This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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 was real excited about an education post, but I'm finding this a bit incoherent.
Are you an educational determinist? Can a somewhat-stupid student earn good grades? Should they? If so, how? Say nothing about the ridiculous assertion that many teachers somehow don't care about their students learning. I'd say rather than them not caring, teachers have been taught tools that don't work very well and gaslit into believing that they do. See: "inquiry-based learning" and its plague on math. Most observers around here claim that the real problem is disconnected parents, so it's strange to see that you seem to be claiming that the real problem is that the parents are too connected to modern educational trends.
Obviously both are true...? You know better than to use this strawman/false dichotomy.
So is extra time unfair? Or merely a poor use of time-resources? I'm willing to buy the latter, but you aren't doing anything to justify the former. Under this stated opinion, extra time "should" be useless, long-term. I think that's your point, that head-burying is more trendy and desirable than black-and-white analysis and accurate grades, and it's certainly true that grade inflation has accompanies lowering state test scores relative to some previous cadres (although IIRC the data isn't super compelling so far that this recent mini-generation is, say, worse off educationally than those of the 80's, but I haven't dug that deep) but claiming that extra time doesn't produce better work is a little misguided. It objectively does. Better scores at least, for certain, in many if not most cases.
Modern neuroscience seems to be suggesting that kids actually all learn in similarly optimal ways but at different rates, and sometimes this is true on a per-subject basis too. If true, this actually, ironically even, suggests that "extra time" in fact be the better solution. A solution best paired with differentiated instruction of the truest type: leveling and creating tiered classes that move at different speeds.
To say nothing about intrinsic or external learning motivation. As far as I can tell, this is mostly a mystery still to everyone including the neuroscientists. All we really know for sure is that there's a lot of wisdom to the general idea that people rise or fall to the level of the expectations put on them. And that includes self-expectations. As a matter of fact, identity is a major driver of human behavior. I think you're insisting that this is a fragile foundation, but I don't think that's a widely supported view. Rather, most experts seem to think that rather than kick against the pricks, it's better simply to focus on which aspects of self-identity are most useful and least problematic.
At any rate, I require some clarification:
Are tests useless or accurate measures of student learning? How entangled are these scores with raw talent?
How involved and/or harmful are parents' efforts at the moment? Are most too engaged in the wrong ways, or unengaged entirely, or what?
Do teachers (and/or administrators) care about learning, or just about the day-care aspects of stuff? Do they even care about that?
Are wealthy, non-stupid recipients of accommodations actually hurting themselves, or is such hurt limited to vague psychological hypotheses of yours? Why should we care if so? Or is everyone being hurt, via some unspecified coddling (presumably 'good unearned grades')?
What do you actually want to see from schooling? Better inculcated mindsets? Civic mindedness? Raw educational attainment? Good test scores? College preparedness? Career aptitude? Plenty of options, or fewer but more-reliable options?
-Even mid-quality tests under universal intellectual standards (so, not counting braille, etc) are accurate measures of both student learning and student rank. Society (this includes teachers and students) expects both measures from schools. When even a small number of people get special intellectual standards (different time constraints, faster writing tools, someone to read the questions to them, etc) even the best tests no longer measure either of the things they are supposed to measure. "But schools are designed to teach conformity, man"- well, they're not even doing that if everyone gets special treatment.
-Parents are deeply involved in grade-grubbing (the trappings of success) but uninvolved in actual education (the substance of success). A parent who was worried that their kid wasn't learning chemistry would either take responsibility for the kids chemistry knowledge and find/be a better teacher, or demand that the school clean up its act. Very few parents are out there demanding more educational rigor, and we admittedly can't tell how many are silently tutoring their kids, but there are certainly lots of parents who have taken a third path and demanded that the chemistry test be made easier for their own personal kid. This often requires expensive diagnosis shopping (though it takes less and less shopping every year) and wild amounts of time spent in meetings and consultations, and the effect of all this expense is to produce the trappings for good parenting ("I'm Serious(tm) about education") instead of the substance of good parenting ("I learned chemistry to help my kid"). And of course this shouldn't be necessary, the school should handle it, but here we are and this is what parents have done. And of course your kid's personal worth as a human doesn't depend on his grade 12 chem mark, but then why are we trying everything (except learning chemistry) to make that number go up?
