If you're looking for anecdotes, two people close to me worked in very poor areas. They were in constant contact with the police about physical and sexual abuse. The kids apparently made huge leaps when these issues were resolved.
I value having a job and paying my mortgage. I value participating in public schooling. I value helping to support my family, being able to support them myself should I need to, and contributing to the world in that particular way. I value modelling to my kids that it's possible for a woman to both be a mother and be employed. Other people can value other things, and that's fine -- but as a society, we were structured so that for those of us who valued some of the things I value, public schools were available and kids went there during the day. And when in many places in the country, that stopped happening, it was terrible not because we don't enjoy spending time with our kids, but because we were doing that at the same time as we were doing paid employment. Our political leaders expressed *their* values when it came to kids and families vs. teacher unions, and it was a bad thing.
You can find comments here from parents who did not do great at home - but it's true that probably no one is going to say "school is what was keeping my abused kid safe", for reasons that would seem obvious, and you can also imagine why someone might not want to share their own personal childhood story of that. As for statistics -- we certainly do have rising youth crime where I am, and in many other places, and in the absence of some kind of definitive paper on the topic, that's really all we can say. There are certainly other possible explanations as well. And when it comes to how many kids have dropped out of school or will, there isn't the data yet. We do have some test score data, and it does show that kids who were already behind have indeed gotten further behind - that gaps that many people purport to care about have been exacerbated by this.
Okay... so the implication is that Scott's observation is explained away by saying that New Orleans kids seemed to do well after missing school only because there were fewer poor kids, with the assumption that poor kids perform worse.
I didn't figure that out on first reading. I misinterpreted it in a way which I now see makes no sense. Sorry.
There's probably a selection effect where if someone were to give an anecdote about them missing a random fact, they'd choose the one that was the most outrageously absurd that it feels like it'd be a funny/interesting anecdote.
Once in an important, early-career orientation session, we were asked to tell about our most embarrassing moments. I couldn't think of one that would make a good story so I said I couldn't think of anything. Several people took that to mean I hadn't ever done anything embarrassing (or was too obtuse to recognize if I had).
I did OK in that career, but the memory haunts me to this day. Perhaps it was my most embarrassing moment.
I took multiple college level biology courses, and have read EO Wilson, Dawkins, Chivers, M. Buss, Sapolsky, probably other biologists... and I learned in the last 6 months that men and women have the same number of ribs.
I basically haven't thought about dinosaurs since elementary school, so if somebody missed that lesson because they were getting taught about jesus, eh. Easy enough.
It probably depends a lot on what you focus and interests are. My wife went to public school in Hong Kong until she was ~16, and despite being apparently an order of magnitude harder than US school (the last two years of which she breezed through despite having just moved here) knows almost zero geography and has asked me "what's the difference between dinosaurs and dragons?" She remembered that dinosaurs actually were things once, but that was it. It's easy enough to imagine someone learning very early on about dinosaurs, not caring, then just not thinking about it for a long time and getting them conflated with other mythical things. And apparently HK high school just doesn't spend any time on where other countries are, such that even straight A students don't know basic things.
The state also extorts money from childless people, and it extorts money from me even though I no longer have children in school. You're not paying for *your own* child to be educated, although that is a side benefit, you're paying your share of what it costs to educate the entire generation after you, on the grounds that a more educated population is a general social good, like good roads or clean air, from which you benefit in a general way.
Private fee-paying schools can also be terrible, see the C.S. Lewis quote above. If you want everyone to be responsible for their own kids' schooling, and everyone to be free of taxation for schools, then it's up to you to figure out how to pay for 'other schooling options'.
Is the state theft really at such a pitch it is so oppressive? Give me an estimation of how much money you personally have to pay for terrible schools, and how you could spend this better on little Alex learning to be a Genius Baby.
Without endorsing it, I'd point out that part of the benefit school provides children that need it are kids that would otherwise run away with a voucher to a better one. It's not much benefit for the student in extreme poverty and bad subcultures to go to school and only be around others in the same circumstance; you need a lot of normal or advantaged kids to be around to trigger socialization benefits. Otherwise they're socializing with other kids with the same problems.
Scott was going to succeed in his life (barring he did something really catastrophically stupid like decide "drug laws are dumb, ergo heroin is a fun no-harm thing to indulge in!") whether he went to school or not, or went to a private school, or his parents set up a foundation for the Scott Alexander Educational Trust, or he was raised by wolves (that last subject to debate).
An article about "I was a smart kid from a stable family, I hated my school experience because of the social aspect/they didn't laser focus on the two subjects I cared about and ignored all the other kids in my class", is of no use to anyone except "smart kids really interested in one or two subjects may benefit from not going to public school but having an individually-tailored programme of tuition".
The only results of "why was I forced to go to school? we should change the law on mandatory schooling! government keep out!" will be that the ones who would have succeeded anyway will survive and indeed thrive, and the excuse will be seized upon to abandon the ones who need help the most, because "school should not be replacement parenting" and now we can spend the money saved on something else that appeals to us better.
My mechanic didn't go to University, but I happily pay him $100/hr for his services and he runs a successful business without dumping hundreds of thousands on an MBA.
I'd lay odds he did Dreadfully at humanities and maths, but quickly learned all the math and computer science that he needs to be a top-tier mechanic, both of which are considerable nowadays.
Public schools are currently run on the conceit that "Everyone" needs and wants a "Modern Liberal Arts Education." To me, who works safety-critical embedded systems in avionics, "Liberal Arts" were a cross to be borne that I could get into the maths and technology I cared about.
I am a functional safety engineer (IEC 61511) and tend to agree, but the interface between the human and machine is the most important part and you need to understand both to do safety critical systems well.
How many such children are there? Should we perhaps be more concerned about these children than just wanting them to be in dysfunctional schools during a pandemic (note: I endorse the opening of schools)? Or, is that the best we can do?
What I find frustrating in this discussion is that Scott doesn't seem to understand that he's in a Different World [https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/], one where "kids" are so intensely curious and wildly enthusiastic about learning that, left alone with the internet, they'll naturally acquire all knowledge necessary to be a high-functioning adult in a developed, technological civilization.
As many have pointed out, while *Scott* was that kind of kid, and many ACX readers were that kind of kid, many, many people were and are not that kind of kid.
I completed my first novel at 12, but left to my own devices, I would have never learned multiplication, or about World War 1, or the biology of a cell.
Left to her own devices, my friend's clever but undisciplined dropped-out-of-high-school-to-"home-school"-sister browsed 4-Chan all day, never bothered with a diploma or GED, and now bounces around in low-end food service due to lack of credentials.
Left to his own devices, my brother would never, *ever* have stopped playing video games, and certainly not long enough to learn to code them. Why bother with the hard stuff of creating, where there are more games to play?
It's like Scott and many of the readers are so curious and intellectually driven that they have never experienced and thus can't conceive of a person for whom pointless hedonistic consumption is a primary goal in life. They don't even know people like that.
But those people exist! And a lot of them are kids!
To just assume that one's own childhood curiosity and capacity for sustained intellectual focus is universal enough that all children should be free to pursue their own agendas is just...so weird.
I mean, you may be right about most of that, but I don't think it's weird. Growing up I didn't really know anyone like that. As an adult I certainly don't know anyone like that. I realize that this is pure cognitive bias, but it is a struggle for me to believe that there is a significant population of children who are like that.
Again, you are probably right, it is just far enough outside my personal experience as to be strange to contemplate.
I think maybe I can see both sides of this particular phenomena because I was bright, highly-motivated pre-teen/teen who produced a huge volume of writing and bought fiction-writing manuals with her allowance money and who is the only person to test out of a year of high school English in the history of her large school district but I turned into an unmotivated hedonist in early (and approaching middle-ish) adulthood. I'm now way underemployed for my native talents, and have no plans to change.
I'd pin the moment of transition on high school, when I discovered procrastination was a thing you could do. Before that, the idea of having fun before finishing homework was absolutely *unthinkable.* The idea of writing the climactic scene I was most excited about before writing the less-fun set up and structural stuff was equally unthinkable. I'd even go so far as to say grabbing at the reward of fun stuff before doing the work was *COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE!!!*, with all that the formatting implies.
But then the friends I met in high school persuaded me to push homework to the weekend and hang out doing fun stuff right after school. Or to go ahead and write that scene I had burning in me now, and get back to the other stuff later. Etc. I discovered cramming, which got sufficiently good grades despite a lower quality of work, and I discovered getting lower but still fine grades, and then scraping by with a C because no one will ever request your transcript, and just changing life plans to do something less hard because...why do hard stuff at all?
When there are no immediate dire consequences for not doing a lot of hard work, it's easy - even logical - to keep not doing a lot of hard work. Not even the fun hard work. Once that "work before play" seal on my personality was broken, it was broken forever.
And that started 25 years ago, when you might conceivably run out of fun stuff that feels very worth of procrastination. Now the world is nothing *but* more pleasant alternatives to "hard work."
Leave a kid alone to do what they want, and many aren't going to do what older, wiser adults want them to do.
I suppose the question here is whether "older wiser adults" are actually wiser. This sounds fairly assumption laden. Indeed, the point is to not have "hard work" for children in Scott's or several of our worlds. Sure there's selection bias, but it takes a certain level of wisdom to recognize that "maybe formal state led education won't be the best for my kid, even though I went through this". This isn't to say that there should be no formal state led education efforts... but perhaps "state education as default" is wrong?
How many lower class people do you spend time around?
The only people I know who are "lower class" are people I've known for over a decade, and they have significant mental health issues and in some cases physical health issues.
Well, I'm lower-class myself (or working-class, now maybe lower middle-class, if you want to class it that way).
My parents left school at the ages of twelve and fourteen, respectively. They wanted us kids to stay in school because they saw the value of education. My mother had me writing letters for her when I was nine years of age, because she considered my handwriting, spelling, and standard of English better than her own. My mother was not stupid or incapable, but she was under-educated and this held her back from a lot of chances in life where she could have improved herself and ended up with a better standard of living.
I don't think I'm smart. I'm bookish, but that is a different thing. Pulling me out of school because I was capable of higher academic achievement (based on reading and writing), was introverted, wasn't sporty, wasn't sociable (and I was never bullied or consciously excluded, I liked sitting by myself in the corner of the yard at breaktimes) would have gotten me nowhere. Yes, I probably *could* have 'learned for myself' - had I the resources. I didn't have them, and would have done a lot, lot worse without public school to attend.
Did you never know kids who were bored in school, and not because "this class is too slow for me, I am at a higher level already" but "I hate being indoors at a desk, left to my own devices I'd hang around on street corners with my pals"?
Re: school drop-outs, it's enough of a problem that governments do have in place programmes to get them into some kind of education/training, because for every kid who would spend their day in the library learning, there are kids who'd like to do so but don't have the option for various reasons (including family circumstances) and kids who only want to hang around smoking weed (personal experience there working in one such programme) and are on the path to a jail sentence no matter what you want to do with them.
The world we have now has a shrinking pool of 'you don't need qualifications to flip burgers or sweep floors' jobs, and some kind of educational credentials are needed for almost everything. If we ever do get the world of AI and Musk's personal robots, those jobs will be automated away. The much derided "teach miners to code" was a recognition of this; the days of "go down the mine at seventeen to have a steady, good-paying job" are gone, and the alternative is increasingly no longer "get a job on the factory line" (because those jobs are gone overseas or gone away altogether), it's "get an education because white-collar work is your only option out of poverty".
Thanks. I skimmed; there seemed to be a lot of "lack of formal education didn't hurt _me_." My intention was just to point out a weakness, not slamming the entire article (which I only skimmed....).
I don't know how to say this in a way that doesn't sound aggro, but I think if you are going to be constructively critical of an article it is important to read the whole thing. Not that I haven't done the same thing.
But yes a sentence being like "look at this wacky selection / survivorship bias" may have been merited.
I think survivorship bias is a strong argument. I'm not sure it's convincing, but It's a very strong hint. Who would you expect to be answering? This is not an unbiased survey.
OTOH, I, also, found school largely boring. However, one week I was sick, and convinced myself I had learned trigonometry during that week off. But when I tried to apply it in math class it became quite apparent that I was mistaken. I got parts of it, and a general idea of what it was about, but not enough to make any use of it. And this was a real surprise. And I was the kid who always finished my math homework before going home from school.
Yeah section 1. Also a selection effect of a blog that attracts the sort of person who would get a phd whether they went to school or not. (and the sort of person who has parents who are able and inclined to homeschool/unschool their kids)
On top of that, I think there's a kind of person who can get a PhD but is no fit for elementary schooling, and they are a much larger fraction of PhDs than they are of people who get a college degree. I think this is related to the fact that PhDs have the largest concentration of [insert weird thing here, such as vaccine resistance, or flat eartherism, or Marxism, or atheism].
All of the anecdotes about school. Smart kids who don’t need school don’t need school, kids with abusive parents and who are fed crackers and twinkies at home will get scurvy and beriberi and be taught by the ESPN sports channel. These combined might be 2% of the total population of kids. Add in the ones on Ritalin and severely disabled autism for another 1%. Who knows about the test?
Well, I don't know about that, but I can tell you about the breakdown of schools in my town (population a little over 9,000).
(1) The 'best' school, formerly all-boys but co-educational since 1990. Example graduate of this (used to be a neighbour of mine) went on a golfing scholarship to an American university, served as legislative assistant to US congressman in the House of Representatives and to a Senator, worked for a private company for five years after that, came home and got a law degree then went into politics, following his father
(2) Medium schools - two all-girls' schools which amalgamated in 1990, one of which is my old school. Reasonable results, streaming in place (or was, in my day)
(3) Medium to average school - the all-boys' school which continues to be all-boys. The bright/well-off boys go to the No. 1 school on this list, the rest of them go here, if they're not attending -
(4) The lowest ranking school. Started off as vocational school for the non-academically inclined/those going into the trades. Co-educational. The one where I worked, and the one that gets lumbered with the students with behavioural, intellectual, and social problems.
Kids at No. 1 school could probably do every bit as well if home-schooled or otherwise educated, though the strong sports element and the networks/connections about "can get you into this, that or the other" guidance etc. would be lacking.
Kids in Nos. 2 and 3? Would manage according to ability and parental support, some would not do so well. On average, school is more beneficial than not for them. I judge it this way because if they were the "bright kids who hated school because it went too slow for them", they'd be attending No. 1 or schools like it.
Kids in No. 4? Now we're talking 'sink or swim', with a lot of them sinking.
Average of kids "2% with abusive parents, 1% on Ritalin and severely disabled autism", your figures are probably not too far off - this website claims, for Ireland:
"11.4 The number of people with disabilities in education is estimated to be at least 4% of the school-going population. Approximately 8,000 pupils with disabilities are enrolled in 114 Special Schools and some 3,800 pupils with various disabilities are in special classes in primary schools. There are also about 8,000 pupils with "specific disabilities" in ordinary classes in primary schools. A further 2,300 pupils are enrolled in 48 special classes at post-primary level: another 100 pupils with disabilities are enrolled in the five designated post-primary schools."
Now, I can't seem to find figures for the exceptionally able students - let's put them at 5% for a figure pulled out of my - hair. So if we go very generously with 10% for the very able and the very disabled, then that leaves 90% of kids on the "average to above average" range, some of whom could manage in a structure outside of public schooling as we currently have it, be that home-schooling or smaller schools or specialised schools, and some of whom benefit from the structure.
So again, in my own personal view, the solution is to give more options but don't do away with public schooling altogether.
And there are those aware of the needs of the exceptionally able:
Myth: Exceptionally able learners will always do well whatever the circumstances.
Reality: Exceptionally able learners have problems like any other learner. They may have learning disabilities which they can hide while the work is easier. It becomes harder and harder for them to excel, which can lead to behavioural problems and depression.
Myth: Exceptionally able learners are so clever they do well with or without special
education provision.
Reality: They may appear to do well on their own but without focused challenge they can become bored and disruptive. As time passes they may find it harder and harder as the work becomes more difficult, since they have never faced challenge before.
Myth: They need to go through school learning with their own age group.
Reality: While it’s true that children need to play and interact socially with other children their age, they do not always need to learn with them, for example the case of an exceptionally able child who has a chronological age of six and a mental age of eleven and has been reading since two. To put that child in a reading class with other six year olds who are just learning to read can be demotivating for that child.
Myth: Exceptional ability is something of which to be jealous.
Reality: Exceptionally able children can feel isolated and misunderstood. They may have more adult tastes in music, clothing, reading material and food. These differences can cause them to be shunned and even abused verbally or physically by other students.
I think people often confuse high intelligence with high executive function or more accelerated emotional development -- which is a dreadful mistake where children are concerned. Someone may be perfectly capable of the work, and perfectly capable of understanding at the intellectual level the desirability of doing the work -- but be no more emotionally/executive-function mature than any other kid of that same age, and consequently be unable to force himself to do the work.
They're sort of like foreign-language learners who have the grammar down cold but have a piss-poor vocabulary: they can construct simple sentences with restricted subjects brilliantly, and you think "wow! I bet they could carry on a complex conversation with a native speaker easily!" but of course they can't, because of the missing vocabulary.
Absolutely. The didn't even *understand* executive function, except that I now realize it's something me and my family had a lot of, but other people are just completely missing it.
Well....I've been there myself, as a parent, and for what it's worth, it does actually eventually seem to happen, usually. I recall once my 2nd son came to me and said "Dad can you give me a ride to such-and-such important appointment?" I sighed and said "Sure. When do we need to leave? 30 seconds? Ten minutes ago?" and he looked puzzled and said "No, I mean Thursday. I'm just asking today (Monday) to be sure you can do it before I make the appointment." So then I'm slack-jawed and babbling: who ARE you and what have you done with Carl, Jr.? Ha ha.
School systems differ drastically across the globe, even restricting the discussion to Western Anglo countries. As an example, you mention that streaming students by ability is in place in the mid-rank schools local to you. I'm given to understand that that is common in Europe, but it's considered extremely politically incorrect here in Australia, and from what I gather of the USA it's not something one is allowed to admit to there, either, though AP classes enable a bit of it in the final years of schooling.
Also, it sounds like your local system has, at least nominally, provisions in place for gifted students, but many of us grew up in places that didn't. I say nominally, because I went to schools that nominally had programs for gifted students but my parents had to fight tooth and nail - up to and including threatening lawsuits - to get me an ability-appropriate maths education, and even then al the fighting bureaucracy meant I got about 1 year of education for every 2 that passed. Private tutoring was the only thing that kept me engaged with the act of learning, and I shudder to think what would have happened to me had my parents not been wealthy.
Perhaps things have improved in the decades since - I have friends who are teachers and there's a lot more people saying the right things than there used to be, but I remain fundamentally sceptical until I see it in practice, and I am seriously considering home-schooling my own children when I have them (though my partner has a much higher opinion of the school system than I do, so we'll see)
Everything. You don't hear as much about the kids who were "super smart" but then dropped out of school/were unschooled and then were failures in life because they're unremarkable and thus aren't actually worth talking about (and indeed, there may be little if any evidence that they are even particularly intelligent).
It isn't just about intelligence, but also conscientiousness. A smart, conscientious kid will learn a lot not in school. But a smart kid with poor conscientiousness will not.
I've known a number of smart people who had poor conscientiousness and for those who left school, it Did Not End Well.
And frankly, I think that a lot of people who think that they're Totally Okay after having been unschooled are not nearly as together as they seem. I've noticed that a number of homeschooled kids I've encountered had very weird knowledge gaps, and this was also associated with a high propensity for those knowledge gaps to be filled with Woo.
Forcing everyone to go through math, science, government, history, ect. is useful because you need that to serve as a basis for future knowledge. Indeed, we don't do enough to force college students to go through at least basic level science classes, which leads to a lot of liberal arts majors who really have no clue about science or statistics, which basically makes it impossible for them to take in a lot of real world knowledge.
Moreover, a lot of intelligent, conscientious kids actually do benefit from school. I have a ridiculous amount of random knowledge, and I knew many, many things that they taught in school, but I didn't know everything, and I learned a lot about various things in school.
I constantly see reddit threads where people are like "Why don't they teach this in school?" and the answer is "They did, you just weren't paying attention."
Which some might say says that school isn't that valuable, but which I'd say was valuable to me, because *I* remembered it.
Responding to other commenters down below as well, survivorship bias is likely to be less of a problem here than people think. Sure, it is only the unschooled with PhD's posting here, definitely a bit skewed. Some tiny percentage of a tiny percentage (~2% of Americans have PhDs.)
On the other hand, we certainly know that not all children who attend public school get PhDs (98% don't) and we also know that many drop out, or graduate and don't go to college, or graduate then go to college then drop out, or graduate then go to college then graduate college then work at Starbucks because they majored in something useless, or get a masters, blah blah. The point is that we know public schools have very wide ranges of outcomes, a fair bit skewed towards the "not great outcomes" end of the distribution.
So knowing that one very strange group (unschooled) has a fair few of the very rare high end outcomes is useful, because in a very small group (unschooled people) you wouldn't expect to find a high number of a tiny proportion (2% PhDs). Finding any suggests that the outcomes of one can't be that far worse than the normal group, and might be better for some. Does it mean all kids should be kept out? Not at all; we know that educational interventions are very ineffective at changing outcomes overall, so there is no reason to think it makes kids better off to keep them out of school even if a larger percentage of kids kept out of school do better academically. However, it does strongly suggest that it isn't worse for kids who we already think are pretty well off, and that it might not be much worse off for other groups.
What is really surprising to me from the other concepts is that people seem to think that kids who have no interest in learning anything (surely a small group, but maybe 25%?) are going to be in school and suddenly meet the best teacher ever and be inspired to learn and read forever. That strikes me as unlikely, along as equally likely that kids that like to learn are taught to hate learning in the inverse process. I know I learned to hate economics through two bad undergraduate courses, and it took a lot of independent learning to care about it again. I strongly suspect that the miserable learning environment that is the modern public school does very little to make students learn the glories of learning, and instead just makes them check out more because they are learning because the teacher wants them to, not because they want to.
"What is really surprising to me from the other concepts is that people seem to think that kids who have no interest in learning anything (surely a small group, but maybe 25%?) are going to be in school and suddenly meet the best teacher ever and be inspired to learn and read forever."
We had a school library with a librarian paid for under a Department of Education project funding scheme, and the kind of work she put in (working with the JCSP team and Home School Liaison) meant that kids - mostly boys - who avoided books because they associated them with 'school work' and hence fell behind in reading, had books and magazines and events tailored towards their interests (if they want to read all the Darren Shan books then stock them and get Darren Shan to turn up for a talk), and yes, suddenly kids who said they hated books were reading, and enjoying books, and being subtly steered towards educational works as well. Maybe now Joe finds out he's really interested in volcanoes, and suddenly that boring geography class starts to make sense.
No, there is no miracle quick-fix cure. But outside the small range of smart kids who are self-motivated to learn and have parents who are able to support them and structure things to enable them to learn at home, the rest of the kids if we abolish public school are going to be left to sink or swim. Some of them will try to learn, and their parents will want to help, but not be able to do so. Without some kind of social project to support such endeavours, they won't get things like "books are not boring and you can find out things you are interested in this way".
Well I had TWO librarians that were just absolute pants, and presumably were librarians because they were such miserable bastards that putting them in a regular classroom was just asking for mutiny. So your observation is invalid.
Your last paragraph is more relevant, but one has wonder if you have any actual evidence that the outcomes you describe don't happen every bit as often with public school as without. I submit as evidence that people do lots of learning outside of school the simply vast amount of online resources for learning, from Khan Academy to the humble YouTube video about how to craft random things, along with the tremendous amount of books on various topics. What evidence do you have public school is really providing lots of learning in important topics that students are not able to get elsewhere? The test score evidence certainly doesn't support that.
"the simply vast amount of online resources for learning, from Khan Academy to the humble YouTube video about how to craft random things"
This is like arguing "I don't know what you mean about living in poverty, the simply vast amount of financial resources like shares in companies such as Amazon that are out there!"
You can have all the resources in the world, but if you can't access them, don't know how to access them, or have no idea where to start, they will do you no good. Jeff Bezos could give me some of his spare change - the odd couple of hundred thousand would make very little difference to a guy worth $190 billion - but that wealth does me no good because the shares etc are all in his name and I can't get at them.
No, it is like arguing "There are lots of people who want to learn all sorts of things, things that do and do not get taught in school. Many of those people are young people."
Arguing that school does a lot to get those kids that have no interest in learning suddenly interested in learning is a big stretch. I am willing to believe that schools are better places for kids with really awful home lives than their homes are, but it is a bit of a stretch to say that is a large fraction of total students. Additionally, given that the students with the bad home lives are the ones that do the worst in school and show up the least, it isn't clear that school is even doing them much good.
At best you can claim that public schooling does good for the sliver of students who do not have access to educational resources at home or from friends and extended family, that is, no books, libraries or internet, but are interested in learning. For those who are interested in learning and do have that access, public school as it currently exists doesn't seem to change things much. For those who are not interested in learning it also doesn't seem to provide much benefit.
If you want to claim more, you need to explain how it is that such a large % of 12th graders do not meet basic levels of math and reading (40% and 30% according to NAEP here https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ ) When even the government says that government schools are failing 30% of students, you have a hill to climb claiming that those same schools are instilling a love of learning to read.
I picked grade 12 because it is close to graduation, but grades 8 and 4 also look really bad for the benefits of school. 35% of 4th graders apparently can't read at the basic 4th grade level.
I kind of think you would need to first demonstrate that the average student without any formal schooling -- say, the average village kid in the backside of Nigeria -- reached higher or at least as good basic levels in math and reading, so long as his family had a smartphone so he could in principle access Wikipedia. I wouldn't say the Third World (or even Second World) data is super encouraging already.
And people have a system now which works for some (in your and maybe even my opinion very suboptimal) definition of "works." Given the stakes -- the lifetime success of my child -- it will be extremely difficult to convince a majority coalition to change -- particularly in the direction of "let's do less, collectively!" -- without some very strong evidence that the change is at least not going to make things worse.
I think it's analogous to how hard it is to convince men with indolent prostate cancer to do nothing ("watchful waiting") on the perfectly logical, but emotionally difficult, theory that you're very likely to die of something else before the cancer gets you.
I think there's a key point here, although it's being passed over in silence a bit. The sort of outreach scheme Deiseach describes illustrates the good that compulsory education can do: challenging a macho culture that opposes activities such as reading means more people are open to learning. It's emblematic of what schools can do well.
But despite the.fact that most school libraries could effectively re-target budgets to do this sort of thing, they unfortunately don't: it's partially about having the books for boys, the books written for 14 year olds with a reading age of 10 etc rather than just prioritising what the kids who gravitate to libraries want, and people seem unwilling to do this because it seems both challenging and risky, especially if your library is regarded as marginal and is already underfunded (as school libraries tend to be) I suppose. And a problem with compulsory education is that it is by its nature not into risk-taking, with the normal tendency of bureaucratic organisations to inertia and box-ticking. Doctor Hammer's uninspiring librarians sit in this context: perhaps showing my age, I imagine old-school librarians who are primarily custodians of books and resources, and may even believe that a library as a place of learning only works through quiet silent reading. I don't think the existence of alternative models of libraries focussed on engagement has been a secret in librarian or educational circles for years (sidenote:early adopters of this model include many of the more successful British public schools whose methods are widely studied), but despite this the idea of the library as a tool to engage people in learning is not common in schools that I've seen. There's possibly good reasons why not, but I'd be willing to bet that this was mostly simply inertia, with change occuring where there's a driver, be this institutions subject to competition or individuals with vision or even a sensible government scheme.
That is perhaps the tragedy of compulsory education: it can be incredibly beneficial, probably even to someone like teenage Scott if the right questions were asked, but frankly it's resistant to change, however easy and beneficial that change might be, and in most countries incentives such as collective payscales and government oversight kill the chances of innovation and promote conformity. A debate about compulsory education therefore is oftentimes a debate between those who see what a system can do and those who see what that system often does instead: analysis of the results of compulsory education might tell us less about the value of sending all children to school and more about the issues with large systems and perverse incentives. If effective leadership is required to maximise the benefits of compulsory education through providing innovation, then perhaps it's not a question of whether the principle of compulsory education works in practice,. but whether a particular principal works out at a particular school that is most important here.
Funding and training is precisely the key here; our school library was part of a pilot scheme that was supposed to run for only two years, but it worked so well that with begging and cajoling we got to retain the librarian.
The library became a place where kids *wanted* to go, and it was incorporated into school rewards/punishments; misbehave too badly and you're barred from using the library. It doesn't work if it's "here's a bunch of books on shelves, just sit quietly and work".
I had little access to our town library for the reasons I described, and once we did get a new librarian and a new library, I was fortunate in that (a) they permitted me to take out an adult card when I was fifteen instead of having to wait for the 'official' age and (b) they struck a bargain with me that instead of taking out one book at a time then tearing through it that night and coming back the next day, I could take out three books at once but only once a week 😁
We didn't have a school library when I was in school. I was extremely fortunate in that I learned to read before ever I started school, I read at a more advanced level than my classmates, and the teachers accommodated me by letting me pick what books I liked off the shelves.
Also, as I got older, there were a lot of books on shelves in the back of the classrooms which nobody had disturbed for ten or more years, so I grazed like a cow in a pasture. But if I had had literacy difficulties, or didn't like 'academic' books or books written a hundred years before I was born, I would have fallen down badly.
It's like everything else in education: it's a resource but it only works if it's used properly. Simply having a school library and hoping by the magic of osmosis kids will absorb reading and good research habits - ain't gonna work.
"it's partially about having the books for boys, the books written for 14 year olds with a reading age of 10 etc rather than just prioritising what the kids who gravitate to libraries want"
This as well. Having, for instance, magazines about motorcycles on the shelves meant that kids who wouldn't turn their head to look at a book had their interest caught, and then little by little they were brought along by "here's something else you might like" and eventually "try this book, no pressure" and then they discovered that there were books they liked and that reading for pleasure was a thing.
Not everybody, of course, but you go along as much as the kids can go. Even if they never open a book, but now they're reading magazines or using the computers to look up things and doing projects about motorcycle racing because they *want* to do that, not because 'the teacher said I have to work on this project, I can't be bothered because I'm not confident in my reading or study ability and it's boring anyway'.
"I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?"
I started on a community college, so open admissions.
I was 23, if I recall correctly. Transferred to a fancy liberal arts college after two years. Fancier grad school right after that.
I remember being given a placement exam in the community college. When my advisor got the results, she said "wait a second, you are actually smart!" Made me laugh.
I went to an unusual school through 8th grade, got a a GED when I was 21, and went to college just after I turned 23. I read a lot in the intervening years.
I started at a small very non-selective liberal arts college. In July, they let me take a "residual" ACT test (basically, one left over from the prior sitting), and on the basis of near-perfect scores on everything but math, and decent math scores (note that my entire knowledge of algebra was that the same letter meant the same number throughout, but with good mental arithmetic and multiple choice tests you can get a lot of answers right that way) not only let me in for the fall but gave me a full-tuition scholarship. (I borrowed a study guide from the library and studied for a day before taking the test.)
It rapidly became clear to me that I wasn't going to get what I wanted there, so I started looking to transfer. At that point, I had three things that went well. A friend of a friend was a college admissions counselor at a high school, and offered to give me some advice on applying to colleges and help me figure out where to apply. I got a 1590 on the SAT - one semester of algebra helped a lot. And I had a semester of college grades. I managed to transfer to a SLAC, and graduated with a degree in economics and a math minor. I suspect my unusual background helped--transferring is very selective, and "interesting" almsot certainly helped.
Early 2000s, I applied to a broad range of colleges, not knowing what to expect, and got accepted by maybe a third of them, including the University of Chicago. I had very involved, decently-well-connected parents who helped me navigate the process and get on people's radars, which is the sort of thing that shouldn't help in a just world and therefore it's hard to tell how much it did. I also took every standardized test available on every topic I'd done any studying on, so that I had a portfolio of ~11 AP Exams and some SAT IIs--nearby high schools were generally fine to proctor them for me, although I had a hiccup at one point when a school changed its process and only informed its actual students. That was almost certainly crucial as a substitute for a GPA. Only one college, a state school, said that my lack of a high school diploma would be a dealbreaker...but if it had come down to it, I could've gotten a GED. My guess is that my unschooling was mainly a strong positive; instead of having extracurricular activities to stand out from the crowd, I was able to describe all my learning as extracurricular.
Similar story. I went to district schools through 7th grade, then took the CHSPE to graduate early and started community college at age 13.
My children are now second generation of that route, taking the CHSPE or the GED (out of CA now) to "graduate" officially, and then starting with community college. After getting a 4.0 there for two years, transferring elsewhere. They could've been admitted to pickier schools to begin with based on test scores, but the CC-route is much less expensive when your parent isn't poor enough to qualify for need-based money, especially considering the scholarship opportunities for transfer students with excellent grades.
I'll add that CLEP tests also sped my progress along, although nowadays, just attending wgu.edu is probably the best route in terms of monetary efficiency for someone who learns fast enough on their own.
Same for my kids. They start "dual enrollment" at a local community college when they're 13-14. Most community colleges have these programs for high school students so that they can take classes their school doesn't offer. As a homeschooler we don't offer any classes, so my kids take a full load and get their Associates of Science in 2 years, then transfer to the local state university. I learned that getting your associates is the same standing as a GED in terms of "did you graduate high school".
Entering dual enrollment requires placement tests for some subjects, but no admissions tests. Then when you transfer to 4 year college you apply based on your transcript alone. It's much more bare bones than freshman admissions. My kids didn't need to give sports played, or a long list of volunteer work, or SAT scores. There's usually a well greased path for good students from community college to state schools.
Finally, in my state dual enrollment is free. So the total cost is 2 years of in state tuition, and kids live at home the whole time. It's very affordable, and if you have a good state school nearby it is great value for money. Plus the statement "I graduated from college at 18" gives you lifetime bonus points in job interviews etc.
In my state, NC, there are also guaranteed spots to UNC and NC State for community college graduates. You actually get moved ahead of potentially more "qualified" students coming right out of HS.
Between my cousins and siblings and I there were 5 of us homeschooled-only in CA. We took the CHSPE and got our diplomas at ages ranging from 12-16, then started taking lab science classes at local junior colleges. Admittance to JC's was easy, and once we had established JC GPA's transferring to 4-year schools was easy as well.
All of us transferred to 4-year colleges and completed BS/BA within 2-4 years (some changed majors; 4 of the 5 of us got BS in some type of engineering). Several of us went on to get MS degrees, and one is current ABD on a PhD in Aerospace Engineering (obligatory, right?).
Overall, there was never a point where homeschooling led to difficulties transitioning into higher ed. A few admissions officials confided that they love homeschoolers; they tend to be very successful in college. Colleges are used to dealing with non-traditional educational paths.
> I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?
I was homeschooled K-12 and had no problems with the college application process. Obviously nowhere was going to take "4.0 from mom" seriously, but I can't imagine they take the grades from St. Middle Of Nowhere's High School & Cannery very seriously either.
Obviously having some kind of hard numbers to point at is valuable, if you're a homeschooler applying to college. For me that was lots of math contests, plus the usual AP/SAT/PSAT/etc suite. I'd also sat in unofficially on quite a few college classes at the local university, and had letters of recommendation from the professors, which presumably helped.
When I was applying to college, around 2010, I still occasionally had to clarify that I was homeschooled because my parents had weird educational theories, not because I was in a cult or something; these days I rarely even have to bother with that. It's gotten a lot more mainstream than it used to be.
There are many, many (many many many) online forums where homeschoolers trade tips on this. The Well-Trained Mind forums are the big hub for serious academic homeschoolers; if you're interested, I'd recommend checking them out.
"I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?"
I finished homeschooling about 12 years ago but still have my transcript because it's attached to an email in my gmail inbox. Some of it was cringey to look back on. I actually did put "grades" and "credits" in my transcript with a little explanation of how I computed them, but they were in all honesty meaningless. Probably more important was having very good standardized test scores. I took 7 SAT subject tests in a variety of subjects (looks like those tests are no more) as well as the PSAT and SAT.
I didn't really get advice on what to do throughout homeschooling / college admissions; my mom mostly stopped being involved as far as curriculum/"teaching me" anything by the time I was 12, although of course she did pay for books. Some of which were infamous A Beka/Bob Jones books (feel free to Google), but those were actually pretty good in terms of being self-study-able. I remember frequenting "College Confidential" which was a forum for anxious highscoolers and their parents about college admissions so I kind of knew what to expect with the process.
I don't think it was a terribly successful portfolio -- I got rejected and waitlisted/rejected at 2 semi-competitive private universities, but did got a full ride at my state university. I also did end up getting a PhD but didn't pursue that field further.
As someone whose entire curriculum k-12 was A Beka books, I just hope the only ones of those you got were the math (and maybe English) books. But I get the feeling you had some from other subjects in there, too.
"And partly it’s because a lot of the service being provided is (taking David’s description seriously) something like “your home environment sucks, we are going to make you spend time with normal people in a normal environment in the hopes that some of it rubs off on you”."
Sadly, those kids most in need of contact with "normal people" are forced to schools with the least amount of "normal people" either as peers or as teachers / other adults. My wife teaches special ed for k-2 at one such school. I'm not teacher bashing at large. But damn a lot of those teachers and faculty I wouldn't trust to mow my lawn without either flaking out, stealing my lawn mower, or burning down my garage. If you want to find normal people in a public school, you need to drive to the suburbs or find a charter.
Segregating schools by geogrophy leads to ghetoization of schools and of neighborhoods.
>Segregating schools by geogrophy leads to ghetoization of schools and of neighborhoods.
They used to try to directly combat this sort of thing not that long ago, the infamous "forced" busing. Apparently pretty much everybody (but of course mostly those richer and whiter) hated it so much that it led to increase in segregation, if anything.
> I’m grateful that people aren’t as angry at me as they are with this person, but I’m not sure why - I feel like I was making a pretty similar point.
That person was being completely insufferable for reasons largely unrelated to her actual substantive point. I'm fully on the "abolish schools" bandwagon, and her tweet annoyed me as well. (Largely, because of playing in to the power-to-truth "all costs of intrusive covid measures are ignorable, the benefits are never to be questioned, there is no limit to what should be done to fight covid" line.)
If she had said, "Here are several studies leading me to believe schooling is unimportant," I don't think anyone would've cared. But any argument along the lines of "Your great-grandparents didn't have x," is a non-starter with me. Life was worse back then! I want my children to have better lives than my great-grandparents!
But are we confident it was worse in every dimension? It might still be the case that some things were, in fact, better for our grandparents. I'm not saying that such a line of thought should be considered sufficient stand-alone argument; I'm just saying the fact that life was overall worse doesn't mean every particular aspect of life was worse.
Sure, but I think that's the point. It wasn't worse in every dimension, which is why "I have several studies leading me to believe schooling is unimportant" is plausible enough that it wouldn't annoy folks.
"I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?"
My wife and I homeschooled my child K-12. He went to a California Community College, which is easy to do starting in high school (the principal, Mom, needs to fill out a form saying he is ready to do college level work). The community colleges don't care what you high school GPA was.
And one you get an AA most colleges don't care about your high school experience at all. When son was applying t the four year colleges after CC a few asked for high school transcripts. Once I made it clear that I *could* make up a transcript for him, but it would be for them and what would they like it to say? ... all but one decided to waive this. The remaining one asked for a "narrative transcript" describing what he had done in high school, but without GPA.
Very few folks gave us advice. Lots of feedback while homeschooling, but not really advice.
AA = Associate of Arts. Many state 4-year schools will take an AA from an in-state community college as the equivalent of two years of classes, rather than evaluating the courses class by class. And the AA is a degree, so once you ahve one, your prior degree (high school diploma) isn't very relevant.
"Many state 4-year schools will take an AA from an in-state community college as the equivalent of two years of classes, rather than evaluating the courses class by class."
California is even better than that.
Every community college course comes with information about whether the class will transfer to the CalState system, the UC system or both.
There is a web-site that even provides the mapping (class X at community college Y transfers as class K at CalState M).
But the AA doesn't necessarily work that way. Your AA may have classes that don't transfer and then you won't necessarily show up with Junior standing.
Still, this is made fairly clear (though it isn't trivially simple).
I don't think the AA helped much with University of California. His units transferred whether he had the AA or not. I think it might have helped with the out-of-state 4-year colleges, but I don't know.
This is the route I took after having a variety of problems affect my late high school work. After getting my two-year community college degree, high school records were completely irrelevant.
My son finished his CC experience with the following:
*) Associates degree
*) 60+ semester units (2 years) of UC transferable units
*) IGETC (University of California campuses will consider you to have fulfilled your GE requirements)
*) A high 3.x GPA
I'm mentioning all of these because a surprising number (to me!) of out-of-state 4-year colleges accepted him and MOST of them scored his general education requirements as completed (a few wanted him to take more foreign language; one wanted him to *still* take a bunch of general ed at that school). He also would enter with junior standing so they clearly also took most/all of his units.
The schools were not bad (Wofford, Florida Southern, Clark University), though not Ivy or even Vanderbilt, Duke level.
But I also don't know which of these mattered for transfer purposes. The GPA? The AA degree? Did IGETC help with the general ed requirements at the 4-year? I dunno.
But his high school education wasn't very important.
AA (or AS) is the community college degree, the equivalent of the BA or BS that you get at completion of a full college. Lots of full colleges then admit you directly as a junior if you have an associate's degree.
Just like universities give out 4-year Bachelor degrees, community colleges give out 2-year Associate degrees. Associate of Science degrees are awarded for the completion of a specialized program intended for immediate employment, while an Associate of Arts is an academic degree meant for transfer to a 4-year university, usually a state school, where the student will finish out the last 2 years of a Bachelor.
Science community colleges have open admissions, the GED -> CC -> AA -> State U -> BA/BS path is definitely viable for homeschoolers, including unschoolers.
An idea in the last post I meant to bring up but didn't was Bryan Caplan's ideas about Unschooling plus math where most of the day kids do what they want but have to do some amount of math studying. https://www.econlib.org/unschooling-math/
And even there, Caplan is "You have to do Maths. No, you *have* to, because everyone will need it!"
Which is the same argument people are having about "but why do I have to study A, B or C, I'll never need it afterwards" and "I wasted so much time in school having to do this subject instead of the one I was really interested in".
So he's making the case for Compulsory You Have To Learn This, In This Way for *one* subject he finds dear to his heart/valuable, and he's re-invented the notion of school.
Well, I kind of agree with the spirit of the thing. We've more or less done away with illiteracy, but innumeracy IMO remains a serious problem that is holding our society back in tangible ways. Can you imagine how much time and money would be saved if everyone understood (at the very minimum) the concepts of "mean" and "standard deviation" ?
I suppose that fits with Scott's steelman version of the Chinese education system he links to. People have to learn discipline by doing some things even if they dislike them. But as an economist, Caplan economizes on that by only having that be a small portion of his kids' education.
Math is somewhat critical to the modern approach to really any complex topic - science engineering programming business etc. it’s probably worth teaching! And teach the advanced stuff too on the principle of “everyone should try to learn it, and maybe they’ll fail but why not try because it is just useful”
In the article he says most adults won't use math. But no child knows for certain whether they will need math in a future career. He also makes the claim that no unschooler is good at math as am adult. And he implicitly claims that math is hard to learn as an adult with no foundation. These later claims might be incorrect, but he is aware that most adults do not need math, just that some do, and unschooling does not teach math well.
You need math to understand science, statistics, and economics. Which is vitally important to existing in society and making any sort of sophisticated or important decision.
Just because you don't use a ton of math in your job doesn't mean that it isn't important as a person.
“He also makes the claim that no unschooler is good at math as am adult.”
Both of our kids were unschooled.
“You need math to understand science, statistics, and economics.”
Both of them understand economics much better than the average bear. Or econ major.
I haven't read what Bryan wrote, but a kid who is interested in math is likely to learn it for himself better than most do in high school. Formal math, in particular calculus, makes teaching economics a little easier, but what is really required is mathematical intuition. David Ricardo was the first great economic theorist, and as far as I can tell he knew no math beyond arithmetic.
Probably not, but I mostly didn't, aside from giving them bedtime puzzles of two equations in two unknowns, rigged to have integer solutions, when they were little. My daughter's opinion was that I was not very good at teaching math to her because it was all too obvious to me. Our son taught himself probability theory from _How to Take a Chance_ (by the same people who wrote and illustrated _How to Lie with Statistics_) when he was eleven or twelve, because he was playing D&D and wanted to be able to calculate odds. I don't think either kid got farther in math later than what they thought they would need for the math SAT.
If you don't understand math, you can't understand basically anything meaningful about science or economics.
Math is just kind of vitally important because there's a ridiculous amount of things you literally can't do without it. People who can't do algebra are severely disadvantaged, people who can't understand statistics can't understand much of the world, and while calculus is "optional", frankly, a lot of things only make sense if you actually understand calculus because otherwise the way they fit together is arbitrary.
Math is also used in programming and accounting, and I randomly use algebra to solve problems periodically.
If you can't do math, you're pretty much boned.
And math is additive - you have to learn lower level stuff before you learn upper level stuff.
On top of all of that, math can be really boring for a lot of people, so you kind of have to force a lot of people to do it.
I wouldn't be surprised if learning math also literally made people smarter; it's worth noting that over the 20th century, as we increasingly compelled people to go to school, median IQ went up by about 3 points a decade. There's some evidence that going to school literally increases IQ, especially for people who are below average.
"a lot of things only make sense if you actually understand calculus because otherwise the way they fit together is arbitrary."
Understanding the basic concepts of calculus, which are the concepts of flow and stock and how they are related, is very important, but that doesn't require you to be actually able to take the derivative of a function or integrate one, let alone solving differential equations. And having taken calculus in high school is no guarantee of understanding the concepts.
I interview Harvard applicants in Silicon Valley, as an alumnus. One question I routinely ask is whether they can show why the fundamental theorem of calculus, that the derivative of the integral of a function is the function, that the two operations are inverses, is true. It's something that can be done in two minutes on one sheet of paper. I don't think even one yet has been able to do it.
And these are typically students who have taken AP calculus and gotten a top grade on the exam.
Well, for what it's worth, I have a PhD in maths, I've even pursued an academic career in probability theory for a short time (and then switched to doing machine learning in a private company) and while I definitely learned the proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus at one point and understood it, I cannot recall it now. That suggest I have not really internalized the reasoning all that much, learned the proof, understood it but did not really integrate it into my "mental toolikit" well enough (because for the stuff where I did, I can recreate at least a rough sketch of the proofs/a heuristic behind it right off the bat).
I think it is a flaw for someone trying to pursue a career in theoretical maths. I felt this was the case for me with several fairly basic concepts which I felt I understood but not well enough to work with them completely intuitively which I think is necessary in order to abstract these things out when contemplating new hypotheses/heuristics and actually be good at mathematical research.
But I don't think it is a flaw in pretty much any other field, including those which apply maths a lot (and also I got a much better intuitive understanding of more advanced concept I learned about later on when I also learned to learn maths better...but even the university was not particularly good at teaching me to learn things that way, at least the undergraduate program did not (and there weren't even traces of this way of teaching before college)
So I agree with David completely...it is better to have rock solid maths intuition in a few key concepts than to learn a lot of maths without really internalizing it. Sometimes a good heuristic teaches a concept better than a formal proof (especially proofs by contradiction tend to be fairly useless at shedding light on the theorems) and those are typically much easier to learn (although sometimes there are no good heuristics or they rely on a deep understanding of other concepts)
In case it's useful to anyone: in the CS Lewis quote, "games" is being used in the British school sense where it refers to mandatory sports (rugby, cricket, maybe something else).
Yeah, I had "PE" and "games" at school. PE was usually indoors in a gym; games was outdoors and involved sports - a choice of rugby or cross-country running in the winter and then cricket (there was probably an alternative, but I don't remember what it was) in the summer.
Less posh schools generally play football (soccer), though rugby gets played at all schools in a small number of towns where rugby is the dominant sport.
Not liking mandatory sports isn’t universal to say the least, sports are one of the most valued parts of HS for many people well into adulthood. Which is interesting and I suspect has more significant effect on other things than is appreciated
The abolish school/pro-homeschool crowd on this blog seems to be largely a product of this crowds demographics and I’m skeptical that the same lessons would transfer to the wider world.
It seems to me that homeschooling would work best for highly motivated, intelligent, introverted, possibly neurodivergent children from well off families (a group that I would guess is heavily over represented in these comments).
"It seems to me that homeschooling would work best for highly motivated, intelligent, introverted, possibly neurodivergent children from well off families"
I'll supply an anecdote in the other direction.
My child was moderately motivated, above average in intelligence (~1200 SAT) but not genius level, extroverted in a way his mother and I find very strange and neurotypical as nearly as I can tell.
Homeschooling went fine.
I think there may be a sampling bias. Few folks who homeschool and it "works out" write books about how their kid got accepted to all eight Ivy League schools :-)
I agree that homeschooling works best for such children, but even meeting all those criteria isn't sufficient for a child to be a good fit for homeschooling. My brother met all those criteria except perhaps for being highly motivated (neurodivergent due to autism and ADHD), and did online schooling for a semester after being severely bullied in high school. Though his online schooling experience was better than his initial experience at the school where he was bullied, he started at another high school the following year, and I think the second in-person school was better for him. One challenge of online schooling for him was that he'd often get into fights with my parents about completing work, since so much of it was done at the student's discretion, and his executive function skills weren't well-developed. He was a teenage boy with ADHD, so his struggles weren't shocking, but I think the more rigid structure of traditional schooling combined with having closer relationships with his teachers helped him. Additionally, he was pretty isolated during his semester of online schooling. He only had one close friend at his second traditional school, but the other kids were kind enough to him, and I think having daily social interaction helped him overall.
More recently, he completed his first year of grad school completely online due to COVID. When I went to visit him and my parents (with whom he still lives) recently, he seemed more withdrawn from the outside world than ever. Part of this is probably due to my parents' unique neuroses. They're also rather isolated, and I think on some level, they still like having a kid at home hanging out with them on evenings and weekends. But even though he struggles socially now, I think he'd struggle even more if he'd done all his high school years online. I also don't think he's the only person like this.
I guess this is all a long-winded way of saying: though Scott acknowledges the importance of schools as social service providers for low-income kids, they also provide non-educational benefits to kids who aren't poor. It's certainly possible for those kids to obtain some of those benefits elsewhere, but in my brother's case, I don't know where he would've found them.
Yeah I think that the benefits of socialization from school can't be overstated. I think that appeals to history which make the argument that mandatory schooling is a relatively new concept and children have been fine without it for most of history miss the unique nature of the present moment - the destruction of local communities plus the new addition of the internet make it harder than ever for children to form meaningful social bonds outside of school.
I suspect there's also something to the point that since most kids are in school these days, there aren't alternate ways for school-aged kids to get this kind of social bonding any more.
Compare - it used to be totally fine for a kid to grow up speaking only Old English at home, and they'd grow into totally normal adults if you did that. But these days, if you raise your kid speaking only Old English at home, you'll definitely have done ... something ... to that kid.
"there aren't alternate ways for school-aged kids to get this kind of social bonding any more."
This simply isn't true, if the homeschooling parents make reasonable efforts to address this need. There are homeschooling groups in all but the most rural areas that provide these opportunities (often free), as well as community clubs, extracurricular activities of various kinds (music or art classes, sports, etc.), camps, parks, and more.
Homeschooling does not require isolation, and the "but socialization!" argument is too often trotted out as some kind of trump card (yay, mixed metaphor!) by those whose minds are already made up against homeschooling. Some homeschooled children are isolated, sure, but that's a failure of the homeschooling parents, in general. It doesn't singularly discredit homeschooling any more than horrific bullying singularly discredits state-sponsored schooling.
Right - I shouldn't have said there *aren't* such alternate ways any more.
What I should have said is just that, since *most* kids are in school, there are fewer kids available for any particular other alternate way of meeting people, and it requires much more of a proactive effort than it would have required in the era before near-universal schooling.
I agree with that assessment. I also suspect the fact that we're in an age less oriented toward "free-range" childhood makes even random neighborhood encounters rarer, because other kids are generally inside or at structured activities. So, purposeful coordination really is required.
I completely agree. Even as a traditionally schooled adult, I'm having a hard time socializing right now. In the earlier days of the pandemic when everyone was at home all the time, I could endure the situation. Then when things started opening up while my spouse and others in my circle were still working from home, things were looking good. But now that I'm working from home while many others have returned to the office, I'm feeling pretty isolated. Conversely, in the pre-Bowling Alone days when local communities were stronger, it would've been easier to make social bonds through local organizations.
I would think the internet makes it easier to form meaningful social bonds outside of school. Several of my daughter's friends were first met in World of Warcraft and continue to be friends, mostly online but occasionally in realspace, thereafter. My wife and both kids flew to the wedding of someone we only knew online — I would have gone but had a prior commitment.
One problem with school as a source of social bonds is that the social group you are interacting with consists of other kids your age, with a little deviation from that in high school. That works badly if you are either intellectually or socially advanced or retarded — I was one of each — or if you get along better with people either older or younger. When our home unschooled daughter went to college, she got along much better with faculty and staff than with her fellow students.
One truism in education research is that every new innovative form of teaching that gets amazing results never seems to replicate on a larger scale. Because the new exciting school trying out the new way of teaching attracts the kind of parents who are themselves highly educated and interested in education, disproportionately wealthy, lack major social problems, etc. A group of kids who it is frankly very easy to teach. The same is true for any schools with selective admissions. Homeschooling seems like it would suffer the same issue
"One truism in education research is that every new innovative form of teaching that gets amazing results never seems to replicate on a larger scale ... Homeschooling seems like it would suffer the same issue"
Homeschooling suffers from a more fundamental self-selection bias: If it is going poorly (from the parents' viewpoint) then it stops and the kid goes to some other school.
Public schooling doesn't have this outlet because most other choices are more expensive.
My wife and I homeschooled our child. It worked (for my definition of "worked"). I don't believe that homeschooling would "work" for everyone. Maybe not even for more than pick-some-percent.
I think the pattern you describe exists in contexts other than schooling. My interpretation is that the original experiment is being done by enthusiasts who really care about the approach and are putting time, effort, and thought into making it work. When it is introduced on a larger scale it's being done as a job by people who have been hired to do it.
Re. CS Lewis going to a school "where the headmaster was suffering from some kind of mental disorder and only taught geometry:
My bro-in-law was sent to a private religious school, where the headmaster was suffering from some kind of mental disorder and beat the children often. He was confined to an asylum shortly after my bro-in-law left.
My mom's dad was sent to a public school in Poland, where the students spoke only German or Polish, and the teacher spoke only Russian; and his main activity was shouting at the students in Russian and beating them.
Wittgenstein renounced his family fortune to go to Austria and help the poor by teaching public school in a poor district. He soon had to flee Austria for beating one of his students to death.
Positions of authority and power, such as being a teacher, pastor, politician, police officer, or soldier, seem to attract both people who would like to use that power to help others, and those who would like to abuse that power. Or perhaps they transform people who want to help others into people who abuse their power. Or perhaps people who want to help others are inherently more-likely to abuse power in the name of helping others.
(Me? I just want to work in AI. Nothing to worry about.)
> Wittgenstein renounced his family fortune to go to Austria and help the poor by teaching public school in a poor district. He soon had to flee Austria for beating one of his students to death.
He did not, in fact, beat one of his students to death. It's also misleading to say that he went to Austria; he was Austrian. I'm also skeptical that he viewed his purpose there as being one of helping the poor. He at least had other motivations, like working somewhere where he would not be recognized as a member of his wealthy family.
Sorry. I read an article claiming that the student he knocked unconscious had died a few days later, and Wittgenstein had to flee. Now, on checking, I find this was false. Your other points are also correct.
The Tractatus was uniquely troubling, at least the parts of it I read.
The authority/power/school situation, yes, I'm a little surprised that hasn't been mentioned more here. In addition to a social services agency school is a social sorting system. It reinscribes class status quite efficiently. I am not sure that some of what Scott rails against ("rails" subtly) isn't just the experience of having to be inside the system watching other humans get sorted. Some socially sensitive (oversensitive?) people gravitate away from positions of any responsibility after seeing teachers, nominally benificent people, favoring, humiliating, and generally sorting their peers and themselves.
And that's just the pretty side. Today:
13-yr-old son: The art teacher hit me on the head today.
Me: WTF?
Son: And I said I was going to tell my mom, and then she did a baby talk voice "poor widdle (name), wunning to mommy."
Me (talking to the principal on the phone moments later): And then my son said she hit him with her hand -
Son: Not her hand -
Me: What did she hit you with?
Son: The top of the box of watercolors!
Me: He says it was the top of the watercolor box....
Educational humiliation. It wasn't a hard blow, more of a tap, apparently, but it's still ridiculous. I asked him how it got to that point and he said "well I talked back to her."
And this place was supposed to be BETTER than the last one. I mean, I've never even met this "art" teacher and she practically dares me to report her. Hmmm.
Sometimes kids who unschool/nonschool are being spared the emotionally destructive manipulation that can leave kids alienated from themselves and unable to move forward into adulthood. Sure, selection bias of rationalists for people who could do well after homeschooling, or homeschool their own kids well. But school as a site of emotional abuse is also an important perspective. Thank you for bringing that up.
Sorry, but I'm amused by this. The teacher's mockery was not correct, but in my day, if you went home and said "Teacher hit me!", you'd be liable for "And what did you do to make them hit you?" and another slap for causing trouble in school.
So what did your thirteen year old mean by "Well, I talked back to her"? Did she tell him to do something (e.g. 'sit down and do your work' and he was a smart arse about it, or she said something wrong and he corrected her?)
Because for every "My little Johnny said the teacher picked on him!" story, there is another story about "Johnny was disruptive in class, picked on other students, and when the teacher finally sent him out of the room, every parent who heard about it was delighted".
Let me repeat: the teacher shouldn't have mocked him, and even with a tap on the head from a cardboard box lid, that shouldn't have happened either. But he did admit to "talking back", so what was that about?
Right? I'm chuckling as I write this. I'm hoping to find out later. "Talking back" is not a construct I use at home - I'll use "Seriously?" or "Ok, that's not realistic," or "Stop doing that right now" or "Did you just say what I think you said?" or "What is that attitude about?" or "Are you feeling overwhelmed?" or even (regrettably) "What the f*** did you just do?" But "talking back" isn't really a concept I go for - which means he was describing the situation in someone else's (probably the teacher's) language, which means that only a few weeks into the school year, he is interpreting himself within her narrative constructs in the context of that class. (Grrr.) It's hard enough to encourage him to communicate clearly, calmly and thoroughly. When adults who are paid to be there cultivate power struggles, I take a dim view of it. It goes nowhere; she wins automatically because she is the teacher, but she also loses because she feels restrained, she can't go full jackass so she mitigates her crankiness with head games. He loses automatically because he is the student, being told what to do and how to do it; but he wins too, because he has a much larger range of attitude available to him due to having little institutional power/responsibility. Middle school is a hard age to teach (it seems) and one of the pitfalls is using the job as an excuse to act 13 oneself (or 10 or 5). She might as well have walked up to him and said, "I don't handle my emotions well and I wish I could be a jerk right now but I know I'm not supposed to!" It makes him have to be the adult in the room. "Can you get me fired today? I hate my job right now!" He's like, Sure, how can I help?
Probably he was doodling on the drawing assignment, probably she told him to stop, probably he tried to make an excuse. The front office says he is very well-behaved there, I went to drop something off the other day, met him at the office and they were saying he would never be getting called there for anything behavioral and he probably wouldn't be at the office again for a while. (He practices all his tricks on his brother at home but usually keeps it under wraps at school). It is a school for kids with learning differences, I think 90% of the teachers and staff are much better at dealing with limit-testing than Art Teacher is. One of the weirdest sequelae of the Trump administration has been watching what happens when people with some thread in their background of something Trump activated, have to reintegrate it with their contemporary situation. In 2016 literally right after the election, some senior citizens became emboldened to glare at kids in grocery stores; some people had been suppressing an urge to criticize and share their feelings of being disrespected, and when he was elected they felt they didn't have to suppress it anymore. With kids with learning differences, there are legitimate pedagogical reasons not to flash back to 1970 (as with many other aspects of the social shift around that election!) Maybe she's renegotiating her inner experience of authority and power. His initial explanation was, "Mom, she's southern, that's how they are." (Bwahaha). If it's a good story I'll respond again.
Shoot. If she was his age, I'd say "she likes you."
Yeah, gonna still say "no, thanks" on that dynamic. I see you saying it shouldn't have happened, but given the apologetics in your comment, I'm underwhelmed. The fact that there is a built-in assumption the adult is always right is a huge part of the problem and why school can be so ripe for abuses. It's comparable to the presumption that cops never lie.
We don't hit other adults when they say something we dislike, unless we want to risk jail. And mockery of subordinates is generally a bad look. I see nothing that makes it *more* noble for adults to hit or mock children than it is for them to hit other adults, only less. If that teacher can't keep her temper in check well enough to keep from hitting and mocking people over whom she has power, she has no business being in a position of authority over others.
I went to a very good private school. Nonetheless, the physics teacher was unwilling to admit that he was provably wrong on a physics question and when my father for some reason sat in on my English class one day his reaction was that the teacher was using the class to let her feel superior to the students.
I'm not sure why you see this as a slur on the school system per se (if you do). Aren't people in general like this? If I hire a plumber and he comes to fix the sink and I observe "you seem to be doing it wrong, I saw a Youtube video in which a master plumber said you should never remove the whatzit dam before you unscrew the framistan from the tarbuckle" I kind of expect a frosty reception. And when I watch TED talks, I have the same impression, that people do that kind of thing largely to bask in the admiring applause -- i.e. to feel superior to the audience.
Mind you, I'm not saying these aren't regrettable human behaviors. They just don't seem special to schoolteachers or the school setting. That's just what people are like. It's why we feel obliged to smile at our boss's idiotic or even mildly offensive jokes, and why it's really really hard to win if you sue City Hall.
I think a physics teacher has a professional obligation to do his best to say correct things about physics, rather than insisting that the incorrect thing he said was true and being unwilling to listen to a student's demonstration that it was not. Do you disagree?
With regard to the English teacher, I don't think it is surprising, but it is regrettable.
Well, sure. And if you personally are made of such sterling stuff that you've always responded with grace and patience when some schmo questions you in your own area of of expertise -- out of momentary insecurity, a default assumption that you can't have made an error, et cetera -- then I truly take my hat off to you, for while I do my best I can't say I have *never* been shamefully dismissive in such a situation.
People are human, no? Flawed since Uriel nailed the eviction notice to the gates of Eden. Few of us are sufficiently angelic in our natures that we never ever (for example) say something dumb on the Internet and, when challenged accurately on it, double down, move the goalposts, turn to an ad hominem attack...
So what I'm asking is whether you have reason to believe that this lapse in professionalism is specific to this school, or schools in general, or is only reflective of the general human tendency to find it difficult to respond gracefully when errors in our personal area of expertise are pointed out by randoms in the audience.
I think the fact that it happened in a very good school suggests that such things probably happen more in average schools.
You put your question as though the physics teacher had some reason for his opinion. He didn't. I have a doctorate in physics, and the claim he was defending, originating in the driver's ed textbook the school used, was complete nonsense, inconsistent with elementary Newtonian physics. Either that was obvious to him and he didn't want to admit that I was right and the book was wrong or he was not competent to teach physics — or, I suppose, he just didn't bother to think about whether the claim was true, on the grounds that as the authority he was automatically right.
Do you think that behavior is within the normal range for a teacher dealing with a question in his field?
I should add that the driver's ed teacher was perfectly reasonable. He said he didn't know if the book was right or not and we should take the question to the physics teacher.
I was homeschooled through high school. I did 2-4 hours of schoolwork a day. I skipped grade 9. I CLEP'd out of most of my gen-eds in college, and graduated college 3 months after I turned 20.
Was it hard to get into college? No, my PSAT and SAT scores spoke for themselves. I took a few dual credit college classes in my senior year of high school, and that might have helped too. Did people in college give me a hard time? Not that I recall, but I didn't advertise it much.
I don't think all these collections of anecdotes are very useful. I personally found school mostly useless and boring and learned much better on my own. I also practically lived in the LA public library and both got a perfect SAT score and won a television quiz show when I was 12. I don't want to blow myself too hard and I'm not all that special now, but I probably kind of was as a kid. Your readers are not some random cross section of the English-speaking OECD world. They're both academically more gifted than average and also more likely to be somewhat outside the norm socially. I actually look back fondly on school anyway because it's the only time I had friends. I find myself naturally drawn to information and to things, not to people, and school forced me into a room with the same people all the time that I got to know and love and it's the only time that has ever happened to me.
But I'm kind of lucky that I wasn't just academically gifted. I was also pretty athletic, good at sports, tall, lean, never had a particularly awkward phase in puberty where I looked like a deformed nitwit like a lot of kids. I get the feeling that was very much not the case for you and a big part of the reason you hate school is that girls were mean to you when you were growing up.
I've been reading your blog for as long you've had one, so you've earned the benefit of the doubt and I believe you're trying as hard as you can to stick to the data, but it's hard, Scott. Frankly, I try very hard not to express strong public opinions on things I have a personal emotional investment in, no matter how dispassionate and data-driven I believe I can be. There be dragons there. It just seems like you're begging for the less rational parts of your brain to come in and subtly infect the rest, relying mostly on crowd-sourced external fact fanatics to keep you in check. But a lot of your readers are also not dispassionate about this and are extremely invested in their personal pet ideas about some unorthodox way a society should be run based on what worked for them or their family.
Your comment about kids wasting away seems amazingly out of touch. Do you really believe you know more about other people's kids than they do because your mom didn't really know you? The idea that anywhere near a majority of kids spending most of their time glued to electronic entertainment devices are actually learning C++ and doing the most useful thing they'll ever do as kids is prima facie rather unlikely, and the fact that three of your personal friends did that 20 years ago is not meaningful evidence.
Yeah he probably does in some significant ways know more about peoples kids than they do. And even if not you can’t reject that immediately, it’s entirely possible to know more about something than someone who seems like they’d know more.
On that specific point I agree with you. And not because (or just because) Scott is particularly perceptive. Parents can have very large blind spots about their children.
Otherwise I think Adam's points are right on the money.
>I forget the content of most books I read years later. Is it not important to read books? No, I say -- those books affected me and had some small impact on my character and thinking.
I actually think this may be a bad thing. You don't remember the specific assertions, but they are now baked into your model of the world. After they affected your thinking, now all the subsequent content you consume about the world will be interpreted through the lens of that model. You can't update the model, because you can't remember the assertions that shaped it, so you can never be persuaded that your model is wrong.
Take someone that read Marx in middle or high school. These are the insufferable people who are convinced of anti-capitalism, and that workers are always being exploited by capitalists. And they can't be convinced otherwise, because they've come to interpret the entire world through this lens, and so you'd have to simultaneously present to them a new lens through which to look at the world for every single piece of knowledge they have all at the same time.
Maybe this is only a problem with totalizing ideologies, and I'm extrapolating too far? It might not be so severe in every case, but I do think there's something wrong with the cultural attitude of "read books to passively consume them and have them shape your worldview." It takes me a very long time to read books. When I read a book, every fact, every assertion, I take the time to roll it through my brain and see what it fits with, what it contradicts with, etc. I have friends that read a book a day, and this blows my mind. What they must be doing when they "read" and what I am doing when I "read" cannot be the same thing. I have heard of speed reading, and I've tried it, and when I do I walk away feeling like I briefly looked at the pages of a book for a while and didn't think about the content at all. It feels to me like this is a form of intellectual LARPing.
It sounds to me like you are advocating the idea that a person should never learn anything unless they are going to learn it so totally and thoroughly that they will never lose explicit memory of it. At least, that would be the way to avoid the specific criticisms you are giving.
Yeah what I want to say about this isn't super sharp yet, which is why I'm spitballing it here for people to challenge me on it.
I think the way you phrased it is stronger than what I mean. I think if one should want to learn something, they should try to tether what they learn to specific, falsifiable assertions that can be remembered, challenged, and revised later. I think passively reading things or speed reading things makes it too easy for people to compartmentalize information and results in a lot of people walking around holding highly contradictory and incompatible ideas in their head and never being forced to do the hard job of resolving the contradiction. When you try to tell people that they espouse two contradictory ideas, for many this seems to be a very painful exercise. They now have to take two ideas that they have a positive valence towards and make them fight in their brain. This is understandably painful. It means some part of your mental map of the world is wrong. It's a real loss. People will predictably avoid suffering it.
My mother once told me "you know, we've just always been Republicans, we've always felt better about them" and in literally the next sentence said "I'm a single-issue voter on a woman's right-to-choose." When I tried to point out that these ideas were contradictory, the suggestion seemed to cause a large amount of physical anguish, and we concluded the conversation having not resolved it. Obviously this contradiction didn't come from books, but I think the tendency is already there and passively reading books and not forcing yourself to think about the content reinforces it.
What I also want to do is criticize an intellectual culture of consuming books like candy that encourages this. There are too many books out there. And too many good books published every year. And I don't think we talk enough about this. There's too much "have you read this book?" and not enough "how thoroughly did you think about this book when you read it?"
