site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24232 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

In general, I like Freddie DeBoer's takes on education. There's a lot of poor thinking about how if only... teachers were better paid, or worse paid; students were tested more, or tested less; unions were weaker, or stronger -- then things would be better. Freddie's there to point out that American public education is exactly what one would expect, given that it is full of Americans.

Enter his newest essay. American schools are exactly what you would expect, given their demographics, there isn't much to be done about that, the teachers and systems are exactly what they need to be, given the constraints they're under, and so... well off parents are racist for preferring schools that are allowed to expel the very lowest performing children.

Wait, what?

My main impression is that when he hears "bad kids," he's somehow thinking of a well meaning black kid who uses AAVE and wants to play sports ball more than learn math, but is in general pretty normal. And in a lot of classrooms it does. But sometimes, in some classrooms, it means a kid freaks out, smashes the other kids' stuff, sometimes hits the other kids, screeches, thrashes around on the floor, and then when they eventually leave, they come back five minutes later with candy in their mouth. None of the other kids are allowed to eat candy in that classroom even if they have it. It doesn't matter, the teacher just mutters to finish the candy quickly and get on with it.

Maybe it's an overrepresented dynamic in schools I've observed, but in addition to outlier events like knife fights, if a kid has the misfortune to be assigned an all day elementary class with a "disregulated" classmate or two, there's literally nothing to do about it, other than changing schools. This is a Problem, actually. It is a Problem with the laws and court decisions, not necessarily individual decisions on a school or even district level, but Freddie is simply wrong in how he talks about the "hardest to educate students." Education Realist was more on track when he wrote about the topic a couple of years ago.

Special ed law originated before medical advances kept children alive in conditions we never anticipated. Imagine just one severely disabled child born at 25 weeks, blind, wheelchair bound, incontinent, and destined to life institutionalization. That child will need an expensive wheelchair, transportation, at least two paras, at a cost of what–$100K or more? Now multiply by what, 100,000 kids? Fewer? more? Now move up the disability chain to kids who can walk, can make it to the bathroom with an escort, but and can’t be put in a classroom without two full-time paras and they’ll disrupt the classroom every day. Or the kids who are locked in an autistic world, screaming if touched. There are still several steps up the chain until you get to the merely low cognitive ability students, the “mildly retarded” as they used to be called, the Downs Syndrome children that IDEA was originally intended to support.

This isn't the same disregulation most parents are pulling their kids out for, since they're in segregated classrooms, but is in fact the "hardest to educate students" that public schools are dealing with. As I recall Freddie did teach actual school at one point, but it looks like he was teaching high school composition, and for all his research, still underplays what the bottom of even normal suburban public schools are like.

The left-wing worldview does not accept the imposition of order, not even at the classroom level. Order is force, force is violence, and violence by authority is unacceptable in any and all cases. Keeping order in the classroom so poor kids could learn is not even considered as an option. Freddie can be right about any number of inconsequential facts, but it won't matter because he cannot bring himself to sanction a smack on the ass to a rambunctious child.

The left would rather have violent schools in which children kill each other regularly than impose discipline. They'd rather have drug addicts shitting in their vaunted public transport than do anything to stop it. They'd rather people get stabbed to death by psychotics with ten thousand felony convictions than be so mean as to snatch them up and jail them.

The left would rather have violent schools in which children kill each other regularly than impose discipline.

Buddy, how many times do we have to tell you to stop doing this?

When you post these beer can boo-thoughts, you start spewing transparent nonsense and anger. There is a form of argument in which "The left would rather have violent schools in which children kill each other regularly than impose discipline" could be expressed as the predictable outcome of their revealed preferences, but that would be too much work for you, so you just say crap like this, which no leftist would agree with. So is every leftist literally in favor of violent schools in which children kill each other, and they are all lying if they say they aren't? Maybe you actually believe that is the case, but if you do, you need to bring some pretty solid evidence for such an inflammatory claim.

Here is your rubric: if you are claiming every (or almost every) member of group X believes something, and you know damn well they would all say "No we don't," then that's a clue that you are arguing something that is, at best, contested and you can't just assert it because you like talking about how terrible group X is. (I'd give you a few "shoe on the other foot" tests but you know them, we both know what they look like, you'd probably just brush them aside.)

Really and truly, I want you argue better and stop doing this. Not because I am a tender-hearted lefty who is offended that you probably lump me in with the people who want stabbed children and shitting on buses, but because there is a reason we have rules against naked culture warring and boo outgrouping. It degrades the discourse. It contributes nothing of value, sheds no light, explains nothing. It's just tribal signaling. You will get upvotes from people thinking "YEAH!!! You tell 'em! Fuck leftists!" and maybe that gives you a dopamine hit, but no one (I hope) really wants the board to become the kind of place where that's all people are doing (and if we allow it, that's all people will do).

Stop this.

I'm holding off on banning you because like most of your posts of this nature, it's just a minor instance of boo-lighting by itself, and we really don't want to ban someone who's a long-time member since the olden days, who often does write things of value. But you are now in that "How often do we let him keep getting away with this?" zone.

I mean, Freddie's main argument in the essay is that:

  1. Public schools have terrible metrics.
  2. A bunch of RWers want to abolish public schools, because of the terrible metrics.
  3. But public schools don't have terrible metrics because the schools suck. They have terrible metrics because they're the school of last resort for the children who suck.
  4. So abolishing the public schools won't fix anything; those children will still suck wherever they are.

That argument holds water.

There's a secondary argument, more implied than stated, which goes:

  1. Public schools have bad metrics.
  2. This makes non-sucky parents pull their non-sucky kids out of public schools.
  3. This very effect, rather than the quality of teaching, is why public schools have bad metrics, in a vicious circle.
  4. Hence, non-sucky parents are wrong to do this.

This argument does not hold water; propositions 1-3 are correct, but while parents doing this solely for quality-of-teaching are indeed making a mistake, there are two other valid reasons to do it: 1) their children could be harmed by the sucky kids, 2) the sucky kids may directly impair the ability of non-sucky kids to learn (I hear this one is particularly a thing recently in the USA due to various court cases and policies). I can certainly sympathise with reason #1, having had an arm broken and a tooth knocked out at one of the bad kind of public schools (my mother actually predicted that I'd lose teeth before I went there), if perhaps not reason #2 (I think better classroom control is/was in place in Australia, at least during the late 90s-early 00s when I was there).

