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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.
How much of this is…well…real?
I think everything else in your comment is either anecdotal or outright speculation. I was going to ask for sources on a couple of the claims, but there were just too many. Who’s muttering about how they’ll get the wake-up call? How is failure to “fight the decline” cowardly? Why do you think TLP’s model is reasonable?
Actually, let’s go into that one. “Insecure narcissists demand omnipotence from others and detest omniscience” is vacuous. It’s a fully general argument. Any time you want me to do something, you’re demanding omnipotence, and any time I dare to disagree with you, I’m just mad about your omniscience. “They hated Him because He told the truth,” huh?
Goodhart’s law is not narcissism. It is a race to the bottom brought on by normal, familiar self-interest. People game metrics when they value the rewards more than the integrity of the system. No psychoanalysis necessary.
Speculation is half the game around here.
-The problem is that the people I’m talking about have confused the metrics for the reward and this has deleterious personal and social consequences. We’re not talking about breeding cobras, here, we’re talking about apparently irrecoverable psychological damage on a wide scale.
-Narcissists really do hate people who tell them the truth, yes. If you object to the n-word, just consider whether you’d want any kind of relationship with someone who hates being told the truth. It doesn’t matter what the clinical name is. Do you want to do business with guy? Do you want to date that woman? Want them as a neighbour?
-The omnipotence in question is granted by the narcissist to everyone else to affirm their identity, and he demands that they use it. They’re not asking you to move a couch, they’re asking you to affirm their self-image, and because that image is baseless (it is not backed by deeds) your affirmation is all they have.
You can advance this discussion by denying either the phenomena I’m describing, the causal links between them, or the significance any of it. I can’t advance it by giving you any sources since the system keeps finding itself to be working just fine.
See, I don’t think most people have confused the metric and the reward. A college degree gives you some combination of skills and prestige. Gaming a disability policy decouples your degree from your skills, but it doesn’t stop you from claiming some of the prestige. Maybe even a lot of it, depending on your field. Connections, investment, political backing, all sorts of benefits.
If what you most value is skill, you suck it up and go to a non-elite school. You’ll get most of the skill and none of the prestige. If you crave the latter, though, gaming the system is a rational choice.
The emperor’s sycophants complimented his new clothes because they were afraid of his anger. In your model, why are the universities going along with it? Are they stupid?
I think the narcissism label is a way to sneer at people one thinks are delusional. If they’re actually making a rational decision, it’s not a useful framing.
Echoing @gog below, I agree that gaming the system isn't necessarily indicative of TLP-style narcissism, if you're fully aware that that's what you're doing and have no illusions about it.
Think back to the Varsity Blues scandal, in which various wealthy parents (including your woman from Desperate Housewives) were found to have bribed elite universities to get their children places.
Now, if these parents were thinking "I know Little Jimmy isn't too bright, but I really want him to go to Harvard, and if that means I have to pay some apparatchik under the table, so be it", that's not narcissism.
But if, on the other hand, they were thinking "Little Jimmy is a genius, but he has a special kind of intelligence that can't be captured by a blunt instrument like the SAT. I know that once he gets to Harvard he'll flourish, and if I need to pay someone off to get him in, so be it" - well, yeah. You see where I'm going with this.
In real life, I imagine there are some parents who have no illusions about how smart or capable their children are, and are just using every exploit they can think of to get their kids into top universities they never could on their own merit, including specious requests for accommodations for disabilities their children don't have. Nothing narcissistic about that – dishonest, yes; selfish, yes; burning the commons, yes; making it harder for the legitimately disabled to be taken seriously, yes – but not narcissistic.
But I agree with @gog that there are a nonzero amount of parents who really think their children are exceptionally intelligent in a way which, for some reason, never manifests in an SAT-legible form, and for which special accommodations are required so that it can express itself. That is narcissism.
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I recall reading an article a few years ago (I'll see if I can dig it out*) that claimed that the absolute number of black Americans with engineering degrees actually declined in the years after affirmative action in university admissions was introduced.
The reasoning was elegantly simple. Like it or not, everyone in a classroom setting is acutely aware of where they sit in the hierarchy of their peers when it comes to how effectively they are understanding the material: people at the top of the class know they are, people who are struggling know it, people who are getting by know it. If you're a mediocre student in a mediocre school, you'll be doing okay: if you move that mediocre student into an elite school, he will be struggling, almost by definition. Ask yourself who's more likely to drop out of an elite school: someone getting straight As with ease, or someone barely scraping by with Ds?
This article argued that affirmative action in university admissions essentially migrated a huge number of mediocre students out of mid-tier colleges (in which their skill level would have matched the content they were expected to master, at the pace they were expected to master it) and into elite Ivy League colleges (in which they were bound to be near the bottom of the classroom distribution: if they wouldn't be, they wouldn't have needed affirmative action to get in). Faced with the demoralising prospect of always being near the bottom of the class, far more of these students dropped out before completing their degree, when compared to an earlier cohort of black students who attended mid-tier colleges. I don't know about you, but I think going to a mid-tier college and getting a degree is more impressive than going to Yale and dropping out after a year because you can't hack it.
It wouldn't surprise me if we end up observing a similar trend here. No genuinely smart student actually needs "accommodations" to get into an elite college, so the only ones who try to game the disability system to do so will be mediocre students. Like the black students in the paragraph above, they will find themselves near the bottom of the classroom hierarchy, constantly struggling to grasp material their classmates master with ease. Consequently, they will be far more likely to drop out with receiving a degree.
You're correct that getting the skills and the credentials is only one reason people go to college, end networking opportunities and so on are also a big part of it. But if you're doing a four-year degree and you drop out one year in, you'll have max one-quarter the networking opportunities that someone who completes their degree will have, so it may end up being a waste of your time anyway.
*I'm not sure if this is the article I was thinking of, but it makes the same general argument.
I think the overall point here is good, but that it only misses the magic “civilization is fucked” sauce.
In the 1970s, the U.S. News & World Report Best Colleges Ranking didn’t exist. Even elite colleges were at least somewhat more likely to cut loose the lowest performers. But now, thanks to the wonders of journamalism, graduation rate is the single most gameable factor in maintaining school prestige.
42% of the score is strictly about graduation rates.
Harvard has a 98% graduation rate and the most common grade is an A. These kids are not going to drop out like a merely above-average black engineer might have in 1975. They don’t even know to be ashamed, and the college will do everything it can to prevent them from feeling shame.
We are not prepared for the stunningly brave world’s first Down Syndrome judge.
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They are delusional.
It’s only rational and not inculcating narcissism if you admit to yourself that you are gaming the system. Remember that I’m talking about high school, which affects many more students at more critical ages. These parents and their kids really believe that the kid is really smart even though there is no evidence this. They handwave the lack of evidence, and teach the kid to handwave it, because schools are there to say “don’t worry about actions, we will affirm your kid’s identity (that you, the parent, picked for him, usually as a projection of your own) by giving him extra equal treatment.” So you have all these vectors adding up to “your actions have nothing to do with who you are.” You can dispute whether that is really so bad, but you can’t dispute that it’s the implicit (and often explicit) message of all this.
Universities go along with it because of stuff like human rights law. I didn’t think that was controversial.
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