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 -
Certain social policies are misguided attempts to ensure skin in the game.
Aristotle I think claimed that most vices correspond to the absence or perversion of some particular virtue. I reread Scott Alexander's review of Freddie deBoer's "The Cult of Smart" and it helped crystalize an observation that a certain kind of approaches to solving social ills is likely to be a perversion of the concept of having skin in the game.
Skin in the game is, basically, the idea that things tend to work out much better when people making decisions are also the people reaping the consequences than when they are not, because otherwise you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal–agent_problem and doctors doing lobotomies on the involuntarily committed and people forcing their politics on culturally different communities and the government spending taxes on catastrophically wasteful projects instead of letting people buy private services with their own money.
Now, Scott REALLY HATES public schools. Literally in CAPS LOCK. So it was kinda funny how he nodded sagely along with Freddie explaining how public schools don't really teach anything, commended his analysis that Montessori schools maybe aren't much better at teaching but at least they aren't DYSTOPIAN CHILD PRISONS, and so on and so forth, until the last part of the review where he COMPLETELY LOST HIS SHIT upon realizing that Freddie's solution is making everyone go to public schools and forbidding all alternatives.
(this was when Scott already mostly calmed down by the way)
But Freddie's approach actually makes total sense as an attempt to force people to have skin in the game. The society is largely controlled by the rich and affluent. As long as they can escape to charter schools, catholic schools, or hire private tutors, they will do that instead of using their wealth and affluence to fix public schools, so those being horrible will remain solely poor people's problem. If we close all alternatives then it becomes everyone's problem and everyone has to solve it.
You can also see this approach in what is currently happening with the US justice system. America has a huge prison population and high rates of recidivism, which maybe could be solved by adopting the Nordic model of rehabilitative justice. But it's hard, it's much easier to lock up recidivists for decades, so that's what the system had been doing until roughly 2018, when a coordinated campaign had elected a bunch of progressive DAs in all major cities, who simply refused to prosecute a lot of crimes. Now with the crime wave affecting everyone people have no choice but to take rehabilitative justice seriously.
Most of desegregation initiatives also had this component to them (in addition to tolerance through familiarity I guess). As long as black people live in their own ghettoes and send their children to their own schools, rich and affluent people by and large don't care what happens there. But if you have gangs selling drugs in your kid's school and a crack den next door, you'll have to care about and fix the problem, right? Right?
Of course all such approaches range from simply not working to greatly increasing the harm they were meant to prevent plus causing other catastrophic consequences. Here's some reasons why:
Just because you incentivized someone to solve a problem doesn't mean they will be able to figure how. Some problems are very hard and you have to try to solve them purposefully instead of setting up incentives and hoping for the best.
Unless you want to live in a North Korea (and can bring it on), it's really hard to incentivize wealthy people to solve problems like that. They'll look at it, admit that they have no idea what to do about it, shrug, and move to another place. So attempting to overmilk that cow will leave you without milk at all.
You are not incentivizing the actual rich and affluent people, you're incentivizing middle class, which is not affluent enough to solve much. Or more precisely, it's the actual rich and affluent people who are doing the incentivizing and they sure weren't busing their own children to mixed schools etc.
Affluent people who end up in charge of solving social ills are usually ideologically incapable of solving them. For example, a school that has problems with drugs and discipline should punish and eventually expel troublemakers, but that's precisely the kids the progressive school board cares about the most, so it would demand that the parents solve the problem with discipline without disciplining anyone, at which point the wealthy parents will shrug and move elsewhere.
Or regarding crime: let's be real, most criminals aren't Jean Valjeans stealing a loaf of bread to feed their younger siblings, they pick $1000 worth of Gucci bags and go do drugs and have fun because it sure beats working a week at Walmart, and that's the truth. If you tell them otherwise they will laugh you in the face. If you ask them to think about the poor Gucci shareholders they will laugh you in the face. The only way to fix them is to promise them a reasonably long stint in prison, at which point our prison abolitionist decides that Gucci shareholders deserve it and secretly gives up on rehabilitation.
