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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29283 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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This is obviously stupid. Blindingly obvious. Unconscionably stupid.

A lot of things that is being forced on us recently by Our Betters (TM) are blindingly obviously stupid. And yet, at best they get a weak lukewarm resistance. Usually, people just follow through the motions and don't make a fuss.

only to realize that the rich white kids weren’t learning to read in school either. Their parents were hiring tutors.

I strongly suspect that, with small localized exceptions, that's how public schools always have been. They do not teach, they socialize and watch kids so they don't kill each other (or at least not too many of each other). There are exceptions, but they for somebody on the lower floor of power there's very little chance to encounter one.

I had the misfortune to sit through a two hour lecture with no breaks about The Science of Reading (tm) with a room full of elementary school teachers a month or so ago. I immediately forgot almost everything, but the part I retained was that children are more likely to be able to read passages if they know something about the topic. This seemed blindingly obvious, but apparently educationalists only now realized it. They gave an example of an average elementary school teacher trying to read a passage about cricket, written for an audience of cricket enthusiasts, along with referencing some study where the thing found to be the strongest indicator of high schoolers ability to decode a passage about baseball was not so much reading level in general, but rather knowledge of baseball. They recommended organizing books more by topic than by reading level, and teaching kids actual things about the world. My father, who taught rather low skill high school readers, had moderate success getting them to read A Child Called It. Simple common words, shocking emotional story, likable narrator, familiar settings of home and school. They could generally decode the phonemes, but didn't have very much background knowledge, vocabulary, or tenacity.

The district is using LETRS (phonics based) and CLKA (core knowledge) curriculums. I was working in the school for over two years before finding out what any of the CKLA topics were. I had asked a couple of times, but both teachers and children seemed confused by the question. It turns out they're studying normal things like Greece, Rome, Astronomy, Geology, and so on, at predictable times of year, which is actually useful for me to know. We have a full time "instructional coach," but had never heard this mentioned before, despite asking.

Anyway, probably part of the issue is that Science of Reading types are lumping together several different things under "reading." A person can't read if they can't convert arrangements of letters into sounds, and then into already known words. Hence, schools that skip phonics are in bad shape. They also can't read if they don't know the meanings of enough of the written words yet, hence the CKLA and sportsball passage examples. Apparently some teachers prefer teaching the latter to the former, but still accept lower elementary positions, then neglect the phonics in favor of the "language rich environment" and "background knowledge" stuff.

Some smaller schools try to mitigate the "teaching phonics is dull and uncreative" effect by having teachers follow their students up the grade levels, only having to teaching phonics once every six years of so if they do it right. The preferred method seems to be to "offer more professional development" and "gather more data,"and occasionally yell at teachers.

I don’t have a defense of whole word learning. I think it’s an example of Mao’s law- given the choice between admitting mistakes and terrible real world outcomes, bureaucrats will choose terrible real world outcomes every time.

But, I do want to chime in that there’s an occasional conspiracy theory in homeschooling circles that whole word learning is intended to teach children that meaning is completely arbitrary and thus communism or gender ideology or whatever. I don’t pay attention to the details. This is a fascinating example of cultural evolution; the justification for whole word learning is almost certainly not thought out beyond whatever bullshit is in the stated reason, but whole word learning sucks and is often recommended, so believing it’s even more sinister than Mao’s law, serves a purpose by getting people to use phonics which has the benefit of actually working.

I don’t have a defense of whole word learning

Whole word learning seems to be good at very young ages, before your kid can talk. Then moving into phonics. Also, whole word learning is great in very small groups, preferably one-on-one. It seems that you can get basically any educational technique to work in one-on-one learning, probably because one-on-one learning is just so much better than group learning. So when these techniques are trialed in small groups, they seem to work. Then they get implemented in some private schools, or as a pilot in a decent public school, and it seems to work, because the type of student is just better. Then it is rolled out to the masses, where it just sucks.

Public schools have to deal with trying to get as many kids to reach the most basic level of literacy, in large class sizes, with educators who are typically bottom of the barrel and protected by their union. They do a really, really bad job at this, and it seems people developing the curriculum don't want 'traditional' models and techniques, they want something they can stick their name to. They also seem to be using the curriculum to promote their social goals, like anti-racism, which in their view means having white and black kids scoring the same, even if those scores are absolutely dismal. They don't care if blacks see their scores drop, as long as whites see their scores drop more, and come in line with blacks. That's equity.

FWIW I have encountered this conspiracy theory in the wild, and not just from the sort of cranks you might otherwise expect, but from gray-haired church ladies talking about their grandkids parents/teachers.

there’s an occasional conspiracy theory in homeschooling circles that whole word learning is intended to teach children that meaning is completely arbitrary and thus communism or gender ideology or whatever.

Im sure it wasnt designed explictly with that goal, but theres more reason to this belief than just "cause it sux". How do you think people got the idea for whole word learning, if it doesnt work? Theres various ideas floating around about explicit knowledge not being so important, things being more fluid and contextual, "patchwork" methods over systems, etc. Those propably contributed to the idea. You could attribute them to constructivism, or pragmatism, or poststructuralism, but all of that falls under "fake and gay".

See also a comment further below.

How do you think people got the idea for whole word learning, if it doesnt work

Same way people get other wrong ideas. They had a clever hypothesis, fell in love with it, and then they decided it's much better to attack anyone that challenges it than to verify whether it actually works. Happens literally all the time.

Well sure, the point was that it’s Alex Jones tier rambling, even if it’s possibly connected to the same philosophical impulses behind postmodernism and the like.

Also @Hoffmeister25 's comment from a few months ago, which, while it may describe a conspiracy, seems rather coherent.

Freire’s The Pedagogy Of The Oppressed, along with his somewhat lesser-known book The Politics Of Education, is one of the most influential texts in teacher education of the last century. Freire was one of the pioneers of critical education - which, like any other branch of critical theory, is explicitly Marxist, and seeks to use education as a tool to undermine and destroy the existing socio-economic system.

This is slightly off-topic, but I think it's worth noting that most other languages don't have as much of a problem with this.

Teaching to read in a more regular system—like Hangul, as @07mk said, for example—ends up resulting in a much easier time than English's system where the same letters have come to indicate several different sounds, due to changes in pronunciation.

There is also some reason to think that syllabaries are usually better than alphabets for learning languages, despite the larger character set required. Syllables are a more natural unit of speech, and so there isn't the whole process of learning to deconstruct a syllable into or assemble a syllable from its constituent sounds that one has to go through to get accustomed to the use of an alphabet.

This paper was really interesting.

Teaching to read in a more regular system—like Hangul, as @07mk said, for example—ends up resulting in a much easier time than English's system

Any data to back that up? I had much easier time to learn to read Hebrew writing (or Georgian writing) than, for example, Japanese kanas, and kanji still looks to me like a hopeless task. Learning English reading, after having Cyrillic, didn't even register as a problem (of course, you can't ever completely learn English spelling anyway, because there are no rules). I didn't try Hangul but I'd estimate it'd be about as hard as Japanese ones. I'm not talking about learning the language of course, just making it from writing to sounds.

I'm not especially knowledgeable about these scripts—I haven't learned to read them myself—but I believe Hangul is an alphabet, not a syllabary (well, an alphabet organized into blocks which are syllables). The second paper I linked to says that English takes about 3 years to learn to read, as opposed to 1 year in more regular orthographies. The paper it links to in order to support that also thinks that syllabic complexity might be a factor, in addition to orthographic complexity, so that gap is not necessarily just due to irregular and complicated spelling. It's only in reference to European languages, but I don't see why that wouldn't also apply to other orthographies.

I haven't really looked properly into language learning with syllabaries, but my instinct would be that if you already know how to use an alphabet, an alphabet would be easier, because of the lower amount of memorization, and maybe whether you already are familiar with the spoken language might matter too.

I think the cost to an alphabet comes in learning how to turn a word into phonemes, and vice versa. In English, and most languages, a "t" never stands on its own, but is always part of some syllable with a vowel (wikipedia (and I would assume this is a normal analysis) breaks syllables into an onset, a nucleus, and a coda—the onset and coda don't stand on their own.). So when we see a "t" in a block of text, we don't pronounce that sound separately, but have to figure out how to attach it to the surrounding sounds. Syllabaries don't have to worry about that whole process of learning to deal with text like that. Going from "duh" "aw" guh" to "dog" is nontrivial. But if you already know how to do all that, you've figured it out, then that will carry over to other scripts and languages, because there's no real difference in the skill, and so the number of things to remember ends up playing a larger factor, relatively speaking, in learning to read it. Or at least, that's how I model it, this whole thing is my own thoughts as to why that might be the case, not something I've sourced from someone experienced.

But in any case, the first paper lists evidence that syllabaries are better for teaching people how to read, for example, "Asfaha et al. found that first graders learned to read the non-alphabetic Ge'ez far more easily than the alphabetic scripts in spite of the larger number of signs."

I'm just guessing here, but it might also be the case that some languages could be more or less suited for syllabaries. If all, or most, syllables in a language are (C)V, that would reduce the number of combinations needed.

I've no data, but I've talked to a couple Westerners mention finding hangul very easy to learn, including 1 who managed to learn to read it (not fluently but competently) over a single weekend, despite having no exposure to non-Latin alphabet before. The complete lack of ambiguity in the mappings between letters and sounds lends itself to being pretty easy to learn. Hangul is generally taught as having 24 letters - 14 consonants and 10 vowels - which is less than the 26 in English, though in actuality there are more vowels due to combinations of vowels being their own things (e.g. "ㅏ" and "ㅣ" are 2 of the 10 vowels, but "ㅐ" is not, and it's NOT pronounced the same as if you just put "ㅏ" and "ㅣ" together). I think the fact that each "chunk" in hangul correlates exactly to 1 syllable might also help, because it makes for a natural mapping between the number of "chunks" you see on the page and the number of syllables you pronounce, versus English where those boundaries between syllables aren't obvious.

No, Hangul and Japanese, despite some superficial similarities to the Western eye, are entirely different and at opposite ends of the difficulty spectrum.

OK looks like I need to learn to read Hangul then, if it's so easy.

If you already know spoken Korean it should be no problem. Learning the syllabary isn't the same as learning the language, though.

Yes, I know. I just like being able to read stuff even if I not always know what it means :)

Teaching to read in a more regular system—like Hangul, as @07mk said, for example—ends up resulting in a much easier time than English's system where the same letters have come to indicate several different sounds, due to changes in pronunciation.

Sure, Hangul is easy. But I bet it's taught as it's designed -- this subcharacter means this sound, this other subcharacter means another sound. They're probably not teaching "whole syllable" (i.e. 김 is Kim, 문 is Moon, etc) nor "whole word" (서울 is Seoul, 학교 is school, 핵무기 is nuke, etc). That would be crazy, ignoring all the design features of the syllabary. The Latin alphabet is older, more irregular when used for English, and more evolved than designed by now, but it's still crazy to ignore it.

I hadn't meant to bring up Hangul as an example of a syllabary, just of regular spelling (I was originally going to put Spanish, but then remembered that I had seen someone mention Hangul, so I figured I may as well acknowledge that instead).

Although, after looking on google scholar a little (and only a little—I'm sure there's a lot more to read) the abstract here seems to suggest that they usually don't process it letter by letter?

This article by the same author, says that children are usually taught using "a CV chart of possible syllables" with children learning syllables (well, leaving off the coda, so not quite whole syllables) before they learn to recognize the alphabet, so it looks like they actually do think of them more like syllables? This is a little surprising to me.

