OK I guess I’m going to go against the deluge of comments here; And give an appreciable reason instead of denigrating those who might choose this.
The context, though, I am British. I grew up in Britain. I went to British school.
I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country.
However, school, for me, was by far the single worst mandatory system I have been exposed to in my life. For the entirety of my young life, school was a prison. With inmates who would beat you, Emotionally abuse you, the “wardens” did not want to be there either, and did not care how the other inmates treated you… sometimes doubling down on the behaviour themselves. - The comparison is further solidified by 6-foot galvanised steel bars surrounding the complex, and that I visited an actual psychiatric prison not long after and the cafeteria, recreational grounds, rooms, etc; were identical to those of my school.
Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning, Everything that got me through school was things that my mother taught me- And as a consequence, I was always top of my class.
I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. I would not be surprised if this feeling is shared among many of my generation and social class, the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
and for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children- The ostracised, are learning to be helpless and to be victims- They are not learning to “socialise” more. If anything it is probably more harmful for those people to be exposed to more people until they’ve had time to form on their own.
I'm both glad and dismayed to hear that I'm not the only one who likens public school to prison.
I went to school in California, and I would say my school experience became prison-like between grades 4 and 11. In fairness, I can now look back at my child self and realize that I was delayed in terms of emotional maturity, which contributed to my social problems, but the kind of environment I was in was the wrong one for helping me overcome that delay. Any slight difference about myself, whether it be my body, or my clothes, or my interests, was a target of daily ridicule. The majority of teachers were entirely self serving and didn't give a damn, even when I was being victimized out in the open. Oh yeah, and my property was repeatedly stolen and my belongings destroyed in front of me.
Having gone through all that, there is no way I'm ever putting my future children in such a system.
The way I think about the socialization argument against home schooling is this: Is it better to be highly socialized but traumatized or modestly socialized by not traumatized?
I think it's more valuable for children to be socialized with a smaller number of other children while being in a safe environment. Tossing children into an ocean of other children that is poorly controlled with callous teachers, creating an unsafe environment, has a rapidly diminishing returns on socialization and a greater chance of being counterproductive.
The principal always told me "just walk away" and I said, "You fool, the bullies have legs".
The key thing that enables bullying is your being confined in a space with them. Bullying can leave scars that last a lifetime that will affect your employment, your relationships, your children, everything. Not least hearing complete crap from authorities primes you to distrust authorities unconditionally.
I can see why an adult who's never dealt with these difficulties in childhood would give that sort of advice, but it's bewildering how school administrators weren't (and probably still aren't) trained on the reality that "just walk away" is a platitude in the context of an environment where bullies have a captive audience.
It reminds me of how we were told "stick and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me", which is easy to say as an adult with autonomy and other sources of fulfillment; in reality, words not only hurt, but have lasting social consequences. If some turd of a kid has the charisma to humiliate you in front of everyone, even when only verbally, that can lead to a permanently damaged sense of self and lack of respect from peers.
Some people have a positive charisma that comes out of treating people well. I'd expect this from the captain of a sports team.
I knew someone who had a negative charisma, who was criminally minded. He was popular among drug users at my school because he would take more chances and thus have the best supply. He got caught on tape selling 3 kilo of cocaine to a cop after I'd graduate. He had a talent to motivate other people into criminal activity and became the leader of a gay bashing gang that seemed to mainly target straight allies because this was the 1980s and folks like that were probably scared about getting AIDS.
I don't picture the elementary school bully as being particularly popular, but he certainly gets deference from the other students. I think of the popular kids in school as being genuinely likeable even if they didn't take a stand against bullies.
I’m not sure if I agree with this essay, but have you heard about the theory that Ender’s Game is pornography? ( There’s lots of other theories about the book, but this is my favorite )
https://archive.is/JtbIY
Having the emotional maturity to deal with things you don’t like happening has a major influence on how tough being bullied feels like. It’s rarely much time or physical pain, but some kids obsess over it even if they aren’t the major target they often feel extremely persecuted.
Adults can watch something happening and think nothing particularly significant is going on while some kids are experiencing extreme internal distress.
The typical case of physical bullying is not just "things happening that you don't like"; it's wanton, unprovoked assault and battery. Even lesser forms of bullying generally involve some kind of unambiguous threatening, menacing or intimidation. The "emotionally mature" way of dealing with such things in any sane society is not to just walk away, but rather to acknowledge that such actions are inherently an outrage to their fellow students' basic human dignity, and demand that those responsible face meaningful consequences. The fact that "it's rarely much physical pain" (and that merely because kids are involved as opposed to adults) is completely irrelevant.
That may be your memory, but in the typical day it’s intimidation and emotional abuse. Especially in terms of girls who make up half the population, they rarely get punched in the face but arguably have larger issues to deal with.
I’m not accusing you of misrepresenting the situation, just trying to convey what’s objectively going on can feel very different from what people’s lived experience is. Someone with older siblings can barely register being bullied in some situations that really are traumatic to others.
In elementary school I had a girl in class who the other girls made fun of. There was nothing physical. Boys kind of made fun of her as well, but what really stuck to her was the other girls. She did therapy, but even her therapist told her that she is a hopeless case. Which is obviously extremely unprofessional and terrible. She ended up taking her life in her 20s. It was just mental bullying by peers. It is very sad to think back at the time. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her to deserve this bullying, and peers did it as some sort of self esteem popularity type of thing.
I do remember school being this survival of the fittest type of thing as well. Some were naturally good at it, others not so much, different people handled it differently.
Certainly it was the most common for me (also California public school). That does not mean I would not bring up the physical violence as the first item in the list! It's the one least open to interpretation.
>The "emotionally mature" way of dealing with such things in any sane society
If my children lived in a war zone and were suffering constant (high risk) of being killed or mutilated, the mature way of dealing with that wouldn't be to teach them to take cover, or survival skills, or medical triage and first aid... it'd be to just leave and never go back. Get one million miles away from it. Normalizing it, saying "what are you gonna do, we live in a war zone" is strange. But it's just as bizarre to say "you should become an anti-war activist and demand that the diplomats make a lasting peace".
No, just get the fuck out as quickly as is humanly possible, and never look back. Later, when you're someplace safe, maybe you do therapy for the PTSD (I have my doubts that it works), but the first and most important step is to put distance between yourself (or your children) and the threat, enough distance that makes it impossible for the threat to follow.
> Adults can watch something happening and think nothing particularly significant is going on while some kids are experiencing extreme internal distress.
I think because that is also often because they regard it as normal for kids. A lot of people say things like "bullying toughens them up".
They would not think its OK for the same things to be done to adults. I wonder what the toughens them up lot would think if I showed up at their house with a few friends and gave them a light beating - I think calling the police would be a more likely outcome than thanking me for teaching them to be tough!
I got picked on all the time as a kid in school. I did not like it, but it did develop several traits that I learned to appreciate later in life. First and foremost, I am not the slightest bit bothered by anyone mocking me anymore. I don’t get easily embarrassed at all.
At the same time, I also learned to fit in a lot better. Getting picked on for things I said or did create some social conditioning about what was and wasn’t acceptable.
This type of bullying was helpful in hindsight.
Physical bullying is different ballgame and I don’t understand anyone that thinks it’s acceptable.
Cyberbullying is on a whole other level of publicly humiliating a developing child in front of everybody they know, often by anonymous people who will take steps to make sure it never goes away if they want to.
The latter 2 are totally unacceptable and dangerous.
The first getting lumped in with bullying creates bullying apologists I think, because there can be beneficial side effects of helping kids learn social norms.
I think the root of this problem is the principal-agent problem.
It literally doesn't matter to teachers (a) if you get bulled at school (they are not being bullied themselves) or (b) if you have problems later in life.
Maybe a bullied kid will completely lose it as an adult and murder a bunch of people. But does the teacher who completely failed to help them get arrested? No, therefore it just doesn't matter to them at all.
The only thing that would prevent this is teachers actually caring or being kind. And of course there are some that do and are. But relying on that isn't enough. There need to be right incentives set in order enable the majority of teachers to put in the effort to act in the right way.
(I don't know what that incentive structure looks like I'll admit.)
My recollections of being bullied is several decades old by this point, and it's probably something that varies from school to school, but I am convinced that bullies won't stop until they are forced to stop. The means may be verbal or physical, but a bully will keep going until there is actual consequences for their actions.
I am fortunate enough that I was too young to get sentenced when I snapped, and that I somehow managed to not get badly hurt in that fight. On the other hand, sending those twats to the scool nurse's office and just laughing at their bruises the day after... Worth it! I still smile when I see my own nose in the mirror.
Mind you, teachers are often powerless in many such situations. They can and should follow whatever procedures they have, but the main problems are the toothless anti-bullying policies and those are usually set though some vague government policy rather than schools themselves.
We pay for a private school, it's expensive yes and I know not accessible for all, but it's kind of the best of both worlds. You get to choose the school and it's a community vibe. It helps when the other kids, potential bullies, know your kid and know their parents talk to your parents. It also helps as the staff is acutely tuned in to things like this, and they have amazing ways of conflict resolutions. It's not difficult, it just requires some attention and thought. They reinforce golden rule type actions/behaviors/leading by example/etc. As an example, if one kid picks on another one, instead of detention - they will both be given a 'private talk' and then paired up on some activity. The result is, they were constructively scolded then had a chance to bond and become friends - and it works. It's never going to be fully eradicated, but it's amazing just how little there is and how supportive everyone is in trying to develop good humans.
They also assess the kids emotional maturity early on. Those that they feel are not ready to go from Kinder to 1st get a 'Primer' year. It's basically holding them back in Kinder but with a positive twist.
Tons of other benefits as the parents hold a lot of power (since we pay). But also, the quality of staff/teachers, and low ratios are quite a perk compared to our area's public schools which are poorly rated.
I went to public school myself, and while I was never bullied, I do think I was a target of bullies at some time. Any time I felt like someone was bullying me, I fought back and would often be disciplined under zero tolerance rules. That's how my parents taught me to deal with it, 'stand up for yourself boy' kind of thing. We've taught our kid not to hit and to be kind and he is, but that's exactly what I think would make him a huge target in a public school environment.
This is why introducing a degree of school choice is becoming a popular policy among parents in both parties, but I think bringing back rapid expulsion to disciplinary boys/girls schools would be even more impactful. Unfortunately, recent social justice activism has stymied that possibility in progressive areas. Either restore unfettered power of self-curation to the environment and ensure it is wielded effectively, or parents will demand more flexibility in choosing from non-monopoly options.
I'm sorry - you're following all the comments about public schools being like a prison and you're suggesting people get expelled faster or disciplined more to improve schools?
my kid goes to private school. expelled students by grade:
1st: 2
2nd: 4
3rd: 4
4th: 3
5th: 5
6th: 3 (so far)
why am I saying this? we pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for having access to this kind of environment. if there is a kid who is fucking up everyone else, the “everyone else” should not have to suffer through it. I would pay double what I pay now for this priviledge for my kid. so yes, 100%, more expelling and more discipline is needed
Isn’t that an absurd indictment of your school? If my (converted) $30k/year school had to expel even a single student every year that would be a massive failure in my eyes.
The crazy thing is, the American populace is already paying ~15k per student for public education. Why are they not expelling kids who are fucking up that environment?
well they will when they realize that MANY children should be left behind… (move to special ed schools
or some vocational schools if they are high school age)
I'm of the opinion that parents are largely to blame for all this stuff. School is viewed as daycare and education not really prioritized by a large part of our population. Teacher's get all the blame and that's not right at all.
I'm for things that entails negative consequences for the parents prior to the kid being pigeon holed as a deplorable or unfitting for academic environments. Sending them home is one way to make the parents suffer. But before that, let's group them together and then find ways to level them up as a cohort. Everyone suffers when the class has a huge standard deviation of skills/knowledge/enthusiasm/engagement/support/etc.
I could not agree more with everything you said - it is really on parents largely. if my kid was one causing trouble in school I would 100% consider this my failure. and your idea about sending them home is for sure good in my book - of course this may create additional shitstorm on the kids if the parents are shitty but it is definitely one way I think makes sense to start with.
let's group them together and then find ways to level them up as a cohort I also agree with this but am thinking there has to be time limits etc... everyone should be given a 2nd chance and for kids I think everyone should be given 10th chance :) but both parents and kids have to understand that there are consequences and there are time limits to patience for behaviour correction.
Prisons would be a lot safer if the dangerous inmates got kicked out of prison and left behind the ones who didn't attack other inmates.
If you want to improve schools quickly, expelling problem kids is the easiest way to do it. But that would cause consequences to the expelled kids, as well as society.
Most problem kids can be rehabilitated with some investment of time in a positive, welcoming environment though. Not so much if you stick them in prison school. They’ll just live up to your expectations in that case.
I've been following the topic for a while as a minority and I worry about this as well as cops in our schools continuously raising the specter of violence and school shootings raising the real concern of violence.
It doesn't feel like expelling students has reduced violence or improved the quality of the day to day when I see the tracking of these issues.
yeah, in what world would that not help? they're not getting kicked out of the school system, just the school. lowest-common-denominator idealism like you are espousing here is one of the primary reasons why schools have gotten so terrible.
Obviously there is a bigger picture in all of this. I don't know what the correct balance is, but assume that all problem kids (for some strict definition of problem) were expelled and placed in a "problem school". I highly doubt that is going to improve that child's life or attitude, but obviously it will help those at the previous school. So we end up with a large number of kids who will almost certainly grow up to be "problem adults", in many cases criminals. Suddenly the problem you solved for the first school is now the problem of society at large.
In a perfect world, most of those problem children would be mentored correctly in regular schools and given a path to a better adult life, and therefore not create a future "problem adult".
In practice, it doesn't seem to work like that, and I agree, "problem children" do cause frictions and disruptions and worse for other children at regular schools.
I find it appalling that parent who can afford a private school, even with much sacrifice, would instead send their children to a a public school.
It is the equivalent of eating soup at a homeless shelter when you can go to the store and buy something better, made worse by the fact that you are making the decision for someone else that cannot decide on their own.
There is an assumption that private is better always and that’s not true. Top 10-20% of private is better but it’s expensive and not available to most. There is a lot of poor and low quality private too.
I attended a private school for a couple of years, and I have to say it was worse than the public ones.
Now obviously this is going to be neighbourhood, country, and community specific, but the problem I had with observing private schools was that now the school had an additional incentive not to expel students, rich and influential parents had extra influence over whether their child could be disciplined and how the school should do things, and half of the time the problematic behaved people were... the rich people and their children. Having and paying money isn't exactly a free ticket to well-adjusted children especially if the children are mimicking the culture they see at home and the society awards bullying and various behaviours with more money... Which most of ours do.
And this was on top of the downsides of private schools: being image obsessed over academics and intellectual investigation, surrounded by non egalitarian private school twats, and bunches of arbitrary private school rules. Now obviously this is not all private schools, but in the same way it's not all public schools either.
I think in this system it's a roll of the die. In my country, neighbourhood and in my life, my kid is currently going to public school and, touch wood... thriving for now. The other private schools around here have too much woo like Waldorf and Steiner and they steer away from evidence based methods in literacy and numeracy.
But I don't know if that's going to hold off into the older ages, and I can't promise, much to my wife's chagrin, not to consider homeschooling considering my own experience of high school also approaching that of a dysfunctional prison and a poor educational environment.
PS: there was plenty of interpersonal violence at the private schools when I grew up.
You couldn’t really own anything and had to prepare for anything nice to be stolen, or anything they looked dear to you (even if not nice) to be destroyed.
I heard of kids having their shoes stolen, but I never had that.
I’m sorry that happened to you, I hope you are doing better now. :(
This is a major reason (but far from the only reason) that we homeschool. Knowing what I know about the school system, about my own experience thereof, and about my kids' personalities, it would be grossly immoral for me to put them through it. The risk of long-term trauma would be too high.
There is some risk of their being isolated (but very low, since they are with other kids three days a week), and a slightly higher risk of missing chunks of learning (which we aim to mitigate in the obvious ways). But ultimately I'd rather my kids have a few gaps in their knowledge than be traumatized by the school system.
> I'd rather my kids have a few gaps in their knowledge than be traumatized by the school system
I went through a normal school system (the first 8 years still during the communist regime in my country, so take that "normal" with a grain of salt), and the gaps in my knowledge are enormous, in some cases subject-wide. I know literally nothing about chemistry, except the bits you learn here and there from TV shows and such. I vaguely remember some kind of equations, but nothing stuck. Biology - everything I know I know from somewhere else, mostly from that TV show with talking blood cells [1].
Surprisingly, I had pretty good grades, but it had nothing to do with knowledge - I was able to quickly scan the textbook before an exam and somehow it was sufficient, but there was no retention, I forgot everything after the exam. I was forced to learn Russian for 4 years and I remember literally nothing, not even the alphabet.
Those are mostly just anecdotes - I am sure that modern schooling can do better than rote memorization in a toxic environment. What I want to say is that motivation, a friendly environment, and fun learning are a lot more important than how well the teacher knows, say, chemistry. It is entirely possible that your kids will retain more knowledge, not less.
I am only talking about elementary school, college was different - I loved it and learned a lot.
Agree, there are plenty of kids who go to government schools and have enormous gaps in their knowledge, in the west as well.
I'm saying that, all things being equal, I'd rather my kids be homeschooled with a few gaps, than go to a government school (and be traumatized) and have no gaps.
I grew up in Russia and I have a very similar experience emotionally, hating every second of my school life, but somehow I couldn't remember any particular horrors. It was just all so ridiculously sad and hopeless and boring, I couldn't stand listening unpassioned teachers talking about sili memorisation tasks the whole day and didn't feel like I fit socially either (even though I wasn't bullied) so it all felt like a torture.
School was and remains a prison, that is why they build the gates so high.
Worse, its a prison with cult-like re-education towards elements of Marxism, without calling it that, in many cases. Its a spectrum so not all teachers are like that, but there are enough that it can be seen widely.
Most of this comes from teacher's followed recommendations made during conferences held by the National Teachers union, which has used many Marxism-based pedagogy while obscuring it.
These things are subtle to anyone who doesn't have some exposure to real life torture constructs, and how those constructs work (mechanism and means).
Schools are also failing to educate and provide people with the skills they need to succeed, the sole purpose for the school's centralized state-run existence.
The teachers exhibit qualities that any centralized system without a loss function has. They have no duty to investigate issues of performance with co-workers since absent an effective loss function (cutoff where you get fired), social standing and seniority become more important. In these types of collectivist systems, regardless of role, creating a hostile work environment hurts the group, and investigating issues creates a hostile work environment. They are all co-workers after all.
Social mental coercion also occurs towards the excellent teachers, since they make all the average teachers look bad. Those teachers then haze, backstab, and undermine in any way they can sabotaging and interfering while imposing social personal cost until the excellent leave, the ones that remain are the average, continually gravitating towards the least common denominator. In state-run institutions with free money, this becomes negative production value.
Sending and subjecting your children to brainwashing and torture is the greatest betrayal.
An example of one these subtle but effective techniques follows, its called the hot potato. It is one of many techniques.
A student is called out in front of the class and asked to answer a question, the question will be opinion based, and the teacher will reflect disapproval if answered incorrectly (in their opinion). These will be mixed in with fact questions to muddy the water so its unclear this is what they are doing.
This technique in pedagogy isolates the student called, making them anxious in front of their peers, often times because answering incorrectly has delayed be inevitable personal cost. At this age, they often don't have the biology to self-reflect or introspect to recognize the basis for why this is happening. They just feel anxious, and rightfully so.
The level of disapproval shown by the teacher results in driving two parallel processes. One that results in inducing bullying from the approval seeking students in that peer group, without the teacher needing to directly or explicitly take action. This bullying, or coercive shunning, is an ever present threat to the subject. The bullies having participated have (their own) consistency drive their efforts, with negative consequence. These are circular processes where both participants become the victim and perpetrator through induced behavior (as a result of structure).
Answering according to the torturer's opinion, forces inherent challenges of fighting your own psychology. It enables the consistency principle in psychology to warp the subjects mind over time (our identity largely remains consistent, which is based in this underlying cognitive bias we all have). What we write, and the words we use, even if we consciously don't agree with them will warp us towards agreement given sufficient repeated exposure and time.
You see this with used car salesmen when they ask innocuous, but carefully constructed questions seeking agreement, and once you answer (in any way but a specific way), they know they've got a sale excepting external factors.
The main principles of influence can be applied beneficially, or coercively. Robert Cialdini goes into these principles, and how they work.
Robert Lifton, and Joost Meerloo cover the reality of torture, how it actually works in their books written in the 1950s (with details from actual torture done by Mao, and the Nazi's).
The reality is, in the 1950s the limits of perception were found, and processes and techniques discovered that let you break and twist people. It started with torture, then a big issue with Cults, then it was used in AdTech and business process design to impose personal cost on the customer. It wasn't just used there, it spread widely, and its hard to find areas that have not in part been shaped by this to an individuals detriment.
The research was also not shared widely in whole either, its been repackaged to obscure the origins, such as conferences on pedagogy done by the Teacher's Union, or Game Design (within the Octalysis Frameworks), too many other places to count. The elements are there for those that know what to look for.
In general, all you really need to get this started are three elements for torture. Isolation, removal/lack of agency (unable to leave without causing loss, disadvantage or detriment), and cognitive dissonance; often where what is said isn't true, and loops back forcing the subject to engage in a endless loop of torture.
It caustically will break anyone down, and Social Media ensures Children can't limit exposure because of addiction triggers, and the lack of biology during Children's existing development to control addiction. The phone follows them everywhere they go, as it does for most of us. These things do break down everyone eventually, and quite a lot of the indoctrinated masses lack the ability to discern or recognize it is happening. Once broken and blinded you tend to stay blinded and broken excepting certain rare individuals.
Ironically, when people break down past a point they segment into the unresponsive dissasociate, or the psychotic seeking self annihilation. Two cohorts. The latter is often a semi-lucid state capable of planning. It seems to mirror objective characteristics seen in Active Shooters.
Rational thought under such psychological stress described breaks down fairly quickly.
You send your kids to school to receive the same tools that were provided to the parents in living a beneficial productive life. Many important tools are no longer taught, and in their place frameworks promoting inducement in false belief, practice, and ideology (towards nihilism) while blinding them to rational thought, have grown. You see this in the Woke cult, and many maoist/marxist inspired movements under adopted group names that change regularly to obscure and mislead.
These two things are why smart and intelligent parents are homeschooling. You don't send your children to Maoist re-education camps and expect them to be able to survive afterwards. The process destroys the individual psyche.
Even the intelligent may not know the process of what's happening, but they often more keenly discern and sense something being wrong and remove their kids from such environments, so long as they were paying attention and fulfilling their parental obligations (many today have or do not, unfortunately).
What you say about the reality and mechanisms of torture may be true. But your insistence on assigning this behavior to some political side is, frankly, frightening.
It won't change the amount of political violence that's ahead of us, but I would recommend that you, at a personal level, question those associations.
No political side, no country, or race has the monopoly of evil, and if you believe otherwise you have some serious work to do.
> But your insistence on assigning this behavior to some political side is, frankly, frightening.
You mistake this being political, and I did not assign these behaviors. These groups have done these acts. Its replete in the histories.
The acts have been littered throughout the historical record repeatedly and regularly starting with Marx and Engels taking from the Jesuits many of the practices that got the Jesuits expelled, and moving forward in time, the actions done by a majority of these people calling themselves such by various names, reflect what you call 'assigned'. They don't self-police and ignore destructive acts, if anything, these people's own actions assigned these to their movement.
I make a point of saying this too, because they change their group names to suit their groups purposes and to obscure their origins; misleadingly in a deceitful way, regularly. They do not want to be tied down by the same repeated failures that are associated with past groups. When you do the same exact things, and expect different results, this is a definition of insanity.
Marxists to Fabians to Bolsheviks, to Maoist, Communist, to Social Democracy, to Social Justice, to Wokeism, and I'm skipping quite a bit here.
There's been roughly a new name every 5-10 years going back to the 1920s, for the same Marxist-based doctrine that fails core components needed for rational objectivity. Failing such it shows the delusion, and fanaticism of those supporting it.
I would have nothing against these belief systems if they were consistent and rational, and in fact there would be no issues if that was met.
All they would have to do is conform to the basic principles inherent in rationalism, that is objective definition, unique meaning in language (no ambiguity of definition), Descartes Rules of Method, and logic. No improper use of the abuse of the contrast principle (hegel).
In other words, falsehoods get discarded.
They do not do this, and that is the core problem. They seek to unify through deceit and omission, that some of them, themselves, believe quite fallaciously, and by using language with multiple contradictory meanings, so no proper context can be made (newspeak). They use coercive methods to induct, following Cult structure as well. Seeming good at a cursory level, while sewing the seeds for evil through delusion, hallucination, and fallacy. These people also almost never happy.
Many leftist movements over the past hundred or so years seek to blur the line between politics, ideology, and economics, and state. This provides them cover to make unprovable false claims and create a power platform. You have part of the group which decries the abuses, while you have the other part pretending to be another group while inducing the same such abuses. Its about control of the resources, not ownership.
Its also beneficial to them to falsely call it political since politics is protected in open societies as is ideology, but this isn't religion, nor should any so called religion/ideology based in delusion or fallacy be protected or supported.
The important difference between real politics and this is in discerning rationally whether that type of ideology is a death cult, whose actions will result in unchecked destruction.
Mises wrote thoroughly about the 6 or so intractable problems of economics under such systems (by structure) because even back then they changed their names regularly (in the 1930s-1950s).
These movements we are talking about seek to make irrational dogma seeking power and control, they make broad nice sounding claims, while setting the stage for indirect but destructive outcomes. This has been demonstrated multiple times in their own policy and publications.
The Russian famine in 1921 for example, or the famines caused by Mao's Cultural Revolution, Maoist Re-education Camps (for the children), the massacres of Hue, Tienanmen Square, political dissident prisoners in Hong Kong, the ongoing acts of terrorism sponsored by the Stasi/KGB, the list goes on for miles.
They of course falsely claim its to make a better future, to get people to cede power to them, but the dynamics and the reality do not match up, and most don't resolve indirectly reference things that show it to be an unobtainable pipe dream, where the real outcome is destruction.
Eventually reality re-asserts when survival is on the line, and failing survival large numbers perish. Production may be continued through slavery, but overall eventually it shows itself to be a death cult.
If you've read any of the material published by the prominent people in these movements, you would see them talking about this, albeit in doublespeak to make it not sound as bad. They never question the viability of their premises.
Now that is frightening.
When you have a movement who abandons rational principles seeking a false utopia while in action only going for short term personal gain, this is destructive. People eventually die when this is unchecked.
Obviously, evil acts are any act that does not result in long term beneficial growth of self or others, and evil people are willfully blind to the consequence of their evil acts.
I'm well aware that there is no monopoly, I never claimed otherwise, but there are clusters or disease vectors where evil seeks to subvert from within until it can show its true face through action.
A group predominantly containing such is important to call out.
The Nazi's were evil, but they started off as the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
The Fabian's had similar origins, resulting in the economic collapse of the UK. They shared tactics, method, and history.
Bolsheviks had similar origins. Maoists had similar origins.
While they all claim to be new and independent groups, their structures show they've adopted core aspects of false or destructive ideology originally derived from Marxism in whole or part.
Political movements with core practices based in false ideology and method, resolving to destruction, are not valid political movements and do not deserve protection.
Sorry, I have to confess that I have just browsed through your text. I'm sure you mean well but I believe you are litteraly paranoid when you try to explain human modern history by the evil ideas of a handfull of people. Can't you see the irony, in 2025 US, to single out "the left" as being distinguishly anti-truth and anti-scientific? That is sick.
The human brain is wonderful at seeing patterns but sometimes it sees them when there are none.
