School is important for socialization! Boy howdy I am just *so* grateful for the bullying and abuse I received from not only students but also teachers and administrators. How else would I be prepared for modern adult life?
Honestly of everything I experienced in my childhood, the social environment of school was the one that was the *least* like adult life in every possible way.
In school you are socializing with people all of whom are about your age and, in some sense, your direct competitors — for grades, but also social status. That is a very unnatural social environment.
I think having children do things together with other children is what makes them get friends in the first place, usually (didn't work for me, but I am certified weird). More than that, I think school serves as a place where you meet a broad array of kids. It gives you an idea what is normal, and what sort of kids exist in the world. Self-selection will distort that (private schools, homeschooling etc do too).
"Am I normal?" is a stigmatized question in a society that values individuality above all, but it is an important one. It helps you find our where you are relative to others: what are you good at? What are you bad at? What can you expect from others, how likely is it that a random kid/person has this or that trait? Identity can only develop in company, and hoo boy does an individualist society care about identities. Whatever your identity is within your homeschooling group, it'll probably be "the homeschooled kid" when you leave that bubble. There's also the comparison of teachers and other kids' parents to one's own: it's the place you find out not every parent hits their kids, or has a big house and garden, or lets them watch TV all day, or goes to church. You're confronted with all sorts of ways of living through others at school (less so in the US with private schools, homeschooling being legal, neighbourhoods being extremely divided by class).
I don't think you need to spend every day sitting at a desk being told you can't go to the toilet to have that, and a lot of it can be done in smaller and selective environments. But there's another meaning of "socialization": "the process of learning to behave in a way that is acceptable to society" (Oxford). Society. Not your church, your football club or the friends your parents approve of. And the norms and opinions and customs of the wider society help you assimilate into it on your own, free you from the control of your parents. I think this the main argument for schools, actually.
We can talk about the smart and privileged and nice kids of smart and privileged and nice people all day, but those are not the one that need school as a gateway to self-determination.
I say all this as someone who was definitely harmed by school and would probably be a better, happier, healthier, more productive and better adjusted person without it.
This is a good argument, but it only works to the extent schools fulfill this function. I think many of them don't. As you admit up top, private schools definitely don't do this.
And what is the "wider society"? To what extent should parents who may not like the messages prevalent in that wider society be allowed to make decisions about what their children should be exposed to, whether through homeschooling or private schools or even just deciding what sort of media/internet access/etc. their children should have access to?
That is a matter of balance, but I am coming down hard in favor of parents not being able to opt out of outside influences for their children to the degree that unmonitored homeschooling allows. "Wider society" is vague on purpose, but usually it's the country/state that is in charge of curricula and schools.
Two thought experiments, let's assume for a second that our only options are complete homeschooling with no oversight and compulsory attendance of public schools: 1. a dissident family in Nazi Germany. 2. a fundamentalist anti-gay family with a gay child in a modern European city. Both disagree with the things their child would learn at school, the kids it would meet there, and both have an interest in isolating it from those influences. If we don't want to descend into "school is good when it teaches the right values and bad when it teaches the wrong values" then our answer must be the same for both.
I think parents should have the right to teach their children what they please, as long as the children also go to school and learn what "the outside world" believes, outside of the control of the parents. Marketplace of ideas, if you will. Take school away, and the kid is basically a hostage to their parents and their parents' community, unprepared for going their own way.
Real life is less black and white and there's middle ground, obviously. In practice, I think schooling beyond grade school should be optional, but some form of getting away from your parents, being around random kids, regularly - I think this is necessary.
I do think it's a tricky question, and your hypotheticals get to the heart of the matter. I think even someone who supports homeschooling or unschooling would agree that there's a point at which homeschooling could be so bad that it's essentially child neglect. I brought up the "wider society" point because for some families the "wider society" would be an Amish community or a Hasidic village. Those societies clearly have different values from the US as a whole. To take a broader example (and, admittedly, to veer into culture war territory), many people (or at least politicians) in Hungary clearly have different views on how children should be raised (pertaining to the recent hubbub about the Hungarian law about exposing children to LGBT material) from politicians in the Netherlands and much of the rest of the EU. If you have public schools, the decisions about what is taught in them may be made at various levels (local school boards, states/other equivalents in federal systems, national governments, even EU decrees or public pressure). I would much rather live in a world where parents have a relatively free hand to raise their children than one in which politicians acting on behalf of the "wider society" make the decisions.
I think the Amish community or Hasidic village would be too narrow to consider "wider society" here - but I have to admit I'm largely ignorant of these matters as a German, where curricula are set at the state level and even private schools with a religious focus or philosophical slant have to adhere to them.
I'd argue both the dissident in Nazi Germany and the LGBT Hungarian profit from exposure to their surroundings, though. To learn how to speak and act in a way that is acceptable to the majority, to learn what they believe and what will cause backlash is important to fight against it, too. If most people are against you in some way, knowing how to stay in or move back into the closet is a useful skill. I don't think full-time assimilation is required for this (and indeed, it's not hard to see how it is damaging, too). I've seen enough examples of people remaining hostile towards the values taught in school, parroting their parents' objections to it, to be confident that parental influence is still strong in the face of compulsory school, though.
If I can spitball for a bit, imagine a fully modular education, where kids can take some subjects, all subjects, accelerated or decelerated classes according to their needs (with minimal requirements as to what order to take them in, or to their number). Imagine homeschooling for most subjects but sending your kids to school for math, imagine taking fewer classes for a stressed or ill or slow or just not very motivated kid, more or faster ones for an ambitious one, and allowing alternatives to regular school. In such a scenario the only things I'd mandate would probably be one course per year/semester in a public school up to age 14 - it might even be an extracurricular, as long as some really basic stuff is taught somehow, somewhere, by someone qualified (civics and health come to mind). As to who decides what a kid takes and where, two out of three - child, parents, teachers - should work?
"If we don't want to descend into 'school is good when it teaches the right values and bad when it teaches the wrong values' then our answer must be the same for both."
Why is this a descent? Can't we say that Nazi schools are bad, modern European schools are good, and our ethical principles ought to acknowledge the difference? I'm not sure why there should be a universal principle governing whether parents should be allowed to opt children out of school. Or why that principle can't be "parents should be morally obliged to allow outside influences on their children, provided those influences themselves meet a basic minimum standard of morality."
I don't understand the tendency towards trying to design principles or institutions or laws that are completely agnostic towards object questions.
Homeschool socialization varies enormously; there are the ex IBLP/Bill Gothard/Pearl/cult homeschoolers who were socialized extremely oddly and have trouble adapting, and plenty of other homeschoolers who were socialized decently. I mainly participated in church youth group and 4-H clubs several times a week for most of a decade, and that worked decently well.
The current cultural climate is not very tolerant of people saying their weird counter-zeitgeist opinions in public, and parents probably have a duty to explain why reticence is often the better strategy. Schools teach this more through reinforcement learning, but it might work just to tell the young adult that when they go out into the world. There can be a steeper learning curve for homeschoolers trying to work in somewhat oppressive environments.
As to whether it makes sense to spend public money on adult socialization, it might depend on the specifics of what that looks like, and the extent to which it works. My main objection is that there's a pretty good chance the Department of Friendships would organize lame activities where nobody actually made any friends, but the administrators made a nice living for themselves and everyone played along and pretended to be interested. As has been known to happen in schooling.
Something like this actually existed in East Germany, in the form of the Jungpioniere and FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend) (nominally voluntary but in practice membership was necessary for getting into university or your preferred line of work), and for adults the Arbeiterbrigaden. In part that went like you said - indoctrination mostly (but not exclusively) being received as something to pay lip service to and roll your eyes at - but the activities weren't actually lame (clubs, vacations, concerts) and they also did a lot of things people in this thread lament schools not doing (practical skills, useful work, interest-directed learning). I don't have the spoons to write the essay the topic demands though.
I should mention that one of the things people lament most after the German reunion (apart from, you know, the unemployment and poverty and mishandling of Eastern assets) is the loss of social cohesion. This stuff worked.
I mean, the activities college organizes for young adults are... lectures and homework? They seem to work. (Obviously I exaggerate, but I do think that if that were all that was provided, it would work.)
"Would it be beneficial to use taxpayer money to help them socialize better? I think people would probably say no to this. But it seems reasonable that if it is a good thing to do at age 10, 12, 14 and 18, it should be a good thing at 20, 25, 30, etc."
You may or may not be glad to learn that Social Prescribing/Community Referral is now a thing in Ireland:
"Social prescribing recognises that health is heavily determined by social factors such as poverty, isolation and loneliness. Social prescribing offers GPs and other health professionals a means of referring people to a range of non-clinical community supports which can have significant benefits for their overall health and wellbeing.
Social prescribing generally involves three key components
- A referral from a healthcare professional,
- Consultation with a link worker
- An agreed referral to a local community activity. Examples include; art, cookery, meditation, GAA, men’s sheds, music, drama, walking groups and many more.
Social prescribing can also enable and support people to access health services such as Smoking Cessation, Self-management support programmes and others."
Were I the kind of person who wanted social support, I could go to my doctor and talk about this. Because I'm not, wild horses would not drag me to a weekly group-therapy/hobbies and meetings style event where I'd have to (pretend to) talk to people.
This is related to my interests, as a BSA Scout, Girl Scout, Young Mudder, Library, and Sunday School volunteer, and parent of two kids with a fair number of home-school friends. Yes, it is vital (though many schools fail terribly at this job), and yes, we should continue to use taxpayer money on it. Socializing doesn't mean "get along wit your peers". It means "learn how to function in all sorts of environments." School presents a number of novel environments that parents can't provide because learning to function without your parents can't be provided with your parents. Learning to deal with beurocratic, stratified organizations that say they care about you but don't, staffed with people who probaby do care about you (but maybe not) but are beholden to the org - well, that's a thing basically everyone is going to have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
This all comes from schooling. If you think public funds shouldn't go to schooling (I do, in theory but very much not in practice in the US in 2021) then yeah I think public funds should go to it.
I appreciate your argument and I will look for Caplan's book. Some of those jobs, though, are the ones I think most likely to be done by machines - not even necessarily AI - just automation. Stocking, most clerk roles, cashiering - so much can be done with a combination of online ordering and automation. The path of birth-school-cashier could be changed to birth-work-cashier but I think more likely it will be birth-school-unemployment or birth-school-UBI (if it's adopted). Birth-apprenticeship-job that still exists might be a better path. There are massive reserves of untapped artistic, mechanical and social talent which school obscures.
If you really think a cashier or bar tender doesn't use basic maths, I think you have no idea what you are talking about. And those are not careers; they're jobs. A very different thing.
If you're working with food, for example, even if you are a high school drop-out you will be expected to comply with basic hygiene requirements so as to avoid giving the customers food poisoning. No, you don't have to be highly educated or very smart, but you do need certain traits such as conscientiousness and you do need to be able to understand about infection, cleanliness and the like.
And it seems it's not a job that people are very happy in:
You are just reinforcing what parents and society in general think: if you want any kind of good job, much less a career, stay in school and get an education. Otherwise you are going to work low-wage jobs in poor conditions for the rest of your life.
The reason why those jobs are the most common is because there are bottom rung people who need jobs. Indeed, most of those jobs are things that are either presently being automated away or are things we can do without.
In a society without bottom rung people, we would probably automate away most of those jobs, or they'd become much more scarce (having other people cook food for you would be expensive if the dumbest person in society had an IQ of 120 and expected a salary to match).
The reason why these jobs exist is because there are bottom rung people who need jobs so we can pay them very little to do them.
And as for your list: Chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, statistics, economics? They're necessary for being a useful citizen in society. You basically cannot make meaningful choices about political stuff without it, and if you have to make choices about stuff like healthcare, having a grounding in this stuff is vital.
You literally cannot understand most things of importance in greater society without this stuff. People who are antivax and hold other foolish beliefs are ignorant of these things at a frequency far above chance.
The reason why we barred literacy tests and similar things in the US is because they were used for the purpose of excluding black people specifically from voting while having exceptions for white people; the history of abuses associated with these tests is what resulted in their ban.
I take no issue with the notion of requiring people to pass a competency test to vote. This would also solve the issue of "How old do you need to be to vote?" quite neatly; people who can pass the test are capable of voting, those who aren't yet ready cannot.
I don't think that it is plausible to get such a requirement passed in the United States for obvious political reasons.
"The reason the jobs exist is because they need to be done."
We have mostly replaced cashiers at a number of local grocery stores; the overwhelming majority of people at this point go through self checkout. I have been to restaurants where they replaced most of the wait staff with apps; you ordered electronically rather than through people because this reduced the staffing load, with staff being there only to bring food out to people. And in the end, thanks to things like pre-prepared frozen food and gas station food, restaurants really don't *have* to exist or be all that common. Costco proves you can have far fewer people engaged in stocking activities, and of course, Amazon does away with traditional shopping for many things entirely.
There's lots of jobs that could be done away with or made significantly more efficient and thus require fewer people if it was too expensive to employ people to do them. Indeed, rising wages, mechanization, and automation have historically eliminated many factory and agricultural jobs. When it becomes cheaper to automate than employ people, we tend to do so.
My family moved in the middle of the school year when I was in elementary school, and because of that I never actually learned long division or long multiplication (it was later in the year in the first school and earlier in the year in the second school). I also missed a whole host of lessons about things like animal classification, American folk tales, and who knows what else. I never managed to pick up either long division or long multiplication, but it didn't seem to have any impact on my future academic career (I was the top of my class for math in high school and got good grades on my math classes in college).
Potentially missing something in Kindergarten could have hurt more, but those are also the skills that will be obviously missing and that the teacher would know to help with. If the whole class next year can't do long division, the teacher can throw in an extra lesson or two on long division and even everyone out.
Long division is useful as a precursor to polynomial division, imo, which is used a fair bit in more mathy subjects later on. Sure, it's basically retaught from scratch at that point as most people have forgotten how long division works by then, but it's not completely useless.
I teach polynomial division to 11th- and 12th-graders science majors (in France) every year. Only practice division by x-a, but hint at more complicated cases. It is not only useful as a technique, it helps understand and connect key concepts about polynomials, like why a being a root implies x-a can be factored
I really do long division or multiplication all the time, maybe not every day, but certainly every week. If you only do arithmetic when you have time to pull out a calculator, then you'll never use arithmetic routinely in observing and understanding the world. You'll never get into the habit of computing probabilities or estimating quantities in everyday life, and so you'll never be able to understand the world empirically, and will probably fall back on something like Aristotelian metaphysics without realizing it.
I tend to do that stuff in my head. I always have a phone with a calculator, but sometimes my hands are busy, and sometimes I'm walking around and don't want to stop so I can poke the phone without missing keys. While a lot of mental artithmetic is about finding ways NOT to have to carry all the intermediates of the "long" methods in your mind, I do think that the "long" methods are a useful starting point for developing your bag of mental tricks.
What benefit do you get from doing long division/multiplication over rounding to three significant figures total (e.g. 6543 x 34567 to 6500 x 30000) which I think is much easier and faster for most people.
I usually round off to about 2 digits. I didn't mean that I do the entire computation. I was responding to a sub-thread begun by someone who said he/she didn't know how to do long division, which I think implies being able to do long division even with rounding off.
I regularly do long multiplication in my head (if by that you mean calculating a bunch of partial products and adding them up), and occasionally long division too. Last week I was sitting outside a restaurant waiting for my food and did some long division on paper while I waited. That kind of thing isn't useful for math, of course, but I wasn't doing math, I was doing engineering. It's true that a calculator is faster, but I didn't have one with me.
It is a useful precursor to concepts such as 'algorithm' or 'recursion' that appear if you go on to study Computer Science. Even longhand addition/subtraction is helpful for explaining binary arithmetic and things like half- and full-adders by analogy.
You clearly haven't had to deal with the typical smart phone calculator. By the time you've gotten past security, found and fired up the app, waded through the usual piles of crap smart phones bombard one with, you could have done the damned arithmetic in one's head. Maybe a dedicated calculator might make sense, but I dropped my faithful HP as a fashion accessory years ago.
Really? My Android has a calculator app that came with it, and it doesn't have any ads at all. I have it on my home screen and use it all the time.
I'm reminded of a Facebook meme a while back: "Remember when we were told in school 'You won't have a calculator everywhere you go'? We sure showed them."
Yea, the calculator app is pretty decent. And there are other apps freely available with absolutely no ads, too, because "writing a calculator app" is one of the easiest things one can do after learning how to program.
People still need to know what to put *into* an app, and if someone simply *cannot* add three 4-digit numbers on paper, it's a sign of something else seriously wrong that needs addressed, so we might as well make sure the kids can do it.
The fact that American schools seem to spend so much time on things like long multiplication and division is probably part of the reason why missing school doesn't matter much. At the end of the day, these are just fairly simple algorithms that you need to learn to execute without making mistakes. I'm pretty sure that if you wanted to learn these, you could pick them up as an adult in a few hours.
Now multiplication tables on the other hand. That requires a fair bit of memorization and I think an adult who didn't know them would have to spend some time before they were able to reproduce them quickly.
On the other hand, modern memorization tools are really good. I'm using Anki to memorize Norwegian and I'm getting through about ten words per day, using maybe ten minutes per day. So that's, what, 2.5 hours of total effort for the 12x12 times table, assuming it's exactly as difficult as Norwegian and ignoring symmetry?
I mean I’m not sure memorization tools are that great of a way to learn a language. You might learn direct word meanings without more subtle important parts. Same for times tables.
I’d say drilling is probably of significantly more value in math than in language. But we definitely do way too much of it in school, over a way too long time, and not enough other stuff.
Same with me but for fractions. And kind of funny, every other part of elementary math is ingrained in my head. I can still do those basic math facts and algorithms instantly and accurately, my kids need help with any of it and I can still do it all (I suspect this will change when they hit High School), except fractions. I have no idea how to do those.
Except, I can quickly derive the rules. So I show my kids how to do that. What's "23/50 + 12/25" I have no idea how to tell you off the top of my head.
But 1/2 + 1/2 = 1
Or 1/2 + 1/2 = 2/2
or 2/4 + 2/4 = 4/4
OK, I see what to do now. You get a common denominator then add the numerator.
I can see how going through that process might be more helpful for my kids then if I just remembered the rule and told them. So ironically, the one part of elementary math I missed so still can't recall how to do, might be the one part I'm best at teaching my kids.
No irony there. The thing you had to figure out how to do yourself is the thing you actually understand. The thing you actually understand is the thing you can teach.
I think both those things are very general principles from maths teaching to sports coaching.
Not being able to do long multiplication and division and especially adding fractions so actually bad for math. You should know how to do that stuff and it’s important for higher math. But I mean that in a specific way - you need to understand the principles / properties well enough to do them for numbers given enough time. You won’t really need to “long multiply” or “long divide” or “fraction add” large numbers ever (although you would a few hundred years ago before computers), but it’s important to understand the principles that lead to them because without that you can’t do more complicated tricks. (I last long divided maybe eight years ago, but picked some 4 digit numbers in my head and managed to, based on principled knowledge, figure it out) - (abc) * (def) = (a00) (def) + (b0)def + c(def) = (ad*100 + (ae)10+(af))100 + (bd*100 + be*10 + bf)*10 + (cd 100 + ce10 + cf) or (a/b) + (c/d) = ad/bd + bc/bd =(ad + bc)/bd so 1/3+1/6 = 2/6 + 1/6 = 3/6 (from the formula (3+6)/18).