Here's the other side:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4z3bWxf2twThlc3xSmdTul?si=48EYBBJsTfuJklH8hRDw4A

I didn't listen to all of it but it seems to do a kind of Motte and Baily. Paraphrasing:

  1. "People are always complaining about teachers and schools, nothing new under the sun." (geh, I wonder why?)

  2. "The real problem is poverty."

  3. "No-one is saying that children doesn't need phonics instruction"

  4. "Whole Language is a philosophy, not a practice."

  5. "Whole Language will not work if we don't address class size."

  6. "If we put a good teacher with eighteen kids and give them time and space to do what they need to do, then all of these things will be successful."

  7. "Sold a Story is angry that people making money while making money for this journalist."

  8. "The market economy of the US depends on poverty to thrive, thus market forces will never overcome poverty."

  9. "Social reform must precede or at least be concurrent to in-school reform, while both must seek equity, not accountability."

Anyway, thought it would be good to have some contrast. It's hard not to snark though. I can see how the argument that teachers should be autonomous and free from commercial influence from publishers, big standardized tests and political silver bullets can be convincing to some, but it's so far away from how I see the world. In my world, lack of competition or accountability will cause stagnation and rot, and idealism isn't enough to prevent this.

"Whole-language" might be a bad technique for trying to teach illiterate kids to read in a classroom setting, but I think the insight that it's better for readers to parse written language as whole words as opposed to a stream of phonemes is correct. I remember sitting in elementary school reading classes, where kids would be randomly picked to read some passage out of a book, and it was painfully obvious which of my fellow students could only read by sounding out syllables based on the spelling of words; they had absolutely no idea what the semantic content of what they just read actually was.

I was privileged to have parents who made teaching me how to read a priority, by reading to me/with me as a toddler, and before I ever set foot in a public school classroom I was already reading books by myself. At this point it feels like they gave me a superpower. Maybe not every kid is capable of learning to read this way. I have no memory of how much or little my parents may have been teaching me about how the spelling of written words mapped to the phonemes that make up spoken words.

Anyway, I think learning to read is far too foundational a skill for any parent who cares about their child's success in life to leave up to schools, no matter how elite. I'm kind of baffled by some of the other comments in this thread about parents who spend the money to send their kids to private schools having the clout to demand that the schools adequately teach their kids to read; I would really assume that anybody who has that kind of money would understand that it's their job to teach their kid basic reading skills, just as it's their job to teach their kid how to speak, and other things like hygiene and how to dress themselves. Like, you wouldn't send your kid off to their first day at kindergarten without being potty trained; why are you sending them there without being able to read at least, like, Thomas the Tank Engine, if not Charlotte's Web? Oh, and if the parents really are too busy with their elite careers to read to their kids at night, hire an au pair/nanny/governess/tutor/whatever.

but I think the insight that it's better for readers to parse written language as whole words as opposed to a stream of phonemes is correct

For a proficient reader of the language, it is. In fact, that's how I was taught to speed-read. But you can't train a toddler and an olympic athlete the same way. You first need to train your brain to be capable to automatically run this pattern creation/recognition mechanism when reading, and that's not something you have at birth. So teaching as if that has already been programmed is not going to be very successful.

I remember sitting in elementary school reading classes, where kids would be randomly picked to read some passage out of a book, and it was painfully obvious which of my fellow students could only read by sounding out syllables based on the spelling of words; they had absolutely no idea what the semantic content of what they just read actually was.

That propably means they (were made to) go too fast. If you can sound out the text, and you can understand speech, then you can understand the text. If you try to go very fast and throw every letter out of working memory as soon as you read it, thats bad. The teacher should make you repeat each word after you finish it, without looking back at the text, and same for sentences. Eventually youll learn to read fluidly just from practice - but better to read non-fluidly before that.

I remember sitting in elementary school reading classes, where kids would be randomly picked to read some passage out of a book, and it was painfully obvious which of my fellow students could only read by sounding out syllables based on the spelling of words; they had absolutely no idea what the semantic content of what they just read actually was.

And what do you think happens when whole-word kids encounter a novelty?

send your kid off to their first day at kindergarten without being potty trained

If you check the teachers sub, they mention this problem regularly. I’m suspecting the real issue is at least in part parents who don’t want to put in the work of being parents, and teachers(to be fair, administrators) thinking that they can replace the work with better techniques if only people would give more money and authority to them, all combined in a toxic mix to try to replace something which can’t be replaced.

it's better for readers

It's certainly better for readers, but I'm not sure that translates to "better way to learn to read". Learning how to sound letters out is easier than memorising every word in full, and thus lets you make progress on your own without having to be told, or remember, every word every time. Sure it'll be slow, but you'll pick up the full words from experience, and be able to practice that on your own. Bootstrapping with the tools to teach yourself to read seems a strong strategy in learning to read, rather than trying to skip to the finish line.

I have no memory of how much or little my parents may have been teaching me

Yeah - I have the same issue: I can't really remember a time before I could read, and so don't really have personal knowledge of what was actually effective. Save that yeah, my parents reading to and with me was probably a part of it. I'm pretty sure I started with the "sounding out" approach though: being able to read quickly a word at a time came from practice - letting me skip that more often as more words became familiar, not a different approach from the outset.

learning to read is far too foundational a skill for any parent who cares about their child's success in life to leave up to schools

The converse applies too though: it's too foundational a skill for schools to trust that parents will have done it: it's vitally important that they ensure the kids who lacked such parents learn to do it too. And so I think it does become pretty important as to how they teach that if what they're using doesn't achieve that goal.

I always wonder how hyperlexia fits into this debate. It's unclear exactly how rare it is, but basically people can be divided into 95%+ of the population that can only learn to read through phonics and 5% (or less? ~1%?) of the population who will never understand phonics but will likely manage to learn to read despite useless phonics lessons. And presumably some people who don't fit cleanly into either group.

Obviously if that summary is true, we should just not care that some of our students might not be getting anything out of phonics, since they'll almost certainly learn to read just fine anyway. But I wouldn't be surprised if hyperlexia were at least somewhat over-represented in teachers (just generally people who find reading easier/more enjoyable are probably more likely to go into reading heavy liberal arts fields?), and there's some amount of them typical-minding and simply not comprehending phonics because it's useless for them.

@ZorbaTHut Something weird is going on with the tilde/strikethrough parsing in this post. The preview always looks fine, but I can't figure out how to get it to show tildes without turning some of them into strikethroughs. According to the formatting help strikethrough is supposed to require a double tilde on either side, so a single tilde shouldn't count anyway. But I also tried escaping with a backslash and that didn't help.

Something weird is going on with the tilde/strikethrough parsing in this post.

The comment preview issues are kind of a big thing. It's something we plan to fix, we've just been fighting bigger fires up until now. In related news, the site should be faster now!

I've noticed better performance

"Better" doesn't mean "perfect", but it is improving.

I worked as a writing consultant in college, a position my college hired English-proficient students for. The job was to be there for appointments other students would schedule to have their essays looked at and the like. This required me to take a semester-long course as training, and the doctrines I was taught there were both extremely bizarre and line up neatly with the CW elements of phonics I've been reading here.

There was a guiding principle for the people who taught this class and who wrote our books that it was wrong to teach a student the "correct" way to speak English. By correct we could instead say hegemonic; the way that educated, well-off people tend to speak and write English in America. Who are you as a (white) educator to tell a (nonwhite) child that the way he learned to speak at home is wrong? It was extremely upsetting for me to learn this was a popular position in the field of English education. But...

It's obviously been a while, but my experience with phonics as a young lad were that they were essentially drills. You have sound-letter association drilled into your brain through constant repetition and reinforcement. It's perhaps not a very Western way to learn on the face of it, as we pride ourselves on being creative learners who don’t rely on rote repetition. But there's a time and place for more rote learning. Like in art, you can't really express yourself in English if don't have the fundamentals down first.

You have to understand that for the type of person who usually gets into English Education, sitting there and beating the sounds of letters into the malleable skull of an underprivileged minority child feels like a form of violence. Your way of speaking is wrong, here is the correct way to talk and write. It is reminiscent of British boarding schools forcing students to copy lines into their books over and over, or of colonial efforts to educate the savages. This may sound like a weakman, but that really is how they seemed to view it.

This conflicts with a more practical understanding of language and the job of an educator. Yes, there is a way that educated people tend to speak. Yes, people go to school so they can fit in with those people and make money. Yes, it is your job as an educator to teach them how to do that. No, it is not your place to decide that this hegemony is unjust and must be overthrown. And finally, how dare you use young students as your pawns in this game to do so.

To the credit of my instructors: they acknowledged that this is, on some level, why people want to get an education. For reasons of practicality, English teachers have to teach English. They made it clear that we should push back against this where we could, and that it was a long-term goal to overthrow this paradigm. To bring it back to the "whole language" model... based on my experience with educators, I know that of the two methods, they would very much like this one to be the one that works. I can see them convincing themselves that it does, especially since it lacks the blunt objectivity of phonics. It makes sense that it took this long before people start raising the alarm on this.

I have some more things to say about English education, but that might be better for another post. I also don't want to lump all teachers into this bucket. I know many of them who just want to educate children and keep their mouths shut about this stuff for the same reason you don't openly push back against your workplace's DEI policies. It is a shame, because mass literacy is a cornerstone of success for a culture, and it seems standards are constantly falling.

I'm not a blank slatist and don't believe that we can equalize outcomes through education. But if we're forcing children to go to school, we should get some form of literacy as a result, and not have the time and money sabotaged by what to me looks like institutionalized white guilt. We could do a lot better by people if we just stopped digging the hole deeper.

A funny aside. As consultants, we weren't supposed to fix the grammar in a student's essay, even if that's what they came in with the intention to do. Just help them with ideas and maybe teach them writing rules they didn't understand. This was... perhaps overselling the importance of the place. Maybe it was to comply with a looser definition of plagiarism the university had (I'm doubtful). However, this was what about half the American students in my appointments wanted me to do, and what almost all of the Chinese students wanted me to do.

This is understandable, especially for the Chinese kids. It seems logical that a writing center for students would be at least in part about an English native fixing your paper so it isn't riddled with basic grammatical and usage errors. English is a difficult language and has a lot of weird rules that make it trivial for a non-native speaker to out themselves as such. After a while I just started doing grammar checks in my consultations, and my consultees tended to be much happier for it.

What do these people imagine English teachers will do when they aren’t, well, teaching English?

There was a guiding principle for the people who taught this class and who wrote our books that it was wrong to teach a student the "correct" way to speak English. By correct we could instead say hegemonic; the way that educated, well-off people tend to speak and write English in America. Who are you as a (white) educator to tell a (nonwhite) child that the way he learned to speak at home is wrong?

That is (unfortunately) not surprising, but is still vexing. Because the obvious answer to the question they asked in your class is: "I'm the person trying to teach this person how to speak correctly so they can do well in life". The people teaching that class seem to have let their compassion run ahead of their sense.

It does seem like a case of pathological compassion. Fortunately, there was some debate on the issue in the class. Maybe half to a third of the students, including myself, argued as you did, and this was in a very orthodox left environment. That said, this was a few years ago and things have only heated up in the culture war since then, and it was clear which side the instructor favored.

INAT but a dude in my regular TTRPG group is a teacher for the local school district and if you get a few shots in him he will go off at length about how our very "blue" state's official curriculum is absolute shit. He says that it seems to actively discourage the development literacy and language skills, to the point that his ESL students end up out-performing in-state transfers on a semi-regular basis because they at least understand the concept of a root word and the Indian/Mexican/Other Foreign-born moms tend to be a lot less concerned about their kids feelings then they are about whether homework is getting done. According to him the only way any kids in this state learn to read is through a combination of involved parents, and individual teachers/schools-districts having the balls to say "fuck the curriculum" and do their own thing.

