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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   31323 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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Kids studying for 5 hours a day after school is worse for society than them spending that time digging ditches and filling them in; the latter at least involves exercise.

Hi, can you expand on this point? My position is that there's obviously marginal utility in increasing/decreasing schooling duration/homework, but then that's a very individual thing where some need more and some need less. This individuality expresses itself in extra tutoring (some people need more time than the average to get something) or special classes (some people need less time than the average to get something and is ready for the next thing). Since society most often rule in averages*, then yes an arbitrary fiat of extra 5 hours system-wide is probably going to be bad, probably just as bad if kids spend 5 hours digging. I suppose what I am trying to get at is do you have a different more clarifying example of your position?

* It's been said before but the dream for education is obviously personalized individual study plan suitable for the person. AI and tech seems to be 1 or 2 years from being able to offer this.

First homework is stupid. Even worse it is pointless. It takes the most valuable time of your life for some absolutely marginal advancement in academic performance. If someone can't grok quadratic equations - solving 200 more at home will help? Making them suffer trough war and peace or crime and punishment will make them appreciate literature? That somehow staring at the physics handbook will make them understand relativity?

We treat knowledge as goal not as a tool. Tell the little ones that at the end of the course they will know how to make total synthesis of cocaine and you will have the most attentive chemistry class in the history of the world. And they will do their homework without even being assigned.

First homework is stupid. Even worse it is pointless.

Most work you perform during your working years will be stupid and pointless, but you still need to do it. Better that children are taught early to swallow their pride and get shit done even when they don't see the point in it.

You might as well put blinders on the kids to prepare them for the fact many of them will develop vision problems as they get older, and force them to wear fatsuits to get them ready for the obesity many of them will settle into as their metabolism slows, and steal their lunch money to train them for taxes, and...

"Adult life sucks, so we should make life for children suck to prepare them for it" is such an insanely negative-sum, anti-child view that I am filled with shock and outrage every time it comes up. It's like you don't remember what it was like to be a kid, because you don't treat children like people.

From "Book Review: The Cult Of Smart" by Scott Alexander:

School is child prison. It's forcing kids to spend their childhood - a happy time! a time of natural curiosity and exploration and wonder - sitting in un-air-conditioned blocky buildings, cramped into identical desks, listening to someone drone on about the difference between alliteration and assonance, desperate to even be able to fidget but knowing that if they do their teacher will yell at them, and maybe they'll get a detention that extends their sentence even longer without parole. The anti-psychiatric-abuse community has invented the "Burrito Test" - if a place won't let you microwave a burrito without asking permission, it's an institution. Doesn't matter if the name is "Center For Flourishing" or whatever and the aides are social workers in street clothes instead of nurses in scrubs - if it doesn't pass the Burrito Test, it's an institution. There is no way school will let you microwave a burrito without permission. THEY WILL NOT EVEN LET YOU GO TO THE BATHROOM WITHOUT PERMISSION. YOU HAVE TO RAISE YOUR HAND AND ASK YOUR TEACHER FOR SOMETHING CALLED "THE BATHROOM PASS" IN FRONT OF YOUR ENTIRE CLASS, AND IF SHE DOESN'T LIKE YOU, SHE CAN JUST SAY NO.

I don't like actual prisons, the ones for criminals, but I will say this for them - people keep them around because they honestly believe they prevent crime. If someone found proof-positive that prisons didn't prevent any crimes at all, but still suggested that we should keep sending people there, because it means we'd have "fewer middle-aged people on the streets" and "fewer adults forced to go home to empty apartments and houses", then MAYBE YOU WOULD START TO UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL ABOUT FREDDIE F@!KING DEBOER AND HIS CULT OF F#$KING SMART.

I sometimes sit in on child psychiatrists' case conferences, and I want to scream at them. There's the kid who locks herself in the bathroom every morning so her parents can't drag her to child prison, and her parents stand outside the bathroom door to yell at her for hours until she finally gives in and goes, and everyone is trying to medicate her or figure out how to remove the bathroom locks, and THEY ARE SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM. There are all the kids who had bedwetting or awful depression or constant panic attacks, and then as soon as the coronavirus caused the child prisons to shut down the kids mysteriously became instantly better. I have heard stories of kids bullied to the point where it would be unfair not to call it torture, and the child prisons respond according to Procedures which look very good on paper and hit all the right We-Are-Taking-This-Seriously buzzwords but somehow never result in the kids not being tortured every day, and if the kids' parents were to stop bringing them to child prison every day to get tortured anew the cops would haul those parents to jail, and sometimes the only solution is the parents to switch them to the charter schools THAT FREDDIE DEBOER WANTS TO SHUT DOWN.

