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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   32403 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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There's a fair bit of talk both in person and in the news about downsizing the Department of Education, possibly moving student loan servicing to another department, and federal requirements around students with special accommodations.

I'm interested if anything will happen with the (massive! extremely expensive!) special education edifice.

Some articles from the past couple days:

I've been personally hearing a lot more (hushed, furtive) negative talk among teachers about IEPs and small groups (children who aren't able to be in a regular classroom due to their conditions) lately, though that could just be my own work environment. Like many controversial things, there are usually a few children who are essentially black holes in the context of large systems, such that while most children will need and be given, say, 1/10 of an adult's attention (and learn the material), two or three will end up with five full adult's attention (and it's entirely unclear whether or if they're learning anything). There are some children in the middle, who may need the attention of one adult, but will then clearly learn things and become productive members of society, and they are generally not talked about negatively, even though it's rather expensive. It might still be less expensive in the long run, anyway.

I have mixed feelings about it. Kids with various conditions should have as good a life as reasonably possible. Their parents and siblings shouldn't necessarily be expected to stop everything to support them full time for the rest of their lives. But at what cost? It's not reasonable to deprive their classmates, who might have a condition but be able to learn curricular things of an education. It's not reasonable to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on interventions to obtain a tiny improvement in the utility of one person.

Apropos Zvi's recent post on education, it's probably not even reasonable to keep dragging a child who's clearly miserable with an enormous school and is trying to run away most days through a daily cycle of "transitions" the they hate every 40 minutes or so (sometimes every five or ten, in the classrooms that use "rotations" with bells and special behaviorist noises).

Perhaps nothing will come of it. Should the edifice change? in what way?

I think honestly that the biggest reason for school failure is the lack of honesty about the students. Because every kid is attending public school unless their parents specifically opt out, they are forced to be a microcosm of what we think society is like. And for lots of reasons, this means that we can’t admit to ourselves that differences in talent exist in education.

Part of it is that education in modern society largely determines where a kid ends up in society. If your kid isn’t learning at the same speed as his peers, he’s going to have much worse jobs later on, and thus make less money, and live objectively worse lives. Obviously, no parent wants this for their own kids, so they will resist anything that seems to suggest that their child isn’t capable of doing what the other kids are. Teachers, being generally optimistic about the potential of a child, are also reluctant to tell them that they’re simply not good at a given skill. The result is that nobody is actually getting an appropriate education in a public school. Everyone is learning at the same speed: too fast for the stupid ones, and too slow for the smart ones. But everyone is learning the “college bound” curriculum, even if an objective look at some kids’ test scores makes it obvious that they cannot actually do well enough in college to get any sort of job that pays them enough to pay back the loans.

Of course, Theres the political part as well. A school system that does tracking like Asian and European schools do is going to find itself in arrears of the Civil Rights Act in fairly short order as the lower tiers of the school will be full of black, Hispanic, and MENA students, and the upper tiers will be full of white and East Asian students. Whether this is biology, culture, or poverty is unimportant to the problem here — getting the results that would happen if you put kids in classrooms that fit their actual education needs would be racist and probably sexist as well. Reality is illegal.

All of which hurts everyone but the most average kids. The smart kids, unless their parents put them in an expensive private school or teach them after school are limited. Sorry, kid, you have more potential than average, so you’ll be made bored at school, probably hate it, and never reach your full potential. The dumb kids are sent through a system that shunts them toward college-bound studies and away from the kinds of life skills that they can learn that would give them reasonably attainable job skills so they can earn a living wage. A college bound kid who can’t actually do college has no marketable skills and thus has a bright future in stores, restaurants, warehouses, and professional driving whether uber, taxi, or delivery. But we didn’t hurt his precious feelings, so all good, right?

And so I think if I were in charge I’d track kids, and if you’re below average, I’d put the kids in a skilled labor track as appropriate to the child. If you are not suited to college, you still need a skill, and that means pushing things like shop classes, cooking, repair, and so on so when those kids graduate, they have something they can do to support themselves and thus earn a living. For the above average kid, I’d put him in the most advanced classes he could handle — and see just how far his brain can take him. I think there are a lot of geniuses stuck, bored with a pace meant for future clerical workers who would shock the world given the chance.

It seems like public schools in the major cities in Texas have this, albeit as a patchwork and parents have to opt in. There’s career high schools, taking classes at community college is free(and community colleges are willing to track much more aggressively than high schools), etc.

I think we’re coming back to involved parents.

shop classes

Random thought, is shop class even a thing anymore? I mean I remember a shop class in middle school every year, and I think my freshman year of highschool too? But that was 20-30 years ago now. Even then it was pretty meager because of the safety aspects of working with power tools. I think there was a drill press we were allowed to use in middle school, and maybe a band saw in highschool? I remember the class being 95% "nothing" or stuff I don't remember, and 5% getting a supervised turn on the drill press. That and sanding. Every time you asked the teacher a question about your project, the answer was always "You should probably sand it more" and being pointed to this giant box of worn out scraps of sandpaper with random grits. I have no memory of a table saw, but it might have been there but verboten on account of how dangerous they are even for experienced woodworkers to use.

