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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   31313 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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I read the new ACX Review post about Alpha School (by an anonymous writer, not Scott). It was well written, but a bit of a slog, because it's quite long for an essay, but not as polished as a book. Some thoughts:

  • The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year. There were apparently only 10 children in their cohort.
  • The big headline for the Alpha School model is that it has only two hours of core academics. I looked at the schedule for my local elementary school, and they have 2.75 hours of core academics. I don't think most people know this. I get the impression the writer, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending three children to this elite private school and wrote a very long essay about it also doesn't know this. Forty-five minutes a day is not nothing, but is not a huge deal or the main thing the school has going for it.
  • The other headline is that they progress 2.6 times faster on the state mandated curriculum, so they'll probably finish it all by junior high or so. Sure. Great. It's nice for kids to learn more things sooner.
  • They have an incentive structure that appears to cost about $400 per child per year, which they earn mostly for completing their lessons well and on time, and can buy real things that they like, not extremely cheap things that individual teachers can afford to buy themselves, like at many schools. It's not impossible that public schools can adopt this, if they're convinced enough. Medicaid gives mothers points for taking their babies to checkups, which they can use in an online shop to buy books, toys, kitchen items, etc.
  • The teachers are well paid ($60,000 - $150,000), not called teachers ("guides"), and have a slightly different schedule structure from public school teachers. In public schools, the art, music, PE, library, and sometimes other teachers are the only specialists, and their schedule is determined entirely by the need to provide a break to the main teachers. There's some office politics around when this "prep" happens, and how the schedules are set up. Apparently at Alpha, all the students work on the digital platform for the first half of the day, and it's not entirely clear what the "guides" are doing during that time -- students ask for individualized help from call center teachers in Brazil -- but given the pay rates, presumably they're doing something. Then they lead clubs and whatnot in the afternoon. That sounds nice, but they're paying them more than the public schools, so I wonder if there's a catch. That's a big part of the question of whether it could scale or not. Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing? Could public school teachers do whatever the guides are doing? It's unclear.
  • Every public school teacher I've talked to likes the idea of morning academics, afternoon specials. This doesn't work due to the schedules of the specials teachers, and also staggered lunches. Large elementary schools have six lunches a row, and are very inflexible about that. Apparently it works at Alpha both because all the teachers are, to some extent, specials teachers, and they have less than 100 kids, so lunches are not a huge concern.
  • I can see why the SSC-sphere is apparently full of well off people with gifted children, but do not personally relate all that strongly. If I were going to send my kids to a school like that, it would be for the better/longer electives and more interesting peer group, more than for the accelerated learning.

The author (seemingly not scott) seems absolutely deranged. He outlined how he was being abused and exploited by some shitty yet expensive sjw private school yet still groveled to their admin when they vaguely threatened to kick him out for complaining too hard.

it was an invitation to grovel so our kindergartener could remain enrolled – “This meeting is not about your proposal or changing anything. This meeting is to decide if you are still a good fit for our school”

If you don't leave after hearing this, you're the school's bitch and paypig. You should never expect them to listen to or do a single thing for you ever again.

He directly says that the main benefit of his abusive provate school is that it lacks undesirables in the student body. Dude bussing is over just move to a better district using the savings from not paying insane tuition.

Then when his shitty private school was going through some changes, he wanted out, and could only say there were no good options and was thinking of staying anyways. Dude your kids are less than 10 just go to normal school.

Our oldest was going to be entering fourth grade; her incoming roster read like a rebuilding year for a professional sports team. It was possible we could get her into a middle school that would feed into a top tier high school, but those did not start until 5th grade. Our best option looked like “suck it up and accept whatever we had for at least a year”.

What the fuck, your kid is in fourth grade!!! She should be playing in the woods with other kids not training to get into a feeder school like it's the olympics!

One option was to do something radical. We considered taking a GAP year and traveling

Going to a "normal" school with "mid" teachers is sooooooo bad. Instead I'm gonna take my kids to travel the world.

Worst case, it would be a one‑year sabbatical from stagnation.

Apparently having his kids growing up in a school where a few of the best teachers quit is "stagnation". Just going to a normal school must be absolutely ruinous to all of the victims who don't have insane parents like the author.

CPS should be going after people like this for child abuse if anyone.

I've noticed this blue tribe insane striver culture, like white orientals. I feel bad for their children and strongly believe the striving doesn't actually do anything. But at the end of the day, it is the default response to a hyper-credentialist culture with overproduced elites(see also, oriental countries). I... don't actually know what we can do about it, other than to let the blue tribe shrivel up and die from the low fertility this produces.

strongly believe the striving doesn't actually do anything.

