site banner
PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27454 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I’m going to do a write up of how I think education curriculum should be reformed. For context: I went through highschool in Ontario, Canada. The way it worked was from kindergarten to grade 8, we’d have a set curriculum every kid in the grade followed, with lots of english and math classes, some science classes, history, geography, French, and gym, and one each of art, music, and health classes a week. Then starting in grade 9, which is highschool, we are given two elective choices, where we choose a minimum of one between art, drama, and music, and the second may also be a general technology course or a general business course. Each year of high school there are more electives choices offered and fewer mandatory courses, with the priorities of what the school system requires us take being the same as elementary school. There were also choices between more difficult and easier options for some classes like math, english, and science as well. Universities and colleges would also require higher level math and sciences for STEM programs too, and there is a standardised literacy test needed to graduate.

I think a lot of people when talking about school want to just add more requirements without thinking about what to cut. It’s very easy to say “all kids should learn to program” or “all kids should have PE every day”, but if you’re adding you either have to keep kids there longer, or cut something. First, I think the elementary school program is basically good, I wouldn’t change anything there. Maybe take a little of time out of science and add it to more PE.

For highschool, I would start more drastically reworking it. First, I would basically replace English with history in the mandatory curriculum for everyone who is literate. Learning about Shakespeare and studying themes in classic novels, while not completely useless, is less useful than learning about real historical events. You gain the same “critical thinking” skills analysing what motivated the people in WWI to conflict as you do analysing what motivated the people in Hamlet to conflict, plus it actually happened, giving it substantially more value. The same english classes will be kept as optional electives, like how history is optional in higher grades now. Science will only be mandatory in grade 9, and computer science will be mandatory in grade 10.

Gym class will be mandatory every year. There is a crisis in how unfit people are today. I recently joined the military. They have drastically reduced requirements, shortening basic training from 13 weeks to 8 weeks, and the weighted march from 13km to 5km. Because people weren’t fit enough to pass. A great many jobs, even today, still require physical fitness, and gym class offers more professional preparement than just about any other possible class other basic literacy. On top of that, being healthy is just healthy, and that’s good for every single person.

There will be extra emphasis on making sure every single person who graduates is literate and numerate. I wouldn’t really require anything else to hand out a highschool diploma, but if they can’t do basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, they don’t get the diploma. They’re stuck in adult night classes until they can or they give up. Ontario high schools also require 40 hours of volunteer community service which I like and anywhere else that doesn’t have that should implement it.

It might be a good idea to have a class on how to get the most out of AI too because it’s looking like that’s becoming an ever more important skill, but it’s changing so fast I don’t know.

Why do you think everything before grade 9 is good? My understanding is that kids are coddled far too much in the earlier grades, and could easily have a high school education by grade 8, if not a full college level education.

I'm sure it could be improved but I just don't have any specific ideas from improving it. Maybe some additional streaming, to separate more kids capable of college work at 13 from the kids who definitely can't

I have just one idea - different classes for students of different talents

At high school there should be an A-class for maths, a B-class, a C-class. For English, Physics and the other rigorous subjects too. The smart people should be able to move ahead and do extensions, whilst the stupid take longer to cover the core of the curriculum. None of this 'I finished the work early so the teacher punishes me with busywork while focusing on the stupid kids so I develop a deep hatred of authority figures' I hear from the American system. It would also weed out most of the disruptive kids and put them in the bottom classes, where they can do less harm.

You have annual or bi-annual exams to determine who moves up and who moves down.

And this could also encourage a little competition and academic elitism, which isn't a bad thing IMO. Status matters and being in the bottom classes hurts one's pride - cheaper and more efficient than American-style 'maybe we offer bribe to get students to study?' https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/20/money-gets-american-students-to-try-harder.html

Canada already has some streaming, although I agree more would be good.

Canada already has some streaming, although I agree more would be good.

The streaming that you and I grew up with in Ontario is not a thing anymore, sorry to say.

Very disappointing.

I don't think I agree about the PE requirement, schools being what they are. 12 years of co-ed games involving balls sounds hellish. I was at a school once where they took the teens hiking through the forest for a week at the beginning and end of the term, and if that kind of thing is on offer as "PE," or some robust swim facilities, or dancing, or other non-gym physical activity, that's fine. Otherwise, to be of much use, they would probably have to be sex segregated, which is so fraught in the current society it would surely be absolutely bungled. Are the basic training requirements primarily reduced for unfit men, or so the they can say men and women are completing the same requirements? Maybe if we stopped relying so much on illegal labor and picked our own fruit and veggies, we wouldn't be such heads in jars.

For high school, I got a associate's degree from a community college in place of a high school degree, and will likely encourage my daughters to do the same, unless they have a compelling reason to do otherwise. The dream of the One True Common Core Curriculum is silly after about 10 years old or so.

Some high schools have unusually robust "career and technical education" programs, with actually good shop, mechanic, home economic, culinary arts, pre-nursing, cosmeology, and other programs that result in enough skill to be employed as an apprentice. That seems like a good trend that I hope will continue.

For high school, I got a associate's degree from a community college in place of a high school degree, and will likely encourage my daughters to do the same, unless they have a compelling reason to do otherwise. The dream of the One True Common Core Curriculum is silly after about 10 years old or so.

How does this work? You just take kids out of high school and then you can send them to community college?

I was in a pretty permissive state, so my mother took me to the local community college when I was 16 and signed some forms saying that I was duel enrolled as a homeschooler and in the classes of my choice, and then since I actually was homeschooled and had no transcript to speak of, I took some placement tests in math and English, and signed up for classes. The state universities had an agreement with the colleges to automatically admit anyone with an AA, so I went to one of them. Otherwise, I think I would have taken the SAT or ACT, with those courses counting for my GPA and applied like a high schooler? I'm not completely sure, but some of my friends did go to other universities afterwards. Some colleges and high schools work together for actual duel enrollment as well, where they take classes at both.

Yes, my coworkers do it as a matter of routine. In my state you can withdraw from school and as long as you pass the GED exam can’t be denied community college admission, but can be denied university admission on that basis. My understanding is that you’re probably not getting into a selective private school with an associates from a community college and no high school diploma, but that special programs to transfer to northwest Iowa state, bumfuck nowhere campus for a year and complete a bachelors are routine.

I've been interested in much more radical forms of education than shuffling classes around.

The current American school system seems to have basically no idea what to do with kids who seriously don't want to bother at all and don't have parents who care. They're required to do something with them though. It seems most of them send them through to the next grade anyways, even if they barely did anything and fought them every step of the way, either so they aren't that school/teacher's problem anymore or so they don't look so bad for failing so many students. Perhaps they should be able to just kick some kids out completely, though it's harder to figure out a system to make that possible but not also let them kick out every kid who's only slightly difficult. I dunno the right solution but there's gotta be something better than just sticking our fingers in our ears and humming loudly to pretend the problem doesn't exist.

I've always thought that there's way too much structure in current schooling. Too much, we'll stick you in a class where you must do X, Y, and Z, and get a grade based on how well they do it. Little kids I've been around always seem super curious, something perverse must be going on if they usually hate and get nothing from the system that's supposed to teach them. What happens if we designed a system around letting them do much more self-directed things? Ask why something happened, or something is a certain way, well here's a library and the internet, you tell me! Wanna build like a go-cart or a video game or something? Here's all the tools and guides, get to it, we'll give you a few pointers.

Seems to me that a lot of problems come from trying to come up with a generalized solution to everyone all the time. How can we do less of that, have a bunch of options all over the map for how you can learn. Maybe something like the voucher systems that have been talked about. Maybe flexible enough that you can go to something like today's regular conventional school, or the one in my previous paragraph if you do well in that environment, or just skip it and do real work as some kind of apprentice instead if you hate school but your family really needs the money, like my first paragraph. Of course then it's hard to judge success, which huge bureaucratic systems tend to do poorly without, but maybe that's the problem in the first place, we need less huge nationwide bureaucracy in this mess.

Gym class will be mandatory every year. There is a crisis in how unfit people are today. I recently joined the military. They have drastically reduced requirements, shortening basic training from 13 weeks to 8 weeks, and the weighted march from 13km to 5km. Because people weren’t fit enough to pass. A great many jobs, even today, still require physical fitness, and gym class offers more professional preparement than just about any other possible class other basic literacy. On top of that, being healthy is just healthy, and that’s good for every single person.

I'm going to take the opposite position and insist that schools shouldn't be wasting time on gym at all. I don't think the point of school is to provide children everything that we think is "good". Schools should not be thought of as substitute parents with a broad mandate to produce good student life outcomes in general. Schools should be narrowly focused on basic instruction in reading, writing, math, and science.

I also don't think there's any place for literature in the curricula of any non-elective classes in middle school to high school. Literature is entertainment. It can be used as a vessel to teach reading and writing, but you could just as well do that with nonfiction. So you might as well be teaching them about things that are actually true or things that actually happened. This is doubly the case for older literature (e.g., Shakespeare or anything from the ancient world), which is not something that is easy for modern readers to understand or be interested in. Frankly, I think the emphasis on it borders on snobbery in many cases.

Yeah, that "old literature is unlikeable" meme is marketing-addled cope on the level of "how could I enjoy a trip two states over when it's so far awaaaaaaay and anyway their food is weird?" For a solid 350 years I'm not aware of anyone complaining that Shakespeare was especially hard to read, and certainly nobody found him boring. Same was true of classical literature for 2000+ years. If all that suddenly changed in the ~50 years since the invention of cable TV, is it likelier that a play's 36th decade contains some sort of magic cultural expiration date, or that we're just experiencing a long superstimulus-driven atrophy of kids' ability to read, focus and explore?

Or, of course, you're mistaken about how readable and enjoyable people thought these works were in the past.

English-language fiction and drama weren't taught in schools until (I believe) the 1900s? 1890s? So prior to that time, nobody would have read these works at all unless they enjoyed them and found them valuable. Some university lecturing on drama seems to have started up a decade or two earlier, 1870s, but that would be about sophisticated analysis of the rhetoric for students who already loved the content, like a film studies class today-- certainly not walking through the plot.

And yet, famously, the general American public of the day was so organically into Shakespeare that speeches from the plays were popular additions to vaudeville acts, and audience members would shout back lines at the actors. I've encountered lots of writing pre-1950 casually referring to how delightful and meaningful Shakespeare is, and it's interesting how free from defensiveness or concessions those statements are: nobody feels the need to add "... although obviously it's really hard to understand the words" or "... even though of course it's pretty boring and confusing," because they don't seem to find those things to be the case.

If we have 350 years of human beings demonstrably finding Shakespeare entertaining, meaningful, and easily comprehensible, followed by 70 years of intensifying complaints that the words are now too hard and the sentences now require too much focus, then my assumption is something has changed about our vocabulary, reading ability and stimulation threshold, not about the plays themselves.

Anti-excellence hot takes are pretty fashionable in these narcissistic times- the SBF-style "old books are booooring and useless" meme rhymes well with the education professors' "algebra is white supremacy," the admissions officers' "the SAT doesn't actually measure anything" and the fat activists' "actually size has nothing to do with health"- but I notice that they suspiciously often come from people who failed at those things themselves, thus have strong ego-defense incentives to convince themselves that anyway the grapes are sour.

This seems completely backwards. There doesn't seem to be much evidence that school can improve someone's mind, but if you have control over someone's body for a thousand hours a year, you can certainly accomplish something with their body. Further, I would say that the body must come before the mind, and that much of our failure in schooling is because we don't respect this, and somehow think that mind and body are independent and separate, rather than the mind being a subset of the body.

Also, school forces children to sit down at a desk for a large part of their day. It seems reasonable that school also is responsible for counteracting the bad effects thereof.

Agreed. If kids were able to run around and get their energy out more throughout the day, I'd imagine they would be far more receptive to sitting down and learning.

I also don't think there's any place for literature in the curricula of any non-elective classes in middle school to high school. Literature is entertainment. It can be used as a vessel to teach reading and writing, but you could just as well do that with nonfiction. So you might as well be teaching them about things that are actually true or things that actually happened. This is doubly the case for older literature (e.g., Shakespeare or anything from the ancient world), which is not something that is easy for modern readers to understand or be interested in. Frankly, I think the emphasis on it borders on snobbery in many cases.

I understand that the point of literature has been completely lost in the regular world, but it is very blackpilling to see not one but two motters consider it entirely useless and fit for the rubbish heap.

Culture is what unites us. Our literature and plays and films and songs allow us to communicate with each other through metaphor and allegory, and when people can communicate prosodically they think more alike and don't have to spend all their time explaining in jokes and slang, or adding throat clearing in deference to the people who refuse to participate in the culture.

You can't do that with non fiction, because people get really upset when you use them or their family as examples, not to mention removed relatives and very common names. Beyond that, real life doesn't play out like stories, which makes it much harder to work into teachable lessons, fables and parables, and those are the tools with which we teach morality.

As for older literature - for starters why do you care what modern readers can understand or are interested in? You got rid of 50% of the school library on the basis it was entertaining. Why not make them suffer The Tempest or The Odyssey? Seriously, I would be much more on board with you guys if you said "only old shit they won't find entertaining", partly because they would actually find it entertaining, if not at first (and I really think you haven't thought through the implications of removing all entertainment, so students have no respite from studying fucking fractions at the rate of the class' slowest students) but mostly because it would rebuild an understanding of the world that would allow us to communicate across generations, instead of intra-generational like we have now.

Also that last line about snobbery makes me think this is more personal than you are letting on.