I will note that there is a socialist solution to the problem of roughhouse public schools, and one that's fairer to poor-but-non-delinquent kids who beat the lottery - remove the delinquents from the normal public school system and put them in less-common reform schools that explicitly only serve delinquents (and possibly have the required infrastructure to stop the delinquents beating each other up). I have a vague feeling that this isn't permitted in the USA due to the aforementioned court cases and civil rights laws, although I don't know the particulars and could be wrong. But yeah, were that solution in place, Freddie would be mostly right about the secondary argument.

Reform schools totally exist in the US, but due to incentives of the US system(that is, very high parental say) they're basically only for kids who would otherwise be in Juvie.

I think most of the problems that crop up in K-12 education come from the one-size fits all nature of our system. We educate every kid as though he’s a completely blank slate, with the end goal that every single kid must go to a 4-year university program. This isn’t how any of it works. Kids, heck, adults are different in ability, temperament, interests, skills and attention span. As such, I think the model of tracking kids into paths would work far better. That kid who disrupts classes every day doesn’t benefit from the pretense that he’s going to have the potential to graduate from a STEM program or even get a 4 year degree. That kid’s future is getting on the “do not rehire” list at Walmart. The only thing happening because we insist on the make-believe that we’re throwing away a future from a kid is that the children of parents not rich enough to a private school get screwed out of their education. Put that kid into a special needs school, teach them to their ability. If they’re capable, teach them skills they can use for the work they can actually do (probably fast food or janitor jobs or something). Put the slower learning kids in a track that teaches them skills they can use, and go up the ladder until you reach the scholar level where the kids are smarter than most of their peers and teach them to be engineers or scientists or lawyers or computer programmers.

Other things that I think would help in general are uniforms and cellphone bans, perhaps getting better teachers, and going back to the basics of phonics and mathematics. Don’t pass kids along until they master their studies.

You will, of course, find out that everyone gets put into college tracks, because it's easier than listening to parents complain.

Technically, you can get a non-college track high school diploma in the modern US. From a public school, of course- parents that pay for private school expect as a matter of course access to college. Admins don't want to do it, of course, but you can get one.

I think at least 3/4 of the problem here is culture. For whatever reasons, anything other than “go to a four year university” is seen as unacceptable to most people. The schools, even public schools, love to brag about kids in college prep, and the rates of kids getting into college. They have a few other courses at least around me, but they’re mostly afterthoughts— the equipment never gets updated, the teachers are barely interested, it’s seen by parents and kids as lesser than academic work. And really, most parents would at least in private consider a child who wanted to go into skilled trades as disappointing and not living up to potential. They’re embarrassed to tell other parents about it.

It might be a waste for a truly top 20% intellect to do HVAC. But for most people, it’s really a better option than the typical office drone. More opportunities for owning a business, less exposure to AI replacement. The money is respectable and the pot is sweetened significantly by the fact that instead of taking on thousands in debt for the education, you get paid to learn the trades. There are downsides, but there are downsides to everything.

Pretty big tribal difference here. Of course, the tribe which genuinely does see becoming an electrician as disappointing compared to the lower pink collar jobs which absorb excess college graduates controls the schools. Red tribe parents don't mind the idea, electrician and HVAC tech and plumber are ordinary jobs like teacher or accountant or cop, and income and personal behavior are what counts for success, not education.

Most federal states in Germany have or used to have a three-track model. When it was designed back during the Kaiser's time the idea was that track one ought to take like 60% of the student population and instill mostly the basics, track 2 should take 30% and give the foundations for becoming a low-to-mid-level engineer, skilled tradesman, competent basic white collar worker etc., and track 3 the elite rest destined to go to the top of society.

Nowadays, due to the exact drift you describe, track 1 is for the dumbest of the dumb, track 2 for the ever so slightly less dumb, and everyone else crams into track 3. Some states have recognized this reality and simply abolished the formal distinction between the three types and have allowed every school, even those from the former track 1, to hand out the necessary certification for tertiary education, which they of course eagerly give to basically everyone (the average grades for this Abitur exam, the German equivalent to the French Baccalauréat or the UK's A-Levels, have skyrocketed over the past decades, even as a bigger percentage of the population takes it and overall scores in more objective tests like PISA have declined pretty badly).

The only way a tracked system works out is if the people maintaining it are willing to accurately filter students. Since there are about a trillion arguments that move typical Western minds, particularly those attracted to the education system, to immediately stop doing this ("it's too early set someone's life in stone!", "the only reason I sucked in school is because my teachers were mean/racist/sexist" etc. pp.), no institutional (re)form will fix this unless the overall culture moves back to being fine with distinguishing people very clearly on their revealed cognitive abilities.

Technical high schools and community colleges are relatively popular, but they're for the average student, or above average working class, not the trouble makers.

Put the slower learning kids in a track that teaches them skills they can use, and go up the ladder until you reach the scholar level where the kids are smarter than most of their peers and teach them to be engineers or scientists or lawyers or computer programmers.

And the moment the lower tracks have way more black kids per capita, half of the country will be screaming bloody murder and demanding we go back to the way things were (with some extra affirmative action tacked on to compensate for our racism in even attempting such a program).

Maybe it's an overrepresented dynamic in schools I've observed, but in addition to outlier events like knife fights, if a kid has the misfortune to be assigned an all day elementary class with a "disregulated" classmate or two, there's literally nothing to do about it, other than changing schools. This is a Problem, actually

There is perhaps one thing parents could do: teach their kids to fight. Starting at a very early age, like age 6, they need to start taking serious martial arts classes, not just tae kwan do for tots or whatever. The Problem kids would be a lot less of a Problem if they were actually punished for their actions, and if the public schools can't do it then the kids have to take matters into their own hands. Instead of being rewarded with candy, the Problem child learns fear that his actions will result in pain. This also helps normal children develop agency and self confidence, as they learn to solve problems for themselves instead of being reliant on public school teachers whose brains have degenerated into a state of permanent childlike mush.

Not to fight. To conspire. You don't need fighting skills to beat someone up five-on-one. You need skills to ensure this happens quickly and without witnesses, that all five of you don't blab and protect each other when questioned.

Do you really want your child to learn how to fight? This will create more problem children, given that teaching your child how to fight involves giving them brain damage

First such a child now is the problem child since they are causing violence for probably little petty reasons.

Second and more importantly learning how to fight means learning how to cause extreme lasting harm.

Here are some basic techniques for fighting for real

  1. Ground and pound: Step one Shoot a double (doesn't work great in concrete so you have to use a slightly different setup) step 2 BLAST double through them, step 3 go to Dope mount, step 4 lay down elbows into their skull until your opponents skull breaks.