This is an interesting claim and I am thinking about it.
It might be fair to say that books work best when they challenge you with new information or ideas, causing you to think critically. Some of the best books I've read have done that.
However, most people likely choose books that reinforce their views about the world (I am talking about nonfiction here). So when I was younger, any Stephen Ambrose fictionalized account of a WW2 story, like "Band of Brothers", was required reading for conservatives -- it reinforces many conservative values. A similar story applies for liberals.
On balance, though, I think it's better to uncritically read books rather than uncritically _not_ read books.
This is a tough problem. Two possible solutions come to mind, both difficult.
One is a sort of spaced repetition--any time you read a book, if you thought you learned anything important from it, you commit to reread it a few months later, and then again a couple years after that, and again after a decade, or something like that. This would roughly quadruple the time it takes to "learn" a book compared to "read" a book, and still might not solve the problem.
The other option would be to explicitly write down what you learned from the book and why you found it convincing. This seems like a better solution in the long run (you could simply review your notes now and then; plus you could more easily transfer the info to others, and it would be easier to synthesize what you learned from multiple books). But for me, at least, all the extra work would be a big deterrent from reading much in the first place.
I'm against solutions that seek to systematize the problem. I don't think there's an algorithm that you can follow to simply solve it. It matters what the subject matter is and who you are.
A large problem with books is that the author must imagine some kind of target audience, and then they must supply all of the information necessary to make their argument, and therefore to expand your potential audience you need to include more supplemental information with diminishing returns. Blogs don't have this problem. They can leverage hyperlinks, or you can just expect your reader to google anything they don't know. For reasons such as this and more, I consider internet-based content strictly superior to books for literally all purposes except post-apocalyptic knowledge preservation.
For the reader, the work that needs to be done is mental. I think making notes, re-reading, those things can still be done in a going-through-the-motions way. Although I think writing notes about what you learned is probably an unalloyed good. But it reminds me of an experience I had in college with a roommate of mine. He studied a lot more than I did, but his test scores weren't often better than mine, and in certain topics were consistently worse. We were both in engineering so we had a lot of classes in common but he took way more classes in the biological sciences than I did. And in those classes, it seems that there's just an immense amount of rote memorization that you have to do. So his study strategy was always the same: make notecards and drill. That's probably right for remembering that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but for differential equations? Thermodynamics? Circuits? Linear algebra?
It seemed like no matter what the source material was, he just wanted to follow a "study" algorithm. He wouldn't have to think very hard about what that algorithm was, but he'd spend an insane amount of time running that algorithm. Any time he spent thinking about HOW to study was time he was spending not studying, so he never wanted to try a new strategy. And it didn't work that well. You can't put every circuit problem you're gonna see on a notecard. Instead I felt that what I had to do was to read the textbook until I understood the concepts, and do problems as necessary to make sure I really did. Memorizing the word-for-word definition of an eigenvalue is not actually that helpful for understanding what an eigenvalue is.
It seems like there's a meta-level of thinking that most people don't want to do. A way of thinking deeply about how you're thinking. Once someone learns how to learn in high school, or thinks they have, they just keep running their learning system on autopilot. If their learning system says "consume books" then they will consume books. If it says "make notecards" then they will make notecards. If it's "read books and then write notes" they'll read books and write notes. But really you need to care about knowing things in a coherent and consistent model of the world and there's no shortcut or algorithm to get you there.
Full disclosure: As I former Jr High School teacher (two years) I have a jaundiced view of what schools can do. But we teachers did force the kids, at least briefly, to consider things they may not have otherwise encountered. I'm not against home schooling, but how many parents who both have jobs can home school their kids? Schools are factories for getting the majority of kids exposed to certain minimum level of skills and knowledge in selected subjects. Nothing more.
And fuller disclosure: If I were to be honest, the three positive things that school did for me personally were to (a) force me to learn how to read, (b) force me to learn math, algebra, geometry, and intro calculus (which I would never have done on my own), and (c) force me to learn how to socialize with my peers — and very importantly, it forced me to learn how to deal with bullies (of the type which I've since encountered in the corporate world).
But in response to Tom, I grew up in situation where there were books all around me. My father had a library of approximately 10,000 books. When I visited him in the summer months I'd be lost in reading his vast array of books. During the rest of year, I lived with mother and my grandmother, and their house was also full of books (maybe 3,000). My mother and grandmother did me the greatest educational favor by purchasing me many of the Time Life series (Time Life Science Library, Time Life Great Ages of Man, Time Life Nature Library, Time Life Ancient Civilizations, Library of Nations, The Seafarers, History of Civil War, This Fabulous Century, and a bunch more — and there was a series on great artists, and a series on classical music). By the time I became an adolescent, I probably knew more about more subjects than most people with a BA or BSc degree because I spent most of my bored indoor time opening these volumes and random and actually absorbing their content.
Likewise, I would say that most undergrad university educations aren't much better than high school educations. I was lucky to be accepted into the honors program at the state university I attended. That exempted me from the 100 level courses my first two years of college, and my last two years (actually three) of undergraduate school the Honors program allowed me to enroll in graduate level courses. So after my Sophomore year, most of the courses I took were graduate level courses in all sorts of diverse subjects (literature, history, botany, paleontology, genetics, pathology, nutrition, paleo anthropology, archeology) that I couldn't have taken if I were a grad student focused on single subject (and oh, the consternation when I enrolled in Med School Anatomy, and it turned out there was no rule against me enrolling in the course!). I purposely delayed my graduation, and I stuck around an extra year to take more grad courses! Then
I had followup round in graduate school. So, I probably have more graduate level courses under my belt than most PhDs have. (Unfortunately [or fortunately] I never finished my doctorate because (a) my department was dissolved, and (b) my thesis advisor and I fell out — the two may be related). But I digress. Anyway, until I started taking graduate level courses, I learned most of what I know from the books that I read as teenager.
"but how many parents who both have jobs can home school their kids?"
According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, as of 2016 only 55% of home schooled children came from two parent families where only one worked.
At all? Because surely you need to correct for the possibility that the main teaching parent worked part-time. A few shifts at Wal-Mart on the weekend is not at all the same thing as a 60 hour work-week as a paralegal at Big Law Downtown.
This makes sense, the stereotype of homeschooling is a parent directly teaching their children, but many home schooled kids are not directly taught by their parents. There's often one or two parents teaching several kids in their neighborhood.
How did your high school force you to learn to socialize with your peers? My high school provided me the *opportunity* to learn to socialize with my peers, but it didn't force me to do so, didn't encourage me to do so in any way that I recognized, didn't provide me with much useful guidance and certainly didn't teach me to do so, and didn't check to see if I actually was learning. My high school would have been perfectly happy if I had been a completely introverted and socially inept academic genius, and to the limited extent that I became anything other than that, it's not because my high school did anything like forcing me.
So, was your high school significantly different than mine, or are you just taking "gave me the opportunity and I took it" to mean "forced me, because how could I miss out on that wonderful opportunity once it was placed in front of me"?
I suppose I was to some extent forced to learn how to deal with bullies, because they forced themselves on me. That, also, is not something I am inclined to credit the school with (unless maybe they were secretly organizing the bullies to make sure nobody was either left out or over-bullied).
I mean first of all they probably do actually remember more of the book than they think they do, so your criticism is correctly motivated but mistaken. You can also just re read the book from the library or libgen or archive org.
Anti capitalists, uh, tend to for the most part stop being so with age. See: the history neoliberals, neoconservatives, reactionaries, etc, many of them were socialists in their youth. So that’s another mistaken concern.
You might be right, this whole comment tree of mine was epistemic status 60% in retrospect.
I do think anti-capitalism (the hot thing is to call it "late capitalism" these days) has a surprising amount of staying power in my generation. I didn't grow up in another generation so I don't have the ability to compare, but I'll soon be 30 and the number of reasonably smart people I know that have worked a job for a decade now and still don't understand how markets work has exceeded my expectations.
"I have heard of speed reading, and I've tried it, and when I do I walk away feeling like I briefly looked at the pages of a book for a while and didn't think about the content at all. It feels to me like this is a form of intellectual LARPing."
Seconded. I don't feel the quantity gained by speed-reading is worth the loss of quality, at least not for me. I leave room for the idea that some particularly gifted sorts might get more out of it, but honestly, I'm skeptical, and I do wonder if they aren't just rationalizing away the trade-offs.
I think there are two competing values here - the value of complete and legible knowledge versus the value of general knowledge and exposure. In practice I think people seek a balance of these values. You don't seem to care about the latter, which might explain why people seem to be acting strangely to you.
Your example of the communist manifesto is definitely the strongest case for your approach. When dealing with such a far-reaching ideology, it's only responsible to address it carefully and rigorously. The potential costs involved with being mistaken about the topic is too high to allow causal reading. On the other hand, consider reading a book on paleontology. The cost of getting something wrong about paleontology is low, so you can safely give it a light read without engaging your critical reading skills. This saves time and allows you to pick up another light nonfiction book to expand your horizons.
Many people do seem to fail to adjust their approach to the content. As in your example, plenty of people do read political manifestos uncritically - particularly people who are culturally predisposed to accept the claims for other reasons. Most young communists call themselves communists before they lay eyes on the manifesto, and approach it more as a prestige text than as something to be evaluated. I'm also reminded of some people who breeze through dozens of self-help books without making any changes to their behavior, compared to the rare people who take the content more seriously and implement change in their lives.
This is a good critique, because I absolutely don't want to be espousing for more specialism and less generalism. I definitely consider generalism underrated and specialism overrated in our current moment in America. So maybe I just think that most people are bad at generalism?
>Many people do seem to fail to adjust their approach to the content.
It would probably be better if I sharpen my criticism to this. As I said in another comment, I get a sense of cargo-cult intellectualism that encourages this, of there simply being too much great literature that a "well-read" person should have read, and not enough recognition of the time commitment that would be required to really ingest that content properly. So then any person that wishes to be "well-read" must learn to speed-read and convince themselves that they're really ingesting the content.
I came from a comfortably middle class family that cared a lot about education. So I would have been academically fine if I'd been homeschooled.
But I *loved* school, and it makes me sad to read about so many who didn't. Perhaps it's because I am an only child, and my parents hated each other, so home was unpleasant and school was the only consistent source of joy in my childhood. My parents knew that so well that the worst punishment they could inflict on me was to keep me home from school for a day. They used it sparingly; it was for when I was in *really* big trouble. But it was torture, much worse than a whupping.
But my husband and I don't hate each other, and my kids love school too (they attend an academic magnet). Perhaps you were just stuck in a mediocre-to-terrible school?
> Perhaps you were just stuck in a mediocre-to-terrible school?
Perhaps there are too many mediocre schools?
I imagine that most schools range from "obviously horrible" where most students would agree that something is deeply wrong, to "mostly okay" where bad things can happen to some individual students (e.g. they are bullied) but if you are not one of them then your experience is nice.
""mostly okay" where bad things can happen to some individual students (e.g. they are bullied) but if you are not one of them then your experience is nice."
Well, that's life in general, isn't it? Bad things happen to people, but if it's not happening to you, then life is generally okay. Some people have fantastic, wonderful lives (at least looking at them from the outside) and some people have horrible lives, but most of us are doing "mostly okay".
Sure. The context was that some people say "school is horrible" and some people say "school is nice", how is that possible? (Are the people who complain about schools merely rare exceptions we should ignore in the public discourse?) I think there are schools so bad that most students will agree that the school is bad, but even in the good schools you will get *mixed* opinions. Eh, probably you will get mixed opinions even in the bad schools, because some people may enjoy it (perhaps because it is still an improvement over what they have at home).
For example, me and my wife both had the same high school. (Different classes, we didn't know each other back then.) She remembers the school as a nice place; I am much less fond of it because some bad things happened to me there. So it's funny how despite both having the same high school, when someone says "school is hell, especially for smart people", I start nodding, and she wonders whether the person was exceptionally unlucky.
So far as my case is concerned, I went to the University of Chicago Laboratory school, arguably, then and now, the best private school in Illinois. It's the same school Obama sent his kids to. I expect it was better than the alternatives, but not very good.
I went to a very good private school, my wife to a good suburban public school. I didn't hate school and I don't think she did, we just both found most of it boring. We thought we could do better for our children, so unschooled them.
Bullied outcasts will be bullied outcasts in essentially every school. There are some variations in favoured types of bullying (lower-class schools having more physical beatings, for instance), but not in whether it happens. Citation: I went to six schools.
Half-decent schools aren't too different in how much kids like them; the kid matters more.
If 1) a major benefit of school is clandestine social services for poor children in the form of "we are going to make you spend time with normal people in a normal environment in the hopes that some of it rubs off on you" and
2) this rubbing is inevitably bidirectional, ie "you become the average of the people around you" then
3) it makes sense that a typical public school education is less and less valuable the more exceptional a child is, as becoming more like their classmates would be more and more of a downgrade. You can see threads of this lots of anti-school sentiment, which tends to come from high achievers, eg Paul Graham's anti-school essay, the CS Lewis quote, Scott's own positions, David Friedman's position on unschooling, etc.
I'm writing in support of Scandi hobby horse riding. Sure you can just jump on your hobby horse and tear around the room, but when its organised and with competitions and you dress up for it, and look after your horsey, it's a whole new world. Now, you don't need to go to school to do that, but you need some sort of association to organise events, set criteria etc, and you need socialisation for kids to see that there is an ultra-point in progressing from tearing around the lounge room to going to a hall and doing the whole hobby-horse dressage. So perhaps there's a metaphor there for schooling too - that the socialisation and competition of "more than one" is a good thing? Schools may give you a chance to explore and find activities and interests that expand you. On the other hand, I do remember spending heaps of time looking out the windows at the wind in the trees.
The comments about school being bad for kids in bad homes, and the comment that "things could turn out really bad in the long term for elementary school kids from families with non-helicopter parents", puzzled me, until I remembered that parents today are legally required to be helicopter parents. I've noticed that kids today don't seem to be allowed to manage their own play time themselves--parents think they're supposed to arrange, attend, and supervise any occasion where their kid steps outside. And I guess this is so, because I've heard numerous cases of the police being called to detain kids as old as 13 for walking around their neighborhood without an adult.
I don't think being forced to stay in school for 6 hours a day is NEARLY as bad for kids as being kept under lock and key 24 hours a day. Old-school school might have taught kids to be drudge-workers; the new continuous-supervision method teaches them to think of themselves as prisoners, and of society as a prison.
Zoom school may be worse for parents than for kids. One I spoke to about it said she has to stay in the zoom room with her son for the entire school day, because he doesn't pay any attention unless she's there with him.
Good point about the current educational system. I am really shocked by how much home work my step son was forced to do. And I hear it's worse now!
I come from an educational period when we got hardly any home work assignments. Other than bunch of term papers and essays, the homework assignments I did get could mostly be polished off in study hall. And after school there were three or four hours before I had to be home for dinner when I just hung out with my friends and did things we didn't want our parents to know about. After dinner, though, I would curl up with a book.
A lot of that is just educational fads, which swing back and forth. Personally I was never given homework until high school. It was assumed that you could learn all you needed to learn in the 6 hours or so a day we spent in school, and it was unheard of to assign work to do *at home* (at least in a routine way, special projects excepted), until you got to high school and things started to kind of kick into a higher gear. The pendulum swung way far back later, to the point where I recall my kids getting "homework" in freaking 1st grade, so they could "get used to it" (the baseball bat I guess). I think it's swinging away now, and I notice more teachers emphasizing to parents that the kids really need down and play time.
"actually, school isn't that important" is my take too.
If I accept the analogy: I could spend 12 years becoming as athletic as possible but if I don't train whatsoever for 5 - 10 years, I'm going to revert back to about the average. When you leave school, you are no longer training. Adults are unable to recall a lot of what they learned in school.
I do not think it is a very good analogy because "training" is one thing while the information learned in school is actually a bunch of different things. The other students forget what they learned in large part, so other students can catch back up when it gets reinforced at a later time. If it's never reinforced, then by the time the students graduate, the information retained for that particular fact will be near zero. The training is not one homogenous thing.
I'm not advocating that public school is social services for poor kids and the rest of us go along with it as some sort of ruse. School is important for my kids, too, it's just also the case that I have more resources to make up for its absence academically. They were still struggling socially and emotionally a great deal, and because we structure our lives with the assumption that they'll be in school during the day, that part wasn't great, either. I know this is a crowd with a specific set of schooling experiences, and I have those, too. But it was bad that we closed schools for all kinds of reasons.
I think it's a perfectly reasonable and defensible take to say "of course we have forgotten 90% of what we learned in school because we don't need it. The problem is that when we were at school, we didn't know which 90% it was".
I suspect that if you went to a high school reunion 20 or 30 years after graduation, took all the people with robust middle-class incomes (ie the reasonably successful people) and asked them what they still used that they learned in high school, then I'd expect all of them to have a very short list. But also that the combined list would be very varied and probably cover a large fraction of the curriculum. And at least some of the stuff no-one uses would be things that are now outdated but could not have reasonably have been predicted to have been so 20/30 years ago.
There is an entirely separate question of whether high school is the right way to learn that sort of thing.
There is also another separate question of what age it is appropriate to narrow the curriculum and start dropping subjects. For instance, a typical English student would cut down to ten subjects for Year 10 (at the age of 14, equivalent to US Grade 9) - always including English Language and Mathematics, and then from a list looking something like: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Combined Science (this can be a single or double subject), Geography, History, various foreign languages, English Literature, Art, Music, Design and Technology, Physical Education (also known as Sports Science), Religious Studies, Computing, Business. You would normally be required to do at least one science (ie single-subject Combined Science; you can only do the separate sciences if you do all three), one foreign language and one "essay subject" (History and English Literature being the most common). Then at the end of Year 11 (grade 10), you cut again to three subjects with no restrictions at all. For incomprehensible reasons, Economics is only taught starting at year 12 (grade 11). A typical example might be to do Maths, Physics and Chemistry. English universities do single subjects, where you literally do not study anything else at all, so that would restrict you to degrees in Maths, Physics, Chemistry and plausibly some other scientific/mathematical subjects, e.g. some Economics or Computer Science courses, especially the more theoretical ones (a practical software engineering course would want someone with some programming experience; a theory/maths heavy computer science course wouldn't). Doctors will usually do Chemistry, Biology and either Maths or Physics. Lawyers will usually do at least one "essay subject" (examined by writing a number of essays), e.g. English, History, Politics, Government, but no other restrictions.
For those of you who have read Harry Potter, the "OWLs" and "NEWTs" are analogies of the English GCSEs and A Levels; so you sit 10 GCSEs and three A Levels.
In respect of homeschooling... anyone who pays the fee can take a GCSE or A Level examination. State schools will pay the fees for their students who have completed a relevant course (and will usually pay the fee to take foreign language exams for native speakers of those languages because the exam is laughably easy if you're a native speaker and it juices the school's stats). Homeschoolers who want to go to university are expected to take a suitable set of GCSEs and A Levels (a minimum of five GCSEs, including Maths, English Language, at least one science, at least one modern foreign language, and a minimum of two A Levels; few universities care much about GCSEs as long as you have the minimum, which is what we have instead of a General Education requirement. Most actual universities will require three A Levels rather than two; entry is competitive on grades, so if you want to get into a selective institution or a popular course, then you will likely need at least BBB, and plausibly as high as A*A*A can be needed).
Oh, and... for what I call an essay subject, a typical examination would be a three hour exam, in which you would be expected to complete four essays. The exam would just be twelve essay titles that you can choose from, so you pick four and write your four essays. You have no other information beyond what is in your head and the title. Here's an example (from a recent history exam):
‘Thatcher’s economic policies created an ‘economic miracle’ in the years 1983 to 1987.’
I think they did GCSE economics at my school, but I remember someone saying that A level went over a lot of the same stuff agin. Maybe it's just a bit superflluous and therefore not offered by many schools. (there are a lot of random GCSEs out there.)
> during the time when they would otherwise be inventing these things, they will come up with things so much more brilliant than this.
What my son will do with time off is gorge Youtube videos, until he learns to scream like a goddamned banshee if there is a problem with the Internet.
There's a lot to hate about school if you're smart. But I don't just *imagine* my son is bored; he says so, loudly.
I was abnormally smart, but my kids have reverted to the mean. Without school, they turn into dumb little shits. I already let one "decide on his own what he wanted to be" and that's been a fucking disaster we're trying desperately to recover from. No way in hell is the second getting that chance.
Yes, it's easy to imagine that tweenage-to-teenage me might have done some wonderful creative things if only he'd been freed from school, but I seem to recall that what tweenage-to-teenage me mostly did on the weekends was play video games.
In young me's defence, I did also teach myself to program, but so what? Programming is easy, which is why children can teach themselves to do it.
I disagree with programming being easy. My understanding is that people who studied teaching it concluded that significant portions of students are just incapable of getting it.
This seems to be my experience. That said, writing, math, reading the Bible, and all sorts of commonly done tasks used to be something that “significant portions of the common people just can’t get” in antiquity. It may take better or earlier teaching or more effort and structure, or it might just be too hard, but I don’t think we can be sure.
That still allows the possibility that most people could be taught programming, we are just doing it wrong. (On the other hand, it still means that programming is inherently much more difficult than writing, because most people can be taught to write even using stupid methods.)
For example, the frustrating part about programming is the existence of many programming languages (imaging learning math in a world where everyone uses a different notation for writing numbers and equations); and the dichotomy between professional development environments which are too complex, and the simplified development environments for kids which often lack important functionality and are full of bugs.
I am not saying that I am convinced that you can teach anyone programming. Rather that, we do not know yet, how many people would actually be able to learn programming, if we used better (from the educational perspective) tools. Problem is, people disagree how the tools should look like, and making them is a lot of work, so there are few experiments and slow progress.
It causes some people to procrastinate on learning programming. But I guess that is more relevant for self-taught people, because at school you are told which language to use.
Some people are really not "getting it". Things on level of "loop printing number divisible by 2" are explainable to some people - who never programmed in their life, within one hour of explanation directed to an entire group.
Some people are not getting it after much longer time, with dedicated tutoring.
Note: maybe I am not a great enough teacher. But some people learn programming hundreds, thousands times faster than others.
As in "writes own simple text-based game on its own" while others are at stage "confused by simplest possible loop" or "confused by 'hello world example' without loops or conditional instructions'"
> As in "writes own simple text-based game on its own" while others are at stage "confused by simplest possible loop" or "confused by 'hello world example' without loops or conditional instructions'"
Perhaps the problem is that the programming language makes writing text-based games more difficult than making loops? Otherwise, everyone would write games, and the most experienced ones would also use loops in the games...
It is a system for writing visual novels. Writing a linear story is really simple, you just go like "say X" and "show picture Y", and it makes an application that does that. I believe anyone could do that, after trying a bit.
And then you can gradually introduce some scripting. You can put labels in the "code", and use a "goto" command. At some moment of the game, you can display a list of options, and when the user chooses one, jump to corresponding label. (That is already a game, kind of.) Then you can introduces variables, like setting a value, and later making a conditional jump depending on the value. Etc... and you can fluently progress to full programming in Python.
(The disadvantage is that the system is often used for programming erotic games -- the kind of game that benefits from having pictures and only very little programming -- so the tutorials and documentation are full of such examples. If you want to teach kids, you better write your own documentation... and even then, someone may look online and get you in trouble.)
My model (perhaps wrong) is that there are some mental *prerequisites* to programming. Things maybe too obvious, so we don't notice them as a thing that could be absent. Like "expecting consistency" or "expecting that behavior of a system makes sense". That programming is already a level-2 knowledge, and some students come to school at level 1 and those get it, and other students come at level 0 and those don't get it.
And the hope is, if we could identify what exactly is the level 1, and provide remedial classes to those who don't have it (and maybe those classes would help them in ways beyond programming), maybe then the results would resemble the bell curve, instead of being bimodal.
My vague intuition about the level 1 is something like playing with Lego, playing strategic or logical computer games, math, maybe some verbal games where you follow the rules... simply, experiencing intuitively systems that are consistent and where you build larger things from smaller ones. Like, the key difference is not at being told "expect consistency, or else" but at having an experience that makes you *instinctively* expect consistency.
In my experience, this works the same way as an adult as a kid (albeit it happens much more rarely as an adult) - you have a bunch of free time, vegetate for a few days, then get bored of mindless hedonism and *then* start actually doing something. Now, that 'something' is more likely to be closer to Finnish hobby-horsing than to math, history, etc.; I'm in favor of having school for actual educational purposes. But the other reasons you and others are giving are in the just-so story category, and could be used for all sorts of activities, down to hitting oneself with baseball bats.
There's a separate thing with boredom being an important emotion to get people to do things, but also being nearly eliminated by the Internet (both in terms of entertainment and in terms of never being free of work-related stress). But the Internet is also the only way for kids and teenagers to socially interact without parental mediation... basically at all. Suburban living is really not good for kids. And (US-type) school as a means of socialization is really overrated, because again there's no freedom of movement, much of the time you don't have authority to speak, the socialization you do get is frequently negative, et cetera; if you take the learning out it's a prison environment, and only looks good when compared to solitary confinement.
(My own opinion is that public school should exist, but should be *much* shorter the than 7 hours a day with additional hours of homework it is.)
The whole "public education as sub rosa social services for poor people" thing implies heavily that the two income trap is in full swing. If mom and dad (or, in many cases, either mom or dad doing a solo run) both need to work full or part time just to keep their heads above the water, then public schooling is a social necessity, because without somewhere to dump their 10 year old off every week day at the family is fucked.
Also, from first hand experience on the childcare side, such a family is also fucked during the baby/early toddler stages. You get ridiculous shit where the dad works overtime to keep up with expenses while mom works full time *to afford childcare so she can work*, because that marginal slice of pay leftafter paying for daycare is needed to pay off the car or what have you.
Contra some of the quoted comments, the last year was a bit of a disaster for my three kids. The hybrid and zoom (MS Teams actually) classes were awful and I would not do them again.
My teen daughter is in counseling (plus meds) for depression and to head off a potential eating disorder which we're seeing early signs of; my oldest son is ADD and remote learning was worse than useless, even though we were with him during the day and available to help. We ended up moving him to an alternative school in the district that had in-person classes and a program that offered a more structured environment that focused on social skills and self-discipline as much as academics - and he's thriving there. My youngest son in elementary school had similar remote learning issues but fortunately, most of last year was in-person in our district. But the couple of months of trying to zoom was a shit-show.
A couple of years prior to settling where we are now, we lived in an RV for almost two years traveling across the USA, and did a combination of virtual school through a State of Florida program combined with supplementary homeschooling. That wasn't easy for us parents, but it worked fine for the kids and was far superior to the zoom nonsense. One huge benefit for my youngest is that he fell in love with reading and is now at a high-school reading level in 6th grade. There were similar benefits for our other kids in other areas from a loose curriculum combined with travel, new experiences, and spending lots of time together as a family. But it wasn't without a lot of challenges.
But overall, giving our kids the opportunity to find a path that worked for them and giving them a chance to focus on what they enjoy worked for us a lot better than the virtual/hybrid classes. If our schools ever went to all-virtual, we'd pull them out and do our own thing instead.
I think the “adolescent/teenage girl mental illness complex” is not well understood and not thought about enough. Especially the extent to which conditions currently generate it. Eating disorders, SH (if you want to have your day ruined - and I really mean that, this isn’t a haha funny sort of ruined - search for it on Twitter - Twitter is structurally harder to censor), and just standard anxiety and depression, etc seem extremely common and yet only sporadically in popular consciousness.
One way to think about the weaker vs stronger claims issue is that your strong-claim beliefs are evidence about the truth of your weaker-claim statements. If [weak claim] were false, how likely would you be to still make it? So, if Medicare For All were bad, you'd still expect communists to believe it's good (and say so); and if MFA were good, you'd expect libertarians to still believe it's bad. Or, if a Republican endorses some tax cut, that's par for the course, but if Vox.com also writes favorably about it, that means something.
RE: The parable of hitting ourselves in the head with a bat.
I don't necessarily disagree with the point this parable is intended to make. But, at the same time, if hitting ourselves in the head with a bat had been around for a century and baked into the social fabric to the degree that certain parts of the community/society are RELIANT on people continuing to hit themselves in the head with a bat, then it becomes a lot harder to convince everyone that hitting themselves in the head with a bat is all that bad.
Similar to the arguments on the FDA, we have a certain expectation (on the whole) of what primary schooling looks like. Most American parents have built their lives around the expectation that their kids will be in school for a certain period.
I'm not against home schooling, per se. But consider that the home schooling option relies on at least one parent being available to plan and execute some level of school curriculum. This is not an option that most parents would or could choose.
It's also a matter of what you are comparing it to:
(1) Hitting yourself in the head with a bat versus not hitting yourself in the head with a bat. Plainly not hitting yourself is better.
(2) Hitting yourself in the head with a bat versus standing in a pit, chin-deep in boiling blood having your toes nibbled off by crabs while ducks peck out your eyes and there's an itch in that part of your back that you just can't scratch, also discordant shrieking noises are being played in your ears and bright strobing lights into your eyes, and to cap it all off, everything you get to eat is coconut-flavoured. Plainly, hitting yourself in the head is better.
It also depends if the positive effects are incidental or necessarily connected to the negative. Cutting yourself with a big kitchen knife to punish your mother is bad. Cutting yourself with a big kitchen knife to suck out rattlesnake venom to save your life is good. Cutting yourself with a big kitchen knife to remove a splinter is excessive, but in the right direction, and improving the situation is more likely to come from "Could we use a smaller knife?" than "Can we get the splinter out by thoughts and prayers and dispense with the cutting business entirely?"
> I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?
Not one of those three, and I didn't previously share my story, so first my homeschooling: my parents were fundamentalist Christians with a slight rationalist bent. I and my three siblings were homeschooled our entire childhood. Early on (until my oldest sibling was 16 or so and I was 11) that was somewhat structured, and probably took 5 hours per weekday. We practiced a combination of passion-driven and 'x minutes per day per subject', and generally enjoyed our time.
When I was 11, my dad became self employed, running a machine shop. The shop almost never employed anyone, and gradually grew until it was eating all of our school time in working there (and for those who had graduated and were in undergrad, it also ate about 30 hours per week.) I had essentially zero schoolling from age 14 to late age 17 (though I DID become a fairly skilled CNC machinist, which led to me knowing necessary bits of trig, drafting, programming industrial equipment, etc., and my parents did pay for all of our college free and clear, as payment for our involuntary work as children and in college.)
Late age 17, when I was getting ready for the ACT, I spent about 3 months cramming in high-school, with work-in-the-shop time reduced to maybe 30 hours per week (from 60+.) My siblings followed somewhat similar trajectories in the same years.
We were all very successful in college.
My oldest sibling got two four-year degrees (Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics) in 3 years, and a masters in ME.
My next-oldest sibling got two four-year degrees (Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in 4 years and a masters in ME.
I got 3 four-year degrees (Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Mathematics) in 4 years and a masters in ME (but really robotics).
My youngest sister got one 4-year degree (Teaching) and two minors with a bunch of coop experience in four years.
I think catching up on high school in a quarter really didn't hurt any of us noticeably in the long term.
Now to Scott's actual question. My parent's created a transcript for our homeschool for each of us which showed we had 4.0 GPA, so technically we had something to put in that field, but I doubt that the colleges put much stock in that. We each scored very high on the standardized exam of our choice (I remember my oldest sibling got a 1600 on the SAT back when that was the max, and I got 35 on the ACT.) With those sorts of standardized testing scores, middle-of-the-road colleges were delighted to have us, and we all got huge scholarship offers from most schools we applied to. We didn't try for any of the Ivy league ones, etc. though, so I don't know how their admissions would have viewed us.
Thanks for sharing your story. My thoughts on this are not organized but I think standard classrooms (US) are not the best ways to learn engineering skills - physical/technical plus abstract. Coding and other sciences are adjacent to this. Having kinesthetic learning experiences which involve careful thinking and result in increased skill may actually be a better path for later success in technical things. And I think it can be a solid path for learning math as well. Your apprenticeship sounds very time-intensive but eventually positive.
Maybe homeschool with enough technical involvement is actually a better start for engineers/programmers/math careers than most public schools - more hands-on, more immediate feedback, more skill development versus verbal activity.
> It sure is lucky that this institution, created by long-dead Puritans to teach reading and arithmetic, coincidentally ended up having all of these totally different benefits, any one of which would be sufficient justification for keeping it around!
I realise that this is meant flippantly, but it ignores that schooling systems weren't just invented once out of whole cloth in the early united states, but are a social innovation that has been independently invented in several places and are replicated in other places that don't currently have them.
Look at developing countries and the history of development over the last century. Countries spend a lot of money on putting in place school systems, and the increase in educational provision tends to correlate fairly heavily with future economic growth.
Now it could very well be that schooling is some societal equivalent of a peacock tail, or tulip mania, and its a side effect of development not its cause. But were that the case you would expect some society that did all the rest of the development stuff, but didn't waste resources and schools, to grow notably faster and outcompete the others. This doesn't seem to have happened. So either all these different societies are universally making the same mistake, or the benefit is real.
(Obviously there are more nuanced takes than this, possibly certain types of schooling are more valuable than others. Maybe all the development benefit comes from reading, writing and arithmetic and the rest is superfluous. Or its a diminishing returns situation. Or education at certain ages matter more than others. Or whatever. But if you're to take a more nuanced take like that, then the conclusion of what school kids can miss changes as well. So the correct response would be to prioritize getting the relevant group of kids back in school not everyone else)
One thing I do believe is that schools are a very effective way of ensuring that children are not working. For the introduction of school (whether that's a century-plus ago in the first world or more recently in developing countries) what it replaces is generally highly-exploitative work.
The stereotypical child factory worker or the equally stereotypical child chimney sweep from Victorian England? Those weren't based on nothing (though maid in a rich person's house might be a more typical job).
Compared to that, school looks very good indeed, and children would learn a lot more. Even if it's just basic literacy and numeracy, you're not even getting that at work.
In the modern west, where the alternative is not "forced labor", but some sort of alternative educational structure? Yeah, I'm less sure.
I've quoted this before, but Arthur Conan Doyle puts these words into the mouth of Sherlock Holmes:
"
"It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high, and allow you to look down upon the houses like this."
I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself.
"Look at those big, isolated clumps of building rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-colored sea."
"The board-schools."
"Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future."
People at the time saw that education was the way to a better future. University and the professions were the realm of the elite, but even the working-class bright child, if schooled, had a chance to be more than a factory labourer or chimney sweep or maid.
>One thing I do believe is that schools are a very effective way of ensuring that children are not working.
Or, from a slightly different perspective, to ensure that children, whose labor is no longer seen as desirable (from either moral or economical standpoint), are under adult supervision during the day. This is especially relevant in the context of the extended family being replaced by the nuclear one, in which both parents often have a day job, a process which usually accompanies the transition of societies away from low-tech agriculture. To me, this is obviously the most important purpose of the public school, one which would still need to be somehow filled if the institution is to be abolished. I remain baffled that Scott doesn't see it, whereas he's usually very shrewd in his understanding of the society's inner workings.
It's also notable that these school-like institutions that were invented in different places (Chinese institutions teaching for the civil service exams, Jewish and Islamic institutions teaching boys to memorize religious texts) all seem to have produced some sort of similar benefit.
Historically a lot of the government demand for education was about having competent administrators. A major problem for pre-modern states was just finding people who were able to do the day to day jobs of government effectively, so they sought to replace the collection of aristocratic cronies appointed on the basis of connections with less influential but more educated people.
Chinese civil service is the obvious example, but it was also one of the motivations for European monarchs to found and patronise early universities. I imagine a similar thing happened in Muslim countries with Madrassas, particularly since the Shariah legal system was so tied in with religious education.
People argue a lot whether the "true purpose" of the school is to prepare you for a job or not. Seems like the actual answer, with lots of historical evidence, is that the school prepares you for a *government* job (but not necessarily for other types of jobs).
The Chinese schools seem different from the religious ones. People got tested and then became bureaucrats if they passed. Religious schools are found in places without such bureaucracies or testing. So the Chinese schools seem to be serving the modern goal of signalling/filtering for something like IQ (even if the tests left much to be desired in terms of g-loading) instead of just a crude reproduction of the clerisy.
In the Imperial Chinese system, people got tested on things almost all of which were irrelevant, at least in any direct sense, to the bureaucratic jobs they were qualifying for. The test was in things like calligraphy, ability to improvise poetry, essay writing in a particular form, knowledge of classical literature. You can find my description of the process and conjectures about its purpose at http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm (first chapter)
The way I understand it the purpose of these tests was more or less two-fold:
1. Indoctrination - making sure all your bureaucrats read and studied the same classical literature and practiced the same form of art at a certain level also lead to a much more homogeneous way of thinking among their class...something that was probably sought after a lot. Also, dutifully studying something fairly irrelevant shows willingness to be a good cog in the government wheel (from the emperor's perspective)
2. General ability filter as TGGP mentions...really stupid or lazy people won't be able to pass those tests, so even if there is very little correlation between the actual job and the tests, you make sure your bureaucrats are at least reasonably intelligent and willing to do hard work.
What all these schools would have had in common is that they would have taught children to read and write, in societies where literacy is not yet universal. Learning literacy is necessary to unlock learning pretty much everything else.
"the increase in educational provision tends to correlate fairly heavily with future economic growth"
What I've heard from Bryan Caplan is that international comparisons show that increasing investments in education don't really help poor countries' economies. Rather, they're just imitating rich countries. As we get richer, we spend an increasing fraction of our income on things like education & healthcare (even though there are no health benefits at spending beyond the level of Spain).
Maybe this underestimated the extent to which these schooling systems directly copied many parts of other successful schools, as opposed to independently growing
Both my children attended a SUNY school after being homeschooled. They had no trouble getting in after they took the GED to get their high school diploma. Not entirely clear that a private school would have required that, but the government school required a diploma from a government school system. Unsurprising, that.
The son got a BA and MA in math in four years. He also completed most of the requirements for a BA in computer science, but some technical requirement wasn't met so he doesn't actually have the degree. He is now employed by a hedge fund in NYC.
The daughter never got any grade in college less than a 4.0, and .... has a PhD.
My mother would have homeschooled me, because I was badly served by the local government school. She didn't have the self-confidence to do so, however. Dang. I skipped from the middle of 2nd grade to the middle of 3rd grade, but it didn't help. I was still bored as hell. I always had a science fiction book that I was reading in class. One teacher grabbed it from me and whacked me with it. Another confiscated it on my way into class and returned it on exit. Another teacher said "Russell is going to read his book, so he can sit over in this other section of seats."
Seriously.
Taught myself electronics, and juggling. Didn't need schooling.
"One teacher grabbed it from me and whacked me with it. Another confiscated it on my way into class and returned it on exit. Another teacher said "Russell is going to read his book, so he can sit over in this other section of seats."
At least my teachers, fully aware I was reading a book under the desk or behind a text book (and I thought I was being *so* clever and fooling them) just let me do it in peace 😀
My reading teacher in elementary school made me stop reading a Xanth novel (which was probably a good idea) to ask me what Frog and Toad did in the story we were assigned. I sincerely asked her if she had read the book, because it was all written in there very clearly. I was taken to the office, my parents got called in, it was a huge pain. That's the story of my whole school experience until highschool.
Okay, maybe a historical take would be helpful here, from someone who knows more about education history.
Back in summer 2020 you would read lots of "police were created as slave patrols and strikebreakers" claims and people would raise their hands and ask why then, exactly, every city on earth has a police department. The Stockholm police were not created to catch American runaway slaves. Likewise, you read takes to the effect that standardized tests were created to promote white supremacy, but then you have to ask why they arose in 1st millennium China, and why other countries' education systems tend to be more test-determined than the US's.
School is pretty similar, as far as I can tell, in pretty much every country on earth. Maybe that's because Puritans did a thing and it got exported everywhere (the education equivalent of Crazy Like Us). That elite madrassah in North Pakistan where the Taliban big shots all learned is somehow the product of the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647. I could on some level believe it, British imperialism touched the whole world. But if education independently evolved in the same direction in many different places, it's a sign that this is just the way most human children learn and we should be careful of tearing down Chesterton's fence down.
Parents need childcare to work and employers need children to be socialized for work in every country where industrialization happened. Education has happened in a great many different ways across human history. The form of modern schooling you're talking about belongs to industrialization and the need for full-time wage labor.
I'm not saying that's the only value of schools. But I don't think it's persuasive to say that schools must be a universal good because they exist everywhere. Lots of things are widespread and yet not necessarily universally good.
"Education has happened in a great many different ways across human history. The form of modern schooling you're talking about belongs to industrialization and the need for full-time wage labor."
I'm not sure I agree with you. After thinking about my own comment I remembered the claim that Ancient Rome had a decent literacy rate (I'm seeing estimates from 5 to 25%, high enough that people bothered writing graffiti everywhere), so I looked up ancient Roman schools. They seem very school-like. Show up on time, shut up, practice writing with this stylus and we will beat you if you get wrong answers:
Now I can readily accept that there were societies where everyone was illiterate and there were no schools or formal education. But were there societies that taught reading/knowledge in some very non-school like way? If so, did any such societies educate more than a very small elite?
Sometimes I feel like Eleizer Yudkowsky has a knack for coming up with the most terrible possible analogy for any situation. Analogies should make reasoning about things easier, but his make them a whole lot harder.
If you want to get specific, then the big difference between "school" and "hit yourself on the head with a baseball bat eight hours a day" it's that head-hitting is intuitively a terrible idea whereas schooling is intuitively a pretty good idea ("children are born not knowing things, knowing things is good, how can we most efficiently teach children things? How about a building where they all go to learn things?"). Or if you feel a compulsion to phrase it in Bayesian terms... "school is good" has a much much higher prior than "head-hitting is good".
I also feel compelled to point out that schools weren't invented by long-dead puritans to teach arithmetic, they were invented independently by even-longer-dead ancient Egyptians, Chinese and Indians, and undoubtedly independently invented by other civilisations too (the Aztecs and Incas seem to have had formal schools of some kind).
To be fair, Eliezer's baseball bat analogy was about status-quo bias -- specifically with respect to death -- not school specifically. From the link:
At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don't recall exactly what. And I said: "You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn't being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no."
OK, fair enough then. That's a much better analogy (death is intuitively bad).
I think EY's whole "well actually death is actually bad" shtick is silly in a different way. Nobody _actually_ thinks death is good, we just have a load of lies that we quite openly tell ourselves in order to come to terms with the fact that we're going to die. Going up to people and telling them "Hey, death is really really bad" doesn't annoy them because they think death is good, it annoys them because they know perfectly well that death is bad and have spent their lives carefully constructing a mental edifice that enables them to live their life without being constantly depressed about death.
I don't think this is correct. Mostly people don't think their *own* death is good, but plenty of people really, truly think the fact that people in general die is a good and important part of our existence.
Even in rationalist and rationalist-adjacent spaces, I routinely encounter people who *vigorously* defend death as a crucial part of our societies. At least among those communities, they don't usually go as far as saying that death is unambiguously bad. Still, they respond to talk of eliminating senescence and age-related death in the same way that a left-leaning moderate might respond to talk of a communist revolution. "Yeah, I guess that could be a good thing... maybe. We'd have to make sure everything was perfectly planned out first, though, or it would go horribly wrong. Honestly, it might be better just not to try it."
I don't know if that counts as a sincere "death is good" position, but it's close enough that I think EY's work on trying to convey how *absolutely, viscerally awful* death is was time well spent.
Sure, but I don't care about whatever ultra-advanced being my death would "make room" for. I'd say that this is one of the more "on the nose" examples of the problem with utilitarianism - people are happy to apply it to others and not to themselves. Speaking of which, I always though a modified version of the fat man trolley problem would be much more interesting - what if there was no fat man around, and you had to sacrifice _yourself_ to save 5 people?
"Nobody _actually_ thinks death is good, we just have a load of lies that we quite openly tell ourselves in order to come to terms with the fact that we're going to die."
The 'death is good' often comes up in the context of cryonics. The claim isn't used to come to terms with an inevitability. The claim is used to explain why (a) the person making the claim ISN'T trying to avoid the bad thing, and sometimes (b) why the person who IS trying to avoid the bad thing is a bad person for doing so.
I don't think it'd be a good idea to make most of the present day population immortal. It'd be better to have genetically engineered people for much better intelligence and general health before you do that.
I think I must be one of those rare creatures who enjoyed school, but I went to school in a small town in Ireland. Possibly had I gone to a big American public school, I would have hated it as passionately as some people on here.
If I had never gone to school, I would have learned to read and write and do some simple sums, and that would have been *it*. There would be no "learn on your own time, find a subject you enjoy, go deep into it". Go to the library? Our town library was one room, the librarian was very strict on "children do not go into the adult section" and even if I had been able to do so, the resources of the time would have been "a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica". I absolutely would not have had the John Stuart Mill educational experience.
On the other hand I was watching my 14yo do zoom school, and in his free time he was exclusively watching things like "funny youtube videos". No cool activities, coding, or learning of any kind was ever observed. He never left the couch either, unless forced to.
This phenomenon has been written about in the homeschooling literature. Kids who have been doing school for years in a setting where most motivation is externally provided will commonly veg out when given half a chance. If you take that same kid and give them support to structure their own day and set their own goals will tend to vary their activities and start to pursue things of interest to them. But it takes time (weeks and months, not days) for a person to transition from a regime of external motivation to one of internal motivation, and they may need some guidance and support to get there. Not every single child will become self-motivating that way, but many will. The transition will take time, particularly if the child doesn't have any earlier history of organizing their own time.
Adult fear of a child's "laziness" is a powerful barrier to a child finding their own intrinsic motivation, or at least until much later in life.
Ok, cool, but lots of us just want to send our kids to public school, which we're supposed to be able to do. The fact that homeschooling works out over some period of time for many kids whose parents want to homeschool them is not relevant to the topic of 'what happens when you close down the public school system and a bunch of parents who have not structured their lives around homeschooling now have to figure out what to do?' A lot of kids watched YouTube while their parents worked. It was not great, even if the kids still learned to read (or didn't forget how read).
I spent maybe 100 hours over the past year watching education style YouTube videos. After the hundredth I realized I wasn’t actually learning anything useful, like at all, it was just omg cool wow, and stopped. Maybe I’ll download some textbooks.
It's called edutainment, and it's a fucking curse. It does indeed persuade people they're "learning" but if you look very carefully at it, it's all the very lowest-hanging fruit, stuff people can pick up almost any old way, or pro tips for people who are already experts. All the painful intermediate slog between "Why yes I *can* learn Latin, I've already learned to introduce myself and ask for the salt in just one lesson!" and construing Cicero is omitted. Because that is actually hard, and not much fun for the student.
Non-sequitur but if you would like to learn Latin to the point of construing Cicero, check out the Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata series. Without a doubt the best textbooks I've ever read.
I second Cole's recommendation; I tried on and off with Wheelock for years, and I found LLPSI far superior; LLPSI is written entirely in Latin, and so long as you understand English or any of the Romance languages, you can follow along with it, maybe using Wheelock as a grammar reference if some specific clause somewhere isn't clear. My strategy (stolen from Luke Ranieri) was to copy out the entire book, word for word, as I went; this forced me to really slow down and understand each new word and each new piece of grammar as they came.
Plus, the final chapter of book 2 is Cicero's "Somnium Scipionis" from De Re Publica, also known as "Cicero's better version of the Pale Blue Dot speech". It's a wonderful way to 'graduate', so to speak, from elementary Latin textbooks and move into the classics.
Yeah, downloading textbooks and reading them is much more reasonable than watching random educational videos.
The videos are random, sometimes too simple, sometimes too difficult, sometimes they repeat the same stuff, sometimes they jump to unrelated topics. The textbook is organized to give you the information in the right order.
Recently I downloaded a textbook on set theory, and reading it gave me much better insight than all the time I previously spent watching videos and reading Wikipedia.
Why is it concerning to you that some readers (correctly, based on your past writing) interpreted you as being more anti-school than that specific post was? The post presented an opportunity for people to challenge those other, stronger views of yours.
I don't doubt that a fairly substantial number of people would be better off with unschooling/non-standard education. I just seems to me that, on this topic, you might be losing sight of just how atypical you and many of the people who participate in the rationalist community are. I'd venture to say that ~90% of students are better off receiving a "traditional" communal education. (Forgive me if this is already close to your view and I've just misunderstood.) With that said, I'm very open to big ideas on how to improve that communal education system.
I don't like how the "bat" example is applied here. I can see that the homeschooling is not working. It takes way more effort and time and provides same or worse results than an average school. And I don't see a clear reason for that. Because, indeed, average school is boring and time is not very effectively spent there. So homeschooling in theory should have way better results, but it does not.
So saying things like "social aspect of the school", "learning how to work as a team" etc is a way to try and explain why is this happening. And not a way to ban homeschooling just because "this is not the way our fathers did it".
What? Homeschooling consistently does better than public school every study I've ever seen where students from the two get compared. I'm curious where you get the idea that it's not working?
I don't think it does better if you take into the account that homeschoolers are mostly from educated and rich families or at least middle class. I might have missed some new research however, so if you have a link I d appreciate.
As far as I've ever seen, most of the studies that control for background still find a significant positive effect of homeschooling. (In that one, the only one that found a negative effect while controlling for background was looking at kindergartners.)
Half of the studies had no control for the background. Another half controlled for gender and socioeconomic status and that's is. No parents education levels, no cities vs villages. Controlling just for 1 relevant parameter out of 10 is not a good study.
"However, regardless of whether their mothers held a degree or did not complete high school, the children’s scores stayed between the 80th and 90th percentile. By contrast, in 8th grade math, public school students whose parents are college graduates score at the 63rd percentile, whereas students whose parents have less than a high school diploma score at the 28th percentile. Students taught at home by mothers who never finished high school scored a full 55 percentile points higher in math and 49 points higher in writing than public school students from families with comparable education levels (Ray, 1997a)."
Couldn't find the original source (Strengths of Their Own–Home
Schoolers Across America: Academic Achievement, Family
Characteristics, and Longitudinal Traits) online easily, to see if/how it controlled for other confounders, but other studies find that parental education level is one of the largest factors in achievement (e.g. "Cross-validation of a multivariate path analysis of predictors of home school student academic achievement" found that "The best predictor of home school student achievement in this study is parent’s education level.")
Yeah tried searching for the war numbers and couldn't find anything as well.
To home school a kid takes a lot of effort. And especially to home school him a way that he would pursue higher education or take tests. So if we take a highly positively selected group of people (higher levels of education and income, full families etc) and positively select from them AGAIN (those that are willing to spend hours daily to teach their kids) then we will get good (but not fantastic) results.
For example, a family starts home schooling and then a husband leaves or dies. Will they continue homeschooling? Probably not. There is a huge number of positive parameters that you need to account for when comparing homeschooling to school.
Homeschooling is sort of self-selecting, though. You get some parents who are whackjob weirdoes and pull their kids out to keep them in a cult, sure, but the majority of parents who want to homeschool are themselves educated to a reasonable standard and have the resources to do so, and know where to go look for more resources. So you're comparing "results for bright, motivated, supported kids" with "the rest of them all".
If every family was homeschooled, as every child now goes to mandatory public education, the results might be different.
"Homeschooling consistently does better than public school every study I've ever seen where students from the two get compared."
Homeschooling does NOT do consistently better than public school if you adjust for the demographics (e.g. parent education, parent marital status, etc.) of the folks doing homeschooling.
Most (all?) homeschooling studies don't do this.
Summerhill school (in England) was subject to a study on how well the students did compared to other English students. The Summerhill students did better than the average English student, but less well that a representative comparison group (eg. when matched by socio-economic status, etc.). Summerhill is pretty close to unschooling ...
"Homeschooling does NOT do consistently better than public school if you adjust for the demographics (e.g. parent education, parent marital status, etc.) of the folks doing homeschooling."
Please, find me a study that has such a null result (and isn't dealing with unschooling, which is obviously garbage). I would greatly appreciate it.
"Please, find me a study that has such a null result..."
Other than Summerhill, I don't have any.
I was trying to make a weaker claim than maybe came across. I'm claiming that "homeschoolers do better" is unproved because of the lack of control and offering up Summerhill as the only example I know of where the was a control. The Summerhill study showed under-performance.
So my conclusion was that the homeschoolers "don't do consistently better."
Not that "homeschoolers consistently do no better."
Summerhill, from what I can gather, was a very odd case of schooling — and I think not at home.
So your actual claim, if I understand it, is not:
"Homeschooling does NOT do consistently better than public school if you adjust for the demographics (e.g. parent education, parent marital status, etc.) of the folks doing homeschooling."
which is what you wrote.
It is "home schooling does consistently better than public schooling on the studies that have been done, but I do not think those studies adequately adjusted for the demographics."
Have you actually read all such studies? Can you describe how they should have controlled for demographics and didn't? Short of that, what you are saying is "the evidence is against my view, but there are reasons why that evidence might be wrong."
"So my conclusion was that the homeschoolers "don't do consistently better.""
I don't think so, since, aside from the Summerhill case, you have no evidence for that claim. Your conclusion was "we do not know for sure if homeschoolers do consistently better or not, because of limitations in the studies that show they do."
Well of course it does. Craftsmanship always beats the assembly line. If when you went to public school the student-teacher ratio was like the family (between 1-to-1 and 3-to-1, say), and the teacher stayed with the same student for years and years, getting to know him very well, and the teacher was deeply emotionally invested in the student doing well -- why, I daresay a public school education would be absolutely phenomenal.
The question is not why individualized tutoring would work better than being one of a class of 35 with a stranger, but why the latter can compete *at all* with the former. The natural expectation would be that homeschooling ought to work about 10x better than group schooling. If it only works 2-3x as well, that's sort of a tribute to the public school actually.
1) In *theory* the public (and private) school teachers are better at teaching. They have been trained and this is their job. The homeschoolers often/usually don't have that background.
2) Tutoring *should* get better results than 20-1.
3) A lot of the homeschoolers aren't trying to accomplish the same thing that the more regular schools are trying to accomplish, but the tests are more geared to what the regular schools teach (or, alternately, the regular schools build their curriculums with the tests in mind).
Two out of three of these favor the regular school, though I think the third has a larger effect. What the intuition would be for how this all combines I don't know.
Craftsmanship doesn't have to beat the assembly line if the craftsman is enough of an amateur.
> the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class
> Technology may simulate tutoring effects without the high cost of providing a live tutor for each student.
In theory, there is a lot of space for improving schools. For example, you could have students learn by watching educational videos first, and then discussing the topic with actual teachers. That would allow the debates happen in smaller groups, making it more similar to tutoring, and allowing different students to progress at different speeds or to different levels.
In practice, school is one of the most conservative (not politically, quite the opposite, but in the "doing it exactly the way we did it 100 years ago" sense) institutions.
"the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"
Going from memory the study was short (a few months) and for younger students doing fairly foundational learning (e.g. learning to read).
I do not believe anyone has found that 1-on-1 tutoring will move the previously average student to the top 2% in the general case.
I'm actually hopeful that focused computer directed drill/practice can help a lot here (keep track of what the students are having trouble with and focus on that ...), but the evidence is still weak.
[Still, I'm building software myself to do this, so ...]
The school is teaching those 20 kids for about six hours a day, and often requiring several more hours of homework. The parent may well be teaching for less than one hour a day, with another hour or two of the kid studying things on his own. In our case, the only time we regularly spent was putting the kids to bed, during which we talked with them (and meals and such, during which we talked), which we would have been doing anyway. So imagining it as a full time tutor is a wild exaggeration.
We were unschooling, but my impression is that the home schooling people also don't put large amounts of parental time into it, nothing like repeated 50 minute classes.
Right, that too. I said homeschooling *ought* to work 10x as better than group-schooling by a stranger. Maybe 100x! If it only works 2-3x as better, if it's even debatable, I'm saying that's a decently strong statement that public schools is surprisingly effective.
In terms of instructor time per pupil, the home schooling works out to about three times as much time, less for unschooling. The parent knows the kid but the teacher is a trained professional, the parent an amateur. It isn't surprising that home schooling works better. So I don't think either 10x or 100x is what one would expect, unless one started out believing that the classroom model is a terrible way of teaching. If home schooling works three times better, whatever that means, either professional training in teaching isn't worth very much or the school's teaching model is a poor one.
I’d think that Scott and five other of us homeschooling a homeschool group of the top 5% of kids by test scores out of all SSC parents would “do better than public school”, while the Universal Baptist Church of Fentanyl homeschool might do less well. And studies may be tough because they may study one or the other, and that what homeschoolers do and what you or another might do as a homeschool might differ a lot from those.
That's why in real science we control everything but the experimental variable. But if they did that over the School of Education they'd only get a paper out ever 25 years and the Chancellor would whack their budget something fierce, so...shortcuts are taken, and ably rationalized.
The problem is that there's enormous selection bias - who chooses to homeschool is not random. Worse, many homeschooled kids *don't* take standardized tests.
> In a 2004 study, Belfield found that less than one third as many SAT takers self-reported as homeschooled students as should have been expected given the number of children homeschooled at the time. He also found that while homeschooled students outperformed public schooled students, when background factors like parental education, income, and marital status were corrected for, the difference between homeschooled students’ scores and those of their public schooled peers decreased markedly.
Homeschooling looks way better than it is because low achieving homeschooled students aren't measured at all by these metrics, and homeschooled students are not remotely randomly selected.
"He also found that while homeschooled students outperformed public schooled students, when background factors like parental education, income, and marital status were corrected for, the difference between homeschooled students’ scores and those of their public schooled peers decreased markedly."
Which means that, with those things controlled for, the homeschooled students still did better. I think that was exactly the claim that Mark was denying a little higher in the thread.
One theory would be that kids learn what they learn based almost exclusively on their abilities, so you'd expect homeschooling to do pretty much the same as regular school, but with much less boredom and random crap about it. But not necessarily much better on results. Just more fun for the kids.
The people talking about how you NEED public schools to serve poor/dumb kids or whatever are very opposite my own experience - my poor first grade experience is why I was taken out of public school and homeschooled instead.
Given the relatively flat statistical variation in a person's lifelong behavior from parenting styles, I also don't think I'd expect teachers to have a much stronger effect. Intuitively, I'd think the risk is greater - a non-zero portion of school faculty are child molesters, and they're going to target the poor/dumb kids disproportionately because they'll have an easier time getting away with it, and CSA has many long-term negative sequelae. Some quick googling (https://www.nheri.org/child-abuse-of-public-school-private-school-and-homeschool-students-evidence-philosophy-and-reason/) suggests ~10% of kids at public schools are victims of sexual mistreatment by school personnel. A one-in-ten shot of your kid getting raped seems like it's going to wash out any theoretical positive effect of a teacher noticing your kid has ADHD when you don't.
There are indeed bad schools and bad teachers, and American schools seem to have their own unique raft of problems.
But you say you were homeschooled, which means your parents were able to do that. There are parents who can't, and if the kids are not in school, then they're wandering around on the streets.
Like the first week in the job, where there was a funeral of one of the fifteen year old students who died from glue-sniffing. Or the principal going down to the school gates to bargain with twelve year old boys about "okay, you can smoke (cigarettes) up to here, but not on the school grounds". Or the kids being raised by grandparents because Dad has gone off to England and Mom is incapable of taking care of a goldfish. Or the kids with all different surnames because they have all different fathers, none of whom are involved in their lives. Those kids are *not* going to get home-schooling.
There are bad schools and bad teachers who take advantage to abuse pupils, but there are schools who are also genuinely trying to help. It would be ideal if social services took over all this, but social services are also over-burdened and hard-pressed and suffering with burnout. There's no easy, neat, simple, cheap solution.
>But you say you were homeschooled, which means your parents were able to do that. There are parents who can't, and if the kids are not in school, then they're wandering around on the streets.
Sure, yeah. But, like, they weren't able to breastfeed me and had to switch to formula but I wouldn't use that to say that formula was good for anybody.
I think I would use that to say it's a really good thing that someone out there is producing formula so that it's available for everyone, in case they need it.
One could say, "every child should be in school" or "no child should be in school", but I think what a lot of people here are advocating is "school should be available for every child, and it might be best for most of them to be in school, though some can do things better otherwise". Which is a bit of a stronger claim than the one most people would make about formula, but also not totally different.
Judith Harris, author of "The Nurture Assumption" did think that schools had real effects. Part of her thinking was based on how children adopt the accents of their new country if they immigrate at young ages, but not if they come later. So the "nurture" effect of their parents' accents got swamped by the peers at school.
Judith Harris's thesis is that kids have one personality at home, another with their peer group, and it is the latter that normally becomes the adult personality. She mentions as an exception the special case where the family is the peer group.
One argument for home schooling is that you believe your family and friends share a culture you would rather have your kids adopt than that of their age mates at school.
The Yudkowsky parable is a complete strawman. None of those reasons sound like remotely good reasons to hit yourself over the head with a bat for 8 hours a day, and the idea that any society could genuinely be confused about that is absurd. I thought the examples about the overlooked benefits of school provided by the commenters were all pretty good.
A better analogy for ending death is disease. 500 years ago half your children would be sacrificed to dysentery or parasites or something like that. Now science stopped it (both simple stuff like variolarion and now complex vaccine and pills). Why do the other half of deaths need to be different?
Not sure I agree, but the reality of the analogy bestows more impact or power than “what if a dragon murdered all people”
"Framed that way, it sounds pretty offensive, kind of adjacent to “you are unqualified to raise this kid, so please turn them over to the government”.
Okay, I am going to bitch about this.
First off, I worked in a DEIS school. This means kids from all kinds of backgrounds, where the best-performing ones may indeed go on to apprenticeships or vocational educational courses (the kind of one to two year courses to get qualifications in childcare etc.) One of those courses is a very highly-regarded award to become an accounting technician, which opens up a path to a good job or going on to university to get the magic degree that will get you even better jobs.
There isn't really a path that goes "my parents went straight to college, I'm going straight to college, this was never in question". Some of the kids? Sure!
But most of them are struggling with some kind of a problem. Be that simply living in poverty, to having behavioural and learning difficulties. The twelve year olds who want to start in that school all get an assessment before they apply, just to make sure that any such problems get identified and so can be supported.
And the parents are struggling themselves - some of them have poor literacy, regret the wasted time in their own schooling, and want their kids to do better - stay in school, get an education, have a chance. There's a lot of single parents (and that's a whole other rant for another day), there are broken families, there's the whole gamut of "and little Johnny has a social worker" to deal with.
There are provisions of breakfast club before school, the Behaviour Support Classroom (before, when a kid had a meltdown, they were left to sit on a seat in the corridor. Now there's somewhere they can go, be monitored, be supported), a Home/School Liaison Scheme, a specific programme for the ages of 12-15 for the kids less academically able and more at risk of dropping out, and so forth.
Now, if anyone wants to be snooty about all this, let them do so. The parents appreciate it and are grateful for it, because it gives them support when trying to do the best for their kids. The parents who don't give a flying fuck, well, the government will not actually come take their kids away until it's too damn late and the kids have been screwed up monumentally, so yeah - I never thought I'd get to that point, but between DEIS and social housing, there were situations where I went "for the love of God, why is nobody GRABBING THESE KIDS AND RUNNING AWAY WITH THEM???" The foster care system is awful, but it would *still* be better than some of the home situations.
That xkcd cartoon makes me want to burn down the joint. You know *how* you get to the point of "one weekend messing with Perl"? First, you have to be aware that such a thing even exists. You have to have the hardware and software to mess around with it (unless you want to write it all down with paper and pencil, and some homes don't even have these). You have to have parents who are able to support your interests, don't need you to mind your younger siblings over that weekend, or look after the house, or do something else where you have an after-school job to help earn money. There is so much underlying "just able to mess around with Perl" that is taken for granted there.
Yes, if you're a smart kid from a good home with smart parents who can afford things to let you 'mess around with Perl', then sure, a weekend doing that is probably better than school. At least you're not relying on the school to make sure you get something to eat in the mornings, right?
And to end up this rather disjointed ramble, there were plenty of 'ordinary' parents who wanted the schools opened because they wanted childcare, to be blunt. They worked, they needed somewhere to park the kids for a minimum of six hours, they weren't "dysfunctional families" but they weren't going to let their kids ramble around unsupervised while they were out of the house, and they don't seem to have believed that their kids would all be doing Junior Genius Self-Tutoring if left on their own.
So yeah, school has been forced into taking over a huge chunk of parenting and other duties that are not part of education, strictly speaking, and should be provided by some other means, be that government services or parents rearing their own kids.
But also yeah, school is providing social welfare services for the deprived, the struggling, the dysfunctional; the parents who are doing their best but are limited by their own problems, and the parents who are like the dogs in the street just littering pups and letting them run feral. It's a very damn imperfect solution, but it's better than nothing - and if you take away schools, that is what the people on the lower rungs of the social ladder will get: nothing.
(As for Yudkowsky and his baseball bat, don't bloody tempt me. Hey, friend, so how would *you* deal with two sisters, thirteen and fourteen, who on the face of it appear to be perfectly nice, ordinary girls - and then you get told in confidence to keep an eye out for them, because they're suicide risks, both of them have attempted it before, and here's the number for their social worker if you think anything is going on. School was an attempt at giving them some kind of normal life. Would it be better to leave them at home? Put them on the locked ward of a hospital? What? I think a baseball bat to the noggin would have been *simpler* for those girls to deal with).
I'm very nearly sympathetic to "take the really bright kids out of school" argument and let them run free-range, because then we might get an end to all the pissing and moaning about "school is a torture machine! I was held back because the teacher was trying to deal with the thirty other morons in the class not as smart as me! I wanted maths and computers 24/7, why did they force me to write da English gooder?"
C.S. Lewis did hate school, and if you read his autobiographical study, you'll know why. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wynyard_School But he still ended up in an academic career, so he couldn't have hated the entire concept.
I find it interesting that you point to reducing the risk of suicide as something schools are good for, even as suicide has become more common while society has gotten more educated.
This doesn’t make the case nearly well enough for school -> child suicide. Everything with a trend can be correlated to everything else with a trend. And there are a LOT of trends over history. And their relations are confounded.
You can easily make it though: school is half the life of kids. It shapes what they know and how they know it. And now lots of kids talk about and attempt suicide. Which is correct, school does cause that. Same for ADHD and ADD. What else is even available? What are kids doing other than school that could cause that change?
And you can tie it to “you can’t do what you want to in school” and “it’s boring and you essentially become a question answering device style AI rather than actually doing things that build knowledge and ability”, both of which really are bad
Actually my first guess would be Lord of the Flies syndrome. One thing schools necessarily do that is horrible is box kids up with only other kids of just the same age, all experiencing the same existential issues. This is highly unnatural, and can easily lead to insane excursions from moderation. In the normal setting for a primate tribe, a kid is constantly exposed not only to other kids his age, but much younger kids who are clearly different and in certain ways inferior (which cheers him up), and also much older kids (and young adults) who have mastered the problems that so trouble him, gained perspective, and are thriving, also a source of hope. I mean, if you put a bunch of depressives together in a room, or even people who sort of all half believe the Moon landing was faked, they're going to re-inforce each others deviancy and get worse. It would be much better -- although completely screw with the academic mission -- if kids spend their school hours with a mix of ages, some younger kids, some older, some young adults, some middle-aged adults, et cetera, so the heterogeneity of viewpoint served to center and steady his own impulses to pathological thinking instead of reinforcing them.
“If” you put a bunch of depressives and schizophrenics together in a room? That happens all across the country - mental hospitals and 72 hour holds. It’s truly terrible.
I was talking to a 16yo girl in a ... bad situation once. They had just come back from a hold after overdosing on Xanax. They talked about how a “tr*nny touched my titty” (exact words used) among lots of other stuff. They also didn’t really go to school and spent most of their time playing Minecraft and other video games with literal internet n*zis. And was groomed at age 14 on the internet on discord into ... anyway mental hospitals clearly didn’t cause any of those problems but they certainly did not help. Neither did the psychiatrist who put her on three different drugs.
Idk why I wrote all that, but the point is I don’t think things are getting better for kids. Letting your kid be on the internet doing whatever they want can create very capable and intelligent kids, but it can also not do that. And mental hospitals are bad.
No argument there. Indeed, our treatment of the mentally ill is deeply shameful, and if God sends another Flood he would be entitled to cite that utter failure to be our brother's keeper as one of the reasons for Starting Over.
I think a simpler answer is that the secularization of society increases the rate of suicide, and increased schooling is part of that secularization process.
That's neat, but yeah, the main benefit of hearts is that you can see them and so can others. Do these tweaks explain how I've gotten notification emails of people "hearting" my comments even though I can't see the hearts on the actual comment?
So you can get hearts through people using those tweaks, or through someone clicking the "Like" button they get in an email notification (I just did this for your comment that replied to me, instead of using a tweak, although I don't think there's any way for you to tell the difference).
Some anecdotal observation from an educator, though not at the school but for the first year of college. Comparing the "remote learning" Covid year with previous years, I'm seeing is that the stronger students have no decrease in results at all and I'm absolutely not surprised that all the quoted stories that end with "... and then I got my PhD" don't find an issue with missing some or much of schooling. However, they are not the target audience of any schooling systems at all - those generally are the type of people who could learn from school or from tutoring or from books or from peers or in any other way; schooling systems have to target the majority of people who would *not* get an appropriate education or skills if left on their own. And for the weaker part of students I am clearly seeing a big decline in average skills at the end of the course compared to on-site learning. They apparently do need all the extra structure and support and motivation-affecting tweaks that have been missing in online education. The new learning environment is leaving them behind.
