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The modern public education system is an expensive daycare at best and a Potemkin village at worst. Kids lack any internal or external motivation to learn, discipline is basically forbidden, and any mark under 85 is cause for meetings and interventions and BS special ed plans. Many teachers don't think this is a problem- school should be a "safe space" for children (though to what end, they usually can't say). Any teacher that does think it's a problem is either too cowardly (or agreeable, same thing) to fight the decline or too attached to the sweet, sweet benefits of the job (even sweeter in Canada!) to die on this hill. They console themselves, however, by muttering about how "these kids are in for a big surprise when they get to university." Well, ti appears that there will be no surprise:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-university-student-accommodation/684946/?gift=o6MjJQpusU9ebnFuymVdsFCUJZQ0G9lMNnLXcGfnS-w
At elite US universities, huge numbers of students (20-30%) receive accommodations for intellectual "disabilities." Since these schools are much more selective than other schools, and intellectual disabilities make you worse at school, we should expect to find even higher rates of disability at less selective schools, but we don't. So either the upper class families are fortunate enough to have the means to ensure their kids get the help they need while less affluent students are struggling unassisted, or they're gaming the system to inflate their marks when the most common grade is already A. You know in your heart which one it is.
The main "accommodation" these kids get, at university and K-12, is extra time. This almost makes sense on final exams, but day-to-day they also demand it. The problem is that there is no "extra" time; there is only one time and it is limited. "Extra time" on anything is an illusion, because you are taking your own time from something else. This is not just a metaphysical quibble- parents will demand that a kid get extra time (which usually means double time) on anything the kid finds difficult. Since time cannot be created, a kid who finds the material difficult will take an entire class period for a short quiz, thereby missing a bunch of material and falling behind, ensuring that he finds future material difficult as well and requiring even more "extra" time. Parents rarely understand this, even when it is explained to them.
Kids and parents universally defend this practice because it allows the kid to do their "best work." The assumption is that if other kids do their best work in half an hour, but your kid needs an hour to do his best work, that's academic justice. We're here to find the kids best work, after all (this is never questioned and any discussion of speed is not even understood, let alone allowed). The "best work" that this system produces is never good- work expands to fill the time allotted, so if you were going to write a C+ essay in an hour, and now you have two hours, it now takes you twice as long to be just as mediocre. Other absurdities abound, which I've mentioned before, like the "separate exam space" having more kids in it than the regular exam room or kids getting the reading test read to them, but the time thing is the biggest one.
Goodhart's Law is driving all of this. We used to use marks as the best available way to measure how smart or educated kids were, but then it started getting gamed and now marks are totally meaningless (note that parents and Good Teachers will assert, in the same sentence, that marks are not a full measure of a person's worth/intelligence/etc and also demand these accommodations so that the kid's marks are propped up because the kid is good or valuable). A colleague just had a meeting about a kid failing Gr 11 advanced math. It's too late to drop the course. He reassured her that if she takes Gr 12 basic math the kid will retroactively receive a Gr 11 basic math credit, and her graduation will not be threatened. The mother freaked because this would still leave "Gr 11 advanced math: 44%" on the kid's transcript, as though there were a situation where you needed a good gr 11 advanced math mark but didn't actually have to be good at math (in Canada, there is no such situation- any scholarship or admission that would have this kind of demand is going to the kids in Gr 12 advanced math anyway).
These are pretty standard complaints about the ed system, but now lets talk about The Last Psychiatrist. His bugbear was narcissism. Not the swaggering bravado we normally associate with narcissism, but insecure or compensatory narcissism that causes empty people to act out a character rather than to be their authentic selves (they don't have authentic selves in the first place). "Main character syndrome" probably comes from his writing, though I don't think he used that exact phrase. So a narcissistic man would demand that his wife get breast implants, not because he loves busty women, but because cool dudes like him have wives with huge knockers. He is trying to shape everything but himself to project the identity he wishes he had. It's normal for kids to try out different identities, get tough-guy tatoos or act like Taylor Swift, but well-adjusted people grow out of it and start actually doing things, and the things they do become the basis for stable identities. TLP alleged that people in the West have stopped growing out of it and are trapped in juvenile psychology where identity is totally decoupled from action. So you can go every day to your actuary job and estimate health insurance risk and go home and scroll Twitter all night, but since you own a guitar you actually think of yourself as a musician. This has all kinds of bad effects on you personally, on the people around you, and on society. Read his oeuvre to find out more.