Culture is what unites us. Our literature and plays and films and songs allow us to communicate with each other through metaphor and allegory, and when people can communicate prosodically they think more alike and don't have to spend all their time explaining in jokes and slang, or adding throat clearing in deference to the people who refuse to participate in the culture.

I totally get that and don't disagree at all. I just don't see how reading plays from 400 years ago or novels from 150 years ago does much for that. We all effortlessly absorb our culture by simply growing up in it and living in it.

You can't do that with non fiction, because people get really upset when you use them or their family as examples, not to mention removed relatives and very common names.

I'm not I understand. You're saying that people would be upset about, say, learning about the Irish potato famine or Newton or the causes of WWI or the invention of the telegram because some students might be related to some of the people involved in these incidents? I'm genuinely not trying to strawman or make you look stupid, I'm just totally lost. Maybe we're talking about different things?

Beyond that, real life doesn't play out like stories, which makes it much harder to work into teachable lessons, fables and parables, and those are the tools with which we teach morality.

Why should a high school teacher be teaching morality? That makes me bristle.

I do see some value for very young kids being taught simple stories, which is why I went out of my way to specify middle and high school.

As for older literature - for starters why do you care what modern readers can understand or are interested in?

Because if students can't understand it and aren't interested in it, it's going to be harder to teach them whatever you're using it to try and teach them (e.g., grammar, reading, metaphors, whatever). Additionally, they're going to have a rather dim view of the magnificence of their own civilization if that tedious and stodgy sludge is what we put in front of them as the supposed crown jewel of it.

Also that last line about snobbery makes me think this is more personal than you are letting on.

Yeah, I harbor quite a bit of resentment for English class, and I don't care who knows it.

I totally get that and don't disagree at all. I just don't see how reading plays from 400 years ago or novels from 150 years ago does much for that. We all effortlessly absorb our culture by simply growing up in it and living in it.

You only say that because you have been saturated in a culture which bases 75% of its popular storytelling on remaking plays and novels from centuries ago. Without Shakespeare we don't have 10 things I hate about you, She's the man, west side story, the lion king, ran, brave new world, and way more than I can list here. Not to mention all of the phrases and sayings and aphorisms we use every day, like it's all Greek to me, love is blind, in such a pickle, heart of gold, cruel to be kind, pound of flesh, and wild goose chases. I mean for goodness sake, we even get for goodness sake from Shakespeare!

I'm not I understand. You're saying that people would be upset about, say, learning about the Irish potato famine or Newton or the causes of WWI or the invention of the telegram because some students might be related to some of the people involved in these incidents? I'm genuinely not trying to strawman or make you look stupid, I'm just totally lost. Maybe we're talking about different things?

Yeah I'm saying you can't fashion allegory and metaphor out of real people's lives without upsetting people. Well you can for positive things of course, but not negative things. Like, pretend Helmedhorror is your last name. But it turns out the most vicious guard at Auschwitz was a distant relative also named Helmedhorror or some guy named Helmedhorror was a soldier in a war who got scared and ran away, getting his squad killed. Kids are vicious, and they will use that to ruin your school life.

Why should a high school teacher be teaching morality? That makes me bristle.

They literally always have and always will. At least if they are using old books and plays to do it they can't exclusively jam a bunch of current year bullshit down their students throats, and if some try their students will be able to find smarter and more sensible writing on the subject.

Because if students can't understand it and aren't interested in it, it's going to be harder to teach them whatever you're using it to try and teach them (e.g., grammar, reading, metaphors, whatever). Additionally, they're going to have a rather dim view of the magnificence of their own civilization if that tedious and stodgy sludge is what we put in front of them as the supposed crown jewel of it.

I feel like you missed the point of this by skipping the next sentence. You removed all the fiction from the school because it's 'entertainment' and now you are worried they're going to get bored?

Also please list three works from the past five years that you believe demonstrate the magnificence of our civilisation better than King Lear or A midsummer night's dream.

You only say that because you have been saturated in a culture which bases 75% of its popular storytelling on remaking plays and novels from centuries ago. Without Shakespeare we don't have 10 things I hate about you, She's the man, west side story, the lion king, ran, brave new world, and way more than I can list here. Not to mention all of the phrases and sayings and aphorisms we use every day, like it's all Greek to me, love is blind, in such a pickle, heart of gold, cruel to be kind, pound of flesh, and wild goose chases. I mean for goodness sake, we even get for goodness sake from Shakespeare!

So what? Why does anyone need to know where phrases came from or who popularized a particular trope or whatever?

Yeah I'm saying you can't fashion allegory and metaphor out of real people's lives without upsetting people. Well you can for positive things of course, but not negative things. Like, pretend Helmedhorror is your last name. But it turns out the most vicious guard at Auschwitz was a distant relative also named Helmedhorror or some guy named Helmedhorror was a soldier in a war who got scared and ran away, getting his squad killed. Kids are vicious, and they will use that to ruin your school life.

We do teach nonfiction, even if it's not focused on as much as I'd like, and yet I don't have the impression there is an epidemic of kids bullying other kids for sharing a name with a bad person they read about. Since I don't expect there to be a way to resolve this difference in intuition, I'm quite comfortable letting the other readers decide for themselves which of us is most likely correct about this.

They literally always have and always will. At least if they are using old books and plays to do it they can't exclusively jam a bunch of current year bullshit down their students throats, and if some try their students will be able to find smarter and more sensible writing on the subject.

So use old nonfiction books.

I feel like you missed the point of this by skipping the next sentence. You removed all the fiction from the school because it's 'entertainment' and now you are worried they're going to get bored?

No, I'm not worried they're going to get bored. I removed the boring fiction books, remember?

Also please list three works from the past five years that you believe demonstrate the magnificence of our civilisation better than King Lear or A midsummer night's dream.

Who said that a demonstration of the magnificence of our civilization needs to come in the form of fiction?

So what? Why does anyone need to know where phrases came from or who popularized a particular trope or whatever?

I don't know, why do we need to know what air is or how it works? I'm assuming you know how air works here, but I think it's a safe assumption. Hell, I'd bet on it.

Also you appear to be contradicting yourself. If you totally understand and agree with this -

Culture is what unites us. Our literature and plays and films and songs allow us to communicate with each other through metaphor and allegory, and when people can communicate prosodically they think more alike and don't have to spend all their time explaining in jokes and slang, or adding throat clearing in deference to the people who refuse to participate in the culture.

Then you shouldn't need me to explain why it is necessary to maintain a connection to the artifacts a culture is based on.

We do teach nonfiction, even if it's not focused on as much as I'd like, and yet I don't have the impression there is an epidemic of kids bullying other kids for sharing a name with a bad person they read about. Since I don't expect there to be a way to resolve this difference in intuition, I'm quite comfortable letting the other readers decide for themselves which of us is most likely correct about this.

For starters I was, as I said, talking explicitly about when crafting metaphors and allegory, which we don't do with non fiction. Even when we do, like the Chernobyl miniseries, or Oppenheimer, we fictionalise elements which can potentially hurt others. But also I would note that almost everyone related to Hitler and Stalin changed their surname.

No, I'm not worried they're going to get bored. I removed the boring fiction books, remember?

That's funny, but still a poor argument. You said we shouldn't teach stuffy old Shakespeare because kids won't understand it or be interested in it. Setting aside the fact that Shakespeare is performed to this day (indicating both understanding and interest), interest and understanding didn't matter to you prior to that part of the argument.

Who said that a demonstration of the magnificence of our civilization needs to come in the form of fiction?

You did. You still are it seems. I just asked you to name three works from the last five years better than King Lear or A midsummer night's dream, I didn't say they had to be fiction.

Literature is entertainment. It can be used as a vessel to teach reading and writing, but you could just as well do that with nonfiction. So you might as well be teaching them about things that are actually true or things that actually happened. This is doubly the case for older literature (e.g., Shakespeare or anything from the ancient world), which is not something that is easy for modern readers to understand or be interested in. Frankly, I think the emphasis on it borders on snobbery in many cases.

Maybe it not being easy to understand is the point? It is a skill to stick with hard, somewhat alien material and learn to interpret it or, more likely, give enough of a bullshit explanation to get by.

(Obviously, for Westerners, keeping in touch with the canon of one's civilization can have its own intrinsic value).

The kids who want to read Harry Potter or other YA are gonna do it anyway. That's why they're bestsellers.

Maybe it not being easy to understand is the point? It is a skill to stick with hard, somewhat alien material and learn to interpret it or, more likely, give enough of a bullshit explanation to get by.

We could also have kids decode, by hand, arbitrary sequences of words written in ROT13. The question is, is this more useful than anything else we might have those kids spend that time on?

(Obviously, for Westerners, keeping in touch with the canon of one's civilization can have its own intrinsic value).

This is indeed probably the best argument for literature, but I don't think it's compelling enough. For one thing, I think kids understand and internalize their civilization without formal instruction. It's just "in the water", as it were. But secondly, I suspect much of the Western canon is more likely to turn off any interest a kid might have had in their civilization. These works of fiction tend to be extremely difficult to make any sense of or derive any value from. Some of that is because the metaphors and allusions are completely lost on a child (or in many cases almost any modern person) or there's a reference to something contemporaneous that's long been lost to time. But, frankly, a lot of it is because the language is just sorely outdated and teachers seldom want to "sully" the work by using modern translations. For example, Shakespeare uses "a haggard" to refer to a falcon. Just fucking say "falcon"! But noooo, that's not "poetic" or "authentic" enough.

If anything, subjecting kids to this stuff and telling them this is an iconic and beautiful important part of their civilization is just going to result in kids thinking their civilization must be pretty fucking boring and unimportant. And I care too much about Western civilization to inculcate indifference to it.

To push back on that: we force kids to leave their families for like 8 hours a day to go to school. We kindof do need them to teach everything that is good, because the government is forcing their parents not to. To say that they're going to take our children away for most of their childhood, and then also restrict them from physical activity, is well past just borderline evil.

we force kids to leave their families for like 8 hours a day to go to school.

Elementary schools in my area are 6 hours (8:30-2:30), so definitely less than 'most'. Leaves about 10 waking hours a day between parents and kids. Plus 24/2 on weekends.

I don't think the average parent is actively imparting wisdom to their child fro more than 10 hours a day every day - even if they don't have a job and have a maid to do all the houswework, most people can't talk for 10 hours a day without their voice giving out.

So I don't think this is an actual restriction on parents raising their kids in the way you imply.

What I think is a restriction in the way you apply is the fact that in most families with kids, both parents have to work in order to keep the household comfortable, that work typically lasts longer than the schoolday, and typically leaves parents tired and harried when they get home. I think that's the actual largest limiting factor on how much parents get to actively mentor their kids.

To push back on that: we force kids to leave their families for like 8 hours a day to go to school. We kindof do need them to teach everything that is good, because the government is forcing their parents not to.

So don't force them.

Also, it's not as many hours as you make it sound. On average, American students spend about 5/6th of their waking hours outside of school.

To say that they're going to take our children away for most of their childhood, and then also restrict them from physical activity, is well past just borderline evil.

Not having gym class is not restricting students from physical activity. Recess is still a thing. I'm not even in principle opposed to having more recess.

That link does not specify time spent in school, it specifies "instructional time", which is not the same. For example, California says that instructional time is "when all pupils in the class are scheduled to attend". This does not include the time between different classes, or time spent commuting to and from school, or time spent eating lunch, but the kids can't go home and be with their parents during those times.

While I would disagree that that time is "most of their childhood", it's more than 1/6th of their childhood. Anecdotally, my childhood experience was the same as the other repliers': 8 hours each school day, and 180 school days each year, which totals to a quarter of the year spent "in school".

I’m trying to remember my school, but I believe it was like: bus picks is up at 7:30. 8:10-8:20 or so was the bell, then leave at 2:45 and home by 3:30 (or so).

I don’t think my point hinges on it being exactly 8 hours, though.

The point is that the state requires you to send your kids to them for a substantial amount of time, and this implies that responsibilities which could or have historically fallen on families now fall on the state.

Yes you can homeschool, but most people aren’t able to actually pull it off.

I don’t think my point hinges on it being exactly 8 hours, though.

No, but it does hinge on it being a substantial enough amount of time that parental substitution is required. I don't think schools need to take over duties from parents when parents have possession of the kid for 5/6th of the kid's waking hours.

Assuming school is 8 hours, and sleep is eight hours, it’s about half of a student’s waking hours on weekdays.

Assuming school is 8 hours, and sleep is eight hours, it’s about half of a student’s waking hours on weekdays.

a) It's more like 6 hours; b) weekdays aren't all days; c) not all weekdays have school (because of summer and holidays).

I mean... I don't know how you can even contest this. It's all right there on the page I linked. 1000-1080 hours of school (varies by state) divided by waking hours (365*16) = ~1/6 of a student's waking hours are spent in school. Even less than that when you consider that earlier grades are <1000 hours.

On the first point, it'd be great if we could expect parents to ensure kids got access to physical activity. In previous generations kids for the most part were fit enough without schools intervening. But today, that's not happening. Parents should make sure their kids go to sports or are otherwise fit outside of school, but that doesn't change the fact that it's not happening. And given that fitness has such a vast variety of positive benefits, I think the government should intervene to make people fitter, and school's the best way to do it.

On the second point, I 100% agree and that's my exact belief as well.

I think the ship has honestly sailed on this (there's just too many places outside scholastics where schools get involved to roll it back) but this is the exact thing that has led to the overreaches and culture wars as parents saw what their kids were learning during COVID.

If you insist that teachers should actually be substitute parents, you won't necessarily get to control where they take that. Arguably even the law doesn't: whatever pipeline produces teachers and whatever group manages them will decide.

