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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.
This idea of "you are smart even though you don't do anything smart" reminds me of a book Freddie deBoer reviewed, Amy Lutz's Chasing the Intact Mind. From reading the review, Lutz's thesis appears to be that the parents of severely mentally disabled children often seem to believe (explicitly or implicitly) that, while their non-verbal autistic or cerebral palsied etc. child gives no outward appearance of engaging in high-level cognition of any kind, somewhere inside there's an "intact" mind which is fully conscious, self-aware and capable of high-level reasoning. Their desperation to communicate with this "intact mind" leads them down a range of garden paths, such as pseudoscientific nonsense like facilitated communication: a technique wherein a non-verbal person can purportedly communicate through an intermediary. Countless studies have demonstrated that facilitated communication is bunk, the product of wishful thinking and the ideomotor effect: the non-verbal person is effectively being used as a Ouija board. The belief in an "intact mind" residing somewhere inside the body of a non-verbal or even vegetative person amounts to a modern form of mind-body dualism.
(Some people might be tempted to point to the existence of people with locked-in syndrome, such as Jean-Dominique Bauby, as a counter-example. The difference here is that Bauby was unambiguously capable of high-level cognition prior to the stroke which caused his condition, living an entirely independent life; and after the stroke his communication did not need to be "facilitated" in the manner described above. Contrast this with a child who has never given any indication of higher-level brain function.)
I wonder if there's a less extreme version of the same phenomenon going on here. Much as proponents of the "intact mind" believe that every human being is equally conscious, self-aware and capable of high-level cognition, and some people just need more accommodations to express themselves than others — perhaps by the same token there are people who believe that everyone is born equally intelligent, and some people just need more accommodations to express that intelligence than others (or they're only intelligent in a nonstandard domain unrelated to verbal or numerical reasoning).
There are several obvious retorts to this worldview:
My attitude towards claims of different forms of intelligence is that it is obviously true on its face, but that one can safely assume that when one is talking to someone claiming that they have a "different" form of intelligence than the ones that can be measured they probably don't rate highly in any form of intelligence.
Other forms of intelligence have their observable markers. The person with great emotional intelligence has a ton of friends, is a great salesman, can start a conversation with anyone off the street. The person with great spiritual intelligence is one who is always moral, a holy man who always does the right thing and knows the right thing to do, a saint. Someone with artistic talent produces art. I've known men who could barely read, but possessed some kind of innate mechanical ability to fix anything. People who truly possess these talents are quick to acknowledge that they are dumb, their talents and the rewards thereof provide the recompense for their stupidity.
By contrast, you have the person who loudly proclaims their emotional intelligence, such a person almost certainly lacks emotional intelligence as that is not a very emotionally intelligent thing to say to people. The person who talks about their intense charisma but has no friends, or the person who speaks of their spirituality but is a bad person. Or the worst of the worst: street smarts, common sense. The number of abject failures who crow about their common sense is a clear indictment of the concept, if it exists it clearly has limited value! And as a country bumpkin, I was eternally treated in my younger years to college friends telling me I lacked "street smarts," which always amounted to some kind of useless local knowledge at best, and just urban myths at worst.
I can say that different forms of intelligence exist from personal experience, in that I consistently rate much higher on any classic test that measures intelligence than I function in day to day life, I overperform on tests. I'm a mediocre mechanic, even though I would trounce anyone at the dealership in an LSAT; and I could never cut hair even if my IQ qualifies me for the job. But when one claims all the forms of intelligence that can't be measured, and has no evidence to back it up, it's easy to dismiss them as a liar.
True, and weirdly enough, these people bear a strong familial resemblance to those people who seem extremely invested in their IQ score or MENSA membership, as a substitute for their paucity of actual intellectual achievements. Genuinely smart people don't care about their IQ score or what fruity little club they're a member of: they demonstrate their intelligence through their actions.
My favourite critique of this concept came from Malcolm in the Middle:
That's not really what street smarts is supposed to mean. Street smarts is things like knowing when someone's trying to con you, being able to tell what strangers you should to be civil to and who you shouldn't, knowing how to avoid getting robbed or caught in the middle of a fight, how to project dangerousness without aggressiveness so people will leave you alone, things like that.
That's what it should mean, in reality when I hear people use street smart day-to-day, it's offered as a contrast and salve to a lack of "book smarts." The lack of books smarts is obvious in a lack of education, a low wage job, or simply in speaking to him; the claim of street smarts is treated as unverifiable, there's no standardized testing for speaking to strangers or dodging a con man.
I'm contending that if one doesn't see evidence of competence in how they handle themselves, one should treat claims of street smarts as unverifiable and subject to being rejected without evidence.
Indeed, like how 'curvy' or 'unconventionally attractive' are used.
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I agree that "street smarts" means more than that, traditionally referring to métis in the Seeing Like a State sense (in contrast to we "rationalist" mistake-theorist quokkas who can't quite believe people would go on the internet and tell lies, or try to take advantage of others).
But it's surprising how often the term gets used in a manner indistinguishable from the usage Malcolm outlined above. It sort of reminds me of those people who "discovered this cool life hack", which amounts to them lying and cheating other people and abusing the social contract. "I discovered this cool life hack: if you print off a fake handicapped parking permit, most people won't bother to check and you can park in the handicapped spaces." Hate to break it to you dude, but the reason we aren't doing that isn't because we didn't think of it.
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