This kind of narcissism is a natural, though regrettable, phase of growing up, and it's bad if you don't grow out of it. It's even worse, though, if all the adults around you are actively inculcating it in you. Accommodations are the main way society is doing this. "Marks are just one way of evaluating people" is perfectly true. If you really believe this, you won't be that worried about your kid getting a 60, unless he's slacking off, in which case you chain him up for a while until he gets his act together. But if you tell your kid, and doctors tell your kid, and the school tells your kid, and TikTok tells your kid (this, to your kid, is tantamount to the entire world telling him), that actually he's really smart even though he doesn't do anything smart, and that actually what needs to happen is for the world around him to change (=accommodations) then you are encouraging a mindset which life should actually be beating out of him.
People around here often object to The Last Psychiatrist's style, Sadly Porn is weird, etc, but he dropped the shtick and wrote a more obviously serious book called Watch What You Hear, about dream interpretation in the Odyssey. The big takeaway in the book (for psychology) is that insecure narcissists demand omnipotence from others and detest omniscience. "Omniscience" here means seeing clearly what your problems are, seeing through you. For example, a guy who thinks of himself as a woman has his whole world rocked if someone treats him like a man, or a girlboss feminist has a breakdown if someone suggests that all she wants is a baby. Instead, narcissists demand omnipotence- the trans guy wants the world rearranged to validate his feminine identity and the girlboss wants childfree spaces enforced, as though every else has the power to deliver affirmation/happiness/fulfillment/ for them.
We have allowed the education system to formally endorse this narcissistic demand for omnipotence over omniscience. The school/teacher/exam must not be allowed to correctly rate the student's intelligence, potential, actualisation or anything else. Whether that science is omni is beside the point; parents and students fear and believe that it is, which is why they lose their #$%ing minds when anyone suggests that if the kid gets 70 in every class then maybe he's just kinda a 70. The omnipotence they demand of everyone is the power to make their kid above-average. In some cases they believe this can be done, in other cases they demand the trappings of academic success without the substance (identity divorced from actions). This is TLP narcissism codified and is far worse for society than some lame teacher trying to get kids to like her by saying she's bisexual or whatever.
(I know that economic anxiety is a huge driver here, that parents fear that their kid will end up destitute if he doesn't get into engineering or something, but again, in what world will he be a successful engineer if you explicitly demanded that we cover up his lack of discipline, drive, and ability with fake marks? A world where, with regard to your kid, everyone else is omnipotent without being omniscient)
I guess my point is that the dominant objections here to public education rest on the system's financial or ideological effects, and while those are bad, the psychological effects are much worse and go much deeper than "I was bored and my reward was more work". The financial and ideological objections have more to do with the ed system being mainly made up of the outgroup, but they'll eventually all be dead. It's fine to dream of the day when the system is dissolved or otherwise rendered powerless, but until then, stop demanding accommodations for your kids. It's much worse for them than reading gay comics in English class.
I think this is representative of a general societal movement that holds, basically, that discipline should be done away with and replaced with more nurturing. The stick is just sadistic cruelty, and does much more harm than good, and whatever good it does do can be done all the better with extra carrots.
And I can see where people may be coming from on that, in that the downsides of discipline - the consequences of overdiscipline - are dramatic and immediate. Too much harshness leaves people shattered on the spot. The downsides of nurturing, though - the consequences of overnurturing - are comparatively dull and delayed. Too much nurturing leaves people stunted, but without any single, immediate, dramatic event that can be pointed to to say "see! That shows that they were treated wrongly!"
(I suppose it's an eternal human way to trade obvious, immediate problems for less-immediate ones.)
But it's not just academia: just as it would be inhumane to hold students to academic standards, in light of their Circumstances and Conditions, so too it would be inhumane to, for example, hold petty criminals to legal standards, in light of their Circumstances and Conditions. Instead of punishing anybody to stop their bad behavior, it is better to connect with them, to build relationships and trust, and constructively help them out of whatever pit they were in that made them feel they had to act out.
Which sounds lovely, but it just, well, doesn't work.
(I'm sure it would be pointed out if I don't do so now that the vanguards of civilized behavior who deplore discipline are real quick to grab the stick whenever somebody they don't like does something that really bothers them. That language policing is carried out with enthusiasm by those who detest regular policing. That would seem to point to just a different hierarchy of values, rather than a consistent stance against discipline...)
I like this framing because I think it highlights just how pernicious overnurturing is.