  2. The batman: Step 1 Imanari roll, step 2 end up in Cross Ashi, step 3 Go into a Z-Lock Step 4: Remove the persons' ability to walk correctly for the rest of their life

Basic fundamental striking causes brain damage, as you can't learn how to fight unless you're practicing against someone who also fights back with real punches and therefore will be taking severe head trauma from just training.

There's a reason 1 in 5 people I did MMA with were sent to Jail for violent crimes like Domestic abuse.

Your last sentence gave me pause. Are you suggesting the reason is the MMA sparring and resultant brain damage? It seems that it may be just as likely that violent sports often attract violent men, violent men act out this violence on whoever is closest, etc.

Nah sorry I should specify It's definitely your explanation If you're violent you'll like doing MMA. But MMA I think makes violent people marginally more violent.

Makes sense. L’appétit vient en mangeant.

  1. fighting tards is a very bad idea, regardless of the rules in place. They’re unpredictable, have hysterical strength, etc.

  2. thats not how it works, your kid goes to suspension for wailing on the LCD kid

The school would rediscover their power to expel violent students and apply it to kiddie-Batman.

What do you think the consequences of your kid beating the shit out of the “special needs neurodivergent” kid in their class are gonna be?

I would hope they'd be smart enough to do it where no teachers or untrustworthy kids are looking, which is not hard to set up in most schools. If they do get caught... probably a stern talking to in the guidance counselor's office. This whole problem starts with schools being extremely unable to really do anything to punish kids.

Well of course it’s a form of anarcho tyranny. For the smart, high potential kid of someone like yourself, beating up another kid might mean missed grades, bad recommendations, getting booted out of semi-mandatory extracurriculars for elite college admissions, and a dimming of their prospects. For the stupid, disruptive, aggressive kid, none of that stuff matters, and no real consequences follow.

Sometimes heroes have to sacrifice their personnal well-being for the greater good of their society.

In case you were wondering what the effects of an oversupply of smart/high potential people looks like for a particular region, here it is.

The stupid, disruptive, and aggressive are actually in socioeconomic undersupply, which is why they alone have the privilege to not be similarly forcibly handicapped if they do that. After that it's just a case of rich get richer.

Were the balance equal, the high potential people would have the social power to hit back; if high potential people were in undersupply, beating one would be similarly against the law.

If/when race is an effective proxy for high/low potential, institutional racism is never far behind. This is why South Africa could do apartheid for so long (and it fell apart just like it did for the rest of the world- high potential people stopped being in deficit and started being in surplus, and as such couldn't sustain their social position), and is why progressives are [publicly] racist against "their own" race. It's merely an attempt to ingratiate oneself with they who circumstances have privileged.

This is also why mass immigration and no-human-is-illegal, intentionally importing this class, sound reasonable as a way to fix this issue. But it turns out that doing this runs up against the privileges of the natives who are in undersupply for the same reason, which is why it is in their interest that they vote for someone who will stop the erosion of their privilege!

In case you were wondering what the effects of an oversupply of smart/high potential people looks like for a particular region, here it is.

You have it reversed. When there are lots of stupid people, stupidity is legally protected by the legions of stupids. There are more stupids today than in the past.

The white percentage of the population has sharply declined. The first census in South Africa in 1911 showed that whites made up 22% of the population. This declined to 16% in 1980,[32] 8.9% in 2011 and 7.65% in 2022

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Africa#Ethnic_groups

There are more stupids today than in the past.

Obvious comment about outgroup midwits, aside, no, there aren't. The cost of labor in Western society being so absurdly high is actually an indication of this- there aren't enough people who will only amount to just enough that you can get away with paying them what their work is worth, so you have to pay them more.

The problem is that most of the high-potential (specifically, as defined by Boomer logic) people are competing for positions that pay less and less every day. It's not so much "elite overproduction" as it is an oversupply of people that can do harder intellectual tasks, so paradoxically they're working those more difficult jobs for less money due to market saturation (and it remains to be seen to what extent AI will devour what remains).

It is that oversupply that has resulted in the complete destruction of this group's human rights. Parenting rights? Gone. Right to self-defense in the places you're forced to go? Gone. Freedom of association? Gone. The pretense that rules could be appealed to? Gone. People didn't get less self-controlled (as crime rates over the last 30 years pretty clearly show); what happened was that the people who could control themselves managed to breed themselves into such oversupply that it's not a scarce resource any more.

This is why this group falls all over itself to paean anti-racist causes, and ruin the lives of those who (quite reasonably) object to those policies- there are too many of them to distinguish naturally between them, so self-oppressing bullshit will be invented such that a distinction can again be drawn (and those doing the selecting can feel morally absolved because they can tell themselves it was about Muh Privilege). This is why purity spirals work.

It's basically what would happen if "take a trade instead" was taken seriously by all of the middle class that go into higher education now- you'd have people performing that trade at a far lower wage relative to what they would get as a mere operator (with no credential)- the operator salary might be less, but not that much less, because most of the wage is coming from the qualification of "is butt at workstation", and the marginal value of intelligence for that task diminishes incredibly quickly.

You can't draw a chief's wage for chief's work if you don't have enough Indians.

But everyone, including the PMC, earns more in purchasing power than they did in all but the very recent past. And 'recent past' here means like, 2014, not 1800. There is no downward pressure on salaries anywhere, it isn't redistribution of jobs driving salary increases- it's prosperity.

I don’t think all of the PMCs are elites. It’s mostly pretense. In fact most of them are specifically useless and don’t have the attention span or the ability to do anything that doesn’t involve “sit at de ask, stare at screen, type up summaries of work other people have done (and write it at a sixth grade level, the people reading the report to summarize the reports written by you and your colleagues don’t read above maybe an 8th grade level)”, and most of their day is taken up by pretending to work and looking busy. They are not inventing new things, they’re basically Confucian Mandarins who exist to churn characters. I don’t think most of them, if presented a problem to solve would be capable of solving it unless the method was something they already knew. They’re doing what they were trained to do at school— fill in worksheets, write book reports, follow the directions their boss told them to.

It’s true we have far too many of these people, but the reason that we have a problem is that we’ve been turning worksheets into a professional career, then invented a program that can do those worksheets.

Obvious comment about outgroup midwits, aside, no, there aren't.

Yes, there are. The statistics are clear on this. How much time have you spent generating all of this thought based on backwards empirics and equations? It's kind of impressive.

Freddie is a textbook example of someone intelligent, pragmatic and willing to accept unpalatable conclusions that others in his socio-cultural milieu won't. The problem is that he's so strongly wedded to his ideology that he still can't see past the blinkers, no matter how hard he tosses and turns. He's looked for his glasses under the light of the nearest lamp, realized that's not ideal and pulled out a torch for a more serious search. Which turns up zilch. He convinces himself that they're nowhere to be found, all while they're sitting perched on top of his head.