So my point is that we shouldn't expect the same effect of schooling/unschooling from different groups ("capability levels"? But not really, motivation and maturity and social aspects perhaps are just as relevant for this distinction as pure innate capability) of students, so evidence that it can result in great success does not imply that it doesn't harm all the people who likely wouldn't have gotten great success anyway.
>> Our teen (and tween) carjacking sprees certainly aren't being helped by not having kids in school.
I don't understand this comment at all. The solution is obvious - just put the kids in jail, the institution specifically intended to prevent people from doing what we don't want them to do.
If that's not the solution.... how is it supposed to be different from putting them in school?
Robin Hanson's proposal is for for everyone to be required to have crime insurance. Your insurer (who would have a lot of authority over you, because you can switch to another insurer) would act to minimize the risk you get in trouble. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/09/who-vouches-for-you.html
This is also somewhat similar to a Yarvin proposal.- where the state “assumes direct responsibility for crime” and then deals with the “dregs of society” as a total power as it wishes.
Except monarchist (state is forced actor) instead of libertarian capitalist (switch insurers). He claims the Patchwork system with different states you can travel combined with incentives to make sure your population is productive will ensure none are too domineering or evil, which ..
Okay, how does the insurer act to minimise the risk? "If you get into trouble, you will have to pay a higher premium, so high it puts you in serious financial pain"? "If you get in trouble, our Harm Reduction Education Associates, Mr. Legge and Mr. Bryker, will pay you an instructive visit"? "If you keep getting into trouble, you go to jail"?
Let's have a look at the new, improved Hanson version:
" If you are found guilty of a crime, your “voucher” pays the state a fine, and then pays to punish you according to your contract with them. This fine in part pays the private bounty-hunter who convinced the court of your guilt.
To lower your voucher premiums, you might agree to (1) prison, torture, or exile, if caught, (2) prior limits on your freedom like curfews, ankle bracelets, and their reading your emails, and (3) co-liability wherein you and your buddies are all punished if any one of you is found guilty. In this system, the state still decides what behaviors are crimes and if any one accusation is true, and it sets fine and bounty levels regarding how hard to discourage and detect each kind of crime. But each person chooses their own “constitutional rights”, and vouchers acquire incentives and opportunity to innovate and adapt, by searching in a large space of ways to discourage crime."
So that's not hugely different from our current system, except that he claims "each person chooses their own rights" and "the crime insurers have incentive and opportunity to search for a large space of ways to discourage crime".
Well yes, if I could put people who dump litter in public spaces on the rack, I imagine that might be an incentive to discourage crime, but we've decided that we don't want our government to literally torture people any more. Letting private companies companies do it seems to be a regression, not an improvement. And maybe some criminals are stupid enough that they think being racked wouldn't discourage them, and so they would offend, then get tortured, then decide "I'm not doing that again", but maybe some wouldn't.
If I'm rich enough to pay a high enough premium so that I can offend with impunity, or pay the high fines if the insurer decides to impose those on me, I don't see this as working to reduce crime (granted, the very rich probably do get away with it as well today).
I honestly don't see the benefit here of turning law enforcement over to private insurance companies. One, if a bounty-hunter can get a bounty by proving Smith is guilty, they have an incentive not to look very hard to see if Jones actually did the crime instead. Two, if the private company can imprison, torture, read private emails, or make you wear electronic monitors, well, the current system does that as well (apart from the torture, which has fallen out of favour from its historic use). Three, the neat little nostrum of "each person chooses their own 'constitutional rights'" is a great soundbite, but what does it mean?
If I am a fervent libertarian that believes the state uses force to coerce individuals, why would I sign up to allowing a private entity to use force to coerce me? If I'm a career criminal who judges "if caught, I could go to jail for this" and yet commits the crime anyway, why would I make a different choice under the private insurer model? (Unless the belief there is that having to pay the increased premium on top of the jail sentence would discourage me, and in that case I should make sure I sell more fentanyl or knock over a security van with a lot of cash in transit to cover my overheads).
Maybe some people would choose torture: "okay, if I get to murder Tommy, I'll gladly let you cut off two of my fingers".
I genuinely don't see the benefit in this proposal.
"To lower your voucher premiums, you might agree to (1) prison, torture, or exile, if caught, (2) prior limits on your freedom like curfews, ankle bracelets, and their reading your emails, and (3) co-liability wherein you and your buddies are all punished if any one of you is found guilty."
Because the insurer would be operating the prisons, we would expect only an efficient amount of incarceration. No keeping old people locked up long after they've aged out of crime.
School is designed to give kids something to do with their time that will at least motivate them to do something other than anti-social things like this. Jail is designed to forcibly prevent people who can't be motivated to do anything else. Both could be designed to be more humane, but just because schools are less humane than they should be doesn't mean that we might as well just go all the way to the even less humane option.
I'm not sure exactly what your position is, so you can clarify if you want. I'm just responding broadly to the idea of school as crime prevention.
I'll say I don't think it's ethical to force 100% of kids to go to school to prevent ~1% from anti-social behavior outside school. They might be anti-social in school to the other kids. It's not fair to make people be around anti-social people. You could argue school prevents them from being anti-social but some people just are anti-social and being in school doesn't prevent that. Anti-social people cause a decline in classroom quality and this is an injustice to the other students. Being ultra-tolerant and not kicking people out means a lot of kids get worse education or a fearful at school.
There are different educational settings for when kids are disruptive, and you could certainly argue we're too hesitant to use them. The emergence of models like KIPP probably has happened in part to enforce behavioral standards that their neighborhood public schools can't or won't. Regardless, there is some educational setting that each kid should be in, and if that kid has not committed a crime, that educational setting should not be in prison, even if you think they might later commit a crime.
Model for the great athletes: Being good at a sport is a stock whereas practice is the flow (similar to income and wealth). Great Athletes tend to start out with a larger stock and can generate higher flows. Thus, by the time they are great they already have a much larger stock then everyone else (So when they miss out they are still ahead of everyone else) and if they fall behind they are able to build back up faster (because they have faster flows). Education clearly works a similar way and this is why people are really harping on why disadvantaged kids get harmed more. Not only are their stocks already lower, but their ability to add to that stock is lower as well thus their opportunity costs are higher.
Also, I must have come from a different niche of papers, but in undergrad I worked on and had to read a bunch of education and health papers that pretty consistently found causal effects of education on health using quasi-experimental data (about 75% found a positive sig effect). I think that if you think cognitive ability affects something (wages, health, happiness), you should also have that education affects (and then even more so from some studies I've seen that specifically try to tease out the difference between education and cognitive ability). If anyone is interested I can go back to some of the lit reviews I did and post em all.
I'm no fan of school overall, but I think it has legible benefits that people are reluctant to endorse because they sound bad, so they get covered with the veneer of academic learning and illegible but better-sounding benefits. It sounds bad to say that a whole group of people should be preemptively imprisoned to prevent some of them from committing crimes; or that parents want their children taken off their hands even if the kids have a bad time; or that success in the workplace requires quietly performing boring and arbitrary tasks, which is contrary to our natural inclinations, and habituating children to those norms is inevitably unpleasant.
"It doesn't matter if the kids learn anything; what matters is keeping them locked up and off the streets, and breaking their spirits so they learn to be useful, and if they don't like it, too bad for them!" isn't a winning proposition, but without the justification of other benefits, people are afraid of opening the floodgates of impulsive criminals and unemployable low-conscientiousness extroverts.
We have learning loss data showing that kids learned when there was not in person education. The argument one could make is that they'll catch back up, or that some parents and kids compensate in other ways (which may or may not be costly). I don't think 'kids don't learn stuff in school' is really a credible argument.
I'd be careful of extrapolating too much from that CS Lewis quote. It's a relatively unique complaint about schooling that it was too long on games and sport and socializing with other kids your own age. For a lot of kids, that's the only redeeming part of the day.
1. Yes, you are entirely right. C. S. Lewis should not be taken as a model of a normal British schoolboy. He's an introvert, and the terrible school he went to previously didn't have any sports to when he got to one with mandatory sports he was way behind everyone else in terms of skill. Also, just generally a great big clutz. And not good at making friends. His older brother liked school quite a bit.
2. The boarding school he went to also wasn't much like normal school. There was intense social competition, with two distinct classes: Bloods and F's (they weren't actually called F's, but the word they were called is now a slur and while I don't mind other people might). Bloods were recognized by the school, consisted mostly of upperclassman (particularly those good at sports) and they had the right to make F's do just about anything they wanted. Here's a (redacted for anachro-slurs) passage from Lewis's biography that explains it a bit:
"As I have hinted before, the (F) system is the chief medium by which the Bloods, without breaking any rule, can make a junior boy's life a weariness to him...(F'ing) was as impersonal as the labour-market in Victorian England; in that way, too, the Coll was a preparation for public life. All boys under a certain seniority constituted a labour pool, the common property of all the Bloods. When a Blood wanted his O.T.C. kit brushed and polished, or his boots cleaned, or his study "done out", or his tea made, he shouted. We all came running, and of course the Blood gave the work to the boy he most disliked. The kit-cleaning--it took hours, and then, when you had finished it, your own kit was still to do--was the most detested corvée. Shoe-cleaning was a nuisance not so much in itself as in its attendant circumstances. It came at an hour which was vital for a boy like me who, having won a scholarship, had been placed in a high form and could hardly, by all his best efforts, keep up with the work. Hence the success of one's whole day in Form might depend on the precious forty minutes between breakfast and Morning School, when one went over the set passages of translation with other boys in the same Form. This could be done only if one escaped being (F'ed) as a shoeblack. Not, of course, that it takes forty minutes to clean a pair of shoes. What takes the time is waiting in the queue of other (F's) in the "boot-hole" to get your turn at the brushes and blacking. The whole look of that cellar, the darkness, the smell, and (for most of the year) the freezing cold, are a vivid memory."
So you have to add a bit of slave labor to the calculation.
They needn't necessarily have been that way by inclination; 'gay for pay' is an old institution, and these kind of romantic associations in single-sex schools became part of the mythos around English public schools, and both parties often went on to heterosexual marriage and families.
Stephen Fry describes the experience from the other side, as it were, at the school he attended in the early 70s in his autobiography "Moab Is My Washpot": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moab_Is_My_Washpot
Oops, sorry, you are writing about the Fagging system, where the older boys made the younger boys act as servants. It's supposed to teach something-or-other, but it's fallen out of favour because it was abusive.
One account of turning the tables comes from the book "Tom Brown's Schooldays", where some of the younger boys stage their own kind of protest when asked to clean for the older boys they don't respect:
"“Better than East, though; for they ain't quite so sharp,” said Green, getting up and leaning his back against the mantelpiece. He wasn't a bad fellow, and couldn't help not being able to put down the unruly fifth form. His eye twinkled as he went on, “Did I ever tell you how the young vagabond sold me last half?”
“No; how?”
“Well, he never half cleaned my study out—only just stuck the candlesticks in the cupboard, and swept the crumbs on to the floor. So at last I was mortal angry, and had him up, and made him go through the whole performance under my eyes. The dust the young scamp made nearly choked me, and showed that he hadn't swept the carpet before. Well, when it was all finished, 'Now, young gentleman,' says I, 'mind, I expect this to be done every morning—floor swept, table-cloth taken off and shaken, and everything dusted.' 'Very well,' grunts he. Not a bit of it though. I was quite sure, in a day or two, that he never took the table-cloth off even. So I laid a trap for him. I tore up some paper, and put half a dozen bits on my table one night, and the cloth over them as usual. Next morning after breakfast up I came, pulled off the cloth, and, sure enough, there was the paper, which fluttered down on to the floor. I was in a towering rage. 'I've got you now,' thought I, and sent for him, while I got out my cane. Up he came as cool as you please, with his hands in his pockets. 'Didn't I tell you to shake my table-cloth every morning?' roared I. 'Yes,' says he. 'Did you do it this morning?' 'Yes.' 'You young liar! I put these pieces of paper on the table last night, and if you'd taken the table-cloth off you'd have seen them, so I'm going to give you a good licking.' Then my youngster takes one hand out of his pocket, and just stoops down and picks up two of the bits of paper, and holds them out to me. There was written on each, in great round text, 'Harry East, his mark.' The young rogue had found my trap out, taken away my paper, and put some of his there, every bit ear-marked. I'd a great mind to lick him for his impudence; but, after all, one has no right to be laying traps, so I didn't. Of course I was at his mercy till the end of the half, and in his weeks my study was so frowzy I couldn't sit in it.”
That's pretty funny! I've only read about the system from Lewis's and Roald Dahl's autobiographies. They both seem like they were too timid to try anything like that.
Man I haven't read that book in 40 years, and could not even tell you when I lost my copy of the book. What with this and the quotes from Conan Coyle, Lewis, Tolkien, et cetera at hand, I'm imagining you having to edge your way carefully about your house between towering stacks of leatherbound classics, first editions of "Emma," folios of The Bard, copies of "The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B" signed by Donleavy, and so forth.
If you want to argue that missing some months or even years of school is no big deal, I can understand that. If you want to argue that for many kids being home schooled, or even unschooled, is perfectly fine, then I'm still with you.
But let's go back to first principles. There's a strong correlation between literacy rates and availability and affordability of schooling. Countries with poor access to schools have poor literacy rates. It seems pretty indisputable to me that on a societal level schools are important.
I can't dispute that a lot of the arguments you make sound very convincing. But it still feels like someone trying to convince me that two plus two equals five. I might not be able to find any flaws in the arguments, I still know it clearly must be wrong.
Hmm, I managed to delete an important sentence while rearranging the order of arguments in that post.
The last two paragraphs were meant as an argument against Scott's underlying aversion to schools, and skepticism of the usefulness of schools. Not as a counter to the claims mentioned in the first paragraphs (which I by andarge agree with).
Also that’s just where literacy is taught. The sometimes illiterate parents don’t teach kids to read, and often don’t have time to do so. Ditto for math and science and literature and bureaucracy and politics and all sorts of things. Poor pre industrial parents see schools as a way for their children to advance and learn things they didn’t know.
<blockquote>And partly it’s because a lot of the service being provided is (taking David’s description seriously) something like “your home environment sucks, we are going to make you spend time with normal people in a normal environment in the hopes that some of it rubs off on you”. Framed that way, it sounds pretty offensive, kind of adjacent to “you are unqualified to raise this kid, so please turn them over to the government”. If you openly asked parents in dysfunctional families to do this, they would probably revolt. But forcing everybody get your social service, even the people from functional families who don’t need it, is a pretty neat trick for looking less sinister.</blockquote>
I would reframe this slightly.
I think it is healthy for people to be exposed to an economically-diverse cross section of our community. To some extent it is inevitable that people who are born to wealthy, educated parents are more likely to grow up and join the elite who have outsize influence over how the world runs.
I think it is _really good_ for those people to have some exposure to kids who got less lucky in the parent lottery, in a controlled environment where they are somewhat equalized and can be friends, and where they're even likely to encounter some really smart kids from those backgrounds, as well as some where you can tell they're "smart but troubled" and develop some sympathy.
This is certainly not a _perfect_ method for instilling some kind of empathy for those who are less fortunate than you, but certainly for myself, having gone and hung out in the homes of other folks in my school who did not have two parents who'd earned graduate degrees helped me develop an instinct for "there but for the grace of G*d go I."
This is also a huge part of why I'm in favor of zoning reform. I _want_ the folks who do min-wage service jobs in my community to be able to live here and rub elbows with the lawyers and engineers and doctors, and I _especially_ want all of our kids in the same schools. It is very hard to have a functional democracy if everyone's silo'd off; we stop making arguments to appeal to each other, and just turn into tribes.
(And while I think one should at least take seriously an argument that maybe elites should just run stuff because they know more, and input from ignorant proles is irrelevant, I think those arguments fail in the end. As the possibly apocryphal Churchill quote goes, democracy is the worst system except for everything else we've tried.)
I’m conflicted. On the one hand I really like talking to people of all classes and varieties. Knowledge and stuff gained from that is important. Even if you’re the most disgusting racist elitist ever, the knowledge gained from those personal interactions is critical in doing your racist elitism, and if you’re the kindest altruist ever you still need to know what the people you want to help are like to help them. Knowledge is power and knowing is personal. On the other hand, I’m not convinced it will improve anything (Yarvin’s article mentioning Rosedale is evocative of what might happen) and I really liked having most or all my friends be smart people or people I had other things in common with when young (like, four to twelve) as opposed to normal people who I did not get along with and they didn’t either.
The academic and intellectual gains from having smart kids take smart classes and learn smart things also important. It seems good for there to be a class where 8 year olds learn calculus if there are 20 8yos in NY or LA who can (and there are, barely)
I am strongly in favor of having diversified classes, with students allowed to learn at different paces.
But that still is going to allow for some mixing across class boundaries, _as long as the school draws from different economic classes_. This is why the zoning reform thing is so important.
My gf for most of college had emigrated to America with her mother from behind the Iron Curtain, when she was five, and her mom started out working as a hotel maid, and eventually got an admin job; the daughter went on to be a straight-A student at an International Baccalaureate school, and then got a full ride at a top-ten university. It is hard to imagine that the version of her arriving in America today would be able to afford to live in the school district that had that IB high school.
Additionally, people aren't necessarily going to be on the "gifted and talented" track in every subject -- they might be in the top-tier math class, but a more average English class, or whatever. Plus they may do various electives. For me, that was choir/madrigals. I had a couple of friends in there who were intensely talented musicians, and who were clearly brilliant in their own way, but were not academically successful basically because they didn't _want_ to be, or at least they didn't want to be good in school more than they wanted to do whatever else it was they were doing. School was not bringing out the best in them. Ezra Klein has written about this -- he was _not_ a great student through high school, and even at UC Santa Cruz he wasn't some huge star. The academic world just was not structured in a way for him to succeed. But he's clearly an extremely sharp thinker and went on to find success and fame.
(Just to make sure it's clear: by diversified classes I mean a diversity _of classes_, where you group together the students by what they're currently learning; not the "heterogeneous class" idea where you intentionally mix people who need remedial help with people who are "above grade level" for the subject.)
I think the school closure issue has simply become a place where liberals who are uncomfortable with extreme COVID policies (Covid Doves) feel like/hope they can win a small victory. Liberals have always been vehement advocates for the importance of schools and I think a lot of well meaning people are simply trying to remind liberal Covid Hawks that there might be some things more important than trying to reduce Covid risk at the cost of everything else.
School closures and universal masking of asymptomatic children under the age of 12 are something that a surprising number of people have supported in the heat of the moment but will probably realize later on they were overreacting (kind of like the Iraq war and the Global War on Terror).
“It sure is lucky that this institution, created by long-dead Puritans to teach reading and arithmetic, coincidentally ended up having all of these totally different benefits, any one of which would be sufficient justification for keeping it around!”
This seems like a few logical fallacies bundled together.
1) I think Scott makes several good points about school. But I f you assume arguendo for a moment that school is good, just because it was invented by Puritans isn’t a counterargument. Baking bread was invented in antiquity, but if all leavenings disappeared for a year we could come up with many reasons it’s good to restart bread making, and “but it’s analogous to beating yourself with a stick for 8 hours” wouldn’t be a good argument.
2) Many things from Puritan times haven’t survived, but if one has, perhaps one reason might be its fitness to survive competition - if it was, at least partially, a good idea as opposed to their many bad ideas.
3) Most of all, school isn’t the same as in Puritan times. It’s evolved. Now, I think we have a long way to go to make school the best it can be, and so am not defending the way it is.
What I would primarily argue, however, is that having children get together with each other and knowledgeable adults from a young age, and focus on building their intellectual and social skills as opposed to working in fields, is an innovation that has stood the test of time and is still worthwhile, for most of not all children.
It sure is lucky that this number system, created by long dead Arabs, underpins modern technology! and this alphabet, created by long dead Phoenicians, underpins programming, books, and encodings of math and symbolic logic! To say nothing of how wood, a component of making tall plants go up, is something we make tables and houses out of AND burn for energy! Repurposing is something we do a lot of. And especially for institutions, which necessarily evolve and have functions added to them.
You are missing the argument. The argument is not "Puritans did it = bad". The argument is "We were told that the main reason for doing action A is that it would have positive benefit X. But the action A doesn't seem to actually cause positive benefit X. Now the pro-A people are stating that A has completely different, hard-to-measure benefits. This is suspicious, they are likely to be post-hook rationalizing.".
Re: the twitter comments, I think people have such strong feelings about education that it's difficult to mention it without opening Pandora' box. We only need the slightest prod to perform a complete brain dump. An innocuous question about the geology curriculum will quickly spiral into discussions on school as slavery vs panacea.
I do wonder why it inspires such passion. Maybe it's one of the few topics to properly split the community? I see about as many in the prosecution as the defense.
it seems to me everything to do with parenting is like this, because parenting is a frightening and overwhelming experience for so many people and one in which it's really hard for the parent to separate their needs from their child's needs.
There is an intense and emotional buy-in to school being extremely extremely important that a lot of people would feel very dumb if they were wrong.
"An innocuous question about the geology curriculum will quickly spiral into discussions on school as slavery vs panacea."
This is so true lol. Asking "how is x relevant to the specific field you're teaching" can turn into "how is x subject ACTUALLY going to help students" and finalizes as "how is school actually helping students. It's turtles all the way down.
I think that some people had bad school experiences and they were forced to do it. When people are forced to do unpleasant things, they feel resentment and strong feelings. Most of the time when something is really bad, people can avoid doing that thing as adults.
Hmmm... Explains the offense but not the defense. I guess all of our most intense emotional experiences (positive or negative) happen during school by default, and it's hard to split that association from our judgement?
I was one of those kids who unschooled from first grade through 12th, and then went to college. Admissions was non-trivial. This was due to a few causes:
1. My background was largely illegible to bureaucracy.
2. Bureaucracy was largely illegible to me.
3. I applied at the very last minute... I want to say I had my applications in around May-June of 2003, intending to enroll that fall.
I'd say that these 3 things probably carried equal weight. The general feedback I got from the admissions offices is that they were concerned I would not know how to handle a formal school environment. After all, this is something the other kids had been training for 12 years to handle -- it could be a pretty big shock to just walk in and have all that responsibility! A lot of schools made this into just a hard "no," by stating that I could not document that I met certain requirements like a foreign language credit. One school had a significantly higher SAT requirement for homeschoolers, and I didn't meet this. Another school just absolutely buried me in documentation requirements -- picture "The Waltz of Treachery," except with essays instead of fees.
I'd have done a lot better if I understood how to present the stuff I'd done on my own in school-speak. One place asked me for a high school transcript. I clarified that I did not go to high school, or any school, and therefore had no transcript. The admissions lady pulled out a transcript she had on her desk, listing course titles, terms and grades, and told me I needed something that looked like that. Stupidly, I again clarified, I don't HAVE that, because I didn't GO to school. Now that I've learned bureaucratese, I'm pretty sure that she was telling me to go home, write down the stuff I'd learned as if they were courses, and self-assess how well I had done in them, and then she could process it as if I were a normal high school student. Whoops.
The place I got into initially wanted to sign me up for a sort of limited enrollment program for dubious students, where I could only take a half-load of credits until I proved that I could get acceptable grades. After some brief lobbying of the admissions office, they waived that.
Based on my admissions experience and the repeated warnings of all the grown-ups, I expected my first year to be exhausting. And I did have to learn how to deal with school bureaucracy and social dynamics and stuff, and these things really did take me a couple semesters to get a firm grasp of. When I bought my school books, somehow I had this notion that I was expected to read all of them ASAP so that we could spend the semester discussing them, or that professors really wanted me to go above and beyond and make up all kinds of extra work for myself to show them how cool I thought their subject was. So really, most of the learning process for me was about learning how to chill the fuck out.
But for many of the traditional students, they'd clearly NEVER been expected to be responsible for themselves at any point in their lives up until then. They routinely made decisions that struck me as batshit fucking crazy.
I did NOT get a Ph.D. I enjoyed my time in school and got a B.S. in Applied Math, doubling in CS. I would never have found or succeeded at math outside the structured environment of a school. In fact, prior to college I was awful at math, and had to take remedial math classes when I got in. Having an external motivator to provide meaningful feedback, a good peer group, and a curriculum with steady milestones was invaluable. Frankly, for as much as I love math, I've never been able to learn that much about it since I graduated.
-- THE SEQUEL --
So I'm a parent now. My kid is in public school. I am not a fan. It's not as bad as I expected, but I had a low opinion of K-12 schools as a kid, and college only lowered it further. Kindergarten went great -- every single morning, my daughter was excited to wake up and go to school. First grade was a decline. By second grade, I knew we'd finally reached real school when she came home telling me "my teacher is LITERALLY Joseph Stalin."
The reading material is insanely boring. There's no way anyone would be interested in these books, because they're completely inoffensive to all major voting blocs and were written to tick off various learning objectives mandated by the district curriculum, which is itself based on Common Core. The math assignments are repetitive. I've seen them give kids the same sheet of 100 addition problems, every single day, for the entire school year.
In the beginning, she was excited to learn and tried excelling. She is highly motivated by attention from adults, and she kept telling me how proud her teacher was going to be of her. Unfortunately, the teacher has 27 other kids in that classroom to pay attention to, and my daughter quickly learned that the high-performers are the ones that need the LEAST attention. One time in second grade, she spent all night every night for a week getting as far as she could in the self-paced online math curriculum the school assigned. The teacher didn't say a word.
Since then, my kid hasn't given a shit about schoolwork. She's figured out that the only prize for doing your schoolwork is more schoolwork, and it never becomes more interesting, so she seems to put forth the bare minimum she can without the teacher getting involved; and then she does the maximum amount of socializing and goofing off without getting in trouble.
When the pandemic hit, I was pleased as punch to take her out of school. I'm divorced, and my ex-wife is not really convinced by this whole unschooling thing, but this gave me the perfect excuse. At first we tried the school district's online option, and having found it to be a disaster, we pulled her out completely.
This resulted in what struck me as a highly productive year in which she basically just did whatever the fuck she wanted. Every now and then, I'd assign her homework as punishment when she got in trouble. (I caught her lying, so I forced her to play through Papers, Please, which then served as the basis of a series of conversations about ethics, mostly led by her.) She decided to play Undertale all on her own. She spent hundreds of hours on Minecraft, and wound up setting up some sort of public house, and then wrote rules for it and recruited moderators to help her enforce them. She played Breath of the Wild, and binged on the complete corpus of Zelda lore. She was angry about Taylor's abusive ice cream machines before it was cool.
Sadly, she's back to school for 5th grade this coming year. She hates being home alone, and her mom is gone all day at the lab since she's working on getting her Ph.D. Besides, she does REALLY enjoy the other kids. Personally, I'm going to miss unschooling her, but I'm happy to send her back to school knowing that it's her choice. I worry that her mom may not agree to pull her back out if she gets frustrated again, but I'll cross that bridge when we get there.
From my vantage point now, it seems to me that schools do a LOT, it's just that they have nothing to do with education or assisting high-aptitude kids. But just off the top of my head, I can think of 8 functions that they serve, each of which will be valued by significant numbers of voters, and each of which has a higher priority than education:
1. A social program for kids in bad situations
2. A law enforcement program to arrest those kids when they're not cute enough to help anymore (this seems to be deprecated now, but school-to-prison pipelines are still a thing)
3. A daycare
4. A place for kids to learn to navigate social systems, and/or their place within those systems
5. A place for kids to learn how modern bureaucracy works
6. A community for conformist parents to feel like they're conforming correctly
I was homeschooled for multiple years in elementary school, and I felt that the consequences were real and severe, but also mixed. I was bullied for years and it was clearly - then and now - because I simply didn't have any social skills. In other words, I was an awkward fucking teenager.
Homeschooling was trivially easy - it was a Catholic homeschooling curriculum and I'm not sure how rigorous it was even compared to public school (which is no great edifice.) I spent most of my time reading fiction books, which ended up being a *lot* more educational than the actual curriculum.
Academically, I think that's what saved me - I was reading 2-3 adult level books per week as a kid, and when I came back to school my English skills were miles ahead of my peers (as I lagged in many other subjects.)
I was "homeschooled" but really unschooled most of my childhood. I did some community college courses via dual enrollment in what would have been my high school year junior and senior years. I also did a bit of math via an online program called ALEKS where you just teach yourself and solve some problems in order to advance through algebra and geometry. The way my parents schooled me is theoretically giving me a lesson plan, me not actually doing anything all year but reading books and goofing off, and then a week before we'd have to report to our umbrella school, we have a huge fight and they'd for me to do a bunch of test prep and write a couple of essays. This continued until the last couple of years of what would be high school.
I ended up becoming a national merit scholar (SAT test prep book helped -- took about a week to prep). I also took AP tests in English, Bio, and Comp Sci and got 5s, again with test prep book help (about a week of prep per exam). To help with college I took a couple of SAT II subject tests and the ACT. Basically tests are stupidly easy with prep books because I hit 90th+ percentile on everything and even got a few 800s, and overall averaged 99th percentile on the SAT and ACT. I probably spent about two full years on schooling in my entire childhood, between the dual enrollment in community college and all the test prep, plus as stated a few online not-classes that just kind of gave me a little guidance for math. English just came from reading lots of fiction and spending lots of time online. I got a full ride at a public university (due to national merit scholar status) and graduated with honors 5 years later (out of laziness -- I hated the classes and so only took 12-hour semesters, and switched majors a bit). Now I'm in my late 20's and in senior management at a bank. School does not seem to have helped my employees or coworkers succeed in life or achieve greater satisfaction. But maybe I'm just the genetic ubermensch, idk.
I should note my parents fought constantly, separated once, went through multiple bankruptcies during my childhood, we got evicted once, we moved halfway across the country when I was 14 and I lost touch with all my in-person friends and non-parental family, my dad was an alcoholic who hit me, and my mom is a former cocaine addict diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety and she hears an audible voice which she believes is god. One time the voice told her to abandon me with no money or place to stay, about 800 miles away from home, with no family or friends in the vicinity. She did what the voice told her told her for a few hours, before finally answering my frantic calls to her cell phone, and returning to get me only after I tearfully apologized for telling her I thought maybe evolution was true. So I'd challenge anyone who accused me of succeeding without school only due to a privileged upbringing, or due to the benefits of my parents involvement in my education or our socioeconomic status. We had very little and my parents were neither stable nor particularly healthy, and I actually had to pretend to them not to believe a variety of the things that I would need to regurgitate on various tests and papers, or else I'd get in very serious trouble. Honestly, I think I was basically exactly what the pro-mandatory schooling crowd conjures up in their mind as the lurid image of homeschooling gone wrong -- kids not doing any work, raised creationist/supernaturalist, bad home life, unhealthy parents, etc. But it turned out fine. Survivorship bias, I guess, but I knew a variety of other kids in kind of similar situations who also turned out fine. Seems pretty common in the homeschool community -- start out weird, turn out ok. Of all the other homeschooled kids I knew, literally none of them turned out to have problems academically or with lack of social understanding. Unless they were specifically homeschooled due to mental problems. It I doubt they'd have done any better in regular school.
I was homeschooled all through high school, as were all of my friends. I was pretty far from the unschooling side though. Most of us took at least a few college classes to show some grades from actual institutions and to get started on college credit. Most homeschoolers I know scored well above average on standardized tests, and quite a few scored in the 90-95th percentile range. The combination of a good gpa on college classes and very high standardized test scores led to scholarships, even full rides, for most of us, especially if we didn’t go to a prestigious school.
> I’m wondering whether people who knew my opinions elsewhere used them as context, or whether I failed to restrain myself and stick to the topic as well as I’d hoped.
FWIW, I am pro-school so I am biased, but IMO it was the latter; that is, your article came off as anti-school. The overall sentiment was, "school is terrible anyway, so missing a year of it could only be a good thing".
+1. Looking back over that post, things that come across as very anti-school (at least to me, with the caveat that I did already know you were generally negative on school):
"You can probably predict what side I’m on here." - first of all this already primes readers who know anything about you to bring in the rest of your views as context.
"Like everyone else, I took a year of Spanish in middle school; like everyone else who did that, the sum total of what I remember is “no hablo Espanol” - and even there I’m pretty sure I forgot a curly thing over at least one of the letters. [...] We learn lots of things in school. Then we forget everything except the things that our interests, jobs, and society give us constant exposure/practice to." - this very much comes across as "school is not actually useful"
"Even beyond this, school is repetitive." - to be fair I think you meant this as "the actually important stuff will be repeated later anyway so it's fine to miss it", but the way you talked about it still sounded pretty anti-school.
“I interpret this to mean that a lot of education involves cramming things into the heads of very young students who would be able to learn it very quickly anyway when they were older.”
“I think the evidence suggests that homework has minimal to no effect on learning. If time in school has the same effect as homework, that suggests it’s also pretty low. This also serves as a proof of concept that educators have no idea whether anything they do educates children or not, and there’s no particular reason to draw a connection between “you are turning your children’s time over to these people” and “your children are learning more”.”
All of these things are in the first third or so of the post; after that you do indeed do an admirable job sticking to your intended point. And I think it’s incorrect to cite your post with the comment “schools are terrible” since the evidence you cite in your post doesn’t show that! But it’s imo totally unsurprising that people would read your post as generally anti-school.
I was homeschooled, got a GED when I was almost 30 to apply for a job and that was the first time it popped up. As noted by Pepe in another comment, community college didn't require it and the shitty online universities I went to after that just assumed I had it because I had college transcripts, I think.
I think if there's any big hit in terms of "missing school" it's more likely to show up in the hard-to-test for "has learned to learn" category as opposed to the easily tested "has learned X" category. Have been homeschooled and around homeschoolers the majority of my life, I can confirm there's often really big gaps in what their parents are able to teach them (I know basically no geography or chemistry, for instance) but it doesn't seem to actually hold the homeschoolers back any. If they need something, they can just go get it - that's the learning to learn in action. If there's harm to be done here, it's to that facet.
As always, I maintain that school is absolutely terrible and worse than useless... for exceptionally gifted children with exceptionally gifted and dedicated parents.
For mediocre dullards like myself, schooling served more than just day-care; it taught me valuable skills that enabled me to have a semi-decent career.
I hate to go all "think of the children !" here; but please, before you move to abolish schools, think of the children with average IQs -- not just of the geniuses who (admittedly) constitute the majority of ACX readership.
The extremely negative experience the author (and some readers) seems to have had with school seems odd to me. School was boring sometimes, but just busywork? 'Review worksheets for material we had learned five times before'? This doesn't match my experience of school in India, or that of anybody I know. Could this be more a problem with the American school system (which seems very lax) specifically ?
Oh yeah, big time. American schools are pretty bad, though YMMV. For me personally, it depended strongly on the teacher. Some teachers were the busywork and rote memorization types; some were engaging, informative, and just plain interesting; and one guy was possibly mentally compromised.
American schools are extremely varied. I'm American and had the same reaction as you; we didn't do many worksheets in school or learning things five times. Many of the honor/AP classes I took in high school were more intellectually challenging than the courses I took at my (highly competitive) college.
You can put me in the "School is mostly public daycare" camp. Of course, its not only daycare, but daycare isn't only daycare either, so its not really a difference. They let you paint and run around and all that good stuff at daycare.
Also, IMO the most potentially valuable part of having mandatory schooling is wasted: Physical fitness. It should not be possible to be enrolled in a state school and be an unhealthy weight.
You load 'em into the Utilitarian Ethical Calculus machine, which averages people, and then they're both right as rain. I mean...provided you loaded them in the right proportions.
There already is PE class. Just make it actually, you know, useful. And its perfectly acceptable for it to cut into the time we currently allot for other classes.
No you are on to the point. But I think you are vastly overrating the % of students that will be overweight if it was actually the primary goal of the organization that has custody over them for 8 hours a day.
Should we let the kids do whatever they want if they are physically fit? For example, if it's just daycare, should we let them play video games or watch TV or whatever provided they are healthy?
I dont think our outcomes would be all that different. I think starting by making 1/2 the school day free time would work pretty well. Then we could re-assess after that.
This should have been a comment on the last post, and hopefully no one has made this point yet, although I’ll be surprised if that’s the case.
In the studies showing that when schools had to close down for some period for test strikes or disasters, test scores got worse when they reopened, were they tracking the kids or the schools? In other words, can we rule out the hypothesis that when the school closed down, all the most engaged parents put their kids in other still-open schools, so when the school opened back up, it had lost those students? Presumably this would cause the school’s test scores to be worse, since the students with the most engaged parents would test better than those with less engaged parents.
Not about anything to do with Scott's thesis at all, but:
Is anyone else massively frustrated with both sides of Nate Silver vs Dr Ellie Murray for BOTH being completely irrelevant to the core question of "School or COVID?" Here's my analogy-parody:
Alice and Bob are in a car when the brakes fail just as they're heading towards a solid concrete obstacle.
Alice says: "Lets jump out of this car because people have been fine without cars before."
Bob responds: "Cars are great so I'm staying in the car."
The car is going 25 mph.
Alice unbuckles her seatbelt and jumps free, breaking her arm on the ground.
Bob wasn't wearing his seatbelt and suffers a concussion.
I specifically didn't want to recommend an answer to the object level tradeoff of school vs COVID risk. Neither person is doing a risk/harm based analysis, but are instead contributing facts or opinions that are useless in the situation at hand.
The original post led to some interesting discussions with my friends. After some back, this came out as a proposal that was fairly acceptable to all:
1. The government allots some amount of money per school age child (5-18 or so)
2. The money follows the student to anyplace that will watch them from 8am-5pm. Leaving early and arriving late are fine. There are criteria and inspections for places that want to be able to get this money to ensure healthy ventilation, no abuse, etc. There are no criteria for content or activities.
2.a. This place can be home, perhaps with similar home inspection.
2.b. This place can be virtual, or online.
3. The money follows on a day to day basis; you could go to 5 places a week, they all get 1 day's worth of money.
4. All students must pass a basic test by age 12. Passing is demonstrating literacy, math, and some basic knowledge at or better than the median adult in your country.
4.a. If you don't pass by 12 you have to go to cram school, until you pass or age out.
5. (Most debated point) The student gets to choose where they go. The debate was around until when parents should choose, and at what age a student should choose for themself.
I see this as allowing for many forms of "keeping the kids off the streets", "letting parents have a job", "socialization", "equal opportunity for rich and poor", and so on. Of course it isn't perfect, but I'd love to see how folks here would steelman this proposal.
The obvious failure mode is that parents, especially poor parents, send their kids to whichever school gives the largest kickbacks. So your $20K/year of subsidy turns into $19K a year for the parents to spend on booze, $750/year in profit for the school and $250 a year for a room to keep the kid in.
If you solve the kickback problem then it's not a terrible plan, except then I have to wonder why you're only doing the test at age twelve. Surely if you accept the idea of a test at all then you'd have to say it was a better idea to do a test once a year or so in order to gauge progress.
Once you've got yearly tests, it starts looking more or less like an ordinary charter school system, and probably not an entirely bad idea, although I'd expect it to Goodhart its way into having its own issues related to those tests.
I think the thing about the original post -- and this post-script -- that rubs me the wrong way is what seems to me the unconscious "First World Problems" elitism that seems to infuse it. We see a lot of people with very smart parents, from pretty well-off backgrounds, who are themselves very smart ("...and I ended up with a PhD!") saying that the regular free public school experience was tedious, stultifying.
Well yeah. It's not *designed* for you. There's no *need* for it to be. You're smart. Your family has resources. You're going to do just fine even if there isn't any school at all -- you'll learn on your own, or some of the adults around you will teach you. Furthermore, you have the initiative and resources to seek out some better form of school if you want -- you can go enroll in a private school that does it any way you like. Waldorf, Quadrivium & Trivium, Great Books, Python boot camp -- whatever floats your boat.
But what about all the people on the *other* side of the bell curve? What about the half of the population with IQ 99 and below, and the multitudinous offspring of exhausted or indifferent or incompetent and poor parents? These are the people for whom the entire institution of free public education is mostly and properly designed, because these are the people for whom some kind of top-down externally designed educational experience is most likely to move their personal needle. Left to themselves, and their family, they're not going to creatively explore scripting Roblox games, or check out Gradshteyn & Ryzhik from the library and teach themselves calculus at age 12, they're going to sink into (or never escape) ignorance, superstition, tribalism, just like a thousand generations before them.
And the social costs of failing to educate *those* people to the best of their abilities well exceeds the social costs of failing to educate the smarty-pants to the best of their abilities. We have much more to lose from failing to prevent a potential future car mechanic turning into a drug pusher and wife-beater instead, than we do from failing to ensure a future middle-class CPA actually fills out his potential much better and founds a billion-dollar Wall Street hedge fund. Maybe writes a best-selling book about unschooling while he's at it.
So C. S. Lewis hated school. Big deal. The man was brilliant. It would take a rare and exceptional school, and set of teachers, to teach C. S. Lewis anything much more than he could learn on his own. Einstein also found school tedious, and indeed it would be hard to excite that mind with the amazing new thoughts of a teacher with 75% of the student's IQ.
But where are all the stories of the barrio and slum kids who went to school and say "God damn it, all they did was teach me discipline and patience and how to reliably add columns of numbers, and so while I am now a gainfully-employed cashier in a Costco, with my eye on assistant manager (because the school also taught me to show up on time), what REALLY chaps my hide is that I wasn't given the intellectual freedom to think unconventional thoughts and explore the possibility that I might be the next Ezra Pound (even though by every objective measure known to man that is a biochemical impossibility)."
I don't seem to read those stories. I don't hear about them. People on the left side of the bell curve, and from squalid and unfortunate family circumstances, are in my experience generally exceedingly grateful for free public school. They appreciate the basic discipline and predictability -- because their lives are *scarily* and not excitingly random. They appreciate being taught bog-standard skills, like reading and writing and basic math, slowly and methodically, even pedantically, because their other experience is being left behind after the smart kids get it -- and they're grateful they *aren't* left behind, in this case. It's true the smart kids are bored out of their minds hearing how to collect terms for the 55th time, but the unsmart kids don't much care, because they need it, and it's hard to see why they should care about the First World Problems of the talented and lucky. "I was so bored today!" isn't nearly as sad as "I just didn't get it today, I'm so stupid, maybe I should just drop out and help my cousin run his chop shop."
We don't really have a big problem in this country with smart and capable kids with good family resources not reaching the apex of their potential. I mean, it happens, I guess, and so maybe the cure for cancer is therefore 50 years away instead of 40. But we *do* have a significant problem with the not smart and not capable kids, with wretched and broken family resources, ending up dependent and disruptive, even criminal, and doing outsize damage to the social contract. Where do "low information voters" come from? People marching (under police protection!) for defunding the police? Where does the inability to even *comprehend* the idea of climate change come from? If you think the failure of the bottom 40% of the bell curve to grasp basic rationality is a real problem -- in no small part because in a republic each of them wields the exact same vote as a Nobel Prize winner -- then it's the public education of *those* people that should be optimized. If that means smarty pants kids from good families get bored a fair amount and grow up thinking geez the free public school is just kind of a dumb institution, you know? I can live with that pretty easily, for the same reason I can live with Bill Gates having a stiff chunk of the 150th $million he earns this year taxed away to provide free prenatal care for some IQ 90 migrant farm worker with a 5th grade education.
"We have much more to lose from failing to prevent a potential future car mechanic turning into a drug pusher and wife-beater instead, than we do from failing to ensure a future middle-class CPA actually fills out his potential much better and founds a billion-dollar Wall Street hedge fund. Maybe writes a best-selling book about unschooling while he's at it."
That sounds backwards. Outlier high achievers would outweigh lots of marginal cases (particularly since progressive taxation means high-earners subsidize everyone else). If the lack of school means more outlier negative cases, then they could cancel out.
I don't agree even a little bit. The social contract is a very fragile thing, a fact people often forget (until it comes apart). It takes a surprisingly small amount of crime, fraud, incivility, and general social dysfunction from antisocial attitude and behavior to cause a culture to corrode. Social trust declines, cooperation goes to shit, politics become vicious and zero-sum -- the list of evils is much, much greater than any hypothetical benefit from having one more brilliant inventor, and it affects everybody.
Great ideas are only operationally great if those seeds fall on fertile soil -- if the society has the social cohesion, trust levels, and support infrastructure necessary for the great idea to flourish in practical application. So if you have to choose between having a few more great ideas or a broad culture that is a bit better about welcoming and effectively exploiting great ideas -- is the latter that gives you the most bang for the buck.
It might be otherwise if we were not as social a species as we are -- if our success hinged almost entirely on individual effort, like it does for tigers or sharks. But as it happens we *are* a very social species, and generally our success, both collectively and individually, owes a very great deal to the quality of the group around us.
We've already got an enormous number of drug dealers, and plenty of domestic violence. A marginal addition doesn't seem to constitute that much of a difference.
You mean adding one antisocial* changes things less than adding one Einstein? No argument there. But it's not a fair comparison: it's so much easier to prevent a antisocial at the margin than create an Einstein (because you're working much closer to the human median) that for the same level of effort I suggest you can reduce the number of antisocial by 30 million or raise the number of Einsteins by 1, and then the comparison is a bit trickier.
----------------
* I'm using this word loosely, in the colloquial sense of "social parasite, low-level criminal, mean and nasty selfish bastard that subtracts from the common weal" and not in its clinical psychology sense of a particular form of mental illness.
You were the one who first came up with the positive outlier so far from the median in your hypothetical.
I think there are things schools COULD do to reduce antisocial behavior, like schedule classes later in the day so kids can't commit lots of crimes before adults get off work, but they'd rather have the easier commutes. As Mark Kleiman noted, we don't actually evaluate & reward schools for that kind of effect.
I think you're mistaken about how far from the median the two cases lie. A briliant inventor is very, very rare. Petty criminality and socially dysfunctional behavior that ruins the local social fabric is far more common. That's why urban cores where people really don't want to live are relatively common.
I agree with you about the necessity of providing the right type of support for the not-smart-not-capable kids. We may disagree about what the right support is, though. The school-to-prison pipeline starts off with lots of years of school. Does it end in prison because of something the school actively does, or something the school does not do enough of or at all? I think both. Optimizing it really is important. One of the challenges of being a young person who is not academically inclined is that much of one's class at school really does do better than you do on most assignments, since the classes are grouped by age and not ability. So the shape of the day is Get up, show up, do things wrong, not really understand why, spend time with friends, eat, leave. Doing that daily prepares specifically for low-level crime, not career. No experiences of real success, no experiences of mastery (of anything), the only joy is social. Civics, logic, government, and life skills might be a very solid curriculum for kids with chaotic home lives who don't show academic promise. Kids who stumble trying to articulate their ideas get laughed at in school, they don't learn to argue or evaluate positions, they learn to mimic those around them, they learn that trying to think is an invitation to be humiliated.
They may indeed need something but public school as it is isn't saving enough of them.
No shit. The way it is actually implemented is a disgrace. The fact that education is routinely a defined-effort system instead of defined-outcome, so, as you say, people who need eight times as much time to master the same concept don't get it, and instead are cursed with 1/8 of mastery instead (which is almost as useless as 0/8 mastery), is incredibly brain-dead. We freely admit different people learn in different ways, but fail to see the enormous elephant in the room that even more than that they learn at different rates -- and completely fail to accomodate that brute fact in how we educate.
And then there is the one-size-fits-all everyone must be above average curriculum. We're *all* going to college to be doctors and lawyers, and so we're *all* going to be serious nerds and study algebra as young as possible, even if 20% of us don't have the mental wiring or even tendencies towards it in 7th grade, and end up thinking anything out of a book is humiliating mumbo jumbo. Wood shop, metal shop, home ec, work-study, apprenticeships have vanished in favor of AP Gov and probably AP Consumer Math for all I know. Instead of *encouraging* kids to get after-school jobs and get a little taste of the real world, start learning what they like and don't like about it, we think it's better that they sign up for extra math tutoring or be on Student Council.
I said we *should* design a public education system to remediate the unlucky fraction of the bottom half of the bell curve (those not irredeemably lost), but I would be the first to agree we're doing a terrible job of actually doing that.
Those after school jobs taught cooperation, among other things. There was something that needed to happen (put all the sodas in the case, clean the yogurt machine, etc) and making it happen was the job. Thinking was not the end goal. That, team sports, and orchestra - try, work together, do something. Some bosses were good, some were not so good.
Someone suggested a curriculum focusing on how to determine accuracy of online media; how government works; logic and critical thinking. That plus a healthy dose of internship hours/apprenticeship might really help some kids make use of their adolescence. Goal of participating in society at large rather than participating just in the school. I don't recall who said it but someone made the comparison that successful drug dealers often had strong sales skills and entrepreneurial spirit and that some ex-cons made great business owners. If we can someone value those skills as a society in a prosocial way.
I think kids benefit from having jobs, but a lot of the jobs that high-school kids used to do are now populated by adults that got pushed down the job market by a variety of factors (old jobs now done by immigrants, increased sorting, lack of proper credentials to work in an office, more competitive economy). So a high-school kid wanting to work after school is *weird*. Both the supply *and* the demand have dried up.
I've made that same observation, and I get it. If *I* owned a fast-food franchise, I'd much rather hire the 30-year-old adult without precisely correct immigration papers than the pimply 15-year-old who might just not show up on Friday at 9am because he had a fight with his crush until 4am the previous night. It's strange that this happened, though. There were tons of low-earning unskilled adults when I was kid, too. It doesn't *seem* like the adult underclass has vastly swelled. So what happened? How come it used to be that all a 16-year-old boy needed to do to score a job was drive over to the mall and look for some Help Wanted signs in all the greasy spoons?
Why is school always the default choice for so many people as the solution to our social problems, when there isn't even that great of evidence it can solve the social problem of people being dumb, ignorant, etc? Seems to me that you'd get so much better ROI on solving most of those social ills if you don't yoke yourself to an already inflated and slow moving bureaucracy whose basis is in another field.
The solution to underclass disruption is known: Beat cops on foot or on bicycles. Most EU countries have higher police/capita in their major cities, and this is not cops in cruisers, its beat cops in bad areas. It works. And its cheaper than trying to "fix" schools, which aren't equipped to deal with such things anyways.
Well, the answer to your question is twofold: (1) people inherently prefer carrots to sticks, it makes them squirm to suggest the right answer to unfortunates with complex stories who don't behave ideally is to hit them with a big stick until they shape up, and (2) the feeling that we ought to provide some suggested *path* for people to improve themselves, or their families, as opposed to just hammering them when they don't. Sort of like if your kid is failing algebra, you can just ground his ass, or send him to bed without his supper, every time he brings home a D, or you can sit down with him and try to tutor him.
We also of course have empirical data that people who do finish school, or do better in school, have lower rates of criminality and dysfunction. You could very reasonably ask "correlation or causation, eh?" and that's a very valid question, but it's still data that tends to point people towards school as at least an important tool in the mix.
Finally, we are generally deeply egoistical as a species, and it pleases us to think we are all born tabula rasa, and can become President or win a Nobel Prize -- if we try hard enough, and our society supports us enough, and we learn enough when young. Certainly false at the extremes, but we like to believe it, because it's discouraging to believe a lot of our eventual success or failure is just wired in, or dependent on luck and circumstancs, and that a dedicated program of mental and skills improvement (which is what primary and secondary education is) won't change things that much.
That doesn't mean I disagree with you that a major component of social order is, well, direct efforts at maintaining social order, including the use of force to discourage people from being shitheads. I'm all in favor of beat cops -- on foot or bike, not rolling around in squad cars -- and in swift and efficient enforcement of "broken windows" lifestyle/behavior laws. I am, in fact. And I think these things do indeed work, and imagining the gangs are all going to vanish if we just put more money into MLK Middle School with three gang-related violent attacks a year within its halls is delusional.
But I would like to point out that if public schools are saddled with a sclerotic and navel-gazing bureaucracy, the criminal justice system, including police forces, is not much better. Anyone who has struggled to do the right thing for a young person caught up in the petty crime parole officer bureaucracy kind of situation has been ready any number of times to shriek in frustration and rage at the rigidity, indifference, and incompetence that runs through it.
This sort of reaction(to this post specifically and Scott's overall thoughts on mandatory schooling) has popped up a few times, and I find it less than well-supported by its proponents.
The first big place I diverge is that I would assert that predestination just does not exist. "Smart kids will do well no matter what" does not check out. There's a large assumption that the anecdotal homeschooled PhDs were ready to become PhDs before their education changed that's kind of just asserted without evidence. I would tend towards the(to me common sense) idea that the events that happen in people's lives affect those people. Of course, most of the instances of this argument agree with this principle... but only in the case of the (non-ACX reader/lower class/dumb/non-prospective PhD): they tend that traditional schooling is helpful for this group while not being harmful(or just not comparably harmful?) for the complementary group. This is certainly possible, but cited evidence remains sparse. I can't blame them too much for this: most of the people arguing this position are touting the non-educational benefits of school, which I can't imagine is a huge area of research given that it's, well, school.
Apologies if this is low-quality: I'm not much of a debater but this is important enough to me and a perspective that seems poorly represented here that I'd thought I'd give it a shot.
First of all, no apologies needed by me: the only kind of contrary response that is unwelcome are zero-content or dishonest, which of course yours is not, and perhaps more on point, it's my experience that the more facile and well-phrased the assertion (or counter-assertion), the more likely it is to represent unexamined conventional wisdom. In contrast genuinely original ideas and thoughts by their very nature tend to be much harder to put into a clear exposition. They're new -- they deviate from what everyone else is saying, and have polished up into fine language. So from my perspective, at least, I pay *more* attention to an awkwardly phrased point than to one that is smooth and polished, because it's much more likely to represent something original. None of this is germane to your main point, but your last paragraph triggered the thoughts and it occurred to me they may be worth saying.
My feeling is that in part you are getting at nature v. nurture. How much of one's scholastic success is in your DNA, and how much is due to how (and by whom) you were taught? This debate rages fiercely, and at any moment you can find (sometimes even from the same person!) paeans to both points of view.
It rages fiercely *within* the community of education professionals. We know, for example, that x% of freshman calculus students will fail. The percentage is remarkably stable, and remarkably resistant to change. What does this mean? Some will tell you: it means some people just don't have the DNA to get it, and what we should do is weed them out before they get to the class, send them down some alternate path, and cross off all calculus-dependent careers from their future. Others will say: it means we have been consistently teaching this wrong for all of history, and we should do something seriously radically different. There is empirical support for both: we already know IQ is a thing, and its correlation with success in all kinds of areas (particularly scholastic) is measureably strong. On the other hand, we also know that intense intervention with small groups, even those whom aptitude testing rates as low aptitude, will often succeed remarkably well, cf. Jamie Escalante, and we *have* been teaching things like calculus in pretty much the same way for centuries -- it's not like there is a flourishing market of alternate approaches, or ever has been. And both ideas can be subjected to criticism, both of the methods for gathering evidence on them, and for the conclusions drawn.
So personally I would say this is not one we can settle here, or anywhere, any time soon. We should probably act as if there is some truth to both, because the costs of assuming either is gospel and being wrong are too high.
Which means, in this context, we should (1) be open to the possibility that the specific critiques offered by Scott, and others, that the way public school works are dumb if not seriously counter-productive, but (2) retain a high bar of skepticism that anecdotal evidence of better approaches that are offered by narrow segments of those to be educated are going to generalize well to the vast range of human aptitude and nature.
As you can see, my post is about (2), and perhaps even more so my impression that Scott does not give sufficient attention to (2), doesn't emphasize sufficiently while saying "this is why I and people like me hated school" that for some other people (and particularly those with less aptitude and drive) the experience might have been very different indeed. As to why I think this matters more than any other neglect (and of course no one can be 100% sensitive to everyone in everything they say), it's because the people about whom we are talking, ipso facto those who do poorly in school, who have bad family situations, who test low in aptitude -- who society generally marks out as dumb losers -- are inherently less likely to have a voice that is heard in the debate. They are held in general contempt, because as much as we natter on about equality and not judging, America is still a highly Protestant country, and we do indeed, in fact, often mentally sort people out into inherent aptitude/quality/worth classes, and look down upon those in the lower tiers. I felt it was important to push back on their behalf, so to speak -- to say "hey, what about the kids who got Ds in algebraa, who struggled with long division, whose homelife was such that they didn't get breakfast before school 4 days out of 10 and came home to one parent punching the latest boyfriend/girlfriend in the face? Is school also a major drag on *their* aspirations? Would *their* life and prospects also be improved if we told their parents no need to send your kid to school, you can just follow this 56 page PDF guide for homeschooling and report for SAT testing in 12 years...?" Just because, as I said, I don't think there's going to be much of a voice for those people here, or any similar forum.
But if I gave the impression that I don't also believe in (1), then I did not write as clearly as I should have. I should like to emphasize that I do indeed believe in (1). Since I've spent significant portions of my career trying to teach (which is why I'm sensitive to the existence of the D students -- those are the ones who turn up in my office in tears), I'm well aware it doesn't seem to work as well as one might hope, and I've done my share of trying new things. It is, unfortunately, discouraging. It's very very hard to move individual needles, and even harder to move collective needles.
You would assert it does not check out... based on what? Admittedly, I come from a different perspective of thinking that childhood experiences don't matter all that much for childhood development beyond a very low minimum (see The Nurture Assumption, and Trivers' work on genetic conflict for why we shouldn't expect kids to be so moldable a priori).
Regarding the mandatory schooling being a century old point from twitter:
My understanding is that the main reason schooling became mandatory was industrialization. We needed fewer farmers and more factory workers. Farmers don't need as much education as factory workers.
These days our economy seems to be shifting more from manufacturing towards the online services. This makes me wonder if we need a different kind of schooling that teaches kids things like:
* Vetting and processing online information
* How to create a website or a million other Internet related tasks that most people cannot do.
Factory workers (especially 19th century factory workers) don't need a lot of education either. While it's tempting to try to ascribe a sinister motive to everything, it really does look like mandatory schooling came from a genuine desire to improve the lives of the lower classes.
another angle - if you spend a century making society dependent on a specific institution, then suddenly take it way, there will be negative consequences even if the institution is defective.
One other point about C.S. Lewis, however atypical he may be: In later life, he credited that private tutor for almost all of his real education. The man taught Lewis how to think, and that was as valuable to him in the long run as all the university prep work they went through day after day.
It's funny because the tweet of "well, our great-grandparents did well without school" is essentially a totalizing own of the entire school system. Yeah, our great-grandparents didn't have school, but the lives they lived weren't totally awful and MAYBE had a few good points over our own modern lives. A lot of education minded libs who are pushing for school closures will probably go back to saying that school is the most important thing in a child's life, which is the really infuriating thing to me.
There is historical evidence that generations can have lifelong struggles after calamities: babies born during the 1918 pandemic had less schooling and lower career earnings than babies born before and after. School graduates entering the workforce during recessions have had less successful careers than others. None of these cases point a finger directly at public schooling. Maybe the pandemic babies had unhealthy parents at birth, and maybe the recession graduates struggled because they started their careers from a lower run on the ladder. It wouldn't surprise me with our current societal upheaval if there is some group that will face a subtle lifelong struggle that we'll only notice decades later.
There might be but it wouldn't come from missing school in my view. If we found that kids who went through COVID-19 are hypersensitive to germs 20 years from now, that would make sense to me. Who knows
School wasn't just useless for me, it damaged my curiosity. I used to really enjoy reading, but now I have so many bad memories involving books that I mostly stopped, and although I've been recovering its been slow.
C. S. Lewis went to boarding school. This is an extreme version of the institutionalization experienced at a five day school. I also went to boarding school and always am ready to testify to the terrors of having one's entire experience to reality channeled by one institution. But boarding school is an extreme example, and schooling is a sliding scale between boarding school and unschooling. Different five day schools exercise different levels of control. I work at a three day school which has more control and accountability than a homeschool or co-op, but less controlling than a five day school. There are options here outside this stark thinking. And schools are only going to be educational if the teachers are decent.
Just as schooling comes in different levels of institutionalization, different students have different needs for structure, and different levels of "home resources" for education (read: cultural poverty). I definitely needed school in order to learn in any type of structured, cumulative manner, and relied upon the institutions Kindergarten through college to hold me accountable. I think **clearly** most students (over 55%) are like this.
Teachers and administrators have seen some heavy hits this past year. My father-in-law's public high school had around a 40% failure rate (meaning 40% of students failed at least one class). In one friend's district the AP Macro test failure rate for in-person vs distance learners was 27% vs 81%. While many students didn't even bother to take the AP test, nationwide 37% of students received 1%, the greatest major failure rate in its history. Around the country consensus seems to be that the failure rate was somewhere around 22%, up from 11%. But at the same time the number of homeschoolers doubled to around 12%, which means the failure rate was even worse! Now you might be optimistic that in two years this will all shake out... but really? Are you so sure? Note also that teachers were streamlining classes and making it easier to pass, as much as they could (in good conscience and bad conscience, too.)
Even in a very pure Caplanian signalling model of education, this great increase in failure rates is tragedy for all those students. You might think the rebound will occur as soon as those nonconscientious students get the physical systems back in place which force them to pass through school with Cs and Ds, but I would not be so sure that those habits will return immediately. It could be several years before the old expectations and habits return. My bet is at least four years of lower graduation rates than in Spring 2019.
In a bullish Raj Chetty model, we can expect today's second and third graders to have great disparity within their cohort in twenty years based on whether they had 'good' or 'bad' pandemic schooling. In any case, if you are looking to higher students, find out how well they did during the pandemic and that will tell you a lot about their conscientiousness.
For myself, I think whatever disparities exist already between schools, students, and families are exacerbated by school cancellation. The mediocre become wretched, and the good suddenly look great. A student who is reliant upon a good school for their education is screwed by closures. A student who is not reliant, is not screwed. What percent of students do you think belong to the possible categories here?
The way Scott talks about worksheets makes me suspect he might underestimate the difference a good school can make for many students compared to an average or poor one. I went to public elementary school in an upper-middle-class neighborhood and then switched to a non-Montessori private school. I’ve also heard from friends who switched to my private school after a longer time in public school. Our public schools seemed to have way too many worksheets and restrict the freedom of students unnecessarily. The private school gave even elementary schoolers more freedom of movement. It also gave much more interesting assignments, eg letting us write fictional stories about whatever we wanted in class instead of assigning five-paragraph essays. The middle and high school teachers had a lot of discretion over the content of their classes and would also combine topics in interesting ways like teaching about the First Amendment by showing how it has been violated in recent Chinese history. There was also a great variety of choice in classes in high school. The last 2 years of high school we could take English and history courses structured like college seminars. Basically many more students might like school in an environment with more subject choice, interesting classes, and freedom. Some students still wouldn’t be well served even by a great school, but the question becomes how to justify funding school through taxes if it isn’t required for everyone.
It's worth noting in this context that US schools are some of the worst funded in the developed world. And the US also has much greater interest in homeschooling etc. So it may just be that it's a response to US schools not being very good, not the inherent nature of the institution
Its more worth noting that this is totally untrue. US schools are incredibly well funded and race-adjusted PISA scores show we do fine in whatever is actually measurable.
If school really _is_ as bad as Scott thinks, then I guess it means we can be happy about the Taliban taking back Afghanistan. Just think of all the girls who will be freed from school attendance!
I don't think this is a fair comparison. In an alternative world in which women did not go to school and the Taliban took over and forced women to go to school, would it be fair to say you are happy the Taliban has taken over? I don't think so. And the situation in Afghanistan is so complicated and bad that analogizing isn't very useful, I feel.
He must also have been pro Holocaust - how kind of the nazis to keep the Jews out of school! (that’s kinda how your comment reads...)
Honestly you could make this a strong argument - poor Afghans or even moderately well off Afghans don’t have the resources or knowledge to homeschool their children in Perl. But this just sounds hostile and like the above. It seems the taliban are also allowing women to be educated a bit
I remember exactly where I heard this argument (maybe TheZvi?), but I am interesting in hearing what you think of it:
If you think that the main benefit of school is as daycare / interacting with normal adults / learning how to act in a (particular type of) job, wouldn't these goals be better served by giving children jobs?
The laws against child labor come from an age when jobs were mostly dangerous industrial work - or farming, which wasn't covered by this law. This isn't true anymore. There are many jobs that could be done by older children. This is better than daycare - it also provides extra income. This is probably neutral for interacting with normal adults. This is better at preparing children for "the workplace".
The laws against child labor have little to do with the decline in employment among older children. Which is very real: when I was 16 essentially all my (male) friends were employed part-time. It was normal and highly expected. When my children were 16, not a one of them or their peers were employed, and if they had been, it would've been frowned upon by our social class. "What? Your kid is stacking canned pineapple at the supermarket instead of doing Model UN or taking AP Government? What kind of parent are you?!"
I am baffled by how this change in attitude occured, but there it is. When I was a kid in the Pleistocene, parents and schoolteachers were all solidly supportive of working (part-time) in 10th grade and above. It was understood to give you basic life experience that could not be acquired in the classroom, and which would serve you well. Today that attitude appears as quaint as corsets, and I can't say I have any strong clue why.
I think that education is signaling and the signal has had to get stronger because competition is more fierce. People need higher level of degrees or degrees from better universities to differentiate themselves more. Those who work are unable to take as many AP classes. If you are really smart, it might be better to invest in the AP classes than a job. The job is more akin to real life but you fall behind in the signaling market. Just a possible theory.
Education is a costly signal of being at least middle-class. By wasting a lot of time we signal that we can afford to waste a lot of time, unlike those kids from poor families who need to start making money as soon as (or before) they are 18.
How much of that is your social group being different than that of your parents? And your kids' school?
Working 16-18 was the norm at my HS, but not at basically anyone else in my social circle. Coincidentally, they all went to much more affluent high schools
There is some chance, and I have thought about that. I personally was wealthier than my parents were when I was the same age as my kids. So that argues a difference.
But on the other hand, my parents believed strongly that my getting a superior education was my ticket to a better life, so with great effort they put me in the very best schools they could -- where the students with whom I rubbed elbows were the offspring of wealthier families. (Not Bill Gates rich, just upper middle class.) And those students, as I said, were all employed just like me.
I'm certainly willing to believe the working tradition is alive and well in families for which admission to Penn or Berkeley is not thought to be in the cards. But my impression is still that 45 years ago, when I was in high school, it was stronger among the middle and upper class than it is now. That is consistent with general observations I've read that the upper and upper middle classes have diverged considerably over the past half century from the lower middle and lower class -- in terms of wealth, education, and attitudes. America in 2021 feels to me personally like a far more divided and fractious nation than it did in 1981.
It is also better socialization, more akin to the "real world", provides job specific training, allows children to get accustomed to the work environment and gets them money that they can accumulate.
I'm pretty sure that it gets their *parents* money that they can accumulate. Which is just one of many deeply perverse incentives that are likely to turn institutionalized child labor into something very different than the enriching experience you imagine it to be. We can sort of see this if we look at the actual history of institutionalized child labor.
In adult labor, the incentives other people might have to do things to the detriment of the laborer are countered by the laborer's ability to assess his own interests and say "this is a raw deal, I'm out of here".
Children make for terrible employees so would not be worth most employers hiring, even if it was legal. Given the huge amount of oversight they'd need. You could come up with schemes where you subsidised employers to employ them, covering the costs of it even when it's not economically productive, but at that point you're basically doing schools again, so they might as well be teaching them achoom type things
I believe that Tyler Cowen's point against Dr. Ellie wasn't that he believed education to be particularly important. The problem of public health experts he speaks of is that these experts are unable to think in terms of balancing trade offs or any sort of cost-benefit analysis, an oft-repeated point.
Having actually done this cost-benefit analysis (and not being a public health expert), this criticism definitely wouldn't apply to your position.
This is a great point. Another point to add to this. I made a video about this. When experts give recommendations about actions that people should take, the moral beliefs that the experts have are influencing their recommendations. If you have different moral beliefs, you might think the experts are making a mistake on the moral front while they are accurately viewing the empirical situation. But when you question the normative recommendations, you look like you are criticizing the experts on their positive beliefs.
This. If you look at Cowen's links, he links the ridiculous Maslow's hierarchy tweet first and the school one second. I take it he thinks the second to be another example of her thinking in the black and white terms she displayed in the first tweet.
The performance of many elite athletes is primarily limited by injury risk.
Most people can just train more to get better. But as you get better, there are diminishing returns to training. Not because the training itself gets less effective, but because you have to carefully limit yourself to prevent injuries. Someone who didn't have to worry about injuries (say they have healing factor) could train all day every day and improve much more quickly than real people.
So when a world-class athlete misses a year of training, it just requires effort to get back to close to where they were. Trying to push beyond that means balancing effort and injury risk.
myparents decided not to homeschool me or have me miss school. so instead they sent me to school for 6 hours a day until i was 18... and now i have a phd.
I wonder how well any sort of home/un-schooling would scale with regards to college admissions- how many of the people with success stories here benefit from being considered "unique"/"diverse" in the admissions process? My impression is that sort of unquantifiable factor is a big positive for admission- if there were a large number of people in that boat such that it was no longer rare, would they have the same sort of success? I guess what I'm thinking is maybe home/un-schoolers get something equivalent to affirmative action, where deficiencies are overlooked in favor of other qualities.