(assuming you are a real human as opposed to an AI with a funny prompt)
how is public school teaching kids to take collective ownership of the private means of production? must have slept through those classes. My public schools in Oregon had a lot of anti-communism elements and I got a brief suspension for writing a research paper analyzing and defending the Black Panthers in high school -- cited reason was "defending/promoting terrorists" or something along those lines
They promote 'critical consciousness', which is a framework of looking at things in isolation without resolving indirections, and examining existing relationships by their power dynamics which are treated as static, not dynamic. These are based in fallacy, but more recently described in the critical turn in education, and was somewhat inspired by Paulo Freire's work.
The framework of reasoning being taught, is anything but, and follows circular paths that travel down a spiral of madness, and subjectivity without proper definition; in classic hegelian structure to abuse the contrast principle.
This is seen most recently in people who have contracted the mind virus, Woke-ism. When you adopt this 'critical consciousness', as they call it you blind yourself to the reality of things, and its a self-inflicted violation of your self. The things they do and say often are borderline delusional or insanely irrational, and not based in reality.
Marxist derivatives has not been about seizing collective ownership for quite some time, its been about interference, demoralization, and destabilization. They seized production by seizing the money, and are doing so through debasement as Lenin said in Keynes quote.
The currency allows control of the means of production as the root of all trade (exchange), and this has been seized already back in the 70s, by central planning bankers, and the ECP driven by money printing will be taking hold in a few short years once third stage ponzi is publicly visible. In other words, debt growth > GDP.
This sieving action of resources into fewer and fewer hands through debt is already driving legitimate producing businesses out of business (bankruptcy), or towards mergers, where they close shop which are funded by a money printer. The money printer swallows everything.
All debt issues with 0% fractional reserve is private money printing. This occurred in 2020 silently at the start of the pandemic. They replaced fractional reserve with an opaque capital reserve system (Basel III), which itself is based on fiat valuations that the banks loaning the money/printing the money decide. Carl Menger thoroughly proved how value is subjective. These structures neglect the simple fact that there are dynamics at work that determine value, so the associated banks will be fine until they suddenly aren't, without notice, or predictability (chaos).
Once concentrated, then everything can be seized and nationalized silently with cutout companies backed by the money printer, but in the process production grinds to a halt, shortage ensures, and stops and all value is lost since the store of value as a property of currency fails.
Order wanes, famine, slavery, and death, as occurs in every non-market socialist state to date; only this time it will be a global event and not an isolated nation event. That is the problem with parasites. Sometimes they kill the host, and by extension kill themselves.
> Research paper analyzing and defending the Black Panthers in high school.
Well I guess it would depend on what you wrote. The simple fact of the matter is, the dynamics of a successful protest or movement depend on largely two things.
The responsiveness of policymakers to listen and correct issues, and the inherent threat of violence or imposed cost.
If policy-makers fail to do their job by being unresponsive when their job is serving their constituency, violence holds them to account when the abuse is egregious enough. This once happened back in 1776, with colonists who were not considered british citizens or entitled to such protections without representation.
The politician's know this in theory too because they had to read the books covering these topics. Many of which are central to constitutional law, or social contract theory (Leviathan, Locke, Kant, Rosseau).
Absent the first, no non-violent movement can succeed in making change. You need appropriate political and judicial structures that are responsive to conflicts so they can be resolved non-violently. If they are not responsive (regardless of reason), the sole purpose of law fails, that purpose is non-violent conflict resolution equally under the law.
This used to be the courts, but they too have degraded to the point where if you don't have the money upfront to hire a lawyer, you don't have a seat at the table. A single civil suit today, even a slam dunk one, costs about a 50k retainer, from the lawyers I've spoken with. That's about the average median annual income for most people unspent (on things like food, necessities etc).
A rule of law requires certain elements, if you examine the law today and the associated costs, its largely only available to the select few with money. The 5 or so components have failed enough times to claim several decade long trends.
There is a psychological consistency pitfall in writing about things you don't care about because words alter your perception even if you don't believe it in the moment, the more often you write something the more it impacts you. They did this in the Korean Conflict to PoWs. It generally started with a choice; hard labor, or write an essay with the following prompt, "Why is the US not the best country in the world", to "Why does communism work better than capitalism", and then its read over a loudspeaker and celebrated among the captors, and prisoners.
Its subtle bias, but effective, proven, and documented.
If people can't organize and react to the reality of things being done to them, they implicitly are agreeing to their own destructive end, for themselves and anyone else they happen to manage to carry along with them.
Absolutely not reading this entire diatribe, but you should post some high quality sources to back up your extraordinary claims about Maoist torturer-teachers or whatever.
If you don't read what you comment on, then you miss out on the things you then ask about. It makes anyone look stupid.
The sources on how torture works, were referenced. The authors are well established in their fields, its old material that has not been refuted in any way and is backed by first-hand accounts in the case studies (1950s).
The structural elements they cover are well discussed. These elements are also present in material pushed at the recommendation by the national Teachers Union in the past (at several points). This included, iirc, the Roots movie controversy and this revisionist fictional film being portrayed as historical to push a false narrative.
Teachers aren't generally malign, but bureacracies can be (NEA almost without a doubt imo). The teachers simply did what they were trained to do without knowing what they were trained to do. A potential example of the banality of evil with regards to complacency and sloth.
You may not like it, and not want to see it, and not want to believe it.
Nonetheless, it is clearly happening.
James Lindsay has published quite a lot of rationally backed literature on Woke-ism, and its relation to Marxism/Maoism, and how its a cult. He has several publications, and a youtube channel if you are so inclined.
Regardless of what you happen to call a thing, you can describe a thing based on its elemental component or characteristics. Rationally this process is called characterization, and when you find the same elements, and the same outcomes, that suggests a thing that goes by another name (deceitfully to obscure), is the same thing functionally.
When you see the same structures used in Maoist prison camps in the 50s being used in education, the question shouldn't be is this happening because the characteristics match. It should be who chose to do this and why, and is it more important to protect them over your own children. These all have pretty simple straightforward answers.
I went to a state school in the North of England with a GCSE pass rate between 30-40% and this is a fair description of what it was like. At the time the performance of all schools was based on the percentage of students achieving at least a C including Maths and English, and as Goodhart’s law suggests this inevitably meant the school’s resources were optimised for getting students around the C grade borderline to pass while all other students didn’t get an education suited to their ability. The Gove reforms included changing how schools are assessed to a value-added measure, that I believe is commonly used in the United States, which has created the incentive for schools to focus on all students rather than just those near an arbitrary passing grade. The deeper underlying issue that’s harder to solve is the anti-aspirational culture that pervades through a lot of schools in deprived areas, in my experience most students didn’t really get the value a good education could bring to their lives and like the original comment treated it like internment rather than a route out of poverty.
I went to a school that had a lot of good teachers, and I learned a lot from them.
But when it came to bullies, the school was just as you described. Worse, the punishment for being in a fight was the same whether you started it or you were just beaten up. If you made the fight get noticed, you got punished. It was quite clear that they had no interest in stopping the fights, just in making sure they didn't get reported.
And on the bus, the driver didn't like my family because she once turned the bus around on our grass, tearing up a bunch of it, and my father was angry about that. In retaliation, she let bullies beat me up on the bus for years and turned a blind eye.
My education would probably have suffered if I was home schooled because both my parents were forced to work to make enough money to survive. And I'd be even more introverted than I am now.
Not being supported by the adults who pretend to be trustworthy is nearly as damaging as the bullying itself. Like you, I would be punished alongside the perpetrator even if I didn't throw a single punch or insult. This is extremely toxic because it completely breaks trust and causes children to lose faith in the system they're in, and they shut down. I know I did. I stopped telling anyone my problems because experience told me saying anything only lead to more shame.
The only true advice I could give to a child with bullying issues is physical violence - as fast as possible. It is sad. It doesn't take many humans to make school/life/work miserable.
> Worse, the punishment for being in a fight was the same whether you started it or you were just beaten up. If you made the fight get noticed, you got punished.
I'm not saying that this is anything close to optimal, but it should be noted that under this system (which is reminiscent of the way ancient Chinese criminal law worked, per Legal Systems Very Different from Ours[0]) people who get beat up should still report and take the punishment. Sure, you'll get punished for it once but you'll also build a solid reputation for not letting things slide, so it's highly unlikely that anyone will want to beat you up again.
[0] Except that the punishment back then for being involved in a crime (generally a theft or a swindle of some sort) was, guess what-- you got beat up.
> […] so it's highly unlikely that anyone will want to beat you up again.
That is, unfortunately, not how this works. The only ways to stop bullying are to be able to stand up to the bullies, which usually is not a realistic proposition (you wouldn't get bullied in the first place if you could) and can lead to further escalation (right on up to shootings or stabbings); to have a very, very empathic teacher who will put their foot down; or to have solid anti-bullying programs which use effective, proven methods to stamp out bullying.
Mind that nothing will deter a really determined bully, and getting punished because your victim spoke up instead of accepting the bully's power will escalate things from 'bullying just because you are available' to 'bullying because I now want you, and specifically, you, as miserable as you can be, all the time'.
From my experience with school bullying it was an entirely social problem. If the rest of the classroom agreed that you shouldn't be bullied then there were few ways for a handful of kids to go against that consensus, and most of them would backfire on the would-be bully.
Of course, if you're young and you have no friends, good luck getting your peers to think you're worth defending.
The one time I got attacked, one of the top three popular guys in the class went berserk on my attacker. This happened in grade school and the next aborted attempt at bullying wasn't until the end of middle school by someone who had transferred in later on.
Let's call this what this is, it is "below terrible" instead of "anything close to optimal". It's an interesting tidbit from a game theory perspective, but telling your child who is getting beaten up to not worry and play the long game is 1) horrible, 2) only works if everyone else in the game is rational. I don't remember bullies getting into trouble and stopping.
> you'll also build a solid reputation for not letting things slide
This is a terrible idea that was obviously flown as a butt-covering excuse by administrators who, like the school administrators, have discovered that it is much easier to fight reporting of crime than it is to fight crime.
I am deeply disappointed to see it treated as some sort of deep truth, when in fact it is a shallow lie that anyone with the slightest understanding of bureaucracy ought to have seen through in no time at all.
Wish I could say the same. I often wonder how things would turn out if I didn't have the insecurities/other mental handicaps stemming from that period. And fantasize about rewinding time with the current brain and leaving a trail of broken bones in my wake :-D
I went to grammar school (UK) in the 1990s, and also absolutely loathed it. I think it set me up horribly for life and (especially) for my career. People use the phrase "PTSD" too lightly, but I think it gave me something like it that I often feel in an office full of people, and especially during in-person meetings. Years of CBT and ERP have helped a lot, and now I'm middle-aged I think I've put the worst of it behind me. I remember that horrible feeling that both the bigger kids and the teachers were against you, and the sense of utter helplessness and despair.
A few times my parents hired tutors for subjects I was struggling in, and I remember that suddenly I found myself enjoying them. I think I would have benefited greatly from being homeschooled, but of course at that time it was unheard of in the UK. I know it's not for everyone. There's no perfect answer. What's certain is that there's nothing 'normal' about sitting in a room with 30 people who are exactly the same age as you, plus one official authority figure.
So school certainly 'socialized' me, but not in a good way.
It wasn't entirely bad. I got a reasonably good education, and some of the teachers have left a positive impression. Overall though it was horrible.
PTSD is misapplied quite a bit these days, though CPTSD (the C stands for complex) seems to be the most appropriate clinical definition for the kind of scattered traumatic damage people experience, especially from childhood.
Glad to know you've received the help that you needed and have been able to move on. I compartmentalized and put off working on my traumas for far longer than I should have. People underestimate how much a dysfunctional school environment can mess someone up even when the home environment is mostly healthy. I screwed up great relationships in large part because I still had trust issues and CPTSD triggers that I didn't even realize at the time.
No joke, I'd rather have only known the neighborhood kids growing up than have thousands of kids to socialize with while having fucked up things happen to me. So what if I wouldn't experience prom night? If it's not the right environment for me, then it's not worth it.
Thanks. Yes, CPTSD would be more accurate -- the result of a state of near-constant low-level fear. I had, and continue to have, massive trust issues, particularly at work. I struggle to think everyone doesn't secretly hate me and that I'm not constantly on the verge of getting fired, even though I can see it's not logical. Steadily getting better now thanks to CBT and similar techniques.
But I have lost many friends and career opportunities as a result of my time at school. I had a basically healthy and happy home environment, but as you say, school can still screw you up badly.
Also Grammar school (in the 1980s), I got lucky as I got in the 'express track' and did O-levels after 4 years not 5 so I went to uni at 17. Probably a good thing as some kids were total sh*ts and 5 years of them would have been awful
Wow, it seems like the UK education system is a very severe environment. Remember Anthony Hopkins saying the same thing about it being brutal, having received abuse from both the teachers and the other students.
Yeah, just from my perspective having gone through the US public schools, the schools here seem to be a lot more open and friendly (following the American stereotype). But at the same time, we probably have a lot lower standards in terms of learning, and also the US has a lot of variation in school quality.
I grew up in the US, we're about the same age, and I went to a public school where I had a similar experience. More than anything else, I remember the crushing boredom and the feeling that time had slowed to a crawl. I wasn't beaten or abused, but I felt trapped in amber, and the school really was prison-like, just as you describe it. I've never hated anything so much in my life as I hated school.
So I escaped the prison. I dropped out at age 14 and went to work in a book warehouse at the age of 16. Everybody was screaming about how much I'd regret it, but to this day I consider it among the best decisions I've ever made.
Now I have young children of my own, and I'm not sure how I'm going to handle their education, but home schooling -- /w private professional tutoring and organized athletic activities -- looks like the best option. There's no way I'd subject them to public school.
I learned basically nothing in my k-12 public school but it was fun times.
Emotionally? It is really hard to top those times in high school.
It was the opposite of a prison for me. Like a garden of adolescent roses that had nothing to do with the real world other than the sweet smell of roses as an adolescent.
It is why I am glad to be child free. Anyone posting here is going to have a child that is better off than almost anyone who has ever lived.
I would suspect the best strategy in 2025 for anyone here is to not crush the creativity of the child. The only thing bad you can really do is to impose yourself too much on the child. The more hands off the better. The lighter the touch the better.
Yours skills are not what your child will need t+50 years.
It also says something about the quality of the "education" that you were able to (presumably) manage some sort of technical aspirations and career without the "required education".
> Everybody was screaming about how much I'd regret it, but ...
In a really healthy society, with really good schools, dropping out would (99%) be quite regrettable.
Some of those screaming people probably cared about you and your future. Most of them just resented you, for highlighting the actual state of their society and schools. And perhaps making them doubt their own choices.
> In a really healthy society, with really good schools, dropping out would (99%) be quite regrettable.
That depends.
Those who drop out because they can't hack it will find misplaced regret, blaming future woes on dropping out when in reality the problem is a continuation of the deficiencies that lead them to dropping out.
Those who drop out because they have bigger and better plans won't think about it again.
I think there are two assumptions embedded in the parent comment that I think you're ignoring:
1) The people who are on to bigger and better things are in fact vanishingly rare. Like, yes, Bill Gates dropped out of college, but he dropped out of Harvard, not Evergreen Community College. He wouldn't have been there in the first place if he wasn't already capable of some big things.
2) A really healthy society, with really good schools, would provide a path for those who can't hack it. Its almost definitionally not a good school if the process exposes some deficiencies, then just gives up. Like "well, it turns out your dyslexic, here's your cardboard box and begging pan" sounds like a bad school.
> The people who are on to bigger and better things are in fact vanishingly rare.
Dropouts are rare full stop, and those that do drop out overwhelmingly have life issues that causes them to drop out. The well rounded people who do okay in school aren't the ones dropping out, it is those with things like mental disabilities. It is not the act of dropping out that is impactful, it is the problems that lead to dropping out that continue after dropping out. It is a misconception that continuing in school would have cured what ailed them.
> A really healthy society, with really good schools, would provide a path for those who can't hack it.
You severely underestimate just how challenging life is for some people. If dyslexia was the biggest challenge to overcome, we'd have nothing to speak of. Some of these kids are, to be blunt, effectively vegetables. They are accepted into school for the sake of relieving the parents/primary caregivers, offering what is a babysitting service, but there is no academic value in them being there. They will not continue in school for prolonged periods of their life and there is no reason for them to.
I guess in your imagined "really healthy" society, all people are perfectly equal. That's impossible. But if we did somehow live in your made up world then we can say that we already have "really good schools". Nobody in our schools we have drops out without a good reason.
From a quick search, the State of Michigan has roughly an 8% dropout rate. Whatever your criteria for the term "rare", that is a huge number of kids.
If you are trying to run a really healthy society (vs. a Social Darwinism dystopia), then putting all the kids who don't do well in academic classroom settings on a "things like mental disabilities" - "effectively vegetables" spectrum seems extremely counterproductive.
> Whatever your criteria for the term "rare", that is a huge number of kids.
It is! When I go to the school to pick up my child, it is shocking how many have overtly visible challenges, never mind those who don't present to someone just casually walking in the door. It is rare, but rare is still a lot of people in large populations.
I live next door to Michigan and 3% of the students have their own personal assistant in school for the schools to be able to cope to their severe challenges, and, by accounts of family who work in that industry, that many more should have an assistant but there isn't a sufficient workforce to fill those roles. So that is around 6% of the students, give or take, right there who aren't really a good fit for being in schools. Used to be that they would have been dumped into institutions and never step foot in school, but that's not socially acceptable anymore.
Hey guys, I just wanted to butt in to clarify that I'm not mentally disabled or dyslexic. I'm basically neurotypical... well... more or less.
I dropped out simply because I found school insufferably boring and an almost complete waste of time. Some of my earliest memories are of myself thinking "oh man, it's still just Wednesday -- two more days to go until the weekend?!" (Fast forward to today, and I find myself looking forward to Monday!)
Just about everything else I found myself doing with my time -- including actual hard labor -- felt more rewarding and productive. (At least I was making money that I could use to buy 3dfx cards and RAM chips.) In truth, past phonics, don't think that I even learned anything in school; I was always ahead of the class just by reading books at home and at the library.
My parents shed many tears, but they came to terms with my dropping out, because I had exhibited depressive symptoms from about the age of 9 or 10, and those symptoms entirely vanished when I didn't have to go to school.
I'm sure that there are many others like me. Public school often tries to shove round pegs into square holes. There are better ways to learn, of that I'm certain.
And this is sort of the case that I was gesturing towards. A good school system is not one that just pounds on you to sit in class until you can regurgitate some fact. Its one that lets students figure out what they're good at before they have to be on their own.
Montessori, vocational programs, self-directed learning on and on and on.
Nobody should have to pick between "follow this specific concept of schooling" or "be institutionalized". That's not good schooling.
> Its one that lets students figure out what they're good at before they have to be on their own.
The best way to figure out what you are good at is to do it. That is not the role of school and will never best be served by school.
I know we've gotten caught up in a society that dreads children doing anything other than academics and sports, but it needn't be that way. In this hypothetical ideal society, it is most definitely not that way. Be careful to not let a poorly considered status quo cloud your judgement.
Where I live (U.S.), new schools are literally built like prisons... each wing is laid out from a central "observation area" for the administrators. It's just a panopticon design modeled after penitentiaries.
I was with my family in our new local high school. My dad and I were the only two who noticed the layout.
The panopticon design was originally intended for schools too, as well as other institutions:
> Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums. He devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison, so the term now usually refers to that.
The criticism section of the Wikipedia article focuses on political aspects, but to me, the very idea of keeping someone feeling like they're always watched sounds like psychological torture.
Many of the bullying stories on here involve either a do-nothing response by authorities or both sides being punished. I do not see how constant monitoring ensures any kind of protection or justice.
I don't think I've ever met in a public place for Craigslist trades. I've always gone to the seller's house. I don't think we've ever sold anything, but when we put something up for free online we just leave it outside and tell them to come get it.
In Missouri, high-school buildings use the same blueprints as state prisons. Why bother designing something custom? They serve the same purpose. They literally are prisons.
If a teenager fails to show up for school, a police officer will eventually show up to arrest their parents and place the teenager in the custody of a "foster family." Now both parent and teenager are imprisoned. And we are told this is freedom.
To make matters much much worse, children in state custody with the foster system are routinely exposed to all kinds of abuse. Many foster families operate like a profitable business where costs are minimized and care is entirely absent.
I feel I must point out that education buildings in Missouri do not share designs with prisons as a norm. Maybe this is true somewhere in the state but not here.
People look at ugly schools, and they look like prisons, and the kids are captive in the ugly buildings, so it invites the prison metaphor. But makes no sense. Schools are a series of classrooms, prisons are a series of small cells. The designs would not be reusable at a fundamental level, or any practical level.
There are in fact a great many school room sized cells in the United States. "Dormitory" housing is the norm for a significant percentage of inmates in jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers (imagine a school gym filled with bunks and you're often not far off). To add to the school-prison linkage, many facilities have lockers as well, replete with padlocks that make dandy weapons.
That said, I am still doubtful there are 1:1 copies of jails being used as schools, regardless of visible similarities. I don't see any of these supposed jail/high schools with secured rec yards for instance, which generally make up part of the structure of the facilities that look most like the examples given.
Don't listen to this Ozarkian tweaker. He has been fed some fringe anti-education propaganda his whole life and chooses to maintain life inside a glass bubble.
I think we pretty much universally agree that mandatory schooling is preferable to the alternative, do you really think an illiterate populous is preferable? So yes actually that is freedom. Society guarantees that you will not be illiterate just because your parents were crack addicts, I think that's a good thing.
I don't think an illiterate populous is the alternative unless you think most people lack intrinsic motivation and also have families that don't value education. Seems extremely unlikely. Maybe you wouldn't have gone to school if you had a choice but most people would, if nothing else for free childcare.
You are missing the point, "most" is not all, I don't think most people/families are like this at all, we don't do this for most people. I think you would be surprised about the number of low-income children in the US who will never see a classroom if we abandoned compulsory education. It is also an effective measure to increase equality and class mobility.
14 million children in the US are food insecure. 43 million people live in poverty, 12.9% [1]
You know how many people in the US are illiterate? 21% [2]
Do you think that number will increase or decrease if we got rid of compulsory education?
> You know how many people in the US are illiterate? 21% [2] Do you think that number will increase or decrease if we got rid of compulsory education?
Just 20% in 1875[1], despite the primitive education system of the time. Is the answer no change, it being limited by the innate capabilities of the people, not limited by what they do?
The source above yours and the one on Wikipedia are using different metrics for literacy. These are generally not comparable. Measuring literacy in a useful way, especially over historic timescales, is harder than it sounds.
There's security checkpoints and police officers in bulletproof vests and carrying guns as well in some cases, because what if a school shooter shows up? Of course, when one does show up a hundred militarized police will show up and... do nothing, because what will the union do if one gets shot?
I live in the UK now, but grew up in the US. My own experience is pretty similar.
I was also a highly sensitive kid so took the abuse pretty hard. I was bullied by both other kids _and_ by teachers. I still remember one teacher openly calling me weird in class and picking on me (I was very introverted and shy due to years of bullying/anxiety, which I guess made me "weird"). Both physical and mental abuse from other kids. One "highlight" was being openly sexually assaulted in PE class and the teacher didn't even care.
I was messed up psychologically for a very long time after my school experience. Extreme social anxiety, hyper sensitivity to criticism, constant feelings of anxiety and depression. It took a failed marriage and years of therapy until I was able to overcome most of this trauma and kind of start to live normally (in my 40s).
As a result, like you, I am incredibly cynical of schooling systems. I see my kids suffering in British schools (in secondary), and it really pains me. They loved primary where there were small classes and secondary just has completely sucked out the joy of school for them. I wish I could just retire from work and full time home school them.
The kind of school you went to sounds very different from the grammar school that my working-class father went to in the 1960s and that helped him escape a life of asbestos-breathing drudgery in moribund shipyards.
There were problems with the grammar school system as well.
They were created to provide a pathway to the middle class for bright children from working class families. But the entrance exam was heavily biased in favour of children from middle class backgrounds.
Famously the first 11+ tests had questions like "Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do".
In later years, getting out of school tuition was the main way to prep for the 11+, which put grammar schools financially out of reach for a lot of working class families. It had basically become a parallel state funded education system for the middle class.
My kid got in, and it turns out everyone else used a tutor (I stupidly took the advice not to do so from his teacher, who thought he'd get in just fine). This is in fact why playdates seemed to die out in the year or two before the test, the kids were being tutored but for some reason nobody would admit it.
When I went for the intro evening, the parents were simply the same kinds of people (often the same actual people) as the private primary where my kid went. Essentially, it is a private school where you don't pay fees. Same parents, with £30K more in the bank each year. The kids get into the top unis at a similar rate to the local fancy private school, which takes in all the classmates who didn't get in.
I have to say, they are a good bunch of kids. There's none of the bullying problems that everyone else is reporting in my kid's year. They have an environment where they have other quite nerdy kids doing nerdy kid stuff, without judgement.
But they are not a socially diverse bunch of kids. I'm not seeing any social mobility at all. Where are the kids whose parents are in the trades? Parents who aren't working? How come everyone I meet works in finance, law, accounting, medicine, or other white collar work?
I think it's the tutoring. It lets the marginal white collar kids win over the marginal "other social class" kids.
I am guessing you live in an area with high average housing prices in the catchment area of your school? Over the past 60 years, several generations of parents moving to catchment areas of good schools creates a self-reinforcing loop where only middle class people can afford to live near good schools.
My parents were both grammar school kids with working class parents, who didn't get any special prep for the 11+ beyond what their state primary school gave them. Both were the first people in their families to go to university and both managed to get into Oxford (where they met!). There was definitely a sweet point period when the system did what it intended in that sense, but there was obviously the drawback that if you ended up in the comprehensive system, you were stuck there and you had a situation where children got labelled at a young age.
Obviously some areas still have grammar schools and the impression I get from people living in those areas is that to stand a fighting chance with the 11+, you need out of school tuition or for your parents to be educated enough and have time to tutor you yourself. House prices are also obviously high in grammar school areas too! I've seen recent 11+ papers and having bright children at state schools around that age who are at the top of their year academically, I think they would struggle with them without any preparation or tuition.
> But the entrance exam was heavily biased in favour of children from middle class backgrounds.
> Famously the first 11+ tests had questions like "Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do".
That doesn't sound like a question a middle class kid would know anything about - not unless your definition of "middle class" is far different from mine.
> In later years, getting out of school tuition was the main way to prep for the 11+, which put grammar schools financially out of reach for a lot of working class families. It had basically become a parallel state funded education system for the middle class.
But given most schools now in the country (given only a small subset still have grammar schools) are done by catchment area, much of this still exists in comprehensive education too. Now, if you're well off you just buy a house in the right area so your kids get in to the good school.
I suspect in the past, people were less mobile, there wasn't the same disparity in wealth between different localities in the same general area, and school league tables weren't published. So the idea of moving to an area for (among other things) better education for their children wasn't something that was done.
I'm not really sure that's true. One of the things about grammar schools was that they covered quite wide areas since they were the top 25% scorers of exams. So think three ordinary sized secondary schools to a single grammar (which were usually single sex as well in those days).
No they weren’t. There are still many (163 according to a very quick google search) selective schools in the UK with entrance based on taking the 11+ exam.
Edit to clarify they are state funded and not private.
Just to confuse things, some former grammar schools turned into private schools but kept 'grammar' in their name.
But to confirm, there are still areas that have state grammar schools and have the 11 plus: Buckinghamshire, Essex and Kent spring to mind as the obvious ones in the South East.
Birmingham also had a grammar school system that is state funded, although most are supported by a charitable foundation as well.
This all became more complex again with the introduction of academies (twice, with different goals and subtly different setups) and free schools (although are those really a thing any more?) and I'm sure New New Labour will at some point add another category if school in the interests of simplicity...
> By the end of the 1980s, all of the grammar schools in Wales and most of those in England had closed or converted to comprehensive schools. Selection also disappeared from state-funded schools in Scotland in the same period.
There are private schools that call themselves grammar schools (paid schools, not state funded) and some grammar schools still exist in Northern Ireland.