So while not being able to do long division or multiplication is bad, missing school for it probably doesn’t matter that much because of how shit they are. Don’t schools spend like five years worth of math on adding multiplying and dividing increasingly long numbers anyway? Missing the 4-digit year can’t just that much.
I'm curious about your claim that you never learned long division or long multiplication. Do you mean "if asked to multiply 837 x 964 or divide 3943 / 73 without a calculator, you wouldn't know how to proceed"? Or that you never memorized which was the standard convention for keeping track of what goes where? Or do you mean "you learned it despite not being taught it by the school"?
I also switched schools in a way that would've prevented the school from teaching me long multiplication or division, but the second school expected me to know it, so my mother taught me. It took more than two lessons, although certainly less than 20. It would've gone much faster when I was older and had more mathematical background, but I'm not at all confident that not learning multiplication and division wouldn't have slowed me down when acquiring the "more mathematical background".
For most of middle school I just had no idea, but it never really came up in situations where I didn't have access to a calculator. Nowadays I know enough algebra that I can figure out how to calculate it if I really need to, but I literally never need to do it on paper since I always have a calculator on me.
> not learning multiplication and division wouldn't have slowed me down when acquiring the "more mathematical background".
Kinda my point - for most of the individual lessons in elementary school, missing one of them might mean that you don't learn the thing, but it probably doesn't matter. If it does matter, then you'll learn it later.
Mm. I think we potentially disagree; I was saying that I'm NOT SURE that not learning (things) wouldn't have hurt me later.
You say that you now know enough algebra that you can figure out some way to multiply out (8 * 100 + 3 * 10 + 7) * (9 * 100 + 6 * 10 + 4); I agree with that (although in passing, I find the point less convincing for long division).
However, I think that knowing the algorithm initially, before I had the concepts in my head, possibly helped me learn the relevant algebra later on, if only by providing an example of "oh so that's what I was doing!". I can't prove it one way or the other, in particular because I probably had plenty of other examples, and you can almost certainly skip any one example; all I know for sure is that in the limit where you end up skipping them all, it's much harder to learn.
By "never managed to pick up [long division]", do you mean that to this day you cannot divide e.g. 46 by 11 without a machine? Or you can produce the correct result, just not showing your steps in rigid conformity to some narrow standard of how long division is supposed to be done?
Dividing 46 by 11 is easy enough to do in my head, but if you asked me to do 40689 by 356 I wouldn't really know what to do. Hmm, I suppose I would want to first figure out how many times 356 * 10^n can fit into 40689, then decrease n's until I'm left with a number smaller than 356 and that's the remainder? But that's just from my general number sense, not because I was ever taught it.
Right, 40600 - 35600 = 50000, so it's at least 100. 5080 is in between 3560 and 7120, and 5080 - 3560 = 1520, and 1529 is something like three or four 356es? Four 356es is 1424, and 1529 - 1424 = 105, so in integer division 40689/356 = 114, remainder 105. You can carry it further; 105 is almost but not quite three 35.6es.
I think that test scores are the wrong thing to look at. I suspect the main benefits of grade school come from getting improved socialization and developing better strategies for general learning/problem solving. Like in your Spanish example, I also don't remember the majority of my second-language education from grade school, but I feel like the experience alone let me explore a lot of new ways of thinking.
You also learn a great deal of categorization and existence knowledge. For example, while Scott does not remember Guassian elimination, he knows something called that actually exists, that it's relevant in math, probably algebra. That means if he hears "Gaussian elimination" in some context later on, he knows enough to roughly place the idea -- it has something to do with algebra -- which means he's about 80% of the way to being able to use the idea, all he needs now is some decent google-fu.
This is a very important part of education, which naive people often overlook when they contemplate how much factual knowledge has evaporated from memory over time. Learning sets of facts brings with it some additional meta-factual knowledge, including about the existence and categorization of facts, which usually sticks around long after the facts have evaporated, and which allows the human mind to recover the knowledge much faster than someone who never learned the facts at all (especially in this era of search-at-your-fingertips). You may not remember exactly in what years Ulysses Grant was President, or his specific policies with respect to Reconstruction, but you will often recognize that "Grant" is the name of a US President, and that he is associated with the Civil War, and that alone gets you 80% of the way to full knowledge, which you can easily complete with a little searching.
Naturally, a lot of people look at this and think "well, why don't we teach the metafactual stuff *only* and leave out the unnecessary facts? We'll be able to get more in when we dispense with the useless memorization of facts, and students will be less stressed and more capable." This is where "teachings students to think instead of memorize" comes in. Very catchy, and it appeals to everybody.
Unfortunately, so far as I can tell, it doesn't work. It appears the human mind simply doesn't absorb the metafactual knowledge *unless* it is digested along with some minimal set of facts, sort of the way Nutrient A is sometimes not absorbed well unless accompanied by Nutrient B. When you attempt to teach only the "thinking/analysis" stuff and punt on all the facts, the metafactual stuff doesn't stick. I'm not sure why this should be so, but empirically it does seem to be true. Maybe the human mind only really integrates the metafactual stuff when it has to, e.g. when it's a way of organizing facts in order to recall them better and faster.
Agreed! I think this applies especially at higher education levels. For me, the biggest advantage of university over self-directed learning was having a nice structure for all the different concepts, even though I don't remember how to do many of those things now.
Interesting point re metafactual knowledge. But im not sure that it requires all that schooling (just lazy research on wikipedia has sufficed to give me some metafacts).
And im also not sure why the particular selection of metafacts learned in k12 classes is so important (why “gaussian elimination” as opposed to “Sulla’s proscription”?)
Related to the point about teaching only the meta knowledge not working: The Monad Burrito Problem (https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-and-the-monad-tutorial-fallacy/). When learning something abstract, you struggle for a while with the details, then understand in a flash of insight. Once you get it, it's easy, so you'd like to transmit just the insight and skip all the hard work, but you can't because the exact mental analogy you used doesn't actually matter, and sharing your description of the insight won't help anyone who hasn't struggled through the concrete examples on their own.
If you presume the ability to Google things, the idea of having a mental taxonomy in which ‘Gaussian elimination’ is categorized is trivial. Skip the steps of remembering it has something to do with math and just Google the words verbatim, and you will immediately learn that “In mathematics, Gaussian elimination, also known as row reduction, is an algorithm for solving systems of linear equations.”
This ‘metafactual knowledge’ shorn of Google is important if you’re a dilettante who needs badly to pretend to be conversant in subjects where you’re actually out of your depth. That way if somebody says “U.S. Grant” in a policy debate you can nod sagely and say “Ah yes, the American President, Grant,” and appear to be following the conversation when in fact the only thing you have grasped is the dim memory of 5th grade civics—and, worse, you have failed in an opportunity to learn something.
What is really important, and is not taught by ‘education’ but rather by exposure to vast quantities of knowledge, is the ability to learn, reason, and research for oneself. The ability, really, to say, “Grant who?” and then answer your own question by taking the initiative to crack a book or, even better, a primary source. Whether this is actually taught in any schools I do not know; I certainly learned it among my books and through argument with other people, not by learning to take a whiz in between bells and temporarily memorize a list of badly mangled ‘facts’ in time for a pop quiz. And I went to pretty good schools! Grade school is probably harmless, though, and at least accomplishes the objective of making sure that the vast majority of the unwashed masses are literate and numerate; probably the most harm is done in college and higher education, where it is all too common that mediocrity is showered with praise and hidebound, narrow thinking is regarded as creative research.
In any case, having ‘metafactual’ knowledge is simply the sign of being insufficiently familiar with your subject to discuss it except in general terms, and might even be worse than ignorance, because hand in hand with this metafactual knowledge is often a ‘scientific consensus’ or a ‘sense of the literature,’—in other words a pernicious textbook prejudice towards the socially desirable opinions about a problem or concept.
>having ‘metafactual’ knowledge is simply the sign of being insufficiently familiar with your subject to discuss it except in general terms
What about other subjects though? Nobody can have in-depth knowledge of them all, so would you say it's preferable to know nothing at all outside of your area of expertise?
I don’t think that’s a good dichotomy. There are more choices than ‘using deep knowledge of subject’ and ‘using traces of categorization bestowed by educator.’
I would say it’s preferable *not* to express opinions based on ‘metafactual knowledge.’ Or make decisions using it. Simply *having* such traces is probably inevitable but confers you nothing but an unwarranted amount of confidence. “Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring,” right?
If you must make a decision, educate yourself to at least an amateur’s understanding of actual facts and principles; if you can’t do that, use your reason to determine who the trustworthy experts are, if any, and examine their evidence; ideally, do both. This is a far cry from expertise, but it’s enough to improvise with.
>I would say it’s preferable *not* to express opinions based on ‘metafactual knowledge.’ Or make decisions using it.
Yes, a world in which everybody follows this principle might very well be a much saner one. It's clearly not how this one works though, given that the biggest current "tech" giants have grown insanely rich off of advertisement, which provides even more tainted "knowledge" than an educator ostensibly following scientific consensus.
Anyone who believes that ads are a source of world knowledge cannot be educated anyway, but I suspect those people are very few regardless.
Whether I am right or wrong about that is immaterial. What’s important for each person is that they don’t wildly exaggerate the validity and importance of barely remembered or unremembered categories. But nobody can stop you from overrating your own knowledge and I don’t presume to try.
Regarding the digestion, I suspect part of it may be that it is easier to recall an 'experience' rather than pure facts. For example, I had some probability and statistics courses a few years back, but barely do statistics nowadays. I recently was asked by a friend to help interpret some claims about covid testing. We wanted to calculated certain conditional probabilities, and it seemed that we needed was to flip the events on a conditional probability. This situation seemed familiar, and I recalled that Bayes rule did something like that. So I looked it up, and was able to calculate what we wanted. Note that I did not recall anyone telling me "if you want to flip events, use Bayes". Perhaps someone did, but that is not very effective. After all, we don't (and shouldn't!) believe everything people say to us. Having to remember "My teacher said that X" seems more difficult than simply remember "X". Furthermore, the teacher can only teach a limited number of explanations, and these do not necessarily have to "fit" with my internal mental model. What I describe as "flipping events" is a natural way of describing the goal to me, but it may be very confusing for others with different internal mental models of conditional probabilities.
If you had been home for that year you would still have been doing things, just different things. Learning to help your mother make dinner, or organizing and running a WoW guild, or arguing politics with your best friend or DMing a campaign might also have let you explore new ways of thinking.
That's a fair point, although I imagine there are some benefits to being forced to explore outside your intellectual "comfort zone". Like, perhaps it gives more practice with convergent thinking as opposed to divergent thinking.
Yes!! I grew up in India and went to mediocre schools. The education I got at home debating ideas within the family was far superior to that. And my parents had interesting friends. For example, an economics professor from Brown University who visited once a year and stayed with us. I learned more from conversations with him than maybe in all my K-12. In middle school, I'd ask him things like "Do you believe in astrology?" And, "But how come some predictions come true?" In a couple of sentences, he taught me so much.
I certainly agree with this, but there is value in learning culturally relevant things that others will also learn. It amazes me when my kids come home from school having learned the same folk story cultural things (like Johnny Appleseed, but including songs, anecdotal stories, patriotism, etc.) that I did. There's a baseline for communal living that helps groups of people who have very little reason to ever meet still have shared values and understandings. If we all just do our own thing, then we might be better individuals in a worse society.
I consider this speculative at this point, but I've been thinking about it a lot more as I watch my own kids grow up.
It also means that they all learn the same false things, with less chance of someone who has learned different things pointing out evidence that they are false. A fair amount that I was taught in a very good high school wasn't true.
One of my standard examples is the claim in the driver's education course that two cars hitting head on at 50 mph was equivalent to each to running into a brick wall at 100 mph. It's quite easy to prove that that cannot be true, but it was what the book said, and when I questioned it and we took the question to the physics teacher, he said it was true and was uninterested in my proof that it was false.
For almost anything politically relevant, such as the causes of the Great Depression or, nowadays, climate change, the school will teach some orthodoxy, likely to be in part false, with which one depending on the political environment, both community and teachers.
I can't disagree with you there. My mom liked to muse about how many moons Jupiter supposedly had when she was in school, verses how many when I was in school. The number is significantly higher now, too, even though the true number hasn't changed at all. It's also surprising how many times in just my lifetime the origin of mankind has shifted. Usually between east and west Africa, but at least once to Asia. Each time taught as definite fact.
So, humans evolved in an environment in which they were socialized by interacting with many other humans of different ages, with everybody performing diverse social roles in diverse circumstances.
It'd be pretty odd if you got "better socialization" by shoving them into age-segregated groups performing stereotyped activities under highly formalized rules, all under the supervision of a limited number of adults who were themselves in very stereotyped roles.
I think that's an interesting idea about reducing the amount of age segregation in educational environments, but I suspect even the highly segregated environments we have now are better for socialization than isolated homeschooling environments. Although, I guess not all homeschooling environments need to be isolated.
I'd rather get rid of "educational environments" as a distinguished category. I just don't know how to get there.
I think a lot of pressure for their existence comes from the fact that all the *adults* are also shoved into weird confining institutional environments (you know, "jobs"). The adults' envronments have no room for the kids, and in fact actively demand that the kids be excluded. As long as that's true, even if you don't have "educational environments", you'll nonetheless have still-fairly-age-segregated kids doing God-knows-what, whether singly or in groups, with limited adult guidance and limited adult examples. Which is probably not ideal socialization either.
And of course if your goal in "socialization" is to TRAIN people to be able sit down, shut up, act like everybody else, and fit into an institution, well, then...
As I've written at considerable length, generally children sort themselves into ability bands very early in life and then stay in those same bands, relative to peers, with remarkable fidelity. (See https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work) Presumably this is due to some kind of intrinsic ability asserting itself consistently throughout academic life, probably genetic in origin. My guess is that once students get back into school they will fall back into their old ability bands in dominant majorities and the hierarchy will have reasserted itself. What's less certain is how the schooling pause will influence how any given age cohort performs relative to another. Since the pause generally seems to be happening fairly uniformly across cohorts it's hard to see that it will make much difference, although I suppose people who miss their last year of formal schooling and never make it up could perform worse compared to those who finished right before the pauses. But in general I suspect that you're correct and that this just won't matter much, for the reasons you've laid out, save for those rare kids who just literally never return to formal schooling at all.
You know a lot more about this than I do. My impression is that a much larger than usual fraction of kids have either dropped out or have had their grades crater. I guess the question is what fraction recover? Do we have any way to guess?
Correlate, yes. But the kinship studies strongly suggest this is not a causal relationship. In the behavioral genetics/population genomics literature they call that stuff the "shared environment," and it is moderately influential early in life but that influence rapidly declines as children age due to the Wilson effect.
Bear in mind that I'm talking about relative performance - a cohort of students that had to face Covid restrictions when others didn't would definitely be disadvantaged in short-term assessments, although for the reasons Scott says here I suspect that disadvantage would fade and ability would reassert itself over time. More to the point, though, this has been a pretty close to universal condition, with some exceptions, so the relative performance is not likely to be deeply affected. (I think!)
I think the talkative kids did well on zoom and the quieter kids did not (separate from other confounders). Watching the class dynamics in my kids' zoom classes made me think that, and I had not thought that ahead of time. So many kids in those classes said nothing - partly because the teachers often did zoom like it was identical to being in front of a room, except with a camera. It is not; they did not realize they were now doing theater and so failed to account for the pros and cons of that. The teachers would get more and more frustrated, the kids in general would get quieter and quieter, and then one or two kids would get the mike and just run on; the teachers were so pleased someone was talking that they did nothing to rein those kids in, with the other kids sitting in increasingly uncomfortable silence while the theater went from bad to worse.
Also, the kids couldn't lock eyes with someone across the room and know they were not alone, recognizing the ridiculousness. They could not poke their neighbor when the teacher's anxiety ramped up. They could not walk out into the hall and share the rude names they had come up with for the teachers and other students, participating in a community. There was no personal defense possible; camera, cranky teacher, silent class, that one kid yammering away about how much they agree with the teacher. Fodder for many horror movies to come, I expect, as this generation grows up. At that point, some kids couldn't bring themselves to do the assignments, others could.
The angry, sarcastic, snarky parts of socialization, so necessary to school, were gone. People say it was bad because kids missed the friendly parts, and I think that is partly true but not the whole story.
Anecdotally, I was far behind at the beginning of my education then rocketed to the top of my class for the rest of grade school. I was a middle to upper middle student in middle school and close to the top student at my high school. I then went to a somewhat elite university where I was bottom of the class the first two years and top of the class the last two. Now, some of this was due to a turbulent life, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it. (And to be clear: I'm not trying to pose this as evidence either way. I'm just not all that well informed on how to contextualize my experience.)
You can think about someone like Ramanujan, who came from a position of near-total educational depravation and yet in very short order became one of the most gifted mathematicians of his era. Because he had a natural talent that's simply not something most people can access.
Did Ramanujan have “near total education deprivation”? He was undereducated I think, but he regularly attended some sort of school. He was also born a Brahmin.
Hmmm, fair question - this was all pretty dimly remembered on my part, I'm probably exaggerating. I think I got the impression from a Numberphile video?
I just read the first 40 pages of a bio of him and he didn’t seem that undereducated. Started at age 5 in a “12 kids in someone’s house” school, moved around for a few years, did half a year at a school in a language he didn’t speak, scored 1st of class in arithmetic at age 10.
He seems to have been poor, as many Brahmins in Tamilnadu are, even today. Tamil Brahmins are just 1 to 2% of the Tamil population, by the way. Due to disproportionate success, they're seen as having stolen something and are the target in the dirty identity politics in the state. Until the British came and needed people to maintain ledgers (reading, writing, basic arithmetic, English..) to collect taxes, Tamil Brahmins were not making much money.
In free India, Tamil Brahmins often have to leave the state to escape the legal discrimination. Every politician in the state gets ahead only by proving his or her anti-Brahmin credentials.
I read your article and was bracing for it to end with a polemic about this is why we should end the meritocracy, which I disagree with for similar reasons Scott did in 2017. But instead you made a very strong argument for wealth redistribution which I'd be hard pressed to argue against, except maybe over the precise method and amount. I'm general I've found myself agreeing with more of your writings in the last two years. I don't know if this is a sign of me becoming more socialist or you becoming better at persuading people on the right.
Either way, it's a shame that the only thing the right and left seem to agree on is the importance of education, when the studies suggest it's one of the least impactful levers to adjust.
I feel like we have not properly grokked the fundamentally flawed nature of every social science study and far too many people treat them as statements of simple fact about reality instead of generally a mixture of fraud, other kinds of fraud, and luck.