I'd love for there to be more shop in school, but I'm not sure the risk profile of working with power tools sits well with most moms.

Career and Technical Education high schools have pretty useful shop classes.

It's definitely still a thing, but district dependent. My high school had a fully equipped shop that was converted into a storage room years before my family went through. Not sure whether that was a district call, funding thing, liability or what. I would guess at some point a decision had to be made whether to fund the shop class, art, or other extracurriculars and my high school decided to dump the former.

I was talking about this with my father. He grew up in a rural area. He had both a woodworking shop class and a metalworking shop class at his high school and took both. That must have been in the 60's. A shame, really.

In the 1980s in Fairfax County, Virginia, I took wood shop and metal shop. I was on the college track, so I couldn't access other vo-tech classes because they conflicted with foreign language and advanced/gt classes. But they existed in the same school.

I’ve known a few people who graduated from highschool with welding certifications less than ten years ago. They all went to school in less affluent white parts of the far burbs, though- redneck parents have a higher risk tolerance and are also more willing to bluntly admit when their kids need to focus on non-college skills.

In the UK we used to have a strong two-track system.

The most damaging criticism came from a group of genuinely “bad at school, good at life” people. The ones who did badly and were put in the bottom track because they were rebellious or narrowly-focused and flourished once they got into a more open-ended environment. There weren’t that many of them but everyone loves an underdog story so they were very influential. It made the system look ludicrous.

I can’t now remember names but think eg Einstein or Gauss.

The ones who did badly and were put in the bottom track because they were rebellious or narrowly-focused and flourished once they got into a more open-ended environment.

But it's not like putting those in the upper track would have actually helped there, higher-tier classes are if anything more restrictive. And it certainly wouldn't have helped the other kids in that track having their education disrupted.

Maybe this suggests the "bottom track" should be significantly shorter or more freeform: get the basics down, then either let the kids out of schooling early or let them spend that time in more focused programs. The writers decide they like writing and then get to spend their whole day on writing instead of learning chemistry. This seems like it might help mitigate the impression that being pushed into a lower track is a permanent blight on kids' lives, that they're being condemned to a label of "stupid".

Granted, they might later learn they're not all that great writers and regret wasting their time focusing so heavily on it, but they're unlikely to pivot into the chemistry or pre-calc classes they're missing in the upper tracks.

I guess the downside is that this style might be attractive enough to pull kids from the upper tracks, but at the very least it would be an unknown that might negatively impact college admissions, so the default path-to-career-success looks basically the same.

Both Einstein and Gauss were tracked into the top track (Gymnasium) of the heavily tracked German school system, and accelerated further within it.

The classic example of a genius-tier mathematician who failed out of school due to poor performance in non-maths subjects is Ramanujan.

I mean outside of entertainment or entrepreneurship, how common is that? I can’t imagine that’s a typical experience for kids who are clearly not interested or successful in school. And as far as public policy, I think the best approach is to aim for the typical experience for students rather than waste time and money hoping that you have that one in ten thousand unicorn who fails middle school algebra and goes on to become the guy behind a tech company.

It’s very untypical, and I agree with you. Unfortunately people love an underdog, so the only time that Grammar schools (the upper level) appeared in the public conversation it was someone in the category boasting about how they’d (been) failed by the exam system but became famous anyway.

It’s just something that’s always bugged me about conversations like this, or criminality, or drug use. It’s like people want to spend billions of dollars on something that rarely works and only for the extreme outliers in hopes of saving a single unicorn. But in anything the government does, you’re doing an essential triage — you know going in that you cannot and will not save everyone that it’s possible to save, because you don’t have infinite resources or infinite time or perfect tools. The best that can be done by a policy is to try to do good for the vast majority of people who the policy affects.

In the case of education, I think tracking is the best option because it works for most people. Most people in lower education tiers are not going to somehow become successful writers, actors, and entrepreneurs. The vast majority will be doing low level work somewhere in the system. In that case, it’s much better to teach them skilled trades so they can be productive members of society, earn a reasonable wage, and raise a family than it is to flog them and drag them to university where not only are they going to fail, but when they do, they have little skill to fall back on. If he can at least make something, read a blueprint, cook a great meal, or repair things, he’ll be a productive member of society able to provide for himself and a family, everyone is better off. If he spends that time pretending to understand calculus he works for peanuts in retail, restaurant, warehouse industries for less than a living wage and we pay for his survival for life. Which is better for him? Which is better for the rest of us?

The ones who did badly and were put in the bottom track because they were rebellious or narrowly-focused and flourished once they got into a more open-ended environment.

Is this really a bad outcome though? If you manage to get every smart person into the white collar stream, you no longer have any smart blue collar workers to advance society in those areas.

In fact a shortage of highly skilled blue collar workers is a crisis society will have to face going forwards. I’d actually like a top level post to discuss it but I’m not sure where to research for sources.

These people became writers, entertainers, well known public persons. They complained loudly about having been wrongly downgraded to the low-grade stream in their youth.

Just tell them that society needs at least a few writers and entertainers who aren't utter morons as well...

I'm obviously no Einstein, but I think I fit into the "didn't do well in school, did well IRL" category pretty well. If people like me were the reason for schools doing whatever the hell they are doing now, it truly feels ridiculous.

Not only don't I see how any of the changes to education systems that I observed over my lifetime would help me fit in, the only thing you'd have to do to make me happy is get rid of credentialism, and let me learn what I want to do on my own (which is exactly what happened).

To your question, I often wonder if I wouldn't be better off going to trade school myself, but when I was growing up that was widely seen as the loser trajectory, so I was avoiding it like the plague. The end result being years of wasted effort at university, as I'm smart enough to get in, but unable to grind long enough to graduate.

The Matura (graduation for the successful completion of higher secondary schooling), awarded to [Einstein] in September 1896, acknowledged him to have performed well across most of the curriculum, allotting him a top grade of 6 for history, physics, algebra, geometry, and descriptive geometry.

Gauss was a child prodigy in mathematics. When the elementary teachers noticed his intellectual abilities, they brought him to the attention of the Duke of Brunswick who sent him to the local Collegium Carolinum,[a] which he attended from 1792 to 1795

None of this sounds like kids who were on the bottom track at school.

Today I learned. Thanks for correcting me. I had heard the Einstein myth around somewhere, and also the (myth?) that Gauss had been forced to add 0-100 to keep him from making trouble in class.

The summation story has an interesting backstory, but it doesn't seem to have been special punishment for Gauss, but rather a standard assignment for all of the students (and the exact nature of the assignment is lost to history).

and also the (myth?) that Gauss had been forced to add 0-100 to keep him from making trouble in class.

I heard that one too, but as the incident showing he's a prodigy, rather than one proving he's a dum-dum troublemaker. Instead of calculating the sum by brute-forcing, he came up with the arithmetic series sum formula on the spot.

Huh, I just did it like this:

001 + 002 + 003 + ... + 049 + 50 + 100
 +     +     +           +
099 + 098 + 097 + ... + 051
--------------------------------------
100 + 100 + 100 + ... + 100 + 50 + 100
--------------------------------------
100 x 49 + 50 + 100 = 4900 + 150 = 5050

Yup, and when you generalize this you get the arithmetic series sum formula. Congrats, you're as smart as 15 (or less) -year-old Gauss.

Nope. I can follow the derivation, but there is no way that would have occurred to me in an hour, or however long his class was. Shota Gauss (who sounds like a great Fate character) is smarter than me.

There's a popular myth that Einstein was bad at school and failed math classes. It is completely false.

IIRC, some other country gives their failing students a grade of "6" and the myth started when someone didn't realize foreign standards were different and mistook his top grade for failure.

It's quite funny that the myth cropped up while Einstein was still alive, and Einstein himself was rather confused about why that myth came to be.

I don't know that this can be addressed without a revolutionary change in how prestige is divvied out in society.

And in fact it may not be desirable for Americans in particular. You could have a system with less de jure social mobility if you make it noble to be on the lower rungs of society and create other games one can play to get prestige.

In Japan, age owes respect to the degree that there's negotiation to be had on who is owed deference if you are the young boss of an old employee. This and other such norms that reward mastery of even the lowest jobs makes all out elitism acceptable when it comes to schooling. But can Americans muster the discipline and ethno-cultural loyalty that such a system requires?

I'm here reminded of a pair of documentaries I saw about Japanese prisons. Prison is yet another solution to ugly reality that one's society must cope with justifying. The Japanese system is setup under the idea that criminals are deviant antisocial elements that must be reeducated into society, and it takes the form of a work camp where every minute of your time is dedicated to hammering pro-social habits into your mind like a soldier's drill. Complete with slogans you have to recite and beatings if you don't do what you're told properly.

The first documentary I saw was made by French television about such prisons, and it depicted a system that is opaque and produced some abuses, but engaged positively with the general idea of the prisoner's life being regimented to a totalitarian degree if that allowed successful reinsertion in society.

The second one was made by American television, and pictured the very concept of this reeducation as an insult to one's human dignity.

My point is then this: is America's infatuation with individual freedom, self made men and the "American dream" not categorically incompatible with dealing with the reality of such problems pragmatically? Is it not morally preferable to the American that everyone is given the same chances and elitism is nominally crushed even if that allows elites to deny a sense of noblesse oblige? Can American nationhood imply enough collective loyalty to shun the need for handouts in the name of Civil Rights?

Other than the beatings, some of the “social communication” classrooms for severely autistic kids are already rather like those prisons.

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