My guess is the opposite. My impression was that the main problem with college admissions for home schooled kids was that the college admissions officers didn't know how to deal with them, how to tell how able they were. If there were many more home schooled kids, the admissions officers would be more likely to have developed appropriate procedures.
I am mostly with Scott on "why go to school if you forget everything anyway" side, but given that long division was mentioned, I've tried to remember how to do it. My brain returned nothing. It was completely blank. Then I've written two random numbers on a paper and tried to divide them. Et voila, it worked! It's interesting that such a intellectually complex activity can still be as automatic and not conscious as riding a bicycle. And it makes me wonder how much of what I learned in school and though to have forgotten is still there in some form.
Psychiatry is one field where the knowledge base isn't studied until much further along in school. Anatomy and physiology, pharmacy, human behavior, assessment and diagnosis, all of that isn't directly taught before college in very many (any?) places. So to the extent that K-12 was building a base for those skills, it would have mattered for Scott's career, but maybe the base for those things is knowing how to memorize and having skills in reading people. Those are tangential to the curriculum in K-12. So when a psychiatrist and writer says that school did not directly impart very many skills he uses daily, that makes sense. For most of human history medics learned by apprenticeship.
Thanks for this. I certainly understand the argument with the baseball bat. Scott's right that we shouldn't look for squirrelly excuses if the main argument doesn't work.
So I'd like to find a way to make the main argument work, and I think I have it. In the USA, in some states, education is only mandatory up to age 16. It must be possible to do some kind of intra- or inter-state study on 18 year olds to see if those who dropped out are better at stuff, or those who didn't drop out (imposing a bunch of socioeconomic controls as necessary).
I stand by the suggestion that education does lots more for you than test scores. But I'm sure it's good for test scores as well, and I would think this is the way to prove it.
I actually think it is a *very bad* thing that schools can identify kids “with ADHD” and “treat” them with Ritalin. ADHD is clearly local to modern life and schooling and technology, and doesn’t exist in agricultural or HG populations. “Kids don’t want to pay attention in school, so we give them low doses of drugs that make you hyper motivated to do anything, the ones that at the extreme make you re arrange the dust on your floor for eight hours straight, and then they’re interested” is more a demonstration of how awful school is than “treating ADHD”. That the drug makes the kids work better in school is about how the modern school (AND life in general) fails these people, not how it helps them.
The drugs do facially help people function in those circumstances, but in a general sense that’s like how (hyperbole!) an antipsychotic might help someone function in a mental hospital even if it’s generally bad for them.
This seems to contradict the reported experience of lots of people who were diagnosed with ADHD as adults and found that treatment significantly improved their quality of life and wished they'd had it sooner
> The drugs do facially help people function in those circumstances, but in a general sense that’s like how (hyperbole!) an antipsychotic might help someone function in a mental hospital even if it’s generally bad for them.
School shapes development and growth, and the criticism is about the entire modern life, of which school is both a driving force behind and a terrible example of.
Compare to say, put a normal ish but easily disturbed person in a mental hospital where a transgender person in your sex segregated area grabs your tits, or where you have to interact with druggies and schizos, and one might snap from that and “benefit” from the antipsychotic behaviorally.
I feel that your "hitting yourself on the head with a bat"-answer is dodging the object-level concerns expressed by the comments.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe historically one of the reasons for the development of (mandatory) schooling has been (state) indoctrination with the values of civilization, christianity, nationalism, modernity, etc. Which is, on the whole, good, I think. Perhaps smart, nice and worldly parents could give their kids something better than the institutions would cook up. But so many couldn't.
For example, my girlfriend is from a poor Islamic immigrant family. If not for school, she would not have got in touch with the world. If not for forced university living arrangements, she would have stayed home until being wed off to one of her cousins in the country she's from.
I am Dutch, and the reason many Dutch people are opposed to homeschooling (and they limited options for it in France recently) is that we're dealing with ~10% of our children growing up within a religion that supresses homosexuality, teaches girls to be submissive, in which arranged marriage is the norm (do americans even know this? Same thing goes, to a lesser degree, for cousin marriage. Its hidden from the outside world unless you know them well.) and which is generally hostile to many facets of Dutch society. There is something of a parralel society. Maybe it's my European lack of libertarianism, but I and most of my countrymen are in favour of some mild domestic neoconservatism, in which we actively break open these segregated communities, forcibly mix population groups in housing, schools, etc and expose children to the variety of Dutch society. Homeschooling is a tool for self-segregation, and giving space to it would be counterproductive.
Basically same thing in Sweden - homeschooling is illegal, and anyway it's only religious crazies who seem to want it (and since we for some insane reason do allow religious schools, the religious crazies can just send their kids there to get indoctrinated instead).
Counterpoint: I am Belgian and majority of children go to Catholic school organized by the church, and we are now one of the most atheist countries in the world, without a bible belt. Our state has had historically no say in what was taught at non-state schools here (even the subsidized ones), so this has certainly not come to pass due to state indoctrination. I think the crucial thing is for schools to teach knowledge (math, language, ...) rather than imposing its values. I am fine with home-schooling as long as children show that they actually learn something by scoring well on exams. The type of Muslim parents that can teach their children mathematics are not the type we have problems with i think, whereas forcing those parents to sent their children to a hyper-liberal school would be counterproductive.
I agree - if you could somehow prove that you would be a capable teacher, some of the problems with dysfunctional/lower class families would go away.
However, your comments makes me realize: if all the smart, upper-middle class kids do homeschooling, and we would leave public school to the working classes so to say, would that not be also a shame?
I am pretty sure I taught many of my friends from "simpler" backgrounds things about books, culture, etc. I defended liberal norms in classroom debates. If I would self-segregate, they would have missed out on some things. Simultaneously, my friends taught me many things about the world that I would have not got from the relatively protected and privileged environment I grew up in. When I went to university, I encountered many kids who had gone to international schools. Not homeschooling, but still a strongly self-segregated upper class environment. These people by and large fitted the caricature that conservatives make of "disconnected lib elites", being obnoxiously woke, having no functional mental model of working class/average people, seeing average persons as no better than peasants, being completely unaware of potential resentment against their social class.
I think I could have easily ended up that way, and avoided that by going to ordinary schools full of immigrants, farmer kids etc, going to an ordinary football team, etc. I was bullied severely, in fact, so it was not all easy for me. But that toughened me up to some degree, I think. Being beaten up by a group of Morrocan kids makes you emphatize with the populist right, having your girlfriend being spit at and called racist slurs makes you emphatize with ethnic minorities, all things you would encounter less had I just lived in an upper-middle class bubble.
I am conflicted about this. Not necessarily about homeschooling which will always be a niche thing i think, but about segregation. I think a lot of Scott's frustration with school is due to a lack of sorting of students according to learning ability. My impression is that American school's don't really sort students the way European schools do, especially in Flanders/Belgium. My brother went to a trade school where he learnt woodworking and almost no theoretical/classical school stuff. I went to a general education school with lots of math and Latin. If you would have put me and my brother in the same class and teached us to our average ability it would have been extremely frustrating for both of us.
Yeah, maybe the way current Dutch/Belgian schools are doing it is actually a right balance of segregation, which explains both why we would see less problems with schooling as it is, but also the dangers of more segregation?
Yeah maybe, though i get the impression that the Americans put a great deal of effort in not having segregated high schools, but don't really get a less segregated society. Difficult to compare though.
Even supposedly egalitarian Sweden sorts high-school students into different programmes, many of them directed at a particular line of practical work. You can for instance leave the high-school Healthcare programme with a formal assistant nurse qualification.
"However, your comments makes me realize: if all the smart, upper-middle class kids do homeschooling, and we would leave public school to the working classes so to say, would that not be also a shame?"
This is basically a guarantee for reduced funding and even worse public schools, when the middle-class doesn't have to be interested any longer.
In horrible families (and cultures), homeschooling is a bad thing.
I wish we had some other tool to effectively address the horrible families (and cultures), so that the question of school vs homeschooling could be about, you know, education.
I think "horrible" is a sufficient but not necessary term here. Both of the people I mentioned in my other reply in this thread disagree with the conservative Christianity with which they were raised, but I don't think they'd describe their families as horrible, and home schooling was bad for both of them.
I wish we had that tool too. Unfortunately, I dont see it, and we might need all levers we can pull to prevent our societies from completely falling apart. I already explained the issues regarding Islam in my country (my girlfriend refuses to publicly speak out about her experiences out of fear of being shot, many such cases), but we have a medium-sized far-right political party that thinks corona is a jewish plot and openly aims at full self-segregation: own currency, own schools, digital arrangement to only buy groceries etc from other party members. Meanwhile the hippie girls I know are descending into full antivaxx astrologism. Maybe all this is more normal in a traditionally multicultural country as the US, but I am kind of done with all these independent communities and their nonsense, and am more and more attracted to the assertive liberalism of someone like Macron.
...those right wing people and the hippies, I guess most of them were *not* homeschooled, right? So the education didn't really help much.
But of course, there is a risk that making homeschooling available and simple, if it becomes popular with such groups of people, the insanity could jump to even *higher* levels, because such parents could isolate their kids from exposure to the mainstream thought.
So perhaps we should keep the schools as the best existing implementation of the melting pot... and perhaps create a parallel system for, you know, providing high quality knowledge to kids during weekends. Like the religious people have religious Sunday schools, perhaps we should create a parallel system of scientific Sunday schools. (Just kidding, kind of.)
In the US, we don't have exactly the same situation, but we do have one that's somewhat analogous. Many conservative Christians choose to home school their kids and do a poor job of educating them (see "Educated" by Tara Westover for an extreme example). Anecdotally, I know two people who were home schooled by their conservative Christian moms. Though they ended up living more secular/liberal lifestyles than their parents would've preferred, their moms didn't know enough math to give them proper foundations before they went to college. One taught herself enough math to get a math-intensive graduate degree, though I think she could've gone even farther with a stronger K-12 math background. The other dropped out of a technical bachelor's degree program because he couldn't pass calculus.
Bringing forth "hitting yourself on the head with a baseball bat eight hours a day" as response to comments "school is important in other ways" sounds like missing the original point. The compulsory government-regulated K-12 school is not the Puritan institution for teaching reading and arithmetic, nor "kids gets exposed to things they otherwise would not" is a post hoc rationalization that came from nowhere; it is a Prussian invention called "Humboldtian education" and its explicit purpose is to government organize school that socializes all people of all ways of life to be productive members of the same society by virtue of ensuring they all the similar knowledge and framework looking at it. It is kinda integral component how a 19th-20th century nation state manages to be a cohesive nation state.
Obviously someone libertarian-adjacent would oppose such purpose, but it'd be better to be explicit about it.
Some rhoughts here though not all directly engaging with this piece:
- The choice between wasting time in a unchallenging classroom and doing interesting things on your own seem a false dichotomy to me. Lack of sorting according to learning abililty in the American school system seems to be part of the underlying issue here. Learning 5 times the same thing in class and not being chalenged is quite alien to my experience in a Belgian/Flemish school, which traditionally has had a very aggressive sorting.
- The thing you advocate for in these articles seems somewhat related to "inquirey-based learning". There is quite some research showing that this is less effective than "direct instruction", which is more similar to classical schooling.
- More engaging with your article here: Hitting yourself with a bat argument ignores the historical effect of the schooling system in moving from a farming/industrial economy into a knowledge-based/service economy. If your (grand)parents are very adamant for you to go to school, maybe this is because schooling did make a large difference in their lives. My (grand)parents where (very) adamant for me to learn french, which was essential in historically francophone dominated Belgium, less so today. I think the schooling issue is more a case of something historically very effective becoming less effective over time. Home-schooling is maybe a viable alternative now (for part of society/the world), but i would argue this is thanks to historical schooling.
I agree with so much of what Scott says, but he seems to think that "school" consists of filling in piles of "worksheets." It often does, but it need not be like that. His parents (like mine) did not send him merely to "school," but to a bad school which wasted his youthful life.
You can to some extent tell what kids would do without school by observing what they do when out of school or when they have free time at school. What they mostly do these days is surf the net, socialize, and then surf the net some more. Then they send text messages and read text messages. Repeat. The athletic ones do a sport, and the artistic ones do their art, often with the involvement of a teacher.
Of course there are exceptions, but if you think the average American kid is spending summers and weekends creatively, I think you are mistaken. They are down in the basement playing video games (and, often, looking at porn).
It's not perhaps as hopelessly grim as that, but the generation that had to make its own fun is not relevant any longer, because in idle hours they don't have to make their own fun.
"The points above argued that closing school might increase inequality (I think all the cool people are calling it “inequity” these days, but I am not that cool)."
I realize this isn't a main point of your post (as evidenced by the parentheses), but in my ideal world where I could control what words people use to describe things, "inequity" is different from "inequality." I try to use "inequity" as "unfairness" and "equity"* as "fairness." To me, some "inequality" might be "inequity," but not all, and things can be "equal" without being "equitable."
I realize, of course, that people are going to use the words in the way they're going to use them, regardless of whether I approve. But I think there's a potentially useful distinction there.
*Unless we're talking about the value one has accumulated in their real property from mortgage payments....
Scott used my comment to argue that adults overvalue school experiences. This may be the case, but when I mention kids wasting away at home during the pandemic it has more to do with the home environment vs the school environment. As a middle-class family, with both parents working, my home environment is actually pretty boring. It doesn’t matter that I buy enriching toys, or have a nicely decorated and spacious house with a pleasant view. My kids want a social scene. They want to do art and music with other kids. They want to gossip and make friends and fight about stupid stuff. School is chalk full of wasted time and adults talking at kids about respect and school spirit and lining up. But school is still something they need because both parents are working. If I didn’t work, I could devote my life to curating an awesome environment for kids. Driving them to and from play dates and paying for music lessons and hobby horsing classes. But I really don’t have the money, the time, or even the desire to do this.
They say it takes a village to raise a child, but that village is long gone. We’ve replaced the village with school. It would be nice if my kids could wander around and explore and play in the streets with other kids, but in the world of locked doors and freeway overpasses I’d probably get arrested for child abuse if I did this. So like a lot of middle class parents who have their kids in a “good” school, I am actually pretty grateful for the free childcare.
If you remove some high-minded aspirations about schooling and start to think of schools as “free daycare” they seem pretty good. They are supposed to provide daycare, good nutrition, loving environment, social services, indoctrination, life skills, counselling, nursing, psychological testing, college counselling, team sports, music, arts, tech skills, and job training. We have far too many goals for our system of free childcare. In Korea they use hagwons, but in America schools are supposed to do that job too. In France schools are more of a sorting mechanism, and if you don’t rise to the top of your class it is your own fault. In America we expect to “raise the bar” in order to lift everyone up. These are unrealistic expectations for a system of free childcare. But schools are still patronized by most families, because free range parenting or being part of a kibbutz, or whatever alternatives Scott has in mind are really hard.
> They say it takes a village to raise a child, but that village is long gone. We’ve replaced the village with school.
Could we bring it back, e.g. by making "non-schools" which would be like schools (i.e. all-day free childcare) except without teaching? Instead the kids would play at a playground, work with a computer, maybe even attend some completely voluntary lessons...
The homeschooling parents could put their kids to the non-school, go to job, the kid would have fun, and the actual learning would happen at home in the evening or during the weekend.
How is this different from getting dropped off at a babysitter's house during summer vacation? A playground and "work with a computer" sounds pretty dismal to me. What happens if you don't really like the other kids that much, or if the food sucks, or if you really want to go exploring in the creek, but you are in a suburban neighborhood? Maybe you want to go somewhere, anywhere else, but you are stuck at this place until your parents pick you up.
Maybe it's not. Schools serve many functions. One of them is warehousing kids. (I think we could make that warehousing a lot more effective and a lot less brutal for kids.)
I agree that school can be brutal for some kids. In my experience, it was usually kids being brutal to other kids. Does this non-school model of warehousing kids offer a mechanism for making things less brutal for kids? Currently, if you don't do schoolwork you just get bad grades and some frowny adults.
Yes, part of the brutalization is like a prison, where the warden doesn't really care so much what the inmates to do each other, as long as they don't make it *his* problem.
And lots of schools are like that. I learned early on that, as one example, "you should tell an adult instead of getting into a fight" was just a lie. The adults don't want to hear your problems. They just want to make sure it's not their fault when something bad happens.
This sounds like a boys & girls club, which I found to be great environments for most kids - just enough structure and adult interaction to provide valuable engagement, but no forced curriculum. There would probably be significant legal barriers to adopting this as a full time standard, but at least the model exists.
"There’s also an ethical issue here: is it okay to make the weaker point “you can recover from missing some school” and convince a lot of nice conventional-minded people that I’m on their side, when secretly I believe the much stronger claim that school itself might not be too valuable for a lot of people?"
I've wondered about that, too, from when I was more active on the blogosphere than I am now. I would sometimes write a post that makes a certain reasonable (or at least arguable) point, but then feel the need to disclose that deep down, I believe something more extreme, on the theory that I needed to be upfront so that people could judge for themselves any ulterior motive I might have. Of course, that often backfired, because people see the disclosure and not unreasonably decide it's something they'd like to comment on.
> I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?
I was homeschooled through middle and high school and it wasn't too hard to apply to colleges. We found an independent service that basically did what a guidance councilor does for kids in school (as far as I understand it) and really streamlined the process. They told us what form to put my "transcript" in, which included a GPA. Let us know what dates we should take the ACT and SAT tests, and even had some quiz-type programs to help decide a college major.
I had taken community college courses my junior and senior years (generic writing classes, spanish classes) both as a way to skip some generic classes once I was in a more expensive state college, and I think that plus my excellent ACT results probably helped.
I did have to take a math test on campus a few months before the semester started in order to prove I could skip into more advanced calculus classes, but other than that I don't think there was anything special I needed to do vs a public school student.
I got an excellent academic scholarship as well, based on my ACT score. Some parents were worried options like that weren't available to fully homeschooled children, but it wasn't a problem for me/my college.
I would definitely recommend homeschooling, and fully intend to homeschool any children I have, IF the parent has the time, and is prepared to put in the effort. It is a lot easier to ship a kid to school and assume their socialization needs are taken care of vs. a parent finding or organizing a half dozen or more different weekly- or semi weekly social groups. But, as discussed, school is a very uneven social experience, and the compulsory nature of it often does more harm then good.
About section (I), I find the "...and I ended up with a PhD" part to actually invalidate the sample. School or no school, the kind of people who end up doing PhDs are not very representative of general ability to learn and find knowledge "interesting". More so considering that IQ has a strong genetic component. (Admittedly IQ is not the same as "passion for knowledge", but I'd be surprised if there isn't a strong correlation.)
I attended school without interruptions, hated nearly every hour of it, often got in trouble for refusing to do my homework... and ended up with a PhD too. So yeah, most of it was a waste of time for me, and probably a lot of it is a waste of time for everybody. But I think we should be specially careful about the long-term effects for those who end up with shorter straws (not just economically, that is what (II) and (III) mostly address). Which doesn't mean the schooling system is OK now - far from that, it's just that we ought to be vigilant about the "inside view" often being biased by strictly personal experiences.
To combine the part quoted about C.S. Lewis and the responses from everyone re: Caplan and the necessity of teaching maths, here's an expanded quote about that first school, which he disguised under the name "Belsen" (nothing like naming it after a concentration camp to let you know how he felt), and how the one good result of the teaching there was - geometry 😀:
"Everyone talks of sadism nowadays but I question whether his cruelty had any erotic element in it. I half divined then, and seem to see clearly now, what all his whipping-boys had in common. They were the boys who fell below a certain social status, the boys with vulgar accents. Poor P.--dear, honest, hard-working, friendly, healthily pious P.--was flogged incessantly, I now think, for one offence only; he was the son of a dentist. I have seen Oldie make that child bend down at one end of the schoolroom and then take a run of the room's length at each stroke; but P. was the trained sufferer of countless thrashings and no sound escaped him until, towards the end of the torture, there came a noise quite unlike a human utterance.
...The curious thing is that despite all this cruelty we did surprisingly little work. This may have been partly because the cruelty was irrational and unpredictable; but it was partly because of the curious methods employed. Except at geometry (which he really liked) it might be said that Oldie did not teach at all. He called his class up and asked questions. When the replies were unsatisfactory he said in a low, calm voice, "Bring me my cane. I see I shall need it." If a boy became confused Oldie flogged the desk, shouting in a crescendo, "Think--Think--THINK!!" Then, as the prelude to execution, he muttered, "Come out, come out, come out." When really angry he proceeded to antics; worming for wax in his ear with his little finger and babbling, "Aye, aye, aye, aye...". I have seen him leap up and dance round and round like a performing bear. ..."Lessons" of this sort did not take very long; what was to be done with the boys for the rest of the time? Oldie had decided that they could, with least trouble to himself, be made to do arithmetic.
...I can also say that though he taught geometry cruelly, he taught it well. He forced us to reason, and I have been the better for those geometry lessons all my life. For the rest, there is a possible explanation of his behaviour which renders it more forgivable. Years after, my brother met a man who had grown up in the house next door to Oldie's school. That man and his family, and (I think) the neighbours in general, believed Oldie to be insane. Perhaps they were right. And if he had fairly recently become so, it would explain a thing which puzzles me. At that school as I knew it most boys learned nothing and no boy learned much. But Oldie could boast an impressive record of scholarships in the past. His school cannot always have been the swindle it was in our time.
...Intellectually, the time I spent at Oldie's was almost entirely wasted; if the school had not died, and if I had been left there two years more, it would probably have sealed my fate as a scholar for good. Geometry and some pages in West's English Grammar (but even those I think I found for myself) are the only items on the credit side. For the rest, all that rises out of the sea of arithmetic is a jungle of dates, battles, exports, imports and the like, forgotten as soon as learned and perfectly useless had they been remembered."
So it is not school as such that Lewis disliked, as much as that first the small, private, fee-paying school he attended at the age of ten had run down so much, and the principal was so crazy, that it taught him nothing and would have permanently ruined him to learn anything if he had stayed there longer.
The second school was better, but again, it wasn't the school work he disliked as all that went with it - the games/sports and the attitude (again, for Edwardian-era public schools in Britain under the influence of Arnold of Rugby) that "Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton". So sports as character building and indicative of virtue, and sporting prowess rewarded as it enabled the school to triumph over local rivals, is something unspeakably wearying to those of us who are not sporty. Lewis was a clumsy child who was useless at sports, and an introvert who was bookish, so he naturally delighted in the chance for a private tutor where he wouldn't have to mix with other kids or play games and could just work on academic subjects.
Responding to your request for information about homeschooling. I and my siblings were all homeschooled from an early age through HS graduation. All of us attended college, and I got a Master's degree. Ironically, I now work at a public school.
None of us had trouble getting into college or providing enough information to do so (though in fairness none of us went to an Ivy League school either). We completed a certification program through a homeschooling co-op that was state recognized, and accepted similarly to a typical HS diploma. My mom thought it was silly and would be ignored if she provided a GPA, so we never submitted that. It's been a while, but my memory is that there were a few logistical issues with submitting information, but that it was pretty easily handled by filling out forms and doing the normal orientation testing (which all of the prospective students did, and helped determine if they met the Math/English/Foreign Language requirements of the school).
My experience was filled with a lot of atypical learning, where a trip to the beach could suddenly become a tracked learning experience. We made fun of my mom for writing down normal activities in her log book if she thought they were educational enough. The amount of time per day we spent on schooling varied a lot, but was generally four hours or less of structured schooling, and a lot of time reading or doing semi-structured learning activities. One year we tried doing school every day instead of the normal September-May calendar. Some of my days were really short once all the coursework was spread out - as little as 15-30 minutes a day on occasion. (Side note, we hated schooling all year and switched back). As mentioned, my mom liked to track non-formal stuff so I guess it was part of school. The structured schooling was pretty similar to what you might get in school, but obviously it wasn't delivered in lecture. We would generally read our textbooks, answer the assigned questions about them, and ask for more information where we got stuck. There is some really good self-directed curriculum out there if you want to find it.
Homeschooling definitely cannot be done by everyone. You need a stable household and enough parental support to fill in the gaps. You also need curriculum, which often comes from a packaged service online or through a company, but can also be piecemealed from various sources. Schools are required to provide the same textbooks you would get if you were attending there, so you can at least use the same materials public schools use.
Feel free to ask additional questions. I know well over a hundred homeschooled adults, and many of them homeschool their own children now. Most did not go to public school for much or any of their education.
After reading some other responses, I should include that I took and did well on the SATs prior to applying to college, so that's relevant to getting in.
Socially speaking I think large schools force kids with underdeveloped social skills into a large hierarchical system that they can't escape, which adults can mostly only regulate the excesses of and not the basic dynamic
Fine for many but I feel confident it's not anywhere near to ideal as we could get. I think my classmates were great and unusually good and I generally loved school. But it's in my bones that I'm not a cool kid. For many of them it's in their bones that they're not a smart kid. I think it will be looked back on some day with some degree of shock
The "hitting yourself on the head with bats 8 hours a day" thing is dangerously idiotic in that unique rationalist way - an extraordinary straw man of tradition that assumes that one/we could simply invent new communal ways that would be immediately functional and net positive.
If a society functions over generations with something in place, even apparently wildly inefficient, be wary of ought but iterating.
That said - school was pretty brutal for me, and the next steps no doubt include some viable exit door or something like it for kids for whom it does not work. (Unschooling and the like seem to be offering just that.)
I can't defend this empirically but I want to be in a society that forces us into 12 years of indoctrination into the Church of Reason. The freedom of my fellow citizens to wallow in ignorance and irrationality looks too similar to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
How confident are you on how much this sort of project would improve decision making overall?
I am leaning towards doubtful that much of anything can improve it more than a bit, but I like to think we have better decision making than those 2 centuries ago, but I'm doubtful of that as well.
A personal anecdote on missing school: My son attended his freshman year of high school almost entirely virtual last year. During this time he became severely depressed and suicidal, and refused to attend classes or do any of the schoolwork. Prior to the lockdowns he was a straight A student and active in multiple sports and after school activities. Both my spouse and I worked from home during this time and provided him with lots of encouragement, engagement, and support, but to very little effect. We sought help from multiple therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, put him in IOP, got him a 504 plan, and enrolled in family therapy. Through all this he refused to admit he needed help and became increasingly unstable to the point we had to have him admitted to the hospital multiple times. He's now in a residential treatment facility.
We are an upper-middle class household, both parents highly educated with masters degrees, so this isn't a case of being poor, uneducated, or uninvolved. There haven't been any incidents of trauma or hardship in our children's lives. Our son also has a twin sister who is also a straight A student, and while annoyed at the virtual school situation she didn't have any trouble making it through the school year. Both our kids have had more opportunities and support than most other families get.
What does this say about the value of school? I think school is a nexus of our community, a common point that allows kids and their parents to make connections with other community members, and a jumping off point for clubs, sports, and other social activities. When school was locked down, all of these other social connections were also severed. Our son has a harder time making and maintaining social connections than our daughter, and despite our best efforts he became increasingly isolated and entered a self-destructive feedback loop. It's entirely possible he would have gone down the same path at some point, perhaps when he went to college (other parents we've talked to had this happen and said it's better it happened while he's younger), but it's hard to say. I think the environment of school was enough of a forcing function to keep him engaged with his peers and encourage him to keep moving down the path of "the typical student."
I am not saying that school is good/bad or that it is an optimal solution for community engagement. However, I do think there's value there that can't be easily replaced. And I am certainly claiming that shutting it off suddenly, even temporarily, can have significant negative effects on kids regardless of their income or home environment. I still have hope that my son can recover and lead a fulfilling life, but given the current state it is highly unclear and may take years to make that recovery--far longer than one year of missed school.
What a harrowing story. I wish you the best of luck in this. Sometimes just time itself performs miracles, with respect to young people. You just keep them alive and kind of OK and in time their brains finish wiring up and they get better. Not because of anything in particular anyone did, but just because the adolescent brain needed time to complete its development. I've seen it happen in my own family. I hope that gives you some sense of hope that even if nothing in particular seems to work well enough right now -- in time, it might.
People go to school and get 16 years of indoctrination about how great school is, from the self-serving bias of their instructors. I think that explains a lot of the resistance to updating on the evidence that school doesn't actually have the much of the legible benefits it was created for.
I hated school so much, in the early years. An elementary home room in lockstep wastes the time of everyone who is outside of the center of the bell curve. Recess is Lord of the Flies. It became more tolerable as I grew more accustomed to it, classmates grew up and learned to behave themselves, and I got more choices about which classes to take, but even by the last year of high school I was not at all enthusiastic about it.
The strong/weak claims problems reminds me a lot of animal welfare activism.
In France we have an NGO called L214 that is openly against any form on animal exploitation.
But they know perfectly well that they have no chance of being heard by institutions about abolishing meat and diary production. And so a lot of what they do is shorter-term stuff about animal welfare, pushing for better conditions of farming or even slaughter, or even for a better compliance with existing laws (they are known for infiltrating slaughterhouses and farms with cameras, to expose illegal mistreatments of animals).
People who are opposed to them love to play the card of "they say they just want decent slaughtering conditions, but their REAL SECRET AGENDA is to reach into your throat and pull out the steak you just ate, then cut every last farmer’s throat as retribution"
I don’t really know what to think about it because, as with schooling, I agree with both short-term and long-term endeavors (though not the homicidal steak-grabbing version to be clear). Generally, I feel like I can recognize that people make some good points even when their opinions are way too strong on others, but maybe I’m fooling myself.
Anyway it seems pointless to try to avoid people accusing you of Trojan-horsing your crazy ideas
Would rather live in any current society with compulsory education than any society past or present without it. Lot's of confounds to making that claim, I realize. Also suspect that if we look at what societies today have happier citizens with better outcomes on most measures, education is a factor.
Not sure if the opposition is coming from a libertarian perspective but, like with socialism, there is no post-industrial example of successful societies in either case. They both have a lack there f understanding of human nature. People will corrupt governments, industries, labor unions... wasn't that the brilliance of our founders in aspiring for checks and balances? Those guys also saw merit in an educated populous.
To answer your question about getting into college, since neither of my kids has...
Our home unschooled kids applied only to reasonably elite schools. One or both were admitted to three. Two of them, Oberlin and the University of Chicago, were schools where they had a strong family connection through both parents and grandparents, which I think gave them a significant advantage. The one school that accepted them where they did not have any such advantage was Saint Olaf. We concluded from our interaction with them that they were deliberately targeting home schooled kids as a potential pool of top students that other schools were missing.
Our general impression of other schools was that they were not hostile to home schooling or unschooling, they just didn't know how to evaluate such students, having developed procedures which depended on the information provided by conventional schools. Our kids had SAT scores well into the range for those schools but didn't have grades or teacher evaluations, other than from their parents.
I should add that the total number of rejections wasn't that large, since our son withdrew all other applications once Chicago, where he wanted to go and where his sister already was, having transferred there from Oberlin, accepted him. Given that elite schools are hard to get into, I can't say with confidence that our kids would have done better if they had had a more conventional education.
I was unschooled during my high school years (mid/late 2000's). I was in a lower-middle class family. We did not know the concept of unschooling but both my parents had to work so no one was at home during the day or able to teach.
One downside of unschooling in that era is that it was much less organized. I received no guidance on how to game... err I mean "navigate", the college admissions system as you might at school. At least at that time, being unschooled was not looked upon well by colleges -- or pretty much anyone else.
But in my case, my extreme ignorance about colleges worked in my favor. Like many people in this thread, I found out that you could be "done" with much of school at a pretty young age. So I took the SAT and enrolled at a local state university at 15 to start taking college courses of interest.
Then I transferred to my target school when I turned 18 (a well-ranked private university in a major metro).
The first university never asked me for a high school diploma because I was an "early admission" student who was nominally still "in high school". The second university also didn't ask me for a diploma, *because I was already in college* and had good grades.
Hilariously, this all caught up with me during my final year of university. I was set to graduate with a very high GPA. The university called me and said "we don't have your H.S. diploma on file and so we can't issue your degree". I told them that I didn't have one.
I don't think it had ever happened to them before because they had no idea how to handle it. I asked whether it really mattered, since I had clearly been capable of doing all the work. But, oh yes, it did matter.
Thankfully, my university credits were able to be applied retroactively as high school credit (sort of like a reverse AP course...). But I still didn't qualify for an HS diploma because I needed a Gym credit.
So as a college senior who was about to graduate with high honors I had to take a remedial high school course in *bowling* and *cycling* through the University of Texas Online High School.
After my competence in bowling and cycle was firmly established through proctored exam, I was awarded my high school and college diplomas at the same time.
A final note: I would never have gone to college if I had stayed in school. I spent my teenage years *working* so I could save money to leave my dead end hometown. People who think that school is always the friend of the lower classes have no sense of the opportunity cost that schools generate for students from less advantaged families.
Woah, hilarious indeed to have you need to demonstrate your proficiency in bowling and cycling to graduate!
I find it very impressive that you were able to get good grades very early at university while also working if I understood correctly, and with very little help of schools or parents! Were you motivated by the university classes themselves or by the perspectives they offered (or both obvioulsy)?
Mostly the way that universities enable personal interests. It was exciting to be able to pick up a university catalog and realize: I can pick any class from this list!
For my part, I never missed more than a week of school, remember it largely as a living hell, and am struggling to pull together anything vaguely resembling a successful life.
This whole discussion feels like the tale of the blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there.
Nobody can agree on anything. Not even what the terms mean. You can't throw a rock without hitting someone making casual logical error via comparing education (the process of learning things) to schooling (the state of being in a school classroom).
And what should be taught? Not only does nobody agree, there's a faction that claims we shouldn't "decide" what is taught at all. Somehow, the evolved system must be best.
It's logically obvious that we have a school system not designed to incorporate the educational benefits of technology. We will certainly have to change it.
"It's logically obvious that we have a school system not designed to incorporate the educational benefits of technology. We will certainly have to change it."
Kindly expand on what exactly those benefits are, and how you teach them to children between the ages of 12-18.
Because I'm hearing the likes of this all my life, with various interest groups and governments deciding that Thing is the next big thing that will provide employment, and so "Kids should all be learning German/Japanese/Chinese in school!" (because the Germans/Japanese/Chinese will be the ones creating jobs and so will be their employers in future). Biotechnology is the coming big thing, everyone should do a science subject! (It was and it wasn't, it certainly wasn't the mass employment creator the government was hoping for). Business groups routinely say they want such-and-such taught in schools to prepare students for work.
We've had more computer manufacturers set up and close down in my country than I can remember - anyone else remember when Wang was a Big Name? And now the shiny tech companies are concentrated in the Silicon Docks in Dublin, and admittedly, there are good jobs there - for as long as it's financially worth the while of multinationals to be based here, instead of Eastern Europe or Asia (Waterford Glass is no longer made in Waterford, the company decided the brand name was what people bought, and now it's made in Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Germany because it was cheaper to move there).
So what do you mean by "educational benefits of technology"? 'Everyone will learn to code'? Some kids will have a natural aptitude for that and will do wonderfully. Most will manage to learn something, maybe enough for a tech support job. Some kids will fail at it (and I would put myself in that bucket, because I have no mathematical aptitude at all and while I could learn off some version of memorised techniques, the way I learned off equations without understanding, that is not sufficient for a proper job).
I know I sound demanding, but I've had too many of these vague statements which are, in the end, a great cry and little wool when it comes to "Students need to learn A, B or C to prepare them for the world of work in the modern age".
Sacred Heart of Jesus. *This* is your "incorporating the educational benefits of technology"? I'm a fucking dinosaur when it comes to tech, and it took me about five minutes to work out how to go on Zoom for webinars for work.
Read through this entire comment thread and the comments on the other posts Scott has put up about this, and see the opinions of people about this whole "can take classes virtually" stuff. A lot of people considered they didn't work at all.
This is the same pablum that has been peddled for the past thirty years: technology can change education! we won't need teachers, students can take self-motivated online lessons! one teacher can oversee a hundred or more students! all will be done by the computer!
This is the same advertising that was pushing "buy an interactive whiteboard instead of the ordinary classroom chalkboards" back when kitting out the new schools where I was involved, and I think the snazzy interactive technology gets used once in a blue moon.
Seriously? After a full year of almost everybody doing all classes online, you are convinced they simply don't work at all? And your evidence it doesn't work is ... that people say it will work? And that a different technology was never used?
I have plenty more thoughts on education (and will have a blog post on some of those next week), but this seemed like a statement so obvious it wouldn't cause contentious debate. I apparently have underestimated the ability for people to argue about any topic, no matter how non-controversial.
Mate, you start off with "It's logically obvious that we have a school system not designed to incorporate the educational benefits of technology" and then your example is along the line of "Today, children, we are going to learn how to send an email!"
Now, agreed, that's valuable. But it's not something that is going to take up a whole lot of time learning.
In fact, I'm going to now agitate for the Return Of Old Technology. Right kids, today you are all going to learn how to - write cheques! The arcane art of "crossing a cheque" 😁 If you're all very, very good, I'll teach you about fax machines and manual typewriters and what "carbon paper" was!
For the last time: I'm not saying "schools need to teach how to use Zoom", I'm saying the schooling system was designed in 1900, when Zoom didn't exist. Or the internet. Or videos. Or even your fax machines and manual typewriters.
Now that those things do exist, we have additional methods of pedagogy available to us. And we need to consider how we should change our schooling strategies as a result of that.
Well, my evidence that onlines classes don't work is...
(1) I saw it tried when I was teaching college. Rarely worked, and only for the most motivated and capable students, for the rest accomplishments were significantly lower.
(2) I had one child who was compelled to do it during COVID, and his accomplishments and happiness dropped like a stone. Sitting in front of a laptop screen all day looking at tiny images of the teacher and other students would drive *me* crazy, and I have way more patience and self-discipline than a kid. Assignments were confusing and the technology frequently broken or brain-dead. The teachers' ability to teach dropped off a cliff, since none of them had been used to this and they were flung into it without any training -- and indeed no one knows how to train an online instructor, because it is not a broadly successful model. (Doesn't mean it doesn't work for some students and some instructors, but you can't build a general training regime out of a collection of exceptions.)
(3) Of course, I know a large number of other parents in similar situations, and every single one of them hated it and thought their kids suffered. They could certainly *all* be delusional, but that's not a great leading hypothesis.
(4) I attended a few school board meetings where school re-opening was discussed, and the reaction from parents was extremely heated. The kids have to go back to school! And this is in a very wealthy suburb, with families that had no problem affording daycare, technology, or even home tutoring.
(5) Almost every major online university program, from ASU's GFA to MIT's edX, has slowly transitioned away from its initial aspirations ("do the first two years of college online! Get an online degree entirely!") to much more confined and traditional goals -- more or less, becoming an online version of the old-fashioned correspondence school, with focus on specific credentials, usually career related. Online college, despite two decades of promise and potential, has completely failed to live up to its expectations, and investors have lost a staggering amount of money betting on it.
I can certainly believe that you can write a glowingly optimistic theoretical argument why online remote education is an idea whose time has come -- yet again, as its time has come repeatedly since 1995, and if we want to include TV broadcast, probably since 1975 -- and you can illustrate it with a collection of anecdotes where it has indeed worked. But I think people who are actually involved in actually teaching people for a living (which I have been at one point) are entirely justified in being deeply skeptical after having been burned by this more than once. The new bar is a lot higher.
Even the Open University, which has been going since 1969, has tutors assigned to students and runs in-person workshops and day schools where the students can meet up with lecturers in person:
>Online college, despite two decades of promise and potential, has completely failed to live up to its expectations, and investors have lost a staggering amount of money betting on it.
Counterexample: USC has been doing remote-learning STEM masters' degrees since before there was "online", only CCTV, and it's worked very well. Evidence: industry reputation, plus a couple of my colleagues teach there, plus I hired one of their graduates and he was superb. But, by definition that's for people who have already earned a STEM bachelors, almost certainly the old-fashioned way, and usually ones who have performed well enough that their employer is willing to pay for an MS. So once again, maybe it's easy to provide equal or superior alternatives for smart highly motivated people but they don't scale to the general public.
You made a very broad, general statement, then rowed it back to "have classes via Zoom" which is about as technologically-advanced pedagogy as "why don't we have special classes to teach kids to ride bikes?". Yes, we could do that, or they could learn it at home from their parents.
Learning how to log on to a Zoom teleconference is something that is indeed part of the world of work, but it's not something that will take more than ten to fifteen minutes for a class to learn how to do (granted, if the entire class is all individual students at home during lockdown, most of the class time will be taken up with 'miss, miss, how do I turn on the microphone?' and the likes, though since it will be at home, it'll be up to the parents to make sure the webcam is plugged in etc.)
'Learning how to use a webcam' is useful, but it's not exactly "incorporat(ing) the educational benefits of technology" except in the most basic manner.
They certainly can but it seems a large majority of students and teachers much prefer in person classes (at least that is true in my French university acoording to several internal surveys).
Doing the thing where we enroll our kid in public school for the first time and there's literally a warning they send out to all the parents saying "If your kid isn't going to come to school for some reason, you have to tell us why, and if we don't like your answer we'll send the police/CPS to your house." The school seems lovely and all, but as someone who felt similar to Scott during most of my years, it gave me the creeps.
Depending on where you are, there may be a relatively innocent explanation for that. In California the public school districts get money from the state in proportion to their "average daily attendance"[1]. Reference 1 observes that on average a California school loses $85 in state funding for every day a single student is absent. Not surprisingly, they're highly motivated to report 100% attendance. It's probably got little to do with being overbearing spinster busybodies, and more to do with the District administration putting pressure on the local school principal to not cost them $$$.
The sad matter is that sometimes you do have to use the outsized stick of "explain or the cops/social workers are knocking on your door", because there are parents who don't give a damn and won't do anything unless you plant dynamite under their backsides.
The school tells them "It's a legal requirement that your kid be in full-time education or training until the age of 18", they blow it off. The prospect of the cops calling and maybe fines or a day in court will make them pay attention.
Yes, no argument there. The situation in certain urban school districts is pretty grim, and you'd probaby have to actually put a parent in jail or something to make an impression -- mere words or threats don't cut it.
And it's certainly the case that The System tries to hand out roughly the same warnings to everybody, whether it's an inner city school with a 30% truancy rate, rival gangs flashing signs at each other in the halls, the necessity of a metal detector at the main entrance, and routine rape in the bathrooms -- or whether it's a nice tony suburban school with good little boys and girls and parents who are just outraged that The System doesn't immediately recognize them as one of the elite, and therefore treat them with the appropriate respect.
But of course they can't, because if the agents of The System started treating suburban white parents with deference and positive assumptions, and urban black parents with skepticism, juries full of suburban white parents would award $100 million punitive damages against the school system in the resulting civil rights lawsuits. So...here we are.
I think mine was a slightly more mixed experience, in which there was a blend of (a) parents who were no more concerned about their kids than dogs about their litter, sometimes because they had so many mental health problems themselves that they could barely handle their own lives and sometimes because they just didn't give a damn (b) parents with problems who genuinely were trying to do well by their kids but sometimes life got on top of the family (c) parents from a range of socio-economic status who were the ordinary kind of parents (d) parents who were better-off, relatively speaking, but still pulled the kids out on whims or let the kids stay at home.
Now, if the kid is missing school but making it up otherwise (home schooling, learning by themselves, parents covering the material), that's fine, just let the school know. But the one-size-fits-all warning has to go out to everyone, because simply "We don't live on the council estate and we both work" isn't enough of a signifier that your kid won't be missing chunks of school.
And yeah, that means the decent parents get the "pony up a good explanation or else" warning like everyone else.
Yeah, that's the "one size fits all" element of public schooling and it's very heavy-handed. But there is probably (I don't know the American situation, only the Irish one) a legal requirement to report absences of more than X many days to the truancy board, and there are a lot of rules regarding bullying, absences, disciplinary procedures, and so on in the parents' handbooks.
The parents who would, in any case, give an explanation to the school as to why John or Jane is not in today are getting the same messaging as the parents who pull the kids out of school in the middle of the term because they want to go on a family holiday and they got a cheap bargain if they go now and not for Easter break or during summer holidays, or the parents who routinely pull the kids out to babysit siblings, mind the house, etc. while the parents (best case) are working or (worst case) spend the entire day in the pub drinking, and the parents who really are literally "I don't know where my kid is and I don't care".
I should include in that the kids who are sent to/dropped off to school by the parents first thing in the morning, then they mitch. Mom and Dad are sure Junior was in school, Junior instead skipped off to spend the day hanging out with pals or otherwise, and when the school rings up/texts/emails/sends letter about "Why was Junior not in class all day on the 35th?", they get an unpleasant surprise (and Junior gets an even more unpleasant one).
Honestly, the general principle of checking in when the student doesn't show up seems fine, the fact that they jump straight to sending the police/CPS rather than just "sending someone 'round to make sure you're okay" is where it seems extreme.
How much would they have to pay you to go around to strangers' houses to knock on the door and deliver the very unwelcome news that the kid is cutting school today and you want to take a look around and make sure everything is OK?
Sure, 19 out of 20 times you get merely an angry or abashed look, or the door slammed in your face, but on the 20th...maybe the reaction is a lot weirder.
The cops are paid to go to houses and get involved in family difficulties, and even with guns and back-up they hate it and will avoid it if at all possible.
Do they do that on a first absence? The tracking system we had was that once the kids went over a certain number of days out, that triggered the automatic "this has to be reported to the truancy board" but before that, the Home/School Liaison would try to make contact and find out if it was because of sickness, a problem or something else.
Though I suppose different school districts in the US would have different policies about that, and different criteria about escalating it to "here come the cops" interventions.
If you want your future offspring to be imaginative and capable of amusing themselves then get rid of your television and don't give them a smartphone or computer either. Instead, rely on books, either fact or fiction and plenty of fresh air.
> I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college.
Count me as one of those kids homeschooled through highschool who now has PhD.
> Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative?
This is maybe boring, but I had a GPA and a transcript. The homeschool groups I participated in had something like a teaching co-op and everyone had grades recorded for classes taken. Every year you could take a (voluntary but encouraged) standardized test, I believe the [Iowa Test of Basic Skills](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Assessments). We mostly all took SAT/ACT when it came time to apply to colleges.
This was still the 90s when homeschooling was fairly unusual, so some colleges still looked at all this suspiciously, however I think the SAT and ACT scores increased confidence.
I had friends in both the homeschool world and the "regular school" world (the latter from my neighborhood or church), and it seemed that a major difference was simply time spent on things. Homeschool friends "time in classroom" was much lower than "regular school" friends, and experiences were consistent with:
> My parents tried homeschooling, rigorously followed a bunch of curricula, and discovered I could finish *all* the assigned coursework in 2 hours/day and spend the rest of the time reading my favorite books.
People I knew did different things with their extra free time. I read all the time, some of my friends fished and hiked a lot (one generous friend lived in rural outskirts of town, had land access), some of my friends practiced their favorite organized sports a **ton**. There was a joke that the homeschool varsity XYZ team wasn't allowed to compete with the public school circuit because all the extra practice time meant they would win a lot ... then years later (after I graduated) when the doors were opened to the homeschool teams, they ... won a lot. Not like completely dominating everything forever, but highly competitive. NCAA scouts started scouting homeschool players and homeschoolers started getting sports scholarships and playing at D1/D2 levels. (If you're homeschooling and want to explore this route, here's the [homeschool registration page with the NCAA](https://www.ncaa.org/student-athletes/future/home-school-students).)
> Did people give you advice on what to do?
Up through (and including) *getting into college* I got good advice from the people running the homeschool group. As I progressed through the academic ranks beyond undergrad I had to rely on new sources of advice, which was surprising to me at the time ("my sources of good advice had always worked up to now!") but in retrospect shouldn't have been.
I feel like the takeaway here is that different children need different things and it's hard to generalize from one person's childhood experiences onto another. Customizing the experience on a child-by-child basis seems like it would be incredibly resource intensive. So how do we solve the problem? Obviously parents who are at least somewhat invested can probably find a way to navigate to an at least "acceptable" solution, but then what do we do for the children of parents who don't care at all?
I think the original comments got it right. School IS important, but you're right in that so are hobbies! But this is more of an argument to say that school shouldn't give a ton of homework that takes up an entire kid's day besides like their soccer practice or dance classes. You can go to school, come back, and then spend your time messing with PERL, y'know.
Just because you preemptively call “chesterton’s fence” (“8-miling”? Where you say your opponent’s likely critique before he has a chance to make it) doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply.
I think conventional wisdom is always on a spectrum between chesterton’s fence and QWERTY keyboard. Things stick around because they’re adaptive, which sometimes means they’re local optima or ruts, and sometimes means they have some utility that’s illegible-but-true. To me deciding between burn-the-boats and the lindy law at an axiomatic level misses the point. It’s about which applies more in a given situation.
This sounds as though you believe Paul David's account of the QWERTY/Dvorak story. Almost every fact in that account turns out to be false, largely the result of his buying puffery by the inventor of the Dvorak keyboard. For a detailed account, see:
So you don't believe it's possible for "conventional wisdom" to fall into ruts and continue being maintained way past its utility? Would you have allowed my argument if instead of "QWERTY keyboard" I'd said "[analogy for something that people keep doing because that's the way it's always been done, even if there's no good reason for inventing it, nor continuing it]"? If that single example doesn't invalidate that I'm trying to say, why even make the comment? Just to nitpick? For fun?
"Great athletes miss a few months of training all the time, for injuries or something, and nobody ever says “oh, she missed six months of training, now she’ll never catch up to all those other athletes who have six months more training than she does”
How confident are you about this? I think there are probably plenty of athletes who fail to hit their window of opportunity because of a poorly timed injury that slowed down their development enough that they don't hit the intersection of their knowledge and their physical prowess. The fact that some athletes overcome such obstacles doesn't mean that everyone can or does.
I *am* a programmer (https://github.com/bugsbycarlin). I am excited about my daughter learning the things she wants to learn, programming or dinosaurs or whatever. And I was pulled out of school, homeschooled for a year, then sent to early college, with initially mixed and ultimately very positive results. But I *still* want to send my daughter to regular old public school for part of her childhood.
So I think this:
---There’s this weird trap a lot of adults fall into where anything a kid does on their own, however interesting, is “wasting away”, and anything they do at school, however ridiculous, is Exciting Prosocial Learning Fun Glowing Childhood Memories. I think this might be entirely a function of whether the parents can spectate and take pictures that look good on a mantlepiece: easy with hobbyhorsing, harder with learning C++.---
is *just a bit* reductive. And maybe even not that nice.
Are we really supposed to take seriously the claim that Scott doesn't know how to do Gaussian elimination, but yet did fine on algebra at school? I think he's just forgotten what the word refers to.
One might also consider the substantial amount of sexual abuse that occurs in public schools, both from staff/faculty of all categories as well as among students themselves. There was a statistic about California public schools that perhaps 1 in 10 students would be subject of sexual abuse/harassment by the time they finished high school. For all the media interest in the Catholic Sexual abuse cases (many going back decades) there is little mention that year after year, an order of magnitude of new victims is being produced by the public education system. It has always baffled me that this was never more closely studied but it seems like there are many limiting factors about under-reporting faculty/staff behaviors and an inability to record student-on-student forms of sexual abuse. I've only seen a handful of really horrifying studies on this and most were about a decade or so old by the time I came across them.
The distinction is that the Catholic Church is no longer seen as a crucially necessary institution in society, whereas schools are. The abuse is seen as "worth it" (and this was exactly the case with the Church in the past, to be clear) to provide the service, but you can't say that out loud without people noticing that you're a psycho, so it's best just to suppress the evidence and try not to think about it.
I am grateful to have been homeschooled K-12. My school day was much more efficient and I could get all my work done in 4ish hours. My mother kept records of my classes and grades, which my college accepted (without grades, I would have assumed a B+ average).
Some readers are concerned about exposure to extracurriculars. Through the public high school, I was able to join the marching, concert, and jazz bands, to fulfill a specific interest. But public school isn’t the only opportunity for group activities. In middle school I was in a private children’s choir which accepted kids from any school. It was self organized and frankly better than any of the school choirs.
I really like homeschooling, but I don’t think it’s for everyone. It’s essentially unpaid work for at least one parent which may be economically difficult for some families. Some homeschooling friends ended up going to a charter high school and enjoying it. On the other hand, my younger sister opted to spend junior and senior year at the public high school so she could have more social interaction, and now she says it probably was not worth it.
Regarding the question about getting into college:
I was basically unschooled thanks to religious extremism and neglect. As such I’m perhaps an interesting example since my poor education took place without the benefit of involved parenting. The one thing I had was math textbooks, but only as far as algebra and geometry. It would have been great to have had more advanced topics, but as a general principle, learning math as a thing I had to figure out on my own seems like the best possible math education. Most kids are taught to memorize steps in math. It’s terrible!
I got a GED and spent two years taking community college classes- most importantly the basic science labs which you can’t make up for with just reading. I then transferred to a four year college. After working a few years I went back to grad school. Sorry to bust the trend- no PhD here. I got a masters in engineering. And I still LOVE math.
Because of my own rough start, I’ve spent nearly a decade tutoring kids at a local homeless shelter. Many were told by teachers in school that they weren’t smart. No school would definitely have been the better option for them. I’ve worked with several kids who developed their own systems and nomenclature for working multiplication and division problems. They were usually embarrassed since they were doing it ‘wrong’. My two favorite things have been 1- when I get them to teach me their way and can tell them it is right and 2- when they tell me that they have started teaching their siblings or friends.
I had once written a post in defense of school, which my husband forbid me to post anywhere publicly on the grounds that it's not worth pissing that many of our friends off. I sorta think that childless geniuses who reason that *they* would have been better off without school, and then use examples from their tech-savy elite friends who put huge parental investments into their children, are not in touch with the rest of humanity. Look, I'm not saying I love the school system as is - it has a lot of horrible things in it and would benefit from huge reforms, but I think for many (most?) kids it really beats their realistic alternatives. Not everyone can have a parent stay home or a nanny who lavishes attention and books on what are already high-IQ, emotionally supported children. Not everyone can get ahead without a good looking path and strong story for college. My immigrant nanny agreed that remote schooling this year was torturing her daughter, yet said it was necessary for her to get into the elite high school she was aiming at in order to become the highly paid professional she wants one day to be. Not everyone can just sit down and get a perfect SAT score and impress the world with their natural acumen. You keep *your* kids home. Understand that most of the world can't.
In my own practice I have had a lot of parents complain of their children developing depression during the pandemic. The children who did in person or blended learning faired much better than the ones who were fully remote. A few parents changed from fully remote to blended halfway through the year, and expressed profound relief that they had done so, noting immediate psychological and behavioral changes in their children. How much of this was due to the social advantages of seeing other humans and how much was due to how terrible remote learning is, is unclear, however I suspect the social aspect was a very large factor, especially in the younger children for whom 'remote learning' was really a big nothing burger anyway. And to be honest, my practice has a lot of highly educated professionals in it, so it's not just what I wrote above. And going back to my nanny, she said over half of the kids in her daughter's remote class were depressed, and the school was having guidance counsellors reach out to everyone on a weekly basis because of this.
My own experience with sending my kids to school has been mixed. There are definitely large positives, which you seem quite quick to dismiss as 'hitting your head with a baseball bat builds character.' Just because *you* did not experience these things does not give you grounds to dismiss the experiences of huge portions of the population that tell you this is a thing.
I should probably write up a new article on my thoughts, but it does miff me when childless genius tech adjacents declare this stuff. I also have thoughts on the damage that being left alone with unlimited screens causes quite a few children, including gaming addiction, social media addiction, and depression (again - you not being one of them is not evidence). I also have thoughts on some of the social damage that my now grown home-schooled patients have reported to me. Anyway ... /rant
Thank you for posting this. I hope your husband is wrong that posting this under your own name would piss off many of your friends; if true, that's a problem with the community of your friends.
I can't speak for Scott, but personally I'm very skeptical of any argument of the form "this is fine for us educated people, but we have to force the plebs", and also, school isn't *supposed* to be a *social* institution. (In fact, if one were to reform schooling to more closely approximate a sane institution, one would have to start by removing the social aspect as thoroughly as possible.) You say Scott is quick to dismiss this as a baseball-bat argument, yet your own argument is entirely baseball-battery, focused on epiphenomena that shouldn't even be there rather than on the thing itself.
Also, tormenting a child for the purpose of ascending a credentialist torment-ladder in the future in the hopes of social mobility is, uh, to put it mildly, not a whlesome operation in any part. That's a situation where a healthier society would just reject the possibility of social mobility. At least in the distant past when social mobility was attained through courage in mortal combat (arguably less traumatic!), winning got you into the *upper* class, not a higher level of servant class.
The only thing I agree with here is you shouldn't leave children alone with screens, or likely let them have them at all. Supposedly when Lord Dunsany was little he wasn't allowed to read anything for pleasure except the Iliad and the works of Shakespeare; if he didn't want to read those he had to go play outdoors, play chess or write his own stories. That library might be a bit restrictive, a child could probably be allowed Plutarch and Froissart without harm, but it's the right idea.
I'm not in favor of 'forcing' anyone. I agree that current regs and the 'common core' are too restrictive and am in favor of experimenting with a variety of charter and vocational programs. Yes, I'm defending school primarily as a social institution, and don't see that it's *not* supposed to be one. Whatever the puritans had in mind 200 years ago is irrelevant now - school has evolved alonside the rest of our society. Society has many, many problems, and the problems in school are reflective of that and not the source of all its ills. Getting rid of schools is not going to magically get rid of the need for two parents to work, bring back extended families, make americans trust their neighbors, or get rid of our general paranoia and litigiousness. It's not going to get rid of the puritan work-ethic or credentialism. I think it is very unrealistic to assume we can just shut down all schools and this will be fine for children and their families.
The best argument I can think of for that would be, well we'd have to come up with something, and it'd probably be better than what we have. However, that sorta happened this last year, and we got remote learning, which was a disaster.
Credentialism is terrible, and it would be great to come up with some other ways for people to prove their human capital besides grades in school, but again, this is where we are now as a society. Immigrants have endured much worse tortures to get ahead in life than enduring a year of remote school. I wish remote schooling were *not* torture (I can think of quite a few ways to make it way better), but on an individual basis, I don't think immigrants are incorrect to focus on academic achievement. Indeed immigrant communities who do so fare better in the US, and I don't see how taking away this possibility would be to their advantage. Who are we to say 'you'd be better off as a servant class than working as hard as you do to rise out of it'?
"I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?"
During the first half of high school I took a few accredited online independent study courses, and during the second half of high school about half my course load was community college classes, so that gave me some independently verified 'A's to back up the ones from my parents. I took a few AP tests, SAT subject tests, and of course the SAT, so those certainly helped as well. This is pretty far from pure unschooling, but I think I still had more freedom and less drudgery than I would have had in a typical high school. I don't know how the admissions officers viewed my homeschool classes, but at the very least it didn't stop me from getting into the college I was aiming for. (I'm at that college now. Based on my performance there so far I'm above average for the school, but not extremely. So I didn't just overpower the homeschooling question by being ridiculously good, but I also don't know what would have happened if I'd been more of a borderline case).
On the extracurricular benefits of school question, I'm overall satisfied with my route but I'm sure there are things I missed out on. For example, I'm naturally not an athletic person, and because of homeschooling I was able to exercise in other ways. I'm overall happy about that, but it also means that I'm abysmal at anything resembling sports. That can be embarrassing at times.
Socialization really depends on your luck with who lives nearby, is roughly the same age, and is homeschooling. You don't have as a big of a pool, but I don't think you need to have dozens of friends to have a fulfilling social life. Also, because I wasn't always in groups based on grade level I got the chance to interact with kids of varying ages and even adults. I think that's at least as good for learning to socialize in the long term as hanging out only with people of the same age is.
The hobbyhorse thing seems really odd to me, since I found one of the biggest benefits of homeschooling to be the flexibility to pursue hobbies. In my early school years I had time for lots of creative projects since I wasn't doing busywork all day, and in my later school years I was able to focus my education to align with my interests. I think the reason I spent my time as a kid on creative projects rather than social media has more to do with my mom limiting my "recreational" computer time than anything about homeschooling. Fortunately programming didn't count (I'm a computer science major).
All that being said, I have a hard time imagining a world where the majority of kids are homeschooled. My dad worked from home and my mother was a stay at home mom. My mom almost became a teacher (she decided she couldn't handle a room full of rowdy children all day), and they're both very intelligent and good at explaining things. I was very receptive to homeschooling. That's pretty much ideal conditions for homeschooling. Also conservative Christian/otherwise ideologically motivated homeschoolers concern me. Still, I do think that there are children in public school right now who would benefit from being homeschooled. There's also a wide range of possibilities in between public school and unschooling, and even between public school and what I had. Some charter schools, for example, have students only come in a few hours a week. I certainly think we can improve on the status quo, and that improving on the status quo means less traditional school not more.
Kids who are analytically inclined, are introverts, and end up doing a PHD in some hard science, those kids are much more likely to hate school, enjoy being on their own, and call their imaginary friend Perl.
They're also a lot more likely to be reading this blog. This is me, I hated school and skipped as much of it as I dared.
What about the other kids? Since being a highly efficient nerd is currently rewarding financially, nerds tend to think that being math-smart is all there is.
We're here not in the context of making schools better (or making something better than schools). We're here in the context of banning children from interacting with each other save on a screen. Somehow this aspect was left out of the conversation. Pretend play - unless you count Perl as your friend - is harder to do over Zoom.
While I wasn't homeschooled or unschooled, I can guarantee I missed more than 18 days of school per year from about grade 8 on.
I remember barely attending highschool. I swear I slept in class, or just skipped class most days. I managed to pass highschool, with only one pitty pass class (I got a 51% in physics 20 that I don't think I deserved, 50% was needed to pass).
I got in to a University bachelor of science program 9 years later without needing to upgrade anything. I'm currently maintaining above 3.0 GPA despite my continued dislike of school. I just started my third year of study.
I think the biggest thing I lack right now is just good study/homework habits. Especially since a lot of school is online/hybrid for me right now.
I recognize not every kid was me in school, but I can imagine there were many smarter kids beside me who could have also skipped a lot more school than they did.
Something to pay attention to when it comes to that other person that posted "your grandparents didn't go to school" and the reaction. That conversation was not in any way about school, it was about whether or not we can and should do whatever Pandemic Alarmists declare we should just because Pandemic - regardless of the potential consequences.
Think of it this way - on the one hand, we have school in which we pay teachers to force children to beat their own heads with baseball bats, but baseball-bat-beating is an obviously required skill to enter modern life (seriously - the number of jobs without a baseball-bat-to-face related requirement is declining faster and faster as more things get automated and (more likely) outsourced to people in China. We largely do this because the historical power structures that be *absolutely demand it*. People are worried that their kids will be behind in the baseball-bat-to-face arena if they don't get their eight daily hours of training - and people have found all kinds of unique ways to make that process much better and more interesting and include more things that are intangible but important. Still, it's largely power at play.
On the other, we have people who come from highly educated places making the demand that *they* be put in charge of whether or not people go to school, or really do anything at all. Gyms? Closed. Schools? Closed. Public life of any sort? Closed. And if you read current Pandemic Twitter - the cases for these just get wilder and wilder as more and more people get vaccinated.
People are reacting to him and not you specifically because he transparently was making the power-play case, not the "it's not the end of the world if this happens" case. People can smell this kind of bullshit *miles away* and will reject it *just because*.
For anyone interested in this subject, I recently wrote about our experience (in the UK) of discovering unschooling. I found all the comments in this thread and the previous post really useful. https://nickasbury.substack.com/p/the-opposite-of-school
If you're looking for anecdotes, two people close to me worked in very poor areas. They were in constant contact with the police about physical and sexual abuse. The kids apparently made huge leaps when these issues were resolved.
I value having a job and paying my mortgage. I value participating in public schooling. I value helping to support my family, being able to support them myself should I need to, and contributing to the world in that particular way. I value modelling to my kids that it's possible for a woman to both be a mother and be employed. Other people can value other things, and that's fine -- but as a society, we were structured so that for those of us who valued some of the things I value, public schools were available and kids went there during the day. And when in many places in the country, that stopped happening, it was terrible not because we don't enjoy spending time with our kids, but because we were doing that at the same time as we were doing paid employment. Our political leaders expressed *their* values when it came to kids and families vs. teacher unions, and it was a bad thing.
You can find comments here from parents who did not do great at home - but it's true that probably no one is going to say "school is what was keeping my abused kid safe", for reasons that would seem obvious, and you can also imagine why someone might not want to share their own personal childhood story of that. As for statistics -- we certainly do have rising youth crime where I am, and in many other places, and in the absence of some kind of definitive paper on the topic, that's really all we can say. There are certainly other possible explanations as well. And when it comes to how many kids have dropped out of school or will, there isn't the data yet. We do have some test score data, and it does show that kids who were already behind have indeed gotten further behind - that gaps that many people purport to care about have been exacerbated by this.
If you want the real Scott Against School post, “SSC Gives a Graduation Speech”. It’s great
I think the implication is that "New Orleans Schools" before Katrina contained a lot more poor/disadvantaged kids than they did after Katrina
Okay... so the implication is that Scott's observation is explained away by saying that New Orleans kids seemed to do well after missing school only because there were fewer poor kids, with the assumption that poor kids perform worse.
I didn't figure that out on first reading. I misinterpreted it in a way which I now see makes no sense. Sorry.
That section raised my eyebrows, since the single example was "dinosaurs were real". That seems like a harder-than-average random fact to have missed.
I think this is likely to be the explanation, as well.
Agreed. I don't even think that's a fact from school, just a fact from the pop culture footprint (sorry?) of dinosaurs.
There's probably a selection effect where if someone were to give an anecdote about them missing a random fact, they'd choose the one that was the most outrageously absurd that it feels like it'd be a funny/interesting anecdote.
YES!
Once in an important, early-career orientation session, we were asked to tell about our most embarrassing moments. I couldn't think of one that would make a good story so I said I couldn't think of anything. Several people took that to mean I hadn't ever done anything embarrassing (or was too obtuse to recognize if I had).
I did OK in that career, but the memory haunts me to this day. Perhaps it was my most embarrassing moment.
I took multiple college level biology courses, and have read EO Wilson, Dawkins, Chivers, M. Buss, Sapolsky, probably other biologists... and I learned in the last 6 months that men and women have the same number of ribs.
I basically haven't thought about dinosaurs since elementary school, so if somebody missed that lesson because they were getting taught about jesus, eh. Easy enough.
Not if you just don’t interact with people enough? Maybe hard with internet tho
It probably depends a lot on what you focus and interests are. My wife went to public school in Hong Kong until she was ~16, and despite being apparently an order of magnitude harder than US school (the last two years of which she breezed through despite having just moved here) knows almost zero geography and has asked me "what's the difference between dinosaurs and dragons?" She remembered that dinosaurs actually were things once, but that was it. It's easy enough to imagine someone learning very early on about dinosaurs, not caring, then just not thinking about it for a long time and getting them conflated with other mythical things. And apparently HK high school just doesn't spend any time on where other countries are, such that even straight A students don't know basic things.
Looks like survivorship bias, all the way down....
Which of the nine sections are you talking about?
The state also extorts money from childless people, and it extorts money from me even though I no longer have children in school. You're not paying for *your own* child to be educated, although that is a side benefit, you're paying your share of what it costs to educate the entire generation after you, on the grounds that a more educated population is a general social good, like good roads or clean air, from which you benefit in a general way.
Think of it as a progressive tax? Or pass school choice?
How much is the % of state+local+fed spending on education? I don’t think it’s above 5% of poor peoples income, or that much of rich.
Private fee-paying schools can also be terrible, see the C.S. Lewis quote above. If you want everyone to be responsible for their own kids' schooling, and everyone to be free of taxation for schools, then it's up to you to figure out how to pay for 'other schooling options'.
Is the state theft really at such a pitch it is so oppressive? Give me an estimation of how much money you personally have to pay for terrible schools, and how you could spend this better on little Alex learning to be a Genius Baby.
Without endorsing it, I'd point out that part of the benefit school provides children that need it are kids that would otherwise run away with a voucher to a better one. It's not much benefit for the student in extreme poverty and bad subcultures to go to school and only be around others in the same circumstance; you need a lot of normal or advantaged kids to be around to trigger socialization benefits. Otherwise they're socializing with other kids with the same problems.
Scott was going to succeed in his life (barring he did something really catastrophically stupid like decide "drug laws are dumb, ergo heroin is a fun no-harm thing to indulge in!") whether he went to school or not, or went to a private school, or his parents set up a foundation for the Scott Alexander Educational Trust, or he was raised by wolves (that last subject to debate).
An article about "I was a smart kid from a stable family, I hated my school experience because of the social aspect/they didn't laser focus on the two subjects I cared about and ignored all the other kids in my class", is of no use to anyone except "smart kids really interested in one or two subjects may benefit from not going to public school but having an individually-tailored programme of tuition".
The only results of "why was I forced to go to school? we should change the law on mandatory schooling! government keep out!" will be that the ones who would have succeeded anyway will survive and indeed thrive, and the excuse will be seized upon to abandon the ones who need help the most, because "school should not be replacement parenting" and now we can spend the money saved on something else that appeals to us better.
