
School Is to Submit - Jerry2
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.html
======
tristanj
One of the biggest benefits of schooling (that almost no one mentions) is that
schools function as an enormous public daycare system that keeps children off
the streets while parents work. This allows both parents to work instead of
having one stay at home for childcare, increasing the size of the workforce
and making the country more productive overall.

Schooling has many benefits to the kids as well (which the author does
address), but I find it really interesting that simply the existence of
schools provides a benefit to society, even when nothing is taught there.

~~~
awt
The country is not more productive if the amount of money earned by the second
working spouse pays only for the cost of childcare, which is actually the case
for many families.

Now, funding public school and paying more income tax _does_ bring in more
revenue for the government, which governments tend to like.

~~~
tomp
It's even worse than that - even if the second spouse has some money left
over, the inflation of life costs (food, transport, and especially housing
and, ironically, education) has turned a one-working-prent from the default
into near impossibility!

~~~
awt
Tell me about it.

------
yk
> Most nations today would be richer if they had long ago just submitted
> wholesale to a rich nation, allowing that rich nation to change their laws,
> customs, etc., and just do everything their way. But this idea greatly
> offends national and cultural pride. So nations stay poor.

The examples of China, Japan and the USA suggest the exact opposite. (Actually
I do not know an example that would support the authors claim.)

> When firms and managers from rich places try to transplant rich practices to
> poor places, giving poor place workers exactly the same equipment,
> materials, procedures, etc., one of the main things that goes wrong is that
> poor place workers just refuse to do what they are told.

[Citation needed] and so on, and so on...

In conclusion, I think were the essay falls apart is, that it does not examine
different kinds of submit. 'submit' is a very different word if the pupil
submits to a teacher out of a deep desire to learn a new skill or if someone
submits to a warlord. (And both are very different from submitting to a boss
at a workplace.) Plus it would be nice to see a rejection of the standard
story, that school mainly teaches useful skills.

~~~
chroma
> The examples of China, Japan and the USA suggest the exact opposite.
> (Actually I do not know an example that would support the authors claim.)

What? Japan adopted representative democracy, human rights, capitalism,
fractional reserve banking, the metric system, and even western attire. China
is more authoritarian, but has made many of the same changes. Their economic
prosperity is highly correlated with these changes.

And I'm flabbergasted that you think the USA doesn't prove his point. The
original American culture was from the native Americans. Once it was replaced
with British culture, the economy of north america flourished. In places where
native culture was replaced with others (Spanish/native culture in Mexico,
Portuguese/native culture in Brazil, etc), the people haven't had the same
level of success. Similarly, Spain and Portugal haven't had the same
prosperity as the UK. When it comes to per capita GDP, the effect of culture
is vastly underestimated.

> [Citation needed] and so on, and so on...

He links to a citation in the sentence after your quote.[1] The paper is a
study of the differences in cotton mill productivity in various countries. The
author accounts for varying levels of technology, training, and other factors.
He finds that the biggest factor affecting productivity is culture.

Honestly, I think you're reading this far too uncharitably. It's a blog post,
not an academic paper. If the author took the time to address the objections
in this thread, it would have been 10x as much work.

1\. [http://faculty.georgetown.edu/mh5/class/econ489/Clark-Why-
Is...](http://faculty.georgetown.edu/mh5/class/econ489/Clark-Why-
Isn't-the%20-Whole-World-Developed.pdf)

~~~
yk
On the US and Japan, Japan did industrialize first, prior to WWII, and adopted
some aspects of western culture afterwards. Similar the US did become
independent first and then largely developed what is nowadays called western
culture. Both actually used force instead of submitting.

My understanding of China is more limited, but it seems they will become a
developed nation first before adopting things like representative democracy,
human rights etc.

> He links to a citation in the sentence after your quote.[1]

Indeed I overlooked that link, so I should have chosen a different claim that
needs a good argument. ( The claim that education became more rigid as a
general trend in history seems dubious for example.) However, looking very
quickly through the paper, it does not seem to claim that culture as most
important factor is well understood, instead he seems to build an argument
that local factors are very important and suggests that culture may be the
most important local factor.

~~~
chroma
> Japan did industrialize first, prior to WWII, and adopted some aspects of
> western culture afterwards.

Except for voting and human rights, Japan adopted all the things I listed
before WWII. The Meiji era was full of westernization.

I don't think people realize just how insanely dysfunctional other cultures
can be. Plenty of poor countries lack concepts we consider basic. Take Haiti,
for example. I'll quote a couple paragraphs from a doctor who volunteered
there after the earthquake[1]:

> It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians
> are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a
> lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don't understand
> the concept of sorting numerically. Not just "they don't want to do it" or
> "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted
> explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically
> is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes
> dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy - harrowing at the best of times -
> positively unbearable.

