Scott Alexander writes about Freddy DeBoer’s The Cult of Smart.
If the season had started, and if DeBoer were on someone’s team, Alexander would get a Win. In response to DeBoer’s case for the Null Hypothesis that successful school reform is not scalable, Alexander writes
These are good points, and I would accept them from anyone other than DeBoer, who will go on to say in a few chapters that the solution to our education issues is a Marxist revolution that overthrows capitalism and dispenses with the very concept of economic value. If he’s willing to accept a massive overhaul of everything, that’s failed every time it’s tried, why not accept a much smaller overhaul-of-everything, that’s succeeded at least once?
Later in the essay, Alexander creates a candidate to score a Meme.
School is child prison. It’s forcing kids to spend their childhood – a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder – sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they’ll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the “Burrito Test” – if a place won’t let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it’s an institution. Doesn’t matter if the name is “Center For Flourishing” or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs – if it doesn’t pass the Burrito Test, it’s an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED “THE BATHROOM PASS” IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN’T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.
Incidentally, I have decided to simplify Meme scoring. A player scores a Meme point if a Meme is used (by someone other than the player) three or more times during the season. So if “child prison” gets used by three other writers to mean school, Scott’s owner gets a Meme point.
The first time I saw the “children in cages” headline, I thought the article would be about schools.
I went to school a few miles from where I live now. And one big difference is that now they have a big tall iron fence with spikes in top
I am assured this is to keep people out and not keep kids in. And I beliet. They are already confident if their ability to imprison the kids.
Malice often compares schools to prisons;
Michael Malice
@michaelmalice
Government schools are quite literally daytime prisons for children
· Nov 26, 2017
Last Rogan Interview;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1dVGs-EVcY
Our 7 yo disagrees. Try private schools, home schooling or virtual learning if it’s not working out for your particular circumstances. In other words, I’m guessing that Malice is expressing a minority viewpoint.
It might be worth qualifying the statement with an age range, say 9-18. So “Government schools are quite literally daytime prisons for children, ages 9-18”. Younger children don’t seem to mind it much, presumably because they are spending time with friends and their day is largely play oriented anyway. (I am a little confused about how much time my 1st grader spends watching Wild Kratts and Sideways Stories at school, for instance.) The enjoyability of school for children seems to tank around 3rd grade.
Private schools, home schooling and virtual learning are all good options, made somewhat distasteful by the fact we still have to pay for the public schools, regardless of our circumstances. How the statement that private or home schooling, etc. are other options modifies the statement “Government schools are quite literally daytime prisons for children” is not clear to me.
If public schooling was limited to Elementary School, I think it would eliminate most of the contentiousness around it for an incredible number of reasons.
My wife attended public schools in communist Viet Nam for K-12. She never felt imprisoned. Same for me, but in the U.S.
The whole imprisonment thing is just a silly libertarian talking point that they like to remind the rest of us about every couple of years. Was it really any worse than what you experienced at the university level? Are we really debating bathroom breaks as a tool of oppression?
I think you’re right and this should be a point AGAINST Scott Alexander.
There needs to be some self-awareness amongst public intellectuals that their good points are often outweighed by saying something memorably bonkers.
There might be truth to the idea that “school=prison”, but amongst 99.9% of the public, all-caps screaming it is an instant argument loser. He might as well casually throw in to the debate that he favors rounding up and killing all puppies.
Actually, public schools are pretty efficient at killing off a child’s natural curiosity and love of learning.
Hell, half the boys need to be given Ritalin just to sit through it every day.
Lysander,
Thanks for the libertarian talking points. No, the Ritalin rates for males are not at 50% and can you provide any evidence that schools squelch curiosity and love of learning? My wife and I survived and lived to tell. Our 7 yo daughter is doing great too and loves it.
Separately, how are things going for the kiddos under lockdowns and Zoom? How are the depression and suicidal ideation rates vs. pre-virus in-person?
If things were so oppressive in the schools, I would have expected the exact opposite to have occurred.
Hans,
If they gave you a voucher and let you do what you wanted, would you still send your kids to the local public school? If vouchers were available, would it have changed any other decisions about where you live (I would, for instance, have been willing to live somewhere that was cheaper and closer to work that had weak schools).