I'm not so much viewing teachers as substitute parents here as I am viewing them as baby sitters. Good baby sitters make sure the kids get some time to run around. So should schools. Physical training probably has some of the least possibility of indoctrination of anything schools could have classes on.

I think what you’re getting at, and this is my general impression, is that the bottom quintile or two of parenting is so awful that the public school(and lets be real, very few of the parents who opt out of public school are in this group) system is making up for basic failures and that explains its constant expansion, but that giving bureaucrats more power is just creating potential fuckups and extra paperwork with the top three quintiles of parenting. Honestly the solution is probably tracking the kids and having easy opt-outs. But that’s not going to happen.

If anything I think putting bureaucrats in charge of making sure kids get a minimum of an hour of running around a weekday, instead of that hour being spent culture like many of the proponents of English classes want, is putting much less power in the hands of bureaucrats. Let parents decide what classics their kids read, the schools can just make kids get some active time.

I don't disagree with you, but what you're describing is actually "recess", not "gym class". In any case, having bureaucrats in charge of making kids play games that aren't on a computer because we can't expect the bottom 35% or so of parents to do anything right sticks in my craw much more than having bureaucrats in charge of making sure they're familiar with the western canon. I don't really know why, exactly.

Ideally the PE classes would go over stretching and doing exercises that improve kid's fitness and be overall structured, not just recess.

First, I'm not convinced that childhood fitness is that important. I suspect the negative health effects of fitness don't reveal themselves until many decades later, and that fitness habits started in early adulthood should be sufficient to stave off the effects of poor fitness. Yes, childhood obesity is a problem, but I'm not convinced that's due to lack of exercise.

Second, regardless of the benefits, I just don't see how that's the school's job. What's the limiting principle? Should everything that's important and beneficial be done in school? Should schools have classes on healthy eating? Healthy social media usage? General socialization? Driving instruction? Home improvement? Taking care of a baby? Household budgeting and financial prudence? I mean, I guess I wouldn't be surprised if you'd say "yes" to some or all of those if you already think schools should basically be in the business of being parents. I just emphatically disagree. One of the things I always hated most about schools was how fucking patronizing and infantilizing it was.

Finally, once you open the door to the idea that schools should be entrusted as quasi-parents with a broad mandate to do good things for children, you're giving your ideological enemies (whoever they are) license to indoctrinate your kids. They already have too much latitude to do that with reading, writing, and science curriculum, but I certainly don't want to make it any easier for them.

you're giving your ideological enemies (whoever they are) license to indoctrinate your kids.

Only if your ideological enemies can get through ed school, get hired as teachers, and stay employed as one. Capture academia, then ensure ideological conformity among administrators doing the hiring, then use increasing conformity of the teachers you produce to bring pressure within the unions and the profession in general to push out those "ideological" teachers not conforming to the "professional standards" of the field, then be watchful to make sure nobody tries to use the same entryist tactics against you. With that, you can ensure "the other side" never gets anywhere near your children.

I really doubt this process is happening the way you describe. In particular teachers are not ideologues; they’re rule worshipping slightly smart highly conformist non radicals, and this is a personality type that if the handmaid’s tale government became a real thing instead of a fantasy that I really can’t tell if it’s paranoid or horny, they’d be asking to cover their faces too. A certain segment of the blue tribe lost their collective minds and they happen to be running the institutions teachers look up to, and that’s a problem, but there’s not actual indoctrination of teachers going on as far as anyone can tell. They’re just people who’d declare themselves colorblind if CNN said the sky was green. These people have always existed and our society tells them to teach, but we’ve been telling them that for a lot longer than we’ve been woke.

In particular teachers are not ideologues;

Not my experience. (My late grandmother was a teacher, so I've known a few through her. My educational career was an ongoing fight with teachers and administrators. Several of the times I got lectures from teachers it was for expressing the "wrong" political opinion in my writing. I worked as a substitute for a time, and also as a tutor. So I've picked up a fair bit of the general "feel" of at least those teachers working for the ASD. And while some of the older generations, nearing retirement, may fit "rule worshipping slightly smart highly conformist non radicals," the rest seem much more "politically-indoctrinated slightly-dim ('those who can, do; those who can't, teach') conformist activists.'

but there’s not actual indoctrination of teachers going on as far as anyone can tell.

Again, my experience is that for the past ten years at least, they are "actually indoctrinated" — deeply so.

Some of it might just be that political capture has set the rules they worship and the standards they conform to such that "1619 project" attitudes aren't "radical," but only some, and I don't see breaking that consensus is anything less than a "coup-complete" problem.

"CRT bans" aren't working, will not work, because teachers — the entire profession — will openly defy them out of ideological fervor. The Left has totally conquered public schooling like they have everything else. One cannot get hired to work in a public school anymore without being a committed Leftist ideologue. And any attempt by the Right to build an alternative for their children will be crushed. The war has already been won utterly.

This is not at all true to my experience (currently teaching, in public education about a decade, got an education degree in the past 20 years).

Different places are different, I suppose?

One cannot get hired to work in a public school anymore without being a committed Leftist ideologue.

Yes, you can, lots of people do it.

And any attempt by the Right to build an alternative for their children will be crushed.

That's not actually true. Based charter schools, homeschooling, and parochial schools are all not only not under threat, they're thriving.

instead of a fantasy that I really can’t tell if it’s paranoid or horny

Oppression pornography is still pornography and should be treated as such.

(Maybe submissive personality types have a pathological need to identify as "oppressed"? It certainly seems that way if you've ever read any yaoi or romance novels, that's for sure.)

“The other side” is presumably having children, which means your attempts at raising an army of military school cadets poised to recapture American institutions from the commies will be met with fierce parental resistance about half the time. Particularly once you begin trying to dictate how parents feed and exercise their children, which is extremely unpopular with parents on all sides.

A half measure that still caters far too strongly to the liberal theory of educated citizens making good citizens, which has been brutally debunked at this point.

I would eliminate high school entirely in favor of trade schools. These schools would function essentially as what undergraduate programs function as now, with students funneled into trade programs at age 14-15 to become functional, productive members of society at 18. This would have a myriad of beneficial follow-on effects, chief among them being the end of the current cultural epidemic that is the extended adolescence of the most intelligent and privileged children in society. The other chief follow-on benefit would be increased rates of family rearing among older teenagers and young 20-somethings, to the benefit of local communities and the current social morass of porn, video games, and Tinder exclusively through age 25.

Physical health doesn’t need to be taught. Most modern men and women are not physically impressive because they don’t need to be. Mandating physical fitness does little except create a society of pretty boys and metrosexuals who are worthless at actually performing dirty work. Teach them how to replace a transmission and roof a shed if you insist on making physically useful citizens. But making pretty citizens is a stupid vanity project.

Otherwise, the upper class can continue to send its children to liberal arts programs until they’re 27 and ready for a 2-year backpacking trip to Europe. But this needs to stop being the norm and become the gross, embarrassing exception.

First, I would basically replace English with history in the mandatory curriculum for everyone who is literate. Learning about Shakespeare and studying themes in classic novels, while not completely useless, is less useful than learning about real historical events. You gain the same “critical thinking” skills analysing what motivated the people in WWI to conflict as you do analysing what motivated the people in Hamlet to conflict, plus it actually happened, giving it substantially more value. The same english classes will be kept as optional electives, like how history is optional in higher grades now.

Maybe this is just my American education but I was required to take both History and English classes though High School. Not clear to me that events having actually happened necessarily gives it more value. The freedom of fiction seems like it gives more opportunity to explore particular issues and themes with more precision than can commonly be encountered in real world events.

Science will only be mandatory in grade 9

I'm wondering here if there's some specific class named "Science" that students are required to take? My recollection of high school is that we had to take one "Science" class per year but the classes were all themselves themed around specific sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc) so you had freedom in choosing what you were interested in.

and computer science will be mandatory in grade 10.

What would be the content of a grade 10 computer science course that would be useful? Maybe it's because I have a CS degree but I struggle to think of what I could teach someone about computer science in a single year that would be useful for them in general life, unless it was some kind of tech-support-esque class.

Gym class will be mandatory every year. There is a crisis in how unfit people are today. I recently joined the military. They have drastically reduced requirements, shortening basic training from 13 weeks to 8 weeks, and the weighted march from 13km to 5km. Because people weren’t fit enough to pass. A great many jobs, even today, still require physical fitness, and gym class offers more professional preparement than just about any other possible class other basic literacy. On top of that, being healthy is just healthy, and that’s good for every single person.

I think this could be a good idea but only if Gym class is significantly reconstituted. Maybe it was just my experience but my own Gym class did not do a good job impressing on us the importance of aerobic exercise as a habit. It was just this annoying class we had to take. I think a gym class reconstituted around the idea of healthy habit formation, the importance of exercise as a habit, nutrition, and so on would be much more effective.

I think a gym class reconstituted around the idea of healthy habit formation, the importance of exercise as a habit, nutrition, and so on would be much more effective.

I had this as a mandatory class called Wellness in high school, in Tennessee nearly 20 years ago. The subject matter was essentially exactly what you describe.

However, the teacher was quite demotivated, and the class consisted mainly of worksheets and reading chapters in the textbook. This is a similar scenario to what I often see posted on Reddit: "They don't teach personal finance in the schools!" - at the same (ordinary, public) school, I did have a personal finance class in 10th grade, in 2005, and I thought it was very helpful. But then, I was paying attention and interested in the subject, and this is apparently not common.

Maybe this is just my American education but I was required to take both History and English classes though High School. Not clear to me that events having actually happened necessarily gives it more value. The freedom of fiction seems like it gives more opportunity to explore particular issues and themes with more precision than can commonly be encountered in real world events.

I'm of the opinion that exploring issues and themes in fiction was basically entirely useless to me. Where as learning about the history of single payer healthcare, or the lead up to WW1, or any number of topics in history, were at least very slightly useful because they provide context to modern politics.

I'm wondering here if there's some specific class named "Science" that students are required to take? My recollection of high school is that we had to take one "Science" class per year but the classes were all themselves themed around specific sciences (Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc) so you had freedom in choosing what you were interested in.

For grade 9 and 10, we had general science classes that taught a bit of each, then grade 11 and 12 we were given our choice of all 3.

What would be the content of a grade 10 computer science course that would be useful? Maybe it's because I have a CS degree but I struggle to think of what I could teach someone about computer science in a single year that would be useful for them in general life, unless it was some kind of tech-support-esque class.

I think learning to think logically and understand a bit about how computers work would be valuable, at least as much as most highschool classes. I might just be over valuing because it was one of my favorite classes though.

I'm of the opinion that exploring issues and themes in fiction was basically entirely useless to me.

I find this fascinating since my experience was quite opposite. Fiction could make issues clear cut in a way non-fiction almost never could.

I think learning to think logically and understand a bit about how computers work would be valuable, at least as much as most highschool classes. I might just be over valuing because it was one of my favorite classes though.

What do you mean by how they work? I think a lot of the practical operation of computers (opening programs, navigating file systems) are easily integrated into other classes. If you mean more literally how they work (binary, memory, CPU clocks, adders, etc) then that seems more esoteric to me than a lot of other stuff you describe as wanting to be optional.

What do you mean by how they work? I think a lot of the practical operation of computers (opening programs, navigating file systems) are easily integrated into other classes. If you mean more literally how they work (binary, memory, CPU clocks, adders, etc) then that seems more esoteric to me than a lot of other stuff you describe as wanting to be optional.

I was thinking a standard Python 101 class. At the end of it, they should be able to do the easiest problems on LeetCode. I think having a basic idea of how websites and software one level of abstraction down work would be good for people.

I find this fascinating since my experience was quite opposite. Fiction could make issues clear cut in a way non-fiction almost never could.

Have you considered that perhaps that's a good reason not to use fiction to think about issues? There's a reason issues often aren't clear cut in non-fiction. The world is rarely that neat and simple. Perhaps fiction encourages us to think unrealistically about issues. Perhaps the author has biases or blind spots that mislead/manipulate the reader into thinking one thing or another. While that often happens with non-fiction too, at least the events in question happened and the author's take can in principle be refuted.

I think it's a good reason not to use only fiction. I think an important part of being able to reason about complex situations is to be able to reason about simple ones. There's a reason logic classes start off with simple syllogisms. One should, of course, always keep in mind that the author has their own views on the topic and the work itself should be examined through that lens. I actually think this last part is an important part of media criticism that I see less often than I would like. Instead of asking whether a work is "good" in the sense that I enjoyed reading it or that I endorse the message it conveys one should think about what message the author is trying to send and whether the work does so in an enjoyable or engaging way. Reading fiction critically is an opportunity to consider how others or yourself might act (or ought to act) in ways that are analogous or dis-analogous to various actual situations one may find oneself in.

While that often happens with non-fiction too, at least the events in question happened and the author's take can in principle be refuted.

I find this a little confusing. What do you take it to mean to refute an author's take? If you mean an author's description of events that have actually occurred, then no one should be reading fiction for that anyway. If you mean refuting an author's take on what ways it would or would not be appropriate to act in some circumstance then it seems to me fiction author's takes are as open to refutation as non-fiction author's takes.

Reading fiction critically is an opportunity to consider how others or yourself might act (or ought to act) in ways that are analogous or dis-analogous to various actual situations one may find oneself in.

Except fiction can create scenarios that are extremely unrealistic, including in ways that might not be obvious to a young person. For example, a work of fiction that sanitizes violence and its true brutality might lead someone to be more likely to endorse violence in general. Or, conversely, fiction that depicts bad guys being effortlessly incapacitated might lead people to be less likely to endorse lethal violence when it's actually called for. I think, for example, that Hollywood's aversion to depicting gruesome violence (yes, you read that right) contributes to people having terrible intuitions about police use of force. They see movie heroes shooting people in the leg and think that's something police should be doing instead.

