gog
8mo ago
The modern public education system is an expensive daycare at best and a Potemkin village at worst. Kids lack any internal or external motivation to learn, discipline is basically forbidden, and any mark under 85 is cause for meetings and interventions and BS special ed plans. Many teachers don't think this is a problem- school should be a "safe space" for children (though to what end, they usually can't say). Any teacher that does think it's a problem is either too cowardly (or agreeable, same thing) to fight the decline or too attached to the sweet, sweet benefits of the job (even sweeter in Canada!) to die on this hill. They console themselves, however, by muttering about how "these kids are in for a big surprise when they get to university." Well, ti appears that there will be no surprise:
At elite US universities, huge numbers of students (20-30%) receive accommodations for intellectual "disabilities." Since these schools are much more selective than other schools, and intellectual disabilities make you worse at school, we should expect to find even higher rates of disability at less selective schools, but we don't. So either the upper class families are fortunate enough to have the means to ensure their kids get the help they need while less affluent students are struggling unassisted, or they're gaming the system to inflate their marks when the most common grade is already A. You know in your heart which one it is.
The main "accommodation" these kids get, at university and K-12, is extra time. This almost makes sense on final exams, but day-to-day they also demand it. The problem is that there is no "extra" time; there is only one time and it is limited. "Extra time" on anything is an illusion, because you are taking your own time from something else. This is not just a metaphysical quibble- parents will demand that a kid get extra time (which usually means double time) on anything the kid finds difficult. Since time cannot be created, a kid who finds the material difficult will take an entire class period for a short quiz, thereby missing a bunch of material and falling behind, ensuring that he finds future material difficult as well and requiring even more "extra" time. Parents rarely understand this, even when it is explained to them.
Kids and parents universally defend this practice because it allows the kid to do their "best work." The assumption is that if other kids do their best work in half an hour, but your kid needs an hour to do his best work, that's academic justice. We're here to find the kids best work, after all (this is never questioned and any discussion of speed is not even understood, let alone allowed). The "best work" that this system produces is never good- work expands to fill the time allotted, so if you were going to write a C+ essay in an hour, and now you have two hours, it now takes you twice as long to be just as mediocre. Other absurdities abound, which I've mentioned before, like the "separate exam space" having more kids in it than the regular exam room or kids getting the reading test read to them, but the time thing is the biggest one.
Goodhart's Law is driving all of this. We used to use marks as the best available way to measure how smart or educated kids were, but then it started getting gamed and now marks are totally meaningless (note that parents and Good Teachers will assert, in the same sentence, that marks are not a full measure of a person's worth/intelligence/etc and also demand these accommodations so that the kid's marks are propped up because the kid is good or valuable). A colleague just had a meeting about a kid failing Gr 11 advanced math. It's too late to drop the course. He reassured her that if she takes Gr 12 basic math the kid will retroactively receive a Gr 11 basic math credit, and her graduation will not be threatened. The mother freaked because this would still leave "Gr 11 advanced math: 44%" on the kid's transcript, as though there were a situation where you needed a good gr 11 advanced math mark but didn't actually have to be good at math (in Canada, there is no such situation- any scholarship or admission that would have this kind of demand is going to the kids in Gr 12 advanced math anyway).
These are pretty standard complaints about the ed system, but now lets talk about The Last Psychiatrist. His bugbear was narcissism. Not the swaggering bravado we normally associate with narcissism, but insecure or compensatory narcissism that causes empty people to act out a character rather than to be their authentic selves (they don't have authentic selves in the first place). "Main character syndrome" probably comes from his writing, though I don't think he used that exact phrase. So a narcissistic man would demand that his wife get breast implants, not because he loves busty women, but because cool dudes like him have wives with huge knockers. He is trying to shape everything but himself to project the identity he wishes he had. It's normal for kids to try out different identities, get tough-guy tatoos or act like Taylor Swift, but well-adjusted people grow out of it and start actually doing things, and the things they do become the basis for stable identities. TLP alleged that people in the West have stopped growing out of it and are trapped in juvenile psychology where identity is totally decoupled from action. So you can go every day to your actuary job and estimate health insurance risk and go home and scroll Twitter all night, but since you own a guitar you actually think of yourself as a musician. This has all kinds of bad effects on you personally, on the people around you, and on society. Read his oeuvre to find out more.