If the answer is that you wouldn’t choose the exact same fate if you were spending your own money, then it’s indefensible. It just sounds like another instance of you saying “suck it up and accept being taken for a ride because you can’t do better sucker.”
People can endure all sorts of things, but that doesn’t mean they should.
P.S. The fact that public schools went remote while private schools stayed open permanently discredits the public school model, even “good schools.” Any district that went remote should have been forced to refund the parents tax money.
asdf,
“If they gave you a voucher and let you do what you wanted, would you still send your kids to the local public school?”
Yes
“If vouchers were available, would it have changed any other decisions about where you live”
No
We’ve had somewhat similar discussions in the past. The people that we want as neighbors coincidentally (but, probably not) have kids that we want to attend school with our daughter. It just so happens to be a bundled proposition. Copy/paste all of your IQ arguments here, if you’re struggling to understand.
Vouchers are for high achievers to opt-out of the crappy schools in their bad neighborhoods. And, I fully support this. But, for the upper middle class folks like ourselves, vouchers are meaningless.
I like my neighbors, but I could have found neighbors I like while paying six figures less for a house and having 30 min less of a drive each way if school district wasn’t an issue.
As for the public schools, I’m surprised Hans. You boycott all sorts of institutions over CRT, but you’re going to send your kids to schools where its part of the curriculum?
We decided that we could put hundreds of thousands of dollars saved with a free education to use in a lot of ways, but I would certainly never choose public schools if the alternative was price neutral.
asdf,
The likelihood of vouchers ever happening is probably <1%. Yes, I agree with vouchers and will continue to advocate for them, but it wouldn’t really impact us that much. We have already structured things to insulate ourselves as best we can from the crazy left while still being able to earn decent incomes.
We are not boycotting businesses…rather we are supporting businesses that don’t overtly and continually express anti-free speech and anti-liberal views. We hit a setback yesterday when our primary alternative to Amazon pulled Debra Soh’s book.
https://twitter.com/drdebrasoh/status/1364646879305293827?s=21
Hans,
I agree with your decision to avoid evil businesses, but it’s hard when you talk about things like Amazon. Is Walmart any less woke than Amazon? Probably not. And I don’t think my kids are really corrupted by what retailer we buy Crest from (all of whom would basically be the same).
We did give up leftist cultural products though. I gave up watching professional sports during the first BLM era, even though I like them personally. We also keep the families media content to an absolute minimum. We avoid leftist businesses when there are alternatives.
We choose our public schools before the pandemic/George Floyd, when we believe that just choosing a nice school in a small conservative town would be enough. However, we don’t know anymore.
Up north all school attendance zones and school boards were town based. It was very local control and mostly people from the same set of backgrounds that had skin in the game. However, down here its county based. The counties are huge and contain lots of people from far away that don’t share your values. The county management and school board is very leftist, especially since the summer, and they are the ones pushing CRT and other nonsense. In addition the attendance zones tend to be very wide, so you’ve got to move pretty far out to avoid the ghetto. Since all of the counties within anything resembling a commutable distance are leftist, you are stuck with this model. I dramatically upgraded how big a problem I think this is over in the current crisis, and I would be glad to send them to the Catholic school down the street if they would refund my tax dollars. If I thought that the local public schools would give the kind of non-ideological instruction I got growing up, we would be satisfied.
asdf,
Good responses, thank you. One last follow-up..
“Is Walmart any less woke than Amazon?”
1) yes, for sure on a scope/breadth/impact basis. E.g. Does Walmart have a hosting service that can shut down services willy nilly?
2) Bentonville, AR vs. Seattle, WA. Much less likely to be woke…we will wait and see.
3) every time we hit the “buy now” button on Amazon we had this visceral slimy feeling that we didn’t want to experience any longer. They literally tried to cancel Shelby and Eli Steele over a completely benign documentary and we don’t want to think about that every single time we order toothpaste. It’s f*cking unbearable.
4) I agree that our stance against woke businesses is extremely unlikely to make any impact whatsoever. We are doing it for the perceived peace of mind vs some larger cause…but if many others start voting with their feet, then we might have something more interesting to explore. Arnold has his FIT picks, which we like a lot, but we are trying a different approach in parallel.
