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Notes -
American Compass has a new article complaining about the decline of the Summer job:
The article notes one reason why:
This might lead you to wonder if maybe you should learn something from the wealthiest racial group in America. But no, the author doesn't suggest that. Send your kid to work at McDonald's, good for them, builds character. Who cares if Asians take 25% of Ivy League seats and conservatives find themselves increasingly locked out of the American elite?
This is the same kind of error Leftists make when they see that kids whose parents took them to art museums have higher incomes than kids whose parents didn't and conclude that it means we need to subsidize art museums. In both cases, genetic confounding is ignored. But while the left fetishizes education and high-class culture, the right fetishizes hauling boxes and cleaning pools.
None of this is to say that summer jobs are necessarily bad. If your teen is rotting his brain with electronics 16 hours a day, kicking him out and telling him to get a McJob is probably gonna be good for him. But if he's well adjusted, does well in school, and has lots of friends, there's no reason to make him work manual labor because someone conservative writer who attended a third-rate university told you it's an "American folkway." It isn't, by the way. John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." It wasn't "I must study politics and way so my sons can work a cash register and be in touch with the working-class."
Modern education is a total waste of life. You spend 17 years to learn something that should take 3-4 at most.
Especially funny since Kamala mentioned working at McDonalds.
Well, clearly her low-class parent who fetishised manual labour should have emulated the Asians!
Er, wait...
For what it's worth, people say she was lying about working at McDonald's. She may have performatively pretended to growing up middle class and working a summer job in college, etc.
Yes, there seems to be some confusion between was it in California or Canada where she allegedly worked. She may well have done so!
The middle-class thing intrigues me, because as "daughter of academics" she is indeed middle-class. But in American terms, that seems to be used to include "lower-middle class/upper working class" and when she was going on the campaign trail about being 'raised middle class' she was trying to appeal to The Ordinary American, somebody not in the same sector of society as "hob-nobbing with the wealthy and well-connected" as her career has brought her to be.
It's about status as much as economics, and while a divorced single mother may not have been swimming in money, being raised as the daughters of an academic who was that divorced single mother is not at all the same thing as being raised the daughters of the divorced single mother working as a waitress. Oakland, where she grew up (in part) is supposedly economically disadvantaged, so far as I can make out? But I imagine there's areas that are relatively better-off and relatively worse-off there as well.
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Can you elaborate?
Do you really think you can take a random sample of 12 year olds from "playing outside all day" to "enough reading/writing/arguing/calculating to do productive work in the modern economy" - in 4 years?
Yes?
If you take that random sample of 12 year olds and run them through the education system, where they are force-fed Shakespeare and algebra against their will for another 6 years, you will find that:
The few things that the average man is both actually capable of learning and truly increase his economic productivity thereby are basic literacy, addition and subtraction, and the multiplication table. The average man cannot actually learn rhetoric or geometry, and resents the attempt to teach him. More to the point, the average man never actually needs those for his job, or to function outside of it.
See "Genetic Russian Roulette", "Against Tulip Subsidies", "SSC Gives a Graduation Speech", "Book Review: The Cult of Smart", and "A Theoretical 'Case Against Education'" for Scott's absolutely brutal takedowns of the education system. Then wash it down with some Education Realist, Bryan Caplan, and Various Refrigerator.
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Do you think that the school does that in 12 + 4 years? The sciences need comparatively few things to really grok to be able to figure out everything else. Physics is 3 pages of formulas, inorganic chemistry is 2, math and geometry ditto (honestly you shouldn't bother remembering theorems - you should be able to quickly prove them on the spot when needed). I was able to read and write at age of 5 - and i was hardly among the most gifted. To know programming you only need to understand recursion, pointers, boolean algebra, hash tables, monads and O(n). That takes an afternoon. I think you really overestimate how much does it take to be mediocre at something - and mediocrity is what schools aims for. And kids are pretty good at investing in stuff that really interests them and becoming gods. Check games.
When people were having problems with integrals in Math 101 in college - I was just explaining to them - it is just the area of a function. Guess what - they understood it in 15 min.
Literature - change the books that are studied and kids will read them and fast.
The school is a combination of daycare and job program. This is why it is so inefficient.