Your example of the teacher covering up the word, and the "soft bigotry" as he puts it of giving kids a pass despite not learning the material, are exactly the sort of thing he will typically cite.

It would be cheap and extraordinarily simple to put 1000-student cohorts into different conditions and conclusively determine what is actually effective. It boggles my mind that such simple research hasn’t been done to conclusively put the issue to bed. What are we paying academics to do exactly? What are we paying the education bureaucrats to do? They have completely lost the plot. Fire all of them and replace them with a dozen highly motivated bloggers and we might actually get some conclusive answers to all of our questions. If some theorist has a new theory in education, let him prove it (double-blind controlled). Allot some money. Fuck, if you didn’t want to experiment on American kids, open up two schools in Nigeria for $400.

My God, even just paying kids to do an hour-long computer-driven program to determine the time-efficient benefit… like this shit costs nothing… fire every pedagogue and start over…

They did, they found it, and it doesn't matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow_Through_(project)

Teachers are much more interested in their self image than in student outcomes.

If you are looking at a dysfunctional system and wondering why people don't just do some tests, find what works, and do that, please understand that this is not how any of these systems work. "We need more data" is almost always an excuse to ignore results the people involved don't like the implications of, not an actual request for the rigorous sifting of knowledge from ignorance or bias. Whether it's teaching methods or school discipline or policing or any of a thousand other areas, they aren't wrecking things because they don't know better. They're wrecking things because they want to, and don't care about the consequences because they don't believe they'll suffer from them.

Well more correctly they’re wrecking things because they have a goal in mind that is served by wrecking things, and that goal does not line up with the stated goal of the organization.

It’s pournelle’s law, but it may not be the needs of the bureaucracy being served. It may simply be a calculation that upper class women feeling high status is more important than the success of poor children, which every society makes. It may be a decision that the most important thing is to listen to the experts, even if those experts are very knowably and obviously wrong(in this case because they are simply ignorant), and that it’s worth sacrificing good outcomes for to honor that rule. This, too, has abundant historical precedent. And it may be that they drink their own koolaide and no one ever points out the results, which, again, has abundant historical precedent. Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to callousness, sycophantic underlings, and a need to feel right.

A fair correction. Mine made it sound like wrecking is a terminal goal, which in most cases is not accurate.

but it may not be the needs of the bureaucracy being served.

Society is itself a bureaucracy.

Oh the testing has been done. We know what works and we know it conclusively. The educationalists just lie about it and do their own thing.

https://www.nifdi.org/research/recent-research/whitepapers/1352-a-brief-summary-of-research-on-direct-instruction-january-2015/file

Direct Instruction is, if not a panacea, then almost a panacea. They tested it in numerous studies, urban and rural schools in the US. They even tested it in Liberia where it works as well. It works on 'underprivileged' kids and smart kids. The effect doesn't wear off. It just works. Now the report I'm reading comes from the national institute for direct instruction, so they have something to gain. But their footnotes are full of studies! And sometimes people do advance ideas that are just generally good. Pasteur had something to gain from pasteurization but so does everyone else.

Is there any research how well DI works for teaching skills that involve motor coordination besides just factual learning?

IIRC, Caplan has a claim that there is evidence that one method works (at least better than others). What I vaguely recall hearing is that the method is just very straightforward and mechanical, like, there's a book that the teacher reads from, basically word-for-word, asking for responses at certain points and such. The problem is that teachers hate it, because they have the idea in their head that their job must be intensely personalized and creative ("We're artists!").

This is very vague recollection, so it could be someone other than Caplan, but I remember the gist of the story. I never dug into it to see if there actually is good experimental support for such a proposition. Lots of education research that goes against the narrative of teachers unions and other lefties gets super buried (see also: Roland Fryer).

EDIT: Below, sarker got at least the name of the thing: Direct instruction.

I remember some controversies about that as well.

If the problem is something like that it's actually quite difficult to find enough people who are both willing to work with small children all day, and willing to follow rigid instructional scripts, this seems like a good opportunity for technological augmentation. If the lessons are scripted, why does it have to be the childcare worker reading the script? Couldn't some kind of anthropomorphic chatbot say the script, and the childcare worker gets to focus on ensuring the kids are actually doing what they should, settling disputes, ensuring some degree of order, emotional regulation, and so on?

Something tells me there’s no shortage of people willing to work with small children and also follow rigid scripts. There’s a shortage of people willing to get master’s degrees and then do that. Now of course you don’t need a masters degree, or even really a bachelor’s, to do that, except as required in applicable law, but then you have to change the law for elementary school teaching to only require a two year degree. Good luck with that.

I think an even greater factor than the education requirement is all the other BS that goes along with being a teacher. Paperwork, compliance, that sort of thing. Plenty of people (especially women) would love to work with small children and teach them how to read etc. but have little interest or talent in filling out miles of regulatory forms, requests, records, etc.. Besides the natural demands of motherhood, I think this is by far the greatest reason teacher burnout rates are so high.

Yes, this. Also, liability. Also, group size.

It's easy to get both men and women to teach things like sports clubs, 4-H, or scout clubs -- with some other adult volunteers present and have similar cultural norms around behavior, families buy and maintain their own supplies, student choice, and groups of 10-12 kids.

It's when you're alone teaching mandatory scripted curriculum to ~20 kids, several of whom don't want to be there, with 504s, BIPs, IEPs, and MLSS procedures, all with their own reporting and compliance requirements that things get dicy.

Also probably true, but most people don’t realize that until they’re in.

Sure, that's why burnout rates are so high.

That is a fantastic point. There’s been an overall decline in “free natural labor”, having been replaced with stressful paid labor in every case. Teaching the young is something that both men and women naturally find enjoyable and would do without pay — but they wouldn’t do it in stressful bureaucratic conditions and they wouldn’t do it every day. Instead of factoring for this in our culture, we simply eliminate this natural teaching instinct and focus on paying the stress-laborers. This is clearly inefficient, because if you can get people to do prosocial helpful things for free it’s always going to be more efficient. Other ways natural labor has been replaced: advising council to members of your community (therapists, psychiatrists, job coaches)

This non-bureaucratic labor may be cheap or free but it's not legible. How does the state know teachers are actually teaching without the mountain of paperwork? Maybe kids are slipping through the cracks and no state official knows about it.

An adult is unlikely to claim to want to teach a classroom for free but instead just sit there doing nothing. You can also have parents decide, or administer a test every two weeks, or etc. There is a huge middle ground between our current bureaucracy and placing a person of ill repute inside a totally unchecked environment

What tells you that?

Too many credentialed interests.

If some theorist has a new theory in education, let him prove it (double-blind controlled).

Ok, I have to ask. How exactly would one run a double-blind controlled study on whether students learn better with phonics or with holistic context-and-rainbows-based teaching?

It sounds impossible to me. But then, there have been a number of extremely[1] clever[2] innovations[3] that solve problems I thought were unsolvable. So maybe I will learn something new and clever today.

[1] Intent to treat solves the problems of "sometimes people in the control group independently get the treatment" and also "sometimes when you tell people to do something they do something entirely different".

[2] Regression discontinuity design, when applicable, solves the "we want to establish causality but we have only observational data, wat do" problem.

[3] Falconer's formula solves the "I want to measure what fraction of some trait is specifically due to genetics rather than environment, but I have only observational data, wat do" problem.

Ok, I have to ask. How exactly would one run a double-blind controlled study on whether students learn better with phonics or with holistic context-and-rainbows-based teaching?

It sounds impossible to me

???

Have teaching be done by one set of people, and literacy testing by a completely different set of people, and mix the kids up at the time of the test, so that they don't know which kid learned in which way.

You can even anonymize the tests so that the people compiling the results have no idea which kid even wrote the test.

Blinding is usually a pretty trivial thing to set up.

That would be single blind, no?

Edit: maybe? Maybe not? Maybe words don't actually mean anything?

CONSORT guidelines state that [the terms single-blind, double-blind and triple-blind] should no longer be used because they are ambiguous. For instance, "double-blind" could mean that the data analysts and patients were blinded; or the patients and outcome assessors were blinded; or the patients and people offering the intervention were blinded, etc. The terms also fail to convey the information that was masked and the amount of unblinding that occurred (source)

I was wondering specifically how the people administering and receiving the treatment would be blinded. Outcome assessors could definitely be blinded - that's the part I was doubting.

Although for the record it turns out that I was wrong to doubt that, and there was a clever semi-solution for that, which was to tvir obgu gerngzragf gb obgu tebhcf, ohg va qvssrerag beqref jvgu n grfg va orgjrra. Which, as directly quoted from said study by McArthur et al, means that "it is highly likely this study used a double-blind procedure."

My understanding is that the best-practices as determined and accepted by education researchers have practically nothing to do with the standard practices actually used in schools. I regularly see friends in education complaining that grading (as opposed to mastery learning, for example), homework, and lectures (as opposed to project-based learning, for example) have pretty strong evidence against them but are nearly universal in actual schools.

The stuff /teachers constantly complains about sounds exactly like mastery learning. PBL sounds delightfully impossible to measure. Why are these supposed to be good?

I'm not sure what teachers you're talking about that are complaining about mastery learning. I've also never heard of it being used in a school.

Why are these supposed to be good?

*shrug* Not my area of expertise. Just examples of things that academic literature in education apparently supports and are taught to people getting education degrees training to become teachers but then are not used in actual schools. Or so my friends' rants tell me.

I'm not sure what teachers you're talking about that are complaining about mastery learning. I've also never heard of it being used in a school.

I sometimes browse /teachers for the cruel schadenfreude. Being required to keep seperate IEPs for every kid and instruct them at their exact level of mastery (and how this is basically an insane and impossible demand on time and attention and multitasking) is a very common complaint. Their descriptions seem like a very close match for the description of Mastery Learning in the wiki link you provided.

instruct them at their exact level of mastery

Part of the issue is that this isn't most IEP's. There are plenty written by some idiot which instruct teachers on precisely what to teach, i.e. "teach multiples of 5 for one week" and then teachers are legally required to follow through with it even if it doesn't make sense. They're very tough to change too.

My wife had an IEP which mandated IIRC 35 hours / week with a single student, meaning the kid was expected to get 1 on 1 tutoring the entire school day and that still wasn't enough because field trips etc. would set her back by 7 hours which couldn't ever be made up.

These could be corrected in pretty common-sense ways but the requirement to have everyone involved with the student (behavioral specialist, speech pathologist, counselor, teacher, resource teacher, resource lead, principal, aid, and so on) at the IEP meeting makes it tough to get done.

Ah, /r/teachers, that makes sense. Never visited there.

But that does match my understanding that mastery learning is practically impossible to implement with anything resembling our current model of lectures to large classes. I wasn't familiar with complaints about IEPs being used (abused?) that way, but it doesn't surprise me.

I think there actually is a pretty strong consensus among researchers that phonics is better, although I can't find a primary source like a survey or meta-analysis. But this consensus (or at least, reasonably strong weight of evidence) is mentioned e.g. in https://www.sciencenews.org/article/balanced-literacy-phonics-teaching-reading-evidence, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/education/learning/schools-teaching-reading-phonics.html, https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2017-17326-001.pdf, and https://www.reallygreatreading.com/what-is-the-science-of-reading-and-phonics#:~:text=One%20of%20the%20key%20elements,key%20to%20successful%20reading%20instruction

The main problem seems to be that this hasn't made its way into graduate schools of education.