Is it possible to force people to have skin in the game in a way that works? Yes, you have to make sure that you're forcing the right people and they can't wiggle out of it. So regarding prison reform again: first we go to the nearest KKK Grand Dragon and ask him if he's willing to pay $30k in taxes to have an innocent black man imprisoned for a year. Having thus established that the vast majority of the society doesn't have real incentives against rehabilitative justice, we greenlight anyone who wants to test their theories about how to rehabilitate criminals--more particularly, we ask the same George Soros fund that elected progressive DAs to bankroll and vet these initiatives, to make sure that the obvious grifters are excluded.
The most important part is that we also pass relatively strict laws against recidivism, say, doubling the term every time. This really incentivizes the anti-prison activists to do their best job trying to rehabilitate their charges. That doesn't mean that they will succeed--that any of them will meaningfully succeed--but they will try their best, and what more can we ask for?
This way instead of making the society hostage to criminals and hoping that someone figures out how to rehabilitate them, we take the criminals hostage and incentivize them and their rehabilitators to succeed.
Am I the only one who grew up in a place that just had good public schools? Maybe it required living in a mildly conservative and middle class to upper middle class suburb but I really don't have any grievances with my schooling growing up and would happily send my kids to the same schools. It's not something fundamental about public schools, it's the students.
I did, but I was in the third richest public school district in the country, locally recognized as a stealth private school.
By the time I graduated, I could see that bad times were ahead, even there.
More options
Context Copy link
It's also the curriculum, teachers and administrators.
I would happily send my children to my elementary school too, in 1980, when I started half-day kindergarten.
The reality of school today is very different even in top decile areas than 1980. We've found our high performing public school to be insufficiently academicly rigorous. Our school committee feels more like PR or cheerleaders for the superintendent and faculty, who are products of post-modern education academia.
More options
Context Copy link
I also don't have too many complaints about my education, but to be fair I spent the last few years of it at a magnet school with a lot more freedom and higher quality students than is the norm. Being familiar with some East Asian school systems also colors my perceptions, and while I have always been somewhat bemused by Libertarians in the US raging about how schools are prisons for children, their arguments are perfectly valid in places like China or Korea.
More options
Context Copy link
Had some rough times but past that I just remember constantly being tired in school.
Feel like school could get a lot better if we got away from school as babysitting. Give the lecture once or twice on a subject instead of 5 times. Fewer hours at school. Trust the kids to do the work at home.
The being tired bit was it’s own torture.
And this would, indeed, be a major improvement for middle class kids with IQ’s of 105+. But public schooling is all about serving all kids, and those are a minority.
Ideally you could walk and chew gum at the same time. Product differentiation isn’t an issue everywhere else in America
Ok. Figure out a way to let middle class kids with IQ’s above 105 do it your way, without breaking any laws, and not making things worse for everyone else.
Because what you’re describing is ‘homeschooling’ and it works really well for the sorts of people who homeschool. But it isn’t a replacement for public schools and the reason it hasn’t seen much adoption among middle class families has at least as much to do with stigma as it does with lack of practicability.
Probably charter schools. Overall we just haven’t had experimenting in schooling because of the dominance of public schools and the unions.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The core issue is that students are no longer allowed to fail, or even to feel badly about themselves. When half or more of the population did not complete high school, and vanishingly few graduated from college, those degrees were an actual signifier of merit. Now that they are essentially birthday gifts, withholding them seems unfair. I wish that was fixable but I cannot see the path.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You’re good at learning the lecture material and homework so schools should just trust all students to be good/responsible at that. You’re bad at going to bed on time so schools should not trust students to go to bed at a sensible time.
Why should your strengths and weakness just be presumed to apply to all students?