-Administrators do not care about learning, hands down. If any learning should accidentally occur in one of their schools, they're fine with it, but not at the cost of graduation rates or parent complaints, which are the two measures on which they are formally and informally evaluated. You can hope for some sleeper cell of serious teachers to worm their way into the upper ranks, but the admin system actually does select for conformity, so the people in charge already know which of their former colleagues are the good ones (interpreted either way, the result is the same).
-Most teachers also don't care about learning, even if they once did. Teachers are mostly women, and the modal woman cares even less than the modal man about learning stuff, especially academic stuff. Those women who achieve academic success are usually motivated by approval and they bring that model with them when they become teachers, so you get girls with straight As because their notes are neatly written (a kid last week was explaining to me how she should actually be really good at math and, as evidence of this, showed me her magifnicent notes. She didn't understand them, but they were beautiful.) Where this is not the case, among both women and men, teachers are often motivated by an interest in the subject (which 99% of students do not share) or an actual desire to see students learn (which 99% of students do not do in any appreciable way past grade 2). As you find that kids don't care about your subject, or aren't learning it, or both, you either quit, kill yourself, double down and become the Mean Teacher (me), or redefine your job to preserve your ego. You tell yourself that actually you can look anything up on Wikipedia now, so what really matters is critical thinking, and so you just talk about DEI all day. Or you tell yourself that these kids' parents are all bigots and will abuse them if they find out their kids are gay, so you go fishing for closeted gay kids so you can be their confidante. When it turns out that there are very few gay kids, you go all in trans stuff, etc. Or you say that your real job is to spark a love of learning, so you have the kids in Gr 10 advanced English read Harry Potter with no actual demands just so they see that reading is fun. If you ever crack down and try to make the kids learn, you can't talk about DEI, they won't think of you as Cool, they won't think learning is fun, etc. "But learning can be fun!" Only up to a certain point- after that it takes effort, and effort feels really bad if you aren't used to it. Kids These Days are not used to it.
-Wealthy, non-stupid kids gaming the system are hurting themselves a bit, because most of them lack the self-awareness of the ones interviewed in the article. The average accommodation-demanding student truly believes that their poor academic performance is excused by their test anxiety, ADHD, or whatever else. They believe that they really are just as smart/driven as actually successful students, they just haven't been given "a chance to show what they know." But if you got into Harvard, someone will see to it that you are looked after. The bigger worry are kids like the law clerk mentioned in this thread, who doesn't get that his test results were just a measure, not the actual goal, and doesn't see how the real work isn't gameable like school was.
-Everyone is hurt by this, though, because it encourages insecure narcissism during the prime years when you should be growing out of it. You really do have to read TLP to get a full explanation of why, but if you believe your success depends entirely on the efforts of the people around you, and happiness is a form of success, then you will make unreasonable demands of your wife, kids, job, friends, etc and become a hell to be around. This will make you solitary and isolated and cause you to think that if you could just get people to do what you want, you'd be happy. But they didn't do what you wanted before, so why would it work now? Well, you'll become a different person. But since change is hard and you were actively robbed of the opportunity to substantially change while you were growing up, you will instead change personas. So you start taking roids to make up for your lack of rizz (RizzNotRoids would be a good username) or you buy a bunch of Funko pops to feel like part of a community, or you get botox because pretty girls have friends, or whatever. It's bad, and it doesn't work, and it's widespread. My contention in the post was that this is the biggest problem with grade inflation and broken schools- it actively encourages this mindset when it used to shake you out of it.
-I want schools to deliver value proportionate to their cost. They will not be abolished, so they should be reformed. They can be reformed in 5 ways:
(1) Students can man up and either accept their results or put in the work to improve them instead of making bs excuses to get their parents off their backs. This will never happen.
(2) Parents can act like they actually believe either of their two claims: That marks are not a meaningful measure of anything (this frees the school to use them to accurately measure things by stopping the grade-grubbing) or that getting good results is really important (which would translate into pressure on kids and schools to actually deliver on learning). This may happen, but it's unlikely that the culture will shift all at once without some external force being applied, and it's hard to imagine what that force could be. Russian dominance in the space-race, I guess?