But the system that defined what a grammar school is - has long since been abolished, and all free-access grammar schools were completely gone from my area before I was even born.
—-
EDIT: seems like the some state funded selective grammar schools exist but they are not exactly distributed evenly.
So, I am wrong; and this situation is actually significantly more class-enforcing than it used to be. Amazing.
Some counties in England still have state grammar schools and still follow the 11+ process. The 163 that the poster above you is referring to are state, selective, schools, rather than private grammar schools. There's a list linked in the Wikipedia page you linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammar_schools_in_Eng...
> all free-access grammar schools were completely gone from my area before I was even born.
That's because you lived in an area that didn't have the 11+ exam. I did, and I went to a state-funded grammar school in the 1990s. It's still there, famously.
I have a friend who teaches at a state funded grammar, and that wikipedia article includes a whole section on Current British grammar schools, which are selective and state funded o_O
There are plenty free non-fee-paying Grammar schools all around London. There are some private fee paying schools that were historical Grammar schools and still have it in their name.
The only issue is that Grammar schools are super selective these days, based on my own experience there are at least 10 applicants for every single place, as well as multiple rounds of tests to filter out children. In the end it’s a lottery of sort too as local councils decide who is awarded a place.
My neighbours kid took the 11+ two years ago to go to a state funded selective school in Warwickshire. 4 of my friends went to a grammar school (slate funded) in the 2000s and that school still exists in the same form it did back then.
Most grammar schools are gone but there are far from none.
The vast bulk of councils in the UK abolished the 11+ system. It does still exist in some places. Unfortunately, the system was ditched by the Labour government of 1976. Our current Labour lot are trying to do the same thing to our private schooling system.
One of the past Labour governments decided that there should be no new grammar schools created. So the existing ones continued to function but, as some closed down, their number diminished.
Thank you. I get irrationally angry, when I hear the 'socialization' argument, precisely because of the experience you described. To be fair, it does, in a weird way, prepare you for some areas of adulthood, but I think those areas are thankfully somewhat avoidable.
Interesting, if there is one thing that I have learned in my life, it is that you can pick up your stuff and leave. It is depressing that what we teach our kids is that they just have to stay in that bad situation; that there are no options.
The book Lord Of The Flies made a lot more sense when I realized it was a satire of British elite schools, rather than a real exploration of what cast away young people would actual do in that situation.
>The boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination
I've always assumed that the babies grown in test tubes and graded into alphas to epsilons in Huxley's "Brave New World" are simply a metaphor for children going throught the UK school system.
In that case the homeschooled are akin to the "savage" in the story.
I hated school as well but I would still disagree on almost all points with you.
But I was lucky enough to go to a good public school, found many lifelong friends there, learned a ton of aside skills that help me now in my personal and professional life.
I think it’s really sad that more and more people opt out of society, either in school or elsewhere. I can understand it to some extent but I think everyone will come of poorer in the end if we all sit in our separate boxes, only thinking about ourselves and how we can profit more.
I’m usually optimistic about the future but this is a hella depressing trend.
To be fair to home schooling - a lot of it involves groups and organised activities. It's not really a separation in practice, but opting out if the default system. (There are those that separate too)
> Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
I hear your overall point, but treating this issue as a dichotomy undermines your point. Critics of homeschooling aren't claiming that schools are perfect, or that schools educate ideally. The claim is that, as poorly as our teachers are equipped to educate students, parents are, on average, worse equipped.
You're insinuating here that you were not educated in school. You're making that claim in a text-based format. How did you learn to read and write? Are you making the claim that your mother taught you how to read and write, and the school had nothing to do with it?
Here's the problem with what you're saying: a lot of homeschooled children don't know how to read and write. Or add, subtract, multiply, and divide. And contrary to your theory of education, memorisation is useful in learning these skills. A kid who has memorized how to do addition and subtraction can make change at a cash register, and a lot of homeschooled adults can't do that.
There are outliers in both schoolchild and homeschooled child experiences. I am one myself: my mom homeschooled me for kindergarten and first grade, and did a great job, but she had the advantage that she was a schoolteacher. And maybe your experience was an outlier in that you really did learn nothing in school. But the averages, at a systemic level, are that homeschooled children are at a large disadvantage compared to children educated in a school.
I'm early 50s and went to school in the Republic of Ireland - late 70s, 80s. I really feel the same as the OP here. It felt like a daily prison, combined with huge amounts of memorisation for exams. (promptly forgotten)
Maybe a child could put up with the incarceration if it wasn't for the bullying on top of that too. No escape.
Aside: In the 70s the Headmaster had a cane that was used occasionally but at least that died out later.
But on a more optimistic note, I think there's some 'alternative schools' becoming more popular in Ireland now, like 'Forest School Ireland' etc... sounds more healthy anyway!
I don't have any friend from my school times. Bullying was the norm back in late 80's and the 90's till I am in college on '99.
The real friends? the real education? started at college. School was a 12 years full of non sense useless stuff to someone's practical life and improvement (to me and many of people around me. The most I remember of these days were math and science lessons that were beneficial and my father alone was more than capable teaching me that... other than language lessons, religious teaching that were just a formality for us (we learn religion the best from home, our extended family) etc etc. At the end? We lost most of 12 years that are the best for internalizing more engineering and professional education. Yes we are capable of that at that age, I and my younger brother at the least built some robots and actual cars with suspension and steering etc although using old Lego collections (since we grew poor we couldn't afford actual tools) and that was ALL on our own at home and we didn't have internet or anything. We modified RC cars to go faster by soldering capacitors to give that boost to the motor (at the expense of battery life and potentially burning the motor) when we were in middle school.
Programming you say? my love for computers and computer games? all at home too, with some help from my older cousin (that I will visit in 30 minutes, he is 67 years old now and without him I wouldn't even dream of getting a PhD in CS, and of course my professors who I revere and respect).
Nearly all my useful skills, other than math and science as I mentioned), I and my brother learned on our own... at home. It all started at home. The school? was torture and a formality we had to go through or no one will hire us.
I am for minimal formal schooling with specialization starting from day 1, each one can choose a MUCH shorter path and more focused on what they want to do... switching between specializations and/or profession shouldn't be like collapsing a sky scraper we have built with hay (like it is now the case). wasting people's lives, causing them trauma for whatever miss function (e.g. students being beaten for silly missed homeworks etc). This system is age old and not effective, and there are more effective ways. Most of those who changed the world were school drop outs for a reason... they focused on what really matters and connected it to reality.
I had a good experience in public K-8 (I went to a specialized STEM high school so I’ll leave that aside) but I didn’t learn anything. Public school is day care. My kids’ expensive private school is day care with better food.
It sounds like he is just describing being bullied in school and teachers not being great about it. Far from universal but also far from uncommon, in the UK or any country I have heard of. Bullying is a very common and documented problem in schools.
Even if bullying is common (say, every school or even every class experiences some bullying), that doesn't necessarily make it a very common experience for those who go through school (the majority of children in a class will neither be bullies nor bullied).
I think it's very area specific - how prosperous the area is. Reading that post was like he was at my school, word for word. I was on the "not bullied end" of that arrangement and life was still hell as you had to constantly watch over your shoulder, align with factions for fear of real violence if you weren't in the right place at the right time. A lot fo the older kids were linked to serious crime in the local area at the ages of 15 and 16 only. All in all I would say the goths got the most amount of abuse on a day to day basis.
I’m 35 now, so, millennial; for additional context I was brought up in a city called Coventry which is a city that was in decline during that period. (just like most of the north of the UK following Thatcher’s closing of the mines).
As a consequence of this experience, though, I saw that I wasn’t exactly entirely unique either, as there were other children treated as I was and we sought each other out. So I know that while my experience is not universal: that it is at least shared by a handful of people within my schools alone. - I would hazard to guess more outside of my school have these experiences too.
I know my experience isn't especially portable as I went to a public school in the home counties, but not all of my friends did, and while I understand they experienced teachers with varying levels of competence and interest, none of them has described it in as harrowing terms as yours, and all came away with friends and a fairly decent education, albeit one that they probably had to have a bit more determination to get than I did.
My mum worked in various UK state schools as an assistant from around 2000-2010 and described serious budgetary problems throughout the system, and teachers trying their best in adversity. She also described the many obstacles in the way of getting the bad kids out of classrooms so they couldn't disrupt things so much. I have a friend who teaches at a grammar school, who is fairly intelligent and interested in his subject, and seems to teach well to kids who are interested, though again there seems to be little money to achieve anything.
I'm not claiming shitty, prison-like schools don't exist or trying to invalidate your experience, it was clearly terrible, but I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it.
I am often left confused by responses like this. I think it would be fair to suggest that some significant percentage of chidren suffer in schools or have harrowing experiences that they are going to carry with them through life until dealt with. If this is the case, why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn? I don't believe you are meaning to suggests that the situation as it stands doesn't need change, but that is nonetheless implicit in your statements.
From my position, saying: "I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it." Comes close to invalidating the experience of another.
Whether school is a net benefit (that can stand to be improved) or a net detriment (a system that needs to be uprooted and upended entirely) depends significantly on that "some significant percentage".
If the percentage is 10% of children suffering through school, that's a horrendous number, but still leaves school as an overall positive experience for the vast majority, even though significant work needs to be put it to fix its problems.
If the percentage is 50% of children suffering, then it's a crapshoot if your child will benefit or be deeply disturbed by school, and the whole system needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch.
One anecdotal experience can't help one decide which of these is the right approach. I'd venture a guess that, since most people are not clamoring for fundamental school system reforms, the experience of most voting adults has been largely positive or at least neutral in school.
The author paints a picture of schools as literal prison, as a place where children are forced to go to waste their time and be tortured. They invite the reader to conclude that the entire exercise is worthless and should be abandoned -
"Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education."
"I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. "
> why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn?
It depends on the conclusion. If the conclusion is "school as a concept is so irredeemably bad that we should scrap schools entirely because of my experiences", I'm not sure it's supportable because of the lack of universality.
If the conclusion is "some schools have been run so poorly that students are left with lifelong emotional scars and little education to show for it, we need to do something about that", I'm all onboard.
Feel (some) of your pain - was bullied some in school, and actually had terrible compressed nerve problems that made sitting in high school all day terrible. But think what this person is saying is that this probably isn't the experience of most students. And in all humbleness, would have to agree, don't think me and my friends wouldn't say it's was an extremely abuse experience.
Not saying it doesn't need to be fixed, but that like most systems handling large volumes, for better or worse, it caters to the majority:(
Like you, I'm older than dijit and went to school in the home counties, but my experiences were also unpleasant enough for me to question the value of my time at school. I went to non-selective "state" (i.e. public-sector) schools in a middle-class area where nearly all of the other pupils presented as working class. Somehow I managed to pick up a combination of working, middle and upper class mannerisms, which seemed to attract more bullying from authority figures than from my peers. I suspect many of my teachers were bitterly resentful about the (then recent) banning of corporal punishment in the state sector. My secondary school seemed to model itself on "public" (i.e. private) schools, where corporal punishment was still legal. The saving graces of my school days included:
1) My primary school clearly took children's advancement seriously (more in things like handwriting, bladder control and cycling proficiency than in subject-matter knowledge or understanding), so it wasn't all pain and no gain, but that mostly stopped at secondary school.
2) Secondary-school maths lessons were (usually) something of a haven because maths teachers were willing to engage in unplanned reasoned argument and for almost three years we worked independently, at our own pace, from booklets while the teacher gave us each in turn one-on-one tuition (for only one or two minutes per lesson, but it did mean that I escaped being uncomfortably pressured to speed up or slow down both when I was working independently and when I had the teacher's attention for a non-punitive reason).
I think British education would be better if secondary schools had a clearer purpose and treated pupils as stakeholders. My experience was that my formal education started at primary school and resumed at university after a seven-year gap. I never really found out how my secondary school was meant to benefit pupils. Pupils ought to not only benefit from school, but understand how it benefits them.
I think schools should reflect clearer thinking about ability-based selection. If pupils are grouped by age and location only, and not at all by ability, then requiring the whole class to work through the same material, in the same way, at the same pace risks seriously inhibiting subject-matter learning. On the other hand, grouping pupils by "general ability" risks putting pupils in some classes more or less advanced than those that would benefit them most, and permanently disadvantaging those who are rejected from the more prestigious academic path at an early age.
Pupils also ought to lead lives they have reason to value. Corporal punishment even for bullies is a net negative, and there should be meaningful protections against teachers using loopholes, such as turning a blind eye to bullying or perpetrating emotional abuse themselves. We had many teachers like that at my secondary school, and one of them was found to have assaulted a pupil while I was there.
Edit:
I think some important points aren't really clear above. I agree with dijit that school can provide pupils with very poor value for the burdens it places on them, but I consider this a missed opportunity, rather than a lost cause. I also suspect some teachers' toxic attitudes about class and violence contribute to the bullying problem, so we should be careful not to let cognitive biases lead us into doubling down on "discipline" in schools, unless there's good reason to believe that isn't part of the problem. I left school many years ago, but before I did, authority figures bemoaned the "end of discipline" and the coddling of pupils, which was at odds with my experience then, so I'm sceptical of any claims that the problem has since been solved.
As a parent with kids in the UK state school system, I've noticed a considerable attitude change in terms of reducing bullying, acknowledging and supporting learning difficulties (dyslexia, ADHD, autism), and on trying to keep kids happy and engaged, in a way that simply didn't exist during my time in the '80s and '90s.
In the same way, my own experiences at school were a significant attitude change compared to the learn-by-rote and corporal punishment era of my parents.
I couldn't claim that it works for every student or that every school is like that - plus the entire school system is now stretched financially to breaking point in a way that it wasn't when I was there, and there are additional new problems such as social media - but I do feel that in general things have moved in the right direction.
I have some friends who teach in Cov, there are some particularly bad schools in the city sadly. Sorry to hear you went through one of them. The effective postcode lottery of schools has an awful affect on how the part of our lives plays out.
Having said that, your experiences weren't a million miles from mine in the 80's in the crap end of Hampshire. Most of the violence there though was from other pupils, rather than teachers.
However, speaking to my daughter schools these days do tend to be kinder, gentler places than when I grew up. Fights seem to happen never rather than on a daily basis.
40's, male, had a horrible experience at state secondary school in semi-rural Scotland. I now have young kids in primary, and I can see how shit the education aspect in particular is - my kids constantly complain about how boring it is, and one finds everything ridiculously easy. For example, he's been doing addition and subtraction up to ten at school for 3 years!?
Even if it's not hell, it could be so much better. It could be a place that kids actually look forward to going every day. Instead, we put them through 12 years of mandatory low grade torture where nothing they do is connected to the real world, their interest or curiosity, and when they're done they're launched into a world of AGI and ASI where none of what they learned is remotely enough for them to contribute to society in any way.
That sucks and I really don't mean to well actually here.. but in that scenario - which doesn't sound like the default outcome of going to a public school anywhere - would this not be "just" a reason to go for homeschooling later, only after the system has provably failed (long-term).
Also maybe I have a false impression but I always thought people decided about homeschooling long before the kid(s) get to normal school age.
That said, I don't have a strong opinion here and I can see how it's useful in certain situations, but I guess might have hated it even more than I hated school (after a certain age, I liked it when I was little) - but also none of my parents went to university or something, so I was on my own in math etc after a certain point, so not sure how they would have even managed to get me to finishing.
My argument is that school experiences vary drastically, that everyone commenting before me was saying that homeschooling their children was egotistical, stupid and harmful.
When I, have a good reason why I might consider not sending my own kids to state school, because my experiences were so bad.
Just because your own school was sadly, terrible, doesn't necessarily mean your kids' would be similar, though? A formula that's worked for us, is - find a school with nice staff, be wary of huge academy chains (UK specific) and above all, seek peers that are very diverse - in terms of class, education level, wealth, race, nationality etc. That way your kids avoid being bullied for being "weird" because there's no such concept of "weird"-ness, kids in such a group have many different perspectives. To me, that's a far better environment for kids to develop and flourish, than siloed in a homeschooling situation.
Kids are excellent at pattern matching, and "weird" doesn't go across racial lines, weird is the kid who's a little on the spectrum, or not emotionally mature enough their first year to deal with circumstances- and instead shuts down.
It's easy to be pigeon-holed by the class, and it's self-reinforcing.
This is the first comment in the page, the first I read, and I can also say, I learned nothing (if anything lies, bad science and nonsense) in school. Coming from a very different country, lived in many others I know is not better in those places. I do not have time to really teach my kids, but I will be all the way by their side, as they go through the brain washing machine of school.
I will send them to the school just because I want them to interact with other people of same age, and also learn how much stupid people is around, and show them it won't get any better later in life. But I do not expect, at all, that they will learn something useful.
It's like all the people that insist "School never taught me anything useful like how to balance a check book" when you learned how to balance a checkbook in the math class that person never paid attention to.
I'm sick and tired of being told what school is good and bad for by the very people who never paid attention. A school cannot magically make you motivated to learn things for 16 years. It's drudgery to most humans and always be, because we aren't naturally """meant""" to learn complicated and robust concepts for 16 years.
Our options are deal with that and help kids who don't want to learn do things they don't want to do, or have a general populace that knows nearly nothing about the world around them.
Literally by my own, with books that luckily I had available. I learned no grammar and certainty no spelling in school. As I was 18 nobody could under my writing because of the terrible spelling.
I had problems also speaking to people, and understanding what they were saying.
I hated school too, but I'm not sure I would have learnt much at home. My parents both lack higher education and frankly haven't been able to keep up with me past the age of 12 or so. Home schooling might work for children of smart people to be accelerated into the exact same field as them. But it won't work for kids like me or those who just aren't good at whatever their parents do.
That may be less true than it was 20 years ago. Even free resources like Khan Academy can go a long ways in helping parents educate their kids beyond what they know themselves. And for parents willing to spend even a fraction of what the public school would spent on education, they can pick and choose curriculum, tutors, or even online live classes with teachers well beyond what they would have in their local high school.
That said, parents without much of an education themselves may tend to set the bar too low for their children, but that often appears to be an issue in the public school as well.
Such an accurate description of what I went through in Switzerland. Kids are mean, and I had to be mean to survive too. It stained my character in ways I am still trying to overcome more than a decade later.
I became progressively more withdrawn throughout my school years and for most of high school I was a ghost. I talked to no one and hid in the library during lunch hours, and for all the kinds of reasons that have already been mentioned here.
My experience in school contrasts dramatically with my experience going through the scout movement. We had an active and healthy group. we would do 10 weekend camps a year and on those weekends I would hit the ground running when we arrived on friday evening and wouldn't stop until I was back in the van to go home on Sunday afternoon. I rose to the rank of troop leader, I won the youth of the year award, I would lead the campfires on the group weekends for 150 kids and their parents. I'm 49 and still in touch with the core group I went through the scout movement with, we're all lifelong friends. I probably would have killed myself if I didn't have Scouts.
School was OK, but Boy Scouts was great! We learned to organize into groups, to obey orders and coordinate as groups, play games, watch the Scout Masters (all adult men) discuss and decide matters and then try to do the same ourselves.
I also learned how different fathers can be: some with few friends, some with many, each having different abilities, etc. All were wonderful people ready to help us learn.
I was never bullied (in school or out) and I can think of only a few instances where I saw it. So I am always disappointed to see numerous claims of bullying "pile up" online whenever there is a discussion of school. One gets the impression that everyone has been bullied always and that school was/is hell. But my experience was that bullying was truly rare: rarer than snakebite, rarer than black widow spider bite, indeed, rarer than actual death! My conversations with others with whom I associate indicate similar experiences. School was fun and rarely boring.
I like your anecdote about the boy scouts being a healthy environment- that could well be true and I have no reason to think otherwise.
But I think being blind to the other kids being bullied is probably a common thing, you’re likely better adjusted as an adult and can’t possibly comprehend how common or how helpless kids can be to being bullied.
You can imagine then, a person like you becoming a teacher might not be looking for signs that kids are being bullied, because its rarer than death after all- and all you’d see is the built-up backlash of the bullied kid finally hitting the bully back (because, being a bullied kid fighting back for once is dramatic).
This is a large part of why the the bullied kids end up being punished when finally acting out in zero-tolerance scenarios.
I didn't enjoy my (US) public school experience, but it gave me a lot of skills for interacting with other people, including people I disliked. Based on the people I've met who were home-schooled, they lacked a lot of those skills.
I agree with this (as the bloggers seems to too). Yeah, dealing with all the different personalities you see at school is an important skill, as is dealing with difficult situations. Yeah, would like to think I was in general a nice kid, but had some share of being bullied, and unfortunately have also bullied another kid (neither were common in my life, but you had to learn how to handle these situations, and also make mistakes to learn from them). Yeah, this understanding of people is super useful, and for me at least, the corporate world can be just as ruthless as a school playground. Need to know how to navigate all those egos.
> Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
There’s so many classes that I want a refund on my wasted childhood time. Reading the “classics” in English, studying foreign language, Theology (Catholic schools), History (yes, History). I hated all these classes, didn’t learn much from them beyond what it took to pass the tests, then quickly forgot what they taught. Anything useful that would have come from those subjects I learned later, through alternate more enjoyable means (e.g. Assassin’s Creed was way more effective in teaching me the history those games covered).
I never read pretty much any book written before 1970, never learned a foreign language beyond a single semester of Spanish, and certainly had no Theology in a US Public school. Now as an adult, I do want to learn all those things (to some degree) and feel like I missed out on it; “If only I had a better education.” But I probably would have been more like you, uninterested and equally as dismissive of my childhood education if I were forced to learn all of those things at that age. Is it a problem with educators, families, or just the children themselves that they will grow up and realize the opportunities they’ve lost?
Also British, although i was living abroad when I started home educating (the correct term in UK law, and more accurate because the whole point is that its not HE).
> It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning
This is why I stuck with home educating up to GCSEs. I wanted my kids to enjoy learning and they do. They have a very wide range of interests and good academic results and IMO are better prepared for A levels and university than they would have been at school (even really good schools).
> find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work,
This is why we have so much after school stuff and breakfast clubs. Yes, it means some kids get fed in the morning, but a lot of them seem to get given junk food.
> for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children
IMO home education is better for socialisation. What skills do you learn from meeting the same group of people your own age in the same place everyday? My kids had more time to do things by themselves (anything from going to a shop to taking a bus to meet up with a friend). They did (between them) guides, dance, sea cadets, sailing, D & D, art classes, singing classes piano classes, drama, stage fighting and more. They had both remote (which develops a useful skill set these days) and face to face tutors at for some GCSE subjects. it would be really hard for kids tied by school hours plus home work to do as much.
> the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
The chasing of metrics has been a disaster. My younger daughter is at sixth form college for A levels and it has deteriorated since her older sister went there. it is still good but they have become a lot more rigid and I feel they are less focused on students best interests and more on the metrics.
I went to one of the best schools in the UK (consistently top 10 academically), with no bullying problems, no corporal punishment (it had abolished it in Victorian times IIRC), excellent facilities - and I still think my kids had a better education than I did
Interesting story and very good points :) I certainly have concerns, that much of the curriculum in school here in UK is basically pointless box-ticking (metrics as you refer to it), and a certain part of the day is just a waste of time and/or at a pace that doesn't suit brighter kids. OTOH there's some great stuff at school that'd otherwise be hard to replicate. I know people that do homeschool or private school with good reason, due to the limitations of state school. Sounds like you've done a lot to ensure your kids have friends and go to things where they meet other kids. So in your case, probably the lack of social side is less of an issue... however, isn't that quite an investment of your time? (and to some extent cost). you list a lot of things your kids go to, that must mean quite a lot of "ferrying" / "taxi-ing" around? Or are they very independent and using public transport? To me , it sound like you've done homeschooling right, but I kind of wonder whether a lot of people would be unable or not enlightened enough to do all the social side you've done.
The people who say "it's to make you interact with normal people!" miss a key point. In the real world, you meet a person, and if they treat you like shit, you walk away. If they physically assault you in the workplace, you can report them to HR, and there's a good chance you'll never have to see them again. In school, you get told you need to have empathy for their propensity to beat you, get subtly or not-so-subtly victim blamed, and you still have to interact with them for at least a year, and maybe years.
Exit is probably the most powerful strategy to dealing with certain kinds of situations, and schools deny you that.
Agreed but what about the person that doesn't exactly treat you like s** but they are difficult to work with, but in order for you to achieve the thing you need at work you have to work with them daily? Then walking away isn't an option - perhaps just going to work somewhere else is not feasible. So then, a certain amount of experience of dealing with idiots at school can be useful can't it? (within reason... ;) )
In one word, yup. My solution: In class put head down and just ignore the teacher. I DID want to learn the good material (math and science) so DID that in the one hour of daily 'study hall' and when I got home. And, with this approach, in math and science did quite well in aptitude tests and achievement tests. Those test results, and NOT what the teachers said about me, got some higher-ups to send me to summer advanced math/science programs.
That self-learning approach served me well in school, work, and life to the present.
The plane geometry teacher was one of the worst. We had a disagreement: She thought that in her subject she was superior, a lot better than the students were (actually, not for long!), regarded the students as subordinates, and tried to intimidate us. So, I communicated with her only a few times but then was showing that I was better in the subject than she was. I.e., one reason I worked hard and DID learn well was to show up the teachers, show that they were NOT better, even in their own subject, and keep them from being nasty to me, trying to subordinate me.
Since my brother wanted me to go for the football team, I did. The coach was no help at all and treated me with contempt. I was not any good at football, didn't try self-learning, but the coach was no help. As part of dumping on me, the coach gave me an old helmet, not effective, unique on the team. One day another player gave his elbow to my head, and I hit the ground maybe a little hurt. In one word, the coach was a bully. To heck with that: I quit the team.
>I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding.
Institutional childcare in general is mostly this; a necessity driven by an economic imperative. Both parents must work. School is a continuation of that logic, although as the kids get older and more independent this becomes less important.
School for me was a gladiator academy. Useful for producing gladiators I suppose but at the expense of any genuine intellectual curiosity or love of learning. Thankfully I had an informal opportunity to stay after school when the budding gladiators all went home to torment small animals or whatever it was they did, when I could sit in peace and play on the school’s Apple II. That opened my eyes to an entirely different world, which I now have the privilege of inhabiting.
Some of my siblings liked school, and my parents were wise enough to make the homeschool/government school decision on a child by child basis. I’m very grateful that they had the courage to make that decision in my case against fierce opposition by all of polite society.
This was my reaction upon seeing the question in the post title, too.
I've chosen not to have kids (my childhood experience of other kids being one contributing factor) but if I did I would not want them to be anywhere near a UK state school.
> Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
Funny enough, in the US, most states changed their methods of teaching (especially math) 10-20 years ago. And facebook is still filled with parents (although probably mostly grandparents) bitching about not understanding "common core math" without trying to understand it, and expressing how they learned via rote memorization and that is what we should use instead.
To be fair - the US changing their mathematics education system has been worse for the mathematics program. The kids learning math now who don't learn from outside networks will be significantly worse off in mathematics by far.
Also there is no other way for people to learn mathematics then without doing the work to learn. This utopian idea that's bled into the education stream that we can teach math without significant amount of problems to practice on is kind of nuts.
Youth polling consistently ranks public schooling middle-high school as the literal worst time in their life. However, I still think they should do it as it gives them exposure to the bottom quartile of the population. It gives them motivation and reason to structure the rest of their life to do anything and everything to never have to interact said population group again.
>I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country.
>However, school, for me, was by far the single worst mandatory system I have been exposed to in my life.
Hey this is more or less the universal experience world over. Be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.
34 year old who grew up on Guernsey (small island south and independent of Britain but with very much the same values) and went to a state-funded Grammar school for secondary and can't relate to all of this, but certainly most. The details are different but I agree that the education offered is subpar and the "socialisation" argument is bullshit. School left me feeling more isolated and alone than I've ever been.