It depends on what you mean. In terms of predictive validity, modern educational assessments are incredibly accurate; we know how to develop tests that predict future performance on all manner of academic tasks with remarkable precision. Not just assessments predicting assessments but predicting real-world behaviors like observed reading ability. Does that make them "statements of simple fact"? I don't know. But I do know that if a casino would take my action on which children will succeed in school even deep into the future, and I could give those children a battery of modern tests, I would become a very rich man.
Perhaps you could become a very rich man if the casinos took your action, and you personally administered the tests -- but do you trust nationwide tests to be administered fairly, or in fact at all ?
The data for “them being incredibly accurate at predicting future performance” are not administered by him, and they’re still predictive. And while people do cheat and study ... that’s not responsible for the effect.
yes? of course some problems will arise but those should be rare enough that their effects disappear at the margin (this is proven by the very fact that the tests are predictive)
security measures in public schools are completely bonkers these days when it comes to tests. if you want to cheat as a teacher it's really quite difficult (I administer the SAT 4x a year)
Is there a risk of circular logic here. Tests that predict performance on "academic tasks"? How is the performance at the academic test measured? Some sort of test?
The actual behavior that the construct refers to. The ability to read as judged by literacy experts. I'm trying not to be short with you because this mysterianism has infected the conversation - "what does it really mean, to be able to read?" - when we know perfectly well the answer to those questions.
Ah. So the educational tests are actually predicting performance as judged by the evaluation of experts. Which experts, I wonder? Academic experts?
I realize by the way, that this line of thinking doesn't really go anywhere. My point is only the same one sibling comments are making - Alexander is arguing that success as measured by metrics controlled outside the system don't give much support to school being super critical. You're arguing that success as measured by experts tells a very different story.
I wonder if quality of memory significantly influences one's take on this question. I was a top student, but I remember even less than Scott purports to. So to me, the idea of worrying about having missed 5% of which I will forget 95% is quite absurd. But perhaps if I remembered all the classes and the content, then the value of that time would be much more real, even years later.
So to some degree "people forget everything anyway". But places with zero school (eg third world countries) do end up with much less educated people. So somebody is getting education at some point. While it's possible that some of this is ambiently in the environment (eg a kid I know who learned to read by playing video games with lots of text in them), it wouldn't surprise me if smarter people could pick things up ambiently from the environment and duller people need their hands held and benefitted from school a bit. I just think a little school probably goes a long way.
I think it's important to differentiate between "school", "education", and "learning". Also, I would introduce an "engagement" variable as a quality multiplier.
Let's say that the average kid gets 10,000 hours of school. This may include 4,000 hours of education, but at a low rate of enegagement. So obviously we do end up with some learning at the end. (I suspect that learning that results from low enegagement will also have much lower retention, as in your example about the Civil War).
If the above example is the status quo, we can play around with the formula. We can try to replace school with other education tools -tutoring, self-directed, online/adaptive, apprenticeships, etc. These will have various rates of engagement with various results.
Or we can cut out "education" entirely and replace "school" with "life". Obvisouly there will be some learning involved in 10,000 hours of life, but it will be entirely dependent on the specific life.
My point here is that when we consider school, or no school, we can be running the economics on the hours spent and the quality of the hours. We can also be optimizing these economics for "learning".
As a parent, If I can come up with a solution that can provide 10,000 hours of high engagement learning to my kid, then it's probably a much better option for my kid than school. Conversely, if I know that I'll be at work all day and my kid will spend the day alternating between staring at a blank wall and looking at porn, then school becomes a very attractive option.
To some degree. People don't forget how to read, or at least they rarely do. Nor do they forget their failure to learn to read or the lessons drawn from such failure.
The overwhelming majority of my early knowledge of English comes from computer games, RPGs (this does net you weird vocabulary, it must be admitted), reading SF/F, and talking on the Usenet in the 90's. I mean, yes I needed to be taught enough for that to even be possible, but once there? School was not even close as a factor.
The more I think about this, the more I have the following problem with this line of argument:
Sure, I'm a molecular biologist and I don't use much beyond biology and general literacy. But to figure out I wanted to be a biologist I had to learn a lot of stuff. I figured out that I liked traveling but had no faculty for languages. I learned that I loved reading history but disliked doing historical research. I was good at math by normal human standards but not future mathematician/physicist standards. I liked devising chemical syntheses on paper but not doing them in the lab. But I really liked and had an aptitude for molecular bio, and that's what I do.
It's an inefficient system. They make us all do math until we hit our limits, and 0.3% are deemed good enough to do it for a living. We learn about all sorts of stuff so we can figure out we hate it. But try coming up with a system where you only learn exactly what you need.
b/c I suspect that "kids don't suffer from lack of schooling" depends a lot on what you think schooling is meant to achieve.
One, to provide an education. The limits Scott mentioned are more true than not, I think. "We forget everything".
Two, to test pupils in a long winded rat race. There, I believe lack of schooling would probably hurt more or less, depending on the way the rat race is designed. If every year is a "yay or nay" on a large amount of material with a non-recoverable-afterwards fork, every minute of schooling actually matters.
Three, to awaken curiosity as Ivan Fyodorovich suggests and give a bit of an initial basis in any subject you might want to pursue. For example, I too have forgotten all about massive amount of the Maths I was taught. I especially hated geometry and trigonometry. I'm told many types of engineers and physicists use these tools.
Now, contrary to Ivan Fyodorovich, I knew pretty early on I didn't want to work with lots of sciences and Maths and I still had to go through the pain of learning that stuff to satisfy the rat race setup of the French educational system.
It sure seems like a lot of waste but I wouldn't call the impact of e-schooling negligible in a country like France where we all compete for limited space (my understanding being that, in the US, if you're born in the middle of the country and don't want to leave your small town, education is basically not needed. You'll find a local job where a bit of discipline, work ethic and a modicum of decency will see you through. Education the French way is only necessary if you're planning to compete in the top 20 cities).
A serious issue is that kids in much of the US didn't miss a year of school, they had a year of sad-ass Zoom school during which an abnormally large number of kids checked-out and/or flunked everything. I seriously wonder if that is ultimately worse for them than a year of no school.
- Far more kids are dropping out/failing than in a normal year
- Some would have flunked out eventually anyway, some will recover when school resumes as normal, but for some this might permanently derail their educations/life trajectories.
In other words, it's the failing, not the learning loss/opportunity cost I'm worried about.
My mother, a teacher at a regional school in Germany (regional schools being the type of school that doesn't qualify you for university, it's grades 5-10) (in a bad neighbourhood, if it matters), has observed that about half the students did their homework assignments and tried to keep up (or their parents made them) whereas the other half didn't really do anything at all - some of the kids don't have (enough) access to the internet, no room for themselves, siblings they had to care for while the parents used the family computer for work etc, so this is not surprising. (I have heard from other classes in secondary schools where all kids attended zoom meetings - I expect these are socioeconomic differences).
The problem is that now both these groups are in the same class. This is frustrating for everyone. Students that kept up resent the repetition, students that didn't have to rush through everything etc.
There are also some teachers that gave lots of homework, called around regularly, held zoom classes for those able to attend them, and some that didn't make their students do much of anything, fully aware they'd need to teach all of it again anyway once school resumes regularly. I expect covid to have widely different effects depending on which of these groups you fall into and which sort of teachers you had.
For some kids zoom school was better than in person as far as learning. I think that was definitely the case for my 11 year old. In regular school there are lots of disruptive kids that get in the way of learning. In zoom school those kids just completely checked out, which was bad for them but actually good for my daughter because they were no longer disruptive.
I'm not sure the disruptive kids necessarily checked out completely. I've been thriving in online classes at uni because I can listen with one ear when bored, playing (simple) computer games and checking back in when I want, with recorded lectures I can go through them at my own pace, and when I zone out I can just pause and get back to it later (I take ~3h per lecture that way, but I retain a whole lot more than when I attend in person). I've never been too disruptive as a kid, but now I can do all sorts of things that would have been - sing to myself, make annoying noises, doodle, chat with friends, talk to my partner, lounge in whatever position I want to, rock and sway, even get up and walk through the room. Being disruptive is no longer disrupting! I expect a lot of ADHD kids to do better, not worse, under those circumstances. I attend way more classes now than I used to, because I don't have to commit to sit in a room (I can't sit for long for chronic pain reasons and attend classes mostly from the sofa now), bored out of my mind or jittery. All of this dependent on the option of disabling the webcam, of course.
Remote kindergarten worked *startlingly* well. I don't know about the socialization side of things, but my kid learned to read and write (to a reasonable, age-appropriate extent) entirely from remote lessons. And it definitely wasn't the only thing they covered.
There was a good EconTalk about this a few years back I think (I can't find it, sorry). Part of the issue seems to have been that the school boards and such were literally involved in massive criminal activities, such that the FBI had people permanently posted there. (Presumably the FBI were not the source of the criminal activities, but who know these days...) Bribes and kickbacks for jobs, money disappearing, political nastiness... The interviewee's position was that the system was just so horribly corrupt and broken that shattering it and starting entirely from scratch was needed, otherwise the system's immune response against reform was too strong.
Also, NOLA lost about 1/2 its population after katrina. Also, "Case studies of neighborhood recovery show that more-advantaged neighborhoods before Katrina have higher rates of return, and even gain new residents, while disadvantaged neighborhoods remain sparsely populated (Elliott et al. 2009). "
Might want to look at the MS coast to see if charts with NOLA or not - much different before/after demographics
> I’m inherently skeptical of these, because I’m suspicious that education researchers love finding that education has huge effects, that any disruption to education is a disaster, and that kids should be in school much more.
We should also expect education researchers to find that strikes are bad for students, since education researchers are incentivized to find results that school administrations approve of, and school administrations want reasons to shut down teacher strikes.
I don't know that administrations do want to shut down teacher strikes. My sense has always been it's mostly "schools vs parents" not "administrations vs teachers" in these sorts of events. Finding that strikes are awful would be good for schools trying to get more resources given to them, because "If we can't make an agreement that gets these teachers back to work, all the children die!" sounds like a good way to get resources given to the schools.
Administrators definitely want to end strikes, as they are judged on their ability to fulfill the purposes of the school. You are correct that they are even happier if the teachers get everything they want and the relationship is smooth. There's very little downside for administrators in getting more resources, unless it causes long term financial problems for the district.
I agree that administrators have more costs associated with teachers' strikes than the teachers themselves, preferring to avoid them. I expect though that by the time contract negotiations get into strike territory it is not because of decisions the administrators are making but because of higher level issues, e.g. needing more money for pay or benefits, that the administrators don't pay the price of. So strikes tend to be against those holding the purse strings of both the teachers and administrators, and the result of a successful strike is both getting more money and resources. I haven't heard of any strikes where the end result was teachers getting more money by way of the administration getting pared down to make the cash available.
Then again, there are probably many strike outcomes I have never heard of :D Still, that seems like the sort of outcome that would show up in the literature a lot.
Cuts to administration do sometimes happen, although even if the cause is higher teacher benefits it's unlikely that a school board would draw that line directly. The more likely scenario is one board negotiating higher wages/benefits and the next board making cuts where applicable to fix a shortfall. Unfortunately for the teacher's union, the administration is usually far too small to make administration cuts really relevant to the higher costs of teachers. If admin is 10% of the number of teachers (which is probably too high), then there simply isn't enough money on the admin side to cover teacher increases. A 5% teacher increase is equal to a 50% admin increase or more. Not to mention that each individual administrator is more likely to be filling a necessary role and in direct support of the school board. You're not likely to cut your building principal, even if you can't afford the teacher contract.
Huh, I would have assumed that education researchers want to find things in favor of the teachers, and teachers want to show that education matters, but that strikes don't.
It depends on whether education researchers are more aligned with teachers or administrators. I would guess administrators since it's usually administrators who pay the bills and give education researchers a platform, but it could also be teachers since education researchers generally come from a teaching background.
Well, remember that the point of strikes is to inflict pain by not working, so that your bosses will accede to your demands to get you to come back to work. If the only bad thing about teacher strikes was the inconvenience of finding a place to put your kids 8 hours a day, someone might ask "Why do we pay teachers so much?" and just invite them to strike forever while they put their kids in daycare.
Put another way, your biggest worry when taking a month off of work is that you will return and no one will have noticed you were gone. That looks bad for your continued employment.
Teachers want the result to be both that education matters and also that strikes matter. That can align quite easily, and both incentivize the administration or school board to resolve things quickly (by giving in to the requests of the teachers).
If strikes don't matter, then administrators can just wait out the teachers.
Based on conversations with K-12 teachers, I've come to think:
- there are roughly two skills taught, "number sense" and "reading comprehension"
- good curriculum + teaching can improve them, though practice and exposure is a big part of it
- it's possible to catch up quickly, though gets harder later b/c you're missing foundations
I think many schools are not good enough at teaching these for absence to matter. But especially for kids who don't get much exposure elsewhere, absence is indeed a missed opportunity. Just, one that would only show up in the stats if the schools were better.
I think that the very low value add of schools does account for a lot of what we are seeing here. When I enroll my kids in piano class, I expect them to play piano better than what they could do if I just had one around the house. Absences there would likely show up. The really damning thing about schools is that they don't seem to be able to teach much more than kids pick up just by being around their families and doing normal human things. Most parents who manage to have jobs and run a household can, and probably do, teach their kids all they really learn during their school years, with the exception of some trivia and harder subjects. (Neither one of my parents was going to teach me math past algebra, but had everything else covered far better than school.)
I was in a meeting with a third grade parent who admonished her daughter, with great seriousness, that the curriculum had gone beyond what she, the mother, could teach and that now the kid was on her own to learn in school what she could learn.
You might be surprised at how many parents don't know much of anything beyond second grade level.
Oh no, just the opposite, I am often surprised at how many people make good with just basic math and reading. What people NEED to know to get by is really pretty low level. Three cheers for the division of labor.
Further, if the research on nature/nurture is anything to go by, it seems somewhat unlikely the daughter was going to pick up a great deal more, either.
I do wonder what the subject of the curriculum was, however. If it was history or science I could see a parent saying "I don't know this stuff, and I am not going to be reading the book for you to learn it, so you are on your own." Third grade math is what, maybe multiplication? Then again, the way they teach math now is bonkers... it takes me a while to figure out what the hell they actually want my kid to do on the way to the answer sometimes.
If missing school affects graduation rates but not learning, maybe kids who miss a lot of school notice how they didn't miss much actual learning, so they realize school matters less than they thought it did, which makes them more likely to choose to drop out.
I wonder how much absences cause dropping out vs. how many kids drop out for the same reason they were absent, ie. their parents don't care about school anymore than they do.
One note I'd like to observe: When it comes to "excused" vs "unexcused" absences, what we are generally looking at is, "Kids who have parents who care and are with-it enough to communicate with the school when the child doesn't attend vs children who don't." So it's still very much a correlational relationship that "unexcused" absences predict learning deficits.
Most of my "unexcused" absences in high school were from before I figured out I could just forge an absence slip from my parents. Presumably that would muddle some of the correlation.
I was thinking it was more "kids who are delinquent and go smoke pot instead of attending school" vs. "kids who get sick and have to go to the doctor a lot"
Sure, that's part of it too, but again, the significant distinction is "kids whose parents see the Unexcused Absences and take steps to make sure their kids get to school" versus "kids whose parents aren't paying attention to their education."
Thinking logically, it has to be something along these lines. If missing school is what causes learning deficits, then there is no logical way to claim that missing school because you're sick doesn't have that impact but missing school because you're skipping does. You're missing school either way. But the kid who is skipping doesn't like school and even when he is attending is probably not really engaged, and of course he's going to learn less. It's not the absence that has the impact, but the absence is indicative of either low parental involvement or low personal motivation.
Some parents don't care whether the absences are excused or not, which will naturally result in a higher proportion of unexcused absences. Those parents tend to also not care much about what their kids do or making sure they are actually learning. They usually do miss a lot more school as well, but that's not a given. Many of the higher earning and more conscientious parents where my kids go to school take multiple vacations during the school year and otherwise get their kids out of school. The kids do great, and as many absences are excused as can be allowed.
Something that was missing from almost all of those studies is a measurement of resources required for catching the students back up. Almost all systems have some stabilizing mechanisms to help bring up students who e.g. got cancer back up to grade level (extra attention by classroom teachers, special ed, social workers, etc). Even disasters come with extra resources in the US to help support the students. Just because a system kept results within it's normal parameters during normal times doesn't imply it can do so during abnormal times. Looked at from this lens the Pakistan study looks much worse.
I've found systems thinking to be the most powerful tool in my toolbox for reasoning about how organizations function. If you haven't read it, Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows is a really good primer and has the single best chapter in a book I've read (the one about leverage points).
My mom's an elementary school teacher. This year she's teaching second grade with a class of students with mixed reading skills from third grade to pre-k. Note this is NOT a special ed class. There is a single systemic resource to catch the kids up: for a few hours a week they take the kids out of the classes and regroup them roughly by skill instead of by age. This practice has, of course, been suspended during Covid. But even in normal times I'm not sure how effective it is, as the older kids would get teaching at the same speed as the younger kids.
Then again her principal usually places her a grade level after a bad teacher and a grade level before a rookie teacher, so perhaps that's an example of a resource at work.
N=1.
Perhaps in the Pakistan situation, a bunch of western counselors swooped in and told them about how they should have PTSD or something?
A some of the stuff I'm thinking about is of the form of how her principal behaves. Preferentially spending a minute extra per class session with a kid that's behind, the administration putting a kid that likes to help the teacher in a class that has a slightly higher number of behind students, things like that.
Other stuff, like extra help, either through an IEP (which technically makes it special ed) or non-IEP support from the same people is also built into the system at most places. My mom is a retired speech language pathologist and she spent a lot of time with elementary kids who were behind for various reasons but didn't technically qualify for special ed. Her school had the lowest scores in the district, so the state kicked in extra money to add more staff to support those efforts. Those are structural corrective actions versus the adhoc ones above.
This is a very interesting point with an anecdotal resonance for me. In senior year in HS, I came down with a liver bug and had to be in bed-rest for nearly 2 months. It was awful because it was boring, but I also missed a lot of classes.
Because India has board exams (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_India_Senior_School_Certificate_Examination), schools start early in summer and finish teaching a year's worth of material in 2 months, and then spend the rest of the year in practice tests and so on. Sadly for me, I was sick for most of the classes. I taught myself most of everything, but Chemistry was my Achilles Heel - I couldn't make sense of it. I noticed most of my classmates were struggling with it just as much as I was and organized them to demand that the classes be taught all over again, and the plan worked - our teacher was young and filled with ideas about being a good teacher and she decided to teach everything again ;-)
At the end of the year, I got a certificate that looked like this for Chemistry (image not mine) - https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ae9cedf353e6c0414ae4024776130d95, which made my life very hard. Everybody wanted me major in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering or something like that - all I wanted to do was put Chemistry behind me (I didn't like it very much) and move on, which is what I did ;-) - I've now forgotten nearly everything I learned in that class 20 years or so ago!)
While I think school is definitely overrated, and missing school underrated, a few comments:
- Presumably not only the amount of knoweldge retained, but also the "damage" from missing school varies quite heavily from child to child? Some children have positive effects from missing school, some children have negative effects from missing school. If "missing school" means "missing the science fair project you were going to win" then that's different to "missing maths class you were kind of average at".