(3)Teachers could grow a backbone and just stop giving in to parental pressure. Grade-grubbers grub grades because grubbing gets the grades grubbed, and this includes accommodations. There are lots of ways to increase friction in the accommodation system. If a kid demands double time on quizzes, have a quiz every day- now it is chronologically impossible for him to have double time. If a kid needs someone to type for him (very common) do everything orally and see how he likes that. If a kid says "Look, I'm not trying to play the special ed card here . . ." point out that that's exactly what they're doing (this is amazingly effective). This has the advantage that no formal systemic changes are required- we got here by teachers informally taking the path of least resistance over and over for many years. It has the disadvantage that teachers are mostly very agreeable, hate conflict, and don't think the current situation is a big problem, so they will never all spontaneously coordinate to do this.
(4) Administrators could do the same thing. But they are even more filtered for allegiance to the current system, so this won't happen.
(5) The government could actually impose standards. Curricula and codes of education, as they are written, are usually pretty strict. The legal basis for a tougher ed system is there but governments have permitted too much drift, mainly because of law suits and human-rights legislation-from-the-bench. There are workaround to all this, especially in Canada where nearly all rights avowedly exist at the pleasure of the monarchy-inspired state (see sec. 1 and 33 of the CCRF). Politically, this would be feasible if you circled around incompetent teachers' unions for a few years (easy to do) and then proposed that we actually make those clowns do their jobs instead of (or in addition to) trying to get rid of this or that gay book. You could spin accommodations and fluff classes as a ploy by teachers to paper over bad teaching and connect accommodations to grift on the part of the system, rather than on the part of parents and students. Even though this would require ways to prevent teachers from gaming results, you can just decide to do that, whereas solutions 1-4 all depend mainly on hope. So this is what I want from schools.
You can't count on universities or the private sector to create their own exams, because cash-strapped universities will take anyone now and the private sector has revealed its preference for low-salaries at the cost of almost all else, so most jobs would require a trivial test. "If that's all most jobs require, why make schools do all this stuff?"- Because schools aren't going away and they cost a fortune, so we might as well try to get an educated population for the money. If they do go away, or become really cheap, that changes the entire debate completely.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but while learning deficit diagnoses are still cartoonishly easy to get, they’ve actually gotten harder since they entered the popular consciousness in the bush era. ADHD is still almost always a garbage bag diagnosis but in theory it now actually requires at least some supporting evidence, when in the past it did not.
More options
Context Copy link
I think the first important thing that absolutely has to happen is that you have to be willing to take the parents out of the loop. If the kid is flunking, then either he improves such that he learns the material or he fails and repeats the material until he can do the work. No more requests to make it easier, no cheats from ADA-diagnosed fake disability, no retests, no open book/note, no extra credit or participation points (all of which are just dressing up the urge to remove rigor so your kids pass). Either Johnny reads at grade level and learns his math to grade level or he doesn’t pass.
Second, I think we have to get back to basics here. Reading and maths and science long before any other fluff. Read real books, learn to do maths, learn how to do physics and chemistry. Personally, im very much in favor of the classical model of education, but I wouldn’t oppose the modern system if the kids had managed to read adult level literature by the time they graduated high school and were able to do advanced algebra.
More options
Context Copy link
Semi-seriously, it would be funny (and not really wrong, at some level) for people to start suggesting we adopt Japanese or Korean schooling methods because they show better outcomes as the mirror to everyone suggesting European-style healthcare systems for the same reasons. And part of that is that, as I understand, their systems are structured more like you're suggesting.
Although there are plenty of other concerns (fertility, for example) in adopting that wholesale.
As with the healthcare systems, those Japanese or Korean schooling methods have some pretty nasty drawbacks of their own (as you note). And I think historically when the US attempts to copy them we end up (temporarily) with the worst of both worlds -- kids grind but learn nothing. The Sputnik Shock worked better for primary and secondary education, but the resulting National Defense Education Act also set us up for the student loan crisis.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
One would think the prospect of Chinese dominance in the AGI race would be the present-day equivalent, but, well, gestures broadly at everything
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link