This kind of narcissism is a natural, though regrettable, phase of growing up, and it's bad if you don't grow out of it. It's even worse, though, if all the adults around you are actively inculcating it in you. Accommodations are the main way society is doing this. "Marks are just one way of evaluating people" is perfectly true. If you really believe this, you won't be that worried about your kid getting a 60, unless he's slacking off, in which case you chain him up for a while until he gets his act together. But if you tell your kid, and doctors tell your kid, and the school tells your kid, and TikTok tells your kid (this, to your kid, is tantamount to the entire world telling him), that actually he's really smart even though he doesn't do anything smart, and that actually what needs to happen is for the world around him to change (=accommodations) then you are encouraging a mindset which life should actually be beating out of him.
People around here often object to The Last Psychiatrist's style, Sadly Porn is weird, etc, but he dropped the shtick and wrote a more obviously serious book called Watch What You Hear, about dream interpretation in the Odyssey. The big takeaway in the book (for psychology) is that insecure narcissists demand omnipotence from others and detest omniscience. "Omniscience" here means seeing clearly what your problems are, seeing through you. For example, a guy who thinks of himself as a woman has his whole world rocked if someone treats him like a man, or a girlboss feminist has a breakdown if someone suggests that all she wants is a baby. Instead, narcissists demand omnipotence- the trans guy wants the world rearranged to validate his feminine identity and the girlboss wants childfree spaces enforced, as though every else has the power to deliver affirmation/happiness/fulfillment/ for them.
We have allowed the education system to formally endorse this narcissistic demand for omnipotence over omniscience. The school/teacher/exam must not be allowed to correctly rate the student's intelligence, potential, actualisation or anything else. Whether that science is omni is beside the point; parents and students fear and believe that it is, which is why they lose their #$%ing minds when anyone suggests that if the kid gets 70 in every class then maybe he's just kinda a 70. The omnipotence they demand of everyone is the power to make their kid above-average. In some cases they believe this can be done, in other cases they demand the trappings of academic success without the substance (identity divorced from actions). This is TLP narcissism codified and is far worse for society than some lame teacher trying to get kids to like her by saying she's bisexual or whatever.
(I know that economic anxiety is a huge driver here, that parents fear that their kid will end up destitute if he doesn't get into engineering or something, but again, in what world will he be a successful engineer if you explicitly demanded that we cover up his lack of discipline, drive, and ability with fake marks? A world where, with regard to your kid, everyone else is omnipotent without being omniscient)
I guess my point is that the dominant objections here to public education rest on the system's financial or ideological effects, and while those are bad, the psychological effects are much worse and go much deeper than "I was bored and my reward was more work". The financial and ideological objections have more to do with the ed system being mainly made up of the outgroup, but they'll eventually all be dead. It's fine to dream of the day when the system is dissolved or otherwise rendered powerless, but until then, stop demanding accommodations for your kids. It's much worse for them than reading gay comics in English class.
gog
9mo ago
-People are forgetting past perfective. You can find oodles of Youtube videos titled "What I wish I knew before I started (whatever undertaking)" and every one of them means "What I wish I had known."
-Fewer vs less. "I got less chances in that game" is not a thing. Makes you sound like a 5-year-old, right up there with "How much couches do you have."
And to all the cool aunt, "AKshually language evolves" descriptivists, this change entails a loss of possible meanings and is bad. I know "deer" used to mean "any animal" and "corn" used to mean "any grain," etc but when those words changed usage it became possible to express MORE thoughts because the language became more specific. My examples, and the examples that stodgy prescriptivists mostly complain about, all involve a blurring of meanings, which in 99% of cases entails blurring of thought (both as cause and then again as consequence). Do you feel like we have an excess of clear thought out there nowadays? Of course not! Do your part- join the prescriptivists. Make language specific again! SEIZE THE MEANS OF INFLECTION!!!!!!!!