Just booked our second vacation of the year, this time with my vaccinated parents from California. Going to South Carolina…no vacation dollars to crazy blue states.
I had a relatively positive public school experience, and even still
– it has been the only place I’ve been exposed to violence in my life
– they taught me falsehoods that I have had to unlearn in adulthood.
– there were teachers who just straight up refused to do their job
– the amount of brushwork and time-wasting activity was atrocious
– the bodily autonomy issue has become a bigger issue in hindsight
We are homeschooling, and the fact that my 6-year-old finishes his math work before I even wake up so that he can watch cartoons, or that he give me a an oral analysis of the life of Leif Erikson while running around the house, or that he has made friends of all ages at the homeschooling community get-togethers is all mind-boggling to me.
I didn’t know it could be like this.
*busywork
Paul Graham made the earliest school-prison comparison that I’m aware of, in 2003: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
The “oppression” in the public schools relates primarily to the lack of choice in optional courses and mandatory courses that are completely worthless (e.g. foreign languages). Not much different in the private schools and only slightly better at the university level. You folks keep wanting an a la carte experience, but you’re only willing to pay for the cafeteria experience that also has the support of the credentialing agencies.
The magnet school I went to provided much more of an ala carte experience and it operated for a fraction of the cost per pupil as the local school district.
Middle class schools are fine for middle class kids, but there is no particular reason we can’t give a different environment for top 1% kids. The magnet school model works as an escape valve for those kids, and it does society a lot of good to make sure they develop their talents. Unfortunately, a lot of magnet schools are being shut down or watered down over CRT concerns. It happened to the magnet schools around here, and my magnet growing up was constantly harassed on such grounds.
The oppression in my mind comes down to mainly:
– the amount of time consumed by both school itself and in homework.
– the limitations imposed on bodily functions (eating, bathroom time, etc)
– the sometimes barbaric culture that develops among students that resembles the power dynamics of prison inmates
Well I guess SSC got around to admitting what his friend leaked in the email.
It’s a good essay.
“These are two sides of the same phenomenon. Some people are smarter than others as adults, and the more you deny innate ability, the more weight you have to put on education. Society wants to put a lot of weight on formal education, and compensates by denying innate ability a lot. DeBoer is aware of this and his book argues against it adeptly.”
I would say precisely those people whose credentials outstrip their meritocratic usefulness (either because they lack enough IQ, or they haven’t turned their IQ into something useful) and the ones that prefer to emphasize credentialism.
Some of our credentialed class do engineering, or start businesses, or invent COVID vaccines. But a lot also have bullshit make-work jobs. If those jobs were taken away they might find other ways to be useful, but it could be a hit in pay, working conditions, or some other factor. After all, they choose the jobs they have for a reason. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the richest counties in America are all around Washington, DC.
—
Left Wing Bell Curvism has always amounted to “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” which has always failed spectacularly. We have a meritocracy in order to reward smart people for doing productive things so they do more productive things and we all get stinking rich, even those that didn’t do much to advance society.
Sure, maybe you pay off those left behind for the sake of social stability. But “pay off” doesn’t have to mean “spend huge portions of your economy on expensive services provided by high IQ professionals to the point of fiscal ruin even though we know the ROI is terrible.” Education, unlimited medical care to treat vice conditions or keep the very old alive slightly longer, and a few others are extremely expensive open ended items aren’t really necessary to keep the peace or “provide dignity” (they may be necessary to win elections in democracy as we have it today, who knows). They seem more like a payoff to middle and upper middle class service providers who get paid for those services, and denial of the Null Hypothesis seems more like a way to protect their jobs.
SSC gets it and notes that spending absurd amounts of money on education if the Null Hypothesis is true is bonkers:
“But I think I would start with harm reduction. The average district spends $12,000 per pupil per year on public schools (up to $30,000 in big cities!) How many parents would be able to give their children a safe, accepting home environment if they got even a fraction of that money? If they could get $12,000 – $30,000 to stay home and help teach their kid, how many working parents might decide they didn’t have to take that second job in order to make ends meet?”