I'm not sure I agree.
My mechanic didn't go to University, but I happily pay him $100/hr for his services and he runs a successful business without dumping hundreds of thousands on an MBA.
I'd lay odds he did Dreadfully at humanities and maths, but quickly learned all the math and computer science that he needs to be a top-tier mechanic, both of which are considerable nowadays.
Public schools are currently run on the conceit that "Everyone" needs and wants a "Modern Liberal Arts Education." To me, who works safety-critical embedded systems in avionics, "Liberal Arts" were a cross to be borne that I could get into the maths and technology I cared about.
I am a functional safety engineer (IEC 61511) and tend to agree, but the interface between the human and machine is the most important part and you need to understand both to do safety critical systems well.
How many such children are there? Should we perhaps be more concerned about these children than just wanting them to be in dysfunctional schools during a pandemic (note: I endorse the opening of schools)? Or, is that the best we can do?
I think this was pretty well addressed in the above post around section 2.
This is similar to what I was going to say.
What I find frustrating in this discussion is that Scott doesn't seem to understand that he's in a Different World [https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/], one where "kids" are so intensely curious and wildly enthusiastic about learning that, left alone with the internet, they'll naturally acquire all knowledge necessary to be a high-functioning adult in a developed, technological civilization.
As many have pointed out, while *Scott* was that kind of kid, and many ACX readers were that kind of kid, many, many people were and are not that kind of kid.
I completed my first novel at 12, but left to my own devices, I would have never learned multiplication, or about World War 1, or the biology of a cell.
Left to her own devices, my friend's clever but undisciplined dropped-out-of-high-school-to-"home-school"-sister browsed 4-Chan all day, never bothered with a diploma or GED, and now bounces around in low-end food service due to lack of credentials.
Left to his own devices, my brother would never, *ever* have stopped playing video games, and certainly not long enough to learn to code them. Why bother with the hard stuff of creating, where there are more games to play?
It's like Scott and many of the readers are so curious and intellectually driven that they have never experienced and thus can't conceive of a person for whom pointless hedonistic consumption is a primary goal in life. They don't even know people like that.
But those people exist! And a lot of them are kids!
To just assume that one's own childhood curiosity and capacity for sustained intellectual focus is universal enough that all children should be free to pursue their own agendas is just...so weird.
I mean, you may be right about most of that, but I don't think it's weird. Growing up I didn't really know anyone like that. As an adult I certainly don't know anyone like that. I realize that this is pure cognitive bias, but it is a struggle for me to believe that there is a significant population of children who are like that.
Again, you are probably right, it is just far enough outside my personal experience as to be strange to contemplate.
I think maybe I can see both sides of this particular phenomena because I was bright, highly-motivated pre-teen/teen who produced a huge volume of writing and bought fiction-writing manuals with her allowance money and who is the only person to test out of a year of high school English in the history of her large school district but I turned into an unmotivated hedonist in early (and approaching middle-ish) adulthood. I'm now way underemployed for my native talents, and have no plans to change.
I'd pin the moment of transition on high school, when I discovered procrastination was a thing you could do. Before that, the idea of having fun before finishing homework was absolutely *unthinkable.* The idea of writing the climactic scene I was most excited about before writing the less-fun set up and structural stuff was equally unthinkable. I'd even go so far as to say grabbing at the reward of fun stuff before doing the work was *COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE!!!*, with all that the formatting implies.
But then the friends I met in high school persuaded me to push homework to the weekend and hang out doing fun stuff right after school. Or to go ahead and write that scene I had burning in me now, and get back to the other stuff later. Etc. I discovered cramming, which got sufficiently good grades despite a lower quality of work, and I discovered getting lower but still fine grades, and then scraping by with a C because no one will ever request your transcript, and just changing life plans to do something less hard because...why do hard stuff at all?
When there are no immediate dire consequences for not doing a lot of hard work, it's easy - even logical - to keep not doing a lot of hard work. Not even the fun hard work. Once that "work before play" seal on my personality was broken, it was broken forever.
And that started 25 years ago, when you might conceivably run out of fun stuff that feels very worth of procrastination. Now the world is nothing *but* more pleasant alternatives to "hard work."
Leave a kid alone to do what they want, and many aren't going to do what older, wiser adults want them to do.
I suppose the question here is whether "older wiser adults" are actually wiser. This sounds fairly assumption laden. Indeed, the point is to not have "hard work" for children in Scott's or several of our worlds. Sure there's selection bias, but it takes a certain level of wisdom to recognize that "maybe formal state led education won't be the best for my kid, even though I went through this". This isn't to say that there should be no formal state led education efforts... but perhaps "state education as default" is wrong?
How many lower class people do you spend time around?
The only people I know who are "lower class" are people I've known for over a decade, and they have significant mental health issues and in some cases physical health issues.
Well, I'm lower-class myself (or working-class, now maybe lower middle-class, if you want to class it that way).
My parents left school at the ages of twelve and fourteen, respectively. They wanted us kids to stay in school because they saw the value of education. My mother had me writing letters for her when I was nine years of age, because she considered my handwriting, spelling, and standard of English better than her own. My mother was not stupid or incapable, but she was under-educated and this held her back from a lot of chances in life where she could have improved herself and ended up with a better standard of living.
I don't think I'm smart. I'm bookish, but that is a different thing. Pulling me out of school because I was capable of higher academic achievement (based on reading and writing), was introverted, wasn't sporty, wasn't sociable (and I was never bullied or consciously excluded, I liked sitting by myself in the corner of the yard at breaktimes) would have gotten me nowhere. Yes, I probably *could* have 'learned for myself' - had I the resources. I didn't have them, and would have done a lot, lot worse without public school to attend.
Did you never know kids who were bored in school, and not because "this class is too slow for me, I am at a higher level already" but "I hate being indoors at a desk, left to my own devices I'd hang around on street corners with my pals"?
Re: school drop-outs, it's enough of a problem that governments do have in place programmes to get them into some kind of education/training, because for every kid who would spend their day in the library learning, there are kids who'd like to do so but don't have the option for various reasons (including family circumstances) and kids who only want to hang around smoking weed (personal experience there working in one such programme) and are on the path to a jail sentence no matter what you want to do with them.
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/education/vocational_education_and_training/youthreach.html#
The world we have now has a shrinking pool of 'you don't need qualifications to flip burgers or sweep floors' jobs, and some kind of educational credentials are needed for almost everything. If we ever do get the world of AI and Musk's personal robots, those jobs will be automated away. The much derided "teach miners to code" was a recognition of this; the days of "go down the mine at seventeen to have a steady, good-paying job" are gone, and the alternative is increasingly no longer "get a job on the factory line" (because those jobs are gone overseas or gone away altogether), it's "get an education because white-collar work is your only option out of poverty".
Thanks. I skimmed; there seemed to be a lot of "lack of formal education didn't hurt _me_." My intention was just to point out a weakness, not slamming the entire article (which I only skimmed....).
I don't know how to say this in a way that doesn't sound aggro, but I think if you are going to be constructively critical of an article it is important to read the whole thing. Not that I haven't done the same thing.
But yes a sentence being like "look at this wacky selection / survivorship bias" may have been merited.
I think survivorship bias is a strong argument. I'm not sure it's convincing, but It's a very strong hint. Who would you expect to be answering? This is not an unbiased survey.
OTOH, I, also, found school largely boring. However, one week I was sick, and convinced myself I had learned trigonometry during that week off. But when I tried to apply it in math class it became quite apparent that I was mistaken. I got parts of it, and a general idea of what it was about, but not enough to make any use of it. And this was a real surprise. And I was the kid who always finished my math homework before going home from school.
Primarily Section 1, really.
Yeah section 1. Also a selection effect of a blog that attracts the sort of person who would get a phd whether they went to school or not. (and the sort of person who has parents who are able and inclined to homeschool/unschool their kids)
On top of that, I think there's a kind of person who can get a PhD but is no fit for elementary schooling, and they are a much larger fraction of PhDs than they are of people who get a college degree. I think this is related to the fact that PhDs have the largest concentration of [insert weird thing here, such as vaccine resistance, or flat eartherism, or Marxism, or atheism].
All of the anecdotes about school. Smart kids who don’t need school don’t need school, kids with abusive parents and who are fed crackers and twinkies at home will get scurvy and beriberi and be taught by the ESPN sports channel. These combined might be 2% of the total population of kids. Add in the ones on Ritalin and severely disabled autism for another 1%. Who knows about the test?
Well, I don't know about that, but I can tell you about the breakdown of schools in my town (population a little over 9,000).
(1) The 'best' school, formerly all-boys but co-educational since 1990. Example graduate of this (used to be a neighbour of mine) went on a golfing scholarship to an American university, served as legislative assistant to US congressman in the House of Representatives and to a Senator, worked for a private company for five years after that, came home and got a law degree then went into politics, following his father
(2) Medium schools - two all-girls' schools which amalgamated in 1990, one of which is my old school. Reasonable results, streaming in place (or was, in my day)
(3) Medium to average school - the all-boys' school which continues to be all-boys. The bright/well-off boys go to the No. 1 school on this list, the rest of them go here, if they're not attending -
(4) The lowest ranking school. Started off as vocational school for the non-academically inclined/those going into the trades. Co-educational. The one where I worked, and the one that gets lumbered with the students with behavioural, intellectual, and social problems.
Kids at No. 1 school could probably do every bit as well if home-schooled or otherwise educated, though the strong sports element and the networks/connections about "can get you into this, that or the other" guidance etc. would be lacking.
Kids in Nos. 2 and 3? Would manage according to ability and parental support, some would not do so well. On average, school is more beneficial than not for them. I judge it this way because if they were the "bright kids who hated school because it went too slow for them", they'd be attending No. 1 or schools like it.
Kids in No. 4? Now we're talking 'sink or swim', with a lot of them sinking.
Average of kids "2% with abusive parents, 1% on Ritalin and severely disabled autism", your figures are probably not too far off - this website claims, for Ireland:
http://nda.ie/
"11.4 The number of people with disabilities in education is estimated to be at least 4% of the school-going population. Approximately 8,000 pupils with disabilities are enrolled in 114 Special Schools and some 3,800 pupils with various disabilities are in special classes in primary schools. There are also about 8,000 pupils with "specific disabilities" in ordinary classes in primary schools. A further 2,300 pupils are enrolled in 48 special classes at post-primary level: another 100 pupils with disabilities are enrolled in the five designated post-primary schools."
Now, I can't seem to find figures for the exceptionally able students - let's put them at 5% for a figure pulled out of my - hair. So if we go very generously with 10% for the very able and the very disabled, then that leaves 90% of kids on the "average to above average" range, some of whom could manage in a structure outside of public schooling as we currently have it, be that home-schooling or smaller schools or specialised schools, and some of whom benefit from the structure.
So again, in my own personal view, the solution is to give more options but don't do away with public schooling altogether.
And there are those aware of the needs of the exceptionally able:
https://ncca.ie/media/1974/exceptionally_able_students_draft_guidelines_for_teachers.pdf
Myth: Exceptionally able learners will always do well whatever the circumstances.
Reality: Exceptionally able learners have problems like any other learner. They may have learning disabilities which they can hide while the work is easier. It becomes harder and harder for them to excel, which can lead to behavioural problems and depression.
Myth: Exceptionally able learners are so clever they do well with or without special
education provision.
Reality: They may appear to do well on their own but without focused challenge they can become bored and disruptive. As time passes they may find it harder and harder as the work becomes more difficult, since they have never faced challenge before.
Myth: They need to go through school learning with their own age group.
Reality: While it’s true that children need to play and interact socially with other children their age, they do not always need to learn with them, for example the case of an exceptionally able child who has a chronological age of six and a mental age of eleven and has been reading since two. To put that child in a reading class with other six year olds who are just learning to read can be demotivating for that child.
Myth: Exceptional ability is something of which to be jealous.
Reality: Exceptionally able children can feel isolated and misunderstood. They may have more adult tastes in music, clothing, reading material and food. These differences can cause them to be shunned and even abused verbally or physically by other students.
I think people often confuse high intelligence with high executive function or more accelerated emotional development -- which is a dreadful mistake where children are concerned. Someone may be perfectly capable of the work, and perfectly capable of understanding at the intellectual level the desirability of doing the work -- but be no more emotionally/executive-function mature than any other kid of that same age, and consequently be unable to force himself to do the work.
They're sort of like foreign-language learners who have the grammar down cold but have a piss-poor vocabulary: they can construct simple sentences with restricted subjects brilliantly, and you think "wow! I bet they could carry on a complex conversation with a native speaker easily!" but of course they can't, because of the missing vocabulary.
Absolutely. The didn't even *understand* executive function, except that I now realize it's something me and my family had a lot of, but other people are just completely missing it.
Well....I've been there myself, as a parent, and for what it's worth, it does actually eventually seem to happen, usually. I recall once my 2nd son came to me and said "Dad can you give me a ride to such-and-such important appointment?" I sighed and said "Sure. When do we need to leave? 30 seconds? Ten minutes ago?" and he looked puzzled and said "No, I mean Thursday. I'm just asking today (Monday) to be sure you can do it before I make the appointment." So then I'm slack-jawed and babbling: who ARE you and what have you done with Carl, Jr.? Ha ha.
School systems differ drastically across the globe, even restricting the discussion to Western Anglo countries. As an example, you mention that streaming students by ability is in place in the mid-rank schools local to you. I'm given to understand that that is common in Europe, but it's considered extremely politically incorrect here in Australia, and from what I gather of the USA it's not something one is allowed to admit to there, either, though AP classes enable a bit of it in the final years of schooling.
Also, it sounds like your local system has, at least nominally, provisions in place for gifted students, but many of us grew up in places that didn't. I say nominally, because I went to schools that nominally had programs for gifted students but my parents had to fight tooth and nail - up to and including threatening lawsuits - to get me an ability-appropriate maths education, and even then al the fighting bureaucracy meant I got about 1 year of education for every 2 that passed. Private tutoring was the only thing that kept me engaged with the act of learning, and I shudder to think what would have happened to me had my parents not been wealthy.
Perhaps things have improved in the decades since - I have friends who are teachers and there's a lot more people saying the right things than there used to be, but I remain fundamentally sceptical until I see it in practice, and I am seriously considering home-schooling my own children when I have them (though my partner has a much higher opinion of the school system than I do, so we'll see)
Everything. You don't hear as much about the kids who were "super smart" but then dropped out of school/were unschooled and then were failures in life because they're unremarkable and thus aren't actually worth talking about (and indeed, there may be little if any evidence that they are even particularly intelligent).
It isn't just about intelligence, but also conscientiousness. A smart, conscientious kid will learn a lot not in school. But a smart kid with poor conscientiousness will not.
I've known a number of smart people who had poor conscientiousness and for those who left school, it Did Not End Well.
And frankly, I think that a lot of people who think that they're Totally Okay after having been unschooled are not nearly as together as they seem. I've noticed that a number of homeschooled kids I've encountered had very weird knowledge gaps, and this was also associated with a high propensity for those knowledge gaps to be filled with Woo.
Forcing everyone to go through math, science, government, history, ect. is useful because you need that to serve as a basis for future knowledge. Indeed, we don't do enough to force college students to go through at least basic level science classes, which leads to a lot of liberal arts majors who really have no clue about science or statistics, which basically makes it impossible for them to take in a lot of real world knowledge.
Moreover, a lot of intelligent, conscientious kids actually do benefit from school. I have a ridiculous amount of random knowledge, and I knew many, many things that they taught in school, but I didn't know everything, and I learned a lot about various things in school.
I constantly see reddit threads where people are like "Why don't they teach this in school?" and the answer is "They did, you just weren't paying attention."
Which some might say says that school isn't that valuable, but which I'd say was valuable to me, because *I* remembered it.
Responding to other commenters down below as well, survivorship bias is likely to be less of a problem here than people think. Sure, it is only the unschooled with PhD's posting here, definitely a bit skewed. Some tiny percentage of a tiny percentage (~2% of Americans have PhDs.)
On the other hand, we certainly know that not all children who attend public school get PhDs (98% don't) and we also know that many drop out, or graduate and don't go to college, or graduate then go to college then drop out, or graduate then go to college then graduate college then work at Starbucks because they majored in something useless, or get a masters, blah blah. The point is that we know public schools have very wide ranges of outcomes, a fair bit skewed towards the "not great outcomes" end of the distribution.
So knowing that one very strange group (unschooled) has a fair few of the very rare high end outcomes is useful, because in a very small group (unschooled people) you wouldn't expect to find a high number of a tiny proportion (2% PhDs). Finding any suggests that the outcomes of one can't be that far worse than the normal group, and might be better for some. Does it mean all kids should be kept out? Not at all; we know that educational interventions are very ineffective at changing outcomes overall, so there is no reason to think it makes kids better off to keep them out of school even if a larger percentage of kids kept out of school do better academically. However, it does strongly suggest that it isn't worse for kids who we already think are pretty well off, and that it might not be much worse off for other groups.
What is really surprising to me from the other concepts is that people seem to think that kids who have no interest in learning anything (surely a small group, but maybe 25%?) are going to be in school and suddenly meet the best teacher ever and be inspired to learn and read forever. That strikes me as unlikely, along as equally likely that kids that like to learn are taught to hate learning in the inverse process. I know I learned to hate economics through two bad undergraduate courses, and it took a lot of independent learning to care about it again. I strongly suspect that the miserable learning environment that is the modern public school does very little to make students learn the glories of learning, and instead just makes them check out more because they are learning because the teacher wants them to, not because they want to.
"What is really surprising to me from the other concepts is that people seem to think that kids who have no interest in learning anything (surely a small group, but maybe 25%?) are going to be in school and suddenly meet the best teacher ever and be inspired to learn and read forever."
We had a school library with a librarian paid for under a Department of Education project funding scheme, and the kind of work she put in (working with the JCSP team and Home School Liaison) meant that kids - mostly boys - who avoided books because they associated them with 'school work' and hence fell behind in reading, had books and magazines and events tailored towards their interests (if they want to read all the Darren Shan books then stock them and get Darren Shan to turn up for a talk), and yes, suddenly kids who said they hated books were reading, and enjoying books, and being subtly steered towards educational works as well. Maybe now Joe finds out he's really interested in volcanoes, and suddenly that boring geography class starts to make sense.
No, there is no miracle quick-fix cure. But outside the small range of smart kids who are self-motivated to learn and have parents who are able to support them and structure things to enable them to learn at home, the rest of the kids if we abolish public school are going to be left to sink or swim. Some of them will try to learn, and their parents will want to help, but not be able to do so. Without some kind of social project to support such endeavours, they won't get things like "books are not boring and you can find out things you are interested in this way".
Well I had TWO librarians that were just absolute pants, and presumably were librarians because they were such miserable bastards that putting them in a regular classroom was just asking for mutiny. So your observation is invalid.
Your last paragraph is more relevant, but one has wonder if you have any actual evidence that the outcomes you describe don't happen every bit as often with public school as without. I submit as evidence that people do lots of learning outside of school the simply vast amount of online resources for learning, from Khan Academy to the humble YouTube video about how to craft random things, along with the tremendous amount of books on various topics. What evidence do you have public school is really providing lots of learning in important topics that students are not able to get elsewhere? The test score evidence certainly doesn't support that.
"the simply vast amount of online resources for learning, from Khan Academy to the humble YouTube video about how to craft random things"
This is like arguing "I don't know what you mean about living in poverty, the simply vast amount of financial resources like shares in companies such as Amazon that are out there!"
You can have all the resources in the world, but if you can't access them, don't know how to access them, or have no idea where to start, they will do you no good. Jeff Bezos could give me some of his spare change - the odd couple of hundred thousand would make very little difference to a guy worth $190 billion - but that wealth does me no good because the shares etc are all in his name and I can't get at them.
No, it is like arguing "There are lots of people who want to learn all sorts of things, things that do and do not get taught in school. Many of those people are young people."
Arguing that school does a lot to get those kids that have no interest in learning suddenly interested in learning is a big stretch. I am willing to believe that schools are better places for kids with really awful home lives than their homes are, but it is a bit of a stretch to say that is a large fraction of total students. Additionally, given that the students with the bad home lives are the ones that do the worst in school and show up the least, it isn't clear that school is even doing them much good.
At best you can claim that public schooling does good for the sliver of students who do not have access to educational resources at home or from friends and extended family, that is, no books, libraries or internet, but are interested in learning. For those who are interested in learning and do have that access, public school as it currently exists doesn't seem to change things much. For those who are not interested in learning it also doesn't seem to provide much benefit.
If you want to claim more, you need to explain how it is that such a large % of 12th graders do not meet basic levels of math and reading (40% and 30% according to NAEP here https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ ) When even the government says that government schools are failing 30% of students, you have a hill to climb claiming that those same schools are instilling a love of learning to read.
I picked grade 12 because it is close to graduation, but grades 8 and 4 also look really bad for the benefits of school. 35% of 4th graders apparently can't read at the basic 4th grade level.
I kind of think you would need to first demonstrate that the average student without any formal schooling -- say, the average village kid in the backside of Nigeria -- reached higher or at least as good basic levels in math and reading, so long as his family had a smartphone so he could in principle access Wikipedia. I wouldn't say the Third World (or even Second World) data is super encouraging already.
And people have a system now which works for some (in your and maybe even my opinion very suboptimal) definition of "works." Given the stakes -- the lifetime success of my child -- it will be extremely difficult to convince a majority coalition to change -- particularly in the direction of "let's do less, collectively!" -- without some very strong evidence that the change is at least not going to make things worse.
I think it's analogous to how hard it is to convince men with indolent prostate cancer to do nothing ("watchful waiting") on the perfectly logical, but emotionally difficult, theory that you're very likely to die of something else before the cancer gets you.
I think there's a key point here, although it's being passed over in silence a bit. The sort of outreach scheme Deiseach describes illustrates the good that compulsory education can do: challenging a macho culture that opposes activities such as reading means more people are open to learning. It's emblematic of what schools can do well.
But despite the.fact that most school libraries could effectively re-target budgets to do this sort of thing, they unfortunately don't: it's partially about having the books for boys, the books written for 14 year olds with a reading age of 10 etc rather than just prioritising what the kids who gravitate to libraries want, and people seem unwilling to do this because it seems both challenging and risky, especially if your library is regarded as marginal and is already underfunded (as school libraries tend to be) I suppose. And a problem with compulsory education is that it is by its nature not into risk-taking, with the normal tendency of bureaucratic organisations to inertia and box-ticking. Doctor Hammer's uninspiring librarians sit in this context: perhaps showing my age, I imagine old-school librarians who are primarily custodians of books and resources, and may even believe that a library as a place of learning only works through quiet silent reading. I don't think the existence of alternative models of libraries focussed on engagement has been a secret in librarian or educational circles for years (sidenote:early adopters of this model include many of the more successful British public schools whose methods are widely studied), but despite this the idea of the library as a tool to engage people in learning is not common in schools that I've seen. There's possibly good reasons why not, but I'd be willing to bet that this was mostly simply inertia, with change occuring where there's a driver, be this institutions subject to competition or individuals with vision or even a sensible government scheme.
That is perhaps the tragedy of compulsory education: it can be incredibly beneficial, probably even to someone like teenage Scott if the right questions were asked, but frankly it's resistant to change, however easy and beneficial that change might be, and in most countries incentives such as collective payscales and government oversight kill the chances of innovation and promote conformity. A debate about compulsory education therefore is oftentimes a debate between those who see what a system can do and those who see what that system often does instead: analysis of the results of compulsory education might tell us less about the value of sending all children to school and more about the issues with large systems and perverse incentives. If effective leadership is required to maximise the benefits of compulsory education through providing innovation, then perhaps it's not a question of whether the principle of compulsory education works in practice,. but whether a particular principal works out at a particular school that is most important here.
Funding and training is precisely the key here; our school library was part of a pilot scheme that was supposed to run for only two years, but it worked so well that with begging and cajoling we got to retain the librarian.
The library became a place where kids *wanted* to go, and it was incorporated into school rewards/punishments; misbehave too badly and you're barred from using the library. It doesn't work if it's "here's a bunch of books on shelves, just sit quietly and work".
I had little access to our town library for the reasons I described, and once we did get a new librarian and a new library, I was fortunate in that (a) they permitted me to take out an adult card when I was fifteen instead of having to wait for the 'official' age and (b) they struck a bargain with me that instead of taking out one book at a time then tearing through it that night and coming back the next day, I could take out three books at once but only once a week 😁
We didn't have a school library when I was in school. I was extremely fortunate in that I learned to read before ever I started school, I read at a more advanced level than my classmates, and the teachers accommodated me by letting me pick what books I liked off the shelves.
Also, as I got older, there were a lot of books on shelves in the back of the classrooms which nobody had disturbed for ten or more years, so I grazed like a cow in a pasture. But if I had had literacy difficulties, or didn't like 'academic' books or books written a hundred years before I was born, I would have fallen down badly.
It's like everything else in education: it's a resource but it only works if it's used properly. Simply having a school library and hoping by the magic of osmosis kids will absorb reading and good research habits - ain't gonna work.
"it's partially about having the books for boys, the books written for 14 year olds with a reading age of 10 etc rather than just prioritising what the kids who gravitate to libraries want"
This as well. Having, for instance, magazines about motorcycles on the shelves meant that kids who wouldn't turn their head to look at a book had their interest caught, and then little by little they were brought along by "here's something else you might like" and eventually "try this book, no pressure" and then they discovered that there were books they liked and that reading for pleasure was a thing.
Not everybody, of course, but you go along as much as the kids can go. Even if they never open a book, but now they're reading magazines or using the computers to look up things and doing projects about motorcycle racing because they *want* to do that, not because 'the teacher said I have to work on this project, I can't be bothered because I'm not confident in my reading or study ability and it's boring anyway'.
"I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?"
I started on a community college, so open admissions.
What age did you start community college? Did you transfer to a four-year college? After how long?
I was 23, if I recall correctly. Transferred to a fancy liberal arts college after two years. Fancier grad school right after that.
I remember being given a placement exam in the community college. When my advisor got the results, she said "wait a second, you are actually smart!" Made me laugh.
I went to an unusual school through 8th grade, got a a GED when I was 21, and went to college just after I turned 23. I read a lot in the intervening years.
I started at a small very non-selective liberal arts college. In July, they let me take a "residual" ACT test (basically, one left over from the prior sitting), and on the basis of near-perfect scores on everything but math, and decent math scores (note that my entire knowledge of algebra was that the same letter meant the same number throughout, but with good mental arithmetic and multiple choice tests you can get a lot of answers right that way) not only let me in for the fall but gave me a full-tuition scholarship. (I borrowed a study guide from the library and studied for a day before taking the test.)
It rapidly became clear to me that I wasn't going to get what I wanted there, so I started looking to transfer. At that point, I had three things that went well. A friend of a friend was a college admissions counselor at a high school, and offered to give me some advice on applying to colleges and help me figure out where to apply. I got a 1590 on the SAT - one semester of algebra helped a lot. And I had a semester of college grades. I managed to transfer to a SLAC, and graduated with a degree in economics and a math minor. I suspect my unusual background helped--transferring is very selective, and "interesting" almsot certainly helped.
Just for clarity on second read: I didn't do any kind of school between 8th grade and starting college.
Early 2000s, I applied to a broad range of colleges, not knowing what to expect, and got accepted by maybe a third of them, including the University of Chicago. I had very involved, decently-well-connected parents who helped me navigate the process and get on people's radars, which is the sort of thing that shouldn't help in a just world and therefore it's hard to tell how much it did. I also took every standardized test available on every topic I'd done any studying on, so that I had a portfolio of ~11 AP Exams and some SAT IIs--nearby high schools were generally fine to proctor them for me, although I had a hiccup at one point when a school changed its process and only informed its actual students. That was almost certainly crucial as a substitute for a GPA. Only one college, a state school, said that my lack of a high school diploma would be a dealbreaker...but if it had come down to it, I could've gotten a GED. My guess is that my unschooling was mainly a strong positive; instead of having extracurricular activities to stand out from the crowd, I was able to describe all my learning as extracurricular.
Similar story. I went to district schools through 7th grade, then took the CHSPE to graduate early and started community college at age 13.
My children are now second generation of that route, taking the CHSPE or the GED (out of CA now) to "graduate" officially, and then starting with community college. After getting a 4.0 there for two years, transferring elsewhere. They could've been admitted to pickier schools to begin with based on test scores, but the CC-route is much less expensive when your parent isn't poor enough to qualify for need-based money, especially considering the scholarship opportunities for transfer students with excellent grades.
I'll add that CLEP tests also sped my progress along, although nowadays, just attending wgu.edu is probably the best route in terms of monetary efficiency for someone who learns fast enough on their own.
Same for my kids. They start "dual enrollment" at a local community college when they're 13-14. Most community colleges have these programs for high school students so that they can take classes their school doesn't offer. As a homeschooler we don't offer any classes, so my kids take a full load and get their Associates of Science in 2 years, then transfer to the local state university. I learned that getting your associates is the same standing as a GED in terms of "did you graduate high school".
Entering dual enrollment requires placement tests for some subjects, but no admissions tests. Then when you transfer to 4 year college you apply based on your transcript alone. It's much more bare bones than freshman admissions. My kids didn't need to give sports played, or a long list of volunteer work, or SAT scores. There's usually a well greased path for good students from community college to state schools.
Finally, in my state dual enrollment is free. So the total cost is 2 years of in state tuition, and kids live at home the whole time. It's very affordable, and if you have a good state school nearby it is great value for money. Plus the statement "I graduated from college at 18" gives you lifetime bonus points in job interviews etc.
In my state, NC, there are also guaranteed spots to UNC and NC State for community college graduates. You actually get moved ahead of potentially more "qualified" students coming right out of HS.
Your state is my state too!
Me too -- I started at 16 as a "duel enrolled homeschooler" with Latin and drawing, and transferred to my state university as a junior.
Damn, more universities should have duelling as an alternative to taking SATs :D
Talk about selecting for dedication and drive for education!
Between my cousins and siblings and I there were 5 of us homeschooled-only in CA. We took the CHSPE and got our diplomas at ages ranging from 12-16, then started taking lab science classes at local junior colleges. Admittance to JC's was easy, and once we had established JC GPA's transferring to 4-year schools was easy as well.
All of us transferred to 4-year colleges and completed BS/BA within 2-4 years (some changed majors; 4 of the 5 of us got BS in some type of engineering). Several of us went on to get MS degrees, and one is current ABD on a PhD in Aerospace Engineering (obligatory, right?).
Overall, there was never a point where homeschooling led to difficulties transitioning into higher ed. A few admissions officials confided that they love homeschoolers; they tend to be very successful in college. Colleges are used to dealing with non-traditional educational paths.
> I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?
I was homeschooled K-12 and had no problems with the college application process. Obviously nowhere was going to take "4.0 from mom" seriously, but I can't imagine they take the grades from St. Middle Of Nowhere's High School & Cannery very seriously either.
Obviously having some kind of hard numbers to point at is valuable, if you're a homeschooler applying to college. For me that was lots of math contests, plus the usual AP/SAT/PSAT/etc suite. I'd also sat in unofficially on quite a few college classes at the local university, and had letters of recommendation from the professors, which presumably helped.
When I was applying to college, around 2010, I still occasionally had to clarify that I was homeschooled because my parents had weird educational theories, not because I was in a cult or something; these days I rarely even have to bother with that. It's gotten a lot more mainstream than it used to be.
There are many, many (many many many) online forums where homeschoolers trade tips on this. The Well-Trained Mind forums are the big hub for serious academic homeschoolers; if you're interested, I'd recommend checking them out.
"I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?"
I finished homeschooling about 12 years ago but still have my transcript because it's attached to an email in my gmail inbox. Some of it was cringey to look back on. I actually did put "grades" and "credits" in my transcript with a little explanation of how I computed them, but they were in all honesty meaningless. Probably more important was having very good standardized test scores. I took 7 SAT subject tests in a variety of subjects (looks like those tests are no more) as well as the PSAT and SAT.
I didn't really get advice on what to do throughout homeschooling / college admissions; my mom mostly stopped being involved as far as curriculum/"teaching me" anything by the time I was 12, although of course she did pay for books. Some of which were infamous A Beka/Bob Jones books (feel free to Google), but those were actually pretty good in terms of being self-study-able. I remember frequenting "College Confidential" which was a forum for anxious highscoolers and their parents about college admissions so I kind of knew what to expect with the process.
I don't think it was a terribly successful portfolio -- I got rejected and waitlisted/rejected at 2 semi-competitive private universities, but did got a full ride at my state university. I also did end up getting a PhD but didn't pursue that field further.
As someone whose entire curriculum k-12 was A Beka books, I just hope the only ones of those you got were the math (and maybe English) books. But I get the feeling you had some from other subjects in there, too.
"And partly it’s because a lot of the service being provided is (taking David’s description seriously) something like “your home environment sucks, we are going to make you spend time with normal people in a normal environment in the hopes that some of it rubs off on you”."
Sadly, those kids most in need of contact with "normal people" are forced to schools with the least amount of "normal people" either as peers or as teachers / other adults. My wife teaches special ed for k-2 at one such school. I'm not teacher bashing at large. But damn a lot of those teachers and faculty I wouldn't trust to mow my lawn without either flaking out, stealing my lawn mower, or burning down my garage. If you want to find normal people in a public school, you need to drive to the suburbs or find a charter.
Segregating schools by geogrophy leads to ghetoization of schools and of neighborhoods.
>Segregating schools by geogrophy leads to ghetoization of schools and of neighborhoods.
They used to try to directly combat this sort of thing not that long ago, the infamous "forced" busing. Apparently pretty much everybody (but of course mostly those richer and whiter) hated it so much that it led to increase in segregation, if anything.
> I’m grateful that people aren’t as angry at me as they are with this person, but I’m not sure why - I feel like I was making a pretty similar point.
That person was being completely insufferable for reasons largely unrelated to her actual substantive point. I'm fully on the "abolish schools" bandwagon, and her tweet annoyed me as well. (Largely, because of playing in to the power-to-truth "all costs of intrusive covid measures are ignorable, the benefits are never to be questioned, there is no limit to what should be done to fight covid" line.)
Additionally, "school isn't that important actually" from someone whose Twitter display name ends in ", ScD" is just irresistible bait.
If she had said, "Here are several studies leading me to believe schooling is unimportant," I don't think anyone would've cared. But any argument along the lines of "Your great-grandparents didn't have x," is a non-starter with me. Life was worse back then! I want my children to have better lives than my great-grandparents!
But are we confident it was worse in every dimension? It might still be the case that some things were, in fact, better for our grandparents. I'm not saying that such a line of thought should be considered sufficient stand-alone argument; I'm just saying the fact that life was overall worse doesn't mean every particular aspect of life was worse.
Sure, but I think that's the point. It wasn't worse in every dimension, which is why "I have several studies leading me to believe schooling is unimportant" is plausible enough that it wouldn't annoy folks.
Fair enough.
"I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?"
My wife and I homeschooled my child K-12. He went to a California Community College, which is easy to do starting in high school (the principal, Mom, needs to fill out a form saying he is ready to do college level work). The community colleges don't care what you high school GPA was.
And one you get an AA most colleges don't care about your high school experience at all. When son was applying t the four year colleges after CC a few asked for high school transcripts. Once I made it clear that I *could* make up a transcript for him, but it would be for them and what would they like it to say? ... all but one decided to waive this. The remaining one asked for a "narrative transcript" describing what he had done in high school, but without GPA.
Very few folks gave us advice. Lots of feedback while homeschooling, but not really advice.
What do you mean by "when you get an AA"?
Guess it's just "A."
AA = Associate of Arts. Many state 4-year schools will take an AA from an in-state community college as the equivalent of two years of classes, rather than evaluating the courses class by class. And the AA is a degree, so once you ahve one, your prior degree (high school diploma) isn't very relevant.
"Many state 4-year schools will take an AA from an in-state community college as the equivalent of two years of classes, rather than evaluating the courses class by class."
California is even better than that.
Every community college course comes with information about whether the class will transfer to the CalState system, the UC system or both.
There is a web-site that even provides the mapping (class X at community college Y transfers as class K at CalState M).
But the AA doesn't necessarily work that way. Your AA may have classes that don't transfer and then you won't necessarily show up with Junior standing.
Still, this is made fairly clear (though it isn't trivially simple).
I don't think the AA helped much with University of California. His units transferred whether he had the AA or not. I think it might have helped with the out-of-state 4-year colleges, but I don't know.
This is the route I took after having a variety of problems affect my late high school work. After getting my two-year community college degree, high school records were completely irrelevant.
An associate of arts degree.
This is a 2-year degree (bachelors is four ...)
My son finished his CC experience with the following:
*) Associates degree
*) 60+ semester units (2 years) of UC transferable units
*) IGETC (University of California campuses will consider you to have fulfilled your GE requirements)
*) A high 3.x GPA
I'm mentioning all of these because a surprising number (to me!) of out-of-state 4-year colleges accepted him and MOST of them scored his general education requirements as completed (a few wanted him to take more foreign language; one wanted him to *still* take a bunch of general ed at that school). He also would enter with junior standing so they clearly also took most/all of his units.
The schools were not bad (Wofford, Florida Southern, Clark University), though not Ivy or even Vanderbilt, Duke level.
But I also don't know which of these mattered for transfer purposes. The GPA? The AA degree? Did IGETC help with the general ed requirements at the 4-year? I dunno.
But his high school education wasn't very important.
AA (or AS) is the community college degree, the equivalent of the BA or BS that you get at completion of a full college. Lots of full colleges then admit you directly as a junior if you have an associate's degree.
"AA" stands for "Associate of Arts".
Just like universities give out 4-year Bachelor degrees, community colleges give out 2-year Associate degrees. Associate of Science degrees are awarded for the completion of a specialized program intended for immediate employment, while an Associate of Arts is an academic degree meant for transfer to a 4-year university, usually a state school, where the student will finish out the last 2 years of a Bachelor.
Science community colleges have open admissions, the GED -> CC -> AA -> State U -> BA/BS path is definitely viable for homeschoolers, including unschoolers.
An idea in the last post I meant to bring up but didn't was Bryan Caplan's ideas about Unschooling plus math where most of the day kids do what they want but have to do some amount of math studying. https://www.econlib.org/unschooling-math/
And even there, Caplan is "You have to do Maths. No, you *have* to, because everyone will need it!"
Which is the same argument people are having about "but why do I have to study A, B or C, I'll never need it afterwards" and "I wasted so much time in school having to do this subject instead of the one I was really interested in".
So he's making the case for Compulsory You Have To Learn This, In This Way for *one* subject he finds dear to his heart/valuable, and he's re-invented the notion of school.
Well, I kind of agree with the spirit of the thing. We've more or less done away with illiteracy, but innumeracy IMO remains a serious problem that is holding our society back in tangible ways. Can you imagine how much time and money would be saved if everyone understood (at the very minimum) the concepts of "mean" and "standard deviation" ?
I suppose that fits with Scott's steelman version of the Chinese education system he links to. People have to learn discipline by doing some things even if they dislike them. But as an economist, Caplan economizes on that by only having that be a small portion of his kids' education.
Math is somewhat critical to the modern approach to really any complex topic - science engineering programming business etc. it’s probably worth teaching! And teach the advanced stuff too on the principle of “everyone should try to learn it, and maybe they’ll fail but why not try because it is just useful”
The difference is that math actually is objectively better than every other subject
As expected, xkcd has a comic for that:
https://xkcd.com/263/
In the article he says most adults won't use math. But no child knows for certain whether they will need math in a future career. He also makes the claim that no unschooler is good at math as am adult. And he implicitly claims that math is hard to learn as an adult with no foundation. These later claims might be incorrect, but he is aware that most adults do not need math, just that some do, and unschooling does not teach math well.
You need math to understand science, statistics, and economics. Which is vitally important to existing in society and making any sort of sophisticated or important decision.
Just because you don't use a ton of math in your job doesn't mean that it isn't important as a person.
“He also makes the claim that no unschooler is good at math as am adult.”
Both of our kids were unschooled.
“You need math to understand science, statistics, and economics.”
Both of them understand economics much better than the average bear. Or econ major.
I haven't read what Bryan wrote, but a kid who is interested in math is likely to learn it for himself better than most do in high school. Formal math, in particular calculus, makes teaching economics a little easier, but what is really required is mathematical intuition. David Ricardo was the first great economic theorist, and as far as I can tell he knew no math beyond arithmetic.
Do you believe that you personal level of ability to teach math to your kids is typical (in the US) ?
Probably not, but I mostly didn't, aside from giving them bedtime puzzles of two equations in two unknowns, rigged to have integer solutions, when they were little. My daughter's opinion was that I was not very good at teaching math to her because it was all too obvious to me. Our son taught himself probability theory from _How to Take a Chance_ (by the same people who wrote and illustrated _How to Lie with Statistics_) when he was eleven or twelve, because he was playing D&D and wanted to be able to calculate odds. I don't think either kid got farther in math later than what they thought they would need for the math SAT.
If you don't understand math, you can't understand basically anything meaningful about science or economics.
Math is just kind of vitally important because there's a ridiculous amount of things you literally can't do without it. People who can't do algebra are severely disadvantaged, people who can't understand statistics can't understand much of the world, and while calculus is "optional", frankly, a lot of things only make sense if you actually understand calculus because otherwise the way they fit together is arbitrary.
Math is also used in programming and accounting, and I randomly use algebra to solve problems periodically.
If you can't do math, you're pretty much boned.
And math is additive - you have to learn lower level stuff before you learn upper level stuff.
On top of all of that, math can be really boring for a lot of people, so you kind of have to force a lot of people to do it.
I wouldn't be surprised if learning math also literally made people smarter; it's worth noting that over the 20th century, as we increasingly compelled people to go to school, median IQ went up by about 3 points a decade. There's some evidence that going to school literally increases IQ, especially for people who are below average.
"a lot of things only make sense if you actually understand calculus because otherwise the way they fit together is arbitrary."
Understanding the basic concepts of calculus, which are the concepts of flow and stock and how they are related, is very important, but that doesn't require you to be actually able to take the derivative of a function or integrate one, let alone solving differential equations. And having taken calculus in high school is no guarantee of understanding the concepts.
I interview Harvard applicants in Silicon Valley, as an alumnus. One question I routinely ask is whether they can show why the fundamental theorem of calculus, that the derivative of the integral of a function is the function, that the two operations are inverses, is true. It's something that can be done in two minutes on one sheet of paper. I don't think even one yet has been able to do it.
And these are typically students who have taken AP calculus and gotten a top grade on the exam.
Well, for what it's worth, I have a PhD in maths, I've even pursued an academic career in probability theory for a short time (and then switched to doing machine learning in a private company) and while I definitely learned the proof of the fundamental theorem of calculus at one point and understood it, I cannot recall it now. That suggest I have not really internalized the reasoning all that much, learned the proof, understood it but did not really integrate it into my "mental toolikit" well enough (because for the stuff where I did, I can recreate at least a rough sketch of the proofs/a heuristic behind it right off the bat).
I think it is a flaw for someone trying to pursue a career in theoretical maths. I felt this was the case for me with several fairly basic concepts which I felt I understood but not well enough to work with them completely intuitively which I think is necessary in order to abstract these things out when contemplating new hypotheses/heuristics and actually be good at mathematical research.
But I don't think it is a flaw in pretty much any other field, including those which apply maths a lot (and also I got a much better intuitive understanding of more advanced concept I learned about later on when I also learned to learn maths better...but even the university was not particularly good at teaching me to learn things that way, at least the undergraduate program did not (and there weren't even traces of this way of teaching before college)
So I agree with David completely...it is better to have rock solid maths intuition in a few key concepts than to learn a lot of maths without really internalizing it. Sometimes a good heuristic teaches a concept better than a formal proof (especially proofs by contradiction tend to be fairly useless at shedding light on the theorems) and those are typically much easier to learn (although sometimes there are no good heuristics or they rely on a deep understanding of other concepts)
In case it's useful to anyone: in the CS Lewis quote, "games" is being used in the British school sense where it refers to mandatory sports (rugby, cricket, maybe something else).
Useful. Thanks.
Yeah, I had "PE" and "games" at school. PE was usually indoors in a gym; games was outdoors and involved sports - a choice of rugby or cross-country running in the winter and then cricket (there was probably an alternative, but I don't remember what it was) in the summer.
Less posh schools generally play football (soccer), though rugby gets played at all schools in a small number of towns where rugby is the dominant sport.
Not liking mandatory sports isn’t universal to say the least, sports are one of the most valued parts of HS for many people well into adulthood. Which is interesting and I suspect has more significant effect on other things than is appreciated
The abolish school/pro-homeschool crowd on this blog seems to be largely a product of this crowds demographics and I’m skeptical that the same lessons would transfer to the wider world.
It seems to me that homeschooling would work best for highly motivated, intelligent, introverted, possibly neurodivergent children from well off families (a group that I would guess is heavily over represented in these comments).
I was homeschooled and I agree with this.
I was also homeschooled and agree with this.
"It seems to me that homeschooling would work best for highly motivated, intelligent, introverted, possibly neurodivergent children from well off families"
I'll supply an anecdote in the other direction.
My child was moderately motivated, above average in intelligence (~1200 SAT) but not genius level, extroverted in a way his mother and I find very strange and neurotypical as nearly as I can tell.
Homeschooling went fine.
I think there may be a sampling bias. Few folks who homeschool and it "works out" write books about how their kid got accepted to all eight Ivy League schools :-)
I agree that homeschooling works best for such children, but even meeting all those criteria isn't sufficient for a child to be a good fit for homeschooling. My brother met all those criteria except perhaps for being highly motivated (neurodivergent due to autism and ADHD), and did online schooling for a semester after being severely bullied in high school. Though his online schooling experience was better than his initial experience at the school where he was bullied, he started at another high school the following year, and I think the second in-person school was better for him. One challenge of online schooling for him was that he'd often get into fights with my parents about completing work, since so much of it was done at the student's discretion, and his executive function skills weren't well-developed. He was a teenage boy with ADHD, so his struggles weren't shocking, but I think the more rigid structure of traditional schooling combined with having closer relationships with his teachers helped him. Additionally, he was pretty isolated during his semester of online schooling. He only had one close friend at his second traditional school, but the other kids were kind enough to him, and I think having daily social interaction helped him overall.
More recently, he completed his first year of grad school completely online due to COVID. When I went to visit him and my parents (with whom he still lives) recently, he seemed more withdrawn from the outside world than ever. Part of this is probably due to my parents' unique neuroses. They're also rather isolated, and I think on some level, they still like having a kid at home hanging out with them on evenings and weekends. But even though he struggles socially now, I think he'd struggle even more if he'd done all his high school years online. I also don't think he's the only person like this.
I guess this is all a long-winded way of saying: though Scott acknowledges the importance of schools as social service providers for low-income kids, they also provide non-educational benefits to kids who aren't poor. It's certainly possible for those kids to obtain some of those benefits elsewhere, but in my brother's case, I don't know where he would've found them.
Yeah I think that the benefits of socialization from school can't be overstated. I think that appeals to history which make the argument that mandatory schooling is a relatively new concept and children have been fine without it for most of history miss the unique nature of the present moment - the destruction of local communities plus the new addition of the internet make it harder than ever for children to form meaningful social bonds outside of school.
I suspect there's also something to the point that since most kids are in school these days, there aren't alternate ways for school-aged kids to get this kind of social bonding any more.
Compare - it used to be totally fine for a kid to grow up speaking only Old English at home, and they'd grow into totally normal adults if you did that. But these days, if you raise your kid speaking only Old English at home, you'll definitely have done ... something ... to that kid.
(And when I say "used to be totally fine", I mean 1200 years ago. There's probably comparable examples from just a century ago.)
"there aren't alternate ways for school-aged kids to get this kind of social bonding any more."
This simply isn't true, if the homeschooling parents make reasonable efforts to address this need. There are homeschooling groups in all but the most rural areas that provide these opportunities (often free), as well as community clubs, extracurricular activities of various kinds (music or art classes, sports, etc.), camps, parks, and more.
Homeschooling does not require isolation, and the "but socialization!" argument is too often trotted out as some kind of trump card (yay, mixed metaphor!) by those whose minds are already made up against homeschooling. Some homeschooled children are isolated, sure, but that's a failure of the homeschooling parents, in general. It doesn't singularly discredit homeschooling any more than horrific bullying singularly discredits state-sponsored schooling.
Right - I shouldn't have said there *aren't* such alternate ways any more.
What I should have said is just that, since *most* kids are in school, there are fewer kids available for any particular other alternate way of meeting people, and it requires much more of a proactive effort than it would have required in the era before near-universal schooling.
I agree with that assessment. I also suspect the fact that we're in an age less oriented toward "free-range" childhood makes even random neighborhood encounters rarer, because other kids are generally inside or at structured activities. So, purposeful coordination really is required.
I completely agree. Even as a traditionally schooled adult, I'm having a hard time socializing right now. In the earlier days of the pandemic when everyone was at home all the time, I could endure the situation. Then when things started opening up while my spouse and others in my circle were still working from home, things were looking good. But now that I'm working from home while many others have returned to the office, I'm feeling pretty isolated. Conversely, in the pre-Bowling Alone days when local communities were stronger, it would've been easier to make social bonds through local organizations.
I would think the internet makes it easier to form meaningful social bonds outside of school. Several of my daughter's friends were first met in World of Warcraft and continue to be friends, mostly online but occasionally in realspace, thereafter. My wife and both kids flew to the wedding of someone we only knew online — I would have gone but had a prior commitment.
One problem with school as a source of social bonds is that the social group you are interacting with consists of other kids your age, with a little deviation from that in high school. That works badly if you are either intellectually or socially advanced or retarded — I was one of each — or if you get along better with people either older or younger. When our home unschooled daughter went to college, she got along much better with faculty and staff than with her fellow students.
One truism in education research is that every new innovative form of teaching that gets amazing results never seems to replicate on a larger scale. Because the new exciting school trying out the new way of teaching attracts the kind of parents who are themselves highly educated and interested in education, disproportionately wealthy, lack major social problems, etc. A group of kids who it is frankly very easy to teach. The same is true for any schools with selective admissions. Homeschooling seems like it would suffer the same issue
"One truism in education research is that every new innovative form of teaching that gets amazing results never seems to replicate on a larger scale ... Homeschooling seems like it would suffer the same issue"
Homeschooling suffers from a more fundamental self-selection bias: If it is going poorly (from the parents' viewpoint) then it stops and the kid goes to some other school.
Public schooling doesn't have this outlet because most other choices are more expensive.
My wife and I homeschooled our child. It worked (for my definition of "worked"). I don't believe that homeschooling would "work" for everyone. Maybe not even for more than pick-some-percent.
I think the pattern you describe exists in contexts other than schooling. My interpretation is that the original experiment is being done by enthusiasts who really care about the approach and are putting time, effort, and thought into making it work. When it is introduced on a larger scale it's being done as a job by people who have been hired to do it.
Agreed 100%, it's what I've been saying all along -- and yes, I was standard-schooled.
Re. CS Lewis going to a school "where the headmaster was suffering from some kind of mental disorder and only taught geometry:
My bro-in-law was sent to a private religious school, where the headmaster was suffering from some kind of mental disorder and beat the children often. He was confined to an asylum shortly after my bro-in-law left.
My mom's dad was sent to a public school in Poland, where the students spoke only German or Polish, and the teacher spoke only Russian; and his main activity was shouting at the students in Russian and beating them.
Wittgenstein renounced his family fortune to go to Austria and help the poor by teaching public school in a poor district. He soon had to flee Austria for beating one of his students to death.
Positions of authority and power, such as being a teacher, pastor, politician, police officer, or soldier, seem to attract both people who would like to use that power to help others, and those who would like to abuse that power. Or perhaps they transform people who want to help others into people who abuse their power. Or perhaps people who want to help others are inherently more-likely to abuse power in the name of helping others.
(Me? I just want to work in AI. Nothing to worry about.)
> Wittgenstein renounced his family fortune to go to Austria and help the poor by teaching public school in a poor district. He soon had to flee Austria for beating one of his students to death.
He did not, in fact, beat one of his students to death. It's also misleading to say that he went to Austria; he was Austrian. I'm also skeptical that he viewed his purpose there as being one of helping the poor. He at least had other motivations, like working somewhere where he would not be recognized as a member of his wealthy family.
None of this should be construed to indicate that Wittgenstein was the sort of person one would want teaching one's child. Or one's PhD student.
Sorry. I read an article claiming that the student he knocked unconscious had died a few days later, and Wittgenstein had to flee. Now, on checking, I find this was false. Your other points are also correct.
The Tractatus was uniquely troubling, at least the parts of it I read.
The authority/power/school situation, yes, I'm a little surprised that hasn't been mentioned more here. In addition to a social services agency school is a social sorting system. It reinscribes class status quite efficiently. I am not sure that some of what Scott rails against ("rails" subtly) isn't just the experience of having to be inside the system watching other humans get sorted. Some socially sensitive (oversensitive?) people gravitate away from positions of any responsibility after seeing teachers, nominally benificent people, favoring, humiliating, and generally sorting their peers and themselves.
And that's just the pretty side. Today:
13-yr-old son: The art teacher hit me on the head today.
Me: WTF?
Son: And I said I was going to tell my mom, and then she did a baby talk voice "poor widdle (name), wunning to mommy."
Me (talking to the principal on the phone moments later): And then my son said she hit him with her hand -
Son: Not her hand -
Me: What did she hit you with?
Son: The top of the box of watercolors!
Me: He says it was the top of the watercolor box....
Educational humiliation. It wasn't a hard blow, more of a tap, apparently, but it's still ridiculous. I asked him how it got to that point and he said "well I talked back to her."
And this place was supposed to be BETTER than the last one. I mean, I've never even met this "art" teacher and she practically dares me to report her. Hmmm.
Sometimes kids who unschool/nonschool are being spared the emotionally destructive manipulation that can leave kids alienated from themselves and unable to move forward into adulthood. Sure, selection bias of rationalists for people who could do well after homeschooling, or homeschool their own kids well. But school as a site of emotional abuse is also an important perspective. Thank you for bringing that up.
Sorry, but I'm amused by this. The teacher's mockery was not correct, but in my day, if you went home and said "Teacher hit me!", you'd be liable for "And what did you do to make them hit you?" and another slap for causing trouble in school.
So what did your thirteen year old mean by "Well, I talked back to her"? Did she tell him to do something (e.g. 'sit down and do your work' and he was a smart arse about it, or she said something wrong and he corrected her?)
Because for every "My little Johnny said the teacher picked on him!" story, there is another story about "Johnny was disruptive in class, picked on other students, and when the teacher finally sent him out of the room, every parent who heard about it was delighted".
Let me repeat: the teacher shouldn't have mocked him, and even with a tap on the head from a cardboard box lid, that shouldn't have happened either. But he did admit to "talking back", so what was that about?
Right? I'm chuckling as I write this. I'm hoping to find out later. "Talking back" is not a construct I use at home - I'll use "Seriously?" or "Ok, that's not realistic," or "Stop doing that right now" or "Did you just say what I think you said?" or "What is that attitude about?" or "Are you feeling overwhelmed?" or even (regrettably) "What the f*** did you just do?" But "talking back" isn't really a concept I go for - which means he was describing the situation in someone else's (probably the teacher's) language, which means that only a few weeks into the school year, he is interpreting himself within her narrative constructs in the context of that class. (Grrr.) It's hard enough to encourage him to communicate clearly, calmly and thoroughly. When adults who are paid to be there cultivate power struggles, I take a dim view of it. It goes nowhere; she wins automatically because she is the teacher, but she also loses because she feels restrained, she can't go full jackass so she mitigates her crankiness with head games. He loses automatically because he is the student, being told what to do and how to do it; but he wins too, because he has a much larger range of attitude available to him due to having little institutional power/responsibility. Middle school is a hard age to teach (it seems) and one of the pitfalls is using the job as an excuse to act 13 oneself (or 10 or 5). She might as well have walked up to him and said, "I don't handle my emotions well and I wish I could be a jerk right now but I know I'm not supposed to!" It makes him have to be the adult in the room. "Can you get me fired today? I hate my job right now!" He's like, Sure, how can I help?
Probably he was doodling on the drawing assignment, probably she told him to stop, probably he tried to make an excuse. The front office says he is very well-behaved there, I went to drop something off the other day, met him at the office and they were saying he would never be getting called there for anything behavioral and he probably wouldn't be at the office again for a while. (He practices all his tricks on his brother at home but usually keeps it under wraps at school). It is a school for kids with learning differences, I think 90% of the teachers and staff are much better at dealing with limit-testing than Art Teacher is. One of the weirdest sequelae of the Trump administration has been watching what happens when people with some thread in their background of something Trump activated, have to reintegrate it with their contemporary situation. In 2016 literally right after the election, some senior citizens became emboldened to glare at kids in grocery stores; some people had been suppressing an urge to criticize and share their feelings of being disrespected, and when he was elected they felt they didn't have to suppress it anymore. With kids with learning differences, there are legitimate pedagogical reasons not to flash back to 1970 (as with many other aspects of the social shift around that election!) Maybe she's renegotiating her inner experience of authority and power. His initial explanation was, "Mom, she's southern, that's how they are." (Bwahaha). If it's a good story I'll respond again.
Shoot. If she was his age, I'd say "she likes you."
Yeah, gonna still say "no, thanks" on that dynamic. I see you saying it shouldn't have happened, but given the apologetics in your comment, I'm underwhelmed. The fact that there is a built-in assumption the adult is always right is a huge part of the problem and why school can be so ripe for abuses. It's comparable to the presumption that cops never lie.
We don't hit other adults when they say something we dislike, unless we want to risk jail. And mockery of subordinates is generally a bad look. I see nothing that makes it *more* noble for adults to hit or mock children than it is for them to hit other adults, only less. If that teacher can't keep her temper in check well enough to keep from hitting and mocking people over whom she has power, she has no business being in a position of authority over others.
I went to a very good private school. Nonetheless, the physics teacher was unwilling to admit that he was provably wrong on a physics question and when my father for some reason sat in on my English class one day his reaction was that the teacher was using the class to let her feel superior to the students.
I'm not sure why you see this as a slur on the school system per se (if you do). Aren't people in general like this? If I hire a plumber and he comes to fix the sink and I observe "you seem to be doing it wrong, I saw a Youtube video in which a master plumber said you should never remove the whatzit dam before you unscrew the framistan from the tarbuckle" I kind of expect a frosty reception. And when I watch TED talks, I have the same impression, that people do that kind of thing largely to bask in the admiring applause -- i.e. to feel superior to the audience.
Mind you, I'm not saying these aren't regrettable human behaviors. They just don't seem special to schoolteachers or the school setting. That's just what people are like. It's why we feel obliged to smile at our boss's idiotic or even mildly offensive jokes, and why it's really really hard to win if you sue City Hall.
I think a physics teacher has a professional obligation to do his best to say correct things about physics, rather than insisting that the incorrect thing he said was true and being unwilling to listen to a student's demonstration that it was not. Do you disagree?
With regard to the English teacher, I don't think it is surprising, but it is regrettable.
Well, sure. And if you personally are made of such sterling stuff that you've always responded with grace and patience when some schmo questions you in your own area of of expertise -- out of momentary insecurity, a default assumption that you can't have made an error, et cetera -- then I truly take my hat off to you, for while I do my best I can't say I have *never* been shamefully dismissive in such a situation.
People are human, no? Flawed since Uriel nailed the eviction notice to the gates of Eden. Few of us are sufficiently angelic in our natures that we never ever (for example) say something dumb on the Internet and, when challenged accurately on it, double down, move the goalposts, turn to an ad hominem attack...
So what I'm asking is whether you have reason to believe that this lapse in professionalism is specific to this school, or schools in general, or is only reflective of the general human tendency to find it difficult to respond gracefully when errors in our personal area of expertise are pointed out by randoms in the audience.
I think the fact that it happened in a very good school suggests that such things probably happen more in average schools.
You put your question as though the physics teacher had some reason for his opinion. He didn't. I have a doctorate in physics, and the claim he was defending, originating in the driver's ed textbook the school used, was complete nonsense, inconsistent with elementary Newtonian physics. Either that was obvious to him and he didn't want to admit that I was right and the book was wrong or he was not competent to teach physics — or, I suppose, he just didn't bother to think about whether the claim was true, on the grounds that as the authority he was automatically right.
Do you think that behavior is within the normal range for a teacher dealing with a question in his field?
I should add that the driver's ed teacher was perfectly reasonable. He said he didn't know if the book was right or not and we should take the question to the physics teacher.
This happened to me in English and history. My sci/math teachers were good though.
I was homeschooled through high school. I did 2-4 hours of schoolwork a day. I skipped grade 9. I CLEP'd out of most of my gen-eds in college, and graduated college 3 months after I turned 20.
Was it hard to get into college? No, my PSAT and SAT scores spoke for themselves. I took a few dual credit college classes in my senior year of high school, and that might have helped too. Did people in college give me a hard time? Not that I recall, but I didn't advertise it much.
I don't think all these collections of anecdotes are very useful. I personally found school mostly useless and boring and learned much better on my own. I also practically lived in the LA public library and both got a perfect SAT score and won a television quiz show when I was 12. I don't want to blow myself too hard and I'm not all that special now, but I probably kind of was as a kid. Your readers are not some random cross section of the English-speaking OECD world. They're both academically more gifted than average and also more likely to be somewhat outside the norm socially. I actually look back fondly on school anyway because it's the only time I had friends. I find myself naturally drawn to information and to things, not to people, and school forced me into a room with the same people all the time that I got to know and love and it's the only time that has ever happened to me.
But I'm kind of lucky that I wasn't just academically gifted. I was also pretty athletic, good at sports, tall, lean, never had a particularly awkward phase in puberty where I looked like a deformed nitwit like a lot of kids. I get the feeling that was very much not the case for you and a big part of the reason you hate school is that girls were mean to you when you were growing up.
I've been reading your blog for as long you've had one, so you've earned the benefit of the doubt and I believe you're trying as hard as you can to stick to the data, but it's hard, Scott. Frankly, I try very hard not to express strong public opinions on things I have a personal emotional investment in, no matter how dispassionate and data-driven I believe I can be. There be dragons there. It just seems like you're begging for the less rational parts of your brain to come in and subtly infect the rest, relying mostly on crowd-sourced external fact fanatics to keep you in check. But a lot of your readers are also not dispassionate about this and are extremely invested in their personal pet ideas about some unorthodox way a society should be run based on what worked for them or their family.
Your comment about kids wasting away seems amazingly out of touch. Do you really believe you know more about other people's kids than they do because your mom didn't really know you? The idea that anywhere near a majority of kids spending most of their time glued to electronic entertainment devices are actually learning C++ and doing the most useful thing they'll ever do as kids is prima facie rather unlikely, and the fact that three of your personal friends did that 20 years ago is not meaningful evidence.
Yeah he probably does in some significant ways know more about peoples kids than they do. And even if not you can’t reject that immediately, it’s entirely possible to know more about something than someone who seems like they’d know more.
On that specific point I agree with you. And not because (or just because) Scott is particularly perceptive. Parents can have very large blind spots about their children.
Otherwise I think Adam's points are right on the money.
>I forget the content of most books I read years later. Is it not important to read books? No, I say -- those books affected me and had some small impact on my character and thinking.
I actually think this may be a bad thing. You don't remember the specific assertions, but they are now baked into your model of the world. After they affected your thinking, now all the subsequent content you consume about the world will be interpreted through the lens of that model. You can't update the model, because you can't remember the assertions that shaped it, so you can never be persuaded that your model is wrong.
Take someone that read Marx in middle or high school. These are the insufferable people who are convinced of anti-capitalism, and that workers are always being exploited by capitalists. And they can't be convinced otherwise, because they've come to interpret the entire world through this lens, and so you'd have to simultaneously present to them a new lens through which to look at the world for every single piece of knowledge they have all at the same time.
Maybe this is only a problem with totalizing ideologies, and I'm extrapolating too far? It might not be so severe in every case, but I do think there's something wrong with the cultural attitude of "read books to passively consume them and have them shape your worldview." It takes me a very long time to read books. When I read a book, every fact, every assertion, I take the time to roll it through my brain and see what it fits with, what it contradicts with, etc. I have friends that read a book a day, and this blows my mind. What they must be doing when they "read" and what I am doing when I "read" cannot be the same thing. I have heard of speed reading, and I've tried it, and when I do I walk away feeling like I briefly looked at the pages of a book for a while and didn't think about the content at all. It feels to me like this is a form of intellectual LARPing.
It sounds to me like you are advocating the idea that a person should never learn anything unless they are going to learn it so totally and thoroughly that they will never lose explicit memory of it. At least, that would be the way to avoid the specific criticisms you are giving.
Yeah what I want to say about this isn't super sharp yet, which is why I'm spitballing it here for people to challenge me on it.
I think the way you phrased it is stronger than what I mean. I think if one should want to learn something, they should try to tether what they learn to specific, falsifiable assertions that can be remembered, challenged, and revised later. I think passively reading things or speed reading things makes it too easy for people to compartmentalize information and results in a lot of people walking around holding highly contradictory and incompatible ideas in their head and never being forced to do the hard job of resolving the contradiction. When you try to tell people that they espouse two contradictory ideas, for many this seems to be a very painful exercise. They now have to take two ideas that they have a positive valence towards and make them fight in their brain. This is understandably painful. It means some part of your mental map of the world is wrong. It's a real loss. People will predictably avoid suffering it.
My mother once told me "you know, we've just always been Republicans, we've always felt better about them" and in literally the next sentence said "I'm a single-issue voter on a woman's right-to-choose." When I tried to point out that these ideas were contradictory, the suggestion seemed to cause a large amount of physical anguish, and we concluded the conversation having not resolved it. Obviously this contradiction didn't come from books, but I think the tendency is already there and passively reading books and not forcing yourself to think about the content reinforces it.
What I also want to do is criticize an intellectual culture of consuming books like candy that encourages this. There are too many books out there. And too many good books published every year. And I don't think we talk enough about this. There's too much "have you read this book?" and not enough "how thoroughly did you think about this book when you read it?"
This is an interesting claim and I am thinking about it.
It might be fair to say that books work best when they challenge you with new information or ideas, causing you to think critically. Some of the best books I've read have done that.
However, most people likely choose books that reinforce their views about the world (I am talking about nonfiction here). So when I was younger, any Stephen Ambrose fictionalized account of a WW2 story, like "Band of Brothers", was required reading for conservatives -- it reinforces many conservative values. A similar story applies for liberals.
On balance, though, I think it's better to uncritically read books rather than uncritically _not_ read books.
Interesting thought, though.
This is a tough problem. Two possible solutions come to mind, both difficult.
One is a sort of spaced repetition--any time you read a book, if you thought you learned anything important from it, you commit to reread it a few months later, and then again a couple years after that, and again after a decade, or something like that. This would roughly quadruple the time it takes to "learn" a book compared to "read" a book, and still might not solve the problem.
The other option would be to explicitly write down what you learned from the book and why you found it convincing. This seems like a better solution in the long run (you could simply review your notes now and then; plus you could more easily transfer the info to others, and it would be easier to synthesize what you learned from multiple books). But for me, at least, all the extra work would be a big deterrent from reading much in the first place.
I'm against solutions that seek to systematize the problem. I don't think there's an algorithm that you can follow to simply solve it. It matters what the subject matter is and who you are.
A large problem with books is that the author must imagine some kind of target audience, and then they must supply all of the information necessary to make their argument, and therefore to expand your potential audience you need to include more supplemental information with diminishing returns. Blogs don't have this problem. They can leverage hyperlinks, or you can just expect your reader to google anything they don't know. For reasons such as this and more, I consider internet-based content strictly superior to books for literally all purposes except post-apocalyptic knowledge preservation.
For the reader, the work that needs to be done is mental. I think making notes, re-reading, those things can still be done in a going-through-the-motions way. Although I think writing notes about what you learned is probably an unalloyed good. But it reminds me of an experience I had in college with a roommate of mine. He studied a lot more than I did, but his test scores weren't often better than mine, and in certain topics were consistently worse. We were both in engineering so we had a lot of classes in common but he took way more classes in the biological sciences than I did. And in those classes, it seems that there's just an immense amount of rote memorization that you have to do. So his study strategy was always the same: make notecards and drill. That's probably right for remembering that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, but for differential equations? Thermodynamics? Circuits? Linear algebra?
It seemed like no matter what the source material was, he just wanted to follow a "study" algorithm. He wouldn't have to think very hard about what that algorithm was, but he'd spend an insane amount of time running that algorithm. Any time he spent thinking about HOW to study was time he was spending not studying, so he never wanted to try a new strategy. And it didn't work that well. You can't put every circuit problem you're gonna see on a notecard. Instead I felt that what I had to do was to read the textbook until I understood the concepts, and do problems as necessary to make sure I really did. Memorizing the word-for-word definition of an eigenvalue is not actually that helpful for understanding what an eigenvalue is.
It seems like there's a meta-level of thinking that most people don't want to do. A way of thinking deeply about how you're thinking. Once someone learns how to learn in high school, or thinks they have, they just keep running their learning system on autopilot. If their learning system says "consume books" then they will consume books. If it says "make notecards" then they will make notecards. If it's "read books and then write notes" they'll read books and write notes. But really you need to care about knowing things in a coherent and consistent model of the world and there's no shortcut or algorithm to get you there.
