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Notes -
(Stupid) Kids These Days
Article link - no paywall
Rough summary:
(Emphasis above added)
Excellent CW quote:
UCSD isn't an online for profit school. It has traditionally admitted kid from middle to upper middle class families that maybe weren't deeply thinkers, but were assumed to be strongly better than average. Their grads go on to form the professional classes of California suburbs, albeit not the ones with $2m media home price gated communities. Far from a bad life.
And the faculty be saying kids are real, real dumb. Like, really tho.
The rearward looking CW angle is too obvious; DEI, affirmative action, grade inflation in High Schools and a "no child left behind" attitude. I'd sprinkle on some helicopter-parent pressuring as well. For those of you interested in that angle, I await your hopefully hilarious takes.
I'm more interested in the future CW angle. Color me skeptical that these kids, already 18+, are going to really buckle down and crack the books now. If you've been retard-maxxing for nearly two decades, it's hard to slow the Downs and speed up the study. But, as the Dean in Animal House, said, _"Fat, Drunk, and Stupid" is no way to go through life. So what happens to these kids?
10 years from now, are we seeing a new sub-class of horrifically incompetent 30 year olds? If so, how does that change policy outcomes. A lot of well intentioned liberals have been smashing the vote button for welfare programs for going on six decades now because they see "structural" problems everywhere - of course the less fortunate need our benevolent support (definitely not noblesse-oblige). But when it just becomes plainly obvious that the COVID generation just has permanent banana brains, does that suicide empathy actually start to dry up?
There's a lot of discourse on the online dissident right about what will finally "wake up" the productive members of society. It usually ends up in HBD adjacent spaces. I wonder if the real "oh shit" moment will be far more obvious - stupid people, of any race, create massive problems and we've been boosting the stupid coefficient for somewhere near 15 years straight now.
I’m very grateful that I haven’t grown up with the educational system of the post-millennium compared to what I went through. Relative to what you have today, my K-12 education was preindustrial by comparison. Education was harder in a sense because it’s meant to be. You’re meant to achieve breakthroughs in your understanding as you build upon concepts from the simple to the more advanced. Book reports were still a regular. Cheating was more difficult. You still had calculators but good luck smuggling them into math class. For English literature we had SparkNotes to provide us with synopses for crap like Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which definitely put me to sleep. Can’t a brother read about Alexander the Great slapping people all over the Indian subcontinent?
Education has been very slow to adapt to the changing landscape over the last 20-30 years or so. If I were a teacher in 2025, all tech would be banned in my classroom and everything would be done in pen and paper. Forget homework. Hand out study guides with the expectation of upcoming exams. That’s your pass or fail. Anything that could be construed as a digital or electronic device at your desk is an automatic F. Classroom sizes should be much smaller IMO and unruly little POS should be thrown out of the classroom. I don’t recall where I saw the data on this but I read charter schools are vastly outstripping the performance of the public educational system. Maybe there’s some social/economic bifurcation there were the increase in mediocre performance is kept to one side (e.g. public schools, or urban vs. suburban vs. rural, etc., in more detail). I grew up in suburbia so I can’t comment on what education is like outside of it.
It’s funny one of the last books I read was Human Diversity by Charles Murray. The book contains a lot of width that covers much ground, but one thing he states is that much of the environmental landscape in education is going to be demystified. We know there’s significant interplay between heredity and environment and all is some mix and interplay of the two categories. Men and women for instance are remarkably similar and perform just as well in science and math as men do, but men concentrate more heavily in proportion to that category because of social and cultural factors. Men on the other had have been observed to be slower to develop if not sit below girls in social skills, and that’s actually due to biological factors. It’s the People-Things distinction and boys and girls use different cognitive and psychological tools in how they learn and navigate the world. How the educational system can reconstruct itself around those differences I’m not too sure.
Yes, because of two things:
It already kind of has; we just... don't bother teaching about things any more. Too dangerous, you see.
I don't even know that "ability to afford" is necessarily even financial: around here, charter (public) schools are covered by the state (with funds taken from the local district, which gets some political consternation). There may be some cost/time differences for parents regarding bus transportation, though. I think parents who select non-default education options are likely more invested in educational outcomes than probably even the median, regardless of prices --- which may well also have an impact.
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This is true, but probably not in the sense that you mean it. There may be exceptions in terminology somewhere, but in general charter schools in the United States do not charge tuition. The price you must afford to send your kid to charter school isn't paid in cash, but in the currency of executive function: do you have the foresight to get your kid on an admissions list ASAP (we didn't try until our oldest was moving from a decent-enough elementary school to a weaker selection of middle schools, and so it wasn't until two years later that she got into a charter), and can you reliably shuttle your kid(s) to a more distant school, possibly with a less-standard schedule, without the school bus services that any public school will offer?
You could outdo charter school selection effects in any mid-size public school district by just using an admissions test (most charter schools aren't allowed to use one), but even where this happens it's just hanging on by a thread.
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I know what TM’s general view is on this and the logic that tends to sit behind it and in one sense I’m with them, but we differ in how we interpret the science on this (IQ). I’m quite the strong hereditarian myself but people vastly overemphasize its importance relative to other effect sizes.
They [almost] tend to think IQ has a causal direct link to some kind of meritocracy in the way they think about it. And I don’t like how they treat the matter in reference to other populations, because then everything goes haywire and becomes a shouting match.
Here’s where TM and I agree. Yes to two points:
Success requires mental ability.
Social rewards are often linked to this success.
But here’s where it makes implicit assumptions that are highly contentious. First it assumes people only labor for material gain. Human beings don’t solely labor for extrinsic reward and the corollary of that assumption is to assume that if human beings didn’t, the mass of them would simply sit around and vegetate. If I could make more money working at a call center than I do with my current employer, I still would not partake of that arrangement due to other factors at play. And in fact I’m prepared to abandon my present vocation for a less satisfying and more demanding job because of the way in which it aligns my priorities with family life.
And how to we rank IQ and merit in this sense? Along what axes? Is a call center clerk of less social value than an NBA player or a software engineer? Why do any of these racial or phenotypic distinctions matter except under the assumption that we’d want to live in a racist society. In the current paradigm it has about as much important as height does (which is to say it’s not irrelevant at all, but it isn’t at the forefront of policy decisions in such regard). IQ in this sense is mostly irrelevant for the state of an individual to want to be what he is and pursue what he chooses for himself.
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I'm working on researching elementary schools. We have school choice, which means charters are an option. Maybe n=4 is not enough to be meaningfully significant, but I've noticed that no charter school I've seen talks about individual teachers on their webpage. I would think that they'd be worth advertising - if they're considered to be a cut above.
Am I reading signals wrong? Or do I just need to lurk moar?
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