John Alcorn pointed out to me that I have two beliefs that appear to be inconsistent.
1. The Null Hypothesis, which is that educational interventions have no durable effect on average outcomes.
2. K-12 educators and college professors and administrators have adverse cultural effects.
It may be tough to reconcile these, but let me try.
Humans have a lot of cultural knowledge to acquire, and we do it by copying others. The Null Hypothesis is true because we do not have interventions that reliably improve one’s copying process. If Jill is better at learning than Jack, we do not have techniques that will produce equal outcomes between Jack and Jill.
But the content of what Jack and Jill learn is affected by educational institutions. If we teach them a heroic narrative of the United States, then they are likely to absorb that narrative. If we teach them a dark narrative of the United States, then they are likely to absorb that narrative. Not everyone who goes through the educational system will support its dominant narrative to the same degree, but the dominant narrative will tend to be absorbed.
I would not say that educators are totally free to impose cultural beliefs on their students. Educators need some support from other influential adults and from students’ peers. Education takes place within a culture, and it has to resonate with that culture to a fair degree. But I think that this leaves room for me to justifiably complain about the cultural influence of K-12 and higher education in the United States these days.
Fifty years ago, American history was a glorious story, expanding across a continent, becoming an industrial powerhouse, growing so much food that we fed a lot of the world, saving civilization by defeating the Nazis, etc. The country had problems, of course, but they were being solved. Most students did not remember much of anything specific. E.g., most couldn’t place the Civil War in the right half century. But they took away the feeling that America was good, that it made the world a better place, and that one should be proud to be an American.
Today in many places it is much less glorious. Stealing land from the Indians and killing most of them. Negro slavery. Mistreating workers. Social Darwinism and McCarthyism. Again, students don’t take away much in the way of specifics. But they may well take away a feeling that America is not a good place, that the world might be better off if there was no American, and that one should be at least somewhat ashamed of being an American.
We are told that minority failures are a terrible thing that can’t possibly be their fault, so it must be someone else’s fault.
If you believe HBD, the heroic narrative holds up. It’s not like the Indians were ever going to do much with the land, it’s not like the negro has done much with civil rights, and all of the workers held back by their class got sorted by the SAT long ago. These groups are lucky we were here to lift them up out of Malthusian stupor.
For what it’s worth, most of the killing of natives was done by European diseases, diseases for which they had no natural immunity. Diseases which were eventually fatal. Germs ran ahead of white settlement, so whites encountered societies that were shrunken and demoralized and easy to conquer. It also looked like the natives “weren’t doing anything” with the land. A settler would see a meadow that would make a great wheat field, not realizing that it had grown corn several years previous.
Sure, we took over North America and didn’t take over India because disease could do a lot of the work for us. Nevertheless, we did push them off the land several times by force going back to the very beginning.
By not use the land I mean that if whites never came the Natives weren’t about to have an industrial revolution and escape the Malthusian trap. The world is vastly better off from the fact that modern America exists today rather than it remained some pre industrial farming and herding state.
I’m not sure I understand this post. I think you mean that educational interventions will not succeed in reducing inequality. That seems to me to be a reasonable claim. Jack and Jill could both improve their “copying process” a lot and still wind up unequal because they started unequal.
That’s not the same as saying that “educational interventions have no durable effect on average outcomes.” These interventions could, and should, improve average outcomes for Jack and Jill both, right? Am I correct in assuming that “average outcomes” is shorthand for “average inequality” with the assumption that more equality of outcomes is an improvement if achieved through education ?
I’m also a little unclear about whether this is really a complaint about a failure to improve the copying process or a complaint about too much success in improving copying of the wrong cultural beliefs.
+1 thanks. I see it as hard knowledge (the 3Rs) vs. soft knowledge (ideological outlook). The former is much more difficult to impact at the margin than the latter. Case solved.
