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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.
At one of our local courthouses a kid fresh out of law school applied to be a judicial clerk. For those of you unfamiliar, a judicial clerk is a mix of an assistant to the judge, and doing the judge's actual job for him, with the percentages varying with the judge and the clerk. Most of the judicial opinions that form the law of the land are written primarily not by judges in black robes but by anonymous clerks whose names are nowhere in the text.
This guy claimed all kinds of mental disabilities along those lines (ADHD and the gang), and before he even started the job, during the application process he was pointing to various accommodations he would need to function within the role of judicial clerk. He would need extra time on assignments, he claimed to be incapable of following speech and taking notes without a laptop or of engaging in live debate because he couldn't process speech fast enough or something.
To even ask for these things reflects an entire misunderstanding of how work works, of the whole idea of a professional. You don't get extra time on assignments, the assignments exist and you get them done. If you don't complete the work necessary in your allotted hours, you have to finish it outside of your allotted hours. If your allotted hours produce less work than the average worker, you are less valuable than the average worker. At no point in the application process did this young man seem to think of the problem as "I'm going to need to work more hours" but always in terms of "You're going to have to go easy on me." I know it's the government, but still, there's not even the illusion of caring about productivity or value for a dollar.
And what offends me most is to lead with it proudly! As @FtttG says below, Hyprocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. One ought to at least have the decency to be ashamed of being a slow worker, or disabled, and hide it until after one is hired in a cushy government sinecure from which one cannot practically speaking be fired.
I used to struggle with this in law school, the idea of extra time or drugs to help someone focus on legal work strikes me as absurd in a professional school that is explicitly preparing the majority of its students to function through billable hours. It seemed obvious to me that it was good to provide help to kids who needed it in elementary school, but that it should stop by professional school. I didn't recognize how slippery the slope was. Standards must be standardized, or they are useless. People we pretended were good at one level always trickle down to the next level and demand we pretend they are good at that too.
This young man is now shipwrecked, with a professional degree and probably a great deal of debt, and no real way to make money at it except by conning others into "accommodating" him. Left to his own devices, as the mythical solo practitioner with a shingle out, he will need to work absurd hours to achieve a livable income. Working for others, he will be fired repeatedly, or barely tolerated for fear of a lawsuit. That's no kind of life. And I don't know how you pull someone out of it.
We're well past the point of "a bunch of kids in colleges," this is now at the point of taking over the workplace.
Do you think this young man ever had the practical chance of having a normal, productive life in an alternate universe?
Probably, but not as a lawyer. And once you are so far down that path, you've taken on a lot of financial-temporal-moral debt that creates path dependance.
If he had the ability to finish law school at all, he has the ability to do some job in the economy. But rather than looking for a profession that he could perform well in, he was allowed to drift into a profession despite failing (under even circumstances) every test designed to filter for the talent required to perform well. Now he's likely in significant debt, he's three years older, and if he tries to do anything else it's understood that he failed as a lawyer.
Someone who can't function within time limits is never going to do well in a business built on billable hours. A lower pressure role, or one where having one great idea every week is better than doing 50 hours of competent drudge work might be fine.
People need to be weeded out as fast possible. Relaxing standards push off the ultimate failure until after someone is pot committed.
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