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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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I read Freddie deBoer on Everyone Can't Do Everything , and I'm trying to have some thoughts on the topic. It's not going well and I'd appreciate contributions and reactions.

In summary, school Halloween celebrations have been canceled at some locations due to equity concerns, due to some students not being of a culture that has Halloween: students without the tradition aren't able to enjoy it, and so no one at the school should enjoy it. Another, different, example of the same impulse is to let a fully blind child onto the field to play peewee football with the aid of radio instructions from the coach. These examples are then bent to serve his argument that schools at all levels should not be designed with the goal of educating every student presented to them, since some students lack the native talent to succeed at them: some check out at 12 and can't read even after high school, some are fit for vo-tech trades but not theory-laden engineering, some few are capable of world-class physics research (or fintech), and all are poorly served by promoting the view that success at any level is merely a matter of effort and perseverance. It's arguably cruel to hold out the possibility of high success to unfortunates who are incapable of it under any circumstance. This leads to lots of poor outcomes: wasted time in schools, devaluation of all markers of achievement as standards are lowered to pass all who show up, credential inflation. That said, he acknowledges the possibility of achievement beyond one's talent with dedication, and offers no real prescriptions beyond protest at the state of affairs.

Raw thoughts, no real ordering: kids who drop out explicitly, not just implicitly, have no place to go other than back home as a drag on the family unit (impractical) or into the workforce as menial labor (viscerally revolting, childhood is for more than that).

attainment, the ability after training to accomplish a task, seems intuitively to have many more factors than just talent and time of exposure. Off the top of my head:

  • developmental enablers - whether the student is or has been stunted by malnutrition, disease, heavy metals, etc
  • social cohort - is there competition between friends to develop skills? Is there mutual support between them? Does the home culture value schooling, or is school just a holding pen to let the parents work?
  • match between presentation and student - not that learning style silliness, but literally the match between the student's model of the things being used to describe the subject of instruction and the vocabulary used to present it
  • amount of potential energy the student has for the task - are adolescents up at 6 for the bus and in class at 8 when they're wired to wake at 10 and 11? Have they already been worn down by 3 hours of lecture before the current topic? Was lunch garbage that will spike blood sugar and crash it a half-hour later, or cause a food reaction?
  • yes, natural talent is a thing, I'm not denying it
  • time of exposure to the topic, in lecture, in homework, in independent work
  • have the precursors of the current topic been laid down effectively?
  • I don't have a clean phrasing for this - are they pushed? Kids aren't typically self-motivated to study boring difficult topics
  • when are the skills presented in the kid's life? Learning rates fluctuate over your life, generally downward; conversely, some kids are late bloomers and hit all their milestones on the same learning curve, just delayed a year.

So, very different skill-acquisition timelines are possible. Here are some prototypes I can imagine:

  • Standard-issue kid is deliberately unschooled and left to follow their interests until 16 with exposure to increasingly complex practical tasks, learning only what is needed, ends up mediocre but comfortable.
  • Standard-issue kid doesn't value anything, spends the entirety of elementary and high school disrupting classes and not learning anything.
  • Functionally damaged kid is advanced with his cohort, doesn't learn anything beyond some of his times tables because the dependency tree doesn't get filled in, bags groceries and never learns anything for the rest of his life.
  • Functionally damaged kid is held back until skills are mastered, discovers that he just needs to be exposed to a topic for twice as long as a standard kid but it takes as well otherwise, is allowed time, graduates high school at 20 and struggles some but ends up running a small lawn care company.
  • Functionally damaged kid is held back until skills are mastered, discovers that he just needs to be exposed to a topic for twice as long as a standard kid but it takes as well otherwise, ages out at 18, is not prepared to advance in life, scrapes along as a grocery bagger forever.
  • Talented kid is given a median course of study, takes engineering courses in college, has 80th percentile life.
  • Talented kid is given a hothouse aggressively tracked course of study with a dedicated tutor, becomes a global expert.

All of these are just-so stories, I'm not very happy with them as argumentation or intuition pumps, and they don't advance a point, but I don't want to waste the time spent typing them out. I guess they demonstrate a few points in the broader space of possibilities and show that life outcomes aren't just f(talent, instruction hours).

I can only resist solutions-oriented thinking for so long. What does a student know, when? What ideas are they prepared to build on? How well do they recall a given fact, when? How well do they manipulate interacting facts? What fact, in other words, do we present to a student, by what channel, with what phrasing, at what time? How do we determine this? Economically, how do we structure delivery of these functions for good scaling? I guess I'm redefining "private tutor" here, with functional breakouts to slot automation in as useful. What about providing education after schooling age?

Teaching staff aren't just presenters and test designers, of course. They're required reporters of signs of abuse, first-line mental health responders, mentors, coaches, disciplinarians, college advisors. Similarly schools have had extra functionality piled onto them over time - childhood food distribution, extracurriculars, a refuge for children from a poor home life, a facility for permissive parent figures, I'm sure there are others.

Raw thoughts, no real ordering: kids who drop out explicitly, not just implicitly, have no place to go other than back home as a drag on the family unit (impractical) or into the workforce as menial labor (viscerally revolting, childhood is for more than that).

All of our agrarian history suggests otherwise. The collapse in child birth rates as we've urbanized and have less need for child labour suggests that the little tykes are supposed to be cheap, low-skill farmhands. We took away their niche and now their numbers are dropping. Coincidence?

Normalize sending kids to a McDonald's upstate.

I do feel a bit confused about the connections Freddie's trying to draw there. They seem to just be loosely connected by "these are all unrealistic expectations placed on schools by some people at some times." I have some opinions and experiences with respect to any given topic, but the piece as a whole seems a bit all over the place.

Yeah, as I thought the first time I saw this story on reddit: the stories seem to have different roots.

The story about Halloween is, imo, just about hostility towards tradition. Freddie himself points out that "LGBT appreciation day" or "AAPI day" wouldn't go under these same criteria, even if many students either don't feel a part of them or actively think they're reductive or insulting. Nobody has a problem with straight, blank people sitting around feeling alienated.

There's no "you can do anything" principle here imo, just social engineers given too much of a leash.

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