For some reason unknown modern society severely underestimates kids intellect and overestimates their wisdom.
I think it would be quite mean to ask a high school student to figure out/invent how to derive the Taylor series of a function ab initio.
And how many high school students will encounter them?
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I work with Haskell developers professionally, and none of them would claim you can learn monads in an afternoon - it is considered the hardest topic when teaching Haskell to programmers with experience in other paradigms. FWIW, I don't think you can learn pointers in an afternoon either if the learning goal is being able to debug code that uses them.
That is because no one explains what are monads the right way. The answer is simple - those are your side effects, but wrapped in complicated syntaxis because Haskell people need to feel superior. The same way our informatics teacher explained pointers - this is just address in memory but you can abuse them to do fun stuff. Applying something right is easy once you grok the nature of it.
Let's get pointers - if you know what is pointer you can design a class from first principles - it doesn't take huge jump to create a memory blob, put some header information - congratulations that is struct. but let's put another blob attached to it with pointers to executable code - now we have a class. But i want to modify already existing class - well just play with the blobs values a bit - you have inheritance.
But we educate usually in the opposite way - we give everything around the concept and hope for the light bulb moment that people see the concept instead of the other way around.
Nicely put, I've been programming for years (though no CS background) and never actually saw it that way. Are there any books you'd recommend that explain things that way round?
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If you have that particular ability. Not everybody does, and it's not just "oh well that's because it was taught badly in school". Some people can't math, that's the sad fact (I am one).
And then we find they can't understand books that are not the "relevant to the youth" ones they read.
Who the hell needs to understand Dickens today? Sure, that's a point. But what do you do when it's a text for the workplace that isn't Dickens but is also not "The Hunger Games"?
This study is even worse than I first thought, because while I had sympathy that American kids of today wouldn't be familiar with 19th century British law terms, then I find they were allowed to look up unfamiliar terms and couldn't even put it together then for the joke about the dinosaur (bolding mine):
It's even more depressing, because these kids got into college to do an English degree with a poor starting level of English:
They wanted to study English literature without the ability to even read Dickens. This would be like me trying to do a degree in Mathematics. You'd have more luck teaching a dog to walk on its hind legs, pace Dr. Johnson:
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Even decently smart, interested teens won't "grok" anything after you taught them those formula sheets. They'll need hours and hours of working with/thinking about the matter. They'll need examples, they need to manipulate the thing in their heads and on paper themselves. Hell, starting from scratch you'll need years just for them to "grok" what equations are, how the symbols are manipulated. Half of them won't really get it, ever. Proving theorems? Most people can't even do that after 12+4.
I think you hang out to much with the top quintile of the population, and you/they underestimate how much they where shaped through learning by osmosis during those "inefficient" 12+4 years.
Could/should the first 12 years be more efficient? Yes, but only for the smart/motivated third of a class. I personally think we should push those kids towards a proper classical education instead of cutting the time in half. The rest? They need to be taught by osmosis, and that takes forever. Both groups should do a lot more music and team sports as part of their daycare, I'd just make both mandatory.
That's the 12. As for the +4? I'm not denying that there are extremely expensive (time, resources) literacy verification and conscientiousness verification degrees. But the hard stuff can't be taught any faster. Engineering (yes, maybe excluding software - half a decade of commits on open source projects are superior to a BA). Medicine. Bio/pharma. Law. Basically, if you can get a post-grad degree and get a well-paying job outside of academia with it, it's probably because the jobs can't be done without the education.
I think you are wrong here. Because no one bothers to teach kids to understand stuff. We pile things they don't understand on things they don't understand and we are surprised when the only way out of it is torturous inefficient memorization and impossibility of application.
Case in point - history. Take a look where the fertile land, water for irrigation and trade routes go and you will have a pretty good idea what will happen and why.
Physics - I started learning physics at fifth grate - I immediately figured out that most of physics laws are - take a spherical cow in vacuum, multiply everything that affects it add something for initial conditions and a constant to fit the real world data. Suddenly physics became a lot easier. The only thing that annoyed me was S = V0*t + aT^2/2 ... because I couldn't figure out why the fuck that 1/2 division is. And i got it at 10th grade when we learned what integral is.