Full disclosure: As I former Jr High School teacher (two years) I have a jaundiced view of what schools can do. But we teachers did force the kids, at least briefly, to consider things they may not have otherwise encountered. I'm not against home schooling, but how many parents who both have jobs can home school their kids? Schools are factories for getting the majority of kids exposed to certain minimum level of skills and knowledge in selected subjects. Nothing more.
And fuller disclosure: If I were to be honest, the three positive things that school did for me personally were to (a) force me to learn how to read, (b) force me to learn math, algebra, geometry, and intro calculus (which I would never have done on my own), and (c) force me to learn how to socialize with my peers — and very importantly, it forced me to learn how to deal with bullies (of the type which I've since encountered in the corporate world).
But in response to Tom, I grew up in situation where there were books all around me. My father had a library of approximately 10,000 books. When I visited him in the summer months I'd be lost in reading his vast array of books. During the rest of year, I lived with mother and my grandmother, and their house was also full of books (maybe 3,000). My mother and grandmother did me the greatest educational favor by purchasing me many of the Time Life series (Time Life Science Library, Time Life Great Ages of Man, Time Life Nature Library, Time Life Ancient Civilizations, Library of Nations, The Seafarers, History of Civil War, This Fabulous Century, and a bunch more — and there was a series on great artists, and a series on classical music). By the time I became an adolescent, I probably knew more about more subjects than most people with a BA or BSc degree because I spent most of my bored indoor time opening these volumes and random and actually absorbing their content.
Likewise, I would say that most undergrad university educations aren't much better than high school educations. I was lucky to be accepted into the honors program at the state university I attended. That exempted me from the 100 level courses my first two years of college, and my last two years (actually three) of undergraduate school the Honors program allowed me to enroll in graduate level courses. So after my Sophomore year, most of the courses I took were graduate level courses in all sorts of diverse subjects (literature, history, botany, paleontology, genetics, pathology, nutrition, paleo anthropology, archeology) that I couldn't have taken if I were a grad student focused on single subject (and oh, the consternation when I enrolled in Med School Anatomy, and it turned out there was no rule against me enrolling in the course!). I purposely delayed my graduation, and I stuck around an extra year to take more grad courses! Then
I had followup round in graduate school. So, I probably have more graduate level courses under my belt than most PhDs have. (Unfortunately [or fortunately] I never finished my doctorate because (a) my department was dissolved, and (b) my thesis advisor and I fell out — the two may be related). But I digress. Anyway, until I started taking graduate level courses, I learned most of what I know from the books that I read as teenager.
"but how many parents who both have jobs can home school their kids?"
According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, as of 2016 only 55% of home schooled children came from two parent families where only one worked.
At all? Because surely you need to correct for the possibility that the main teaching parent worked part-time. A few shifts at Wal-Mart on the weekend is not at all the same thing as a 60 hour work-week as a paralegal at Big Law Downtown.
This makes sense, the stereotype of homeschooling is a parent directly teaching their children, but many home schooled kids are not directly taught by their parents. There's often one or two parents teaching several kids in their neighborhood.
How did your high school force you to learn to socialize with your peers? My high school provided me the *opportunity* to learn to socialize with my peers, but it didn't force me to do so, didn't encourage me to do so in any way that I recognized, didn't provide me with much useful guidance and certainly didn't teach me to do so, and didn't check to see if I actually was learning. My high school would have been perfectly happy if I had been a completely introverted and socially inept academic genius, and to the limited extent that I became anything other than that, it's not because my high school did anything like forcing me.
So, was your high school significantly different than mine, or are you just taking "gave me the opportunity and I took it" to mean "forced me, because how could I miss out on that wonderful opportunity once it was placed in front of me"?
I suppose I was to some extent forced to learn how to deal with bullies, because they forced themselves on me. That, also, is not something I am inclined to credit the school with (unless maybe they were secretly organizing the bullies to make sure nobody was either left out or over-bullied).
I mean first of all they probably do actually remember more of the book than they think they do, so your criticism is correctly motivated but mistaken. You can also just re read the book from the library or libgen or archive org.
Anti capitalists, uh, tend to for the most part stop being so with age. See: the history neoliberals, neoconservatives, reactionaries, etc, many of them were socialists in their youth. So that’s another mistaken concern.
You might be right, this whole comment tree of mine was epistemic status 60% in retrospect.
I do think anti-capitalism (the hot thing is to call it "late capitalism" these days) has a surprising amount of staying power in my generation. I didn't grow up in another generation so I don't have the ability to compare, but I'll soon be 30 and the number of reasonably smart people I know that have worked a job for a decade now and still don't understand how markets work has exceeded my expectations.
"I have heard of speed reading, and I've tried it, and when I do I walk away feeling like I briefly looked at the pages of a book for a while and didn't think about the content at all. It feels to me like this is a form of intellectual LARPing."
Seconded. I don't feel the quantity gained by speed-reading is worth the loss of quality, at least not for me. I leave room for the idea that some particularly gifted sorts might get more out of it, but honestly, I'm skeptical, and I do wonder if they aren't just rationalizing away the trade-offs.
I think there are two competing values here - the value of complete and legible knowledge versus the value of general knowledge and exposure. In practice I think people seek a balance of these values. You don't seem to care about the latter, which might explain why people seem to be acting strangely to you.
Your example of the communist manifesto is definitely the strongest case for your approach. When dealing with such a far-reaching ideology, it's only responsible to address it carefully and rigorously. The potential costs involved with being mistaken about the topic is too high to allow causal reading. On the other hand, consider reading a book on paleontology. The cost of getting something wrong about paleontology is low, so you can safely give it a light read without engaging your critical reading skills. This saves time and allows you to pick up another light nonfiction book to expand your horizons.
Many people do seem to fail to adjust their approach to the content. As in your example, plenty of people do read political manifestos uncritically - particularly people who are culturally predisposed to accept the claims for other reasons. Most young communists call themselves communists before they lay eyes on the manifesto, and approach it more as a prestige text than as something to be evaluated. I'm also reminded of some people who breeze through dozens of self-help books without making any changes to their behavior, compared to the rare people who take the content more seriously and implement change in their lives.
This is a good critique, because I absolutely don't want to be espousing for more specialism and less generalism. I definitely consider generalism underrated and specialism overrated in our current moment in America. So maybe I just think that most people are bad at generalism?
>Many people do seem to fail to adjust their approach to the content.
It would probably be better if I sharpen my criticism to this. As I said in another comment, I get a sense of cargo-cult intellectualism that encourages this, of there simply being too much great literature that a "well-read" person should have read, and not enough recognition of the time commitment that would be required to really ingest that content properly. So then any person that wishes to be "well-read" must learn to speed-read and convince themselves that they're really ingesting the content.
I came from a comfortably middle class family that cared a lot about education. So I would have been academically fine if I'd been homeschooled.
But I *loved* school, and it makes me sad to read about so many who didn't. Perhaps it's because I am an only child, and my parents hated each other, so home was unpleasant and school was the only consistent source of joy in my childhood. My parents knew that so well that the worst punishment they could inflict on me was to keep me home from school for a day. They used it sparingly; it was for when I was in *really* big trouble. But it was torture, much worse than a whupping.
But my husband and I don't hate each other, and my kids love school too (they attend an academic magnet). Perhaps you were just stuck in a mediocre-to-terrible school?
I mean this could just be a “fire vs frying pan” scenario. Home was worse but that doesn’t make school perfect or even good as it is now
> Perhaps you were just stuck in a mediocre-to-terrible school?
Perhaps there are too many mediocre schools?
I imagine that most schools range from "obviously horrible" where most students would agree that something is deeply wrong, to "mostly okay" where bad things can happen to some individual students (e.g. they are bullied) but if you are not one of them then your experience is nice.
""mostly okay" where bad things can happen to some individual students (e.g. they are bullied) but if you are not one of them then your experience is nice."
Well, that's life in general, isn't it? Bad things happen to people, but if it's not happening to you, then life is generally okay. Some people have fantastic, wonderful lives (at least looking at them from the outside) and some people have horrible lives, but most of us are doing "mostly okay".
Sure. The context was that some people say "school is horrible" and some people say "school is nice", how is that possible? (Are the people who complain about schools merely rare exceptions we should ignore in the public discourse?) I think there are schools so bad that most students will agree that the school is bad, but even in the good schools you will get *mixed* opinions. Eh, probably you will get mixed opinions even in the bad schools, because some people may enjoy it (perhaps because it is still an improvement over what they have at home).
For example, me and my wife both had the same high school. (Different classes, we didn't know each other back then.) She remembers the school as a nice place; I am much less fond of it because some bad things happened to me there. So it's funny how despite both having the same high school, when someone says "school is hell, especially for smart people", I start nodding, and she wonders whether the person was exceptionally unlucky.
So far as my case is concerned, I went to the University of Chicago Laboratory school, arguably, then and now, the best private school in Illinois. It's the same school Obama sent his kids to. I expect it was better than the alternatives, but not very good.
I went to a very good private school, my wife to a good suburban public school. I didn't hate school and I don't think she did, we just both found most of it boring. We thought we could do better for our children, so unschooled them.
Bullied outcasts will be bullied outcasts in essentially every school. There are some variations in favoured types of bullying (lower-class schools having more physical beatings, for instance), but not in whether it happens. Citation: I went to six schools.
Half-decent schools aren't too different in how much kids like them; the kid matters more.
If 1) a major benefit of school is clandestine social services for poor children in the form of "we are going to make you spend time with normal people in a normal environment in the hopes that some of it rubs off on you" and
2) this rubbing is inevitably bidirectional, ie "you become the average of the people around you" then
3) it makes sense that a typical public school education is less and less valuable the more exceptional a child is, as becoming more like their classmates would be more and more of a downgrade. You can see threads of this lots of anti-school sentiment, which tends to come from high achievers, eg Paul Graham's anti-school essay, the CS Lewis quote, Scott's own positions, David Friedman's position on unschooling, etc.
Evidence that the worst students make things worse for their peers, but not much in the opposite direction: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/01/helpful-inequality.html
A bunch of ACT readers smart enough to get PhDs didn’t really conventional K-12 schooling to be successful. I’m shocked I tell you. Shocked.
I'm writing in support of Scandi hobby horse riding. Sure you can just jump on your hobby horse and tear around the room, but when its organised and with competitions and you dress up for it, and look after your horsey, it's a whole new world. Now, you don't need to go to school to do that, but you need some sort of association to organise events, set criteria etc, and you need socialisation for kids to see that there is an ultra-point in progressing from tearing around the lounge room to going to a hall and doing the whole hobby-horse dressage. So perhaps there's a metaphor there for schooling too - that the socialisation and competition of "more than one" is a good thing? Schools may give you a chance to explore and find activities and interests that expand you. On the other hand, I do remember spending heaps of time looking out the windows at the wind in the trees.
The comments about school being bad for kids in bad homes, and the comment that "things could turn out really bad in the long term for elementary school kids from families with non-helicopter parents", puzzled me, until I remembered that parents today are legally required to be helicopter parents. I've noticed that kids today don't seem to be allowed to manage their own play time themselves--parents think they're supposed to arrange, attend, and supervise any occasion where their kid steps outside. And I guess this is so, because I've heard numerous cases of the police being called to detain kids as old as 13 for walking around their neighborhood without an adult.
I don't think being forced to stay in school for 6 hours a day is NEARLY as bad for kids as being kept under lock and key 24 hours a day. Old-school school might have taught kids to be drudge-workers; the new continuous-supervision method teaches them to think of themselves as prisoners, and of society as a prison.
Zoom school may be worse for parents than for kids. One I spoke to about it said she has to stay in the zoom room with her son for the entire school day, because he doesn't pay any attention unless she's there with him.
Good point about the current educational system. I am really shocked by how much home work my step son was forced to do. And I hear it's worse now!
I come from an educational period when we got hardly any home work assignments. Other than bunch of term papers and essays, the homework assignments I did get could mostly be polished off in study hall. And after school there were three or four hours before I had to be home for dinner when I just hung out with my friends and did things we didn't want our parents to know about. After dinner, though, I would curl up with a book.
A lot of that is just educational fads, which swing back and forth. Personally I was never given homework until high school. It was assumed that you could learn all you needed to learn in the 6 hours or so a day we spent in school, and it was unheard of to assign work to do *at home* (at least in a routine way, special projects excepted), until you got to high school and things started to kind of kick into a higher gear. The pendulum swung way far back later, to the point where I recall my kids getting "homework" in freaking 1st grade, so they could "get used to it" (the baseball bat I guess). I think it's swinging away now, and I notice more teachers emphasizing to parents that the kids really need down and play time.
"actually, school isn't that important" is my take too.
If I accept the analogy: I could spend 12 years becoming as athletic as possible but if I don't train whatsoever for 5 - 10 years, I'm going to revert back to about the average. When you leave school, you are no longer training. Adults are unable to recall a lot of what they learned in school.
I do not think it is a very good analogy because "training" is one thing while the information learned in school is actually a bunch of different things. The other students forget what they learned in large part, so other students can catch back up when it gets reinforced at a later time. If it's never reinforced, then by the time the students graduate, the information retained for that particular fact will be near zero. The training is not one homogenous thing.
I'm not advocating that public school is social services for poor kids and the rest of us go along with it as some sort of ruse. School is important for my kids, too, it's just also the case that I have more resources to make up for its absence academically. They were still struggling socially and emotionally a great deal, and because we structure our lives with the assumption that they'll be in school during the day, that part wasn't great, either. I know this is a crowd with a specific set of schooling experiences, and I have those, too. But it was bad that we closed schools for all kinds of reasons.
I think it's a perfectly reasonable and defensible take to say "of course we have forgotten 90% of what we learned in school because we don't need it. The problem is that when we were at school, we didn't know which 90% it was".
I suspect that if you went to a high school reunion 20 or 30 years after graduation, took all the people with robust middle-class incomes (ie the reasonably successful people) and asked them what they still used that they learned in high school, then I'd expect all of them to have a very short list. But also that the combined list would be very varied and probably cover a large fraction of the curriculum. And at least some of the stuff no-one uses would be things that are now outdated but could not have reasonably have been predicted to have been so 20/30 years ago.
There is an entirely separate question of whether high school is the right way to learn that sort of thing.
There is also another separate question of what age it is appropriate to narrow the curriculum and start dropping subjects. For instance, a typical English student would cut down to ten subjects for Year 10 (at the age of 14, equivalent to US Grade 9) - always including English Language and Mathematics, and then from a list looking something like: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Combined Science (this can be a single or double subject), Geography, History, various foreign languages, English Literature, Art, Music, Design and Technology, Physical Education (also known as Sports Science), Religious Studies, Computing, Business. You would normally be required to do at least one science (ie single-subject Combined Science; you can only do the separate sciences if you do all three), one foreign language and one "essay subject" (History and English Literature being the most common). Then at the end of Year 11 (grade 10), you cut again to three subjects with no restrictions at all. For incomprehensible reasons, Economics is only taught starting at year 12 (grade 11). A typical example might be to do Maths, Physics and Chemistry. English universities do single subjects, where you literally do not study anything else at all, so that would restrict you to degrees in Maths, Physics, Chemistry and plausibly some other scientific/mathematical subjects, e.g. some Economics or Computer Science courses, especially the more theoretical ones (a practical software engineering course would want someone with some programming experience; a theory/maths heavy computer science course wouldn't). Doctors will usually do Chemistry, Biology and either Maths or Physics. Lawyers will usually do at least one "essay subject" (examined by writing a number of essays), e.g. English, History, Politics, Government, but no other restrictions.
For those of you who have read Harry Potter, the "OWLs" and "NEWTs" are analogies of the English GCSEs and A Levels; so you sit 10 GCSEs and three A Levels.
Yes, you can ditch maths at the end of year 11.
In respect of homeschooling... anyone who pays the fee can take a GCSE or A Level examination. State schools will pay the fees for their students who have completed a relevant course (and will usually pay the fee to take foreign language exams for native speakers of those languages because the exam is laughably easy if you're a native speaker and it juices the school's stats). Homeschoolers who want to go to university are expected to take a suitable set of GCSEs and A Levels (a minimum of five GCSEs, including Maths, English Language, at least one science, at least one modern foreign language, and a minimum of two A Levels; few universities care much about GCSEs as long as you have the minimum, which is what we have instead of a General Education requirement. Most actual universities will require three A Levels rather than two; entry is competitive on grades, so if you want to get into a selective institution or a popular course, then you will likely need at least BBB, and plausibly as high as A*A*A can be needed).
Oh, and... for what I call an essay subject, a typical examination would be a three hour exam, in which you would be expected to complete four essays. The exam would just be twelve essay titles that you can choose from, so you pick four and write your four essays. You have no other information beyond what is in your head and the title. Here's an example (from a recent history exam):
‘Thatcher’s economic policies created an ‘economic miracle’ in the years 1983 to 1987.’
Assess the validity of this view.
I think they did GCSE economics at my school, but I remember someone saying that A level went over a lot of the same stuff agin. Maybe it's just a bit superflluous and therefore not offered by many schools. (there are a lot of random GCSEs out there.)
I think your hypothetical reunion attendees would have more overlap. Some subjects are MUCH more likely to be useful than others.
> during the time when they would otherwise be inventing these things, they will come up with things so much more brilliant than this.
What my son will do with time off is gorge Youtube videos, until he learns to scream like a goddamned banshee if there is a problem with the Internet.
There's a lot to hate about school if you're smart. But I don't just *imagine* my son is bored; he says so, loudly.
I was abnormally smart, but my kids have reverted to the mean. Without school, they turn into dumb little shits. I already let one "decide on his own what he wanted to be" and that's been a fucking disaster we're trying desperately to recover from. No way in hell is the second getting that chance.
Yes, it's easy to imagine that tweenage-to-teenage me might have done some wonderful creative things if only he'd been freed from school, but I seem to recall that what tweenage-to-teenage me mostly did on the weekends was play video games.
In young me's defence, I did also teach myself to program, but so what? Programming is easy, which is why children can teach themselves to do it.
I disagree with programming being easy. My understanding is that people who studied teaching it concluded that significant portions of students are just incapable of getting it.
This seems to be my experience. That said, writing, math, reading the Bible, and all sorts of commonly done tasks used to be something that “significant portions of the common people just can’t get” in antiquity. It may take better or earlier teaching or more effort and structure, or it might just be too hard, but I don’t think we can be sure.
Writing was common even among medieval Russian peasants, even if they had to write on bark.
https://www.medievalists.net/2019/12/b-mail-everyday-communication-on-birch-bark-in-medieval-russia/
Language is something humans typically have an innate ability to learn. But programming is different from natural languages.
That still allows the possibility that most people could be taught programming, we are just doing it wrong. (On the other hand, it still means that programming is inherently much more difficult than writing, because most people can be taught to write even using stupid methods.)
For example, the frustrating part about programming is the existence of many programming languages (imaging learning math in a world where everyone uses a different notation for writing numbers and equations); and the dichotomy between professional development environments which are too complex, and the simplified development environments for kids which often lack important functionality and are full of bugs.
I am not saying that I am convinced that you can teach anyone programming. Rather that, we do not know yet, how many people would actually be able to learn programming, if we used better (from the educational perspective) tools. Problem is, people disagree how the tools should look like, and making them is a lot of work, so there are few experiments and slow progress.
If you know one programming language, it's MUCH easier to learn an additional one than to learn an additional natural language.
> the frustrating part about programming is the existence of many programming languages
that is not a problem, problem is with the first one. Learning second one is massively easier and without truly fundamental issues.
It causes some people to procrastinate on learning programming. But I guess that is more relevant for self-taught people, because at school you are told which language to use.
I can +1 this.
Some people are really not "getting it". Things on level of "loop printing number divisible by 2" are explainable to some people - who never programmed in their life, within one hour of explanation directed to an entire group.
Some people are not getting it after much longer time, with dedicated tutoring.
Note: maybe I am not a great enough teacher. But some people learn programming hundreds, thousands times faster than others.
As in "writes own simple text-based game on its own" while others are at stage "confused by simplest possible loop" or "confused by 'hello world example' without loops or conditional instructions'"
> As in "writes own simple text-based game on its own" while others are at stage "confused by simplest possible loop" or "confused by 'hello world example' without loops or conditional instructions'"
Perhaps the problem is that the programming language makes writing text-based games more difficult than making loops? Otherwise, everyone would write games, and the most experienced ones would also use loops in the games...
Actually, such thing already exists: https://www.renpy.org/
It is a system for writing visual novels. Writing a linear story is really simple, you just go like "say X" and "show picture Y", and it makes an application that does that. I believe anyone could do that, after trying a bit.
And then you can gradually introduce some scripting. You can put labels in the "code", and use a "goto" command. At some moment of the game, you can display a list of options, and when the user chooses one, jump to corresponding label. (That is already a game, kind of.) Then you can introduces variables, like setting a value, and later making a conditional jump depending on the value. Etc... and you can fluently progress to full programming in Python.
(The disadvantage is that the system is often used for programming erotic games -- the kind of game that benefits from having pictures and only very little programming -- so the tutorials and documentation are full of such examples. If you want to teach kids, you better write your own documentation... and even then, someone may look online and get you in trouble.)
My model (perhaps wrong) is that there are some mental *prerequisites* to programming. Things maybe too obvious, so we don't notice them as a thing that could be absent. Like "expecting consistency" or "expecting that behavior of a system makes sense". That programming is already a level-2 knowledge, and some students come to school at level 1 and those get it, and other students come at level 0 and those don't get it.
And the hope is, if we could identify what exactly is the level 1, and provide remedial classes to those who don't have it (and maybe those classes would help them in ways beyond programming), maybe then the results would resemble the bell curve, instead of being bimodal.
My vague intuition about the level 1 is something like playing with Lego, playing strategic or logical computer games, math, maybe some verbal games where you follow the rules... simply, experiencing intuitively systems that are consistent and where you build larger things from smaller ones. Like, the key difference is not at being told "expect consistency, or else" but at having an experience that makes you *instinctively* expect consistency.
Could be wrong, of course...
I remember hearing a lot about this study, but it was later retracted: http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/staffpages/r_bornat/papers/camel_hump_retraction.pdf
In my experience, this works the same way as an adult as a kid (albeit it happens much more rarely as an adult) - you have a bunch of free time, vegetate for a few days, then get bored of mindless hedonism and *then* start actually doing something. Now, that 'something' is more likely to be closer to Finnish hobby-horsing than to math, history, etc.; I'm in favor of having school for actual educational purposes. But the other reasons you and others are giving are in the just-so story category, and could be used for all sorts of activities, down to hitting oneself with baseball bats.
There's a separate thing with boredom being an important emotion to get people to do things, but also being nearly eliminated by the Internet (both in terms of entertainment and in terms of never being free of work-related stress). But the Internet is also the only way for kids and teenagers to socially interact without parental mediation... basically at all. Suburban living is really not good for kids. And (US-type) school as a means of socialization is really overrated, because again there's no freedom of movement, much of the time you don't have authority to speak, the socialization you do get is frequently negative, et cetera; if you take the learning out it's a prison environment, and only looks good when compared to solitary confinement.
(My own opinion is that public school should exist, but should be *much* shorter the than 7 hours a day with additional hours of homework it is.)
The whole "public education as sub rosa social services for poor people" thing implies heavily that the two income trap is in full swing. If mom and dad (or, in many cases, either mom or dad doing a solo run) both need to work full or part time just to keep their heads above the water, then public schooling is a social necessity, because without somewhere to dump their 10 year old off every week day at the family is fucked.
Also, from first hand experience on the childcare side, such a family is also fucked during the baby/early toddler stages. You get ridiculous shit where the dad works overtime to keep up with expenses while mom works full time *to afford childcare so she can work*, because that marginal slice of pay leftafter paying for daycare is needed to pay off the car or what have you.
If you’re referring to warren’s book, https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/05/06/the-two-income-trap-stuff-is-clearly-incorrect/
Otherwise I’m still unconvinced the two income trap is precisely real. As opposed to there being other economic effects
Contra some of the quoted comments, the last year was a bit of a disaster for my three kids. The hybrid and zoom (MS Teams actually) classes were awful and I would not do them again.
My teen daughter is in counseling (plus meds) for depression and to head off a potential eating disorder which we're seeing early signs of; my oldest son is ADD and remote learning was worse than useless, even though we were with him during the day and available to help. We ended up moving him to an alternative school in the district that had in-person classes and a program that offered a more structured environment that focused on social skills and self-discipline as much as academics - and he's thriving there. My youngest son in elementary school had similar remote learning issues but fortunately, most of last year was in-person in our district. But the couple of months of trying to zoom was a shit-show.
A couple of years prior to settling where we are now, we lived in an RV for almost two years traveling across the USA, and did a combination of virtual school through a State of Florida program combined with supplementary homeschooling. That wasn't easy for us parents, but it worked fine for the kids and was far superior to the zoom nonsense. One huge benefit for my youngest is that he fell in love with reading and is now at a high-school reading level in 6th grade. There were similar benefits for our other kids in other areas from a loose curriculum combined with travel, new experiences, and spending lots of time together as a family. But it wasn't without a lot of challenges.
But overall, giving our kids the opportunity to find a path that worked for them and giving them a chance to focus on what they enjoy worked for us a lot better than the virtual/hybrid classes. If our schools ever went to all-virtual, we'd pull them out and do our own thing instead.
I think the “adolescent/teenage girl mental illness complex” is not well understood and not thought about enough. Especially the extent to which conditions currently generate it. Eating disorders, SH (if you want to have your day ruined - and I really mean that, this isn’t a haha funny sort of ruined - search for it on Twitter - Twitter is structurally harder to censor), and just standard anxiety and depression, etc seem extremely common and yet only sporadically in popular consciousness.
This doesn’t actually say what SH is or how to search for it but honestly that’s probably better
I admit that I am now morbidly interested and curious.
self harm, #shtwt, it is images
That one doesn’t really work anymore they switch due to censorship so #yeettwt, #ouchchietwt, and shtwt without the hash
One way to think about the weaker vs stronger claims issue is that your strong-claim beliefs are evidence about the truth of your weaker-claim statements. If [weak claim] were false, how likely would you be to still make it? So, if Medicare For All were bad, you'd still expect communists to believe it's good (and say so); and if MFA were good, you'd expect libertarians to still believe it's bad. Or, if a Republican endorses some tax cut, that's par for the course, but if Vox.com also writes favorably about it, that means something.
RE: The parable of hitting ourselves in the head with a bat.
I don't necessarily disagree with the point this parable is intended to make. But, at the same time, if hitting ourselves in the head with a bat had been around for a century and baked into the social fabric to the degree that certain parts of the community/society are RELIANT on people continuing to hit themselves in the head with a bat, then it becomes a lot harder to convince everyone that hitting themselves in the head with a bat is all that bad.
Similar to the arguments on the FDA, we have a certain expectation (on the whole) of what primary schooling looks like. Most American parents have built their lives around the expectation that their kids will be in school for a certain period.
I'm not against home schooling, per se. But consider that the home schooling option relies on at least one parent being available to plan and execute some level of school curriculum. This is not an option that most parents would or could choose.
It's also a matter of what you are comparing it to:
(1) Hitting yourself in the head with a bat versus not hitting yourself in the head with a bat. Plainly not hitting yourself is better.
(2) Hitting yourself in the head with a bat versus standing in a pit, chin-deep in boiling blood having your toes nibbled off by crabs while ducks peck out your eyes and there's an itch in that part of your back that you just can't scratch, also discordant shrieking noises are being played in your ears and bright strobing lights into your eyes, and to cap it all off, everything you get to eat is coconut-flavoured. Plainly, hitting yourself in the head is better.
It also depends if the positive effects are incidental or necessarily connected to the negative. Cutting yourself with a big kitchen knife to punish your mother is bad. Cutting yourself with a big kitchen knife to suck out rattlesnake venom to save your life is good. Cutting yourself with a big kitchen knife to remove a splinter is excessive, but in the right direction, and improving the situation is more likely to come from "Could we use a smaller knife?" than "Can we get the splinter out by thoughts and prayers and dispense with the cutting business entirely?"
Getting polio or TB is bad, but totally removing all virus and bacterial exposure is also bad. Some bad things are critically important in moderation
> I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?
Not one of those three, and I didn't previously share my story, so first my homeschooling: my parents were fundamentalist Christians with a slight rationalist bent. I and my three siblings were homeschooled our entire childhood. Early on (until my oldest sibling was 16 or so and I was 11) that was somewhat structured, and probably took 5 hours per weekday. We practiced a combination of passion-driven and 'x minutes per day per subject', and generally enjoyed our time.
When I was 11, my dad became self employed, running a machine shop. The shop almost never employed anyone, and gradually grew until it was eating all of our school time in working there (and for those who had graduated and were in undergrad, it also ate about 30 hours per week.) I had essentially zero schoolling from age 14 to late age 17 (though I DID become a fairly skilled CNC machinist, which led to me knowing necessary bits of trig, drafting, programming industrial equipment, etc., and my parents did pay for all of our college free and clear, as payment for our involuntary work as children and in college.)
Late age 17, when I was getting ready for the ACT, I spent about 3 months cramming in high-school, with work-in-the-shop time reduced to maybe 30 hours per week (from 60+.) My siblings followed somewhat similar trajectories in the same years.
We were all very successful in college.
My oldest sibling got two four-year degrees (Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics) in 3 years, and a masters in ME.
My next-oldest sibling got two four-year degrees (Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in 4 years and a masters in ME.
I got 3 four-year degrees (Mechanical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Mathematics) in 4 years and a masters in ME (but really robotics).
My youngest sister got one 4-year degree (Teaching) and two minors with a bunch of coop experience in four years.
I think catching up on high school in a quarter really didn't hurt any of us noticeably in the long term.
Now to Scott's actual question. My parent's created a transcript for our homeschool for each of us which showed we had 4.0 GPA, so technically we had something to put in that field, but I doubt that the colleges put much stock in that. We each scored very high on the standardized exam of our choice (I remember my oldest sibling got a 1600 on the SAT back when that was the max, and I got 35 on the ACT.) With those sorts of standardized testing scores, middle-of-the-road colleges were delighted to have us, and we all got huge scholarship offers from most schools we applied to. We didn't try for any of the Ivy league ones, etc. though, so I don't know how their admissions would have viewed us.
Thanks for sharing your story. My thoughts on this are not organized but I think standard classrooms (US) are not the best ways to learn engineering skills - physical/technical plus abstract. Coding and other sciences are adjacent to this. Having kinesthetic learning experiences which involve careful thinking and result in increased skill may actually be a better path for later success in technical things. And I think it can be a solid path for learning math as well. Your apprenticeship sounds very time-intensive but eventually positive.
Maybe homeschool with enough technical involvement is actually a better start for engineers/programmers/math careers than most public schools - more hands-on, more immediate feedback, more skill development versus verbal activity.
Very possibly. It's really hard to extrapolate from one particular odd family though.
> It sure is lucky that this institution, created by long-dead Puritans to teach reading and arithmetic, coincidentally ended up having all of these totally different benefits, any one of which would be sufficient justification for keeping it around!
I realise that this is meant flippantly, but it ignores that schooling systems weren't just invented once out of whole cloth in the early united states, but are a social innovation that has been independently invented in several places and are replicated in other places that don't currently have them.
Look at developing countries and the history of development over the last century. Countries spend a lot of money on putting in place school systems, and the increase in educational provision tends to correlate fairly heavily with future economic growth.
Now it could very well be that schooling is some societal equivalent of a peacock tail, or tulip mania, and its a side effect of development not its cause. But were that the case you would expect some society that did all the rest of the development stuff, but didn't waste resources and schools, to grow notably faster and outcompete the others. This doesn't seem to have happened. So either all these different societies are universally making the same mistake, or the benefit is real.
(Obviously there are more nuanced takes than this, possibly certain types of schooling are more valuable than others. Maybe all the development benefit comes from reading, writing and arithmetic and the rest is superfluous. Or its a diminishing returns situation. Or education at certain ages matter more than others. Or whatever. But if you're to take a more nuanced take like that, then the conclusion of what school kids can miss changes as well. So the correct response would be to prioritize getting the relevant group of kids back in school not everyone else)
One thing I do believe is that schools are a very effective way of ensuring that children are not working. For the introduction of school (whether that's a century-plus ago in the first world or more recently in developing countries) what it replaces is generally highly-exploitative work.
The stereotypical child factory worker or the equally stereotypical child chimney sweep from Victorian England? Those weren't based on nothing (though maid in a rich person's house might be a more typical job).
Compared to that, school looks very good indeed, and children would learn a lot more. Even if it's just basic literacy and numeracy, you're not even getting that at work.
In the modern west, where the alternative is not "forced labor", but some sort of alternative educational structure? Yeah, I'm less sure.
I've quoted this before, but Arthur Conan Doyle puts these words into the mouth of Sherlock Holmes:
"
"It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high, and allow you to look down upon the houses like this."
I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself.
"Look at those big, isolated clumps of building rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-colored sea."
"The board-schools."
"Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future."
People at the time saw that education was the way to a better future. University and the professions were the realm of the elite, but even the working-class bright child, if schooled, had a chance to be more than a factory labourer or chimney sweep or maid.
>One thing I do believe is that schools are a very effective way of ensuring that children are not working.
Or, from a slightly different perspective, to ensure that children, whose labor is no longer seen as desirable (from either moral or economical standpoint), are under adult supervision during the day. This is especially relevant in the context of the extended family being replaced by the nuclear one, in which both parents often have a day job, a process which usually accompanies the transition of societies away from low-tech agriculture. To me, this is obviously the most important purpose of the public school, one which would still need to be somehow filled if the institution is to be abolished. I remain baffled that Scott doesn't see it, whereas he's usually very shrewd in his understanding of the society's inner workings.
It's also notable that these school-like institutions that were invented in different places (Chinese institutions teaching for the civil service exams, Jewish and Islamic institutions teaching boys to memorize religious texts) all seem to have produced some sort of similar benefit.
Even if those schools are *now* seen as institutions holding back those communities from the benefits of modern schooling.
Historically a lot of the government demand for education was about having competent administrators. A major problem for pre-modern states was just finding people who were able to do the day to day jobs of government effectively, so they sought to replace the collection of aristocratic cronies appointed on the basis of connections with less influential but more educated people.
Chinese civil service is the obvious example, but it was also one of the motivations for European monarchs to found and patronise early universities. I imagine a similar thing happened in Muslim countries with Madrassas, particularly since the Shariah legal system was so tied in with religious education.
People argue a lot whether the "true purpose" of the school is to prepare you for a job or not. Seems like the actual answer, with lots of historical evidence, is that the school prepares you for a *government* job (but not necessarily for other types of jobs).
The Chinese schools seem different from the religious ones. People got tested and then became bureaucrats if they passed. Religious schools are found in places without such bureaucracies or testing. So the Chinese schools seem to be serving the modern goal of signalling/filtering for something like IQ (even if the tests left much to be desired in terms of g-loading) instead of just a crude reproduction of the clerisy.
In the Imperial Chinese system, people got tested on things almost all of which were irrelevant, at least in any direct sense, to the bureaucratic jobs they were qualifying for. The test was in things like calligraphy, ability to improvise poetry, essay writing in a particular form, knowledge of classical literature. You can find my description of the process and conjectures about its purpose at http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Legal%20Systems/LegalSystemsContents.htm (first chapter)
Impractical tests can still service as filters.
The way I understand it the purpose of these tests was more or less two-fold:
1. Indoctrination - making sure all your bureaucrats read and studied the same classical literature and practiced the same form of art at a certain level also lead to a much more homogeneous way of thinking among their class...something that was probably sought after a lot. Also, dutifully studying something fairly irrelevant shows willingness to be a good cog in the government wheel (from the emperor's perspective)
2. General ability filter as TGGP mentions...really stupid or lazy people won't be able to pass those tests, so even if there is very little correlation between the actual job and the tests, you make sure your bureaucrats are at least reasonably intelligent and willing to do hard work.
What all these schools would have had in common is that they would have taught children to read and write, in societies where literacy is not yet universal. Learning literacy is necessary to unlock learning pretty much everything else.
"the increase in educational provision tends to correlate fairly heavily with future economic growth"
What I've heard from Bryan Caplan is that international comparisons show that increasing investments in education don't really help poor countries' economies. Rather, they're just imitating rich countries. As we get richer, we spend an increasing fraction of our income on things like education & healthcare (even though there are no health benefits at spending beyond the level of Spain).
Maybe this underestimated the extent to which these schooling systems directly copied many parts of other successful schools, as opposed to independently growing
Both my children attended a SUNY school after being homeschooled. They had no trouble getting in after they took the GED to get their high school diploma. Not entirely clear that a private school would have required that, but the government school required a diploma from a government school system. Unsurprising, that.
The son got a BA and MA in math in four years. He also completed most of the requirements for a BA in computer science, but some technical requirement wasn't met so he doesn't actually have the degree. He is now employed by a hedge fund in NYC.
The daughter never got any grade in college less than a 4.0, and .... has a PhD.
My mother would have homeschooled me, because I was badly served by the local government school. She didn't have the self-confidence to do so, however. Dang. I skipped from the middle of 2nd grade to the middle of 3rd grade, but it didn't help. I was still bored as hell. I always had a science fiction book that I was reading in class. One teacher grabbed it from me and whacked me with it. Another confiscated it on my way into class and returned it on exit. Another teacher said "Russell is going to read his book, so he can sit over in this other section of seats."
Seriously.
Taught myself electronics, and juggling. Didn't need schooling.
"One teacher grabbed it from me and whacked me with it. Another confiscated it on my way into class and returned it on exit. Another teacher said "Russell is going to read his book, so he can sit over in this other section of seats."
At least my teachers, fully aware I was reading a book under the desk or behind a text book (and I thought I was being *so* clever and fooling them) just let me do it in peace 😀
My reading teacher in elementary school made me stop reading a Xanth novel (which was probably a good idea) to ask me what Frog and Toad did in the story we were assigned. I sincerely asked her if she had read the book, because it was all written in there very clearly. I was taken to the office, my parents got called in, it was a huge pain. That's the story of my whole school experience until highschool.
Okay, maybe a historical take would be helpful here, from someone who knows more about education history.
Back in summer 2020 you would read lots of "police were created as slave patrols and strikebreakers" claims and people would raise their hands and ask why then, exactly, every city on earth has a police department. The Stockholm police were not created to catch American runaway slaves. Likewise, you read takes to the effect that standardized tests were created to promote white supremacy, but then you have to ask why they arose in 1st millennium China, and why other countries' education systems tend to be more test-determined than the US's.
School is pretty similar, as far as I can tell, in pretty much every country on earth. Maybe that's because Puritans did a thing and it got exported everywhere (the education equivalent of Crazy Like Us). That elite madrassah in North Pakistan where the Taliban big shots all learned is somehow the product of the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647. I could on some level believe it, British imperialism touched the whole world. But if education independently evolved in the same direction in many different places, it's a sign that this is just the way most human children learn and we should be careful of tearing down Chesterton's fence down.
Parents need childcare to work and employers need children to be socialized for work in every country where industrialization happened. Education has happened in a great many different ways across human history. The form of modern schooling you're talking about belongs to industrialization and the need for full-time wage labor.
I'm not saying that's the only value of schools. But I don't think it's persuasive to say that schools must be a universal good because they exist everywhere. Lots of things are widespread and yet not necessarily universally good.
"Education has happened in a great many different ways across human history. The form of modern schooling you're talking about belongs to industrialization and the need for full-time wage labor."
I'm not sure I agree with you. After thinking about my own comment I remembered the claim that Ancient Rome had a decent literacy rate (I'm seeing estimates from 5 to 25%, high enough that people bothered writing graffiti everywhere), so I looked up ancient Roman schools. They seem very school-like. Show up on time, shut up, practice writing with this stylus and we will beat you if you get wrong answers:
https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/ancient-rome/roman-education/
Now I can readily accept that there were societies where everyone was illiterate and there were no schools or formal education. But were there societies that taught reading/knowledge in some very non-school like way? If so, did any such societies educate more than a very small elite?
Sometimes I feel like Eleizer Yudkowsky has a knack for coming up with the most terrible possible analogy for any situation. Analogies should make reasoning about things easier, but his make them a whole lot harder.
If you want to get specific, then the big difference between "school" and "hit yourself on the head with a baseball bat eight hours a day" it's that head-hitting is intuitively a terrible idea whereas schooling is intuitively a pretty good idea ("children are born not knowing things, knowing things is good, how can we most efficiently teach children things? How about a building where they all go to learn things?"). Or if you feel a compulsion to phrase it in Bayesian terms... "school is good" has a much much higher prior than "head-hitting is good".
I also feel compelled to point out that schools weren't invented by long-dead puritans to teach arithmetic, they were invented independently by even-longer-dead ancient Egyptians, Chinese and Indians, and undoubtedly independently invented by other civilisations too (the Aztecs and Incas seem to have had formal schools of some kind).
To be fair, Eliezer's baseball bat analogy was about status-quo bias -- specifically with respect to death -- not school specifically. From the link:
At another point in the discussion, a man spoke of some benefit X of death, I don't recall exactly what. And I said: "You know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn't being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no."
OK, fair enough then. That's a much better analogy (death is intuitively bad).
I think EY's whole "well actually death is actually bad" shtick is silly in a different way. Nobody _actually_ thinks death is good, we just have a load of lies that we quite openly tell ourselves in order to come to terms with the fact that we're going to die. Going up to people and telling them "Hey, death is really really bad" doesn't annoy them because they think death is good, it annoys them because they know perfectly well that death is bad and have spent their lives carefully constructing a mental edifice that enables them to live their life without being constantly depressed about death.
But that's a whole different complaint.
> Nobody _actually_ thinks death is good
I don't think this is correct. Mostly people don't think their *own* death is good, but plenty of people really, truly think the fact that people in general die is a good and important part of our existence.
Even in rationalist and rationalist-adjacent spaces, I routinely encounter people who *vigorously* defend death as a crucial part of our societies. At least among those communities, they don't usually go as far as saying that death is unambiguously bad. Still, they respond to talk of eliminating senescence and age-related death in the same way that a left-leaning moderate might respond to talk of a communist revolution. "Yeah, I guess that could be a good thing... maybe. We'd have to make sure everything was perfectly planned out first, though, or it would go horribly wrong. Honestly, it might be better just not to try it."
I don't know if that counts as a sincere "death is good" position, but it's close enough that I think EY's work on trying to convey how *absolutely, viscerally awful* death is was time well spent.
Death cleans and makes room for innovation. We can’t all be plankton and eukaryote ancestors - if they never die we wouldn’t have space left lol
Sure, but I don't care about whatever ultra-advanced being my death would "make room" for. I'd say that this is one of the more "on the nose" examples of the problem with utilitarianism - people are happy to apply it to others and not to themselves. Speaking of which, I always though a modified version of the fat man trolley problem would be much more interesting - what if there was no fat man around, and you had to sacrifice _yourself_ to save 5 people?
"Nobody _actually_ thinks death is good, we just have a load of lies that we quite openly tell ourselves in order to come to terms with the fact that we're going to die."
The 'death is good' often comes up in the context of cryonics. The claim isn't used to come to terms with an inevitability. The claim is used to explain why (a) the person making the claim ISN'T trying to avoid the bad thing, and sometimes (b) why the person who IS trying to avoid the bad thing is a bad person for doing so.
I don't think it'd be a good idea to make most of the present day population immortal. It'd be better to have genetically engineered people for much better intelligence and general health before you do that.
We can improve humans quite a bit.
I think I must be one of those rare creatures who enjoyed school, but I went to school in a small town in Ireland. Possibly had I gone to a big American public school, I would have hated it as passionately as some people on here.
If I had never gone to school, I would have learned to read and write and do some simple sums, and that would have been *it*. There would be no "learn on your own time, find a subject you enjoy, go deep into it". Go to the library? Our town library was one room, the librarian was very strict on "children do not go into the adult section" and even if I had been able to do so, the resources of the time would have been "a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica". I absolutely would not have had the John Stuart Mill educational experience.
On the other hand I was watching my 14yo do zoom school, and in his free time he was exclusively watching things like "funny youtube videos". No cool activities, coding, or learning of any kind was ever observed. He never left the couch either, unless forced to.
This phenomenon has been written about in the homeschooling literature. Kids who have been doing school for years in a setting where most motivation is externally provided will commonly veg out when given half a chance. If you take that same kid and give them support to structure their own day and set their own goals will tend to vary their activities and start to pursue things of interest to them. But it takes time (weeks and months, not days) for a person to transition from a regime of external motivation to one of internal motivation, and they may need some guidance and support to get there. Not every single child will become self-motivating that way, but many will. The transition will take time, particularly if the child doesn't have any earlier history of organizing their own time.
Adult fear of a child's "laziness" is a powerful barrier to a child finding their own intrinsic motivation, or at least until much later in life.
Ok, cool, but lots of us just want to send our kids to public school, which we're supposed to be able to do. The fact that homeschooling works out over some period of time for many kids whose parents want to homeschool them is not relevant to the topic of 'what happens when you close down the public school system and a bunch of parents who have not structured their lives around homeschooling now have to figure out what to do?' A lot of kids watched YouTube while their parents worked. It was not great, even if the kids still learned to read (or didn't forget how read).
I spent maybe 100 hours over the past year watching education style YouTube videos. After the hundredth I realized I wasn’t actually learning anything useful, like at all, it was just omg cool wow, and stopped. Maybe I’ll download some textbooks.
It's called edutainment, and it's a fucking curse. It does indeed persuade people they're "learning" but if you look very carefully at it, it's all the very lowest-hanging fruit, stuff people can pick up almost any old way, or pro tips for people who are already experts. All the painful intermediate slog between "Why yes I *can* learn Latin, I've already learned to introduce myself and ask for the salt in just one lesson!" and construing Cicero is omitted. Because that is actually hard, and not much fun for the student.
Non-sequitur but if you would like to learn Latin to the point of construing Cicero, check out the Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata series. Without a doubt the best textbooks I've ever read.
Oh many thanks! I've dabbled in it off and on for years, but when I contemplate Wheelock in all its turgidity, I quail.
I second Cole's recommendation; I tried on and off with Wheelock for years, and I found LLPSI far superior; LLPSI is written entirely in Latin, and so long as you understand English or any of the Romance languages, you can follow along with it, maybe using Wheelock as a grammar reference if some specific clause somewhere isn't clear. My strategy (stolen from Luke Ranieri) was to copy out the entire book, word for word, as I went; this forced me to really slow down and understand each new word and each new piece of grammar as they came.
Plus, the final chapter of book 2 is Cicero's "Somnium Scipionis" from De Re Publica, also known as "Cicero's better version of the Pale Blue Dot speech". It's a wonderful way to 'graduate', so to speak, from elementary Latin textbooks and move into the classics.
Yeah, downloading textbooks and reading them is much more reasonable than watching random educational videos.
The videos are random, sometimes too simple, sometimes too difficult, sometimes they repeat the same stuff, sometimes they jump to unrelated topics. The textbook is organized to give you the information in the right order.
Recently I downloaded a textbook on set theory, and reading it gave me much better insight than all the time I previously spent watching videos and reading Wikipedia.
Why is it concerning to you that some readers (correctly, based on your past writing) interpreted you as being more anti-school than that specific post was? The post presented an opportunity for people to challenge those other, stronger views of yours.
I don't doubt that a fairly substantial number of people would be better off with unschooling/non-standard education. I just seems to me that, on this topic, you might be losing sight of just how atypical you and many of the people who participate in the rationalist community are. I'd venture to say that ~90% of students are better off receiving a "traditional" communal education. (Forgive me if this is already close to your view and I've just misunderstood.) With that said, I'm very open to big ideas on how to improve that communal education system.
I don't like how the "bat" example is applied here. I can see that the homeschooling is not working. It takes way more effort and time and provides same or worse results than an average school. And I don't see a clear reason for that. Because, indeed, average school is boring and time is not very effectively spent there. So homeschooling in theory should have way better results, but it does not.
So saying things like "social aspect of the school", "learning how to work as a team" etc is a way to try and explain why is this happening. And not a way to ban homeschooling just because "this is not the way our fathers did it".
What? Homeschooling consistently does better than public school every study I've ever seen where students from the two get compared. I'm curious where you get the idea that it's not working?
I don't think it does better if you take into the account that homeschoolers are mostly from educated and rich families or at least middle class. I might have missed some new research however, so if you have a link I d appreciate.
Offhand, here's a study that looks at various different studies, some of which controlled for background variables:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/15582159.2017.1395638
As far as I've ever seen, most of the studies that control for background still find a significant positive effect of homeschooling. (In that one, the only one that found a negative effect while controlling for background was looking at kindergartners.)
Half of the studies had no control for the background. Another half controlled for gender and socioeconomic status and that's is. No parents education levels, no cities vs villages. Controlling just for 1 relevant parameter out of 10 is not a good study.
"However, regardless of whether their mothers held a degree or did not complete high school, the children’s scores stayed between the 80th and 90th percentile. By contrast, in 8th grade math, public school students whose parents are college graduates score at the 63rd percentile, whereas students whose parents have less than a high school diploma score at the 28th percentile. Students taught at home by mothers who never finished high school scored a full 55 percentile points higher in math and 49 points higher in writing than public school students from families with comparable education levels (Ray, 1997a)."
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/Homeschooling2007.pdf
Couldn't find the original source (Strengths of Their Own–Home
Schoolers Across America: Academic Achievement, Family
Characteristics, and Longitudinal Traits) online easily, to see if/how it controlled for other confounders, but other studies find that parental education level is one of the largest factors in achievement (e.g. "Cross-validation of a multivariate path analysis of predictors of home school student academic achievement" found that "The best predictor of home school student achievement in this study is parent’s education level.")
Yeah tried searching for the war numbers and couldn't find anything as well.
To home school a kid takes a lot of effort. And especially to home school him a way that he would pursue higher education or take tests. So if we take a highly positively selected group of people (higher levels of education and income, full families etc) and positively select from them AGAIN (those that are willing to spend hours daily to teach their kids) then we will get good (but not fantastic) results.
For example, a family starts home schooling and then a husband leaves or dies. Will they continue homeschooling? Probably not. There is a huge number of positive parameters that you need to account for when comparing homeschooling to school.
Homeschooling is sort of self-selecting, though. You get some parents who are whackjob weirdoes and pull their kids out to keep them in a cult, sure, but the majority of parents who want to homeschool are themselves educated to a reasonable standard and have the resources to do so, and know where to go look for more resources. So you're comparing "results for bright, motivated, supported kids" with "the rest of them all".
If every family was homeschooled, as every child now goes to mandatory public education, the results might be different.
"Homeschooling consistently does better than public school every study I've ever seen where students from the two get compared."
Homeschooling does NOT do consistently better than public school if you adjust for the demographics (e.g. parent education, parent marital status, etc.) of the folks doing homeschooling.
Most (all?) homeschooling studies don't do this.
Summerhill school (in England) was subject to a study on how well the students did compared to other English students. The Summerhill students did better than the average English student, but less well that a representative comparison group (eg. when matched by socio-economic status, etc.). Summerhill is pretty close to unschooling ...
"Homeschooling does NOT do consistently better than public school if you adjust for the demographics (e.g. parent education, parent marital status, etc.) of the folks doing homeschooling."
Please, find me a study that has such a null result (and isn't dealing with unschooling, which is obviously garbage). I would greatly appreciate it.
"Please, find me a study that has such a null result..."
Other than Summerhill, I don't have any.
I was trying to make a weaker claim than maybe came across. I'm claiming that "homeschoolers do better" is unproved because of the lack of control and offering up Summerhill as the only example I know of where the was a control. The Summerhill study showed under-performance.
So my conclusion was that the homeschoolers "don't do consistently better."
Not that "homeschoolers consistently do no better."
Summerhill, from what I can gather, was a very odd case of schooling — and I think not at home.
So your actual claim, if I understand it, is not:
"Homeschooling does NOT do consistently better than public school if you adjust for the demographics (e.g. parent education, parent marital status, etc.) of the folks doing homeschooling."
which is what you wrote.
It is "home schooling does consistently better than public schooling on the studies that have been done, but I do not think those studies adequately adjusted for the demographics."
Have you actually read all such studies? Can you describe how they should have controlled for demographics and didn't? Short of that, what you are saying is "the evidence is against my view, but there are reasons why that evidence might be wrong."
"So my conclusion was that the homeschoolers "don't do consistently better.""
I don't think so, since, aside from the Summerhill case, you have no evidence for that claim. Your conclusion was "we do not know for sure if homeschoolers do consistently better or not, because of limitations in the studies that show they do."
Well of course it does. Craftsmanship always beats the assembly line. If when you went to public school the student-teacher ratio was like the family (between 1-to-1 and 3-to-1, say), and the teacher stayed with the same student for years and years, getting to know him very well, and the teacher was deeply emotionally invested in the student doing well -- why, I daresay a public school education would be absolutely phenomenal.
The question is not why individualized tutoring would work better than being one of a class of 35 with a stranger, but why the latter can compete *at all* with the former. The natural expectation would be that homeschooling ought to work about 10x better than group schooling. If it only works 2-3x as well, that's sort of a tribute to the public school actually.
You have at least three factors in play:
1) In *theory* the public (and private) school teachers are better at teaching. They have been trained and this is their job. The homeschoolers often/usually don't have that background.
2) Tutoring *should* get better results than 20-1.
3) A lot of the homeschoolers aren't trying to accomplish the same thing that the more regular schools are trying to accomplish, but the tests are more geared to what the regular schools teach (or, alternately, the regular schools build their curriculums with the tests in mind).
Two out of three of these favor the regular school, though I think the third has a larger effect. What the intuition would be for how this all combines I don't know.
Craftsmanship doesn't have to beat the assembly line if the craftsman is enough of an amateur.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
> the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class
> Technology may simulate tutoring effects without the high cost of providing a live tutor for each student.
In theory, there is a lot of space for improving schools. For example, you could have students learn by watching educational videos first, and then discussing the topic with actual teachers. That would allow the debates happen in smaller groups, making it more similar to tutoring, and allowing different students to progress at different speeds or to different levels.
In practice, school is one of the most conservative (not politically, quite the opposite, but in the "doing it exactly the way we did it 100 years ago" sense) institutions.
"the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class"
Going from memory the study was short (a few months) and for younger students doing fairly foundational learning (e.g. learning to read).
I do not believe anyone has found that 1-on-1 tutoring will move the previously average student to the top 2% in the general case.
I'm actually hopeful that focused computer directed drill/practice can help a lot here (keep track of what the students are having trouble with and focus on that ...), but the evidence is still weak.
[Still, I'm building software myself to do this, so ...]
The school is teaching those 20 kids for about six hours a day, and often requiring several more hours of homework. The parent may well be teaching for less than one hour a day, with another hour or two of the kid studying things on his own. In our case, the only time we regularly spent was putting the kids to bed, during which we talked with them (and meals and such, during which we talked), which we would have been doing anyway. So imagining it as a full time tutor is a wild exaggeration.
We were unschooling, but my impression is that the home schooling people also don't put large amounts of parental time into it, nothing like repeated 50 minute classes.
Right, that too. I said homeschooling *ought* to work 10x as better than group-schooling by a stranger. Maybe 100x! If it only works 2-3x as better, if it's even debatable, I'm saying that's a decently strong statement that public schools is surprisingly effective.
In terms of instructor time per pupil, the home schooling works out to about three times as much time, less for unschooling. The parent knows the kid but the teacher is a trained professional, the parent an amateur. It isn't surprising that home schooling works better. So I don't think either 10x or 100x is what one would expect, unless one started out believing that the classroom model is a terrible way of teaching. If home schooling works three times better, whatever that means, either professional training in teaching isn't worth very much or the school's teaching model is a poor one.
I’d think that Scott and five other of us homeschooling a homeschool group of the top 5% of kids by test scores out of all SSC parents would “do better than public school”, while the Universal Baptist Church of Fentanyl homeschool might do less well. And studies may be tough because they may study one or the other, and that what homeschoolers do and what you or another might do as a homeschool might differ a lot from those.
That's why in real science we control everything but the experimental variable. But if they did that over the School of Education they'd only get a paper out ever 25 years and the Chancellor would whack their budget something fierce, so...shortcuts are taken, and ably rationalized.
There's no good evidence for this.
The problem is that there's enormous selection bias - who chooses to homeschool is not random. Worse, many homeschooled kids *don't* take standardized tests.
> In a 2004 study, Belfield found that less than one third as many SAT takers self-reported as homeschooled students as should have been expected given the number of children homeschooled at the time. He also found that while homeschooled students outperformed public schooled students, when background factors like parental education, income, and marital status were corrected for, the difference between homeschooled students’ scores and those of their public schooled peers decreased markedly.
Homeschooling looks way better than it is because low achieving homeschooled students aren't measured at all by these metrics, and homeschooled students are not remotely randomly selected.
"He also found that while homeschooled students outperformed public schooled students, when background factors like parental education, income, and marital status were corrected for, the difference between homeschooled students’ scores and those of their public schooled peers decreased markedly."
Which means that, with those things controlled for, the homeschooled students still did better. I think that was exactly the claim that Mark was denying a little higher in the thread.
One theory would be that kids learn what they learn based almost exclusively on their abilities, so you'd expect homeschooling to do pretty much the same as regular school, but with much less boredom and random crap about it. But not necessarily much better on results. Just more fun for the kids.
The people talking about how you NEED public schools to serve poor/dumb kids or whatever are very opposite my own experience - my poor first grade experience is why I was taken out of public school and homeschooled instead.
Given the relatively flat statistical variation in a person's lifelong behavior from parenting styles, I also don't think I'd expect teachers to have a much stronger effect. Intuitively, I'd think the risk is greater - a non-zero portion of school faculty are child molesters, and they're going to target the poor/dumb kids disproportionately because they'll have an easier time getting away with it, and CSA has many long-term negative sequelae. Some quick googling (https://www.nheri.org/child-abuse-of-public-school-private-school-and-homeschool-students-evidence-philosophy-and-reason/) suggests ~10% of kids at public schools are victims of sexual mistreatment by school personnel. A one-in-ten shot of your kid getting raped seems like it's going to wash out any theoretical positive effect of a teacher noticing your kid has ADHD when you don't.
There are indeed bad schools and bad teachers, and American schools seem to have their own unique raft of problems.
But you say you were homeschooled, which means your parents were able to do that. There are parents who can't, and if the kids are not in school, then they're wandering around on the streets.
Like the first week in the job, where there was a funeral of one of the fifteen year old students who died from glue-sniffing. Or the principal going down to the school gates to bargain with twelve year old boys about "okay, you can smoke (cigarettes) up to here, but not on the school grounds". Or the kids being raised by grandparents because Dad has gone off to England and Mom is incapable of taking care of a goldfish. Or the kids with all different surnames because they have all different fathers, none of whom are involved in their lives. Those kids are *not* going to get home-schooling.
There are bad schools and bad teachers who take advantage to abuse pupils, but there are schools who are also genuinely trying to help. It would be ideal if social services took over all this, but social services are also over-burdened and hard-pressed and suffering with burnout. There's no easy, neat, simple, cheap solution.
>But you say you were homeschooled, which means your parents were able to do that. There are parents who can't, and if the kids are not in school, then they're wandering around on the streets.
Sure, yeah. But, like, they weren't able to breastfeed me and had to switch to formula but I wouldn't use that to say that formula was good for anybody.
I think I would use that to say it's a really good thing that someone out there is producing formula so that it's available for everyone, in case they need it.
One could say, "every child should be in school" or "no child should be in school", but I think what a lot of people here are advocating is "school should be available for every child, and it might be best for most of them to be in school, though some can do things better otherwise". Which is a bit of a stronger claim than the one most people would make about formula, but also not totally different.
Judith Harris, author of "The Nurture Assumption" did think that schools had real effects. Part of her thinking was based on how children adopt the accents of their new country if they immigrate at young ages, but not if they come later. So the "nurture" effect of their parents' accents got swamped by the peers at school.
Judith Harris's thesis is that kids have one personality at home, another with their peer group, and it is the latter that normally becomes the adult personality. She mentions as an exception the special case where the family is the peer group.
One argument for home schooling is that you believe your family and friends share a culture you would rather have your kids adopt than that of their age mates at school.
The Yudkowsky parable is a complete strawman. None of those reasons sound like remotely good reasons to hit yourself over the head with a bat for 8 hours a day, and the idea that any society could genuinely be confused about that is absurd. I thought the examples about the overlooked benefits of school provided by the commenters were all pretty good.
As others have pointed out, Yudkowsky created it as an analogy for death (like Bostrom's Dragon Tyrant), not school
Ah, thanks. I think the analogy to death makes a lot more sense.
A better analogy for ending death is disease. 500 years ago half your children would be sacrificed to dysentery or parasites or something like that. Now science stopped it (both simple stuff like variolarion and now complex vaccine and pills). Why do the other half of deaths need to be different?
Not sure I agree, but the reality of the analogy bestows more impact or power than “what if a dragon murdered all people”
Sure. Could probably think of even better analogies. My main point is that using it as a comparison to going to school makes absolutely no sense.
"Framed that way, it sounds pretty offensive, kind of adjacent to “you are unqualified to raise this kid, so please turn them over to the government”.
Okay, I am going to bitch about this.
First off, I worked in a DEIS school. This means kids from all kinds of backgrounds, where the best-performing ones may indeed go on to apprenticeships or vocational educational courses (the kind of one to two year courses to get qualifications in childcare etc.) One of those courses is a very highly-regarded award to become an accounting technician, which opens up a path to a good job or going on to university to get the magic degree that will get you even better jobs.
There isn't really a path that goes "my parents went straight to college, I'm going straight to college, this was never in question". Some of the kids? Sure!
But most of them are struggling with some kind of a problem. Be that simply living in poverty, to having behavioural and learning difficulties. The twelve year olds who want to start in that school all get an assessment before they apply, just to make sure that any such problems get identified and so can be supported.
And the parents are struggling themselves - some of them have poor literacy, regret the wasted time in their own schooling, and want their kids to do better - stay in school, get an education, have a chance. There's a lot of single parents (and that's a whole other rant for another day), there are broken families, there's the whole gamut of "and little Johnny has a social worker" to deal with.
There are provisions of breakfast club before school, the Behaviour Support Classroom (before, when a kid had a meltdown, they were left to sit on a seat in the corridor. Now there's somewhere they can go, be monitored, be supported), a Home/School Liaison Scheme, a specific programme for the ages of 12-15 for the kids less academically able and more at risk of dropping out, and so forth.
Now, if anyone wants to be snooty about all this, let them do so. The parents appreciate it and are grateful for it, because it gives them support when trying to do the best for their kids. The parents who don't give a flying fuck, well, the government will not actually come take their kids away until it's too damn late and the kids have been screwed up monumentally, so yeah - I never thought I'd get to that point, but between DEIS and social housing, there were situations where I went "for the love of God, why is nobody GRABBING THESE KIDS AND RUNNING AWAY WITH THEM???" The foster care system is awful, but it would *still* be better than some of the home situations.
That xkcd cartoon makes me want to burn down the joint. You know *how* you get to the point of "one weekend messing with Perl"? First, you have to be aware that such a thing even exists. You have to have the hardware and software to mess around with it (unless you want to write it all down with paper and pencil, and some homes don't even have these). You have to have parents who are able to support your interests, don't need you to mind your younger siblings over that weekend, or look after the house, or do something else where you have an after-school job to help earn money. There is so much underlying "just able to mess around with Perl" that is taken for granted there.
Yes, if you're a smart kid from a good home with smart parents who can afford things to let you 'mess around with Perl', then sure, a weekend doing that is probably better than school. At least you're not relying on the school to make sure you get something to eat in the mornings, right?
And to end up this rather disjointed ramble, there were plenty of 'ordinary' parents who wanted the schools opened because they wanted childcare, to be blunt. They worked, they needed somewhere to park the kids for a minimum of six hours, they weren't "dysfunctional families" but they weren't going to let their kids ramble around unsupervised while they were out of the house, and they don't seem to have believed that their kids would all be doing Junior Genius Self-Tutoring if left on their own.
So yeah, school has been forced into taking over a huge chunk of parenting and other duties that are not part of education, strictly speaking, and should be provided by some other means, be that government services or parents rearing their own kids.
But also yeah, school is providing social welfare services for the deprived, the struggling, the dysfunctional; the parents who are doing their best but are limited by their own problems, and the parents who are like the dogs in the street just littering pups and letting them run feral. It's a very damn imperfect solution, but it's better than nothing - and if you take away schools, that is what the people on the lower rungs of the social ladder will get: nothing.
(As for Yudkowsky and his baseball bat, don't bloody tempt me. Hey, friend, so how would *you* deal with two sisters, thirteen and fourteen, who on the face of it appear to be perfectly nice, ordinary girls - and then you get told in confidence to keep an eye out for them, because they're suicide risks, both of them have attempted it before, and here's the number for their social worker if you think anything is going on. School was an attempt at giving them some kind of normal life. Would it be better to leave them at home? Put them on the locked ward of a hospital? What? I think a baseball bat to the noggin would have been *simpler* for those girls to deal with).
I'm very nearly sympathetic to "take the really bright kids out of school" argument and let them run free-range, because then we might get an end to all the pissing and moaning about "school is a torture machine! I was held back because the teacher was trying to deal with the thirty other morons in the class not as smart as me! I wanted maths and computers 24/7, why did they force me to write da English gooder?"
C.S. Lewis did hate school, and if you read his autobiographical study, you'll know why. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wynyard_School But he still ended up in an academic career, so he couldn't have hated the entire concept.
I wish I still had the Substack heart icon to click on this comment.
I find it interesting that you point to reducing the risk of suicide as something schools are good for, even as suicide has become more common while society has gotten more educated.
This doesn’t make the case nearly well enough for school -> child suicide. Everything with a trend can be correlated to everything else with a trend. And there are a LOT of trends over history. And their relations are confounded.
You can easily make it though: school is half the life of kids. It shapes what they know and how they know it. And now lots of kids talk about and attempt suicide. Which is correct, school does cause that. Same for ADHD and ADD. What else is even available? What are kids doing other than school that could cause that change?
And you can tie it to “you can’t do what you want to in school” and “it’s boring and you essentially become a question answering device style AI rather than actually doing things that build knowledge and ability”, both of which really are bad
(The other possibility is the internet and computers. Both contribute)
Actually my first guess would be Lord of the Flies syndrome. One thing schools necessarily do that is horrible is box kids up with only other kids of just the same age, all experiencing the same existential issues. This is highly unnatural, and can easily lead to insane excursions from moderation. In the normal setting for a primate tribe, a kid is constantly exposed not only to other kids his age, but much younger kids who are clearly different and in certain ways inferior (which cheers him up), and also much older kids (and young adults) who have mastered the problems that so trouble him, gained perspective, and are thriving, also a source of hope. I mean, if you put a bunch of depressives together in a room, or even people who sort of all half believe the Moon landing was faked, they're going to re-inforce each others deviancy and get worse. It would be much better -- although completely screw with the academic mission -- if kids spend their school hours with a mix of ages, some younger kids, some older, some young adults, some middle-aged adults, et cetera, so the heterogeneity of viewpoint served to center and steady his own impulses to pathological thinking instead of reinforcing them.
“If” you put a bunch of depressives and schizophrenics together in a room? That happens all across the country - mental hospitals and 72 hour holds. It’s truly terrible.
I was talking to a 16yo girl in a ... bad situation once. They had just come back from a hold after overdosing on Xanax. They talked about how a “tr*nny touched my titty” (exact words used) among lots of other stuff. They also didn’t really go to school and spent most of their time playing Minecraft and other video games with literal internet n*zis. And was groomed at age 14 on the internet on discord into ... anyway mental hospitals clearly didn’t cause any of those problems but they certainly did not help. Neither did the psychiatrist who put her on three different drugs.
Idk why I wrote all that, but the point is I don’t think things are getting better for kids. Letting your kid be on the internet doing whatever they want can create very capable and intelligent kids, but it can also not do that. And mental hospitals are bad.
No argument there. Indeed, our treatment of the mentally ill is deeply shameful, and if God sends another Flood he would be entitled to cite that utter failure to be our brother's keeper as one of the reasons for Starting Over.
I think a simpler answer is that the secularization of society increases the rate of suicide, and increased schooling is part of that secularization process.
Probably, I guess both contribute in complex ways
Well said
I also wish I could heart this or buy a sub to you or something
Thank you! The second to last paragraph is golden. (And I also really want hearts back on this blog.)
If you really want hearts back, Pycea's ACX tweaks at https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks (or mine, not as polished, at https://github.com/EdwardScizorhands/ACX-simple ) can let it happen.
Since most people don't use them or see them, you exist in a parallel universe where only the occasional heart gets granted.
That's neat, but yeah, the main benefit of hearts is that you can see them and so can others. Do these tweaks explain how I've gotten notification emails of people "hearting" my comments even though I can't see the hearts on the actual comment?
The hearts have only been removed in the UI.
So you can get hearts through people using those tweaks, or through someone clicking the "Like" button they get in an email notification (I just did this for your comment that replied to me, instead of using a tweak, although I don't think there's any way for you to tell the difference).
