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 -
I wrote a rather long post on my reflections in the wake of affirmative action, detailing why I'm mostly ambivalent about its end and what I see as the core problem with college admissions. One section is mirrored/excerpted below:
[...] hearing some prestige university arguments for affirmative action in non-technical positions, I find myself almost persuaded.
Almost. And then I see the chart that gives the game away, the chart that should be seared into the mind of every observer to the affirmative action debate: the Asian Discrimination Chart.
Why, if the goal was to ensure representation of vulnerable or historically discriminated against populations—why precisely did Harvard and other top universities use "holistic" factors to ensure Asian Americans had to climb a steeper objective hill not just than under-represented minority students, but than all others?
Well, just what sort of business do you think Harvard is in?
Harvard's Business
You don't get to be in the position Harvard is without understanding certain games on a deep institutional level, without playing them better than all others. Harvard is no mere technical school, seeking to train domain experts in rigorous ways. No. It's an Ivy League School, and more than that, it's Harvard. Its mission is not to find the best, but to define the best. And with all due respect to Yale and new upstart Stanford, it's been the best in that business since before the founding of the United States.
Harvard students, put simply, are better than you. This isn't me saying this, mind: it's the whole holistic edifice of university admissions and university rankings, the Supreme Court and the halls of Congress, really every prestige institution in the country. Ask McKinsey or Deloitte if you need convincing. Check where your professors went to school. Run up to a random passerby on the street and see what they think of a Harvard degree. Like it or not, it's a near-universal symbol of competence.
Some are better than you because of their heritage, some because of their wealth, some because of their connections. Some, in part, because of their race: you cannot maintain credible elite institutions with few black people sixty years after the civil rights movement. And, yes, some because of their academics, their intelligence and their work ethic. What sort of elite would it be, after all, if it did not pay lip service to the ideal of meritocracy that inspires so many of the hoi polloi, did not reassure them that academic skill, too, would be counted among its holistic ranking? Most, to be clear, have a combination of the above, a mix precisely in line with Harvard's dreams. Admit just the right set to render your institution legitimate as the elite.
I've met many Harvard students by now, and to be frank, it was almost always clear quite rapidly why they were attending Harvard while I was not. I'll give their admissions team this: they're good at their jobs. It's comforting to imagine some sort of cosmic balancing, where aptitude in one domain is balanced by struggle in another, but Nature is crueller than that. I won't claim every Harvard student is peerless. But they are, by and large, an extraordinarily impressive group of young people, by any measure. That's what happens when you spend several centuries building a reputation as the best of the best. It is a true signal of excellence, one that any individual, rational, ambitious actor should pursue.
For twelve years, every student in the country toils away in a system shouting egalitarianism at every turn. Look at policy priorities and school budgets and you'll see it: an earmark for the disadvantaged here, a special program there, an outpouring of funding for special education in this district, and of course classroom after classroom where teachers patiently work with the students who just need a bit of extra help.
Then comes admissions season, and with a wink and a nod, the system strips away the whole veneer and asks, "So, just how well did you play the game? ...you were aware you were playing the game, yes?"
Let us not mince words: the role of holistic college admissions is to examine people as whole individuals, to account for every second of their lives and every bit of their cultural context, and to rank them from best to worst. Or, more precisely: to justify and to reify the values Harvard and its co-luminaries use to select best and worst. Not just the most capable academics, mind: are you telling me you want a campus full of nerds? Please. Leave that to MIT and Caltech.
I don't want to be reduced to just a number, you say. Very well, Harvard responds, we will judge the whole of you and find you wanting. Is that better?
Let us return to the question, then: why does Harvard discriminate against Asians?
Set aside every bit of high-minded rhetoric, even understanding that most who give noble justifications have convinced themselves of those justifications. Set aside every bit of idealism, even understanding that most at every level of education are indeed idealists. Harvard discriminates against Asians because it is not just an elite school, but the elite school, and Asians are simply not elite enough.
I try to be cautious in using the phrase "systemic racism"—I find it often abused past the breaking point. But as I've said in terser form before, if you want a pure example of the term, and a pure demonstration of just what game Harvard is playing, look no further than its treatment of Asian Americans. Elite values—the true values underlying an institution like Harvard—are never fully legible and never fully set. In easy cases, they align with the values trumpeted on the surface: we value intelligence, we value hard work, we want to give everyone an equal shot.