- School is more than learning, missing school is probably less bad than missing "time to meet with friends".
- If everyone misses school, the social effects of a single child "missing out" can't be compared to the social effects of a snow day. If you used to be cool but your parents then stopped you from joining meetings with your friends maybe you become less cool? idk, I never understood how being cool worked in school, and the little I knew I have forgot.
- Lots of things vary from school to school, maybe in Argentina they have school figured out fully but not in the US (I kid, but this kind of thing makes it hard to run good studies).
I would just quibble that social time with friends is definitely not one of the "Things that make school super important" when policy makers or whomever are discussing closing schools for one reason or another, or determining how much money schools should get. If the studies that find "Eh, missing school entirely doesn't mean kids don't get educated" are finding a true effect, that suggests that kids could spend even more time hanging out with friends.
Just hollow out the school into a giant warehouse, put in some comfortable chairs and couches, some tables, maybe a small library, you know, all the fancy dormitory rec areas from colleges. Fire all the teachers and just hire some reasonably functional adults to act as supervisors to keep the monsters at bay, and just have the kids hang out from 9-5. When they are older, maybe they could go and get part time jobs with their friends somewhere.
Boom, all the "more than learning" social friends time happens, money is saved, and kids have a much more pleasant and perhaps even more productive use of their time.
I have no opinion on this, my thoughts on the relevance of social time with friends were in the context of "should I send my immunocompromised kid back to school?"
I am curious about what parents with immunocompromised kids have been doing with them the past year, though. COVID has been miserable for my three kids with not being able to go out and do things and see friends (less so since the oldest is just 7) but I am not worried about the health risks so the trouble is mostly things being closed etc. If I were worried about the health risks due to immune problems, that would be a nightmare.
We sent our kids back to school as soon as it was an option mainly because they both really wanted the interaction with peers in person. The learning was going fine with online school. And I would say both of them were much happier after they went back and we were glad we faced our fears and sent them.
I am glad our school was open last year, albeit with masks. I really hope they don't start doing remote this fall, especially since our second is starting kindergarten this year. Here's hoping.
I suspect that you are entirely correct about grades and test scores as such, but what about harms from prolonged social isolation? I know of no studies on that, but my prior is that it will be a significant factor, especially for teenagers, and especially if they have less than ideal family support.
I was unschooled until I was 15, I'm pursuing a PhD now. Catching up on the basics wasn't easy but only took a few months. There are still a bunch of random general knowledge things I don't know, but at most it's caused a moment of embarrassment in social situations (e.g., when I genuinely thought dinosaurs were mythical creatures).
BUT I was motivated to catch up, which I think makes a big difference. I'd say most kids probably don't care too much about their education, so for them, missing school might matter more
Okay, this is tangential. Skip if you don’t want to read someone trumpet their liberal arts and science education.
You may be right about deleterious effects of missing school. But as a case study of the value of school (college), I got a liberal arts education with a double major in chemistry and philosophy. The chem helped me do my environmental chem work right out of school but the classes that I FEEL were most valuable include a course on Kant, a course on modernist epistemology, a course where we read Conjectures and Refutation, Against Method, and Lakstos’s Methodology of Scientific Research Programs. For whatever reason I also feel very influenced and enriched by a history and aesthetics of film class and a film comedy class. I later went to grad school in a different scientific field and then a career in science and was often told that my strength was critical thinking. Of course, we can’t draw causal conclusions. Maybe a talent for critical thinking drew me to my experiences. One thing I feel confident in is I encounter a lot of younger colleagues who can’t think. I cherish those four years. I know I am off point, but you mentioned not being a fan of school and I feel very different. Don’t know how it paid off economically (not too bad it seems) but in terms of what it feels like to be me, it was worth a lot to me.
I think this is pretty clearly looking at K-12; college is a different beast (I can’t recall Scott’s writings or perspectives on post-secondary at the moment). What’s your perspective on your pre-college education?
I feel the... irony, I suppose might be a good word for it, of this post is that I took 0 classes on philosophy, read no philosophers, and yet my homeschooling gave me gratuitous amounts of critical thinking. Now this was because we argued for fun at the dinner table, I read books like Godel Escher Bach, and other such learning opportunities I had growing up. I presume that my aptitude for critical thinking is part inherent and part environmental, but none of it was related to a classroom.
I am not sure there is irony here. I am sure there are homes and home schooling that can effectively instill critical reasoning. My father taught me a bit about Plato, Aristotle and, his favorite John Dewey and he liked to sit outside and read poetry (The One Hoss Shay was a favorite) or talk about the stars at night. Lucky to have that. Realistically, a lot of people can’t get that at home.
I suspect that most people don't get that from school either, given my own experiences interacting with those outside my bubble. Which suggests that "a lot of people won't get it ever". I suppose the irony I was getting at is that you're touting that as a "great result of school" but it seems more likely that it was a result of "you as an individual being exposed to ideas, which you then took and run with" and that doesn't require school, or family, but an interest in learning and access to information (e.g. the internet). Formal training or no, those who have an aptitude for critical thinking will pursue testing it, those without are unlikely to pursue it.
On SSC, Plumber would often write about "simple work for simple folks" and I feel as though your position is falling into something of a typical mind fallacy. It's less "this wasn't good for you" but more "What did work for you is not the same as what works for others" and even more "Kids tend to be information sponges, but aptitude shouldn't be overlooked". For the year and a half or so I did attend public school (charter school), I felt as though everything was done at a snail's pace. As several people point out: lots of information is repeated year after year because kids forget. Perhaps there is a way to do school that would make it truly beneficial, but my experience indicates that we'd probably be better off if we didn't reiterate things so much.
I am not trying to be dogmatic either way, but believe I benefitted tremendously from the back and forth with teachers and fellow students in many of my classes, philosophy but also chemistry and even calculus. The other thing that was super beneficial in my view was the socialization part - this from someone who grew up in small town Appalachia. Now I will also say I got a lot of beneficial socialization working at a Fortune 100 company with people from all around the world.
In my case, I got a little from back and forth with a few teachers but more from extended political/philosophical arguments with a friend and still more from interaction with my father.
Some of that forgetting, I think, is a feature not a bug. "Education" and "learning" seem obvious to adults but what the kids think they're doing may be something completely different. "See friends, sit quietly, do all the problems correctly, sit around, hear a story, eat with friends, watch someone get in trouble, sit with friends, write a sentence correctly, sit with friends, ride the bus home, see older kids yelling" is a somewhat accurate kid's-eye view of a school day and you'll notice that acquiring, retaining and analyzing information is not in the top activities; sit quietly and see friends are the top two. Math and writing occurred as many times as watching someone get in trouble and older kids yelling (once). This isn't a great model but I think it hits some main points - and this is why apprenticeship can be a good idea, the kids see what the skills are for and are motivated to continue by a desire to level up in regards to the mentor. Otherwise, "learning" is the word grownups say when they mean sitting quietly, seeing friends and people-watching. Part of the transition to zoom during Covid was the abrupt and peculiar discovery that "learning" had other meanings. I think a lot of kids felt cheated.
I've experienced a lot of different kinds of school. Public school, private schools, charter schools, home schools, self-education, distance learning, family trade education. And none of them for more than a few years. I'm the product of a bunch of incomplete educations.
It definitely handicapped me academically in some ways. I don't feel it's handicapped me all that much in life other than getting through credentialed gates. I feel that the education I had in common family knowledge/trade was the most valuable, for what it's worth. Self-education probably second place. Third was on the job training and vocational stuff.
This makes me think the old apprentice and community school model might be better than what we currently have. Though I'm not particularly certain. Especially in a generalizable sense: it might just be it would have been better for me.
I've attended ten different schools in my youth, followed by a bunch of different vocational education, distance learning, some odd jobs, the faint start of a career and now university, so I think I can relate. I think the main takeaway for me is that what matters is what I know and can do, as these will help me find my way in another environment, help me beyond the institution I am at right now. The ability to catch up by myself is also important - I do have odd gaps here and there.
I've been saying for years (tongue in cheek) that I'm in favor of more child labor. A lot of things only make sense to learn when you have need of them, yet school offers basically no opportunity for self-efficacy, and only distant promises of what it's for.
I learned lots of stuff I missed in school in a fraction of the time when I had use for it (this might not generalize if I am as smart as I think I am, but I think it applies to people less smart, too). There's also the fact that a lot of kids pass tests without any useful knowledge about the subject at all, purely by memorizing data meaningless to them, and guessing the teachers' passwords.
Very much this. Learning is fun and easy when you plan to use it for something, and tends to be a boring grind when you don't even know what it is for. Even though I really like learning for learning's sake, the things I like to learn about, and how much actually sticks with me, suggest that just learning for learning's sake is not terribly effective.
My experience with "Learning for learning's sake" is that there is a lot of value in "oh I've seen something like this before", but if that's the case, than the way we teach is completely wrong. School should be a smorgasbord of diverse experiences, with very little emphasis on any particular topic. Spend a week on carpentry, a week on plumbing, etc etc. I imagine that if K-8 was just exposing kids to various activities, we could then have 9-BS be actual training, and that training would be orders of magnitude more effective because the kids could sort into things they already found interest in.
Oh, and it's probably worth mentioning that New Orleans improved relative to a Louisiana median that was itself a basket case, and so it's hard to draw meaningful conclusions from what happened there even independent of the large demographic changes in the city post-Katrina. Half of New Orleans's charter schools got the worst possible grades in the state's grading system in 2019, which again is relative to a terrible state baseline. Whatever "miracle" occurred post-Katrina it still left a huge portion of the system's students unable to meet basic proficiency standards.
One problem with verifying your predictions is that standardized test standards keep getting lowered, or even outright eliminated (in favor of e.g. more diverse and inclusive metrics). Thus, comparing test scores today vs. five years from now might be comparing apples and oranges.
You wrote: "I think some of these points are stronger for poor/minority/at-risk kids, and weaker for comfortable/Eurasian/not-at-risk kids."
For the at risk kids, school closing is a disaster. Imagine a kid living in a homeless shelter or a kid whose parents are terrible role models or, worse, abusive, or a kid who doesn't have enough to eat. For those kids, school may be their only oasis of normalcy. Without school, they will at minimum suffer and might permanently lose a chance at a decent life. This has little to do with test scores and everything to do with socialization and having adults in their lives who care.
You probably leaned the 80/20 rule AFTER you left school, but I would say that 80% of the damage from school closings will be felt by 20% of the kids.
Yeah, came here to say this. I remember articles from last spring talking about how all the rich kids would be fine, and the high school kids would survive (education-wise), but things could turn out really bad in the long term for elementary school kids from families with non-helicopter parents.
(Of course, to the extent that this article is “Contra Helicopter Parents on Educational Outcomes” it would still be correct, but it might be missing other real problems while disproving there fake ones.)
The vast majority of kids living in those kinds of family situations do not attend a public school that you would calssify as an oasis of normalcy. Not a snark, my wife and my mother work at two of them.
A lot of kids in DC missed nearly a year and a half of in-person school, and we don't know how many of them also had very little involvement with virtual school. We have some data on learning loss already, and the real story is probably worse because we're not tracking anything for the kids who weren't present enough to take tests. I agree with the conclusion of this, which is that if you're the kind of parent who is an SSC reader, your young kids are probably not going to permanently academically affected in any way by not having school for awhile. But from the perspective of 'should we keep schools closed this year' - which is the perspective I am personally terrified of right now - this is a disaster on a number of levels. We see the kids who were already the worst-off losing the most learning. We don't know how many kids just aren't going to come back at all. (Chronic truancy already having been a major issue, it's not like we're great at making teenagers go to school if they don't want to.) Our teen (and tween) carjacking sprees certainly aren't being helped by not having kids in school. And the message that our city government has sent parents who do think it's important kids be in school is so negative for trust in institutions.
Hear, hear. I had serious medical problems in grade 5, needed a major surgery in grade 6, and was told I'd have to miss a year. My parents tried homeschooling, rigorously followed a bunch of curricula, and discovered I could finish *all* the assigned coursework in 2 hours/day and spend the rest of the time reading my favorite books. We were so unimpressed by the time wasted in "regular school" that we kept homeschooling another 2 years. I now have a PhD, but those were among the best days of my life.
C.S. Lewis has a great comment near the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, about the kings and queens of Narnia making "good laws" to stop trees from being cut down and to stop children from being sent to school.
In "Prince Caspian" when Aslan goes around freeing the kingdom from Telmarine tyranny one of the first places he stops is a school building, which he magically turns into a forest glade. C. S. Lewis didn't like school, and for good reason. He was tutored by his mother until she died of cancer while he was young. Then he was sent to an awful boarding school in Britain, where the headmaster was suffering from some kind of mental disorder and only taught geometry: the rest of the "lessons" consisted of him randomly choosing kids to answer questions on various topics and beating them with a cane if they got it wrong. After the school folded (due to not teaching anything and having a crazy headmaster) he was sent to a much better boarding school where he didn't have a great time. Quoting from his autobiography: "Never, except in the front line trenches (and not always there) do I remember such aching and continuous weariness as at (school). Oh, the implacable day, the horror of waking, the endless desert of hours that separated one from bed-time! And remember...a school day contains hardly any leisure for a boy who does not like games. For him, to pass from the form-room to the playing field is simply to exchange work in which he can take some interest for work in which he can take none, in which failure is more severely punished, and in which (worst of all) he must feign an interest...Consciousness itself was becoming the supreme evil; sleep, the prime good. To lie down, to be out of the sound of voices, to pretend and grimace and evade and slink no more, that was the object of all desire--if only there were not another morning ahead--if only sleep could last for ever!"
Then after a couple years of this his father took him out of school to be educated by a private tutor. He writes about how his father tried to prepare him for the change: "He did his best to put all the risks before me: the dangers of solitude, the sudden change from the life and bustle of a great school (which change I might not like so much as I anticipated), the possibly deadening effect of living with only an old man and his old wife for company. Should I really be happy with no companions of my own age? I tried to look very grave at these questions. But it was all imposture. My heart laughed. Happy without other boys? Happy without toothache, without chilblains, happy without pebbles in my shoes? And so the arrangement was made. If it had had nothing else to recommend it, the mere thought, 'Never, never, never, shall I have to play games again,' was enough to transport me. If you want to know how I felt, imagine your own feelings on waking one morning to find that income tax or unrequited love had somehow vanished from the world."
Hey, it's great to see another Lewis fan here! I'm not well-read on his autobiography, but I've been looking through the recent literature on boarding schools in Britain & Canada. It seems everyone hated them, despite being so posh and upper-class. It's a real puzzle that each generation sent their kids back, despite remembering very well what an awful time they'd had.
The autobiography of Roald Dahl (the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory guy) had similar recollections of the misery of British boarding school, and he was there around the same time as C.S. Lewis (about a generation after). One thing that stood out though was that Dahl's parents were Norwegian, though his father had a successful business in Wales. Roald recounts why their family stayed in Wales even after their father died when he was just a child:
"Here she was, (my mother), a young Norwegian in a foreign land, suddenly having to face all alone the very gravest problems and responsibilities. She had five children to look after, three of her own and two by her husband's first wife, and to make matters worse, she herself was expecting another baby in two months' time. A less courageous woman would almost certainly have sold the house and packed her bags and headed straight back to Norway with the children. Over there in her own country she had her mother and father willing and waiting to help her, as well as her two unmarried sisters. But she refused to take the easy way out. Her husband had always stated most emphatically that he wished all his children to be educated in English schools. They were the best in the world, he used to say. Better by far than the Norwegian ones. Better even than the Welsh ones, despite the fact that he lived in Wales and had his business there. He maintained that there was some kind of magic about English schooling and that the education it provided had caused the inhabitants of a small island to become a great nation and a great Empire and to produce the world's greatest literature. 'No child of mine', he kept saying, 'is going to school anywhere else but in England.' My mother was determined to carry out the wishes of her dead husband."
Later he recounts how, miserable at boarding school, he faked appendicitis so he would be sent home. Once home the local doctor checked him out and the following occured:
"'You're faking, aren't you?" he said.
"How do you know?" I blurted out.
"Because your stomach is soft and perfectly normal," he answered. "If you had had an inflammation down there, the stomach would have been hard and rigid. It's quite easy to tell."
I kept silent.
'I expect you're homesick,' he said.
I nodded miserably.
'Everyone is at first,' he said. 'You have to stick it out. And don't blame your mother for sending you away to boarding-school. She insisted you were too young to go, but it was I who persuaded her it was the right thing to do. Life is tough, and the sooner you learn how to cope with it the better for you.'
'What will you tell the school?' I asked him, trembling.
'I'll say you had a very severe infection of the stomach which I am curing with pills,' he answered smiling. 'It will mean that you must stay home for three more days. But promise me you won't try anything like this again. Your mother has enough on her hands without having to rush over to fetch you out of school.'
'I promise,' I said. 'I'll never do it again'"
So it seems that people kept sending their kids out of a combination of the superiority of British schools (were they superior? They might well have been, compared to the rest of Europe at the time.), and the old British "stiff upper lip" ideal, where the the fact that schools were awful was a selling point since they would toughen kids up.
It should be noted that while C. S. Lewis hated the boarding school he went to (the good one, not the one run by a madman) his older brother Warnie loved it. As C. S. pointed out himself, he wasn't a very sociable kid. He might have had a better time if he was better at sports and made friends.
I really want to read this C. S. Lewis autobiography, but I can't figure out which book it is. Can you help, FLWAB? (The question sounds dumb but he has so many books.)
School is important for socialization! Boy howdy I am just *so* grateful for the bullying and abuse I received from not only students but also teachers and administrators. How else would I be prepared for modern adult life?
Honestly of everything I experienced in my childhood, the social environment of school was the one that was the *least* like adult life in every possible way.
In school you are socializing with people all of whom are about your age and, in some sense, your direct competitors — for grades, but also social status. That is a very unnatural social environment.
I think having children do things together with other children is what makes them get friends in the first place, usually (didn't work for me, but I am certified weird). More than that, I think school serves as a place where you meet a broad array of kids. It gives you an idea what is normal, and what sort of kids exist in the world. Self-selection will distort that (private schools, homeschooling etc do too).
"Am I normal?" is a stigmatized question in a society that values individuality above all, but it is an important one. It helps you find our where you are relative to others: what are you good at? What are you bad at? What can you expect from others, how likely is it that a random kid/person has this or that trait? Identity can only develop in company, and hoo boy does an individualist society care about identities. Whatever your identity is within your homeschooling group, it'll probably be "the homeschooled kid" when you leave that bubble. There's also the comparison of teachers and other kids' parents to one's own: it's the place you find out not every parent hits their kids, or has a big house and garden, or lets them watch TV all day, or goes to church. You're confronted with all sorts of ways of living through others at school (less so in the US with private schools, homeschooling being legal, neighbourhoods being extremely divided by class).
I don't think you need to spend every day sitting at a desk being told you can't go to the toilet to have that, and a lot of it can be done in smaller and selective environments. But there's another meaning of "socialization": "the process of learning to behave in a way that is acceptable to society" (Oxford). Society. Not your church, your football club or the friends your parents approve of. And the norms and opinions and customs of the wider society help you assimilate into it on your own, free you from the control of your parents. I think this the main argument for schools, actually.
