hates relaxation and increases anxiety (there were studies confirming it!).
7) Homework can not serve as an excuse to escape. My own parents, who are way nicer than most, never accepted an excuse "I'm busy with homework" to not give me grief about something if they wanted to. Parents who actually beat their children are even less likely to.
In general, school is an enormous burden placed on kids. Some kids (like me) have a lot of slack in their lives and can deal with it. Children with horrible families have way less slack in terms of free time, ability, self-esteem, mental energy and more, and so the burden almost certainly harms them disproportionately.
It depends on how you define school. I didn't want to defend schools the way they work right now, and judging from many comments here your schoola in the US could very well be worse than what we have here in Europe.
I was starting at Scotts 'child prison' so I was thinking about an institution were all children have to spend a relevant amount of time together with other children that are not only from the same 'bubble' of society. The imported part is, that there are no excuses allowed so there is no chance for parents to isolate their children.
So my point is, that there should be some kind of school and of cause it should be implemented in the way it helps the most.
Why do you assume that the culture kids will be taught in your institution will be superior to the culture their parents would choose for them? There seems an implicit assumption in discussions of this sort, often attacks on home schooling, that any parent who doesn't approve of the cultural lessons his kid will learn in the local school is an ignorant fundamentalist. Also that people other than parents are more competent to decide how children should be brought up than their parents are.
Consider, for example, hard working religious parents in the black inner city who want their kids to turn out like them rather than like the average of the local high school.
I do not think nor did i say that the culture at school would be superior. But i also don't think that any school can 'overwrite' the culture that is lived and tough by the parents, so it doesn't matter much if one of them is 'superior'.
It is about seeing there is a choice and having a fair chance to compare. Parents can plant a seed, and advertise for what they think is best, but in the end every human has to choose for them self. Parents trying too hard to influence the outcome often cause the opposite.
If the culture of the parents is too constraining (often with the best in mind, but overly protective) seeing other cultures can be liberating. On the other hand, if children have a loving family living by honest values, this will stick. Perhaps it takes some experiences, but than they can value their culture at home much better.
Parents can plant a seed, and advertise for what they think is best, but in the end every human has to choose for them self. Parents trying too hard to influence the outcome often cause the opposite.
There is even more about this. Imagine someone growing up only in the best culture were everyone is nice and honest and true. Then this young adult gets out in the world and has never (practically) learned how to identify a liar, trickster or bully. This can turn out to become a much harder lesson than it had been in the schoolyard where you can get the support of your parents, hopefully teachers and the opponent is also just a kid. Therefore there has to be a place were kids can play and experiment with their power, skills and relations It does not have to be comfortable, but there should be some kind of independent supervision that takes care that it does not get real dangerous. This safety net is the main point that makes an organized place (you can call it institution) much better than just randomly playing outside.
Of cause the current schools will often not achieve this. But i think it is better to fix the schools instead of burning down the schools or leave there all kids whose parents do not have the resources (this is not only about money) to organize something better privately.
I don't know if you are familiar with _The Nurture Assumption_. The author argues that, for most kids, it's the peer group, typically in school, not the family, that is the main factor determining adult personality.
> your school in the US
Damn it, I was supposed to be undercover! What gave me out as an American? Was it my incredibly american name?
Having read a number of the comments and the assumptions contained therein in the original post and this one, I kind of feel compelled to weigh in. As this is my first comment here: hi all and thank you Scott for the amazing work you do.
DISCLAIMER: The content in this post is purely anecdotal/experience based. If that doesn't interest you, skip over it I promise you you won't miss anything.
So I went to a Montessori School. I'll try to outline as briefly as possible the framework this entails: Students were giving a lot of freedom from the very beginning (talking about 6 year olds here) and the focus was on empowering them to make their own choices. In short, I think it worked and proves that, at least in some cases, you can let kids decide what they want to do and what and how they want to learn and end up with kids consciously deciding to learn things.
About half of the time spend in school, you would be literally free to do whatever you wanted. You were obliged to spend it in the classroom (although you could take bathroom breaks whenever you wanted) but that's it. If you wanted to do math, you could go to your teacher and ask for some math problems, if you felt like reading a book, that was fine. A friend of mine and I decided we wanted to draw a comic set in the world our favourite video game and we did that and nothing but that for multiple weeks. Nobody had a problem with it. Students were free to wander around the classroom, sit on a different table or on the ground, even rearrange tables if they wanted to engage in some form of group project. I don't remember there being anything remotely describable as anarchy.
There were no grades. From time to time, you would get tested in this subject or that and afterwards your teacher would tell you how you did and how you could improve. At the end of each term, you would receive a written assessment of your learning progress from your teacher, about half a page for each subject and also stuff like general behaviour. Furthermore, you yourself would write an assesment of how you viewed your efforts and your progress (again, starting from grade 1). I remember that being really hard but these are now cherished documents of a younger me's view on themselves.
Ages 6 - 9 and 9 - 12 would be educated together in one classroom. As students mostly chose what they wanted to spend their time on, that worked surprisingly well. If you had trouble with a certain task the idea was that you would first go to another, usually older student and ask them about it and only if that didn't solve your issue you would ask the teacher. I remember that being mostly enjoyable and I found explaining things to younger students was a great way to test your own understanding of a matter.
There was no fixed curriculum either. If you took longer than other kids to learn to write, you were encouraged to keep working on it but nothing else happened. If you wanted to repeat a certain exercise for the 10th time, you were free to do so. If you felt you got it after the first time, you could get a harder one or move on to a different topic. There were learning goals sorted by year but how and when exactly you achieved them was entirely up to you.
There were no homeworks. Occasionally you would be asked to do presentations or group projects (of which you could usually choose the specific topic yourself out of a broad range) and these could require you to go to the library to get some material or something of the likes. You could take care of those during the freely assignable school times or at home.
So where did that leave the kids? I decided to leave that school at the age of 12, which to this day I consider one of the greatest mistakes of my live but it gave me the opportunity to observe how I and other kids from that school would fare when tested the regular way. Pretty much all of them seemed to do just fine, with very few being true all-As kind of students but with nobody really struggling too much. Neither me nor the many people I talked to, including those that switched at a much later age, found any noticeable deficit in curriculum and most went on to finish high school with good-to-very-good grades.
Of course I am aware that such a school would heavily select parents for certain traits. While, as it was a public school, it wasn't a selection by wealth (I was raised by a single mom and money was definitely an issue) I would expect parents who really cared about their childs education to be more likely to choose such a school. Which definitely would bias the results of my anecdotal observation.