I find this a little confusing. What do you take it to mean to refute an author's take?

The author of a work of non-fiction (say, a textbook) might selectively omit certain other historical facts that would have changed how the reader thinks about a particular fact of history, or they might claim certain information is factual when there's actually some dispute about it among experts, or they might make normative claims that are debatable or use language in clever ways to try to sway the reader to the author's point of view.

We had the phys/chem/bio split, too, but it wasn’t elective. Not until the AP classes!

I want to say students would benefit from using a REPL. Anything that has a state to manipulate plus a limited set of commands. I’m not sure it would ever be directly relevant, because the only command line a layman might encounter is the Windows one. A 10th grade understanding of .bat scripting isn’t going to help anyone.

What I’d try to convey is the core concept of computers setting up stuff and then looking back at that stuff later. Get them to ask “what steps will the computer take next?” Or “what have I already given this computer?” I think the average person could be better at predicting what a system is or isn’t capable of, rather than treating it like a person who just won’t help.

I wonder what fraction of high school age people have played video games. The way you describe what you want people to do and how you want them to reason are things anyone who has spent any amount of time playing video games has had to do. They are very literally state machines with limited inputs that the player must be able to reason about. The player must be able to reason about what the game will do with further inputs and the context of previously given inputs. Most people playing games don't think about it at this level of abstraction but it seems clear to me that's what's happening.

When you get more fluent with a system, it fits that reasoning process into existing patterns. Learn that moving the mouse corresponds to moving that little cursor, and you can now rely on the same kinesthetic sense that you use for any manipulation. You can skip the slow reasoning step. You will skip it, and you’ll use that cognitive power for the underlying task.

A system which is really clever about this, and makes the intuition easy and painless? We call that good UX.

I think it’s very possible to learn a game and skip right over the explicit reasoning. Especially if

  • it’s particularly immersive, mapping to real space in 1st person
  • you’re familiar with most of the control scheme from similar games
  • you’re using it as a vehicle for social dynamics.

All of which apply to, say, the Xbox Live or (vanilla) Minecraft server modes of play. Barrier to entry is not usually a design goal. When it is, and you get a niche game like NetHack or Aurora 4X…yeah, I’d expect those players would make good programmers. But hey, correlation != causation.

Is there not already an emphasis on numeracy and literacy?

The Texas standards are overly complicated, bordering on purple prose, but center on phrases like

The strands focus on academic oracy (proficiency in oral expression and comprehension), authentic reading, and reflective writing to ensure a literate Texas.

For math, by middle school, they’re already assuming basic numeracy, and

embedding statistics, probability, and finance, while focusing on computational thinking, mathematical fluency, and solid understanding

Texas is not great at this whole reading thing, but it’s clearly in spite of the strategy, not because of it. I think this is probably true for most jurisdictions. Teachers, administrators, and legislators know that literacy is important, and make policy accordingly. Then the implementation immediately runs into poor, hungry, disengaged, and/or unintelligent students. “No child left behind” was the big push in the US, but it’s not easy.

I think your curriculum changes are interesting, though I’m not sure I agree with them. Teaching history effectively is non-trivial! There’s also some value to a common cultural context, which in theory gets instilled by common English literature. Enforced fitness is a worthy outcome, but not one I’m sure can be achieved in 50 minutes of half-assed sports a day. Not without better diets, which…good, but hard to implement.

Not without better diets, which…good, but hard to implement.

And any attempt at implementing them will lead immediately be sabotaged to prop up Kellogg’s sales numbers, with the failure blamed on inadequate funding.

I hear a lot of stories about schools being overly pushed to just graduate students, or getting rid of advanced classes and basic classes and putting the smart and dumb kids together. I want to stop that. Kids who aren't literate yet should be pulled away from the advanced classes and keep being given literacy classes until they are.

50 minutes of half assed sports is a hell of a lot better than nothing in my opinion.

I actually had 9th grade Geography/Literature and 10th grade Wold History/Literature taught in the same 'block.' We would alternate days between a History focus and a Literature focus, but both subjects were taught in the same timeslot with a concurrent lesson plan. For example, we learned about the beginnings of civilization while reading excerpts of Epic of Gilgamesh, covering Mesopotamia and the Hero's Journey at the same time. Then excerpts from Ramayana and Hindus valley. It was at a pretty broad level, the topics themselves are huge. But the literature helped provide color to the history.

It is true that to include more time for PE or other things, you need to make more time in the day. But this does not necessarily mean to change the requirements.

If your bubble is homeschool-adjacent, you will quickly notice families who claim that their kid is learning math, history, science, literature and language arts, completing the base curriculum of whatever mail-in program they have in 3-4 hours a day. Then they go on to learn new languages, go on field trips, garden, whatever.

I am not referring to homeschool programs that lack crucial skills. I'm talking about programs like Memoria Press, where kids are reading the Iliad and Odyssey by 8th grade, Algebra I by 8th grade (normal for when I was a kid, just showing they're not behind.)

How are parents able to be so efficient? They have a small classroom size of 1-7. They are able to give each kid 1:1 time, slowing down when the kid needs more help, breezing through topics that have already clicked.

If I were to change anything, I would decrease administration staff and increase the number of teachers, until classroom sizes were around 1:10. After kindergarten, students would be arranged in classes based off standardized test scores, where similarly scoring children are sent to the same classrooms.

K-5th graders already have a recess, and I believe that unstructured play is best at that age, so I would not do gym every day (but maybe have a gym instructor supervise recess and encourage kids to do more physical activities if it looks like they are avoiding them.)

PE sucks and I would rather have a requirement that kids join a sports team than go through a general PE class. To make it more feasible, some team's practices could take place during the school day, the normal fees would be waved, it's just part of school not something extra. If someone is unable to join a team there could be a general PE offering. I would prefer it to be more like an introduction to modern gym equipment - some weights, some treadmills, some yoga/aerobics. A class that teaches kids about something that exists in the outside world. Not a class of doge ball and running laps.

Alternatively, keep recess and make a teenage-sized jungle gym.

I think I’d have mandatory after school clubs. Sports might be a part of it, but I think one thing sorely missed in modern childhood is time to simply explore interests with other children their own age. Let kids who want to write stories write them, let the jocks play any sport they want, have a manga club or a sci-fi club or dance or robotics. Get kids socializing and learning and hopefully exploring the stuff they’re into. You could do that 3 days a week and gym 2 days if you’re super worried about fitness as well.

If I were to change anything, I would decrease administration staff and increase the number of teachers, until classroom sizes were around 1:10. After kindergarten, students would be arranged in classes based off standardized test scores, where similarly scoring children are sent to the same classrooms.

Good luck with that. Increasingly if the lowest performing members of a politically relevant melanated group can't perform, nobody is allowed to.

I'm actually waiting for the government to start cracking down on homeschoolers. If too many people opt out of curriculums like this by withdrawing their kid, they'll just stop allowing it. I'm already seeing weird, nonsensical hit pieces, like John Oliver's terrifying segment basically trying to smear all white homeschoolers as Nazis or white supremacist. And the articles about "disproportionate impact" or "equity" practically write themselves. A lot of the true believers already belief the existence of the family is the biggest barrier to equity. You can't have whites fleeing the sinking ship that is public education and retreating even further into family!

Homeschoolers are probably not going to get cracked down on. For one thing, the homeschooling political machine is one of the most powerful on the right, on par with pro-life and pro-gun(both of which have more wins than losses). There’s also constitutional difficulties and a lack of interest in strong crackdowns from relevant parties; teachers unions want more money, but not to have to deal with homeschooler problems.

I wish I had your optimism. All I see in the future if homeschooling ends up like gun control is the state doing whatever the fuck they want, and then 5 to 10 years later of bad lower court judgements later, the Supreme Court finally tells states to knock it off. If you are lucky. And the state will just spuriously write another shitty narrowly tailored law effectively doing the exact same thing they were told not to do, and the cycle repeats with zero actual respite for the people suffering under a fascist state violating their rights.

Applied to homeschoolers, instead of the state taking your guns, they take your kids. And then 5 to 10 years of lawfare later you missed out on the most formative years of their life, and the state has taught them to hate you.

And maybe they won't come at homeschooling directly. Maybe they'll just have an informal policy of sending social workers of fishing expeditions to your house. Or, wouldn't you know it, "anonymous" allegations are just constantly made against homeschoolers. Oh well. I'm sure some billionaire will put an NGO on that. Or maybe your own tax dollars.

They'll show up and start saying a bunch of scary shit that may or may not even be true about having the cops take your kids immediately if you don't let them in to snoop around. Maybe they'll insist on having the kids alone for a private conversation, whether they have the right to not, and then next thing you know they've declared your child has a protected identity and they aren't safe with you.

My understanding is social workers, as agents of the state, are bound by the same constitutional restrictions as police officers. But I doubt many people know that. I doubt people know you can refuse to allow them to enter, refuse to speak to them, etc.

I've seen so much weaponization of the government against the people the last 3 years, I wouldn't consider anything off limits for them.

Homeschoolers already have a playbook for CPS interest; increased scrutiny is unlikely to do much(and AIUI there’s a few odd exceptions but that CPS generally doesn’t have the power to remove children without evidence of actual abuse; the half dozen or so homeschooled kids on the country who claim untrue things about their gender might be removed if their families visit California or something like that. To the best of my knowledge the vast majority of CPS removals are for neglect, and homeschoolers are generally pretty good at avoiding that one).

Homeschoolers already have a playbook for CPS interest; increased scrutiny is unlikely to do much

Even if it doesn't result in removal, it can still be an ongoing hassle. "The process is the punishment" and all that.

This is absolutely true, but we should probably bear in mind that homeschoolers are likely to be a tough nut to crack because they signed up to deal with hassle, and have support from irl communities invested in protecting them from such things.

support from irl communities invested in protecting them from such things.

Protecting them how? If you have a social worker showing up to "investigate" each month, every month, what can others do to "protect" you from the hassle, the stress, the time loss, et cetera. I say this because there's a non-homeschooling case — involving kids walking home from school a few blocks away, and a neighbor who considered that "neglect" — which immediately comes to mind.

Education reform is, at least to me, one of the many things I no longer get particularly worked up about because even if the world's most optimized, ideal and effective curriculum (for any purpose) was introduced today, it would likely have a minimal effect on anything.

This is both because of AI, as you noted yourself, and because the main bottleneck is intelligence, especially combined with diligence. There are a few scalable ways to provide better educational outcomes, for example, we know that one-on-one tutoring is by far the most effective didactic method, yet it remains cost-prohibitive for public deployment.

Firstly, I don't expect a student entering pre-school or even middle-school today will ever be employable on the basis of what they learn in school, so at that point the debate looks to me more like an argument about what general knowledge and ethics are good to have in the citizenry, or more like an idle classical education for the purposes of being a well-rounded and erudite person, not someone who has to think for a living.

However, it's AI that promises a temporary flourishing of personalized tutoring. For a brief period in time, we have cheap, scalable models that are better in almost every way than the average school teacher available for personalized 1:1 tutoring for every kid alive. I certainly make full use of it to learn things, and will continue doing so after it makes me obsolete, because I enjoy learning.

For a brief period in time, we have cheap, scalable models that are better in almost every way than the average school teacher available for personalized 1:1 tutoring for every kid alive.

That's not a bad thing, if we can be sure the AI isn't going to hallucinate "this author wrote this poem" (no they didn't) or that the word "potato" contains the letter "b".

But the major problem is the same one bedeviling conventional education today - kids who want to learn will, be that teacher, homeschooling, or AI. Kids who don't want to, won't. Johnny playing on his phone instead of listening to the fun! interactive! personal tutor! AI is not going to learn. And how do you make Johnny pay attention?

That's not a bad thing, if we can be sure the AI isn't going to hallucinate "this author wrote this poem" (no they didn't) or that the word "potato" contains the letter "b".

You studiously refrain from even using any LLM, so take it from me that hallucinations aren't a debilitating problem, and presumably teachers are going to check their students work in the first place. I don't deny it's an issue, but every new and improved model suffers from it less and less, and I don't think even you can claim that every statement made by a human teacher in class can be accepted as gospel truth.

They're already anal enough about not considering Wikipedia a "source", leaving aside it comes with its own citations for claims.

But the major problem is the same one bedeviling conventional education today - kids who want to learn will, be that teacher, homeschooling, or AI. Kids who don't want to, won't. Johnny playing on his phone instead of listening to the fun! interactive! personal tutor! AI is not going to learn. And how do you make Johnny pay attention?

This isn't a problem that can be entirely solved today, far from it. But an AI had the benefits of having much more leeway in organizing a tailored curriculum, assessing mastery, rephrasing or reformulating knowledge and so on than a harassed teacher grappling with a class of 30 students.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the better and all that jazz.

Look, friend, we've had decades of exciting! new! educational! reform! that were going to absolutely alter all the fusty old ways of teaching, engage every child, lift every boat, mend the hole in your bucket, and I don't know what else.

iPads for the classrooms was the last iteration of "new fancy computer tech will entice kids to learn", and how is that going?

