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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38229 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Yeah, but it's always been a ridiculous lie. The United States outspends almost every country in the world. The failures of American schools (such that they exist, I would argue that the failures are more with the local demographic stock than with the schools themselves) cannot plausibly be explained by funding at schools that are spending more than Germany, Japan, or our neighbor to the north.

There's some serious slight of hand going on here where your link (by default) only shows US spending on tertiary education but the rest of your comment uses 'school' to mean primary+secondary education. If you instead look at primary and secondary education costs and use % of GDP, the US is just above the middle of the group.

I don't see a toggle for displaying the desired data in the direct link, I assumed people would be able to look at those pretty easily.

I am strongly against using percent of GDP rather than PPP or nominal dollars. The education sector isn't entitled to a fixed percentage of the overall economy.

Using percentage of GDP makes sense in certain circumstances, such as when your trying to analyze the burden the spending puts on the economy but I agree it makes less sense when your comparing national education spending to see who spends more, or when you considering whether spending is increasing over time and how rapid the increase is.

The education sector isn't entitled to a fixed percentage of the overall economy.

No, but to the extent it provides services via humans rather than automation, it is subject to Baumol's cost disease. Ironically, the education you can afford in a country where most talented would-be-educators don't have any better options may be greater, at the same adjusted dollars-per-student price, than the education you can afford in a country where that education really pays off in other sectors of the economy. GDP isn't a good unit against which to compare this, but neither are dollars adjusted by a PPP basket which weighs mass-produced consumer goods along with skilled man-hours.

On the other hand, that's about as much of a steelman as I can come up with before noticing that the education sector may be to blame for this themselves. "Students work on computers at their own pace, teachers are on hand to work with students who are having problems the automated lessons can't handle" was how a few of my best classes were handled, experimentally, decades ago, and it's a tragedy that the closest most kids can get today is "Make a Khan Academy account, then hope you have time for it on top of whatever superannuated one-size-fits-all busywork your teachers assign instead". I'm not sure what happened over those decades, but I don't think that whole "software" thing turned out to be just a fad in the rest of the economy, so I have a suspicion that the possibility of teaching more students better even with fewer teachers was treated as a threat to unionized teachers rather than an opportunity for the kids.

Somewhat unrelated, but I was watching Vinesauce last night, and he was playing a few of those JumpStart games by Knowledge Adventure. The Kindergarten game (yes, seriously, I'm going somewhere with this) got me thinking: could people ever really trust software to educate their kids? Edutainment games are one thing; but serious educational programs, software, and websites have developed to the point that they can serve as legit building blocks for getting through at least public school. I understand that at the undergrad level and beyond, anyone who might hire you for a cushy job expects a prestigious credential that digital services can't offer, but if we pretend that doesn't exist, what happens then? Could software (have) eat(en) the education world so thoroughly that the way we teach children would be radically different?

For some anecdata, in undergrad, I had to take two algebra classes, and both of those relied heavily on a mixture of hardware (a "clicker" device) and Pearson's testing website. The second one was practically an online course (something my college offered) that I still had to physically show up for (though few of my classmates did).

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