I give him plenty of points for being willing to bite bullets that it would be easy for him not to bite, and remain disappointed that he's never going to chew through the whole belt.

I think Freddie's fundamental problem is that he could stop the trolly at any time but that would mean admitting that he made a mistake.

It turns out that privileging equal outcomes at the expense of equal opportunity makes everything worse for everybody.

I have never actually read Freddy DeBoer, maybe I tried to once 5 years ago, but I couldn't get through it, he simply didn't hold my interest the way Scott does in his writing. But this is practically all I ever hear about him. That he has an extremely balanced and accurate view of everything, and all the data, and then he takes complete leftward turn at the 11th hour and says actually the leftists are right on everything. It always sounds like the last 30 seconds of this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8Wwm_eQaUVA&t=200

I really don't think so. He spends most of his energy arguing against the standard progressive school reforms and wokeness. Though he's pulled back on the latter I think because he didn't like the type of fans he was getting.

I don't have the data to argue against you on that. My only data is what I've seen people cross posting here or on ACX threads, maybe half a dozen times or so.

The only article of his I could ever care to read even a sizable chunk of was the one about how most differences in school or school district level outcomes etc. are not due to superior teaching methods or anything like that. It can almost entirely be explained away by selection effects in the composition of the student body.

Other than that I've found most of his articles boring/uninteresting.

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-selection-bias-is-the-most-powerful-force-in-education

Well yes, differences in school performance are almost all down to what percentage of the student body's biological parents are still married to each other. This is why both the Army and the RCC run better schools than states. Any state, including Massachusetts and Mississippi. Percentage of kids living with married biological parents edges out average household income as a predictor, edges out race as a predictor, everything else.

I learned way back in the reddit days that I should add any writer commonly referenced on The Motte to my "never read them"-ignore list.

TheMotte has never recommended you a winner? Ever?

Why do you think that is?

For me it's that I don't really like that sort of really long verbose writing... Except for Scott for some reason. I have no clue why that is. But I guess I like understanding the ideas behind the writing, and I don't appreciate the writing itself. Maybe Scott just has better ideas, that make it worth it to get through, or maybe he has better presentation in some way.

You just have to remember that Freddie is a no joke commie, but at least he is internally consistent. Commies want to level out all playing fields. Most leftists turn into blank slatists because if the low can be raised up that would be a nice world to live in, and "this would be best, therefore it must be possible, anyone who says otherwise is a bigot" is their standard way of seeing the world. FDB is smart enough to know that's bs, so his solution is that the top are therefore genetically lucky and responsible for lifting up the bottom artificially. When he is talking about taking their money and giving it to the bottom that sucks, but its standard commie bs so it kinda goes unremarked on. But he ALSO thinks the top need to pay in terms of giving the bottom wide leeway in annoying them, disrupting them, inconveniencing then, etc since it would be somehow unfair to ask anything of the poor benighted bottom and the glorious top can surely take the hit. He doesn't QUITE go as far as saying the top should grin and bear being beaten, raped, and killed in order to spare the bottom the indignity of being policed but he sure implies it.

But he ALSO thinks the top need to pay in terms of giving the bottom wide leeway in annoying them, disrupting them, inconveniencing then, etc since it would be somehow unfair to ask anything of the poor benighted bottom and the glorious top can surely take the hit. He doesn't QUITE go as far as saying the top should grin and bear being beaten, raped, and killed in order to spare the bottom the indignity of being policed but he sure implies it.

He definitely does not believe this he has many articles arguing against this very idea. So no he doesn't think that and he's very opposed to the leftists that do.

He does, however, believe that a large number of people are effectively too stupid to participate in the modern economy in an economically productive way and thus the conservative pull yourself up by your bootstraps and the liberal educate everyone into smarts are both loosing propositions for a significant portion of the population.

Freddie DeBeoer and Matthew Yglesias were two of the specific people i had in mind when i wrote this a month ago.

"equal outcomes" sounds nice in theory but it leads them to this weird theory of "Justice" where in the morality (or "Justness") of any act or actor is largely if not entirely determined by power differential.

I am surprised that you are surprised. Freddie has always been able to look reality in the face but only up to a certain point. It's easy to forget sometimes, but he really is a literal Marxist, and that informs everything he writes. In the redistributionist world of his dreams, these inequalities would not exist because no one would have the option of selfishly providing a better education for their own children by removing them from environments with disruptive students and taking resources away from those students.

It’s bizarre then because actual communist countries (at least in Eastern Europe) had a very discriminatory high school system. If your child didn’t have the right grades, and you didn’t come from the correct background, they’d be sent off to be a vocational school to become a bricklayer or a janitor at the age of 14.

The acceptance rates of gymnasiums were very low, even if they significantly favoured students from a proletariat background, and the curriculum at engineering high schools was on par with a modern undergrad university course.

If you’re against selective public high schools and try to mix students of different academic abilities in a classroom, it seems to me like the American system is exactly what you’d get, where private and charter schools act as a substitute of public high schools with selective admissions. In what world would you want to put a 13 year old who knows calculus with one that’s functionally illiterate in the same class? They need to be taught different materials at different speeds otherwise you’re wasting precious public money paying for one to do nothing in class, either because they have already learned the material or because they can’t follow it. Each according to his ability, each according to his need, no?

Yeah, but actual communist countries have very little in common with US Marxist’s recommendations. Props to them for figuring out the Soviet system didn’t work, I guess, even if they’re wrong about the whys and wherefores.

Education, at least in STEM fields, was one of the few areas where the Soviet system arguably outcompeted the American one though. They went from a society of illiterate farmers to dominating in Math olympiads, chess, getting most of the early milestones in the space race, and had more women in STEM than probably a lot of the West has today. Quite impressive given the degree to which their economy was crippled by central planning and ideological suppression.

The soviet ability to keep up with the US technologically despite ideological suppression indicates that their education system was good, yes. But modern US leftists are already rejecting everything else about the soviet system(because the system as a whole did not work).

Actual communist countries also didn't allow people to shoplift freely, consume narcotics in the street, walk into their countries by the millions and demand welfare. Lots of things become possible when you have full immunity from Progressive social critique.

Speaking plainly, the problem isn't figuring out that the calculus kid and the illiterate kid shouldn't be in the same classroom. The problem is that the entire educational establishment is absolutely dedicated to keeping them in the same classroom, and is almost entirely insulated from any form of consequences for the bad outcomes their desires produce. It is almost certainly easier to burn the entire system down than it is to get them to stop sabotaging the system we pay them absurd amounts to administrate.