> Gail told the story of the time she asked a city office for some paperwork
> regarding Doctors Without Borders. The local official took out a drawer full
> of paperwork and looked through every single paper individually to see if it
> was the one she wanted. Then he started looking for the next drawer. After
> _five hours_ , the official finally said that the paper wasn't in his
> office.

I hope that gives an idea of the culture gains Robin Hanson is talking about.
Such concepts only seem obvious to us because we were raised in a culture that
already had them.

1\.
[http://squid314.livejournal.com/297579.html](http://squid314.livejournal.com/297579.html)

~~~
yk
Unfourtunatly I don't have much time at the moment, so just a too brief
answer; if you view culture as broad enough to encompass the example, then I
agree. I would view the lack of alphabetical sorting as more akin to a lack of
technology, rather than as a feature of culture.

------
fiatjaf
If you want to read something about why schools are bad, don't read this
prententious and bizarre ode to the employment, read John Taylor Gatto's "The
Seven Lesson Schoolteacher":
[http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt](http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt)

~~~
throwadeedee
One of my favorite pieces of writing. Both in content and style.

------
panic
_Most nations today would be richer if they had long ago just submitted
wholesale to a rich nation, allowing that rich nation to change their laws,
customs, etc., and just do everything their way. But this idea greatly offends
national and cultural pride. So nations stay poor._

I'm sure the people of these nations would love to watch their culture be
erased as they become an underclass in the territory of a powerful nation.
Just ask the Native Americans!

 _When firms and managers from rich places try to transplant rich practices to
poor places, giving poor place workers exactly the same equipment, materials,
procedures, etc., one of the main things that goes wrong is that poor place
workers just refuse to do what they are told. They won’t show up for work
reliably on time, have many problematic superstitions, hate direct orders,
won’t accept tasks and roles that that deviate from their non-work relative
status with co-workers, and won’t accept being told to do tasks differently
than they had done them before, especially when new ways seem harder._

"Many problematic superstitions?" What? Who is this guy even talking about?
This sounds like a caricature, not an actual description of reality.

 _The farming mode required humans to swallow many changes that didn’t feel
nice or natural to foragers. While foragers are fiercely egalitarian, farmers
are dominated by kings and generals, and have unequal property and classes.
Farmers work more hours at less mentally challenging tasks, and get less
variety via travel. Huge new cultural pressures, such as religions with
moralizing gods, were needed to turn foragers into farmers._

Again, how does he know this? Is he just making up stories, or is this based
on some sort of evidence?

~~~
vessenes
A couple comments; first, you have clearly never tried to manage a third-world
work force/team. A single example came to mind quickly for me; a hotel I
frequented in Mozambique had a serious problem with feral cats. Like 50 of
them. They would come right up to your table, jump on it while you were
elsewhere, and lick the butter of your plate.

I like cats as much as the next guy, but seriously.

It took a couple of months to get an exterminator in willing to deal with
them; cats = black magic = no employees (relatively well educated and very
well paid for the town) were willing to deal with them.

The fact that you're writing this post in English significantly bolsters the
point the author made about acculturation. You live in a world in which the
English essentially won the culture war, and imposed their culture on a vast
swath of the globe. (Check out this fine map of places England has _not_
invaded for some perspective: [http://www.humanosphere.org/basics/2013/08/map-
of-the-day-wh...](http://www.humanosphere.org/basics/2013/08/map-of-the-day-
where-the-brits-never-invaded/))

While it might be controversial to say that English culture generates on
average more wealth than some other cultures, I think it would be reasonably
easy to demonstrate that something about the English acculturation of colonies
left them better off financially than other European and Asian colonizers.

And, by better off, I mean vastly better off. Compare Nigeria (British, $3k+
per person GDP) to CAR (French, $350 per person GDP). I'm not cherry picking,
either. America to Mexico. We live in a world shaped by the Brits.

To your point, financial well-being isn't anything like the only measure. At
least in America, part of what made growth easy was whole-sale genocide.
Places with more balanced colonization plans got much more strung out violence
and economic difficulty. I would argue due to culture conflicts, at least in
part.

I don't think the author is disputing this in the essay, though. He is instead
saying that more individualistic cultures who will not engage with Western
school systems hurt their economic outcomes, for a variety of reasons.