We can talk about the smart and privileged and nice kids of smart and privileged and nice people all day, but those are not the one that need school as a gateway to self-determination.
I say all this as someone who was definitely harmed by school and would probably be a better, happier, healthier, more productive and better adjusted person without it.
This is a good argument, but it only works to the extent schools fulfill this function. I think many of them don't. As you admit up top, private schools definitely don't do this.
And what is the "wider society"? To what extent should parents who may not like the messages prevalent in that wider society be allowed to make decisions about what their children should be exposed to, whether through homeschooling or private schools or even just deciding what sort of media/internet access/etc. their children should have access to?
That is a matter of balance, but I am coming down hard in favor of parents not being able to opt out of outside influences for their children to the degree that unmonitored homeschooling allows. "Wider society" is vague on purpose, but usually it's the country/state that is in charge of curricula and schools.
Two thought experiments, let's assume for a second that our only options are complete homeschooling with no oversight and compulsory attendance of public schools: 1. a dissident family in Nazi Germany. 2. a fundamentalist anti-gay family with a gay child in a modern European city. Both disagree with the things their child would learn at school, the kids it would meet there, and both have an interest in isolating it from those influences. If we don't want to descend into "school is good when it teaches the right values and bad when it teaches the wrong values" then our answer must be the same for both.
I think parents should have the right to teach their children what they please, as long as the children also go to school and learn what "the outside world" believes, outside of the control of the parents. Marketplace of ideas, if you will. Take school away, and the kid is basically a hostage to their parents and their parents' community, unprepared for going their own way.
Real life is less black and white and there's middle ground, obviously. In practice, I think schooling beyond grade school should be optional, but some form of getting away from your parents, being around random kids, regularly - I think this is necessary.
I do think it's a tricky question, and your hypotheticals get to the heart of the matter. I think even someone who supports homeschooling or unschooling would agree that there's a point at which homeschooling could be so bad that it's essentially child neglect. I brought up the "wider society" point because for some families the "wider society" would be an Amish community or a Hasidic village. Those societies clearly have different values from the US as a whole. To take a broader example (and, admittedly, to veer into culture war territory), many people (or at least politicians) in Hungary clearly have different views on how children should be raised (pertaining to the recent hubbub about the Hungarian law about exposing children to LGBT material) from politicians in the Netherlands and much of the rest of the EU. If you have public schools, the decisions about what is taught in them may be made at various levels (local school boards, states/other equivalents in federal systems, national governments, even EU decrees or public pressure). I would much rather live in a world where parents have a relatively free hand to raise their children than one in which politicians acting on behalf of the "wider society" make the decisions.
I think the Amish community or Hasidic village would be too narrow to consider "wider society" here - but I have to admit I'm largely ignorant of these matters as a German, where curricula are set at the state level and even private schools with a religious focus or philosophical slant have to adhere to them.
I'd argue both the dissident in Nazi Germany and the LGBT Hungarian profit from exposure to their surroundings, though. To learn how to speak and act in a way that is acceptable to the majority, to learn what they believe and what will cause backlash is important to fight against it, too. If most people are against you in some way, knowing how to stay in or move back into the closet is a useful skill. I don't think full-time assimilation is required for this (and indeed, it's not hard to see how it is damaging, too). I've seen enough examples of people remaining hostile towards the values taught in school, parroting their parents' objections to it, to be confident that parental influence is still strong in the face of compulsory school, though.
If I can spitball for a bit, imagine a fully modular education, where kids can take some subjects, all subjects, accelerated or decelerated classes according to their needs (with minimal requirements as to what order to take them in, or to their number). Imagine homeschooling for most subjects but sending your kids to school for math, imagine taking fewer classes for a stressed or ill or slow or just not very motivated kid, more or faster ones for an ambitious one, and allowing alternatives to regular school. In such a scenario the only things I'd mandate would probably be one course per year/semester in a public school up to age 14 - it might even be an extracurricular, as long as some really basic stuff is taught somehow, somewhere, by someone qualified (civics and health come to mind). As to who decides what a kid takes and where, two out of three - child, parents, teachers - should work?
"If we don't want to descend into 'school is good when it teaches the right values and bad when it teaches the wrong values' then our answer must be the same for both."
Why is this a descent? Can't we say that Nazi schools are bad, modern European schools are good, and our ethical principles ought to acknowledge the difference? I'm not sure why there should be a universal principle governing whether parents should be allowed to opt children out of school. Or why that principle can't be "parents should be morally obliged to allow outside influences on their children, provided those influences themselves meet a basic minimum standard of morality."
I don't understand the tendency towards trying to design principles or institutions or laws that are completely agnostic towards object questions.
Homeschool socialization varies enormously; there are the ex IBLP/Bill Gothard/Pearl/cult homeschoolers who were socialized extremely oddly and have trouble adapting, and plenty of other homeschoolers who were socialized decently. I mainly participated in church youth group and 4-H clubs several times a week for most of a decade, and that worked decently well.
The current cultural climate is not very tolerant of people saying their weird counter-zeitgeist opinions in public, and parents probably have a duty to explain why reticence is often the better strategy. Schools teach this more through reinforcement learning, but it might work just to tell the young adult that when they go out into the world. There can be a steeper learning curve for homeschoolers trying to work in somewhat oppressive environments.
As to whether it makes sense to spend public money on adult socialization, it might depend on the specifics of what that looks like, and the extent to which it works. My main objection is that there's a pretty good chance the Department of Friendships would organize lame activities where nobody actually made any friends, but the administrators made a nice living for themselves and everyone played along and pretended to be interested. As has been known to happen in schooling.
Something like this actually existed in East Germany, in the form of the Jungpioniere and FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend) (nominally voluntary but in practice membership was necessary for getting into university or your preferred line of work), and for adults the Arbeiterbrigaden. In part that went like you said - indoctrination mostly (but not exclusively) being received as something to pay lip service to and roll your eyes at - but the activities weren't actually lame (clubs, vacations, concerts) and they also did a lot of things people in this thread lament schools not doing (practical skills, useful work, interest-directed learning). I don't have the spoons to write the essay the topic demands though.
I should mention that one of the things people lament most after the German reunion (apart from, you know, the unemployment and poverty and mishandling of Eastern assets) is the loss of social cohesion. This stuff worked.
I mean, the activities college organizes for young adults are... lectures and homework? They seem to work. (Obviously I exaggerate, but I do think that if that were all that was provided, it would work.)
"Would it be beneficial to use taxpayer money to help them socialize better? I think people would probably say no to this. But it seems reasonable that if it is a good thing to do at age 10, 12, 14 and 18, it should be a good thing at 20, 25, 30, etc."
You may or may not be glad to learn that Social Prescribing/Community Referral is now a thing in Ireland:
https://www.hse.ie/eng/about/who/healthwellbeing/our-priority-programmes/mental-health-and-wellbeing/social-prescribing/
"Social prescribing recognises that health is heavily determined by social factors such as poverty, isolation and loneliness. Social prescribing offers GPs and other health professionals a means of referring people to a range of non-clinical community supports which can have significant benefits for their overall health and wellbeing.
Social prescribing generally involves three key components
- A referral from a healthcare professional,
- Consultation with a link worker
- An agreed referral to a local community activity. Examples include; art, cookery, meditation, GAA, men’s sheds, music, drama, walking groups and many more.
Social prescribing can also enable and support people to access health services such as Smoking Cessation, Self-management support programmes and others."
Were I the kind of person who wanted social support, I could go to my doctor and talk about this. Because I'm not, wild horses would not drag me to a weekly group-therapy/hobbies and meetings style event where I'd have to (pretend to) talk to people.
This is related to my interests, as a BSA Scout, Girl Scout, Young Mudder, Library, and Sunday School volunteer, and parent of two kids with a fair number of home-school friends. Yes, it is vital (though many schools fail terribly at this job), and yes, we should continue to use taxpayer money on it. Socializing doesn't mean "get along wit your peers". It means "learn how to function in all sorts of environments." School presents a number of novel environments that parents can't provide because learning to function without your parents can't be provided with your parents. Learning to deal with beurocratic, stratified organizations that say they care about you but don't, staffed with people who probaby do care about you (but maybe not) but are beholden to the org - well, that's a thing basically everyone is going to have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
This all comes from schooling. If you think public funds shouldn't go to schooling (I do, in theory but very much not in practice in the US in 2021) then yeah I think public funds should go to it.
I appreciate your argument and I will look for Caplan's book. Some of those jobs, though, are the ones I think most likely to be done by machines - not even necessarily AI - just automation. Stocking, most clerk roles, cashiering - so much can be done with a combination of online ordering and automation. The path of birth-school-cashier could be changed to birth-work-cashier but I think more likely it will be birth-school-unemployment or birth-school-UBI (if it's adopted). Birth-apprenticeship-job that still exists might be a better path. There are massive reserves of untapped artistic, mechanical and social talent which school obscures.
If you really think a cashier or bar tender doesn't use basic maths, I think you have no idea what you are talking about. And those are not careers; they're jobs. A very different thing.
If you're working with food, for example, even if you are a high school drop-out you will be expected to comply with basic hygiene requirements so as to avoid giving the customers food poisoning. No, you don't have to be highly educated or very smart, but you do need certain traits such as conscientiousness and you do need to be able to understand about infection, cleanliness and the like.
And it seems it's not a job that people are very happy in:
https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/food-preparation-worker/satisfaction/
You are just reinforcing what parents and society in general think: if you want any kind of good job, much less a career, stay in school and get an education. Otherwise you are going to work low-wage jobs in poor conditions for the rest of your life.
The reason why those jobs are the most common is because there are bottom rung people who need jobs. Indeed, most of those jobs are things that are either presently being automated away or are things we can do without.
In a society without bottom rung people, we would probably automate away most of those jobs, or they'd become much more scarce (having other people cook food for you would be expensive if the dumbest person in society had an IQ of 120 and expected a salary to match).
The reason why these jobs exist is because there are bottom rung people who need jobs so we can pay them very little to do them.
And as for your list: Chemistry, biology, physics, mathematics, statistics, economics? They're necessary for being a useful citizen in society. You basically cannot make meaningful choices about political stuff without it, and if you have to make choices about stuff like healthcare, having a grounding in this stuff is vital.
You literally cannot understand most things of importance in greater society without this stuff. People who are antivax and hold other foolish beliefs are ignorant of these things at a frequency far above chance.
The reason why we barred literacy tests and similar things in the US is because they were used for the purpose of excluding black people specifically from voting while having exceptions for white people; the history of abuses associated with these tests is what resulted in their ban.
I take no issue with the notion of requiring people to pass a competency test to vote. This would also solve the issue of "How old do you need to be to vote?" quite neatly; people who can pass the test are capable of voting, those who aren't yet ready cannot.
I don't think that it is plausible to get such a requirement passed in the United States for obvious political reasons.
"The reason the jobs exist is because they need to be done."
We have mostly replaced cashiers at a number of local grocery stores; the overwhelming majority of people at this point go through self checkout. I have been to restaurants where they replaced most of the wait staff with apps; you ordered electronically rather than through people because this reduced the staffing load, with staff being there only to bring food out to people. And in the end, thanks to things like pre-prepared frozen food and gas station food, restaurants really don't *have* to exist or be all that common. Costco proves you can have far fewer people engaged in stocking activities, and of course, Amazon does away with traditional shopping for many things entirely.
There's lots of jobs that could be done away with or made significantly more efficient and thus require fewer people if it was too expensive to employ people to do them. Indeed, rising wages, mechanization, and automation have historically eliminated many factory and agricultural jobs. When it becomes cheaper to automate than employ people, we tend to do so.
My family moved in the middle of the school year when I was in elementary school, and because of that I never actually learned long division or long multiplication (it was later in the year in the first school and earlier in the year in the second school). I also missed a whole host of lessons about things like animal classification, American folk tales, and who knows what else. I never managed to pick up either long division or long multiplication, but it didn't seem to have any impact on my future academic career (I was the top of my class for math in high school and got good grades on my math classes in college).
Potentially missing something in Kindergarten could have hurt more, but those are also the skills that will be obviously missing and that the teacher would know to help with. If the whole class next year can't do long division, the teacher can throw in an extra lesson or two on long division and even everyone out.
Long division is useful as a precursor to polynomial division, imo, which is used a fair bit in more mathy subjects later on. Sure, it's basically retaught from scratch at that point as most people have forgotten how long division works by then, but it's not completely useless.
I teach polynomial division to 11th- and 12th-graders science majors (in France) every year. Only practice division by x-a, but hint at more complicated cases. It is not only useful as a technique, it helps understand and connect key concepts about polynomials, like why a being a root implies x-a can be factored
> It helps understand and connect key concepts about polynomials
Surely the key-most concept is that numbers are polynomials? [Typically evaluated at x=10, i.e. in base 10.]
The correctness of the polynomial division algorithm then shows that long division also works in base b (for all integers b >= 2).
I was only ever taught long division of polynomials, not numbers. (but we did do short division of numbers)
I really do long division or multiplication all the time, maybe not every day, but certainly every week. If you only do arithmetic when you have time to pull out a calculator, then you'll never use arithmetic routinely in observing and understanding the world. You'll never get into the habit of computing probabilities or estimating quantities in everyday life, and so you'll never be able to understand the world empirically, and will probably fall back on something like Aristotelian metaphysics without realizing it.
I tend to do that stuff in my head. I always have a phone with a calculator, but sometimes my hands are busy, and sometimes I'm walking around and don't want to stop so I can poke the phone without missing keys. While a lot of mental artithmetic is about finding ways NOT to have to carry all the intermediates of the "long" methods in your mind, I do think that the "long" methods are a useful starting point for developing your bag of mental tricks.
What benefit do you get from doing long division/multiplication over rounding to three significant figures total (e.g. 6543 x 34567 to 6500 x 30000) which I think is much easier and faster for most people.
I usually round off to about 2 digits. I didn't mean that I do the entire computation. I was responding to a sub-thread begun by someone who said he/she didn't know how to do long division, which I think implies being able to do long division even with rounding off.
I regularly do long multiplication in my head (if by that you mean calculating a bunch of partial products and adding them up), and occasionally long division too. Last week I was sitting outside a restaurant waiting for my food and did some long division on paper while I waited. That kind of thing isn't useful for math, of course, but I wasn't doing math, I was doing engineering. It's true that a calculator is faster, but I didn't have one with me.
It is a useful precursor to concepts such as 'algorithm' or 'recursion' that appear if you go on to study Computer Science. Even longhand addition/subtraction is helpful for explaining binary arithmetic and things like half- and full-adders by analogy.
You clearly haven't had to deal with the typical smart phone calculator. By the time you've gotten past security, found and fired up the app, waded through the usual piles of crap smart phones bombard one with, you could have done the damned arithmetic in one's head. Maybe a dedicated calculator might make sense, but I dropped my faithful HP as a fashion accessory years ago.
Really? My Android has a calculator app that came with it, and it doesn't have any ads at all. I have it on my home screen and use it all the time.
I'm reminded of a Facebook meme a while back: "Remember when we were told in school 'You won't have a calculator everywhere you go'? We sure showed them."
Yea, the calculator app is pretty decent. And there are other apps freely available with absolutely no ads, too, because "writing a calculator app" is one of the easiest things one can do after learning how to program.
People still need to know what to put *into* an app, and if someone simply *cannot* add three 4-digit numbers on paper, it's a sign of something else seriously wrong that needs addressed, so we might as well make sure the kids can do it.
The fact that American schools seem to spend so much time on things like long multiplication and division is probably part of the reason why missing school doesn't matter much. At the end of the day, these are just fairly simple algorithms that you need to learn to execute without making mistakes. I'm pretty sure that if you wanted to learn these, you could pick them up as an adult in a few hours.
Now multiplication tables on the other hand. That requires a fair bit of memorization and I think an adult who didn't know them would have to spend some time before they were able to reproduce them quickly.
On the other hand, modern memorization tools are really good. I'm using Anki to memorize Norwegian and I'm getting through about ten words per day, using maybe ten minutes per day. So that's, what, 2.5 hours of total effort for the 12x12 times table, assuming it's exactly as difficult as Norwegian and ignoring symmetry?
I mean I’m not sure memorization tools are that great of a way to learn a language. You might learn direct word meanings without more subtle important parts. Same for times tables.
In maths, drilling the rote bits is so that you have more brain left over when doing more complicated problems (real or academic).
Eg even proofs often involve some calculations.
I’d say drilling is probably of significantly more value in math than in language. But we definitely do way too much of it in school, over a way too long time, and not enough other stuff.
Drilling is tremendously helpful in learning a language. An expanded vocabulary is critical.
Same with me but for fractions. And kind of funny, every other part of elementary math is ingrained in my head. I can still do those basic math facts and algorithms instantly and accurately, my kids need help with any of it and I can still do it all (I suspect this will change when they hit High School), except fractions. I have no idea how to do those.
Except, I can quickly derive the rules. So I show my kids how to do that. What's "23/50 + 12/25" I have no idea how to tell you off the top of my head.
But 1/2 + 1/2 = 1
Or 1/2 + 1/2 = 2/2
or 2/4 + 2/4 = 4/4
OK, I see what to do now. You get a common denominator then add the numerator.
I can see how going through that process might be more helpful for my kids then if I just remembered the rule and told them. So ironically, the one part of elementary math I missed so still can't recall how to do, might be the one part I'm best at teaching my kids.
No irony there. The thing you had to figure out how to do yourself is the thing you actually understand. The thing you actually understand is the thing you can teach.
I think both those things are very general principles from maths teaching to sports coaching.
Sorry, plenty of irony. No paradox.
Not being able to do long multiplication and division and especially adding fractions so actually bad for math. You should know how to do that stuff and it’s important for higher math. But I mean that in a specific way - you need to understand the principles / properties well enough to do them for numbers given enough time. You won’t really need to “long multiply” or “long divide” or “fraction add” large numbers ever (although you would a few hundred years ago before computers), but it’s important to understand the principles that lead to them because without that you can’t do more complicated tricks. (I last long divided maybe eight years ago, but picked some 4 digit numbers in my head and managed to, based on principled knowledge, figure it out) - (abc) * (def) = (a00) (def) + (b0)def + c(def) = (ad*100 + (ae)10+(af))100 + (bd*100 + be*10 + bf)*10 + (cd 100 + ce10 + cf) or (a/b) + (c/d) = ad/bd + bc/bd =(ad + bc)/bd so 1/3+1/6 = 2/6 + 1/6 = 3/6 (from the formula (3+6)/18).
So while not being able to do long division or multiplication is bad, missing school for it probably doesn’t matter that much because of how shit they are. Don’t schools spend like five years worth of math on adding multiplying and dividing increasingly long numbers anyway? Missing the 4-digit year can’t just that much.
I'm curious about your claim that you never learned long division or long multiplication. Do you mean "if asked to multiply 837 x 964 or divide 3943 / 73 without a calculator, you wouldn't know how to proceed"? Or that you never memorized which was the standard convention for keeping track of what goes where? Or do you mean "you learned it despite not being taught it by the school"?
