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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
Yeah, it's just not possible with the current population's beliefs and political environment. More of a fantasy wish list of policies, laws, and norms that would be nice to have.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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).
Sure, although I imagine there will be some exceptions. Partly because the less academic students may be more “cool”.
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.
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.
I mean sure. But it’s also true that such kids are unlikely to benefit from getting educated at a level at sigma above what a kid in that situation can achieve. And most of the fallout will harm the kids pushed into that situation.
A kid whose background and intelligence make him unlikely to stand out after university starts out kinda fucked. He was basically conned into thinking he could go to university and get a degree and get a 100K a year job doing high level office work. He owes a mortgage on the education he bought at 18 under that impression. Worse, those skills he learned are mostly worthless to him, as he’s too dumb to trade on the skills he was taught at university, but lacks education and experience on jobs he could easily do well in. Worse, years of the education system blowing sunshine up his ass have convinced him that the kinds of jobs that would be at his level.
Imagine a society that basically highly values baseball. We judge a kid on his ability to play baseball, we have every kid trained to play baseball from 5 onward. Every kid is told that he should aspire to become a professional baseball player. Then we tell the kids who suck at baseball that they can do it too. We cheat them through, maybe with a designated hitter, designated runners, etc. the kid honestly believes he’s going to play for the Mets. So he spends thousands on baseball academies, who also want him to keep buying lessons, so everyone is telling him that baseball is his ticket, that he’s good, etc. and other paths are never discussed. No “hey, maybe you should try to be an usher.” He tries, he fails, and has nothing else.
More options
Context Copy link
Substitute “merit” with “ability”.
It’s arguably unfair, but I can’t imagine a solid argument that it’s unjust that doesn’t also justify Harrison Bergeron.
I’m also sure some students would be over and under placed due to conscious and subconscious bias (because not all assignments can be graded on objective criteria, and everybody is biased), which is one reason I leave open the opportunity for a student to manually enroll in a higher class.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
No, sorry I often edit my posts after posting to add new ideas and correct mistakes, I added that political realism part last after you read it the first time.
Yes, birth rates would get crushed more which is undesirable. It wouldn't be the root cause though - that's probably women's education and entry into the workforce. Birth rates would need a different fix if that's even possible.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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 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?
Schools already have special ed teachers, even when the kids are put in mainstream classes, but the win I'd expect is the drop in the number of special ed kids -- once you start segregating them and not trying to teach them the regular stuff, you end the phenomenon of parents of ordinary kids getting a leg up by claiming their kid is special ed. In fact, they'll be incentivized to keep their kids OUT of the special ed system.
You're conflating two completely different issues.
'My Kid has X condition so they get more time on exams' and 'My Kid has X conditions so they go in the special ed class and learn nothing' are two totally different things. Most of the educational accommodation gaming is more of the former element where something mild is claimed and then leveraged in order to extract extra time, translators, notes, using computers during exams or anything else they possibly can. No sane parent wants to send their kid to the actual special education class if they're not special education.
Precisely. So if you get rid of that middle ground, you reduce the number of students considered in need of accommodation, which works into all those formulas for the amount of resources needed for that crap.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link