~~~
trill1
> _I like cats as much as the next guy, but seriously._

Sure about that? I wouldn't want 50 harmless cats exterminated just because
they bother the uptight guests of the hotel occasionally. I live in a country
were stray cats are everywhere, and they routinely come in my apartment too.
No problem, I enjoy it and have had they chance to raise many kittens as well.

~~~
eveningcoffee
Cats have very _interesting_ parasites.

Full disclaimer: I took a young feral cat into my custody once (after it
appeared behind my window on the second floor), but it is still worth
mentioning.

------
timthorn
The idea he proposes sounds very similar to the University Technical Colleges
in the UK. Taking students at 14, they try to have a very work like
atmosphere, with 9-5 workdays, no homework, and a curriculum with a large
project based component run in conjunction with business so that students are
solving actual problems seen in real business.

------
jseliger
I explicitly tell students that total rebellion from the school system (or
professor expectations) is usually really stupid—but so is total conformity.
Students, and people in general, need to find ways to rebel intelligently.

That's probably true in many companies too. A lot of employers, especially
white collar / creative employers, don't want or need total drones. But they
also can't have people who are utterly unable to work towards common goals.

I remember a somewhat notorious guy at Google who got fired because he was
wildly, vociferously opposed to much of what the rest of the company was doing
much of the time. Can't remember his name, though.

~~~
wutbrodo
I believe he left, not got fired. And iirc it wasn't about "much of what the
company was doing" but just the stupid way the promotion system works (as well
as a very, very niche product idea).

Then again I'm mostly assuming we're talking about the same person because he
was one of the only ones I would count as particularly "notorious". The fact
that our recollections are so different might mean you're talking about
someone from many years ago (before my tenure).

------
x5n1
In my opinion the very ideas propping up the idea of work and the economy are
flawed. They are flawed because work is not designed to meet human needs.
Instead the output of work is designed to meet human needs. But people are so
busy working they have little time to participate in the output of that work.
Work itself is the end, because that is what you spend most of your time
doing, it is the product in of itself. We should figure out how to produce
work that actually improves well being. Not products or services which do that
because they all actually fail to do that in the end if the people producing
them are miserable. And they all are.

Like let me give you an example. Say a worker produces a widget. They can
produce the widget in an hour or in two hours. They feel better if they
produce it in two hours. Modern work practices would force you to have them
produce it in one hour to lock in that profit of the additional hour of work.
At the end to cost of the item would be affected by how much time is given for
work. Say the cost is doubled by doing things this way. At the end the worker
earns the same, and say we do that with the whole economy and so everything
costs twice that much. But workers are generally happier and more relaxed. To
me that would be a better out come than goods that cost 1/2 as much. Not so
for the economy.

In fact it would be very good if we could use automation to do just this. Make
work more pleasurable. But the way the economy is set up, and the logic that
goes with it. This is simply not going to happen.

~~~
backlava
In theory the market should balance this. Workers should be willing to accept
less money for more rewarding work.

~~~
coldtea
Only if this "more rewarding work" is available and at above subsistence level
(nothing rewarding about doing what you like but barely being able to make
ends meet and/or not being appreciated for it, which in the end destroys your
enjoyment of your line of work too).

And only as long as people aren't hammered 24/7 with ads and consumption
imperatives -- a lot of people believe those can be easily resisted and that
they never buy anything because of these etc, but statistically most of them
are overestimating themselves, they are as susceptible as anyone to
consumerism persuasion which includes ads, fashion, peer pressure, status
signals, being more attractive to potential partners and tons of other things
besides.

------
pizzasynthesis
This self-fellating cultural revisionist drivel is exactly the sort of meta-
analysis I'd expect from someone who has spent too long codependent with
academia and thusly suffers from an irrational self-hatred and tunnel vision
and a lingering feeling that their qualifications are much narrower than
they'd like to believe. The author only once cites an _external_ party (three
links to the very same blog along with a link to their colleague's book). Even
that study says:

> The proximate cause of inefficiency in at least some cases was the workers'
> refusal to accept more machinery, but the choices of workers correlated with
> the local real wage. Whatever constrained the choices of workers in cotton
> textiles, or whatever determined their preferences, must have applied to all
> of the local labor force. Unfortunately the sources on the textile industry
> do not allow me to go with any confidence beyond this limited ascription of
> responsibility to local influences.

So workers in Bombay, who were being payed less than workers in England,
refused to take on more responsibilities until they received higher wages.
Sounds pretty fair to me. Given the information at hand, we could posit that
Western countries were more successful at organizing labor instead of
assuming, like the author does, that it can be fundamentally attributed to
culture, and that less-developed countries like India should just adopt
Western culture. Maybe if they adopted Western culture, they could come
colonize Western nations, then they'd be _really_ successful. /s

I can't see this as anything more than some sort of strange philosophical
flexing, and the author could stand to get another degree--perhaps this time
in history.

------
KaiserPro
> * foragers are fiercely egalitarian*

[citation needed] because human nature is egalitarian isn't it.

> _Most nations today would be richer if they had long ago just submitted
> wholesale to a rich nation_

What you mean is, British colonialism is the only way to run a country. That
sort of thinking lead to wholesale massacres, and the British loosing 4
consecutive wars in Afghanistan.