After watching blue states close schools and force kids through an even more hellish garbage fest of remote learning so they could keep their paychecks, does anyone not agree this is a jobs racket run by utterly terrible people.
The #1 threat to a well functioning society is relatively high IQ often over-credentialed people that want to be (over)paid to do what they want instead of what the meritocratic free market actually wants. Their #1 way to bring this about is to claim they are doing it for the disadvantaged. To the extent the disadvantaged go along with this and grant political power to these people I fear the disadvantaged as well (they have a bad track record), but let’s be clear about who enemy #1 is.
—
The solution to some people failing at the meritocracy is that we just increase the number of smart people. Either through genetic engineering (if possible) or differential fertility (or at least not dysgenic fertility). In the long run, there are no other solutions to the problem as posed. The easiest of those two is the former, and maybe we will get it soon enough.
I’d say the obvious and largest moral imperative today is to keep this thing called “advanced stable developed economy with ever increasing technological and economic production” going for as long as humanly possible. If we do, genetic engineering becomes a more likely outcome. If we don’t, its back to nasty, brutish, and short. As the greatest threat to modern advanced economies is mass immigration (especially low IQ), that’s always been my hobby horse. It’s very difficult to advocate against mass low IQ immigration without being able to state that they are in fact low IQ and that is never going to change.
The charitable view of opponents of this is that they think genetic engineering is imminent, and so none of this matters since it’s all going to get solved in like one generation at most. If that’s the position its fine, though they seem a lot more certain of it than me (I have no particular prediction of the effectiveness of genetic engineering over a particular time period beyond that I don’t think 0% or 100% are sound bets).
There is also a strange fact that if its imminent, then the problems immigration seeks to solve are rather temporary and perhaps not worth the risk. I mean if we are going to be able to increase IQ in a generation, people in the third world can just stay there and wait for their genetically engineered high IQ children and grandchildren to fix the place up in no time. They don’t need to move here to be around high IQ people to solve their problems for them, their own countries will be high IQ in short order.
The semi uncharitable view is that they haven’t thought about the implications at all. They know that “position X” makes them feel good and fit in, and they haven’t considered the likely outcomes at all. Which would just make them like regular people most of the time.
The really uncharitable view is that they know that genetic engineering might be awhile off or not happen, but they insist on rolling the dice on societal collapse anyway because their deontological beliefs demand it. If that wrecks the wealth and technology engine short of developing gene editing and dooming us to nasty/brutish/short future rather than a Star Trek future, well whatever bro that is the price of ideology.
they think immigration is nowhere near society-destroying levels and would demand restrictions when the ‘mass’ scenario actually came (see EU)
How do you determine what is society destroying? On what timeline? 10 years, 30 years, 50 years, etc?
How do you determine what “mass” is?
How do you both demand and get restrictions when you determine this? Whose to say it’s in your control at that point?
It kind of seems like people don’t have answers to these questions, don’t ask them, and wouldn’t be able to stop it once it became demographically self reinforcing.
The book eventually comes down to a very basic ethical statement of the sort that will always trip you up if you try to get around it.
Kant, Buber, etc –
We are tempted to value people based on what they can do for us.
How to get around that? ‘Education’ of people we don’t value to make them more useful isn’t going to cut it.
Ah, bathroom passes. It’s complicated. Even if students don’t really dislike school, the marginal utility of leaving class for five or ten (or more) minutes is generally positive. But allowing students to leave whenever they want would lead to the least attached students roaming the halls, congregating in the bathrooms (maybe making trouble for the people who actually have to use them), smoking weed in the back parking lot, etc. So the system of passes. And the need to decide, “This is the fourth day this week X says he has to go. I think I’m being played.”
On the other hand, in my “Honors” classes, the pass was by the door and anyone could just quietly get up, take the pass, and go.
On the third hand, I got in trouble for some of the things I did with the Honors seventeen year olds. Quote the relevant authority, “Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to a fourteen year old.”
The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.
For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day…
-Wilde, Ballad of Reading Gaol
I stand apparently alone in thinking SSC is interesting, but not the god that most folks at this blog and his worship to.