Last year I was dating a girl who worked for this public policy research organisation. She was telling me about a study she was writing, which argued that private secondary schools use different methods for teaching students than public schools do, which explained why private students do better academically and professionally than public students.

I found her optimism touching, even heartbreaking, and immediately started reciting all of my best talking points from Freddie deBoer: it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

I dunno. I feel like to work in this space you're essentially required to have drunk the blank slate Kool-Aid. Hearing her talk about how, if public school teachers just adopted this One Neat Trick then we'd end up with a generation of working-class astrophysicists - I dunno, it's a similar feeling to when an otherwise intelligent person wants to read your horoscope.

The idea that different teaching methods have zero impact strikes me as just as implausible as the blank slate position. Yes, a lot of it is selection effects, but not 100%.

I think Freddie would argue that different teaching methods might have some impact on absolute educational outcomes, but not on relative educational outcomes.

That is to say, Method A for teaching children to read might make children 5% more literate than Method B. But neither method will have any impact on the distribution by educational attainment of children in a cohort: at the end of the intervention, the children near the top will be the same children who were near the top at the beginning of the intervention. Likewise for middle and bottom children.

I think this may be true if we start out with all children learning via Method A, then switch to all children learning via Method B. But due to sorting effects, in the real world the kids near the top are already learning via Method B and the kids near the bottom are learning via Method A. So if we switch everyone to Method B the gap may well close to some degree.

I would also argue that switching to better methods that make learning easier may tend to close gaps simply because smart kids are more able to learn via any method, whereas less intelligent kids will struggle more with suboptimal methods. If you take a cohort of kids with different intrinsic skiing abilities and have them start on a black diamond (difficult slope) then you will see a big delta in performance between kids. The weakest skiers will fail and give up quickly, the strongest skiers will figure it out and get better. If you start them all on the bunny slope, you'll see less of a delta between the best and worst skiers since the worst skiers are at least able to make progress.

But due to sorting effects, in the real world the kids near the top are already learning via Method B and the kids near the bottom are learning via Method A.

Do you mean the private schools are using Method B and the public schools are using Method A?

Yes, from what I understand private schools and "better" public schools (i.e. the ones in more affluent areas) tend to use phonics more.

I think it's very plausible that, there's zero impact of, in most courses, switching between the kinds of teaching methods that are at least somewhat popular and capable of being implemented by existing schools and teachers. Being 1-on-1 tutored by Einstein will definitely teach a dumb kid math or physics a bit better than lectures + homework, and the teaching method of 'here's a textbook, go nuts, i'm going fishing' will be less effective, but between the bounds of 'student intelligence and interest' and 'teachers not being that smart and teaching methods not being that smart' there isn't that much room for impact

I found her optimism touching, even heartbreaking, and immediately started reciting all of my best talking points from Freddie deBoer: it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

Freddie is right about relative differences in learning ability being attributable to IQ, but a major selling point of expensive private schools is not the learning aspect but the social one. I think also private schools may have better curriculum too. If some kids are being disruptive or doing drugs in public school without any disciplinary action, I cannot imagine how that would be conducive to learning, all else being equal.

Fair point.

Remember what Scott wrote about "beware the man of one study". Has anyone turned up other studies with results different from the ones DeBoer quoted? Especially when he points to narrow results such as public versus private schools--I can easily believe that school quality in general doesn't matter, but that there may be quality differences between public and private schools which do matter.

beware the man of one study

deBoer's article cites a lot more than one study.

Two is literally more than one, true. He cites two studies for the specific claim about public versus private, which is what you're quoting him for. He does cite many studies for interventions in general not mattering, but it's possible for interventions in general to not matter while public versus private does.

You’ve left out the entertaining part! What was that girl’s reaction to your apostasy?

Pure disbelief. At least she wasn't outraged or accused me of being a eugenecist.

There's some cream skimming by private schools but there really is a billion dollars on the sidewalk here that nobody will pick up because it would ruin teachers' self image.

Direct instruction is meaningfully better than other methods: https://psych.athabascau.ca/open/engelmann/direct-evid.php

Being able to fire teachers also makes a difference: https://www.econtalk.org/terry-moe-on-educational-reform-katrina-and-hidden-power/

I agree.

Being able to discipline students and maintain that discipline also makes a big difference. And IIRC at least if it’s specifically catholic schools the difference remains if you control for social class.

See also the selection effect of having parents that care enough about their kid's education to get involved, but I'm sure someone will be a long in a bit to go aKsHuAlY that just proves that "it's all genetics".

Inclination to parental investment absolutely has genetic roots. We can see this at a glance in animal species without much in the way of culture to speak of.

The idea that different human populations didn't stabilize at different equilibria is flatly absurd. Now, how great the differences are is something I'd like to see more research into. Not holding my breath.

But if your girlfriend is correct and public schools are not teaching kids to read, they're teaching them "look at the picture and guess the word", while private schools are going "yeah no, we have to satisfy parents so we have to teach the kids to actually read", then using "teach the kids to read the words" method would be better.

I agree that if you take two schools that are both using the same methods, and one is rich kids and one is not, you are not going to get the same outcomes for a multitude of reasons. But if you send the rich kid to a school where they don't learn to read, then you will see a change in educational outcomes - up to the point when the parents yank the kid out of that school and get them a tutor or send them someplace better.

Hearing her talk about how, if public school teachers just adopted this One Neat Trick then we'd end up with a generation of working-class astrophysicists - I dunno, it's a similar feeling to when an otherwise intelligent person wants to read your horoscope.

I'd agree if we were indeed talking about turning kids into astrophysicists, but this is just about teaching them to read.

I absolutely agree that some methods of teaching kids to read are vastly more effective than others, and the idea that teachers would deliberately choose an ineffective method just because it's more "fun" (for the teacher!) fills me with a sort of furious disgust.

that teachers would deliberately choose an ineffective method just because it's more "fun" (for the teacher!) fills me with a sort of furious disgust.

I must confess a certain amount amusment/schadenfreude reading this.

If ability to read really is, as you just so confidently asserted, "all genetic" why shouldn't teachers pick their methods based on what's fun for them?

Genetics places hard limits on the extent of a specific child's educational attainment potential. Some children will never be neurosurgeons no matter how much they are taught, by whom and using which method.

This does not imply that all teaching methods are equal. You can't change children's relative educational attainment, but you can change their absolute educational attainment. The fact that some children will never be neurosurgeons doesn't mean they can never be taught to read. If you take a child who is near the bottom of an IQ distribution, you will never mould him into a neurosurgeon, but teaching him basic literacy will improve his quality of life. Some methods are demonstrably more effective for improving literacy than others, teachers should be choosing the best methods available for teaching children, and knowingly using a subpar method for teaching literacy just because you find it more enjoyable than a better available method is a massive dereliction of duty.

The worldview that I find objectionable is the blank-slate idea that everyone's educational attainment potential is identical, and that the only reason that working-class children attending public schools tend to have poorer educational outcomes than middle- and upper-class children attending private schools is because private schools have better teachers/better teaching methods/better teaching resources etc.. The former group tend to have poorer educational outcomes: they don't have no educational outcomes. I'm quite confident that almost every child who graduates public school knows a few things they didn't know when they started public school, as a direct result of their schooling. But if you were to take a single town which has Public School A and Private School B, track the educational attainment of a cohort of first-year children in each school from the year they enter to the year they leave, I predict that you would find:

  • Most of the highest-performing children are attending the private school

  • Most of the lowest-performing children are attending the public school

  • The relative positions of each child are mostly unchanged by the time they finish school: students who were high-performing at the outset will be high-performing when they leave

The deBoer article linked above contains a wealth of data backing up this highly intuitive assertion.

Genetics places hard limits on the extent of a specific child's educational attainment potential.

And that doesn't change my point. You seem to be engaged in a certain sort of strategic equivocation here, treating "potential" and "manifested ability" as equivalent when they are not. Similarly there's an obvious motte and bailey going on here. some qualities are inherited by children from their parents is the motte, where the motte is 100% bio-determinism where environment, discipline, are all meaningless distractions is the bailey.

You're complaint is essentially that I am refusing to grant you the bailey.

I'm not sure if I understand which position is the motte and which is the bailey in this framing. I don't believe in pure biodeterminism.

The Motte is that genetics exists, the Bailey is that everything is reducible to genetics, and that all other factors can be discarded as inconsequential.

More comments

My answer would be: because reading is not a terminal value.

Our methods of measuring outcomes are good insofar as outcomes are trivially measurable. Teaching methodology does virtually nothing to break through the genetics-defined limit for literacy, IQ or SAT or educational attainment. That's not all there is to life. These «creative» teachers have an inkling of the right idea; they're just deluded on account of them being midwitted women endowed with state-approved legitimacy and parental authority knockoff. They self-servingly imagine the dichotomy between rote learning and acquisition of some ineffable property one could call «genuine understanding» (that their gimmicks ostensibly further). You do the same with regard to LLMs, by the way. Still, this property exists.

I agree that abilities are overwhelmingly genetic; a kid who can learn to read, eventually will, and a kid who can't, will acquire a worthless facsimile of the skill. But my hypothesis is, it matters a great deal whether you start reading at 4 or at 9 or at 12. The brain changes meaningfully and deterministically with age; the plasticity and open-endedness available to a child never come back. The scale of possible change shrinks with every month.

If you begin working with information early on, it may not affect your g, or actual neural substrate of intelligence, or your highest achieved diploma (that is, anyway, a matter of dominant socioeconomic practices), or really much of what can be called «specs». But it'll give you time to integrate this information on a deep level, generalize it, crystallize your knowledge to actually know things better and in time become wise before you become obstinate and mired in sunk costs fallacies. In this framework, building a foundation for general-purpose reasoning – which is not the same thing as solving cognitively loaded puzzles in known contexts – is a race against time.

This is why elites are so serious about the maintenance of their private education traditions. It doesn't make them smarter (they are smarter by default), it doesn't make them score higher on SAT or IQ than they otherwise would. It makes them more like elites, in that they fucking understand what's happening and can act accordingly. On the lowest level, this requires beginning to read early in life.

I admit this narrative can be countered with any number of other just-so stories and particularly by the objection to assuming text as privileged modality of information. In my defense, I say that large-enough mixed-modal ML systems robustly improve in other modalities from adding text tokens during training, and indeed pure-language models easily acquire competence in non-text domains, but nothing else – for now – is shown to improve performance on pure text. Well, there's synergy with speech, but humans learn speech naturally anyway.

With the changing rate of generalization ability through life, it stands to reason that loading on text early on is a desirable strategy.

This is why elites are so serious about the maintenance of their private education traditions. It doesn't make them smarter (they are smarter by default), it doesn't make them score higher on SAT or IQ than they otherwise would. It makes them more like elites, in that they fucking understand what's happening and can act accordingly. On the lowest level, this requires beginning to read early in life.

Are graduates of posh private schools learned and knowledgeable? Do they understand what is happening in the world, do they know accurate facts about the world that normies lack?

To ask this question is to answer it.

"Huh? What is Shiite Islam?"

"Someone help me! They never taught me about it in Kinkaid School Phillips Academy and Yale University!"

Maybe the purpose and the secret sauce of expensive private education is making connections with other elites, learning to know people who know people who matter?

My answer would be: because reading is not a terminal value.

Really? If actually teaching kids to read is not the terminal value of "teaching kids to read" what is?

Ability to read is clearly not genetic; unlike spoken language, (almost) nobody picks up written language without instruction. Ability to learn to read may be genetic, but if so it's genetic in the same way height is -- if you don't feed a kid something like the right things, he ain't going to reach his potential height, and if you don't teach a kid he ain't going to be able to read.