Some anecdotal observation from an educator, though not at the school but for the first year of college. Comparing the "remote learning" Covid year with previous years, I'm seeing is that the stronger students have no decrease in results at all and I'm absolutely not surprised that all the quoted stories that end with "... and then I got my PhD" don't find an issue with missing some or much of schooling. However, they are not the target audience of any schooling systems at all - those generally are the type of people who could learn from school or from tutoring or from books or from peers or in any other way; schooling systems have to target the majority of people who would *not* get an appropriate education or skills if left on their own. And for the weaker part of students I am clearly seeing a big decline in average skills at the end of the course compared to on-site learning. They apparently do need all the extra structure and support and motivation-affecting tweaks that have been missing in online education. The new learning environment is leaving them behind.
So my point is that we shouldn't expect the same effect of schooling/unschooling from different groups ("capability levels"? But not really, motivation and maturity and social aspects perhaps are just as relevant for this distinction as pure innate capability) of students, so evidence that it can result in great success does not imply that it doesn't harm all the people who likely wouldn't have gotten great success anyway.
>> Our teen (and tween) carjacking sprees certainly aren't being helped by not having kids in school.
I don't understand this comment at all. The solution is obvious - just put the kids in jail, the institution specifically intended to prevent people from doing what we don't want them to do.
If that's not the solution.... how is it supposed to be different from putting them in school?
There is supposed to be a standard for throwing people in jail - for example, they should have done something wrong.
On the warehouse model, why does this not apply to school?
Robin Hanson's proposal is for for everyone to be required to have crime insurance. Your insurer (who would have a lot of authority over you, because you can switch to another insurer) would act to minimize the risk you get in trouble. https://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/09/who-vouches-for-you.html
This is also somewhat similar to a Yarvin proposal.- where the state “assumes direct responsibility for crime” and then deals with the “dregs of society” as a total power as it wishes.
Being Yarvin, he never really ... gets to it, but I think (?) it was here https://graymirror.substack.com/p/4-principles-of-any-next-regime
Except monarchist (state is forced actor) instead of libertarian capitalist (switch insurers). He claims the Patchwork system with different states you can travel combined with incentives to make sure your population is productive will ensure none are too domineering or evil, which ..
I don't read Gray Mirror because you need a paid subscription to comment. But I recall back at Unqualified Reservations he was saying we should put the dregs into virtual reality a la the Matrix. https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2009/11/dire-problem-and-virtual-option/
It doesn’t improve comment quality at all either, it sucks.
Okay, how does the insurer act to minimise the risk? "If you get into trouble, you will have to pay a higher premium, so high it puts you in serious financial pain"? "If you get in trouble, our Harm Reduction Education Associates, Mr. Legge and Mr. Bryker, will pay you an instructive visit"? "If you keep getting into trouble, you go to jail"?
Let's have a look at the new, improved Hanson version:
" If you are found guilty of a crime, your “voucher” pays the state a fine, and then pays to punish you according to your contract with them. This fine in part pays the private bounty-hunter who convinced the court of your guilt.
To lower your voucher premiums, you might agree to (1) prison, torture, or exile, if caught, (2) prior limits on your freedom like curfews, ankle bracelets, and their reading your emails, and (3) co-liability wherein you and your buddies are all punished if any one of you is found guilty. In this system, the state still decides what behaviors are crimes and if any one accusation is true, and it sets fine and bounty levels regarding how hard to discourage and detect each kind of crime. But each person chooses their own “constitutional rights”, and vouchers acquire incentives and opportunity to innovate and adapt, by searching in a large space of ways to discourage crime."
So that's not hugely different from our current system, except that he claims "each person chooses their own rights" and "the crime insurers have incentive and opportunity to search for a large space of ways to discourage crime".
Well yes, if I could put people who dump litter in public spaces on the rack, I imagine that might be an incentive to discourage crime, but we've decided that we don't want our government to literally torture people any more. Letting private companies companies do it seems to be a regression, not an improvement. And maybe some criminals are stupid enough that they think being racked wouldn't discourage them, and so they would offend, then get tortured, then decide "I'm not doing that again", but maybe some wouldn't.
If I'm rich enough to pay a high enough premium so that I can offend with impunity, or pay the high fines if the insurer decides to impose those on me, I don't see this as working to reduce crime (granted, the very rich probably do get away with it as well today).
I honestly don't see the benefit here of turning law enforcement over to private insurance companies. One, if a bounty-hunter can get a bounty by proving Smith is guilty, they have an incentive not to look very hard to see if Jones actually did the crime instead. Two, if the private company can imprison, torture, read private emails, or make you wear electronic monitors, well, the current system does that as well (apart from the torture, which has fallen out of favour from its historic use). Three, the neat little nostrum of "each person chooses their own 'constitutional rights'" is a great soundbite, but what does it mean?
If I am a fervent libertarian that believes the state uses force to coerce individuals, why would I sign up to allowing a private entity to use force to coerce me? If I'm a career criminal who judges "if caught, I could go to jail for this" and yet commits the crime anyway, why would I make a different choice under the private insurer model? (Unless the belief there is that having to pay the increased premium on top of the jail sentence would discourage me, and in that case I should make sure I sell more fentanyl or knock over a security van with a lot of cash in transit to cover my overheads).
Maybe some people would choose torture: "okay, if I get to murder Tommy, I'll gladly let you cut off two of my fingers".
I genuinely don't see the benefit in this proposal.
"To lower your voucher premiums, you might agree to (1) prison, torture, or exile, if caught, (2) prior limits on your freedom like curfews, ankle bracelets, and their reading your emails, and (3) co-liability wherein you and your buddies are all punished if any one of you is found guilty."
Because the insurer would be operating the prisons, we would expect only an efficient amount of incarceration. No keeping old people locked up long after they've aged out of crime.
School is designed to give kids something to do with their time that will at least motivate them to do something other than anti-social things like this. Jail is designed to forcibly prevent people who can't be motivated to do anything else. Both could be designed to be more humane, but just because schools are less humane than they should be doesn't mean that we might as well just go all the way to the even less humane option.
Yes. I'm arguing for school as a crime prevention tool. Preventing the crime is better than incarcerating someone for it after the fact.
I'm not sure exactly what your position is, so you can clarify if you want. I'm just responding broadly to the idea of school as crime prevention.
I'll say I don't think it's ethical to force 100% of kids to go to school to prevent ~1% from anti-social behavior outside school. They might be anti-social in school to the other kids. It's not fair to make people be around anti-social people. You could argue school prevents them from being anti-social but some people just are anti-social and being in school doesn't prevent that. Anti-social people cause a decline in classroom quality and this is an injustice to the other students. Being ultra-tolerant and not kicking people out means a lot of kids get worse education or a fearful at school.
There are different educational settings for when kids are disruptive, and you could certainly argue we're too hesitant to use them. The emergence of models like KIPP probably has happened in part to enforce behavioral standards that their neighborhood public schools can't or won't. Regardless, there is some educational setting that each kid should be in, and if that kid has not committed a crime, that educational setting should not be in prison, even if you think they might later commit a crime.
Model for the great athletes: Being good at a sport is a stock whereas practice is the flow (similar to income and wealth). Great Athletes tend to start out with a larger stock and can generate higher flows. Thus, by the time they are great they already have a much larger stock then everyone else (So when they miss out they are still ahead of everyone else) and if they fall behind they are able to build back up faster (because they have faster flows). Education clearly works a similar way and this is why people are really harping on why disadvantaged kids get harmed more. Not only are their stocks already lower, but their ability to add to that stock is lower as well thus their opportunity costs are higher.
Also, I must have come from a different niche of papers, but in undergrad I worked on and had to read a bunch of education and health papers that pretty consistently found causal effects of education on health using quasi-experimental data (about 75% found a positive sig effect). I think that if you think cognitive ability affects something (wages, health, happiness), you should also have that education affects (and then even more so from some studies I've seen that specifically try to tease out the difference between education and cognitive ability). If anyone is interested I can go back to some of the lit reviews I did and post em all.
I'm no fan of school overall, but I think it has legible benefits that people are reluctant to endorse because they sound bad, so they get covered with the veneer of academic learning and illegible but better-sounding benefits. It sounds bad to say that a whole group of people should be preemptively imprisoned to prevent some of them from committing crimes; or that parents want their children taken off their hands even if the kids have a bad time; or that success in the workplace requires quietly performing boring and arbitrary tasks, which is contrary to our natural inclinations, and habituating children to those norms is inevitably unpleasant.
"It doesn't matter if the kids learn anything; what matters is keeping them locked up and off the streets, and breaking their spirits so they learn to be useful, and if they don't like it, too bad for them!" isn't a winning proposition, but without the justification of other benefits, people are afraid of opening the floodgates of impulsive criminals and unemployable low-conscientiousness extroverts.
We have learning loss data showing that kids learned when there was not in person education. The argument one could make is that they'll catch back up, or that some parents and kids compensate in other ways (which may or may not be costly). I don't think 'kids don't learn stuff in school' is really a credible argument.
"learned less when there was not", rather
I'd be careful of extrapolating too much from that CS Lewis quote. It's a relatively unique complaint about schooling that it was too long on games and sport and socializing with other kids your own age. For a lot of kids, that's the only redeeming part of the day.
Two things:
1. Yes, you are entirely right. C. S. Lewis should not be taken as a model of a normal British schoolboy. He's an introvert, and the terrible school he went to previously didn't have any sports to when he got to one with mandatory sports he was way behind everyone else in terms of skill. Also, just generally a great big clutz. And not good at making friends. His older brother liked school quite a bit.
2. The boarding school he went to also wasn't much like normal school. There was intense social competition, with two distinct classes: Bloods and F's (they weren't actually called F's, but the word they were called is now a slur and while I don't mind other people might). Bloods were recognized by the school, consisted mostly of upperclassman (particularly those good at sports) and they had the right to make F's do just about anything they wanted. Here's a (redacted for anachro-slurs) passage from Lewis's biography that explains it a bit:
"As I have hinted before, the (F) system is the chief medium by which the Bloods, without breaking any rule, can make a junior boy's life a weariness to him...(F'ing) was as impersonal as the labour-market in Victorian England; in that way, too, the Coll was a preparation for public life. All boys under a certain seniority constituted a labour pool, the common property of all the Bloods. When a Blood wanted his O.T.C. kit brushed and polished, or his boots cleaned, or his study "done out", or his tea made, he shouted. We all came running, and of course the Blood gave the work to the boy he most disliked. The kit-cleaning--it took hours, and then, when you had finished it, your own kit was still to do--was the most detested corvée. Shoe-cleaning was a nuisance not so much in itself as in its attendant circumstances. It came at an hour which was vital for a boy like me who, having won a scholarship, had been placed in a high form and could hardly, by all his best efforts, keep up with the work. Hence the success of one's whole day in Form might depend on the precious forty minutes between breakfast and Morning School, when one went over the set passages of translation with other boys in the same Form. This could be done only if one escaped being (F'ed) as a shoeblack. Not, of course, that it takes forty minutes to clean a pair of shoes. What takes the time is waiting in the queue of other (F's) in the "boot-hole" to get your turn at the brushes and blacking. The whole look of that cellar, the darkness, the smell, and (for most of the year) the freezing cold, are a vivid memory."
So you have to add a bit of slave labor to the calculation.
The Fs were called "Tarts" (as in another term which is probably now called a slur: https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/tart)
They needn't necessarily have been that way by inclination; 'gay for pay' is an old institution, and these kind of romantic associations in single-sex schools became part of the mythos around English public schools, and both parties often went on to heterosexual marriage and families.
Stephen Fry describes the experience from the other side, as it were, at the school he attended in the early 70s in his autobiography "Moab Is My Washpot": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moab_Is_My_Washpot
Oops, sorry, you are writing about the Fagging system, where the older boys made the younger boys act as servants. It's supposed to teach something-or-other, but it's fallen out of favour because it was abusive.
One account of turning the tables comes from the book "Tom Brown's Schooldays", where some of the younger boys stage their own kind of protest when asked to clean for the older boys they don't respect:
"“Better than East, though; for they ain't quite so sharp,” said Green, getting up and leaning his back against the mantelpiece. He wasn't a bad fellow, and couldn't help not being able to put down the unruly fifth form. His eye twinkled as he went on, “Did I ever tell you how the young vagabond sold me last half?”
“No; how?”
“Well, he never half cleaned my study out—only just stuck the candlesticks in the cupboard, and swept the crumbs on to the floor. So at last I was mortal angry, and had him up, and made him go through the whole performance under my eyes. The dust the young scamp made nearly choked me, and showed that he hadn't swept the carpet before. Well, when it was all finished, 'Now, young gentleman,' says I, 'mind, I expect this to be done every morning—floor swept, table-cloth taken off and shaken, and everything dusted.' 'Very well,' grunts he. Not a bit of it though. I was quite sure, in a day or two, that he never took the table-cloth off even. So I laid a trap for him. I tore up some paper, and put half a dozen bits on my table one night, and the cloth over them as usual. Next morning after breakfast up I came, pulled off the cloth, and, sure enough, there was the paper, which fluttered down on to the floor. I was in a towering rage. 'I've got you now,' thought I, and sent for him, while I got out my cane. Up he came as cool as you please, with his hands in his pockets. 'Didn't I tell you to shake my table-cloth every morning?' roared I. 'Yes,' says he. 'Did you do it this morning?' 'Yes.' 'You young liar! I put these pieces of paper on the table last night, and if you'd taken the table-cloth off you'd have seen them, so I'm going to give you a good licking.' Then my youngster takes one hand out of his pocket, and just stoops down and picks up two of the bits of paper, and holds them out to me. There was written on each, in great round text, 'Harry East, his mark.' The young rogue had found my trap out, taken away my paper, and put some of his there, every bit ear-marked. I'd a great mind to lick him for his impudence; but, after all, one has no right to be laying traps, so I didn't. Of course I was at his mercy till the end of the half, and in his weeks my study was so frowzy I couldn't sit in it.”
That's pretty funny! I've only read about the system from Lewis's and Roald Dahl's autobiographies. They both seem like they were too timid to try anything like that.
Man I haven't read that book in 40 years, and could not even tell you when I lost my copy of the book. What with this and the quotes from Conan Coyle, Lewis, Tolkien, et cetera at hand, I'm imagining you having to edge your way carefully about your house between towering stacks of leatherbound classics, first editions of "Emma," folios of The Bard, copies of "The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B" signed by Donleavy, and so forth.
If you want to argue that missing some months or even years of school is no big deal, I can understand that. If you want to argue that for many kids being home schooled, or even unschooled, is perfectly fine, then I'm still with you.
But let's go back to first principles. There's a strong correlation between literacy rates and availability and affordability of schooling. Countries with poor access to schools have poor literacy rates. It seems pretty indisputable to me that on a societal level schools are important.
I can't dispute that a lot of the arguments you make sound very convincing. But it still feels like someone trying to convince me that two plus two equals five. I might not be able to find any flaws in the arguments, I still know it clearly must be wrong.
Hmm, I managed to delete an important sentence while rearranging the order of arguments in that post.
The last two paragraphs were meant as an argument against Scott's underlying aversion to schools, and skepticism of the usefulness of schools. Not as a counter to the claims mentioned in the first paragraphs (which I by andarge agree with).
Also that’s just where literacy is taught. The sometimes illiterate parents don’t teach kids to read, and often don’t have time to do so. Ditto for math and science and literature and bureaucracy and politics and all sorts of things. Poor pre industrial parents see schools as a way for their children to advance and learn things they didn’t know.
Regarding this:
<blockquote>And partly it’s because a lot of the service being provided is (taking David’s description seriously) something like “your home environment sucks, we are going to make you spend time with normal people in a normal environment in the hopes that some of it rubs off on you”. Framed that way, it sounds pretty offensive, kind of adjacent to “you are unqualified to raise this kid, so please turn them over to the government”. If you openly asked parents in dysfunctional families to do this, they would probably revolt. But forcing everybody get your social service, even the people from functional families who don’t need it, is a pretty neat trick for looking less sinister.</blockquote>
I would reframe this slightly.
I think it is healthy for people to be exposed to an economically-diverse cross section of our community. To some extent it is inevitable that people who are born to wealthy, educated parents are more likely to grow up and join the elite who have outsize influence over how the world runs.
I think it is _really good_ for those people to have some exposure to kids who got less lucky in the parent lottery, in a controlled environment where they are somewhat equalized and can be friends, and where they're even likely to encounter some really smart kids from those backgrounds, as well as some where you can tell they're "smart but troubled" and develop some sympathy.
This is certainly not a _perfect_ method for instilling some kind of empathy for those who are less fortunate than you, but certainly for myself, having gone and hung out in the homes of other folks in my school who did not have two parents who'd earned graduate degrees helped me develop an instinct for "there but for the grace of G*d go I."
This is also a huge part of why I'm in favor of zoning reform. I _want_ the folks who do min-wage service jobs in my community to be able to live here and rub elbows with the lawyers and engineers and doctors, and I _especially_ want all of our kids in the same schools. It is very hard to have a functional democracy if everyone's silo'd off; we stop making arguments to appeal to each other, and just turn into tribes.
(And while I think one should at least take seriously an argument that maybe elites should just run stuff because they know more, and input from ignorant proles is irrelevant, I think those arguments fail in the end. As the possibly apocryphal Churchill quote goes, democracy is the worst system except for everything else we've tried.)
I’m conflicted. On the one hand I really like talking to people of all classes and varieties. Knowledge and stuff gained from that is important. Even if you’re the most disgusting racist elitist ever, the knowledge gained from those personal interactions is critical in doing your racist elitism, and if you’re the kindest altruist ever you still need to know what the people you want to help are like to help them. Knowledge is power and knowing is personal. On the other hand, I’m not convinced it will improve anything (Yarvin’s article mentioning Rosedale is evocative of what might happen) and I really liked having most or all my friends be smart people or people I had other things in common with when young (like, four to twelve) as opposed to normal people who I did not get along with and they didn’t either.
The academic and intellectual gains from having smart kids take smart classes and learn smart things also important. It seems good for there to be a class where 8 year olds learn calculus if there are 20 8yos in NY or LA who can (and there are, barely)
I am strongly in favor of having diversified classes, with students allowed to learn at different paces.
But that still is going to allow for some mixing across class boundaries, _as long as the school draws from different economic classes_. This is why the zoning reform thing is so important.
My gf for most of college had emigrated to America with her mother from behind the Iron Curtain, when she was five, and her mom started out working as a hotel maid, and eventually got an admin job; the daughter went on to be a straight-A student at an International Baccalaureate school, and then got a full ride at a top-ten university. It is hard to imagine that the version of her arriving in America today would be able to afford to live in the school district that had that IB high school.
Additionally, people aren't necessarily going to be on the "gifted and talented" track in every subject -- they might be in the top-tier math class, but a more average English class, or whatever. Plus they may do various electives. For me, that was choir/madrigals. I had a couple of friends in there who were intensely talented musicians, and who were clearly brilliant in their own way, but were not academically successful basically because they didn't _want_ to be, or at least they didn't want to be good in school more than they wanted to do whatever else it was they were doing. School was not bringing out the best in them. Ezra Klein has written about this -- he was _not_ a great student through high school, and even at UC Santa Cruz he wasn't some huge star. The academic world just was not structured in a way for him to succeed. But he's clearly an extremely sharp thinker and went on to find success and fame.
(Just to make sure it's clear: by diversified classes I mean a diversity _of classes_, where you group together the students by what they're currently learning; not the "heterogeneous class" idea where you intentionally mix people who need remedial help with people who are "above grade level" for the subject.)
I think the school closure issue has simply become a place where liberals who are uncomfortable with extreme COVID policies (Covid Doves) feel like/hope they can win a small victory. Liberals have always been vehement advocates for the importance of schools and I think a lot of well meaning people are simply trying to remind liberal Covid Hawks that there might be some things more important than trying to reduce Covid risk at the cost of everything else.
School closures and universal masking of asymptomatic children under the age of 12 are something that a surprising number of people have supported in the heat of the moment but will probably realize later on they were overreacting (kind of like the Iraq war and the Global War on Terror).
“It sure is lucky that this institution, created by long-dead Puritans to teach reading and arithmetic, coincidentally ended up having all of these totally different benefits, any one of which would be sufficient justification for keeping it around!”
This seems like a few logical fallacies bundled together.
1) I think Scott makes several good points about school. But I f you assume arguendo for a moment that school is good, just because it was invented by Puritans isn’t a counterargument. Baking bread was invented in antiquity, but if all leavenings disappeared for a year we could come up with many reasons it’s good to restart bread making, and “but it’s analogous to beating yourself with a stick for 8 hours” wouldn’t be a good argument.
2) Many things from Puritan times haven’t survived, but if one has, perhaps one reason might be its fitness to survive competition - if it was, at least partially, a good idea as opposed to their many bad ideas.
3) Most of all, school isn’t the same as in Puritan times. It’s evolved. Now, I think we have a long way to go to make school the best it can be, and so am not defending the way it is.
What I would primarily argue, however, is that having children get together with each other and knowledgeable adults from a young age, and focus on building their intellectual and social skills as opposed to working in fields, is an innovation that has stood the test of time and is still worthwhile, for most of not all children.
It sure is lucky that this number system, created by long dead Arabs, underpins modern technology! and this alphabet, created by long dead Phoenicians, underpins programming, books, and encodings of math and symbolic logic! To say nothing of how wood, a component of making tall plants go up, is something we make tables and houses out of AND burn for energy! Repurposing is something we do a lot of. And especially for institutions, which necessarily evolve and have functions added to them.
You are missing the argument. The argument is not "Puritans did it = bad". The argument is "We were told that the main reason for doing action A is that it would have positive benefit X. But the action A doesn't seem to actually cause positive benefit X. Now the pro-A people are stating that A has completely different, hard-to-measure benefits. This is suspicious, they are likely to be post-hook rationalizing.".
Re: the twitter comments, I think people have such strong feelings about education that it's difficult to mention it without opening Pandora' box. We only need the slightest prod to perform a complete brain dump. An innocuous question about the geology curriculum will quickly spiral into discussions on school as slavery vs panacea.
I do wonder why it inspires such passion. Maybe it's one of the few topics to properly split the community? I see about as many in the prosecution as the defense.
it seems to me everything to do with parenting is like this, because parenting is a frightening and overwhelming experience for so many people and one in which it's really hard for the parent to separate their needs from their child's needs.
Yep. Be interesting to see how my own opinions change once I have a kid.
There is an intense and emotional buy-in to school being extremely extremely important that a lot of people would feel very dumb if they were wrong.
"An innocuous question about the geology curriculum will quickly spiral into discussions on school as slavery vs panacea."
This is so true lol. Asking "how is x relevant to the specific field you're teaching" can turn into "how is x subject ACTUALLY going to help students" and finalizes as "how is school actually helping students. It's turtles all the way down.
I think that some people had bad school experiences and they were forced to do it. When people are forced to do unpleasant things, they feel resentment and strong feelings. Most of the time when something is really bad, people can avoid doing that thing as adults.
Hmmm... Explains the offense but not the defense. I guess all of our most intense emotional experiences (positive or negative) happen during school by default, and it's hard to split that association from our judgement?
I was one of those kids who unschooled from first grade through 12th, and then went to college. Admissions was non-trivial. This was due to a few causes:
1. My background was largely illegible to bureaucracy.
2. Bureaucracy was largely illegible to me.
3. I applied at the very last minute... I want to say I had my applications in around May-June of 2003, intending to enroll that fall.
I'd say that these 3 things probably carried equal weight. The general feedback I got from the admissions offices is that they were concerned I would not know how to handle a formal school environment. After all, this is something the other kids had been training for 12 years to handle -- it could be a pretty big shock to just walk in and have all that responsibility! A lot of schools made this into just a hard "no," by stating that I could not document that I met certain requirements like a foreign language credit. One school had a significantly higher SAT requirement for homeschoolers, and I didn't meet this. Another school just absolutely buried me in documentation requirements -- picture "The Waltz of Treachery," except with essays instead of fees.
I'd have done a lot better if I understood how to present the stuff I'd done on my own in school-speak. One place asked me for a high school transcript. I clarified that I did not go to high school, or any school, and therefore had no transcript. The admissions lady pulled out a transcript she had on her desk, listing course titles, terms and grades, and told me I needed something that looked like that. Stupidly, I again clarified, I don't HAVE that, because I didn't GO to school. Now that I've learned bureaucratese, I'm pretty sure that she was telling me to go home, write down the stuff I'd learned as if they were courses, and self-assess how well I had done in them, and then she could process it as if I were a normal high school student. Whoops.
The place I got into initially wanted to sign me up for a sort of limited enrollment program for dubious students, where I could only take a half-load of credits until I proved that I could get acceptable grades. After some brief lobbying of the admissions office, they waived that.
Based on my admissions experience and the repeated warnings of all the grown-ups, I expected my first year to be exhausting. And I did have to learn how to deal with school bureaucracy and social dynamics and stuff, and these things really did take me a couple semesters to get a firm grasp of. When I bought my school books, somehow I had this notion that I was expected to read all of them ASAP so that we could spend the semester discussing them, or that professors really wanted me to go above and beyond and make up all kinds of extra work for myself to show them how cool I thought their subject was. So really, most of the learning process for me was about learning how to chill the fuck out.
But for many of the traditional students, they'd clearly NEVER been expected to be responsible for themselves at any point in their lives up until then. They routinely made decisions that struck me as batshit fucking crazy.
I did NOT get a Ph.D. I enjoyed my time in school and got a B.S. in Applied Math, doubling in CS. I would never have found or succeeded at math outside the structured environment of a school. In fact, prior to college I was awful at math, and had to take remedial math classes when I got in. Having an external motivator to provide meaningful feedback, a good peer group, and a curriculum with steady milestones was invaluable. Frankly, for as much as I love math, I've never been able to learn that much about it since I graduated.
-- THE SEQUEL --
So I'm a parent now. My kid is in public school. I am not a fan. It's not as bad as I expected, but I had a low opinion of K-12 schools as a kid, and college only lowered it further. Kindergarten went great -- every single morning, my daughter was excited to wake up and go to school. First grade was a decline. By second grade, I knew we'd finally reached real school when she came home telling me "my teacher is LITERALLY Joseph Stalin."
The reading material is insanely boring. There's no way anyone would be interested in these books, because they're completely inoffensive to all major voting blocs and were written to tick off various learning objectives mandated by the district curriculum, which is itself based on Common Core. The math assignments are repetitive. I've seen them give kids the same sheet of 100 addition problems, every single day, for the entire school year.
In the beginning, she was excited to learn and tried excelling. She is highly motivated by attention from adults, and she kept telling me how proud her teacher was going to be of her. Unfortunately, the teacher has 27 other kids in that classroom to pay attention to, and my daughter quickly learned that the high-performers are the ones that need the LEAST attention. One time in second grade, she spent all night every night for a week getting as far as she could in the self-paced online math curriculum the school assigned. The teacher didn't say a word.
Since then, my kid hasn't given a shit about schoolwork. She's figured out that the only prize for doing your schoolwork is more schoolwork, and it never becomes more interesting, so she seems to put forth the bare minimum she can without the teacher getting involved; and then she does the maximum amount of socializing and goofing off without getting in trouble.
When the pandemic hit, I was pleased as punch to take her out of school. I'm divorced, and my ex-wife is not really convinced by this whole unschooling thing, but this gave me the perfect excuse. At first we tried the school district's online option, and having found it to be a disaster, we pulled her out completely.
This resulted in what struck me as a highly productive year in which she basically just did whatever the fuck she wanted. Every now and then, I'd assign her homework as punishment when she got in trouble. (I caught her lying, so I forced her to play through Papers, Please, which then served as the basis of a series of conversations about ethics, mostly led by her.) She decided to play Undertale all on her own. She spent hundreds of hours on Minecraft, and wound up setting up some sort of public house, and then wrote rules for it and recruited moderators to help her enforce them. She played Breath of the Wild, and binged on the complete corpus of Zelda lore. She was angry about Taylor's abusive ice cream machines before it was cool.
Sadly, she's back to school for 5th grade this coming year. She hates being home alone, and her mom is gone all day at the lab since she's working on getting her Ph.D. Besides, she does REALLY enjoy the other kids. Personally, I'm going to miss unschooling her, but I'm happy to send her back to school knowing that it's her choice. I worry that her mom may not agree to pull her back out if she gets frustrated again, but I'll cross that bridge when we get there.
From my vantage point now, it seems to me that schools do a LOT, it's just that they have nothing to do with education or assisting high-aptitude kids. But just off the top of my head, I can think of 8 functions that they serve, each of which will be valued by significant numbers of voters, and each of which has a higher priority than education:
1. A social program for kids in bad situations
2. A law enforcement program to arrest those kids when they're not cute enough to help anymore (this seems to be deprecated now, but school-to-prison pipelines are still a thing)
3. A daycare
4. A place for kids to learn to navigate social systems, and/or their place within those systems
5. A place for kids to learn how modern bureaucracy works
6. A community for conformist parents to feel like they're conforming correctly
7. A public employment program for women
8. An advertising program for colleges
What a great comment, thank you for taking the time to write it.
Interesting.
I was homeschooled for multiple years in elementary school, and I felt that the consequences were real and severe, but also mixed. I was bullied for years and it was clearly - then and now - because I simply didn't have any social skills. In other words, I was an awkward fucking teenager.
Homeschooling was trivially easy - it was a Catholic homeschooling curriculum and I'm not sure how rigorous it was even compared to public school (which is no great edifice.) I spent most of my time reading fiction books, which ended up being a *lot* more educational than the actual curriculum.
Academically, I think that's what saved me - I was reading 2-3 adult level books per week as a kid, and when I came back to school my English skills were miles ahead of my peers (as I lagged in many other subjects.)
I was "homeschooled" but really unschooled most of my childhood. I did some community college courses via dual enrollment in what would have been my high school year junior and senior years. I also did a bit of math via an online program called ALEKS where you just teach yourself and solve some problems in order to advance through algebra and geometry. The way my parents schooled me is theoretically giving me a lesson plan, me not actually doing anything all year but reading books and goofing off, and then a week before we'd have to report to our umbrella school, we have a huge fight and they'd for me to do a bunch of test prep and write a couple of essays. This continued until the last couple of years of what would be high school.
I ended up becoming a national merit scholar (SAT test prep book helped -- took about a week to prep). I also took AP tests in English, Bio, and Comp Sci and got 5s, again with test prep book help (about a week of prep per exam). To help with college I took a couple of SAT II subject tests and the ACT. Basically tests are stupidly easy with prep books because I hit 90th+ percentile on everything and even got a few 800s, and overall averaged 99th percentile on the SAT and ACT. I probably spent about two full years on schooling in my entire childhood, between the dual enrollment in community college and all the test prep, plus as stated a few online not-classes that just kind of gave me a little guidance for math. English just came from reading lots of fiction and spending lots of time online. I got a full ride at a public university (due to national merit scholar status) and graduated with honors 5 years later (out of laziness -- I hated the classes and so only took 12-hour semesters, and switched majors a bit). Now I'm in my late 20's and in senior management at a bank. School does not seem to have helped my employees or coworkers succeed in life or achieve greater satisfaction. But maybe I'm just the genetic ubermensch, idk.
I should note my parents fought constantly, separated once, went through multiple bankruptcies during my childhood, we got evicted once, we moved halfway across the country when I was 14 and I lost touch with all my in-person friends and non-parental family, my dad was an alcoholic who hit me, and my mom is a former cocaine addict diagnosed with clinical depression and anxiety and she hears an audible voice which she believes is god. One time the voice told her to abandon me with no money or place to stay, about 800 miles away from home, with no family or friends in the vicinity. She did what the voice told her told her for a few hours, before finally answering my frantic calls to her cell phone, and returning to get me only after I tearfully apologized for telling her I thought maybe evolution was true. So I'd challenge anyone who accused me of succeeding without school only due to a privileged upbringing, or due to the benefits of my parents involvement in my education or our socioeconomic status. We had very little and my parents were neither stable nor particularly healthy, and I actually had to pretend to them not to believe a variety of the things that I would need to regurgitate on various tests and papers, or else I'd get in very serious trouble. Honestly, I think I was basically exactly what the pro-mandatory schooling crowd conjures up in their mind as the lurid image of homeschooling gone wrong -- kids not doing any work, raised creationist/supernaturalist, bad home life, unhealthy parents, etc. But it turned out fine. Survivorship bias, I guess, but I knew a variety of other kids in kind of similar situations who also turned out fine. Seems pretty common in the homeschool community -- start out weird, turn out ok. Of all the other homeschooled kids I knew, literally none of them turned out to have problems academically or with lack of social understanding. Unless they were specifically homeschooled due to mental problems. It I doubt they'd have done any better in regular school.
I was homeschooled all through high school, as were all of my friends. I was pretty far from the unschooling side though. Most of us took at least a few college classes to show some grades from actual institutions and to get started on college credit. Most homeschoolers I know scored well above average on standardized tests, and quite a few scored in the 90-95th percentile range. The combination of a good gpa on college classes and very high standardized test scores led to scholarships, even full rides, for most of us, especially if we didn’t go to a prestigious school.
> I’m wondering whether people who knew my opinions elsewhere used them as context, or whether I failed to restrain myself and stick to the topic as well as I’d hoped.
FWIW, I am pro-school so I am biased, but IMO it was the latter; that is, your article came off as anti-school. The overall sentiment was, "school is terrible anyway, so missing a year of it could only be a good thing".
+1. Looking back over that post, things that come across as very anti-school (at least to me, with the caveat that I did already know you were generally negative on school):
"You can probably predict what side I’m on here." - first of all this already primes readers who know anything about you to bring in the rest of your views as context.
"Like everyone else, I took a year of Spanish in middle school; like everyone else who did that, the sum total of what I remember is “no hablo Espanol” - and even there I’m pretty sure I forgot a curly thing over at least one of the letters. [...] We learn lots of things in school. Then we forget everything except the things that our interests, jobs, and society give us constant exposure/practice to." - this very much comes across as "school is not actually useful"
"Even beyond this, school is repetitive." - to be fair I think you meant this as "the actually important stuff will be repeated later anyway so it's fine to miss it", but the way you talked about it still sounded pretty anti-school.
“I interpret this to mean that a lot of education involves cramming things into the heads of very young students who would be able to learn it very quickly anyway when they were older.”
“I think the evidence suggests that homework has minimal to no effect on learning. If time in school has the same effect as homework, that suggests it’s also pretty low. This also serves as a proof of concept that educators have no idea whether anything they do educates children or not, and there’s no particular reason to draw a connection between “you are turning your children’s time over to these people” and “your children are learning more”.”
All of these things are in the first third or so of the post; after that you do indeed do an admirable job sticking to your intended point. And I think it’s incorrect to cite your post with the comment “schools are terrible” since the evidence you cite in your post doesn’t show that! But it’s imo totally unsurprising that people would read your post as generally anti-school.
I was homeschooled, got a GED when I was almost 30 to apply for a job and that was the first time it popped up. As noted by Pepe in another comment, community college didn't require it and the shitty online universities I went to after that just assumed I had it because I had college transcripts, I think.
I think if there's any big hit in terms of "missing school" it's more likely to show up in the hard-to-test for "has learned to learn" category as opposed to the easily tested "has learned X" category. Have been homeschooled and around homeschoolers the majority of my life, I can confirm there's often really big gaps in what their parents are able to teach them (I know basically no geography or chemistry, for instance) but it doesn't seem to actually hold the homeschoolers back any. If they need something, they can just go get it - that's the learning to learn in action. If there's harm to be done here, it's to that facet.
As always, I maintain that school is absolutely terrible and worse than useless... for exceptionally gifted children with exceptionally gifted and dedicated parents.
For mediocre dullards like myself, schooling served more than just day-care; it taught me valuable skills that enabled me to have a semi-decent career.
I hate to go all "think of the children !" here; but please, before you move to abolish schools, think of the children with average IQs -- not just of the geniuses who (admittedly) constitute the majority of ACX readership.
The extremely negative experience the author (and some readers) seems to have had with school seems odd to me. School was boring sometimes, but just busywork? 'Review worksheets for material we had learned five times before'? This doesn't match my experience of school in India, or that of anybody I know. Could this be more a problem with the American school system (which seems very lax) specifically ?
Oh yeah, big time. American schools are pretty bad, though YMMV. For me personally, it depended strongly on the teacher. Some teachers were the busywork and rote memorization types; some were engaging, informative, and just plain interesting; and one guy was possibly mentally compromised.
American schools are extremely varied. I'm American and had the same reaction as you; we didn't do many worksheets in school or learning things five times. Many of the honor/AP classes I took in high school were more intellectually challenging than the courses I took at my (highly competitive) college.
American schools are some of the worst funded in the developed world, so that may be a factor
> American schools are some of the worst funded in the developed world, so that may be a factor
Someone lied to you, and you believed it.
You can put me in the "School is mostly public daycare" camp. Of course, its not only daycare, but daycare isn't only daycare either, so its not really a difference. They let you paint and run around and all that good stuff at daycare.
Also, IMO the most potentially valuable part of having mandatory schooling is wasted: Physical fitness. It should not be possible to be enrolled in a state school and be an unhealthy weight.
So the chubbies and anorexics are kicked out? Or the schools cure those kids?
You load 'em into the Utilitarian Ethical Calculus machine, which averages people, and then they're both right as rain. I mean...provided you loaded them in the right proportions.
There already is PE class. Just make it actually, you know, useful. And its perfectly acceptable for it to cut into the time we currently allot for other classes.
Yep. All for kids learning healthy exercise habits. I’m now assuming you meant your last sentence to be aspirational rather than literal:
“It should not be possible to be enrolled in a state school and be an unhealthy weight.”
Even assuming good faith efforts by educators and students some kids will still remain somewhat overweight or underweight.
Or am I still missing your point?
No you are on to the point. But I think you are vastly overrating the % of students that will be overweight if it was actually the primary goal of the organization that has custody over them for 8 hours a day.
Should we let the kids do whatever they want if they are physically fit? For example, if it's just daycare, should we let them play video games or watch TV or whatever provided they are healthy?
I dont think our outcomes would be all that different. I think starting by making 1/2 the school day free time would work pretty well. Then we could re-assess after that.
This should have been a comment on the last post, and hopefully no one has made this point yet, although I’ll be surprised if that’s the case.
In the studies showing that when schools had to close down for some period for test strikes or disasters, test scores got worse when they reopened, were they tracking the kids or the schools? In other words, can we rule out the hypothesis that when the school closed down, all the most engaged parents put their kids in other still-open schools, so when the school opened back up, it had lost those students? Presumably this would cause the school’s test scores to be worse, since the students with the most engaged parents would test better than those with less engaged parents.
Not about anything to do with Scott's thesis at all, but:
Is anyone else massively frustrated with both sides of Nate Silver vs Dr Ellie Murray for BOTH being completely irrelevant to the core question of "School or COVID?" Here's my analogy-parody:
Alice and Bob are in a car when the brakes fail just as they're heading towards a solid concrete obstacle.
Alice says: "Lets jump out of this car because people have been fine without cars before."
Bob responds: "Cars are great so I'm staying in the car."
The car is going 25 mph.
Alice unbuckles her seatbelt and jumps free, breaking her arm on the ground.
Bob wasn't wearing his seatbelt and suffers a concussion.
Who was right?
I'm missing the point of the analogy. What's the equivalent of the non-stupid plan "Stay in the car with your seatbelt buckled"?
I specifically didn't want to recommend an answer to the object level tradeoff of school vs COVID risk. Neither person is doing a risk/harm based analysis, but are instead contributing facts or opinions that are useless in the situation at hand.
The original post led to some interesting discussions with my friends. After some back, this came out as a proposal that was fairly acceptable to all:
1. The government allots some amount of money per school age child (5-18 or so)
2. The money follows the student to anyplace that will watch them from 8am-5pm. Leaving early and arriving late are fine. There are criteria and inspections for places that want to be able to get this money to ensure healthy ventilation, no abuse, etc. There are no criteria for content or activities.
2.a. This place can be home, perhaps with similar home inspection.
2.b. This place can be virtual, or online.
3. The money follows on a day to day basis; you could go to 5 places a week, they all get 1 day's worth of money.
4. All students must pass a basic test by age 12. Passing is demonstrating literacy, math, and some basic knowledge at or better than the median adult in your country.
4.a. If you don't pass by 12 you have to go to cram school, until you pass or age out.
5. (Most debated point) The student gets to choose where they go. The debate was around until when parents should choose, and at what age a student should choose for themself.
I see this as allowing for many forms of "keeping the kids off the streets", "letting parents have a job", "socialization", "equal opportunity for rich and poor", and so on. Of course it isn't perfect, but I'd love to see how folks here would steelman this proposal.
The obvious failure mode is that parents, especially poor parents, send their kids to whichever school gives the largest kickbacks. So your $20K/year of subsidy turns into $19K a year for the parents to spend on booze, $750/year in profit for the school and $250 a year for a room to keep the kid in.
If you solve the kickback problem then it's not a terrible plan, except then I have to wonder why you're only doing the test at age twelve. Surely if you accept the idea of a test at all then you'd have to say it was a better idea to do a test once a year or so in order to gauge progress.
Once you've got yearly tests, it starts looking more or less like an ordinary charter school system, and probably not an entirely bad idea, although I'd expect it to Goodhart its way into having its own issues related to those tests.
I think the thing about the original post -- and this post-script -- that rubs me the wrong way is what seems to me the unconscious "First World Problems" elitism that seems to infuse it. We see a lot of people with very smart parents, from pretty well-off backgrounds, who are themselves very smart ("...and I ended up with a PhD!") saying that the regular free public school experience was tedious, stultifying.
Well yeah. It's not *designed* for you. There's no *need* for it to be. You're smart. Your family has resources. You're going to do just fine even if there isn't any school at all -- you'll learn on your own, or some of the adults around you will teach you. Furthermore, you have the initiative and resources to seek out some better form of school if you want -- you can go enroll in a private school that does it any way you like. Waldorf, Quadrivium & Trivium, Great Books, Python boot camp -- whatever floats your boat.
But what about all the people on the *other* side of the bell curve? What about the half of the population with IQ 99 and below, and the multitudinous offspring of exhausted or indifferent or incompetent and poor parents? These are the people for whom the entire institution of free public education is mostly and properly designed, because these are the people for whom some kind of top-down externally designed educational experience is most likely to move their personal needle. Left to themselves, and their family, they're not going to creatively explore scripting Roblox games, or check out Gradshteyn & Ryzhik from the library and teach themselves calculus at age 12, they're going to sink into (or never escape) ignorance, superstition, tribalism, just like a thousand generations before them.
And the social costs of failing to educate *those* people to the best of their abilities well exceeds the social costs of failing to educate the smarty-pants to the best of their abilities. We have much more to lose from failing to prevent a potential future car mechanic turning into a drug pusher and wife-beater instead, than we do from failing to ensure a future middle-class CPA actually fills out his potential much better and founds a billion-dollar Wall Street hedge fund. Maybe writes a best-selling book about unschooling while he's at it.
So C. S. Lewis hated school. Big deal. The man was brilliant. It would take a rare and exceptional school, and set of teachers, to teach C. S. Lewis anything much more than he could learn on his own. Einstein also found school tedious, and indeed it would be hard to excite that mind with the amazing new thoughts of a teacher with 75% of the student's IQ.
But where are all the stories of the barrio and slum kids who went to school and say "God damn it, all they did was teach me discipline and patience and how to reliably add columns of numbers, and so while I am now a gainfully-employed cashier in a Costco, with my eye on assistant manager (because the school also taught me to show up on time), what REALLY chaps my hide is that I wasn't given the intellectual freedom to think unconventional thoughts and explore the possibility that I might be the next Ezra Pound (even though by every objective measure known to man that is a biochemical impossibility)."
I don't seem to read those stories. I don't hear about them. People on the left side of the bell curve, and from squalid and unfortunate family circumstances, are in my experience generally exceedingly grateful for free public school. They appreciate the basic discipline and predictability -- because their lives are *scarily* and not excitingly random. They appreciate being taught bog-standard skills, like reading and writing and basic math, slowly and methodically, even pedantically, because their other experience is being left behind after the smart kids get it -- and they're grateful they *aren't* left behind, in this case. It's true the smart kids are bored out of their minds hearing how to collect terms for the 55th time, but the unsmart kids don't much care, because they need it, and it's hard to see why they should care about the First World Problems of the talented and lucky. "I was so bored today!" isn't nearly as sad as "I just didn't get it today, I'm so stupid, maybe I should just drop out and help my cousin run his chop shop."
We don't really have a big problem in this country with smart and capable kids with good family resources not reaching the apex of their potential. I mean, it happens, I guess, and so maybe the cure for cancer is therefore 50 years away instead of 40. But we *do* have a significant problem with the not smart and not capable kids, with wretched and broken family resources, ending up dependent and disruptive, even criminal, and doing outsize damage to the social contract. Where do "low information voters" come from? People marching (under police protection!) for defunding the police? Where does the inability to even *comprehend* the idea of climate change come from? If you think the failure of the bottom 40% of the bell curve to grasp basic rationality is a real problem -- in no small part because in a republic each of them wields the exact same vote as a Nobel Prize winner -- then it's the public education of *those* people that should be optimized. If that means smarty pants kids from good families get bored a fair amount and grow up thinking geez the free public school is just kind of a dumb institution, you know? I can live with that pretty easily, for the same reason I can live with Bill Gates having a stiff chunk of the 150th $million he earns this year taxed away to provide free prenatal care for some IQ 90 migrant farm worker with a 5th grade education.
"We have much more to lose from failing to prevent a potential future car mechanic turning into a drug pusher and wife-beater instead, than we do from failing to ensure a future middle-class CPA actually fills out his potential much better and founds a billion-dollar Wall Street hedge fund. Maybe writes a best-selling book about unschooling while he's at it."
That sounds backwards. Outlier high achievers would outweigh lots of marginal cases (particularly since progressive taxation means high-earners subsidize everyone else). If the lack of school means more outlier negative cases, then they could cancel out.
I don't agree even a little bit. The social contract is a very fragile thing, a fact people often forget (until it comes apart). It takes a surprisingly small amount of crime, fraud, incivility, and general social dysfunction from antisocial attitude and behavior to cause a culture to corrode. Social trust declines, cooperation goes to shit, politics become vicious and zero-sum -- the list of evils is much, much greater than any hypothetical benefit from having one more brilliant inventor, and it affects everybody.
Great ideas are only operationally great if those seeds fall on fertile soil -- if the society has the social cohesion, trust levels, and support infrastructure necessary for the great idea to flourish in practical application. So if you have to choose between having a few more great ideas or a broad culture that is a bit better about welcoming and effectively exploiting great ideas -- is the latter that gives you the most bang for the buck.
It might be otherwise if we were not as social a species as we are -- if our success hinged almost entirely on individual effort, like it does for tigers or sharks. But as it happens we *are* a very social species, and generally our success, both collectively and individually, owes a very great deal to the quality of the group around us.
We've already got an enormous number of drug dealers, and plenty of domestic violence. A marginal addition doesn't seem to constitute that much of a difference.
You mean adding one antisocial* changes things less than adding one Einstein? No argument there. But it's not a fair comparison: it's so much easier to prevent a antisocial at the margin than create an Einstein (because you're working much closer to the human median) that for the same level of effort I suggest you can reduce the number of antisocial by 30 million or raise the number of Einsteins by 1, and then the comparison is a bit trickier.
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* I'm using this word loosely, in the colloquial sense of "social parasite, low-level criminal, mean and nasty selfish bastard that subtracts from the common weal" and not in its clinical psychology sense of a particular form of mental illness.
You were the one who first came up with the positive outlier so far from the median in your hypothetical.
I think there are things schools COULD do to reduce antisocial behavior, like schedule classes later in the day so kids can't commit lots of crimes before adults get off work, but they'd rather have the easier commutes. As Mark Kleiman noted, we don't actually evaluate & reward schools for that kind of effect.
I think you're mistaken about how far from the median the two cases lie. A briliant inventor is very, very rare. Petty criminality and socially dysfunctional behavior that ruins the local social fabric is far more common. That's why urban cores where people really don't want to live are relatively common.
I agree with you about the necessity of providing the right type of support for the not-smart-not-capable kids. We may disagree about what the right support is, though. The school-to-prison pipeline starts off with lots of years of school. Does it end in prison because of something the school actively does, or something the school does not do enough of or at all? I think both. Optimizing it really is important. One of the challenges of being a young person who is not academically inclined is that much of one's class at school really does do better than you do on most assignments, since the classes are grouped by age and not ability. So the shape of the day is Get up, show up, do things wrong, not really understand why, spend time with friends, eat, leave. Doing that daily prepares specifically for low-level crime, not career. No experiences of real success, no experiences of mastery (of anything), the only joy is social. Civics, logic, government, and life skills might be a very solid curriculum for kids with chaotic home lives who don't show academic promise. Kids who stumble trying to articulate their ideas get laughed at in school, they don't learn to argue or evaluate positions, they learn to mimic those around them, they learn that trying to think is an invitation to be humiliated.
They may indeed need something but public school as it is isn't saving enough of them.
No shit. The way it is actually implemented is a disgrace. The fact that education is routinely a defined-effort system instead of defined-outcome, so, as you say, people who need eight times as much time to master the same concept don't get it, and instead are cursed with 1/8 of mastery instead (which is almost as useless as 0/8 mastery), is incredibly brain-dead. We freely admit different people learn in different ways, but fail to see the enormous elephant in the room that even more than that they learn at different rates -- and completely fail to accomodate that brute fact in how we educate.
And then there is the one-size-fits-all everyone must be above average curriculum. We're *all* going to college to be doctors and lawyers, and so we're *all* going to be serious nerds and study algebra as young as possible, even if 20% of us don't have the mental wiring or even tendencies towards it in 7th grade, and end up thinking anything out of a book is humiliating mumbo jumbo. Wood shop, metal shop, home ec, work-study, apprenticeships have vanished in favor of AP Gov and probably AP Consumer Math for all I know. Instead of *encouraging* kids to get after-school jobs and get a little taste of the real world, start learning what they like and don't like about it, we think it's better that they sign up for extra math tutoring or be on Student Council.
I said we *should* design a public education system to remediate the unlucky fraction of the bottom half of the bell curve (those not irredeemably lost), but I would be the first to agree we're doing a terrible job of actually doing that.
Yes, the "Lake Wobegon Curriculum," very true!
Those after school jobs taught cooperation, among other things. There was something that needed to happen (put all the sodas in the case, clean the yogurt machine, etc) and making it happen was the job. Thinking was not the end goal. That, team sports, and orchestra - try, work together, do something. Some bosses were good, some were not so good.
Someone suggested a curriculum focusing on how to determine accuracy of online media; how government works; logic and critical thinking. That plus a healthy dose of internship hours/apprenticeship might really help some kids make use of their adolescence. Goal of participating in society at large rather than participating just in the school. I don't recall who said it but someone made the comparison that successful drug dealers often had strong sales skills and entrepreneurial spirit and that some ex-cons made great business owners. If we can someone value those skills as a society in a prosocial way.
*somehow
I think kids benefit from having jobs, but a lot of the jobs that high-school kids used to do are now populated by adults that got pushed down the job market by a variety of factors (old jobs now done by immigrants, increased sorting, lack of proper credentials to work in an office, more competitive economy). So a high-school kid wanting to work after school is *weird*. Both the supply *and* the demand have dried up.
I've made that same observation, and I get it. If *I* owned a fast-food franchise, I'd much rather hire the 30-year-old adult without precisely correct immigration papers than the pimply 15-year-old who might just not show up on Friday at 9am because he had a fight with his crush until 4am the previous night. It's strange that this happened, though. There were tons of low-earning unskilled adults when I was kid, too. It doesn't *seem* like the adult underclass has vastly swelled. So what happened? How come it used to be that all a 16-year-old boy needed to do to score a job was drive over to the mall and look for some Help Wanted signs in all the greasy spoons?
Why is school always the default choice for so many people as the solution to our social problems, when there isn't even that great of evidence it can solve the social problem of people being dumb, ignorant, etc? Seems to me that you'd get so much better ROI on solving most of those social ills if you don't yoke yourself to an already inflated and slow moving bureaucracy whose basis is in another field.
The solution to underclass disruption is known: Beat cops on foot or on bicycles. Most EU countries have higher police/capita in their major cities, and this is not cops in cruisers, its beat cops in bad areas. It works. And its cheaper than trying to "fix" schools, which aren't equipped to deal with such things anyways.
Well, the answer to your question is twofold: (1) people inherently prefer carrots to sticks, it makes them squirm to suggest the right answer to unfortunates with complex stories who don't behave ideally is to hit them with a big stick until they shape up, and (2) the feeling that we ought to provide some suggested *path* for people to improve themselves, or their families, as opposed to just hammering them when they don't. Sort of like if your kid is failing algebra, you can just ground his ass, or send him to bed without his supper, every time he brings home a D, or you can sit down with him and try to tutor him.
We also of course have empirical data that people who do finish school, or do better in school, have lower rates of criminality and dysfunction. You could very reasonably ask "correlation or causation, eh?" and that's a very valid question, but it's still data that tends to point people towards school as at least an important tool in the mix.
Finally, we are generally deeply egoistical as a species, and it pleases us to think we are all born tabula rasa, and can become President or win a Nobel Prize -- if we try hard enough, and our society supports us enough, and we learn enough when young. Certainly false at the extremes, but we like to believe it, because it's discouraging to believe a lot of our eventual success or failure is just wired in, or dependent on luck and circumstancs, and that a dedicated program of mental and skills improvement (which is what primary and secondary education is) won't change things that much.
That doesn't mean I disagree with you that a major component of social order is, well, direct efforts at maintaining social order, including the use of force to discourage people from being shitheads. I'm all in favor of beat cops -- on foot or bike, not rolling around in squad cars -- and in swift and efficient enforcement of "broken windows" lifestyle/behavior laws. I am, in fact. And I think these things do indeed work, and imagining the gangs are all going to vanish if we just put more money into MLK Middle School with three gang-related violent attacks a year within its halls is delusional.
But I would like to point out that if public schools are saddled with a sclerotic and navel-gazing bureaucracy, the criminal justice system, including police forces, is not much better. Anyone who has struggled to do the right thing for a young person caught up in the petty crime parole officer bureaucracy kind of situation has been ready any number of times to shriek in frustration and rage at the rigidity, indifference, and incompetence that runs through it.
This sort of reaction(to this post specifically and Scott's overall thoughts on mandatory schooling) has popped up a few times, and I find it less than well-supported by its proponents.
The first big place I diverge is that I would assert that predestination just does not exist. "Smart kids will do well no matter what" does not check out. There's a large assumption that the anecdotal homeschooled PhDs were ready to become PhDs before their education changed that's kind of just asserted without evidence. I would tend towards the(to me common sense) idea that the events that happen in people's lives affect those people. Of course, most of the instances of this argument agree with this principle... but only in the case of the (non-ACX reader/lower class/dumb/non-prospective PhD): they tend that traditional schooling is helpful for this group while not being harmful(or just not comparably harmful?) for the complementary group. This is certainly possible, but cited evidence remains sparse. I can't blame them too much for this: most of the people arguing this position are touting the non-educational benefits of school, which I can't imagine is a huge area of research given that it's, well, school.
Apologies if this is low-quality: I'm not much of a debater but this is important enough to me and a perspective that seems poorly represented here that I'd thought I'd give it a shot.
First of all, no apologies needed by me: the only kind of contrary response that is unwelcome are zero-content or dishonest, which of course yours is not, and perhaps more on point, it's my experience that the more facile and well-phrased the assertion (or counter-assertion), the more likely it is to represent unexamined conventional wisdom. In contrast genuinely original ideas and thoughts by their very nature tend to be much harder to put into a clear exposition. They're new -- they deviate from what everyone else is saying, and have polished up into fine language. So from my perspective, at least, I pay *more* attention to an awkwardly phrased point than to one that is smooth and polished, because it's much more likely to represent something original. None of this is germane to your main point, but your last paragraph triggered the thoughts and it occurred to me they may be worth saying.
My feeling is that in part you are getting at nature v. nurture. How much of one's scholastic success is in your DNA, and how much is due to how (and by whom) you were taught? This debate rages fiercely, and at any moment you can find (sometimes even from the same person!) paeans to both points of view.
It rages fiercely *within* the community of education professionals. We know, for example, that x% of freshman calculus students will fail. The percentage is remarkably stable, and remarkably resistant to change. What does this mean? Some will tell you: it means some people just don't have the DNA to get it, and what we should do is weed them out before they get to the class, send them down some alternate path, and cross off all calculus-dependent careers from their future. Others will say: it means we have been consistently teaching this wrong for all of history, and we should do something seriously radically different. There is empirical support for both: we already know IQ is a thing, and its correlation with success in all kinds of areas (particularly scholastic) is measureably strong. On the other hand, we also know that intense intervention with small groups, even those whom aptitude testing rates as low aptitude, will often succeed remarkably well, cf. Jamie Escalante, and we *have* been teaching things like calculus in pretty much the same way for centuries -- it's not like there is a flourishing market of alternate approaches, or ever has been. And both ideas can be subjected to criticism, both of the methods for gathering evidence on them, and for the conclusions drawn.
So personally I would say this is not one we can settle here, or anywhere, any time soon. We should probably act as if there is some truth to both, because the costs of assuming either is gospel and being wrong are too high.
Which means, in this context, we should (1) be open to the possibility that the specific critiques offered by Scott, and others, that the way public school works are dumb if not seriously counter-productive, but (2) retain a high bar of skepticism that anecdotal evidence of better approaches that are offered by narrow segments of those to be educated are going to generalize well to the vast range of human aptitude and nature.
As you can see, my post is about (2), and perhaps even more so my impression that Scott does not give sufficient attention to (2), doesn't emphasize sufficiently while saying "this is why I and people like me hated school" that for some other people (and particularly those with less aptitude and drive) the experience might have been very different indeed. As to why I think this matters more than any other neglect (and of course no one can be 100% sensitive to everyone in everything they say), it's because the people about whom we are talking, ipso facto those who do poorly in school, who have bad family situations, who test low in aptitude -- who society generally marks out as dumb losers -- are inherently less likely to have a voice that is heard in the debate. They are held in general contempt, because as much as we natter on about equality and not judging, America is still a highly Protestant country, and we do indeed, in fact, often mentally sort people out into inherent aptitude/quality/worth classes, and look down upon those in the lower tiers. I felt it was important to push back on their behalf, so to speak -- to say "hey, what about the kids who got Ds in algebraa, who struggled with long division, whose homelife was such that they didn't get breakfast before school 4 days out of 10 and came home to one parent punching the latest boyfriend/girlfriend in the face? Is school also a major drag on *their* aspirations? Would *their* life and prospects also be improved if we told their parents no need to send your kid to school, you can just follow this 56 page PDF guide for homeschooling and report for SAT testing in 12 years...?" Just because, as I said, I don't think there's going to be much of a voice for those people here, or any similar forum.
But if I gave the impression that I don't also believe in (1), then I did not write as clearly as I should have. I should like to emphasize that I do indeed believe in (1). Since I've spent significant portions of my career trying to teach (which is why I'm sensitive to the existence of the D students -- those are the ones who turn up in my office in tears), I'm well aware it doesn't seem to work as well as one might hope, and I've done my share of trying new things. It is, unfortunately, discouraging. It's very very hard to move individual needles, and even harder to move collective needles.
You would assert it does not check out... based on what? Admittedly, I come from a different perspective of thinking that childhood experiences don't matter all that much for childhood development beyond a very low minimum (see The Nurture Assumption, and Trivers' work on genetic conflict for why we shouldn't expect kids to be so moldable a priori).
Regarding the mandatory schooling being a century old point from twitter:
My understanding is that the main reason schooling became mandatory was industrialization. We needed fewer farmers and more factory workers. Farmers don't need as much education as factory workers.
These days our economy seems to be shifting more from manufacturing towards the online services. This makes me wonder if we need a different kind of schooling that teaches kids things like:
* Vetting and processing online information
* How to create a website or a million other Internet related tasks that most people cannot do.
* How to avoid algorithmic rabbit holes
* Rationality and cognitive biases (of course).
Factory workers (especially 19th century factory workers) don't need a lot of education either. While it's tempting to try to ascribe a sinister motive to everything, it really does look like mandatory schooling came from a genuine desire to improve the lives of the lower classes.
another angle - if you spend a century making society dependent on a specific institution, then suddenly take it way, there will be negative consequences even if the institution is defective.
One other point about C.S. Lewis, however atypical he may be: In later life, he credited that private tutor for almost all of his real education. The man taught Lewis how to think, and that was as valuable to him in the long run as all the university prep work they went through day after day.
It's funny because the tweet of "well, our great-grandparents did well without school" is essentially a totalizing own of the entire school system. Yeah, our great-grandparents didn't have school, but the lives they lived weren't totally awful and MAYBE had a few good points over our own modern lives. A lot of education minded libs who are pushing for school closures will probably go back to saying that school is the most important thing in a child's life, which is the really infuriating thing to me.
There is historical evidence that generations can have lifelong struggles after calamities: babies born during the 1918 pandemic had less schooling and lower career earnings than babies born before and after. School graduates entering the workforce during recessions have had less successful careers than others. None of these cases point a finger directly at public schooling. Maybe the pandemic babies had unhealthy parents at birth, and maybe the recession graduates struggled because they started their careers from a lower run on the ladder. It wouldn't surprise me with our current societal upheaval if there is some group that will face a subtle lifelong struggle that we'll only notice decades later.
There might be but it wouldn't come from missing school in my view. If we found that kids who went through COVID-19 are hypersensitive to germs 20 years from now, that would make sense to me. Who knows
School wasn't just useless for me, it damaged my curiosity. I used to really enjoy reading, but now I have so many bad memories involving books that I mostly stopped, and although I've been recovering its been slow.
Also, even without the suffering, I had to spend so much time on bullshit that I wasn't able to follow up on things I found interesting. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qkfqiFHzmG36KqAhD/the-homework-assignment-incentives-and-why-it-s-now-so
I think the best way to deal with that would be to read books again and learn that they can be interesting and the experience of reading can be okay.
This might be relevant: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Toxic_memory
I have been
Good to hear
C. S. Lewis went to boarding school. This is an extreme version of the institutionalization experienced at a five day school. I also went to boarding school and always am ready to testify to the terrors of having one's entire experience to reality channeled by one institution. But boarding school is an extreme example, and schooling is a sliding scale between boarding school and unschooling. Different five day schools exercise different levels of control. I work at a three day school which has more control and accountability than a homeschool or co-op, but less controlling than a five day school. There are options here outside this stark thinking. And schools are only going to be educational if the teachers are decent.
Just as schooling comes in different levels of institutionalization, different students have different needs for structure, and different levels of "home resources" for education (read: cultural poverty). I definitely needed school in order to learn in any type of structured, cumulative manner, and relied upon the institutions Kindergarten through college to hold me accountable. I think **clearly** most students (over 55%) are like this.
Teachers and administrators have seen some heavy hits this past year. My father-in-law's public high school had around a 40% failure rate (meaning 40% of students failed at least one class). In one friend's district the AP Macro test failure rate for in-person vs distance learners was 27% vs 81%. While many students didn't even bother to take the AP test, nationwide 37% of students received 1%, the greatest major failure rate in its history. Around the country consensus seems to be that the failure rate was somewhere around 22%, up from 11%. But at the same time the number of homeschoolers doubled to around 12%, which means the failure rate was even worse! Now you might be optimistic that in two years this will all shake out... but really? Are you so sure? Note also that teachers were streamlining classes and making it easier to pass, as much as they could (in good conscience and bad conscience, too.)
Even in a very pure Caplanian signalling model of education, this great increase in failure rates is tragedy for all those students. You might think the rebound will occur as soon as those nonconscientious students get the physical systems back in place which force them to pass through school with Cs and Ds, but I would not be so sure that those habits will return immediately. It could be several years before the old expectations and habits return. My bet is at least four years of lower graduation rates than in Spring 2019.
In a bullish Raj Chetty model, we can expect today's second and third graders to have great disparity within their cohort in twenty years based on whether they had 'good' or 'bad' pandemic schooling. In any case, if you are looking to higher students, find out how well they did during the pandemic and that will tell you a lot about their conscientiousness.
For myself, I think whatever disparities exist already between schools, students, and families are exacerbated by school cancellation. The mediocre become wretched, and the good suddenly look great. A student who is reliant upon a good school for their education is screwed by closures. A student who is not reliant, is not screwed. What percent of students do you think belong to the possible categories here?
The way Scott talks about worksheets makes me suspect he might underestimate the difference a good school can make for many students compared to an average or poor one. I went to public elementary school in an upper-middle-class neighborhood and then switched to a non-Montessori private school. I’ve also heard from friends who switched to my private school after a longer time in public school. Our public schools seemed to have way too many worksheets and restrict the freedom of students unnecessarily. The private school gave even elementary schoolers more freedom of movement. It also gave much more interesting assignments, eg letting us write fictional stories about whatever we wanted in class instead of assigning five-paragraph essays. The middle and high school teachers had a lot of discretion over the content of their classes and would also combine topics in interesting ways like teaching about the First Amendment by showing how it has been violated in recent Chinese history. There was also a great variety of choice in classes in high school. The last 2 years of high school we could take English and history courses structured like college seminars. Basically many more students might like school in an environment with more subject choice, interesting classes, and freedom. Some students still wouldn’t be well served even by a great school, but the question becomes how to justify funding school through taxes if it isn’t required for everyone.
It's worth noting in this context that US schools are some of the worst funded in the developed world. And the US also has much greater interest in homeschooling etc. So it may just be that it's a response to US schools not being very good, not the inherent nature of the institution
What countries do you consider the developed world? US per-pupil spending on both elementary and secondary education is much higher than the OECD average: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/020915/what-country-spends-most-education.asp
However, as I learned from Freddie deBoer, it's not clear that more educational spending causes better outcomes: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/is-the-conventional-wisdom-on-educational
Its more worth noting that this is totally untrue. US schools are incredibly well funded and race-adjusted PISA scores show we do fine in whatever is actually measurable.
If school really _is_ as bad as Scott thinks, then I guess it means we can be happy about the Taliban taking back Afghanistan. Just think of all the girls who will be freed from school attendance!
I don't think this is a fair comparison. In an alternative world in which women did not go to school and the Taliban took over and forced women to go to school, would it be fair to say you are happy the Taliban has taken over? I don't think so. And the situation in Afghanistan is so complicated and bad that analogizing isn't very useful, I feel.
He must also have been pro Holocaust - how kind of the nazis to keep the Jews out of school! (that’s kinda how your comment reads...)
Honestly you could make this a strong argument - poor Afghans or even moderately well off Afghans don’t have the resources or knowledge to homeschool their children in Perl. But this just sounds hostile and like the above. It seems the taliban are also allowing women to be educated a bit
I remember exactly where I heard this argument (maybe TheZvi?), but I am interesting in hearing what you think of it:
If you think that the main benefit of school is as daycare / interacting with normal adults / learning how to act in a (particular type of) job, wouldn't these goals be better served by giving children jobs?
The laws against child labor come from an age when jobs were mostly dangerous industrial work - or farming, which wasn't covered by this law. This isn't true anymore. There are many jobs that could be done by older children. This is better than daycare - it also provides extra income. This is probably neutral for interacting with normal adults. This is better at preparing children for "the workplace".
The laws against child labor have little to do with the decline in employment among older children. Which is very real: when I was 16 essentially all my (male) friends were employed part-time. It was normal and highly expected. When my children were 16, not a one of them or their peers were employed, and if they had been, it would've been frowned upon by our social class. "What? Your kid is stacking canned pineapple at the supermarket instead of doing Model UN or taking AP Government? What kind of parent are you?!"
I am baffled by how this change in attitude occured, but there it is. When I was a kid in the Pleistocene, parents and schoolteachers were all solidly supportive of working (part-time) in 10th grade and above. It was understood to give you basic life experience that could not be acquired in the classroom, and which would serve you well. Today that attitude appears as quaint as corsets, and I can't say I have any strong clue why.
I think that education is signaling and the signal has had to get stronger because competition is more fierce. People need higher level of degrees or degrees from better universities to differentiate themselves more. Those who work are unable to take as many AP classes. If you are really smart, it might be better to invest in the AP classes than a job. The job is more akin to real life but you fall behind in the signaling market. Just a possible theory.
Education is a costly signal of being at least middle-class. By wasting a lot of time we signal that we can afford to waste a lot of time, unlike those kids from poor families who need to start making money as soon as (or before) they are 18.
It's not that we can afford to waste time but that we are intelligent, conscientious and conformist.
And we conform to our middle-class relatives (as opposed to someone just as conformist, who conforms to their working-class relatives instead).
How much of that is your social group being different than that of your parents? And your kids' school?
Working 16-18 was the norm at my HS, but not at basically anyone else in my social circle. Coincidentally, they all went to much more affluent high schools
There is some chance, and I have thought about that. I personally was wealthier than my parents were when I was the same age as my kids. So that argues a difference.