> I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. I would not be surprised if this feeling is shared among many of my generation and social class, the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
The problem is, when you allow homeschooling, a non-insignificant number of children will have to endure the same, just the wardens and torturers will be their own parents. There have been more than enough cults who actually promote that parents keep their children from "outside influence", and on top of that come the pedophiles, again especially in religious circles. Even private schools suffer from such issues, again mostly religious ones, but there also have been a fair share of scandals surrounding "ordinary" esoteric schools.
I would rather fight for government-run schools to have proper budgets for a high quality learning experience, adequate staff, modern curricula and teaching methods and actually sensible policies against bullying of all kinds than to allow systems to thrive that are even worse than what you went through.
> I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work
Open an history book and look how it was before schooling was free and mandatory.
I do agree that the most recent spin on it is far from ideal and that the underlying goals seem to have shifted, but I can clearly and easily imagine an alternative way that doesn't involve home schooling.
The problem is the same as in many other industries, once you optimise everything to please the capitalistic beast we created you're set for personal hell
I grew up in the US and I hated every single day of school. I don't have a favorite teacher I remember fondly, I don't have friends from school, etc. I absolutely hated it.
But I still am against home schooling. I still got social skills from going to public school that homeschooled kids lack. I still don't think your average parent is equipped to give their children a good education.
I have people I know who have homeschooled their kids. Without exception these people are narcissists with insane views who are using it as a way to indoctrinate their children into having the same worldview that they hold.
Homeschooling should be illegal. It is child abuse.
My mum never punched me in my face, followed me around the playground trying to put dog shit in my backpack, steal my books and piss on them or make rumours about me to ensure I was ostracised by the other children. All the while the adults were helpless and continually told me to be a man- and worse, the adults leaning in on it being my problem. A true hopeless feeling.
You will never know how much I can despise you for your presumption that my home-life could possibly be correlated with my school life.
Lots of kids home lives are worse than your school life. But that's not the point I was making. You are letting your personal horrible experience define the whole discussion for you. But that is completely beside the point I was making. Yes some kids are physically abused even tortured at school, some kids are physically abused even tortured at home. You don't make policy decision based on outlier cases that are already illegal.
As I explained in my initial comment, the problem is average parents are not equipped to be good teachers and homeschooled kids are being denied the variety of experiences that kids going to an actual school are getting. That's why I said all homeschooled kids are being abused by definition. Not the same type of abuse you got at school or I got at home. But they are being denied a proper education. They are being denied the opportunity to learn to make friends and socialize with different people. When it's time for them to finally go out into the world they will be poorly equipped to do so.
If I thought home schooling was a sure fire way to avoid violent abuse for any kids, maybe it would be worth the trade off. But we both know if anything abusive parents are also going to abuse their kids via home schooling.
I honestly think on the whole homeschooling is doing more damage to the kids being put through it and should be illegal. Obviously before actually doing that we should do scientific studies and surveys of adults who went through it and make a decision based on that rather than just my opinion. But right now we let parents do it just because extremist parents insist on it. And I think we are failing those kids.
If it weren't for homeschooling my autistic daughter would be spending her day in the headteachers office shaking and crying due to her cripping anxiety.
I'm glad that you have a way to help your daughter. But there are many kids with similar issues and homeschooling can't be our solution for all of them. Instead we need to figure out how to accomodate them at schools.
Not sure about USA, but here in UK there are special schools for people whose autism really makes it unviable for them to be in mainstream school (whether that's a failure of the mainstream school, or just level of anxiety etc of the student). Such special schools are often wonderful, with the most amazing, dedicated staff. Usually staff have specialist training (albeit not always to as high level as one might like, due to underfunding) and much experience of working with autistic people. So, able to provide things that parents with no prior knowledge of autism, and jobs to go to and bills to pay, are less able to provide.
I was schooled in Bangalore India and I particularly loathe and revile both the school and most of my teachers. My school did nothing except make me believe I was a horrible child with no future.
I believe in homeschooling but it isn't very fashionable here.
If there's one thing I was surprised when I moved to the UK from Portugal were the number of stories work colleagues told about bullying in school. Although there were fights and stupid games in the schools I went to in Portugal there was never systematic bullying.
You might not have succeeded at that. You did a very good job at denigrating school though :)
Let me try to tell you my view: both homeschooling and schools have risks. A child can suffer mistreatment both at school and at home.
School however offers something that homeschooling can't: options. If you have a bad teacher, you will have another 4 which are average, and 1 or 2 which are actually decent. There will be bullies, yes, but you also have opportunities to make friends.
At home, all you have is a single adult. If that adult happens to be a psycho, there's no escape.
I say this as someone who suffered at school. My ADHD got completely unnoticed, being of the inattentive kind. I didn't know how to relate with others, I had no friends. I would pick up a book and read in a corner during recess. I got bullied. For me school was something I "endured", not something I enjoyed.
I also happen to be the elder of 4 children. My younger brothers and sister went to the same school I went to. They had different teachers, different co-students. All of them were happy at school, and they turned up just alright.
Now, my parents. My mum is ok (for someone who has raised 4 people) but my dad is a self-absorbed narcissist. My brothers and sister stopped talking to him 20 years ago. He doesn't know his own grandchildren. I still talk with him, but out of pity. There's no love left.
So yeah. I suffered at school. It happens. My siblings didn't. I think homeschooling with my mum would have been ok, she's decent. But homeschooling with my dad? I would be way worse than I am now.
Bullies couldn't do what they do if they did not have the support of the other students, teachers, administration, etc. As late as college I was harassed by criminally minded person who led a criminal gang that was not held in check until they finally smashed somebody in the face with a rock in front of many witnesses. Two people were driven to suicide.
The leader has been to prison and if he got out and went straight I could forgive him, even celebrate him, because it is so hard to get out of being justice involved. I'm still angry at the college administrator who told me "my hands are tied" who many see as a hero because he really did a lot of great things for our school -- but I wonder who else was driven to suicide and I fantasize about going to his funeral and dumping over his casket. An apology from him would go a long way, I've asked for it, I never expect to get it.
If you're being bullied in elementary school you don't get friends. It could be that the bullying drives away friends, or if you had friends you wouldn't get bullied, or the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you not to get friends. Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.
I guess you are answering to the "you also get friends" part of my comment.
What you suffered was horrifying, I hope you have recovered. There's degrees in bullying. Mine was not that bad in comparison to yours. The kid who was a bane of my existence would not attack me every single day, at every single hour. I was not important enough or "fun enough to mess with", I suppose. It was more like a "once per week" kind of thing.
I was not very successful at making friends. But I did make a couple. The first one was the other guy who was also regularly bullied. He had clear developmental issues, I don't think teachers could turn a blind eye on them like they could on mine. We talked about videogames, almost exclusively. It helped, somewhat. Then he (I think) became romantically interested in me and I had to cut it off.
Then there was another kid who regularly came to my house. We played with legos, which I had many. Then he stopped liking Legos. (Children...)
My school did give me many more opportunities to make friends. Retrospectively, I know I could have made more. I just didn't know how to. In my case it would be "the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you to not get friends". I only managed to make real friends in highschool (and even then it was just 2 or 3). And that was after I decided to make a conscious effort to understand the social rules that seemed to come naturally to others.
I think my problem was more a "me" issue. The bullying didn't help but I suspect I would have made very few friends independently of it.
> Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.
I do agree. Unfortunately many children's homes are not safe environments. Homeschooling for them is worse than bullying can ever be at school. Imagine 24-7 with your bully, who is way bigger than you and from whom you also depend for food, water and shelter.
Wow, that is tremendously messed up! I'm sorry you had to experience that. Kind of makes my young adult life sound like a cake walk.
Ironically, it was the jocks and the gang affiliated kids who always left me alone. I don't know exactly why, though I figured the jocks were popular enough to not waste their energy tormenting someone socially beneath them.
Anyway, I completely agree with what you've said. Whenever I experienced bullying, it was in close correlation to how callously indifferent the overall system was. The couple of schools I went to where I didn't experience trouble had empathetic teachers and administrators whom actually built trust with the students. The earlier schools I went to were mostly run by selfish teachers (whom I later learned were even more selfish than I realized at the time!) and administrators who would punish the bully and the victim equally out of laziness/callousness/stupidity; or look the other way entirely! Guess which ones I suffered under and which ones I didn't.
> If you're being bullied in elementary school you don't get friends. It could be that the bullying drives away friends, or if you had friends you wouldn't get bullied, or the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you not to get friends. Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.
I know you're referring to elementary school here, but I think this dynamic you're describing also explains why so many kids have a rotten time in middle school. Usually, middle school lasts only a few years, and can easily mean being separated from any sort of peer group you have for multiple reasons. If your friends are even slightly older or younger than you are, then one will have to face a year of middle school without them. Depending on where your friends live, they might end up in a different middle school even though you both went to the same elementary school.
Even though I did have one good friend in elementary school (we are still best friends today), he is a year older than I am, and even though we went to the same middle school I had to spend at least 1 year in elementary school without him and then another during my second year in middle school. And I know he had the same problem in reverse. When you're seen as having "no friends", even though you actually do, everyone treats you like you have the stink of death. Those were some of the worst years of my life.
I hate the stereotype in movies that jocks are bad.
There must be some bad apples but mostly they are focused on their sport and the team and don't have time or energy to make trouble, and if they do make trouble, they are off the team.
The time some people attacked me at my dorm I ducked into the room of the captain of the rugby team and that was the last time they came to my dorm. The captain of the football team at my high school was popular because he treated everybody well, I'd say the same about kids who were stars in youth soccer. In fact, even though I didn't feel terribly engaged with it at the time, youth soccer is a precious memory to me because it was one place where I was never mistreated (a group photo shows me standing next to the coach who probably gave me just a little extra attention because of my neurodivergence.)
Yup, I agree. I'm sure there's bad apples out there, but I had the least issues with jocks and popular people. Even in America, they didn't pick on me, and I was always confused by how vilified they were in popular media. Looking back, it was always these sort of middle of the road kids who were the problem; neither particularly popular nor at the bottom of the totem pole. Completely unremarkable, and with incredibly fragile egos.
Your analysis is on point. With some exceptions, popular people are usually popular for a valid reason.
There was this one guy I remember who wasn't exactly a jock, but sort of overlapped with them I guess. I'm pretty sure he played rugby. He had a great physique for a high schooler, was charming to everyone, and had the sort of look about him like he would become a "dreamboat doctor" as an adult. Anyway, I was doing miserably in chemistry class, not necessarily because I was bad at science but I was just having a tough time in school in general which made me unfocused. Without even asking him, he offered to help me study for my exams, and I took him up on it even though I did feel ashamed for needing help. With his help, I passed that class with what was the equivalent of a C grade in New Zealand. He became class president, and I know he was the one to deserve it. I'm grateful to this day that he was one of the few people during my school career who actually cared. And yeah, he was probably the most popular student there.
As another product of the British 'education' system, this is all very familiar.
If you're interested in some content that really helped me understand why I hated school so completely, I recommend "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto, and "Free to Learn" by Peter Gray. Peter Gray also has a very nice blog called "Play Makes Us Human" at https://petergray.substack.com/
As a parent of a toddler, deciding on schooling options is one of the most serious decisions I'll have to make with my partner over the coming years and it terrifies me. Home schooling is a very attractive option from my perspective, but only due to lack of alternatives that offer the sort of nurturing and positive environment that I want my child to have.
To heavily paraphrase a short of stature comedian: Childhood and School is basically jail. You're confined with a bunch of violent sociopaths, have minimal agency over what you do everyday, spend most of your free time trying to smoke weed out of improvised pipes, and the greatest reward you can obtain is like a bag of Doritos.
This does prepare you to life though. More likely than not you will go to office. You will find yourselves with bullies, and again you can become a victim. Rather than feeling sorry about yourself, school prepares you to fight with bullies, to find inmates, to find friends. I think you could have not understand the life lessons.
You will also enter other communities, where again, you will find bullies.
Good grief, if the lack of caring for the kids, the indifference of the educators is now reframed as a virtue and core function of the failing school system I guess we are in deep trouble.
Nope, if I have to share an office with an ethnic gang that attacks co-workers because of their different ethnicity I will certainly not "deal with bullies" but leave the place.
In a way you're right, I worked in a consulting firm that seemed to have that mentality, and I did find bullies, and it seemed the only way to go forward was to become a bullying, lying cheat yourself.
Then I went on to work for a more civilised company that believed in people being decent and such, and discovered that you can actually coexist with people and foster growth without stepping on other people on your way.
If you think one can just "fight with bullies, find inmates, find friends" and everything will be alright, you're quite clueless to some experiences many people have gone through.
>You will find yourselves with bullies, and again you can become a victim.
I don't know what kind of places you've worked at, but everywhere I've worked if anyone behaved even 10% like the average high school bully they'd have been fired on the spot.
"everywhere I've worked if anyone behaved even 10% like the average high school bully they'd have been fired on the spot." unless...they're the CEO ? ;)
This is abhorrent. The feeling of safety underpins emotional well-being. What you advocate is only the repetition of past suffering. Without safety, what is left but fear?
Reality? And those safe spaces are built upon and upheld by others - who bully the other mean bullies to keep it that way. Every part of civilization is a energetic effort and if the civilization runs low on energy/supplybribery - the space closes with a thunderclap as the structure giveth.
I can agree with that, it's the best counter argument, at least. Though it's a weak one.
Cause there is certainly better ways to prepare a kid to the real tough life than having him to go through a prison. I can certainly see what the OP went through by relating to my own experience. I managed better, I was more often than not in the neutral ignored camp but I really see how bullies made life miserable to others, and how it could have been very different. These tensions didn't help me, it was just an issue I had to deal with, more or less successfully. But I really felt a liberation when I started my first job, though I've no rights to complain about my childhood.
Regular teaching is a thing of the past. Specific lessons tailored to a kid capacity through AI (let's give it a few more years) is the future. Most modern countries will certainly start swapping regular teaching within the 10 next years, the rest of the world will follow.
spending precious studying time on fighting and searching for transient "friendship"... yeah, that'll teach you about life. Nobody needs eggheads, boxers are in trend!
I have worked in 5 different companies, not one had any bullying. (Technically there was a one-off event involving a colleague and it was dealt with severely enough that it never happened again)
While I hate to admit that you are not inaccurate, we are humans and should be able to find a way to raise the youth without resorting to storing them in prisons while they explore how to physically and emotionally torture one another. The fact that we accept this as a mere expression of nature is beyond horrifying, because schools are anything, but nature. I would sooner accept gangs of free roaming kids across the neighborhood, but you can't have that, because that would impede private property and businesses.
<< God how I hate idea of "safe spaces".
It is not a question of safe space. It is a question of what you are teaching. Because of the people like you, who think it is perfectly fine education, I can accurately pinpoint 'troublemakers' and 'danger' as I walk down the street and avoid the place. That is explicitly NOT what early education should be.
I live in a good area and have friends who work in a few different schools out here. Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. The reading/math skills are so dismal, any student who learns at home is bored as hell.
I'm curious where you live. My spouse and I selected the area we live in based on the school district when our kids were around pre-K age. We live in a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation.
Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works. I've never heard a story like this and we've been in the district for 8+ years.
As for skills, my kids are probably 3 years ahead of where I was at the same age. Devices are not a huge component of their schooling, although I am on a parent board that's pushing back on SaaS creep. They're forced to have Google accounts which I'm proposing to remove and/or minimize. Math and reading programs are fantastic. Teachers are great. There have been one or two mediocre teachers but nothing to really complain about.
We also have great private options, but again, we moved to this district to take advantage of the public schools.
As an observation the homeschooled kids that participate in extracurricular activities along with the public school kids are definitely behind. Not only from a traditional education standpoint, but also social skills. It's always an awkward conversation when those parents engage in a conversation asking where our kids are at with respect to reading, math or science.
Our goal is to have our kids be the best version of them that they can be. If they're happier, healthier and better equipped than we were then I'll be happy. I look at a lot of parents who want their kids to be stars and it's painful. Modern day parenting has lost its way in US society on so many levels.
There really seems to be two kinds of public schools. One is willing to expel students who are violent and disruptive and this allows the students who are willing and able to learn to do so. The other refuses to expel violent and disruptive students and they make it nearly impossible for the willing and motivated students to actually learn.
There are some rotten incentives at work here, as well as constraints that aren’t obvious from a parent or student’s point of view.
For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them. In practice, this means that expelling a student (short of some extreme situations) is a lengthy process of ass-covering. Even when administrators are doing the right thing, from the outside it can look like nothing is being done. Think HR putting you on a PIP.
Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. And for what it’s worth, usually a child in crisis. For school staff, your role as an adult is to teach the child to participate in society with whatever limited influence you have. As a parent or classmate, of course, you have no reason to give a shit about some asshole kid, but the teacher has to.
And then, what does “violent and disruptive” actually mean? How much violence? No tolerance? What about a bullying victim who sticks up for themselves? Playground scuffle? At what point does the dial turn from teaching a child not to hit, to teaching a child that they are bad and do not belong? What about non (physically) violent bullying? What about children who are disruptive, but not violent (surely including a lot of those posting here about how their ADHD was misunderstood)?
Sometimes expulsion is the answer, even keeping in mind that every student expelled before 16 is just going to school someplace else. But the problems are more complex than people often realize.
> The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. And for what it’s worth, usually a child in crisis. For school staff, your role as an adult is to teach the child to participate in society with whatever limited influence you have. As a parent or classmate, of course, you have no reason to give a shit about some asshole kid, but the teacher has to.
This is where I wholeheartedly disagree with you. Education is not a right if you can't comply with simple rules. I'd also like to see where you're correlating "violent and disruptive" with a "child in crisis". I'm not saying it's not there, but I am saying I don't believe those two components are exclusive.
These games of "what if" and "what is" must be fun for some people - because they seem to be played quite often. Rules are rules, they can be cut and dry - even in this case. The excuses are played out, the fallback on so many "disorders" is rampant. Either society is essentially fucked, or people are abusing the exceptions. I do agree, there should be some exceptions, but those should be few and far between to avoid slipping through the cracks.
Finally, the implication that a teacher "has to" give a shit has got to be the worst idea Americans have embraced. No, they don't. If my kid was asshole in school - I would handle the situation and apologize. Parents who go at districts for not "giving a shit" about their kid when their kid has been taught there are no repercussions by their parents don't have a right to anything in my opinion.
The purpose for "blame" or "fault" is to know who to punish to best improve society. The "what if" and "what is" scenarios stem from treating "blame" as a mysterious entity that leads to punishment, and then pathological (pathos) appeals that no one is really to blame. It seems rather tautological that society should adopt rules for blame that improves society, not rules that make people feel good inside.
- The kid's behavior isn't their fault. They might have a medical condition or a home situation causing them to act this way. It's tempting to write kids like this off, but we shouldn't punish kids for their parents' failings.
- No matter what, this represents a problem we have to solve. Either family can solve it at home, educators can solve it at school, or some LEO can solve it in the carceral system, but you burn more money and suffer worse outcomes the further down the pipeline you solve it (not unlike bugs in software engineering).
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I have a hot take that school is so frustrating because it's one of the very few things in the US money and status don't readily fix. Your household income might be $250k a year, but your kid's playing kickball with... people who make less, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. The US isn't good at these kinds of "let's make society as a whole healthier so we avoid the worst outcomes" type problems, preferring to use those bad outcomes to motivate people to not be poor/lazy/unlucky.
Unfortunately the resources required to create some kind of middle tier education are truly bonkers (it's also de facto racist: 30% of Black kids and 20% of Hispanic kids are impoverished, so if you're saying "poor kids with all their problems not welcome here" you're kind of also saying Black/Hispanic kids with all their problems not welcome here--which also doesn't super work because of de facto segregation, so you're also saying "no middle tier schools here"). There are around 70m kids in the US. Let's take the top 2/3 (they're in households making > 199% of the poverty line) and assume ideal class size of 12. That's $229,000,000,000 a year just in salary (current median teacher salary is $58,950), which is more than 2/3 the current DoE budget, plus you'd have to dramatically increase salary and benefits if you wanted to hire that many new teachers anyway.
But, yeah overall my point is it's really hard to appreciate the scale of the problem both like, logically (can it really cost this much money?), emotionally (my kid got hit with a chair today), and culturally (I honestly thought making a quarter of a million dollars a year ensured my kid would never be hit by a chair in school; who do I see about this). But, it really is just the case we are going have to spend money like crazy and hire a shitload of professional educators. It might seem expensive, but you'll pay 10x if kids slide to the end of the pipeline--to say nothing of the moral cost.
In neighborhoods with better school districts, home prices and rents are higher in proportion to the demand people have for better schools, creating de facto segregation based on income, and by your logic, by race too.
What do you mean by "fault"? My concept of "fault" is whoever I'm going to punish to make society better. (More precisely, assume everyone has some policy `p_i` for actions they take. If a certain action `a` is bad for society, they get punished proportionally according to `KL(a, p_i)`, i.e. they are that much at fault.)
If their home circumstances are forcing them to act this way, then too bad for them! That is part of them and they should be blamed until you can fix the root cause.
Expecting children to be responsible for their own actions to this degree is unrealistic, any policy built on that expectation will be ineffective at best and likely harmful, and thus anyone advocating for it is at best asking us to waste resources and at worst asking us to harm kids.
You've got over 20 posts in this thread, many of them putting the blame on children with no evidence that this would be helpful (probably because it wouldn't be). You've yet to contribute good ideas or substantial new information to our discussion. Your behavior is making our group worse, and ironically if we were to follow your advice here we'd have to throw you out.
I can tell you're passionate about, but frustrated by this issue. My advice is to take a breath and if you're really interested, do some reading and get involved. There are successful education systems out there (everyone references Finland); things aren't hopeless.
> You've yet to contribute good ideas or substantial new information to our discussion. Your behavior is making our group worse, and ironically if we were to follow your advice here we'd have to throw you out.
Do you really believe this? I flagged your comment, because I'm worried that you are trying to convince people by building an ethos (and tearing down others' ethos) instead of appealing to logic. Your writing is very good, but there isn't much substance to it. For example, you say
> Expecting children to be responsible for their own actions to this degree is unrealistic
but don't substantiate why it is unrealistic. I've found that when people disagree (in America) there are usually layers of rhetoric that have been built around the issue, so much so that it can be hard to dig down to the crux of the issue and actually resolve the disagreement. This is why I'm worried about how you're writing: it seems to be adding layers instead of removing them. (EDIT: Note, I don't think you are doing this intentionally.)
Now, I do think I have been adding to the discussion. For example:
- I proposed we raise salaries by 10x and fire everyone to balance the budget.
- I gave an anecdote showing that even top-tier public schools have anti-learning cultures.
- I've pointed out that the "for whom" is important when discussing what is good or bad.
I wanna start off by saying you're clearly a smart person and I'm not trying to run you out or anything. I'm--both deliberately and subconsciously--saltier post Trump v2 and I'm trying to work through it. A big part of me wants to litigate everything all the time, but I'm gonna avoid that here because I believe in the HN community and that wouldn't build and strengthen that community (imagine the breathing exercises it took to attain this level of clarity haha).
Instead I want to discuss your basic point: we should expel problem kids because it improves outcomes for non-problem kids. I don't want to come off as condescending but I DDG'd for "does expelling students improve outcomes" and literally nobody thinks that. Here's some stuff to read:
"evidence shows these tactics aren’t effective in changing a student’s conduct, and carry major long-term risks for their welfare. Students most affected tend to be those with higher and more complex needs, such as those with disabilities and mental health issues."
"The findings underscore that suspending students does little to reduce future misbehavior for the disciplined students or their peers, nor did it result in improved academic achievement for peers or perceptions of positive school climate." (emphasis mine)
"Suspensions do not reduce classroom disruptions, and often encourage them."
"Suspensions do not improve outcomes for students, whether suspended or not."
"Suspensions do not prevent, and may increase, the risk of school violence."
"Restorative justice focuses on reconciliation with victims, learning from misconduct, and repairing harm caused by student misconduct. Victim-offender mediation is a common restorative justice program. For one example, in Denver Public Schools, a successful school-based restorative justice program decreased expulsions by 82%, suspensions by 39%, and referrals to law enforcement by 15%."
"Black students in North Carolina are more than four times as likely to be suspended or expelled as white students. Research has found no evidence that the over-representation of Black students in school suspension rates is due to higher rates of misbehavior."
"In total, Washington students lost over 169,689 days of class time during 2015. When students are suspended or expelled, they cannot participate in class, are less likely to complete schoolwork, and are more likely to skip school."
TL;DR: suspending and expelling doesn't do what you think it does; instead it causes a lot of harm; other approaches are better.
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Alright, now for some soapboxing. Again, you're a smart person, so I earnestly want to know did you jump in this thread to push your wildly incorrect take before Googling, or have you drank some kind of anti-DoE anti-public-education anti-teacher kool-aid? I'm so deeply weary of arrogant STEM people assuming there are no smart people anywhere else--I just wrote a whole screed in that Paul Graham wokeness thread about this exact thing. Educators are smart! They run studies on how best to educate! They're so easy to find and read!
This is the kind of thing I'm thinking about when it comes to what improves and enriches a discussion. Giving people information they may not have, getting new information and making connections that aren't yet there, giving people grace. The moment we give in and just start trying to win the argument we've lost the whole thing--we have to enrich our mental model of the world together. Or more pointedly, I'm relying on you to help me enrich my mental model of the world, so I need you to call me out when I'm blathering on tilt (could maybe be doing that here) or I've got it wrong, or you know something I don't. If you're gonna be effective at that, you have to do the reading, you have to be self aware, and you have to have compassion. It is work, but people doing that work is how HN stays valuable.
Thanks for the very thoughtful response! I admit I also get salty, particularly when it comes to education. It feels so obvious things should be a specific way, but of course that may just be my STEM person arrogance :P.
So, what I'm mostly confused about is why expulsion wouldn't work. We know some schools are better than others. We know students in "gifted" classes do better than others, and if your references are correct even a regular student in a "gifted" class would soak up the positive climate and turn out better than in a regular class. This seems to imply that expelling enough students should make the school better. For an extreme example, you could have everyone take a test, expel the lowest 50% of marks to a lower-tier school, and the remaining students would have better marks. This comparison is a little unfair, because expulsion is usually reserved for disruptive behaviour, not poor marks, but you could similarly have every teacher compile a list of misbehaving students. When I hear that expulsion wouldn't fix the problem, it must be because they are not expelling enough people!
I'm also a little leery of drawing the same conclusions as the news articles you linked. It seems likely that suspension/expulsion does always work, there's just a causation between lots of students misbehaving in a school and more students being expelled in the school. For example, the second news article says
> The findings underscore that suspending students does little to reduce future misbehavior for the disciplined students or their peers, nor did it result in improved academic achievement for peers or perceptions of positive school climate.
which has a few paragraphs on peer spillover effects from out-of-school suspension vs. in-school suspension. They do find a 1-2% decrease in the peers achieving ELA/math credit with out-of-school suspension (20-30% for the suspended), but there are also 20,000 incidents of out-of-school suspension with a median length ~two weeks [Table A.4]. Their data comes from the NYCDOE which has just under a million students, which means their peers also being suspended could account for half of the decrease! Then there's the correlation between negative school climate, more grievous offences, and out-of-school suspension (re: Table A.4), and it seems to be a clear-cut case of Simpson's paradox.
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Alright, time for the spicier part of this comment.
> I just wrote a whole screed in that Paul Graham wokeness thread about this exact thing. Educators are smart! They run studies on how best to educate! They're so easy to find and read!
I don't think the so-called educators are being smart. I think the average wokist is smarter than the average MAGAt (by a lot), but most systems fall into the Goodhart trap. People who optimise for looking good rather than being good often bubble to the top. This is why I think many woke arguments lean heavily on emotional appeals. The callous or ignorant MAGAts that only care about the gas price ironically end up with a more meritocratic system, because results matter.
I didn't partcularly like Graham's essay either, but I do sympathise with the anti-woke sentiment almost entirely because I believe this Goodharting has devastated the education system. For example, a common refrain I found in the comment section and your linked articles was,
> Expelling the student is not a good solution. Think about how this will effect his life! And what if he's going through abuse? Is it even his fault?
The MAGAt mentality is "I don't care, show me the results". They find current schools lacking, but don't particularly care about why they're lacking which is where school choice/vouchers come in. You don't need to fix things if you can just let the market find something better. This is a rather callous/ignorant take, and you can do much better by caring to find where the current system went wrong. I suspect it's because wokists forgot why we assign moral blame.
I think the purpose of "blame" in society is to figure out who to punish/rehabilitate to make society better. Note that even if there is a confounding factor it does not excuse the blame. I believe I've already mentioned this to you: you assign moral blame based on KL(bad action, person's policy). Why? If someone puts a gun to your head, and tells you to rob a store, you are unlikely to repeat the action. Your policy is really only, "rob stores when I have a gun to my head". On the other hand, if you were abused as a child and turned out a kleptomaniac, you are extremely likely to repeat the offence.
Now, rehabilitation has to actually work. If someone is starving, it doesn't matter how many beatings you give them, they will still steal food. Positive rehabilitation is often better for society, because you don't need to spend a bunch of money on the justice system, and the rehabilitated criminal can hold a job and pay taxes. Punitive rehabilitation works by decreasing the cost of future crimes from similarly-minded people. Note that I'm being really careful to talk about what is good for society, not the criminal. After all, every individual except the criminal (and friends/family) gains more by asking for the good of society, not the individual.
This ties into wokism and education as so: the wokist gives the emotional appeal,
> Expelling the student is not a good solution. Think about how this will effect his life! And what if he's going through abuse? Is it even his fault?
and the proper response is,
> good for whom?
As I mentioned at the start of this comment, it is good for the top 50% of students to expel the bottom 50% to an alternative school. Should we? In reality, we have to work under money and (as you pointed out) pitchfork & torch constraints. My issue with emotional appeals is they bring out the pitchforks, for potentially no good reason.
For example, I went to middle school in a rather conservative city, but even there the gifted program was eliminated in the name of equity. High school graduation standards have dropped, again in the name of equity. And California briefly proposed not allowing 8th graders to take algebra (for equity's sake) until they received massive backlash.
I care much more about what is actually good for society than what looks good. I really don't see how it's good to be holding back our brightest students to the bottom quintile's pace, or allow disruptions from known troublemakers.
At this point I'm rather tired; I might continue writing this tomorrow, but I probably won't. I'll just end with what I wish the school system looked like:
1. A national placement exam for each grade (including Kindergarteners). Students get placed into schools and classrooms entirely from their rankings (within the local system). The top scorers are offered room and board at nationally-run schools.
2. Disruptive students get kicked to penitentiaries. I read elsewhere in this thread of a city with three tiers of schools: one for regular students, one for first-time expulsions, and a last for the chronically expelled. This is what I'm imagining.
3. The same people that write olympiad problems and run the summer camps are hired to create a new curriculum. Quite frankly, Common Core is a failure; you see a decline in AMC 10/12 scores and participants about eight years after it was introduced, i.e. just enough time for the students who learned from Common Core to be taking the exams.
4. Everyone is fired, and as many people as money there is are hired at $300–500k/yr (in total compensation) to teach. At $15k/yr per student (what the US currently spends), and 30 students to a class, this should be just doable.
> Thanks for the very thoughtful response! I admit I also get salty, particularly when it comes to education. It feels so obvious things should be a specific way, but of course that may just be my STEM person arrogance :P.
Thank you (also for indulging)! As an also-arrogant STEM person myself we can muddle through together haha.
> So, what I'm mostly confused about is why expulsion wouldn't work.
I think a number of dynamics are at play here:
- Schools don't usually reach for suspension/expulsion that quickly because they're weighing the impact of the problem kid's behavior on others vs. the impact of a suspension/expulsion on the kid, so their disruptive lingers.
- Some schools have zero tolerance policies that suspend/expel very quickly, but it turns out that creates a super weird climate (students defending themselves are also suspended/expelled, school staff feel pretty bad suspending/expelling all the time, you can't build relationships with problem kids which is deeply dehumanizing on both sides, etc.)
- Problem kids have a weird habit of just coming right back. A lot of us are envisioning a relatively rich school district with multiple nets to cordon off problem kids, bost districts have the one school, maybe if they're lucky there's an "alternative school" in the parking lot, which is a trailer that should only ever have 5 people in it, but it has 15. Maybe some people are advocating for some kind of super harsh zero-tolerance-expelled-forever pipeline, but let me introduce those advocates to the School-to-Prison Pipeline [0].
- Problem kids are still in your neighborhood, your kid is pretty likely to still see them outside of school, and that leads to more weird social dynamics.
But moreover, let's say that zero-tolerance-expel-immediately leads to better outcomes for kids and we have some way of totally segregating problem kids both in school and broader society. Those kids are still a problem for society that we'll have to deal with at some point. Today they're throwing stuff in class, tomorrow they're breaking the windows of your car or running drugs in your neighborhood. At that point in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, rehabilitating the person is extremely expensive.
> seems to be a clear-cut case of Simpson's paradox
Nah, definitely not. A commonly cited paper [1] has a pretty good table breaking down the effects of various classroom properties on outcomes. Reading it, you'll immediately get a great look at why private/charter school outcomes are so much better: they work pretty hard to cherry-pick kids that lead to better outcomes, thus exacerbating the School-to-Prison Pipeline issue by putting more pressure on public schools. Anyway, there's so much on this topic you're gonna have to switch your argument to explaining a conspiracy in educational research:
Blame essentially never works, and it's because people are the products of systems. You talk about Goodhart's Law; another dynamic is where we do things that feel good or confirm our understanding of the world despite poor outcomes. Harsh disciplinary policies are the poster child for this. I'm gonna assume here you're pretty naive to the criminal justice space (this is because anyone who knows anything about criminal justice understands blame essentially never works), so I strongly encourage you to interrogate your priors here and read up on deterrence, punishment, and so on.
> National placement test for each grade
This would really only measure socioeconomic status, like most (all?) standardized tests. You also get stuck in tracks, so if say your mom dies in 3rd grade, you do poorly on the test and get bumped down, you're probably bumped down forever. That's a bad outcome.
> Disruptive students get kicked to penitentiaries.
Not only are there completely valid reasons for students becoming disruptive (parental issues, injuries, mental health issues, etc), the expense of this is out of this world. Even in the cheapest state (Arkansas) spending-per-inmate is $23k/yr--the median is something like $60k. Your options here are dramatically increase taxes or create a truly horrific human rights disaster.
> The same people that write olympiad problems and run the summer camps are hired to create a new curriculum.
This doesn't work because different people learn in different ways. You need dedicated, educated, well-compensated, supported professionals applying state-of-the-art techniques and research to get the outcomes we want. Also when you talk about replacing Common Core with some new standard, you're still not escaping Goodhart's Law.
> Everyone is fired, and as many people as money there is are hired at $300–500k/yr (in total compensation) to teach [30 student classes].
30 student classes obviates any benefit you'd get from anything else. There are no systems with those class sizes that are achieving the outcomes we want. You also can't literally fire all teachers. The NEA or teacher tenure won't let you. Training and interviewing 2.333 million teachers (plus administrators) is a gargantuan undertaking. Who moves to the middle of nowhere in Arizona, or Mississippi? How will you find so many qualified people? That $15k/yr number you keep citing isn't all salary; we spend around $236b on ~4m teacher salaries, which yields ~600k teachers (at $400k/yr salary), so you still need to find $680b (which is more than the budget of Medicaid) for the remaining 1.7 million teachers. You also have to somehow survive the political fallout of firing hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have families and various health issues.
> 30 student classes obviates any benefit you'd get from anything else. There are no systems with those class sizes that are achieving the outcomes we want.
I disagree? Universities have larger lectures, and students can move to lower classes if theirs moves too fast. I think your argument goes somewhat like:
| Assume each student randomly needs extra help some x% of the time. Then, the expected length until no needs help is (1-x%)^-n. Just to throw a number out there, assume ten students can move half as quick as one student. Then by the time you get to thirty students, you're moving 20% as fast as with ten students.
However, x% decreases with higher-salary teachers, and you can just move on without answering questions: "Ask me after class, we don't have time today." Finally, if you organize classes so similarly ranked students are together, the correlation in needing help increases, and the pace improves.
> You also can't literally fire all teachers. The NEA or teacher tenure won't let you.
Not with that attitude! Milei layed off 20% of his federal employees, and Musk 80% of Xitter. So, it is possible. They can protest, but I don't have sympathy for shitty teachers looking after their own interests.
> Training and interviewing 2.333 million teachers (plus administrators) is a gargantuan undertaking. Who moves to the middle of nowhere in Arizona, or Mississippi? How will you find so many qualified people?
I think the key is to steal employees ;). If you're offering double the salary, I think the local universities might lose a few professors. Also, as I mentioned, the university pyramid scheme is pumping out more PhDs than they know what to do with. There are also many universities shutting down as enrollment drops. Finally, interviewing 2 million teacher positions is a gargantuan undertaking, but each town only needs a few dozen. The federal government can create a teachers' job board for people to apply to, and let local towns do the hiring. Lots of doctors move to the middle of Nowhere, Mississippi, so I'm sure lots of teachers would too for a competitive salary.
> You also get stuck in tracks, so if say your mom dies in 3rd grade, you do poorly on the test and get bumped down, you're probably bumped down forever. That's a bad outcome.
Bad for whom? It's great for the kid who got bumped up. If you really want a better spot, you can study harder for the next test. No one is *stuck* in tracks. Do you know how I got good at math? I just solved thousands of math competition problems I found on AoPS.com. I would have improved faster if I had a coach/teacher to guide me, but the resources are out there if someone actually wants to hop tracks. It'll be harder than just never losing your spot, but that's no reason to give up.
> This [olympiad problem->curriculum writers] doesn't work because different people learn in different ways. You need dedicated, educated, well-compensated, supported professionals applying state-of-the-art techniques and research to get the outcomes we want. Also when you talk about replacing Common Core with some new standard, you're still not escaping Goodhart's Law.
I call bullshit. The SAT/ACT do not go high enough to distinguish the top 0.1% from the top 0.5%, and other (American/state) standardized exams are even worse, which means the so-called professionals literally do not have metrics that can capture that signal to tune their curriculae against. On the other hand, olympiad problem writers/camp counselors have a proven track record of doing exactly that. Here are two anecdotes:
1) In elementary school, my gifted class' teacher was complaining that her evaluations looked bad, because her students never showed improvement. It wasn't because they didn't improve, it's just because they stayed at 99%.
2) When Luke Robitaille got second in MATHCOUNTS in sixth grade, the next two years of exams became much harder, solely to make sure he wouldn't get a perfect score. His eighth grade year had the lowest top twelve cutoff in history, but at least there was a full spread at the top.
At the very least, we should agree that smarter students need an Uncommon Core curriculum.
> Today they're throwing stuff in class, tomorrow they're breaking the windows of your car or running drugs in your neighborhood. At that point in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, rehabilitating the person is extremely expensive.
In my other reply, the TLDR; is essentially, "it's the other way around". It's much more expensive to rehabilitate them in the classroom than in the prison system.
>> 30 student classes obviates any benefit you'd get from anything else. There are no systems with those class sizes that are achieving the outcomes we want.
> I disagree? Universities have larger lectures, and students can move to lower classes if theirs moves too fast. I think your argument goes somewhat like:
You're doing the thing again where you apply your expertise to a domain you're naive to. Google for class size and outcomes.
>> You also can't literally fire all teachers. The NEA or teacher tenure won't let you.
> Not with that attitude!
Contracts are contracts. Attitude has nothing to do with it.
> I think the key is to steal employees ;). If you're offering double the salary, I think the local universities might lose a few professors.
How do you deal with losing... let's just say 2m people from other high-value professions? Unemployment is at historic lows. You also haven't wrestled with finding ~$700b to pay for all of this. There's ~100,000 public schools in the US in ~13,000 school districts. You think you'll get good outcomes letting them all hire individually? Will you put caps on salary so smaller districts don't lose out?
You've honestly not thought through this at all. You're again walking onto an issue you're entirely ignorant of, and if you were in charge of it you'd thoroughly destroy it.
>> You also get stuck in tracks, so if say your mom dies in 3rd grade, you do poorly on the test and get bumped down, you're probably bumped down forever. That's a bad outcome.
> Bad for whom? It's great for the kid who got bumped up.
You're naive to the problems with standardized testing and trying to supplement with anecdata.
> [Weird takes on common core and standardized testing]
There may be a problem with the educational system not serving highly gifted students, but that's way further down the list than kids who graduate without basic reading and math skills. I'm not saying we can't walk and chew gum at the same time, but dealing with gifted students is a whole other kettle of fish (which judging by your anecdata I'm confident you've read nothing about).
>> Today they're throwing stuff in class, tomorrow they're breaking the windows of your car or running drugs in your neighborhood. At that point in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, rehabilitating the person is extremely expensive.
> In my other reply, the TLDR; is essentially, "it's the other way around". It's much more expensive to rehabilitate them in the classroom than in the prison system.
I'm gonna quote something from my response to Paul Graham's wokeness essay: "It's like someone's running an experiment on how many times you can be bafflingly wrong before people notice." I'm noticing.
There may be a problem with the educational system not serving highly gifted students, but that's way further down the list than kids who graduate without basic reading and math skills. I'm not saying we can't walk and chew gum at the same time, but dealing with gifted students is a whole other kettle of fish (which judging by your anecdata I'm confident you've read nothing about).
the answer is simple - these two groups should NEVER be in the same classrooms - NEVER. these two groups will soon approach being different species. The entire issue is that they ARE in the same classroom but shittiest programmer is not sharing an office with Googlers working on search algo - yet somehow this is acceptable in schools. I have to pay tens and tens of thousands of dollars every year to make sure my kid does not have to deal with that nonsense
> There may be a problem with the educational system not serving highly gifted students, but that's way further down the list than kids who graduate without basic reading and math skills.
My entire premise is it's way further up the list. I called you out originally for "adding layers instead of removing them." You won't even acknowledge my cruxes exist, in fact you "refuse to even continue considering it." It's like they say: insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Everyone you talk to from the other side is baffingly wrong, because you keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.
I think the school->prison pipeline is a real issue, but I think a poor quality of education is a much bigger deal because smart, educated people generate exponentially more wealth since the industrial revolution. If you want what is best for everyone, you would focus more resources on top-performing students rather than less! Sure, top-performing students would turn out better than mid-performing students—even with fewer resources—but that's a tautology and an emotional appeal. I think the tricky part is to make sure top students give back to society once they graduate, but that seems more of a cultural issue to solve. Boring students to death probably doesn't help, though.
Now, you brought up that national testing + placement would mostly reflect socio-economic status. I think this is concerning because it lead to in-groups reinforcing themselves, which naturally decreases motivation for future rich people to help the rest of society. However, we already have examples of placement tests, and this isn't what happens! NYC has several "specialized" schools, including one of the best high schools in the nation, Stuyvesant. Admissions to Stuyvesant are entirely based on your rank on the SHSAT, yet 48% of their students are "economically disadvantaged" according to USNews. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I would expect lower or lower-middle class. This data also matches up with my intuitions: although intelligence is heritable (through genes or upbringing), there are exponentially more "economically disadvantaged" people than rich people, so even though rich kids are overrepresented, they are still outnumbered by poor(er) kids.
Also, keep in mind that rich people will always be able to pay for private schools or tutors if they find public education lacking. So, you are really only depriving poor students of any possibility of a good education by lumping everyone together, which is worse for reinforcing classism. As you mentioned, charter/private school outcomes are so much better because they work pretty hard to cherry-pick kids that lead to better oucomes. Why not give everyone that opportunity?
That's a little facetious, because not everyone has that opportunity. Some people are just not genetically predisposed towards exams, or they're being abused at home, or they have to work after school to buy food for their younger siblings. But, it doesn't really matter why someone cannot do/be better if we're unable to fix the why. Until it can be fixed, the problem is just a part of them and they'll be punished for it. This isn't very sympathetic, but it's the game-theoretical optimal approach for getting to the Pareto frontier.
You mention that blame/punishment essentially never works, which is probably because humans are not perfectly rational agents. Sure. I've definitely seen this when I play Risk online. You have to use different strategies when people are irrational/prone to mistakes, e.g. with novices it's usually good to make a big stack and wait for everyone else to noob-slam, while with masters it's better to work with the othe rplayers to slowly choke out the rest. Optimal strategies may be less tolerant to mistakes, and a common mistake humans make is, "this person hurt me, so I will hurt them even more," without considering why they were hurt. A common theme I saw in school->prison pipeline studies is that youth get disaffected with society/the justice system, so they end up committing more crimes. If people really are being irrational, in such a way that punishment will not work, you really only have three options:
1. Force them into rationality.
2. Rehabilitate them through positive reinforcement.
3. Eliminate them from society, e.g. sending them to Louisiana/Australia, prisons/executions, or closed communities.
I'd argue that you should take whichever option is best for society, i.e. costs it the least. Why?
a) Societies cannot be comprised of mostly (weighting by utility) negative-externality people for very long.
b) Everyone else is better off by eliminating such people, thus they are motivated to do so in whichever way is cheapest.
If it were cheaper to just execute all criminals, or commit horrific human rights disasters to make prisons cheap to run, that's what society should do. Historically, that's what societies have done. Nowadays, it probably isn't cheaper; even if the average inmate spends just as much time in prison as out of it, they are probably close to net-positive to society. The cheapest solution probably is rehabilitation for most people except the unfixable, and even there, life in prison is probably cheaper than execution.
So, I think I agree with you about rehabilitation, but probably not for the reasons you cite. I think "people being products of systems" is a rather naive take; if people were products of stable systems (in the physics sense), punishment actually would work. Conservatives have a bias towards everything being a stable system [which is true; you are exponentially more likely to end up in more stable (determined by transition probabilities) trembling-hand/thermodynamic equilibria], which is probably why they're all pro-punishment and such. Note that rehabilitation can still be cheaper, but at least punishment would work. It's only when you have unstable systems that punishment might not work at all. It's a little worrying to think that America's system might be unstable right now, but the race riots and past two elections kind of show it is. More accurately, it's too easy to transition out of its current maximum for punishment to really dissuade future malcontents.
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Alright, let's return to education. I think we're in agreement that:
I) The school->prison pipeline is real.
II) Imprisonment is expensive, probably moreso than rehabilitation.
As I put at the top, we probably disagree that:
III) This cost is more than that of a poor education system.
I think rehabilitation through the education system is far more expensive. Here's just a back-of-the-napkin calculation. Suppose that all inmates are directly a result of the school->prison pipeline. It costs ~$70bn/yr to incarcerate them, but let's also assume we're missing out on 2 million people * $65k/yr = $130bn from jobs they could be working. This amounts to about $200bn/yr in costs to society.
Now, the number of billionaires increases by about 36 each year, and the average billionaire has $7bn. If a better education were to double the number of billionaires produced each year, this would entirely offset the cost. Of course, billionaires are usually better at capturing value than producing it, but at least some educated STEM guy below them is producing the value. I think this is entirely doable by expelling more students. In fact, I think the justice system will only start costing more than the wealth generated from better education (through the top students) once the pitchforks and torches come out.
Similarly, we should be able to do a cost-benefit analysis on teacher salaries. In reality, the most efficient use of money is to pour it into the top schools (and have entrance exams), but the metrics don't look as good. Most legislators care about the quintiles, not the top 0.1%, plus the wokists hate inequity. And, even bottom schools need much better teachers than are currently around. That's why I want to raise all salaries to $300-500k/yr.
You mentioned that only $236bn is spent on ~4m teachers, but there actually is another $600bn going elsewhere. If you want an average class size of 20 students, you only need ~2.5m teachers, so it should be possible if you strip everything else to the bare-bones. My elementary school class was taught in a portable, and I think that's better than having a shitty teacher.
You've done a lot of thinking here, but if you did 80% of the thinking and 20% of the reading you'd reach better conclusions. There are systems that spend more per student than the US does, more % of GDP than the US does, they have lower classroom sizes than the US, they have better systems for gifted students, their students spend more time in class, they pay teachers professional salaries, they have more state of the art instructional programs, etc. etc. etc. None are trending towards the outcomes you're suggesting; in particular the EU isn't producing more billionaires (this is a product of income and wealth inequality, not educational system efficacy).
> I'd argue that you should take whichever option is best for society, i.e. costs it the least. Why?
> a) Societies cannot be comprised of mostly (weighting by utility) negative-externality people for very long.
> b) Everyone else is better off by eliminating such people, thus they are motivated to do so in whichever way is cheapest.
I can't imagine what you might mean by negative-externality people, but whatever it might be let me inform you there are lots of countries/governments/societies in the world that aren't doing so hot, and they've been doing not so hot for quite some time. Is this some kind of quasi-rational-market hypothesis for societies? Nowhere is this true. Why do people stay in abusive relationships? Why did Black people continue to live in States that practiced segregation? Why do people still eat unhealthy food, or smoke, or drink?
> If it were cheaper to just execute all criminals, or commit horrific human rights disasters to make prisons cheap to run, that's what society should do. Historically, that's what societies have done.
I think relying on the actions of governments who knew almost nothing (Earth is flat, what is air, diseases are punishment from God, the sun revolves around Earth) is a bankrupt argument. Governments have almost never been data-driven. Reducing the rubric of how governments/societies should act to "do whatever's cheaper" is... so wrong I don't even really know where to start. How do you justify investments? How do you justify things like entering WWII or The Manhattan Project? How do you know what's cheaper or will result in the most gains ahead of time? This can't be a real argument. Are we about to go the entire history of how governments work? I refuse. Do more reading.
> I think "people being products of systems" is a rather naive take; if people were products of stable systems (in the physics sense), punishment actually would work.
Punishment doesn't work. Deterrence is a myth, and recidivism rates are off the charts. Again you're naive to the criminal justice system. If we don't think better systems/environments lead to better outcomes and worse systems/environments lead to worse outcomes, why are we trying to improve the US educational system at all? A kid's educational attainment is preordained right? Even if you think this is a straw man, it does us no good to consider "some kids just suck" when building an educational system, again because of the School-to-Prison Pipeline where bad outcomes are so lopsided.
> Similarly, we should be able to do a cost-benefit analysis on teacher salaries. In reality, the most efficient use of money is to pour it into the top schools (and have entrance exams), but the metrics don't look as good.
Your argument relies on the prospect of these super students increasing GDP so much we offset the cost of shunting tons of students into the School-to-Prison pipeline. Not only is there no evidence for this, it's a deeply immoral system. I refuse to even continue considering it.
To be pointed about it, I have people in my family who are special needs. I myself was disruptive in school because of life circumstance. When you advocate literally for imprisoning me and members of my family, at some point I have to recognize we're fighting. I've reached that point now.
> I can't imagine what you might mean by negative-externality people
Google is your friend. Essentially, in a counterfactual universe where they never existed, the world would be better off. If you have more negative externalities than positive externalities, your society is draining wealth, and will eventually disappear.
> Punishment doesn't work. Deterrence is a myth, and recidivism rates are off the charts.
We've already gone over this. Go rehabilitate, I don't care. Just rehabilitate people in a way so they aren't actively commiting crimes against education.
> Your argument relies on the prospect of these super students increasing GDP so much we offset the cost of shunting tons of students into the School-to-Prison pipeline. Not only is there no evidence for this, it's a deeply immoral system. I refuse to even continue considering it.
You are trying to coerce one group into sacrifcing enormously for another group, and you say my system is immoral? If sacrifices have to be made (they don't), why do you get to choose who bleeds on the altar?
Also, there is plenty evidence that super students do offset the cost. For example, North Korea's system puts disproportionally more money into their top students, and they usually rank higher on the International Mathematics Olympiad than every European country except Russia. The benefit is mostly for their defense: they really needed nuclear weapons, and they couldn't get them without investing in their best students. They might not even exist as a country today if they didn't do so. What could be more beneficial to their society?
> There are systems that spend more per student than the US does, more % of GDP than the US does, they have lower classroom sizes than the US, they have better systems for gifted students, their students spend more time in class, they pay teachers professional salaries, they have more state of the art instructional programs, etc. etc. etc. None are trending towards the outcomes you're suggesting; in particular the EU isn't producing more billionaires
Look, everyone acknowledges Europe has a stagnation problem, America is better for startups, and the USD being the principal reserve currency makes Americans richer. You cannot directly compare countries like that. I know you're smart enough to recognize that, so I'm astonished you wrote this down.
Ideally, you could just randomly assign two policies, and see which works better. But in the real world, pretty much all studies in education are surveys, and it's hard to account for differences in space (countries/culture/socioeconomic status). Even differences in time (when new policies are introduced) have confounders, but less so. If you look at those studies, you'll find that new policies that throw money at smaller class sizes or higher-quality teachers lead to better educational outcomes. It's uncontroversial to say that better educational outcomes lead to better salaries, and higher wealth generation. (BTW, I'm not using wealth to mean USD, I mean quality-of-life. The USD is just a convenient proxy. Not sure if that was clear earlier.)
Tracking is more controversial. However, the one study that did just randomly assign tracking to 120 first grade classes found it benefited everyone:
Most other studies use standardized exams (e.g. the PISA), and let me remind you, those are not difficult enough to see improvement for the upper percentiles! You flippantly dismissed it, but it's a huge deal. If your national assessment were the AMC 10/12 the bottom 50% would all score zero points (really 37.5, but that's irrelevant), and tracking would look like a resounding success if the top few thousand showed improvement.
> To be pointed about it, I have people in my family who are special needs. I myself was disruptive in school because of life circumstance. When you advocate literally for imprisoning me and members of my family, at some point I have to recognize we're fighting. I've reached that point now.
This upsets me. Have you, this whole time, only been arguing for your in-group? Every time you said, "what is best for society," did you really just mean what is best for the people you care about? I, too, want what is best for my in-group, but I've tried to talk about how ranking/expulsions/etc. would increase wealth generation, and improve everyone's quality of life.
Quite frankly, your in-group needs my in-group, not the other way around. If we really are just trying to capture value for our in-groups, people in mine could just give up on public schools and go home-school their kids. I don't think this is optimal for either of our in-groups, but you have to acknowledge that if you want certain people to go to public school, you can't be defecting against those very people! If we really do have a conflict between two in-groups, why do you feel entitled to anything from the other side?
You've mentioned the school->prison pipeline, and how a lack of education brings out the pitchforks and torches. This is entirely true on the other side as well. As you saw in the comment section, a lot of smart people literally feel like school was prison to them. They were bullied, abused, had no freedom, etc. We've both acknowledged that bad students may become disaffected with school and society (if we don't rehabilitate properly), but only I've seemed to recognize that good students will too. Perhaps the difference is, disaffected bad students become violent, while disaffected good students become quantitative traders. Well, guess what? If your entitlement comes through a threat of violence, the correct response is to eliminate that threat.
Maybe you are alright with threatening violence, but I'd rather we not fight. And we don't have to. Society holds itself together through mutually beneficial deals (and a plethora of convenient lies). The minimum I'm asking for is for public schools to be mutually beneficial. This is why, although I think it is best for society to put extra resources into their top stuents, I am okay spending only equal resources.
>Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education.
They may have a right to an education, but they need to be at an alternative school with teachers equipped to handle their behavior and classmates who are in similar situations. If they’re going to ruin their classes for their classmates, those classmates shouldn’t be innocent, well-behaved students.
They have a right to education much like one has the right to bear arms or publish a book. You can have it, but your rights end where you demand someone else give it to you involuntarily, particularly with violence.
Which is where an expulsion often leads, similar to how adults unable to function in society are channeled into SSDI, homelessness, or prison in some combination.
There are unlikely to be many caring and constructive adults there though, for reasons that should be obvious.
"Rights" only exist through the will of an omnipotent force, which is an undefined concept. I think it's better to respond to ill-defined arguments with simply that: "interpretation error, argument 'right' is ill-defined."
Moral nihilism is obvious and not helpful. Everyone knows that our moral language is just a manner of speaking. We nevertheless engage with moral concepts because we reject moral nihilism at least from a pragmatic point of view. Pointing out that things like rights, justice, etc., have no real existence is not clever.
> For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them.
Are you sure administrators care? I live in Oakland, where some of the public schools have absolutely abysmal (academic) statistics. I haven't checked the expulsion statistics. I'm not sure anyone cares.
Literal children are incapable of forfeiting their rights by being "violent and disruptive", and it would be insane if they could because they can't possibly begin to understand what they'd be giving up. Clearly that right is sometimes taken from them anyway, but that's neither the fault or a failure of the child.
Often kids who get their right to education taken from them are failed by their parents and/or by the schools, but the blame cannot be placed on the child for that. Every child, excepting those with significant mental illness or intellectual limitation, can and should be successfully educated. Any educational system that is incapable of handling a child's tantrum or helping a child in crisis is a failed system.
It isn't an either / or. Expelled children have to go somewhere. So you provide education / rehabilitation facilities where they hopefully manage to get their behaviour under control and can be brought back into mainstream education or stay in those institutions where they can at least get a bit of an education rather than just being left to roam the streets. Whether there's the appetite to fund that kind of institution properly is another matter.
This is what they did in my school district when I was growing up. You had 3 tiers. First tier is regular school. If you get expelled, you go to tier 2 which is a school for people who got expelled. If you get expelled from there, you go to tier 3 school, which is where all the really bad kids go. This worked pretty well, keeping in mind all the students' needs in mind.
They did away with that since I was young and now they just let the disruptive kids run rampant.
Keep in mind, you only have one chance really to get an education. If your learning is impeded by uncontrollable children, you now have a greater risk of life failure because you weren't able to learn the fundamentals, because a class of 30 was always being disrupted by one or two people. Say you didn't learn pre-Algebra well because of disruption; now you're behind when it comes to the higher level math for the rest of your school tenure and ultimately, life. These disruptions could have major long term consequences for other kids trying to learn.
Finally, teachers' average turnaround is 4 years last time I checked. That means there are very few veteran teachers available to show new teachers the ropes and how to manage a classroom full of teenage kids. Not that it matters, the new teachers will look for other careers within 4 years on average. The cycle continues.
> If you get expelled, you go to tier 2 which is a school for people who got expelled.
So if you're a kid who's already struggling, you get sent to be surrounded by other kids who are already struggling.
> you only have one chance really to get an education.
That's true for the bad kids too.
I 100% get where you're coming from. My kids come home from school and tell stories about disruptive stuff other kids do and how much it gets in the way of the school functioning effectively.
At the same time... what are we supposed to do with those kids? The kids that have behavioral problems are much more likely to be that way because they have a bad home life. So if you expel them, they're missing out on education and they're spending more time in a bad environment. They're not going to get any better after that. Then what? Now they're a year behind academically and have the shame of being expelled. Their behavior is likely even worse because they spent a year not being socialized in a bad environment. So they're even worse next year, and they get expelled again.
Eventually, they stop going to school entirely. But at least here in the US, the number of jobs available to people without any kind of school degree gets smaller every year. So now they can't find work.
What do desperate people do? Commit crimes. So now we have a system that effectively just produces uneducated mentally unhealthy criminals.
I think you're missing something. Getting expelled doesn't mean you didn't attend school for the remainder of the year. Getting expelled meant you were sent to a school for expelled kids. If you got expelled from there, you went to a school for expelled x2 kids. In the US, it's illegal to not attend school under the age of 16.
>and have the shame of being expelled.
Shame is a powerful motivator, but only works sometimes. The alternative is to ignore the behavior or reward it, both worse solutions IMO.
I think the idea is if kids are disruptive, put them with other disruptive kids so the amount of disruption is minimized. All the kids in the disruption school are already disruptive. Also, you don't want to teach the current non-disruptive kids that being disruptive is acceptable, otherwise, you'll just create more disruptive kids by inaction.
Do you really want to force good students to have to be in the same classroom as the kind of students who get expelled from public schools? Do you understand just how bad your behavior has to be to actually get expelled?
"At the same time... what are we supposed to do with those kids? "
The most important thing is to NOT allow them to prevent other kids from getting an a good education.
> Do you really want to force good students to have to be in the same classroom as the kind of students who get expelled from public schools?
Where precisely do you think "the kind of kids who get expelled from public schools" should be? I mean that literally, concretely.
Do we send them home where they are statistically much more likely to be abused and not have access to reliable nutrition? Imprison them? Ship them to some sort of Lord of the Flies island?
Do I want disruptive kids in the same room as my kids? Not really. Is it the least bad place I can think of to put them? Unfortunately, yes.
This is a deeply hard problem. Sure, if you only care about well-behaved kids it's easy: kick out the bad eggs and forget they ever existed. But if you consider that those bad kids are actual people who will still participate in your society, you need some solution for how to help them.
>Where precisely do you think "the kind of kids who get expelled from public schools" should be? I mean that literally, concretely.
That's really the make-or-break question. IIRC, it was kids who constantly got into fights. Kids caught with knives, drugs, or firecrackers; kids in gangs, etc. It was kids who constantly disrupted the classroom, even after being assigned to after school detention multiple times. It was kids who disrespected teachers (cussing them out, threatening them, attacking them, etc). It was kids that got pregnant. It was even kids that cheated because it was taken more seriously back then.
The levels were: write sentences on the board after class, get sent to the principal's office with a parent call, get after school detention, get after school detention a whole lot, get expelled. Sometimes like in the case of knives, it would go straight to expulsion.
Today, teachers will send kids to the principal's office to get them out of the classroom and they just get sent back to continue disruption. Back then, teachers were expected to teach and the administration dealt with unruly kids. Disciplining kids who are bad is hard on the heart, but in the long term, not disciplining them is way worse for them. There's no discipline today in schools (other than getting arrested, which really should be avoided at all costs). There hasn't been discipline in schools for a generation. It shows not only in schools but in society as a whole.
> Is it the least bad place I can think of to put them?
Bad for whom? If you have the two options:
(A) Bad for people causing negative externalities.
(B) Bad for people causing positive externalities.
I will choose the former over the latter every time. Sure, it's bad for the kid to be getting abused since they're expelled from school, but it's bad for the kid to be getting abused since this other kid wasn't expelled from school.
Your solution it to let disruptive children ruin the education for all students so that no one gets a good education? You are making home-schooling sound much more appealing. Public Schools aren't supposed to be daycare centers, they are supposed to teach children.
I think you and many others in this discussion presume that kids fall into a neat binary classification:
1. Good kids who were always and will always be good kids.
2. Bad kids who were always and will always be bad kids.
Further, any interaction between a bad kid and a good kid is strictly making things worse for the good kid.
I can definitely understand how someone might end up with that belief system. It was probably formed while they themselves were a kid and thus lacks the nuance and maturity that comes with time.
A closer picture of reality is that:
1. People go through good and bad periods. An "good" kid might become a "bad" kid for a year while going through the divorce of their parents. A "bad" kid might get the structure or diagnosis they need and blossom into their better potential. Kids mature at different rates and times.
2. Being around "good" kids is good for "bad" kids. If the people in their home life are awful, having a community of mentally healthy kids around them during the day can be very helpful for learning how to behave better.
3. Being around "bad" kids is often good for "good" kids. Obviously, it's not OK for some kid to bully or abuse another. But short of that, it's often useful and educational for kids to be exposed to a variety of personalities and maturity levels. Do we want our kids to grow into adults that have the skills to take care of and help other people who are struggling? I do. They can learn many of those skills in school by being part of the support network for bad kids.
Often, when they do, it turns out that kid wasn't so bad in the first place.
Overall, this simplified mindset is one I see all the time where we look at situations as a consumer: Is this a thing I want to "purchase" or not? Instead, it's better to look at the entire situation as an environment that you are both consuming and yourself part of.
They always talk about "it takes a village". We all both need a village and are the village for each other.
1. Good kids who were always and will always be good kids.
2. Bad kids who were always and will always be bad kids.
Further, any interaction between a bad kid and a good kid is strictly making things worse for the good kid.
My experience in K-12 proves that this is in fact largely TRUE.
" Being around "bad" kids is often good for "good" kids. "
This is just a mind-numbingly stupid take. A 10th grader taking advanced calc and programming robots doesn't benefit from being forced to interact with an illiterate 19 year old who has been held back 3 times and steals his lunch money every day. This is in fact almost a human rights violation for the smart kid.
"I can definitely understand how someone might end up with that belief system. It was probably formed while they themselves were a kid and thus lacks the nuance and maturity that comes with time."
Thank you for demonstrating the point that there are constraints and complications that are difficult to appreciate from the outside. The law generally disagrees with you.
And that really hasn't turned out very well. Letting the most disruptive students ruin the education of other students isn't fair at all to those students AND is pretty damn stupid when you consider how much tax money is spent educating those students and the harm to society from not educating them.
To be clear, I am not about to justify any sort of violence anywhere. That said...
Many violent and disruptive students were just kids with special needs. And I don't mean mental conditions or anything like that.
I mean a kid that would do WAY better if he was in a trade class doing something that motivates them, rather than being frustrated and forced to endure a rubbish secondary education, several hours crammed into a small room with other people and getting nowhere.
But of course that's more difficult to implement than a generic standardising/equalising pipeline of norm-conforming average citizen production.
I think we should focus on students already trying to be a positive influence in the school, rather than catering to the bottom quintile. After all, that is how schools got in this situation in the first place.
My point was not clear. What I'm saying is that often it would be better for a certain profile of people to not be forced to attend what in my country is mandatory secondary education, and that it would be better to put them to work on stuff they might enjoy.
But of course that would mean the system needs to contemplate individuals, instead of collectives, and the system doesn't like that.
> For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions.
Are there actionable consequences if these numbers get too high? If they're merely published, as a parent, I would see high numbers as a positive signal if anything...
When I was in high school there was a local school that was notorious. Apparently here the public schools were not allowed to expel kids if they would no longer have local options. This was the worst school, and thus the last place the kids would end up. So it was basically just a prison.
There's a big difference between someone with an IEP (usually massive trauma and mental illness also) doing things and a "regular" student doing them. Expelling a kid usually just means they move to a different school, and all expulsion is doing is moving the burden down the chain, usually from more affluent places where parents are equipped to complain, to less affluent ones. Particularly if the room destroying-violence kiddo's family don't have lawyers.
When I judge an educational institution I could not care less why some child being significantly disruptive is tolerated, even slightly. That institution simply becomes a non starter for a place I might send my children.
Of course parents who don't care about such things, or don't have the luxury of being able to choose, would accept such things. As would those who themselves have 'problem children.' Now think about what this does to the quality of that institution over time.
I do think it's totally fair to put pressure on the school to reduce mainstreaming of kids with major behavior issues. But it's really not about "tolerating" or "not tolerating"- you're witness a system failure and responding by making the problems worse for everyone but the wealthy in a society where governance is premised on the population at large being well educated.
* Tossing around hot potato kids doesn't resolve things in a good for society way.
* Concentrating the proportion of kids interfering with normal income families by removing all the high-income kids from the school doesn't resolve things in a good for society way.
* Letting people choose to send their kids to charters while all the kids of low-involvement parents are still stuck in a situation with a concentrated proportion of problems doesn't either.
Unfortunately there are a several things at play:
* Increased availability of specialized, non-mainstream resources for moderate+ (moderate is pretty severe most of the time IMO) kiddos, gen pop behavior interventions, etc.
* Better general welfare for parents (often unstable/low income ones).
* More push back from districts when parents w/ lawyers demand stuff that's bad for the rest of the classroom.
IMO institutional quality is purposefully damaged by people who hate paying taxes or supporting the general welfare - public schools are basically being purposefully doomed in much the same way that Republicans say "government always bad" and then set out to make it fail on purpose to prove their point, only with a wider variety of motives at play. "I'm sending my kids to private school, why should I pay taxes for public schools?" is not an uncommon strain of thought.
It's a doom loop leading to societal regression into a stratified society unable to properly self-govern IMO.
Kids with major behavioral issues should be getting a bootcamp-style education, where their tendencies can be held in check by adequate physical supervision. This is not about denying anyone an education - if anything, it's doing the exact opposite and addressing their unique educational needs in the most effective way.
While I certainly agree that specialized care and instruction is needed, it is unfortunately not that case that "bootcamp-style" is actually universally fitting. Autistic kids need autism specific early intervention. Many kids with extreme behaviors or mood disorders will respond better to reward structures than they will to heavy-handed discipline. Appropriate settings with professionals trained in behaviors (IE the management and alterations of) can have substantial success, especially if the home environment is not antagonistic/trauma inducing.
> ...unfortunately not that case that "bootcamp-style" is actually universally fitting. Autistic kids need autism specific early intervention. Many kids with extreme behaviors or mood disorders will respond better to reward structures...
These things are not mutually incompatible. Kids with autism who actually have major behavioral issues will clearly benefit from some physical supervision, in addition to whatever autism-specific intervention may be most appropriate for them. Similarly, rewards for good behavior can often go hand-in-hand with some sort of more rigorous discipline for those who persist in damaging and harmful conduct - these things will hopefully be complementary.
It hardly matters to other students WHY a particular student is making it very hard for them to learn and using up all the teacher's time. Only that they ARE.
> Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works.
Our local education superintendant _in_ _his_ _program_ _document_ is saying that he will go after any teacher attempting to impose discipline in a "community inappropriate manner".
I have friends who were teachers in San Francisco unified School district who quit because students were literally attacking and breaking the bones of teachers and not being expelled.
It was a really hard choice for them because they were a bleeding heart liberal and wanted to use their PHD to help the underprivileged
Administrators are constantly castigated for disciplinary actions, as the "throwing chairs" behavior is not evenly spread among the different cultures that students come from.
Different rates of suspensions leads to accusations of racism, and said accusations lead to Hail Mary attempts to make unequal rates equal, including forbidding any meaningful type of punishment for certain varieties of students.
If this sounds far fetched, public officials in Rotherham became objectively evil in their attempts to avoid racism accusations, "1400 children betrayed" is a extremely understated headline, if you want to learn more.
After spending some time on the teachers subreddit I completely understand why so many people are choosing to homeschool. The amount of in-classroom abuse -- verbal and physical -- in addition to the entitled parents is shocking.
> a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation
To have a great school district where housing isn't overly expensive is rare these days. I would have to guess it is hard to find a house in such a district unless you waive inpections and pay in cash.
There's also rising awareness among parents of neurodiversity while many schools are still stagnant and failing to correct.
I have ADHD. My wife doesn't, but most of her siblings do. Our kids do. Our kids love reading and love learning new things, and I know from my own experience that the fastest way to kill that love would be to send them to a public school that doesn't know how to work with ADHD brains.
There's a saying that if you gave a scientist the job of designing a system to completely derail an ADHD brain, they'd come back with the typical public school classroom. This matches my experience, and I want better for my kids.
> There's a saying that if you gave a scientist the job of designing a system to completely derail an ADHD brain, they'd come back with the typical public school classroom.
Doctors aren't sure if I have ADHD or Major Depression or Bipolar II (I've been diagnosed and attempted to be treated for all three), but this fits into my experience.
I was consistently frustrating to my high school teachers, because I was clearly learning the material, but I wouldn't do my homework, and I'd get bored during class, and as a result I would get bad grades. I don't think the teachers took any joy in giving me a bad grade, but they were kind of forced into it because I didn't really fit into the bureaucratic mold that they needed me to fit in.
This eventually led to me almost flunking out, and eventually dropping out of my first attempt at university. I did eventually finish my bachelors, but it was at Western Governors University (WGU), which feels almost tailor-made for the ADHD-brained people.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but the American GPA system still kind of gives me anxiety when I think about it.
You pay per-term, not per class, and you can take as many classes as you'd like per term. You take one class at a time, and many classes can be finished after taking a test and/or completing a project.
I say it feels tailor-made for ADHD because it feels almost "gamified". It's addictive to see how many classes you can knock out in a week, and you can work at whatever pace you'd like.
Part of the reason I always did poorly in school is that I didn't like how slow everything went, but with WGU I can go whatever pace I want, and the faster I go, the more money I save. Since I'm an extremely impatient person, the fact that I was able to quickly go through the material while only having to focus on one course at a time was kind of game-changing to me.
I already had a decade of software engineering experience when I did WGU, so when I did the Computer Science degree on there I finished the entirety of it (having to start from scratch) in six months, for a grand total cost of around ~$4600.
WGU is hardly the fanciest school, but it's good enough, inexpensive, and most importantly it is fully accredited. If you always struggled with traditional universities, I recommend giving it a look.
> you can take as many classes as you'd like per term. You take one class at a time, and many classes can be finished after taking a test and/or completing a project.
Is it all based on self-guided learning? Because I can't see how this system could work with the classic system of bottom-up lectures accompanied by tutorials and exercise classes?
It’s self-guided. There aren’t lectures or anything. They have reading stuff they recommend, and there are course instructors you can reach out to if you need help.
Some courses do have recorded lectures, but nothing live.
I think that there's a reasonably good chance that if school were like that by default, I probably would have done better. It's hard to juggle six classes at a time like you're expected to in American high schools.
If I had a magic wand and could make the education system however I'd like, I'd make it so every student spends the exact same amount of time on the subject, but I'd make it so you only ever manage a single class at once, instead of trying to interleave everything.
This isn't even that weird of a concept, even in the US; American summer schools will often do exactly this. Instead of doing an hour per day over the course of 180 days, you do roughly thirty six-hour days. That's how I took gym in high school, and how I retook calculus (even though I passed the AP exam first-try).
Honestly, I'd bet there are a variety of delivery models that would be most effective for each person. Having choice in that would really be amazing. Unfortunately, its also very hard to organize and measure.
Yeah, that's true. I'm not entirely sure how you'd implement it but it would be great if there was options to do the one-class-at-a-time model or the traditional one if you prefer, though almost by definition the public school system is (mostly) one-size-fits-all.
It's definitely not for everyone, and to be honest I'd recommend a trying a traditional university first if that's an option.
The reason I liked it is because I have always just been better at teaching myself stuff than being taught. I like working at my own (usually faster) pace and I really hate waiting to make progress. WGU is a perfect system for someone with that mentality, particularly since it's inexpensive.
I think the quality of the education is "ok". I think you'll leave with a good enough education in computer science to be "useful", but I will acknowledge that the fast-pace does make it easier to get away with skipping the boring stuff than it would be with a traditional school.
If you already have a lot of experience with software, WGU can work as a "legitimizer" if nothing else, though. I had a bit of a complex about dropping out and not having a bachelors. That pretty much went away once I got my bachelors from WGU.
Oh! Xir entire software developer career has been built on skills xe taught xirselves from childhood (never took a CS course in college; majored in fine arts) so this sounds absolutely perfect! Probably would have crushed it there back in the day, too. Thank you!
ADD/ADHD was over-diagnosed for a long time. Why are you so sure all the people you mention have it vs other explanations? What is it you think makes ADHD brains special?
As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot.
It’s also debatable how over diagnosed ADHD is. The diagnosis criteria has certainly changed, but current literature estimates about 6% adults are believed to some degree of ADHD [1]—though many are high functioning and find ways to cope with varying degrees of success and difficulty.
Totally on board with your comments on disparagement, but there's been a rash of autism diagnoses in my daughter's school to the point where in some classes 20% of students have been diagnosed as autistic. I feel at that point people are diagnosing personality, and it's using the (UK) special educational needs system to force schools to pay attention to different learning styles. (My daughter's school is actually pretty good on that front if you point it out to the staff, so I'm not sure what's triggering it particularly in her school, but it may be to do with releasing government funding for extra classroom assistants).
ADHD and autism are diagnosed based on behaviors. This might work for cases at the more extreme end of the spectrum, but when it comes to trying to identify more mild cases, you are going to start seeing a lot of overlap in behaviors of the larger population. Couple that with extra funding for kids who can be said to have ADHD and autism, and you get a recipe for overdiagnosis.
Maybe it is worth it to try to make sure fewer kids with the issue slip through the cracks at the expense of diagnosing kids who don't actually have it. Maybe it's not, but it makes sense why it can happen.
You and GP make great points, and these are situations that are becoming more common. Luckily, there is some light at the end of the tunnel (at least for ADHD). There's been a lot of study in recent years and medical science is starting to identify physiological markers commonly correlated with ADHD [1][2][3]. The sad thing is that the science hasn't advanced far enough to include these in the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. It's my hope we'll see an updated DSM and medical training within the next decade, but it'll be a long and painful wait.
> As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot.
Not my intention, but I was diagnosed as a kid when over-diagnosing did seem to be a trend, and I've become skeptical in these times of self IDing.
When I mentioned over-diagnosing it was more referring to the 90s, but I think a lot of adults who were diagnosed then may have been misdiagnosed and never checked.
My heart goes out to you. Misdiagnosis is just as bad (and sometimes worse) than not being diagnosed. I've known people who were diagnosed with ADHD with very bad outcomes because it later turned out that they had bipolar disorder; the wrong medical treatment literally ruined their life. At the same time, I've had periods in my life where I couldn't focus on important conversations with my partner because of a noisy bird nearby.
If you suspect you have a condition or someone is advocating for you to seek treatment, please seek a qualified psychiatrist who's specifically trained in diagnosis. Better yet, make sure they're in touch with your primary care provider [1]. Psychiatric assessment and diagnosis its own psychiatric specialty for a reason, but doctors with these qualifications are criminally difficult to get time with for a variety of reasons.
Me and my friends were in the wrong side of the culture (tabletop RPGs, video games and heavy metal) and I can bet we would all be diagnosed back then as it felt it was mostly "feisty kids that don't fit".
There are many volumes on the subject, but I'm honestly tired of debating this with people who doubt ADHD is a thing. If you're legitimately curious, there are myriad sources out there about the differences in ADHD brains.
Suffice it to say that I'm sure. All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.
"Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't. I just know that we don't work in the way that the world expects us to.
I don't doubt the research, it's more I doubt how many diagnoses were accurate.
I was diagnosed with ADD as well, so I'm not being entrely dismissive. In this age of self ID I think there can be reason to be.
> All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.
If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?
> "Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't.
Not my intention, I should have said unique or significantly different in the contexts you mentioned or something.
> If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?
There's a lot of overlap there and my personal feeling is that they likely share similar causes—there's too much similarity and too many people with both to be a coincidence. But in the case of my family, most of us do just fine in reading social cues... when we're paying attention. Where we struggle is maintaining attention on things that don't interest us for long enough to meet employer or school expectations.
> Where we struggle is maintaining attention on things that don't interest us for long enough to meet employer or school expectations.
Yes, this is something I deal with as well.
It's interesting because as a kid I got diagnosed with ADD, and my sibling who was more physically hyperactive got diagnosed with ADHD. My parents thought, and thus I did also for a long time that the 'h' difference was due to his physical energy, but it seems unrelated.
I've wondered if I am on the spectrum also but I don't match a lot of the base/core traits, although I feel ADHD or ADD alone doesn't explain some of my, ahem, quirks either.
I want to again stress there was no malice behind my question, just interest in trying to relate through my own experiences. Thank you again for answering.
> It's interesting because as a kid I got diagnosed with ADD, and my sibling who was more physically hyperactive got diagnosed with ADHD. My parents thought, and thus I did also for a long time that the 'h' difference was due to his physical energy, but it seems unrelated.
These days they don't draw a distinction any more. There are different presentations of ADHD, but it's all the same disorder.
> I want to again stress there was no malice behind my question, just interest in trying to relate through my own experiences. Thank you again for answering.
No worries, sorry for reacting negatively! I've had a lot of people assume that ADHD is not a thing at all, and it gets exhausting having to explain it. I pattern matched on your comment too aggressively.
> There's a lot of overlap there and my personal feeling is that they likely share similar causes
Autism and adhd definitely appear to share traits, and I suspect there's a shared cluster of genes affecting certain aspects of neural linking between regions of the brain. Even without shared genes it makes sense that a "networked system" of core brain functions would share similar behaviors if the parameters were tweaked in similar ways.
Were you the downvote I got instantly after commenting, lol? I'm simply curious and that should be sufficient, I'm not really sure what it has to do with you though.
Homeschooling parents are divided into two separate groups. One is secular with college degrees who really want to give their children a better education than they could get in a school AND are able to do so.
The other group are very religious who don't want their children learning about evolution or many other secular things.
The only real issue I have with homeschooling in the US is that regulations vary wildly by state. Some states have so little enforcement that it is possible to teach a child essentially NOTHING by the time they are 18 and face no punishment for ruining that child's life.
Certainly a biased view of religious home schoolers. Most of my religious friends who homeschool are college educated and many have postgraduate degrees. Some do disbelieve evolution, or at least disdain it a bit. Pretty much all of them are motivated people however. Of course that's just my little bubble.
The hard thing for a lot of people to accept is that belief or lack thereof of evolution has no impact on daily life at all. It always comes up in these discussions as a boogeyman anyway.
It's not necessarily just the idea of evolution itself, but rather that it's indicative of someone's willingness to continuously and actively reject all evidence in order to maintain the beliefs they've decided are true.
Most of the disagreements are fundamentally metaphysical (would God make fossils?), so debates about evidence, expertise, and scientific consensus are beside the point.
But highly educated people believe this too. There’s lots of wacky and unscientific, ideas out there that people believe because they come from Columbia University social science professors instead of the Bible. After the last several years I take back everything I said when I was younger and an atheist about religious people and not believing in evolution.
The trick here is that we can reject OP's unnecessarily binary categorization as a premise and focus on the illogical and under-developed personal systems for testing reality and challenging beliefs that represent a far greater concern than the particulars of categorically unexamined beliefs.
Xe were raised young earth creationist and that requires gaslighting your own child on established science, going so far as to regularly test them on their willing to believe or lie about believing patent untruths. Oh, plus the constant repression of one's identity, the lack of exposure to a wider range of perspectives and experiences, and the panopticon of surveillance by people with near total control of your socializing, especially in the suburbs. That really fucks a child up.
That kind of homeschooling is a cult, no matter how much our wider culture has normalized the literal insanity.
Existence of vestigial structures in organism. Why do humans get goosebumps when we don't have enough hair to insulate us? Because it's an evolutionary leftover from our hairy ancestors when the reflex would actually cause hair to trap more air for better insulation.
Understanding evolution is crucial for crop management. The development of pesticide resistance in insects follows the same principles as antibiotic resistance. Farmers who don't understand evolutionary principles might not recognize the importance of rotating pesticides or implementing refuge areas to prevent resistance from developing.
Medical research often relies on animal models because of shared evolutionary history. Our biological similarities with other mammals exist because of common ancestry. Without this framework, it becomes harder to understand why medicines tested on mice or primates might work in humans, or why certain diseases affect multiple species similarly.
Human susceptibility to back and knee pain is a consequence of how recent bipedalism is in our evolution. Same for why humans are so prone to chocking, our larynx evolved to enable speech at the cost of making it easier for food to enter it.
Thanks to ubertaco for the neat response point by point, but I don't think any of your points are relevant, even if they are true.
I know a couple of big-scale farmers in the US. They are Christian, and believe in Creation. That doesn't stop them from using the necessary pesticides, or choosing the adequate strain of corn seeds, etc.
Believing in Creation doesn't turn you into an illiterate moron. Believing God created everything according to a design and purpose is not incompatible with acknowledging the presence of similarities and design patterns throughout all of Creation, and believing that doesn't suddenly poof take away your rational capabilities to think and understand things.
Either way, I was asking for is a real situation in which someone will be negatively impacted because they hold a Creationist belief.
Will a Creationist live a sad life without fully embracing the misteries of goose-bumps? Will a farmer not use pesticides, or choose the wrong one because Creationism? Will Advil won't work on a Christian because they don't understand that rats and rabbits are our cousins? Will their knees hurt more (or maybe less?) because they think humans were standing up from the beginning?
More generally all of modern technology is a result of the exact same processes that led to the theory of evolution. If you reject it where do you draw the line?
"Believing in Creation doesn't turn you into an illiterate moron"
You kinda do have to be a moron to be a true young earth creationist. I went to Lutheran schools that taught me that the earth was created by god 6000 years ago and evolution was an evil plot created by Satan. By the time I was 15 I realized how stupid this was and how the theory of evolution fits the evidence and is self-consistent. One of the biggest realizations I had is that the theory of evolution, due to requiring such VAST amounts of time for evolution to occur, actually has nuclear fusion embedded in it as a dependency because nothing else could allow a star to shine for so long. When Darwin first proposed the theory a major and reasonable objection was the timescales needed because at the time it was thought that the Sun was powered only by gravitational collapse which would last less than 20 million years. Then this utterly absurd source of power for stars was discovered that could allow them to last for almost 1000 times as long.
> all of modern technology is a result of the exact same processes that led to the theory of evolution
Could you please elaborate? I'm not sure I understand. Are you referring to the scientific method?
If so, I really feel the need to insist that being Creationist or Christian is not exclusive or incompatible with that. Guess what, I am Christian, I believe in a Creator God and yet I am (surprise, surprise) an accomplished Software Engineer.
I can understand if you think I'm stupid because of my beliefs. That's your opinion and I'm totally fine with it.
What I'm trying to say is that holding these beliefs doesn't make you intellectually impaired, or unable to use reasoning. We're just working with different assumptions.
You have faith in Nothing, from which everything came, I have faith in Something (God) from which everything came. And it is faith indeed, because you don't and can't possibly have definite proven knowledge of the origin of things. You weren't there.
To you, nuclear fusion is evidence of evolution. Fine. To me, alongside the rest of Creation, it is evidence of God.
Therefore, you will reason a certain set of things, and I will reason a different set of things. Because we have different starting points, we will reach different conclusions.
"What I'm trying to say is that holding these beliefs doesn't make you intellectually impaired, or unable to use reasoning. "
They prove their is something fundamentally wrong with your logical reasoning and evaluation of evidence.
You use God as an explanation for why the universe exists but cannot explain where God came from so you are just adding an extra unnecessary step.
Your software engineering background gives you a unique perspective to understand this: When debugging code, you follow the evidence (logs, stack traces, reproducible errors) rather than starting with assumptions about what should be happening. Evolution works the same way - we follow the evidence rather than starting with assumptions about how life should have developed.
The power of evolutionary theory isn't just that it explains what we see - it's that it makes testable predictions. For example, evolutionary theory predicted we would find transitional fossils in specific geological layers before we actually found them. It predicted specific genetic relationships between species that were later confirmed by DNA sequencing. Just as in software engineering, a theory that makes accurate predictions is more valuable than one that only explains what we already know.
You're absolutely right that being religious doesn't make someone intellectually impaired. But perhaps consider that accepting evolution doesn't require abandoning faith in God - it might instead lead to a deeper appreciation of the elegant mechanisms through which creation could have unfolded.
Not to mention the tens of thousands of people who were killed in the witch trials (medieval and contemporary), among so very many other examples.
Few things are more personally relevant than not getting tortured and executed by your neighbors because you were granted no defense against spectral evidence.
> Few things are more personally relevant than not getting tortured and executed by your neighbors because you were granted no defense against spectral evidence.
As @arkey points out, this happens with atheistic beliefs as well. By numbers communist purges have killed vastly more people than all religions combined just due to the numbers of people involved in modern ages.
The denunciations are very similar with actual evidence rarely being required or needed. Or it’s based on some characteristic of being on an outside group. Netflix’s adaptation of the Chinese authors book “Three body problem” gives a visceral showcasing of what that would’ve been like as one of the characters father is denounced and killed during that time for having “anti-Marxist” beliefs like gravity.
I’ve been to the Pol Pot’s killing trees in Cambodia where they slaughtered millions of people. Anyone who was educated in any way were considered polluted by capitalism and killed. Things like having spectacles was sufficient evidence.
I’ve seen the holocaust monuments in Berlin and Tel Aviv where the ideals of racial purity based on pseudo scientific interpretations of evolution were a key philosophical underpinning.
Actually much of the anti-evolutionary zeal in the US can be partially traced back to progressives (of that period) use of “evolution” to justify mass forced sterilization of “undesirables” by several US states during the 1910-1930’s.
Really humans are pretty flawed with any belief system. You fool yourself if you think “scientific” or “atheist” are any hindrance to these group behaviors.
Oh honey, xe are visibly queer. None of the above is new to xe, as a matter of survival. And a matter of sanity, as xe were raised to believe that the world was created from whole cloth six thousands years ago and that dinosaurs either lived with humans or were an invention of the devil.
There are no such things as atheist beliefs any more than there are a-unicorn beliefs, even if many things have been done in its name. The same goes for evolution. And no, communism isn't any more inherently atheistic than German fascism was inherently Catholic (it certainly wasn't atheistic) nor US democracy inherently Protestant. Anyone doing anything "in the name of evolution" is projecting their own hate and small-mindedness onto whatever convenient vocabulary at hand, as has happened over and over and over long before science. Avoid confusing belief with confidence in replicability, not when only one was sufficient for humanity to reach the moon.
No, as a science-minded secular materialistic atheist, xe are burdened with expecting nuance, detail, precision, specificity, and consistency of xirselves and in xir communications. But xe also expect the same of others in kind. Tell xe again how belief will save you from junk forensic science if you are ever accused falsely of a crime? Because actual science has no patience with such nonsense whereas xir original point still stands. We can resume this discussion after that.
> There are no such things as atheist beliefs any more than there are a-unicorn beliefs, even if many things have been done in its name. The same goes for evolution.
That’s just silly. Of course there are atheistic, theistic, along with myriad of other classifications of belief systems. If you decide to try and redefine all commonly accepted terms based on your belief system you’re not participating in a fair discussion.
> And no, communism isn't any more inherently atheistic
Perhaps it’s not, but all the major communist states have embraced atheism as a matter of course and that is what pertains to my comment. Most scholars consider Karl Marx an atheist and he was certainly secularist.
> Avoid confusing belief with confidence in replicability, not when only one was sufficient for humanity to reach the moon.
Confidence in something is a form of belief. You believe something will occur or is a certain way based on prior information.
Again you’re trying to insert your idiosyncratic definition of belief into the discussion.
> No, as a science-minded secular materialistic atheist, xe are burdened with expecting nuance, detail, precision, specificity, and consistency of xirselves and in xir communications.
As I pointed out above a couple of times you are not being precise but rather are injecting your own idiosyncratic non-standard definition of things. Defining your own unique pronouns is a good exemplar of this.
This all comes across to me as you not being open to genuine conversation.
> Tell xe again how belief will save you from junk forensic science if you are ever accused falsely of a crime?
Having fair trials, hearing of evidence in a court, having impartial judges, etc is based on a societies belief that those things are important.
Junk science goes against those sort of beliefs in a country like the USA and has been used to fight against such things.
As a counter, a science minded secular materialism belief system doesn’t have to believe in things like fair trials or the need of evidence to convict. Some rationalist scientific minded have argued that belief in fair trials and equality of people is illogical as common people don’t have the intelligence or expertise to properly judge things.
The CCP for example is arguably generally more scientific-minded secular materialist society than the USA. Yet they have no problems eschewing things such as trials as in their (dare I say logical and self-consistent) belief system the needs of the state subsume those of the individual.
What about the tens of millions of people who have been killed because atheism?
But how about this: the first time that any relevant powers decided that slavery was wrong at a global level was due to Christian beliefs, fancy that. And luckily they went on to impose that moral belief to the rest of the world. (England, France vs. Slavery)
It's true that a lot of evil has been done in the name of Christianity, but that's not of Christianity. If I came to your home and punched you in the face in the name of your mother, would you blame your mother?
But Christianity and the Bible have been abused very wrongly by evil powers as tools for control, something possible through deceiving illiterate, uneducated people.
As some other comments mention, Protestant Evangelicals made a big push for literacy precisely so people could read and interpret the Bible themselves, without depending on interested third parties.
Anyone taking a little time to read the Bible will see and understand that the Crusades were wrong, racism is wrong, oppressing women is wrong, and so on.
To play the devil's advocate here, as someone who grew up homeschooled and in a culture of "micro-scale evolution exists, but macro-scale evolution has not been demonstrated":
>Antibiotic resistance
...is a micro-scale adaptation, like an organism's immune response. Recognizing it does not require belief in a prehistoric common ancestor for all organisms; it just requires observing changes that happen on a much smaller and more rapid scale.
>Existence of vestigial structures in organism. Why do humans get goosebumps when we don't have enough hair to insulate us? Because it's an evolutionary leftover from our hairy ancestors when the reflex would actually cause hair to trap more air for better insulation.
This is non-falsifiable conjecture about a pre-historic past based on observation of present structures. It is equivalent to "we obviously know that dinosaurs did not have feathers, because their skeletons do not have feathers, and feathers would have made them more visible to predators, so they wouldn't have had feathers."
>Understanding evolution is crucial for crop management. The development of pesticide resistance in insects follows the same principles as antibiotic resistance.
...which, again, is a micro-scale adaptation, like an organism's immune response. You can notice pesticide resistance occurring in pests and rotate your pesticides without having to sign on to the unverifiable claim that this happens because all life derives from a single organism.
>Medical research often relies on animal models because of shared evolutionary history. Our biological similarities with other mammals exist because of common ancestry. Without this framework, it becomes harder to understand why medicines tested on mice or primates might work in humans, or why certain diseases affect multiple species similarly.
This is more non-falsifiable distant-past conjecture based on observation of current structures. Is it necessary to believe a particular set of conjectures about the origins of mammals' biological similarities in order to recognize the fact in front of you that the mammals are biologically similar, and thus some mechanisms of action may apply across species, provided those similarities are retained?
>Human susceptibility to back and knee pain is a consequence of how recent bipedalism is in our evolution. Same for why humans are so prone to chocking, our larynx evolved to enable speech at the cost of making it easier for food to enter it.
...which, again, is non-falsifiable distant-past conjecture that has no bearing on recognizing the existence of the verifiable current-day reality in front of you: humans have back and knee pain. Is it necessary to accept a particular set of unprovable conjectures about the distant-past origins of this particular skeletal structure in order to make decisions about how best to treat a symptom that exists today resulting from the skeletal structure that you see immediately in front of you?
But the micro vs. macro distinction is only one of time and scale and that's the whole point: species aren't "real," even fish aren't "real" in any ontological sense, but the countless organisms that we categorize as such existed, exist, and will continue to exist regardless of how we conceive of them.
The ask of evolution and science in general is to accept the incredibly narrow capacity of human cognition as a starting point for an even deeper understanding rather than an end goal to rationalize towards.
>But the micro vs. macro distinction is only one of time and scale and that's the whole point: species aren't "real," even fish aren't "real" in any ontological sense, but the countless organisms that we categorize as such existed, exist, and will continue to exist regardless of how we conceive of them.
This is an excellent rebuttal to the micro/macro distinction, because it's working in the correct direction, which you've stated well:
>to accept the incredibly narrow capacity of human cognition as a starting point for an even deeper understanding rather than an end goal to rationalize towards.
Using the notion of "species" as a "ground truth", as though it were some biological law, is a self-defeating point precisely because the definition of "species" is "a somewhat-arbitrary taxonomy developed by people to try to group organisms together based on observed common traits."
Want to have your mind blown? The creationist fallacy of "irreducible complexity" isn't just wrong for eyeballs and flagellum but for upward complexity as well. And lateral complexity.
OK, for falsifiable how about evolution predicts patterns of genetic similarity between species that match their apparent morphological relationships - a correlation that didn't have to exist but does.
That's not what falsifiable means. It's not experimentally verifiable. There is no way to conduct a test that would negate it if it were untrue.
It is why, being intellectually honest, the theory of evolution as the origin of species is called a "theory" in the academic sense: it's a proposed model that fits the data available on hand, but which has not been experimentally verified in its premise. Short of time-travel, I'm not sure how it can be experimentally verified.
"Falsifiable" means "I can construct an experiment that could yield an outcome that directly demonstrates this idea as false." This is sort of like the difficulty that exists with the four-color theorem [1]: yes, you can run a lot of examples using computer-assisted proof tech, but at best what that tells you is "we haven't found a counterexample yet."
Except, for non-falsifiable claims like the theory of evolution as the origin of species, there is no experiment you can run to provide a counterexample. The theory covers any possible counterexamples by simply saying "that form of life must have evolved from a different origin point and/or under different conditions (regardless of whether we can recreate those conditions)", and tucks any counterexample in neatly into itself without feeling threatened by falsifiability. It is "total" by having an "escape hatch" for any counterexamples.
That stacks it up alongside "a deity made everything, and designed an ordered universe with certain mechanics, including giving organisms the ability to adapt"; both are explanations that fit the available data, but neither can be experimentally verified. Similarly, that theory is "total" by having an escape hatch: "well, maybe the deity did something different in that case." Young-earth Creationists do this with visible starlight that is a million or more lightyears away: "maybe God just accelerated that starlight so that humans would have a pretty night sky."
That tendency is similar to "maybe the [hypothetical] organisms on Mars adapted from a different common ancestor that maybe was made of non-living substances that are similar to the non-living substances that comprised Earth's first organism." Boom, done, no need to re-examine the premise, you just fold it in with "maybe the same magic worked a little differently over there," just like saying "maybe God made starlight go faster in the direction of Earth."
As long as you don't engage in denial of the available data because of your theory, then I don't understand why holding a particular non-falsifiable theory is mandatory.
It doesn't matter if I hold to the theory that the universe began as an origin-less hypercompressed single point of matter suddenly and rapidly decompressing...if I'm in the lab next to you claiming that vaccines cause autism. The problem is not which non-verifiable theory I hold about an unrelated subject, but rather my denial of the available data on hand.
Similarly, it doesn't matter that Louis Pasteur was a Creationist when discussing the mechanisms he discovered by which vaccines work. What matters is his recognition of the reality of the data at hand, and his work to explore and build on it.
It’s directly correlated with young earth creationism and climate change denial. A significant portion of the population being taught "don’t trust scientists they’re lying on behalf of the literal devil" has done terrible things to American politics.
> It’s directly correlated with young earth creationism and climate change denial.
Is it though? Any sources to back that?
From what I know CC denialists come in all shapes and sizes, from Christians to Conspirationist Atheists to people who are hoping for the return of the Anunnaki. As well as firmly Creationist Christians that don't deny the climate change at all.
I'd broaden the group to "kids who parents feel have been done wrong or failed by the local school and see home schooling as the best choice available." I don't think this group is quite as consistently college educated as group 1.
I suppose from their perspective they do but from my perspective they are just going to raise scientifically ignorant people. I was raised young earth creationist Lutheran and understand this world quite well.
On the other hand, my sister is a firm Creationist Christian, has a PhD and had a brilliant career in research (albeit nothing directly related to 'The Beginning of All Things').
Chances are she is less "scientifically ignorant" than many people around here, myself included.
Just like my sister's, yours is a specific case. It's sad that they didn't teach you Creation in a way that wouldn't cancel out Science, as Science itself is something profoundly Christian as well.
"O, Almighty God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee!..." - Johannes Kepler
Are we talking young-earth creationist or "God triggered the big bang and guided evolution" creationist? Because there is a huge difference between them!
Young earth creationists are scientifically ignorant by definition.
Young-earth creationist, as in "God created everything from scratch in 7 days".
There are many scientists out there that believe in that. They are not scientifically ignorant, they just believe different stuff from you, which, mind you, unless you've seen all proof and understand everything about it to the very last detail, you just hold a faith-based belief of what you're told about by a specific bunch of people/books.
People forget that we often know a lot about stuff, but then we discover more stuff which totally changes the stuff we knew and so on.
Not intending to start a flamewar here or anything, but the fact is that even if there's a lot of evidence for many claims about it, the THEORY of Evolution is not failsafe let alone definitely proven.
You can choose to go with it until we have something better, that's your choice.
Allow that same choice for the rest of the people out there.
"There are many scientists out there that believe in that. "
Not any GOOD ones.
"They are not scientifically ignorant, "
They are actually.
" they just believe different stuff from you, "
They believe very stupid things directly at odds with all evidence. All of modern technology is a result of the exact same logical thought that led to the theory of evolution. If you reject it where do you draw the line? Do you reject fusion in stars because there is no reason for them to last so long?
"People forget that we often know a lot about stuff, but then we discover more stuff which totally changes the stuff we knew and so on."
> Do you reject fusion in stars because there is no reason for them to last so long?
No. Why would I?
You see? You're jumping to absurd conclusions. The fact that I don't believe in Evolution does not mean I reject the Scientific Method, or technology, or reasoning, or logic.
I'm an engineer. I like and enjoy Science, building things, researching, learning, understanding, reasoning, creating. Don't try to make it incompatible or exclusive.
> Not any GOOD ones.
Maybe you should review a bit your history of Science.
I think the gp's worldview doesn't allow for such a person to exist. It's an anomaly and, therefore, must be fake. Otherwise, I can't make sense of the way they have been arguing in this thread.
I think it's you who doesn't understand how science works, making claims like the fact that Evolution needing something like nuclear fusion to explain longevity of stars, and nuclear fusion existing, must then mean Evolution is real.
According to the Scientific Method (which I obviously must not understand) an honest researcher would posit an hypothesis (which ideally should be falsifiable, unlike Evolution, or Creation for that matter) and then should rather try to prove that hypothesis false. That's what I do at my SE job. If you are unable to prove a falsifiable hypothesis as false, chances are you're right.
You see, because Evolution and Creation are not falsifiable, they need a certain amount of faith to be accepted. I acknowledge my faith in God, and I acknowledge that I cannot scientifically and undeniable prove the existence of God or Creation through purely empirical methods. That's actually a necessary aspect of it. I do, however, see a lot of evidence which points me to that way, and it points me to that way because of where (or rather, on who) my faith is placed.
You, like it or not, do have faith too, but it is placed in a different set of persons and scriptures. You have faith in Modern Science. It's a faith, a 'trust' if you will, you choose to risk having in a lot of data that, by the way, you cannot possibly have had the chance to validate personally.
I invite you to honestly reflect on that.
This will most likely be my last response because at this point I am not sure this conversation is constructive at all.
Are you arguing that religious people are scientifically ignorant?
Such religious people like Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, René Descartes, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître?
Our times are like they are in part thanks to their work.
Yes, there is much more knowledge at least content-wise nowadays than then. Does that make their contributions ignorant, or invalid? Remove what they did in their day, what are we left with?
no. I don't really understand what your point is. Are you trying to argue:
> They were Christian, thus you can be a scientific genius in your time and still Christian.
? You have to keep in mind, these people were scientific geniuses in a time where people had recently established that the Earth orbited the Sun. The first periodic table wasn't compiled until 1869, hundreds of years later. Given they had no alternative explanation, is it any wonder they were content with answers from religion? I'm not sure you realize this, but the whole separation of religion and science is a recent phenomenon. They used to be the same thing, just explanations for how the world worked. It was only when empirical evidence and scientific theories started explaining the world better than "the gods" that religion began claiming a separate sphere of influence.
So you're suggesting that religious people who home school have some sort of intrinsic characteristic that causes them to raise scientifically ignorant people? It just seems a bit far-fetched to me for someone who claims to be pro-science, especially given the number of respected religious scientists in the world.
"So you're suggesting that religious people who home school have some sort of intrinsic characteristic that causes them to raise scientifically ignorant people?"
Not intrinsic but very highly correlated with WHY they are home-schooling in the first place.
I'm not sure you understood my comment (despite quoting it). Otherwise, why would you assume any religious person who is home-schooling is automatically an Evangelical young Earth creationist? What about Muslims, Jews, Hindus, or practically any other religious person who home schools?
Your thesis seems to be that religious people are anti-science, which is a very outdated and frankly wrong stereotype to be pushing in 2024.
Do you think there are many religious parents who choose homeschooling because it lets them reinforce their worldview? GP says he was raised in such a household, I have friends who were homeschooled for that reason. There are probably many religious people who just find public schools uncouth, but I think there are more who homeschool primarily for easier indoctrination. I don't think GP is automatically assuming anything about individuals, they're just pointing out that a significant fraction of the homeschooling population will come from Evangelical Young Earth Creationists.
Based on your comment, I would assume you are religious. Quite frankly, religious doctrines are anti-science, or more accurately anti-epistemology. The Young Earth Creationists are a dim example of this, but even your generic Christian believes in lichs based on two-thousand-year-old hearsay. You say this
> is a very outdated and frankly wrong stereotype
but why? It seems more true than any religion. I think you could make an argument that it's impossible to convince people they're wrong, so to avoid fighting you should avoid making such comments, but that's empirically not true.
I was being absolute in my language because I was trying to understand the extent of GP's views on this subject. Sure, it's entirely possible that it didn't translate across and that we're talking about a "significant fraction" of religious people raising scientifically ignorant kids. Even then, it's almost impossible to prove because we're not operating with a well-defined meaning for "scientifically ignorant."
However, you've now moved the goalpost by stating that "religious doctrines" are anti-science. That wasn't the original argument. We're talking about whether or not religious people, who homeschool, will necessarily produce scientifically ignorant children.
Nonetheless, the more I think about this, the more the conversation is pointless because we'd spend an eternity working out what scientifically ignorant looks like. A person may agree with 80% of the scientific theories in the world and disagree on 20% and someone might say that makes them "scientifically ignorant." Which I find amusing, considering the amount of fraud going on in modern scientific journals.
I want to make it clear that the main issue is anti-epistemology. Trusting authority figures on "the science" isn't much different than trusting authority figures on "the gods", but there is a big difference between how the two schools of thought investigate new ideas. Religions take their axioms as inviolable, while science usually treats them as convenient beliefs until better ones come along.
I'm less worried about people being scientifically ignorant than people who lack the ability to think through ideas (specifically, most religions have built-in thought-stoppers such as "doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith"). For example, Socrates was a great thinker, and even though he was terribly ignorant by today's standards, I wouldn't be worried if our society was composed of people like him. I am worried about people who have literally been indoctrinated out of the capacity for reason.
Well, regarding that concern, we are in total agreement. However, I have many religious friends, and none of them have demonstrated being indoctrinated out of a capacity to reason (and yes, a few were homeschooled).
I'm not suggesting these individuals do not exist, but I find it very troubling to make blanket statements like the GP's. As I said, it's a stereotype I often see on HN, and I think it's very distasteful as it eliminates an entire group of people from the conversation because "they can't reason."
Ah, I on the other hand have met many individuals who have been indoctrinated out of a capacity to reason. I grew up in a town with a relatively high population of Mormons. Their reasoning capacities are mostly fine when it comes to science/work/etc., but very stunted when it comes to discussing their religion (which is important because it defines their politics). You'll essentially get conversations that go like this:
- Why do you think gay people shouldn't kiss?
| Because it's wrong.
- Why is it wrong?
| Gay people can't have children / homosexuality is bad.
- Why is that bad?
| The Bible says it's important to have children / The Bible says so.
- So, if you didn't think God was real, or the Bible was accurate, you would think it's okay?
| Eh, but I know it's true. I know acting on gay feelings is wrong. [Counterfactuals don't make sense when the counterfactual is impossible.]
- How do you know this?
| Well, I prayed about it.
- Okay, but lots of people pray and think their religion is the right one.
| Yeah, but you'd expect the TRUE religion to have <specific features about Mormonism>. And only Mormonism has that.
- Couldn't a Muslim or Hindu say something similar?
| No, they don't have all the <specific features>, just some of them. Like, sure, other religions have some of the truth, but we have all of it! Aren't modern prophets great?
- Well, I'd expect a true religion to not have <specific flaws>.
| Those aren't true. Our founder didn't have sex with a bunch of teenagers.
- The second guy, Brigham Young, did, didn't he?
| Um, well, that was normal for the time.
- It really wasn't. You can look at the census data, and even though some teenagers married other teenagers, almost none of them were marrying men 20 years their senior.
| Well, God commanded it, so it must have been alright.
- How do you know God commanded it, and your leader didn't just make this up?
| Because I know the Book of Mormon is true and I have a testimony of Joseph Smith!
- Okay, why do you think so?
| It says right there at the end of the Book of Mormon that you can pray about it to know it is true. And I did, and I've had so many personal experiences that reaffirm my faith.
- Okay, but lots of people pray and think their religion is the right one. Couldn't a Muslim or Hindu say something similar?
| No, they don't have all the <specific features>! Look, I don't know what you've been reading about Mormons, but you can't expect to get accurate sources from random internet sites. If you want to know the truth, you have to read the Book of Mormon and ask God. The devil will try to lead you astray, but you just need to cultivate a seed of faith and hold onto it until it grows into an unshakeable foundation.
- Um... that's circular reasoning. How do you know that's how you can get the truth?
| Oh, I see. You're some anti-Mormon, aren't you? You were never interested to begin with, you were just trying to trick me up. Well I don't want to hear your bigotry anymore. All my friends/family who are Mormon are the best people I know, and even if you don't believe in my religion, you have to acknowledge its fruits are good.
- Didn't we get into this conversation because you said gay people shouldn't be allowed to kiss each other? That isn't a "good fruit".
| No, according to my religion it is. God has a plan, you just have to open up your heart and believe.
" Otherwise, why would you assume any religious person who is home-schooling is automatically an Evangelical young Earth creationist?"
Because in the US this is largely true. And young earth creationists are most empathically anti-science. I know because that is how I was raised and I have rejected all of that nonsense.
To be fair most high school graduates might recite the “right scientific facts” while having no basis for supporting them.
The earth is 4 billion years old. Survival of the fittest drives evolution. Why? How do you know?
Basically just another form of indoctrination. Children are not taught science so much as science appreciation.
Under what circumstances would it matter? As long as people believe the earth is older than around 3,000 years they are going to have more of a problem with general background ignorance than their misconceptions about that specific fact.
If a group of people believing a random untrue fact is a threat, there are a vast number of threats out there. Far more than the school system can possibly deal with. Misidentifying the age of the earth is harmless compared to things like economic misconceptions and there aren't many school systems making a credible effort to correct those.
The neat thing about science is that all the explanations have to fit together. The explanation for why the sun shines so bright for so long can't contradict the explanation for why birds can fly. When you reject an explanation as fundamental as evolution and the ages of the earth you really put yourself at a disadvantage in understanding many other things.
I actually had a young earth creationist say that the sun doesn't use fusion and thus its lifespan is more in line with the creationist worldview and I responded with neutrinos emitted from the fusion reactions in the sun.
A few weeks ago while giving a talk to some business school students, I was shocked to find most of the students and children of the faculty were homeschooled for K-12. This was a Baptist-affiliated university. I really had no clue this was so prevalent amongst evangelicals.
Schools shouldn't teach neither evolution, nor creationism, nor any other origin story. Because it is something that doesn't matter at all – knowledge without value.
Worse is that the majority pupils around the world will be taught both the Abrahamic creation story, the origin of man according to evolution, and usually a third or even fourth creation story from local pre-Abrahamic mythology. In the same school and from the same teacher. Talk about confusion of the highest order!
There is another issue. Kids in the first group can get an incredible academic intellectual education, AND be emotionally and socially stunted. I have directly observed this, unfortunately. It also happens in very liberal, high-end, private schools.
I've known people who were going to some of the top private schools in the U.S. who were still paying for weekend math classes because the schools weren't reaching them at their level.
Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students, and they're fine with them not learning anything in the class as long as as the teachers are hitting their goals. I imagine the same attitude is harming the other students as well, but it's especially easier to see with high performing students where their needs are often openly ignored.
It’s easier to see with kids who have stronger behavioral or learning needs.
I was a 3rd grade teachers aide and I saw the distinction first hand. A gifted child was given advanced textbooks and space to work at his own pace. The teacher didn’t really teach much, but the child was learning.
Conversely there was another kid who just got headphones to watch videos in the back of the room. I guess learn st his own pace, except the videos didn’t actually seem educational to me. I think it was mostly just done to keep him preoccupied.
>Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students
If you really believe this, then sue your school district. In my area, there was a district where parents believed high performers were not getting the necessary resources and through a combination of legal pressure and partnership with the school district, made it a priority in the same way that district had prioritized education for other specialized needs. Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.
If you really believe this, then sue your school district.
AIUI, California school districts are under no obligation to meet kids where they're at, i.e. if a kid is ahead they don't have to be offered differentiated content or acceleration.
> Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.
It's worth discussing the administrators and the budget (though our budget is much higher than the national average), but why should we reflexively dismiss concerns about the teachers? There are advanced students who only get acknowledged as such when the teachers tell them "don't do that, we haven't learned it yet."
There's a large difference between trying to engage advanced students with limited resources, and not trying to engage or even acknowledge advanced students at all.
Yes, and... In states where property taxes fund schools, there are basically two ways to pay for a good school: a) go to a private school, b) live in a school zone with high real estate values. At various points my wife and I calculated that 8 years at ~25k/yr tuition would work out to about the same as the ~200k house price delta we'd have to pay to move to a better school zone.
And I suppose option #3 is rationing, which is how some schools do it (our daughter is in a gifted academy where admission is limited via lottery.)
I did the same math comparing portland with suburb schools (around portland and seattle) and came to the same conclusion. But one other thought is when the money goes to the mortgage, you get to keep the wealth after (assuming you sell to downsize at some point).
More money in the mortgage principal you theoretically keep when you later downsize housing, but you also will probably spend a good bit more in taxes as well.
Yes, good to do the calculation properly before making the decision if its motivated primarily by finances; sometimes the outcome can be surprising. Ironically speaking specifically about Portland, you'll pay _less_ in taxes moving to e.g. Washington schools in addition to getting better schools. But I think this is likely a special case.
>In states where property taxes fund schools, ... b) live in a school zone with high real estate values
Here's some tangential anecdata.
I'm in Oregon, the county I live in pays for the local schools through property taxes. More than half of the tax goes to the schools if I recall.
Anyway, that's not the fun part. The fun part is one of the schools needs(wants?) a new roof. Sounds reasonable, here are the unreasonable parts: They want to raise funds with additional taxes, because they refuse to budget and earmark money for it. They also said they need(want?) several million dollars to do it. The taxes would also be used by the county to buy school-issued bonds from the school to fund the new roof, rather than directly using the tax dollars.
Unsurprisingly, the county measure to introduce that new tax failed during the election in November with a resounding laugh.
The entire way our schools are operated begs some very hard questions.
Our local schools, like many around the country, spooled up new permanent programs in response to the influx of COVID funding which they always knew to be temporary.
Now that the funding has gone away, they say they have a funding crisis, and will have to cut other things unless they can get the state to "adequately fund" them.
What you’re describing is the completely normal way of funding capital projects… they presumably need to fund the improvements at once (the roofing contractors aren’t going to be paid over the next 15 years) and tax payers won’t want a huge spike in taxes so the district will sell bonds with a ~15 year horizon, taxpayers can have slightly higher taxes for 15 years, and the funds are available for improvements on day one.
You seem to be under the impression that the school district has enough extra funding that they could just put tens of millions of dollars aside and complete the improvements as they come up, but can you imagine the shrieking that would erupt if they had a school board meeting and disclosed a capital improvement fund with millions of dollars in it? People would demand that their taxes be lowered post haste since it’s clear the schools don’t need all the money they’re being given.
Something like a new roof is an expense known literally years in advance. You know when something will be due for repair or replacement due to reaching the end of design and/or useful life. The proper way to handle that kind of expense is to set aside some money every year in the budget toward an earmarked fund until you have enough when time comes to buy a new roof.
So no, I (and clearly most of the voters) heartily rejected the new tax proposal. Fiscal discipline before any more or new taxes.
Also: There is no reasonable, commonly understandable way a new roof costs several million dollars. Forget where the money could come from, the demand itself is questionable. As a taxpayer I want to see the school's entire fiscal records, including data that might not be public, if they want that kind of money for what should be a regular maintenance job.
So basically you think taxes should have been set higher a long time ago so they would have a yearly surplus that could have been saved up to pay for a new roof?
I don't see why this is preferable to lower taxes that just cover operations and short term maintenance, with separate bond issues to play for things like new roofs which are expensive but only come up ever 20 to 30 years.
There is quite a bit of variability in how long a roof lasts, because it can be greatly affected by weather and climate and accidents. With the "save for it out of a surplus" approach you'd need enough surplus so that you'll be ready if it turns out your current roof needs replacing on the low side of the roof lifetime range.
But then what happens when you reach that and the roof turns out to actually still be fine? Do you just keep adding each years surplus to the roof fund? I bet taxpayers wouldn't like that. They'd want taxes to be lowered to get rid of the surplus.
But then when you do replace the roof you'd have to raise taxes back to what they were to start building the fund for the next roof. So you still end up with the pattern being higher taxes for several years after a roof is installed and then lower taxes from then until it is time for the next new roof.
That's the same pattern you end up with under the "use a bond issue to pay for a roof when needed" approach.
>So basically you think taxes should have been set higher a long time ago so they would have a yearly surplus that could have been saved up to pay for a new roof?
Yes.
Simply put: If you can't or won't budget+save for a known future expense, I'm not giving you money to pay for it when it comes knocking.
>But then what happens when you reach that and the roof turns out to actually still be fine?
Save what's in there for when the roof really hits end of usable life and either: A) Keep adding to the fund if it's justifiable, or B) Remove the line item from the budget and reduce or reallocate the budget accordingly.
We're not talking about RNGesus throwing down a randomass thunderbolt at the school and blasting a randomass hole through it on a randomass Thursday. We know reasonably when the roof will need replacing for an absolute fact, and at least a ballpark estimate how much it will cost.
Fiscal discipline goes a long way to convincing me to pay (more) taxes.
Lol never worked construction for government gigs? I was once hired on as a laborer for a city government funded arts building. The construction boss had to buy a very expensive and gawdy table from the mayor's kids. The government was paying themselves. It's likely 30% roof and 70% old boys network of hiring select people for favors.
I'm quite aware what the several million buckeroos are actually "needed" for, and I'm all the more vindicated in telling the school and county to get fucking bent.
Unfortunate that kids have to indirectly get caught in the crossfire, but such is life.
IME private schools also tend to be in more expensive areas, so you will either still have to pay more for housing, or spend a lot of time and transportation costs to get between home and school. Plus friends from school will live further away.
And of course many people don't have enough money for private school or to move to a good school district.
This seems to reflect a lot of what I hear about as well. Everything is too entrenched from a decision making standpoint for any one person to make a difference in reforms.
A free market fixes anything where people have the ability to "vote with their wallet" and simply stop paying for services which aren't meeting expectations when they find another that does. Things like employer sponsored health insurance are insulated from you choosing a different option for yourself and we get the situation that we currently have because of it.
Education is the same way but the only ways to vote with your wallet are...
1. Buy a house zoned for the school that you want.
2. Pay for private school.
3. Home school.
4. In some areas, school choice where you can choose from another of the available public options may be viable too.
The only long term solution here that has potential to fix things legislatively is a true school voucher program that would let you take the tax money assigned for your kids education and put it into whatever option you believed was actually best for their education.
This _should_ lead to a start-up like small business ecosystem with lots of small Montessori style schools especially for younger kids. Most likely a "neighborhood schools" model would pop up and parents would end up walking their kids to school again, even in suburban areas.
Most likely you would still see bigger options for high school still as teenagers crave more socialization. Sports would likely revolve more around communities than individual schools too.
You'd of course see some specialties. Schools advertising why they were the best option for your kids and then having to prove it in order to keep them. Yes, there would definitely be religious schools as there already are now.
My guess is that a lot of the current home school co-ops that are popular in my area would simply become suddenly funded because the parents involved as pretty happy with the model. I had a lot of biases against home schooling until I saw how these co-ops work and it's really effective. Basically just like a normal school small school with parents teaching different lessons on different days. Each parent's commitment is a half day a week to teach and they still do school plays, etc.
Voucher programs are just going to flood the "education market" with substandard schools teaching things like humans walked with dinosaurs a few thousand years ago before the great flood. They're going to extract profits from our tax dollars to give us a worse quality service.
We'll see a lot of new schools open up, spend a few years collecting profits, then get shut down for substandard quality after effectively failing to teach kids for those few years. Meanwhile the public schools which can't be choosy will end up with fewer resources and have worse outcomes for the kids who have parents who can't afford private transportation to the few nicer, choosier voucher schools.
Being able to read the Bible would be a big improvement on say the Baltimore school system, which spends $22,500 per year per student: https://www.city-journal.org/article/are-baltimore-students-... (“According to the 2022 NAEP test, only 10 percent of fourth-graders and 15 percent of eighth-graders in Baltimore’s public schools are proficient in reading.”)
Literally, madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to read the Quran would be an upgrade.
Those numbers do not mean what you seem to think. 1st, proficiency on that test is a pretty high bar. There are kids making perfectly adequate progress who don’t score proficient. Second, average per-pupil costs are meaningless. Baltimore city pays for two of my kids’ educations. One costs the city about $8k (the money that a school gets for a kid with no extra needs). The other costs well over $100k, due to significant disabilities. Baltimore has a disproportionate number of kids with significant needs of some sort, including learning disabilities, extreme family poverty, and ESL learners. Those kids need extra resources. A voucher system isn’t going to change that.
Those numbers are actually painting a rosier picture of what is actually happening in Baltimore and other cities. In 23 out of 150 school, zero students - none! - were proficient in math. Not a single student. There is simply no way to put lipstick on that pig.
>The Maryland State Department of Education recently released the 2022 state test results known as MCAP, Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program.
>Baltimore City’s math scores were the lowest in the state. Just 7% of third through eighth graders tested proficient in math, which means 93% could not do math at grade level.
>But that’s not all. WBFF combed through the scores at all 150 City Schools where the state math test was given. In 23 Baltimore City schools, there were zero students who tested proficient in math.
In the other 127 schools, what percentage of students were proficient in math? How about other schools given the same test? It's hard to draw conclusions without context as to what an average or above average school scores in these tests.
Not saying they are useless but standardized tests only work for kids who take them seriously.
I recall taking these as a kid, and there were kids who would just fill in the bubbles. They would not even read the questions. They thought it was funny.
So when we have anecdotes, we get told to look at the stats for objective facts. Alternatively, when we do have stats, we get told "no those numbers do not mean what you think they mean" as a way to dismiss the abysmal numbers. So which is it.
Let's face it, we all know it, just some of us are too scared to say it publicly. In large urban areas in America, there is a (large / huge / significant) portion of the school population that is illiterate, speaks non-functional english in the form of black-culture slang, the rest don't even speak english in an english-speaking country, and practically none of them are going to be functional adults that don't require assistance and handouts to survive.
I tend to see big per student spending in public schools as suggestive that they've been loaded up with a disproportionate share of the kids with IEPs.
>madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to read the Quran
I thought they were just teaching the sounds of the Quran. Like the Pakistani kids don't know any Arabic, and they don't learn to read or understand Arabic. They just memorize and recite the Arabic sounds of the Quran that they've been taught.
I can believe that they don't actually teach the grammar of Arabic or how to speak or write it, but they don't even translate the meaning of the verses to Urdu (or whatever the local language is)?
I'm not an expert in this area at all. But I was under the impression that for some of these schools, that is the case. My understanding is that some (many?/most?) Muslims believe that the Quran was a direct revelation from Allah in Arabic, and so translations are somewhat suspect, risking incorrect interpretations from humans.
I know that Muslims believe that translations of the Quran are of a lesser status, but I didn’t think that would extend to not even explaining their meaning to the students.
They usually do teach you to read Arabic, which is mostly the same script as Urdu. But you don't understand what you're reading which doesn't really make it any better.
Why would it give people worse education? Besides who are you or any of us to decide what is and isnt a good education for someone elses kids? It's not your job to police ideas.
Are you really arguing schools getting taxpayer money to teach kids humans walked with dinosaurs and all modern biology is a lie a good educational outcome?
Do you really not see how that's a bad outcome?
Do you not see that removing the funding from the regular public schools to go to teach that nonsense will lead to worse outcomes for those kids who can't leave those regular public schools?
Sure, maybe some students will potentially have some better outcomes if they manage to go to a good private charter school with their voucher that happens to be a decent one. For everyone else it's a worse outcome, unless you think it's a good thing to teach every animal alive today are direct descendants of the ark that was just a few thousand years ago.
Also, kiss special education funding goodbye. It won't be profitable to handle these students. They'll be trapped in those even more underfunded public schools. Hooray, great outcomes!
But those kids who are "being left behind" are good to have vouchers too. You don't think there will be small schools who want to take them?
I had a bunch of random teachers teach really dumb stuff while I was in public school. I don't believe those things, because I had parents who were involved in my education. It's never a good idea to leave your kids education to the whims of someone else.
Public school doesn't have some magic monopoly on good ideas. And private/voucher schools aren't going to have a monopoly on bad ones.
Why would the kids not be able to leave public schools? They will all have vouchers?
> You don't think there will be small schools who want to take them?
Spending a second of logic on it and thinking critically, there won't. Why would a school empowered to be choosy and subject to profit motivations choose the pricier students to specialize that reduce their rankings?
And why do you think a flood of schools arguing germ theory is a lie be a public good?
I went to religious private school and too had teachers who taught some bullshit things. Dinosaurs were fakes buried in the soil by the devil to test believers. Evolution is a lie by the government. And yet by personal experience I'm more learned than the average public school peer I know. I'm a somewhat special person though; I know many in my class that still believe without question. It's not a good thing for society overall to have such "knowledge".
As for why kids wouldn't be able to leave the public schools, some schools will be required to provide transportation. Others won't. Some will be able to be choosy, some won't. You see where this goes? Those schools which are choosey and don't provide transportation will end up selecting the most well off while those unable to be choosy and/or forced to provide transportation will be forced to shoulder those who aren't good performers who don't get into the choosy schools with a transit scholarship.
Ok, so… you went to some self-described example a school you are complaining about, turned out great, and are upset that kids might not keep going to known-failing schools?
Maybe… there is more to school than facts? Maybe it’s about order and discipline and shared values too?
> Maybe… there is more to school than facts? Maybe it’s about order and discipline and shared values too?
Maybe status-quo bias is so powerful that people will see an institution that fails at literally everything it tries to do and instead of concluding that it's a failing institution they will pick some other random thing and decide the institution must actually be about that, because the idea that the institution is actually pointless is too horrible to contemplate.
> I went to religious private school and too had teachers who taught some bullshit things... And yet by personal experience I'm more learned than the average public school peer I know.
Should that not give you pause about the general quality of the schools you're defending? Do you not see where parents might see you in fundie school learning about how man rode the dinosaurs alongside a public school kid that somehow knows even less than you about history or biology, and think "hmm maybe I'd like to find something else"?
> Should that not give you pause about the general quality of the schools you're defending?
No, because I've seen the average of the extremist schools which will grow with the voucher program and they're far worse than the negatives I experienced. Education like Eve gives Adam two apples, how many apples does Adam have; it doesn't matter Jesus will come soon here's another chapter of the KJV.
Except there's no reason to believe extremist schools should grow significantly. Most people aren't extremists (pretty much by definition). In fact, good schools are a usual top tier concern when looking at housing. Your worry about fly-by-night schools extracting profits and fleeing is also not particularly hard to solve: hold them liable for damages/a return of n years of voucher funds if the school fails to meet standards and require them to carry insurance or post a bond to prove they can meet their liability. High performing schools or new schools associated to people/organizations with a previous success record will have cheap premiums. Dodgy schools will have expensive premiums or will be uninsurable. Your worry about special ed is also not that complex: give higher funds for those kids to offset their higher cost.
> Are you really arguing schools getting taxpayer money to teach kids humans walked with dinosaurs and all modern biology is a lie a good educational outcome?
I'll say yes. Most people I've seen who have gone through that type of schooling are good members of society. They work jobs, they pay taxes, they have friends, they often go on to higher education, they raise families, and they may be happier than the average person. The outcome is perfectly fine.
You are ignoring the externalities. We end up with an ignorant society that ultimately harms all of us. I hate to use a movie trope here, but we're barely a step above Idiocracy when it comes to the ability of the average American to function and make decisions. This ultimately becomes self destructive.
87% of kids attend public k-12, and secular and Catholic schools together make up the majority of private, so if we're barely a step above Idiocracy, it seems a bit silly to point at the "man rode the dinosaurs" people.
I went to a young earth creationist Christian school and it messed me up. Most of us had a hard time adjusting to life outside the Evangelical Christian bubble. It's really hard to connect to others when your identity is tied up in believing a lot of outlandish things and it's hard to love yourself because you're given a long list of crazy rules to follow. I was told that kissing someone before I was married would taint my soul and whoever I married would be disgusted by me if I did so. Most people I've kept in touch with regret going to that school and every queer person I know has been absolutely traumatized by the experience. I'm happy, and by your criteria, a good member of society but that was despite my school. It took a lot of therapy, personal growth, and finding a community of people who actually care about me to be happy.
Catholics aren't generally young-Earth creationists, and overall the Church argues the age of the earth is a scientific not a religious question.
I totally agree there are many religious schools which are extremely high quality. Despite a few strange views at the school I went to, the general quality of education was quite high. However, I refuse to ignore the many other examples of schools which are not high quality. They should be called out, and there's no way I want my tax dollars going to teach their nonsense.
The thing is - the average school is terrible. NAEP scores show less than 25% reach "basic" proficiency in math, and reading is even worse.
I can't find any comparable stats on just religious schools, but I strongly suspect they are, on average, performing substantially better than non-religious schools. The reasons for that are more to do with the students than the schools, but the exact reason is inconsequential - the point is that people are targeting them because of the religious aspect and not the quality of education.
The typical claim of evolution is illogical. Even if a religious school solely and exclusively taught creationism while not even paying lip service to the controversy (which few to none do), it's not at all like a child's education would be permanently crippled. As the most important things learned in basic education are not facts, but skills - reading, writing, and arithmetic in particular.
A school which can be choosy in admissions will likely have students with better proficiencies. It's easy to have only top scoring students when you can kick out the bottom scoring ones.
> the point is that people are targeting them because of the religious aspect and not the quality of education
This is the point I'm making. Many people aren't going to end up choosing the school because of the quality of the education, they'll be choosing it because it aligns with their world view. That germ theory is a lie, the Earth is 5,000 years old, scientists are liars out to eliminate Christ from society, and that the only things you need to know is what is in the Bible.
Let's assume what you're saying is true, though I'm sure you realize you're being rather hyperbolic, at a minimum.
I think the purpose of school is to teach the fundamentals - reading, writing and arithmetic in particular.
I don't really care what worldview a school endorses so long as they are completely transparent on it.
Young Earth theory and creationism is one side of a coin - 80 genders, intersectionalism, and critical theory is the other.
If a parent is down with these worldviews, I see no problem so long as the school is excelling at their primary educational responsibilities, and also making their ideological motives transparent to parents.
Or private equity owned schools. Imagine how bad product they could effectively deliver. The would not even teach humans walking with dinosaurs... As they would do bare minimum of teaching anything at all...
Why would parents send their children to those schools? Never mind who owns them; I would expect the kind of hypothetical schools you’re describing to go bankrupt quickly. Private equity is not in the business of losing money in predictable ways.
Same reason parents send their kids to public schools: because the price is right. Since we're importing legions of indentured servants, wages aren't rising, and parents have to make tough decisions in order to pay for basic necessities.
A thriving education system is an indicator of a prosperous society, not a cause.
Schools are a state and local matter. So just because you might be frustrated with the government in your area ain't my effing problem. To chastise all public schools is a false narrative.
Two, then you wouldn’t be opposed to eliminating the dept of education then, right? I hope Trump follows through on his promise you seem to agree with.
Come on, be serious. In a huge country with 50M students attending primary/secondary school you can always dredge up a few horror stories but those are far from the typical case. On the scale of ways that schools damage kids, teaching them the unscientific mythology of certain Christian sects is hardly the worst. The Catholic church, which is one of the largest private school operators, has no official position on paleontology or evolution through natural selection.
I am serious. If you're thinking most of the families are chomping at the bit to repurpose tax dollars to Catholic schools you've clearly never interviewed the average homeschool family South of the Mason-Dixon. They don't even think Catholics are Christian; many would align a priest with Satan!
Most families I know who currently home school do so so to avoid vaccine requirements because germ theory/biology is a lie or because they're worried their kids will be exposed to the idea of the fossil record or that gay people exist in the world or put thoughts like dinosaurs died before humans into kids heads.
You're delusional if you think of these aren't major homeschooling points in the US. Willingly holding your nose to ignore the extreme stench of the anti-intellectualism the rest of the movement massively embodies.
This will be the outcome in an extreme majority of school districts. If anything, this recent election shows fundies vote. To them it's even more than life or death, it's eternal death to miss voting.
This isn't pure statistics though. This dataset is massively biased. And out performed on what, that 2+2=4 or that 2+2=Who know what except that God gives us our provision despite what our eyes see and logic tells us
Even if there were more ways to "vote with your wallet" is abundantly clear that a lot of parents, respectively, (a) couldn't care less anyway, and (b) can't actually tell a good charter or voucher school from a bad one.
When the purpose of schooling is ensuring a civic floor amongst citizens the effectiveness of things like the home school co-ops mentioned can't come at the expense of population at large unless we wish to surrender the republican form of government for something else.
You need to contrast suggested ideas to the current systems, not an idealized standard that the current system is nowhere near achieving.
For instance NAEP scores consistently demonstrate only about 25% of students achieve "basic" proficiency in math, reading is even worse. Its going to be difficult to do worse.
And I mean that very literally - some percent of people would become competent in e.g. basic math with 0 public education due to family or personal interests. I can't imagine it's "that" far from 25%.
Nothing magical about it. It’s pure economics and rational decision making. The institutions we complain about in this country every day are completely insulated from it. Everything else survives or fails on its own merits.
Pure economics and rational decision making are the exact reasons for engaging in regulatory capture, bribery, and oligarchy.
Why on earth would democracy (or any other form of shared power) be a rational choice for you, from an economic standpoint, if you already are wealthy enough to neuter it to the point where nearly all profits and decision-making authority are allocated to you?
Dictatorship is the ultimate in rational decision-making for a rational self-interested actor. Philanthropy and benevolence are not rational for the wealthy and powerful.
Income inequality and regulatory capture are features of the free market, not bugs. They are baked in by design.
Most countries in the world "patch" those bugs by regulation that moves them away from being pure "free market" economies. Antitrust regulation is a well-known example of this.
>There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English.
This really gets my hackles up, because my kids grew up in schools with a 50% Spanish speaking population and my partner is a dual-language teacher in a district where Spanish, Russian, and I believe Vietnamese are all taught as first-languages in specialized classrooms. Your assertion around English is misguided. This isn't to say that we don't need to get our kids proficient in English (it is the lingua franca after all), but there's more here than meets the eye. In my area we are headed toward universal bilingual education, which I see as only a good thing. That means that it may take longer to reach full proficiency, but the overall outcome is more capable and prepared students.
I don’t want my kid in a classroom where everything has to be repeated in Spanish. It’s already this way for school meetings and it slows information sharing down to a crawl.
If there was mandatory English and Spanish in elementary school classrooms I would consider home schooling.
Outside of certain fields (skilled trades primarily) my children will not need to be proficient in Spanish to be successful in the United States. It’s a nice to have and should not slow down everything else.
The teachers in this school don't speak Spanish. The Spanish speaking children are struggling, and the rest of the kids cannot proceed at the same rate.
I'm not pretending to have solutions, and I'm certainly empathetic for all involved. Just stating the reality that this is a suboptimal learning environment.
this is the experience i see at our local schools. english as first language kids are bored and not challenged. the class is moving slower because half the kids are only learning english for the first time at school. “modern” progress ideology is to not separate the students by ability anymore and there’s less accelerated tracks
Perhaps you shouldn't have a knee jerk reaction of getting yourself irritated then. The GP clearly said 1/4 students don't speak English, not 1/4 students speak one more language besides English.
My kid is in a program where they spend half the day, and learn half the subjects, in a language that most of the students didn’t initially speak at all. They pick it up and do quite well.
I think you missed the point of the parent, which is that ~1/4 of the students are dead weight at the cost of the rest of the class. It isn't "misguided" if their experience is different than yours.
If your outcome is students that are more capable at languages but less capable in virtually every other subject, is the result really "more capable and prepared students"? I'm not opposed to bilingualism but you're lying to yourself if you think this comes at zero cost to at least some students.
for kids in early development, their skill level in all the other subjects later will be essentially determined by their linguistic ability. math is a language. there is research that shows benefit to bilingual programs, but there has to more structure than just dumping esl kids in there with everyone else.
Forgive me, but with machine translation becoming nearly a solved problem — why would kids spend years of their lives learning new languages anymore? By the time they grow up, won't that be a rather useless skill — except perhaps in very nuanced contract negotiations?
I don’t know where you live, but kids (plural!) assaulting teachers like that would be very unusual. I have a lot of family and friends in elementary education and management. Stories like that are the kind of thing that get talked about for years if they happen, not something that happens enough to be referred to in the plural.
A family member who taught at a title 1 elementary schools encountered chair/desk throwing multiple times in the short time she was there. I think unfortunately YMMV greatly depending on the area where you live
Very expensive suburb of Seattle. I was shocked to hear this as well. Reported to me by my friend who is the school counselor and had to deal with these kids (plural) herself.
It’s good they had access to counseling and I hope she was able to help some of them. I don’t imagine most kids are born wanting to throw chairs at people. Something is going on at home.
The girl in the math class before me would beat the shit out of my desk like clockwork. She hated math, was violent, and very autistic, no apparent other issues nor even hate towards humans. Nothing could be done, just wait for the tantrum to end then take my seat.
Room destroyers are pretty common, but they usually have IEPs.
TBH there's no good choices for many - big mental health issues and trauma, no home or family support, and no real options: kids have to go somewhere, self contained classrooms are at capacity, there are worse kids in line to get put in facilities, and often you can't really do that unless parents push for it anyway.
Yeah, I know one kid that threw a chair in school. We use public education because I think it's good for kids to be independent at an early age. It can't be healthy to spend 16 years within bluetooth range of your parents at all times.
A slightly different perspective: schools are mass produced education. Mass produced in the sense that they are the lower cost in terms of person hours to produce an educated child. Like all mass produced products, it's better than 1/2 hearted solo attempts to do the same thing, but a parent that can afford to put a huge amount of time into it can do better job as lots of comments here attest.
If true, that also provides an explanation for the rise home schooling: more people can afford to do it.
I have observed that any two-tier system accentuates inequality, be it health, education, security, or anything. When one group pays to have a system better than a universally provided one, the differences between both tend to increase, as the incentive to keep the universal system only as a fall-back to the private one by investing less on it (or by receiving generous donations from the private sector) is tempting to politicians.
A former colleague of mine, who grew up in communist Yugoslavia, remembered how he cherished summer vacations when kids from different schools went together to state-operated summer camps. I thought this was an excellent way to build inter-group bonds between kids that w
The context, though, I am British. I grew up in Britain. I went to British school.
I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country.
However, school, for me, was by far the single worst mandatory system I have been exposed to in my life. For the entirety of my young life, school was a prison. With inmates who would beat you, Emotionally abuse you, the “wardens” did not want to be there either, and did not care how the other inmates treated you… sometimes doubling down on the behaviour themselves. - The comparison is further solidified by 6-foot galvanised steel bars surrounding the complex, and that I visited an actual psychiatric prison not long after and the cafeteria, recreational grounds, rooms, etc; were identical to those of my school.
Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning, Everything that got me through school was things that my mother taught me- And as a consequence, I was always top of my class.
I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. I would not be surprised if this feeling is shared among many of my generation and social class, the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
and for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children- The ostracised, are learning to be helpless and to be victims- They are not learning to “socialise” more. If anything it is probably more harmful for those people to be exposed to more people until they’ve had time to form on their own.