I can't remember how I was taught, but I can say for certain that children in the UK today are taught using phonics. I've seen my nieces and nephews learning to read and they sound out each letter before saying the word. The conservative government forced all schools to teach phonics from 2010, and this approach hasn't been changed since then.

According to this article, the previous approach was one of 'balanced reading', which seems to be a mixture of phonics and whole language instruction. From what I can gather, criticism of phonics in the UK is based on the same impulses that work against it in the US.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-phonics-to-teach-reading-is-failing-children-says-landmark-study

Our view is that the system doesn’t give teachers enough flexibility to do what they think is best for their pupils

Wonderful. I am all for flexibility, innovation, and initiative... When there's a strong system that gives people feedback and incentives of what is/is not working. That's the case in a contestable market, but not generally in state education.

Since the introduction of the phonics screening check in 2012, the percentage of Year 1 pupils meeting the expected standard in reading has risen from 58% to 82%, with 92% of children achieving this standard by Year 2

However:

All but one of the 936 comments from the survey [of teachers] were negative about the screening test [that they were using phonics] while one teacher described having to “live and breathe phonics” and another appealed for “reflection on the mass of skills involved in reading rather than solely focusing on phonics”.

I’m a teacher in Canada. Points below about teachers finding phonics boring are true, although there is constant pressure from administrators and colleagues to be FUN, and phonics doesn’t make class fun.

It is impossible, however, to overstate the staggering stupidity of the average teacher. Intellectual mediocrity combined with everyone else in the room treating you like an authority (and shamelessly kissing your ass) is a really bad combination for self-awareness.

Examples:

-Test question shows a French peasant and a priest riding on a rich guy. Implication is that he is supporting them. Correct answer is “this image depicts France after the revolution.” I show up and point out that the nobility was destroyed (not esoteric knowledge) and largely the clergy too, and therefore this image cannot depict France after the revolution. Say it is more like some noble’s uncharitable take on the true motivations of the 3rd estate. Unanimous response from the entire department: “we’ve used it for 17 years, we’re not changing it.”

-kid gets shunted out of AP English for arguing that the accepted interpretation of a story is wrong. “It’s not what you’re supposed to think.”

-AP English teacher says a play is racist because it contains a song where a girl mocks the bumpkin townsfolk by listing all the stereotypes they expect her to fulfill, and agreeing to enact them because that’s all their tiny minds can understand. Teacher protests that stereotypes should never even be mentioned unless he (personally)is present to make sure kids think correctly about them.

-I teach French, but can also teach math. Have no degree in either. Fellow teachers universally baffled that, in the 20 years after university, I have learned other things to slightly above high-school level. I say “you can learn new things.” One says “NO, I CAN’T.”

-Gr 3 math teacher comes to me, kid is multiplying stuff like 71x83 incorrectly, but getting correct answer every time. He’s doing tens then ones, instead of ones then tens. She cannot understand how this can work, because she has never actually understood multiplication.

-At provincial gr 12 French immersion meeting, teachers unanimously lament that, after 12 years of relentless French instruction, kids can’t read French novels and they must be read to them. Final essays are 80% about hallmark-grade movie Intouchables, a black-guy cool/white guy uptight shlockfest. Teachers are SO happy. It’s the BEST movie, with SO many themes.

I could go on and on (“I showed my students this really good TED talk”), but if you are wondering “how did they not see that the kids weren’t learning,” the answer usually is “they were, on average, not smart enough to do anything other than follow a recipe.”

-AP English teacher says a play is racist because it contains a song where a girl mocks the bumpkin townsfolk by listing all the stereotypes they expect her to fulfill, and agreeing to enact them because that’s all their tiny minds can understand. Teacher protests that stereotypes should never even be mentioned unless he (personally)is present to make sure kids think correctly about them.

I'm curious what this one is, this makes me think of Oklahoma! even though I'm pretty sure that's not what it is.

-I teach French, but can also teach math. Have no degree in either. Fellow teachers universally baffled that, in the 20 years after university, I have learned other things to slightly above high-school level. I say “you can learn new things.” One says “NO, I CAN’T.”

I have heard this exact phrase from a teacher before: "I'm not here to learn." ("Je ne suis pas la pour apprendre.")

The total lack of intellectual curiosity is no joke.

Gr 3 math teacher comes to me, kid is multiplying stuff like 71x83 incorrectly, but getting correct answer every time. He’s doing tens then ones, instead of ones then tens. She cannot understand how this can work, because she has never actually understood multiplication.

*Eye Twitch* had almost this exact thing happen at a Parent/Teacher conference for my eldest (9) involving fractions/division.

My wife (a teacher) has colleagues who mark their students' work incorrect for doing this kind of thing. Or worse, their parents will teach them some sensical method of doing math, and the teachers will mark them wrong because they're not doing it in the nonsensical curriculum-prescribed way.

My pre-calculus teacher gave me zero on a bunch of questions because I did the derivatives in my head and just wrote down the correct answers. This wasn't even made clear on the test but she had wanted me to write down every single step in the derivation.

Or worse, their parents will teach them some sensical method of doing math, and the teachers will mark them wrong because they're not doing it in the nonsensical curriculum-prescribed way.

Yup, that's pretty much what had happened in my case. I used to do things with my kid when he was around 6 or 7 where I'd be like "We need 8, 6-foot lengths to build this project, the store sells bar-stock in 12 foot pieces, how many do we need to buy?" and if he could figure it out he'd get an ice cream or something. Skip forward a couple years and he's trying to argue with his 3rd grade teacher about how fractions work.

I did the same thing as a child. It frustrated my teachers to no end that I could do the problems up for discussion in my head before the lesson had begun, and it frustrated me that they never let me.

Little dude had apparently "disrupted class" by insisting that "the irregular fraction" on the board wasn't a fraction at all but a "division problem" which granted, arguing with the teacher was disruptive, but he wasn't wrong.

After the teachers stopped actually looking at my notebooks and started to just "randomly" ask students (read: using some trivially simple to deduce pattern) to do homework problems on the whiteboard I just stopped doing most homework and would simply do the problem either on the fly or while waiting for the previous student to finish.

Test question shows a French peasant and a priest riding on a rich guy. Implication is that he is supporting them. Correct answer is “this image depicts France after the revolution.” I show up and point out that the nobility was destroyed (not esoteric knowledge) and largely the clergy too, and therefore this image cannot depict France after the revolution.

Was it this image I just found on the wikipedia entry for the French Revolution? If so, that would be (according to the caption on the entry) "the Third Estate carrying the First Estate (clergy) and the Second Estate (nobility) on its back."

Actually, I suspect there probably is another version that depicts the Second Estate carrying the other two on its back ("a French peasant and a priest riding on a rich guy" as you describe) that is supposed to show the apparent situation after the revolution which you were shown, parodying the image I've linked to above

But either way, even after the French Revolution, France still had many rich people, right? Certainly the monarchy was abolished, and maybe the nobles were stripped of their titles or shunned from society or something, but somebody was still owning all those chateaux and vineyards and 18th century jewels, right?

They had rich people, but not in the service of the poor, the poor did not proclaim “vive le roi,” and the clergy did not become vessels of revolutionary justice, as the image suggests.

They show the kids the one you found and explain it, and then test “higher-order thinking” by showing the one I described, but the lesson is “different roles=reversed roles=opposite=after the revolution.” After the revolution, it was not the case that the peasantry and clergy were being supported by the nobles, but even if you didn’t know any of that, the chain of reasoning is still clearly fallacious.

There is indeed an image of the 3rd estate riding the 1st and 2nd that depicts conditions after the Revolution. You can find the original and the later parody here

http://davidmhart.com/liberty/Art/Class/ImagesAtlas.html

Which does somewhat put a hole in the criticism of the stupid colleagues if this is the image. And even if it isn't really, as neither the clergy or nobles were wiped out after the Revolution.

This is also a good example of epistemic learned helplessness. The teacher wasn't going to change his answer even though the answer was "proven wrong" by a complainant. This turned out to be the correct way to act.

Yeah, it's obviously riffing on the troisordres image, if it exists. I don't understand what sort of perspective it could come from. Is the rich guy a commoner, or nobility? If commoner, it's some sort of anachronistic libertarian perspective, I don't think rich commoners can afford to throw peasants under the bus just yet. If noble, they are usually allied with priests.

It seems like a dream of the ideal post-revolutionary period, but it’s so rosy that it looks like a cynic’s satire of revolutionary aims. It certainly doesn’t depict post-revolutionary France, though.

Sorry for being blunt, but I don't think the image exists as described, you must have misremembered. A satire of revolutionary aims would not have a priest sitting on a noble. The peasant would sit on both.

The priest on the peasant was a mistake. The image has a priest leading a noble, and a peasant riding the noble. It’s in the link someone posted above.

Yeah this is part of Reunion des Trois Ordres from 1789. And the interpretation of it being a depiction of post Revolutionary France is basically accurate. With the proviso that it is from just after the ancien regime was in theory abolished in 1789.

It is a depiction of revolutionary France from the time period itself. That doesn't mean it is necessarily itself factually 100% accurate.

"This print is in fact a combination of three etchings produced separately during the summer of 1789 to celebrate the overthrow of the political and social order in France following the Bastille’s fall and the legislative events of the night of 4th August."

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/obl4he/frenchrevolution/1_reunion_de_trois_ordres.html

The central and right images were paired as pendants and sold to commoners celebrating the revolution, so I don't think the idea it was a cynics idea holds up much.

A more accurate answer might have been: This is a depiction of France after the revolution as viewed by someone celebrating the reversal of fortunes between the 1st/2nd and 3rd estates. But depending on the level of the class, I am not sure you need that level of accuracy.

I can’t believe this has elicited such a response. Thanks for finding the original and clearing up the intent of the image. Looks like the idealism was because the revolution had just begun- not a cynic’s take, but the dream of a true believer. “The summer of 1789,” though, is in no way “France after the revolution,” any more than “The autumn of 1939” is “Germany after the Second World War.” “This is how things stood in France after the revolution was all over” is not a correct explanation of the picture, but that was the agreed-upon answer for 17 years.

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Yeepee, we got the right to hunt in our own forests now! Living high on the hog off the sweat of all those aristocrats! Although I've cooled down considerably on siding with the oppressed in the last two centuries, at the time, I'm sorry, those things weren't nearly enough, and nothing compared to the old regime's oppression.

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yeah that makes sense

The podcast Sold a Story claims that “whole language” and “balanced literacy” became mainstream curricula for reading instruction in American schools despite the fact that they are almost certainly trash.

I'm not sure that "despite" belongs there for any sort of widespread policy, government or otherwise. It just seems to me that "is this thing almost certainly trash?" simply isn't a thought that crosses anyone's minds when implementing this kind of stuff, and certainly not when they're following it. It's more, "Can it convincingly appear to people, especially people I consider important, to be effective?"

But to get away from the snarky cynical aside, I must admit that I find myself feeling little vindicated at learning of this. I'm a Korean immigrant to the USA, and I had immense difficulty learning how to read English when I first moved here, starting from no English knowledge at 1st grade. There was one lesson that was a huge breakthrough for me, which was when my father sat me down one day and wrote out for me each of the 26 letters and then the Korean (Hangul) next to each that came closest to the pronunciation of that particular letter. (E.g. "아" for "a"). From then on, I was able to mentally map English letters to Hangul and sound them out that way, eventually internalizing the English directly and getting to the point where my English reading was better than my Korean.