He’s always wrong on schools.
He did a followup on on that post. My relevant comments:
And
“I stand apparently alone in thinking SSC is interesting, but not the god that most folks at this blog and his worship to.”
FWIW – you are not alone. These number one pick posts are starting to feel a little stale. I’m here for Arnold’s thoughts vs. outsourcing to SSC. Or, at the least, can we get a number two or number three pick post instead?
Happy to hear that!
I have found it difficult to find statistics on special ed spending. One source claimed that 11% of CA K-12 students are special ed. Unsupported guess would be that special ed average 3-4x the average pupil $. (so special ed ~30% of total cost). Any ideas on this, Education Realist?
If special ed costs 3-4x, then that is something like $50k+ in a many states and $100k+ in may expensive urban metros.
For 13 years of schooling that’s $650k and $1.3M respectively, and that might be low.
I have a feeling the societal ROI on that investment is terrible, and its an awful lot for one person to request by right for existing (and this is just the education expense). If it’s truly taking up 30% of the education budget or 50% as Ed Realist claims, that’s clearly a huge burden of questionable benefit.
Rather than asking private schools to take on such onerous requirements, it’s worth asking if such costs should be borne by the system at all.
50% of my states per pupil expense is still enough to send a kid to the private Catholic school down the road for k-12. Cough it up and you’ll never have to hear the complaints again.
I don’t think you understood what I said.
Hint: you won’t get anywhere near to half of the average state expense. You’ll get maybe half of what an ordinary kid costs, and an ordinary kid costs maybe 40% of the average state expense.
Responding to children’s complaints about how they’re treated at school by asserting that teachers (i.e. grown adults who have voluntarily agreed to be there in exchange for payment) have it even worse? Check.
Blaming parents for the school system’s failure to deliver a compelling curriculum to their students? Check.
Clearly viewing children primarily as a burden who make it harder for you to do your job (i.e. educate them)? Check.
Displaying complete and total unwillingness to even consider the possibility that teachers and/or school systems might be responsible for any of the problems associated with schooling? Check.
Yep, this comment was definitely written by a teacher…
I noticed this too.
None of these assertions stand up to a moments examination, let alone a little data collection. I’m not even going bother pulling up the list of private schools in my metro area that only take special ed students and have a tuition less than the average spent by the government on a student in my metro area. Its trivially easy to do in every metro I’ve tried. Or the charter schools with higher % of special ed students than the public schools and that only get about 60% of the funding per pupil from the state (which is what we ended up going with for our special needs kids, and before you go assuming we are some anti-teacher crazy family, my wife is a teacher in the public school we pulled out kids out of.)
“. I’m not even going bother pulling up the list of private schools in my metro area that only take special ed students and have a tuition less than the average spent by the government on a student in my metro area. ”
You have a list of private schools in your metro area that change student diapers and have five aides per violent student that costs less than $20K a year. That handles blind children with aides, and kids in wheelchairs with full time aides–and they specialize in this, so each kid takes 2-3 aides–and less than $20K/year.
Or you’re lying. Or just really ignorant.
“Or the charter schools with higher % of special ed students than the public schools”
You have no such thing. There are charter schools with sped kids whose parents don’t want them to be treated like sped, and so they cost ore.
Again, you’re just ignorant. Read up more and grasp your limitations.
If we are spending 50% of education spending on special ed as you claim, then we should re-evaluate providing all of these services to special ed.
For most of these kids, the idea that they are going to “get an education” is kind of a joke. No way most are going to use that education to pay enough taxes to self fund all these services.
If it’s as bad as you say, then nearly all of the increase in funding over the last several decades went to special ed. If so we should consider reverting to how things were before, when presumably we didn’t do so much for special ed kids.
It is difficult to raise a special needs kid. But that is life. In an era of genetic screening and abortion, it’s a voluntary decision for many. Its fine to give people some level of charity, but not if its literally eating our entire education budget and being a huge drag on society. The kids can stay home and their parents can change their diapers, the world won’t end.
1. I’m not responding to child’s complaints, but adult ones. And the implicit criticism behind the complaint is that adults can go the bathroom whenever they want. Except they can’t. Which kind of kills the issue. That was the point of bringing up adult jobs in which going to the bathroom on demand is not an option, not your moronic conclusion.