But on the other hand, my parents believed strongly that my getting a superior education was my ticket to a better life, so with great effort they put me in the very best schools they could -- where the students with whom I rubbed elbows were the offspring of wealthier families. (Not Bill Gates rich, just upper middle class.) And those students, as I said, were all employed just like me.
I'm certainly willing to believe the working tradition is alive and well in families for which admission to Penn or Berkeley is not thought to be in the cards. But my impression is still that 45 years ago, when I was in high school, it was stronger among the middle and upper class than it is now. That is consistent with general observations I've read that the upper and upper middle classes have diverged considerably over the past half century from the lower middle and lower class -- in terms of wealth, education, and attitudes. America in 2021 feels to me personally like a far more divided and fractious nation than it did in 1981.
It is also better socialization, more akin to the "real world", provides job specific training, allows children to get accustomed to the work environment and gets them money that they can accumulate.
Excellent point.
I'm pretty sure that it gets their *parents* money that they can accumulate. Which is just one of many deeply perverse incentives that are likely to turn institutionalized child labor into something very different than the enriching experience you imagine it to be. We can sort of see this if we look at the actual history of institutionalized child labor.
In adult labor, the incentives other people might have to do things to the detriment of the laborer are countered by the laborer's ability to assess his own interests and say "this is a raw deal, I'm out of here".
Children make for terrible employees so would not be worth most employers hiring, even if it was legal. Given the huge amount of oversight they'd need. You could come up with schemes where you subsidised employers to employ them, covering the costs of it even when it's not economically productive, but at that point you're basically doing schools again, so they might as well be teaching them achoom type things
I believe that Tyler Cowen's point against Dr. Ellie wasn't that he believed education to be particularly important. The problem of public health experts he speaks of is that these experts are unable to think in terms of balancing trade offs or any sort of cost-benefit analysis, an oft-repeated point.
Having actually done this cost-benefit analysis (and not being a public health expert), this criticism definitely wouldn't apply to your position.
This is a great point. Another point to add to this. I made a video about this. When experts give recommendations about actions that people should take, the moral beliefs that the experts have are influencing their recommendations. If you have different moral beliefs, you might think the experts are making a mistake on the moral front while they are accurately viewing the empirical situation. But when you question the normative recommendations, you look like you are criticizing the experts on their positive beliefs.
This. If you look at Cowen's links, he links the ridiculous Maslow's hierarchy tweet first and the school one second. I take it he thinks the second to be another example of her thinking in the black and white terms she displayed in the first tweet.
A guess for the training riddle:
The performance of many elite athletes is primarily limited by injury risk.
Most people can just train more to get better. But as you get better, there are diminishing returns to training. Not because the training itself gets less effective, but because you have to carefully limit yourself to prevent injuries. Someone who didn't have to worry about injuries (say they have healing factor) could train all day every day and improve much more quickly than real people.
So when a world-class athlete misses a year of training, it just requires effort to get back to close to where they were. Trying to push beyond that means balancing effort and injury risk.
myparents decided not to homeschool me or have me miss school. so instead they sent me to school for 6 hours a day until i was 18... and now i have a phd.
I wonder how well any sort of home/un-schooling would scale with regards to college admissions- how many of the people with success stories here benefit from being considered "unique"/"diverse" in the admissions process? My impression is that sort of unquantifiable factor is a big positive for admission- if there were a large number of people in that boat such that it was no longer rare, would they have the same sort of success? I guess what I'm thinking is maybe home/un-schoolers get something equivalent to affirmative action, where deficiencies are overlooked in favor of other qualities.
My guess is the opposite. My impression was that the main problem with college admissions for home schooled kids was that the college admissions officers didn't know how to deal with them, how to tell how able they were. If there were many more home schooled kids, the admissions officers would be more likely to have developed appropriate procedures.
I am mostly with Scott on "why go to school if you forget everything anyway" side, but given that long division was mentioned, I've tried to remember how to do it. My brain returned nothing. It was completely blank. Then I've written two random numbers on a paper and tried to divide them. Et voila, it worked! It's interesting that such a intellectually complex activity can still be as automatic and not conscious as riding a bicycle. And it makes me wonder how much of what I learned in school and though to have forgotten is still there in some form.
Psychiatry is one field where the knowledge base isn't studied until much further along in school. Anatomy and physiology, pharmacy, human behavior, assessment and diagnosis, all of that isn't directly taught before college in very many (any?) places. So to the extent that K-12 was building a base for those skills, it would have mattered for Scott's career, but maybe the base for those things is knowing how to memorize and having skills in reading people. Those are tangential to the curriculum in K-12. So when a psychiatrist and writer says that school did not directly impart very many skills he uses daily, that makes sense. For most of human history medics learned by apprenticeship.
Thanks for this. I certainly understand the argument with the baseball bat. Scott's right that we shouldn't look for squirrelly excuses if the main argument doesn't work.
So I'd like to find a way to make the main argument work, and I think I have it. In the USA, in some states, education is only mandatory up to age 16. It must be possible to do some kind of intra- or inter-state study on 18 year olds to see if those who dropped out are better at stuff, or those who didn't drop out (imposing a bunch of socioeconomic controls as necessary).
I stand by the suggestion that education does lots more for you than test scores. But I'm sure it's good for test scores as well, and I would think this is the way to prove it.
I actually think it is a *very bad* thing that schools can identify kids “with ADHD” and “treat” them with Ritalin. ADHD is clearly local to modern life and schooling and technology, and doesn’t exist in agricultural or HG populations. “Kids don’t want to pay attention in school, so we give them low doses of drugs that make you hyper motivated to do anything, the ones that at the extreme make you re arrange the dust on your floor for eight hours straight, and then they’re interested” is more a demonstration of how awful school is than “treating ADHD”. That the drug makes the kids work better in school is about how the modern school (AND life in general) fails these people, not how it helps them.
The drugs do facially help people function in those circumstances, but in a general sense that’s like how (hyperbole!) an antipsychotic might help someone function in a mental hospital even if it’s generally bad for them.
This seems to contradict the reported experience of lots of people who were diagnosed with ADHD as adults and found that treatment significantly improved their quality of life and wished they'd had it sooner
> The drugs do facially help people function in those circumstances, but in a general sense that’s like how (hyperbole!) an antipsychotic might help someone function in a mental hospital even if it’s generally bad for them.
School shapes development and growth, and the criticism is about the entire modern life, of which school is both a driving force behind and a terrible example of.
Compare to say, put a normal ish but easily disturbed person in a mental hospital where a transgender person in your sex segregated area grabs your tits, or where you have to interact with druggies and schizos, and one might snap from that and “benefit” from the antipsychotic behaviorally.
It’s definitely an uncommon position
I feel that your "hitting yourself on the head with a bat"-answer is dodging the object-level concerns expressed by the comments.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe historically one of the reasons for the development of (mandatory) schooling has been (state) indoctrination with the values of civilization, christianity, nationalism, modernity, etc. Which is, on the whole, good, I think. Perhaps smart, nice and worldly parents could give their kids something better than the institutions would cook up. But so many couldn't.
For example, my girlfriend is from a poor Islamic immigrant family. If not for school, she would not have got in touch with the world. If not for forced university living arrangements, she would have stayed home until being wed off to one of her cousins in the country she's from.
I am Dutch, and the reason many Dutch people are opposed to homeschooling (and they limited options for it in France recently) is that we're dealing with ~10% of our children growing up within a religion that supresses homosexuality, teaches girls to be submissive, in which arranged marriage is the norm (do americans even know this? Same thing goes, to a lesser degree, for cousin marriage. Its hidden from the outside world unless you know them well.) and which is generally hostile to many facets of Dutch society. There is something of a parralel society. Maybe it's my European lack of libertarianism, but I and most of my countrymen are in favour of some mild domestic neoconservatism, in which we actively break open these segregated communities, forcibly mix population groups in housing, schools, etc and expose children to the variety of Dutch society. Homeschooling is a tool for self-segregation, and giving space to it would be counterproductive.
Basically same thing in Sweden - homeschooling is illegal, and anyway it's only religious crazies who seem to want it (and since we for some insane reason do allow religious schools, the religious crazies can just send their kids there to get indoctrinated instead).
Counterpoint: I am Belgian and majority of children go to Catholic school organized by the church, and we are now one of the most atheist countries in the world, without a bible belt. Our state has had historically no say in what was taught at non-state schools here (even the subsidized ones), so this has certainly not come to pass due to state indoctrination. I think the crucial thing is for schools to teach knowledge (math, language, ...) rather than imposing its values. I am fine with home-schooling as long as children show that they actually learn something by scoring well on exams. The type of Muslim parents that can teach their children mathematics are not the type we have problems with i think, whereas forcing those parents to sent their children to a hyper-liberal school would be counterproductive.
I agree - if you could somehow prove that you would be a capable teacher, some of the problems with dysfunctional/lower class families would go away.
However, your comments makes me realize: if all the smart, upper-middle class kids do homeschooling, and we would leave public school to the working classes so to say, would that not be also a shame?
I am pretty sure I taught many of my friends from "simpler" backgrounds things about books, culture, etc. I defended liberal norms in classroom debates. If I would self-segregate, they would have missed out on some things. Simultaneously, my friends taught me many things about the world that I would have not got from the relatively protected and privileged environment I grew up in. When I went to university, I encountered many kids who had gone to international schools. Not homeschooling, but still a strongly self-segregated upper class environment. These people by and large fitted the caricature that conservatives make of "disconnected lib elites", being obnoxiously woke, having no functional mental model of working class/average people, seeing average persons as no better than peasants, being completely unaware of potential resentment against their social class.
I think I could have easily ended up that way, and avoided that by going to ordinary schools full of immigrants, farmer kids etc, going to an ordinary football team, etc. I was bullied severely, in fact, so it was not all easy for me. But that toughened me up to some degree, I think. Being beaten up by a group of Morrocan kids makes you emphatize with the populist right, having your girlfriend being spit at and called racist slurs makes you emphatize with ethnic minorities, all things you would encounter less had I just lived in an upper-middle class bubble.
I am conflicted about this. Not necessarily about homeschooling which will always be a niche thing i think, but about segregation. I think a lot of Scott's frustration with school is due to a lack of sorting of students according to learning ability. My impression is that American school's don't really sort students the way European schools do, especially in Flanders/Belgium. My brother went to a trade school where he learnt woodworking and almost no theoretical/classical school stuff. I went to a general education school with lots of math and Latin. If you would have put me and my brother in the same class and teached us to our average ability it would have been extremely frustrating for both of us.
Yeah, maybe the way current Dutch/Belgian schools are doing it is actually a right balance of segregation, which explains both why we would see less problems with schooling as it is, but also the dangers of more segregation?
Yeah maybe, though i get the impression that the Americans put a great deal of effort in not having segregated high schools, but don't really get a less segregated society. Difficult to compare though.
Even supposedly egalitarian Sweden sorts high-school students into different programmes, many of them directed at a particular line of practical work. You can for instance leave the high-school Healthcare programme with a formal assistant nurse qualification.
"However, your comments makes me realize: if all the smart, upper-middle class kids do homeschooling, and we would leave public school to the working classes so to say, would that not be also a shame?"
This is basically a guarantee for reduced funding and even worse public schools, when the middle-class doesn't have to be interested any longer.
In horrible families (and cultures), homeschooling is a bad thing.
I wish we had some other tool to effectively address the horrible families (and cultures), so that the question of school vs homeschooling could be about, you know, education.
I think "horrible" is a sufficient but not necessary term here. Both of the people I mentioned in my other reply in this thread disagree with the conservative Christianity with which they were raised, but I don't think they'd describe their families as horrible, and home schooling was bad for both of them.
I wish we had that tool too. Unfortunately, I dont see it, and we might need all levers we can pull to prevent our societies from completely falling apart. I already explained the issues regarding Islam in my country (my girlfriend refuses to publicly speak out about her experiences out of fear of being shot, many such cases), but we have a medium-sized far-right political party that thinks corona is a jewish plot and openly aims at full self-segregation: own currency, own schools, digital arrangement to only buy groceries etc from other party members. Meanwhile the hippie girls I know are descending into full antivaxx astrologism. Maybe all this is more normal in a traditionally multicultural country as the US, but I am kind of done with all these independent communities and their nonsense, and am more and more attracted to the assertive liberalism of someone like Macron.
I agree with you almost completely, but...
...those right wing people and the hippies, I guess most of them were *not* homeschooled, right? So the education didn't really help much.
But of course, there is a risk that making homeschooling available and simple, if it becomes popular with such groups of people, the insanity could jump to even *higher* levels, because such parents could isolate their kids from exposure to the mainstream thought.
So perhaps we should keep the schools as the best existing implementation of the melting pot... and perhaps create a parallel system for, you know, providing high quality knowledge to kids during weekends. Like the religious people have religious Sunday schools, perhaps we should create a parallel system of scientific Sunday schools. (Just kidding, kind of.)
In the US, we don't have exactly the same situation, but we do have one that's somewhat analogous. Many conservative Christians choose to home school their kids and do a poor job of educating them (see "Educated" by Tara Westover for an extreme example). Anecdotally, I know two people who were home schooled by their conservative Christian moms. Though they ended up living more secular/liberal lifestyles than their parents would've preferred, their moms didn't know enough math to give them proper foundations before they went to college. One taught herself enough math to get a math-intensive graduate degree, though I think she could've gone even farther with a stronger K-12 math background. The other dropped out of a technical bachelor's degree program because he couldn't pass calculus.
If that is your problem, I think the school system is a very poor, and very authoritarian, tool for solving the problem of a "parallel society".
What do you think would be better tools? "Not allowing parents to lock up their children" seems quite fit, no?
C.S.Lewis's experience of a British boarding school in the early twentieth century has very little to do with the experience of ordinary schools 100 years later. Even in the late twentieth century, some British boarding schools had widespread, institutionalised bullying and abuse, as discussed in this article published on Sunday: https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/19529579.neil-mackays-big-read-boarding-school-survivors-reveal-horrific-stories-childhood-abuse-metoo-moment/
That kind of abuse is scarcely relevant to the question whether a modern-day classroom provides the best way for kids to learn.
Bringing forth "hitting yourself on the head with a baseball bat eight hours a day" as response to comments "school is important in other ways" sounds like missing the original point. The compulsory government-regulated K-12 school is not the Puritan institution for teaching reading and arithmetic, nor "kids gets exposed to things they otherwise would not" is a post hoc rationalization that came from nowhere; it is a Prussian invention called "Humboldtian education" and its explicit purpose is to government organize school that socializes all people of all ways of life to be productive members of the same society by virtue of ensuring they all the similar knowledge and framework looking at it. It is kinda integral component how a 19th-20th century nation state manages to be a cohesive nation state.
Obviously someone libertarian-adjacent would oppose such purpose, but it'd be better to be explicit about it.
Some rhoughts here though not all directly engaging with this piece:
- The choice between wasting time in a unchallenging classroom and doing interesting things on your own seem a false dichotomy to me. Lack of sorting according to learning abililty in the American school system seems to be part of the underlying issue here. Learning 5 times the same thing in class and not being chalenged is quite alien to my experience in a Belgian/Flemish school, which traditionally has had a very aggressive sorting.
- The thing you advocate for in these articles seems somewhat related to "inquirey-based learning". There is quite some research showing that this is less effective than "direct instruction", which is more similar to classical schooling.
- More engaging with your article here: Hitting yourself with a bat argument ignores the historical effect of the schooling system in moving from a farming/industrial economy into a knowledge-based/service economy. If your (grand)parents are very adamant for you to go to school, maybe this is because schooling did make a large difference in their lives. My (grand)parents where (very) adamant for me to learn french, which was essential in historically francophone dominated Belgium, less so today. I think the schooling issue is more a case of something historically very effective becoming less effective over time. Home-schooling is maybe a viable alternative now (for part of society/the world), but i would argue this is thanks to historical schooling.
I agree with so much of what Scott says, but he seems to think that "school" consists of filling in piles of "worksheets." It often does, but it need not be like that. His parents (like mine) did not send him merely to "school," but to a bad school which wasted his youthful life.
You can to some extent tell what kids would do without school by observing what they do when out of school or when they have free time at school. What they mostly do these days is surf the net, socialize, and then surf the net some more. Then they send text messages and read text messages. Repeat. The athletic ones do a sport, and the artistic ones do their art, often with the involvement of a teacher.
Of course there are exceptions, but if you think the average American kid is spending summers and weekends creatively, I think you are mistaken. They are down in the basement playing video games (and, often, looking at porn).
It's not perhaps as hopelessly grim as that, but the generation that had to make its own fun is not relevant any longer, because in idle hours they don't have to make their own fun.
"The points above argued that closing school might increase inequality (I think all the cool people are calling it “inequity” these days, but I am not that cool)."
I realize this isn't a main point of your post (as evidenced by the parentheses), but in my ideal world where I could control what words people use to describe things, "inequity" is different from "inequality." I try to use "inequity" as "unfairness" and "equity"* as "fairness." To me, some "inequality" might be "inequity," but not all, and things can be "equal" without being "equitable."
I realize, of course, that people are going to use the words in the way they're going to use them, regardless of whether I approve. But I think there's a potentially useful distinction there.
*Unless we're talking about the value one has accumulated in their real property from mortgage payments....
> I try to use "inequity" as "unfairness" and "equity"* as "fairness."
What's wrong with just using fairness and unfairness directly?
Well....erm....nothing....
I should've put a smiley face there. There really is nothing wrong with using those words. It's certainly clearer than "equity."
Scott used my comment to argue that adults overvalue school experiences. This may be the case, but when I mention kids wasting away at home during the pandemic it has more to do with the home environment vs the school environment. As a middle-class family, with both parents working, my home environment is actually pretty boring. It doesn’t matter that I buy enriching toys, or have a nicely decorated and spacious house with a pleasant view. My kids want a social scene. They want to do art and music with other kids. They want to gossip and make friends and fight about stupid stuff. School is chalk full of wasted time and adults talking at kids about respect and school spirit and lining up. But school is still something they need because both parents are working. If I didn’t work, I could devote my life to curating an awesome environment for kids. Driving them to and from play dates and paying for music lessons and hobby horsing classes. But I really don’t have the money, the time, or even the desire to do this.
They say it takes a village to raise a child, but that village is long gone. We’ve replaced the village with school. It would be nice if my kids could wander around and explore and play in the streets with other kids, but in the world of locked doors and freeway overpasses I’d probably get arrested for child abuse if I did this. So like a lot of middle class parents who have their kids in a “good” school, I am actually pretty grateful for the free childcare.
If you remove some high-minded aspirations about schooling and start to think of schools as “free daycare” they seem pretty good. They are supposed to provide daycare, good nutrition, loving environment, social services, indoctrination, life skills, counselling, nursing, psychological testing, college counselling, team sports, music, arts, tech skills, and job training. We have far too many goals for our system of free childcare. In Korea they use hagwons, but in America schools are supposed to do that job too. In France schools are more of a sorting mechanism, and if you don’t rise to the top of your class it is your own fault. In America we expect to “raise the bar” in order to lift everyone up. These are unrealistic expectations for a system of free childcare. But schools are still patronized by most families, because free range parenting or being part of a kibbutz, or whatever alternatives Scott has in mind are really hard.
> They say it takes a village to raise a child, but that village is long gone. We’ve replaced the village with school.
Could we bring it back, e.g. by making "non-schools" which would be like schools (i.e. all-day free childcare) except without teaching? Instead the kids would play at a playground, work with a computer, maybe even attend some completely voluntary lessons...
The homeschooling parents could put their kids to the non-school, go to job, the kid would have fun, and the actual learning would happen at home in the evening or during the weekend.
How is this different from getting dropped off at a babysitter's house during summer vacation? A playground and "work with a computer" sounds pretty dismal to me. What happens if you don't really like the other kids that much, or if the food sucks, or if you really want to go exploring in the creek, but you are in a suburban neighborhood? Maybe you want to go somewhere, anywhere else, but you are stuck at this place until your parents pick you up.
Maybe it's not. Schools serve many functions. One of them is warehousing kids. (I think we could make that warehousing a lot more effective and a lot less brutal for kids.)
I agree that school can be brutal for some kids. In my experience, it was usually kids being brutal to other kids. Does this non-school model of warehousing kids offer a mechanism for making things less brutal for kids? Currently, if you don't do schoolwork you just get bad grades and some frowny adults.
Yes, part of the brutalization is like a prison, where the warden doesn't really care so much what the inmates to do each other, as long as they don't make it *his* problem.
And lots of schools are like that. I learned early on that, as one example, "you should tell an adult instead of getting into a fight" was just a lie. The adults don't want to hear your problems. They just want to make sure it's not their fault when something bad happens.
This sounds like a boys & girls club, which I found to be great environments for most kids - just enough structure and adult interaction to provide valuable engagement, but no forced curriculum. There would probably be significant legal barriers to adopting this as a full time standard, but at least the model exists.
Boys and Girls club for 7 hours per day for 180 days a year. For 13 years. I am all for having options, and maybe this could be one of the options.
"There’s also an ethical issue here: is it okay to make the weaker point “you can recover from missing some school” and convince a lot of nice conventional-minded people that I’m on their side, when secretly I believe the much stronger claim that school itself might not be too valuable for a lot of people?"
I've wondered about that, too, from when I was more active on the blogosphere than I am now. I would sometimes write a post that makes a certain reasonable (or at least arguable) point, but then feel the need to disclose that deep down, I believe something more extreme, on the theory that I needed to be upfront so that people could judge for themselves any ulterior motive I might have. Of course, that often backfired, because people see the disclosure and not unreasonably decide it's something they'd like to comment on.
> I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?
I was homeschooled through middle and high school and it wasn't too hard to apply to colleges. We found an independent service that basically did what a guidance councilor does for kids in school (as far as I understand it) and really streamlined the process. They told us what form to put my "transcript" in, which included a GPA. Let us know what dates we should take the ACT and SAT tests, and even had some quiz-type programs to help decide a college major.
I had taken community college courses my junior and senior years (generic writing classes, spanish classes) both as a way to skip some generic classes once I was in a more expensive state college, and I think that plus my excellent ACT results probably helped.
I did have to take a math test on campus a few months before the semester started in order to prove I could skip into more advanced calculus classes, but other than that I don't think there was anything special I needed to do vs a public school student.
I got an excellent academic scholarship as well, based on my ACT score. Some parents were worried options like that weren't available to fully homeschooled children, but it wasn't a problem for me/my college.
I would definitely recommend homeschooling, and fully intend to homeschool any children I have, IF the parent has the time, and is prepared to put in the effort. It is a lot easier to ship a kid to school and assume their socialization needs are taken care of vs. a parent finding or organizing a half dozen or more different weekly- or semi weekly social groups. But, as discussed, school is a very uneven social experience, and the compulsory nature of it often does more harm then good.
From an earlier era
“What are our schools for if not for indoctrination against communism?” ~ Richard Nixon - 1962
About section (I), I find the "...and I ended up with a PhD" part to actually invalidate the sample. School or no school, the kind of people who end up doing PhDs are not very representative of general ability to learn and find knowledge "interesting". More so considering that IQ has a strong genetic component. (Admittedly IQ is not the same as "passion for knowledge", but I'd be surprised if there isn't a strong correlation.)
I attended school without interruptions, hated nearly every hour of it, often got in trouble for refusing to do my homework... and ended up with a PhD too. So yeah, most of it was a waste of time for me, and probably a lot of it is a waste of time for everybody. But I think we should be specially careful about the long-term effects for those who end up with shorter straws (not just economically, that is what (II) and (III) mostly address). Which doesn't mean the schooling system is OK now - far from that, it's just that we ought to be vigilant about the "inside view" often being biased by strictly personal experiences.
To combine the part quoted about C.S. Lewis and the responses from everyone re: Caplan and the necessity of teaching maths, here's an expanded quote about that first school, which he disguised under the name "Belsen" (nothing like naming it after a concentration camp to let you know how he felt), and how the one good result of the teaching there was - geometry 😀:
"Everyone talks of sadism nowadays but I question whether his cruelty had any erotic element in it. I half divined then, and seem to see clearly now, what all his whipping-boys had in common. They were the boys who fell below a certain social status, the boys with vulgar accents. Poor P.--dear, honest, hard-working, friendly, healthily pious P.--was flogged incessantly, I now think, for one offence only; he was the son of a dentist. I have seen Oldie make that child bend down at one end of the schoolroom and then take a run of the room's length at each stroke; but P. was the trained sufferer of countless thrashings and no sound escaped him until, towards the end of the torture, there came a noise quite unlike a human utterance.
...The curious thing is that despite all this cruelty we did surprisingly little work. This may have been partly because the cruelty was irrational and unpredictable; but it was partly because of the curious methods employed. Except at geometry (which he really liked) it might be said that Oldie did not teach at all. He called his class up and asked questions. When the replies were unsatisfactory he said in a low, calm voice, "Bring me my cane. I see I shall need it." If a boy became confused Oldie flogged the desk, shouting in a crescendo, "Think--Think--THINK!!" Then, as the prelude to execution, he muttered, "Come out, come out, come out." When really angry he proceeded to antics; worming for wax in his ear with his little finger and babbling, "Aye, aye, aye, aye...". I have seen him leap up and dance round and round like a performing bear. ..."Lessons" of this sort did not take very long; what was to be done with the boys for the rest of the time? Oldie had decided that they could, with least trouble to himself, be made to do arithmetic.
...I can also say that though he taught geometry cruelly, he taught it well. He forced us to reason, and I have been the better for those geometry lessons all my life. For the rest, there is a possible explanation of his behaviour which renders it more forgivable. Years after, my brother met a man who had grown up in the house next door to Oldie's school. That man and his family, and (I think) the neighbours in general, believed Oldie to be insane. Perhaps they were right. And if he had fairly recently become so, it would explain a thing which puzzles me. At that school as I knew it most boys learned nothing and no boy learned much. But Oldie could boast an impressive record of scholarships in the past. His school cannot always have been the swindle it was in our time.
...Intellectually, the time I spent at Oldie's was almost entirely wasted; if the school had not died, and if I had been left there two years more, it would probably have sealed my fate as a scholar for good. Geometry and some pages in West's English Grammar (but even those I think I found for myself) are the only items on the credit side. For the rest, all that rises out of the sea of arithmetic is a jungle of dates, battles, exports, imports and the like, forgotten as soon as learned and perfectly useless had they been remembered."
So it is not school as such that Lewis disliked, as much as that first the small, private, fee-paying school he attended at the age of ten had run down so much, and the principal was so crazy, that it taught him nothing and would have permanently ruined him to learn anything if he had stayed there longer.
The second school was better, but again, it wasn't the school work he disliked as all that went with it - the games/sports and the attitude (again, for Edwardian-era public schools in Britain under the influence of Arnold of Rugby) that "Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton". So sports as character building and indicative of virtue, and sporting prowess rewarded as it enabled the school to triumph over local rivals, is something unspeakably wearying to those of us who are not sporty. Lewis was a clumsy child who was useless at sports, and an introvert who was bookish, so he naturally delighted in the chance for a private tutor where he wouldn't have to mix with other kids or play games and could just work on academic subjects.
Responding to your request for information about homeschooling. I and my siblings were all homeschooled from an early age through HS graduation. All of us attended college, and I got a Master's degree. Ironically, I now work at a public school.
None of us had trouble getting into college or providing enough information to do so (though in fairness none of us went to an Ivy League school either). We completed a certification program through a homeschooling co-op that was state recognized, and accepted similarly to a typical HS diploma. My mom thought it was silly and would be ignored if she provided a GPA, so we never submitted that. It's been a while, but my memory is that there were a few logistical issues with submitting information, but that it was pretty easily handled by filling out forms and doing the normal orientation testing (which all of the prospective students did, and helped determine if they met the Math/English/Foreign Language requirements of the school).
My experience was filled with a lot of atypical learning, where a trip to the beach could suddenly become a tracked learning experience. We made fun of my mom for writing down normal activities in her log book if she thought they were educational enough. The amount of time per day we spent on schooling varied a lot, but was generally four hours or less of structured schooling, and a lot of time reading or doing semi-structured learning activities. One year we tried doing school every day instead of the normal September-May calendar. Some of my days were really short once all the coursework was spread out - as little as 15-30 minutes a day on occasion. (Side note, we hated schooling all year and switched back). As mentioned, my mom liked to track non-formal stuff so I guess it was part of school. The structured schooling was pretty similar to what you might get in school, but obviously it wasn't delivered in lecture. We would generally read our textbooks, answer the assigned questions about them, and ask for more information where we got stuck. There is some really good self-directed curriculum out there if you want to find it.
Homeschooling definitely cannot be done by everyone. You need a stable household and enough parental support to fill in the gaps. You also need curriculum, which often comes from a packaged service online or through a company, but can also be piecemealed from various sources. Schools are required to provide the same textbooks you would get if you were attending there, so you can at least use the same materials public schools use.
Feel free to ask additional questions. I know well over a hundred homeschooled adults, and many of them homeschool their own children now. Most did not go to public school for much or any of their education.
After reading some other responses, I should include that I took and did well on the SATs prior to applying to college, so that's relevant to getting in.
Socially speaking I think large schools force kids with underdeveloped social skills into a large hierarchical system that they can't escape, which adults can mostly only regulate the excesses of and not the basic dynamic
Fine for many but I feel confident it's not anywhere near to ideal as we could get. I think my classmates were great and unusually good and I generally loved school. But it's in my bones that I'm not a cool kid. For many of them it's in their bones that they're not a smart kid. I think it will be looked back on some day with some degree of shock
The "hitting yourself on the head with bats 8 hours a day" thing is dangerously idiotic in that unique rationalist way - an extraordinary straw man of tradition that assumes that one/we could simply invent new communal ways that would be immediately functional and net positive.
If a society functions over generations with something in place, even apparently wildly inefficient, be wary of ought but iterating.
That said - school was pretty brutal for me, and the next steps no doubt include some viable exit door or something like it for kids for whom it does not work. (Unschooling and the like seem to be offering just that.)
I can't defend this empirically but I want to be in a society that forces us into 12 years of indoctrination into the Church of Reason. The freedom of my fellow citizens to wallow in ignorance and irrationality looks too similar to the Taliban in Afghanistan.
How confident are you on how much this sort of project would improve decision making overall?
I am leaning towards doubtful that much of anything can improve it more than a bit, but I like to think we have better decision making than those 2 centuries ago, but I'm doubtful of that as well.
A personal anecdote on missing school: My son attended his freshman year of high school almost entirely virtual last year. During this time he became severely depressed and suicidal, and refused to attend classes or do any of the schoolwork. Prior to the lockdowns he was a straight A student and active in multiple sports and after school activities. Both my spouse and I worked from home during this time and provided him with lots of encouragement, engagement, and support, but to very little effect. We sought help from multiple therapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, put him in IOP, got him a 504 plan, and enrolled in family therapy. Through all this he refused to admit he needed help and became increasingly unstable to the point we had to have him admitted to the hospital multiple times. He's now in a residential treatment facility.
We are an upper-middle class household, both parents highly educated with masters degrees, so this isn't a case of being poor, uneducated, or uninvolved. There haven't been any incidents of trauma or hardship in our children's lives. Our son also has a twin sister who is also a straight A student, and while annoyed at the virtual school situation she didn't have any trouble making it through the school year. Both our kids have had more opportunities and support than most other families get.
What does this say about the value of school? I think school is a nexus of our community, a common point that allows kids and their parents to make connections with other community members, and a jumping off point for clubs, sports, and other social activities. When school was locked down, all of these other social connections were also severed. Our son has a harder time making and maintaining social connections than our daughter, and despite our best efforts he became increasingly isolated and entered a self-destructive feedback loop. It's entirely possible he would have gone down the same path at some point, perhaps when he went to college (other parents we've talked to had this happen and said it's better it happened while he's younger), but it's hard to say. I think the environment of school was enough of a forcing function to keep him engaged with his peers and encourage him to keep moving down the path of "the typical student."
I am not saying that school is good/bad or that it is an optimal solution for community engagement. However, I do think there's value there that can't be easily replaced. And I am certainly claiming that shutting it off suddenly, even temporarily, can have significant negative effects on kids regardless of their income or home environment. I still have hope that my son can recover and lead a fulfilling life, but given the current state it is highly unclear and may take years to make that recovery--far longer than one year of missed school.
What a harrowing story. I wish you the best of luck in this. Sometimes just time itself performs miracles, with respect to young people. You just keep them alive and kind of OK and in time their brains finish wiring up and they get better. Not because of anything in particular anyone did, but just because the adolescent brain needed time to complete its development. I've seen it happen in my own family. I hope that gives you some sense of hope that even if nothing in particular seems to work well enough right now -- in time, it might.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I do have hope that time will help. It doesn't make it easier to get through though.
Scott if you don't endorse the word "destroy" in "wants to destroy the FDA", what do you mean by "FDA delenda est"?
People go to school and get 16 years of indoctrination about how great school is, from the self-serving bias of their instructors. I think that explains a lot of the resistance to updating on the evidence that school doesn't actually have the much of the legible benefits it was created for.
I hated school so much, in the early years. An elementary home room in lockstep wastes the time of everyone who is outside of the center of the bell curve. Recess is Lord of the Flies. It became more tolerable as I grew more accustomed to it, classmates grew up and learned to behave themselves, and I got more choices about which classes to take, but even by the last year of high school I was not at all enthusiastic about it.
The strong/weak claims problems reminds me a lot of animal welfare activism.
In France we have an NGO called L214 that is openly against any form on animal exploitation.
But they know perfectly well that they have no chance of being heard by institutions about abolishing meat and diary production. And so a lot of what they do is shorter-term stuff about animal welfare, pushing for better conditions of farming or even slaughter, or even for a better compliance with existing laws (they are known for infiltrating slaughterhouses and farms with cameras, to expose illegal mistreatments of animals).
People who are opposed to them love to play the card of "they say they just want decent slaughtering conditions, but their REAL SECRET AGENDA is to reach into your throat and pull out the steak you just ate, then cut every last farmer’s throat as retribution"
I don’t really know what to think about it because, as with schooling, I agree with both short-term and long-term endeavors (though not the homicidal steak-grabbing version to be clear). Generally, I feel like I can recognize that people make some good points even when their opinions are way too strong on others, but maybe I’m fooling myself.
Anyway it seems pointless to try to avoid people accusing you of Trojan-horsing your crazy ideas
Would rather live in any current society with compulsory education than any society past or present without it. Lot's of confounds to making that claim, I realize. Also suspect that if we look at what societies today have happier citizens with better outcomes on most measures, education is a factor.
Not sure if the opposition is coming from a libertarian perspective but, like with socialism, there is no post-industrial example of successful societies in either case. They both have a lack there f understanding of human nature. People will corrupt governments, industries, labor unions... wasn't that the brilliance of our founders in aspiring for checks and balances? Those guys also saw merit in an educated populous.
To answer your question about getting into college, since neither of my kids has...
Our home unschooled kids applied only to reasonably elite schools. One or both were admitted to three. Two of them, Oberlin and the University of Chicago, were schools where they had a strong family connection through both parents and grandparents, which I think gave them a significant advantage. The one school that accepted them where they did not have any such advantage was Saint Olaf. We concluded from our interaction with them that they were deliberately targeting home schooled kids as a potential pool of top students that other schools were missing.
Our general impression of other schools was that they were not hostile to home schooling or unschooling, they just didn't know how to evaluate such students, having developed procedures which depended on the information provided by conventional schools. Our kids had SAT scores well into the range for those schools but didn't have grades or teacher evaluations, other than from their parents.
I should add that the total number of rejections wasn't that large, since our son withdrew all other applications once Chicago, where he wanted to go and where his sister already was, having transferred there from Oberlin, accepted him. Given that elite schools are hard to get into, I can't say with confidence that our kids would have done better if they had had a more conventional education.
On getting into college when unschooled:
I was unschooled during my high school years (mid/late 2000's). I was in a lower-middle class family. We did not know the concept of unschooling but both my parents had to work so no one was at home during the day or able to teach.
One downside of unschooling in that era is that it was much less organized. I received no guidance on how to game... err I mean "navigate", the college admissions system as you might at school. At least at that time, being unschooled was not looked upon well by colleges -- or pretty much anyone else.
But in my case, my extreme ignorance about colleges worked in my favor. Like many people in this thread, I found out that you could be "done" with much of school at a pretty young age. So I took the SAT and enrolled at a local state university at 15 to start taking college courses of interest.
Then I transferred to my target school when I turned 18 (a well-ranked private university in a major metro).
The first university never asked me for a high school diploma because I was an "early admission" student who was nominally still "in high school". The second university also didn't ask me for a diploma, *because I was already in college* and had good grades.
Hilariously, this all caught up with me during my final year of university. I was set to graduate with a very high GPA. The university called me and said "we don't have your H.S. diploma on file and so we can't issue your degree". I told them that I didn't have one.
I don't think it had ever happened to them before because they had no idea how to handle it. I asked whether it really mattered, since I had clearly been capable of doing all the work. But, oh yes, it did matter.
Thankfully, my university credits were able to be applied retroactively as high school credit (sort of like a reverse AP course...). But I still didn't qualify for an HS diploma because I needed a Gym credit.
So as a college senior who was about to graduate with high honors I had to take a remedial high school course in *bowling* and *cycling* through the University of Texas Online High School.
After my competence in bowling and cycle was firmly established through proctored exam, I was awarded my high school and college diplomas at the same time.
A final note: I would never have gone to college if I had stayed in school. I spent my teenage years *working* so I could save money to leave my dead end hometown. People who think that school is always the friend of the lower classes have no sense of the opportunity cost that schools generate for students from less advantaged families.
Woah, hilarious indeed to have you need to demonstrate your proficiency in bowling and cycling to graduate!
I find it very impressive that you were able to get good grades very early at university while also working if I understood correctly, and with very little help of schools or parents! Were you motivated by the university classes themselves or by the perspectives they offered (or both obvioulsy)?
Mostly the way that universities enable personal interests. It was exciting to be able to pick up a university catalog and realize: I can pick any class from this list!
For my part, I never missed more than a week of school, remember it largely as a living hell, and am struggling to pull together anything vaguely resembling a successful life.
This whole discussion feels like the tale of the blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there.
Nobody can agree on anything. Not even what the terms mean. You can't throw a rock without hitting someone making casual logical error via comparing education (the process of learning things) to schooling (the state of being in a school classroom).
And what should be taught? Not only does nobody agree, there's a faction that claims we shouldn't "decide" what is taught at all. Somehow, the evolved system must be best.
It's logically obvious that we have a school system not designed to incorporate the educational benefits of technology. We will certainly have to change it.
"It's logically obvious that we have a school system not designed to incorporate the educational benefits of technology. We will certainly have to change it."
Kindly expand on what exactly those benefits are, and how you teach them to children between the ages of 12-18.
Because I'm hearing the likes of this all my life, with various interest groups and governments deciding that Thing is the next big thing that will provide employment, and so "Kids should all be learning German/Japanese/Chinese in school!" (because the Germans/Japanese/Chinese will be the ones creating jobs and so will be their employers in future). Biotechnology is the coming big thing, everyone should do a science subject! (It was and it wasn't, it certainly wasn't the mass employment creator the government was hoping for). Business groups routinely say they want such-and-such taught in schools to prepare students for work.
We've had more computer manufacturers set up and close down in my country than I can remember - anyone else remember when Wang was a Big Name? And now the shiny tech companies are concentrated in the Silicon Docks in Dublin, and admittedly, there are good jobs there - for as long as it's financially worth the while of multinationals to be based here, instead of Eastern Europe or Asia (Waterford Glass is no longer made in Waterford, the company decided the brand name was what people bought, and now it's made in Slovenia, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Germany because it was cheaper to move there).
So what do you mean by "educational benefits of technology"? 'Everyone will learn to code'? Some kids will have a natural aptitude for that and will do wonderfully. Most will manage to learn something, maybe enough for a tech support job. Some kids will fail at it (and I would put myself in that bucket, because I have no mathematical aptitude at all and while I could learn off some version of memorised techniques, the way I learned off equations without understanding, that is not sufficient for a proper job).
Some vague kind of "after twelve weeks of instruction, the class could mess around with simple components to make a basic digital clock" curriculum? Something like this for the Great Neck public schools? https://www.greatneck.k12.ny.us/cms/lib/NY02208059/Centricity/domain/76/presentations/HSUPTCPresentation11-24-14.pdf
I know I sound demanding, but I've had too many of these vague statements which are, in the end, a great cry and little wool when it comes to "Students need to learn A, B or C to prepare them for the world of work in the modern age".
You're completely misleading my comment. I don't mean "students need to learn to code", I mean "students can take classes through Zoom calls".
Sacred Heart of Jesus. *This* is your "incorporating the educational benefits of technology"? I'm a fucking dinosaur when it comes to tech, and it took me about five minutes to work out how to go on Zoom for webinars for work.
Read through this entire comment thread and the comments on the other posts Scott has put up about this, and see the opinions of people about this whole "can take classes virtually" stuff. A lot of people considered they didn't work at all.
This is the same pablum that has been peddled for the past thirty years: technology can change education! we won't need teachers, students can take self-motivated online lessons! one teacher can oversee a hundred or more students! all will be done by the computer!
This is the same advertising that was pushing "buy an interactive whiteboard instead of the ordinary classroom chalkboards" back when kitting out the new schools where I was involved, and I think the snazzy interactive technology gets used once in a blue moon.
Seriously? After a full year of almost everybody doing all classes online, you are convinced they simply don't work at all? And your evidence it doesn't work is ... that people say it will work? And that a different technology was never used?
I have plenty more thoughts on education (and will have a blog post on some of those next week), but this seemed like a statement so obvious it wouldn't cause contentious debate. I apparently have underestimated the ability for people to argue about any topic, no matter how non-controversial.
Mate, you start off with "It's logically obvious that we have a school system not designed to incorporate the educational benefits of technology" and then your example is along the line of "Today, children, we are going to learn how to send an email!"
Now, agreed, that's valuable. But it's not something that is going to take up a whole lot of time learning.
In fact, I'm going to now agitate for the Return Of Old Technology. Right kids, today you are all going to learn how to - write cheques! The arcane art of "crossing a cheque" 😁 If you're all very, very good, I'll teach you about fax machines and manual typewriters and what "carbon paper" was!
For the last time: I'm not saying "schools need to teach how to use Zoom", I'm saying the schooling system was designed in 1900, when Zoom didn't exist. Or the internet. Or videos. Or even your fax machines and manual typewriters.
Now that those things do exist, we have additional methods of pedagogy available to us. And we need to consider how we should change our schooling strategies as a result of that.
Well, my evidence that onlines classes don't work is...
(1) I saw it tried when I was teaching college. Rarely worked, and only for the most motivated and capable students, for the rest accomplishments were significantly lower.
(2) I had one child who was compelled to do it during COVID, and his accomplishments and happiness dropped like a stone. Sitting in front of a laptop screen all day looking at tiny images of the teacher and other students would drive *me* crazy, and I have way more patience and self-discipline than a kid. Assignments were confusing and the technology frequently broken or brain-dead. The teachers' ability to teach dropped off a cliff, since none of them had been used to this and they were flung into it without any training -- and indeed no one knows how to train an online instructor, because it is not a broadly successful model. (Doesn't mean it doesn't work for some students and some instructors, but you can't build a general training regime out of a collection of exceptions.)
(3) Of course, I know a large number of other parents in similar situations, and every single one of them hated it and thought their kids suffered. They could certainly *all* be delusional, but that's not a great leading hypothesis.
(4) I attended a few school board meetings where school re-opening was discussed, and the reaction from parents was extremely heated. The kids have to go back to school! And this is in a very wealthy suburb, with families that had no problem affording daycare, technology, or even home tutoring.
(5) Almost every major online university program, from ASU's GFA to MIT's edX, has slowly transitioned away from its initial aspirations ("do the first two years of college online! Get an online degree entirely!") to much more confined and traditional goals -- more or less, becoming an online version of the old-fashioned correspondence school, with focus on specific credentials, usually career related. Online college, despite two decades of promise and potential, has completely failed to live up to its expectations, and investors have lost a staggering amount of money betting on it.
I can certainly believe that you can write a glowingly optimistic theoretical argument why online remote education is an idea whose time has come -- yet again, as its time has come repeatedly since 1995, and if we want to include TV broadcast, probably since 1975 -- and you can illustrate it with a collection of anecdotes where it has indeed worked. But I think people who are actually involved in actually teaching people for a living (which I have been at one point) are entirely justified in being deeply skeptical after having been burned by this more than once. The new bar is a lot higher.
Even the Open University, which has been going since 1969, has tutors assigned to students and runs in-person workshops and day schools where the students can meet up with lecturers in person:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_University
>Online college, despite two decades of promise and potential, has completely failed to live up to its expectations, and investors have lost a staggering amount of money betting on it.
Counterexample: USC has been doing remote-learning STEM masters' degrees since before there was "online", only CCTV, and it's worked very well. Evidence: industry reputation, plus a couple of my colleagues teach there, plus I hired one of their graduates and he was superb. But, by definition that's for people who have already earned a STEM bachelors, almost certainly the old-fashioned way, and usually ones who have performed well enough that their employer is willing to pay for an MS. So once again, maybe it's easy to provide equal or superior alternatives for smart highly motivated people but they don't scale to the general public.
You made a very broad, general statement, then rowed it back to "have classes via Zoom" which is about as technologically-advanced pedagogy as "why don't we have special classes to teach kids to ride bikes?". Yes, we could do that, or they could learn it at home from their parents.
Learning how to log on to a Zoom teleconference is something that is indeed part of the world of work, but it's not something that will take more than ten to fifteen minutes for a class to learn how to do (granted, if the entire class is all individual students at home during lockdown, most of the class time will be taken up with 'miss, miss, how do I turn on the microphone?' and the likes, though since it will be at home, it'll be up to the parents to make sure the webcam is plugged in etc.)
'Learning how to use a webcam' is useful, but it's not exactly "incorporat(ing) the educational benefits of technology" except in the most basic manner.
"students can take classes through Zoom calls".
They certainly can but it seems a large majority of students and teachers much prefer in person classes (at least that is true in my French university acoording to several internal surveys).
Doing the thing where we enroll our kid in public school for the first time and there's literally a warning they send out to all the parents saying "If your kid isn't going to come to school for some reason, you have to tell us why, and if we don't like your answer we'll send the police/CPS to your house." The school seems lovely and all, but as someone who felt similar to Scott during most of my years, it gave me the creeps.
Depending on where you are, there may be a relatively innocent explanation for that. In California the public school districts get money from the state in proportion to their "average daily attendance"[1]. Reference 1 observes that on average a California school loses $85 in state funding for every day a single student is absent. Not surprisingly, they're highly motivated to report 100% attendance. It's probably got little to do with being overbearing spinster busybodies, and more to do with the District administration putting pressure on the local school principal to not cost them $$$.
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[1] https://www.educate78.org/crunched-data-based-look-at-oakland-public-schools-2/
The sad matter is that sometimes you do have to use the outsized stick of "explain or the cops/social workers are knocking on your door", because there are parents who don't give a damn and won't do anything unless you plant dynamite under their backsides.
The school tells them "It's a legal requirement that your kid be in full-time education or training until the age of 18", they blow it off. The prospect of the cops calling and maybe fines or a day in court will make them pay attention.
Yes, no argument there. The situation in certain urban school districts is pretty grim, and you'd probaby have to actually put a parent in jail or something to make an impression -- mere words or threats don't cut it.
And it's certainly the case that The System tries to hand out roughly the same warnings to everybody, whether it's an inner city school with a 30% truancy rate, rival gangs flashing signs at each other in the halls, the necessity of a metal detector at the main entrance, and routine rape in the bathrooms -- or whether it's a nice tony suburban school with good little boys and girls and parents who are just outraged that The System doesn't immediately recognize them as one of the elite, and therefore treat them with the appropriate respect.
But of course they can't, because if the agents of The System started treating suburban white parents with deference and positive assumptions, and urban black parents with skepticism, juries full of suburban white parents would award $100 million punitive damages against the school system in the resulting civil rights lawsuits. So...here we are.
I think mine was a slightly more mixed experience, in which there was a blend of (a) parents who were no more concerned about their kids than dogs about their litter, sometimes because they had so many mental health problems themselves that they could barely handle their own lives and sometimes because they just didn't give a damn (b) parents with problems who genuinely were trying to do well by their kids but sometimes life got on top of the family (c) parents from a range of socio-economic status who were the ordinary kind of parents (d) parents who were better-off, relatively speaking, but still pulled the kids out on whims or let the kids stay at home.
Now, if the kid is missing school but making it up otherwise (home schooling, learning by themselves, parents covering the material), that's fine, just let the school know. But the one-size-fits-all warning has to go out to everyone, because simply "We don't live on the council estate and we both work" isn't enough of a signifier that your kid won't be missing chunks of school.
And yeah, that means the decent parents get the "pony up a good explanation or else" warning like everyone else.
Yeah, that's the "one size fits all" element of public schooling and it's very heavy-handed. But there is probably (I don't know the American situation, only the Irish one) a legal requirement to report absences of more than X many days to the truancy board, and there are a lot of rules regarding bullying, absences, disciplinary procedures, and so on in the parents' handbooks.
The parents who would, in any case, give an explanation to the school as to why John or Jane is not in today are getting the same messaging as the parents who pull the kids out of school in the middle of the term because they want to go on a family holiday and they got a cheap bargain if they go now and not for Easter break or during summer holidays, or the parents who routinely pull the kids out to babysit siblings, mind the house, etc. while the parents (best case) are working or (worst case) spend the entire day in the pub drinking, and the parents who really are literally "I don't know where my kid is and I don't care".
I should include in that the kids who are sent to/dropped off to school by the parents first thing in the morning, then they mitch. Mom and Dad are sure Junior was in school, Junior instead skipped off to spend the day hanging out with pals or otherwise, and when the school rings up/texts/emails/sends letter about "Why was Junior not in class all day on the 35th?", they get an unpleasant surprise (and Junior gets an even more unpleasant one).
Honestly, the general principle of checking in when the student doesn't show up seems fine, the fact that they jump straight to sending the police/CPS rather than just "sending someone 'round to make sure you're okay" is where it seems extreme.
How much would they have to pay you to go around to strangers' houses to knock on the door and deliver the very unwelcome news that the kid is cutting school today and you want to take a look around and make sure everything is OK?
Sure, 19 out of 20 times you get merely an angry or abashed look, or the door slammed in your face, but on the 20th...maybe the reaction is a lot weirder.
The cops are paid to go to houses and get involved in family difficulties, and even with guns and back-up they hate it and will avoid it if at all possible.
Yeah, the bit where you get beaten up by the teenage daughter and then mauled by the family dog would be a deal-breaker for me.
Do they do that on a first absence? The tracking system we had was that once the kids went over a certain number of days out, that triggered the automatic "this has to be reported to the truancy board" but before that, the Home/School Liaison would try to make contact and find out if it was because of sickness, a problem or something else.
https://www.tusla.ie/tess/tess-ews/reporting-absenteeism/
Though I suppose different school districts in the US would have different policies about that, and different criteria about escalating it to "here come the cops" interventions.
If you want your future offspring to be imaginative and capable of amusing themselves then get rid of your television and don't give them a smartphone or computer either. Instead, rely on books, either fact or fiction and plenty of fresh air.
> I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college.
Count me as one of those kids homeschooled through highschool who now has PhD.
> Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative?
This is maybe boring, but I had a GPA and a transcript. The homeschool groups I participated in had something like a teaching co-op and everyone had grades recorded for classes taken. Every year you could take a (voluntary but encouraged) standardized test, I believe the [Iowa Test of Basic Skills](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iowa_Assessments). We mostly all took SAT/ACT when it came time to apply to colleges.
This was still the 90s when homeschooling was fairly unusual, so some colleges still looked at all this suspiciously, however I think the SAT and ACT scores increased confidence.
I had friends in both the homeschool world and the "regular school" world (the latter from my neighborhood or church), and it seemed that a major difference was simply time spent on things. Homeschool friends "time in classroom" was much lower than "regular school" friends, and experiences were consistent with:
> My parents tried homeschooling, rigorously followed a bunch of curricula, and discovered I could finish *all* the assigned coursework in 2 hours/day and spend the rest of the time reading my favorite books.
People I knew did different things with their extra free time. I read all the time, some of my friends fished and hiked a lot (one generous friend lived in rural outskirts of town, had land access), some of my friends practiced their favorite organized sports a **ton**. There was a joke that the homeschool varsity XYZ team wasn't allowed to compete with the public school circuit because all the extra practice time meant they would win a lot ... then years later (after I graduated) when the doors were opened to the homeschool teams, they ... won a lot. Not like completely dominating everything forever, but highly competitive. NCAA scouts started scouting homeschool players and homeschoolers started getting sports scholarships and playing at D1/D2 levels. (If you're homeschooling and want to explore this route, here's the [homeschool registration page with the NCAA](https://www.ncaa.org/student-athletes/future/home-school-students).)
> Did people give you advice on what to do?
Up through (and including) *getting into college* I got good advice from the people running the homeschool group. As I progressed through the academic ranks beyond undergrad I had to rely on new sources of advice, which was surprising to me at the time ("my sources of good advice had always worked up to now!") but in retrospect shouldn't have been.
I feel like the takeaway here is that different children need different things and it's hard to generalize from one person's childhood experiences onto another. Customizing the experience on a child-by-child basis seems like it would be incredibly resource intensive. So how do we solve the problem? Obviously parents who are at least somewhat invested can probably find a way to navigate to an at least "acceptable" solution, but then what do we do for the children of parents who don't care at all?
I think the original comments got it right. School IS important, but you're right in that so are hobbies! But this is more of an argument to say that school shouldn't give a ton of homework that takes up an entire kid's day besides like their soccer practice or dance classes. You can go to school, come back, and then spend your time messing with PERL, y'know.
Just because you preemptively call “chesterton’s fence” (“8-miling”? Where you say your opponent’s likely critique before he has a chance to make it) doesn’t mean it doesn’t apply.
I think conventional wisdom is always on a spectrum between chesterton’s fence and QWERTY keyboard. Things stick around because they’re adaptive, which sometimes means they’re local optima or ruts, and sometimes means they have some utility that’s illegible-but-true. To me deciding between burn-the-boats and the lindy law at an axiomatic level misses the point. It’s about which applies more in a given situation.
This sounds as though you believe Paul David's account of the QWERTY/Dvorak story. Almost every fact in that account turns out to be false, largely the result of his buying puffery by the inventor of the Dvorak keyboard. For a detailed account, see:
https://personal.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html
So you don't believe it's possible for "conventional wisdom" to fall into ruts and continue being maintained way past its utility? Would you have allowed my argument if instead of "QWERTY keyboard" I'd said "[analogy for something that people keep doing because that's the way it's always been done, even if there's no good reason for inventing it, nor continuing it]"? If that single example doesn't invalidate that I'm trying to say, why even make the comment? Just to nitpick? For fun?
"Great athletes miss a few months of training all the time, for injuries or something, and nobody ever says “oh, she missed six months of training, now she’ll never catch up to all those other athletes who have six months more training than she does”
How confident are you about this? I think there are probably plenty of athletes who fail to hit their window of opportunity because of a poorly timed injury that slowed down their development enough that they don't hit the intersection of their knowledge and their physical prowess. The fact that some athletes overcome such obstacles doesn't mean that everyone can or does.
I *am* a programmer (https://github.com/bugsbycarlin). I am excited about my daughter learning the things she wants to learn, programming or dinosaurs or whatever. And I was pulled out of school, homeschooled for a year, then sent to early college, with initially mixed and ultimately very positive results. But I *still* want to send my daughter to regular old public school for part of her childhood.
So I think this:
---There’s this weird trap a lot of adults fall into where anything a kid does on their own, however interesting, is “wasting away”, and anything they do at school, however ridiculous, is Exciting Prosocial Learning Fun Glowing Childhood Memories. I think this might be entirely a function of whether the parents can spectate and take pictures that look good on a mantlepiece: easy with hobbyhorsing, harder with learning C++.---
is *just a bit* reductive. And maybe even not that nice.
Are we really supposed to take seriously the claim that Scott doesn't know how to do Gaussian elimination, but yet did fine on algebra at school? I think he's just forgotten what the word refers to.
One might also consider the substantial amount of sexual abuse that occurs in public schools, both from staff/faculty of all categories as well as among students themselves. There was a statistic about California public schools that perhaps 1 in 10 students would be subject of sexual abuse/harassment by the time they finished high school. For all the media interest in the Catholic Sexual abuse cases (many going back decades) there is little mention that year after year, an order of magnitude of new victims is being produced by the public education system. It has always baffled me that this was never more closely studied but it seems like there are many limiting factors about under-reporting faculty/staff behaviors and an inability to record student-on-student forms of sexual abuse. I've only seen a handful of really horrifying studies on this and most were about a decade or so old by the time I came across them.
The distinction is that the Catholic Church is no longer seen as a crucially necessary institution in society, whereas schools are. The abuse is seen as "worth it" (and this was exactly the case with the Church in the past, to be clear) to provide the service, but you can't say that out loud without people noticing that you're a psycho, so it's best just to suppress the evidence and try not to think about it.
I am grateful to have been homeschooled K-12. My school day was much more efficient and I could get all my work done in 4ish hours. My mother kept records of my classes and grades, which my college accepted (without grades, I would have assumed a B+ average).
Some readers are concerned about exposure to extracurriculars. Through the public high school, I was able to join the marching, concert, and jazz bands, to fulfill a specific interest. But public school isn’t the only opportunity for group activities. In middle school I was in a private children’s choir which accepted kids from any school. It was self organized and frankly better than any of the school choirs.
I really like homeschooling, but I don’t think it’s for everyone. It’s essentially unpaid work for at least one parent which may be economically difficult for some families. Some homeschooling friends ended up going to a charter high school and enjoying it. On the other hand, my younger sister opted to spend junior and senior year at the public high school so she could have more social interaction, and now she says it probably was not worth it.
Regarding the question about getting into college:
I was basically unschooled thanks to religious extremism and neglect. As such I’m perhaps an interesting example since my poor education took place without the benefit of involved parenting. The one thing I had was math textbooks, but only as far as algebra and geometry. It would have been great to have had more advanced topics, but as a general principle, learning math as a thing I had to figure out on my own seems like the best possible math education. Most kids are taught to memorize steps in math. It’s terrible!
I got a GED and spent two years taking community college classes- most importantly the basic science labs which you can’t make up for with just reading. I then transferred to a four year college. After working a few years I went back to grad school. Sorry to bust the trend- no PhD here. I got a masters in engineering. And I still LOVE math.
Because of my own rough start, I’ve spent nearly a decade tutoring kids at a local homeless shelter. Many were told by teachers in school that they weren’t smart. No school would definitely have been the better option for them. I’ve worked with several kids who developed their own systems and nomenclature for working multiplication and division problems. They were usually embarrassed since they were doing it ‘wrong’. My two favorite things have been 1- when I get them to teach me their way and can tell them it is right and 2- when they tell me that they have started teaching their siblings or friends.
I had once written a post in defense of school, which my husband forbid me to post anywhere publicly on the grounds that it's not worth pissing that many of our friends off. I sorta think that childless geniuses who reason that *they* would have been better off without school, and then use examples from their tech-savy elite friends who put huge parental investments into their children, are not in touch with the rest of humanity. Look, I'm not saying I love the school system as is - it has a lot of horrible things in it and would benefit from huge reforms, but I think for many (most?) kids it really beats their realistic alternatives. Not everyone can have a parent stay home or a nanny who lavishes attention and books on what are already high-IQ, emotionally supported children. Not everyone can get ahead without a good looking path and strong story for college. My immigrant nanny agreed that remote schooling this year was torturing her daughter, yet said it was necessary for her to get into the elite high school she was aiming at in order to become the highly paid professional she wants one day to be. Not everyone can just sit down and get a perfect SAT score and impress the world with their natural acumen. You keep *your* kids home. Understand that most of the world can't.
In my own practice I have had a lot of parents complain of their children developing depression during the pandemic. The children who did in person or blended learning faired much better than the ones who were fully remote. A few parents changed from fully remote to blended halfway through the year, and expressed profound relief that they had done so, noting immediate psychological and behavioral changes in their children. How much of this was due to the social advantages of seeing other humans and how much was due to how terrible remote learning is, is unclear, however I suspect the social aspect was a very large factor, especially in the younger children for whom 'remote learning' was really a big nothing burger anyway. And to be honest, my practice has a lot of highly educated professionals in it, so it's not just what I wrote above. And going back to my nanny, she said over half of the kids in her daughter's remote class were depressed, and the school was having guidance counsellors reach out to everyone on a weekly basis because of this.
My own experience with sending my kids to school has been mixed. There are definitely large positives, which you seem quite quick to dismiss as 'hitting your head with a baseball bat builds character.' Just because *you* did not experience these things does not give you grounds to dismiss the experiences of huge portions of the population that tell you this is a thing.
I should probably write up a new article on my thoughts, but it does miff me when childless genius tech adjacents declare this stuff. I also have thoughts on the damage that being left alone with unlimited screens causes quite a few children, including gaming addiction, social media addiction, and depression (again - you not being one of them is not evidence). I also have thoughts on some of the social damage that my now grown home-schooled patients have reported to me. Anyway ... /rant
Thank you for posting this. I hope your husband is wrong that posting this under your own name would piss off many of your friends; if true, that's a problem with the community of your friends.
I can't speak for Scott, but personally I'm very skeptical of any argument of the form "this is fine for us educated people, but we have to force the plebs", and also, school isn't *supposed* to be a *social* institution. (In fact, if one were to reform schooling to more closely approximate a sane institution, one would have to start by removing the social aspect as thoroughly as possible.) You say Scott is quick to dismiss this as a baseball-bat argument, yet your own argument is entirely baseball-battery, focused on epiphenomena that shouldn't even be there rather than on the thing itself.
Also, tormenting a child for the purpose of ascending a credentialist torment-ladder in the future in the hopes of social mobility is, uh, to put it mildly, not a whlesome operation in any part. That's a situation where a healthier society would just reject the possibility of social mobility. At least in the distant past when social mobility was attained through courage in mortal combat (arguably less traumatic!), winning got you into the *upper* class, not a higher level of servant class.
The only thing I agree with here is you shouldn't leave children alone with screens, or likely let them have them at all. Supposedly when Lord Dunsany was little he wasn't allowed to read anything for pleasure except the Iliad and the works of Shakespeare; if he didn't want to read those he had to go play outdoors, play chess or write his own stories. That library might be a bit restrictive, a child could probably be allowed Plutarch and Froissart without harm, but it's the right idea.
I'm not in favor of 'forcing' anyone. I agree that current regs and the 'common core' are too restrictive and am in favor of experimenting with a variety of charter and vocational programs. Yes, I'm defending school primarily as a social institution, and don't see that it's *not* supposed to be one. Whatever the puritans had in mind 200 years ago is irrelevant now - school has evolved alonside the rest of our society. Society has many, many problems, and the problems in school are reflective of that and not the source of all its ills. Getting rid of schools is not going to magically get rid of the need for two parents to work, bring back extended families, make americans trust their neighbors, or get rid of our general paranoia and litigiousness. It's not going to get rid of the puritan work-ethic or credentialism. I think it is very unrealistic to assume we can just shut down all schools and this will be fine for children and their families.
The best argument I can think of for that would be, well we'd have to come up with something, and it'd probably be better than what we have. However, that sorta happened this last year, and we got remote learning, which was a disaster.
Credentialism is terrible, and it would be great to come up with some other ways for people to prove their human capital besides grades in school, but again, this is where we are now as a society. Immigrants have endured much worse tortures to get ahead in life than enduring a year of remote school. I wish remote schooling were *not* torture (I can think of quite a few ways to make it way better), but on an individual basis, I don't think immigrants are incorrect to focus on academic achievement. Indeed immigrant communities who do so fare better in the US, and I don't see how taking away this possibility would be to their advantage. Who are we to say 'you'd be better off as a servant class than working as hard as you do to rise out of it'?
"I’d be interested in hearing stories from some of these people about getting into college. Was it hard without a GPA? Did admissions officers treat your unschooling or homeschooling as a positive or a negative? Did people give you advice on what to do?"
During the first half of high school I took a few accredited online independent study courses, and during the second half of high school about half my course load was community college classes, so that gave me some independently verified 'A's to back up the ones from my parents. I took a few AP tests, SAT subject tests, and of course the SAT, so those certainly helped as well. This is pretty far from pure unschooling, but I think I still had more freedom and less drudgery than I would have had in a typical high school. I don't know how the admissions officers viewed my homeschool classes, but at the very least it didn't stop me from getting into the college I was aiming for. (I'm at that college now. Based on my performance there so far I'm above average for the school, but not extremely. So I didn't just overpower the homeschooling question by being ridiculously good, but I also don't know what would have happened if I'd been more of a borderline case).
On the extracurricular benefits of school question, I'm overall satisfied with my route but I'm sure there are things I missed out on. For example, I'm naturally not an athletic person, and because of homeschooling I was able to exercise in other ways. I'm overall happy about that, but it also means that I'm abysmal at anything resembling sports. That can be embarrassing at times.
Socialization really depends on your luck with who lives nearby, is roughly the same age, and is homeschooling. You don't have as a big of a pool, but I don't think you need to have dozens of friends to have a fulfilling social life. Also, because I wasn't always in groups based on grade level I got the chance to interact with kids of varying ages and even adults. I think that's at least as good for learning to socialize in the long term as hanging out only with people of the same age is.
The hobbyhorse thing seems really odd to me, since I found one of the biggest benefits of homeschooling to be the flexibility to pursue hobbies. In my early school years I had time for lots of creative projects since I wasn't doing busywork all day, and in my later school years I was able to focus my education to align with my interests. I think the reason I spent my time as a kid on creative projects rather than social media has more to do with my mom limiting my "recreational" computer time than anything about homeschooling. Fortunately programming didn't count (I'm a computer science major).
All that being said, I have a hard time imagining a world where the majority of kids are homeschooled. My dad worked from home and my mother was a stay at home mom. My mom almost became a teacher (she decided she couldn't handle a room full of rowdy children all day), and they're both very intelligent and good at explaining things. I was very receptive to homeschooling. That's pretty much ideal conditions for homeschooling. Also conservative Christian/otherwise ideologically motivated homeschoolers concern me. Still, I do think that there are children in public school right now who would benefit from being homeschooled. There's also a wide range of possibilities in between public school and unschooling, and even between public school and what I had. Some charter schools, for example, have students only come in a few hours a week. I certainly think we can improve on the status quo, and that improving on the status quo means less traditional school not more.
Kids who are analytically inclined, are introverts, and end up doing a PHD in some hard science, those kids are much more likely to hate school, enjoy being on their own, and call their imaginary friend Perl.
They're also a lot more likely to be reading this blog. This is me, I hated school and skipped as much of it as I dared.
What about the other kids? Since being a highly efficient nerd is currently rewarding financially, nerds tend to think that being math-smart is all there is.
We're here not in the context of making schools better (or making something better than schools). We're here in the context of banning children from interacting with each other save on a screen. Somehow this aspect was left out of the conversation. Pretend play - unless you count Perl as your friend - is harder to do over Zoom.
While I wasn't homeschooled or unschooled, I can guarantee I missed more than 18 days of school per year from about grade 8 on.
I remember barely attending highschool. I swear I slept in class, or just skipped class most days. I managed to pass highschool, with only one pitty pass class (I got a 51% in physics 20 that I don't think I deserved, 50% was needed to pass).
I got in to a University bachelor of science program 9 years later without needing to upgrade anything. I'm currently maintaining above 3.0 GPA despite my continued dislike of school. I just started my third year of study.
I think the biggest thing I lack right now is just good study/homework habits. Especially since a lot of school is online/hybrid for me right now.
I recognize not every kid was me in school, but I can imagine there were many smarter kids beside me who could have also skipped a lot more school than they did.
Something to pay attention to when it comes to that other person that posted "your grandparents didn't go to school" and the reaction. That conversation was not in any way about school, it was about whether or not we can and should do whatever Pandemic Alarmists declare we should just because Pandemic - regardless of the potential consequences.
Think of it this way - on the one hand, we have school in which we pay teachers to force children to beat their own heads with baseball bats, but baseball-bat-beating is an obviously required skill to enter modern life (seriously - the number of jobs without a baseball-bat-to-face related requirement is declining faster and faster as more things get automated and (more likely) outsourced to people in China. We largely do this because the historical power structures that be *absolutely demand it*. People are worried that their kids will be behind in the baseball-bat-to-face arena if they don't get their eight daily hours of training - and people have found all kinds of unique ways to make that process much better and more interesting and include more things that are intangible but important. Still, it's largely power at play.
On the other, we have people who come from highly educated places making the demand that *they* be put in charge of whether or not people go to school, or really do anything at all. Gyms? Closed. Schools? Closed. Public life of any sort? Closed. And if you read current Pandemic Twitter - the cases for these just get wilder and wilder as more and more people get vaccinated.
People are reacting to him and not you specifically because he transparently was making the power-play case, not the "it's not the end of the world if this happens" case. People can smell this kind of bullshit *miles away* and will reject it *just because*.
For anyone interested in this subject, I recently wrote about our experience (in the UK) of discovering unschooling. I found all the comments in this thread and the previous post really useful. https://nickasbury.substack.com/p/the-opposite-of-school