Overdiscipline is easy to spot. We call it abuse. If I steal from the cookie jar and my mother gives me a sharp crack about the ear, that's discipline - perhaps harsh and a bit pre-1972, but still within the acceptable definition of discipline. If, however, she wails on me with a wooden spoon for 10 minutes, that's abuse.
Grown up abuse is often called hazing. If I am at Marine Corps boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina and I screw up my locker inspection, the Senior Drill Instructor may respond by making me do pushups for some amount of time or repetitions. Discipline. If he throws the locker at me, that's hazing (if it seriously injures me, that's actually illegal, but it'll be covered up.)
Abuse or hazing, that it is fairly easy to draw the line makes it easier to manage, imho.
Not so with the over-nurturing. Returning to the cookie jar example, after my mother has caught me red handed, she takes 15 minutes to "gentle parent" me about how stealing is wrong because it makes other people sad and that too many cookies might make my tummy hurt and she knows I just like cookies, which is great, but right now we (why are we using the plural all of a sudden?) just can't have any cookies. Now, I don't even know if I did anything wrong. I don't know if I was just subjected to that ... event ... arbitrarily or in response to something I did directly.
Fast forward the tape and now I'm being arrested because I stole a couple doze iPhones with my friends from the mall. The cop is placing me into the back of his squad car because ... why? I wanted the iPhones so I took them. I'm not thinking about Apple, Inc. or the employees at the store because nobody (like, for instance, my mother) ever told me to do that much less associated direct consequences with the failure to do that. It's as if the entire concept of causality has been so watered down in my brain that I am an observer of my own actions instead of their source.
Sound familiar?
Every police interaction video online where the person who is obviously resisting arrest shouts "I didn't no nothin!" is, perhaps, a person who literally cannot associate their actions through time with a chain of causality. If it weren't so socially destructive, I'd feel bad for them -- like they're forced to watch a movie of their own life that's nothing but jump cuts.
Overdiscipline can lead to a damage deficit that may take years for a person to overcome. Extreme enough and it may never be totally overcome. But there is still the potential to overcome it and people will have the ability to work to do that. With overnurturing, it seems to me, they are utterly robbed of that ability to overcome. It's a complete short-changing of some core developmental pathways that turn children into adolescents into young adults that lack even the vague concept that they have control over their own actions which then influence the outcome of life and circumstance around them. If I drop you into the middle of a Japanese accounting firm and tell you to reconcile the balance sheet of Hashimori Corp in 90 minutes, you're going to laugh, throw up your hands, and just kind of let the world roll over you. You don't even have a sense for where or how to begin because you have zero contextual history or familiarity with this environment.
And that's a non-trivial part of younger millenials, Gen-Z, and whatever laboratory goo babies follow after them.
Is that actually a thing, where 'gentle parenting' results in kids who are stealing iphones or doing more or less organized crime? I genuinely have no idea.
I think robbers know perfectly well what they're doing and are evaluating risk and reward for their crimes, perhaps with skewed analysis of risk but they're still making an assessment. You'd never see them rob some 2 metre tall bodybuilder, even those 'schizophrenics' who push people onto subway lines or whatever, they'll go for someone weaker than themselves. Maybe the payoff for killing is hatred or jealousy rather than pure monetary gain...
I agree that swift discipline is the cure but I think that they all have some ability to judge, even if it's some reptile-brain 'this guy looks alpha better not attack him' level. More specifically I think some middle-class coddled brat is going to be really whiny and irritating when running into some obstacle but won't rob a store because he/she assesses 'I can just get my parents to pay for it'. Whereas the hardened thief calculates more along the line of 'who cares if I go to prison, my mate Bronco is there, I know lots of people who went to prison, and I don't want to look like a pussy and I need this cash fast'.
You'd think this, but then there are endless videos of criminals doing things that just seem completely insane to anyone who has a normally functioning understanding of cause and effect, like reaching for a cop's gun inside of a police precinct. A mere knave wouldn't do that.
This is because a certain category of criminals are simply that slice of humanity that has very low impulse control and is incapable of modeling the consequences of actions, or at least incapable of letting that affect their judgement. Watch enough footage and you'll recognize them.
Lots are just pretending they don't understand because they think that this will let them get away with it, but the small slice of people who genuinely have no impulse control exists and is most of those people who are arrested hundreds of times for the same petty crime.
Career criminals as you mentally model them also exist but they're a different breed.
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