2. I’m not blaming the parents for anything. I’m pointing out that parents either have options or they don’t. If they don’t, well, that’s why it is called public school. No blame at all. Just a fact.
3. I have an entire blog with a million plus page views that makes it very clear I don’t do this, and nothing of what I said warrants your conclusion. [personal insult over the line]
The “child prison” meme has been floating around Less Wrong for a long time, most prominently from Zvi back in 2017 and 2018:
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/08/05/something-was-wrong/
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2018/04/15/the-case-against-education/
Jeff Kaufman has written about his attempt to raise children in a less authoritarian way, although I’m not sure if he’s ever written anything explicitly anti-school.
2017-2018 is a long time? Good heavens. I first read it in J. T. Gatto’s “Six-Lesson Schoolteacher” in maybe 2004. At the time I didn’t know any better and it made an impression, although skimming it now I find much of it absurd. That essay was originally published in “Whole Earth Review” in 1991. The meme itself certainly goes back a long time before that. The first alternative schools appeared, I believe, late in the XIX century. Sudbury Valley School was founded in 1968 partly as a reaction against what its founders derisively called “progressive schools” which were themselves old by that time; e.g. Summerhill School was founded in 1921. Alternative schools have existed for a long time, certainly enough for the rest of humanity to discover their supposed wonderful advantages, but of course evil capitalists suppress yada yada. Alternative schools are subject to the same criticism as discrimination in hiring: if students of such schools were so much better, how come they aren’t dominating the top creative levels or whatnot? Are we supposed to believe that there is a worldwide conspiracy to keep them down? The creme de la creme keep sending their kids to Sidwell Friends, a regular “six-lesson” school by all accounts – is that a fake to keep the real education from the people? Pfui. As is, I haven’t ever heard that alternative schools amounted to anything special. For better or worse, we have as a culture decided that child labor is unacceptable, and have crowned school and schoolteachers as the only institution and the only sort of people that can have charge of unrelated children for prolonged periods. Unless we are willing to change that, school is here to stay.
What baffles me is how Scott Alexander can write such beautiful reasonable posts on education like this one and also the SSC classic post on education, “Against Tulip Subsidies”, where he argues against government subsidizing education; and then he votes for Elizabeth Warren (did he endorse her?) who made subsidies to higher ed one of her big policy initiatives.
DeBoer’s belief that one’s intelligence is synonymous with one’s worth only serves to betray his own internal beliefs and his lack of time spent with anyone outside of his own ivory tower.
Amongst people outside of the class he has insulated himself with, many other qualities are considered more important and amongst plenty, intelligence is if anything, viewed more as a flaw than an asset.
Pretty sure he’s not saying one’s intelligence is synonymous with worth, but the opposite.
To be more specific, his contention that this is what “society believes.”
Arnold, I’d be curious on your thoughts regarding Number One pick’s take regarding “deservingness.”
In the free market, I think Number One pick is entirely right that De Boer’s concept is nonsense. However I’m less sure regarding academia/government/non profits.
In fact, I again suspect De Boer is betraying his own insularity. He views the appointment of good jobs or positions as based on “deservingness” per academic success because that’s the artificial world he has been in… namely academia.
And given growth of government / nonprofits / academia, is it possible that a greater share of our economy is less one where we can choose to pay more for the surgeon we believe will do the procedure best – per Number One picks’ aganlogy – and more one where there is top down choice of who “deserves” that pay?
Lots of very smart people really had a miserable time in school and are still very sour about it and can hardly restrain themselves from letting you know. Stephen King is one example of many. It’s fine for them to express their feelings of anger and trauma and one doesn’t have to be dismissive about it, so long as they understand it’s not like that for everyone and there are indeed reasons things are how they are that aren’t just products of people being stupid and cruel, though political and ideological nonsense does play a certain role.
Robin Hanson has his theory that mass schooling may be about signaling and even a little skill learning but is bolstered by it’s incidental benefit in conditioning youth for ‘industrial’ era employment, being obedient and on time and practicing focus and self restraint all day every day.
