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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   10621 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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So…is it not the maximally uncharitable but nevertheless correct take on the entire education system that its sole relevant social role is to ensure that

  • schoolchildren are put under official supervision during the day so that their parents won’t have to worry about them
  • working-class children receive their minimal level of socialization in high school so that they form social circles and pair-bond after graduating
  • middle-class and upper-class children form the necessary social networks in college that enable them to preserve their social status later in life and also preferably compel them to pair-bond after graduating

?

Oh, no, you can get less charitable while being more correct. An old Eliezer Yudkowsky quote I saved:

Education is not secretly intended to turn adolescents into conforming factory workers. If 'they' were trying to produce factory workers 'they' would take advantage of elementary modern research on conditioning, reinforcement, and shaping to produce much better factory workers, rather than making conformity so unpleasant and unrewarding. If schools were actually trying to teach things they would take advantage of modern research on spaced repetition. If grade schools and high schools were secretly babysitting institutions, they would offer more flexible hours. If colleges had been designed by employers to weed out anyone with trouble submitting to authority, then there would be harsher enforcement of drug rules or more prohibitive sexual regulations as tests; as it stands, many students who gain a college credential will still have trouble submitting in a workplace. The educational process has no agenda, hidden or otherwise. The overall process of going to college might have the intention of gaining a piece of paper, but the actual day-to-day activities of college are not being optimized for any intended consequence, by anyone.

There are a lot of relevant social roles played by various educational institutions. There are no relevant social roles being played as well as they could be by these institutions. It's not exactly that nobody is trying to optimize for any particular consequence, though, it's just that handling any one of their roles perfectly well would conflict with a different role being played for a different interest group, and trying to optimize for both at once would interfere with the desires of a third interest group, and so on.

Mandatory public education seems like a big Chesterton's Fence.

… except that in Chesterton’s original fence analogy, the naive reformer did not know for what purpose the fence was originally built. In this case, we do know, to some extent: we in the US have a bastardized mélange of rationales with the Prussian model of education as the basal substrate, plus a healthy dose of American civic religion, daycare services for working parents, and concessions to public sector unions and the DEI commissariat on top.

There is much truth to the Big Yud quote above, about how modern schooling isn’t optimized for any of the usually-stated goals (viz. the production of manual laborers, well-informed and civic-minded voters, intelligent and conformist office drones). But this is because the system has been pulled in different and mutually-incompatible directions over the years as the fortunes of the various interest groups involved have waxed and waned.

Returning to your point: Chesterton himself was OK with fence-removal in some cases, provided that the original purpose of the fence was known, as indeed it is. And moreover, we have decades of experience now with tearing down this particular fence in gradual, incremental, localized ways (viz. homeschooling, unschooling, and certain private or charter schools), which incidentally is exactly how Chesterton would advise us to begin the process of doing away with the fence.

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