True I’m more of a late person. Ideally you wouldn’t need to offer just one program.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I do remember being quite tired, but I've always credited that to not listening to this wisdom of my parents and constantly staying up super late. There probably is something to scheduling in a way that affords students more sleeping time.
It probably says something that the one education policy that actually literally everyone agrees on is to have high school start later.
When high school starts depends on when the busses from other schools are available. If high school starts later, elementary school may have to start earlier, and that may be worse.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I went to what was considered to be one of the best public schools in the area, possibly in the country, and I didn't hate it at the time, but in retrospect, I do think that there really should be better alternatives.
Regarding interactions with other kids, I wasn't beaten up, and I had friends, but there is a degree of psychological bullying that happens there regardless. Your popularity was determined by how little you cared about anything. Being passionate about hobbies made you vulnerable to ridicule by the greater school body populace of the cooler kids, and people thought you were lame for it. That seems perverse, as we should be encouraging people to pursue their passions, not ridiculing them for it. I think trying to fit in with that system did leave some lasting personality problems for me. And I was very shocked in college that the opposite was true, and the people who did nothing but ridicule others for being passionate were not considered the top of the popularity chain.
Then there's the education aspect. I was in every advanced class that I could take, and it was still entirely underwhelming with regards to what I learned. I feel like if I was challenged and allowed to grow, I could have learned at least 5 times as much as I did. Instead I wasn't challenged to really learn, and instead was swamped with tons of busy work every day.
More options
Context Copy link
I think that most of the binary polarization around public schools depends on whether you were a 'cool kid' in school, or not. I made a bit of a transition from cool to uncool during my high school years, and it was like being on a totally different planet.
Like @DuplexFields says below, schools have likely changed since we were in them as well. I'd imagine kids nowadays don't have to deal with the same brutal physical beatings that nerds like myself went through in public school, but it seems that the social ostracization(sp?) is perhaps even worse due to social media and other factors that have been accelerating.
Not to mention the rise of internet pornography, the redpill sphere, etc. Growing up as a young man in public school must be a minefield nowadays, even outside of trying to figure out how to act in a socially acceptable manner.
I really wasn't anything like a particular cool kid, I had a couple social groups but frankly in retrospect a kind of an outsider complex that made me feel like a victim even though I probably wasn't. I was a bit of a geek, more into wasting time in video games than much socializing. albeit most of the time was playing those games with people I knew so socializing in a way.
I definitely had some social complaints but talking about the schooling itself? My teachers were professional and seemed happy and engaged in teaching the subjects, with one exception or my chemistry teacher that I think had to do with a last minute replacement for someone who quit. My fellow students mostly weren't disruptive and did what the teachers asked of them without much question. By highschool we were given quite a bit of freedom and had access to a wide range of elective options at either a community college or a career and technology center that many high schools shared(I took a couple CISCO certification classes, a video game design class and an mobile phone programming class).
People are talking about above and beyond improvements like better sleeping hours and even more accelerated options. These might be worth considering in their own right as an improvement on something that already works. But as far as doing all the basic stuff right I think I've personally seen it work given you have the right student population.
But yeah, the separate question of whether schooling itself is oppressive or the tyranny of teenaged social interactions ring somewhat true. Making young people going through puberty not be total assholes to each other constantly as they figure it all out just doesn't seem like it could reasonably be in scope in a discussion about improving schools in a country where, just to pull the first depressing stat I could find, 63% of high school seniors can't read at grade level.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I had a decent, if lacking, public school experience here in Albuquerque. From the teachers, that is; the kids teased and hectored me to the point of tears quite regularly.
But the future is a foreign country, and those schools are not the same, even if housed in the same buildings.
More options
Context Copy link
I doubt you're the only one, but the opposite experience seems to strike a chord with many, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer (set in just such a suburb) wouldn't have been the hit it was.
Yeah public schools are a cesspool of misery and frankly, evil. @aqouta you're lucky you avoided the worst of it my friend. No wonder you're such a chad.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link