While the use of iPads enabled the teacher to work closely with a small group of students, that did not mean that the students using the iPads independently were always on-task. One of the most striking findings during our observations was how frequently children appeared to be off-task, not engaged with their device, distracting peers, or finding reasons to be out of their seat. This was especially prevalent when we observed students using apps that were a regular and consistent part of their day, including, ST Math (https://www.stmath.com), RazzKids (https://www.raz-kids.com), and IXL (https://www.ixl.com) (see Table 3). These were apps that many teachers used on a very frequent (often daily) basis with the students to support differentiated learning or to provide small group instruction. It was during these daily rotation times when we observed the most concentrated instances of behavior issues and potential for problematic use of iPads.

This finding was further supported when we were able to observe a class during both a rotational period and a time when students were working on a project with a novel app (e.g., iMovie, Trailers, PicCollage). We noticed a contrast in students’ behavior, engagement, and enjoyment between these two types of activities; students were more actively engaged while working on novel projects. However, as the novelty of using these specific apps diminished, behavior problems were more likely to be observed. For example, one student was not only off-task from the work she was supposed to be doing on her iPad (using an app they use regularly), but also was disruptive to her classmates and resistant to the teacher's requests to work on her iPad. The disruptive behaviors that were observed included one student engaging the other students at their table in conversation, moving to other chairs and tables to talk to another student or show them something on her iPad, and even poking or touching other students to get their attention. These types of examples occurred frequently, and teachers were regularly observed managing student behavior during student use of these frequently used apps.

In our interviews with teachers, some teachers acknowledged that behavior problems, potentially out of boredom, could arise during iPad use. For example, one teacher (113) said, “I think the phonics app they're bored...it's frustrating for them if they're having a hard time.”

Somehow I'm still seeing stories about standards dropping like a stone, kids graduating without being able to read, gross misbehaviour in class, etc.

AI individual tutoring will work for the kids who want to learn. For the kids who can't, and especially the ones who don't want to learn, it'll be no more use than anything else. The kid who five minutes into the class starts throwing chairs around, either because of psychological problems or because he's a budding criminal, how is AI going to deal with that?

AI individual tutoring will work for the kids who want to learn. For the kids who can't, and especially the ones who don't want to learn, it'll be no more use than anything else. The kid who five minutes into the class starts throwing chairs around, either because of psychological problems or because he's a budding criminal, how is AI going to deal with that?

Taps sign: "Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good (or at least better)"

Existing, presumably 100% real human (not that they act like it) US teachers are largely powerless in the same situation, correct me if I'm wrong, but they don't even have the leeway to kick the little shit out of class, let alone rap them on the knuckles. This is the same line of thinking that prevents gifted students from entering fast track programs, because imagine the plight of those left behind!

So if helps those who can be helped, while not really making things worse for those who can't be fixed short of a good caning, what's there to lose?

There are plenty of intermediate situations between purely human teachers and purely artificial ones, you could simply have the electronics that each kid has come loaded with the AI so they can ask it questions, during class or after, about things they couldn't quite get. Or have it tell the human teacher where the kid is struggling.

I think GPT-4 is a better tutor than the average human teacher, certainly if given a curriculum to follow and metrics to track, but even if it's worse, it seems to be clearly additive to the capabilities of having the human around while not costing much.

they don't even have the leeway to kick the little shit out of class, let alone rap them on the knuckles

See, that's the thing. If your individually tailored AI is - let's be blunt here - run along the lines of streaming or segregation or the other methods whereby children were sorted out into classes based on academic ability, it might work.

That doesn't mean the less academic kids are condemned to the 'stupid pile'; AI tuition for woodworking and metalwork classes (I think materials technology is the fancy new name) and practical subjects would be great, also.

But that does mean Johnny with the anger management issues needs to be in a separate class, and probably still needs human teacher supervision. That's not even the main problem, because if Johnny gets proper support, he may do as well as he can.

What we need - and what nobody wants to do - is separate out the troublemakers. Forget the bleeding-heart stuff about "school to prison pipeline"; if Johnny or Jamal or Jésus is smashing up stuff, dealing drugs, assaulting other students and teachers, and not paying a second's attention to any attempt to teach him something useful, then boot him out. Schools would love to do this, but for a combination of reasons - the political lack of will, the bureaucratic social worker belief in not doing anything because of culture or not imposing values, the legal requirement that children get an education which means that parents will go to court to force some unlucky school to take their little budding Al Capone for daycare because they don't want him hanging round at home - they can't.

I've seen early school leavers programmes, and the result there depends on the same thing: motivation. A kid who drops out of ordinary school but does want to turn their life around will work in that environment. A kid who is bored, surly, and violent, and only interested in weed, sex, and easy money, hence moving towards crime all of their own volition, won't do anything except waste time until they're finally old enough to be sent to adult prison.

AI on its own won't work, if the expectations are "this will solve the problem of dropping out, lack of attainment, illiteracy, crime, and so forth" - and those expectations will be loaded onto it! - because the roots of those are in social conditions as much as intelligence or academic ability. And until we're willing to look that Gorgon in the eye - that Jamal or Johnny may not be salvageable - then all the happy techo-optimism that this time this fix will work for sure - well, you know what I think there.

What solutions do you prefer instead?

Learning about Shakespeare and studying themes in classic novels, while not completely useless, is less useful than learning about real historical events.

Kids do something like 6,000 hours of school-time and schoolwork over the four years of high school, there is plenty of time to do both. Storm of Steel should of course be required reading. I think it would be cool if elite students read the Shakespeare historical plays, watched multiple play versions, and then read the actual primary source history and the secondary source history. You learn the literature, you learn the history, you learn about propaganda and how the magic of storytelling works, you break out of the present and immerse yourself in a world very different than ours.

IMO, it's important to read primary sources and the classics. First, multiple generations have concluded that these sources were edifying, whereas a new book is much more likely to be of low quality that will soon be forgotten (the Lindy effect0. Second, classic sources help you eliminate "presentism" and build a basic common sense and historical grounding for how the world works. It's easy to read a history book in 2023 and have also sorts of current ideologies imposed on the past, you may read about how terrible the patriarchy was and how everyone was secretly gay, etc, but if you actually immerse yourself in primary sources I think you come to a much more complex, interesting, and realistic view about the past. Even if the play itself is fiction, all the assumptions built into the background of the play tell you a lot about the people who created such a play and the people who watched it.

But when talking about reforming high school, the elephant in the room is that most kids should not be in high school, at least not until age 18. If your IQ is around 105, you probably should be done with school once you can write a business letter and know enough math to do some carpentry or double-entry book-keeping for your business. If your IQ is 95, you should be done with school once you can do basic reading and know enough math to make change. Sticking the majority of kids on an academic-heavy track is not doing anybody, any good.

I think Shakespeare’s histories tend to get shelved in US classes, usually in favor of one of the big tragedies. Maybe a comedy if your teacher is feeling motivated.

But also…there might have been a gap in the history classes, too, at least when I was in school. On the AP side, World History covered ancient and classical civs, then sped through the Guns, Germs and Steel approach to colonialism. European conflicts were remarkably absent, though one of the assigned books was Louis Lamour’s Walking Drum. AP US history was obviously not Euro-focused, either. You’d have had to take the specific elective to get enough context for any of Shakespeare’s histories!

Perhaps the non-AP route would have done a better job covering Middle Ages through Renaissance Europe, but somehow, I doubt it.

It's not just about "how propaganda works", it's about the beauty of language. I think that is what gets forgotten with the "dump English as more than learning to read and write, what use is knowing how to write an essay, it's not a subject like STEM where there's a right or wrong answer, you can just bullshit" attitude.

Beauty, guys. Beauty.

At least Germany has a pragmatic approach to things, those who can't crack the requirements for a typical white collar job that needs college are put on a different track far earlier in schooling, or simply can opt for that if they feel like it.

There's a lot of disinterest in "tracking" (dividing students by ability groups) in the United States because it makes the racial divides in educational outcomes very obvious. This isn't to say that such things don't exist (most notably magnet schools), but there's also a portion of the political left that attempts to stunt or eliminate such systems: selection to attend Lowell High School in San Francisco, one of the best (public) schools in the city, was switched from an academic basis to a random lottery in 2020. This led to a huge increase in failing grades in incoming classes, and a successful recall election of several school board commissioners in 2022 -- the school has returned to merit-based admissions as of this academic year. Stuyvesant in NYC also sees similar calls to end merit-based admissions from time to time.

Well, there’s also the history of tracking as a tool to dodge Brown v. Board. I’d say that’s one of the stronger cases for racism actually causing disparate outcomes.

More generally, tracking runs afoul of a particular brand of aggressive egalitarianism, and that brings a lot of centrists into the coalition. It’s the same sort of attitude that fuels pushback against charter schools. Americans get really nervous around anything that suggests a class system. Of course everyone should be given the same opportunity. It’s the American Dream!

This mindset may not survive close contact with public schooling, but it absolutely plays into the politics.

Americans get really nervous around anything that suggests a class system.

Yes, and the incident in junior high that greatly contributed to my becoming a reactionary monarchist (and when I tell people about it, they seem surprised at that, thinking it should have made me a leftist instead) was learning that we still quite clearly have one anyway, all "American Dream" rhetoric to the contrary.

(Most people try to make the system live up to the rhetoric; I say, simpler to make the rhetoric match the reality.)

Interesting: my deep-rooted American egalitarian sentiments do show up occasionally, most recently in a "um, hell no" reaction to rumors that Meghan, Duchess of Sussex was considering running for office in California. Royal titles are cute, but very un-American.

A school administrator told me to my face that, with regards to state education law and their ongoing violation of it in my case, "The law doesn't matter. The law can say whatever it wants," but what matters is what you can get a court to enforce "and I know your parents can't afford a lawyer."

But when a friend of mine was about to be in the exact same situation, except this friend's last name is on a major street of this city and a whole bunch of buildings (including the former mall that is now the school district's headquarters), suddenly they were able to shake loose the supposedly-nonexistent resources to do for him what they couldn't possibly do for me, law or no law.

Because I'm a peasant nobody, and he's local petty nobility. It's that simple. Over two centuries of "the American Experiment" attempting so hard to create a society free of hereditary class in line with those "deep-rooted egalitarian sentiments," and look at how little we've accomplished. Apparently, most people think the response to looking at this utter failure should be the conclusion that we need to double down and try even harder. Me, though? It may be that us autists are apparently resistant to the "sunk cost fallacy" and other common forms of human irrational persistence, or it may just be that I'm personally given to calling it quits on things, but I look at that, and I just see trying harder as "throwing good money after bad," that we should just accept the sunk costs as sunk, admit the goal, however noble, looks impossible, declare the whole "experiment" a failure, write it all off, and just openly acknowledge who are born to which class and how that still matters (will always matter).

No offense, but that's very ... autistic. Sure there's still large differences and resentment is not inappropriate. Especially given the often extreme hypocrisy and prejudice of our woke betters. But nevertheless, it's also important to keep in mind that we did in fact make great advances. My parents come from poor rural super large families (I literally don't know the number of my cousins) and didn't even enter high-school. Nevertheless, they build up a comfortable middle class existence and I'm now a postdoc at a decent university.

My gf, who is also a postdoc, comes from a post-soviet background where they lost EVERYTHING, twice (once her grandparents due to being silesian germans, then her parents due to their entire education not being accepted by west germany, so they were suddenly untrained workers with no private ownership).

We lived together with a thai girl for a while, whos parents most prized possession was ... a donkey I think? Some large animal like that. And they lived in a literal shack. She's now a nurse with, comparatively, amazing living standards in germany.

And so on. Re-introducing monarchy, or even just formalizing classes/castes solves exactly no problems, and in fact just makes everything worse. What we need is an honest perspective on what real privilege looks like, and less (sometimes literally) royal girls lecturing everyone on how they deserve to get special treatment. The current petty woke framework is so popular because it's very easy for even the most privileged to conjure up some kind of oppression. Monarchy, as we have seen in the past, would just make them go "actually, I deserve this", which is even worse.

More comments

school administrator told me to my face that, with regards to state education law and their ongoing violation of it in my case, "The law doesn't matter. The law can say whatever it wants," but what matters is what you can get a court to enforce "and I know your parents can't afford a lawyer."

This is the sort of thing you really ought to get on tape.

More comments

It is a bit interesting to me that very, very few educational reform proposals I hear ever mention that we should be teaching and implementing epistemics as a core, fundamental aspect of any well-rounded curriculum. It seems almost self-evident and yet...

It's cliche to say that "education should be about teaching you how to think, not what to think," but I think that's actually a pretty decent goal. I'm not say you completely excise the 'rote memorization' aspects, but perhaps also provide the tools that make that rote memorization useful.

Seriously. Shouldn't we be able to at least ensure that someone who graduates high school has the ability to consider the truth-value of a statement and at least weigh whether they should incorporate the statement into their beliefs about the world or not? That they're able to make predictions based on limited evidence and reject falsehoods when there are actual consequences on the line.

And working off the assumption that not many students will be capable of autistically applying Bayes' Theorem to every new piece of evidence they encounter, it would still be pretty useful to teach the variety of heuristics that have a proven track record and teach the more blatant fallacies to avoid, and provide them with ample opportunities to learn in a controlled environment how to detect when people are lying or when the evidence isn't strong enough to support the purported conclusions, and to notice when someone is just trying to manipulate them.

Epistemics is like the ONE truly useful branch of philosophy, so it seems like making students slog through Ethical, Political, and Aesthetic philosophers without addressing the foundations of knowledge is a backwards approach to 'classical' education.

I say all this already knowing that even if we taught all students how to ascertain truth, the real lesson of high school is how to navigate complex social environments and to identify where you are situated in the hierarchy and, from that, what beliefs you need to adopt and which signals you need to send in order to maintain or improve your status.

And that's a core of human psychology that has been engrained into us over millions of years, so any lessons about how to think better will, in most cases, be suborned to the innate need to fit in with and protect the tribe.