I see people on Twitter and Reddit post their stories from child prison, all of which they treat like it's perfectly normal. The district that wanted to save money, so it banned teachers from turning the heat above 50 degrees in the depths of winter. The district that decided running was an unsafe activity, and so any child who ran or jumped or played other-than-sedately during recess would get sent to detention - yeah, that's fine, let's just make all our children spent the first 18 years of their life somewhere they're not allowed to run, that'll be totally normal child development. You might object that they can run at home, but of course teachers assign three hours of homework a day despite ample evidence that homework does not help learning. Preventing children from having any free time, or the ability to do any of the things they want to do seems to just be an end in itself. Every single doctor and psychologist in the world has pointed out that children and teens naturally follow a different sleep pattern than adults, probably closer to 12 PM to 9 AM than the average adult's 10 - 7. Child prisons usually start around 7 or 8 AM, meaning any child who shows up on time is necessarily sleep-deprived in ways that probably harm their health and development.

School forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving, and psychologically tortured in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse. The only possible justification for this is that it achieves some kind of profound social benefit like eliminating poverty. If it doesn't, you might as well replace it with something less traumatizing, like child labor. The kid will still have to spend eight hours of their day toiling in a terrible environment, but at least they’ll get some pocket money! At least their boss can't tell them to keep working off the clock under the guise of "homework"! I have worked as a medical resident, widely considered one of the most horrifying and abusive jobs it is possible to take in a First World country. I can say with absolute confidence that I would gladly do another four years of residency if the only alternative was another four years of high school.

If I have children, I hope to be able to homeschool them. But if I can't homeschool them, I am incredibly grateful that the option exists to send them to a charter school that might not have all of these problems. I'm not as impressed with Montessori schools as some of my friends are, but at least as far as I can tell they let kids wander around free-range, and don't make them use bathroom passes. DeBoer not only wants to keep the whole prison-cum-meat-grinder alive and running, even after having proven it has no utility, he also wants to shut the only possible escape my future children will ever get unless I'm rich enough to quit work and care for them full time.

When I try to keep a cooler head about all of this, I understand that Freddie DeBoer doesn't want this. He is not a fan of freezing-cold classrooms or sleep deprivation or bullying or bathroom passes. In fact, he will probably blame all of these on the "neoliberal reformers" (although I went to school before most of the neoliberal reforms started, and I saw it all). He will say that his own utopian schooling system has none of this stuff. In fact, he does say that. He sketches what a future Marxist school system might look like, and it looks pretty much like a Montessori school looks now. That just makes it really weird that he wants to shut down all the schools that resemble his ideal today (or make them only available to the wealthy) in favor of forcing kids into schools about as different from it as it's possible for anything to be.

I am so, so tired of socialists who admit that the current system is a helltopian torturescape, then argue that we must prevent anyone from ever being able to escape it. Who promise that once the last alternative is closed off, once the last nice green place where a few people manage to hold off the miseries of the world is crushed, why then the helltopian torturescape will become a lovely utopia full of rainbows and unicorns. If you can make your system less miserable, make your system less miserable! Do it before forcing everyone else to participate in it under pain of imprisonment if they refuse! Forcing everyone to participate in your system and then making your system something other than a meat-grinder that takes in happy children and spits out dead-eyed traumatized eighteen-year-olds who have written 10,000 pages on symbolism in To Kill A Mockingbird and had zero normal happy experiences - is doing things super, super backwards!

And from "Chattel Childhood: and the way we treat children as property" by Aella:

In response to my childhood post, many people responded by saying homeschooling should be illegal.

But homeschooling was probably the best part about my childhood, because it allowed me freedom. I had to do a few hours of schoolwork in the morning from various books, at my own pace - and then I had the rest of the time to do whatever I wanted (so long as it wasn’t sinful and I wasn’t at the ass end of the funnel).

I consider my childhood to be, in many ways, obviously better than most other kids’ childhoods - they had to go to school. I only had my agency violated some of the time, but they had theirs systemically violated for a minimum of seven hours of the day, and realistically probably more than that. Sure - mine hurt worse physically, but that was temporary - theirs did much more permanent damage to their relationship with learning.

When I was fourteen, I was extremely well behaved, and so my parents tried (briefly) sending me to public school. I had massive culture shock. The kids’ humor felt regressive, I was horrified by everyone using bad words - but most of all, I was shocked by the amount of time wasted.

I would spend all day at school and learn as much as I would have learned in an hour at home. It was tedious. I had to be at certain rooms at certain times, I had to sit in a single spot and stare at a teacher who took a while to get going with the lesson, and then delivered the lesson slowly, and then we were made to leave. Rinse and repeat. And after I got home, I had to do more homework, most of which I wasn’t interested in. I couldn’t believe it, it felt like I was watching a TV show made out of entirely filler episodes.

I had much less life in me during my time at public school, because they had taken my time away from me. I had less attention and energy to devote to stuff I cared about.

When I first got out of being homeschooled, I ended up in a group house with open, smart people who’d gone to public school. It was an amusing point of difference between us that I didn’t “think learning was uncool”. They explained to me that in the normal world, trying to learn stuff about the world was actually pretty low status. This was mindblowing to me. It felt like someone was telling me that listening to music or enjoying a beautiful sunset was embarrassing.

I feel like I’m in absolute crazytown that everyone seems to think the school system is okay. You’re pouring the most vivid years of someone’s life into the fucking drain, forcing them to sit and wait and stare at walls and spend their attention focusing on stuff that most of them don’t care about at all, and will barely remember afterwards. This is how you treat property, not people.

I am extremely triggered by the way everyone treats kids. It’s upsetting to me that people get mad at my childhood, but aren’t near equally as mad at everyone else’s. You’re mad at the wrong thing!

Every culture throughout history has justified the abuse of treating their children as property by arguing this is good for them and good for civilization. Kids )need_ to learn this stuff to be functioning members of society! It’s good to learn discipline! You can’t have kids just sitting around playing video games all day! Not everyone is self-directed autodidacts!

Sure, I know that argument. But hopefully if my parents had said to you “do you expect her to learn good morals if we spare the rod?” you would have said “have you even tried other methods?”

If you were trying to get an adult to learn how to do something without being able to resort to using physical force, how would you do it? Maybe you would find something they’re interested in and show how learning a specific skill would let them accomplish what they wanted. Maybe you’d point out how their coolest friends who they respect are pretty good this skill. Or maybe you wouldn’t try at all - do they actually need to learn how to do that thing? I personally failed to learn a bunch of stuff as a homeschooler, but simply went and learned it as an adult when I needed to know it in order to achieve a goal.

I’m not sure many people have ever figured out what it means to learn at all, because the thing they’re doing in school is very rarely it. Everyone seems to have fooled themselves into thinking that school is about learning. But half of the skill of learning is knowing how to be curious! Schools force facts down incurious throats; if you grow up in a world where the thing they call “learning” is enacted upon you under the implicit threat of violence, completely independent of your will, then you will never learn how to weaponize your own will into the true Learning.

I feel like an alien, having traveled down to planet earth and found that society just does this and thinks it’s normal, and I am personally horrified but gently going ‘are you sure this is ok’ to people who insist that no, this was necessary and they will happily do it to their own children. On a planet made out of Aellas, any one of you who attended public school could go on the talk shows and discuss your traumatic upbringing where your entire childhood was wasted away into systematic damage to your curiosity. You’d get massive sympathy from the audience and you could go on a book tour and they’d make a dramatic tragic biopic about your life. On a planet made out of Aellas, you’d need therapy.

When I was very young, I remember adults treating me like I wasn’t a person, but this didn’t upset me quite as much as the fact that no adult seemed to remember what it was like to be a kid, or else they certainly would have taken my feelings much more seriously, like they did for other adults.

I was terrified that I, too, would one day grow up and forget what it was like to be a child, and would also stop taking other children seriously. So I swore to myself I wouldn’t forget - I chose the phrase “Don’t forget, I’m a person!” and deliberately sent it up the chain across my older selves by regularly meditating on the phrase and the importance with which it was carried. I’m an adult now, but I have not forgotten what it was like to be a child.

For what it's worth, having seen homeschoolers extensively- the most impressive specimens homeschool through early highschool, but if male they switch to some sort of hybrid system after that(community college/homeschool hybrid is the best). Girls are approval motivated enough to keep themselves on track without a formal class structure. Boys are not. Not self motivated- approval motivated.

We really need to stop talking about education like we're just educating ancient nobles' children.

Or as if the fact that a handful of related universities in one single country were based on an idea two hundred years ago somehow makes that idea The One True Fundamental Truth globally today.

Going by the digging ditches comparison, it's also pointless and stupid, but for many kids it would be genuinely more fun and engaging. That's because it has the possibility of a positive reward signal: finishing the ditch. But the quadratic formula is something many genuinely are just not capable of: there is no final "get shit done" point for it.

And better still that we work on removing the stupid and pointless work as much as possible.

We treat knowledge as goal not as a tool. Tell the little ones that at the end of the course they will know how to make total synthesis of cocaine and you will have the most attentive chemistry class in the history of the world. And they will do their homework without even being assigned.