I'm reminded of Scott's old homeschooling post where, iirc, he proposes that in early childhood there's just an underlying brain maturity process that can't be meaningfully accelerated toward basic educational attainments, such that you could either spend every day from, say, age 5 to 7 strenuously trying to teach a kid how to read and do arithmetic before their brain is ready for it, or you could spend those years doing basically anything else and by the time they're 7 they'll pick up reading and arithmetic easily in a couple of weeks. (Some version of this has to be true -- you can't teach a baby to read).

I was "unschooled" through elementary age myself and I don't think I learned to read til I was 8, but when I did it barely required any instruction and I was reading at a college level by 12, possibly because I hadn't learned to resent the attempt.

So much of this striving for early acceleration is probably pushing rope, physiologically, putting in 10x the effort to get to (at best) the same result marginally faster.

I was about four and a half when I went to school (no such thing as kindergarten in my day) and I was able to read. Learned at home, can't even remember learning so I can't brag about "I was two (or three) when I learned to read". That wasn't a sign of me being particularly smart, it was (a) the result of freaky genes on the paternal family side where everyone is an early reader, for some unknown reason (possibly bound up with the strongly suspected but not formally diagnosed autism spectrum/Aspergers we got going on as well through the generations) and (b) my maternal grandmother lived with us and she did a lot of the childminding of infant me, and what is a bedbound old woman going to do with a two year old but start them on the alphabet etc.?

All that means that I have no idea what the optimum age for learning to read is, or what is the best method for teaching reading, but there's definitely a range between "will pick up reading anyhow be it late or early" and "need to be taught or will fall behind" where school is useful.

From the public school's perspective, the problem is that there are all these families where the parents don't read, and would like their kids to read better than they do, but don't necessarily do things like reading in front of their kids, making the whole thing much more difficult and tedious. And there are also kids with various processing differences, who have to be taught very concretely, but English is a bit odd phonetically, it takes up a lot of memory space, so they have to drill a lot.

My daughter just turned six, and has started spontaneously spelling things out loud. She'll say "that's good" and try to spell out the "g-o-o-d" part. I'll tell her the right spelling if necessary. This is not something I suggested, she seems to just want to do it, as a developmental thing. I remember being a teenager and was reading more than I was talking, so my internal monologue contained spelling and punctuation. But that's because my parents had a bunch of curated books in there house, and had designated quiet reading time because they actually wanted to read themselves, which a lot of kids don't have and the schools (not Alpha school, of course) are always trying and struggling to replicate that.

From the public school's perspective, the problem is that there are all these families where the parents don't read, and would like their kids to read better than they do, but don't necessarily do things like reading in front of their kids, making the whole thing much more difficult and tedious. And there are also kids with various processing differences, who have to be taught very concretely, but English is a bit odd phonetically, it takes up a lot of memory space, so they have to drill a lot

Oh gosh yes. Reading aloud fluently and easily, you need to practice that, and the best way in school still is "have everyone read out loud in class and take turns reading several paragraphs". If there's no reading at home, and no practice with books, that's hard to pick up (having said that, my parents never read bedtime stories to us, but my father used to tell us stories every night). You can only do so much in school, and if it's not happening at home, then what you get at school is even more vital.

Oh gosh yes. Reading aloud fluently and easily, you need to practice that, and the best way in school still is "have everyone read out loud in class and take turns reading several paragraphs". If there's no reading at home, and no practice with books, that's hard to pick up (having said that, my parents never read bedtime stories to us, but my father used to tell us stories every night). You can only do so much in school, and if it's not happening at home, then what you get at school is even more vital.

I think people fret far too much about reading happening at home. Maybe there are some edge cases where mom reading bedtime story helps out, but the biggest issue still seems to me happening when that sperm hits that egg, and sometimes what happened during the 9 months of pregnancy. My son just like, looks at books himself. He can't read (to my knowledge there is no such thing as a kid as young as him doing so), but he recites them on his own. I can hear him in the other room "reading" books to himself. I suppose in a world totally devoid of reading at home he couldn't do THAT, but he'd be doing some other thing that smart kids do. He'd be inventing his own stories (he also does this), he be practicing whatever new thing he discovered (like skipping about a month ago). The difference in self-play amongst kids is pretty vast. The kids that cant read at 12 never wanted to read, and reading to them for a lot of their lives is akin to torture.

The kids that cant read at 12 never wanted to read, and reading to them for a lot of their lives is akin to torture

What should the system formerly devoted to education, but definitely committed to keeping kids off the street do with them? A brief look at https://nces.ed.gov suggests it's something like 30% of people are below literacy level 2 (of 5).

Lots of running.

If you read The Idea Factory with a somewhat critical eye you can easily see why Bell labs isn't happening now, and can't happen in the near future. Sure, some of their best guys went to MIT, but that was when you got into MIT by like taking a train there then passing an entrance exam. None of this extra-curricular and AP maxxing nonsense. But many of the main figures also just were like paperboys who were the small town genius and went to a random engineering school nearby. At some point, however, determining actual merit, talent, and skill became unfashionable for academics and hiring managers so they outsourced to boring metrics and racial adjustments.