So it's not like I expect teaching epistemics to produce a generation of enlightened thinkers, it just seems like its a bare minimum that ought to be done to ensure education isn't merely brainwashing/propagandizing with some math and science tacked on.

(Yes, I know that from the perspective of the state and ideological actors, the brainwashing is in fact that point)

It's cliche to say that "education should be about teaching you how to think, not what to think," but I think that's actually a pretty decent goal.

One might equally say that fabrication is about making sure the right atoms are in the right places. And equally, that would be a decent goal, but just as equally, we don't have the tools to do it.

You can absolutely teach people how to think, to at least some degree. The degree you can achieve this goal, in a general population sense, using the existing tools of the educational establishment, is so extremely limited that no value is gained from trying. The system evidently works for ideological indoctrination, and it conceivably could function to teach basic skills, were it reformed. There is no evidence supporting the idea that it can actually mass-produce "well-rounded individuals", or "teach people how to think" in any meaningful sense.

Right. I'm amenable to the argument that the system can't be reformed in its current state, or that brainwashing/indoctrination is in fact the point and thus we shouldn't even care about producing well-rounded individuals.

It just seems like whatever your proposal for improving education is, there should be some component that actually addresses how to assess and learn new information and gives students the tools to learn more efficiently and hope that at least some of them use them.

Even if this is literally just teaching the students to use tools like Spaced Repetition to enhance their study.

Not including this is a bit of an admission of defeat.

Not including this is a bit of an admission of defeat.

Yes, and? What's wrong with admitting defeat and moving on, anyway?

Nothing, but in this context it's politically unacceptable to just throw in the towel.

So we keep getting proposals to fix everything, and things continue to decline.

On one hand, I agree that classic logic and rhetoric should be included in any elite education, along with statistics and exercises in doing historical primary source research and discovery. However, if you try teaching these things to a midwit, they will just start accusing everyone of "having confirmation bias" instead of "being stupid", they won't actually apply these concepts accurately, just use them as smart-sounding replacements for classic insults.

That said, in order to think well, it's important so simply have a lot of knowledge about the world. You can't be a good thinker in a vacuum. You need high quality information to feed in all those Bayesian priors. If the BBC publishes an article about 10% of Britain being black in the 1300s and black women being hardest hit by the plague, if you have a grounding in lots of historical knowledge about the world of that time period, including lots of primary sources and literature, then you will have a lot better intuition about whether that claim is likely true or absolutely ridiculous.

That said, in order to think well, it's important so simply have a lot of knowledge about the world.

Chicken-Egg problem.

Yes, it is very important to have a lot of knowledge. But it is just as important to make sure that knowledge is accurate and wasn't fed to you simply to ensure you behave in a particular way to benefit some person's agenda.

For instance, I used to actually believe the "Bermuda Triangle" phenomenon was some unexplained mystery of the world because I saw that factoid repeated a lot in various contexts. Then I eventually saw someone do the basic statistical analysis to show that while, yes, a lot of boats and plane 'mysteriously' disappeared in that area, that's just because it's a particularly busy area of the ocean and isn't really an outlier from any other randomly chosen location.

This gets especially important in the context of history! Where it is very important to learn what 'primary sources' actually are and how to cross-reference and confirm details rather than just accepting one person's account as accurate.

That's part of my concern, if 'education' means memorizing "10% of Britain was black in the 1300s" and at no point do you learn to examine how that conclusion might have been reached, then the knowledge they're inheriting is not going to do them much good.

I'll second this one. Learning about epistemology in college was extremely helpful for me. It seems pretty core to the idea of what we think of as critical thinking. Who is telling me this information? Why are they telling it to me? Why do I believe X? What makes X true? Are all important questions to be asking and to be able to answer to understand the world around you. Especially appreciating the distinction between why you believe a thing and what would need to be the case for a thing to be true.

I am not sure about teaching Bayes Theorem or specific fallacies, but I think teaching students the ability to reflect on their beliefs and how they formed them would be very valuable. School itself is rife with opportunities for this since most of the time you learn things by trusting the testimony of a teacher or some other expert source rather than by direct firsthand experience of the facts that establish something as true.

Yes, there's an irony in that if you do really well at traditional academics, you're basically training yourself to accept the word of an authority figure as truth.

"Teacher lectured on this topic, the textbooks confirmed their teachings, and then I was tested on my ability to accurately recite the teachings! What a useful way to discover the truth!"

It'd be interesting, for example, if teachers explicitly told students that they'd be slipping occasional falsehoods into the lessons and teaching them as true, and that there were extra credit available to anyone who not only could identify the falsehoods, but explain exactly how they figured out it was false.

Its a good exercise to test one's epistimics AND to teach that authority figures occasionally (lol) outright lie to you!

It'd be interesting, for example, if teachers explicitly told students that they'd be slipping occasional falsehoods into the lessons and teaching them as true, and that there were extra credit available to anyone who not only could identify the falsehoods, but explain exactly how they figured out it was false.

I'd say that's a good idea, and what should have been done, but these days what will happen is that someone will copy paste lecture transcripts into an LLM and have it find the error and explain it lol. I suppose that does still deserve points for diligence.

I recall a professor back in med school who did do that, and I'm particularly proud of catching several of the bugs myself, even if I suspect a handful were simply him misspeaking from memory instead of being intentional heh.

Actually, medicine might be a bad idea for such tricks, plenty of things are outright counter-intuitive or edge-cases where we need to memorize where the heuristics fail. If you try this before the students have a good fundamental underpinning of theory and some practise, they might well never figure out where they went astray unless they crack out a textbook and pour over every claim.

I'd say that's a good idea, and what should have been done, but these days what will happen is that someone will copy paste lecture transcripts into an LLM and have it find the error and explain it lol. I suppose that does still deserve points for diligence.

Or the more traditional pre-Internet failure mode: the student knows better than the teacher, finds "intentional" errors that are unintentional and just the teacher not knowing better, and gets punished for it.

is that someone will copy paste lecture transcripts into an LLM and have it find the error and explain it lol. I suppose that does still deserve points for diligence.

Also probably true, but I'll also say that if we have LLMs that are reliably able to spot and correct actual falsehoods we're probably in a world that is a little epistemically safer for the average person than our current one.

But this will tip into my other concern that people will become utterly reliant on AI tools for information, and thus almost ALL of their knowledge will ultimately rest on an appeal to authority. "The AI says this was true, no need to question that."

And finally, I do think relying on authority is not the worst thing people can do! If you've found an actual reliable source of information then you can choose to simply take most of what they say as accurate! I have a handful of people I follow on Twitter who I believe are making a good faith effort to be correct about complex issues, so when they summarize things or make a prediction, I lend them a lot of credence. Because I don't have the energy to assess every single claim I encounter for accuracy, myself.

But there's gotta be some bedrock somewhere where the person(s) making certain claims actually care about getting it right.

Also probably true, but I'll also say that if we have LLMs that are reliably able to spot and correct actual falsehoods we're probably in a world that is a little epistemically safer for the average person than our current one.

Entirely dependent on your standards for "reliability" in my eyes. I have found SOTA models adequate for that purpose in almost everything I've cared to try, and I have checked to see whether they were providing corrections that had a basis in objective fact. It's not perfect, but I say we're past "good enough" to catch anything the teacher says that they already expect diligent students to notice.

I broadly agree with the rest of your comment, I'm happy to defer to Scott for most things, even if I do disagree with certain things he's said, and there are certainly plenty of crime-thinkers on Twitter I follow because I trust them to give me information that's both true and suppressed because it's outside the general Overton Window.

If, say, we had an aligned AGI that proved itself to be smarter and more capable in terms of answering questions I had of it, including taking into account my values where relevant, I'd have few qualms about eventually handing over my decision making to it. But if I had a route to improving my own cognition to the point where I didn't need it, being able to match it myself, I'd prefer that.

I think we should probably continue exercising caution with current LLMs due to their propensity to hallucinate, especially if given a prompt that encourages such.

And since they're able to do internet searches now, we're hinging some of their reliability/truthfulness on the accuracy of the internet at large which... well, you know why we're here on THIS site rather than on Reddit.

I suspect that I won't be ready to accept LLM's as 'oracles'/truth-sayers until they've got the ability to tap into the real world directly and explain their reasoning for their logic.

If I ask ChatGPT "Is the sun currently shining right now"

I don't want it to just say "Based on your location data (which I scraped from your browser) I figured out what your time zone is and based on weather reports for your zip code is appears that it is a bright and sunny day!"

I'd want to hear something like "I've checked several camera feeds from various locations around the globe and it appears the sun is shining brightly in the following areas []."

But if I had a route to improving my own cognition to the point where I didn't need it, being able to match it myself, I'd prefer that.

This is definitely the future I want but ain't sure I'm gonna get it.

Something that has always ticked me off about the medical curriculum, and which is likely a global problem, is that while doctors are occasionally trained to consider potential applications of Bayesian reasoning, we're not taught it explicitly.

So we're told, "if you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras" in the context of always considering the most common potential causes for a presentation, or confronted with questions like X disease has a prevalence of Y%, test A has a sensitivity B and specificity C, given a positive test result, what are the odds that the person testing positive actually has the disease and so on.

But the generalized thought process? Not a fucking peep.

And there's no reason that people should even enter med school without knowing Bayes' theorem, the math isn't even complicated.

"if you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras"

One thing I like about this particular aphorism is that there's a meta lesson. "Think Horses, not Zebras... unless you happen to be in a location where Zebras are more common." If you happen to be in Eastern Africa, for instance.

Because I think physicians are pretty good at applying the basic "its usually the simplest, common explanation, don't overthink it" logic but then apply it to everything and outright dismiss explanations that are more esoteric.

There's also the risk-aversion that comes when you can be sued for malpractice if you do anything other than give the most common and accepted advice.

One thing I like about this particular aphorism is that there's a meta lesson. "Think Horses, not Zebras... unless you happen to be in a location where Zebras are more common." If you happen to be in Eastern Africa, for instance.

Another reason to teach explicit Bayesianism, because that takeaway comes with it!

Plenty of tests reveal the equivalent of a news reel going "authorities report an escape of 22 zebras from the local zoo after the paddock was left open", or your neighbor swearing some of those ill-tempered horses had stripes on them.

There's also the risk-aversion that comes when you can be sued for malpractice if you do anything other than give the most common and accepted advice.

Malpractice claims are still thankfully a rarety in India, but I suppose you can still mitigate most of the risk by providing both the "recommended" advice as well as your particular suggestions and leave it to the patient to choose, assuming you document this well. There's nothing much stopping a pissed-off patient litigating against you really, not if they want to.

I do suspect that most US doctors are more risk-averse than necessary, but teaching them Bayesianism would help them figure out the optimal course of action for their particular risk tolerance.

but teaching them Bayesianism would help them figure out the optimal course of action for their particular risk tolerance.

Exactly.

I hear a lot of accounts on twitter of people who WANT their doctors to start giving them some of the more out-there suggestions for therapies or drugs or procedures that could fix [problem] but get frustrated because they have to navigate the standard process first and most doctors won't deviate from the script much, even when asked nicely. Some people resort to homebrews out of frustration, even.

It shouldn't be difficult for intelligent risk-seekers to hook up with intelligent doctors who understand risk and to mutually agree to try out more radical options, with some safety precautions in place.

The FDA is at least part of the problem, granted.

I hear a lot of accounts on twitter of people who WANT their doctors to start giving them some of the more out-there suggestions for therapies or drugs or procedures that could fix [problem] but get frustrated because they have to navigate the standard process first and most doctors won't deviate from the script much, even when asked nicely. Some people resort to homebrews out of frustration, even.

One of the under-appreciated perks of being a doctor is that, when you go see a doctor, they're far more likely to indulge such concerns.

For example, UK guidelines for contraception, which are also used in India, mildly frown on using IUDs in nulliparous women who want a family down the line. Yet when my girl and I went to see a gyno, we were able to convince her to approve and insert one, since I could convincingly argue that despite it being UKMEC 2 (meaning it works, doesn't do any harm, but is ~overall held to not be the best choice for that demographic, which would be UKMEC 1 like OCPs or implants), we know what we were getting into. Or various psychiatric consults I've had to do myself.

I'm sure the same is true for lawyers consulting lawyers in other niches, or mechanics seeing mechanics and so on. You get a sense of palpable relief from knowing that you don't have to rehash the basics.

Sadly short of having a medical degree or experience in an allied field, there are few signals, costly or otherwise, that declare the same thing to a doctor who has to also consider the deficit in both knowledge and common sense in the average patient. I certainly wish it were otherwise, or that there was something like a short questionnaire or form you could fill out to declare yourself the equivalent of a sophisticated investor in medicine, who is willing to step outside the norm without crying about it later if it fails.

I think epistemics isn't really that useful in day to day life. For the vast majority of people in the vast majority of situations, just going off intuition is more effective. I think an elective of epistemics would definitely be good, and maybe it'd be better than one of the lower priority courses like science, but it's much lower priority than literacy or physical fitness.

Explicit reasoning, especially on Bayesian lines, isn't necessary 99% of the time, in the sense that crunching the numbers will provide an increase in value greater than the time/opportunity cost spent doing it. This is because humans are probably fundamentally Bayesian in their reasoning, according to the predictive processing theory of cognition.

This ceases to be true in certain important edge cases, where people devote far too little thought or rigor to important decisions like say, buying or renting a house, or what insurance to get and so on. Hard numbers and research will almost certainly beat going off vibes, at least in terms of dollars per hour of effort.

