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I think the blue tribe ideological reason for not teaching reading don't have much to do with the idea that it's racist. It's an ideological fixation with teachers always being right. Teachers don't like phonics and self-proclaimed education experts say it shouldn't work- these things may be related, but they're both there and they're both more important than whether it actually works. To these people 'educating kids' isn't really the point of public schools- although it's ideal- public schools exist to spend an ever-increasing amount of money, provide jobs for college educated women, and separate kids from their parents. It's unsurprising that red states who care more about the kids learning than about using the public schools for evil can close the gap rapidly when discovering techniques that work.
No, DeBoer is just Dutch for the farmer(the South African Boers were originally named this to refer to their supporting themselves by farming, in contrast to east india company employees). It's not a particularly uncommon surname and Dutch names are scattered throughout the US white population from either small waves of immigration or original settlement.
We need a term for the set of things that people and movements push for in practice after all the social dynamics have been accounted for, as opposed to the things they want in principle. Revealed preferences is close, but it comes bundled with a theory of mind I reject. (Revealed preferences are not preferences.)
The only item on your list of goals that anybody would support in principle is separating kids from their parents, and only some would endorse that. But as a practical matter that movement ends up fighting for the whole list.
How about revealed (or implicit) tolerances? Downgrades the intentionality of wanting implied by "preferences" to simply "acceptable results" .
The class of ideas I’d like to name is more intentional than that.
Consider feminism as a set of ideologies versus feminism as a political movement. Different feminist ideologies are quite varied, but the political movement is more or less united by the idea of increasing individual women’s freedom of action.
If you ask in the abstract, “What should family law look like?” then different forms of feminism will give very different answers. But if you want to know whether the feminist movement will support or oppose a given change to family law, you can simply ask whether it will grow or shrink individual women’s freedom of action. Likewise, pro-life types of feminism are often closer to other forms than those forms are to each other, but opposing abortion runs against this principle and so gets one labeled an enemy.
I think that increased school funding is a similar rallying point for a different coalition. Depending on the issue, money may or may not address it. But money is always a socially acceptable reason to give for the problem, rather than criticizing your allies, and it’s something the coalition wants anyway.
People legitimately support school funding or women’s freedom as they understand it, so it’s more than toleration. But it’s not necessarily their terminal value, either. It’s more of a means that has been elevated by social dynamics to the status of an end.
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It seems related to the discussion from a couple of months ago about "The Purpose of a System is What it Does".
I agree. But the various steelmen Scott got in reply convinced me that there's no way to rescue that framing that lets you discuss intended and actual consequences at the same time, let alone different levels or stages of intent. There's got to be a better set of terms to discuss those ideas.
That would probably be useful.
I felt irritated about the assertion above, but didn't bother spending energy responding to it, because it's basically just boo outgroup. People being motivated by making money is a fully general complaint, and it was two of the three complaints. As for the third claim -- I provide childcare, you are an overeducated babysitter, she is separating children from their parents.
To be clear, my claim is that the education system exists to employ college educated women to make home-makers more of an odd one out than they already are, thus suppressing their numbers further, and that this is an ideological opposition to female domesticity rather than a program to pass out economic benefits.
I don't think this claim is insane on the face of it; education workers are probably a double digit percent of working women who would prefer to be- and could reasonably expect to be if their job was eliminated tomorrow- housewives, and not a particularly low double digit percent.
I don't think it's insane, necessarily, but I can't think of any way to test it off the top of my head, either.
There is a strong case for elementary schools, specifically, and even very conservative communities generally have them. Apparently the Puritans had them, the Amish often have them, Catholic parishes, etc. People who can't do reading, writing, and arithmetic really are at a huge disadvantage, and homeschooling is pretty niche. Even historically, sometimes housewives would also educate their own children to the same standard as a school, but often not. Even Muslim countries have to be very strict indeed to stop sending little girls to elementary school. Sometimes very conservative communities specify only unmarried women can teach, though.
Calling elementary school teaching a jobs program for women doesn't make any more sense than calling policing departments a job program for men.
Elementary special education and the various specialty positions that come with it is largely misguided, in my opinion. But they are not very attractive jobs, as evidenced by the many, many unfilled openings, and the average woman is not very well suited to filling them. Teachers are upset when asked to transfer to SE, and complain about it constantly. There are two sides to that: the low function/high needs self enclosed classrooms, and the inclusion kids on IEPs. The former is probably a function of better healthcare and smaller family units, and is extremely staff intensive, but also extremely draining for the women staffing those positions. Not only the kids themselves (there are a decent number of women suited well enough to that when they're small enough not to be physically threatening), but the compliance paperwork. The overlap between the legal skills and the care work skills is pretty low. Schools are a bit embarrassed about how many SE employees they have, and struggle to hire for those positions.
Junior high and high school are more controversial, but also include more men as workers.
To be clear, historically Catholic schools were staffed by nuns(unmarried women) and in the United States other schools were staffed by literal teenaged girls(unmarried women). Now high school teachers require more subject matter expertise(and this probably extends into many middle school grades/subjects) so it seems like this was always a college educated job. Agreed that even the taliban allows preadolescent girls to go to school with no special conditions, and that modern special ed, flawed as it is, is genuinely a skilled profession that is likely an improvement over previous systems. But the fact remains that a bright sixteen year old can teach a 'normal' third grade classroom, elementary school teaching as a career track- and at least a large portion of the administration growth in schools- is about pulling middle class women who love children into careers. Absent that ideological push 'elementary school teacher' would be similar to 'lunchlady' or whatever, where a college degree isn't necessary.
It's also important to note that elementary school used to be much shorter, with less demand for teachers. My own parents remember kindergarten being treated as advanced preschool(and regularly skipped), with no such thing as preK and first grade having a loosey-goosey attitude to attendance, sometimes first and second grades were combined. While not doing this obviously requires more teachers it's not clear that it's better.
Modern elementary school does have a much stronger childcare component than neighborhood schools in the past (though not necessarily more than boarding schools, which were somewhat more common). I could certainly imagine heading in the direction of educational assistants supervising children as they learn from interactive digital materials, or several educational assistants directly teaching phonics to the children if the older teachers find it too unbearably boring.
As far as hiring a 16 year old who's likely to quit to form her own family after six year or so, vs a 23 year old who's likely to take maternity leave at some point for an elementary teacher, it just depends on what the prevailing life path for the society in general is. As you mentioned elsewhere, elementary teachers are pretty conformist, and will teach at 16 if that's the Done Thing, or else go to college if that's the way to show you're conscientious and normal. I doubt there's a way back at this point, since generalist labor is increasingly automated, so there isn't that much demand for even more very young women to work before having kids.
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There is a Dewey-esque impulse among many education reformers to use the schools to shape the next generation into something their parents would not approve of. Nineteenth-century opponents of Roman Catholic education were in that vein, as was Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I think that's what he was getting at.
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