I also switched schools in a way that would've prevented the school from teaching me long multiplication or division, but the second school expected me to know it, so my mother taught me. It took more than two lessons, although certainly less than 20. It would've gone much faster when I was older and had more mathematical background, but I'm not at all confident that not learning multiplication and division wouldn't have slowed me down when acquiring the "more mathematical background".
For most of middle school I just had no idea, but it never really came up in situations where I didn't have access to a calculator. Nowadays I know enough algebra that I can figure out how to calculate it if I really need to, but I literally never need to do it on paper since I always have a calculator on me.
> not learning multiplication and division wouldn't have slowed me down when acquiring the "more mathematical background".
Kinda my point - for most of the individual lessons in elementary school, missing one of them might mean that you don't learn the thing, but it probably doesn't matter. If it does matter, then you'll learn it later.
Mm. I think we potentially disagree; I was saying that I'm NOT SURE that not learning (things) wouldn't have hurt me later.
You say that you now know enough algebra that you can figure out some way to multiply out (8 * 100 + 3 * 10 + 7) * (9 * 100 + 6 * 10 + 4); I agree with that (although in passing, I find the point less convincing for long division).
However, I think that knowing the algorithm initially, before I had the concepts in my head, possibly helped me learn the relevant algebra later on, if only by providing an example of "oh so that's what I was doing!". I can't prove it one way or the other, in particular because I probably had plenty of other examples, and you can almost certainly skip any one example; all I know for sure is that in the limit where you end up skipping them all, it's much harder to learn.
By "never managed to pick up [long division]", do you mean that to this day you cannot divide e.g. 46 by 11 without a machine? Or you can produce the correct result, just not showing your steps in rigid conformity to some narrow standard of how long division is supposed to be done?
Dividing 46 by 11 is easy enough to do in my head, but if you asked me to do 40689 by 356 I wouldn't really know what to do. Hmm, I suppose I would want to first figure out how many times 356 * 10^n can fit into 40689, then decrease n's until I'm left with a number smaller than 356 and that's the remainder? But that's just from my general number sense, not because I was ever taught it.
Right, 40600 - 35600 = 50000, so it's at least 100. 5080 is in between 3560 and 7120, and 5080 - 3560 = 1520, and 1529 is something like three or four 356es? Four 356es is 1424, and 1529 - 1424 = 105, so in integer division 40689/356 = 114, remainder 105. You can carry it further; 105 is almost but not quite three 35.6es.
I think that test scores are the wrong thing to look at. I suspect the main benefits of grade school come from getting improved socialization and developing better strategies for general learning/problem solving. Like in your Spanish example, I also don't remember the majority of my second-language education from grade school, but I feel like the experience alone let me explore a lot of new ways of thinking.
You also learn a great deal of categorization and existence knowledge. For example, while Scott does not remember Guassian elimination, he knows something called that actually exists, that it's relevant in math, probably algebra. That means if he hears "Gaussian elimination" in some context later on, he knows enough to roughly place the idea -- it has something to do with algebra -- which means he's about 80% of the way to being able to use the idea, all he needs now is some decent google-fu.
This is a very important part of education, which naive people often overlook when they contemplate how much factual knowledge has evaporated from memory over time. Learning sets of facts brings with it some additional meta-factual knowledge, including about the existence and categorization of facts, which usually sticks around long after the facts have evaporated, and which allows the human mind to recover the knowledge much faster than someone who never learned the facts at all (especially in this era of search-at-your-fingertips). You may not remember exactly in what years Ulysses Grant was President, or his specific policies with respect to Reconstruction, but you will often recognize that "Grant" is the name of a US President, and that he is associated with the Civil War, and that alone gets you 80% of the way to full knowledge, which you can easily complete with a little searching.
Naturally, a lot of people look at this and think "well, why don't we teach the metafactual stuff *only* and leave out the unnecessary facts? We'll be able to get more in when we dispense with the useless memorization of facts, and students will be less stressed and more capable." This is where "teachings students to think instead of memorize" comes in. Very catchy, and it appeals to everybody.
Unfortunately, so far as I can tell, it doesn't work. It appears the human mind simply doesn't absorb the metafactual knowledge *unless* it is digested along with some minimal set of facts, sort of the way Nutrient A is sometimes not absorbed well unless accompanied by Nutrient B. When you attempt to teach only the "thinking/analysis" stuff and punt on all the facts, the metafactual stuff doesn't stick. I'm not sure why this should be so, but empirically it does seem to be true. Maybe the human mind only really integrates the metafactual stuff when it has to, e.g. when it's a way of organizing facts in order to recall them better and faster.
Agreed! I think this applies especially at higher education levels. For me, the biggest advantage of university over self-directed learning was having a nice structure for all the different concepts, even though I don't remember how to do many of those things now.
Probably why "whole word" spelling works for some very bright kids (who probably already know some of it) and didn't generalize.
Interesting point re metafactual knowledge. But im not sure that it requires all that schooling (just lazy research on wikipedia has sufficed to give me some metafacts).
And im also not sure why the particular selection of metafacts learned in k12 classes is so important (why “gaussian elimination” as opposed to “Sulla’s proscription”?)
Related to the point about teaching only the meta knowledge not working: The Monad Burrito Problem (https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuition-and-the-monad-tutorial-fallacy/). When learning something abstract, you struggle for a while with the details, then understand in a flash of insight. Once you get it, it's easy, so you'd like to transmit just the insight and skip all the hard work, but you can't because the exact mental analogy you used doesn't actually matter, and sharing your description of the insight won't help anyone who hasn't struggled through the concrete examples on their own.
If you presume the ability to Google things, the idea of having a mental taxonomy in which ‘Gaussian elimination’ is categorized is trivial. Skip the steps of remembering it has something to do with math and just Google the words verbatim, and you will immediately learn that “In mathematics, Gaussian elimination, also known as row reduction, is an algorithm for solving systems of linear equations.”
This ‘metafactual knowledge’ shorn of Google is important if you’re a dilettante who needs badly to pretend to be conversant in subjects where you’re actually out of your depth. That way if somebody says “U.S. Grant” in a policy debate you can nod sagely and say “Ah yes, the American President, Grant,” and appear to be following the conversation when in fact the only thing you have grasped is the dim memory of 5th grade civics—and, worse, you have failed in an opportunity to learn something.
What is really important, and is not taught by ‘education’ but rather by exposure to vast quantities of knowledge, is the ability to learn, reason, and research for oneself. The ability, really, to say, “Grant who?” and then answer your own question by taking the initiative to crack a book or, even better, a primary source. Whether this is actually taught in any schools I do not know; I certainly learned it among my books and through argument with other people, not by learning to take a whiz in between bells and temporarily memorize a list of badly mangled ‘facts’ in time for a pop quiz. And I went to pretty good schools! Grade school is probably harmless, though, and at least accomplishes the objective of making sure that the vast majority of the unwashed masses are literate and numerate; probably the most harm is done in college and higher education, where it is all too common that mediocrity is showered with praise and hidebound, narrow thinking is regarded as creative research.
In any case, having ‘metafactual’ knowledge is simply the sign of being insufficiently familiar with your subject to discuss it except in general terms, and might even be worse than ignorance, because hand in hand with this metafactual knowledge is often a ‘scientific consensus’ or a ‘sense of the literature,’—in other words a pernicious textbook prejudice towards the socially desirable opinions about a problem or concept.
>having ‘metafactual’ knowledge is simply the sign of being insufficiently familiar with your subject to discuss it except in general terms
What about other subjects though? Nobody can have in-depth knowledge of them all, so would you say it's preferable to know nothing at all outside of your area of expertise?
I don’t think that’s a good dichotomy. There are more choices than ‘using deep knowledge of subject’ and ‘using traces of categorization bestowed by educator.’
I would say it’s preferable *not* to express opinions based on ‘metafactual knowledge.’ Or make decisions using it. Simply *having* such traces is probably inevitable but confers you nothing but an unwarranted amount of confidence. “Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring,” right?
If you must make a decision, educate yourself to at least an amateur’s understanding of actual facts and principles; if you can’t do that, use your reason to determine who the trustworthy experts are, if any, and examine their evidence; ideally, do both. This is a far cry from expertise, but it’s enough to improvise with.
>I would say it’s preferable *not* to express opinions based on ‘metafactual knowledge.’ Or make decisions using it.
Yes, a world in which everybody follows this principle might very well be a much saner one. It's clearly not how this one works though, given that the biggest current "tech" giants have grown insanely rich off of advertisement, which provides even more tainted "knowledge" than an educator ostensibly following scientific consensus.
Anyone who believes that ads are a source of world knowledge cannot be educated anyway, but I suspect those people are very few regardless.
Whether I am right or wrong about that is immaterial. What’s important for each person is that they don’t wildly exaggerate the validity and importance of barely remembered or unremembered categories. But nobody can stop you from overrating your own knowledge and I don’t presume to try.
Regarding the digestion, I suspect part of it may be that it is easier to recall an 'experience' rather than pure facts. For example, I had some probability and statistics courses a few years back, but barely do statistics nowadays. I recently was asked by a friend to help interpret some claims about covid testing. We wanted to calculated certain conditional probabilities, and it seemed that we needed was to flip the events on a conditional probability. This situation seemed familiar, and I recalled that Bayes rule did something like that. So I looked it up, and was able to calculate what we wanted. Note that I did not recall anyone telling me "if you want to flip events, use Bayes". Perhaps someone did, but that is not very effective. After all, we don't (and shouldn't!) believe everything people say to us. Having to remember "My teacher said that X" seems more difficult than simply remember "X". Furthermore, the teacher can only teach a limited number of explanations, and these do not necessarily have to "fit" with my internal mental model. What I describe as "flipping events" is a natural way of describing the goal to me, but it may be very confusing for others with different internal mental models of conditional probabilities.
If you had been home for that year you would still have been doing things, just different things. Learning to help your mother make dinner, or organizing and running a WoW guild, or arguing politics with your best friend or DMing a campaign might also have let you explore new ways of thinking.
That's a fair point, although I imagine there are some benefits to being forced to explore outside your intellectual "comfort zone". Like, perhaps it gives more practice with convergent thinking as opposed to divergent thinking.
Yes!! I grew up in India and went to mediocre schools. The education I got at home debating ideas within the family was far superior to that. And my parents had interesting friends. For example, an economics professor from Brown University who visited once a year and stayed with us. I learned more from conversations with him than maybe in all my K-12. In middle school, I'd ask him things like "Do you believe in astrology?" And, "But how come some predictions come true?" In a couple of sentences, he taught me so much.
I certainly agree with this, but there is value in learning culturally relevant things that others will also learn. It amazes me when my kids come home from school having learned the same folk story cultural things (like Johnny Appleseed, but including songs, anecdotal stories, patriotism, etc.) that I did. There's a baseline for communal living that helps groups of people who have very little reason to ever meet still have shared values and understandings. If we all just do our own thing, then we might be better individuals in a worse society.
I consider this speculative at this point, but I've been thinking about it a lot more as I watch my own kids grow up.
Yes, there is indeed huge value in that.
It also means that they all learn the same false things, with less chance of someone who has learned different things pointing out evidence that they are false. A fair amount that I was taught in a very good high school wasn't true.
One of my standard examples is the claim in the driver's education course that two cars hitting head on at 50 mph was equivalent to each to running into a brick wall at 100 mph. It's quite easy to prove that that cannot be true, but it was what the book said, and when I questioned it and we took the question to the physics teacher, he said it was true and was uninterested in my proof that it was false.
For almost anything politically relevant, such as the causes of the Great Depression or, nowadays, climate change, the school will teach some orthodoxy, likely to be in part false, with which one depending on the political environment, both community and teachers.
I can't disagree with you there. My mom liked to muse about how many moons Jupiter supposedly had when she was in school, verses how many when I was in school. The number is significantly higher now, too, even though the true number hasn't changed at all. It's also surprising how many times in just my lifetime the origin of mankind has shifted. Usually between east and west Africa, but at least once to Asia. Each time taught as definite fact.
So, humans evolved in an environment in which they were socialized by interacting with many other humans of different ages, with everybody performing diverse social roles in diverse circumstances.
It'd be pretty odd if you got "better socialization" by shoving them into age-segregated groups performing stereotyped activities under highly formalized rules, all under the supervision of a limited number of adults who were themselves in very stereotyped roles.
And I don't think that you do.
I think that's an interesting idea about reducing the amount of age segregation in educational environments, but I suspect even the highly segregated environments we have now are better for socialization than isolated homeschooling environments. Although, I guess not all homeschooling environments need to be isolated.
I'd rather get rid of "educational environments" as a distinguished category. I just don't know how to get there.
I think a lot of pressure for their existence comes from the fact that all the *adults* are also shoved into weird confining institutional environments (you know, "jobs"). The adults' envronments have no room for the kids, and in fact actively demand that the kids be excluded. As long as that's true, even if you don't have "educational environments", you'll nonetheless have still-fairly-age-segregated kids doing God-knows-what, whether singly or in groups, with limited adult guidance and limited adult examples. Which is probably not ideal socialization either.
And of course if your goal in "socialization" is to TRAIN people to be able sit down, shut up, act like everybody else, and fit into an institution, well, then...
As I've written at considerable length, generally children sort themselves into ability bands very early in life and then stay in those same bands, relative to peers, with remarkable fidelity. (See https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work) Presumably this is due to some kind of intrinsic ability asserting itself consistently throughout academic life, probably genetic in origin. My guess is that once students get back into school they will fall back into their old ability bands in dominant majorities and the hierarchy will have reasserted itself. What's less certain is how the schooling pause will influence how any given age cohort performs relative to another. Since the pause generally seems to be happening fairly uniformly across cohorts it's hard to see that it will make much difference, although I suppose people who miss their last year of formal schooling and never make it up could perform worse compared to those who finished right before the pauses. But in general I suspect that you're correct and that this just won't matter much, for the reasons you've laid out, save for those rare kids who just literally never return to formal schooling at all.
You know a lot more about this than I do. My impression is that a much larger than usual fraction of kids have either dropped out or have had their grades crater. I guess the question is what fraction recover? Do we have any way to guess?
Results probably correlate tightly with the family/home/neighborhood environment.
Correlate, yes. But the kinship studies strongly suggest this is not a causal relationship. In the behavioral genetics/population genomics literature they call that stuff the "shared environment," and it is moderately influential early in life but that influence rapidly declines as children age due to the Wilson effect.
Bear in mind that I'm talking about relative performance - a cohort of students that had to face Covid restrictions when others didn't would definitely be disadvantaged in short-term assessments, although for the reasons Scott says here I suspect that disadvantage would fade and ability would reassert itself over time. More to the point, though, this has been a pretty close to universal condition, with some exceptions, so the relative performance is not likely to be deeply affected. (I think!)
I think the talkative kids did well on zoom and the quieter kids did not (separate from other confounders). Watching the class dynamics in my kids' zoom classes made me think that, and I had not thought that ahead of time. So many kids in those classes said nothing - partly because the teachers often did zoom like it was identical to being in front of a room, except with a camera. It is not; they did not realize they were now doing theater and so failed to account for the pros and cons of that. The teachers would get more and more frustrated, the kids in general would get quieter and quieter, and then one or two kids would get the mike and just run on; the teachers were so pleased someone was talking that they did nothing to rein those kids in, with the other kids sitting in increasingly uncomfortable silence while the theater went from bad to worse.
Also, the kids couldn't lock eyes with someone across the room and know they were not alone, recognizing the ridiculousness. They could not poke their neighbor when the teacher's anxiety ramped up. They could not walk out into the hall and share the rude names they had come up with for the teachers and other students, participating in a community. There was no personal defense possible; camera, cranky teacher, silent class, that one kid yammering away about how much they agree with the teacher. Fodder for many horror movies to come, I expect, as this generation grows up. At that point, some kids couldn't bring themselves to do the assignments, others could.
The angry, sarcastic, snarky parts of socialization, so necessary to school, were gone. People say it was bad because kids missed the friendly parts, and I think that is partly true but not the whole story.
Anecdotally, I was far behind at the beginning of my education then rocketed to the top of my class for the rest of grade school. I was a middle to upper middle student in middle school and close to the top student at my high school. I then went to a somewhat elite university where I was bottom of the class the first two years and top of the class the last two. Now, some of this was due to a turbulent life, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it. (And to be clear: I'm not trying to pose this as evidence either way. I'm just not all that well informed on how to contextualize my experience.)
You can think about someone like Ramanujan, who came from a position of near-total educational depravation and yet in very short order became one of the most gifted mathematicians of his era. Because he had a natural talent that's simply not something most people can access.
Did Ramanujan have “near total education deprivation”? He was undereducated I think, but he regularly attended some sort of school. He was also born a Brahmin.
Hmmm, fair question - this was all pretty dimly remembered on my part, I'm probably exaggerating. I think I got the impression from a Numberphile video?
I just read the first 40 pages of a bio of him and he didn’t seem that undereducated. Started at age 5 in a “12 kids in someone’s house” school, moved around for a few years, did half a year at a school in a language he didn’t speak, scored 1st of class in arithmetic at age 10.
5 as the normal age. He wasn’t totally deprived but it’s fair to say that really good education wasn’t one of the big causes there
What does his being Brahmin have to do with this?
Sorting into innate ish ability classes being partially mediated by ancestry!
He seems to have been poor, as many Brahmins in Tamilnadu are, even today. Tamil Brahmins are just 1 to 2% of the Tamil population, by the way. Due to disproportionate success, they're seen as having stolen something and are the target in the dirty identity politics in the state. Until the British came and needed people to maintain ledgers (reading, writing, basic arithmetic, English..) to collect taxes, Tamil Brahmins were not making much money.
In free India, Tamil Brahmins often have to leave the state to escape the legal discrimination. Every politician in the state gets ahead only by proving his or her anti-Brahmin credentials.
I read your article and was bracing for it to end with a polemic about this is why we should end the meritocracy, which I disagree with for similar reasons Scott did in 2017. But instead you made a very strong argument for wealth redistribution which I'd be hard pressed to argue against, except maybe over the precise method and amount. I'm general I've found myself agreeing with more of your writings in the last two years. I don't know if this is a sign of me becoming more socialist or you becoming better at persuading people on the right.
Either way, it's a shame that the only thing the right and left seem to agree on is the importance of education, when the studies suggest it's one of the least impactful levers to adjust.
I feel like we have not properly grokked the fundamentally flawed nature of every social science study and far too many people treat them as statements of simple fact about reality instead of generally a mixture of fraud, other kinds of fraud, and luck.
It depends on what you mean. In terms of predictive validity, modern educational assessments are incredibly accurate; we know how to develop tests that predict future performance on all manner of academic tasks with remarkable precision. Not just assessments predicting assessments but predicting real-world behaviors like observed reading ability. Does that make them "statements of simple fact"? I don't know. But I do know that if a casino would take my action on which children will succeed in school even deep into the future, and I could give those children a battery of modern tests, I would become a very rich man.
Perhaps you could become a very rich man if the casinos took your action, and you personally administered the tests -- but do you trust nationwide tests to be administered fairly, or in fact at all ?