For the vast majority of people in the vast majority of situations, just going off intuition is more effective.

I think this absolutely ceased to be true (if it ever was) in the current era where the average person is exposed to dozens of possible scams every day, many of which were devised by extremely sophisticated actors and have been refined over years or decades to be almost imperceptible from honest business opportunities.

Maybe if you still live in a small town where you know your neighbors (i.e. you're unlikely to exceed Dunbar's number) and you've got friends and family nearby looking out for you your intuitions will still suffice to navigate life without too many pitfalls.

But even merely browsing the internet can have you stumbling into places that are designed to suck you in and extract resources or spur you to action or instill some false but alluring belief which will in turn be exploited by other malicious actors.

Most of Crypto-space, for example. Blows my mind how billions of dollars have been thrown at rugpull scams and pyramid schemes just by making people believe it was possible to 10x their money for zero actual effort. Get-rich-quick schemes have existed forever, but the sheer ubiquity of them is what makes it more risky for the average person these days.

Bryan Caplan has a book on education, one of the things he found going through the research is that "transfer of learning" is very low. Like learning Latin does not help most students learn a Latin derived language.

Students tend to learn the thing for the test then quickly forget it.

The idea of teaching epistemics sounds nice, but I don't think it would have much practical effect.

I think just awareness of the existence of epistemics might be helpful.

It's like math. Most people can't remember half of what they learned in high school math classes. Many can't even do basic algebra, but they're at least aware that algebra can and probably should be done to explain why an answer is correct.

Sometimes I'll be in conversation with a person and they'll make an assertion. I'll ask them why they think that. How do they know? Suppose I didn't agree. How would they convince me? Then their eyes narrow and their lips curl. I can see the gears turning as they mentally brand me enemy and then they just assert the thing again, but louder and with edge to their voice.

My guess is that person will remain unchanged by an epistemics class.

And the people that might benefit from an epistemics class will hate the subject and think it is dumb, because the way it will end up being taught will be dumb. They won't be learning how to think. They'll learn the major philosophers in epistemics, they'll memorize some vocab words, and they'll do a few story puzzles.

They won't be learning how to think. They'll learn the major philosophers in epistemics, they'll memorize some vocab words, and they'll do a few story puzzles.

This is my fundamental complaint with K-12 education. You sit in a chair for hours a day filling out worksheets. It isn't clear to me that actually teaches most people very much.

I spent years filling out Spanish language vocabulary and verb conjugation worksheets. At no point did I learn to speak Spanish nor was I on a path to learning to speak Spanish. I suppose someone learning Spanish could benefit from some of those worksheets, as a very small part of a larger effort.

I had a good language teacher in highschool. She taught German with full immersion. People would come from all over the state to observe this amazing teaching method. I'm terrible at learning languages, but after 4 years I can kind of have basic conversations in German. My thinking at the time was "yeah of course this is the only way to actually learn the language".

What I hadn't spent those four years of German class doing was learning how to pass a test that verified my German speaking skills. So when I got to college and tried to test into a higher level German, I couldn't get past the entry level requirements. I would have had to entirely start over. My frustration at that led me to never take a language class in college.

For highschool, I would start more drastically reworking it. First, I would basically replace English with history in the mandatory curriculum for everyone who is literate. Learning about Shakespeare and studying themes in classic novels, while not completely useless, is less useful than learning about real historical events. You gain the same “critical thinking” skills analysing what motivated the people in WWI to conflict as you do analysing what motivated the people in Hamlet to conflict, plus it actually happened, giving it substantially more value. The same english classes will be kept as optional electives, like how history is optional in higher grades now. Science will only be mandatory in grade 9, and computer science will be mandatory in grade 10.

I think I have the biggest beef with this. You want to study history without direct exposure to culture. This is a fools errand, and will only allow "experts" to further lie about the past, and demonize your ancestors and your cultural birthright. Exposure to primary sources is the strongest antidote to this.

You know it's funny, I love reading about history, and I love reading generally. I loathed history and English/literature class.

History was always boiled down to memorization of dates, a fact or two about a dozen historical figures, and also memorization of way more geography than was relevant. I had a singular history teacher in 12 years of public school who taught history as a story. I fucking loved that year of history. I don't know what the rest of them were doing. I took AP History, the only AP class I didn't pass the AP test for, and once again it was taught as memorization of trivia. The teacher would meander through irrelevant nonsense. Then she'd give a test on which nothing discussed in class was on it. I'd just read 3 straight chapters from the textbook and hope for the best. Usually got a B.

English was hit or miss. I had teachers that mostly forced us to read emotive, introspective nonsense that was boy kryptonite, and write essays parroting back their correct opinions about it. I had teachers that allowed us to read whatever we wanted, and I'd delve into Dune, HG Wells or Ray Bradberry. I actually enjoyed Shakespeare, 1984, Heart of Darkness and Brave New World which were all required reading. I even enjoyed The Iliad and The Odyssey, though it was difficult for me in middle school. I loathed the 6 months I had to spend on "diverse" authors and racism polemics. I loathed that it increasingly crept into the summer reading, growing from an option out of two dozen books I could read, to a subcategory I had to pick a book from. The autobiographical ones were the worst, because all I saw were terrible anti-social choices to do drugs, commit petty crime, and ignore their education. And then the discussion would all revolve around "systemic racism". I'd just check out completely, it made so little sense.

I don't know how typical this is. My grade school education primarily occurred in the 90's in the US. I no longer trust the education system to be capable of reform. School choice is probably the only possible means of moving towards anything better. At least then people could try different things and see what works, versus this top down enforcement of pedagogy and curriculum that is a Gordian Knot of corrupt politics.

I don't know what the rest of them were doing. I took AP History, the only AP class I didn't pass the AP test for, and once again it was taught as memorization of trivia. The teacher would meander through irrelevant nonsense.

That's wild, given the low priority the AP history tests place on dates (generally just wanting students to know the general order and timeframe of events). Absolutely setting her students up for failure.

My understanding is that at a lot of American high schools they'll hire people for the purpose of coaching then shove them into teaching history courses because those aren't part of state standardized testing.

I was lucky enough that most of our teams were such a low priority that it tended to be the other way around, with teachers getting roped into coaching something.

took AP History, the only AP class I didn't pass the AP test for, and once again it was taught as memorization of trivia

Speaking as someone who taught AP World History for many years, that is because history is often poorly taught. It can be instead taught as a set of historical questions with no correct answers (eg, comparing slave systems), but it rarely is. It doesn't help that many teachers think that the purpose of an AP history class is to prepare students for the AP test.

Given how the AP History tests are formatted, even just teaching to the test would be a significant step up from rote memorization of dates and names.

It's disappointing that I hear about so many classes not even meeting that low bar.

I rather doubt that there are actual AP classes which literally are nothing but rote memorizatiion. For one thing, a syllabus for such a class would be unlikely to pass the AP course audit.

To be clear, when I say history class, I don't mean rote memorization. I mean it would be like the English classes you liked with books like Dune, just instead of Dune it'd be Winston Churchill's biography or some other non-fiction book. Lots of primary sources would be used still.

There was a time when anyone with even a church grade school education could recite at least a little classical poetry and discuss at least a little Shakespeare. The real question is whether the loss of this is a tragedy, or whether the modern equivalents (eg. knowing a few key lines from Kanye's 'Power', or being able to discuss the plot of Harry Potter) are no better or worse for the public. By the way, I consider this at least a somewhat open question.

And it can be fairly argued that men with the finest classical educations sent millions to die in the Somme, and that even those few moderns who still had a similar education (eg. Eton-and-Oxford classicist Boris Johnson) hardly appear superior to their more mundanely-educated peers, and certainly do not appear more moral or more capable than them, even though they can speak Latin and recite Greek poetry.

That's not to say there's no way to talk about education objectively. You can talk about preparing people for certain jobs or whatever, although I think with AI on the horizon that's a flawed thing. But it is to say that I think 'objectivity' is the wrong framework. It's about culture. What should the next generation know, not because it'll make them 'better', but because it will make them 'us', because it will preserve, in them, something people alive today want to conserve, or want to promote.

People with a classical education could also talk all about the Roman Republic and French Revolution. We can't teach everything, and I'd much prefer to double down on stuff that's real than stuff that's fiction.

People with a classical education could also talk all about the Roman Republic and French Revolution. We can't teach everything, and I'd much prefer to double down on stuff that's real than stuff that's fiction.

In general I'd agree, there was way too much fiction -- especially bad contemporary literary fiction -- in my high school curriculum. But certain works of fiction are of such cultural importance that they keep getting referenced by historical figures, so it is very helpful to have read the original so you know they talk about. Perhaps part of the problem with Shakespeare is that schools spend too much time over-analyzing it (badly). And often, they don't even watch a good production of it. It should be possible to get through a play in about 10 hours, including both reading it, watching it, and reading a commentary on it. Spending 60 hours total out of 6,000 hours of total schooling on Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo & Juliet, and two comedies seems like a good use of time to me. I'd throw in a few histories as well, integrated in with a history course on that subject.

But certain works of fiction are of such cultural importance that they keep getting referenced by historical figures, so it is very helpful to have read the original so you know they talk about.

I once wrote a little trivia quiz "Bible or Shakespeare," that was full of commonly-used English phrases, idioms, and metaphors that originate in either the King James Bible or a Shakespeare work, and seeing if one could identify which of the two they came from. And then there's the Classical allusions: "Achilles' heel," "Trojan horse," "Herculean task," "siren song," etc. So much of our language at least used to be built around what, again, at least used to be a set of common stories and references, such that it can be hard to understand without it — I once encountered someone here in the US, and "culturally Catholic" at that, entirely unfamiliar with "30 pieces of silver," for example.

Last year I did a big Shakespeare read and discovered to my surprise that many of the famous quotes, in context, mean something very different than how they are popularly used. For instance, when Mark Antony says, "I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him" he is lying and goes on to praise him and foment a revolution. Now, when I see someone playing on that quote in a title, I never know if they are using the surface meaning or the in-context meaning.

And then there's the Classical allusions: "Achilles' heel," "Trojan horse," "Herculean task," "siren song," etc. So much of our language at least used to be built around what, again, at least used to be a set of common stories and references, such that it can be hard to understand without it

Do you think people need to read the stories to understand the references? I've never read any ancient Greek story and I know what all those references mean. You can explain those references in a paragraph, and sometimes even a sentence.

I would reform the education system to strongly encourage people who are smarter and more capable to have more children. And for people in general who are capable and responsible to not fail at the task, which should be the majority, to have children.

Which means directly telling that they should do this and having actual lessons where they are taught by parents with children about how to raise children.

Another idea is to have mentors for the whole youth life of families that keep meeting and keep in touch and help them along and these mentors get a salary and bonuses based on X family raising successful multiple children that are net tax payers. Then this whole system can be adjusted to be X hardcore or Z hardcore based on fertility rate.

Also, the native peoples and I don't use it in the left wing sense should be especially targeted by these kind of programs, from the perspective that it should be a state goal for the continuation of nations under threat of demographic extinction due to lack of fertility and mass migration. This is just one sane reform that ought to be done.

Another idea is to open as a career matchmakers and recreate the old social technology by encouraging religious communities. In the past, even in the 1990s there were a greater share of adults who arranged dates and this strongly declined in the 2000s and 2010s. Obviously the current "free" market of dating doesn't work equally well to the previous arrangement on average, and also the dating platforms don't work. Even in schools there should be encouragement of greater amount of dating and more dances and such activities. So have a profession of match makers that people pay to help arrange dates between people that hire them. And enforce professional standards so they don't exclude people for not being sufficiently woke.

In all things there is a right balance, the goal is to get more young people to be dating and create responsible families earlier on than the current situation, which is better for the people involved and society in general but not to encourage irresponsibility and excessive hedonism. The end goal is young adult monogamous families.

Mandatory Gym class and pressure for people to be fit, and teaching them discipline and having meals that are not obesogenic is a good idea.

Eliminate all woke ideology in the broad sense. This includes any milking of holocaust, slavery, etc, etc. Spent more time attacking modern progressive activists and ethnic and other lobbies and excesses of identitarianism associated especially with the left than complaining about any of the past grudges promoted by the woke types. But don't spent too much time on it. Promote still a balanced understanding than hiding history, but countries should promote a positive vision and focus more on their own national history. Still teach the complete rejection of the progressive stack kind of ideology and condemn as evil and insane the idea that any progressive identity group is incapable of doing wrong now, or in the past against other groups, for any of these groups in isolation and combination including the one that the taboo is the strongest. Teach people an ethic that where one group rights ends another begins and the moral wisdom of concentric circles of concern in combo with the golden rule and trying to respect to others the same rights you want them to respect to you. Attack marxist ideology and any of its ideological cousins that calls for destruction of nations as evil. Teach an intolerance towards the worst radicalisms of our day.

Well, for this paragraph to happen and people to be trained in ethics certain organizations and NGOs and lobbies that captured institutions and even governments who promote the progressive stack need to be banned and kept down.

In western world teach of course about grecoroman history and also based on specific branch of the tree of western civilization, the particular historical people too. Try to create a sense of continuity with ones ancestors and the ideal of passing the torch. Promote the giants of history like Aristotle, Newton and the historical beauty of your civilization. Spent less but still some time about the accomplishment of other peoples too. Give people an appreciation for achievements and encourage the attitute of continuing on the accomplishments of the past. To accept the torch of civilization!

Well, I focused on the cultural/ethical/historical aspects which are the more important and today most lacking.

