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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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
"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.
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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.
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.
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.
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