The problem is that the entire educational establishment is absolutely dedicated to keeping them in the same classroom

I don't think that's actually the case. It's more accurate to say that the educational elite (who design curriculums and whatnot) is dedicated to that. These are the same people who keep thinking that "open classrooms", major emphasis on group work and so on are a must have even though the people on the ground tell them those are just making everything shit.

The phenomenon that was written about it Coming Apart and its consequences...

As someone who was educated in semi-elite schools for most of my childhood/college, I recall the real kick in the teeth I felt in my 20s when I learned, through experience, that people who actually obeyed rules and put in honest effort into improving oneself was a rarity, rather than semi-common (still likely a minority or barely a majority in the schools I attended). People who grew up in even more elite institutions and then stayed only in elite institutions professionally, surrounded primarily by other people with similar experiences, just don't seem to have the capacity to understand just how dysfunctional vast swathes of society are, and how much of keeping society running is making sure their dysfunction doesn't cause too much damage. It seems like just another case of the apex fallacy, which seems endemic in the culture wars, including gender relations, race relations, and immigration.

Now, one possible point of hope there is that it's easier than ever before to see direct evidence of the actual lives of the actual people with whom one doesn't share an environment. I've seen people reference this with respect to the popularization of bodycam footage since they became near-ubiquitous among police forces post-Floyd. However, people - including myself - had foolish, naive, stupid, idiotic ideas about the proliferation of social media bringing people of different ideas and principles together, when, AFAICT, it has done the exact opposite. And generative AI adds a new wrinkle as well. After all, you can bring a horse to the water, but you can't make it drink. So I'm pretty pessimistic.

I felt in my 20s when I learned, through experience, that people who actually obeyed rules and put in honest effort into improving oneself was a rarity, rather than semi-common

Quite often the rules are set up to make those mutually exclusive.

cough real communism hasn't been tried yet man cough

shoots up

Edit: Sorry, effort incoming

The rebuttal to "actual communist countries have tried..." is often some flavor of "actually that's not a real communist country...". When pressed further, the rebuttal expands to "actual communism has never been tried because it was hijacked by..."

Despite the first two sentences in this comment, I don't actually believe hard drug users are debating the merits of communism on the street while shooting up. I do believe self identified communists have an idealized, unrealistic belief in the ability of communism to mitigate the ugly and selfish parts of human nature. Which is why communism always ends up in some sort of failure state, and why we should carefully critique any social planning recommendations from communists.

More effort than this, please.

It is almost certainly easier to burn the entire system down than it is to get them to stop sabotaging the system we pay them absurd amounts to administrate.

Gove's reforms in England, as well as the recent improvements to reading education in Mississippi and other southern red states copying them suggest that it is less difficult than you would expect.

I'm ignorant about Mississippi, but I can only assume that the teacher's unions don't have the power they have in NY and Chicago.

That's not really an easily fixable problem once entrenched. Though the one in Chicago seems to have burned its popularity due to being particularly brazen with Brandon Johnson. On the other hand, they got what they wanted.

I don't think those examples actually touch on the point of difficulty, which is convincing every state to copy Mississippi in terms of whatever it is they did that caused improvements.

If Mississippi consistently produces better educated people than other states that sounds like a pretty huge advantage. I can imagine parents would want to move there to secure a better future for their kids, and companies would like to recruit the people living there.

That seems like a pretty good incentive for other states to follow suit.

I doubt it. School quality being better than other states' doesn't imply producing better educated people than other states, it implies producing a better delta in educated status compared to other states, controlled for the children's potential ceiling, and my guess is that both the floor and the ceiling for children in Mississippi are lower than for most other states. It is also but one of many, MANY dimensions by which parents measure their likelihood of moving to the state, and my guess is that Mississippi has a lot of negatives in other very important dimensions. Furthermore, even if those weren't true, this is the kind of thing that would take at least a decade to see confirmation on any meaningful differences in output, which means even more time before people start moving in meaningful numbers, and that gives plenty of time for people in other states to find and come up with excuses for why the differences in output, as measured by the education level of public HS graduates, isn't due to Mississippi's specific methods of educating.

There are more ideological inputs that went into the modern American left than just Marxism/"tankie" European communism. The universalist egalitarian HBD denial seems to be East Coast Christianity (embodied by the likes of Quakers); there is a current of native anti-intellectualism that I can't pinpoint the source of (remember how the country had to be dragged kicking and screaming into harder universal schooling by the Sputnik crisis); and "you can be anything you want!" denial of differences in individual talent is perhaps just mass-produced Hollywood fantasy.

I feel like you are projecting your map of local German politics onto the US in a way that doesn't really apply.

Support for both Racial-identity politics and racial discrimination are pretty much an exclusively left-wing/Democrat phenomenon in the US.

I would like to think I know both well enough to distinguish between them.

Support for both Racial-identity politics and racial discrimination are pretty much an exclusively left-wing/Democrat phenomenon in the US.

Not that I strictly agree, but I am not aware of making any claim that contradicts this, unless you think that Christianity in the US is definitionally not left-wing (which I think would be false, and the East Coast universalist-leaning denominations are my specific counterexample).

Its not that "Christianity in the US is definitionally not left-wing" so much as the left in the US defines itself (at least in part) through its opposition to "Christian Moralism".

The sort of "The universalist egalitarian HBD denial" you describe has little to no influence on the US Left and is overwhelmingly associated with the religious right and so-called "Moral/Silent Majority".

The sort of "The universalist egalitarian HBD denial" you describe has little to no influence on the US Left and is overwhelmingly associated with the religious right and so-called "Moral/Silent Majority".

I think even before we get to questions relating to HBD, we have the fact that the right treats inequality of outcomes differently than the left. Thomas Sowell mentioned how there are tons of arbitrary inequalities. in the modern world such as mountain vs lowland, first vs. later born, birth month, and a bunch of others. Middlemen minorities who succeed despite often being discriminated against are another example of inequality despite there being no discrimination in favor of, of there is discrimination against, the middlemen. The standard American conservative position is 'There are tons of inequalities in the world, and if there is a clear injustice it should be remedied, but we can't rip up society to try the quixotic task of making everyone equal."

If you take that position, instead of the position of trying to remedy all inequalities, whether HBD is true or not doesn't really matter. If you aren't gong to uproot society to try and force equal outcomes, the presence of a gap between two groups being environmental or genetic doesn't really change how society and the people within it should relate to each other.

For the record I'm not ignoring you, I just agree with a much of what you've said and don't have anything to add.