On the technical side, it does make sense to promote engineering and some level of computer science/A.I. fields, to avoid teaching the most advanced math to everyone, to shorten the high school years, and promote secondary specializations faster, and strong discipline against disruptive students. Obviously woke fields need to be removed.

Maybe an indirect way to foster an increase of intelligent families would be elite schools and then promoting in a more hardcore manner pro natalist encouragement there.

College education must be shorter to the extend possible. Another idea is to the extend there is something useful there that would take time from raising family to strongly discourage it in the 20s and to promote it more for those who have children after they had their children in their mid 30s. People can live a sufficiently long time, sacrificing career and education for their 20s in better from the long term both for themselves in all likelihood and certainly for society (and also to the extend it is common it avoids the effect of fear of missing out on career when others would do likewise). It is stupid to encourage delaying family to the extend we do now. Moreover based on polls people have less children than they claim to want and part of that is this delay that is encouraged by the current way things are set up.

Stop all pro female discrimination in admissions. Make all AA illegal. The only discrimination that makes sense in counries is having special programs for access to native students that recent migrants, or more commonly non citizens are excluded from. I don't have the USA in mind (because this model fits more for nation states dominated historically mainly by one group, although you could adjust it for treating different historical american demographics tm but it is more tricky and debateble there) but it makes sense for elite admission to put people who are part and identify with the population they are supposed to represent. Generally, migration ought to be limited to the extend that will not substantially change demographics and cause problems and people of decent human capital should be the ones who get in, prefferably as same ethnically as possible but for some professions migrants and their especially recent descendants make more sense than others. The ones that are about running and deciding the course of how society operates like say the law, should be more exclusive and try to have clear ethical proffessional requirements that would exclude those who support abuse of the law in favor of favoring or screwing over demographics in line especially with the pervasive force today of the liberal/progressive prejudices (which is what I mean by wokeness).

Wreck the factions that would never allow any of these things which is a prersequite to doing them. Obviously antinatalist which are often antinative racists in my experience of seeing how they talk having an apoplectic reaction and it stinks to them as fascism things that would stop and reverse the decline. There is no compromise that can be had, only by getting them out of the way can these ideas be implemented. Encouraging natalism will get you in trouble with feminists and antinativists.

Another idea is to try to scan for gifted students and give them more advanced education early on so they can progress further.

While promoting those who are gifted, promote still an ethic of noblese oblige, and gratitude of the gifted but not of guilt rather than an ethic of arrogance that encourages those who do better should mistreat those who do worse. For those who do worse, encouraging improvement and to abide by useful habits while not stirring jealous hatred is also a good idea. In general we need coexistence in compatible roles for those of unequal abilities and to punish bad behaviors, not tolerate it based on excuses, nor to foster social class conflict. For ethnic groups, they should fight for their legitimate rights but not be greedy and respect the same rights to others, they should also fanatically oppose any attempt to destroy them and respond to that with hatred but be proud but not arrogant. The goal is to destroy pathological altruism for some and the abuse of it for the others. Which would keep down the particular nasty factions who most abuse the susceptibility of society to it today, but it isn't the goal to enshrine selfishness as the common value.

I would reform the education system to strongly encourage people who are smarter and more capable to have more children. And for people in general who are capable and responsible to not fail at the task, which should be the majority, to have children.

I strongly doubt that you can do this, short of sterilization by IQ score. Any benefits to having kids will wind up as the underclass neglecting an extra kid and pocketing the money.

This is anachronistic when we live in an age where even many under-achieving demographics have bellow replacement fertility rate.

You only need smarter people to have more children. It has happened historically too you know. I outright say encourage those capable to have more children. You know that we can socially shame or even punish people who are absentee parents.

Indeed, the sacrifices relating to being a parent, in an environment where it is more encouraged and more seen as the default, could lead to people who are more capable taking such role.

Especially taking in mind my suggestion for pushing back on higher education for the 20s and all other things I suggested.

And yes designing bonuses that do target in some way capabilities might be a way to do this too.

You seem to be responding to a scenario of just giving everyone as much "gibs" possible to have children which isn't what I argue for.

It is impossible to do the things you don't even try to do and where the prevailing sentiment is fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Isn't this culture of naysaying towards strong attempts for pro natalism in itself part of the reason why this isn't happening? We have no choice but to try such measures.

Do you have any alternative?

Also, my view is that extreme supposedly based suggestions or implementations are the enemy of doing "based" things in an ethical manner. This extreme suggestion ends in the comfortable place for our dominant ideology, which is to do nothing. Plus I don't actually want to do the unnecessarily extreme option. Compare the modern success in eliminating certain genetic diseases with family planning policies with the also historical event of certain regimes previously in the 20th century that murdered people who had genetic diseases. If we compare the two and also compare doing nothing, the family planning policies that strongly reduced genetic diseases of thalassemia and tay sachs disease were the best option by far over two really bad alternatives. And family planing worked because people listened to the advice and modified their breeding accordingly. The mentality of the naysayer would have had as believe that such policies would be impossible.

We don't need to sterilize the underclass to do my suggestion.

If you're already at the point where you can actually get the education system/government to agree to this as a goal, actually implementing it would be child's play. You've already blown up the existing orthodoxy completely to get here after all, there's nothing stopping you from just putting minimum parental IQ levels for the bonuses. If someone from the underclass can actually qualify for a subsidy accurately and competently designed to encourage people with good genes to procreate, that's a net benefit.

I would reform the education system to strongly encourage people who are smarter and more capable to have more children.

While I wouldn't deny that there are cultural messages that come up here, I'd think that the workplace is a far bigger issue here than the K-12 education system. If women perceive having a child as holding them back in their career, fewer will.

Lots of women freeze their eggs and have the clock run out on them. That is not really an issue of not wanting kids but trying to balance them with having a secure career first and failing.

While I wouldn't deny that there are cultural messages that come up here, I'd think that the workplace is a far bigger issue here than the K-12 education system.

Once again, I bring out Osili & Long's 2007 "Does Female Schooling Reduce Fertility? Evidence From Nigeria" [pdf], which found that each year of elementary school reduced the average number of children per woman by significant amounts. (You can also find more results from Africa on the negative correlation between female education and realized fertility rates here.) And while I can't find it at the moment, I recall a Nepalese study that found similar results for "Western-style" grade schools but, interestingly, not for "Islamic" ones. (Whether that's due to differences in the schools themselves, or a selection effect reflecting differences between the sorts of students who attend the two types of schools is a question, though.)

That is not really an issue of not wanting kids but trying to balance them with having a secure career first and failing.

Which, of course, could be addressed with better education about the realities of female fertility, the limits of technology, the nature of the trade-offs being made, and so on.

And while I can't find it at the moment, I recall a Nepalese study that found similar results for "Western-style" grade schools but, interestingly, not for "Islamic" ones.

"Impact of female education on fertility status of Muslim community" by Irshad Khan, as linked to in "The Cause of Population Decline" by the Dreaded Jim.

Thank you.

As I recently said elsewhere online: I recall reading somewhere that growing up with the internet has changed how younger generations remember things. That is, instead of remembering some specific piece of information itself, they instead remember the path to look up/retrieve such information. I, however, am definitely part of the older generations, then. I read a lot of stuff, online and offline, and while I can remember a lot of facts and details I’ve read, I don’t so much remember just where or when I read them. Thus all my “ I recall reading somewhere.”

Which isn't great for my participation in the link-and-citation heavy argumentation one finds here.

I mention the career and college education part too in my post but the influence of teaching people and not teaching people certain things can not be underestimated.

If you encourage and tell people to do X, then they actually are going to do X, unless X is very destructive for them. Even then some will do it. The reality is people are encouraged and incinitivzed to do multiple things today, many of which are against natalism. If you make it particular focus that they should have multiple children and get to see parents raising their children, then plenty of women especially are going to have more children.

The education system can be but one aspect of this. The others can be the media and the goverment in general. Like they can make the current thing to be the current thing, they can certainly promote the meme that those capable in general and in regards to being good parents should have children, and the more capable the more children.

People would have more children if there is a doctrine, like the religious doctrine to have children and so they see it as an expectation and a duty. Part of this should be the religious element that existed previously being encouraged. But you can also try to promote it in a more secular sense too. The lack of direction is a key aspect of the current malaise. Good leadership that tells people to do things that are good for them and for society in general is necessary instead of getting used to habits that are destructive for them and for society in general.

Pressure works.

Pressure works.

Sure, and I don't have any disagreement with the idea of encouraging the good in principle.

But the more of an investment something is, the more it'll determine someone's life, the more pressure it needs. It seems relatively easy to enforce ludicrous norms , but often that's because those norms cost less. People bend because they can easily retreat later on. Not so with kids.

Some people may legitimately just be bad at forecasting what'll make them happy and would benefit from some Caplanesque education, but I think this is a thorny problem for a reason: if people perceive the costs to be too high it's hard to see them being educated out of it without some seriously novel tactics that haven't been tried by the most educated and powerful nations in the world, who have every incentive to fix this problem.

The reality is that these nations haven't tried these tactics and humanity is lead by abysmally awful leadership on the natalist question. Our elites and our civilization in general on this issue deserves an F.

I am not recommending Caplanesque education.

But the more of an investment something is, the more it'll determine someone's life, the more pressure it needs. It seems relatively easy to enforce ludicrous norms , but often that's because those norms cost less. People bend because they can easily retreat later on. Not so with kids.

I actually think that the current trajectory comes with massive sacrifices and does include a decent % of true believers and others who go along.

In rgards to the sacrifice part of raising children that relates to focusing on the sacrifice part and not the reward part. But if people see monogamous families as a reward for which the sacrifice is worth it, that would effect their choices.

We should also not forget that overpopulation was once seen as a problem and certain policies were advocated that were implemented to reduce fertility rates which they did.

I think we should be pragmatic but act based on a goal and modify things accordingly to the results. The social technology that results in a sustainable civilization has existed in much of human history, and we can pick even a mix of that which includes some amount of "liberalism" so we could try enforcing the mores of the past and gatekeep them. So the fact that this has happened makes the idea of an insurmountable problem mistaken. And modern Israel also is doing this.

My experience reading liberals and the zeitgeist influenced by them is that they put their dogma first and have an attitude of not wanting to change things from the dogma and its limits even if it would be good to do so.

What do you think should be done? Its all hopeless and humanity should admit that it will go extinct? Let us all be replacement by the projected to be demographically growing blacks, unless their fertility decline too? Should robots run the planet?

Or do you have a different idea? I pretty much suggested most of the things that seem like they would work, including discouraging education in the 20s. I am sure other people can also articulate such plans with plenty of crossover and put even more detail if they want.

If you eliminate mandatory English classes, the only people who will take them as electives will be those who will benefit the least from them. All those who hate reading, writing, and grammar will avoid them for four years, then suddenly find themselves unable to graduate when they fail the basic reading and writing tests their senior year. And no, the kids aren’t going to do their required history reading, so that’s not going to help. They’ll also use ChatGPT to write their papers (this is already happening), so their writing skills will atrophy as well.

To be clear, I do want mandatory English until kids are literate and can write an understandable five paragraph essay. Not just a single standardized test on graduation. But the English classes that come after literacy is achieved, where you analyze Shakespeare to talk about how peasants ignoring their king leads to natural disasters, should be entirely optional.

And no, the kids aren’t going to do their required history reading, so that’s not going to help. They’ll also use ChatGPT to write their papers (this is already happening), so their writing skills will atrophy as well.

Understand the concern, but I'm unclear as to why this is a problem for reading and writing about World War I and not for reading and writing about, say, The Scarlet Letter.

Would the students not wish to skip the reading and use ChatGPT to write the papers regardless of the subject matter?

Oh, they will, but at least they’ll be forced to deal with English grammar and reading comprehension in their English classes (through lectures, quizzes, in-class assignments, etc.)—hopefully enough so that some of it will stick.

I think you can teach grammar and reading comprehension about historical subject matter that's real instead of fiction. The benefit of fiction is that it's entertaining and kids will pay attention to it more, but you lose that benefit with stuff like Shakespeare that the slow kids won't pay attention to either

I’m not convinced, mostly based on my own school experience. I attended parochial elementary schools and a public high school. I can still remember the shock I felt when, in my freshman Honors English class, we started going over adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, direct and indirect objects, etc. In Honors English. It turns out that this information—which we learned in first and second grade—was largely new for many of the public schools kids. I have no idea what the regular English students were learning.

Now, you could argue that grammar isn’t all that important, but if it is, I don’t see how you’re going to teach it in history class. Or take metaphors and figurative language. I’ve seen college students struggle and fail to understand Swift’s Modest Proposal and Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. Unless you integrate your English literature and history classes (as OracleOutlook suggested), a good chunk of these students will never understand what is basically just written sarcasm.

Now, you could argue that grammar isn’t all that important, but if it is, I don’t see how you’re going to teach it in history class. Or take metaphors and figurative language.

If they're still at that level, they aren't really ready for Shakespeare either. I am talking about replacing Shakespeare and To Kill a Mockingbird with history. Below that, fiction is fine.

Now, you could argue that grammar isn’t all that important, but if it is, I don’t see how you’re going to teach it in history class.

I just want to make sure I understand: you are claiming that you don't understand how one could teach grammar in a history class?

You could teach grammar using any written sentences. You could teach grammar using the comment you just made!

Or take metaphors and figurative language.

Perhaps it would be helpful to use a made-up sentence or short dialogue for the purposes of educating a student about metaphors and figurative language. I guess that technically counts as fiction. But do they really need to read a Shakespeare play or Swift or Lewis? I'll be honest, it seems to me that you really want students to read classic literature and are perhaps reaching for whatever justification is handy. Am I way off?

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats