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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14417 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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Yeah it seems like OP is bouncing back and forth between the signalling and capital formation models of schooling as needed.

  1. Tests in both models should be useful. For signalling it lets you differentiate. For capital formation it lets you know if the teachers are doing their job well. So ruining testing in any way is a bad move by education.
  2. Parental engagement with education seems tied to wealth and class. With the middle class being engaged to some degree, and everyone else involved to a lesser degree.
  3. Teachers unions seem to mostly care about the quality and pay of the job itself. Administrators seem most concerned with the day care aspects. Individual teachers care to carrying degrees about the education itself. The level of care and ability to push education outcomes makes for good or bad teachers. But it doesn't seem that there is a systemic force within education that cares about education, while there are at least two forces pushing against education for other goals they follow.
  4. Coddling is bad for the recipient and neutral for everyone else in the capital formation model of schooling. In the signalling model of education coddling is bad for everyone else, and good for the recipient. So the people asking for coddling seem to be treating education as a signalling exercise. Coddling is at best zero sum, and at worst negative for the recipient.

As a parent of young kids I have a wishlist for schooling:

  1. Rigorous Testing. Tests are either letting me know teachers are doing their job. Or fairly measuring relative ability and achievement. It would be best for me if my kids had an advantage, but it seems the current environment makes you jump through a bunch of hoops to acquire those advantages. I'd rather just let no one get the advantage. This hasn't come up much yet for my kids, but the stories I've heard have me weary.
  2. Consistent child care. Yes it is a day care to some extent. But it is also the worst day care ever for working parents. We are almost halfway through the school year and there have been maybe three full weeks of school, i.e. no half days, teacher work days, holidays, elections, etc. There is an after school program but the wait-list for it is twice as long as the number of spots available in the program itself. Schools also completely failed this function during COVID.
  3. Learning progress tracking. I'd like to know where my child is at with math, reading, and anything else the school thinks is valuable to teach. I'm happy with how the school is doing this right now, no complaints. I just want to make sure it doesn't go away.
  4. Progress relevant education. After you spend all the time tracking where a student is at you should know what they can be learning. If they know addition you can stop teaching addition and move onto subtraction. The school mostly fails at this. Large class sizes and teachers with big hearts means that the class teaches to the lowest common denominator. My kid has complained about being bored of learning about patterns and shapes, the class has apparently been learning about them for three months. I apparently need to get my kid into the gifted programs as soon as possible to avoid the boredom issues. But that is apparently something that requires active parental involvement, but it should just be default based on where the kids education progress is at (which the school knows because they are doing a good job of tracking it).
  5. Less state religion. Recycling, environmental worship, diversity worship, nice little lies about how government works, etc. I know this is least likely to happen. It's what you get when you have government funded schools. But this is my wishlist, and it would be nice if I didn't have to worry about them teaching my children crap.

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