As recently as Obama, Democratic presidents also made a show of their Christian beliefs and church attendance, and even in the '90s 90% of US adults self-identified as Christian. Do you think the "left in the US" popped into existence ex nihilo after that, freshly importing the belief system of the Soviet Union and throwing away everything that the >=40% who must have voted for them while considering themselves Christian believed in? There is such a thing as intellectual lineage, including from systems that someone now disagrees with. For centuries, Christians and Jews had nothing but occasionally murderous disdain for each other, but Christianity at no point denied straight up copying half of its holy book from the Jews, either. For a more spicy example, many a red-blooded American right-winger is quick to point out how the Nazis were more formally a National Socialist German Workers' Party, but there is little denying that they defined themselves (at least in part) through their opposition to communism!

Note that I said "Christian Moralism" not "Christianity" the need/desire to move beyond Christian morals and replace them with something more "rational" "scientific" or "pure" has been a core theme of left-wing ideology for over a century. And for all this time it has been the "right" that pushes back.

Yes Nazis defined themselves in part through thier opposition to Communism but also through thier opposition to what we would describe today as "traditional western values" both Hitler in his own manifesto and his contemporary critics like Lewis wrote at length about his disdain for the "slave morality" that was/is Christianity.

Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian Art School Socialist of ambiguous sexuality who thought Jews and Billionaires were to blame for all of the world's ills and wrote positivity about the Islamic revolutionaries of his day. Fact is that if Hitler circa 1938 were to be Isekaied into the present day, he would be an immediate darling of the left-wing podcast circuit.

If the Nazis fighting Communists makes the Nazis a right wing movement, would you also describe Trotsky as "right wing" because he fought against Stalin and the Bolsheviks?

You don't have to go back to Obama to find democrats making a big show of how Christian they are- Joe Biden's mass attendance was a regular slow news day story.

More comments

There are more ideological inputs that went into the modern American left than just Marxism/"tankie" European communism

The liberal meritocratic side of the party may need naive blank slateism more than the communists.

I don't necessarily have a problem with the argument that this is tax money, redistribution is the best form of distribution, and the Public doesn't care how aggravating your childhood is. Well, I'd rather have even more niche schools than charter friendly states currently have, but it's a valid preference. My main problem with the current article is:

Parents, credulous towards this propaganda and often already looking for excuses to separate their children from poor kids and students of color, pull their kids out of public schools.

Which is entirely unproven, and more snide than he usually is. What if it's not that the kids are poor, but that they're flailing around in the school entrance, screaming their heads off? (I've seen this) What if it's not that they're of color, but that they're pacing around relentlessly, stealing everyone's school supplies, tearing up their papers, for hours at a time? (I've seen this) What if your child has a disability, and their also disabled classmate keeps pulling her by the hair, and the staff are all wearing helmets and shin guards, because the classmate kicks them and throws things at their heads, but your child doesn't have those protections, and isn't able to protect herself because she's a six year child with Down's syndrome? (I've seen this)

I don't mind Freddie having his Marxist policy preferences, as long as he shows that he knows how disruptive the most disruptive 5% of children are.

This is going to sound messed up, but can we (if we update laws) reasonably not educate these children? As medical advances in life saving technology improve, we are investing more on a slim minority of children, instead of the education of all children as a whole. I have no idea about how this would be implemented, maybe a child would have to take a basic test of some sort to prove worthy of educational investment, I suppose. We are not a post scarcity society that can infinitely provide health care at taxpayer expense when our national debt is constantly increasing. It's just leaving a debt to future generations, kicking the can down the road.

There's a sense in which we don't educate them, certainly. In my preferred world, the ones who aren't expected to live independently would have a pleasant sensory environment prioritized over being in a school setting, freaking out at "transitions" every hour or so. We could build some gardens with greenhouses for what we currently spend on specialists, and have them hang out enjoying the pleasant sensory experience.

My main impression of why we don't is that if they're in a normal school, with normal administrators stopping in and checking on them now and then, and normal specials teachers trying to engage with them, it will be obvious if their minders become weird and abusive towards them. Whereas if they're in a completely different environment, everyone might just spiral into even more misery and degradation, even if there are gardens.

Those gardens sound pretty nice, something like that with a pleasant sensory environment seems a worthwhile goal. It's essentially a really early retirement home - and it could be pitched to parents as the best choice for the children if it was well-run.

My mom had a 40 year career in essentially Special Education. She spent the last 25 years in a niche Private School that was essentially designed as 'the special education school for upper-middle+ children between 5th to 10th percentile in educational capability plus those with behavioral issues that made them difficult to educate but not actively dangerous' to begin with. That niche was a great spot for the first 15 or so years she was there, and generally the school would get most students up to like a 5th-grade educational level which enabled them to work a minimum wage role and kinda acted as a finishing school otherwise to make it less socially obvious.

Then a combination of factors hit. Upper-Middle+ economy eroded a bit/started valuing private education less, so a lot of the name-brand good private schools who'd happily offload their lower kids onto the private school in the good times started dropping their bottom thresholds a bit and/or bringing special education classes into their schools. As a result, the selective school had to dig deeper on their waiting lists which started increasingly hit those that my mom essentially implied were just not productively educatable. There were also some legal changes that meant that schools had to actually trial all applications on the waiting list, which causes perverse incentives with special education since a lot of the issues that lead to you putting your 2 year old's name down for a high school slot are ones that are very apparent/major and tend to slot you into the very bottom tier.

This was due to some parents managing to sue another school for discrimination for dismissing their child out of hand where they'd essentially made a read that the child was absolute bottom percentile and that they'd be better suited for the lower tier of education (which is perfectly fine and well-resourced but most parents aren't really capable of understanding why/what their child is being filtered on) which suits the like 0th-5th percentile. The schools being able to largely sort this themselves saved a ton of stress and issues in the system previously. But in her experience parents are more interventionalist on behalf of the lowest tier of kids (which frequently isn't really to their benefit. If a person's mental is 3 and they're gonna be there for the rest of their life there's really not much you can do aside from keep them entertained and engaged which is what the lowest tier services are pretty good at doing) and the legal situation now makes it a lot messier to sort.

Seems like people will pay for the illusion that their child is not special needs, even if they are. Probably would be a better use of resources to save that money in an index fund managed by a trust, but maybe the children already have that and money is no object for some parents.

This discussion makes me often think about Forrest Gump, where the titular character's mother is presented as being heroic for prostituting herself to the school superintendent in exchange for allowing Forrest, despite being officially tested as having something like 75 IQ, to attend classes with everyone else, because "he deserves the same education as any other kid" or something like that. The film also, of course, featured the same kid, who needed braces to walk, just one day suddenly becoming capable of running, not only like any other kid, but to a level enough to make him the star running back to what seemed like a high level college football team, despite having zero other football skills.

I'm always highly skeptical of the whole "we must manipulate fiction because fiction inevitably, implicitly, unconsciously manipulates people's beliefs about reality" crowd, but I think there may be a grain of truth in their claims.

he deserves the same education as any other kid

Which is an indication that society is at a point where the educated are in oversupply. He deserves it precisely because it no longer makes a difference, and at that point the pageantry of education is what matters: a costly signal from the group in oversupply meant to distinguish themselves as "one of the good ones". Which is important when there are too many of you.

The US hit that point in the '60s, and Forrest Gump is a period piece.

The Telepathy Tapes was one of the more popular podcasts in 2024 and it's obviously complete bullshit but for spiritually minded and hopeful parents/family of a severely autistic child it's something that takes a terrible situation and gives a shining ray of hope. The same thing with facilitated communication despite all evidence it's a hoax continues to pop up over and over.

It's emotional, and understandable. Accepting the tragedy that your kid can't talk or understand you and it's not fixable is very difficult. And telling these very emotionally driven and loving parents that it's too bad and education is a waste is an awful experience on its own, and that's if you even manage to convince them which you probably won't.

There are some snake oil salesman profiting from the unrealistic hopes of these parents, and in the kind of society I prefer they would be charged with fraud, the schemes exposed to the public, and lashed Singapore-style.

Maybe we can't educate all the children to the ideal, but we can try to protect them and their families from predators.

society I prefer they would be charged with fraud, the schemes exposed to the public, and lashed Singapore-style.

Good luck with that when a substantial portion of the population believes in the claims. You're not gonna be charging the psychics like Uri Geller or the Ghost Hunters or the Ancient Aliens people or chiropracters or "natural herbal medicines" or other psuedoscientific whack anytime soon because a substantial portion believes it. Just take vitamin pills for instance, the FDA tried to regulate them a few decades ago as medicine and consumer backlash forced them to stop.

More comments

I mean it's also a multi-barreled thing. There's parents with kids in the bottom 1st percentile who won't accept that their kid isn't really going to progress beyond toddlermode and that it's best to focus on enrichment and low-level socialization. There's also parents with like 10th percentile kids where a good outcome is 'achieves enough to be able to reasonably hold a stocker job at Walmart' where they insist on trying to handle them like there's a reasonable chance of them directing the family business on their own.

Also a peculiarity my mom observed a lot was the amount of cases where it was two intelligent parents who'd inevitably throw the occasional major autistic child from overlapping their own recessive tendencies. Probably a byproduct of the socio-economic filtering that the school had, but she saw a lot of Doctor/Doctor older parent couples.

Interesting bit with the doctor-doctor couples. Doctors should know the risks best with maternal age and major autism risks, I heard about it from a friend in the first year of medical school classes. Apparently it wasn't in the textbooks but the lecturer wanted to emphasize the risks because many doctors delay family to focus on their studies. By the time the subspecialty doctors are established in their careers they are 35+ on the young side.

Then again I have a family member who miscarried during her (now illegal) 100+ hours per week residency, so there's the risk of high stress pregnancies too.

A bit higher risk for older fathers than for older mothers, if I am not incorrect.

Not literally just Doctor-Doctor but yeah a lot of mid-thirties parents where they're both in high-intellect careers and both have vague spectrumatic inclinations.

It's a hard sell, emotionally and ideologically speaking. Education is meant to be for everyone, and the entire point of making it mandatory and free is so the children from the weakest backgrounds get a level playing field with the rich kids. Not educating the very weakest is counterproductive to this ideal.

Besides, you run into the problem that society is structured around school taking care of the kids for the majority of the workday. Forcing the kid out of school likely means the family has to take care of it, and a lot of parents simply won't be able to do this while also holding down a job. There just aren't enough hours in the day.

How about a Montessori-like system, where students progress through classes at their own speed (instead of age)? They would still interact with similarly-aged students in social activities like meals, except disruptive students who are bothering others would be a separate group (who would be assigned some form of therapy).

Self contained social education classes are often like that in some respects, though they need. lot of help still with things like bothering each other and toileting.

How about a Montessori-like system, where students progress through classes at their own speed (instead of age)? They would still interact with similarly-aged students in social activities like meals, except disruptive students who are bothering others would be a separate group (who would be assigned some form of therapy).

It pains me to sound like a midwit, but it's the question of legibility to the state. The state considers education its business, and it can't deal with complexity at scale.

For a less James Scott-pilled take, you can totally do this with charter schools, but they suffer from self-selection bias.

Maybe they can with online resources like Khan Academy. They’ve gotten much better very recently (the latest improvement being one-on-one LLM tutors), so schools haven’t yet adapted.

Then, teachers only must ensure students follow the rules and answer rare questions, strictly less than they do now.

Someone who can follow Khan Academy is probably at least 10th percentile in public education, and would be fine in a regular remedial class. They might have an IEP, but it'll just say things like they should sit near the teacher and have extra time on tests. Perhaps an extra study hall and interventionist time.

I am skeptical of the whole "encouraging children's natural interests instead of formal education" part, but I do like the idea of segregating students into different groups based on their abilities or how they act in the classroom. I am biased due to being the kind of kid who would have greatly benefitted from the bottom half of the class being shifted into different grades though. I think it would still be a hard pill to swallow for broader society.

At the end of the day, this system will benefit the best students the most, and it seems likely that the students would form cliques based on whether they are in the good or the bad class. The best students are usually from good socioeconomic backgrounds, so this will easily be spun as discrimination and enforcement of the existing social order. Limiting social mobility, putting disadvantaged groups further behind, etc.

On the other hand, the new system only needs to be better than what we currently have. Having the school environment be destroyed by a handful of kids that obviously have no business being there, seems overall worse than excluding said students from normal teaching.

I am skeptical of the whole "encouraging children's natural interests instead of formal education" part

The students would still be required to take core subjects, just at different speeds. Although I also think there should be more electives, by having one teacher administering multiple (with the help of online resources).

At the end of the day, this system will benefit the best students the most, and it seems likely that the students would form cliques based on whether they are in the good or the bad class.

Sure, although I imagine there will be some exceptions. Partly because the less academic students may be more “cool”.

The best students are usually from good socioeconomic backgrounds, so this will easily be spun as discrimination and enforcement of the existing social order. Limiting social mobility, putting disadvantaged groups further behind, etc.

