[HN Gopher] The case for mutual educational disarmament
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The case for mutual educational disarmament
Author : jkuria
Score : 42 points
Date : 2021-08-21 19:33 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.economist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.economist.com)
| ilammy wrote:
| I wonder if the same logic could be transferred to other parts of
| the economy. Mutual disarmament for the amount of "growth", for
| the amount of consumption, for the working hours, etc. I feel
| that people would be much more eager to cut back on some things
| if they knew that they would not be outcompeted into dirt if they
| did so.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's a society-wide prisoners' dilemma, but I think most of the
| proposed cures are worse than the disease.
|
| I don't want to rule out the possibility for someone to decide
| to work harder/achieve more if they want or to try to compress
| their working life into 10 instead of 40 years.
| tibbetts wrote:
| It bothers me that this article from the economist fails to
| recognize the deleterious impact that lack of antitrust
| enforcement has had on life outcomes and thus on the educational
| arms race. The article mentions that competitive goods like
| housing and social status drive the push for education. Before
| the last 50 years of industrial consolidation there were more
| opportunities to succeed in more cities, creating a greater range
| of available competitor goods in those places. Now everyone has
| to be competing globally for status and to a great extent for
| housing (as people consolidate into a few cities) and career
| opportunities (as fewer companies mean fewer paths to high
| achievement). It's a nice idea to discourage unpleasant
| competition among Hugh school students. But fixing other parts of
| the economy could help address demand for this activity, and
| improve aggregate outcomes in many other ways.
| baybal2 wrote:
| One big problem across the developed world, which was later
| replicated in Asia is that high school exams morphed into
| university entry exams.
|
| A person can have god knows how much more educational, and work
| experience in between high school+few years in instutute, and a
| proper graduate education.
| xondono wrote:
| For anyone interested in following some of the themes of this
| article, I always recommend Bryan Caplan's The Case Against
| Education.
| lordnacho wrote:
| This is basically right. Quite a lot of education is a waste,
| it's window-dressing actual learning.
|
| For instance, you might have spent some time getting exam prep
| advice: read the instructions, skip questions that are hard and
| come back later, try to memorize this or that formula / molecule
| / map / argument, if it's multiple choice strike out obviously
| wrong answers, look for hints to part 2 in part 1, if you can't
| figure out the integral guess that it's 0 or 1 (LOL a lot of high
| school integrals are elegant).
|
| You have to spend real time learning this kind of sharpening
| exercise in order to do exams, or you will get less than what you
| should get, given what you actually understand about a subject.
|
| There's no value to this time. You'll never need to remember how
| to reverse a linked list, because in real life when it comes up,
| you will just find it in a browser. Similarly with most things
| that require a precise answer, the effort in sharpening the
| answer is way more than what might reasonably be worthwhile in a
| real-life setting. Eg. I needed a Bessel function at one point in
| my career. Could I write down its form from having seen it at
| uni? No, of course not. Did I spend time doing just that at uni?
| Yes.
|
| The real damage is we end up not educating people. We give them a
| bunch of answers to memorize and never test them on how the
| question is important. Did anyone ever examine you on why complex
| numbers are a big deal? Or what the big gap between classical and
| quantum physics was? I bet you only had exam questions about how
| to do the calculations and derivations. Get a number or a
| formula, that's easy to test. Whether this formula makes sense to
| use, that's hard.
|
| The part about education being positional is also important.
| There's quite a lot of jobs that could be done by someone with no
| degree at all, including mine. My first boss in the City still
| has no degree, and didn't need it despite options trading having
| a reputation for being mathematical. All that's happened is
| nobody wants to not go to uni, and nobody wants to hire a non-
| degree holder to trade options anymore, because both groups think
| that going to uni signals that you're smart. Neither group
| actually thinks you need any of the actual skills you learn in
| uni, though.
| totetsu wrote:
| never had to do any of that stuff to get my arts degree. never
| found writing essays a waste of time. Just saying..
| lordnacho wrote:
| For essay subjects as well, there's a way about writing the
| exam essay that isn't what you'd do if you wrote an essay for
| a magazine or a book.
|
| I wrote quite a few economics essays according to a bland
| template: introduce the question, arguments for with authors,
| arguments against with authors, conclusion.
| nerdponx wrote:
| > I wrote quite a few economics essays according to a bland
| template: introduce the question, arguments for with
| authors, arguments against with authors, conclusion.
|
| Doing this over and over is a learning exercise in and of
| itself.
| trabant00 wrote:
| > needed a Bessel function at one point in my career. Could I
| write down its form from having seen it at uni? No, of course
| not. Did I spend time doing just that at uni? Yes.
|
| From someone without formal education: you knew about the
| concept and what to search for. I have to waste a lot of time
| every time digging for this.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Basically what I came here to say. "Education" gets far too
| much benefit of the doubt. Most of it is worthless, or even
| harmful, teaching unhelpful and dependant patterns. Very little
| of the content aside from the basics is validated to be worth
| its ROI.
| kook_throwaway wrote:
| The schools I went to were more propaganda than education, I
| don't regret dropping out to learn on the job one bit.
| mmarq wrote:
| It seems as if the author is convinced that in the German system
| children are assigned to different high schools based on their
| skills/intelligence/talent/whatever. But the fact is that you
| will hardly find an upper class kid in a hauptschule and
| similarly poor immigrant kids are underrepresented in gymnasiums
| (and even middle class kids with foreign parents have been
| historically underrepresented).
|
| Maybe the point should be guaranteeing that all jobs pay enough
| to live a decent life. Germany is much better than the UK on
| this, which is probably the reason why the education rat race is
| less of a problem there.
| tsss wrote:
| Foreigners always think the German school system (Hauptschule,
| Realschule, Gymnasium) is 30/30/30 but in reality it's more
| like 5/15/80. Almost every student is going to the gymnasium by
| default nowadays. If you are not a total dimwit then you can
| get in and as a result, the standard of education is not great.
| I remember I had a student in my senior year English class who
| couldn't even deal with the simple present and still got a B.
| The discrepancies in performance between students on a
| Gymnasium is probably greater than between Gymnasium and
| Hauptschule. While the average education on a Gymnasium may be
| better than on a US high school, the US high schools are
| actually much better for capable students because the AP system
| allows them to get away from the window lickers like the
| Gymnasium was initially intended to do. The Realschule then is
| for all the people who _could_ go to a Gymnasium but their
| parents didn't let them. Finally, you have the lowest 5% in the
| Hauptschule who are practically outside of society. They are
| functionally illiterate or have such grave behavioural problems
| that many of them are unsuitable for even the most simple
| menial labor jobs (think stealing, regularly skipping school,
| arriving hours late for a job interview, assaulting classmates
| and coworkers, etc).
|
| Since Gymnasium is already so easy that almost everyone can get
| in, the only people who end up at a Hauptschule are those who
| grew up "outside the system" in an environment that practically
| prevents any kind of education. They live in a ghetto where
| everyone receives social security, are often immigrants with
| parents and friends who don't speak the language, have to deal
| with domestic abuse and bullying everywhere... you get the
| gist. Even the bright students among them who initially do well
| are continuously put down by their parents and peers while the
| teachers are hopelessly overwhelmed just trying to keep the
| worst of them from literally killing another.
| mmarq wrote:
| Wikipedia says ~28% attended a gymnasium in 2010:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(Germany)
| choeger wrote:
| The thing is that upper/middle class parents value education
| more than lower class parents (on average). Unless you take the
| kids completely away from their parents (horrible thought, was
| somewhat tried in the GDR), the former kind of parents will
| find a way to give their kids valuable lessons, even if it is
| just sitting on the sofa and reading a book.
|
| I recently met a woman that brought her son to the first day of
| school. Not only did all her manners signal "lower class" when
| she talked to the teachers, but also she explicitly mentioned
| that she thought the kid would not fare well in math. I also
| saw the boy and he did indeed not behave like the brightest,
| but who knows what lies under the surface? That mother
| basically made it very hard, if not impossible, for her kid to
| ever reach higher education. She won't search for tutors, even
| if she would not need to pay it. She will be content with bad
| results. It's really sad to see, but I think there really is no
| way to fix this inside the school system.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| > The thing is that upper/middle class parents value
| education more than lower class parents (on average).
|
| I don't know if I'd agree with this. It might be true in some
| contemporary societies but I don't think it is universal. But
| I do agree with your other point, which is that culture will
| always dominate other factors in determining how much
| education parents seek for their children.
| nerdponx wrote:
| The specifics aren't as relevant as the acknowledgment that
| there are cultural factors and feedback loops that are
| generally not part of the discussion (and might be omitted
| specifically due to concerns about stereotyping and bias).
|
| How involved in your kid's education can you be if you work
| 60+ hours a week with a 90 minute commute each way? How do
| you expect kids to focus or even care about school if they
| come from a violent neighborhood or a broken home?
| v_london wrote:
| Holding university entrance exams earlier seems like a recipe for
| disaster that would hurt disadvantaged students the most. This
| may be just my experience, but the older you get, the more time
| you get to catch up with students from better families. Coming
| from a working class background, I only started to study actively
| in high school (the culture I grew up in discouraged and actively
| mocked boys who read books or liked maths) which means that had
| the entrance exam be held at the beginning of high school, I
| would not have done as well as I did at the ned of high school.
|
| The problem with building a meritocratic system is that everyone
| wants capable kids from poor backgrounds to raise to the top, but
| the elite doesn't want their average kids to fall down in society
| to their expected rank. One of the jobs of the elite schools is
| to prop us these average kids and to make them seem smart to
| outsiders: anyone who has studied in an "elite" university has a
| story about the rich kids who spend their days partying,
| intending to only pass the easiest classes in the school because
| that's all they need - their parents have already arranged an
| entry-level job for them.
| parineum wrote:
| >The problem with building a meritocratic system is that
| everyone wants capable kids from poor backgrounds to raise to
| the top, but the elite doesn't want their average kids to fall
| down in society to their expected rank.
|
| I disagree with the second half of this. I think it simply
| creates an arm race that the wealthy win. A rich family looks
| at what it takes to get their kid into Harvard and they do what
| they can, no matter the cost. A poor family simply can't
| compete on an otherwise equal footing. Even if we socialize all
| the advantages that the rich currently have, they simply do
| even more in response.
|
| The real problem with a meritocratic system is that rich people
| from good schools with private tutors actually get a better
| education, that's what all the hubub is about. Poverty leads to
| worse education and worse educated people are less prepared for
| the more difficult course load of college. Through no fault of
| their own, they are less ideal candidates. That's the
| injustice.
|
| It's cognitive dissonance to simultaneously recognize that
| injustice but not recognize that poor students are actually
| substantially less prepared for college at 18.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Poverty leads to fewer social connections and that follows
| the rest of the outcome.
|
| People in a cohort fall into a bell curve. "Social lubricant"
| is why the dumb or less capable kid in a rich suburb ends up
| being some sort of professional in a nebulous job where the
| smart kid from a poor neighborhood feels like Starbucks or an
| LPN is a life changing job.
| crusty wrote:
| This just doesn't fit the evidence. I've wanted Freakonomics
| or similar to cover this for a decade but haven't really
| seen/heard seen anything...
|
| If getting into top (TOP!) universities correlated with
| education/aptitude alone, the wealthy would pay more to get
| thier kids educated but the best teachers. But they don't do
| this, they pay to dollar for their children to get educated
| by the "best" schools. But what makes them the best schools
| is their ability to get more kids into better universities.
| If education were the critical component of these schools,
| they'd pay premium rates for the best teachers, but often the
| teacher salaries at these private schools are lower than
| those at the public schools they compete with in the area.
| That suggests that it isn't the education provided by the
| teachers that's the most important component of these
| schools. There's a whole stew of other factors that these
| schools rely on to get kids into top placements that had
| nothing to do with actual education.
| zhdc1 wrote:
| > If getting into top (TOP!) universities correlated with
| education/aptitude alone, the wealthy would pay more to get
| thier kids educated but the best teachers. But they don't
| do this, they pay to dollar for their children to get
| educated by the "best" schools.
|
| Simple! People receive a benefit from peer group
| connections (status) and quality-based assessments (in
| economic terms, reputation). If you are well educated and
| intelligent, on average, you will have access to more
| resources if you are also associated with high-status
| institutions, such as prestigious schools and high ranked
| universities.
|
| The good news is that, under competitive conditions and
| provided that everything else is equal, being "good at
| something" (reputation) eventually leads to high-status
| attainment. So, if you happen to receive a good education
| but graduate from a less prestigious university, you have
| an opportunity to eventually recoup the difference in
| resource availability (on average & assuming that your
| production translates to the market).
|
| Likewise, if you're a less prestigious institution,
| providing a superior education and employing people who do
| "good research" will eventually increase your prestige.
| tibbetts wrote:
| It can be difficult to overcome initial conditions and
| shine if you are locked out of the best opportunities.
| The bimodal outcomes for law school graduates are a good
| example. That's not how the whole economy works, but it
| is a potential failure mode.
|
| https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-
| distribution-c...
| zhdc1 wrote:
| > That's not how the whole economy works, but it is a
| potential failure mode
|
| There are others. E.g., if you're line of work doesn't
| allow for high-status recognition (e.g., a blue collar
| job), being good at what you do will likely not allow you
| to benefit from reputation -> status transfer.
| tibbetts wrote:
| Friends of mine work at these private schools for lower
| salaries than public schools. The reality is the job sucks
| a lot less. You get ~100% engaged students, supportive
| parents, and a school administration with minimal perverse
| incentives. Struggling students and discipline problems get
| filtered out and sent somewhere else. There a loads of
| qualified teachers, and really plenty of very capable
| teachers. There is no need for the schools to pay a premium
| to get the best teachers.
|
| Imagine if 99% of programming jobs were on Win32 native
| apps using tools from 1998, and 1% of them were using
| modern tools on a modern Unix-derived stack? Would the 1%
| really have to pay a premium to get top 10% developers?
| jkhdigital wrote:
| I was about to compose this exact comment... thanks for
| saving me the trouble. In K-12 education, and especially
| elementary level, the job is _at least_ as much about
| daycare as it is education. And well-socialized children
| makes the daycare part of the job a lot easier, so less
| stress = less demand for financial inducements
| (compensation).
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| Best answer and a good metaphor. Paying more only goes so
| far in attracting talent. You need the job to be
| manageable, the environment needs to be at the least not
| actively hostile, and the system the job exists within to
| not be completely broken.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Incentive alignment would help too. If only there was a
| socially and legally tractable way to pay teachers like
| sales reps...
| fallingknife wrote:
| You are only considering salary and not overall quality of
| life. As one of my teachers at private school said, "you
| get paid a little less, but you don't have to worry about
| being robbed by your students in the parking lot."
| Retric wrote:
| Innate intelligence is a huge factor in education. Rich
| parents can prepare their children very well, but it's only
| changing the minimums. This is why elite schools always have
| an easy track to graduate they don't want to dispel the
| illusion that their actually elite schools, but they also
| don't want to turn away the children of billionaires etc.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > Rich parents can prepare their children very well, but
| it's only changing the minimums.
|
| If you need an example of this, take a look at the
| admissions scandal with Lori Laughlin, et al. No denying
| they were rich, but despite how rich they were, they could
| not tutor their kids way to a good SAT score and had to
| resort to outright cheating that was so blatant that they
| had to go to prison.