This had its issues, since English doesn't neatly map letters to sounds like in Hangul. And not just exceptions, but just standard usage - e.g. is the letter "a" more commonly pronounced like in "dab" or like in "haha" or like in "anus?" I don't know. Whereas "아" is always - almost definitionally - pronounced like the "a" in "haha." But it was, in my case, still evidently good enough to use as a base to make me reach the point where my reading skills were indistinguishable from that of a native.

I always assumed that my experience was atypical. Now I'm wondering how many students learning English are suffering like I did, but without having access to that sort of breakthrough lesson where they're taught explicitly the phonemes of each letter.

Liked this post. Two additions for consideration.

  1. Political / ideological affiliation for all graduate programs outside of the licensing professionals (law, medicine) has shifted left since at least the 1990s. And educational / teacher's graduate programs are in a league all of their own. There's left, there's progressive, there's actual socialists, and then there's teacher's colleges. I just tried to find the report on this that I'm thinking of, but wow is Google really trash theses days. The report I'm thinking of mentions that a reason for this is that graduate education programs, even among the social sciences, has a particular resistance to, well, evidence. Think about it. If you're trying to compare the long term outcomes of a particular teach style, you have to track children over several years and then somehow control for cognitive ability, parental involvement, and personal preferences (Alice likes math naturally etc.) This is impossible almost from the jump. Therefore, a LOT, of the courses taught in graduate education courses are one step away from woo-woo bullshit. I had a family friend who, already quite liberal, shifted his graduate program to education technology (basically finding better ways to catalog and use online materials in public schools) because he was aghast and the low level of rigor in the teaching instruction courses.

  2. It's worth looking at who teachers used to be and who they are know. Fun fact; there are more active duty Navy SEALs than there are male pre-K teachers in the US. The number of men teaching in public schools at any grade level has plummeted. This is now starting also to happen to women past 40. Classrooms are led by younger, highly educated women, who quickly burn out and do something else. Pair this with administrator's inability to really do anything with disruptive students, and classroom order and discipline is DESTROYED. Then, it doesn't even matter what the instruction style is. Repeating words, guessing them based on context - none of it matters when have the class is filming a TikTok and the most the non-binary double masters grad at the front can do is loudly clear her throat.

This post got longer than initially intended, but you caught me mid caffeine stream. There is no viable path for public education in the US for the close to mid-term. COVID was the last nail in the coffin. Parents will turn to home-schooling and private schools until teachers unions finally go bankrupt because their membership goes to zero.

The number of men teaching in public schools at any grade level has plummeted

Is there any evidence for this? Because this indicates that the percentage of male public school teachers was 25% in 1999-2000, and 24% in 2017-2018.

This is now starting also to happen to women past 40.

It appears that the average age of public school teachers in 2011-2012 was 42; the median was 41. It was the same in 2017-2018. In 2000 the median was 42, up from 36 twenty years earlier.

Classrooms are led by younger, highly educated women, who quickly burn out and do something else

Again, I don't see much evidence of increased early burn out

Parents will turn to home-schooling and private schools until teachers unions finally go bankrupt because their membership goes to zero.

Home schooling is an option for only a very small percentage of parents, and certainly not the substantial number of parents whose first language is not English. As for private school enrollment, it has not exactly skyrocketed including after COVID, if CA is representative.

NOTE: The column for "schools with fewer than 6 students" in the above is probably home schools, given that the average enrollment in those schools is less than 2. A 25,000 increase in enrollment in a state with 6 million K-12 students doesn't mean much.

Ca is almost certainly not representative due to low fertility rates and outmigration.

That is unlikely to be very important, because the change in numbers is tiny, regardless. And, controlling for those factors, as a pct of total enrollment, the increase in pvt school enrollment since 2017-2018 has been from 8.3 percent to 9.3 percent. And outmigration is offset by immigration; with 10-11 pct of the US population, CA has 23% pct of the US foreign-born population, and those residents are definitely raising kids.

The point is that OP made claims without evidence.

Political / ideological affiliation for all graduate programs outside of the licensing professionals (law, medicine) has shifted left since at least the 1990s. And educational / teacher's graduate programs are in a league all of their own. There's left, there's progressive, there's actual socialists, and then there's teacher's colleges.

I think a big problem is that universities now have entirely separated departments from the others. Something that can be taken as an axiomatic truth in one department can be seen as completely false in another. Peer review has become review by your small subfield. Papers should have to have a randomly select a peer reviewer from another department. It would be interesting to see a neuroscientist, pediatrician, psychologist or psychiatrist review education papers. Just taking zoologists who are used to studying how animals behave and function in an ecosystem and toss them into sociology or education would be intriguing. Academia has become too specialized for ideas to propagate or for there to be effective cross-breeding of ideas.

The academia works on layers of abstraction. On the bottom there are mathematicians and physicists who describe the fundamental truths of the world, a bit higher up we have chemists, biologists and neuroscientists, in the middle there are psychologists, engineers, and doctors and on top we have economists and sociologists and historians. Generally, peer review should include people from a lower level of abstraction.

Economists and sociologists should be be put on small islands together, neuroscientists and educators would be another high priority combo.

Papers should have to have a randomly select a peer reviewer from another department.

How would this work for anything non-trivial in practise?

I have a masters degree in electrical engineering, have published a bunch of peer reviewed papers in a subfield of that and it wouldn't be at all hard to find papers I'd be unqualified to review even in that subfield. Back when I was working in university, it was hard enough to come up with responses to supposedly qualified reviewers in the same subfield who clearly hadn't at all understood what the paper was about.

Maybe you could find a small handful of superhumans who could understand both 3D electromagnetic field simulations as well as quantization noise in multi-bit sigma-delta-converters, but those are just two narrow sections of electrical engineering. You certainly won't find anyone who understands all the thousands of slices of just electrical engineering, nevermind all of science.

100%. And it's particularly bad in humanities where over-subdivision is ridiculous. I think the British University's still have PPE as a sort of default humanities major - that's politics, philosophy, and economics. Which, when you stop to think about it, are all intrinsically related and, therefore, necessary to be taught together. In a sort of dark hilarity "intersectionality" is a weird bottom-up recreation of ... sociology (which, to be clear, is anthropology without the field work and economics without the math).

Part of this has to do with the relentless credentialism. I went to a fancy kid college and there were classmates I had who wanted to take STEM courses from genuine interest but worried they would struggle and their GPA would fall. The idea of college GPA is absurd to me because it can be hacked and demonstrates ZERO proficiency at anything. Take the courses you want, attend however you feel. Senior year should be an independent project that you publish publicly ... employers can make their determination based on that.

Classrooms are led by younger, highly educated women, who quickly burn out and do something else.

By highly educated do you mean bachelor's degrees? I think few have more than that, and there are also many who are allowed to teach while working towards their bachelor's. My guess is that that "do something else" for most women is to become a stay at home mother, possibly retaining a part-time job.

And yeah, the state of education is abysmal. The good teachers try to work around the relevant laws. For instance, when a severely disabled kid is throwing a tantrum, teachers aren't allowed to intervene, even if the tantrum involves throwing around and destroying expensive equipment. Idk about whether the same rules apply to regular kids. However, teachers CAN intervene if the tantrum is threatening someone else. So they stand in front of the expensive equipment, wait for the kid to throw a swing as they inevitably will, and then restrain them. Resource teachers have strict limits regarding how many support minutes they give to students who need them, and their workarounds for dealing with these incredible regulations are absurd and often hilarious.

At its core I think it comes down to something very simple. We are outsourcing parenthood, but not trusting the government-provided parents to do their job. Parents need to be able to discipline kids and teach them morality. Giving teachers such an enormous role in kids' lives, without the ability to discipline or support any coherent worldview besides enlightened secular centrism, is doomed from the start. Of course, giving unrelated government employees a parenting role is doomed from the start anyways, so I don't want to give them even more power over kids--just pointing out the inherent contradiction in our approach.

Pedantic answer: Only a minority of American's have bachelors so, by default, a four year not-online bachelors degree is highly educated. However, I AM the asshole for saying that so ...

Anecedotally ... there's a trend of women doing an immediate masters in education / social something something right after undergrad, mostly as a way to continue to delay adulthood. They stack this again with a delay into adulthood by teaching and then, yes you are 100% right, plop into adulthood by getting married. I see it as a way to save professional / feminist face (I have a masters degree and was an educator!) while covertly pursuing a more traditional family arrangement that they may have wanted all along.

Regarding Government-As-Parent .... the antecedent for Teachers-As-Parents was welfare. It's tricky. I'm not a crypto-libertarian-social-darwinist that says let single mothers fend for themselves ... but the OVERWHELMING incentives to abandon the nuclear family have wreaked havoc on everyone, most especially the children of the lower middle class. Even the middle to-upper middle class essentially pay for surrogate or auxiliary parentage in the form of nannies, afterschool programs, and summer camps. This is because fighting for the limbo of a Dual Income Household necessitates both parents spend most of their time (and close to all of their energy) in competitive careers.

the OVERWHELMING incentives to abandon the nuclear family have wreaked havoc on everyone, most especially the children of the lower middle class. Even the middle to-upper middle class essentially pay for surrogate or auxiliary parentage in the form of nannies, afterschool programs, and summer camps. This is because fighting for the limbo of a Dual Income Household necessitates both parents spend most of their time (and close to all of their energy) in competitive careers.

For sure. We didn't always need dual income households to feel successful. My wife (a teacher) has quite a few coworkers who pay for childcare only $3-4/hr cheaper than what they themselves make. After taxes, gas costs, etc. they are pretty much paying money to look like teachers rather than mothers. And sure, maybe they're just financially illiterate, but it still raises the question of why they felt like the default should be working rather than parenting.

At its core I think it comes down to something very simple. We are outsourcing parenthood, but not trusting the government-provided parents to do their job. Parents need to be able to discipline kids and teach them morality. Giving teachers such an enormous role in kids' lives, without the ability to discipline or support any coherent worldview besides enlightened secular centrism, is doomed from the start. Of course, giving unrelated government employees a parenting role is doomed from the start anyways, so I don't want to give them even more power over kids--just pointing out the inherent contradiction in our approach.

Well I think there is some disagreement on whether we should be outsourcing parenthood at all. The group that thinks it's a good idea and the group that distrusts the government provided parents are not composed of the same people but because we've allowed so much centralization we can't seem to conceive of having different systems for these groups.

Well, I agree that it would be nice to have separate systems, but I'm not sure such a clear dichotomy exists. I think most people both think it's a good idea and somewhat distrust the teachers, with a large minority both liking the idea and trusting the teachers, and a much smaller minority disliking school and distrusting the teachers. There's a reason that among those who support school (most people) most still want restrictions on what teachers teach--they're not allowed to teach their religion, or their politics, or generally provide their own viewpoint on anything divisive. That group clearly trusts teachers less than parents, but also still wants their kids spending more time with teachers than with parents.

They did know it was bullshit.

But they found phonics boring and considered their own entertainment more important than children learning stuff.

“For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.”

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.

https://archive.is/WdzIm

It's much the same story with Direct Instruction, which is basically the classroom version of spaced repetition (and also students get tracked based on ability). Teachers follow a very repetitive script and those scripts are organized based on spaced repetition principles. No creativity. No use of their professional education. Just follow the script.

Back in the 90s we did some great trials and discovered Direct Instruction was the best way to teach children. But teachers found it boring and revolted against it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_instruction

Back in the 90s we did some great trials and discovered Direct Instruction was the best way to teach children. But teachers found it boring and revolted against it.