One problem: Asian Americans came along and took those values a bit too seriously. They started gaming the system by taking it earnestly at face value and working to align with explicit institutional values. But admit too many, and the delicate balance is upset, the beating heart of elite culture animating the whole project disrupted. Academics-focused students, after all, lack social development and, as Harvard infamously argued in the case, simply have bad personalities.
Harvard's been around long enough to have played this game a few times before. When a new group gets too good at understanding and pursuing the explicit values it uses to grant its project the veneer of legitimacy, it smiles, thanks them for their applications, and then changes its process.
As sociologist Jerome Karabel documents, this is in fact the original inspiration for holistic admissions. From The New Yorker:
As public values change, the conception of "elite" changes with them. Harvard and its co-luminaries do not quarrel with each change in turn. They simply adopt them, embrace them, and embody them. In the '50s and '60s, this meant (again per the above New Yorker article) Yale accepting a mediocre academic who seemed like "more of a guy" than his competitors, proudly noting the proportion of six-footers, and watching out for troubling homosexual tendencies. In the 1980s, it meant disapproving notes from Harvard admissions about "shyness," a student seeming "a tad frothy," and one poor soul who was "short with big ears."
In 2023, it means hyperfocusing on one particular, often self-contradictory, frame of Diversity, on preaching ideals of egalitarianism, social justice, and inclusivity quite at odds with its pedigree. And yes, it means that Asians have stellar academics and extracurriculars but, alas, inviting too many would wreck the vibe.
What galls about this all—and look, how could it not?—what galls is the hypocrisy. What galls is watching some of the most elitist and exclusive institutions in the country preach inclusiveness while closing their doors to all but a minute fraction of those who apply, preach egalitarianism while serving as the finishing schools of the most privileged.
If the leaders of Harvard and Yale truly believed in the values they espouse, they would tear their schools to the ground, stone by stone, brick by brick. If the administrators and student body truly, in their heart of hearts, believed in a philosophy of egalitarian inclusiveness rather than the image of themselves as the deserving elite, nothing would be left of either by tomorrow morning.
In the other sections, I focus on a comparison to the Navy Seals (flat admission standards & high-attrition pipeline vs opaque standards where admission itself is the prize and graduating is trivial), examine my personal experience with the whole thing, and cover why I'm skeptical the AA ban will change much in a practical sense.
So, presumably, if we, the non-leaders of Harvard and Yale believe in not being racist, we should be the ones to tear the schools to the ground, and disclaim their elite leanings as self-serving sophistry.
Also, can you elaborate on the superiority of Harvard students that you experienced? It sounds like that if you instead sampled top-academic Jews in the last century, and Asians in this century, you'd find better academics; if they weren't better than the Harvard crop, then the Harvard crop wouldn't need to change the rules.
My personal instinct is that it may be that the Harvard brand is about baffling people with bullshit over actually producing quality scholarship; I can point to the fact that they are doing bald-faced lying about the affirmative action as evidence in favor of bullshit and against good scholarship. Is there a way that you can confirm your impression? How do you know that you have not been baffled with bullshit yourself and that the amazing Harvard scholars are actually as amazing as you think?
I wouldn't call them all amazing scholars. As I mention in the post, Harvard hasn't selected primarily on intelligence for a long while. I would call the ones I met noticeably capable, well-adjusted, balanced people when compared to the median individual: smart, knowledgeable, conscientious, well-connected, well-off, and ambitious, the sort of people who stand out in any group they're in as being the ones who get things done. Not better than anyone else in the world, but noticeably highly selected in those domains.
This is a generalization, of course, not a rule, and reality is always less shiny than generalizations of this sort allow for, but I've been sincerely impressed by the Harvard (and Yale, and similar-school) graduates in my life.
The quality of graduates from the top schools has fallen precipitously over the last 30 years. This shows in two ways. Firstly, while in college, students are less interested in the material, ask less questions, interact with their TAs and professors less, and generally are more like consumers than people engaged in discovery. The quality of exam answers increased up until about 2010, but the quality of in-person engagement decreased notably. Students who are selected for doing well on exams do well on exams, but somehow, they are less interested, and significantly less interesting. Cheating has gone from being almost unheard of, save for very marginal students who were desperate to pass, to commonplace, and now to almost universal. I have seen students speak at graduation who did not do a single problem set of their own.
Once these kids hit the workplace, they are strikingly lost. They understand how to do a set task, so long as it is phrased like a problem they would be posed in school, but beyond this, they find independent work very challenging. They tend not to be comfortable having opinions of their own. When asked to do analytical work, they tend to write in a polemical style. They will present all the information that supports a thesis, but do not understand the importance of covering the facts and evidence that points the other way.
A lot of this may be due to the practices of college admissions. Kids who get into top schools tend to have gotten straight As, perfect recs from their high school teachers, and have learned to lie about (or at the very least, wildly exaggerate) their extracurriculars. This requires diligence, always agreeing with authority, never displaying independent thought - as high school teachers hate that. Developing a passion for a subject requires time to think and space to explore. How housed kids do not get this, and thus arrive in college with no opinions that they have developed for themselves. They sit through classes where they don't interact with the professors, as they have learned that channeling their teachers is a bad idea. They write banal essays so as not to offend.
Much of modern high school is about learning to deny the obvious. English is perhaps the most obvious example of this, where literary classics, that are obviously great, and intermixed with books that any smart high schooler can see are pulp trash. Getting good grades requires pretending that Beloved, which does not have literary merit, is just as good as Shakespeare. This lying about the obvious teaches very bad analytical skills, where students learn to support pre-given conclusions, rather than follow where the evidence leads.
History is just as as bad, as AP History explicitly has themes that give the answer to each question. The historical facts are secondary to large-scale themes that the curriculum has identified. As an example, one of the themes is the West colonizing the rest of the world in a search for raw resources. The correct answer to why Cook traveled to the Pacific is thus that he was looking for resources for England, not scientific exploration, despite the transit of Venus being the stated reason for the trip.
They are smarter than they average person, but they are a lot worse than they used to be.
I, and probably most other upvoters, would love to see more details or mini-stories about the things you've described here, or other things you've noticed from the inside.
And questions like - Has student quality decline been pronounced in some subgroups (race or not) while not in others, or is it universal? I've also noticed the growth of cheating, any ideas on the causes?
More options
Context Copy link
This would explain my high school GPA.
Good to know I'm not the only one.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Honestly I’ve often been in favor of a more classical approach to education where students are expected to learn logically and to read whole books and write essays about topics. Modern education doesn’t do that. Every question or problem has a set answer and requires nothing outside of the lesson in question to solve.
I think just as an example, in history, I’d ask students to write about counter factual versions of the events in question. How does history look different if Rome had adopted Mithraism instead of Christianity? How does history look different if the French or American Revolutions fail? Or in mathematics you can have students try to use Fermi’s method to come to a guess about how many people in Ireland have green eyes or something silly. The point would be to teach people to think and reason to a conclusion that they then must justify logically.
I'm undecided about this. It would be difficult to know how this would play out long-term in a large, complex and technologically advanced modern society.
I don't 'necessarily' have a problem with aspects of the Prussian educational system. In 2023, you 'have' established canons of knowledge across disciplines which need to be inculcated in people. The last thing you want to do to a child, is take simple concepts like 2+2=4 and confuse the hell out of them by asking them to get philosophically creative and ask if 2+2 'really' equals 4; and get tripped up on basic terminology, like two friends high on peyote around a campfire, staring at the stars. In fact that 'creative' aspect is essentially why I struggled so much in school. I'm 'very' much an individual that reasons backwards, from the answer/conclusion to the logic that got you there. The 'creative', 'explore around' method of education left me confused as hell and at odds with my intuitive and focused tendency to think about things. I understood things easiest in chronological sequence, from A to B to C to D.
If you look at Singapore for instance, it's lack of natural resources and geography lend it's very survival to making itself economically relevant to the outside world. They don't have room for a classical education. The consequences are much more severe for departing from the State driven mandate and focus on STEM. They have to make themselves technically and technologically relevant to the rest of the world, simply to survive. A classical education won't work there IMO. And it has increasingly diminished returns in modern society. I say this as a huge lover of the humanities, unfortunately.
The problem I have with the Prussian model is that it’s pretty much a failure at teaching people how to approach problems and solve them without having to be hand held. If anything, I think it actually teaches people not to think.
In a typical Prussian school, the students sit at desks while the teacher lectures on some subject. They’re then given worksheets on the specific material to drill the exact thing the lecture covered. These worksheets have no problems that reference anything outside the lesson given, and only very rarely ask for application of the material or anything going above and beyond, or requiring the students to reason from facts given to a logical conclusion.