One more: "Have a good rest of your day" is rampant in Canada and has almost completed replaced "Have a good day" among customer service workers under 30 years old. To wish anyone anything implies that you wish it for the future. Are they worried that I might think they're wishing that the past of my day, up to the point of our interaction, had gone (or more likely "went") well? What happened to these people?
gog
10mo ago
Who counts as "productive"? In the Bill and Shelley thread people are using the word to mean anything from "blameless" to "civilizationally load-bearing." Having a definition for "productive" is important to enable people who disagree to converse, otherwise everyone's talking past each other. The best candidate I've seen is "reducing the per-unit cost of a good or service." On this definition Bill and Shelley are obviously not currently productive, since they just spend money and therefore bid up prices of things. The guy who invented the GMO rice is obviously extremely productive, since he made rice way cheaper for millions of people. But what if Bill and Shelley grow one carrot this year, and eat it instead of buying one at the store. They have, in some small way, reduced the per-unit cost of carrots, but this wouldn't be enough for us to call them productive. There's some ratio of how-much-you-reduced-prices to how-much-you-bid-them-up that most people seem to have in mind when they call someone productive in a strictly economic sense. We don't have to quibble over what that ratio is, but it seems to get hard when you consider someone working as a small cog in the Apple machine, or the Toyota machine. Their contribution to reducing per-unit prices is a lot closer to growing one carrot than it is to inventing GMO rice. What definition are you using? How do you tell who is productive?
gog
10mo ago
I'll continue this with you if you explain your understanding of the difference between an economic and a moral argument. You keep stating that the situation isn't fair, which is a moral complaint, not an economic one. I don't dispute that it isn't fair, I dispute that if it were abolished everyone currently alive would get richer.
gog
10mo ago
A fact is not an argument. "If you don't stay home old people may get COVID" is a medical fact, but it is not obvious from that fact what the best course of societal action is.
But anyway, I thought you meant Broken Window policing. The difference between this and the Broken Window fallacy is that these people aren't actually inflicting any damage. They're spending huge amounts of money on frivolous stuff (which is why OP is offended), and that money is circulating around so that high earners can earn it again. The speed of money through the economy drives economic growth, and while a perfectly laissez-faire system might very well have a higher speed of money, switching to such a system, even if it were phased in over a few years, would cause a huge economic contraction. You might object that, as with broken windows, the 27% tax bill is imposing an opportunity cost, that taking OP's money so someone on "stress leave" can buy Tinkerbell statues prevents him from inventing a better battery or something, but A) not giving the Tinkerbell salesman that money might prevent HIM from inventing the same battery and B)the vast majority of taxes taken collected from the industrious and squandered by the poor on frivolous stuff actually impose the opportunity cost of the industrious not being able to squander the money on frivolous stuff himself. So it all boils down to who "deserves" the money, and all talk of desert is moral disputation. Since no one agrees on morality anymore, there can be no moral disputation on a wide scale and so people need to either make peace with the current system or wield it to their benefit.
gog
10mo ago
Government spending on these sorts of programs is so huge that anyone old enough to be posting here would not live long enough to see things shake out if things ever switched, assuming they survived the violence that such a transition would probably involve. If we were setting up a society from scratch, then the current system would be something to avoid, certainly. Having come as far down this road as we have, though, any benefits from switching would fall mainly on generations to come. That might be a great thing, but "duty to future generations" is a moral, not an economic argument. I'm not defending the morality of the system, just explaining that it's not the simple math problem OP seems to think it is.
Furthermore, all of the experiments (I assume you're talking about free-market vs socialist countries) have converged on wild government spending. Unless you say that REAL capitalism has never been tried, then maybe 90% of the population recirculating the wealth produced by the remaining 10% is just how it works? Maybe that's the true triumph of post-scarcity industrial victory: welfare grift and BS jobs for the lucky majority and productive, morally-pure, toil for the unfortunate few.
gog
10mo ago
"The luxury of the spendthrift slackers is paid for by the industrious" is not an economic argument, it's a moral one. I don't see the resemblance to Broken Windows- can you clarify?
gog
10mo ago
While it might be morally offensive that these spendthrift slackers aren’t working as hard as you are, economically it doesn’t matter very much. You can think of your own prosperity in terms of absolute (nominal) numbers, but the real value of your wealth matters a lot more, and the real value of your wealth depends on your relative position in the economy- what fraction of the total economy you own.
If all government aid to these people were switched off overnight and your 27% tax bill were reduced to zero, you would own 27% more of the economy than you do now, but government spending is such a large part of the economy that the total size of the economy would be much less, possibly more than 27% less, which would cancel out your gain. So you wouldn’t be much richer, you might be poorer, and your relative status would be much lower because the median income would skyrocket (because the parasite class would be dead).
gog
10mo ago
They want whomever they believe to be low-status in the culture to have more status. They believe everything is a social construct, and so they conclude that status is not earned, but granted by authorities to preferred classes of people, and stigma to disfavoured classes. Cultural marxists want to become the status/stigma-granting authority, and for them this means controlling art and education. In the US they’re primarily concerned with black people. In Canada they’re concerned about indigenous people. In Europe they’re concerned about migrants or something. You can question whether status actually works this way, but you can’t dispute that this attitude toward status is widespread all across the political spectrum.
gog
10mo ago
"They" is the disadvantaged. And if "they" won't seize the means of cultural production, then a cultural Lenin or Lenins has to do it for them. When the welfare state (mid-20th century, which explains your timeline) solved economic problems but none of the attendant social problems in marginalized communities, it seemed like maybe the problem was cultural power. If no one lacks anything material, but you still don't have the equality you were looking for, maybe you need a black little mermaid.
gog
10mo ago
OG Marxism says that the key to true freedom is for the proletariat to seize the means of industrial production because they are materially oppressed. Cultural Marxism says they need to seize the means of cultural production (art, universities, etc) because they are socially oppressed. Replace "economic status" with "cultural status." Hence "cultural Marxism."
-Even mid-quality tests under universal intellectual standards (so, not counting braille, etc) are accurate measures of both student learning and student rank. Society (this includes teachers and students) expects both measures from schools. When even a small number of people get special intellectual standards (different time constraints, faster writing tools, someone to read the questions to them, etc) even the best tests no longer measure either of the things they are supposed to measure. "But schools are designed to teach conformity, man"- well, they're not even doing that if everyone gets special treatment.
-Parents are deeply involved in grade-grubbing (the trappings of success) but uninvolved in actual education (the substance of success). A parent who was worried that their kid wasn't learning chemistry would either take responsibility for the kids chemistry knowledge and find/be a better teacher, or demand that the school clean up its act. Very few parents are out there demanding more educational rigor, and we admittedly can't tell how many are silently tutoring their kids, but there are certainly lots of parents who have taken a third path and demanded that the chemistry test be made easier for their own personal kid. This often requires expensive diagnosis shopping (though it takes less and less shopping every year) and wild amounts of time spent in meetings and consultations, and the effect of all this expense is to produce the trappings for good parenting ("I'm Serious(tm) about education") instead of the substance of good parenting ("I learned chemistry to help my kid"). And of course this shouldn't be necessary, the school should handle it, but here we are and this is what parents have done. And of course your kid's personal worth as a human doesn't depend on his grade 12 chem mark, but then why are we trying everything (except learning chemistry) to make that number go up?
-Administrators do not care about learning, hands down. If any learning should accidentally occur in one of their schools, they're fine with it, but not at the cost of graduation rates or parent complaints, which are the two measures on which they are formally and informally evaluated. You can hope for some sleeper cell of serious teachers to worm their way into the upper ranks, but the admin system actually does select for conformity, so the people in charge already know which of their former colleagues are the good ones (interpreted either way, the result is the same).
-Most teachers also don't care about learning, even if they once did. Teachers are mostly women, and the modal woman cares even less than the modal man about learning stuff, especially academic stuff. Those women who achieve academic success are usually motivated by approval and they bring that model with them when they become teachers, so you get girls with straight As because their notes are neatly written (a kid last week was explaining to me how she should actually be really good at math and, as evidence of this, showed me her magifnicent notes. She didn't understand them, but they were beautiful.) Where this is not the case, among both women and men, teachers are often motivated by an interest in the subject (which 99% of students do not share) or an actual desire to see students learn (which 99% of students do not do in any appreciable way past grade 2). As you find that kids don't care about your subject, or aren't learning it, or both, you either quit, kill yourself, double down and become the Mean Teacher (me), or redefine your job to preserve your ego. You tell yourself that actually you can look anything up on Wikipedia now, so what really matters is critical thinking, and so you just talk about DEI all day. Or you tell yourself that these kids' parents are all bigots and will abuse them if they find out their kids are gay, so you go fishing for closeted gay kids so you can be their confidante. When it turns out that there are very few gay kids, you go all in trans stuff, etc. Or you say that your real job is to spark a love of learning, so you have the kids in Gr 10 advanced English read Harry Potter with no actual demands just so they see that reading is fun. If you ever crack down and try to make the kids learn, you can't talk about DEI, they won't think of you as Cool, they won't think learning is fun, etc. "But learning can be fun!" Only up to a certain point- after that it takes effort, and effort feels really bad if you aren't used to it. Kids These Days are not used to it.
-Wealthy, non-stupid kids gaming the system are hurting themselves a bit, because most of them lack the self-awareness of the ones interviewed in the article. The average accommodation-demanding student truly believes that their poor academic performance is excused by their test anxiety, ADHD, or whatever else. They believe that they really are just as smart/driven as actually successful students, they just haven't been given "a chance to show what they know." But if you got into Harvard, someone will see to it that you are looked after. The bigger worry are kids like the law clerk mentioned in this thread, who doesn't get that his test results were just a measure, not the actual goal, and doesn't see how the real work isn't gameable like school was.
-Everyone is hurt by this, though, because it encourages insecure narcissism during the prime years when you should be growing out of it. You really do have to read TLP to get a full explanation of why, but if you believe your success depends entirely on the efforts of the people around you, and happiness is a form of success, then you will make unreasonable demands of your wife, kids, job, friends, etc and become a hell to be around. This will make you solitary and isolated and cause you to think that if you could just get people to do what you want, you'd be happy. But they didn't do what you wanted before, so why would it work now? Well, you'll become a different person. But since change is hard and you were actively robbed of the opportunity to substantially change while you were growing up, you will instead change personas. So you start taking roids to make up for your lack of rizz (RizzNotRoids would be a good username) or you buy a bunch of Funko pops to feel like part of a community, or you get botox because pretty girls have friends, or whatever. It's bad, and it doesn't work, and it's widespread. My contention in the post was that this is the biggest problem with grade inflation and broken schools- it actively encourages this mindset when it used to shake you out of it.
-I want schools to deliver value proportionate to their cost. They will not be abolished, so they should be reformed. They can be reformed in 5 ways:
(1) Students can man up and either accept their results or put in the work to improve them instead of making bs excuses to get their parents off their backs. This will never happen.
(2) Parents can act like they actually believe either of their two claims: That marks are not a meaningful measure of anything (this frees the school to use them to accurately measure things by stopping the grade-grubbing) or that getting good results is really important (which would translate into pressure on kids and schools to actually deliver on learning). This may happen, but it's unlikely that the culture will shift all at once without some external force being applied, and it's hard to imagine what that force could be. Russian dominance in the space-race, I guess?
(3)Teachers could grow a backbone and just stop giving in to parental pressure. Grade-grubbers grub grades because grubbing gets the grades grubbed, and this includes accommodations. There are lots of ways to increase friction in the accommodation system. If a kid demands double time on quizzes, have a quiz every day- now it is chronologically impossible for him to have double time. If a kid needs someone to type for him (very common) do everything orally and see how he likes that. If a kid says "Look, I'm not trying to play the special ed card here . . ." point out that that's exactly what they're doing (this is amazingly effective). This has the advantage that no formal systemic changes are required- we got here by teachers informally taking the path of least resistance over and over for many years. It has the disadvantage that teachers are mostly very agreeable, hate conflict, and don't think the current situation is a big problem, so they will never all spontaneously coordinate to do this.
(4) Administrators could do the same thing. But they are even more filtered for allegiance to the current system, so this won't happen.
(5) The government could actually impose standards. Curricula and codes of education, as they are written, are usually pretty strict. The legal basis for a tougher ed system is there but governments have permitted too much drift, mainly because of law suits and human-rights legislation-from-the-bench. There are workaround to all this, especially in Canada where nearly all rights avowedly exist at the pleasure of the monarchy-inspired state (see sec. 1 and 33 of the CCRF). Politically, this would be feasible if you circled around incompetent teachers' unions for a few years (easy to do) and then proposed that we actually make those clowns do their jobs instead of (or in addition to) trying to get rid of this or that gay book. You could spin accommodations and fluff classes as a ploy by teachers to paper over bad teaching and connect accommodations to grift on the part of the system, rather than on the part of parents and students. Even though this would require ways to prevent teachers from gaming results, you can just decide to do that, whereas solutions 1-4 all depend mainly on hope. So this is what I want from schools.
You can't count on universities or the private sector to create their own exams, because cash-strapped universities will take anyone now and the private sector has revealed its preference for low-salaries at the cost of almost all else, so most jobs would require a trivial test. "If that's all most jobs require, why make schools do all this stuff?"- Because schools aren't going away and they cost a fortune, so we might as well try to get an educated population for the money. If they do go away, or become really cheap, that changes the entire debate completely.
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