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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30625 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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In a just world we would have passed legislation allowing prosocial and well behaved people the chance to make their decades-long participation in the country’s social and economic fabric official. Maybe tax them higher for a while as a sort of restitution or something.

But there is no such system that would allow a guy like this to remain. He's not productive, he's an active participant in the public schools system. Not just at the teacher level, which IMO is bad enough in most scenarios, but at the administrative level. The argument that this isn't a parasite class is incredibly weak. At best he's just following the incentives laid out before someone who wants money and prestige and has a passion for progressivism. 99% of the other scenarios he's cynical and knows he's part of a parasite class.

If you declare "My ideological opponents (including people who work in fields I disapprove of) are not productive citizens" you are not striving to create a just system, just one that rewards your ingroup and punishes your outgroup.

But I actually think most school administrators are not productive in a "positive net value of their labor" sense. There's been a multi-hundred percent increase in school administrators in the past few decades. There's some correct level of administration and then there's the Iron Law of Institutions run wild. I think we are far into the second case regarding public school administration.

I don't really disagree with that, but it's not relevant to the argument. I can think of a lot of jobs I think are net negative.

Fair enough if you're complaining about free enterprise that you don't approve of, but it's rather different if the job in question is paid for by your own money taken at the proverbial gunpoint.

An ancap argument is essentially the same argument.

public school teachers are a parasite class? this seems like it's painting with a broad brush.

Public school administrators as a parasite class. The teachers are far below these people.

I think @anti_dan is reflecting a broader ratsphere view which sees schools as child prisons. Personally, I would agree that the public school system is far from optimal.

On the other hand, I also do not have a solution ready to replace the US public school system at scale. If one simply gets rid of the schools and hopes that kids will learn how to read from their smartphones, that will likely backfire spectacularly for most kids.

If we fired all the teachers tomorrow and spend their salaries on licensing LLM-powered learning apps, that would be unlikely to be an improvement over the status quo.

The purpose of the public school system is to 1) provide state-funded daycare, and 2) force kids to socialize with each other and give them hands-on experience with navigating social hierarchies. The "teaching" and "learning" of objective information, to the extent that it occurs, ranks at a distant third (or it might rank even lower, depending on how much weight you assign to "Pavlovian conditioning with regards to how to follow orders" and "repeated IQ testing and sorting based on future potential", and how tightly interwoven you think those things are with the actual teaching/learning).

So in order to fulfill (1) and (2), you still need to gather all the kids under one roof with adult supervisors.

The purpose of public schools is to spend taxpayer money on themselves. They don't prioritize state funded daycare any more than they prioritize education.

Parents consistently say that they prioritize job prep. Teachers mostly prefer general education. Admins prioritize spending as large a fraction of society's resources as possible and also their ideological crusades. Statefunded daycare and actual education are not priorities.

I think the assumption is that public school administrators are, which seems broadly fair at first blush.

Does it?

I’ve met my fair share of public school administrators. They were 1) very small in number compared to the total school staff and 2) did the necessary ground level admin work mandated by the law and city, required planning (eg. resource allocation depending on student numbers, scheduling classes etc), hiring teachers and so on. They had zero input into any of the ”improved” education styles and similar foolishness (that was all mandated at city / ministry level). Of course this wasn’t in the US, but I’d be surprised if it was all that different.

Now university administration is a whole different game.

Administrators are (obviously?) necessary and useful, so it's not a purely parasitic function. Imagine a world where we have a good public school system, but a teacher is refusing to teach or use effective methods to teach. Who will discipline or fire them?

In the world we actually have, they... fall short of that ideal, to say the least. But it seems alienating to call them a parasite class. For people who do want a public school system but one that's better run, it's better to distinguish between good administrators and destructive ones, even if as a class a current supermajority of them can be fairly described as destructive and self interested.

Good administrators can be good, but it's not the sort of specialized position for which no qualified citizen is available, and must be drawn from the pool of foreign Olympians.

This seems beside the point given that we are seemingly not talking about a case where a "foreign Olympian" was invited to the position because no qualified citizen was available. Rather, the employers either (charitably) thought he was in fact a qualified citizen, or (less charitably) thought that he should be considered one.

Imagine a world where we have a good public school system, but a teacher is refusing to teach or use effective methods to teach. Who will discipline or fire them?

Well...

DENNIS: We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week. But all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting. By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more--

ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!

More seriously, lots of schools like Oxford and Cambridge seem to have been able to run themselves without a specialised professional administrator class until recently.

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