Science and math classes are taught much the same way. The students have “lab” classes, but even up to senior in high school (or possibly non-majors science courses in college) nothing done could be called an experiment— they’re at best demonstrations of something already covered in class and of course you have to get the right results. So students graduate with really weird ideas of how science works — mistakenly believing that science is a set of knowledge something like psychics belief in Akashic Records. The science exists and people in lab coats know The Science and so on. Except that science is a process of trying to figure things out, it’s discovered by seeing something and trying to prove yourself wrong on that front. Mathematics is a system for describing the universe and a tool for figuring things out. Most people don’t understand that because the Prussian system isn’t interested in having kids do experiments.
What classical education does, is teach, in every subject is how to think. How to take apart a text and understand it, how to think and argue logically, how to ask questions and find answers to them. They learn how to seek truth rather than simply waiting for the authorities to hand it to them. And I think, especially with AGI teed up within the next 20 years, the future belongs to people who can think, invent, and lead, and those who only learn to repeat the same things their teacher told them are correct answers will be lost in a world where the only jobs humans are doing are original creative thinking jobs. They haven’t been taught to do that, and learning later is very difficult.
I think the exact subject matter should be brought up to date for the twenty first century, but the method works and has produced the greatest thinkers of the last several centuries.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In related news, Florida is now accepting an alternative to the SAT designed to favor students with a classical education background, I believe.
More options
Context Copy link
See also: most of the AP curricula.
Probably not technically true for the harder sciences, since there’s not many ways to set up a free-body problem. But the history essay rubrics look like more formal versions of what you’re describing.
Overall, the problem is that school is serving as a daycare and indoctrination. So the mandatory parts can’t be too comprehensive. It’s fulfilling far too many purposes.
More options
Context Copy link
This isn't a history exercise, it's a creative fiction exercise and treating it like a history exercise does nothing but instill false confidence in students about their ability to reason about situations with far too many unknowns
Of course it’s a history exercise; building a credible case for a counterfactual relies on deep knowledge of pre-existing context and trends. You cannot explain how Rome would differ without understanding how Rome was and how Rome did change.
A counterfactual without utilizing the factual would be shoddy work.
There is no such thing as a credible case for the questions you posed. There are cases that superficially sound credible but actually make too many assumptions. In my opinion such a case is actually worse than just saying "I don't know".
The best political analysts of our time struggle to predict the economic impacts of a single peice of legislation a few years out with any decent accuracy. So when you ask a mere student to predict something orders of magnitude more difficult like the impacts of a grand change on a distant civilization that spanned centuries, you are only testing their ability to tell a story, not to get at the truth.
The only thing an avowed rationalist would say to such a question is "I don't know and neither do you"
More options
Context Copy link
This is exactly the goal of the exercise. And it wouldn’t be an everyday thing either. Most of the subjects would be taught in order to get those deeper understandings, studying the culture and history and personalities, learning the dates and geography and so on.
Although, it’s always been my contention that having the facts, theories, and procedures memorized is a big part of proper reasoning. If you know the names of great figures, their peers and rivals, what they did, and what the issues of the day were, understanding why things ended up as they did and how else things could have gone.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this coincides with the neoliberal push in education, but the cracks in the foundation were already there much earlier. I think captivating a child's attention in grade school was always going to be an issue. They're much more interested in exploring and imagining than being forced into a chair ala the Prussia model of education. As a person who paid his way through college, cheating looks like an attractive option if you're falling behind; considering the financial investment you put into your classes. Someone's 'always' had to pay for it at the end of the day, but I think the financialization of the university system continues to contribute a crucial piece of the problem.
This was me, also. Maybe I took for granted so much the fact that I could coherently speak English, that I could turn around after graduation and say it felt like I didn't learn anything. But I didn't feel like I was prepared for life in any way. When I asked myself "what next?," I had no idea how to answer it or where to go. I think a 'practical' education solves this problem where an 'academic' education barely makes any attempt to address it. Maybe that's part of the reason for higher education's insistence on extracurriculars and their interest in your time spent outside of the classroom. I did do pretty well (though not exceptional) in the former but not the latter. It's still difficult for me to tell if I'm a successful product of the contemporary American educational system or not. I'm not exactly where I would like to be in life, but I'm not really complaining either. I think the lack of social and economic mobility in the job market and other socioeconomic ladders are to blame, from a policy standpoint more than my education was.
More options
Context Copy link
As someone attuned to the system, what’s the solution, then?
More options
Context Copy link
William Deresiewicz does some pretty good observations on this in Excellent Sheep.
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