I don't remember my reading curricula in elementary school (partially because I remember reading before kindergarten), but I was briefly attending a "trendy" (public) school that was trying all sorts of newfangled ideas. One year tried mixing K-2 in a single classroom on the notion that peer instruction would improve outcomes (spoiler alert: no, it's harder to match instruction to more varied students and the size difference between kids led to bullying).

I'll lump teaching in with a few other professions that are both difficult and have poorly-measured outcomes. This also includes things like parts of economics, medicine, policing, and social work. I've observed that these fields seem especially prone to groupthink and oscillation between questionable policy choices. We'll focus on a single small and poorly-controlled study showing that different reading curricula improved one classroom once, and use that to justify throwing out years of tradition and experience.

As much as we want a silver bullet to solve our problems, the sad truth is that phonics or direct instruction alone won't solve the problems in these schools, and I'm fairly confident that more total time (inside and outside the classroom) practicing reading is far more important than the marginal gains of the specific curriculum. And even then there are still students who will struggle with reading due to dyslexia and such.

These problems are hard and I think treating them otherwise does us all a disservice in finding actual improvements.

Phonics and DI aren't "silver bullets". They are merely interventions that reliably perform better than all known alternatives. Their inability to solve all problems is not a reason to give them up.

Also teaching outcomes are quite straightforward to measure, thanks to standardized tests.

Is it blaming American kids’ low rates of reading proficiency on the wrong thing, offering us false hope of fixing the problem?

Basically. Teachers want a magic method that works for all pupils, reduces educational inequalities, and which is fun for them. It's find to want that, as long as one doesn't succumb to wishful thinking.

I remember being part of an experiment where they tried to teach us mathematics for a few weeks using connected wooden blocks, e.g. a chain of 5 wooden blocks to represent 5, as an alternative to chalk-and-talk. I think it was connected to "learning styles". Fortunately, it was just a brief experiment, and I generally had a very traditional mathematics education up to geometry: chalk-and-talk from teachers, chanting as a class, board problems where we competed to get the right answer first, number problems to solve in class competitions (e.g. "Who can find the closest approximation of 52 using these numbers?") and so on. Geometry was less traditional, in that we learnt it by example and rule rather than the old Euclidean procedure of proof from first principles, so e.g. we never learnt how to define a line or a circle, rather than just solve problems involving them.

I don't think Euclid actually defined what a straight line is.

Ha! That makes me feel a bit better about my lack of a rigorous understanding of geometry.

My nonsense detector goes off every time blacks are used as an example for why X is bad. It's the typical Boasian anthropology 'cart before the horse' thinking that permeates every single mainstream explanatory theory relating to the gaps between blacks and whites. So when a person who subscribes to Boasian anthropology presents a new battleground where they can potentially excuse the drastic differences between people with innate cognitive differences with some half baked social theory my brain just shuts off. I mean, honestly, do people never tire of this ridiculous rigamarole that is repeated again and again? Do they never start questioning or doubting the hope they feel in their hearts when this sort of theory gets peddled? The differences are there. They will always(within lifetime) be there. Just like there are dumb white kids who can't into reading properly there are dumb brown kids who can't either. And the distribution of these dumb kids between the different population groups is not the same.

It's important to be able to help dumb kids function in modern society but you can't couch that concern as a universal worry for all children. Kids have been learning how to read for centuries. With time, methods and materials that are so lacking by today's standards that it's not even comparable. By the same token I've seen kids take special classes for years with specially trained teachers that ultimately amounted to very little comparatively. I am sure the extra time helped compared to not having it, but you would never blame the problem those kids were having on the method. Those were obvious cases where the kids had issues.

So whilst there might be an interesting discussion relating to the efficacy of various teaching methods on 'normal' children there simply isn't any space for it in mainstream society. We have retarded ourselves to the point of being unable to accurately categorize reality and have methodologically reduced ourselves to rely on hopeful fiction. That is leaving aside the larger problems with 'teaching' kids in a classroom regardless of their affinity or ability.

But on the actual topic, I only have anecdotal experience as a student.

As a kid I remember not liking 'phonics' since I had a much easier time reading text than doing specific exercises. Especially if I had some way to contextualize the text I was going to be reading. I would not read letters but instead look at the words as symbols. So I lagged behind in reading through first and second grade since most of the 'reading' was just exercises. But through third grade and onward I had great scores for reading since the exercises were more narrative based. Which, I found, was much more entertaining than the boring exercises that centered around individual letters or words disconnected from context. Reading a text I could contextualize two or three times with someone next to me that could tell me what a word I didn't know was helped me learn quickly comparatively.

On the whole, if you can't teach normal kids how to read when they are locked in a room with you for hours, 5 days a week for years then you have issues beyond state mandated methodology and are probably just a bad and incapable person. I remember hearing stories of my relative's teacher from their years in elementary school in the early 80's. The teacher had no qualification other than his own literacy. They had only a few 'books' and of those the only ones designed for children were handwritten by the teacher himself. Yet somehow learning how to read was not an issue in that class despite the kids spending much less time there than they would today.

I feel that illustrates just how low the bar is when we are talking about teaching normal kids how to read. And how inconsequential teaching methodologies, textbooks and all the other crap that gets brought up might be when it comes to teaching something basic like reading. That's not to say all methods or environments are equal. But after a certain point, that is set very very low, you quickly start seeing diminishing returns. So when folks start looking that way for solutions to obviously giant problems I think it's more pertinent to ask why people are looking in such an obviously wrong direction.

Amusingly, similar experiences seem to have resulted in my development of the same reflex only in the opposite direction.

I watch the advocates of "innate cognitive differences" stack epicycles upon epicycles trying to explain why teaching methods don't matter, why classroom discipline does not matter, why nutrition, poverty, a tradition, literacy, a stable home-life/two-parent household, and any number of other things don't matter while arbitrarily dismissing any arguments, claims, and evidence to the contrary as "blank-slatism" and can't help but find it just as (if not even more) ridiculous.

Especially when the most aggressive and ardent advocates always seem to be coming from the same space. This might sound uncharitable but perhaps if you redirected some of that energy from rationalizing the world into being a little less neurotic and asking that cute barista out on a date maybe the problem of dysgenics would start to seem a little more tractable.

Considering I made appeals to the opposite this is just bizarre. I guess it makes more sense to equivocate fiction with reality than look at multiple population groups deriving drastically different outcomes from similar environments.

Opposite of what exactly?

I to have learned to hate misleading statistics being quoted by political operators who clearly do not understand statistics. I to find myself feeling frustrated when forced to countenance arguments that go against my directly observed reality. I to have become wary of if not outright hostile towards anything resembling strategic equivocation. I to am sick of the "ridiculous rigmaroles" and "half baked social theories"

The only difference between us is that you think your side is free of these sins.

I made appeals to the opposite of what you call 'the advocates of innate cognitive differences'. More specifically when I said that not all teaching methodologies or environments need be equal. On top of that I mentioned that there are other issues with schooling that are outside of the scope of specific teaching methodologies.

It's not that the difference between us is that I don't recognize the pathologies that naturally come about when people have grouped up, regardless of the topic. It's that I don't assume I'm better than you. So I don't base my arguments around that.

So, you’ve now regressed to the “people who disagree with me are lame weirdos who get no bitches” stage of normie-tier arguments?

No more so than anyone else here I would argue.

The standard form of the argument in question is that the lame wierdoes can't get "bitches". HlynkaCG is claiming they choose not to, which rather puts a different spin on the "lame wierdoes" part. I can say candidly that similar advice was of great personal benefit to me.

Sure, I think that’s a reasonable distinction to draw, although in the context of Hlynka’s entire post - and his oeuvre more broadly - it’s difficult not to default to a less charitable read.

It’s also not clear how Hlynka believes that asking “the cute barista” out on a date will significantly help the dysgenics issue; one of the reasons why many HBD advocates struggle to find partners (I’m well aware that the reasons are numerous, but this is one of them) is that the majority of the single women they are likely to interact with on a daily casual basis are not selected for intelligence, let alone for sensible beliefs about the nature of humanity, which means that it’s not worth investing significant effort into dating them only to have the relationship implode after the first deep discussion about race. Or, even worse, for the relationship to result in marriage and children, only for the woman to fill the children’s heads full of egalitarian nonsense.

I’m not saying this is the primary reason why so many of us far-right “weirdos” are single, but I can say that this has been one of the serious obstacles in my personal life. In any case, if the shot across the bow being fired at my side of this particular battle is “maybe if you stopped autistically sorting people into theoretical categories like they’re data points on a spreadsheet, and spent that mental energy getting laid, you’d have better personal life outcomes”, that argument is both correct and also missing the point on, at least, an intellectual level.

Is finding a mate a priority or not? If it's not a priority, it probably won't happen. If it is a priority, obstacles can be overcome. It seems to me that a lot of single men approach this from the perspective of "it'd be nice if I found the perfect woman, otherwise no thanks". But in the first place there are no perfect women (or men either), and in the second place, being in a healthy, committed relationship is incredibly beneficial, in a way that I think a lot of men don't realize until they've had it. Certainly the modern world does not often grant single men the experience of being cared for and valued as a person.

Assuming that finding a mate is a priority, the two questions that follow are first how to be a worthwhile mate yourself, and then how to find a worthwhile mate. Ideally, one wants a selection mechanism better than "someone I'm willing to have sex with/is willing to have sex with me, at least once." What is more desirable is a good person to share one's life with, and of course the possession of enough goodness oneself that a good person would be interested in sharing a life together. Since it is lives at stake, you want something that penetrates through the surface detail and into the core of identity, worldview, lifestyle. You want people who make thinking long-term and being responsible part of their core identity. Such places exist, so if you're dissatisfied with the quality of the women in your social circles, why are those your social circles in the first place?

If one is an outspoken racial ideologue, that's probably going to be a hard pass for most women. But why is being an outspoken racial ideologue necessary? Sticking rigidly to the evidence and disdaining theorizing, maintaining a humble admission that one can be wrong, appealing to evidence on the defense and refraining from actively pushing the issue is likely plenty, and all of these are good practice in any case, because HBD is not a terribly actionable worldview.

If your intellectual pursuits interfere with the process of gaining and keeping a family, they're probably not worth it. A family of one's own is immensely valuable, far beyond what theory can provide. Almost all theories will be irrelevant in a decade at the most. Family will shape and enrich your life till the day you die, and then continue shaping the world on and on long after you have returned to the dust.

It’s also not clear how Hlynka believes that asking “the cute barista” out on a date will significantly help the dysgenics issue...

It's quite simple really. If you believe that dysgenics is a serious concern, and If you believe that you are intelligent enough to be worth reproducing with, the obvious solution is not to whinge on reddit about it. the solution is to have more kids.

The thing that rationalists always seem to miss about the opening Idiocracy is that the "smart" couple chose their fate. They chose decline, They chose to be replaced. The future belongs to those who show up.

Then you are one of the ones that @FCfromSSC was just talking about.

It’s also not clear how Hlynka believes that asking “the cute barista” out on a date will significantly help the dysgenics issue; one of the reasons why many HBD advocates struggle to find partners (I’m well aware that the reasons are numerous, but this is one of them)

It depends on what you want to do with your life.

Do you want to be normal normie, normally living in normal society like everyone else, or do you want to be rebel and revolutionary, destroying the normal society root and branch?

If the former, behave and think like every other normie, no other advice is necessary.

If the latter...

https://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/nechayev/catechism.htm

The revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name. Everything in him is wholly absorbed in the single thought and the single passion for revolution.

...