Unfortunately yes, even though it’s supposed to be exclusively based on merit.

However, if a non-disruptive student or their parent really wants to be in a class above their level, I think it should happen. If they struggle, some of their assignments should be replaced with those from their actual level and between, to try to prevent them from falling behind, but if they continue to insist they can stay. That may slightly alleviate complaints, because the students in the lower sections are there partly by choice (albeit partly by encouraged default).

I also support allocating extra resources to students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, especially those in upper-level classes.

exclusively based on merit.

Merit is just very limited when it comes to kids. They don't have as much agency as adults, so their abilities are often a reflection of how involved their parents are. If my parents help me with my homework and feed me healthy meals, I will obviously have a natural advantage over kids for whom this isn't the case. It seems really hard to solve this with extra funding. Sure you can provide free meals and expertly educated teachers to level the playing field. But good parents is not something that you reasonably buy with money.

So I think any kind of merit based education will run into complains about it favoring kids from good socioeconomic backgrounds. Overall, these children are just going to do better, so granting merit-based benefits will in a way always be a "rich get richer" policy.

Not that this is necessarily disqualifying though. I personally believe that society should encourage skills and hard work in children more than it currently does, so to some extent I am very much in favor of incentives to support these values.

More comments

I do like the ideal that the opportunity of education is meant to be for everyone. But we lack the resources to sustainably achieve that ideal. When we made that educational promise, it was probably assumed that these children were relatively able-bodied. Children with extreme disabilities simply didn't survive previously as the medical tech and knowledge didn't exist. Children with behavioral problems were easier to separate from the group, because we were willing to enforce prosocial behavioral norms. We made that promise for education, and it is time to break that promise because the commitment is greater than our ability. It's not wrong to admit mistakes (just political suicide).

What the ideal should be changed to is, "education funding will be equally split among everyone". We would be tightening up the meaning of reasonable accommodation to be much stricter. So we can redirect funds spent on special education into job training programs and healthier school lunches. We will have better chances of generating healthier and more productive members of society. Decades later we may even generate a surplus with these early childhood educational investments, and we can reevaluate spending more on special education at that time.

My suggestion would have the families shoulder the cost, likely very high, of taking care of their own special-needs children. Will one parent need to quit their job to become a full time caretaker? Yes, that is likely unless their job pays more than enough to hire a caretaker in their place. Is that harsh? Yes, but only from the perspective of a currently-unachievable ideal, which is free public education for all no matter the cost. Perhaps those families should have a federal tax break as a refund of their taxes they paid into education that excludes them from the public system. Essentially a forced public education system opt-out with refund.

Is this politically realistic - no way it's just not happening. But I'm just tossing some ideas up on how we should approach this to maximize educational outcomes (as a society, unfortunately not on an individual basis) in a sustainable way. The result of my exclusion-approach would be that we would have more functionally illiterate, barely hanging to life children. But they were probably going to be a net drain of society anyway, even though we hired multiple full-time servants (special needs educators) to keep them minimally educated.

It's harsh in the same way not having insurance is harsh - people are terrified of being the one to hold the bag. Having a severely disabled child is bad enough with help, let alone when it completely wrecks your life. A lot of people fundamentally shoulder tax as a form of insurance, paying for the (sometimes fictional) feeling of safety that comes from knowing the state will step in if things ever get really, really bad.

I guess my proposed tax refund is like the home insurance company telling you - sorry because of (wildfire, flood, etc) risk your home is uninsurable and we are refunding the balance of your policy. I have no doubt many lives will be ruined by the high costs of caring for severely disabled children. But having children comes with risk, and that risk was an individual choice unless a woman was raped and she was unable to access abortion. We spread the increasingly higher cost of special needs children over society instead of the primary responsibility which should be the parents.

Is this politically realistic - no way it's just not happening.

I'm sorry, I didn't read your full post properly. My point was broadly that I think the number of takers for this policy would be very low even among the normal audience for 'callous but effective' policy. It would likely also further drive down birth rates - the modal outcomes are much more salient to people than the median.

More comments

I'm guessing it would never happen.

Something that's one step more reasonable but would also never happen is kicking them out of public school (one at a time, if necessary) if they can't meet the standards of conduct. That wouldn't necessarily reduce the expenses any, but it would at least let the rest of the kids learn in school.

It would reduce the expense by a lot. A huge part of the reason mainline public school performance per dollar looks bad is because of the immense cost of dealing with special ed kids, which private and charter schools get to avoid. Worse, the additional funding schools receive does not really cover the additional cost of special ed kids, so it also sucks resources away from mainstream. Even worse, the ubiquity of special ed has led to the toxic equilibrium of helicopter parents inventing reasons for their perfectly normal kids to receive accomodations (mostly special treatment like extra time on tests).

The contemporary interpretation of special ed law mandating schools do almost whatever it takes to put students in mainline classrooms is a really big problem.

Yes, many schools have something like a 20% IEP rate.

I imagine "kicking out the kids" would in practice mean "moving them to special ed" or something similar where they can stay for the day (so the parents have time to work) and hopefully learn the skills they need to function in a classroom (or at least not make the day a nightmare for the other kids). In that case money would not be saved, merely moved around. Not providing them with a chance for an education at all due to factors outside their control (mental disabilities, parental neglect, etc.) seems contrary to modern values.

I guess you could maybe do it when they are older though. Expelling a teenager is very different than expelling a 6-year-old. An argument could be made that if a kid is still unwilling to put in effort and constantly disruptive by around age 14 or so, society has done all that could reasonably be expected of it, and from now on the duty is on the parent.

I imagine "kicking out the kids" would in practice mean "moving them to special ed" or something similar where they can stay for the day (so the parents have time to work) and hopefully learn the skills they need to function in a classroom (or at least not make the day a nightmare for the other kids). In that case money would not be saved, merely moved around.

I would expect it to be cheaper to move the unteachable kids to a separate classroom and not bother try to teach them what the normal kids are learning than to keep them in the regular classroom, attempting to teach them, and allowing parents to exploit the system by pretending their ordinarily dull kids are special ed, driving costs up for all.

You need a special ed teacher for the special ed kids. If you pretend that no kids are special ed, you only need the normal teacher and no extra help for all the normal kids. In other words, you save money on the teacher but sacrifice the quality of education that the majority of the class receives. This is bad for the kids and society, but seems good for the school budget in the short term.

I obviously don't know if there are additional costs to having difficult children in a normal classroom. But it seems logical to me that mixing all the kids together lets you save on teachers, meaning that having separate classes for special ed kids would be more expensive.

Why do you expect it to be cheaper?

More comments

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats