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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30626 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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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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