Education system is like TSA - it is theater, not the real deal. We give engineering degrees for taking exams and writing papers, and not by throwing people on a deserted island with hand tools and getting back 1 month later to check if they have gotten to the early stages of the industrial revolution.
I've thought about this for a long time, but have been dwelling on it more lately. You are absolutely right that no one bothers to teach kids to understand stuff. Back when I was teaching in university, many many experiences (often via my own attempts to teach the students to understand stuff) made that abundantly clear.
However, I am somewhat sympathetic to their plight. In many cases, you don't know how far along you can take the student. Often times, you have a known end point to a program, at which point, the vast majority of your students will simply not continue further. So you have to pick your battles.
Like, for example, I get why the intro calc classes for undergrad engineers do what they do. You've only got them for so long; many of them really only need so much; you have other things to get to. Of course, for me, it all seemed so absurd in retrospect. Why couldn't you have just started me off with Baby Rubin? It's really not that hard of an on-ramp; it begins with friggin' sequences! But it does take some time and growth, and let's be honest, the vast majority of the engineering students who go through the college will stop with a bachelors, and when you think of all the types, the chemical engineers, civil engineers, hell, the industrial engineers, etc., they'll probably get by without really understanding.
I never did any nuclear stuff, so believe it or not, I'm going through an MIT OCW nuclear course right now. I haven't "taken a course" in a long time. Wowza is there a lot of stuff in there that makes me want to say, "Ya know, if you had just had your students take a full set of quantum classes already, you could have actually done this right, in a way such that they could really understand what's going on, rather than being a bit handwavy and saying 'this is just what happens because of quantum magic that we don't know yet'." ...but how long would the curriculum take to get there? These kids have basically just taken ordinary differential equations! I honestly kinda wonder to what extent they get what proportion of their undergrads to really grok it within the four years, or if they still have plenty of clean-up to do in grad school.
As much as I often hate on the unis, I am sympathetic to their constraints here. I don't know what to really do to fix much of it, because I do think one of the roots may be the utterly disastrous K-12 situation from a long legacy of terrible public control with the primary mission of babysitting and only secondarily happening to have any learning going on (perhaps due in part to their own, must-take-all-comers constraint).
Humans are not meant to read; we learn through doing a lot of the time. Most of their education will occur outside the university system because the university system is not meant to teach (which is something nobody will really teach you, and if you're one of those people who do learn this it'll also destroy your patience with it, and that's not something you can afford to lose at that stage of your life: this is why your early twenties should not be spent in education).
Judging by the quality of the instruction I've received from the average university professor, not even the professors actually get it. The ones that do understand it tend not to be academic-types.
No, what they've taken is a week of differential equations and three months of that being obfuscated by algebra for credential reasons.
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IDK, now I'm getting flashbacks to Calc 2 and how useless it was to ask the instructor anything in the interest of understanding. Then sequences and increasingly absurd integrals came along without explnation of the utility ... and that's how I got the worst grade in Calc2. F? OK, retake it. C? Eh ... maybe that's more poor study strats than lack of understanding. But D? They wouldn't let me retake the class and I had absolutely no business moving on because I learned ... hmm, as I remeber, I learned the professor's opinions on Liebnez Vs Newton, and there was something involving a log cabin pun.
Dude's office was right by the CS departments's offices. I frequently heard far more enthusiastic convos coming from there on my way to see a CS prof. Maybe the secret wasn't showing an interest in the subject, but to be a perky flirtatious student? It's been 19 years; just be glad you remember any calculus and hit comment ... ☹️
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If what you're saying were true, doing homeschooling successfully would be much easier than it actually is, and it would be much more common. But the opposite is the case. I have yet to meet a single homeschooled kid I'm impressed by. And those kids certainly did more than 3 years of learning.
If the parent's smart enough to educate their kid correctly with homeschool, and the kid inherited enough of that intelligence to get the benefits of having an intelligent teacher, the parent is also more likely to understand the opportunity cost of leaving their 6-figure job to do it and that private school and tutors aren't that expensive (and you can fire them if they do it badly).
So it makes sense that most homeschoolers are going to be average parents (or maybe slightly below average if they're doing it for religious reasons), teaching average children, and getting average results.
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