| andi999 wrote:
| Might be good for society as a whole if the elite has at
| least to study hard. (not in terms of equality, but outcome
| compared internationally). A failed state is where the kids
| of rich ppl flunk school and still become leaders.
| summm wrote:
| That culture is everywhere in schools, not limited to poor
| people, also in middle class. These kids are suffering, and
| thus culture needs to be fought. Instead teachers and society
| are lazy and say "lol whatever boys will be boys, let's just
| let this kids suffer and waste more time until they are grown
| ups and then maybe the bullies catch up academically" Is that
| what you are proposing?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| There isn't much meritocracy in the system, at least as far as
| I can see. In Czech we have a saying "the wolf has eaten, but
| the goat remained whole" for situations like that.
|
| The American elite wants to be seen as anti-racist, which means
| elevating at least some kids from the ghettos to the Ivy
| Leagues etc. At the same time, the American elite is still
| mostly white and does not want to jeopardize future of their
| own offspring, and many of those offspring are indeed average.
|
| It seems to me that the current way to square those two
| interests is to raise tuition really high, combine it with
| legacy admissions (even an average kid of rich parents will be
| able to thread the needle there) and raise higher admission
| obstacles for Asians who would otherwise qualify in high
| numbers on knowledge alone.
| watwut wrote:
| The from ghetto don't go to Ivy League. These are middle and
| upper class blacks studying there.
|
| Like really, not every educated black rose from ghetto.
| tomp wrote:
| A disproportionate percentage of the US elite is also Jewish.
| Yet they, as a society, seem to have mostly overcome the
| tensions that have plagued Jews and white non-Jews in Europe
| for a very long time. What makes you think that the US
| "melting pot" culture cannot overcome other obstacles
| (currently IMO mostly exemplified with the rising Asian
| "elite")
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Well, I think it definitely _can_ and probably will; for
| example, given how hard the Asian children tend to be
| driven by their parents, I expect them to occupy a
| significant part of the elite in 2050, bringing with them
| very different perspectives, too.
|
| (The same process, albeit on a much smaller scale, is
| taking place in the Czech Republic. We have a Vietnamese
| minority that began as convenience store owners, but their
| children are rising fast into the educated elite of the
| country.)
|
| But that process will be fraught with a lot of conflict and
| will likely require abandonment of any efforts to pre-
| balance student bodies by ethnicity.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| The elephant in the room is culture, of course. The
| relative freedom of the American economic system ensures
| that any group with strong "meritocratic" cultural values
| will eventually come to occupy a disproportionate share of
| the economic elite.
|
| The obvious advantage of Jewish culture is (in part) its
| ancient tradition of demanding literacy from everyone. East
| Asian cultures also place a high value on literacy, and the
| Confucian emphasis on social harmony tends to promote an
| ideal of "self-cultivation".
|
| I think the real challenge here is that within the American
| "melting pot," one particular group has a tragic history of
| cultural devastation, and no amount of money or assistance
| from outsiders can rebuild a strong culture--it can only
| come from within. In fact, outside interference is likely
| to obstruct this process.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Fresh" African immigrants are quite successful and I
| believe that Nigerian Americans have the highest share of
| PhDs of all groups. Selective immigration will do that.
|
| But the fact that they share the same skin color with
| African-Americans is unlikely to help the latter. Common
| color does not mean common culture (as any white American
| traveling around Ukraine or Caucasus Mountains can find
| out quite easily) and rich and educated Nigerian-
| Americans live in a different world than descendants of
| slaves.
|
| Paradoxically, a color-based affirmative action may help
| the already advantaged fresh immigrants at the cost of
| reducing the chances of one group it was supposed to
| help.
| fallingknife wrote:
| Yes exactly. And also dumb down public schools by not
| teaching advanced classes and getting rid of magnet schools
| like the Democrats are doing in multiple states. While of
| course still teaching those classes at the private schools
| that upper middle class and above can afford. Gotta keep
| those smart poor people in their place.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| This is fairly new. Magnet schools and accelerated classes
| for smart poor people used to be something that we
| considered good, because we want at least a few smart
| people getting educated. Now that "smart poor people"
| generally means "people of asian descent," we're changing
| course and getting rid of all of those programs.