This is the sort of thinking that died out in the 1930s when the indian
servants poisoned their british master's tea.

Of course you don't suggest that spain should have submitted to the moors, who
were demonstrably more advanced in financial, artistic and technological
means.

Progress doesn't happen because the populous reject change, its because
progress only happens through chance. The industrial revolution was sustained
in england because, despite massive political change, england didn't
completely purge/remodel the upper-classes. There was the same level of
suffering and servitude.

> _Forager children aren’t told what to do; they just wander around and do
> what they like_

[citation needed]

Have you ever fucking seen how foraging works? The child follows the parent
and actively learns, or they die when they get lost. Do you think that the
knowledge that some red berries are bad is instinctive?

> _While human foragers are especially averse to even a hint of domination,
> they are also especially eager to take “orders”_

Logic isn't your strong suit is it? Basically your article could be summed up
as:

Humans don't like being bullied or enslaved. If you change the practices of
leaders, the plebs will follow.

------
ktRolster
It's true there are plenty of problems with our school system, but....I've
been to places that don't have school systems, and having a poor one is better
than none.

Also, I feel sorry for anyone who only views education as a way to get a job.
They've missed out on a lot of beauty in the world.

~~~
unimpressive
>Also, I feel sorry for anyone who only views education as a way to get a job.
They've missed out on a lot of beauty in the world.

One famous result from psychology is that having people focus on an extrinsic
reward for doing something tends to completely overshadow the intrinsic reward
involved in performance.

Contrast this with the cost of tuition and the dots naturally connect. (Of
course, the opportunity cost of spending four years of your life doing
something shouldn't be understated either.)

------
Animats
Well, yes. This isn't a new observation. Here's a modern overview, describing
kindergarten as boot camp.[1] This idea goes back a long way in European
tradition, when education was church-driven. Submission to authority is basic
Catholic doctrine, and persists in most spinoffs from Catholicism.

School as training for submission to authority went mainstream during the
Industrial Revolution, when employers needed a large but passive workforce.
But that's a longer story than I have time for now.

[1] [http://www.sociology101.net/readings/Learning-the-Student-
Ro...](http://www.sociology101.net/readings/Learning-the-Student-Role.pdf)

------
tmptmp
Some things in this article I would like to object and to point out are
(although I am not here to support or argue for/against the current schools):

>>But they won’t be publicly ranked and corrected nearly as often as in
school, even though such things will happen far more often than their
ancestors would have tolerated.

Are you kidding? Their ancesters would even be publicly killed/maimed by other
foragers if they couldn't perform as expected or didn't conform to the rules
of the society.

I hate when modern people try to paint very rosy pictures of the past,
especially of the so called tribal (hunter-gatherer) people. Many tribal
societies can be seen to be guided by a single principle "survival of the
fittest" and generally the survival function is some combination of "ability
to perform as expected by other tribals" and "conformity to arbitrarily chosen
rules by the tribal society".

>>They don’t have a single random boss they don’t respect, but can instead be
trained by many adults, can select them to be the most prestigious adults
around, and can stop training with each when they like.

Here the author ignores one important aspect :- not even the forager children
can stop training with each "when they like": there are many important factors
to be considered here; that if a forager kid has not yet learnt how to "earn
food and other things needed to survive" he/she must continue training and it
may be under those adult(s) he/she may or may not like to train under.

>>Have teachers continually give students complex assignments with new
ambiguous instructions, using the excuse of helping students to learn new
things.

If any human language is used to give instructions, those instructions will be
ambiguous. I doubt if the foragers used any unambiguous human language.

In short, the rise and need of schools is a very important topic and this
article leaves too much out. If time permits, I will write my thoughts on it.

------
deft
No one has mentioned Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society yet? I obviously
haven't read Bryan Caplan's book that's discussed in this article, but from
the looks of it, none of his ideas are new. They've been explored before.

I find his title interesting though, the problem isn't education, but
schooling. Another commenter touched on this, but if you're actually
interested in this subject check out Illich's book. It's a lot more radical
than this hard to understand piece.

Another thing, at the end why is the concept of appearing as "prestigious
forager teachers" instead of the actual "dominating bosses" listed as a
benefit? Maybe I'm not reading it right.

tl;dr: read Illich.

~~~
nickysielicki
Not sure if this is complete, but I found this link:

[http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.h...](http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/intro.html)

------
rrss1122
For a website called Overcoming Bias, the bias in the article is fairly
transparent.

------
joelthelion
And learning to read is to brainwash you. sigh...

------
yotamoron
Read 'deschooling society' by Ivan Illich. Will help you understand a thing or
two about what is school all about.

