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”
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/