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Aug 17, 2021
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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"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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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"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.

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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.

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Aug 17, 2021
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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.

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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.

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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.

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Aug 18, 2021
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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.

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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.

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Aug 17, 2021
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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.

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Aug 17, 2021
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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

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> 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).

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I was only ever taught long division of polynomials, not numbers. (but we did do short division of numbers)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Drilling is tremendously helpful in learning a language. An expanded vocabulary is critical.

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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.

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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.

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Sorry, plenty of irony. No paradox.

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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.

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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".

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Probably why "whole word" spelling works for some very bright kids (who probably already know some of it) and didn't generalize.

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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”?)

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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.

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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.

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>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?

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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.

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>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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Yes, there is indeed huge value in that.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

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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?

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Results probably correlate tightly with the family/home/neighborhood environment.

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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.

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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!)

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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

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What does his being Brahmin have to do with this?

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Sorting into innate ish ability classes being partially mediated by ancestry!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 ?

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“ do you trust nationwide tests to be administered fairly, or in fact at all”

Why would they not be

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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.

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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)

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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I suspect you’re right.

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This is a very good question.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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