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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29307 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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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.

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?

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.

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