However, even if we assume that most of the kids on that school would have finished high school with good grades regardless of which elementary school (which honestly I doubt) they did, there is still one crucial difference: Me and most people that I talked to (I'd guess n~100) who attended this or a similar kind of school enjoyed it. Very much. At the end of the holidays I was actually getting a bit impatient to get back to school, to start learning again. And nobody, not a single one experienced it as the living hell that I find so much writing about here and elsewhere.
So why am I writing this? It seems from my observation that you can achieve, at the very least, similar results of regular modes of education with MUCH more freedom and MUCH less suffering on the side of the children. The model is certainly not perfect (and, as always, implemented even less perfectly) but it goes against the conventional wisdom and assumptions about childrens behaviour in so many ways with results so far from what I have heard people express that I think it is worthwhile to at least know it exists. That it is possible to do things differently and to at least not necessarily have it descend into the sort of prisoner-experiment-survival-fight that a lot of people seem to be envisioning.
This sounds amazing.
How about the social relationships within the school? Were there children that had trouble making friends because everyone was involved in their own thing?
It all sounds like a sink-or-swim environment where you can have the time of your life if you have initiative and drive, but mostly waste your time if you do not. Were there children that struggled with the lack of structure?
On the social framework I want to say it wasn't paradise: some kids were more popular than others and there were still school yard fights and the likes. But honestly, if anything there were more opportunities to make friends than anywhere else: after all, you were allowed to get up during school hours and just walk up to another student and talk to them. I think the vast majority of kids likes to do stuff with other kids more than doing it alone, so being involved in your own thing doesn't seem like too much of an issue. At any rate, I have not talked to anyone who felt completely alone and much less bullied.
I'd kind of say the same about getting used to the lack of structure. Some did it better with it than others but I don't recall anyone being completely lost. After all, if you didn't know what to do you could always ask your teacher to give you some tasks (or, if it seemed you were really falling behind in some area, the teacher might tell you themselves they thought it was a good idea if you would work more on this or that). It's not that there was no structure, just that the structure forced on anyone who would rather do something else.
Sounds very attractive. What country was this in? How common were such schools?
"I don't remember there being anything remotely describable as anarchy."
Relative to the usual model, what you are describing is anarchy — individuals deciding what to do for themselves rather than being told what to do by someone else. What it isn't is chaos.
They essentially described how a pretty standard Montessori elementary school runs. They're not all over the place, but common enough. Sadly, most people are only familiar with Montessori day cares stopping at age 5, which tend to not be run as well/as sophisticated.
We started a K-8 charter school with a similar model (gpacharter.org) a decade or so ago which is still going strong. One of the most difficult parts was finding/training teachers. Most teaching college graduates just don't get it.
"Most teaching college graduates just don't get it."
Could this be a symptom of 'the cult of smart'? Not the book (i didn't read it), but what it seems to talk about: that theoretical skills and knowledge is valued very high and every else like personal development, working and thinking independently, learning by experience, cooperating and so on, get almost forgotten meanwhile.
My wife is a secondary Montessori teacher who taught at a Montessori HS. There are some really neat things you can do when you get the Montessori method into the hands of older kids.
For example, the kids were supposed to run a shop (for learning about economics and stuff). They got together and decided they wanted to run a pizza parlor. The kids had to do some research on how to build the pizza oven, made the rounds and got materials donated, built it, and figured out the pizza recipes on their own (with some guidance from the teachers). Then they sold pizzas they made and used the money to go on 'intercessions' - basically long-distance field trips to go help clean up after natural disasters, or learn history from first-hand sightseeing.
The hardest part about it was that the HS was a public school. The school district didn't like that one of their schools didn't have the same cookie-cutter vision as the rest of the district so they had to constantly fight against a dozen initiatives coming down from on high. Every state and local politician would want to layer on a new 'solution' to fix schools, which meant teachers like my wife had to spend another hour after school going through the motions for a program that had no idea what her classroom was dealing with, but promised magical results. Nobody ever ended the old failed programs, of course.
Fast forward: we moved to a state with a strong charter school program and my wife moved into a new secondary Montessori program. The biggest difference with the charter? It stripped away the layers of bureaucracy. Finally freed of the politicians from both sides of the aisle trying to 'fix' education, she could focus on the actual problem of educating the children. I still think Montessori is good for some kids and not necessarily for all (as with any educational approach, kids aren't one-size-fits-all), but I do like the emphasis on the kids becoming independent learners. Still, maybe the biggest thing we can do is stop trying to 'fix' schools, and instead empower them to fix themselves.
The thing I found interesting about this discussion, and the unpleasantness of last weekend, was how it highlighted the degrees to which various parties index on agreeableness.
By agreeableness, I don't necessarily mean personal pleasantness or nastiness, though I suspect they are somewhat correlated. But how much people value agreeing with the right people or disagreeing with the wrong people.
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I think the current mainstream internet culture is characterized by a strong emphasis on agreeableness. I think Matthew Yglesias summed it up well in his post last weekend:
"But everyone also believes that sexism and misogyny are significant problems in the world, and that the people struggling against those problems are worthy of admiration and praise. So to leap into a conversation about sexism and misogyny yelling “WELL ACTUALLY GIOLLA AND KAJONIUS FIND THAT SEX DIFFERENCES IN PERSONALITY ARE LARGER IN COUNTRIES WITH MORE GENDER EQUALITY” would be considered a rude and undermining thing to do"
Again, this should not be confused with personal pleasantness -- this agreeableness can manifest itself in some ugly ways like Twitter mobs. But there is a sense that if people are fighting on the side of the angels; defined as against racism, sexism, homo/transphobia or Trump, then it's best to nod along and ignore any inconvenient facts, lest it provide ammunition to the other side. In fact, they are unlikely to follow paths of research that may lead to inconvenient facts.
Critics would call this careerism and groupthink. It may be a response to the media industry being driven by social media. More charitable people would consider it an understandable response to a president who was a blowhard and stoked resentment. Regardless, it's there.
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Scott indexes a little lower on agreeableness (though again, seems to be more personally pleasant). He will not stop digging for truth, even if it might lead to a conclusion that puts him at odds with people supporting a cause he may believe in. He'll listen to and allow in his forum voices that might be shunned elsewhere.
I'm glad there's people like him doing it. But I confess it's not for everyone. I wouldn't even go down the road of researching racial differences in IQ. I'm still not convinced it's prudent to even take up that question, given the light/heat ratio such a discussion will produce. But I'm glad someone is doing it. It can lead us to taking a possible pandemic seriously before we might have otherwise.
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On the other end of the spectrum we have Frederik de Boer. As Scott noted at the beginning of the review, he's someone who doesn't seem to agree with anybody.
It seems that for de Boer, not only does he not care about being in agreement with the right people, he cares very much about *not* being in agreement with the wrong kind of people.
So, if his research leads him to conclusions that are uncomfortably close to Charles Murray, he writes a several page rant about how loathsome he thinks Murray's ideas are, and anyone who might agree with them.