“ do you trust nationwide tests to be administered fairly, or in fact at all”
Why would they not be
The data for “them being incredibly accurate at predicting future performance” are not administered by him, and they’re still predictive. And while people do cheat and study ... that’s not responsible for the effect.
yes? of course some problems will arise but those should be rare enough that their effects disappear at the margin (this is proven by the very fact that the tests are predictive)
security measures in public schools are completely bonkers these days when it comes to tests. if you want to cheat as a teacher it's really quite difficult (I administer the SAT 4x a year)
Is there a risk of circular logic here. Tests that predict performance on "academic tasks"? How is the performance at the academic test measured? Some sort of test?
The actual behavior that the construct refers to. The ability to read as judged by literacy experts. I'm trying not to be short with you because this mysterianism has infected the conversation - "what does it really mean, to be able to read?" - when we know perfectly well the answer to those questions.
Ah. So the educational tests are actually predicting performance as judged by the evaluation of experts. Which experts, I wonder? Academic experts?
I realize by the way, that this line of thinking doesn't really go anywhere. My point is only the same one sibling comments are making - Alexander is arguing that success as measured by metrics controlled outside the system don't give much support to school being super critical. You're arguing that success as measured by experts tells a very different story.
I wonder if quality of memory significantly influences one's take on this question. I was a top student, but I remember even less than Scott purports to. So to me, the idea of worrying about having missed 5% of which I will forget 95% is quite absurd. But perhaps if I remembered all the classes and the content, then the value of that time would be much more real, even years later.
So to some degree "people forget everything anyway". But places with zero school (eg third world countries) do end up with much less educated people. So somebody is getting education at some point. While it's possible that some of this is ambiently in the environment (eg a kid I know who learned to read by playing video games with lots of text in them), it wouldn't surprise me if smarter people could pick things up ambiently from the environment and duller people need their hands held and benefitted from school a bit. I just think a little school probably goes a long way.
I think it's important to differentiate between "school", "education", and "learning". Also, I would introduce an "engagement" variable as a quality multiplier.
Let's say that the average kid gets 10,000 hours of school. This may include 4,000 hours of education, but at a low rate of enegagement. So obviously we do end up with some learning at the end. (I suspect that learning that results from low enegagement will also have much lower retention, as in your example about the Civil War).
If the above example is the status quo, we can play around with the formula. We can try to replace school with other education tools -tutoring, self-directed, online/adaptive, apprenticeships, etc. These will have various rates of engagement with various results.
Or we can cut out "education" entirely and replace "school" with "life". Obvisouly there will be some learning involved in 10,000 hours of life, but it will be entirely dependent on the specific life.
My point here is that when we consider school, or no school, we can be running the economics on the hours spent and the quality of the hours. We can also be optimizing these economics for "learning".
As a parent, If I can come up with a solution that can provide 10,000 hours of high engagement learning to my kid, then it's probably a much better option for my kid than school. Conversely, if I know that I'll be at work all day and my kid will spend the day alternating between staring at a blank wall and looking at porn, then school becomes a very attractive option.
To some degree. People don't forget how to read, or at least they rarely do. Nor do they forget their failure to learn to read or the lessons drawn from such failure.
The overwhelming majority of my early knowledge of English comes from computer games, RPGs (this does net you weird vocabulary, it must be admitted), reading SF/F, and talking on the Usenet in the 90's. I mean, yes I needed to be taught enough for that to even be possible, but once there? School was not even close as a factor.
The more I think about this, the more I have the following problem with this line of argument:
Sure, I'm a molecular biologist and I don't use much beyond biology and general literacy. But to figure out I wanted to be a biologist I had to learn a lot of stuff. I figured out that I liked traveling but had no faculty for languages. I learned that I loved reading history but disliked doing historical research. I was good at math by normal human standards but not future mathematician/physicist standards. I liked devising chemical syntheses on paper but not doing them in the lab. But I really liked and had an aptitude for molecular bio, and that's what I do.
It's an inefficient system. They make us all do math until we hit our limits, and 0.3% are deemed good enough to do it for a living. We learn about all sorts of stuff so we can figure out we hate it. But try coming up with a system where you only learn exactly what you need.
That's a very interesting comment, IMO.
b/c I suspect that "kids don't suffer from lack of schooling" depends a lot on what you think schooling is meant to achieve.
One, to provide an education. The limits Scott mentioned are more true than not, I think. "We forget everything".
Two, to test pupils in a long winded rat race. There, I believe lack of schooling would probably hurt more or less, depending on the way the rat race is designed. If every year is a "yay or nay" on a large amount of material with a non-recoverable-afterwards fork, every minute of schooling actually matters.
Three, to awaken curiosity as Ivan Fyodorovich suggests and give a bit of an initial basis in any subject you might want to pursue. For example, I too have forgotten all about massive amount of the Maths I was taught. I especially hated geometry and trigonometry. I'm told many types of engineers and physicists use these tools.
Now, contrary to Ivan Fyodorovich, I knew pretty early on I didn't want to work with lots of sciences and Maths and I still had to go through the pain of learning that stuff to satisfy the rat race setup of the French educational system.
It sure seems like a lot of waste but I wouldn't call the impact of e-schooling negligible in a country like France where we all compete for limited space (my understanding being that, in the US, if you're born in the middle of the country and don't want to leave your small town, education is basically not needed. You'll find a local job where a bit of discipline, work ethic and a modicum of decency will see you through. Education the French way is only necessary if you're planning to compete in the top 20 cities).
A serious issue is that kids in much of the US didn't miss a year of school, they had a year of sad-ass Zoom school during which an abnormally large number of kids checked-out and/or flunked everything. I seriously wonder if that is ultimately worse for them than a year of no school.
Maybe, but my specific concern is:
- Far more kids are dropping out/failing than in a normal year
- Some would have flunked out eventually anyway, some will recover when school resumes as normal, but for some this might permanently derail their educations/life trajectories.
In other words, it's the failing, not the learning loss/opportunity cost I'm worried about.
I suspect you’re right.
This is a very good question.
My mother, a teacher at a regional school in Germany (regional schools being the type of school that doesn't qualify you for university, it's grades 5-10) (in a bad neighbourhood, if it matters), has observed that about half the students did their homework assignments and tried to keep up (or their parents made them) whereas the other half didn't really do anything at all - some of the kids don't have (enough) access to the internet, no room for themselves, siblings they had to care for while the parents used the family computer for work etc, so this is not surprising. (I have heard from other classes in secondary schools where all kids attended zoom meetings - I expect these are socioeconomic differences).
The problem is that now both these groups are in the same class. This is frustrating for everyone. Students that kept up resent the repetition, students that didn't have to rush through everything etc.
There are also some teachers that gave lots of homework, called around regularly, held zoom classes for those able to attend them, and some that didn't make their students do much of anything, fully aware they'd need to teach all of it again anyway once school resumes regularly. I expect covid to have widely different effects depending on which of these groups you fall into and which sort of teachers you had.
For some kids zoom school was better than in person as far as learning. I think that was definitely the case for my 11 year old. In regular school there are lots of disruptive kids that get in the way of learning. In zoom school those kids just completely checked out, which was bad for them but actually good for my daughter because they were no longer disruptive.
I'm not sure the disruptive kids necessarily checked out completely. I've been thriving in online classes at uni because I can listen with one ear when bored, playing (simple) computer games and checking back in when I want, with recorded lectures I can go through them at my own pace, and when I zone out I can just pause and get back to it later (I take ~3h per lecture that way, but I retain a whole lot more than when I attend in person). I've never been too disruptive as a kid, but now I can do all sorts of things that would have been - sing to myself, make annoying noises, doodle, chat with friends, talk to my partner, lounge in whatever position I want to, rock and sway, even get up and walk through the room. Being disruptive is no longer disrupting! I expect a lot of ADHD kids to do better, not worse, under those circumstances. I attend way more classes now than I used to, because I don't have to commit to sit in a room (I can't sit for long for chronic pain reasons and attend classes mostly from the sofa now), bored out of my mind or jittery. All of this dependent on the option of disabling the webcam, of course.
Remote kindergarten worked *startlingly* well. I don't know about the socialization side of things, but my kid learned to read and write (to a reasonable, age-appropriate extent) entirely from remote lessons. And it definitely wasn't the only thing they covered.
I can't say that Zoom school was bad for all kids. On a population level though, there has been substantial measurable learning loss:
https://texas2036.org/posts/tracking-covid-learning-loss/
Now, for the reasons Scott gets into, I don't think this will matter greatly in the long run. What I worry about more is the kids who out and out failed or dropped out, and I worry some of them will be derailed forever. I can't find data quite as comprehensive for this, but this article has some links https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/12/23/students-failing-grades-online-class-coronavirus/3967886001/
Someone said the New Orleans results after Katrina were due to the new charter schools being able to better screen the new teacher cohort.
There was a good EconTalk about this a few years back I think (I can't find it, sorry). Part of the issue seems to have been that the school boards and such were literally involved in massive criminal activities, such that the FBI had people permanently posted there. (Presumably the FBI were not the source of the criminal activities, but who know these days...) Bribes and kickbacks for jobs, money disappearing, political nastiness... The interviewee's position was that the system was just so horribly corrupt and broken that shattering it and starting entirely from scratch was needed, otherwise the system's immune response against reform was too strong.
Also, NOLA lost about 1/2 its population after katrina. Also, "Case studies of neighborhood recovery show that more-advantaged neighborhoods before Katrina have higher rates of return, and even gain new residents, while disadvantaged neighborhoods remain sparsely populated (Elliott et al. 2009). "
Might want to look at the MS coast to see if charts with NOLA or not - much different before/after demographics
The main reason was that a lot of the poor kids didn't come back.
Turns out if you get rid of a lot of the poor kids, your scores go up.
> I’m inherently skeptical of these, because I’m suspicious that education researchers love finding that education has huge effects, that any disruption to education is a disaster, and that kids should be in school much more.
We should also expect education researchers to find that strikes are bad for students, since education researchers are incentivized to find results that school administrations approve of, and school administrations want reasons to shut down teacher strikes.
I don't know that administrations do want to shut down teacher strikes. My sense has always been it's mostly "schools vs parents" not "administrations vs teachers" in these sorts of events. Finding that strikes are awful would be good for schools trying to get more resources given to them, because "If we can't make an agreement that gets these teachers back to work, all the children die!" sounds like a good way to get resources given to the schools.
Administrators definitely want to end strikes, as they are judged on their ability to fulfill the purposes of the school. You are correct that they are even happier if the teachers get everything they want and the relationship is smooth. There's very little downside for administrators in getting more resources, unless it causes long term financial problems for the district.
I agree that administrators have more costs associated with teachers' strikes than the teachers themselves, preferring to avoid them. I expect though that by the time contract negotiations get into strike territory it is not because of decisions the administrators are making but because of higher level issues, e.g. needing more money for pay or benefits, that the administrators don't pay the price of. So strikes tend to be against those holding the purse strings of both the teachers and administrators, and the result of a successful strike is both getting more money and resources. I haven't heard of any strikes where the end result was teachers getting more money by way of the administration getting pared down to make the cash available.
Then again, there are probably many strike outcomes I have never heard of :D Still, that seems like the sort of outcome that would show up in the literature a lot.
Cuts to administration do sometimes happen, although even if the cause is higher teacher benefits it's unlikely that a school board would draw that line directly. The more likely scenario is one board negotiating higher wages/benefits and the next board making cuts where applicable to fix a shortfall. Unfortunately for the teacher's union, the administration is usually far too small to make administration cuts really relevant to the higher costs of teachers. If admin is 10% of the number of teachers (which is probably too high), then there simply isn't enough money on the admin side to cover teacher increases. A 5% teacher increase is equal to a 50% admin increase or more. Not to mention that each individual administrator is more likely to be filling a necessary role and in direct support of the school board. You're not likely to cut your building principal, even if you can't afford the teacher contract.
Huh, I would have assumed that education researchers want to find things in favor of the teachers, and teachers want to show that education matters, but that strikes don't.
It depends on whether education researchers are more aligned with teachers or administrators. I would guess administrators since it's usually administrators who pay the bills and give education researchers a platform, but it could also be teachers since education researchers generally come from a teaching background.
Well, remember that the point of strikes is to inflict pain by not working, so that your bosses will accede to your demands to get you to come back to work. If the only bad thing about teacher strikes was the inconvenience of finding a place to put your kids 8 hours a day, someone might ask "Why do we pay teachers so much?" and just invite them to strike forever while they put their kids in daycare.
Put another way, your biggest worry when taking a month off of work is that you will return and no one will have noticed you were gone. That looks bad for your continued employment.
Teachers want the result to be both that education matters and also that strikes matter. That can align quite easily, and both incentivize the administration or school board to resolve things quickly (by giving in to the requests of the teachers).
If strikes don't matter, then administrators can just wait out the teachers.
Based on conversations with K-12 teachers, I've come to think:
- there are roughly two skills taught, "number sense" and "reading comprehension"
- good curriculum + teaching can improve them, though practice and exposure is a big part of it
- it's possible to catch up quickly, though gets harder later b/c you're missing foundations
I think many schools are not good enough at teaching these for absence to matter. But especially for kids who don't get much exposure elsewhere, absence is indeed a missed opportunity. Just, one that would only show up in the stats if the schools were better.
I think that the very low value add of schools does account for a lot of what we are seeing here. When I enroll my kids in piano class, I expect them to play piano better than what they could do if I just had one around the house. Absences there would likely show up. The really damning thing about schools is that they don't seem to be able to teach much more than kids pick up just by being around their families and doing normal human things. Most parents who manage to have jobs and run a household can, and probably do, teach their kids all they really learn during their school years, with the exception of some trivia and harder subjects. (Neither one of my parents was going to teach me math past algebra, but had everything else covered far better than school.)
I was in a meeting with a third grade parent who admonished her daughter, with great seriousness, that the curriculum had gone beyond what she, the mother, could teach and that now the kid was on her own to learn in school what she could learn.
You might be surprised at how many parents don't know much of anything beyond second grade level.
Oh no, just the opposite, I am often surprised at how many people make good with just basic math and reading. What people NEED to know to get by is really pretty low level. Three cheers for the division of labor.
Further, if the research on nature/nurture is anything to go by, it seems somewhat unlikely the daughter was going to pick up a great deal more, either.
I do wonder what the subject of the curriculum was, however. If it was history or science I could see a parent saying "I don't know this stuff, and I am not going to be reading the book for you to learn it, so you are on your own." Third grade math is what, maybe multiplication? Then again, the way they teach math now is bonkers... it takes me a while to figure out what the hell they actually want my kid to do on the way to the answer sometimes.
If missing school affects graduation rates but not learning, maybe kids who miss a lot of school notice how they didn't miss much actual learning, so they realize school matters less than they thought it did, which makes them more likely to choose to drop out.
I was wondering the same thing while reading that section.
I wonder how much absences cause dropping out vs. how many kids drop out for the same reason they were absent, ie. their parents don't care about school anymore than they do.
One note I'd like to observe: When it comes to "excused" vs "unexcused" absences, what we are generally looking at is, "Kids who have parents who care and are with-it enough to communicate with the school when the child doesn't attend vs children who don't." So it's still very much a correlational relationship that "unexcused" absences predict learning deficits.
Most of my "unexcused" absences in high school were from before I figured out I could just forge an absence slip from my parents. Presumably that would muddle some of the correlation.
I always had to ask a girl with much batter cursive than me to handle that task.
I was thinking it was more "kids who are delinquent and go smoke pot instead of attending school" vs. "kids who get sick and have to go to the doctor a lot"
That's another way of saying "parents who don't care" vs "parents that do care"
Sure, that's part of it too, but again, the significant distinction is "kids whose parents see the Unexcused Absences and take steps to make sure their kids get to school" versus "kids whose parents aren't paying attention to their education."
Thinking logically, it has to be something along these lines. If missing school is what causes learning deficits, then there is no logical way to claim that missing school because you're sick doesn't have that impact but missing school because you're skipping does. You're missing school either way. But the kid who is skipping doesn't like school and even when he is attending is probably not really engaged, and of course he's going to learn less. It's not the absence that has the impact, but the absence is indicative of either low parental involvement or low personal motivation.
Some parents don't care whether the absences are excused or not, which will naturally result in a higher proportion of unexcused absences. Those parents tend to also not care much about what their kids do or making sure they are actually learning. They usually do miss a lot more school as well, but that's not a given. Many of the higher earning and more conscientious parents where my kids go to school take multiple vacations during the school year and otherwise get their kids out of school. The kids do great, and as many absences are excused as can be allowed.
Something that was missing from almost all of those studies is a measurement of resources required for catching the students back up. Almost all systems have some stabilizing mechanisms to help bring up students who e.g. got cancer back up to grade level (extra attention by classroom teachers, special ed, social workers, etc). Even disasters come with extra resources in the US to help support the students. Just because a system kept results within it's normal parameters during normal times doesn't imply it can do so during abnormal times. Looked at from this lens the Pakistan study looks much worse.
That's a good point, thanks.
I've found systems thinking to be the most powerful tool in my toolbox for reasoning about how organizations function. If you haven't read it, Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows is a really good primer and has the single best chapter in a book I've read (the one about leverage points).
My mom's an elementary school teacher. This year she's teaching second grade with a class of students with mixed reading skills from third grade to pre-k. Note this is NOT a special ed class. There is a single systemic resource to catch the kids up: for a few hours a week they take the kids out of the classes and regroup them roughly by skill instead of by age. This practice has, of course, been suspended during Covid. But even in normal times I'm not sure how effective it is, as the older kids would get teaching at the same speed as the younger kids.
Then again her principal usually places her a grade level after a bad teacher and a grade level before a rookie teacher, so perhaps that's an example of a resource at work.
N=1.
Perhaps in the Pakistan situation, a bunch of western counselors swooped in and told them about how they should have PTSD or something?
A some of the stuff I'm thinking about is of the form of how her principal behaves. Preferentially spending a minute extra per class session with a kid that's behind, the administration putting a kid that likes to help the teacher in a class that has a slightly higher number of behind students, things like that.
Other stuff, like extra help, either through an IEP (which technically makes it special ed) or non-IEP support from the same people is also built into the system at most places. My mom is a retired speech language pathologist and she spent a lot of time with elementary kids who were behind for various reasons but didn't technically qualify for special ed. Her school had the lowest scores in the district, so the state kicked in extra money to add more staff to support those efforts. Those are structural corrective actions versus the adhoc ones above.
This is a very interesting point with an anecdotal resonance for me. In senior year in HS, I came down with a liver bug and had to be in bed-rest for nearly 2 months. It was awful because it was boring, but I also missed a lot of classes.