If you are interested in getting a feel of how strange the transmission of soft knowledge can be in impacting ideological outlook, have a look at the following video on voter id requirements. Students at an elite public university vs. the average folks on the street. The juxtaposition is completely insane:
https://youtu.be/odB1wWPqSlE
Good point on voter id requirements Kurt but the real action on voter suppression has everything to do with making it harder for people with proper id to vote if they live in minority neighborhoods. I live in an affluent, primarily white neighborhood. I’ve been voting for half a century and I have never had to wait more than 5 minutes to vote.
There are minority neighborhoods where people have to wait hours outdoors in November to vote in person on election day. I wonder why they didn’t ask the people in the video about that? And I wonder what they would think about criminalizing giving water to people waiting in such lines? As with all surveys, the answers depend on the questions.
Oh, FFS, every state but six offer early voting, Greg. In only KY, MS, CT, NH, SC, and MO. If one is waiting in line on Election Day for hours, it is ones own fault.
>—“Oh, FFS, every state but six offer early voting”
Oh FFS, early voting tends to mean much LONGER, not shorter, lines because there are many fewer early voting sites than election day sites especially in certain neighborhoods. And, just in case, these proposed voting “reforms” tend to further restrict, not expand, early voting.
Voter ID laws really do suppress the black vote.
“75% Of All U.S. Voters, 69% Of Black Voters Support Voter ID Laws” https://www.dailywire.com/news/75-of-all-u-s-voters-69-of-black-voters-support-voter-id-laws-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-election-integrity-debate
So, first guess: would reduce the black vote by about 6%. At least, 6% more than it also suppresses non-black votes.
If you define [racist] as [disparate impact] then that means such laws are unquestionably racist.
First problem: racism without racial spite is not meaningfully racism. If you can be [racist] without even knowing the race exists, the term is being used to obscure rather than enlighten. Political in the sense of being the opposite of scientific.
I can guarantee you have heard from 0 people who like voter IDs that are arguing for racial spite. It’s either pragmatic politics about suppressing the blue vote regardless of legitimacy of said votes, or it’s about the principle that non-citizens and corpses shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Of course the opponents of voter IDs are likewise not doing it out of concern for saving their poor brown brothers. (Their feelings are very much the opposite of concern.) It’s the same pragmatic politics in reverse – opposing the suppression of blue votes, regardless of the legitimacy of said votes.
Second problem: [disparate impact] is based on radical egalitarianism. Perhaps call them nurture fundamentalists. I also like [nature denialism]. This doctrine is flagrantly incorrect.
Real problem: voting is itself irresponsible. Literally an early symptom of a communism infection. “Should locksmiths be allowed to sell lockpicks to thieves?” Err, maybe instead ban theft, then safely ignore the question?
—
The video is amusingly clear about how much orthodox racial contempt you need to be a proper blue partisan.
P.S, fun fact: where there are voter ID laws on the books, election workers do not follow them.
[would have deleted this sooner had I been on top of it. We are not Twitter]
[let’s not get personal, folks–ed.]
“a complaint about too much success in improving copying of the wrong cultural beliefs”
I think this is closest to Arnold’s argument. The Null Hypothesis is an assumption that one can improve neither Jack’s nor Jill’s native copying abilities. Education can, however, affect what is copied, including the wrong cultural beliefs.
Interestingly, the Jills of the world, the smart Ivy Leaguers with the best copying abilities, do seem to have copied Wokeness better than the Jacks of the world. If Arnold’s hypotheses are correct, then had our educational institutions taught instead the “heroic narrative of the United States”, then those *same* Jills would have been expected to copy that heroic narrative better than the Jacks. We would have a lot of smart, GenZ and Millennial Jill classical liberals expounding on the Enlightenment. I don’t know whether Arnold actually believes that.
You can’t make kids smarter. You *can* teach them to believe dumb ideas.
Any technique will cause both to learn faster and cause little change in their relative positions. If you can put a turbocharger in a slow car and make it go less slow, you can also put a turbocharger in a fast car and make it go even faster.