Acknowledging how cruel schools can be to some people might land him in alignment with people like Christian home-schoolers and proponents of more traditional families, and we can't have that! So it's back to the standard prescriptions of universal pre-K and after-school programs so kids can be supervised while parents are at work where we belong!
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I agree (ahem) with Yglesias that we have swung too far to the agreeable side of the spectrum. I'm not sure Scott's at the optimal point, but I'm glad there are people pulling us in that direction. And I think that as Trump shrinks in our rear view mirror, and we realize that our pandemic response could have benefitted from some unorthodox thinking, we'll move in that direction.
> I think there's a weak straw-mannish version of (2) which is something like "because I'm smart, I naturally should get more money than dumb people, to reward me for being an inherently better person". I think the stronger version is something like "very few people can be surgeons, lots of people can be fast food workers, if someone is smart enough to do either one we want to incentivize them to become a surgeon, so surgeons should be paid more." If you take out a lot of steps, it looks like "smart -> pay more", but it's not quite as moralistic as the straw man.
I mentioned this no reddit, but I'll mention it here too: you don't need to have smart people paid more to incentivize them to be doctors. Pay them more for being doctors, pay them less (i.e. via taxes) for being smart.
I won't say taxing IQ isn't controversial, but we also shouldn't pretend there is no alternative to smart people being richer than dumb people. Society currently assigns economic spoils at birth via IQ, and society could very easily undo this without destroying the incentives of smart people to pursue important/hard jobs. We choose not to.
And to add: once you've heard the idea of modifying people's taxes by IQ, you're no longer "reasonable capitalist caring about incentives vs reasonable communist caring about the poor". You now need to pick between (1) a policy that reduces inequality without reducing production or (2) enshrining the legitimacy of income that was won by cosmic lottery.
Unsurprisingly almost everyone I've talked to about this has gone for 2.
Unsurprisingly, legal discrimination based on genetic background sounds (rightly) horrifying to almost everyone.
Measurement problem. How would you properly measure IQ when people know that they'd be highly taxed for having a high value in it?
Progressive income taxes are not economically efficient, but they are taxing something very measurable.
I think the idea is to institute this tax after we have found most of the genetic determinants of IQ. So the only way of avoiding it for yourself is to bribe or somehow follow the people testing your genes.
There could still be some long run elasticity, with high IQ people having fewer children due to being poorer, low IQ people more, assuming that children are a normal good.
Children are an inferior good. As incomes drop, consumption of children increases.
How would this not still reduce smart people's incentive to work? They could certainly work fewer hours and do lower quality work. It's not just about allocating them into the right professions. It's also more important to society how much smart people work relative to how much others work.
I would add on to Pete Shenkin's comment regarding vocational schools. The public HS I attended from 87-90 wasn't a dedicated vocational school but it still had vocational/shop classes that included wood-working, drafting, home-ec, and auto shop. It at least provided alternatives and creative outlets to learning that the required classes could leave one wanting. I think the push towards STEM in the 90s caused these programs to be cut, then subsequently, art & music classes as being worthless for creating a society of engineers and doctors. As a student back then I bridged the gap between enjoying doing moment-diagrams in my statics classes and doing woodworking projects. Learning opportunities that my parents couldn't provide and ultimately led me away from wanting to be an engineer and veer into architecture.
The learning environment over the last 20 yrs for middle and HS kids has been this relentless drive towards STEM learning (with the whip-hand held by tech telling everyone that the only way to save American kids from a life of wrenching pipes or welding steel is to teach them code) and the media, parents and politicians lapping that up.
Believe me, I enjoyed math, statics and chemistry until I got into a University Engineering school and loathed every minute of my classes. Only once I started taking creative electives did I realize differential equations, learning Fortran, and plodding through thermodynamics did I realize my talents lay adjacent to engineering via architecture. I'm also fortunate/unfortunate enough to be self-didactic enough to want to learn a lot of things without becoming an expert in everything.
This segues into the meritocracy side of the equation. Not every surgeon is smart. Not every engineer is smart. Not every architect or lawyer is smart. But these professions have managed to gatekeep the flow of folks into their respective fields to also keep social respect, accolades and pay higher. It's always fun listening to my very smart brother-in-law who is finishing his medical fellowship talk about the dumb doctors who he has to learn under and who are well-paid despite the fact. I can say the same for many formula-smart engineers who are not common-sense bright. I also know a few tradespeople who never went to college but are smart and make good money.
I think the last 25 years of our collective shift towards STEM learning as the be-all-end-all of education by forcing a certain-type of meritocratic learning and social stratification has been a big disservice to society in general. It wrongly assumes that STEM will lift all boats (tech certainly thinks so) but it just furthers stratification and marginalizes the type of Renaissance learning that leads to more well-rounded individuals.
Maybe a return to trade/vocational classes to primary learning environments would allow us to see a shift in making learning enjoyable for everyone and not as either a prison-sentence for 18yrs or simply the means to earning a future high 6-figure income.
https://i.redd.it/fzrdqksju9i61.jpg is a school sucks meme for your perusal.
> The purely financial issues seem solvable; if the cost of public education is X, give kids who want charter schools a voucher for 0.75X, and donate the extra 0.25X to the public school system. The charter school will be fine with less money, and every kid who leaves for charter schools will make the public schools better instead of worse.
I'm not sure I follow. This increases the per capita funding for the public school system, but still decreases its funding total. There are per capita costs for school (textbooks, materials), and there are non-per capita costs (like teachers). I'm not entirely sure that a class of 30 with 30.25X funding is better than a class of 31 with 31X funding.
To extend the difference a little, a class of 20 with 22.5X funding vs a class of 30 with 30X funding is still something I wouldn't be sure about. If the class of 30 spent 21X on a teacher, and 9X on materials (.3X per person), then a class of 20 would have 16.5X on a teacher, assuming the same material costs. I know lower class size helps, but surely a teacher paid a little over 25% more would too, so I still don't know which wins out, or if the winner is consistent with varying numbers.
It *might* be true that there are economies of scale, but it also *might* be false. People who want everyone in one basket they manage like to say "economy of scale" as if it answers everything, but scale brings both benefits and problems.
Right, but that was my point. I don't know which way it falls, so it seems difficult to claim that Scotts proposal here constitutes a solution. It might, but it might not, and you need more argument to resolve that.
"and there are non-per capita costs (like teachers). "
???
Why do you think the number of teachers required doesn't scale with the number of students? Do you think a school with a thousand students has the same number of teachers as one with five hundred?
Because you can scale class size. A school with a thousand students probably has more teachers than one with five hundred, but not necessarily twice as many. It could just have bigger class sizes. Therefore, teachers are not per capita.