| okaram wrote:
| Do you have a ref for any state that is eliminating
| magnets? I hadn't heard ...
| fallingknife wrote:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/nyregion/nyc-schools-
| admi...
| [deleted]
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I feel this is one of the obscure benefits of a universal income
| and/or reducing wealth inequality.
|
| Once you accept that every human deserves a basic level of
| economic comfort, you need to structure society to actually
| harness their talents.
|
| If you can make your child's life easier by waving a wand and
| making everyone in your society dumber and/or worse educated,
| then that would be a terrible temptation, and that's basically
| what we have now. Imagine a world where the simplest way to your
| kids and grandkids being healthy and wealthy was to maximize the
| human potential of the population.
|
| This is the promise of meritocracy, but we seem to already have
| hit the limits of that, with everyone jockeying to keep other
| people's kids out of the good schools. Why don't we just build
| another good school? Oh, because it's not about what they learn,
| or how much they could learn, it's about dividing the population
| into winners and losers.
| twic wrote:
| > Germany's custom of placing children on different tracks at age
| ten or 11 also invites an interesting thought experiment. What if
| the gaokao (and similar tests) were held earlier in a pupil's
| career?
|
| Shame this guy's never heard of the eleven plus:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus
| richardjdare wrote:
| I failed my 11 plus and ended up at a high school where they
| didn't even tell us about university. At school, I found
| bullying and sadistic teachers completely overwhelmed the
| educational aspects; my only goal was to get through each day
| without being hassled.
|
| The only circumstances where I would consider supporting
| streaming would be if it was continuous, and people could move
| between streams at any point in their education.
|
| Putting all emphasis on a single test, taken on a single day at
| age 11 is like something out of the hunger games. I still
| recall breaking down in tears when my headmaster called out
| "Time's up!" at the end of my 11 plus. I knew I hadn't done
| very well.
|
| Now I am a professional programmer (the only non-graduate in
| the company), shipped video games on my own, and have had
| writing published, so obviously the education system's estimate
| of my abilities was far from accurate.
| twic wrote:
| There's a reason it has long been abandoned by all but the
| most backwards counties!
| yung_steezy wrote:
| My partner is from Essex and I thought she was kidding when
| she said she did the Eleven Plus. We learnt about it in high
| school history class in Scotland! The module was on the
| foundations of the British Welfare state and it was discussed
| as a barbaric practice from the past.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/jQNxo
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The article misidentifies education as a zero-sum positional
| good, whereas what's often zero sum is _credentialing_ , and
| often a rather peculiar kind of credential that doesn't reflect
| much real-world usefulness. Reduce the impact of these
| credentials, and people will feel less of a need to wastefully
| compete for them.
| rewq4321 wrote:
| Underwhelming conclusion to the article IMO:
|
| > What if the gaokao (and similar tests) were held earlier in a
| pupil's career? If these exams truly test the knowledge required
| for university, they must be held just before university starts.
| But if such tests mostly serve as filters, sifting better
| students from worse, they need not be held so late. An aptitude
| test at 16 years of age, say, will probably generate a similar
| ranking as one held two years later. The tests would remain
| stressful. But an earlier gaokao would save families a year or
| two of costly cramming, shortening "the obstacle course", as
| Hirsch put it, without much changing the results. Such tests will
| always have high stakes. But they need not require such high
| effort.
|
| I was somewhat "late" in terms of some aspects of my development,
| and so there's a chance I'd have been put on a particular track
| simply because my peers were more biologically mature. I won't
| pretend to know the solution here (though I'm interested in the
| research around "mastery-based" learning), but I do know that
| sometimes a system is in a deeper local optima than you expect,
| and making small changes like the one suggested here isn't enough
| to get it out.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning#:~:text=Maste....
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