To that extent, I would like James Scott’s next book to be “Seeing like a Supervisor” about how even with many adults it’s hardly a picnic getting ordinary people to do basics, and one can only shudder to imagine how much worse it might be without all that conditioning. Which, again, probably is an awful, terrible experience for those who don’t need it when we just throw all different levels of capability together.
We have a solution to this problem. Gifted programs in elementary school and magnet schools at the high school level. It gives the kids bored with regular school a way out, but it’s under attack.
I disliked school until I went to Princeton. One thing I especially resented was having to ask permission to go to the bathroom. Once I wet my pants because I failed to hold it until a scheduled break.
The essence of public school is that you use violence to take money from people to provide a service they would not pay for on their own. That is the most basic reality of it. When that is your system, the people providing that service have far less incentive to provide something satisfactory. In this pandemic, we have even learned that they don’t feel a need to provide the service at all.
Here is a school board meeting for a closed school system that the members thought was private:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FgJ4fONHoo
They mock the parents for wanting the schools open. Say they just want babysitters so they can smoke pot all day. Etc.
That’s what public schooling IS. At a fundamental level. When push comes to shove over something as simple as BEING OPEN, they do not care.
I don’t want to hear Ed Realist complaining that parents want schools closed. Maybe some parents do. But a lot of parents want them open. They are not being given that option and are not having their tax dollars refunded.
1) Open the Schools
2) End Remote Learning
3) Anyone that shows up in school gets an education
4) Anyone that doesn’t is on their own.
Done. No debate. That’s it.
I would be willing to give *unpaid* leave for up to a year to any teacher that wants to keep their job and let anyone above 55 retire early if they want. But other then that if you want to get paid you get your ass in school and teach in person. No excuses. Private schools have managed to do this even when they have a lot less money.
“The essence of public school is that you use violence to take money from people to provide a service they would not pay for on their own.”
Actually, that’s incorrect. Public school was invented by taxpayers. And if you weren’t an idiot, you’d recognize that if you want to be the sort of whiner who says that taxing is taking money by violence, then that’s the definition for every public institution.
“I don’t want to hear Ed Realist complaining that parents want schools closed. Maybe some parents do. But a lot of parents want them open. They are not being given that option and are not having their tax dollars refunded.”
Here’s the cool part: reality will ignore your wishes every bit as much as I do. I could care less if you want to hear it or not. It’s a fact. ANd it’s not “some” parents. It’s close to half. Where half of parents want schools closed, they are closed. Where “a lot” of parents want schools open, they are open. “A lot” is not just “people who can’t escape knowing me” but in excess of 70%.
And no, they don’t get their taxpayer dollars refunded for two reasons. First, because school is being offered. IF they don’t like how it is offered, they have the same options they always do.
Second, parents don’t pay for public schools. Taxpayers do. If parents choose not to use public school, no worries. Doesn’t get them out of paying.
Try and up your game. This is a really weak post. There are plenty of polls on parents and school openings.
“Public school was invented by taxpayers.”
Public school was invented a long time ago so the kids of factory workers and farmhands could learn the three Rs in an era where they couldn’t afford that and because the ROI on everyone learning their three Rs was enormous.
But today we could easily get that out of private education at a fraction of the expense.
“Where half of parents want schools closed, they are closed.”
That is their problem. You open the schools and if they don’t want to show up, they don’t show up.
“Second, parents don’t pay for public schools. Taxpayers do.”
Funny thing, there is a line item on my property taxes for the taxes that go towards schools. I sure as hell am paying for it.
You provide a lousy service (well, you don’t even provide a lousy service since you closed) that you can’t get people to pay for of their own free will. Everyone that had to earn their keep managed to get through this. That’s the reality of it.
>—“Funny thing, there is a line item on my property taxes for the taxes that go towards schools. I sure as hell am paying for it.”
If you have a child in the school system it’s very unlikely you are paying as much school tax as it is costing the taxpayers to educate your kid.
If you have two kids in the school system it is almost certain you are receiving a huge subsidy from other taxpayers, many of whom who don’t have a kid in the school at all.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea the the “number one pick” is an Elizabeth Warren supporter.