A school with 500 students can have larger classes too. Presumably both schools try to set class size at what they think is the best value. Why do you expect the larger school to have bigger classes?
I expect rough correlation between teachers and students, but not necessarily linear correlation. That is, most of the time, I'd expect more students to equate to more teachers, but not always, and rarely perfectly.
For example, my toy example in my first comment had a class of 30, where 1 extra student does or doesn't go to a charter school. If that student choses not to go to a charter school, the public school is not going to hire .03 extra teachers for that year, they're just going to have that teacher teach a class of 31. I suppose it's possible, but I'd be surprised if the teacher even gets paid 3% extra.
The second toy example might fall apart on this. That is, if enough students decided not to go to charter school that class sizes increased by 50%, there probably would be more teachers hired. On the other hand, this might not be how it works either. Imagine a small school that has one teacher for each of the 3 R's: reading, writing, and arithmetic. If they get 50% more students, they can't just hire 1.5 more teachers, and even if they hire 1 or 2 more teachers, which subject(s) get(s) left out? This is a silly toy example, but because teachers are a discrete resource, there will be parts on the curve where stuff like this happens to a lesser or greater degree. In fact, I think any school with X teachers for each required class would run into this problem with any percent increase that isn't a multiple of 1/X.
Very aside comment, I ordered a copy of "The Bell Curve" yesterday. I know of two people who claim to have read it... so I'll be the third. I liked "Coming Apart" by Murray, which I think was described as an update of the Bell Curve without the forbidden topic. I mostly feel that Charles should be given some credit for pointing out the effect of genetics, intelligence and selection. Rather than being demonized for sharing an uncomfortable truth.
In the interest of adding data to the competing anecdotes of whether kids hate school: The Georgia Department of Education surveys students on school climate annually and requires public schools to administer the results to at least 75% of students in grades 3-12.
372K students in grades 3-5 responded to the statement, “I like school”: 35% Always; 26% Often; 34% Sometimes; 5% Never.
690K students in grades 6-12 responded to the statement, “I like school”: 16% Strongly Agree; 56% Somewhat Agree; 16% Somewhat Disagree; 13% Strongly Disagree.
The elementary survey is 15 questions long, but the middle/high survey is over 100 questions long. However, “I like school” is the first question for either survey, so I’m reasonably confident in its validity.
Another relevant question: 372K students in grades 3-5 responded to the statement, “How often in the past couple of months have kids picked on you by threatening you?”: 70% Never; 15% Once or twice; 8% A few times; 4% Many times; 2% Every day.
The results for “How often in the past couple of months have kids picked on you by hitting or kicking you?” are pretty similar.
Data is here (in a very unhelpful Excel format): https://www.gadoe.org/schoolsafetyclimate/GSHS-II/Pages/GSHS-Results.aspx
I summarized the results for Atlanta Public Schools here: https://apsinsights.org/2020/03/17/climate-survey-2019/
In the bottom part of that post, I briefly describe analysis that shows the 6-12 grade question, “I feel my school has high standards for achievement” has the strongest relationship to student growth (schools that see the most improvement in test scores tend to have high standards). And the most predictive question for elementary schools is the threats question.
The point of meritocracy isn't to move everyone into the upper class, it's just to create a maximally productive society. Assume that education has the ability to create a surgeon who, without education, would have been a general laborer (this may or may not be true).
In a "meritocratic" capitalist society, that's good for the surgeon - she gets more money. It's also good for people who need surgery - if she's a good surgeon, they get better surgery, if she's a bad surgeon, she provides an alternative that decreases surgery costs society-wide. Note that this doesn't have anything to do with what the surgeon "deserves" as Scott points out. It's just people making choices that help them. There aren't as many surgeons as general laborers.
But, and here's the part I feel like people miss, it's *also* good for general laborers. With people removed from the general labor pool, the cost of general labor goes up. So when people say "education is the silver bullet that solves poverty" it doesn't necessarily mean "education will turn all factory workers into programmers." It means "education, done well, will place our citizens more optimally in a way that fills empty programming jobs *and* makes factory workers more valuable by alleviating the glut."
You can ask whether education actually does this - maybe it gates high-skilled jobs more than it fills them by forcing all high-skilled workers to be credentialed. But I get very annoyed with people who talk about "meritocracy" being unfair (it is), without asking, "okay, but even if it is unfair, is it better for everyone?" If I'm going to lose in every possible world, even if it's completely out of my control, please do not waste your breath arguing about how unfair it is that some people have to lose. Please instead just let me lose in a world where losing has a good consolation prize.
One thing missing from the ideal schooling system you describe is civics education. Schools teach subjects that make each individual student no better (or not much better) off, but benefit society as a whole. Broadly I think this includes some math, a fair amount of history, a fair amount of science, and a bit of actual civics. Few students would choose to study these topics, but we're all better off when more students understand these things.
Imagine if no one got the lesson on the balance of power between the federal government branches. We might have one branch ceding lawmaking power to the other two. Or if everyone skipped the lessons on trends versus data points in statistics, a bunch of people would be fooled by arguments like "winter is cold still, therefore climate change isn't real". In reality, just imagine how much worse it could be.
I think you are vastly overestimating how successful schools are in teaching. I doubt many people, a decade after graduating from high school, remember anything at all about trends versus data points. If you watch the discussion of covid infection rates, you may notice that most people don't see the difference between level and rate of change. They explain the sharp drop starting in early January as due to the fact that people were no longer partying because the holiday is over, without realizing that that implies a change in the rate of change of infection rates, not a change in the level. It's only if the rate of change goes negative that the level starts to go down.
Similarly for most other issues. And that's aside from case where what the schools teach isn't true. My elder son's school taught about AIDS as if it were a normal venereal disease, not one spread mostly by anal intercourse and, secondarily, blood transfusions and needle sharing. What schools teach about politically relevant issues such as the causes of the Great Depression depends on the political views of the teachers and school boards, not on the evidence.
These are good points. But I think we should consider the alternative here. In the Ideal School System, would people have more or less statistical training. At least most of us know medians and averages, if nothing else. Furthermore, while some schools teach incorrect or misleading things, in general they teach correct information. Their mathematics and science might be dull sometimes (personally I'm in the School was Pretty Decent camp), but they're correct. History might not be your preferred selection or versions of events, but if kids chose their classes like in the ISS, a much larger group of people hasn't studied the American Revolution or Nazi Germany (Godwin points!).
I agree with @Erwin below. Even very basic elements of schooling confer collective benefits on society. Maybe the ISS accomplishes some of these, maybe more kids choose to take courses and do so more willingly than I expect, but I think these benefits would be net decreased in a system as described.
In the ideal school system, someone would tell the kids that _How to Lie With Statistics_ is a really fun book, some of the kids would believe that, read it, and tell other kids that it was true. More generally, a school system would work better if, like unschooling, it had a strong incentive to offer kids things they wanted to read, material they wanted to learn. That's less likely to happen in a context where the kid has almost no power over what he is being taught.
You go in an very important direction, but kind of stop half way, by sticking to the intellectual education. I think the most important thing people learn at school are things that we usually don't even think about. There they see how different people are out there in the society they once will live in and learn some kind of strategies to deal with them.
That doesn't require school, just some context where they are interacting with other people. Some such contexts would have a narrower range of people than school, some a wider. The people I got to know in the SCA or SSC are much more diverse than the people I went to school with.
Basically i agree, it can look much different and better than today's schools.
But it has to mandatory, with no chance for parents to isolate their children until they are adults. And this is almost Scotts definition of a 'child prison' as a institution where every is forced into by law.
You assume that the only alternative to parental tyranny is state tyranny. In almost all contexts of a modern society, parents don't have the option of isolating their children until they are adults, because the children are interacting with other children, watching television, reading books, ... . You seem to be imagining a closed compound of cultists, which is a pretty rare pattern outside paranoid imaginations.
If you want to phrase it like this, yes I assume the only way to break though parental tyranny are strict rules of society. The state is just the current form the society organizes on a bigger scale.
It was a specific man i know that convinced me about the importance of this. He was quite supportive of homeschooling to keep out the evil state tyranny from his family He was also very good in leaving a positive impression with people he who met him first and hiding how tyrannic his ideas of family were. From this example i know, that none of us would recognize someone like this if we don't know them very well. But trying to recognize tyrannic parents would produce a lot of false positives and do more harm than good. Modern media can help for sure, but things like books and friends from the neighborhood can be banned too easily. So the only way I see, is to ensure enough social contacts.
I welcome alternative ideas to ensure save social contacts that the parents can effectively ban. And please also think of people living in dangerous neighborhoods or remotely in the countryside, so it is not suspicious if the kids don't just play outside or don't meet any other kids there.
You appear to be generalizing from a sample size of one. My sample size isn't very large but it's larger.
How is anyone taking this article seriously? Such fundamental misconceptions about 1. how to create better learning environments and 2. economic value provided by specialized labor.
1. How to create a better learning envrionment:
Instead of pointing at the good schools (the ones with the best results) and saying, "How come all of their parents care about their education? How dare they all sit in class well behaved! We need to break that up so that those 'special' kids are evenly dispersed." How about you take the principles that are established in those schools and imitate them. What principles are those? The very ones you complain are selected for in those schools: mainly 1. ability of the child to act civilized in a classroom setting and 2. parents who care about their education.
2. Economic value:
The people who get paid more in society don't get paid more because we value intelligence more that stupidity, or however you want to label that spectrum. They get compensated more because of scarcity. There are less people who can build good software than can mow a lawn. I can agree with you all the day about gatekeeping problems, especially in well established industries like medicine. But there are only certain people who can do certain things. This alone doesn't make them receive higher payment. It is that fact which leads their labor to be competed over. The fact that multiple employers will seek them out is where their salary is determined.
I mean these are so fundamental and your article laughs in the faces of these tenants. I understand how education and gatekeeping are tied into both of these, but I think your article doesn't deal w/ that properly.
How is anyone taking this article seriously? Such fundamental misconceptions about 1. how to create better learning environments and 2. economic value provided by specialized labor.
1. How to create a better learning envrionment:
Instead of pointing at the good schools (the ones with the best results) and saying, "How come all of their parents care about their education? How dare they all sit in class well behaved! We need to break that up so that those 'special' kids are evenly dispersed." How about you take the principles that are established in those schools and imitate them. What principles are those? The very ones you complain are selected for in those schools: mainly 1. ability of the child to act civilized in a classroom setting and 2. parents who care about their education.
2. Economic value:
The people who get paid more in society don't get paid more because we value intelligence more that stupidity, or however you want to label that spectrum. They get compensated more because of scarcity. There are less people who can build good software than can mow a lawn. I can agree with you all the day about gatekeeping problems, especially in well established industries like medicine. But there are only certain people who can do certain things. This alone doesn't make them receive higher payment. It is that fact which leads their labor to be competed over. The fact that multiple employers will seek them out is where their salary is determined.
I mean these are so fundamental and your article laughs in the faces of these tenants. I understand how education and gatekeeping are tied into both of these, but I think your article doesn't deal w/ that properly.
Re: "cherry picking parents" - maybe it explains away the overperformance of some charters, but *is it a bad thing*? Parents in deprived neighborhoods often face schools with significant discipline problems that interfere with learning. Parents who want better for their kids should have the option to get their kids out of these situations.
Prevalence of bullying is another reason the child prison analogy is apt.
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2018/03/another_case_ag.html
>DeBoer argued that charter schools succeed through selection effects: they only take the best students. Several commenters pointed out this was illegal.
Is this written with USA in mind? How does it work and why is it illegal? In Russia, many schools for children only take those who perform best on some kind of test.
The scary name for that is "high-stakes testing" and if you google that you'll see the debate play out in your results.
The US does have some magnet schools that may accept students based on test scores. But the charter schools discussed here are not supposed to be able to deny students.
I am disappointed with the treatment of lotteries. There are several issues that people are failing to distinguish.
Freddie DeBoer asks why are they cheating "if the charter advantage is as powerful as proponents claim"? Different people make different claims! Some of them are exaggerated and some are probably correct. Yes, barriers to entering the lottery improve the charter's test scores, but they controlled in a randomized controlled trial. It is very important to only consider the results of RCT. In the book he cites the same Reuters article and claims that it undermines RCT. This is confused. Also, he mentions drop outs / backfill as another form of selection. This should be corrected by intention-to-treat analysis. I haven't checked how extensively this is used, but Scott pointed it out in the study he cited.
Maybe the drawing of the lotteries is rigged, and not just entrance to the lotteries. Steve Sailer is the only person I have heard clearly suggest this. Sometimes people imply it, but muddled insinuation does not produce clear thought. In particular, DeBoer said at SSC that the papers take the lotteries "on faith," which sounds like this, but again he cited the Reuters article and is probably just confused. This lead me to actually look at some charter RCTs and they don't take it on faith. They check that the selected and rejected groups were indistinguishable on all the metrics they could measure, in particular prior test scores. I looked at 4 studies, looking at multiple schools each, and only one found a school with rigged lottery, which of course they excluded from their analysis. Maybe lotteries are rigged in the normal case where a school is not subject to a study, but for the factual question of whether charter schools do something, that is irrelevant to RCT. One of the studies noted that the Boston charters have a centralized lottery, which I'd think would be more secure than letting the individual schools draw their own lotteries.
Alexander H suggests that the selective students made his education better. Maybe charters are just streaming, but that doesn't mean they don't work. Is streaming a positive-sum change or a zero-sum change? Do smart students help arbitrary classmates, or do they more help other smart students? Disruptive students are probably a zero-sum game of hot potato, though. But people are already playing this game; are charter schools making it worse?
If the hot potato game is significant (and I suspect it is), then letting any players opt out is going to cause big problems.
"Why would they have felt the need, if the magic charter school dust was all it took?"
This is like expressing incredulity that Lance Armstrong is a fast bicyclist because he cheated. 'If he's so fast, why'd he have to cheat.' Because he wanted to win, and the surest way to win is to both be really good and also cheat.
What no one cares to admit is that while Lance Armstrong did PED's, pretty much EVERY competitive cyclist at that level does, but Lance committed the Unpardonable Sin of breaking Greg LeMonde's Tour de France consecutive wins record. He therefore was hung out to dry. This is a scarcely hidden inconvenient truth in the pro cycling world. See also the NFL, and probably the top levels of any other professional sport.
"The community centers offer a wide variety of classes aimed at a wide variety of learning styles to make that happen."
I was surprised to see this -- it's not something I'm especially knowledgeable about, but I was under the impression that "learning styles" had been widely discredited -- am I mistaken on that? eg from a 2017 literature review (https://bit.ly/2M6xDSR), "more methodologically sound studies have tended to refute the hypothesis and...a substantial divide continues to exist, with learning styles instruction enjoying broad acceptance in practice, but the majority of research evidence suggesting that it has no benefit to student learning, deepening questions about its validity."
Does anyone have some pointers to read more about this "Thielian perspective"?
> There are studies finding extreme negative effects from having disruptive kids in your class; I'm a little skeptical of this kind of research
I went to a "good" school district and was a "good" student, in that I have a nearly eidetic memory and enjoyed learning most things. In eighth or ninth grade, I had a social studies class with a "disruptive" boy who quickly figured out that the teacher was *extremely* timid. He effectively ran the classroom all semester, running around, yelling over the teacher's feeble attempts to teach anything, inciting other kids to join him in bullying the teacher or performatively goofing off. This continued such that I have no memory of doing anything in that class or even what we were supposed to be doing - maybe we were supposed to be getting some geography? I really don't know. But I am pretty sure that one disruptive kid invalidated an entire course.
I had a great high school chemistry teacher but he got fed up dealing with a different chem class (the disruptive students) and quit and so we had substitute teachers for the rest of the year and I definitely learned less after he left.
Italian universities usually work somewhat similarly to your utopian education system.
For most curricula and courses attendance is not mandatory. Students have multiple opportunities in an year to take a final exam worth the whole grade, they can retake exams if they fail or they are not satisfied with their grade, and delaying exams even by more than an year is not particularly punished or frowned upon. Often there is a syllabus listing multiple adequate sources for individual study and students can look for the one that most suits them.
Single professors can deviate from this model and try to enforce more standardized classwork, for instance by making the final exam significantly harder than whatever other grading option they offer to students attending the lectures and following week by week. Those who do are usually almost universally disliked, and the amount of misery they produce becomes only more jarring by the close comparisons to their more relaxed colleagues
Of course we are talking about institutions that educate adults, albeit usually young and not financially independent, which in many ways makes things simpler.
Also usually the more "professionalizing" a curricula is, the stricter the organization becomes, for instance medical students and engineers often get much less liberties than say students of pure mathematics or literature or philosophy.
In general I think this flexibility is very effective in both making the whole experience less miserable and in retaining students that would otherwise dropout or underperform.
Early in my university degree I had an important loss in my family and I was not able to study effectively for some months, and failded or got bad grades in multiple exams. In the end I graduated with honors in the normal three years, whilst in another system I may have been kicked out.
I think there are two main reasons people object to meritocracy, which aren't quite the ones mentioned:
1) No-one's bothered about how surgeons are chosen, and only a handful of hand-wringers care about "how we, as a society, decide who we value and who we don't." People care about how the current ruling-class is chosen. Historically, the US was ruled by a lively mix of robber barons, small-town lawyers, charlatans, silver-spoon dynasts, slaveowners, militia generals and religious zealots. Now it's ruled by copy-pasted Princeton grads.
This has massive policy implications, as seen by the fact that it nearly lost the Cold War until a senile B-movie actor surrounded by a clique of blanco refugees, religious zealots, oil barons, a spy with Nazi connections and his wife's favourite astrologer took over. All this was only skin deep, because the broader ruling class weren't replaced, and civil servants, lawyers judges, NGO-ites, journalists, academics and bankers are all varying degrees of the same copy-paste. Even modern Republican politicians are mostly Princeton grads LARPing as cowboys (hence Trump). Surgeons are a terrible example, as they're the least relevant to the direction the US takes. They'd always be chosen on ability in the same way athletes are, it's the ruling/administrative class who wouldn't.
"Picking the best people and putting them in charge" is the point of all political systems, as opposed to the definition of any of them, and it's difficult to see how swapping "credentialism" for [actual ability determination system] would would change the way the US is run.
2) In any meritocracy, there has to be a way to assess merit that is quickly legible to whomever's making hiring/promotion decisions, there will always be tests, and people will try to game them. These could be improved a bit in a way which wouldn't immediately degenerate (e.g. standardised, open-admission tests at the degree level), but the trade-off greater gains for those with test-taking skills (as opposed to actual ability at the occupation) vs. class bias in university selection. Sarcastically straw-manning your position as "Real meritocracy hasn't been tried yet" is rebuttable, but I'm not convinced meritocracy wouldn't degenerate into credentialism fairly quickly.
I agree that surgeons are a bad example (I was going to post similar) but I think a lot of meritocracy critique comes from powerful people trying to find ways to maintain their power (e.g. attacks on magnet/exam schools). I support increasing lotteries as a way to correct for bias but given a choice between selecting people based on a test and selecting people based on their parents I'd choose the test.
With regard to point 2 I think this is the real problem with meritocracy. Many successful organizations have a good method of determining merit but that these organizations are fragile and hard to scale (typically relying on good bosses hiring good subordinates in a self perpetuating hierarchy). This becomes even more difficult when the job is not the job (e.g. politics)
Also, Marxists don't like it because anyone who's still a Marxist is presumably angry at the ruling class we have now (most of the old-growth Marxists in Europe/North America made peace with the system and merged into the current ruling class).
Late to this convo, as always, and also as always I find the conversations irritating but appreciate those who discuss this as policy for all rather than assuming everyone's a bright but anti-social kid who hated school.
I know Michael Pershan posts here and he's very good. His writing focuses more on teaching and research, while I focus on teaching and policy. In any event, if you are interested in reading about policy and teaching in Title I schools with a diverse community, you may want to ignore my politics and try my blog: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/
Specific topics mentioned here that you might want to read about: disruptive kids, vocational education, the worth of teaching advanced topics to lower IQ kids, the value of education, my experience as a bright kid who was bored, Brian Caplan's book, Robert Pondiscio's book, the history of education reform in Bush/Obama years.
General comments:
1. It is impossible to overstate the damage risked by a disruptive kid in a classroom, even when the teacher can handle it. (as I can)
2. Vocational education is very expensive, and there was never a halcyon period when we did it better than today.
3. Any discussion of education that doesn't discuss the disparate impact of the policy is really not worth discussing. Education policy in the US is *all* about race and disparate impact.
4. Most people are woefully ignorant of how the costs are distributed. For example, Scott starts by proposing that parents be given "the cost" of educating their child, then says as a counter well, give them 75% of "the cost". But "the cost" of educating children includes the cost of educating sped and ELL kids. Little is done on cost of educating the kids who show up at the border and are plopped in a public high school (I taught those classes for three years), but they get twice as many English classes and then electives and also stay in school an extra year.
And "on average", special ed kids cost twice as much as non-sped, but even that masks the tremendous expense of severely handicapped kids. Even severely handicapped kids who can learn. I taught a wonderful, fantastic kid in a wheelchair who had to have a full-time aide to help him go to the bathroom, order food, eat. That aide easily cost at *least* $50k/year. And this was a kid who could be unattended, who could participate in class, and is now in college. Blind kids need full time aides in the classroom (who have to whisper information to their students while the teachers talk, not that this isn't disruptive). Again, these are kids who can benefit.
Now let's try the severely mentally disabled and autistic kids, who are violent and who often need their diapers changed. These classes have one teacher and 5-7 aides for maybe 10-12 kids. These kids on average cost close to $100K/year. (there's a reason why schools aren't totally averse to paying private school tuition for severely disabled kids whose parents argue for it. It's irritating, but often cheaper.)
Then there are all the services that schools have to provide: psychologists. Reading and sight specialists. ELL specialist to test the kids every year.
So if the average cost per child is $16K or $12K, or even $20k, you can dream on if you think a normal kid costs that much, or that you'd get that much. It will depend a great deal on the costs of your particular district, and they will have all sorts of laws on their side justifying all your costs.
Figure an average NYC kid costs a lot, as most of them qualify for special services. Maybe 8K. Average suburban kid? Maybe 4-5K. Teacher salaries are higher in certain states, of course, but as someone observes, teachers don't scale.
So it's more likely that Scott's idea to give parents the cost of educating their child will be negotiated down to maybe 50% or less, and that's of a much, much smaller number.
There's a lot of people commenting here that are just....wow. But I always forget how many are making really good points because, well, they're just so polite. And I know some of you read my blog already.
But education's important, and I really feel the aggravation keenly when I see a bunch of highly educated people be in the aggregate so utterly clueless about the issues in US Ed.
You mention that the restrictions on bodily freedom got easier to bear as an adult. But isn't it possible that a large point of school is just that? To get you to adjust to letting go of bodily freedoms for a duration of time and become ok with it?
The same about intense boredom. I think the virtues of being able to tolerate boredom are not enough appreciated. The jobs society needs to get done are most often NOT tasks that are enjoyable. But they need to be done and often the wage premium is for learning to do a good job of things that you don't enjoy. Or oftentimes you don't think you enjoy but get past a certain threshold and they don't seem as bad.
In that sense learning to get past the frustrations of boredom seems a good skillset for success.
But it's one learned better when it is success at something you want to do, not a task someone else has set you. Consider, for example, grinding in an RPG, which quite a lot of people do voluntarily. Or learning the sort of athletic skill where you feel incompetent and frustrated in the early months.
In all of this, I did not find a link to studies showing that the average charter school or homeschooled kid is on actually happier than the average student of a regular high-schools. Some of the comments just seemed to me like the situation described could be mostly independent of school, and be caused by e.g. puberty. It may also be interesting to see whether class size affects happiness. As far as I know, it does not affect standard school results, once you control for background variables.
To respond to deboer’s comment, they would cheat even if their education system worked (1) as a hedge because they didn’t know in advance it would, (2) to make it work even better
Bathroom passes and defund the police: I was struck that the same utopian argument exists in both places - “if it weren’t for the system we wouldn’t need the enforcement”. And there’s the same Chesterton’s fence trade off: are we sure we really want to dismantle this system and roll the dice that the next thing won’t be way worse, vs if we keep trying to iterate on the current system there’s every incentive for dead Enders to do the bear minimum and keep dead-ending, and the only way to escape the rut is to tear down and rebuild. I was also struck by my instincts that it’s very dangerous to tear down the existing system when it comes to police, but that I’m more open minded when it comes to schools. Then I interrogated that apparent contradiction, looking for a model that would encompass a few axes and tell me whether I’m wrong and both flavors of utopian experiment are bad ideas, or if there’s a solution space that situates “tear down the rebuild school” but not “tear down and rebuild law enforcement.”
If we assume there’s an inflection point where some systems are better torn down and other systems iterated, it’s probably a matter of costs and benefits. How likely is it that the existing system is above the 50% margin of what we’d get if we rolled the dice and started over? How big is the upside if we succeed? How big is the catastrophe if we fail.
On its face it seems like defunding or dismantling the police scores medium on the first axis, high on the second, and high on the third. Which makes me need another axis, or at least a caveat to the first, which is “in the same game theory universe, how likely is it we could make something better even if we were well intentioned?” Call it “the wire principle”.
Given the above, the risks of dismantling the police would seem to exceed the benefits, especially when we can work granularly: dismantling and replacing some of the worst, for instance.
Schooling might score differently. The risks are certainly lower, as long as we allow home schooling and charters. If we eliminated public schools the burden while we were figuring out something better would almost certainly fall on the poor, and I’m not as convinced as Scott that school is not doing anything for them.
Harrison Bergeron is a much misunderstood story. It's a parody/satire of anti-egalitarian writers like Ayn Rand, making fun of the "if not for the oppressive System that we think wants this ridiculous caricature of equality, we'd be godlke supermen" attitude. The point is not "strawman equality is bad", it's "they really think they're superheroes trying to stop us from implementing this strawman version of equality they've created in their heads."
(And remember the ending: after bounding through the air like a superhero and declaring himself king, Harrison Bergeron gets literally brought down to earth in the most extreme way possible: being killed by a shotgun, a weapon that almost anyone can use.)
I read somewhere that Kurt Vonnegut thought Diane Glampers was the hero. Not sure if it's true, but it *is* true that the story was written long before the concept of affirmative action or quotas, so it's certainly not satirizing anything to do with civil rights.
Someone on Data Secrets Lox tracked down the Vonnegut quote, and I don't think that's the correct interpretation:
"I can't be sure, but there is a possibility that my story "Harrison Bergeron" is about the envy and self-pity I felt in an over-achievers' high school in Indianapolis quite a while ago now. Some people never tame those emotions. John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald and Mark David Chapman come to mind. "Handicapper Generals," if you like."
That implies that the inspiration for the story was his remembering emotions in high school that would have put him on Glampers' side, but not that he as the author of the story is on that side. Not unless you assume that he approves of Booth, Oswald and Chapman.
> We act as if there is some other sense of "deserve" beyond these three, where everyone in the First World "deserves" a middle-class lifestyle, and maybe a few very likeable hard-working people like surgeons and inventors "deserve" just a little extra. I share this intuition. But I don't have a good sense for what kind of definition of the word "deserve" lands us there
What about circles of concern? We start from the computer point of view: Assume that you are an incredibly strong transistor with lots of money, but your significant other isn't. Do they deserve an equal share of your money? No, according to the model, but it would make them (and thus you) unhappy if they got just the standard rate for childcare and housework and so they get the money. Same thing with children, parents, friends, employees etc. The people that you want to do well are in your circle of concern and you will spend money to make them happy. In the context of a whole society this becomes trickle-down economics which due to the limited number of people any person cares about works badly if only few people are rich but pretty decently if a fair share of the population has money to spare.
(Also, everyone cares a little bit about the people they meet in the streets (altruistically or you wish them economic success so you might benefit), so social security makes sense. You could maybe shoehorn this into utilitarianism by arguing that people always view themselves as part of a group and so would be happier in a disease-ridden African village than on the disease-ridden streets of San Francisco.)
"This is also the kind of thing I hear from people in psychiatric institutions. Some people say it saved their life and helped them begin the work of self-transformation, other people say it was abusive and traumatizing. People will have both sets of comments about the same institutions, same doctors, same nurses."
Or the same people can say both that it was terrible and useful. Being locked in a box with a bunch of scary conspecifics and scared for your life isn't fun, but it's also closer than most of modern life to the sort of problem for which evolution baked our brains. That can be pretty helpful for some sorts of people - in particular, those clever enough to actually solve the problem and get all the happy juices associated with that.
As a parent, the idea of enshrining in law the same freedoms for kids than adult have is... pure insanity.
The point of parenting children is they do not have the experience to make good choices. They avoid pain (like we all do) but cannot appreciate that pain avoided now is more pain in the future, or that things that hurt can turn out to be great things.
It is the job of a successful parent to balance freedom and joy and exploration of the world as the child wants it with discipline, effort, discomfort, and tolerating negative in exchange for positive. There is no easy answer, and attempting to parent has failure modes on both sides - too little push to do the hard, and too much regimentation and force. It still needs to be done.
Responding to the section: "If a child wants to stay at home, they can stay at home. If they want to wander the streets, they can wander the streets..." Hahahahaha! Oh wait, you're serious, let me laugh even harder! *humor intended.*
It is a common failure of extremely gifted people to imagine that other people are just like them, i.e., possessing the curiosity, drive, independence, and personal discipline to maximize their potential from a young age. Most people are not like that, and most children are *especially* not like that. I think that Scott would learn something from being a parent. I have two very bright, very capable daughters, and we encourage them to pursue their own interests, but giving them total freedom would be an unmitigated disaster.
The vast majority of children, given total freedom to do whatever they wanted to with their time, would choose to stay home and watch TV or play video games all day. Given a choice of food, they would choose pizza and mac & cheese. I remember a news story a while back about a girl whose parents did let her do whatever she wanted, so she stayed home in front of the TV, and was morbidly obese at the age of 14. The parents were charged with criminal negligence and child abuse. This is basic biology: the portions of the brain that govern self-discipline and long-term planning are among the last to mature, and do not function properly until adulthood. Expecting 8-year olds to make decisions based on their future job prospects is laughable; many of my classmates in *college* couldn't do that effectively.
I share many of Scott's frustrations with "school as an institution", and elementary school in particular seemed like an enormous waste of time. The problem is that if you have a class of 30 kids, all of whom must learn the same lesson, then the teacher must teach to the lowest common denominator. The solution, however, is not to give kids total freedom, but to use a customized curriculum based on interests and ability. When I got to middle school, life for me improved enormously, because I was able to take a number of gifted classes. The rule in the gifted math class was that I could choose a textbook, and work through it at my own rate. However, the book had to be math, and I had to turn in a certain amount of work each week, and take occasional tests on whatever subject I had chosen to learn.
My daughters go to a public school where each class is divided by ability into small groups of 4-5 students, which learn different things at different rates. IMHO, it works reasonably well, but it is enormously labor intensive. The small groups are led by parent volunteers, so you so need 1 teacher and 5 parents for a class of 24 kids. Needless to say, the district is in Silicon Valley, where you have a surplus of highly-educated, high-paid, single-earner families, so that there are enough parent volunteers. (Charter-school-like selection-bias-for-parents applies here, too.) It would not work in a poor inner-city district.
The sad truth of the matter is that we are expecting public schools to take over much of the responsibility of child-rearing, because both parents are off working, sometimes multiple jobs, for low pay. The schools behave as institutions because they do not have the manpower (womanpower? personpower?) to do that properly.
Unfortunately, parenting is hard. You can't outsource it to the schools, nor can you outsource it (as Scott suggests) to the kids themselves.
> The utilitarian's definition [...] even a burger flipper making $15,000 a year doesn't “deserve” it
> the utilitarian perspective, which is [...] "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need"
What the hell, Scott? As author of the Consequentialism FAQ, you should know better than to confuse utilitarianism with communism.
My opinion as a negative utilitarian is that everybody by default "deserves" $15,000 a year or so. Because why not? It doesn't hurt to say so. If you don't "deserve" something then you might feel guilty for having it (a feeling with negative utility), but not guilty enough to give it all away, and as you've discussed yourself, extreme generosity doesn't scale as well as, say, the Giving What We Can Pledge does, so we both favor the latter, do we not? Aside from which, incentive structures yada yada.
Some follow-up by Freddie on lotteries: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/charter-school-lotteries-are-a-black
Harry Nyquist is often credited with the sampling theorem (independently explored by Kotel'nikov in 1933 and Shannon in 1948 and perhaps some other people, Wikipedia story on it is instructive; Nyquist had proven a specific subcase). But yes, generally having a place to bounce ideas off each other is good. And I'd argue that elite schools are essentially that, that they are providing non-trivial benefits because they get both best students and best teachers in ("peer effects", superadditivity, whatever you want to call that).