Tyrannical toward himself, he must be tyrannical toward others. All the gentle and enervating sentiments of kinship, love, friendship, gratitude, and even honor, must be suppressed in him and give place to the cold and single-minded passion for revolution. For him, there exists only one pleasure, one consolation, one reward, one satisfaction – the success of the revolution. Night and day he must have but one thought, one aim – merciless destruction. Striving cold-bloodedly and indefatigably toward this end, he must be prepared to destroy himself and to destroy with his own hands everything that stands in the path of the revolution.

...

The nature of the true revolutionary excludes all sentimentality, romanticism, infatuation, and exaltation. All private hatred and revenge must also be excluded. Revolutionary passion, practiced at every moment of the day until it becomes a habit, is to be employed with cold calculation. At all times, and in all places, the revolutionary must obey not his personal impulses, but only those which serve the cause of the revolution.

I watch the advocates of "innate cognitive differences" stack epicycles upon epicycles trying to explain why teaching methods don't matter, why classroom discipline does not matter, why nutrition, poverty, a tradition, literacy, a stable home-life/two-parent household, and any number of other things don't matter

We know what the root cause is for classroom indiscipline, poor nutrition, bad (cultural?) traditions, bad (parental?) literacy, unstable home life and one-parent households.

If people are smart and capable, they won't find themselves in situations where they're having more children they can support with unhelpful partners, won't have a culture glorifying crime, won't be illiterate, won't disrupt classrooms, won't create or maintain food desserts or fail to provide nutritious food.

This might sound uncharitable but perhaps if you redirected some of that energy from rationalizing the world into being a little less neurotic and asking that cute barista out on a date maybe the problem of dysgenics would start to seem a little more tractable.

With great respect, if you preface an insult by implying 'this only sounds like an insult', it does not become less offensive. Quite the opposite.

and there you are

Which comes first? Genetics or 'parents loving their children enough to take a serious interest in their education'? You could be saying that love is a metaphysical force, beyond the power of science - I have no response to that.

Which comes first?

Does it matter?

Well it's only the basis of what you're trying to imply, that genetics is unrelated to whether parents care about their kids education - or is that comment just sneering 'aKsHuAlY' at the thought that people might object to whatever you're saying?

No it's not, what you're doing is affirming the consequent

I don't have to imagine it, I've seen it.

That the predicted outcomes of abandoning of strict discipline and race-blind grading predicted by American trad-cons came true came true is not a condemnation of their thesis it is a vindication of it.

This is literally nothing but a long winded insult. Which I suppose should reinforce one to the essentialist position if that's all one can say in opposition.

As someone who doesn't think that's all the story, please actually make arguments instead of just...this. We both know there is more to it than that, that you're actually capable of it and that the venue demands it.

This is literally nothing but a long winded insult.

You can say that but I would reply that is no more insulting than a lot of stuff that gets posted here every day without comment including, I would argue, the post i was directly replying to. The only difference is who's sacred cows are getting gored. As for accusing me of being "long winded" do you know what forum you're posting to?

Simply put, If had intended for my post to be insulting, it would have more closely mirrored that of FacelessCraven @FCfromSSC only I would not have displayed the admirable charity and restraint that they have thus far.

From just upthread:

“For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.”

Teachers: "We totally figured out how to teach poor black kids! we just didn't like doing it, so we decided to not teach them instead, figuring that ought to work just as well!"

HBD: "As this example clearly shows, teaching poor black kids just isn't possible."

You dumb fuckers it's right fucking there youHNNNNNNNNNGGGGGG!

But it's fine. It's fine! We can just go back to discussing how valuable our existing institutions are, and how we should centralize more of our lives under their direct control.

I know right? Welcome to my world.

Is English your mother tongue?

It isn't mine, and I don't know how to spell English words. I'm somehow capable of it, but I don't remember how I learned (it must've been at school but I don't remember anything about the method other than that they had us copy words a lot), and I could not describe the rules.

Dutch spelling is regular. The method of teaching kids to read essentially hasn't changed in over a century. It involves learning the sounds that letters make and then sounding them out, but that's a lot easier when it's pretty much always the same except for loanwords.

I'm confident I could teach a kid to read without any pre-made teaching materials at all, even though I have no training other than my own literacy - in Dutch. Not in English though, even though I'm personally just as literate in English. I couldn't teach a cooperative English-speaking adult to read. I have no conscious idea what I'm doing when I write in English.

For me primary form of English is written, and I know spelling much better than pronunciation

It isn't mine, and I don't know how to spell English words. I'm somehow capable of it, but I don't remember how I learned (it must've been at school but I don't remember anything about the method other than that they had us copy words a lot), and I could not describe the rules.

I remember learning about four types of English vowel sounds: open, closed, vower-r, vowel-r-e. Alternatively, there's something like the 56 easy rules of English spelling, which cover ~83% of words.

And I remember being forced to memorize the rules and write out which ones applied to common words in catholic elementary schools. I hated it at the time but it was probably the best way to learn.

In French, which I learned via whole-word, I cannot read without a pronunciation guide, although I can speak well enough to converse with a native speaker.

English is my second language. But when I went through elementary school there was a big push to teach kids English. So there was a kind of parallel thing going on where kids who weren't even alphabetically literate in their first language were doing the ABC's in English.

I'm pretty sure you could teach an English speaker how to read English by just slightly modifying the way you learned to read Dutch and you wouldn't have many problems. Learning to read might be very important but it's ultimately not hard. Literally, kids can do it. It just takes a little time.

So there was a kind of parallel thing going on where kids who weren't even alphabetically literate in their first language were doing the ABC's in English.

Something similar goes on in Ireland where Irish class material will be so much more advanced than foreign language classes despite the fact that most people don't have it as a first or second language. Spanish class will have you learning verb conjugations while in Irish class you'll be studying poetry and reading plays. It's common to hear complaints from people saying they retained more French than Irish after leaving school.

As an American, I learned a few interesting English grammar rules (most memorably, proper use of the subjunctive) from my AP foreign language class because high-school English instruction is almost entirely literature and writing.

This sounds somewhat similar to what you are saying about Irish, with the caveat that English is nigh-inescapable to Americans, even those who speak other languages at home.

A lot of the discussions we have here hinge on public policy. The default assumption is that our institutions run in at least a quasi-rational fashion: that methods are tested, the results recorded, and lessons drawn to improve the systems involved. Obviously no system is perfect, and there will always be flaws, but the system will, even if haltlingly, progress toward greater efficiency. Almost every discussion of public policy, even here, takes this view as an axiom.

No part of the above assumption is accurate enough to base a meaningful discussion on. Our systems do not test theories, record results, or draw lessons. Malpractice leading to screaming disaster might perhaps be locally corrected, but the knowledge so painfully gained does not propagate, and it is routine to see the same ideas implemented a year or two later the next state over. No one, not the workers, not the management, not the politicians, not the academics or journalists and certianly not the voters, is actually both willing and capable to implement any sort of rational approach to any serious public policy question. Our systems drift in circles, guided not by hand and mind, but by the closed-loop human centipede of flattering falsehoods. And this is, amusingly enough, the optimistic state; were the fog of policy dementia to lift, people might demand solutions from a system congenitally incapable of providing them.

Never underestimate the extent that the popularity of an idea hinges on the ease of implementing it. Construction companies promote architects that like boring boxes and say they are superior to neoclassical buildings. School districts like experts that say that they don't need lots of special teachers and instead should include special needs kids in the regular class. If you want to become a star expert, find a way of justifying cutbacks and corner cutting by claiming that the cheap and fast method is superior.

Is it this one? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-not-whole-word-best-teaching-reading/591127/

Also, this: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/the-reading-wars/376990/ (1997! That's how old this war is!)

In an atmosphere rich in simple printed texts and in reading aloud, small children make a wondrous associative leap from knowing the alphabet to being able to read whole words. Their minds receive print as if each word were a Chinese ideogram. If a word is unfamiliar it can be skipped, guessed at, or picked up from context. Phonics theory takes exactly the opposite position: the proper analogy for learning to read is learning music notation, or Morse code, or Braille, in which mastery of a set of symbols comes first.

How do Chinese children learn to read, if their every word is an ideogram? Do they all have abysmal literacy rates, like these "balanced literacy" children from the US?

They also have pinyin. They can spell things out phonetically to get the pronunciation.

1997? Try 1955, when Rudolf Flesch's "Why Johnny Can't Read" was published.

Care to elaborate for the non-Flesch readers amoung us?

He just demonstrated that phonics was, objectively, the best way to teach Anglophone kids to read, and lamented its disappearance in American schools. IIRC, the "see-and-say" method was dominant as early as the 1930s.

Phonological and morphological awareness do seem to be well-correlated with literacy outcomes both in alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages, and there's a lot of meta-analyses which show about the same low-moderate correlation in Chinese primary language learners as in English primary language learners. There's some studies that show cross-language transfer in English/Chinese bilingual households for phonological and morphological awareness, but no such transfer for orthographic awareness, which seems to suggest there's something fundamental about the cognitive process of organizing and mapping the set of graphemes and meaningful constructive subsequences in the written language to its equivalent phonetics and trivial phonetic expansions, which is independent of a language's orthographic characteristics.

In any case, I don't think there's any dispute that written Chinese has semi-consistent phonological and morphological structure. The majority of Chinese characters are horizontally structured phono-semantic compounds with a semantic left radical and a phonetic right radical (maybe 70-80%); around half are phonologically regular regardless of tone; and there's only a few hundred common semantic and phonetic radicals. There's clearly a massive encoding and decoding efficiency achieved through semi-consistent phonological mapping of the orthography.

It's really hard to find trustworthy or low-bias takes on this topic. There's a vivid, unsettled debate about how exactly the Chinese literacy rate improved (from <20% in the 1950s, to ~96% by the 2010s), and to what extent the introduction of simplification, pinyin, etc played a role. People get downright vicious in these discussions because they tend to get deeply involved in Chinese idpol culture wars. The debate has its own Wikipedia page. I don't place that much confidence in my understanding of how it all fits together, especially through the fog of culture war - this is a mind-bogglingly complex topic. My basic understanding is that opinions vary widely, from believing that simplification (and possibly pinyin, significantly more controversial) fundamentally enabled mass literacy, to believing it was purely a result of herculean educational investment and widespread literary access (and even that simplification/pinyin was reformist nonsense or foreign interference), with huge diversity of opinions on the relative weights of every effect within that spectrum. It seems fairly uncontroversial that China pre-1950s did not have widespread educational access, and that what access existed was often printed in traditional characters or unique regional characters that the masses could not feasibly learn without dedicated scholarly investment. The literacy rates are also undisputed. I don't think it has much relevance to the question of how Chinese children today learn to read, but it's nevertheless an interesting sideshow.

How do Chinese children learn to read, if their every word is an ideogram? Do they all have abysmal literacy rates, like these "balanced literacy" children from the US?

First of all, there are only ~3000 commonly used Chinese characters, and they contain patterns which make them easier to memorize once you memorize a few hundred. At one character per day, you can learn all the characters in 12 years of schooling. Realistically, the characters are introduced much faster than one character per day and used much more frequently.

One might compare this to the number of phonetic exceptions in English: I remember 5-10 new words for the spelling test every week, from 1st grade to 9th grade.

Note however that if you are going to memorize English words without learning them phonetically, there are many more English words than Chinese characters. A few orders of magnitude more.

One might compare this to the number of phonetic exceptions in English: I remember 5-10 new words for the spelling test every week, from 1st grade to 9th grade.

Yes, this is one thing I noticed living in China and comparing strings. When you look at English in terms of phonemes rather than characters, it's just as impressive that people learn to read in English-speaking countries as in China.

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