Because India has board exams (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_India_Senior_School_Certificate_Examination), schools start early in summer and finish teaching a year's worth of material in 2 months, and then spend the rest of the year in practice tests and so on. Sadly for me, I was sick for most of the classes. I taught myself most of everything, but Chemistry was my Achilles Heel - I couldn't make sense of it. I noticed most of my classmates were struggling with it just as much as I was and organized them to demand that the classes be taught all over again, and the plan worked - our teacher was young and filled with ideas about being a good teacher and she decided to teach everything again ;-)
At the end of the year, I got a certificate that looked like this for Chemistry (image not mine) - https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-ae9cedf353e6c0414ae4024776130d95, which made my life very hard. Everybody wanted me major in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering or something like that - all I wanted to do was put Chemistry behind me (I didn't like it very much) and move on, which is what I did ;-) - I've now forgotten nearly everything I learned in that class 20 years or so ago!)
While I think school is definitely overrated, and missing school underrated, a few comments:
- Presumably not only the amount of knoweldge retained, but also the "damage" from missing school varies quite heavily from child to child? Some children have positive effects from missing school, some children have negative effects from missing school. If "missing school" means "missing the science fair project you were going to win" then that's different to "missing maths class you were kind of average at".
- School is more than learning, missing school is probably less bad than missing "time to meet with friends".
- If everyone misses school, the social effects of a single child "missing out" can't be compared to the social effects of a snow day. If you used to be cool but your parents then stopped you from joining meetings with your friends maybe you become less cool? idk, I never understood how being cool worked in school, and the little I knew I have forgot.
- Lots of things vary from school to school, maybe in Argentina they have school figured out fully but not in the US (I kid, but this kind of thing makes it hard to run good studies).
I would just quibble that social time with friends is definitely not one of the "Things that make school super important" when policy makers or whomever are discussing closing schools for one reason or another, or determining how much money schools should get. If the studies that find "Eh, missing school entirely doesn't mean kids don't get educated" are finding a true effect, that suggests that kids could spend even more time hanging out with friends.
Just hollow out the school into a giant warehouse, put in some comfortable chairs and couches, some tables, maybe a small library, you know, all the fancy dormitory rec areas from colleges. Fire all the teachers and just hire some reasonably functional adults to act as supervisors to keep the monsters at bay, and just have the kids hang out from 9-5. When they are older, maybe they could go and get part time jobs with their friends somewhere.
Boom, all the "more than learning" social friends time happens, money is saved, and kids have a much more pleasant and perhaps even more productive use of their time.
I have no opinion on this, my thoughts on the relevance of social time with friends were in the context of "should I send my immunocompromised kid back to school?"
If I may ask, what have you been doing with the kid over the past year and a half?
I think it's a quotation from Scott's OP, not Matty's own kid.
Derp, you are right. Sorry.
I am curious about what parents with immunocompromised kids have been doing with them the past year, though. COVID has been miserable for my three kids with not being able to go out and do things and see friends (less so since the oldest is just 7) but I am not worried about the health risks so the trouble is mostly things being closed etc. If I were worried about the health risks due to immune problems, that would be a nightmare.
We sent our kids back to school as soon as it was an option mainly because they both really wanted the interaction with peers in person. The learning was going fine with online school. And I would say both of them were much happier after they went back and we were glad we faced our fears and sent them.
I am glad our school was open last year, albeit with masks. I really hope they don't start doing remote this fall, especially since our second is starting kindergarten this year. Here's hoping.
I suspect that you are entirely correct about grades and test scores as such, but what about harms from prolonged social isolation? I know of no studies on that, but my prior is that it will be a significant factor, especially for teenagers, and especially if they have less than ideal family support.
There are probably better ways to fix social isolation for young people other than sending them to schools. Day camp or something.
I was unschooled until I was 15, I'm pursuing a PhD now. Catching up on the basics wasn't easy but only took a few months. There are still a bunch of random general knowledge things I don't know, but at most it's caused a moment of embarrassment in social situations (e.g., when I genuinely thought dinosaurs were mythical creatures).
BUT I was motivated to catch up, which I think makes a big difference. I'd say most kids probably don't care too much about their education, so for them, missing school might matter more
>when I genuinely thought dinosaurs were mythical creatures
Well I've never seen one!
Wow, shame on your parents for not telling you about dinosaurs. If there's one thing about history that's universally interesting to kids, it's them!
Not sure if you want to elaborate, but I'm curious what you mean by unschooled? No classroom or home education until age 15?
NM, I read the comments before the article!
Okay, this is tangential. Skip if you don’t want to read someone trumpet their liberal arts and science education.
You may be right about deleterious effects of missing school. But as a case study of the value of school (college), I got a liberal arts education with a double major in chemistry and philosophy. The chem helped me do my environmental chem work right out of school but the classes that I FEEL were most valuable include a course on Kant, a course on modernist epistemology, a course where we read Conjectures and Refutation, Against Method, and Lakstos’s Methodology of Scientific Research Programs. For whatever reason I also feel very influenced and enriched by a history and aesthetics of film class and a film comedy class. I later went to grad school in a different scientific field and then a career in science and was often told that my strength was critical thinking. Of course, we can’t draw causal conclusions. Maybe a talent for critical thinking drew me to my experiences. One thing I feel confident in is I encounter a lot of younger colleagues who can’t think. I cherish those four years. I know I am off point, but you mentioned not being a fan of school and I feel very different. Don’t know how it paid off economically (not too bad it seems) but in terms of what it feels like to be me, it was worth a lot to me.
I think this is pretty clearly looking at K-12; college is a different beast (I can’t recall Scott’s writings or perspectives on post-secondary at the moment). What’s your perspective on your pre-college education?
It sucked but that was a mix of me and the school
Maybe they should talk about Kant, Feyerabend and Lakatos in K-12?
I feel the... irony, I suppose might be a good word for it, of this post is that I took 0 classes on philosophy, read no philosophers, and yet my homeschooling gave me gratuitous amounts of critical thinking. Now this was because we argued for fun at the dinner table, I read books like Godel Escher Bach, and other such learning opportunities I had growing up. I presume that my aptitude for critical thinking is part inherent and part environmental, but none of it was related to a classroom.
I am not sure there is irony here. I am sure there are homes and home schooling that can effectively instill critical reasoning. My father taught me a bit about Plato, Aristotle and, his favorite John Dewey and he liked to sit outside and read poetry (The One Hoss Shay was a favorite) or talk about the stars at night. Lucky to have that. Realistically, a lot of people can’t get that at home.
I suspect that most people don't get that from school either, given my own experiences interacting with those outside my bubble. Which suggests that "a lot of people won't get it ever". I suppose the irony I was getting at is that you're touting that as a "great result of school" but it seems more likely that it was a result of "you as an individual being exposed to ideas, which you then took and run with" and that doesn't require school, or family, but an interest in learning and access to information (e.g. the internet). Formal training or no, those who have an aptitude for critical thinking will pursue testing it, those without are unlikely to pursue it.
On SSC, Plumber would often write about "simple work for simple folks" and I feel as though your position is falling into something of a typical mind fallacy. It's less "this wasn't good for you" but more "What did work for you is not the same as what works for others" and even more "Kids tend to be information sponges, but aptitude shouldn't be overlooked". For the year and a half or so I did attend public school (charter school), I felt as though everything was done at a snail's pace. As several people point out: lots of information is repeated year after year because kids forget. Perhaps there is a way to do school that would make it truly beneficial, but my experience indicates that we'd probably be better off if we didn't reiterate things so much.
I am not trying to be dogmatic either way, but believe I benefitted tremendously from the back and forth with teachers and fellow students in many of my classes, philosophy but also chemistry and even calculus. The other thing that was super beneficial in my view was the socialization part - this from someone who grew up in small town Appalachia. Now I will also say I got a lot of beneficial socialization working at a Fortune 100 company with people from all around the world.
In my case, I got a little from back and forth with a few teachers but more from extended political/philosophical arguments with a friend and still more from interaction with my father.
One would hope so.
Some of that forgetting, I think, is a feature not a bug. "Education" and "learning" seem obvious to adults but what the kids think they're doing may be something completely different. "See friends, sit quietly, do all the problems correctly, sit around, hear a story, eat with friends, watch someone get in trouble, sit with friends, write a sentence correctly, sit with friends, ride the bus home, see older kids yelling" is a somewhat accurate kid's-eye view of a school day and you'll notice that acquiring, retaining and analyzing information is not in the top activities; sit quietly and see friends are the top two. Math and writing occurred as many times as watching someone get in trouble and older kids yelling (once). This isn't a great model but I think it hits some main points - and this is why apprenticeship can be a good idea, the kids see what the skills are for and are motivated to continue by a desire to level up in regards to the mentor. Otherwise, "learning" is the word grownups say when they mean sitting quietly, seeing friends and people-watching. Part of the transition to zoom during Covid was the abrupt and peculiar discovery that "learning" had other meanings. I think a lot of kids felt cheated.
I've experienced a lot of different kinds of school. Public school, private schools, charter schools, home schools, self-education, distance learning, family trade education. And none of them for more than a few years. I'm the product of a bunch of incomplete educations.
It definitely handicapped me academically in some ways. I don't feel it's handicapped me all that much in life other than getting through credentialed gates. I feel that the education I had in common family knowledge/trade was the most valuable, for what it's worth. Self-education probably second place. Third was on the job training and vocational stuff.
This makes me think the old apprentice and community school model might be better than what we currently have. Though I'm not particularly certain. Especially in a generalizable sense: it might just be it would have been better for me.
I've attended ten different schools in my youth, followed by a bunch of different vocational education, distance learning, some odd jobs, the faint start of a career and now university, so I think I can relate. I think the main takeaway for me is that what matters is what I know and can do, as these will help me find my way in another environment, help me beyond the institution I am at right now. The ability to catch up by myself is also important - I do have odd gaps here and there.
I've been saying for years (tongue in cheek) that I'm in favor of more child labor. A lot of things only make sense to learn when you have need of them, yet school offers basically no opportunity for self-efficacy, and only distant promises of what it's for.
I learned lots of stuff I missed in school in a fraction of the time when I had use for it (this might not generalize if I am as smart as I think I am, but I think it applies to people less smart, too). There's also the fact that a lot of kids pass tests without any useful knowledge about the subject at all, purely by memorizing data meaningless to them, and guessing the teachers' passwords.
Very much this. Learning is fun and easy when you plan to use it for something, and tends to be a boring grind when you don't even know what it is for. Even though I really like learning for learning's sake, the things I like to learn about, and how much actually sticks with me, suggest that just learning for learning's sake is not terribly effective.
My experience with "Learning for learning's sake" is that there is a lot of value in "oh I've seen something like this before", but if that's the case, than the way we teach is completely wrong. School should be a smorgasbord of diverse experiences, with very little emphasis on any particular topic. Spend a week on carpentry, a week on plumbing, etc etc. I imagine that if K-8 was just exposing kids to various activities, we could then have 9-BS be actual training, and that training would be orders of magnitude more effective because the kids could sort into things they already found interest in.
Agreed.
Oh, and it's probably worth mentioning that New Orleans improved relative to a Louisiana median that was itself a basket case, and so it's hard to draw meaningful conclusions from what happened there even independent of the large demographic changes in the city post-Katrina. Half of New Orleans's charter schools got the worst possible grades in the state's grading system in 2019, which again is relative to a terrible state baseline. Whatever "miracle" occurred post-Katrina it still left a huge portion of the system's students unable to meet basic proficiency standards.
One problem with verifying your predictions is that standardized test standards keep getting lowered, or even outright eliminated (in favor of e.g. more diverse and inclusive metrics). Thus, comparing test scores today vs. five years from now might be comparing apples and oranges.
You wrote: "I think some of these points are stronger for poor/minority/at-risk kids, and weaker for comfortable/Eurasian/not-at-risk kids."
For the at risk kids, school closing is a disaster. Imagine a kid living in a homeless shelter or a kid whose parents are terrible role models or, worse, abusive, or a kid who doesn't have enough to eat. For those kids, school may be their only oasis of normalcy. Without school, they will at minimum suffer and might permanently lose a chance at a decent life. This has little to do with test scores and everything to do with socialization and having adults in their lives who care.
You probably leaned the 80/20 rule AFTER you left school, but I would say that 80% of the damage from school closings will be felt by 20% of the kids.
Yeah, came here to say this. I remember articles from last spring talking about how all the rich kids would be fine, and the high school kids would survive (education-wise), but things could turn out really bad in the long term for elementary school kids from families with non-helicopter parents.
(Of course, to the extent that this article is “Contra Helicopter Parents on Educational Outcomes” it would still be correct, but it might be missing other real problems while disproving there fake ones.)
The vast majority of kids living in those kinds of family situations do not attend a public school that you would calssify as an oasis of normalcy. Not a snark, my wife and my mother work at two of them.
A lot of kids in DC missed nearly a year and a half of in-person school, and we don't know how many of them also had very little involvement with virtual school. We have some data on learning loss already, and the real story is probably worse because we're not tracking anything for the kids who weren't present enough to take tests. I agree with the conclusion of this, which is that if you're the kind of parent who is an SSC reader, your young kids are probably not going to permanently academically affected in any way by not having school for awhile. But from the perspective of 'should we keep schools closed this year' - which is the perspective I am personally terrified of right now - this is a disaster on a number of levels. We see the kids who were already the worst-off losing the most learning. We don't know how many kids just aren't going to come back at all. (Chronic truancy already having been a major issue, it's not like we're great at making teenagers go to school if they don't want to.) Our teen (and tween) carjacking sprees certainly aren't being helped by not having kids in school. And the message that our city government has sent parents who do think it's important kids be in school is so negative for trust in institutions.
Hear, hear. I had serious medical problems in grade 5, needed a major surgery in grade 6, and was told I'd have to miss a year. My parents tried homeschooling, rigorously followed a bunch of curricula, and discovered I could finish *all* the assigned coursework in 2 hours/day and spend the rest of the time reading my favorite books. We were so unimpressed by the time wasted in "regular school" that we kept homeschooling another 2 years. I now have a PhD, but those were among the best days of my life.
> I could finish *all* the assigned coursework in 2 hours/day
Yep. This is the origin story of basically every homeschooler.
C.S. Lewis has a great comment near the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, about the kings and queens of Narnia making "good laws" to stop trees from being cut down and to stop children from being sent to school.
In "Prince Caspian" when Aslan goes around freeing the kingdom from Telmarine tyranny one of the first places he stops is a school building, which he magically turns into a forest glade. C. S. Lewis didn't like school, and for good reason. He was tutored by his mother until she died of cancer while he was young. Then he was sent to an awful boarding school in Britain, where the headmaster was suffering from some kind of mental disorder and only taught geometry: the rest of the "lessons" consisted of him randomly choosing kids to answer questions on various topics and beating them with a cane if they got it wrong. After the school folded (due to not teaching anything and having a crazy headmaster) he was sent to a much better boarding school where he didn't have a great time. Quoting from his autobiography: "Never, except in the front line trenches (and not always there) do I remember such aching and continuous weariness as at (school). Oh, the implacable day, the horror of waking, the endless desert of hours that separated one from bed-time! And remember...a school day contains hardly any leisure for a boy who does not like games. For him, to pass from the form-room to the playing field is simply to exchange work in which he can take some interest for work in which he can take none, in which failure is more severely punished, and in which (worst of all) he must feign an interest...Consciousness itself was becoming the supreme evil; sleep, the prime good. To lie down, to be out of the sound of voices, to pretend and grimace and evade and slink no more, that was the object of all desire--if only there were not another morning ahead--if only sleep could last for ever!"
Then after a couple years of this his father took him out of school to be educated by a private tutor. He writes about how his father tried to prepare him for the change: "He did his best to put all the risks before me: the dangers of solitude, the sudden change from the life and bustle of a great school (which change I might not like so much as I anticipated), the possibly deadening effect of living with only an old man and his old wife for company. Should I really be happy with no companions of my own age? I tried to look very grave at these questions. But it was all imposture. My heart laughed. Happy without other boys? Happy without toothache, without chilblains, happy without pebbles in my shoes? And so the arrangement was made. If it had had nothing else to recommend it, the mere thought, 'Never, never, never, shall I have to play games again,' was enough to transport me. If you want to know how I felt, imagine your own feelings on waking one morning to find that income tax or unrequited love had somehow vanished from the world."
So yeah, C. S. Lewis hated school big time.
Hey, it's great to see another Lewis fan here! I'm not well-read on his autobiography, but I've been looking through the recent literature on boarding schools in Britain & Canada. It seems everyone hated them, despite being so posh and upper-class. It's a real puzzle that each generation sent their kids back, despite remembering very well what an awful time they'd had.
The autobiography of Roald Dahl (the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory guy) had similar recollections of the misery of British boarding school, and he was there around the same time as C.S. Lewis (about a generation after). One thing that stood out though was that Dahl's parents were Norwegian, though his father had a successful business in Wales. Roald recounts why their family stayed in Wales even after their father died when he was just a child:
"Here she was, (my mother), a young Norwegian in a foreign land, suddenly having to face all alone the very gravest problems and responsibilities. She had five children to look after, three of her own and two by her husband's first wife, and to make matters worse, she herself was expecting another baby in two months' time. A less courageous woman would almost certainly have sold the house and packed her bags and headed straight back to Norway with the children. Over there in her own country she had her mother and father willing and waiting to help her, as well as her two unmarried sisters. But she refused to take the easy way out. Her husband had always stated most emphatically that he wished all his children to be educated in English schools. They were the best in the world, he used to say. Better by far than the Norwegian ones. Better even than the Welsh ones, despite the fact that he lived in Wales and had his business there. He maintained that there was some kind of magic about English schooling and that the education it provided had caused the inhabitants of a small island to become a great nation and a great Empire and to produce the world's greatest literature. 'No child of mine', he kept saying, 'is going to school anywhere else but in England.' My mother was determined to carry out the wishes of her dead husband."
Later he recounts how, miserable at boarding school, he faked appendicitis so he would be sent home. Once home the local doctor checked him out and the following occured:
"'You're faking, aren't you?" he said.
"How do you know?" I blurted out.
"Because your stomach is soft and perfectly normal," he answered. "If you had had an inflammation down there, the stomach would have been hard and rigid. It's quite easy to tell."
I kept silent.
'I expect you're homesick,' he said.
I nodded miserably.
'Everyone is at first,' he said. 'You have to stick it out. And don't blame your mother for sending you away to boarding-school. She insisted you were too young to go, but it was I who persuaded her it was the right thing to do. Life is tough, and the sooner you learn how to cope with it the better for you.'
'What will you tell the school?' I asked him, trembling.
'I'll say you had a very severe infection of the stomach which I am curing with pills,' he answered smiling. 'It will mean that you must stay home for three more days. But promise me you won't try anything like this again. Your mother has enough on her hands without having to rush over to fetch you out of school.'
'I promise,' I said. 'I'll never do it again'"
So it seems that people kept sending their kids out of a combination of the superiority of British schools (were they superior? They might well have been, compared to the rest of Europe at the time.), and the old British "stiff upper lip" ideal, where the the fact that schools were awful was a selling point since they would toughen kids up.
It should be noted that while C. S. Lewis hated the boarding school he went to (the good one, not the one run by a madman) his older brother Warnie loved it. As C. S. pointed out himself, he wasn't a very sociable kid. He might have had a better time if he was better at sports and made friends.
I really want to read this C. S. Lewis autobiography, but I can't figure out which book it is. Can you help, FLWAB? (The question sounds dumb but he has so many books.)