Asian tiger parent culture is different due to bugman conformalism. They send their kids to extra lessons to get ahead in public school, the same one normal kids go to. Not this abomination that this parent is getting into.

Asian tiger parent culture is different due to bugman conformalism

I can’t parse this sentence. Asian culture is more conforming, so their children go to public instead of private schools? Weird tech-nerds are more non-conforming? I don’t know what bugmen are.

"Bugman" in this sense is meant to evoke eusocial insects, like ants and bees; the implication is that Asians, though hard-working, are highly conformist. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down and all that.

Probably genetic; East Asian cultures have a history of collective punishment that is largely absent from the West, so if you fucked up, you didn't just get yourself killed, but your whole family; that strongly selects for conformist genes.

Bryan Caplan would not have lasted five minutes in ancient China or feudal Japan.

I'm not sure I have this right as I'm only going by impressions picked up online at third-hand, but there seems to be the reverse idea about Asian universities: what we would call the state ones are considered the high-value, high-class colleges you want your kids to get into (the equivalent of MIT and the Ivies), going to a private university is considered a step down (think "small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere versus an Ivy League college").

So you grind grind grind to get into the right university to get the degree that will get you into the handful of 'acceptable' large business combines where you grind grind grind to get on the executive path or else you're just an 'office worker' which is a failure.

There is this notion of being an elite/belonging to the elite, and elite seems to mean "from a wealthy family, went to the right university, got into Big Corp and am on the executive promotion track".

Let the more informed correct me, please!

This is the case in germany as well for the most part, though it's as always more complicated. For the state universities, there are very few shortcuts, top degrees are kept highly selected & small, and it's free to boot - you just have to be good enough. The private universities, meanwhile, have the reputation that anyone can just buy their way in. It's gotten even harder for them since there's lots of new, easy-to-get degrees even in state universities nowadays. But most people know which are which, so they're only worth it if you can't get anything else.

All bugman references aside, I think the point is that Asian societies are more conformist, so everyone sends their children to the same (public) schools and then quietly to cram school out of sight.

Weird tech nerds are more likely to brag about sending their children to an experimental school, whereas in Japan this is kind of like saying ‘I’m an enemy of society and I don’t want my children to be brought up in the normal way’. There are special schools for diplomats’ children etc. but not enough to matter at scale.

You are not wildly off, but this is an exaggeration. There are many private schools at the secondary level in Japan. They cost more and in general may have a higher academic standard. Their accreditation is only relevant in terms of what they may prepare students to expect in the college entrance exam. In some cases these private high schools have International Baccalaureate programs, etc. As for university, the highest ranked schools are public (Tokyo, Kyoto, Kobe, etc.) But any kid from any high school, public or private, who can pass the entrance exam can get in. This, as you say, is the purpose of cram schools at the high school level.

Re: private schools, would I be right in saying that most of them are grandfathered in? Particularly thinking of the Catholic schools.

For any school in Japan, if a kid can pass the entrance exam (these can begin as early as junior high) he or she can get in. There is a 推薦 / suisen or recommendation-based or so-called "escalator" system as well for kids who begin school in, say, Takagi Goodschool elementary--they will probably then go to Takagi Goodschool JHS, HS, and even university if there is a TG University (sometimes the Takagi Goodschool is associated with a different university and is a feeder school for that one.)

If I am understanding your question correctly, yes, some children who are legacy entrants (whose parents or whatever went to Takagi Goodschool) will go there as well. But as I say, any kid can go there if they pass the entrance test. Still, you will find that some suisen students are exempted from what are sometimes considerably difficult tests (because they are athletes or demonstrate some other skill, or have a very good recommendation from someone at their high school who is a known and respected quantity.) This results in a lot of students who got in via social standing/parental influence/hereditary reasons and then some who are just really smart and/or know how to study for tests.

Not to get too much into it, but Japan has a system where low level students are filtered very early in a way that doesn't seem to happen in the US, at least not how I understood it as a kid. Here, a kid who has no real academic skill will be counseled, channeled into a JH school or then HS where none of the kids are really so academic, and they will focus on sports or trades or whatever, or be pushed to universities or junior colleges or 専門学校 senmon gakko (vocational schools). Of course some do fall through the cracks and become delinquents or just move into something else. Students can opt out as young as 15 (and some do, if they have no parent pushing them to continue.)

I don't know much about specifically Catholic schools, though, so there very well may be something going on there that I am not aware of.

I... don't actually know what we can do about it, other than to let the blue tribe shrivel up and die from the low fertility this produces.

Considering this guy has three kids, this plan isn't panning out in this case.

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