This sounds like a hack Michelle Pfeiffer would try to educate inner city children.

What would actually happen is that the kids would think you're cool but the minute they had to apply any of the things you said in a more boring, sterile environment (and of course they must) a bunch would get tired and move on to something significantly more stimulating. I don't know what schools you went to but plenty of kids are fucking lazy and need the tripwire of mandatory homework. Plenty of kids would be hooked on every word in one class and then not care about another.

You may have been particularly intelligent and conscientious, most aren't. Unless we're talking purely about schools that cut those people out, kids need to be forced to push through their boredom because work will be boring.

@quiet_NaN this is interesting to me because I feel like high-school level homework (and to some extent college level) was actually helpful for me.

Doing the readings in history and typing up notes really helped me remember history better Doing problem sets in Calc I-III and professional exams helped me remember concepts better than I would've otherwise (though I still forgot most of them within a few years) Doing coding assignments in CS 101 really helped me be able to code.

Maybe it's more about elementary and middle school homework?

I absolutely agree. I had a math class at uni and the prof gave us hundreds of problems to solve with a promise, that one of them will be exact copy on the exam and that we are allowed to bring solved problems to it. This actually made me go through all the problems. Copying the one I solved from notes on exam helped, but I had perfect score on all the other problems as well. Solving them for a week or so definitely helped. I caught several deficiencies, I taught myself more efficient ways to do checks mid-problem, I even consulted theory as problem solving brought understanding that went beside me at the time, and I just rechecked the theory because it was cool to have more thorough understanding.

It was kind of grueling, but I did not regret it. It was probably better than yet another Netflix binge session.

There is homework and then there is homework. On one end of the spectrum, you have problem sets designed to help you master algorithms. On the other end, you have things like projects, which Scott correctly defines as "take this subject you already understand, a few sheets of construction paper, scissors, and a computer program such as PowerPoint, and combine them in whatever random way you want as long as it takes a minimum of six hours of time". And there are plenty of those in high school.

In fact, Robin Hanson has a post about how only math homework helps. It probably generalizes to other math-like subjects, like physics and compsci. But it does not justify the three hours of homework a day that kids receive from all their subjects combined.

I've seen the justification that can be paraphrased as "most of them will be doing uninteresting and uninspiring work 9-5, uninteresting and uninspiring homework helps prepare them for the fact that not everything is gonna be exciting edifying self-directed projects all the time".

Agreed. Doing the individual work is when learning happens. Sitting in lectures has its benefits but we probably do too much of it in high school. Cutting classroom instruction time by 66% with more time to do the work during the day would increase learning.

I think that math class is probably the worst offender for pointless busywork.

Case in point: Polynomial long division. 100% "we make you learn an algorithm as a proxy for intelligence", 0% "something you will need to know as a prerequisite for understanding something else." The correct place for it would be "Having just discussed the properties of polynomial rings in general, here is as a curiosity a technique of dividing polynomials. You know that it will not be relevant for you exam because it involves just playing an algorithm (possibly even with concrete quantities)."

Instead you get tasks like "one of the factors of x^3+5x^2+7x-3 is (x+3). Factorize x".

People whose skill is to pass 'math' class in high school do not need to worry about being replaced by LLMs, because they were presumably replaced by WolframAlpha in 2011.

This is equivalent of doing multiplication and eventually memorizing the multiplication table during elementary school. With enough "busywork" you will be able to factorize from your head, which will enable you to solve some key problems much, much more quickly "look and see" style ,sifting through unproductive approaches before even trying them. This is cookie cutter thing in many engineering areas, basically anything that uses differential equations which is a really a lot of stuff.

Busywork is really important especially in early stages. You have to go through some shit like memorizing vocabulary when you are learning a new language, before you will be able to do some creative things like translating poetry or doing some Tolkien-like stuff with that language.

This is equivalent of doing multiplication and eventually memorizing the multiplication table during elementary school.

No, that is my whole point. Knowing the multiplication table up to 9*9 is a prerequisite for the following:

  • Do long multiplication to calculate the product of any positive integers
  • Efficient long division (technically you could build up a multiplication table for the divisor using addition, though)
  • Factorize integers (through inefficient brute force multiplication, because factorization is a hard problem)
  • Simplify fractions (through factorization)

Anyone who is arguing that kids do not need to learn what 7*8 is denying the need for learning arithmetic at all. (There are probably people arguing that you do not need to know arithmetic because computers exist. I disagree. Knowing how to arrive at a result without a computer in principle, even if a million times slower and error prone, is useful in itself. Besides, with LLMs, this argument generalizes against anything you learn in high school.)