While you can’t raise someone real or effective IQ via training, you can consume the time they (might) use to learn domain knowledge. E.g. how to do your taxes. Life insurance; how much to get and when. Trades, such as carpentry. Magnets: how do they work? Etc. Even playing video games can’t possibly be more of a waste of time than going to public school.
The history of Prussian schooling shows that the institution is designed to ruin the character of the inmates. E.g. Johann Gottlieb Fichte quotes. Weak civilians are easier to control. This hypothesis is hardly easy to refute. Not only do you not learn anything, it enculturates the worst possible habits. E.g. in life you aren’t graded down from 100 for every mistake. You are graded up from 0 for every success, and it doesn’t stop at 100.
While we have no domain-nonspecific learning enhancement techniques, I have a suggestion. Pick the domain-nonspecific domain of knowledge. Study epistemology. Shouldn’t this have already been tried? It turns out a proper study of epistemology looks a lot more like a gym schedule than a reading schedule. If you want to make better predictions, the basic plan is to make as many predictions as possible. Further, like a gym schedule, it turns out [no pain, no gain] applies a fortiori to training in epistemology. If you don’t feel attacked you’re doing it wrong.
Joanne Jacobs linked to a study the other day that suggests school choice can kill both birds. Because children are not fungible, the study, unsurprisingly, found that school choice unleashes the advantages of the principle of subsidiarity and pluralism resulting in better overall outcomes. https://www.joannejacobs.com/2021/04/free-to-choose-and-learn/
“We find that higher levels of education freedom are significantly correlated with higher NAEP achievement levels and gains even after controlling for key state conditions such as per-pupil education spending, student-teacher ratios, teacher quality, household income and other features of the student population.”
https://projectforeverfree.org/the-data-bears-it-out-educational-freedom-means-higher-educational-achievement/
Families who have multiple options to the tyrannical indoctrination that is the forte of government schools also benefit students in those schools by forcing government schools to desist in their indifference to teaching basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. Naturally y the Biden administration is doing everything possible to prevent such improvements.
I have seen or heard of many studies like this. As far as I know, NONE OF THEM controlled for IQ. Which makes them utterly useless.
All charters are required to take students by lottery. However, smarter parents are more likely to seek out charters that focus on academic achievement–which means smarter kids. The admissions process often requires a bit of smarts to navigate through it. Students who do poorly tend not to be happy in such a charter and are counseled out. Then, no one is allowed to enter to fill the emptied places. By a nice little Darwinian process, the charter has significantly smarter students than the traditional school down the road.
As Mises observed nearly a century ago in ‘Liberalism’, schooling, especially in areas of diversity, is always a political prize. He was speaking of mixed nationality, but a century later, we have more diverse diversity.
“In all areas of mixed nationality, the school is a political prize of the highest importance. It cannot be deprived of its political character as long as it remains a public and compulsory institution. There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions. ”
The cultural training kids receive is all about building an indoctrination for future political purpose. The last thing “educators” executing this mission want are students who are trained to think or learn independent of their teachers. I’ve never come across anyone overtly taught how to study by their teachers. I once thought it was an unknown, but as I’ve cited here many times, it was a topic of a lot of research in the early 20th century. Students with access to family or other adults who figured out how to learn in their student careers will emulate those traits. Students whose parents were poor students will have to figure it out on their own. Random luck if they have a teacher or professor that offers a good example, rarer in schools today.
Thomas Sowell describes how he came to be a learner. After moving to NYC, his family ensured he was exposed to a slightly older boy who explained the library to him and this got him to be a reader. Similarly, Ben Carson describes how his mother working in wealthy white houses noticed they had books and read. She insisted her children read and we know the results.
As it is, most American schools emphasize sports over academics. Create a sense that if you aren’t good at sports, you are a loser. Even if big on academics, the incentives of schooling is to get good grades, not real learning. Student learn how to get those grades and that to delve deeply into a topic will just hurt their grades as they need the answer the teacher wants, not anything more informed or nuanced.