I am fine with busywork which is an instrumental goal for something worthier. I learned my multiplication table because I knew that it would enable me to do long multiplication in base 10. Then in fifth grade, they tried to make me learn 2..9 * 11..19, and I was not having it. If you are in base 10, the utility of knowing non-trivial products of integers takes a sharp dive after 99. I felt that if I gave in and learned what 137 was, they would come around in sixth grade and demand I learned by rot what 1315 or 237 was. (For factorization, the useful thing would be to quickly identify a prime factor in any integer in a given range, but even this obviously does not scale.)

A lot of the stuff kids learn in math class, painful as it may be, is actually useful in some fields. I don't think that youths should be forced to learn what a logarithm is, but they should be clearly told that any subject up to the softest social sciences will expect them to know, so that they can make an informed decision.

Other stuff has value because it teaches core concepts of math, such as proof by induction or the definition of real numbers. Sadly, people only learn what real numbers are when they go to university, and proof by induction in high school is turned into a mockery by turning it to just another pointless algorithm which can be used to prove increasingly pointless sum formulas by rote.

Efficient long division

Wait - you value this, but not polynomial division? They're both things you can just ask the computer to do for you instead, but at least polynomial division requires you to hunt down a computer algebra system; long division capability come pre-installed on every phone.

Polynomial division is IMHO a curiosity.

Long division crops up every time you need want to split the bill.

Polynomial division might crop up in the wild if you want partial fraction decomposition, which I guess you might want if you are dealing with rational functions and want to numerically evaluate them or calculate their anti-derivatives. While I am sure that rational functions have their uses, my gut feeling is that they are both too narrow to pop up in physics a lot (where you will frequently have square roots placed so that your functions can not easily be transformed into rational functions) and too inconvenient to be preferred for empirical models.

Factorization of an integer is a hard but finite problem. Factorization of a polynomial is in general just not possible exactly. You can test if 7, 13, 17, 19, 23, ... etc happen to divide 3071 to factorize it. You can not test if x-1, x-1.1, x-sqrt(42+sqrt(42)) etc are factors of 5x5+4x4+7x**2-2x-2, because there are countably many algebraic numbers which could be a root.

I think that we learned both polynomial division and solving quadratic equations around grade eight. Solving quadratics in something which I would call bloody useful. Quadratic functions are the first non-trivial functions students can tackle, and quadratic equations pop up all the time in high school physics.

I strongly disagree with the sentiment that math skills which are less readily automated are more valuable. To grok (I'm reclaiming that word) how multiplication and division work doing long multiplication and division is definitely more useful than just using a calculator. Nobody needs the numeracy to be actually excellent at these operations any more. Anyone whose job actually requires them to multiply five-digit numbers will hopefully have the good sense not to try that by hand.

My more general point might be that I do not want students to be excellent at applying any algorithm. They will always suck very hard compared to the simplest of computers. Still, it is useful to demonstrate that you can apply an algorithm, even if it is just at toy-sized problems.

Also, applying a pre-learned algorithm is not math. Some algorithms (e.g. solving an equation for a variable) are genuinely useful in proofs, and thus are valid technical skills to learn to be able to engage in math, same as being able to write symbols with a pencil. And of course, 'can you apply an algorithm halfway reliably?' is also a good way to check if someone has a basic understanding of the algorithm in question (even if it does not probe if they understand why it works), which is why rotating trees by pencil is a staple in CS exams.

Still, for school math, I feel that 'can apply pre-learned algorithms' should earn a passing grade, not an actually good grade, which should require thinking.

This was an excellent explanation, thank you.

One side note:

too inconvenient to be preferred for empirical models

Piecewise-rational functions are very popular for two big categories of empirical model: anything where the true behavior can have asymptotically-polynomial singularities, and CAD models. Being able to do sharp corners and spectral approximation refinement and exact conic sections all with the same backend is a very useful trick.

This is irrelevant to your points, though; even when working with NURBS, polynomial long division doesn't really come up.

Where do you have proof by induction in high school?

IB does proof by induction in high school.

In Finland in the mid 90s.

Of course that was by far the most useless thing they ever taught in high school math here (and in fact one of the few useless things).

Any East Asian education system would touch upon proof by induction, and most certainly of any Math-specialized classes. Seems like AP Calculus briefly touches upon it. IB Math Higher Level and Further Level certainly does. The British A-Level Further Maths also does. India probably does.

Obviously teaching material quality varies and I'm not a math expert but proof by induction might not be accessible but definitely within reach for most high schoolers out there.

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